It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://paradise.caltech.edu/~cook/papers/TwoNeurons.pdf <comment><USER2> This is a really easy read if folks are looking for easy-to-digest papers!

From the results:

> Although the two-neuron network controller works well for a range of speeds, > one thing the controller does not do is to try to dampen the instabilities > that can arise when riding too slowly or in too sharp of a turn. (This would > probably require a third neuron that is dedicated to this task.)

</comment><comment><USER3> > There is not a direct or fixed correspondence, but as a general rule, during > stable riding, a higher clockwise torque on the handlebars will cause the > bicycle to start leaning more to the left

It's counter-steering! I was glad to read that counter-steering is accounted for and works in their physics simulation like it does in the real world.

I don't have a source handy, but I believe that there is a fixed correspondence between steering angle and the resulting turn that depends on the bike's speed, lean & steer. (And maybe tire radius counts too.) A bike riding in a stable constant clockwise turn will have a slight right lean & clockwise steer in steady-state. Steering clockwise from there will turn the bike left, or increase the turning radius until it's straight and then start turning counter-clockwise. Steering counter-clockwise from steady state clockwise turn will turn turn the bike right, increase the lean and decrease the turning radius.

<comment><USER4> The fixed correspondence between leaning and turning is easy to derive on your own:

Draw a picture of a leaning bike from behind. Add a horizontal line for the ground. Assume the entire bike/human system is leaning an equal amount, so put the center-of-mass somewhere in the leaning line.

If the bicycle is maintaining a constant amount of lean, then the extended line of the force applied by the ground to the bike must pass through the center of mass (i.e. in this case the angle of the force vector is the same as the angle of lean).

Now decompose the force vector into vertical and horizontal components. The vertical portion when riding on the ground (i.e. not jumping the bike), neglecting aerodynamic effects, is fixed to be the gravitational force, so it will be constant regardless of the direction of lean.

This means that the horizontal portion of the force will be equal to the the gravitational force times the tangent of the lean-angle. This also means that when the tangent of the lean-angle exceeds the coefficient of friction between the tires and pavement, you will crash.

The turn-radius can then be calculated by treating the horizontal force as the centripetal acceleration, and is indeed related to speed (faster speeds mean a larger turn radius).

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that's a useful breakdown, thank you!

Does this help to explain the fixed correspondence between steer and direction of turn? (For example, to someone who doesn't believe counter-steering is a thing.) The physics of the lean seems easier to decompose than the physics of counter-steering.

I am interested in finding a way to describe counter-steering so that it's obvious, similar to the way you described the horizontal force vs coefficient of friction.

<comment><USER4> When you turn the wheel, your wheels move to the right.

Inertia keeps your center of mass moving straight, so your center of mass is now to the left of the wheels.

Think of it as the ground pulling the wheels out from under you.

<comment><USER4> Also, there is no fixed correspondence between turning the wheel and leaning, because in this case you do move your body. Think about when you are in a car and someone turns sharply to the right. At first you lean left, but then you unconsciously right yourself.

Similarly on a bike, if you turn the wheel right, you will eventually either fall over, or turn to right (which will happen with an unconscious lean). Since the correction to lean-right is usually not done consciously, and happens very quickly most people don't realize there is an initial lean left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is now my favorite scientific paper headline, beating out the previous champion, "How Many Birds Are There?"

[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018341530497](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018341530497)

<comment><USER6> Do you have a freely accessible copy of this paper?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does a Raspberry Pi have enough computing power to run these two neurons in the real world? Could I attach motors and sensors to a real bike and have it drive itself? That would be amazing.

<comment><USER8> This is just a PID controller, they have existed and been used in industry much longer than computers and thus require almost no computing power at all. Everyone taking higher level engineering courses learns how to design these because almost everything uses them. Honestly I thought that the paper was a joke on how everything is called neural network, but maybe it is serious...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller#History)

<comment><USER9> I'm with you here. Did no-one else do robotics in CS?

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately it's not a part of many curriculum. A lot of CS tracks seem to shy away from hardware.

For contrast, the bioengineering track at my state college did include electronics (along with programming, high level math and of course biology and chemistry).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice paper. It makes me wonder how different the two 'neurons' are from a classical control theory set of equations (w/ gains in a feedback loop) solving for the same plant model.

I do love the visualization of "Instability of an unsteered bicycle" in figure 2 though.

<comment><USER12> I have some minor background in control theory. After going trough the paper I had a very same thought thus I googled and found this: [http://www.control.lth.se/media/Staff/KarlJohanAstrom/Lectur...](http://www.control.lth.se/media/Staff/KarlJohanAstrom/Lectures/BikeTalkKTH2006.pdf)

After checking out the slides I kind of feel that there might be some oversimplification in the used simulator, like producing _the desired lean angle_ might not be enough. But I am no expert.

<comment><USER11> I give the authors a little bit of a break because they're sort of more thinking about the meta problem of how to build an automated system to create a controller. From that standpoint, the original paper is more introducing the early landscape of the problem and documenting some early stabs at it. Introducing the question of how to get that automated derivation to arrive a simple set of end controls for the system as simulated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looking at the roads it seem like driving cars is taking no neurons at all.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wish math notation becomes substitued with pseudocode. I can never figure out all the greek letters!

<comment><USER15> But then it wouldn't look as "scientific" (i.e. anyone could understand it, it wouldn't look complicated). At least that's what I feel like, reading and writing a bunch of papers for my master's. We are encouraged to put math stuff in ours just because it looks more theoretical that way. Whenever I do something of worth I also make sure to blog about it so I can write down in normal terms what we did and found, with code, (online) demo, and anything else that might be useful.

<comment><USER16> 1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α).

2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down- voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translating the concise notation to meaningful interpretation. Obviously, using variables names like `velocity_of_thing` is much too verbose in mathematics (papers would 1000's of pages); however, β with hover-text "This is the velocity vector of the thing." would be super helpful IMO.

<comment><USER15> > Obviously, using variables names like `velocity_of_thing` is much too > verbose in mathematics

That is not obvious to me. Perhaps in a purely mathematical paper with dozens of formulas, but that's not my field of study. In any paper I read of any discipline, I never came across any paper filled with enough formulas that it would make sense to compress at the cost of clarity.

I fully agree, though, on following conventions (that only conveys extra context) and using hover text to act as a quick lookup function. I actually looked for the latter in the past but couldn't find a way to do it in LaTeX.

<comment><USER16> > I never came across any paper filled with enough formulas that it would make > sense to compress at the cost of clarity

Fair point, but with this approach, even simple formulae could really clutter up a page if the variable names are long and descriptive (imagine just a rational function!). Also, as with programming, folks might abbreviate (e.g., `vel_thg`) and then we're nearly back at square one.

<comment><USER15> Also in programming, when my girlfriend (the mathematician[1]) used single letters in code and I helped her with the coding part of it, she had to remind me what some letters stood for. With acronyms or abbreviations I might need to ask a first time (or maybe not even that, especially if you put a comment with the full version upon declaration), but it's definitely easier to remember what is what.

But anyway that's programming. Papers are a little different of course, with limited space so usually there are no big code parts with declarations and comments. Which is also why I like blog posts: things are clickable and interactive. A PDF is super static and you can't expect a reader to click through to the code or to be able to zoom in.

[1] well, she claims not to be, but from my POV it's math even if she says it's a subfield.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This sounds a whole lot like a Braitenburg vehicle [1] and I was surprised the author did not cite and compare/contrast Braitenburg's work.

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

</comment><comment><USER18> I loved that diagram titled "Instability of an unsteered bicycle"

</comment><comment><USER19> There are no secrets to riding a bike:

1\. Do no try to go straight. Move the handlebars violently left and right when you feel you are falling left or right.

2\. Going slow is hard. Go fast. The wheels spinning will behave as stabilizers, making it easier to stay on the bike.

3\. Moving your body will make you fall at first if you do not counteract by moving the handlebar. Start by going downhill, without pedaling.

<comment><USER20> The two "secrets" I know to riding a motorcycle are (1) not leaning on your arms, and (2) consciously countersteering.

Seems like a lot of people I see on the street never learned how to countersteer and turn or change lanes with alacrity.

<comment><USER21> > (1) not leaning on your arms

I can already guess an answer to this, but would you mind expanding on it anyway? I tend to do this on my bicycle a lot.

<comment><USER20> Well, I was told not to in the course I took to get my license, and I found it helped without really thinking about why.

However, if I try to introspect...supporting my weight with my arms tends to conflict with the counter-steering part. If I push on the left side, the motorcycle leans that way. But one instinctively pushes on something to hold oneself up. So I think I would say my brain gets subconsciously conflicted over whether to push or pull.

Unfortunately, sport bikes typically have a seating position that makes it very difficult not to put weight on your wrists unless you have good leg and abdominal muscles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> (2004)

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, the videos linked in the paper seem to have disappeared. Are these mirrored anywhere?

<comment><USER24> They work, but the tilde character in the pdf is wrong. Try this: [http://www.paradise.caltech.edu/~cook/Warehouse/RecursiveBik...](http://www.paradise.caltech.edu/~cook/Warehouse/RecursiveBike.avi)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> code?

