Safari and Chrome Web Inspector Updates - <AUTHOR> http://webkit.org/blog/1091/more-web-inspector-updates/

<comment><USER2> tl:dr – general usability improvements, HTML editing for the DOM, timeline (a lá the beginnings of Speed Tracer), audit (a lá YSlow). Wiki here: <http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebInspector>

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been playing with the Chrome/Safari Web Inspector for a few weeks now and let me say that I kind of like Firebug more.

I hope this update make CSS editing more Firebug-like.

<comment><USER4> I prefer WI for some tasks, Firebug for others, but with every update I feel I need FB less and less.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please review my new app StatusDashboard - <AUTHOR> http://statusdashboard.com

<comment><AUTHOR> "Make something someone specific needs, launch fast, let users show you what to change, change it, repeat last two." -PG

Summary: StatusDashboard is a hosted app that let's companies easily build a status dashboard for external services like SaaS applications and APIs or internal IT services like email, phone, wireless internet, etc. (similar to Google Apps Status Dashboard or Amazon EC2). The dashboard can be shared by link or embedded into an company's web-site.

There are plenty of alternatives (including rolling your own and open source offerings). But the target market for this product just wants it up and running now without any hassle.

Goals of project:

-Address a pain point I had (prevent help desk flooding when a service goes down)

-Learn RoR (Looked at Ruby for the first time 3 weeks ago...loving it so far)

-Learn day-to-day operations for the basic SaaS components, before I launch my "real product": * Hosting (Heroku) * Payment Gateways (Authorize.net) * Recurring Billing (Chargify) * Support (ZenDesk) * Mail Transport (SendGrid) * Mailing List Mgmt (MailChimp) * Lots of other things (Adwords, marketing, analytics, community feedback, etc.)

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

</comment><comment><USER2> I would suggest a demo link be available instead-of/next-to the Try It Now link button on the home page. I was interested in trying it now but I don't want to pay $10 just to see what it is. The fact that there is "No Risk" is not important to me at this stage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. I'll update to make it clear that everyone gets a 30-day free demo. In fact, I collect no credit card info at signup.

Edit: Done. Does that look better on the signup page?

<comment><USER2> I don't see a difference or a free option. Anyway, you're asking to have a fairly "deep" relationship with me without my knowing anything about you with that TIN link. I don't know if I like your product well enough or whether it meets my needs to justify giving you my name/email. That's important info to me - I get enough emails already so why should I make an exception for you?

My point is that, while you might be comfortable giving out your email/contact info easily and on a whim, others will not be so quick to want to do so. Help them/me get over the hump and your signup rate will improve. You can't improve sales until you improve signups.</comment></comment></comment>


[Show HN] An experiment - Group Chat from just a URL - <AUTHOR> http://groups.gaglers.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks great. I've seen similar projects and I think these disposable group chats are very powerful.

My biggest problem is that I never remember them for when I need them and resort to group chats. Often that's "good enough" but for when everyone isn't on the same network something like this would be nice. Again, the hardest part is thinking about the service when I need it.

A feature request would be file attachments. It's 2013 and attaching a file in a chat is still extremely painful and rarely works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gee, thanks! We were thinking that we'd allow other websites to take a url and embed it within their site or collaborative area. Do you think that will help?

Yeah, I hear you about file attachments :)

<comment> grey-area A great and simple idea and a service that I think a lot of small companies would actually pay for if you execute it well. The front page of HN will be a good load test...

However I'd also be concerned about security - if you're trying to sell this as a service, you'd need to password protect groups somehow and ideally serve on https. Can't see this on the site right now but presumably you're planning to offer this? Perhaps this is just an experiment, but having no guarantees like this would not reassure me - ideally chats should be namespaced too so that there are no issues with collisions of chat room names.

There's no way I'd type anything useful into a chat like this without basic security in place and being reassured about how the data was stored and deleted. Chats are just too prone to leaking information because they're so informal, so it's even more important than email in a way. In fact I'd probably prefer to buy the software and run it on my server to be sure about that if actually using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. Yes, we would provide https, password protected groups and a nice dashboard to view the transcripts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _"Profanity detected. Message cannot be sent"_

Seriously?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there is a simple trie that checks for common profanity words. I'm sure we can improve it. :)

<comment><USER4> I would love to use this service, but I demand the freedom to bitch and moan to my friends using whatever cuss words I fucking feel like.

<comment><USER5> Just override the isProfanityPresent() function:

        function isProfanityPresent() {return false}

<comment><USER6> See <http://groups.gaglers.com/chat/wordfilter/> for the data is loads as profanity

<comment><USER5> Really ?!

        attractive
        abusive
        bra
        style
        naked
        seduce
        seductive
        sex
        sexy
        gay
        homo
        oral
        testicle

WTF?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What do you mean by "may exist"?

         Failed! "asdjoiqndiqnw09d21eh09n20dnqdqddqw" may exist, try another name

Are you using a bloom filter or something?

<comment><USER8> My guess would be they spread random false positives for privacy reasons?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      Failed! "sdf" may exist, try another name
      Failed! "sdkjfhjkshf" may exist, try another name
      Failed! "kjht7y248i23uh" may exist, try another name

Great minds think alike, right? (edit: formatting)

</comment><comment><USER10>
      > Failed! "test" may exist, try another name
      > Failed! "another name" may exist, try another name
      > Failed! "i just did" may exist, try another name

<comment><USER11> but apparently touchme wasn't taken!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://groups.gaglers.com/r/EM3m/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Choosing 'Ø' as my name made the whole thing go blank.. removing the cookies and choosing another name made it work again..

Edit: Great idea btw :)

</comment><comment><USER14> > Failed! "sodihfoihvocin" may exist, try another name

Hmm. Every name I tried gave me this message. At first I thought it was because I used obvious names that other people had used, like "test" and "foobar", but even the above random string of gibberish failed.

</comment><comment><USER15> Kudos. Very clean design. I toyed with pretty much the exact same concept a few years ago when I wanted to try out Google's AppEngine:

<http://yakeze.appspot.com/nick/hackernews2013/>

</comment><comment><USER16> If you're going to give people a unique URL to give out, then can we have non unique group names? I couldn't find a relevant group name that wasn't already taken, so resorted to mashing the keyboard

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting. I've been working on a very similar concept but based on IRC. There's a version running here: <http://lalo-g7stltno.dotcloud.com/>

Once authenticated with your Twitter account you can join a room using the URL, the path represents a room/channel. The cool thing is that you can also join to that channel using a standard IRC client as well.

The code is here: <https://github.com/malditogeek/lalo>

</comment><comment><USER18> When me and a friend of mine were experimenting in creating a web chat we realized that inserting new messages into the beginning of page (or div) is much better for both users and developers. No bothering with autoscrolling. No user distraction of autoscrolling when he reads previous messages. It was really a good decision.

Anyway IRC is much better. I don't want to live my life in a multitabbed web browser window.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd also make the identifiers non-guessable.

