Ignore No More – lock your child's device until they call you back - <AUTHOR> http://ignorenomoreapp.com/ <comment><USER2> Products like this are great, as they teach children how to get around stupid arbitrary restrictions from a young age, so are less likely to end up as drooling passive consumers poking at a tablet and more likely to become hackers.

<comment><USER3> My mom installed a program on our computer when I was younger that only let you use it for a limited amount of time (my limit was usually 30 minutes a day).

We broke through that thing so many times that the company gave us a refund and hired me as a "security contractor" to find ways around it. I found a few that they never figured out how to beat - for example opening a document in Word, typing some stuff, and telling the computer to shut down. Windows would shut down all of the other programs (including the computer time monitoring one) before it shut down Word. Word would come up with it's "save/don't save/cancel" prompt and you could just click "cancel." That was arguably my first foray into "hacking."

<comment><USER4> It's because companies that sell products like this sell what makes a good sales pitch; they don't understand that things need to actually work as advertised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you thought your kids didn't like you before, wait until you install something like this on their phone.

Emotions are weird, if you're sitting around worrying about your child then you need a hobby. If it's really a problem that your child goes somewhere without texting you if you asked them to then don't let them go out next time. If they are in college and don't answer your calls, then leave them alone, find something else to do, send them an email if you need to inform them of something or have something you want to discuss.

Kids go through weird phases, they lash out at parents for different reasons such as being unhappy with themselves or struggling to find purpose. Talk to them in person, ask difficult questions, if they don't have an answer, ask again later or ask different questions.

Be a good roll-model by being calm, rational, humble, and honest. I can picture the mom who had the idea for this app, controlling, slightly crazy, comes off as bitchy.

What if your significant other installed a similar app on your phone? Would piss you off, right?

If you want to restrict the games kids play or the sites they visit on their phones, that's probably for the better, be sure to inform them of the logical reasons such as the fact that game companies exploit human psychology to create addiction and many apps upload private information that could harm them later in life. But locking their phones because they haven't called you back, I just can't see how that'll do anything but harm in the long-run.

"Because I said so.", "Do as I say, not as I do.", "Say it, say I love you."

If you kid doesn't answer their phone they are either in class, busy, have it on mute, in jail, dead, getting high, in a loud car, at a party with friends, having sex, eating somewhere, or they just don't want to talk to you at the moment. If they are in jail, they'll call you, if they're dead, then there is nothing you can do about it, you'll find out soon enough. In every other situation it's not that critical that you hear their voice, send them a text message and find something to do.

It might just boil down to positive verses negative reinforcement.

Just my 2 cents about actually using this product as a parent. Looking at it as an app idea, it's a good idea and looks well executed. I'm sure many parents will purchase it.

<comment><USER6> > _What if your significant other installed a similar app on your phone? Would > piss you off, right?_ //

Attempting to equate spousal (or similar) relationships with parent-child relationships suggests you either have no clue about how adults in such a relationship should relate to one-another or you have no clue about parenting.

I've never said any of those unwanted idiomatic phrases but can still see a place in which I would want a child who relies on me to buy their phone and/or keep them safe to be coerced to respond to a contact request.

> _In every other situation it 's not that critical that you hear their voice_ > //

That doesn't appear to be the point of the app, the point is to coerce a response instead of allowing a person to ignore you but keep using the phone you purchased.

Suppose my child has absconded, ie gone off without telling me where they're going, I'm about to start my shift at work. Do I miss work and try and find them, or do I use this app and "force" them to respond indicating they're safe & well? This app means you can give your kid a smartphone but enforce a usage pattern coterminous with a single-number phone if required. Having a smartphone isn't some sort of inalienable right for a minor.

If you're an adult (eg at university) then buy your own phone and refuse to let people install apps on it; or not, your call.

<comment><USER7> > Suppose my child has absconded, ie gone off without telling me where they're > going, I'm about to start my shift at work. Do I miss work and try and find > them, or do I use this app and "force" them to respond indicating they're > safe & well?

This is the equivalent of jerking a dog's leash. It's sad how ready some parents are to deny their children basic human dignity.

If you need to get to work and can't find your child, then whether you go to work or whether you run after your child is a simple matter of setting priorities and following through. Also, if your child takes off without telling you, and you have genuine reason to worry, then there's little reason to think this app will actually be of any help.

The only situation in which this app would "help" would be one where the child is not in any real danger/distress, but you'd still want to reassure yourself of the non-existence of danger (i.e. just calm your nerves), but are too lazy too actually take the steps necessary to do it properly. So lets trample that little human's dignity, for our own selfish desires, since there's only little they can do in return anyways, right?

This is disgusting.

The real tragedy here however is that children don't realize that they're actually the ones with the power in any parent-child relationship, until they've stopped being children and lost the respect for their parents. If they grasped the amount of power they hold, and occasionally jerked their parents around the same way, then these sort of apps most likely wouldn't exist.

<comment><USER8> > This is the equivalent of jerking a dog's leash. It's sad how ready some > parents are to deny their children basic human dignity.

Basic dignity? It's not their phones.

If you possess a work phone, and never respond to your bosses call there are consequences: you get fired, lose your income, and may soon find yourself on the streets in destitution.

If you possess a family phone, its not yours either and so you might expect consequences if you don't respond to the owners of it.

The alternative to this app is just taking away the kids phone, or grounding them (i.e imprisoning them). This is a bare slap on the wrist compared to all that.

<comment><USER7> > It's not their phones.

No, it's not - because they have no sensible way for providing for themselves and you have a legal obligation to provide them with the things they need for everyday life.

The food they eat also isn't theirs, but that doesn't make it alright for you to first spit into it, before serving it to them, in order for you to blow off steam.

The roof over their head also isn't theirs, but that doesn't make it alright for you to make them sleep on the street because you're too tired of them keeping you up at night.

> If you possess a work phone, and never respond to your bosses call there are > consequences

Not responding to calls on your work phone may result in you getting fired, but it will not result in you being humiliated (at least not directly). From what I've seen there's a fair amount of people not responding to some calls in some situations as a way of playing the "office politics" game - so it seems for many people this is a reasonable tradeoff they engage in at times in order to advance their interests.

Also, for better or worse, there's no formal way to "quit" your family and go be the child of other, possibly better, parents. Hence, parents don't really compete on who's able to provide the best family. (Though for some reason some of them seem to compete on who's got the most obedient child.)

> The alternative to this app is just taking away the kids phone, or grounding > them (i.e imprisoning them).

The analogy is lacking.

There are humongous barriers to actually get someone into prison. Simply talking back to someone, or failing to pay attention to them won't suffice to land in prison, but may very well suffice for getting grounded. Also, there's no due process for children when being grounded (There's not even any official written record of the rules that can get you grounded). But then again, grounding really is a very very mild version of imprisonment, so there's not much issue with leaving it up the parents discretion - it's just that it's a bad analogy.

But still, imprisonment, as you might have noticed, actually is a valid disciplinary measure in modern societies and at every point throughout its enforcement care is taken to protect the prisoner's dignity as a human. Of course, in reality things aren't always that rosy everywhere.. but at least the theory is sound.

Putting people on a leash, on the other hand, isn't a valid disciplinary measure - or at least it hasn't been any more for quite some time in civilized societies.

> This is a bare slap on the wrist compared to all that.

No, humiliating someone is not alright, regardless of circumstances.

If proper punishments need to be dealt out (like grounding), or proper safeguards need to be put in place (like taking away the phone), then do that.

But deluding yourself that putting someone on a leash, because you feel that the infraction doesn't actually warrant the punishment, but you're also too lazy to actually educate your child on why not to do it again, or deal with the consequences of it happening again, is not alright.

<comment><USER8> I think you're being a bit hyperbolic if you say that locking someones cell phone is the same as putting them on the leash.

You make a few valid points there, but in essence I think we disagree on the severity of punishments.

I'd say being grounded is far worse than having your phone locked, yet you'd call it a fair punishment that should come first.

I'd also say that a cellular phone isn't essential to life, like food is. While you might see many middle/upper class children with phones, they're still a luxury item.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Danger: the front page says the child will always be able to call "first responders," but the FAQ reveals that 911 is the only built-in one which the child cannot change. If you live outside the US, 911 may not work, leaving your child unable to dial emergency services.

Adding 112 and 999 to the list would help, but perhaps it's better to just let the kid call whomever they like, and just block "fun" things like texting and other apps. After all, if your kid is out with friends and gets a bit lost, the best person to call will be one of those friends, not the police.

<comment><USER10> Hilariously, there's actually nothing stopping the kid phoning whoever they want. It's controlled by a contact group on the phone, that the child device can edit at will. Step 1 would be to add all friends to that group.

<comment><USER11> Kids don't use phones to make _voice calls_ , grandpa, for much the same reason they don't use morse code, or smoke signals.

<comment><USER12> "Kids"? Hell, I'm 31 and the only people I ever call are my parents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The perfect app for helicopter parenting, be sure to tell your child you don't trust them as they leave the door.

I'm sure this would be a good product commercially.

The FAQ is a bit jarring, most of it seems to be self praise.

<comment><USER6> > _The perfect app for helicopter parenting_ //

Alternatively the perfect app to allow you to let your children have freedom to go out by themselves but still to coerce response when it's needed.

