Getting to work on diversity at Google - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/getting-to-work-on-diversity-at-google.html <comment><USER3> So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the ticket, it's an upstream problem.

<comment><USER4> Well, they say they're working with "upstream" to resolve the issue:

"Among other things, since 2010 we've given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we've been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science. For example, this year Google engineer Charles Pratt was in-residence at Howard University, where he revamped the school's Intro to CS curriculum."

<comment><USER3> My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. This came right after I'd read a PBS article that claimed "Google finally discloses its diversity record, and it's not good." Then I read a breakdown of CS grads in this submission, and Google seems to be pretty representative.

<comment><USER5> No, it's not Google's job, but Google is in a good position to fix upstream.

One of the things you repeatedly hear from girls/young women considering CS is that there are no role models. Sending female engineers to university events is a small step, but it can have huge impact. In a nutshell, it's playing the long game :)

<comment><USER6> Are role models in CS (and even other industries) really what drives people to pursue the career? Just looking at my own experience, its hard to pinpoint a "role model".

I'm curious why there is always such a huge focus on role models (is it a grandfathered idea from the past?) and not on the herd of other problems, such as access to tools, ease of self-learning and targeted tutorials at under- represented demographics. I'd imagine tutorials that are targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics would be more useful than a few famous minority or women C.S. majors, but I could be wrong.

It seems dated to me, but maybe there is some strong research that correlates to the role model idea. I'm just not seeing it.

<comment><USER5> What swampangel already said, essentially.

It's not about having somebody you look up to all the time, but just knowing you're not alone. It might not _sound_ like a big deal, but believe me, when you're the only woman on a 20-person team, it gets lonely.

But I'd argue that you're correct in your judgment of famous role models, specifically. What's needed is not the few famous ones, but knowledge that an average person of your minority can succeed. That others like you have travelled the path before. And famous people really don't evoke "just like me" images for most people :)

Sidenote: please let's not have tutorials that are "targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics". The intent is good, but it inevitably leads to pinkwashing. As it turns out, women are, like men, pretty diverse in their interests. I would assume that's true for other minorities, too.

As for tools & self-learning: That's orthogonal to having representation/role models. We should neglect neither. Nor traditional learning, and many other tools to ensure success.

<comment><USER6> You're right about the pinkwashing. I didn't mean for it to sound as bad as it did.

Having a much younger little sister sort of led me to that comment. I'd enjoy if there was some way to teach her programming that she would also enjoy and undeniably, for her, it would be something stereo-typically associated with what young girls like (cute creatures, bright colors, etc.). Obviously girls, just like boys, have much more diverse interests than what society sees as the "standard", but it just seems that something targeted at stereotypical young "girl-y" interests (forgive me for using girly and not a more descriptive term) is missing, while there is lots of tutorials for stuff that is more stereo-typically associated with other demographics.

Hope that explained it without coming off as sexist or discriminatory. If not, I tried.

<comment><USER5> No worries, I didn't take it as discriminatory (or sexist). It's hard to see what "other" people need, and it's easy to fall into the stereotype trap :)

FWIW, I don't object to activities considered stereotypical per se. By all means, create a "how to animate My Little Pony" workshop. Or remote controlled sewing machines.

Just don't attach "for girls". The issue is not the activity, but associating it with a demographic instead of letting it stand on its own. (And lest we forget, guys suffer from the same stereotyping - it's considered uncool by many for a guy to do anything remotely "soft and cuddly". Let's not reinforce)

I'm curious - have you asked your sister what kinds of things she would enjoy? What programming means to her, or why she would/would not consider getting into it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's {{current_year}} and people are still asking, "why does diversity matter?"

Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, demographic diversity is strongly correlated with diversity in points of view. You want the people building your products to come from many walks of life. Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence. If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies. If the latter is your belief, that's all the more reason to work to increase diversity as a corrective to those external social biases. Diversity also impacts the way that people see your company, which makes attracting a diverse pool of qualified candidates easier (few people want to be the only member of a certain demographic group) and is good for public relations.

<comment><USER8> "Diversity in points of view" is not an unalloyed good. There are significant coordination costs associated with it.

It is also not something you get when you attempt to recruit people from the same sources and socio-cultural milieus with the same acceptance criteria, but of different genders and ethnicities. Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.

"If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population". Huh. So, if most of my sales of akvavit are to expat Finns, I should certainly not hire a German to do my security audits. And if most of my sales of peat-optimized spades are to the Irish market, I should certainly not contract out the manufacturing to the great industrial base of Shenzhen. This seems rather insensible and possibly bigoted to me.

<comment><USER4> > Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does > not engender diverse viewpoints.

I don't agree with that statement. At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. (Source: Approx. 50% of all jokes, also science) I think that ethnic diversity will also result in more diverse viewpoints, even when passed through "purifying filters" such as elite college acceptance standards.

<comment><USER9> >At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other.

That's a pretty prejudiced statement. I have not observed this at all when it comes to work-related items, which is what is relevant in the workplace.

<comment><USER4> Well, maybe I didn't phrase it very well. What I mean is that in my experience, women consistently bring unexpected perspectives to my attention that are attributable to the differences in life experience between men and women in the same society, even in subjects and areas where I wouldn't expect these differences to be relevant. So I definitely see the benefit of having a more balanced ratio of men and women in the workplace, regardless of what the work consists of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are these diversity numbers for the US or for Google as a whole?

If they are world-wide, I find it quite interesting how closely the location of the Google offices where software development occurs[1] matches the ethnicity numbers.

Notably, there is only one development office in Latin America (and none in Spain/Portugal), and the only development office in the Middle East or Africa is Tel Aviv (not clear what ethnicity the workers there would class themselves as).

I'm not aware of any world-class Computer Science programs in Africa. There are some decent ones in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, but increasing the number would be a problem worth tackling.

[1] [https://www.google.com.au/about/careers/teams/engineering/sw...](https://www.google.com.au/about/careers/teams/engineering/swe/)

<comment><USER11> Race is US, Gender is Worldwide.

<comment><USER10> Interesting.. my point is pretty valid then.

<comment><USER10> (err. Actually this means there is no evidence for my point one way or another. Too late to delete though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a person who comes from a place where there has always been an unhealthy obsession with demographic classification (South Africa), I'm curious about the "Asian" classification, which seems even more worthless than the average racial classification. Does it encompass both South Asians and Chinese? Do they have a common "Asian experience" in the US? Does the average person whose ancestors came from Tehran have much in common with someone from Beijing?

<comment><USER13> I think I get what you're saying. The continent of Africa contains more human (genetic) diversity than the rest of the world combined, yet almost everyone from it would be classified as "Black".

<comment><USER12> _The continent of Africa contains more human (genetic) diversity than the rest of the world combined, yet almost everyone from it would be classified as "Black"._

Interesting that you should bring that up: in South Africa under Apartheid, the racial classification of "Black" (previously called "Bantu" and "Native") was a person of "pure" African descent.

In post apartheid South Africa, for the purposes of redress [^] "black" means Indian, Coloured (mixed race) and black Africans. Of course, it was found that disproportionately Coloureds and (especially) Indians were being appointed (they were better educated and more affluent), so there seems to be a renewed emphasis on black Africanness... our Indian finance minister was just replaced by a black African, which was viewed as some kind of milestone - <USER2> Julius Malema brought this up a few years ago, but it was quickly sent down the memory hole.

There has been, in recent times the emergence of racial bomb-throwers who claim that whites cannot be "African".

In any case, my point is that even the term "black" is not as clear-cut as we would assume.

