FBI admits that no useful information found on San Bernadino iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/san-bernadino-iphone-data/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm well aware that my post doesn't reflect the headline, because basically the FBI are spinning like crazy here!

Here is their evidence:

"The phone didn't contain evidence of contacts with other ISIS supporters or the use of encrypted communications during the period the FBI was concerned about."

<comment><USER2> > _I 'm well aware that my post doesn't reflect the headline_

If a headline is misleading, you're correct to change it (this is in the HN guidelines), but you need to change it to one that's accurate and neutral. Yours certainly is not neutral, and it doesn't seem to be accurate either (since the absence of something can obviously still be 'useful information'). So what you've done here is out of line.

Submitting a story doesn't give you license to spin it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots of folks disagree with you. How can the absence of anything in this case be at all useful? Not obvious to me I'm afraid.

I don't feel I was out of line at all.

<comment><USER2> Violations of HN's rules aren't affected by what "lots of people" agree with (lots of people agree with every such violation) nor by how you feel. You broke the rules by replacing what you saw as political spin in the original headline with an opposing political spin that you happened to prefer. That's so obviously against the rules that if you do it again, we'll take away your right to submit stories here.

Instead, either use the original title or (if it is misleading or linkbait) replace it with one that is accurate and neutral. That means as spin-free as you can make it, preferably using representative language from the article itself. It's pretty easy in most cases if you try. Doing this is a valuable service to the community: it presents the story in a way that allows people to receive it as information, not agitation.

<comment><AUTHOR> No need to threaten me.

Fair comment on neutrality, but your comments on accuracy is what lots of people disagree with. No less than Mike Godwin has commented on that anomaly, off HN. I'll be more careful on neutrality in future.

What would you have used as the title?

 _Edit:_ love to know the reasoning of the person following this thread. If you could step out of the shadows and comment, I'd appreciate it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm... I've reflected on my reaction as I was clearly feeling upset about dang's comment.

I have to come to the awkward conclusion that I reacted badly here because I was fairly called on something that broke the rules. I reasoned my way out of my responsibility to be more neutral and in the back of my mind I must have realised what I was doing wasn't the right thing to do. The fact that I felt the need to justify the title choice tends to confirm this :-(

Therefore, I owe dang and I guess ycombinator an apology: first for that last comment where I mischaracterised dang as being threatening, and secondly for the title of this post which was needlessly partisan.

I guess I react badly sometimes to being rebuked. However, that's my issue as in this case the rebuke was fair. I think in this matter my emotions got the better of me and I was in denial - I guess the only good thing about it is that I can recognise the emotion, try to take a step back from myself and then after I realise it's caused by my own behaviour I need to make amends (i.e. I feel sheepish).

So once again, apologies to dang and the wider HN community. I'll try much harder to listen to criticism and I'll ensure this sort of submission doesn't happen again.

<comment><USER2> Being rebuked is never fun, and the correction is all we care about, so thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It was his work phone they found, he destroyed his personal phone. Any intel would have been on his personal phone. If he used his work phone for terrorist communication he'd destroy it as well.

<comment><USER4> People do make mistakes. But yes, this is the obvious expectation.

Still, the FBI wouldn't be doing its job if it didn't review the evidence. I'm not, however, claiming that Apple should have done what the FBI wanted. I'm just saying that the FBI should have wanted it.

<comment><USER3> The FBI wants access to any smart phone. Even if Apple did what the FBI wanted they would have made a way to bypass any iPhone and it could be used without a warrant on anyone's iPhone.

It is like opening Pandora's box and anyone with access to that code/iOS could access anyone's iPhone.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you about the risks of the FBI's request.

I'm just saying that the FBI would have been remiss to ignore the phone.

<comment><USER3> Sure they have to check everything just in case it has any evidence on it.

In this case the work phone didn't have any evidence on it, and breaking into the phone cause an ethical debate over the right to privacy and encryption.

It is important to know that the FBI has tools made by hackers to break into an iPhone, and Apple stood by their corporate ethics to not create any OS or tools to break into an iPhone. I think this is because Apple cares about their customers and their right to privacy.

<comment><USER4> Does seem so. I'm impressed, frankly. They've granted much more slack to iOS users than Google does to Android users. Unless I'm missing something. iOS devices are _almost_ yours. Not as much so as a *BSD or Linux box, but better than Android. There is the Apple Store dictatorship. And the black-box radio. But hey.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask:  What is your office workspace setup? - <AUTHOR> Attending meetups in NYC gives a glimpse of office layouts.  The meetup hosts tend to be early or mid-growth stage tech-oriented startups.  The impression that I've gotten, at least from this category, is that employees get a powerful laptop, a widescreen monitor, and dock their laptop in at their desks.<p>I'm curious what your workspace is like.  What city are you in, what stage of growth is your company in, and are you working in IT? <comment><USER2> Systems administrator / web developer (full stack PHP developer) in Buffalo, NY

Company has been around just shy of a decade; small (15 employees ish) but global reach / product.

I have my own office - small, 8ft x 10 ft with a door but it's enough

I asked for and received a Autonomous standing desk.

I use my own 13 inch MBP which I leave at the office; it's connected to company issued second monitor 21 inches. I'm free to take it home when I choose obviously.

On the wall in front of me is a 15 inch monitor that shows google analytics live feed all day.

Behind me is a bookshelf with various left over keyboards, network tools, etc... and a 2 drawer cabinet with random paper work. Both from the old desk I had.

3x5ft white board and various movie posters and stuff I decorated the office with.</comment>


Ivy League Admissions Are a Sham: Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper - <AUTHOR> http://www.highly.co/hl/550b57736c696c4ab50a0000 <comment><USER2> > This is why admissions officers will say "well-rounded" until they're blue > in the face. There's nothing wrong with plain old eggheads—but let's try and > get out there once in a while, too.

If you want to exclude the smart middle class kids, this attitude is the way to do it. The kid whose parents belong to the country club doesn't work there. He goes on the carefully orchestrated volunteer trip to Africa. The middle class kid, on the other hand, can't count on the Bank of Dad to pay for movies and pizza. She's the "egghead" who spends her time either studying or working.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://gawker.com/ivy-league-admissions-are-a-sham- confessio...](http://gawker.com/ivy-league-admissions-are-a-sham-confessions- of-a-harv-1690402410)

<comment><AUTHOR> HN kills articles from the Gawker domain. I tried to bypass it but it looks like the submission has now been killed anyway.

<comment><USER3> Yea, that's why I put it in the comments. I'm surprised it didn't get down voted quicker.

Edit: Point being that people might still want context even if HN frowns upon gawker

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even in the US, 1% of people are born in an environment that prepares them for acceptance into elite networks like Harvard. But the other 99% of people make up 99% of the geniuses.

Throughout history wealthy people have done almost all the great things, mostly for the simple fact that they were the only ones in a position to attempt them. Technology is rapidly leveling the playing field and, within a couple of generations, humanity will tap into the 99% potential it has always done without.

<comment><USER5> "Even in the US," \- American social mobility is something that is often touted, but not often proven. And last I saw, it seemed to have been exaggerated (though I don't have any great overview over research on this at all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know about this. His complaints seem to be that the pool of applicants is largely made up of highly coached overachievers, and that standardized tests and an hour-long interview aren't enough time to get to the core of whether someone will be a good Harvard student or not. I wouldn't call that a "sham," more like a systematic failure to recognize, highlight, and quantify the many forms of achievement and merit. A sham to me would be that someone upstream from these reviewers is throwing away all this data and just accepting a pre-formed list of rich white people.

Evaluating students in the first place is an extremely hard problem technically and philosophically. That Harvard even has in-person interviews for all its prospective students suggests it's less of a sham than many other admissions processes. Does this guy think the all the other schools are giving five-hour interviews, or psychological test batteries, or brain scans?

You have to decide who you're going to let in, and so far no one has found a really reliable way to separate the wheat from the chaff - that is, where the wheat is the type of student you want. Even selecting a 'type' of student is risky, considering people at the age of 16-18 are essentially larval. So not only do you have to gauge performance, but potential. Good luck with that!