I'm having quite a nice conversation with kokpo at the moment but I don't think he meant to invite me ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> Whatever I try to use as group name, "it may already exist":

"Failed! "almzirfmzeurfuerzf" may exist, try another name"

"Failed! "lalalalalalalahello" may exist, try another name"

…

<comment><USER21> Same issue:

 _Failed! "this name is clearly not in use due to the random string of characters it ended with ~agsh1das82S~" may exist, try another name_

Perhaps the system is overloaded, or they use a dynamically generated unique identifier with each room, such as a short URL of 3-6 characters, if they're numeric only HN and Reddit could probably fill it pretty quickly - but without any more information, this is all guess work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Keep getting:

Failed! "rexasdsfed" may exist, try another name

<comment><USER23> I was surprised by what names were already taken. Seemed like there was a bug in the name check rather than the name actually being taken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to be able to use this for my telepresence rig. Please let me know if I can license this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let us talk. Can you send me a email? My email is in profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I tried 5 random names (each more complex and more unique than the last) and each one failed...

</comment><comment><USER26> Tried to create groups with non-us character in it (ö) and get the following message:

Page unavailable Sorry, but the requested page is unavailable due to a server hiccup. Our engineers have been notified, so check back later.

</comment><comment><USER11> this is cool, any possibility of the source showing up on github?

</comment><comment><USER27> <https://crypto.cat/> will give you encrypted group chat from a word. But you do have to install an extension.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The bug that caused many group creations to fail is fixed now. Let us know if there are still more issues.

</comment><comment><USER28> If I could use this for our support chat with my customers on a native client, that would be awesome too..

<comment><AUTHOR> We are experimenting with some like that. We'll be glad to work with you on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> One issue I noticed immediately, if you resize the window while in chat, the input box overlaps the chat.

</comment><comment><USER13> Feature request: The ability to associate an gravatar email address after I've entered a room..

</comment><comment><USER30> These things pop up about every six months. Some have a USP, others like this one, don't.

</comment><comment><USER31> typed in three choices of group name: one a dictionary word, another a university module code, the last a random selection of about 20+ letters. All three choices returned the same error message - that this group may already exist.</comment>


Show HN: Do you hate toolbars? Try my new tool to get rid of them once for all - <AUTHOR> http://www.toolbarblocker.com

<comment><USER2> As an outsider who doesn't use Windows, it really does look like a ghetto. Recently I installed some software in a Windows vm using an un-configured browser (i.e. no adblock), and I was genuinely amazed at how challenging it was, even when I wanted to download things that I knew were reputable.

<http://i.imgur.com/0vPdDYU.png> this is what trying to download software on windows is like if you don't use adblock.

It does seem notable that the providers of online ads have little incentive to remove fake download ads and the like due to having their own platforms that compete with Windows. Reducing trust and making it more difficult to download native software pushes people towards competing platforms like ChromeOS. I'm not saying it's a deliberate plot, just that there is little organisational will to stop the abuse because the harm largely affects others.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I created this tool because I am sick of the state of Windows world that we got into. These days its almost impossible to download free software from the internet and not being offered toolbars and other products. Whenever I visit my family, I have to constantly clean up junk from their PCs as they are not careful when installing stuff on Windows. Hopefully Toolbar Blocker will help users keep the computers cleaner - it effortlessly prevents installation of toolbars (kind of like antivirus for toolbars). I am not sure about business model for this yet. Obviously I don't want to bundle anything, and I don't think people will want to pay for such a software.

Your comments would be very appreciated!

Here is the download site: <http://www.toolbarblocker.com></comment>


Data processing on modern hardware - <AUTHOR> https://lemire.me/blog/2018/06/26/data-processing-on-modern-hardware/ <comment><USER2> As a team working a _lot_ on modern GPUs in the cloud for pretty normal (non- just-deep-learning) compute, we have a different experience:

1\. Big GPU memories, sufficiently flexible compute units, breakthroughs in irregular algorithms & tooling => we found end-to-end GPU computing quite viable for most of our data processing. GOAI (link below) is becoming the next big leap here.

2\. Getting data on device isn't the issue: Slow communication part is data warehouse -> device (3 GB/s), not cpu->gpu (30-300 GB/s). No significant advantage to CPU here, and for the slight CPU tax here, I expect network->GPU to become cloud-standard.

3\. Multi-GPU & GPU memory is insane: The exciting thing for us is (a) all cloud providers have GPUs and are updating them regularly and (b) Nvidia is providing multi-GPU designs with a lot of fast shared memory (ex: DGX2/HGX2). It's a world where for most datasets, there is more GPU RAM than workload data, and 100K+ threads means a node can destroy a dataset in a few steps. For the bigger datasets that require streaming, GPU memory bandwidth & thread count is a monster.

1+3 => We're playing with interactive (<100ms) tasks on dataset sizes that, as interactive tool devs, we regularly get surprised by.

Ex: For some of our high-level interactive visual analytics task that renders in the browser, we'll run a a GPU compute pipeline end-to-end (5+ GPU kernels), where most subtasks take 0-1ms (so many threads!), maybe repeatedly for simulations, and within 20ms, get back to the CPU, and then send down to the browser. Amdahl's Law hits us.. at the network compression & transfer layer.

For a sense of where members of the GOAI (gpu open analytics initiative) community members are going, from the perspective of web devs, we wrote up some planning notes on our path to making regular nodejs apps plug into all this: [https://www.graphistry.com/blog/js-gpus-ml-arrow- goai](https://www.graphistry.com/blog/js-gpus-ml-arrow-goai) .

</comment><comment><USER3> > networking folks like something called DMA (direct memory access). As I > understand it, it allows one machine to access "directly" the memory of > another machine, without impacting the remote CPU. Thus it should allow you > to take several distinct nodes and make them "appear" like a multi-CPU > machine. Building software on top of that requires some tooling and it is > not clear to me how good it is right now.

In the old days CPUs couldn't saturate DRAM bandwidths but DMA could, so DMA was important. Today a single core of a CPU can read or write about 100 GByte/sec, about 4x more than the bandwidth of a single DRAM module ([https://zsmith.co/images/XeonE5-2630v4.png](https://zsmith.co/images/XeonE5-2630v4.png) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR4_SDRAM#Modules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR4_SDRAM#Modules)). Also PCs tend to have more CPU cores than DRAM channels.

If you use something like DPDK to get fast network performance, then I'm not sure what more DMA brings.

If you are already using all your CPU power and not saturating your DRAM channels, then DMA is a win. But instead of buying the fancy NIC with the DMA support, you could have bought more CPU cores.

I can see that the latency and power consumption of DMA might be lower than if the CPU was involved because when a NIC supports DMA, the data path looks like this:

NIC <-> PCIe <-> Northbridge <-> DRAM

If the CPU is involved, it looks like this:

NIC <-> PCIe <-> Northbridge <-> CPU <-> Northbridge <-> DRAM

And you have to jump through hoops to prevent the DPDK NIC polling thread from being descheduled occasionally, particularly if you are running in a cloud VM.

Another interesting thing is that modern machines allow the NIC to write traffic into CPU cache directly, bypassing DRAM ([https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/io/data-direct- i-o...](https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/io/data-direct-i-o- technology.html)). If the data you are trying to read (via DMA) is in CPU cache, then I'm guessing it'll be slower than if you asked the CPU for it.

And another thing: the memory controller in the Northbridge maintains a table of outstanding memory requests that CPU cores or PCIe peripherals have demanded. I don't know what the contention policy is. That could alter things drastically.

<comment><USER4> There hasn't been a Northbridge for quite some time. This was replaced by the QPI/HyperTransport and an integrated memory controller.

