Employees at Google, Yahoo, and Amazon lose nothing if they unionize - <AUTHOR> https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/08/08/employees-at-google-yahoo-and-amazon-lose-nothing-if-they-unionize-heres-why/ <comment><USER2> I'm an engineer at Google. This article's description of stack ranking and perf is fundamentally and completely wrong. There is no stack ranking for perf ratings, there is no percentage of people that have to fail, and managers are not allowed or empowered to give people poor perf ratings in the way described here.

I have no comment on the stuff about unions.

<comment><USER3> This is correct. There is no formalized stack ranking (at least for eng positions) at Google. There's always informal stacking: "does it make sense this person is rated above this other one?" "If we line up all the promotes and don't promotes, does this cut off point make sense)." However, I've seen cases where 75% of the promos made it and cases where it was closer to 30%. It just depends on the group at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have a union for IT workers (including developers) at my workplace. I was only recently allowed to leave it as a result of becoming a supervisor.

In my opinion, the union was manipulative and not beneficial to employee outcomes. They were first and foremost politicians who used union funds to support various unrelated political objectives and didn't really offer any substantive help or improvement with salary/benefits.

After I left (completely in accordance with procedure and my position), the union sent me a threatening letter demanding that I continue sending them dues.

As a very "left leaning" person politically, I'm totally pro-labor, but unions often only pay lip service to the employees they are supposed to benefit.

<comment><USER5> >We have a union for IT workers (including developers) at my workplace. I was only recently allowed to leave it as a result of becoming a supervisor.

If you exit the union but still work at the company you're free riding on the higher benefits and wages negotiated by the union your coworkers paid for.

If you really don't like unions that much you can leave and go work for a company that isn't unionized. It isn't like there's a shortage of them.

<comment><USER6> This is an incredibly arrogant argument for a union to be making. If a union gains membership by forcing employees to be union members, its claim to be legitimately representing employees becomes very weak, IMO.

Closed shop tactics are ways for unions to gain power, often at the expense of labour. Also, once its place a union doesn't need to do much to win members. The incentives are all wrong. These things collapsed all over the world for a reason.

The cheek of believing they "own" these benefits and should be payed by anyone who wants this job.

<comment><USER7> I don't think there's any question that a union that lives up to the ideals of the labor movement - solidarity, equality, power for working people over their own lives - has to persuade people that membership is worth it, not coerce them. You're right that there's a connection between the collapse of unions and their bureaucratization and loss of the ability to persuade workers that membership is worth not just paying for, but fighting for.

But free riding is a real problem. If people can gain the benefits of union protection while avoiding the costs and risks of union membership, that temptation will be enormous. And if you believe workers deserve control over their own lives, including their workplace lives, some of that control has to be collective and democratic, not just individual. In a workplace and a society, decisions that affect everybody collectively and override individuals will get made. The alternative to democracy making those decisions isn't that everybody has infinite liberty, it's that the boss makes those decisions.

<comment><USER6> I agree to an extent, however this is where is comes back to arrogance vs humility. A union believing itself to be the only indispensable guardian of worker from abuse to the extent that they feel comfortable running a closed shop (these things are not historically rare) means you end up with two bosses. You're no less a slave to a system.

In any case, the democracy argument is tricky. Democracy might have voting, but it is not voting.

Even calling this free riding rubs me the wrong way. It implies they are claiming ownership over something that I don't think they own.

Planting you flag, demanding compliance, excluding... Whether or not you vote I don't like it, I don't think it's power to the working person. I might hold my nose and pay the fees, I might also laugh at my boss's jokes or agree that unpaid overtime. None of those things are empowering though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love it if they unionize.

The only thing I dislike is protecting the bad apples such as police union or teacher union style tenured.

I feel like company HR aren't there for you but for the company and unions are there for you.

I was in a situation were I was harass by my boss and HR was never there for me. After twice reporting, there was an incident where I decided I'm going to quit because I couldn't handle the harassment. This was in a gov agency mind you and I regret not joining a union.

We also had an option to take out of our paycheck a monthly fee for legal advice and retainers. I got that option just cause I thought it was a nice security I really don't know why I would need it. It turns out these retainers cannot help you legally against your boss or company btw.

<comment><USER9> > I feel like company HR aren't there for you but for the company and unions > are there for you.

HR is paid by management to manage -- that is, assure that the company can get the most out of for the least cost -- the "human resources" of the company.

Unions are paid by their members to assure that those members can get the most out of their employers for the least cost.

From the employees point of view, it is quite literally true that HR is not there for you whereas unions are (or, more accurately, the union you are a member of, if any, is) there for you.

> We also had an option to take out of our paycheck a monthly fee for legal > advice and retainers. I got that option just cause I thought it was a nice > security I really don't know why I would need it. It turns out these > retainers cannot help you legally against your boss or company btw.

Yeah, employer-arranged group legal services plans _never_ cover any scenario where you are against your employer; they are something the company arranges so that employers can be less distracted from serving the company's interest by outside legal matters.

<comment><USER10> I think if we could externalize the benefits of unions such that they don't protect the willfully lazy and don't hinder the brilliant, that might be the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER11> But, like crdoconnor says, unions are an exercise in democracy--and the majority of the workforce are not brilliant.

<comment><USER10> never said democracy was good. A benevolent dictator externally motivated by serving his subjects is a much better government.

for example, Jesus.

<comment><USER9> > A benevolent dictator externally motivated by serving his subjects is a much > better government.

Not sure that's generally true; a perfectly benevolent, non-omniscient dictator could be quite bad.

Not that "perfectly benevolent dictator" is a real option as a long-term form of government.

> for example, Jesus.

Jesus may have been perfectly benevolent, but isn't much of an example of benevolent dictatorship as a better form of government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unions historically were organized by people that were individually very replaceable, could not find easily another job if fired, had limited education and means to fight for their rights and improve their condition.

For this reasons ther employers could force upon them punishing work conditions and contracts, and unions allowed workers to leverage their number electing representatives that could organize them and would be better suited to negotiate with the employers.

I fail to see any connection with engineers which can easily move between jobs, command decent salaries and benefits and are more than able to negotiate better conditons individually with their employers.

Maybe a more suitable organization would resemble the medieval artisan and merchant guilds...

<comment><USER7> > Unions historically were organized by people that were individually very > replaceable, could not find easily another job if fired, had limited > education and means to fight for their rights and improve their condition.

Not really. It's not just writers and actors, examples mentioned in the post. Baseball players (stars made middle-class salaries before the union). Engineers at Boeing and other aerospace companies.

Machinists, who were the software developers of the early 20th century (high- skill workers who spent their time automating things away), were not just unionized but often union pioneers and at the leading edge of militancy. Radical machinists were at the forefront of some of the most dramatic moments in labor history, like the strikes that knocked Russia and Germany out of the First World War.

This idea that unions are for peons is a mythology that software engineers tell each other in order to separate themselves conceptually from other workers. I think in part it's motivated by a sincere recognition of relative privilege, but sometimes I'm afraid it may also be motivated by a certain concealed snobbery.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry if I came across as a snob, I honestly value highly the unions contributions to workers' rights (all workers), historically.

I just do not see any factual reason for a "SW developer union", since it is a very modern role, and as a group never experienced any need that could be solved by unionizing.

As you mention for the case of baseball players (or the actors, in another post), the union was made during a period in which the current work conditions were not seen by the category as fair.

Do SW engineer think it is actually so, today ?

<comment><USER5> >as a group never experienced any need that could be solved by unionizing.

* Breaking Apple and Google's wage fixing cartel.

* An end to those bullshit contractual terms that state the employer owns everything you dream up in the shower.

* Legal help with companies that promise the world with options and then shaft you later with fine print.

* Lobbying to trash software patents / H1B/indentured servitude visas.

* And end for stack ranking

I could go on...

<comment><USER13> Add non-competes to point #2. I know they don't exist in CA but for the rest of us they still do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In Germany they have this alternative structure called the work council. My understanding of it (I had 2-3 workers in Germany 5 years ago) was that it was essentially a union, but only the "good parts". They spoke up around things like stack ranking (and could vote it down) and generally acted as the "employee's HR". Everyone in the council also had to be an employee so you didn't have the overhead (or mob influences) of a traditional "pay in" union scheme.

Anyone here from Germany that can describe it more and talk about what you like / dislike about this system?

<comment><USER15> Also would like to hear from the Germans how their software billionaires think of unions? With unions I find it hard to imagine being able to gift 30 billion dollars to future Mark Zuckerbergs or Bill Gates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I was in a unionized position, it was frustrating because I couldn't choose to not join (technically I guess I could, but the union and the employer had already agreed that non-union employees still paid 90+% of union dues to the union. why this is legal I have no idea). Anyway, the union (which I became part of because, hey, 10% difference) really didn't help me. They were an entity with lots of institutional power, but they all had their own agenda. It's not like they __really __had my best interests at heart. It just became one more level of power to answer to. It was really frustrating, and I was happy when I was able to leave.

