Be careful before you sign a non-compete agreement - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/labor/seemingly-harmless-paper-you-signed-when-you-were-hired-can-bite-you-ass <comment><USER2> I don't have an inherent problem with non-competes. I could understand why certain industries would need restrictions along those lines.

The problem is when businesses expect the non-compete agreement when it is not a negotiated item during the hiring process. I recall one instance where I given an offer by a company and we went through the usual salary/benefits/role negotiation process. I accepted the offer and put in notice at current employer. During the new hire paperwork they added an extremely onerous non- compete agreement. Of course I refused to sign it.

The most insulting part was how baffled they acted. Like they just assumed they could add demands like that without any additional consideration. This attitude of 'well we need to protect ourselves, and we can ask for this legally'. Well yes you can ask for anything, but it's _not what we agreed as the terms of employment_.

<comment><USER3> "What we get is valuable, but what you give up is worthless."

It's true that the world isn't zero-sum, but it's offensive for them to just assume that means you're going to surrender something for nothing.

<comment><USER2> That they would just demand it without even negotiating it during the hiring process. Just assuming that I would cripple my career for years to minimize their risk without any compensation in exchange.

"I understand that your feel your business is at risk for poaching/trade secrets etc... But what I don't understand is why you assumed that I would aborb the costs of your risk."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I worked at AWS in Seattle and signed a non-compete that stated what was laid out in the article. Given the things I'd done for Amazon, when it was time to move jobs, it was insinuated that going to Microsoft and working on similar things might be enough to trigger action on the non-compete. While I wasn't interested in going to MS, it was clear that this non-compete was holding my wages down as the company recognized I couldn't easily go elsewhere in the local area. Who knows if it was a bluff or not, but I'm in California now and I don't plan to ever sign a non-compete again.

<comment><USER5> Yep, the script should go:

 _hearty laugh_

I will not sign a non-compete agreement.

Show me the money.

<comment><USER6> In my case, at a "startup" (it isn't) I was offered the non-compete, with extremely nasty and broad language that unfortunately is enforceable in Texas, 3 months after I had been working there. You can imagine the coercive effect of that one: sign this or look like you got fired at 3 months. I was able to negotiate some changes to the broad clauses, which by their own admission were cut-and-pasted from somewhere else, but it made for an appalling experience.

<comment><USER7> Which is why businesses in Texas aren't able to attract talent an investment to the level that those in Silicon Valley are.

<comment><USER8> Which may explain why the unemployment rate is so low in Texas. Anybody who already lives there is employed if they want to be, and are employable. Texas has trouble attracting talent from outside of the state for the reason you mentioned, and the backward labor laws in the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One simple solution would be to require employers to pay at least the workers' prior base salary for the duration they wish to enforce the non-compete. I've held senior positions where non-competes are to be expected, and that is always a standard term. Of course, the only reason it became a standard term is because people like me are represented by expensive lawyers who consistently demand it, and an Amazon warehouse worker isn't in the position to follow our lead. So the warehouse worker should be given the same protection by statute: if the employer wants to enforce a non-compete, they must do so affirmatively by paying the worker's salary (i.e. if they elect not to pay then the non-compete is automatically null and void).

Of course the odds of something like that making its way through the dysfunctional legislatures of 48 states is vanishingly low. But we can hope.

<comment><USER10> Right, the standard contract term is called 'consideration', meaning that for a contract to be valid and enforceable, each side must be giving up something of value as part of the transaction.

There's a pretty good summary here:

[http://www.wolfbaldwin.com/Employment-Articles/Non- Compete-C...](http://www.wolfbaldwin.com/Employment-Articles/Non-Compete- Covenants.shtml)

<comment><USER11> Worth noting that continued employment is considered sufficient consideration for many such contract changes, in "at will" employment states.

<comment><USER8> This is simply not true. It has nothing to do with at-will employment. It is state law. Some states require consideration separate from salary, some say continued employment is sufficient consideration. 49 out of 50 states recognize the doctrine of at-will employment. Only Montana uses just-cause instead (just like the rest of the developed world coincidentally).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the reasons Silicon Valley is so successful is that California not only prohibits non-compete contracts, it prohibits employment contracts which claim that the employer owns technology the employee develops on their own time. Most wannabe competitors of Silicon Valley aren't willing to put that into law.

<comment><USER6> Which unfortunately gives California the label "business unfriendly". I hope for California's continued growth because of its frequent ability to tell most "job creators" where they can take their pre-Depression-era worker preferences.

<comment><USER7> I've never been able to take anyone who talks about things being "business friendly" seriously, because it almost always is a policy that makes things worse for everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are some posters on here who take offense to the term 'poaching'

This is the first article where I really understood that. Saying a non-compete defends a big corporation from "poaching" (by ensuring a low level employee can't work in the same industry after quitting) shows an almost depraved pro- business bias.

<comment><USER14> You being too nice even calling the stance 'pro-business'. It's not even pro- business since labor can't flow to the place where they are the most valued.

The non-compete situation is one of those prisoner's dilemma problems. If you're the only one with non-competes then you're better off because you can retain employees for less than their market rate, and if everyone except you uses non-competes then you lose your best talent and can't attract more. Thus the short-sighted decision is to use non-competes.

But if everyone uses non-competes then labor doesn't flow at all, businesses can't attract talent, and then everyone is worse off.

<comment><USER15> Good point. "Pro-capital" is often a more accurate and precise term than "pro- business."

<comment><USER16> Well its certainly not pro-capitalism as it inhibits a fair market. I just put it under cronyism. Entrenched interests are always a problem unless checked by laws or new technology.

<comment><USER17> > Well its certainly not pro-capitalism as it inhibits a fair market.

Of all the delusions about economic system, the one that capitalism loves free markets is the most hilarious.

<comment><USER16> Of all the delusions about economic system, the one that capitalism is about anything but free markets is the most hilarious

You can mock it, but that's the whole point

<comment><USER17> The point of capitalism is return on capital. The ultimate return will be generated by monopolies, duopolies, or cartels. Capitalism is fundamentally antagonistic to free markets.

<comment><USER16> you seem to be talking about what theseatoms mentioned, because capitalism is nicely summarized by Wikipedia as:

 _Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investment is determined by the owners of the factors of production in financial and capital markets, and prices and the distribution of goods are mainly determined by competition in the market._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The specific issue with the author of this article is that she did not disclose her prior noncompete to the new employer. Of course the new employer did not sign the noncompete with the former employer, so there is no contractual privity and thus no direct basis for the former employer to sue the new one for breach of contract. The only way the former employer can mess with them is to argue that they intentionally interfered with the contract by encouraging the journalist to violate it. The SOP for employers targeted by such claims is to put the employee in question on leave, or on alternative duty if something's available that is unrelated to her prior job and does not risk violation of her covenants. To terminate the employee altogether is a rather extreme move. It's a solid damage mitigation strategy, but I think conveys a total lack of spine, particularly for a journalistic organization. The right thing to do would have been to put her on leave, while attempting to get dismissed from the lawsuit -- which should have been easy enough to do since the new employer apparently had no knowledge of the prior contract.

<comment><USER19> Much as I'm against non-competes under most circumstances...

>The specific issue with the author of this article is that she did not disclose her prior noncompete to the new employer.

In fact, according to the original WSJ article, "In applying for the job at the Reuters newswire, she checked a box saying she wasn't subject to any noncompete agreement. Her termination letter from Reuters, which was reviewed by the Journal, said that mistake cost her the job."

I get that she had supposedly forgotten she had signed one but it puts Reuters in a tough situation.

<comment><USER18> It actually puts Reuters in a great situation! Because they have a piece of evidence that says they had no knowledge of the restrictive covenants. Sure, it's not an accurate disclosure on the part of the employee. But that inaccuracy only strengthens Reuters position in this case.

You could say "ah, but Reuters never would've hired her if the noncompete had been disclosed." Not sure about that, because a fair reading of the noncompete is that under New York law it cannot prevent the employee from practicing her trade of journalism. If I were Reuters HR, and I saw the noncompete, I might not have considered it a problem (aside from the industry practice of filing meritless lawsuits).

<comment><USER20> I agree with you that the box-checking cost me my job, and the decision was easy for Reuters. But the company now has a blanket policy in place not to hire from my former employer because of the non-compete. So other employees are now prevented from moving there.

<comment><USER18> Well, it was cited as the reason from what I read. But they could have stood by you without increasing their legal exposure. I would hope to see the AG's office take some action against publishers who use overly broad noncompetes to depress the labor market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The piece's subtitle/tag line is interesting: "If we're going to pretend we operate in a free market, we need to at least give labor a fighting chance of flowing as freely as capital does."

</comment><comment><USER22> Call me crazy, but there's a huge difference between non-competes in startup- land and non-competes in corporate america.

In a startup, the whole endeavor rides on secrets. The company doesn't more money, talent, or employees than big companies. This applies to a pretty broad definition of startups that includes unicorn and high-growth public companies. The only things that matter to those companies are what they're doing and how they're doing it, and in many startups, every employee has specific knowledge that would be valuable to a bigger company or competitor. [Ironically, the state with most of these companies (CA) doesn't allow non-competes, so it's obviously not death, probably because trying to replicate a startup's success means starting after they've become successful, so it may not matter. The point is, non-competes make sense in a world where knowledge is core to the business.]

