In Which Eben Moglen Like, Legit Yells at Me for Having Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/13/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw this, read it, identified with it since I don't have a Facebook or twitter, and wanted to share it with others.

Paradox: By the logic of the article, does that mean I have committed the cardinal sin the article was condemning? I know PG probably doesn't sell data to people, but still, by encouraging sharing behavior, I feel like I am helping the social networks become more entrenched.

How does one easily spread an idea which is against people easily sharing their lives, and thus, their ideas?

<comment><USER2> I read the piece and also identified with the interviewee, but felt bad for not instantly cancelling my fb account.

I like to think of HN as a positive alternative to typical social sharing sites like fb or twitter.

I wasn't aware of the notion mentioned in the interview of social sites sharing photographic data with police in other countries-- that is enough reason to get out of the social networks for me.

That said, it is safe to say that social networks are absolutely entrenched in society. As individuals we can choose to not participate, but this is effectively the same as choosing to live in a mountain outside of society.

<comment><AUTHOR> My main hope is that the government never uses facebook for anything. No check ins, no taxes, no voting, nothing.

And I do choose to live on that mountain. Email and Skype suffice for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thumbed up this article - but the title kills me. I had to re-parse it at least 3 times to be sure that I was reading it correctly.

Having failed to delete my FB account for over a year because my wife's FB profile would then lack 'in a relationship with' information (her concern, not mine), this professor's rant is encouraging me to make a stand!</comment>


Ruby on Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://blog.antarestrader.com/?p=77

<comment><USER2> If I understand him correctly, he wants to make all classes into processes and method calls into message sends. I don't think this would improve performance in any way.

"Many of the processes will actually be suspended waiting for the next message, [...]" Exactly. What's the use of making a function call asynchronous, if the program has to wait for the result? None. It's just going to generate overhead.

Just a thought experiment: What if I take a program and make every line of code spawn a process, and the next line wait for the result. It's clear that this won't improve performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> problem with reusing syntax from another (more familiar language) (imho) is that some fundamental/ubiquitous features e.g. pattern matching which permeates almost everything in erlang, are pretty hard to get right. same applies for creating objects (by writing them down) and matching against them.

i "feel" that problems are more due to difference in semantics associated with the syntax, rather than with just the syntax itself.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting thought. One can argue that the ability to write better OO code is already present in modules, functions, processes, and asynchronous message passing. Threads are needed in Ruby and Java to handle the asynchronous piece. Consider also Erlang's pattern matching style of defining functions, which reminds me a bit of generics in CLOS. Lisp like atoms are also a very useful device in Erlang.

So it strikes me that this proposal is sort of re-inventing in Erlang something that already exists. Moreover when one throws in OTP and it's frameworks for structuring collections of processes, I'm not quite sold on the benefits of doing this beyond making Erlang accessible to the larger audience steeped in the OO way.

Corrado Santoro has done a little bit with this in his agent technology <http://www.diit.unict.it/users/csanto/exat>

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure his approach is a winner, but I do agree that Erlang feels much slower to use than Ruby, even after taking the time to rejig your brain for its style of doing things, and I think the idea of layering some more stuff on top to make it convenient isn't a bad idea at all. Perhaps that 'stuff' wouldn't end up actually being Ruby, but it's a good starting point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why replace Erlang's message passing with a baroque RPC call/return thingy based on that same message passing?

</comment><comment><USER7> Making an uber concurrency friendly Ruby would probably end up looking a lot like Stackless Python.

Rubinius is going whole-hog on green (lightweight) threads, BTW.

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out the Io language. I think you might like it.</comment>


What the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King says about modern spying - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/what_the_fbi_s_surveillance_of_martin_luther_king_says_about_modern_spying.html <comment><USER2> The link on page 2 is to [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an- uncensore...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored- letter-to-mlk-reveals.html?_r=1) which describes that:

> F.B.I. officials began to peddle information about King's hotel-room > activities to friendly members of the press, hoping to discredit the civil > rights leader.

and how

> one of Hoover's deputies, William Sullivan, apparently took it upon himself > to write the anonymous letter [the so-called "suicide letter"] and sent an > agent to Miami, to mail the package to Atlanta.</comment>


Washington Adds Pay History Ban, Salary Range Transparency Requirements [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2019-20/Pdf/Bills/Session%20Laws/House/1696-S.SL.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> From the Bill Digest [1]:

      - Prohibits  an  employer  from:
        (1)  Seeking  the  wage  or salary  history  of  an  applicant  for  employment  from  the applicant or a current or former employer; or
        (2) Requiring that an applicant's prior wage or salary history meet certain criteria.
      - Requires an employer, upon request of an applicant for employment, to provide the wage scale or salary range for the job  title  for  the  position  for  which  the  applicant  is applying.
      - Requires  the  director  of  the  department  of  labor  and industries,   upon   complaint   by   an   employee,   to:
        (1) Investigate  to  determine  whether  an  employer  has  violated this act; and
        (2) If  it  is  determined  that  an  employer  has  violated this  act,  order  the  employer  to  pay  actual  and  statutory damages,  and  interest  of  one  percent  per  month,  to  the complainant.

The salary range clause is particularly interesting. I help run Levels.fyi and we actually just released a visualization for comp ranges by level at companies [2]. Users have found it incredibly useful but it is based on user- contributed data and so there will always be a question of accuracy. This new law (I hope) allows us to display accurate ranges.

[1] [https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1696&Year=2019...](https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1696&Year=2019&Initiative=false#documentSection) [2] [https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html](https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html)</comment>


Serverless computing on DC/OS with Galactic Fog - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/2016/07/20/serverless-computing-dcos-galactic-fog/ <comment><USER2> In my book, the innovation in Lambda is, above everything else, about the billing model. My company moved the work of 40 dedicated servers onto Lambda and in doing so decimated our costs. Paying for 1500 cores (our current AWS limit) in 100ms increments has been a game changer.

I'm sure there are upsides to adopting the same programming model with your own hardware or VMs, but the financial benefit of Lambda will not be there.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the cost significantly higher? Even with bulk pricing, lambda was more than 8x more expensive than ec2 for constant computing.

<comment><USER4> It depends on your traffic.

If you have a million 1ms transactions per second, you'll spend $500k/month, or $6m/year.

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/lambda-tools/pricing- calculator.htm...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/lambda-tools/pricing- calculator.html)

<comment><USER5> That pricing calculator isn't correct.

From the AWS Lambda pricing page:

        Duration is calculated from the time your code begins
        executing until it returns or otherwise terminates,
        rounded up to the nearest 100ms

So it would really be closed to $1 million per month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do Mesosphere ops (who are developers first, maybe not so experienced with the operations side) normally manage these services, like Gestalt? How do you keep track of what should be running and how resources should be allocated? Do you just install directly from this service repository, and then update resource allocations as needed, through Marathon or the service itself? Or, do you have a system for managing and versioning the entire cluster?

I'm new to Mesosphere, and right now, I'm figuring out a process for managing the cluster that would work well for a small but growing team. It would be nice to have a specification of what the cluster should look like, and how it has changed over time. For that, I'm thinking of having a "{company}-DC" git repository with a collection of Ansible playbooks that would set up the DCOS cluster, and then install, configure and set up scaling policies for the services and applications that we want to run. Is this how most people do it? Do you see problems with the general idea of keeping all of Mesosphere under configuration management? Where do secrets fit into this, where do you store them and how do you make them available to your applications?

<comment><USER7> Also, there's a tool called mesosctl ([https://github.com/mesoshq/mesosctl](https://github.com/mesoshq/mesosctl)) if you want to start small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm very clueless to this new architecture, but a concern i frequently hear about is lockin (both in language and vendor).

Does this style of computing / engineering hinder open source adoption in languages? Eg, OS images pre-setup with some type of PHP-style provider, letting you run whatever language you want with low startup time to handle each request?

I'm sure much of this is way off the mark, so to explain it differently, i'd love to be able to work with a Rust framework tailored to this "serverless" model, and hosted on any generic box i want (or fleets of boxes, etc).

And of course, apologies for the ignorance i'm sure is visible :)

</comment><comment><USER9> If we want to replace AWS Lambda with self hosted service for Java, what are the recommendations? Apache Mesos ?

<comment><USER7> Actually, Galactic Fog runs on DC/OS which is at it's core a Mesos distribution. As far as I understood it can't currently run Java lambdas...

<comment><USER10> So their docs seem pretty clear that their lambda engine runs jvm based languages. Or at least java and scala, but if you can run java you can run scala and clojure and jruby etc.</comment></comment></comment>


LZFSE compression library and command line tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lzfse/lzfse <comment><USER2> > It targets similar compression rates at higher compression and decompression > speed compared to deflate using zlib

I don't doubt this is true, but I'd expect a little benchmark on the README as a proof. It would be interesting to see how LZFSE compares to LZ4 ([https://cyan4973.github.io/lz4/](https://cyan4973.github.io/lz4/)).

