An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion. - <AUTHOR> http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/featured-article/space-the-final-frontier-of-profit

<comment><USER3> As much as I'm a fan of space exploration, it's a bit silly to say that an asteroid is worth $20 trillion.

The ore in an asteroid, REFINED, is worth that much.

It's a fair bit of work to move that ore from pt A to pt B, crush it, smelt it, refine it, anneal it, etc.

A cubic kilometer of sea water is worth a similarly preposterous amount ... and yet, noone has become a trillionaire by refining sea water. It costs more to do it than the minerals are worth.

Will it happen some day? Sure. Is it relevant today? No.

</comment><comment><USER4> (minus shipping and handling)

</comment><comment><USER5> I suspect that flooding the market with those metals would depress the price of those commodities significantly.

<comment><USER6> Its not really about that. The point is that the wealth of a single small planet is insignificant compared to the wealth of even the extra bits floating around our solar system.

What could we build if titanium was _free_ (or very close)? What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum?

A vital step to us getting off this planet in a meaningful way is sending robots out to gather resources, both to build the ships we'll need outside of our gravity well and to return some of that abundance to the surface so we can alleviate our scarcities here.

<comment><USER3> > What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of > aluminum?

There _IS_ a limitless supply of aluminum. The top kilometer of crust all over the earth is stunningly rich in aluminum. It's just that PROCESSING it takes energy.

...just like processing an asteroid.

Dirt, though, has the added advantage of already being HERE.

<comment><USER7> _It's just that PROCESSING it takes energy._

Which is exactly why we need fusion power and not the hydro, wind and solar power the shortsighted environmentalists keep pushing. Those will never produce the vast additional amounts of energy needed to make the next step in our general wellbeing. With cheap limitless energy, you can produce all the water you want, bind all the CO2 you want, produce all the O3 you want, recycle everything you want and even use fission to produce whatever materials you want.

<comment><USER8> And what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap? People said the same thing about fission, but it's turned out to be quite expensive, and the technology is likely to be very complex. If you calculate how large area of photovoltaics you can build for the price of developing and building a fusion reactor (not that anyone has any idea what this cost will be), I suspect you'd get a lot of it.

<comment><USER7> _And what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap?_

Because fusion scales well. With time, everything limited by technology becomes cheap as technology advances. There are no fundamental problems or limits in fusion, just practical problems. Fusion has never received the amount of funding it should have received. How long did it take ITER to get the measly 10 billion dollars required?

As for fission: the all important difference is that the fuel for fusion is much easier to get, is unlimited and the garbage that gets left behind isn't nearly as much of a problem. Moreover, there is no risk of blowing up half the nearby city and irradiating the area for the next 100K years. Fusion and fission are incomparable as for their ability to provide energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you haven't read _Entering Space_ I highly recommend that you do. Published in 1999, it was my first introduction to the basic economics and technology required for asteroid mining. It not only that, but also many other topics from possible Lagrange point space stations to Helium 3 fusion. As a bonus, it is old enough that your local library probably has it for you to check out with no reservations.

<comment><USER10> > As a bonus, it is old enough that your local library probably has it for you > to check out with no reservations.

Unless other HN readers are in the same city :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Moore's Law has given us exponential growth in computing technology, which has led to exponential growth in nearly every other technological industry."

This is very untrue.

</comment><comment><USER12> Did any Eve Online players here see "20 trillion ISK" when they read the headline? ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> An interesting article, but full of speculation. Many assumptions where made to produce the conclusions and the data (like an asteroid being worth 20 trillion).

Yes, I agree with many of the predictions of the article. Like how private industry will take over the space exploration. But the opinion of the author and I is about as valuable as a crystal ball.

If we are going to play the speculation game, here is what interests me about the subject.

1) Who would get the mining rights in space? Or would it be a 'gold rush?' If so, would it be like international waters with no laws? Could I achieve my childhood dream of being a space pirate? ;)

2) Most of the asteroids of our solar system take months to reach reach with our fastest ships. If you want a human presence we are talking YEARS. Humans on prolonged space flights are very, very tricky to take care of. That makes a strong case for only sending robots, and that would require some very wicked AI, since the transmission times for controls would be too great.

Think about all the hazards and procedures the robot(s) would have to perform. Guidance, acquisition, positioning, detection of surroundings, plotting return course, AVOIDANCE, ext. And the hardware implications, the fuel, the power, capturing, ext.

It would make a Mars rover look like an RC car. And the two mars rovers cost us approx. 820 million dollars.

The cost of development may be justified by a 20 trillion dollar prize, but the cost to buy in is very high. If a corporation did want to fund it with billions of dollars without knowing if they were going to see a return, and willing to wait years for it. Then you have a winner, I don't see anyone jumping at the bit to take that risk though.

3) While asteroid mining seems like a great idea. Why are aren't we being more creative about the other things we can do in space? Where is the startup mentality?

How about technicians that repair satellites in orbit? Great place to hone the programing for the asteroid gatherers.

</comment><comment><USER14> I doubt that earth has the resources to serve as a processing facility for space asteroids. Even if we get metals from asteroids we would still have to smelt and refine them on Earth, which is a polluting and resource demanding process.

<comment><USER15> Would it not be possible to create a nuclear powered robotic installation on that asteroid as well? I guess the initial costs are high, but it would pay off in the long term (just move the factory once you are done, the low gravity requires little fuel)

<comment><USER8> If you're only going to the asteroid belt, you can probably get away with photovoltaics instead of nuclear power, too. And yeah, it seems it would be better to do it in place. But if it's really quite pure metal, there's not much refining that would need to be done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >First, private capital is seeing space as a good investment, willing to fund individuals who are passionate about exploring space, for adventure as well as profit. What was once affordable only by nations can now be lucrative, public- private partnerships.

For the moment being, that sounds specious at best. _We_ (the US) are not able to get back to the moon because of a lack of funds (NASA accounted for some 5% of the entire federal budget in 1966, now it's down to .5%); any amount of funding by private entities for such tasks is minuscule in comparison, and therefore obviously insufficient.

But I suppose that'll change in interesting ways with time.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is unfortunate that he uses the Alaska purchase as the benchmark for shrewd public investment as there is some thought that maybe it wasn't, see: <http://bit.ly/d3WsHn > _The purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, ridiculed in 1867 as "Seward's Folly," is now viewed as a shrewd business deal. A purely financial analysis of the transaction, however, shows that the price was greater than the net present value of cash flow from Alaska to the federal government from 1867 to 2007._

</comment><comment><USER18> If this is interesting to folks, I highly recommend "Mining the Sky": [http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids- Planets/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids- Planets/dp/0201328194).

</comment><comment><USER19> And where does one apply for the position of Space Adventurer? I want in.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article seems a little overly optimistic on the logistics problems of exploiting asteroids. It even compares them to Alaska.

</comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps Nasa can become a profit center. :-P

<comment><USER22> Does the gov't even have any profit centers outside the IRS?

<comment><USER23> The Postal Service and the Patent and Trademark office have had net positive cash flow some years. Not for the last few years though, I think.

<comment><USER24> The post office couldn't make a profit if it didn't have laws supporting it. They have terrible customer service, take sundays off, various other problems, UPS and Fed Ex would destroy them.

Of course the Patent and Trademark office is law supported too.

<comment><USER25> Perhaps FexEx and UPS could "destroy" the USPS if they didn't have to worry about guaranteeing relatively quick delivery for envelopes from Kirby, WY to Boone, TN for the same inexpensive price as deliveries within a few blocks. The USPS may have laws supporting it, but don't we have expectations of it that far exceed whatever private business could hope to accomplish for profit?

(And, naively, aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a profit without laws supporting them?)

<comment><USER26> _aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a profit without laws supporting them?_

In a sense, no, by definition.

