The college debt crisis is worse than it seems - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2016/05/18/hopes-dreams-debt/fR60cKakwUlGok0jTlONTN/story.html <comment> rm_-rf_slash The article should have mentioned the inflationary effects of foreign students. A lot of foreigners who study in the US are either A: loaded or B: backed by their home state. It has gotten to the point where foreign students are somewhat expected to come to subsidize American financial aid. Add in the article's woes: increasing value of a college degree, cuts in education budgets, and cutthroat competition leading to a state of constant expensive campus development all leads to an enormous bill just to keep the lights on.

The other aspect I take issue with is the farming out of federal loans to private companies. The US Department of Education doesn't need to make a profit on my federal student loans to exist, but my loan company does, and I'm stuck paying 6%. I have never seen a convincing argument as to why people like me are saddled with profit-seeking companies doing what should be a purely public service.

<comment><USER3> Foreign students are 1.13 million [1] and the sum total of all students in the US is around 20 million ( age < 25 + age > 25) [2]. How much can they really contribute marginally to tuition inflation given that they are only 5-10% of the population? If foreign workers are taking American jobs, Chinese factories are taking over manufacturing, and international students are leading to tuition inflation, in general, US seems to be coping rather poorly with the effects of globalization. More likely, internationals are like Don Quixote's windmills.

Edit: forgot references

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/international-students-stream- in...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/international-students-stream-into-u-s- colleges-1427248801)

[2] [http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98](http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98)

<comment> rm_-rf_slash "Coping poorly" is one way of putting it. I prefer "[the American people were] suckered into bad trade deals with countries with nonexistent labor and environmental standards which forced them to compete on the same level even though foreign competitors were handed enormous advantages as though they were US states but immune from regulation, thereby gutting the American middle class and the necessary tax base necessary to foot the bill for the kind of human investments necessary for a large country to succeed in a global information economy," but I guess your way works too.

<comment><USER4> The US is rocking the information economy.

You can maybe complain that we aren't employing even more people in the information economy.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Maybe in the coastal cities and Austin TX. Aside from that, our economy is barely budging and people are sliding ever further into debt. That's the thing about rot: if you don't address it early enough it soon consumes everything.

Besides, a lot of our "rocking" of the information economy is because of legacy, not current policies. The US emerged from the Cold War as the sole global hyper power at the same time the Internet was being developed as a commercial tool in the very same country.

If Great Britain hadnt conquered half the world their cultural products (Beatles Bond and Harry Potter) would have very little reach, London would have no more reason than anywhere else to be the global financial centre, and their manufacturing and mining economy would be in equal shambles as today.

My godfather - a historian who specialized in Ancient Rome - often said that "It only takes one generation's loss to lose everything forever."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like these thinkpieces about "debt" are really about two separate issues:

(1) College debt is a good investment if you learn things and graduate, but too many colleges are failing to educate students and too many students end up dropping out with debt and no degree. The good news is that this problem has a pedagogical solution, but it requires many colleges to hire faculty based on teaching skill rather than research achievements. The US is doing some of the world's best research, but too many academics are doing second-rate research at third-rate institutions. Many of those academics should instead be focused on teaching instead of research.

(2) Everyone can benefit from learning new things -- even (or perhaps especially) a liberal arts education -- but many students are attending college to get a credential and land a good job. We should be clearer about what we want institutions of higher learning to teach: life's big questions or job skills? I could imagine a higher education system that does both, but there's no good reason it should cost $50k/year to read literature/philosophy with thoughtful guidance and peer discussion. Maybe our liberal arts educations should look more like structured gap years, while technical education would have specific learning outcomes tied to workforce demand and better information for prospective students about passing rate, job placement rates, and starting salaries so they can make informed decisions about their financial risk.

My final complaint: I've never wanted my student debt forgiven, but it does sting to make student loan payments with after-tax income that goes directly to banks bailed out at taxpayer expense during the recession. If lawmakers wanted to help the student debt crisis, a great start would be making student loan payments tax-deductible (up to a certain total, and only below a certain income level) instead of just having student loan interest be tax-deductible.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash There is literally nothing wrong with studying the humanities. I am amazed at how many brilliant engineers skip history and literature and become predictable consumerist cogs because "that's how the world works" as far as they've ever known.

Time was you'd go to college, get a job, and get trained while you work. Of course I'm not saying a rocket scientist opening should cater equally to the engineer and the artist, but we have become so addicted to pedigree that we forget how differently things can be done when we don't expect a new CS graduate to build a mobile API on their first day.

<comment><USER6> >>Time was you'd go to college, get a job, and get trained while you work.

You got trained while you worked because most people stayed at the same company from the day they started until the day they retired. So it was easy for companies to justify investing time and money into training: barring unusual circumstances, they expected that person to remain an employee for a long time.

Nowadays though, job-hopping is the norm. If the company cannot expect you to stay for longer than X years, they're going to adjust their hiring practices to make sure new hires are "safe", i.e. have degrees from prestigious colleges. Of course that still doesn't guarantee they will have the necessary skills from the get-go, but if things don't work out the hiring manager can at least cover his/her own ass by saying, "well, he/she was a <prestigious college> graduate..."

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Absolutely. Seriously this cannot be stressed enough: there is a huuuuge amount of influence in the decision-making process, whether it's choosing a vendor or hiring an employee, that ultimately goes back to someone preemptively covering their ass.

When I tried an Ed-tech startup in college, our biggest barrier was that nobody wanted to sign off on an untested product in case it went wrong and they got the blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe we should learn from the 'controlled' experiment in the UK. There the new fees structure caps undergraduate tuition at £9k per year. Gov loans with very forgiving repayment terms are provided for students. The government expected only a few elite universities to charge the full £9k, with the rest charging between 6k and £8k. Their rationale was that universities would compete on price and try to deliver value for money. In reality, universities interacted with each other in entirely the opposite direction – they raced to the top. This is quite surprising, considering the huge variability between universities and courses: 3 years of tutorials in economics at Cambridge cost the same as staying at home and doing social work at the University of Huddersfield. LSE used to charge £8.5k (a symbolic gesture, more than anything), but bumped it up to £9k when it realised (1) their perceived value was derived from their price tag (the higher the better) and (2) that hyper- competition over league tables encourages aggressive spending programmes.

I think this tells us that universities will always charge as much as they can get away with, and that laissez faire economics does not work well in a market filled with institutions that are often shielded from free market effects (e.g. 'lock-in' to past choices, difficulties for new entrants into the market, no easy way to weigh-up costs/benefits of investment, etc.). Colleges in the US have a broad range of incentives to charge the highest acceptable market rate (which is usually between $55k and $85k for undergraduate tuition).

<comment><USER4> It think that gets a lot of it. If everyone has loan money, universities get less out of competing for students than students get out of competing for spots at universities. So the universities stop competing (financially) for students (that's a euphemism for charging the maximum).

To me it makes sense to limit the support that students see to competitive grants that only cover most of the cost of tuition (like 75 or 80 percent). Then universities have some reason to keep tuition lower (students will be somewhat price sensitive), students have motivation to examine whether they should go to school. There's probably some fairness issues to address with that, I guess the competitive aspect of the grants could be the size of the grant, with every student having some access.

edited in the (financially) in the first paragraph.

<comment><USER8> Yes. For a long time, most schools never competed on price, because the student was never seeing the price. The result was predictable: skyrocketing costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems clear that the American university system is fed by a largely inelastic demand and isolated from larger market forces, thanks in part to the endless spigot of federal loan money (complimented by the strong preference of employers towards traditional degree holders).

What is less clear to me is how to fix this in a reasonable, least-damaging way.

<comment><USER10> Ban education discrimination against job applicants. (Except for jobs which require certification).

Right now, there is no drawback for an employer requiring a bachelor's degree for a job that has no use for it. Putting an end to this practice will stop the pointless rat race.

Alternatively, cap student loans, and put lower boundaries on what % of tuition goes towards instruction. Most tuition funds do not go towards education, and there is a lot of pressure for universities to spend them on building Potemkin villages.

<comment><USER11> I really want my aerospace engineers to be able to do math...

Universities accredit them, so companies don't have to spend their money doing it (via a ridiculous number of interviews). Interviewing is already one of the largest sinks of money for a largish company, no need to make it worse.

Far better, would removing the guaranteed loan payback the government provides. This would force universities to lower prices as students wouldn't be eligible for loans. Further, it increases the barrier to universities, meaning less people will have degrees and in turn companies would have an incentive to hire people without degrees. Plus people with degrees would get paid more (making it easier to pay off loans).

The whole issue is universities aren't having to deal with market forces. Add back in the incentives and it'll be 10x cheaper.

<comment><USER10> Your aerospace engineers already need to pass engineering certification. My fast food franchise managers, on the other hand, need to show up, and apply a little common sense.

<comment><USER9> > Your aerospace engineers already need to pass engineering certification

Generally not in the U.S., unless it's a civil or electrical engineer designing infrastructure. I say this as an aerospace engineer with a mathematics PhD only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is my observation: based on oldest kid graduating 1.5 years ago from a Big 10 University with a degree in Scientific & Technical Communication. It was substantially harder to get a job than we expected. With my network - <USER2> finally located her a summer internship on 1099 basis that has turned into a year long engagement - still on a 1099 basis. To date she is showing no financial advantage from attending college. She could make the equivalent doing any number of things that don't require a 4 year degree. They are finally making noise about bringing her on FT salaried with benefits.