It seems a reasonable _quid pro quo_ to me - I give you this tool which is the pinnacle of consumer communication devices but if I need to talk to you then it's locked until you respond.

Doesn't it mean that children who aren't so trustworthy get the benefit of being allowed out when otherwise they wouldn't?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I find more interesting about this, besides the fact you can block your kids' phones, is the amount of effort put into the creation and marketing of it.

I mean - as far as I can tell [0] this is the only app this person has done, but they've created the website, set up a company, and I even heard about this on the UK BBC news! And at the moment they only have about 100 downloads?!

It would be interesting to hear the story behind this and how much this all cost. Does anyone know more? How did they manage to get such exposure on launch day/week?

[0] reading [http://ignorenomoreapp.com/mountaineer-technology- ventures](http://ignorenomoreapp.com/mountaineer-technology-ventures)

<comment><USER15> They should sell their marketing services rather than this app. To get such quick publicity for something like this, either they have great marketing skills, a bunch of $, or both. Either way, it would be nice to see how they did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my experience many adults (meaning everyone over 35 at this point) seem to have an irrational attachment to phone calls, when texting or email would suffice or be better. This is just a manifestation of that mentality. If you encourage your kid to text you it's much more likely they'll communicate, largely because it can be done quickly and discreetly.

Given the problems I've heard about with app store purchases from parents in this target market there's zero chance of this actually working, and I'd be surprised if any parent in the target group even believes it would work either.

</comment><comment><USER17> The developer must have hired a great P.R. company because yesterday our local TV news was covering it. Now it's on HN!?!

Read the FAQ and you'll get an idea of the brains (or lack thereof) behind this app: [http://ignorenomoreapp.com/faq](http://ignorenomoreapp.com/faq)

"Q: My child ignored my instructions and selected "OK" to the pop-up request to "Disable Device Admin". How do I restore Ignore No More on their phone?"

"A: I know, I know let me guess the child said, "It was an accident". First you need to check to see if Ignore No More is still on their phone. If it is then that's great news. All you have to do is select the device's Settings icon>Security>Device (or Phone) Administrators where you will then see an empty box beside of Ignore No More Device Admin. Select the empty box; a pop- up will appear, select "Activate". Ignore No More is now restored on the child's phone. On the other hand, if the child deleted the app entirely from their phone you will need to download again from the app store."

</comment><comment><USER18> This app would put whatever rocky relationship I had with my mother on even rockier ground.

The biggest flaw is that the child may not be ignoring the parent, but simply can't call at that time. Perhaps the kid's phone is in their bag or they are in class or something.

To lock the kid's phone based on an assumption of guilt is like punishing the kid for not eating his vegetables before dinner is served.

<comment><USER19> Not to mention you may be preventing them from getting important help from other sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, YOUNG MAN? WHY WERE YOU IGNORING MY CALLS?

 _checks GPS log, sees school_

 _does child 's homework for him_

 _applies to college for him_

 _goes on job interviews for him_

<comment><USER21> you forgot, _wipes butt for him_

<comment><USER20> I thought that was implied :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ransomware improves parent-child communication?

Better: analytics dashboard on latency of response.

Suppression of emotional signals (response latency) is unlikely to improve communication and could lead to second-order consequences "If you treat me like ___, I will behave like ___".

</comment><comment><USER23> I like these projects to get more children interested in hacking!

</comment><comment><USER24> Kids will have to explain to their parents how to install it.

Or show them how they removed it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Shouldn't parenting be about trust?

<comment><USER2> Agreed.

Also, going to be funny when they work out how to uninstall it.

<comment><USER10> Hell, uninstalling is mild. Set the parent phone to a child phone and vice versa, all you need is to guess that password. I wonder if it's the same as their email account?

<comment><USER2> From their FAQ, looks like that would need you to deregister and reregister the phone. Still, as in my experience most parents (mine and others I'm familiar with) leave their phones lying around without a password so much of the time (or else likely use weak ones such as their date of birth or similar), that isn't exactly hard.

I've also accidentally shoulder surfed dozens of random people's (patterns on android are particularly easy as by default it shows the full trace; ios7 is also easy as the buttons are very high contrast) where I had zero intention to just because they aren't careful about who can see the screen when they unlock.

Of course, given the poor security of so many mobile apps, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way to reverse engineer the protocol to lock a 'parent' phone. Then, of course, the child can feign ignorance with "but I thought that wasn't possible".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Or you take their phone away when they don't call you back; or ground them. It seems to me that having an enforced version of that won't actually promote responsible behavior as much as more traditional punishments.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is ridiculous - really more like "Teach your child how to jailbreak his device". I know this holds true of me, but I truly can't stand talking on the phone with anyone - I much prefer just a simple text message. My parents/baby- boomers can't stand this, in my experience - for some reason they need the actual call. I think this would be more effective if it unlocked after a text message back.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's very rare that an app inspires as much rage in me as this one has. I'm not sure if it is the over the top self praising tone of the FAQ, or the fact that this will be such an amazing tool for abusive parents, or the fact that this is a great way to condition children to obey unconditionally, but seriously, this app makes me irrationally angry.

Some parents are assholes. Some kids have other things going on and don't need a helicopter constantly hovering over top of them. And some media outlets need to learn to be critical of the crap that they flog.

Even if the FAQ included some child abuse/help lines, I'd be significantly less angry. But seriously, this app looks like a red flag for extraordinarily controlling parents. And, there is a bunch of research that indicates extremely controlling behaviour is a sign of abuse. What if, as an entire industry, we decide to always err on the side of protecting kids??

Sorry for the rant. I've edited this several times to tone things down, but this app makes me intensely angry. If there is any justice, the app store will remove this garbage.

</comment><comment><USER29> I often feel when reading discussions about parenting that posters should be required to list the number and ages of their children. If you're spouting off about how terrible and awful this is, lack of trust, etc, etc, and you haven't been there, your opinion on the matter has a value approaching zero to a stressed out parent.

That said, I don't think this is the greatest of ideas, but I can see cases where it could be a useful tool in parenting. And it is a tool, not a solution that replaces an open dialogue with your kids. Grayclhn said it best[1]: "Of course, a parent could also install an app like this as part of a long process of discussion and negotiation wherein the child repeatedly blows off commitments to check in, blows off even lenient curfews, and struggles to hold up his or her side of the agreement."

Agreed that it is something that is ripe for abuse and helicopter parenting.

(Parent of girl 15, boy 12.)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8197401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8197401)

</comment><comment><USER30> I find the negativity about this surprising.

I live in a low income area - you would wish many parents around here cared this much and would helicopter their kids. I fear many of them are doomed from the start.

I think this app is a last resort measure, not like a block on computer use but if the kid is being bad about something to get them to respond.

<comment><USER31> Being controlling is not the same thing as caring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> While it's nice to see other applications using the Device Administrator's API, I fail to see what advantage this provides over Google's implementation [1].

[1]: [https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager](https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager)

</comment><comment><USER33> _Q: Why won't the message "Ignore No More!" go away once my child has used the password to unlock their phone?

A: Don't worry their phone is unlocked. "Ignore No More!" stays visible to your child to help you. The message is a constant reminder to them to answer your calls and texts or else you will lock their phone. If you don't want to use this feature and want the message to go away, simply open up the parent My Household page and press "Unlock Phone" for that child. Once the child refreshes their screen the message will be gone._

If you market to helicopter parents, that's one thing. If you market to parents who actively enjoy being mean to their children, you should maybe overthink your business model.

</comment><comment><USER34> Language is weird, and it's always interesting to see the way people spell things that they've only ever heard, often picking completely different words to construct sentences that sound kinda right but don't actually make any sense with the words they've used (there's a guy here who says "properly" whenever he means to say "probably" for instance).

This is the first time I've seen anybody substitute their own made up word (notta') for nada though.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow that's disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks great! one thing, you have a nice carousel going on, and maybe I'm a slow reader but I had to make it go back to the last slide three times before I finished reading it. Consider either making the carousel change slower or better yet, make the story vertical.

</comment><comment><USER37> Another way to do it would be to stop offering a free phone plan, or free rent for that matter. What kind of self respect do you have if you're letting a teenager whose lifestyle you're subsidizing treat you like this?

</comment><comment> rational-future Hmmm, here's a business idea - install the app on as many phones as you can (remote exploits, free apps in stores) and demand monthly payments to keep them unlocked.

</comment><comment><USER38> The solution to poor parenting is not an app.

<comment><USER39> but it could be PaaS

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I haven't tried it, but isn't this trivial to disable by just booting into safe mode and uninstalling the app?

<comment><USER2> Yep. With root, you can even just disable administrators without allowing them to hijack the attempt.

Actually, letting apps hijack the normal disabling of their administrative functions is a massive vuln, as then any piece of malware can do that to prevent it from being removed.

The funny thing is, Android's safe mode isn't that well publicised (I knew it existed, but would have to look up how to enter it), but if apps like this ever proliferated, it definitely would become well known. See how in the UK, since TPB got censored, there are now literally hundreds of reverse proxies available, and since the government pushed 'opt-out' censorship, there are now dozens of proxies explicitly marketed for defeating them, and more and more sites are switching to use TLS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> if you have this problem with your child, an app is not the solution. you have serious discipline problems.