In a large company, execution dominates. You can go all the way to factory worker, but anything that looks like "use your trade skills to make this thing" obviously shouldn't be protected by non-compete. Trade skills should cut across companies.

There's ways to argue that, say, developers for CA startups could go either way. React / Ember / Angular / etc. is certainly a trade skill. I'm going to hire somebody eventually to help with munging our data set, plugging into more APIs, and figuring out how to make sense of the data that comes back. If that person went to work for another marketing analytics company, I wouldn't be too happy, because to some extent, our specific mix of APIs to integrate with and what we got from them is proprietary. If an engineer I'd worked with and developed that knowledge with went to somebody trying to solve the same problem as me, I'd be kind of pissed. Analytics the way we do it isn't a trade skill, and I expect an informal agreement that you're not going to go work for one of the ~5 companies in the world doing something really similar.

<comment><USER23> Not even sure where to start on this comment, but I'll try:

> In a startup, the whole endeavor rides on secrets. ... In a large company, > execution dominates.

Have you ever worked for a startup? Most likely at least 10 other companies have had the same idea. And 100 people outside those companies. Your ability to (out) execute is all that matters -- regardless of the size company. See also: talk is cheap. And yes, there are trade secrets that can be hugely important, but these are handled by NDAs and other Confidential Information agreements, not non-competes. If those are stolen, you sue under those agreements, not your non-compete.

> If that person went to work for another marketing analytics company, I > wouldn't be too happy, because to some extent, our specific mix of APIs to > integrate with and what we got from them is proprietary. ... If an engineer > I'd worked with and developed that knowledge with went to somebody trying to > solve the same problem as me, I'd be kind of pissed.

Then you should give them a reason (ideally, several) to stay. Your employment agreement trades some form of compensation -- typically cash and equity -- for their output. You're getting value, they're getting value. If you don't treat them properly, you don't deserve to keep them, regardless if you "wouldn't be too happy" about it.

<comment><USER22> I have. Last company I was the first the join, was acquired by a bigger startup, and left at 120 employees. I'm currently starting my own company.

Maybe idea is the wrong word. Vision? Strategic plan? Narrowly-focused execution with an emphasis on coherence? Facebook and MySpace are the same idea, but vastly different companies, no matter when you compared them. Communicating all the things you do differently isn't something that you can do with a website or a quick chat with a single employee. That structure of shared ideas is important, and in small companies, it's basically all that exists. Comparatively, the code and customer base replaceable.

And anybody can leave, at any time, in the same way that I'm allowed to fire anybody or sell the company with a provision to devalue the equity. There's a million ways for us all to screw each other. There needs to be trust in the company, because if you're just after short term cash, there's way better ways to find it than startups.

<comment><USER23> If all you have are (shared) ideas, you have nothing. Think about it this way: even if you took everything you've planned to do with your NewCo and published it for the world to see, and then encouraged people to copy your plan, you'd have a hell of a hard time convincing anyone to do so. It's also one snapshot in time, for something that evolves rapidly -- if not by the hour then at least by the day.

As an example, even if Facebook published their detailed road map years ago, do you think MySpace would have been able to mimic their success? Of course not. The team you assemble and your ability to lead them through execution is what matters. That's 95% of it, if not more.

> There needs to be trust in the company, because if you're just after short > term cash, there's way better ways to find it than startups.

Huh? What point are you trying to make here? Do you have employees joining your startup for short-term cash? If so, they're idiots and should go work for a larger company. I think the word you're looking for is "loyalty" and yes, of course you want to create an institution that promotes mutual loyalty. But you don't get it just by giving someone a job. You get it by valuing their skills, rewarding them for their efforts, and selling them on the idea that _you_ as a leader will make it worth their sacrifice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are pretty draconian non-competes in the vein of you can't do a similar job for anyone else for 2 years and there are ones that are less draconian.

When a company I was with was acquired, we were all given non-competes to sign and it was pretty clear we could sign them or leave. I left not much later for other reasons but I did sign the non-compete. Its terms were such that they seemed unlikely to affect me. (Basically they enjoined me from taking a senior executive position in a fairly narrow slice of the market for a limited period of time.) So, yes, under those specific circumstances, continuing to get paid seemed a reasonable decision.

[Edit: This was intended to be a reply to the comment asking why one would ever sign a non-compete.]

</comment><comment><USER24> I've noticed the same trend in using non-competes on low-level grunts. Every job I've taken in the last decade required one. Only one of those jobs had a legitimate competitive reason for it.

</comment><comment><USER25> The current HN title is "Be careful before you sign a non-compete agreement."

Is there any time when I should _ever_ sign one? OK, perhaps if my family was literally starving and this was the only job I could get. Aside from extreme cases like that, are there any circumstances where a non-compete would be a good idea for me? It seems like there's no point in "being careful," just reject them out of hand. Sort of like you wouldn't say "be careful when handling live wires while standing in a full bathtub."

<comment><USER26> Sure, like if the non-compete isn't that onerous for you (some are as short as 6 months, and some firms pay your salary for the duration of the non-compete), and you get compensated for it (e.g. a large salary boost).

Also, many firms in finance enforce non-competes as well as many other restrictions, e.g. mandatory approval for trading in personal accounts. So if you want to work in this industry, it's not easy to avoid them without compromising something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Everybody loves the invisible hand of the free market... until they don't.

<comment><USER28> I've seen this so many times. Pay someone low wages "Free Market", that same low wage employee (Me for example, more times that I can count) leaves for a better paying job "What about us? We're the CompanyName family!". It's amazing how fast republican free-market types can become european socialists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Or, you know, you can sign them and not give a shit.

Unless you're working for SuperLargeCo (and according to this article, in most cases even then) nothing bad will happen if you then work for a competitor. As others have pointed out in this thread, there's no potential legal harm to your new employer. And it is incredibly rare for prior employers to enforce noncompetes.

How many of you have had issues with noncompetes? Is my experience totally atypical? I've job hopped pretty frequently both in and out of California and never had any issues.

<comment><USER24> Some employers will not hire you if you have a non-compete that might impact your work for them. It's never been an issue for me, I've only read stories online. But I have been asked while applying for a job whether I have any non- competes.

It's a risk for you. Even if unlikely, there's a non-zero chance that it could screw up your career and hurt you badly. That risk has very real value attached to it. Just like insurance and out-of-money options have real value to them.

<comment><USER30> Long ago a company I worked for had to terminate development on an entire product line because an inferior competitor decided to harass its former employees across two different companies, rather than make a better product. One target was a large corp (where I worked), the other was a highly innovative startup. The aggressor had way more money than the startup and killed them with legal fees and discovery costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Broad non-competes are very common for many jobs, and virtually never enforced.

When you enforce one, you are basically trying to take someone's livelihood away.

They're the EULA of of jobs. Sure, make a stand of you really want. But if you don't, there's practically nothing to worry about.

(I feel bad saying that, but TBH I've signed a lot of EULAs.)

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of the requirements for noncompetes at companies originate at the insistance of the investors.

</comment><comment><USER32> While this contract is currently viewed as unenforceable, it is only enforceable by old conventions I think. We've already seen that it is possible to lose basic inalienable rights by signing a contract you did not read, so why not the ability to have a livelihood?

<comment><USER33> It might be "unenforceable" in a court of law but the other company still dropped her like a hot potato, so it's pretty practically enforceable.

<comment><USER20> exactly - even the slightest threat of enforcement can have a chilling effect on employees, who are usually not in a position of power (to negotiate, go to court, risk their livelihood etc)

<comment><USER19> That's the big thing. When I worked for a small company, if someone came along who had even the most remotely relevant non-compete, the conversation was pretty much over. It was one of the first things we asked before beginning any serious discussion. Just too much potential for cost and risk.

Their were also firms in more or less the same industry who were known for having non-competes that basically said, you couldn't do the same job for a year with any competitor. I know at least one person who wanted to go out on his own and he took a year off rather than trying to fight it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can I get into a respectable CS masters program with a Math and Physics degree? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys,<p>I was planning on majoring in CS + Physics, but the introductory course for CS is really turning me off. I'm interested in machine learning, which I believe is mostly graduate work. I was wondering if I can do my undergrad in math & physics and still get into a respectable program (say tier 1 schools) to learn about ML <comment><USER2> You don't like the introductory programming course?