There's also an ignorant undercurrent of "kids these days," as if kids in the 90s and before didn't have advisors or vanity trips or ultra-practiced answers for every question. The way _he_ got in is the _right_ way, even though as he points out shortly after, there is no right way.

</comment><comment><USER7> Exclusion is tradition at these schools.

 _By 1926, Harvard moved away from admissions based strictly on academics to evaluating potential students on a number of qualifiers meant to reveal their "character." A report released that year by an admissions committee endorsed a limit of 1,000 freshman per class — allowing a shift in policy, as Harvard could no longer admit every student who achieved a certain academic cutoff.

Here's how Karabel sums up the new changes approved in 1926, which would effectively allow the Harvard administration to limit its Jewish student population:

The committee decisively rejected an admissions policy based on scholarship alone, stating that "it is neither feasible nor desirable to raise the standards of the College so high that none but brilliant scholars can enter" while stipulating that "the standards ought never to be so high for serious and ambitious students of average intelligence."

When the faculty formally approved the report eight days later, Lowell was further elated, for they also approved measures making the admissions process even more subjective. In particular, the faculty called on [Committee on Admissions chairman Henry Pennypacker] to interview as many applicants as possible to gather additional information on "character and fitness and the promise of the greatest usefulness in the future as a result of a Harvard education." Henceforth, declared the faculty, a passport-sized photo would be "required as an essential part of the application for admissions."_

[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of- di...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of- discriminating-against-jews-2014-12)

disclosure: I am a Princeton alum and applicant interviewer. There is definitely a strong element of self-perpetuation at these schools, for better or for worse.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Had to use highlighting service to bypass gawker block. Sorry.

<comment><USER8> That's actually a service I haven't seen before and find an interesting little thing. So thanks for linking to it anyway ^_^

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When you read this, it's so damn clear that education is going to change _dramatically_ in the next 15 years.

I'm pretty scared for late in my career when I'm going to be competing for jobs against people that got educated in a much better way.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it, they are having _volunteers_ gatekeep and giving ratings on a scale of _absolutely superior_ to _not recommended_?

I mean, we've heard lots about interviews for hiring, but this is just ridiculously misinformed and terrible on every level.

<comment><USER11> I think they're just alumni interviews. And from what I understand they don't make much of a difference in the application process. I have a friend who used to do these sorts of interviews for Harvard and he expressed similar sentiments, namely that he found it disappointing how the kids he most liked never got in (generally because they were poorer and not as polished as the wealthier kids who got in over them).

<comment><USER7> I'm an alumni interviewer for Princeton, and that evaluation metric reads very similar to ours.

I've also experienced the limitations of making an appeals to the admissions committee based on adversity and potential and what the school could do for the student.

My sense is that the alumni interview only really affects the borderline cases or if you give a truly horrific review of the student for one reason or another.

The process selects for a certain mold of person. Diversity happens only within this smaller universe, imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> OP: Why post this stupid link instead of the Gawker story?

<comment> daniel-cussen Gawker is banned from this site, and rightly so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So? Post as much about the downsides of (admission to) prestigious schools as you want. People are still going to fawn over people who went there, and those who went there are going to continue to flaunt it (because, hey, it works).

<comment><USER13> Some people are going to fawn over people who went there, and some aren't. Don't be one of the first category, and to the extent such matters are under your control (e.g. if you have influence over hiring decisions in your place of employment), don't tolerate other people doing so either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Instead of giving people a boost on the ladder to upward mobility

If college admissions went by this person's standard, that would indeed be a sham.

<comment><USER7> Well they already do this, to a lesser degree.

Ex: a student from a less priviledged background whose school did not offer 20AP courses, but did take the 3/3 that were available and had high marks on them, will be "boosted" versus a student who took, say, 9/12 that could have been taken, for example.</comment></comment>


I don't feel like buying stuff anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/recession-unemployment-covid-19-economy-consumer-spending <comment><USER2> It will be interesting to see how this affects people's behaviors in the long run. How much years of marketing & advertising will be undone.</comment>


CEO compensation surged 14% in 2019 to $21.3M - <AUTHOR> https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-surged-14-in-2019-to-21-3-million-ceos-now-earn-320-times-as-much-as-a-typical-worker/ <comment><USER2> I'm guessing this had to due to surge in stock market.

In my opinion the only way to get this large inequality between CEO comp. and employee compensation under control is for employees to also be rewarded with more options for reduced stock-price purchases and a tax-incentive or tax- reduction on those realizing those profits instantly (as oppose to the waiting period in order to avoid capital gains tax).

Maybe an overall tax haul for people who profit less than X amount of dollars per year with stocks.

This doesn't solve much directly for people under a private employer, but I think it's a start. Maybe indirectly, people will have more money to spend on stuff therefore helping everyone, but it might also cause prices to rise.

Disclaimer: Not a financial advisor (anymore) nor a economics professional.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do these headlines leave out the "in the top 350 companies in the US"? How much bigger have these companies grown in the number of employees? Is the job the same for the CEO or more difficult?

I'm also curious: what does an average/median CEO earn? Not in the top 350 US companies, but among all of them.

This seems like an issue to me, but the way it's framed makes me feel like we're not hearing the whole story. If the companies in the top 350 are now X times larger than in 1965 then that seems like it would matter here, no?</comment>


Dataflow as database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2016-07-17.md <comment><USER2> Fun reading. I'm digging into montonicity/functional models of decentralized agreement / coord for dbs myself

</comment><comment><USER3> _> (my guess: protein powder)._ [1]

I wonder what this is in reference to.

[1]: [https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blame/master/posts/201...](https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blame/master/posts/2016-07-17.md#L11)

<comment><USER4> My guess? This: [https://medium.com/feature-creep/the-software-engineer-s- gui...](https://medium.com/feature-creep/the-software-engineer-s-guide-to- asserting-office-dominance-ddea7b598df7#.ka5f266ii)

<comment><USER3> Oh my that is some hilarious content. It reminds me of me circa 2005-08. I had so many jugs of protein laying around the office that they call me Mr. Wizard. Of course I should have showed my dominance and ridiculed them and demanded they call me Mr. Warlock goddamn it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Merging execution and data - just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be done.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting approach of using a GitHub repo as a blog.

<comment><USER7> Not sure why he doesn't just use github-pages as thats how most people would use "a Github as a blog".

<comment><USER3> Because it is just one more inhibition to write stuff when you are are worried what your blog looks like and if it will generate correctly.

My blog looking like crap is sadly one of the excuses I make not to blog. Every time I go to look at updating the look I have to reexamine the latest jekyll. I'm sort of inspired now to just make a bunch of dated markdowns files like this guy did.

<comment><USER8> Dates are awful.

The Jekyll requirement of having filenames starting with dates is the main reason I don't blog.

It would be so much better if I could not put dates on files and just name them. If I wanted, I could put the date inside the file, either in free-text or in that crazy YAML metadata (which should be optional).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


WEB DEVELOPER (DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES) - <AUTHOR> https://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/web/4894818972.html <comment><USER2> Once again, we see the terrible effects of there being not enough technical talent here in the United States.

As we are constantly told by the VCs and large tech firms, we need to open up the green card immigration program to allow developers in who will do the jobs that Americans just won't do. Like, for example, being a full stack web developer who does QA, customer support and data scrubbing for 12 bucks an hour while living in one of America's most expensive cities.

/s

<comment><USER3> I do agree with you, but to be fair, this is only a single post, likely from some company that either has no idea what they're doing or is deliberately interested in exploiting someone in desperate need of a job.

<comment><USER4> They clearly know what they are doing. They definitely need people with prolog experience

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also, background in machine learning, algorithms research, data mining and large dataset visualization, and real-time optimization.

Must multi-task by making coffee, making sure bathrooms are well-stocked with paper goods, occasionally running out to perform errands, walk owner's dogs, etc.

Not required but preferred: deep background in robotics research, computer vision, AI, mechanical engineering.

Must agree to compliment owner on inherent genius in all areas, and also render compliments on owner's cars, sexual achievements, and financial accomplishments.

Candidates with background in deep-space communications, global mobile technology, and mathematical research requisite for those areas of expertise given special consideration.

Successful applicant will be asked periodically to perform remedial sexual services, ritual degradation, self-flogging, coprophagic activities, etc.