<comment><USER42> I agree the app isn't a solution to disicpline problems, but the problem of a child not calling back is not really a discipline issue. If you have proper trust and be sure to not over-check the child, this isn't as much of an issue - 'hey, that's my mom, she doesn't usually call, i better answer this' is Very easy when the kid has proof. It is also pretty easy to talk to a child to see why they might not have called back and explain why answering from parents is important It also seems that perhaps parents should try switching to text or whatever the child's preferred method of communication - being flexible might bring better responses. None of this is due to actual discipline problems, just miscommunication or inflexible parenting.

<comment><USER43> I don't think you or jpfielding have any real experience raising kids. That's pretty clear from your smug assumption that children are reasonable people who will see the error of their ways if only their parents took the time to explain it to them and pander to whatever way the child wants to go about subverting parental authority.

Let me clue you into reality. When kids pop out, they are uncivilized savages. It takes a good 25 years (on average) before they stop acting like savages and start resembling a reasonable human being. A reasonable person does not require an explanation as to why answering a call from a parent is important, they just answer it because they are reasonable and civilized and know automatically that answering such a call is the right thing to do in the civilized world. A reasonable person also does not require others to pander to their "preferred method of communication", they just pick up the phone and deal with whatever's on the other end.

Teenagers with phones are like hungry cavemen with shotguns. There has to be a way to pull the plug before things get out of hand and dumb stuff happens. This app is part of the solution. If a teenager's trumped up, uncivilized sense of independence is telling them to disrespect their parents and not answer their call, then this app is a useful tool for parents. The correct mode of operation, of course, is to prompt the child to call their parents so the parents can then tell the child that they're coming to pick them up immediately, and to have the phone ready to hand in because they're never going to see it again. The child should also prepare to have their wings clipped.

Unreasonable savagery can not be made civilized through reasonable discussion. That's why economic sanctions, bombs falling from airplanes, and smartphone crippling apps are still effective tools for civilized people.

<comment><USER44> It's strange. Everyone who's had a child is an expert on parenting.

Yours is just one data point. Here's another: it's perfectly possible to actually trust teenagers without regarding them as savages, while still catching the bad stuff that inevitably happens.

Different cultures tend to raise their kids differently. Many North American disciplinary actions are downright illegal here. Our kids still turn out fine.

<comment><USER43> Oh, look! Another Hacker News pedant come to pick meaningless holes in someone's comment.

I didn't say I was an expert on parenting. Did I?

Did I also say that teenagers are always and everywhere uncivilized savages? No. I made one over-the-top statement equating teenagers with cavemen, so I guess that's worth pointing out because it obviously proves that my entire comment was wrong, especially since that one statement can't be applied universally across time and space. Jeez...

Look, I've seen more than a few reasonable teenagers, but that's only because I roll with orthodox Catholics who actually believe what the Catholic Church teaches (without whining about it), and believe it's important to teach their kids how to be civilized. It's noteworthy that those teenagers only have dumbphones, if they have a cellphone at all.

So what if different cultures raise their kids differently? How does that negate anything I said? The children of one culture are born just as uncivilized as the children of any other culture. Civilization comes only from hard work. If you're a parent, imparting civilization to the uncivilized requires the right tools. If you're ok with giving your kid a smartphone, then it makes sense to have a tool to reel them back in when they can't resist the urge to abuse the freedom you've given them.

So, go take your pedantic inability to reason clearly, and participate more fully in whatever culture of deficient civility into which you were unfortunate to be born. I'm sure it'll turn out fine.

<comment><USER45> "I've seen more than a few reasonable teenagers, but that's only because I roll with orthodox Catholics who actually believe what the Catholic Church teaches"

Today, like in the 1500s, Catholicism saving the world from the "uncivilized savages". Hilarious.

<comment><USER43> That's right. In all of history, the single most civilizing influence on the world has been the Catholic Church. Even with all the abuses and excesses, I don't think this can reasonably be denied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I should come out with an app that disables this app, and charge something like $5 for it.

</comment><comment><USER47> Somewhat surprising there is no Facebook backlash yet... this is a horrible product.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hah, the FAQ reads like you're trying to keep pests out of your house.

</comment><comment><USER30> Very very clever. Grew up before mobile phones existed so it is hard to relate but I guess if a kid has to have a phone, this helps.

Of course nothing stops the kid from lying to their parents which I guess 99% of all kids do.</comment>


Erlang: Programming Rules and Conventions - <AUTHOR> http://www.erlang.se/doc/programming_rules.shtml

<comment><USER2> > 8.9 File headers, revision history

This is shocking on so many levels. People should let a VCS to keep the revisions.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you run(or work at) a b2b or b2c startup? - <AUTHOR>

Curious to see what's the split between b2b (enterprise) and b2c startups on HN.<p>How many b2c startups are profitable vs. b2b startups? <comment><USER2> b2c

</comment><comment><USER2> b2b</comment>


Ask HN: Leap year bugs? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
With the leap day about to start on the West Coast I'm trying to find a place to keep track of and see all the bugs and system failures that occur.
For one, I think it will be really interesting but after it's over I want to try and categorize the different types of errors and come up with a guide to avoid them in the future.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> [http://codeofmatt.com/2016/02/29/list-of-2016-leap-day- bugs/](http://codeofmatt.com/2016/02/29/list-of-2016-leap-day-bugs/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for.</comment></comment>


YC's Geoff Ralston on Learning as You Go - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-radio-ycs-geoff-ralston-on-learning-as-you-go <comment><USER2> When is YC going to fund a startup which will run a school which uses the techniques of the class featured in this article[0] found on HN today[1]? Note that this is the first comment on either this YC post or the wired one. Do this and _FUCKING CHANGE THE WORLD_. [please excuse the all-caps, but this could FUCKING CHANGE THE WORLD, couldn't it?]

[0] [http://www.wired.com/2013/10/free- thinkers/](http://www.wired.com/2013/10/free-thinkers/)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10169442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10169442)

<comment><USER3> Whenever a formidable founder presents it to them in an investible form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought this was going to be about Learning Go

</comment><comment><USER5> Teleflora was the original platform.</comment>


Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool that lets you sketch hand-drawn diagrams - <AUTHOR> https://excalidraw.com/ <comment><USER2> In the future, would be great if outsiders wouldn't try to influence what gets to the frontpage of Hacker News. Here is the author of this project trying to push people to upvote: [https://twitter.com/Vjeux/status/1219340291603230721](https://twitter.com/Vjeux/status/1219340291603230721)

I'm pretty sure I have read somewhere on HN that people should not ask for upvotes. Here is a example of just that happening.

If more people flag the submission, it'll eventually get removed from the frontpage.

Edit: annoyingly, the author (vjeux) seems to have deleted the tweet by now (not sure what the accomplishes?) and I took no archive of it. Life goes on

<comment><USER3> Sorry about that! I don't really know what's the etiquette about this. I've always asked people to upvote for the initial submission so that it has a chance to get to the front-page. I'm happy to stop if that's against the rules.

<comment><USER4> It is very against the rules; it's too bad, because this is neat and probably would have (in fact, probably did, given the ring detection stuff HN does behind the scenes) done fine on its own. I appreciate the gracious response and cancelled my flag on this post. But a comment pointing out vote manipulation, even if it's well-intentioned, is on topic and deserves its place on the thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's delete the Tweet and unflag it. it was an honest mistake

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure where you're coming from, where soliciting for votes/likes/whatever is NOT frowned upon. Only community I can come up with is producthunt, where it used to be frowned upon but doesn't seem to be anymore.

Edit: also, missing to read the rules of community before participating doesn't seem like a honest mistake. vjeux been around for a long time and I'm sure knows how to navigate the different communities. Also since the whole "no vote rings please" thing is mentioned in 3 or more places on news.ycombinator.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> The tool deserves some visibility!

<comment><USER2> That's an opinion someone can hold.

In general, we let the HN community decide of what's worthy of visibility, and it worked out great so far. Let's keep it that way! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wrote a blog post with my thoughts on the project here if you're interested: [https://blog.vjeux.com/2020/uncategorized/reflections-on- exc...](https://blog.vjeux.com/2020/uncategorized/reflections-on- excalidraw.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can also share your diagrams via links: [https://excalidraw.com/?id=6264616665481216](https://excalidraw.com/?id=6264616665481216)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have been following it since a week and is awesome to see how it evolves.. PR after PR it's getting better. Yesterday used it to just wireframe a small feature. Awesome project!

</comment><comment><USER6> Using hand-drawn sketch diagrams is useful, as it suggests it's a draft, not a finished diagram.

However, you can do all of this and more with powerpoint, it's my default sketching tool at the moment. More info: [https://blog- insider.office.com/2019/07/03/sketchy-shapes-fo...](https://blog- insider.office.com/2019/07/03/sketchy-shapes-for-word-powerpoint-and-excel/)

</comment><comment><USER7> What's the deal with lines that are composed of two lines with a space in the middle? This seems a very odd choice for something "hand drawn"

Eg: [https://excalidraw.com/?id=5650452045627392](https://excalidraw.com/?id=5650452045627392)

<comment><USER8> It's an artifact of how Rough.js renders sketchy lines. It does that by creating some random offsets. For some random values, it may create this effect for long lines, which is not ideal. This is less pronounced in shorter lines. The latest release has tried to reduce this effect, but there is a small probability that it may still happen: [https://roughjs.com/posts/release-4.0/](https://roughjs.com/posts/release-4.0/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I made my first open source contribution on this project and watched how it evolved day by day. Absolutely love it!