<comment><AUTHOR> It feels like the material is a little rote and that I can learn it on my own. I have a much harder time learning math on my own, and I figure it might be more worth my tuition to do that instead.</comment></comment>


How Satya Nadella Has Completely Changed Microsoft In 3 Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/How-Satya-Nadella-Has-Completely-Changed-Microsoft-In-Just-3-Months/articleshow/35173529.cms?fb_action_ids=10202276073924127&fb_action_types=og.likes <comment><USER2> I'm sceptical. Is it possible for anyone to "completely change" a large corporate entity? If possible, is that even a good thing? It will certainly take time for the metaphorical dust to settle, and we see if any unintended effects follow on from a complete change, eh?</comment>


Ask HN: OLAP and Reporting that feels like 2012 - <AUTHOR> Hi Guys,
after researching how to continuously aggregate and mine our tracking data (200GB and growing fast) for almost a week, I'm still stuck. Is it just me or didn't I just find the right product yet? I must admit that I'm a generalist developer, no DBA - but to me it looks like all the products I've looked into just don't "feel" right. JasperReports, InfiniDB, Pentaho, just to name a few... it's all - how can I say - crusty, unintuitive, 1999. All the products look very corporate, there are basically no howto's, no prices, no shiny, bold Open Source products that fit my bill. I wouldn't even mind using a good commercial product that does what I want, but even the advertisements are "from DBA to DBA". Lots of termdropping like ETLs, M/ROLAP, BI, Case-Based-Reasoning - but nothing that looks reasonably simple and straightforward. Maybe I'm spoiled by the DX (Developer Experience) that Backbone and Rails give me, but is there really nobody that has done something simpler and more straightforward? Like "these are my dimensions, these are my facts - now generate my Cube here so I can go datamining"? Now I know this is a huge field and I might sound naive but I'd like to know if there are others sharing my pain or having something closer to a solution.
Some more data: I'm lead architect for a Berlin startup - currently we're storing our data in MySQL but moving to Cassandra soon. I'm open to any technologies that could simplify our lives here.
Thanks in advance, Dom <comment><USER3> Yeah, I've been wondering the same thing. Here's what I found so far, but really nothing definitive:

<http://demo.analytical-labs.com/>

<https://github.com/drkreso/cube>

<http://databrewery.org/cubes.html>

<http://exposedata.com/parallel/veggie/>

<http://square.github.com/crossfilter/>

Some saas's:

<http://www.metricly.com>

<https://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/>

<http://chart.io>

<http://www.gooddata.com>

Another option is to use Excell. With an odbc data source and some materialised views, you can pull stuff into a pivot table and get pretty far on the BI front. Of course, you have to use Windows on the client and mssql on the server side (I currently just mirror my MySql database into mssql on a daily basis).

Interested in hearing if you found other options?

<comment><USER4> The most recent parallel coordinates examples are here:

<http://exposedata.com/parallel/>

<http://bl.ocks.org/2420080> \- iPad and FF friendly

Also check out:

<http://vis.stanford.edu/projects/datavore/>

<https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid/wiki>

<http://novus.github.com/nvd3/>

More promising saas:

<http://polychart.com/>

<http://www.plot.io/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is the greatest source of your pain at the data storage end (ETL, RDBMS), aggregations (OLAP cube), or presentation (reports, visualizations)?

I ask because other than issues with the traditional RDBMS+cube approach, mentioned by some in this thread as outdated, one of the issues I find is that open source ETL and BI tools do not have the maturity of open source databases.

Having moved from all-Microsoft shops (SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS), to PostgreSQL for data, and a mix of OSS and commercial ETL and presentation tools, my greatest source of frustration is the effort in working with tools that feel "unfinished". Cumbersome processes to accomplish what should be simple tasks can make any project frustrating.

This is not to say that the folks working on OSS OLAP / BI tools are not doing good work. But these tools have not been in development as long as something like PostgreSQL, so they simply don't have the maturity.

Another issue is that many of those who are consumers of open source OLAP tools are data people, not as adept in languages like Java or C. Thus non- developers can't contribute back to the projects at the same rate that developers can.

None of these points solve your issue, but as it stands, I find a mix of mature open source with commercial front ends suitable. I am mixing PostgreSQL with Tableau with some success. Tableau means license costs and Windows, but from an ease of development perspective, I have not found a suitable open source replacement. Saiku is one that has my interest.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can confirm your findings - this domain [simple OLAP] really sucks.

As CFO I implemented [all including planning database/dimensions/forms/reports/calculations/rules/etc except for programming] 3 OLAP based projects in three multinational companies.

Closed source In 2 projects we used Hyperion Essbase, in 1 project we used SAP Business Objects. In all cases we used consultants for programming the cubes and all else per spec. Also, there is MS solution - have not used it.

There are a number of OpenSource solutions, including Mondrian, etc - most of them use SQL database (PostGre et all) for storing data and building OLAP cubes.

Check SO on OLAP, most Q&A are garbage, but found some good gems. You can start from here

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3705011/what-should-i- hav...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3705011/what-should-i-have-in-mind- when-building-olap-solution-from-scratch)

I also saw post of Cubes implementation in Python some time back on HN - Google for Stiivi-cubes-v0.7 and Stiivi-brewery-v0.7.

pls keep posted if you'll find smth cool, i.e. easy and simple DIY OLAP. After spending close to several days on Googling, I gave up.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been in this field for more than a decade and I couldn't agree more. The tools, and even the underlying theory is stuck in the past, and every project I work on is hampered by the technology not meeting the expectations of (business) users who demand a much more intuitive way of working - <USER2> that's what the experience every day on consumer devices.

There are issues though with getting consistent and accurate measures that are not easily solved by just looking at the data - albeit at a very high level of detail) for example when customers move or change details, it's easy to lose track of where you should be reporting the facts. And depending on the volume of data it's not going to be a long term solution to recalculate _everything_ every day - which is the mistake a lot of companies make when trying to cope with this.

The problem is in your question. The Cube. This is a construct that assumes that the underlying data is typed allowing it to be re-arranged into facts, characteristics and attributes, and unless you have the foresight to think of your db like this before you build your web app, it's hard going to squeeze it into the dimensional model.

In fact I'd go as far as saying that the dimensional model is no longer a suitable model for dealing with event based data generation, and that may be why you ask the question.

It's one of my personal goals to solve this, I have some thoughts but it's not quite my priority at the moment, but I'd love to hear what others have to say on this.

<comment><USER8> I too have spent quite a few years working in this area. I have primarily been involved in building tools to make this kind of analysis easier - but it is very difficult.

As you mention, the primary issue is that almost all business data is _very_ complex. There are very few areas (in my experience), where simple queries offer much value, because there are so many niggling business rules that lead to exceptions and counter exceptions to rules.

This means that "self service" analytics are pretty much impossible. There are often very few people in an organization who actually know how to define even seemingly simple measures like profit or revenue.

This means you need consultants who can learn the business rules, and who also understand the data platform. This makes these projects expensive, and makes it hard for platforms to win in the market.

For the most part in my experience, the best way forward is to choose a database engine (MySQL, Postgress, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server), get the data into it (itself difficult!), then write a bunch of SQL to incorporate the business rules. Then if you are feeling fancy (and still have budget!), built a nice HTML front end on it.

Its not very sexy, but it does work. I would love it if there was an easier way, but I am yet to find it.

<comment><USER9> Agree. But usually business rules and exceptions boil down to filters and look ups on the dataset. It is difficult to keep up with that mess from outside, but if you deliver a way to make look ups and filters efficiently, maybe you got a solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We use Qlikview at work and SQL Server Reporting Services. I'm not clear on what exactly you are trying to do but Qlikview could be worth a look. There is a full featured demo which is only limited in that you can't share your documents with others.

Two neat features of Qlikview are that it compresses everything into memory (depending on the data up to 100:1 compression) so it is quick to manipulate your data. The second feature is that it links everything and you can change your filters on the fly. The net result is that you can explore your data on the fly and get instant feedback to your filter changes.

<comment><USER11> +1 for QlikView. A lot of banks, amongst other companies, use it and it's very good for an interface for end users (so IT people are out of the loop for tweaking reports).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Almost all OLAP products provide this simple functionality, but it's almost impossible to find where it is because it is hidden under layers and layers of "added value" in the form of tools to extract, transform and present that data in flashy executive dashboards.

My first advice would be, don't try to build the fancy executive level dashboards, that's the component of the system with the least ROI, in spite of being the most visible for upper level management and thus likely to be the one that is easier to get funding for. The dashboard should be the top of the pyramid, but without a solid foundation it will be an exercise in frustration each time anyone wants to go deeper into any of the numbers.

The problem with these tools is twofold: first, they are targetted at big enterprise buyers that are not the end users. They are strong on fancy and simple features that do not scale well when your analysis becomes real-world complex. Second, all those fancy tools break down under heavy data loads. So in the end "these are my dimensions, these are my facts - now generate my Cube here so I can go datamining" works only during the executive demo.

You're usually better cherry picking up components from these suites that work well enough for you, and building the missing pieces on your own than trying to fully try to shoehorn one of these suites into your needs. Or maybe your needs are simple enough that one of these is good enough for you.

And finally there is the problem with data quality. Perhaps in the startup web-based application world this problem is less relevant, but it's not unusual for large organizations to invest heavily in large OLAP efforts only to find later that they should first have invested heavily in large proces, application and data cleanups. Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how fancy or cube structured the garbage out is.

Which by the way, I think that the cube is a fairly good structure for end users to work with. The only caveat is that have to make sure that they are able to link the data in the cube with the underlying transaction-level entries that make it up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, at work I use Cognos. But it is clumsy and it forces you in its paradigms. Instead, when I dream or code (I am learning to code, I am a finance guy), I am making demos for things that should provide a better way to explore your data: <http://andemo.ep.io/>.