Then we run into someone who graduated in her same class - still hasn't found work in her field and is making do as a hostess at a restaurant. No financial advantage.

These are kids who graduated from respected university and yet here they are still struggling to see a financial benefit.

My daughter's debt is fairly low because: she took advantage of a state program that pays tuition to start college early, she lived at home, took public transportation, didn't buy a car until she got this 'job' and still lives at home with our support so that she can focus on paying off the education loans that she did end up with.

Was college worth it? I still think so and I have 3 more to go, but I have to say that I am really starting to think hard about the value of higher education.

<comment><USER13> What department at your employer would you expect to hire a Comms major? How many do they need per year? What fraction of those are college hires, vs people who have paid their dues in some trench elsewhere?

<comment><USER12> She is working in an Engineering department for a company that does sensors and cloud monitoring in a specific vertical industry. She does a combination of QA for devices and related software plus has been migrating their documentation from a wiki to SharePoint and editing the entries for clarity, grammar and writing style of the documentation as she does the migration.

People from her degree typically would work with product and engineering teams to do both internal documentation as well as user manuals, well written FAQs and other support documentation. In a major medical device company located near here they have teams of people doing this working with expert translators to appropriately localize surgical guides for surgeons around the world. In more academic settings they are sometimes employed to provide assistance in grant writing.

You make some good points about new college hires versus experienced people who have paid their dues - but that is true of any field. I am not saying I expected that she would match the salary of CS or engineering grad from the same university. But in comparison to pure communications degrees or English lit degrees - this degree is positioned as the sensible writing degree that actually has corporate positions available.

And, to the point of the article - which focused on people who maybe aren't quite ready for college and don't finish their degree but still end up with debt. If anything she is the opposite - qualified to start college 2 years early. Finished in a total of 4.5 years and for what?

Now it may payoff as she continues to pay dues in entry level work but for now she could make as much money doing any number of jobs that don't require a 4 year degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The college debt crisis is not so much about specifics like the rising cost of education or that more women and minorities are attending now than in the past. It's really about corruption.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got big after the saving and loan scandal in the 80s, orchestrated by Neil Bush:

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

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

Sallie Mae got big after Reagan largely defunded public universities, switching to student loan based funding with the goal of moving those loans over to private institutions.

So what it basically comes down to is each generation keeps getting fleeced by these private firms while the government looks the other way, and taxpayers pick up the tab.

Just watch as this thread fills up with thousands of comments blaming this or that. They have us all distracted bickering amongst ourselves so we don't see who is profiting. If we want to fix higher learning in America, we need to go back to pre-1980s policies and get private financing out. Universities should be funded by endowments set up by the alumni who have profited greatly by the quality educations they received. It's no wonder that people are doing the math and opting out of college because the loans are too expensive. It was never supposed to be like that in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think it's obvious to anyone not living under a rock that the higher education cliff is in view.

</comment><comment><USER16> No one is forced to go to a private college and rack up debt. Go to a state college. Most students could probably go to a junior college their first two years close to home and transfer. I always laughed seeing people thousands in debt getting a comp Sci degree making no more than me - a graduate of an unremarkable state school.

</comment><comment><USER17> That first graph is really confusing.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is another article beating the college debt drum, and unfortunately it also misses a few critical points: Students are attending expensive schools, with expensive private loans. Instead of going to a community or state school, paid for by the federal Stafford loan, they choose to take out loans from banks to go to private, or worse, for-profit schools, with zero certainty and little guidance. This is further compounded by the endless number of require classes students are forced to take, that have little to no impact on their major, career choice, or academic goals, and are further saddled with endless labs, and fees.

Large student debt is the fault of both the students, and the schools. Both need to take responsibility.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever gone back to a job after quitting? - <AUTHOR> Randomly curious how common this is - let's say you quit and went to another job for a while, but started missing your old job, have you ever gone back? <comment><USER2> I did this at one point in my earlier career. My resume had a job change every 9 - 18 months. I was mortified to find that I was really unhappy at a new place after 5 weeks. I was discussing with my old coworker who let my manager know I was unhappy so they offered to have me back, which I did, but the reasons I left were unresolved some 6 months later so I left again.

This time I did some soul searching about what would make me happy. I knew the problem was really with me and though I had strong urges to leave, similar to my previous urges, I managed to stay at my new job for 6 years.

The takeaways from my sample size of 1: You can go back. If you left for some particular reason, it is possible that the situation remains unchanged and you will still be unhappy. If you leave again, you will likely burn bridges so be sure you want to be back. If you are doing this on a frequent basis, look within to understand why you have the need to change jobs so often.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've come back to a job after a round of layoffs. My company laid me off and after a month, they realized my manager had lied and actually had another job lined up as they were letting me go. I was the only one that actually knew how the system worked (my manager lied about this too) and they begged me to come back.

10K higher salary and an extra week of vacation later, I was working there again.

The company lasted another year before it folded completely. I only did it because the boss pretty much left me alone and I didn't have anything to do besides maintain the current system that I built during my 5 years there.

I used this opportunity to start my own company because my daily job took me about 20 minutes in the morning. I previously automated most of my daily tasks. Anyone with any tech experience was fired or let go and nobody really knew what I was doing besides keeping the current system running smoothly.

New jobs are always difficult in the beginning. Mostly because you have lots of unfamiliar systems to learn and new coworkers.

The question you should be asking yourself, is why did you quit your old job in the first place? Do you think anything will be different if you go back?

</comment><comment><USER4> Actually yes. I had a job for 5+ years, but was getting stressed and unhappy. I found what seemed like a perfect job, on paper, and left. As it turned out the perfect job was not great, so I bounced around 3-5 companies for a year, before asking for my old job back.

With the benefit of hindsight I should have raised my problems with the original company, at the time, not just walked away. That would have lead to improvements for myself and others, and saved me a year of starting new jobs which didn't suit me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would imagine for someone who is to come back to an old job, the staffing or team may have changed as well. There's a really high chance that your ex- coworkers may have left as well. I never gone back to a previous job but I do keep in touch with previous bosses/project managers/ex-coworkers in which lead to them hiring me as a consultant for a different company.</comment>


Google's Algorithms for Talent - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466852658514144.html

<comment><USER2> A workable program for teaching technical people how to effectively manage others _in specific technical contexts_ is probably one of the most potent things a company could have.

So much of the quality and productivity of a programming group depends on how well the group is managed. Despite this, the production of effective managers is often shockingly haphazard.

 _They are not going to do something for you just because of your title. You really have to make your case...

"One of the practicalities of a less hierarchical company is that you aren't necessarily going to have the position power to decree something or dictate something..."_

This is actually the case at most BigCo. If you think otherwise, then you've bought into the window dressing.

<comment><USER3> _This is actually the case at most BigCo. If you think otherwise, then you've bought into the window dressing._

I have seen plenty of companies where this only held true within certain teams, but the majority of staff were process workers and just did what they were told. Government, too.

<comment><USER2> I was primarily thinking of knowledge workers, not process workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a good business idea, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER5> the HN title is a bit misleading. i clicked on this link expecting to read about google's hiring practices and how they judge talent in candidates.</comment>


SiPort Shooting: No Layoffs, Killer Was Fired - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/11/16/siport-shooting-no-layoffs-killer-was-fired/ <comment><USER2> Well that changes the context quite a bit then.

</comment><comment><USER3> I condemn the killing of CEO Agrawal.

However let me share my experience in a fab automation software company in Phoenix, AZ. 80% of programming staff in this company are Agrawals and Patels from Gujarat state in India.

They are using CORBA (ORBIX) for IPC (Inter Process Communication) on Solaris platform and they created a number of irrational config files for their software product.

The management and customers are completely confused about these config files and totally locked-in to these programmers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure it matters if he was layed off or fired. If someone is capable of getting angry enough to kill people (either random killings or targeted) the perspective of how/why they became unemployed may not matter much from the killer's perspective. I'm no expert in such edge case mental instability. I just think that when people get that far over the edge, their irrationally doesn't factor in the predicates in the same way as the rest of us.</comment>


The EM2S 60kHz radio receiver module and the MSF time signal [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deirdreobyrne/MSF-EM2S/blob/master/paper.pdf <comment><USER2> The file is binary and cannot be displayed at the time</comment>


Things to Do Before You Buy a Domain Name - <AUTHOR> http://www.domainsherpa.com/5-things-to-do-before-you-buy-a-domain-name/

<comment><USER2> _If a domain name has twenty name server (web hosting) changes over the recent past, for example, it might be an indication that the owner is trying to cover something up._

Too bad that experimenting with your own name servers could be held against you. Are search engines known to penalize web sites based on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> @ez77: It's a factor to consider, not the end-all, be-all deciding factor.

I was going to purchase a five letter domain name for $2,000 a couple of years ago. It was way under priced for a standard english word dot com domain name. Turns out he moved it from place place, and when I asked the seller why he had a terrible answer. I think it might have been a stolen name but I couldn't prove it. In the end, the lack of clarity was enough to convince me not to buy it.

