Life advice from Harvard Business School's Class of 1963 (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://hbs1963.com <comment><AUTHOR> I found this (among many others) particularly good, by a gentleman called Jose M. Faustino:

I switched fields twice in my academic career — I believed the entire experience was part of growing up. The lesson here for young people: Do not hesitate to switch interests, majors, or fields of concentration. Find your preference or your passion, then focus on it to your heart's content.

Success is a journey – not a race. Prepare well, retain good practices, and make a habit of effective strategies:

1\. Do not be content to be average. Mediocrity breeds boredom, poor opportunity, and an unsatisfactory lifestyle. Instead, decide to excel in everything you do, and be distinctive, if not unique, in your approach.

2\. Take well-analyzed risks, particularly when there is everything to gain and little to lose. Do not be afraid of rejection when you have competently and ethically tried to succeed.

3\. Be skilled in political strategy. Interpersonal, leadership, and motivational skills are all important for success, but few consider political strategy. In my mind, there is organizational politics in any group with more than three people.</comment>


Webmail and Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://blog.whiteout.io/2014/10/17/webmail-and-open-source/ <comment><USER2> I generally stay away from companies that advertise their jobs using titles like "JavaScript Junkie," "CSS Craftsman," "UI/UX Ubermensch," "Crypto Crack," and "DevOps Demigod."

Really?

<comment><USER3> If they use that language for their job listings I'd assume their company culture has a similar "bro" feel to it. It works both ways, you can take it as a warning that you won't like it and only "bro" people will apply :-)

Edit: Just to be clear, I also agree it's a bit over the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't look into this in detail, but I think the best system is on its way independently via [https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/)

<comment><USER5> Is it just me or is the mailpile demo very slow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI, [https://mail.whiteout.io/](https://mail.whiteout.io/) is returning a 503 error at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty weird that their homepage shows a screenshot of an iPad (only), while the Product page indicates that iOS isn't actually supported yet.

<comment><USER8> I have a feeling you're just disappointed you can't poke into the code yet? :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The cool thing is that the IMAP/SMTP logic is still implemented completely > in js on the client.

What's the point then? Why not just use Thunderbird/K9Mail/dunno what's the Apple equivalent?

</comment><comment><USER10> These same folks have also put a pretty nice set of open source mail libraries here: [http://emailjs.org/](http://emailjs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> For people interested in this - make sure to checkout out [https://github.com/al3x/sovereign](https://github.com/al3x/sovereign)

I find it extremely easy to use. And it should be quite secure.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Whiteout Mail is the first email solution with end-to-end encryption based on open standards"

\- Is this different than using something like Roundcube over HTTPS ?

<comment><USER13> Roundcube isn't shipped with PGP support. Their are some plugins though...

See: [http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Dev_Encryption](http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Dev_Encryption)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We're using their EmailJS libraries for Firefox OS, and they've worked quite well so far.

<comment> mike-cardwell Any chance for PGP support on Firefox OS's email client? That's the only thing stopping me moving from Android atm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a little disturbed by the thing about inbound e-mails being encrypted. That's a "won't read your mail" not a "can't read your mail" solution. If I'm counting on you to encrypt it before it reaches me, I'm basically counting on you not to read it anyway, so it's just an inconvenience to me to have to decrypt the PGP key. Such worthless solutions shouldn't be offered.

<comment><USER16> It is not worthless.

It might be misadvertised, but there is value in encrypting data at rest even if it's not encrypted in transit. The main benefit, of course, is forward secrecy.

If the government would like to read ed's email and he's using this technology, they can tap the wire or demand the mail host save an unencrypted copy. However, the government cannot read ed's past emails because they're encrypted.

Without this, anyone who compromises the server or takes out a warrant can get all past and future emails, not only all future emails.

If you want a better solution, simply have everyone who emails you gpg encrypt their messages. If your contacts aren't encrypting your messages there's little an email provider can do other than receive plaintext messages and, in rare cases like this one, encrypt them at rest.

<comment> mike-cardwell Also, if somebody manages to get access to your email client, they can't just issue email based password resets to get access to all of your other accounts, because they wont be able to read the confirmation emails without your PGP key.

<comment><USER15> I'm not really sure what attack you are envisioning here. If they have access to your e-mail client, they should be able to just lift your account credentials, allowing them to add a new PGP key to the key ring, then issue all the password resets and, if you want, change the PGP key back.

<comment> mike-cardwell Not sure why you think "knows username and password to access email" has to mean "has permission to change the PGP key assigned to the account"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Metal foam obliterates bullets - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-04-metal-foam-obliterates-bullets.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't have much in the way of interesting details, you need to go to the paper for that.

The armour is a composite sandwich, with boron carbide on the front face (a hard ceramic), followed by the metal foam, and either aluminium or kevlar on the rear face.

The boron carbide layer blunts the bullet and distributes the compressive stress over a large area of the metal foam. The metal foam is made of 2mm- diameter hollow steel spheres in a stainless steel matrix (created using powder metallurgy). The metal foam deforms plastically under the compressive stress, absorbing the kinetic energy of the projectile (i.e. the spheres get crushed). The backplate provides tensile strength and stops the foam from tearing apart due to residual tensile stresses.

<comment><USER3> Presumably very expensive and one-time usable. I guess that's true of most types of armour anyway.

<comment><USER4> Dragon Skin ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Skin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Skin)) claimed to withstand multiple hits without loss of performance, although there was some controversy around it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYaSRIbPWkM&nohtml5=False](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYaSRIbPWkM&nohtml5=False)

<comment><USER5> Given that it weighed ~50 pounds and failed in a variety of environmental conditions, it's no surprise it wasn't adopted.

[1] <[https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Dragon-Skin-armor-rejected- by-...](https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Dragon-Skin-armor-rejected-by-the-U-S- Army?share=1>)

<comment><USER6> Problem is, US Army procurement is sufficiently corrupt you can't trust testing of any physical item you hand to them, this goes back at least to the '50s when they caused the AR-10 to fail by replacing screws with wire springs....

That said, the design is obviously way too heavy without anyone even needing to weigh it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did modelling work for a group researching metal foams in my past academic life. Very interesting stuff with a lot of applications if the manufacturing processes can be nailed down.

Our funding was a mixture of European Space Agency and a car conglomerate: light armour for space vehicles and crumple zones / reinforcement respectively (less acceptable to research military applications in EU in my experience).

<comment><USER8> I'd love to chat more about these materials, could you message me? tom[at]printtopeer[dot]com cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would this be effective against micrometeoroids and orbital debris?

<comment><USER10> I asked Dr Rabiei that very question by email yesterday, and she is working on it:

"Let me start by saying that it is not a crazy idea and is actually what I have been working on recently. I even have a proposal in DARPA on testing the performance of the material at supersonic speeds. At this time, our data covers up to a speed close to 1Km/s as you mentioned. We have not tested the performance at higher speed and that is what I was hoping to conduct soon."

(I asked if it could be used for space debris at 8-15km/s, and apologized for asking a crazy question)

<comment><USER11> That would be outstanding if it could ... talk about the perfect material for shielding supercritical spacecraft components. Radiation resistance, projectile resistance, lighter than normal metal, temperature resistant... What's not to like?

<comment><USER12> You still need to make it fit, and this shielding may require more volume and more mass than a Whipple shield.

<comment><USER11> I was thinking of a small amount to protect supercritical components; navigation computers, comms, life support (if applicable); not necessarily the entire spacecraft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The part about shielding radiation sounds dubious to me. I thought shielding from radiation was mostly about mass. How is that foam supposed to shield better than cast metal of the same weight? Maybe the "foam" deteriorates less?

<comment><USER14> > I thought shielding from radiation was mostly about mass.

Not for all types of radiation. Neutron radiation for example is absorbed better by a hydrogen rich material like say polyethylene. But then during absorbtion it would emit gamma rays sometimes, so metal shielding is needed as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Last year, with support from the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear > Energy, Rabiei showed that CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, > gamma rays and neutron radiation.

Designers of spacecraft and lunar/Mars bases are likely pretty happy about this development.

<comment><USER16> Here's the doi for that paper: doi:10.1016/j.radphyschem.2015.07.003

Unfortunately I could only find the paywalled version here: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969806X15...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969806X15300104)

<comment><USER17> The subreddit /r/scholar or the Twitter hashtag #icanhazPDF can help out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Neat, though of course this raises the question: what would it take to engineer a foam-piercing bullet?

<comment><USER19> Two projectiles. First one explodes on impact and compromises the target. Second one penetrates the target.

<comment><USER20> This is exactly how a Soviet style RPG works. Ironically, it is also why the "bird cage armor" works so well against the RPG. Here is a picture of a Stryker combat vehicle from when I was in Mosul Iraq circa 2004ish:

[http://www.digitalprognosis.com/album/images/iraqpics/the- st...](http://www.digitalprognosis.com/album/images/iraqpics/the-stryker.jpg)

The slats are smaller than the height of the outer explosive and prematurely detonate it. As a result, the penetrator simply bounces off the armor harmlessly.