<comment><USER7> > why this is legal I have no idea

It's legal, and in fact normal, under the US labor law regime, because because the union is legally obligated to represent all employees equally, members and non-members, in both collective bargaining and individual grievances. Without something like this the temptation to free-ride those benefits would be pretty enormous.

<comment><USER17> They aren't obligated to represent all employees equally in collective bargaining. It'd be impossible for them to do so, because there are intra- employee conflicts of interest. Rather than being a fiduciary institution, at least when it comes to negotiation, it's a democratic one that only needs to represent the interests of 50% + 1 members of the union. Often this manifests in trading off the interests of newer members in order to secure benefits for senior members -- sometimes even going so far as to bargain on behalf of retirees who aren't even members. But other configurations of favored and non- favored groups exist (another fairly common one is part time or seasonal employees paying dues but not being effectively representated during contract negotiations).

Grievance representation is a different matter, there the union is much closer to the fiduciary ideal.

<comment><USER7> Sure, it's not equality in all respects, but they aren't allowed to discriminate purely on the basis of union membership. If they negotiate a pay level for a job classification, that's for everyone. You don't join a union workplace and then negotiate your salary separately while everyone else is on a scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can someone explain a bit more the actual current problem? I like to think that in our field of work, we prove ourselves by our abilities and nothing else. I feel like unions are first a way for the less competent to kind of hang in there and not have to try harder. I can see how it's a bit cut-throat currently, but if I'm protected then what do I have to gain by improving my skills? When I think of the industries that are heavily unionized, I picture demoralized workers with union leaders replacing their actual bosses and forcing the group to go along with things they would never find reasonable individually.

Personally, not a fan of the article. Also this line: _and nothing will be done about it so long as most software engineers remain apolitical cowards who refuse to fight for themselves._. Thanks...?

<comment><USER19> I used to feel the same as you, but after years of salary negotiations I began to realize how disadvantaged employees are in the negotiations. In part due to information asymmetry, but also negotiation expertise--or lack thereof.

Given the demand for top talent we are largely underpaid, at least look at the multipliers that top engineers can generate.

So, imagine what you could achieve with collective negotiations. You want a death march to achieve a deadline, great then pay in overtime or stock at 1.5x my salary. You've given me new responsibilities, great I love the new challenge but now contractually we are obliged to open salary discussions to bring my salary inline with those new responsibilities (usually this happens 6 months later). Just a few ideas off the top of my head.

<comment><USER20> Yep, us programmers are usually introverted but more than that we just have never been given lessons on negotiations. Business people have classes on psychology and on how to deal with workers and clients and they have far more social training and skill to use in their negotiations. Us programmers, jesus christ, we can't even negotiate to be able to use a paltry $500 training budget.

<comment><USER13> I just want the company to buy me a new mouse but I end up buying it myself.

<comment><USER20> Same. It took 2 months to get a Macbook Pro; it took a month to get a monitor (and the CTO himself walked over to buy it); and I ended up bringing my own keyboard and mouse and mouse pad and headphones. I'll end up bringing in my own monitor to dual monitor and buy my own thunderbolt->dvi cable. It's far easier than trying to negotiate expensing and having to justify it.

<comment><USER13> I just got my 2009 MBP replaced last month. What a struggle. I finally had to find the right person and explain how it was an embarrassment in front of customers to have a laptop that can't handle our software. I buy my own keyboards, mice, dongles, etc but I'm taking those with me if I leave. We have a program that allows you to purchase things. I ordered a mouse one time and was told the order total amount was too little. So I added a few other things I might need and was denied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This kind of hate that Americans have for unions is something I will never understand.

Unions have clear purpose: help the workers negotiate with the company with equal opportunities and prevent abuse from the employer. Companies have power, money and lawyers and, usually, a worker has none of those; so, if one day the worker has a conflict with the company, the Union will be there to assist the worker.

I've been working in a couple of companies that had a Union (in Europe, not USA) and it has been always a good experience. The guys in the Union knew quite well how law works in the country and helped the employer to always keep a relationship between the employer and the employee according to the law. Unpaid overtime? Mmmm... it's not going to happen. Firing someone just because the manager doesn't like him? Nahhh.... Abusive boss? Mmm... Lets talk with him about the consequences of a Lawsuit for Bullying.

Of course, if an employee did something really wrong, there was not much the Union could do for him.

But the main thing is that the employee is always in inferiority when dealing with the employer, and the Unions are there to solve that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Aside from labour issues and collective bargaining over employees getting "shafted", unions are the first to pick up unsafe working practices. As software and tech in general ingrains itself into society the risk of deadly mistakes becomes ever greater - people already die due to bugs, and we can't remove the possibility entirely but we should be damn sure when the finger is pointed at our profession that we've got it covered. The free market typically doesn't cause this kind of enlightenment.

<comment><USER5> >Aside from labour issues and collective bargaining over employees getting "shafted", unions are the first to pick up unsafe working practices.

No, the opposite is true.

[http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5813/fatalities_higher...](http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5813/fatalities_higher_at_non- union_mineslike_masseys_upper_big_branch)

<comment><USER22> This is not evidence that unions make labour more dangerous.

The last paragraph even in your link is this;

"Tougher enforcement of laws, with higher penalties, and stronger safety standards are essential. But unionized miners have the power to enforce those standards before there's an accident, and they can prevent the speed-ups, overwork, and shortcuts that are common in non-union mines, like Upper Big Branch, and that contribute to the dangers of the job.

If Congress and Obama want to do something to save miners' lives, they should first of all protect and strengthen their right to organize."

<comment><USER5> >This is not evidence that unions make labour more dangerous.

No, it's evidence that unions help make laborers safer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Step 1: Unionize software companies.

Step 2: Turn Silicon Valley into Detroit.

</comment><comment><USER24> Everyone loses union dues.

High performers lose high compensation relative to the mean engineer.

There are plenty more arguable things you can say engineers lose (stock option value with lost company competitiveness, etc) but I'm not going to bother with those. The top two are not arguable, which is enough to invalidate a simplistic clickbait title.

<comment><USER5> >Everyone loses union dues.

All they get in return is a salary that is above industry average.

>High performers lose high compensation

Sure, because unions in Hollywood totally ruined it for A listers.

<comment><USER25> > All they get in return is a salary that is above industry average.

I've always wondered if that's actually true. Typically, unions form around well established businesses that are already dominating their market where the employees can clearly see the amount of money being made hand over fist.

This works great for employees whenever things are going great but cripples the company from adapting when things are going poorly. Hostess was a decent example of that.

In other words, Unions basically seem to form to take advantage of a good situation so when they're able to extract higher salaries from the company it's because they are already at very successful companies.

That would seem to imbalance the sample data because you'd need to compare them to all of the other non-unionized equivalently successful companies for a real comparison rather than the entire industry including small players.

<comment><USER26> Hostess is a really bad example for why unions are bad. Hostess suffered from several non-union related problems such as repeatedly selling off profitable assets, failure to update their product line to keep up with trends, and repeated raises for management while the company continued to decline [0]. I can't find a relevant article to site right now but iirc the unions had already made significant concessions previously (I think it was during Hostess' previous bankruptcy). Hostess failed for many reasons and mismanagement was at least as big a problem as labour costs.

[0] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/helaineolen/2012/11/16/who- kille...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/helaineolen/2012/11/16/who-killed- hostess-brands-and-twinkies/)

<comment><USER25> I stand corrected

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are we supposed to flag this because MichaelOChurch the user id got banned? Not bothered either way, but wondered what the policy was.

<comment><USER28> Just because he was a bad poster doesn't mean he's an un-person.

<comment><USER29> It appears there's a large number of people here who disagree with you.

<comment><USER28> I wonder which they disagreed with, was it the 'was a bad poster' or the 'is still a person' part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unions at one time were necessary, but are now nothing more than a funds- sucking entity that promotes a single political party.

</comment><comment><USER31> unions are great when people want a paycheck but don't want the need to perform to be a part of the equation. I can see why that's tempting for a certain mindset, but it's a clear loser in every way except tickling those populist "worker" nerves so many seem to have.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, SAG has really stopped actors from performing. George Clooney just sits on his ass all day running out the clock until he can collect his paycheck. /s

<comment><USER33> They do!

[http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-SAG-Card](http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-SAG-Card)

I mean, they don't stop SAG members from performing, but they do keep non members out of SAG shoots.</comment></comment></comment>


People Are Starting to Realize How Voice Assistants Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/facebook-paid-contractors-listen-messenger-audio/596143/ <comment><USER2> I'm convinced that voice technology could be positively impactful for my life, but unwilling to use it when it's driven by companies who profit from the data collected. There should be an open source, secure, self-hosted option for voice assistance, how can that become a reality?

<comment><USER3> There's mycroft[0] that uses Mozilla's Common voice[1], but last time I checked the speech-to-text stuff was still being done in the cloud.

The Speech to Text was taking a general approach that isn't nearly as well optimized as FAANG-level STT. So it needed a GPU to run.

