How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexkharlamov/how-mta-shut-down-my-app-for-penn-station-commuters-39e1cf69395f <comment><USER3> I can see why the MTA wouldn't want you telling people to go to a track before it is actually assigned -- if the train ends up on a different track, now you need to get all those people back up, off that platform an on to the new one, clogging stairs that that people who actually wanted that platform might be trying to use too. Obviously it would be nice to assign tracks earlier, so that people can head straight to the right platform, but sending people to potentially the wrong platform seems even worse.

EDIT: Penn is extremely platform/track constrained -- NJ Transit, LIRR and Amtrak are all sharing a fixed number of platforms, some of which are too short.

To maximize platform utilization, they have to wait until the last minute to finalize track assignments -- if you reserve one too early and the train ends up late, you're wasting an empty platform. Once you send a horde of people to a platform, moving them to a different one is a challenge (stairs/bottlenecks, communication, etc).

<comment><USER4> Have you ever taken a rush hour train at Penn Station? The alternative (i.e. current system) is everyone congregates on the concourse staring at the platform screens, and when a new one pops up hundreds of people flood in the direction of that platform in a mad dash. It's a mess.

<comment><USER5> It is exactly this alternative(the current system) that the Amtrak/MTA/LIRR prefer for safety reasons. Amtrak which also has the same procedure at Penn states this here:

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/17/amtrak_s_unpe...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/17/amtrak_s_unpersuasive_response_on_boarding_procedures.html)

Although it is indeed inefficient and the MTA is completely inept, the platforms for LIRR trains are very narrow, they are shared by two trains and the escalators to get up to the main floor are also very narrow and crowded already.

So although the "mad dash" is in fact a mess, its a safer mess than overcrowding the platforms on the tracks.

<comment><USER6> I think this is also dehumanizing.

<comment><USER7> Mass transit is dehumanizing. Cities are dehumanizing. A significant amount of the way that giant infrastructure works is making assumptions and rote; Turning the human problem of "how do I get here" into a mechanical process of "There are two ways to do so, X and Y, each of which follow these steps".

This is great for efficiency - that's why it's done. It's terrible for humanity. It's stagnant, it kills creativity, it leads to these incredible tragedies of the commons when so much relies upon the commons.

<comment><USER8> > It's terrible for humanity. It's stagnant, it kills creativity

Your other points may be valid but I'm not so sure about this one. Artists tend to cluster in big cities, often with mass transit (and sometimes without, like LA). I sincerely doubt there's any sort of correlation between mass transit and creativity.

<comment><USER7> Mediocre artists cluster. Good artists hermit. Great artists do both - <USER2> don't maintain city apartments.

<comment><USER9> Source?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For about a year a decade and a half ago, I commuted into and out of Penn Station with my father who had been doing so since the late 70s.

Not only did he know which track any of a half dozen trains that he might take would come in on but he knew where the doors would open for each of the tracks. And he wasn't the only one either. If you went down before they announced the tracks you'd see little clusters of people waiting apart from each other on an otherwise empty track. We'd usually go to the same car in order to reduce the distance on the other side. Other commuters would do likewise and so trains would have a contingent of regulars.

There's a fascinating kind of micro-expertise that develops when you do the same thing over and over again.

<comment><USER11> same thing on the subway, with an extra dimension of starting on the local, switching to the express, then transferring at another station. Pretty quickly you get to know where to stand to get on the most efficient end of the train to be closest to the stairway up to the transfer platform, etc. Makes an otherwise tedious trip somewhat interesting as a puzzle.

<comment><USER12> And on some systems, one can usually tell if an inbound train is running faster/slower than normal and where to adjust position accordingly to end up at the right door/position/etc..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As an interesting, although unrelated aside: platform data is available in the UK's National Rail's feeds, but the terms and conditions[1] explicitly prohibit displaying platform numbers early, as mentioned in their developer guidelines[2].

I guess the wording doesn't technically ban you from displaying historical platform information, but that would likely be a bad-faith use of the data anyway...

[1] [http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/Terms_and_Con...](http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/Terms_and_Conditions.pdf)

[2] [http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/Developer_Gui...](http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/Developer_Guidelines.pdf) "Occasionally Time-Bound Data will become available through NRE feeds before it is ready to be published to the public. [...] One such example of Time- Bound Data is platform numbers. Early display of platform numbers, particularly at origin and destination stations, can lead to platform overcrowding and/or staff not having sufficient time to prepare the train for oncoming passengers. In some instances, platform numbers will be available in Darwin before being displayed on screens in stations."

<comment><USER14> UK rail data is quite open in comparison to this story, for instance check out these live track diagrams (of London Waterloo & many other areas) which show real-time movements of trains. This is how I often find out the platform numbers prior to travel and I also get information before staff during disruption.

[http://www.opentraintimes.com/maps/signalling/wat#T_WAT](http://www.opentraintimes.com/maps/signalling/wat#T_WAT)

<comment><USER15> There are maps of many more routes at traksy [https://traksy.uk/live/M+2+CARLILE](https://traksy.uk/live/M+2+CARLILE)

<comment><USER14> Great to see another good implementation of rail maps, I do however prefer the opentraintimes layout as its easier to scroll through while reflecting the look of operational systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would have been interesting to see if you could reliably crowd-source the data from commuters themselves.

<comment><USER17> Google almost certainly already could, without even asking the commuters, since they have real time location for so many Android phones. But there's a chicken and egg problem: it's hard to get the data before you're able to offer anything in return.

<comment><USER16> Chicken and egg yes, but he had the recent historical data and a bunch of paid-up users.

I'm just amazed this app was even necessary in a first-world transport system. For all their faults, the UK rail network is pretty good at providing timely information (and as some other comments have mentioned have solid APIs for this stuff). Same with the LTA[1] in Singapore.

[1] [https://www.mytransport.sg/content/mytransport/home/dataMall...](https://www.mytransport.sg/content/mytransport/home/dataMall.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For Penn Station in particular, one can beat the crowd by heading downstairs and looking at the small CRT under the stairs. You will see the platform assignment at the same time as the crowd, but you are closer to the platforms and don't have to use the same stairs as everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER19> There is a similar issue with the MBTA commuter rail in Boston. At south station, the signage in the main waiting area and at the platform only announce the train 10 minutes before departure.

However, there are a couple of tools to get around this. For Starters, each revenue service train has a number (like 508). In a push-pull system like the MBTA the first coach in the consist is nearest to to the platform. This coach has a number like 1827. Luckily, the MBTA publishes which trainsets will be assigned to which departures. This makes it easy to know that 1827 is for train 508. All you need to do is walk out to the platform and see if 1827 is sitting there.. if so it's your train. You can get this mapping of trainset to train via a bunch of apps.

This has been further expanded upon by micro-social apps like "MBTA Rail Tracker" which has a comment section for every train. The whole thread is basically "which platform" followed by a bunch of responses and then snarkiness on why the trains are horribly late all the time.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been collecting Penn Station NJT and LIRR track assignment data for almost a year now. I've been intending to use ML to predict track assignment, but haven't gotten there yet. I should post it to Kaggle or somewhere similar.

<comment><USER21> Do you think the track assignment is something that's learnable? I feel like there is some schedule where, under normal operations, the train will end up. But then there are unpredictable events that cause this to change.

<comment><USER20> I think it is. Like in the article, you can see that given certain parameters like train number and time, you predictably end up with a certain track assignment. If you can also consider track assignments leading up to this time, you can discount those tracks. For example, the 8:02PM Long Beach train always leaves on track 18, except when any 7:56 train left on track 18. As a novice to ML it's currently beyond my ability to model, but my intuition is that it should be doable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interestingly enough, I have had this same exact idea for an app, also being one of those commuters who rely on LIRR trains, also being someone who noticed that my peak train home arrives almost always on the same track, and also being one of the (few) commuters who go down to the platform before the train is called.

It is a shame that this had to happen to OP. I personally don't see the app as an issue, because the amount of commuters that would actually use such a thing is rather low (seriously, stand in the concourse and look around at people, a large amount of them are not using their phones).

My original idea was to scrape the data from their webpage, or see if there was a way to get the data from the Train Time app's Arrival Countdown page, but according to the post, it has been removed from their website, so there goes that idea.

The lesson to me is clear though: don't try to make an app that would make commuter's lives easier. The MTA does not seem to want that, especially during the track repairs. I find it interesting that it was shut down so close to the start of the Penn Station track repairs...

</comment><comment><USER23> Why didn't he switch to a crowd-sourced data model like GasBuddy?

<comment><USER24> Was thinking the exact same thing. One possible reason would be wrong info, but you could use some sort of weighted algorithm that would need more than one submission to match and/or trust level per submitter based on historical correctness.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. Like what Yelp / Foursquare / Google Places use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if there's any correlation or way to know based on where a train is arriving from to know where it's headed. If that were the case, you could potentially either look for that data, or if it isn't available, have a Waze- like app where commuters can report which train they are on and which track they are pulling into.

