Semaphores are surprisingly versatile - <AUTHOR> http://preshing.com/20150316/semaphores-are-surprisingly-versatile/

<comment><USER2> Semaphores are _theoretically_ versatile. However, when they are actually used to construct higher level primitives, the result are "Rube Goldberg devices". It is bad engineering.

Also, note that the examples on this page depend on atomic operations in addition to semaphores, not semaphores alone. If you _only_ use semaphores, you must also use them to protect the accesses that are required to be atomic, which complicates the code.

Let's look at LightWeightMutex. This object is so light weight that we can't even ask it whether it is currently locked, and who the owner is. These features are important for error detection and debugging: real-world requirements that actual mutex implementations satisfy.

Another comment; I find the following completely pointless:

        void lock()
        {
            if (m_contention.fetch_add(1, std::memory_order_acquire) > 0)
            {
                m_semaphore.wait();
            }
        }

A semaphore _is already supposed to implement counting_. What we have here is an implementation of a counting semaphore, using a semaphore.

That is to say, to implement a light weight lock using a semaphore, we actually need only this:

       void lock() { m_semaphore.wait(); }

The semaphore _already has a built in atomic variable_ equivalent to the m_contention. The atomic increment and test wrapped around this is redundant, and has nothing to do with implementing a lock with a semaphore.

<comment><USER3> If I implement the mutex as you suggest -- by using the native semaphore directly, with no separate counter -- the running time of "testBenaphore" increases from 375 ms to 3 seconds on my Windows PC.

As mentioned in the article, most mutex implementations already use this trick. So you can just use std::mutex, and things are fine.

In the past, though, runtime environments weren't so well-developed, so there definitely [was a point]([http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy- docs/benewsletter/Issue1-26.h...](http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy- docs/benewsletter/Issue1-26.html#Engineering1-26)).

<comment><USER2> That looks like some API/kernel call overhead; you've moved the fast path of the semaphore implementation into user space. But what you have there is undeniably a semaphore implementation: atomically tweak a counter, and based on that result, wait or signal.

<comment><USER3> > you've moved the fast path of the semaphore implementation into user space.

I see now why your original comment was a bit inflammatory. I should have been more clear in the post that by "lightweight", I meant exactly that: "fast path in user space". I guess not everyone shares this vocabulary. I'll improve the post.

You're right that this lightweight mutex is a semaphore, of course. But not every semaphore is a lightweight mutex. So the technique isn't pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently found myself in need of a semaphore in go. They're quite easy to make out of channels:

Implementation:

[https://github.com/scraperwiki/s4log/blob/master/semaphore.g...](https://github.com/scraperwiki/s4log/blob/master/semaphore.go)

Use:

[https://github.com/scraperwiki/s4log/blob/2714f9553880121ad6...](https://github.com/scraperwiki/s4log/blob/2714f9553880121ad6852846a4761f65a22967d8/commit.go#L103-L105)

Useful for:

1\. Writing a web handler which may use some CPU time and you don't want too many of them in flight at once (to prevent them from all slowing down to mud). (Best combined with something to abort if we had to wait to long before we could even do computation)

2\. Execute a parallel upload to S3, but avoid doing too many at once (again, because you don't want very many of them contending on the network connection such that none proceed).

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in writing concurrent code worth running, Mike Acton has a nice introduction:

[http://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/2009/08/roundup...](http://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/2009/08/roundup- recent-sketches-on-concurrency-data-design-and-performance.html)</comment>


Boeing agrees to buy Airbus jets to ease 777 sale - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/boeing-agrees-to-buy-airbus-jets-to-ease-777-sale/articleshow/12949050.cms <comment><USER2> tl;dr

      Just like car dealerships, the world's dominant aircraft
      manufacturers sometimes offer to take back their old
      models when trying to persuade airlines to upgrade to the
      latest models</comment>


Ask HN: Hackable iPod-like hardware? - <AUTHOR> I would like something like an iPod nano/touch with the hackability of a Raspberry Pi (Linux). I don't need the GPIO etc as I'll never be hacking hardware, and I definitely want good battery life. A screen is not important, but a few buttons & some sensors would be nice. Anything like that out there ? <comment><USER2> Really depends what you want to do.

The Intel Edison kit from Sparkfun has an OLED screen with buttons on it. You can easily add sensors, speakers, etc. It runs Linux and can act as an access point (but not at the same time you use it as a station) so you can ssh in from your phone and do more complex stuff. You'd need an enclosure of some kind but 3D printing is common these days.

Another option would be something like the TinyDuino, which has a wearable kit. It's Arduino but maybe it could be made to work.

The new Raspberry Pi Zero W would be the perfect form factor but I haven't seen any interesting in terms of wearables, and it runs at 5 volts which is a bit discouraging for this use case.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is your use case?

You are asking for something like an iPod, but the screen is not important. When you look at an iPod touch, the main feature is the screen! I think you need to give a better description of what you are looking for. Is it a one-off project, or are you developing a product?

If you want something like an iPod with a touch screen, look at android devices.

Otherwise there are add-on boards for the raspberry pi that let you connect a battery.</comment>


The raise of AAA+ Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-25-weak-aaa-launches-are-a-precursor-to-industry-transition <comment><USER2> I suppose this is the natural consequence when you repeatedly release game sequels--your audience potentially grows tired of the same thing.

Further, I'd argue that we are in the dark ages of gaming. Yes, game engines, broadband, and hardware make for incredible experiences. But, publishers aren't daring with new experiences, so the market is filled with constant rehashes of the same franchise. Since that didn't make enough for the industry now we have deluxe editions and season passes ad nauseum.

Where is game innovation? Instead of DLC for new maps, where are the procedurally generated levels to keep a game fresh? Where is the progress in AI for single player games? Where are the driving games filled with traffic to drive around?</comment>


Digital output produced this year would fill 75 billion Apple iPads - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/it-business/it-department/news/index.cfm?newsid=20126 <comment><USER2> The ipad is not a unit of storage.</comment>


Intel eats Infineon's mobile unit for $1.4B, looks to 'accelerate 4G LTE' - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/30/intel-gobbles-up-infineons-mobile-unit-in-1-4-billion-deal-lo/ <comment><USER2> and their revenue is below expectations!! [http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=503033&R...](http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=503033&ReleasesType=Financial%20News)</comment>


Goldman CEO on Bitcoin: "A Vehicle to Perpetrate Fraud" - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-30/blankfein-says-too-soon-for-bitcoin-strategy-as-volatility-jumps <comment><USER2> "A Vehicle to Perpetrate Fraud"... says the guy whose organization has perpetrated wide-spread fraud at the Board level, and gotten away with _most of it_ with just a congressional hearing and a fine.

"There was little ambiguity about the criminality of Rajaratnam's intentions. In one tape played at trial, he called a contact and said, "I heard yesterday from somebody who's on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose two dollars per share." Rajaratnam quickly traded his shares, avoiding major losses, thanks to this inside information. Convicted in 2011, he was sentenced to eleven years in prison, and given a ten-million-dollar fine, along with an order to forfeit more than fifty-three million in gains. (Gupta, who was also a board member at Goldman, was later convicted of insider trading as well.)"

Source: 2016 : The Man Who Terrifies Wall Street: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/the-man-who- te...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/the-man-who-terrifies- wall-street)

</comment><comment><USER3> Goldman Ceo should be the last person to call something fraud

<comment><USER4> Well if someone knows fraud, it would probably be the Goldman CEO lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > ... captivates everyone from mom-and-pop investors to high-frequency traders > and Wall Street banks.

If this isn't a recipe for financial disaster, I don't know what is. When dumb money, fast money, and smart money are all feeding off the same carcass, things will get ugly.

</comment><comment><USER6> He's attempting to jawbone down the price so that Goldman can buy.

</comment><comment><USER7> So I'm guessing that Goldman is all in on Bitcoin then?

<comment><USER8> It's arguably more likely that a few traders there are planning on pumping Bitcoin until it goes on the exchanges soon. Then, they'll take a short future position and remove their support.

<comment><USER9> This is a popular theory in many of the cryptocurrency Discord servers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You could say the same thing about Goldman Sachs.

</comment><comment><USER11> People do know CEO or employee's opinions doesn't really represent company's views, right?

Because here's what happened: "Goldman Says the Bitcoin Haters Just Don't Get It"

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/goldman-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/goldman- s-currie-says-bitcoin-is-a-commodity-much-like-gold)

<comment><USER12> When the CEO is making a public statement, as the CEO, then they most definitely are representing the view of the company.

An employee may or may not be depending on their role and the circumstances. For example, if they are the company's press officer then they will be representing the company's view.

Your link is regarding the view of an analyst who works at Goldman's. Because of the nature of their role, they can and do make statements that are not company policy nor strategy.

As such, of the two, Blankfein's statements will better reflect the official position of Goldman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like an endorsement.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, let's not talk about that $10 billion fraudulent bailout.

</comment><comment><USER15> Former Microsoft CEO on Linux: "Linux is cancer"

Microsoft CEO on Linux: "Microsoft loves Linux"

Just give him time.

Then, Goldman Sachs should not be pontificating about fraud. Remember 2008?

<comment><USER16> Goldman is probably secretly buying bitcoin while trying to keep the price down so they don't have to pay too much for it.

