YC Fall 2015 College Tour - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-fall-2015-college-tour <comment><USER3> It would be really cool if YC came by UMD (University of Maryland). There is a start-up shell where a whole bunch of companies work out of, some of which has raised money and some not quite yet but it's a cool spot for start-ups nonetheless.

<comment><USER4> Alumni of UMD founded Google, Oculus, Under Armour and many other companies.

<comment><USER5> Squarespace also IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clicking through to one of them ([http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/4922?eventId=32998738&ca...](http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/4922?eventId=32998738&calMin=201509&cal=20150914&skinId=11049)) says:

"In July 2015, Y Combinator introduced YC Fellowship Program to make an investment of $12,000 into 1000 startups every year. The first batch of YC Fellowship includes 32 companies, which received an equity-free grant instead of an investment."

Does that mean there will be 968 more fellowships given over the next ten months?

<comment><USER7> I think that 1000 figure comes from a statement they made along the lines of "one day we could be funding 1000 companies through this Fellowship program". I don't think they had a figure in mind for this batch.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking it might be through scaling up the next batch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for catching. I asked UIUC to make an edit on that. The first batch of YCF is starting up this week -- and we're not making decisions about the future of the program till we see how this pilot goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome, wish I was back in college!

Note to YC: Why don't you set up an official YC Startup University? You're effectively doing it now with all the talks, tours, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> Excited for Startup@Brown!

[http://startupatbrown.org](http://startupatbrown.org)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to see this at Georgia Tech in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're planning to visit Georgia Tech this winter.

<comment><USER11> Any plans to visit NY? RIT or RPI would be good candidates.

<comment><USER12> Or Cornell!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any chance that you'll be coming to San Jose State University? We're not so far away from you.

<comment><USER14> I'll come, who can we coordinate with?

<comment><USER13> Honestly I'm not too sure. There is an Entrepreneurial club, but I wouldn't say any particular organization is out there for this kind of thing. Do you have an email I can reach you at? Maybe I can connect you with someone from the Computer Science club at the very least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A bit disappointed that YC isn't visiting Penn seeing as 3 of the startups from the most recent summer batch were by Penn students.

<comment><USER16> Also agree that YC should consider a trip to Philly / Penn. There are a lot of students in the area that would flock to any talks or office hours

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about a stop in Ottawa, Canada? Two big universities (Carleton and Ottawa U), and a pretty big tech community here.

<comment><USER18> Waterloo is well within train commute distance of Ottawa -- consider applying to Hack the North next year!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Would love for you guys to come to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. We're only a 3 hour drive away and we have a huge entrepreneurship mindset on campus - <USER2> have an on campus incubator as well as a whole Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, plus a pretty good CS program :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Can YC set anything up at UCLA? We're really starting to have a very vibrant start-up community. Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) is actually paying us a visit and is sitting down with students and alumni in a couple of weeks!

I'd be more than willing to help out or volunteer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shoot me a note at kat at ycombinator. We'll be visiting more schools later this fall and this winter. We went to UCLA last year with Alexis Ohanian's bus tour and we'd be happy to visit again.

<comment><USER20> Sent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hi! As a student I am really happy you'll be touring universities to inspire hackers about making great things :)

Unfortunately I'm too far away from any of them to personally enjoy this opportunity.

Do you plan any visit to European Universities in the near future?

</comment><comment><USER22> I would really love YC to come to Utah. We're building a dorm specifically made as a 24/7 living / co-working space providing all the resources for students to start businesses.

</comment><comment><USER23> It seems like the west coast isn't getting much love. I understand staying out of the Bay Area, but UW, UCSD etc. seem like they would be good places to visit.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why not make a stop at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology? It's not far from Urbana-Champaign if the Y Combinator folks have a presenter to send.

</comment><comment><USER25> Would y'all consider coming to George Mason University? We're actively trying to build a entrepreneurial start-up culture here.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone else heading to the Ann Arbor event?

</comment><comment><USER27> Hey katm, are you still planning to do Startup School this fall too? Or does this replace that?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are not doing Startup School this fall. This doesn't replace Startup School - but we decided to focus on things like this, YCF, and open office hours this fall. Startup School will be back next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Any plans for Cal Poly?

</comment><comment><USER29> Are you planning something like a college world tour soon?

</comment><comment><USER30> huge startup community at Indiana University:Bloomington that would love this opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER31> No stanford?

</comment><comment><USER32> No MIT?

<comment><AUTHOR> We visited MIT this past spring and plan to visit again soon -- just not this fall. We are doing office hours in Boston, which you're welcome to sign up for: [https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/y-combinator- offic...](https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/y-combinator-office-hours- in-boston-928929/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Too bad I'm located in Germany.

</comment><comment><USER31> No Stanford?

</comment><comment><USER34> And Western Canada gets shafted again, nice.</comment>


Kind of Screwed (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/ <comment><USER2> Fair Use is not a right; it's an affirmative defense ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense)) that needs to be used in court.

Here's a recent (long) video on fair use that I enjoyed, and might be interesting for some of you here who are interested in this sort of thing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyucXC6pWug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyucXC6pWug)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not that I agree with lawyers suing over this, but one problem is that the pixel-art nature of the Miles Davis cover is very subtle rather than obvious chunky pixels as is typically done. At one level I applaud that as historically accurate; graphics even in the 1980s weren't as awful as a lot of pixelart implies, but on the other hand I can understand the argument that the pixel art and the original were too close.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be interesting to hear why he paid royalties to get a license for the songs but not for the cover art.

Hiring artists to create retro versions of the music and hiring an artist to create a retro version of the album cover seem like pretty analogous situations.

<comment><USER5> Can't speak for him myself, but there are clear and well-established rules and the songwriting industry has a well-defined and straightforward process for paying royalties for publishing cover versions of songs. And there's no question either legally or ethically whether publishing a cover version of a song without paying a license fee is fair use of the songwriting IP.

There's no similar existing framework or precedent for photographs, and the rights involved are much less clear. There's plenty of evidence of other similarly transformative artwork based on photographs (described in the article) is considered fair use in the artistic community. I find most convincing the fact that the photograph is primarily documentation of a factual situation (Miles Davis playing trumpet), something which many other people saw, and which in and of itself is not copyrightable. Whereas the songwriting involved in creating the music for the album is entirely creative and not documentary in the slightest.

I think there are plenty of other good arguments about why his use of the photograph was Fair Use in the article.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that insight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI: [https://observer.com/2011/06/andy-baio-jay-maisel-kind-of- bl...](https://observer.com/2011/06/andy-baio-jay-maisel-kind-of-bloop- lawsuit-sue-2011-06-24/)

</comment><comment><USER7> > "It breaks my heart that a project I did for fun, on the side, and out of > pure love and dedication to the source material ended up costing me so much > — emotionally and financially."

It seems like he just overlooked the cover art piece. That sucks how much damage to a project an unmalicious seemingly small mistake can make on the legal side. In that regard, it's valuable to have access to lawyers and legal resources just to avoid all the BS that comes along with lawsuits and legalese. It's not just a matter of being intelligent or capable, but also able to jump through all the hoops the right way in the legal system, which puts most non-lawyers at a disadvantage.

> "Anyone can file a lawsuit and the costs of defending yourself against a > claim are high, regardless of how strong your case is. Combined with vague > standards, the result is a chilling effect for every independent artist > hoping to build upon or reference copyrighted works."

As can be popularly seen vis-a-vis DCMA takedown requests, the trivial-ness of of sending a C&D or demand letter out to virtually anyone makes this process a money-making machine for law firms. It's a win-win for them. You settle and they make a profit, or you draw out a legal battle at a higher cost and they make a bigger profit. Honestly, it's a tarnish on our legal system that it so often rewards those with bigger wallets.

Not all lawyers are bad, and there are times where the 'little guy' may be thankful IP law exists, but it's when someone like this gets screwed that the legal system seems unfair. It's one thing to speak softly and carry a big stick, and another to pick a fight for lunch money.

</comment><comment><USER6> If he'd created an anonymous persona for his pixel artwork, Maisel would have been left pounding sand. So if there's no reason to link stuff to your meatspace identity, why risk it?

<comment><USER8> This. But in a softcore version of the same way that you shouldn't be using your real name while advocating for gay rights in Saudi Arabia: it's a solution eliding a larger problem.

<comment><USER6> Back in the day, when I was discovering Usenet, it was common advice. But of course, tools for ~anonymity were primitive then. No Tor. No VPNs. Remailers were about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sucks that this happened and I'm glad he found a tolerable payout and resolved the issue with the owner of the photograph.

All that said, this chiptune record is a beautiful homage to the source material. I highly recommend anyone that's interested to find it and give it a listen.

</comment><comment><USER10> So where is the list of people who give money to Jay Maisel so I can opt not to do business with them anymore? Do you really change anyone's opinion on most issues other than giving a hint which behaviors are unprofitable because they piss people off?

How about a ublock origin filter that auto removes anything created by the artist? Obviously no content filter belongs in default but it could be offered.

<comment><USER11> That's a waste of time. It won't affect the artist in the slightest.

