Disable Flash support by default in Firefox 69 - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519434 <comment><USER2> Flash is already disabled by default, by virtue of not being installed by default. It is also disabled by default, by virtue of being click to play by default.

What this actually means, per the roadmap [0], is "stop telling users what they need to do to make the website work".

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what's going to happen to all the incredible Flash media, especially games, produced over the years. I hope someone's archiving them, because I'd hate for us to lose them.

<comment><USER4> This should be a solemn reminder about proprietary (especially binary) file formats. They serve a purpose but are an awful way to archive things of value.

I truly hope that we have learned our lesson from Flash and choose formats like SVG (human readable and an open standard) from now on for things like animations and games.

<comment><USER5> > I truly hope that we have learned our lesson from Flash and choose formats > like SVG (human readable and an open standard) from now on for things like > animations and games.

At least with a flash game, you can often just download the .swf file and run it however you like.

With HTML-based stuff, you're often reliant on a server being up. Authoring tools are also just not what they were with flash - the sheer number of quality vector-based games and animations has dropped like a rock. I'm not sure if this is something Adobe will resolve eventually, but at the moment it's just kinda sad.

<comment><USER6> Not true. Browsers work with file addresses on your system. You can download an HTML file and all its JS and CSS and if navigate to the path of the HTML on the disk, the website would just behave as if it were served by a static server.

<comment><USER7> While true for simple things, this is one of those things that's highly variable depending upon how you built your app. If all your JS is included via script tags and all your image assets are referenced directly, sure, probably.

When anything is dynamically generated things get iffy, though. It's one of the big problems both Google and services like the Wayback Machine and Pinboard have had with searching and preserving content.

Of course gaming as a whole has also evolved, so it's less likely you'd ever get a purely single player game in the first place, and who knows if the game will even load in 10 years if it can't connect to the server to see if you're registered or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Per [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar), the projected release date for Firefox 69 (stable) is 2019-09-03.

</comment><comment><USER9> They've warned about this for a while now, good to see it going through.

</comment><comment><USER10> I just finished uninstalling flash on all my computers and it feels great, not as great as uninstalling java though years ago. There's finally no sites that require it. I can thank the mobile first trend for this.

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on- flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

\--Steve Jobs, "Thoughts on Flash," 2010

<comment><USER12> Took 9 years for it to get chucked out of the PC space.

The annoying thing is that with the rise of the open web, fingerprinting has become significantly easier.

Private browsing or a VPN doesn't make you anonymous because your web browser is fingerprint-able because of the peculiarities of the hardware its running on.

That not to mention things like Google Chrome for Android that puts your phone model and software build number in the user agent. That puts you in a very small population especially with carrier customised software versions.

Combine that with even the basics of fingerprinting, ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting)) then you are known.

<comment><USER13> You can disable or cripple fingerprinting by disabling or faking the data you send.

<comment><USER7> Tails even warns you about resizing the Tor Browser window because the size of the window could fingerprint you.

The difficulty of avoiding fingerprinting multiplies exponentially depending upon how paranoid you are (or need to be). Keeping Google from knowing (passively) who you are is one level. Keeping the oppressive governmental regime you're exposing the corruption of that has a dedicated secret police force actively attempting to track you by name is completely a different one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Until it's easy to recreate a Strong Bad E-Mail in HTML5, Easter eggs and all, Flash doesn't deserve to die.

<comment><USER15> Ask NH: How do you watch Homestar Runner in 2019?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Will this force HBO to switch from Flash now? That'd be nice because HBO is the only service I actively use that still requires Flash and it hurts me every time I have to give it permission to run.

</comment><comment><USER17> Jeez. I'd been thinking about switching to Firefox now that Chrome is making me re-enable Flash every time I visit a website, but guess there's no point.

<comment><USER18> Why do you want Flash? Unless you're using a very outdated proprietary piece of software that can't be updated there's no reason for it.

<comment><USER17> I'm visiting sites that use it, many of which aren't updated (for flash games in particular the original creator may not even be around).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seeing this feels a bit like when the end of production of floppy disks by Sony was announced in 2010.

"Oh but they were still being produced?"

</comment><comment><USER20> But... but... zombo.com

<comment><USER21> [https://html5zombo.com/](https://html5zombo.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice.

</comment><comment><USER23> Another reason for people to switch to Chrome

<comment><USER24> Adobe themselves have abandoned Flash. They announced the end of life for Flash quite some time ago:

[https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash- update/](https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/)

All browsers will block Flash soon enough. It has no future.</comment></comment>


How I Became HackerRank 1 in Two Hours - <AUTHOR> http://williampross.com/became-hackerrank-1-two-hours?ref=yc <comment><USER2> Over the past several months about 4 out of 10 companies that interviewed me actually required me to complete several HackerRank challenges because I did not have a HackerRank score. The fact that I have worked for several industry leading companies, and had 20+ years of development experience was irrelevant without that score. As a sr. dev manager, I found this to be an odd requirement.

<comment><USER3> I'm totally okay with that. I was fresh out of school and was working at a small consulting company that required us to go work with some larger companies and lots of "senior" devs - 10+ years of experience all of them - I'd say 50-60% of them could not code fizz-buzz.

There was one meeting with two devs, both of whom had worked as programmers for over 10 years at this company and we were looking at code one of them wrote. The code looped over a string's chars to check for a single char's existence, and there were 26 IF statements: one for each alpha character. I had to explain to these two about the "contains" method. 10 years of programming experience each. And I had to show them the "contains" method... Since then "X years of programming" doesn't mean a thing to me.

<comment><USER4> How are people that can't do fizzbuzz able to function in a programming job? The thing you describe should lead them to struggle with virtually anything. I used to do front line interviews, and it was rare even then for people like that to make it to me. I've mostly worked for large, successful tech companies. I don't see someone like that getting a job, and definitely not being able to hang around for a long time.

<comment><USER5> When people say someone "can't do fizzbuzz", do they mean _can 't do it cleanly or optimally_, or _can 't do it at all_?

<comment><USER6> Can't do it at all. About 70% of the people we interview fall into this bucket. Another 10% can't do it cleanly.

The rest get to continue past the first five minutes.

<comment><USER7> Just to clarify, since I've never done a programming interview:

70% of people can't do fizzbuzz _during_ the interview?

<comment><USER8> Correct.

For our coding screen, we use coderpad.io, which lets you chose whatever language you want. Go try it out yourself!

<comment><USER9> Doesn't include Lisp :-(

<comment><USER10> At least it includes Clojure, which is technically a Lisp...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like computers. I did when I was 17 & I still do now. But, as a young developer now, I'm quiet scared of the industry as a whole. The direction it's heading towards. I don't know the right answers but there is quiet a lot of things on part of the hiring process & what's considered as value in the software industry, that feels wrong.

Let me get specific.

1\. Competitive programming is great. But why hold it in direct proportion to ability to build products?

2\. What happens 10 years from now. I know the 'keep up with the latest' drill. I'll definitely be doing it & I quiet like it. But why is the trend unreasonably favouring fresh graduates and quiet unjust to the seniors. Shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't despise the freshers. I'm quiet a fresher myself, but it still concerns me.

3\. Why are things changing so fast in the first place? Don't get me wrong. I'm looking at the JS ecosystem. I like diversification. It's good. In our industry diversification helps better than anything else. They eventually converge back. JS is yet to reach that state, but still it concerns me the way the Javascript ecosystem is diversifying.

We've got an awful lot of things to set right in the industry. Hiring process is definitely something that needs attention. I personally find short-term paid contracting as a part of the hiring process, much much healthy than whiteboard coding & website ranks.

<comment><USER12> > Competitive programming is great. But why hold it in direct proportion to > ability to build products?

Because it's quick to test how good someone is at competitive programming, it's easy to grade everyone consistenty, and it (somewhat) correlates with actual programming ability.

Compare it to other interview techniques. A programming project/trial period is time consuming. And it's hard to grade everyone consistently when going off of their resume/github.

<comment><USER11> > Because it's quick to test how good someone is at competitive programming, > it's easy to grade everyone consistently, and it (somewhat) correlates with > actual programming ability.

I'd agree. Competitive programming does correlate with actual coding ability. The category of people who find it satisfying, earning ranks from a website - that's what bothers me.

Young talents who've got all the time needed to earn score, they do it. What about the rest of our veterans? How fair is it to keep a website rank as a baseline for job in the real world.

I don't know many who find competitive programming fascinating, after 5 years solving real problems for real people. I may be wrong here. Please disapprove/acknowledge me in the comments.

It's a deep problem. Not a lot of organizations can afford the short-term contracting method. I agree. But I consider the cumulative star counts of their github projects, way better a metric than a rank from a website.

There's no one right solution to this. But competitive programming score is IMO a very wrong direction to go. We are very much capable of coming up with better solutions. That's what we are good at :)

<comment><USER13> [http://codeforces.com/profile/Petr](http://codeforces.com/profile/Petr)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It should also be pointed on that #1 is not an exclusive position on HackerRank's leaderboard. It it shared by everyone who got full points on each Java practice problem [1]. I see 16 full pages + 1 partial page = 166 people who are tied for "#1 in Java".

