Tell HN: Danny Cohen Has Died - <AUTHOR> Danny Cohen died yesterday morning, August 12th, peacefully at home. Danny was major figure in the development of Internet protocols, particularly those related to packet audio and video. He was a member of the Internet Hall of Fame (https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/danny-cohen). <comment><USER2> Wow... "In 1967, Danny Cohen developed the first real-time visual flight simulator on a general purpose computer. " \- I'm always amazed at some of the things people managed to do "way back when", when my mental image is of people with punch cards.

Here's an article I found about his flight simulator work, among other things.

[https://www.wired.com/2012/11/he-engineered-the-internet- to-...](https://www.wired.com/2012/11/he-engineered-the-internet-to-take- flight/)

<comment><USER3> Video from that flight simulator is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a88Ixuv084](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a88Ixuv084)

This video seems to be from 1973 (not 1970, as the title says), when the flight simulator was actually running as a distributed application over the ARPAnet!

<comment><USER4> It's fun to note that apparently Pong was invented in 1972.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, I'm seeking a movie, called "Digital Voice Conferencing" Danny did when he was at ISI, demonstrating packet voice technology in the '70s at Marina Del Rey. It used to be linked to by a WIRED article on Danny -- [https://www.wired.com/2012/11/he-engineered-the-internet- to-...](https://www.wired.com/2012/11/he-engineered-the-internet-to-take- flight/) but the the embeded movie has vanished. We (Computer History Museum) would be super grateful if anyone had a copy or knew of one lurking on the internet somewhere. Can you help?

<comment><USER6> Could this be it?

[https://youtu.be/MGat1jRQ_SM](https://youtu.be/MGat1jRQ_SM)

<comment><USER5> YES! Thank you so much. Gosh, it seems obvious?? But nothing related to any of the title keywords or danny cohen or ISI or packet voice came up. Whatever you did, THANK YOU!!!

<comment><USER7> [https://www.youtube.com/user/dannycohen90272](https://www.youtube.com/user/dannycohen90272) !

<comment><USER8> Wow. CAD designing a vase in 1968:

[https://youtu.be/-QWqCYPlGPA?t=18](https://youtu.be/-QWqCYPlGPA?t=18)

vs CAD designing a vase in 2011:

[https://youtu.be/66FoxykeT0w?t=10](https://youtu.be/66FoxykeT0w?t=10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of his most familiar contributions is the coining of Big/Little endian. RIP.

<comment><USER10> Wow, I didn't remember that he was the origin of that.

[https://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt)

"On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace", IEN 137, 1980

<comment><USER11> Thank you for sharing this, great read!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To understand Danny's influence on early packet audio and video, I can really recommend the Google tech talk he did with Steve Casner: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av4KF1j-wp4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av4KF1j-wp4)

Don't miss the video clip around minute 55 from 1978!

RIP

</comment><comment><USER12> Danny was a rock star in the early days of general computing and things people could do on the ARPANET. We all owe him a thanks for all the ideas that he pioneered.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants like Danny.

</comment><comment><USER13> May his memory be a blessing

</comment><comment><USER14> My personal favorite Internet Hall of Fame member: [https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/test1-test2](https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/test1-test2)

<comment><USER15> I'm Danny's son, and I can tell you he would have got a great kick out of being in the august company of TEST1 TEST2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've found it written of him, " _Danny is a bona fide member of the Flat Earth Society_ ". Is that a joke?

<comment><USER15> Oh it was a joke but it was certainly true (I'm his son). He joined in the days of Charles K. Johnson, who liked to tell the press that "my wife is from Australia and she says they don't all walk around upside down over there." He assumed the society was a joke until they rejected him for being a scientist, but he applied again without listing profession and they let him in. Here's photos of his membership certificate, the rejection letter, and his "Flat Earth Map of the World."

[https://imgur.com/gallery/sqpAng8](https://imgur.com/gallery/sqpAng8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> RIP Danny.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm sorry for your loss.

</comment><comment><USER19> RIP

</comment><comment><USER20> RIP

</comment><comment><USER21> RIP

</comment><comment><USER22> Wait, in what timezone was 4 hours ago the 13th?

<comment><USER23> We re-upped the post as described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380).

<comment><USER22> Gotcha, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> RIP

</comment><comment><USER25> RIP ... so say we all.</comment>


They Don't Want You.To (FSF Europe campaign) - <AUTHOR> http://theydontwantyou.to/

<comment><USER2> The site doesn't give a lot of information. Where to you go if you want to know more?</comment>


Startup Committed to Financial Transparency - <AUTHOR> http://www.backyardbrains.com/finance.aspx

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I'm more interested in the "affordable brain recording kits". But +1 internets to the marketing department. This is genius.</comment>


Tech Talk:  "10 Things" Design Talk with Jason Putorti - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/15066599

<comment><USER2> It was a very informative talk. Got lot to learn especially what not to do while designing websites.

</comment><comment><USER3> For non-designers looking to understand how "design" can and will influence your company's value - the talk is a good springboard. A list of the first 10 things to research to get a basic grasp.

</comment><comment><USER4> Having been there I recommend anyone who doesn't know what "design thinking" watch. The talk isn't comprehensive but should spark your interest in the right direction.</comment>


Steve Jobs' Biographer on Charlie Rose - <AUTHOR> http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11962 ...for the hour. <comment><USER2> I've been trying to figure out what makes this interview so good. Most Charlie Rose interviews are good, but this one has something different. I think it's that both of them are really trying to figure out what made Jobs work, because they're both ambitious guys themselves and they want to learn from his example. Usually when Charlie's asking someone questions it's because he wants to know what's going on in the world. But here he wants to know for his own sake, because he wants to do great work, and so does Isaacson. So this is like watching two athletes talking about Michael Jordan.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very well put.

I think it is also because Rose is a huge Mac guy, even fell and bruised his eye while protecting his iPad, and wants to understand how Jobs was able to make products that have so captivated the world. I don't think either Rose or Isaacson are techies, so they aren't approaching the discussion from a technical perspective, which is good, but from a general business and individual in history sense.

I agree, a great inteview. Makes me want to read more of Isaacson's books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I often find Charlie Rose annoying but I'm liking this interview too. I think it's that Charlie sits back and lets Isaacson give his full, fleshed-out answers, instead of interrupting.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Rose isn't a bad interviewer, and he gets great guests, but he often interrupts far too frequently. He was better here than he often is.</comment></comment>


TechCrunch Redesign Live - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com

<comment><USER2> The feedback on this redesign should serve as a reminder for startups: Ignore all feedback after a redesign and look at your metrics. Your metrics will tell you the real story whereas feedback will almost always be negative.

<comment> mkr-hn It's not a good idea to myopically focus on anything. Including data.

<comment><USER3> Or advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My first thought is that social sharing should go down dramatically. A lot fewer social CTAs on each post, and the left buttons, although aesthetically pleasing, don't really incite the user to share.

Mashable is an example of the in-your-face sharing buttons allows social sharing to go through the roof, and also allows for immediate social proof that hey - other people thought this article was cool, too.

<comment><USER5> I have to wonder why they haven't added a "+1" button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The logo looks like a minecraft creeper caught in mid-explosion. [http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/220/3/d/Minecraft_Cre...](http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/220/3/d/Minecraft_Creeper_Wallpaper_by_LynchMob10_09.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER7> My thoughts on it:

1) Two clicks for search needs to go. Why can't they just get rid of the white space from the logo and display the search at all times? Make search easy, not hard.

2) I don't like being asked to share an article before I even see the title of the article.

3) Images under "popular posts" get maimed and look bad (low resolution/pulled horizontally)

4)Im not a huge fan of the pixelated logo, but to each his own

5) The headlines on the articles seem quite... Big.

They got some things right, but it still seems like a first draft rather than a final copy.

EDIT: They already fixed the images under popular posts, so they are already working on it. Maybe there is hope yet!

</comment><comment><USER8> I cannot really help this inescapable feeling that the new design is somewhat obnoxious. It's just... there's something about the design that I just cannot get past. This will only serve to further decrease my already declining viewership.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps it is the sticky "menu" bar on top. Is it just me or do other people really despise these sticky bars that people like to stick on the top/bottom of their sites.

<comment><USER10> I desire to buy larger and larger monitors, am forced to buy HD aspect ratio monitors, and then find all these webmasters spooging all over my monitor with their various toolbars and spambars and crapbars and wastebars and iebars until I eventually get back to a 320x240 pixel screen.

When I see these toolbars, I just want to reach out through the intertubes to find the developer and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any more code...

Yes, it's just you. :)

<comment><USER11> +1 for Richard Mlynarik reference and 'wastebars'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> New logo reminds me _way_ too much of Minecraft. I keep looking in the new logo for a hidden Creeper.

<comment><USER13> I was about the comment with the exact same thing. It does look like a creeper to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I ain't gonna lie. I vomited a little when I first saw the new logo. The pixelated green is seizure inducing. Congrats TechCrunch, you've just topped the Gawker redesign. Keep up the good work.

<comment><USER15> To be fair the Gawker redesign absolutely ruined the usability. If you don't like the _look_ then ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Two reasons why I'm still not digging TC's site design: <http://kacy.me/8NzH> & <http://kacy.me/8Mpa>

That's a cache version with ad block on (use it for testing sites). Maybe if they turned off the linkedin and facebook integration, the site would load faster. I guess they get a lot of traffic from that though. :-/

I'll still stick to reading articles in Reeder.