Position offers no insurance benefits.

</comment><comment><USER6> Damn! I was going to apply to this but I only have experience with GoDaddy and BlueHost, but not HostGator. I'll have to take my Prolog experience elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER7> SWI-Prolog? DrRacket? This has to be a joke, right?

They're obscure enough that a non-programmer wouldn't likely know they exist, yet nobody with a clue would request that of a web developer. The only plausible explanation I can fathom is that they Googled a list of IDEs and picked a few at random... or that this is a joke.

<comment><USER8> This actually looks a lot like the product of someone asking several "tech savvy" friends what skills a web developer would need, and then pasting the results into a job announcement.

This practice isn't limited to small shops either - I've seen multi-billion dollar companies (not in the tech sector) require a 4 year CS degree for a Wordpress developer position.

<comment><USER9> I literally can't image the person, tech savvy or not, who would come up with DrRacket here. Or prolog.

I agree with GP that its' just blind googling.

<comment><USER10> This would also be a great way to warn other devs off of the company (note that the sites are given).

I actually tried a couple of searches based on your comment and I really didn't get anything that wouldn't taken quite a bit of effort to piece together into this listing.

"what does an expert web programmer know" "what does it take to be a web programmer" "what do I need to know to be a web programmer"

This might be a warning written by someone who is leaving. In other words, with a less-than-friendly parting of ways, his/her final task was to write a job description to hire a replacement. If so, well played.

<comment><USER9> That's a really interesting theory. Improbable, but I like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I believe $12/hour is also right around the starting wage at In-N-Out Burger in LA, just to put that into perspective.

<comment><USER12> You can clean houses for twice that, and the shit you have to deal with is far easier to handle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is this being posted? Its not like they are expecting any special skill that anyone who works for minimum wage would not have.

<comment><USER14> I think that's the joke.

Must have HUGE AMOUNT OF EXPERIENCE IN ALL THE THINGS (with bonus "Hosting" on GitHub)!

Pay rate: $12/hr.

<comment><USER15> Github hosts code, Github also hosts websites. It's not too outrageous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Screenshotted for the eventual CL takedown: [http://i.imgur.com/CsathsU.png](http://i.imgur.com/CsathsU.png)

<comment><USER17> It will be those who think like you who survive the apocalypse. </humor>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just did a quick 'whois' on the second domain mentioned (COUTURESHOPELA·COM) and see it has never been registered. I bet some enterprising developer could register it in less than one hour and sell it to them for a bit more than $12.

Any takers?

<comment><USER19> I think they can't even proofread. It's probably supposed to be coutureshopla.com. That website looks similarly styled to the mnm* one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> All this is missing is an experience requirement for longer than some technology has existed.

<comment><USER21> Those ones really crack me up. Its the first filter of the clowns that have no idea what they're talking about. The other glaring one that normally gets/got me back in the day that Java == JavaScript to all agencies.

<comment><USER22> The problem with the logic in your last statement is that you're using == when you should be using ===.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In case anyone's curious what their site is actually built with: [http://builtwith.com/mnmcouture.com](http://builtwith.com/mnmcouture.com)

Funny how they mention Magento, but the site is actually on Volusion.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord I didn't know Scheme and Prolog programmers were this underpaid.

</comment><comment><USER24> At least they are paying. Check out this one for "volunteers"

[http://letscreateapp.com/LCA%20careers.html](http://letscreateapp.com/LCA%20careers.html)

<comment><USER21> Its flexible, that's the real draw. I'd definitely go for it, being one of the "creatives".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Impressive stack, must be a undercover Google R&D project for fashion VR: • HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, JQuery, XML, ASP.NET, PHP, SQL. • CMS: WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla. • Web Server Package: LAMP, XAMPP, WAMP. • Web Hosting: BlueHost, GoDaddy, HostGator. • IDE: NetBeans, Notepad++, Dreamweaver, PhpSt • Java, C, C++, C#, Prolog, Scheme. • Hosting: GitHub • IDE: Eclipse, NetBeans, CodeBlocks, Dev-C++, SWI-Prolog, DrRacket. • Web Design: Adobe suite

</comment><comment><USER26> $12 bucks per hour? You could work at McDonalds in Seatac (just south of Seattle) and make $15.

</comment><comment><USER27> So I am not a fan of recruiters, ever since the very first one I dealt with tried to screw me on salary. But I did an interesting thing as a consulting gig once: I got paid to interview a guy for a first technical hire at a company. Basically, it was two non-tech cofounders and they needed a developer. They put out ads, got resumes, then realized they don't know how to interview a developer. Friend of a friend of a friend referral => I got to talk to them. Charged them for an hour of work to interview their top candidate and gave them my conclusion.

Always wondered if this is a better business model than non-technical recruiters, at least for a part of the process. And getting paid by the hour means I don't have a conflict of interest to say the candidate is great.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't live in LA so am not too sure about the wage market there. But 12$/hr seems pretty low for any job, let alone a developer position, in the second largest city in the US?

I bet some HR person came up with that stack and the corresponding pay.

<comment><USER29> I doubt this company has an HR person. They most likely stole another job post or this is a complete troll. $12/hr isn't a _bit_ low. It's about $100 per hour low.

<comment><USER10> As I mentioned in another post, my guess is it's a disgruntled (ex-)employee who was tasked to make the ad. This is a warning to other devs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> [http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/los-angeles-web- developer-...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/los-angeles-web-developer- salary-SRCH_IL.0,11_IM508_KO12,25.htm)

</comment><comment><USER31> Personally, I'm learning to code in Python, and once I do will probably work for $3 per hour doing remote work via a freelancing site. At the moment I'm going through Flask— which shouldn't take more than a couple of days to grok at a basic level. I made a CRUD site a few years ago, so it's not like I'm starting for zero.

Anyway, working for below minimum wage is economically rational. Once I have more experience I'll command more money, or create products for myself.

<comment><USER32> Don't go that way. Seriously. It's better to offer your services for free to local non-profits than work for peanuts. The main thing is that clients who pay the lowest also treat you the worst. You'll meet a lot of unreasonable demands and overally crappy people while working those very low wage projects.

Go to your local non-profits and offer them your services for free. Be clear that you're just learning and that's why you'd make them a web page or an intranet app for free. You'll get to learn, some feedback, more or less honest customers and karma points. Once you got experience and portfolio, you can go after the better paying projects (~$10/h or so) that are run by sane people who will treat you well.

Source: Started freelancing back in high school, almost 10 years in business.

<comment><USER33> I learned web programming by building an e-commerce site from scratch in Perl the late 90s. When all was said and done, my partner and I split $2k, which brought my hourly rate to $1-$2/hour. But for 10 years I made $55-$75/hour maintaining that thing - which I hadn't really foreseen I just wanted to learn web programming. The point is it can be worthwhile.

<comment><USER32> I think we're talking about different things. Did you do freelancing on Elance/Odesk/etc?

I agree that doing a useful real world project for learning is great. If you get paid for it, it's even better. But cheapass clients on those websites are usually a different kind. People want to have a {popular thing} clone or {popular thing} meets {another popular thing} and don't really understand neither what they want from the freelancer nor what they want as the final delivery. Of course, there're good but cheap projects on those marketplaces as well. But as a beginner, it's way too use to stumble upon let's say... not very pleasant clients. Thus if money is not the issue, I'd recommend going the non-profit way instead. They at least know what they want and usually appreciate your work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I feel like this has to be some dev exacting revenge on these guys

<comment><USER35> "Unfortunately, your request for a 5% raise was rejected. We're sorry to see you go. Can you help hire a replacement? Just write up a quick job posting w/ your basic work experience and daily routine. Thanks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Their site is hosted on Volusion, a hosted ecommerce platform. Probably what they're really hiring for is someone to maintain the template and product SKUs, but figured they'd throw in a bunch of other bullet points related to "web development" thinking it'd get a better employee.

</comment><comment><USER37> If we define expertise in all the things this post lists at the same level of depth with which the person who posted it understands web design, my semester of Scheme and DrRacket makes me overqualified!

I'm almost tempted to email them and just ask them to define some of the terms they used in this post.

</comment><comment><USER38> I like how it's a Magento site but knowing Magento isn't required however knowing Scheme is.