Furthermore, "#1 in Java" is not "Hacker Rank #1". Each leaderboard is broken up by language, topic, or contest. OP is trolling really hard here. There is no overall ranking across boards, so this claim doesn't make much sense.

(All this aside, I do really like the HackerRank platform and have been solving quite a few problems there lately.)

[1]: [https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1...](https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1/page/1)

<comment><USER15> And HackerRank Java challenges are more like training for the beginners than a "Master of Java" verification. I know this because I also was #1 in Java and it was very easy compared to the algo challenges they have (you lose #1 position when they add new questions).

<comment><USER14> This is true. I've done dozens of the Python ones which are more or less mastering the basics of the standard library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> tl, dr: The guy just blindly copy/pasted the answers from the discussion section of each problem to the question itself and passed all tests, without even really reading the question or answer.

Is having a specific HackerRank meaningful to the outside world? I am unfamiliar with HackerRank, but solve algorithm questions on a site called LeetCode for fun. When I get truly stuck, I consult the discussion area and implement the suggested solutions. But I don't think it would be meaningful for me to go through all 450+(?) of their questions and paste in the answers.

What's the motivation to achieve Hacker Rank of 1, when presumably everyone knows you can just copy/paste the answers?

edit: as pointed out below, I jumped the gun on the motivation question. I guess I assumed the second part of the article expanded on the motivations, which were that the author heard people hired based off of HR. Hopefully those companies realize how easy this is to manipulate.

<comment><USER17> He mentioned why he did it. Allegedly Morgan Stanley / other unspecified banks were hiring people based on Hacker Rank rankings

<comment><USER18> I believe that article stated Morgan Stanley / Banks were hiring based on using Hacker Rank to screen candidates with their own unique tests, not rankings. It didn't involve the default questions William went through, though similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I prefer Codility over HackerRank: [https://codility.com/](https://codility.com/)

They also have lessons: [https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/1-iterations/](https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/1-iterations/) and challenges: [https://codility.com/programmers/challenges/](https://codility.com/programmers/challenges/)

</comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR

Copy/Paste the solutions from the discussions page.

Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3BXmrLl...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3BXmrLlEVhAJ:williampross.com/became- hackerrank-1-two-hours/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

</comment><comment><USER21> Companies like HackerRank turn software engineering into a commodity (great for code copy paste). The HackerRank contests submitted by companies were quite buggy, verbose (but with confusing English), and like the author, took a lot of fighting with the website to get the code to pass the tests.

This is in no way a measure of success as a software engineer, where a significant amount of time is spent in defining problems and articulating maintainable solutions for deploying features. This means using design patterns, proper documentation, in lieu of regex type expressions that are indecipherable a week later.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is going to keep getting worse until we have some sort of guild or association whereby being a member implies we're already vetted.

</comment><comment><USER23> He's not reading between the lines. They are looking for young/green developers.

</comment><comment><USER24> Today in "What happens when nailing the tech interview is impossible for companies but the incitament for doing so is great and well, there's a lot of software companies around".

Great read, worked for about 10 years in dev never heard about hackerrank but it's part of a pattern sure.

</comment><comment><USER25> I feel like a system like IBM Watson is going to end up writing the code in the near future. The real action, therefore, is in explaining the business logic and requirements in a structured way so that the AI can write the code.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ladies and gents, this is the 2016 software engineering world

<comment><USER27> This is how companies ensure they "only hire the best".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Disclaimer : Developer at HackerRank, however I do not know details about how Furlong was hired, so I can not go into that. Also this is not an official response, but a personal one.

So I think the source of misunderstanding is that we have multiple rankings on HackerRank. The leaderboard Mr. William Ross became #1 was in the practice leaderboard for the Java Domain[1], which is based on practice problems, and which is intended to get people upto speed with Java.

This is our global leaderboard sections [2] : [http://i.imgur.com/2rkgwmg.png](http://i.imgur.com/2rkgwmg.png)

We make the distinction of Contest based leaderboard which are based on your performance in contests, and practice leaderboard, which is the one Mr. Ross got on to.

This is based on contests and the forums during contests are monitored for answers and solutions, and this is what would be considered really hard to get on to, and I know the #1 there, uwi is amazing.

Our regular domains available at our domains page[3] are meant as a learning tool, where you can rise up as you solve problems, and yes the solutions are all available in many places. However since this is a practice area we do not do many of the things done in contests like restrict forums, look if solution is available online, run plagiarism(code similarity) matches etc, and generally we encourage people helping out in forums, although yes we should keep a watch on direct solutions appearing in forums. This is not intended to be a competition.

While I do not know how Furlong was hired, I can tell you the common ways that people do get hired.

1\. Companies conduct contest or sponsor HackerRank conducted contests.

2\. Candidates apply via HackerRank jobs[4] which again has a HackerRank test that follows.

3\. Candidates practice on HackerRank after which they may be approached by companies seeing their positions, but generally this involves a HackerRank test as the first round.

4\. Common test for a LinkedIn placements (currently in India alone)

5\. The regular HackerRank test companies send across.

[1]: [https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1...](https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard/java/practice/level/1/page/1)

[2]: [https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard](https://www.hackerrank.com/leaderboard)

[3]: [https://www.hackerrank.com/domains](https://www.hackerrank.com/domains)

[4]: [https://www.hackerrank.com/jobs/all](https://www.hackerrank.com/jobs/all)

<comment><USER29> Well shit, I thought doing the challenges there would actually reflect my ability. Now it kinda seems like a waste of time.

<comment><USER28> Well in practice areas it would if you take it without cheating it will. We do not want to make practice areas competitive in nature. If you want to really get to know your ability or challenge yourselves then I suggest the contests[1]

[1]: [https://www.hackerrank.com/contests](https://www.hackerrank.com/contests)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Which coding challenge website do you prefer? HackerRank, LeetCode, TopCoder, CodeFights, Stockfighter, etc.?

<comment><USER31> I have a list of nine different websites _(see them below)_ that I visit every-single-day to keep my programming skills in shape. I have no preference whatsoever since they are all pretty much the same, some of them have better coding problems than others but nothing special.

However, during the last two months I have been using LeetCode and HackerRank more than the others because they are used I have been interviewing with a lot of medium and big sized companies, the big ones usually ask medium/hard questions from LeetCode while the medium sized companies prefer to filter people via HackerRank.

\- [https://leetcode.com/](https://leetcode.com/)

\- [https://www.codeeval.com/](https://www.codeeval.com/)

\- [https://www.hackerrank.com/](https://www.hackerrank.com/)

\- [https://www.hackerearth.com/](https://www.hackerearth.com/)

\- [https://www.interviewbit.com/](https://www.interviewbit.com/)

\- [https://www.codingame.com/](https://www.codingame.com/)

\- [https://www.codewars.com/](https://www.codewars.com/)

\- [https://open.kattis.com/](https://open.kattis.com/)

\- [https://codefights.com/](https://codefights.com/)

<comment><USER30> I thought Code Fights was the current hotness, people have been hyping how they feature real AIs (testbots) created by actual companies or note. Isn't its format at least distinct from the other sites, which are mostly the same Top Coder format of "here is an algorithmic problem, solve it and we'll grade it?"

<comment><USER31> CodeFights is more like a play environment like CodingGame, I am yet to find a company that requires me to write the algorithm for a robot in order to demonstrate my programming skills. This is why I prefer LeetCode and HackerRank, not because they are better but because they are what companies are using to interview people. CodingGame has a Machine Learning exercise so it is not like the other websites are not innovating, it is just personal preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author is breaking the rules of HackerRank and should (hopefully will) be banned.

Anytime we share challenge problem solutions in the open there is an ethical issue about it. HackerRank specifically even does plagiarism detection.

I some of my own solutions to challenge questions in a public repo on GitHub [1] for educational purposes. I recently slapped a big disclaimer on that for people like this.

> Disclaimer: These solutions were developed by me individually unless > otherwise stated and are shared for education and curiosity. Please do not > use them as your own. If you're working on the same problem, please do not > view my answer until you've solved it on your own. If you're working on a > related problem, it's generally okay to cite a solution to another problem > as a reference.

[1]: [https://github.com/tedmiston/challenges](https://github.com/tedmiston/challenges)

<comment><USER32> What ethical issues?

This is imaginary internet points we are talking about here, not your PHD thesis.

The internet points on these websites really don't matter, what matters is the skills you learn while doing them.

<comment><USER14> The ethical issue of pretending you thought of and wrote code that you didn't. Not much different than plagiarizing in academia.

Internet points aside, HackerRank is a technical recruiting platform.

<comment><USER33> There is already an ethical issue, anyway you look at it. Even if you do not copy paste the answers.

Its not like participants on forums like hackerrank invented those algorithms. Every single data structure and algorithm question asked on sites like hackerrank has solutions invented by some Computer Scientists, participants are just using them.