Here is the repo: [https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw)

</comment><comment><USER10> It was amazing to see the rapid progress on Excalidraw, all fueled by open source contributions but organized by Christopher. So cool to see what enthusiastic devs can hack together in short order

</comment><comment><USER11> Found it pretty useful for note taking in classes. Awesome tool</comment>


Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan Just Resigned - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/11/20905033/acting-dhs-secretary-kevin-mcaleenan-resigned-border <comment><USER2> I would just like to point out that this article is from October 11th 2019. The title may want to be changed to indicate that he didn't just resigned but resigned two months ago.</comment>


DARPA Is Funding Interstellar Space Travel - <AUTHOR> http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/with-grant-us-defense-research-agency-reaches-for-the-stars.php?ref=fpblg

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link from DARPA's site as well:

DARPA ENCOURAGES INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS TO LOOK TO THE STARS; ISSUES CALL FOR PAPERS FOR 100 YEAR STARSHIP STUDY PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM

[http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/2011/06/15_DAR...](http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/2011/06/15_DARPA_Encourages_Individuals_and_Organizations_to_Look_to_the_Stars.aspx)</comment>


Marijuana use tied to serious diabetes complication - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-11-marijuana-tied-diabetes-complication.html <comment><USER2> >However, the study only found an association and could not prove a cause-and- effect relationship.

Garbage tier study.

>Zonszein said that getting high on marijuana may impair people's ability to give themselves the correct insulin dose.

I've been using marijuana for 5 years now while giving myself prescribed estrogen injections in the leg longer than that. I can only remember one time when I would've too high to dose myself, and often took marijuana to calm myself before the injections. I live in Washington and have done absolutely everything with cannabis of all forms. Just how high are diabetic patients getting, or how high isn't Zonszein getting to form such a bad opinion?

<comment><USER3> So, you're saying Zonszein is wrong because you have an anecdotal experience that contradicts the hypothesis? I'd venture a guess that if Zonsein is right it wouldn't be a uniform effect.

The study does have a bad setup though, to the point of invalidating any conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like an incredibly poor-quality study. The effect size is small, and there are differing education levels, etc between groups. People should not be paying attention to single studies like this. It's just stupid clickbait fodder. Literally most medical studies like this are wrong.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not just the munchies and appetite effects?

</comment><comment><USER6> What an awful study. They have absolutely no theory for where the effect is coming from, other than that people are getting too stoned to check their blood sugar.

<comment><USER7> Amen! As a diabetic (with a pretty high educational level, mind you) and as I've ingested marijuana before... halfway thru the article, I concluded it was nothing but anti-cannabis propaganda. I've deliberately put myself into ketosis for the fat burning effects and knowing how DKA develops, never had any issues - because I made sure to take my insulin.

My guess on what is going on is a) lower educational level diabetics b) they don't really understand the biochemistry of things, the medical stuff c) they probably (I'm pretty sure) are drinking as well -- and alcohol is 10x at least if not more a larger factor in bad control of one's diabetes.

Something I've had to acknowledge as I've gotten older. I was never much of a big drinker, but I've have noticed it has gotten more problematic over the years and my advice now for young diabetics would be to really be super conscious of your drinking habits. Alcohol causes all sorts of lower level not so obvious issues with managing things properly - blood sugar levels get really out of sorts for days until the liver gets back to normal operating procedure.

So if the study didn't account for the use of alcohol and how excessive it might be by the subjects (especially in the lower classes) then they ignored a very large factor in how diabetic related problems might develop. And the article was so obviously very sloppily written and the biases in it were quite obvious given how things were phrased --> propaganda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Called diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), the condition occurs when there is not enough insulin to break down sugar in the body, so the body burns fat for fuel instead." - sounds like every dieters dream

<comment><USER7> The important part of DKA is the imbalance in the pH of the blood, which is a dangerous problem. This sentence is basically false and misleading. Diabetics can thrive (yeah, thrive) on a ketosis type diet.

DKA != ketosis, but "dietitians" and "popular wisdom / common sense" don't have much of a clue, as I've concluded over the years.</comment></comment>


Computational Linear Algebra - <AUTHOR> http://www.fast.ai/2017/07/17/num-lin-alg/ <comment><USER2> Looks like a reasonable overview of applications of dense linear algebra operations, with very specific applications in mind.

I feel like iterative Krylov subspace methods should be around somewhere, but to be honest I'm not sure what the applications space for linear inverse problems looks like in the deep learning domain. So maybe that wouldn't quite fit (despite me finding it to be pretty cool, and these methods sort of eating the lunch of most other inverse methods).

I'd round out the course maybe with a read through of Trefethen-Bau, "Numerical Linear Algebra" for those new to the topic area.

<comment><USER3> So, what applications are iterative Krylov subspace methods good for? Can you give us a sense of where they're useful, and what (in general) inverse methods in this space are?

<comment><USER2> The sibling comments are great, so I'll comment in a more direct application- oriented way: Krylov methods provide a way to expose most the machinery of linear algebra to you by means of only forward matrix-multiplication with the relevant matrix.

A cool thing is that means you can do linear algebra operations with a matrix (including solving linear systems) without ever needing to actually explicitly construct said matrix. We just need a recipe to describe the action of multiplication with a matrix in order to do more advanced things with it. This is why they are so popular for sparse matrices, but their suitability can go beyond just that.

Projecting problems into Krylov spaces also tends to have a noticeable regularizing effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a good course. I think it would benefit if they added some module on implementing some basic Linear system of equations solvers, like gradient or steepest descent. Or even GMRES/MINRES or so.. The amout of knowledge that i gained from trying to implement these was remarkable.

<comment><USER5> Gradient descent is covered. We even show a pytorch implementation :)

<comment><USER4> Great! It's 2AM here and i totally missed it.

I will definitely give this course a try and spread the word. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Locality: traditional runtime computations focus on Big O, the number of > operations computed. However, for modern computing, moving data around in > memory can be very time-consuming

I need to nitpick here... Big O notation is a way to describe growth rates of functions. You can count data movements (or anything else) with Big O.

<comment><USER7> Moreover, "moving data around in memory can be very time-consuming" means that in the end, it is still about time, not about memory.

So the correct way would be to translate memory access to time, but that means modelling the memory hierarchy, modelling caches in general, and finally perhaps modelling the specifically used caching strategies.

<comment><USER8> The limits on memory access are physical, illustrated by grass hoppers famous video about nanoseconds and the speed of light.

Should computer algorithms always assume they need to model caches since they are never going away? When determining the computational complexity, time and memory are treated with equivalence, but real memory doesn't and never will behave that way.

<comment><USER9> Grace Hopper, not grass hopper. The latter is an insect, the former was an awesome computer engineer who invented the compiler.

<comment><USER10> Then again, both have something to do with bugs on some level...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone have a comparison to the "Code the Matrix" book and lectures?

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

[https://cs.brown.edu/video/channels/coding-matrix- fall-2014/](https://cs.brown.edu/video/channels/coding-matrix-fall-2014/)

</comment><comment><USER12> For someone with an ancient undergrad math background and only "interested observer" level of machine learning knowledge, would it be better to do this course before tackling the deep learning one?

<comment><USER13> No, start with fast.ai's deep learning course. They have a top down approach so you start with connecting layers to solve deep learning problems and then dig down into the theory behind the thing.

If you want a bottom up approach, go look at Ng's coursera course.

[http://course.fast.ai](http://course.fast.ai)

<comment><USER5> Absolutely right. There's very little linear algebra required in deep learning. This Computational Linear Algebra course mainly covers decompositions, which aren't used much in deep learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing this, it seems like a lot of interesting material is being discussed. The audience seems to be more like the hacker news visitor than the average student though, as it feels like little hand holding is provided.

I've just started lecture 1 but I already felt some minor frustrations:

\- One of the links in the first lecture is to a notebook about intro to convolutions but that notebook is just a big code dump.

\- After executing the exercises, you lose the expected answer. It might be better if the answers were included as a comment in the code fragment.

\- Sometimes the given answers are not actually the answer but just the computation performed as part of getting the answer. I.e. for the matrix- matrix products section in lecture 1 the suggested answer is just the resulting matrix from doing the matrix product, but according to the question in the text the answer should be the actual cheapest shop.

\- Is this a USF course or a fast.ai course?

I don't know if the author is planning on improving the material, because right now it feels a bit like a beta version.

</comment><comment><USER15> Top-down approach is the best approach to teach and learn well done!

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm hooked by the title and excited by teaching people about the linear algebra gospel. Powering search engines forever.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm excited to do this after I get through as much of the DL course as I can. Maybe that's a bit backwards but whatever.

Thanks for your hard work, Rachel! Really curious what you two will get up to next.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice - I was taken by the "acceptable accuracy" comment, much less stomach acid inducing than "numerical stability" :-)

</comment><comment><USER19> Would one get much out of this course with only minimal ML background?

<comment><USER5> Yes it doesn't directly cover ML much. It does assume some basic linear algebra, but provides links for where to learn that quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why 'computational' and not 'numerical'?

<comment><USER21> Probably to emphasize that it is a practical course. Numerical courses, at least those I've seen or completed, tend to focus on algorithms and their properties, not implementation.