<comment><USER25> I was thinking about legal monopolies or companies barely profitable by virtue of tax credits/breaks or companies that don't have to follow certain costly regulations for some (legal) reason.

Would those factors actually make them "not really profitable" or "not actually private businesses"? Or is this where the "In a sense" part of your reply breaks down? (These are legitimate questions, but I'm afraid it might sound snarky.)

<comment><USER23> I'm pretty sure he meant "not actually private", in a sense of something like "any organization dependent on the government for survival can be regarded, to some extent, as being effectively a branch of the government".

Of course, by that standard, I'm not sure how many "truly private" companies exist, since it seems to rule out (among others) any company that relies on intellectual property law, including trademark enforcement to prevent bootlegs and cheap imitations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think what might finally send us to the asteroid belt will be the military. If we are able to pick an appropriate sized asteroid and deflect it off it's course, the asteroid can easily be accelerated using Mars or Venus or the Sun. We can take it anywhere we feel like. We can destroy any target on earth - <USER2> small as a city or as large as you want. The energy needed to deflect the asteroid is minuscule compared to the kinetic energy you can exert on your target. The ultimate WMD.

<comment><USER28> Nukes are much cheaper.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. They also already exist in sufficient quantity to do whatever you'd imagine doing with an asteroid and still inhabit the Earth. Unless, of course, you don't have nukes. Maybe Iran should consider this? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Unfortunately this article overlooks the "startup" costs for developing and deploying the requisite technologies for harvesting the profits (which are significant enough to preclude privatization, IMO).

And there is another more grievous oversight in the article which pertains to the sinister slight-of-hand on the administration's policy: they intend to slough off the cost of developing and deploying what portends to be mankind's greatest engineering feat, while planning to reap the profits: do you really think for one second that good old Uncle Sam will not find away to skim away a hefty share of these (potential) profits? do you think that such asteroids will be corporate or "social" property (read government)?

Tying together one last point, does anyone really believe that this administration has a new found faith in the free markets - or is all of this pandering and innuendo just a red hearing to keep us from sobering up to the cold fact that the promising Constellation project was just killed?

</comment><comment><USER30> WOW, I guess no one on HN remotely thinks humans and the earth are facing any sort of environmental problems at the moment. All everyone here is talking about is the profit margins and logistics of pulling this preposterous, albeit very cool, idea off. I'm all for adventure, technology, progress, blah blah blah. I am thrilled about the possibilities of space. But realistically I think we as a species need to better undertand ourselves and create better; more sustainable systems on our native plannet before we embalance our natural habit and ecosystem on an intergalactic scale.

<comment><USER31> interplanetary

<comment><USER32> ♫ intergalactic planetary, planetary intergalactic ♫</comment></comment></comment>


A Study of 2.7M Startups Found the Ideal Age to Start a Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/a-study-of-27-million-startups-found-ideal-age-to-start-a-business-and-its-much-older-than-you-think.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see relatively objective data come out about startups lately and challenge the startup exceptionalism arguments. Such as: founders must be young and unattached, companies must take VC to be big, you can tell at the seed stage which bets will pan out and working all the time correlates well with output. What impact would it have on startups, if those things were in fact untrue?

</comment><comment><USER3> The article is short and worth a read, but to save you a click: 45.

However, the data is really not presented well and it's hard to cut through the clickbait aspect of this because the author conflates a few terms and it at least seems like this is about "entrepreneurs" rather than the HN-type definition of "startup". If you look at the Kellogg writeup link, the authors apparently looked at "technology" businesses and limited the set to the 0.1% "fastest-growing" (not sure how they determined that). The more interesting metric to me is in the Kellogg writeup as well: average age of tech IPO company founder is 47.

The takeaway for me is a bit different than the headline - Middle-aged founders are more likely to start sustainable, long-view companies than their younger counterparts. However I'd love to slice the data myself to see speed- to-exit vs. age plotted. I think that might tell a different story and better match VC models.</comment>


What we learned on the way to 1M users - <AUTHOR> https://www.lucidpress.com/blog/2015/08/27/what-we-learned-on-the-way-to-1-million-users/ <comment><USER2> Great post. I really liked this quote: "Good marketing techniques aren't about what works for you—it's about what works for your customer."</comment>


30(500) Redirect Blame - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/will/redirect_blame

<comment><USER2> That is some mean-spirited internetting right there.

From the title I was hoping it was a 500 page that git blames the backtrace and tells the user who specifically messed up.

<comment><USER3> That's a fascinating idea, even if it's not made public to the end user. Getting the git blamed stacktraces mailed to the dev team would be interesting!

<comment><USER4> Hahaha! It's definitely evil, but a funny evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like it thinks my iOS chrome is safari. The demo does not look at all like a chrome Internet connection error screen

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing.</comment>


Why aren't you striving to be a leader in your field? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2009/05/why-arent-you-striving-to-be-a-leader-in-your-field.html <comment><USER2> Striving for leadership seemed like a path of diminishing, even negative returns for me in a corporate job. Those at the top worked twice as hard (at least) for maybe 10% more pay and were just as subject to layoffs as I was. The economics dictated that I just go with the flow.

There's also a risk in the corporate world. Bad managers see leaders as threats and terminate them. I've seen it happen too many times in my careeer.

Now I'm on an different path, where leadership is demanded and rewarded (startups), so my attitude is very different. I have a long ways to go.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a good point and think it has been brought up with google many times here on HN such as why google recruiters look for As in all their subjects. Employers want someone who will follow the rules and follow them well, especially if they are smart; but if you want to succeed with a product or as a company you kind of need to start to lead.

<comment><USER4> Dude, if you think Google is looking for people who will follow the rules and follow them well, you must know a different Google than the one I work at...

<comment><USER3> I don't have a primary source so I'll take your word the only reason I said this was because of a few articles submitted like:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553254> ( [http://www.chriskopec.com/blog/2009/apr/08/great-students- ar...](http://www.chriskopec.com/blog/2009/apr/08/great-students-are-great- employees-not-great-found/) ) and another on the leaders of many big companies that I couldn't find.

<comment><USER4> The vast majority of things you read in the press (including blogs) are wrong. Not just about Google. Compare what the media says about any topic with which you have expertise vs. what your actual expertise tells you.

FWIW, I had a 3.0 GPA and flunked two physics courses, and they still hired me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Disagree with "If I said that the top people in your field, at your experience level, are active participants professional societies, write popular blogs about your industry, get asked to write articles for magazines and regularly speak on conference panels, that's probably a reasonable estimation of what it means to be on top, right?"

That isn't a reasonable estimation of being on top. It's a reasonable estimate of someone who fits into that kind of [rather social] professional circle. Doesn't apply everywhere.

In any esoteric field, you find out who are the top people after you enter, and swim around for a while. The ones with the most exposure are just the ones with the most popular appeal.

I have a friend who is wicked smart. I asked him why he isn't full of ambition. He just doesn't give a frolicking fancy. He feels like he has what he needs. Who is just the opposite? Napoleon. Is there something going on here?

Maybe some top fellow will write about it in Psychology Today.

</comment><comment><USER6> First of all, what is with the recent deluge of poorly written trite?

secondly, this guy is failing to see that being a "leader" in the field is different from being at the top. Being at the top connotates that one is the best; their abilities are superior to others. A leader can simply be him who recognizes a vacuum in power and seizes it. Being a leader in no way implies that one is at the top of their field.

The best programmers/hackers I've met were quite content to hone their skills without the public attention that only the "leadership types" seem to require.

<comment><USER7> Is this "thought Leader" stuff a specific American thing? Not being derogatory, I am wondering if this style of "being a leader" obsession is common amongst _some_ Americans and few other nationalities.

And if there is a noted concern amongst other nationalities, how much of that is trying to mimic the Americans versus actual concern with being a leader.

I just got back from EuroDjangoCon, and the American speakers were much more evangelistic than the British/Euro/Australian.