The only question we are asking from the where do those participants replicate the answers? Do they replicate it from a book? Webpage? Memory? You could replicate the answer from anywhere, as long _you didn 't invent the data structure or the algorithm you are essentially plagiarizing._

>>HackerRank is a technical recruiting platform.

If you use irrelevant tests to measure capability of the candidates, why cry when they match up to it in their own way?

<comment><USER14> Writing your own algorithm or data structure implementation from a description of the algorithm is considered fair game in every programming challenge competition I've ever seen. This includes the national level ones like ACM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A developer who has so much time in hand that he spends his time playing challenges all day is likely to not be "good" or "great" anyways. I've always found these challenge sites to be stupid and would never wanna work for a company who demands a good HackerRank or a good karma score on StackOverflow.

</comment><comment><USER35> I guess it would also be trivial to detect copy/pasted solutions and ban/remove those answers from the user.

<comment><USER36> It's a game of cat-and-mouse. A user can modify some variable names and get around naive algorithms.

If you eliminate too many 'pre-made' answers, then you get into a situation (especially for shorter problems) where you start flagging people who legitimately solved the problem, and just happened to write an answer similar to someone else's.

<comment><USER37> Homework: Write an adversarial ML model in which one model modifies source code to produce equivalent output, and the second model tries to determine whether the output of the first model is 'original' or not...

<comment><USER36> It's hard for even a human. In some cases, the copied material can be equivalent to original material, thus, literally impossible to distinguish (disclosure: I've worked on a system to detect this sort of thing in academic settings).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> People should start using real world coding as a measurement of skill. My personal website shows real-time graphs of my programming in each language I've used.

[http://ahamlett.com/](http://ahamlett.com/)

<comment><USER39> It's offtopic but the urge to ask is too high. I have an idea of how wakatime works, so on Tuesday you've been coding for almost 13 hours? No planning, not committing, not reading docs, just typing into your editor for 13 hours?

<comment><USER38> Yep, I had a backlog of things to work on and no distractions that day. However, it's also counting the previous day's coding that spilled over across midnight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Hackerrank is a great site for solving problems and learning. If you want to do fraud you can do anywhere. But fraud won't go very far. You would be caught.

One example: I quit my last job because one co worker (c++) try to set a flag in destructor and checking that flag in member function to fix a segfault. Even though the person was having an ivy league degree and 10+ year of experience I don't want to work with them. Couple of other guys also left the company.

So it won't last long and a fraud would be caught. A fraud might end up working in sucker jobs and always wonder why they ask algorithmic question in interviews ;)

<comment><USER41> 3 people left their jobs rather than work with the novice to make him better?

You're never going to find happiness that way, friend.

<comment><USER40> The guy has 10+ years of experinence. There is a fifferenve between fraud and novice.

<comment><USER41> I just... never see "quit" as the response to a bad colleague. I could be wrong, I guess.

<comment><USER42> There's no guarantee you won't have a bad colleague in the next place, too. That said, if a bad colleague makes your work exceptionally difficult, that's a tough position to be in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> On a related note, I've observed that some of the solutions to tough problems just perform matching on the input and print out hard-coded expected output. How utterly pointless.

I don't see the point in hackerrank-bashing though. The site's UI is nice and it has got a good selection of problems for brushing up coding interview skills. Also, I think that most companies that "hire based on hackerrank ratings" use it to feed their pipeline and do additional interviews on their own.

</comment><comment><USER44> Well, if you guys know any Wall Street companies hiring "programmers" based on their HN points, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a very well know thing and this post could have been more interesting if you could have automated stuffs :P

</comment><comment><USER46> imo hacker rank is bad since it commoditizes developers. Ive in the past refused to take a hacker rank quiz. I always offer the alternative to take a live phone screen. Some agree some don't. But in the end I refuse to have my reputation in the hands of some random company.

</comment><comment><USER47> HackerRank seems ideal for apprenticeships, internships, and other low-risk onboarding programs that provide candidates with opportunities to perform in real-world situations.

Those who "game" the system are easily filtered out.

</comment><comment><USER48> Another recent discussion about HackerRank [0]. (It was flagged.)

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174)

</comment><comment><USER49> Not likely to get a programming job out of this, but perhaps a job in information security where the game is to figure out how to abuse systems.

</comment><comment><USER50> Did you get any offer from any company?

</comment><comment><USER51> Validation of my decision to never use HR for hiring data

</comment><comment><USER52> If the system is stupid, the smart thing to do is find a stupid solution to it. Illustrate the absurdity of the metric.

</comment><comment><USER53> You earned it as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't sound like you're breaking any rules so much as taking advantage of a flaw in the system. That's hacking in it's most sublime form. If it were a blackhat operation, you'd be exposing yourself to punitive damage. You're not here (unless the mods take retribution on you)

</comment><comment><USER54> "The service is unavailable."

It seems no algorithm there taught you more useful things though.

<comment><USER55> whoosh

<comment><USER54> Nah. It was just a (bad) joke. Should have added a :p</comment></comment></comment>


It's okay to say "I Don't Know" - <AUTHOR> http://careercarrot.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/its-okay-to-say-i-dont-know/

<comment><USER2> I hate it greatly when people _won't_ say "I don't know", but instead hem and haw and avoid the question or give obtuse answers. Once someone admits they don't know, it's fine, you can work to solve the problem another way. But for that to work with most people, I think you have to be pretty nice and make it clear you are not the sort of person that is going to cause problems if they are honest about ignorance.

<comment><USER3> There could be because they got punished or saw someone get punished for saying "I don't know". Or, they either got rewarded or saw someone get rewarded for fudging and lying their way through when the real answer was "I don't know".

It is also about trust. When there is trust between the employees, one is not afraid of being honest and saying "I don't know" followed by "but I will find out" or "ask Jack, he knows more about this".

If there is a feeling that punishment or implied accusations of incompetence or experience will be made, they will start making shit up on the spot.

I see this everyday. It is really sad, hours of productivity is lost because people can't be honest. Usually it goes like this. A new employee, call him N, doesn't know how something works. They don't even know who is responsible for that product area. They go to a random employee X to ask for help, so they ask "how does this work?". Employee X knows they themselves don't know, but they won't admit it and won't send employee N to the employee Y, who really knows about the stuff.

Instead employee X starts to make stuff up on the spot, or which is slightly better, they both spend hours learning about the answer by reading code (not too bad again), but all they could have done is asked employee Y about it and they would have gotten an answer in under a minute.

<comment><USER4> That should be easy to fix, all you have to do is to ask them who knows the most about the question you have - then they can help you without being dishonest or losing face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think admitting you don't know isn't as hard as dealing with constantly admitting you don't know.

I often feel like a broken record when my boss comes to me and I have to answer that way. He doesn't seem to mind, but it eats away at my very soul... not to be overly dramatic, but it does cause more stress than it should.

</comment><comment><USER6> In a discussion with my first post degree employers it came up that one of the reasons I got the was the fact that during the interview I was quite open about things I was not sure of, and asked the right questions to help guide me to the answer.

You should never feel a question is stupid, or feel stupid for asking one. If someone makes you feel that way, and you can, find a new situation!

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember in the first pg essay I read he mentioned to work with the kind of people who are ready to say "I don't know" because of the confidence it shows in what they do know. It's stuck with me.

<http://paulgraham.com/start.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I recently interviewed for a position where I had to say I don't know, but I'll figure it out. Its was a weird situation because I knew the answer, but nerves wrecked my mind, and could not think straight.

Did not get the job. Even made a thread about it in Ask::HN.

But not knowing something is a great motivator for me. Something that I think employers should value.

<comment><USER9> Of the 100 or so interviews I have done over the past year and a bit, only two or three have had cases where the interviewee did not need to admit they did not know. If my goal is to understand the breadth and depth of knowledge, then one can only really have a clue about that when one starts hitting the edges.

The grace/confidence in admitting they don't know, the willingness to guess and explain how they came up to it (and continuing/iterating as I give more information), and how well someone integrates something new (ie, something I have just told them) later in the interview are all major considerations in my interview feedback and hire/no-hire decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, this was the first type of question I was asked at an interview, something like, "From our website, how do you think we plan to do x?". Obviously, there was nothing related to x on their site.

It's a great way to separate people who'll make up something vs people who are good at admitting what they don't know and are willing to look for the answer.

</comment><comment><USER11> I recently started a new network admin job at a school. I knew I had the skills to do the job but I knew I would be asking lots of stupid questions. I learnt the environment fast and only sounded like an idiot a few times. Why would you think you should know how a business works because you have the skills for the job? That's weird.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe, but like skipping socks on the first day, it could potentially harm you for little or no gain to you personally so why risk it?