</comment><comment><USER26> does anyone recognize what software was used during this study

</comment><comment><USER27> About the most fascinating thing I read all week.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I move into software from hardware engineering - <AUTHOR>

	I recently completed my masters degree in VLSI from a top 15 school in the US. But in the last two years, I have become very interested in software. However, because of the course structure and time constraints, I never got time to learn any programming language. I can program in C and know basic HTML and CSS. I really want to move into software but since I have no projects/experience in software, companies refuse to even look at my resume. How do I move into software and get a job in that domain. <comment><USER2> I've worked with someone with pretty much exactly your background, someone who found himself in a software development project, and I'd indeed never hire you as you are today for a software job. :-(

The only answer is simple in principle, you just have to find the time and energy: do a lot of programming. If you're hard core or want to find out if you are or have that potential, I'd start with SICP/6.001: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs)

Good luck! People with your background can bring a _lot_ to the table, you just need to achieve the relevant software background first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The link looks interesting. Will have a look. Now just have to find some time for programming.

<comment><USER2> You're welcome.

In the meantime, make sure to carry around one of your MOSIS chips, that earns you a _lot_ of geek cred for those who know what it means ^_^.

(Seriously, it does.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a few random thoughts:

What were you doing before the VLSI course? How did you get your experience with C, HTML, CSS and Perl? Can you rewrite your resume so it emphasizes the experience you have had with programming, even if it wasn't part of a course?

"Design of VLSI Systems" at [http://lsiwww.epfl.ch/LSI2001/teaching/webcourse/ch01/ch01.h...](http://lsiwww.epfl.ch/LSI2001/teaching/webcourse/ch01/ch01.html#1.2) says "The design process, at various levels, is usually evolutionary in nature. It starts with a given set of requirements. Initial design is developed and tested against the requirements. When requirements are not met, the design has to be improved. If such improvement is either not possible or too costly, then the revision of requirements and its impact analysis must be considered." That sounds a lot like what we do for programming. Is there some way to emphasize the skills you learned for VLSI and state how you would use them for software?

Isn't VLSI mainly software driven these days? I would state what software you used and what you did with it. That's a kind of programming.

During your course, did you work in a team or on your own? Did you gather requirements, obtain resources, prioritise and allocate tasks and follow up to make sure each team member did his/her job? You could reuse that experience for programming.

With your hardware background, I'd aim for low-level technical programming jobs like writing device drivers rather than more business-oriented software like account packages, CRMs, databases, GUIs or possibly websites.

Did you debug hardware by using a CRO, JTAG port, signal injector or protocol analyser? Those can be useful for device driver writers too.

Is there an Arduino group in your area that you could do voluntary programming for? That would get you started with simple device drivers.

You might have to take a VLSI job for a while to keep the cash flowing while you get more software experience by programming part time or on a volunteer basis. There's a list of VLSI companies at [http://www.vlsi- world.com/index.php?option=com_glossary&...](http://www.vlsi- world.com/index.php?option=com_glossary&func=display&Itemid=44&catid=30/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That was an awesome answer. Thanks. I did C as part of course and the rest because of interest. VLSI is mainly software driven. I have worked with Hardware descriptive languages like Verilog. As per the suggestions above, I have decided to take up an open source project and hone my software skills and then try for a job change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps you could work on an open source C/Python/Ruby. This way you could add something of relevance to your resume.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya. That would probably be the best bet. Can you suggest which would be better-Ruby or Python? I have some experience with Perl.

<comment><USER4> I prefer Python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just do it. Pick a project and program it. Then do another. Practice is the key.

</comment><comment><USER6> Find a friend who runs small software company, bribe him a bit, so you can then easily write that you worked in his company a year.

<comment><USER7> "Find a friend who runs small software company, bribe him a bit, so you can then easily write that you worked in his company a year."

Why would you want to do this? If you have a friend with software company _work for him_ for a year! Any sw company worth its existence always needs more programmers. You can work at low pay (or even for no pay if you are okw ith it) for a couple of months while you are learning and then get into a fulltime position. With friends you can make such unorthodox arrangements. If you have a friend who owns a software company, _use_ that to learn!

<comment><USER6> Well, the friend with COMPANY, may have NO REAL positions open. And you may be ALREADY very experienced in technology. So to break through bureaucracies of job agencies/HR departments, you need to apply some grease. Yes it is deception, I know, but it is benign and important one. Your politicians deceive you every second, but keep them, do not you?.</comment></comment></comment>


HN: Minneapolis Meetup Tonight - <AUTHOR>

There will be a Minneapolis Meetup tonight for HN readers at 6pm at The Bulldog Northeast.
http://www.thebulldognortheast.com/
If you're interested you can also join our Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/minneapolishackers <comment><USER2> Thanks for the announcement. I'll be there with a new MathPath hat if I possibly can, but this is not yet a promise, as I have to check my evening schedule. Last time we were in two groups; I hope we can all gather in one group this time. I appreciate you setting up these meet-ups.

<comment><USER2> Schedule conflicts arose, and I will not be there this evening. Have a great time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gaaah! Was there 2 days ago. I just moved to Green Bay.

Here is my trajectory of living locations in the last N years. London -> Washington D.C. -> Hong Kong -> Shanghai -> New York -> Sydney -> Green Bay.

One of them is unlike the others.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great to see something like this coming together, but considering it's at the Bulldog NE, it's a wash ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ah, this is when I get a little bummed i moved to Bismarck. Disappoint.

Have fun.

<comment><USER6> The ND meetup would probably be pretty sparse at this point

// MN address, working in ND on long term</comment></comment>


P2P CPU resource sharing for everyone? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everybody, is there a project that lets me use others' cpu resource and let others use mine when my computer is idle? It is similar to SETI@home or BOINC but everybody can use it. I remember seeing this before but do not remember its name. <comment><USER2> Not sure if this has the maturity or feature set you're looking for, but a pretty interesting development on top of Sovereign's federated roll-your-own cloud platform: [http://sneer.me/project.html](http://sneer.me/project.html)

There are also some interesting papers if you search for 'peer to peer CPU resource sharing'.</comment>


Calculator that thinks only if you do too - <AUTHOR> http://qamacalculator.com/

<comment><USER2> Submitted a number of times, but the discussion is here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3851691>

Here are a few more:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=qama](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=qama)</comment>


Apple buys 50 business class seats to Shanghai daily - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/LAflyr/status/1083787010186260480 <comment><USER2> This looks like a banner that would exist only on a sales floor or something internal, certainly not something they would intentionally publish publicly. I'm guessing a new hire (or visitor) to the site has taken a pic. That's going to be easier to explain to Apple than if they made an actual advert out of it.</comment>


My beautiful, high-maintenance wife, Apple - <AUTHOR> http://peternixey.com/post/37988283331/my-beautiful-high-maintenance-wife-apple

<comment><USER2> Great sexism, bro!

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, let's think this through. Maybe if I pull both drives from the mirror my life will be interesting againpanic: ZFS: I/O failure (read on <unknown> off 0: zio 0x8aab9678 [L0 SPA space map] 1000L/800P DVA[0]=<0:5a0006b000:c00> DVA[1]= <0:760005e000:c00> DVA[2]=0:910006f000:c00> fletcher4 lzjb LE contiguous birth=30357 fill=1 cksum=826e30d130:8ee58de6107a:5f1171be2ea

</comment><comment><USER4> Paraphilia in its finest form</comment>


Newgrad: Post a job for new grads - <AUTHOR> https://newgrad.io/new-post <comment><USER2> The first 2 positions I looked at randomly were for experienced resources.

\- Consulting Financial Analyst (Puget Sound Energy | Bellevue, WA) -> 7-10 years of experience in finance with at least 5 years of financial planning or strategic analysis for the consulting level.

\- Business Administrator (Microsoft | Redmond, WA) -> 2 – 4 years of demonstrated relevant work experience in a fast-paced and complex environment

Not sure I see the point of this product if it doesn't even filter out these positions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Off-topic but not completely unrelated, hiring new grads is difficult. No, scratch that; employing new grads is difficult.

Enthusiasm and eagerness is valuable, but one needs to set aside an ongoing block of time for education and discussion and guidance and so on; not only do they not know what they don't know (had a CV cross my desk this week in which the new grad rated himself "guru" at C++, which is not impossible but seems very unlikely - typically at the interview, such candidates are actually what one would expect from a new-grad, and just don't realise how much they don't know and to what extent knowing the syntax isn't the same as being any good with it), but _I_ don't know what they don't know and it's impossible for me to fully appreciate how difficult some things are to get to grips with. Sure, it took me a long time as well, but I just don't remember how long it took me to grasp various things, and that's only my experiences. They could have a completely different set of unknowns.

Placing them in the right team is hard too. They need the support and guidance of experienced people, but adding a new grad to a team generally serves to slow things down for a while; ultimately, the team and company benefits, but finding a team with a runway long enough to absorb the hit without jeopardising their own targets is not easy. Sometimes there's just no good place to insert a new grad and we have to just take the hit.

<comment><USER4> >"guru" at C++

Isn't something like that a requirement for entry level job these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In case the creators are here: I typed my location (hint: not the US) and I got... nothing. I don't mean "no results" \- I mean there was no indication whatsoever that my search did anything. I thought it could be hugged to death, until I tried "Seattle" and got results.

I would suggest adding a "no jobs found" message (using Firefox on Android, in case it matters)

<comment><USER6> Also, the 'research' tag is misspelled 'rersearch'

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How are you getting lots of new graduates to look at these jobs?