[0][https://mycroft.ai](https://mycroft.ai) [1][https://voice.mozilla.org](https://voice.mozilla.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Still only use them for two things - the weather and setting alarms/timers. Great stuff

<comment><USER5> [https://grumpy.website/post/0SGdYelIi](https://grumpy.website/post/0SGdYelIi)</comment></comment>


How to turn an Arduino-based proof of concept into a final prototype - <AUTHOR> http://digitaljunky.io/how-to-turn-an-arduino-based-proof-of-concept-into-a-final-prototype/

<comment><USER2> Are there any books for non-engineers, that go from basic concepts up to PCB design?

UPDATE: Not sure if it's going up to PCB design but apparently this one[1] seems to be the most praised on Amazon UK.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0071771336?psc=1&redirect...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0071771336?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=ox_sc_sfl_title_1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE)

<comment><USER3> I learned a lot about the basics with "Getting started in Electronics" by Forrest M. Mims III, it's very (very) accessible and I find the drawings very amusing.

Or else you have the Bible of the trade, or "The Art of Electronics" by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill that just came out for a third edition. It's an incredibly comprehensive guide but you'd better have some free time ahead if you want to read through it all :)

<comment><USER4> Agree with you. The Forrest Mims books are concise and written in a very simple manner without dumbing things down. His collection of the basics which is about four small volumes, will cost you about $50 in total. Money very well spent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Next question is how to go from final prototype into production... that can be pretty hard in practice.

Indeed, calling a prototype "final" before looking at the manufacturing side of things might not be wise.

<comment><USER6> Right. This is something that looks like the final product, but isn't ready for manufacture.

* If you run a 9V battery into a linear regulator to get 5V, there goes 55% of your energy and battery life. Consider 4 AAA cells. Work on reducing standby power consumption. When idle, put the CPU to sleep until IR is sensed. (An ATmega can do this.) Things which burn battery power when idle fail as consumer products.

* "I could (and probably should) use an ATtiny for such an application but I only had some ATMega328 in my parts bin."

* Prototype plastic things with 3D printing. Manufacture them by injection moulding. The little injection moulder at a TechShop could bang out about one box a minute. Any commercial shop can turn out thousands in a day. Making the mould is either work or expense, but you come out way ahead after a few hundred parts.

<comment><USER7> > Making the mould is either work or expense, but you come out way ahead after > a few hundred parts.

Where are you getting your mould? Everywhere I deal with wants $5K+ USD NRE.

You can 3D print a lot of stuff for $5K USD.

<comment><USER6> Get a TechShop membership, take the classes in injection moulding, CNC I, CNC II, and CNC mill. You get free access to Autodesk Moldflow, an injection moulding simulator. Learn to use it. Design and mill your mold. Make some parts using TechShop's injection molding machine. Make a new mold if you're not getting what you want.

Completely straight sides make injection moulding harder. The tooling for straight sides has to come apart to release the finished part. But a shape that's smaller at the bottom can be made in a far simpler mould. This is why cheap items such as plastic glasses are tapered so much. Look at plastic parts around you, and notice that most of them are shaped to come easily out of a simple mould.

Consider making the outer shell by vacuum-forming. That's cheap and easy, and the tooling can be made of wood. TechShop has that capability, too. It works better for shapes that aren't as sharp-cornered as a cube, so consider modifying the shape to have rounded corners.

Both of these processes will produce a much smoother finish and a stronger part than 3D printing.

Welcome to manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tip: to help make even smaller proof of concepts use a Teensy [1] instead of an Arduino.

[1] [https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/](https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article, lots of resources in there for someone getting started and your writing style is great too. Please do a follow up if you figure out the production part :)

<comment><USER3> hey thanks. I sure will add additional details along the road and probably write something else about manufacturing. Since it appears that it can be a very complicated (and costly) adventure, I contacted a local start-up incubator hoping to benefit form their expertise.</comment></comment>


Analysis of the PS3 hypervisor exploit - <AUTHOR> http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/27/how-the-ps3-hypervisor-was-hacked/

<comment><USER2> Cliff's notes: a tiny piece of electronics can glitch the PS3 memory bus, causing memory writes to fail (far below the level of the instruction set architecture). If you can force writes to fail, you break fundamental assumptions that conventional code depends on; in this case, you turn a deallocation into a no-op, leaving you with a reference to stale memory --- roughly a use-after-free bug (like what just killed IE with Aurora).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a detailed analysis of source code for the geohot glitching attack on the PS3 hypervisor. It's a combined software/hardware attack and is likely to lead to a software-only hack later on.</comment>


German Chemical Company Pilots Supply Chain Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/german-chemical-company-pilots-supply-chain-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> Is there any reported upside to storing that information in the blockchain instead of a stupid old database - except for guaranteeing funding for that project due to the hype?

I mean really - Blockchain is the new MongoDB... I haven't seen any real world problem I've seen them solve (well, better than any existing tehnology at least) that wasn't cryptocurrencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> "If trust and robustness aren't an issue, there's nothing a blockchain can do that a regular database cannot."

[https://www.multichain.com/blog/2016/03/blockchains-vs- centr...](https://www.multichain.com/blog/2016/03/blockchains-vs-centralized- databases/)</comment></comment>


How to escape lock-in with a multi-cloud stack - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/07/how-to-escape-lock-in-with-a-multi-cloud-stack.html <comment><USER2> It takes a lot of engineering time and effort to be able to switch between mentioned alternatives. E.g. Druid and Drill vs. BigQuery.

This article is more probably to convince ppl to use Google Cloud rather than how to run multicloud strategy.

<comment><USER3> ding ding ding, we have a winner.

If their "cloud" offerings were all just hosted instances of open source, there would be no lock-in, but they would have no 'competitive edge'.

I think this is more about letting Google fanboy dev's sell higher-ups on GCP because "hey look they're not trying to lock us in like AWS is!"

<comment><USER4> OP/fanboy here; i'm interested in your thoughts on our products like Cloud BigTable: OSS (HBase) API, but unique goog performance bits under the hood. Valid? How can we best move the state of the art forward?

<comment><USER2> Though I agree some Google products are great, but cloud industry lacks standardized APIs allowing to switch between products.

E.g. in the past we had OpenGL, PC which spur a lot of innovation and created whole industries. Common subset that allows seamless migrations.

E.g. I wish we have standard for big table like databases:

1\. Google Cloud BigTable.

2\. DynamoDB.

3\. HBase/Cassandra.

<comment><USER4> I'm with you! We didn't want to ship yet another one so Cloud BigTable uses the HBase API: [https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/bigtable-and- hbase](https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/bigtable-and-hbase)

<comment><USER2> Kudos for doing that. I didn't realized about it.

Common API even in non-perfect way is so much better than everybody reinventing the wheel from scratch, because some tiny use case doesn't fit in the previous API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well that's odd, they sort of forget to mention the whole premise of (all the projects composed in) openstack (which is to provide the same APIs across providers, vendors... by its very nature escaping lock-in by doing this).

Also sadly (and maybe I'm taking this wrong) but calling the holy land 'Google Infrastructure For Everyone Else' seems condescending ...

<comment><USER4> Author here: yeahhhh we don't know what to call it. CoreOS folks said this and it sorta made sense, we call out the name ookyness right in the post. AsKSHBDDVBTFRcsM seemed, well, dumb. Ideas?

<comment><USER5> Call it 'googles view of a stack', at least that doesn't make it sound like an elitist view on (one of many) versions of a stack (that yes is just one version of many stacks that have and do work for the <wider world>).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After all the noise about Firebase at the last Google I/O, it's odd that the article doesn't mention it at all. I guess its proprietary API and undocumented wire protocol with no open source alternatives would be off message...

<comment><USER7> I know everybody would love to see this, but for me it's a bit much to ask from Google to open-source Firebase since they invested quite a lot of time and money into it to get to the current version. Apart from that, I can definetly recommend [http://deepstream.io](http://deepstream.io) as a Firebase alternive, although it currently lacks an Android/iOS client (Java client is in the works).

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I agree that open sourcing Firebase is too much to ask. But there's other things they could be doing: a) document the wire protocol and license the clients for free use with any server, b) make the API definitions public domain and provide a compatibility test suite for alternative implementations, c) lead a standardization effort on real-time JSON databases, etc...

<comment><USER7> True, maybe [https://github.com/firebase](https://github.com/firebase) could help with some reverse engineering. However, I discovered the Firebase document and the deepstream.io record structure to be fairly similar, so with the help of [https://github.com/firebase/firebase- queue](https://github.com/firebase/firebase-queue) the migration from Firebase to deepstream.io + RethinkDB might be possible. As a more general note, I would expect some of the stuff you mentioned to happen in the upcoming months/years, since Firebase is right now set to become the universal plattform for app devs (analytics, dynamic links etc.) rather than a standalone database offering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the key thing is data interchange so you can get off of product X when you have business reasons to do so without running into a huge data migration project.