\---

> deluge of poorly written trite?

It's depressing, isn't it. Especially when written by someone who is trying to take on the Mantle of "Being a Leader"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Striving for a "leadership" position seem like a zero sum game to me. It is like trying to make into major league football or something.

Rather, I prefer to play a game where I'll win eventually like working on some pretty cool library that everybody want or a semi popular game. If it happen that I got to be in the top 10 hacker list, than that's just an unintentional bonus.

Pick battles you know you're going to win like building a successful startup, working on libraries that everybody wants but can't find, having a semi popular blog, and other ultimately winnable events.

For me, I am learning game programming and dream of making a living as a developer of open source games. I know it is going to be rough. However, I believe if I pick my niche right, than I should be able to stake out a small piece of the market just enough for decent living.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree that being a leader in the field does offer flexibility and choice. But I don't think that's always (or even mostly) why people work to that position. They do it because they LIKE writing and speaking, or because networking is a key part of their responsibilities.

I'm a nuts and bolts, head and shoulders deep in code kind of guy. The stuff that gets my crank going never requires an audience. TOP-of-field is my career ambition. Being so good at what I want to do that people will pay me to do it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Everyone in the Rails community is trying to be the leader in their field. The result is a lot of blog posts about how everyone else is worse than them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Someone I admire a lot once told me "we get bad politicians because anyone who wants power so much that they'd allow the media to humiliate themselves and their family is someone who wants power too much to use it responsibly"

At the time I thought it was a really cynical thing to say but as I've gone along in life I've often seen how right he was. How people who desire power for power's sake generally aren't worthy of that power.

That's the category I'd put this article in. He's basically saying "you should strive to be a leader because it makes you important." But I'd counter that by saying leaders should only lead if they see things headed in the wrong direction. If you work in an industry where you're happy with the direction it's going in you probably don't need to be a leader.

I guess what I'm saying is that leadership is a response to an external stimuli not an internal desire.

</comment><comment><USER12> Short version: There's no traffic jam on the extra mile.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe it's because I'm in the wrong field. I'm not a technology junky. I don't run my own email server, DNS server, and token ring network at home. I'm frankly not interested in how something works unless it's not obvious how it _could_ work. The most valuable people in my company are the ones who know the (to me) excruciating details of every technology we use, the excruciating details of how every part of our system works, the excruciating details of all of our customer relationships, and the excruciating details of exactly which person out of thousands to talk to about every issue.

Frankly, all of that bores me. I like solving logical and algorithmic puzzles. My work provides me with a regular but meager diet of such things. My ability at such stuff makes my code correct, performant, and reliable, and I'm valued for that, but I'd probably be a more productive employee (a better Software Engineer, in other words) if I couldn't write recursive code but could remember the names of all the people I've been in meetings with in the last six months.

</comment><comment><USER14> Having leadership in your field as a goal implies that one makes that a strong part of one's self-identity. Or more simply, you need to self-identify with your work, that you feel you _are_ the work you do.

However, work is not the top priority for many people, particularly those with families and significant life outside work, and nor should it be.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think a lot of it comes down to initiative. It's the difference between saying "man, somebody should do X" and just doing it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if by leadership he means someone of high caliber or skill in their chosen field.</comment>


Bitcoin Creator 'Satoshi Nakamoto' Unmasked as Nick Szabo - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/16/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-unmasked-again/

<comment><USER2> I think the headline should probably be changed. This isn't really an unmasking, and the original article uses a question mark, which makes its headline sound less definitive than this. As mentioned by others, Nick Szabo as Satoshi is an old theory. While this adds to the case, without conclusive evidence, it's not a big story.

<comment><USER3> I just spent several minutes trying to come up with an accurate title, then found that users had overwhelmingly flagged this article anyway.

The title on this post is outright false. The HN guidelines call for making titles _less_ misleading, not more.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A previous text analysis had identified the same person (as well as a number of converging clues):

[http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams- razor-w...](http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is- most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/)

[http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi- nakamo...](http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is- probably-nick-szabo/)

</comment><comment><USER4> it is only more thorough than prior efforts because they list the names of the other people they applied the same textual analysis to. HOWEVER, this type of analysis is too subjective. It may help when you definitively know the suspect is one of 12 or 20 but it is useless when it could be literally anyone. You might as well water board random people on the street demanding they tell you who Satoshi is.

Szabo is definitely a candidate but the onion of who Satoshi is requires you look at much more information. Such as what the target was doing 2 years before the publication (this is the known timeframe of when he started working on bitcoin), the style of coding, the times of coding which indicate sleep patterns and what happened the end of last year to Satoshi (nov 2013) which lead him to diverge control of all final assets (known from whois records for bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org, confirmed by theymos). If you cant complete that, don't bother writing an article on who Satoshi is and don't bother telling a journalists about your textual pseudo-suspicions.

</comment><comment><USER5> "A group of 40 students and researchers at the university studied the writing of 11 candidates...It's important to stress that the team isn't saying its study points conclusively to Mr. Szabo, only that of the people it studied, he appears – on the basis of his writing – to be the most likely candidate."

</comment><comment><USER6> This is old news in the Bitcoin community... but it's far from definitive proof.

</comment><comment><USER7> \- They only compared people they already suspected.

\- Satoshi should've already known about linguistic analysis.

\- It's likely Satoshi had someone read and rewrite his works to avoid linguistic analysis. Nick Szabo would've been a logical choice for this.

<comment><USER8> In that case that would mean that Nick is single point of failure which does not help much. It's single proxy. Although we do not know whether transparent or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1) Old news

2) Nick already denied being satoshi years ago

3) Really old news

4) Failure to use google isn't journalism

</comment><comment><USER10> At the least, a writing style analysis is stronger evidence than the last pile of shaky not-even-coincidences used to point the finger at someone.

I'm far more likely to believe Satoshi is Szabo--or a collaborative group that includes Szabo--than someone who is not actually a recognized expert in cryptography.</comment>


Ask HN: Will I die thin or fat? - <AUTHOR> I am a fat person 130kg (almost 290 pounds) lost in the mountains with access to water, but no food at all. Later when you find my dead body, am I still fat or I will die thin? <comment><USER2> If you truly find no food, fat - though less so. Your body can live for a little while off your fat stores, but with no proteins it will eventually start to break down.

I've seen 6 weeks cited as a typical life expectancy without food. Even on a starvation diet, that's not long enough to lose the minimum 100+ lbs an average adult would need to drop to reach a vaguely healthy weight.

This paper [1] suggests that 6 weeks of starvation would result in less than 40lbs of weight loss.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1274154/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1274154/)</comment>


Ask HN: What is your company architecture? - <AUTHOR>

The company I work for is going through some big shifts right now.
Changing of department heads and structures, etc.
It is a web development agency, with client services, project management, development, and some office admins. I am curious what structures you guys have experience with.
What works well? What doesn't work? How many managers are there, what are their jobs? What is the reporting structure like, who reports to who? Who is accountable for what? Processes that work? Scrum, agile, sprints, Kanban, JIT, etc?
Other thoughts welcome! <comment><USER2> Here's what you do (IMVHO):

Step 1: Broadly define isolated units of work. This can be per project, per customer, per account, per whatever. An isolated continuous effort can also be called a unit of work (for example lead generation, sales etc.) The underlying idea here is to define teams. These will be cross-functional teams (programmers, designers, testers, marketers, managers, analysts etc. all put in one team).

Completion criteria:

\-- You have defined all the activities your organization does \-- You have a fairly good idea who does them. It is okay if a small minority of people are part of two or more teams.

Step 2: These teams will largely be self managed. Company does not tell them how the work. Instead let the team decide. The team must be answerable to itself. And make sure your team has mentors who understand the concept of self-management and self-accountability.