<comment><USER12> And the artist is so old he's unlikely to live much longer, he's probably years past the point where he cares. He probably doesn't even know how to use / care about the Internet.</comment></comment></comment>


CEOs vouch for Waiter Rule: Watch how people treat staff - <AUTHOR> http://www.protocoladvisors.com/wp/news/articles/ceos-vouch-for-waiter-rule-watch-how-people-treat-staff

<comment><USER2> The waiter rule works - if someone is rude to a waiter, it's an incredibly bad sign, because at the very least, it means they've never heard of the waiter rule.

However, just because someone is _nice_ to a waiter doesn't mean they have good social skills or don't treat inferiors badly. It turns out there's an even better variant of the waiter rule: listen to _all_ a person's interactions with other people. Listen, for example, to how that person talks about other people behind their back. As the aphorism says, what people will say to you about other people, they would say to other people about you.

In my real-life example of this lesson, there was a person who always gloated about how they had screwed or were about to screw other competitors, negotiators, etc, but of course always made sure to point out how much he was helping me. I foolishly believed it, when of course all the evidence was that I shouldn't. Eventually, the situation changed, he didn't need me anymore, and sure enough, he took advantage of me too.

Knowing how people treat others is _supremely_ important as a defense mechanism.

<comment><USER3> A corollary to this, always speak in private as you would in public. Never say anything about someone else you would not say to them directly (even if you're talking to your spouse about work issues whatever). Sometimes you think you need to, but looking back it's always better to keep your own voice strong and true. It's like playing a violin. The more wrong notes you hit when you practice in private, the more wrong notes you hit when you perform in public. Eventually the bad notes resonate so much they start affecting the voice of the instrument and it starts to develop poor tone in and of itself. The wood particles start to re-align themselves. That's what separates the great instruments from the cheap instruments. Sure the great instruments were made well to start, but they were also played well throughout their lives. Always speak in private as you would in public.

<comment><USER4> This rule applies online too. Try not to make statements online that you're not comfortable seeing on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, or indeed in 20 years.

Nothing online is private. Nothing.

<comment><USER3> As we share more we're learning to value our privacy more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The purple sorbet in cut glass he was serving tumbled onto the expensive white gown of an obviously rich and important woman... Thirty years have passed, but Odland can't get the stain out of his mind, nor the woman's kind reaction. She was startled, regained composure and, in a reassuring voice, told the teenage Odland, "It's OK. It wasn't your fault."_

That woman had admirable self-control. It's difficult to retain your composure when you're inconvenienced by the incompetence of your social inferiors, but it's usually worthwhile.

The trick, I find as I get older, is to make the move from asserting status to _assuming_ it. Instead of the mindset "I'm so fucking awesome, why won't these goddamn idiots stop inconveniencing me", you move to the mindset "I'm so fucking awesome, which means I have a responsibility to set a good example for these people". As soon as you start seeing your role at the top of the pyramid as being all about setting a good example for those below you, rather than being served by those below you, dealing with them gets a whole lot easier.

(Then again, maybe that's just me, and I've just over-shared enough to mark myself out as a supremely arrogant prat.)

Another story I like of noblesse oblige is about casino magnate Steve Wynn, who shortly after purchasing a $139 million Picasso accidentally ripped a hole in it at a cocktail party. "Oh shit", he said, "Thank goodness it was me". If anyone else had ripped Steve Wynn's $139 million Picasso it would have ruined their life, but if Steve Wynn accidentally rips Steve Wynn's Picasso then the painting is just as ripped _but_ nobody's life is ruined.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, but I really do hate your attitude. It takes a very big person to never think of yourself as better than anyone else (I'm definitely not that person), but a few points:

\- Why does the fact that it is people who are less important than you screwing up annoy you more than anyone else? I get just as pissed when I'm screwed around by a CEO as when I get screwed around by a taxi driver.

\- Some people find it difficult not to get angry at stuff, I don't know if that's just because they've learned to be that way or if it's unavoidable. But for lots of us it's possible to, for example, have a drink spilt on you and think "fuck that's annoying" without getting mad at, or even blaming, the person whose fault it was. Even if for some reason it does make you angry, you shouldn't need any motive for hiding that anger rather than being a jerk about it, assuming they didn't do it on purpose (again, no-one's perfect, few people manage to never act like a jerk, and, again, I'm not trying to preach, I'm a long way from perfect when it comes to being a dick to others.)

\- The fact that people have done less well in life (and/or were less lucky) means you can think "I've done better than them", you can't think "I am better than them". They're not "inferiors", and you're not at the "top of the pyramid", at least not in society, just (I assume) in your wealth. Being rich doesn't mean you're good for or important to society.

And for all your comments about having come across badly in your comments, that really hits at the heart of the problem so many people have with this rule. The last time the "waiter rule" came up on HN it was talked about in comments as a "yes, you should always be nice to waiters or you will appear like a jerk". No, that's missing the point; you should be nice to waiters because otherwise you _are_ a jerk. And the fact that normally these views are kept in your head rather than spoken outloud doesn't change the fact that they are your views, your problem isn't that you told us, your problem is that you have them.

I know I've been pretty negative to you, but I do feel like you were asking for it.

<comment><USER7> "I've done better than them" vs. "I am better than them" is such an important distinction, it really is those subtle differences in attitude that make all the difference in how we view the world and what we get out of the world.

Somewhat off-topic example: my mom told me later in life that, when I was younger and I did something stupid and my parents scolded me they always phrased it as "that was a stupid thing to do" instead of "you are stupid for doing that thing."

It's a minor difference in phrasing and attitude, but it's a major difference in impact. The former makes you feel bad, you understand that you screwed up, and you don't want to do it again. With the latter, you either A) accept subtly that you're stupid, which has all kinds of negative consequences, or B) you reject the notion that you're stupid, so you don't feel the need to change the behavior and your anger can then be directed at your parents for calling you stupid.

<comment><USER8> Exactly!

I was reading this book " How We Decide" (must read by the way) and one of the examples was this distinction between two groups of students who scored well in an easy test.

One group was told, "Wow you must be smart" and the other "Wow, you must have worked really hard at this". The first group showed deteriorating performance with increasing level of difficulty of test and gradually accepting maybe they were not as smart as they were told.

While the other group kept trying even in higher test and score far better. Of course both the groups were divided equally in terms of intelligence and attitude.

Very important perspective for every walk of life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it just fascinating that _anyone_ (CEO or whatever) would ever be rude to a person that is handling their food.

Oh well.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, every time I see someone being rude to a waiter, my first thought isn't about the waiter rule, it's whether this person didn't watch fight club.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was a bit surprised to see an entire article devoted to this, as it's a very common in the theatrical world. Because of the short turn around time, directors are constantly having to work with new people. As well as calling people they know on the resumes, they will often ask the people collecting headshots and herding cattle outside the audition room if anything notable occurred. It can make or break an actors chances.

This is easy to apply to business. If you have a secretary greeting interview candidates, just get a quick opinion. Nobody wants to work with an asshole, and everyone remembers them.

<comment><USER12> If this is the case how come so many assholes got through the screening process? The arrogance of very successful actors is legendary (though very successful singers may surpass it).

<comment><USER13> They pretended to be nicer people before they were very successful.

That's why the waiter rule is so weak -- it has a lot of false negatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And yet, somehow, we continue to see psychopaths promoted up the corporate ladder while decent folks - who pass the 'waiter test' with flying colors and are otherwise qualified for the positions - are passed over.

<comment><USER15> And _they_ keep promoting them! I can't stand _them_ or anything they stand for. _We_ should do something about this, like we would have in the good old days!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm always amazed at how nice people are when they want something from you. If you want to see their true colors, you have to watch how they treat people they don't want something from.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting, a friend of mine used to own a chain of restaurants in Chicago, recently he went out to dinner at a nice restaurant with family, he said that his sister-in-law's boyfriend had some habits that indicated a similar to the personality that's described here, but that aren't as obviously obnoxious. For example if a waiter didn't introduce themselves by name he'd ask theirs, apparently waiters hate stuff like this because it's such an unequal relationship.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's kinda sad that we need the waiter rule...is it too much to ask for people to treat others nicely?

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately, yes. Some people don't see the point of treating others nicely, _especially_ when there are no consequences to mistreating others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bill Swanson may not have invented the Waiter Rule:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Swanson#Swanson.27s_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Swanson#Swanson.27s_Unwritten_Rules_of_Management_and_plagiarism)

</comment><comment><USER21> I like the idea of the Waiter Rule ; but here in France it would be quite difficult for a client to be more rude than the waiter. :)

2 anecdotes: An American friend of mine wants to become a waitress when she's back to US, just to give people the experience she didn't have here in France. Last time I was shocked to find such a soft-speaking waiter, and I though for a few seconds he was just joking.

</comment><comment><USER22> Down here. Cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l0Yrdc_...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l0Yrdc_X8lMJ:www.protocoladvisors.com/wp/news/articles/ceos- vouch-for-waiter-rule-watch-how-people-treat-staff+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

</comment><comment><USER23> I could see this. During my senior year in high school I worked as a waiter at a four-star restaurant on Park Ave in Manhattan. The clientele included a lot of business execs working nearby and they often met for meetings. Some of the regulars were casual, friendly, and very cool, but then there were always a few who had a snobby and obnoxious air about them.