<comment><USER17> very likely. a company like Goldman can make more money manipulating the BTC market, versus simply buying coin as an investment, which would spike the exchange rate up and reveal them.

Goldman already has a cryptocurrency patent portfolio and top-notch lobbyists in Washington. I wonder what they're using both for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If my scummy business model was threatened like this I would probably also call the replacement "A Vehicle to Perpetrate Fraud"

<comment><USER12> How is Bitcoin replacing Goldman? They're an investment bank.

If anything, it'll be net positive for Goldman if Bitcoin settles down as a sensible investment vehicle as they can then make fees flogging it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> When we do it then it is fine, if others do it then OMG competitors!! /s

</comment><comment><USER20> 01:45 - "In fact, the Bloomberg system is a blockchain"

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't see the word "Fraud" in the entire article.

</comment><comment><USER22> Fiat currency is no different.</comment>


IBM blamed for Australian online census debacle - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/census-debacle-laid-bare-malcolm-turnbull-to-decide-which-heads-will-roll-20161025-gsacqc.html <comment><USER2> There have been some high profile instances over the past few years of consultants (IBM, Accenture, etc.) delivering awful, broken solutions after being paid big dollars by governments.

Can anyone who has worked at one of these consultancies (or on the procurement side in government) shed light on _why_ this keeps happening?

<comment><USER3> Especially when IBM Australia has been accused of "ethical transgressions" [0] in a report by the State of Queensland. Although in that case, part of the issue was the government not going after them for damages competently/aggressively enough.

I'm thinking big consultancies either have the "right" connections or are simply better at talking to bureaucrats who ultimately decide what gets funded?

[0] [http://www.healthpayrollinquiry.qld.gov.au/home?a=207203](http://www.healthpayrollinquiry.qld.gov.au/home?a=207203)

<comment><USER2> Maybe the big consultants are the only ones with the resources (and patience) to shepherd a proposal through a government RFP process.</comment></comment></comment>


So you want a flamethrower - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/root-ventures/so-you-want-a-flamethrower-76289ad2338b <comment><USER2> There's still the reasonable argument that this represents a collector's item, conferring appreciable value more reliable than many cryptocurrencies.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use in your New Tab window? - <AUTHOR> Is is the classic Google Search? A list of shortcuts? Or any other useful page or tool? <comment><USER2> I'm using Momentum[0], which has my ad hoc todo-list, beautiful scenery images, inspirational quotes and weather.

I also like how it says "Good morning/afternoon/day/evening Hamatti". Makes me feel good.

Its todo list is not my main list (I use pen and paper for that) but I use it as an addition every now and then.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfkn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfknpbbblfpciffpaejjkokdgca?hl=en)

<comment><USER3> After installing Momentum I was about to do a google search for some troubleshooting. So I open a new tab like always and paste the error message from my clipboard and press ENTER in haste. Momentum must've had autofocus on it's initial "What's your name" input field, because I mistakenly set my name to `ntu gnome-software error`. This was a year ago, but it's so amusing I just kept it.

Good evening, ntu gnome-software error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google Art Project, which makes the wallpaper for new tabs into a work of fine art from Google's library of museum scans.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-art- project...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-art- project/akimgimeeoiognljlfchpbkpfbmeapkh?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info- dialog)

</comment><comment><USER5> I use an extension that is called "Blank New Tab" and does exactly that. It's lovely.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blank-new- tab/beaf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blank-new- tab/beafekehjfhnkpnnjegadfdncaipnljp)

<comment><USER6> I also prefer blank tabs. This one is from Chromium team:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab- page...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab- page/dpjamkmjmigaoobjbekmfgabipmfilij)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Along with New Tab iFrame[0], I use TabTerm[1] for a terminal in the new tab page.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab- iframe/pjj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab- iframe/pjjgnpjhedgolccfdplecmnapdjhlknm)

[1] [https://github.com/tabterm/tabterm](https://github.com/tabterm/tabterm)

</comment><comment><USER8> I enjoy Surge[0] which automatically picks high-ranking backgrounds from /r/wallpapers and includes a nice time/weather feature. When I'm not on Chrome, I usually use Ricain's OwnPage[1]

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/surge-material- new...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/surge-material-new- tab/fimecghnlpkdjcjhpaemckklaimbafae) [1] [http://ricain.github.io/ownpage/](http://ricain.github.io/ownpage/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I was using Panda new tab extension ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/panda-5-news- inspi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/panda-5-news- inspiration/haafibkemckmbknhfkiiniobjpgkebko?hl=en)) earlier but it was more of a distraction than being helpful. I'm on chrome's default new tab page now.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using New Tab Draft for a while. It's pretty minimalist, just a blank page (colours configurable) that I can make some notes on it I want to.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab- draft/nmfj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab- draft/nmfjkeiebceinkbggliapgfdjphocpdh?hl=en)

<comment><USER11> I used a similar extension called Write Space for a long time. For some reason it's a 404 in the Chrome store right now but very minimal and useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> An extension called Currently that shows the current time and weather. Pretty minimalist and I like being reminded of life outside the 4 walls of my office.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/currently/ojhmphdk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/currently/ojhmphdkpgbibohbnpbfiefkgieacjmh?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm using this chrome plugin: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/modern-new-tab- pag...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/modern-new-tab- page/ogllliimbhgmclkgjldeffhjbhaenapo)

And set it up with 10 shortcuts, all the apps I use 99% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER14> Dream Afar [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dream-afar-new- tab...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dream-afar-new- tab/henmfoppjjkcencpbjaigfahdjlgpegn?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER15> I make it blank black for when I want a black screen.

      body:empty {
        background: black !Important;
        margin: 0 !important;
      }

(the ":empty" is important to keep iframes without set background white)

</comment><comment><USER16> about:blank

<comment><USER17> This. The last thing I need when loading a new tab is either a) distractions or b) network connections or JavaScript keeping the browser busy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unsplash Instant[0] is my favorite. It shows a new background from Unslpash for every tab.

[0] [https://instant.unsplash.com/](https://instant.unsplash.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I use the planet labs images plugging (on mobile, so can't look up exact link). It shows satellite imagery from their dataset of interesting places. I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER20> i use cow tab [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cow- tab/iecanhcmkn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cow- tab/iecanhcmkngjdhpgnaijdcfnhpjdjffc)

</comment><comment><USER21> "New Tab Tools" for firefox.

</comment><comment><USER22> about:newtab</comment>


The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences - <AUTHOR> http://oeis.org

<comment><USER2> By Neil Sloane at AT&T research

<http://www.research.att.com/~njas/>

I also discovered it from HN[1] :)

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579925>

<comment><USER3> Its first editions were in paper format:

[http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Integer-Sequences-N- Sloan...](http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Integer-Sequences-N- Sloane/dp/0125586302)

and the original, from 1973,

[http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Integer-Sequences-N- Sloane/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Integer-Sequences-N- Sloane/dp/012648550X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A059893 Reverse the order of all but the most significant bits in binary expansion of n. n = 1ab..yz -> 1zy..ba = a(n).

is awesome <http://oeis.org/A059893>, look at the scatterplot <http://oeis.org/A059893/graph>

<comment><USER4> This is "because" those correspond exactly to the Hammersley sequence, a well- known quasi-random sequence of points:

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HammersleyPointSet.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A great resource!

If you don't have time to peruse it in depth, they have a 8.5 minute video which runs through 1000 sequences. It starts out a little slow, but some of the later examples are quite bizarre.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCWglXljevY>

</comment><comment><USER6> I once was doing a project euler challenge of some sort, and I had to find the nth term of some sequence. My code for generating the sequence was taking too long (order of hours), and I didn't feel like googling. So I downloaded the sequence from oeis and output the correct term.

Problem Solved!

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting you should post this, I just made a submission relating to my discovery of OEIS:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2496701></comment>


I open sourced my startup - <AUTHOR> So I've spent the last 3 years attempting to teach a computer how to understand recipes. What they taste like, ingredients you'd need to make them. If they have animal products or are gluten free. If they're a dessert. This work involved a lot of natural language processing, Beyesian filtering, etc.
With this, I built a very powerful recipe search engine. It allows you to find recipes using some pretty interesting queries. For example, if the user wants to make 5 recipes that will efficiently use a head of lettuce, 12 bananas, a pound of salmon, and 6 eggs, it can find the most efficient set of recipes that will use as much of those ingredients as possible, while requiring the user to have to buy as few new ingredients as possible. It's also able to normalize the ingredients across all recipes to build really accurate shopping lists. For example, if one recipe calls for 6oz of cheddar cheese and another calls for 1/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese, it knows the weight of 1/4 cup of shredded cheese and can combine that with 6oz. So, pretty interesting technology.
Unfortunately, after several iterations, this completely failed to gain any traction as a consumer product. However, I got dozens of emails from other entrepreneurs who were trying to build similar products and were very interested in the technological side of things. I had a lot of asks if I could share the code, or turn it into a web service.
For this reason, I have decided to re-factor my code as a free, open source project. I'm hoping to find some other developers who could build on what I've done to create the next big recipe startup. The code is all written in C#, but could almost definitely be run under Mono.
It's up at: https://github.com/KitchenPC/core
If you'd like to help contribute, by all means!  I really hope it can help someone out! <comment><USER2> Mike, its pretty sad that you had to close this down. I work at Cucumbertown, [http://cucumbertown.com/](http://cucumbertown.com/) that's pretty close to what you do but not exact. We don't enter the search vertical but focus just on building this as a replacement for food bloggers. Jef Miller (Punchfork acquisition to Pinterest) wrote something very similar for Pinterest [http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/courtesy-of-punchfork- acqui...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/courtesy-of-punchfork-acquisition- pinterest-launches-a-recipe-search-engine/) though not exact.