Simplest example is the morning standup / scrum meeting. For instance in my team every morning at 10 am everybody shows up an a specific spot in our office. The last person to arrive starts the meeting by telling the rest of the team what he did yesterday, what he did today, if he needs any help in his activity. Then the next person gives the team and so on. At the end, everyone in the team has a rough grasp of what's been going on and what they will work on today.

As a lazy slacker, I am pressured to work because I am answerable to my team. As an egoic fool, I would like to accomplish a lot because I get to brag to my team.

Step 3: Backlog. Always have a prioritized list of what each team must do. This is the backlog. The backlog can be groomed by the manager / sales / analyst / customer rep or everyone together. Each team has a ordered backlog, and each team member can pick work from that list.

Step 4: Sprints. You have a backlog, you have a team working on it. Now, give the team a chance to "demo" their work. Let's say they demo it every two weeks. They demo it to the customer and any other relevant stakeholder. This helps in getting regular feedback for the work done and course correction if required, it also is a great motivator for the team to perform. This iteration of work done and demoed is a sprint.

After the demo, the team sits together and says "oh okay, this is what we did. this is what we did wrong. this is what was cool. these are some action points for us to keep in mind for the future...". This is the "retrospective" meeting in scrum terminology.

\---

Do you really need a "manager" or "delivery head". Not really, but you do need somebody communicating closely with the customer. Ideally there's a dedicated point-of-contact representing the customer and the team has direct and continuous access to him.

\---

The leadership doesn't interfere with how the team works. But routinely checks with the client to assess their sentiment. Are they happy how its going? Usually they'll be happy but want more.

The leadership also routinely checks with each team. Are they happy? Is the customer forcing them to use archaic tools? Are there any impediments that weren't resolved within the team during the retrospective.

The leadership is generally hands-off and can focus on leads development, pre- sales and other business'y stuff.

\---

Disclaimer: I am obviously not responsible for your interpretation of my message and its subsequent consequences. However I am available for consulting, my profile has contact info. : )

<comment><USER3> And that's three books on Agile practise in eight paragraphs.

You just ruined the consultancy market for three states :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Professional services. Flat. Partner team (Dave, Jeremy, and I) with Dave as President. 3 offices (NYC, Chicago, SF). Practice managers for each office help manage the schedule, backstop client concerns, stuff like that. Lots of ongoing projects, each led by a senior team member. Partner team and practice managers all deliver work alongside consultants. Supporting team for project management, for finance, for IT, and for development.

Some functional divisions of work; for instance, I run recruiting, and a team of consultants runs research and judges bonuses for developing tools or writing papers. But mostly, deliberately flat.

<comment><USER5> Here are a barrage of further questions that I hope you don't find too annoying:

Do you assign specific teams to each project? I assume project leader to project is one-to-many (since you said senior member); is project manager to project one-to-one? How many consultants are typically assigned to a project? Are developers assigned to specific projects from the start or do project managers send requests to developers on an as-needed basis? If it's the latter, do requests get sent to some sort of development leader/manager type or do project managers ask around to see which developers have the bandwidth for their project?

Also, and this isn't particularly related to structure, but how do sales work in your organization? Do the partners handle it for the most part?

I'm not asking these questions merely to annoy you; they apply to the business I am in the process of building. (So far, we've got a flat partner team of three and a single part-time employee. We're experimenting with a contracted salesperson, which has been working surprisingly well until now.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, 1 team 1 project (no overlap, every project is full-time). Project lead is 1:1 too. Practice managers are 1:many, but aren't intimately involved in delivery. Projects generally rotate among staff; staff aren't permanently allocated to clients. Practice managers collaborate with partners and project manager to work out the schedule. We book pretty far in advance.

We don't have salespeople.

<comment><USER5> Thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do you have the brains for cybersecurity? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34312697 <comment><USER3> What area of 'cybersecurity' would I be finding myself breaking substitution ciphers based on wingdings in?

I work in the information security industry, and I feel like I'm missing something but I really have to ask what these are relevant to.

Cryptography, which this appears to be a reduced form of is mostly tangential and very nuanced relative to the ciphers in this challenge. I often feel my line of work is grossly misrepresented by dizzying fields of esoteric numbers and references to ancient cryptography when I'm happy to find myself many of my days engrossed in the security characteristics of some powerful technology used right now in the real world.

I moved from engineering to security, but if this was my only interaction with security, I'm not sure I'd have been interested.

Edit: if you're interested in real crypto challenges, try [http://cryptopals.com/](http://cryptopals.com/) and read Cryptography Engineering, which is a wonderful read that goes over not only the cryptography but also the principles common across the many specialisations of the infosec industry

<comment><USER4> I think this is geared for kids, and not really adults.

<comment><USER5> It's a recruiting exercise for various companies.

Apparently it's a _serious_ recruiting exercise for various companies - <USER2> is frankly terrifying for anyone who knows anything about infosec but isn't a cybercriminal, terrorist, or foreign hostile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wasn't aware I had to explain _how_ the crypto works in order to advise my clients that they should be disabling outdated SSL versions on their servers and returing RC4 ciphers.

Evidently I don't have the brains for cybersecurity. My clients should be just fine with their telnet-enabled/remote-root-accessible servers until someone who can descramble Wingdings riddles can save them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have mixed feelings about this. While being a good puzzle solver is important, to be really good you need a certain level of creativity in thinking which goes beyond just the ability to solve puzzles. Thinking like a criminal as an example is a necessity in a number of cyber-security fields and can trump the ability to solve puzzles. I see a lot of vulnerabilities get marginalized because people simply can't correlate how it could be used by a criminal to make money. Likely for a reason, it's the ability to think like a criminal which is largely missing & where people do have that ability many times they are treated by their cyber security peers as a bit suspect.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you enjoy this, maybe you will like the challenges of Hacking-Lab ([https://www.hacking-lab.com](https://www.hacking-lab.com)).

Right now there's a Hacky Easter competition running which you can participate in for free: [http://hackyeaster.hacking- lab.com/hackyeaster/challenges.ht...](http://hackyeaster.hacking- lab.com/hackyeaster/challenges.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is probably a recruitment operation. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think that's what this is.

<comment><USER10> "They range in difficulty from simple to knotty and fiendish. We will let you know the answers next week."

It's not a recruitment operation. They're just some fun puzzles which are accessible to laypeople. It shows the fundamentals of cryptanalysis in a way that a casual reader can understand and even have a crack at solving.

Someone mentioned in another comment that Simon Singh's "The Code Book" starts in a similar way and they're dead on. You don't introduce someone to a subject by posing problems based on constructs they don't yet have the tools or context understand. The history of the field informs its current state - cryptography and cryptanalysis have a very rich and fascinating history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's not "cybersecurity", that's paper and pencil cryptanalysis. Completely different skill.

Here's NSA's internal course list.[1] Not much about puzzles.

[1] [https://cryptome.org/0001/ncs-courses.htm](https://cryptome.org/0001/ncs- courses.htm)

</comment><comment><USER12> This might be the optimal place to start (Khan academy's excellent intro): [https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer- science/crypt...](https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer- science/cryptography)

</comment><comment><USER13> No[1], because "cybersecurity" is an open-ended non-static target, with human adversaries in the loop, who will adapt to circumstantial changes dynamically.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't do one of these. It's the middle one of the last part. The diagram with the pentagon.

</comment><comment><USER15> What's the point if they're just going to ask for backdoors in those systems later?

<comment><USER16> I guess if you can crack these, then you're more competent than the current guard you'll be asked to replace and won't be asked to compel companies to write code without pay to breach their own security systems... so perhaps you'd be doing the world a favour by becoming an underpaid cyber security expert working for peanuts at one of the world's premier intelligence gathering agencies without needing to ask for sweeping surveillance rights that are a gross breach of everyone's right to privacy - which there are laws set in place to protect, unless you're the Government, in which case, the law doesn't apply to you. ;)</comment></comment>


Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/technology/success-of-crowdfunding-puts-pressure-on-entrepreneurs.html

<comment><USER2> Crowdfunding as it stands is a form of charity or maybe status because there's no guarantee anyone will even attempt to follow through with anything. That's why I only use it for charity or art. Are they attempting to change this in any way?

