Stanford Computer Science '11-'12 Salary Survey Results - <AUTHOR> CS/EE Undergrads (135 responses; 380 job offers)
95% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 5% were from the Midwest and East Coast. 10% of the job offers were from start-ups.
Offers ranged from $65,500 to $92,000. AVG: $79,360. MEDIAN: $ 78,750.
~70% of students were offered stock options. ~80% of students were offered signing bonuses. ~60% were offered relocation assistance and there were others who did not report the statistics since relocating did not apply. Relocation assistance ranged from $3,000 to $10,000 with an average of $3,500. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 with an average of $5,700.
CS/EE Masters (150 responses; 345 job offers)
94% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 6% were in the Midwest and East Coast. 15% of the job offers were from start-ups.
Offers ranged from $70,000 to $105,300. AVG: $98,246. MEDIAN: $87,650.
~78% of students were offered stock options. ~66% of students were offered signing bonuses. ~43% were offered relocation assistance and there others who did not report the statistics since relocating did not apply. Relocation assistance ranged from $3,000 to $8,000 with an average of $2,500. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $35,000 with an average of $6,325.
CS/EE PhDs (30 responses; 75 job offers)
80% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 20% were in the Midwest and East Coast. 30% of the job offers were from start-ups. 5% of the job offers were from a university.
Offers ranged from $133,250 to $146,980. AVG: $143,083. MEDIAN: $140,115.
~50% of students were offered stock options. ~50% of students were offered signing bonuses. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $19,500 with an average of $7,200. Relocation assistance ranged from $5,000 to $10,000 with an average of $6,500. However, they may not have reported on all the benefits they received.
Compare with the previous year's survey: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3141716 <comment><USER2> Glad to see salaries are going up for new grads (at least for Stanford grads with ludicrous offers from Google and Facebook). Pushing salaries up across the industry can only be a good thing for pretty much everybody here.

Definitely a refreshing change from the GlassDoor surveys we keep seeing here telling people to hold on tight to that $70k salary you deserve from your 7-10 years of experience.

All that's missing now is the obligitory dismissive comment from that DC government contractor guy who thinks we're all really making $30k/year and lying about it (and says as much on every single discussion about salary that comes through this site).

<comment><USER3> I've held a perception that Stanford students have ludicrous offers from Bay Area companies, and I definitely expected the average to be higher due to cost of living.

However, these numbers really are similar to Georgia Tech's CS numbers for 2012, and I know there's a lot of east coast companies that pull GT graduates.

[http://www.adors.gatech.edu/commencement/salary_report_resul...](http://www.adors.gatech.edu/commencement/salary_report_result.cfm?college=TOTAL&level=1&surveyid=62&Submit=Submit)

The College of Computing has better numbers (including relocation and stock option numbers), but that link is the rollup for the school. I can't find the CoC specific ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm assuming these are jobs offered straight after graduating.

I wonder what the trend looks like 5 - 10 years post graduation and whether experience in the field will ever close the gap between an undergraduate and a postgraduate. An extra $60K a year is a huge incentive to undertake a PhD.

I wonder what the level of employment is between different groups.

<comment><USER5> I had the opposite thought: a PhD might be worthwhile if you really love research, but it's hard to imagine making up the opportunity cost.

What's the normal time to PhD? 5-7 years? Five years out of school, my base salary was barely below the range, and salary + bonus was just a bit above the top end of the range. Seven years out of school (without a PhD), my base salary is in the range, and my salary + bonus is substantially above the range. In the meantime, I've been making a six figure salary instead of a grad student stipend.

I sometimes regret not doing a PhD, but it's definitely not because of the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does "offered stock options" mean? I'd like to have a complete understanding to total average comp, but I need to know the total present value of these stock options.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Computer Forum doesn't calculate stats on stock options, because "stock options offered by companies are so different in their actual and potential values."

So it just means that they were offered options as part of their compensation package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Damn.. I am getting paid less than that :(

No mention of the average number of job offers? From last year: "Students who replied averaged about 2 job offers."

<comment><AUTHOR> Undergrads: ~2 offers

MS: ~3 offers

PhD: ~3 offers

I edited the original report to fit it into 2K chars. The report is compiled by the Stanford Computer Forum, and sent out to the jobs mailing list each year.</comment></comment>


Why Nobody Should Ever Search the Ashley Madison Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/26/why_nobody_should_ever_search_the_ashley_madison_data/?mt=1440619423114

<comment><USER2> While the first 3 have some merit, the 4th one is terrible.