From my learning: Build a solid BD team that can focus on taking your core value proposition to the masses. As a founder create the story. The market is flooded with recipe related products that exist since 1995. Unrelated but I wrote the first V of Cucumbertown in C#. Then had to port to Python.

I hope you don't lose the enthusiasm to continue keeping this open sourced.

</comment><comment><USER3> The big problem with recipe startups is that it's incredibly hard to make money.

Most startups either go the route of affiliate sales (incredibly hard; supermarkets make tiny margins as it is) or brand promotion (which is better but you still need a huge audience and dedicated sales team to make it work).

I can't think of any recipe focused startup that's managed to raise money from top-tier VCs (although some have used it as lead gen method for other businesses).

<comment><USER2> I work at Cucumbertown: [http://www.cucumbertown.com/](http://www.cucumbertown.com/) and we've managed to raise from venture funds. We are not just recipes though. It's more about the cooks: [http://jane.cucumbertown.com/](http://jane.cucumbertown.com/). There are a lot interesting models outside of ad & affiliate sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kinda related, but I know there's a pretty decent-sized market for startups/companies/groceries that need barcode data for the entire universe of foods for their apps (Think MyFitnessPal). I know of someone making 6 figures a month selling this data (he makes 5 figures per sale on average), and he's probably one of the few reliable data suppliers.

So for anyone looking to get into this type of market, that's an idea for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: [https://github.com/KitchenPC/core](https://github.com/KitchenPC/core)

</comment><comment><USER6> Could I ask why you didn't turn it into an API and pivot into an API as a service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - very straight forward answer to that: I did a lot of interviews with potential customers, and it was a deal breaker for virtually all of them. Basically, no one was foolish enough to build a startup that depends on a service which may or may not stay up and running, or go out of business and disappear completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for sharing. I've been thinking about building something similar for personal use just to make doing the groceries more efficient.

I'm also starting to learn machine learning so this should even make this mofe interesting.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome. Always a fan of people open sourcing cool technology like this!

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any chance to open source collected recipe data as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a tough question, which I don't have an answer to without throwing out "IANAL" type acronyms. The recipes I've collected were crawled from several different major recipe websites. I think my website database has somewhere around 50,000. Not only would a sample database with that many recipes be _huge_ , it also made me uncomfortable to include content scraped from AllRecipes, Food.com, Epicurious, etc in an MIT licensed open source project. Do I have the rights to even do this? Are there copyright issues involved? Who knows. The best approach, at least for now, was to include a couple dozen hand-picked sample recipes (which I got from friends and family) as a starting point. After all, I'm open sourcing technology I built, not recipe content I did not create.

<comment><USER9> I totally understood your point. Besides a project can have several aspects. Somebody can have interest over your algorithms, others can have interest over your processed data. On the other hand, I don't think recipes are copyrighted. Actually I am not an expert on this matter but most of time, also you might realize that famous sites use copy-pasted or slightly changed materials. Inventing a recipe usually is not a case. If someone can enlighten us on this subject, I will be really appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thank you for granting the world the spoils of your hard work.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> is KPCData.xml the whole recipe database?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's basically sample data. I hand picked about 30 recipes from my database, at least one from each category. The sample shopping lists, menus, and favorites also use those recipes. Not enough to build a massive recipe website with, but enough to get you started.</comment></comment>


How To Hide^H^H^Handle Security Vulnerabilities In Your Products - <AUTHOR> http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2009/4/1/how-to-hidehhhandle-security-vulnerabilities-in-your-product.html <comment><USER2> HiHandle? Edit: I won't delete my comment, but yes I failed at counting.</comment>


An Apology - <AUTHOR> http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/mv/an-apology.html

<comment><USER2> its never too late to apologize for unintentional (as well as intentional) mistakes you do, so its quite welcome.(even though I'm not someone you fired).

On the side note, the post made me think (and how it is the cheerful time of the year) that you are down on your dough? If so, shit happens, and best way is to make up for it in future, so cheer up man, happy holiday season to you.</comment>


Boston is the new hot hunting ground for Natural Language expertise - <AUTHOR> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/08/06/boston-is-the-new-hot-hunting-grounds-for-big-data-understanding/

<comment><AUTHOR> Natural Language Understanding is how we talk to our devices, and while the tech savvy interact with phones like they learn commands for a programming language, the majority of people want to interact with their phone in a more natural way.

While many people don't want to "talk" to their phone the truth is the ability to give commands quickly via voice can be a huge advantage over touch interfaces. It is much easier to say "I ate a banana" rather than open a calorie counting app, select the banana, and exit the app.

As Google starts to get creepy hardware companies are looking to provide the same functionality with out all of the big brother built in to the phones. This is creating a gold rush for the human resources to make this possible.</comment>


Show HN: Web-Based trending tool for manufacturing facilities - <AUTHOR> http://www.preciseintegration.com/trend http://www.preciseintegration.com/trend
I have built things similar to this for a couple of clients in the past and had interest from a thrown-together demo on our site. I took some time and built it into an MVP and am looking for people in the manufacturing world to beta test so I can prioritize what needs to be added to make it useful and find any bugs.
Any thoughts on the landing page or how best to get this information out to the people who could be customers would be greatly appreciated. <comment><AUTHOR> I have built similar tools for a couple clients in the past and received interest in making it into a product based on a demo on our site. I invested some time in making that happen and am looking for people to beta test so I can add additional database connectivity and work out any bugs.

Any thoughts on the landing page or how to drive traffic would be greatly appreciated.</comment>


Google Driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://latviancoder.com/story/google-driven-development

<comment><USER2> I've always wondered about this. Prior to the modern era, developers didn't have StackOverflow or tech blogs written by people who have already done the legwork, imparting their wisdom. Does it mean that it's cheaper to gain coding knowledge now? And how do we combat that, to make it so we do understand what we're doing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's really much cheaper and faster, and we're living in amazing times. It's just so easy to abuse these opportunities.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Seeding a new site with data from sites you don't own? - <AUTHOR>

I've been developing a stackoverflow-like site for a niche market. The challenge with question and answer sites like these is that you really have to build up a critical mass of existing answers to attract any attention (or search engine, for that matter).
So, I've been thinking about "borrowing" existing questions/answers from similar sites. However, I'm concerned with whether I might get into legal hot water?
I recall that there was a bit of an outcry when it was revealed that www.thedailyplate.com was scraping data from existing sites, but now they're a very popular site with a deal with Lance Armstrong and livestrong.com, so I guess it worked out for them.
What does HN think? Yes, I'd feel a little slimey doing it, but is it a legal thing to do? <comment><USER2> Look at the bottom of stackoverflows pages:

site design and logo is © 2009 stackoverflow.com llc; user contributed content licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/>

<http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/>

So it looks like as long as you play by their rules you'll be fine.

And if you don't play by their rules you've basically told the world now that you did so with intent.

Also, to save you some time and them a lot of server load here is the data ready for download:

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow- creativ...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative- commons-data-dump/)

<comment><USER3> The sites you will be competing with (at least the ones cc'ing their user content) would probably say something bombastic like "we're better, so go ahead and try to use our content to beat us"--I can certainly imagine the kids at Stack Overflow saying something macho like this on their radio show.

I say go for it. Us HNers have a major crush on Stack Overflow, and if you can drive us to your site (without spamming the google front page a la Nabble), you win. Bonus points for cc'ing your user content so the next fad can take all of your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if I was unclear...I'm not trying to compete with StackOverflow. I'm trying to borrow answers from places like Yahoo Answers, etc. My site is a question/answer site for a niche (think quilting, or folks who collect rocks, or home schoolers...that sort of niche).

<comment><USER2> If you are going to copy - not borrow - stuff from Yahoo answers you probably should be warned that Yahoo has a small army of lawyers at their disposal who could probably make your life quite miserable if you started copying their information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with Daniel, and I've had this discussion with others starting up new sites focusing on UCC recently.

My personal opinion: the only time it's okay to scrape data is when it's actually "data" - e.g., addresses, events, etc. Scraping conversations or articles - content that people took the time and energy to craft - even though it may be legal, just isn't right.

But I've come across this practice with increasing frequency over the past few months... and every site I've come across that engages in this practice or -even worse - uses it as their business model - has been put on my blacklist (e.g., BigResource, etc.).

Reasoning? It takes 10 sec. for a page to load. After I've seen 6 pages in a row that have the same exact content, I've wasted over a minute of my life, and want to throttle someone.

First impressions are the ones that last, and if the first impression a user gets of your site is one that makes them vow not to use your site again, you'll end up far less successful than if you were to wait and allow your content to grow organically.

A better option: look for topics that haven't been covered elsewhere (or at least topics that aren't easily found through google), and ask and answer the questions yourself (maybe even using a different account so it looks 'real') with a mind towards SEO.

