Life in a City Without Water: Anxious, Exhausting and Sweaty - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/world/asia/india-water-crisis.html <comment><USER2> Earlier threads about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345066)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20322186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20322186)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20254416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20254416)

</comment><comment><USER3> My parents are both residents in Chennai and visited me in Tokyo last month. I overheard phone conversations and their complaints on state of the crisis. The water crisis gets deeper and more sinister.

I remember plumbing being done years ago around the house to harvest rainwater, to store it in underground tanks and excess drained into the well. Nearly every household was forced to do this by the government. Few households built a sump and others bought plastic water storage tanks (it is the cheaper option) to store water. These are being re-purposed to store water delivered by water tankers. (a family 4 approximately uses upto 4000 L of water every month, in Chennai, around my parents neighbourhood)

With the water crisis now, these plastic storage devices are under attack. Near my parent's neighbourhood a few households had the water drained from the tanks and the tanks themselves stolen or sabotage to prevent further storage. Sumps are not risk free either, as malicious actors drop pipes into them and use a pump to drain the water out. (some pollute the sump after draining it and later charge to clean them up as innocent service providers)

Furthermore, water bodies around the greater metro have dried up. These so called "water tankers" are siphoning water from bodies which were designated unsafe for drinking, from agricultural wells, and through other illegal means. The water being delivered is neither certified for quality or acceptable for drinking. Some neighbourhoods that were recipient of such water have seen a rise in the number of sick children.

Edit:

\----

The well in our house was 8ft deep, there are also two borewells one at 400 ft and the other at 1000 ft deep. All three of the waterholes are now dry. There's literally no underground water left in certain areas in Chennai. It also costs several thousand dollars to drill a new one now.

There is hope yet. People have banded together to clean up nearby water bodies, like the Chitlapakkam Rising [0] and Velachery Rising [1] NGOs who have raised funds and put their children and old to work on cleaning nearby lakes removing garbage and making the lake bed deeper. They hope to have the monsoon rain fill them this year and restore the underground water supply.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt29MvgX01I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt29MvgX01I)

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

<comment><USER4> I think its great that the people are getting involved in the cleanup but I really feel the government should pitch in and bring some heavy equipment to speed up the cleanup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now imagine a climate change future where this happens all more often -- also the resulting wars between neighborhood states with more/less recourses.

This is a more likely future than "colonies on Mars", fully autonomous self driving cars, and personal robot assistants...

<comment> Joe-Z Who says we can't have both? Of course the latter will only be accessible to a wealthy elite still glad they managed to escape the woes of socialism.

<comment><USER5> > _Who says we can't have both?_

Reality. Once constant recession, social unrest, famines, resource struggles, and so on become a permanent fixture, consensus to spend money on such things becomes even lower (and there's no market to sustain a "wealthy elite" either, the elite declines too, like it did in Rome's fall).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reading articles like this makes me want to check our local reservoirs more. We build a desal plant to feed about 10% (I think?) of our city's consumption starting in about 2007, when we had some pretty major drought. I believe it is only now that we see a drought severe enough again to start appreciating it, but no one thinks about it anymore. Shortly after it was built, about 5 years ago, it was derided as a great big waste of money. But I think it has been our hidden reservoir savior. It has been running continuously since in maintenance mode, but even just a little bit may be enough to make our reservoirs seem like they're enough on their own, as that small amount of water no longer needs to come from them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't imagine having to deal with this sort of issue on a daily basis nearly all the time. I have a travel trailer and sometimes camp without hookups, which forces you to be very careful with your fresh water supply. Of course, I can simply move somewhere and get more water, these people don't have that luxury.

<comment><USER8> The "water tanker mafia" in Karachi is another example, in many areas with large population where there simply is no municipal water supply, and wells are literally impossible to extract water from.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/10/6455253...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/10/645525392/for- karachis-water-mafia-stolen-h20-is-a-lucrative-business)

[https://nation.com.pk/08-Oct-2018/water-tanker-mafia- looting...](https://nation.com.pk/08-Oct-2018/water-tanker-mafia-looting- karachiites)

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and- people...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and- people/tanker-mafia-using-illegal-hydrants-sell-drinking-water-black/)

[https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/292872-water-mafia- sells-40...](https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/292872-water-mafia-sells-40pc- of-city-s-water-through-tankers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the biggest immediate change we will see from climate change and "climate emergencies" is massive migration of people. If sea level rise affects a significant portion of Bangladesh, or Rajasthan remains at 50C weather for long periods of time, millions of people will become climate refugees.

[https://www.unhcr.org/climate-change-and- disasters.html](https://www.unhcr.org/climate-change-and-disasters.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/02/climate-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/02/climate- change-will-create-worlds-biggest-refugee-crisis)

<comment><USER9> This current crisis is 90% mismanagement and ineptitude, 10% climate change and that's probably being very generous.

<comment><USER10> I can't find it but someone from one of the zones in India that is suffering from severe water shortages said just this (what you mentioned).

They said everything from filling in lakes to leaking water pipes and a corrupt local government are more to blame than climate change.

What's interesting is that even private enterprise can't fix this problem since there is probably a water cartel already in place to profit from the situation with the local government officials in on the take.

Why hasn't the local population held their government responsible or is this not possible?

<comment><USER11> India is a super corrupt place where faith in government services is low. There's also a kind of apathy involved where long term corruption has narrowed people's horizons about what government can achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With people collecting water from AC's, seems like moisture farming could be a viable business if power is cheap enough.

[https://theconversation.com/new-technology-brings-star- wars-...](https://theconversation.com/new-technology-brings-star-wars-style- desert-moisture-farming-a-step-closer-76183)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think I'm going to go back and finish Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife. It feels less like dystopian science fiction and more like realistic observation than ever at this point.</comment>


Google Researchers Introduce System to Rank Web Pages on Facts, Not Links - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/google-researchers-introduce-system-rank-web-pages-facts-not-links-215835

<comment><USER2> The increasing co-dependency between Google and Wikipedia, has basically has turned unwitting Wikipedia editors into Google's unpaid fact checkers. [http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best- friends-...](http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best-friends- forever/)

<comment><USER3> Aren't they every ones unpaid fact checkers? Isn't that the point of Wikipedia?

It would be nice if Google would donate some more money, though.</comment></comment>


The Real Story of Developing for Nintendo's Download Platforms - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/175869/The_Real_Story_of_Developing_for_Nintendos_Download_Platforms.php

<comment><USER2> No mention in the article that New Super Mario Bros 2 will be released in the eShop. Having such a big game straight from Nintendo being digitally distributed will be interesting. It might give the eShop a boost in people checking it out.

I'm a little disappointed that NSMB2 will also have a physical release. But I can understand Nintendo not wanting to take such a risk.

<comment><USER3> I've been spoiled by the iOS app store. Buying once, playing on several devices. Also the ability to delete and redownload whenever. I won't consider buying a big title like NSMB2 digital-only until they fix that stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The 3DS eshop is very easy to use. I've spent way too much money there already.

My only con is that you can't buy AAA titles, requiring me to order physical goods like a caveman.</comment>


Show HN: Decode a GIF blinking in Morse code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hinathan/blinkingmorse

<comment><AUTHOR> The Prometheus movie website has a blinking star that's showing Morse code as a hint to more teaser content. Take that animated gif, break it into frames, pull out the primary color from each frame's histogram, then requantize the time-variant signal into buckets to finally back out a clean Morse code sequence and then map that into letters and numbers. Fun!

<comment><USER2> Where exactly is this blinking star? I can't seem to find it..

<comment><AUTHOR> Click the [About Us] panel of the unlabeled pulldown menu on the <https://www.weylandindustries.com/> site, then it's to the lower left of the planet image. It's a HTML site that loads links in-page without changing the url at all, so I can't link directly, hiss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Many of us ham radio operators can hear morse at pretty high speeds but I remember being on a bus with a friend who was well known for being the best of the best. He was staring at an ad for the longest time before I interrupted him to ask why.

There was some morse printed on the ad, just one line, but because we are so used to listening to morse, interpreting it visually took far longer.</comment>


Core flaw of Cookies - <AUTHOR> http://homakov.blogspot.com.es/2013/07/core-flaw-of-cookies.html

<comment><USER2> > The "port" thing. This is not a solved problem yet. If someone owned a ToDo- > App at [https://site.com:4567](https://site.com:4567) he will get all the > cookies for [https://site.com](https://site.com) with every request. Yes, > "httpOnly;". Yes, "Secure;" too. Cookies just don't care about ports.

Notionally, the _domain_ is supposed to identify the extent of a security sandbox. This is why CAs sign an SSL/TLS cert for a domain.

The _port_ and _protocol_ , on the other hand, are just supposed to indicate _services_ provided by programs running within that security sandbox.[1] Since they're within the same sandbox, they can likely talk to (or more importantly, _exploit_ ) one-another. So there's no reason to send your cookie to example.com:80 but not example.com:8080. _Presuming standard old-school UNIX SysV daemons running on the same machine_ (which is, of course, what the W3C and IETF assumed when they dreampt all this up), if one daemon can grab your cookie and stuff it in a session database, then another daemon can just read it back out of that same database.