> 4\. It Is Morally Wrong To Even Look At The Ashley Madison Data. If You Have > Looked At It You Are The Truly Evil One – Far Worse Than An Adulterer – And > Nobody Should Or Will Care What You Say Or Think

Saying it is morally wrong for anything is shorthand for "I totally know my argument has no merit whatsoever, but I am really hoping that you overlook that due to some of our shared values"

A lot of "morally wrong" stuff got "morally right" in the last century.

And of course you are not invading anyone's privacy. I can totally recall some FISC decisions that data given to a third party does not have reasonable expectation of privacy ...

The best argument to not look at AM data is that: Nothing good will come out of it.</comment>


Spleeter – Music Source-Separation Engine - <AUTHOR> https://deezer.io/releasing-spleeter-deezer-r-d-source-separation-engine-2b88985e797e <comment><USER2> Once this technology gets incorporated into DJ mixers / CDJs, this is going to make DJing much more creatively interesting.

Historically, blending between mixed stereo tracks has limited to mixing EQ bands, but now DJs will be able to layer and mix the underlying stems themselves -- like putting the vocal from one track onto an instrumental section on another (even if there were never a capella / instrumental versions released.)

It also opens up a previously unreachable world for amateur remixing in general; for instance, creating surround sound mixes from stereo or even mono recordings for playback in 3D audio environments like Envelop ([https://envelop.us](https://envelop.us)) [disclaimer: I am one of the co- founders of Envelop]

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be much more efficient for everyone (and even lucrative for the owners) to also provide the studio stems at a slightly higher/different price?

(not that some of these are not already available when you know where to search, but it's not very... structured)

<comment><USER4> Native Instruments tried that with their Stems [0] project. Didn't seem to get all too far though.

[0]: [https://www.native- instruments.com/en/specials/stems/](https://www.native- instruments.com/en/specials/stems/)

<comment><USER3> This one is proprietary to them.

The "open source" format/practice exists already: just bounce your mix into separate audio files, one for each track or group, into a folder, zip it, ship.

Only, it's not (yet) much embraced on the commercial side. When you pay up to 20 boxes to get a full album, why couldn't you pay, say, 100 to get the same album but with separated tracks for your own use + instructions as who to contact & how for any other kind of uses?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone who wants to try Spleeter in a version that "just works" without having to install TensorFlow and mess with offline processing, Spleeter has been been built into a wave editor called Acoustica from Acon Digital. It's been working really well for me, and the whole package is solid competition to editors like iZotope RX:

[https://acondigital.com/products/acoustica-audio- editor/](https://acondigital.com/products/acoustica-audio-editor/)

<comment><USER6> I've been trying for months to make redistributable Spleeter "binaries" that I can bundle with user-facing applications. Happy to see someone's succeeded where I've failed. Really sad they've chosen not to share their changes :(

I emailed them requesting more info on how their implementation works. I think this might be a violation of the MIT license?

<comment><USER5> The MIT license isn't copyleft, there's no obligation to share modifications or provide source - just to acknowledge the copyright / credit.

But they seem friendly and proactive (from my experience on music forums anyway), so hopefully you'll get a helpful reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussion, where I posted a demo using a full song (legally under Creative Commons):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21431071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21431071)

Note: I'm not affiliated with this project; I just think it's cool.

<comment><USER8> I'm going to pretend that we didn't see this (otherwise extremely helpful) link to a major discussion from 6 months ago, so as not to have to mark the current post a dupe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I often have voice recordings with a lot of background noise (e.g. a public lecture in a room with poor acoustics, recorded from a phone in the audience — there's usually sounds of paper rustling, noises from the street, etc). Is this "source-separation" the sort of thing that could help, or does anyone have other tips? The best thing I have so far is based on this [https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Sanitizing_speech_recordi...](https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Sanitizing_speech_recordings_made_with_portable_audio_recorders#A_simple_two- step_process_taking_a_minute) —

(1) Open the file in Audacity and switch to Spectrogram view, (2) set a high- pass filter with ~150 Hz, i.e. filter out frequencies lower than that (which tend to be loud anyway), (3) _don't_ remove the higher frequencies (which aren't loud), because they are what make the consonants understandable (apparently), (4) look for specific noises, select the rectangle, and use "Spectral Edit Multi Tool".

But if machine learning can help that would be really interesting! This Spleeter page does mention "active listening, educational purposes, […] transcription" so I'm excited.

<comment><USER10> You could give a shot to the Nvidia RTX Voice plugin if you have one of the compatible cards. I'm not sure how it deals with low background noises, the youtube reviews mostly tested it with over the top cases like a vacuum cleaner next to the speaker.

