What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn't Understand About Skills - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/05/28/what-the-head-of-hiring-at-google-doesnt-understand-about-skills/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en <comment><USER2> This article is ridiculous. While there are certain areas (e.g. pattern matching) where a typical English major is likely to do well, rigorous logical thinking of the sort needed when we program computers is simply not developed as well as it is in CS, EE, and various other programs.

As a third-year undergrad I took a 400-level course on logic from the humanities department. I remember being blown away by how inept the average students there seemed at first. They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc. The way of thinking required to get through that class easily was one which most second-year CS students had, but not the student body at large. I came to realize I had been groomed for this class for years already.

In a 200-level CS course we learned to use Karnaugh Maps. This was not optional. There is a difference between analyzing digital logic and writing papers outside CS. Not that one is better than the other, but you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry.

<comment><USER3> > They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, > tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc.

All of which I never see used in a professional capacity for the vast majority of software developers.

What I do see used quite often is the ability to communicate to customers or other engineers in a clear, succinct and enjoyable manner using the English language.

<comment><USER4> Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication. Technical does not necessarily refer to programming, but also to other fields like statistical financial modelling (which I do). And complain about the fact that people less qualified than them are in management. I'm not suggesting that communication should be the sole criteria for management - a lot of software companies need programmers at the helm (as advocated by Joel Spolsky), but there are situations where an analytical liberal arts major with maturity and leadership skills will do much better than someone whose primary skills is technology.

<comment><USER5> _> >Technical people often underestimate the value of good communication._

Not just underestimate, even outright condemn. Like the people who defend Linus's form of _" communication"_ on the kernel mailing list as _" to the point"_ or _" efficient"_. Anyone who thinks that's an acceptable style of communication from/to any human being is wrong and a perfect example of why the tech companies in general should probably make their engineers attend a speech and/or social relationships class. Somewhere along the line, _" engineering culture"_ decided any communication protocols outside of TCP, UDP and syscalls are a waste of time.

<comment><USER6> Linus excels at communication. He makes it crystal clear what he's trying to convey and the standard he's setting, and has coordinated the development of the most widely-deployed kernel on earth entirely via email for decades. He communicates perfectly well.

He's an asshole on occasion, but that's not the same as communicating poorly.

<comment><USER5> Completely disagree. I don't care how popular his kernel is; his communication style is ridiculous and the fact that there are so many devs that have no problem working for him isn't a sign that his communication is good.... it's a sign all the people working with him don't realize, or ignore, or accept his ridiculous behavior and is just an example of why the tech industry needs a communications/social relations course for a lot of engineers.

<comment><USER6> Are you judging by results or by your own subjective taste? Because I find results more interesting (and persuasive).

<comment><USER5> Even if maximum efficiency is achieved by his style of communication, I still don't agree with it. Efficiency is not more important than being civil.

 _" Ends don't justify the means"_ kinda thing... but I know I'm not going to convince you in this thread; and you're definitely not going to convince me otherwise. There are too many rude people in tech that don't know how to communicate properly with people. Rudeness has somehow become acceptable in the tech-industry so they can't see the problem they have.... and it __is__ a problem.

<comment><USER6> I'm trying to draw a distinction between effective communication and not being an asshole. They are different problems. One is a problem of ability and the other is a problem of temperament.

Conversely to Linus, someone can be perfectly polite and pleasant but fail to communicate effectively because they don't convey any meaningful information. Such a person would have poor communication skills, but not be an asshole. Linus has good communication skills, but is an asshole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not that you _can 't_ learn rigor and critical thinking skills as an English major, it's that it's not all that hard to complete an English degree without learning those things. Hence the word "signals".

<comment><USER8> As former English literature and philosophy student (I am studying computer science while working for a startup now) I can tell you at that at my university you would not get an A if your reasoning and critical analysis were poor. When I was studying it was not uncommon for STEM students to get 100% for tests and exams but such a thing was unheard of in the humanities faculty. If an undergraduate got 100% for an English essay that essay would be worthy of publication in a literary journal which only happened once while I was there.

<comment><USER9> As the time of me writing this, it looks like you're being downvoted (which I don't think is fair), but I think your answer points to one of the problems. Grading in the humanities is more subjective. By analogy, Olympic gymnastic scores are subject to a lot more disagreements than 100 meter sprint times.

<comment><USER8> Let them downvote me: let them bring their slings and arrows! :) I can't argue against what you have said. The humanities are subjective but that does not mean that they are not valuable but the greater problem is that there is very little demand in the global economy for essays on social contract theory and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and anti-industrialism. The best thing we can hope for is that the humanities plays a complimentary role in education. i.e. studying a humanities major like philosophy in addition to a computer science degree. In my "subjective experience" when building consumer facing apps for my company having a humanities degree has helped to make these apps better. Being able to code well is not a guarantee that your app will appeal to a consumer but knowing what people want in a product for instance, is an enterprise for the humanities because it demands introspection, divergent and subjective thinking which is a different kind of thinking altogether. That is why I am irked when people from the sciences dismiss the humanities too readily because the humanities does have something to give to the world. In short, tech + humanities = better products/ideas.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you. I think the humanities are important not only for what they teach, but also in that they attract people with a different view of the world (and way of thinking, perhaps) than is common in the sciences. From the perspective of the Google hiring manager, though, filtering based on degree type is probably one of the easiest cuts to make when you're operating at that scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course you can teach a rigorous English course.

The problem is that you can also not.

I took an intro to philosophy course in which we were graded reasonably rigorously on our logic. But the prof also made it clear via both a bit of text and a bit of subtext that we were getting so graded because nobody really takes the old stuff that seriously anyhow, so there's no sacred oxes getting gored. You can write an essay for this class either endorsing or denouncing Descartes and as long as it is reasonably logical, you'll get a good grade. Don't expect such accommodations if you start getting into what is taken seriously.

I also took a real-deal English history class graded primarily on essays, and both at the time and even now I'm pretty sure I got a 2.5 simply because I failed to correctly echo back what the prof expected, made harder by the fact that she did a reasonably good job of not _telegraphing_ what she expected. However, I never got any _other_ useful feedback on my essays; the facts were correct, the arguments were logical enough, they were to the expected length, they just got graded poorly. (And it's not as if I was going out of my way to write offensive political agitprop myself, I was just trying to answer the questions. But I'm quite sure my perspective was quite different than hers, in ways hard to explain in an HN comment.)

The fact that _you_ run a rigorous course grading logic and rhetoric (based on a computer science degree) is not proof that everybody else does. Yes, they all _say_ that's what they do, but that's not proof either. In practice the humanities are pretty notorious for this sort of thing, and I'm completely unconvinced this essay with its one data point that is almost by definition an outlier (both coming from a computer science degree and being what is probably an early course in the sequence as implied by having a lot of non-English majors in it) provides any significant evidence against the original claims from Google, or that the field's notoriety is unearned in practice.

(Incidentally, to the extent that I rather dislike the humanities we have today, it is precisely that they _could_ be excellent training in logic and rhetoric, but they generally aren't. Postmodernism poisoned the humanities nearly unto destruction.)

<comment><USER11> Your position can apply to anything. There are Computer Science graduates who cannot tell you what a linked list is.

You need to look for signals that imply humanities majors that are smart. Do they have published articles in student publications? Were they active in campus organizations?

End of the day, look for smart people who get things done.

If you need specific, rigorous domain expertise, hire somebody with a degree in that discipline of engineering or whatever. Otherwise, you're better off with a smart person who knows how to think and communicate vs. someone with an engineering degree who cannot function.

<comment><USER10> "If you need specific, rigorous domain expertise, hire somebody with a degree in that discipline of engineering or whatever. Otherwise, you're better off with a smart person who knows how to think and communicate vs. someone with an engineering degree who cannot function."

This is one of those cases where it sounds like you think you disagree, yet you just gave away the farm there. If you want a programmer, hire one trained in programming, you just agreed. As for whether you hire the functioning English major or the non-functional computer science major for a programming job, in practice, you hire neither.

As for it "applying to everything", actually, my last paragraph is a parenthetical because I don't feel like justifying it deeply in an HN post when it would properly take a book, but there is a difference. Postmodernism killed the humanities. Evicting the entire idea of "truth" and calling that eviction virtue murders all further academic thought. (Yes, I'm summarizing. Brutally. But that is more true than it is false.) Even if that is true, it's still not an epistemological framework under which any academic function can take place. Computer science doesn't have that problem, all the moreso because the compiler grounds almost the entire discipline; certainly everything an undergraduate will encounter. It's hard for the humanities to brag about their ability to inculcate logical thought and careful rational reasoning when at the highest levels those things are despised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel bad that I cant get a job at the New York Times with my cs degree. I might not know any literary composition or journalism techniques, but you can't tell me that as a computer scientist I am not as smart as an english major that learned all these skills in college.

Ok. Now we both feel inadequate and offended, so it's all even.

<comment><USER13> Drama major here.

I can look or sound competent in any field.