The fact that within the last 20 years we've switched to protecting processes from one-another by creating separate users for each service -- and within the last 10, with things like OpenVZ containers [or now LXC, or earlier BSD jails] -- doesn't change the fact that "ports on the same domain" still translate semantically to "services running within the same security sandbox, and thus presumed mutually trustworthy."

If you have services that should be thought of as mutually-untrustworthy running on the same machine (even if it's done in a perfectly safe way!) you _should_ route them through load-balancers or somesuch to translate the different ports into different domains/subdomains. Think the subdomains hanging off of Heroku's ".herokuapp.com" domain. On their dyno-node servers, they likely just expose each uploaded user-service on one intranet-public port --but since you see it through a load-balancer, you see a separate domain (and thus a separate security sandbox!), not a separate port.

\---

[1] Reminds me a lot of the security sandbox of a single Erlang node/VM. Every service running within a single node can send messages to, or kill, any other service--so they'd _better_ all be mutually-trustworthy. It seems that UNIX was conceived with a similar architecture (at least for daemons providing public services; user-started programs are a separate matter), but with a physical machine being the quantum of sandboxing.

<comment><AUTHOR> You just made a really long excuse why domain is a security sandbox and domain+port is not.

ALL other wb interactions are relying on Origins. Cookies rely on domains solely, trying to fix http/https shadowing cookies with flags. Instead of treating them as different origins

<comment><USER2> > ALL other wb interactions are relying on Origins.

No; the very first line of my reply was the most important. SSL/TLS rely on domain, not domain+port. If two mutually-untrustworthy services both need to be carried over SSL/TLS, you need to put them on separate domains, full-stop.

If your services aren't using SSL/TLS, that should be your first concern, not cookie origins; it doesn't matter what ports your service is running on if someone has MITMed your machine and put Mark's Malevolent Service on Alice's Allocated Port. Once both services _are_ using SSL/TLS, they literally won't work any more (because you need two separate CA-signed certs) until you move one to a separate domain. Once you've done that, the "port" part of cookie origin is again irrelevant.

In short: security boils down to the weakest link in the system. In a web stack, that's SSL/TLS origin identification. It doesn't matter if you "fix" cookies; as long as CAs keep signing certs for example.com instead of for [https://example.com:443](https://example.com:443), you need to keep mutually- untrustworthy services on separate domains anyway.

<comment><USER3> I could totally be wrong here, this is not my space of expertise (I generally do security work at much lower levels), but it is my understand that these "two mutually-untrustworthy services" that are hypothetically on the same SSL domain are only going to be able to share information via cookies, so cookies are the real problem. For all other purposes, they will be considered separate "origins": they will not be able to share local storage, they won't be able to make HTTP requests via JavaScript to each other, they won't be able to view the contents of each other's iframes or images, they won't have access to each other's message ports... in essence, these are totally different websites for every interaction that the browser even considers enforcing a security boundary for... except cookies, where apparently the port doesn't matter? That seems to be the core problem here, and I don't see how your comments about SSL are addressing actual security boundaries.

<comment><USER2> What I'm really saying is, without SSL, site B can MITM site A, and then ports don't matter, because it looks like you're talking to port 80 or whatever the attacker wanted anyway. With SSL, ports don't matter, because you _can 't run_ mutually-untrustworthy services on the same domain using SSL. So, with or without SSL, ports don't matter.

Here, let me show my work:

1\. All these cross-origin protections the browser uses are basically entirely meaningless without SSL, because you're talking to an unathenticated counterparty. So you've got to assume site A is using SSL+HSTS before a conversation about cross-origin protection even becomes coherent. You've also got to assume that, since site A is using HSTS, site B has to attack it by running SSL as well.

2\. Now, _with_ SSL, you can't _have_ two separate sites on the same domain unless they're mutually-trusting, because they would need to share the same cert--and thus both have copies of the private key used to generate that cert. (Unless a CA screwed up and double-issued a cert, that is.) So you have to assume the attacker is now on a separate domain (or using a self-signed cert) for the conversation about cross-origin protection to _retain_ coherency.

3\. Disallow connections to sites with self-signed certs. (Browsers already do this.)

4\. Do all the cross-origin protection stuff--like not sending cookies--when the domain is different. (Browsers already do this.)

5\. You're done, because the previous assumptions simplified the problem.

Your browser's SSL logic, combined with CAs' certificate-signing policies, have effectively protected you from talking to anything running on the same domain as site A, which doesn't also use the cert site A uses. Everything left is either mutually-trustworthy (that is, has access to site A's SSL private key), or has managed to break your SSL stack somewhere--in which case, we're back to the "you're screwed because you're talking to an unauthenticated counterparty" problem.

<comment><USER3> MITM attacks are only possible if you have a privileged location in the network: "the middle". Further, it is easily possible that neither the people operating Site A nor the people operating Site B have access to the SSL certificate for this domain name, as they might be behind a proxy or load balancer operated by the people holding the domain's SSL certificate. You can't just randomly MITM someone else's traffic: you need all the pieces together.

Your assumptions about what is possible in certain hypothetical situations should not cause all security opportunities to be eroded. I mean, seriously: the logical conclusion to your argument is that all non-SSL websites should just share a global pool of insecure cookies, because it isn't like any of it can be considered secure anyway. The people you are protecting yourself from matters: these attacks are different threat models, and are secured separately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Cookie forcing" is more commonly called "session fixation". You'll find far more about it if you search under that name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not true, two pretty different techniques. Forcing is about dropping HTTP cookies to https using mitm Fixation is session riding

<comment><USER4> I disagree. The point in either case is to get a cookie of the attacker's choosing accepted as the session identifier for the privileged domain.

But even if we consider them separate techniques, the mitigation strategy is identical anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes mitigation is identical

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's nothing.

Ever wonder why GitHub Pages were moved from username.github.com to username.github.io, citing security concerns, but username.blogspot.com continues to be available?

Ever wonder why www.example.co.uk can set cookies on example.co.uk, but not on co.uk?

The answer is that browsers ship something called the _Public Suffix List_ : [http://publicsuffix.org/list/](http://publicsuffix.org/list/), which includes blogspot.com and *.uk, but not github.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah kinda heard about pages thing.

And the other thing is nothing new to me.

If you mean how cookies can be set on subdomains while Origins are completely different you are right. One more badly described in standards feature (sorts by path making cookie tossing very easy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not quite seeing the problem when you can use the secure flag to enable it on only https [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Secure_and_HttpOnly](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Secure_and_HttpOnly)

<comment><USER7> I haven't tested it fully but what if https is running on different port i.e. 443 (It is possible.)

I believe marking cookie secure will only save you from MITM attack, not from attacks where ports are shared in a domain. i.e. cookies will be sent over https only but to a compromised port.

<comment><AUTHOR> Furthermore they will be sent to https but where set on http hacked page. Most of website don't implement protection from forcing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> »Obviously, cookies is the only adequate way to authenticate users.«

What's wrong with HTTP Authentication?

<comment><USER9> Nothing aside from the UI, really. Well, as long as you're not using Basic auth).

If browsers handled HTTP logout nicely, by displaying a prominent logout button somewhere, then developers' jobs would be far easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> UI is not flexible

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I won't lie, I was hoping this would be an analytical look at a flaw in cookies, the tasty treat.</comment>


The oldest, continuously running, independent business in the world? - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi <comment><USER2> I can hear the naysayers now: "100% of all start-ups fail in the first 1500 years."

<comment><USER3> First we should see what happens with these fellows: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoshi_Ryokan>

This whole list is actually quite interesting:

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

<comment><USER4> "At nearly 400 years old, Zildjian is the oldest family-run business in America."

I never would have guessed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a comparable curiosity, see the VOC. From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company> –

"It was the first multinational corporation in the world and the first company to issue stock. It was also arguably the world's first megacorporation, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, negotiate treaties, coin money, and establish colonies."

"The Dutch East India Company remained an important trading concern for almost two centuries, paying an 18% annual dividend for almost 200 years. In its declining years in the late 18th century it was referred to as Vergaan Onder Corruptie (referring to the acronym VOC) which translates as 'Perished By Corruption'."

</comment><comment><USER6> I love that somebody created a Wikipedia category page for "Companies founded in 578". You can guess how many entires it has.

<comment><USER7> Aren't these pages made by bots? Still funny though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what is the secret to keeping these corporations alive.

Some people say that the grandpa build the business, dad grow the business, and the son wreck the business. So these families might have ways or tradition to transmit knowledge and wisdom to their offsprings, or maybe they're just incredibly lucky.

<comment><USER9> Peter Lynch, the investor who used to run Fidelity's Magellan fund used to have a saying that he wanted to invest in businesses that even his dumb nephew could run.

The idea being, businesses that have great fundamental economics and competitive advantages are going to be much more sustainable and thus more likely to compound wealth over time.

If you look at the lists, a lot of these are businesses that are fundamental and cater towards basic human needs/wants. For example, note all the hotels on the list. Maybe they have a fantastic really critical location in a country that has good property laws. That means you can keep transferring it through your bloodline and as long as nobody does anything too stupid (e.g.: take on crazy amounts of debt, go wild and de-worsify) the hotel should continue to exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did a newsletter on family business about eighteen months ago, and came across this article - the 100 oldest companies in the world [http://www.bizaims.com/articles/business+economy/the+100+old...](http://www.bizaims.com/articles/business+economy/the+100+oldest+companies+world)

There's actually a range of industries in the top 10 - construction, inn keeping, viticulture, goldsmithing and others.