<comment><USER12> I've found that people actually tend to perceive me as knowing more the more honest I am about what I do and don't know. I'm sure some people aren't that way, but I've found it to be true the vast majority of the time for me. I would consider fudging the truth the riskier option unless you're some kind of silver-tongued devil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "I don't know... but I know how to find out"

</comment><comment><USER14> The money shot is towards the end: "I don't know... but I will find out." I think that shows initiative and a willingness to learn and work as part of a team, which in many environments is just as important as being an expert.

<comment><USER15> I find the most productive people I know seem to always be saying "I don't know, but I know who to ask, gimme a minute I'll send mail to a friend*…"</comment></comment>


vim as an IDE - <AUTHOR> http://clipboarded.blogspot.com/2007/10/vim-as-ide.html

<comment><USER2> vim is good, so too is emacs. But I learnt the hard way why vim has one edge that emacs does not, size (I could be wrong anyone know of an emacs version thats <1Mb). If you know vim at command level you can pick up vi which allows you to edit all but the smallest systems that require tools like _"ed"_ (installing openBSD <http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT230736.html> )

If you want to understand more about editors on Unix systems try reading _"Raymond E., The Art of Unix Programming, Chapter 13, Complexity, A Tale of Five Editors"_ ~ <http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch13s02.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> vim is awesome. I discovered it after 8 years of Delphi, Eclipse and Visual Studio. After two months of a steep learning curve I could honestly say that indeed, vim alone can be as productive as any IDE.

<comment><USER4> s/as productive as/more productive than/

Fixed it for you. :-)</comment></comment>


Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton's DARPA Chances - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/showcase/IfOnlyWedUsedANTSProfiler.asp

<comment><USER2> Pretty misleading title - the issue wasn't a C# memory leak, it was that these developers didn't remove old objects from an event subscriber list...

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, but it points out the often overlooked truth that using a garbage collected language is substituting one set of memory problems for another. I can't tell you how much of my time at work is spent trying to work around the java garbage collector because I can't manually destroy objects.

<comment><USER4> > Perhaps

No, the title _is_ misleading. It was misleading on reddit too.

> ... because I can't manually destroy objects.

I'm not sure about Java, but if it's similar to C# then you can manually destroy objects. When they get "officially" removed from memory is up to the garbage collector (that is, when more memory space is needed).

<comment><USER3> Also, its worth noting that you can not reclaim the memory of an object in Java, C# (<http://blogs.msdn.com/clyon/archive/2004/09/21/232445.aspx>), or any other garbage collected language. If you could, you would no longer have managed code. What you may be able to do in some languages is say "hey GC, I've got this object, I know its got no references, verify that and free the space now please". You can't do this in Java (or C# so far as I know). This is what I meant when I said destroy.

Why might someone need that level of control? Well in an ideal world you would not, but in reality (at least in Java), GC is highly JVM dependent, and on the JVM I use (and probably most if not all of them) GC makes no guarantee that objects available for collection will actually be collected. The OS X JVM in particular is pretty bad here (again, I'm guessing others are too), when you run out of memory, it doesn't even try to GC. Even if you call System.gc() you might not get any space reclaimed. Its ridiculous, but lots of people actually have a method that is basically "System.reallyGC()" which loops a whole bunch of times on System.gc() calls until it either gives up or reclaims some percentage of memory.

<comment><USER5> Could you / do you use memory (object) pools? It's crazy to put C++ techniques on top of Java which is supposed to take all that off your hands but, as you say, 'in the real world'...

<comment><USER3> We use a lot of thread local pools so that we never allocate new objects. We generally have a fixed number of long lived threads, so this works out pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Truth to be said, the title comes from slashdot, but hey guys, why argue about the title when the content is cool? I enjoyed the article and just for the record, I did understand the problem was a user memory leak and not something to do with C#.

<comment><USER4> > the title comes from slashdot

That explains it. From a site that uses a photoshop of Bill Gates/Borg hybrid for every Microsoft story, it's no wonder the title's misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And if you call right now with the ANTS Profiler you'll get not just ONE license, but TWO licenses for 5 easy payments of $59.95. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!! We'll throw in this FREE Profiler coffee mug, absolutely free! Operators are standing by!

<comment><USER4> Oh please, we're all whores. This story would only be spam if it were contrived to sell more ANTS software.

<comment><USER7> You will probably get down modded, but you are right. We are all whores of some sort, some of the time at least. Its actually liberating to make this realisation, and get over ourselves.</comment></comment></comment>


Seattle council passes jumpstart tax on large employers - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-city-council-passes-new-jumpstart-tax-on-high-salaries-paid-by-big-businesses <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not going to comment on the pro's and con's of this tax, but rather want to discuss the implications. With COVID forcing many employers and employees to prove out the model of remote working, isn't the net of this tax going to accelerate employees to move from Seattle, leaving the city worse off without the reinvestment of their salaries back into the local communities, effectively creating a modern day Detroit with the "wealth donut" spreading out and away from the center of the city?

<comment><USER2> Mountlake Terrace (10.5% sales tax), Edmonds (10.4% sales tax), Lynnwood (head tax[1]), Bellevue and other cities that are on the periphery of Seattle have equal or higher taxes.

Seattle had a head tax up until 2008, if a minor increase in tax like this is going to stop hiring of employees, then our zone based business commuter tax scheme would have already been that death knell [2]

1 - [https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/city- of...](https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/city-of-lynnwood- increases-employee-head-tax-by-567)

2 - [https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/employ...](https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/employer- programs/business-orca.aspx)

<comment><USER3> (Edited to reflect the response's article link)

One can hardly compare a $93-$105 per employee head tax to a much higher income tax.

<comment><USER2> None of the cities I listed charge that little in head tax: [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle- businesses...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-businesses- strike-back-against-head-tax-launch-referendum/)

This measure is progressive taxation on earnings over $150k a year, if anything its a boon for small and medium businesses in Seattle.

These large companies have driven up rent and gentrifed our neighborhoods while paying less in taxes than small and medium businesses, meanwhile our tax burden is still much lower than California.

<comment><USER3> My objection isn't the tax per se, but an utter lack of faith in the city government to spent it wisely. From the anti-Amazon rants, it's about punishing them and anyone else successful, with any resultant cash being a 2nd order effect.

My partner spent many years analyzing area homeless programs and Seattle has done so much poorer than King County. Giving them more money isn't going to fix anything.

Sawant and friends are hardly going to improve matters with their profound insights - Pol Pot is not a good model. I personally heard one of her speeches to Boeing machinists where she literally yelled at them to take over their factory and produce airliners for the people. (They'd probably do better than the 737MAX...)

<comment><USER4> From the article: "The council also passed a high-level spending plan Monday. The money from the new tax will be allocated to coronavirus economic relief this year and preserving city services next year, the plan says. Starting in 2022, the revenue will fund affordable housing, community-led development, local business assistance and Green New Deal investments."

About 800 businesses will be affected. The tax rates are far from exorbitant. The businesses can certainly afford to pay them, and the need is self-evident.

Seattle has certainly done poorly for homeless people. Under the old guard it has spent a lot to have police push them around the city, and done very little else. Nothing visible except tent cities. Anything beats nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Despite trying to avoid this facet of the discussion in my original post, this response is where the argument becomes irrational: "businesses can certainly afford to pay them" is not a valid argument to justify a tax.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MTNT: Machine Translation of Noisy Text - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pmichel1/mtnt/ <comment><USER2> Here are a few more examples from the en-fr dataset in case you are interested:

      240 There are some nice JVM languages like Scala and Clojure.   Il y a quelques langages JVM sympas comme Scala et Clojure.
      244 Would anyone here actually register their firearms if a bill passes making registration mandatory   Est-ce que quelqu'un ici enregistrerait reellement ses armes à feux si une loi passe rendant l'enregistrement obligatoire
      348 Of course Adam and Eve would have belly buttons.    Bien sûr, Adam et Eve avaient des nombrils.
      658 I get their order out, and she starts claiming that the pizza isn't cut.    J'obtiens leur commande, et elle commence à se plaindre parce que la pizza n'est pas coupée.
      698 Why does Cici's Pizza advertise so much around here when the nearest one is in Morgantown?  Pourquoi Cici's Pizza fait-elle autant de publicité ici, quand la plus proche est à Morgantown?
      899 I am for the truth, not your rhetoric or anyone else's. Je suis pour la vérité, pas pour ta rhétorique ou celle de quelqu'un d'autre.
      966 Every dog I have had appologizes when they get stepped on   Chaque chien que j'ai eu a reçu des excuses quand ils se sont fait marcher dessus

In general, the level of noise (grammar / spelling) seems to be what you'd expect from reddit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking of "noisy text", is it really necessary to require javascript access to read that blurb.

\-- p.s. to other script averse --

[https://github.com/pmichel31415/mtnt](https://github.com/pmichel31415/mtnt) [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Epmichel1/hosting/mtnt- emnlp.pdf](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Epmichel1/hosting/mtnt-emnlp.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Sadly, I am mostly monolingual :(

One neat aspect of "noisy" text is that deviations from prescribed grammar conveys so much personality and tone and all that good stuff. If I write "Ummmmmmmm, dude, that's like totally cray (IMO)" a strictly correct english to english translation could be "That is totally crazy in my opinion, my friend" but there's so much lost in translation.

