The Feedback Fallacy - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy <comment><USER2> When I hear people talking up their policy of

 _> "encouraging harsh feedback" and subjecting workers to "intense and awkward" real-time 360s_

... I can't help but think how much a review there sounds like a capitalist version of a Maoist "struggle session" (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session)).

The point of a struggle session wasn't to build people up; it was to tear them down. A culture where the way you move up is by tearing your colleagues down is generally a dysfunctional culture. Everybody involved ends up losing sight of things outside their four walls (such as, you know, _what customers want_ ), because they're spending all their time squaring off against each other internally.

I would suggest a healthier, more sustainable culture could be imagined by contemplating these words from the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation, chapter 27: [http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=27&a=Stephen+Mitchell](http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=27&a=Stephen+Mitchell)):

 _What is a good man but a bad man 's teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man's job?_

<comment><USER3> So far, all of the people I know that have been boasting about their "I gave brutally honest feedback" only mean "I will tear you down at every opportunity".

It is always "brutaly honest when it comes to put people down, but weirdly enough, these same person never have positive feedback to give.

Even if it was the case, it would not be worth it. Even as a foreigner weirded out by the "everything is awesome" way of speaking in California, tearing down your colleagues is not how you build a healthy team.

<comment><USER4> "People who are brutally honest generally enjoy the brutality more than the honesty." \- Richard Needham

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How the author seems to get and present such a distorted view of the original Netflix culture slides (which we modeled quite a lot of our original culture from) is completely beyond me. Nowhere did anybody say that feedback should be a one sided activity, here's the original source for your reference:

[https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/11-11Com...](https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/11-11CommunicationYou_listen_well_instead_ofreacting)

The "Communication" slide (p.11) even _starts_ with the skill of listening rather than talking well.

We're living an open, candid, two sided feedback culture in our company and it's by far the best thing that has ever happened to my personal development. The impact on my own perception and management style has been tremendous. Maybe I'm biased by being a founder, but on our most recent anonymous employee survey, structured feedback got an average 8/10 on satisfaction.

I take that just like the original ideas of Scrum or Agile, transparent Feedback culture has apparently been bastardized enough by toxic companies living the letter but not the spirit that it's apparently starting to get into a negative perception... that's a pity but won't stop us from giving and getting transparent feedback regularly.

<comment><USER6> Having worked in a large company that is famous for its feedback culture, I think the type of feedback culture you refer to is hard to scale. While I think it helps people improve, I've mostly seen how feedback is used to hurt people.

<comment><USER7> +1 to this, at scale it's really important to channel feedback on useful topics. Learning that everyone hates working with your authentication system is really quite different than everyone hating the lone maintainer who keeps it alive in their "spare time".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that > of their own feelings and experiences

Side note, but this strikes me as extremely wrong, based on 35 years of living among humans. Humans have unsurpassed abilities of self-deception, cognitive dissonance tolerance, and building monumental mental models to hide the truth about themselves from themselves.

As one economist put it, your 'self' isn't the CEO, it's the PR department. You produce a PR-approved spin of your own experiences and feelings for your internal, conscious consumption.

<comment><USER9> I think the error is including experiences.

I am the sole source for what I'm feeling. Whether I admit that or not is another story, but if I think I feel sad, then I feel sad.

Now, whether that emotion is justified is another story and whether the related experience should induce sadness can be up for debate and if I'm interpreting the situation correctly and all of that.

But we can't argue that I'm not feeling sad. I would probably have said that "The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and perspectives"

<comment><USER10> > but if I think I feel sad, then I feel sad.

Our sensitivity to our own emotions doesn't seem to be that great. People talk about happiness sneaking up on you, or having a realization that they're unhappy in a relationship. Presumably the feelings were there, but they weren't conscious of it.

I suspect if I did have dials in my head that displayed the level of each emotion, I'd go insane trying to move the needles. There may be some logic to the arrangement.

<comment><USER9> This doesn't actually go against what's being said.

Unexamined feelings are still felt. I'm still the only one who can tell you with 100% accuracy what I'm feeling.

Even if you're technically wrong about what you're feeling, there's no way for me to verify that you're wrong. You are still the sole arbiter of absolute truth on that matter.

Because people love to read into things that aren't there. Apparently, I have a very threatening face when I'm concentrating on something and I look kind of angry. I'm not. And it's kind of exhausting to have people try and tell you what you're feeling when they have no clue as to what's actually going on inside of your head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Adding up all the inaccurate redness ratings—"gray," "pretty gray," "whitish > gray," "muddy brown," and so on—and averaging them leads us further away > both from learning anything reliable about the individuals' personal > experiences of the rose and from the actual truth of how red our rose really > is.

I don't understand this comment. How does averaging noisy signal, even systematically noisy signal, result in something that is noisier than any individual signal? I would have assumed the average would converge on (real signal + systematic error).