<comment><USER23> It's not even a Magento site - it's Volusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The killer line: "Experience in the following programs is a must."

Followed by 35 tools/technologies!

</comment><comment><USER40> [http://i.imgur.com/q6lzN9x.png](http://i.imgur.com/q6lzN9x.png) \-- Here's a screenshot for anyone who might stumble upon this thread in the future, because craigslist deletes posts after a couple weeks.

</comment><comment><USER41> The real punch line would be if they offered equity in exchange for the low salary.

</comment><comment><USER42> I enjoyed "Must multitask by helping answering phones" too.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is $24,000 per year even above the poverty line for SF? That's a giant list of expert qualifications for just a tiny bit more than someone gets their first day flipping burgers.

</comment><comment><USER44> All they have to do is walk out their cushy hipster pad in the garment district down to skid row, and they can probably find 50 qualified individuals for the price ..

</comment><comment><USER45> I love how after the enormous list of ridiculous requirements, they have, "SEO Knowledge is prefered but not required." Just tops it off perfectly.

</comment><comment><USER46> They didn't specify the future employee's legal status in the country. Are they accepting resumes from the "undocumented illegal aliens"?

</comment><comment><USER47> Any idea why do they need prolog?

(I'm assuming that the person who compiled this has a clue, which is a thesis not very well supported by the posting itself...).

</comment><comment><USER48> Actually, 12 per hour is about 1900 a month. Not bad. Here in Italy, I'm doing development work at a University for far less than that.

</comment><comment><USER49> I thought these things happened only here in Italy. It's kind of relieving to know that we are not the only ones in this situation.

</comment><comment><USER50> Wow. I'm sad to admit we see a LOT of this kind of job posts in my city (Mexico city, Mexico). And they get plenty of answers too.

<comment><USER21> Gah. Bring on my IT union. I'll get the ball rolling if need be. Long as I don't get shot by affiliates of Jobs who like making wage agreements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I hope I get it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Don't forget your two references.

</comment><comment><USER21> Tempted to apply and send them some NSA-ridden hard drives to get them started.

</comment><comment><USER53> Serious! Is this the average hourly rate for a web dev in Los Angeles?

<comment><USER54> My ecommerce business is based out of Los Angeles and our shipping clerk gets that. I wish he knew a dozen programming languages... unfortunately he is still training on email. He can pack the hell out of a box though.

<comment><USER47> You made me LOL "[...] I wish he knew a dozen programming languages... unfortunately he is still training on email."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Yep, that's the fashion industry for you.

</comment><comment><USER56> I think they left off the extra 0, no?

</comment><comment><USER57> Now, I'm definitely not saying that anyone should do this, because I don't advocate any illegal actions. But, if they happened to get DDOS attacked, I would laugh heartily.</comment>


New OO design for full deep feedforward neural network (Python codes) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/debridge/dnn <comment><AUTHOR> deep feedforward neural network with graceful layered OOD, according to design pattern chain of responsibilities; I learned Design Patterns around 1999, now it's time to apply it and contribute to deep learning community(education, illustration and real work)</comment>


FCC Orders Google to Respond to Net Neutrality Complaint - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/future-participle/5a2d9322bdc4?hj

<comment><USER2> Or the complainant should do like everyone else who wants to run a server and pony up for a business account. Nearly every major ISP in the area I live (and I afaik, most of the US) disallows and even blocks use of personal servers running from a basic consumer account. Some ISPs even filter all web traffic through a proxy.

If you want to run a server, you pay extra for a business account and BOOM! 100% open pipe.

I think here that Google is simply guilty of a poorly written agreement in this case and the guy complaining is a cheap bastard.

<comment><USER3> Why should he pay extra to get rid of an illegal restriction?

<comment><USER2> It's about fairness. Most residential pipe is balanced to favor downstream bandwidth over upstream. In many locations using internet over Cable infrastructure, a node will share the upstream pipe. When a single user runs high-demand services from their home it can saturate the upstream connections and everyone suffers from the lag. Generally business users are provided SLA on speeds and availability and their traffic is routed differently to support that.

In theory, your consumer price reflects a discount for not fully utilizing bandwidth, etc...

I could flip your argument and say why don't the telcos just say fuck it and charge everyone $200+ for basic internet? I don't think Grandma who checks her e-mail once a week is going to be to thrilled about that shit.</comment></comment></comment>


The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews - <USER2> http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html <comment><USER3> If you really want to do a startup then get used to the rejection thing. Even if you get into YC you will probably have to get funding afterwards. To do so you'll need to make the case that you are building a company that will eventually be valued at ~$100 Million. It's very rare that you'll be able to do that on the first shot. Or even on the 5th shot. I know a company that got rejected 45 times before getting funded. And many more get rejected 10 times. So shake it off. It's not going to be the last time it happens. And some VC's / angels aren't as nice as PG. They will twist the knife after the fatal wound.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you think you were rejected unfairly and that your idea is a good one, then build it. PG is telling you that many didn't get rejected for any defined faults or voids in your app. There were good ideas and good applicants, and some were just a rung above you. If anything, that's more encouragement to pursue your idea.

So you got cut, big deal. It happened to me before, and it happens to hundreds every year. Just move on and be productive. In my case, I realized I needed to get more into coding, and get a better grasp of everything, which is what I'm doing.

Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Digg, Revision3, Ustream.tv, Qik, Meebo, Delicious, Twitter, Craigslist, HotorNot, etc. all are successful/profitable/growing in popularity and all did it without YC.

If you're confident in your team and idea, stop asking for feedback, you already got the best feedback you could get, that there's 'literally nothing wrong' about your app.

Congrats to who made it, and congrats to who didn't, it's a kick in the ass that should launch you forward.

<comment><USER5> The concept of "fair" doesn't really apply here. YC can use any [legal] criteria they wish. We're just interested in learning what we could do to improve the application, so we're asking for a little more information, if possible. It's not a "tell us why not". It's an "if possible, give us some info to help improve efficiency of the process".

<comment><USER4> You can't give suggestions on improvement if you can't pick out anything that's lacking or needs to be improved. That's the point.

<comment><USER5> Ok. Didn't hurt to ask, though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems to answer the recent questions about movements and competition for YC. With 200-250 rejected applications that are "pretty good", there should be more than enough material for XCombinator (where X!=Y) to work with.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to suggest that we network a bit to see what can be pulled together. I just submitted a story with some of what I'd like to see happen:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160398>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought pg once said that there is no limit on the number of groups they can fund in a cycle. I'll post a reference link if I find one.

Update:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066>

[ thanks to <http://www.searchyc.com> ]

<comment><USER2> There's no limit on the percentage of groups we interview that we can accept, but there is a limit on the number we can interview.

<comment><USER9> So this is the first scalability bottleneck you have hit?

<comment><USER2> It's the current one. There have been others we hit and overcame. We used to review applications printed out on paper, for example; now we have software for it.

We also have software for keeping track of all the startups, for communicating with them, and for generating all the documents for startups we fund. We'd have ground to a halt by now without these apps.

<comment><USER9> Any thoughts on how to overcome this one?

Perhaps try to achieve better ranking before interviews? You might do psychological profiles or tests to estimate technical ability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would it be possible to see an example of a stellar application? You'd only have to put it up once, and it would help all of us understand what we're up against.

<comment> craig-faber I think we can just look at who's been accepted in the past.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but that only gives you information about the people and ideas you're competing with. It doesn't give you information on how to present yourself on the application, which really is the bottleneck when conveying information to YC.

<comment> craig-faber Good point. I think I did a pretty poor job on mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _So why don't we tell people why we didn't invite them to interview? Because, paradoxical as it sounds, there often is no reason._

Maybe I'm trying to read tea leaves, but did the "You are the only founder" boolean play a bigger part this time around since you received so many qualified applicants?

Working full time as a solo founder for the last four months (and 13k LOC of Java later), I understand why you would be hesitant to give the nod to a solo found. The work is overwhelming, but some folks can pull it off if they have the right support network and determination.