<comment><USER3> It's tested against a wide range of other compressors in this thread: [http://encode.ru/threads/2221-LZFSE-New-Apple-Data- Compressi...](http://encode.ru/threads/2221-LZFSE-New-Apple-Data- Compression?s=031e6ce4e62b74fde592c96e91384332)

The results are kind of underwhelming.

<comment><USER4> [https://quixdb.github.io/squash- benchmark/unstable/](https://quixdb.github.io/squash-benchmark/unstable/) in particular paints a pretty good picture of the current landscape. It seems like ZStd is usually better than LZFSE and LZ4 is pretty competitive with LZFSE:LZVN.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious to see comparisons on a 64bit ARM cpu, since that's what Apple likely optimized it for. (I don't expect a huge difference, but I'm admittedly ignorant on this topic.)

<comment><USER6> I'd also be curious to see what the energy impact is of the various methods. LZFSE wasn't just designed for speed, it was also designed for energy efficiency.

<comment><USER7> I can't see how "power efficiency" can be different from "speed" in the context of a CPU decompressor algorithm. Care to explain?

<comment><USER6> I don't know the details, but I don't see why power efficiency has to be the same thing as speed. For example, various patterns of memory access or I/O may run at the same speed but could very plausibly have different amounts of energy consumption. Similarly, it's conceivable that different CPU instructions that run in the same time might have different energy demands. CPUs also have different speeds they run at which have different energy usage, it's possible that LZFSE might be designed to avoid putting the CPU into its highest-power mode. But as I said before, I don't know the details about what LZFSE does, I just know that there are various reasons why energy usage is not the same thing as CPU time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The most interesting discussion of this compression algorithm that I've found is in a presentation from WWDC 2015 [http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/7125ovmdf36/7...](http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/7125ovmdf36/712/712_low_energy_high_performance_compression_and_accelerate.pdf?dl=1). The goal is not strictly faster or higher compression ratio, but a reasonably balanced mix of the two at lower energy consumption (since the original target was iOS).

<comment><USER9> Note that energy efficiency is pretty proportional to performance, so it's very likely that a faster algorithm (e.g. LZ4) would also be more efficient.

(Back when I was working on energy efficiency, people kept trying to invent "low-power compilers", but they kept discovering that the fastest code is also the most efficient.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Based on internet bechmarks, zstd looks like strictly better option: [https://github.com/Cyan4973/zstd](https://github.com/Cyan4973/zstd)

<comment><USER6> Those benchmarks don't include energy efficiency, which was a primary design goal of LZFSE. I also don't see LZFSE on that page anyway, which makes it kind of hard to compare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was an Apple presentation that claimed lower decompression energy usage:

[https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/712/?time=4...](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/712/?time=457)

On an iOS device this is a pretty hot path, since it's used to decompress the asset catalog, including some images, so most of your apps on iOS probably already use this algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER12> Same link posted a few days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11922484](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11922484)

Previous (but brief) discussion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689471)

</comment><comment><USER13> Pardon me if this was already answered. Is this the official implementation of LZFSE from Apple? The main contributor for the Github repo @ebainville is listed in Cupertino, CA.

<comment><USER9> "Copyright (c) 2015-2016, Apple Inc."</comment></comment>


PostgreSQL Index Internals - <AUTHOR> https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/events/934.en.html <comment><USER2> The thing is, there's not much documentation on where each index type would be applicable, what their upsides and downsides are in particular situations.

For example, the hash index is (currently) not WAL-logged, which means it's not crash safe and not replicated. It also may have some concurrency issues, the resources are sparse on this one.

The BRIN index _should_ be ideal for situations where there is a huge storage of data (TBs) inserted in sequential order and rarely queried - a BRIN index for such a thing would be only a few MB in size. I say _should_ because when I tried it on 9.5.0, the query planner kept ignoring the index.

Both GIN and GIST indexes can be used for full text search (tsearch2), but GIN is faster for queries while GIST is smaller and faster for insertion.

The SP-GIST index is so underdocumented that, when I wanted to try it out in a project, I could not even understand how it works and does it work correctly as a radix tree for strings.

What's also somewhat underdocumented are the "operator classes" and which are and aren't implemented for different index types. I.e. a table of which index type can be used with which data type (and what exactly does such combination produce) would be great.

<comment><USER3> > The BRIN index should be ideal for situations where there is a huge storage > of data (TBs) inserted in sequential order and rarely queried - a BRIN index > for such a thing would be only a few MB in size. I say should because when I > tried it on 9.5.0, the query planner kept ignoring the index.

A BRIN index only keeps summary information for a range of pages. Because of this, a BRIN can only be used for a bitmap scan and cannot be used for a normal index scan. This makes the set of queries where the planner will use the BRIN index really small. It is also possible, since it is such a common mistake, that you forgot to run ANALYZE and so the planner had no clue the data was in sequential order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To all the upvoters, did you actually read the linked slides or are you just upvoting because it has "PostgreSQL" in the name[1]? Interesting to see this many votes with zero comments.

It is a great set of slides by the way. The btree piece would be old news to anyone familiar with database related data structures but the detail on GIN, GIST, and particularly BRIN make for a good read. Seeing the physical layout for each of those gives you a much better understanding of the cost of maintenance and what situations would they'd be useful.

Also, if you happened to follow the recent Postgres/Uber thread, this gives a lot more context as to how updates to a row would cascade to many writes for each index.

[1]: _... which isn 't a bad idea anyway because PostgreSQL is awesome!_

<comment><USER5> At least for me, I have two different voting style:

\- Yeah, this is pretty cool. Upvote!

\- I've got to save this for later when I can really read it

PostgreSQL stuff tends to be pretty reliably good, and usually with an educational bent. So I'll tend to use the upvote as a bookmark to go back to later.

I gotta say, I don't really like slides, but I've yet to be disappointed by a PostgreSQL post. And usually, a high vote/comment ratio is a nice indicator of quality.

EDIT: formatting

<comment><USER6> You might be interested in the "favorite" link under each submission title.

<comment><USER7> But I think the "favorites" are publicly view-able, isn't it? Is there any way to make them private?

<comment><USER6> From viewing my profile it appears that they are public. I've never actually used it, just noticed the feature a while back. I've been using Instapaper for ages for my "read later" links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> is there a book/documents about DB internals ? I have found some books about theory but not about an actual implementation.

<comment><USER9> Because there are many different implementations, with different trade-offs and design decisions. Also, the implementation-specific documentation is typically kept fairly close to the code, as the docs need to be kept in sync.

So for example if you need to know how indexes in PostgreSQL work, look into the READMEs in the proper directory:

b-tree indexes: [https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend...](https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend/access/nbtree/README)

gin: [https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend...](https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend/access/gin/README)

brin: [https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend...](https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend/access/brin/README)

etc. The READMEs also include links to related papers etc.

<comment><USER8> hey thanks!, tho I agree with this, I was thinking, if there are books about kernel internals there may be some about db internals.

but Thanks for your links !</comment></comment></comment>


A death on Usenet: Sharon Lopatka and the strange case of "consensual murder" - <AUTHOR> http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/16932/usenet-sharon-lopatka-consensual-murder/ <comment><USER2> > She also took to Usenet newsgroups. In 1996, these newsgroups were the > internet's social backbone, a primitive and more tribal forerunner of > Facebook.

Oh, irony. I know what the author means but to someone that knows Usenet from 1996 and Facebook from 2016 this must sound like an insult.

<comment><USER3> As someone that did not live through pre-Eternal September Usenet, what did it have that Facebook and Reddit do not?

<comment><USER4> It wasn't a million miles away from what HN and Reddit are today, or perhaps more select sites like LtU[1]. People used their own real names, and even real physical addresses and phone numbers(!), partly because most had access through a university or company which might enforce[2] that, but partly because the risks were low and/or not well understood. I spent many, many happy hours reading through postings on comp.unix.wizards when I should have been working. Oh and nobody ever top-posted (yay!)

[1] [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/)

[2] Very loosely - it was possible, indeed simple, to spoof postings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Similar to the case of Armin Meiwes and Bernd Brandes.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/04/germany.lukeha...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/04/germany.lukeharding) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes)</comment>


Show HN: Cross-platform Journal Mindwave now available for iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> https://daily.mindwave.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, maker here My app is, finally, out in the App Stores (iOS and Android). So, l can really call Mindwave a Cross-Platform journal now. I'm super excited about that! Happy to hear your thoughts and feedback.