That's all this article is supposed to do: help people figure out domain names and, in this case, figure out if there might be trouble associated with a premium domain name.

<comment><USER2> Hey, thanks for your exaplanation. Come to think about it, I'm only likely to experiment (DNS etc.) with a personal account nobody is likely to want.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to take it next? Flight tracking side project - <AUTHOR> http://flightlite.com http://flightlite.com
Flightlite is a visual flight tracker combining 3D and overhead views and flight information.
It is my first launch since I started reading Hacker News and was developed as a side project for the past 6 months or so. I made the final push on it this morning to get it to a semi-launchable state.
- The best coverage is US and UK - Sometimes the data I get is a bit crazy, I've spent a lot of time working on ways to automatically correct it/sanitise but it's not perfect - Doesn't work in IE 64bit due to Google Earth not being available on that platform
As a commercial aviation enthusiast I found other flight trackers to be a bit lacking. Their route visualisations weren't very exciting and the maps tended to be boxed into a small portion of the total page area.
I'm now trying to work out how to take this further, if there is anywhere to take it that is!
The data feeds are paid for per transaction and I can't subsidise that out of my own pocket for any serious level of traffic. I'm also concerned that classic CPC advertising won't cover the costs of the data, hosting, and bandwidth to run the site.
So i'm wondering about the possibility of either co-branding with a sponsor or selling unit space for specific routes (think of Air New Zealand branding on the pages when people are tracking any of their flights for example).
Does anyone have any ideas or ties into the relevant industries that thinks this could be a goer in some way?
My ideal situation is that it produces enough money to cover its costs and justify me continuing to developing it by adding more/better data feeds and extending the feature set. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://flightlite.com>

Flightlite is a visual flight tracker combining 3D and overhead views and flight information.

It is my first launch since I started reading Hacker News and was developed as a side project for the past 6 months or so. I made the final push on it this morning to get it to a semi-launchable state.

\- The best coverage is US and UK

\- Sometimes the data I get is a bit crazy, I've spent a lot of time working on ways to automatically correct it/sanitise but it's not perfect

\- Doesn't work in IE 64bit due to Google Earth not being available on that platform

As a commercial aviation enthusiast I found other flight trackers to be a bit lacking. Their route visualisations weren't very exciting and the maps tended to be boxed into a small portion of the total page area.

I'm now trying to work out how to take this further, if there is anywhere to take it that is!

The data feeds are paid for per transaction and I can't subsidise that out of my own pocket for any serious level of traffic. I'm also concerned that classic CPC advertising won't cover the costs of the data, hosting, and bandwidth to run the site.

So i'm wondering about the possibility of either co-branding with a sponsor or selling unit space for specific routes (think of Air New Zealand branding on the pages when people are tracking any of their flights for example).

Does anyone have any ideas or ties into the relevant industries that thinks this could be a goer in some way?

My ideal situation is that it produces enough money to cover its costs and justify me continuing to developing it by adding more/better data feeds and extending the feature set.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I entered the above as the body of my post but for some reason it doesn't appear so I've added it as a comment also - help!)</comment></comment>


Boeing Pilot Warned of 'Egregious' Issue with 737 Max in 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/business/boeing-flight-simulator-text-message.html <comment><USER2> Reuters broke this story: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia- airplane-boeing-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane- boeing-exclusive/exclusive-boeing-2016-internal-messages-suggest-employees- may-have-misled-faa-on-737-max-sources-idUSKBN1WX25G)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious," he went on to say, > according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times.

> "I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)," Mr. Forkner says in the > messages.

<comment><USER4> There's some positions that I'm not sure that I want the candid honesty, or if I'd rather have the bliss of ignorance.

No one wants to hear their surgeon on the record saying "I'm just an OK surgeon"

<comment><USER5> I'd take it with a grain of (self-deprecating) salt. No one who truly "sucks at flying" makes it to the level of Airline Transport Pilot.

<comment><USER6> Seriously. An Airline Transport Pilot must: * Have demonstrated precision flying, including precision power off landings, from a variety of altitudes and preconditions. * Multiple demonstrations of a wide range of flying capabilities, including recovery from loss of navigation, systems failures, and unusual attitudes. * Attained a 1st class medical certificate, which is actually quite challenging. Annual re-certification, and sometimes more frequently than that for pilots that have anything at all quirky going on in their body. This includes extensive health records (such as EKGs) sent to the FAA for analysis and includes relevant dental work. (Yes, pressure bubbles inside teeth can cause pilots to lose the ability to control an airplane.) Got a DUI? Pretty much eliminates flying for life. * Attained a flight instructor's certificate. Almost all airline pilots were flight instructors before becoming airline pilots. * 1500 hours flight experience, enough to all but guarantee in-flight emergency or systems failure will have occurred. * 1000 hours jet experience. * Attained instrument ratings, multi-engine ratings, etc. * And that's just to get past the interview. Then the real training begins.

In all, that's a lot of training, and pilots pay about as much as a doctor to get that training. Since attaining a Private Pilot's license myself (which I found challenging and which ATPs consider kindergarten) I've realized that actual airline pilots are in general remarkably good pilots. Even if you, sitting in the back cabin, think the landing is rough, it's probably a really good firm precision landing considering the conditions.

<comment><USER7> >Got a DUI? Pretty much eliminates flying for life.

Not true at all, most of the ATPLs in my class were foreign and as such would be well beyond the reach of such rules.

<comment><USER6> I'm only talking about American pilots flying in America, which any chief ATP @ Boeing most certainly would be.

<comment><USER7> Well sure, this particular guy almost certainly doesn't have any DUIs.

It's only the statement about DUIs preventing flying for life I was objecting to, if someone really wants to become a pilot a DUI isn't going to stop them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious how an issue he experienced in the simulator relates to the problems that occur with MCAS. The known problems with MCAS occur when the active angle of attack sensor fails. Perhaps the simulation was simulating AoA sensor failure?

</comment><comment><USER9> Whenever I hear the word "Egregious" I always think here come the lawyers.

<comment><USER10> What's really sad is you need the lawyers to let the public know something went wrong. If people had listened to the engineers (admittedly internal vs external communication are completely different) then we never would have had this problem in the first place.

Lawyers often profit from the misery of others (I know many lawyers that do great things and are proud of their work, but almost nobody gets into law because they "want to make the world a better place"), but sometimes that misery can prevent other's misery in the future.

Sadly the profits aren't in putting anyone in jail, but in civil suits. I would love to be wrong, but nobody is going to jail over this because nobody will profit from it.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, engineering dialogue brings out concerns like this on many major programs. The lawsuits happen on the ones where the concerns turn out to have disastrous consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I take it to mean he think there's an issue with the sim, not the real aircraft. There's absolutely no information in what manner MCAS was misbehaving.

It's very possible this is being completely blown out of proportion.

</comment><comment><USER13> > "I suck at flying"

Ironically, after leaving Boeing, this same pilot is currently a first officer (co-pilot) at Southwest Airlines, which exclusively flies Boeing 737s.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like impostor syndrome and/or self-deprecating humor more than anything tbh

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > the chief technical pilot for the plane

> "I suck at flying"

<comment><USER16> it is almost as if he wasn't entirely serious

<comment><USER17> Sarcasm/irony in text form can be difficult to figure out sometimes, but some people are better at it than others. This community as a whole seems to suck at it.

<comment><USER10> I think it's easy to understand sarcasm when you know who you're talking to, such as a group of friends or coworkers. But when you're part of a huge online community like hn that discourages humor, it's pretty easy to understand why people fail to recognize it - this community punishes sarcasm more often than it rewards it. And most of us are not talented enough at writing that we can make it easily understandable to a broad audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Obviously the warnings weren't loud enough

<comment><USER19> We have no data on the following:

a) How many warnings were not ignored by this pilot or others.

b) Whether this particular pilot was prone to being the 'pilot who called wolf'.

<comment><USER20> Even if they were prone to "crying wolf", I think it still would need follow up. I have customers that often complain about "bugs" that turn out to be as yet unimplemented features but I still have to track down the issue and verify it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> \-->WRONG It seems that he retracted his statements. Was it even MCAS related at all? WRONG<\-- Also, it's impossible that the simulator was simulating the sensor failure that caused the the MCAS problems which lead to the two crashes.

EDIT: Wait, there was no retraction. It's hard to tell from the NYT reporting, but the "lie" statement seems to be in reference to his sign-off on the removal of MCAS from pilot's manuals.

<comment><USER22> There doesn't need to be a sensor failure for MCAS to kick in or be overly aggressive.</comment></comment>


More than 1 in 10 tests voided – Theranos lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/explosive-new-details-emerge-in-lawsuit-against-theranos <comment><USER2> Didn`t know Tim Draper is such a lying scumbag,probably made a killing of Theranos. Same modus operandi as Holmes,lie,lie,lie.</comment>


9 Essential Rails Tips - <AUTHOR> http://fortytwo.gr/blog/18/9-Essential-Rails-Tips <comment><USER2> Invaluable tips -- stuff I've never seen in a book, and stuff I absolutely didn't know (or realize, anyway).

I wonder if this guy has considered writing a book about optimizing Rails. I think the Rails world is ready for a book like that.

