Actor Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1008.1459v34.pdf <comment><USER2> A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459](http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459)) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper (this one has 34 versions!), search for other things by the same authors, etc.

<comment><USER3> Yes. The first thing I wanted to know was whether this was a "classic" paper published a few years ago (e.g., Gul Agha's MIT AI-TR 844) or whether it was current. That question is instantly answered in the abstract. Instead, I went to look at the references to see when they were published, where I caught this amusing line:

        AMD AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual October 12, 3011

From the future! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      However, Erlang lacks the following:
        Instead of using exception handling, Erlang relies on silent
        process failure which is supposed to be detected by nonresponse
        to messages of other processes.

Only somewhat true. Sending message to non-existing process will not fail, but there is erlang:monitor/2 API call which allows to deal with such situations.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a three minute pictorial introduction to the actor model: [http://adit.io/posts/2013-05-15-Locks,-Actors,-And-STM-In- Pi...](http://adit.io/posts/2013-05-15-Locks,-Actors,-And-STM-In- Pictures.html)</comment>


Fast wildcard searches with trigrams - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattwarren.org/2015/08/19/the-stack-overflow-tag-engine-part-2/

<comment><USER2> I'm fairly sure this is the same technique employed by pg_tgrm. There's a new version (1.2) floating around the mailing list that's BLAZZZING fast!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll just leave this here: [http://ntz-develop.blogspot.com/2011/03/fuzzy- string-search....](http://ntz-develop.blogspot.com/2011/03/fuzzy-string- search.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for that link, there's some interesting stuff in there.

I also tried using a trie, but as the linked post states, they are only good for starts-with or ends-with searches. They can't be used for contains searches, i.e. " _java_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is the same technique as Russ Cox used to search Google Code: [https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html)

<comment><USER5> This is mentioned in the article. (and links to rsc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a cool explanation of the technique, but maybe the author can share why they built their own tag database vs. using elasticsearch or postgres, both of which natively support trigram indexes (and in ES's case arbitrary ngrams).

<comment><AUTHOR> It was "just for fun". I read about the Stack Overflow tag engine and I was intrigued what it would take to build it. Plus they make a dataset available, so I had ~8,000,000 questions to try it out on.

It's been a good chance to learn some optimisation techniques and new data structures, such as trigrams and bit map indexes (coming up in the next post)

Also AFAIK SO still use their own custom solution for tag searches. They've moved to Elasticsearch for regular searching, but not tag searches. So their must be some benefit to their custom solution.</comment></comment>


The World's Congested Human Migration Routes in 5 Maps - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150919-data-points-refugees-migrants-maps-human-migrations-syria-world/ <comment><USER2> It is interesting that the routes going into the Australian direction ends up at the holding centers on the three islands for asylum seekers.</comment>


Ask HN: Is AI a growing field? - <AUTHOR>

I have become interested in artificial intelligence lately and I'm trying to gauge the field, but I haven't found many publications about the current state of it.
Are more people becoming interested in AI? Is there greater demand for it in businesses then say 10 years ago? <comment><USER2> If by AI you mean machine learning, yes. If you mean "human-like-interactive- thing," yes but not in a way that means we're substantially closer than we were 15 years ago.

AI in the ML sense is quickly becoming critical to business and is opening up lots of possibilities that we could only dream of 5 years ago. At its heart, Google is basically an ML company for one big example. Facebook is moving in that direction as well. There are lots of startups solving old problems with AI, too, such as Knewton (tutoring), and for some self-promotion, my company (Quantios).

<comment><USER3> Computer vision seems to be in high demand, too. The army wants its robots to know what they're shooting at.

<comment><USER4> Yes, they do. Reminds me of the AI algorithm designed to tell US tanks from Soviet ones. They accidentally trained it on one type of film for US tanks, and another type for Soviet tanks, each with different color tones, and ended up with a system that could spot different color tones...

[http://books.google.com/books?id=JNhRSAMFn6YC&pg=PA271&#...

<comment><USER5> That's one of the problems with neural nets...there's usually no easy way for a human to understand what the actual decision process is (in sharp contrast to, say, decision trees).

<comment><USER6> Yes there is. There are a few methods of converting a trained nn to a decision tree. It's actually a better way of training decision trees for some problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd say no. My dad worked in AI 20-30 years ago(worked on some AI project for Russian military, something to do with nukes), and he looks for jobs in the field, now and then. And from what he say about, it seems like the AI field is pretty much frozen right now.

There are almost no jobs available, and the few available are usually the be assistant to some professor who is trying to do something that was already done 20 years ago.

<comment><USER8> Had the same impression. The most interesting advances I saw when visiting Alife XI last year was in cognitive robotics. Using MRI scan information from thinking persons to unravel the global structure of the brain, and then implementing that in computers.

The global workspace theory definitly seemed interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm currently going around visiting potential Ph.D. programs as an admit for next year, and at all the top schools (CMU, Stanford, Berkeley) the amount of people studying AI and machine learning is staggering. The field is definitely academically very active.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are a LOT of publications on AI if you look at all the conference papers and journal papers floating around on the net. The field of AI itself is divided up into lots of sub fields such as logic theory, machine learning, language processing, search/optimization.

Examples of "AI research at work" are the face detection in google picasa/iphoto ( machine learning + vision ). You email spam filter ( text classification ).

As AI research matures and as computers get faster, its safe to say that there is definitely a greater demand for AI but its hard to come up with "obvious" applications of AI algorithms like the ones I listed above.

</comment><comment><USER11> as peter norvig said at a recent conference, it depends on how you define AI.

to gauge the field, why not start with his textbook (<http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/>). right next to this link, i just saw this one here for more resources on the web (<http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ai.html>).

btw, i wouldn't really think too much about what other people are interested in or not if you are at your stage. if you are drawn to the field, do it. tech is too unpredictable to make this kind of career calculus.

</comment><comment><USER12> Depends on what you mean by AI. It's not a single area of study.

<comment><USER13> Somewhere I heard a saying that goes something like "AI is machine intelligence we don't quite understand. Once you've figured it out, it is no longer AI, it is an algorithm."

<comment><USER5> I don't find that especially convincing - there is no machine intelligence we don't understand, since we have created all of it.

I would say that AI includes a few classes of algorithms related to solving certain types of problems (detection, planning, concept abstraction), or perhaps related to certain techniques for solving problems (heuristic search, ML, vision, etc.).

<comment><USER13> If your only talking about machine intelligence that we've already created, then of course we already understand that. I was talking about the _concept_ of machine intelligence and problems that we would like to solve and are trying to solve with machine intelligence, but haven't solved yet. Once we solve a machine intelligence problem, we tend to call it an algorithm or a technique rather than machine intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Try searching AGI or "strong AI", which is a new movement trying to achieve general AI rather than application specific. I have got a good article on that: <http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=689>

<comment><USER15> Don't go into THAT field unless you have guts of STEEL.

<comment><USER16> Either that or believe in the singularity.

<comment><USER17> The singularity is probably inevitable. I doubt it we'll see it in our lifetimes, though.

<comment><USER5> Why? If you buy into exponentially increasing progress, then most of the graphs seem to indicate that it will happen within a lifespan from now, especially if you consider the medical advances that will come in the intervening time.

<comment><USER18> All real-world exponential curves I can think of eventually reverse precipitously, or at least plateau.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is mentioned in Kurzweil's Singularity book. With Moores Law, he expects transistors to peak at 2020 and molecular computing to take over after that and continue the growth.

He believes innovation and paradigm shifts supplement the plateauing of S-curves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Main problem with AI is that nobody really knows what it means. When something starts to be remotely useful, it is not called AI anymore :)

</comment><comment><USER20> For me, AI's goals are very cool but most of its approaches not so much. In fact, I find most AI talks rather boring.

The only parts I really like have to do with human computation (e.g., ESP Game) and stealing ideas from nature (e.g., genetic programming, ant colony optimization, etc.):

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143>

[http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Biology-Peter-J- Bentley/dp/074...](http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Biology-Peter-J- Bentley/dp/0743204476)

</comment><comment><USER21> My total out-of-butt reasoning: with low-level AI-ish things becoming commonplace (computing power getting cheaper, and devices becoming more ubiquitous; ever cheaper, more sophisticated robots, O'Reilly books on Collective Intelligence) and more data around, there'll be more demand for harder, truer-AI stuff. And if somehow there isn't, it still helps to have an understanding of the lower-level, easier stuff.