<comment><USER11> Works on non-RTX cards too [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/you-can- get-nvidias-r...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/you-can-get-nvidias- rtx-voice-noise-filtering-without-a-pricey-rtx-card/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is a Max/Ableton live plugin version here, which makes it much easier to experiment with Spleeter artistically.

[https://github.com/diracdeltas/spleeter4max/releases/](https://github.com/diracdeltas/spleeter4max/releases/)

<comment><USER13> Nice! I had this idea and was too lazy to do it haha, glad someone else wasn't

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another recent open source contender for source separation is Open Unmix: [https://github.com/sigsep/open-unmix- pytorch/](https://github.com/sigsep/open-unmix-pytorch/)

I've not had time to try it yet but have read good things.

<comment><USER13> Just tried this and it's really impressive, I'd say it does a nicer job on vocals than Spleeter. Less of the "underwater" effect compared to what I remember of Spleeter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very cool!

I was even able to run it on their notebook [https://colab.research.google.com/github/deezer/spleeter/blo...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/deezer/spleeter/blob/master/spleeter.ipynb) without setting anything up locally.

The results of vocal separation were quite impressive.

<comment><USER15> Can you share the outputs please?

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I tried it on a (typical) copyrighted song.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's the sample output, for those who are curious:

\- Sample track: [https://files.catbox.moe/56op27.mp3](https://files.catbox.moe/56op27.mp3)

\- Spleeted vocals: [https://files.catbox.moe/4d9aru.wav](https://files.catbox.moe/4d9aru.wav)

\- Spleeted accompaniment: [https://files.catbox.moe/y67g23.wav](https://files.catbox.moe/y67g23.wav)

</comment><comment><USER17> A local radiostation has a broadcast of four hours. They are required to play an x amount of music tracks by the station (about 6 per hour), but there has been demand to make the broadcast available as podcast without the music.

Could this make it possible to automatically remove the music from the MP3 file they have available? With 6 tracks per hour times 4 hours, manually removing the music is time consuming.

I doubt it, as it seems all vocals are are output to a single file...

Is there any other tool someone can recommend?

<comment><USER18> Presumably they own the rights on broadcast material, so they'd have to be directly involved in the podcast production. That given, it would probably be more straight forward to take the microphone feeds from their broadcast desk (via "aux-out" perhaps) and record only the spoken output separately.

Sox etc. could be used for silence detection, probably best done in post (scriptable), but could be piped through after experimenting with settings. Otherwise, even old desks can trigger when a mic channel fader is raised, so that too is a possibility for pausing the recording during music.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Leveraging a state-of-the-art source separation algorithm for music information retrieval

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=JIR6HJISrtY...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=JIR6HJISrtY&feature=emb_logo)

</comment><comment><USER19> Now we can create all-star bands that never existed. For example:

Neil schon from journey. Lead guitar

Heart sisters doing lead vocals and lead/rthyum guitar

Flea -- bass guitar from Chili Peppers

Neal Peart -- drummer from rush

Tony kay --- keys from genesis

The only difficulty is they must all be playing the same song. Then we can extract, transpose if needed, and remix together.

<comment><USER20> We can deep fake vocals and redraw your photos as if they were painted by van gogh... I'm sure someone has trained something that immortalizes different artists into their AI instrumental avatar.

If not, I'm sure if you ask nicely Amazon will give you a few credits to burn on a pandemic art project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I couldn't find any examples so was wondering for anyone that's tried this are the results better than using a bandpass filter and an equalizer to isolate frequencies or one of those auto karaoke things?

Because the ability to separate any song into separate tracks would be amazing. The ability to remix any song or just play with any instrument or vocal track would be awesome. But does it have the same poor quality and limitations of most frequency based source separation?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the results are a lot better than filtering... deep learning has pushed the state of the art in source separation on quite a lot recently.

It isn't magical and the results still have artefacts (mostly that kind of slightly underwater sound of a low bitrate MP3, I believe due to the way the audio is reconstructed from FFTs), and some songs trip it up entirely, but it's definitely worth playing around with and I think it could potentially have applications for DJ/remix use if you added enough effects etc.

It's fairly easy to install and runs quickly without GPU, or you can try their Collab notebook, or seems someone has hosted a version at [https://ezstems.com/](https://ezstems.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Had a play with the Colab and it's quite good indeed. The authors claim "100x real time speed", which is mighty impressive, but I'd be more interested in seeing a "Try Really Hard" mode, trading off quality and speed. Is that a thing that can be done in the current code, I wonder?

</comment><comment><USER22> If you're trying to run it on Windows with Python 3.8, add numpy and cython to the dependencies, and change Tensorflow's requirement to be >= rather than ==.