<comment><USER21> I thought the slats were to provide stand off distance for explosively formed projectiles.

If the explosively formed jet forms more than a few inches from the armor, it's way less effective.

<comment><USER20> Nope, we had them in Iraq before EFPs were really a thing (Thanks Iranain Quds Force for that). They were specifically for RPGs, which was one of the few things that could take out a Stryker without it. They even tried those Soviet parachute anti-tank grenades, but the Stryker is much faster than a tank and just moved away in time. That being said, the I'm sure this slat (birdcage as we called it) armor would help with that as well.

<comment><USER22> I thought an RPG _was_ an EFP? The round is just a shaped charge with a copper liner that penetrates the armour. So the slatted armour stops both RPGs and EFP-based IEDs.

<comment><USER6> The usual RPG with a HEAT shaped charge doesn't destroy by forging a penetrator that then potentially travels some distance to the target, it produces an intense, narrow jet that'll cut through a lot of material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfFcs25KmMc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfFcs25KmMc) more about the inventor.

</comment><comment><USER24> I found the post-impact part of the video interesting. The article says "turn an armor-piercing bullet into dust on impact". But in the video, it looks like it turns it into a lot of metal particles / shrapnel. As a body armor it looks like it could be increase the danger to those around a person getting hit.

<comment><USER25> In practice, you'd probably wrap the plate in fabric that would tend to catch the fragments, if nothing else because you need a plate carrier.

<comment><USER26> The effect is called "spalling" and current steel and ceramic armor plates are coated in a layer of rubber material to catch the fragments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are there any potential downsides to this stuff? It seems too good to be true.

<comment><USER28> It's going to be expensive, may not meaningfully improve survival in actual combat situations, and may not actually be successfully deployed.

How could this be extraordinarily effective at stopping bullets but not meaningfully improve survival? Fairly few American soldiers are killed by gunfire which directly strikes them; even fewer of these soldiers are killed by gunfire which directly strikes them _on their armor._ (This is partly because armor is fairly effective, partly because bullets are often non-fatal, and partly because medical care is very good.) Improved body armor may not meaningfully improve survival against other threats such as, for example, IEDs (once 60%+ of fatalities, down these days) or "the helicopter impacted terrain at a high rate of speed."

<comment><USER29> What about vehicle armor?

Something like this would be a great improvement over the very heavy homebrew plating that our guys in Iraq and Afghanistan were forced to improvise on their Humvees? I.e. before MRAP type vehicles made it into the field.

Lighter and better armor isn't just for people, it's also for vehicles.

<comment><USER30> It's actually very similar in a lot of ways to chobham armor, which is layers of ceramic and high strength metal in a composite structure. This seems to work similarly but with a more consistent mixture of both materials throughout a material, which might make it easier to manufacture and to work with, and possibly lighter as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This reminds me of an old Mythbusters experiment where they showed that covering a wall in the same stuff people put in the bottom of their trucks can protect the wall from explosions.

</comment><comment><USER32> Looking at the ammo channel for I think the same ammo the results don't seem that remarkable. The foam article quotes "less than an inch", the ammo test article has about 1 inch for mild steel and 0.319 inches for AR500 plate

[http://www.ammochannel.com/30-06-30-cal-m2-ap-armor- piercing...](http://www.ammochannel.com/30-06-30-cal-m2-ap-armor-piercing/)

</comment><comment><USER33> What if you shoot twice at the same spot?

<comment><USER34> If you can reliably hit a target that small, you could just shoot the other fellow in the eye and not worry about armor.

<comment><USER35> No. You're confusing _consistency_ with _accuracy_.

To hit someone in the eye, you've got to aim at their eye and land a round there. That is, _accuracy_ at hitting a _pre-specified_ target.

To hit armour in the same location twice, you need either two (or more rounds) delivered _consistently_ on _whatever happens to be where the first round lands_. It's a case where being a Texas Sharpshooter actually works (painting bullseyes around the bullet holes you just shot into a barn).

A compound impactor with a leading and secondary round might work, for example. Difficult to package into a small-arms round, but possible. Keeping everything on the same impact point would be the crucial element.

<comment><USER34> At that point, wouldn't it be easier and just as effective to use a single, larger round? .50-cal rifles already exist; no need to invent a big bullet that turns into two smaller bullets.

(Unless you mean something that starts out the same size as the one in the video, in which case I can't imagine that two halves of a .30-06 would penetrate any better than one whole .30-06.)

<comment><USER35> There's often an advantage do a dual-mode strike. That's how many existing armour-piercing weapons operate. E.g., tungsten-alloy armor piercing rounds:

[http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/armor-piercing.htm](http://www.tungsten- alloy.com/armor-piercing.htm)

Another alternative, depleted uranium, relies on the exceptionally dense, and self-sharpening DU penetrator to defeat armour. Rather effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "showed that CMFs are very effective at shielding... gamma rays..."

Really? That would be quite an achievement.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sweet - when can I buy level IV plates made out of this stuff?

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I read about it as a child. On earth, molten metals readily lose gas by the force of gravity, but in space, you can easily make metal foams that will be very strong and light. Sounds like a good material for spacecrafts.

Also, how about glass foam? I imagine you can blow large and cheap hulls from foamed molten glass.

<comment><USER38> bubbling asteroids :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> And a big ass gun /

<comment><USER40> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11464777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11464777) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


You won't find FSF on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/facebook Well, you might, but they say it isn't them. <comment><USER2> This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become?

> so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, > Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users > of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect > with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold > mine for government surveillance and advertisers.

I would think just about any popular web site would be a gold mine for such information. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Doesn't this sentence hold true if we replace Facebook with Google? This seems like a tinfoil/scare everyone into believing Facebook is evil and out to get you.

> and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In > some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging > service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because > those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss.

Comeon, examples/proof please. Is Facebook blocking URLs to competition or child porn sites? There is a pretty big difference here.

I would think that the FSF should be on Facebook, trying to spread their message, gaining support, and discovering new users. They have an interesting problem, a lot of support, and some very big challenges ahead of them... and yet they spend time publishing articles like this and making fancy dislike buttons. FSF you should be ashamed.

<comment><USER3> > Is this what FSF has become?

What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like.

They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods.

In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator.

Imagine:

Mom: How come I'm not receiving updates from your aunt anymore?

You: Well, you have to wait for $INSERT_TECHNICAL_TERM to propagate or something.

Mom: Do I have to enter her hash-thing again?

or worse:

Mom: I'm getting a lot of spam

You: You have to install morton anti-spam social-edition

Mom: It won't install.

You: _sigh_ here I come.

It's like email, but much worse because it has way more features, and more ways for things to go wrong.

Plus, I think Mark Zuckerberg actually donated money to the Diaspora project.

<comment><USER4> Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser, what do yours use?

Is your point that only companies worth $50bn can build usable web apps, or that anyone that doesn't want to sell your data can't do UX?

<comment><USER5> The Facebook crowd is 500m people. The number who even know what BitTorrent is compared to that is a rounding error.

<comment><USER4> [http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay- smashes-12000000-bitt...](http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay- smashes-12000000-bittorrent-users-080424/)

That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the hundreds of millions of users range, possibly as high as 300M or more.

I'm not a crazy bittorrent fanboy, in fact I'm quite the opposite, but I think it's clear that the number of users of a decentralized system can far exceed any "rounding errors" of facebook's numbers.

<comment><USER6> By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized?

If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the technology being used under the hood.

<comment><USER4> The pirate bay hasn't actually run a tracker for a year now or so. BT uses a system called DHT (and maybe something else) that lets the peers handle the tracking themselves. The peers do need to boot strap off of something, but it's very minimal afaik.

Even when they did use a tracker it's probably more reasonable to think of it as a directory server more like LDAP or such. At their base even classic decentralized protocols like SMTP rely on DNS as a directory, IP on routing tables etc.

<comment><USER7> While DHT is indeed decentralized, a central tracker is still preferred since it can quickly give an authoritative list of peers (rather than a probabilistic one).

Private sites tend to disable DHT anyways, since it's much harder to detect cheating without central trackers.

The important thing is that trackers are easily decentralized, since they're a per-torrent URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >"He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers."

It would be nice for more people to realize this. Really, they're lining up like sheep for government monitoring, and Zuckerberg and Co. are happy to comply. FB seems thrilled with the prospect of being the eyes and ears of Big Brother, actually.

<comment><USER9> As we've learned from the whole HBGary Federal thing, there is plenty of money to be made in doing the government's dirty work.

<comment><USER10> Except they didn't make any money, which is the sad irony of the whole situation. Yes, there are likely many others out there willing to do the work, but the fact that H&W, a DoJ-recommended firm, turned to HBGary et al, who didn't have any real experience doing what they said they could, suggests that this isn't something the gov't is doing regularly...yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hasn't this been discussed before? The Person of the Year award is supposed to be given to the most influential person of the year, not the nicest or the most ethical one. Zuckerberg did become a widely recognizable person and you can't say he has not become influential too. Joseph Stalin got the award twice, 'nuff said.