</comment><comment><USER3> _A study by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found that 75 percent of design- and technology-related projects on Kickstarter, most of which involve physical products, failed to meet their promised deadlines._

\--Key point: Crowd funding is a loose form of contract.

<comment><USER4> Is meeting the deadline the same as defaulting? I was unaware a timeline in a Kickstarter promotion was part of any contract - its more like salesmanship.

<comment><USER3> Some of kickstarter campaigns are strucured as actual (or implied) pre- orders.[1] Any such quid-pro-quo is a loose form of contract. With the emphasis on _loose_.

[1] "Cash in return for the promise of a future reward," per the article with examples also referenced therin.</comment></comment></comment>


14 years of Mark Zuckerberg saying sorry, not sorry about Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/facebook-zuckerberg-apologies/ <comment><USER2> It's an interesting position to be in when your organization has a lot of pressure from the general public to do right by the people instead of by the interests of the shareholders of the company, especially in the context of a technology company.

The only real solution here is just to NOT share data with facebook (delete it), but a lot of people either don't understand that or don't care.

These types of events make me worried about what kind of precedents will be set for technology companies in the US going forward. I hope that they don't over-regulate and strangle out innovation, but at the same time I agree that a company as large as facebook should have a larger interest in the good of the people.

Who is really responsible for the user data though? Should the users be held responsible for sharing data or should facebook for not making it easier to manage privacy?

<comment><USER3> Deleting your account is not sufficient; even having never created an account in the first place is not sufficient. Facebook will compile and maintain a "shadow profile" on you regardless, using data uploaded by other users and gathered from external sources. (See [https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook- figures-out-everyone-youve-...](https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out- everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691))

At some point Facebook stopped being a social network and started being an intelligence agency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No company in the history of Big Tech has gotten away with as much malpractice, breach of trust/ethics, invasion of privacy as facebook has in its (relatively) short history.

Facebook management's recorded antics will likely become a case-study for future founders and entrepreneurs -- taught in business schools and ilk.

<comment> m-p-3 Showing how much you can get away with relatively minor repercussions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't seem like the average user cares about social media privacy at all, let alone Facebook politics and forced apologies.

The current privacy settings available on Facebook are actually very extensive, but totally overwhelming to most users, which would help explain why mostly open profiles are still common.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, Mark and Facebook, about my canceled Facebook account.

</comment><comment><USER7> For Mark to really _feel_ sorry, being not on Facebook needs to be way more cooler. It needs famous people like Kylie Jenner [0] to act.

[0] [http://fortune.com/2018/02/22/kylie-jenner-snapchat-snap- val...](http://fortune.com/2018/02/22/kylie-jenner-snapchat-snap-value-stock/)

<comment><USER8> FWIW, this is really just clickbait as Snap released its first annual report (10-K) that day, which most certainly had the effect on share price.</comment></comment>


SXSW Interactive is Not a Tech Conference Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.austingunter.com/2013/04/sxsw-interactive-is-not-a-tech-conference-any-more/

<comment><USER2> I went to the first SxSW Interactive. It was not a tech conference then, so I never went back.

</comment><comment><USER3> You left SXSWi on Saturday meaning you experienced 2/5 of the interactive days...

</comment><comment><USER4> FWIW According to the author's blog this article was written on 2013/04/09.</comment>


DBeaver – Open Source SQL Management Tool/Editor That Supports All Major DBMS - <AUTHOR> http://dbeaver.jkiss.org/ <comment><USER2> Last I checked about 2 months ago ... Huge issues attempting to edit SQLite db columns. You can use it to select rows, but not much else for SQLite.</comment>


NatWest bank+RBS debit card/wire transfers down (not just a social network) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2162630/NatWest-Royal-Bank-Scotland-online-banking-meltdown-Millions-hit-technical-fault.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't a huge story, but IMHO, people living week-to-week not being able to get their child tax credit and buying food kinds trumps "people couldn't post what they had for lunch for 2 hours".

The HN discussion about the Twitter story was "twitter doesn't lose any money when they're down for 2 hours, so full uptime isn't essential". So what happens when a bank's wire transfer and debit card infrastructure is down for a day or more? Could they afford the fix that would prevent it? Will they publish a report on what went wrong and how they'll prevent it in the future? Seems much more interesting to me...

<comment><USER2> It's not about how something affects the world. It's about how it affect my, and my perspective of my world. Human's are not very good at paying attention at things that do not directly affect them. Those who are the exception to this, are the minority I believe.</comment></comment>


Whats up with the error "We've temporarily limited requests for old items" - <AUTHOR>

I really want to read through old articles but cannot do it. <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4250303>

</comment><comment><USER3> #FirstWorldProblems

<comment><USER4> There's a lot of really good information in comments section of old Hacker News items.</comment></comment>


Why wasn't the Windows 95 shell prototyped on Windows NT? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/01/02/10252333.aspx <comment><USER2> As someone who worked in the systems division throughout the 90s, I've often found Raymond's history a bit odd.

"Windows 95" was originally "Windows 93" and explicitly wasn't going to have a new user interface. They wanted to maximize revenue and not force people to re-train. It slipped and slipped and slipped...

The UI was actually prototyped and built not on Windows NT, but Cairo -- the thing that was supposed to come after Windows NT 3.1. It also slipped and slipped and slipped...

Paul Maritz (now of VMware) thought it was a great idea to have lots of teams, under competing vice presidents, build overlapping systems technology that needed to remain compatible at the legendary Windows level.

So. Stupid.

It basically took until Windows 7 to get the mess he created straightened out.

The key shuffle had the Cairo UI developers -- but not the designers -- move from under VP Jim Allchin to VP Brad Silverberg's group. Design was managed by Joe Belfiore, a very junior guy with no design or UI design experience. Nobody wanted the job (interface was not respected then) and he manned up and took it. He's now VP over Windows Phone.

But this engineering team was sort of -- uh -- let's just say Allchin didn't really fight to keep them. The types of guys who never quite realize width is (x2 - x1 PLUS 1) resulting in everything from blurry icons to blurry images/faxes for a decade. Who then refuse to fix the bugs because they "don't see it and it would add risk to our ship date."

After Windows 95, these devs went on to build the first IE. Yet again in a mad "must ship" panic, again led by people with no visual or design experience, again under Silverberg. So that's where all the box model madness and "things just don't line up" nonsense started.

<comment><USER3> >They wanted to maximize revenue and not force people to re-train. It slipped and slipped and slipped...

And don't forget the 80386 was released in _1985_. In fact MS had the early OS/2 2.0 SDK betas in around 1990 which continued until MS broke the JDA in mid-1991. And while Chicago was slipping, look up "OS/2 Microsoft Munchkins" for some of the unethical tactics MS used to attack OS/2 after the JDA was broken. And I hasn't even mentioned DR-DOS yet.

In fact, MS screwed up the protected mode transition so badly I could write an entire article about this history, starting with when Intel announced the 80286 in year 1982 but MS ignored it and made the mistake of wasting years writing a _real mode_ multitasking DOS. Then IBM refused to license it, which led to the JDA in 1985, which resulted in the 286 protected mode based OS/2 1.0 being released in 1988 which was what should have been finished by 1985 in the first place. Problem was that the 386 was introduced by Intel in 1985, and I could go on about Windows/386 and Windows 3.0 etc including the MS OS/2 2.0 SDK betas mentioned above...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting how the developers of Windows 3.1 were forced to use relatively low end computers.

The hardware & bandwidth of your average HN reader is likely much better than your users' setups.