Standard SQL databases you can use pretty much the same tooling as if you were running it yourself. Cloud storage, you can download/upload to a new thing, but it may take some time and cost some bandwidth. BigQuery/Redshift you should be storing your data as .json.gz on S3/GCS as a backup anyway, so an export shouldn't be needed -- you'd just import the cloud storage data into another system.

I did a smallish BigTable dump a couple months ago -- kinda a PITA to do -- I don't recommend it; maybe I was doing it wrong, I'm not that familiar with hbase and it was a one-off thing.

I also did a rather small scale data migration out of app engine (~100GB) awhile back -- total PITA -- datastore dumps are protobuf, so you need to build special tooling to import the data into another database.

And generally, I don't use the other services to avoid lock-in. DNS round- robin+nginx for load balancing and ssl termination, Saltstack/Ansible deploying to Ubuntu VMs for config management and deployment. I run the databases myself so I can run it on any cloud I want -- or localhost; having a full dev environment you can create and destroy on your own machine using the same tools that you deploy to is really nice. This also enables doing things like running dev workloads on cheaper clouds (Linode) while running production in a VPC on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who worked with Google from a customer perspective, they take pride in the fact that their big data (BigTable, BigQuery, DataFlow) is proprietary and superior the their OSS alternatives (I believe they actually are). I am not saying that they should OSS it, if they build something so awesome that differentiate them, they should know how to monetize it. But at least don't come off with a post like this.

<comment><USER10> Dataflow is the hosted version of Apache Beam, which is OSS. [http://beam.incubator.apache.org/](http://beam.incubator.apache.org/)

BigTable is compatible with Apache HBase API, so it's trivial to swap out. [https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/bigtable-and- hbase](https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/bigtable-and-hbase)

Even BigQuery now has a standard SQL interface, although it's still Beta: [https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/sql- reference/](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/sql-reference/)

Working at Google Cloud myself, I find the company philosophy to be to provide standard interfaces to superior implementations. This keeps us honest, because if the door to leave is open, then you have to actually _want_ to stay. (Standard disclaimer: my opinion, not the company's.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised they didn't mention Cloud Foundry, which runs on OpenStack, vSphere, AWS, Azure and ... GCP. It's owned and managed by an independent foundation and is the most mature of the open PaaSes, having a head start of several years.

I guess they see it as a competitor to Kubernetes. Or, plausibly, Google is very large and the engineers who are working on Cloud Foundry integration with GCP are not known to Miles Ward, Head of Global Solutions.

I work for Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering to Cloud Foundry. We make our money selling a distribution, Pivotal CF.

Cloud Foundry's ability to switch cloud providers, or to take a cloud inhouse, and in future to do so seamlessly, is _very_ attractive to our customers. IaaS providers remind them the bad old days of RDBMS and middleware lockin and they do _not_ want to go back.

As for the services, it's good that Google are pointing to open alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER12> Google's support for a multi-cloud vision would be a lot more meaningful if they were offering the open source alternatives as part of their cloud platform and contributing to their development. Google has done so in a few key cases (Kubernetes and Tensorflow), but in other areas it's hard to get comfortable with the belief that there will be smooth transition to other infrastructure.

<comment><USER13> You've got a point. BigTable is an example; they've never open-sourced it and instead other OSS projects (notably the Hadoop ones) were inspired by it.

Other examples are GFS, Colossus, Spanner and F1. The OSS analogue of GFS is HDFS (AFAIK), but I know of nothing equivalent to the others. (CockroachDB is a bit like Spanner, but is much more pragmatic about its clocks.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Many companies would be better off however using cloud services since the "lockin" still costs them less than the overhead of running xyz service them self. Lock-in is only important if you have a cheaper way to run something, not if you're hiding costs in IT salaries for operations. :)

<comment><USER3> > Lock-in is only important if you have a cheaper way to run something

False. Lock-in is a business risk, and anyone who thinks it isn't is kidding themselves.

If you are dependent on a single vendor for a non-standardised service, you are also at risk if the vendor goes out of business, if the vendor decides to raise prices significantly, if the vendor decides to discontinue that service, or even if the vendor decides to change the mode of operation for that service.

You are also beholden to that vendor's internal procedures, and tech decisions, which aren't always in your best interests. You may remember last September when there was a fucking massive AWS outage, where customers couldn't access the console, EC2 instances wouldn't spin up, etc. The fault for _all_ of that, was a network disruption which caused DynamoDB to flip it's shit and make "the worlds biggest cloud provider" into the worlds biggest brick shitting machine.

They've probably made changes so that type of error is less likely in future, but that doesn't matter because you don't get to make that decision if you're a single vendor customer on AWS. Whatever choices they make, they make for you.

> hiding costs in IT salaries for operations

Here's a pro-tip for you: use of AWS/Azure/Google Cloud/etc doesn't absolve you of the need for operations staff. If you think your single nodejs developer is equally skilled and has enough time to setup and maintain your infrastructure just because it's dynamic and has a browser interface, I have a great investment offer for you, in magic beans futures.

<comment><USER15> All of this is accurate. Also on the infrastructure deployment and maintenance side, virtualization already vacated the need for any ordinary organization to spend time worrying about infrastructure. You just rent colo and slap hypervisors in.

There are still organizations messing around with overly complex internal server systems because they have bad admins or are heavy in technical debt, but these are no longer the rule.

<comment><USER3> > You just rent colo and slap hypervisors in.

For most clients I work with (who often have this "oh but shouldn't we use AWS, they're the best right?" attitude) even a few rented VPS (i.e. on shared hardware) is sufficient.

I'm a big fan of the way some providers like Rimu allow more control, which helps with scaling up - by default most customers just use one or more Xen VM's on shared physical hosts, but you have the option to rent dedicated hardware (either existing stock, or custom orders), and then you can run one or more VMs - without noisy neighbour concerns.

The "single vm on a host" seems weird to most people at first, until you realise that it allows you to migrate the VM between physical hosts.

Sure, the new hotness is servers-as-cattle and we should just provision a new instance, but that doesn't always work for smaller outfits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The blog entry covers a lot of options, but as a cheapskate who wants to play with cloud infrastructure, I'm wondering if there are any good resources for pricing comparison?

I could use AWS or Google, but if I'm just keeping a toy cloud service going. I'm not particularly worried about reliability, and I don't want to spend $30+/month.

<comment><USER17> I also recommend Digital Ocean for quick/cheap personal toy services, but for projects of enduring duration and reliability pricing calculators are totally public for AWS[1] and GCP[2]. I haven't seen any direct comparison calculators as everyone's particular mileage/needs may vary.

The good news is that at scale, the days of compute, storage, and data management becoming easy to use utilities to plug into are here, or near. The bad news is it still feels a bit too 'big' to plug small lamps into the main AWS or Cloud Platform grids, but I suspect those days are numbered as well.

[1]: [https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html](https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html) [2]: [https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/)

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee, dealing with Cloud, loving all options, but especially being able to have options.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't really understand why the title was changed to this from my original or the title of the post, since it is less informative and more inflammatory...

<comment><USER18> It looks like the current title is in the URL but not on the page itself. Maybe someone at Google changed it but retained the URL for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is one of the main reasons we built [https://github.com/exceptionless/Foundatio](https://github.com/exceptionless/Foundatio) as we didn't want to be locked into azure or aws and have a great dev experience.

</comment><comment><USER20> Gentlemen, I would like to interrupt this "google promotes open-source anti lock-in" PR party, and ask for a minute of silence for the recently departed GoogleCode.

Their actions speak louder than their PR blogs.

Edit: spelling

<comment><USER21> There's already an open standard for the core functionality of code hosting sites: Git. Projects migrate between GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and other alternatives all the time by simply changing the Git remote. There's some lock-in via extras like issue trackers and wikis but that's not difficult to migrate, especially with Markdown as a common standard so markup can be preserved.

I'm not really sure why you think that's relevant to this. Google Code simply failed to compete with the alternatives and was obsoleted. It has nothing to do with lock-in.</comment></comment>


Trolling The Internet With 'If I Were A Poor Black Kid' - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/12/14/trolling-the-internet-with-if-i-were-a-poor-black-kid/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm reminding of how one HN poster referred to John Dvorak as a "curmudgeon" and I responded that, essentially, JD was a troll: <http://scripting.com/2006/06/09.html>

Gene Marks just trolled the internet yet again for dollars. Well played.</comment>


Happiness on a Scale from 1 to 72 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@christiet/your-happiness-on-a-scale-from-1-to-72-50786fb15cd8 <comment><USER2> Paywall</comment>


Zero-knowledge attestation - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperialviolet.org/2019/01/01/zkattestation.html <comment> dane-pgp "Ultimately, in such a world, sites only operate on a single bit of information about any registration: was this public-key generated in a certified device or not? The FIDO Alliance wants to run the certification process, so then the problem reduces down to providing that bit to the site."

Are we really building a web where a single organisation gets to decide which devices people can use to access any website securely? I don't know if that's worse than a web where individual sites can say "Only Windows/Android/iOS/WeChat users can create accounts here".