Disclaimer: I'm not comparing, just pointing out that the FSF's reaction is kind of attacking the straw man here.

<comment><USER12> I'm making a guess that FSF (and EFF) would probably have preferred the most influential person to win, namely Julian Assange.

<comment><USER13> You gotta wonder though, how many people are touched each day by the work of Zuckerberg versus the work of Assange.

<comment><USER14> If directly touching people's lives was any sort of criteria then I think Jonathan Ive or Steve Jobs ought to be a better candidate. Or Larry/Sergey.

<comment><USER13> I do believe Facebook has a tad bit more users than Apple products. I also get then feeling, just walking around the area, that people spend more time on Facebook than Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Facebook appears to have had a tremendous effect on countries like Tunisia and Egypt. The alternatives that FSF lists may not have been as effective because of the technical difficulty for a large number of people to set up such a service.

<comment><USER16> Revolutions've happened before Facebook. There was some anecdotal evidence that more people went on the streets of Egypt when Internet got shut down and they couldn't anymore just sit in front of the computer and read updates.

<comment><USER17> Thank you!! Because revolutions didn't happen until facebook/twitter were invented. They might have helped, but this was brewing for ummm 30 years or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I personally think advertisers knowing more about preferences is better than if they know less.

Every day we are exposed to crapload of advertisement that are in no way related to me and what those ads do is only annoy me. But there is nothing I can do, I cant turn off all the ads on Time Square, or pay the TV network to turn off all of the ads on my favorite tv channels, same for radio (thanks to adblock I manage to get rid of large portion of ads on the web).

If advertisers knew that I am a male ( a no secret, nothing I would hide) it would escape me from being exposed to all of the annoying ads of pads, make up, and other women centric products. that only would be a huge relief. If advertisers knew I am straight ads for gay social networks would not come up on facebook for me. I can state at least 10 more points.

The bottom line is, as long as a certain lines are not crossed (like diseases, home address, etc.) letting advertisers know more about us could be good.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site"

I thought you had to have a facebook account to "like" something, either on facebook itself or sites with the FB "like" link. Anyone know otherwise?

edit: Just logged out of FB, opened a random Time article ([http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2049569,00.htm...](http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2049569,00.html)) and clicked "like" - and was asked to login to FB. Hmm

<comment><USER20> The "Like" button infrastructure (images, JavaScript) is loaded from Facebook's servers via a cross-domain request. Those servers can theoretically use cookies or IP addresses in conjunction with referrers to do tracking even without clicking Like, for both authenticated and unauthenticated users.

Some content is loaded off of their CDN, which I highly doubt is doing any tracking. The non-CDN pings are quite possibly not doing tracking, but it would be possible for Facebook to enable some tracking with most people never noticing.

<comment><USER21> "I highly doubt is doing any tracking."

On what evidence do you have this doubt?

facebook has a long history (the entirety of their existence) of being extremely greedy about personal data. Whenever outsiders have had the chance to see inside their thought process on collecting data, it has always been clear they'll collect anything and everything they can. What they're doing with it might not be nefarious; but they love personal data like no company ever before, and go to great lengths to own it.

I'd be surprised if they _aren't_ tracking every request that passes through their servers and gathering usage patterns of everyone on the Internet, regardless of whether someone is logged into facebook or not, and regardless of whether the request originated on a facebook property. That's just the kind of thing facebook does, as far as I can tell. If they aren't doing it already, it's just a matter of time.

<comment><USER20> I'm speculating that the CDN servers are running stripped-down, static-file- only HTTP servers that don't integrate with a more complex user-identification and logging infrastructure to help with throughput.

I could be completely wrong.

<comment><USER21> I agree that they probably aren't doing complex user-identification...probably no cookies or JavaScript or anything like that happening on their CDN.

But, IP alone would be enough to follow the trail of most people (I know all the caveats about IP!=individual, but that data is still far from worthless), and collecting IP trails would be absolutely trivial and practically free from a performance perspective. The difference in a high performance webserver environment with logging vs. without logging is less than one percent...probably much less.

With a bit of clever data juggling, and logging of user agents and other information about the client, compare that to past visits from the same IP on properties where facebook has more data (from cookies and logged in activity), and identify users by name with pretty good accuracy.

In short: Performance is not a factor for logging, and facebook wouldn't need a large amount of additional cooperation from the client, like cookies or JavaScript bugs, to track users who aren't logged in. They just need to combine the already available log data in useful ways. A big part of the reason all these fancy distributed key/value stores and BigTable imitators exist (and why facebook has developed their own in-house) is for processing exactly this kind of data.

I'm extremely confident that facebook logs everything, though I have no idea what sorts of things they do with the resulting data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Don't look now but Adsense and every other ad network can track your movements online too! In keeping with their Facebook stance, FSF should block the GoogleBot and get off of Google too.

<comment><USER23> Adsense and Indexing are separate services. One tracks you, the other tracks published sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Small quibble, they're using the wrong url for Appleseed. It's actually:

<http://opensource.appleseedproject.org>

<comment><USER25> At one level, it's the thought that counts -- great to see Appleseed mentioned.

At another level, it's disappointing they didn't take the time to get things right

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's alright, I wasn't planning on friending the FSF anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that people have the right to their views and their right to licence things and act accordingly, but the zealotry in the FSF is just too much for me to handle.

</comment><comment><USER27> I believe that with anything the extent that Facebook can do for good equals the extent that it can do for bad. So yes, they have a lot of information that could be used for good, bad, or (more likely) some of both. I certainly don't recall anyone FORCING anyone to click a "like" button nor have a Facebook account. If you are worried about this sort of thing then don't do it. I don't understand why there are so many people attempting to create a rebellion against a service that no one forced them to be a part of.

[1] Clarification

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Software- Foundation/11227...](http://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Software- Foundation/112270732121738)

<comment> mkr-hn That's not official according to the article.

<comment><USER28> Does that matter much? The Facebook Likernet is coming, and the FSF will be represented on it, regardless of its preferences.

Also, an FSF fan club _without_ the most doctrinaire FSFers (who refuse to use Facebook) is an interesting syncretic phenomenon in itself, for reasons that both overlap and diverge from the reasons the FSF itself is interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Until there's a Free Utilities Foundation, or even a Free Infrastructure Foundation, there won't be a 'free' facebook.

</comment><comment><USER30> The public at large doesn't care and more to the point and the public at large usually aren't affected by loss of privacy - it doesn't inconvenience them enough to bother them.

Diaspora and other such projects are a complete joke. People aren't going to run their own server. Make it easy, make it fast and get their friends to use it, that's it. Nothing else matters.

<comment><USER24> _People aren't going to run their own server._

Why do people keep repeating this fallacy? People won't have to. None of these projects are focused on single-user P2P approach. For all of 30 seconds, Diaspora insinuated that, but that was before they had actually written any code.

If you feel these projects (including mine) is a joke, I'd love to hear feedback why, but please don't repeat falsehoods about how the software is meant to be used.

<comment><USER30> Simplicity mostly. People want to be abstracted away from the nitty gritty details. Open ID failed because you couldn't explain it to your grandmother. But you can explain, "oh yeah, you can just click this button and login with your facebook account" Maybe this is just marketing.

If individuals don't run their own server and hold control of their own data, then who does? Whoever is running the node.

I know as nerds, we like to get our geek boners over cool projects that aren't mainstream, and fight the man and all, but people on the street could give a crap less. It means that these are stillborn ideas. Does this mean you should stop fighting the good fight? No, but I wouldn't hold my breath for critical mass.

<comment><USER24> _people on the street could give a crap less. It means that these are stillborn ideas._

People don't need to know what an apache, django or drupal is in order to use a website based on it. It's a fallacy to think that the user has to be aware of what the underlying software is in order for that software to catch on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> FSF doesn't like a service that doesn't operate exactly how the FSF thinks they should. Shocking.

I don't take anything they or their pseudo-communist leader say seriously anymore. Back when Stallman started attacking OpenBSD because of their ports tree I knew he had finally lost it.

<comment><USER32> Why do you use words like communism when you don't know what they mean?

<comment><USER31> because it gives my rant a nice tinge of political edginess.

I view the FSF as software socialists, as in they have a utopian view of how things should be and everyone should buy in and give all of their stuff to everyone else for the good of the community. I also view socialism as an impossible ideal to achieve. In my opinion, all attempts at socialism have ended in communism, where the ruling class tells the people they have socialism but in reality the people at the top of the chain don't buy into it and live much better lives.

Finally, I used the prefix "pseudo" because obviously we're talking about software and not the rise and fall of empires (although Facebook is sort of a digital empire) so I didn't want to attach a full-on label of "communism" to it.

edit: I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine. I bitched about the FSF and I feel better so my mission was accomplished.

