Sheryl Sandberg Says an MBA Doesn't Matter in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-16/sheryl-sandberg-says-business-school-doesn-t-matter-in-tech <comment><USER3> I'm a developer at a financial services company. I was content to be a developer and let the "business" folks define our stories and I'd just code them. I never understood the application I was building on a deep level--it was always superficial.

A friend convinced me to take a few MBA classes at a local university. The first class was accounting. It opened my eyes to understanding what our product and business owners were saying on my projects at work. Now I could understand the "why" behind the screens I was building! I asked questions that made them re-think their screen mockups. Since then I've graduated and taken classes in Finance, Leadership, Economics, and my favorite: Strategy.

I use more knowledge from my MBA in my coding career than the stuff I learned in my undergrad in Computer Engineering.

In my experience, an MBA doesn't make me a better "coder." But it has given me confidence and competence in my interactions with customers and the leadership team. I'm very glad I took the time and effort to pursue my MBA.

<comment><USER4> I would be interested to hear from you, and anybody else with similar experience, what were some of the most valuable courses you took. That is, for someone with no interest in pursuing an MBA but with the opportunity to take a course or two, what are the must-haves?

<comment><USER5> That's going to be heavily weighted based on your personal background and the quality of the specific class.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your reply.

> That's going to be heavily weighted based on your personal background

Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER5> Accounting is _really_ important, but if you have the basics getting to the point you can see though accounting tricks has limited value and takes a lot of work.

It's like an extreme version of the 80:20 rule. You can get some basic c functions to compile in a few hours, but seeing though the winner of an obfuscated c contest on your own might take years.

Just remember, your not a specialist and becoming one takes a lot more effort than a few MBA classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm always skeptical about stuff like this. Sandberg's springboard into her career was two-fold: working at McKinsey after HBS, and working under Larry Summers, who was her thesis advisor at Harvard UG. She went to Google as a VP after her stint in government.

There is a huge "getting your foot in the door" advantage to that credential. I can totally believe she didn't use much of what she learned at HBS in what she did at Google. But would she ever have gotten that VP job at Google without that sterling resume?

<comment><USER4> Good point. Pedigree is and always has been a huge advantage. A disproportionate number of execs' backgrounds I've looked into have Yale/Harvard/Stanford/etc somewhere. I wonder if that will ever change. Having worked with many folks who attended those universities, most do not strike me as being intrinsically more capable than their counterparts who attended other universities, although a few have a high degree of self-assuredness (which, granted, is quite valuable as a career trait).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never worked with MBAs before, in all my tech career, which included stints as a programmer and then a long period as a manager/director where I was in a much more business-oriented role. I always had a preconception that "MBA" essentially meant "management consultant", those high-priced guys who were paid to support bad news the CEO didn't want to seem came from himself. Restructuring advisement is certainly a valid role business consultants fulfill, but it's definitely not the only one, or even one of the more common ones.

I joined Google this summer and I have 2 ex-consultant MBAs in the team I'm managing, along with a third employee who is ex-BCG-but-no-MBA. They are awesome. They freaking rock at analysis, and are highly skilled at asking good & pointed questions to help nail down business opportunities & good/bad ideas. Two of them have technical BSes (EE & CS) and are fantastic PMs: well organized, analytical, strong communicators, outgoing, and perhaps most importantly, they know when they're weak in an area and how to recruit complimentary team members.

This by no means should be considered advice that everyone needs an MBA, that all MBAs are equal, that all tech PMs need an MBA, or even that all Google MBAs are good at their jobs, but _MINE ARE_ , and they'd be much less proficient if they hadn't spent that extra two years in business school (along with tech internships both years). Just like everything else, people need to set goals and work appropriately to achieve them. For some individuals this will suggest an MBA; for many others, not so much.

Honestly, the biggest piece of business school advice I'd offer anyone is that if you can't get into or afford a top tier school, don't bother paying a school at all. Just try to DIY it the best you can. The gap between what students get out of the tier 1 programs and everything else (with a few notable exceptions _) is immense.

_ I'm not counting exec MBA programs at all. They're specifically targeted at people who are already execs and just look to amp up certain skills (M&A, international development, etc).

<comment><USER8> Why would you jump to the conclusion that their skills have anything at all to do with their MBAs?

<comment><USER7> Because I'm managing them and I talk to them and watch them work every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Sandberg suggested a career in tech might not even be necessary to catch > Facebook's attention. "We don't look for a specific background or skill-set > when we make hiring decisions," she wrote. "As my friend and Instagram COO > Marne Levine says, we hire athletes and cross-train them."

From a randomly selected job posting on Facebook's web site:

      Requirements

      B.S. or M.S. Computer Science or related field
      Experience building high-performance, large-scale server applications and reliable software
      Expert knowledge developing and debugging in C++
      End-to-end experience in online ad serving and background in online advertising/auction theory strongly preferred
      Knowledge of Perl, PHP, or Python a plus
      Knowledge of Hadoop/MapReduce a plus

<comment><USER10> I believe Sandberg was referring to positions where someone might think an MBA is required, like product management. No one is asking whether an MBA might be useful for highly technical roles, like the above posting for someone doing the technical implementation of an online ad engine.

<comment><USER11> From what I've read of Sandberg, she is an executive looking at grooming executives. In her mind, "professional" is equivalent to a plumber: not her children.

Her athlete analogy makes a special sort of sense in that context. I have seen a strong connection from the athletes and spec-ops people I went to school with now moving into executive positions. I'm not sure what the common denominator is, because I know a lot of athletes who are now in construction too. But if you're an athlete and can hang intellectually, there's a desirable mindset there. And I think that mindset is the striver: they see themselves every day as a little faster or a little slower, never the same. And they always want to be faster.

In Plato's Republic, there's a chapter on training the guardians, and I think that reflects her ideas reasonably well, in so far as a _lot_ of Western leadership practices derived from the Greeks and the Republic in particular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if she would still become COO of Facebook without Harvard MBA and all the oportunities resulted from it.

MBA is probably really not necessary, but if you have the oportunity to do one on a top school, it may open some doors and expand your network. At least it has no negative effects (if you can efford it).

Especially if you have technical background and want to move to management position. It simply diversifies your background and strengthens signaling.

<comment><USER13> The issue with pointing to things like "the Harvard MBA" is that people who are selected into top tier programs are likely to have done just fine on their own anyway... so it's really hard to say that the MBA is why she was successful. I think she was successful because of qualities she already had, not something she learned in business school.

<comment><USER14> I think the implication may have been that the "Harvard MBA" credentials - <USER2> necessarily training - may have been instrumental in her career path. Degrees are filtering mechanisms, and while it may be true that an MBA isn't needed to succeed once you're in the door, it may be harder to get your foot in there in the first place without them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Honestly the MBA has always mostly been an advanced degree for people who didn't get an advanced degree in a real subject. Lets people tick the 'grad school' box. The real world value has always been quite questionable and yes I'd agree here that in tech it's mostly useless, if not actually even a disadvantage.

For what's it's worth nearly all the excellent executives I've met over the years didn't have an MBA and nearly all the worst ones did...

<comment><USER15> Well, I have had the opposite experience, but then again I'm not in tech.

Thing is, the useless MBA image comes from the indiscriminate and formalistic practices of HR recruiters, who would equate an "MBA" with "value". So the incentives have changed from "I want to bring my company forward" to "I want a cushy job with little actual work".

And it is true, that traditional business education has now suffered from this. What I ask myself, if CS will be immune to this. Judging that Fizz Buzz is still a thing, I'd say no.

<comment><USER16> So you're saying that "No true MBA graduate is useless".

<comment><USER15> Why are people on HN so obsessed with trying to find argument fallacies in comments?

No, I am not saying that. The words "true MBA" have the same amount of content to them as "a true kitchen sink": zero.