And I've found this to be such an annoyance that yes, I'm cross posting this response on my blog.

<comment><USER2> The only way I see that you could use that data in a constructive way is to mine the hell out of it and to use it to add value to it somehow. That's going to be pretty tricky but it certainly seems to be a better goal than to just re-invent the wheel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This makes me seriously reconsider even posting to StackOverflow anymore. I _HATE_ websites that just repost stuff from other sites (think Nabble). You give the appearance of having a community of users (the only thing about sites like StackOverflow which is actually useful), but you really don't. If you find something cool on a site like that, there's nothing you can really do about it. It's like a figure in a wax museum. It looks like the real thing, but you can't interact with it. If you post a reply, you're going to get nothing in return, because the community is at StackOverflow, not at the other site.

To me, this is like lying to your users, and I don't see how anything good can come of it. I never, NEVER use Nabble despite the fact that they infest Google results like vermin. Please don't do this.

</comment><comment><USER6> if you go to searchyc.com, bing, google with terms like "mashup copyright", unfortunately most of them are about music mashups.

<http://searchyc.com/copyright> going thru this is a legal education

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411555>

[http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/01/23/lawsuit_o...](http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/01/23/lawsuit_over_website_links_in_spotlight/)

And, oh, yeah, IANAL or bus dev person or MBA anything like that.</comment>


LSTM Neural Network that tries to write piano melodies similar to Bach's (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/robbiebarrat/Bach_AI <comment><USER3> 30 LSTM layers of 30 neurons each? Two notes as input? Those are some unusual choices...

For a dataset this small, a single layer LSTM with 300 neurons, accepting four bars of input at a time, would most likely do much better.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool, you might be interested in an open source chord-melody dataset I'm hand curating for generating pop melodies:

[https://github.com/shiehn/chord-melody- dataset](https://github.com/shiehn/chord-melody-dataset). I'm feeding into LSTM's and and its working quite well in my system :)

[http://treblemaker.ai/](http://treblemaker.ai/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Btw I just noticed that he's the same guy whose work on GAN was used by an art collective, and the resulting image sold for $14k. [https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073](https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073)

<comment><USER6> $432k, actually!

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art- sold-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold- christies.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure why this has been compared to Bach. It's not very similar at all, and quite jarringly disorganised. I can't comment on the method used to make it (though would love to understand more, as this is an area that professionally interests me) but you may want to go back to the drawing board :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool! Music generated by neural networks is such an interesting field.

Me and some friends also had a go at it. We used two different datasets, one from Bach and one from Final Fantasy. In contrast to many other approaches, we allowed chords as well as playing multiple notes at the same time (not necessarily the same as playing a chord). You can find some results here: [https://github.com/HalfVoxel/deep-piano](https://github.com/HalfVoxel/deep- piano) (they are definitely cherry-picked, but it worked out quite well overall imo).

</comment><comment><USER9> Very different to Bach.

</comment><comment><USER10> Glad to see people posting links to music modeling projects - it's a huge space, and a ton of fun to actively work on or just mess with if you like music and code. Even simple markov models can get someplace with a bit of tweaking [0][1].

If you like this, you might like some more recent work from Anna huang et. al. at Magenta, using a modified Transformer network [2][3].

Some other relevant reading includes DeepBach [4][5], and outside the domain of Bach alone, the venerable folkRNN [6]. There's a huge chain of work I posted a while back here [7], and Kyle McDonald wrote a really great review piece here [8].

Modeling music in latent spaces has also seen a number of recent publications [9][10][11], and having smooth latent spaces for generation seems (to me) to be a very natural interface for manipulating things, which has a natural analogue in "real" composition, cool video at [12].

There have also been some really fun online demos for interacting with these types of systems [13]

There's a lot of interesting work going on in music modeling, hopefully leading to new and interesting musical tools and toys. Interactivity (often via clever conditioning) can really change the way you approach these types of problems [14].

[0] [https://github.com/kastnerkyle/magenta/tree/my_cleanup_branc...](https://github.com/kastnerkyle/magenta/tree/my_cleanup_branch/exp/markov_lm)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8mHW0-NW8&list=PLRMa_gJ8vx...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8mHW0-NW8&list=PLRMa_gJ8vx8mC9VvtXE7eGamGdf3MxzV4)

[2] [https://twitter.com/kastnerkyle/status/1018617315196309504](https://twitter.com/kastnerkyle/status/1018617315196309504)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04281](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04281)

[4] [https://www.flow-machines.com/archives/deepbach- polyphonic-m...](https://www.flow-machines.com/archives/deepbach-polyphonic- music-generation-bach-chorales/)

[5] [https://github.com/Ghadjeres/DeepBach](https://github.com/Ghadjeres/DeepBach)

[6] [https://github.com/IraKorshunova/folk- rnn](https://github.com/IraKorshunova/folk-rnn)

[7] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14822281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14822281)

[8] [https://medium.com/artists-and-machine- intelligence/neural-n...](https://medium.com/artists-and-machine- intelligence/neural-nets-for-generating-music-f46dffac21c0)

[9] [https://storage.googleapis.com/magentadata/papers/multitrack...](https://storage.googleapis.com/magentadata/papers/multitrack/index.html)

[10] [https://magenta.tensorflow.org/music- vae](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/music-vae)

[11] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbyvbO2F7ug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbyvbO2F7ug)

[12] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8d-PUuUJnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8d-PUuUJnA)

[13] [https://codepen.io/teropa/](https://codepen.io/teropa/)

[14] [https://twitter.com/chrisdonahuey/status/1051868153700016128](https://twitter.com/chrisdonahuey/status/1051868153700016128)

</comment><comment><USER11> A Markov chain would have done better. Something is seriously wrong here - <USER2> even the 2-grams are accurate. If your neural network can't outperform a simple control like a Markov chain, it's hardly worth publishing.

</comment><comment><USER12> A file with space in its name? We had an entire article about not to do this here.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice idea.

I suspect Bach made use of a lot more neurons to write this:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkXet4WX_c&t=7s](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkXet4WX_c&t=7s)

</comment><comment><USER14> From 2016. Add that year to the title.</comment>


A post-capitalist vision of design: happiness, not -only- sales (video) - <AUTHOR> http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/a-post-capitalist-visionsign-happiness-not-sales/

<comment><USER2> Beautiful. Touchscreens will also change the Internet and designers will have their work ahead of them.</comment>


Ask HN: which RSS reader is the most like Google Reader? - <AUTHOR>

Self-explanatory. <comment><USER2> I just released Reader.is [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5905943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5905943) I tried not to make it exactly like Google Reader as all other reader tried just to copy Google Reader..

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I've heard and seen good things about yoleorss and Feedly , in combination with [http://www.feedsapi.org](http://www.feedsapi.org) , you should be good to go

</comment><comment><USER4> BazQux Reader [http://bazqux.com/](http://bazqux.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: How has covid19 effected the consulting market? - <AUTHOR> We are roughly 3 months into this pandemic and wondering how the consulting market is going for you?<p>Did you loose clients? Have rates been effected? Is it hard to find new clients? Has the halt of incoming talent into the US helped or hurted your business? Is this a really bad time to enter the consulting world? <comment><USER2> Bad spellers find it more difficult than ever to get work :p</comment>


It might cost you $39K to crowdfund $100K under the SEC's new rules - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/02/it-might-cost-you-39k-to-crowdfund-100k-under-the-secs-new-rules/

<comment><USER2> The SEC press release:

[https://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/13...](https://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/1370540017677)

Federal Register docket entry at 78 FR 66427:

[https://federalregister.gov/a/2013-25355](https://federalregister.gov/a/2013-25355)

Submitted comments:

[https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-09-13/s70913.shtml](https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-09-13/s70913.shtml)

Submit comments using the SEC's Internet comment form, due by 3 February 2014:

[https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/ruling- comments?ruling=s70913&ru...](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/ruling- comments?ruling=s70913&rule_path=/comments/s7-09-13&file_num=S7-09-13&action=Show_Form&title=Crowdfunding)

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startup...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups_Act)</comment>


Pangu 9 Internals [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pangu.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/us-16-Pangu9-Internals.pdf <comment><USER2> Conclusion: _" The battle between jailbreaks and Apple makes iOS better, and more secure"_

It's true. Even if you have no interest in jailbreaking, you can thank them for this.

<comment><USER3> Hackers make the world go round

<comment><USER4> It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls.

\- Civ4 / Aristophanes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's about an iOS 9 jailbreak. (In case you where asking yourself "wtf is pangu9", like I did)

<comment><USER6> Looks like it covers iOS 8.x, 9.0, 9.1, and latest 9.3.3 jailbreaks. Very crafty methods used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if there is a video of this talk on the internet?

<comment><USER8> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW1U93sXXz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW1U93sXXz4)

<comment><USER7> Thanks, I will check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I updated my ipad to iOS 10 by mistake and now I simply don't have any requirement for a locked down device and it gathers dust.</comment>


Histography – every dot is a historic event from wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://histography.io <comment><USER2>
        WE ARE CURRENTLY NOT SUPPORTING YOUR BROWSER
        (BUT WE WILL SOON)

That's the latest Firefox running on Ubuntu 14 LTS.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can see how "biased" wikipedia is! If you click on "Music" you see that most of the events happened in the late 60s, for example.