As an aside, I wonder whether the OP considered charging a hefty price (>$20 or so) for the app. This would lessen the number of users and page requests.

Having travelled from Penn many times and having had to deal with the massive stampede that ensues when they suddenly reveal the track number, I would pay dearly to have this info available to me. Even if I used it once every year, not having to fight crowds or look forever to find an available seat, that would be money well spent. Additionally, many of the peak travelers are business travelers who probably have more money to spend on an app. I realize this isn't the most democratic solution, but it could be a way to lessen the crowds nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a great explanation of the need for this app, and how zavulon fixed a problem.

But organizations change how they work with customers/the public all the time, and I couldn't help but say Waaah.

Things change; tell us about the alternatives you tried to move around this obstacle.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ok, I understand that the Railway Authority don't want people to guess / predict platform numbers because of various reasons (problems with platform maintenance, safety and last min changes etc.

But what I don't understand is that why can't they change the seat allocation process such that people can reserve remaining available seats on the trains for free if they have arrived in station lobby? This can result is reduced rush to grab seats and will help people to make a more informed decision around whether to wait for the next train.

<comment><USER3> it takes longer to load a train with assigned seating -- that's why say, Amtrak might do it, but commuter rail trains, that at peak run minutes apart and want to minimize dwell-times at highly contended platforms, optimize for loading speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Crowdsourcing the track data based on where commuters' phones travel, something like waze for LIRR should help.

Instead of asking users to report the track info, it can be automated to a great extent with the use of BTLE beacons on each platform (but that again needs permission from MTA / Penn station authorities unless a long lasting BT 4.0 beacon can be sneaked in somewhere).

Sad that MTA is not cooperating. Can understand why the app had to be shut down!

</comment><comment><USER30> Why don't you sue them? It's a government agency, and I believe that the data should be available under New York's public records laws (I only have limited experience with NY's laws and IANAL). From personal experience, being nice to a government agency never got me anywhere, but our lawyer has a 95% win rate against them.

<comment><USER31> There is no law that NY government information has to be available through a realtime API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why would you want to know the train more than 10 minutes before departure? Surely you'd just get on the immediate next train?

Are tickets only for a specific time of train?

Or are trains less frequent than every 10 minutes?

<comment><USER33> The next train for your destination may be 30 minutes later, or over an hour away. LIRR has about 125 stations in 8 zones. It's not called Long Island because it's small and round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> www.njtwizard.com

We do this for NJ Transit with about 90% accuracy. We spent at least two months figuring out how it all works, though. It's non-trivial to do right.

<comment><USER35> How do you do it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Whoever decided to close his access to the API should be fired.

<comment><USER37> It sounds like The API changed. But same sentiment -- that was a shit design decision.

<comment><USER38> It sounds like locking down the API was an entirely deliberate decision made at the same time as removing platform data from the website, which means Chesterton's fence[0] applies - we should work out why that decision was made before criticising it.

Discussion upthread is about commuters being pushed onto the tracks, which sounds like a good reason not to display data that isn't 100% certain.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's) fence

<comment><USER39> how about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27s_fence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why the OP did not continue with scraping the website then? I think there will be no legal issue if he does that.

<comment><USER41> > They also stopped publishing the track number on the website — so going back > to scraping was not an option either.

So the only way to gather the data would be manually from the station.

<comment><USER42> Carefully placed raspberry pi + OCR?

<comment><USER43> I'd imagine that placing a "homemade" electronic device in a densely- populated, public space is going to attract a lot of unwanted attention.

<comment><USER44> From all those military guards that parade up and down the station

<comment><USER45> You joke, but Penn Station and Port Authority are effectively occupied territory. There are at least four different law enforcement agencies present and patrolling, stopping and frisking anybody who "looks out of place", hassling homeless people, and generally making you feel "safer".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Scraping the MTA site against the TOS, and intentionally obfuscating requests to limit the chance of the MTA identifying and shutting it down? Yeah, no surprises here.

EDIT: Oops, missed that he didn't end up going live with the scraping.

It would still be great for the MTA to publish this data intentionally; but I'm sure the potential for trains to switch tracks and the associated backlash when they do is what prevents them from doing it.

Perhaps they could adopt the airline model, where there's a best effort to reach a particular pre-announced track, with notifications ringing out when they can't.

<comment><USER42> The author didn't do that, though. As far as MTA is concerned the app was always using an API he had been given a legitimate key for.

As an aside, fuck websites that prohibit scraping. If you send me some bytes I'm gonna do whatever I damn well please with them.

<comment><USER47> In that case screw your API, if you allow DDOS I may as well do it for the lulz.

Isn't it the same approach? If you can abuse a site you will, because they opened themselves up to the public?

<comment><USER48> That's an illogical extreme. I don't think anyone thinks that, rather, the question is whether this app was an abuse of MTA's system. They claim wide distribution of the app is a hazard. Really, it's not like MTA is stopping anyone with the inclination to do this themselves. If it's as reliable as the author says, you could do it without any automation if you were patient enough. Downvoting because that kind of exaggerated strawman reduces the quality of discussion with no benefit.

<comment><USER47> Thanks for explaining the downvote. But this is not exaggerated nor a strawman. It mirrors the extreme "screw your website" reaction and investigates whether the logic for such an extreme disregard holds.

So a website allows you to "download some bytes". Yes you can do anything you want with THOSE bytes. Does this mean you should make an app to let people scrape the website in an automated way and possibly overload it?

If airlines, restaurants give something free or discounted, does that mean you can make an app to systematically let millions of people take advantage of the arbitrage?

XKCD even has a comic for exactly this situation: [https://xkcd.com/1499/](https://xkcd.com/1499/)

I wasn't the one who said "FUCK WEBSITES". I used a nicer word and questioned the logic. Yet I get downvoted while the parent comment with expletives is upvoted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


College Dropout Became Mathematical Genius After Mugging - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/04/27/real-beautiful-mind-accidental-genius-draws-complex-math-formulas-photos/ <comment><USER2> Malarky. Quite pretty, but the story behind it is malarky.

</comment><comment><USER3> > [http://fineartamerica.com/featured/towards- > pi-3141552779-han...](http://fineartamerica.com/featured/towards- > pi-3141552779-hand-drawn-jason-padgett.html)

Uhhmm... 3.14155...?

Better than the apocryphal story of pi === 3, I guess, but still.

That said, it IS entitled "TOWARDS Pi", I guess. I fail to see how the picture represents the decimal shown - can someone explain?

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh man, I really want to buy this guy's art and put it up in my living room.

Edit: Wow, thanks Google! <http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason- padgett.html>

<comment><USER5> Yeah, read the author description on that page, with the gobbledygook about fractals and pi and E=mc^2. He's not a mathematical genius; he's an artist who draws pretty spirographs.

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

<comment><USER6> Yep, seems like he is just a bad version of the logo turtle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm very skeptical of this. Sure the guy draws very nice fractals but have any of his claims been investigated by mathematicians? How exactly are his drawings representations of math? How is his pi drawing a representation of pi?

</comment><comment><USER8> Somebody should contact this guy and ask him to open a kickstarter page to raise cash for a coffee table book which includes his art with detailed explanations of the math behind it. Would totally buy it.

</comment><comment><USER9> If I were but so lucky. It sounds like he has plans to help the world with his gift too so good on him.

</comment><comment><USER10> Makes you wonder how much potential there is in all of us that just isn't "activated".

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder why we never hear stories about the college dropout who became a mathematical genius after independent study.</comment>


Why global warming and pollution may have no effect on earth. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/12/george-will-earth-doesn-t-care-what-is-done-to-it.html?gt1=43002

<comment><USER2> I don't think we have to be ashamed of being egoistic. We don't care about the wellbeing of the Earth, but at least we can care for us, for our quality of living, the short term effects, while they are short on geological scale, are not so short on human scale (our children, grand children, etc).

I don't know if all this about climate change is a real threat or not, but I don't feel that the argument "it happened already" really hits the core of the issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't care about earth. I care about humans.</comment>


Getting real about distributed system reliability - <AUTHOR> http://blog.empathybox.com/post/19574936361/getting-real-about-distributed-system-reliability <comment><USER2> Nice commentary by zooko:

[https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe- dev/2012-March/007185...](https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe- dev/2012-March/007185.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really liked "These systems end up being large hunks of monitoring, tests, and operational procedures with a teeny little distributed system strapped to the back."

</comment><comment><USER4> Where is the flaw in the reasoning? Is it the dreaded Hadoop single points of failure? No, it is far more fundamental than that: __the problem is the assumption that failures are independent. __Surely no belief could possibly be more counter to our own experience or just common sense than believing that there is no correlation between failures of machines in a cluster.</comment>


Indian govt will decide Rupee Sign today. - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Cabinet-decides-on-rupee-sign-today-/articleshow/6084121.cms <comment><USER2> Jeez, I've never seen such ridiculous ads on a legitimate-seeming website.</comment>


The Grocery Industry Confronts a New Problem: Only 10% of Americans Love Cooking - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-grocery-industry-confronts-a-new-problem-only-10-of-americans-love-cooking <comment><USER2> I would add a category to the list of three types;

4) Someone who doesn't like to cook but will for the most part due to health and cost considerations.