I say that people buy education for different reasons. Some get an MBA because they want to flash their CVs, have a cushy job, and avoid the strains of being original. Others get an MBA because they need the skills, the language, the professional network, and the confidence, that such degrees (at least from good universities) bring for a specific goal they want to accomplish, be that within an already established business or not.

Saying that those kind of mind sets (or only one of those mind sets) is strictly particular to a group of people, which made a certain academic choice is wrong.

In my professional experience, for example, I've met a lot more engineers who were absolutely useless from a business perspective, than I've met useless MBAs. Of course, this is because I've met way more engineers than MBAs.

<comment><USER16> Well, when you quantify your opinion like that, there's not much of an opinion left to even debate.

"Different people get an education for different reasons" is a nice statement, and I would even agree that it's true. But nothing follows from that. It's not a statement that one can draw conclusions from.

In your original statement you're saying "MBAs are useless now, but it's because of HR, and it sucks that MBAs are useless but it didn't always use to be like that". Now you're saying "no, they aren't useless, in fact they're better than engineers".

Oh, how easy it is to claim a strong point when you're unconstrained by the truth.

<comment><USER15> I haven't claimed a strong point. Neither have I said anything like what you are implying I've said. I've only tried to clarify my previous comments at which I seem to have failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It confuses me endlessly that MBAs should be so misunderstood by so many people, it being suggested that they are only good for networking, that people with MBAs are cold and evil, and so on. They're simply a course which teach you the fundamentals of several areas which are relevant to business. It'd be like saying that a degree in CS would be superfluous for somebody who wants to program. If you love programming, then you'll get value from every aspect of a CS degree. Likewise for an MBA and business. Also, truly they only teach the fundamentals. An MBA's exposure to marketing/accounting/management would be _far_ more diluted than that of an 18 year old who pursues a degree in one of these specific areas, so I'm not sure why people seem to be so threatened by the MBA.

It's also funny to read in the article that Thiel has said MBAs are useless, because his books are a joke when compared to the most basic business courses. It's also laughable that Sandberg would say this, having already gotten an education from a place which has been central to business trends globally for decades. It's likely that Facebook et al would not exist without HBS and similar institutions in the US.

<comment><USER18> The usual criticism is that MBAs believe the degree endows them with far more strategic intelligence than they really have.

It's like officer school. The worst graduates come out absolutely convinced they can run an entire army, when in fact they're still almost completely clueless.

Aside from the networking - which is not trivial - the benefits of an MBA for talented individuals seem to be exposure to the idea that strategy, cost/benefit analysis, accounting, marketing, and the rest all exist, and are more relevant to a business than the code base.

This can be a surprise to straight CS people, many of whom only care about code.

But by analogy, many MBAs only seem to care about money.

There's more to running a successful business than the bottom line - or at least there should be - and more subtle management principles that build businesses by _making customers and employees happy_ as well as making shareholders rich don't seem to figure at all in MBA schools.

The MBA point of view seems to be that happiness doesn't matter when there's profit to be made.

Ironically, there's a lot of poverty in that view - not just morally, but politically _and economically._ In the longer term it leads to the kind of economic picture we have today, where there's a lot of profit being made, but at the cost of rapidly shrinking broad prosperity and economic freedom for most of the population.

<comment><USER17> I can't agree on your interpretation of an MBA point of view, but I will say that it does seem to be the most prevalent interpretation. Thinking solely about the bottom line could be the result of a twisted grounding in accounting, but no other course in an MBA relates to profit in any direct way. Almost every class typically/simply involves being grounded in decades of research in complicated areas.

It seems to me that your interpretation is more of a criticism of public shareholding and the duties of the board. Coincidentally, board members in public companies may be MBAs, and their consultants may be MBAs, but the Masters isn't why they're pursuing profit.

Lastly, I had whole courses on the happiness of employees (Organisational Behaviour, HR), but like Strategy and Marketing and every other class, they were extremely theoretical and totally unrelated to practicalities of business such as profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york > She said her MBA helped her get a basic sense of business, which might be > instrumental "for some people and in some situations," but dismissed the > notion that the training would offer a leg up at Facebook.

My background is economics (and political philosophy) - and I work in tech - first as a programmer, the product manager, and now as founder: knowing economics has been useful in my roles as PM and founder.

Everyone should know some basic economics - micro-econ concepts such as marginal utility, producer/consumer surplus - as its useful for business.

And everyone should know basic macro stuff (interest rates/GDP/etc) because in a democracy it pays to have informed citizens.

An MBA, however, is overkill.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm in startup tech, I have an MBA, and I agree. The qualification itself is largely irrelevant.

More to the point, most of what I was taught in my MBA course is irrelevant to a bootstrapping startup using Lean/Customer Development methods.

<comment><USER20> ehh... MBAs are pretty useful when you raise ridiculous later stage round and need to justify a high burn rate so you hire a team of them....

The MBA could be useful but most MBA curriculums have not adjusted to the speed of firm development in the startup space. the degree needs a 21st century revamp.

<comment><USER19> It needs decoupling from academia, like a lot of university education. It's not a vocational qualification, yet industry treats it as if it is (Computer Science also suffers from this), so the universities do their best to make it as vocational as they can.

It really needs to be separated out into "advanced management training", a "masters of business research" for the academics, and really a "business teaching qualification" as a third option. Trying to wedge all these objectives into one course is hurting everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Then why do several prominent tech companies have MBA preferred in their business job postings? I noticed maybe 9 months ago during a job search.

I also have a friend who is MBA and works at FB. They have a whole formal program set up for them.

So while it may not be advantangeous per Se I think companies do use it as a proxy for character traits or pattern of achievement. Because of that it is an advantage. Even if not if they have a formal Recruiting program then IT is an advantage.

<comment><USER22> Because, honestly, HR at most of these "tech companies" is rather clueless. Also as an investor if I see a tech companies looking to pack the halls with MBAs that tells me a lot about its soon to be bloated future.

If someone is really skilled outside the MBA and it was more of a tack-on then they'll probably be fine. ...but in my experience the person relying on their MBA is the type of clueless executive that demands all the metrics for their division be totally reworked into some crazy ridiculous Excel spreadsheet because that's the only thing they know how to use and they think this means that they are doing analytics. These are the types that slowly destroy companies these days.

<comment><USER23> So you stopped investing in Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple? Each has formally hired MBAs for years. Google just promoted one to CEO. I assume you're calling the top of each of these companies? How have they managed the MBA death spiral for the past five years -- is their demise just a matter of time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I agree 100% with Sheryl. I'm a 7 time serial entrepreneur. built a few big ones. the only bad/failed ones were because of MBA leaders in the company. the only good ones were with techies leading who learned through experience the practical application of scientific business practices.

99% of all top tech company CEO's are techies who learned practical business through experience --- and are not MBAs.

Sheryl Sandberg knows exactly what she's talking about. MBA was designed for corporate middle management. No need for that in a startup - especially at founder level.

Now I invest in startups. I do not invest in MBA founders. I'm doing very good investing.

Its simple. Every logical argument says the same.

</comment><comment><USER25> I guess an MBA is more for networking and opening doors, and not necessarily for important job skills.

</comment><comment><USER26> Taking two years out of your life to study business full-time will improve your business judgement. That this is controversial always surprised me.

<comment><USER27> I haven't found this to be universal. If anything, I think it can warp your thinking in a way that can be beneficial in certain circumstances, but is really scary in others. By way of example:

I have a parent who teaches at a top-5 business school. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Japan on a trip where my parent acted as a faculty chaperone and was able to attend some of the meetings with Japanese business leaders. One of the trips was to a 400+ year-old sake brewer. After the tour of the brewery, there was a Q & A period with the president of the company. The business school students asked him question after question about expansion, new product lines, finding new markets, advertising campaigns...everything they could think about to achieve growth. His answer was always basically the same and to the effect of, "I'm happy with the current situation. I make a profit making the best sake in the world, just as my ancestors have made it for the past 400 years. I provide a comfortable life for my family and the families of the people who work for me. Why would I want to change?"