<comment><USER3> OK, perhaps I'm showing my age by clinging to these archaic terms. By Northbridge I just meant the functional block that contains the memory controller.

<comment><USER4> I totally understand, it was around forever :)

I thought you made good observations, I was trying to add to it. Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love reading about modern CPUs, SIMD, cache efficiency etc. But then people serialise the hell out of their data and send it over the network (sometimes across regions), so all the benefit is gone. I hope people start processing data on single nodes more often, I see too much distributed processing when a single node will do.

</comment><comment><USER6> > We have cheap and usable machine learning; it can run on neat hardware if > you need it to. Meanwhile, databases are hard to tune. It seems that we > could combine the two to tune automagically database systems. People are > working on this. It sounds a bit crazy, but I am actually excited about it > and I plan to do some of my own work in this direction.

Aren't databases well understood in comparison to machine learning? I know it would take me a lot less time to look up how to tune a database than it would to get a machine learning system up and running.

<comment><USER7> This was the only point that struck me as well. I believe the author was referring to self-tuning within a general case (ie. as part of the DB software to be deployed against many new databases) rather than one-off ML-based tuning (ie. as part of a manual optimization effort for an existing database).

Of course, the real optimization should be for legibility and maintainability... human time being far more important than machine time. But that wouldn't allow fetish discussions diving in to low level efficiencies, now would it?

 _Any sufficiently complex system acts as a black box when it becomes easier to experiment with than to understand. Hence, black-box optimization has become increasingly important as systems become more complex._ \- Google Vizier: a service for black-box optimization Golovin et al., KDD'17

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a lot of research on this topic. Peloton[0] is one example. It's an in-memory SQL DB designed for OLTP and OLAP workloads that tunes itself. Andy Pavlo, one of the researchers, has an awesome series of lectures on YouTube that describes a lot of the modern research on database implementation[1].

[0]: [https://pelotondb.io/](https://pelotondb.io/)

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjYplQRUlrgQ...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjYplQRUlrgQKwIAV3es0U6t)

</comment><comment><USER9> > There is an argument that says that if you have the GPU anyhow, you might as > well use it even if it is inefficient. I do not like this argument.

Why not? People use CPUs all the time where GPUs are much more efficient, why not the other way round as well? If you have GPU, why to keep it idle?

<comment><USER10> I think he touches on why not during the comments about block chain. It is probably about "wasting" power and energy with inefficiency.

<comment><USER9> Alright, with proof of work you indeed waste energy, but it's still just tangentially related - if you do it on CPU, you are probably wasting even more. However, I see e.g. my Core-M laptop as vastly underused - if I run Deep Learning there, it's on CPU, which is inefficient, but given it has only Intel HD graphics with OpenCL for which I don't have a working TensorFlow/Keras, I might have it 100x slower than I could. But I still use CPU for simpler Deep Learning models when I need it "on the road", though wish I could use iGPU. OTOH when I have a problem that requires AVX-512, it's much more efficient to compute it on latest Xeon, but if I only have a stack of single-precision GPUs, I might use those even knowing my results will be less precise and they would take longer to compute?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> what's the point of making a post to dismiss everything you heard without much arguments...</comment>


Innovation is implemented ideas - <AUTHOR> http://tomcritchlow.com/creativity-vs-innovation

<comment><AUTHOR> This may seem a bit pedantic, but it is something I am working on right now to get myself thru a "ship-it" issue.

Innovation != implemented ideas. Execution results in implemented ideas. An implemented idea _can be_ an innovation, but usually - or my money is on that - it isn't.</comment>


Top 50 Products by Total Number of "Distinct" Vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php <comment><USER2> Windows 10 is _nowhere_ in the Top 50?</comment>


'Why Won't Microsoft Spy for the US?' – Trump Adviser - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2019/wont-microsoft-spy-us-government-trump-advisers-query-recounted-execs-book-shows-need-global-norms-tech/ <comment><USER2> Because it sets bad precedent and would lead to other nations where MS hosts services to spy on others including the US. People tend to be short sighted and forget that where we go, others will follow.

Look at where cyber warfare has gone since stuxnet for example. It's so much worse today.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...because they want to sell products in other countries?</comment>


We thought it was just a respiratory virus - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucsf.edu/magazine/covid-body <comment><USER3> _But the virus hadn't wrecked Dowd's lungs. In fact, she had only mild pneumonia. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 had ruptured her heart._

A lot of the early part of the article rehashes basics, like how viruses replicate. If you have basic knowledge of that sort, you can kind of skim until the mid point, where we find the above factoid.

I have been reading less about the virus of late, but this fits with everything I know. It causes blood clots. Ventilators aren't really fixing it. The lack of oxygen is probably more about what it does to the blood (than what it does to the lungs).

Later in the article, it talks about impacts on the feet suspected to be a side effect. Feet issues are commonly associated with blood/circulation issues. This is why diabetes can lead to feet being amputated.

The blood issues are well established and this has been known for some time. I'm somewhat aghast to see this article talking like we don't already know that detail.

<comment><USER4> Yes, COVID-19 is a bad one but it's just another virus at the end of the day. I feel they act as we rediscovering everything about viruses for sensationalism.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but downplaying the fact that it's new and that there's a lot of unknown unknowns about it and its effects mid/long term is dangerous. Not all viruses are the same, and it takes time to observe and study them.

This is IMO the other important reason why it's important to stop the spread, besides overloading hospitals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Influenza does this stuff too, and we happily refer to influenza as a respiratory virus.

<comment><USER7> Yup. For example, there's a well-established effect where influenza causes heart attacks and strokes, big enough that the severity of the influenza season has a noticable effect on heart attack deaths. This is, naturally, taken into account when calculating the number of influenza deaths. The differencce is that instead of this being spun as proof that influenza is more deadly than people think, since Covid the press has been spinning it as proof it's leas deadly and that the official flu stats are overstating the number of deaths. For instance, this article - which was quite popular on HN - <USER2> claimed that widespread flu deaths didn't exist because doctors didn't see people dying because of the flu and the CDC was misleading the public by claiming otherwise: [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing- covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/)

<comment><USER8> But on an apples to apples comparison, aren't there very few flu deaths confirmed by testing?

And what you cite can't be proof that the flu is more deadly than people think. If what you say is true, those deaths are in the numbers used for the death rate of the flu.

The point of that article is that perhaps our algorithms for estimating flu deaths are wrong.

Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? Any error in my reasoning is not obvious to me. The claim above was that:

1\. Heart attacks are included in flu death estimations

2\. This should make the public think the flu is more deadly than they believe

That seems contradictory, as the public's belief about the deadliness of the flu comes in stats from point #1. As for the article, the author made no real attempt to rebut its central claim.

<comment><USER9> > aren't there very few flu deaths confirmed by testing?

Is this true? An anecdote, but both times I and/or my partner had fever and flu-like symptoms, a flu test was the first thing performed by the doctor.

<comment><USER8> Yup! Only about 20% of flu deaths are confirmed by test. The rest are estimated by an algorithm (which the OP alluded to)

Sorry for AMP link, canonical url is paywalled: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/02/theres- more-accurate-way-compare-coronavirus-deaths-flu/%3foutputType=amp)

The CDC explains its methodology here. There are valid reasons to assume influenza deaths are higher than confirmed tested deaths. But many of these apply to coronavirus as well: [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc- estimates.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every other source online says that you can't get Covid from eating, but this one says your stomach cells are particularly susceptible.

