Trump Readies Sweeping Tariffs and Investment Restrictions on China - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/us/politics/trump-china-trade-measures.html <comment><USER2> Just my opinion but I think trade wars is heading in the wrong direction. We need to open trade more. At first it will cause pain and inefficiency, but specialization and collaboration has a larger net benefit to humans than both countries manufacturing everything themselves. But of course over specialization weakens the whole system when a piece goes missing perhaps.

<comment><USER3> I agree. However, it only works when trade is fair.

Overall, what has happened is that low skill and unskilled jobs have gone to where labour is the cheapest. This has benefitted the poorest of the poor, at the expense of poor people in first world countries. The other consequence is that labour and safety standards are effectively eroded as where these jobs are offshore to are unlikely to enforce these requirements. The result of this has been to reduce global poverty and drive down the prices of goods (i.e. clothing).

However, then you have places like China which then place restrictions on market entrants, enable local companies to steal intellectual property and undercut western companies, without legal recourse. No-one has been willing to call China on these actions for fear of losing out on the entire market.

<comment><USER4> Not much I can disagree with there, except that apart from labour and safety standards none of what you describe is in any way unfair. Being poor and willing to work for less money isn't cheating. Meanwhile, as they develop and labour wages rise and the pool of untapped labour dries up, the bargaining power of workers in China and elsewhere to get improved wages and conditions also rises. We can see that happening in China now.

It's indisputable that China has used many protectionist manoeuvres to hamper and limit foreign participation in Chinese markets, but western countries have been willing to accept that in return for having access at all. If we want to renegotiate that position fine, and maybe judicious use of tariffs and restrictions could be a useful tool to use to prompt serious negotiation, but that's not the same thing as just flat out hitting the nuclear button and going for an all out trade war, which is what seems to be happening.

<comment><USER3> It may not seem unfair to you and I, who have skills and knowledge that keep us highly employable.

I think in its totality trade has globally reduced poverty, and improved lives globally. But that doesn't mean that there are not people who have been harmed by it, and see it as unfair. If your grandfather and father worked in a steel mill, and you worked in that steel mill and got let go because "its cheaper in China" then I can understand why that person may not feel that it is fair, to be sacked from everything they know. Whose family helped build and run that mill, through blood, sweat and tears.

Historically, elites have tried to mask this by saying that these low skill jobs will be replaced by higher skilled and higher paid jobs, and through training those low skilled works can just take these higher paying jobs. The rise in Trump is in large part due to the perceived callousness of elites on those who have been made worse due to trade. I think this is the key failing through-out the Anglosphere. How to get unskilled people into work, how to enable them to maintain their dignity, and do an honest days work for an honest days wage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are we really back in 1929? Seems like it [1]. [1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot–Hawley_Tariff_Act](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot–Hawley_Tariff_Act)

<comment><USER6> The US has a trade deficit towards China, so China has more to lose in a trade war than the US. Therefore the US can try to impose a limited amount of trade sanctions on goods from China without getting punished for it. It seems just common sense economics to me.

<comment><USER7> There's nothing common sense about this. It's just stupid. But do few Americans understand economics that I can see the majority falling for it. People will happily vote to cut their own throats in order to punish some out group.

For future reference the giant trade deficit has benefited the USA enormously and increased quality of of life of most Americans. The incredible thing here is not that we import so much from China but that the hyper-productive Chinese exporters and manufactures have been so willing to surrender real goods and labor for the green pieces of paper we call currency which the government can create at the push of the button. This was the trade of the century.

I suspect that this will ultimately only help China and hurt America. China will be forced to develop their own internal markets and diversify their exports more -- which they've been doing already. You'll also just see more action from other low wage exporters like Vietnam. In the end Americans will just as price increases. Tariffs won't bring back jobs, reduce the extreme inequality that's killing the country nor are they real investment.

<comment><USER8> That's a shortsighted view. As the saying goes, "you can have the free apples, as long as I own the orchard". At some point, there will be no more free apples, and you have no idea how to farm

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Trump will tax americans for $30bn per year in imported goods/raised domestic prices. Many cheer their increased costs. :D

There are no global benefits to limiting trade, which this action is. Neither are there any overall regional benefits. Certain industries will benefit, and certain industries will lose, on both sides of the border, as markets adjust.

Some people will be forced to do their trade with different people for higher prices, rise prices, or close business, or suck it up in private life. That's about it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm very much in favor of free movement of people, capital and goods, but would like to point out that David Ricardo himself had to caveat his free trade argument:

 _Ricardo recognized that applying his theory in situations where capital was mobile would result in offshoring, and therefore economic decline and job loss. To correct for this, he argued that (i) most men of property will be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek[ing] a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations, and (ii) that capital was functionally immobile._ [1]

I definitely did not learn this in Microeconomics when we studied comparative advantage.

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

<comment><USER11> Did you study Macroeconomics? It's a fairly accepted phenomenon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization) (identified there by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson), about as "mainstream" as it's possible for an economist to be).

"Whichever factor receives the lowest price before two countries integrate economically and effectively become one market will therefore tend to become more expensive relative to other factors in the economy, while those with the highest price will tend to become cheaper. An often-cited example of factor price equalization is wages. When two countries enter a free trade agreement, wages for identical jobs in both countries tend to approach each other."

It could be argued that this is a good thing if one considers the benefit of bringing third-world people out of abject poverty to outweight the loss of slightly reducing the living standards of first-world semi-skilled labour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> seems to be an example of cutting of one's nose to spite the face. This will unfortunately prove counter-productive.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it possible to bet on a rising consumer price index?

</comment><comment><USER14> A couple of decades too late.</comment>


Critical and Significant Dates - <AUTHOR> http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/critdate.htm

<comment><USER2> _" 2^1E80 approx. - As there are only about 1E80 particles in the observable universe, it has by now become impossible to write the date"_

Reminded me of Wikipedia's Timeline of the Far Future [1].

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

<comment><USER3> I love the "Bubnoff unit" mentioned in that article - a unit of speed at 1 meter per 1 million years, used to describe erosion of rocks:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "20??-??-?? ??? - Introduction of the Euro in the UK ??? "

At least it was non-committal.

<comment><USER5> Hey, it committed to a specific century. Given how long it took the UK to decimalize and, therefore, decimalise the pound, that's pretty ambitious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone else notice his hostile tone in the copyright/license text.

Some of this sort of belongs on Wikipedia.

<comment><USER7> You can re-phrase it and use that anywhere. It's only the text that's copyrighted, the information in it is freely usable.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Reconstruction of Data from a Chart or Graph - <AUTHOR>

I have here several charts of driving cycles. These are standard plots derived from real traffic data, of velocity versus time. Unfortunately I cannot find the data anywhere. So I hatched a plan: maybe there's software that will reconstruct data from a graph or chart? Does anyone know?
If not, I'll just write it myself and open source it. It seems like a generally useful thing in engineering and science. It deserves an application (maybe even a web application).
A picture of the drivecycle is here: http://einfall.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/reconstruction-of-data-from-a-chart-or-graph/ <comment><USER2> A trivial search turned up this: <http://www.uniphiz.com/digitizing.htm>

I'm sure there are more tools out there like it too, but you may need Windows to run them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a bundle; for some reason I didn't come across that on my own search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _"... maybe there's software that will reconstruct data from a graph or chart? ..."_

Compelling idea. Are the sources all images? Using software to process images to extract information?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the sources are all images. It's often the case that one sees a graph in a paper or on the web or something, and one wants the data that constructed it. This is one of those times.</comment></comment>


SICP 2.6: Church Numerals (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://jlongster.com/2011/12/16/sicp-26-church-notation.html

<comment><USER2> Tom Stuart used various Church encodings in his presentation "Programming with Nothing" [1] [2]. He used nothing in the Ruby language but creating procs and calling procs. He demonstrated this by implementing the fizz-buzz program in nothing but procs.

[1] [http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing](http://codon.com/programming- with-nothing)

[2] [http://computationbook.com](http://computationbook.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> What's really interesting beyond just type coercion and "increment," is the way addition, multiplication, and exponentiation were implemented by Church and Rosser back in the 30's (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus)). Rather than using SICP-style recursion to count down to zero and repeatedly apply inc/add/mul, they took advantage of some of the special properties of Church numerals. A year later, and I still have not really wrapped my head around their solutions. Maybe you will fare better.

For a real challenge, try to implement the decrement function. Legend has it, Rosser thought of the solution while on the dentist's chair. (It is a bit heavier on code than the other Church numeral functions, but conceptually simple - and was a creative idea at the time, before functional programming had really come into being.)