> Jeremy and I developed this material for a numerical linear algebra course > we taught in the University of San Francisco's Masters of Analytics program, > and it is the first ever numerical linear algebra course, to our knowledge, > to be completely centered around practical applications and to use cutting > edge algorithms and tools,

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> ... What part of linear algebra isn't computational?

<comment><USER23> Like... most of it? You can't do linear algebra "safely" without doing error analysis. So lots of decompositions and operations are very useful for proofs and finding bounds - but can't be use directly to compute values. It's why a good fraction of stuff people do with linear algebra is numerically garbage

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been wanting to do a math refresher in linear or modern algebra for a while...tempting.</comment>


How I Escaped North Korea - <AUTHOR> http://parkjiwoo.kinja.com/how-i-escaped-north-korea-479759525 <comment><USER2> As touching as the story may be, it is not that different from billions of other children who are starving right now, all over India, China and African continent. I find it amusing that how we Americans love to bash North Korea and Iran.

Does anyone know, that the Indian Government (under pressure from the World Bank to reduce poverty) just lowered the poverty line? According to the new poverty line, anyone who makes more than about 0.50 USD is not poor. By lowering the poverty line, they brought down the number of poor people in India from 42% to 35%. 66% of people in India live on less than 2 USD per day, in conditions similar to those in which the author lived. And India in not under any sanctions, or trade embargoes.

<comment><USER3> > _As touching as the story may be, it is not that different from billions of > other children who are starving right now, all over India, China and African > continent. I find it amusing that how we Americans love to bash North Korea > and Iran._

Well, North Korea is "communist" and Iran has oil resources and threatens some of our allies in the area.

If it was a starving population, with a regime that's just as oppressive or even more, but are US allies and offer their natural resources for a pittance, then not only would the US would like them, but they would also get guns and support.

Like all those dictatorships in Latin America. Or Saudi Arabia. Etc...

<comment><USER2> This is exactly the point I am trying to make, that other people here are not understanding.

When we went into Iraq, we had three reasons: 1) It has weapons of mass destruction. 2) It has ties with terrorist organisations (Al Qaeda), and 3) It's a dictatorship. Well, the first 2 turned out to be wrong. But, at the exact same moment in time, all 3 were relevant to Pakistan. 1) It had proven nuclear weapons, 2) It had proven terrorist training camps, and links to Al Qaeda (Where did we find Osama?) and 3) It was under dictatorship.

So, why Iraq and not Pakistan?

<comment><USER4> The point you made was that India et al are bad too, so why are we judgmental Westerners always harping on North Korea.

North Korea is a grotesque among nations, reminding the Western observer more of dystopian, cautionary literature more than a nation-state in the modern era. It has a theocracy founded on a religion invented by its reigning family, it has profound poverty, it is militant and provocative in a way that overshadows even Iran. Especially recently this is the case, with North Korea making nuclear threats against its neighbor and the United States which we know are backed up with at least some know-how. It engages in such bizarro control measures to keep its population as isolated as possible from the rest of the world.

It couldn't be more clear to most why it is a country of focus for the international community.

<comment><USER3> > _it is militant and provocative in a way that overshadows even Iran._

"Overshadows even Iran"?

Sounds like Iran did some very militant and provocative things, to be singled out as the second most offensive country after NK.

What exactly were those?

Iran, with the exception of the Iran-Iraq war (which Iraq started, with Saddam supported by the US at the time), merely made some idle threats to neighbors it has a beef with.

To contrast, the US has been involved directly in around 10 wars where it has no place --thousands of miles away from home-- in the last 30 years. And lots of proxy wars and interventions. Including toppling the legitimate, democratic at the time, government of Iran, to install the dictatorship of the Shah.

So, people in glass houses et al...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Touching story, but it leaves out the part that most intrigues me: how this person made it to the US. Who would give this person a visa? Illegal resident of China whose background you can't verify. Having been through the US visa application process, I am genuinely baffled that she was given a visa.

<comment><USER6> I've been addicted to these documentaries on Netflix lately, but they seem to glance over those precious details.

<comment><USER5> This is a general pet peeve of mine - I hate it when people present "rags to riches" or "prison to freedom" stories without giving a real sense of the "how" part. To me that is where the real story and the real character lies. Too often stories focus on the pain and suffering alone and the stories feel very incomplete to me. That is also why I kike reading biographies or autobiographies, because there finally the focus shifts from "what" to "how".

update: this was a general comment, not specific to this article where the writer might need to protect her family and thus have good reason not to go into details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know it's cliche, but it definitely puts things in perspective and makes me realize how fortunate I am to have the life I have

</comment><comment><USER8> Good job on finding your way to a better life. Remember those you left behind and work towards setting them free.

As for the other comments here, there is no doubt there are many other countries all around the world that suffer poverty under the rule of totalitarian regimes. Many of them are supported or ignored depending on whether they can afford to buy stuff (mostly weapons) from leading powers. The first-hand report in this article does nothing to deny or highlight that simple fact. So, take it as the personal account that it truly is, and nothing else.</comment>


Company Culture: Crutches vs. Wings - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/company-culture-crutches-vs-wings-daniel-dotsenko <comment><USER2> I fully agree, both regarding programming languages and company culture. A younger and more naive version of me once took one of those savior jobs at a big, established company. I could stand it for 2 months before I freaked out, went to my manager and demanded change or else. I'm pretty sure he was relieved to get rid of the pesky little fly that was disturbing his waiting- to-die routine.</comment>


Tesla stock jumps on Musk's tweet that he is considering taking company private - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/07/tesla-stock-jumps-on-musks-tweet-that-he-is-considering-taking-compan.html <comment><USER2> Trading now halted</comment>


Ask HN: Please complete a one minute survey about education - <AUTHOR> https://story-board.pro/x <comment><USER2> This is a badly designed survey. Why would I give you my name before even knowing what for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, no worries. Now it is anonymous.

<comment><USER3> Sure:

>Your Twitter account URL

Also:

>Excited? Notify on launch?

Are seemingly two different questions, one might be excited and still don't want to be notified of launch or vice-versa one could be not excited but still interested in being notified of the launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the help. This make sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Build a Startup, Build a Business - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@SoldOutSupplier/dont-build-a-startup-build-a-business-127b61328922 <comment><USER2> > Remember, the focus of a business should be on delivering value and making > money while doing so, unlike a usualstartup, whose sole purpose often seems > to be burning money and thinking of ways to eventually turn a profit in the > future.

Rewrite: offering a free service, then boiling the frog by slowly introducing more ad revenue schemes until eventually users are fed up and jump ship to the next iteration of the same service.

<comment><USER3> Ohh, do you mean Youtube? They seem to be doing pretty good!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if the author checked previous discussions on exactly the same topic.

</comment><comment><USER5> Similarly don't build a product, build a process.</comment>


Ask HN: New York Hacker News Meetup - Extending "Offers HN" in Person - <AUTHOR>

Hey I just created a HN Meetup for New Yorkers cause I've been having the hardest time finding one.  So, why not just start one?
The meetup is to meet new friends and extending the Offer HN trend to personal interactions!
I'm going to be the first to extend the Offer NYHN: Tax Help for Startup Entrepreneurs.  This is a standing offer in general for the HN as a whole but now you get to SEE the boring beancounter say it in person!
Format Meetup
I want the HN community in New York to meet each other and get to know each other personally cause it's always cool to meet people with similar interests but different ideas.  I've found the best way to make fast friends is to help someone, so  our format is "Offer HN Meetup Style."
The format is 5 Minutes to ask your question or issue to the community or whatever. After those 5 minutes, we the audience, get 5 minutes to give you feedback and help.
Other than that, there are 2 rules:
(1) No Startup Pitches
(2) Don't be a dick
We're looking for people with issues they'd like to discuss and people who'd like offer help (sans Offer HN style in person). We're looking for 5 people who need to help to discuss their issue and 5 people to offer this assistance.
If you wanna present, contact me (contact (at) thekenggroup.com), or better yet, fill out the RSVP question. Leave a link if relevant!
Props to Hack and Tell because I stole their format because their meetup is awesome. Lol.
Linkage:  http://www.meetup.com/NYHackerNews/ <comment><AUTHOR> Quick note: If there any suggestions, please let me know! Also, if anyone has a good venue they'd like to suggest or offer that would be awesome too!

I jumped into doing this without planning it out really well haha. =X. BUT, i promise that I will have a venue ready by the meetup even if I had to pay for it. I'm pretty cheap so thats something special coming from me lol.</comment>


The American Dream 2.0: Why America Should Reject Silicon Valley's New Wealth - <AUTHOR> https://scobleizer.blog/2018/11/12/the-american-dream-2-0-why-america-should-reject-silicon-valleys-new-wealth-redistribution-and-bring-a-new-g-i-bill/ <comment><USER2> I agree with everything in this article right up until the proposed solution. Yes, people need to feel useful, and UBI does nothing to address the fundamental social problem. However giving everyone tech jobs is not really going to work—I agree anyone can learn to write code to some level of competence, but the problem is that there is not really a big market for the basic level of competence. If you don't have the fundamental curiosity, systematic thinking and famous programmer "laziness", you will never attain the level necessary to go beyond the "bullshit job" level of coder. For example, anyone can learn to code HTML and CSS, but not anyone can build Squarespace, and yet even at minimum wage, it's not cost effective to pay a mass of individuals to create sites manually because it'll be more expensive and lower quality than just using Squarespace. More abstractly: top programmers are capable of automating away the work of lesser programmers, and this balance will worsen significantly if we start trying to push everyone into programming as a basic job.