> Gut specialists are finding that 20% to 40% of people with the disease > experience diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting before other symptoms, says > gastroenterologist Michael Kattah, MD, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor. If > you swallow virus particles, he says, there's a good chance they will infect > cells lining your stomach, small intestine, or colon. As in the lungs and > heart, these cells are studded with vulnerable ACE2 portals.

In that case, is the info about not getting it from eating as thoughtless and parroting as saying masks don't work, or is this article fake news? It makes a huge life changing difference to know for high risk people

<comment><USER8> So there are a few unknowns:

1\. Does the virus remain infectious in food? In particular, does hot or reheated food affect it?

2\. The digestive process produces more acid. Will that kill the virus?

3\. Will the virus even touch the wall of the stomach? It may be _in_ food after chewing, rather than directly on the stomach wall

There are some reasons to think that swallowing virus replicating in your throat is different than having some inside a chewed up piece of food surrounded by saliva.

We don't know of course, and someone super high risk should perhaps avoid takeout salads. But as of yet we haven't had _any_ case cluster reports where a superspreader cook spread the virus to their colleagues + customers via food. No country has reported a single instance of a traced infection via takeout.

This doesn't mean it's impossible, as contact tracing is not perfect. But the lack of any evidence so far is suggestive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting explanation for why children rarely get sick or transmit this disease:

> Fattahi's team has found evidence suggesting that male sex hormones such as > testosterone may increase the number of ACE2 receptors that cells produce, > which could help explain why SARS-CoV-2 seems to wreak greater havoc on men > than on women and why kids rarely get sick.

<comment><USER12> This is only true for Children under 10. Children over 10 transmit contract and transmit at similar rates. Considering 11 is when puberty kicks in for many kids, this appears to support Fattahi's findings.

([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus- childr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children- schools.html))

<comment><USER11> That article puts people in 10 year bins, so it is not useful to determine what the cutoff age should be with more granularity than 10 years of age.

However, Sweden did not close school for children through 14 years of age.

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/how-sweden-wasted- ra...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/how-sweden-wasted-rare- opportunity-study-coronavirus-schools)

And their excess mortality rates for that age group are indistinguishable from other European countries:

[https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps](https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps)

When you go to that link, near the bottom select graphs by age and see that Sweden ages 0-14 looks like all the other countries shown there. I think that is a pretty good indication. We have a country that kept their schools open and a number of countries that did not, and the results look the same.

EDIT: in fact, the excess mortality for that age group looks indistinguishable from other years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article based on studies by UCSF is a good read for many who are not understanding the basics of what is happening. I would suggest giving this out to friends and family who have concocted their own version of science and are refusing to wear a mask.

</comment><comment><USER14> If a lot of the damage is often caused by an overreacting immune system, why isn't this disease harder on younger people who presumably have stronger immune systems? Kind of like the Spanish flu? This doesn't add up for me and this article doesn't dwell on that either.

<comment><USER15> I've seen the idea of cross-reactivity and T-cell immunity being passed around.

I think the idea is that younger, healthier people with better immune systems are able to prevent the virus from replicating as much, whereas sluggish immune systems and bodies that are highly inflamed like overweight ppl, diabetics, etc. (high leptin, also related to il-6) get overwhelmed.

T-cell immunity/cross-reactivity meaning that most people have the ability to fight the virus from exposure to other coronaviruses.

I think a major component of the death toll from the pandemic is basically a consequence of obesity. I'm suspicious that govt interventions, planning, etc make that much difference when the US is an order of magnitude more obese than Japan, for example.

<comment><USER16> That hasn't really been seen in the data though. Yes, obesity has been linked to more severe cases, but some of the hardest hit, highest mortality rate areas, like NYC and Italy, are markedly lower in their rates of obesity that other areas with lower mortality rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Always interesting to learn more about the virus and that there is a lot of knowledge about handling ventilators. But even so, the numbers from New York say that 80% of people over 80 years do not make it once they are on the ventilator.

Source: [https://www.google.dk/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/health/el...](https://www.google.dk/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/health/elderly- covid-19-patients-on-ventilators-usually-do-not-survive-new-york-hospitals- report/2020/05/19/ba20e822-99f8-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html%3foutputType=amp)

I do hope that more attention will be focused on telling that this virus is both causing respiratory issues and heart issues. The leading comorbidities data from New York says it very clearly.

Source: [https://www.the- hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/220457/c...](https://www.the- hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/220457/coronavirus-updates/comorbidities- rule-new-yorks-covid-19-deaths)

</comment><comment><USER18> I will get beat up for bringing this up, but I think that these facilities are operating in bubbles / silos. The reason I believe this, is that for months everything discussed in the article has also been discussed by an ER doctor in Riverside, CA that makes Youtube videos in his down time. [1] He is just reading the research available on nih.gov and a few other sites. What would it take to get all of the medical research groups to start collaborating on a common platform? Is the issue that they do not have a platform to share findings, theories, tests, or is everyone depending on the scientific review process and waiting for peer reviewed papers? Should we set up a forum for all the medical groups to share findings, theories, debate theories, etc?

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/user/MEDCRAMvideos/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/MEDCRAMvideos/videos)

<comment><USER19> The article is a summary of research findings over the course of the pandemic. What makes you think the research is happening in a silo? it's not. Medical researchers, just like, uh, that guy you saw on YouTube, are quite capable of reading the research on nih.gov and capable of discussing and sharing findings with each other.

The article even says "By June, clinicians were swapping journal papers, news stories, and tweets describing more than three dozen ways that COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, appears to manifest itself."

<comment><USER18> I see each group reaching the same or similar conclusions, but months apart. This suggest to me they are not collaborating with one another. It feels to me like there is a gap.

Think of it this way. If there were a giant asteroid heading towards earth and we have a limited time to solve this problem, would I want 500 teams all operating by themselves and using the incredibly slow process of sharing data via NIH / NIST and other research paper repositories, or would I want them all in a war room (virtual or physical) and someone coordinating the effort to risk rank all the solutions and quickly form action plans? My vote is the latter. It feels like the scientific community may have artificially painted themselves into a corner because of something like the banana ladder conundrum. [1] meaning, doing it that way because that is the way it has always been done.

[1] - [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33470/what- tech...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33470/what-technical- reasons-are-there-to-have-low-maximum-password-lengths/33471#33471)

<comment><USER16> I think the issue here is less that they are arriving at the same conclusion months apart, and more that the reporting makes it sound like a sudden, recent revelation rather than a consensus that has been building for months and months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article claims that they are able to isolate live virus from stool, which seems to contradict the observations here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised to read the stuff about asymptomatic cases. I thought the current thinking was that asymptomatic people are really pre-symptomatic, because of the incubation period. In other words, truly asymptomatic cases are rare. Am I wrong about that?

<comment><USER16> Yes you are wrong, though I suppose what you consider "rare" could be arbitrary. It seems that asymptomatic cases are anywhere from 20-40% of cases, although even that could be low, given that you are more likely to be missed if you have no symptoms prompting you to get tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is potentially concerning, but it's worth playing devil's advocate. What are the confounders? Most people have been more sedentary than usual this year. What impact does that have on circulation?

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this mean that it's possible blood thinners could help some patients with covid-19?