</comment><comment><USER17> The actual article display isn't that bad, I can read it quite well, but the overall layout is (as others have said) _very_ obnoxious. The most important part is the articles and they haven't butchered the content finding like gawker did. It'll take some getting used to I assume but I guess we can wait and see.

</comment><comment><USER18> An outdated look that shouldn't have got past concept stage. More importantly though, it still feels super sluggish for me in the latest version of Safari. I won't be visiting anymore that normally do, which is about 1-2x a month, despite knowing there is some decent content there.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't even have an opinion on the redesign because their site performance is still terrible. Techcrunch is probably the most sluggish website I regularly visit on my Macbook air. Bringing up Firebug/Web Inspector is horrifying.

</comment><comment><USER20> Holy shit. It's _terrible_. That said, I like the sticky navigation bar.

<comment><USER21> Ya that nav bar is slick!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Two immediate impression: \- the logo. oh my gosh, it's hurting my eyes! \- there's empty space next to Share button, why not expand it so users dont need 2 extra click (open the share list) to share?

</comment><comment><USER23> I wouldn't have a problem with the logo if it didn't seem so far out of place with the rest of the design. It's a shame because the navigation bar looks really good once you scroll down the page.

</comment><comment><USER24> Pro: The Share "widget"'s options are hidden, so I don't have to see 45 options next to each headline.

Cons: The logo just doesn't seem right. Not a fan of the new header.

</comment><comment><USER25> The "Share" button needs to be re-aligned. But, maybe it was placed that way intentionally, to call it out and increase sharing.

I suppose attractive != effectiveness.

</comment><comment><USER26> The way the copy reads it immediately makes me suspicious tech crunch did a redesign solely to milk the "outrage" publicity. It's really not that far beyond linkbait.

</comment><comment><USER27> The none pixelated logo is actually pretty cool. The additional higher res pixelation looks like video game vomit, though.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, it's better then the Gawker redesign

<comment><USER29> This, as well as the Gawker redesign are just more proof that you should _banish the word "redesign" from your professional vocabulary_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It is hard on the eyes- With that shade of green, reading anything is a pain.

</comment><comment><USER31> My lord. I sure hope this is a late April fools joke or something.

</comment><comment><USER32> When I visit the TC, I thought I visited any other site.

</comment><comment><USER33> I mean, I hate it, but whatever. It's still TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oh look, their list of "Hot Topics" includes "Quora".

</comment><comment><USER35> I wish green theme lasts temporarily..

</comment><comment><USER36> There is something wrong !!!

</comment><comment><USER37> The logo is horrendous.

</comment><comment><USER38> I rather like it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Over 300 HTTP requests required to load the new techcrunch. While this is much better than the previous ~800 HTTP requests on the techcrunch homepage, it's still pretty ridiculous.</comment>


Calculate distance & bearing between two long/lat points - <AUTHOR> http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

<comment><USER2> I recently used this for an app I'm working on.

In case you're thick like me, here's how you convert from the deg min sec format to a decimal format:

deg + minutes/60 + seconds/3600

Then make your answer negative if you started with a South or West lat/lon.

So, for example, if you had 53 08 50N, that would be:

53 + 08/60 + 50/3600 =~ 53.1472222

</comment><comment><USER3> More information on Great-circle distance: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great-circle_distance></comment>


Block This – Open Source Ad Blocker for Android - <AUTHOR> https://block-this.com/ <comment><USER2> He says it was removed from the Play Store, which is understandable. But why not add it to the F-droid repo?

Otherwise it looks great.

Edit: I installed the .apk without any issues, and it seems to work well so far.</comment>


Long Before Boeing 737 Max Crash, Ethiopian Air Pilot Warned of Dangers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/long-before-crash-ethiopian-air-pilot-warned-bosses-of-dangers <comment><USER2> Sorry for another comment, but in my research into the topic the saddest bit of information I've seen is the image of the black box data for the flight (the first crash): [https://i.imgur.com/WJuhjlO.png](https://i.imgur.com/WJuhjlO.png)

You can see from the graph that in the final minutes and seconds, the pilot put insane amounts of force on the control column (aka the yoke) to try to pull the plane out of the dive - to save the 189 people on board. But no, MCAS was overpowering and lacked the documentation for the pilot to try anything else.

Also interesting to see is the amount of times the pilots bring the nose up, only for MCAS to kick in and force the nose back down. 26 times.

All data from this Seattle Times article, which was written before the second crash occurred: [1] [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/black...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/black-box-data-reveals-lion-air-pilots-struggle-against- boeings-737-max-flight-control-system/)

<comment><USER3> There's one thing I don't understand while looking at the flight recorder data:

After flaps are retracted for the final time, the altitude seems to stabilize. So why the sudden drop before the crash? Why couldn't the pilots just keep on flying on the same level?

There must be a sudden behavioural change of the plane or the pilots right before it went down, but I never got it explained to me clearly why...

Second question: why did they retract the flaps? Wouldn't the wings generate more lift with flaps extended?

<comment><USER2> IIRC, the pilot increased thrust to increase airspeed which made it harder to pull back on the yoke to fight against MCAS. I will need to check references again but I just got into bed.

Edit: here we go: Pilots have demonstrated in simulator that the trim wheels cannot be moved in severe mis-trim conditions combined with a high airspeed.[92][93] As the pilots on Flight 302 pulled on the yoke to raise the nose, the aerodynamic forces on the tail's elevator would create an opposing force on the stabilizer trim jackscrew that would prevent the pilots from moving the trim wheel by hand.[86][91][94]

The resolution for this jammed trim issue is not part of Boeing's current 737 manual according to The Air Current.[90] The Seattle Times reports pilots on the 737-200 were trained for this failure, but latter models got so reliable, this procedure was no longer necessary.[91][90]

Just stolen from Wikipedia before I sleep: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_30...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302#Expert_analysis)

<comment><USER4> "Unable to trim": [https://youtube.com/watch?v=aoNOVlxJmow](https://youtube.com/watch?v=aoNOVlxJmow)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Von Hoesslin, who identified himself in the documents as a certified 737 > instructor, submitted his resignation to Ethiopian Airlines in April.

Not seeing much discussion of the guy who called it right and is losing his job because of it. I'm not sure if there's a way to know if he's being forced out or choosing to avoid some backlash, but it seems sad that the one person in the story who made the right call pays a hefty price, as opposed to being kept, protected, and/or promoted. Same thing has happened to many people trying to do the right thing, Roger Boisjoly would be a super famous example, one of the engineers who predicted the Challenger disaster.

Are there examples of people being rewarded for their efforts after a large scale accident, rather than punished?

<comment><USER6> I think this might be a case of selective bias, as people who are rewarded for their efforts would likely prevent large scale accidents in the first place if their management listened enough to promote them.

You likely don't hear about this, because for these cases the oversight works and it's just people doing their jobs.

<comment><USER5> Oh, almost certainly! Failing to listen to warnings beforehand, and then after an incident wanting to suppress the knowledge that there were warnings, are very likely to be correlated. Not only that, there's usually a lot of money involved, and admitting company fault could be legal liability, or I would assume that's the fear anyway.

I'm just curious if there are any well-known cases of companies doing right by the people who tried to avert the accident, of companies admitting it was a management mistake as opposed to letting their fears / liability concerns / embarrassment steamroll the only people who did the right thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >However, that report shows the pilots left the thrust too high and turned the motor driving MCAS back on after initially switching it off.

I really wish the media wouldn't leave out important context when making statements like this.

If you aren't a pilot or an aviation enthusiast, you'd think leaving the thrust high was a mistake, but an on the fritz AoA sensor means you're in an airspeed unreliable condition, which calls for maintaining appropriate power for the desired flight regime, which in this case was TO/ascent, a regime generally flown at higher power.

[https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Unreliable_Airspeed_Indi...](https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Unreliable_Airspeed_Indications)

Or, how leaving the airspeed issue unresolved until the more pressing issue, the plane being continually put out of trim, is a triage call akin to what a medical professional would be expected to make in a condition where there were more problems to solve than hands or brains to resolve them.

Or how Boeing intentionally changed the functionality of the console stabilizer trim cutout switches in such a way as to prevent pilots from being able to shut out the flight computer's capability to command trim adjustments with the trim motor, but maintaining the pilots' ability to leverage the trim motor to neutralize trim against aerodynamic load through their trim switches on the yoke.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boein...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boeing-altered-key-switches-in-737-max-cockpit-limiting-ability-to- shut-off-mcas/)

This is one of those cases where we _need_ the layman to be accurately informed at all costs. There is no room for weasel legal maneuvering that we as a society can afford when this comes to trial. The courts have no authority over physics.

<comment><USER8> > maintaining appropriate power for the desired flight regime, which in this > case was TO/ascent, a regime generally flown at higher power.

But the memory item calls for 75% N1 and 4deg pitch up. Not leaving it at 94% N1

<comment><USER9> Is the 75% and 4deg pitch for cruise, or for initial climb out from a high altitude airport in mountainous terrain?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sure does contrast with all the early talking down about pilots in the developing world. People were so quick to blame them instead of looking to the people responsible for selling the planes.