Basically, my issue with corporate analytics is that there are no apis. Everything has to be accessed from its software. SAP data stays in SAP or goes in some 90' data warehause system.

Another issue is that data is stored in multiple versions in different files across many users locations (Excel files madness). This drives people nuts and I can't understand why don't we already have a BaseCamp for finance and analytics.

A third issue is that people are mixing data and views. This makes usually data in, i.e. in spreadsheets, completelly unuseful for other analysis, you basically have to copy and paste data from the fancy templates to a clean file to use it. Views should be web based too, not to enter the 'update this file periodically manually' hell.

Once you have apis, it's a matter of building apps to consume them and eventually to make snapshots of your data (you don't want to recalculate monthly billings at every page request). Your specific need, for example, could be solved with a fancy web based pivot table (the sort you have in spreadsheets) that accesses json data...

So, finally, if you find or start an interesing project of this type, let me know as I am interested to join!

<comment><USER13> RE. issue 2) and 3) I just thought that data cubes an open, but standardized format could help - not only in the financial area: I found RDF data cubes ( [http://publishing-statistical- data.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/...](http://publishing-statistical- data.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/specs/src/main/html/cube.html) ) perhaps being a part of the solution there, with the value add that you could easily connect different data source using their semantics.

(liked the "basecamp for analytics" point)

<comment><USER9> Yes, an RDF format looks like a good solution. It appears that RDF is quite supported in python and that it also abstracts away persistance ([http://readthedocs.org/docs/rdflib/en/latest/persistence.htm...](http://readthedocs.org/docs/rdflib/en/latest/persistence.html)) in a way. I ll look into that, thanks.

If you like the basecamp idea for analytics, I am kfk on github, I am doing some demos to get an idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "there are basically no howto's, no prices, no shiny, bold Open Source products that fit my bill"

as the developer of the first one that got mentioned here (saiku) <http://demo.analytical-labs.com/>

i can say that the problem is that everybody asks for a shiny, nice, intuitive open source project.. but there is very little will to contribute to such a project.

we really try to create something thats easy to use, fun to play with the data, and provides the necessary functionality. but unfortunately developing something that looks simple needs time, a lot of time. so if anyone is interested, i always appreciate any kind of contribution (not necessarily just coding)

if more people would work together, there would already be such a tool that we are all dreaming of

</comment><comment><USER15> Open source BI software is generally poor.

For intuitive front ends look at: neutrinoBI tableau software tibco spotfire qlikview panoptical advizor solutions

Some (e.g. qlikview) insist on taking a dump of all data onto the workstation, so aren't suitable for big data.

These may still need a relational database to actually store the data. We use Vectorwise. Infobright (MySQL engine) is good if you're on a tight budget, particularly their open source community edition. There are many players here: Vertica, ParAccel, Exasol, Teradata, Aster Data, Netezza, Kognitio, InfiniDB (also MySQL), probably others.

</comment><comment> m-ic3 I guess <http://www.icCube.com> (an in-memory OLAP server) is quite easy to setup (in JAVA following Web standards). Then, a quite simple JSON/HTTP interface is provided in addition to the standard XMLA. There's currently a JS client API and an early JAVA API as well. The JS client API is used by their visualization library / dashboards.

I'm not sure that OLAP cubes are good for 200G / week. I would go for something in between. Use a map/reduce algo. to mine your data and generate the relevant data from which you will build cubes for later and different analysis.

As somebody said, I guess OLAP cubes concepts are still good nowadays and MDX is a very powerful language that goes far beyond SQL.

My 2 cents (disclaimer I work for icCube)

</comment><comment><USER16> I _think_ you'll like this:

<https://github.com/rsim/mondrian-olap>

As for the ETL part, you may like that (which I maintain):

<http://www.activewarehouse.info/>

<comment><USER16> Also adding this:

<https://eazybi.com/>

which is a SaaS run (I think) by rsim.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I can confirm that <https://eazybi.com> is built and run by me.

The goals of eazyBI are as described in the question - simple way to upload your data or import from other applications and easy to use OLAP reports, charts and dashboards. And it is built using Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js as well :) In the backend it is using Pentaho Mondrian OLAP engine which is embedded in JRuby open-source library <https://github.com/rsim/mondrian-olap>

<comment><USER18> eazyBI looks very interesting, but your site and sales pitch seem pretty unpolished. How big is your team and where are you situated?

<comment><USER17> Currently it is primarily just me and I am from Latvia (Eastern Europe). And trying to improve site and sales pitch as well, I appreciate any feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel your pain. I started <http://discoproject.org> back in 2007, trying to make MapReduce more easily approachable.

If vanilla MapReduce is too low-level for you, you might want to take a look at <http://bitdeli.com> which provides a cloud-based scripting platform for real-time data (disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Bitdeli).

Neither Disco nor Bitdeli provides OLAP out of the box but if you are ok with writing a screenful of Python to process your data, you might find them useful.

</comment><comment><USER20> I know no solution doing all we need, only some interesting components. Here are some more links:

storing data

* couchdb <http://couchdb.apache.org/>. Good if you already know the analysis you want to do. drawback is that indexes you create (= materialized views) are monodimensional. a multidimensional indexing on top of it would simply be great. Not great if you need real real time reporting and your data change a lot.

* mongodb: more flexible than couchdb for ad-hoc querying

* graph databases: neo4j, orientdb, ... might be a good alternative to OLAP

* ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> lets you have faceted indexes (= index and retrieve facts according to dimensions values). Pluggable to a many storage solutions

reporting / visualizations

* d3.js <http://mbostock.github.com/d3/> far above other charting libraries

* Simile Exhibit <http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit3/> Great for faceted browsing (facet = dimension)

* Cube <http://square.github.com/cube/> Time series visualizations

* mind gapper <https://github.com/RandomEtc/mind-gapper-js> visualizations la Hans Rosling's Gapminder

* dejavis <http://beta.dejavis.org/> looks offline for the moment

Big data

* Hadoop + data-warehousing / Querying solutions Apache Pig and/or hive

ETL (nothing exceptional here)

* Yahoo Pipes

* Python flow

* Google Refine

Saas

* Bime <http://bimeanalytics.com/>

* Druid [http://metamarkets.com/2011/druid-part-i-real-time-analytics...](http://metamarkets.com/2011/druid-part-i-real-time-analytics-at-a-billion-rows-per-second/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Try Tableau, or Omniscope, both are pretty feature rich.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hey Dom,

you could try looking at

* SAP Business Objects Explorer - [http://www.sap.com/germany/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/sme/...](http://www.sap.com/germany/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/sme/index.epx)

They used to provide a feature that will directly load your data and let's you simply specifying your fact and dimension tables and than you can directly run your reports.

Maybe it's worth a try.

</comment><comment><USER23> We've developed a high-level query language, <http://htsql.org>, for complex reporting of medical informatics data sets stored in a relational database (Sqlite, MySQL or PostgreSQL). I'm not sure how this might fit your requirements, but it feels like 2012 to us -:)

</comment><comment><USER24> Few years ago I felt that Adobe Flex has excellent client side OLAP capabilities. But then that runs on Flash and you'll have to weigh in the pros and cons.

Also for large data sets, wouldn't make sense to do things on the client.

</comment><comment><USER25> Have you looked at SQL Azure? Microsoft have really good BI tools. I think 200GB of SQL Azure will cost a couple of hundred bucks a month.</comment>


Deadmau5 Video DJ set tears the house down. Literally. - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/technology-video/8922159/Londons-Millbank-tower-collapses-in-spectacular-light-show.html

<comment><USER2> *for some value of "Literally"</comment>


Ask HN: Moving to Silicon Valley in one year - <AUTHOR>

I graduate college in one year with my bachelors in Business Administration.  I've held multiple business and some political internships and I plan on moving to the bay area and getting a job at a start-up in business development/marketing or sales. I've launched a couple start-ups so far that haven't been successful.
I'm nervous because I go to a state university and I'm not sure how competitive business positions are in the Bay area. What could I do now to prepare myself as far as finding the right position and transitioning from NY to the Bay Area?
Thank You <comment><USER2> You may find Tristan's story inspirational.

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1794501/how-foursquare-tristan- wa...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1794501/how-foursquare-tristan-walker- dennis-crowley-naveen-selvadurai-business)</comment>


PerceptiveIO Publications - <AUTHOR> http://perceptiveio.com/publications/ <comment><AUTHOR> The current publications/research listed all seem to come from Microsoft Research, and most of the team members[1] are also ex-MSR/HoloLens researchers. I like how they present their research with video demonstrations - makes it a lot more approachable for someone curious (but less knowledgeable on the area) to quickly grasp the potential applications.

The company, PerceptiveIO, doesn't seem to be affiliated with MSFT though (apparently it's a newly founded SF-based stealth company[2]/R&D Lab[3] in the VR/AR space). Looking forward to see what these guys will come up with going forward; They're certainly off to an interesting start!