<comment><USER12> The author is arguing that the real signal is zero and the systematic error is large, so you will always end up converging on a repeatable but useless value. Technically, taking only one sample could have gotten you closer because there is a 50% chance that the random error would have gone in the opposite direction to the systemic error, although the author is wrong to phrase that like it's some kind of advantage, because the other fifty percent of the time the random error will make the total error even worse.

<comment><USER11> They say later that

> When a feedback instrument surveys eight colleagues about your business > acumen, your score of 3.79 is far greater a distortion than if it simply > surveyed one person about you—the 3.79 number is all noise, no signal.

Which implies to me that they believe there is signal there, but that it goes away when aggregated?

<comment><USER13> I think by "surveyed" they don't mean "asked one person for a score" but rather got some overall information from one person including their qualitative feelings and perceptions. There is signal in those as they discuss elsewhere in the article, but the quantitative rating allegedly has no value even when averaging. That's the charitable reading, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Agreed feedback is tough. One of the problems is that it depends a lot on the setting and team. A person in one team might get some kind of feedback, but in another team the same person could get the opposite advice.

The other problem in our industry being relative inexperience of many people. When everyone in the team has had < 5yrs experience who is really qualified to objectively describe what a person is doing wrong? I know when I was a an inexperienced manager I gave "constructive feedback" that I now recognize was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the simple actionable advice near the end in the "Explore the present, past, and future" section.

The authors' biographies just below that caught my attention:

 _Ashley Goodall is the senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco Systems and a coauthor of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World_

Cisco Systems is the kind of giant multinational conglomerate that I would expect to be a (to put it euphemistically) corporate shithole. The kind of place where this kind of forward-thinking management gets lip-service but in the end, for the most part, it's the same kind of Gervais Principle Hunger Games hierarchy we've come to deride and deplore in these type of threads.

Is this not the case?

<comment><USER16> Ever since I read McKinsey's "in search of excellence" I've been a bit skeptical of these sort of "to run your company better just follow this one weird trick" pieces. The book when I read it was quite convincing, but when I read the results of the companies cited as "excellent" by the book later on, about half had gone bankrupt or otherwise ceased trading!

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

<comment><USER17> GE and Jack Welch come to mind. For a long time they were held up as an example of good management but somehow this didn't result in a long term healthy company.

<comment><USER12> If you're hearing about good anything, you're hearing about good marketing. ;)

<comment><USER18> All conversation is a continuation of psychological warfare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> managers spend way too much time on trying to get inside their employees head and fiddle around imho, they really don't have the skills or training. if they spent this time on actually helping do the work in terms of what's needed and wanted so everyone could just go home then the world would be a much better place.

<comment><USER20> Yes. They'd hire someone like Wayne Dyer to develop treatment plans at a psychiatric hospital. My favorite personal example was when my employer hired a management engineering consultant company to help people who spent their time in meetings to trim fat, i.e., fire people who did the work. One of the ways that was used to help us dumb people understand what a quality product is was to ask us which restuarant has a higher quality product: a gourmet steakhouse or McDonald's. The answer? It was supposed to be a 'gotcha' of course. People inevitably answered the "gourmet steakhouse", but our brilliant teacher laid down some truth that day: McDonald's is of equally high quality because they do very well at providing a consistent product throughout all of their franchises. I told her that there's a difference between consistency and quality. A consistently low quality product is still a low quality product. Management just didn't get it. This was at a time in the early 90s when my employers touted themselves as being a "World Class Hospital". What kind of claim is that when American hospitals were world beaters?

<comment><USER21> This is such a cliche about consistency anyway. Who says they are consistent? The whole thing about franchising is they are independent businesses, and McDonald's isn't harmed if a given one does terribly and goes out of business.

Certainly after some critical mass, you don't have to be as consistent to retain customers. We all know how first impressions matter at any job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The best I can recommend for managers: [https://roadmap.manager- tools.com/product/basics/1](https://roadmap.manager- tools.com/product/basics/1)

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey, we're in my territory!

Something to note is this premise is disputed by A LOT of experts in this domain. They've been challenged to a debate on this by Marc Effron (not my favorite guy but does generally have grounded thinking in his work) with proceeds benefiting charity but no uptake yet. They have also not shared their data in a way that enables replication or outside validation (or hadn't lest I checked). They is a pretty robust history of peer-reviewed research that doesn't come to the same conclusion.

I think they are on to _something_ here but I think they are taking too far. For their "Source of Truth" section, most of what they say is true, particularly about rating and assessment of employees. Extending that to say suggestions on future behavior from others is also value-less is wrong. The former is problematic because it's treated as a source of objective truth that personnel decisions are made against, the latter is clearly a single subjective data point people can reflect on and potentially integrate into future behavior.