Does anyone here keep low end computers on hand for testing? With the proliferation of client-side Javascript processing, hardware is becoming more important. What about testing over dial-up or slow DSL?

Anyone know of an easy way to simulate a slow bandwidth connection? Perhaps tether your MacBook to your iPhone and turn off 3G, to test at Edge speed.

Lowest I go is testing on IE8 in a VM on my MacBook Pro. That's probably not good enough (or... bad enough, technically).

I'd like to see a discussion about this topic. Testing with low end hardware & bandwidth, etc.

<comment><USER5> If you are using Lion and have Xcode 4 (or was it 4.1). Check out link conditioner which lets you simulate slower and less stable connections.

<comment><USER6> tried it. didn't work.

<comment><USER5> Can't install/run or when it doesn't have any effect when enabled?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always thought it was related to MSDOS compatibility.

If I recall correctly cli, sti, in, out, ... are privileged operations in WinNT, but not in Win95. Why? Because these instructions can't work in virtual-8086 mode and need to be handled by the OS, and that was really expensive for early 32bits machines. Win95 required legacy DOS programs to work with a reasonable performance, so the solution was to ignore the problem and allow the privileged operations... and I can't provide more details because I don't remember them :)

So yes, it was a hw limitation thing.

EDIT: typo fixed.

<comment><USER3> Yea, Intel VME, introduced in the Pentium and SL-enhanced 486 processors, fixed the problem by allowing the processor to maintain the virtual interrupt flag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "(When Windows 95 shipped, my primary machine was a 486/DX50 with 8MB of RAM. My test machine was a 386 with 4MB of RAM. The combined computing power and storage capacity of all the machines in my office is now exceeded by your cell phone.)"

I love the pace of technology.

</comment><comment><USER9> This makes me wonder why NT's minimum requirements were _six times_ those of Windows 3.1's. Both 3.1 and NT 3.1 had essentially the same front-end, to my knowledge, so was NT's back-end just that vastly more inefficient than DOS?

<comment><USER2> Raymond also glosses over this a bit in his article. Microsoft wasn't selling Windows 95. Microsoft was selling an upgrade product to corporations who ran Office.

There were few (if any) 12MB machines, it was mostly 8MB or 16MB. (If you had 4MB, Windows 95 would boot and you could play Minesweeper.)

The target market had 8MB systems. Which needed to run Windows 95 + Office 95 flawlessly. 4MB was a lie and a fake goal -- which made it all the way to the box -- that made sure an 8MB system could run Office.

User Interface and Plug and Play were the risk items. I personally thought giving the critical path guys shitty dev machines was shortsighted -- we had plenty of ways to make sure the overall system met performance goals.

NT wasn't that much bigger. It had the Win16 subsystem (WoW), so there were basically two copies of Windows running at all times. Still, NT fit comfortably in 8MB and ran every version of Office (old and new) well in 12MB.

TL;DR: arguments over 4MB and one cycle of upgrade revenue stalled Windows and IE development for 15+ years.

<comment><USER3> Note that Raymond was talking about NT _3.1_ , and one of the goals of 3.5 was to make it smaller and faster.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I file that under "Raymond glossing things over." NT 3.5 shipped 11 months before Windows 95 did!

People forget that Microsoft wasn't always a lumbering giant. Ship dates:

NT 3.1 - July 93 NT 3.5 - September 94 NT 3.51 - May 95 NT 4.0 - July 96

Platform support: Intel, MIPS, Alpha, plus PowerPC on 3.51 and 4.0.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats your "zen" software stack? - <AUTHOR> I'd love to know what sorts of software stacks "feel" right to people. Everyone has their own way of thinking, and in my experience when you find that particular method/language/framework of coding that works in a similar way that you think I've gotten this wonderful zen moment.
I'll start: For me as a web developer its recently been Node.js with a browserified frontend. Its easy to pick up a module/concept, write it as its own little machine, put it down and hook into it from the bigger structure. I can quickly zoom out to the larger view of the project and dig right back down to a problem area. I get to make a machine to handle a thing once and only once, and don't ever need to repeat myself.
What makes you giddy to work with? <comment><USER3> I feel the same as you that Node seems to make sense in my brain. I find JavaScript in general really fascinating to begin with. I've been watching videos on how people have been structuring apps in Node and every new trick blows my mind. It may just be because it's the new thing, but I'm really enjoying it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used to dislike Javascript generally as a webdev in the last decade, but after adopting Node pretty early on, I discovered that my brain seems to natively support asynchronous programming. So I use primarily Node.js at work everyday and for most of my side projects. Along with that, I like Redis for data because it's just so fast and "feels right" for me. I am absolutely head over heels for Docker, so most of the time it's that on commodity dedicated hardware. I have a fondness for AWS though, so I use that when I'm feeling lazy or when I want a particular feature they offer. I have been learning Go over the last couple of years, and having been raised on C in the 90s, it feels very comfortable for when I need to write system or network code. Nice idea for a post! I like hearing what individual people are into.

</comment><comment><USER5> A recent JDK, Groovy 2.3 or so, Grails 2.4 or so, Eclipse with the STS plugins for Groovy and Grails, running on Fedora Linux or CentOS. PostgreSQL 9.x database. KDE desktop environment, bash shell. For front-end stuff, pretty much just JQuery and Bootstrap. But I'm not primarily a front-end guy, so I don't get as deep into a lot of the different javascript tools and stuff as some people. I do like Hopscotch for building product tours though.

Angular is on my "to learn" list, and I'm always working to learn more about CSS.

For data-crunching on the backend: Hadoop 2, Hive, Pig, Impala. Kafka. Storm for real-time stream processing stuff.

Other "go to" libraries / tools:

Lucene for search

Tika for document parsing

HornetQ for JMS / message queuing

Activiti for workflow / BPM

Camel for message routing

On the "to evaluate / learn" list: Spark, Samza

</comment><comment><USER6> We are just now picking ours:

Apache or IIS webserver

Javascript includes Server Side Includes or SSI for templating system - <USER2> once, use everywhere

doT.js is a possible contender at [http://olado.github.io/doT/](http://olado.github.io/doT/)

Etherpad server for content creation ( think Wiki or shared Google Docs where those invited can write, update and edit documents for later placement ).

Javascript JQuery library ( demos here [http://jquerydemo.com](http://jquerydemo.com) )

Javascript html5shiv - Makes previous IE9 browsers know some HTML5 [https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv](https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv)

Bootstrap framework - [http://getbootstrap.com](http://getbootstrap.com)

Brackets.io by Adobe or text editor of your choice - [http://brackets.io](http://brackets.io)

BBEdit - text editor ( commercial product ) - [http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/](http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/)

Photoshop - images ( commercial product ) -

databases - ?

Nodejs - Node is a javascript framework [https://www.npmjs.com](https://www.npmjs.com) and [http://nodejs.org/download/](http://nodejs.org/download/)

Any tips welcome.

<comment> at-fates-hands First time I've seen someone recommend Brackets. I've been using it since some of the early sprint versions and really like it.

The Extract and split screen updates have been fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Emacs + Clojure + Postgres + Linux + Amazon AWS.

Really a nice place to be, with structural editing, an extremely clear and simple routing scheme, functions all the way down, picking and choosing libraries (as opposed to frameworks) as some of the best attributes of this stack.

</comment><comment><USER8> My "zen" stacks 1\. for APIs: Scala + Spray + Slick + Postgres, Java + Dropwizard

2\. frontend: React.js + Emacs as a code editor

3\. quick stuff, scripting: Python + Flask (optionally) + Emacs

</comment><comment><USER9> Clojurescript Om Light table Postgres

</comment><comment><USER10> C / OpenBSD, vim, git. Although embedded C is fun too.</comment>


The Best Little Bar in Manhattan: An Experiment in Belief versus Bourbon - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/the-best-little-bar-in-manhattan

<comment><USER2> Strange story.