</comment><comment><USER11> no way - the Catholic Church has been around for over 2,000 years.

<comment><USER12> I have a question, and I am not trying to be cynical.

What differentiate a profitable church from a company, other than a different legal structure?

<comment><USER13> The "Church" is a government/country, not a corporation.

They've executed (lots of) people with their power via sovereignty.

If you mean the church on the corner, well there is no difference, they are simply a profitable business that pays no taxes (the clergy are often owning nicer homes and driving nicer cars than their patrons).

<comment><USER11> some corporations probably exerted country-like powers, too. Think, for example, the banana companies in Central America.

<comment><USER14> Look no further than U.S. based United Fruit Company:

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

The company responsible for much of the misery throughout Americas.

Today they go by as Chiquita.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_companies>

<comment><USER16> Heh... I was rather hoping to see "Nokia -- cellphones" in the list, but it cuts off just a few years before Nokia's 1865 founding date. Same for Nintendo (1889).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just goes to show, construction will probably not be going away any time soon. Safe bet for a company, same as how land generally holds value (in the extreme long term). People need places to live.

</comment><comment><USER13> What's most interesting is in the end, their culture did them in, not their own work/management ethic.

</comment><comment><USER18> Church

</comment><comment><USER19> yeah 2006 was a tough year.

<comment><USER20> For those who are wondering, this seems to be a reference to the 2006 bankruptcy of Kongō Gumi, the previous record-holder for the oldest continuously-running independent business. ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> sticktoitiveness

</comment><comment><USER22> I pictured something like "Eve's Escorts"

<comment><USER23> "It's the world's newest profession"</comment></comment>


The Goldfish Solution - <AUTHOR> http://blog.goldfishserver.com/post/219544196/the-goldfish-solution

<comment><USER2> the goldfish server allows normal hosted websites add realtime characteristics to their website.</comment>


Best custom ROM for Galaxy S3 - <AUTHOR>

Looking for opinions here: I've got an S3, I've put CM and Slim on my phone, and just seeing if you all can tell what your experiences are, as I always like to hear from people, as opposed to read in an article somewhere. I personally didn't like CM's Kit Kat, but Slim has a nice one. Now I'm going to try out ARHD. What do you all like the best? <comment><USER2> [http://forum.xda- developers.com/galaxy-s3-t-mobile/developme...](http://forum.xda- developers.com/galaxy-s3-t-mobile/development)

I use Stock Mod Rom myself

I don't actually care for themes and fancy stuff I just want something with a working root and 4G compatibility which is exactly what it gives me also saves a shit ton of battery.</comment>


Laid-off IT workers muzzled as H-1B debate heats up - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3027640/it-outsourcing/laid-off-it-workers-muzzled-as-h-1b-debate-heats-up.html <comment><USER2> H1B worker here. I understand the sentiments of being replaced by an H1B worker. I just want to emphasize that the worker is not be blamed for this. The fault is with the H1B system & the consultancies which exploit the H1B system.

1\. The H1B visa is supposed to be a "skilled visa". But currently this visa is purely based on luck and not on skills & that's how many bad apples game the system. The DOL approves LCA based on minimum wages. The consultancies just pay the minimum wages and bring in the H1B employee. This minimum wage should be increased to match the salary of a skilled American worker. So that this exploitation will stop.

eg: (the salaries are approximate)

In Arizona , the minimum annual salary for LCA is 62K, the average salary paid to an American worker is 115K. Consultancy firms like TCS,Infosys and many other local "one room" consultancies pays 62K and bring in H1B employees because 62K is the minimum stipulated by Department of Labor. Increasing this minimum 62K to a realistic salary like 115K will stop this abuse.

2\. There is no easy job portability for H1B workers. Switching jobs on H1B is a precarious act and if something goes wrong, you will have to be out of the country immediately, no grace period. So to be on the safer side, many H1B employees stay silent and accept lowball offers. They also have kids who are going to school and a spouse who cannot work because they are on H4. So H1B workers job portability is not really easy.

Make H1B jobs portable without any strings attached. So that if an H1B employee is paid less and abused by the employer. He/She can switch jobs easily. So this will prevent H1B abuse by the employers and they will think twice before low balling an H1B worker.

3\. H1B is a dual intent visa. Once the employer starts GreenCard process for the worker. The H1B worker is literally on shackles. The rules are so strict that the worker cannot change jobs easily. Cannot accept promotions or title change for years. The worker silently accepts this because he/she has a family & kids to support just like any other American worker.

All I want to convey is: The H1B employee is not be blamed for this. The very rules of the H1B system are being gamed by the consultancy companies from India. Stopping H1B system is not the solution because all the large companies in US has huge dependency on H1B employees.

So to stop this abuse, 1\. Increase the minimum wages to a more realistic one. 2\. Stop lottery system and grant visas based on top salary. 3\. Make the H1B job easily portable.

<comment><USER3> The challenge here will be for international undergrads graduating from US universities. How are they expected to find a job when the minimum salary reqd to get an H1 is $150k+? This is why they have Level 1 Computer Programmers and Level 4 Software Engineers. That Level 1 is meant for undergrads so that they can have a chance to enter the workforce. Of course, Indian companies misuse that a lot and do classify their workers as Level 1 as well to save on cost.

Also, you are not accounting for non tech professions. For example, fashion industry doesn't generally pay as well. Do you expect that none of them are granted an H1 in that case?

The solution is much more complex than you have laid out here..

<comment><USER4> H1-B is supposed to be used when there are no qualified candidates in the US. The US is overflowing with throngs of people capable of being Level 1 computer programmers and working at the bottom of the fashion industry.

No offense at all to those in the US for H1-B, but too many citizens are unemployed or underemployed right this very second.

<comment><USER5> Not true. There are not enough qualified candidates. It still takes a long time to find people in places like New York, Boston and San Fransisco. Not every company is Apple that they attract tons of resumes from prospective candidates.

<comment><USER6> > Not every company is Apple that they attract tons of resumes from > prospective candidates.

If Apple can attract the candidates and you can't, you're not offering enough money.

This is exactly the point about the "engineering shortage". If there is a shortage, salaries should be going up. Since salaries are not going up, there is, by definition, no shortage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a race to the bottom. Most companies today prioritize the satisfaction of the stakeholders as follows:

C-Level Management->Shareholders->Customers->Employees

In this environment, one must be financially prepared to retire early once you reach your 50's because you will likely be replaced.

Replacement by H-1B's is just a symptom of a greater underlying problem: The need to enrich management and shareholders.

Instead of C-corporations which put profit above everything else, we need more public benefit corporations (B-corps) which have balanced priorities.

<comment><USER8> And which investor, when put before the choice of supplying capital to a C-corp or a B-corp, will willingly choose the entity that admits having his ROI as a lower priority than the other, all other things being equal ?

By this logic, we could see B-corps in niches where capital is not a strategic advantage. The search for these niches is left as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER9> The public absolutely would invest if it meant these B-corp's have solid, steady, long term focused growth.

<comment><USER10> or C-corps taxes more and international tax avoidance loopholes are closed. But i guess both of these would be hard to make happen

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> H1-B and Outsourcing to offshore are two completely different things. As outsourcing means hand part of a job to contactor firm which could either be local or foreign. Foreign contracting firm don't need visas, and local contracting firm can either hire Americans or sponsor visas.

The real problem is that a foreign worker should not get paid less doing the same job American do. That will kill the incentive and it's also very inhumane and racist to pay less for the same work based just on citizenship.

<comment><USER12> It's never made sense that H1B Visas are awarded by lottery instead of salary. In a lottery system a company can game the system by applying for thousands of visas.

If they were to do it based on highest salary it would offer U.S. workers more pay protection, and it would still allow companies to bring over the high- quality talent they need.

<comment><USER13> The problem with that is that it would immediately prioritise areas with a high cost of living - San Francisco, New York, etc.

<comment><USER14> Yes, if companies in lower cost of living areas want more people, they will have to increase how much they pay; if they can't match "market" H1B rates they could increase their pay until they can recruit people from other areas of the US. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

<comment><USER13> Seems like a way of discouraging any non-Silicon Valley parts of the country, which already have fewer developers available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I'm reading the situation correctly, the foreign workers are NOT on H1-B, but on internal "company transfer" visas. The way it works (and someone can correct me if I'm wrong) is that the company, say TCS, brings in workers from India in the B1 (?) visa category, which is unlimited and for internal company transfers. It then sends these workers (who are still working for TCS) to the client's site. This way, they avoid the H1-B mess altogether.

<comment><USER16> L1 is the internal company transfer. It's actually a quite nice visa, spouses can work on that visa.

<comment><USER17> I think it doesn't have a market wage requirement though. I'm not sure.

<comment><USER18> It does not, however as of 2012 it is quite hard to prove that the worker skills are essential to the company in a way that only transfer will fill the skill gap. Also L1s are not allowed to change employers so de facto it's an indentured servitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not sure how a simple statement of, "I was a full-time employee of company XYZ until I was laid off, with severance, after training my H1B contractor replacement," is at all disparaging. It is simply a statement of fact.