</comment><comment><USER24> Zinc

</comment><comment><USER25> Dear reader, it's ok, you can skip the comments here. Just read the article and move on

<comment><USER26> It's only been an hour, and insightful comments take more time to type out than ignorant speculation. Have some faith that this community isn't just another Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > If we did a mass testing campaign on 300 million Americans right now, I > think the rate of asymptomatic infection would be somewhere between 50% and > 80% of cases

Wow that's incredible. 200 million Americans could have the virus.

<comment><USER28> That's not what it says. It says if you tested everyone, out of those who tested positive, 50-80% would be asymptomatic, not 50-80% of the whole population.

<comment><USER27> Ah, thanks for the clarification. That was indeed not obvious to me the way they worded it.</comment></comment></comment>


Drones Getting in the Way of Emergency Responders - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/drones-emergency-responders-32983940 <comment><USER2> Oh, for the love all that's holy.

Why does this raise so much excitement?

Add some jammers to the responder's equipment. RC control units are on frequencies that don't conflict with radios used by anyone with any business being there.

Drones tend to crash or land when they lose the control signal.

The politicians will push jammers as a solution after they've all milked it for as much publicity as they can. They will, of course, shout and rant to have the "pilots" found and arrested, event though that really isn't feasible. But it has so much bullshit headline potential for trials/failures/etc., that they won't be able to resist it. Elections are coming, remember.

So I predict that jamming will be pushed as the best solution towards the end of the 2016 Bullshit Election cycle.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is in contrast to this article, that states, "Drones can help in two ways: They can safely gather more information about fire conditions than is currently available, and they can send that information to firefighters on the ground quickly." \--- [http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/19/technology/innovation/fire-f...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/19/technology/innovation/fire- fighting-drones/)

<comment><USER2> Both articles are correct.

The helpful drones are operated by fire services, not by some nosy civilians or news vultures.

That's why there was almost a mid-air event: Some idiot felt he was entitled to ignore existing flight rules because he wasn't actually "in the cockpit" and thought it would be cool to fly right in there to watch.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Zone, my new productivity tool - <AUTHOR> http://zone.codingwithlove.com/

<comment><USER2> Nifty!

I'm afraid to load more apps onto my work MacBook (Because it's so old and decrepit that it's barely crawling along) but I'll give it a shot when I get home.</comment>


Is AMD Returning to Open-Source BIOS/Coreboot Support? - <AUTHOR> https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/09/01/224238/is-amd-returning-to-open-source-bioscoreboot-support <comment><AUTHOR> Found this article while looking if Libreboot is supporting AMD Ryzen for my DIY homelab / NAS box. Found an outdated HN article too and thought this might interest someone on HN.</comment>


Curl vs Wget - <AUTHOR> http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html

<comment><USER2> >Wget requires no extra options to simply download a remote URL to a local file, while curl requires -o or -O. However trivial, this fact is often mentioned to me when people explain why they prefer downloading with wget.

Funny because that's _exactly_ the reason I installed macports and then wget. It's stupidly trivial, but there you have it.

<comment><USER3> Another stupidly trivial reason:

I can type 'wget' and then do command-V entirely with my left hand, keeping my right hand on the mouse. Having to type 'curl' would require me to move my hand back and forth, slowing me down.

<comment><USER4> I love reasons like this, they make non-geeks look at us like we're insane. I've only used curl personally, so this wouldn't be enough to switch, but it's an excellent point.

<comment><USER5> Whereas the true geeks look at you like you're crazy for still using crufty old QWERTY. =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My main complaint about curl is that it prints a bunch of crap (well, statistics technically) to stderr by default. Especially for something claimed to be (at least in this article) "traditional unix style", that seems undesirable.

It's annoying when I do 'curl $URL | less' and end up with garbage in my pager that I have to scroll around a bit to make disappear.

It seems like default behavior should be more like 'curl -s -S' -- silent, but print errors if they occur, just like...well, every other sensible command- line tool in the world (so that's what I have curl aliased to).

wget of course prints statistics too, but it's not such "pipe-oriented" tool, as the author points out, so this isn't as big of a deal.

<comment><USER7> My version of curl only prints the progress junk to stderr if you pipe stdout somewhere. I guess I've never had a problem since I don't use a pager usually.

BTW, how do you detect whether your program's stdout is being piped to something other than the shell?

<comment><USER6> > _My version of curl only prints the progress junk to stderr if you pipe > stdout somewhere._

Hmm, good point -- I actually hadn't noticed that, and it seems to be the case on mine as well. (Though I rarely use it without piping or stdout-redirecting to something, so it still strikes me as inappropriate.)

> BTW, how do you detect whether your program's stdout is being piped to > something other than the shell?

In the three languages I've used recently enough to remember:

C: int isatty(int fd); /* from unistd.h */

Python: os.isatty

Shell (bourne): [ -t 1 ] # exits 0 if stdout is a tty, 1 if not

<comment><USER8> Instead of os.isatty(sys.stdout.fileno()) (ew) you should just use sys.stdout.isatty(). In addition to being shorter, it will work everywhere [that Python does], not just Unix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I do

      * curl for any bash scripts
      * wget for downloading via command line

The error codes that curl output make it very powerful when creating a script. Something that gets run on cron & you want to know why it failed if it did.

Wget is simple, and for a shell it's what I always turn to. The only time I would use wget in a script is if I was making some sort of simple web crawler script.

<comment><USER10> same here. I use wget to do stuff, and I use curl to do complicated/fancy stuff. One is simple, one is powerful. I'll use simple whenever I can get away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Probably wget's major reason for being is mirroring websites. It does this well. Curl is a more general HTTP library with a command line front end.

And of course there are GUI frontends for wget, but it's not really intended to be used as a library. I don't see a problem here.

</comment><comment> X-Istence I use curl for almost everything. Especially for debugging caching and whatnot, using curl -D - -o /dev/null <http://example.net/> makes it extremely simple to see the headers the server is sending for a certain file.

Not only that, but curl is installed standard on Mac OS X whereas wget is not, also, most attacks that attack PHP tend to use wget to download further files to the target system, which means that when wget is not available no extra files are downloaded and it generally stops the exploit cold in its track as the attacker does not try again.

<comment><USER12> _> most attacks that attack PHP tend to use wget to download further files_

Nowadays, neither Wget nor Curl is required for downloading in PHP, because functions like _file_get_contents()_ are able to handle URL arguments! So a missing Wget protects only against script kiddies who don't know PHP very well and copied over some outdated code snippets.

Also, not installing Wget "protects" you just from those kind of primitive attacks to which your system shouldn't be vulnerable in the first place.

Security is achieved by sealing entry doors, not by removing tools.

<comment> X-Istence file_get_contents on most hosts does not allow external URL's, including the one where I am an administrator.

[http://www.php.net/manual/en/filesystem.configuration.php#in...](http://www.php.net/manual/en/filesystem.configuration.php#ini.allow- url-fopen)

Also, installing wget is just one more way to defend a server that is hosting multiple sites with multiple scripts all of which can not be trusted all the time. I don't know if tomorrow a new bug is found in phpBB that allows a remote exploit that runs as the user php runs under, if not having wget stops one such exploit it is a win in my book.

The other thing I have in my firewall is all outgoing access is blocked for the user that PHP runs under so that in the event something does happen and something is executed under that user it won't be able to make an outbound connection or get inbound connections.