Before long, the requirements for a "secure" device will be one which effectively implements something like DRM (i.e. has secret signing keys outside of your control), probably requiring biometrics (iris scan or fingerprint), and possibly phoning home to a government or corporation, to check for firmware updates or revocation information (i.e. a kill switch, like in AACS).

<comment><USER2> I think you can swap out FIDO in the role of certification for any other group willing to run the process of certifying devices, so it is basically just CA style PKI for client certs again but with an initial attempt at a free CA.

I think FIDO specifications and most organizations feeling pressure to at least support devices they approve would mostly be good for the user.

The rate FIDO will introduce more invasive behavior instead of user benefiting behavior before there is a version too common for most sites to reject is going to be related to the level proprietary dongles issued by Banks, etc, remain acceptable.

In the FIDO case, the consumer actually is the customer, so negative features will have to arrive by vendors fighting their own customers interests, and pushing institutions to reject their older devices. I think they probably will, but not at the rate they can fight users when the institution is the customer.

<comment> dane-pgp A likely scenario is that, just as with mobile OSes or browsers, there will be effectively an oligarchy or cartel of approved FIDO device manufacturers, who will end up setting the rules to make it hard for new manufacturers to join the trusted set.

This is basically a huge coordination problem, and there are natural barriers to entry against becoming a globally accepted provider of hardware which websites are prepared to trust.

History has shown that, as long as a market appears to have two options, people will be content to choose the lesser or two evils rather than invest time and effort into changing the system to add more options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have to say, the short description of arithmetic circuits in elliptic curve finite fields in this blog post is probably one of the clearest and most concise I've seen. Bravo!

As for the problem of user-agent sniffing, well, it is done for a reason. Probably there's less of it these days than there used to be as browsers got better and more standards compliant. I'd be interested to know why Vanguard restrict to YubiKeys, perhaps someone from the FIDO alliance can find out.

</comment><comment><USER4> That big financial site would be Vanguard which only allows Yubikeys for U2F. Blogger is/was a Googler right? I heard they use them for their retirement accounts.

<comment><USER5> Vanguard has recently moved to require[0] some form of 2FA for online account access, probably in an attempt to either improve security (optimistic) or shift liability for phishing to consumers (cynical). They do this by forcing[0] you to sign up for SMS 2FA initially, which as informed readers should know, is total crap for 2FA and frequently hijacked by bad actors. I'm not a fan of this policy.

[0]:

> When it comes to account security, everyone has a role to play. So we're now > requiring you to sign up to receive security codes. These codes provide a > type of 2-step verification that adds an extra level of security to your > accounts.

You can avoid signing up for 2FA after login by clicking "Get started," then "Cancel" without marking that you agree to the terms, and then manually navigating to your desired URL, e.g., [https://personal.vanguard.com/us/myaccounts/balancesholdings](https://personal.vanguard.com/us/myaccounts/balancesholdings) .

<comment><USER6> As a 2nd or 3rd factor SMS is usually fine. Hijacking a text message is still an "extra hurdle" that improves security over _just a password_. The problem comes when a site allows _account resets_ over SMS because then they've just traded one single factor (a password) for another weaker one (SMS).

<comment><USER5> > As a 2nd or 3rd factor SMS is usually fine. Hijacking a text message is > still an "extra hurdle" that improves security over just a password

Perhaps, but often 2FA is leaned on to reduce the significance of the primary factor or shift liability.

> The problem comes when a site allows account resets over SMS because then > they've just traded one single factor (a password) for another weaker one > (SMS).

Yeah, exactly — that would be one way some "2FA" systems weaken the primary factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) has the extra feature that signature computation can be split between trusted device and host. How does this compare?

<comment><USER8> There are various groupish signature systems (including DAA and BBS[1]) that would probably be a better answer here, _if you controlled the signers_. But, in this context, the devices have shipped and they do P-256 ECDSA. So the question then becomes, what _can_ we do without being able to change the signers? Can we plausibly retrofit something onto them?

[1] [http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/groupsigs.pdf](http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/groupsigs.pdf)

<comment><USER7> I see, thank you for the clarification. I was just surprised to read it takes several seconds on a 4GHz cpu. For example the chip we're using in Solo is a STM32 at 80MHz so it's prob impractical (But in fairness I don't have numbers on DAA either.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why not do this with the TPM?

<comment><USER7> FIDO attestation is compatible with TPM, just its not required, so other device manufacturer can implement it without a TPM.

<comment><USER9> What modern machines have no TPM or enclave? I know phones, tablets, laptops and desktops do. FIDO key seems weak, i have a basket of them.</comment></comment></comment>


Launching Density Labs. If you can dream it, we can code it - <AUTHOR> http://densitylabs.io/ <comment><USER2> I am not expert... The site looks great, maybe you could put a little sample of your previous works in the first part of the website, not just the "Contact us" and something that I always look, the "About us", is good to know more about who is behind of the website... Is just an humble opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback!

I'm working on the about us page. I'll add it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is the tag line I expect from people who don't deliver consistently. I want to hear you say no when the dreams are unrealistic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe I'm a realistic dreamer. I believe anything is possible. And I built things people said it was impossible.

Given a due date or budget, I set priorities and find a compromise. I do time- boxed research to increase the certainty. Also, I find the must-have and nice- to-have. Then, I build the product backlog and start weekly sprints using scrum.

I consistently deliver 88% or more of the weekly sprint goals. 88% is the average of points I delivered in each sprint for the last 3 years.

Dreams always seem unrealistic. I say yes, but what's a must-have? What can we build in the first week? Or second week? What should we build first? Which is a nicer way of saying no, right?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm the founder of Density Labs. We are a small team of Ruby and Javascript developers with more than 10 years of experience.

I would love to get your feedback about our company or the website.</comment>


Can anybody convert this BP oil spill cam to a viewable format? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html

<comment><USER2> Appears to be streaming ASF, which most media players should be able to play if you give them the URL of the stream that the page embeds: <http://mms.piersystem.com/deepwater1>

(I tested in mplayer and xine on Linux.)

<comment><USER3> Confirmed that it works.

Any idea of the scale of what we're looking at? The diameter of that pipe for instance?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am not well versed in online video. Maybe some video service is capable of transcoding on the fly?</comment>


The European question: will it be splendid isolation or miserable for the UK? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/dec/09/michael-white-blog-splendid-isolation/print

<comment><USER2> I am pretty sure that Germany and France made a major tactical error in trying to deal with an issue directly affecting just 17 EU member status through an extension to the EU treaty.

The UK had no choice but to veto the proposals as they stood.

I strongly doubt that all of the countries that have signed up to coordinated fiscal controls will be able to ratify the treaty - the next few days might well see some back-peddling. I am not even sure that the 17 member states that are in the Euro will be happy with the proposals when the implications sink in.

Net result? I think that this has brought the end of the Euro, as we currently know it, closer.</comment>


Thousands of College Kids Are Powering a Clickbait Empire - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/thousands-of-college-kids-are-powering-a-clickbait-empire-403c89c1e008#.mcsrkpa0y <comment><USER2> I wonder if Odyssey's UGC plan is starting at the wrong time--well the wave of clickbait now be a target of platforms under pressure? Or is "viruality" at any cost still the way to make a big splash on social?</comment>


Ask HN: Question about Heroku - <AUTHOR>

So I just started my first ever rails app today and am using the new Heroku garden.  Poking around with it now but does anyone know if there is any syntax completion or correction that you can enable?  I would love to be able to view all the available methods and things of that nature following a . since I am just getting started but see no such ability.
I know I could install rails on my own machine and use a better editor but any way inside of heroku to do this?
Thanks <comment><USER2> This kind of thing is really difficult to do in Ruby. (I'm guessing you're looking for something similar to the autocomplete lists you've used in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or another IDE?)

Because classes can have new methods added at runtime, individual objects can have methods added or removed at runtime, and so on and so forth, there's no easy way to reflect and grab that information while you're typing.

Having said that, try the following in irb or script/console (not sure how to do that on Heroku)

>> object.methods.sort

>> object.methods.sort.grep /something/

(where /something/ is a regexp representing the name or part of a name of what you're looking for).

Hope that helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the feedback. I knew it wouldn't be trivial if it hadn't been implemented but you are exactly right that I was looking for something similar to the list an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse used to give me of available methods when I programmed in java.

Anyways thanks for the response and I guess I will have to truly learn ruby.

First Note on Rails: has_and_belongs_to_many is painfully long to type.

<comment><USER2> Whenever you type that, you usually want has_many :through anyway :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's say i have categories that have many products but many products fit into several categories. Or I have a games with several players but players can play in several games?

Am I wrong to you has_and_belongs_to_many without using has_many :through?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make Steam Without Boiling Water - Just Add Sunlight and Nanoparticles - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com.au/science/energy/to-make-steam-without-boiling-water-just-add-sunlight-and-nanoparticles

<comment><USER2> The technology is interesting, but the title is misleading at best. The water is still boiling, but only a small fraction of the volume needs to be at the boiling point. The tidbit about "cheap and abundant source of steam" is totally uncalled for. Unless you're changing the heat of vaporization of water, you will always get the same amount of steam for the same amount of energy input.