For "How We Learn" section, much of the words written are true but the conclusion goes beyond what I have seen data justify. Yes, we get better faster at the things we're already better at. Should that mean focusing on strengths is often a better coaching direction than weaknesses, yes. Does that mean we shouldn't do the latter or that it is value-less? No. It _does_ mean we have to find ways to make weakness-oriented feedback happen in a repeatably non-threatening way.

On the "Excellence" section I'm again in agreement with most of it, but have fewer overall critiques. I should think more about this. I still say the conclusions are not natural endpoints for the points he makes.

Then, interestingly there is a table near the bottom. I find it interesting that many of those things you should "Try" rather than "Instead of" are indeed types of feedback and modern organizational development professionals espouse. Language really does matter, that's a great table with great suggestions, and most of those are feedback prompts.

All that said, I truly like Marcus Buckingham and find his work to typically be evidence-based (to the extent work like this can be) and on solid ground. Here is a brief video of him that is on a related topic that I think everyone should really take to heart if interested in this topic. [https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/rwtb/performance- management...](https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/rwtb/performance-management- is-two-things/)

</comment><comment><USER24> In my limited experience as a developer, managers and supervisors need to first open their mouths before we can determine if the feedback is good or not.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe this is some problem on a large institution level. For me, every time something I'd done was not correct or I'd failed, it felt very valuable to me that someone noticed and told me and how they wanted it to be. It reinforced in my mind what was good and that what I thought was not was, in fact, not. I always felt way better coming out of an interaction like that.

The worst feeling is when I feel something is going poorly and no one will tell me they think that about my thing.

</comment><comment><USER26> The part about pain isn't actually necessarily true. When I was recovering from surgery, they would ask "on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst possible pain, how much pain are you feeling?" I imagined how excruciatingly bad the worst possible pain would be and rated my pain a 2. When my pain went up to a self-reported 3, the nurses were surprised to find me crying from the pain...

Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...

<comment><USER27> > Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...

That's the exact point the author was making with this example. A doctor cannot normalize pain ratings across patients, and has to rely on each patient scoring their own pain relative to their own experiences. Your 2/10 could be 7/10 for someone else - all that matters is that you have a measurement stick to compare pain for yourself, so that medical staff know that your 3/10 is more than your 2/10.

<comment><USER26> The problem is that my 2/10 is rather distressful and doctors assume it isn't, because they assume that self-reported pain ratings map consistently to subjective levels of distress across patients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The recent Malcolm Gladwell book also talks about how poorly we size up others. Oh and I really like "Excellence is idiosyncratic.", very true.

</comment><comment><USER29> Feedback is dangerous for many reasons, but mostly because the signal/noise ratio is mediocre.

The problem with noisy feedback is the instability of the closed-loop system, and it can quickly become erratic and ultimately counter-productive.

Thus, we should only use feedback when the signal is clear and loud, mostly at the extremes, when performance is outstanding or catastrophic.

</comment><comment><USER30> Paraphrased \- How should giving feedback work? > Precisely how it will be received most effectively. \- How is that? > You must learn that for every person. Here are some ideas.

This is something that I feel like many in engineering have to grow to appreciate (or at least I did, and I see some of the same markers in many of my peers that I had.) not just about feedback and interpersonal relationships, but about everything. There are likely many things that you have an intuitive feel for, but just as many you have to calmly, slowly, and carefully consider yourself, your actions, and their consequences, if you want to be more effective or be better.

In the past, I coached jr. high and highschool boys basketball. Some players got lots of leeway to make mistakes before getting subbed out during games, because they were capable of learning from those mistakes themselves, and coach feedback didn't help their learning process. Other players would make mistakes and immediately get subbed out, mistake pointed out, discussed, correct action proscribed, and shortly subbed back in. They needed the outside feedback to process "that was a mistake, I shouldn't do it again." Some players goofed off in practice and got to sit on the sidelines. Some players goofed off in practice and got to run laps. I had several discussions with parents about why their son got "special treatment" when really it was about me trying to give effective feedback. And I'm not saying I was awesome at this, or always adjusted my approach for every kid in every situation, but when I could, everyone's results were better.

A larger rant I have on this and any topic that circles back to effectiveness is how to respond to "What is the best thing to do in X situation?"

For example, today in a team meeting, my group was discussing way to improve performance in one of our systems. In the past, I've seen caching greatly improve performance over database optimizations, so I'm optimistic about a better caching paradigm, whereas one of my team members is looking at a longer-term code maintenance and simplicity perspective that says, do fewer things better, so optimize our database calls. Long slog to figure out which is better, but we can't just generalize from past experience. What should we do? Precisely what is needed. How do we know that? We'll have figure it out. We have some general guidelines, but we'll have to figure out how to apply them to this situation.