I'll refrain from projecting too much onto the author, and instead say that his characters' relationship to alcohol is downright alien to me. As is their relationship to women, who are apparently without exception unpleasant, disapproving control freaks:

>your mother—not to mention that wife of yours—would never forgive me if I helped you find the place

>So far as Mrs. McHintry is concerned, I work late on Mondays. If she complains about the smell of booze on me, I tell her I had a beer on the way home to wind down

> The evening wore on. I had to phone an increasingly exasperated Donna a > couple more times

> I do recall the frequent appearance of terms like "skunk," "loaded," "all on > my own," "lush," "douchebag" and even a tentative "staying with my mother > awhile"—we both recognized this last as an empty threat, because … well, you > remember your grandmother, don't you?

</comment><comment><USER3> > If you Google very carefully today you'll eventually find > RencourtBlitzenMcPhail

I did perform a Google search for 'RencourtBlitzenMcPhail' and all I got was that one article! Perhaps other users of the Google search service will get this comment too, but the real 'RencourtBlitzenMcPhail' will probably remain elusive for a while. Maybe I can't 'Google very carefully', I'm not really sure what that means in the context of searching for RencourtBlitzenMcPhail.

<comment><USER4> This story is a work of fiction.

<comment><USER5> And your point is?

<comment><USER6> There is no RencourtBlitzenMcPhail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this about debt in general, or a particular instance or kind of debt?</comment>


Ask HN: practical uses for augmented reality? - <AUTHOR>

Say you've got a pair of computerized glasses that can augment your vision, not just by overlaying, but by projecting 3D models onto your environment.<p>While I think this tech is really cool, I'm having a hard time seeing what industries could benefit, or how one could make a business out of it. <comment><USER2> -Modify your surroundings:

Don't like the bare walls and blue doors at your office? Use the glasses to put pictures up on the walls and change the door colors.

Don't like your husband's shirt but don't want to insult him? Have you glasses display a nicer shirt on him.

Can't afford a nice couch because you're a starving start-up founder? Get a cheep one on Craigslist and use your glasses to make it look like it's made of leather.

Don't want to pay for a TV in every room, or a second monitor for your desktop? Use your glasses glasses to virtualize all of those.

-Business uses:

Need to tour the new building but don't want to fly halfway across the globe? Tap into a co-worker's glasses' feed to get a real-life virtual tour.

What to do A/B testing on physical devices? Virtual models are even cheaper than 3D printed ones.

-Education uses:

Teaching students about the functioning of a cell? Let them actually enter the cell and explore how it works themselves.

Want to give students an impression of how huge dinosaurs actually were? Put a life-size virtual model of a T-Rex inside the classroom.

</comment><comment><USER3> Teachers knowing names and information of each of their students just by looking at them.

Virtual stores occupying empty physical space.

Guides on how to do just about anything—learn to play instruments, repair things, emergency first aid.

Navigation overlays and guided tours with Wikipedia information popups.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Teachers knowing names and information of each of their students just by looking at them."

Maybe for substitutes.

"Guides on how to do just about anything—learn to play instruments, repair things, emergency first aid."

Here are some of my thoughts on instruments. For the piano, you're much better off creating a keyboard that lights up the right keys at the right time so you just place your hands on top of them, and build muscle memory faster that way. For string instruments (including the guitar), you're not really able to look at your own hands, and looking at someone else's hands in a reversed view is confusing - and can be done with a video overlay vs. any augmented reality. Could I be overlooking a teaching mechanism here you had in mind?

"Navigation overlays and guided tours with Wikipedia information popups."

Yeah I generally think overlays are better uses for computerized glasses. However my question was targeted specifically at augmented reality, which I consider different from straight-up overlays such as Google Glass showing you a map. Perhaps I should have clarified better.

"Virtual stores occupying empty physical space."

This I like. I was actually tinkering with software to make a marker-based AR haunted house. Basically there would be QR-code-like markers everywhere, and as you'd look at them through the Glasses, something scary would pop up =) Regardless, the haunted house idea seems like a novelty. And the virtual store thing seems to imply that lots of consumers would have computerized glasses - or the store could own them and lend them out, but then how many do you need to buy, and is it really worth it?

<comment><USER3> Regarding teachers, I'm thinking of lecture classes with 100 students. A similar feature would be great in other opt-in environments like parties or other situations where one wants to meet people.

Regarding teaching mechanisms, for instruments the advantage of AR over custom hardware is that you don't have to buy a special learning piano or guitar, you can just use the one you've got with your AR glasses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Guide someone through repairing a car or some other device.

Assessing volume and packing a truck or car optimally.

Making it look like someone's zipper was down.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand the value proposition because I believe most of these problems (with the exception of possibly the last) can be solved more easily.

Video instructions - even if overlayed in Google Glass, let alone a nearby phone or tablet - will do this fine. This is the most compelling AR demo I've seen that realizes your first idea: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVV5tUmky6c](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVV5tUmky6c)

While it's super-cool tech, I really feel that a video screen or overlay video does the same job just fine. It's still digital content consumption, at the end of the day.

So then there's digital content creation. Well, you can try sculpting or designing structures with your hands some virtual 3D models all day, but I bet (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that it will _never_ be as efficient as using CAD with a screen and qwerty keyboard.

"Assessing volume and packing a truck or car optimally." Hmm, this sounds like an interesting use-case. Could you give an example of where this might save people tons of time and/or money?

<comment><USER4> As a glasses wearer, I feel like replacing my lenses with screens eventually is a forgone conclusion.

Imagine something with LIDAR, scans the engine block to know what model year you are working on and pulls up the Chilton Manual 3D app and suddenly you know exactly where that vacuum hose is that you want to replace.

The packing one is just because I'm moving right now, and again, what I want is, something to scan the boxes and the vehicle and let me know how to fit the most stuff in. It wouldn't have to be glasses, but it wouldn't bother me.

You bring up input devices and such, and I really just think of it as a display, plain and simple. I would much rather manipulate interfaces that I already know or are made for manipulation. But I don't need to carry around a screen all the time, either.

tl;dr I don't want to wave my hands around like an idiot OR hunch over staring at a screen.</comment></comment></comment>


Commas.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/harmankang/commas.js <comment><USER2> Not sure I get why you'd use it. Easier to just type the commas, or if dynamic get the server to render them. Also this doesn't seem to take localisation into account.</comment>


Remote work statistics for April 2017 - <AUTHOR> Hello HN. I see a lot of people here ask regularly what skills to learn to get a job they can do remotely. I aggregate remote jobs from the majority of job boards on my website. Here's a data dump I did today for you:
Top remote jobs (last 30 days)

    - <USER34>
    - <USER36>
    - <USER41>
    - <USER39>
    - Full Stack
    - <USER6>
    - <USER35>
    - <USER37>
    - Product Manager
    - <USER38>
    - Meteor JS
    - Machine Learning
 Top remote jobs (last 90 days)

    - <USER34>
    - <USER35>
    - Full Stack
    - <USER36>
    - <USER37>
    - Product Manager
    - Meteor JS
    - <USER38>
    - <USER39>
    - Dev Ops
    - <USER40>
    - <USER41>
 Fastest growing remote jobs (last 30 days)

    - Machine Learning
    - <USER46>
    - <USER42>
    - <USER48>
    - <USER44>
 Fastest dropping remote jobs (last 30 days)

    - <USER22>
    - Sys Admin
    - <USER56>
    - <USER58>
    - <USER59>

 The usual caveats apply, data scope is limited and there might be many more reasons for job categories to rise and fall outside of actually becoming more or less popular (for example, people hiring outside of job boards).
- @levelsio
(Source: Remote OK, https://remoteok.io/remote-work-statistics) <comment><AUTHOR> Update: did a new data dump with a broader range of job boards, data is almost same but some tiny differences:

Top remote jobs (last 30 days)