And, there's a lecture on Google video (don't have the link) of a guy going on about how there are lots of expert systems out there run by companies that don't advertise themselves.

<comment><USER22> > And, there's a lecture on Google video (don't have the link) of a guy going > on about how there are lots of expert systems out there run by companies > that don't advertise themselves.

It it this, by any chance? <http://is.gd/otrN>

I haven't seen that one myself (watching it now), but I've seen others where Larry Smith talks about exactly what you mentioned. Unfortunately nobody thought to mic him and his style of moving around makes him hard to hear on a camcorder mic.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was a great video. I made this post with an interest primarily in the expert systems part of AI and this video solidified by interest.

I now know what I'm going to do after the internet. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think robotics is in a lull, and will be for a few years. This of those out there (pleo, roomba, packbot, kiva, anybots), and you'll find they are all "dumb". Interesting physical intelligence like BigDog isn't really a product.

It will be a few years before any intelligent robots come out. 6-10 years is a good time frame to start a robotics business.

</comment><comment><USER24> I do AI for work, however, it is not my only task. Most of my work is development work, data wrangling and debugging. Pure AI jobs probably exist, but I like the diversity and hoping to do more research is a lost cause in most software applications since so much time is required doing development.

<comment><USER25> I work in AI as well after completing a phd in computational intelligence (a relatively recent flavor of AI). from my limited exposure, working in AI involves consulting/software engineering with different tools, in my case intelligent agents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I took a degree in AI, and now I'm firmly convinced that AI == search. If you make something searchable in a simple, new way, that's AI. If it's grandiose but doesn't work, that's not useful.

<comment><USER27> Two exceptions:

1\. Many computer vision algorithms (Canny...) are more clever than search.

2\. Fourier analysis is not search.

But maybe that's too low-level to be "real" AI.

<comment><USER26> About (1), I wrote some software that finds text in an image, by searching for items and filtering with rules.

Maybe in my post, I was being too general.

I studied neural networks at University too, and maybe I don't use them because I find them hard to apply to a search task.

But all the AI module's theory (outside of neural nets) was about searching trees, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Shameless plug for my University: <http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai- lab/publications_recent.php>

<comment><USER29> Shameless plug for mine, although the publications page is pretty terrible: <http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/>

Every time I have a conversation with someone in the department I get excited about some new direction of AI research. (I work in natural language processing myself.) AI certainly isn't dying, but from my own experiences straddling business and academia, I'd say it takes far too long for Cool Stuff(TM) to make it into the real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> By AI, do you mean Asians and Indians?

In the Silicon Valley, yes.</comment>


"SQL queries ran up to 29 times faster on CrateDB than they did on PostgreSQL" - <AUTHOR> https://crate.io/a/benchmarking-complex-query-performance-cratedb-postgresql/ <comment><USER2> I'm curios if this is a fair benchmark (considering it was conducted by one of the vendors).

So I downloaded the mentioned whitepaper to look at the indexes they created in PostgreSQL.

The only thing mentioned in the whitepaper is this table definition:

      CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS t1 (
      "uuid" VARCHAR,
      "ts" TIMESTAMP, "tenant_id" INT4, "sensor_id" VARCHAR,
      "sensor_type" VARCHAR, "v1" INT4,
      "v2" INT4,
      "v3" FLOAT4,
      "v4" FLOAT4,
      "v5" BOOL,
      "week_generated" TIMESTAMP, "taxonomy" ltree
      );

The table definition in Crate is a little different:

      CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS b.t2 ( "uuid" STRING,
      "ts" TIMESTAMP,
      "tenant_id" INTEGER, "sensor_id" STRING, "sensor_type" STRING,
      "v1" INTEGER,
      "v2" INTEGER,
      "v3" FLOAT,
      "v4" FLOAT,
      "v5" BOOLEAN,
      "week_generated" TIMESTAMP GENERATED ALWAYS AS     date_trunc('week', ts),
       INDEX "taxonomy" USING FULLTEXT (sensor_type) WITH (analyzer='tree')
      ) PARTITIONED BY ("week_generated")
      CLUSTERED BY ("tenant_id") INTO 3 SHARDS;

I don't know anything about how Crate works, but I see PARTITIONED BY ("week_generated") and CLUSTERED BY ("tenant_id") INTO 3 SHARDS.

Now looking at the first query, both, their PARTITION BY as well as CLUSTER BY columns appear in the query:

      SELECT min(v1) as v1_min, max(v1) as v1_max, avg(v1) as v1_avg, sum(v1) as v1_sum
      FROM b.t2
      WHERE tenant_id = ? AND week_generated BETWEEN ? AND ?;

Unless there is a sufficiently good index used in PostgreSQL, this doesn't seem to be a fair benchmark.

In the Appendix they mention how the partitioning could be implemented in PostgreSQL, also mention the indexes to be used together with the partitioning, but also say: "Because of this, we abandoned the partitioning approach for our benchmark, instead opting for a single PostgreSQL table with no partition logic."

I didn't find any statement about if/which indexes they were using in PostgreSQL when measuring their benchmarks.

They also use a rather old PostgreSQL version (9.2 — released in 2012). Now, we have PostgreSQL 9.6 which has some parallel query execution support that might also change this figures dramatically.

<comment><USER3> thanks for the comment, we'll update the indexes used in postgres. we tried to be as objective as possible and of course show our sweet spot. we don't want to treat postgres unfair, if you have suggestions on how to improve indexing in postgres we'd be happy to take that into account. (full disclosure: i'm co- founder of crate.io).</comment></comment>


Raft Refloated: Do We Have Consensus? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ms705/pub/papers/2015-osr-raft.pdf

<comment><USER2> The proposed optimizations are pretty interesting, but I think my favorite such optimization has been proposed by Ayende Rahien. As with the optimizations outlined in this paper, his is related to leader election.

One of the issues with leader election in Raft is the potential for split votes. Raft tries I guard against this by randomizing election timeouts in order to discourage two candidates from requesting votes at the same time. What Ayende suggests, though, is to add a pre-vote stage wherein followers poll other nodes to determine whether they can even win an election prior to actually transitioning to candidates and starting a new election. This ensures that only up-to-date followers ever become candidates and thus prevents nodes that will never win an election from ever transitioning to candidates in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if the consul or etcd teams will consider adding this into their respective raft implementations (assuming it does actually improve things as the paper alludes to).

</comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone seen their JS visualizer or tool source?

<comment><USER5> We're still cleaning that up for a proper release. It's based on js_of_ocaml and d3.js, but we're now porting it to use Irmin as its persistence model so that we can rewind the simulator to arbitrary points in the traces.</comment></comment>


Edison's prediction of Kindle (1911) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html

<comment><USER2> "In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world's machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels."</comment>


Ask HN: Which companies or startups in SF give tours of their offices? - <AUTHOR>

I'm heading up to San Francisco from Los Angeles this weekend. It will be my first time there. I would like to take a tour of any software company or startup that would allow that, but I don't know of any that would (unless I know someone that works there).
Anything that has to do with programming/computers/startups/etc would be interesting to me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I should do while in SF?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> If you're driving, I'd recommend a brief detour to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It's just off 101, next to Microsoft and Google. On the weekend you can see a Babbage engine run, and on the first and third Saturday of the month a PDP-1 fully restored and running Space War (and the docents doing the demos are the guys who wrote Space War, among other awesome stuff).

Schedule:

<http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/>

I go every month or two, whenever a friend is in town who hasn't visited. It's always fun.

It's no startup, but it _is_ an enlightening experience for an entrepreneurial nerd. Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, you know?

</comment><comment><USER3> Um, who are you, what are you doing, and why do you want to see a startup office?

Here's pics of one of them: [http://blog.earlh.com/index.php/2009/07/building- a-zip-line-...](http://blog.earlh.com/index.php/2009/07/building-a-zip-line- at-scribd/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a 23 year old student, finishing up my B.S. in Computer Science. I've recently started working on my own startup with a friend (I'll be posting it on HN when I have something to show) and trying to find a balance between that and school.

As for my reason for wanting to see a startup office, I've seen a lot of pictures (thanks for posting those), and as enjoyable as they are to look at, I would like to see the environment for myself. For me, it's about taking a closer look into the culture which interests me. I've wanted to travel to SF for years now, and see the tech culture that everyone speaks so highly of.</comment></comment>


Almost everything you know about hifi audio is wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpUDuUtxPM <comment><AUTHOR> There is so much misinformation even in HN about audio. Rigorous double blind tests, scientific methods, and laboratory measurements _do_ make a difference in producing high quality audio.