<comment><USER20> I assume you're talking about these paragraphs:

> _Leo Perrero, an IT worker at Disney who was laid off after training his > foreign replacement, says non-disparagement agreements hinder the debate > over the H-1B visa. Without such agreements, "you would have a lot more > people speaking out - real human beings with real stories, not just > anonymous persons speaking out," said Perrero._

> _" Their freedom of speech is being taken away from them with the non- > disparagement agreements," he said._

Stating a fact is probably not disparaging. (Not a lawyer; I dunno.) But that's not a debate, either. If you want to debate about it, you basically have to say that this act hurt you, which may count as disparaging or discrediting your former employer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You do wonder how much of the "silence" on this issue is due to all major US media outlets now being owned by large corporations who don't want this issue to see the light of day.

To wit, how much of the American government's dysfunction is made possible by today's captive press?

<comment><USER22> Depends if the people running the press sides with Government A or Government B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You know I think this has been a debate for longer than just H-1B. Take consulting companies and the recent huge expansion of companies like TATA/TCS.

I've worked for two companies now that completely replaced their operations teams with TCS, and it's been a disaster each time, but it's cheaper and the tradeoff in ops quality doesn't matter when you have millions in labor off the bottom line instantly.

It's much easier to see that than any negative perception or lost sales.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is the US Government not also to blame for this? I had thought that one of the major rules about immigrant worker visas was that they can only be granted for workers whom are doing a job for which no available citizen worker can be found.

<comment><USER2> " no available citizen worker can be found. "

H1B stipulates this. Here is how the companies work around this. The ADs that they put for this position should have the salary too. The salary will be the bare minimum specified by the Department of Labor for that work location. eg: Arizona I think its not more than 62K per year. There will not be any American worker who will be willing to work for that. So the AD will yield zero American applicants for that position and thus they hire an H1B worker.

If your company has H1B workers, go to to your company's public notice boards usually in the break rooms. You can find notices like "Labor condition application for a foreign worker". Take a look at the second page or the third one and see the salary for that position. Usually it will be a bare minimum or minimum + ~10K.

<comment><USER25> I'm pretty sure you're conflating H-1Bs and Green Card applications. H-1Bs do not have this stipulation, and you're not required to put out ads for the position (like you do for green card labor certs).

The only stipulations for H-1Bs are that you work in a specialized field as described by USCIS, that you have the requisite degrees (and that the position requires those degrees), and that you're paid market salary. Whether the "market salary" describes the actual market is another issue, and should be enforced by the government.

<comment><USER2> You are right. In the case of LCAs, the employer do not have to prove that they did not find a qualified citizen worker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can you imagine being forced to train your replacement?

Holy hell. I couldn't do it, I'd starve first.

And can you imagine sitting with and being trained by someone that you knew you were causing them to lose their job?

Corporations making people hate each other, it's the American way.

Those H1B replacements should be keeping those American flags - what other country would allow this kind of nonsense to happen.

<comment><USER27> Or you can negotiate a nice bonus/severance and good references for the favor of training your replacement, provided that you are willing to quit on the spot.

<comment><USER28> Good luck with that. If you're being laid off and your replacement is already lined up for you to train, you're not really in a very good negotiating position. Plus, a company that would put you in that situation probably doesn't understand or care about the value of your knowledge before they've already felt the pain of losing you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> These companies are doing something blatantly illegal.

The H1-B program was designed to prevent abuses like these. It looks like enforcement is sorely lacking.

</comment><comment><USER30> How does someone sniff out companies like this during an interview or pre- screen?

<comment><USER7> It's really hard to tell without working there as employee. What most people do not realize, is that you need to be in a position to quit a job if you find it doesn't work for you. Too many people live paycheck to paycheck and are not in a position to do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It should be absolutely illegal to place any kind of condition on severance pay.

<comment><USER7> The main reason why severance is offered is to keep people from portraying the company in a bad light. If anti-disparagement clauses were made illegal, fewer companies would offer severance.

<comment><USER28> > The main reason why severance is offered is to keep people from portraying > the company in a bad light. If anti-disparagement clauses were made illegal, > fewer companies would offer severance.

Then let's make anti-disparagement clauses illegal and severance packages mandatory.

Companies afraid of bad press may then be motivated to be _even more_ generous than they would have otherwise. Not only would they have to pay you enough to sign, they'd have to pay you enough to make you happy enough that you don't speak against them. They'd only have a carrot but no stick.

Frankly, if a company doesn't want to be portrayed in a bad light, it should endeavor to avoid doing things worthy of disparagement.

<comment><USER7> I agree 100% on your last sentence. As for making severance statutory in the US; that will be a uphill battle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The major issue with the H-1B isn't the Indian consultancies, who contribute to some of the more egregious abuses, but the regular tech companies: The Intels, Microsofts, IBMs, EMCs, Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, etc. It's not that they are replacing employees that are citizens it's that they are preferring the H-1B and OPT for open positions.

Modern tech corporations have been automated to the point that the biggest cost is labor, so they are now spending a lot of effort to address this cost. The claim that there is a STEM shortage is a myth invented by these corporations in order to lobby and expand these programs. They operate within the letter of the law but not in the spirit, with misleading job advertisements and preferential hiring practices. This becomes a self fullfilling prophecy in that the smart people who are paying attention are driven away from technology.

<comment><USER33> Not true, the numbers clearly show that its consultancy companies that take up the vast majority of the H1B quota.

[http://foreign-employment.findthedata.com/](http://foreign- employment.findthedata.com/)

Microsoft is the first big 'tech' company on the list at no. 11 with 3600 applications. Compare that to Infosys which had over 23,000 applications, or Tata with 14,000.

Its also conspicuous that the consultancy companies pay much less and seem to apply for drastically less green card labour certs as a percentage of H1B's than the tech companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> In singapore, work permit class are all based on salary you earn and associated rights. EP1 above 8k you can apply long term visa for your parents. EP2 above 6k you can think about applying permanent residency. SP you cannot bring your own spouse. WP you cannot marry to local.

It is a bit brutal. but effective.

IT outsourcing is like training you while you on pay. once entry level engineers get experienced and they will ask to migrate to US. eventually a local hire become out of job.

Things I don't understand is why all these IT jobs require degree. why cannot we train school dropout to do the works? don't listen to outsource company when they say we have 80% graduate/16% masters/4% PHD etc. see what skills you really want.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm completely in favor of H-1B. I've been trying to hire an American CEO for years, but there is a critical shortage of CEOs (willing to work for a reasonable salary). I'm certain there are plenty of MBAs we could import to fix this shortage.

<comment><USER36> _willing to work for a reasonable salary_

Reasonable salary to you is different from reasonable salary to a highly qualified CEO. Also, you should revisit your idea of qualifications. There are many VP/SVP level folks who are fully qualified to be CEO given the chance. CEOs weren't born CEOs. There were promoted to that position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This video came out yesterday, about immigration. I think it's worth a watch, and the economics behind it are good:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg)

My views:

[http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and- jobs...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs/)

<comment><USER32> He lost me with his first false equivalency.

To keep with his basketball analogy, imagine a basketball league with a separate farm system. There is an unspoken agreement that the farm system will train basketball players and when the major league needs them the farm system will get a percentage of the players salary. Now the major league teams are using players that didn't go through the farm system, and are only playing garbage time (80% of H-1Bs are paid on the lower 2 tiers of the DOL pay scale).

So young people and families see that the farm system isn't really all that viable and so they either don't participate or chose a different sport all together. Ultimately the farm system dries up...

I also skimmed your views, and I'd like to address the straw man in your moral section. People that are against H-1B aren't trying to keep out other people. I'd prefer that if we do indeed have a shortage which requires special immigration visas that we have actual hard evidence of the shortage first and if the data shows it then to focus on encouraging employers and education institutions to train citizens first. If that can't be done, I'd rather we automatically give citizenship to those that we deem are vital to our economy instead of keeping them in immigration limbo that is the H-1B system.

<comment><USER38> > I also skimmed your views, and I'd like to address the straw man in your > moral section. People that are against H-1B aren't trying to keep out other > people. I'd prefer that if we do indeed have a shortage which requires > special immigration visas that we have actual hard evidence of the shortage > first and if the data shows it then to focus on encouraging employers and > education institutions to train citizens first. If that can't be done, I'd > rather we automatically give citizenship to those that we deem are vital to > our economy instead of keeping them in immigration limbo that is the H-1B > system.

Yes, but the majority of people against H-1B are not proposing or pushing a feasible alternative. Let me just state a short argument here: currently ,there is no simple way for a programmer being offered a $300k salary to immigrate to the US within a reasonable timeframe (let's say <6 months). EB-x will take years depending on your country of origin (and still takes 1-2years even without waiting, just for the processing time alone). Said programmer will not qualify for O-1 (O-1 requires specific types of achievement/ popularity). L-1 requires you to stay with the company abroad for at least a year.