<comment><USER4> The graphical notation for the decrement function

      ┬──────────
      ┼─────┬────
      ┼─────┼─┬──
      │ ──┬─┼ ┼ ┬
      │ ┬─┼─┼ │ │
      │ │ ├─┘ │ │
      │ ├─┘   │ │
      └─┤     │ │
        └─────┤ │
              └─┘

makes for an artistic picture...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's what the factorial function on Church numerals ends up looking like if you expand it out:

        ((λ (f) ((λ (g) (g g)) (λ (h) (λ (x) ((f (h h)) x)))))
       (λ (f)
          (λ (n)
             (if ((λ (p a b) (p a b)) ((λ (n) (n (λ (x) (λ (x y) y)) (λ (x y) x))) n) t nil)
               ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x)))) (λ (f x) x))
               ((λ (m n) (m ((λ (m n) (λ (f x) (m f (n f x)))) n) (λ (f x) x)))
                n (f ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (n (λ (g h) (h (g f))) (λ (u) x) (λ (u) u)))) n)))))))

Note the use of the Y combinator to implement recursion :-)

Here it is in action computing the factorial of 6:

        ? (((λ (f) ((λ (g) (g g)) (λ (h) (λ (x) ((f (h h)) x)))))
       (λ (f)
          (λ (n)
             (if ((λ (p a b) (p a b)) ((λ (n) (n (λ (x) (λ (x y) y)) (λ (x y) x))) n) t nil)
               ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x)))) (λ (f x) x))
               ((λ (m n) (m ((λ (m n) (λ (f x) (m f (n f x)))) n) (λ (f x) x)))
                n (f ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (n (λ (g h) (h (g f))) (λ (u) x) (λ (u) u)))) n)))))))
      ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
       ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
        ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
         ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
          ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
           ((λ (n) (λ (f x) (f (n f x))))
            (λ (f x) x))))))))
        #<COMPILED-LEXICAL-CLOSURE #x30200105130F>
        ? (funcall * '1+ 0)
        720

<comment><USER4> Church factorial can be implemented without recursion though.

Hint: consider a function that maps the pair <n,n!> to <(n+1),(n+1)!> ...

<comment><USER4> Here is Church factorial in graphical notation:

      ┬──────────────────────
      │ ┬────────────── ─ ┬ ┬
      │ ┼─┬───────┬──── ┬ │ │
      │ ┼─┼───────┼─┬── │ │ │
      │ │ ┼─┬─┬── ┼─┼─┬ │ │ │
      │ │ ┼─┼─┼─┬ │ ├─┘ │ │ │
      │ │ └─┤ ├─┘ ├─┘   │ │ │
      │ │   ├─┘   │     │ │ │
      │ └───┤     │     │ │ │
      │     ├─────┘     │ │ │
      └─────┤           │ │ │
            └───────────┤ │ │
                        └─┤ │
                          └─┘

<comment><USER5> That's pretty cool looking, but I have no idea what I'm looking at. Does this notation have a name? Is it documented somewhere? (Hm, I wonder how hard it would be to write a parser for it. :-)

<comment><USER4> That's my graphical notation for lambda calculus, documented at [http://www.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/diagrams.html](http://www.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/diagrams.html)

Btw, here's an even shorter version of factorial:

      ┬────────────────
      ┼─────────────┬──
      │ ──┬──────── ┼ ┬
      │ ┬─┼─┬────── │ │
      │ │ │ ┼─┬─┬── │ │
      │ │ │ ┼─┼─┼─┬ │ │
      │ │ │ └─┤ ├─┘ │ │
      │ │ │   ├─┘   │ │
      │ │ ├───┘     │ │
      │ ├─┘         │ │
      └─┤           │ │
        └───────────┤ │
                    └─┘

In de-Bruijn notation it is \\\2 (\\\1 (2 (\\\3 2 (2 1)))) (\2) (\1), which in conventional notation is \n\f.n (\x\m.m (x (\a\b.m a (a b)))) (\x.f) (\x.x)

<comment><USER5> BTW, is there a description of how this works written up anywhere? I tried to reverse-engineer it and got lost in lambdas. (I did manage to translate it into Scheme and verify empirically that it works!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh man. I worked through SICP when I was just starting to program. Little did I know that no other book would be so full of gems and enlightenment like this[0]. Some of the stuff stopped me dead and caused me to daze off for several minutes.

What's amazing is that I feel like I didn't fully "get" a large portion of the book. I could work through it again in a few years and learn something from every page.

[0]Other books come close, but the impact of this book will stay with me forever.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I was doing this exercise with a friend on Understudy, he found solutions to multiplication and exponentiation too. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the exponentiation. Passing a number to another number?!

      (define (multiply number1 number2)
        (lambda (f)
          (number1 (lambda (x) ((number2 f) x)))))

      (define (exponentiate base exponent)
        (exponent base))

<comment><USER8> Let's use "twice" as the name of Church numeral 2, and "thrice" as the name of numeral 3.

If you look at the input and output of thrice, it looks like this:

       (function that gets applied once) -> (function that gets applied 3 times)

What if we used the output as the input again?

       (function that gets applied once) -> (function that gets applied 3 times) -> (function that gets applied 9 times)

We have a name for what we just did to the "thrice" function, and that name is "twice". So that's (twice thrice), and we can see it makes something happen 3^2 = 9 times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Along the same vane from the math world is how natural numbers (which can then be used to build the reals, etc) are represented using only empty sets. Pretty awesome.

See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set- theoretic_definition_of_nat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set- theoretic_definition_of_natural_numbers)

</comment><comment><USER10> This exercise was an enlightening when I read it for the first time.

I came just after 2.5 which was already an awesome magic trick.</comment>


How privacy advocates shined light on the NSA's unconstitutional surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/22/heres-how-privacy-advocates-shined-light-on-the-nsas-unconstitutional-surveillance/?tid=rssfeed

<comment><USER2> It's a shame that the EFF had to fight so hard to get the opinions. What is really telling is that the Obama Administration delayed the release till after the FAA was passed and signed.... and then released a completely redacted version. So much for "most transparent administration in history", eh? Just read this and laugh: [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment)

<comment><USER3> _In a small, secret room in the White House_

Obama: It would be great if I could actually live up to my promise about transparency, but the NSA knows about that I affair I had last year.

Adviser #1: What if we got someone to "leak" the information, and then just bumbled around like idiots trying to "catch" the guy?

Adviser #2: Better make sure he is well taken care of, but by a country we can always blame. How about Russia? They owe us for those spies we caught and sent back to them a few years ago, and anyway Putin always wants to look like he is taking a stand against us.

Adviser #1: Good idea! Let's find out which low-level guys at the NSA can be trusted to keep their mouths shut.

Obama: I like it. I bet those Wikileaks assholes would gobble this crap up. Get Kerry on the line, tell him to get ready to look like a buffoon this summer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sigh. So what? The gov will do whatever they want to whomever they want. Bills and rights be damned.

<comment><USER5> This is a completely self-defeating attitude, that gets a person nowhere and gets in the way of other people.

It's also simply not true, as shown by the change evidenced by the very release of these court documents, in this very article.

Be wary of those that publicly express premature defeat. It's a poisonous attitude.

Edit: the only reason to respond to a troll like this is that the bad attitude is infectious.

<comment><USER4> Cute.

<comment><USER6> > Cute.

"Lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way"

<comment><USER4> Give it a rest, Guy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pocket Ariely – make sense of life with Dan Ariely's newest app - <AUTHOR> http://danariely.com/pocket-ariely/?ref=ycombinator <comment><AUTHOR> Dan and his team at Duke's Center for Advanced Hindsight are bringing you his newest app: Pocket Ariely. The app's goal is to help people make better decisions in life. In order to do that, we have created a curated library of Dan's most relevant work in Behavioral Economics and categorized the content into "areas of life" for easier consumption. Even though the app is not free, all profits will go back to the Center for Advanced Hindsight to fuel research that is helping advance the field of BE and decision making. We know that the app is not perfect, but we are working on providing users with a decent UX/UI, even though we only have a small team working on the app (this is a bootstrapped effort after all). Please feel free to share your comments and we will diligently work on taking care of what's important to ensure users love the app!

</comment><comment><USER2> That test was really irritating. I'm not going to share it before I see my results.

Was the goal to just make me angry? Was I part of some weird behavioral experiment?</comment>


Bujagali: Incredibly Fast JavaScript Templating - <AUTHOR> http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2010/10/bujagali-incredibly-fast-javascript-templating/

<comment><USER2> What about search engines? If HTML is only generated in the browser, they may not find anything to index.

<comment><AUTHOR> This supports search engines just fine, you just render the template server- side.

<comment><USER2> I overlooked the last bullet point below "Goals".</comment></comment></comment>


Austin is getting its first co-working space - <AUTHOR> http://conjunctured.com/blog/not-scouring-anymore/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations guys. I keep running into your sites ever since SXSW. I'm excited about what you all are doing. Have you guys already figured out costs and filled up the place? It looks very cool. Nice location.

<comment><USER3> We're working this out as we speak! Make sure to keep up with the blog as we're posting info everyday as it becomes available on conjunctured.com. We're looking to be open in some capacity by the beginning of the month.

If you're going to innovationCamp on the 28th, we're a sponsor and will be around AND we're hosting the official after party, so make sure you attend both so you can ask us questions and come check out the space in person.