I have two kids. The older one would usually go to anyone when he was a baby and be happy, smile, coo, play, for 10 minutes or so before he would get worried about where mom or dad were. The younger one usually senses that mom or dad might be handing him off, and gets upset and takes 5 minutes before he calms down. But sometimes the older one would cry going from my wife to me, and sometimes the younger one will happily go with the church nursery lady. Why? I don't know. We'll figure it out.

Generalization is great, generalization is helpful, generalization is not right in every case. With people, if you really want to be effective in feedback or anything, you have to figure out how to have an approach that you are generally successful at, how to generally alter it when you need to, and then laser focus that flexibility for the people, relationships, and situations that you really care about.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is an excellent article that deserves careful study.</comment>


A Post-Mortem on the Recent Developer Story Information Leak - <AUTHOR> http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340960/a-post-mortem-on-the-recent-developer-story-information-leak <comment><USER2> I wish more companies could be this transparent</comment>


I Turned Down Amazon 3x in a Year - <AUTHOR> https://shakycode.com/i-turned-down-amazon-three-times-in-a-year-f6b193db13d6#.1s45zicod <comment><USER2> I've been contacted twice by their recruiters and also hear that they have contacted many other developers in my town.

Perhaps they need to "think different" about moving people to Seattle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, I wouldn't work for Amazon even if I was without a job and they offered me a 250k salary. My experience with them was negative x3</comment></comment>


Why I'm Selling My Ski/Travel Startup for $5000 - <AUTHOR> I've decided to sell my skiing website WhereTo.Ski (https://whereto.ski/) on Flippa.com. It's bittersweet sale for me as I do love the idea, the industry, but my environmental concerns with promoting travel have trumped my desire to carry on with it.
WhereTo.Ski connects skiers to the best places to go skiing based on snow forecast, base snow depth and cheapest flights (from SkyScanner).
We had some great future plans to integrate way more API's like Airbnb but focused on Private Chalets to start with as I've done a few ski seasons so had a few contacts.
The site has been automated as much as possible so haven't really needed to touch it technically all season. We've done some copy changes but that's about it. It's a complete JavaScript stack so the new owner would need to know React, Redux, MongoDB and Node.
The most difficult parts we found was to get the correct based snow depth. You can buy this but it was pretty expensive so we ended up making our own scraper which is essentially what everyone else does anyway.
I've added a reserve of $5000 as that's how much time I took off work to make it. I hope you like the idea and the site as much as I do and please let me know if you have any questions and I want to make sure it goes to a great new home.
Visit the site: https://whereto.ski/
Buy it now: https://flippa.com/9864563-whereto-ski <comment><USER2> $5k is a steal!

<comment><USER3> +1</comment></comment>


Show HN: Detective Droid - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I spent this Labor Day weekend working on an idea I have had for a while. I just published it to Github and would really appreciate if people helped contribute.
The project can detect what libraries/sdks are being used inside applications that you have installed on your device. Ever wonder what advertising networks Angry Birds uses to monetize? Well now you can find out!
Github: https://github.com/michaelcarrano/detective-droid
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.michaelcarrano.detectivedroid <comment><USER2> It's not uninteresting that's for sure, would people be ready to pay for that I don't know.

Thinking out loud: what could be nice would be to use what you have done to collect a related libraries database and then maybe build a recommender system. According to its personal project one could on your website and see what tools are commonly used with what he already use. An hypothesis: if you drive enough traffic to paid libraries or services (for example I have seen that Udacity used Mixpanel which is paid), maybe those people would be willing to pay you for helping the discovery of their product.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't really thought about monetizing it but eventually, I do want to collect data/statistics.

There is already an Android application available like what I just released which collects data/stats. [http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/overview](http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/overview)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Easily Add a CMS to Your JavaScript App - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-node <comment><USER2> Looks very similar to [https://github.com/asm- products/buckets](https://github.com/asm-products/buckets)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly. Cosmic JS is a flexible, platform-agnostic cloud-hosted CMS, whereas the one you linked to is installed and locked into Node / MongoDB.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI, there's also a browser version: [https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs- browser](https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-browser)

An example React app that uses the Cosmic JS browser client: [https://github.com/tonyspiro/react-flux- cosmicjs](https://github.com/tonyspiro/react-flux-cosmicjs)

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this integrate into existing Content Management Systems like WordPress, Drupal, and such?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cosmic JS allows you to create an on-the-fly CMS / API to power your full app or website or you could also integrate it with only a part of your website.

Check out the Docs to learn about the Cosmic JS API: [https://cosmicjs.com/docs](https://cosmicjs.com/docs)

There's also an easy export plugin available for an existing WordPress site: [https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-wp- export](https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmicjs-wp-export)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What non-technical skills do you wish you were better at? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Drawing. With programming, I can create a remarkable amount of things out of almost nothing, and I always wanted to do the same with pictures, but there's just something missing (and yeah, I tried the whole side-of-brain approach).