Well, except Drama, but it's not like there's any money to be had there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > In "Dante's Hell and Its Afterlife," an undergraduate course I teach at my > university, students have to work hard to achieve good results (not to > mention an A-level grade) on a research essay. The "excellent" paper will > contain a substantive thesis that is appropriately focused, coherent, and > interpretive, not merely descriptive; a detailed analysis of well-chosen > examples to support the argument; a logical ordering of parts, each > contributing to the whole, with transitions and topic sentences that advance > and crystallize the main points; an effective use of information from > credible sources, correctly cited and documented; and all expressed in > clear, concise, grammatically correct prose.

So true. Writing is highly technical and very difficult. Just before I started at my state university, it added a writing test that all students had to pass before receiving a degree because employers complained about the lack of writing skills. Several years in, most people were still failing on their first try.

Unfortunately, writing doesn't have debugging tools, tests and output for feedback to let you know if what you put together works. Rather, you need someone who is a good writer to provide honest feedback.

Also difficult is that developing good writing skills requires good instructors / mentors. I have had too many writing classes with instructors who would give praise for just about anything. All of my instructors in my first year of taking writing classes told me how great I was. It wasn't until I took a technical writing class in which my first paper came back a mess of red ink that I finally felt like I was learning something. That class was one of the most valuable I have ever taken. She told us at the beginning of the class that few people can write well, we probably won't ever be able to write well either (true for me,) but she would help us become passable enough to get through the writing test.

Granted, most writing classes don't focus on the same items as technical writing. But with as much effort as this instructor put into every one of my papers, this can't be something many instructors are willing to do.

How do you become a good writer and get good feedback? I don't know.

Compare this to many other classes in which the instructor is largely a guide and you do most or all of your learning on your own.

ETA: I think the instructor and the quality of the course is extremely important. Many subjects in college can be setup to be easy to coast through or rigorous. The name on the course isn't as important as the contents.

<comment><USER15> "How do you become a good writer and get good feedback? I don't know."

Write a lot and have other people read it.

Try and communicate, and see where that communication breaks down.

Write for large audiences, and see where you are either misunderstood or how you piss of the readers.

These recommendations are some of the tools you're asking for, though they aren't as automated or have answers as clear as piping something to a standard output.

Remember, when you first start to learn programming, you don't have access to "debugging tools, tests and output for feedback", either... these are tools you develop because you realize that you need them. That doesn't mean that these tools don't exist, or that you can't find them, or that they are useful to you in your situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> @joelgrus really nailed it. When someone at Google uses the verb "signals," you need to pay attention. Nothing is black and white in search. It's entirely about pulling together multiple sources of information, and deciding which ones signal the strongest and correlate with the results you're looking for.

Guy Raffa is welcome to make his own search engine company staffed entirely with English majors to prove his point.

<comment><USER17> Disagreeable or not, I find it amusing that he opens his piece with a rubric regarding what constitutes an "excellent" paper in his course, and your last sentence contains such a glaring fallacy that it seems entirely likely he'd dock you heavily for it (and rightly so). It's also incredibly ironic considering the context of the argument at hand.

<comment><USER16> > It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates > adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some > "specific answer" the professor is looking for. Bock just doesn't realize > they are what he is looking for.

Guy Raffa goes so far as to claim that those topflight English majors are what Bock is looking for.

If that were true, then a team built on this core principal should clearly be better than one built without it.

If you see a fallacy in the last sentence of my first post, please explain it to me. Calling something a fallacy is your thesis. Now it is your job to prove it. Irony, indeed.

<comment><USER17> Nowhere does Raffa claim that a team built entirely of English majors would be better than one built of any other constituency. That's a strawman you erected. QED.

<comment><USER16> Raffa says, "they [topflight English majors] are what he is looking for." Topflight English majors are the constituency Raffa says Bock should hire. You have to purposefully misread what Raffa has written, in order to see it any other way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Guess the teacher's password" is a strategy that works for many English majors and few Computer Science majors. You can succeed at rhetoric by either learning how to make good rhetoric, or by learning how to tell people what they want to hear.

It's significantly more difficult to write good programs by learning how to tell people what they want to hear.

<comment><USER19> There are English professors who are legitimately hard to game, people who are smarter than most or all of us but have chosen to focus on something different. Yes, there's more noise in the system in the humanities, but don't underestimate them just because they have a different skill set.

However, the game-the-system students generally avoid those professors, who get a reputation for being difficult graders. So your point has validity. I just object to the idea that _all_ humanities professors can be "hacked". Yes, there are some who grade highly any students who confirm their biases, but quite a few of them are smarter than any of us.

<comment><USER20> Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room. CS degree definitely signals something - a minimum competency that is uncertain in a humanities student.

<comment><USER21> > Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that > wiggle room.

CS grading is not the same thing as just programs working (and often that's not even the most important part of it), and, in my (obviously limited and potentially not representative, I'll admit, but there's not a lot of structured evidence being presented on any side here), the variability between institutions and individual classes within institutions in CS grading is more alike than distinct from that in any other field.

The scope of the curriculum, OTOH, in CS is probably more consistent between institutions and individual students within institutions than is the case in most non-technical fields, _particularly_ for CS taught within an engineering rather than liberal arts institution (e.g., at UC Davis, the difference between a degree from the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science), and, further, while there are certainly kinds of analytical skills that are central to most courses of study in English, its not at all unreasonable to expect that the _kind_ of analytical skills that Google is more concerned about are more likely to be central in CS programs.

But, overall, I think people are generally overplaying this. The stated preference for CS over other degree fields even with a slightly higher GPA in the non-CS field isn't anything like an absolute bar. Its saying that a degree in CS is one signal that is relevant to the Google hiring director that has some weight, not that it overwhelms all other information.

As an aside, though, it _is_ worth _Google_ examining whether this signal is given more weight than it should, especially considering their recently-posted diversity numbers and their stated concern for diversity -- since their overall diversity matches fairly well the diversity of CS graduates but clearly doesn't meet what they want, they might want to consider whether part of their diversity problem is overemphasizing having a degree in CS in their recruitment material and selection processes. If it is overweighted -- and I'm not saying that it is -- that would be a _lot_ easier for Google to fix than many of the other things they are trying to do to address diversity (not that those things aren't valuable to pursue _even if_ addressing the weighting of CS degrees can address some of the problem more easily and in a shorter time frame.)

Full disclosure: I am programmer whose only degree is in Political Science.

<comment><USER20> Your last line is telling. I know Many programmers who have no CS degree, or no degree at all. They are some of the best.

SO clearly a CS degree as a bar is going to miss an important demographic (potential hiring population). But a CS bar is also clearly useful in an effort to weed out inappropriate hires (vs one that filters for hiring the best).

<comment><USER21> But note that the preference that Google's hiring director has stated _is not a bar_ \-- there is a difference between a positive signal and a _sine qua non_ litmus test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So one of the very few English professors in the country with a computer science degree is offended by Google's hiring practices.

The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as much and it's not that weird to expect a computer science major to depend more on logic and rigor when approaching a problem than it is for someone whose thesis was devoted to a literary analysis of the symbolism behind the pickle dish in Ethan Frome.

<comment><USER23> "The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as much"

These statements need data to back them up, Mr. Science.

<comment><USER24> You don't think it's a given that, on average, students who choose a degree that requires "heavy duty math" enjoy it more than students who choose a degree that doesn't require "heavy duty math"?

<comment><USER23> I'm unsure of the motivations most people have in choosing majors. When I see generalizations of a very large group of people, no matter how obvious it may seem, I just like to see data to back it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> First comment to the article by @skeptomycin sums up entire article. Not worth the time to read it really.

>>I cannot believe how the actual statements by Bock were distorted and taken out of context by Prof. Raffa. It is beyond appalling.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think of English courses as teaching you about being _convincing to humans_. Correctness is important, but _secondary_. This is probably best exemplified by anecdotes being arguably the most evocative form of explanation, and yet the weakest form of evidence.

It makes sense to me that a technology company would downweight achievements in the humanities when hiring (for their technical positions). It's a noisier signal. Computers and nature aren't convinced or understood in the same way as humans are, so a lot of the English major benefits get lost in the translation to STEM.

(Serious question: what are the best examples of people in the humanities contributing to science and technology? For example, Noam Chomsky basically invented formal grammars.)

</comment><comment><USER27> I think most humanity studies develop critical thinking, but at very shallow level.

Mathematicians have to nest 100s levels of logical operations to get proof they want. Programming around 50 to 10 logical operations. Lawyers perhaps 10. Literature nests perhaps 5 levels of logical operations.

There is simply no apparatus to manage this level of complexity in human language. Just try to describe 3th level integral or matrix operations with pure words. It is like analyzing complex program on TI programmable calculator with 5 line display.

And I think English is not very logic friendly language, too many double meanings and context sensitivity. I like German for its logic and Esperanto for its simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER28> A quality education is a quality education. I'm sure he takes into consideration more than just the major and letter grade achieved though (obviously getting a B avg in MIT's CS program would not be the same as getting an A avg in Auburn's).

Anyway I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter what someone's academic focus is. Smart, impassioned people can excel at any field that they take the time to become educated in. Not to mention that programming and computer engineering is much more about experience than we'd like to admit.