<comment><USER3> I understood this as improving the efficiency of creating steam, though unfortunately they didn't say how much more efficient it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This lead me to an interesting Google search around engine efficiency. I always knew that engines are imperfect engine transfer devices, but I didn't realize how much is lost.

Seems like in most scenarios you're getting _at best_ 40% energy efficiency in gasoline engines and somewhere between 17% to 40% in steam engines.

Even at 17% efficiency using the sun to generate steam power seems to hold lots of potential. The trick will be to get it working at scale and able to produce a similar level of energy with the same or lower cost as existing technologies. May be a while yet, but it's an exciting time to teach your kids science as this is the kind of stuff that they'll probably see in mass later in life.

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly how large scale solar thermal power stations work.

The most common ones use thousands of mirrors around a central tower. The sun bounces off the mirrors and focuses at the top of the tower where there is a tank of water. The water is heated, boils, turns to steam, which turns a steam turbine.

Look up BrightSource Ivanpah

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool. So it basically improves water's efficiency to absorb energy in the form of light.

Can the same idea be applied to improve water's efficiency to _exchange_ heat, to make it cool easier? Then you can slap a turbine and have the perfect steam generator.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cooling it isn't hard, when the steam hits the turbine it loses a lot of its energy and will inevitably cool down and condense. Then you just pump it around back into the chamber and re-steam it.

I work in the solar thermal industry - my company (<http://www.sunapse.co>) builds software for solar thermal power plants. I can say with some authority that this is legit and VERY promising tech.

<comment><USER6> Care to explain in what respect it is promising?

the way I read this is that they put black particles that adsorb heat better in the water. That makes this produce some steam fast. I do not see how this would produce more steam than, say, a thin layer of water on top of a thin black-painted sheet that is well-insulated from below (sun heats black sheet; sheet heats water).

How is producing some steam rapidly an improvement?

<comment><AUTHOR> how long do you have? :)

So, them being 'black' isn't really the point. The point is the potential to get steam from water at lower temperatures, in less time.

If you are dealing with A LOT of water (if you were to scale this to power- plant scale), you are dealing with large 'thermal mass'. This means you need a lot of heat over time to raise all the water to a high enough temperature to create electricity.

If you run a power plant, you want flexibility. You want to switch on your power plant fast, and then shut it down when you want, without cost. This lets you speculate on the electricity market, and be more available if there is a sudden spike in electricity demand. If you're dealing with large thermal mass, you don't have this flexibility.

Also lots of advantages of lower cost - not needing heat exchangers etc but I'll leave it there.

<comment><USER2> How exactly would you scale this direct absorption? Glass tubes? Under pressure? Oops, now we're at the air-receiver dream. Never gonna happen. Also, can you guarantee that particles don't get entrained in the steam flow? I'm not sure Siemens is gonna warrantee that turbine. Sorry to be a pessimist, but it's gonna take a while longer for tech like this to make sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The big win seems to be from eliminating much of the heat dissipation that would otherwise normally occur if, e.g., you tried to use sunlight to boil water when nanoparticles aren't involved.

</comment><comment><USER8> I always wanted a steam-powered laptop. Bring on the brass and leather!

</comment><comment><USER9> Pressure.</comment>


The freelancer's guide to good jobs and great pay - <AUTHOR> http://thecreativeclass.io/guide/ <comment><USER2> I have seen Paul Jarvis' site before, and coupled with the teaser for this course, have come away feeling I've missed something.

Great writing, good work, and obviously talented. But...

"bringing in more than $20K a month for over a decade"

"I started freelancing in the '90s and [...] had a full client roster and a multi-month waiting list since I started freelancing."

What - not even one month without work set up for the following month/month- after-next? Or one month in 120+ months where income has dropped below $20k? [A decade ago, $20k was worth even more than now]

Now I've freelanced for over a decade, and my best months have been ~$18K - but my average is a lot lower than that. Short of Mr Jarvis having some advantage -- contacts and a foot in the door, ninja networking skills, or a magnetic personality: how are the above two true?

I'm especially curious as his website doesn't show him as an expert in one topic (per @bdunn et al's advice), but more of a generalist like myself. And generalists aren't supposed to make such money.

[Edit: Redid the currency conversion and upped my best months]

<comment><USER3> "And generalists aren't supposed to make such money."

If generalist don't make much money, and the best you've done isn't to your liking (because more is always better)... Why would you keep labeling yourself a generalist?

Your best month isn't that great. And if you've been at it for over 10 years, you probably have a lot of experience to share. Ever thought about re- assessing yourself, giving yourself the credit you deserve and creating a better pitch for your services?

<comment><USER2> > Why would you keep labeling yourself a generalist?

Because variety and new challenges are the spice of life? All jesting aside, if I had deep passion/believed deeply in something, I would be the specialist for that ("Appointment reminder systems for equine vets") -- but I don't.

This is the best quote I've seen on the subject. Haven't made the transition, and still trying to see what to define myself a specialist as:

"The generalist is drawn to the problem he has not yet solved. His curiosity trumps all else. He feels no discomfort in operating outside of his area of expertise because such an area is broad, shallow and loosely defined. He pursues with passion the new and the different. When the transition is made however, and he becomes used to the benefits of deep expertise—when the client ceding control to someone deserving of such control becomes the norm—he will not be easily enticed back to operating from the powerless position of the generalist. "

<comment><USER4> I'll save you other curious people the search: The quote is from 'The Win Without Pitching Manifesto' by Blair Enns.

[https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/read-it-online/the- passio...](https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/read-it-online/the-passion- dichotomy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has a _horrible_ vibe of all of these guides on how to get rich quickly, that a company would mail you for $19.99. Everything, beginning from having to supply an email address to be sent the first lesson,to cheesy "testimonials" like "now I can pay my bills 3 months in advance!" reeks of some sort of scam.

At the very top "A FREE EMAIL COURSE FROM THE CREATIVE CLASS"

And at the very bottom: "FULL DISCLOSURE: THERE'S A PAID COURSE ABOUT FREELANCING OFFERED AT THE END OF THIS COURSE."

<comment><USER6> At the very top "A FREE EMAIL COURSE FROM THE CREATIVE CLASS"

And at the very bottom: "FULL DISCLOSURE: THERE'S A PAID COURSE ABOUT FREELANCING OFFERED AT THE END OF THIS COURSE."

I fail to see anything wrong with that. They are giving away something for free in hopes they can sell something else. Nothing wrong with that at all. They are even disclosing that before you join the list, which most people don't. I guess you may not see that before joining but I see no harm.

<comment><USER7> The free course _cannot_ work.

There is a particularly good reason why the free course in how to be a successful freelancer _won 't_ teach you how to be a successful freelancer: If it did then there'd be no reason to buy the paid course.

They ought to be more clear that you're about to spend time on something that they _know_ won't do what it says it does.

<comment><USER8> Not necessarily true. I offer a free email course (also for freelancers), and I position the free course as the _strategy_ \- how should a freelancer think about sales? The premium course is the _tactics_ \- an actionable deep dive into the content covered in the free course, along with templates, scripts, video interviews, accountability, and more.

It's worked really well. People love the free course, and those who want a more tactics and accountability buy the full course.

<comment><USER9> People may love the free course, but does it actually make previously unsuccessful people successful? I think the implication here is that the free course is essentially just there to get you pumped up for the paid course, and is not actually useful.

<comment><USER8> It does. My business goal with my email course is to generate qualified leads for my course. My personal goal is to make people better off than they were before they started the course.

If the free course is nothing but the "sizzle" and a giant pitch for something paid, that's a problem. You're probably not going to get many sales for your paid course, and no one's going to refer others to the free course.

But if it's valuable independently of the premium course, and allows the reader to determine if it makes sense to go pro, then it's a win-win for all involved. At the end of my course, I ask people to reply back with what they got out of the free course and what they plan on changing as a result of it — I get a fair amount of awesome responses (which turn out to be great testimonials) from this last email: [http://i.glui.me/1A3VNtx](http://i.glui.me/1A3VNtx)

<comment><USER10> I can vouch for this. Not with the emails, but came across bdunn's free blog and podcast 2 months ago. They earned me an extra $8,000 last month, and a better end product for my client. Spending a fraction of this to get more advice (the paid course) was a no brainer.

(Brennan, feel free to use as testimonial / ask me to elaborate.)

<comment><USER8> That's great! We're actually running weekly profiles on people who have used my advice to help grow their business, and I'd love to feature you. Here's the link: [http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/student-success- spotlight-a...](http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/student-success-spotlight- application/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The hostility towards the freemium model with content is ridiculous.

If you don't get something out of the email course, _then don 't buy the paid course_.

If you do buy the paid course, there's a money-back guarantee ([http://thecreativeclass.io/](http://thecreativeclass.io/)).