With a lot of other lacking abilities, I feel like I could just punch through with enough dedication and discipline (music, business etc.). But some simple lines and curves...

</comment><comment><USER3> prioritising tasks. being able to discern what tasks are essential and what tasks are mildly useful

</comment><comment><USER4> Managing, Leading and motivation

</comment><comment><USER5> talking to girls. I suck when it comes to talking to girls</comment>


2020 Psychedelic Industry Insights Report - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/emkhwt/2020_psychedelic_industry_insights_report/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is by far the most comprehensive and quantitative report we've seen. Our firm is also working on publishing industry insights: tabularasa.ventures/research

Incredibly impressed with the ThinkMyco team</comment>


France's government is building its own encrypted messenger service - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-privacy/france-builds-whatsapp-rival-due-to-surveillance-risk-idUSKBN1HN258 <comment><USER2> This isn't a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we've been providing some support to them :) It's very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source and open standards.

<comment><USER3> Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?

<comment><USER2> Not really - the protocols are very different. Matrix is a way of replicating conversation history over a mesh of participating servers; a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. XMPP is much lighter weight and builds on simpler message passing and pubsub primitives. You can use both to build comms systems, but they take opposite engineering and governance approaches on almost everything.

<comment><USER4> > a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) > to one another.

Why would you need to do that? Why not just give every message a timestamp, make sure they get sent, and sort the messages on the receiver side? If you're really concerned about message order, you could give every message a unique id, and send out the id of the previous message with every message, and improve your sort function accordingly.

<comment><USER2> Absolute timestamps cannot be trusted in a byzantine environment, so we do precisely as you suggest - messages are transmitted with pointers to the previous message(s) in the room message graph, so you get a partial ordering within the room (just like git). We also sign the messages into a merkle graph (like git) to stop the shared datastructure being tampered with.

<comment><USER5> So it's a blockchain! /s

<comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/946886702932557824](https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/946886702932557824) :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there is an attack...

The worst is that it will cost tax payers millions

<comment><USER7> Such a comment is meaningless without context. How often do corporate IT projects fail? How often do government IT projects fail?

<comment><USER8> How is the corporate failure rate relevant?

<comment><USER7> It is relevant because IT projects are inherently difficult, and many of them fail. Just because the French government failed at two projects mentioned in the original comment does not mean that a) it's particularly bad at IT projects or b) it will necessarily fail again. Having the corporate failure rate as a baseline could help assess the proficiency of governments around the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The spin here is funny. The article pretends this is done to prevent eavesdropping, while it is probably closer to the truth that this is done to _ensure_ eavesdropping by the DGSI.

<comment><USER10> If you're talking about the metadata, yes, probably. It 's the same kind of eavesdropping capability you'd have from Signal servers (i.e: not much).

Also: from what we've seen of Macron's team, they've proven that they have good-enough internal technical advisors; so it remains to be seen if they'd use a solution that can be eavesdropped.

<comment><USER11> Unless you can verify the deployed build against an open source code, whether the code is open source or not is irrelevant, you trust all the intermediaries. Which is ok for a corporate actor but probably not when you are a sovereign actor and know you are dealing with a keen NSA. How could you control that Apple or Google wouldn't patch the app before it gets deployed or after it has been deployed?

<comment><USER10> On Android (at least); you can verify that the apk is signed with the developer's key; and Signal provides reproducible builds. Then the app is designed to not trust the server.

I think we are in agreement that Apple or Google _could_ patch the app before it gets deployed. But AFAIK it has never been done yet, and if it ever happens, it would undermine all credibility of the platform. Of course a state actor wouldn't want to be the first to find out.

<comment><USER11> Thinking about it, Google and Apple actually don't even need to patch the app, they have access to all key strokes and screen rendering. It just needs to be a few lines of code hidden anywhere.

<comment><USER10> This would need patching the OS at runtime, but yes, it's also possible.

<comment><USER11> What I mean is that perhaps they already have.

<comment><USER10> It's a possibility. It just wouldn't make any business sense, it's a pure self-destruct button. And there are hundreds of reverse engineers on both platforms that could have caught it by now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's amusing is that foreign secret services are not the only ones snooping on French politicians. French secret services have a whole department (formally called RG) in charge of collecting files on every domestic public figure (own file is a interesting ritual read for a newly promoted minister of interior). The justice dept had also an interesting interpretation of attorney client privilege where it argued recently that it was ok to snoop if retroactively a wrongdoing is found (the Sarkozy case).

If I was a tech savvy French politician I would try to use something that is neither in control of French authorities nor foreign. But French politicians are almost exclusively political science graduates, lawyers, doctors and teachers, not typically tech savvy.

<comment><USER12> > But French politicians are almost exclusively political science graduates, > lawyers, doctors and teachers, not typically tech savvy.

I think this applies to politicians worldwide, at least in western countries.