<comment><USER3> Oops... I meant to mod _up_ your comment, sorry about that ;-)

<comment><USER4> I have restored balance on your behalf. :)</comment></comment></comment>


How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Axis of Evil (Oracle) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/companies/how-i-learned-to-love-new-evil-empire-oracle/ <comment><USER2> > Java not good enough for Android? Fine, let's make a new language that > finally innovates on the mobile device, unlocking us from the collective > disasters of Objective C, mobile Windows, and bloated Java ME.

While I appreciate the sentiment of this post, it displays some ignorance of the actual legal issues at play. Oracle's patent attack has nothing to do with the Java language. They have to do with virtual machines, and any VM (even clean-room like Dalvik) running any language is going to run afoul of them since they're absurdly broad.

<comment><USER3> Never mind that VMs are as old as UCSD p-code.

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

edit: Interesting voting here, would someone please explain what's so bad about UCSD p-code being a primitive byte code interpreter + associated VM ?

<comment><USER4> Modern VMs use some techniques for optimizing runtime dispatch, or for security, or for dynamic loading of code, etc... techniques which are newer.

Sun did research on Self, and Strongtalk which they've bought was heavily influenced by Self, which later became Hotspot.

So Oracle might own really relevant IP to modern implementation techniques for a VM ... for which there might NOT be prior-art. And some of those techniques are really not trivial.

This is just speculation btw, without a careful analysis of their patents. But if I'm right, Oracle can nuke all modern VM implementations.

<comment><USER3> The parent comment wrote explicitly: "and any VM (even clean-room like Dalvik) running any language is going to run afoul of them since they're absurdly broad."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who votes for Scala developers free scala from java vm and .net with compiler for own vm or runtime?

<comment><USER3> And a self hosting clojure.

<comment><USER5> Let the engineers build the vm modular and plug everything that deserves it.

But i dont't know if this could be really fast accomplished, because the java vm has such a maturity.

Goodies could be modern concepts deeply incorporated and specific configurations for current and future hardware usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not a fan of these strangelove references. First time was good, but it has become cliché</comment>


Ask HN: Flatiron or General Assembly? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone completed these bootcamps and got a job and if so how was the experience.
I want to join one of these bootcamps but codefellows is expensive I don't have money right now but my dream is to become a web developer. I just don't have a good enough network or opportunities to land a job or start my career
maybe one of these bootcamps can help any advice would help me.
I'm 29 living in Seattle, WA <comment><USER2> I have a lot of respect for bootcamps, and they have done a very admirable job considering the potential and pressure to turn into a full fledged scam industry.

That being said, corporations have closed ranks at this point and basically refuse to hire from them.

It's very sad to see and very unfair and not deserved.

Don't go into web development also. It's quite a crowded field even if pretty in demand.

I would recommmend Cloud Engineering especially since you don't have a network. Pass your associate and pro cert for AWS for instance and that will guarantee you 100k+ job (assuming you don't have any crazy issues I'm unaware of and have at least basic service industry level experience). After you pass the certs, which takes 6 months to study at a total cost of like $450, maybe 10 business days max to find a job?</comment>


Does Porn Hurt Children? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/sunday-review/does-porn-hurt-children.html <comment><USER2> Minor nit wrt. the first paragraph: the UK's mandatory "family-friendly filters" only apply to consumer internet accounts. It's possible to get a BT Infinity business account without any company letterhead or ID -- it just costs a bit more (and a provides a better quality of service, with no net nanny in the way because your IT department is supposed to do that for you). And there are ISPs (Andrews and Arnold -- [http://www.aa.net.uk/](http://www.aa.net.uk/) \-- spring to mind) whose approach to government-mandated family-friendly filtering is robust and principled:

[http://www.aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html](http://www.aa.net.uk/kb- broadband-realinternet.html)

(I'll probably be moving there when my BT contract is up).

(Also, Tunnelbear is my friend.)

 _However_ : regardless of whether porn harms children (disclosure: everything I've read, from the Meese Commission report onwards, says that it doesn't), the problem with the net.nanny filters is that they're indiscriminate and over-block important material that is not the ostensible target of the block. Want to find out about breast cancer? Good luck with that -- breasts are of course _only ever_ of interest in an erotic context. Teenagers wanting to explore non-mainstream aspects of their sexuality are SOL; LGBT content is commonly blocked. And so on. This shouldn't be a problem for sensible parents -- who will opt out, and discuss the issues face-to-face with their kids -- but is storing up lots of trouble down the line. Not to mention providing a temptation for politicians who might want to follow that nice Mr Erdogan's example and censor viewpoints hostile to them.

And meanwhile, Page Three of the Sun remains on display in every newsagent and supermarket in the UK.

<comment><USER3> I agree that internet filtering is a broken idea.

But there are people who think that porn does change behaviour. They might. Have a point - hairlessness seems to have come from porn.

While it's weird that breasts are displayed in a national newspaper (not because they're breasts, but because that paper is so judgemental about s lot of things. See also Daily Mail "all grown up" while shreKing about paedophiles) unclothed breats are not the "problem" that filters should be addressing.

1) it easy to find extreme, graphic, porn for free.

2) some parents find it difficult to filter that porn.

3) we don't want health or sexuality etc information to be filtered.

These are hard problems to solve and it is immensely frustrating that Government ignores all the expert advice they get about the difficulties. I tend to welcome a "can do" attitude ("you're Google! You can do this!") it should be realistic.

I have a child and I honestly have no idea how I am going to talk to them about porn.

<comment><USER4> > hairlessness seems to have come from porn

I've seen a lot of just-so stories on this subject. Has anyone got any evidence to show?

<comment><USER3> I'd like to see evidence.

"Shaved" used to be a niche fetish in porn. Now "hairy" is the niche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Only if it falls on them. Stack your DVDs and magazines carefully, folks.

More substantively: When divided into "pro-impact" and "no-impact" groups for the "improvised debate" mentioned in the article, the former camp is described as having essentially parroted all the various arguments their elders make for pornography being bad for teenagers, while the latter camp had no such arguments for the position they were assigned to defend. Segal is (somewhat) careful to avoid explicitly drawing any inferences from that, but the obvious implication is that the "pro-impact" camp is correct ("Given that pornography is emotionally charged, it would be shocking if it had no impact.") Leaving aside the question of what a small cohort of randomly selected 16-to-18-year- olds, an age not generally noted for its keen introspective abilities, can be expected to know about much of anything, I'd be curious to find out whether the cohort which produced this result had had anything like equal exposure to both sides of the debate, or whether instead the "pro-impact" kids drubbed the "no-impact" ones because only the former had been fed lines beforehand.

<comment><USER5> > "Given that pornography is emotionally charged, it would be shocking if it > had no impact."

I realize you're not making that argument yourself, but it strikes me as exceptionally weak. The "obvious" response is that it's been extremely difficult to document _any_ experiences as having measurable impacts on children (starvation is a big exception, but hopefully it's not too difficult to see what might make that different...). So the baseline expectation should be a fairly strong confidence that no matter what it is that you're showing children, the effect is likely too small to measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" It turns out that the research suggesting that teenagers and pornography are a hazardous mix is far from definitive."_

[Devil's advocate] If you had children, would you need peer-reviewed literature to inform your decision to allow them access to pornhub? And similarly, if you were a politician elected by people with children?

<comment> barry-cotter No. My (currently hypothetical) children will grow up with as few barriers to consuming unsavoury weirdness as I did. I'll be doing it deliberately though.

<comment><USER3> So long as you're aware that some people (not me) will see that as abuse, and will report you to child protective services.

The line "i don't have any evidence of harm" will be weak, because laws exist to prevent children under 18 from having access to porn.

<comment> barry-cotter Yeah, fuck 'em. If reading Stephen King and Stephen Donaldson as a teenager didn't do me any damage porn certainly wasn't going to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps the instinct of adults to shield children from the likes of pornography, and even the Catcher in the Rye itself, is akin to Holden Caulfield's desire the children from becoming "phonies" like the adults who had been exposed to whatever in life he saw as the catalyst of said phoniness.

Only now after so many years from having read the Cliffs Notes do I realize that Holden was "catching" the children from the Rye that was pornography - more specifically to what J. D. Salinger had in mind, bittorrent clients and Kazaa. :)

</comment><comment> throw-away4 Personally I started watchin porn on the internet at age of 7 and more actively at age of 10. I have not noticed any sign of it negatively affecting me.

E: "If we start teaching kids about equality and respect when they are 5 or 6 years old --" And what does this BS SJW propaganda have to do with porn? It's just a way for people to get off.

<comment><USER8> How is your social life ? I'd be worried for people who only see sexual relationships, and somehow all relationships through cheaply crafted pornography.

<comment> throw-away4 My social life is just like I'd want it to be. I got few close friends that I can trust and that's all I asked for.

If someone only sees sexual relationships it's probably not caused by pornography at young age but some other mental problems. You mustn't mix up porn and relationships because frankly they don't have anything to do with eachother.

<comment> vertex-four And how do we give kids the mental tools to understand the difference between porn and real relationships/sex, and at roughly what stage of development? That's what I want to see research on, personally. Blocking porn isn't going to help; learning how to teach kids to successfully maintain a concrete barrier between porn and the real world is.