That basically describes me.

I've never particularly enjoyed cooking and find that cooking a good meal can take so much time out of my day that it eats into time I would rather spend doing something else.

However I know how bad most convenience food is and how pricey it can be compared to throwing a few ingredients together to make a sauce or something. I generally won't make anything that takes over 45 minutes to prepare. Over that time and it's just shortening my day in a way I don't like.

That said, if I could afford to have someone trained cook my meals for me every day, I absolutely would.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think people have less time and energy to cook than they did in the past. Commutes are longer. Kids are in more after-school activities. More people are taking work home with them. Something has to give.

Other factors could be the disappearance of home ec classes, the growth in some companies offering a lot of free food as a work perk, or mandatory meal plans in colleges (have those always been a thing? Or are they new?).

</comment><comment><USER4> I find something objectionable about the vast majority of the items sold in grocery stores. I wouldn't classify myself as someone who loves cooking, but I like to make stuff. Recently I threw together an apple cobbler that was well- received... It had apples, sugar, lemon juice, flour, butter, sugar and cinnamon.</comment>


April Fools Prank: Lannister inspired micro-collection for men - <AUTHOR> http://seat14a.com/limited_edition Don't forget to click the purchase button. :) <comment><USER2> solid job team, love what happens when you try to actually purchase it. hahaha ... almost fell off my chair. solid!

</comment><comment><USER3> Hilarious!

</comment><comment><USER4> Loved it</comment>


3D Printed Gun Movement - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/click-print-gun-the-inside-story-of-the-3d-printed-gun-movement-video

<comment><USER2> I thought that was pretty interesting actually. Regardless of gun control stance. I wonder how much of an impact 3D printers will have in the coming years.</comment>


Show HN: MeetingResponse – Track and get rid of ineffective meetings - <AUTHOR> https://meetingresponse.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN - I made this SaaS tool to help me and my project track and analyze all of the meetings we have throughout the work week.

There's no sign up - just forward any meeting invites you wanna track to "email@example.com". The app takes it from there. Any feedback would be great.</comment>


Mozilla Public License (MPL) Version 2.0 FAQ - open-source-ux https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/ <comment><AUTHOR> Highly disingenuous - it doesn't even mention the patent grab. Yet the same move is precisely what has gotten Facebook into so much controversy re the React BSD plus patents license.

"5.2. If You initiate litigation against any entity by asserting a patent infringement claim (excluding declaratory judgment actions, counter-claims, and cross-claims) alleging that a Contributor Version directly or indirectly infringes any patent, then the rights granted to You by any and all Contributors for the Covered Software under Section 2.1 of this License shall terminate."

[http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License](http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License)

<comment><AUTHOR> I love Mozilla. I rue this kind of clause which has been so destructive, causing so much rewriting to get to another license.</comment></comment>


Hadron Collider: we are still alive - <AUTHOR> http://dev.emcelettronica.com/hadron-collider-we-are-still-alive# <comment><USER2> Related Reading -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson> [http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_co...](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> they didn't actually collide anything yet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Cern scientists expect to find answers to many important subjects of physics such as the origin of universe, up to now explained with the big bang theory. Since the boson seems tied to the very origin of the universe, hence to the beginning of life, boson is also known as god particle.</comment>


Ask HN: Founders, what title do you use in email? - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering what title people use when emailing customers?  For my load testing consultancy, I have to periodically send introductory emails to sales prospects, and I'm struggling with what I should call myself.  So I'm wondering, what do you list as your title in emails? <comment><USER3> Depends on how you want to be perceived. One of the most interesting article I read talked about how this founder carries 2 business cards. When he meets prospective clients, his title on the card says "VP of Sales" so his organization seems much bigger than a 1 man shop. But if he is meeting investors, he uses his CEO title card so he seems to be the one in control.

I think this scenario would apply to you pretty well :)

<comment><USER4> I also like the VP of Sales pitch if you want an out in any negotiation, "well I have to talk to higher management, but what if I could do xyz for you..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _He carried two business cards: a plain one with just his name and another that read "I'm CEO...Bitch."_

[http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/21129674/the_battle_f...](http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/21129674/the_battle_for_facebook/7)

</comment><comment><USER6> All my business cards I've chosen when working for other companies say only "Programmer." I like that.

But when you're a founder or such, you have to cop to it. You don't want it to look like you're evading responsibility or jerking people's chain.

So it's "CTO and Co-Founder" on my business cards and (when appropriate) on email.

</comment><comment><USER7> I take after Mobutu, myself: (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko>)

"In 1972, Mobutu renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga ("The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."), Mobutu Sese Seko for short."

No, but seriously, I use "Principal." It conveys my central role in the company from a financial perspective without having the dangers of sounding pompous, pretentious or immodest to the ears of people who think "President" or "CEO" is a bit lofty for a 1-3 man show.

<comment><AUTHOR> Principal might be good--I've seen that used. I tried googling to figure out what it implies exactly, and wasn't successful. Can define for me what it "means" a little better?

<comment><USER7> It has a somewhat flexible meaning, but is usually used to refer to the partners (owners) of a business with an emphasis on the financial aspect of their ownership. The ownership has to be significant; elementary shareholders don't qualify. It is also sometimes used more loosely of corporate officers, i.e. CxOs.

The signature of a principal is often required in serious contracts. In other words, the defining attribute of a principal is his or her ability to represent the firm in a legally binding way with no limitations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You should use whatever you think your actual title is at this point in time. "President" or "Founder" would probably work well. For a small shop "CEO" and "VP" titles can be a little over the top. 90% of the time, this isn't an issue, but in some cases people will honestly have more of an impression of "Oh, isn't that cute!" instead of "Oh, he is is the CEO". I guess what I'm saying is that in general you will do well with no over or understating your reality in the company.

Do what you say, say what you do.

</comment><comment><USER9> It depends entirely on what your selling and what your client is like.

For example when I am prospecting work for my day job I always use "VP <company>" or "Senior Analyst"

On the other hand for my own company I usually choose something light heartened related to the rest of the mail: "the man" or "the tech guy" etc. it goes down quite well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just use your name and explain in human language what you do.

<comment><USER11> What about in the signature?

I usually don't put any titles in the actual email itself. In the signature, I sometimes go with Co-founder, other times, just put the company name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Generally I sign emails to customers with my title as "Developer". When you're responding to a support email or a pre-sale email, a lot of customers think it's very cool that they can contact the guy who built the product, not some random support person.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't use a title.

Scott Whigham

LearnItFirst

<phone>

<fax>

<http://www.learnitfirst.com>

</comment><comment><USER14> Just my name and my company's name. We're dealing mostly with consumer's though.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've just been using Founder... especially since it's jut me here.

</comment><comment><USER16> It depends... when speaking with people I want to make deals with, I use my title. If I'm dealing with users/customers, I just ID myself as co-founder.

</comment><comment><USER17> I put my degree BSc (Hons) even though a friend says it's irrelevant.

I earned those letters dammit!

<comment><USER18> Sorry to say this but .. I agree with your friend. Your qualifications are pretty much irrelevant in an email; mentioning them anyway may well be taken negatively by some people.

Still, at least it's a respectable degree. I once had to converse regularly with a guy who signed his emails "(full name), M.C.S.E.", flaunting those letters like they were equivalent to Medical Doctor or Order of the British Empire or something. Needless to say, merciless ridicule ensued.

<comment><USER17> I'd rather have THAT than my stupid degree!

<comment><USER18> Ha! Believe me .. no you wouldn't. In many circles an MCSE is like an anti- qualification in that unless the person has a good excuse, it is often viewed as a negative. At best it's neutral. And any employer wanting one - <USER2> clear.

In my humble opinion, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Optimist Prime at Blindoptimists

</comment><comment><USER20> Call yourself what you are, don't be too cute, keep yourself out of Valleywag.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use the title of "Product Manager" because that is what role I play.

</comment><comment><USER22> VP Sales.

</comment><comment><USER23> Make something up, make yourself the "Senior Sale Maker"

</comment><comment><USER24> Chief Nerd

<comment><USER24> Really, a downvote for that? I answered the question truthfully - <http://theninhotline.net/features/staff/>

<comment><USER25> Or nearly truthfully (ie not!) "Founder, Chief Nerd".

<comment><USER25> Well I got a down vote for correcting your false assertion, so karma is restored, or somesuch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Janitor

</comment><comment><USER27> Depends on who I am emailing.

Creative Director, Business Development manager, Creatively Directing Product Development.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sincerely,

Paul Blart

Mall Cop

<comment><USER29> Do not lie to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Casual: First name

Introduction: Full name

Sales email: Full name + "\nOwner, {{ company }}"

</comment><comment><USER18> Vice President for Special Projects</comment>


Ask HN: What Are European Alternatives to Azure, AWS and Office365? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> None. But why do you think ppl need eu alternative if these services are good and have datacenters in europe?