The iOS and Android apps are a great addition to the Telegram Bot, Slack App, Chrome PWA, and Email service already in place. So I'm wondering, what would be a great next step? Should I build a browser extension, iPad or desktop app, or any other suggestions?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best hosted open source alternative to Gsuite or office 365 - sahin-boydas <comment><AUTHOR> OnlyOffice ([https://www.onlyoffice.com/](https://www.onlyoffice.com/)) is the only one that I believe comes very close to either of these. It has several components that can be used individually or together, I believe all AGPL- licensed. They have fully featured in-browser editors for documents, spreadsheets and presentations that can be used with their document management system (also very good) or integrated into Nextcloud (or similar). There's also a PMS, CRM, E-mail and calendar.

<comment><USER2> In case anyone else had difficulty finding the source code link on the web site: [https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE](https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some words of caution about moving away from mainstream products like Office (or Gsuite, to a certain extent). Most alternatives have today very good features, but inter-operability between platforms remain somewhat an issue. Arguably my experience of this is a bit dated (2 years) but at the time there were still issues on format conversions. It is less of a problem with .doc formats (though I found Libreoffice messing up on how these are converted to/from, for example when images where embedded between text), but if you work with spreadsheets in a meaningful way (i.e. you build heavy models and financial projections, with pivot tables etc.) can you afford to doubt whether a file will operate as intended once converted to/from xlsx when you need to share it with someone outside your team/company? Gsuite is much more basic, in terms of features, than Excel so i believe this is less of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> LibreOffice online:

[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_Online)

[https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/)

</comment><comment><USER5> What about nextcloudd's office solution? I'm interested too. Thinking about giving it a try for our school network which already runs its own nextcloud instance.

<comment><USER6> Huh, nice. May I ask what school is that

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you like open office you might like the collabora code app for Nextcloud.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the engineering behind Netflix's 'Skip Intro' button? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Is it so hard to believe that they are manually tagged?

They only have several thousand videos. Each one has some sort of process that it goes through to be included in their service. Someone decides which screenshots will be shown, edits the intro video, writes the synopsis, etc.

<comment><USER3> this has been my assumption ! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't know if it's what Netflix actually uses, but you can use perceptual hashing[1] to identify spans that are common to multiple episodes of the same series.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it naive to think that just as the shiws provide previews, box art etc they would provide the length of their intro? Then skip intro just needs to increment the video time by that amount

<comment><USER6> It makes sense that they'd provide the length because they wouldn't want it split in two by ads when shown on TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In addition to the other suggestion, I'd expect it to be something like this [0] or [1], a mix of data on what people skip in the first 10 minutes and the superstar of modern machine learning: human annotations. I've seen several shows where all episodes where consistently off by a few seconds, that might be either algorithmical bias or due to some annotators personal preference.

[0] [https://outline.com/BjsXnF](https://outline.com/BjsXnF)

[1] [https://medium.com/an-attempt-at-writing/netflixs-skip- intro...](https://medium.com/an-attempt-at-writing/netflixs-skip-intro- feature-how-the-hell-do-they-do-that-7c5db9408f82)

Edit: looks like these sequence fingerprinting patents might be relevant: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190028525A1/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190028525A1/en) [https://patents.google.com/patent/US9418296B1/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9418296B1/en)

</comment><comment><USER8> In the case of Netflix created content. It can be as simple as a number of seconds in metadata. Things get easy if you control both the production and consumption ends.</comment>


A framework for information extraction from tables in biomedical literature - <AUTHOR> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10032-019-00317-0 <comment><USER2> Pretty cool. I could see this having some application for a project[0] I'm working on - an open source platform for doing Literature Based Discovery[1].

More broadly than that, better approaches to extracting tabular information could probably be useful in many domains. Definitely looking forward to digging into this more deeply when I get home tonight.

[0]: [https://github.com/fogbeam/Valmont-F](https://github.com/fogbeam/Valmont-F)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature- based_discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature-based_discovery)</comment>


The FCC Fined 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' 'The Walking Dead' for Use of Emergency Tones - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/16/media/jimmy-kimmel-live-walking-dead-fcc-fine/index.html <comment><USER2> You better believe it! EAS is no joke, and FCC is right to take a hard line.

Not very many people know that tone contains data. (It's pretty interesting, really; see wiki link below.)

Broadcasters have an EAS box that listens for alert tones on other frequencies and repeats it over the broadcast frequency (and others may listen, etc). Among other things, the data in the tone affects how far it propagates, so if someone plays a tone over the air that's set to propagate nationwide, it's kind of a problem.

This isn't the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last.

Source: I worked on the engineering team at my college radio station (WSBF-FM Clemson).

EAS header: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System#EAS_hea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System#EAS_header)

<comment><USER3> Could people create a synthetic simulated EAS tone that contains no data and couldn't be decoded by any EAS equipment, but that would still remind a human viewer of the EAS tone? Would that be OK with the FCC, or are they also concerned with human listeners recognizing the sound and believing that an alert is imminent?

I worked on the engineering team for my high school radio station, but we didn't learn much about how EAS worked, other than that it was mandatory and was replacing EBS. :-)

<comment><USER4> > Could people create a synthetic simulated EAS tone that contains no data and > couldn't be decoded by any EAS equipment,

Could, but probably shouldn't.

From FCC link [https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-settles-investigations- misu...](https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-settles-investigations-misuse- emergency-alert-tones)

> These rules aim to protect the integrity of the alert system by helping to > avoid confusion when the tones are used, alert fatigue among listeners

I like the term "alert fatigue". Very descriptive and useful. Definitely a good thing to avoid.

<comment><USER5> This reminded me of the illegal number [0]. People being told the number was illegal so created flags that also represented the number. The neat thing was that by making numbers illegal anything that can be used to represent those numbers also becomes illegal. Like art work painted a certain way. Imaging being told you can not paint a certain color pattern as it is illegal. 0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number)

<comment><USER6> The term illegal number is like calling ink contraband because the use of ink in a manner which communicates something illegal may itself be illegal. Illegal numbers aren't illegal themselves. (And, anyway, by the theory justifying calling them illegal, every configuration of matter is illegal, since not only can any information be encoded in a number, but any information can be encoded—by selecting the right encoding scheme—in any finite number, and any configuration of matter can be represented by a number, so any information can be, by choosing the right scheme, be encoded in any configuration of matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I also wish there was a rule preventing the use of motor vehicle horns and emergency services siren sounds on any radio station. People are tired driving home and may react unpredictably in dense traffic to sirens and horns on the radio.

<comment><USER8> I agree.

Also, I think there should be a law regarding the new electronic billboards, especially at night. They should have a smooth transition over a period of say 10 seconds, instead of instantaneously changing / flashing and distracting drivers.

<comment><USER9> They should be outlawed completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> EAS tones were also used in the trailer for "Olympus Has Fallen" in 2014, the networks were fined $1.9 million.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20141231204456/http://bigstory.a...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141231204456/http://bigstory.ap.org/article/false- alarm-olympus-movie-ad-draws-19m-fine)

</comment><comment><USER11> While on the topic of causing a "boy who cried wolf" problem with emergency tones. All of the Amber alerts on cellular networks in Ontario are currently being sent as "presidential alert" priority level.

On many phones' OSes you can disable audible amber alerts but not presidential alerts. Some people in network engineering at the mobile network operators in Canada screwed up big time.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/amber- alerts-1.5137889](https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/amber-alerts-1.5137889)

[https://globalnews.ca/news/5683167/amber-alert- system/](https://globalnews.ca/news/5683167/amber-alert-system/)

Presidential alerts are only supposed to be used for absolute max priority events, such as literally a nuclear missile attack, a fire storm that's about to engulf a town, tsunami that will affect hundreds of thousands of people, etc.

<comment><USER12> Canada doesn't even have a President!

I believe in the US "Presidential alerts" actually require approval from POTUS. What's the intended protocol in Canada?

<comment><USER13> The entire process was badly bungled. The FCC designed a nicely tiered alert system for mobile phones. The CRTC then adopted the same system but tossed out all but the "Presidential" level. Then they delegated responsibility for what to alert about to local authorities.

The end result is cops in Burlington sending end of the world alerts that can't be silenced to people 1500 km and 15 hours away in Thunder Bay about events that took place 2 hours ago. It's complete lunacy.

The tone is so disruptive and loud people are calling 911 to complain. It's so jarring I'm shocked it hasn't resulted in fatal car collisions.

I've been in the states during amber alerts and even natural disaster warnings and the process is simple and effective. The alerts come in and you action them if warranted. Ours are literally the end of the world tone no matter what.

<comment><USER14> How those alerts work technically? They are SMS with special header or entirely separate message type?

(eg. in Poland alerts are sent as plain old SMS)

<comment><USER15> No, they are not done like SMS. Think of SMS like a normal IP packet, it has a source and destination. Belaboring the analogy, the WEA messages are more multicast packets.