Can anyone multilingual comment on whether the examples listed keep that kind of nuance in translation?

</comment><comment><USER5> If they named it Translation by Machine of Noisy Text then the abbreviation would have been TMNT. (As in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.) Missed opportunity.

<comment><USER6> There should be a whole industry around this, like naming prescription drugs.

<comment><USER7> There would be an industry around it if there was an incentive to produce titles like that. But most authors probably want to avoid cutesy pop-culture- referential names because it signals unprofessionalism.

<comment><USER8> I think it depends on the wildly on the field. MRI has techniques named things like GRAPPA and CAIPIRINHA which are gloriously tortured backronyms, and there is something of a competition to come up with good ones.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Solving Excel - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@julienmarie/on-solving-excel-391ec933ada9#.ctod6iqfa <comment><USER2> The product behind the post: [http://calcfusion.com/](http://calcfusion.com/)</comment>


Cl-bcrypt: A first attempt - <AUTHOR> http://www.letsyouandhimfight.com/2010/07/14/cl-bcrypt-a-first-attempt/ <comment><AUTHOR> Before discussion starts, I just want to emphasize that I recognize I'm not a crypto professional and I welcome corrections and contributions.</comment>


All flights (including MH17) were being escorted by Ukrainian Su-27 jets - <AUTHOR> http://theaviationist.com/2014/07/21/su-27s-escorted-mh17/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not necessarily. Escort can fly lower and behind the plane outside the visual range for pilots. And commercial planes don't have capability to "see" military planes (unless military planes want to announce their presence).

</comment><comment><USER2> wouldn't pilots be usually made aware if they were being escorted for any reason? Then wouldn't all other airlines come public with this fact?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you want out of a datacenter? - <AUTHOR>

All,
I am exploring different datacenter models and as the HN community is effectively the DC target market, I'd like to find out what you would want out of a datacenter.
Obviously, many startups are heavily reliant on hosted I/PaaS offerings, so for arguments sake - lets leave out comparisons to AWS for the moment.
I am exploring a new full datacenter build out in San Francisco - and would like to find out what the community would most value:
There are effectively three data center models;
Colocation - where you get rack/floor space and you bring in your own equipment and rack it into the DC provided space.
Hosting - Where you timeslice/rent dedicated hardware or resources.
Modular - which can be a combination of the other two, and also offer an option to bring in your own modules. These are more rare as there are few modular datacenters at this point.
I am developing a hybrid model for DC design though, where I try to employ a number of design innovations which would integrate/incorporate things like modular containers with certain aspects of ideas found in the Open Compute platform.
The issues with purpose built systems such as Facebook's open compute platform, is that it is beneficial at scale, but difficult to leverage in a shared hosting model.
I am interested in deploying open compute style systems (racks, UPS, mobo-slot machines, integrated cabling) into container modules.
This would be sold as hosting - or you could choose to buy a number of nodes and have your own cluster. The benefit is ideally that you have a great PUE for a set number of nodes.
Additionally, the site may have traditional colo space as well - either in a separate building - or as rack space in containers.
My question to the HN community, assuming you're buying hosting and not simply leveraging AWS - what model is your preference.
If you could buy open compute-style nodes/infrastructure - would you? Or do you want to buy fully enclosed machines and rack them up in a more traditional fashion?
Any feedback would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> As an application developer the VPS/cloud model is very appealing. So much so, I think you'd be nuts not to build a datacenter that doesn't target this market. I'm not interested in floor space, dedicated servers, or supplying my own hardware. I'm really interested in how easily I can launch, update, and manage my applications -- everything else can be abstracted.</comment>


The Most Dangerous Gamer - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/ <comment><USER2> Blow gave a talk once that I remember vivdly where he described the greatest challenge facing indie developers (applies to all products, not just games): going too slow. The average programmer can write maybe 10k lines of production ready code in a year, but a modest game the likes of Braid took ~100k LOC. In order to get it done in a reasonable amount of time you can't spend all day optimizing or constructing beautiful algorithms - you have to plow through as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER3> Here's the talk in question:

[http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe...](http://the- witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/)

In a course I took junior year of college, my project partner (now cofounder) and I worked on a zombie outbreak simulation game. Towards the height of the project, we were probably tearing up and laying down a thousand lines of code a day, keeping in touch over the phone and fixing build errors and weird behavior.

Years later, I can't look at that code without wanting to gouge out my eyes. It makes me physically sick. That said, it worked and worked well for the task at hand.

Game programming is weird like that, and Blow's talk has a section where he talks about the relative merits of dumb structures and algorithms for developers that just have to get the thing to work. It's an interesting perspective.

<comment><USER4> With games like Braid you can afford to do that because as cool as the game is, it's just a platformer.

Big production games don't have the same luxury as most reviews will focus on graphics/sound etc. If it runs like crap and looks average no one is going to accept that no matter how much fun it is.

<comment><USER5> I think you may have taken this too far. Graphics and sound can contribute to or detract from fun, but in the end it is fun that keeps people buying a game. A game that looks great, but plays poorly will not survive, but a game that plays fantastically might be around for years later.

I played Planescape Torment many years after it was released because I kept hearing about it. Comparing it to graphics in other games that I played at the time the graphics were poor. But it had a tremendous story and was a lot of fun, so I played it through and still recommend it to others even though it is now even more dated.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you but I think with big studio games it isn't always the case. The graphics can carry a mediocre game very far. On the other extreme they can crush a really fun game if it doesn't look "current generation" or has other technical issues.

Planescape Torment is fantastic. I still play Fallout2 these days. I love that game :)

<comment><USER6> My experience matches the previous poster. I used to abhor video games of any kind. Then I was given an XBox for good work or something, and started checking them out.

Project Gotham Racing looked awesome, and played well. Same for Gears. Chromehounds looked crap, but played _insanely_ well. I've spent more time playing Chromehounds than I have any other game, and I play CoD a lot these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with most of Blow's supposedly controversial points (on Zynga, social games, and the juvenile nature of most games...), but I just can't get excited about his games. Who wants to spend 30 hours speculating on the psychology of an alienated prude with a bunch of pseudo-philosophical garbage about the meaning of life slapped on as affect? Maybe if he was really good at it, I'd give it a shot. But he's not Ingmar Bergman, he's not even close.

<comment><USER8> >Who wants to spend 30 hours speculating on the psychology of an alienated prude with a bunch of pseudo-philosophical garbage about the meaning of life slapped on as affect?

How can you even make that claim when the game isn't out yet? I seriously have no idea what to make of your comment.

<comment><USER7> I was going off the description of Blow's aims and goals for The Witness from the article:

Blow's decision to bare his soul in The Witness springs from this same drive to live up to the full potential of his artistic medium; a meaningful game, he believes, must be an honest one. The Witnesss narrator, he freely admits, is a thinly veiled version of his own psyche. When the narrator speaks of his guilt over spending millions to create an island filled with puzzles instead of using that money for worthier causes, this is Blow's real spiritual dilemma. When the narrator reflects on his feelings of empty vanity, on his alienation from others, on his "yearning for truth and deep understanding," these are Blow's pains and desires.

Honesty and truth in storytelling is certainly important, but the kind of honesty he is talking about there is a boring truth. It reminds me of the same kind of thinking that produced Cinema Verite, and what Werner Herzog had to say about that philosophy:

"By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants."

Even if I am not interested in Blow's pains and desires, I do respect the fact that he is deliberating on them, and hopefully encouraging other game developers to do so. However, the potential product of his process as described in that article just bores me to tears.

<comment><USER9> Going further - how many great (or at least enjoyable) books or films are the ruminations and self-analysis of a lone individual? Camus' L'Etranger almost qualifies, except it depicts events involving multiple people, even if it never speculates on the motivations of the other characters.

Honesty is not enough. I think Blow is more naive than he, or indeed this reporter, realizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Blow himself is the most pretentious jerkoff in the world. He makes good games though.

His game is about a stalker whether he wants it to be or not. Authorial intent is irrelevant.

edit: Also, I hate how this article is written. It's not journalism when you turn the subjects into characters in a short story.

<comment><USER11> _Blow himself is the most pretentious jerkoff in the world._

I'm curious, care to elaborate?

<comment><USER12> In a nutshell: Blow's a rich guy and GP is jealous.

What's really going on, though, is that mainstream engineering and development CS types don't understand _auteurs_ the way Hollywood and Greenwich Village does. Blow is no more pretentious or jerkoffy than Quentin Tarantino, Damien Hirst, or Banksy. He's an incredibly intellectual guy and a great game designer.

Now, the _Fez_ developer, it could be argued, is a bit of a jerkoff. Telling people to "suck his dick" on twitter because he won IGF award in two separate years (4 years apart) for the SAME GAME still in development, or when he says Japanese games "suck". Now _there_ is where you _could_ direct your hate if you were so inclined.