Yes, vote me down further! PUNISH ME FOR USING WORDS YOU DO NOT LIKE.

<comment><USER24> _I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine._

Hello! :)

Socialism, Communism, et all are very broad terms. It would behoove any points you make to not use them pejoratively, because they are simply too broad to use in the way you're using them. Especially utopianism, which no more describes socialists than it describes many capitalists.

You could make an argument that the FSF follows the ideals of a very soft libertarian socialism, but that's a stretch.

The FSF is very single-issue, they don't talk about social equality, they don't even have a critique of capitalism and wages. If they're communists, they're particularly undeveloped ones.

<comment><USER31> Your logic is really taking the air out of my rant. This is more entertaining than doing actual work though so that's why I'm still going with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


There are more than 600k millennial millionaires in the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/16/us-has-more-than-600000-millennial-millionaires-according-to-report.html <comment><USER2> _On average, millennial millionaires own three homes, slightly higher than the 2.4 properties the average older millionaire possesses. They also have larger real estate portfolios than non-millennials, $1.4 million compared to $919,000._

3 homes? Really? I assume some of those are investment properties.

If housing prices take a down turn, it's going to hurt these folks bad.</comment>


Beta release of PHP 7.2 in the Google App Engine standard environment - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/php7/ <comment><USER2> This is exciting because the second generation standard environment allows Google App Engine to provide a more "idiomatic" experience.

Using gVisor, instead of NaCL, as the sandboxing technology, shipping new runtimes becomes a much more tractable task with less differences from the "plain" runtime. In fact, gVisor allows us to use the runtime unmodified.

This in turn, decreases the "lock-in". There are still decisions we need to make depending on the runtime, e.g. which package manager to use if there isn't a community default.

Hopefully, the narrative for "Serverless" moves beyond lambda and functions. Sometimes (!) we want apps, databases, caches and more to be "Serverless" :-)

Disclaimer: I work at Google, on the App Engine Runtimes team. I helped ship this

<comment><USER3> Am I correct in understanding the new environment is built on essentially a ptrace sandbox? How does that impact performance? Is it still single threaded? If you're moved beyond single threads, how does the it cope with security problems endemic to userland sandboxing? (TOCTTOU issues as the 'hypervisor' verifies arguments, etc)

Are you willing to compare your approach to for example Lambda's approach, where the user gets an actual real Linux VM. with zero differences (Work that, incidentally was in part contributed to Linux by Google!), as opposed to a Linux emulator?

<comment><USER4> gVisor can use KVM for isolation instead of ptrace, and I would guess that Google is using it.

<comment><USER2> Correct. We do not use ptrace in production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The state of App Engine environments seems super confusing, but I _think_ this uses the "second generation standard environment" like the Python 3.7 and Node 8 beta environments, which means that unlike App Engine of Yore, you have access to the full package ecosystem and full network access. I'm not actually 100% sure on this because it's not listed on the runtime page ([https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/appengine-g...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/appengine- generation)), but the docs show that you can use composer, unlike the PHP 5.5 runtime.

The documentation for all these second generation runtimes is shockingly bad. I consider Google to be _generally_ pretty good at documentation, but this is one of those cases where their propensity for confusing naming and classification of their products makes it hard as hell to figure out what is going on. It doesn't help that the top-level "product overview" page is useless marketing junk (microservices! serverless!) instead of a practical description, which is buried several links deep.

Having never used App Engine but occasionally wandering into its docs when a new product gets announced like this, am I right in assuming that App Engine's "second generation standard environment" is more or less equivalent to the feature set you'd get from Heroku? The flexible environment also continues to confuse me - it talks about being a managed Docker container, but it doesn't seem like you actually get access to anything like a Dockerfile and that's more of an implementation detail on their end.

<comment><USER6> For the moment, unfortunately it appears this second generation also lacks some of the great parts of the older platform. For example, with the shiny new GAE Standard Node Beta, you can't declaratively put your app behind authentication, you can't access the (extraordinarily useful) work queue feature from the older GAE, and probably more I have forgotten about for the moment.

I hope that stuff is missing just temporarily - there is a lot of genius in the original GAE.

<comment><USER7> genius… or vendor lock-in?

<comment><USER8> Member of the App Engine team here. In the context of the second-generation runtimes, this is one of the big reasons we're pushing people to use standard libraries and public cloud services rather than App Engine specific services accessed through syscall magic that doesn't work elsewhere. We want you to be able to run your app locally or on a non-Google server (or on Flex, GCE, GKE, etc).

<comment><USER9> You should really consider either very detailed porting guides or compatibility libraries, at least from what I hear those required changes will keep some projects on first-gen otherwise (and thus Python 2, and thus requests to dependencies to please keep Python 2 supported and ...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those not familiar with benefits, it's mainly about scaling from zero to heavy traffic fast. If for example, you are running CRM behind call center with crazy traffic during TV ads, and no traffic on weekend your infrastructure can scale from 0 to multiple instances instantly.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is on the heels of the Python 3.7 AppEngine release from 2 weeks ago[0]. gVisor[1] (user-space kernel) seems to be ready for prime time, which is allowing rolling out new AppEngine runtimes waaay faster.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717045)

[1] [https://github.com/google/gvisor](https://github.com/google/gvisor)

</comment><comment><USER11> What explains the vast price difference between App Engine standard and flexible environment? In the standard environment, $0.05/hr gives me a 128MB, 600MHz container. Flexible environment is priced at GCE pricing, giving me 3.75GB and 1 vCPU for the same price, before even applying committed use discounts. It seems hard to justify using the standard environment, even if scaling up/down is faster.

<comment> cloud-is-future That is a very good question.

Another thing to note is that GAE standard api does not work in Flex or GCE (no portable api for datastore, memcache, runtime apis for versions and modules, etc.) So basically any code that you write in standard gae is locked in.

Another interesting note is that standard gae is covered in free tier but flex is not covered in free tier.

It seems like google is trying to lock you in with standard gae and then make you pay order of magnitude more for the infrastructure once your service gets some traction.

<comment><USER12> Gen1 Standard used proprietary GAE APIs that locked you in.

Gen2 Standard (PHP7, Node8, Java8, Python3, etc) uses the standard GCP APIs that you can call from anywhere, including other clouds. It should be relatively straightforward to move from Gen2 Standard to Flex and vice versa.

(I work for GCP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Excuse my complete and total ignorance here - but is this essentially a 'quick deploy' php instance? if so, what might a none-Google alternative be?

I've only ever 'rolled my own', on small-scale virtual or shared servers, but I've got an upcoming project I could do with trying to install on something completely seperate - something like this might fit the bill.

Or not!

Thanks.

<comment><USER14> AppEngine is a "Platform as a Service" although they are re-phrasing it as "serverless" these days. It has benefits like you dont have to worry about the "roll your own" side of things - you just deploy your code and it runs (Google takes care of the servers - patches, security etc).

The "killer" feature of AppEngine is the scalability - i.e. your small-scale virtual or shared servers are ok for small usage, but what happens when you have more traffic than that VPS can handle? Perhaps call the hosting provider and ask for more CPU/Mem/Bandwidth, or maybe move to a new bigger server elsewhere. But that takes time, and what if it was just a spike and now your traffic is back to normal but you've got a beast of a server running the site. You could be wasting money even with the small VPS sitting idle for most of the day if you have very infrequent traffic.

With AppEngine it just scales automatically to handle the load, from zero QPS to many thousands QPS and back down to zero again without any effort from the developer apart from the initial config (... of course you can limit that scaling too if you want to control cost).

There are also a bunch of other nice-to-have features around traffic splitting (i.e. A/B testing), some nice task-handling tools (e.g. cron-style stuff, task queues), centralised logging, and the easy plug-ins to the other Google Cloud stuff.

Deployments themselves are not especially "quick" and you have to do a few things "the appengine way", but the trade-off is you have nothing to manage on the server _at all_.

I've used AppEngine a lot over the past few years (mainly Java and Go) and its pretty decent I've found, although I do use a lot of the other Google Cloud services (e.g. their database stuff) so it makes sense. App Engine has been pretty rock solid in my experience.

<comment><USER15> I'll add that the "free tier" makes it a great place to host hobby apps that get little traffic without paying a monthly fee. They are very stable; I've only had to upgrade every five years or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was wondering what people generally think on using AppEngine when compared to rolling the API gateway+Lambda for public side projects. Somehow there seems to be much more movement on Lambda front, but I can't seem to find a lot of opinions from people running their apps in app engine, which I am quite sure there are more than Lambda? Or am I mistaken? The standard environment seems to be quite feature rich, but with a lot of hidden limitations for a newcomer, but at the same time the developer story for Lambda is not that great at all.

<comment><USER17> Not sure why you compare GAE to lambda?

<comment><USER16> Well lambda+API gateway is somehow what AWS is pushing in the serverless, scalable and pay per use app model, so for me it seems quite logical to compare. Cloud functions can't really compete feature set and integration wise in my opinion.