<comment><USER11> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145749>

"The odds of being accepted are much greater (roughly 4x) with a cofounder, but it's not impossible to get funded as a single founder." - <USER2>

<comment><USER10> My prodding was more along the lines that since there was an order of magnitude more applicants this round and they only had a week to look over the applicants, was it nearly impossible to get in being a solo founder?

I'm a bit annoyed with myself since I didn't apply to the previous rounds. I first read Hackers & Painters over two years ago, ah well!

<comment><USER11> I think that figure was based on evidence from the previous 6 (?) rounds. I would guess the 4x more likely for co-founders figure holds. pg usually won't throw out a number unless he really means it.

<comment><USER10> _I would guess the 4x more likely for co-founders figure holds._

Right, my guess is also the same.

My question was so pg could chime in with data since YC has gotten much more popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What about a simple traffic light feedback: green for the accepted ones, yellow for the pretty good rejected ones, red for the rest. At least it would help to see if someone is on the right track...

<comment><USER2> It wouldn't work in practice. There are no sharp lines between these categories, and we'd be misleading people, one way or the other, if we insisted on drawing them. It already bothers me that circumstances force us to draw a line between green and yellow, because we're probably discouraging some people who should instead be encouraged. It would be even worse if we tried to draw a line between yellow and red.

<comment><USER13> What might be useful are comments overall like "we received several applications for online invitation services but nothing seemed innovative or compelling enough to us" or "we received a handful of applications for doing x but, in our opinion, the mobile space is where we think that market is headed". I think you once mentioned that you get a ton of hotel/food review website ideas. You've also indicated that you think the email overload management is an area of YC's interest.

Doing this might help at least some of the applicants get some idea. Not everyone is covered by these comments and no one is forced to take your opinion for it but it just helps to get broad feedback.

<comment><USER14> PG seems like a nice guy and is doing something really cool with YC, but it's not his job to give people advice, beyond the people he picks for YC. Part of 'not giving people advice' probably includes statistics on what sorts of applications are 'hot' in a given time period, which might actually be fairly valuable information that they want to keep to themselves.

If you want advice on your app, post an 'Ask YC' thing here and usually, people will give you some pretty good feedback.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't it be a bad move to do this if you are still in "stealth mode"? I have been thinking a lot about this especially after having not been accepted into YC. Half of me wants to know what people in the business think about my idea, and the other half wants to wait longer until closer to launch?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> recent tweet from venturehacks: You don't need permission to start a company. From investors, co-founders, or anyone else. (including PG, Jessica, and Trevor)

</comment><comment><USER13> Summary: The number of good/compelling ideas+team >> Available spots

<comment><USER17> Exactly. Thousands of Valedictorians don't get into Harvard every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think that the reason people want to know is not that they are looking to be graded, (they already have,) but that they would like to know how to do better. They want to improve their chances of getting in next round or succeeding while going solo. It seems to me that a "why I wasn't excepted" would be the first piece of advice I'd get from YC.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Probably the reason people expect feedback about why they were rejected is that they implicitly think of this as like a grade in a class. But a test where only a fixed number of applicants can pass regardless of the average quality is not a grade in that sense."

Actually, I disagree with the premise of this statement. I don't want feedback on why I was rejected, I want feedback on my product. Yes, I can see that it is very nuanced and difficult for you to say which idea/product is better than another, and you have your own business reasons for making those decisions. I don't think anyone really expects you to disclose those reasons, and even if you did it would be completely subjective and would just lead to arguments. However, given that, you're only addressing why you don't comment on the relative strengths of the applications and not why you don't give feedback on any individual product/idea.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sorry but there is no logic in this article. If the top 50-60 "stellar" applications will put the other 250 down, this 250 applications are missing something compared to the top 50-60 or they are not very strong in some point, so you can at least reply with an hint, like: The idea could work but you did too little things in the past compared to the best applicants, or for example, the way the application expose the idea give us the feeling you are not addressing the problem in a way we like.

In brief once you are able to see a difference between the stellar and the non-stellar ones you know why the rest is non-stellar and an hint can be a nice feedback for a people that spent some time writing the application.

</comment><comment><USER21> One day, you'll have a manuscript to push and you'll _really_ know what rejection is...

</comment><comment><USER22> PG, I have one suggestion - for many people, YC funding amount is not as important as the advice and networking they will get there.

Can you think of a mechanism where the next 10 promising or so YC applicants who didn't get funding in this cycle atleast get other benefits in return of some equity for YC?

For e.g., YC members can advice those 10 startups for weekly or bi-weekly basis. Also, these startups may get chance to attend those weekly dinner meetings or so. Of-course, this would take YC's extra energy, but they will be rewarded with some reasonable amount of equity as well.

What says? Does this make sense?

<comment><USER2> The problem is, the "other benefits" are what's in short supply, not money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting, the main thing i take away from what pg said is there's a need for more YC clones. Clones that can handle the talent that YC can not accommodate

</comment><comment><USER24> only a suggestion but since there are many aplicants, the selection proccess could be done in more stages.

<comment><USER25> This seems like a good idea on the surface, but in practice I don't see how it would work. There are only two real categories of information being collected, the information about the idea and the information about the team. And it doesn't really make sense to separate the evaluation into two different phases since the variables are multiplicative; that is, if the value of one is zero then the value of the whole equation is zero.

<comment><USER24> true, but what i was thinking is that way you would know which one failed. your idea, your team, etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Next: To get into that YC clone in India. You know, the one with armed guards that make sure you don't leave your cubicle before midnight. (Shamelessly copied from the real YC.)</comment>


Ask HN: What's one problem you'd like startups to solve? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Local product search.

I really, really want to be able to search for what products are available on the high-street in any shop, based on a live stock-room database.

Imagine an application which could recommend what exactly you should do in order to obtain item X based on your location, the amount of time you had and how much money you wanted to spend.

E.g., "I'm at home and I need to pick up a pair of smart shoes. I have an hour, and £50 to spend. Where do I go?" \- the application has two nearby places. Place A has smart shoes for £35, and it'll take you 30 minutes to get there, but place B Is only 10 minutes away but you'll have to spend £45 on the shoes. Trivial example, but that sounds pretty useful, no?

If anybody has a solution for this and wants to talk seriously about implementing it, get in touch with me.

<comment><USER3> Been researching this type of system for about two years now. The feedback from business owners has not been very positive. Some do not want their inventory to be readily available to anyone (for whatever reason). Others do not see the value of anything outside of Facebook (the social network has become their own little internet). A couple talked about how expensive software is (they are right). One or two were open to the idea. But were not ready to be used as guinea pigs for research.

One common trait has been the lack of understanding of what online sales are, and what they might mean to them. There is a lot of space to innovate here, but it has to be done in a way that is less _take a risk with me_ , and more _this is totally safe and normal to do_.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, and all due respect, you're not selling it right

<comment><USER3> I was not selling it. Just researching the idea. Had I tried to sell it people would have not given me much data to crunch. I'm still convinced the idea is good. Though it will require a great amount of effort to gain momentum. Businesses are very conservative due to the fear of losing precious resources on a wrong decision. They need to know about others being successful with a product/service before they decide to try it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i think it's ridiculous that in order to get a prescription for a simple low- risk medication, i have to call my doctor, make an appointment, wait 45 minutes past when my appointment was supposed to be, and have a physical meeting with the doctor that consists of nothing but talking and takes all of 5 minutes. oh, and i have to pay way too much for it too. i should be able to do this over the phone or internet, and for less money.

<comment><USER6> This is often because doctors aren't paid unless they physically see you in the office. Current insurance payment policies do not recognize phone or internet consultation as billable events.*

My doctor provides this service and does so as follows:

I call my doctor leave a voicemail(Name, DOB, Phone#). A "triage nurse" (their exact wording) returns my call. I describe my symptoms and answer a few questions, these are then relayed to my doctor. If he feels the issue doesn't require a visit but requires a prescription the order is placed electronically and a nurse calls back to confirm my desired pharmacy, provide instructions and answer any additional questions.

*While some companies are making efforts to amend these policies, this holds true for the majority in my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Email. My inbox is overflowing and all the folders and tags in the world don't seem to help. Is there anything better out there?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure there is! What sort of emails do you think are the largest problem in your case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI, pg made a "Request for Startups" a couple of years ago, detailing problems he'd like startups to solve. You'd also know that those problems are fundable.