[^] I actually do support affirmative action in South Africa as a corrective measure. The potential for abuse does exist, in the future - currently whites, despite a huge amount of whining are not particularly disadvantaged. Sadly there isn't a sunset clause, although the constitution limits reverse discrimination to reversing the effects of past discrmination, a sunset clause of, say 2035, after which all racial discrimination would be banned, would have been better, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Although it's fairly straightforward to distinguish between gender and sexual orientation, I disagree with these traditional US categories of ethnicity.

Take a 'White' person, for instance: is a White American the same as a White Englishman, or a White Australian? What about a White Frenchman? These are all classified as 'White' but could potentially be vastly different in terms of diversity.

The same argument could be made with the other ethnicities. The 'Asian' category -- are they Chinese, Japanese, Filipino..? Or an American Asian immigrant -- Chinese-American, etc.

If you're aiming for diversity that's representative of your customer base, then surely your measure of ethnicity has to be more granular.

<comment><USER15> Yes, race and ethnicity are socially constructed and are fluid.

No, however much you try to whitewash it, 70-30-3-4-5 is as shitty as it gets outside of legalized segregation.

<comment><USER16> Whites are 78% of the US population, so being 70% of Google's population is a pretty fair representation. Asians are over-represented though. What exactly do you think is "fair"? I'm guessing having fewer than 50% whites at Google.

<comment><USER17> Why would you guess that? Clearly the non-asian minorities figures are abominable.

<comment><USER16> Because "diversity" is code for "there's too many white people here." I highly doubt anyone would complain about diversity if Google were 61% black (just like no one complains about the NFL and NBA's appalling lack of diversity).

Either way, to boost non-Asian minority percentages you've got to take away from the white or Asian percentages. Hmm... who do you think's gonna be on the receiving end of that rebalancing?

<comment><USER17> The point is that in reality Google is not 61% Black. If it were, you'd have a point.

And people do complain about lack of diversity in the NFL/NBA, on both sides.

These are such small percentages that you wouldn't even need to reduce head count to increase representation, just hire a few more workers. But even if they did have to replace, why are you so focused on saving every last White or Asian soul to the detriment of addressing the problem?

<comment><USER16> > why are you so focused on saving every last White or Asian soul to the > detriment of addressing the problem?

Because I take offense to people saying that having a majority of white workers at a company located in a white majority country is a "problem".

<comment><USER17> Well, minorities take offense at having a 2-5% rate of employment in a 37% non-White country so you can pick your problem, but don't just assume your personal concerns trump all others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's great to be open and all, but they never mention what their goal is. Do Google believe diversity is good for workplace cohesion, their own social mobility goals, good corporate moral policy, etc.?

The data is interesting in it's own right but I don't better understand where Google is going with diversity; I only understand where Google currently stands.

<comment><USER19> As a Google employee, the reasons I hear is that we'd like the diversity of our workforce to more accurately reflect the diversity of our users, so we can serve them better.

<comment><USER20> As a Google employee, the reason I'd like to improve the diversity of my work place is so I can work with more than just a bunch of white dudes. I mean, white dudes are great and all, but I really value diversity of opinion and experience in my life.

<comment><USER21> Of all the places to force new perspective onto yourself the workplace just seems like an odd choice to me. If I want to experience different cultures a corporate office is probably the absolute worst place I can think of to do so.

<comment><USER20> Uhhh I don't want to "experience different cultures". People of other races and genders are not weird aliens that are going to challenge me. It's not like I'm asking to import some Ugandan field workers as colleagues. I just want to engage with more, different kinds of people from my own society. There are a lot of them out there.

<comment><USER21> I didn't mean "experience different cultures" in such a literal sense, but it's probably my own fault for wording it like I did.

Like you, I enjoy engaging with a lot of different sorts of people. I was mostly just commenting that I've found a lot more success doing so outside the workplace in my own personal life. Maybe it's the places I've worked? Hard to say.

<comment><USER20> I have plenty of success interacting with different sorts of people outside the workplace. But I spend 40-50 hours a week at my workplace, so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What a lovely attitude by Google to open up and show those statistics.

It's especially praiseworthy due the fact it's not a case of "look how 'diverse' we are" but more of a "let's openly discuss these numbers".

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand why companies are obsessed with diversity just for the sake of it.

Edit: I am mexican, and I personally wouldn't like to be hired for diversity reasons, I would prefer to be hired on my abilities.

<comment><USER24> > I am mexican, and I personally wouldn't like to be hired for diversity > reasons, I would prefer to be hired on my abilities.

Which is all a non-sequitur, since nothing in Google's blog post or the linked diversity website suggest that Google's approaches to improving diversity include hiring people for diversity reasons rather than for their abilities.

<comment><USER25> Well, no one would ever admit that anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's tiring always being first, always being different, always being the one who has to adapt, denying important parts of yourself just to get the chance to do your job. It's like being a stranger in a strange land, where you speak the language but nobody learns yours. That's why even women who do well in development end up leaving mid-career. [http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008216/tracking/minding-gap- how-y...](http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008216/tracking/minding-gap-how-your- company-can-woo-female-coders) [You could swamp out woman with any other minority group and it would still be true. Its much harder to stick with something when the river flow is actively against you.]

</comment><comment><USER27> Ah, the US, where blatantly racist categorization of humans is used to prove your not racist.

Seriously, how many other countries divide people in "black" and "white"? Or is it even legal to do so?

<comment><USER28> Not to mention it makes less and less sense everyday. Look at how many multi- racial people there are. Well, almost everybody really if you think about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's nice for Google to publish this, but their commentary is misleading.

From 2000 to 2009, 10% (48,897 / 471,318) of Computer Science undergraduate degrees were awarded to Blacks, according to NSF ([1][2]).

[1]: [http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm](http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm) [2]: [http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c2/at02-19.xls](http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c2/at02-19.xls)

</comment><comment><USER30> I found data (from 2012) for some other companies: [http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech- diversity-d...](http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity- data/)

<comment><USER10> The low proportion of Asian sales workers at Cisco is interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> age diversity would be interesting as well

<comment><USER32> Indeed. I would bet my last dollar that its workforce is skewed hugely, disproportionately young. And there are no convenient they-just- aren't-majoring-in-CS excuses for this either. Lots of 50 year old engineers with years of training and experience are looking for work.

<comment><USER33> (approximate) ages on my team at Google: 26, 32 (me), 35, ~55, ~60, ~70.

<comment><USER34> Wow, a 70 year old engineer?!

<comment><USER35> Ken Thompson is 71: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson) and he still has quite a go at programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> True diversity is diversity of thought.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm always confused by the vagueness of these diversity PR efforts.

When you consciously want to improve something, you set goals for yourself, and then figure out ways to meet those goals. Then people can hold you accountable.

Google doesn't seem to have done any of that. They made a start in choosing what they're going to measure, but I don't understand it. For example, I don't think "Black" is an ethnicity. The differences between a black South African and someone from Egypt is huge, let alone a third generation American.

Also, I notice Google didn't include anything about gender in their diversity graphs, and I think everyone believes gender and sexual orientation contribute a valuable difference in perspective. I'm curious as to why they chose to exclude gay, transgendered, straight, and everyone in between and outside those labels from this push.

And then, even if they define all the categories of diversity they want, how the hell do they determine what their targets are for all the different demographics?