Send me an email or a tweet for more info! @cesart // email@example.com</comment></comment>


An 18 year old's very brief thoughts on iOS 7 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/trends-predictions/611cfe1cee05

<comment><USER2> Daniel, your age is irrelevant.

Apple looked at the steps other companies took and followed suit: webOS-like multitasking, Android-like control panel widgets, Microsoft-like thin UI fonts and flat surfaces. This is not necessarily a bad thing -- for a while, other players were catching up with Apple's design. But now, Apple is catching up with their innovations (and graphic design memes).</comment>


Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of 52,000-person Reply-All email storm - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/26/microsoft_reply_all_email_storm_52000/ <comment><USER2> I love this, great share - thanks for making me smile today.</comment>


Former GE CEO Jeff Immelt Close to Becoming Uber's CEO - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/19/former-ge-ceo-jeff-immelt-close-to-becoming-ubers-ceo/ <comment><USER2> Seems like the story of apple again.

Jeff has no real tech credibility, he is a old school boys network business guy with dodgy/bad performance rap.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2017/03/28/ge- needs...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2017/03/28/ge-needs-a-new- strategy-and-a-new-ceo/#82df5f34ad28)

"At this point, it is probably too late to save GE. By losing sight of the need to grow, and instead focusing on optimizing the old business while selling assets to raise cash for reorganizations, Immelt has destroyed what was once a great innovation engine. Now that the activists have GE in their sites it is unlikely they will let it ever return to the company it once was - creating whole new markets by developing new technologies that people never before imagined. The future looks a lot more like figuring out how to maximize the value of each piece of meat as it's carved off the GE carcass."

Good luck to the folks that work at uber. You are going to need it.

<comment><USER3> That article is a bit biased, especially given that it ignores that not only has GE has paid out around $15 in dividends since Immelt took over, and that GE stock was in a huge bubble at the time.

Uber doesn't need tech leadership, it needs adult leadership. It's wounds are all entirely self inflicted.

<comment><USER4> To really dispute GP's claim you'd need to make a claim that GE has innovated in new categories under Immelt. The fact it paid out $15 in dividends might only support GP's (and the Forbes article) claim that Immelt has optimized for better selling what currently exists.

This is the same thing that happened to MSFT under Ballmer. MSFT stocked performed well, but they missed the biggest opportunity of the post-PC era (mobile), were late to the cloud game, and probably missed some other opportunities I can't think of.

<comment><USER3> Every company doesn't need to innovate, sometimes just running the business well is the best strategy. Warren Buffett's entire massive track record is based on companies that do little innovation. And it's a strategy Uber desperately needs.

<comment><USER4> There are certain industries and companies that you do really need to continue to innovate. If your product is a technology innovation, it has a life span. Eventually, something will replace it. History has proven this over and over again.

At this point of time, Uber is an excellent example. There is an innovation on the horizon that will completely change the taxi industry; autonomous vehicles. It's not a secret either. It's an inevitable future. The date of realization? No one knows, but we can see it's coming. Now, should Uber optimize on it's current product set and optimize until they are profitable on every ride? Or should they balance some part of that, with innovating on the future of autonomous vehicles? Travis seems to be working towards the big vision of driverless cars. What would Jeff do?

Fun stuff to think about :)

<comment><USER5> "It's an inevitable future"?

I'm assuming you mean it's something that will happen within the next 50 years?

I just don't get how this isn't a super-hard social/political issue that we haven't even begun to address as a society. Maybe spending significant resources on this now, is not optimal.

<comment><USER6> How are driverless cars a huge social issue?

<comment><USER5> * Who will be liable when a self-driving car hits someone.

* Will people, on mass, accept being driven around by a machines, on public roads.

* How will they deal with "trolley problem" type ethical scenarios? How will these decisions be made.

* How will self-driving cars cope with rural roads (where they are arguably MORE useful than in Urban settings better served by public transport)?

* How will they cope with signs/marking intentionally designed to fool machine vision systems. Who will be liable for accidents caused in these cases?

There are other issues too. However, overall, I think with some infrastructure investment we could have had self-driving cars since the late 90s early 2000s and there have been many prototypes. It's the ethical/social issues that are the bigger barrier in my mind.

<comment><USER7> > How will they cope with signs/marking intentionally designed to fool machine > vision systems.

They won't, but neither can humans. Signs aren't secure. Anyone with a wrench can take down a stop sign or put up a fake speed limit.

<comment><USER8> [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/sens...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/sensors/slight-street-sign-modifications-can-fool- machine-learning-algorithms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked 13 years under Immelts mediocre reign. Jeff tried to push rope, desperate knee-jerk reactions to stock analysts opinions, superficial restructuring with no real change to the company. GE leadership/management was vastly overvalued. Tech, and technical talent was a completely unvalued commodity, outsource to the lowest bidder in India. When he understood that software eats the world(via some SV guru whisperer) he tried to coin some "industrial internet" mumbo jumbo that was going to be a trillion dollar business. Out of touch like an unfrozen Dr. Evil.

<comment><USER10> Not sure how it's played out in practice but I've heard a lot about GE Predix. It's something like an IoT PaaS "Heroku for factories".

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predix_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predix_\(software\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who hasn't followed GE closely, why is Immelt considered a good CEO?

Looking at the numbers, over his tenure, GE's stock is down ~38% while the S&P 500 is up 123%. He did take over during some rocky times, but in the last 10 years, it's the same picture. If you put $100 into GE at the start of 2007, today you'd now have ~$105. For the S&P, you'd have $210. For a basket industrial stocks, you'd have $205.

[http://performance.morningstar.com/stock/performance- return....](http://performance.morningstar.com/stock/performance- return.action?t=GE&region=usa&culture=en-US)

How can the CEO who delivered this be considered good at his job?

<comment><USER12> Welch left that company in a sorry state, and a lot of the financial machinations that pumped up that stock were played out (and worse became liabilities) by the time Immelt arrived. (Welch turned GE into a leveraged bank that happened to make generators and plastic)

GE's stock performance imo is more about how the market no longer favors conglomerates and relatively boring industries.

<comment><USER11> If you assume Immelt was a great CEO and was just victim to Welch leaving GE in a very over-valued state, you'd expect the stock's performance to start off lousy and be better as Immelt's 16 year tenure went on. But that's not what we see. If you only take the last 10 or 5 years, GE has greatly underperformed both the market and similar industrial stocks.

Total return for 5 and 10 years:

        GE                      6.6% -1.6%
        S&P 500                 13.7% 7.6%
        Diversified Industrials 13.0% 6.4%

<comment><USER12> Frankly I don't know enough to say the Immelt was good or bad.

However... based on the experience of friends and colleagues who worked for different divisions of the company, I think that Welch's glory was a little overstated and not well understood at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Uber's valuation is entirely driven off the idea that they will reap monopoly profits in a market that is exploding. Like PayPal, Google and Facebook before them the wager is that they are going to be dominant and collect all the profits while all competitors are scraping up nickels and dimes.

I think that there is good reason to doubt that premise. Driving people around has a very different cost structure from a SaaS business that can throw off 85% margin if you get to product / market fit. Uber is a commodity and is trying to create margin by sucking all the air out of the room for competitors. A key strategy has been weaponized fund-raising. But even if you snuff out Lyft the barrier to entry for any player with a platform and scale is very low.

Then let's think about the tech. There's an implicit assumption that Uber is going to be a force in the self driving car market. Even if you set aside the Otto mess, why does anybody think that a 6 year old company that drew a car on Google Maps and did a payment integration is going to dominate the driverless car game? GM, Tesla, Volkswagen, Google have been thinking about this shit for decades. Why is Uber going to win? They can't run HR yet -- how are they going to own what happens next?

It's a monster business and they should be super happy with where they are. But I just don't see how they win in the shift that is coming. Car ownership is dying. It's becoming about transit experience

<comment><USER14> Uber has essentially become too-big-to-fail startup for all the involved investors, so at this point it's game of how you can get it into a stable state where the involved investors can withdraw without making the whole cardhouse fall down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Should Immelt become CEO this would be a huge culture shock not only to UBER employees but also drivers given the button downed culture Immelt originates from. He is also very financially focused so not sure we would continue to see pricing that we are accustomed to in the long-term. On the plus side, he comes with a reputation of integrity and professionalism which may help Uber gain entrance to cities and other areas that have previously been inaccessible.

I realize Immelt fits the picture that the Board is looking for (professional, intelligent, organizational, experienced, etc) but given SV's tendency towards men under 40, Immelt does not fit that bill at all. Would be interesting to see how well he would be accepted at all the tech conferences, events etc.

<comment><USER16> To my eye, SV has a preference for founders to be under 40. I'm not sure many care about the age of the CEO once the company has hit its stride. Uber has hit its stride, right?

<comment><USER17> Google with Eric Schmidt, for example. Coming from Novell, I thought he would not be a good fit...