WEA messages are encapsulated in Cellular Broadcast data (CB Data) payloads which are then encapsulated in System Information Blocks (SIB12 specifically). The way they are "routed" to your phone is by being near a tower in the coverage area of the alert. Even if you weren't in range of the tower when the alert initially went off, you'll still receive the message as soon as you are within range of the tower(s) broadcasting it (assuming the alert hasn't been cleared). Each payload has the equivalent of a payload ID which is supposed to prevent duplicate notification on your device of the same alert (but for different reasons, isn't always done right).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the kind of thing it's easy to imagine anyone doing.

If you're a comedy or TV writer... it would probably never occur to you that this aspect of real life is illegal to reproduce on TV. (It certainly wouldn't occur to me.)

Seeing as this has happened to at least 3 prominent TV channels... it feels like the failure here is at a much higher level -- kind of like, if an intern wipes your prod database, it's not the intern's fault but the fault of your processes that allowed it to even be a possibility.

So... when did the FCC pass this rule? How did it make sure every broadcaster knew about it? Why didn't broadcasters add it to their content review process? Where did the failure occur?

I mean, it's not like this was a cost/benefit calculation the broadcasters made to try to get away with something -- it's obviously just out of sheer ignorance. So are the lawyers at the broadcasters totally incompetent or not being listened to... or is it the FCC's fault here for not ensuring the right people at each and every broadcaster actually found out about it in the first place and added it to their review processes?

<comment><USER17> I worked at a couple radio stations doing production and engineering. In short, EAS is a legal requirement and not a joke. I have no doubt that production staff did it out of ignorance and that nobody caught onto it until it actually aired. I bet that control room's air turned blue as it aired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> These fines don't sound all that hefty?

A $395,000 fine would be absolutely devastating for even an abnormally wealthy individual, but I've got to imagine that producing a professional television show comes with much higher costs.

<comment><USER19> Jimmy Kimmel is an abnormally wealthy individual, and according to my 10 second lazy Google search, $400k is less than 2 weeks' pay for him personally. For the Kimmel show production company, or ABC, or Disney, it's closer to peanuts. I'll speculate wildly that $400k might not even offset the Kimmel show's ad revenue for a single night.

Edit: another lazy Google search says a 30 second ad spot on Kimmel runs about $20k. That means they hit $400k with ~10 minutes of commercial? [https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/new-data-shows-just-how- much...](https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/new-data-shows-just-how-much- advertisers-are-paying-commercials-late-night-167634/)

<comment><USER20> Which feels like an entirely appropriate fine given it's a first offense and presumably wasn't done with malicious intent.

If Kimmel decides to go ahead and make this a regular segment and flaunt the rules, I would expect the fines to multiply accordingly.

<comment><USER18> I think the fine itself is perfectly appropriate for all the reasons you listed. However, I don't understand why the article said the fine will "cost parent company ABC dearly."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess that would set the record for the most expensive royalty payment ever. #2 The Beatles #1 Emergency broadcast sounds

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a solid rule. Glad it's enforced so strictly.</comment>


Autograms: Self-enumerating Sentences - <AUTHOR> http://autograms.net/ <comment><USER2> There's a way to generate these super efficiently (presumably, since these were made in the 90s): [https://selfreferentialsentences.blogspot.com/](https://selfreferentialsentences.blogspot.com/)

The author claims they used binary decision diagrams, but I haven't figured out how they were able to apply them to this problem. I'd be interested to know if anyone knows how you might approach this.

The space of possible solutions is truly astronomical. I was able to write a program ([https://github.com/jimrybarski/autogram](https://github.com/jimrybarski/autogram)) that I estimate could exhaustively enumerate all solutions for a given "prefix" in about a month (all other solutions I found do a probabilistic search). After 12 hours it found what I would argue is the best possible bar trivia team name:

"This bar trivia team name has seven a's, two b's, one c, two d's, thirty-two e's, five f's, one g, five h's, ten i's, one j, one k, two l's, three m's, twenty-two n's, seventeen o's, one p, one q, five r's, twenty-two s's, twenty- two t's, one u, nine v's, eleven w's, one x, five y's and one z."

<comment><USER3> You can first divide the solution in two parts, 1) the letter selection and 2) finding a valid permutation.

There's a fairly finite set of letters that you might want to enumerate based on both your initial 'seed' text and the letters that are in the numbers especially if you consider 'one [a-z]' as seed text. That is to say, the amount of sets of letters that have different sets of numbers that you can spell with them is small.

If you know what letters you have to write and you know all of those must have 2 or more instances you can add the "'s"'s and single instances of those letters to the seed text. At that point you just need to worry about selecting numbers that including their own letter counts sum to the seed text constant. This can be easily expressed in an ILP.

The ILP will define a 26 boolean array for each possible number we can spell representing whether that number is the count of that letter. We add a constraint that the sum of all active numbers on a given letter == 1. Next we simply add constraints that sum all active numbers their lettercounts to the known constants from the seed text.

But as it turns out that is overkill, a more traditional and flexible solution would involve a tree search that keeps track of the lower and upper bounds of lettercounts and picks number words within those bounds without associating it with a specific letter yet. And you associate at the end. Runtime is a 15 minutes in python for most numeric bases/seed texts/variations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is my own version:

      $ echo -n 'The SHA256 for this sentence begins with: one, eight, two, a, seven, c and nine.' | sha256sum
      182a7c930b0e5227ff8d24b5f4500ff2fa3ee1a57bd35e52d98c6e24c2749ae0

(Edit: a better version).

</comment><comment><USER5> Autograms wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Reflexicons. Pangrammers, more than meets the eye.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are also sentences like

        'z' is the first letter of this sentence.

z yields a finite sentence, a fixed point of the procedure of finding all the instances of that letter and enumerating their positions. Some find non- trivial fixed points, like

        'f' is the first and seventh letter of this sentence.

My procedure for 'l' remains finite but finds no fixed point, switching between

        'l' is the first and twenty-eighth letter in this sentence
        'l' is the first and twenty-seventh letter in this sentence

neither of which is true. 'c' cycles through (1st, 20th and 56th), (1st, 52nd), (1st, 22nd, 44th), none of which are true.

Others diverge, like 'n' and 'e'

        'e' is the first, sixth, [... no fixed point found ...]

where the tail of the sentence just explodes on every iteration. What happens is also sensitive to the [presumed] end of the sentence 'letter in this sentence'.

The most interesting one is 'r', which doesn't explode in length after 100 iterations but (if it loops, which I haven't established) has a very long period.

I also found a few fixed points like

        'a' is the first and twelfth letter of this sentence

which doesn't come from iterating on "'a' is the first letter of this sentence"; I think it's an Eden.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like phonetic pangrams for language learning, ie:

[https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-text-that-covers-the- entire...](https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-text-that-covers-the-entire- English-phonetic-range)

Now, I'll need to try autograms for ____ learning.

\---

Link in intro is broken. Could be [https://web.archive.org/web/20060207093314/http://www.fatraz...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060207093314/http://www.fatrazie.com/EWpangram.html)

Can't find this one though, [http://www.fatrazie.com/numgram.html](http://www.fatrazie.com/numgram.html)

\---

Also, when do they count their zeros?

</comment><comment><USER8> Obscure novelties like this are my favorite kind of HN post.

</comment><comment><USER9> On a white board at work a while back, someone had drawn pictures of a few little things like flowers, houses, people. Next to each was a number, like "3 flowers".

Then someone wrote, "The sum of all numbers on this board is 15"

Then 15 got crossed out and replaced by "30"

And so on. You can see where this goes.

Anyway reading this, seems that self-enumerating sentences that tell you the sum of all numbers in the sentence aren't possible, unless there is just 1 number, or all zeros, or balanced positive and negative numbers that sum to zero.

<comment><USER10> It could work if you allow arithmetic operators and/or their English names, or if you allow any ways of naming numbers other than with their decimal digits alone.

A simple example might be: "4 flowers, 4 cats, 4 dogs. The sum of all the numbers on this board is 4 squared."

Or: "4 flowers, 4 cats, 2 dogs. The sum of all the numbers on this board is 4²."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sort of like a natural language quine.

<comment><USER12> Just what I was thinking!

I find things like this fascinating. Ever since discovering quines, I've thought that it would be neat to use some kind of quine as humanity's radio "calling card" in space. As a puzzle/joke for other beings to enjoy.

Just for fun I've mocked up what such a message could look like [0]. I'm not convinced it totally works... But in any case, I'd thoroughly recommend checking out the inspiration [1] if you haven't seen it already.

[0]: [https://firstcontact.space](https://firstcontact.space)

[1]: [https://research.swtch.com/zip](https://research.swtch.com/zip)

<comment><USER13> There is also another kind of metacircularity that does not bind meaning with letters but with the enunciation context.

Two examples coming from underground 90s hip hop:

\- Smoked Out Productions, Bok Bok: "Where my niggas at ? In the range of my voice". This is very faint, but it's here.