I like this as a psychological indicator, not just because of the employer- employee dynamic, but because I think it shows how one perceives their own self-worth, as well as that of others. If you're elitist and too self-absorbed in your own status, you're probably not well-suited for a lean merit-based culture and you're probably also going to be blind to spotting hidden talent in others as well.

<comment><USER24> Four star restaurant? The only internationally recognized star system for restaurants is the Michelin guide, which has a maximum of 3 stars. It really grates me that Americans go on about 4 star and 5 star restaurants

<comment><USER10> There's also an difference between the michelin system, where most restaurants get 0 stars and getting even one star is a biggish deal, and rating all restaurants from one to five, which is what the system used in the us seems to do.

Like the rating system on the web, it's useful for rating all things, not just the highest ranks.

The Michelin guide is also not particularly useful as a global system because it's heavily weighted towards french cuisine -- [http://www.urbanspoon.com/blog/14/Fixing-Michelins-French- bi...](http://www.urbanspoon.com/blog/14/Fixing-Michelins-French-bias.html) \-- and only serves major tourist destinations outside of europe -- six cities in the US for example.

The Michelin green guide, which is more the equivalent of other rating systems, does use a 1-5 scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That is why when you are interviewing at a company, you treat everybody you meet politely and cordially - even the cranky secretary. :)

<comment><USER26> I always ask the receptionist about how the candidate acted. You don't have to be all warm and fuzzy (heaven knows I'm not!), but you do have to be courteous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a simpler version: "Would you be OK with someone talking like that to you?"

If the answer is no, then you know what to do. If the answer is Yes, then the other person probably did cross the line or whatever. If the answer is Yes, but ________"Insert any statement of the contrary nature or how infallible you are here"____________, then you are a jerk.

It is not just about waiters, but any human being be it higher in whatever illusionary status system you believe in or lower than you.

Treat others how you would want to be treated.

</comment><comment><USER27> Rather ironic that it's the CEO of a weapon manufacturing company that's moralizing about how to treat others.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps not as ironic as you think:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/business/03cnd- raytheon.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/business/03cnd- raytheon.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd worry about someone who mistreats waiters for the simple reason that it is a sign that person is a complete idiot. Unless all that's left is for the waiter to bring the check, you are pissing off someone who is going to be handling your food. Mistreating the waiter is just asking for the next dish to be seasoned with spit or worse.

<comment><USER12> Depends on the country. There are still places where being a waiter can be a career but if you get caught doing something insane like that (I personally think spitting in someone's food should be a crime on the level of assault at least) your career is over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Working link:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l0Yrdc_...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l0Yrdc_X8lMJ:www.protocoladvisors.com/wp/news/articles/ceos- vouch-for-waiter-rule-watch-how-people-treat- staff+site:+www.protocoladvisors.com/wp/news/articles/ceos-vouch-for-waiter- rule-watch-how-people-treat- staff&hl=en&lr=lang_de%7Clang_en&client=safari&tbs=lr:lang_1de%7Clang_1en&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER31> I've skimmed the comments and haven't noticed these two thoughts, so will add them:

1) Opening line of the article: _Office Depot CEO Steve Odland remembers like it was yesterday working in an upscale French restaurant in Denver._ Waiters won't necessarily remain waiters. We are all human beings, regardless of our current role at the moment. There are also cases where someone may be more important than they appear to be -- for example, managers run cash registers during busy times at my local grocery store. I have long liked collecting true life anecdotes about such things: Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin look alike contest and came in third; a bank turned down some long-haired, jeans-wearing young person for an account and then they were given the account when one of the younger employees recognized them as a wealthy rock star; someone in a bank was an utter ass to a guy in overalls covered in paint who threatened to move his accounts. She said something like "feel free". He was the owner of a construction company worth millions and did, in fact, move his accounts.

Treating people badly who appear to be your "social inferiors" at the moment is simply stupid. That person may not really be the "social inferior" they appear to be. And even if they are at this moment, they may not remain so. If you are an ass to them, they will remember it when the table has turned. It is shocking how often you run into people later, sometimes many years later.

2) Even if they truly are your social inferiors and will always remain so, it is still stupid to mistreat them. That waiter carries your food from the kitchen to your table. Do you really want to give him reason to do something to your food? If you think he won't, then you think he's a nicer guy than you are. Don't be so sure. People with power may be assholes to your face. People without power are very likely to reciprocate but in a way that covers their ass, so it is more likely to be done behind your back.

So aside from my hippie-tree-hugger, give-the-world-a-hug, we-are-all-first- and-foremost-souls-on-a-spiritual-journey idealism for trying to be decent to people I meet, I think folks who mistreat others in this manner are simply stupid. Last, I will note that my observation has been that folks who try to lord it over others in this manner are also usually insecure and hiding behind their degrees, titles, big paycheck etc. I'm not impressed by such behavior, at least not favorably so.

</comment><comment><USER32> I didn't know that this was a management rule! I loved this article.</comment>


Deploying a Rails 3.1 app in production  - <AUTHOR> https://moocode.com/posts/1-deploying-a-rails-3-1-application-to-production <comment><USER2> I found this really helpful. I'm a little surprised at the inconsistency of the asset pipeline deployment though. I guess we're all supposed to use erb templates if we intend to use it and include images in our stylesheets?

It strikes me as really strange that they would allow certain functionality which you would get used to in development (images in stylesheets that are automatically matched to assets), then have that completely break when you precompile for production.

</comment><comment><USER3> Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you avoid compiling in production if you package everything as part of your CI build? Rather than deploy off of a git clone, you compile at the end of CI, vendorize your gems, generate a tarball, and push that up.

This minimizes production dependencies (including the need to compile gems live) as long as your CI environment sufficiently resembles prod.

<comment><USER4> That could be one solution, however there are some problems that spring to mind like deploying to different architectures (common if you're using EC2) - I guess this fits your point about your CI env resembling prod.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't post this in the Facebook comments on the post, but you can fix the Rake 0.9.0 error by putting the following right before load_tasks in your Rakefile:

        module ::MyAppName
          class Application
            include Rake::DSL
          end
        end

        module ::RakeFileUtils
          extend Rake::FileUtilsExt
        end

There's a fix on the way, too.

Also, I believe if you're using SASS/SCSS you can interpolate the asset like so, without having to use erb:

        background: #00ff00 url(#{asset_path 'rails.png'}) no-repeat fixed center;

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the info, I'll update the post shortly. Out of interest, what was wrong with the FB comments? I only started using it yesterday because disqus doesn't have a HTTPS option (that I could find anyway).

<comment><USER5> Oh, it seems to trip out on double colons. If I wasn't being lazy I would have just posted a gist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be fantastic if someone would release a capistrano/rails plugin that lets you specify when to build the assets and where to send them, for those of us who have static assets on different servers from production Rails apps.

<comment><USER7> Why can't someone = you?</comment></comment>


Bash Scripting: Why didn't I start this earlier? - <AUTHOR> http://burakkanber.com/blog/bash-scripting-why-didnt-i-start-this-earlier/

<comment><USER2> I use Python for my scripting needs. It is a little bit more cumbersome to call unix tools from a Python script, but handling strings and arguments and things like that is so much easier. I feel like bash is really weird for anything longer than a for loop.

Can someone please provide some arguments why I should write bash scripts instead of Python scripts?

<comment><USER3> Personally I use bash when I need to, well, script shell commands. Anything that is reasonably described as series of shell commands, filter/pipes.

There are a lot of best-practices that one need to adapt though, and there's definitively a learning-curve. Generally scripts should work under things like dash, and not be bash-specific. That means delegating some work to sed/grep/awk (or being really "clever").

I've found that using functions, and passing arguments rather than setting (global) variables help a lot -- and if you get to the point that you _really_ want do debug, you're better off rewriting in something like python.

I've never liked perl -- it's always seemed like a bit of a pointless exercise in moving side-ways rather than "up". I've never had to move away from shell scripts out of performance needs, only out of maintenance needs -- and for _me_ perl buys me nothing in that direction.

Now, things like fabric[f] can make sense -- but the benefit of (ba)sh is that it's guaranteed to be there (on a _nix platform) -- and it is great for bootstrapping.

I'm _not* a fan of how some projects use (ba)sh, though. The ones that list instructions like these (and there have been a few lately):

      curl http(s)://great-tool.com/install | sudo bash

They often a) don't use https and b) require sudo/root blindly (rather than at least wrapping what needs sudo in something like:

          prompt -p "Need superuser permission for apt-yum-install libfoo [y/n]: " ans
          if [ "${ans}" == "y" ]; then
              sudo apt-yum-install libfoo
          else
             echo "Aborted."
             exit 1
          fi

Which generally works rather painlessly -- and could be further "automated" by allowing a --yes-go-ahead, or checking if the script is running as root.

[f]: [http://fabfile.org](http://fabfile.org)

<comment><USER4> If you are worried about dash compatibility I hihly recommend checkbashisms:

[http://packages.debian.org/sid/devscripts](http://packages.debian.org/sid/devscripts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a dual wielding hat person (sysadmin and programmer), stay away from bash programming.