Also, here is more research done about headphones:

[https://www.listeninc.com/wp/media/Perception_and_- Measureme...](https://www.listeninc.com/wp/media/Perception_and_- Measurement_of_Headphones_Sean_Olive.pdf)</comment>


That Sentimental Feeling: using sentiment analysis as a proxy for plot movement - <AUTHOR> http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/12/20/that-sentimental-feeling/ <comment><USER2> First it's really awesome that human judgement and the sentiment analysis tools agree with each other so well. Maybe this was common knowledge, but I was always skeptical of it when I saw it used.

Second the amount of human hours put into generating all this data must have been insane. That could have a lot of value to researchers if he'd be willing to share it.

Third it's really awesome that the average sentiment changes so much throughout books, making these nice visualizations of the plot. Sentiment is just a fairly crude measure. Emotion and tone has many dimensions. I wonder if it would be possible to use similar tools to discover them, and get even more detailed statistics on the emotion and tone changes between and within works.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting if the author had speculated why the correlation for _The Lovely Bones_ seems quite a lot worse than the other.

Interestingly, all three methods seems to correlation much worse on that book than the others.

I haven't read it so I can't speculate myself.

Edit, there is a more recent post on this topic too: [http://www.matthewjockers.net/2016/08/11/more-syuzhet- valida...](http://www.matthewjockers.net/2016/08/11/more-syuzhet-validation/)</comment>


Alerts when new currencies are added to GDAX - <AUTHOR> https://beep.network <comment><AUTHOR> Simple (and free!) app that will send you email or SMS notifications when it detects new trading pairs on GDAX.</comment>


Bit Flip: The biggest bug you've never heard of. - <AUTHOR> https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-flip <comment><AUTHOR> Charged particles from space randomly flip computer bits and crash software. The biggest bug you've never heard of.</comment>


A Call to Action - Help Protect Startup Financing - <AUTHOR> http://www.bigstartups.com/matt/blog/206/A-Call-to-Action---Help-Protect <comment><USER2> Repeal of Regulation D is huge and would, if effected, be highly negative for startup financing.

Before Reg D, the only way to handle an inter-state offering of stock in an early-stage company was to rely on so-called Section 4(2), a part of the Securities Act of 1933 that specified a bunch of murky factors for what constituted an "exempt" offering. If you failed to meet those requirements for your company when it issued stock to investors, not only your company but all of its controlling management could be sued and be required to refund all monies to investors for any non-compliant offering. The results were often highly surprising, e.g., where an issuer was found to have done a "public offering" when it issued stock to 20 investors or so.

Regulation D changed this whole landscape by defining a set of "safe harbor" requirements that, if met, assured the issuer and its management that the securities law rules were met. It has been a huge success in bringing certainty and clarity to an area that desperately needed it.

This is a surprise to me to learn that a Reg D repeal is to be found in Senator Dodd's proposed legislation. There have been absolutely _no_ pending efforts to repeal Reg D and it is insane to do it, at least from the standpoint of startups and their investors.

The only thing could guess is that Senator Dodd is trying to slip this in as a favor to the trial lawyers. It would be highly dismaying, and quite shocking, if something like this does pass. It would definitely hurt startup funding in significant ways.

<comment><USER3> > There have been absolutely no pending efforts to repeal Reg D and it is > insane to do it, at least from the standpoint of startups and their > investors.

Sanity and law have only a passing acquaintance.

> The only thing could guess is that Senator Dodd is trying to slip this in as > a favor to the trial lawyers.

Or maybe he's trying to get money from VC funds and others that would be impacted.

Tne game is roughly "If I scare them, they'll pay money to talk with me."

Dodd is in a serious reelection fight. He took serious favors from Countrywide Mortgage in return for looking the other way during the start of the housing crisis. (His current defense is that he thought that everyone was on the "friends of Angelo" list when it came to mortgages, Angelo being the name of the president of CM at the time.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's now an online petition at:

<http://gopetition.com/online/32354/signatures.html></comment>


Smart People Should Read Fewer Books and Listen to More Podcasts - <AUTHOR> https://nickwignall.com/read-fewer-books/ <comment><USER2> Going to have to argue the other direction...

First on the Input/ knowledge gain: 100 - 150 wpm is roughly what people speak at, versus average reading speed of 200 to 250 wpm all the way up to 1000 wpm for top speed readers. If we were to analyze straight by wpm you can put into you Reading is 2X-10X better... Not that it's even a good argument though.

Books take a long time to create because the information is curated. The author of the article makes a decent point that people should focus on great books... and the answer there is yea... they should focus on great books over listening to podcasts. And yes ... there are a lot of good books out there.

<comment><USER3> Plenty of non-speed readers read at 1000 wpm. If you read a lot, you get faster.

AFIK, just about the only people reading at 200-250 wpm are people who don't regularly do any sustained reading.

<comment><USER4> I'm in the top percentile of reading speed but my comprehension is average. It's not that I'm trying to read fast I just do. I don't know if more wpm means you're taking in more information. I guess it's useful for skimming for spaced repetition type learning techniques.

Generally I find I learn faster from reading regardless but I can listen to podcasts in situations where I can't read. E.G. doing a mindless repetitive task.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can read infinitely faster than I can listen, which to me suggests that even if the signal to noise is lower the value for time is higher for reading. Podcasts are also rarely as well edited as books are. It is strange too, to attribute value to the medium rather than the content.

<comment><USER2> have to agree with the note about content over medium...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Smart people see headlines like this and know whatever the contents are, they are not worth their time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Books take some time to generate in a professional manner.

the manuscript is one thing then finding a publisher, and getting through the legaleese.

as a result, a published book may be 5 or more years out of date by the time it is published.

This is why some of my "proffs" refused to endorse a particular text, but would publish reserves to the library, and recommend select portions of a text for background information to prime to collegiate for the lectures.

so you can read about how "it" was thought to be, and assimilate what is the most up to date take on "it" from the horses mouth, the person that is actually doing the science that is written about in the texts.

.....and of course i am typing about the uni lecture, and not recreational reading.

<comment><USER7> >spurious misclick of the D.O. but its not cool to delete it so if a mod wants to nuke this bit thats fine

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hilariously weak logic... reading has higher information rate than listening. Written content can be parsed rapidly to focus on interesting chapters and sections of books. Main use case for listening to podcasts (incl vs. scanning podcast written transcripts) is in the case of listening while doing another activity (e.g. driving a car).

</comment><comment><USER9> I listen to a lot of the New Books Network podcasts. Usually the interview is better than the book, but the interview wouldn't exist if the author hadn't put the work into writing the book. But yeah, life is too short to see how everybody worked out every idea.

<comment><USER10> I often also listen to New Books Network, but my hope that the discussion will focus on the most important and original part of a book sometimes takes a beating. The interviewer often starts with a "Tell us about yourself" inquiry and follows with, "Why did you decide to write this book?" The answer to that question is almost always too long and rarely gives any significant knowledge about the content of the work. Add another 5 or 10 minutes near the end of the interview for, "What are you working on now?" Then you have a couple of ads or promos from the podcast site, introductions, closes, so even if the interviewer has read the book and is a very skilled questioner and the writer is also a very skilled conversationalist, the salience ratio of an hour podcast rarely exceeds 50%. YMMV.</comment></comment>


Awesome use of js page scroll on mystery short comic - <AUTHOR> http://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=350217&no=20&weekday=tue

<comment><AUTHOR> Just scroll down and enjoy.</comment>


Facebook React Starter Kit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you planning to build a web application with complex UI? Consider using React.js which is used by sites like facebook.com, instagram.com, feedly.com, khanacademy.org and many others.

Another idea - instead of spending dozens of hours putting the initial project structure together you can clone an existing template on GitHub and customize it for your needs. Later on, if new features are added to the template, you can fetch and merge them back into your project.</comment>


Show HN: Find a public park gym near you - <AUTHOR> http://outdoorgyms.co/ <comment><USER2> [https://imgur.com/25jmqul](https://imgur.com/25jmqul) Sadness for those living in the tri-city area! Though, around the track at Fremont Central Park there are some basic pull up bars and such every X distance apart. (You may want to add to the map if you count that.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please add it using the Add Gym button on the top right! The whole thing is powered by crowd-sourced gym points. I used to live in Pleasanton and seem to recall some ones there that I'll add.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a good idea, but I can't find any outdoor gyms near the tri- valley area (pleasanton, dublin, san ramon) or anywhere in the bay area for that matter. am i searching wrong? or does it just need more data?