</comment><comment><USER11> DOJ needs to subpoena Boeing's internal communications for all things MCAS during and after it's development, and everything up to date.

We don't know if MCAS is the only thing keeping the planes in the air, and if it is easily disabled by faulty sensors in their new software update, we don't know how unsafe those planes are.

</comment><comment><USER12> In the flight just before the Lion Air crash, with the same airplane, the MCAS activated wrongly, and the pilots shut off the stab trim and landed safely.

The MCAS system was known about after the Lion Air crash, and it baffles me why pilots wouldn't have known about successful corrective action taken on the previous flight. After all, I read about this in the newspaper. It wasn't a secret.

It's hard to tell from the newspaper accounts, which often leave off crucial details, but it seems the electric trim switches (on the control column) override the MCAS commands. So the way to recover is to set the electric trim switches to nose up, turn the trim system on at the cutoff switches, wait until it's trimmed out properly, then turn it off via the cutoff switches and let go of the electric trim switches.

<comment><USER13> >It seems the electric trim switches (on the control column) override the MCAS commands.

...but not if you follow the procedure set out by Boeing and reiterated in an FAR published after the Lion Air crash. The ET302 pilots recognized that they were dealing with MCAS failure, and followed the procedure, including toggling the trim cutout switches. On 737 NGs, one could turn off trim automation while allowing electrical control from the yoke, but on the Max, the latter was also disabled when these switches were toggled [1]. I don't think this way in which the Max differs from the NG came out until later.

This created a second problem - the trim wheels are very hard to turn manually under the load created by using the elevator to counteract the mis-trim. The procedure in this case is to unload the stabilizer jack-screw by pitching down, but the airplane was not high enough for that.

This might have been apparent if pilots had trained for an MCAS failure, which brings us to a question I had in another thread: Were there any simulators that realistically simulated MCAS failure, or were the simulator manufacturers and operators as much in the dark about MCAS as were pilots and airlines?

[1] [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boein...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boeing-altered-key-switches-in-737-max-cockpit-limiting-ability-to- shut-off-mcas/)

<comment><USER12> What you're saying does not contradict that the trim switches override the MCAS. Hence, trim could be restored by using the trim switches and throwing the cutouts when not using the trim switches.

I read about this in the newspaper, it wasn't a secret. I do not have inside information.

Again, if I was an MCAS pilot I'd be very interested in following what happened with the Lion Air crash, to ensure it wouldn't happen to me. I'd still follow the procedures set out by Boeing - but when they didn't work I'd do what did work.

It's a little hard to discern from the erratic newspaper reports, but during the time the pilots were fighting the MCAS they were using the trim switches and surely would have noticed that those switches overrode the MCAS.

The reason we have pilots, and not a fully automated airplane, is we need them to think outside of the procedures when the procedures aren't working. This is not impossible as the pilots in the flight prior to the LA crash did have MCAS runaway and did successfully deal with it.

<comment><USER7> It can be overridden, yes, but releasing the switch also resets the MCAS activation timer, resulting in an activation 5 seconds after the switch is released.

You would have to pulse the switch in sub-5 second increments depending on the way the switch works.

If it's a direct switch, I.e. switch held down->motor moves, then they'd have to hold it down until trim was neutralized, then cut it out.

If it's a discrete toggle, I.e. each toggle increments/decrements a set point the motor then follows; a pilot would have to be very conscious of their timing on the switches, and how much the stabilizer had actually managed to travel.

Both of these would constitute new, MAX specific skills, that Boeing cannot show any acknowledgement or foreknowledge of without opening a massive can of worms.

<comment><USER12> > It can be overridden, yes, but releasing the switch also resets the MCAS > activation timer, resulting in an activation 5 seconds after the switch is > released.

That's why I suggested in this thread to activate the cutoff switches when the trim is in the correct position.

The electric trim switches are a hold down => motor moves. It's not a MAX specific skill. Neither are the cutoff switches.

<comment><USER7> >The electric trim switches are a hold down => motor moves. It's not a MAX specific skill. Neither are the cutoff switches.

Neat!

>It's not a MAX specific skill. Neither are the cutoff switches.

Well, the cutoff switches functionality was changed according to the Seattle Times, so while the procedure may be shared, the semantic significance of the switches did, in fact, change for MAX.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boein...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/boeing-altered-key-switches-in-737-max-cockpit-limiting-ability-to- shut-off-mcas/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This type of information is very convenient for Boeing...

Edit: It's likely true, but surely nearly every airline had a pilot 'warn of dangers'. But why is this a news story being promoted?

<comment><USER14> Why is it convenient for Boeing?

<comment><USER2> Boeing is trying to claim inadequate training (by the airlines) is the problem, not the fact the MCAS software bandaid had serious design flaws yet Boeing pushed for it in order to compete with Airbus.

<comment><USER15> If poor training was the cause the plane shouldn't have received the same type number. So this is all still on Boeing. Boeing also specifically told these planes with the benefit that only a few hours of training would be enough.

I'm not seeing how this is beneficial for Boeing.

<comment><USER16> I'm starting to think a plane that can't glide during a emergency because they decided to deny physics is just not a good design.

<comment><USER17> The 737 can glide as fine as a plane of that size can. The MAX didn't change anything at that and no one was denying physics. The problem was the MCAS, which as a result of a single sensor malfunction would aggressively point the nose down via the stabilizer trim.

<comment><USER2> Yep, the reason they implemented MCAS was because they popped on some larger engines, which were too close to the ground, so they moved them up and forward on the wing a bit. This gave the plane a tendency to tilt up which could cause a stall, so Boeing added some software to bring the nose down.

In both crashes, one of the two Angle of Attack sensors was incorrect. Boeing only use one AoA sensor per flight (alternating for some bewildering reason), and in this particular flight it was constantly incorrectly stating the plane was nearing a stall. So MCAS would continually kick in until the Pilot could no longer keep the plane in the air.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't Boeing just put in a bunch of gyroscopes into the chassis and use that as a backup AoA sensor? (I am not a pilot so I have no clue if that is reasonable)

<comment><USER19> The plane attitude (what you can sense with gyros) and angle of attack are very different things. They only coincide in level flight with no wind (the attitude is measured to the earth frame of reference (transposed by gyros) and the AoA is measured with reference to the local wind stream)

<comment><USER20> OK then why not put a couple extra AoA sensors in? I thought everything critical on airliners was supposedly redundant?

<comment><USER21> Indeed, part of this story is that the MCAS system was not classified as "critial" (i.e., a system which can cause a crash if it fails). If it had been, then it would have faced additional scrutiny and they'd probably needed three AoA sensors and majority voting. Apparently the authority of the MCAS system was increased during development, with the criticality judgement based on the old smaller value.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-saw-737-max-flight- control-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-saw-737-max-flight-control- system-as-non-critical-safety-risk-11557831723)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> so is boeing being held liable for the deaths? corporations are people right? a human person would probably go to jail if they did the same

<comment><USER23> Seems like a clear case of negligence, so yes, they will pay for the deaths. A high level program manager may go to jail if there is a paper trail, but we don't jail people at the CEO level in the U.S. for negligence or fraud usually.

There's a separate system of punishment for them involving their children hating them and acquired learning disabilities from cognitive dissonance. (Not a joke these are actually the primary mechanism by which America holds that class in check).

<comment> village-idiot Can you provide more on the last paragraph? That sounds fascinating.

<comment><USER23> You can allow yourself to become corrupt in order to succeed financially, and try to hide that corruption from your family... but A) children, with a decade to study you, are lie detection beasts and they will see your true self, and B) the cognitive dissonance you need to frame your abusive behavior as "normal business" will interfere with your ability to learn new things that conflict with your internal narrative. Those blind spots make adjacent things harder to learn, leading to spreading blind spots, which eventually become a generalized learning disability.

See for example the Theranos board. Living as a CEO/power broker type can lead to debilitating dementia in middle age.

This is one of the reasons we so rarely see middle managers drop back down into individual contributor roles. Early dementia literally inhibits the clear thinking required for production work. In a leadership role they can rely on the management hierarchy for executive function, but lose the ability to do it alone.

<comment><USER24> Those are some pretty bold claims. Care to cite your sources?

<comment><USER23> No sources, observation from life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> " The Chicago-based planemaker, while careful not to be seen blaming a customer, has noted the role pilot actions also played in the Ethiopian and Lion Air disasters."

"What were they doing flying our planes if they didn't want to crash?"

<comment><USER2> This is a lie to save face. Boeing literally decided against telling the pilots about MCAS [1] [2].

[1] [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/u-s-p...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/u-s-pilots-flying-737-max-werent-told-about-new-automatic-systems- change-linked-to-lion-air-crash/)

> Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said > Monday the airline and the pilots "were kept in the dark."

"We do not like the fact that a new system was put on the aircraft and wasn't disclosed to anyone or put in the manuals," he said in an interview. What's more, he noted, Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration have now warned "that the system may not be performing as it should."

[2] [https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the- boeing...](https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the- boeing-737-max-maneuvering-characteristics-augmentation-system-mcas-jt610/)

> "Since it operates in situations where the aircraft is under relatively high > g load and near stall, a pilot should never see the operation of MCAS. As > such, Boeing did not include an MCAS description in its FCOM. The explainer > continues: "In this case, MCAS will trim nose as designed to assist the > pilot during recover, likely going unnoticed by the pilot."