Use a modern scripting language like Python or Ruby otherwise you are entering a world of pain.

[http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls)

<comment><USER6> Dependencies are another huge issue if you want to be cross-platform. A Ruby script (for example) relies on the Ruby interpreter, which works the same cross-platform. If it has other dependencies, there's an established way to declare and install them.

In contrast, a bash program calls out to lots of little programs: sed, awk, grep, etc. Different platforms have different implementations which take different flags, etc.

My friend and I just spent a couple of days getting some bash scripts that ran fine under Cygwin to also run on OSX. It was painful.

<comment><USER7> Ruby system scripts assuredly do not work the same cross-platform, particularly if they have to call to C libraries. Expect to have to rejigger them just as you would bash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> welcome to 2003

<comment><USER9> Author makes that point in the very first paragraph.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the title, even!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bash > All other languages. Bash is glue.

<comment><USER11> you thinking of perl</comment></comment>


Virtualizing MySQL , are you stupid ? - <AUTHOR> http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/node/757

<comment><USER2> the only reason to virtualize MySQL that I can think of is if you have 2 servers with way more ram than you need. Say that, like me, you buy servers based on the dollar-per-ram metric. Right now, this means your servers have 32GB ram each. (I use two quad-core opterons in each 32GB ram server) so say I have 2 servers with 32GB ram each, running Xen. (I do, in various states of assembly and burn-in) Further say I only need 1GB of data on my MySQL server. I can easily carve off a 4GB ram server from each Xen hardware host, and I can setup a MySQL cluster server, with redundancy for much less than it would cost to build two 4GB servers.

Remember, virtualization is just a tool to make consolidation easier. Consolidation saves you money when the best value per unit of CPU/RAM leaves you with a server that is larger than you need. Consolidation, though, tends to reduce redundancy. Be careful with it.</comment>


Web design? Screw aesthetics - <AUTHOR> http://www.drawar.com/articles/web-design-screw-aesthetics/113/

<comment><USER2> I've known Scrivs from his days in 9rules, and while I respect what he's doing over at Drawar, I'm beginning to question his focus on design as an answer to ... well, everything.

Good design only helps if your site is useful; this in particular applies to both blogs (like his) and webapps. He argued recently that:

 _Do you think it bothers the Gowalla people that they put so much care and effort into the design of everything that they do and Foursquare is still right there with them with a significantly worse design?_

That's missing the point. The point is that Foursquare is doing something right, and that something is likely more than just design. I've not looked into the location app space recently, but my guess is that Foursquare reached critical mass before Gowalla did. Connecting an app's value to its design only makes sense when all else is equal.

 _When Google is brought up as an example of mediocre design that succeeds, people come out from the woodworks to argue that it is actually great design and base it on the success that they have had. I don't believe it._

I think design only gives you an advantage when you're competing in a space with little or no technical differentiation. In this case, Google has had such a huge technical advantage over its competitors that it didn't matter what design they used anyway.

<comment><USER3> Remember when the internet was slow? If Google had loaded down their design with huge amounts of images and clutter, they wouldn't have been nearly as attractive in a world of "portal" search engines.

<comment><USER4> Good design =! many images

Minimalist search pages can look better than Google's without being any bigger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's well known that Google collects massive amounts of data, and does massive amounts of UI testing (such as the infamous testing between 85 different shades of blue), so I'm somewhat skeptical that it's design is mediocre because this guy says it is and he's a web designer. Data trumps intuition every day of the week.

<comment><USER6> You are skeptical because you believe that this is a data problem. He believes (as do I) that it is not a data problem.

Making more people click your button is not, on its own, good design. There's more to aesthetics than conversion rates. You can argue aesthetics aren't important, but it's simply not the same subject as the kind of data collecting A/B testing that Google does.

<comment><USER7> I have a hard time understanding how people can reject the notion that design is a data problem. I know I might be wrong about this. Random thoughts:

If your design doesn't accomplish a business objective, it may be better, but it is irrelevant to the business.

If data indicates your aesthetic doesn't increase a metric, then ultimately the only rational decision to make is to minimize the cost of your aesthetic. All things being equal, you take the equivalently successful design that imposes the least costs.

If the data indicates that your design _decreases_ a metric, then ultimately the only rational decision is to kill the design.

There are also probably non-obvious cost factors. A much better Google SERP design may be more aesthetically strong, and may not hurt metrics --- it may even marginally improve metrics --- however, if the end result of that aesthetic is that every other page at Google needs to cost more to cohere with the SERP, then, again, it may be irrational to improve the design.

Companies spend a lot of money on design. Companies tell themselves a lot of things about design. Somebody's whole career is predicated on the idea that the lobby of a class A office building in the Chicago Loop needs to be just- so. In the building I'm in now, somebody spent several million dollars to improve the aesthetics. I think that probably has more to do with vanity than it does with business.

Corporate annual reports are a marquee design project. Companies spend serious dollars on them. Berkshire Hathaway does theirs in Word, set in Times New Roman. They seem to be doing OK.

Sell me on aesthetics more? I don't see it.

<comment><USER8> Design can be a powerful weapon if done right - just look at Apple..

However, it's very difficult to achieve Apple's near perfect blend of aesthetics & function so I think most people give up and build anyway, making something perfectly functional i.e. Facebook or Gmail, but not awe-inspiring.

<comment><USER7> Apple's design is also more data-driven than it appears --- although it's clearly not as coldly rational as Google's.

<comment><USER6> Data driven from an individual collection and observation perspective, perhaps. Apple doesn't AB test its products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Design is problem solving. Nothing else.

You don't apply aesthetics to a design you apply a style to a design.

Whether something is aesthetic i grounded in culture, history and so many other things.

The google style is bad by print and 1999 standards, but we have come to like it because judging visual things is not only about how they look but how we feel about them.

<comment><USER2> Worth noting: <http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/06/logos.html>

_About thirty years ago, three companies dreamed up logos that have become so powerful, I don't even have to show you the images to get them to pop up in your head. A sneaker company paid a few hundred dollars for an abstract, upside down wave, a coffee company picked a half-naked mermaid (is there any other kind) that cost them nothing, and a computer company picked [hired a PR firm that picked] a piece of fruit with a bite out of it.

What the images had in common: nothing. They range from abstract to woodcut to groovy. The art of picking a logo, even one for the Olympics, has almost nothing to do with taste or back story. A great logo doesn't mean anything until the brand makes it worth something._

Likewise, great aesthetics/graphics mean nothing until the brand makes it worth something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aesthetic is a consequence of good design. A good design is almost a science. If you ask anybody to divide a page in two section, it isn't a coincidence if almost everyone will divided it using the Golden Ratio without even knowing what it is.

<comment><USER11> Yes, because people automatically solve x^2-x-1=0 in their heads when dividing up the page. Wait, my bad, it's just that people looking for that sort of thing take whatever ratio they see and round it to the nearest multiple of the golden ratio, and ignore any other ratios because they don't count.

Why don't you look at the top colored bar at Hacker News and compute its ratio against the entire page? Why not count the ratio of this comment box? Why does the resize draggie that Chrome puts in the bottom right hand corner of the comment box have a 1:1 ratio? Why does the reply button, and most other buttons online, have a ratio larger than 2:1? All the windows I have open on my screen that are divided into sections don't follow the golden ratio. None of their sizes are the golden rectangle. My monitor doesn't follow the golden ratio. My aesthetically pleasing coffee mugs don't follow the ratio -- wait, the handle's smaller than the width of the brim, but not less than half as small. It must be the golden ratio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article but I don't get the title.

<comment><USER12> link. bait.</comment></comment>


Questions to Ask When Interviewing at a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.instigatorblog.com/questions-to-ask-a-startup/2010/06/18/ <comment><USER2> I don't have experience with start-ups, so the question "How much money is left in the bank?" was interesting to me. I understand that it's important for potential employees to know the start-up can afford to pay their salary for more than a few months, but on the other hand I can imagine founders being reluctant to divulge too much financial information. Does anyone have experience with asking/answering a question like this? What kind of answer can you expect? Are there better ways to ask this, such as "How long can you guarantee that you can pay my salary?"?

<comment><USER3> Asking about the funding status, burn-rate, lead investors, and related details is pretty standard. While most companies won't put this data out in a press release (well, actually, they usually put out a release when they raise money, they just don't talk about their burn openly), it's not a taboo subject. It _might_ be better suited for a round 2 interview though.

They _should_ tell you about funding, if they won't divulge burn rates, you can usually factor $8K-$15K/employee/month for a grossed up burn rate (ie: salaries, rent, equipment leases, travel, etc.). Startups that are more hardware-centric and/or have a large sales force (which == travel) are on the upper end of that. A dozen guys squatting in Class B office space building a webapp are going to be on the lower end.

<comment><USER4> These points probably are not relevant to the "interview process" but they can often be vital to the economic decision whether to join a startup:

1\. What equity will I get and what form will it take? 2\. What are the total outstanding shares in the company (fully diluted)? 3\. What is the total dollar value of the investor liquidation preference?