<comment><AUTHOR> A national risk assessment has increased the danger level on non-eu companies for storing citizen data.

So we're just trying to plan ahead for the unlikely event that we'll need to move off those services.</comment></comment>


Large scale Apache log file analysis - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of any good commercial products to analyze about 500 million to 1 billion rows (1 week) of apache access logs?
Looking for fairly simple analysis. Something similar to what weblog expert does, but on a larger scale.
Are there any commercial tools out to do this or are we stuck writing something for this?
I know we could use hive/hadoop/cassandra etc and build something. We are about to roll out another product that uses cassandra as a backend, but this is simply to get an idea of some of our basic web stats in a simple report.  This is not part of our core product, so I am just looking to see if there is an easy way to do something here without a bunch of development. <comment><USER2> I'm not aware of any commercial solutions but a tool you might find useful is Hive: <http://hadoop.apache.org/hive/>

These videos are a great introduction: <http://www.cloudera.com/videos/introduction_to_hive> <http://www.cloudera.com/videos/hive_tutorial>

</comment><comment><USER3> Splunk is very popular, although I think it's software that you have to host. I have no idea how fast it is, but with a recent-ish machine I wonder if you could have it process stuff in a weekly batch with minimum of frustration. They have a free trial that might be worth it to you -- www.splunk.com</comment>


Gizmodo and the Prototype iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/gizmodo_prototype_iphone <comment><USER2> According to Gizmodo the phone was lost March 18. On March 29 Gruber publishes a short comment that casually includes some of the specs (A4-family CPU, 960x640 display, front-facing camera). Kinda makes me wonder if there was an authorized leak of the hardware specs in order to steal some thunder from any upcoming stories.

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/29/wsj>

<comment><USER3> Or the specs were just obvious. Apple already released a next-gen device running iPhoneOS with the A4 processor. And their competitors are all hyping massive-res screens and front-facing cameras.

Apple would be insane not to do exactly what Gruber predicted.

<comment><USER4> Gruber gave the exact screen resolution, which was far from obvious (as, to my knowledge, no other phone has been released with that resolution).

<comment><USER5> Given that it was a fairly safe bet the new phone would have a higher-res, 960x640 was a fairly obvious candidate for the resolution. Anything else would have made resulted in a noticeable drop in quality when running existing apps.

Because 960x640 is exactly 2x the existing iPhone resolution in each dimension existing apps and their artwork can be doubled. Since the screen is approx the same size (unlike the iPad) this results in an image that's entirely indistinguishable from previous models, and may even be better if things like font and path rendering are "aware" of the higher res.

If they had chosen any other resolution then existing apps would need filtering when rendered fullscreen which in many cases would almost certainly resulted in a worse, or at least oddly different, look than the original. I'm sure Apple would have preferred not to go with 960x640 for cost reasons, but they couldn't very well release a phone where 160,000 apps look worse than when running on the previous model.

<comment><USER6> _960x640 was a fairly obvious candidate for the resolution_

A candidate perhaps, but not at all obvious. It's a higher pixel density than any device Wikipedia knows about: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_densi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_density). Other alternatives that would have been at least as plausible would be to keep it the same ("only geeks care about meaningless specs like that") or go to 720x480, where 1.5x scaling wouldn't be that bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a bit confused by this. Gizmodo's behaviour seems skanky, but only different by degree from Gruber, in this very post, confirming that the recent photos were of a late stage prototype, or in recent posts confirming tech specs.

People are throwing terms like "industrial espionage" around. Why is publishing such details of unreleased products from internal sources, as Gruber seems to take great delight in doing, not the same thing.

If one of his moles gets fed tagged information and the release gets traced back to him, resulting in a firing are we supposed to all gang up on Gruber too?

<comment><USER8> I do not perceive a double standard here.

Gruber: _I'm not offended by their decision to obtain this unit and publish everything they were able to ascertain regarding it._ [...] _Second, publishing the name, photographs, and personal information of the Apple engineer who lost the phone is irrelevant to the story. It was the dick move to end all dick moves._

It seems to me that he made it pretty clear that he does not take offense with reporting about the prototype per se. Rather, he condemns the way that Gizmodo chose to handle the whole affair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gizmodo's actions were equivalent to a tabloid posting topless photos of a "hot" celebrity they obtained via some sleezy paparazzi hiding in the bushes with a telephoto lens. For people who are too obsessed with the idea of celebrity to gauge the morality of their actions, or even the health of and nature of their relationship to those celebrities, this sort of thing can be exciting and can certainly cause a spike in readership.

But simultaneously it represents the self-destruction and denigration of gizmodo's brand. Personally I'm not a fan of the slightly-warmed-over-PR- release and tabloidesque tech journalism that is so common these days. I'd rather have honest personal reviews and hard-hitting technical critiques than gadget porn, gossip, and rumor mongering.

<comment><USER10> > equivalent to [...] photos of a "hot" celebrity they obtained via some > sleezy paparazzi hiding in the bushes

Not hiding in the bushes: detaining the photographed subject illegally for weeks. It would have been equivalent if pictures had been taken while the Apple engineer was playing with the phone, thinking he was alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My problem with this post is that Gruber acts like he isn't involved in this whole circus - he's just as much to blame as Gizmodo.

I'd suggest one of the main reasons that Gizmodo published the guys name is that Gruber implied immediately that they stole the prototype (<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/19/gizmodo-rumors>) without giving any evidence - not really the act of a 'ethical' journalist. It's fine to decide that you think it's theft if you go by the letter of the law (AFAIK Gruber isn't a lawyer, so it's just an uneducated opinion) but to stoke the flames and then be 'offended' is pure hypocrisy.

<comment><USER8> _(AFAIK Gruber isn't a lawyer, so it's just an uneducated opinion)_

That's a bit harsh; there's a large difference between an "uneducated opinion" and a "carefully researched assessment by a non-lawyer". Based on your criteria, no journalist could ever write about any topic but journalism.

<comment><USER12> Based on what I've seen, especially in science journalism, there are a lot of journalists who should be topic-restricted in this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i agree that gizmodo shouldn't have published the guy's name at all. though how it was reported etc is hardly surprising. this is exactly how journalism works. people are all hotheaded in this situation because it's an apple product that's been unveiled. i doubt gruber would be "offended" by a similar case for any other company's gadget.

<comment><USER14> > _this is exactly how journalism works_

No, this is "industrial espionage" through illegal methods, and it's only OK- ish to do if it serves some public good (justice). And no, this is not journalism, unless by that you mean intentionally breaking the law for your own profit.

I really hope the person that stole that phone and Gizmodo are prosecuted for theft.

Because of dicks like these we ended up with the current patent system.

<comment><USER13> all i think is that everyone is making a mountain out of a molehill in this situation. this is blown way out of proportion.

<comment><USER15> Except reactions to Gizmodo publishing the name and photo of an innocent employee, who they then proceed to mock. The only rationale for doing so is to deflect some of the heat that they were getting in classic dick fashion.

"Dude! We screwed up, but... look at this guy! Man he likes BEER!"

Thats professionalism right there.

<comment><USER12> I read their comments regarding beer as attempts to rehabilitate that guy as an ordinary fellow who makes mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is he personally offended by this?

I can understand if someone (including me) not really agreeing the way Gizmodo handled this situation, but are you _offended_ by this?

<comment><USER17> I just read about three bisexual men who were disqualified from playing in the Gay Softball World Series because they were not deemed to be "Gay enough." I was offended.

Sometimes people are offended by what they perceive as injustice or impropriety even when it doesn't directly appear to harm them. You may not be such a person, but I am not surprised they exist.

I'm astounded that they outed the engineer who they claim "lost" the phone. They appear to have taken the word of a law-breaker with a $5,000 incentive to lie that the phone was lost and not stolen, and on that basis they publicly humiliate the engineer. They are either exceedingly cruel or this is an act of misdirection intended to bolster their "defense" that the phone was actually lost and that neither the person who approached them or themselves were able to return the phone promptly.

A very nasty bit of business indeed.

<comment><USER18> Not gay enough? Hell, the olympics have a hard time even telling if people are woman enough:

[http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/OlympicGenderTesti...](http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/OlympicGenderTesting.html) [http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/30/olympicgames2008...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/30/olympicgames2008.gender)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any suggestions of ethical gadget bloggers would be appreciated.

I don't give Gizmodo pageviews because of this incident.

I don't give Engadget pageviews because it feeds Calacanis' troll ego.

<comment><USER20> Calacanis has nothing to do with Engadget anymore. It's still not a great site, but don't visit because of him. He's busy filling the web with spam.