</comment><comment><USER4> What tech stack is behind it?

<comment><AUTHOR> React + Meteor + Mongo</comment></comment>


Training Your Brain So That You Don't Need Reading Glasses - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/upshot/training-your-brain-so-that-you-dont-need-reading-glasses.html?partner=qz&_r=0 <comment><USER2> What about nearsightedness? I can read print just fine, but restaurant menus hung up high are the worst.</comment>


Solar Orbiter first images revealed - <AUTHOR> https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2020/07/Solar_Orbiter_first_images_revealed <comment><USER2> Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience.

Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.

<comment><USER3> I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images) to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire 11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around. The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved. It was fun showing everyone how simple parsing a structured text file, passing that data to another app for downloading, renaming/sorting to proper image sequence format. Start it, (stop/start 2 or 3 times to fix typo bugs), walk away for the weekend to come back on monday to see stuff ready to go.

Many thanks to anyone at NASA/ESA/JAXA/anyone else that makes all of that data available!!

<comment><USER4> The data is public and this usage seems to be intended, not sure why you call it "hacking".

<comment><USER3> I quoted the word hack deliberately. There have been well known cases of people being brought up on charges for using elite hacking software known as curl and/or wget.

Also, it's what my co-workers called it. These are non-coder types, and can operate a computer just well enough to use the software they are trained to use. I use the Homebrew color scheme in Terminal, so green text on black background. Only hackers use Terminal anyway, so 1 + 1 = ? (you better have said 10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is this thing here? [https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png](https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png) (around 25%-25% from top left)

Looks distinctly not part of the corona, more like a pod of some sorts, and it also jitters around in the video. I'm puzzled!

<comment><USER6> Maybe damage to the instruments?

<comment><USER7> It is definitely a spacecraft side instrumentation artifact. Notice how all three of these jiggle the same? [https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG](https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG)

<comment><USER8> '"But in fact, it's a sensor defect," he said. "In future processing when we further optimize this, this will be cleaned up and interpolated from nearby pixels. But for the moment, it's still clearly visible."'

[https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter- ima...](https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter-images.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Those are some amazingly beautiful images. And for some reason, I'm reminded of the comet-core ship that surfs just above the Sun's convection tops in _The Killing Star_ , by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Also the ~analogous ships mentioned in Vernor Vinge's _Marooned in Realtime_ , and in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" trilogy.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love watching video of activity on the solar surface because my brain has no intuition for the immense gravity and plasma dynamics at play. It's almost like getting a glimpse of a world with different laws of physics.

<comment><USER11> If I were to visit the sun I'd probably orbit it close up, rather than landing on the surface. Seems like the sensible thing to do.

Being in orbit, I would sense weightlessness while being in the presences of an enormous gravitational field. Just as in orbit around earth: gravity is still there, you just can't feel it.

Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something 300,000x more massive than earth?

<comment><USER12> > Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something > 300,000x more massive than earth?

Yes, due to tidal forces being stronger at one end of you than the other. You could use the formula given below but it looks like about a quarter of a newton.

One other thing: not sure you could "land on the surface" because it's all plasma. Flying through it might be interesting.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Haha these cookie popups, I don't know why I'm hesitant to take action on them. So like this site on mobile I'll read the article through half my phone screen.

<comment><USER14> Fun fact, the video changes from a direct video element to a YouTube element if you accept the cookie banner.

<comment><USER11> ...which is then promptly blocked by my browser.

The video is only playable if I _don't_ click the cookie nag.

<comment><USER15> This does not happen on my end. I wonder why? I'm in Europe and using Firefox with tracking protection, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (and no cookie popup killers of any kind). No sign of youtube, and the native element functions properly.

EDIT: Tried also on Chrome. Accepted only essential cookies. No youtube. (Chrome also has uBlock Origin installed, though I don't know how effective that currently is.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.

<comment><USER17> Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well.

[http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/](http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/)

<comment><USER18> Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems.

 _Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth's momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth's velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet's motion essentially canceled out, the spacecraft can surrender to the sun's gravity and begin to fall toward it._ [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker- solar-probe-launch-nasa/567197/)

<comment><USER19> Interesting article thx.

I dont get why the speed up works only towards the outer solar system though. Why does it have to loose speed to control direction?

<comment><USER20> The direction is "towards" or "away" from the sun, the only way to get closer to the sun is to make your orbit smaller, the only way to do that is to slow down in your current orbit. You can't reach a lower orbit by accelerating. (I'm simplifying a bit, it's all acceleration, what matters is if it's in your orbital velocity, prograde, or against it, retrograde)

<comment><USER21> You can accelerate so slow down. The flyby of a planet creates an accelleration that, if in the correct direction, results in a slower orbital velocity in the sun's reference frame. In really simple terms, if you approach the planet from the right (in a counterclockwise solar system) you speed up, if you aim to the left you slow down. The velocity is transferred to/from the planet.

[https://youtu.be/hKjcbmlAaYY](https://youtu.be/hKjcbmlAaYY)

Notice how the probes orbit gets more eccentric but still smaller each time it approaches a planet on the left. The gravity assist is slowing it down, again in the solar reference frame.

<comment><USER20> Gravitational slingshots are a method were you accelerate and end up slowing down but I don't think it's fair to say that you "just accelerate to reach a lower orbit", since your acceleration ultimately ends up being either retrograde for very low fly-by orbits or on the normal/radial axis. Or possibly even prograde.

Basically, using a flyby to apply retrograde speed is not much more than accelerating prograde and then using the gravity of a planet to A) move your orbital position without a speed change and/or B) redirect your acceleration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Kind of surprised this orbiter was not called Icarus

<comment><USER22> That name was floating around internally on the engineering teams until we'd ironed out the kinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Published", not "revealed".

I'm sorry. This just annoys me so much. There's two perfectly good words that pretty much always should be used instead of "revealed": "Published", or "Announced".</comment>


Tiffany removes advert over Hong Kong controversy - <AUTHOR> https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/08/tiffany-removes-advert-hong-kong-controversy/ <comment><USER2> On one hand, add Tiffany to the list of China bootlickers. On the other hand, lifestyle brands like Tiffany have been sensitive to public backlash for a couple years now. Do a search for things like "removes ad amid backlash" or "ad controversy" and there are plenty of examples.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kind of proves how ridiculous this regime is along with companies backing down over silly accusations.

As if being scared of Winnie the Pooh imagery isn't silly enough.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for low level (OS, concurrency, C++ trivia) content? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,<p>I'm a new grad trying to prep for HFT interviews. I noticed that some companies will ask these low level questions, and almost everything I read says something along the lines of "Oh, there's some C++ tricks you _just run into when you're working_." So HN, do you know any resources that can help me review concepts that show up in interviews? <comment><USER2> This can help you with OS.. [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/)</comment>


Back of the Envelope Calculations [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.yorku.ca/bquine/ENG1000/lectures/ENG1000_6_2_BOTE_BQ_rev2.pdf

<comment><USER2> When hiring engineers for my company, I might ask, what are the trade-offs in using PowerPoint-style slides to make a technical presentation? And I would expect an astute engineer who has thought about technical communication to refer me to either serious

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0001yB)

or humorous

<http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/>

discussions of the defects of PowerPoint slides as a communication tool.

The slides shown here cover some interesting ground, and I was glad to see the specific reference to Enrico Fermi, who popularized the kind of estimation question discussed here in certain circles. Certainly, it is beyond dispute that

"Although most engineers remember key numbers related to their field, no-one has every detail at their fingertips

"Hence we need to estimate not only the values of numbers we need, but which numbers are appropriate, and how to perform the calculation

"the emphasis here is on 'order of magnitude' estimates – to the nearest factor of 10

"it is also important to remember that these are rough estimates and to place only appropriate reliance on the results"

The last point is the most crucial. It is vital to remember how much uncertainty there is in your estimates, or overall in your model that includes both exactly measured and estimated values. The model is not reality. It is not easy to get engineers to remember that they have to look into the mechanism of the model to understand how it works. That's why a NASA Mars probe failed when one part of the engineering team used United States customary units while another used metric units to design modules of the probe that were supposed to communicate values to each other.