<comment><USER16> "We need more diversity" is code for "we need fewer white men", but I think you already knew that. Everyone does, that's why it doesn't have to be stated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I really don't get why gender or ethnicity should play any role at all. Especially for jobs based on technical skill it would make a lot of sense to select mainly for ability. It is then very likely that this would have the same skewed distribution of ethnicities that all the 'elite' universities have, despite affirmative action. As a white priviledged male, I feel sort of disheartened reading that all things being equal, officially I won't be hired, unofficially of course often it is the other way around. There are plenty of countries that are much less diverse than the US and still have highly successful companies, so apart from good PR I fail to see why 'working on diversity' does have any meaningful impact.

<comment><USER39> From a company perspective the reason is you may well be missing out on great talent and the great teams that research shows come with greater diversity.

I don't necessarily agree with affirmative action, but if you believe that many of the factors which contribute towards easily measured ability (attending a good school, work experience) may be skewed, then you presumably also accept that there is untapped potential out there - people with the ability to be as great but who have been in some way - fairly or otherwise - disadvantaged.

In IT in particular, where everything changes rapidly, you want to be hiring for potential as much as skill the candidate has today.

I don't think it's about picking someone because they're part of a minority, it's about thinking about how you look for and judge candidates to take into account that potential which so far hasn't been tapped.

<comment><USER38> I agree that there is a lot of potential lost due to unequal opportunities (for example children with poor parents, versus children with rich parents) and peer pressure / gender stereotypes. I've studied physics and the 5% of female students consistently were well above average for example, which suggests that only a portion of the _extremely_ talented females even considered studying physics.

I am not sure if an individual company can really do anything about the factors contributing to those inequal oportunities. I feel for many skills they come to late, the education system is really the place that should work to reduce the amount of wasted potential.

<comment><USER39> I'm not suggesting that companies change the system, more that they look at the criteria they use for recruitment to see if there are ways they can better judge underlying potential that what grad school people went to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Curious to see granularity by job type - ie engineers vs sales.

<comment><USER41> The official site breaks it down by tech/non-tech/leadership: [http://www.google.com/diversity/at- google.html](http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html)

<comment><USER42> Interesting that non-tech is less male-dominated than tech, as expected, but even _more_ white-dominated.

<comment><USER40> Same white, just fewer Asians.

Nothing to see here, all stereotypes confirmed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> why is diversity good? forced diversity seems very contrived. why should the percentage of women hired be higher than the number that graduate from school with a CS degree?

<comment><USER44> >why should the percentage of women hired be higher than the number that graduate from school with a CS degree?

No one is implying that it should. From the blog they seem to be working on improving the latter number too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Google needs to hire a few older people who know about the Mcarthy Era, and how Nazis used personal information against family members? And yes, Duckduckgo is getting better each month. My love affair with Google is long over. She taped everything I said, and will not stop stalking me.

</comment><comment><USER46> When I worked there I thought they did a reasonably good job on gender, religion, and sexual orientation but there were not enough older engineers there. I wonder what the actual numbers are for that.

<comment><USER34> Burnout maybe? How long is the average work week?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is a near-dupe of the discussion of this PBS article, which has more data, including the tech vs non-tech breakdown:

[http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses- workfor...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce- diversity-data-good/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813310)

</comment><comment><USER48> It appears the prior story on this topic got blasted off the front page [1] for whatever reason. Here's what I had to say over there [2].

1: [http://hnrankings.info/7813310/](http://hnrankings.info/7813310/)

2: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813811)

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how many of those minorities are working the low ends at Google...the details of course didn't say. Also, they stopped short of saying it's the perception and blame the facts on 'statistics'. I'm sure they have no problems hiring cooks, janitors, etc who are minorities.

</comment><comment><USER50> Hispanics mentioned 4 times in this thread as of 10:23pm MST. Asian's mentioned 18 times...

Everyone talks Black (27 mentions) and White (82 mentions).... meanwhile Hispanic and Asian ethic groups race higher and higher in total number. [1] In raw numbers, Hispanics are growing far faster than any ethnic group in the US. Companies in this game for the long haul had better recognize that Hispanics will be the dominant ethnic group in relatively short order.[2]

But who are the Hispanics? Better figure it out. It matters now and will increasingly matter much more going forward.

[1] [https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population/cb13-112.html) [2][http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fast-growth- latino-...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fast-growth-latino- population-blurs-traditional-u-s-racial-lines-article-1.1291138)

</comment><comment><USER51> I'd be really curious to see the gender/ethnic breakdown of just the Google software engineers. As it stands it's hard to make a meaningful comparison between Google and the overall US population of CS majors.

<comment><USER52> They don't have the software engineers specifically, but they have the breakdown of the "Tech" people [http://www.google.com/diversity/at- google.html#tab=tech](http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I think that the author doesn't know the difference between race and ethnicity.

</comment><comment><USER54> "But we're the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be"

Who is "we"? And why do they want to be somewhere else?

<comment><USER24> > Who is "we"?

Google.

> And why do they want to be somewhere else?

Among other reasons, because Google is employee-constrained (they have plenty of money and plenty of things they'd like to do, but have trouble hiring enough workers that meet their qualification standards to be able to effectively apply the money they have to the opportunities they would like to pursue), and the lack of the diversity in their workforce, mirroring the lack of diversity in their qualified candidate pool -- given the absence of evidence that there are inherent reasons for that lack of diversity -- indicates that improving social barriers that constrain their qualified candidate pool is likely to be an effective way of making more of the people who are innately capable of being Googlers actually able to become qualified to be Googlers, allowing Google to hire more qualified people, allowing Google to more effectively pursue the wide range of opportunities they would like to pursue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> If Google achieves a 51% Female 49% Male ratio, is this good? Supporters of forced diversity are implying it is, but why?

If there is something gained by having gender X, then you are saying that genders are not equal. If there is no difference, then why are we doing this? Why are we basing employment on gender anyway?

I'd like to see stats regarding people looking for work who are successful and those that are not. If a woman wants to stay at home, can we not accept her choice? If a man wants to stay at home while the woman is breadwinner, is this not okay too?

<comment><USER5> Please do show me these strawmen supporters of _forced_ diversity.

> then you are saying that genders are not equal No, you're saying that their > _life experience_ is not equal. There's no inequality in terms of ability, > but in terms of what you know.

> I'd like to see stats regarding people looking for work who are successful

Closest proxy I can find is a study of success rate for MBAs by gender.[1] No surprise whatsoever, women experience lower salaries and career satisfaction. Also, women have less upward mobility into management positions.

> If a woman wants to stay at home, can we not accept her choice? The issue is > not _wanting_ to stay at home.

> If a man wants to stay at home while the woman is breadwinner, is this not > okay too?

Of course it is. To make that possible, we need to close the salary gap and address glass ceiling issues.

[http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/29182...](http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/29182/0000235.pdf?sequence=1)</comment></comment>


Why Every Startup Should Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2016/03/why-every-startup-should-bootstrap <comment><USER2> I had this nightmare the other day:

Our new company was suddenly funded by a VC. Incessant tweeeting by one of their partners very quickly got us 5 new competitors and 0 new customers.

If I were starting a company today, I'd look to raise PE money who is more quiet about their investments than VC money who are not.

<comment><USER3> What is this new company - I am intrigued?

<comment><USER2> The company is not new--so it was more a temporal shifted nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am also a true believer in bootstrapping, but we don't all have the advantages that Ryan had when he started qualtrics. You either need a very good idea or a very generous family to bootstrap.