I know this comes off as elitist and dismissive, but I've been mentoring and training junior programmers for 20 years, and it's just a fact that not everyone is cut out for programming. It's not even about intelligence–there's just something intrinsic that people need to be able to create significant value from programming. And if we assume some kind of general AI or singularity is coming, eventually we will reach a point where no human programmer can create any value over machine-written code. We're not sociologically equipped to deal with these changes, and I think it's going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.

</comment><comment><USER3> LOL. There is so much "demand" for technically skilled people, yet try finding a job as an entry level dev in this market.. employers reject people left right and center for the tiniest of reasons. They want to take 0 risk of hiring someone who doesn't already have every skill they need, 0 risk of hiring someone who has made mistakes in their career, 5 leetcode rounds, 5 references, 3 past internships, 5 github projects and the list goes on. Anyone recently graduating from CS will tell you they apply to 100s of jobs to get 10 callbacks and a shot at landing 1.

The problem with hiring is employers, and they just don't need to change. As much as they would like more employees, they either don't really need them as urgently as they claim, or they would rather go out of business than take a risk.

<comment><USER4> Schools produce Computer Scientists, but companies want Software Developers. When interviewing new grads, the CS questions are just weed out questions like a hard sophomore level class.

But if you don't how to build a passable REST API, when to use an event queue instead of a database, or experience with a build system you are far from my ideal candidate.

In all reality, my advice for anyone in college today is to get an internship during school, and try to convert it into a full time position. Good luck getting a position with no internship experience.

<comment><USER5> > Schools produce Computer Scientists

This is not actually true, at least at average universities in the United States. Schools have a degree called "Computer Science" but the standards are shockingly low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Jobs. Work. Church service. Community service. Or simply helping some other alcoholic out of the hole that he or she is in. All fit. Sitting at home collecting a check doesn't._

This doesn't make sense. Church service may give someone a higher purpose, but it won't _put food on their table_. Guaranteed basic income would make it possible for people who want to devote their lives to community service or helping other alcoholics to do so without becoming homeless.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Many Native Americans are given something like a guaranteed minimum income > on the reservations America gave them and what has that brought them? Higher > rates of alcoholism, for one.

I'm not an expert on Native American history or alcoholism, but I have a hard time believing that guaranteed income from Tribal revenue is the primary driver of substance abuse issues within that community.

<comment><USER8> It's an unfortunate and inept parallel to draw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Time will solve a lot of problems. Within three years we are getting new > computing devices that will help us learn a lot faster than the computers > you see above in the photo I shot in the current school.

I'm honestly not convinced of this. Learning is not about technology, it's about people. I worked on some educational activities and have been knee deep in this personally.

If this were true, then I feel like since the 90s, we should be at least twice as smart given all the technological improvements. But if anything, American students are falling behind compared to the rest of the world, and we are a technology leader!

People are people, have been, and will continue to be. The issues about learning aren't about technology to show us the way, it's about getting understanding as a person. This means things like knowing how to teach concepts well to people who think a certain way, such as understanding learning styles (which we're not good at).

</comment><comment><USER10> > unfriending more than 4,000 on Facebook alone and unfollowing 45,000 on > Twitter

I tried to read this article but I couldn't take this person seriously after that.

<comment><USER11> I know, right? I met him a few times back in the 2000s and didn't see why he got so much attention back then. I think he is regurgitating some of the common talking points amongst the valley anarchists about how we live in a bubble. I don't disagree with the overall message but nothing new to see here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for posting this. It's a very compelling read.

I've been saying this for ages and I can't understand why folks don't see it as clear cut as I do: if you want economic prosperity for the average person, invest in education. It's the best use of our tax dollars because the long- term return on investment is higher than you can measure. Those tax dollars can be put to use through free education provided directly by the government or via tax credits for private enterprises that provide standard education services _subject to a high degree of scrutiny and measured through standardized exams and KPIs_

I don't necessarily agree that we don't need teachers. That may work for certain skills and jobs. But in fact, I think we can provide real wage growth to lower income workers simply by paying teachers twice as much as we do today today so we actually attract top talent.

</comment><comment><USER13> > and unfollowing 45,000 on Twitter

So they what saw, maybe one tweet per-person ever? There is no point to following so many people.

</comment><comment><USER14> Isn't retirement a counter-example? Yes, a lot of new retirees have trouble redefining their identity and finding purpose in life. But, on the other hand, many retirees are very happy despite not having a supervisor or any customers.

Anyway, BI directly addresses poverty. Providing job training opportunities will not completely cure poverty. So why ignore the poverty problem in your haste to advocate for more educational opportunities for everyone? Surely there is room to improve learning opportunities and also alleviate material suffering (without troublesome discontinuities/perverse incentives).

</comment><comment><USER15> > Now we are facing a new age where many people will find themselves jobless > due to automation ... More than a million truck drivers, for instance, will > lose their jobs in the next decade or two, maybe less.

Just to be clear, the premise of this article is that a new wave of unemployment will come sometime "in the next decade or two," the example given is truck drivers, and the debate is what to do with all these future unemployed truck drivers (specifically, whether to just give them welfare directly or whether to help them find jobs by retraining them).

</comment><comment><USER16> Everybody is currently conditioned to think they have to stand up on a stage and give a TED talk/I Have a Dream speech -> drum up enough support and you are on your way right?

Wrong. Because everyone else is playing the same game. It's an arms race for peoples attention. And mass attention is highly scattered and diffused over all kinds of things in the spectrum of useful to bullshit.

That needs to change first.

</comment><comment><USER17> I had no idea Scoble had popped his head back up.</comment>


Ask HN: How will more corporate acceptance of remote work play out? - <AUTHOR> Given that Facebook, Google, Twitter, Shopify, Coinbase, and many more companies are announcing long term plans to allow for vastly more remote positions, what do you think the effects will be to:<p>* The economy overall?<p>* High priced localities (SV, SF, NYC, Seattle, etc)?<p>* Rural economies?<p>* Engineer pay?<p>* Workers on visas, H1Bs? <comment><USER2> I'm in a big city, but my company is fully remote. My salary is already on the high end for my city.

I see a lot of people concerned about wages going down. I suspect wages will go UP for most people as we're no longer trapped working with companies in our cities. There might be some slight downward pressure at big tech as people leave the bay for less expensive locales and are willing to accept less money to work at those companies if they get to stay in, say, Texas or other cheaper locales.

But in my opinion this is the greatest opportunity for workers in history - your options for employment are now unlimited. Companies are going to have to compete a lot harder to get the best talent when they now have to compete with every other company in the world. I've seen some suggest that the opposite would be true - companies can now get employees from anywhere. While true, companies have always had more power to hire from wherever they want - it's always been much harder as an individual to pick up and move your family across the country. You'll probably find it easier to get remote contracting work, too.

I expect this will cause some downward pressure on bigger city property values. Might cause a slight uptick for smaller cities and suburban areas. Rural areas might not have good enough internet yet and are spacious enough that they won't be very affected.

<comment><USER3> This is a rather optimistic view. Historically speaking, the capitalist class generally wields enough financial and political power to prevent a massive transfer of power to workers. We've seen this with the buildup and erosion of labor movements in the 20th century and since.

So whatever inherit or natural benefits may come about for workers due to the remote work boom, it's likely these gains will be purposefully offset.

<comment><USER4> I think the really question here is, what is the motivation for corporations to make this type of shift? History shows us it often isn't to do what's best for workers in the long-run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be curious about the potential for remote work in somewhere like NW or even central Mexico for remote positions? It would be possible to use zoom meetings for most things and when Covid is over it's not that far from most places on the west coast. I'd think this would be a much better alternative to Eeu/Russia/India.

There are of course the cartels which need to be dealt with.

</comment><comment><USER6> Workers on vias, H1Bs aren't really affected by remote work too much. They are affected by the rules that the administration has put in place around them. Visas are not being issued currently (I've got one co-worker stranded in his home country when he was getting ready to do his final GC interview). This really means that individuals on existing visas won't move jobs, foreign students graduating won't be able to get jobs within the US, and foreign citizens won't be able to get jobs within the US. Essentially, a significant portion of engineers in the hiring pool are no longer available. This may result in high engineer pay, although that's probably cancelled out by the number of companies who've had to do large layoffs.

<comment><USER7> Can you please elaborate? what new rules by the administration are you talking about?

<comment><USER8> In April, green card registration and issuance was suspended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there will be some interesting dynamics between states.

Look at places like Florida or Texas without income tax, they are going to be able to draw away workers from states with higher income taxes.

This will create some revenue issues for states that rely on higher income taxes. I believe this will put further pressure on businesses and others that cannot perform work remotely.

<comment><USER10> The pay in Seattle is generally about the same as bay area pay based on my exp (although people have quibbled with this). We have no state income tax, so wouldn't that be appealing? Texas is hot, Seattle is cooler and rainier, Florida is Florida ;-), everything has tradeoffs. If you just lived ~30 miles outside of seattle you'd be able to get a very inexpensive house and pass the "arguably working in seattle area" test.