Though then you'll run into compatibility errors like "No module named 'tensorflow.contrib'" which you'll have to fix.

</comment><comment><USER23> While this is awesome, it's trained on MUSDB18-HQ which as far as I can tell is proprietary. zenodo.org claims it is available, however I have filled out their "request access" page a half-dozen times. Does anyone know of a training data-set that's possible to obtain?

Here is the zenodo response:

Your access request has been rejected by the record owner.

Message from owner: no justification given

Record: MUSDB18-HQ - an uncompressed version of MUSDB18 [https://zenodo.org/record/3338373](https://zenodo.org/record/3338373)

The decision to reject the request is solely under the responsibility of the record owner. Hence, please note that Zenodo staff are not involved in this decision.

</comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of this open source project (and its predecessor manyears and open hardware projects 8/16soundsusb).

[https://github.com/introlab/odas](https://github.com/introlab/odas) [https://github.com/introlab/manyears](https://github.com/introlab/manyears) [https://github.com/introlab/16SoundsUSB](https://github.com/introlab/16SoundsUSB)

Website of the team behind these:

[https://introlab.3it.usherbrooke.ca/](https://introlab.3it.usherbrooke.ca/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Out of interest, and to put this in context - your brain can only do this for conversation, not music.

You routinely suppress background noise and room acoustics when listening to someone speaking. But you don't do the same thing when listening to music. At best you can focus on individual elements in a track, and you can parse them musically (and maybe lyrically).

But you don't suppress the rest to the point where you don't hear it.

<comment><USER26> Is there some research behind this or are you opining on how YOUR brain works?

<comment><USER27> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect)

Not sure how this pertains to music, but this ability normally requires localizing different voices and noises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is ultra-cool .. I have a few terabytes of jam-session recordings that I'm going to throw at this. If it ends up being usable to the point that I can re-do vocals over some of the greatest moments in the archive, I'll be praising whatever Spleeter deity makes itself visible to me at the time, most highly ..

</comment><comment><USER29> Once you have obtained just the Guitar from a track, are there any tools out there which can work out the Tablature (eg. [https://www.ultimate- guitar.com//top/tabs](https://www.ultimate-guitar.com//top/tabs)) so you can play along?

<comment><USER30> [https://products.zplane.de/decoda](https://products.zplane.de/decoda) can help

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, it seems neural networks started to appear for vocal and instrumental track isolation^^ recently I've discovered [https://www.lalal.ai](https://www.lalal.ai) and it works quite well

</comment><comment><USER32> I tried using the 2 stem model to remove the music from an audio recording of two people talking. It kept sucking in some of the music whenever someone started talking, however. Is there a better model to use for that?

</comment><comment><USER33> It says it can be 100 times faster than in real-time.

So can it be run in real-time?

I am thinking about extracting features for music visualization but it could make a DJ happy also.

<comment><USER34> Sometimes the distinction is made between "real-time" and "online" processing.

The first one refers to the speed of the processing in relation to the length of the recording - so, say, you can process a 10 minute recording in 1 minute then you're 10x real-time. However, your analysis might require the full track to be available for best outcomes, and so you cannot really start with the processing until the full source is available.

The latter is what "online" processing refers-to, the ability to process on- the-fly in parallel to the recording. Obviously, this cannot be faster than real-time ;-) but hopefully it is not slower, either. Often times, though, you get a (somewhat constant and) hopefully slow offset, i.e., you can process a 10 minute recording online in the same time but you need another 10 seconds on top of that.

This is, by the way, not restricted to source separation, it applies to other disciplines as well, say, automatic speech recognition.

<comment><USER33> Exactly, while fast if this method needs to parse the full track before starting to generate the results then it can't be used in real-tine.

To be used with arbitrary audio in real-time, after initialization and setup you need an API that looks like:

ProcessAudio (samples, num_namples)

And it would return n packets of num_namples samples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> You could try spleeter on the cloud here [https://voxremover.com](https://voxremover.com)

</comment><comment><USER32> The output appears to cut off after 10 minutes. How do you make it operate on longer files, like in the 100 minute range?

</comment><comment><USER36> Deezer is pretty useless if all supported hardware require your phone to stream.