There is another explanation, according to a Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal: "One high-ranking Boeing official said the company had decided against disclosing more details to cockpit crews due to concerns about inundating average pilots with too much information - and significantly more technical data - than they needed or could digest."

<comment><USER13> That last statement is extremely patronizing towards airline pilots, and also self-defeating: the more Boeing says telling pilots would have added "significantly more technical data", the less defensible is its position that no additional training was needed. The alternative to telling pilots in advance was to blindside them with unexpected and inexplicable aircraft behavior when the system failed.

<comment><USER9> Boeing's position was: if there is uncommanded Stab trim movement, use the stab trim runaway checklist, just as before. No need to know why the issue occurred in the first place.

Now, clearly that didn't work very well, and there are many other problems, but I wouldn't call Boeing's initial attitude there "lies" or "extremely patronising".

<comment><USER13> My "extremely patronising" comment was explicitly in response to one specific statement from Boeing. Personally, I would not call Boeing's response "lies"; rather, it seems to me, it is probably being careful to not make any objectively false statements that could come back at them in an inquiry or court of law, while also attempting to imply that its actions always put safety first, and that training cost avoidance was never an overriding concern. My main point here is that, in doing so, Boeing appears to contradict itself in a way that weakens their position on the latter issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How They Got the Second Suspect - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/04/19/boston_marathon_suspect_dzhokhar_tsarnaev_in_serious_condition_here_s_how.html?wpisrc=obnetwork

<comment><USER2> Well. The accused has rights, but those rights do not include "being read his rights". They include things like "the right to remain silent" and to a defense attorney. The accused had rights before they invented the Miranda Warning, and said warning's main value is as a procedural guard to make sure that no one's rights were violated because the accused were not aware of their rights.

What he can do when he's tried, and when they're using any of his testimony against him, is that he can say "I was not read my rights" and then the judge can ask "were you aware of your rights?" and if the court determines that he might actually have been unaware of his rights then they can throw that testimony out, or provide other remedies.

I have my suspicions that his own testimony won't be the deciding factor in any criminal proceedings, however, so it may come to nothing in the end.

(No commentary on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the decision to not-read-him-his-rights is herein advanced by this comment, except that it would have at least avoided the fuss which is currently being made about it, so that is a point against it.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Carmen Ortiz, arguably the person who drove Aaron Swartz to his death, is the same person who made the decision not to read Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. Apparently the rights of the accused aren't a high priority with her.

<comment><USER3> I was just thinking it seems like she's doing everything she possibly could to make a certain segment of people hate her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "public exemption in cases of national security."

This is a huge stretch for the definition of "national security" and not necessarily one that a US Attorney should be making in this case, lest courts rule against them for over-extension and they lose the privilege of invoking this exemption for the future.

<comment><USER5> I suspect the police messed up, and she's looking ahead to the day when she might have to salvage her prosecution because of it. "National security" is just the straw she's grasping at.

And when everything becomes a national security issue, then national security means nothing. But that doesn't matter to one prosecutor trying to notch one more case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If Tsarnaev will get a good lawyer - this will play well in his defense in court after emotions will cool down.

<comment><USER7> I doubt his post-arrest statements will be critical to the government's case. Even if everything he said gets thrown out, it likely won't matter.

At the time he was questioned though, the point wasn't "Let's get a confession we can use in court", it was "Are there any more bombs out there".</comment></comment>


Ruby Web Dev The Other Way - <AUTHOR> http://rwdtow.stdout.in/ <comment><USER3> I'm not going to be able to comment on everything on this article and it is indeed a wonderfully put together resource, but I must say that I tend to disagree with the over-all premise. Yes, if you are a first time or beginner developer Rails can be overwhelming and you will learn a lot more by using a smaller framework such as Sinatra.

On the other-hand if you are undertaking a medium to large scale project (and not a micro-service), you probably want Rails. With Rails you have the benefit of a complete package of libraries that work out of the box and are quite extensively tested. I can almost guarantee everything else will cause you more pains, subjectively, if you _really_ dislike the Rails style, it may be worth it.

I also have a minor quibble with the suggestion that multi-level delegation is a good coding pattern - it is a terrible pattern! Have you ever tried to find the function you need through 3-4-levels of delegation when everything extends 5-10 different concerns? I'd much rather read - `self.parent_objects.children.function_name` in my code than `function_name` and then spend time searching where the later came from.

<comment><USER4> If you have "self.parent_objects.children.function_nam" in your code base is a demeter violation (which I like to see as yet another code smell rather than a law or rule) that is telling you that you are probably missing a domain model. Mixins don't solve that either but hide the smell from you.

<comment><USER5> GP is not saying mixins solve that problem, they are saying that it further obfuscates where the method is being delegated to. You have to search all the mixins to see who defines the method you are looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> begin minor rant...

Occam's razor is misused in the manifesto. The author indicates that it means "Prefer simple solutions", which it doesn't.

Occam's razor requires a hypothesis, and generally means "Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected".

For example, Special Relativity is exceedingly complex, especially if I try to explain it to you. Ontologically though (in actual fact), it's the "simplest" solution to explain the real world data that the speed of light is fixed regardless of reference frame. I could come up with other theories to explain the data that might be "simpler" in explanation, but they require more and more assumptions to be made about the real world. For example, I could say that the speed of light is fixed because aliens cause all of our testing apparatus to show the same reading. For sure, that's a much simpler explanation than explaining Special Relativity. But it rests on a whole huge number of assumptions (like aliens existing, that the aliens want to mess with us, that they have the capability of doing so, etc, etc). So here Occam's razor favors the more complex theory because it makes fewer assumptions.

So saying that something is better because it's simpler and then justifying it with Occam's razor is really an abuse of the concept.

... end rant

<comment><USER7> Well, actually...

[http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html)

<comment><USER6> Lol... maybe you're not.

The author invited comment directly by using a scientific/philosophical principle in his story. If you mention Occam's razor as a reason your argument is correct, and you completely get that wrong, you stand to be corrected.

So if you want to sound smart by using scientific terminology you don't understand, the scientists are going to call you on it, and that's not being pedantic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This confirms my overall feeling when considering Ruby and Rails. Instead, I choose Python and Flask. The whole Zen of Python really spoke to me and my team members: [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/)

No magic, just developer clarity. Neither of these items seemed like a primary concern for many different Ruby libraries and Rails itself.

I also suggest trying out data mapper pattern instead of active record. Flask and SQLalchemy are extremely powerful and easy to use. Virtual data fields and all kinds of neat things that really makes working with data easy and customize for complex business requirements.

<comment><USER9> I didn't like the magic of Rails either, but didn't grok Python :(

I'm much happier using Ruby + Sinatra + Sequel/ROM + dry-rb

I do admit that Rails devs develop considerably faster than me. But I get a feeling the majority of them can't make much more than a single machine monolith. Rails has a way of narrowing many people's technical curiosities. But it probably behooves both sides to learn more about each other.

<comment><USER10>
      > Rails has a way of narrowing many people's technical
      > curiosities.

That's, let's say, very odd statement. Especially keeping in mind how many frameworks in other languages were inspired by RoR.

<comment><USER11> Well, yeah. People move to other languages and then build a RoR-inspired framework, instead of trying other alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Excited to see this piece - an ambitious guide to developing with Plain Old Ruby and associated tools!

I ended up disappointed. The piece reads in a very partisan manner, makes questionable declamations of common Ruby tools & patterns, and throws in a lot of obnoxious asides about how bad other programmers are.

Examples: "RoR is a good starting point for a young developer." Its usage encompasses just a tad more than that. "MVC is not an architecture." Just factually untrue.

That said, the lower portions of the guide have some good content and the list items describing popular gems are helpful.

<comment><USER13> There are a lot of "emotions" and personal opinion that is not wrapped with tolerant euphemisms. I don't have time to explain all POVs in details, also even after reading those books I mention - every person would have his own opinion and conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with the Manifesto. I've been using Rails professionally for 6+ years and the magic still causes some confusion. The Rails ecosystem provides so much out of the box and so many answered questions on Stack Overflow and Google it would be a constant uphill challenge to go against that flow.

I'm looking forward to moving to Elixir and Phoenix which seems to embrace the less magical, more explicit manifesto while also being the accepted solution in that domain.

<comment><USER15> If you've been using Rails for 6+ years and aren't at least passingly familiar with the majority of the source code and design decisions, then you aren't a very curious developer

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good work!

On some work projects I've gotten a lot of mileage out of breaking with the traditional Rails patterns in favor of stuff like `Operation` objects. Too bad I didn't know about Trailblazer!

I also agree about Rails making excessive use of Ruby magic. Just because it's possible, doesn't mean you should do it.

Regarding non-ActiveRecord models, I use Sequel[1] exclusively at work - <USER2> addition to being decidedly less magical, it has wonderful support for most Postgresql specific features.

I'll be consulting this in the future before embarking on new Ruby adventures.

[1] [http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/](http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/)

<comment><USER17> Do you have experience of using sequel with rails 5?

Also, what do you use for authentication?

<comment><USER18> There's a plugin for Sequel::Model that provides ActiveModel compatibility, which should make it work with the usual rails gems.

[http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/rdoc- plugins/classes/Sequel/Pl...](http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/rdoc- plugins/classes/Sequel/Plugins/ActiveModel.html)

Sequel is my favourite of the tools I use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes, you shouldn't do Ruby development on Windows if at all possible. But is there any reason why OS X is not mentioned in the Linux section? It is after all what many Ruby developers use.