[1] [http://perceptiveio.com/team/](http://perceptiveio.com/team/)

[2] [http://perceptiveio.com/news/2016/6/15/hey-whats- perceptivei...](http://perceptiveio.com/news/2016/6/15/hey-whats-perceptiveio- all-about)

[3] [http://perceptiveio.com/contact/](http://perceptiveio.com/contact/)</comment>


How to design an anti-open office - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90238559/this-is-the-ultimate-anti-open-office?partner=rss&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss <comment><USER2> I still find it awful and not different to open-offices.</comment>


Safe ECC curves for HTTPS are coming sooner than you think - <AUTHOR> https://certsimple.com/blog/safe-curves-and-openssl <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, quick summary since I know HN likes that kind of thing:

Curve25519:

\- is in Chrome now

\- is in OpenSSL 1.1, which is running late but scheduled for release any day now

\- will be in Windows cryptoAPI (and hence Edge) shortly

No word on FF or Safari yet.

Safecurves are simpler than traditional ECC curves, so implementations are smaller and more likely to be robust.</comment>


Aussie IT firms cop customer trust hit as encryption laws bite - <AUTHOR> https://www.itnews.com.au/news/aussie-it-firms-cop-customer-trust-hit-as-encryption-laws-bite-519286 <comment><USER2> I don't understand the title. I read it five times, but I still don't understand it. The title probably should've been something like:

>Encryption laws have damaged customer trust in products made by Australian IT companies

<comment><USER3> It's just a British English (at least I think that's where it's from) use of the word "cop". Replace it with "take".

<comment><USER4> It's English, but it's not good British English -- it sounds like a headline from "The Register" but lacking puns.</comment></comment></comment>


[Image] How Facebook would have looked in the 70s - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/cZEj3.jpg

<comment><USER2> Actually, no, since the display would be 80x24.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha very true.</comment></comment>


Lessons from Amazon's Success - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2010/03/lessons-from-amazons-success.html

<comment><USER2> Worth reading if for nothing other than this insight:

" _Settle arguments with A/B testing and Web Analytics. (Avinash Kaushik calls this_ getting rid of the influence of the HiPPOs _: Highest Paid People in the Organization.)_ "

(Then again my worst problems with HiPPOs were of the low level architectural type that killed the company outright, but that's probably because I'm a "engine" vs. UI type.)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Amazon reportedly used doors for desks, in some cases.

I don't recall ever seeing anyone there who did not have a door (plate) for a desk.</comment>


Twitter is down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/# <comment><USER2> [https://status.twitter.com/](https://status.twitter.com/) redirects to [https://status.twitterstat.us/](https://status.twitterstat.us/): Shows that Twitter is working perfectly fine. I am still able to access Twitter on my end.</comment>


Bitcoin: Price v hype - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25332746

<comment><USER2> In the words of Aaron Levie:

"The challenge with Bitcoin is the bubble came before the utility was proven, not the other way around."</comment>


Get ready for the 'tech alt-right' to gain power and influence in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/get-ready-for-the-tech-alt-right-to-gain-influence-in-silicon-valley-2017-8?r=US&IR=T <comment><USER2> This political war between left and right is getting insane. Especially when the idea of firing people for their beliefs is thrown around so casually as it is in this article.

I think one of the main issues is that dialog is really difficult. If we can't express our views to each other the divide will continue to grow. But if you job is on the line the best policy is to keep your mouth shut.

<comment><USER3> I think that's an issue many seemed to have overlooked about the whole "Google Memo" thing. Your personal views are just that _personal_. It's something you should be doing on your own time. When you're at work you're going to have to deal with different personality types and differing personal opinions. Part of being a professional is being able to set your personal opinions aside and focus on the job. It would be analogous to someone sending out a memo asking if everyone excepts Jesus Christ in to their hearts as their personal lord and savior and saying they're going to hell if they don't. It's fine to have political, social or religious views, but the workplace isn't really an appropriate place to bring those things to attention.

<comment><USER4> Diversity seminars and population distribution memos are fine. People ought to be allowed to take their personal opinions and speak them at their workplace. What isn't fine is attempting to cause economic harm to someone for espousing a non-violent perspective.

If their perspective is to constructively point out your natural ineffectiveness at a task, I can see why you would want to avoid them speaking, but it's an avoidance of criticism and will eventually be fatal to the censor as has historically been proven to be the case again and again.

<comment><USER3> But there's a hierarchy in a company. If you want to raise an issue you need to go through the proper channels. You're just there to do a job. If you don't like it you can leave. I've left jobs because I didn't agree with management. No one is forcing you to be there. This is just how the corporate world is. Corporations are not democracies and you are expendable. I'm not saying it's right, but it's just how things are and you shouldn't expect anything less. This is why I left the corporate world. Google is actually one of the better places to work. It gets _much_ worse, trust me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CppCon 2019: Bjarne Stroustrup "C++20: C++ at 40" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ij0YNkFUs <comment><USER2> I get a 404 for the github page linked on the video? (to read the presentation slides)

[https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2019](https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2019)

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually the slides only get uploaded after the conference, so I guess it is still not ready.

<comment><USER2> I see thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


The cloud landscape described, categorized, and compared - <AUTHOR> http://www.theenterprisearchitect.eu/archive/2013/10/12/the-cloud-landscape-described-categorized-and-compared

<comment><USER2> Excellent article. Wish I had this when we started working on Nephorider Putting together all in one place and with a clear vision is certainly a non easy task.

</comment><comment><USER3> "This account has been suspended. Either the domain has been overused, or the reseller ran out of resources."

Yay cloud?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, no elasticity indeed. Just added resources.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A static/dismissible admin notifications handler for WordPress - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/askupasoftware/wp-admin-notification <comment><AUTHOR> It's important to note that dismissed notifications are persistent and will remain dismissed when the page reloads.</comment>


Ask HN: Free learning stuff during lockdown which is otherwise payable - <AUTHOR> Hi folks,
Many leading publishers and vendors are making their training / learning materials free of cose during the COVID-19 lockdown period so that people can sit and learn.
I have found ACM Digital Library[1] and RedHat[2] to be made free for now.
Can you all please point out to some valuable learning stuff which is free now but would be payable once lockdown is lifted?
Gotta make hay while the sun shines brightly on us :)
Reference:
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22762508
[2]https://www.redhat.com/pt-br/campaign/red-hat-free-courses <comment><USER2> Pluralsight is free for 1 month.</comment>


A SILICON VALLEY DISASTER: How Clinkle Blew Up    - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-clinkle-2014-4#ixzz2z5Y824wX

<comment><USER2> A repost with the name of the company mis-spelled?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! thx for catching that. Fixed</comment></comment>


Faster arithmetic by flipping signs - <AUTHOR> https://nfrechette.github.io/2019/05/08/sign_flip_optimization/ <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be about 2s complement bit flipping. But no it's for floating point!

</comment><comment><USER3> Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a quite recent game, and was not released on Xbox 360 (according to my memory and the helpfully linked wikipedia article). Wouldn't this piece be about Rise of the Tomb Raider instead?

Of course, this nitpick only concerns the introduction, the rest is a good piece.

<comment><USER4> > tasked with optimizing the cloth simulation code in Shadow of the Tomb > Raider. It had been fine tuned extensively with PowerPC intrinsics for the > Xbox 360 but its performance was lacking on XboxOne (x64).

Sounds to me like they were recycling some old cloth simulation code from previous games and it needed to be optimized for Xbox one for the release of the new game.

<comment><USER5> Correct, their game engine has been around since the very first Tomb Raider and even before that. The code evolved over the years of course and the cloth simulation code as well. Shadow of the Tomb Raider used much more cloth in the environment and on the characters than previous games and it needed a bit of help. I don't remember off the top of my head how much I managed to speed it up but tuning the assembly for x64 and SSE yielded a 1.5-2x speedup over the old code due to various optimizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does this work with GLSL?

<comment><USER7> You'll need to examine the binary generated for a particular architecture by the driver. It may work on one driver+GPU combination, but be slower on another. Also, the semantics for floating-point math are somewhat looser in GLSL so the driver is given more power to reorder expressions and might exploit this trick on its own. As usual, you should profile and benchmark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a nice little optimisation! Would you mind sharing the aarch64 assembly from before and after applying the optimisation? It would be good to know the compiler flags used too :)

<comment><USER9> OT, but, this account seems to be reposting comments from the original article as HN comments. I wonder if it's automatic or manual. Regardless, it doesn't really seem to work (-6 karma as per the writing of this comment).

<comment><USER10> Possibly someone playing with that AI text generation software whose name I forget. Looks similar.</comment></comment></comment>


Lessons From a Failed Startup — From and For First Time Founders - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/4-lessons-from-a-failed-startup-from-and-for-first-time-founders-c61913df3bb5 <comment><USER2> In my experience "do both" on any big decision is a recipe for disaster. Very hard to avoid tho. I've known this and still pushed for it just because choosing one of two hard options is itself so hard.

<comment><USER3> Famously, this is what Justin.tv did. They split the company into three parts:

1) Justin.tv 2) Twitch 3) SocialCam

I suspect if they had to choose one, they would have done SocialCam, and they would have missed the billion dollar opportunity that was Twitch.

Like most things, it depends.

<comment><USER4> We did both for a relatively short period of time (about 1 year) when we were a profitable company. So... very special circumstance. Btw - its kinda cool that people even know the backstory to Twitch.