<http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/>

<comment><USER3> What are the alternatives though? (to powerpoint)

I love chalk and talk but it puts a lot of load on the speaker. My Electricity and Magnetism professor basically pushed it to the limit I think. He had a carefully cultivated temper that was bad enough to keep 100 students totally silent for 50 minutes and he used about five different colors of chalk, but there are limits to what you can scrawl out on a blackboard.

You can distribute written documents, this gives you maximum opportunity to convey information, but you can't force people to actually read them. Going from a paper memo to email exacerbates this I think. Best case scenario, you can present very clear and well structured information but if you go past two pages you have to wonder if anyone is really paying that much attention. As a "best case example" I'd look at something like this memo that Robert McNamara wrote to LBJ about a month after LBJ took office: <https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon3/doc156.htm> . A benefit of written work is that you are committed to your words. But: creating a concise and readable written document that will effectively spread your thoughts is excruciatingly difficult. You can't write a book of background info every time you have a staff meeting.

...

About remembering that you have a rough model though, I think the key thing is that when you realize that there is something you are interested in measuring and once you have a model then you can start looking for quantities you can actually measure to (in)validate and tighten the model. Always be model checking.

<comment><USER4> I spent four years studying physics and mathematics, and I only had one professor that used transparent acetate sheets with notes pre-written and examples on them. All my other professors wrote out everything with chalk. Heck, we were _excited_ when they used more than one colour of chalk, because that meant there was something exciting about to come up.

Additionally, having chalk & talk meant that many students showed up to class, instead of just relying on "reading" printouts of slides that the professor made available. I would venture a guess that I would have performed rather poorly in a class that had powerpoint slides, due to my inherent laziness in my early 20s.

<comment><USER5> Acetate rocks, especially when its well written and you can pop into the prof's office and have a tea and chat and do some photocopying. I learned much more this way.

Chalk, we spent more time dictating and deciphering the babbling fool who can't communicate it all concisely from memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there were 6,300 Musical Instrument Repairers and Tuners (code 49-9053) in the United States in 2010 and 320 in New York State in 2008.[http://www.acinet.org/occ_rep.asp?next=occ_rep&Level=...](http://www.acinet.org/occ_rep.asp?next=occ_rep&Level=&optstatus=111111111&jobfam=49&id=1&nodeid=2&soccode=499063&stfips=36&x=68&y=17)

<comment><USER7> But that's a broad category. There are a lot of instruments that need repairs and maintenance that are not pianos, and they tend not to cross instrument categories, or even individual instruments. A flute repair person will not likely also repair oboes, for instance. Also, piano repairs and piano tuning are not always done by the same people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This method breaks rather quickly because, when you multiply two order-of- magnitude estimates, you get a two-orders-of magnitude estimate. (And so forth.) In the piano tuners example, there are some five independent quantities being estimated. Of course, the answer "I think there are 500 piano tuners in NYC" doesn't sound as impressive when you add "within five orders of magnitude"...

<comment><USER9> This is strictly true, but doesn't account for the fact that errors tend to cancel one another. For instance, if 2 of the 5 independent estimates are high, one is right on, and 2 are low, you can end up with a number very close to the actual number. And, by "very close," I mean usually within 1-2 orders of magnitude, depending on the quality of the component estimates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 15\. Source: [http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=piano+tuner&find_lo...](http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=piano+tuner&find_loc=New+York%2C+NY)

<comment><USER11> If this was Reddit this would pretty much be /thread, however I propose the following question:

While this may be a good estimate, what about businesses not on Yelp?

"Professional Piano tuner" doesn't seem the most technologically advanced profession, so I think it's safe to assume that there are several, if not dozens more in existence in the NY area.

<comment><USER12> This is correct. In my town, there are four used game stores. Two of these stores do not exist online in any shape or form (One locally owned, one a subsidiary of game exchange).

Searching for a seamstress in my town turns up a few results for dry cleaners. A look on craigslist returns a much larger result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> NYC is a weird place to estimate in exactly this way. It has more of a lot of types of people who have pianos other than families. NYC has a disproportionate number of wealthy people, and also a disproportionate number of professional pianists, and I would expect both those categories get their pianos tuned rather more often than a typical family.

NYC also has lots of concert halls, and any decent concert hall will tune the piano to be used in a performance on the day of. A hall like Carnegie hall would have several pianos tuned every day.

I no do math, so maybe those things aren't enough to have a material effect on the number of piano tuners.

</comment><comment><USER13> Book: <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics>

Free PDF edition available there.

</comment><comment><USER14> Jon Bentley has a chapter on this topic in the performance section of _Programming Pearls_. This is a very useful skill for reasoning about problem boundaries. All too often, our performance estimates are on the order of "fast" and "crazy fast". Worse yet, we build systems without understanding how they will scale under load.

</comment><comment><USER15> _> A well-known curve of a calculation's accuracy versus mental effort goes like_

      \
       \
        \    __
         \__/  \
                \____

Have anyone really measured this bump or it's only folklore / myth?

<comment><USER16> It's the well known 'this graph is true because it has unexplainable data in it' bump.

<comment><USER15> The problem is not that it is unexplainable, or yet unexplained. The problem is if it is measurable and if it really exists.

(For example gravity is "unexplained" in some way. You have two masses, they deform the space, and with some approximations you can use the formula F=GmM/R^2. But, for example, why do masses deform the space?!?!?!?!?! But luckily you can measure it, just drop a stone or find a gravity lens, so gravity exists.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One problem: He assumes that the market is being adequately served, i.e. that supply and demand are relatively equal. What if tuners have a 1 year backlog and they're charging triple what you'd pay in other cities because there aren't nearly enough of them? This one piece of information could drastically affect the accuracy of any response.

Not exactly relevant when all you're concerned with is determining whether or not someone can "estimate the answer without any specialised knowledge". But, then again, why would you only be concerned with something so trivial?

<comment><USER18> Knowing the correct order of magnitude is seldom trivial. Getting the correct order of magnitude quickly will make you a better decision maker (not to mention impress people whose opinion matters).

An imbalance of supply can increase/decrease the population by maybe as much as 2x (or .5x). An order of magnitude can be the difference between a market that's worth considering and one that's too small to currently be serviceable.

This is important because in business getting a right(ish) answer quickly is often more important than getting a precisely correct answer slowly. While you're measuring precise supply and demand, FermiCo has already concluded that the market is too small and moved on.

p.s. irregardless is a great word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use this type of calculation all the time. It's often applied to a more scientific problem than piano tuners, but the key is round numbers, approximations and simplified equations. It's an incredibly useful process if you have an idea sloshing around but don't know whether it would yield anything. 10 minutes and a few estimations and you know whether it's feasible or not.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've asked out-of-town job candidates "How many gas stations do you think are in this town?" but I've not had much success with that. I think for engineers it's vital to be able to do order-of-magnitude estimations and I'm trying to get my kids to learn that but it doesn't seem to come naturally to people.

<comment><USER16> I think it has to do with how you phrase the question. People go to job interviews knowing that they're going to be tested for their knowledge, and phrasing the question like that triggers a "how am I supposed to know that?" response.

But you're not actually asking them to know it, you're asking them to reason about it. So perhaps instead of asking "How many gas stations do you think are in this town?" try asking "Could you give me a reasonable estimate of the amount of gas stations in this town?".

I think a lot of people just lock up when they're asked something they don't know in a synthetic situation even when in a real situation they would actually make very good judgements since in any real situation the context is often so much more clear, unless you like to keep your employees in the dark..

<comment><USER21> > _I think a lot of people just lock up when they're asked something they > don't know in a synthetic situation even when in a real situation they would > actually make very good judgements since in any real situation the context > is often so much more clear, unless you like to keep your employees in the > dark._

I've had that mental block happen, not when asked to estimate something like balloons in a gym, but when asked to estimate something I _knew_ for a _fact_ was a single search query away.

I was asked, "So how many travelers or trips in the US each year?"

Googling "how many travelers in us" gives [http://www.ustravel.org/news/press- kit/travel-facts-and-stat...](http://www.ustravel.org/news/press-kit/travel- facts-and-statistics) as the top result.