<comment><USER20> Because osx in not linux? (Although it does bundle some out of date gnu tools.) A separate osx section would seem more appropriate.

<comment><USER19> Poor phrasing on my part. What I meant is to have an OS section and then discuss Linux and OS X as the two main options or mention OS X as an alternative, if Linux is the OS he intends to promote in the section. He could also mention non-Darwin BSD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first few sentences of this article sold me. Because it describes to me exactly why I hate Rails, and Ember, and any other framework with a similar model. I hate Rails because Rails is Magic. And not the good (well, as good as magic can be), 0x5f3759df kind of magic either.

The kind of magic where you're given some functions to call, and some places to put your code, and if you ask why, you are told that you don't want to know, so shut up. In a non-CoC system, a lot of this magic would be exposed to the developer, so even of we didn't exactly know what was going on behind the scenes, we could at least kind of reason about it.

I hate rails because I like to be able to reason about the code that I write, the libraries I use, and what's going on behind the scenes, even if I don't know ALL the details.

Why? Because I assume that at some point, my code will break. And if I can't reason about what my app's doing, I can't fix it. And after running Ubuntu for a few years, I have long run out of patience for problems I can't fix.

<comment><USER22> > The kind of magic where you're given some functions to call, and some places > to put your code, and if you ask why, you are told that you don't want to > know, so shut up.

Rails is open-source and _extensively_ documented. I honestly cannot understand this take at all.

<comment><USER21> Okay, YES, Rails had docs, but that's the attitude I see: use this, do this, put your code here, we know best. The docs do not ENCOURAGE understanding of how Rails works, or why it is the way it is.

<comment><USER22> There are plenty of docs (official and unofficial) explaining the internals of how and why Rails works; here's an example: [http://guides.rubyonrails.org/initialization.html](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/initialization.html)

The documentation for getting a blog built in 15 minutes doesn't explain why you put your code in each place or how it's put together, because that's not the point. Rails is about making default decisions for commonly bikeshedded questions like "how do we name our database tables" so you don't waste mental bandwidth on them when you're trying to build an application. But explanations for how and why all that happens is very readily available.

<comment><USER21> Fair 'nuff. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know whats wrong with vanilla rails. The most I have to do to organize large projects is used concerns.

For better performance I serve up json directly from Postgres.

All these additional abstractions makes it hard to migrate away later to another platform.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm currently researching JS frameworks/libraries to front a Ruby web app. Interesting to see vue.js in the author's ideal stack. I'm very intrigued by re-frame (React based, in ClojureScript, inspired by Elm architecture). The Readme is fantastic: [https://github.com/Day8/re- frame](https://github.com/Day8/re-frame).

</comment><comment><USER25> "I dislike the complexity of Rails and wish to make my own way of things."

..three years later...

"We are upgrading to Rails."

</comment><comment><USER26> Let's be real RoR is not about learning, or perfect engineering, or being easy to learn. It is 100% about being productive in industry.

"Put this file in this folder with this name and your app will do x".

"Why?"

"Because 10 years ago this file structure made a lot more sense and some people liked it so we stuck with it".

</comment><comment><USER27> Great effort. There's still a lot to go but you've got some great content already. I just wanted to mention gitbook.com as a resource to you. Keep it up.

<comment><USER13> Thank you. I think about writing a script to convert Jekyll MD files info [https://leanpub.com/](https://leanpub.com/) book format to have it compiled in ebook format (+ distribution platform).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Obligatory phoenix/elixir mention

</comment><comment><USER29> Independently from people preference in working with this or the Rails approach, what is nice noticing is how the Ruby community is putting a lot of effort in creating alternatives to Rails.

</comment><comment><USER30> Bird's eye view, what is Hanami's performance like compared to Rails?

</comment><comment><USER31> I really love and understand a lot of choices here. I didn't realize that mindshare behind Hanami/Trailblazer is so big, this is excellent news.

I am a little confused on editor suggestion, but this is geared to starting devs. I would say SublimeText all the way. Next step, obviously Vim.

<comment><USER13> Try to use Trailblazer. Even if you would not adopt it entirely - it is really a great way to broaden your perspective. An Editor is solely personal taste.

<comment><USER9> I have only a fleeting familiarity with Hanami and Trailblazer. It struck me that they are both achieving very similar ends. I preferred Hanami in that it retained very discoverable mechanics for people comfortable with recent low- level trends in webdev (e.g., Interactors are simply Service Objects) while Trailblazer seems to have its own heavily engineered high-level paradigms (e.g., Cells) that seemed more suited to the Rails way of thinking (geminize all the things!). Any paradigms/approaches that Trailblazer advocates that you prefer over Hanami?

<comment><USER13> Yes, they really have similar parts (mostly Operation and Action). But Hanami is a framework and Trbr is a architectural layer, that could be used inside any framework. In Trbr I really like the idea of Representable to convert objects. Trbr is more tailored for Raiks, to allow step by step improvement of existing Rails apps. Maybe it is not so important for Hanami, but with Sinatra it will still help a lot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mobile Game Graphics: A Remarkable Evolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.modojo.com/features/mobile_game_graphics_a_remarkable_evolution/

<comment><AUTHOR> The timeline images are fabulous.

Moore's Law on mobile has a long, long way to go ...</comment>


New Javascript Class Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/06/20/new-javascript-class-patterns

<comment><USER2> Nothing new here. I'm not sure the author understands that he can assign _this_ to a local var in the constructor and use it from the functions. This is a known pattern...

function Point(){

       var self = this;

       self.x = 0;
       ...

       self.show = function(){
          console.log('x=' + self.x);
       };

}

var testPoint = new Point();

...</comment>


Neural Networks and Deep Learning: An Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/index.html <comment><USER2> This is an excellent book written by Michael Nielsen. I had tried to learn neural nets earlier, but either found the descriptions too simplistic to come up with a clear understanding, or too complicated. IMHO, in this book, the right learning curve exists, and dare I say, trains up our biological neurons at the optimal learning rate :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Michael has written a great book. I humbly propose that readers who would like another intro, and who learn better from conceiving of the same subject in different ways, check out our introduction to neural nets:

[http://deeplearning4j.org/neuralnet- overview.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/neuralnet-overview.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> For C fans I ported the Python example from this excellent book here:

[https://github.com/dougszumski/NNet](https://github.com/dougszumski/NNet)

</comment><comment><USER5> Highly recommended! I was able to get a pretty good understanding of Deep Learning using this book. The book contains really good analogies (like explaining how a basic neuron works using a real life decision model) to help you understand the complex topic of Deep Learning.

</comment><comment><USER6> The book is excellent, but i have some trouble understanding, Gradient descent (mostly the calculus equations)

Can anyone help me with a rudimentary, simpler explanation for this? (a link may also do)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't already, you should check out the first and second week of Andrew Ng's Coursera Course on Machine learning. He exclusively talks about gradient descent the first few weeks. [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning)

<comment><USER7> Second the motion. Ang really explains gradient descent very well in that course.

As far as the equations go, if you don't know multi-variable calculus, you might not be able to follow the actual derivations, but I don't think that's all that crucial, depending on what your goals are. Certainly you can _apply_ this stuff without knowing the calculus behind it. And in the ang course, he gives you all the derivations you need to implement gradient descent for various purposes.

Anyway, here's my quick and dirty, way too high level overview of the whole calc business:

All you're really trying to do is optimize (minimize) a function. Given a point on the graph of that function, you need to know which direction to move in in order to get a smaller (more minimal) output. To do that, you calculate the slope at that point. Calculating the slope at a point on a curve is exactly what calculus does for you. If you were working with only one variable, the derivations would be trivial, but once you get into higher dimensional spaces and the need for partial derivatives, that's where the calculus gets a little trickier. But in concept, you're always just doing the same thing... calculating the slope so you know where to move, and by how much (the steeper the slope, the bigger the hop you make in a given iteration).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another freely available book on Neural Networks is here:

[http://hagan.okstate.edu/nnd.html](http://hagan.okstate.edu/nnd.html)

I've started skimming over this and it looks pretty useful so far.</comment>


Ask HN: Equity for Non-US employees - <AUTHOR>

I've got a bit of a conundrum. I have an employee located in India, to whom I'd like to give an equity stake in my US startup. In principle, I'd like to give him more or less the valley standard - x% over 4 years.
The employee is currently physically located in India, and is employed by an Indian corporation which sells services to the US corporation. Let's assume US immigration authorities will never allow him to physically enter the US.
I'm concerned about the specific mechanics of how to structure such an equity agreement. Particular issues:
a) Enforceability. This is the biggie. How can I construct a contract which he can enforce? We can transfer equity in a US corporation to him with little difficulty, but how can he enforce his equity rights? It's unlikely that any US lawyer would be willing to get involved in such a cross-border dispute, at least not for the sums of money involved.
b) Taxation. How can we avoid having him taxed by both the US and India?
We are thinking about multiple mechanisms. One is for him to sign an equity-like cash-settled contract with the Indian corporation. Another is for him to directly invest 1 rupee every month, in return for X/48 shares, and we can terminate this agreement whenever we like. (If we terminate the agreement, he quits, roughly equivalent to firing before fully vested.)
Has anyone here done something like this in the past? How did you structure it? Any pitfalls to be aware of?
tl;dr How can I give an Indian employee equity in a US corporation and minimize the ability of future owners of the company to screw him over? <comment><USER2> Equity may be tricky but cross-border contracts are nothing new. I think you just need to find the right kind of lawyer.</comment>


Ask HN: How does HN make money? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> HN itself doesn't make any money, but it serves as a community that attracts people who apply for YC, and in turn generate returns (similar to the playground at a McDonalds). There are other startup accelerators that don't have a community like HN, and they miss out on this source of potential applicants.