<comment><USER5> HackerNews proving once again that you can get incredible insight in real-time from names big and small :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am intrigued by the fact that they managed to get funding _before_ finding product market fit. I was always of the belief that most VC's would only invest in companies that had traction and an initial revenue stream, i.e. that they already have PM fit to a certain extent that they have customers and a plan to get more of them.

Is it a case that some VC's are willing to take the extra risk to fund companies that are still in the stage of finding proper product market fit? With the associated possibility that this might never actually happen?

<comment><USER7> Depends on the product, depends on the potential market size, depends on the founders, etc.

And you can definitely have traction and an initial revenue stream without having product-market fit in a meaningful way. You can survive for years on a large-enough group of savvy early adopters (and get funding based on that initial enthusiasm), but if you don't cross the chasm, your revenue stays flat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be honest, this is highly amusing to me because nowhere in the musings on the failure did I see the writer(s) acknowledge that they have not a foggiest idea of the apparel (i.e. fashion) business. I bet no one in the entire company was a subject matter expert.

No one here would be surprised if Bob, a literature professor, who played tetris five times in his life would fail at building a video game startup. This is Bob, a literature professor, who gets his clothes at Macy's on sale ( still at ~400% markup ) building a fashion startup and failing.

That is why they failed. The founders are all men. The biggest consumers of apparel are women. Those that run successful boutiques are women and they largely service... women. Those that decide to do their own knock offs of the on trend are owners of the successful boutiques. Surprise surprise they are also women. What do they all have in common? They _know_ that the market is in the throw away clothes that are supposed to last just one season ( trends move ), be cheap ( trends move ), and look kind of like what has been walking down the runway during the Milan FW, Hong Kong FW, New York FW and London FW. Turn around on this stuff in design is about 1 week, manufacturing is another 1 week and mass production is in 3-4 weeks. Designers of the knockoffs ( ok, call them inspirations ) can be talked with in NYC fashion district and in NYC Chinatown (I'm sure it can also be done in LA and during MAGIC in Las Vegas but they are in NYC weekly). Those that want to tweak designs can request it right there and in 3 weeks time i.e. a month after Willow Hand walked down the catwalk in Pineapple pants and well before D&G supplies their stores all those boutiques would have $40-$100 pants inspired by that.

I bet they did not hear what their potential customers were telling them.

And that's not even talking about the likes of Zara and H&M.

There was no market for this kind of a company.

<comment><USER9> That's a lot of assumptions you've made without any backing.

1) Building a startup requires the ability to build a tech product and knowing how to solve a problem and sell it. Bob the literature professor is not a good example, as he would not know either - but these guys could clearly build the product at the very least.

If you looked at their backgrounds, at least the CEO (OP) had previously started a fairly successful apparel company. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentmori](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentmori)

So to correct your analogy, this is like if Bob the video game software engineer was starting a video game startup.

2) Many top fashion companies are built by men. In fact, H&M - your example - was founded by a man.

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

I'm all for diversity, but your comment is overly harsh in tone and not back by substance.

<comment><USER8> > If you looked at their backgrounds, at least the CEO (OP) had previously > started a fairly successful apparel company.

It was not successful. It was an unknown flop.

> So to correct your analogy, this is like if Bob the video game software > engineer was starting a video game startup.

It was Bob, a professor of literature, who tried writing a tetris clone in college got to drawing pieces, who tried starting a video game company

> 2) Many top fashion companies are built by men. In fact, H&M - your example > - was founded by a man.

In _nineteen fourty seven_.

> I'm all for diversity, but your comment is overly harsh in tone and not back > by substance.

This is not about diversity. It is about a vegan starting a butcher shop and getting accolades for waxing about reasons for a failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the lessons here.

But just to provide a contrarian perspective on #4, one of my previous jobs was at a company that did both, where we have dev department that built the software, and a growing and profitable consulting arm that helped customers customize and use our system.

A better example is Microsoft, many of its enterprise solutions, like..cough..SharePoint, is supported by an army of consultants hand-holding their customers on non-trivial use cases.

The larger clients tend to be less willing to adapt their internal processes to a new solution, and in many cases it'll require special customization or hand-holding/training to make a sale. On the plus side, they also tend to be able to afford those kind of things, you just have to charge them at a profitable price point.

<comment><USER11> You need to look beyond just profitability as product vs. consulting businesses grow in very different ways. Do you have a pipeline of quality potential hires? consulting headcount grows more in line with workload than product, which tends to stair-step. Can you handle the boom/bust of consulting? demand tends to be infinite or zero. Can you manage a long sales cycle? product (especially enterprise) sales can easily take 6-12 months. These are the clients that will also likely demand the most customization with software purchase.

I like looking at the motivations for consulting, of which revenue is just one. You also get great ideas for new features, solve existing pain points and leverage relationships for new sales leads.

You can do both but should have a very clear picture of _why_ you do both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Regarding Point 4: One recurring point in a lot those post-mortem articles is how hard it is to sell software, but how (relatively) easy it is to sell service (incl. consulting). Why is that?

<comment><USER13> Customers want problems solved. Tech people (me included) assume that once the hard part is done (the product/software), the rest is a minimal effort.

This is usually false. Customers are not familiar with the software, they may have a tech knowledge gap, its usage may entail organizational change. There are many possible reasons for adoption to be a very relevant factor.

Consulting means you are responsible for the whole process, not just providing software.

<comment><USER14> This is also why every developer should be required to do a bit of technical support and some sales calls.

<comment><USER15> Yes! This is an underappreciated reason why Twilio was such a success early on. Every employee (including software engineers) had to work 10 or 20 support tickets in the first two weeks on the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really appreciate #3 about founder-led sales.

Even if you _don 't_ make the mistake of bringing in a VP of Sales too early, it's easy for founders to get lost during this stage of the company.

When founders struggle to get those first paying customers, I wonder how many conclude that they haven't yet found product/market fit when really, they're just terrible at doing sales. It's especially difficult for technical founders (who tend to be bad/new at doing sales), and particularly challenging when selling B2B software.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Founders are the only ones willing to get excited about a constantly changing product."... so true!

</comment><comment><USER18> So, without knowing the company any more than what was hinted at in the article, the goal was to build some kind of digital version of Zara (short lead-times, short to-market cycles) for all the individual designers out there.

And that basically makes this company less of an apparel or even a tech comapny and more like a dedicated supply chain service company for the apparel industry. Which requires solid SCM skills and the corresponding solid organisation and network. And maybe it's just me, but I have the impression that they focused almost exclusively on the tech-part. It's nice offer a service to manage "logistics" through an app. But what happens in the background of said logistics? That customer seemed to complain about long lead-times whatever happened wasn't that great. Considering vertical integration, the micro-factory in China, is not a solution if you don't have the experience running apparel manufacturing, in China of all places. And if you do have that experience you don't need an own factory, just use local partners like everybody else. Or don't in order to avoid all the ethics issues that come with it. Thing is, lead-times are reduced by cutting waste out of the process, and I didn't read anything regarding how they wanted to use technology, which is great in doing just that when used right, in order to achieve that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Really great distinction made regarding raising.

It's not about having the time to think up and try a bunch of different ideas, but executing a list of prepared hypotheses. This would pitch way better to VCs, too.

</comment><comment><USER20> I agree with the idea that startups should generate clear hypothesis and do well-documented experiments.

VCs should be more vigorous about grilling founders on their hypotheses, imo. The experiment logs also make for content-marketing and investor documentation.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mori sounds like a lost MBA.

LA Koreatown has an entire and modern apparel industry.

They could have validated anything they wanted from SoCal.

</comment><comment><USER22> Point #1 seems completely over-thought to me.

 _> At the beginning, startups are simply a belief that a problem out in the world needs solving and that someone is willing to pay for the solution. This can be based on intuition or experiences, but they're still assumptions and hypotheses that must be verified._

You don't need 7 different steps to find excuses to pat yourself on the back. Either someone pays you, or they don't.

<comment><USER23> I mean it's true that either someone pays you or they don't, but there's still plenty of grey area:

1\. Some people might pay you but it's not enough revenue to sustain a business

2\. People may not pay you now but are willing to pay you later

3\. Sales cycles can be quite long esp. for B2B, and can cease at any point for quite a few reasons (e.g. legal)

4\. People will definitely pay you $0.99 for $1.00, but that's not a sustainable business. It's super easy to fall into this trap especially when you consider the monetary value of time

5\. It's usually a good idea to figure out if people will pay you _before_ you spend a bunch of time and money building something

Having a process for determining whether you're falling into one of those traps seems valuable.

<comment><USER24> "People will definitely pay you $0.99 for $1.00, but that's not a sustainable business." Looking at founders of Uber and many other "Unicorns" selling $1.00 for $0.7 is pretty popular strategy for becoming a billionaire.</comment></comment></comment>


The binary search of distributed programming - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/news/102 <comment><USER2> Alright man, I think you need a public push to go and embrace TLA :)

Here is the bakery algorithm from the tlaps examples:

[https://github.com/cartazio/tlaps/blob/master/examples/Baker...](https://github.com/cartazio/tlaps/blob/master/examples/Bakery.tla)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Usually it is hard with distributed computations to say what happened before > and what happened after. Using those IDs you always know the order of > certain events.