<comment><USER32> At 300k the O-1 visa should be doable. Peter Roberts, an immigration attorney for SV startups that did an AMA here a few weeks ago seems to be able to do them. Here is a blog of someone who went through the process as essentially a glorified programmer[0]

Either way I'd rather not keep a broken system just because it works some of the time. 80% of H-1B use the lower 2 pay tiers, so your 300k programmer is an outlier when it comes to H-1B.

[0] [http://www.dirkdekok.com/2013/08/my-o1-visa-story-and-how- it...](http://www.dirkdekok.com/2013/08/my-o1-visa-story-and-how-it-almost- killed-my-startup-mobtest/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love that a power company is outsourcing its IT. Isn't that a security concern?

<comment><USER40> Not really, foreigners governments are minions of the US Military, it just for war reasons they are painted as real enemies. In reality any country fighting the US in any way would be like being a skinny kid who fights Mike Tyson in his prime and Mike Tyson has a bat and a gun and the referee is Tyson Mother.

<comment><USER41> The problem with that approach is that while Mike Tyson keeps flexing his muscles and banging heads around the neighbourhood, some scrawny nerdy type is quietly toying in his basement with ultralight drones and shrapnel grenades.

I think if most people around here agrees that Big Old Industries can be "disrupted", there is no reason to think that the same cannot happen to Big Old Geopolitics.

Not to say that Tyson's mom does not have her own nerds working in her own garage, but the scenario is probably more complex that what you made it out to be.

<comment><USER42> Time-frames. You imply major changes in geopolitics which typically need multiples of 100s of years. No body can plan for that long a period - they can sure pretend to. Such changes, often come undetected until we are well into or past them, so useful for anthropoligists and historians.

Another example of a still larger time-frame are geographical and ecological changes (multiples of 10,000 years)

IMHO, the GP's argument is relevant to time-frame of politics/policies in a few years/decades. Post 2nd world war and more so end of cold war era. Its US which rules the world, and so GP is quite right (found the Tyson example, hilarious).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why do I have a nasty feeling that Disney's severance contract was written by a H1-B lawyer? Whoever it is I think will be looking for a new job if they aren't already.

<comment><USER44> I think that's unlikely since it _doesn 't_ include the prohibitions against disclosure or disparagement common in these agreements.</comment></comment>


Ask PG: Can Y Combinator do 1000 startups a year? - <AUTHOR>

So, the State of the Union speech just passed and I'm wondering if innovation and entrepreneurship is the way for the U.S. to grow it's way out of this slow economy.  So, Paul here's a question:<p>If the U.S. government was willing to give an innovation/entrepreneurship grant to Y Combinator (of course this is all hypothetical) of a significant amount, then how many startups could Y Combinator theoretically fund per year?  And could it make a significant impact on the U.S. economy? <comment><USER2> We're not limited by money. The limit is the number of good applicants. We've always funded between 2.5 and 3.5% of groups that apply-- not as a conscious plan, but it has always worked out that way. So we've grown as the applicant pool has.

I don't know how we'd have to change to fund 1000 startups a year. We don't think that far ahead. It would be premature design. But we could grow another 2 or 3x without dramatic changes.

<comment><USER3> I think past a certain point, each additional startup funded would decrease the value of YC to founders as more and more startups have to compete for a finite amount of pg's time and investor dollars.

I suppose the solution is bringing on more partners and building the YC brand to attract more angels. But I can't imagine that scaling to 1000 startups.

<comment><USER2> The question is, where is that point? We're already past where I would have put it if I had to guess when we started, and the startups are doing better than ever.</comment></comment></comment>


SICP taught by Abelson and Sussman [video] - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/video-lectures/1a-overview-and-introduction-to-lisp/ <comment><USER2> I only watched the first 12 minutes or so (thus far!), but ... just wow! I originally took a course at the U of Mn where SICP was taught as intro to programming and intro to OO programming (yep, OO programming with Scheme, I have a very lucid memory of some dude standing up and complaining about learning OO programming using Scheme vs. C++ (circa 1992 mind you) because "who will ever use Scheme in their programming career" and the professor (Dr. Maria Gini) had to ask the student to "keep an open mind" and all I could think was "hey, why not?").

This class was the most mind expanding class I've ever taken. I have read SICP three times since the early 90's and use it as a reference _to this day_ (who else was re-reading the SICP streams chapter when Java 8 was recently announced? /raise).

Anyway, I'm _way_ off track here, but whatever. Having watched only the first 12 minutes of this video ... if Dr. Gini had this influence on me and now seeing this ... it's a huge step up! Listening/seeing Hal Abelson talk about programming and referencing the Egyptians ... I was just shaking my head, he's right to cross off computer science, it's not about that, it's _bigger_.

I can't wait to watch the rest. And I'm going to make my team watch this. As much as I loved SICP as taught by Dr. Gini, this is way beyond her abilities as much as it pains me to say that.

<comment><USER3> Yes! I also was exposed to SICP by Maria Gini! Great class, great professor.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thought others might also enjoy watching the series instead of reading it -- I personally greatly enjoyed the lectures, and they serve very well as an overview before a deep dive into the book (at the very least).

Always amazes me how slowly computer science moves, despite how fast technology is moving

<comment><USER4> well why things that were relevant 20+ years ago would not be today?

SICP is still the best introduction to computer science. The problem is the reliance on scheme/lisp languages to explain stuffs. it could be taught in almost anything that supports basic FP,it's even taught in JS !

[http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs1101s/sicp/](http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs1101s/sicp/)

<comment><USER5> > SICP is still the best introduction to computer science. The problem is the > reliance on scheme/lisp languages to explain stuffs. it could be taught in > almost anything that supports basic FP,it's even taught in JS !

The fact that Scheme uses Lisp is what makes SICP work at all. The course would be difficult or impossible to complete using most other languages. The keyword is: homoiconicity, the "code=data" property of Lisp.

Most of the course focuses on writing interpreters and compilers for Lisp and making variations on it (lazy evaluation, non-deterministic). This would be very painful if a non-homoiconic language is used.

And indeed, the "JavaScript version" you posted is very painful to read. It's difficult to understand how the data structures used by the interpreter are related to JavaScript code. And the code most definitely is not idiomatic JavaScript. I would not consider this an improvement over the original Scheme version.

<comment><USER6> > The course would be difficult or impossible to complete using most other > languages. The keyword is: homoiconicity, the "code=data" property of Lisp.

But if that is the case, wouldn't SICP be less language agnostic since (most of) the concepts taught cannot be universally applied to non-homoiconic languages?

<comment><USER7> The problems can be solved in other languages, the tools are just clunkier. Lisp lets you solve the hard problems simply, and the solutions (not their expression) are what matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is notable about this video series that these lectures were given to an audience of professional programmers (staff of Hewlett-Packard), not first year students taking their first baby steps in programming.

It's nice that the video moves at a comfortable pace and doesn't get stuck explaining some details which most of the audience finds dead obvious.

<comment><USER8> My understanding is that their lectures to MIT freshmen were substantially similar in pace and content, but just spaced out over a longer period of time.

Schools like MIT tend to assume that students are sufficiently mathematically sophisticated and technically competent, and willing to work hard to keep up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0m6...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0m6hoOelZH8#t=2083s) A great little moment from this class.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link. Last time someone posted about those courses i started watching them, but i didn't went up to there.

My problem now is that this _really_ made me want to start coding my own Lisp.

<comment><USER11> Thankfully chapter 4 demonstrates how to do just that! Want to make it lazy like Haskell? Syntax different from Scheme? You are limited only by your imagination. Round that off with the last chapter from Let Over Lambda and you can add in "or make it like Forth"!

<comment><USER10> One thing i wonder though: i first wanted to code that lisp in haskell (learning two languages in one), but i'm not quite sure it's such a good idea, now that i've learned about homoiconicity.

Any advice ?

<comment><USER12> You are one courageous individual. But you are not the only one. [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours) has got you covered.

<comment><USER10> absolutely fantastic ! Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There seems to be some psychological barrier that prevents people from learning Lisp (or Scheme for that matter).

i think that the problem is that of nesting parenthesis; Multiple nestings of parenthesis assume that the information hidden in the inner levels of parenthesis nesting is somehow different/or hidden from the outer levels.

I think that a complicated system must combine multiple level of 'truths'; a fact that is definitely true on a lower level might end up as being of less significance on a higher level (or vice versa - the process of debugging turns designs on to its heads; some philosophers (see Hegel) call that 'dialectics').

Now people who are used to censorship have no problem with that ! A person who is supposed to hide his stuff - he is a person who must be afraid of external censorship; this person is used to social hierarchy; he knows that the lower level (his personal self) knows things that are different from what is regarded as public truth.

Now assume that society opened up (somehow) since the fifties; people who grow up during later timers are less accustomed to multiple levels of truths; therefore this hierarchy of parenthesis will be regarded as oppressive/disconcerting to subsequent generations.

<comment><USER12> So North Koreans make the best Lisp programmers? Colour me doubtful.

<comment><USER13> North Koreans might be good Lisp programmers; however they might have other, more pressing problems - like staying alive under this monstrous regime.

There are other societies that had censorship, maybe to a lesser extent than North Korea; I guess that once upon a time people in the US did rely on the Tube for information (that was before the net) the tube is a centralized source of information, its editors were subject to some control; so I guess that censorship was quite real during that period.