</comment><comment><USER3> Indirectly: brand identity, community building, etc. YC makes money off seed funding deals.

Lots of venture capitalists blog heavily for the same reason.

</comment><comment><USER4> HN makes YC's investment portfolio more valuable, via:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs](https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs)

[http://www.ycombinator.com/apply/](http://www.ycombinator.com/apply/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It does?</comment>


Hundreds of dogs in Norway hit by mystery illness - <AUTHOR> https://www.mattilsynet.no/language/english/serious_illness_in_dogs.36035 <comment><USER2> As a dog owner in norway following this, my bet is on an extra bad seasonal outbreak + breaking the threshold of runaway media. Recent news article said there is a spike of dogs dying with these symptoms every spring and autumn. Even now, the majority of affected dogs just end up more or less sick for a couple of days. Not dead. I even suspect my own dog had it. It was bad enough that we would have called the vet if it was'nt the worst time of day and week for getting hold of one. (He's fine, tending his stick collection.) A "dog hotel" owner interviewed on tv said about half of the 17 dogs she took care of got sick, only two got it badly, none died.

<comment><AUTHOR> If this was only a media fear fest the Norwegian Food Safety Authority wouldn't act as they have. They wouldn't recommend dog owners to avoid dog socialization if they didn't think this was a serious, real threat.

It's clearly a seasonal thing. The autumn weather activates Providencia Alcalifaciens somehow, but how isn't known yet. It's apparently a part of the normal gut flora, but the levels are very elevated in the dead dogs.

\</comment></comment><comment>

This article is really interesting (paywall):

[https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/MRWR00/Har- ventet-i-13-ar...](https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/MRWR00/Har- ventet-i-13-ar-pa-at-bakterien-skulle-dukke-opp)

Paywall free article (translated to English): [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fkristofferr.com%2Ffiles%2Fdog.html)

The bacterium have apparently killed dogs before in South-Africa.

<comment><USER3> I don't know how it is in Norway, but in the States sometimes these organizations like to "get out ahead" of something for fear of being blamed later.

In the US we have an average of 7 cases of EEE (Mosquito born illness) in humans per year, but if you get it it's often fatal. This year there was an "outbreak" in MA of 7 cases. There are 36 communities which are claimed to be at "critical" risk.

The problem with this nonsense is that they close the town fields and they don't let the kids outside before school starts or even for recess. This apparently will continue until the first hard frost hits.

It's tragic that a few people have died. I think it's insane to respond by effectively canceling fall outdoor sports.

Humans are just really bad at evaluating risks of extremely low probability events.

<comment><USER4> Norwegian culture is very different to US culture with this sort of thing at many levels. If a Norwegian public body declares an emergency it means there is a problem.

Some examples... There isn't really a blame culture here. People can fuck up massively and face no serious consequences. There isn't really the same aversion to risk. Sick people are told by their doctors to get some exercise and lose weight before the doctors reach for drugs. It would seem alien to an American in many ways.

<comment><USER5> Those are some of the things I love about Norway. The culture and people seem much more practical, on many levels.

As a Texan with family in Norway, I've often admired Norwegian culture... Everything is just so _koselig_ , you know?

<comment><USER4> There are some downsides. The fact no one is held accountable for failure means incompetent people can waste a lot of resources and time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "In most cases where several dogs live in the same animal care, only one dog has become ill. This may indicate that the possible disease is not so contagious from dog to dog. For the time being, the Norwegian Food Safety Authority's advice on restricting close contact between dogs remains valid."

I'm looking forward to seeing what caused this. Really strange (In my non- expert mind) that it hasn't made its way to Sweden.

<comment><USER7> > Really strange (In my non-expert mind) that it hasn't made its way to > Sweden.

Elsethread people are speculating that it might be due to contaminated food. Sweden is in the EU, Norway isn't, and AFAIK the EU doesn't like importing meat and other agricultural products.

<comment><USER8> Norway is in the EEA and that means they are effectively bound by same rules as the rest of the EU governing trade.

<comment><USER9> The EEA free trade and common standards have significant exceptions for agricultural and fisheries products. Norway and so on are not subject to the Common Agricultural Policy or Common Fisheries Policy, and can put significant tariffs on EU products in those areas AIUI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More info: [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/10/europe/norway-dog- disease...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/10/europe/norway-dog-disease-intl- hnk-scli/index.html)

Spain is advising people dog owners to not travel with their dogs to Norway.

There are fears that it might spread to other countries, it spread all over Norway quickly without any logical common cause found.

<comment><USER10> One possibility is that the disease is carried by humans and affects dogs more heavily.

When I lived in Norway mild flu symptoms would spread through society and quickly, especially when the weather would start to turn cold and dark.

<comment><USER11> Humans and dogs do not share many diseases. Flu are too different in both species. All the cases would be spatially related in this case. With most cases in a small area instead some animals falling ill here and there.

<comment><USER12> The carrier doesn't have to get sick with the disease to spread it; most of our insect-transmitted diseases don't affect the insect in any manner after all.

<comment><USER13> It sounded like you can rule out transmission through insects due to the patterns.

Transmission through latent infection of Humans would also be strange. Dog to Dog would be more probable. Of course, Humans accidentally transfer pathogens from animal to animal all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really like the tone of their regulator.

Straight up we don't actually know but here is our best known info.

As regulator the temptation is always there to say it's all fine. So saying we don't know is extra hard.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe food. Dogs eat fish normally in norway?

> serious bowel disease, with bloody content in the small intestines. Non > transmisible from dog to dog...

Sounds like food poisoning, yup. Or water. I assume that radiation can cause those symptoms of tissue bleeding if ingested via food or drink.

Clostridum happened suspiciously as cause of massive death of 10.000 Saiga just weeks after forests of Chernobyl burned.

Smells like scorched atoms. What do we know about the recent Russian atomic accident?

<comment><USER15> > What do we know about the recent Russian atomic accident?

That it was notable, but tiny, less than 100x background radiation within close proximity to the release.

<comment><USER11> Have they looked for Tritium release? It seems that is not picked by common geiger counters (I could be wrong about that point)

Update: Nah, a Virus explains much better some animals falling ill and other in the same place not (affected by the disease before and having developped immunity).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Salmonella sp. and Campylobacter sp. has not been identified.

Salmonella was my first thought. The CDC in the US just issued a warning to dog owners about pig ears: [https://mb.ntd.com/fda-cdc-dont-buy-or-feed-your- dog-any-pig...](https://mb.ntd.com/fda-cdc-dont-buy-or-feed-your-dog-any-pig- ear-dog-treats_377245.html)

<comment><USER11> Is a good candidate. In this case some people should be falling ill also. I don't know if the same strands of Salmonella in dogs can affect people, but I assume that could happen.

Update: In other source says that Salmonella has been ruled out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17>
      > dozens

Statista ([https://www.statista.com/statistics/515533/dog-population- eu...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/515533/dog-population-europe- norway/)) :

      > The dog population in Norway was measured at approximately 500 thousand in 2017

<comment><USER18> Dozens are dead over hundreds infected, it doesn't matter if the whole dog population is 1000 or 1B for the mortality rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That would be a pretty bad thing to jump the species barrier given the proximity of us and our pets and the apparently high mortality. This is the one thing I keep coming back to: we are but one small mutation away from some very bad disease jumping from cows, pigs (very likely due to anatomical resemblance), fowl (chickens) or pets such as cats or dogs to us humans with disastrous consequences. And we'd be about as prepared as a sitting duck is for acute lead poisoning.

Large numbers of cases like these in pets are always scary for that reason. See also 'avian bird flu' for another example of this as well as this one:

[https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-05-pig-virus- potential-t...](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-05-pig-virus-potential- threat-humans.html)

<comment><USER20> The methods to create a global flu pandemic have already been documented. Ferrets are great flu incubators and can serve as hosts to selectively breed deadly, highly transmissible flu. I hope world governments are keeping a close eye on Ron Fouchier, because if I were a Bond supervillain my plan would be to kidnap him and force him to create a superflu.

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/09/flu-researcher- ron-f...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/09/flu-researcher-ron-fouchier- loses-legal-fight-over-h5n1-studies)

Note that even though he lost this legal fight, his work was still published - this hearing was solely about whether he required an export license to publish dual-use scientific research.

<comment><USER21> We are not as close to bioterror as this comment implies - there are still very considerable technical hurdles

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just to add up to the list of links to follow up, these are from the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, where they keep posting updates:

\- (one) [https://www.vetinst.no/en/news/severe-illness-in-dogs-in- nor...](https://www.vetinst.no/en/news/severe-illness-in-dogs-in-norway)

\- (update 11 sept) [https://www.vetinst.no/en/news/severe-illness-in-dogs-in- nor...](https://www.vetinst.no/en/news/severe-illness-in-dogs-in-norway- update-11-september)

</comment><comment><USER23> Could it be dog feed/treats from China?