My question is still what's the limit on 'claiming to work in <big city> area' when I'm fully remote. If I was working in a vacation house 30 miles away and my company is fully remote, then my tax situation is the same. I'm not moving there, it's my vac home say. Facebook et al need to define what working in the big city means? 50.1% or 183 or 4 days in the city? I know someone who was commuting into Seattle for 1.5 hours each way every other day, working at a seattle company. He's happy working from home now. Would he be working in seattle if he was at facebook?

I want the freedom to live in a cabin in the woods for a month with good internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> well FB just announced that engineers keen on moving out of CA will get salary adjustments. Itd be silly to think you can move to rural Idaho and keep your 500k/yr TC

<comment><USER2> If Google is willing to pay 500 but FB says you get cut to 250... you're going to work for Google. The companies will pay out as long as they get good returns on the money. Location will become irrelevant for pay.

If companies say you'll get a pay cut, it presents an excellent opportunity to poach some talent.

<comment><USER12> Once Google realizes that people are willing to work for 250k, there really is no reason for them to continue to offer 500k. The salary inflation in the Bay area is at least partially fueled by a shortage of people willing to move there. There really is no way of extending the hiring pool while keeping salary at Bay area level.

<comment><USER11> Thats a very good point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The game will shift to a competition among state and local government policies. We already know how this game ends. More profit for corporate; less rights for the workforce.

<comment><USER10> I disagree. What state or local govt policies matter, except maybe taxes? There are a bunch of states with no state income tax, probably even more with less state & local taxes than Cali. People already move to Seattle from SF because of no state income taxes and similar salaries (it's exp. in seattle but cheaper than sf, it's crowded in seattle but less than sf, etc).

I think there are about 5 tiers.

1\. High taxes & many jobs and high salary (SF, NY),

2\. None or minimal state/local taxes and semicrowded (Florida?) and medium or lower salary,

3\. no taxes but high salary area (Seattle), high expenses,

4\. some taxes but medium salary (Portland),

5\. less or no taxes and more rural and not much remote work (most of the midwest or south outside big cities), much lower comp today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> bad news for equal opportunity in hiring

</comment><comment><USER15> I may add to this list:

Workers mental health?

Workers standard of living?</comment>


Distri: 20x faster initramfs (initrd) from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-01-21-initramfs-from-scratch-golang/ <comment><USER2> For those who haven't dug that deep.

initramfs is essentially a tiny Linux operating root image that Linux boots to RAM, before it goes on to boot from hard disk.

You can actually configure Linux to never go onto the next step of booting from hard disk, and run the operating system purely from RAM. Indeed there are distros such as Tinycore Linux that are designed exactly this way which can make things very fast compact and secure and diskless.

<comment><USER3> You can also go in reverse, and escape the running distribution's mounted / by pivoting to a tmpfs /, kill all processes and unmount the old root. Figuring out how to do this was quite fun. Systemd makes it actually fairly easy, because you can easily hijack the PID 1 if it's systemd, which is necessary to be able to umount the old /.

<comment><USER4> systemd makes it the _most_ easy. all you need is systemctl switch-root ROOT. on other inits, you usually need to replace /sbin/init, then use some non- portable (sysvinit is not the only competitor) method of telling init to re- exec itself. sometimes that method doesn't even stop the running services, so you need to either manually stop them, or kill them.

<comment><USER5> In what situations would you expect a re-exec to stop the services? The normal case is that the reexec preserves state.

<comment><USER4> IIRC, some init implementations have this capability. I'm not saying that it's good in general, but just that it facilitates this particular case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the article reads as a so-what matter, it is worth remembering that the major Linux distributions often rebuild the ramdisk on kernel upgrade as a post-installation step, which is semi-frequent. Worse is how slow rebuilding is.

<comment> semi-extrinsic On Arch it's like ten seconds tops. How slow is it on others?

<comment><USER7> Same order of magnitude. But that's kinda ridiculous, no?

<comment><USER8> Windows updates can take 10-30 minutes with computer unusable for anything else. 10 seconds of background activity does not sound too bad. Why do you care? You should be able to work on your tasks at this time.

<comment><USER9> While Windows updates are nowhere near 10s, nowadays they are also nowhere near 30m.

 _Years_ ago, _rarely_ , you'd get a Windows update that took up to 30m to to complete. These days it's more like a few minutes - certainly noticeable, but let's not exaggerate.

<comment><USER10> If the upgrade fails it's very annoying though. First you have to wait 10 minutes for the upgrade, then it reboots, then it upgrades some more, then it discovers something is wrong, it reboots, uninstalls the update which takes maybe minutes, reboots again. That can easily kill half an hour if not more of your work day, as you are not able to use the computer when it's upgrading and rebooting. Compared to Linux where you rarely need to reboot after an update. And you can also choose _when_ you want to upgrade, eg. you can shut off your computer without upgrading. And most importantly, Linux lets your _start_ your computer without having to wait 30 minutes for upgrades.

I'm currently using Linux for Windows apps that is no longer supported by Windows. eg. they don't even work in compatibility mode. But they do work in Wine!

<comment><USER11> If the upgrade fails, that's a completely different issue, not a typical path. We need to separate those, otherwise we'll end up with "On <any> system, when the upgrade catastrophically fails, I have to reinstall the whole machine, so upgrades take hours."

<comment><USER12> Eh, windows updates, especially when you're including .net 4+ take a pretty considerable amount of time, especially when on a HDD. Server 2016 updates Re very memory hungry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We at croit.io use it to boot all systems in our environment. Debian uses a better live-boot than most other distributions with Dracut (only half the ram required).

After more then 10 years of PXE booting most systems, I personally can definitely say it is rock solid, reduce maintenance times, and makes scaling simple.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really enjoyed this article. However the following passage seemed a bit hand-wavy to me:

>"How will our userland program know which kernel modules to load? Linux kernel modules declare patterns for their supported hardware as an alias, e.g.:"

      initrd# grep virtio_pci lib/modules/5.4.6/modules.alias
      alias pci:v00001AF4d*sv*sd*bc*sc*i* virtio_pci

Devices in sysfs have a modalias file whose content can be matched against these declarations to identify the module to load:

      initrd# cat /sys/devices/pci0000:00/*/modalias
      pci:v00001AF4d00001005sv00001AF4sd00000004bc00scFFi00
      pci:v00001AF4d00001004sv00001AF4sd00000008bc01sc00i00

>"Hence, for the initial round of module loading, it is sufficient to locate all modalias files within sysfs and load the responsible modules."

Could someone elaborate on this a bit? I'm familiar with udevd. Is /sysfs enumerated first and then a match is searched for in lib/modules/5.4.6/modules.alias? Or the other way around? Are these files parsed before normal kernel PCI bus enumeration then? Any other specifics or detail would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER15> > Is /sysfs enumerated first and then a match is searched for in > lib/modules/5.4.6/modules.alias?

Yes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is 20x faster _build time_ to create the initramfs image, is that correct?

It's not 20x faster to boot?

<comment><USER16> Yes, 20x faster build of initramfs image. But boot is also a bit faster due to the faster go-based initial init process, I'd guess:

> Measuring early boot time using qemu, I measured the dracut-generated > initramfs taking 588ms to display the full disk encryption passphrase > prompt, whereas minitrd took only 195ms.

<comment><USER17> Is that an interesting difference, though? At least on my machine, boot time is dominated by... grub loading the kernel and initramfs. Which is actually ridiculous when you consider it's a few dozen megabytes on a NVMe. I have't inveatigated what's up yet.

<comment><USER18> fyi a quick way to see this is with systemd-analyze

      systemd-analyze plot > bootplot.svg

      systemd-analyze critical-chain

      systemd-analyze blame

<comment><USER17> Systemd-analyze doesn't know about grub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I want to like dracut, I really do. It's amazingly flexible and dynamic. Mostly, though, I find it a complete pain in the neck any time I go remotely outside the default behaviour.

It gets even worse when you enable debug. It's a series of really nested bash scripts, and enabling debug does "set -x" for everything. That spews out so much information over serial console / screen that actually tracking down the bug is almost impossible. The sheer complexity of the embedding and sequence of events means that even innocuous changes can have a way bigger impact than expected. RedHat changed something between RHEL7.6 and RHEL7.7 and suddenly we were having all sorts of issues with CentOS7 instances booting off iSCSI.

The one big positive about it (from my perspective at least) is that it _does_ make it pretty easy to inject additional functionality in to the initramfs. Just drop in a bash script with a number prefix relevant to where you want it to occur in the boot order.

</comment><comment><USER20> Related work is being done in the u-root project ([https://github.com/u-root/u-root](https://github.com/u-root/u-root)).

</comment><comment><USER21> This is an excellent article giving into the Initrd pattern.

</comment><comment><USER22> He cuts 390ms off of time to passphrase prompt. Does that translate to 390ms faster boot time?

I can't remember the last time I sat in front of a Linux box during reboot. Is that a pittance or a noticeable improvement?

<comment><USER23> With full disk encryption you can turn on a system and have a usable light weight desktop up in 20 seconds.

Alternatively you can suspend and resume in most cases and have it in 2.

<comment><USER24> If your DE is light enough just put it and its dependancies in the initramfs with your home folder (and /etc /var?) encrypted.

I used to do this, although without the encryption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use this on all of my systems. It's great and supports unlocking disks with full disk encryption.