You might listen to the following song for some more context: "White Houses" Eric Burdon & The Animals [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mefFJFZydG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mefFJFZydG4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I watched several MOOCs and OCW courses but this one was the first and the best I've ever came across. Most of the MOOC videos are still boring and I need to speed them up to 1.25x but SICP was so great, I could spend hours talking to my peers about every episode! My notes of it are here: [http://devblog.me/sicp.html](http://devblog.me/sicp.html)

<comment><USER15> For me Dan Grossman's course on Programming Languages takes the cake. Best course I've ever done. Taught SML, Racket and Ruby enough to touch on so many concepts (FP, recursion, algebraic datatypes, polymorphism,... the list goes on). For the assignments a small programming langauge was implemented in almost all of these, showing different ways of solving the expression problem. It was amazing.

<comment><USER16> Completely agree. I've done Scala, Algorithms, and one other and Dan's course stands out for its interest, enthusiasm and clarity.

Plus it uses functional programming! What's not to like.

<comment><USER15> Haha exactly the same 3 courses I did last year. Doing any currently?

<comment><USER16> Nah, having a "summer break _+_ " that's extended a bit longer ;). I plan to do a crypto course at some stage.

      + Southern hemisphere

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Other MIT Open Courseware:

Recently my memories of the first time I saw linear programming were triggered- those few pages in an algebra book were the last time for many many years that I felt "wow this is so cool" about math and I think part of my loss of interest during high school and pretty much entirely by college was that the subject was never revisited and instead there was a lot of looking stuff up in tables and not much with systems.

Anyway, I've been watching Gilbert Strang teach Linear Algebra on OCW. It makes me wish Abelson and Sussman could remake the SICP videos with another 25 years of in the classroom experience - Strang's presentation is masterful. And linear algebra after all these years is still awesome

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear- algebra-...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra- spring-2010/index.htm)

<comment><USER18> I've been doing the same.

It really strikes me how amazing the MIT professors are. In contrast, most of the Coursera courses have me tearing my hair out. Pet theories on how to structure a course, mumbling, stuttering, essentially reading power point slides - I am so glad school is a few decades behind me.

But in contrast, Strang, Sussman, et. al make the topic come alive. Despite having taught the same course over and over they can put themselves into the mindset of the student. Beyond that, they find the beauty in the topic, and are able to communicate it to inexperienced freshmen.

<comment><USER19> I mostly agree, but I want to give props to Dan Grossman's Programming Languages course on Coursera. It's the only Coursera course I was actually able to see through (out of 6 or so over the last couple years), and I learned quite a bit.

<comment><USER17> I took the second edition of Grossman's course and it was very good. Kickzales's _Introduction to Program Design_ was also good as was Pascal Van Hentenryck's _Discrete Optimization_ \- his enthusiasm is infectious.

Odersky himself is teaching _Functional Programming in Scala_ later this month, and I'm looking forward to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the set of lectures that made me fall back in love with computer science. The enthusiasm and "clever troll" attitude of Sussman is infectious.

This is our Principia.

</comment><comment><USER21> I want to start working through SICP again beginning these Easter holidays. I tried it before using Vim and and ran the REPL in a different terminal. This really sucked and I gave it up as a bad job. I decided that Emacs is probably a better "development environment" to try and go through SICP so I did this:

Got Emacs "pimped" [1] enough to behave like Vim but Emacs enough to use Geiser and connect to Racket with Neil Van Dyke's SICP package. (Emacs prelude, Eviled, Solarized and installed packages: geiser, quack, sicp (M-x info-display-manual sicp)).

Gonna see how it goes this time round.

[1] [https://github.com/humana/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/persona...](https://github.com/humana/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/personal/custom.el)

<comment><USER22> You can always use Dr Racket. I'm a vim user but find DrRacket fine for doing iterative "practice" with a REPL.

<comment><USER23> DrRacket is not as easy to customize as Emacs is and it, by default, offers a different mode of exploratory programming than the one SLIME users expect. In DrRacket you don't evaluate a single form, you just execute a module and then are dropped into it's namespace. If you change a definition in your module you need to re-read all of it or alternatively copy-paste it into the REPL, which is not convenient. I found that the SLIME/Geiser/Emacs model is better for really tiny stuff, while DrRacket's is better for longer scripts, where there are many dependencies.

Anyway, while both ways are ok, they are not exactly equivalent - is what I wanted to say.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure if this matches your exact needs, but there is a way to achieve this functionality in DrRacket:

[http://docs.racket- lang.org/drracket/Keyboard_Shortcuts.html...](http://docs.racket- lang.org/drracket/Keyboard_Shortcuts.html?q=drracket#%28part._.Sending_.Program_.Fragments_to_the_.R.E.P.L%29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone interested, Paul Snyder and I are currently running a SICP study group. We have an online meeting and in person meetings in Philadelphia and King of Prussia. We are currently doing one minor section every month, which averages out to roughly one homework question every 3 days. For anyone interested we will help you get setup and started, no prior programming needed.

We are running section 1.3 this month, so there is not much to catch up! Also, anyone who wants to work it their own pace is welcome too!

[http://www.meetup.com/Clojadelphia/events/172933722/](http://www.meetup.com/Clojadelphia/events/172933722/)

Paul hasn't put up the info for the 1.3 online session yet, join the Clojadelphia group to get updates when he does

<comment><USER25> I had to re-read the 'King of Prussia' several times (O_o) before Googling it up :)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, silly name, we also have a Bala Cynwyd, Conshohocken, and Bryn Mawr all right next to each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am doing the chapter on register machines now. I love the diagrams that show the controller and the data path of the machine. See [http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/5_002e1.xhtml#g_t5_002...](http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/5_002e1.xhtml#g_t5_002e1_002e1)

Scratch and Quartz composer show code in a graphical way. Are there examples of languages that show the data path in a similarly graphical way?

I would love to see how variables relate to each other and other functions (the data path) separated from the order in which these operations actually happen (the controller). It would be an interesting way to debug. For example, variables that get assignment but are never read would be glaringly obvious.

<comment><USER27> While it's _very_ purpose specific, you might check out Unreal Engine 4's visual scripting in Blueprint.

[https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/U...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/UserGuide/index.html)

For a quick primer: white connections represent the flow of execution, and have a variety of flow control nodes (Switch, Gate, DoOnce, etc) to direct execution around the graph. The other color coded lines represent the usual int/float/bool/string types, as well as some specialized things like rotators/translators/objects.

The debugging is fantastic, and sounds like something you might be interested in. You can set breakpoints on nodes and step through execution. Hovering the mouse over any variable will tell you what it's currently set to, or you can mark a value to be displayed next to its node in the graph. Take a look here for more: [https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/U...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/UserGuide/Debugging/index.html)

You'd need a $20/month subscription to get UE, but you can cancel it immediately if you don't mind not getting updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Watched the lectures a couple years ago while reading the book.. I highly recommend it to everyone looking to Be A Better Programmer. Ironically, people who would benefit the most from reading the book seem not interested by it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Not sure if this could be useful to someone here, but just in case – I've created a Russian version of the first 1/5th of this course: [https://hexlet.org/course/sicp/](https://hexlet.org/course/sicp/)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is the best course I've ever seen

</comment><comment><USER31> Eyebrows for emphasis! :D</comment>


The Price of GPL - <AUTHOR> http://bitsplitting.org/2016/10/30/the-price-of-gpl/ <comment><USER2> " if you want to link your software with GPL code, you must also make your software's source code available. "

Actually, no. The main question is whether it makes your software a _derived_ _work_ or not, in the eyes of a copyright judge.

The notion of derived work is not related to the size of the code being included. A small function could still make your software a derived work, and a big library could still not make your software a derived work of it. And in any case, it's up to the judge to decide.

But otherwise, indeed, linking with GPL code is asking for a judge to possibly force you to deliver your sources.

<comment><USER3> GPL explicitly cover the library case, a linked library must be relased under GPL too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Actually, even if it's a license violation only copyright owner (so wordpress contributors) can enforce it.</comment>


The story of Apollo 17, and why we haven't been back to the Moon - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/the-real-story-of-apollo-17-and-why-we-never-went-ba-1670503448

<comment><USER2> Extensive discussion from 24 hours ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749619)</comment>


Latest Snowden Leaks: FBI Targeted Muslim-American Lawyers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/snowden-leaks/

<comment><USER2> Very strange that this story is on front page instead of the original. [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/07/09/under-...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/07/09/under- surveillance/)

neutralitymentality said that his post of the source story was taken down on twitter.

[https://twitter.com/BenDoernberg/status/486737087992201216](https://twitter.com/BenDoernberg/status/486737087992201216)

<comment><USER3> That post fell off the front page because it was flagged by users. Same with the current post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why does Wired hyphenate and reverse the term "American Muslim"? "Muslim" isn't a nationality or ethnicity. No-one says "Christian-American" or "Hindu- American".

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008025)

<comment><USER6> Look at that thread; it's shockingly bad, almost a perfect illustration of the problem of political threads on HN.