<comment><USER24> [ For context, this has happened in the United States around 2008 or 2009, with a manufacturer in China putting melamine into food to test higher for detected protein content, falsely. I think the manufacturer was severely prosecuted by China. ]

<comment><USER25> > I think the manufacturer was severely prosecuted by China

I would like to think that. I would not hold my breath.

<comment><USER24> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How likely is it that those dogs are just being poisoned by someone?

<comment><USER27> Not very since apparently many dogs were infected, some got very ill, some died.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration are quoted on speculating that it may be parvovirus, as it seems to fit the symptoms. I have seen no further reporting or repudiation on that possibility, though.

Or ... maybe it's lupus?

<comment><USER13> A lot can fit those symptoms, and dogs with some other infection may be affected worse by parvovirus.

The Norwegians probably know more about the details. There are vaccines against Parvo, so it's hard to tell if denial of vaccinations is so bad in Norway, that there is an outbreak with hundreds of dogs...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I know the movie : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7aum_Arivu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7aum_Arivu)

</comment><comment><USER30> This does sound awfully similar to the plot of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(1982_film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(1982_film\)) —- ancient/alien parasitic organism buried in thawing Norwegian permafrost affecting a sled dog ... also reminded me of the recent warnings of bacteria in permafrost e.g. [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-74335-4_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-74335-4_6) ... of course this is an idle association and apologies to all the real dog owners whose dogs are ill from this very real disease.

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be really much more useful if they've bothered to mentioned what are the early symptoms?! If a dog has bloody diarrhea of course you'll take it to the vet...

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it only affecting dogs that are walked out in public, as opposed to those that stay in kennels or on their owner's property?

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems light on details of the incidents and timelines. Is there a better source that explains how this all started?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nobody knows what it is or where it's come from. Most of the sources are Norwegian, but it's spread all over Norway.

This is a timeline of the news since Sept 5 (click "Vis flere"):

[https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/mystisk- hundesykdom-1.14689833](https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/mystisk- hundesykdom-1.14689833)

Here are more sources:

[https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/0nkmk6/bianca-7-fikk-s...](https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/0nkmk6/bianca-7-fikk- symptomer-paa-alvorlig-hundesykdom-doede-i-loepet-av-24-timer)

[https://www.nrk.no/ostlandssendingen/atte-nye-tilfeller- av-s...](https://www.nrk.no/ostlandssendingen/atte-nye-tilfeller-av-syke- hunder-1.14701114)

[https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/dOPwpo/Dette-er- de-12-for...](https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/dOPwpo/Dette-er-de-12-forste- hundene-som-er-obdusert-etter-hundesykdommen)

[https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/kJX3ov/Vet-ikke-om-vi- vil...](https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/kJX3ov/Vet-ikke-om-vi-vil-fa-svar- pa-hva-hundene-er-blitt-syke-av)

[https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/K31n1y/spania- advarer-...](https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/K31n1y/spania-advarer- etter-hundedoedsfall-ikke-reis-til-norge)

[https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/P9moz7/skrev- oppgave-o...](https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/P9moz7/skrev-oppgave-om- hundesykdom-bakterien-alle-utbruddene-har-skjedd-om-hoesten)

<comment><USER33> Thanks, this is what I was looking for.

There wasn't even an incident count in the alert so I was curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> All those recommendations and they are not advising to let them eat the same food as the owner?

<comment><USER6> "Preliminary assessment of the responses received so far in the survey, doesn't show any correlation between the cases that give a clear trace to follow in the investigation. In most cases where several dogs live in the same animal care, only one dog has become ill."

Seems unlikely that dog food is the issue, else they would have caught it by now. Dogs don't take well to quick changes in their diet either (they'd start showing some of the symptoms described), and the list of foods they shouldn't ingest is long. Recommending that people start feeding their pets human food would probably just make the whole situation a lot worse.

<comment><USER18> If it's something that is happening simultaneously in all the country while dogs living in the same animal care are not affected seems to push strongly towards contaminated food rather than towards some mysterious non infective disease just appearing all over the country.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but it's weird that it's a combination of extremely sudden illness (often less than 24 hours from first sign to death) and a regular stream of new cases every day.

If it were from contaminated food you would expect it to happen more abruptly, then taper out. No common food link has been found either.

<comment><USER18> The extremely sudden illness seems more compatible with poisoning than with a disease, or more precisely, I'm not aware of any disease capable of killing in less than 24 hours from the early signs, at least in humans, but I'm not anywhere near an expert on dog's diseases. About the food distribution can be that it's affecting only some common ingredient used by different dog foods so it will be difficult to pinpoint it. If I were in Norway with a dog I would rather avoid the common dog food until there is more clarity on what's going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the dead dogs all have the Providencia alcalifaciens bacterium: [https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/MRWR00/Har- ventet-i-13-ar...](https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/MRWR00/Har- ventet-i-13-ar-pa-at-bakterien-skulle-dukke-opp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I bet it's the dog food.

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't a mystery disease wiping out dogs (and cats) the cause for the original Planet of the Apes?

<comment><USER15> It's the impetus for the domestication of apes, who later go on to rise against us, but I'm not sure I'd elevate it to being the cause of the uprising.</comment></comment>


Feedback on weblerr.com, any suggestions / ideas? - <AUTHOR> http://weblerr.com

<comment><USER2> The demo video doesn't clearly explain how it works. You mentioned that there is a weblerr bar but no other info on that. Without asking us to signup, could you show us how it will work? How will we make friends; if we are gonna import our contact list and such.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, i will make a new video for it soon as a lot of people have been saying that.</comment></comment>


Is there a program like codeacademy but for learning sysadmin? - <AUTHOR> if not, anyone wanna build one? <comment><USER2> Linux Academy is how I went from dude working at a call center for an insurance company to Linux SysAdmin/AWS SA interviewing for jobs at Fortune 500 companies and Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recommend the free Linux Foundation courses on EdX:

Introduction to Linux [https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to- linux](https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-linux)

Introduction to Kubernetes [https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to- kubernetes](https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-kubernetes)

Disclosure: CNCF funded the Kubernetes course development.

</comment><comment><USER4> Guide to the Systems Administration Body of Knowledge

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

Training program to make a Novice System Administrator (2016)

[http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to- make-a-...](http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/training-program-to-make-a- novice-system-administrator/)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's nothing like hands-on experience. Go set up a VM, and read the digital ocean docs. They're some of the best resources out there. Go start reading the arch linux wiki, that has some nice information on configuring services. Look into docker and investigate it. Think about how these things are put together. Understand business needs and how things fit together to make money.

</comment><comment><USER6> Linux Academy is the best training provider for this that I've seen so far.

<comment><USER7> Seconded, LA, while not perfect, is probably your best online learning path.

Or, even better, find a server/hosting company/datacenter, and insist on interning/working for free/peanuts as a NOC Tech. You'll learn all the SA/networking/Linux/DNS etc fundamentals for sure, and it's a great foot in the door into the tech industry. If you're half way decent, you'll move up the chain quickly.

<comment><USER6> Not either/or. Both/and.

You're going to learn the best by _doing_ it with your hands.

It'll cement what you're learning from the training.

<comment><USER7> Fully agree. I mainly learned by doing the latter route (started as a NOC Tech). If LA had existed then, it definitely would have been a nice compliment.

I like the mindset of people wanting to learn SA/fundamentals though. Far too many are skipping the needful whilst diving straight to cloud/serverless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few sysadmin and _devops_ curriculum resources; though none but Beaker and Molecule are interactive with any sort of testing AFAIU:

"System Administrator" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator)

"Software Configuration Management" (SCM) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_managem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_management)

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

"OpsSchool Curriculum" [http://www.opsschool.org](http://www.opsschool.org)

\- Soft Skills 101, 201

\- Labs Exercises

\- Free. Contribute

awesome-sysadmin > configuration-management [https://github.com/kahun/awesome- sysadmin/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/kahun/awesome- sysadmin/blob/master/README.md#configuration-management)

\- This could list reusable module collections such as Puppet Forge and Ansible Galaxy;

\- And module testing tools like Puppet Beaker and Ansible Molecule (that can use Vagrant or Docker to test a [set of] machines)

[https://github.com/stack72/ops-books](https://github.com/stack72/ops-books)

\- I'd add "Time Management for System Administrators" (2005)

[https://landing.google.com/sre/books/](https://landing.google.com/sre/books/)

\- There's now a "Site Reliability Workbook" to go along with the Google SRE book. Both are free online.

[https://response.pagerduty.com](https://response.pagerduty.com)

\- The PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation is also free online.

\- OpsGenie has a free plan also with incident response alerting and on-call management.

There are a number of awesome-devops lists.

Minikube and microk8s package Kubernetes into a nice bundle of distributed systems components that'll run on Lin, Mac, Win. You can convert docker- compose.yml configs to Kubernetes pods when you decide that it should've been HA with a load balancer SPOF and x.509 certs and a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) from the start!