They should spend dev time on something that matters

</comment><comment><USER37> This is very cool, I have started using it for experimenting creating hardstyle dance remixes of popular songs</comment>


2020 Candidate Puts His Money on Universal Income - <AUTHOR> https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/20/this_2020_candidate_puts_his_money_on_universal_income_139516.html <comment><USER2> Should we try try universal basic needs, education, health care ... before income?</comment>


IRS Rules Bitcoin Is Property, Not Currency - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/irs-rules-bitcoin-is-property-not-currency/ <comment><USER2> This strikes me as the most expected outcome. They are essentially treating Bitcoin as gold (actually slightly better, since gold has a collectible tax rate of 28% which doesn't qualify for the long term capital gains rate). The trickiest and scariest consequence will be for miners, who might need to report taxes at the time their bitcoins were mined and at the current market rate. This will mean a lot of people will need to retroactively declare gains, many of which may not have been realized. For small mining operations likely the miners will avoid reporting and just sell for cash. But for large miners who will need to use the exchanges, this becomes a real issue. Consult an accountant!

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course for the many people who will do simple point-to-point purchases with bitcoin, these rules won't really apply, since those transactions and gains aren't detectable unless they're declared.

On the other hand, with retailers and 3rd-party apps adding Bitcoin payment layers, an increasing amount of bitcoin purchases will be on record and associated with an address or bank account in some way or another. I think it's good - we get both worlds and bitcoin grows.

I think they also did a good job of doing this without having it come off stiff or overly specific to Bitcoin. Doubtless things will be adjusted over the next couple years, but this is a big step in the right direction. (I also anticipate a couple small steps in the wrong one, but that's to be expected)

<comment><USER4> >these rules won't really apply, since those transactions and gains aren't detectable unless they're declared.

Well, this is only assuming you use precautionary measures to protect your identity. If you, for example buy a stereo from a store, and use bitcoin. If you provide any information about yourself, such as your name/address/email/etc. Then the gov't has easily obtainable information that can connect you to other parts of the block chain. At which point, you're toast if the feds want to come after you for tax evasion.

Bitcoin is a great tool, but don't think it's going to open up some anarco- libritarian fantasy camp. It's not. Pay your taxes people.

<comment><USER5> if i buy $1 worth of bitcoin today and the price of bitcoin appreciates to $10 per bitcoin, i'm now wealthier and won't have to pay taxes as long as i transact in bitcoin. for example, i can probably now by 10 cups of coffees instead of one as long as i can pay for the coffees in bitcoin.

<comment><USER6> > i'm now wealthier and won't have to pay taxes as long as i transact in > bitcoin.

False, you clearly aren't understanding what's being said. Transacting is a taxable event, you owe money on the gains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So that means if I hold it over 1 year I can treat any gains as LONG TERM capital gains, right?

<comment><USER8> > So that means if I hold it over 1 year I can treat any gains as LONG TERM > capital gains, right?

The tax issues don't change because you've held an asset for Y years, it depends only on the date when you sell the asset. Remember that capital gains don't apply to assets that aren't sold -- this happens only when they're sold.

Any asset held for longer than a calendar year is taxed as long-term capital gains, otherwise short-term. And short-term capital gains are taxed the same as income.

<comment><USER7> You have an odd way of phrasing it.

I would have said that the tax issues DO change because you've held an asset for Y years: if Y >= 1 year then you are taxed at one rate and if Y < 1 year then you are taxed at a different rate.

Regardless, the tax consequences are now clear.

<comment><USER8> > I would have said that the tax issues DO change because you've held an asset > for Y years: if Y >= 1 year then you are taxed at one rate and if Y < 1 year > then you are taxed at a different rate.

Fair enough, but my point is that you aren't taxed at all until you sell the asset. People who haven't invested much don't get that, and it's an argument in favor of buy & hold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This can only be good for Bitcoin. If you can pay taxes on it; it increases its legitimacy.

Bitcoin has never really been currency anyway; it's more of a pseudo-futures contract than anything else. IMO an essential criteria for a currency is that it is backed by an economy and a government with the power to ensure the security of that currency.

<comment><USER10> > This can only be good for Bitcoin. If you can pay taxes on it; it increases > its legitimacy.

Prostitutes are expected to pay tax on money they earn. Drug dealers are expected to pay tax on money they earn.

Paying tax is nothing to do with legitimacy.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that more a problem with legislation not with the basic principle?

I.e. Drugs and prostitution should not be illegal.

<comment><USER12> It's not limited to those things, though. For example, thieves need to pay taxes on the proceeds from selling what they steal.

<comment><USER13> And they can subtract their investments (e.g. handguns, crowbars ) from income tax.

<comment><USER14> You must pay taxes on all income, however earned. However, you are not entitled to deduct all expenses. Expenses related to criminal endeavors cannot be deducted.

IOW...you are taxed on your _gross_ criminal income.