<comment><USER4> or a good ability to market your product, or to build leads pre-product

<comment><USER3> You do need the resources to build your product before you can market it. I would argue any product you can get people to pay for when it just a concept is a very good idea.</comment></comment></comment>


Algorithm recovers speech from a potato-chip bag filmed through glass (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804 <comment><USER2> At some point it is (controversially) hypothesized that we may be able to pull imprinted recordings off of ancient artifacts: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics#Past_interpre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics#Past_interpretations_controversy)

<comment><USER3> I also once thought of that, but maybe there are other ways in which large vibrations have left fingerprints on materials. I don't mean gravitational waves, but really acoustic phenomena. Like a comet impact or a vulcano outburst. What's a delicate material which would be able to record sound but that doesn't get destroyed by time? Clay that dries up is a logical one.

<comment><USER4> Old glass or porcelain might be the most viable candidates for a first look as they would be cooling off from a heated, more malleable state, potentially capturing sound from the immediate vicinity as they cooled off.

I have no science to back this up. It's just a hunch.

<comment><USER5> That may be complicated from old glass never fully hardening. But it sounds plausible enough.

Possibly mortar in walls could record the workers taking. All sorts of pottery start out malleable, so they might be candidates. Cave paintings might be an option - wonder whether being finger painted would leave biological fingerprints behind - heart rate, for instance.

Pretty wild idea. Here's hoping it has some legs.

Maybe someday we'll learn about places like Stonehenge this way.

<comment><USER6> Old glass doesn't flow and is solid. Google it to see plenty of debunking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If interested in this, you might also be interested in the lead author's other research papers

[http://abedavis.com/research.html](http://abedavis.com/research.html)

and his 2016 PhD thesis, which includes the "chip bag" research.

[http://abedavis.com/thesis.pdf](http://abedavis.com/thesis.pdf)

I'm interested in this research, from the angle of "Can passive surface measurements tell us what is happening inside the human body?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Ah, yes, I saw this in 2010. They didn't have high enough resolution to detect actual vibrations, so they used an algorithm based on per-pixel color shifts. Really clever.

</comment><comment><USER9> [2014] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131785)

</comment><comment><USER10> Definitely some interesting applications.

Sort of orthogonal but is there a similar way to get sound from seeing someone's lip's move in a video -- would it then be possible to recover audio/conversations from old video only files?

Edit: Guess they can read lips via AI [https://www.techemergence.com/machine- learning-that-learns-m...](https://www.techemergence.com/machine-learning- that-learns-more-like-humans-an-ai-lip-reading-machine-and-more-this-week-in- artificial-intelligence-11-11-16/)

Now getting the high quality sound from just video would be amazing.

<comment><USER11> What about lip-reading with reflected Wi-Fi signals :) :

[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~guanhua/paper/WiHear_MobiC...](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~guanhua/paper/WiHear_MobiCom14.pdf)

 _" WiHear aims to detect human speech by analyzing radio reflections from mouth movements. It requires individual user to train the system extensively, and can recognize only a limited number of words (6 words) with high accuracy."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "If I'm sitting next to a swimming pool, and somebody dives in - and she's not too pretty, so I can think of something else - I think of the waves and things that have formed in the water. And, uh, when there's lots of people have dived in the pool there's a very great choppiness of all these waves all over the water and to think that it's possible, maybe, that in those waves there's a clue as to what's happening in the pool. That some sort of insect or something with sufficient cleverness could sit in the corner of the pool and just be disturbed by the waves, and by the nature of the irregularities and bumping of the waves have figured out who jumped in where and when and where what's happening all over the pool. And that's what we're doing when we're looking at something. Uh, the light that comes out is ... is waves, just like in the swimming pool except in three dimensions instead of the two dimensions of the pool it's they're going in all directions. And we have a eighth of an inch black hole into which these things go ... which, uh, is particularly sensitive to the parts of the waves that are coming in a particular direction it's not particularly sensitive when they're coming in at the wrong angle which we say is from the corner of our eye. And if we want to get more information from the corner of our eye we swivel this ball about so that the hole moves from place to place. Then ... uh, it's quite wonderful that we can see ... figure out so easy. That's really because the light waves are easier than the ... the waves in the water are a little bit more complicated it would have been harder for the bug than for us but it's the same idea. Figure out what the thing is that we're looking at at a distance."

Transcribed from footage included in the documentary "The Last Journey of a Genius" (1989) by Christopher Sykes, a BBC TV production in association with WGBH Boston and Coronet/MTI Film and Video.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQQXTMih1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQQXTMih1A)

</comment><comment><USER13> _Because of a quirk in the design of most cameras' sensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second._

That's a pretty convenient quirk if you ask me.

<comment><USER14> It's known as the Rolling Shutter effect. It's most commonly observed when attempting to take still imagery of very fast moving objects like rotors on airplanes, but affects pretty much any image sensor that isn't designed specifically to work around it. The following Wikipedia article goes into far more depth, but the basic problem is that an image sensor doesn't sample every pixel instantly, but instead reads them out serially, and thus there's a tiny, tiny fraction of a second in-between each pixel being sampled. It's small enough to not matter for most purposes, but it's still there, and can be useful / detremental depending on the application.

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

<comment><USER15> And it is why mechanical shutters are still a thing in dedicated cameras. It is still much faster to move two pieces of metal or carbon fiber over the sensor than it is to read out a multi-megapixel CMOS sensor. When shooting video mechanical shutters cannot be used so the rolling shutter effect can cause artifacts such as fast-moving subjects appear slanted.

<comment><USER16> Err, modern global shutters like those made by CMOSIS/ams are _much_ faster than that.

Their fast one is an APS-C sensor with 4k*3k Px, a shutter closing time of 1s/~120000 and a minimum shutter open time of ~1s/50000\. The shutter closing time might be even faster, just reconstruction from frame overhead time values I remember, and adjusting for the share the row skew had. Check the datasheet if you like to.

If you know a mechanical shutter that can do such, I'd like to know.

This, by chance, allows laser-flash illumination of objects that are behind a close wall of fog, as you can keep the shutter closed while the light travels to the further away object of interest. You will have the blur, but no longer the massive constrast loss due to light pollution. If it's not as bad as fog, and just e.g. normal rainfall or such, you lack the reflection artifacts that would be common, and only retain the refraction artifacts from the light passing through it by necessity.

These sensors do lack a little dynamic range, but you can compensate with some slight trickery, see the datasheet, to get ~15 stops out of this particular device.

Rolling shutter has applications, but videos for users of low knowledge and high ambitions is not one of them.

<comment><USER17> Could you expand on or link the bit about time of flight trickery in fog or rain?

c * 1 s / 50,000 is still kilometers, so I'm not sure I understand how this shutter can do what sounds like using time of flight to selectively illuminate stuff at a specific depth

<comment><USER16> No, the part that can solve this is the fast time from insensitive to sensitive, which is shorter than the time form sensitive to no longer sensitive. You will need a pulse with a short enough duration, e.g. a Q-switched Nd:YAG with frequency doubling giving you up to about a dozen Joules at up to a few hundred Hz with pulse durations of under 50 ns, and, while limited in some ways by breakdown peak power in components, a lower limit of about .5 ns.

Most of the shutter time is used to copy the data to the shadow pixel, but just releasing the dark pull won't take long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Makes me wonder why this is even possible...video of Oval Office argument... [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ija-VZwcznE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ija- VZwcznE)

</comment><comment><USER19> Discussed 6 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16201745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16201745)

</comment><comment><USER20> pushing the argument to its limit : what happens if we can recover any speech from this or that material (moving leaves, bags, lips movements (AI would be good at that), changes in magnetic fields whatever). should we assume that there is no such thing as a "safe place" anymore ? One could argue there never was (because, for example, police can eavesdrop) but, this article implies it can reach a whole new level... How is that kind of technology controlled by those in powers ? Considering Apple is valued at gazillions of dollars, I guess those technologies will be worth a lot and be available to some others very powerful people... James Bond looks quite outdated to me now :-/

<comment><USER21> Microphones are already quite good. If you can be seen, you can be "heard". That has been true for many years. I think there was a scene in the movie Enemy of the State involving cone mics. The difference with this technology is that someone can "hear" you even if you're around a corner.

</comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al Forgive me, as someone with zero actual knowledge in this field. This may be a naive question, but wouldn't this be fairly easily defeated by playing songs in the background?

<comment><USER22> It might be possible to cancel that noise out. But something like a pink noise generator or an office grey noise generator would probably fool it, the same way it would fool a microphone at distance

<comment><USER18> This doesn't work anymore, if it ever did. There is free software capable of isolating audio like a single voice from background noise.

<comment><USER23> Not sure how this can't work, it's just audio jamming, same as for EM waves.

You just need to broadcast sufficient noise to cover the signal, i.e. the S:N ratio is such that the receiver (crisp packet, microphone, etc.) can no longer see the signal above the noise floor. Now, this might mean broadcasting a _loud_ noise signal, which could overwhelm your (or other friendly) receivers (ears, etc.) so optimal placement of the jamming noise source becomes an issue.

Generally, you want it closer to the threat than you, so that distance attenuation keeps it bearable for you but still jams possible recording devices. Or, introduce high bandwidth noise vibrations into the surfaces of the area you are in, such as windows or walls. Anyway, it's very possible and in use today in secure facilities that must be protected from audio eavesdropping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A different approach to decoding vibrations into speech, involving a laser microphone: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone)

</comment><comment><USER25> So if I eat my sour cream chedar ruffles in a one-party consent state could I get in trouble?

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there any applications for this tech that aren't a massive violation of privacy? Seriously... why develop this? It's super creepy.

</comment><comment><USER27> Tangential... but why do the US call them 'Chips' whereas in the UK we call them 'Crisps'?

</comment><comment><USER28> This would also be really cool for recording vocals. I liked the glitchiness of potato chips!

</comment><comment><USER29> Rule of thumb is never having sensitive conversations where such exploits are feasible.

<comment><USER30> With enough processing power, you can listen to anyone as long as you can get an object in frame that's vibrating with speech (the UK and Chinese CCTV networks comes to mind). Depending on resolution, I'd expect this to be the case for any footage already stored. It's just a matter of having a distributed computing job kicked off to comb through video data and add the additional audio metadata.

Will you only speak of sensitive subjects in rooms with no windows? Will we be silent in public? These are issues where technology, politics, and human rights intersect.

<comment><USER31> Don't sweat the CCTV or recordings:

 _Reconstructing audio from video requires that the frequency of the video samples — the number of frames of video captured per second — be higher than the frequency of the audio signal. In some of their experiments, the researchers used a high-speed camera that captured 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second. That's much faster than the 60 frames per second possible with some smartphones, but well below the frame rates of the best commercial high-speed cameras, which can top 100,000 frames per second._

<comment><USER32> The article quite literally is about a technique to bypass that limitation and do it with a regular 60fps camera.

<comment><USER31> It sounds like that technique doesn't quite recover the audio though, just a portion of it:

 _While this audio reconstruction wasn't as faithful as that with the high- speed camera, it may still be good enough to identify the gender of a speaker in a room; the number of speakers; and even, given accurate enough information about the acoustic properties of speakers' voices, their identities._

Saying _it may still be good enough_ pretty strongly implies that the quality is quite low.

<comment><USER32> There is a video on the webpage that includes the recovered audio. It is low quality, but enough to understand the speaker most of the time, and definately enough to pose a security risk when analysed by a specialist

<comment><USER31> The youtube clip in the article? The voice reconstruction there is from high speed video. If you mean some other video, I'd appreciate a link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think this has shown up on HN previously... Cant find the link though.

</comment><comment><USER34> >In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.

Its hard enough to discern intelligible speech from many people who are standing right in front of you.

</comment><comment><USER35> TIL don't leave snack bags out, and the window shades open.

</comment><comment><USER36> "I'm sure there will be applications that nobody will expect. I think the hallmark of good science is when you do something just because it's cool and then somebody turns around and uses it for something you never imagined. It's really nice to have this type of creative stuff."

Thinking atomic bombs :(

<comment><USER37> >Thinking atomic bombs :(

The same ones which have prevented large scale open military conflicts involving superpowers for the last 60+ years? Atom bombs have likely saved more lives than they have taken, if we had conventional wars with modern technology without MAD.

<comment><USER38> That's one read on history. Another is that the world has been tremendously lucky to not have suffered a nuclear holocaust since WWII. Many powerful people have done everything they could to advocate for nuclear bombings in the past 60 years, and we've had some extremely close calls with near accidental launches.

<comment><USER37> You are right. It might be too soon to definitively say which take is correct. It might be the case that a disaster (natural, economic, alien invasion, etc) might spark yet another world war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Now imagine doing this with a high res satellite anywhere on earth.

<comment><USER40> Satellites will never get such resolution due to optics and atmosphere. Drones however...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are startups victim of DDoS attack? - <AUTHOR> I am a DDoS security specialist trying to sell IT security services for businesses against DDoS attacks. It doesn't seem that anyone need that.
Is it me or no one is really being DDoS'ed or the Business just don't really care and wait for the attack to move on?
I'd like to hear your feedback on this. <comment><USER2> They do need this, but they have no idea what it's called. (eg: drop the tech jargon). Many don't REALIZE they need it - mainly because it hasn't happened to them. The risk is highest for companies with real customers or events - since it's lost revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see what you mean. Thanks

<comment><USER2> Sure - hope it helps. I've sold many security engagements and done the work. I've seen startups first hand usually do not understand their risk unless they've experienced it directly (hack / vuln / PCI / DDOS). It's a hard sell at first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case anyone is interested, I can help you with SYN flood, amplification attack, volumetric attack, rate-limiting botnets and also against spoofed attacks.</comment>


Incredibly detailed map of North American English dialects, with audio - <AUTHOR> http://aschmann.net/AmEng/

<comment><USER2> Seeing the title of this post, I got really excited -- the subject is a longtime interest of mine. However, after clicking through to the actual page, the excitement quickly subsided. I'm sure the information is great, but the presentation is plain _awful_. Quite a pity, it looks like the author put a lot of time into it.

It's one big MS Word-file, exported to HTML. It would be best if the content is divided into several pages. It definitely needs a different stylesheet, especially for the tables. The maps could be redrawn in SVG and it would be nice to add some interactivity so that layers can be peeled back by the user.

I'd like to help the author clean up this page, if he'll allow it. Would anyone like to join me?

<comment><USER3> I'd love to help but don't have the time. I just wanted to say as soon as I saw the page, I thought the same thing.

If the author made their data available, it should be reasonably easy to restructure the data a bit then use something like OpenHeatMap (www.openheatmap.com) to create layers on top of Google Maps.

EDIT: Another idea -- if the author made their data available in shapefiles, it'd be easy to use with _any_ mapping program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I grew up in Southern Illinois. As you can see on the map its the confluence of four very different dialects, changing town to town. I wonder how long this will continue before it is homogenized.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lots of info. Could use some Tufte love.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is the UK equivalent: <http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html>

We have roughly the same number of accents/dialects as the US, in a tiny fraction of the area. Yes, it does get confusing sometimes.