<comment><USER10> If Braid had failed and Blow was getting interviewed at Gamasutra rather than The Atlantic, I'd still say he's an incredibly pretentious jerkoff. I'll admit that I wish I had the freedom to build whatever I'd like, but I can assure you that jealousy has nothing to do with his wealth. Actually, the part of the article that quotes him I most agree with is how meaningless the numbers just changing in your bank account seem. Wealth is so far removed from value that it's kind of scary.

Phil Fish is an asshole, but I haven't read enough of his thinking on art, design and life to say whether he's a jerkoff or not.

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about: "He loathes watching sports, because they yield few tangible returns on the hours you invest in them."

Now, I mean, I'm not someone who particularly enjoys sports, but if the article is paraphrasing him accurately, then that's such a boorish way of dismissing a hobby, especially from someone who is in entertainment. Some people like watching sport because they see the performance of the athletes as an art, the culmination of thousands of hours of effort played out upon a grand stage. Others see it as the drama between competing forces, with players and coaches as the actors in an improvised play. Some people just enjoy analyzing the tactics and strategy employed and attempting to know what the outcome would be. And the really weird people (in my opinion) just wanna crunch the numbers.

Personally, I just don't care for the rules of many sports and would rather be doing something less passive. I mean, I'm not gonna tell him that he should like sports, but that's such a strange way for him, in his position, to say that he doesn't like them. I watch lots and lots of movies. How many of them do I get anything out of after the film is over besides in-jokes? Vanishingly few. How much of the music that I listen to _really_ makes me feel something? A handful of songs.

What he so out of hand dismisses in general is the umwelt of experience, the notion of being in the moment. Fully engaged. Blow doesn't seem to be happy with the idea that people like to be immersed. He wants to make people rationally grind through games, to never be in the moment, to always have their mind on and trying to analyze. He characterizes everything else as evil or wrong or garbage.

And then he goes and practices Tai Chi.

<comment><USER13> It's nice how you've written him off entirely because he likes one thing and not another! You completely disregard the possibility that some people are only ever fully engaged and in the moment when their mind is on and they are performing analysis. There's so little to what you're saying, you can mad libs your whole rant to paint you as the asshole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just a heads up for people who haven't played Braid (or you have played it but still want to dig deeper into the game's meaning), don't read Page 2 of the article. The author gives away too much! I've played the game and know that it's just his interpretation, but I still wish I haven't read it...

</comment><comment><USER15> It appears Mr. Blow has never heard of the likes of Portal or Minecraft, two of my favorite games that also happen to be tremendously popular. Neither features the testosterone-laden warrior-men or buxom bikini babes that he claims have the industry in a death grip, neither can be slotted into the "money-grubbing sequel" category, and neither is immediately understandable "on an elementary level" as Clark says. While it's true that games like Call of Duty are tailored towards a certain audience, Blow and the Clark are blatantly disregarding evidence that contradicts their damning critiques of the industry.

<comment><USER16> Only one of them was developed within the industry, and that one (portal) was actually drafted in school. Finding only two examples is actually pretty damning too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting. I've avoided video games for quite some time for the same reason Mr. Blow avoids watching sports. Perhaps I'll check out this new game of his when it is released.

</comment><comment><USER18> Slightly off topic: The setting for his game is apparently inspired by Myst. I never got the appeal of Myst, I know it was very popular but to me it just seemed to be not mush more than a slideshow. It had the reputation of being the most popular game for people who didn't like games. At the time I was an avid gamer, maybe that's why I couldn't get into it.

<comment><USER19> The game was created in hypercard, so technically it was exactly zero more than a slideshow. Probably the most atmospheric game I've ever played though; there was something intensely creepy about wandering around a beautiful empty island full of strange gadgets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Such a great read, very interesting person. I love reading about people who life societal expectations and focus on spiritual and existential questions.

The game looks pretty interesting, and while I thought it was only for Windows / xbox, it's also for mac!

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/braid/id411902645?mt=12>

</comment><comment><USER21> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834203>

</comment><comment><USER22> After seeing some early videos, I had mixed thoughts. I was impressed with the idea of the game, but thought for all the time he spent on it, it might be over the heads of 85% of the gamers out there.

I'm still wondering if he's just putting this game out there, or if he actually has a target audience he's aiming at.

</comment><comment><USER23> Because this story was already posted a couple days ago and never really received much attention I'm going to repost my comment from that story.

It was in responce to someone comparing his new "innovative" game to myst and how Blow is much more derivative than he lets on. It was also a response to the article implying he was the only person working on truly artistic video games.

"and don't forget the much more recent Dear Esther. Which is a first person exploration game based on an island.

Oh and don't forget that other 'cerebral' game that is yet another source mod (which Dear Esther originally was). The Stanley Parable.[2]

Personally I think this developer is stuck up his own arse. Talking about how the industry is full of dross for cretins whilst ignoring these games. His biggest game, Braid, revolves wholly around the twist at the end along with an interesting gameplay gimmick. He may be an artist within the industry. But by far isn't the only one, nor is he the best by a long shot.

Comparing the video game industry to literature and movies and saying "Oh, look at how mindless we are in comparison." Is missing the entire point. A lot of books, movies and games are mindless. But to then stand up because of that and say that the industry as a whole is mindless and that your brainchild is going to revolutionise it and fix all that is wrong is not only egotistical and ignorant but disrespectful of incredible artists like those who made the Stanley Parable. (Which was the first video game I played that really made me think. It is the game that I point to when I need to point out a video game that is art.)

[1] <http://dear-esther.com/>

[2] <http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-stanley-parable>

<comment><USER24> Dear Esther was funded by the Indie Fund. One of the founders of the Indie Fund is Jonathan Blow.

<http://indie-fund.com/about/>

<comment><USER25> Thanks for noticing!

Some posters here have very weird perspectives. Yes, if someone wants to extrapolate some straw man, based not on statements in the article or evidence from the real world, but built from whatever feels easy to criticize thoughtlessly, then sure, it is easy to knock that straw man down. Whatever.

For what it's worth, I liked The Stanley Parable and had a nice chat with the author of the game at PAX last year. Why would anyone assume that something like this is not the case?

You guys do know that the subjects of articles you read on the internet are other real people also on the internet, right? Why would a poster here assume that I am some kind of inert punching bag rather than, you know, someone who's been on HN for a couple of years and involved in discussions?

<comment><USER23> My reasoning for ranting was less directed at you and more at the idea that the article held up as you. I never thought about it and hence never realised that my disagreement was misdirected. I regret not thinking before posting...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So I though video games werent generating money because of piracy and that even big titles had troubles. They'd have lied to me?!

<comment><USER27> There is a lot of money in them still. Perhaps even more than ever. Top titles, in both indie and AAA spaces, are pulling in revenues that would've seemed absurd a few years ago. Modern Warfare 3 grossed $400 million in its first 24 hours. By comparison, the top-grossing opening weekend for a film in 2011 was the Harry Potter film, which grossed $169 million.

And in the indie space, if you're one of the handful-per-year breakout successes, you can make millions, perhaps double-digit millions, on typically _much_ lower production+marketing costs. Super Meat Boy grossed somewhere above $10 million, Minecraft about $80 million, Bastion somewhere in the single-digit millions. The trick is being one of the few breakouts...

<comment><USER28> "in the first few hours" isn't the same for games as for other media. The shelf life of most big names is incredibly short - enough that DRM is often seen as a way to just survive piracy for the release period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think he's going about his goals incorrectly. We wants to elevate games to a critically and mainstream accepted Art, so he creates a game that declares itself Art. Such an approach will have immense push-back from the 'main stream' (game) industry and even more from the general public. It actually does not matter what industry we're talking about - an industry that has not mainstream publicly accepted expressions of itself as High Art worthy of the equivalent of an Oscar/Emmy/Hugo/Literary-Nobel expression of the human condition will have virtually no chance of convincing the public one of their own has broken through into this level of communication.

Think about what Clint Eastwood did with "The Unforgiven": before that film, the Western was considered a tired, spent, comical film genre. I remember reading pre-release critics saying Clint had wasted his time on that over used genre: "what could he possibly say that has not already been said 1,000 times?" they wrote...

What did Clint do? He started the film as a more-or-less classically serious western. However, as the film progresses, it acknowledges itself through the presence of dime store outlaw novellas causing kids to idolize the criminal aspects of the western experience. Then our heroes go about demonstrating the fallacy of this attitude, and the film ends with the audience being spoon fed the horror this idolization creates.

I suggest Mr. Blow and others attempting to elevate games to High Art need to begin with the traditionally insipid game style so popular today. (I can say this as a former 15 veteran of the games industry. I left specifically because of all the "pretentious" reasons Jonathan cites.) As the game's traditional fight-puzzle-fight mechanics play out, the character becomes exposed to the game engine simulation itself, and the gamer becomes exposed to the existential dilemma of wanting to continue their suspended disbelief while the game itself taunts them with the fact they are playing a game. Through such a careful balance of crossed signal communications, the gamer is left to question their own existence and the potential of our world merely being a simulation for the amusement and enrichment of others - at their expense.