[http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html](http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm aware of them, thanks! :) I'm interested in hearing more from other people as well. I'm not looking for any ideas to go after myself - I'm currently busy enough with uni and a startup job - but always love hearing ideas like these!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the U.S. dental issues are not considered a serious health problem even though you can die from it. Teeth aren't covered by "obamacare" and well, if the side of your mouth rots out then tough shit. Poor Americans have trouble affording dental insurance. I know this probably isn't as interesting as 'local product search' and the like, but I thought I would chime in. Thanks

<comment><USER10> Do you have any ideas in this space? My wife is a dentist and I've done a bit of work in the EHR space.

The real issue (at least it seems to be the issue to me) is people are lazy (or perhaps uneducated) and don't put any effort in until it is too late.

<comment><USER9> Well I had dental insurance at my old job and lost it. Then my hours rapidly declined. A filling fell out. Got laid off and haven't been able to catch up. My unemployment is about to run out but I just signed up for Humana with the same assumption that put me off from getting insurance in the first place - even if I had it I still wouldn't be able to afford the tooth pull. So I guess I'm one of the lazy and uneducated. Thanks. Regardless that's not the point. The point is that irrespective of how 'lazy' or 'uneducated' you perceive anyone to be they should still have the basic human right of not having to die from something that is simple and preventable.

<comment><USER10> I suppose if you brushed and flossed everyday like you should, you would still have to had the filling done originally? No? I suppose then that you knew you should brush and decided not to (lazy), or you were to young to know better (uneducated). Is this a false dichotomy?

Now that's out of the way.

There are many free dental clinics that would examine the tooth and pull or fill if needed. Sure, you may have to wait in line a few hours. There are also usually public health clinics that charge very little.

What city, state are you in? I'm in NC and know more about stuff in the state, but could certainly find clinics, public health, etc in other states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My grandma wants to communicate with her family trough internet but dont know how to use a computer. Solve that for me.

<comment><USER12> make a remote control with a mic with one button on it.

the altekaker (your grandma) presses the button and asks her television to do things.

the audio is matched against previous requests, or sent to a call centre with access to her command prompt.

they open skype and call the kid she wanted to call

bill is about the same as cable per month OR for poor ppl, the audio can be sent to her grandson's phone and he can do whatever she asks and not be payed because he loves his grandma

<comment><USER11> Love that idea. Ok if I steal it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> site to swap skills. earn credits and buy other people's time. ex. designer needs programmer. does some design work earns some credits and hires programmers. not as big a market as freelancing but could be useful somewhere bewteen fiverr and elance size projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds a bit like [http://www.konnektid.com/](http://www.konnektid.com/) ? They're very early stages though.</comment></comment>


Why it's better to be hardworking than smart - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/e4ejp/dae_feel_like_being_labeled_a_smart_kid_set_them/c158f4b

<comment><USER2> "Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising."

      -- Cyril Connolly</comment>


In Mexico, 'It's Easy to Kill a Journalist' - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/world/americas/veracruz-mexico-reporters-killed.html <comment><USER2> In more developer countries, it's easier to make the public ignore them, and if that's too difficult, discredit them or drawn their findings in media noise and Kardasian gossip.</comment>


Doctors and nurses treating Covid-19 report high rates of depression and anxiety - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/3/26/21193122/coronavirus-mental-health-doctors-nurses-covid-19 <comment><USER2> The ones I speak to report a high rate of overtime pay.</comment>


I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/magazine/white-men-privilege.html <comment><USER2> What does this have to do with anything related to HackerNews? Go fuck yourself.

<comment><USER3> Whoa, posting like that will get you banned here. Please review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and stick to the rules.

The submitter presumably thought the story was intellectually interesting, which would make it on topic. See the first paragraph of the guidelines.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone have an iPad SSH client suggestion? - <AUTHOR>

I know I'll need one one day, and the reviews on the App store are less than awe inspiring.<p>Has anyone used one, and have suggestions / complaints / apps to avoid or buy? Not worried about price, as I know I'll need one at some point, and when I do, I'll be risking more than the cost of an SSH app. <comment><USER2> I've used iSSH for a couple of years on my iPhone 3G and couldn't be happier.

<comment><USER3> +1, iSSH on the iPhone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried a few, and iSSH is the only one still remaining on my iPad.

<comment><USER5> Ditto. I have tried four or five and iSSH seems the best (but substantially better on the iPad then on the iPhone)

<comment><USER6> I can echo this also; though for more than the tiniest amount of command line typing, I set the iPad aside and pick up a notebook/network/whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Problem is, I'll be out, say at movie, something goes wrong, I get a frantic call asking what is up, have to taxi home to sort it out. So an iPad/iPhone app would REALLY help there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use Tiny Term on my iPad

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sweet thanx guys!</comment>


Amazon May Have Trouble Dodging California's New Online Sales Tax - <AUTHOR> https://www.baycitizen.org/taxes/story/amazon-trouble-dodging-online-sales-tax/

<comment><USER2> Under the law Amazon has a CA presence because it has wholly owned subsidiaries like a9.com and Alexia in CA. I know that the corporate veil is not impervious, but can CA pierce it in this instance, or can only the Feds do it? Has it been tested in the courts? I dont have a clue, but would be interested in hearing from someone who does.</comment>


Deconstructing Pinterest's reverse-image-search SEO growth hack - <AUTHOR> https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-hack <comment><USER2> Back when I was an SRE at google for their web crawler, I thought they should de-index pinterest (did not get any traction with this). I still think they should de-index pinterest. I add "-site:pinterest.*" to all my image searches.

<comment><USER3> I wish we could do the same for Shutterstock and all these useless stock image websites that have totally hacked Google image search yet Google won't do anything about them for some reason.

<comment><USER4> How do you search for previews of commercially available images then?

What I would like is an open protocol for media licenses. Some media- license.txt file with names of images (and wildcards) and license info.

      hero.jpg CC0
      *.PNG PD # public domain
      # A free preview of a proprietary image.
      Teaser.jpg preview

Everything not marked is considered proprietary, like now by default.

Then sites like shutterstock could clearly mark their previews of real images, and galleries of free images could mark their images as free to use, etc. This could be reflected in the search engines' UI.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't Google support this already as an advanced search feature?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just mentioning that Pinterest used to boast on their engineering blog how they designed the non-dismissable nag-screen [1] and how they increased engagement by making their landing pages more confusing [2].

Not surprised they hack their way through search.

[1] [https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in- growth-a...](https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth-and- increasing-signups-d6e7d8fef479)

[2] [https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in- growth-e...](https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/lessons-in-growth- engineering-how-we-doubled-sign-ups-from-pin-landing-pages-1c0bc400cdb9)

<comment><USER7> If that's the stuff they're willing to openly brag about, it makes me wonder what dirtier things they're doing behind closed doors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is fascinating in a potentially terrible way. In summary: when an image is posted, a reverse-image search is done and top results are scraped then added to a "More like this" section for the post. This ranks highly because it's _exactly_ what Google already associates with that image, except now all in one page instead of across multiple pages.

Applying this same method to other content (blog posts/pages and video posts) would, presumably, also work. The terrible part of all this, is that it would create more junk posts ranking higher and stratifying the word association of that content with the respective search terms. New content could end up having zero chance of _ever_ ranking highly because another factor of result ranking is content age (older content is weighted heavier).

Am I understanding all that correctly?

<comment><USER9> > Applying this same method to other content (blog posts/pages and video > posts) would, presumably, also work.

I believe reddit started recently doing something like this for text and as a result has made google searching for reddit posts essentially useless.

Basically when you view any post/thread while logged out there are a bunch of other threads shown on the page that have related text, with all the text of their posts included collapsed in the HTML.

The result is that when you search for the context of any reddit post you get hundreds of results which on vaguely similar topics which don't contain the post that you're looking for (unless you log out and count hidden text collapsed under other threads).

<comment><USER10> _"...all the text of [the related] posts included collapsed in the HTML"_

Huh. Facepalm.

Is there any way to exclude portions of content from indexing?