<comment><USER29> +1 from the systems engineer with over a decade experienceat cutting edge facilities - and a BA in philosophy (focused on recent continental thought, not logic). It comes down to the individual and their passion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have one humanities degree (Japanese Studies) and one STEM degree (Aerospace Engineering), both from good schools in those respective domains. So, I feel in a unique position to comment on this.

I enrolled in the engineering program second, after I was sick of the poor employment opportunities associated with the first degree. During my engineering studies, it sometimes felt like my brain was being rewired, making it more suited to meet the rigors of the coursework.

I don't know if this was "in my head" or if something was actually happening on a neurological level. But, I know that the course work went from being ridiculously challenging in my first semester (pulled teeth to get B's and C's in the early days) to manageable and often fun in the last (mostly A's).

I am eternally grateful to the research and writing skills that I honed during my first degree. However, it was definitely the engineering courses that made me into the "analytical thinker" I am today. So, I think there is something to be said about what a STEM degree signals.

</comment><comment><USER31> I used to be a philosophy major at a top 10 school notorious for its rigor. Now I am a CS major at my local university after transferring (for various reasons including cost). What the author doesn't understand is that when we says, "It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some "specific answer" the professor is looking for", you actually get much more creative solutions to CS problems because implementations may vary, but are still bounded by the problem. In English (and potentially moreso in philosophy), you are not really bounded by anything, so it's incredibly easy to get at least a "good" grade, while getting an A is entirely at the mercy of a subjective grader with no clear grading rubric to distinguish a B+ from an A. Further, there isn't any domain to learn, so you can fairly easily skim the cliffnotes of every assigned reading and produce at least a B essay. Thus, no work ethic. CS really forces you into a discipline because there is a domain to learn as well as projects to code, and you can't BS a program at the last minute. If an essay doesn't have a coherent conclusion at 4am, turn it in and get a B. But if your program doesn't compile at 4am...

From my experience I consider CS to be far more challenging in terms of critical thinking, work ethic, and ability to solve complex problems. Also interesting is the camaraderie the students in these classes develop as we solve hard problems together, with the knowledge that if you've made it this far in the major, you're pretty capable. To echo the sentiment of another poster, you would be pretty blown away be the ineptitude of many liberal arts majors (apart from their complete lack of relevant domain knowledge) who are able to cruise through their classes for all the reasons mentioned above.

<comment><USER32> > while getting an A is entirely at the mercy of a subjective grader with no > clear grading rubric to distinguish a B+ from an A

Huh? This is true in programming too. Getting something to compile can't be all CS professors are looking for, right?

Programming is more about communication than anything else. You can write something a hundred different ways which will all run more or less fine -- but they all won't be equally readable and maintainable.

I didn't get a CS degree, so I don't have experience on the matter. Do CS professors grade for readability at all?

<comment><USER31> CS professors do grade for clarity and not just "does it work/compile?" but as a matter of relative weight in a grading distribution I think it gets less attention, and necessarily so for the more challenging problems. Writing prompts have a simpler objective domain to test (grammar, word usage) so the bulk of the grade weight goes to interpretation and style, which is of course subjective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> To be instrumental about it, English (and the arts/humanities subjects in general) teaches the skill of decision making under conditions of uncertainty: we are required to make inferences on the basis of ambiguous 'data' (a literary text whose meaning will generally be slippery) and competing bodies of theory which cannot be proven against each other, of sufficient solidity that they can be defended in a logically coherent argument.

This is a real skill. And if you actually _apply_ yourself to an arts degree, it does develop it. (Before the emergence of national literature studies and modern historiography, the study of the Classics played this role, broadly speaking.)

It does not have direct relevance to software engineering at all (speaking as someone with two literature degrees). But not all problems in development are strictly technical. Someone down there said:

> Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't.

Indeed. Google+ works, right?

</comment><comment><USER34> I was an English major in undergrad and grad school and I see these arguments all the time. I learned a great deal in my university career, and much of what I learned in the humanities took real intellectual curiosity, hard work, and deep thinking. You're not going to put together a real, publishable work by copy and pasting work from Stackoverflow, not in a master level English course. And let's be honest, the majority of CS students are lazy and incompetent, just like the majority of all students in all majors. Sure, you get some truly brilliant students that come along, but most of them never really produce anything of value. And most engineers, talented as they may be at slinging code and doing the lambda calculus, are pitiful communicators and can barely write a coherent sentence.

<comment><USER34> Let's see some logical refutations before we start with the emotional down votes, you purely logical genius gods of knowledge.

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that, were I you.

My education is in science. My particular science is one in which I had to learn a lot of mathematics--everything from real analysis to quite advanced analytical geometry and a wide variety of other things. I forgot more math by the time I took my qualifying exams than most CS people I've known ever learned. So for my part it's just hilarious to see the unbridled arrogance showing its head here. CS majors like to think of themselves as being paragons of logical and intellectual rigor. I think the downvotes we've accumulated here shows that some, at least, ought not.

That's not to excuse or defend the author of the article. I happen to agree with the argument he claims the Googler makes (even though the Googler doesn't apparently actually make that argument) in a very broad sense, based solely on my personal experiences. It's a sense broad enough that it ought not be applied to individuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ha! Last developer I hired was an English major ...I found out after I hired him ... the degree question didn't come up in three interview process ... just programming.

</comment><comment><USER36> Your obviously missing the point he was trying to make. No one was saying that an english major can't make a well thought out argument with a valid point. In fact they can probably do it better than a computer scientist. But, that's not what programming is. Programming is taking the simplest thing and elaborting in mind numbing detail for the computer to execute. way past the point most people get bored and give up. Take a simple form first name great how many characters should we store. middle name same question address how many lines? should we break it out into number and street name? what about suites? State great..list them out... all of them. city..ok..find a database of the cities and tie them to zip code. Oh wait...this is an international ap..great..let's start over...ok now three screens back if they selected this option change the font to one size larger. Programming isn't about making an argument it's closer to mapping out all the arguments and figuring out how they all fit together. but usually for topics that people wouldn't waste their time arguing over. like how to fill out an insurance form. or which document to pick first from a list.

</comment><comment><USER37> What I am saying here is anecdotal (but when did that ever stop anyone)...

I have to agree with Bock.

I was an English major at a solid school (Rutgers) and went on to do some grad work in Comp Lit at NYU. Years later I took CS/ Math classes at Stevens - there is no comparison in the difficulty. The only exception were the political theory classes I took which were grounded in Hegel - they were hard.

I have met 10 times as many Science / Tech people who were relatively well versed in Literature and/or Art than the contrary. There tends to be absolute illiteracy in Math and hard Science in the Humanities.

I remember years ago one of my profs got caught up in an embarrassing incident where a faked article which conflated Relativism and Relativity passed muster at a critical theory journal and was published with glaring scientific errors. (The Sokal Affair)

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

Now that i am in a tech field I wish I had spent more time studying math instead of so much Englsh and Political Theory as an undergrad.

</comment><comment><USER38> Bock and the author both miss the same point: the thing that helps you learn to think in a rigorous way is to study something that does _not_ come naturally to you.

I see it as the difference between learning a new skill and practicing an existing one. The former forces you to focus completely, while the latter tolerates inattention.

</comment><comment><USER39> Doing well in an English major at a good school is hard work, requires strong critical thinking skills, etc. But it doesn't reflect the level of analytical precision and rigorous correctness that doing well as a CS major does.

The humanities as a course of study are primarily interpretive and creative, and most schools of thought will support the idea that many different interpretations have value.

By comparison, while there are many different approaches and creative and engineering opportunities in CS, in the end the computer Does Exactly What It Is Told To Do And Nothing Else. And the level of precision, exactness and rigor necessary to support that environment is alien to most humanities curricula.

</comment><comment><USER40> Its like the author of this article never compared an English major to a CS major. Yeah, I'm sure the top 1% of English majors are pretty smart guys, but on average they are not very good at thinking logically. And yes, the bottom 25% of CS graduates are probably not that good either.

But the fact remains, if you take a top 25% CS graduate from almost any program in the world, that guy can probably understand a business case quicker than a top 25% English major from an equivalent institution.

Its just far easier to get a humanities degree than it is to get a CS degree, if you aren't a structured thinker to begin with.

<comment><USER41> That's sort of a straw man, though, isn't it? The Google guy said he'd take a B-level CS major over an A-level humanities major. So you're not comparing top-25% CS to top-25% humanities. You're comparing second quartile (roughly) CS to top quartile (again, roughly) humanities.

Now, I'm a just physicist with no skin in the game, but it seems to me that arguments on HN in support of the Google position (and yours in particular) all try to argue that CS is generically "harder," or that it's easier to graduate with a humanities degree, or that the xth percentile CS major is smarter than the xth percentile humanities major.

So far I haven't really seen anyone address the assertion that graduating with an A-average in a humanities major is very difficult. Maybe it really _is_ easy to get a BA in humanities with a 2.0 GPA (I don't know, but it sounds plausible). But that's not the issue. The issue is how a 3.5ish GPA humanities major compares to a 2.5ish CS major.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Some of the inflammatory statements have been taken out of context. The B vs. A+ quote was used in the context of students changing majors due to difficulty -- i.e. changing from a CS+English double major to Economics due to the difficulty of the double major. It is a discussion of the phenomenon described by "Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay." written in the WSJ.