Yes, security is achieved by sealing entry doors, but removing an entry door in the first place may be even better, wget being an entry door, unfortunately the front door is a huge gaping mess you could drive a truck through, but that is unfortunately required for the business I am in, administrating a server with multiple websites running various PHP scripts.

<comment><USER12> _> file_get_contents on most hosts does not allow external URL's_

This is still not really a gain in security, but ...

 _> The other thing I have in my firewall is all outgoing access is blocked for the user that PHP runs under_

... this is! And since you do that, there is no need for strange measures like providing Curl but not Wget.

Wget, Curl and allow_url_fopen are just tools to access the network API. So you need to block that API, rather than blocking some tools which merely use that API.

Although I fully agree that it improves security if you remove all _services_ that aren't needed, I don't think the same holds for _tools_. (except if they are SUID binaries, but such a program is in fact more a service than a tool)

<comment><USER13> Good points all round, X-Istence is suggesting defense in depth, and you (vog) suggest making sure the outer perimeter is secure. Both good ideas - even if you fill the hall with barbed wire, you should make sure to lock the front door. Beyond that, it's a trade off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "libcurl does not put any restrictions on the program that uses the library."

I wonder how much of the activity could be attributed to such things.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a nice breakdown... I've been a curl user, and never really knew what the major differences were. And it doesn't seem overly biased to me. Many thanks to the author!

</comment><comment><USER15> I find wget is almost always what you want, unless you're interested in development details like headers. If I want output to a pipe, I use wget -O -.

In scripts, I use wget -o <log-file> (or -a) so that I can tail -f to keep track of it. I don't see off hand what curl's log file support is, so I can't comment too deeply on it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone knows how to mirror a site using wget or curl, and get all the assets? (specially images linked on stylesheets).

<comment><USER17> Some time ago I filed a bug report because of the stylesheet images. So it still isn't fixed? It's simply a bug.

I have tried and liked pavuk in the past, don't know if it supports stylesheet images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> lwp-download should be in this comparison. I've found lots of random cases where it does stuff right and the others don't.

<comment><USER19> As should aria2. But that would make it a completely different type of an article, more like a Wikipedia sub-section. We already have Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When downloading via HTTPS curl seems to barf error codes often so I try wget first, and use curl only if wget doesn't work or curl is easier (which isn't often).

</comment><comment><USER21> wget has a better-designed command line API and documentation, although its inability to PUT or POST is rather unhelpful. For example, curl uses --include to output full headers (wget uses --save-headers) and, more inexplicably, --request to change the request method, even though --method is available.

<comment><USER15> Use --post-data or --post-file to POST with wget.

<comment><USER21> \--post-* is pretty sensible for POST. Unfortunately wget doesn't do PUT or DELETE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> kinda banal if you ask me. it's two simple tools that do approximately the same thing. even grep vs ack would be more interesting.

no offense to the authors of course, they did a great job in both cases.

<comment><USER23> As someone who have always used curl and wondered why I often see wget quoted in READMEs (as how to obtain some remote file), I quite enjoyed reading the write-up.

My take-away was that a) I am not missing out by staying with curl and b) the use of wget is likely due to being part of GNU.

<comment><USER24> You did notice this was written by curl's author? I only noticed after I read it and without that knowledge thought it was rather a pathetically biased article.

But you can't expect developers to be impartial about their own code and it was my fault for not noticing the disclaimer the first time. It reads completely different with that framing in mind, but still if I was looking for the definitive reason that one tool was recommended over another I'd consider the point of view of the developers as a starting point rather than an open and shut case.</comment></comment></comment>


SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs - <AUTHOR> https://www.suse.com/c/news/suse-acquires-rancher/ <comment><USER2> mods / dang: there are 3 posts about this. Can we consolidate to one?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769563)

and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769478)</comment>


Rising high water blues - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/rising-high-water-blues/ <comment><USER2> This story has the perfect way to ask someone to subscribe to their newsletter. The signup form is inline with the story, so it doesn't popover and annoy/distract the reader. although it should use an opt in instead of opt out on the offers portion of the form.

Designers please take note.</comment>


The Science of Scientific Writing (1990) - <AUTHOR> http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-scientific-writing

<comment><USER2> There is a class on coursera going about scientific writing if anyone interested:

<https://class.coursera.org/sciwrite-2012-001/class/index>

</comment><comment><USER3> Non-paginated, printer friendly version here [1]

[1] [http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.877,y.0,no.,conte...](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.877,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER4> It might be that my standards are too high - I'm accustomed to reading how-to- write books written by the likes of Orson Scott Card - but I'm a bit worried that the article itself isn't as well-written as it should be. Maybe you need unnecessarily pollysyllabic linguistics for scientists to pay attention to you at all, but it's still a bit worrisome when it comes to my deciding how much to trust the advice.

<comment><USER5> I regret to announce that I share your sentiments with regard to the circumloquacious fashion of the writing in that article.

I think we've made progress since it was written. Eye-tracking shows how we read and which words or letter combinations trip us up.

By the way, wouldn't that table naturally have time in the left hand column, considering it's probably an independent variable, while temperature is dependent?

<comment><USER6> As to your final point, the authors were trying to suss out _why_ we want the independent variable first. Their answer: it provides the context to understand the significance of the dependent variable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went on a little bit of a mini-rant a while ago (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4680626>), which, while not so eloquently worded, attempted to share my frustrations about scientific writing that this article makes much clearer.

I think it's easy for technical people to write something and think "well, this is clear to me", so they don't put much additional thought into thinking about how their writing will come across to others. Someone that writes journals or articles for a living realizes how important clear communication of ideas is, and it would be nice to see this carry over into more technical domains.

<comment><USER8> The original article suggests ways of writing that will aid reading, and they give _reasons_ why the texts they quote are poorly expressed. The article is _useful_ because of that.

Observation: In the child comments in the post you link to is a comment from xanmas. This user points out the space constraints on much academic publishing. I remember papers in experimental physics where the list of authors took up more space than the text of the paper - however some re- writing always helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A reasonable article, however they do not use the term "subject" correctly. The subject of their example is not just "the smallest", but all of the following modifiers (adjectives and relative clauses). From "the smallest" to "subunit 6 gene" is all one noun phrase, albeit a complex one.

The appropriate advice is therefore to have short subject phrases.</comment>


Pymc: implements Bayesian statistical models and fitting algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pymc/ <comment><USER2> Anyone use this? Is it any good? How fast?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got this funny feeling that I could kill _a lot_ of hours learning this...

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone used similar packages for other languages?</comment>


Gpredict: satellite tracking for amateur radio and antenna aiming - <AUTHOR> http://gpredict.oz9aec.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> quick example: here it is showing the next above-the-horizon passes for the two spacex "Starlink" test satellites (TINTIN A and TINTIN B) for spacex's redmond, WA earth station.

[https://imgur.com/a/VN1uUIE](https://imgur.com/a/VN1uUIE)</comment>


Ask HN: As an Engineer, how would you like to be interviewed? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
Most people, if not everyone, in our field think that hiring engineers is a broken process. How do you think you should be interviewed as an engineer for the company to see your skills and strengths? How do you think a company should judge whether you are suitable for the job or not?
Cheers! <comment><USER2> To give an opposing data point, I think that the conventional interview style is working well in some places. I'll discuss Microsoft, where I interviewed last fall for an internship.