<comment><USER18> AWS's offering is more mature, but has a concomitantly steep learning curve; using something like serverless[1] can reduce the exposure to that, but there's a lot of stuff to learn to get things working nicely with AWS.

[1] [https://serverless.com/](https://serverless.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now if they only would support Perl...

<comment><USER20> 6

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> now .net core in standard environment!

</comment><comment><USER22> I feel slightly queasy :-)

<comment><USER23> You should see a doctor if it doesn't go away :-)</comment></comment>


Amazon's AWS Strategy Becomes Clearer Every Day - <AUTHOR> http://abovethecrowd.com/2009/06/08/amazons-aws-strategy-becomes-clearer-every-day/

<comment><USER2> Strategy: good customer support, huge scale, low margins.

Good support wins loyalty, helps debugging the system to eliminate systemic problems, and helps against Google (which is really bad at customer service). Huge scale drives down the cost and allows reusing knowledge from user to user, thus each user suffers less while Amazon learns. Low margins keep high- margin competitors away (Microsoft, IBM) and make users happy.

<comment><USER3> Low margins making this a good fit for Amazon was really a light bulb going off for me. Microsoft, IBM, and even Google hate low margins, but it is inherent to Amazon's other businesses and built into their DNA. Microsoft, specifically, knows that this space is important, but they can't get their heart into it because they know the low margins will eventually have an impact on their other high margin businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do think there's a _ton_ of room for someone to destroy AWS. Amazon is pretty good. I'm sure they can beat Google and Microsoft. But they're not nearly as fast or smart as they could be with AWS.

I think a small team of sysadmins and programmers could get together with $40MM and wipe the floor with them.

<comment><USER5> I sincerely doubt that this is true, for a few reasons:

1\. Amazon can afford to lose money on AWS for years, while a new company with just $40MM can't.

2\. Many of the early adopters using AWS are "rogue developers" within large organizations. A key defense for a strategy like that if you get caught would be that you went with one of the largest, most reliable companies in the industry, as opposed to a small, unproven startup.

3\. A small team of very smart, very motivated developers and sysadmins with $40MM would be better off going after a high-margin business where they don't have to compete with three or four of the biggest and most powerful technology companies in the world.

Not saying that there's not room for improvement, or that a startup in this space couldn't do well, but I highly doubt they'd "wipe the floor" with Amazon.

<comment><USER4> 1\. $40MM is probably less than Amazon invested initially in AWS. That's enough to buy hardware/bandwidth/datacenter space in quantity for significant savings. It's also enough to afford to lose some percentage of money every year for a while. Definitely enough to prove to investors that you're on to something. This is the strategy Amazon used themselves. Also, I truly doubt Amazon designed or operates their datacenters as cheaply as is possible (whether they think so or not). IT infrastructure is probably a relatively small cost for their retail business. They're also surely quite bloated by legacy choices.

2\. Fair enough. They certainly have a great brand name, that helps them. They're going to have an easier time getting rogue developers. That still leaves startups and other small businesses that only care about what's actually better for them. I think it's safer to bet on what's _actually_ better winning than what has a good brand name, otherwise Google would be winning already with App Engine.

3\. I agree it'd be easier to play it safe by going after some high margin niche. That doesn't mean it's "better" though. Some people want to do really big things.

I think a great team with great financial backers could absolutely wipe the floor with Amazon. Amazon only looks untouchable because they haven't faced a really serious contender yet.

<comment><USER6> Let's think this through.

1\. If IT infrastructure was a relatively small cost for their retail business, why on earth would Amazon have built a core competency building infrastructure and services that operate at a scale only a handful of other companies match? A lot of AWS is evolved from internal services that supported their retail business.

2\. Given the above, what possible reason do you have for thinking Amazon doesn't strive for efficiency in its datacenters? They spent ~$80M on servers in 2008, and it seems very likely that they spent at least that much this year, so most of their equipment is fairly new. Also, given that power & cooling costs are a significant portion of both capital and operating costs in a data center, the economics for aggressively retiring older equipment is quite strong.

3\. Bloated legacy choices: See the above two points. I think the fact that the dominant infrastructure as a service vendor grew out of a f'ing bookstore should tell you that Amazon is not a company that gives bloat and inefficiency a free pass. Furthermore, given the growth they've seen in the last few years, they've had both the opportunity and probably, the necessity, to revisit earlier choices. And by the way, they hired a VP earlier this year who clearly lives & breathes data-center efficiency.

4\. Don't underestimate the advantages of scale in this business. Say saving 10% in costs is worth $50K to your startup. Consider how many dollars shaving just 1% in costs is going to be worth to Amazon. It could easily be enough to hire an engineer for a year. For a startup, it might be enough to buy lunch for the company, once a month.

It going to play out in other ways too. Amazon is surely transferring enough data that they can negotiate free peering, something a little startup is going to have a harder time doing. And having a broader customer base likely gives them an advantage in higher average utilization while still keeping a reasonable safety margin.

5\. You act as if the Amazon name offers nothing to small business and startups. The relative certainty that Amazon is going to be around tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year is not some foolish superstition. How big is their Amazon bill going to be that it is worth risking data-loss or multiple days of downtime because they were dependent on a startup that ran out of funding?

In the end though,its really not clear to me how you think a startup is going to "absolutely wipe the floor" with Amazon. What's actually going to be better? Clearly, there is room for improvement, but you're talking about taking on the market leader in a growing, and all you talk about is efficiency.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How in the world is $TSLA worth more than $TM? - <AUTHOR> Tesla is now worth more than Toyota, and yet has pretty much lost money every quarter. Toyota, on the other hand, has had billions in profit every quarter for years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=net-income&axis=single&comp=TM:TSLA
Is there a reasonable explanation for this, or is it a complete bubble? <comment><USER2> Stock prices do not reflect future earnings or company fundamentals, despite popular belief. The price of tradable assets with zero possible earnings demonstrate this.

Stock price is purely a function of supply and demand, and the demand does not have to be based on any sort of rational expectation of earnings. Price psychology is the biggest factor in my experience. People often buy for no reason other than the price moving up, which creates a cycle of upward price pressure which continues until enough decide to sell to take a profit, or there are no more buyers. This usually has little to do with company fundamentals like earnings. Day trading is pretty much based entirely on this logic, looking only at price and volume.

The lack of past profit actually fuels a higher price for Tesla, because it allows for imagining bigger profits in the future. A company that has a history of profits leaves little to the imagination. The story matters more than reality.

At the macro level, yield had dried up everywhere but stocks, combined with the Fed giving money to prop traders and signaling that they will buy junk assets and attempt to stop the market from crashing through any means possible. The market has become saturated with day traders and swing traders (retail and institutional) looking for volatility and price movement more than earnings or fundamentals, and newer stocks like Tesla attract them over established stocks like Toyota.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you believe in all of the following,

Model Y, Semi, Truck and Model 3 will being in 5x the revenue, RoboTaxi, Lv5 AV coming in anytime, Tesla has the largest Battery Manufacturing Plant on the Planet, Tesla has 5 years lead in Battery Production, SolarCity taking over Solar Energy production, Elon Musk.....

But Yes... I still dont understand how on earth is it worth $200B.

<comment><USER4> Agree, but would extend: company "value" as in market cap is also affected by other things, notably debt; given two identical companies but one with more debt, it will have lower market cap.

There is a bit on this here: [https://mondaynote.com/tesla-and-apple- valuation-questions-c...](https://mondaynote.com/tesla-and-apple-valuation- questions-cdb95ffcf0a1) apparently for Ford it's pension liabilities are more than 2x it's market cap; so if you were to exclude them, the company is worth 3x more. Tesla, as a young company (and born in a different era) doesn't have such liabilities. Etc etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because stock prices reflect future earnings, not past earnings.

Basically, people buying TSLA stock believe future sales will be larger than Toyota.

<comment><USER6> Many of them believe that Tesla stock will somehow get them a piece of spacex. Many more are just following the price.

<comment><USER3> I have seen that floating around. Is there any reason why this is being so? They are just two different companies belong mostly to the same person.

Why would owning Tesla gets your SpaceX?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't, at all. I've heard suggestions that great news coming out of SpaceX does impact Tesla, but not the other way around. Plus, SpaceX isn't a public company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there even a meaning to the stock market anymore? Share prices are running on a greater fool theory, aided by long term capital gains and the "reinvest in growth" charade, which will inevitably peak out. Everyone's just waiting to time the peak.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems insane to me. For some time its been my opinion that "the markets" weren't connected to any reality I can see. From my hilltop in the woods I don't see far; so that doens't necessarily signify much.

From my limited perspective it sure looks like there's so much play money seeking return that "brand recognition" is the only real reason to choose between one offering and another.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder how many individuals received one of the recent stimulus checks and parked it right into Tesla stock.