Bock further explains that analytic thinking skills, whether or not they were derived from a CS degree or another degree (Statistics in his case) or not from a degree at all, are the important factor.

</comment><comment><USER43> Some of the best developers I've hired don't have a degree. When looking at resumes, I don't really care about their academics.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm sorry, did Prof. Raffa really just admit to the First Great Sin of Dante Studies---taking the Inferno in isolation, separate from the Purgatorio and Paradiso? I do believe he did! And he's from UTAustin! Argh! And he's the Danteworlds[1] guy! Salvami!

[1] [http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/](http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER45> For the most part, HR are a group that believes in data, but rarely uses it during evaluation and hiring decisions.

</comment><comment><USER46> The skills he talks about are useful, for lawyers, politicians, sales and other such professions. They are useful in STEM type subjects as well, but usually only if you have the "harder" CS / science / maths type skills as well.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's google's loss. And believe me it will be. A CS degree may be the best signal of a worker who will program all day, but it's not a good signal for the wide variety of other skills that are required to make a popular, well rounded and valuable product.

For example, making a workflow that is general understandable for the average user requires a strong set of less defined soft skills, like empathy, clarity of thesis, interviewing skills and a translation of discrete systems into metaphors non CS majors can work with.

And to be fair, google already seems to know this as they are trying to minimize the power of engineers in consumer facing product groups.

<comment><USER48> I think its more feasible and smart of Google to find engineers with a subset of soft skills that you describe than hire on those soft skills alone and hope they have a subset of technical skills.

<comment><USER47> I think this is a false attitude that comes from a rather egotistical belief that engineers can 'do anything' \-- so just be an engineer and then do other things too.

Have you watched an engineer design an interface? Its not their speciality because they simply don't have the time to concentrate on such things. Have you seen them write marketing copy? Create HR requirements? Cast product visions?

They usually aren't good at these things because it isn't their speciality. Why would anyone argue that engineers are good at everything and ignore the concentrations that yield very real and measurable value to the products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Google has such an arrogant culture for an ephemeral company built around the sole business to milk indirectly their customers with online advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER50> Growing up in housing projects I had a hard time realizing how many people internalized even the most egregious stereotypes as fact.

Spent a lot of time in gyms with a lot of hypertrophied chest, shoulder and arms walking on crane legs.

Thinks we don't really know how to measure each other when it comes to it.

Never met a carpenter who didn't complain about the prior carpenter's work.

Finds there's a lot of ways to describe things and some say more than they are designed and often leave a bitter aftertaste.

</comment><comment><USER51> Are there enough diverse people to satisfy companies' diversity index goal?

</comment><comment><USER52> In writing, critical thinking amounts to having an opinion on something. I think the author is mistaking something that's tedious for something that's rigorous.

</comment><comment><USER53> There's so much to say here about the incompetence of the OP that it's better to write a long blog post about it...so I'll just leave it at this.

First of all, check out the source material, which is this Thomas Friedman column:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/friedman- ho...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a- job-at-google-part-2.html?_r=0)

The OP is suggesting that the Google exec doesn't value the skills in the humanities departments. This is not _even remotely true_. Read the Friedman column for yourself:

> _Are the liberal arts still important?_

> > _They are "phenomenally important," he said, especially when you combine > them with other disciplines. "Ten years ago behavioral economics was rarely > referenced. But [then] you apply social science to economics and suddenly > there's this whole new field. I think a lot about how the most interesting > things are happening at the intersection of two fields._

So basically, the OP basis for argument is a little off-kilter. But where the OP is incredibly wrong is his interpretation of the following:

> _I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer > science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your > thinking and a more challenging course load._

The OP is aggreieved because he interprets Bock's statement as saying that English doesn't have the same critical thinking skills as computer science. Bock is not saying that at all, he is saying to a student that leaving comsci, because the courses are too challenging, is a bad idea, and that he/she shouldn't prize an A in an "easier" curriculum over a B in computer science, because the value of a grade is not the only measure of skills valuable to Google.

What's really important here is the word that Bock uses: "rigor". I'll refer to the definition that Google's search engine brings up:

> _the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate._

The OP interprets "rigor" as being "hard" or "challenging." But Bock is more likely referring to the importance of _accuracy_ and the more rigidly testable questions in a typical computer science curriculum versus an English curriculum. Bock does not at all talk about the intellectual challenge of English versus Computer Science.

The fact that a professor has such a skewed, and in my opinion, _wrong_ interpretation of not just Bock's statement, but of the English word "rigor" is itself a testament to the lack of "rigor"...or "stiffness" in how English is evaluated.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't get why you have to argue with a company on the way it does its recruiting. They feel that's the best for them and they have the right to.

Yes I believe that a person that studies English could become an Engineer. But being an Engineer requires experience and time. It's not like you'll pick it up in a day. On the other hand a person that studies CS or Engineering has learnt the basics and its easier for him to become one.

The way google is recruiting feels the right way for them (and for me) since they don't want to take in someone that has no idea and start teaching him on that.

Also if someone wants to work for a Tech Company like google I don't see why he will go study English... if English is what he likes best then why would he pursue working under a tech company.

I think you are trying to apply the logic that all the banks have that they'll hire whoever if he passes their tests. But they will train him into investments and guide them through. And also that person like everyone working on finance will have to undergo exams every-year to prove himself. (That's pretty much like studying finance if even more advanced).

Well Google doesn't want to go with the paragraph above.</comment>


Theres a Campaign to Rename the Software "RuboCop" Because "Cop" Is Offensive - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091 <comment><USER2> It seems that, as a rule, modern open source communities devolve into an utter shitshow. Well done to the voices of reason, thumb voters and the maintainer for handling this appropriately.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I find it incredible that seeing a word like "cop" makes someone uncomfortable/unable to do their job. Reading the rest of the replies made me feel like I was crazy one. (thankfully the thumb votes show that most people disagree) I know these people mean well, but I view these people as bullies disguised as allies.

<comment><USER4> Also, for all the "projection" they talk of, they are projecting US-centric views on to the wider world innit? Not many countries have cops carrying military grade guns/tanks and randomly shooting...

<comment><USER2> >they are projecting US-centric views on to the wider world innit?

Projecting, maybe, but at the same time the last few weeks have shown there's a not insignificant amount of people in other Western countries who are addicted to American culture, latched closely to the teat, who are all too eager to have American issues imported into their own societies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why are you bringing this up again? It happened over a week ago, and afaik, things are all settled now. Are you looking to spark light to the flaming again? Please stop with the needless provocations.

<comment><USER6> The point -- for me, anyway -- isn't what some piece of software happens to be named. You all can call it what you like. The point is that the prevailing mindset in the US today has devolved to the point that people actually reason in this fashion. And that is hardly settled now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a link to a blog post detailing the thinking of Bozhidar Batsov, RuboCop's author:

[https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name- dram...](https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-drama- redux.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Can we take a moment to appreciate that the movie this project is named after is about the harm done to society by an out-of-control overly militarized police force?

</comment><comment><USER9> You couldn't make this up!

</comment><comment><USER10> Thing is resolved: use rbhint if you care, do whatever you want if you don't care

</comment><comment><USER11> Call it RoboPig, after the filthy animal.

<comment><USER12> Pigs are highly intelligent and sympathetic creatures. I'm told that they're more intelligent than dolphins. Please do not malign them, and please consider not eating them.

<comment><USER11> It was a Pulp Fiction reference. A dog's got personality.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA_Tl1kvlQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA_Tl1kvlQU)</comment></comment></comment>


What a ball pen tells us about China's manufacturing weakness - <AUTHOR> http://www.ejinsight.com/20160121-what-ball-pen-tells-us-about-china-s-manufacturing-weakness/ <comment><USER2> No it doesn't. Rather it says a lot about global supply chains. This is bullying and shaming with some nationalism thrown in for good measure (the one entrepreneuress saying, importing those spherules ships your profits overseas, bad, bad!). If Chinese manufacturers thought there was a big market for precision ball point pens, they'd make them. But there isn't such market in most of the world.

In any Chinese office, you'll have plenty of semi disposable pens, the likes of papermates and bics. They don't really explode in your pocket.

Most of the world just want pens that write, they don't see pens as status symbols. Other things take their place.

And even if we took the reprimand at face value, really, are the Swiss taking in and rolling in the dough by selling these small spherules?

It was opportunistic bashing by some apparatchik who saw it fit to bash industry who actually pulled the country out of dire poverty in a mere thirty years.

<comment><USER3> You missed some key details in the article - China does make 38 billion ball- point pens per year, but doesn't make any of the balls in those pens. This is a commentary on their ability to make the single precision element within the pen.

<comment><USER4> Why would the socket require less precision than the ball that goes into that socket?

<comment><USER5> I also don't buy the story on just how much precision is required, considering the ballpoint pen is a 128-year-old invention.