<comment><USER4> No, that's just The Beatles. Which kind of makes sense given how big/famous/world known they are.</comment></comment>


Spotify will officially launch in the US tomorrow morning - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/spotify-will-launch-in-the-us-tomorrow-morning-its-about-time/

<comment><USER2> When I first heard of Spotify I was super excited (but it was quickly followed by disappointment when I learned that it wasn't in the U.S. yet). It did lead me to subscribing to Rhapsody which I have been pretty happy with. For those who have used both what does Spotify offer over Rhapsody (better UX, breadth of selection, etc.)?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think they will hit their 50M in the next 12 months.

Most of the 18-25 yr olds I know use GroveShark at home or are happy with Pandora while on the move (if they are not listening to music they have downloaded.)

I just don't see the value added over other existing services.</comment>


2^74207281-1 is Prime - <AUTHOR> http://www.mersenne.org/primes/?press=M74207281 <comment><USER2> Glad I actually read the article because I never would have known this:

"The official discovery date is the day a human took note of the result. This is in keeping with tradition as M4253 is considered never to have been the largest known prime number because Hurwitz in 1961 read his computer printout backwards and saw M4423 was prime seconds before seeing that M4253 was also prime."

<comment><USER3> So if a mathematical fact is known by one person, "it is known."

<comment><USER4> That's how existence proofs work.

<comment><USER5> I have seen aliens.

<comment><USER6> And I'm sure you'll have no more trouble proving the existence of aliens than the fine mathematician who was the first to discover a fact.

So, let's see your proof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Big numbers are fun. Here's some stupid stuff I thought of while reading about this.

The number is 2^74,207,281 - 1. Naively stored like a normal integer in memory, that's roughly 75 MB of RAM just to store the number. Compare that to your 64-bit time_t and imagine how long a duration of time could be represented by such a large number. Stored on 3.5" floppy disks for some reason, that's roughly 50 disks just to store the number.

Edit: Duh, bits, not bytes. I leave my mistake here for posterity.

<comment><USER8> Not unless you gzip it. Since the number is just the binary 1 repeated a bunch of times, it should gzip pretty well.

<comment><USER9> gzipped it's a 9043 byte file when the source is the number expressed exactly as bits. gzipping that 9043 byte file yields a 129 byte file, which gzip can't compress any further. Base64 of the file:

      H4sICBPHnlYCA2EuYmluegDt0LENQQEUQNHnK7xINF8rLIAVbKH88VU0ZlATK4gt1DQ6vURMoBID
      iN4CknOa29/BNrN72U+LZj2eL1fxPDU6EXE+3CbvUTEMAAAAAAAAAODfPfq9/DZfx6petw2B32Z5
      XZT31mYXH9vDv0RTIwAA

<comment><USER10> I see some redundancy there. The letter "A" appears many times in a row.

Also it could be compressed even further. All you need is a computer program that prints "1", 74 million times.

<comment><USER11> It's already been concisely expressed as 2^74,207,281 - 1, so you don't need a computer program that prints "1" 74 million times.

You just need a computer language that can interpret bignum math equations.

<comment><USER10> That would take ages to compute. Printing one is faster. And might produce the smallest file size if it's done in assembly.

<comment><USER11> but the metric was the most concise way to store the data

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you were abducted by aliens, and had memorized that number, you could possibly trade it for wealth in their society. If they hadn't discovered it yet!

<comment><USER13> If an alien were abducted by humans, and it memorized a much larger prime number, what would we give in exchange for that piece of information?

<comment><USER14> Apparently a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award. What's the practical utility of knowledge of a prime, especially considering that upon announcement it's immediately disseminated?

<comment><USER15> It's a very large prime number which has a very convenient representation, which makes it useful. You could use it in a Mersenne Twister RNG, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious to understand the significance of finding the largest known prime numbers. It seems that some people get pretty excited but I'm not sure if it's just purely academic or there's some useful applications I'm unaware of. Can anyone enlighten me?

<comment><USER17> I am curious too. I wonder if this has anything to do with the public key encryption relying on prime numbers.

EFF has a bounty for large prime numbers: [https://www.eff.org/awards/coop](https://www.eff.org/awards/coop)

 _" The EFF awards are about cooperation," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder and project leader for the awards. "Prime numbers are important in mathematics and encryption, but the real message is that many other problems can be solved by similar methods."

Finding these prime numbers will be no simple task, given today's computational power. It has taken mathematicians years to uncover and confirm new largest known primes. However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. EFF is encouraging people to pool their computing power over the Internet, to work together to share this massive resource. In the process, EFF hopes to inspire experts to apply collaborative computing to large problems, and thereby foster new technologies and opportunities for everyone._

<comment><USER18> > However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, > which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the > user to do something.

Considering how much more electricity a running computer uses versus an idle one and how much faster consumer CPUs degrade under load this definitely seems like a huge waste of resources for something that has little, if any, utility.

<comment><USER19> I used to run prime95 on all of my machines, back when power management (especially on desktops) was virtually nonexistent. Obviously, with the power management features we have now, an idle CPU (especially outside of a hosting environment) is not considered wasteful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had to find out what a Mersenne number was again (vaguely remember but forgot) and I was shocked to find this problem in mathematics:

"It is not known whether or not there is an odd perfect number, but if there is one it is big! This is probably the oldest unsolved problem in all of mathematics." [1]

[1]: [http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html](http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> > The primality proof took 31 days of non-stop computing on a PC with an Intel > I7-4790 CPU.

How does this work? You just try to divide by every possible number and ensure the result isn't an integer?

<comment><USER22> You only need to divide by prime numbers up to ceil(sqrt(your_number)).

They don't know all prime numbers up to this number, but they can easily exclude many numbers (for example even).

<comment><USER23> That would still take an eternity.

They use special form primes (the big primes are all n+1 or n-1 forms, with n being easy to factor).

If a Mersenne Number is prime, then the exponent must also be prime (74,207,281 is also prime). That cuts down on a lot of processing time.

Also, all factors of a Mersenne Number, if it's composite, are of the form 2 _n_ k + 1, where the Mersenne number is written 2^n - 1. That also helps factor it. I generated a huge list of prime number indices and did some tests on them a couple of years ago. 25% of the Mersenne numbers have 2*n + 1 as a factor. That's even less computation time to find a large prime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice. Only the 49th Mersenne yet discovered. This also gives us a new perfect number, 2^(74207281-1)(2^74207281-1).

</comment><comment><USER25> Meanwhile, somewhere in Wisconsin, the number 274-207-2811 is being mercilessly prank-called my mathematicians.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 22,338,618 digits long, 1 More step towards EFF award for first 100 Million digit prime number.

<comment><USER26> I wonder how much it would cost to generate that using EC2 spot instances.

<comment><USER27> Amazon would like for you to try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, many years since I've contributed to the project with my little cluster, nice to see them still going strong.

Incidentally, the project source code contains one of the fastest Fourier transform implementations that I'm aware of.

<comment><USER29> Do you happen to know how it compares to kissfft or fftw?

<comment><USER28> Good question, no, no idea but of those two fftw would appear to have the edge so if you're going to compare do it with that one. I do know the fftw guys benchmarked an older version of it but I can't find the results (there used to be a bunch of graphs showing the relative performance of all those ffts listed).

It should be fairly easy to figure this out though, the benchmark code is public and if fft sizes you are interested in are known you could make a very precise comparison.

One warning about the mersenne fft code, it is not the most readable one on account of all the optimizations, but if all you're interested in is a drop-in library then it might suit your needs, especially if the size fft you're after is one that has already been optimized to the hilt by the mersenne project people. If you find you need to customize it then you're probably better off with a more universal implementation, even at the expense of some cycles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have a stupid question that will reveal how I know nothing about cryptography. I understand that large primes are somehow important for some types of cryptography. How are there not just databases of large primes that make breaking the types of cryptography that rely on large primes trivial?

<comment><USER31> There are too many. Not just more than could fit in every database on Earth. More than could fit on every database if every star in the sky had an Earth, each with as many databases as there are on Earth.

This is nothing specific to cryptography or prime numbers. Fun fact: if you shuffle a deck of cards correctly, it's almost certain that no one in history has ever had a deck in the exact same order. [https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/10002.4-6.shtml](https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/10002.4-6.shtml)

<comment><USER30> I understand that there's a huge number of primes, but surely the primes being used to generate keys or whatever process they're involved in are "known" primes, right? It's not as if when I try to encrypt something my machine is going to search for a new prime number that hopefully won't get guessed.

<comment><USER32> Long prime numbers are used for RSA keys. You only generate RSA keys when creating a new identity (webserver certificate, client certificate, SSH key, etc). Then, you _do_ search for "a new prime number that hopefully won't get guessed". It can take from a few seconds to several minutes, depending on the hardware and the desired key length.

The usual approach is to take a random odd number of desired length and then have a probabilistic primality test (much faster than what would be needed for a formal proof). Several attacks rely on bad entropy or bad pseudo random number generators (PRNG) to guess what prime was selected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Are there any double Marsenne primes that we know of? Where 2^(2^n - 1) - 1 is prime as well?