<comment><USER18> But they replaced him

<comment><USER19> After ten years

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any insight on why his failures innovating at GE that caused him to resign aren't a red flag for an innovative company like Uber? Just because they're looking for a grown up?

<comment><USER21> Uber is an international brand for taxis. I'm not even sure why they are considered a tech company.

<comment><USER22> It's a mystery. They do have a nice app for hailing their taxis, but so does my local "legacy" taxi company.

Similarly: Why is Blue Apron a tech company? Their business model is putting food in a box, and then shipping it to people. That's great, but my local grocery chain does that too?

And then there's Juicero, who's only claim to being a tech company seems to be they printed QR codes on the packaging, despite the QR codes being entirely unnecessary to their core business. If Kraft puts a QR code on a box of mac and cheese so you can scan it and get a cooking instruction video on your phone, do they become a tech company too?

It's just branding.

<comment><USER23> My guess is that it's "cool" to be a tech company. It gives an excuse to not be profitable. Get wider range of talent.

My current and my previous company is a traditional business, both more than 20 years old. They sell a product or service that has existed for decades. But damn they both tried to say we are a startup, we are a tech company, etc etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They need to be in the self driving car game or the company has maybe a 7-10 year life span. Managing that innovation is necessary, and it's unclear they are optimizing around that.

The other interpretation is this decision is entirely about managing short term to get to an IPO, so investors who have lost faith can cash out. The candidate they are considering fits that bill more closely.

<comment><USER25> As valuearb has pointed out in other comments, it's not at all clear that Uber needs to be in the self-driving car game to the point of _making self-driving car technology,_ any more than they need to be in the human-driven taxi game they're in now to the point of buying an automobile manufacturer.

It's not at all unreasonable to think that the way to save Uber is to ruthlessly cut costs and focus on the business of fleet and driver management, _without_ banking on the assumption that the drivers are all going to go away within a decade. They should certainly still be watching autonomous cars, and perhaps find someone to partner with the way Lyft has with Google/Waymo, but I'm not at all convinced that's a business they should actually be in.

(I also suspect that the belief that we're going to have "level five" autonomous cars within the decade is far too optimistic. Also, an awful lot of discussions apparently assume the vast majority of consumers will, as soon as it becomes practical, stop buying cars and switch to autonomous taxis for all transportation needs. At least among American consumers, I'm going to stamp that with "[citation needed]" until further notice.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would anyone who is working on their own products partner with Uber (or Lyft etc.)? It's pretty clear that a genuine self-driving product would demolish the human driving equivalent. Forget network effect, it's going to be way cheaper.

<comment><USER26> Because, if they're still in business long-term, 1.) they're potentially a very big customer and 2.) They can be a great source of data and broader insights about exactly how people use/want to use taxis in different locations. What are the patterns? Pickup and dropoff points. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The question is whether to focus on tech leadership or adult leadership. In Meg, they had a candidate that had both experience scaling a tech company and maturity in building a real organization.

But TK and his buddies ruined that by leaking her name to the press and putting her in an impossible position. Given how leaky the board is - they can only go after candidates that are between jobs.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, if Uber needs some serious earnings manipulation, errr, management, Immelt is certainly the guy. And boy do they need it. Guy made something like $300-400 million during his tenure - GE stock did nothing.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't get why anyone would associate themselves with Uber at this point.

There is no fix for the "bro culture" at Uber except firing everyone and rebuilding the company from the ashes. Also, regulators are starting to apply pressure to all this "sharing economy" crap (Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Foodora and friends) which is basically just exploitation of workers combined with open ignorance of laws and regulations... which means that there is no way Uber can justify its valuation except they manage to roll out fully autonomous driving in 2 years.

<comment><USER30> We've been fixing "bro culture" given that it's largely a myth propogated by a select group of SV tech writers via cherry picking a small group of bad apples that are in no way representative of the majority of folks at the company.

You associate with Uber if you want the chance to solve big problems with incredible teams to continually improve a product that you and millions of others rely on as a matter of necessity.

The "Uber exploiting workers" meme is a classic, and holds little water given the fact that everyone on the platform consents to be there and can leave at any time. If anything, the flexible earnings opportunity Uber provides is transformational to a group of people who have historically had to make insidious trade offs (money over family time) to keep the lights on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is great news for Lyft.

<comment><USER32> And Apple, and Tesla, and Google, and GM, and Ford, and Toyota, and Honda, and Kia, and every other group out there working on a self driving car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Oh wow. When did Immelt become former GE CEO? With so much political news, I did not even notice he got fired recently. He will take Uber to the ground with his excellent non technical chops.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think a visionary tech leader, like Robin Chase (zipcar co-founder), would still be better as CEO, and hire someone with experience running a big company like Immelt as a COO.

</comment><comment><USER35> Historically speaking, putting blue chip CEOs in charge of tech companies, had worked out disasterously. The skill set, management style and risk profile is completely different.

<comment><USER36> Uber's been at war on several fronts for a while now, imo they were on a course for disaster already. I don't see how money managers in charge might help but if ever there were a time for hail marys for them, this is it.

I doubt it'll help but hey.

<comment><USER37> Hi

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Among the more interesting speculation I'd seen was that Marissa Meyer might be considered. Putting a woman in charge would send a clear and strong signal.

I'm not sure I'd want to inherit that particular mess, though, particularly not after Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER39> The culture change would be huge. I'm curious how the rank and file would respond.

</comment><comment><USER40> Lyft would love this.

</comment><comment><USER41> Hey this guy and Travis were both on Trumps business panel. At least Travis quit months ago, this guy waited until till the bitter end. Probably the biggest reason Travis quit outside of the public was because his employees asked him to. I wonder how the employees will react to this new guy support of Trump

<comment><USER42> Being on the oanel does not imply support.

Apple CEO is pretty anti Trump but still sits on panels.

Ignoring the president just creates divide and conflict. If you sit on the panel you get Trump's ear and don't really have to give anything in return.

<comment><USER43> Just to correct, the Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has attended meetings with Trump, but never sat on any formally organized council.

Jeff Immelt and Travis Kalannick sat on the "American Manufacturing Council" and "Strategic and Policy Forum" respectively, which had memberships and were regularly consulted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wow, this is going to be bad.

<comment><USER3> Why? He can't be anywhere near as bad as Kalanick.

<comment><USER45> There are different kinds of bad. Immelt has been at GE since 1982, which was about the time the early SMTP RFCs were written. That's a long time. Will the skills and behaviors that worked for him there be what Uber needs?

Personally, I'd be surprised if they were. Of course, it's not clear anybody has what Uber needs.

<comment><USER3> There are many skills in managing a business and people that never change. Uber needs basic blocking and tackling, not some new age management wonderkind. They absolutely don't need a technology person.

<comment><USER46> >Uber needs basic blocking and tackling

Can you explain these terms?

<comment><USER3> It's a term from American Football. It means that games are won not by superstars doing extraordinary things, but because unsung employees and managers are coached to do their jobs well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yeah, since he's did such a great job with GE's stock...</comment>


Soylent Is Not Healthy – Let's Create Something Better Together - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/elbmci/soylent_is_not_healthy_lets_create_something/ <comment><USER2> Top comment is pretty effective:

> _" You do know there are alternatives that are more along what you are > looking for, right? And they cost multiplies of soylent.

"This is like criticizing a Toyota when your specifications are for a Mercedes."_</comment>


London museum is livestreaming a key 21st-century artifact: festering sewage - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/stinky-festering-sewage-now-21st-century-artifact-watch-the-livestream/ <comment><USER2> A lot of people make a big deal about the less biodegradable wet wipes (people carry with them, and use instead of toilet paper) and disinfecting towelettes (used for killing germs on hard countertops and metal/plastic/wood/tile surfaces) but it's interesting to see that 90% of the mass is fat and or derivatives of fat as when converted to harded soap precipitates.

There's a lot of junk people flush, that aren't intended to pass down drains and sit in pipes or receive sewage processing. Are wet wipes and disposable germ cleansing antiseptic towels and products like daipers and condoms as big a deal as people make them out to be?

<comment><USER3> According to the sewage experts providing an analysis of the Whitechapel _fatberg_ in London, yes, wet wipes and such are a big part of the problem¹. Wet wipes and other comparable sanitary products _combine_ with the fat in the sewers to create these blockages — massive ones in areas with ageing sewer pipes and a lot of people.

Solving this problem means reducing _both_ fat and sanitary products that should not be flushed.

One proposed action in London is to stimulate toilet owners to place bins next to the men's toilets as well. A sizeable group of men using wet wipes is a recent phenomenon, providing a place to dispose of them might help.

And honestly, what makes people flush nappies, period products, and condoms down the toilet? Awareness (clear 'don't flush' messages on packaging perhaps?) can be part of the solution too.