> it requires state-of-the-art machinery and cutting-edge computerized > measurement equipment with pinpoint precision to produce, not to mention the > ability to produce the high-quality steel material of which it is made.

 _Nobody_ had this in 1950, say nothing about 1888.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm reasonably certain ball point pens existed long before computerized manufacturing, despite the claims of the article. I'm no material scientist but I believe there has to be better ways to manufacture a ball bearing than computer controlled cutting?

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen) \-- Wikipedia suggests that the ball point pen was first invented in the late 19th century, but that they didn't catch on until after WWII because they need "modern chemistry and precision manufacturing capabilities", which sounds consistent with the claims in this article.

<comment><USER8> In USA Ballpoint pen was introduced on 29 Oct 1945, but the reliable ones (made by BIC) was launched in 1959. [http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-enduring- genius-of-the-ballp...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-enduring-genius-of- the-ballpoint-pen-1433512313)

Anything produced in 50s, I'm sure can be easily produced by any nation today, leave alone China.

<comment><USER9> Any nation could produce supersonic aircraft, nuclear reactors, and satellites and the launchers to send them to space?

<comment><USER8> > Any nation could produce supersonic aircraft, nuclear reactors...

These are not industrial mass produced items made by machines. 1950s industrial setup can be duplicated by any country today on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Precision equipment manufacturing is _hard_. It's easy to get round balls, but to get them consistently within a certain tolerance in yields that would beat just importing them is even harder.

I can't find the article now, but I remember reading about the manufacture of a certain kind of high quality lenses and at the time, the place with the highest quality manufacturing capacity was a couple tiny factories in Japan. At some point the technology to make lenses at that quality and yield had been R&D'd in Japan and there it sits.

Nobody feels like dumping a few hundred million (or billion) into matching that capability when they can just order them from these places at $20 a pop in volume.

"But", people say, "China makes all kinds of high-tech goods!". Sorta, is the answer. China does final assembly on tons of things, but many of the components, ultra-precision parts, are made elsewhere: CPUs, DSPs, Memory, Displays etc. China is getting there as market forces allow, but there often isn't a good reason to try to achieve parity or leapfrog suppliers who you already have good relationships with and who sell you product at reasonable prices.

</comment><comment><USER11> Presumably plenty of higher end shops in China _could_ produce such a ball, but inertia and economies of scale from current producers probably make it less valuable to pursue.

Some high end optics, semiconductors, etc perhaps China really cannot yet produce.

<comment><USER12> The article claims that they _could_ produce such a ball, but choose not to because of the high initial investment combined with the weak IP law in China.

No sense in footing the bill for the needed R&D, when your investment will be quickly stolen by the local competition.

<comment><USER13> I suspect IP isn't really the question here. After all, the required balls are made in "Germany, Switzerland or Japan" so I doubt they couldn't be made in China, if someone wished to.

On another note, the article neatly taps into the chip many Chinese have on their shoulder when it comes to be recognized as "equal" to Western countries. In reality, and according to the principle of comparative advantage, no two countries would ever be equal in all things. And that's not a bad thing.

<comment><USER12> I'm no expert, but we do import quite a bit of a specific type of electronics from China. The various companies steal from each other with impunity. Not just ideas...like specific microcode for example. The physical proximity, plus the fact that it's not technically illegal makes it easy.

Stealing from Germany/Switzerland/Japan might have consequences, at least for exporting to where you stole from. It's also not as easy as just hiring away an expert from down the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the early days a joke circulated around Beijing in "China hand" circles as follows:

What's the difference between a Hong Kong Chinese and a mainland Chinese?

The Hong Kong Chinese knows the difference between 1/100th and 1/1000th of an inch.

By the way, Li Keqiang (#2 in China leadership) is a fantastic scientist, wonderfully inquisitive/open-minded about knowledge, and is encyclopedic. Great guy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Alibaba is full of chinese manufacturers offering tungsten carbide balls for pens, pen tips and all sorts of precision pen parts.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ball point pens were made since the 19th century the balls were (and I'm pretty much sure that still are) made by dropping liquid metal into a coolant with high viscosity so they'll turn into spheres and then tumbled with an abrasive material usually fine sand or glass to make them smooth.

You do not need sophisticated equipment and especially not some high end CNC machining to make balls from metal what is this nonsense?

EDIT: Found a video from BIC basically tungsten carbide droplets abrasively tumbled into perfect spheres (this is basic physics as they always want to tumble around their center of mass they end up being pretty close to being perfect spheres) [https://youtu.be/D0OyjRgUBns?t=43](https://youtu.be/D0OyjRgUBns?t=43)

</comment><comment><USER17> What a biased article. I'm interested in learning about the strengths and weaknesses of many cultures and countries (including China) but reducing it to "China can't build working pens therefore they suck" is not just cheap but also an insult to our intelligence.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that the article said "China can't build working pens therefore they suck" and I also do not think it was offering any sort of commentary on "culture" in the first place. Instead it was offering opinions on how the structure of the economy, etc. was holding the country back from moving up the value-added production food chain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I though this sounded familiar. Here's another article on it from a few weeks ago. Some of you might like the tone a bit better: [http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/10/world/why-cant- china-m...](http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/10/world/why-cant-china-make- good-ballpoint-pen)

</comment><comment><USER20> 0.1mm balls are unusual - 1.0mm is more typical (eg. standard BIC pens).

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought that was the whole point of trade, that you specialize. What nonsense.

<comment><USER6> Milton Friedman has a wonderful short lecture on this, about pencils no less.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8)</comment></comment>


A new memory profiler for Linux written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nokia/memory-profiler <comment><USER2> Author of the tool talks a bit about it at [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bq64xw/a_new_memory_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bq64xw/a_new_memory_profiler_for_linux_from_nokia/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like it is made by Nokia. My lucky guess is that they probably use it for base station diagnostics and debugging.

<comment><USER4> This seems to be Nokia's version of 20% projects.

He said this is used for long running tasks @ Nokia so you are probably right.

<comment><USER5> The old Nokia had not such things.</comment></comment></comment>


IBM Raises the Bar with a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609451/ibm-raises-the-bar-with-a-50-qubit-quantum-computer/ <comment><USER2> I think they only announced an early version of their prototype, and it's not clear if it's even implemented yet.

Google was supposed to announce their own 49-qubit quantum computer this year - one that actually works - but it seems they haven't had time to finish it, or maybe they weren't satisfied with its performance and didn't want to overhype it.

Also, I think IBM proving that 56-qubits can be simulated wasn't a simulation of a universal quantum computer, but a more specific simulation. The record in universal quantum computer simulation seems to be 46-qubits:

[http://www.fz- juelich.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/UK/EN...](http://www.fz- juelich.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/UK/EN/2017/2017-12-15-world-record- juelich-researchers-simulate-quantum-computer.html)

Also, interestingly enough, the number of qubits that can be simulated seems to increase by 1 every 2 years. I suppose this is because generally you need 2x the memory for your supercomputer to add an extra qubit to the simulation. Being able to double the memory every two years seems to make sense from Moore's Law perspective.

In that case, we should be able to _simulate_ a 50-qubit quantum computer by 2025. So any real quantum computer that has 50 logical qubits and is built by 2025 should be able to prove quantum supremacy.

<comment><USER3> I'm familiar with the 56 qubit simulation from IBM: That does not appear to be significantly restricted in any way, at least not based on the limited understanding I can glean from their publication's results & conclusions (I'm not a quantum computer scientist or physicist). They appear to have found a practical tensor-based work around to the previous exponentially increasing memory requirements.

Moreover it is one that can, in limited circumstances, be applied in a paralellized, distributed environments (cloud). _That_ appears to be the limitation: They successfully simulated a 56-qubit computer, but many some workloads using their method cannot be distributed, and must be computed within the same environment. I.e., they made two advancements: 1: A successful simulation, and 2: it can be done distributively, only for certain workloads.

Of course it's all roughly a billion times slower than a true quantum computer.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the proper etiquette when interviewing with multiple companies? - throwaway-brd Throwaway account for obvious reasons. I apologize if this question is a bit basic but I had a job right out of college so I never encountered such a situation with interviewing.
I am looking for a new position and have a few on-site interviews scheduled in a different city. The companies interested in interviewing me are obviously willing to book my flights but the problem is that I am planning on interviewing with multiple companies while I am in that city.
So my question is- what is the correct etiquette here in terms of dealing with flight bookings?
1. Do I have the company that is interviewing me first on Monday book my inbound flight ticket and the company interviewing me last on Thursday book my outbound flight? I am kinda worried about this as these companies might not be too happy if they find out I am interviewing with other companies while on a trip that they partially paid for to fly me there.
2. Do I just pay for the tickets out of pocket? That way I don't owe anyone anything and they can't be mad.
If I go with 1. do I need to tell them that I am interviewing with other companies in the same city during my trip? <comment><AUTHOR> Having been there, in hindsight I'd say companies really don't care.

Pick one to do the flight (both ways). Perhaps the "richer" one, or the one you'd most like to work for.

If necessary, adjust the dates so that you can do the other interviews while there, and tell them you're looking around the city.