My company is _very_ good at getting new graduates off to a really good start to their career, so I've seen all the various sites and services for finding new graduates. (Our pitch: [https://www.haplo-services.com/jobs/new- graduates](https://www.haplo-services.com/jobs/new-graduates) )

The problem with these kinds of job sites is getting enough new graduates to look at them for it to actually have an effect, and most new graduates think they need to talk to a recruitment company or just apply to the big names. :-(

<comment><USER8> We had a lot of luck sourcing candidates at career fairs from local universities, actually. They usually will head to the campus career center prior to contacting recruiting companies, but you can get hundreds of candidates (including double-digit good ones) for less than $500-1000. The signal-to-noise ratio we saw was also much, much better than you normally get from online services.

This doesn't scale well for middleware like the parent product, but it's a decent option for companies who are trying to attract talent.

<comment><USER7> Oh yes, that's one of our techniques for finding graduates.

I was just wondering about how this job board was going to do it, as "who will see this" is the key question for someone considering posting a job on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You need to be careful if you use this in the US. As far as I know, job ads specifically targeting new grads can be seen as illegal since they may be discriminating against 40+ year olds.

<comment><USER10> There's nothing stopping someone from graduating at the age of 56.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great! I was going to make literally the same thing just so it existed</comment>


Ask HN: Co-working spaces in Taipei? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,<p>I'm coming to Taipei from Silicon Valley. Anyone know of some coworking spaces for a few months? <comment><USER2> I went to Hun Coworking, very few foreigners mostly Taiwanese, but it was pretty much just a coffee shop so I stopped going. [https://www.facebook.com/huncoworkingspace](https://www.facebook.com/huncoworkingspace)

CLBC is nice but a little pricey in my opinion.

I'm trying to find a new coworking space here right now, but have been having little luck. The thing about Taipei is they have a huge amount of coffee shops all over the city, I might just end up settling to work at a coffee shop. Email me tecmoviking[at]gmail.com if you want to connect and I can offer other suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out CLBC in Da'an district (大安區): [http://clbc.tw/](http://clbc.tw/)

The Taipei.py (Taipei Python User Group) also meets there pretty regularly and they are all really friendly people.

[http://www.meetup.com/Taipei-py/](http://www.meetup.com/Taipei-py/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Kaohsiung now, if anyone wants to connect post here and I will contact you!</comment>


OpenJDK source code (C++) check by PVS-Studio tool - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Coder_HarryLee/openjdk-check-by-pvs-studio-f25a2187b8a0 <comment><USER2> "It's always amusing to check a project which is used and maintained by a large number of people."

I wonder how serious the bugs they've found are. Are they in little used corners of little used aspects of the api or something more insidious? But yes, I can see why a salesperson would find such spectacular displays of their tool amusing. I'm amused myself.

<comment><USER3> It seems that most of the warnings in the article are not in the JVM proper, but in AWT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can PVS-Studio actually find any buffer overflows? These logic errors are important but they're not what people are typically most concerned about these days.

<comment><USER5> Yes.

Examples: [http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0154/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0154/) , [http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0360/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0360/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That was a great read. Fun and informative. We use the static analyzer in Xcode, which is not that advanced as PVS by the looks of it, but still finds a few things to improve.

Are there analyzers for languages like say Ruby or Clojure?

<comment><USER7> RuboCop is what most Ruby projects use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are there open source linters and analyzers for C?

<comment><USER9> [http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/](http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/)

[http://cppcheck.sourceforge.net/](http://cppcheck.sourceforge.net/)</comment></comment>


Stop telling me what to do - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I really need those TPS reports by the end of the day</comment>


Amazon grocery shopping free with prime now - <AUTHOR> https://blog.aboutamazon.com/shopping/ultrafast-grocery-delivery-is-now-free-with-prime <comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts on future of insta cart type delivery services?

</comment><comment><USER2> that's great news</comment>


Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-spectacular-failure-that-was-the-bill-gates-deposition/ <comment><USER2> This was written by someone who has no idea what a deposition is about, or is intentionally misrepresenting it. The USG's depositions were PR stunts, filmed on purpose to make Gates look bad.

If you've ever been deposed (and I have), then you know that Gates' approach was close to optimal when dealing with lawyers.

Bill's biggest mistake was having a terrible attitude and bad posture when answering questions. He made it too personal. Otherwise, the strict answers were mostly ideal and are often used as tutorials by attorneys to show those two things:

1) How not to have the posture/tone/etc in your voice when answering questions, but...

2) ...that this is an adversarial discussion and you should seek extreme clarity every single time.

<comment><USER3> Could you please expand on WHY posture/tone/etc are important? W

<comment><USER4> Could you explain how it is possible not to understand that posture, tone, etc are important?

<comment><USER3> I am aware that posture, tone etc are important factors in communication. My question above asked WHY they are important in this context. Specifically, why the OP thinks they are important given they have been in such a scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having followed these events closely at the time, the Gates/Boies deposition videos are fascinating in their entirety; I'm overdue for a rewatch.

Despite having been a mild OS/2 and Java partisan, I agree with the general consensus in this thread that Gates gets a bad rap for surely following his expensive lawyers' advice on how to respond during a deposition. Boies' strategy was to assume that as a competitive CEO and logically-minded programmer, Gates would indeed follow that advice to an extreme that could be made to look evasive and sinister. It's not an accident that they spend so much time arguing over definitions of industry terms or what some Microsoft VP means by "ours". Boies at any time could have accepted Gates' understanding and moved on, but instead keeps calmly needling on subtle distinctions to rile him up.

EDIT: Yikes, now rewatching and I forgot that the first half hour of the deposition is Boies reading Gates carefully selected definitions out of the 1997 Microsoft Computer Dictionary and asking him if he accepts them as written. The idea that it was _Gates_ who wanted to litigate terminology is nuts.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't agree with the article at all.

I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that.

Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire?

Now if Microsoft had restricted users from installing another browser in Windows, _then_ I would agree it's anti-competitive. And this is much more akin to what Apple is doing.

The author wants to paint MS as hypocritical, but aside from being accused of anti-competitive practices, there are no similarities.

And second, I despise how one's deposition attitude plays so much into the media's narrative. It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude, agreeable or flippant, sloppy or well-dressed. The only that that matters are legal facts.

<comment><USER7> > For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or > notepad too? How about solitaire?

There was a reason it was browsers.

At the time there was rather a lot of software written against the Win32 API and nothing else. It was a moat. You needed that software, so you needed Windows. The web threatened to bridge the moat -- if people write web applications for Netscape, and Netscape runs on not only Windows but Mac and Solaris and everything else, no more moat.

So the strategy with Internet Explorer was to make it the dominant browser on Windows (which was 90% of desktops), and then add all kinds of IE-specific features and get web developers to use them, so their web pages only worked in IE. Then the user gets a dependency on a web page with an Active X control that runs on Wintel but not Mac/PowerPC or Solaris/SPARC, so they have to use Windows. And they have to use IE, which enables _more_ web developers to target IE instead of open standards.

The problem wasn't that it was free. The problem was that it was free _and_ non-standard _and_ the non-standard bits were tied to Windows.

<comment><USER8> That's a pretty poor argument for govt intervention. Why? Because all of that Windows-only stuff existed, and the market ultimately rejected it. ActiveX controls? Yeah I remember those. Same with Java applets, Flash, Silverlight. The government didn't need to get involved in getting rid of any of these.

<comment><USER9> At the time, both Java and standards-compliant browsers posed major threats to Microsoft, and Microsoft did a pretty good job of messing up both. Only in distant hindsight do ActiveX and MSFT's hobbled 1.1 JVM seem inconsequential.

<comment><USER8> Neither Java nor "standards-based browsers" are things the govt has any role or authority to protect. The govt (via anti-trust law) breaks up established monopolies, and very rarely.

In fact, if Microsoft was indeed threatened by a programming language, or by a couple of nerdy academics (not even a company), that would greatly weaken the govt's case that they were a dominant monopoly.

<comment><USER9> Kind of a strawman argument by dint of hyper-narrow focus, isn't it? Sure, there are no laws granting the government authority or duty to nurture Java or browsers; however, what Microsoft did more generally was to squash potential competition by leveraging their _extremely_ entrenched OS monopoly.

Java is (or was) much more than a programming language. Rather it was viewed as something more like an operating system. Write once run everywhere, etc. By comparison I don't imagine Microsoft worried much about Pascal or Delphi.

Further, it seems... difficult to argue that a company that crushes nascent threats can't be a monopoly.

<comment><USER8> > hyper-narrow focus

Lol -- you chose to focus on those 2 specific items, not me.

> squash potential competition

Virtually every single feature of Microsoft desktop OS'es could potentially be provided by an alternative provider. Many were and still are -- disk defragmentation, disk compression, anti-virus, firewall, web server, ftp client, image editing, database drivers, etc etc. People used to pay money for 3rd party utilities to expand beyond DOS's 640kb RAM limit... should Windows be prevented from handling memory management in order to not suppress competition? Seems like the most basic function of an OS. Early on, you couldn't print a spreadsheet in landscape mode without a 3rd-party utility... should the government disallow Windows from enabling landscape printing? Does Putty have an anti-competitive claim now that ssh is included in recent versions of Windows 10? How about accessibility features... should disabled individuals be denied use of standard Windows releases because the inclusion of a screen reader, magnification, etc would be anti-competitive with commercial alternatives?

> crushes nascent threats

Microsoft "crushed" neither Java nor web standards, both of which are doing fine and outlasted Internet Explorer, the focus of the government's case. Most of the problems Java does have, starting with poor stewardship, are entirely Sun/Oracle's own making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The 2019 documentary "Inside Bill's Brain" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv29JKmHNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv29JKmHNY)) definitely focused a part on how Bill still hates talking about this deposition.