\- More convincingingly, Alps Cru, Words From My Thoughts: "As my thoughts are merged, these are those words."

\- Here is a poemnigma I wrote to a friend:

______Qui suis je ?______

M E V O I C I S U L T A N

N U I T I S M E V O C A L

S I L I C E M O U V A N T

I O V E N T M U S I C A L

L E V O I C I M U S A N T

M O T I N C L U S A V I E

C E M O T I V A L I N S U

L A V O U S E M I N C I T

C U L T I V O N S A M I E

S I I L V A U T C E N O M

S O N V A L M U E T I C I

Indice:

S I N U L V I C E A M O T

V U I C I S L A M E T O N

N O M C E S T V I A L U I

V A I N C U T E L O M I S

Translation:

___Who am I ? ____

Here I am Sultan !

Vocal nightism

Moving silica

Io, musical wind !

Here it is drifting

This lifetime word

This hidden motive

Here it slices you thin

Let's cultivate my friend

If it equates this name

Its silent vale here

____Hint____

If no word-vice

As seen here slams your

Name it's through it

Vanquished like this, omitted

Explanation:

All the lines are built up using the same set of letters, and every line either hints at the encryption mechanism (anagrams) or at the nature of the key (a person's name). I can't wrap my head around the "cryptographic setting" here but it looks like it's a two levels system where both the encrypted and clear forms of the message have a meaning. The encrypted form meaning relies on common sense, patience and a certain sense of observation to convey to Bob both what's the encryption algorithm (anagrams) and what kind of key it uses (a person's name), like any public algo. However, the key appears to be ... the message's true target !

Of course it's not cryptography strictly speaking, and I'm not even sure it's conveying any meaning. At most I can cause Alice to raise her hand among the crowd of message readers, but that's all. It's like cryptography, but it works at another level: it's not about concealing the meaning of the message, but concealing its enunciation context. This is about catching someone's attention by broadcasting a message among a crowd without them knowing who is targeted and without prior coordination with the target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> xkcd has a self-enumerating comic: [https://xkcd.com/688/](https://xkcd.com/688/)</comment>


Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career - <AUTHOR> http://mattswanson.org/corporate-stereotypes-and-why-microsoft-could-kill-your-startup-career/

<comment><USER2> Full text from google cache:

Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

Note: This post is intended for engineers who are looking to start their own company or join an early stage startup. Many of the critiques I suggest do not apply to engineers who enjoy the comfort of a larger company. As the CTO of a growing early stage startup, I have had the experience of interviewing a number of very talented people. As with any large enough dataset, I have come to find some consistent patterns amongst the candidates. While there are and will always be a set of clearly untalented unqualified people, I am surprised by the number of genuinely talented people who––because of choices they've made in their career––are now unqualified to work at an actual web startup or start their own.

The provocative title to this post may sound like I'm suggesting that the problem is local to Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft just epitomizes the large bureaucratic environment that seems to confine an engineer to become just that, an engineer. This typically leads to detailed knowledge in some proprietary technology which is not compatible outside of the company it applies to. Moreover, larger companies tend to position engineers to remain engineers. If you want to someday start your own company, you will need to have a network of investors and people with diverse and complimentary skillsets to your own. And after three years at Googlesoft, the only people you know will be engineers.

This goes against a prevailing mindset amongst freshly minted, high talent engineers, which seems to be that if you aren't ready to start a company, the next best thing to do is to go to a "startup" like Facebook or Google and get connected into the valley. This would make sense if either Facebook or Google was actually a startup. Neither one is, and this path can end up leading engineers down a decidedly non-entrepreneurial path.

The more likely outcome if you do go down this path, is that every day you become less likely to start your own company. Every day you are probably learning some proprietary technology that isn't helping your startup career. Every day you are becoming more and more accustomed to that cushy job and fat salary.

I've seen this happen to too many friends that I once would have considered "die-hard" entrepreneurs. I hate to see entrepreneurs give up, it's a truly sad thing to witness.

Below are some stereotypes that I have gathered from the larger subsets of candidates I've interacted with. I use the word stereotype purposely to indicate that these are unfair assumptions when considering individuals at each company, but seem to embody the culture at said company. This assessment is intended to give startup-minded engineers an idea of how experience at some of the bigger tech companies looks to a startup founder hiring early employees.

Facebook: Some of the more intelligent people I have talked with, but borderline autistic. To date, I wouldn't want any one of the people I've talked with at Facebook working on my team. My impression is that this type of person would create beautiful software, but jet at the first hint of trouble. There seems to be very few risk takers.

Beyond that, for a young startup there are characteristics other than technical prowess that are vital to growing a company. Outside of Facebook, Aspberger's Syndrome is not thought of as an "asset". A small team can't have the liability of someone on the team alienating other team members because they aren't aware of human emotion. If even one of my team members is constantly getting pissed off at another member, dev team productivity can go down by 50%. Can't happen.

If you are at Facebook and looking to someday do your own startup, make sure you are interacting with non-tech people. Get out of the office…but don't just go and play Rock Band with the same two friends you're used to. Make sure you are interacting with non-tech people, they actually do have value in the startup world.

Of course if the only thing you care about is working on interesting technology, Facebook sounds like a great place.

Google: The new IBM. No longer a startup culture. Despite what they like to tell themselves, the company has morphed over the past three years. Once again, Google is huge and of course there are some startup-minded people there, but that's not the prevailing culture.

What I have seen are a lot of talented engineers who end up working on "interesting projects" that have no place in the market. I find it entertaining reading quotes from Google, such as:

"Google is still the same entrepreneurial company it was when I [Larry Page] started, encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high-reward opportunities".

Take a moment to think of what the real "risk" is at Google. What happens if you fail? Your project is just a drop in the bucket from the endless Google money pit. Most likely, you will not be scarred.

Whereas entrepreneurs systematically try to create something that people want (and will pay for), Google systematically creates things that hardcore engineers think are cool. When a company openly dismisses the value of designers and business analysts, you end up with Google Wave.

Bottom Line: The Google Search cash cow has created an inward, engineer- focused culture that is been systematically shielded from market forces and, consequently, market discipline.

If you are an entrepreneurial minded engineer at Google, don't get stuck hanging around Googlers your entire time. Google has done a great job of creating a comfortable work environment that encourages long hours at their playground. You need to get to startup events and go out drinking with actual entrepreneurs and investors. I guarantee that you will hear completely different responses from a startup founder on how they would approach a real world problem as compared with your coworker. The technology behind the solution will only be part of the answer.

Beyond that, try launching something. Can you create something that people actually want to use? Not something that is nice to look at once and strike a fleeting interest, but something that will actually result in people wanting and using your creation. If you can, you are ready for a startup. If not find someone with complementary skillsets or a startup that can help you learn this.

Microsoft: Microsoft has kept a pretty tight screening process for engineers, but if you are an engineer there, make sure you are working outside of Microsoft. Microsoft is very tied to the .net platform. I don't know how many startups use .net as their development environment but there aren't a lot. In fact, if your primary development platform is Windows your are going to get bumped down a couple notches if you are looking to join a startup. I have been pretty impressed with raw aptitude from Microsoft employees, but if you aren't exposed to non-proprietary technologies, its going to be very difficult to sell yourself to an early stage startup.

More Companies: There are many more companies not mentioned due to either lack of enough candidates to make an assessment or to keep from pissing off some of our investors.

In general, if you want to start a company some day, my best advice is to either start one NOW, or join an early stage company. If you decide to join a startup, make sure you join one where you can have direct interaction with the founders. If not, you aren't getting the real benefits that a startup can offer.

Note: if you are a talented entrepreneurial minded engineer at any of the above companies (or just in general) drop me a line. I will either try to hire you, or give you a sense of where you fit in with what I've seen.

<comment><USER2> If the author wants the traffic to go through his site (once he gets a mirror up), just leave a comment and I'll delete the above copy.

<comment><USER3> Whew. It's working again!

<comment><USER3> Ok, it was working. Getting crushed even further. Maybe it will work again in a few?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty interesting since I know of a Microsoft person who was talking to some startups in the Bay Area to find a potential role (this person is one of the most talented engineer/product manager I've met, has run some very critical initiatives for MSFT and extremely well-versed in both the Microsoft and the non-Microsoft landscape and is looking to move to the Bay Area from Seattle for personal reasons).

There were atleast two really terrible experiences with very well-known startups (think 'often on HN's front page'). In one case, the interviewer asked "So, you work in Microsoft - have you heard of this thing called an iPhone?" . And in another interview, the person at the other end couldn't hide his disdain for Microsoft and Microsoft-people in general throughout the interview.

I think there's an opportunity here for startups to hire some great engineers when they look past stereotypes (which is really what the OP's post is reflecting). Going into a hiring discussion with a preconceived notion is always a bad idea (and this post is full of stereotypes with the FB one probably being the most negative).