<comment><USER34> 2^3-1 = 7 => prime 2^7-1 = 127 => prime 2^127 - 2 is also prime

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> is there anything special you can do with mersenne primes? if there's no pattern to them, can't it just be seen as dumb luck?

<comment><USER36> They represent the largest known primes, as the special case 2^n-1 allows us to verify their primeness using a method much more efficient than checking all potential factors.

So to answer your question, if there's ever a need for ridiculously large numbers that are known to be prime this is how we'll fill it.

Short of that need, it's still fun as a mathematical world record!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love this. So M49 is now the largest known prime, but what does it take to find the next prime number? Or any larger prime?

<comment><USER37> A buttload of electricity

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I downloaded and checked the zip file. Last digit is a 6. Downloaded it multiple times to test. Can anyone else replicate this?

<comment><USER39> If I have read it correctly, the last digit is a 1. This is the end of the file I downloaded:

...010073391086436351

Edit: Confirmed by [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ozBnrd5Zc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ozBnrd5Zc)

<comment><USER38> I'll try a different tool to decompress the file maybe. a 6 would have made no sense. What was your uncompressed file size? I ended up with 44.7MB

<comment><USER40>
      % tail -1 M74207281/M74207281.txt
      010073391086436351
      % du M74207281/M74207281.txt
      44504	M74207281/M74207281.txt
      % md5 -q M74207281/M74207281.txt
      53294de131970c2cee8da6fe9a3135b3</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't look at Average Time to Conversion - <AUTHOR> http://blog.custora.com/2012/10/dont-look-at-average-time-to-conversion/

<comment><USER2> cool post- my experience with conversion rates in startups is that tracking the changing nature of your audience is really important: early adopters are really fundamentally different from people who want others to test the water. you can kind of see a separation in the vintage chart.</comment>


'Call me': Donald Trump woos tech leaders at New York meeting - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/14/donald-trump-google-facebook-amazon-microsoft <comment><AUTHOR> [...] Trump opened the event by boasting of how many would-be-attendees he had turned away at the suggestion of Thiel. "I won't tell you the hundreds of calls we've had, asking to come to this meeting," Trump told attendees. "And I will say Peter [Thiel] would sort of say, 'You know, that company's too small.' And these are monster companies."

Donald Trump Jr, whom the president-elect has said will run his businesses during the senior Trump's administration, attended the meeting. Alex Karp, the CEO of Thiel's own data analytics firm, Palantir, managed to get an invitation. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who founded the service Trump often uses to communicate with the public, did not.

Dorsey is said to be on the outs with the Trump camp after refusing the add emojis to Trump's Twitter campaign hashtag #CrookedHillary. Gary Coby, a Trump advertising staffer, detailed the dispute on the blogging platform Medium last month; early Wednesday, Politico reported that Trump had taken revenge by excluding Dorsey. [...]

I don't know, but this seems so sick. I can't imagine there is no conflict of interest here. And it really doesn't look very democratic any more.

<comment><USER2> > And it really doesn't look very democratic any more

It isn't, this is the executive part of the government.

That aside misgivings and thoughts of bad faith by the opposing side are not special phenomenon.

I remember when Obama got in, Fox News got a temporary (1 year?) ban attending the whitehouse press conferences and panicking gun owners were making the cost of ammunition soar. He also has had a tendency to intervene in partisan issues, albeit most presidents are a little guilty of that.

Before that G.Bush was going to put all the atheists into Jesus Camp according to the websites I was visiting then. This later turned out to be preposterous. An imperfect president but not a totalitarian one.

A president/king is in the position where he has to balance power among multiple parties in order to accomplish a task. Even the likes of Saddam Hussein were in the same position.</comment></comment>


What if the Bitcoin bubble bursts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21722841-latest-frenzy-tulipmania-gold-rush-or-dotcom-boom-what-if-bitcoin-bubble <comment><USER2> > It is hard to argue that those buying cryptocurrencies are unaware of the > risks

Well, it certainly was in the beginning but I think at present time bitcoin has had so much coverage in mainstream media that certainly a lot of people have put their money in bitcoin without much understanding as to how any of it works.

I've had a few people ask me about blockchain and I've given them some handy links.

A couple of people have asked me about whether or not they should buy bitcoins and I say the same thing to everyone; don't invest any money in anything unless you're prepared to lose that money.

I've seen what happens when you offer technical support to friends and family. They mess it up and then it's your fault because you touched the machine last, right. Yeah I'm not going to be the scapegoat to blame for the ill-advised investments done by someone else. Least of all for free.</comment>


Lenovo Thinkpads Missing Keypresses - <AUTHOR> https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X1-Extreme-Gen-2-missing-keystrokes/td-p/4569936 <comment><USER2> I've had a Thinkpad X1 Extreme for a year. I love a lot about this machine, but I had to send it back for repairs (essentially replacement) twice. The first time, the keyboard was flaking out; the GHB keys around the mouse nub were repeating and/or not registering, then the machine started crashing/rebooting randomly, and finally it crashed during a BIOS upgrade and bricked itself. They replaced basically the entire machine (possibly re-used the display), and it seemed fine, until I tried to run a game on it. Then I realized that the Nvidia graphics weren't working at all; only the Intel HD graphics worked. This was a hardware issue, not simply a driver problem. They replaced the entire motherboard again. Both times I lost a full two days installing and configuring the replacement system.

It's working great now, for the moment, and I still haven't seen a better laptop option, but I'm going to be hesitant to buy any more Lenovo products. Between wrestling with the broken machines and then waiting on repairs, I lost months of usability. Now my warranty is expired, I wasn't able to extend it (their warranty extension policy seems intentionally designed to prevent you extending), and if it bricks again, I've got a $2800 (original price) doorstop.

When it works, it's the best laptop I've ever owned. Here's hoping I get at least another year out of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems to be how many people feel about Lenovo now. Great if it works, but seems to need multiple replacements before getting a properly working system.

I just got the Extreme 2, and immediately ran into the keyboard issue. The matte screen has some light bleeding in the corner too.

It's a bit aggravating that laptops with a high price point can have bad design or quality control issues.</comment></comment>


Is URL submission via bookmarklet broken? - <AUTHOR>

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbrockerhoff.net%2Fbb%2Fviewtopic.php%3Fp%3D2417%232417&t=Solipsism%20Gradient
The title keeps going into the URL field, and then when I submit, I keep getting redirected to news.ycombinator.com/mismatch, with the message:
"Dead link: users don't match."
Submission via http://news.ycombinator.com/submit works fine. <comment><USER2> Oops, something does look broken. Will fix.

<comment><USER2> Fixed; sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah it seems to be broken.</comment>


Online Markdown Editor (with Bootstrap themes) - <AUTHOR> http://www.anupshinde.com/markdown-editor

<comment><USER2> showdown is ok.

but multimarkdown would be better.

and local storage is ok.

but the cloud (e.g., dropbox) would be better.

and this space is starting to get crowded, so you need to do something special to stand out.

but you've made a good start.

-bowerbird

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks bowerbird! My intent wasn't really to get into that space - I created that for "my need" and shared it. I wasn't aware of the awesome features that "multimarkdown" has. But you have given me good reasons to explore further and get into that space.

<comment><USER2> online there are many markdown editors, like dillinger.io.

the best standalone offline tool is multimarkdown composer. for versatility, visit marked2app.com for an app that gives on-the-fly display of a markdown file as you edit it with any other text-editor, a mighty clever idea, well- executed.

even if you stick with your own tool, you will get lots of ideas for functionality by examining these other executions.

-bowerbird</comment></comment></comment>


Solar Bag concept purifies water as you walk - <AUTHOR> http://avesom.com/solar-bag-concept-purifies-water-as-you-walk/

<comment><USER2> Why aren't projects like this on Kickstarter? I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there willing to pony up $5 to help kids in Africa get clean drinking water.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, when i have one I will take it with me for trips I made. No problem with Pure Water scarcity.

<comment><USER4> So all these days you never took water with you? lol just kidding. Yeah this bag is looks like pretty awesome.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who's Using Terraform? - <AUTHOR> I've used terraform for a couple of personal projects, and a bit at a company I used to work for, and I'm considering using it for my company. But I'm curious how other people are using it. I'm mostly interested in:
1) Do you use it for everything (eg ALL cloud resources created, updated, removed via terraform?)
2) Do you use it for isolated cases (eg creating roles and permissions in your cloud provider?)
3) Who runs it, and where? (eg run by individual contributors, or in an automated environment, or some other way?)
4) What are some things to watch out for? (eg patterns/anti-patterns.)
Just curious what it looks like out in the wild. Thanks! <comment><USER2> At Lob we just finished migrating all of our AWS resources to Terraform. We have a strict policy where everything (creating, updating or deleting) should be done through Terraform and the AWS console should be used as a read-only dashboard (some actions on the console such as invoking Lambdas, deleting an SQS messages, etc. are fine). We have alerting setup for any action that is performed in our AWS accounts that was done through the console.

Right now, changes are applied manually by the terraform changes author (every engineer has access to provision infrastructure they need, some teams have access to more AWS accounts than others) but we're looking to move to an automated environment such as Atlantis or Terraform Enterprise later this year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, that sounds ideal! I've always found it frustrating to use the AWS console for anything other than dashboards and one-off trouble shooting.