He makes it very clear in that documentary how much he regrets that he wore his disdain for the antitrust suit on his sleeve, as it played directly into the prosecutor's hands.

<comment><USER11> I was so disappointed with that documentary. 3 hours, with\ bill, and no real questions about the antitrust stuff, or about Microsoft stance on Linux and open source, His relationship with Apple and Steve jobs, His relationship with Paul Allen and Steve Balmer, the birth of X-Box, the war against Lotus123, and Word Perfect, the original deal with IBM, and the failed tablets, WinFS, Microsoft Bob, and loads of other things that would be interesting to get his take on.

<comment><USER12> That was really not the focus of the doc. As the title implies, they wanted to take a peek in the interesting ideas going on in his mind right now.

<comment><USER11> I was hoping we we would find more "Inside bill's brain", then just toilets.

<comment><USER13> Toilets are a fucking big problem.

Toilets are one of the reason why we left a past of disease and death from sewage contamination.

Yet open defecation is a problem in so much of the world.

So this is exactly what I wanted to see how he deals with. A hard problem that is so vital. How does his brain tackle that. Especially how it's unlikely a computer problem

But they did totally miss the mark on talking about it, it was what I wanted exactly to see and was disappointed it was so disappointing.

Maybe we couldn't tackle it. But I have seen other specials where he had made a unique start on the problem.

<comment><USER11> If I got to spend days interviewing Bill, I would love to here about his projects to build toilets, and eradicate decises, but I would find the time to ask other questions too.

My feeling was that the documentarian got to make the documentary on the condition of not asking the hard questions about Bills past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      Q: Okay. Let me ask you to look at Trial Exhibit 560. This is a message from you to Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Chase with a copy to Mr. Maritz and some other people also given copies dated August 15, 1997 at 4:07 p.m. on the subject of IBM and Netscape; correct?
      A: Uh-huh

      Q: BY MR. BOIES: And you type in here Importance: High."
      A: No.

      Q: No?
      A: No, I didn't type that.

      Q: Who typed in "High"?
      A: A computer.

      Q: A computer. Why did the computer type in "High"?
      A: It's an attribute of the e-mail.

      Q: And who set the attribute of the e-mail?
      A: Usually the sender sends that attribute.

      Q: Who is the sender here, Mr. Gates?
      A: In this case it appears I'm the sender.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/business/longterm/micr...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/business/longterm/microsoft/documents/gatespart8a.htm)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE&t=38m07s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE&t=38m07s)

<comment><USER15> Eh, I think I can understand where he's coming from. There's a difference between choosing "high" from a drop down and manually typing out "Importance: High". The former is kinda throwaway, while the latter is more serious. He's definitely super awkward about it though.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but he's clearly being evasive. He could simply have said: "I didn't type it; I marked it as high importance."

<comment> _-___________-_ Yep, he could have been less evasive, and then they'd have a recording of him saying "I marked it as high importance."

Being evasive like this is only a problem in depositions to the extent that it gives the media fuel to make the general public hate you. It's pretty much the optimal strategy in terms of the deposition itself.

<comment><USER14> Not if it makes the judge hate you, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The entire thing is on YouTube. Part one starts here: [https://youtu.be/m_2m1qdqieE](https://youtu.be/m_2m1qdqieE)

Worth a watch imo.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for linking. That was interesting.

I only watched the first little bit, but I could understand how this could play badly for PR, but i'm pretty sympathetic to gates here. Seems like they want to use layman simplified definitions of tech concepts, then catch him up on technical nitty gritty.

<comment><USER6> Clearly Gates sees where this is going: first ask him to agree to the definition, then reveal that the definition doesn't include 'viewing HTML' (or 'editing text files', or 'creating images' etc.).

Of course we all know that dictionary definitions are meant to introduce someone unfamiliar to the topic, and not to enumerate every possible function. Using that logic I could say that 'cars don't have air-conditioning' since the definition of an automobile is "A self-propelled passenger vehicle that usually has four wheels and an internal-combustion engine".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > [...] Microsoft was now comfortable supporting the Davids of the tech > industry.

This is a 29 year old company with a four-digit number of employees worth 17.3 Billion USD. Fortnite alone seems to have been a quite solid share of the App Store's gaming revenue. This is not a "David".

Sure, Apple, Google and Microsoft are worth one to two orders of magnitude more. But this is like seeing a small person fighting a bigger person from the perspective of an ant.

<comment><USER19> Wasn't David a king?

Goliath would have only been up to like double David's size anyways, so orders of magnitude sounds bigger than the David/Goliath difference.

<comment><USER20> I think at the point he defeated Goliath David was still just a shepherd. There may have been a prophecy he would become king but I don't think he had even been anointed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While there might or might not be questionable or illegal things that Bill Gates did, by himself or as the MS corporation at that time, the over-fixation of the article on how he is talking to the attorney in the deposition seems misguided and amateurish.

        Boies: What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996?
        Gates: I don't know what you mean "concerned."
        Boies: What is it about the word "concerned" that you don't understand?
        Gates: I'm not sure what you mean by it.
        Boies: Is—
        Gates: Is there a document where I use that term?
        Boies: Is the term "concerned" a term that you're familiar with in the English language?
        Gates: Yes.
        Boies: Does it have a meaning that you're familiar with?
        Gates: Yes.

Isn't this how you are supposed to talk to lawyers? They make it their business to routinely try to force you into their own prepared lines of questioning and try to use your own words against you and make you appear to say things that you didn't really mean. This is their job.

If you are on the other side of this, it is your job to prevent this use of language and make sure that they don't manage to implicate yourself in any way, by nonchalant use of words. Being vigilant about your use of specific words in specific contents, and about querying what exactly they are trying to say by each question seems like a good default approach to the problem of not giving your opponent attorney more ammunition than they should fairly have. I imagine Mr. Gates was used to mistreatment by lawyers and simply speaks their language at that point.

<comment><USER22> If you haven't been deposed this will look weird. But depositions are about "gotcha" moments, so your job as the person being deposed is to play the game and only answer questions with minimal information and force the attorney asking questions to really work for it. It's about being purely logical. If they ask you what two plus two is, respond vaguely and ask for clarification. "Are you asking about numbers? Or objects? What does plus mean in the context of this question." Etc.

<comment><USER23> To the public, it looks like another "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

The general public hates lawyers. But it hates weasels even more. And CEOs acting like weasels even more than that. That's why congressional hearings are sometimes delightful to watch. It feeds our hatred of CEO "others."

There are plenty of CEOs who can talk to lawyers, even in a public forum, and do it well. Splitting hairs never looks good. It makes you look guilty.

<comment><USER24> Gates wasn't splitting hairs there, though. "Concerned about" could mean "concerned about as potential competitors we need to pay attention to", "concerned about as potential competitors who might gain more market share than us", "concerned about as potential competitors we might need to stifle", "concerned about as a potential danger to our browser monopoly", "concerned about as potential competitors who might develop features users want which we should also look into developing", etc.

Any company offering a product could be said to have executives who are concerned about competing products. It could range from malicious, anti- competitive behavior to simply wanting to provide a good experience.

That's why Gates wanted the lawyer to use less charged, ambiguous language. I personally believe he was engaging in unethical anti-competitive behavior, but you're going to have to nail him on it fair and square, rather than playing word tricks with him.

>The general public hates lawyers. But it hates weasels even more. And CEOs acting like weasels even more than that.

The lawyer was the one employing weasel words, there, by definition [1]. "Paying attention to" or "aware of" would be a much more fair and clear phrase.

>Splitting hairs never looks good. It makes you look guilty.

Yes, and the lawyer was probably aware of that and deliberately exploiting the ability to create such a perception. Either you fall into the trap and later are pointed to as sounding guilty, or you demand rigor and sound guilty in the moment. It's a double bind.

[1] Oxford definition of "weasel words": "words or statements that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading."

<comment><USER23> You can act like a weasel and not employ weasel words. They're two different concepts. Nobody stated that Mr. Gates was using weasel words.

<comment><USER25> On the contrary, he's making sure that Boies isn't going to weasel meaning into his responses. Demanding that questions be more precisely-worded than they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is probably why Zuckerberg will never testify in a federal court. Like Gates, he has "never groveled for a job or sufffered many of the indignities most of us suffer on a regular basis."

</comment><comment><USER27> > No longer the Goliath it once was—in large part because of the ascendance of > companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple made possible by a settlement > Microsoft signed

Hahaha, haha, ha. I'll just stop you right there, Dan Goodin.

Microsoft is several times the goliath they were at their Windows monopoly / anti-trust days peak.

If you had to pick the company that will be the most profitable tech company five years from now, who would you pick? Apple? Facebook? Google? Amazon?

It's Microsoft. They'll be the most profitable company on earth five years from now.

Operating income the last four quarters:

Microsoft: $53 billion

Apple is at $67 billion and barely growing. Their operating income has increased by a mere 11-12% in the last four years. Microsoft's operating income increased by about 140% over that time.

Google? They're going to soon have half the operating income of Microsoft. In terms of profit centers they've entirely failed to branch out from search advertising; that dog has largely seen its day, their growth potential in search advertising is rapidly heading toward zero (and Google is soon going to lose all of China for Android; it's a 100% guarantee they will move off of Android as soon as possible, nothing will stop that outcome now). Google as a corporation is a zombie, it walks around headless, directionless, with the least talented management team among major tech companies. Larry and Sergey are entirely responsible for that mess.