No, Matrix fans/critics, I'm not saying "make the Matrix". What I'm pointing out is how "The Unforgiven" elevated itself by acknowledging the disjoint between the fiction and the reality, and spoon fed that to the film viewer. Sure, many a western and plain film fan missed Clint's higher message. Such is the diverse nature of how Art communicates. Much of what is considered "Art" today is simply artfully ambiguous. Jonathan can not afford such ambitiousness if he wants to achieve his goal.

Jonathan's goal of elevating games needs to include all the insipid game cliches to draw the traditional fan in, and then pull the floor out from under them, leaving them literally afraid to continue the game because it risks wreaking their appreciation for game playing thereafter. It's not a success to simply engage. It's not a success to merely cause consideration and wonder. Jonathan Blow's goal is to end games as they are today and reboot the entire industry, reborn as the 21st century's equivalent to the 20th century Film.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why does this article make 178 HTTP requests and load Javascript from 24 different domains over a duration of 16 seconds, before even the basic loading is done?

After that it starts on its three realtime services: Disqus, Chartbeat and Tubemogul (whatever that is) all keep track of how long you stay on the page. Not to mention how the site manages to slow down the entire browser during loading, and has many simple syntax errors. Not cross-browser stuff (like webkit-only css rules), also simply misspelled CSS.

Worst of all, the font is too small. I'm not going to read kilobytes of text like this.

This kind of website makes me want to disable Javascript by default...

<comment><USER31> If you are using Firefox, RequestPolicy[1] is really nice: allows you to block all those useless requests (and selectively activate ones that are required).

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/)</comment></comment>


Zenefits (YC W13) Just Raised $500M at a $4.5B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/zenefits-rising-hrs-hottest-startup-just-raised-500-million-at-a-4-5-billion-valuation/ <comment><USER2> One of my favorite displays of how little the tech press gets it is this stark contrast. (I think Garry Tan is the one who pointed to me it originally but I don't have that reference right now.)

PandoDaily in 2013:

"While I don't have my Tarot cards handy, I don't think there's a big winner in this bunch either."

[http://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo- day-2013-still...](http://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo- day-2013-still-looking-for-the-next-airbnb-or-dropbox/)

Startups are a function of markets and execution. Pick a big market and execute well and you're golden. It's difficult beforehand when a company is larval to tell who's picked the right market unless you're able to really think through it.

<comment><USER3> Journalists make terrible VCs as a general rule.

<comment><USER4> Michael Moritz, senior partner at Sequoia Capital and arguably the best VC ever, started his career as a journalist. From his bio, it sounds like he leveraged that to start his career at Sequoia.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moritz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moritz)

<comment><USER5> > as a general rule

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zenefits: you are growing too fast! Scale up your customer service and improve your customer satisfaction rates before making big customer acquisition pushes, else you risk disappointing your existing customers. (Anecdote: I am a disappointed existing customer)

<comment><USER7> Our view of this is that growth is not inconsistent with improving the service - and, actually, quite the opposite, our growth is what gives us the ability to solve a lot of the challenges in this industry.

This is particularly relevant in your case (an installation error on Aetna's end). One of the biggest problems with health insurance for companies < 1,000 employees is that everything is done via paper / pdf / fax machine. This is of course a pain in the ass, but more importantly it's a source of large and irreducible error. Insurance companies average about 10% to 20% error rates on the stuff that we send them _even if Zenefits is 100% correct_. These errors aren't unique to Zenefits -- any broker or other company doing this stuff would have them -- and we spend a lot of time following up with carriers to verify, etc....

Here's the important thing -- our growth means we can make insurance companies build APIs for us, some of which are live right now, and many more of which will be live in the coming months. Only with this full electronic integration can these processing errors go away, for us and for everyone else. APIs == zero errors. Existing paper / pdf method can never fully eliminate errors b/c we (zenefits) don't control the guy on Aetna's end who is keying information into their system.

<comment><USER3> This is a really bad answer to a concern about customer service, just a heads up. We want to be reassured that you value your customers and will be working to make things better no matter what, not given paragraphs on why it's actually someone else's fault.

<comment><USER8> I don't think so, basically the HN crew wants to see the nuts and bolts, and he's giving a real reason why problems happen on the platform. I personally find it refreshing when someone from a B2B company helps me understand their internals, it helps me trust them more because either their sound or not.

<comment><USER3> Sure, it's interesting to know (even if there's no way to verify what he's saying is correct), but it starts to come off as passing the buck. I think your perspective on the HN crowd might have been more valid 3-4 years ago but let's not pretend like it's still the same group of people.

We use Zenefits and (AFAIK) have no issues with the service. Just throwing it out there that a little reassurance goes a long way.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I agree on both points. Nothing really substitutes knowing (and hearing) someone is in your corner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> $4.5B Valuation for an SaaS business that doesn't charge for it's service and makes money from commissions?

Did they invent something no one else can do? Why would insurance companies not just scrap the middle man and build their own thing?

<comment><USER10> _Did they invent something no one else can do? Why would insurance companies not just scrap the middle man and build their own thing?_

I once worked for a company that built smaller products for insurance companies. No really big ones, but a decent representation of the market. We would put together an update for what was an internal application, and sometimes it would take 6-8 months or more for them to get around to deploying the new version to their users, assuming they didn't decide to just hold off for the next version for some reason or another.

These companies are pretty absurd in how slowly they move with anything, especially anything technology related.

<comment><USER11> I think there are some big players who do daily if not weekly releases. I worked for one. It is all tenant shared and they push client specific changes on a regular basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "If you think about it like we're driving a car, we want to go extremely fast at an extremely high speed, and go very far," [CEO] Conrad said. "And if you want to do that you're gonna burn a lot of gasoline. So this round we had to do the mother of all pit stops for gas and beef jerky, to continue building at the speed that we're going."

<comment><USER13> Going extremely fast at an extremely high speed also frequently results in a fatal accident.

<comment><USER5> Yes it does. It also wins races. Conrad recognizes that risk and is taking it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A fella named Kevin from Zenefits sent me email once asking about our human resource needs.

I told Kevin that we have no need for human resources since our company was run entirely by strong AI. I signed it, Yours in the Singularity.

Kevin never emailed me back.

<comment><USER15> So essentially, he spammed you?

<comment><USER16> No no no, this is a funded startup, he used the power of social relationship and communication medium to reach out and generate interest

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We're using Zenefits at the current start-up I'm at. It's not half bad. I am only a user so I can't speak for how the entire system works but from my perspective it took all of the annoying HR, payroll and insurance paperwork and put them into a single place where I can always access it, digitally sign it and fill it out / update it. This is the first place where I didn't have to manually sign up or print anything which was great.

It's a valuable service in my opinion and I'm surprised there are not more companies that make this stuff all together. $4.5 billion valuable though? I'm not sure especially since I'm only seeing the user side, not the management side.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seriously anyone working to create just a brokerage these days is pathetic in comparison to zenefits.

Also, zenefits knows that they don't really have a moat. Anyone with a brokerage license can come along and follow their model. They need to blow up while nobody is chasing them.

</comment><comment><USER19> My company had considered to switching to Zenefits, but decided to stick with the local middleman we've already got. The difference, according to HR, was that he knew for certain that a phone call to the current rep would fix almost any weird issue--with Zenefits, despite the convenience of doing things online, he couldn't be sure that was the case.

<comment><USER20> No to mention their platform is still far off from what i'd call user friendly. I have to download excel sheets, edit them and upload? Really??

<comment><USER21> depends on the user as to what's friendly...?

not used zenefits, but I've got several apps where I end up doing just that, because the target audience is so used to excel, that anything short of excel is a really bad experience for them. as I can't embed excel directly in, down/uploading excel files is the next best thing (for now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm the first tweet on their homepage expressing my profound love for Zenefits. Great product, my praise is authentic.

Happy to see they've raised a boatload of capital. I look forward to more product development and additional customer support resources. If I had the means to invest at a $4.5B valuation, I would.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know of a Zenefits like business that serves the UK?

I've not come across anything close and HR administration is just as big of pain in the UK as the US. I recognise the business model (commissions on health insurance) wouldn't work in the UK, but I'd be happy to pay. Our health insurance costs are so much lower anyway....

<comment><USER24> YOU'd be happy to pay, but maybe not the rest of the UK companies (or not that much, or not today, etc.). SO the growth of a UK-based Zenefits-clone will be much, much slower, and maybe never reach profitability. So I wouldn't count on that too much :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do not see it. I worked forMarsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. It has been around for years, has billions in revenue, and owns Mercer HR Services with customers like Toyota Motor Corp., Halliburton, American Airlines and many many others. They have a platform, SASS model, and nothing much different that what zenefits is doing. Even in the mid market they are extremely competitive. I do not see this is worth 4.5 billion dollars.

<comment><USER25> I suspect that if HN had been around when Google was raising we would have read the same type of comments there.