Like maybe inlining robots directed pragmas:

      <span data-robots="noindex"> blah blah blah </span>

Or using meta tags to spec exclusions:

      <meta name="robots" content="noindex:.related-posts" />

FWIW:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Meta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Meta_tags_and_headers)

<comment><USER9> I assumed that the practice was intentional to make reddit be more heavily represented in google results.

Reddit staff doesn't actually use the site that much (or at least that was my impression a couple years ago after having a meeting in the office and finding that I knew a lot more about the meme-art that users sent them than their staff did)-- so it wouldn't be shocking that they'd be indifferent to making google search unusable for users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For some years now, Google Images has been pretty awful to navigate, all thanks to Pinterest. I do hope Google is just unaware of the mentioned "hack", because the other option is they do not care because Pinterest helps them through ads.

Note: I have not checked whether Pinterest has Adsense since I use Adblock. I'm going by some of the comments here.

A couple of days ago I was trying to find out better image search websites because google removed the feature to find images of an exact size. I was brought to Bing, but it also lacks that feature. It kept me up that night thinking how to make a better service and whether I'd have to scrape Google, which made me think of webcrawlers, site indexing... It's turtles all the way down, I can't imagine a solo developer (or startup) pulling it off. I know there are decentralized search attempts, but anything decentralized simply does not work for 2020.

So I ask here on HN, how could a power-user friendly http image search service work without depending on big corps? Is it just impossible and we need to keep praying billionaire CEOs will listen to us or it's simply something no one has done yet?

<comment><USER12> The first problem is monetization. Do you think people would pay a yearly subscription fee for a better image search? I'm not sure they would, but maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They speak so positively about flooding the internet with useless garbage results

</comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and it doesn't seem to be backed by any evidence, either in the original Twitter thread nor the linked blog post.

I think far more likely what's happening is Pinterest is actively crawling the web for images and surrounding text. They will then perform their own reverse image search on _their own_ database, and add this context text to their existing copy of the image, or create a new one if one is not present.

Why would they rely on a user submitting a picture then go to the trouble of reverse searching it? I think they are much more proactive than that.

<comment><USER15> A lot of business accounts sign up to activate Rich Pins which adds a few additional features when people pin from you site.

When you are signed up for this they will scrape the page the pinned image comes from to collect some extra info on the page to show along with the pin.

I'm not sure how if they do this if you are not signed up for Rich Pins though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey folks, I'm the author here and CEO of RankScience (YC W17). AMA about this growth hack or SEO in general!

<comment><USER17> In your opinion, is this a growth hack you'd suggest one of your customers try? Or does it cross a line in your opinion?

"SEO Optimization" is difficult because it's such an imperfect science (or perhaps not, based on your company name!) What are a couple examples or anecdotes of SEO "hacks" / optimizations that are least obvious or things most people wouldn't think of, that have had the most significant impact on SEO?

<comment><USER16> I think it crosses the line and I'm surprised Google hasn't issue them a warning, or maybe they have and we just haven't heard about it.

Organic search is still where 80% of the clicks are in search. (only 20% go to paid - though this is changing)

These are easy wins and are considered "white hat" and legitimate tactics:

* Title tag optimization with SEO A/B testing - increase CTR from Google by 10-40%

* Using NLP Content Optimization to increase content relevancy

* Optimize internal linking structure of your site so Google can easily understand your site hierarchy and spread value to important pages

* Build natural backlinks by creating interesting content that people want to engage with and link to (like this post!)

[https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split- test](https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split-test)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pinterest does a lot of SEO stuff that is interesting.

For one of my boards that ranks #1 in Google I've found that the page Google indexes is quite a bit different than the one I see as a logged-in user.

One of the differences is that they display the text content associated with the pin. This is also used as the image alt text, but then appended with a bunch of keywords.

They also link to other people's boards which have names related to the images so it looks like "tags", but I have the feeling it is probably a mix of keyword stuffing/linking to other content for Google to follow.

The page title is also adjusted to include something like, "237 Best ________ images in 2020" followed by the board name.

</comment><comment> blinding-streak There are certain sites like Wikipedia that improve the web's utility for all who use it, small and giant companies alike. Google search is improved by Wikipedia's existence.

And then there are sites like Pinterest, that degrade the web's utility for the vast majority of people on Earth. It actually harms Google's search experience (obviously image search) and frustrates us that try to benignly browse images. Why does Google let Pinterest get away with its user-hostile approach?

<comment><USER4> An obvious question: does Pinterest buy a lot of Google's ad services?

<comment><USER18> Another obvious question: does Google pay for the valuable free content they get from Wikipedia?

<comment> blinding-streak "The licenses Wikipedia uses grant free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the Wikipedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement; see below for more details). Copied Wikipedia content will therefore remain free under an appropriate license and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom."

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights)

<comment><USER19> Besides, Wikipedia isn't an ad-supported site, so Google's practice of including their text in the search result doesn't cost them ad revenue. You could argue that it means people will see the banner requesting donations less often, but that's compensated for by Google's own donations to them. So while I have definite concerns about some of Google's other practices, that one is no big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey, I run the Growth team at Pinterest. I just wanted to comment on the article to be very clear and say we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.

<comment><USER21> I have two questions for you then.

First, if you insist that you have not scraped data then can you offer an alternative explanation for the data being presented here?

Second, it's pretty clear that the majority of at least the tech community hates what you do with the regwall. Do you not know how bad your site's behavior makes GIS for those of us who aren't interested in joining it? Or do you just not care?

<comment><USER22> I'm guessing that they use one or more third parties that do indeed scrape Google results but provide plausible deniability in the process. And I'd look very closely at the employment histories of principals at those nominal "third" parties. It's not that uncommon in this industry to find companies with exactly one customer, staffed entirely by ex-employees of that one customer.

<comment><USER23> Interesting. Can you cite any examples if it isn't uncommon?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "growth hack" is a great way of saying spam.

</comment><comment><USER25> To me the most interesting bit in the article is they managed to scrape Google results at scale.

</comment><comment><USER26> > "If so, it's the greatest SEO scam of all time."

Pretty much.

Hopefully Google will fix the bugs that allow search results to be ruined by Pinterest spam.

</comment><comment><USER27> Pinterest goes in the PiHole.</comment>


Jax – Composable transformations of Python and NumPy programs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/jax <comment><USER2> Hello from the JAX team!

We'd like to take this opportunity to give a shout out to some of the awesome projects folks are building on top of JAX, e.g.,

* Flax, a neural network library for JAX ([https://github.com/google/flax](https://github.com/google/flax))

* Haiku, a neural network library for JAX inspired by Sonnet ([https://github.com/deepmind/dm-haiku](https://github.com/deepmind/dm-haiku))

* RLax, a library for building reinforcement learning agents ([https://github.com/deepmind/rlax](https://github.com/deepmind/rlax))

* NumPyro, a probabilistic programming library on top of JAX ([https://github.com/pyro-ppl/numpyro](https://github.com/pyro-ppl/numpyro))

* JAX-MD, a differentiable molecular dynamics package built on top of JAX ([https://github.com/google/jax-md](https://github.com/google/jax-md))

<comment><USER3> I've noticed that many JAX libraries (including those from Google) seem to adopt an object-oriented style more similar to Torch/Keras rather than JAX's functional style demonstrated in modules like jax.experimental.stax. This is disappointing since stax is quite clean and these libraries seem to use a lot of hacks to make OO work with JAX. Is there an effort to implement and maintain more full-featured functional libraries in the jax/stax style?

<comment><USER4> I've been involved w. jax/stax/trax/flax - I think the real issue w. the stax- like functional form is that it gets unwieldy very quickly when dealing w. more complicated models that are natively general-graphs as opposed to simple sequential pipelines that can be trivially mapped to a combinator expression tree. Of course there are many solutions here, but ultimately if you're building an NN library you need to build something that ML researchers actually want to use daily, and that tends to look closer to hackable pytorch- like DSLs rather than higher-order functional code - which often looks elegant but tends to hurt readability and rework speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> JAX is similar to many other autodifferentiation frameworks being developed for machine learning. It's a spiritual successor to the popular autograd framework (same authors).