<comment><USER13> I am basing this on remembering one case here in The Netherlands where this supposedly happened, when a bankrobber had to pay a sum of money, but he could put up his pistol as expenses. [1] The Districts Attorney's office was quoted on saying that in certain cases this could be done. Also stating that for example in the cultivation of marijuana, you get taxed for an estimated income amount. You could subtract your expenses n that estimation.

Maybe that's better in the U.S. then..

[1] [http://www.nu.nl/algemeen/472183/crimineel-kan-pistool- decla...](http://www.nu.nl/algemeen/472183/crimineel-kan-pistool- declareren.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, if military capabilities can detonate the planet in under a millisecond...

The "property" is so liquid that it can be taken away faster then it can be processed, and acquired...</comment>


Japan's sexual apathy is endangering the global economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/22/japans-sexual-apathy-is-endangering-the-global-economy/ <comment><USER2> A simple (though far from easy, and likely complex in political reality) solution to this sort of problem is to import workers.

Japan, as a high productivity nation, would be a very desirable destination for workers willing to relocate. The practical issues stem from xenophobia and (based on my naive understanding) higher cost of integrating with such a foreign culture (for much of the world).

</comment><comment><USER3> This problem has been known for quite a while. For the past three years or so I see articles popping up discussing this trend with some stats, graphs, and reasoning, but most of them fail to mention whether the Japanese government a) acknowledges the problem and b) is taking steps to fix it (I'm thinking measures such as a subsidy-per-child).

Anyone have more info on this?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not entirely convinced that population "graying" is as bad as it's made out to be. If the society needs work to be done, it will pay for the work to be done. The people most screwed will be non-working old people who thought that they were retired, but face high inflation due to a lack of young workers, and who can't easily get back into the workforce. That's not a good thing, but that itself is unlikely to damage _the global economy_.

From a US perspective and a member of the 2nd in a series of Screwed Generations (Millennials, after Xers) I'm actually OK with this. No one wants Weimar inflation, but wage-driven inflation is often a good thing. Besides, the reason why Japanese young people aren't having sex is _because they can 't start their careers_. The Japanese economy has been fucked for 25 years and the situation for education young people over there is far worse than in the US. We can't buy houses, but many of them can't even get stable jobs. I'm not an expert on Japan at all, but an increased demand for the work that young people can provide seems to be exactly what that economy needs.

In other words, the "sexual apathy" was caused by Japan's lost quarter-century and, while Japan's economic state (and especially its debt) is a threat to the global economy, I don't buy the headline because I think the sexual apathy is, quite obviously, a symptom of Japan's economic problems and not a cause.

On the age pyramid, I do wonder if societies should get rid of the concept of "retirement" (as an entitlement or expectation) wholesale and replace it with a basic income... and I think we should also oppose the need for retirement by more aggressively enforcing anti-ageism policies in the workplace so that people in their 60s and 70s who are able to work and want to do so, can. (I may move to something less remunerative or even unpaid, but I plan on remaining active until I die.) Much of "retirement", sadly, is involuntary and I'd like to see that change... but with a Japan-style age pyramid, one might think that societies would be less ageist against the capable older people. When there is a labor surplus, society peels off the young and the old (by forcing the young into unpaid schooling and internships for longer, and becoming ageist against the old as in Hollywood and, more recently, the Valley). When there's a shortage, those attitudes change pretty quickly.

In sum, I'd argue that the "sexual apathy" is a symptom of a bad economy. It would be a danger if one believed it to be causative of a positive-feedback loop, but I don't think that's so. When there are jobless young people, the economic signal is that the society has a surplus of young people... and the producers of 30-years-younger-people (out of self-preservation) hold back. Over the decades, we can expect that (unless there is a collapse of demand in labor, which I find unlikely) to increase wages and eventually normalize. It's shitty for a generation of people who don't get to start adulthood until their eggs and tadpoles are stale, but it does stabilize.</comment>


Passwordless authentication done right ...or can you break the auth? - <AUTHOR> https://canistro.linuxforme.com

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately the lack of a proper SSL certificate is rather off-putting, but it is an interesting idea. It reminds me a bit of this article about securing an API without OAuth: [http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/designing-a-secure-rest- api-with...](http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/designing-a-secure-rest-api-without- oauth-authentication/)

Hopefully I'll have some time to dig into it later - I am curious how this was done.

<comment><AUTHOR> The code is available on github, have fun...</comment></comment>


Sorry, English major, the engineers have triumphed - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/sorry-english-major-the-engineers-have-triumphed.ars <comment><USER2> Well, of _course_ that's what _ars technica_ would report.