Maybe hit the other company up for their night's hotel room.

Being nice to companies you're interviewing with is a waste. I can assure you that they won't hesitate to be cut-throat with _you_.

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't claim to be any kind of an expert. But to me, it seems a bit much to stick one company with all the expenses. Maybe have the one you interview with first pay the fare to get you out there, have the last one pay the fare to get you back, have the ones in the middle pay for your rooms.</comment>


Controllable Video Sprites That Appear Like Professional Tennis Players - <AUTHOR> https://cs.stanford.edu/~haotianz/research/vid2player/ <comment><USER2> As a tennis player, I think this is super impressive.

Their models actually do a decent job of replicating true tennis strategy, and as they pointed out, even account for the quirks like the left handedness of Nadal.

However, it's still a bit unrealistic due to the lack of full data.

There's 3 things that make a tennis shot what it is: placement (covered in the video), pace (speed of ball), and spin (rpm and direction of spin). In this method, they only use placement. Probably because pace and spin data don't exist at this scale.

But there's a big difference between a slice, flat, and top spin shot to the same placement on the court, and it directly affects the return shot. For example, it's a very common and 'safe' play to return a slice with a slice

Would like to see the full extension one day

<comment><USER3> The lack of full data is because tournaments keep Hawk-Eye ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk-Eye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk- Eye)) data to themselves right?

<comment><USER2> Hmm from the look of it, it's not clear Hawk eye does everything.

Certainly it does pace. But from the article it's hard to say if it would track spin - it's not clear to me that with the natural markings on the ball (seam lines + ballmaker logo) and the lighting that exists in the stadium, that would be enough fidelity for some algorithm to calculate the spin.

I think Hawkeye could be updated to easily do it though, and maybe if they would be willing to draw 1 or 2 black dot markers on the ball in addition to the natural markings.

<comment><USER4> It does track spin, they often show stats measuring rpm.

Additionally spin is a big part of the trajectory model - the Hawkeye cameras are only 60fps, so the trajectory is interpolated.

However, I doubt it's the cameras measuring spin. It's more likely spin is a free variable when they fit the trajectory.

<comment><USER5> Found this: [https://commons.nmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1746&con...](https://commons.nmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1746&context=isbs)

Very interesting read, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really give you an accurate tldr, sorry

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting work that demonstrates the benefits of the use of domain knowledge [1] and of trying to understand a dataset, rather than throwing a bunch of data at an and-to-end black box and hoping for the best. In particular, data in the tennis point play domain is too sparse for approaches that rely heavily on large amounts of dense data, like a neural network. This is good, old- fashioned AI work and I mean that 100% as a compliment.

_______________

[1] Quoting from Section 10:

 _Finally, our work makes extensive use of domain knowledge oftennis to generate realistic results. This includes the shot cycle statemachine to structure point synthesis, the choice of shot selectionand player court positioning outputs of player behavior models,and the choice of input features provided to these behavior models._

A successful behavioural model of that kind is a contribution in and of itself, useful beyond the task of simulation presented in the paper.

</comment><comment><USER7> I watched it and I felt like I was playing Mortal Kombat 3

technology really repeats itself

<comment><USER8> Mortal Kombat 3 (and previous ones) was just digitized sprites with no logic in between animations, certainly nothing comparable to that.

<comment><USER9> I can very clearly see the sudden swap between (some) animations in this example as well.

The MK analogy seems spot on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's becoming increasingly clear that video by itself will soon no longer be reliable evidence.

How long before it becomes a plausible criminal defence to say "the CCTV must have been deepfaked, that's not me"?

The indicator of reliability will be the chain of custody of the video data.

<comment><USER11> This is one of those technologies where I struggle to think of beneficial use cases, but my mind fills with ways this could abused.

That's not to say it shouldn't be researched, or people more creative than me won't think of beneficial use cases.

<comment><USER12> This whole post is a beneficial use case of deepfake-ish tech.

<comment><USER11> And that is what, exactly?

From the abstract: _" Our system can generate novel points between professional tennis players that resemble Wimbledon broadcasts, enabling new experiences such as the creation of matchups between players that have not competed in real life, or interactive control of players in the Wimbledon final."_

I don't believe academic researchers needs to justify their work by providing real life applications. But if that were the extent of deepfake's utility, I'd be underwhelmed.

<comment><USER13> Interactive deep faking of real people in video games seems insanely impressive at least to me. What more could you expect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't get the paper to load, but I'm curious if they address the lack of player shadows. Having shadows would have made the video much more realistic.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the player modeling is way more interesting than the visual representation and could probably be competitively useful.

I wonder if you could use some of the recent advances in pose estimation to rig a 3D model of each player rather than the rotoscope look of clipped frames in the demo.

<comment><USER16> I can recommend "Two minute papers" for that kind of stuff. Here is an episode about AI controlled basketball player movements: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBkFAIUmWu0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBkFAIUmWu0)

<comment><USER15> Yes! have been a subscriber since nearly the beginning of the channel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm excited to see this applied to more popular video games such as FIFA, Madden, and NBA 2k. The behavior modeling also likely has huge applications in NBA film analysis and figuring out how a traded player might "gel" in a new team.

<comment><USER18> What about it's implications for things like ballet in a world where people can't go to live venues and there is no money to support real dancers.. Or music videos that already have auto-tune singers.. why not generated backup dancers..

<comment><USER19> _why not generated backup dancers.._

It's been done.[1]

[1] [https://youtu.be/t9VYYhX3P1Y](https://youtu.be/t9VYYhX3P1Y)

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure I understand the context of the video you linked, are you saying it's not real?

<comment><USER19> LiveLeak said it was CG.[1] But it may be real and the article may be fake.

[1] [https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=9SDBX_1526444350](https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=9SDBX_1526444350)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if players will be able to use this to prepare for opponents. For example, knowing where to hit and "seeing how they typically react" and then predicting where they'll most likely to return the ball.

If so, this could be expanded to other sports, maybe even team sports, where you can test set plays against the simulated defense.

<comment><USER22> Why wouldn't they just use actual replay footage for that and not some generated sprite?

Simulated match ups have been done on pro sports video games for years. But they're not that useful because a model is not reality.

<comment><USER23> Presumably:

* Hard to find all replays against that shot

* Time consuming to review

This would work as compression over that space. However, I don't watch tennis and know nothing about sport. This may be an insignificant improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> the title doesn't do justice: it's about the syntheses of tennis players in generative video.

<comment><USER11> Synthesis of tennis player sprites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is what I imagined video games would look like in the future... looking from the 80s. Hi-res background, but static. Awesome life like sprites, but basically the same video games we had on the C64.

It was somehow very soothing to watch that video. It felt like someone was telling me a bed time story about a different brighter future that never came to be. Very "Back to the Future".

</comment><comment><USER26> Video: [https://youtu.be/GnZUIuOzgQc](https://youtu.be/GnZUIuOzgQc)

</comment><comment><USER27> This is amazing. I played this arcade game like 30 years ago that projected 3d video that you could control. But instead of generative, it was a bunch of little clips spliced together so you tap shoot and it plays the shoot clip. Had lots of awkward seams but it was still really impressive. Now we get the real thing.

<comment><USER28> Time Traveller?[1] It used a pepper's ghost approach.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_\(video_game\))

<comment><USER29> Could also be Holosseum?

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

I remember my local AMC 6-plex had one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My head gravitates towards how visualization makes the behavior modeling more palatable. The incredible technical feat on display is the video rendering, not so much the behavioral modelling, but it seems conceptually straightforward to add increasingly better "sabermetric" analysis to control the player's choices.

The data might be just as "productive" as a spreadsheet or formula to inform play, but it requires someone with a more specialized skill set to translate its meaning. The HCI design, for lack of a better word, in rendering the data visually makes it not only more entertaining but easier to "see"—for mainstream users, pro players, or almost anyone. Design makes things visible.

</comment><comment><USER31> I was thinking at exactly this idea for over 2 years.

I even started with Python & OpenCV for basic background extraction, and as I expected, the edges for the players are imperfect. But still, the result is very very promising. I'm so glad someone did it.

Why I was thinking at it is because the end goal would be to apply frame matching & transitioning to football. Tennis is the easier task, the camera angle is almost fixed.

But from this result, to football, we aren't far. Even an approach based on AI + some human intervention would suffice.

<comment><USER31> Part 2: Even though Fifa / PES are doing great things, no video game can match the player personalities and add specific / individual animations for everyone. By using the already recorded matches, we would have something very authentic in terms of how players behave on the field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes but can it shoot a ball at a line judge's neck?

<comment><USER3> I'm sure Novak Djokovic would like to simulate an alternate reality where that went slightly to the side, he didn't get disqualified as a result, and then he continued his undefeated 2020 run.

<comment><USER33> So in your universe it hit the judge and he got disqualified? Oh no, I jumped into another reality again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> watching those realistic video sprites playing reminds me a lot of the old tennis game on NES, it really makes you wonder how far and bizarre this technology can become?