<comment><USER19> He still spends plenty of time taking credit for it, I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm slightly torn about this. This does appear to be theft, however, but Gruber also seems to imply that Apple is a bit of a victim. This reminds me of the relationship between celebrities and the paparazzi. Celebrities hate the downside when they are stalked trying to live their normal lives, but need all of the attention to continue making the ridiculous amounts of money they do. Similarly, Apple lives by creating the obscene levels of hype around their product launches. I can't help but think Apple has created this environment where people would freak out about a prototype leak and do _anything_ to get early details about it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I dont understand why people are blaming gizmodo and siding with the guy who lost his phone. He works for a corporation notorious for secrecy and 'leaking' product info through such underhand means for generating hype. Employees of 3-letter Govt. agencies know the risk when signing up, that their life may be in danger because they know stuff which is worth killing. Well, same with apple i guess. They have lowered(raised?) the bar on this whole secrecy nonsense that punishing them by publicly disclosing and humiliating their secret-bearing employees is the only way out. Let's keep in mind that it is apple which has cultivated this ring of secrecy, and now their employee is whining because gizmodo does what apple exactly expects them to?

<comment><USER23> Do you suggest that Apple's secrecy policy justifies buying stolen property??

<comment><USER22> The whole point is that apple is capable enough of engineering such an incident. And that whiner has no right to complain after being part of apple's insidious plans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what he feels about Wikileaks?

<comment><USER24> This was primarily a legal analysis. What laws are wikileaks breaking?

<comment><USER20> Classified US military documents and videos are a whole lot more secret and illegal to publish than an iPhone prototype (and have a lot bigger consequences--there won't be any retaliation suicide bombings from HTC). I think it's illogical to call for Gizmodo to be prosecuted without also saying the same for Wikileaks.

<comment><USER25> In Gruber's post he points to a law that clearly state that if the theft was done in the interest of justice, then it could be considering OK. I think wikileaks might be able to use this. They are doing it in the interest of the public in their mind which is completely different here. Gizmodo did it in the interest of making money and paid for a phone they knew had been stolen.

Also, wikileaks isn't hosted in the US and thus doesn't have to obey to American laws. They also did not steal those videos these are copies and in my IANAL opinion is completely different.

<comment><USER26> I did not see anywhere that it was _stolen_ , any pointers?

<comment><USER27> Did you read TFA ? What happened perfectly fits in the legal definition of theft and handling of stolen property.

<comment><USER28> There's also the problem that the "found on a barstool" story came from the guy who sold it to Gizmodo. Gruber hints at another possibility, but let me just lay it out explicitly:

1\. Powell takes the photo that he posted to Facebook, but uses the _front- facing camera_ to do it. (Hey, field testing under real-world conditions!) 2. Seller notices this (iPhone with a front-facing camera? WTF??). 3. Seller puts two and two together ("cha-ching" noise, dollar signs roll up in their eyes, etc.). 4. Seller sticks around for a while, picks Powell's pocket at the first opportunity, and bails. 5. Seller lays low for a while to see if word gets out, thinks up a plausible story, then makes the rounds of the tech blogs. 6. _Profit!_

If this is what Apple believes happened, it's unlikely they'd take any action (assuming they take action at all) until after the phone is announced/released. Starting that ball rolling now would be too big a distraction from the actual launch. But after that it could get very ugly for Gizmodo very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This whole episode is probably staged and directed by Apple. Great way to call attention to an upcoming release. Oh and also to get people like me, who otherwise never would've read an iPhone spec/review, to actually read an iPhone spec/review.

You got me there Apple! Well played.

<comment><USER30> Because Apple has a really hard time getting attention for upcoming releases, right?

If only they could generate buzz and media coverage in some other way, they wouldn't have to resort to these transparent and desperate gimmicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Gizmodo knows Apple won't sue because it would be a public relations nightmare.

<comment><USER17> Remind me: Was it a PR nightmare when they sued various rumours sites for offering a bounty to anyone who would break their confidentiality agreements?

<comment><USER32> Right, they were pretty effective at ending ThinkSecret. No reason to believe that they wouldn't be just as happy to end Gizmodo too.

<comment><USER33> They settled with ThinkSecret, probably paying a ton of cash to Ciarelli, to shut it down. Don't think that's going to happen with Gizmodo...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Such publicity is good for AAPL, even if that was an accident. =)

<comment><USER35> How so?

<comment><USER34> yellow-papers methods to keep the buzz up. Of course, effectiveness of such events cannot be compared to spreading rumors about ARM acquiring. =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh goody, a legal analysis by a non-lawyer. Great reading...

</comment><comment><USER36> sometimes and sometimes a bit more often there is a thought coming up my mind and (attention ironic) I dont know why, but always apple got to do with it: what if...?

... never heard of viral marketing?

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand why everybody is trying to quote the law and take strict meaning of it to prove Gizmodo did wrong. All are ignoring the fact that Gizmodo brought it to light, which everybody is _really_ interested to know anyway!

As per the strict letter of law, many of our day to day activities would be wrong too! Considering that there were no deaths or loss of money, and Gizmodo is willing to return it back to Apple, I would give Gizmodo a clear pass!

<comment><USER37> Logged in to say this:

If many of your daily goings on would be wrong in the strickest sense, IMHO you're doing it wrong. Ethics matter. Rule of law matters.

No, I'm sure not perfect myself. But we all should try our best and correct/learn from our mistakes and try to achieve the high road.

<comment><USER26> Ethics matter, i agree. Rule of law matters? I am really not sure, it needs to be considered case by case: Things change over time, new laws come in that make old things illegal. Do i have to accept them blindly or not is a personal decision.

Coming to the point, you did not mention what part of Gizmodo story you think is ethically wrong. Ethics matter, rule of law matters, try our best, learn from mistakes, etc. are kinda universal truths, everybody knows. Say something concrete to the point!

<comment><USER30> Regardless of rule of law. What Gizmodo/Gawker did looks very unethical, at least to me. To hand-wave and say "people break laws all the time" and "the story was interesting, so it's worth it" are both ex-post-facto rationalizations for something that is, at best, pretty sleazy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SameTunes – A Music Compatibility Platform for Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://sametunes.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

I'm one of the developers on the SameTunes team. We've spent the whole summer working out of a house to build this platform. We're really proud of the work we've done and hope you all enjoy using it.

With SameTunes you can view interesting statistics about your taste, find your music compatibility with friends, and discover new music!

Let us know what you think

<comment><USER2> Nice work, it looks really polished! What I would suggest improving is the single user experience: what I can do without involving friends. Right now I only see a huge list of strangers in alphabetical order. Picking someone at random seems pointless. However, if strangers could be sorted by match, that could be really interesting. That could also serve as a benchmark for my matchscore with friends.

If this is prohibitively costly in your current setup, I would suggest mapping each user profile to an embedding vector and find best matches using approximate nearest neighbors, that scales really well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree 1,000%.

When building out the platform, efficiency was a foremost consideration. Because of that, each comparison calculation flies.

That's a good implementation suggestion, it reminds me of the adjacency matrix Twitter uses for mutual friends.

I'm drafting up proposal for your idea now, it serves a really strong introduction to the platform.

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> I think the embedding idea in specific is quite good and there are several potential approaches! One is, if you let xᵢ be the song vector for user i (whose kth entry is 1 if user i has song k in their library and 0 otherwise). Then you can compute the "overlap" by something like xᵢ ⋅ xⱼ (with some normalization of course!) where ⋅ is the inner product. [0]

A simple approximation of this inner product would be to generate a random (potentially sparse!) matrix S whose nonzero entries are i.i.d. Gaussian, for example, and whose number of rows is much smaller than the number of columns [1], then you can instead store and compute

        (Sxᵢ) ⋅ (Sxⱼ)

which gives you an approximate overlap, whose storage and computation requirements are much smaller for each user (since Sxᵢ is much smaller in number of entries than xᵢ).

\-----

[0] Of course, there are many other similar methods! This is a particularly simple, but often fairly effective one.

[1] More specifically, it goes like O(log(n)/ε²) where ε is the error you wish to achieve. Often, a fairly large choice of ε actually will suffice. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson–Lindenstrauss_lemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson–Lindenstrauss_lemma)

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant.

Through the Spotify API we are given locational and positional data on some music objects. Your proposal to structure songs as vectors opens up a lot more flexibility for storing, weighting, and manipulating that data.

The way in which the overlaps are calculated is crucial to our platform, something like feeding the dot product into a weighting matrix would leverage this structure really well.

Your proposal is very similar to how comparisons are currently computed on SameTunes. But, leveraging existing mathematical theorems and restructuring the algorithm with linear algebra in mind would help a ton with some of the noise and normalisation issues we've experienced.

I really appreciate you taking the time to draft that out!

<comment><USER3> For sure! It's a cool product (I got two people who messaged me about it this morning, before I even saw it on hn) and it's pretty fun. Good luck with it! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess the point is that it compares your favorites with friends, so you can listen to what your friends are listening to? My friend link is [https://smtn.es/4973.99538c0985](https://smtn.es/4973.99538c0985) if anyone wants to try.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any app that wants my personal info to "connect me" from the get go creeps me out. Spotify already connects me with others. Although I find spotify UI a bit obtuse and their music suggestions moronic. I would be more interested on a mobile platform that connects me with independent artists (aka fresh music)...like Soundcloud combined with music guaranteed to get it right on suggestions not because some computer algorithm but because they have competent curators...Like Calmradio.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's totally fair. I wish Spotify gave us more granularity in the data we ask for, I don't think we need the blanket permissions a user has to grant us (as someone who just deleted their Facebook and soon Google accounts, this is really important to me).