Which "certain events"? The typical case I can think of wouldn't work:

        - at time t0, event e0 occurs on client c0, an id is requested
        - at time t1 > t0, event e1 occurs on client c1, an id is requested
        - id1 = 62 is generated and returned to client c1
        - id0 = 63 is generated after because of network latency

The IDs say that event e1 reached the ID generation servers before event e0, but I don't see when this would be useful, e0 still happened before, it may even be causally older than e1.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> My understanding is only server side events are considered. So for ordering perspective, if due to network latencies e0 reaches the server later than e1, id0 > id1 is correct behaviour.

<comment><USER3> By "client" I meant client of the ID generation servers, may they be web servers that run DB clients, or cellphones. When someone uses a distributed ID generation cluster, they presumably want large throughput, like millions of IDs per second, and latency will likely be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Here fsync at every write is mandatory because if nodes go down and restart, they MUST have the latest value of the "current" key."

Why could not a node that is restarting, simply do the algorithm and set its own "current" from the $NEXTID it gets? In other words, a single failed- restarting node does not need to rely on having a recent disk value for "current", as long as it can call on a majority of non-failed nodes.

Only if _all_ nodes failed (a system-wide crash) and had to restart, the consensus value of "current" might be less than some (possibly all, if it reset to 0) IDs that were issued prior to the crash.

However there could be a protocol for recovery from a system-wide crash, requiring all nodes, before they go on-line, to scan their most recent ID- stamped transactions and start their "current" at the maximum seen. Then following this disaster you might issue IDs that were less than some that were issued pre-crash, but it would not matter if none of the "lost" IDs were never recorded in transactions.

<comment><USER6> The problem is a single node doesn't whether it can safely skip fsync or not, because it doesn't know what's going on with the other nodes.

In the case of three nodes recieving an update and dying at once in a five node system, the first node to recover needs to tell the other two what happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always look forward to reading these - it typically leads to a good hour or two of Wikipedia and learning.

</comment><comment><USER8> fsync()ing on every increment is kind of required, but makes me wince; I feel that a bit of NVRAM holding the incrementing counter would allow you to greatly increase the throughput of this system.

<comment><USER9> I agree. With custom hardware, one could drastically increase the performance of many distributed operations. For example, Google's Spanner[1] uses GPS receivers and atomic clocks to ensure global consistency.

The current state of distributed systems makes me think of 3D games before Nvidia's GeForce 256. Without dedicated hardware, there was only so much you could do.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_\(database\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like you could use a combination of time and unique machine ids to generate ordered sequences in a distributed system without the need for nodes to talk to each other.

<comment><USER11> That's the intuition behind systems like Flake ([https://github.com/boundary/flake](https://github.com/boundary/flake)) and its predecessors.

In systems like Flake you are able to get a useful roughly-ordered property which is good for generating ID's and organizing things like activity feeds. Things will be mostly sorted by time by encoding the time in the most significant bits, but they will be fuzzy because of machine and sequence ID's in the LSB's. You will get monotonically increasing ID's per-process because each one spinlocks locally against backwards drift, but you're not guaranteed to get monotonically increasing ID's globally across all processes. One process' time might drift forward, or you might have two ID's at the same time but the instance with the higher machine ID responded first.</comment></comment>


30 Years of .ORG - <AUTHOR> http://happy30th.org

<comment><USER2> The "responsive" text layout needs some work.

I clicked and clicked expecting to find the second half of every sentence (".ORG hit the 10 million mark with"... with what?) and only at the very end did it occur to me to resize the browser window.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Self Study Physics? - <AUTHOR>
 Hey HN, I'm a CS graduate student, and I do a lot of Deep Learning Research. I've always wanted to get a strong foundation in Physics, and while on lockdown because of COVID, I thought it would be a great opportunity.
I've run across this incredible guide https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/13/so-you-want-to-learn-physics and I was also thinking about going through MIT Open Courseware following their bachelor's curriculum.
Do you all have any suggestions or tips? I really appreciate it! <comment><USER2> Duplicate submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22682837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22682837)

<comment><USER3> Comments moved thither. Thanks!</comment></comment>


When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/youraba/2018/december-2018/when-is-it-okay-for-a-lawyer-to-lie--/ <comment><USER2> These are interesting scenarios, but let's not forget that the rules are only binding under the threat of being caught and punished. They aren't like the laws of physics. So if a lawyer isn't supposed to engage in trickery, they might do so anyway, especially if they think they can get away with it and their client happens to be a rich criminal who pays them extra to do shady stuff.

Source: Lawyers wouldn't have the reputation they do if all the members of the club had integrity.

<comment><USER3> > Lawyers wouldn't have the reputation they do if all the members of the club > had integrity.

Some anecdotes:

\- A company I started, hired a big-brand SV legal firm, super expensive. We thought they would be great. But we were so little to them, it was sometimes even hard to get a timely response. In the end we stopped using them, but not before we signed a bunch of documents they reviewed and told us were fine to sign, when in reality those contracts left us fatally exposed (and were in great part responsible for the downfall of the company later).

\- Had a complaint filed against me personally earlier this year. The complaint has some truths twisted to paint a mostly false story, but it also has plenty of lies and omissions. The lawyer(s) that wrote the complaint knew what they were doing, yet no one is ever going to get punished for it.

\- Looking for lawyers to defend the case (and in previous experiences), I realized that most lawyers have certain formulas or patterns they follow for specific types of situations that they already know how to address, if you don't fall into those, then they'll either pretty much fail at the job, not do what they actually should do (sometimes even if you ask them directly), or just refuse you as a client. It is very hard to find a lawyer that will actually take the time to really listen to you, understand your story/situation and then work on a personalized strategy/solution.

I think that any lawyer that intentionally mis-represents stuff in their work, or tries to shoehorn their clients into their formulas, or just half-asses their job, are seriously lacking in integrity. And by my experience, this seems to be the case for 50%+ of lawyers. A lot of them will probably do a ton of damage both to their clients and their counterparties, and they will never be held responsible.

<comment><USER4> I do not want to dismiss what you are saying (in fact I find it extremely interesting) but don't 80%+ of people in all professions (or even out in society) just suck? I am more surprised that you consider 50% to be the minimum of bad lawyers rather than a higher percentage.

<comment><USER5> 80% of doctors don't suck.

It's not that lawyers suck, per se. It's that you're dealing with an adversary, and if you get a 50th percentile lawyer to go against a 90th percentile lawyer, well, you could still win if you've got a good case, but it's certainly not as likely as the reverse. In many cases you get what you pay for.

<comment><USER6> 80% of doctors (especially cheap ones like the lawyers mentioned above) would fail to get optimal results in complex scenarios like presented above, just like the lawyers.

<comment><USER5> The doctors wouldn't be put in that position, though. While lawyers will often gladly take a case that they have a low chance of winning without fully disclosing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It has been several years ago that I discovered that despite a similar philosophy behind law-writing and programming, these worlds are very far apart and every year, even when I thought my cynicism was stable, the gap continues to widen.

This is from the American Bar Association, it is the opposite of a blog post you would end with IANAL. Yet, we read (at the end) that even professional lawyers are "struggling" with understanding why a given accepted practice is ok given the laws and obligation. And this on no small matter: it is about hiding that the plaintiff died before the trial. And it is not clear whether it is ok or not.

I had the "chance" to discuss with lawyers specialized in intellectual property. They did not even understand their subject or the imprecision of law. Every time I try to dig into legal issues surrounding IP I end up with the impression that the difference between a lawyer and a layperson is that the lawyer just is more up to date with what was made up in court recently.

Lawyers are going to help you if you are in a case that has happened tens of times in the past but is going to be clueless in a genuinely new situation. Just as the judge will be.

Recently I read about the licensing issues around deep learning models, the definitions of fair use and derivative works. We are used to IETF standards and IEEE specs. Even RFCs are usually pretty precise in how they define things. Laws are crappy when put to that standard. They are just there to provide arguments in a mud-slinging negotiation.

<comment><USER8> If you have any more info about the licensing issues around deep learning models, I'd be very interested to read it.

In exchange, here is a link to the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy:

[https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml- policy](https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy)

<comment><USER7> Well, I'd be happy to have someone to chat with and exchange ideas about it. I am currently digging that rabbit hole that seems to be basically uncharted waters.

I would like to find a way to make true open source deep learning models.

Debian legal newsletter [1] and lwn[2] have interesting takes on the relevance of GPL. To them, putting a trained model under the GPL implicates that you have to open your dataset too, which are the "sources". That seems somehow consensual but I still think it is debatable and could need clarification.

I also dug around the question whether a trained model can actually be copyrightable if the training code and the dataset are free. This is akin to a "compilation" operation that adds no creative input (anyway applying copyright to source code is already a bit of a hack). There is a pretty strong ground to argue that they are similar to "compilation of facts" which come with very little protection.

I am now wondering if open source can actually work for deep learning: if trained models are not copyrightable, open source licenses require strong copyright protection to be implemented. Maybe a DL model is not protected enough for that.