It's zero-risk, free information that can likely help you level up your freelancing. It's the same thing as a blog or other free resource, just packaged in an email course.

</comment><comment><USER12> "34% of North American workers now consider themselves freelancers"

That is a very surprising claim. I'd have appreciated if they told us where they got the information.

<comment><USER13> I've been expecting freelancing to become the dominant means of finding work for a long time now. It just seems inevitable. Think about it. What does an employer offer you? Security? Nope. Pension? Nope. Predictable income? Nope. Companies have abandoned absolutely every single thing they ever offered to employees. They stagger along now just because people go to them out of habit.

Companies first came around because someone has to solve the distribution problem. That was such a valuable problem to solve that it shaped commerce and society for well over 100 years. It still shapes society. And it shouldn't. The Internet solves the distribution problem. It makes it so any 12 year old with a net connection can run circles around any mega-corporation when it comes to distributing product from point A to point B. The only place the 12 year old CAN'T beat the corporation is the place that large corporations never really managed to penetrate much in the first place - goods and service which are actually intrinsically bound to geography. You need your hair stylist to be physically near you. You need the plumber to be near you. And those people do not work for a mega-multinational.

And I expect when the change happens, it will only take a matter of weeks or months. There will be a sudden realization on all sides. Companies will realize they can't get ridiculously profitable workers for dirt cheap any more. Workers will realize their company has been playing them like a game - and realize that if they play the company at the same game instead of listening to myths their parents told them - they will kick ass any time.

Zero overhead, zero debt and obligations going up against a large organization who relies COMPLETELY on the ability to hire workers who will accept pay less than 5% of the value they actually earn for the company? It's not even a competition.

<comment><USER14> Regular employment still has one thing going for it - the unbounded term. Contract employees have to renegotiate every so often. Employment - no issue. Also your insurance keeps renewing, which is convenient.

<comment><USER15> Well, in the wrong place (i.e., downsizing org or stacked ranking), you do end up "renegotiating" just that its' mostly on employers terms, and quite an unbalanced contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 'YOU'LL GET ONE EMAIL FOR 8 DAYS AND THAT'S IT.'

I believe you don't want to/would not send any more emails, ads, any of your product spams etc (since you make clear by saying "that's it") then why not give whole thing at once and without asking for emails?

At the end of content, you could include an extra chapter explaining about paid course. By giving at once, without requirement of email, a lot of people would download the course.

<comment><USER17> I think there's a better chance of people reading it if delivered in small chunks. He also gets to deliver 8 ads (or whatever marketing opp) instead of just one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Paul -- I'm sorry there's so much hate in the comments. Thanks for posting this and thanks for sharing what you've learned :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems like great content but I wish they offered a preview (the first lesson) before requiring an email address.

On a related note, a Thinkful alum and I just launched on a guide together highlighting the same process but direct towards the client. As the intro paragraph states, we're hoping to help the client understand the hiring process without any frustration and uncertainty. All feedback welcome.

[http://www.thinkful.com/learn/how-to-hire-a-freelance- develo...](http://www.thinkful.com/learn/how-to-hire-a-freelance-developer/)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is probably just me, but the fact that the page does not even load with Ghostery running is kinda a red flag, and makes me infer that the author is much more worried about his experience than mine.

<comment><USER21> To be honest, I hadn't heard of Ghostery - I've tweaked the code to work with it (just installed and tested it).

Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> FYI Paul: I get a black page when using Ghostery on Mac Chrome 40.0.2214.115 (64-bit)

<comment><USER23> The problem is caused by Typekit, that appears to be blocked by default. Providing an alternative font could be a partial "fix" for those using ghostery (many).

<comment><USER21> I've changed the way typekit serves fonts (no longer async, but at least it loads the fallback).

<comment><USER23> I can confirm it works :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anybody here successful with the strategy of _hiring_ somebody to find good jobs for you?

<comment> white-flame There's a word for that: Sales.

<comment> white-flame In particular, view your freelancing as a service organization and partner/contract/hire a salesperson to generate and/or convert leads. Offer a commission on your revenue. We've done that before with a few jobs, and have gotten opportunities we likely couldn't score on our own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's a book which offers an alternative to freelancing as a serious career choice: [http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thinking-Like-Freelancer- Evolutio...](http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thinking-Like-Freelancer-Evolution- ebook/dp/B00PJIDO9C) I wrote an article recently which concerns this, called Stop thinking like a freelancer [http://blog.higg.im/2014/12/06/freelancing- financial-freedom...](http://blog.higg.im/2014/12/06/freelancing-financial- freedom/) Basically I was sick of all the drama that came with freelancing. I exclusively do agency work now...

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the book recommendation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The site owner may want to put a timeout on the font loading. I had to manually remove the `wf-loading` class from the `html` tag to get the page to appear.

</comment><comment><USER28> There are many sites from where you can offer consultant services quoting hourly rate. For instance www.fiverr.com and [http://hourlyconsultant.com](http://hourlyconsultant.com). The key is fixing the right rate taking into consideration all the factors that define your work profile.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd love to read a blow-by-blow on how you put together the site, course and explainer video. How much did you do yourself, how much did you contract out, did you use any firms as opposed to individual freelancers, how did you decide, and where did you find your team?

<comment><USER21> I wrote the course myself, I hired a local freelancer that I know to film the video. I also programmed the site and design it myself. I hired a freelance editor too (who I've worked with for 10+ years).

So the videographer was a recommendation from a freelance friend. My editor I've worked with in collaboration on many client projects, so I know her work is amazing.

The site runs on WordPress, payment through memberful.com, emails go out through MailChimp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are the courses suitable for the professionals who want to become freelancers?

Thank you for sharing, I have signed in.

<comment><USER21> It would give you a framework for starting to work on gigs with clients, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Damn, that was a good pitch video. Nice work, Mr. Jarvis.

Definitely one of the best I've seen. Clear, concise, relatable, human, and funny.

I wonder if the classes are like the pitch video?

<comment><USER21> Thank you!

The classes/lessons are slideshows - as I've found people retain more of what I'm talking about if there are words on the screen.

It's all the same stunning personality though, haha...

<comment><USER32> I bought this out of desperation. Quit my job a few days ago and I only have runway for at MOST 3 months. Going to try the freelance thing again.

I mostly got inspired by this site + [http://ivomynttinen.com/blog/freelance- business-report-2014/](http://ivomynttinen.com/blog/freelance-business- report-2014/). Ivo is a fucking beast freelancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wow that whole site doesn't render with Ghostery blocking Typekit by Adobe.

</comment><comment><USER34> Seriously, this is the kind of garbage that makes me long for a downvote button.

</comment><comment><USER35> $20K/month is not an impressive claim for something that has "great pay" in the title. You can make that much on a W2.</comment>


Facebook Website Redesign - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/facebook-tries-to-wipe-the-slate-clean-by-giving-its-bu-1834422391 <comment><USER2> It looks like Twitter to me. Like a _very_ bright Twitter.</comment>


Descubriendo Erlang - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/erlang-battleground/descubriendo-erlang-12b45a1463e9 <comment><USER2> This looks on-topic, but this forum is in English, so most post in other languages are ignored or flagged, unless they are very good and there is no equivalent information available in English. Try to make and post a translation of this in English.</comment>


I Went from Sales to Front End Developer in 16 Months - <AUTHOR> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-i-went-from-sales-to-frontend-developer-in-16-months/ <comment><USER2> Why... why...</comment>


Catching a Unicorn with GLTR: A tool to detect automatically generated text - <AUTHOR> http://gltr.io/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if these detections would become just impossible once NLP researchers figure out how to integrate adversarial training (specially GANs) into their models.

<comment><USER3> What OP is detecting is not a flaw in GPT-2 but in how GPT-2 is used to generate samples: it chooses only from the top k most likely words, so you can easily detect GPT-2 simply by running it and noting that no sampled word appears from below, say, the top-40 candidates, while human text will occasionally have a top-41 or a top-99 or a top-1000 word.

If you fix that with a better sampling strategy like beam search or RL finetuning, unclear how well OP-like methods would work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to see a Chrome plugin for this, to look at text on various sites and flag out of it's likely machine-written.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's neat, but many of the tests are using text generated with the same GPT-2 data set used for testing the text.

(Also, whatever generates their images of text blocks has what looks like interpreting Windows-1252 as Unicode.)

<comment><USER6> > _has what looks like interpreting Windows-1252 as Unicode_

The other way around. The underlying data is UTF-8; it's being misread as either latin1 or Windows-1252. E.g., "Pérez",

      Original string: "Pérez"
      Encoded as UTF-8: b'P\xc3\xa9rez'
      Those bytes, erroneously decoded as latin1: "Pérez"

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

These two (latin1 and Win-1252) are the most common mis-decoding. UTF-8 data is common. HTML/HTTP/the "text/*" mimetype default to latin1. Windows, for North American users, defaults to Win-1252 in places. (Both encodings are extremely similar.)