We've reached out to a lot of local artists here in Atlanta and hope to use the platform to recommend and share their content to those interested.

Hand curating playlists is also a big feature we've been toying with. That's where something like Apple Music's hand crafted playlists are usually a lot stronger than Spotify's computed playlists.

I haven't heard of Calmradio, it's exactly what I've been looking for! I've resorted to listening to music through a cheap FM radio to try and break out of the algorithm hell Spotify tends to put me in.

Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Finally. It's such a simple idea, I've been waiting for a long while. Is there something like this that takes more profiles into consideration?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely something we're focusing on more now. Like qnsi mentioned, last.fm does a pretty good job of that -- I've been a fan since high school.

We, SameTunes, have an advantage when it comes to calculating a user's affinity for songs, artists and albums. Last.fm ranks your music by tracking how many times you've played (or "scrobbled") a song, songs by an artist, etc. SameTunes uses additional data Spotify publishes (like position in a created playlist, occurrences in your liked music, etc) to build a more well rounded representation of your music taste in the past and present.

There are definitely features we can, and plan to, add to help better portray this data to a user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spent an hour with friends talking about our music because of this :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool idea, I just tried it out. Any reason you used PHP, and I assume a LAMP stack, instead of something more modern?

<comment><USER9> It's interesting that these kind of false premises come up often on HN. Don't get me wrong, I don't like PHP either, but nowadays. PHP is just as "modern" as many other languages in use. And with frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, it stacks up well against the likes of Ruby on Rails, Django or any NodeJS based stack. And let's not forget that the majority of websites and webapps runs on PHP.

<comment><USER8> I think that's totally fair. I have a personal project that I'm getting started on and I'm having trouble picking a stack to use. I hear a lot of conflicting opinions on here. I've looked through the documentation for newer frameworks like React and they seem really easy to get started with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in no place to recommend technologies to chose (I'm no expert) but the documentation argument is a good one. There are a lot of articles from the past few decades introducing different odds and ends with PHP. Additionally, PHPDocs are great but they're nothing in comparison to the tutorials and examples provided by things like ReactJS' or Vue's official docs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If you accept evolution, you must oppose over-regulation of the economy - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-moral-molecule/200905/if-you-accept-evolution-you-must-oppose-over-regulation-the-economy

<comment><USER2> You can accept evolution -- and then conquer it.

If the premise of this article is true, then we would oppose medicine. We would oppose plastic surgery. We would oppose debt. We would oppose the police. We would oppose _marriage_ and commitment to _one_ individual.

All those things are contrary to evolution, yet, they are social institutions that have _evolved_ to protect and further _our species_.

If you accept evolution, then you accept that it is _the species_ that is important -- not an individual organism. We are fighting for the very existence of intelligence in the universe. We are fighting to preserve the most unique thing we know that exists -- life itself.

This word "over-regulation" and these arguments about government intervention are all bogus. It is because the government backed off what many called "over- regulation" that we are in the very mess we are in!

If you accept _evolution_ then you must also accept that some individuals within a population are going to attempt to ensure _their_ survival over the survival of _our species_. Some _individuals_ do not understand that they exist in a fabric composed of threads between every living organism. They believe their individual success is of the prime importance -- but this is not what evolution teaches.

Darwin's theories of evolution are made in a world devoid of free will. We can choose how to proceed as a group. We can come together as a planet and make our planet better for all. We do not need to compete with each other to the deteriment of our opponent. We need to compete toward common goals: Survival for all, good health, longevity, eternal intelligence in the universe.

<comment><USER3> _"If you accept evolution, then you accept that it is the species that is important -- not an individual organism. We are fighting for the very existence of intelligence in the universe. We are fighting to preserve the most unique thing we know that exists -- life itself."_

That sounds terribly naive to me. According to the gene-centric view of evolution, that is completely wrong.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolution>

I like to watch documentaries about simians because they're the animals closest to humans. They live in society, share tasks, and generally do a lot of things humans do. Some male simians even pay for sex! It happens that the alpha male gets to impregnate most females of the group, and most males are left with nothing. These males obviously don't like being reproductive losers and rebel against the _status quo_. They will try to kill the alpha male and fight among themselves to see who the new alpha male will be. They will kill the former alpha male's babies so that they can impregnate the females and let these take care of their offspring, not someone else's offspring. They don't care a fig about the species, they care about fulfilling their biological role, which is to procreate with the best females of the pack.

Humans are not monkeys, but most of us aren't that different in terms of behavior. Given that there are limited resources such as food and fertile females, caring about the species makes little sense to most animals. Maybe it makes some sense to humans, but I personally think that's baloney. We have evolved beyong the basic primate level, but not as much as some people think.

<comment><USER4> We are more than our genes. Let's not be reductionists here. So yes, we have brains which can make some of us do things like die for others or even die for ideas. That's quite something for your uncaring individuals.

And I think your view of gene-centric evolution sounds terribly naïve: It has been explained a lot of times that the "selfish gene" has nothing to do with making us selfish ^^ Quite the contrary: it can make individuals do very altruistic things for their siblings (potentially carriers of the same gene).

And finally, in my opinion even if genes are fixed like hardware, their seems still to be some freedom left to software, memes...

<comment><USER3> Of course we are more than our genes. We can rise above our primitiveness, hopefully. I didn't mean to defend the gene-centric theory of evolution because I am not an expert on it. And yes, I have read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" too, so I am acquainted with the theory that altruism and collaboration can stem from the so-called selfish gene.

Enough of theories. Let us look at facts. There are limited resources, and we will fight for them. Like I said, I don't believe that we fight for what's good for the species. We fight for ourselves, our families and communities. We are still rather tribal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This piece is so horribly fundamentally naive, that it's not worth even considering.

You want to use the evolutionary example? Fine, look at livestock or plant husbandry. We breed and select for animals which serve our needs. Cows that have more meat, which produce more milk. Ones which are more docile. Plants that produce more yield, which are less susceptible to poisoning us, or making us sick as vectors for diseases.

We control a great deal of evolution, because it makes us safer, and healthier.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

This is easily put another way.

There is an Economic fitness landscape, just the same way that there is an Evolutionary fitness landscape.

Just the way that we control the incentives, and conditions for how reproduction takes place in our livestock, we also control the incentives and conditions for economic growth and (re)production.

We _must_ ensure there are sane incentives for how corporations and individuals behave in the economy. We _must_ observe and shape the landscape that we live in or we risk becoming victims of evolutionary, or economic pitfalls, both seen and unseen.

<comment><USER5> An addendum:

Regulation is a tool to change the landscape and the conditions in which businesses and individuals operate.

You can regulate in a way that benefits certain types of business, i.e. breaking up a monopoly helps smaller businesses. Making the phone companies lease their lines to smaller competitors is a GOOD thing for competition and diversity.

The notion that regulation only ever stifles the economy, in that sense, is simply incorrect.

That is not to say that there aren't regulations that have a stifling/dampening effect, nor that there shouldn't be. Sometimes you do want to raise the bar across the board. We need banks to be sufficiently capitalized in order to be able to pay their customers back.

That may be stifling for banks, but it's in OUR best interest.

<comment><USER6> All of this also assumes that government can do its job well.

That breaking up a monopoly (and how do you define one, anyway?) is good is not obvious (economies of scale, etc). But even taking this as given, that sometimes monopolies are bad, it is far from clear whether allowing government to intervene will be better.

You have to weigh the costs and benefits. Anti-trust law is extremely subjective. It's existence incentivizes companies to use it against each other to gain a competitive edge rather than real value-added approaches. Anti-trust law creates uncertainty that can deter innovation (should we develop this technology if we can't fully profit off of it?)

Government institutions are like all other institutions - they want to survive. And to survive, they need to grow. Mission creep is inevitable. So even if you have identified a narrow area in which government intervention can help, it is not obvious that we should allow government to intervene.

<comment><USER4> I know people on HN are very liberal, but this is extremely cynic about institutions. I mean: I know we are not living in wonderland and this is close to true. Here in France I even have the impression that key institutions have mostly been overtaken by private interests. But in theory we are supposed to try to get closer to something called democracy, where those institutions should reflect our common goals and hopes by some collective decision-making process (the difficult part!). Even if it is extremely tough at the scale of countries, and even if we are far from it, I though we were at least trying...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't follow the argument. It seems to claim that because there ISN'T a God involved in evolution, there OUGHT NOT be a God figure involved in the economy. Regardless of how anyone feels about each individual statement, I fail to see the logic that connects them.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author is confusing accepting biological evolution as a fact with _belief_ in natural selection as an all-powerful optimizing agent. As most biologists understand (since Gould & Lewontin's 1979 "Critique of the Adaptationist Program", anyway), evolution makes mistakes and leads to nonoptimal outcomes. There is every reason to believe that conscious human design can construct better systems than some sort of anarchical survival-of-the-fittest scheme.