You don't ever have issues with teams not applying resource changes? I.e. contributor A adds a resource, but doesn't apply it, and then contributor B goes to apply their changes and sees unexpected resource changes that they potentially don't have the permission to create? I guess that would be as much of a cross-team problem as a technical one.

<comment><USER2> Most of the Terraform changes are done by the infrastructure team which is currently 5 people. We're pretty diligent about making sure that whatever is in our master branch in the repo is what the source of truth is and what our environment should look like. If there's anything that looks off it gets caught by running a plan before applying and we quickly sync up and make sure to push the changes upstream or override them. For the smaller changes that are performed by other teams, they need a stamp of approval from someone in our infrastructure team and we make sure to be proactive about being available to not block them as well as making sure the changes are applied properly.

That being said, our current approach will definitely not scale well and that is why we're going be looking into a CI/CD pipeline way of applying changes.

It's also worth noting that it took _a lot_ of effort to migrate everything into terraform. The infrastructure team took the initiative to migrate everything in a zero-downtime way such that we wouldn't be affecting the application teams.</comment></comment></comment>


Explain like I'm 5: Kerberos - <AUTHOR> http://www.roguelynn.com/words/explain-like-im-5-kerberos/

<comment><USER2> I still think this is the best intro I've ever gotten on Kerberos

Designing an Authentication System: a Dialogue in Four Scenes <http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/dialogue.html>

"This dialogue provides a fictitious account of the design of an open-network authentication system called "Charon." As the dialogue progresses, the characters Athena and Euripides discover the problems of security inherent in an open network environment. Each problem must be addressed in the design of Charon, and the design evolves accordingly. Athena and Euripides don't complete their work until the dialogue's close.

When they finish designing the system, Athena changes the system's name to "Kerberos," the name, coincidentally enough, of the authentication system that was designed and implemented at MIT's Project Athena. The dialogue's "Kerberos" system bears a striking resemblence to the system described in Kerberos: An Authentication Service for Open Network Systems presented at the Winter USENIX 1988, at Dallas, Texas."

</comment><comment><USER3> How widely is Kerberos used these days?

I've worked in a handful of Unix environments in both academia and enterprise over the last 20 years but never actually used Kerberos. (Of course 20 years ago it was brand new, so that is at least part of it.) Is it gaining in popularity?

(From the two minutes of searching I just did, it sounds like Windows AD is actually based on Kerberos? If that's the case I guess it's super-widely used.)

<comment><USER4> Windows AD is Kerberos based with a gratuitous compatibility breaking change that I can't remember right now. We use Kerberos at work, and the FreeIPA project is Kerberos based. It doesn't really come into its own until you have many, many machines, probably at least fifty, but it isn't bad in the end. I have had many, many problems with FreeIPA but very few are due to it using Kerberos.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that I'm going to get out of my depth very quickly here, but I'm not sure what the gratuitous breaking change is that you're speaking of; relatively recent MIT or Heimdal krb5 implementations can interop with Active Directory with no problem that I'm aware of.

Some older implementations were lacking ciphers that Active Directory required. If this is what you're speaking of then I wouldn't classify it as a "breaking change", since cipher negotiation is meant to be - well - negotiated. Its gratuitousness may be more in question, but I'm certain it was for backward compatibility with NT Lan Manager password schemes. (Alas.)

<comment><USER4> From [http://www.h5l.org/manual/HEAD/info/heimdal/Authorisation- da...](http://www.h5l.org/manual/HEAD/info/heimdal/Authorisation- data.html#Authorisation-data):

      The Windows 2000 KDC also adds extra authorisation data in tickets. It is at this point unclear what triggers it to do this. The format of this data is only available under a "secret" license from Microsoft, which prohibits you implementing it.

This makes/made? it difficult to have a Windows domain authenticate against an existing KDC; you needed to set up an AD server and then set up cross-domain trust relationships, which means you _must_ have a Windows server on your network in order to support Windows AD clients.

<comment><USER5> Very interesting. I had a similar setup in a previous life without any issues, but the "it is at this point unclear what triggers it to do this" is ominous indeed, so it's possible I just went down the happy path where this sort of issue doesn't come up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Evan Williams: What I Learned Building Medium (So Far) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/4191574378

<comment><USER2> I know a few founders that have had to let people go after aggressively hiring. They've ended up fine but when they first raised their seed round they went out and hired a load of people. I do also know a few that are incredibly slow at hiring and it's lead to slow product development and an odd balance in the team (They have more designers than developers). I think sometimes if you hire too slowly it's hard to add more people when you start to need them. Because you have such a tight knit team that can't really change how they work to allow a few other people into the mix.

Somewhere in between seems best, only hire folks that really understand and fit in your vision and hire people that are going to be key for where you are slightly ahead of now over the people you needed a month ago. The team I spoke about needed designers then but now that the team has more designers than developers there's an odd balance that has lead to a beautiful but not very functional product. Their homepage changes more than their product.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really admire Ev's transparency. It's relieving (and a little scary) that starting a new company seems only slightly less difficult for him as for the rest of us. Money, team, reputation, network are all nice things to have. But none of it matters if unless you make something new that people want.

<comment><USER4> Which is also a great leveller. I always think that if you do build something that people want on a deep enough level then you can overcome those other things. No amount of money or developers will make a mediocre product spread at web scale.

Agreed Ev is a class act. Im really looking forward to seeing what Obvious come up with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> clicking the "looking to grow" link to their jobs page with middle click (which means it should open in a new tab) causes it to open in the same window (in google chrome). It seems that medium is hijacking clicks and forcing them into the same window, I wonder why...

<comment><USER6> Command-click works fine for me in Chrome. Is this a Linux thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> He mentions Steve Jobs, and the parallel I see is NeXT. Too many people, too much money, and too much focus on one-upping his previous success.

Then again, maybe in a few years Twitter will end up buying Medium. We'll have a second coming of Ev, followed a Twitter renaissance, wherein he expands on what he learned doing Medium.

<comment><USER8> Why would he want to be purchased by twitter? I assume he still has equity there, so it wouldn't make too much sense to keep all the eggs in one basket. Increasing his equity share at twitter would be somewhat meaningless, since I'm sure he could always go back to twitter and continue working.

<comment><USER9> If he sells Medium to Twitter for stock and cash and the cash portion of his stake in Medium is worth more than what it would add to the value of his stake in Twitter, or he is for some reason unable to cash out some of his Twitter stake, then he might have good financial reason to sell to Twitter.

However, I agree that is unlikely to be his goal since he has taken enough off the table in Twitter fundraising rounds that he likely wouldn't need to sell just for the money and re-entry into Twittrr, which would likely be the purpose of such an acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He has access to everything he could ever want... While it's a nice piece, this isn't the startup life everyone else lives. Hopefully this isn't another Airtime.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like scrum would fit you</comment>


Ask HN: Will AI create an impossible barrier to entry for software development? - <AUTHOR> Will software worth using eventually require advanced AI to differentiate or add value, limiting the ability for startups or individuals to create desirable software ? <comment><USER2> Humans are quite good at all the things AI can do, and are also much more adaptable. So building tools that help humans do what their good at seems like it would still be valuable.

Most software I interact with is broken, buggy or badly designed in ways that AI would not help with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Humans are good at finding/exploiting edge-cases. No matter how computationally advanced we get, there will always be a limit. And there will always be people imaginative enough to think beyond that limit. Implementation details will probably change as AI automates repetitive tasks. But software developers will be needed to the degree people like thinking outside the box and striving for improved conditions. I don't see that changing any time soon : )</comment>


Startup M&A availability bias and what to do about it - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/08/startup-ma-availability-bias-and-what-to-do-about-it.html <comment><USER2> _You might think that this initial bias wouldn't help much in the end because the buyer would proceed to evaluate both startups and pick the one they thought was better. However, the bias isn't easily severable._

Again, I don't have any evidence beyond the anecdotal, but it's not even funny how critical a role this seemingly tenuous bias can play in large enterprise sales (where competing vendors offer nearly identical products / services). Makes a solid case (if you buy into the intuition, that is) for backing up an aggressive sales strategy with a well rounded marketing effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think his idea for the newsletter is awesome. I never considered keeping a newsletter for potential investors and partnerships. It seems to obvious now that I think about it, but it's sad that it totally blindsided me. =O</comment>


I'm a white guy in Silicon Valley and I'm done buying the meritocracy myth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/diversify-tech/i-m-a-white-guy-in-silicon-valley-and-i-m-done-buying-the-meritocracy-myth-2cc0ef9f9b60 <comment><USER2> The biggest issue that I see is how much startup founders justify the idea that they need to hire and promote people that they 'would want to hang out with', aka the people they would want to be friends with outside of work. This leads to an extremely homogenous workforce with almost no diversity, because people generally are attracted to those who look and act like them. Guys usually don't see women and internally think 'I want to be friends with that person', white people don't generally see a black guy and think 'I want to be friends with them'.

Now obviously this isn't universal, plenty of cross-group friendships exist, tons in fact, but they are usually formed by the people being forced together (work, neighbors, school). When hiring based on first impressions, though, this becomes a huge problem.

<comment><USER3> This is probably a side effect of startup founders not actually having lives outside of work.

<comment><USER4> Self-selecting for this type of employee is also a problem. I can understand doing this for the first few months when you're trying to bootstrap, but long- term if your business model can't scale without people working 12-14 hour days, your business model doesn't scale.