<comment><USER8> We have a non-insignificant number of engineers as politicians in Portugal. E.g. the current Secretary-General of the UN is one of our ex-PMs, and is an ex-assistant professor of Telecommunication Signals after having graduated in Physics and Electrical Engineering.

Considering our political panorama, I don't think this has helped much, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember when they tried to build a Google rival:

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/quaero-qu-est-ce-que- c-e...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/quaero-qu-est-ce-que-c-est-franco- german-rival-to-google-flops-a-455775.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> When tax dollars go into open source, it's just an endless chain of win-win- win-win-...

News like this is just great. :-)

<comment><USER15> Yeah its a total win for the french tax payer who will spend a bunch of money on a service that they neither need nor want.

<comment><USER16> It seems that the source have already been published and is using open protocols.

I'm actually greatly pleased that my taxes are spent on an app that is actually accessible from the public, and will benefit open source project. This should be the standard way for most government development projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome to see! My only wish was that matrix and riot were clearly mentioned. This would have significantly raised the profiles of both projects that I'm a big fan of.

To @Arathorn and any other members of matrix and riot teams, kudos on this news, and great job! Next step - of course, beyond the tech work already being done on the platforms - is to promote the heck out of this news!! ;-)

EDIT: Ok, there's at least some other promotion elsewhere which mentions matrix and riot; cool: [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/france-alternative- whatsap...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/france-alternative-whatsapp- telegram-spying-concerns,36898.html)

<comment><USER2> thanks :) the problem here is that the government comms guys simply don't know about Matrix or care about the underlying protocol, hence lack of reference to Matrix. Hopefully the word will get out anyway!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Both WhatsApp and Telegram promote themselves as ultra secure because all > their data is encrypted from start to finish.

Sigh. I wish they had added that Telegram is not "encrypted from start to finish"

</comment><comment><USER19> See also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero)

</comment><comment><USER20> What about using Signal? Will they do something else then using the Signal protocol? If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.

<comment><USER21> I thought about that too...if their concern is that they want the server to remain on French soil could they not spin up an instance of their own Signal server?

[https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Server](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there a reason a crypto messenger team wouldn't seem to publish their protocol specs using BAN notation that people can objectively reason about, and then verify the implementation of it in the code?

As in, if you can't explain it this clearly, what's the problem?

[http://www.lsv.fr/Software/spore/table.html](http://www.lsv.fr/Software/spore/table.html)

Having worked on some crypto projects, the admonition to, "just read the code," is disingenuous, because without a formal spec, you have nothing to compare the code to or evaluate the code against.

<comment><USER2> the crypto specs are [https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/olm.rst](https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/olm.rst) and [https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/megolm.rst](https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/megolm.rst) (amongst others).

<comment><USER22> Now that's how it's done. Nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't quite get the need of messaging service for the government when there are already other secure/official means of communication. Would any corporate promote messaging app over official email communication channel for employees?

<comment><USER24> I though we already had such a service, used by top-level government executives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are these communications preserved for open records purposes? This seems like a good way for government officials to avoid scrutiny from the public or history.

</comment><comment><USER26> What is the best Matrix/Riot Android app right now? I see Riot only has 50k downloads which I'm not sure if is a mistake or reality.

<comment><USER17> Asking for "the best" might be a bit subjective, no? Early on, the Matrix Console Android client was ok; i had no problems with it. Though i think it was intended merely as a reference implementation. The Riot client (it used to be called Vector client) gained alot of attention since the beginning, so its got plenty more polish. I honestly have not used any of the other clients - since happily sticking with Riot (web client). But the matrix.org site does have a list of clients/apps (and the list is much longer than I recall since the last time I checked): [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix- now.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html) You lose nothing in giving a few of them a try. Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's funny how I'm learning things about my government first on NH and not on national news.

Edit: and I've learned a few other things (SAIP, Quaero)

</comment><comment><USER27> Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution.

But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "what they are doing" and deliver a crappy platform that no one will use :) It already happened too many times.

<comment><USER28> The article was pretty light on details, but isn't it more a case of "Not Hosted Here"? This is the only relevant parts I could find:

> We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not > encrypted by the United States or Russia

and

> The French government's encrypted app has been developed on the basis of > free-to-use code found on the Internet.

I'm hoping this means they are using a mature, open implementation for most of it.

<comment><USER29> +1 on that. Based on the article I hope they're using signal or some other reputable crypto. Ideally they'll host it in France and provide a good UI

<comment><USER6> I think it is intended for the government only, you'll never see it as a citizen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wasn't PGP illegal in France in the 1990s? Do they expect people to trust them?

<comment><USER31> > Wasn't PGP illegal in France in the 1990s?

Essentially yes (and not just PGP), strong cryptography fell under arms regulations and required, essentially, the equivalent of a firearms license (but was, by contrast, almost impossible to obtain). Import and export of cryptography technology are still regulated, though [1].