<comment><USER9> Probably all of them followers of Dave Portnoy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what the perception of Tesla will be in a few years when people start wanting to upgrade / sell these cars. I can't imagine the resale being comparable to a Toyota. There is certainly a reason Toyota is the worlds most popular auto manufacturer, and it is very different from the reasoning people use to justify Tesla bullishness.

<comment><USER11> Yeah true... there will be a glut of used cars. Therefore more people can afford to get a used one, which will lower the brand premium they've been enjoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Company "worth" is calculated as: last sale price * number of shares outstanding

stock is held by founders and fans ==> few sellers

more buyers than sellers ==> stock price goes up ==> inflates worth

Company worth is an imperfect metric at best and non-sensical at worst.

<comment><USER13> I've heard this argument many times, but consider that _everyone_ holding a share has the option to sell at the market (last sale price) and are choosing not to. That seems like a pretty fair way of calculating worth.

<comment><USER12> Good point.

Stockholders are not _free_ to sell, technically or for practical purposes. Many stockholders are under restrictions to hold like employees, founders, index funds etc. Most non-index institutional holders have to hold TSLA if they want exposure to Automotive, EV, Battery industries. There is simply no option.

On non-technical restrictions, what do you think will happen to TSLA,FB or AMZN stock if Musk, Zuck or Bezos started dumping their holdings respectively. The stock holds up precisely because the the founder is holding it. Necessary but not sufficient.

Finally not everyone who wants to sell can avail the last price. Every bid taker (seller) causes a price impact. This has been explored extensively by academics in Market impact models and Optimal execution of block trades. See [1] and [2]. This is the financial econometric model of "a rush for the exits will cause a stock to crater".

Last price is imperfect but not useless. Depends on how much signal vs. noise you attribute to the sale price in the value discovery process.

[1] [http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~jdf/papers/mastercurve.pdf](http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~jdf/papers/mastercurve.pdf)

[2] [https://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/chriss/optliq_f.pdf](https://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/chriss/optliq_f.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not.

Enterprise value of Toyota: $318B

Enterprise value of Tesla: $205B

<comment><USER15> According to the NYSE, the market cap of $TM is $171.88B and $TSLA is $205.88B.

<comment><USER14> That's the point. Market cap is only a portion of enterprise value.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/enterprisevalue.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/enterprisevalue.asp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It isn't worth that much. It is however successful at making its stock price go up. These are not the same thing. If one share trades hands at $0.01 above the market then the market cap is outstanding shares * new price. Tesla has something like 185 million outstanding shares. That means a 1 cent change in price nets the market cap of the company 1.85 million. $0.01 = $1.8 million. Does that seem like a reality based means of setting the value of anything? It's about human psychology in the setting of a game at that moment. I would not take a linear extrapolation of that as a meaningful metric of the value of a company.

You can go down rabbit holes of apparent market manipulation, seeming fraudulent financial statements, an unquestioning media, toothless and out to lunch regulators, bubble inducing liquidity pushed by central banks but that stuff doesn't matter until it does. See Wirecard, Enron, Et al.

</comment><comment><USER17> Do you think the future is cars running on fossil fuels, or electric cars?

<comment><USER9> That's not the question though. Even if you believe EVs are the future, you still have to convince people that Toyota can't make them.

<comment><USER17> Why would you have to convince anyone? If you believe Tesla is better positioned for the future than Toyota, buy Tesla stock and not Toyota stock.

<comment><USER9> Because valuations should be debated? How else is anyone going to come to a good judgement?

<comment> doopy-loopy2 what's your time horizon?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Speculation, incredible liquidity in the system, etc.

That would be my guess.

</comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps because Tesla is less bloated? Buying shares in an old big corporation feels like hiring the Vogon bureaucrats while investing in Tesla and SpaceX seems like paying young smart people for getting up-to-date things done.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Perhaps because Tesla is less bloated?

Is that simply a perception you think many might investors have? Tesla has lost money every year, while Toyota has showed substantial profit. Without knowing anything else about these companies, an outside observer might think Tesla was the "bloated" of the two.

<comment><USER19> I don't know the proportion of investors who think this way yet I simply can't believe there is going to be much place for non-electric cars in cities in future. So, given how strongly do electric cars associate with the Tesla brand, I find it improbable that Tesla is going to fail or stagnate. Cities probably are going to start phasing gas/diesel cars out as soon as they recover from the CoV-caused economic crisis or shortly after. I know Toyota also builds electric and hybrid cars but many consumers don't know.

<comment><USER9> The company has never made a profit. Why do you think it is impossible for it to fail?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


2d game art tutorial – rotating a face in vectors with easy - <AUTHOR> http://www.2dgameartguru.com/2017/12/character-design-simpler-rotation-of.html <comment><AUTHOR> Another inkscape tutorial on 2dgameartguru on character design just went online. This one is about rotating a character's face using simple shapes and guidelines to place, skew, rotate and scale the facial elements easily.

The tutorial is written using Inkscape (a free vector program) but the same technique would apply in Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, Affinity Designer, etc.</comment>


Untrusted – a user JavaScript adventure game - <AUTHOR> http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/ <comment><USER2> Very cool game, indeed. Currently on third level. And I don't even know JavaScript!</comment>


AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3643

<comment><USER2> The development of GPUs never ceases to amaze me - they keep pulling some crazy speed increases out of the bag. It's the usage/market side that pisses me off - continually horrible integrated graphics in all but the high end systems and Apple continuing to rip us off to get a decent graphics card in the Mac Pro.. eugh (£280 for a Mac HD 4870 in the UK.. $460ish).

<comment><USER3> The color scheme reminds me of older Cray supercomputers. [http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputer...](http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputers- Are-Slowly-Becoming-Hypercomputers-2.jpg) I wonder if there's something about it that visually indicates "there's a ridiculous amount of parallel computing power in here"?

Edit: apparently the CM-5 supercomputer had a very similar color scheme as well. [http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_S...](http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_Supercomputer.html)

<comment><USER4> Funny, SGI used to use racy colours for all their boxen too. Yesterday's announcement of the plain-Jane Octane III was such a disappointment in that respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool stuff - glad to see some wins for AMD. Pity the review was so focused on games stuff - I'd love to have seen some OpenGL results for GPU-enabled packages like Adobe Photoshop or Luxology's Modo, but games are obviously where the cutting edge is at...though there's a disruption opportunity for a manufacturer with enough vision to build an authoring application around an existing game compositing/ rendering/ physics library.

2.7 billion transistors blows my mind - that's almost 4x what the current Xeons have. GPU obviously have a totally different architecture. and this at 40nm...with Intel announcing yesterday that they've got working 22nm(!) chips, the future possibilities are exciting.</comment>


Obama Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/obama-supports-filesharing-verdict/ <comment><USER2> These methods aren't going to make people share music less -- it will simply make them find more secure ways of sharing. Lets all remember, that at the end of the day, if I burn a few gigs of MP3s to a dvd and pass it to a friend hand to hand, the music industry will never know.

Ultimately, sharing is something people want to do as a natural inclination. I like this band, so I want you to like this band, so here's their music. I personally have found the vast majority of the music I love in this fashion.

I love passing on my love of music to other people. I've run private MP3 servers before. It brings me much joy to share music and then talk about it.

I don't really know what these large verdicts do. They are still effectively like being hit by lightning, it's so unlikely it will happen to you.

<comment><USER3> This made me think of a quote which turns out to be from a Clay Shirky essay (<http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html>)

"It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. [...] Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon."

<comment><USER4> On the other side of the ledger we find this famous quote from Tim O'Reilly:

> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than > piracy.

<http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html>

<comment><USER2> Yeah. I've never seen any solid stats, and I hate using my gut as an information source, but my gut tells me that piracy has been a much larger help to artists. I've seen a few news articles that imply it. Piracy is a threat to labels, but really, when a musician can grab Garage Band and a few thousand bucks of hardware and publish his own music... do we need labels?

<comment><USER5> What I find amusing is this argument I've heard a few times coming from the labels that goes along the lines of that we need their expertise in order to produce and discern the "quality" music... Because they do such a good job of that usually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me extremely angry. $675,000 verdict to the average person is basically going to ruin their life. Per-capita income is still only about $21,500 in the US, so you're asking for 30 years of their working life.

<comment><USER7> A $675,000 tort judgment is going to send you into Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which will take 3-5 years to resolve. It's bad, but it's not going to ruin your life.

I think there's cognitive dissonance here between the ease of committing torts on the Internet and the severity of the penalty.

If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement.

But on the Internet, we all know that the same tort is a couple clicks away, and that it's widely practiced. So there's outrage and surprise when the law works the same way against those filesharers.

I guess I see things a little differently because my career has been spent in close contact with _other_ torts that, while far more damaging than file sharing, are often just as simple to commit. Nothing stops you from sharing files, and so you feel somewhat entitled to do so. But nothing stops you from crashing any number of important web applications, either.

<comment><USER8> The fact that it is widely practiced _is_ a defense. For the same reason that people would rightly object to a $675,000 tort judgment for speeding, or jaywalking, or smoking marijuana.