Amazon has 1/3 the operating income of Microsoft and will never catch up; and AWS will eventually be spun off anyway. Facebook's growth rate is going to continue to trend downward. Facebook applied the brakes to their thin operating model several years ago, and has gone on a massive cost expansion since. Under the former thin model, Facebook had a distant shot at catching Microsoft in profit, now they don't.

The anti-trust agreement Microsoft signed is part of the reason for that massive boom in prosperity. In pushing for anti-trust action, Silicon Valley did Microsoft a huge favor. It forced Microsoft to be aggressive about looking for other ways to make money that weren't locked to their Windows monopoly position. If that hadn't happened, the odds were drastically higher than Microsoft would have rotted away over time, stuck permanently on Windows and following its erosion of prominence. In the future, Microsoft will make as much money just off of Azure Linux-based services as they do Windows in total.

Also, conveniently, Microsoft is the only tech giant not being pursued for anti-trust right now. They have a wide open field to expand into. Karma is a bitch, Silicon Valley; you helped create something in Redmond that is far more powerful than Microsoft circa 1998, and while it grows unencumbered, your tech giants are all going to be tied down by the government, with every move and acquisition closely scrutinized.

<comment><USER28> > The anti-trust agreement Microsoft signed is part of the reason for that > massive boom in prosperity.

This history doesn't sound right to me. Microsoft languished for a decade after that agreement, completely missing out on the mobile revolution in the process. Their resurgence seems to have mostly occurred in the past 5-6 years (since Nadella took over), so it seems kind of odd to credit an anti-trust agreement signed 15 years prior.

<comment><USER29> Balmer launched Office 365 and Azure, which are two of their biggest product lines today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And sometimes I wonder, if that PR problem from so long ago eventually gave birth to current conspiracy theories linked to Bill Gates.

Or maybe I've read too much Douglas Adams...

<comment><USER31> Zuckerberg and Gates think you can go from cutthroat business executive to kindly old sweater-wearing grandpa in twenty years. Average folk are smarter than the intelligentsia often give them credit for.

<comment><USER32> Do people not realize how long _20 years_ is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Bill Gates was the prototype for the amoral shitshow that is Mark Zuckerberg. Cory Doctorow has a great thread on Twitter today about this very topic: [https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1304811968398729218](https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1304811968398729218)

<comment><USER34> That twitter thread reeks of bias, I couldn't finish or take it seriously at all. If you want to convince me of something don't go around painting people as evil capitalist masterminds...

<comment><USER35> Do you have counter arguments to what was said in the thread or are you just projecting your own bias? It is pretty well known what kind of shitty things MS did to get where it is, if someone sprinkles insults on top of it on twitter does not make it less true.

<comment><USER17> "Shattered" the law is pretty questionable. MS (Feel like i should write M$ for /. nostalgia) had some underhanded bussiness tactics, no doubt (some of which probably werent even illegal, just scummy), but im not sure shattered the law is a reasonable description. That's something i would reserve more for organized crime. Microsoft never extorted people, planted listening devices, hired hitman, etc. The rabbit hole of crime goes down very far, microsoft did not stoop anywhere near that far.

<comment><USER36> The difference is that the mafia has never managed to extort and murder and then be told they did nothing wrong by law enforcement. The mafia also never attempted to make the law say they did nothing wrong (outside of small scale bribery or threats). "Shattered" is more appropriate here because Microsoft did (and does) try to get favorable legal treatment that extends outsides the bounds of what the law intended on a national level with far reaching implications of what others can also get away with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation, yet when innovation came in the form of Java, the first thing Gates did (as proven by evidence) was to seek a way to destroy it. (because he was a man-child annoyed because he didn't invent it, and couldn't find a way to compete honestly). So he did what big bully's do, he crushed Sun and got all his big boy friends to help.

What a inspiration.

<comment><USER38> Java was never a form of innovation.

<comment><USER17> Java was very innovative at the time, with byte code and JIT, a more clear OO design relative to C++, embeddable safetly sandboxed web apps, memory safety in a "professional" language, cross platform binaries (in a non scripting language) etc.

The mid 90's was a long time ago. What was exciting then is not exciting now.

<comment><USER38> Everything that you mentioned was already available at the time in other languages. This is not innovation.

<comment><USER17> But to what extent was it available in a polished package?

For example, everything in rust was available in other languages, i would still say it was innovative because it brought all that together into a polished package that made the right tradeoffs for mainstream usage.

<comment><USER38> > But to what extent was it available in a polished package?

To a large extent. Both Smalltalk and Erlang were mature at that point in time.

> everything in rust was available in other languages

I am not doubting you but are you aware of any other language with affine types? I am not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Watching the video is even more revealing. Future historians will be amazed as to how a border-line aspergers case got away with engineering a virtual monopoly on computing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE)

Groklaw has some interesting Microsoft Files:

[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009122612211929](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009122612211929)

<comment><USER40> I do not know if I would describe it as "border-line aspergers," but there were several obvious things that his prep team/PR should have addressed (e.g., hair, suit, posture, lack of explicit cues for listening to question vs. thinking about response).

I always find it infinitely surprising that these billion-dollar companies with all their prestige are constantly making simple but serious mistakes in every field of activity they are present in.

<comment><USER41> Who should they hire or what should they cultivate to do better?</comment></comment></comment>


This High Speed Camera Tracks Light Bouncing Off a Mirror at 100bn FPS - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/this-high-speed-camera-tracks-light-bouncing-off-a-mirr-1667133832 <comment><USER2> There's also a video of light changing mediums on the YT channel: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCukPHZgmrDonqpLzUQHr9QQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCukPHZgmrDonqpLzUQHr9QQ) (I think the video with the mirror is also better on YT.)

The motherboard article is better: [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the- fastest-camera-ever-cre...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fastest- camera-ever-created-will-be-used-to-study-invisibility- cloaks?utm_source=mbtwitter) although I still don't really understand how does this works. Apparently the sensor(s?) moves with the light??

</comment><comment><USER3> to be clear that is 100,000,000,000 frames per second</comment>


Ask HN: What's it like to work at Oracle? - <AUTHOR>

. <comment><USER2> I worked at their HQ in Redwood City briefly right out of college as an entry level programmer. The campus was very nice with a wonderful fitness center that I used regularly. They also had a pretty good offering of cafeterias. It was my impression that most of the employees were relaxed and never really stressed or over-worked. Pretty much everyone worked no more than 40 hours/week. So in terms of "work-life balance" or whatever it's called, I'd rate it pretty high.

Turning to the technical side, I quickly found myself feeling very under- challenged/inspired. The tasks I was assigned were mainly fixing bugs in a huge code base (granted this is probably expected and a decent way to get new hires up to speed on the project). They weren't very involved bugs and never took more than a day or two to correct. So I was constantly asking for more tasks to work on. Frankly, I got bored. I realized the environment wasn't for me. Having come from a very rigorous undergrad program, the difference was like night and day. So I found a startup to work for (something I always knew I wanted to do at some point) and tendered my resignation 10 weeks after starting.

However, I got the impression that each division/group/project at Oracle have fairly different cultures. Perhaps I would have had a different/better experience had I been on a different project. Though for what it's worth, a friend of mine who graduated a year later from the same school had the exact same experience at Oracle as I had.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting hearing about people from other groups. You're definitely right in that there are very different cultures depending on division. I was asigned relatively important tasks within a month or so of joining my team as I showed relatively high promise. Just a year after joining I'm essentially leading my own feature for the 12g release (a feature I proposed, no less).

My biggest surprise is that there is still really interesting (at least to me) work to be done in the 30 year old RDBMS kernel. There's always places to innovate and my manager has always been encouraging of thinking of new ways to do it.

But then again, I've never had the itch to work for a startup, so maybe I'm just suited for a rank-and-file job :)

<comment><USER4> data/transaction/space?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Developer career tracks end in management, for better or worse. Frequent telephone calls. Frequent meetings. Much of the conferencing software assumes a Windows desktop. Development occurs on hosted VMs so that works in progress aren't lost. Many of the development tools were built in-house, including the bug tracker and the source control system, the latter of which bears some resemblance to Rational ClearCase.

My time at the company was brief. Though I did meet a few people who clearly loved their work, the feeling I had was of a vast, top-heavy organization with a culture of micromanagement, and I was glad to leave. I don't know if any of the above is applicable outside of the division that I worked in.

</comment><comment><USER3> I enjoy my job. I work in a group in the RDBMS kernel. I'm very passionate about low systems-level C programming, so I think I'd be able to thrive in any environment that'd let me do it.

Development Environment: Everything is an "Eating our own dog food" type thing. Bug Database was built in-house and backed by an Oracle Database. Same story for the source control system (which, to my pleasant surprise, was a DVCS). Conferencing software and e-mail infrastructure is based on Oracle beehive

On the logistics side, quite a bit of bureacracy; Functional Specs, then design specs by certain deadlines. Significant changes need to get approval from maybe two levels of management. I only have about one meeting every two weeks, so that's a plus. The stress level is extremely low as releases are very very far apart, so unless we're dealing with a high priority customer bug, there's not much urgency to anything.

<comment><USER6> Any downsides to having your own in-house source control system? Got any horror stories of bugs in it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clearly, it's like not having access to HN...