> Do they expect people to trust them?

I'm not sure what you mean by that: This isn't a trust issue, the French government is/was completely upfront about these restrictions.

[1] [https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT...](https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000801164#LEGISCTA000006136109)

<comment> loup-vaillant Wait a minute, does this means what I have done with Monocypher¹ is illegal? I live in France, and I clearly provided and exported "cryptographic means", and I haven't written a word to our prime minister.

Same goes for Libsodium by the way, I doubt Franck Denis bothered to ask permission as well.

[1]: [https://monocypher.org](https://monocypher.org)

<comment><USER31> As far as I understand (I haven't lived in France since 2004), the import and export restrictions are essentially unenforced, and nobody cares (as long as you're not actively trading with embargoed nations). But if you're working in cryptography, it might be worth talking to other local experts. There are surely user groups that know the legal situation inside out — at the very least, publicly funded researchers should be able to point you to resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wish I would have seen a GitHub repo opened by the French government (à la Keybase) instead of an article from Reuters telling me that 20 officials beta- test an app developed by "we don't know who" using the taxes that pay my parents and friends. Show, don't tell.

<comment><USER2> So there is an open github repo, and I'm a bit surprised they're not linking to it - I think this reflects more on the government comms processes than the FOSS side of things. On the Matrix side we're seeing what we can do to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Would it not have been enough to pass a law that prohibited survaillance?

It's a wonderful initiative, but I doubt the average user will switch.

</comment><comment><USER34> Until there is an open source micro chip i won't believe that any security protocol is not being cheated.

</comment><comment><USER4> When are they rolling their own CPUs, in light of Intel ME and associated surveillance risk?

<comment><USER35> So if it can't be perfect we might as well give up? One time pads or go home?

<comment><USER4> No, I was just wondering how far they are prepared to go.</comment></comment></comment>


Does working for highly esteemed companies actually help build your career? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/ff825564963a

<comment><USER2> I'm a bit disturbed and annoyed by the popularity of the concept of social proof, and the fact that people assume its a good thing. I never see it discussed critically.

How is it not a mechanism of entrenched elitism? Wouldn't people born into higher socioeconomic circumstances inherently end up with a lot more "social proof" surrounding themselves simply as a result of the circles they've walked among? Doesn't this give rise to the "old boy network" and similar phenomena? Isn't it anti-meritocratic, anti-democratic, and generally something that hearkens back to the socialite mechanics of European aristocracies?

Is its popularity a sign that our own capitalist / democratic system is trending back in the direction of feudalism and aristocracy?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your advice/comments on "publish or perish" culture in academia? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Think you meant "publish or perish." I'm not on academia, but it seems like it'd lead to a lot of filler articles written.

The problem with research is that it doesn't always move in predictable increments. Sometimes things do take a few years to actually have any sort of breakthrough. Secondly, it might pressure researchers to falsify their data just to appear that they're making progress. I remember this being a contentious issue laster year.</comment>


When startup get funded by YC? - <AUTHOR> Does startup get funded upon selection of application? Or at later stage after successful completion of 3 month YC accelerator program. <comment><USER2> when they get selected and complete the company incorporation in USA (if they are not already incorporated).</comment>


Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss talk about Startups, Angel Investing, YC and Traffic/Conversions - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/3934635

<comment><USER2> Great first show, love that they kicked off discussion around naming and branding. It's usually one of the first issues to come to surface amongst founders, and one of the most misunderstood areas of importance in my belief.

I also think it's worth noting that the bar for consumer sites / services is set pretty high now. So while server and infrastructure costs are decreasing, one should probably put some of those costs savings into developing a great brand (very important in B2C). After all, infrastructure costs decrease with competition — marketing and branding increase. It's pretty surprising what a well-executed brand can do for you, I consider it low hanging fruit with the right person managing it; however, when mismanaged it can turn into a your own barrier.

</comment><comment><USER3> The way he used Google AdWords to test book titles is exactly what I described here ([http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/11/testing-book-titles-using- go...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/11/testing-book-titles-using-google.html)) when I was working on the title for The Geek Atlas.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. When people clicked on the ad, what did it say on the landing page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny how as an investor, Kevin is clearly unaware of iminlikewithyou's name change to omgopop. :P

<comment><USER6> omgpop

<comment><USER7> the real question is how you pronounce it. I think saying "ohh my god, pop!" is the way to go. "Ohh em gee pop", just doesn't work for me.

By the way, if there is one game I think you might actually play it's <http://letterblox.com>

<comment><USER8> I'm inclined to pronounce it "ahh-mg pop".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Summary:

Use Google Adwords to A/B test your company/product name. Throw up 6-12 names on adwords, have them lead to blank pages, find out what names convert the best.

Both Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose are doing angel investing.