<comment><USER3> And yet...stereotypes often come from somewhere, no? Would you say that these stereotypes are inaccurate in terms of the general picture they paint?

<comment><USER5> I would most definitely say that. I've hired from corporate cultures far more rigorous than Microsofts (Samsung springs to mind) with great results. A smart engineer who can get things done is a strong engineer regardless of where they've cut their teeth.

One only needs to look at all of the startups that IBM, famous for their bureaucratic structure, too see what rubbish this is.

<comment><USER6> Divisions and collaborative ventures that start in a large companies' research lab and eventually split off or are sold to another party are not startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What absolute drivel. Any engineer worth their wage doesn't pigeon hole themselves into one technology. Those that do, you simply don't hire and they fade into obsolescence.

Concepts are more important that technologies. If you embrace the Microsoft stack, that gives you but one view of how things can be pieced together. If you embrace some different stack that gives you another view and so on.

To claim that you are somehow inferior as a developer for using a Microsoft stack is just bigoted and really doesn't have any place on hacker news.

<comment><USER8> Did you read the same article I did? The article said very little about which stack you used, and spent as much time, if not more time, attacking Facebook and Google employees than Microsoft employees. He basically said two things:

1) if you're a facebook or google employee, get out more and interact with people who aren't also employees there.

2) if you're a microsoft employee, make sure you work on stuff that uses a non-microsoft stack.

In other words, he agrees with you on the Microsoft side and you're just aimlessly ranting about an article you didn't read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's another thing you should take away from this article: if all you want to do is work on really hard technical problems, be well compensated, and never have to worry about managing people and career-limited for it, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google are all great places to do that. Having sat on the other side of the hiring wall from the author -- as a manager doing hiring of developers at Microsoft -- I found that college students who had gone off to a startup for several years often had gained some breadth (product knowledge, used/configured more types of systems, etc.) but had failed to gain much real technical depth.

I take a little bit of issue with his characterization of risk at these big companies. I don't know anyone working at any of those companies who hasn't experienced feature or product cancellation at some point in their career. Well, except for a couple of guys who've worked on debuggers and text editors for their entire 15+-year careers, but those are special cases :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> The title is catchy, but it doesn't seem to do justice to the contents of the post.

If anything, it seemed like the post was somewhat complimentary of Microsoft and a lot more critical of Facebook and Google. OTH the title seemed to be harsh on Microsoft and doesn't mention Facebook or Google.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was at DDD9 on Saturday (Community MS conference) and there were a lot of startup folks there. I think it's too easy to get caught up with a subset of the community (say the mobile startup community or the rails community) and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Certainly among b2b startups BizSpark has encouraged a lot of startups to go with the MS stack where they previously would have gone with Rails, etc. While consumer startups seem in general to be more often based on non-MS stack there's plenty of MS stack consumer startups (PlentyOfFish, Just-Eat, StackOverflow) which have become the dominant players in their field.

When it comes down to it, for most startups it doesn't really matter what your stack is, just pick the stack that you're most productive with.

</comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: don't be complacent.

Slightly less TLDR: companies which foster working there all the time (Facebook, Google) are the kind of people who need to go out and meet people besides their coworkers. Companies which foster working on their own stack the whole time (Microsoft) are the kind of people who need to go out and use other programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a wonderful post! Mainly because I saw this happening to me before I took steps to stop it.

It is _very_ possible to become trapped in a skillset, even one that seems highly desirable. I've got friends who are thrilled at getting jobs in certain technical spaces and I hope for their sake that they get to do a bit of everything.

One of the best things I did at my last job was become a Scrum Master, mainly because it stretched some muscles I hadn't used for a while, and discovered I actually really like using.

</comment><comment><USER6> A stable system must have high diversity and high connectivity. If you do not have a network with strong connections to many people of many backgrounds, you will have trouble surviving/understanding changes in the world around you and you will eventually become irrelevant. The startup environment is incredibly taxing on a person and the group. If the people in a startup are not well connected and diverse in knowledge, they will not be resilient enough to survive internal or external conflict. In small groups, it only takes one person with a small network or a limited scope to make it all crumble when the pressure is on.

</comment><comment><USER14> I try really hard to not get pigeon-holed into using my company's (one of the mentioned ones) stack but its really hard. Why? Cause when you have a full- time job then you're working 8-9 hours a day and there's really not that much time left over. I do a lot of side projects that usually revolve around non- proprietary technology but really there are only so many hours a day. I think it comes down to a decision of whether you want to sacrifice employment productivity over your own enrichment (which might never even pay off)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, and I think this decision is what defines an entrepreneur

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So people can't adapt? Once you've worked in one place, you're stuck that way forever?

<comment><USER3> Read the article. It's not that people can't adapt, it's that they need to make themselves adaptable. Startups need people who can be productive on day one. Someone who has only worked with proprietary technology cannot meet that requirement.

Ergot, if you're working at a place that relies on proprietary technologies, you need to take proactive steps to not tie yourself exclusively to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> anyone have a mirror?

<comment><AUTHOR> ugh...having server issues, cached copy: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://mattswanson.org/corporate- stereotypes-and-why-microsoft-could-kill-your-startup-career/&hl=en&strip=0)

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately that doesn't work from behind most corp proxies. They see the Google cache (and even Google Translate) as an evil way to get around their restrictions.</comment></comment></comment>


Neil Young's Lonely Quest to Save Music From Low Quality Streaming - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html <comment><USER2> I don't feel like streaming quality is the biggest issue. Spotify's highest quality rate (for paid users) is pretty good, but the audio compression for streaming to a bluetooth device kills the quality. I've stuck with wired headphones because the quality is so much better than bluetooth.

<comment><USER3> I disagree, I have switched from Spotify premium (HQ) to Tidal uncompressed and have noticed a huge difference. I usually listen on a wired pair of Senheisser HD-25 ii's. Its very frustrating for me that Spotify doesn't support anything better than 320 MP3, it truly sounds muddy.

<comment><USER4> It's time for double blind testing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neil Young is an audiophile in the worst sense of the word. He's tried to make a player and music service [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_\(digital_music_service\)) and it didn't work because there isn't demand.

If there was demand, Spotify would just add FLAC. They already added 320kbps compressed streams, and I doubt anyone can hear the difference between that and FLAC.

The vast majority of the audio perception people are going to pick up on happens during production. And [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) is why everything sounds worse than it used to. When records were being made for vinyl, the physical material wouldn't allow for the level of "loudness" that removes dynamic range from the track. That changed when all music started being produced digitally for digital distribution. Ironically, digital audio actually has a much larger dynamic range and should be better, but because of the way it's mastered it comes out louder but with less dynamic range.

Audio compression is the least of the problems for people interested in high quality recordings.

<comment><USER6> I backed the Pono Kickstarter. I got a player that had some cool features, but I ultimately stopped using it after a few months because it was slow and battery hungry compared to my old Sansa Clip with Rockbox.

<comment><USER7> Rockbox was (is?) such a great project.

<comment><USER8> Looks like the last release was in May 2017.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Normally I don't particularly mind the meandering, personal style that typifies these magazine-type pieces but this one was fairly grating. Maybe it's the more or less immediate elimination of any suggestion that there could be a difference between Young's views, the author's views, and "the truth."

> At ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but > the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the > human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had > wiped out the existing planet of sound.

> digital-recording technology, as opposed to low-quality streaming services, > can be a gift to musicians, properly deployed

The article doesn't really have any interest in talking about streaming, or quality, or music, or the various actually realistic options people currently have... I guess that's fine. The closest this comes to having something useful to say about its ostensible topic is a small aside about how music _production_ has changed over the years.

</comment><comment><USER10> If music needs saving from something is not streaming quality, but the increasingly marginal and irrelevant role it has (even in teens) compared to the cultural power it had in the 60s up to the 90s...

<comment><USER11> Music today is deeply meaningful, partly because of how it is produced:

Take one part modem noise, mix thoroughly with 2 parts bass and 1/2 part melody line. Serving suggestion: crank the bitrate way up to a full 96 Kbps!

/s

Lyrics are one thing that makes some music meaningful. If there aren't any, or if they are unintelligible, then that meaning is lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not like Neil Young can hear it anyway. Dude has had tinnitus for decades, and there's no way he doesn't have major noise-induced hearing loss from standing in front of those cranked Fender Deluxes for all those years.

From [https://www.audiologyonline.com/releases/by-time-we-got- to-3...](https://www.audiologyonline.com/releases/by-time-we-got-to-3118): "It was guitarist Neil Young who suggested Stills try a new modern-design, behind- the-ear hearing solution called Dual."