<comment><USER8> I just found these resources from a real live company in the GitLab Handbook:

Handbook > Engineering > Infrastructure [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/)

Handbook > Engineering > Ops [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ops/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ops/)

(Sysadmins are part of teams that solve business and scientific experiment problems for people that are part of organizations' teams)</comment></comment>


Banned Ozone-Harming Gas Creeps Back, Suggesting a Mystery Source - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/climate/ozone-layer-cfc.html <comment><USER2> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090224)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find this story fascinating. The specific gas, CFC-11 is like old school, produced in '86 banned by '96\. There are alternatives that are better today and not banned. So who fires up an old chemical plant to make this stuff?

<comment><USER4> I seriously doubt it was a fired-up plant that manufactured the uptick.

More likely, I wonder if their model considers the natural decay of other chlorofluorocarbons, like R-115, R-114, or, counterintuitively, R-12. It's probably reasonable to expect that as those compounds break down, that R-11 could be an intermediate step.

Crushing up old closed-cell foam, old cars, old refrigerators, and old industrial plants are all possibilities if the above is not what's actually happening.

It's remarkable how we as a society have declared victory on our ozone problem, when in reality, it's not been fixed. Did you know that the UV index outside can actually go way above 12, like 45? Nobody measures this, but it happens.

Spending all day at the beach with no sunscreen hasn't always been insane, just since we started our experiment with refrigerants.

<comment><USER3> In the study they considered the destruction of things like foam and old refrigerant systems and concluded there was too much material for that to be the source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My assumption is developing nations relive variations of the past of the developed nations, while adding some new mistakes of their own.

In the industrial context, there's a whole bunch of worrying things that had to be learned not to do the hard way but were probably obvious and emergent discoveries making them likely to recur without sufficient intervention/education.

At least our mistakes were made with relatively small population multipliers. Repeating them on the scale of China or India's population, there's massive potential for environmental harm the likes of which we've never seen.

</comment><comment><USER6> The first thought that crossed my mind is bitcoin mines. Large mining operations using it as a better coolant.

Could be nonsense, though, if there are better coolants available today that are legal.

<comment><USER2> They would only do it incidentally while buying whatever cheap coolers, there's no good reason to seek out refrigeration systems that use CFCs.

<comment><USER6> The question is, is there a technical reason? Are modern refrigeration systems more efficient than CFC systems? If so, then it's a dumb idea. But if there's an actual efficiency gain to be had with CFCs... well.

This is not my field of expertise, and a quick googling didn't turn up really unbiased sources.

<comment><USER2> They aren't different enough to justify any hassle seeking them out.

<comment><USER6> Depends. It's not just efficiency, it's cost savings. If someone is running a large enough operation to save millions of dollars a year in cooling by using CFCs (assuming they're actually cheaper), and one is in a, um, lightly regulated industry (like Bitcoin mining) that uses massive power... well, that's a lot of justification. Small savings become big savings at scale.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Charlie Rose Interviews Paul Graham [video] - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/disrupt/video/watch/id/Vkc3dnMjprA5pSXVul65bhBfVkI2VtQ_/ <comment><USER2> Great interview. Love how PG is so honest and doesn't pretend to have all the answers.</comment>


API Reference with elasticlunr – JavaScript full-text search with great results - <AUTHOR> https://api-reference.shutterstock.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.npmjs.com/package/elasticlunr](https://www.npmjs.com/package/elasticlunr)

"Elasticlunr.js provides Query-Time boosting, field search, more rational scoring/ranking methodology, fast computation speed and so on. Elasticlunr.js is a bit like Solr, but much smaller and not as bright, but also provide flexible configuration, query-time boosting, field search and other features."</comment>


SOPA has Not been postponed to 2012. Committee changed date to December 21. - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#%21/DarrellIssa/status/147795287732264960 <comment><USER2> Javascript-free: [http://mobile.twitter.com//DarrellIssa/status/14779528773226...](http://mobile.twitter.com//DarrellIssa/status/147795287732264960)</comment>


What do principle / staff engineers do? - <AUTHOR> I was working in a small company that got sucked up big a bigger corp. now falling into the job ladder and I was given the above "grade".
I've no idea what someone like this does in a large company as there seems to be a lot of teams and groups to navigate.
My understanding is someone like this isn't a manager but they aren't really hands on either, depending on team size of course.
Anyone able to give me a "in the life of" explanation ? <comment><USER2> You don't get day to day supervision. Rather, you set your own agenda. Talk to product groups, figure out what could be new stuff. A lot of the work is prototyping and experimentation. It is easy to fall into rat holes. Ultimately, your performance review will come and you have to justify your existence (i.e. salary). Lots of freedom but also responsibility. I end up hacking a lot but many people at this level also have teams .. usually informally (i.e. people they work with for a particular project).

<comment><USER3> this is closer to my experiences than the people talking about nonstop meetings. I report directly to the cto and basically do whatever i want(as a staff eng, 100+ engineers) Two main criteria at our company is the breadth of work you do - instead of being the best on one project, its expected that you can hop in wherever needed. I don't get assigned tasks, bounce around between many teams, and am expected to be connected enough to know what needs doing. Also multiply others - identifying and/or solving a problem that makes everyone 10% more efficient, or training/teaching/etc.

The other thing expectation is product and business focus. Understanding how what youre doing affects the business, making changes that solve business problems. It's cool to make something 10% faster, but the expectation is you understand that if spending your time elsewhere will increase revenue, youll do that. Often I've found the product team assumes a thing is impossible, but if you understand the problems the business is facing, you can recommend the solution they thought was too hard to even bring to the eng team.

Yea, there are more meetings than as a regular engineer, and probably do less "work", but i dont find it political and your impact is larger in that you are making every other engineer better, and more control and input on the business.

<comment><USER2> Agreed with all you said. I'm curious how one manages their career at this level. I got my current gig due to some peculiar circumstances. I don't think companies interview for these positions. You need to have a track record or some kind of "in" (the original poster seems to have come in with an acquisition). I'm two years into my job so am not sure how this goes forward. Wish I had a mentor :)

<comment><USER4> Usually larger companies have some sort of mentor ship program. If that's not true in your case, you can always find someone individually and do it unofficially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In big companies, the most successful Staff Engineers forge a symbiotic relationship with a manager at the equivalent level.

The two build trust where the Staff Engineer makes tech decisions and sets direction for the manager's teams in exchange for not having to deal with people or personnel issues as a titled manager. Much of the power without the direct accountability.

The manager, on the other hand, gets the awesome power of the Staff Engineer to deliver projects and handle the technical challenges while reaping most of the credit and rewards, in exchange for being held directly accountable for the teams.

Without this relationship, both halves are fairly useless. So my advice is to forge a relationship with a manager peer until you are ready to move on.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of my pet peeves... It's principal, not principle. Sure, I hope principal engineers have principles, but that's not what their title says. Principal, as in "main engineer", not "engineer with scruples".

Generally, a principal engineer is one of the highest engineering titles (the only one above would be fellow), which means you are invited to management- only meetings, essentially.

<comment><USER7> I think a principle engineer would set and tune the morals for a group of people. If they did their job well, then the group would function fairly and efficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lead developer here, In my experience it's been:

\- Setting up the dev team for success by helping select language/framework/tech stacks

\- Helping other devs, sharing knowledge, training, tools

\- Encourage good developer habits, testing, OOP/OOD/patterns where needed etc.

\- Get team input and be point of contact with upper management

\- Plan the technical/solution design/architecture of said app. Share with other team members, work through it, get everyone on board, setup foundation, go build.

\- A bunch more but that's a good start.

</comment><comment><USER9> To maintain this type of position, one is typically in non-stop meetings. Usually bullshit political meetings like who should be in charge of what, trying to convince executives to hire/fire/start/stop someone or something, trying to get money from executives, trying to keep other people from getting money or projects.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do all shopping websites look the same? - <AUTHOR>

I have been looking at various shopping websites, and to me they all look the same. Nordstrom, Amazon, Half.com, Etsy, Ebay. Category bar at the top. Hero Image and search bar. Some content below the fold.
Is this because this is the ideal way to shop for things online, or everyone just copies each other and converge on the same layout?
I realize at this point this category is pretty mature, but it just strikes me that there don't seem to be many "alternative" layouts for shopping websites.
Any counterexamples (or perhaps push back on my argument) are welcome. <comment><USER2> This is how retail people think the category bar corresponds to aisles and shelves. Customers stroll the aisles (i.e. browse) to find the product they want.

Categories match up with internal structure as well, as individual people or whole departments are responsible for the products in each category. Performance of each category is measured individually and budgets and bonuses are produced.

The dirty little secret is most of e-commerce site traffic is driven by search. A good search function out performs category browsing. REI.com has a great search, for example.

About 8 years ago A/B testing starting to make retail marketing departments very excited. No longer would the whims of designers drive site decisions! We can test and pick the most profitable! We can prove that the most familiar appeals to the most common denominator! We can kill innovation, end risk taking and protect profits.

And that's the moral of the story - retail has a terribly thin margin and when your closest competitor is one tab away no one is interested in creating something new.</comment>


Movie: Visualizing Bank Failures, 2008 - 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://computationallegalstudies.com/2009/12/13/visualizing-bank-failures-2008-2009/

<comment><USER2> shouldn't there be two massive bubbles for bear sterns and lehman brothers?

the only reason i can think of for not seeing them is that maybe they weren't counted as full "failures" since some of their assets were bought, but it would make sense to include them in something like this..

<comment><USER3> I think they are only including banks that deal with the general public. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are investment banks.</comment></comment>