It was a profound experience for me to watch him try to explain what should be a completely reasonable position to a group of people that have had the ideal of growth beyond all else drilled into their head so thoroughly that they simply couldn't understand contentment with the status quo. On the ride home, the whole group was complaining about why they'd even wasted their time talking to someone so ignorant. Comments ranged from, "He'll be out of business in 10 years" to "At least we got to drink sake."

I worry that putting MBAs in charge of businesses puts a skewed view on risk and desired outcomes. Each and every one of their suggestions could have backfired immensely and most would have required taking on considerable debt. It's this way of thinking that gives people the unicorn-or-bust mentality and look down on those who try to build "lifestyle businesses" (I hate that term). The world would be a much better place with fewer unicorns and more lifestyle businesses. The hockey stick isn't necessary to be successful, at yet it seems to be all that MBAs understand.

<comment><USER28> But did the course make the students think that way, or are students who think that way more likely to enrol for an MBA?

<comment><USER27> That's a fair point. Those skills are probably completely unnecessary for building small, sustainable businesses. But whether they self-select or are produced, I can see it leading to broad, cynical generalizations about MBAs which are, for the most part, true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why is it that every couple of weeks the tech world has to re-adjudicate the MBA argument? Is it just a fun debate? Why do so many people care about other people's degrees?

I have an MBA, I normally go around saying it doesn't matter. Mostly it's because bragging about your MBA is douchey, and we know it. I don't feel like people I work with care either way.

</comment><comment><USER29> To be honest, you don't need MBA in management too.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think Sheryl might be missing the point that it depends with where you're coming from. Career paths differ and I think it's hyperbolic to reduce it to one "true" way and discredit some things from a privileged position.

A lot of top execs do have the credentials often dismissed so I'm not personally sure they'd be there without that kind of education.

The value of attending business school (assuming it's a top school) might be more related to "outside" factors such as more opportunities, tapping into good networks and of course, involvement in different disciplines with all the resources you need to grow your thinking and expertise.

What I am concerned about is that some statements can easily be taken the wrong way by people who honestly would benefit from MBAs. Facebook not choosing or using an MBA as main criteria is fine, but Facebook is not the only company that matters and i'm sure having an MBA does also not discredit you in their eyes.

</comment><comment><USER31> Corporations are legal constructs that require specific domain knowledge to correctly administer and develop. MBAs are ostensibly targeted at that (in the same way Computer Science degrees are ostensibly targeted at teaching you domain knowledge to think and reason about the specific mathematics that underlie computers and software).

What you get out of them and their utility probably is very contextual in the same way any degree is.

My suspicion is that for many roles and at many times in a technology business, the utility is low, but that for some roles at some times, it is quite high.

Ultimately, the thing that's might be funky is that if you hire someone for their expertise in domains pertinent to MBAs, you are putting them very close to having control of the legal construct of your business. Like a sysadmin, you need to place a lot of trust in them to ensure they are doing their job correctly if you _don 't_ have the domain knowledge to provide careful oversight.

</comment><comment><USER32> Aside from the value of the degree itself, can anyone attest to the usefulness of any particular knowledge gained from doing an MBA, particularly around running small companies and startups? If so, any recommendations for resources, books etc?

This whole issue (usefulness of MBA in tech management) sounds very similar to the usefulness of CS degree in development issue. We can talk all day about the effect the CS degree has on getting jobs in the first place, but putting that entirely aside, as a developer with a CS degree, I can certainly point to some very useful things for the job that I learned in the course of doing the degree, and I could tell somebody without a CS degree what those were and where to read about them. Ignoring the entire issue of whether or not the 'piece of paper' would help them in their career, this knowledge certainly would.

If anyone (MBA or not) has any such advice, I'd be very grateful to hear it!

<comment><USER33> I'm a chemical engineer and self taught programmer who turned strategy consultant. Graduated from my MBA a few weeks ago, so I might be a bit biased :)

I've found that different people find different things valuable in their MBA. We had an entrepreneurship prof who was also an investor who took us yoking from term sheets to buy outs. Found that super valuable, but yes, no doubt could read up more on this online as well. Same for finance, which was a topic that I didn't know that well before. From a course perspective also got more out of strategy than I expected, but that seems to be very dependent on the prof teaching. (Read 'profit or growth' by bala if you want a book, but more suited for large corporates)

Above all though, i think you get more out of the MBA in personal development (leadership in group work, dealing with pressure, being confident with new material, etc.) and network (after 1-2 years you are at least well connected to a group of people that have high business ambitions, plus alumni). In that sense it's difficult to replace the full MBA experience with a set of MOOCs.

Finally, I've always found it powerful if someone in a room full of technical people knows more about business than any other tech guy in that room (or vice versa, being the only biz guy who understands tech or can program in a room full of biz guys). The MBA is one way for technical people to make that step.

realizing that I didn't answer the question... Here are some things I think would also be interesting, regardless of the paper for more tech oriented people:

\- time value of money (finance)

\- basics of accounting (p&l vs cash flow, you'd be amazed how many startups die by running out of cash even though their p&l is positive)

\- understanding competitive advantage & successful market entry (strategy)

\- basic operations: the difference between efficient and market responsive supply chains (right supply chain for right product, i.e. Don't typically airfreight toilet paper); and the newsfeed or model if you make real products

\- lots around marketing (pricing, channels, etc.)

\- some stuff on more executive lvl management (do executives have most impact by the decisions they make themselves, or by the premises they set for others in the organization within which they make decisions? If the latter, how do you work best as an exec?)

\- negotiation 101: there are some great HBS cases available online, it's even fun as a Friday afternoon to negotiate between people and see what works best.

\- governance and boards

\- basics of investing, leveraged buyouts, private equity/VC

<comment><USER32> This is really useful, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think this depends on the kind of person you are, as well as the field you are in.

If you can learn things for yourself effectively then there are a whole range of degree level courses which are completely unnecessary. In fact, not wasting your time with them, can be an advantage of its own...

Although even then... its always good to have others with experience teaching you. Regardless of the subject matter.

There is no 'rocket science' in business and there is plenty of material available to learn from.

</comment><comment><USER35> As many have noted, it's not necessarily 1:1 useful in the context of advanced skills training. However unsavory, many mid to large tech companies have a relatively high concentration of engineers who later received MBA's in very senior positions. So yes - the cliche that it's a way to climb the corporate ladder can still ring true for tech, if the tech company you want to work for is structured in the conventional way.

</comment><comment><USER36> The biggest value an MBA provides (and this is not me claiming it does or doesn't provide other value) is that companies recruit out of them. If you are looking to make a career change, it can be tough to get considered for roles you might do well in, given your lack of experience, but companies are demonstrably more willing to hire into roles without relevant work experience if coming from a solid MBA program.

</comment><comment><USER37> Would she be where she is without her Harvard MBA? Its not all about the education. Its about the doors it opens and the connections you make.

<comment><USER38> More important was her connection to Larry Summers, the Secretary of Treasury. She was given a role that far exceeded her experience, which gave her an advantage over the other 2000 Harvard MBA grads in her class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> In a tech consultancy, especially if you are in the payments space or do any work with financial institutions can be very helpful. Closely defined, yes it doesn't seem helpful in tech alone but we work in/for businesses and our software solutions are often used by business. Understanding overarching business drivers is very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER40> There is a common perspective in this thread that XYZ skills/knowledge are useful to understand (even if one's not seeking the social signaling associated with a top tier MBA).

Can anyone post some favored texts/resources for self-directed learning?

What do we include in the HN home-brew MBA?

<comment><USER41> Unsurprisingly, someone has attempted to make a business out this exact question. The Personal MBA site has a good selection of books to get your started. It's categorized under different topics like marketing, finance, strategy, etc.

[https://personalmba.com/best-business-books/](https://personalmba.com/best- business-books/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think of Sheryl Sandberg as an ad exec who happened to get into tech at the right time. I'm not really aware of any technical bona fides, just the usual executive ability to extract money from technical processes for personal gain.

Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER43> Oh, it matters. It can easily be a hindrance because the thinking required by large business, consulting and wall street is quite different that that required to get a business off the ground.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have 3/4 of an MBA. Stopped with just an MS in IT Management. I could finish it but, didn't seem that useful.

</comment><comment><USER45> Once could make the argument that having an MBA is actually a hinderance in tech...

<comment><USER46> I don't know that more education is necessarily a bad thing. For a startup it's the opportunity cost of someone who has spent several years in an MBA program that makes that candidate unattractive.

<comment><USER47> You are implying that startups value experience, and more so when gained early in one's career - so they would be discounting knowledge based on how late in one's life it's gained.

I reckon this comes form the American/British style tradition of going straight to college, graduating at 22 and then starting a career. In Europe styding/working isn't a mutually exclusive, binary option. It's not uncommon to graduate at 25 or even 30, whether that's because of mandatory military service, self-funding study concurrently with studying, finding interesting opportunities while at university, pursuing arts/theatre/sport, etc.

In fact, I've never disclosed my age to employers whether during or after hiring. Since it can't be easily deducted from graduation years, I've had people estimate anything from 19-40 in the past few years.

If you are comparing two potential hires, the age should be irrelevant. Experience, skill and future value (including fit and other subjective aspects) vs. their price (salary) is pretty much the only relevant consideration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> People need a general business understanding for most jobs, even government jobs.

</comment><comment><USER49> Most people with a top-tier MBA would never wanna work in tech.

Sure, it may seem interesting to be an executive in Facebook, but that is not nearly as lucrative (and interesting) as working in trades or billion dollars deals in finance.

<comment> UK-AL I believe tech has been competing pretty well against Management consulting and investment banking for top mba grads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> >> "Sandberg suggested a career in tech might not even be necessary to catch Facebook's attention. "We don't look for a specific background or skill-set when we make hiring decisions," she wrote. "As my friend and Instagram COO Marne Levine says, we hire athletes and cross-train them."

So how does one interpret this? It sounds like she doesn't really have a good idea as to what makes a great employee, and falls back to magic catch phrases, altough this is probably an industry (actually multiple industries) wide problem currently (How to identify a great employee a-priori).

So if she doesn't really know what makes for great employees, is her advice about MBA's really relevant then?

IMHO yes MBA's have a bad rap, but just like everything the knowledge you gain from a MBA program can open your mind to thinking about problems in a whole different way. A lot of techies have no concept of how the business side of the industry works, and it would not be a bad thing to understand it. But you can also gain that awareness from a couple of good books on the subject, not just from attending a MBA.

Just for completeness the other advantage of a MBA is the network, which is another discussion. (Of value for the person, not necessarily for the business, which is the point of the article)

<comment> jor-el Can you suggest some books? I would be interested to read them.

<comment><USER50> Well I don't have a MBA :D, but I do have a masters degree of a similar orientation (Masters in engineering management). I can only recommend the ones I have read and found of value:

[1] Crossing the chasm (Marketing related)

[2] Peopleware (HR related)

[3] How to win friends and influence people (HR related)

[4] The Goal (Business related)

[5] Critical chain (Project management related)

[6] Who moved my cheese (Change management related)

and any of the lean / agile businessy books for ex.

[7] The lean startup

These might not be viewed as traditional MBA material, but my course featured some of these along with more traditional academic books on subjects like financial management, people management, operations etc. I can provide these textbooks to you as well if you like.

*Amazon links just for convenience, no affiliation.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Disruptive- Mainstre...](http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Disruptive- Mainstream/dp/0062292986/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450359318&sr=8-1&keywords=crossing+the+chasm)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects- Teams-3...](http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects- Teams-3rd/dp/0321934113/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450359341&sr=8-1&keywords=peopleware)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence- People/dp/06...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence- People/dp/0671027034/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450364297&sr=8-1&keywords=how+to+win+friends+and+influence+people)

[4] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0884271951?keywords=eli%20g...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0884271951?keywords=eli%20goldratt&qid=1450358834&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1)

[5] [http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Chain-Eliyahu-M- Goldratt/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Chain-Eliyahu-M- Goldratt/dp/0884271536/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450359400&sr=8-1&keywords=critical+chain)

[6] [http://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-My-Cheese- Amazing/dp/0399144...](http://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-My-Cheese- Amazing/dp/0399144463/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450359425&sr=8-1&keywords=who+moved+my+cheese)

[7] [http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs- Continuous-...](http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous- Innovation/dp/0307887898/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450359450&sr=8-1&keywords=The+lean+startup)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best Windows 7 Anti-Virus? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/1/114373064968292928213/posts/ZNEKJhsSd5C

<comment><USER2> No anti-virus is the best anti-virus. It's a flawed concept, a waste of money and essentially a virus itself. Just say no to anti-virus.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, it has come to this. Linux maybe?</comment>


New mouse design raises questions - <AUTHOR> https://www.realhardwarereviews.com/quadraclicks-gaming-rbt/ <comment><AUTHOR> hey HN, I'm Qeric. This Right 'Bove Touch design is my creation. +.+</comment>


School-Sanctioned Mid-18th-Century Hazing Rituals at Harvard - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/09/02/history_of_harvard_customs_hazing_rituals_of_the_school_in_the_18th_century.html

<comment><USER2> Agree. Besides, point by point (from the article)

1\. No freshmen wearing hats on the quad. -- This is a classic stylistic indicator of manhood. By telling Freshmen to not wear their hats, it's a way of identifying them to their peers as new students.

2\. Taking off one's hat when passing a senior student. -- This isn't about subservience, it's about creating an atmosphere of collegiality. It's why in the military junior ranking personnel salute senior ranking personnel: because saying hello is a great way to create common bonds of friendship and fealty, and because you need some sort of rule of who should say hello first.

3\. "No Freshman should be saucy... or speak to a Senior with his hat on." Again -- this is anachronistic. But only insofar as wearing a hat while talking to someone was a sign of higher social status. Harvard is raising men to serve in the public sphere, and deference (or at least its outer edifice) is important to get ahead.

4\. + 5. (same as above -- just good manners)

6\. Privacy. Similar to 3, 4&5.

7\. ???? No idea what this means -- though these seem to be ranks of some kind given the linguistics. Perhaps these are "Freshman" "Sophomore" "Junior" "Senior" and then "Professor" in 19th century student lingo?

8\. This is a great lesson for anybody. When asked to do something, do it quickly and efficiently. Wish I could teach my peers this skill!

9\. This is the 19th century version of digital privacy.

10\. This is just basic standardization for executing code. They're just telling everybody what phrases indicate the end of the command.

11., 12. 13. - more good manners. Freshmen seem to essentially be social media tools. Want to play a sport on the green? Send out an invite (i.e. Freshman) to get your friends. What would you prefer, that they get a slave to do it? If it's a Freshman, at least they can rationalize it by saying they're simply investing in a system which has a 3-1 ROI (i.e. for the next three years they'll be able to utilize the same system to their own benefit).

14\. This is a good rule for kids who are likely to be a little wild. It's like forcing people to log in to Facebook in order to comment -- the thought will always be there that at any given time someone might come in and see what you're doing. Also good training for public life. Getting used to public scrutiny.

...

</comment><comment><USER3> Hazing? More like good manners.</comment>


The doctors give me 30 days to live, each post is potentially my last - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Funcondamne.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F52052034209%2Fjour-1

<comment><USER2> I feel like this is perhaps fake. The first post read well to me, seemed reasonable, at least the first time through. The second post, about the job, is what gave me suspicion.

The way he quits, the feeling of "liberation", it borders on sociopathic in some ways. Pretending you're going on holiday when in reality you're going to die, who has time for such games when they've got a 30 day timer running.

It reads like a movie, not like my experience with reality.