In particular: look for the (prominent!) long-form anti-Islam comments. Notice how some of them _aren 't illegible light grey_ \--- despite large numbers of downvotes, they sustained enough upvotes to stay viable on the thread!</comment></comment>


Android Market Gets A Badly-Needed Facelift - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/android-market-gets-a-badly-needed-facelift-but-web-purchasing-is-still-mia/

<comment><USER2> Do any of the mobile app stores have an API?

Developers could come up with better app stores that drive more sales. Bonus points if they get a small percentage of every sale that flows through their app-store app. "Let a thousand flowers bloom and we'll see what flourishes."

<comment><USER3> I wonder what <http://www.appbrain.com/> uses to access Android Market data? It must have some sort of API to get the new apps on there, they update very quickly. Older apps less so, it takes a day or so to sync up.

There's also <http://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/> (OT: just me, or is the new Google Code look much more confusing/cluttered?), but that is not official in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> App developers can also post an youtube video to demo the app. they currently only have the option to add pictures to the purchase screen!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm excited for the update but it doesn't seem too aesthetically pleasing in the screenshots... maybe it's the lime green.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use as a whiteboard replacement for distributed developers? - <AUTHOR> What are you using in lieu of a whiteboard for developers collaborating in a distributed setting that you find works well?
The ideal solution for us would have a short learning curve (less than 5 minutes), be almost as time efficient as a whiteboard (minimal fiddling), and not require any special equipment.
Standard equipment in this case would be a touch screen phone and a laptop with a touchpad (no touch screen) and a camera. While it would be nice if the results were pretty enough to keep around, if trade-offs must be made, we have a strong preference for ephemeral use cases. SaaS is the ideal delivery model.
I know I'm asking for a lot, but we're ultimately going to have to come up with something that works for us very soon, so hearing about any setup you're proud of is helpful, even if it isn't quite the (impossible?) "ideal solution" above.
I'm sure there are a few other teams struggling with this as they ramp up distributed collaboration in light of the COVID-19 outbreak, so I figure I'd ask here! <comment><USER2> We use the whiteboard feature on Zoom. I prefer a wacom tablet and others prefer an ipad with a stylus. Not sure if both of those violate your goal. The thing is: it is hard to draw with a touch pad, it is hard to draw with a mouse, it is hard to draw with limited surface real estate.

Pretty much anything that you can get a shared "doodle" board will work. There are online cooperative doodling programs that can be leveraged. Just remember to do screen grabs before you toss what y'all drew :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Although we have plenty of whiteboards around my workplace, we almost never use them. We've found that (for us), they are more of a hindrance than help.

Instead, we use desktop sharing combined with a text editor and/or a graphics program to do what we used to do on whiteboards. It's just easier for us, and makes it easy to send everyone copies of what was written.

If my employer starts enforcing a work-at-home rule (right now, such a thing isn't in the cards), our workflow on this wouldn't change at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> We have a whiteboard at the office. I have a whiteboard at home, too. No learning curve, literally as time efficient as a whiteboard since it's a whiteboard, and doesn't require any special equipment.

It's 2 metres x 1 metre. I took an ugly frame off the wall and put it in its place. Installation time: 30 seconds. Cost: 35 euros. Not a SaaS, but keeping the same "stack".

</comment><comment><USER5> This thread may be of some usefulness

[https://twitter.com/jeff_weinstein/status/123474490458191052...](https://twitter.com/jeff_weinstein/status/1234744904581910528?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER6> Room.sh might be what you are looking for. It does a lot more than whiteboarding and is very easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER7> Miro works really well.</comment>


Ask HN: What would be your approach to make maths easy* for age group 5-25 yrs? - <AUTHOR> Not just simple maths but complex concepts taught in high-school and at university level.<p>*easy ==> easy, exciting and approachable <comment><USER2> ++ No matter the age, telling Math history could be useful.

Some stories are just fun and could change the mood in a classroom! Did you knew Évariste Galois, one of the most influential mathematicians of all time, died very young in a duel? What about Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy?

But more importantly some of these stories could help to understands math problems better. Why people tried to solve this particular problem? And how did they manage to solve it?

++ Another useful thing would be this: making problems less abstract! Telling students about why this formula is important? Which physics problem it can solve? How could be related to real life? etc.

++ Fun math problems could be useful too. Raymond Smullyan books are an example. But I'm sure there are lots of other books...

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know any online resources for this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Vedic Maths

Dropping some links:

[https://www.iiva.in/](https://www.iiva.in/)

[https://www.vedicmaths.org/](https://www.vedicmaths.org/)

[https://vedicmathschool.org/](https://vedicmathschool.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Lower student to teacher ratio. That way you'll get faster feedback as to what's not working in any particular case. Let the student tell you what they need.

Practical examples, like word problems, but concrete.

</comment><comment><USER5> Bootstrap [https://www.bootstrapworld.org](https://www.bootstrapworld.org)

Or ask them what they want to know and work it out with them, self directed learning.</comment>


Ask HN: JavaScript Devs, have you ever built message driven systems? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on a service bus for Node (https://github.com/node-ts/bus) for writing message driven node apps, and am really keen to learn from JavaScript/Node devs what your experience has been like writing distributed/scalable node systems (message/http/other).
Message based systems offer a lot of benefits around decoupling, reliability and durability; yet it doesn't seem to be as popular in Node as it is in say .NET or Java.
Do you think this is because there's less in terms of framework support, because node isn't used on larger systems, or something else completely? <comment><USER2> Because of RabbitMQ, Kafka, nats, cloud vendor solutions etc.

There is a lot of effort that goes into building and maintaining such a system. JavaScript devs are a demographic less interested in building such things, rather than using a working solution.</comment>


Show HN: Online Data Science Courses for $10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamleada.com

<comment><USER2> I find it striking the amount of testimonials from one time commenters. It looks like one of the accounts was even created to post a testimonial.

<comment><USER3> I can assure you I have no relationship with this company. I have been wanting to learn Python for a while and I just saw the number of testimonials and figured worst thing that can happen is I lose 10 dollars so I assigned up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please let us know what you think! My emails firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My statistics class at Cal requires the use of R for statistical analysis. Professor wasn't the best, and the GSI was even worse. Took the "Intro to Machine Learning in R." Super helpful and made working with R in class much simpler. Thanks for helping my grade jump a letter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! Glad we could help :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been an avid user of Leada for a few months now, and must say that the one-on-one time I receive with the founders is very helpful. It's a crisp and effective digital classroom at my fingertips. As a beginner, it has been a very manageable and powerful tool to an introduction of a whole new way of thinking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really great instructors and about as "real world" in terms of subject matter as you can get in a classroom.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Super impressed with it. I've been using it for a few months and this product has evolved quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In this data-driven world, I would love to learn more about this. Especially we are about to launch a new product, A/B test will definitely help us to understand users more. Thanks for making effort on this subject!

</comment><comment><USER9> Is "data science" a new hipper name for "statistics"?

<comment><USER10> Data Science can mean machine learning, statistics, "data engineering" (the IT side of Big Data), SQL Monkey, data cleaning, data mining, data analytics, data visualization, etc.

So its like statistics, except there may not be math or statistics. Depends heavily on the role.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would add "domain expertise" but other than that I totally agree!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the founders of Leada here, any and all feedback would be appreciated but especially UX and if any part of the on-boarding process is confusing would be great!

</comment><comment><USER11> I've just bought one of the courses. This looks awesome :)

Is there an easy way to buy courses as a gift for someone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! There currently is not but email me firstname.lastname@example.com and we can figure something out!

<comment><USER11> Hey Brian,

It was mostly curiosity, but thanks anyway!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Took a class on A/B testing...paid off during an interview for data analyst position

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear! Glad we could help :)

<comment><USER3> I just signed up for a class based users comments on this post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome!</comment>


Turing Pi Cluster Board Lets You Make a Raspberry Pi Server Rack - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/turing-pi-raspberry-cluster-board-server <comment><USER2> For anyone interested in running a cluster, but in a significantly smaller (cheaper, less powerful) form factor, I use the 8086 ClusterHAT. It supports 4 Raspberry Pi Zeros hosted on a Raspberry Pi 2, 3 or 4. Of course the four zeros together are only as powerful as the host (quad-core vs single core), this setup is great for learning mpi and other super computing concepts. It is definitely not meant for industrial use, but is definitely good for the educational aspects.

I have used it as a personal network of vulnerable machines with a firewall (the host pi) to demonstrate hacking techniques. That's not what the ClusterHAT was designed for, but it is super-easy to set up for classroom use like that.

[https://clusterhat.com/](https://clusterhat.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very similar to [https://store.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard- with-7-sopine...](https://store.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard- with-7-sopine-compute-module-slots)</comment>


Bill Maher Tells Amazon's Jeff Bezos to "Take One for the Team" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0oeeXjyHiw <comment><USER3> I think he missed a point. Amazon likely can't go to Mississippi, because there aren't enough programmers there. And very few would move there, even if the offers were good.

I turned down $300K in LA to stay in Hawaii. I can't think of what kind of offer would make me move to Mississippi.

<comment><USER4> Not every employee is a programmer, and how many people moved from places like Mississippi to Seattle/Silicon Valley/NYC etc? Surely some of them would love to return to their home state or nearby earning good money, paying a lot less rent and actually seeing family and friends from their childhood.