Knowing this is that kind of data, I was unable to put myself in a frame of mind to make believe reasoning through it. The interviewer told me to just pretend we were white boarding a marketing plan for a travel tool. I pointed out that in such white boarding or brainstorming conversations, someone would look that data point up because it's obvious a lookup would be more quickly available and more accurate than running through a Fermi style reasoning chain.

Partly because the best developers are "lazy", morally opposed to reinvention of wheels, your point about performance in a _synthetic situation_ is dead on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I actually did this the other day to show a friend that a newspaper had greatly exaggerated the number of prostitutes in Spain (300.000).

There are 40M persons in Spain, 50% are women, 50% of women have an age suitable for the trade, it is impossible that 3%, or 1 in 30 are prostitutes.

</comment><comment><USER12> If only all requirements were up front and found in the initial discourse.

</comment><comment><USER23> Never thought i'd see my first year eng prof's lecture on HN. :)

This lecture note is credited to Professor Ben Quine, a popular and favourite eng prof at York University, Canada.

<comment><USER24> Really, I had him a couple years ago. I'm in CompEng, what field are you in, we might know each other ;).

<comment><USER23> We do know each other. Very well :0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was taught by the engineer who created those slides. Pretty interesting guy. Has Professor Quine okayed the slides being posted?</comment>


Alpaca: Algo Trading Commission Free Arrives - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@AlpacaHQ/alpaca-algo-trading-commission-free-is-finally-here-d2ab6be175c5 <comment><USER2> Great job on this - I'm so excited to use it - when does it go fully live?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Expecting to go in live this summer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Love what these guys are doing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Make sure you are on the waitlist!</comment></comment>


Men Are Paying Sixfold Markups to Feel Cool About Buying Generic Viagra - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/generic-viagra-online-sellers-may-not-offer-a-great-deal <comment><USER2> Kudos to Hims and Roman. Their branding and comms strategy are on point, and they've tapped into a longstanding insecurity for men. I can't help but feel like this is applying the same sales strategy used often in women's beauty products -- pointing out flaws then selling you a solution -- but with an added premium for discretion and 'hiding your shame.' Then consolidating all your 'shameful' purchases into a one-stop shop by selling hair-loss products? Genius.

I mean, where else are you going to go? Fess up to your doctor? Stand in line at Walgreens? Some shady site on the dark web?

<comment><USER3> There are some potential downsides with the model that they are using with respect to the client-doctor relationship. See here for some more details: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/technology/for-him-for- he...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/technology/for-him-for-hers-get- roman.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Hims charges $28.50 for a monthly supply of finasteride, plus a $5 fee for > an online physician visit. The drug can be had for half the price elsewhere.

Good luck finding a doctor to write you a scrip elsewhere for $5. Assuming you're on the common high deductible plan you're looking at $100+ for a 5-min appointment unless you can mention it in passing to during your annual checkup.

Can you take the scrip from these online pharmacies to your local one and get the $.15/pill pricing?

<comment><USER5> Costco online costs about $35-$40 PER YEAR for finasteride and it comes in just as bland a packaging as anyone else would send. I can't speak to the other products Hims sells. Hims is cheaper than CVS for generic finasteride but is 10x more expensive than Costco online.

<comment><USER6> The same can be said about many things Costco sells.

And yet people are willingly paying about $100/year for Amazon Prime to buy things from Amazon at a higher price.

Not understanding why people would prefer to do that is a big part in how companies like Sears died.

<comment><USER7> Why _do_ people prefer to do that? I'm genuinely curious as I've significantly reduced my Amazon usage besides for buying niche programming books (otherwise I hit my local bookstore and a physical retailer for everything else).

<comment><USER8> Because I don't have to _drive_ to Costco for things I buy on Amazon (or EBay or Aliexpress or Zappos or...)

With kids, an overall busy schedule, and more free money than free time, I'd much rather pay a few bucks and wait a day or two. Click, click, click, it's fast and easy.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, that was unclear. I agree with you wholeheartedly about the advantages of buying things online and getting them delivered; I should have asked why people stand the Amazon tax when there's so many other options at better prices and equally convenient (including Costco's online delivery service).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The value prop is not having to have an in-person doctor visit or pay a huge copay to get access to the drug. The per-pill cost is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of cost, especially if you don't actually want that much of the drug.

</comment><comment><USER10> They are making their margin from the fancy marketing, AND from not having to talk with their doc about it. It is called the shame coefficient. Clearly prices can be had for significantly less as seen in a comparison site [1]

[1] vqRN : [http://vqrn.com/Compare-Pharmacies- Viagra.html](http://vqrn.com/Compare-Pharmacies-Viagra.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> If Veblen Goods are the expensive objects of conspicuous consumption, what will we call the expensive objects of inconspicuous consumption?

<comment><USER2> "Male enhancements" haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this article was inspired by a Blink Health press release? The article positions them as the obvious one to switch to if you still want automatic ordering/delivery and don't want to bother with in-person coupons or a doctor's visit: According to the article:

> "Blink Health, a drug-discount startup that pitches low prices on generic > drugs, recently added a men's health telemedicine offering that undercuts > Hims and Roman, charging $6.95 for 10 sildenafil pills and $8.95 for a > month's supply of finasteride."

Except...I just went through their order form for finasteride and noticed that in addition to the charge for the pills there is also a 9.95/month "subscription fee", making the full price (after a first-month discount) "$18.90 per month with auto-refill."

Which is still a BIT cheaper than the other services, but not THAT much cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER13> All the medicines are not making side effects on the body. But few medicines are making the side effects due to the patient's body health conditions. But the doctor must aware of the medicine power and patient health condition. My small suggestion is prevention is better than cure. So be care full...before taking the medicine. Men can buy generic Viagra online from a well-known online pharmacy name as Assertmeds.com. This pharmacy gives two-fold advantages to its customers i.e. they get top quality medication at a reasonable price. For more details, you can visit: [https://www.assertmeds.com/generic- viagra.html](https://www.assertmeds.com/generic-viagra.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> The framing of this article is weird. Keeps.com charges $25/month for finasteride; if we look that up on GoodRx it is ONE THIRD the regular retail price at CVS or Target or Rite-Aid or Walgreens. True, it's more than the secret with-special-coupon price nobody knows about, but since most people do pay the original overinflated retail price, those who patronize these services _are saving money_. They're perhaps not saving the most money they possibly could if they checked the GoodRx rankings every month, printed out those special coupons and stood in line...but that sounds like a lot of work.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think it's about "feeling cool", come on. I think the advantage is that you can do it all online without having to go to a doctor and discuss your erection problems in person.</comment>


Show HN: Railcar – a container runtime in rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oracle/railcar <comment><USER2> Oracle is using rust? interesting, I wonder if this is just a passion project of an individual or if these are actually teams using rust within Oracle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Usage of rust at Oracle is pretty nascent, but it is a large company and a few people are using it here and there.</comment></comment>


Indepth overview of tesla drivetrain - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMQjcukphpA

<comment><AUTHOR> If you guys know where to find the videos or write-ups on the battery pack, that he talks about in the video, please post them here.</comment>


Hackage, Cabal and the Haskell Platform: The Second Year : Report from ICFP - <AUTHOR> http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/hackage-cabal-and-the-haskell-platform-the-second-year/

<comment><USER2> The slide that stuck out to me was the claimed number of Haskell programmers: enough to fill 1155 Boeing 747's. By my estimation that comes out to about 575,000 (assuming ~500 per plane), which definitely seems high to me. I would guess the actual number is closer to the 125,000 the slide cites per HP release, and even that may be high. But in any case, Haskell's growth is very exciting and encouraging. Let's hope it continues!</comment>


How to Explain Your Tech Job to Your Family During the Holidays - <AUTHOR> https://builttoadapt.io/how-to-explain-your-tech-job-to-your-family-905a7c367e2a <comment><USER2> Keep it short and simple within 1-3 sentences. Truth is no one really gives a damn, it's polite small talk. Ask your aunt about her rat-sized dog instead, you'll make a far better impression.

I'm definitely not setting it up with some bakery analogy.

<comment><USER3> Is this a US thing? I mean, talking about your job with your relatives and closed-ones. I'm asking because as an European I don't talk that much about my job whenever I visit my parents (in fact, I barely mention it, as in reassuring my mom that yes, my boss still likes me and that I'm not going to be out of a job anytime soon), and whenever I meet my other relatives (which is pretty rare, we don't care about each other) I never mention it at all.