(Unfortunately the recordings are in WMA. Ewwww. VLC can cope.)</comment>


Advice for not adding more founders? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/traction-book/paths-to-5m-for-a-startup-founder-73b781d34a2f

<comment><USER2> Nobody is Omniscience. Maybe you are a good coder and you can build a new system all by yourself. Most of good cordes, have not good verbal skills, or financial skills, and they can't join into an incubator or find an angel or ventur capital.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes one can't just do it alone.</comment>


Why Search Crawlers Sometimes Ask for URLs That Never Were Part of Your Site - <AUTHOR> http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/slurp-10.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm setting up a new site and noticed that within seconds of starting the server I was getting hits in the log like:

      126.96.36.199 - - [2011-06-17 18:49:37] "GET /SlurpConfirm404/starsong/pro-road.htm HTTP/1.0" 404 18 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
      188.8.131.52 - - [2011-06-17 16:53:30] "GET /SlurpConfirm404/drugstore.htm HTTP/1.0" 404 18 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"

My initial thought was that I was getting crawled by a spam bot masquerading as a Yahoo crawler, but after a bit of googling I found a couple of blogs guessing on the nature of the strange requests.

My best guess is that they're using the above test to check if your server is gladly responding even the most obscure request, thus making it look like a spider trap/content farm.</comment>


Code hidden in Stone Age art may be the root of human writing (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230990-700-in-search-of-the-very-first-coded-symbols/ <comment><USER2> > _Our ability to represent a concept with an abstract sign is something no > other animal, not even our closest cousins the chimpanzees, can do. It is > arguably also the foundation for our advanced, global culture._

Human chauvinisms.

Until we can objectively test the likelihood of humans that have never been taught a language, like "feral children" [0], to spontaneously develop a coding system on their own, can we really compare innate intelligence in these areas across species?

For all we know, the trigger for such developments may be _watching others of your own kind_ doing something odd, that is interesting or beneficial enough to catch on for long enough to be passed on to offspring.

In the Blue Planet 2 series, there is a segment about an octopus and a grouper fish, entirely different species, communicating with each other via gestures and changing their skin colors, to work together in trapping prey.

Ants etc. use "abstract signs" of pheromones. Bees use 3-dimensional dances to communicate. Are we dumber than them because of our inability to do that?

Intelligence certainly isn't a linear 1D scale with discrete steps.

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

<comment><USER3> > Until we can objectively test the likelihood of humans that have never been > taught a language, like "feral children" [0], to spontaneously develop a > coding system on their own, can we really compare innate intelligence in > these areas across species?

Nicaraguan Sign Language[1] developed spontaneously among a group of deaf children.

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

<comment><USER2> That's interesting, but those children were already exposed to civilization and in contact with language-using humans.

How likely is a human to develop any of our abilities that we take for granted, _in the wild?_

<comment><USER4> We tried to teach various animals language and mostly failed.

Thus there is indeed a class difference between humans and the rest of animals.

The rest of animals seem incapable of this ability, even when we try our best to teach them.

<comment><USER5> Parent is arguing that they need to witness language use between members of their own species, and then not learn, in order to show they are incapable of language use.

The first human language user managed without this. (Though, if used for communication, it takes two... so there couldn't have been _a_ first. OTOH there's an argument that language is primarily for thought, not communication, so it only takes one person. Secondly, evolution doesn't usually build a complete perfect system, but iterates, gradually improving. A puzzle here is that abstraction seems to be all or nothing, you can't have _part_ abstraction. One resolution is that the necessary neuro-machinary was built up for _other_ purposes, and abstraction emerged when some crucial capstone happened to be put into place. Or... maybe you _can_ have some kind of "partial" abstraction...?)

<comment><USER6> I think you could have partial abstraction. People move around physical objects which represent other things, all the time.

<comment><USER5> Maybe representation is more important than grammar? e.g. representational art

The bee-dance "represents" direction and distance, but only that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have always speculated that animal tracking was the origin of human reading and writing and that the interpretation of an animal's path is a storyline. But I am not alone in this: the idea was put much better by the Kickapoo tracker Famous Shoes in the Larry McMurtry novel "Streets of Laredo" (part of the "Lonesome Dove" series):

 _" Famous Shoes was given a Bible, in lieu of the little white girl. He would have rather had the girl but he took the Bible and he pored over it for years, in his spare time. He had never seen tracks as strange as the tracks in his Bible. After much study he could see that the tracks were individual, as were the tracks of all animals. Even worms and snails made tracks that were unlike those of other creatures."_

Famous Shoes strong desire to learn to follow the tracks in books surfaces a number of times in McMurtry's novels.

There is no Wikipedia link for Famous Shoes, my favorite character from the "Lonesome Dove" series.

</comment><comment><USER8> It always amazes me how close to this sort of thing Szukalski was, with his "Behold! The Protong!!" .. I mean, he was an artist who saw all these ancient signs and signals as a porto-tongue throughout all human culture.

Does anyone know if Szukalski has any credence among these researchers? He is definitely in the lunatic-fringe/crazy-guy sector - but maybe he was right that there is a common human language throughout all ancient art?

So crazy to see his claims being investigated now and confirmed by mainstream archeologists ..

<comment><USER9> To save others a search: Stanisław Szukalski

"Zermatism, Szukalski's concept of world history, postulated that all human culture derived from post-deluge Easter Island and that in all human languages one can find traces of the original, ancient mother-tongue of mankind. In his view, humanity was locked in an eternal struggle with the Sons of Yeti ("Yetinsyny"), the offspring of Yeti and humans, who had enslaved humanity from time immemorial."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Szukalski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Szukalski)

Apparently there's a Netflix documentary (Dec 2018) about him called, Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski.

<comment><USER8> The Zermatism stuff is whack .. but the Protong stuff is great!

>Beginning in 1940, Szukalski devoted most of his time examining the mysteries of prehistoric ancient history of mankind, the formation and shaping of languages, faiths, customs, arts, and migration of peoples. He tried to unravel the origin of geographical names, gods, and symbols that have survived in various forms in various cultures. This work, called "Protong" (in Polish, "Macimową"), continued uninterruptedly for over 40 years. He wrote a manuscript of 42 volumes, totaling more than 25,000 pages, and including 14,000 illustrations.[3] The volumes covered a variety of issues; his pen drawings of artifacts, which he considered "witnesses", were done to confirm his theories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Another idea that I find fun to think about, especially for fiction: What if those ancient humans weren't primitive creatures newly learning things, but remnants of a civilization making do with whatever they had left?

e.g. If everyone in the future uses always-connected AR glasses and personal AI assistants, would anyone bother to write much, "in the wild"?

Someone discovering a cool sightseeing/hiding spot may Instagram a few photos, saying "follow the arrows.", and we kind of already do that with geocaching etc. [0]

In the farther future, someone may only find the crudely-etched arrows, with no reason to assume that anything like the internet existed back now. :)

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

</comment><comment><USER10> Earlier discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18227517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18227517)

</comment><comment><USER11> Url changed from [https://kottke.org/19/03/stone-age-cave-symbols-may-all- be-p...](https://kottke.org/19/03/stone-age-cave-symbols-may-all-be-part-of-a- single-prehistoric-proto-writing-system), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER12> > It is worth noting that many of the earlier scholars studying cave art were > men, which may have led to gender biases in their interpretations.

It's sad we cannot have a post on an interesting topic not spoiled by the gender war anymore. Moreover this remark is totally stupid: women are as much likely to formulate a biased opinion than men.

<comment><USER13> > Moreover this remark is totally stupid: women are as much likely to > formulate a biased opinion than men.