I can respect your decision to stay in Hawaii, just like I stay in Sydney it's a vibrant multicultural city with everything I want. Despite coming from a small town in a rural area I wouldn't go back, especially as the nearest Korean BBQ would be a 6 hour drive away.

However if that small town grew to a medium town and had those things, and enough money to build some community facilities that I desire such as public pools that are open year round and have enough space for multiple activities (First world problems you can't go for a swim on a hot day because the local swim squad has the whole pool reserved), theatres that could host local and travelling groups, a public library that is open more than twice a week and of course city wide broadband, preferably available to outer regions as well (5G networks might bring this one home)...

Any big move like Amazon would have to be thoughtfully planned, the last thing a small town needs is thousands of new residents with salaries 2-5 times the local average driving up the price of everything, imposing their worldview on the community and creating an us/them divide in the town.

<comment><USER5> Not that many people who work at big tech companies moved from places like Mississippi to Seattle/SV/NYC. Lots of them came straight out of school (and top schools these companies recruit from are concentrated on the coasts), lots of them came from overseas and most of the rest came from other coastal areas. Even those who came from places like Mississippi don't all prefer their hometown.

Also what makes places like SV and NYC great is that they are big and diverse enough to serve as acceptable second/third choices for lots of people from all kinds of places. Some people may prefer small towns and cities, but most people who do have are often driven by concerns like family and friends and have specific small cities they'd prefer. HQ2 in some small city in Mississippi may appeal to those who happen to be from that area, but don't offer much to others from small towns elsewhere in the US. If you consider that these companies employ glboal workforces, this is even more obvious - <USER2> a random American tech worker had to work in Turkey, would they rather work in Istanbul or a random small Turkish village?

I don't understand this idea that it would be better for top tech companies to be headquartered in random places in the US - it's obviously terrible for the companies involved but it also doesn't serve the greater good. It leads to 1) company towns that live and die with the company; 2) environmentally inefficient sprawl; and 3) talents being trapped in wrong situations at wrong companies due to immobility. Furthermore, a critical mass is important and innovation is not a zero-sum game - if Silicon Valley's capital and talent, etc was spread around the country, I don't think the outcome is that you get the same level of innovation and wealth creation, only distributed more fairly - a lot of it probably never happens. Innovation is almost certainly accelerated along by a concentration of capital and talent in a small area. This doesn't mean everything should be in SV, but that there are strong benefits that accrue to society at large from companies choosing to bring talent to an already talent-rich area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The literal interpretation has only humour value (which is great btw). If you were worth many billions and thought to better something you cared about it should be something big and long lasting. It would be to set into motion a new thing in a chosen direction over a longer time span, say a generation or more.

<comment><USER7> > set into motion a new thing in a chosen direction over a longer time span

Isn't that what Maher was saying though? An investment in a small town in the middle of nowhere to bring those places into the "party". The way Wal-mart did with Bentonville AK, or SC Johnson in Racine WI. Those companies have changed those regions for generations.

People here are saying you can't get programmers to move to Nebraska, but I don't buy that argument. Wal-mart and SC Johnson have attracted talented business people to Arkansas and Wisconsin. Sure, some won't want to go, but eager millenials who can't afford a home in Hawaii, Seattle, or Brooklyn will go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another media celebrity espousing left-side views. I'm just tired of it at this point. I'm not thin-skinned, I just want some jokes that poke fun at both sides. I don't want a one-sided barrage from talk show hosts to award shows.

Really, if the playing field were level, wouldn't there be more jokes about foibles of the left? The nation is about 50/50, shouldn't the media be about the same?

I think in the decades ahead this will be seen as a golden age of propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been wondering how much climate change is taken into account in decisions such as these? If I were planning where I built my headquarters it wouldn't be in the South. (In fact I'm trying to convince my mother to move- we were only 30 miles away from Michael and it's only a matter of time until we get hit.) Besides the threat of natural disasters, I imagine the increased cooling bills would not be insignificant.

<comment><USER10> > I imagine the increased cooling bills would not be insignificant

Actually, from a total energy perspective, living in warm climates is better. It used far less energy to cool a house than it does to heat it.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but there are many non energy ways to warm a house and few to cool it. I believe the term is "warm clothes" and "blankets". There is a limit to how much clothing you can take off.

I've never been so cold in a cold climate that I couldn't get warm without power. Between heat and humidity I've had plenty of days the opposite though. Now well designed and constructed housing makes a difference, but so does thoughtful clothing choices.

Here in Australia we often complain about the cold in winter, when it isn't even below freezing, we just don't dress for it and our houses are designed for cooling not heating (Assuming any thought was put into that at all). I spent time in Japan and half the times we turned the heaters off in our apartments because we were too warm, while outside there was a metre of snow...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The biggest joke in all of this is that someone like Bezos or Zuck or Dorsey etc actually cares about shit like this. They don't. They live in a completely different world detached from 99.9% of the populace.

</comment><comment><USER12> The suggested regions are unpleasant places to live and work and it isn't because of employment alone. It is because the political philosophy of the people present there is not conducive to individual freedom. Any effort to try to get engineering-like success there will fail. They do not want it. And few engineers want to live like them.

The question isn't "what can we do to make these people prosperous?". It's "what are these people choosing to do that makes them non-prosperous?". And I'd argue "nearly everything".</comment>


The Terminal: Snowden stuck in Moscow airport - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/news/snowden-terminal-passport-stuck-265/ <comment><USER2> "Your honor, my client—a man who never even graduated from high school—had no idea what he was doing when he leaked NSA secrets. As you can see from his trips to Hong Kong and Russia, he clearly doesn't think things through before doing acting."

Just wait.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems unlikely to me that someone as technically skilled as Snowden would be carrying physical copies of his data as the article claims. Why not simply upload his encrypted stuff to a few anonymous Gmail accounts, a few VPSes, Dropbox, etc.? Also, I hope he never leaves his laptop(s) as his hardware/software could get backdoored (aka "Evil Maid" attack).

<comment><USER4> So how long will it take in the tender care of an FSB Q&A setup before Snowden "agrees" to login to his VPS/Dropbox/etc. for them?

Although on the flipside, at least NSA will be able to track the login to that service and possibly be able to figure out where it was stored.

They and/or the FBI are probably already serving NSLs/subpeonas/etc. to determine whether Snowden or his girlfriend have active accounts with any of the major/medium/minor cloud providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the thought process behind voiding his passport? Wouldn't it be easier for the CIA to kidnap him from South America compared to Russia?

<comment><USER6> What about the (very real) possibility of him not being illegally kidnapped and instead being extradited through legal process and brought back to the US? Do you think the US _cares_ that much about bringing back this guy considering the political fallout from such an act of kidnapping.

We could do it for bin Laden because it's bin Laden. I think most people would disapprove of something similar for Snowden (as in : running into a foreign country to take this guy , not kill him). Plus everyone's watching anyways, and the last thing we need to do is vindicate Russia/Venezuela

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "There's this guy walking around with as many as four computers and thumb drives full of classified information and the Russian intelligence services haven't gotten ahold of it? Whatever was on those devices has been copied."

^ I doubt he would have 4 laptops, nor would they know if he has a bunch of thumbdrives.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's summer how can he be (wait for it... drum roll....) Snow'd-in! _rim-shot_</comment>


GPS jumps of -13.7 us? - <AUTHOR> https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2016-January/095692.html <comment><AUTHOR> Cynical prediction: A trillion or so dollars just moved around various stock exchanges arbitraging between GPS timebased and non-GPS timebased stockmarkets...

<comment><USER2> Time arbitrage is mostly at the millisecond time scale, not microsecond. For instance there is massive investment in microwave data transmission between New York and Chicago. Microwaves in air go close to speed of light in vacuum, while the more typical fiberoptic data links are at the speed of light in glass, about 30-some percent slower. The microwave links beat the fiberoptic by about 2 milliseconds on New York to Chicago, which is enough to arbitrage between markets located in those places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SVN 23 was decommissioned on the 25th

[http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?Do=gpsShowNanu&num=2016008](http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?Do=gpsShowNanu&num=2016008)

</comment><comment> cat-dev-null For reporting actual, demonstrable GPS constellation errors only (not equipment or user issues):

mailto:firstname.lastname@example.com

via [http://www.gps.gov/support/contact/](http://www.gps.gov/support/contact/)

(Folks at shops like Trimble and Garmin already have contacts within their respective orgs, so employees should try to work with their channels where possible.)

</comment><comment><USER4> How often does this kind of thing happen? and what are the practical consequences?</comment>


Live from Sony's PlayStation 4 event (6pm EST) - <AUTHOR> http://live.theverge.com/sony-playstation-4-event-live-blog/

<comment><USER3> Having had 2 PS3s flat out die on me right after the warranty expired - <USER2> after experiencing having a PS2 die on me a few years after I bought it as well - I will be disgusted beyond belief if there are any DRM schemes that will lock a game into only being playable on one machine as has been rumored.

Anything that leans in this direction will get me out of console gaming altogether.</comment>


Tool for browser share over time for your website - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/tools/analytics-browser-trending/

<comment><USER2> Very cool! I love seeing Chrome usage graphs - it shows how awesome their updater is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought exactly that! I almost wrote a post about it.</comment></comment>