The advantages JAX brings are

        * Numpy-adjacent interface
        * Auto-vectorization
        * Great tie-in with XLA
        * Higher-order derivatives (critical for some applications)
        * Simplified, functional interface

The disadvantage is that it's younger and not trying to be a fully-fledged competitive neural network framework and thus is behind and less resourced compared with other libraries implementing auto-differentiation.

I think it's really exciting to see more people learning about JAX and beginning to use it for serious projects.

<comment><USER6> > The disadvantage is that it's [...] not trying to be a fully-fledged > competitive neural network framework

Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion, but to me this is an advantage. JAX is a library upon which you can build a neural-network framework -- or a framework for something else.

It seems clear that we're still figuring out the Right Way to write code that defines a neural network. The fact that JAX lets you write different, competing libraries/APIs/DSLs -- however you want to think of it -- lets us innovate more freely.

<comment><USER5> Honestly, I don't disagree, but I feel like it's harder to get resources if you're not aiming for neural networks somewhat directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I continue to wonder how does JAX compare to Zygote.jl see [https://twitter.com/oxinabox_frames/status/12394957113324789...](https://twitter.com/oxinabox_frames/status/1239495711332478976?s=19) for a good start

<comment><USER8> It would be great to see a comparison of Zygote to Jax (both features and performance). I think the Julia language with the ability to manipulate it's AST via macros makes this kind of source-to-source transformation a lot easier than it would be in Python. I'm not sure how they achieved this in Python, but I'm going to guess it was a lot more work.

Also, Zygote is much more ambitious than Jax. Zygote aims to support all of the Julia language whereas Jax is limited to a subset of Python. I wonder if the Zygote folks are biting off too much here? Though currently Zygote doesn't support mutation.

<comment><USER9> More than AST manipulation (which is probably not a key element in Zygote), the most important aspect is Julia's multi-stage JIT compilation (which is actually an aggressive mixture of JIT and AoT). A Julia program has access to it's own compiler at runtime, which you can call to compile any program down to Julia's Intermediate Representation, which happens to be a Julia structure that you can freely manipulate just like the AST and Static Single Assignment making it already similar to an execution graph. Then the Zygote library traverses the structure systematically writing the backward pass as if it was part of the code in the first place (plus applying any kind of optimization), and finally compiles everything together down to machine code through the LLVM.

Since Python is not compiled like Julia, the approach usually involves using custom types that store a separate intermediate representation from python (a custom one or the MLIR for example) and overloading functions (and perhaps other more sophisticated ways of metaprogramming) to map all the required operations while interpreting the Python code before compiling. That's why Zygote says it works on Zygote unaware libraries, as it doesn't store the graph within any of the types or directly overload any of the methods (it does need to know how to reverse them though), and also why it can directly operate on control structures since they are part of the full IR even when you can't overload them.

And while Zygote aims to fully support the Julia language, they'll certainly work on getting the most important operations working well enough before focusing on the more complicated stuff like mutation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is an earlier submission of JAX from December 2018:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18636054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18636054)

JAX is pretty neat because it is effectively a _derivatives compiler_ : it can automatically differentiate a function and JIT compile the result. This makes training in machine learning both fast and easy because gradient descent no longer has to be written by hand.

<comment><USER11> > gradient descent no longer has to be written by hand

Nobody's been writing derivatives by hand for 5+ years. All major frameworks (PyTorch, Tensorflow, MXNet, autodiff, Chainer, Theano, etc.) have decent to great automatic differentiation.

The differences and improvements are more subtle (easy parallelization/vectorization, higher-order gradients, good XLA support).

<comment><USER12> For high performance CUDA kernels people still need to write derivatives by hand. I know this as for my own research, and for many production systems, I'd still need to write it myself. Many of my architectures wouldn't have been possible without writing the CUDA myself (Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network[1]) or using optimized hand written black boxes (cuDNN RNN). The lack of open optimized hand written CUDA kernels has actually been an impediment to progress in the field.

Automatic differentiation allows for great flexibility and composability but the performance is still far from good, even with the various JITs available. Jax seems to be one of the most flexible and optimized for many use cases for now however.

[1]: [https://github.com/salesforce/pytorch- qrnn](https://github.com/salesforce/pytorch-qrnn)

<comment><USER13> Right, you still need to write derivative rules by hand for the _primitive operations_ of an auto-diff system. Automatic differentiation provides composition, it doesn't solve the root mathematical problem of differentiating operations at the lowest level.

So yes, if need a new primitive to add an efficient CUDA kernel, you will probably also have to write its derivative manually too. JAX has a few shortcuts that occasionally make this easier but fundamentally it has the same challenge as any auto-diff system.

<comment><USER12> I still strongly disagree. Few of these hand written CUDA kernels outside of the frameworks are about implementing derivative rules, they're about eliminating the CUDA call overheads or avoiding the layered computational / memory inefficiencies that existing ML compilers have trouble handling.

Next to none of the frameworks are yet able to JIT you a performant RNN, yet RNNs only use very standard components[1]. OpenAI had a massive speed and memory usage boost for attention by implementing what amounts to a few standard primitives together[2].

There are massive gaps in the optimizations that existing ML compilers provide. The landscape is starting to get better but it's still filled with many pitholes.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/stanfordnlp/status/1224106217192087552](https://twitter.com/stanfordnlp/status/1224106217192087552)

[2]: [https://openai.com/blog/sparse- transformer/](https://openai.com/blog/sparse-transformer/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Jax is compelling because it's a lot simpler than other solutions. It's hard to quantify the value of simplicity over new features, but I'd argue we usually undervalue simplicity; it helps move way faster and makes debugging & maintenance exponentially easier. Helps focus on the 80/20 of helping customers instead of internal bullshit...

</comment><comment><USER15> I am wondering what is the state of things for fixing gradients are kinks, or if there is no hope for general automatic differentiation libraries.

        import jax.numpy as np
        from jax import grad, jit, vmap
        from jax import random

        def relu(x):
          return np.where(x>0, x, np.zeros_like(x))

        def identity(x):
          return relu(x) - relu(-x)

        derivative_identity = grad(identity)
        derivative_identity(0.0)

returns 1.0 or 0.0? It currently returns 0.0. (Edit: typo in sign)

<comment><USER16> See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subderivative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subderivative)

<comment><USER15> The derivative of x->x (identity) should be 1 regardless of your definition of derivative.

Subgradients are only applicable when summing convex functions. Here relu(x) - relu(-x) is a sum of a convex function and a concave function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone benchmarked Jax? Curious how it compares to PyTorch for nontrivial networks, say ResNet.

<comment><USER18> It is compiled to XLA so should be a lot faster then pure PyTorch but probably will be slower then TVM ([https://tvm.apache.org/](https://tvm.apache.org/)) i can prepare some benchmarks in next few days if u are interested :)

<comment><USER17> That would be wonderful if you're able to! Also doubles as a good intro to Jax :). Please feel free to tweet at me (@tbenst) or email [same username at stanford dot edu] if you do get around to it.

<comment><USER18> Sure (dont have twitter yet) but will post it here on hacker news in next week probably :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I assume that this only works for total derivatives (e.g., with respect to time) not general partial derivatives (i.e., the n-th total derivative with respect to another variable), right? Otherwise how would one avoid generating _massive_ amounts of code, and temporary data along with it, if I want to

<comment><USER20> You can run a k steps of adam-sgd and differentiate through the learning rate and scalarising parameters of a composite loss function in order to meta-learn them.

Support for general n-th total derivatives is rather good :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does the resulting chain of transformation pull all data into main memory at once, or can JAX handle larger than memory datasets?

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone from the Numba team care to comment?

<comment><USER23> A big difference is jax having a tracing compiler while numba does not. In general, jax is more suited towards vectorizable code (so using numpy functions broadcasted over axes) while numba is better for accelerating manual for loops.

(I'm not from either jax or numba, but a keen jax user for non-ML research.)

<comment><USER24> Out of curiosity what are you using JAX for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How is it different from ChainerX?</comment>


Fiat Chrysler Recalls 1.4M Vehicles to Defend Against Hacks - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/fiat-chrysler-recalls-1-4-145122174.html

<comment><USER2> From BBC:

The company added that hacking its vehicles was a "criminal action".

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33650491](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33650491)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Earlier this week: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9921557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9921557)</comment>