<comment><USER35> Nick Bostrom might say to the point where we can no longer tell what's real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I want this real-time generated on endless-tennis.tv</comment>


The Evolution Of C# - <AUTHOR> https://exceptionalasp.net/blog/the-evolution-of-csharp

<comment><USER2> You should have added about what is coming up for C# soon - async: <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx>

It's a very interesting feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have but I haven't had time to look into it and understand it yet, maybe a future post. There's a lot of stuff in the framework for parallel programming now, time to figure out which is still relevant.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty simple, "await/async" rewrites normal-looking code to continuation passing code the same way "yield return/yield break" rewrites normal-looking code to be a state-machine.

Jon Skeet has written a number of insanely detailed articles on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense and sounds a lot simpler than how I was trying to read the samples at first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, I wrote this post because I wanted to point out how far C# has come from it's V1 and suggest you have another look if you haven't seen it since then. Sometimes its reputation isn't deserved, though sometimes it is.

I'd really appreciate any feedback on my writing style, presentation etc. The site around it is obviously still a big work in progress so don't worry too much about the design!

</comment><comment><USER4> Well written post, and I agree that C# has come a long way. It's one of my favorite languages now!

</comment><comment><USER5> Almost catching up to 2000era javascript ! :)</comment>


Parsing: The Solved Problem That Isn't - <AUTHOR> http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/parsing_the_solved_problem_that_isnt

<comment><USER2> Yet another article nullified by lisp.</comment>


Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House? (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomontech.com/upload/46eb74c0-76e7-4906-bba6-16e673445e7d/mommybook.pdf <comment><USER2> No subliminal message or anything.</comment>


Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://articles.os2voice.org/category/software/11-sponsorship-needed-for-new-os-2-web-browser.html <comment><USER2> OK, I understand why someone might need to maintain and deploy an OS/2 app deep within some enterprise backend, but why on earth is anyone trying to browse the web with it?

<comment><USER3> Because the likes of eComStation and ArcaOS have consumer-level tools. Both come in business/commercial and home/personal flavours.

* [http://ecomstation.com/](http://ecomstation.com/)

* [https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-now-available/](https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-now-available/) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359630))

<comment><USER4> Put differently, why would anyone in their right mind use OS/2 to browse the web, given that it misses more than two decades in development of security techniques. As far as I understand Mensys and now Arca Noae never had the source code to the OS/2 kernel or foundational libraries. Given that this code was written in the late eighties-half nineties in a largely pre-internet world:

\- It's likely that many of the libraries are full of buffer overflows, double frees, dangling pointers, etc.

\- OS/2 is not a multi-user system, there is no boundary between a user and a root-like account.

\- OS/2 does not have modern mitigation techniques like (K)ASLR, probably no PIE/PIC, stack canaries, etc.

\- OS/2 (AFAIR) does not offer sandboxing facilities, such as seccomp, capsicum, or pledge.

\- OS/2 has no protection against recent CPU vulnerabilities.

So, if you are using OS/2 to browse the web, you are purely relying on security through obscurity.

<comment><USER3> They aren't using OS/2 to browse the WWW. They are using Mozilla Firefox to browse the WWW. In case you missed it, the headlined article even tells you that this is version 52 of Firefox, from March of last year.

The same goes for many of these libraries that you vaguely allude to. They aren't part of the operating system. Almost all such major programs tend to have layers of either Unix-alike or Windows-alike libraries over the top of the operating system API. They are third-party add-ons, presumably built from equally recent versions.

And that goes a long way down. This isn't Unix. There is no single, distinguished, "the" C library. Every compiler has its own C libraries.

<comment><USER4> _They aren 't using OS/2 to browse the WWW. They are using Mozilla Firefox to browse the WWW._

In the end there will still be calls into the Presentation Manager to render pages on screen. Also, TCP/IP are handled through system libraries (tcp32.dll, so32dll.dll). So, there is a large surface area where Firefox will use system libraries.

Besides that, the web browser can have vulnerabilities and runs untrusted code. It's pretty insane to use a browser in 2018 that doesn't execute Javascript in sandboxed processes.

<comment><USER3> Mozilla Firefox not sandboxing Javascript is not an OS/2 problem. It is a Mozilla Firefox problem.

The problems with WWW browsers are not solved on other operating systems, are a lot more to do with a user being vulnerable to processes _running as xyrself_ which multi-user semantics will not address on _any_ operating system until the world starts taking advantage of GNU Hurd or nonce SIDs, and in large part lie _within the application_.

* [http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1200:_Authorization](http://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1200:_Authorization)

They lie in cryptography implementations, in the architecture of downloading programs across the WWW from arbitrary third parties and running them, in the access from one WWW site to another, in the architecture of "Web APIs" and non-document WWW sites, in document model implementations, and so forth. Presentation Manager and low-level sockets form almost none of this. You are positing that the major locus for flaws is libraries that literally provide the low-level read()/connect()/bind()/&c. library functions. Whereas the add- on libraries that the people porting these applications have to _also_ build, from SSL libraries through HTML parsers to PNG and MPEG processors, form a lot of it; but are not part of OS/2 nor set in stone.

You cannot have your cake and eat it. Either OS/2 comes with this stuff and it is a problem that the stuff is old with known vulnerabilities, or the problem is (as indeed explained in the headlined article) that OS/2 _does not_ come with this stuff and a large amount of effort is needed in porting all of these modern libraries, runtimes, and even whole language development toolsets to OS/2\. The reality is the latter. They are, after all, asking for money for doing one part of exactly that.

But that reality means that vague handwaving about "written in a pre-Internet world" (which it of course was not, the Internet pre-dating any version of OS/2 by about a decade) is ill-thought. The irony is that the vast bulk of the so-called "surface area" in a WWW browser is in all of these application layers and libraries that are _modern_.

Or, put more glibly: I don't expect _any_ Javascript security holes in IBM WebExplorer _ever_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you really need OS/2 so bad, then why not just run OS/2 in the web browser sandbox on top of a modern operating system?

<comment><USER6> Exactly—modern browsers are about as complicated as OS/2 anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Update: [http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/17-new-web- brows...](http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/17-new-web-browser-for- os2-roadmap-update-4.html)

They've raised $12,650 and think it will take around 18 months.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's October 2017. There was a follow-on in November 2017 that answered some questions.

* [http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/12-update-on-the...](http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/12-update-on-the-voice-browser-funding-campaign.html)

And further follow-ons as already mentioned in this discussion.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17461751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17461751)

</comment><comment><USER8> No mention of NetSurf? It's a much simpler codebase that should be easy to port.

<comment><USER9> I love NetSurf and I love that it even exists. It's fun browsing pages in a reasonable fashion on my '060 Amiga 4000T.

However, NetSurf's DOM and JavaScript support is embryonic by comparison, and sites other than static pages generally don't work. It's slowly improving but it's nowhere near Gecko, WebKit or Blink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So what makes Rust impossible to port to OS/2?

<comment><USER11> They said "unlikely" not "impossible". I guess it is unlikely because no one is willing to put in the massive resources needed to port Rust to an archaic platform.

Here's a link about porting the Rust compiler to the Haiku OS: [http://rust- on-haiku.com/wiki/PortingRust](http://rust-on-haiku.com/wiki/PortingRust)

Please note that Haiku is among the supported OSs of the LLVM compiler framework while OS/2 isn't. So unless you want to re-create a Rust compiler from scratch you would first need to port LLVM to OS/2.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the backend not being available is certainly a showstopper, thanks. GCC being ported to every silicon-based system under the sun does blind one to the fact that that isn't necessarily true for its rivals.

<comment><USER12> It probably helps that GCC was around when OS/2 and other now-archaic systems were relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> eComStation and ArcaOS are commercial software, shouldn't their developers be the ones paying for the effort to keep their clients' software cheaper to maintain on their legacy platforms than rewriting it to something better- supported?

<comment><USER14> Yup. I'd love to get paid for working on OS/2 apps.

<comment><USER15> Same here. Man. That would be some serious nostalgia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wouldn't be surprised if by sheer code size _and_ tools needed, a major browser is a more complicated me…, erm, project, than the OS+UI itself.

</comment><comment><USER16> Lack of Rust on OS/2 is touted as a reason for not porting more modern Firefox, I wonder if anyone has had a go at porting Rust to OS / 2?

<comment><USER17> Not so much lack of Rust, as lack of LLVM, that Rust needs to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For those wondering what Warpstock 2018 Toronto had to do with it, that is apparently a mis-print in an article written in 2017. (-: Here is Warpstock 2017:

* [http://warpstock.org/staticpages/index.php?page=ws2017_sessi...](http://warpstock.org/staticpages/index.php?page=ws2017_sessions)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interestingly, the SPARC people with TenFourFox suffer for the same reasons.

* [http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/07/another-one-bites-rus...](http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/07/another-one-bites-rust.html)

<comment><USER18> TenFourFox isn't SPARC but PowerPC. Rust runs on PowerPC but not on OS X on PowerPC. OS X earlier than 10.7 lacks at least some thread-local facilities that Rust expects.

<comment><USER19> [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/11927](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/11927) is the discussion when minimal OS X version for Rust was bumped to 10.7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like if you ordered the things that needed funding, OS/2 would be near the bottom of the list.