1: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/18/dont- fee...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/18/dont-feed-fatberg- museum-london-clogging-sewers-oil)

<comment><USER4> "Awareness" brings you things like "Dwaine Pipe" :|

[https://www.nwl.co.uk/your-home/learn-about-water/Dwaine- Pip...](https://www.nwl.co.uk/your-home/learn-about-water/Dwaine-Pipe.aspx)

<comment><USER5> That's aimed at children.

Water companies have less cartoony messages aimed at adults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always wondered what real sewage looks like. Now I can watch it while snacking on popcorn.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if something like a non-stick (PTFE) coating would be effective in preventing deposits from growing again.</comment>


A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs (1959) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www-m3.ma.tum.de/foswiki/pub/MN0506/WebHome/dijkstra.pdf <comment><USER2> Is there a visualization showing this?

<comment><USER3> Heresy :-)

[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD696.html):

 _" The habit of using pictorial aids, like any habit, is very difficult to get rid of. If, however, we take any responsibility for the effectiveness of our thinking habits, we should try to get rid of the habit as quickly as possible, for it is a bad habit, confusing and misleading up to the point of being paralysing"_

<comment><USER4> "One of the bad things about pictures is that they are almost always overspecific. One cannot make a picture of "an arbitrary triangle": as soon as one has made it, it has either an obtuse angle or not, whereas for "the arbitrary triangle" the property of having an obtuse angle is explicitly undefined."

Still one can make a picture of all the arbitrary triangles at the same time and in an interactive visualization explore them to get the complex behaviour and constrains the notion "arbitrary triangle" actually represent. For a good example have a look at: [http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/](http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/)

<comment><USER3> But how do you know that, while playing with such an interactive visualization, you looked at all possible cases?

Also, let's say a theorem says two lines are parallel, two distances are equal, or three lines intersect in a single point, how are you going to judge that that's the case from such a display, even for one particular choice of points?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If my startup fails, what are the impacts on my future career prospects? - <AUTHOR> For the seasoned startup vets out there, I was wondering about how working for or starting a failed startup would impact career prospects down the line.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> I closed my startup 1 year ago.

Your career prospects are at least what they were before you started your company, but you will have to answer much different questions than most people.

1\. People will be concerned that you don't want to work for anyone else. It is important to remind the people that you meet with that you were willing to take on many, many more bosses than a typical employee. Customers, investors, future employees etc. You can talk about how you helped them etc.

2\. If you are a developer, there a lots of options. Business is harder, but there will be life after your startup. (I can code a tiny amount but I am not a real developer. I am really knowledgeable about finance and financial modeling. It took me about 30 days to find something in finance... more on this below)

3\. When I decided to shutdown my company, I emailed basically everyone I had talked to about the company and told them first that I decided to shut it down and thanked them for their previous help. I did it because it was the right thing to do, but it actually helped a lot in my search because people all offered intros when I asked later on.

4\. Asking for intros is the way to go. Find companies that you like and find a 2nd connection there or 1st connection there. If it is a 1st connection, tell them you would like to grab a coffee with them to get information about their experience at the company you are interested in. If you have someone who is a 2nd connection at a company you are interested in, ask the intermediary connection for an intro. Most people will happily help!

5\. When you shut down your company, you will probably want $$$ immediately. Try to resist taking the first offer unless you are sure it is a good fit. I made the mistake of taking an offer from a manager I wasn't sure about and it turned in to a full disaster.

6\. Email me if you need help with your story or want to understand the introduction process better. (email in profile).

Best of luck, you will either have success in your company or finding another role. In 2 years, this period of extreme stress will be behind you so just keep doing the right things.

<comment><USER3> May I ask what kind of products your startup was based upon, like online shopping, online community, real estate etc. and if possible what do you believe was the core reason or events that lead to its shutdown. Thanks.

<comment><USER2> I was attempting to remove risk from a niche of the real estate funding market while providing small funds with more access to capital. Ultimately there was only weak demand for what I was providing. The switching cost from the way they were currently doing business was not overshadowed by what we were providing. I am happy to provide a more lengthy explanation if you are in that space. Just email me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My startup failed last year. It wasn't the greatest feeling to be back searching for a job. I did find a good job and I'm at a good place now. I joined as a developer.

I was the CTO of my startup and was a senior architect looking across multiple domains in my previous job. Now, I'm more a specialist, looking at one single thing while it's expected that someone has the responsibility to solve a different problem.

To me, that's the biggest career impact. In our startup, everyone did everything. Need to hotfix something in production in the morning and then head off to a investor pitch in the afternoon? Come back and rework on our marketing message? Yes. Yes and Yes.

Now, I'm just a dev. Not the marketing guy. Not the finance guy. That's someone else's responsibility. Am I being paid less? Not really.. But am I having lesser responsibilities? Definitely. Is that a career downturn or not? I don't know, but I do see others who joined the same company from a more successful startup being "higher up" when it comes to responsibilities and job titles.

<comment><USER5> i think this is the reason most companies fail. people do too much, and aren't able to do a good job at any of it. people lie to themselves and think it's even remotely possible, when it's not. you're going to do a shit job at every one of those 4 jobs if they're all your responsibility.

i think companies that raise or make money quickly are able to actually dedicate people to very, very, very critical shit, and will have an astronomically higher chance of success for this reason _alone_.

<comment><USER6> It can be a big competitive advantage to do everything yourself, because you see inefficiencies that fall through the cracks between job descriptions. That's what's left after you've specialized and optimized: all the things about the product that suck because they are nobody's responsibility. Fix them and you not only are doing something that your competitors aren't, but you're doing things they _can 't_ do without re-organizing and losing all the accumulated domain knowledge that they have.

The flip side of this is that you need to pick a _problem_ where this is actually an advantage. If you're solving the same problem that your competitors are but they have 100 highly-specialized employees but you have one generalist, you're going to lose. Big. But if you identify the problem that they're _not_ solving because nobody in their organization has the relevant expertise or job description, you can get a solid foothold, then use that to hire the expertise that you were missing in the first place.

<comment><USER5> > _It can be a big competitive advantage to do everything yourself, because > you see inefficiencies that fall through the cracks between job > descriptions_

i agree, but this is begging the question of actually being able to do a good job at any of it. i'm not saying it's impossible, i'm saying most can't.

<comment><USER6> The point isn't to do a good job of it, the point is to do a better job than the people who are _not doing it at all_.

This is probably the most counterintuitive part of founding a startup that I've observed so far: if you're doing it right, you'll suck at everything you do. Why? Because if you _don 't_ suck at something, it's time to seek funding, hire people, and train them to do it. The founder's job is to seek out problems where _everyone else sucks more_ and yet people still want it, which itself is quite a challenging task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It substantially depends in what region you are located or more to the point from what culture you are coming from. Different cultures have massively different attitudes to independent workers and personal failures.

In Asian cultures the common expectation for a worker is to be loyal to its company, know its place in the hierarchy and diligently follow the procedures. An independent thinker with many creative ideas and innovation proposals will unlikely to be welcome. Failure at something is generally a point of embarrassment that needs to be covered up or at least not advertised.

In Western cultures independence, experimentation and failure are seen as normal elements of the life process. There have been many inventors and entrepreneurs in the Western history exactly thanks to those liberal perceptions. Failure is not tragedy but useful experience. You learn a valuable lesson that will help avoid mistakes in the future and ultimately achieve success in what you do.

In reality of course it's not as black and white. There are both types of people living in all countries, and many people are somewhere in between on that axis. Also, even among Western countries there are those which are more Western and more adventurous than the rest and some are less Western and more risk-averse. There is the full spectrum out there.

Back to the software industry, I'd say somebody with an experience of failure is way more valuable than a person who never did anything wrong. Humans learn more from failure than from success. If you do something and succeed right away then you'll never know why you succeeded - because you did everything right or just because of the right set of circumstances, fortunate timing and some good luck. Meaning you won't know what components are crucial for success. When you fail you learn what elements are responsible or have contributed to the failure. You may not know yet what ingredients you need to have to succeed but at least you know which obstacles you need to remove to not fail.

In general, experienced people do value failure and can appreciate the usefulness of someone with that kind of background. They should not have any problems hiring that person because they recognize the knowledge that comes with it.

I too have had some failures in my professional life and I'm not ashamed to admit them. Each of them taught me a valuable lesson. On a personal note, I would be more inclined to hire somebody who was bald enough to attempt something big, failed and learned from it than someone who just drifted from one safe employment to the other never actually interacting with the real world in the wild.

TL;DR: Don't worry about it and go for it.

<comment><USER7> P.S. Sorry for the typos. For some reason the edit/update function has no effect for me so can't fix them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the past 20 years; I have had more than 10 different startup ventures; all with varying degrees of success; none of them were the "Golden Ticket" that allowed me to retire.

All were self-funded if that makes a difference.

It has not hurt my chances of finding paying consulting clients. Many of my clients like that I have that experience; and business experience is awesome when you're talking to small business owners who are not tech people and just want someone they can trust to build their project. Often the startup venture / project can be used as 'proof' of technical skill.