The "English Majors" (quoted because it's an artificial stereotype) the article refers to have quite different priorities, and probably see things differently.</comment>


Ask HN: Was the source code to Procomm or Procomm Plus ever released? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't think so. Most of the transfer protocols were though, x,y,z modem, Kermit etc all were/are available. As were the term emulations.

Something in specific you are looking for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. Source code to Procomm is not critical for me to have or anything... I was just curious about it, plus, if I ever decided to do some terminal based software which dealt with ANSI sequences, that would probably be the canonical reference, but I'm sure there are other places to look, perhaps in some termcap file or something... But as I said, not critical, just curiousity...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ...That is, Procomm and Procomm Plus that were made by Datastorm Technologies: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datastorm_Technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datastorm_Technologies) ?</comment>


Twitter and Facebook are worthy adversaries – don't regulate them - <AUTHOR> https://sgb-free-thought.blogspot.com/2020/06/twitter-and-facebook-are-worthy.html <comment><USER2> > There's always been a suspicion, occasionally backed up by anecdotal > evidence, that the social media giants Twitter and Facebook have been > skewing the balance of power in public discourse toward the Left, by > "shadowbanning", censoring right-leaning posts, and occasionally even > banning conservative users for seemingly minor infractions, while taking no > action against similar or worse offences from people on the Left.

> Lately, it seems they've thrown away all pretence of even-handedness: > Twitter, in particular, has been taking down account after account of > conservative commentators, even placing a "call to violence" warning on > President Trump's pledge to enforce the law on mobs of anarchists and > arsonists.

The fun times guys is back. Send me a message if you'd like to read some "ideas" from his blog that he "deleted."</comment>


PySide for Android - build and use guide - <AUTHOR> http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide_for_Android_guide

<comment><USER3> In other news kivy just got up to version 1.6.0 <http://kivy.org/#changelog>

</comment><comment><USER4> This sounds a lot like Flash and AIR:

In order to avoid having to learn Java, you use a third party framework that lets you author code in a more familiar language. In exchange, you have to bundle 16 MB of framework in your app and rewrite the whole Android skin in your new language.

Users hate dependencies. I wrote a game in the AIR for Android beta and half my reviews are people bitching about installing AIR.

<comment><USER5> > Users hate dependencies.

If they know about them. In this case I believe everything necessary is bundled with the application (as is with Kivy mentioned above).

<comment><USER4> Either they bitch about downloading a separate runtime or about downloading a 16MB app to do something simple. There's no winning on this issue - <USER2> overall rating will suffer if you build atop a nonstandard runtime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a way to use native API? For example I'm looking for a framework that can embed browser into the App's interface. Or it's done in some other way?

</comment><comment><USER6> It says Python 2.7 is needed. Does it work with 3.x?

<comment><USER7> Well it depends on how the code is written. But compatibility is partial anyway you should use 2.7.

<http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3>

<comment><USER6> I mean, looks like PySide supports Python 3 (<http://qt- project.org/wiki/PySide_Python_3_Support>), but does it work on Android (with Necessitas, Shiboken, whatever is needed for it to work)?

<comment><USER7> apparently on 3.2 yes.

<comment><USER6> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


9 Technical and On-Page SEO Wins from the Auditor Who Analyzed My Blog - <AUTHOR> http://mfishbein.com/on-page-seo-wins/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this Jeremy. I hope everyone learns a few ways they can improve their site to get more traffic.</comment>


Ask HN: Good alternative to Google reader - <AUTHOR>

I'm tired of Google and want to quit all it's services and products. But my feeds are important for me and I would like to port them.
Can anyone suggest a good alternative to Google Reader (preferably web-app) which also imports my google reader feeds and saved items? The saved items are important as well.
Ps. Please do not suggest bloglines because I only switched to Google Reader because bloglines started to suck so bad it was not funny.
Pps. The reasons for me trying to quit google are a different story and I would like to keep answers to this question focused on good feed readers
Edit: I forgot to mention that I would prefer to have a free service with a possible paid upgrade <comment><USER2> To get your feeds from Google Reader, just go to Settings->Import/Export and click "Export your subscriptions as an OPML file."

Any competent RSS reader will be able to import that file.

Starred/Shared items have RSS feeds themselves, which can be accessed from Settings->Folders and Tags.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah that should be useful. I'll get that.. Any suggestions on a good web based feed reader alternative?