Edit: oh, there they are :-)

<comment><USER8> This is telling in and of itself...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you work on the RDBMS kernel, your debugging and reverse engineering skills will certainly be put to the test. The deeper knowledge is somewhat silo'd, so in addition to comfort in system level C, you should be comfortable walking up to people's desks to get answers rather than expecting things to make sense over email. The RBDMS kernel is pretty deep so people spend time in specific areas. I can still regurgitate function names and acronyms and code paths for the areas I worked in. I spend some time there after college and learned quite a bit. The single biggest take away was that it removed any fear I ever had of looking at someone else's code. Lots of good people I still keep in touch with.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was working for a small to medium sized company that was acquired by Oracle about a year into my employment, and I stayed there for another few years. The internal culture of the office didn't change much, and neither did the direction of our development (as far as I could tell), so I don't know much about working on what you might think of as Oracle software.

But anything dealing with the Oracle at large started looking a lot more bureaucratic. We had to get rid of our toaster because it was a fire hazard. And I wasn't a big fan of their development tools, or internal website. It wasn't a big deal though.

<comment><USER10> I was the same (although got to see the acquisition from the inside which was pretty interesting), we were in Aus though which meant we had comparatively high degree of independence, ie all our dev platforms, code tools were hosted locally. So our team stayed pretty much the same, nerf guns, christmas trees, boardies in the office and all. Releases slowed but revenue went up which meant we could take time to really think through releases etc. Learnt heaps about the business of software as opposed to just engineering. So good and bad like most things.

Generally I think it depends on the group; as with any large group there's the excellent and below average, you just see more of it. Different to a startup/small company though where you can't really suffer poor performance for long.

As a engineer I went into dev management. Anything above IC5/6 (high level engineer) in Aus seems not really to happen, but more a function of less product dev as opposed to service delivery in Aus. This is generally true of Aus. Good product management and strategic releases, so was interesting experience. I found your M _/IC_ level matters dealing internally within the org, ie trying to make stuff happen with people you've never met before means you prioritise based on looking at ARIA, but what you'd expect in a large distributed org.

I've got friends still there, still fighting the good fight. As with all things it's really about what you make of it and want to do.</comment></comment>


The most important lesson I ever learned - <AUTHOR> http://alexshye.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/the-most-important-lesson-i-ever-learned/

<comment><USER2> It's true that nothing really stops you from just doing it, but in my opinion without anyone there to anticipate your accomplishment it's hard to motivate your self. Sure if you have natural talent, meaning you can naturally generate motivation without anyone's positive feedback. But without any positive external feedback your natural motivation will probably die out.

I can relate to the author in many ways, but I didn't take that lesson away from my time in school. In my view, I was born with a natural motivation to invent and analyze things, and my struggle was to find the right environment, with the right people and tools that could grow this motivation rather than killing it with indifference. It's all about meeting the right people who gives you that push.

The author said he didn't need any professor to get started, it's true, but he did need a friend to give him that push, that showed him that at least someone wanted to see him "do it".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting, and I agree that it is often all about surrounding yourself with good people.

I can already tell that the motivation/drive part is one of the larger challenges. My approach to it so far is to work on something I know I can passionate about for years. But who knows? It has only been a few months. When I've gotten further into this entrepreneurship thing, I'll probably write a post on how I've succeeded/or failed at that challenge.

<comment><USER2> I wish you the best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thought this was pretty well-written, but I didn't come away from it with the same lesson. It didn't seem like you needed any motivation to 'just do it', but that you confused what 'it' was. You thought what you were doing (bugging professors to get funding/advising) was 'it' (doing research). This seemed like the right thing to do since it's the norm (this hints somewhat of cargo culting), but you didn't realize that what you were trying to do, what others had done before you, was not truly a prerequisite to the next step. I'm not clever enough to come up with a slogan like "Just do it" nor am I certain of the pattern behind your realization (skip the prereqs? refocus your efforts? blaze your own trail?); that'll have to be an exercise for the reader.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there could be many lessons. I took as broad an interpretation as I could: if there is something you want to do, there is probably nothing stopping you from getting started and trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are no easy lessons to learn. The world is very complex. The search for easy lessons and universal formulas to success is silly. You have to learn that you don't now. Nobody knows.

<comment><AUTHOR> The world is complex, and chances are that any lesson worth learning isn't easy to learn.

This particular lesson is simple in theory, but can be very difficult in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Just do it" is a pretty shitty lesson.

<comment><USER6> Especially if you are a protestor looking for handouts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or if you have a burning desire to chop your own hand off.</comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb Allows Users to Share Parking Spots  - <AUTHOR> http://launch.is/blog/airbnb-allows-users-to-share-parking-spots.html

<comment><USER2> I live in NYC. My garage will revoke my spot license if I were to do this.</comment>


Show HN: Eve, a utility to search and replace with environment variables - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You're missing a link. [https://github.com/Aaronepower/eve](https://github.com/Aaronepower/eve) Fixed.</comment>


Google, but for colors - <AUTHOR> https://picular.co/ <comment><USER2> Very fun.

I put in some scientific proteins, and it spits out their common fluorescence staining colors:

ZO1 (stain tight-junctions, often blue): [https://picular.co/zo1](https://picular.co/zo1) (see [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1399&bi...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1399&bih=908&ei=0_WGW7mIOaff0gKI6KGgDw&q=zo1&oq=zo1&gs_l=img.3..0l10.812.1160.0.1322.214.171.124.0.0.0.70.18.104.22.168....0...1ac.1.64.img..0.3.194....0.IWkvy0stiWA))

hN1 (a protein usually stained red or green with GFP or mCherry): [https://picular.co/hn1](https://picular.co/hn1) (see [https://www.thermofisher.com/antibody/product/HN1-Antibody-P...](https://www.thermofisher.com/antibody/product/HN1-Antibody- Polyclonal/PA5-63771))

</comment><comment><USER3> In case anyone is wondering how this works, it does a google image search and then extracts the primary color of each result. That's why you see unexpected colors like grey for "heart": image search returns black and white hearts.

<comment><USER4> My first search for "apple" gives you a bunch of greys and a red is only the 8th result. There's more grey, beige, a blue, black, yellow, orange, but only one green and 5 reds total.

Searching "heart" at least gives you a red first and majority reds.

<comment><USER5> Try "apples instead", all red and a single lime green.

It's amusing having a background in software development and this is the first thought I had. (like many here I am sure would) I don't know exactly "why" this works, but knowing that it likely would before trying. (like hitting refresh when your web app barfs)

Someone else suggested cause of the apple logo... and it seems they are likely right. :)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&tbm=isch)

Shows the "holes" in this method.

<comment><USER6> Yep. Works pretty well for terms that return highly relevant images. Try "baby poop", for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can type nonsense words into this --- words for which Google will say no page in its entire corpus has a match --- and get color palettes back. What's it actually doing?

<comment><USER8> Looks like Google image search always has a fallback for a nonsense search query, and the images between Google and Picular exactly match (if you hover over the bottom-right of any color card, it shows the source image):

[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj)

[https://picular.co/sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj](https://picular.co/sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj)

If you put it in quotes, though, Google gives no results and Picular crashes (500 internal server error from an XHR):

[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q="sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q="sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj")

[https://picular.co/"sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj"](https://picular.co/"sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj")

<comment><USER9> Fixed! There's now a color palette for "sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj" ;)

<comment><USER10> What did you change?

My guess is you're still doing a Google Image search, but when it returns no results, you return something random and cache this query for consistency. Is that about right?.

<comment><USER9> Good guess! That's almost right, but there's no cache involved. Random colors based on a seed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is the site getting overloaded with traffic? Nothing returns any results.

Edit: Left a search running for 10 minutes and got some colors.

<comment><USER12> It appears to be flummoxed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is really cool, nice work!

I tried 'horse' ([https://picular.co/horse](https://picular.co/horse)) and I got some interesting results, some sky and grassy colours as well. Where do you get the photos from, and will searches give the same results every time or do they vary?

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it works. I looked for "fog in san francisco" and it gave me a bunch of shimmering gray boxes that all look the same.

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://picular.co/love](https://picular.co/love) returned a nice color palette

pretty neat to search for the planets as well (e.g. [https://picular.co/jupiter](https://picular.co/jupiter))

I also like that the favicon changes colors. Nice touch.

<comment><USER16> Looks similar to [https://picular.co/hate](https://picular.co/hate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Searching for quarks or gluons did not result in colorless combinations. This website clearly doesn't conform to QCD.

<comment><USER18> Neither quarks nor gluons (in general) are colorless.

One should object, however, that the site returns colors for 'hadron' and 'meson' :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting how "pride" returns the colors of the rainbow in order: [https://picular.co/pride](https://picular.co/pride)

It might be ordering the results by hue.

<comment><USER20> Also quite vivid: [https://picular.co/neon](https://picular.co/neon)

Not so vivid: [https://picular.co/noir](https://picular.co/noir)

<comment><USER21> Some nice colours as well: [https://picular.co/pastel](https://picular.co/pastel)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's funny because if you scroll through Google images fast enough, you will catch glimpse of monochromatic placeholder images for images that haven't loaded yet. The placeholder image seems to be the average color (maybe with some object boxing to reduce contributions from backgrounds and such) inside the image. This website is kind of the opposite in that it presents the placeholder color as if it were the content itself.

</comment><comment><USER23> Apparently the colors come from the images in Google Images search results.