If you choose to list the startup company on your resume, you can easily give yourself a title / position relevant to the job you are after [programming / management / CTO / whatever ]

I haven't been in a traditional 9-5 employment situation in a long time; so I'm not sure about that area.

</comment><comment><USER9> As long as you have solid skills, success or failure doesn't really matter at all (although if you were successful you wouldn't be applying for a job, which leaves us with failure in this case).

From my experience companies only look at your objective skills when they hire you. And a lot of large companies actually respect that you have worked on your own company even if it failed.

So don't worry about what it means, if you're trying to find a job, study for the interview really. That's one thing I messed up when I shut down my company and had to get a job for the first time in my life. I didn't even know "preparing for an interview" was a thing and failed miserably at some of the early interviews I did, but later figured out there's a formula and then I aced everything, ended up getting multiple job offers and chose the one I wanted.

<comment><USER10> Mind sharing details on what you mean by "preparing"? Like .. a weekend worth or a lot more? I go into interviews with a half day of prep and admittedly it isn't always pretty. How does someone with a high responsibility/workload current job get the focused prep time? A friend of mine said "3 months to prep for a Google interview" ... I couldn't believe him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone on the other side of the table at a startup, I always ask, and it depends on the answer.

\-- Con: flight risk, collaboration risk

\-- Pro: for valid reasons, they don't want the founder stress, risk, focus, whatever (say due to family, time, whatever), but love the environment. Such people are amazing: a classic "barrel" ([http://firstround.com/review/Keith- Rabois-on-the-role-of-a-C...](http://firstround.com/review/Keith-Rabois-on- the-role-of-a-COO-how-to-hire-and-why-transparency-matters/)) .

We've been working the past few months with someone like this, and he is basically a multiplier on our ability to execute!

<comment><USER9> The "con" part actually has nothing to do with whether you failed at a startup or not. Like you said it depends on the answer, which means you make the decision based on the personality at the end of the day, not based on the failure itself. So I would say there is no "cons".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What country are you in? How long was the company afloat? Was it ever cashflow-positive? Were you the technical guy or not?

Your career prospects largely depend on answers for those questions - it is different in US (attitude towards failure), different for non-techies, etc. etc. If your company was cashflow positive, then you can show at least temporary success to others (in objective, business terms).

</comment><comment><USER13> \- Anyone with startup experience will high five you during the interveiw when you mention the failure, and will be interested in discussing what went wrong.

\- People coming in from the outside, such as HR and recruiter staff won't get it, and will snidely try to get you to admit that you were actually fired for cause, or were responsible for the ship going down.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you end gracefully by treating customers with respect, being honest and open with investors, helping the team move on, and understanding the where/how it failed, it won't be a negative.

Remember those customers, investors, and colleagues all trusted you. How you deal with that after.. people remember.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think it matters at all. Any place where that would be looked on negatively is probably not a good fit for you anyway.

It's a really small sample size, but we've had several people join us after winding down or leaving their startups and they've been successful.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was under the impression that the vast majority of startups fail. I don't think being a failed entrepreneur is a bad thing, if anything it's hard-won experience that should be valuable going forward. People expect startups to fail- actually succeeding is huge, but not getting there isn't a bad thing in itself. I can't imagine you would be judged for being associated with a startup that didn't make it, unless there were was something fundamentally unusual and terrible that happened that was scandalous or criminal or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER17> It shouldn't affect your prospects too much. Just keep your skills sharp while you an building and running your startup.

I've built and failed at two startups. And after those failures I've found one of the most fulfilling jobs I've had in my career. I've learned so much about business building, managing, sales, and finances over the last few years. Use those skills you learn while building to help find your next role!

I'll build something in the future, once I've had a few years to recover from the startup world.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it depends on how you explain it, because it's bound to be asked about. If you can spin it as a learning experience and perhaps assuage worries about you jumping ship to start another company, any human recruiter (and most are) would interpret it as a plus.

On the other hand, if all you talk about are mistakes and failures to learn from them, or suggest that you'll be leaving at some point to do it again, a recruiter is likely to worry.

</comment><comment><USER19> Failure of a startup doesn't mean you're a failure or even that you failed in this instance. There are many reasons why a startup can succeed or fail. Either way, if you've shown you learned from the experience, I think you're likely to find that some of the best teams to work with will value that.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm a regular employee at the bottom of the fruit bowl but I would imagine that starting a failed startup probably challenged you in a lot of ways and gives the interviewer the opportunity to ask a lot of deep questions in terms of whether you're a good team player that fits for them or not.

TLDR; nothing different IMO.

</comment><comment><USER21> They say: "you're only as good as your last performance".

So, dust off. Stay positive and do another.

It's all about how you handle your (last) failure.

Most startups fail. The fact that you tried is more valuable than the result.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you learned from it, there's no negative impact.

<comment><USER23> It helps if you can articulate the learned lessons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> They are awesome!

In the last ten years all my projects and startups failed in the sense of hitting any type of home runs or even a single...but they led me on great, unique journeys that make me a more interesting candidate/coder then those who just code to make a living. After ten years of doing startups and coding/designing for a living I am never out of work and landing jobs and better ones is easy because and again my story is more interesting then the next guy who just codes for a living.

Doing side projects and or startups in the past or even present is a great thing for any coder and or designer for your resume! You will be more then fine and the market is great for us...get a few years under your belt and you will have recruiters banging at your door offering you a better job weekly or daily!

</comment><comment><USER25> Leave it off your resume.

<comment><USER9> This is the worst advice ever, don't try to give advice on something you have no idea about. It can change people's lives for the worse.

"Leaving it off the resume" means lying, and they will most likely ask what happened during that time. Even if they don't ask it's a bad sign since it means you come off as someone who's been unable to get a job for whichever duration you worked on your startup for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Anytime I would see a resume with CEO / Founder on it I would immediately pass.

My thinking was this person won't be a good fit working for someone else if they felt the need to strike out on their own. Just like I wouldn't hire myself.

This was when hiring for a sales role mind you. Obviously different for different positions / experience.

CTO wouldn't scare me if we were hiring for a lower position.

<comment><USER7> Maybe people wouldn't feel "the need to strike out on their own" if they were better treated by their former employers.

It's the number one reason why people generally attempt to "strike out on their own" \- lack of recognition and perspectives as an employed worker.

<comment><USER27> Also, some people just have ideas and the desire to implement them.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to move a large volume of data? - <AUTHOR> Let's just say 40TB of data arrives at your door on a big NAS and you have to move it to another storage array.
You're stoked because you have a 10GbE network so bandwidth isn't an issue at close to 1000mb/s read & write.
So how do you tackle it?
rsync? torrent? Some tool I've never heard of? <comment><USER2> Recent discussion on this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12058253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12058253)

The consensus was rsync, then private torrents.</comment>


NSA has stopped collecting location data from US cellphones without a warrant - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20965354/nsa-intelligence-no-warrant-phone-location-data-collection <comment><USER2> Sure they have.

> Next month, provisions of the Patriot Act — specifically, Section 215 — are > set to expire, raising questions about potential reforms. "Now that Congress > is considering reauthorizing Section 215, it needs to write a prohibition on > warrantless geolocation collection into black-letter law," Wyden said in a > statement.

How about just LET it expire!

</comment><comment><USER3> There is still no mention of any of the conspirators being charged with wiretapping and going to jail - aka _the rule of law_. I didn't think that after being caught, criminals could just pinky-swear to stop committing crime and be free to walk away. But apparently being on the DC-dole gives you that privilege. So there is no disincentive to just create a new illegal anti- American program that will take its own time to get through the courts.

<comment> java-man "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let me guess. They're collecting the data, but hashing the cellphone unique identifier into some form that cant be reversed without a warrant?

<comment><USER5> "can't"

At this point, I don't trust the NSA at all. There's always some wiggle room in anything they say, and I'm fed up with it. This isn't how a free society operates...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You forgot to put quotes around the word "stopped"

</comment><comment><USER7> "NSA has stopped breaking the law and violating the constitution"

</comment><comment><USER8> Right.</comment>


Can you advise me in how to use my spare time? What project should I start - <AUTHOR> Hi, I am a javascript developer. Full time employed. But...
I was thinking a lot to make a music web and mobile app, like spotify, but with content from youtube. But I am too afraid that google would ban me at some point. There isn't any legal way to stream only the audio yet. I can't also store content from youtube legally.
On the other part, I'm thinking to make some simple mobile apps and sell them at the smallest price.
The point is that I really wanna start a business and make some extra cash asap. Can you give me a few ideas? <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I didn't phrase properly, is the business that I wanna start asap, not to make money asap. So I am more interested in starting a business that can scale rather than try sell something made fast with a 80-90% chance of failure. That's why I first thought of music service first, because it can get big since it would be free, and easy to monetize cause I can provide download for offline use. But I am too afraid of laws, and I am pretty sure google would take me down before it gets viral.