Finally, I am reassured by recent fair use rulings that a model will probably not be considered a derived work of its dataset and that proprietary data can legally be used to produce an unencumbered model but the legal uncertainty still exists.

If you are interested in helping me trying to figure out how to protect crucial models so that the first AGI will be beneficial to all and open sourced, I'd be very happy to have someone poke holes into my ideas.

[1] [https://lists.debian.org/debian- legal/2009/05/msg00028.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian- legal/2009/05/msg00028.html) [2] [https://lwn.net/Articles/760142/](https://lwn.net/Articles/760142/)

<comment><USER8> The Debian ML policy linked above goes a fair way to making truly open source deep learning models. The biggest problem with the policy is they do not address the economic disparity that means only folks with a lot of money can train a model even if they had all the training software, drivers and source data under a free license etc. Perhaps Debian can get enough donated compute time that we can solve this though.

The products of compilation seem to be copyrightable, otherwise software piracy wouldn't be prosecutable. Perhaps the same would apply to trained models.

Do you have a link to those fair use rulings? Also note that fair use is an American concept and doesn't apply in many countries, some of which have similar but more restricted concepts. Also, I wouldn't consider a model produced under your example as a free model, that would be more of a ToxicCandy model in the Debian ML Policy parlance.

<comment><USER8> Some links to Debian mailing list discussions:

[https://lists.debian.org/msgid- search/33417ce2bcf9b6a0efaf47...](https://lists.debian.org/msgid- email@example.com) [https://lists.debian.org/msgid- search/20190608184309.GA10146...](https://lists.debian.org/msgid- email@example.com) [https://lists.debian.org/msgid- search/f544829dcd6c0f92ea11cd...](https://lists.debian.org/msgid- firstname.lastname@example.com) [https://lists.debian.org/msgid- search/20180712123524.GA25751...](https://lists.debian.org/msgid- search/20180712123524.GA25751@Asuna)

<comment><USER7> Thanks! It really gave some good insights!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was bummed to see the examples, which I reproduce here to highlight their obviousness (or their, uh, being noncontroversial):

1\. Can a lawyer who suspects the opposing party of breaking an agreement engage in plain-clothes trickery to figure out if that's true? Yes.

2\. Is a lawyer obligated to essentially testify [respond to a judge's inquiry] in a manner that incriminates their client based on private information? No, thought when they do respond to the inquiry they should be vague rather than affirmatively lying.

3\. Do prosecutors need to drop charges if, after a plea deal is signed, information comes up that would inhibit prosecuting the case in the absence of a plea deal? No, but this feels scummy.

<comment><USER10> I think 3 turns on the fact that this is more specific than just "information that would inhibit prosecuting the case." That would include exculpatory evidence, which the prosecutor _would_ have to turn over.

<comment><USER11> If a fact need not be disclosed in the midst of prosecution, why is it a requirement to prosecute in the first place?

<comment><USER12> It's a soft requirement, because the witness will be 'necessary'[1] in court _in the particular circumstances of this particular crime_. If the prosecutor had a stronger case (Say, a different witness, or CCTV evidence, etc, etc, etc), then this particular witness would not be necessary.

[1] In the opinion of the average criminal lawyer, assuming that the case is litigated correctly, and that the jury isn't entirely composed of utter mouth- drooling morons prejudiced against the defendant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I few months ago I was in court, I was suing 2 related parties and I was pro- se. One of the lawyers of one of the defendants lied 3 times in front of the judge, when I called him upon it, the judge didn't bling.

This was civil court, not small claims.

Oh well.

<comment><USER14> Was there clear and obvious evidence of the lies, or was it largely your testimony?

If there was clear and obvious evidence of the lies then you can submit a complaint to the bar (or whatever the disciplinary body is for lawyers in your state). The judge is NOT actually the one with the authority to enforce these professional obligations.

<comment><USER15> The judge doesn't enforce professional obligations but absolutely enforces perjury. Of course the real question is why was the lawyer testifying at all?

<comment><USER16> It doesn't sound like the lawyer was testifying? They can certainly lie in their presentation of the case, during summing up, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My wife is an attorney, family law, and it's clear from the years of stories and discussions on what's she has dealt with that most attorneys lie with impunity ... and so do the litigants going to court! The judges generally don't hold the liars accountable, the attorneys don't hold the other attorneys accountable, and no one holds the judges accountable ... and with no real accountability, it's a free for all. If the State Bars would hold their own members to their own supposed standard we'd be in a much better place.

</comment><comment><USER18> It was interesting to read the scenarios but the result was only disappointing. I'm a non-lawyer expecting there to be complicated nuances that lawyers can use to explain their 'honesty'. Misdeeds by prosecutors (as in ignoring police lying on the stand because they need support from them for their next cases), not disclosing information like in this case cause me to take a very careful consideration of what a lawyer tells me.

</comment><comment><USER19> I find it interesting in the US that we hold lawyers to the high standard of no lying, while law enforcement officers are given more latitude, esp in interrogation situations.

Seeing it in TV shows and movies, which often have officers and detectives lying about knowledge, evidence, other witness statements, all to get info, I assumed that it was fictional. In many cases, though not all, it appears to be allowed within limits in real life. See, for example, [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsluka.com/amp/can- the-p...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsluka.com/amp/can-the-police- lie-to-me.html).

This doesn't mean all cops are liars, and they still shouldn't commit perjury, but it's an interesting comparison to me. I guess it's a reflection of the advocate/adversary approach that is often a part of the legal process.

<comment><USER20> Non-AMP link: [https://www.adamsluka.com/can-the-police-lie-to- me.html](https://www.adamsluka.com/can-the-police-lie-to-me.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just have to say, that is one horrible font for a website.

<comment><USER11> Could not read without reader mode, which is rare for me in 2020.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How is a court-appointed defense attorney supposed to do his job if he knows his client is guilty?

<comment><USER23> They would have to sit back, tell their client to plead the 5th, and let the prosecutor do their job of proving a crime was committed by the suspect beyond reasonable doubt.

I watched the OJ Simpson trial when I was a kid. I was sure he was guilty. I think his lawyers thought so as well. Once they realized the LAPD had tampered with the crime scene and the evidence they used that wedge to open the door for reasonable doubt. And they absolutely hammered at it for months. By the end the jury was full of doubt.

Most public defenders don't have the resources for that kind of defense. And most assume their client is guilty. Which is why plea bargains are prevalent.

<comment><USER24> An alternate explanation for the prevalence of plea bargains is that many defendants are actually guilty of something, that guilt is likely enough provable to not be worth the risk, and we've allowed sentencing guidelines and charge-stacking practices to amplify that risk to the point where it's game theoretic sensible to take a light plea deal. I'm not nearly convinced that public defender assumption of guilt is a significant driving factor.

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately, there are reasons to accept a plea bargain even if you are perfectly innocent.

First, reality is not important per se, only how the judge and the jury see it. If you know you didn't do something, but there is evidence pointing towards you, and you have a reason to believe that people judging you would be convinced by it... it makes sense to accept a smaller punishment (for something you didn't do) rather than risk years of prison (for something you didn't do).

Second, the process itself is already a punishment. How many times can you be absent from your job because you are at the court, before you lose the job? How much will it cost you to pay for the lawyer, for travel, etc. If you are poor, it can make more sense to accept a smaller punishment for something you didn't do, rather than ruin your life in an attempt to prove your innocence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Holly Golightly: How do I look?

Paul Varjak: Very good. I must say, I'm amazed.

</comment><comment><USER15> Scenarios 1 & 2 are pretty obvious, and 3 is not about the lawyer at all. Makes sense though since you're unlikely to hear any criticism of the profession in a publication by the ABA.

<comment><USER27> The third scenario is about a lawyer - the prosecutor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Always. See, _The Grammar of Money_ , by Felous.

</comment><comment><USER29> Should prosecutors be able to add incriminating statements to a confession transcript? (I'm talking about damning statements that the defendant didn't make.)

The CA Attorney General at the time said yes. A CA Appeals Court said no.

[https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of- appeal/1695398.html](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of- appeal/1695398.html)

<comment><USER30> I can't quite tell, but Kamala Harris might have been the AG in question.

That wasn't what the AG argued; the AG argued that case shouldn't be _dismissed_ on those grounds. The question is closer to if the prosecutor adds incriminating statements to a confession transcript, is that grounds for dismissal.

<comment><USER31> Yup:

> Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General, Michael P. Farrell, Assistant Attorney > General, R. Todd Marshall and Larenda R. Delaini, Deputy Attorneys General, > for Plaintiff and Appellant. Richard A. Levy, under appointment by the Court > of Appeal, for Defendant and Respondent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How does an attorney sleep? First he lies on one side, then he lies on the other.

Source: An attorney told me.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Everyone knows that lawyers are not allowed to lie — to clients, courts or > third parties.

What a great point for lose people reading the article; from the first sentence.

</comment><comment><USER34> When do you want it to be ok?</comment>


Microsoft's Xbox SmartGlass app now out for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/6/3611400/xbox-smartglass-ios-app-available

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks quite nice so far. The startup/login time is still pretty long, though.</comment>