In fact, saying so is blisteringly obvious. Virtually every human accomplishment has required conscious design. Evolution by natural selection could never have designed a wheel -- but we did. It may be tempting to employ biological principles to everything, but it's a mistake.

</comment><comment><USER6> While the argument presented in this article is obviously nonsense, it is definitely not obvious that regulation is desirable. Have any of you touting regulation to 'correctly align incentives' considered how much regulation has existed already?

From the GSE's (Fannie and Freddie), the SEC, the mere existence of a central bank, to scores and scores of other existing government interventions in the economy, what we've seen in the past few decades cannot really be called free- market capitalism.

The current crisis clearly indicates that something is broken. That we have too much regulation is as plausible an explanation as that we have too little. And yet, very few people seem to even acknowledge this fact.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone actually advocate over-regulation?

<comment><USER10> I listen to Robert Reich radio commentaries, and he seems to advocate over- regulation.

<comment><USER11> Surely the level of regulation he advocates seems excessive to you, no? (I have no particular opinion RR's actual recommendations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So regulation interferes with the natural process of business evolving so they can consume more resources and grow larger and more powerful. It also protects the "weaker" (smaller businesses and actual people) by giving them unnatural advantages that allow them to survive and avoid being obliterated by the stronger "more fit" organizations. Vaccines interfere with the natural process of viruses evolving into more powerful organisms and giving their competition (us) an unnatural advantage that allow us to survive and avoid being obliterated by the stronger viruses.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think I've ever met anyone with a consistent perspective on everything (me included). People will accept contradictory premises, especially across different fields, all the time.

</comment><comment><USER14> That assumes the purpose of regulation is to limit competition between corporations and prevent them from failing. The true purpose of most regulation is to protect consumers and small time investors from the worst side effects of a competitive market.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter Is does not imply ought.

</comment><comment><USER15> "If you accept evolution, you must oppose over-regulation of the economy " ... How about this: "If you accept evolution, you must oppose putting to jail murderers."

<comment><USER16> Civilized society is perfectly fine with opposing jail for murderers, for several definitions of "murder".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> ...may I breed dogs or plant hybrid tomatoes in my garden?

</comment><comment><USER18> Memo: Evolution is an explanation of fact and contains no moral (or religious, for that matter) position. Accepting evolution as an explanation of what happened does not require that one subscribe to so-called "Darwinist" social and economic ideologies.

^OP didn't get it.</comment>


Refused U.S. visa eight times, Zoom CEO is now a billionaire - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-18/u-s-refused-his-visa-eight-times-now-zoom-ceo-is-a-billionaire <comment><USER2> Zoom is interesting. They don't really seem to have done anything particularly novel, they just made a product that works better than the competition. We use Zoom heavily on our fully remote team because it works better than free alternatives like Skype and paid alternatives that we're already paying for like Slack.

It's quite refreshing to see a tech company succeed by just making a better product and expecting that people will be willing to pay for it. They were able to grow so quickly in part because it was relatively easy for people to switch from other video conferencing solutions however. I'm not sure they will be able to build much competitive advantage other than just continuing to be a better product though. If Slack worked just as well we'd happily use it and stop paying for an additional service.

<comment><USER3> MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark patterns".

But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running; sales are easier if you are _known_ as better; you get more informative feedback if you have more users, etc.

<comment><USER4> > MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark > patterns".

Dramatic statement. I am an SWE and an MBA. There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business. Tech/Product is just one - an important one in a Saas company, but still just one.

> But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race > if you keep running;

This is another way of saying "build it and they will come". You have to combine good business/economic sense with great products.

Apple didn't just get to be Apple by staying ahead in a technological race. Arguably, they are behind a lot of other phone makers in specs. But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.

<comment><USER5> > There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business.

This isn't a refutation of the parent - all you've said is that sometimes those dark patterns are worth exploiting. I'm rarely one for defending an absolute, so I think it would be far more interesting to say _why_ it is worth using a 'dark pattern'. So far, it just feels like you're deflecting through masking the issue.

<comment><USER6> "Dark pattern" has a more specific meaning than it seems like you're using here - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern)

<comment><USER7> "dark pattern" was a phrase in use before that neologism.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="dark%20pattern")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm nobody compared to the person on the story, but I was refused a US visa that I needed to speak at a tech conference.

The US visa system needs to get out there and see what people are doing. I'm a full-time freelancer and I am 27. The officer said that I don't have ties to my home country and that I'm still young...

Damn right I am! I traveled to over 30coubtries so far and had spoken at various tech conferences. There is a lot of travel history on the passport. Unless you got to this outdated image of a person that's risk-free, you won't make it to US. It doesn't matter if your talk is selected among 700 others, you just won't make it. Bye.

<comment><USER9> Refused visas for conference presentations is kind of an old story; I can recall incidents from back in the Bush II era. My guess (uninformed) is that the concerns are about the distinction between visiting for tourism and coming here to perform work, especially since the advice I've seen given at some events is to avoid any mention of the conference when entering the country.

<comment><USER10> That's not smart. As a non-citizen you don't have much rights. If you get caught lying, you'll be barred from entering the US and you'll probably need to resolve to court.

How they can find out:

\- Booking of where you are staying.

\- Going through your phone/laptop.

\- Paper/Flyers for your company or the event.

\- A big event is happening and you are kinda fitting the bill for it.

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying it's smart, I'm saying it's the advice I've heard given.

<comment><USER10> It also the advice that I have heard but it is still a bad advice. Another advice: don't tell them you have food so that you avoid going through a baggage search.

Here is the downside: if a dog catches you, you'll get a fine. You could avoid that just by declaring any food you have.

<comment><USER9> I'm confident you're right. My point was just to reinforce the argument that CBP has a longstanding concern about whether visitors to the US are here to conduct business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Similarly, Adi Shamir, bazillionaire founder of RSA (he's the "S"), couldn't get a visa this year to attend the RSA conference.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/adi-shamir-couldnt-get-us-visa- to-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/adi-shamir-couldnt-get-us-visa-to-attend- rsa-conference-named-for-him/)

<comment><USER12> We don't know if it is similar. Zoom CEO was probably applying for an investor immigrant visa which are complicated and could be rejected for many reasons until the proper documents have been provided.

Shamir sent in a visa request and never heard back from USCIS.

Similarly, his US visa was delayed in 2013 also: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/17/crypto_guru_shamir_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/17/crypto_guru_shamir_red_tape_bungle/)

<comment><USER13> Visas are issued by the Department of State, not USCIS. USCIS can adjust the status of foreigners already within the US but that's not the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good for him. However, the wind has already turned eastward. Given the insanity in US immigration policy and xenophobia among the public, talents are going back to their original countries in flocks. Check out top 20 most valuable startups in the world - used to be 100% American and now half[ref] are foreign owned.

edit ref: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_compan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_companies)

<comment><USER15> Looking at the listing you provided, the wide majority of the non-American unicorn startups are from China, with some scattered startups in other eastern countries. So I think the shift in startup-location speaks more about China's success in bringing back talent (especially compared to India) versus America's lack of a grip on talent.

<comment><USER14> The trend is more important. US has only 32% of the world's unicorns. Even if you remove all the Chinese companies, US is 58% of the total, far less than the number a few years back. India and Southeast Asia are especially doing well if you put the size of their economies into consideration. In five years, these unicorns could grow into nowadays Amazon and Facebook, and the same holds true for the shift in the job market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The story of being denied a visa appears to be from years/decades ago. He attended Stanford Business School around 2006. He also worked at Cisco and WebEx for 10+ years. Heck, Zoom headquarters are in California. Way to spin an article about a great achievement, Bloomberg.

</comment><comment><USER17> Good for him. Nice to hear about success stories. Zoom is excellent. Markedly better than WebEx, in my experience.

<comment><USER18> To be fair anything is better than WebEx. Glad it finally has Linux support in the browser though, but it was way too late to the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google's constant shifting finally lead us to abandon it in favor of Zoom. We used Google Hangouts, then Meet for 3 years. Finally switched to Zoom and happy. It always seems to be 5% better (our marketing guy always used it for external meetings).

</comment><comment><USER20> Selecting immigrants doesn't work, in my opinion.

Regardless of the selection criteria, any screening will deter "desirable" people. It will not deter those who choose to circumvent that process, especially those who immigrate "illegaly" or "irregularly", like refugees in Europe, who are not eligible for asylum, but can't be deported for all sorts of perfectly valid reasons.

In the end, and we see this all over the world, such screening leads to adverse effects even considering the intended screening criteria.

<comment><USER21> >Regardless of the selection criteria, any screening will deter "desirable" people.

Is there any evidence this is true?