<comment><USER4> Every kid (ideally) learns the difference between "real" and "not real", and, more subtly, the difference between "valid example" and "don't trust this, it lies" (e.g., most television, which is exaggerated for effect).

I've seen plenty of assertions that porn is a special case for which the general lesson doesn't suffice, but never yet run across a supporting argument which didn't reduce to "well, because genitals are involved." Which, I mean, I understand why that would seem to an ape like a sensible thing to say, if an ape could talk, which we can. But I'm curious to know whether anyone has a genuinely novel argument to make in defense of the proposition.

<comment> vertex-four I'd disagree that most people can successfully differentiate between most TV and the real world. If they could, we wouldn't be in the mess we are where mainstream media gets to define political discourse, as people would take what the TV and newspapers say with a grain of salt.

In any case, porn has the issue in that it's "secret", and not discussed with adults with experience in the subject like most things are. It's also usually discovered well before any experiences with actual sex.

I posit that because it's not discussed with adults with a more experience mindset, kids do not have a framework to understand how it relates to the real world; they don't usually even know what sex in the real world _is_ from an emotional standpoint (and usually not really from a technical standpoint either).

That is, I posit that the way we understand things, and the way they affect us, depends heavily on how we discuss them, and past experience. If we don't discuss sex, and we have no past experience of sex, then how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction of sex?

<comment><USER4> News is a special case; it implicitly claims to be factual. That it often fails to live up to that claim doesn't put news in the same category as entertainment programming, which makes no such claim to begin with.

> ...how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction > of sex?

I grant the result of such processing isn't likely to be all that accurate to reality. I do _not_ grant that the result of such processing is immutable even in the face of compelling new experience.

Between lack of information and a natural tendency to confabulate, young children often form bizarre ideas about how copulation actually works, to the extent they think about it at all, which they rarely do because their glands aren't yet giving them a reason to take an interest. When, years later, copulation becomes a pressing concern, they seek out whatever information is available, on which basis they revise their understanding of the subject. The result is a gradually increasing congruence between the understanding and the reality, which in most cases culminates in a successful first sexual experience.

Sure, in the intermediate, i.e., pre-experiential, stages of this investigation, porn probably does give a kid some bogus ideas about how things work. On the other hand, so could a kid's best friend who lives next door, who's picked up a farrago of half-understood bogosity from his older brother in college. In either case, once the matter proceeds from the theoretical stage to the practical, everything that's gone before tends to get revised in a hurry. I've yet to see anyone posit a way in which pornography is somehow magically exempt from that process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can there ever be evidence for physical (psychophysical) harm to children who watch adults have sex? We 're like the only species who copulate in private, so it seems hugely presumptuous to argue that it is harmful. I think the greater harm is done by the continuous brainwashing with messaging that suggests that sex is the ultimate reward and is somehow connected to your value as a person, and is a thing you can trade.

</comment><comment><USER10> my suspicion is that governments don't really care that much about teenagers (maybe a little about children, but parents still care more). porn is just an addictive product like alcohol and tobacco and governments want to tax it (more), and they can't if it's so plentiful and easily accessible on the internet. maybe these are just first small steps towards restricting supply and imposing taxes.

<comment><USER11> Addiction to alcohol leads to cancers and withdrawals can lead to death. Psychologically, addiction can make folks violent or take unnecessary risks. Cigarettes cause cancers not only in you but in those around you. They smell to high hell too. Porn is not physically addictive and is not physically harmful. It's just as addictive as video games, television, or any other form of entertainment. If your argument against it's that it can help form unnecessary habits, we may as well ban free speech so that we can block all forms of entertainment that offend you.

<comment><USER12> "Porn is not physically addictive." Oh but it can be _addictive_. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction)

<comment><USER4> Anything that provokes a dopamine dump can be addictive. What's your point?

<comment><USER12> It's disingenuous to suggest it's "not physically addictive", it makes it sound like there's no danger of addiction, yet there is actually a significant portion of the population who when consuming porn regularly do get addicted, just like cigarettes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Citing Betteridge's law of headlines, I'm going to say no.

Scientists are having a hard time proving that porn even has an impact, let alone that the impact is negative. What are they even looking for? That children will somehow start practicing BDSM after stumbling on porn? That their "precious minds" are tainted by the Real World?

<comment><USER14> What's wrong with BDSM? You say it like "practicing BDSM" is a bad thing.

<comment><USER10> because BDSM hurts ? (I really don't know, I only guess that's why the OP used BDSM as an example)

<comment><USER15> But is that a bad thing if it is something one enjoys?

I find it saddening that people should be ashamed of their fetishes and whatnot, like it's a taboo. Why couldn't we just express our sexuality openly and the way we want to without social stigma surrounding it?

If there's something I think which needs disruption in our Western societies, it is human sexuality. What's holding us back and with what arguments?

<comment><USER16> As long as every party is consenting and of adult human intelligence, I have no problem with it.

If you start playing with children, real rape and animals, I'm going to be the first person to call the police.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the huge problems you have in this debate is the question of cause and effect.

Does porn cause harm? That it does is indisputable. There are many cases where men report decreased sexual performance as a result of watching too much porn (that is a harm particularly if it interferes with close intimate relationships). If nothing else, that is a harm. Does it cause harm on the balance? That, however, is unknowable.

But the harms which are readily documented don't match the harms which are posited. The harms which are posited are also readily observed but a causal connection is impossible to draw. Our culture has for the better part of a century (since probably the 1920's or at least 1930's) slowly been decoupling sexuality, marriage, and reproduction. Pornography may be seen as a consequence of that separation, but it certainly cannot be seen as the primary cause given the timing. Whether it furthers and further entrenches a pattern of hedonistic sex may indeed not matter -- it is only one small piece of a much larger cultural pattern.

So in the end, I don't know if it causes the harms portrayed. What is clear is that a failure to deal with the context rather than the technology is a much larger problem.

<comment><USER18> > Does porn cause harm? That it does is indisputable.

Isn't the whole point of this thread, and the whole international debate, that it is disputable?

<comment><USER4> It would appear so:

> Does porn cause harm? That it does is indisputable.

> So in the end, I don't know if it causes the harms portrayed.

But, hey, what's a little internal inconsistency when you're urging everyone forward into the past?

<comment><USER17> What's wrong with trying to preserve or even revive the social institutions of the past? I am of the opinion that as energy prices continue to rise, we are going to find that retirement with the kids comes back (this is already starting). If that become the norm, the implications for marriage and sexuality are quite significant.

But the point of my downvoted post is that you can't take an element of culture and assume that it is responsible for other elements. These things form tangled webs, not linear chains of cause and effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I read once that it's very difficult to assess any harm due to the near impossibility of creating control groups (that is, people who have never been exposed to porn).</comment>


Could Bill Gates write code? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/ <comment><USER2> Programmers working with modern compilers and tools and in what are comparatively resource-rich environments often haven't had to bum instructions and bum bytes.

In (most) modern environments, the optimizations are toward maintenance and support and speed of programming. Not toward memory optimizations.

All sorts of bizarre constructs can be commonplace when you are looking to stuff an application into a tiny ROM or tiny RAM; into 32 KB main RAM memory that was commonplace on a number of systems years ago, for instance. This using instructions as data storage for constants, modifying the return pointer in the call stack, using instruction side-effects, and otherwise.

When you're at the edge of needing a bigger (and then far more expensive) ROM or falling out of available memory or needing to switch over to overlaid segments or other run-time hackery, getting a dozen bytes back somewhere could be a big deal.

Some of these coding techniques can be appropriate in and still show up in very tight loops and embedded applications, but they're far less common now.

And thankfully, cheap "large" physical memory and virtual memory means we seldom have to deal with anything like TKB and its overlays:

[http://wjh.conflux.net:16080/RSTS-V9/documents/DEC/AA-5072C-...](http://wjh.conflux.net:16080/RSTS-V9/documents/DEC/AA-5072C-TC_RSTS- E_Task_Builder_Reference_Manual.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I recently had to do this for an embedded processor. 1920 bytes to fit some controller code in. It was a ton of fun, to the point where one of my cow- orkers found himself compelled to help out. I think we're at around 20 bytes free right now.

"I managed to save three bytes here."

"My God, you're a sick person. I love it."

Then I went back to my "day job" data mining a couple dozen terabytes of stuff in a database.

I love working with computers.

<comment><USER4> This is called "code golf". You try to get the final program with the minimum of "shots" (bytes, lines, tokens or characters). It's amusingly addictive.

And I really hope you misplaced that hyphen in "cow-orkers".

<comment><USER5> Scott Adams popularized this construction, which suggests that one's co- workers are likely to ork cows (but he didn't originate it:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Coined_phrases>).

EDIT: As far as I know, the definition of "ork" as a verb is left to the imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bill Gates wrote code very well, and was an exceedingly good programmer.

I know, because I used to sit with him late at night at the Harvard CRCT PDP-10 consoles (graduate research center in computing technology), ribbing him about hacking on such silly hobbyist computers as 8008's and 8080's. (He was working on his 8008 assembler/linker/simulator which he used to write the Altair Basic before he ever saw the hardware. Worked the first time he tried it on the real thing.)

He and I also had the same fate undergrad (I was '76, he was '77): we knew enough CS that the undergrad courses at the time (fairly underdeveloped) were too mickey mouse, so we took only grad CS courses (which were good even for their time). And he did well in those courses.