Are they crimes? Certainly. But because they're widespread, generally unenforced, mostly "victimless", people are outraged that they'd have such high penalties. If you applied that judgment fairly you'd probably bankrupt 3/4s of America, if not more, which would be bad. Any law that you don't want enforced in the general case is a bad law that's going to generate outrage when it is enforced.

<comment><USER7> Torts and crimes aren't the same thing. There is, for instance, no such thing as a "victimless tort".

<comment><USER4> A listener not paying for something they weren't going to pay for anyway _is_ a victimless tort when the record label doesn't actually lose any money.

Cory Doctorow puts it best in explaining why he Creative Commons licences his books:

> Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't > have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an > audience.

[http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright- tec...](http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech- media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html)

Someone is harming the music industry, but it's not the listeners. It's the RIAA.

<comment><USER7> While we could argue the first sentence, it's not germane to the discussion. People are getting sued for distribution, not for personal use.

<comment><USER9> But it's mostly about distributing it to people who wouldn't buy it anyway. If they want to claim a file copied to 100 users prevented 100 sales, they must have a reasonable evidence indicating those 100 downloaders are capable and willing to buy every song they download, which is probably not the case.

Most downloaders I know of are more collectors and explorers than anything else. By making numerous copies of artistic works, some of them very obscure, they could as well be providing a valuable data preservation service for future generations.

Just imagine if a generation manages to completely DRM works of art just to discover they lost their keys and the programs required to reconstruct those works... Without proper context, they will look like random noise to future archeologists.

I agree artists deserve adequate rewards for their works. Perhaps a compromise should be reached. It seems copyright has been abused and extended far too much, to a point where it creates more harm than good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find the headline very disturbing.

It says "Obama" supports the verdict, when really it is Obama's administration. I am not a Washington insider but something tells me more likely than not, Mr Obama was not personally involved in this decision at all. He has more important things on his mind right now, and other fires to put out.

I worry a lot about how so many people think "I voted for Obama, ok he's in office, my job is done!" and then they sit there and do nothing and wait for Obama to pull off some magic and make the world good again. In the meantime the other side has a whole army of crazies pushing their agenda.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bait-y title. I read the article, perhaps a bit casually, and I'm left with doubts that Obama even knows about this verdict.

<comment><USER11> Yes I was a bit confused on that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement 'creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred.'"

I wonder how much campaign contribution money the RIAA had to spend to get those five lawyers (or lawyers with that resume) into those five positions?

</comment><comment><USER13> This judgement is a travesty.

\- Justice is only just if it is handed out evenly and in proportion to the crime. If ten million people share an mp3 and only one person is convicted for it, should that person have to pay for the alleged damages caused by the ten million? That's contrary to my sense of justice and to hundreds of years anglo-saxon jurisprudence.

\- Stealing one CD from a store is clearly a more tortuous act than making one copy of the songs on a CD. If you steal a CD then the owner doesn't have it any more. If you make a copy of a CD then the copyright owner's potential sales may be diminished by some theoretical fraction of the original value of the CD.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone else have the same problem as me in this area? I am more than happy to pay for things, I just find it very hard to justify paying for some things that don't give any benefit over a one that I can get for free. So if they were to find a way to totally stamp out piracy or make it as likely to get punished for as taking goods from a store I'd be happy to pay for everything.

A good example is things like the WSJ, sure I probably don't read them enough to pay anyway, but the fact that you can just Google search things to not pay means that I would never see the value in paying.

I think when you feel that you are paying to support the content producer rather than to acquire the content something is wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a list of some of the songs Joel is accused of sharing:

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.p...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.pdf)

Funny thing is if I type the names (e.g. Nirvana "Come as you are") into Google in a couple of seconds I can listen to all the songs on YouTube. I would have thought Google would be a better target than Joel. If the music industry are justified in their cause they could do at the very least do a better job of communicating why.

</comment><comment><USER16> What kind of public image is the RIAA seeking for itself? Can't they see they're committing imago suicide? Maybe these lawsuits were meant to show unequivocally to the public that file sharing is not permissible and will be prosecuted, but these figures are getting ridiculous. They lost their sense of proportionality.

</comment><comment><USER17> Please change title to Obama [administration] Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict

It's what the article actually says and is far less link bait. _The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs._

<comment><USER18> How is he not directly responsible for _his_ administration's statements and positions?

<comment><USER19> Indeed, we held Bush responsible for things that we _know_ his administration was deliberately keeping out of his immediate purview for deniability reasons.

<comment><USER20> Whatever this supposed "we" collectively did, it's still a linkbait title. Sure the buck stops at the president's office, but you can't say that person X supports some very specific activity unless they come right out and say it. However it is certainly fair comment to say that Obama, by appointing industry lawyers, has given tacit endorsement to the industry stance of harsh penalties.

<comment><USER19> So you're arguing that maybe he _just doesn't care_ about the issue or the case?

That's the defense? "No no, he doesn't _support_ it. He's merely so disinterested in the situation that he doesn't have any idea, or interest in, the position his administration is taking on his behalf."

<comment><USER20> The administration does not take positions "on behalf" of the president. Obama is not the administration nor is the administration some kind of perfect reflection in every detail of Obama's innermost thoughts and desires. And verily it is possible that a sparrow falls from heaven without Obama knowing about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paying programmers or designers hourly works against your best interest - <AUTHOR> http://maxkle.in/paying-programmers/

<comment><USER2> You can't have it both ways. Upfront price means the per hour is purposely inflated to deal with the changes the client is going to demand, or an argument about what is and isn't covered by the initial agreement. This happened weekly at my previous company.

Of course there are people that take advantage of an hourly rate, particularly at the bottom of the barrel pricing. If I was on contract and thought that X tech would make the project better, I wouldn't be charging for research time (call it my education bucket). I've saved weeks by using something I'm not as familiar with, but more suited to the problem at hand.

</comment><comment><USER3> Duh. Though it doesn't really work like that; there are enough ethical programmers who work their asses off and give you high quality despite hourly pay.</comment>


Man Loses More Than 50 Pounds Playing a VR Game - <AUTHOR> https://uploadvr.com/man-loses-50-pounds-playing-soundboxing/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad what he did worked, but I would have suggested starting with diet first and as the pounds start coming off, start slowly ramping up the exercise.</comment>


Show HN: Help your favourite local spots survive Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://lunchnext.com/en/ <comment><AUTHOR> This country-wide quarantine puts local businesses, in particular restaurants, cafes, cultural venues, hairdressers and other service providers in a difficult position. Some of them may not survive a lockdown of several weeks! Fortunately, we can support our favourite spots by purchasing their digital voucher to help them sustain financial liquidity.

In order to help as many service providers as possible, during the quarantine we are not charging them platform fees, except for the small transaction fee of the payment operator Stripe.

#SupportLocal

<comment><USER2> Maybe add an about us page, to add more credibility and make it more personal. An image on there would help too.

Should you add social sharing buttons to the pages?</comment></comment>


Computation at the Edge of Chaos (1990) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cb4c/df7812fc8ad56d13317eaabc99b76659e95f.pdf <comment><USER2> Interesting cite [OP's #5] from the paper (while searching for Wolfram :-)

E. F. Codd was doing CAs in late 60s. What an impressive mind: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd%27s_cellular_automaton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd%27s_cellular_automaton)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there practical applications for cellular automata?

<comment><USER4> Only thing I could think of.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30#Applications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30#Applications)</comment></comment>


Using git-crypt to transparently encrypt sensitive data in a Git repository - <AUTHOR> http://ebarnouflant.com/posts/3-using-git-crypt-to-transparently-encrypt-sensitive-data-in-a-git-repository <comment><USER2> Related: The software's author's original post: [https://www.agwa.name/projects/git- crypt/](https://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, but I would still try my best to just keep sensitive data out of the repo rather than commit an encrypted version of it.</comment>


This is why my wife/mom loves Apple: They don't need me to make it happen - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/icloud/#tv-ad-harmony <comment><USER2> I'm impressed! Like many of Apple's latest ads this one is worth studying. Not a single word speken. Just the product front & center. Yet everyone knows what it is about.</comment>


Potential Macbook Security Flaw - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cgarduno1garduno/Macbook-Security <comment><USER2> This is neither a flaw nor news. Any unencrypted volume on _any_ system is subject to being read if the volume is mounted elsewhere.

Additionally, this requires physical access to and control of the machine. As anyone in security will tell you, when someone has physical control of a machine, all bets are off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then what is the point of having a password on your machine if anyone can access your files? On university campuses there are numerous laptop thefts every year and it seems like there should be some sort of protection against this. Why not request the password through the terminal?