In the bottom right of each color is a button that reveals the image where the color is sourced from.

</comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't work out of the box with tracking protection in browsers enabled. So I don't see any color and I guess I don't have to.

</comment><comment><USER25> Loved the idea and well implemented. Is it open source, like to add a feature to it. Could you also care to share about the underlying algorithm ?

<comment><USER26> Seems to be doing a google image search and take the average color. Meh.

EDIT: My "meh" is not bashing on the author or anything, at least they actually made a project, all I've done this past while is browse HN and make half-baked terminal apps. It was more of a let-down because I thought this was a very cool idea and was interested in a sophisticated implementation of it.

<comment><USER25> Ahh much simpler than I thought (fancy NLP and such :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know why but this reminded of Guess-The-Google[0] where you get a series of images and you have to guess the search word that generate them.

Sadly, I couldn't find any playable version of it.

[0]: [https://www.onlymelbourne.com.au/guess-the- google](https://www.onlymelbourne.com.au/guess-the-google)

</comment><comment><USER28> Could this be implemented by doing a google image search for whatever the user enters. Then show the average color of each image.

<comment><USER29> That's exactly how it's implemented. You can hover over the pictures' corners to show the original image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I just tried "love" and "hate" \- the first three results were very similar shades of red.

<comment><USER31> Love and hate are pretty similar, both are passionate emotions. We just need to remember that, and then it's easy to choose the right one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Neat! No greens returned in [https://picular.co/christmas](https://picular.co/christmas) but OTOH I just created palettes called Retro and Grunge for a recent project and they were quite similar to Picular's choices

<comment><USER33> Interesting. Same for "cash" or "money".

<comment><USER34> dollar does get green, perhaps it's just not US-centric?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I put in bisexual. It returned those colors, but also returned the colors for the pansexual pride flag. [https://picular.co/bisexual](https://picular.co/bisexual)

I wonder what kind of magic is going on under the hood.

</comment><comment><USER36> I searched blue and it returned some tan and green colors (but not bluish green or greenish blue).

I searched naked, expecting skin colors (I was wondering if it would tend to show "white" skin colors instead of a range of skin colors). The results were... strange.

<comment><USER37> if you search "skin" you get more or less anticipated results. I think it's using safesearch-filtered results, so "naked" isn't likely to return any actual naked bodies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you are really looking for colours and palettes with a theme you are much better off with the groupthink at sites like [https://www.colourlovers.com/](https://www.colourlovers.com/)

</comment><comment><USER39> That the icon changes color is a nice touch. I can see this being useful in generative art.

</comment><comment><USER40> Works.

[https://picular.co/oscarhealth](https://picular.co/oscarhealth) [https://picular.co/yeukhon](https://picular.co/yeukhon)

</comment><comment><USER41> I really like this! Searching for 'sea foam green' gave me exactly what I thought.

That being said, personally, I would prefer something original instead of "Google, but for colors.". just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER42> A very good example how engaging and useful a simple idea can be! Now the source images are also shown in the results!

I do not think it uses any AI/ML, the beauty is in the simplicity of the solution. Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER43> Not loading anything for me.

<comment><USER44> I was super slow for me. Wonder what is going on in the background?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Would be nice instead of just colours it gets a selection of palettes.

<comment><USER46> You can try the one of these sites for that:

[https://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/search?query=love](https://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/search?query=love)

[http://www.color-hex.com/color-palettes/?keyword=love](http://www.color- hex.com/color-palettes/?keyword=love)

There are some other sites that do similar searches as well, just can't remember them off the top of my head :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Doesn't work for me: the boxes never load. I searched for potato.

</comment><comment><USER48> [http://www.colr.org/](http://www.colr.org/) does something very similar.

</comment><comment><USER49> [https://picular.co/the+matrix](https://picular.co/the+matrix) gives the expected greens, but not as the first result sadly.

</comment><comment><USER50> Nice. I tried Formula 1 constructors, and all those that I tried matched their liveries. Force India returned some pinks, Ferrari returned some reds, and McLaren some orange.

</comment><comment><USER51> [https://picular.co/devastating+public+breakup](https://picular.co/devastating+public+breakup)

</comment><comment><USER52> No offense, but I expected more orange: [https://picular.co/trump](https://picular.co/trump)

</comment><comment><USER53> I love this! It's really fun, and will be really useful for when I'm making something and can't find a specific color.

</comment><comment><USER54> Brilliant and colorful idea! Really love this!

</comment><comment><USER55> It seems to me like when I type in company names, I don't get the exact colors they use in their branding...

</comment><comment><USER56> I put in "macbook" and it didn't return gray or black. Think the machine learning needs some tweaking

</comment><comment><USER57> I typed fall colors and got a bunch of shades of orange, tans, yellows and browns. One blue tile in there as well...

</comment><comment><USER58> It seems to return blue for pretty much anything ("cat", "man"), maybe because of blue sky?

</comment><comment><USER59> I tried searching for "picular.co", and to my disappointment it did not melt down the website.

</comment><comment><USER60> well, I just tried [https://picular.co/hackernews](https://picular.co/hackernews) which gives lots of orange, but doesn't seem to give me the color I get when I use a color picker on the top bar of FD6423

</comment><comment><USER61> Keeps showing Broken Website Gray now

</comment><comment><USER62> I want to take all the main colours in my house and get a word back! Someone work on it now.

<comment><USER44> MVP:

return "beardyw's house"

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Any idea on how they obtain the underlying images? It seems like a huge pre- trained database.

</comment><comment><USER64> Interesting to see #0432CA for "human", and #3CA4D4 for "person".

</comment><comment><USER65> Crashes half of the time, I guess it did not scale enough to handle Hacker News

</comment><comment><USER66> Looking for "orca" I was expecting black and white, but got only blue.

</comment><comment><USER20> I typed in "Trump News" and I got a bunch of Fake Colors, none of which were anything like the correct shade of orange. They're shadow banning orange colors and right wing red colors, only showing dark left wing blue shades!!! Why are they censoring all the warm positive Trump colors??? All colors matter!!!

</comment><comment><USER67> Is your backend doing a google search? Wont you get blocked...

</comment><comment> V-2 Nice Easter egg (I assume) for "chess" ;)

</comment><comment><USER68> It cannot do "lego"

But maybe it's just hug of death..

<comment><USER68> okay. "lego" looks like "google"

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I like how the first result for black is #040404.

</comment><comment><USER70> Cool! Reminds me of xkcd's color survey results: [https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/](https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/)

</comment><comment><USER71> Anyone typed in penis yet ?

</comment><comment><USER72> This is SUPER DUPER cool!

</comment><comment><USER73> I'm making sounds in my throat like I'm a cat.

</comment><comment><USER74> queries: ennui, glee, barack obama, donald trump, puppies, kittens, paris, kolkata, yosemite, death valley

the machine has lots to learn.</comment>


Best Buy's bizarro world Xoom ad « The Orange View - <AUTHOR> http://theorangeview.net/2011/02/best-buys-bizarro-world-xoom-ad/ <comment><USER3> The phrase "To activate Wifi functionality on this device, a minimum 1 month data subscription is required." IS footnote 7, mentioned on the left side in the WiFi icon.

<comment><USER4> Good point, but that requirement itself is already beyond bizarre.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the requirement is bizarre. It's bizarre if you're a consumer, but not if you're Verizon or Motorola. Verizon and Motorola would rather make more money than less money and so they want you to sign up for 3G service for a month ($30) and hope you just get accustomed to paying that $30 - <USER2> you'll pay the first month and forget to cancel it for the second month and then you'll just be used to having that $30 gone from your budget and enjoy the convenience of 3G coverage and end up continuing to pay $30/mo.

It's bad for consumers, but it makes a lot of sense if you're Motorola and Verizon trying to make more money off consumers. Plus, frankly, if you just want it for WiFi, it's really expensive. A WiFi iPad is only $500 making the XOOM 60% more expensive if you just want it for WiFi. Yes, the XOOM's specs might be better, but rumors are that an iPad 2 is right around the corner so that might not last too long.

I think that companies are looking to make more money off it and realize that if consumers are looking for a WiFi-only device, the iPad is already a much cheaper option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This ad will have no effect on this tablet's future. It is already doomed. $800 and carrier lock-in? I can't even imagine they'll be able to sell _one_.

I am dying to get a Honeycomb tablet. But not under these terms.

</comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't make sense that they'd require you to pay this price and buy data on top. Sounds to me like a typo, in which they meant to describe 3G functionality, but inserted Wi-Fi instead.

<comment><USER8> That's what you would think, but I recall reading on Engadget that they just won't sell them at all if you do not activate them on Verizon. Although they also think it may be a typo. [http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/06/verizon- locking-wifi-on-m...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/06/verizon-locking-wifi- on-motorola-xoom-until-you-buy-one-month-of/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While the table in the ad does not say which carrier for the 3G plan, the ad does contain a Verizon logo.</comment>


Ask HN: Can OpenCourseWare substitute an education from a top tier school? - <AUTHOR>

I've begun watching/taking some courses on iTunesU and realized you have all the materials there to actually feel like you are in the course.  You can take exams, complete all the assignments and check your answers.  Is there any reason why someone couldn't form a OpenCourseWare work load and get a well rounded education without paying 40k a year?  Obviously at the end you don't have anything material to show for it but you'll have the knowledge.  Note, I already have a BS in Computer Science but began watching some courses as a refresher and just to really see how different a top tier school was from my state school's education. <comment><USER3> At least WRT MIT's OpenCourseWare, no.