Back to my discussions with my parents, we always end up talking about national politics and the international situation, I thought that was a thing that people do world-wide whenever they meet with their closed ones around a table, eating.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if it's just a US thing; in fact, I highly doubt it. But yes, "What are you doing nowadays?" and "How's the job going?" and the like is a common conversation starter among friends and family here, even if just for small-talk.

And, of course, politics is a topic of conversation too, though it will be mutually avoided if it's known it may cause unpleasant friction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Cloud: A big networked oven that helps make your goods available all around > the world at fast speeds.

That's almost certainly the worst metaphor I've heard for explaining what the Cloud is. "Networked oven" indeed...

<comment><USER4> I guess it depends on how you would define "the cloud" _without_ using a metaphor…

<comment> vertex-four "Somebody else's computers."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I'm a web developer."

"So you design web sites?"

"No, that's a web _designer._ For example, on an e-commerce site, a web designer will design what the pages look like, including the 'Add to Cart' button. But I will write code that handles what happens when that 'Add to Cart' button is clicked. It usually involves changing various bits of data in a database."

"Oh, I see. Hey, Moshe, come over here and meet Cyberdog! He's a web designer now!"

<comment><USER6> Designers do a lot more than determine what pages look like. That's _graphic design_ or _visual design_ . Design in general [should] determine _how the website flows_ from one interaction to the next and _what the experience is like_ (another subfield called UX design). There's also _interaction design_ that deals with e.g. animations when e.g. pressing the button.

In general though, _design_ is _how it works_ from the standpoint of the user; design decisions are things like "what does the user see when they first visit the site" and determining if that's the best thing for whatever goals you have is the tough part.

Design is not the paintbrush, but this is a commmon misconception, even among engineers who work with designers. If you're making websites at a company and designers are just giving you CSS to style elements and determine colors, you're not taking advantage of _design thinking_ : [https://www.ideou.com/pages/design- thinking](https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking) and are very likely making design decisions without realizing it, similar to how it's possivle to be architecting systems without realizing it and without considering the large body of work in these fields that exists.

It pains me greatly that design is so misunderstood as ~"the paintbrush", even / especially with engineers, as [a dearth of] design is almost always the cause of gripes like "it's so stupid how {piece of software} works! Why did they make it like this?!".

If you're an engineer and you commonly think "this software really suck", please check out [http://www.designkit.org](http://www.designkit.org) over the holiday break (if you get one). We desperately need more people who understand the need for and the realities of design in positions where decisions are made.

<comment><USER4> I do not disagree at all, but your arguments here run contrary to the idea of "briefly explain what you do to non-technical friends and family."

Suppose such a person asks you what you (who, I presume, is a "web designer" of some sort or other) do for a living. How do you respond without going into the weeds of various types and concepts of design for five paragraphs?

<comment><USER7> You don't. Just let them think what they think, because its the least important conversation you'll have all day

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I actually do: "I work on safety-critical software for autonomous vehicles."

What I tell people: "I make websites."

Because what I've learned over the years is that there's no faster way to kill a dinner conversation than explain any part of what I actually do.

<comment><USER6> This is why I love the valley; it's possible to have dinners where people not only understand what the first one means, but are fascinated by it and would love to talk about it.

<comment><USER9> On the flip side the valley gets annoying because work is all anybody talks about outside of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The developer is the baker? No. The developer is the guy who writes recipes. The baker is the computer who executes recipes.

The difference is that our recipes are hundreds and thousands of pages long and some lines are references to other recipes of more thousands of pages. Also, we write recipes where hundreds of bakers have to work in parallel without confusing each other.

</comment><comment><USER11> When a non-family member asks you what you do for a living, they usually either want to make small talk or they want to size you up and see where you fit relative to them on the ol' social totem pole. I usually just say I'm an exotic dancer, and that will most of the time get a laugh, break the ice, and subtly convey the message that it's none of their business. Works like a charm!

</comment><comment><USER12> Years ago, I did a brief stint at a government agency which strongly discouraged employees talking about their work to anyone.

Made for some quite awkward Christmas party small talk that year. "So, I hear you landed this new job..." -"Yup. Public servant." "Oh. What do you do, then?" -"Public servant stuff."

Now, working in the marine industry, it is much simpler. "I get heavy, expensive stuff to the seabed. Oil stuff. Unmanned submarine stuff. On good days, I also get it back up again." "Oh, I see."

</comment><comment><USER13> I do not think I will every be able to explain to my family what I do. Back in the day I worked for an ecommerce shop, my mother asked "Well isnt it finished?" Actually a very true question but too complex to answer.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have tried different ways but in the end people didn't really get it so it wasn't very useful. Now I just say I am a software engineer and nothing else.

Sometimes I add some technical detail to a discussion like the Equifax leaks or net neutrality to clarify misconceptions. But that's only mildly related to my real work so people still don't know what I do :)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not the job that's hard to explain, it's explaining the willful lack of income that's hard.

</comment><comment><USER16> "I'm part of a large, multi-organizational effort to put as many people out of work as possible."

<comment><USER17> This is every corporate job ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You must not be very good at your job if you can't explain it to people you've known your entire life analogically/in layman's terms. Furthermore, you definitely should not need a cookie-cutter metaphor from some article.

<comment><USER19> Describe the end goal of the company you work for is usually easy ("we provide software for the call center for 911").

Your actual role «development of master-master database cluster to ensure 99.99999% uptime" cannot be expressed in layman terms.

Alternative would be "I write software for Oracle database called Oracle RAC with a 1M$ price tag", which, while also true probably won't make sense.

Sticking to "I work in IT" is probably better than trying to explain the CAP theorem.

Not everything can be ELI5 without losing a large amount of important knowledge...

<comment><USER20> "I work in IT" is the fastest way to get a phone handed to you to fix an email account.

I typically explain that I work with communications. To the casual asker this typically suffices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "I work in data processing for a large corporation. How about you?"

Having used Chef, which completely half-arses the cookery metaphor, that's not one I'd choose. You got cookbooks and recipes and knife, but then the developers just couldn't be bothered any more so you also got nodes and run lists and data bags...

</comment><comment><USER22> Those must be the worst analogies I've read in a long time.

Please avoid analogies if possible. They rarely help, and mostly just tell a story that sounds plausible but has nothing to do with what you are actually trying to explain.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. Analogies are like trying to compare a metaphor with a simile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't explain it, let them piece together their own imagination from Hollywood depictions of tech workers and news reports about tech companies.

Sometimes the best inspiration is to imagine the alternative ;)

</comment><comment><USER24> I avoid family in general. Too many self-interest mixed with alcohol andresentment, no thanks.

</comment><comment><USER25> I stop bad guys from stealing people's money from tbe bank (IT security).

Works well for kids and adults

<comment><USER4> Sooo… you're a security guard?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just tell them you're a hacker and then evade any further questions.

</comment><comment><USER27> Our product is mobile middleware, so I try to make an analogy to their business. To my dentist, I explain that it's kind of like supplying their tools or their filling materials.

</comment><comment><USER28> If they're interested, there's probably a better way to explain it. If they aren't interested, a baking analogy isn't going to make them interested.</comment>


What happens to Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends? (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/ <comment><USER2> As a (south) Asian immigrant I found this article trite. To answer the title—what happens after the test taking ends? Asians end up as the highest income demographic in the country. Thank you, tiger mom.

I also don't appreciate the angsty ranting about Asian immigrant culture. Work hard, keep your head down, raise kids, provide for your family, respect your parents, etc. Those are great values and are as much traditional American values as Asian immigrant ones. It's the American baby boomers and millennials with their fixation on self-gratification that are the outliers.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. There's a tendency of exaggerating the downsides of Asian culture. Some people can't accept uncomfortable truths. I lived in Japan for one year. I felt like a medieval peasant stepping into a time machine. Everything was clean, safe and fully operational. Rome looks like a ghetto compared to Tokyo. Not one graffiti in sight – a byproduct of respect for public spaces. Critics always bring up their work culture, as if that invalidates the whole picture.

> _Work hard, keep your head down, raise kids, provide for your family, > respect your parents, etc._

Have you noticed how American media is always set on undermining those qualities?

<comment><USER4> In case you haven't heard, there's "Paris syndrome" for Japanese, which is:

"a condition exhibited by some individuals when visiting or going on vacation to Paris, as a result of extreme shock at discovering that Paris is different from their expectations."