Test, everyone 8s biased by their own experiences, but those biases are very _useful_, especially when coupled with the biases of those who has a rather different background. They allow others to see ideas they wouldn't have thought of leading to true synergy.

That's the point being made: not that another group of researchers would have been better, but that a diverse group would be preferred to a not diverse one.

<comment><USER14> Why would diversity by sex be very important here? Wouldn't diversity by field of study, expertise, accomplishment, etc by far more relevant?

I'd totally buy that diversity was a problem because "all the people who looked at this were from a few schools studying the same degree, and came up in the same academic circles and so had the same idea.". But the fact that the people studying the issue had similar genitals seems irrelevant.

<comment><USER15> This is just a guess, but my guess is that although gender differences are not so important in today's world, even back as early as the 80s I as a child saw gender roles in my parents. Dad went to work mom stayed home. Go farther back and those things become stronger yet I believe. I think gender had a much stronger influence on ones mindset then it does today. Now people are okay when other gender identify as the opposite sex. Back then I have no doubt there would have been gender biases.

<comment> thraway-burnout > Now regressive left activists are okay when other gender identify as the > opposite sex.

FTFY. Coming from a progressive socialist who doesn't like to stick his head in the sand

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> New Scientist website may be the worst I've ever seen. Unreadable.

<comment><USER17> I read almost everything through outline.com these days.

<comment><USER16> I love Outline too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting to see the hashtag was already around in the stone age.</comment>


ChatSecure v4.0.9 - Sustainable Open Source Starts with You - <AUTHOR> https://chatsecure.org/blog/sustainable-open-source-starts-with-you/ <comment><USER2> > There's also the elephant in the room. Although "Internet freedom" > appropriations may be safe for now, a large chunk of this funding pool could > also quickly dry up, leaving many projects scrambling to keep the lights on.

I think this an oft-overlooked, yet important point to raise, especially in the current American political context. We've already seen superficial budget cuts (or attempts at them) by this administration such as to the NEA. Especially given the political context in which some of the OTF-funded applications operate, I think we should be grateful for as long as this funding stays off the radar, but not rely on it as a long-term funding solution for "Internet freedom"-type projects.

Too many projects in the not-for-profit tech/Internet freedom/FOSS realm depend too heavily on grants in general, not just from the government. You aptly point out some of the problems that creates as far as maintaining an application over time. We saw recently with Tor a move away from DoD grants and towards crowd-funding. This is important for the independence, trustworthiness, and accountability of a project as well.

...

So one more thing I want to touch on about the donation mechanism in general. I really, really like how easy you've made it to contribute by building the mechanism into the app and making it an in-app purchase. The biggest barrier to me donating to most projects is visibility and ease of use of the mechanism. It's a combination of the out-of-sight-out-of-mind concept and the fact we're lazy as humans and sometimes just don't want to fill out repetitive multi-page forms to make a donation. By supporting small-dollar, recurrent donations and making the mechanism dead-simple, I think you're doing the most you can ensure the people who care and use the application will donate.</comment>


Show HN: A New Concept for Programming Tutorials - <AUTHOR> http://tardis.matthiashager.com/programming-tutorial-demo/ <comment><USER2> I like the concept and implementation of the proposed improvements, but I think it starts off a bit too slow - lots of repetition in 2 through 6. The reader doesn't know what's coming, so you're asking a lot for them to sit through those "boring" bits.

Also, information on how to deploy this concept on other sites might also be useful, especially given the venue. Maybe even use the project itself as the tutorial?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right! As someone who does marketing for a living I'm completely unsatisfied with the "pitch." But I had to get over the mental block of publishing this and go live with something that isn't yet perfect.

Appreciate the feedback. My next step is to publish a couple small tutorials so there are more live examples of the concept.

</comment></comment><comment> asus-wrt The concept is great. Is there a GitHub repo?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is not a repo yet. The demo is running a lightweight vue.js app for the front end. In the MVP spirit, I simply hard coded the tutorial steps and code revisions in the JavaScript. Reading and processing repository diffs has held me back from creating this for such a long time, but I wanted to throw something out there and this was the easiest route to publishing a concept demo.

I'd be happy to publish the front end on GitHub, but without the ability to read from a repository it isn't functional for anything beyond a demo.</comment></comment>


Scientists See Signs of Learning in a Ball of Dough - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2016/10/24/researchers_find_hints_of_learning_in_a_ball_of_dough_109789.html <comment><AUTHOR> This article makes a synthesis more accessible than the PLOS article, due to probable deliberate obfuscation in the original. [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165269#pone.0165269)</comment>


Engineer wins $1.9 million in "wrongful hire" suit against Seagate. - <AUTHOR> http://www.hirecentrix.com/can-an-employer-wrongfully-hire-someone-case-highlights-potential-pitfalls-of-the-hiring-process.html

<comment><USER2> "alleges Seagate knew that the position for which he was hired did not actually exist, but falsely represented that it did so in order to use Vaidyanathan's credentials to better market one of its divisions to be sold to another company"

Wow. This happened to me once, many years ago. Never thought of suing over it, but I am still angry about it. I'd prefer not to get into all the details or name names, but I had published some papers in a specialized hot domain that was highly mathematical, and owned some modest but important IP. This company hired me, and then trotted me out in meetings with suitably impressed clients to get three multi-million dollar contracts. Once they had the contracts, they dismissed me. They also tried to steal my IP despite our licensing agreement, but that's another matter. They are now out of business, but they did so by leveraging the existence of the development contracts to flip the company to a bigger company that didn't realize it was buying a pig in a poke. The three owners of the privately held company were sociopaths who then took off with the acquisition money.

So details are a little different, but basic idea is I got shafted in the same way as that guy. I was hired only to be a prop in a scam where my existence as an employee was only used to screw over clients for money as part of a larger scam to sell off a company to another company for profit and pocket the money.

It's very cool that Minnesota has a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you. I wasn't in Minnesota and am fairly sure that I wouldn't have had any case even if it had occurred to sue over this specific aspect of it.

<comment><USER3> > _a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you_ //

Isn't fraud a general prohibition in most legal jurisdictions? Why would it matter that the company personnel committing the fraud were doing so in the arena of employment as opposed to sales or whatever?

<comment><USER4> [IANAL] Technically, there was no fraud. They made a job offer, he accepted, and they (most likely) properly compensated him within the bounds of the offer. So, in terms of that specific business transaction, there was no intentional deception made for personal/business gain (they made good on the job offer), or to damage a specific individual (they paid him according to the employment contract). Employment being at-will in most of the US, Seagate was completely within their rights to let him go anytime they wanted, for any reason. There's no case, there. Seagate was not playing fair, but they were still within the bounds of the law.

However, the actual intent of creating the job in the first place was done under false pretenses, and MN has a specific (albeit old and obscure) law against that.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Technically, there was no fraud. They made a job offer, he accepted, and > they (most likely) properly compensated him within the bounds of the offer.

Without having seen the job offer, or knowing what exactly he did for them, we can't really say, can we.

<comment><USER5> No, we can't, which is his point.

The parent commenter is simply observing that "fraud" is a harder case to make than a specific violation of a statute narrowly tailored to exactly this guy's case.

Given the obscure statute which won this guy his judgement, it seems reasonable to assume he had better legal representation than is available on an HN thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Normally I find a lot of these lawsuits frivolous, but on the surface this sounds completely legitimate.

It's obvious he wasn't just another engineer, but rather someone with very specific skills and credentials such that his employment caused other parties to enter into business, sign a contract, etc.