<comment><USER3> These come up every day on reddit, and almost all of them turn out to be fake. There was a guy about two weeks ago that claimed to have Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer at age 24. He got thousands of upvotes, got a celebrity from the band Blink 182 to tweet to him, etc. Exposed as fake because he used someone's actual identity he found on Google who did not have cancer.

This line is an incredible clue that it is fake:

>I do not want to go into details about the disease. I do not want to go into the particularities of my life. And because time is short, there will be no comments, no contact address.

Hard to prove false when literally no information is given.

These two lines are interesting though:

>I am 58 years old and I never will 59. I will die in 2013.

>Yesterday, I had the whole life ahead of me. Thirty or forty years, at least. Today thirty days.

Either he's losing track of his lies, he's bad at math or he has unrealistic expectations about life expectancy. If a 58 year old had "thirty or forty years, at least" ahead of him that means that he was expecting to live to "at least" 98 years old.

EDIT: Here are links to Day 2 and Day 3 translations.

[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Funcondamne.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F52127098365%2Fjour-2)

[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Funcondamne.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F52209627415%2Fjour-3)

<comment><USER4> Research on aging is making significant progress. We will know things in 20 years that we can't imagine now. Therefore, a 58 should expect to live past 100 if he or she is in good health now.

<comment><USER5> Well, if we take historical trends as any kind of indication, not quite. E.g. according to Google's life expectancy charts, if we take the period 1992 - 2012 (20 years), and take 3 good, developed countries (USA, UK, Canada), life expectancy has gone from mid 70s to low 80s in that period. On average, about 1.9 years added every decade, and that would lead us to something like 84 years by 2032. The very high numbers we're used to hearing are fairly wild extrapolations of this trend for the next 90 or so years, for newborns today.

Of course, the trend could accelerate, but it could also easily plateau (or even reverse in an extreme case, perhaps due to environmental influences). Current trends don't seem to show 100-year average life expectancy before 2100.

* Edit: this was combined stats for men and women. For men, you can subtract a few years, and for women, add a few. Also, I realise I'm just linearly extrapolating the data, but it's not like the data shows some kind of exponential growth; if anything, it's flattening out.

<comment><USER6> Life expectancy changes with age -- a 60yr old man should live to 81, a 70yr old man should live to 86.

This is important because I don't think that life expectancy for a 60yr old has changed dramatically ... it's just infant care is better, so fewer people die <5 yrs old, and that raises the long term average too.

This might suggest that your estimate is too liberal — not too exciting. On the other hand, we are working hard, as a society, on some gnarly medical issues, and it's possible we'll make a huge break through and figure out how to deal with obesity, heart disease, or cell aging and totally change the situation over the next few decades.

<comment><USER7> And Zeno stirred...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You read the post and feel pretty bad. You load the comments. You see what the top comments are about and it dawns on you - this is why engineers are stereotyped as being emotionless robots.

<comment><USER9> Or people sick of some PR firm's bullshit stunts, jerking people around for a few more follower or clicks. When things don't add up, we take notice rather than just wishing it to the way it ought to be.

It may very well be that the story is true. But when you see obvious giveaways, not only is it valid to doubt what is written but in my opinion a damn public service. I felt sad after reading the post, reflecting on my own mortality, and fleeting times. Then I felt sadder that some A-Hole may be deliberately trying to manipulate negative emotions. Perhaps nothing is off limits.

<comment><USER8> when i wrote that comment, the top conversations were about how good the google translation was. that's what i was referring to.

<comment><USER9> Ah! Taken in context your comment makes more sense. I must admit that while reading the post, my first feeling was of sorrow, but as someone fascinated with technology, I was also thinking a little about someone who speaks a different language being able to communicate their innermost thoughts with people half way around the world.

While posting a comment, stating the story is sad, might be redundant. But, posting a comment about some silver lining might be a common response. My siblings and I laughed at some of the funny events about my dad did while transporting his body to the cemetery. The feeling of grief was overwhelming and that was a coping mechanism.

That being said, given the level of info that was passed on, one might be more enamored by the blog and twitter and translate, as they try to cope with the terror or death. Smells a lot to me like PR company BS. While I suspected it when reading the post, looking thru the HN comments showed that my suspicions weren't unfounded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He talks about his job in day 2:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Funcondamne.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F52127098365%2Fjour-2)

<comment><USER11> That really puts life in perspective. Enlightenment, I suppose, is living every day as if it's your last. I wonder how to reach that mindset.

<comment><USER12> I don't know how. But one way I can think of is to not make any long-term plans.

All your plans and goals can be achieved in one day. You finish the day reaching your goals. You wake up next day, find yourself alive, you make new goals for that day only.

Rinse. Repeat.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I agree with this. I seem to have reached a point in life where I don't really think about the past and future often, but I wouldn't say I've quite reached enlightenment yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really impressed by the quality of Google's translation.

<comment><USER14> Me too. I didn't notice the "translate" in the URL, and just thought it was written by a non-native English speaker. I did a double take at the end when I realized it was translated. Does Google do a particularly good job on French to English? (Bigger training corpus?) I more often used it on Chinese or Japanese, and it didn't seem as good.

<comment><USER15> French to English generally works rather well because they have similar sentence structure (except for inverted adjectival order) and neither has a lot of long-distance dependency stuff. Even Systran kicks ass on French to English.

Where FR>EN fails is vocabulary. This text, as you see, is really basic terminology, nothing technical. The French categorize things _very_ differently in technical texts sometimes - to the point of despair for the translator. Google tends to do OK on that to a point, then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it.

<comment><USER16> French grammar is very similar to the English's one.

A text translated "word for word" to English from French, using the later grammar, will almost look readable. Strange but not really wrong.

Most errors will be from an over-usage of perfect tenses ("I have visited" vs "I visited") and wrong superlatives ("most fast" vs "fastest"), as these are the biggest differences between the two languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify, I'm not the author, I'm doing fine. This blog is having quite a buzz in France/Belgium right now.

Many wonder if fake. Not much evidence pointing one way or the other.

<comment><USER17> Seems fake from day one. The tone, the Twitter account etc.

But I guess almost twenty year of Internet can make you a bit over-suspicious :)

<comment><USER18> I think you are completely reasonable. Exceptional claims requires exceptional proof, and this blog only has a claim and no proof. I don't see any reason to believe it.

<comment><USER19> OTOH, someone who has 30 days left to live has absolutely no motivation or need to prove the validity of his story to anyone.

<comment><USER20> One would think that if you are taking the time to write something like this in your last 30 days of life, you would do what you can so it wasn't just dismissed as fake since it would have meant that you have wasted some of the last time on Earth.

<comment><USER19> I can't think of any better circumstance than knowing your living days are a numbered few, to absolutely not give a damn about what other people think. There are many therapeutic reasons to write a blog/journal during this time that are not diminished by worrying about skeptics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Heavy stuff. I'm reading it in french at <http://uncondamne.tumblr.com> . I've subscribed to the RSS.

<comment><USER22> Him or google reader...the race is on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> All of the posts on one page:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Funcondamne.tumblr.com%2F)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is going to be revealed as a "public art piece" in about 45 days, with commentary on the morbidity of the media outlets that picked up on the story.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's very well written. Touching, to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER26> That's really bleak. I wonder what kind of disease can kill you in 30 days but otherwise leave you well enough to write and travel? It doesn't sound like he has a history of anything. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing and could hazard a guess?

<comment><USER27> Brain tumors can be very quick, that would be my guess

<comment><USER25> He writes that his wife is worried for his liver (Day 3, I think). Maybe he has Hepatitis C?

Edit: Well, this shows that I'm not a doctor. I have no idea if Hepatitis C can kill as quickly as this. Maybe he was diagnosed very late and his malady already is at its final stage?

<comment><USER28> > He writes that his wife is worried for his liver

lol no! you lost something in translation...

<comment><USER25> I'm French. She says it because of the wine, but maybe it has to do with his illness? Maybe not...