Thanks

<comment><USER3> have you tried this: <http://www.mcsquare.me> ? not sure if it'll fit your needs, that's my suggestion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.feedafever.com> <http://www.lazyfeed.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Feedafever is paid IIRC I'll give lazyfeed a shot. Thanks

<comment><USER4> Yes, but you only have to pay for it once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I personally use gregarius that I host myself. Not perfect, but good enough for my needs and my independence :)</comment>


The Next Web uses cheap JavaScript hack to fool you into installing an extension - <AUTHOR> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/07/13/the-next-web-javascript-hack-chrome-extension-phishing/ <comment><USER2> I think this issue signals a problem with the UI in Chrome or Firefox, or any browser that creates this kind of popup. The problem is that, by placing the popup above the webpage contents, the webpage creators can mimic that native UI and create the same effect with the page contents themselves, and you don't know if the popup was created by the browser itself or if it's part of the webpage.

I think the problem could be solved by modifying the UI in the browser in such a way that you don't allow the webpage to create a similar popup because there would be a visual barrier that clearly indicates when the popup is part of the browser itself and when it's not.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that the browser owned control bar is right next to the web content. It's good for usability (quick to reach with mouse), but opens the door for trickeries like click jacking (that's actually why there's a countdown when you want to install an extension in firefox).

I filed a related bug a year ago at Mozilla: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497388> but it didn't get anyone busy (no offense). We probably have to wait until browser extensions are more common place and these kind of UI vulnerabilities get exploited on a regular basis.

<comment><USER4> This may be a stupid question but, how does the countdown prevent click jacking and the like?

Thanks in advance for any answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> you should know that we added that this morning, it was built by the the guys at idiomag.com, as is the javascript. Once we realised that it could potentially confuse or "trick" people we removed it.

<comment><USER6> Really, what excuse could you have had for including such content in the first place, other than malicious intentions? Surely you review all content before placing something on your pages, right?

I'm not buying this feigned innocence. It's like listening to Zynga say giving Farmville credits for users to sign up for trial offers is perfectly legitimate. They know perfectly well the revenue generated by getting thousands of users to sign up for free trials of stuff that is impossible to stop before the bill gets charged to your card is generating more money than legitimate ads/networks.

You're using illegitimate ad networks because it pays a higher CPM period. Just admit to it so we can blackhole your domain without bullshitting us.

<comment><USER5> Jesus, are you serious? You really think we want to scam our readers? Dude seriously sort your shit out and learn to trust a little, have a little faith.

And no, we didn't review the javascript bar that was placed at the top of all our pages but as soon as we saw what it looked like, we removed it.

And what illegitimate ad networks?? We use Google Adwords and Federated Media!

Don't go making accusations like that until you've got your facts straight.

And seriously, where did you get such distrust and anger? Ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Independent has had this toolbar in the past.

Wasn't there even an IE6 hack that spoofed "this browser has critical updates" and updated the browser to IE7?

</comment><comment><USER8> One man's cheap trick, is another man's UI integration. I've done something similar to mimic what the end-users were accustomed too.</comment>


Guess Which State Has The Fastest Internet Access? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/guess-which-state-has-the-fastest-internet-access-2011-3?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Silicon+Alley+Insider+Select&utm_campaign=SAI_Select_032311

<comment><USER2> I don't know which colors are supposed to be hot, and they don't seem to provide a scale. And I don't know where Delaware is.

Leaves something to be desired ...

<comment><USER3> You can go to the linked M-Lab site to play with the visualization first-hand, which includes a scale, as well as with numbers that popup on rollover (note that you need to move the time slider to see Delaware):

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z6q5492nj009fe_&...](http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z6q5492nj009fe_&ctype=m&strail=false&nselm=s&met_s=download_throughput&hl=en&dl=en#ctype=m&strail=false&nselm=s&met_s=download_throughput&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&met_c=download_throughput&ifdim=region:country:840&pit=1262304000000&hl=en&dl=en)

FWIW, they include numbers in the article's description of the figures. "Hotter" means toward the red end of the spectrum. Delaware's label can be seen under the orange circle (partly transparent).

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Not their fault, I know, but as described here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2320323>

flash no longer works on my laptop. I'm using the built-in version in Chrome (as best I can determine) and I consistently get

      The following plug-in has crashed: Shockwave Flash

It works for a while if I shut down Chrome and restart, but it doesn't last long. I'm finding I don't really care much, although it would be nice if the much vaunted Chrome were actually better than IE in practice. For me.

<sigh>

Not been a good day.

</rant>

<comment><USER3> FWIW, regarding your Flash problem: you might try checking to see if there is an update for your video drivers. The latest versions of Flash have been using increasing amounts of hardware acceleration, so they could have started using some feature that is poorly supported in your current driver.</comment></comment></comment></comment>