You can get 100,000 options vesting over 4 years, for example, but this could represent potentially 1% of the company (if 10M shares are outstanding) or one-tenth of 1% if 100M shares are outstanding or any other percentage depending on the total capitalization structure. In the one case, on a $100M acquisition (assuming pro rata participation by all parties), you would get $1M and, in the other, $100K. Key point: the absolute number of shares is much less important than the percentage they represent of company ownership.

Same scenario but assuming preferred stock in place holding $50M of liquidation preference and full participation rights beyond the preference amount: in the $100M acquisition scenario, your 100K of options would net you $500K if there are 10M shares outstanding (1% of the $50M that is left after payment of the $50M liquidation preference) and $50K if there are 100M (.01% of the net $50M amount). Key point: outstanding liquidation preferences can (and often do) materially reduce the equity return to common shareholders, particularly if the company is sold in a marginal acquisition (in an extreme case, the preferred investors can force a sale where founders and employees get nothing).

Of course, if you haven't vested in full, and you don't have any accelerated vesting on acquisition, the numbers get shaved even more. Say you worked 2 years at the startup on a 4-year vesting schedule, you would net $500K in the best case under the above examples (1% potential ownership that is 50% vested, no liquidation preference) and $25K in the worst case (.01% potential ownership that is 50% vested with $50M liquidation preference).

These days, many who join startups as employees after the early stages are generally aware of the above issues but it never hurts to remember them _if_ the major reason you are joining is for the hope of a large potential equity payout (if the terms you get are good apart from the equity, and you see it as more of a "tip" if things happen to go well, then these issues are of course much less important to you).

Capitalization questions are awkward to raise in an interview but are important if equity is key to the offer. Interview as is best for you, then, but make sure to consider these points in deciding how to finalize your deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Can I take a glance at your code?" - If applying for an programming position, this is one of the leading indicators of how well the team works regarding refactoring, communication, and their philosophy towards coding.

<comment><USER6> Hmmm, I never tried that; most firms seem to be very protective of their code. In general, for a programming position anywhere, it's good to apply the Joel Test: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html>

<comment><USER7> The chances of you seeing a section of code that is central to their IP and the answer to the question, "how did they do it?" and, additionally, your ability to instantly understand it are very slim.

This is a great question for an engineer to ask. Being able to see if the code is smart (e.g. using shorthand instead of multiline logic), neat and documented is a great way to get a feel for how your potential future coworkers work. They've spent the last two to four hours grilling you and know you, how you code and how you solve problems pretty intimately -- why not get to know them better, too?

<comment><USER8> Don't you ever watch movies about programmers? That's exactly how it works. The protagonist looks briefly at some code before declaring "Oh wow, this guy is good." For added realism, he should be typing the entire time.

<comment><USER9> You don't ask to see the code so you can identify the really good places, you ask so you can run away from the really bad places. It's the flip side of employers asking for basic coding tests: it's not there to tell you how good the good guy is, it's there to get rid of the guy with the great-looking CV who can't write "Hello, world".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When my 2nd company got bought (quickly and for a relatively small pile of money, sadly), I thought I asked a bunch of smart questions of the acquirer (who I went on to work for for a year and got a bunch of stock from as part of the acquisition).

The question I WISH I'd asked was around retention. i.e. "Of the people who touch this product, how many come back a second time? How many are addicted?" The company was well-financed and the sales machine sold the product REALLY well. But users didn't love it-- and most eventually churned.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love the first sentence of his post. So many people forget that job interviews are _conversations_.

</comment><comment><USER9> This sounds a lot like questions someone whose experience of start-ups consists mostly of reading Hacker News would ask. I wouldn't be offended if someone I was interviewing asked me those questions, but I sure as hell wouldn't answer some of them, given that things like detailed financials wouldn't necessarily even be revealed to current employees. If sound basics like "we're profitable" isn't enough, that's a no-hire.

<comment><USER11> If you expect equity to make up part of my pay, then knowing the financials is critical. You are basically asking me to be an investor with my time, so this sentence doesn't make sense: "If sound basics like "we're profitable" isn't enough, that's a no-hire."

<comment><USER9> If we're in this kind of interview situation, where I am openly recruiting for a position and you are a job applicant, then it is very unlikely that I expect equity to be part of your pay.

These days, equity is for founders (if you're serious) and prospective employees who didn't get the memo about the .com bust (if you're both fools). A fixed salary at a credible professional rate is for prospective employees you respect, possibly with some clearly defined bonus structure.

YMMV, but I haven't seen any exceptions to this from either side of the table in a long time.

<comment><USER12> _These days, equity is for founders (if you're serious) and prospective employees who didn't get the memo about the .com bust (if you're both fools)._

Of course it's an outlier, but do you really believe Facebook isn't going to make a lot of its early employees rich at some point?

<comment><USER9> But the point is that it _is_ an outlier. Most people interviewing with a start-up aren't interviewing with the next Facebook. Even if they are, paying single-digit employees who are not founders in equity isn't nearly as common as it used to be IME.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, it sounds like inexperienced bootstrappers like me have a lot to prove to our potential employees given that we have neither much funding or experience. Hopefully some early cashflow from an MVP can help make that easier

<comment><USER14> Just mention all the synergy you have and they will know whats up

<comment><USER13> Hahaha!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Engineering Turnover Rate? That's one the of the questions I wish I would have asked where I work now. The smaller the company, the greater the effects of turnover are on the product....

</comment><comment><USER14> > Am I going to receive a w2 before April 15?</comment>


Chrome 40 beta: Offline service workers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2014/12/chrome-40-beta-powerful-offline-and.html

<comment><USER2> >[...] could do their work even after the page is closed, provided the user has given permission.

I'm really glad for the second half of that statement.

While I could imagine a few use cases, the last thing I want on my smartphone are arbitrary bloated sites draining my battery after closing them. I even consider it a feature of websites vs. native apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Service Workers are what Application Cache should have been first. Application Cache has a big flaw and that is, you can't control it much. You depend on browser to decide what to do when there is no Internet connection. With Service Workers you get to programmatically tell browser what to do with network requests and so on.

Classic configuration file vs. let me write actual code approach. I'm glad we have both now! Application Cache makes sense for a lot of static websites.

<comment><USER4> I tried playing with Application Cache, but my applications kept getting "stuck." The user would return online and the old version of the application would be shown and it wouldn't update the one cached either...

Only solutions I found required configuring the web-server. Which is fine in theory, but when you consider that an application is a self-contained blob of static data in this context (i.e. HTML, CSS, JS, and a manifest) you'll potentially need one web-server cache policy for legitimately static content (i.e. HTML with no manifest) and another for Application Cache (i.e. HTML with a manifest) just to make sure the Application Cache is flushed correctly.

I find it very telling Google web-pages don't use Application Cache (e.g. Gmail). In fact the only thing in chrome://appcache-internals/ is the new-tab page.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I recall that there is a way to tell the browser to 'flush' the application cache, but only once the user has loaded the old version of the application anyway; in other words, you can tell the browser that the _next time_ they load the page, they should load the new version. Which seems odd.

<comment><USER6> The only way to force a reset is to query the manifest and receive a status not equal to 200. If your application is stuck to an old version, this is the only way to update it.

And Firefox is considering the manifest as a normal cache so you need to put a lot of http headers to prevent any normal cache otherwise Firefox will never check any updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad it's a native feature.

I attended a talk by an FT engineer and I was amazed by what's possible.

Update: Mistakenly thought that FT uses Polyfill for service workers.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I understand how these are related.

While what the Financial Times has done with polyfills is pretty neat, it at least does not document any of the behavior mentioned in this article.

In fact, it seems very clear that they are making use of App Cache for their website, which the technology mentioned in this article effectively replaces.

<comment><USER7> Update: Sorry, I misunderstood.

Polyfills emulate service workers as they were not actually implemented in any browser. So they have to fall back on App Cache. But now they can seamlessly use Chrome's native service workers while still relying on polyfills for other browsers.

<comment><USER9> I don't see service workers here: [http://cdn.polyfill.io/v1/docs/features/](http://cdn.polyfill.io/v1/docs/features/) or here [https://github.com/Financial-Times/polyfill- service/tree/mas...](https://github.com/Financial-Times/polyfill- service/tree/master/polyfills)

Emulating service worker with App Cache sounds... very hard. Do you have more info on this specifically? I've got an app that's using app cache now and I'd like to gracefully transition it to using service workers as they become available.

<comment><USER7> It's possible I misunderstood it then. I was at a talk by an FT engineer. Here's his course that he referenced in his talk: [https://github.com/matthew- andrews/workshop-making-it-work-o...](https://github.com/matthew- andrews/workshop-making-it-work-offline). You're right that maybe he was talking about what it is possible not what they did.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is our pricing structure right? - <AUTHOR> Our service: https://smartip.io is an IP Geolocation API and we are currently offering the following tiers:
Free Tier: up to 250,000 req/mo Startup Tier: up to 1.5 Million req/mo for $40/mo Pro Tier: up to 10 Million req/mo for $150/mo Enterprise Tier: need to contact us to discuss
Considering that this is a pretty cluttered market we are trying to be as much competitive as possible. What do you guys thing about the current pricing structure? Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> It's a very cluttered market. Why are you different than any other geolocation service?