<comment><USER29> It reads to me as a dark joke by repeating a common caution that is now completely irrelevant. Note the "Je ris" ("I laughed" for the non-French speakers) immediately afterwards. I'm presuming that's what kome think you missed.

<comment><USER30> It's meant as a joke. As a wife who is worried about his health, although irrelevant in his current state, continues to pretend having a normal life.

Such sentence is very common in my (Belgian) entourage.

This is also why he adds he is smiling.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I totally missed the sarcastic tone. I just thought she was making the joke on his actual illness, not the possibility of having another illness due to wine abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder about all this talk and arguing back and forth over whether "it's a fake".

What this man is expressing is real. I can confirm it is real, because as a human I can feel many of the same things, as I read it. Whether he will die in 30 days or not, we don't know. And you can, of course, argue about that all day long. You might even be quite put out if he does not. But whether he is having these thoughts and feelings because he is about to die, or whether he is simply exploring these thoughts and feelings because he is a human (and facing death like us all), they are no less real. You may call one fiction because the man does not die on cue, but after reading it, I say it is not fake.

<comment><USER32> Well said. Joseph Gordon Levitt isn't actually facing death in the movie 50/50, but I can assure you the anxieties expressed in that movie touch me profoundly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can't tell whether this is a fake or not. But ever since calling the one about the one night stand woman in Denmark that wanted to contact the father of her baby I've had a healthy dose of unbelief for anything that goes viral and that involves some personal tragedy.

Another couple of those and real people with real problems or calls for help will find it impossible to be heard.

If this is real I hope he makes the most of whatever time he's got left.

</comment><comment><USER34> After reading day 2 and day 3, it started to sound fake

</comment><comment><USER35> What does it matter if this were fake? It's not like they're asking us to donate a tithe.

</comment><comment><USER36> I just read the french original, and fake or not it is certainly well written.

If it's not fake, I hope he keeps up like this until the inevitable.

Ah, and before I forget, he's certainly right with a lot of things, fake or not.

</comment><comment><USER37> There was someone else who was sent home by doctors to die: <http://www.presentlove.com/lester-levenson/>

</comment><comment><USER38> Even if it turns out to be fiction, it does make you stop and think at least for a moment how you'd spend your own final 30 days.

I think I'd like to travel. Not sure.

</comment><comment><USER39> That's got to be the saddest thing I've read on HN. I'm going to hug my sons, and play with them more.

</comment><comment><USER10> "See you tomorrow..."

<comment><USER40> Love the optimism in the farewell.

<comment><USER41> That is an interesting parting phrase. I suppose on that level where he's coming to grips with only have 30 days, he must be rationalizing that today is the first of those, and that he'll at least get the 30... Heavy.

I can't even imagine the understanding of my own mortality where I could say "See you tomorrow... Maybe." and actually mean it.

<comment><USER30> The three dots ("...") show an uncertainty. I could imagine someone saying see you tomorrow, even if there is a (big) chance that won't happen.

A form of self mockery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Get this man a ticket to Waponi Woo.

</comment><comment><USER43> valar morghulis

</comment><comment><USER44> i'll assume it's fake. We dont know who the guy is, no name no address , nothing. i could come up with the same stuff ( i'm french). IF you cant verify an information , assume it is fake.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why would the author waste time posting about the things he is doing? I hardly speak for everyone, but I would be using that time to for a bucket list, visiting friends, and other personal things that needed to be done.

<Well, I think my son must have created and configured the blog.

He is an engineer and he isn't sure?</comment>


German vandals target Street View opt-out homes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11827862

<comment><USER2> I didn't think very much of it at the time these requests were made, but now that I have seen the effect, pixelating these houses seems like an act of vandalism in itself to me.

Imagine 50 or so years from now, these recordings will be a wonderful document of our times, but in Germany they are now heavily scarred.

<comment><USER3> How so? The source material is no doubt still available in unpixelated form.

<comment><USER4> No, the German data protection officials insisted on Google blurring the original source material and not preserving any unblurred copies.

IMHO, that might be appropriate in certain exceptional circumstances, e.g. when inadvertently something very private or embarrassing has been captured, but it is a bit over the top as a general policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The picture displays typical German life.

<comment><USER6> Haha, totally. I don't know - I think it's kind of sad. Rural Bavarian life is taken for life in Germany in general... it's plain wrong. I should know, because I live in Germany. I wonder why everyone keeps going back to restricting Germany to that single cliche.

<comment><USER7> The southern part of a european country is usually the stereotype of the larger nation.

When thinking of the UK the stereotype is the english banker more than the scottish clansmen, for spain is the mediterranean south insted of the atlantic/mountainous north, for italy it's the more noisy&caoithic rome/naples/sicily instead of the mitteleuropeans & industrial milan and turin.

I have no explanation for this though except some pseudohistorical ramblings.

<comment><USER5> How about the Russians? It can get pretty hot in the south in summer there, but everyone is just depicting Russia in winter.

Another funny thing is that part of European countries that's closer to Switzerland tends to be richer. E.g. the north of Italy, and the south of Britain and Germany. (It doesn't work for Belgium, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I must admit that I would find it amusing as a street art project to pixelate some of those houses for real, with some kind of graffiti perhaps. Or like the artist Christo who wraps things into garments (including the German Reichstag).

I find the pixelated buildings really annoying. Luckily mine isn't pixelated yet, but I am sure it is only a matter of time. My street already has 5 pixelated buildings.

<comment><USER9> >I would find it amusing as a street art project to pixelate some of those houses for real,

That would be fantastic, I'm thinking, having large pixels on a fuzzy material, varying colours matched to the surrounding buildings but at different depths to avoid anyone getting a focussed image of the whole building? Any ideas on materials? At first I thought frosted perspex, but I'm more drawn to fabric that can be fuzzy round the edges too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've opted out from street-view, asking both my flat, and my car to be removed, Google obliged. No eggs yet.

<comment><USER6> The eggs are the exception, I think. With 250k people having opted out, and the article speaking of 'some homes in Essen'... it probably were some youths high on googlemania - a local thing. Though I suppose others may follow - copycats.

<comment><USER11> "some youths high on googlemania - a local thing"

Is this really a thing in Germany? That's the weirdest part of this whole story, that kids would care that much about an international corporation like Google. It'd be like getting in a fight with someone because they didn't drink Coke.

<comment><USER12> It's a bit baffling to me, too, but there are some voices on the web which feel very strongly about that whole Street View thing one way or another. The sentiment that opting-out is very narrow minded definitely exists. It also looks like this is an isolated case, so all it takes is one or two people taking that sentiment too far.

Just to give you an idea of the discourse at the moment, there was for example this blogger who proposed uploading geotagged photos (publishing those is, after all, legal if maybe morally questionable) of the blurred buildings which will then appear on Google Maps and Street View [0]. That idea found quite a few supporters and was also controversially discussed.

[0] <http://mspr0.de/?p=1767> (German)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I live in Germany and eyed the whole process of Google Street View.

The whole thing with the opt-out is more considered to be a conflict of generations, so don't take this too seriously.

The problem is a different one: if in one apartment building only one rentee opts out the whole apartment building becomes blurred. This is what caused a lot of hate by rentees who want the house to be seen in Street View.

Another action that occured (only in German, sorry, but I'll try to translate roughly):

<http://asset.soup.io/asset/1253/8519_985c.jpeg>

Someone put a note saying that because some rentee saw his private sphere violated by Google Street View he won't accept packages for his neighbours anymore since this is also a violation of private sphere. Additionally he blurred his signature for security reasons (because of the often quoted argument that showing the house in Google Street View causes safety concerns).

</comment><comment><USER14> The other kind of vandalism has happened too, where houses were requested to be taken down / pixelated by someone other than the owner or tenants. There was a news report about this happening to the Green party headquarters last week, and according to Google, it couldn't be undone because Google had deleted the data (imagine that).