There were a total of 4 interviews from various people on a perspective team, all back to back in the morning, 30 minutes each. Each interview was pillared by an algorithmic problem of varying difficulty, but there was clearly no expectation that you'd write a working program in the time. Most of the time was spent discussing the problem, comparing it to other ones you've approached before and searching for solutions. If you felt comfortable after this you could write code given time.

4 algorithmic interviews may sound like a lot, but I credit Microsoft for using this to the candidate's advantage. Each interview is an opportunity to succeed and show your best self, and I found that the one question that played to my strengths had the most impact on my hiring decision, whereas questions I did poorly on did not ruin my chances.

The rest of the interview was spent discussing past experiences, with an emphasis on the challenges of collaboration. This part was a discussion, with extensive back and forth and no expectation to be a certain way or exude some quality. Some of my discussions ended with us at unsolvable questions, and in others I got valuable feedback that I brought back to my personal projects. All in all my interviews at Microsoft helped me grow as a programmer.

Further, Microsoft makes their on-site interviews an enjoyable process, giving candidates time to learn about the company, tour the campus, and spend time in the Seattle area to get a taste of it. Their interviews are as much an enjoyable vacation as an opportunity to show your stuff. For me Microsoft's hiring process (At least the on-site part, stages before this have some issues) was an enjoyable opportunity for growth.

<comment><USER3> Not sure why someone(s) downvoted you. Maybe because you mentioned Microsoft?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There needs to be written (and if given the time I'll write) a yelp specifically for engineering interviews. Only interviewees can give reviews, and reviews will be restricted to binary yes-or-no questions (did they inform you of a decision in 24 hours? Did they try to sell you on the job? Did you still want to work there after you interviewed there? Did it seem probable to you that you had absolutely no chance of getting that job?, etc.). Think of it in terms of a Joel test, only strictly dealing with the hiring process, and publicly (freely) shared. Call it a Matt test.

These reviews would be aggregated and allow a new prospective candidate to decide whether it's worth the gamble to take the time to interview with that company (a bet amounting to hundreds of dollars of lost time if they're already employed elsewhere). The goal is to encourage hiring managers to step up their game, cut out the baloney, and quit putting their own staff through breakneck quotas of pointless and feckless interviews.

It's also to draw a huge scarlet spotlight on the companies out there that do nothing but interview and never hire. These tirekicker companies are a scourge on the industry and it's a necessary public service that they be identified.

If your company is so choosey that it has to go through 100 onsite interviews to pick one candidate, fine, but candidates have a right to know that before they commit to your process.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to reference coding tests specifically, because I'm not against them but I'm against them implemented poorly:

\- If I have an extensive github, and my github is on my resume, and you don't have the time to look at it, I don't have time for your coding test.

\- If your coding test asks thinly veiled lateral thinking questions, I will not be accepting a job with your company.

\- If you spend more than 60 seconds of the interview asking me what I think of your coding test, I will not be accepting a job with your company.

\- If I'm interviewing for a position where I'm going to be mostly developing CRUD apps, don't ask me to implement a bubblesort. Interview for the job you're actually hiring for.

\- Ideally, let someone else design your coding test. There's plenty of companies that do these now, and they'll be better at it than you are.

<comment><USER6> >If you spend more than 60 seconds of the interview asking me what I think of your coding test, I will not be accepting a job with your company.

Is that a big enough deal to rule out a whole company?

<comment><USER5> From what I have seen, companies that fetishize their coding tests have toxic social dynamics, and they always interview poorly in other ways (e.g. haughtily dismissing industry accepted best practices).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Start from this: candidates should NOT need to prepare in advance. So your process should test them AS IS.

Many BigCo's assume that candidates should be dedicated enough to allocate weeks/months for preps.

Another critical point - if you have take home tests/assignments and it might take more than 10-15 minutes, always offer to pay the premium hourly rate regardless of outcome.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're interested in hiring people who are already employed, don't design your hiring process to require me to take a week off work just to interview with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, let's say the company proposes an on-site interview that would last 0.5-1 day, how would you like to be interviewed on that day?

<comment><USER8> A full day interview is excessive, unreasonable, and almost certainly unnecessary (you're also wasting your own people's time). Again, your candidate has another job and - if they're any good - is probably interviewing other places. Especially if they're not desperate to make a move, they're not going to take multiple days off in a week to attend interviews.

(And that's not even counting the awful take-home coding challenges that take multiple evenings or an entire weekend to complete.)

For a half day, allow it to be scheduled at least partly before/after standard work hours so that the candidate can just come in a bit late to their current job or leave a bit early - claiming a dentist appointment or similar.

If you don't respect my time, I'll assume that's a harbinger of how you'll treat me after hiring, and I'll walk away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. Let's say that the interview was scheduled for 3 hours in a time- window that suites you, how do you think the interviewing process and contents should be? What is a good way to showcase your strengths as an engineer?

<comment><USER8> No algorithms. Talk through the design and architecture of a real life or hypothetical system.

And at least half of the interview should not be about technical skills; at least half should be me finding out about the company rather than vice-versa. Talk about process. Talk about stack. Talk about interactions with non- engineers. Talk to non-engineers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This works better for freelancers: check the engineer's online presence, his blog, GitHub etc, then have an informal interview to see if you two are able to help each other, and then start working together on a _small actual task for a reduced price_.

Both benefit. The engineer does not need to work on silly online tests, gets paid and gains an impression about how the company works; the company gets to see how the engineer solves a real problem, gets (most likely) a usable result in return and has provided the engineer with a headstart into the company's work culture should they decide to continue the cooperation.

Everyone wins, resumes become mostly useless and no artificial interviews

</comment><comment><USER10> I want to be interviewed in a manner similar to how almost all other professional job types experience interviews.

\- The vast majority should be technically probing conversation that digs into the specifics of my expertise and work project history. No whiteboards, no live coding, no take-home tests. Just technical conversation.

\- The interview should weight my ability to speak clearly about my technical expertise and work history highest by far. This should be weighted drastically more highly than performance on coding tests.

\- Code tests should offer the candidate whatever combination of tools they feel most comfortable with, in terms of editor, mouse/trackball, language of choice, access to basic documentation.

\- Code tests should mostly be about talking with the interviewer. They should involve no "gotcha" trickery to see a shortcut. Getting the naive, slow time complexity, memory-hungry solution with a clean writeup should count as a fully complete solution, not scored any lower than a solution from someone who happened to memorize a dynamic programming trick, etc. The basic fact of being observed in an interview means that if you observe someone only able to complete the naive solution, it does not tell you anything at all. In a non- interview setting, they might easily work out an advanced solution. Or, if someone overfitted their knowledge to memorize these types of interview solutions, in a real work setting they might not generalize to ambiguous, unsolved problems. Observing anything other than the basic solution truly cannot tell you anything useful. It's sheer hubris to believe otherwise.

\- The entire interview process, expectations, and precise timeline should be explained to the candidate at the start. Each interviewer should clearly explain who they are and how to contact them later if needed. And each interviewer should have knowledge about the candidate, their work history, etc., and place a higher value on learning more about those items than hurrying up to ask their favorite trivia questions.

\- Rejections should always be sent out in a very timely manner after the interview. It should include meaningful feedback about all relevant factors that went into the decision, and should offer the candidate a genuinely sincere option to provide feedback. Even if the candidate feels hurt, bitter or angry at the decision, you should thank them sincerely for taking time to help you by pointing out ways your process might have been unfair or suboptimal.