So his brilliance and his skill aren't in question.

Nor is his drive and competitiveness--that was obvious even back then. He was a serious player in the Currier House poker (bridge?) tournaments that would go on for days and involve many $K pots. (Way over my head.)

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of the following piece from <http://www.sorehands.com/humor/real5.htm>

"Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter."

BTW, I would be very grateful if someone could verify this.

<comment><USER8> It appears that the story is first mentioned in a letter by Ed Post of Tektronix to the editor of Datamation. A transcript can be found here:

<http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html>

Every other instance of the quotation seems to reference that letter (if anything), and the letter appears to contain no further references.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice story. People still do this stuff by the way, for example in 4k democoding. E.g. how these guys put an entire world (+ music) in 4 kilobytes:

<http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50063> ('download' for the Windows executable)

</comment><comment><USER10> Gates was an extremely talented programmer. There's a great chapter on him in "Programmers at Work" - [http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Work-Interviews- Computer-I...](http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Work-Interviews-Computer- Industry/dp/1556152116/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307462942&sr=8-1)

Joel Spolsky also mentions his talents in some of his old posts as well.

<comment><USER11> The BillG Review article:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html>

"...a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f __*-count, the better."

<comment><USER10> Thanks, that's exactly the post I was thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >if that bit of code was small enough (ie one or two bytes) you could simply encode those one or two bytes inside a two or three byte instruction thus saving the three-byte instruction needed to jump over it.

The 8080 and Z80 had a relative jump, which took only 2 bytes. It had a more limited jump range, but it was definitely wide enough to jump over 3 bytes.

>All that... for three bytes.

No, two.

<comment><USER8> If I recall correctly the opcode for the jump absolute was C3, and the conditional versions we C2, CA, _etc._ The destination was two bytes, 16 bits, little endian.

The JR - jump relative unconditional - was hex 18 followed by the number of bytes to jump, calculated from the byte _after_ the JR instruction to account for the pipelining.

From memory - I could be wrong, but it's close enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a pity that people think these sorts of tricks are amazing in any way. This is the sort of stuff you have to do when you have a very small amount of available memory and need to make something as powerful as possible.

You are likely to still see the same sort of stuff going on when working with microcontrollers. Now, if you want to read about something really cool, read about drum memory and optimizing code so that instructions are ready for execution when the drum they are on has rotated to the right spot: <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/650.html>

<comment><USER14> The only reason you're able to make a statement like "This is the sort of stuff you have to do when you have a very small amount of available memory..." is because people like Gates came up with it first. It's only common knowledge now because the trailblazers made it so.

The real pity is not appreciating the incredible creativity of those who laid the groundwork for everything we take for granted today.

<comment><USER13> That's not correct.

I have been programming for a very long time and have been involved in all sorts of nasty tricks to fit things in memory (self modifying code, code that uses subroutines from the OS to save having duplicates in its own base, code that relocates itself while running, storing tiny amounts of code in 'free space' inside the BIOS, temporarily storing code in screen memory because there's nowhere else to go and you hope the user won't notice the funny image on screen, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I found the proposition absurd: Why would you suspect Gates to be less of a coder than, say, Page, Brin, or Zuckerberg?

<comment><USER16> Someone is doing technical historical research by disassembling a piece of software written by Bill Gates. They found the software used numerous clever hacks to stay small. What proposition are you referring to?

<comment><USER15> From the article:

"'Could Bill Gates Write Code?' Or was he merely the luckiest man alive,..."

Maybe I'm wrong but I found the title to be kind of linkbait-ish, trying to ride the prevalent anti-Gates sentiment. I'm no Gates fan, but to doubt his coding skills or technical prowess either shows you're ignorant or just young enough not to know. I use and like a Radio Shack Model 100 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100>, a dinosaur, but the battery life on that thing is awesome, and works with stands AA batteries, too), this is agreed to be the last piece of hardware that has Gates' code on it.

I, too thought he was just a corporate raider (like our managers, sigh), but got corrected many times by friends who worked at Microsoft Research before, who said his assessment and knowledge of new technology was spot on.

<comment><USER17> I think I still have one of those... now I really want to dust it off and play around with it.

<comment><USER15> I thought it was junk but then found a vibrant community of users online. Now I use it for word processing, great for focusing, like WriteRoom on Mac. Also get some interesting looks. "Retro all the way baby" :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This doesn't mean Bill could write code. This means either Bill Gates, Paul Allen, or both could code.

I'm inclined to say Bill could code, just because of his background and upbringing, but being a developer on a joint project doesn't say much.

</comment><comment><USER19> The more relevant conclusion is that Gates/Allen could hack.

</comment><comment><USER20> Apparently this sort of thing was relatively common. In the late 60's my aunt worked for MetLife as a programmer and would routinely hide data in execution code to save space. When she became pregnant they put her on 'leave' but refused to reinstate her after my cousin was born. Unfortunately for them only she knew about the hidden data and they were forced to hire her back as a consultant, for much more money, when things inevitably broke.

<comment><USER21> Another similar story, from my interview with Guy Steele in Coders at Work:

This may seem like a terrible waste of my effort, but one of the most satisfying moments in my career was when I realized that I had found a way to shave one word off an 11-word program that Gosper had written. It was at the expense of a very small amount of execution time, measured in fractions of a machine cycle, but I actually found a way to shorten his code by 1 word and it had only taken me 20 years to do it.

Seibel: So 20 years later you said, "Hey Bill, guess what?"

Steele: It wasn't that I spent 20 years doing it, but suddenly after 20 years I came back and looked at it again and suddenly had an insight I hadn't had before: I realized that by changing one of the op codes, it would also be a floating point constant close enough to what I wanted, so I could use the instruction both as an instruction and as a floating point constant.

Seibel: That's straight out of "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer."

Steele: Yeah, exactly. It was one of those things. And, no, I wouldn't want to do it in real life, but it was the only time I'd managed to reduce some of Gosper's code. It felt like a real victory. And it was a beautiful piece of code. It was a recursive subroutine for computing sines and cosines.

So that's the kind of thing we worried about back then.

<comment><USER22> Not really related, but Gosper's algorithm (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospers_algorithm>) is the thing I've learned in the last few years that blew my mind the hardest. It's how Maple or Mathematica can reduce your crazy sums to a single formula. Earlier work was apparently pioneered by a nun: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celine_Fasenmyer>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I find this a bit of a moot point. Could Bill Gates really code? Yea, probably. Does it really matter? Not that much as we like to believe.

Right time, right place, right people on the team and whatever other circumstances you might want to describe as "luck" play a much bigger role than people like to admit because it would diminish their own accomplishments.

Also his and Microsoft's success has less to do with how much and how great Mr Gates can code; just think of Steve Jobs and many others. Good techs don't necessarily make for successful CEOs - quite the opposite is just as plausible if not likely considering how techs typically detest politics.

<comment><USER24> I think coding at this level -- successfully; well -- reflects a kind of relentlessness that was essential.

Gates had other qualities that contributed to Microsoft's success: The desire and ability to focus on getting people to do things and on business, etc.

But his coding work demonstrates a focus, an intensity and persistence, that was instrumental.

I'm not particularly fond of some of his and Microsoft's business techniques. But he damned well executed them, relentlessly. As I see it (from afar), he was, is never one for half measures -- not with regard to his true interests.

<comment><USER23> And he came at the right time to the right place - with an operating system for a new platform that would prove to be more widespread than all platforms before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the example provided was valid but it's bad, unintuitive code. Sort of showboating.

<comment><USER8> You're missing the point. Such "tricks" were essential to fit the required code into the necessary space. The same thing still happens (although rarely) when fitting required functionality into limited devices such as FPGAs and PICs.

You're not aiming for readable, maintainable code. You're trying to get the cheapest device, and then squeezing the essential into what little space you get. Such "tricks" as jumping into the middle of instructions are unavoidable.

<comment><USER25> They had enough spare bytes to not have to pull that trick. It'd have been better to clean up some algorithms somewhere or reuse some code.

Prime example COS/SIN = same operation with 180 phase shift. I've seen BASIC implementations with two separate implementations...

Note: I've worked with very memory constrained systems in assembly before (actually hand assembled code on paper as well).

<comment><USER8>
      > They had enough spare bytes to not have to pull
      > that trick. It'd have been better to clean up some
      > algorithms somewhere or reuse some code.

I assume from your clear and unequivocal statement that you have first hand knowledge of that. I'll bow to your better information.

      > Note: I've worked with very memory constrained
      > systems in assembly before

As have I.

      > (actually hand assembled code on paper as well).

That's how I started, although largely I ended up writing directly in machine code since it was quicker, and after I found my third bug in the assembler I had occasional access to I gave up on writing mnemonics at all. It was only much later when I had other people to communicate with that I went back to writing assembly.

And I remember writing code that really, really needed to do things like jumping into the middle of instructions.

<comment><USER25> Sorry should always "cite your sources": [http://web.archive.org/web/20011211233332/www.rjh.org.uk/alt...](http://web.archive.org/web/20011211233332/www.rjh.org.uk/altair/4k/index2.html)

Total assembled output was 3826 bytes so they had a few bytes left including the RAM used to switch in the tape loader.