It's designed for educators, not students, so there are frequent gaps in the individual courses (in one I couldn't even figure out how it might be useful to an educator trying to use it for the basis of a class).

A number are crippled by copyright, or, rather, you'll need access to a research library to get copies of all the papers in the required reading list.

And there are gaps in which courses have been captured. E.g. first term inorganic chemistry is missing and OCW has no plans as of a year or so ago to address this.

There's also the not so minor detail of science laboratories. With a lot of work you could probably make do for physics but chemistry and biology would be right out; you'd probably need to find a college that would be willing to let you take just those labs, although at least in the case of chemistry they often aren't separate classes.

A lot of course require Matlab, which the last time I checked would require a non-student to pay around $1,800 for a copy.

All that said, a really disciplined autodidact can get a good education with the many resources on the web.

<comment><USER4> Just wondering what you think of the ongoing debate in the legal education world about distance learning and the like. The American Bar Association and 'the establishment' rejects it out of hand and considers the California State Bar's tolerance of it foolish; but the ever-soaring cost of law school and the fact that 3 or 4 graduates of a Kaplan-operated law school (Concord) were recently admitted to the Supreme court bar is setting up the conditions for a showdown.

Mind you, it ain't like doing it via distance learning is cheap either - <USER2> think Kaplan/Concord charge about $10k a year, and distance learning requires 4 years rather than 3. On the other hand, the nearest ABA school to me (UC Hastings in SF) runs about $35k a year in tuition fees. It's become a very remunerative field; apparently the average law school professor earns about 20% more than a supreme Court Justice.

<comment><USER3> I didn't even know of it before you mentioned it, so I guess my only thought is that it's another sign that higher education is a bubble.

I.e. "If something can't go on forever it won't", and higher education inflation is certainly an example of that. Here's the Instapundit (a law professor) on this: " _A recent Money magazine report notes: 'After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982.'_ " ([http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Ref...](http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Higher- education_s-bubble-is-about-to-burst-95639354.html)).

And as one article noted, _The next generation of home buyers has too much college debt_ : [http://bayarearealestatetrends.com/2010/06/the-next- generati...](http://bayarearealestatetrends.com/2010/06/the-next-generation- of-home-buyers-has-too-much-college-debt/?source=patrick.net)

College debt is of course non-dischargeable (can't escape it through bankruptcy), so when you combine all the above with the drastically reduced returns due to the Great Recession, including the ugly fact that history shows that people entering the work force during bad economic times have sharply reduced lifetime earnings....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The network effects of going to a good school are enormous. I don't mean just who you know, but also what they can teach you (mostly outside of class). At MIT, I've found that classes have mostly taught me specific course material, while the people around me have taught me how to live/learn. The latter effects have been extremely important in the way I approach my education.

See also, Lesson 6 of Gian-Carlo Rota's "Ten Lessons": <http://www.math.tamu.edu/~cyan/Rota/mitless.html>

_"You must measure up to a very high level of performance. I can imagine a propective student or parent asking, "Why should I (or my child) take calculus at MIT rather than at Oshkosh College? Isn't the material practically identical, no matter where it is taught, while the cost varies a great deal?"

One answer to this question would be following: One learns a lot more when taking calculus from someone who is doing research in mathematical analysis than from someone who has never published a word on the subject. But this is not the answer; some teachers who have never done any research are much better at conveying the ideas of calculus than the most brilliant mathematicians.

What matters most is the ambiance in which the course is taught; a gifted student will thrive in the company of other gifted students. An MIT undergraduate will be challenged by the level of proficiency that is expected of everyone at MIT, students and faculty. The expectation of high standards is unconsciously absorbed and adopted by the students, and they carry it with them for life."_

That said, one must weight these benefits against the cost of attendance.

</comment><comment><USER6> Top tier schools don't necessarily deliver better educations (though some do).

In general they simply provide better opportunities:

\- networking

\- brand recognition of institution

\- head hunters that look for talent pre-graduation

That said, I think you can get an excellent education with online and offline materials (don't discount the latter... a good book and some solid study hours every day will still get you pretty far). You'll just be at a disadvantage on the above points. It's possible to route around those limitations however.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a great resource, though that varies with the course as discussed below. As far as pure knowledge goes I think it's wonderful; from a purely economic point of view it may be frustrating to put in the effort in time only to be almost-certainly outcompeted by anyone who has been able to pay/finance the cost of attendance and has the actual degree - not just from MIT, but from any decent college. Many employers and investors simply don't have the time to adequately assess a person's actual skills when a proxy qualification is so much easier to sign off on.</comment>


Crytek haven't paid their employees in Bulgaria in 3 months - <AUTHOR> Crytek haven't paid their employees in Bulgaria in 3 months and all workers in that office are currently owed 3 full salaries. The company is not looking to pay these salaries any time soon and have spent the last few months lying about the availability of this money in order to keep as many employees as possible.
The Yerli brothers (Avni, Cevat and Faruk) are now looking at the second delay in the last 6 months (after finishing up a delay of 2 months just before the current one) and the third payment delay in the last two years.
The former director of the Sofia studio, Vesselin Handjiev, left several months ago and the studio is entirely at the mercy of Crytek Frankfurt's leadership, which has proved to be unsuccessful in stemming the current bleeding for 6 months.
Anyone who has an offer or is otherwise considering joining Crytek is advised to steer their ship elsewhere, as the current situation is rumored to apply to all studios within the company, even after the closure and selling off of several of the Crytek studios around the world. <comment><USER2> Takes courage to stand up to them publicly like this. Good on you and best of luck in resolving this shitty situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that's disgraceful, I hope they sort it out.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is when governments need to step in and just seize the property of those who ran the companies. If their employees don't deserve pay, then neither do the owners.

<comment><USER5> No actually it's not. It's when an orderly court-mandated bankruptcy proceeding begins, because if they owe employees you can be sure they owe others as well.

<comment><USER6> Salaries are unsecured so employees get paid last in bankruptcy. I think he is calling for them to be paid first.

<comment><USER7> In some parts of the world salaries go first, as they should. Don't know about Bulgaria though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> just sue their asses off!</comment>


Drag and drop attachments to save them to your desktop - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/drag-and-drop-attachments-to-save-them.html/

<comment><USER2> remove last / from link, proper link [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/drag-and-drop- attachme...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/drag-and-drop-attachments- to-save-them.html)</comment>


This Game Has Huge Potential. So Why Is Its Kickstarter Tanking? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/10/black-glove-kickstarter-republique/ <comment><USER2> Novel ideas don't make the big bucks on Kickstarter. Nostalgia does.

The biggest video game kickstarters are all, "Remember [CRPGs/Adventure Games/Space Sims/Megaman]? Eeeeeevil publishers killed them off, but now, we're bringing them back!"

</comment><comment><USER3> "Why is its kickstarter tanking?"

Easy answer: "Our plans have been to distribute the game through Steam"

No thanks.

Alternately: "speaking with the fine folks at Humble"

You mean another front for Steam?

<comment><USER4> If HB is a front for Steam, then there's a lot of side-deals going on: HB has its own distribution system and also ties into Desura. If that makes HB a front for Steam, then you might want to clarify what you mean by "front."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went expecting to say "well, if I'd be able to run it..."

Lo and behold, there's Linux support.

Pledged!

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, pulling strings to get free press on Wired (and Hacker News) will help.

I hate these manipulative articles.

<comment><USER7> hah ya. Should just title the article "You should donate to this kickstarter game". Looks cool, though.</comment></comment>


Hyrum's Law: An Observation on Software Engineering - happy-go-lucky https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> There is a solution to Hyrum's Law: Change undocumented details on every release. If you have hash tables, change the hash function. Change offsets and placement of struct members. You can't change everything somebody might accidentally or foolishly depend on, and yes, some users' code will break, but the sooner it breaks, the less disruptive the bug revealed is.

For many years, the maintainer of GNU libc refused to accept bug reports for behavior that wasn't documented, and gleefully broke undocumented behaviors that users had been so foolish as to rely on. As people were accustomed to this, it caused little actual difficulty, and gave enormous freedom to make improvements throughout the system, so the library continued to improve.

Some people responded by copying the code they depended on into their own programs. OpenSSL was one such project, and the code they copied in, and the code that depended on incidental details of it, was a very fertile source of gaping security holes.

</comment><comment><USER2> Raymond Chen's blog the Old New Thing is a wonderful source of stories of programs relying on undocumented, internal behavior and the Herculean efforts Microsoft undertook to keep them working with new versions of Windows. Here is an example:

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=41373](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=41373)

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe you can restate this as: With a sufficient number of users, all bugs will eventually become features. I spent many years maintaining an old system with spaghetti-like structure and thousands of users. When attempting to design fixes to known problems I would often dig up odd code that looked like it could not possibly be correct. When I pointed out the odd behaviors that resulted from the suspect code to managers or other programmers somewhat familiar with the system, they just about always advised to never change anything just because it looked bad, no matter how bad. The question, "Bug or feature?" is meaningless in such a situation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sadly, the author forced the text layout to 1000 columns wider than my phone, so I cannot learn what Hyram's law is without scrolling from left to right until my thumb bleeds...

Would anyone care to paraphrase it?

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law#cite_ref-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law#cite_ref-3)

</comment><comment><USER6> Relevant XKCD, of course: [https://xkcd.com/1172/](https://xkcd.com/1172/)</comment>