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

Basically, Paris is so dirty that it is a shock to many Japanese. And it's not surprising that's the case, given how clean and tidy Japanese cities are.

<comment><USER5> The joke is that you are not in a true Parisian coffee if the waiter is not rude.

With that said there are a lot of nice and clean places in Paris. But the tourists area are mostly in the worst neighborhoods. To compare with American cities Moulin Rouge would be a strip club in Skid Row. It's madness sending tourists in the north/ north center of Paris, travel agencies don't do their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very good and raw article. You can feel the author's angst and confusion about his standing in society and the need for recognition of who he really is rather than being defined by accident of birth. I think the lessons are applicable universally to any individual who feels alienated from their society due to the perceived need for conformance.

I loved this passage;

 _Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you're supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you're finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you._

"Leadership" in a nutshell!

<comment><USER7> > in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you're supposed to > break. If you break the wrong rules, you're finished.

That is a very insightful observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think some of the conclusions of the article put the cart before the horse. The writer mentions a few times that if Asian people are X% of an incoming class at e.g. PwC, then of that cohort, about X% should also become partner; but then the author also claims that he doesn't think Asians are intrinsically smarter than other people, just taught to be much better test takers / students. Those two outcomes aren't necessarily contradictory; it could be that focusing too hard on academics causes people to end up in career tracks where they are less suited to the job compared to people who put in less effort but performed similarly.

This is actually a noted phenomenon at Google where competitive programming experience correlates negatively with job performance, because by practicing the measure so much, you can display a stronger signal than you actually have (in other words, you can seem better than you are because you are highly practiced at the tests).

Also I think the author is off the mark with their generalizations of white people. Almost all of the stereotypes about Asian people also apply to e.g. white software developers.

<comment><USER9> I actually think the Pwc partner example is a poor one. Not all people that work at Pwc want to become partner as it necessitates 4 months/year of 7 day 94 hour work weeks for 8-12 years. Most people get the brand on their resume and then leave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Overachiever_ is a loaded term. It has many negative connotations. As if someone went so far beyond _achieving_ that they deserve to be despised for it. This type of rhetoric is often used to disparage Asian-Americans. I enjoyed reading the different perspectives in the article, but I do wish they'd be more conscious about such terms.

<comment><USER11> I'd never really considered the implications of that term before.

There is a shockingly large segment of American society that feels pride in its own ignorance. I've had numerous discussions with family members, particularly those from rural areas, who flat-out deny statistical fact because "they know what's right in their heart"

That being said, I think there is an analogue to these ideas in Asian cultures. I think Asian cultures can be similarly resistant to new ideas - particularly in social contexts (LGBTQ rights, as an example.)

<comment><USER12> There are farmers in Asia that are similarly close minded, they just don't tend to immigrate to the USA. There is a lot of selection bias that prevents generalizing immigrant experiences back to native ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the next generation of AA will be more balanced in how they raise their kids, thus they will break all the stereotypes. Most of the examples used in this article are children of first generation immigrants who were raised in a super chaotic society, enduring poverty (maybe), immigrating to a completely different land. It is normal that they would advise caution and hard work to their children. But make no mistake, i think this tiger parenting stuff is super toxic. No children in America should be raised like a race horse.

<comment><USER14> AA typically means African American so I was confused for a bit.

<comment><USER15> I was thinking Alcoholics Anonymous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition

 _Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable._

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys- miserable-winners/594760/)

Recently on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741224)

</comment><comment><USER17> Are there any books our there that strike a balance between being "tiger mom" and the positives of a western upbringing? I've read Amy Chaus book and it seems like some balance of both cultures is the ideal solution for kids in the future. Has anyone tried to cherry pick the best of both worlds/cultures and written about it? It's a question I've pondered as I start to look into how to raise my 2 year old.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a pretty gross article. Pickup artists are the answer, really?

<comment><USER8> This was written back when they were still a relevant subculture

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From 2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506651)

Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530663)

</comment><comment><USER20> The part about the hardness of the transition from school to real life is great. The part where, somehow, we're supposed to buy that a path out of the situation comes from Asian American men getting better at "picking up" white women feels pretty ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER21> _Fuck sacrificing for the future._ [...] _there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and be in a garage band or something_ [...] _If you take this job, you are just going to hit the same ceiling we did. They just see me as an Asian Ph.D., never management potential._ [...] _I didn't earn more than $12,000 for eight consecutive years._

A rambling slog. Needs a [2011] tag.

</comment><comment><USER22> What a racist title.</comment>


Cockroaches: The insect we're programmed to fear - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140918-the-reality-about-roaches <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8346952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8346952)</comment>


Ask HN: What is Google.com/domains? - <AUTHOR>

I just visited http://google.com/domains by mistake and was redirected to http://charlestonroadregistry.com/.<p>Did I miss something in the news about Google buying these TLDs under a different name? Thanks. <comment><USER2> "How is Charleston Road Registry related to Google?

Charleston Road Registry (CRR) is a subsidiary of Google. Because ICANN requires that registrars and registries remain separate entities, and Google is already an ICANN-accredited registrar, CRR exists as a separate company from Google. We don't favor any registrar over any others in terms of pricing, awarding domains, or any other domain operations; we'll partner with any ICANN-accredited registrars that are interested in our domains"

From [http://charlestonroadregistry.com/faqs.html](http://charlestonroadregistry.com/faqs.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally missed the FAQ there. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Jeff Jarvis on Why the Rutgers Suicide Can't Be Blamed on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://thefastertimes.com/mediaandtech/2010/10/02/why-the-rutgers-suicide-isnt-about-the-internet/

<comment><USER2> isn't the argument like the gun argument, guns don't kill people, people kill people.

The internet was not the problem it was person who immorally used it.</comment>


Vice leaves metadata in photo of John McAfee, pinpoints him to Guatemala - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/03/vice-leaves-metadata-in-photo-of-john-mcafee-pinpointing-him-to-a-location-in-guatemala/ <comment><USER2> metadata can easily be faked</comment>


Major Washington DC area hiring - <AUTHOR>

Over 20 open positions.
Top Secret security clearance required.
BS in Computer Science or similar required.
- 5 weeks vacation after one year.
- very competitive base salary + bonus.
- relocation assistance.
Submit resume to woti.com/jobs.cfm
Benefits:  woti.com/benefits.cfm <comment><USER2> If relocation assistance is available, you may want to try again with a title less location specific and more about the type of work (large scale data sets?).

It's also unclear between your post and the job descriptions on the site whether it's required to already have Top Secret clearance, or if you simply need to be willing to get it. Many people may not know that Top Secret clearance is actually something you can apply for: <http://www.taonline.com/securityclearances/>

<comment><USER3> You must already have a clearance, or the OP's company must be willing to pay thousands of dollars for you to get one. A TS clearance is not something that can simply be applied for. Yes, you fill out the SF86 (for a TS clearance), but your clearance must be sponsored by your current employer or your to-be employer. You cannot fill out the SF86 and mail it in expecting to get a clearance without a sponsoring organization.

TS clearances require a rigorous background investigation on the applicant and sometimes require 1 or more polygraphs. The entire investigation/adjudication process can take up to a year or more. The intelligence community that will adjudicate you is trying to determine whether or not you are a risk to the country if you are given classified information.

Clearances are very difficult to get, and people are often disqualified because they have poor credit history or have lied on their SF86 (especially about drug use). This is why people that hold a clearance command a premium on their salary. Current figures are that TS-cleared individuals make up to $15K more than their non-cleared counterparts.</comment></comment>


Teen Finds Her Flickr Image On Bus Stop Ad - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/24/tech/main3290986.shtml?source=RSSattr=World_3290986 <comment><USER2> The lawsuit notwithstanding, does anyone know if Virgin really did anything wrong here? What torts, as I'm told they say in law school.

I ask because from what I can tell, they didn't _quite_ do anything that should get them into legal hot water. They followed the terms of the CC license. The only trouble spot is that they didn't get the girl's permission, but it would be easy to argue that she gave the photographer implicit rights to the image and thus would have little say in how it's used.

Obviously, though, her complaint is understandable. If only as a courtesy, Virgin certainly should have contacted the photographer to say that they were using the image in a large campaign. But unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a legal recourse. What we've got here is a failure to communicate.

<comment><USER3> And it seems they did not mention the name of the photographer like it was required.</comment></comment>