Honestly, it's really easy (and cheap) to do it yourself: Buy the Maxmind DB and leverage open source libraries for reading the data.

<comment><USER3> The free maxminddb geolite2 does fine for most cases, too. Nice and easy-to- use python module to go with it. I'm pretty sure the city one is ~100MB, so doable to keep a copy on-device.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is all down to the usage and performance needed. If you need high resiliency and performances, using a third party API like smartip.io is the way to go.

If the requirements are less strict then using a local db like MaxMind would be the right choice.

As a side note, we offer very simple and well documented libraries in C#, Typescript and PHP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IPv6?

<comment><AUTHOR> We support IPv6 lookups as well.</comment></comment>


Tesla partially reimburses Autopilot 2.0 in $5M settlement - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8gauyf/tesla_agrees_to_partially_reimburse_people_who/ <comment><AUTHOR> Tesla blatantly duped thousands of people into buying their Beta "Enhanced Autopilot" features years before it was ready/publicly safe on the road. Anyone who got an AP2 in Q3'16 and Q1'17 knows this. Hopefully there will be another lawsuit for those who paid for their self-driving vaporware.</comment>


RPN calculator implementations in 61 languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.bas.bg/bantchev/place/rpn/rpn.impl.html <comment><USER2> I love things like this. While 99 bottles of beer is pretty simple, applications like this give you a slightly better look at the language.

I try doing a simple 4 function calculator (*/+-) with parens and with two numerical addins (sometimes I pick sin/cos, sometimes I pick max( ....) and min( ...)

The RPN version is good since you need to create stack management in the core.

While this doesn't have the panache of "Write a web server in 3 lines of Ruby (oh don't forget those two 500 line libraries.) It does give you good example of the simple things you can do.

He also has a pretty good swath of languages, I'm always excited to see Awk, Lua and Python (my go to lanaguages) on the same page. I'll need to see if I can break out my COBOL skills and get a pull request made up.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really cool, I think I would like to do this as an exercise with a similar small program. Does he have some sort of write-up after making all these talking about the individual languages?

</comment><comment><USER4> The D version currently on display on the website (Which I wrote, minus the use of static foreach):

void main() {

        import std.stdio, std.string, std.algorithm, std.conv;

        // Reduce the RPN expression using a stack
        readln.split.fold!((stack, op)
        {
            switch (op)
            {
                // Generate operator switch cases statically
                static foreach (c; "+-*/")
                    case [c]:
                        return stack[0 .. $ - 2] ~
                            mixin("stack[$ - 2] " ~ c ~
                                " stack[$ - 1]");
                default: return stack ~ op.to!real;
            }
        })((real[]).init).writeln;
    }

</comment><comment><USER5> So, haskell version may be little shorter

      main = interact $ unlines. map (show.calc) .lines

      calc :: String -> [Float]
      calc = foldl f [] . words
        where
          f (x:y:zs) "+" = (y + x):zs
          f (x:y:zs) "-" = (y - x):zs
          f (x:y:zs) "*" = (y * x):zs
          f (x:y:zs) "/" = (y / x):zs
          f xs y         = read y : xs

</comment><comment><USER6> Related code golf challenge: [https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/221/reverse- pol...](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/221/reverse-polish- notation)

</comment><comment><USER7> I expected the javascript implementation to be a oneliner with Array reduce operation.

<comment><USER8> I was very disappointed that the JS implementation leans on eval(). That's kind of cheating, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love using RPN</comment>


Colour Symbolism in Ancient Mesopotamia - <AUTHOR> https://www.academia.edu/2026013/Colour_Symbolism_in_Ancient_Mesopotamia

<comment><USER2> Related: _The Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World_ by Erin Hoffman [1]. Extract:

 _" We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for "blue" in ancient Greek. Homer's descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze."_

Edit: Interestingly, Russian appears not to have a single word for blue [1]. Instead, light blue and dark blue are thought of as separate colours.

[1] [http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/](http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/)

[2] [http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full)

<comment><USER3> With regard to Homeric interpretation of colour, i found this interesting.

[http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bodysphere/feat...](http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bodysphere/features/5267698)

Some of the comments are interesting as well, such as that Homer might have been blind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not only do different cultures apply different meanings to colors, they may perceive them entirely differently than how you do. [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7cgh_horizon-do-you- see-w...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7cgh_horizon-do-you-see-what-i- see-part-1-4_shortfilms)

<comment><USER5> That was one the most impressive documentaries I'd ever seen.

Makes trying to understand consensus reality a real mind-bender.

Also tangentially related to light and colo[u]r perception and how dramatic it's effects can be:

[http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm](http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm) (Search for "Phase response curve (PRC)") [https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tried downloading the PDF and man... fuck everything about that intrusive piece of shit website.</comment>


Ask HN: Should we block non-gzip HTTP bots to reduce bandwidth costs? - <AUTHOR> We run web servers on EC2 (behind ELB) and are dealing with high bandwidth charges. The bulk of the bandwidth charges are due to bots scraping/crawling/pinging without gzip.
Is it safe to block requests made without the accept-encoding header? (and what HTTP status code should be used? 400?) Naively it seems it would only be inconveniencing poorly written and uninvited bots (SEO spam, bots trying to find exploits etc.)
Or should we respond with gzip compression, no matter what?
Or should we stop using AWS since the bandwidth is too expensive because of situations like this? <comment><USER2> Have you considered banning the problematic bots using robots.txt[0]? Then if they ignore that, you could block them more aggressively.

My concern about gzip is that it could impact legacy clients or real people behind poorly configured proxies at places like businesses, colleges, and public hotspots.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd block it and wait to see if your clients notice... If it breaks functionality for some of them just help them fix this and say you fixed performance issues so you could reduce prices later down the road.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just ignore the ACCEPT type and send Gzip anyways.

Always send compressed data. All real clients accept it. The rest is noise.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you considered using Nginx directives to slow bots down/rate limit them?

[http://alex.mamchenkov.net/2017/05/17/nginx-rate-limit- user-...](http://alex.mamchenkov.net/2017/05/17/nginx-rate-limit-user-agent- control-bots/)

Also, can you front your EC2 cluster with Cloudfront, Cloudflare, or another CDN in order to reduce your outbound EC2 data costs?

</comment><comment><USER6> The company I work for makes a great next gen WAF. Along with identifying and protecting against malicious entities we also can help reduce load from heavy handed bots.

Reach out at [https://threat-x.com/contact](https://threat-x.com/contact)

</comment><comment><USER7> Serve a "blocked" page with some simplistic captcha to unblock?

If you see a lot of clients using the captcha, then consider backing it out...

Or maybe 302 them to an aggressively cloudflare cached copy of your site that's no-indexed?</comment>


Ask HN: Can I be public about a interview process with a Company? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN
I just took a frontend coding challenge with a 50 Million funded company and they rejected my solution.
I repect that, but I think they were wrong about some of the feedback. One was about how to average RGB colors and other about file structor.
I want to tell others how they do the interview and what I think was right, but my first impression is that it may backslash on me.
But I don't want to keep quiet just because I am scared of a big company and other people thinking about interviewing with this company may be told they are wrong and don't know they were right. <comment><USER2> I'd say - wait a week or two. See how you feel then.

You can post an interview "review" on glassdoor.com - there are thousands of reviews, including stories similar to yours. The companies can respond but don't know who you are(well, kinda), nor can they change your review.

Ultimately, as long as you make the post constructive - you should write a review. But - Don't write to spite.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on your objectives, it might be more constructive to ask the company the basis for the opinion that the solutions were incorrect. It could be that there were additional considerations that the company missed or vice versa.

On the other hand, if the goal is to publicize the nature of the coding challenge, then it really doesn't matter how one goes about justifying it. No matter how doing so is rationalized, one ought to be willing to live with the consequences of their actions.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> > but I think they were wrong about some of the feedback.

Your interviews and code challenge feedback were not posted in a public forum. Neither should your professional opinion.

If you feel strongly about it-- compose a note to the hiring executive, informing him (in businesslike fashion) how & where their process failed. Take the high road, offer ways they can correct the problem.

Incidentally, even smart, well intentioned companies screw up the hiring process and miss out on great talent.

</comment><comment><USER5> You should weigh the upside and downside. Upside is likely: you feel slightly vindicated, get a few up votes and comments when you xpost to HN. Downside is likely: burning bridges with that company, damaging your reputation by making people think you're stubborn and immature and will leak things that should be private.

Best bet is just shrug it off and keep moving.

</comment><comment><USER6> Have you considered the possibility that you were actually wrong?</comment>


How we ensure credible analytics on Dropbox mobile apps - <AUTHOR> https://dropbox.tech/mobile/how-we-ensure-credible-analytics-on-dropbox-mobile-apps <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I am Marianna, an Android Engineer at Dropbox and the blog post author. Would love to answer the questions you have about the post :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome work on an under-discussed, but business critical topic!</comment>


Tinder Suspends Co-Founder In Wake Of Sexual Harassment Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/30/tinder-suspends-co-founder-in-wake-of-sexual-harassment-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> People saying "she planned this" or that "she writes all legal-y" don't understand how this works.