Coupled with the fact that this wasn't a simple decision for the guy and his family (up and move from Texas to Minnesnowda), Seagate obviously made some short-term decisions that were quite underhanded.

Makes one wonder -- what was a reasonable threshold time that Seagate needed to employ the engineer before this lawsuit didn't have merit?

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that a simple "months on the job" threshold is sufficient to decide wrongdoing here. From what the article says, it seems like Seagate misrepresented the position to the engineer. Given that, I think a better standard would be to look at the job listing and the communication that Seagate had with Mr. Vaidyanathan, then compare that with what he was asked to do.

<comment><USER5> I don't read him as arguing that there should be a simple "months on the job" test, but rather observing that if he had been employed for, say, 24 months before termination, he probably wouldn't have made his case; a reasonable group of people being likely to conclude that 24 months constitutes a bona fide employment relationship and not a parlor trick.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it does seem like timeframe is a key consideration here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great for Vaidyanathan and all, but what I really dislike about this article is this "wrongful hire" neologism. Seagate committed fraud, and calling it "wrongful hire" makes it sound so much weaker. And maybe I'm just paranoid, but the author of the piece definitely operates on the employer's side of these relationships (read his bio), so half of me wonders if this is intentional.

<comment><USER9> I agree and think it was intentional. It won't be long before politicians are mocking "Companies have even been successfully sued for wrongfully hiring someone." as a pretext for cutting employee protection laws.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully we'd be able to claim that they were wrongfully elected, and get them recalled.

<comment><USER10> But then they could sue _us_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FTA "Vaidyanathan alleged that Seagate knew that the position for which he was hired did not actually exist, but falsely represented that it did so in order to use Vaidyanathan's credentials to better market one of its divisions to be sold to another company."

I wonder why his employment didn't transfer to the acquiring company if Vaidyanathan was so important to the success of the division being sold.

<comment><USER12> Maybe the deal didn't go through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Something similar happened to me during the dotcom era. I was poached from a very nice job at an airline by someone I did work for on the side who always paid well. The salary he offered me was about 20% higher, plus he offered a massive cash payout over the first few months. I quit my job and joined this company, only to find out that the cash was based on his businesses selling a lot of equity to a large company, and I was part of the deal. The deal fell through as I joined, probably because it became apparent to the investor that the guy was a crook. I was paid a third of my salary for several months and left with a lot of debt. I really should have sued when I was back on my feet again, but I didn't really want to deal with this guy any more.

</comment><comment><USER14> Forget 1-year warranties, if Seagate actually did this they are morally bankrupt.

I wonder if he will even see $1 of that award though and how many years later.

</comment><comment><USER15> The intention of this law is good for employee in spirit but I wonder if companies will now be reluctant to have clear career paths in fear of a lawsuit.

<comment><USER16> In this case they wanted a "big fish" type of engineer, they have to compete to get this type of employee because the guy has weight in the industry. I don't see how a company can not present a clear, desirable path to a prospective employee of this status and still expect to attract "high caliber" (whether perceived or real) talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't get why he had to sue under that law: fraud is fraud and bait and switch is fraud too.

<comment><USER18> " bait and switch is fraud too"

That doesn't make much sense....they offered him a job with a salary and he got there and was given a job with a salary. Not like he got there and they had a car with a sandwich waiting for him and a note that says "Sorry :(".

Bottom line, bait and switch is a consumer law not employment law.

<comment><USER10> If they knew at the time they the job was only temporary (i.e., they had planned in advance to dispose of him after a short time) yet they presented it to him as a "full time permanent" position ... obviously it's not the same as the classic car dealership B&S, but it doesn't seem like honest dealing either.

<comment><USER18> What about the flip side, an employee who takes a job knowing that it isn't permanent and will jump ship giving the first opportunity (which could be in as little as 6 months). Is that wrong? These situations are always possible because most (if not all) states are at-will states.

<comment><USER10> I'm thinking in your scenario the employee probably didn't entice the employer (under false pretenses) to terminate whatever their previous arrangement was and relocate to MN, with a much smaller job market.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Millennials Aren't Entitled–They're Just Better Than You - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtcatalog.com/tucker-max/2016/12/millennials-arent-entitled-theyre-just-better-than-you/ <comment><USER2> Provocative, flame-bait anti-Boomer rant in response to anti-Millennial rants. Personally I find that the name-calling simply devolves into an endless cycle of mutual blaming that helps no-one.

Even allowing the validity of such labels as "Boomer" and "Millennial", each group's general situation is so far outside the other's that they might as well be different worlds. Compound this with the Fundamental Attribution Error and odds aren't good for any rational discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> That sounds more like Gen-X, who really are the kids of Baby Boomers. Millennials are the _grandchildren_ of Baby Boomers.

Mandatory XKCD: [1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/973/](https://xkcd.com/973/)

</comment><comment><USER4> All this "let's create tension between generations" is really old and formulaic... "New = good, Old = bad." It comes off as just desperate for attention.

Personally... I liked Tucker Max a lot more when he was writing dribble for frat boys, at least those were stupidly entertaining.

* The Famous "Sushi Pants" Story « TuckerMax.com || [http://tuckermax.com/stories/the-famous-sushi-pants-story/](http://tuckermax.com/stories/the-famous-sushi-pants-story/)</comment>


C++ Cartesian Products - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/16s/cartesian_product

<comment><USER2> The approach of hardcoding a set of nested loops per each possible count of input sets is probably okay for most common use-cases, but wouldn't a more general algorithm be better? You'd either need to generate N nested loops via template metaprogramming, or else use an algorithm that didn't explicitly have the nested loops.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've thought of doing something more general (see my while loops), and I've looked for other bits of source code that use a general approach, but haven't found any in C++. Maybe I've just over-looked it

You're right, most people hard code the for loops they need. I call that the "intuitive approach". It works and it makes sense I think and performs OK. In fact, whenever I come up with new ways to do CPs I always compare their performance to the hard coded loops.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

I've been fascinated by CPs for some time. In particular, efficient ways in which to generate them. So I placed my source code on github that demonstrates a few ways I've done it in the past. My hope is that others can offer suggestions and insight into different (especially faster) approaches to generate them.</comment>


Wikileaks today published the source code HIVE – CIA malware control platforms - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/vault8/document/repo_hive/ <comment><USER2> looks like CIA used fake certificate to sign its malware and make it look like it was legitimate code from Moscow-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Labs. There is an important lesson in attribution for all

<comment><USER3> I remember the states blaming kaspersky for some intrusion earlier this year, looks like it was all a cover up.

<comment><USER4> Now watch, they got caught with hands in the cookie jar, and there's going to be a bunch of pitchforks out for wikileaks not catching all the other kids stealing cookies. It's gross and childish.

<comment><USER5> Clearly wikileaks is a Russian agent /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well.. what's the possibility that this "leak" and "source code" is something coming from russia/kaspersky to pretend it's a CIA cover up, in order to cover themselves up?

I mean... personally i really don't care. But for people like you and others who seem to care so much... is it a realistic possibility ?

<comment><USER7> Unlikely, core metrics will put a reasonable lie into this. we've had a decent number of samples. Unless CIA actually hired Russians just for this tool. Which would be extra ironic Source code carries a fingerprint of the team who worked on it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Goblin – Stream your content as your users solve computations (beta) - <AUTHOR> https://www.goblincompute.com <comment><USER2> Very cool idea! Very ambitious market, this could have an impact on the Internet, changing it from being ad-driven to compute-driven. Has this been tried before in some other project?</comment>