One way to sum all this up is to say interviews should be humane. Use common sense about being humane to this person. Additionally, if you believe detailed code trivia or tests gives you better quality info about a candidate than technically probing their experience and skills in conversation, you are wrong, and this mistake will totally corrupt your hiring process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks you! This is a really good outline. What is your take on system design questions that follow the "How would you design a Twitter-clone" vein? Do you think an open-ended question like that would show the interviewer your communication skills and good software design skills?

<comment><USER10> As long as these questions are focused on projects the candidate already worked on before, then yes, they can be good.

When they are canned questions, there is at least one small issue and one big issue.

The small issue is that people will research and memorize solutions for common questions like "how to make Twitter" or "how to rank a newsfeed" or "how to ensure fault-tolerance in a distributed file system" (yes, the memorization even covers how to respond to questions in a ~45 minute open-ended conversation). If someone looks good on a design question about e.g. a Twitter clone, it doesn't tell you much. If someone does bad on it, it probably also doesn't tell you much unless they totally can't parse the basic concepts (which should have been weeded out way earlier).

The bigger problem is "Guessing the Teacher's Password"[0] and applies even when you ask non-standard questions that someone couldn't have memorized ahead of time.

As the interviewer, especially if you were prepped in some interview training or team meeting, you will have preconceived expectations about what the "right" answers are and what the right progression of concepts, features, and details would be like.

As a result, you'll favor candidates who happen to "guess" your preferred way of looking at the discussion, even though there could be many perfectly valid alternative ways to think about or discuss the problem that approach it differently, with a different sequence of questions or iterative enhancements.

At best this introduces some unnecessary arbitrariness into the pool of qualified candidates. At worst, you are unwittingly self-selecting for people who approach problem solving the same way you do, and are therefore reducing diversity of thought. If the big design question is also unrelated to the day to day job, then this arbitrariness is even worse: rejecting or self-selecting entirely based on your preferences about a toy exercise.

[0]: < [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing- the-teacher-s-password) >

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Before the interview:

      - Do read my CV
      - Look at my GitHub repo.

During the interview:

      - Ask what were the technical difficulties of whatever project calls your attention/looks relevant, both on my CV or GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER12> Instead of asking me to complete some boring challenge, bring me into your office, and let me help solve a real issue you're facing, then at least we both don't waste our time on challenges that only prove you have free time on your hands.

<comment><USER13> BUT also pay me for my time at market consulting rates.

<comment><USER14> So, in other words, "don't interview me at all, just hire me"?

<comment><USER13> No -- pay candidates for the day they spend interviewing with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Have the team meet me for a meal and/or drinks to get a feel for each other. If my resume looks good enough (make sure to set the bar realistic or even a little low), and I seem to be a culture fit, bring me on, but make it clear that the first 30 days is the second half of the interview process. Maybe make the first 30 days only 30-hour weeks so the company doesn't have as much cost to hire me and so I can continue to look for other jobs. Or 'contract' with me for 30 days 30 hours/week if that's easier for the company. As soon as the team knows it wants to keep me, make it official, no need to wait the full 30 days.

In theory this sounds good to me, but it might be terrible if I needed a full paycheck right away, idk.

<comment><USER16> > Have the team meet me for a meal and/or drinks to get a feel for each other.

The circumstances of a (forced) meal/drinks outing are almost certainly quite different from those you'll experience on a day to day working basis.

(Or if they aren't, run, that's a toxic environment right there.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't think hiring is "broken." I think that it's a hard problem where you would require unlimited resources and time to achieve perfection.

A short onsite interview where we discuss my previous work experience and your current needs is the best way. Programming skill should have already been proven beforehand, but FizzBuzz never hurts. It should be no more than an hour long.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's say you are interviewing for a managerial position, how would you like to be interviewed in a way that shows you can lead people?

<comment><USER17> My resume will already have the relevant experience listed on it. The purpose of the interview is not really to gain new information about me, but to verify the experience I claim to have. It is very difficult to tell if someone is being dishonest or even just exaggerating their experience just from looking at their resume, but easy in an interview. I expect they would just ask me questions that no one would know except someone who actually did what I claimed to do, until they are satisfied.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha, that's if you assume that you're applying for a position that you worked in before, but say you applied for a entry engineering management position and all you did before was develop software without leading anyone else. How should the interview go about from your perspective?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> like a hackathon, implement an app within a day with a provided topic, such as a chat app, a forum.

<comment><USER16> But only if you get paid for your time - it's daft to think anyone can afford to give up a day's wage for a test.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Live Fails To Scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/yahoo-live-fails-to-scale/ <comment><USER2> More like scales to FAIL, m i rite?</comment>


Widevine L3 DRM Vulnerable to DFA - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1080606827384131590 <comment><USER2> Can someone check if I'm understanding the consequences of this correctly?

It seems to me there are close to none (it's still very interesting nonetheless. I wasn't aware of DFA): \- You still need to have the right to view the video \- You still need to run proprietary widevine blob once per file to extract AES key \- You already could extract the encrypted file before, by simply looking like an hardware codec, in which case this fake codec

So for "pirates", who shares the files, it doesn't change anything, because they already extracted the files For standard users, they still need the proprietary blob anyway.

It could be a little bit interesting for foreign architectures (like RISC-V) with no widevine L3 proprietary blobs, which would be able to run the AES key extractor in qemu, then decipher using native instructions.

<comment><USER3> If it becomes possible to get the key and decrypt content in a user-friendly package, it enables downloading of content from smaller providers that currently isn't pirated widely.

I used to work for a commercial Belgian broadcaster that puts almost everything they broadcast online for 7 to 30 days after broadcast, and heavily uses Widevine L3 (along with PlayReady and FairPlay). Their content isn't popular enough to be widely pirated, but before only offering DRM'ed streams episodes would often hit YouTube as soon as they were put online. The broadcaster isn't big enough to be targeted by 'professional' pirates.

If users once again get the opportunity to use simple downloader apps/extensions to get unencrypted video files, it's going to mean either a revenue loss for the broadcaster (as people will go to YouTube to watch ad- free variants), or users will lose access to content on devices that don't support Widevine L1 (which is unlikely to happen as it'd exclude Chrome, for example).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> @David3141593 Soooo, after a few evenings of work, I've 100% broken Widevine L3 DRM. Their Whitebox AES-128 implementation is vulnerable to the well- studied DFA attack, which can be used to recover the original key. Then you can decrypt the MPEG-CENC streams with plain old ffmpeg...</comment>


Startup Quote: Jason Fried, Founder, 37signals - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/8399036416

<comment><AUTHOR> It's simple until you make it complicated.

\- Jason Fried (@jasonfried)

<http://startupquote.com/post/8399036416></comment>


$30 Device Turns the Cold of Outer Space into Renewable Energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xweg8a/this-30-device-turns-the-cold-of-outer-space-into-renewable-energy <comment><USER2> So people built a large Peltier element that radiates a bit of heat on one side and powers a LED.

That's a cool experiment, but comparing it to solar power and saying "it literally is generating visible light out of the darkness of the sky" goes a bit far imho.

The headline implies energy out of nothing, while in truth it's more like "small thermoelectric experiments also work without a candle".</comment>