</comment><comment><USER13> Sigh, obligatory repost, given the topic:

 _24 /192 Music Downloads ...and why they make no sense_

[https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

 _[edit, add prior discussion on HN:]_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898)

<comment><USER14> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM)

Video by the same man of the same topics but with shiny lights and graphs.

<comment><USER15> And who speaks about the audio aspects, noise including, but unfortunately produces his own video with very audible noise, which he could have filtered even in the post-production using the open source program (1), if he used poor microphones originally. I prefer no noise to the "fidelity" in such cases.

1) [https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/noise_reduction.html](https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/noise_reduction.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Trouble is that most streaming services, even YouTube, aren't low quality. Opus at about 160kb/s is more than sufficient for transparency.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure if it's the source material or Youtube's compression, but music on Youtube often sounds terrible compared to e.g. Spotify. There are obvious artifacts and dynamic range issues.

<comment><USER16> Music on YouTube is resampled to 48kHz for Opus. YouTube's resampler is probably optimised for speed over precision. Resampling to 48kHz before uploading can yield better results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems like the use-case for streaming music is mostly mobile and almost always with headphones, most of which these days are ear-buds.

So it's not surprising that most users aren't interested in lossless or other high-fidelity options.

Meanwhile, I assume most audiophiles with traditional hifi setups would prefer downloads or physical media over streaming.

<comment><USER19> > Meanwhile, I assume most audiophiles with traditional hifi setups would > prefer downloads or physical media over streaming.

I find that unlikely. Sure, it's preferred but that's because of the quality. Not because audiophiles enjoy fumbling with one disc at a time.

<comment><USER20> I do not consider myself an audiophile (too much BS in this field) but I do buy lots of physical music releases (vinyl and cds, preferably cds). Beside the obvious audio quality, there are other reasons to do so, all of them as a whole making for a very different experience from streaming. Downloads don't cut it either. Alas, physical releases are not always available and that's a shame because there is no shortage of good new music these days. I found myself down the rabbit hole of Bandcamp very often only to find that some great albums don't have any physical release. That's how it is, I guess.

<comment><USER21> I'm not an audiophile but I have a pair of speakers that is probably 70 or so laptops of volume and something nice to hook them to. I stream lots of music through the YouTube app in my smart TV, and last night some of that was written by Grieg[0]. Remember this Qwest commercial [1]? Streaming music has its pleasures and undistorted sound should be one of them.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNIon17o5kQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNIon17o5kQ)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The main problem is with how records are mastered and remastered now (the loudness war).

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

</comment><comment><USER14> I've always thought that if you can _hear_ the difference then you aren't listening to the music; I say that as someone who plays multiple musical instruments and is a reasonably competent audio engineer.

(Obviously up to a point)

</comment><comment><USER23> If it didn't come from a needle in a groove, straight through tube amps into your speakers, it's low quality.

<comment><USER24> I cannot tell if this comment is sarcastic or not.

<comment><USER14> Poe's law</comment></comment></comment>


For international entrepreneurs: 3 can't miss meetings when visiting Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/04/29/the-3-cant-miss-meetings-for-entrepreneurs-visiting-silicon-valley/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552542> for inspiring this discussion.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sure, whatever, just don't forget to pick up a burrito. If you're headed toward LA, get some tacos.

<comment><USER2> And if you're in between, pick up some tri-tip.</comment></comment>


DPR's payments to Redandwhite for five murders - <AUTHOR> https://blockchain.info/address/1MwvS1idEevZ5gd428TjL3hB2kHaBH9WTL

<comment><AUTHOR> Just in case the WIRED article isn't scary enough:

[http://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads- boss...](http://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-boss- ordering-5-assassinations/)</comment>


Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-need-specs/

<comment><USER2> It's absurd when Mr. Lamport writes that developers don't think beforehand about what to code and how to code it. Of course they do, I do at least. However, writing a detailed spec upfront will not ensure that software will do what it needs to do or that it does that stably. Not at all!

A simple piece of code can already amount to more complexity then a skyscraper. I think that most developers can agree that even when meticulously thinking upfront about what to make and how it should function, when a system is actually coded, new, unforeseen situations arise, always. This is without any exception. This simply arises from the fact that software systems become too complex for us to oversee fast. Especially how processing by these systems evolve over time is difficult to grasp.

Only in special cases you want to do some sort of formal specification to proof that something works, e.g. in the case of an algorithm. In all the other 99% of the cases writing good software is mostly about iterating and communicating __a lot __, with co-developers and stakeholders: In each small iteration we should think, discuss, code and assess.

Last, I do think that at least __after __the code has stabilized its functions/classes/methods/APIs needs to be documented such that it becomes easier for developers to fix, change or extend a system in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...

Its a cost-demand thing. Software can (and sometimes is) built like we build, say, a skyscraper. The problem is that most people don't want to pay the same price for software as they would for a skyscraper. Mission-critical software is built more similarly to how a house is built than an iphone app. The price difference is also much much higher to match.

</comment><comment><USER4> A must read: [http://www.tablexi.com/blog/2013/01/why-building-software- is...](http://www.tablexi.com/blog/2013/01/why-building-software-is-not-like- building-a-house/developers/)</comment>


How a 1-Engineer Rails Site Scaled to 10 Million Requests Per Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.railsinside.com/deployment/338-how-a-1-engineer-rails-site-scaled-to-10-million-requests-per-day.html <comment><USER2> The summary: An surprisingly large investment in a complex platform development and extensive hardware purchases.

Let's be really, really generous and say peak load on 10 million requests is 5 hours, and pack all 10 million requests into 5 hours. That's 2 million requests/hour, 33,333 requests/minute, 555 requests/second.

You can easily handle 5-10k requests a second with a few ms response time -- including dynamic templating and hitting a backend database -- on a 2.66 GHz 4 core Xeon 5150 with a couple gigabytes of RAM, using a servlet runtime and a JVM-based language.

Basically, you could take that entire solution stack and compress it down to a few items with far fewer moving parts, and spend half as much on engineering and capital expenditures.

My hope is that efforts like MacRuby bring this level of free performance to the Ruby world, and that languages like Scala and Clojure make the JVM more attractive, too.

<comment><USER3> You can support 10,000 requests/second hitting a servlet engine, with dynamic templates, and backend DB calls, on one quad core box? I'd like to give you a job.

Maybe I've been working with heavyweight frameworks too long, but that seems an order of magnitude off at least. Any stats on Servlet JVMs that can do 10k requests/second on a single quad core?

<comment><USER2> _You can support 10,000 requests/second hitting a servlet engine, with dynamic templates, and backend DB calls, on one quad core box?._

5-10k, depending; a local instance of a recent webapp I wrote can run 5.9k requests/sec on a simple page JSP-templated page backed by a database request. It's running on tomcat, using servlets with a lightweight REST API, and postgresql.

The webapp I'm working on right now has the following performance profile for a page that fetched the user-list from the backing database. Not as fast, but 2k req/sec is not bad, and I haven't done any profiling on the new stack we're using at all yet:

      Server Software:        Jetty(6.1.x)
      Server Hostname:        localhost
      Server Port:            8080

      Document Path:          /users
      Document Length:        5855 bytes

      Concurrency Level:      4
      Time taken for tests:   0.508 seconds
      Complete requests:      1000
      Failed requests:        0
      Write errors:           0
      Total transferred:      6045474 bytes
      HTML transferred:       5855000 bytes
      Requests per second:    1968.41 [#/sec] (mean)
      Time per request:       2.032 [ms] (mean)
      Time per request:       0.508 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
      Transfer rate:          11621.09 [Kbytes/sec] received

      Connection Times (ms)
                    min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
      Connect:        0    0   0.1      0       1
      Processing:     1    2   1.7      2      22
      Waiting:        1    2   1.7      2      22
      Total:          1    2   1.7      2      22

      Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
        50%      2
        66%      2
        75%      2
        80%      2
        90%      3
        95%      3
        98%      4
        99%     12
       100%     22 (longest request)

_I'd like to give you a job._

Something in your tone tells me you're not serious ...

 _Maybe I've been working with heavyweight frameworks too long, but that seems an order of magnitude off at least._

I couldn't say; I do have local 3rd party spring-based webapps that take 5 minutes just to start up, not to mention 300ms+ to render a single page, so I wouldn't be surprised.

<comment><USER4> Your methodology doesn't reflect actual usage of the site. I suspect there hardly an (if any) writes happening when you hit /users, the database is repeatedly fetching a hot query (or you are pulling from a cache that isn't changing because there are no writes happening), your dataset could be minimal, etc.

<comment><USER2> That may be partially true[1], but I'd challenge you to re-implement this non- optimized case (ie, this is a rough webapp, no caching, etc) in another runtime on similar hardware and see:

1) Whether it can support anywhere near the same level of concurrent requests with similar response times.

2) How much complexity (nginx + unicorn + memcached + puppies) is required to achieve this in comparison to a servlet engine (eg, tomcat) and your webapp.