The point is that I don't wanna work for free, this idea makes me lose any motivation. And I really need to start doing sth productive with my free time. So what I am really asking from this community is a way to do the music service safe or ideas for mobile apps that people would pay for. A friend told me once that a lot of productivity apps are missing from the market but I can't actually find out what would people need and they don't already have.

</comment><comment><USER2> Mobile apps is a good idea for getting a subscription base, as long as you are totally willing to accept that most or all of your apps will make zero dollars (and in the eyes of people with business degrees, actually cost you money). Once you are doing it for the sake of having a good time, you remove the disappointment inherent from the extreme likelihood that your apps won't make money, and you remove the stress that inevitably will make you stop. And then any reward you reap from those apps will just be icing on the cake of doing what you enjoy doing. If you are strictly only about the money, then the other advice here about doing side contract work is a better idea, since it will give you surefire money immediately, though with no possibility of scaling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your best bet is to try side work if your looking for quick cash.</comment>


McDonald's New Big Mac ATM Requires Zero Human Interaction - <AUTHOR> http://www.eater.com/2017/1/26/14400334/big-mac-atm-mcdonalds <comment><USER2> Some recent discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494426) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514997).

</comment><comment><USER3> Bad headline. Right there in the article:

 _"The burgers are cooked on-site at [a nearby] McDonald's and then immediately loaded into the heated machine, which is refilled on an ongoing basis to ensure fresh quality,"_

It's just spitting out preboxed items like any other vending machine. Humans are still involved.

<comment><USER4> I assume by "human interaction" they meant that customers don't hand money to a human, not that no humans were involved at any stage in the process.

<comment><USER3> Yet we don't see daily headlines declaring "Coca-Cola machine sells cans of soda to humans without interaction".

I'll stand by the premise that this is clickbait, centered around a marketing event from McDonald's, loosely gathered on paranoia about replacing fast-food workers with robots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the "humans are still involved" comments, maybe the article is referring to the fact that these machines allow you to purchase a big mac without having to talk to a human.

In this situation, the experience of a fast-food purchase is being removed of the small talk, the smiles, the "have a nice day!". And now there are people behind a curtain that you don't see or interact with.

<comment><USER6> > In this situation, the experience of a fast-food purchase is being removed > of the small talk, the smiles, the "have a nice day!".

I think I'm visiting different fast food restaurants. My experience typically involves a challenging conversation through a low quality speaker system and then paying for the order with someone who can barely stand to look at me, much less tell me to have a nice day!

<comment><USER7> I'm always annoyed by the screen they have at the drive-thru that was supposed to confirm your order, but now only shows ads.

<comment><USER8> Not that case for a local (SV) Taco Bell, at least. Good ol' list of items/prices and voice works well I guess, unless you love gimmicks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


High Performance Browser Networking - <AUTHOR> https://hpbn.co/ <comment><USER2> \o/ ... a pleasant surprise to see this at the top of HN!

If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions on the contents of the book, please file an issue on GitHub: [https://github.com/igrigorik/hpbn.co/issues](https://github.com/igrigorik/hpbn.co/issues)

<comment><USER3> I like and enjoy the book.I have been searching for this link for a while as it was posted on HN sometimes ago and i forgot to bookmark it.Thank God that someone re-posted it today. And keep up the good work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After reading this, I suddenly understood so much more about what a web application actually _is_ by appreciating it from the point of view of the browser.

Well written, clear, and enlightening. This is absolutely required reading for anyone doing web development (front and back).

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a must-read for any web developer, frontend, or backend, or full- stack. It's short enough to be a fun read, but detailed enough to convey the most important browser networking facts.

If you can, buy a hard copy to keep as a reference. I have referred back to mine regularly (and will surely refer back to it in the future, likely next time I have to do something serious with websockets). It's fairly neatly organized by protocol, so if you just need a quick review of HTTP2 (for example), you can skip to that section and read it in isolation.

I highly, highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER6> The third book I force my Junior devs to read. This is as close to the definitive resource on topic you can get without digging into standards & specs.

<comment><USER7> Just curious, what are the other two?

<comment><USER6> The first is "Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement, 2nd Edition" by Aaron Gustafson. This is the greatest resource of "stuff they forgot to tell you" when you learn web development that I have ever seen in printed form.

The second is "Secrets of the Javascript Ninja" by Biebault and Resig. Every one of my devs groaned at first, then thanked me profusely when they finished it.

FWIW, my favorite "look-it-up"-style resource is Speaking Javascript by Rasuchmeyer - and his follow-up "Exploring ES6".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "there is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution"

\-- this book, about NAT

<comment><USER9> I really wonder where this originated. :-D I've been saying a variant of this for years: There's no such thing as a temporary solution in the government. ( I've been a techie in gov for the better part of 2 decades ;-> so I've seen and implemented many "temporary" solutions )

<comment><USER10> I can't know where it originated but I think I, myself, first heard it -- or the same general idea, anyways, perhaps in different words -- in _The Practice of System and Network Administration_ many, many years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a terrific book. I purchased a subscription to Safari Books Online in large part due to wanting to read this. I was writing an app and was considering using Websockets, but realized I didn't know much about them and this book helped to lay out their mechanics. That, and so much more is in the book.

</comment><comment><USER12> Love this book, but why is it making the rankings today? It was published like three years ago.

</comment><comment><USER13> performance is not a feature; it is a requirement.</comment>


Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available - <AUTHOR> http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/10/we-have-a-winner-open-kinect-drivers-released-winner-will-use-3k-for-more-hacking-plus-an-additional-2k-goes-to-the-eff/ <comment><USER2> The code for the camera.c is here: [http://git.marcansoft.com/?p=libfreenect.git;a=blob;f=lib/ca...](http://git.marcansoft.com/?p=libfreenect.git;a=blob;f=lib/cameras.c;h=412b465fd3ea66a02d87f4d2f2dac5b60ce330eb;hb=HEAD)

I've always wondered how people reverse engineer these things. Do they just guess what the interface might be based on the chips? Or are they able to probe it somehow through the port?

<comment><USER3> I loved this book as a kid: [http://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Secrets- Engineering-Eldad-Ei...](http://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Secrets-Engineering- Eldad-Eilam/dp/0764574817)

It's probably a bit out of date now, but my dog-eared copy is still a good read. Ah, nostalgia. There once were days when I dreamed that a CS degree would make me as a god; the silly thoughts of a child. Now I know that it is a _PhD_ which makes gods of men.

<comment><USER4> _Now I know that it is a _PhD_ which makes gods of men._

I know you're joking, but...

When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The _proximate_ challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to write a thesis. But the _ultimate_ challenge to getting your Ph.D. is this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you feel like a god and just _write something down_ and get on with life.

It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink, but after you get to that point you can graduate.

Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you. Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis will look _incredibly boring_ to you, because you've moved on, or -- vastly more likely -- your thesis will look _woefully incomplete_ because, geez, there is so much that you couldn't figure out, and you're just so stupid!

Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the same time.

Similarly: Being the world's foremost expert on a particular scientific problem is a lot less exciting in real life than it seems in the movies. In fact, being on the frontier of science feels like being totally, hopelessly lost and confused. Why this came as a surprise to me I'll never know.

<comment><USER3> When I went to do mathematics at Chicago I figured I was the smartest person alive. There I was, facing the gargoyles of my dreams; a poor kid aspiring to a better life by shrugging off the accent I was born into and the mentality of defeat so common among the poor. But I had gone too far, became _too_ confident and failed horribly. I was sure that _the world_ had failed--I was too good--and that everything was bullshit. I left, walked away from a full scholarship because _I_ had overcome the constrains of my life before and Mathematics and University were no different. I took a job at a small software shop in Portland, OR instead, enrolling part time at PSU doing computer science.

I failed at both, as you might expect. The _world_ wasn't wrong, I was. While I could program, I had no discipline. While I had intellect, I had no ability to learn. The world was not wrong, I was. All of my anger and suffering and frustration were _my_ fault. From the defeat of my new University and my new job I learned that my romantic notions of most things were not reality. Enrico Fermi, on whose stairway I bounded up, did not simply decide to conjure nuclear fission under what is now a library. He worked for _years_ , a thing which I had never done.

The novice says to the master, "Coal is black." The master replies, "No, it is not."

The intermediate says to the master, "Coal is not black." The master replies, "Of course it is."

The masters say among themselves, "It is coal."

I hold no romantic notions as I held when I were a boy; I have not become a cynical man. Life is suffering and pain. Life is joy and love. I have built a business from nothing and sold it for a profit. I am now very poor. Life is life and that is beautiful. What we learn, what we _truly_ learn, we so incorporate into our being that we cannot perceive it as unknown to all. We are the streams into which a man steps: never the same, yet always the same.

To gain mastery over the frontier of science is to gain mastery over nothing, over one's self. It is confusion and pain and truth and beauty.

<comment><USER5> You wrote all that as a 3rd level reply to an offhand comment in a random thread? Wow. This is the reason I keep coming back here.