<comment><USER3> Like Steffan said, this is old news. If it's easy for people to get physical access to your machine - which is the case for a laptop - then you should encrypt the disk. I don't know the reasons why Apple doesn't do this by default (legacy? performance?) but they don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. Well this is useful to know so thank you both! It still concerns me because I have some friends who have had their devices stolen with sensitive information and as I try and learn more about computing it's becoming clearer to me that everyone should encrypt EVERYTHING that is sensitive. Thanks to the both of you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is primarily a concern regarding the average Macbook user that would not know to encrypt their data and only uses the standard OSX user password.</comment>


The land before modern APIs - <AUTHOR> https://increment.com/apis/land-before-modern-apis/ <comment><USER2> I thought this would be about APIs as in _APIs_ , that is the general concept which goes back decades, not REST APIs. This sounded like a much more interesting piece on the history of software development in the old days.

<comment><USER3> Same here, I hate when API is used to denote Web APIs, which are only a subset.

> While in one sense an API is a _compact_ between two or more pieces of > technology, it's ultimately a _compact_ between two or more people.

Also the author could have re-read its article before publishing.

<comment> frosted-flakes > _Noun_ compact ( _plural_ compacts)

> An agreement or contract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My largest gripe with REST is that it's a very lock-in technology. Once we evolve past REST instead of being able to decouple cleanly from the underlying protocol, we're pretty much trapped in status codes and methods that lock us in. At least with GraphQL there's a clean break. Everything should have been focused on the payloads, not the transport layer.

<comment><USER5> REST is an architectural style and while the decision to use the style may lead to "lock in", it in and of itself does not given it's a choice to use it or not.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't I say that about anything that leads to lock in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just because YSK,it was posted before too, 3 days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363052)

</comment><comment><USER7> I sometimes discover these old protocols when I am testing things on localhost and using traditional netcat. The original nc does automatic reverse DNS lookups. rje was assigned port 77. I knew about rje from using port 77 but I had not read this.</comment>


SQL vs. NoSQL: you do want to have a relational storage by default - <AUTHOR> http://enterprisecraftsmanship.com/2015/11/06/sql-vs-nosql-you-do-want-to-have-a-relational-storage-by-default/ <comment><USER2> I care so much less about the data model. Document or Relational: I can see different apps preferring one or the other.

Two things are interesting to me:

1\. What's the consistency model? Is NoSQL really NoTxns? Whether you need transactions or not probably affects your decision more than tables vs docs. Similarly if you still want some partial functionality in the face of larger failures, maybe forgoing consistency is worth it. (Note that some NoSQL systems support strong consistency and some relational systems don't).

2\. Is your query language as powerful as SQL? First, SQL is not a great language, but it's probably still better than whatever your NoSQL store is using, once you move beyond CRUD and very simple filtering. Declarative queries with an optimizer is the right choice for most applications. The expressiveness once you get to "group by", joins and subqueries is difficult to replicate in a programatic query language.

You may not _like_ SQL. That's fair. But there's a reason it seemingly can't be kept down. See CQL, Impala, SparkSQL, F1/Spanner, Presto, etc... Couchbase has been the most recent "oops" with their N1QL introduction and near complete messaging reversal (on this issue).

</comment><comment><USER3> > you do want to have a relational storage by default

No I do not, thank you very much.

> The concept of NoSQL databases has been around for a while

For far longer than the concept of SQL databases.

> Alright, so are NoSQL databases really schemaless?

All the classic document-oriented systems had very strict and complex schemas.

> The first one is data (referential) integrity

Enforced by a schema. SQL is not any special here.</comment>


7 soft skills you need to succeed as a developer - <AUTHOR> https://techbeacon.com/7-keys-succeeding-software-engineer <comment><USER2> Key point: "The better those relationships are, the better your own work will be, which is why it's so important to treat others with empathy and respect."

I want to highlight empathy, especially when interacting with colleagues who are not technical. There are a lot of things developers know that are second nature, but to many others, it's not. Meet them halfway, help them understand, don't dismiss someone because they don't know how something works.</comment>


[pdf] Twitter's Real-Time Related Query Suggestion Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.7350v1.pdf <comment><USER2> Why didn't they just run Hadoop on a sample of the logs instead of the full dataset? It seems like they were just looking for popular related queries anyways. Any ideas?</comment>


ThousandEyes Bought by Cisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.networkworld.com/article/3546288/cisco-grabs-thousandeyes-for-network-intelligence-technology.html <comment><AUTHOR> Great company with great product, leadership, and investors. Congrats!</comment>


Startup Marketing: Tactical Tips From The Trenches - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/9008/Startup-Marketing-Tactical-Tips-From-The-Trenches.aspx <comment><USER2> Great post</comment>


The Joel Test for Software Teams is 20 years old this weekend - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ <comment><USER2> Some of these points look like a common sense nowadays (is there any software team in year 2020 that does not use any VCS?), but do not agree with a couple of them.

> Do you use the best tools money can buy?

This is just unrealistic, and actually not required - the tools do not have to be the best, they should be _adequate_. Which author kind of confirms discussing his #1: "I've used CVS, which is free, and let me tell you, CVS is _fine_."

> Do you do hallway usability testing?

Usability testing is important, of course, but IMHO it should __not __be done in hallway, but rather among the target audience. Otherwise you 'll end up with UI that is easy to do some basic things with, but very inconvenient for real work, in real workflow that is not possible to test in hallway (not providing any examples to not hurt anybody feelings by accident, but from my experience this is quite common, unfortunately).

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said! I guess if some of Joel's points have become common sense then that speaks well of the test. And of our industry. :)

I don't have a strong opinion about buying the best tools money can buy but it seems fair enough to include tool quality as a factor in how good a software team is. You might be right that adequate is adequate but it's not binary. Better is better.

As for your point about hallway testing, I think the point is that that's a bare minimum. Deeper testing with the target audience is even better but it's amazing how common it is to never watch over a real user's shoulder (screencast, whatever) as they try to actually use your thing.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought it could be fun to compare how our own teams do on The Joel Test now. I estimate Beeminder gets a 68%:

      1. Do you use source control? [1 point]
      2. Can you make a build in one step? [.6 points for modernized version of this]
      3. Do you make daily builds? [1 point]
      4. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? [1 point]
      5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? [1 point]
      6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? [0 points]
      7. Do you have a spec? [.9 points]
      8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? [.5 points]
      9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? [.5 points]
      10. Do you have testers? [0 points]
      11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? [1 point]
      12. Do you use hallway usability testing? [.8 points]

Details at [https://forum.beeminder.com/t/20th-anniversary-of-the- joel-t...](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/20th-anniversary-of-the-joel-test- for-software-teams/7096)

<comment><USER3> 4 and 5 are duplicate

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, thanks! Should be:

      4. Do you have a bug database? [.9 points]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ok</comment>


Help Vampires: A Spotter's Guide - <AUTHOR> http://slash7.com/pages/vampires

<comment><USER2> I do customer support for a non-technical market. Name an issue, my customers have had it -- they can't print when the printer isn't plugged in but the print later button doesn't work, etc. (You might describe this as "I can't save.", since your model of what a program does is a bit more sophisticated than hers is. Plumbing that mental model took a day of wading through some fairly exasperated emails.)

A lot of small software developers think that I must be going totally insane with questions like that. Honestly, no, I could do this forever. I have two main secrets.

One is relentless focus on ease of use, because you CAN find ways to take your existing program, business, and business processes and simplify them so that there are less places to have errors.

The other is that you can never have contempt of your users. Not even quietly to yourself. Don't call them Help Vampires, even mentally. You'll poison yourself, you will start to _dread_ the You've Got Mail light, and you will find answering questions exhausting instead of a routine task which you're paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

P.S. Charge more. If there were such a thing as Help Vampires, and there is not despite the fang-marks in your neck, charging more would be a cross against them. You'll almost invariably find the most difficult people at the bottom of a market.

<comment><USER3> >> The other is that you can never have contempt of your users... which you're paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

In all fairness... those are clients then. Totally different situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While Help Vampires in software development skew male, that's easily attributable to the field's sausage-fest reality.

In the general population, I think that Help Vampires skew female to a large degree. Witness Yahoo Answers (and to a lesser degree Ask Metafilter, from which it was cloned). The vast majority of the askers are female.

<comment><USER5> As far as I've seen, the vast majority of Yahoo Answers _questions_ aren't really of the "I need help" variety. They're more conversation-starters-in- question-form. It's a forum.

<comment><USER6> I think it depends on the category, but yes, I can see that.

In the more technical areas there are the predictable "Here's a homework question that I'm sort of trying to disguise" and, what the article said, "How do I build a forum." What Yahoo Answers REALLY needs is an FAQ in each category. But, I suppose, then it would be IRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related to, but a different slant on, <http://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html>

Discussion of that here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682864>

</comment><comment><USER8> "It appears that male Help Vampire, drawn as it is to shiny technology, occupies an evolutionary niche that females of the species simply do not find desirable."

By a percentage involved in tech, there could be more women help vampires but because there are fewer women in tech they are rarer than the male version.

<comment><USER9> I have met female help vampires. Unfortunately, they are related to me so there's not much I can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yet another reason to avoid success at all costs.</comment>