<comment><USER12> Completely deleting the photos of houses people requested to be blurred was one of the requirements of the government. (It's not a law but a voluntary agreement. The government did, however, threaten to regulate services like Street View. That's probably not going to happen now.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The Most Important Data Structures - <AUTHOR>

A few weeks ago there was an article on the frontpage listing some of the most important algorithms in CompSci (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489166). In a similar vein, what are the most useful data structures a working programmer must be familiar with?
Links to papers/articles/code samples much appreciated :) <comment><USER2> Linked list. Array. Hash table. Binary tree. Binary heap. Patricia trie. Bloom filter. B+Tree. Red-black tree.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://us.php.net/spl>

i think most of them are here, but there are few missing(but it depends on language you are working with)

</comment><comment><USER4> The suffix array:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_array>

</comment><comment><USER5> Stack.</comment>


Encrypted messaging apps are trending in Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/stegersaurus/status/1138727909940760576?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw <comment><USER2> What are the chances that China will extend their Firewall over Hong Kong as well as a result?

I presume business wise it'd be a bad idea.</comment>


Ian Grigg: "Satoshi Nakamoto was cryptography's best-kept secret since Enigma" - <AUTHOR> http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001593.html <comment><AUTHOR> > Satoshi Nakamoto was cryptography's best-kept secret since Enigma. For more > than 6 years the secret was held by a tiny bunch of supporters ring-fencing > around the team - for privacy, for safety, and for fear.

> Sometime in summer of 2015 the secret started to spread, and the writing was > on the wall. An extortionist and a hacker started attacking, perhaps > together, perhaps apart; to add to the woes, Dr. Wright and his companies > were engaged in a long harsh bitter battle with the Australian Tax Office.</comment>


Do you think Nassim Taleb has read Paul Graham's essays? - <AUTHOR> I ask because I see many similarities between Nassim's writings and some of Graham's older essays.Perhaps some ideas are in the "air" or have a common predecessor. <comment><USER2> Malcom Gladwell's ideas fall in the similar radar. I don't think there is one particular influence on Taleb. In his Black Swan book, there are probably thousand references to quite diverse set of things ranging from greek philosophy to modern investment theories.

 _(I tried to look up references in Black Swan, couldn 't find any)_

<comment><USER3> I hated Malcom Gladwell's books. The concept maybe valid, but they were so repetitive.</comment></comment>


These Awesome Shoes Were Printed Using The World's First Color 3D-Printer - <AUTHOR> http://nocamels.com/2014/02/these-awesome-shoes-were-printed-using-the-worlds-first-color-3d-printer/ <comment><USER2> That Israeli site sure puts an Israeli focus on the various exciting Israeli innovations and Israeli business events that come out of Israel. I'm not so sure the shoes are really that awesome, since they're just a prototype. Basically a mainly visual model of a shoe.

<comment><USER3> I was put off by the fact that the title is "No Camels". Seems vaguely offensive ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not the first color printer. I'm not sure how long color sandstone printing has been available commercially, but it's at least since 2012 (see item #7 here):

[http://3dprinting.com/materials/10-game- changing-3d-printing...](http://3dprinting.com/materials/10-game- changing-3d-printing-materials/)

and it's currently offered by Shapeways commercially.

This may be the first color printer in a particular material,

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there any difference between a 3d printer for prototyping and one for making things you can use? Is it just aiming for different markets?

<comment><USER6> It depends on what you mean by "use".

Output of the Objet printers is generally fragile, expensive, not safe for food and degrades over time. But it's incredibly detailed and can handle geometry that requires support material very well. This makes them great for prototyping a part that will be injection molded.

A ceramic printer in contrast will give you a rugged, inexpensive, food safe, durable item. But it can't handle delicate geometry or geometry with overhangs very well. This makes it great for producing consumer products designed for manufacturing on a ceramic printer.

FDM printers can sometimes fall in between. They are expensive, but if your part is bulky enough and you're only making a few of them (for example, an enclosure for part of an MRI machine), you can produce them on the printer for end use (after some hand finishing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The ZCorp printers, which use a gypsum powder, binding agent and inkjet-like color have been around for a while: [http://www.zcorp.com/en/Products/3D-Printers/ZPrinter-850/sp...](http://www.zcorp.com/en/Products/3D-Printers/ZPrinter-850/spage.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER7> Alternatively, for less than a grand, well over a year ago...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkkbjpHVNZQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkkbjpHVNZQ)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g0fiWx8RyM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g0fiWx8RyM)

</comment><comment><USER8> These awesome MODELS OF shoes were printed using ...

</comment><comment><USER9> ...and not one picture of someone actually _WEARING_ the shoes.</comment>


Former TechCrunch Contributor Launches Rival Site - <AUTHOR> http://ustech.blognation.com/ <comment><USER2> isn't the first rule about launching a site to launch with a ton of content? i see two posts on the US tech site and they are more like rants than posts indicative of future content.

</comment><comment><USER3> isn't this the guy who used to do Mobilecrunch - if so dont hold your breath - he didnt used to post much and what he did post was dull.

</comment><comment><USER4> It looks a damn sight better than TechCrunch. Now to see if the quality is any better.</comment>


JazzScheme a development system based on extending Scheme  - <AUTHOR> http://www.jazzscheme.org/index.htm

<comment><USER2> For anyone wondering why this was posted now, version 2.3 was released today.</comment>


StackExchange System Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://stackexchange.com/performance

<comment><USER2> More details:

[http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow- upda...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow- update-560m-pageviews-a-month-25-servers-and-i.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the share. It's very interesting to see such statistics. It also gives a lot of insights regarding the technology used behind.</comment>


Robert Scoble's amazing setup - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/DQDUq6EkN7m <comment><USER2> I think there's some sickness here.</comment>


Samsung playing with possible phone designs - <AUTHOR> http://www.samsung.com/no/isthisthenext

<comment><AUTHOR> I really wish mobile makers tried to deviate from the current mobile design norm. I am not against touch interfaces, but i sure miss some more physical buttons.</comment>


Show HN: Get professional coaching on job interviews for less than $10 - <AUTHOR> https://boldvue.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback @wingerlang! The professional coaching is ten dollars per job interview question. How it works is the customer uploads a video of themselves answering one job interview question - e.g. what is your greatest strength? The coach then reviews the answer and gives the customer specific and detailed feedback on how he or she can improve. We'll see if we can fix that so it's easier to understand. Yeah, good call about the social media links. We'll take them off until we get some content on them. We have been prioritizing development above marketing. That's a good point about the sign up. We'll brainstorm ways to better approach this. Thanks again for the feedback.

</comment><comment><USER2> The website is not very clear. Getting tips for "less than $10" is almost giving me the impressions of cheap and low quality in this case.

Looking at your social media (why do you need a pinterest anyway..) the pinned post is from 2016, so it looks like it is dead or outdated. Each social media account is more or less dead as well.

So basically I have no idea how you will help me, and most content looks dead anyway.

Also everything is under sign up, which was annoying.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, It doesn't take too many job interviews to realize how bad they suck. The worst part is they can keep you away from your dream job. Boldvue helps you discover what questions you should practice, what great answers look like in video form, and gets you the feedback you need (free or professional feedback for $10) in order to be confident and nail your job interview. This is our MVP, we'd love it if you could take it out for a spin and give us your feedback. Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: How can i verify perfect secrecy of a cryptosystem? - <AUTHOR>

i'm playing with an encryption algorithm (demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1kABn5dfXc). how can i prove it's information-theoretically secure? <comment><USER2> Your key is too short - it's not possible for it to be information- theoretically secure. That's just one of its obvious faults: it looks like it doesn't even work all of the time, the system generates a key instead of taking on as input, the data undergoes unnecessary expansion, etc etc etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- the first time, i intentionally modified the key [to show that it doesn't work just on any number input]

\- the system can be updated to take a key as input.

\- right, it expands by nearly a half; that's used to make it just as secure as the one-time pad, but more practical. [and this is what i want to verify, then optimize].

if you have the time, i'd love to hear more feedback. thank you very much.