We all read articles on HN and HBR saying that more hours != more work, but we still hire for it anyway. I know most founders are just looking for passionate people who fit with their team, and it can be hard to build a team when one of your team members has to leave every day at 3:30 to pick their kids up from school. But we should at least try to be better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm an advocate of blind hiring and promotion across the board. Study after study has shown that it is the only way to remove bias (race/class/gender/etc) on the part of the hiring/promoting party.

Here's an NPR/All Tech Considered story on it.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/05/28/410...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/05/28/410264592/blind- auditions-could-give-employers-a-better-hiring-sense)

<comment><USER6> How would hiring work in practice? Wouldn't you have to completely eliminate in-person and or telephone interviews?

Promotions I can see (although you need very formal promotion requirements). Hiring? I don't know.

<comment><USER7> You contract with an outside firm to do the interviewing, screening, etc. On the other hand, a completely separate HR department gathers the prerequisites of the hiring department or manager, and then they make the decision as to whom to hire. The manager is given a new worker with no biased input as to race, gender, sexuality, attraction, etc. I think it goes much further than simply having a workforce that works well together, and likes to hang out with each other. The attractiveness of the candidate, and whether or not they'd be fun to hang out with on the weekends, or worse, date, should have zero bearing on the hiring process.

Check out Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Blink" discussing blind auditions for musicians.

Also: [http://www.theguardian.com/women-in- leadership/2013/oct/14/b...](http://www.theguardian.com/women-in- leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Eliminating bias in hiring is likely a good thing (with some govt security exceptions) Allowing opportunity to all who meet qualifications is good. What is not settled is what is normal or acceptable for different fields. That's to say, while women are severely underrepresented in high tech, if based on demographics, is the end to have all fields mimic the demographics of a given area radius or a given graduating class? It may be worthwhile, or not. I don't know.

What I would say is people who qualify (credentials, whatever, immigration status, clearance status, etc) should have equal opportunity and should not face discrimination. It may even warrant active recruitment, but I'm unsure if that is good or just on the surface desirable.

Interestingly, and this is anecdotal, but in my experience there is a higher relative ratio of East and south Asian women than women in general in tech. Even more to the point, Asian women are better represented in ee and cs than non Asian who might be in supporting roles like marketing, branding, etc. If the observations hold, it would be interesting to see why.

</comment><comment><USER9> His "it's not the pipeline" argument rests on 30% of STEM degrees going to women, but that is for all STEM degrees. In the degrees most relevant to Silicon Valley, engineering and computer science, it is 16%. The average is pulled up to 30% by much higher concentrations of women in physical sciences (40%), math and statistics (42%), and biology (58%).

16% of the engineering/CS degrees going to women lines up very nicely with the 15% he cites for the number of tech jobs in the Bay Area being held by women.

Many of the comparisons of Silicon Valley to national averages are comparing very different types of companies. For example, the comparison of executives is comparing to the S&P 100. I see no reason to expect that, say, a pharmaceutical company absent discrimination would be expected to have the same percentage of women executives as a computer software company absent discrimination. As his link on STEM degrees shows, women make up a considerably higher percentage of the degrees that would be of interest to a pharmaceutical company.

</comment><comment><USER10> They're all about being data-driven until the data shows they're racist and sexist. ;)

However, I'm going to note that this happens with any majority. I'm a white guy that spent much of my life in areas that were controlled by Blacks and one controlled by Hispanics. Whites in those areas experienced everything Blacks describe in areas with white racists: job discrimination; government discrimination; different police treatment; being served second or not at all at a food place; unprovoked beatdowns by black mobs (esp in schools); different punishment in schools; banned from certain "hoods" always or certain times. Ran into one or two places controlled by women that discriminated against men for key positions but most women-run places were more fair.

Anyway, the point is this stuff is an aspect of human nature and group dynamics. It happens any time a majority is in control of an area or situation with minorities pushing into their turf. We need to eliminate it across the board for all parties. The Navy example was a great one. I also once attended a diversity class that suggested methods of trying to eliminate bias. Another time a HR person suggested Topgrading methodology that was results-focused and said it helped her. Each of these apparently reduced the effect of discrimination in hiring, promotion, and firing.

So, I think we should put a bunch of effort into further R&D on such methods. Not to mention, collect a bunch of what's proven to work (partly or fully) into one resource. I see lots of interesting, data-driven methods posted on HN. Add them, too. Maybe keep a forum or blog network going where results of experiments can be posted over time to see where success is trending. All methods focusing on the skills, character, and objective-as-possible results are the best starting point regardless.

</comment><comment><USER11> As long as there is "fit" based decisions being made, conscious/subconscious biases based on age/gender/race etc will creep in.

And as long as these pervade, hiring will not be a meritocratic process.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article is disingenuous. 'Science' has nothing to do with being an engineer in Silicon Valley. I know lots of women in science; they do research in pharmaceuticals and academia, not program social networks for dogs.

Computer science and math at my school (which has the largest faculty of Mathematics in the world) was something like 20% female.

</comment><comment><USER13> The guy could be correct but some of those stats don't look like they relate. Presumably a lot of the people working in tech in SV didn't originate from SV so the proportion of women in the general population of SV is pretty meaningless unless women interested in tech are going to SV then not landing tech jobs but staying in SV.

</comment><comment><USER14> If I recall correctly (I may very well be mistaken), men's performance is more variable than women's. Which would lead to the following: * Men would hold the majority of top and bottom spots in a field.

That said, I don't think that's fully responsible for this, but it's interesting to think about.

Additionally, I do think people in Silicon Valley seem to give off the vibe of sacrifice life to be good at your job; something I think women tend to do less often. I don't think that everyone does do that, but there's a stereotype about it for a reason.

Part of fixing the 'gender problem' is not only fixing the selection bias but making sure that there's an environment that does discriminate against one sex or the other. If you're looking to do that.

Are these blanket statements? Yes. Please take them with a huge grain of salt. We are talking about trends and stereotypes after all.

<comment><USER15> I agree with your assessment of the problem -- it's the environment. But, as long as millions/billions of dollars are on the line then there will always be those who put all their time/energy into their job.

Maybe it's biology that allows men to lead less balanced lives; mabye it's culture. But the effect is what we have today -- when living an unbalanced life is rewarded handsomely, men dominate.

I'd like to hear counter examples.

<comment><USER16> _Maybe it 's biology that allows men to lead less balanced lives_

It can't be ignored. Males are nature's crapshoot. In many measures when comparing men against women, we'll see more men at the extremities. Most bay area CEOs are men. But so are most prisoners.

This essay helped to shape my views around the topic: [http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm](http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish the world would use blind hiring a lot more. I'm not attractive, and I'm a big guy. I've lost out on jobs to people who were less qualified but better looking, and skinnier. I know if the interviewer is a young person I'm probably not getting the job. This crap about "culture" fit is nothing more than code for not hiring people the HR person wouldn't want to hang out with, bang, or find attractive.

</comment><comment><USER17> Everything is a meritocracy until the bankers arrive. Well, the bankers have arrived.

<comment><USER18> But it was never a meritocracy. That's the pernicious myth of--well, most of modern society, but very much including tech. The unconscious and conscious biases of the first movers have shaped it since day one, and we still see the effects today.

<comment><USER19> The first movers in programming were women.

<comment><USER10> Yep. As was Margaret Hamilton who invented both software engineering and fault-tolerant, hardware-software design. Bunch more on top of that.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29)

Been my favorite for the last year or two since a friend told me about her work doing... basically much of what I was trying to do lol. Her software resume kicks much of Silicon Valley's ass. Yet, many wouldn't hire women and certainly wouldn't know one invented the engineering aspect of their field after another invented programming. ;) Many similarly impressive women in tech and colleges that face uphill battle getting good jobs. Messed up...

Note: Her USL and 001 Toolkit handled specification, semi-automated design, automated coding, automated testing, and handled SCM issues for arbitrary platforms. You could say she was the first "full-stack" engineer with a broader definition of full-stack. ;) 001/USL are really weird so one line of my research is doing same with a user-friendly, specification and implementation language + extensive metaprogramming + good heuristics. Racket or RED are likely implementation languages when I get the concepts all together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It makes sense to issue different rucksacks to women but boots?

</comment><comment><USER21> How is it not a pipeline problem when according to the article:

> In the last two decades, the amount of women graduating with tech degrees > has been in decline

If that's happening before they even have a chance to be hired, then it _is_ a pipeline problem.

Is it even really a "problem" though? It looks as if young women are exercising their free will and choosing their own career paths which may or not be technical. Why are the choices they're making deemed problematic?

<comment><USER22> Because his argument is that even adjusting for the pipeline issue, women and minorities are under-represented. In other words, even if you fixed the pipeline issue, they would still be discriminated against and under- represented because of bias.

<comment><USER21> His numbers are all over the place. Most of the stats he provides are for executives and investors which don't require STEM degrees, yet he uses STEM graduation as his initial stat.

I don't even know what this means:

"0% of partners at some of our largest Bay Area VC firms are women"

So > 0% of partners of the largest Bay Area VC firms are women, since he qualifies the statement with "some"?

<comment><USER23> I think it means that there are large firms whose partners are 100% male.</comment></comment></comment></comment>