[https://github.com/slashbeast/better- initramfs](https://github.com/slashbeast/better-initramfs)

</comment><comment><USER4> this article is oddly really knowledgeable and also really unknowledgeable at the same time. despite its length, it doesn't explain what an initramfs is or how it's created until basically the end (excluding the appendix). an initramfs is simply a cpio archive with a minimum of one file, an executable "/init", then compressed with a standard compressor. currently gzip, xz, and lz4 are the useful ones.

this means that an optimized initramfs creator ought to take as long as a tar file creator, because it basically is a glorified tar file creator. on my system, with a full cache, mkinitcpio takes about 1.5 seconds to run. my custom initramfs generator (not released yet) takes 0.03 seconds to run using "cat" as compressor. it is written entirely in POSIX shell and uses only the external commands ldd, gen_init_cpio, and the compressor. however, if gzip -9 is used for the compressor, then compressing the 12 MB takes 1.8 seconds. so, we can see that compression can significantly inflate (pun intended) the time consumed. as a matter of fact, looking at [https://github.com/distr1/distri/blob/master/cmd/distri/init...](https://github.com/distr1/distri/blob/master/cmd/distri/initrd.go), it appears to pass no options to gzip, so I assume the default is used, probably -6. [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man8/dracut.8.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/dracut.8.html) indicates that dracut uses gzip -9 by default, which would increase the time required. if dracut is configured in a non-default manner (e.g. lz4 -12) that would further increase the time.

the author credits Go, concurrency, no external dependencies, and threads (?!) for the improved performance. this is manifestly unnecessary: no threads are needed to improve the performance of "tar", firstly because it is I/O bound, and secondly because the compressor is usually the slowest part anyways. it might be possible to slightly improve the performance by using native code, but there is no substantial difference between running mkinitcpio in 1.0 vs 1.5 seconds, and there's definitely no difference between 10.0 and 11.5 seconds (lz4 -12 takes about 10 seconds to run, and I assume the remaining 1.5 seconds can be fully optimized to require 0 seconds).

regarding the rest of the post, it's... a little weird. I don't understand why anyone would manually trudge through modules.dep files when that is the main objective of the "modprobe" command, as opposed to "insmod", which does no dependency resolution. (modprobe also supports config files, aliases, and some other things, but the main and original objective is dependency resolution.) it's also a bad idea to reimplement libblkid: it supports a ton of filesystems, many of which one might actually want to use as a root filesystem, but are not supported by this basic implementation, including xfs, btrfs, or zfs. it also doesn't appear to support LUKS2. libblkid isn't even necessary: busybox findfs works perfectly well for most common filesystems, and runs very quickly (0.02 seconds on my machine). but, again, the main cost when booting with a necessarily cold cache is likely to be I/O, not spawning a process. I don't understand why someone would faff about with manually parsing ELF files when ldd works just fine with simple text parsing and handles interpreter, rpath, and transitive dependencies built-in.

this all just seems overly complicated to me. my initramfs generator is 77 lines of code, including automatic ldd dependency generation, and init is 37 lines, including LUKS decryption, dropbear for remote password entry, and e2fsck with automatic reboot if requested by e2fsck, for a total of about 110 lines. I didn't count the lines of code for minitrd, but adding together the two files linked is already about 1000 lines of code. mkinitcpio has far more flexibility and is only about 1500 lines for the core code.

</comment><comment><USER26> "I currently have no desire to make minitrd available outside of distri. While the technical challenges (such as extending the generator to not rely on distri's hermetic packages) are surmountable, I don't want to support people's initramfs remotely.

Also, I think that people's efforts should in general be spent on rallying behind dracut and making it work faster, thereby benefiting all Linux distributions that use dracut (increasingly more)."

As described on the website unixsheikh.com recently posted to HN^1 and making the front page^2, I think this illustrates one difference between "Linux" and BSD. Much of what unixsheikh describes has been said before however I think it still remains true today. I am currently using Linux and open to being persuaded otherwise. I want to learn "the Linux way" if there is such a thing.

That said, I always found booting to ramdisk, "root on mfs", "mfsroot", or whatever people might call it, very straightforward on BSD. They maintained and provided all the necessary tools, some of them have no Linux equivalent. Things stayed more or less the same so once the process was learnt, there seemed little chance of the goalposts moving. One did not need to be a contributor to understand these processes. Sometimes I get the feeling I am just not smart enough for Linux, and it _seems_ like these processes are constantly subject to change. (I hope to find the truth is otherwise.)

As a BSD end user, I found it relatively easy to compile a custom kernel and a custom, statically-linked, multi-call binary as a userland, like busybox but using utilities "as is" not pared down with features missing, to be inserted into the kernel. I could boot from USB stick^3 to ramdisk root, pull out the USB stick, e.g., if I needed the USB port, then chroot into any userland. This was extremely flexible and allowed for easy experimentation. Sometimes I might have that userland prepared on internal media, the USB stick, or some other external media, or I might create it dynamically by downloading and extracting binary sets. This "targetroot"^4 userland might be mounted, usually r/o, on HDD or it might just be mfs/tmpfs.

Apparently, the author was inspired to make his own distribution because he found the package installation process too slow for large packages, e.g. qemu.^5 He tried using SquashFS images to speed up the process. I did the same thing in 2012 using cloop2 compressed filesystem images for large packages, e.g. ghostscript, on NetBSD. I would keep them on the USB stick and just mount them over an executable directory as necessary. I was not using these large programs too frequently and I was running entirely from tmpfs, no HDD, so I did not want them occupying space and depleting RAM.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unixsheikh.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unixsheikh.com)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-01-20](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-01-20)

3\. Thanks to the excellent BSD bootloaders I could manually choose the kernel during boot. I would have several kernels on the USB stick. Of course the kernel did not have to reside on the USB stick, I could load it from any connected media. At one point I was able to boot NetBSD kernels using the FreeBSD bootloader.

4\. TBH, I still do not know the true story behind targetroot. Things in BSD always have a history behind them. Surely there is a story behind the "targetroot" directory.

5 [https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-08-17-linux- package...](https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-08-17-linux-package- managers-are-slow/)

"How can minitrd be 20 times faster than dracut?

dracut is mainly written in shell, with a C helper program. It drives the generation process by spawning lots of external dependencies (e.g. ldd or the dracut-install helper program). I assume that the combination of using an interpreted language (shell) that spawns lots of processes and precludes a concurrent architecture is to blame for the poor performance."

Interesting that dracut uses bash, not dash for its scripts. Would dash be any faster. Are bash features a necessity for the simple tasks dracut performs.

Also, could dracut use readelf instead of the bash shell script ldd. According to Wikipedia, the Linux man page for ldd asserts it is a security risk.

Does default Ubuntu include a manpage for ldd. Mine is missing.

<comment><USER27> The only thing in your post I really want in Linux is a better bootloader the FreeBSD one is pretty neat, I've seen bootloaders that include kexec to change Linux kernels in early boot. But I seldom see the need for a better pre boot env, and I think this is the general consensus. Also the key to boot speed is to forgo initramfs completely, at least if you look at those sub 500ms boots that are out there.

<comment><USER26> Seems there is a ever-growing list of Linux bootloaders. Which ones are not satisfactory and why.

I was very satisfied with the BSD bootloaders. Plus the kernels comply with the multiboot specification so it was possible to use other bootloaders. This way I could boot kernels from different BSD projects from the same USB stick using a single bootloader. I do not use GRUB.

<comment><USER28> Since you seem to like to experiment, have you ever heard of

[https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html](https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html) ?

Though that seems for older hardware, mostly. The one for current systems is in development. Anyways, on older hardware it enabled otherwise impossible things for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Was Stack Overflow Built With? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/

<comment><USER2> It's probably not the stack I would pick and my initial reaction is always to gasp when I see startups built on Microsoft, but...

\- ASP.NET can scale, if you do it right. Aside from Microsoft.com/MSN, which don't really count, MySpace uses it (though they upgraded from ColdFusion, which wasn't much better) and Plenty of Fish, the web's largest dating site, uses it too: <http://www.plentyoffish.com/about_team.aspx> These are probably all larger than the most successful Rails sites.

\- ASP.NET MVC isn't a horrible programming model. Forget the abomination that's normal ASP.NET with its funky events. If you've used another MVC framework like Rails or Cake, you'll feel right at home.

\- Microsoft's startup program gives startups the early software for super cheap: <http://microsoftstartupzone.com/>

\- It's all about getting v1 out and releasing early and often. If your team grew up on Microsoft, are you really going to make them all learn a new framework? If you do it right and prove out your idea, you can always rewrite later.

<comment><USER3> _"my initial reaction is always to gasp when I see startups built on Microsoft, but..."_

What would you recommend that career Microsoft developers use for their startups?

<comment><USER4> Maybe just have static html pages, web services, and jquery for Ajax. Use whatever you want for the web services (Python)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't like stackoverflow.com UI.

</comment><comment><USER6> ASP.net MVC in C# I believe

</comment><comment><USER7> It's an abomination on so many levels.

<comment><USER8> Hey, everyone, let's use this content-free comment to vote on how much we like ASP.NET!

<comment><USER9> Take a look at the html source and see if you think it's an abomination.

<comment><USER10> I don't. Why should I?

Also, you may want to peek at the HN HTML source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With what was Stock Overflow built?

<comment><USER12> As long as we're being pedantic:

With what was St _a_ ck Overflow built?

:~)</comment></comment>