<comment><USER2> > that's used to make it just as secure as the one-time pad, but more > practical.

No. There is no such thing as "just as secure as the one-time pad but more practical". If you want information-theoretic security you have to pay for it, and if you don't pay for it you don't get it. Like, there are theorems. That's why mention of OTP is a good proxy for not understanding modern cryptography. Everyone who's serious about it knows that not only are the benefits of the OTP not achievable in almost every practical situation (due to key distribution), nobody actually needs that level of security when 256-bit algorithms are available.

<comment><AUTHOR> you're correct.

my claim is a bit different though; it's a new take on encrypting text that has no properties of existing crypto systems. used OTP as an analogy. i think it's a fallacy to do so.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What worries me most about the NSA fibre issue... - <AUTHOR>

Is not that they are monitoring me. I have nothing to hide. Other than the usual, which is encrypted in utorrent, apparently.
What worries me more is, what if they were to perform covert MiTM attacks? They are in the perfect position to do so. Anyone using online banking could be targeted and suddenly they have no money.
Or they could transfer money into people's accounts and make them look like money launderers, so they could be arrested.
Yes yes, it is all a bit conspiracy theory-ish... but if I had suggested I thought the NSA was mirroring fibre a year ago you would think the same.
This is what worries me over the debacle, as most data appears to pass through the USA. <comment><USER2> _" Is not that they are monitoring me. I have nothing to hide."_

This is not a valid argument. See [http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should- all-have-somethin...](http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have- something-to-hide/) and [http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a- day](http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a-day)

<comment><USER3> And this: [http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_belie...](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/caeb3pl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide" argument has been debunked countless times and made the front page of HN in the last week at least twice. Privacy is a building block foundation for freedom. You can't have freedom without privacy.

Your utorrent encryption is merely useful to thwart some forms of bandwidth throttling, it is _not_ hiding you or your sharing/downloading.

NSA could do such MiTM attacks, it's been a known possibility for years. but why would they rely on this kind of attacks as they probably have a copy of the private key of the party your communicating with (or something along these lines as was shown with lotus notes).

Also they already have other ways to seize and freeze assets, so you shouldn't have to worry about this specific abuse. There's more than enough to worry about the rest.

</comment><comment><USER5> While we should of course be concerned about the privacy implications these programs hold for ordinary American citizens, it's also important to think about the implications these resources have on the class of people who are most likely to be targeted: the immediate competitors and enemies of those who have access to them. While everyone's privacy is threatened by these surveillance tools, there are 300,000,000 everyones. Only a tiny subset of that pool has direct, palpable influence into the political power elite. They are the ones most likely to have this infiltration of their lives used against them.

Those at the top of this informational food chain who are able to abuse it are most likely to abuse it in a way that benefits them most directly by blackmailing and otherwise undermining the influence of their competitors. In this manner it makes the consolidation and perpetuation of political power more efficient by orders of magnitude compared to those who have no access or very limited access to these surveillance programs.

This is dangerously destabilizing to a democratic society. If we have no real competition for authority, there are no real checks on that authority. The US is grooming an autarch.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's possible that a MitM like this is feasible. Recall that the author of the Flame malware that targeted Iranian computers used a hash collision attack on the MD5 hash for a trusted certificate, which essentially allowed them to create their own certificate that hashed to the same value as the real certificate. [1]

The SHA-1 hash in your average SSL cert might be more expensive to attack than MD5, but that doesn't make me feel much better.

The mitigating factor here is that it seems like this could only be used on a case by case basis against a small number of people, since it would be found out if widely deployed.

Also, we only have evidence of traffic interception and not tampering. Actually writing to the stream, i.e. performing a MitM on an SSL connection, is probably a lot harder than just copying all traffic.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/flame-crypto- breakth...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/flame-crypto- breakthrough/)

<comment><USER7> When the forged certificate was created MD5 has been _throughly_ broken for a long time, much more so than SHA-1 even now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just an FYI, encrypting your uTorrent downloads won't stop you getting busted if you are down/uploading copyrighted material.

Regards MiTM attacks, yes they could but then again they always could. It wouldn't be 100% undetectable though since they would have to change the key/cert for sites they wanted to MiTM. Certificate pinning may address this issue in future.

<comment><USER9> > _encrypting your uTorrent downloads won 't stop you getting busted if you > are down/uploading copyrighted material._

Could you elaborate? Assume you mean using a VPN service while downloading.

<comment><USER4> From what OP said, I understood he meant turning on encryption in the bittorrent client, not using a VPN.

Turning on encryption is a way to work around bandwidth throttling and deep packet inspection, not a method to protect your identity or activity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, just the "Forced Encryption". First layer, just to stop my ISP flagging me straight away.

I don't use a VPN, I probably should use a Seedbox or something, not in my name and paid for in cash, but I don't do it often enough to be bothered...yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >but if I had suggested I thought the NSA was mirroring fibre a year ago you would think the same.

I wouldn't have. Were you unaware of this (from 2006)? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is silly. a corrupt gov does not need rubegoldberg machines. They have much more efficient ways of jailing you.

</comment><comment><USER12> You are right to worry.

> what if they were to perform covert MiTM attacks?

Then you would be pwned.

However, active MitM attacks are generally targeted. They can only get away with so many for so long before they are detected. Their scope can be quite large however. The entire country of Iran was MitM'd for some weeks before a single Chrome user reported seeing a cert error in Gmail. The Flamer malware MitM'd unattended systems apparently for years.

So if I were the target of the NSA, I'd expect them to get me with drive-by malware. A bit of malware is much easier to replace than backbone fiber access if the capability is 'burned'.

However, there are an unlimited number of other attackers out there in the world, most with 'catch as catch can' capabilities. That public Wifi or hotel internet could easily be hostile and the attacker may not have much to lose.

</comment><comment><USER13> What worries me most are two things:

1\. as was pointed out on an HN top story a week ago, if the surveillance is accepted by the public, then the public will accept regulations prohibiting use of software to avoid surveillance (i.e., most tools useful to software developers). I'm not really looking forward to the day when downloading crypto software requires me to pay certification fees and have an ID verifying that I'm a licensed software engineer.

2\. I can't wait for the day when we can type with our brains (and no hands). Maybe we do that with pupil tracking software or facial cues... or maybe via direct brainwave input. Some products like this already exist, but they're in their infancy. One day though, when we all have bluetooth head masks and carpal tunnel is a thing of the past, I don't want every thought I have tracked by guys at an NSA lab... and I doubt the government wants that either, but it's going to be hard to not have them get that data.

... and I guess the third problem is just basically the death of liberty. But that's a harder issues to argue about, amazingly, when people are worried about terrorism.

</comment><comment><USER14> Chrome include certificate pinning first described here, which offers some protection for MITM: [http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html](http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> If I was an NSA analyst who could spy on who ever I wanted, I would not be keen to throw people in jail, but seducing women would be fun; I think there is even a movie about it.

<comment><USER16> Really? Do you know the title? I once worked on developing a romantic comedy along the same lines, but the NSA guy was a matchmaker. I would be interesting to see how such a film did in the marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was under the impression that they used beam splitters to get a copy of the data going over the fiber. It is my understanding that they can only receive data this way, not send it.

<comment><USER18> Wouldn't simply owning the DNS be more efficient?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> You think NSA can really fix their budget issues by stealing funds from your ample bank account?

<comment><AUTHOR> What if they stole 1 dollar from everyone who's online banking passes through the US? That would be roughly $188m in one day...</comment></comment>


Cell phone fraud rising sharply - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/business/fraud-robocalls-spoofing.html <comment><USER2> I think I have read hundreds of reports and warnings filed about similar scams since years ago. We should have been quite familiar with their tricks. Since now, I still could read people complaining about them at sites like [http://whycall.me](http://whycall.me) and also on social media. We need to inform our family about this. Don't let them become one of the victims.</comment>