Consider that this is only a tiny snapshot of the entire (horrible) ordeal, selected by her lawyers to reflect the egregious components of their behavior, placed in contrast to her requests to cease. Of course they include the ones where she says stop, and the aggressor(s) persist.

There could be, and likely is, far worse interactions, where she didn't say stop, that they didn't include in their exhibits. They will come to light later if this suit progresses.

There are also probably texts that make her look bad, too. Where she lets it go, or even plays along. Maybe she was too tired that day to argue. Maybe she hoped it would stop if she answered questions. Who knows? I don't.

But that doesn't make her guilty of any wrongdoing, or absolve them of their erroneous ways. People have a right to work in a harassment-free workplace, and employers have a duty to ensure it operates that way. That's all that will matter at the end of this.

And from what's included in the suit, my quick read is that they are in a very bad spot, both ethically and legally. Sean Rad seems like a woefully and perilously unqualified CEO.

<comment><USER3> "horrible ordeal" \- I'm sorry, but if you dislike your workplace, you can always quit. That's not to justify sexual harassment, but the picture you evoke of a "horrible ordeal" just seems next to impossible. An ordeal would have to go on for quite a while, and then the question really is why don't you quit.

<comment><USER4> Sorry but have you actually worked before because it's never that black/white.

You may love/hate any combination of work, boss, people, culture, location, pay, politics, perks, title etc. Maybe it was the perfect job except for the sexual harassment. In which case just quitting isn't so simple.

<comment><USER3> "it's never that black/white."

Exactly - that is exactly what I am trying to say... I just can't stand the mob mentality on here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recommend taking a look at the original complaint for even more context, especially with the exhibits.

[http://www.rezlaw.com/News- Events/06-30-14_Complaint_with_Ex...](http://www.rezlaw.com/News- Events/06-30-14_Complaint_with_Exhibits-1.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link. The exhibits really paint an appalling portrait of the guy. He's acting like an insecure 14 year old.

I don't want to downplay the situation but I feel like it's your responsibility as an adult to disengage from situations like this faster than she did. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess but the whole situation seems to have been really mishandled (and that's a feeling I'm getting from a court complaint from her side). Again, I'm not saying she asked for it or anything, just that pursuing an ongoing relationship might not have been the best idea.

In any case, that seems to be a terrible working environment. I also find it kind of ironic that the co-founders of an inherently social app like Tinder appear so poor at handling interpersonal/romantic relationships.

<comment><USER7> > I don't want to downplay the situation but I feel like it's your > responsibility

Article about sexual harassment on HN. Came to comments expected victim blaming, 2nd sentence in 2nd comment.

Well done.

<comment><USER6> If that's how it came across I probably really expressed myself improperly because that wasn't my point at all (English being my second language probably doesn't help and I really hesitated to post because I knew there was a chance I wasn't properly formulating my argument).

So let me clarify: I don't believe it was her fault in any way. Quite the opposite, I believe 100% that the guy is at fault here. My point was more related to the fact that we (myself included) tend to maintain relationships that are clearly unhealthy in hindsight. I probably should have chosen a better word than responsibility seeing as it was more a comment aimed at the apparent lack of capacity to adequately disengage from unhealthy situations a lot of adults seem to exhibit. We're not used to saying "no" and to moving on. I was only saying this because similar situations happened to me in which I wished later that I could have disengaged and saved me some heartache.

I believe (only from reading this complaint) that the behavior exhibited by Mateen is unacceptable and reprehensible and that he's clearly at fault. My intention was not to blame her but merely to express a general observation regarding a lot of relationship failures I witnessed. So if this came across as victim blaming I sincerely apologize. It wasn't the intent.

<comment><USER8> It's nothing to do with how you said it.

The point is that reading something like this, the least interesting topic is what the complainant could have done differently.

The principle discussion is: never shoulda happened. Inappropriate, unacceptable. Not second guessing the strategy of someone in an impossible situation.

But you led with that.

That's why you got called out.

<comment><USER6> I have to disagree that it's the least interesting topic. A relationship is never a one way street and while in this situation one of the party clearly seems to be at fault, it's not always the case. Of course it never should have happened but it has and so the discussion about damage mitigation is still a valid one.

I wish I was taught any kind of disengagement skill when I was being bullied as a kid, even though it never should have happened (and since I can foresee the uproar here, I'm in no way implying the two are equivalent but merely noticing similarities).

<comment><USER9> It's a shame that "here are some tips to protect yourzelf from assholes" only come up after a case like this. Because in this context it does feel a little bit like victim blaming, even with all the caveats.

<comment><USER10> That's because it should read "here are some tips to avoid being an asshole". "Here are tips to protect yourself from assholes" is very much victim blaming no matter the context.

Sure, some of it - most of it - might be good advice (e.g. don't date cofounders/coworkers) but in the end that advice in itself won't do anything if the other person is an asshole. Whitney could have avoided a relationship and tried to defuse things as best as she could, but Justin could still have been an ass and harass her for rejecting him.

<comment><USER11> Victim-blaming implies someone has blamed someone else for their circumstance. Telling someone how to avoid assholes is not victim-blaming, its education that all [young] adults should receive, because it helps people make informed decisions and be responsible adults.

All adults maintain responsibility for their own actions. That goes for both the assholes and the victims. Ideally, everyone would get exactly the same training, because everyone has the capacity to be either an asshole or a victim.

Of course we know that in our particular society (as in many others) women are at higher risk for being abused, and men are more likely to be the abuser. So it seems like there should still be an equal amount of education, but that men should probably receive greater feedback about how (and why) not to be an asshole, and women should receive greater feedback on how to protect themselves from assholes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really glad that lawsuits like this are becoming more common, or at least more publicized. I see it as a sign that people are becoming better at recognizing inappropriate workplace behavior and finding the courage to litigate over it. It sets the right example for others who are in similar situations.

</comment><comment><USER13> From the documents:

> As Ms. Wolfe began to head toward the exit, she was accosted by Mr. Rad's > guest at the party who spat in her face.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's surprising the CEO of match said "it doesn't bother me I can sleep at night"

</comment><comment><USER15> From reading the texts, I've decided that none of these people know how to type. And I can't understand someone that high profile not realizing that these things are going to come to light at some point.

<comment><USER16> I immediately lose all respect for anyone who can't be bothered to type out "you" instead of "u", especially anyone over the age of ~21, and _especially_ in professional contexts.

Of course these idiots also apparently have no concept of "professional contexts".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As the saying goes, "Kids playing house."

</comment><comment><USER18> The whole thing sounds like an episode of some reality tv show with teenagers. Both of them should be feeling embarassed about themselves.

<comment><USER2> I hope by both of them you mean the CMO and CEO.

This woman has nothing to be embarrassed about, although I'm sure she is. Going public must have been a terrifyingly difficult thing to do. It certainly would have been for me.

<comment><USER18> They were dating and they broke up. This is all a teenager break up story. Just they have the money and publicity to tell the whole world about it.

Hes still guilty of harassment. But I'm sure if more records were released We would see a lot that makes her look bad and probably guilty of similiar crimes if not the same ones.

This is why no established company allows dating in the work place. Break up arguments are now workplace harassment charges.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "The suit also describes the romantic relationship that Mateen pursued with Wolfe"

Taking revenge 101...

</comment><comment><USER19> What an idiot.

</comment><comment><USER20> You can tell from the beginning of those texts that she was planning this all along, or at the very least - preparing for it. She uses legal language throughout and says little else: 'stop threatening me' 'this is harassment' 'you are effecting my working environment' etc etc.

<comment><USER21> I used to know this girl (Whitney). I knew her for many years, and I have to say that she was probably baiting them at the very least. The guy is clearly slimy and should lose his job, and of course, people change... but over a year ago, another friend and I predicted that something very similar to this would happen. She has played this role in the past.

<comment><USER22> She's a WOMAN, not a girl. Sorry—no intent in being PC, but as a female in the biz, it's just profoundly abrasive to read "girl" all over the place.

In a social context, a woman cam be a "girl." In business, she's a woman. Always. Period. This is a business matter, where personal stuff got inappropriately smeared-in to the business, which is the premise of the lawsuit.

Guys: We don't call you boys at work. Woman, please please please.

<comment><USER23> This is obviously kind of delicate, but as someone who has referred to young- ish women as girls before, I'll at least attempt to explain my confusion.

Men are often called "guys" \- and the connotation to me is just a more informal way of saying "men".

What is the female equivalent of "guy"? Is it chick? Chick certainly doesn't seem right and (to me) kind of has different meaning associated with it as compared to any extra meaning "guy" has when compared to "man".

"Woman" usually seems very formal to me in the same way that "Man" does. So...what do I use instead? Sometimes I do use girl in its place because it seems less formal but (I thought) not offensive.

If someone says "do you know who John Doe is" in a work context, I will probably say something like "oh he's a guy working on XYZ"

If someone asks "do you know who Jane Doe is" in a work context, I will sometimes say "oh she's a girl working on XYZ". I admit there is some extra thought process in choosing the pronoun:

\---1. Who am I speaking to?

\---2. How old is the person they are referring to?

IDK. Kind of just a brain dump, but just wanted to explain where I come from. But I'll internalize the fact that this may actually be irritating to the women I'm referring to. And that was never my intent.