It used to be that if you typed "Québec" into Google, it'd give you Québec, and wouldn't even issue a "did you mean?", just silently corrected it. Seems like that's not the case anymore. Back when it was, I wondered if the "machine" thought that Québec was an alternative spelling. (The results for "Québec" are still decently relevant.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds a good idea for deterring spam, etc. until you realise that such techniques can also be used for very insidious forms of censorship. Imagine writing about some controversial topic/opinion and getting "you've been banned because your comment looks like it was written by a robot."

<comment><USER8> If your comment is so banal as to trip this filter then maybe you haven't actually contributed anything to the discussion anyway, so what is the loss? I don't mean this to be as glib as it might sound, but as the old saying goes, 'opinions are like assholes, everyone has one' and if your proposed addition to the discussion is indistinguishable from auto-generated text there is little lost by removing it.

<comment> xkcd-sucks I think the implication is either that

1) The people running the filter are saying that in bad faith, they have actually trained it to catch "Bad Ideas" instead of autogenerated text

2) Training a GAN to mimic your political opponents and spamming sites so the bad political opinions themselves become heuristics of spam

<comment><USER8> In the referenced paper the trigger for the filter is lack of novelty, not any specific content. In neither of the cases you present would you be able to demonstrate that a filter like this could be operated in way to discriminate on content rather than on novelty other than by shifting the corpus in a manner that would be obvious to everyone.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Goodbye, Digital Camera; It Was Fun, but We're Done - <AUTHOR> https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1332503& <comment><USER2> I've got an iPhone X in the mail that I'm waiting patiently for, and I've got the 7+ currently. It's a really good camera ... for a phone camera. But it absolutely sucks compared to a real digital camera. They are all basically pinhole cameras with no optical zoom and a really small sensor size, so they will always be worse than a real dedicated digital camera, especially one with interchangeable lenses.</comment>


Blood, Sweat and Tears (City of the Future, Part 2) - <AUTHOR> https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-sweat-tears-city-future-part-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Part 1: [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bijlmer-city- future-p...](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bijlmer-city-future- part-1/)

Discussion of part 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434759)</comment>


Ask HN: How do I jump from iOS dev to firmware/embedded software engineering - <AUTHOR> I'm a developer in my early 30s with an education on software engineering. When I was in college I was fascinated by low-level programming but when I got into the job market I got stuck with higher level development.
Right now I'm a iOS developer but that's not my passion. I feel that I would rather be developing firmware in C or Forth for avr/arm or eventually even get into VHDL. I like digital electronics, low-level programming, protocols and bitwise stuff.
I know there's a strong hardware hobby culture around arduinos/teensy/raspberry but I never really got into it. I could start there, I have a lot of projects I want to do but since I'm programming full-time it's difficult to come home and spend my remaining time programming.
I've also seen some embedded master programs that I would love to take but even though education is free in Europe I would still need a job to pay my bills.
I'm a very decent POSIX C developer but embedded is different. I lack the experience. How easy it would be to change careers at this point? I would love your feedback and 2cents.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> It's my belief that the future is a portfolio of things you built as a "resume". We have been building embedded projects (and the hardware around them) in my program called Contextual Electronics ([http://contextualelectronics.com](http://contextualelectronics.com)). Maybe this would be of interest in the short term?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your website looks a good idea. Have you released any content yet?

<comment><USER2> Yep! There was a 16 week session last year where we built a bench instrument. This year we're about 8 months into a robot build with multiple boards. It's now "ongoing" content, so we have legacy content and people signing up get access to everything.</comment></comment></comment>


When Data Science Destabilizes Democracy and Facilitates Genocide - <AUTHOR> http://www.fast.ai/2017/11/02/ethics/ <comment><USER2> Most it this made sense to me, but the section on 'bias' seemed to leave the ground a little more than I think is healthy. The problem is correctly identified. The solutions offered are OK, but the examples and concluded causes appear unreasoned.

Probably the clearest example is in the section on stereotypes. Again, the problems are solidly identified but the understandings of their causes are lacking. The implication of surprise that an algorithm with real-world data would associate being a doctor with being a male and being a nurse with being a female is highly suspicious. There's plenty of reason to assume a social bias feedback loop as discussed in the beginning of the article, but the argument that this is a result of bias rsearch is unsound. This correlation is consistent in the statistical data, in all societies and cultures on Earth. Again, there's plenty of reason to argue the results correlate with _societal_ gender bias, but not _researcher_ gender bias. Big difference. The race/skin color correlations argues in the article _do_ have sound arguments for _researcher_ bias.

<comment><USER3> The whole point of this article is that good data science involve detecting and avoiding these biased feedback loops, because software can amplify them.

It literally says: _"It's not that data can be biased. Data is biased." Know how your data was generated and what biases it may contain. We are encoding and even amplifying societal biases in the algorithms we create._

<comment><USER2> ??? I just read the article... not sure what you're point is. My point is that the author "encoded and even amplified" bias that the data _did not_ have. Most of the article concerns being aware of inherent bias _in_ data. My point concerns bias that the author has ascribed _to_ the data.

<comment><USER3> Gender bias in Word2Vec data is a well known problem. The article provides references. It's an unsupervised algorithm, and the Google pretrained vectors are trained from news coverage, so not really a researcher issue (insofar as they select an unusual datasets or something).

Edit: to clarify, your claim is that Word2Vec data isn't biased even though there is a link right there showing how it is? Why do you think that?

If you use that data in a system then you reinforce that bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh please.

This article is completely correct of course. But there is zero hope that it'll be taken seriously at all.

Just the other day, here on HN someone seriously proposed the idea that hate speech doesn't lead to violence against minorities[1]. I pointed at the Rwanda genocide, and got voted down (a lot), because the OP claimed that 10% of deaths didn't prove my point. Then I pointed out that was at least 60,000 deaths, and that was downvoted too.

Enough people clearly want to ignore things which disagree with their world view that there is zero chance that this destabilising behaviour will stop.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15936785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15936785)

<comment><USER4> You told people to look up a topic but did not provide any link as a recommended starting point nor any justification why Rwanda's history is relevant in the context of hate speech; now you just refer to yourself.

<comment><USER5> You shouldn't need to provide links for every topic of general knowledge, like the factual existence of wars that have taken place within living memory or are part of an educational curriculum. Wikipedia is an adequate place to begin researching a topic like that. If you can't see why Rwanda's example is relevant in this context then I urge you become more informed about the topic.

<comment><USER4> I am actually very familiar with the topic and I am thus aware that one can find many, seemingly contradictory, sources. But thanks anyway.

I was simply justifying my downvote.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Terms and Conditions May Apply - <AUTHOR> http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/termsandconditionsmayapply/ <comment><AUTHOR> Talk about good timing.</comment>


Amino: Live CSS Editor for Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://aminoeditor.com/ <comment><USER2> I'd love something that compiles changes I make in the inspector in to a CSS override, this sadly does not do that.

It's nice to have an ok editor and finally SASS, but I'll stick to stylus for now.

\- Stylus has true live CSS editing (if it has no errors it comes in to effect without saving).

\- I totally don't get why you would want all your code in a drop-down that closes as soon as you try to inspect an element or something

</comment><comment><USER3> and for Firefox?</comment>


Show HN: Ekho, a simple way to add voice interactivity to your site - <AUTHOR> http://ekho.io/

<comment><USER2> Nice implementation!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> for chrome? seriously?

<comment><USER4> I am sure other browsers will be supported in future. Why would a developer spend time testing other browsers if the project is not even known to succeed?</comment></comment>


1964 IBM 029 Keypunch Card Punching Demonstration [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnGbcM-H8c <comment><USER2> Oh, my-my, a blast from the past—the KP-29 exactly as I remember it. We had a few 026s as well but the 029 was the much preferred machine.

I remember many late nights coding FORTRAN statements on those card punches until university security chucked us out of the punch card room. Those IBM punches were very nice machines, they were exceptionally well engineered and very reliable, and they worked very well.

Reckon we were some of the first hackers too. Back then, time was so precious on our university's IBM360 that we students were only allowed a few seconds processing time per job. Some of us figured out a neat solution to the problem which was to raid old discarded fan-fold printouts from garbage dumpsters at the back of the Electrical Engineering School that the computing department had used for its own purposes. On them, we'd find 'secret' $Job control codes that we put onto our own $Job control cards which we'd then insert surreptitiously into the batch job, this enabled us students to alter/increase the time given to any job within a student batch run.

Back then, no one in authority seemed to think we would ever get up to such mischief.</comment>


Just launched a free Apple help site that uses iMessage and FaceTime, ask away! - <AUTHOR> http://www.boxy.co/index.html

<comment><USER2> How are you going to make money? Can you track/located a iphone that does not have an icloud account?</comment>


Our CEO Tells It Like It Is - <AUTHOR> http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/011169.html <comment><USER2> I am surprised to see that after 10 hours of this item being posted I am the only to respond.

I think the CEO was absolutely correct and should be praised for his leadership in this matter. No company is perfect, Craigslist included, but the 1st Amendment is not dead in the US of A!</comment>