<comment><USER8> Thank you - useful. Perhaps they really didn't need to use that specific trick on that specific occasion. It might be interesting for someone to comb through and find out if they used it lots of times, or just a few. perhaps they simply got into the mindset and used it because they could, in anticipation of needing it.

Certainly that sort of thing is easier to do first time round, rather than having to go round again to find bytes when you find later that you need them. It becomes a habit, much like these days it's a habit to layout code clearly, name variables carefully, and comment tricky code.

<comment><USER25> A possibility and a fair one! I might write something to scan through looking for jumps that jump inside opcodes (added to list of projects which I will do one day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yes, but does Altair BASIC still work on the Pentium 4 and its trace cache? I'm afraid this trick may not have been any more future-proof than self- modifying code.

Still, nice.</comment>


The best android adb resource on the internet - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/srsudar/eg/blob/master/eg/examples/adb.md

<comment><AUTHOR> If something is missing, open an issue or submit a PR!

</comment><comment><USER2> So much useful information. This is great!</comment>


Ask HN: Where did you find your best "coder-for-hire"/consultant? - <AUTHOR>

So school has officially started and I have significantly less time than I expected to work on my startup.
I need a small Obj-C code snippet that checks whether an app is cracked, then sends some post data to a url depending on whether the app is cracked or not. All in all a very small project for someone that knows what they are doing.
So... my question to HN is where did you find your best consultants? Rentacoder, Elance, Odesk, or something else entirely? <comment><USER2> None of those. Personal recommendations will always deliver above any automated solutions.

Start with anyone you know who knows Obj-C, if you are posting this you probably don't know anyone that fits though.

So the next step is to talk to anyone else in a similar business to yours and see if they have someone they have used and would recommend.

The last step, post to places like HN asking for recommendations - if someone is willing to publicly endorse someone chances are they really believe in them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Checkout <http://www.drobnik.com/touch/anticrack/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Noticed that this got down voted... do people have good/bad experiences with this?

<comment><USER4> Does not appear to be relevant to the OP.

<comment><USER3> You'd be right. It does not _appear_ to be relevant. Though, since the op is looking for someone to write an obj-c lib for detection cracked apps my link is relevant.

<comment><USER5> May I suggest a relevant narrative under the screencast, instead of that horrible music?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found our best contractors on HN itself.

Posted an "80legs is hiring" and got a handful of quality applicants that were available on an as-needed basis at good rates, given the quality of their work.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, I believe that option is only available to YC teams?

<comment><USER8> There's nothing to stop you from submitting a story titled "$foo is hiring $language/framework developer!" with a description of the job or linking to the post.

And FWIW, Flurry's analytics library has an option to check for if the app is cracked or not. I haven't used it, but it is there. Its just a matter of turning it on, if you're already using them for analytics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wanted someone local so I used Craiglist and found a great programmer within 10min of my house.

</comment><comment><USER10> I do iPhone dev, contact me madhancr at hotmail

</comment><comment><USER11> oDesk - easy to screen and pay people.</comment>


Many in West Africa Are Thought to Be Immune, but Finding Them Will Not Be Easy - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/health/ebola-immunity.html <comment><USER2> "Right now, there are about 1,800 survivors of the current West African outbreak, all of whom are now immune, of course. But there may be many thousands more."

Well, that's conjecture, oddly enough, reinfecting people with a deadly disease has various ethical issues - so there aren't any experiments to look at.

When it was tested with primates [1] they all survived after a 10 week period but 2 out of 6 died after 13 week period. How this works for humans god knows but 'all of whom are now immune' I wouldn't be so confident.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131128/srep03365/full/srep03...](http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131128/srep03365/full/srep03365.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Immune to what? Should keep the original title.

<comment><USER4> If you look at the light-grey note at the bottom of the article, you will find this:

 _A version of this article appears in print on September 6, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Many in West Africa Are Thought to Be Immune, but Finding Them Will Not Be Easy._

So that was the original (printed) title.

<comment><USER3> You know what I meant, right? And the article mentioned as the source is not linkable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The hypothesis is that immunity is conferred by the presence of ebola antibodies developed after very-low-dose exposure from eating fruits visited by infected bats.

> His teams took 4,349 blood samples in 220 randomly selected villages. They > found that 15 percent of Gabon's population had antibodies. But it varied > widely: near the coast, only 3 percent did; in some jungle villages near the > Congo border, up to 34 percent did.

>Also, their antibody levels varied widely, and what level is protective is roughly known for lab monkeys, but not for humans.</comment>


Shaving the Yak (Why Software Development is so Distracting) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.snootymonkey.com/post/21377807221/shaving-the-yak-why-software-development-is-so

<comment><USER2> I like the idea of adding a time to when I begin a task. I bet if I can see how long I have been googling "+selection last word phrase editor" I will realise I am not saving myself any time at all.</comment>


Simplified Common Lisp reference - <AUTHOR> http://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/index.html <comment><USER2> Very nice resource! I have a suggestion: add a search field that would just search the linked function documentation summaries (depth of 1 web crawl). As someone else mentioned, adding a new section for CLOS would also be useful.

Pardon a shameless plug, but I released the 4th edition of my Common Lisp book yesterday (free to read online, and book is CC licensed so you can share it): [https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp](https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not really sure who the intended audience for this is! I find it quite difficult to imagine that anyone who doesn't already know what the functions do could actually figure it out from the descriptions, eg. "CDR function returns cdr part of cell in the argument, that is list of all elements but first. CDR is identical to REST."

<comment><USER4> I used this site quite a bit when I was first introduced to Lisp.

Reading the first few chapters of ANSI Common Lisp gave me a good understanding of the semantics of the language, and this provided me with a specific explanation of the functionality of each function. Together that was enough to get through my assignments for the class I was taking at the time. It was most helpful for things like the differences between eq, eql, and equal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Contrast to the Common Lisp Quick Reference: [http://clqr.boundp.org/](http://clqr.boundp.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> First thing I searched for on the page: loop (not found).

<comment><USER7> You have let [0], why would you need a special loop function?

[0] [http://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/let.html](http://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/let.html)

Edit:

That is to say, this is a simplified reference, and loop is a macro, not a special form.

<comment><USER8> I assume you're thinking about Schemes `(let loop (...) ...)`, but that doesn't exist in Common Lisp. CL:LOOP is a looping macro with its own small DSL.

        (loop :for i :below 5
              :when (evenp i) :collect i)
        ;=> (0 2 4)

<comment><USER9> That's a step up from loops with 'goto':

        (prog ((result '())
               (i 0))
          loop
          (when (>= i 5)
            (return (reverse result)))
          (when (evenp i)
            (push i result))
          (incf i)
          (go loop))

<comment><USER10> tagbody/go is implementation detail of macro expansion though.

<comment><USER9> prog + goto was two decades one of the main tools for loops in Lisp...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you use this library you can simply ignore most of the things on that page:

[https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib](https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib)

<comment><USER12> > _It deliberately sacrifices run-time efficiency_

I'll pass...

<comment><USER11> Premature optimization is the root of all evil.</comment></comment></comment>


A Study of 2.7M Startups Found the Ideal Age to Start a Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/a-study-of-27-million-startups-found-ideal-age-to-start-a-business-and-its-much-older-than-you-think.html <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty interesting stats (as quoted from the article):

\- 50-year-old startup founder is 2.2 times more likely to found a successful startup as a 30-year-old.

\- 40-year-old startup founder is 2.1 times more likely to found a successful startup as a 25-year-old.

\- 50-year-old startup founder is 2.8 times more likely to found a successful startup as a 25-year-old founder.

\- 60-year-old startup founder is 3 times as likely to found a successful startup as a 30-year-old startup founder--and is 1.7 times as likely to found a startup that winds up in the top 0.1 percent of all companies.

</comment><comment><USER2> If you want to listen to this article in audio, here's a link: [https://www.listle.io/#/article/3454682958](https://www.listle.io/#/article/3454682958)</comment>


Convert Figma Layouts to Flutter, SwiftUI and Tailwind. OSS and 99% Tested - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bernaferrari/FigmaToCode <comment><USER2> Hi Berna! Great effort you've put here. The IR approach to nodes is a great strategy. Just dropping some support here ;)</comment>


Court in India asks Google to not send traffic to site with hijacked keywords - <AUTHOR> https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/bangalore-court-issues-directions-to-google-diversion-of-traffic-keywords-145771 <comment><USER2> Aren't all search ads, essentially hijacked keyword driven as most users do not expect ads there when they look for information?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. I wonder if this will lead to the interesting question - is the use of trademarked words as keywords by the competition fair use? Or will trademarks be disallowed from such use in the future with only the trademark holder being permitted to use them.</comment></comment>


Linux 3.8 Released - <AUTHOR> http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/02/19/0136213/linux-38-released <comment><USER2> Thanks Samsung for your contributions.

It is simply wonderful how Linux is utterly dominating the mobile platform, underneath Android and Tizen.