Edit: I just realized that even in your comment you used "Guys" and not "Men". Basically case in point as to the 'conflict'. Why didn't you type Men? it just feels kinda formal, right? But maybe I should just bite the bullet and go the formal route if my attempt to be less formal just ends up being offensive...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As all the corporate training says: "Don't put into writing what you don't want to see on the cover of the WSJ."

This is a pure example of what happens when you do not listen to that adage.

<comment><USER25> I kind of doubt any of these people have ever worked in a place big enough to have "corporate training."

<comment><USER22> "Big enough for corporate training" is the golden ticket. No company should have to be big enough, for training to be available. Yes, I am actively changing that... stay tuned.</comment></comment></comment>


P2P-assisted Web music streaming with WebRTC and Scala Play Framework - <AUTHOR> http://ztream.atamborrino.cloudbees.net

<comment><USER2> Very nice guys! I believe you are aware of Peer5 and [http://www.sharefest.me](http://www.sharefest.me). Would love to discuss mutual opportunities.

<comment><USER3> Yep ShareFest is very cool. Does Peer5 (the streaming solution) use WebRTC?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Btw it doesn't work (for me) currently. Didn't see anything in the chrome://webrtc-internals. Does it use both http and webrtc?

<comment><USER3> Yep both Websocket (from server) and data channels (from peers). Streaming from server should always work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can audio streaming like this be done in current Chrome Stable with unreliable RTP Data Channels?

</comment><comment><USER5> There's no such setting as "Enable SCTP Data Channels" on Chrome 27 on Mac.

<comment><USER2> Yup, that's why he said Canary... (I actually think it should work on dev channel as well (M29+)</comment></comment>


Movfuscator: A single-instruction C compiler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator <comment><USER2> Back in the time of FIDO, I've accepted the challenge to crack a program (find a correct password) that more or less consisted of a loop to simulate three- address MOV instruction.

The loop jump address sometimes changed for some effectful operations like printing or for optimizations like executing addition.

It took me about four hours to find the correct password. In the course of there three hours I wrote 1) an executor that used i386 debug registers to look for current MOV addresses, 2) a tracer that produced a trace and 3) a compactor which identified common instruction sequences and presented them as some macrocommand. It turned out the original source code has used macros in the opposite way. The final challenge was to write brute force password finder, which is not that hard at all (for 32-bit checksum).

All in x86 assembler. I guess it was about 1995-96, somewhere there.

Now I'd use the same technique, but on higher level. Instead of peephole compacting I'd use graph analysis, but that's about it. You can get pretty much everything from the program trace, I think this way you can get even more information than from disassembly.

So in my opinion, it is one hell of a cool experiment. But try not to use it as a real obfuscation device.

<comment><USER3> I also remember seeing a "forest of MOVs" obfuscation technique attempting to crack a protection back in the very late 80s, and I remember it so well because it caused me to change my analysis strategy completely. The fun part was that the "interesting" MOVs were hidden amongst other instructions that seemed to perform useful computation, although the results of that were just thrown away and the MOVs were doing all the work. At the time I was fond of printing out code and inspecting/annotating it manually, so I think it took several days and lots of careful documenting of the algorithm before I realised that it was all useless; and upon tracing back the source of the actual value used in the decision and crossing out the irrelevant instructions, imagine my surprise when almost all that was left were MOVs...!

That one taught me it was far better to start by working backward from the result, although self-modifying code tends to be more difficult that way.

<comment><USER2> And this is exactly why traces are better than assembly. You see instructions that were executed, not the code. You can restore the decision tree (and then the graph, most probaly) and figure out what is going on.

<comment><USER4> > And this is exactly why traces are better than assembly. You see > instructions that were executed, not the code. You can restore the decision > tree (and then the graph, most probaly) and figure out what is going on.

Do you have some illustrative example?

<comment><USER5> I think a good example is the last level (Hollywood) from www.microcorruption.com, which has self modifying code and is set up such that the actual execution jumps into the middle of what the disassembler thinks are actual instructions. Reading the code is pretty useless, but with a trace of instructions executed and register state at each instruction it's easy to start at the end and follow backwards to the interesting part of the program.

Getting the trace is the tricky bit, I had to write an msp430 emulator.

(Actually seeing this example requires completing the rest of the levels, but you should do that anyway, especially if this is the sort of thing you're interested in)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I suggest taking a look at the slides, which show how much trickery is involved: [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator/raw/master/slide...](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator/raw/master/slides/the_movfuscator_recon_2015.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Strongest possible +1 for the slides if you are at all interested in low-level alchemy. Also see slide 109 for the beginning of a shadow argument that this might actually have some real-world utility, in that the long list of MOVs is virtually immune to comprehension by existing reverse engineering tools and practices.

<comment><USER8> On the other hand you could compile it back to regular assembly and use them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Maxim Integrated MAXQ is is one commercial processor that uses a MOV based instruction set. [http://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app- notes/index.mvp/id/322...](http://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app- notes/index.mvp/id/3222)

I've always felt these were more of a trick in being single instruction set because you are using some of the addressing bits to encode an opcode.

<comment><USER3> That's a TTA ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_triggered_architectu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_triggered_architecture) ), where effectively the ALU and other computation units become memory-mapped devices. It's the logical extension of how a lot of microcontrollers which don't have a multiply instruction in their instruction sets, e.g. 8051, will instead have a multiplier unit that's accessed by reading/writing special memory addresses.

That's somewhat different from the move-based code discussed here where the MOVs are actually performing the computation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The x86 is actually Turing-complete without even executing a single instruction. Page faulting is enough: [https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc](https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc)

</comment><comment><USER11> Author is the same person who published epic X86 vulnerability [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sinkhole](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sinkhole)

<comment><USER12> I thought those slides looked familiar. Thought it might have been a template that the conference provided. Should have looked at the author ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Exact dupe:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751312)

</comment><comment><USER14> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751312) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309631)

</comment><comment><USER15> Write your program using the nearly Turing-complete C preprocessor and compile into mov.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is ARMv7 mov turing complete?</comment>


The Angel Empire Strikes Back – Why pay-to-pitch works  - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/10/22/the-angel-empire-strikes-back-why-pay-to-pitch-works/ <comment><AUTHOR> Still seems smarmy, but worth reading to hear from "the other side".</comment>


Building a 'Mango' App - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/hh547105.aspx

<comment><USER2> I consider myself a pretty seasoned C# developer with experience in Silverlight and WP7, but I found this tutorial really confusing to follow. I can't imagine _first timers_ learning WP7 programming from this tutorial. Lots of unexplained boilerplate code.

<comment><USER3> The intro does mention that the "real purpose" of this tutorial "is to explore some of the big new features in the 7.1 release"... So I think it's more geared towards developers with WP7 experience who want to learn what's new in Mango. (I don't mean that it necessarily does a very good job at even that, just pointing out.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something about using String.Format for internal IDs sketches me out. Is this a common practice, or do developers use URL builders instead?

<comment><USER5> .NET is strongly typed so using String.Format in the manner this example does is safe, as long as the values you're inserting are integers or guids or such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If an app falls in the woods, and nobody buys phones to use it, does it make a sound?</comment>


Reinfection with Covid-19 6 months later, rapid death - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/OutFrontCNN/status/1286814293896372227 <comment><USER2> This is pretty bad. Now, n=1, so we can't draw any serious conclusions from this, but for him/her to die even with existing antibodies indicates that the development of a vaccine is not going to be easy and lessens the effect heard immunity.

Let's hope the patient simply had bad luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, this looks like the first case report of its kind so we can't draw any conclusions, but hopefully this incident draws a lot of news coverage so that the global medical community is on high alert for this disturbing possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> sounds unlikely and sensational</comment>


RLCD, better technology than E-Ink itself? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h0fj3s/new_ereader_hisense_q5_new_tech_rlcd_the_best_of/ <comment> kalium-xyz Classic reddit link: [https://old.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h0fj3s/new_ereader_hi...](https://old.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h0fj3s/new_ereader_hisense_q5_new_tech_rlcd_the_best_of/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is probably not the right forum - but I think we need to wait for real life reviews. This is apparently being released next week.

I'd happily drop money on this if it's on par with Kindle!

PS. I went into a bit of a rabbit hole looking into this, Hisense has released some interesting E-Ink consumer devices. The A5C/A5Pro CC look really interesting!

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, there is some innovation happening in the space. Here you can find the latest eink technologies:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h0ujo1/what_is_the_be...](https://old.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h0ujo1/what_is_the_best_eink_technology/)

</comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz As the reddit comments show, this is not a novel technology and does not compare with e-inks power usage and persistence.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hm, dont know. This kills it: 10.5" HD

I want an eInk Computer Monitor, starting >= 13"

<comment><USER4> [http://www.einkmonitor.com/](http://www.einkmonitor.com/)

<comment><USER3> This Monitor is old news. It is $1,049.00 USD for 13"!</comment></comment></comment>


Recommend the best on vehicle gps - <AUTHOR>

What is the best gps system on the market for small businesses to track where their service vehicles have been? <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone use GPS or have a company that sells them?</comment>