Maybe Gates could cough up something, just for the irony.</comment>


Magdeburg Water Bridge - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_Water_Bridge <comment><USER2> Well, here's the photo that should be in the article: [https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2013-05-13/magdeburg- wate...](https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2013-05-13/magdeburg-water-bridge- maphead-ken-jennings)

<comment><USER3> Or this one:

[https://media.wired.com/photos/59327bdd9be5e55af6c25628/mast...](https://media.wired.com/photos/59327bdd9be5e55af6c25628/master/pass/water_bridge.jpg)

Wired Article:

[https://www.wired.com/2011/10/physics-and-the-magdeburg- wate...](https://www.wired.com/2011/10/physics-and-the-magdeburg-water- bridge/)

<comment><USER4> Interestingly, the wired article has the text "Image via Wikipedia" below the image.

The image must have been removed from the wikipedia article since 2011.

<comment><USER5> [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wasserstra%C3%9F...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wasserstra%C3%9Fenkreuz_Magdeburg)

(Also check out the subcategories)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I took a narrowboat over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct [0] a couple summers ago. It's really strange to be on a boat 130 feet up in the air, especially with no guard rail on the side.

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

<comment><USER7> Pontcysyllte is magical, not least thanks to its setting in delightful countryside.

Barton Swing Aqueduct is in an unattractive patch of urban Manchester, but impressive in engineering terms. It's a canal-over-canal bridge which can swing aside to let big ships through:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I'm thinking it right, the weight carried by that bridge is much greater than for something like a typical road bridge. On the other hand, the weight also doesn't increase at all when a ship passes over it.

<comment><USER9> Surely the weight increases, the displaced water needs to go somewhere right?

<comment><USER10> It (mostly) doesn't stay on the bridge.

<comment><USER9> As in it overflows over the sides?

<comment><USER11> It would overflow out the ends of the bridge

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And no matter how heavy are the ships that are crossing the bridge, the weight of the bridge always stays the same as when no ships are crossing it (provided that water level stays the same). See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel)

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RealGrouchy/FalkirkGearin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RealGrouchy/FalkirkGearing) is a fun explanation of how the gear system works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Imho even more amazing are those water bridges of the Canal du Midi. Built around 1670.

[https://www.beziers-in-mediterranee.com/sites/ot- beziers/fil...](https://www.beziers-in-mediterranee.com/sites/ot- beziers/files/styles/image_fond/public/visuel/peniche_pont_canal_0.jpg)

<comment><USER15> I'm sorry but as an engineer there is no way aqeduct is from 1670, it looks mid 1800s (and definitely no earlier than 1800).

Edit: Google shows canal du midi is indeed from 1670 but this aqeduct section is later, completed in 1858 (the order was decreed by Napoleon himself according to wiki)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for pointing out this mistake. Here is one of the canal bridges which have been built around 1670.

[https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont- canal_du_R%C3%A9pudre](https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont- canal_du_R%C3%A9pudre)

and one from 1690: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesse_Aqueduct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesse_Aqueduct)

<comment><USER15> Ah yes, they are both very nice structures that would have taken some good engineering at the time. I wonder what would have been used as the impermeable water barrier - puddle clay or similar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if any navigation software needed a rewrite to handle the "water on top of water" case.

<comment><USER3> Google Maps shows it correctly with bridge borders.

Apple Maps does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Other water bridges: [https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Water- Bridges/](https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Water-Bridges/)

</comment><comment><USER17> The other, possibly more famous one, is in Minden. It's the same canal, but a different river.

<comment><USER18> Here is an aerial picture of the one in Minden. _Wasserstrassenkreuz_ translates to _waterway interchange_.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Wasserst...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Wasserstrassenkreuz_Minden.jpg)

<comment><USER17> In front is the old one (but rebuilt), that may not be used by commercial shipping, behind it the wider new one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The highest boat lift in the world was in Belgium until recently:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C3%A9py- Thieu_boat_lift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C3%A9py-Thieu_boat_lift)

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's one in New Jersey [1], carrying the D&R Canal parallel to the Delaware, across a tributary creek. It's part of a park, you can bike or hike across here, and I was really quite astounded the first time I came across it.

This whole area is pretty much paradise to bicyclists, from the D&R Canal's 70 miles of towpath, to the 15 miles of the Colombia Trail. There's a huge amount of riding to be done, completely off roadways and safe from cars.

[1] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mapleton_Aqueduc...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mapleton_Aqueduct_in_The_Delaware_and_Raritan_Canal_State_Park,_Princeton,_NJ,_USA_- _panoramio.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER21> If you enjoy engineering marbles like that, I recommend checking out this boat lift:

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

</comment><comment><USER22> The Falkirk Wheel, while being a glorified lock, is pretty cool as well: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel).

<comment><USER23> And for something a little older doing something similar, there's the Anderton Boat Lift built in 1875 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderton_Boat_Lift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderton_Boat_Lift)

<comment><USER24> Or the Niederfinow boat lift, which is on the same canal system as the Magdeburg water bridge, just 200km to the east: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederfinow_Boat_Lift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederfinow_Boat_Lift). I am glad they decided not to tear down the old one (from 1934) but built the new one right beside it over the last years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The bridge is visible from the nearby Highway. Its an amazing structure and shipping goods by ship is eco-friendly/cheap too.

</comment><comment><USER26> _Work started in 1998, with construction taking six years and costing €501 million._

Given that large US construction projects always seem to come out costing multiple billions of dollars, this seems quite cheap. The Eastern span of the Bay Bridge ran about $8 billion and Boston's Big Dig also multiple billions.

<comment><USER10> We Germans have noticed this deficiency in our history of construction projects and are currently making up for it in one go with the new Berlin Airport: original planned opening in 2011, still not done and currently about 3.7 billion EUR over budget.</comment></comment>


Three Tips For Getting Started In the Indie Gaming Biz - <AUTHOR> http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/02/three-tips-for-getting-started-in-indie.html <comment><USER3> I would add, for the benefit of sixteen year olds like myself: you will almost certainly not ship a game as your first well-done piece of software. Get some experience and come back later. ( _cough_ Or never. _cough_ Games are a terrible industry to be in for the overwhelming majority of programmers. Starting a business is hard enough without handicapping yourself that way and competing with a virtually infinite population of people willing to work for nothing. But I didn't want to hear that at sixteen either.)

<comment><USER4> Seconded.

If you're in gamedev(as I am), you're essentially going into it as your lifestyle. You can make it a reasonably sane, healthy one if you can find a niche and make it as an indie, but good money won't ever be the motivating factor, and working in the studio environment is harsh and essentially requires migrating to find new work every time you're taken off a project. When new segments take off, like casual gaming did a few years ago, or social gaming more recently, you have a better chance of money and stable employment, but it'll fade away when the market saturates.

That said, the bar to make it is really high. It's not as impossibly high as making it as a musician, I think, because the variety of situations and skillsets is exponentially larger in the interactive multimedia context - <USER2> you always have less competition for your particular skillset - but it's definitely harder than "business programming" because you can add as many technical challenges as you want(soft real-time simulations, physics, graphics, audio, world persistence, networking, tools+scaffolding....) and still have only scratched the surface on what the computer is potentially capable of as an entertainment device.

If you take pains to avoid technical challenges you can make games more quickly, but you have to take on at least one or two to have a game, and adding more usually helps quality. Plus, the code alone doesn't make a game. The final game is the result of code+assets+design+player feedback - and lots of meticulous details. Game design isn't terribly different from business in that you have to make tons of hard decisions with little information immediately available. And like in business, you can get more info, but you have to work at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would suggest anyone interested try their hand in Flash, it's quite a powerful tool for rapid prototyping and even fully releasing games, and a good platform to learn about rich interfaces on.

There's also a ton of tutorials, and if you're good at it you can make some pretty decent cash upfront + residuals.

Failing that, Visual Studio + XNA is by far the best you're going to get your hands on for free.

<comment><USER6> For those interested in learning, Epic now provide the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) for free to those who wish to use it in non-commercial capacity. This means that whilst you can't sell anything you make with it, you can get your hands on the full Unreal 3.0 engine that powers many modern games (eg. Gears of War, Bioshock 2), and do whatever you like with it. Great for prototyping, experimenting and generally learning about game development.</comment></comment>


WP8 emulator requires a Nehalem processor due to SLAT enabled requirements - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-for-windows-phone#product-express-phone-requirements

<comment><USER2> not new!</comment>


Show HN: Turning thoughts and prayers into crypto coin charity support - <AUTHOR> https://www.thoughtsandprayers.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all. I decided to stop lurking and actually try to post something. I am hoping this effort could actually help people. Please let me know your thoughts about how I can make it better, be more transparent, and of course any other comments you have. Thanks.</comment>


China has carried out a test flight of an aerial vehicle for cargo delivery - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2117438/drone-could-deliver-cargo-islets-south-china-sea-makes <comment><USER2> The key word missing from the submitted title is _unmanned_.

An "aerial vehicle for cargo delivery" could be _any_ aircraft.</comment>