Based on the numbers in the article, they could very well be in the billions of rev within a few years if they can maintain the growth.

<comment><USER26> The problem I have with valuations is that they're supposed to somehow reflect what somebody might pay to buy the company. But because of the hamfisted way they're calculated they seem to be so huge or so small (depending on the case) that they're essentially meaningless.

For example, here's a company operating in an ultra-competitive space, from a fairly interchangeable position (middle-man) that has a supposed value on the market that's 225x what they expect to bring in in revenue during 2015. And they're losing 5x their projected revenue in customer acquisition costs (yeah yeah, growth stage and all that). "Valuation" as a term is clearly divorced from actual business realities.

People who claim to be smarter than I will say "but the investors figure the company's market position in through their N-round investment terms". So what do I know?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Holy shit, now _that 's_ a slide deck I'd like to see.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't get the hubbub about Zenefits. They offer a commodity service for no fee, but offer worse plans at higher rates? I've heard there's some merit to using them when your company is really small. But our finance and HR teams whines about them incessantly -- saying how they can't handle larger companies well. I know their ADP payroll integration is terribad.

I just don't get the $4.5B valuation other than they don't make any money.

</comment><comment><USER29> We have Zenefits at my job and it really is amazing. All workers should be so lucky to have that type of interface for their benefits.

</comment><comment><USER30> What exactly are they spending the money on? Is it marketing? I assume their overhead should actually be very low.

</comment><comment><USER31> Congrats guys, this is awesome! :)

</comment><comment><USER32> $20M ARR... $5B Val?

</comment><comment><USER33> jbob2000, you are hellbanned, that means every comment you've made for the last few weeks has been hidden from this forum.

<comment><USER17> Not to go off topic but this is a thing on HN? That's psychologically terrifying (though I'm assuming deserved). How does it work, exactly? Is it permanent? Just curious.

<comment><USER34> I think it's permanent.

pg defended it here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060954&utm_source=dlvr...](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060954&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr)

(I'm not a moderator here, though I was in another high-profile site) In particular, jbob2000 made several low-quality or sarcastic comments, not very in line with what HN wants.

The one that probably triggered the hellban:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9382992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9382992)

was a sarcastic:

"Oh no! Giving something away for free! The travesty!"

but he had others like:

"Foursquare? What is this, 2009?"

which don't contribute that much.

<comment><USER17> Ah thanks for the clarification. Today I learned.

<comment><USER35> We're working on some major changes to how banning and flagged/dead comments work, so please put a mental asterisk alongside all of this. Assuming our changes hold up in testing, the community will soon be managing most of it.

<comment><USER17> > the community will soon be managing most of it

I see this as an awesome thing and as a horrible thing at the same time. Color me interested, ha.

<comment><USER35> Note that word _most_. I'm hopeful we can find a good balance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Marzipan - <AUTHOR> http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/marzipan <comment><AUTHOR> > _Marzipan apps are ugly ducklings. As soon as you use them, you can just > know these are not at one with the system. You detect that there's a > translation layer of some kind at work here, just like when you use Slack on > the Mac you instinctively feel that it's a web app in a thin wrapper. The > underlying implementation is exposed to the user with a bevy of performance > sluggishness, UI quirks and non-standard behaviours. That's bad._

A thoughtful critique, including screenshots and interaction details.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm still trying to grapple with the point of this thing. Does Apple have so few macOS developers that they couldn't have written a native news app? What are the iOS apps people are so desperate for on macOS that the developers refuse to port? Unless AppKit is going away, I feel like I am missing something.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's about the News app, the technology gives Apple an easier way to ensure the Mac has a sort of 'feature parity' with iOS devices. Apple's own goals seem to be the primary driver.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for Mobile App Analytics? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to incorporate analytics in my iPhone apps and I see a few options out there: flurry, mobclix,google analytics for mobile, etc..<p>So which ones have you used and what do you recommend? <comment><USER2> We are currently using Flurry basic version mainly because it's free and really easy to setup. I recommend it for those two reasons.

We are also planning to use Appfigures real soon for iTunes Connect download analytics (<http://www.appfigures.com>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Right now I'm using AppViz for download analytics...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, I see Localytics as another option. Anyone have any experience with it?

<comment><USER3> We've been using Localytics for almost a year and a half now and have been super happy with it. They're positioning themselves as high quality mobile analytics and it shows. We personally use them for BlackBerry analytics but would easily go to them for our upcoming Android and iPhone apps. Plus the fact that their mobile libraries are open source is pretty cool too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> in-app Tending to use Flurry because of ease and in house stat tracking due to custom requirements

Make use of AppViz and appannie for download + store monitoring</comment>


Ask HN: Do you meditate? Does it help you concentrate and improve your code? - <AUTHOR>

Concentration is the key to coding, right? Does anyone out there meditate? Have you noticed a marked improvement in your ability to concentrate and to code since you began meditating? Any advice? <comment><USER2> I do meditate and it does help me solve problem on a large scale, with some perspective. But it's not magic, i.e. if I'm not in a calm room for long hours, I just can't code properly or be more productive. I used to have trouble sleeping (that's not really the case now) and I'd remain in bed doing nothing, expecting (hoping) sleep would come. Then I started noticing my breathing, and it became some sort of exercise. That was 7 years ago or so... Now every night I go to bed and I do the same routine: notice and control (more or less) my breathing, nothing else. I'm quickly engulfed by thousands of thoughts and the trick is just maintaining the routine for as long as it takes for them to calm down, observing them in a non-judgemental way, waiting. It's a bit of a leap of faith, that part. I can hardly describe the sense of clarity that strikes me after that... I actually believe this simple routine helped me a lot in getting rid of a general anxiety I use to have when I was a teenager, and find a better sleep (with richly symbolic dreams during the night that proved to provide a lot of "subconscient" answers to day-to-day or creative problems), among other things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. It especially helps to get you back on track. You know those urges to check email and Facebook, it has helped me to ignore those and remain focused on my task until my Pomodoro time is up. It also helps with my own self awareness. I feel I am much more aware of my body now than before. This helps me to recognize when a break would help me solve a problem rather than pushing on.

Another big benefit is just having time to relax. I don't know about other developers but I always feel I have to be doing something. With smartphones and high speed internet, there is always something I could be doing. But boredom is a good thing. It helps your body and mind to heal. Meditation has helped me to reduce my anxiety a lot and to just slow down and not feel so pressured.

</comment><comment><USER4> Since all the answers are yes in here, I might as well post since my answer is "no". I don't meditate because

1) That time is better spent doing something else

2) It's boring

The only time I have trouble concentrating on code is the after lunch slump.

</comment><comment><USER5> I listen to brainwave entrainment tracks, even while I'm working, and from past experience I can say it helps a lot. My mind is a lot clearer, and I can code for great stretches of time without stalling out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely! As in anything in life, experiment! Give it a try for a week and see how it changes you.

</comment><comment><USER7> For all those that say Yes, can you tell us how you started? Any resources?

<comment><USER8> A book called "Change Your Mind: A practical guide to Buddhist meditation" was very good for me. It's written by an English Buddhist monk, but is singularly free of any mystical or religious content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes. Meditation helps me achieve flow and a more balanced state of mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, it helps, and I do it everyday.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes meditation helps, but what helps even more is insight to meditation to gain knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and experience.</comment>


Porn app for Google glass, "It's sort of like you're near a woman" - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3011064/fast-feed/google-glass-porn-is-here

<comment><USER2> "Take pictures using Google Glasses and share with other Tits & Glass users."

I'm mortified.</comment>


Ask HN: Hour 34 at Startup Weekend Indianapolis, Whatcha think? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
We are here at Startup Weekend Indy finishing hour 34.  As a fellow HN'r (Coxymoney), I'd love to get some feedback.  We got it in our heads to build a startup in the homemade brew space.  We left 10 hours into the weekend, went home crashed, and came back into the room stoked.  Only to find out the original "pitch man" had fallen not only out of love, but into hate with the idea.  We all immediately did the same, feeling funny that we hadn't known how we all truly felt about the company.
Fast forward to day 2 – we broke out the whiteboard and started making magic happen.  Within an hour, Ninja Button was born.  NinjaButton is a button creation and comparison tool designed to optimize conversion rates.  We provide an easy solution to track the effectiveness of your buttons.  Better buttons mean bigger profits.
As a community that gives kick ass advice, we thought that you all could certainly provide some good insight into what is missing/needs fixing in the conversion optimization and website button space.  Any thoughts you care to share, we'd love to hear.  In any case,  the highlights for our product are as follows:
1) Split Testing 2) Geared toward users with little knowledge of web management 3) Tiered pricing model with a monthly subscription 4) Suggestive and measured advice on a button's placement, style and text 5) Saving time and cost (sorry IT invoice guy)
Well that's it.  We are now rounding out our 34th hour and, with only 20 hours till launch; any input would be pure awesomeness!
Please feel free to fire away! <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone?</comment>