Are cars next?</comment>


Low-end Linux - <AUTHOR> http://jeelabs.org/2011/09/08/low-end-linux/ <comment><USER3> I'm running a low-end linux myself at home for years, with surprisingly similar characteristics (no FPU either):

        lloeki@slug> cat /proc/cpuinfo                                                ~
        Processor   : XScale-IXP42x Family rev 1 (v5l)
        BogoMIPS    : 266.24
        Features    : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
        CPU implementer : 0x69
        CPU architecture: 5TE
        CPU variant : 0x0
        CPU part    : 0x41f
        CPU revision    : 1

        Hardware    : Linksys NSLU2
        Revision    : 0000
        Serial      : 0000000000000000
        lloeki@slug> free                                                             ~
                    total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
        Mem:         28844      27212       1632          0       2372      10496
        -/+ buffers/cache:      14344      14500
        Swap:       121076      10272     110804
        lloeki@slug> cat /etc/debian_version                                          ~
        6.0.2

It has been tasked to do quite a bit of things, including:

        - imap+smtp server (smarthost)
        - out-of-cloud mail mirror
        - having a permanent, "immutable" diagnostics access point
        - securing untrusted wifi connexions with a vpn
        - tunnelling through even the worst http proxies (httptunnel+openvpn)
        - hosting a sixxs tunnel and a radvd instance for my LAN
        - IPv6 everywhere (via the openvpn TAP if)
        - <USER2>
        - networked Linux rsync hardlink delta backup (Time Machine style)
        - private file sharing (kinda like megaupload/dropbox links...)
        - mpd host
        - DNLA server
        - WOL packet sender
        - ssh hop
        - alarm system (cron+aplay)
        - LAN DNS
        - mDNS/dns-sd
        - WAN v4/v6 uptime monitor with history

Debian/arm provides a huuuge number of packages. The biggest constraint is actually not the CPU but the RAM, 2x or 4x that amount would be nice.

Many of those have been phased out when I replaced my wrt54g (v5, dd-wrt) with a Time Capsule, but it saved (and still saves) me time (or even my ass) quite a lot.

Total cost: ~100€ + 5W max. Well worth it.

<comment><USER4> What is the product?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really see the value of running 486 instead of equivalent ARM CPU. Looking at something like RaspberryPi[1], you'd get a lot more everything with the same price, and the performance characteristics are actually relevant to modern day low power systems.

<http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoard#Provisional_specification>

<comment><USER6> The value is x86 compatibility.

Our seismograph network is held together by DMP eBox 2300 computers. These things have 200 MHz 486DX compatible CPUs, 128 MB RAM, and a CompactFlash slot that we populate with a 4 GB SLC NAND card (that are now ridiculously hard to find). The computers come in a nice, small, passively cooled metal case, cost about $150 each, and draw a few watts at idle.

Now, sure, we could get ARM-based systems that are cheaper, faster, and even less power hungry (and I hope in the future I can start using such systems!), but for now, I'm stuck with x86 because we have to run a proprietary Linux/x86 binary on each computer to get the data out of the digitizers and into a "common" data format.

(One day I'll write my own code to replace that proprietary binary, and then the company that makes a small, sub-$100 ARM board that boots Linux and has a flash memory slot of some sort, two Ethernet ports, and two real [not TTL- level] serial ports will be my most favorite company in the world.)

<comment><USER5> Legacy applications are a very valid reason to run x86, that I'll agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been a long time user of Soekris boards & cheap x86 boxes:

<http://soekris.com/>

They've just come out with their first Atom based system; it's been 486 class (Amd Elan) and 586 class (Amd Geode) processors until now.

<comment><USER8> Soekris is good suggestion for small boxes to use as Linux/BSD appliances. That said, they're too high a spec/cost a device for the kind of applications one would want to use a bifferboard for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some years ago I had some memory problems installing Debian in a similar setup (486dx4/100Mhz/24mb), Netbsd worked fine though. I think these days most Linux distributions are compiled for i686.</comment>


Get Ready for Walmart Prime [Walmart+] - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/27/21154357/walmart-plus-walmart-grocery-delivery-unlimited-membership-amazon-prime <comment><USER2> I'm not sure Walmart+ will work, the main reason I have a Prime membership is not for the free shipping. My rationale for keeping my Prime membership is the streaming services both for my Echos and Fire TV devices.

The free and fast shipping that comes with my Prime membership is the reason I choose to make my online purchases with Amazon, that and the fact that their website loads very fast, and I don't have to sign up for another account which can be a real pain.

Walmart should consider partnering with Amazon to sell it's products, chances are they are already using AWS in some part of their infrastructure already.

PS: I also resent the fact that Walmart has the nerve to charge me for plastic bags when I use the self checkout unit in store, while Amazon never charges for the boxes and packaging when I order from them. Give me free cotton bags if you really care about the environment or even charge a deposit on plastic with an unconditional return policy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couple of things, Walmart recently announced that they will not be using AWS for anything they do online. Its like giving keys to the kingdom. same goes for selling via Amazon.

Walmart+ can be successful, because as per a recent report, they have around 150 million people visits their super centers every week (or month) and if they bundle it properly with Vudu and grocery, it might challenge it. The problem would be to compete with the scale of logistics Amazon has developed already..

While i agree with you that it will make our lives easier if we just used one portal, reality is far from it..

<comment><USER2> I am one of the 150 million visitors that frequent Walmart on atleast a monthly schedule, in fact I can't remember the last time I went to town without making a purchase there.

Maybe that is part of the reason I am not interested in making online purchases through a Walmart website, unless they can offer a better price or an even larger selection of items online that are not available instore, what is the point?

I also have what is possibly an unfounded fear but a fear none the less, that ordering groceries online would result in receiving wilted produce and closer to be expired products.

Chances are the online groceries at this point in time are fresher than those available in store.

But as with all good things this will eventually come to an end, once a critical mass of customers is achieved and the pressures on store management to turn greater profits and reduce spoilage sets in.</comment></comment></comment>


BP Damage Control Leaks Online (buying oil phrases on Google/Yahoo) - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/m/screen?id=10835618&pid=4380645

<comment><USER2> "...the company is paying upwards of $10,000 per day to maintain the various search terms."

I'm assuming this is a guess in pay-per-click numbers? I understand the PPC cost itself might be very high, but is this just (one of many) mis- descriptions by the story?

"Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal slammed BP for its PR efforts..." $50m spent on PR != $50m that would have been used for cleanup. Just like the government, a company is capable of spending its money and resources in more than one place at a time.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article paraphrases the situation as if they bought the first search result, when all they really did was buy a targeted ad at the top of the search results.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I had this arguement with a friend on Facebook as well. Furthermore, the fact that they're willingly tying a search phrase like "oil spill" to their name shows a bit of ownership to the catastrophe, which I think is a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i clicked on it just to cost BP more money, did not read what they are doing because all they do is LIE</comment>


Dartendo lets you play your nintendo games in browser - <AUTHOR> http://dartendo.appspot.com/ <comment><USER2> As the name implies, this is an NES emulator written in dart, running on app engine. The source can be found here: <http://code.google.com/p/super- dartendo/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen a few emulators implemented for HTML5 but I have yet to actually get one to work. For this particular emulator, I've tried the SMB3 rom available in Dartendo's repo at [http://code.google.com/p/super- dartendo/source/browse/trunk/...](http://code.google.com/p/super- dartendo/source/browse/trunk/dartendo/roms/SuperMario3.json), but I must be doing something wrong because nothing happens when I "load" the rom. Anyone know what the deal is? I'm using Chrome 17 on Windows 7.

</comment><comment><USER4> How in the world does someone begin to write something like this? It's one thing to understand the language, but how does one gain insight into the underlying mechanics of a device like this, and given this insight, understand how to instrument a replacement?

I've been a developer for over a decade, and reading code like this still leaves me in awe...

<comment><USER5> Emulators are a dime a dozen, and almost every console from before the PSX already had at least one by 1999.

In the beginning it wasn't (usually) one person but an entire team studying every component of the console, dumping the BIOS and then coding something that (at first) could at least boot the game. After that it was mostly about working out the details like graphic glitches, slow framerate, certain graphical issues, etc...

But once the "core" was made other teams or individuals could use it to make their own versions, or port it to other OSes/architectures.

The NES is together with the Sega Genesis one of the most emulated consoles out there: you'll find emulators of these two for every computer, PDA, PMP, phone or tablet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be based on vNes and JSNES (the repo in google code contains copies of both projects).

</comment><comment><USER7> has anyone got it working?

<comment><USER8> I haven't. I dont see anything at <http://code.google.com/p/super-dartendo/> either?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, controls seem a bit odd to me. Instead of the standard arrow keys or WASD, it looks like they are using the right side of the keyboard for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this work in Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER11> It was pretty smart of the person that made this to use roms that you upload. Nintendo is pretty serious about rom sites.

<comment><USER2> Strangely enough, the repo appears to have some ROMs. Smart that he doesn't expose them to the casual user and that he doesn't advertise them, however.

<comment><USER12> Those look to be free/homebrew not commercial games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The ROMs tab doesn't do anything for me

<comment><USER14> I couldn't figure out what to do either. One of the few flaws in HTML5 is I have no idea if everything is still loading or I'm just clicking in the wrong places.

<comment><USER15> Didn't work for me in Firefox but worked okay in Chrome. Even so, it was so slow and unresponsive it remained unplayable. But it's a good example of what still isn't really possible with current web technologies.</comment></comment></comment>