[1] Most web applications are read-heavy, low on writes, and scaling up write capability generally requires scaling up the database. You can grow quite a bit with simple caching and monolithic database scaling before having to tackle more complex distributed data architectures.

<comment><USER5> If those 1968.41 [#/sec] were on a quad core then python can match it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is scaling a Rails site to 10M requests per day _that_ big of a deal? Scaling anything to 10M has its challenges but at the end of the day, you rarely read about people making a big deal out of scaling a php website of that size.

<comment><USER7> It's only noteworthy because of the early reputation Rails had for being slow (earned or not).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The real meat about how it was done is here: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/9/22/how-ravelry- scales...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/9/22/how-ravelry-scales- to-10-million-requests-using-rails.html)

and that info was taken from this interview: <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelry>

The linked article is just a summary.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it was mostly a "if you haven't seen this stuff, you need to check it out" for my subscribers. I'm not sure why it's become so popular.. I guess a lot of people still hadn't heard of it! (So mission accomplished, in a way..)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is at least the 4th article on Ravelry's scaling accomplishments here on HN.

<comment><USER9> Yeah. I made this post and it was really just a "throw away" piece for any of my subscribers who hadn't already heard about it - I'm as surprised as Obama is at winning the Nobel ;-)

I guess that even when a story blows up in the techie world, there are enough people who didn't hear about it that it can be repeated several times and still do well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the OP of this one, sorry. And I saw Casey above groaned a little bit at it surfacing again. :)

But seriously, even with all the repostings, there are a lot of us who somehow hadn't already seen it. Even though the headline, and the story, emphasize the scaling challenges and solutions, the larger story is how you can bootstrap something really successful with minimal resources.

Peter, thanks for running a great blog.</comment></comment></comment>


Top 6 Samsung SmartPhones Under Rs.10,000 in 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.etechtime.com/2016/05/top-6-samsung-smartphones-under-rs10000.html <comment><AUTHOR> The South Korean giant was founded in 1969, in Suwon in South Korea. In early days it used to make electrical appliances including television calculators, refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines. It has expanded it business by making lithium ion batteries, semiconductors, chips, flash memory and hard drive devices. Companies like Apple ,Sony, HTC are in its client list. It ruled the Indian market few years, till it is faced tough competition from the Chinese Maker and home brewed Micromax. Now to regain the top spot once again, it is ready with some exciting products with some exciting features, and most important with affordable price which will definitely woo the middle class people. Here some exciting Samsung SmartPhones under Rs 10000/.</comment>


Tesla escalates battle over alleged theft of robocar secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-25/tesla-escalates-battle-over-alleged-theft-of-robocar-secrets <comment><USER2> > the Guangzhou, China-based maker of Tesla look-alike electric cars

The car in at the top really doesn't look like any of Tesla's cars. Googling around for the model[1] and comparing it to Tesla's SUV[0] they really don't really have any similarities that any two random SUV's wouldn't have save for the glass roof. Just look at the entire back profile[0][1] and the fact that the G3 has a fairly prominent carbon fiber front grill[?] where as Tesla always made it a point to leave a blank spot where a grill would've gone in their cars.

[0] [https://www.tesla.com/modelx](https://www.tesla.com/modelx)

[1] [https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/xpeng/g3/first- drives/x...](https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/xpeng/g3/first- drives/xpeng-g3-2020-review)

<comment><USER3> True, from that Autocar gallery the Xpeng's body shape looks more like a bad copy of a French car with a few incidental sprinklings of Tesla that could have been described to Xpeng's designers over a brief telephone call.

From the front it looks like a Tesla Model Y that was reproduced in balloon form—and then slightly overinflated.

The dashboard and driver display clearly too obvious liberties from the Tesla Model S, but that design is what... eight years old now? And the real value is in the software interaction design, not the coarse hardware alignment. Besides it's likely that Tesla will be doing a major refresh of the Model S/X interior within the next couple of years anyway, making the Xpeng look like a bad copy of a decidedly dated.

(I offer no opinion about IP theft.)

<comment><USER2> > it looks more like a bad copy of a French car

Could you provide an example of this "French car" that they copied? A google image search for "French SUV" doesn't turn up any cars that particularly resemble the G3. A search for "French electric vehicle" turns up with a bunch of Smart Car lookalikes. It's like whenever China is mentioned people turn into Markov chains and have to work the word copy into the rest of their sentence regardless of the reality.

Edit: You added a bit about the interior looking like a Model S's, which I agree with. Personally I believe touch screens in a car console should be illegal.

<comment><USER3> Apologies for not being clear. I wasn't thinking about any specific French car, just that it had a bulgy, mid-2000s Peugeot/Citroen feel about it. Beyond that I'd describe its body shape as almost painfully generic.

I was not accusing the design of being a clone of a specific existing design. I was accusing it of being hideous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tesla is finally learning the lesson that all other companies doing business in China have already learned.

Prediction: Tesla would be forced to withdraw it's lawsuit.

<comment><USER5> China would be short sighted to cross Tesla right now. Tesla is way more valuable over the long term. It would ridiculously stupid to cross Tesla for a shitty copy of last year's code.

Prediction: The lawsuit will be prosecuted and resolved in favor of Tesla.

<comment><USER6> Oh no! China fears the terrible might of Tesla, which sells fewer cars than even the smallest domestic manufacturer!

More likely, China will simply steal Tesla's technology, share it with domestic manufacturers, and tell Tesla to swallow their medicine or leave the market, like they've done with every other foreign manufacturer that tried to dictate terms.

<comment><USER5> It's pretty simple. Tesla has the best technology right now and likely will for the next few years. Causing Tesla to leave means China loses out on future technology. Ergo, China will likely side with Tesla. Witness the incredible subsidies and favorable loans Tesla has been receiving in China.

<comment><USER6> China can steal trade secrets almost as easily from the US and they can from China, but they have significantly more leverage when the company has a physical presence and assets in the country.

China has been buttering up Tesla to make it easier to steal the technology by convincing then to move a huge portion of their manufacturing and process research into China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Find it hard to believe there's anything valuable to steal from Tesla. Most the hardware is proprietary so stealing source for main computer would be kinda pointless.

Stealing neural net would be even more pointless - it's mainly built for US roads, to run on specialised AI computer and control specialised hardware and can probably be extracted via firmware update anyway.

Plus Musk is always claiming to open source their patents and innovate so fast that their old software is irrelevant.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about self driving car industry.

<comment><USER8> > Disclaimer: I know nothing about self driving car industry.

I just wonder, why do you comment then? If you by your self-assessment know nothing, you would just be adding to confusion around the topic, or in the best case scenario would randomly get some correct fact or intuition and thus increase confusion even more because some people would assume the rest is correct. Why not just comment on the things you know something about?

<comment><USER9> I would read the post with implied ", right?" after every statement given the disclaimer. Sure, it would've been possible (and likely better) to phrase everything as questions directly, but raising interesting talking points to start a discussion is... kind of what we are here for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Meanwhile Tesla continues to not be GPL compliant.

</comment><comment> ur-whale [http://archive.is/gfyzz](http://archive.is/gfyzz)

</comment><comment><USER11> that why their ai ain't ready yet them stole it</comment>


Bringing Interoperable Real-Time Communications to the Web - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/10/27/bringing-interoperable-real-time-communications-to-the-web.aspx <comment><USER2> Why would I want to develop to ORTC/WebRTC 1.1 instead of WebRTC 1.0? What is it able to do that WebRTC 1.0 isn't able to do? Is it more or less secure by design?

Microsoft IE folks, please implement WebRTC 1.0 _as well as_ your draft standard WebRTC 1.1. As I understand it, Chrome and Firefox can connect via WebRTC 1.0, it would be very cool if IE11 or 12 could claim the same.

<comment><USER3> Think of WebRTC 1.1 as a slightly lower-level API with more controls for the same components that exist in WebRTC 1.0. For advanced applications, this additional control is very important. For basic applications, the differences in the APIs aren't as significant. One is not more secure than the other.

The WebRTC 1.0 API can be implemented on top of WebRTC 1.1. The wire-level protocols are the same, and so a WebRTC 1.1 client should be able to connect to a WebRTC 1.0 client (modulo all the normal interop issues that exist regardless of the API version). It's just a matter of which API the JS sees. It may be that by the time IE implements WebRTC 1.1, there will be JS libraries that implement 1.0 on top of 1.1, so that you could continue using the 1.0 API if you want, even in IE.

<comment><USER2> Excellent information, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sucks! I think this a move by Microsoft to render a Skype implementation incompatible on Chrome and Chromebooks.

NO browser supports this and Microsoft has openly ignored the more widely implemented WebRTC.

<comment><USER4> Or maybe, according to other comments, this is not so bad.</comment></comment>