        - <USER34>
        - Full Stack
        - <USER37>
        - <USER35>
        - <USER36>
        - <USER39>
        - <USER40>
        - Product Manager
        - <USER41>
        - Dev Ops
        - <USER38>
        - Meteor JS

Top remote jobs (last 90 days)

        - <USER34>
        - <USER35>
        - Full Stack
        - <USER36>
        - <USER37>
        - Product Manager
        - Meteor JS
        - <USER38>
        - <USER39>
        - Dev Ops
        - <USER40>
        - <USER41>

Fastest growing remote jobs (last 30 days)

        - <USER42>
        - Machine Learning
        - <USER43>
        - <USER44>
        - <USER45>
        - <USER46>
        - <USER47>
        - Customer Support
        - <USER48>
        - <USER49>
        - React Native
        - <USER50>

Fastest dropping remote jobs (last 30 days)

        - <USER51>
        - <USER52>
        - Ruby on Rails
        - <USER53>
        - <USER54>
        - <USER55>
        - Social Media
        - <USER56>
        - <USER57>
        - <USER58>
        - <USER59>
        - <USER60>

(Source: Remote OK, [https://remoteok.io/remote-work- statistics](https://remoteok.io/remote-work-statistics))

</comment><comment><USER61> Clojure's gonna take off any day now, I just know it... any day....

I'm surprised I don't see Java (could be included in 'Backend', I suppose). As a JVM guy who's always wanted a remote gig I find your list depressing.

<comment><USER62> I have been working remote for 8+ years doing JVM stuff. Lots of jobs that are not listed as being remote can usually be convinced to allow it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Really surprised to see how high up Meteor is on that list. As an early Meteor fan, it felt like its growth had stagnated over the last year or two.

<comment><USER64> Keep in mind that it's data from only his site so it's got the noise of a small dataset.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. This is an analysis on 1,950 remote jobs in the last 90 days. This is a somewhat representative sub set of most job boards remote jobs as I aggregate from there but it's indeed not the whole remote work market obviously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The interesting thing with Remote is that most companies these days "allows remote" as part of their package. Not a statistical data but I can see it[1] more often these days, whilst looking at our internal tool[2] that we used to look for new interesting prospects for consulting.

1\. [https://www.dropbox.com/s/b937olnwswwkwlm/getbetterluck-2017...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/b937olnwswwkwlm/getbetterluck-2017APR25.png?dl=0)

2\. We aggregate lots of well-known to lesser-known job boards for our internal consumption. Cleaning it up a bit. Will release it to public in about a month's time. [https://getbetterluck.com/](https://getbetterluck.com/)

P.S. If you're looking for a job either full-time, contract or freelance, you might like to try this. Ping me if you need very alpha test access now.

<comment><USER66> > The interesting thing with Remote is that most companies these days "allows > remote" as part of their package.

This question goes for the original post too -- but how many of these are _truly_ remote? i.e. I can work for the majority of the year remotely, with maybe one or two visits to the company main office, if that.

Asking because I see far too many companies these days trying to brand themselves as remote-friendly, when they really mean something with far less freedom, like "We'll maybe allow you to work from home two days out of five".

<comment><USER65> Well, when they mention "allows remote", it is mostly not remote (work anywhere, wherever you like, just get things done) from what I gather. This is from a British company in London, "because we love family, and are a family company, we will allow 2 days a week for you to work from anywhere." :-)

<comment><USER67> I think it's definitely a spectrum.

To me the most important binary distinction is whether it's "remote friendly" meaning you can work from home if you give an excuse, and remote friendly meaning it's expected that you'll be working remotely on a regular basis.

Once you're in that second category there's range from "work from home one to several days a week" and "never set foot in the office again"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> A lot of people will probably disagree with me but I'm not a fan of remote work and don't think it suits most companies.

So many employees like to slack and procrastinate. At all the companies I've been at people will instantly open Facebook, reddit or HN as soon as management can't see their screens. It's so easy to wing some BS at the daily stand-up that makes it look like you're productive. No-one really questions how long things take and even if it puts you in unnecessary crunches sometimes to catch up to some deadline you still do it.

Working from home is like haven for slackers. No-one can see your screen and you can do whatever you want. I'm sure there are people that are highly effective working from home but I think those are in minority.

<comment><USER69> If management can't find a way to measure output, then having butts in seats isn't gonna fix that. That's a management problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> _waits patiently for elixir jobs_

<comment><USER71> waits _restlessly_ for elixir jobs... :)

Seriously, left my decently paying Tech Lead job in Bangalore to take a break and work with Elixir/OTP.

Would be nice to see an upward trend in Elixir related remote jobs.

<comment><USER70> best thing those of us championing elixir can do is build apps in elixir that need to be maintained.. the more elixir apps in the wild, the more jobs we can create.

my studio is doing all of our greenfield backend work in elixir and we're all very happy with our current stack.

haven't been this happy since the early days of rails. elixir and react are a match made in heaven.

<comment><USER71> Agree that's a big way to create more jobs. Currently building for myself, hope to do it for others too in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I just want to say that I love working with Laravel and am glad to see it growing.

</comment><comment><USER73> These looks like they could just as well be stats for movement in non-remote work offers.

It might be useful to do a comparison.

</comment><comment><USER74> Interesting, how about adding them into a graph and show it on a weekly basis? I always wondered, plus if you could do something like avg salary and such... and evolution. Also to take in consideration the country and inflation over there, plays a big role.

What do you think about this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have them now in a graph per quarter (90 days), see [https://remoteok.io/remote-work-statistics](https://remoteok.io/remote-work- statistics)

<comment><USER74> Can you add it percentual? I mean I can do the math, but I think it will be a lot more useful to see out of the total available remote jobs were it stands. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! I'll change that now. Check back in 5 mins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Damn. Nothing with C, C++ or C#.

<comment><USER76> It is relatively easy to get C# remote positions specially for web applications (WPF and UWP not so much), the problem is with C and C++, as they are being pushed down the software stack.

So most C and C++ greenfield projects happen to require physical access to hardware that cannot leave the company premises.

<comment><USER77> Most of the positions identified are in the "low pay webdev" category. I don't mean low pay in comparison with median incomes nation wide. I mean low pay in comparison with the industry. I wonder how many of those WordPress "jobs" are really $35/hr 6-month contracts or low fixed-rate projects, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not cheap Upwork positions. This is companies payinf $200 to $400 for a single job post. Therefore salary is probably in the $2,000 to $5,000 range at least.

Remember many companies use WordPress as part of their website and it might be "part of" the stack.

<comment><USER77> $2,000 to $5,000 per what increment of time? $35/hr is $70k/yr, or about $5800/month. (Numbers assume 2000 paid hours in a year.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I have no data on this unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> How come Xamarin tag exists, but there is no python?

<comment><USER79> Makes no sense. After a quick search on StackOverflow for remote jobs I see:

\- 32 JS offers: [http://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Remote&d=20&u=Km&tl=j...](http://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Remote&d=20&u=Km&tl=javascript+)

\- 15 Python offers: [http://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Remote&d=20&u=Km&tl=p...](http://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Remote&d=20&u=Km&tl=python+)

\- 10 PHP offers: [http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/developer-jobs-using-php-in- re...](http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/developer-jobs-using-php-in- remote?sort=i)

\- 8 Ruby offers: [http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/developer-jobs-using-ruby- in-r...](http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/developer-jobs-using-ruby-in- remote?sort=i)

<comment><AUTHOR> Some jobs are reposted repeatedly, I don't count these as new jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Anybody knows the reason for the drop in mobile/android postings?

Less demand in general?</comment>


"Most insecure router ever made" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ioactive.com/2016/08/multiple-vulnerabilities-in-bhu-wifi.html <comment><USER2> Considering it was bought in china, is the insecurity a bug or a feature?</comment>