<comment><USER20> At the very least immigrants would need to fill out a ton of paperwork and endure multiple bureaucratic round trips, assuming the destination country even has the capacity to deal with all applications.

Then the message behind a detailed screening is: "We consider you as an extreme risk, which is only worth taking if we can exploit you enough."

You can't bring your spouse or family, at least not without significant hurdles, and if that process is too easy, screening for the original criteria is undermined.

Considering restrictive immigration policies against your people, you won't be able to find a supportive immigrant community and are totally dependent on fitting in with the locals, and the locals letting you fit in. Just ask Westerners in Japan.

For any kind of screening to work, you also need a ruthless border control and immigration enforcement, including mass deportations if neccessary. An effective enforcement has to - at the least - "inconvenience" anybody looking remotely like an immigrant, before being shown any paperwork.

Many of these factors don't play out in many countries, but mostly with the result that the screening doesn't really work that well. The US and Canada have rather big populations of undocumented immigrants, despite having detailed and sophisticated "screening" processes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "an American billionaire".

Would be interesting to learn why he was denied eight times, or granted one on the ninth try.

<comment><USER23> More curious why he even tried 9 times. Australia is very accepting of Chinese migrants, and there's plenty of talent to hire.

<comment><USER24> I know of someone who went on to interview at Google a total of sixteen times.

<comment><USER25> I just failed mine and they said I can only try once a year though?

<comment><USER26> Well Google was founded 20 years ago so... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The U.S. is the favored country

EU needs to up its game on this. It's a travesty we haven't managed to lure these people to the EU reliably yet.

<comment><USER28> Until you improve on the pitiful salaries offered in Europe's tech industry, that's not going to change.

<comment><USER29> Eh, some people will be tempted, knowing that their children will get a decent education that doesn't cost the world, healthcare, gun violence, etc. But you're right, we'll likely never convince the people who have never experienced another culture and who value money over everything. Edit: Even if we did pay more, the language barrier is still pretty high.

<comment><USER30> The above list makes sense for people outside of tech. People in tech have most of the above in US. Some countries in Europe have pretty competitive comp like Switzerland (Denmark, Norway have decent comp too but its getting destroyed by high taxes)

<comment><USER31> Curious about the comment on Norway taxes. They are high but the benefits offered are very good for citizens. Education and healthcare being top benefits. Also the culture contributes a lot to viewing it more positively from what I understand.

I don't work in Norway but I've been researching it as a possible location to migrate to in the future. Curious if there are any citizens from Norway who'd be interested in adding information to this though.

<comment><USER30> I think the situation is very skewed when comparing tech sector because of how competitive things are in US the comp packages can be far beyond of what you get as "free" gov. services in a place like Norway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "America succeeded in spite of Americans" \- Immigrants

</comment><comment><USER33> Well done. Zoom's the only video conferencing app I've come across that has been reliably pleasant to use.

<comment><USER34> They have some weird tiers where the max length of a web meeting is something silly like 40 mins. Ok laugh, why do people need more than 40 mins, but this makes that tier useless because any serious company is going to have people who need to meet over 40 mins. So it's a tier of service which exists for the sole purpose of upsell.

<comment><USER35> You mean, like, a profitable business model?

If you're a "serious company" then surely you can pay for a great service like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm curious, why would a Chinese citizen feel compelled to apply for a Visa 8 times, to start a business? Surely it is far easier and faster for a Chinese citizen to start a company in China? I would imagine that capital would be almost as easily available, as would labor. As for market access, surely just opening branch office in Silicon Valley would have served the purpose? If high quality American engineers, were needed, that too could be achieved by opening a branch office. Why go to all the trouble of emigrating from China? Am I missing significant context here, was the visa granted the 8th time an investor visa?

<comment><USER37> I have a sense (perhaps unfounded) that it's difficult for Chinese tech companies to make inroads outside of China. This is because of the Chinese government's role as a kingmaker within its own tech industry, and because of concerns of IP theft, surveillance, and state-backed hacking from the Chinese government. Big firms outside of China do not trust Chinese software firms with their data. As a big time software company in China, you can only really sell to Chinese buyers, with a few rare exceptions.

On the other hand, a US company can operate essentially anywhere but China. Maybe he thought he had a better shot on his own merits outside China. Maybe he didn't want to get in bed with the party, or maybe he was just a guy who was enamored of the dream that was Silicon Valley in the 80s through the 00s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> As someone who owns a Zoom H2 recorder this thread was initially confusing. Apparently there are two major companies called Zoom.

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

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

<comment><USER39> You're not the only one who was confused... Apparently there is _yet another_ Zoom company -- the one whose ticker symbol happens to be "ZOOM" \-- who has seen an increase of 54,000% in share price since March, purely on news of Zoom Video's IPO.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zoom-ipo-stock- soared-54000-per...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zoom-ipo-stock- soared-54000-percent-for-very-bad-reason/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Zoom deserves the huge pop for adding the "touch up face" feature to the desktop app. I can look fresh for meetings even if I'm running haggard from taking care of an infant. :)

Seriously though, that's one of those small features that shows real love and care was put in the product. I was skeptical of Zoom when I switched to it but it quickly became my favorite video conferencing software by a mile.

<comment><USER41> >Zoom deserves the huge pop for adding the "touch up face" feature to the desktop app.

Heh, I remember that from 'The Jetsons' \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0idWiHiasKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0idWiHiasKg)

They should have labelled it 'Morning Mask'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> the problem with proprietary tools like Zoom (and Skype, hell even Slack) is that people are forced to use them when working for remote companies. At least if they want to keep that job. But ofc you're still using your own hardware to run this shit on to do your job. I suppose this is better than the atrocious idea of using WhatsApp as team collaboration tool on your personal phone.

<comment><USER43> Everyone I know who has worked remote has had their tools supplied by the company or has been reimbursed for purchasing them on behalf of the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> appear.in, does what it says on the tin, no fucking about. Played about with zoom but it was a multi-minute ballache of signup steps and a screen sharing plugin the doesn't work properly on i3wm, I can't even begin to imagine the others if Zoom was mean't to be straight forward.

</comment><comment><USER45> Alternate opinion, I work at Microsoft as an Engineer. We (obviously) use Teams for meetings. For one thing, it integrates well with the MS/Office ecosystem (sharing videos is easier etc). But the video conferencing system is really poor. Meetings sometime start with one party not able to hear properly, the other one. Usually, we spend the first 5 minutes saying "Am I audible?", "Can you hear me?" and their variants with that a feeling of deja-vu hits me. Usually, there aren't issues once the meeting starts (not with the software at-least). But the starting a meeting is certainly painful. SfB is a whole different ball of wax.

I have never used Zoom but I understand why someone would be willing to pay for a video-conferencing solution that works. Think about your hundreds of thousands of employees losing 5-10 meetings of all their meetings, everyday. That is the problem Zoom must be solving.

</comment><comment><USER46> Best zoom feature is the magic screen share. Just being in the physical room I can hit share screen and it will find the right meeting. I think it uses inaudible sound to identify them right room.

</comment><comment><USER47> A bit offtopic: what happened to gotomeeting? I recall that 10 years it was a go-to software for conference calls / distributed meetings / etc. Now it's mostly zoom.

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe its just the tone of the headline but it seems antiquated. Are we implying billionaires can only come from america? Or if america blesses their presence?

</comment><comment><USER49> I could not participate in an internship at Google a few years ago because my US Visa was refused, seemingly because the consulate clerk was having a bad day.

</comment><comment><USER50> I always though Zoom came standard on Macs, and that is was made by Apple. It works that well.

Turns out my wife had installed it before she gave me her MacBook.

</comment><comment><USER51> what about polycom? the one used to have more markshare before Cisco purchases its major competitor Tanderberg, it seems zoom does not build its own hardware, the legacy players like polycom/tanderberg(cisco) still do, maybe it's the time to use off-the-shelf hardware with zoom software these days.

</comment><comment><USER52> Ay we got enough billionaires here already

</comment><comment><USER53> Zoom's stock jumped around 81% on debut. They seem to have left a lot of money on the table.

</comment><comment><USER54> God forbid we let freeloaders like this into our country!

/s

</comment><comment><USER55> it's ironic that 8 is the chinese number for luck

</comment><comment><USER56> Anyone knows an open source alternative to zoom that is good.

</comment><comment><USER57> Respects !

</comment><comment><USER58> That was back when US immigration and state departments were sane.

Imagine applying and going through those hassles today.

</comment><comment><USER59> Being contrarian, I would say, that he should be thankful to US immigration authorities. If they issues a visa first time he applied he might have become just an SDE at Amazon.

<comment><USER60> Hmmm, I think you're into something aside from the shitty jab. Tenacity definitely plays an important role in success. This person had to deal with a system that judged him unfairly and that probably helped him to built resilience for other situations where his ventures received the same scrutiny and rejections.</comment></comment>


Nariya - Continuous Deployment Server on Node JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arunoda/nariya

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently Nariya is support Github for it's deployment and a quick guide can be found here - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNptRGFAPkM></comment>