Just yesterday I saw so much negativity and pettiness on another thread that I had pretty much written off HN as a lost cause.

Your post brought me back. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So much for "With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering" ... :-)

<comment><USER7> Microsoft had already started backpedaling with it's "that's not hacking" comment to Gamespot.

"Kinect for Xbox 360 has not been hacked--in any way--as the software and hardware that are part of Kinect for Xbox 360 have not been modified. What has happened is someone has created drivers that allow other devices to interface with the Kinect for Xbox 360. The creation of these drivers, and the use of Kinect for Xbox 360 with other devices, is unsupported. We strongly encourage customers to use Kinect for Xbox 360 with their Xbox 360 to get the best experience possible."

[http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sports/thebiggestloserultima...](http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sports/thebiggestloserultimateworkout/news.html?sid=6283696)

<comment><USER8> Yeah. I thought it was some exec shooting his mouth off the first time. There didn't seem to be much a of a traditional DRM reason to lock the Kinect down. So the most obvious answer is it wasn't.

<comment><USER9> At the start of a product cycle, game consoles are typically sold at a loss. Manufacturers recoup this loss through licensing fees paid by game publishers.

If Microsoft is selling the Kinect at a loss, then Microsoft will be motivated to keep it locked down to ensure that they can recoup the loss through licensing fees.

<comment><USER10> I don't think this is a very convincing argument. I don't think there have been many examples of people building games for the PC using the Wii controller. I suspect that the same goes for the Kinect. The vast majority of people buying this will be people buying it for the XBOX, with a small proportion of geeks using the open source driver for interests sake, but not the sole purpose of buying it.

<comment><USER11> Sony suffered a bit with the PS3 being used by Universities as cheap super computer clusters. I believe from memory PS3 had a very low attach rate (the number of games purchased per console). Though from Sony's view point they are also trying to move TVs and ensure the success of Bluray so perhaps they were happy with a low rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a misleading title. The Kinect sensor has been hacked, but Kinect proper is a combination of hardware and software. Arguably the more interesting aspects of Kinect are in the software.

That being said, this is still pretty cool, it'll be interesting to see what people come up with using this technology.

<comment><USER13> Honestly the hardware is more interesting than the software. Yeah, skeleton tracking is cool, but the hardware is capable of so much more. 3D scanning, mapping, and localization for robots come to mind. With the microphone array built in, Kinect is basically begging to be the eyes and ears of a robot.

<comment><USER14> Right now the Kinect drivers can't do anything that a pair of cheap USB webcams can't. The only advantage seems to be the on-board depth processing instead of having to use something like OpenCV. <http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/>

<comment><USER13> Completely wrong. Kinect is _not_ a stereo vision system. It's the first consumer application of a completely new class of cameras which directly measures depth by the time of flight of a reflected laser beam. It's literally a 320x240 array of laser rangefinders. It's called a flash LIDAR camera, and the quality and robustness of the depth data is far beyond anything achievable from stereo vision today even with high-end cameras, let alone webcams.

edit: Actually, there seems to be some confusion on the Internet about exactly how Kinect's depth sensor works, and it may be more likely based on structured light scanning than LIDAR (though Microsoft has recently acquired some LIDAR startups). Either way, though, the depth data quality is far beyond any kind of stereo vision.

<comment><USER14> From what I understand, an IR pattern is projected on to the room and the cameras pick it up. The level of distortion in the pattern shows how far the object is. NOT Lidar. Probably a laser projector though.

The tech is nice, and it's nice that it's bundled up in one affordable package, but the real power in Kinect is in the software. Right now all that the drivers return is raw video and depth. It's what you do with that data that counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh man. Ordering one ASAP. So much cool stuff could be done with this. Going to try to create a gestures thing so I can browse my email from bed.

<comment><USER16> Could this all have been genius marketing by Microsoft?

<comment><USER8> I think it's probably an executive with enough power to say things but without enough knowledge to know what he's saying. That's fairly normal for large companies.

<comment><USER17> I thought it was mandatory for large companies. If lower-upper management actually had new ideas they might usurp someone elses power and then where would the top execs be? And where would the company be then!? (besides rapidly bankrupting itself through moron ideas)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That was quick.

<comment><USER19> I'm actually surprised it took this long - how much more motivation did the REs need than MSFT's lawsuit threats?

<comment><USER20> He did it within 3 hours of it going on sale in Europe. That's pretty quick!

<comment><USER21> I think the internet is getting people to the point they expect it to be hacked a month before the product is actually released ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is an exciting achievement and I'm very impressed that it was carried out so rapidly. Good hacking indeed!

Although, I have two questions which HN may be able to answer for me:

1) What are the benefits of the Kinect over building a servo-driven IR bar with audio yourself out of cheap commodity hardware? Is the price far less when all components are integrated? Is the construction just that much simpler?

2) Presumably now that the "easier" task of reverse engineering the comms protocol has been achieved, the next step is to understand/replicate/replace the "proprietary" algorithms in use by Microsoft that run in the XBox in order to have some meaningful interaction with the device. Is it possible to use some FOSS such as OpenCV with Kinect? I know it's early days and many of you probably haven't had time to look at the protocol yet, but I am curious.

</comment><comment><USER23> What would be very interesting, is if you could mod the device to work with a better camera. Then, it would probably be useful in the photography industry. Maybe it would allow you to correct issues with lighting? It would allow someone editing pictures to easily select a part of the picture in the foreground or background. With selections being much easier, you could enhance specific parts of photos to make them stand out around other less-important parts without much effort at all.

I'm sure there are many more applications for this technology in the photography and even videography industry. Any ideas?

</comment><comment><USER24> I always wanted to be able to set focus on windows by looking at them. Perhaps that can be achieved with a Kinect.

<comment><USER25> You should be able to do that with a normal webcam, since you don't need depth information. I've thought of that too; I think there will be a similar interface when heads-up displays in glasses become viable.

<comment><USER26> I haven't been paying attention, but has eyetracking software gotten that good? Can you point to people or companies who are working on this, or currently available solutions?

I've been doing some usability testing stuff and it'd be nice to have eyetracking (especially paired with click/mouseover data.) and not much less helpful head/face tracking that is built into the webcam.

<comment><USER27> Commercial use:

<http://www.gazehawk.com/>

Some open source:

<http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/opengazer/>

<http://sourceforge.net/projects/gazetrackinglib/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I would have thought there was some onboard CPU on the kinect, based on the power requirements (it can't be powered by a USB port alone.) If so, I suspect that any heavy lifting the unit does is probably by software that uploaded to the camera via USB at startup.

Anyone have further details?

<comment><USER29> Yes, there's at least one CPU. It looks like the Kinect performs depth extraction on-board and the 360 performs gesture recognition.

[http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect- Teardown/406...](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect- Teardown/4066/1)

<comment><USER30> Which, as stated elsewhere in the comments, is the really interesting bit of this tech.

On the otherhand, it's still an impressive hack in terms of speed.</comment></comment></comment>


What You Can't See You Can't Get - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/what-you-cant-see-you-cant-get.html <comment><USER2> That "Gliimpse" animation concept is really interesting. I'd like to see it become widely used.</comment>


Type Casting Verification: Stopping an Emerging Attack Vector [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~blee303/paper/caver.pdf <comment><USER2> > Type casting, which converts one type of an object to another, plays an > essential role in enabling polymorphism in C++ because it allows a program > to utilize certain general or specific implementations in the class > hierarchies...

What? No. C++ polymorphism doesn't work based on type casting, it works based on virtual functions. Type casting would mean you were using some kind of "switch on type" scheme. That's not polymorphism. That's what polymorphism is supposed to _replace._

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This paper just received the $100,000 Internet Defense Prize from Facebook at USENIX Security '15</comment>


Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/us/politics/facebook-suspends-alabama-elections.html <comment><USER2> This got no traction, I have submitted a Washington Post version of it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18775696)</comment>


An idea to get significantly more web surfers -- including savvy ones -- to read ads. - <AUTHOR>

The idea is to adapt http://www.readmytweets.com to work with ads instead of tweets.
Note that if your product/service isn't very good, then maybe you will get tired of reading other people's ads without much benefit.  In that case, your ad(s) won't be shown much anymore.
Do you think it will work? <comment><USER2> A few notes:

1) This idea has been explored before, there were a few services in the first dot-com bubble that tried this idea.

2) Conversion would be horribly low. This would draw people who would click through as quickly as possible to make the maximum ROI for their time. Oh sure if you make it necessary for the user to click through, you'll see conversions in terms of clicks / impressions, but the advertisers will see very little in terms of conversions into sales.

3) Most ad systems, Google Ads etc. actively disallow this sort of system. So any ads would have to be in house and thus fully funded by the financial backing of the person posting the ad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which services tried this idea?

Also, could you elaborate on (3)? I'm not sure what you mean. Of course, I would not be using ads already submitted into other ad services in this approach. But are you saying I can't even make money from adsense on the same page?</comment></comment>