I lost interest after that.

<comment><USER10> I'd suggest a really good lawyer who would look at the deal with an adversarial perspective before taking money from either of them. Just my two cents.

<comment><USER9> Speaking from experience Owen. :) You would know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER10> While sometimes I overdo the bitching and moaning (especially after a few beers) I think I'm offering solid advice in this case. Though I guess I'm being a little unfair to Tim Ferris - I've only met him in bars, he may have some integrity. He just seems like a tool.

<comment><USER9> I actually rather enjoy your comments about the Digg fiasco. I've _never_ gotten the impression that Kevin was a great business man. And, I'd avoid taking business advice from him most days of the week, although his celebrity might be handy. I'd definitely take advice from you re: business arrangements with Kevin any day of the week, however.

Tim... I agree. Very tool like. I actually liked Tim's book. He's a rampant self promoter, and turns a lot of people off. But, he did have some interesting ideas, which I liked a lot, however. Having him as a angel or board member... I don't know. I'd have to think about that one a lot.

<comment><USER11> I've never had a negative impression of him. He is confident and forces you to think in a different direction. I also know the "4 hour" week is an exaggeration. Pay close attention and he does a lot of work related stuff (including writing a book) that consumes time. Nonetheless, he is providing a road map for things most of us have thought were unobtainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Transcript? I prefer reading/scanning to watching.

<comment><USER3> You can do as I did and listen to it and not watch. There's no actual need to watch these two poseurs on the sofa.

<comment><USER12> I prefer reading/scanning to listening, too. If I'm listening and doing something else, the moment the something else gets a bit complicated, I tune out what I'm listening to, and find I've missed half of it. If I sit down and really listen, I can't do much else... I'm just not much of a multitasker that way, I find paying serious attention to audio to be incompatible with working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does Tim Ferriss keep popping up everywhere?

<comment><USER14> He's got to do something with the 164 hours a week he's not working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Amazing video... I transcripted out all the great info and advice Tim and Kevin had to share, check it out <http://tinyurl.com/cpaw8o>

</comment><comment><USER16> Tim Ferriss seems way more savvy than Kevin Rose</comment>


Expert of nothing - <AUTHOR> http://joel.is/post/42713179646/expert-of-nothing

<comment><USER2> We have an apropos saying in journalism: "to be a journalist is to be great at nothing, but good at everything."

</comment><comment><USER3> As a side effect, you become expert in a lot of "soft skills" that are harder to quantify, but no less valuable.

</comment><comment><USER4> You are becoming an expert in something: your business.

In fact THE expert.</comment>


A curated list of community detection papers with implementations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benedekrozemberczki/awesome-community-detection <comment><AUTHOR> The papers included cover these families of methods:

1\. Factorization

2\. Deep Learning

3\. Label Propagation, Percolation and Random Walks

4\. Tensor Decomposition

5\. Spectral Clustering

6\. Cyclic Patterns

7\. Centrality and Cuts</comment>


Ask HN: How do you get startup ideas? - <AUTHOR> When I was in my early 20's I used to have lots of interesting ideas. I was lazy and as no one else was doing them I did nothing, as I figured there was no demand. 8 of them are now being done by large companies and appear successful.
Now I'm in my early 30's I'm less creative and have fewer ideas, and when I do 1+ companies are already doing it (usually 10+) and blogging about their success, or the market appears too small to be viable.
Where do you get your inspiration, and have you any suggestions? <comment><USER3> This might help. This is in no way comprehensive, but rather just to help you get unblocked, and that, age has less to do with creative ideas, than you are making it.

1\. Industries that disrespect their customers. Say, you had a bad service/sales rep experience. Then you tried to switch, but found out that every other large competitor to this one is as bad. Probably the reason why there are so many banking/financial services upstarts in the last couple of years.

Caveat - usually these businesses are good at building high switching costs into their products. How many times have you thought of ditching your bank, but have never got around to it?

2\. Fat and thin margins. If everyone is enjoying a fat margin, they are most likely colluding in their industry, and have some kind of (in)formal association barring anyone else to entry with lower price. Can you legally go against that trade association. Technology helps in leap frogging in these situations. Thin margin businesses (usually) indicate that all the efficiency that there is to be extracted has been. This can still be disrupted, if your tech can find new ways of doing things.

Finally, take a look at this - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade)

Fedric Tudor started the whole ice industry by cutting pieces of lake in the north and shipping them to south. People weren't even used to having ice in their drinks. He created a whole new market and industry.

This might have been said a million times, most ideas look bad on the surface. What makes them good is the execution. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Just keep your eyes and ears open. The set of all possible startup ideas is an infinite one, so no matter what your age/position/domain is, you can, at any point in your life find one or more ideas that can be turned into a startup. How to find them? => Just be a keen observer for a couple of days. Look at the people around you and assess the stuff that you go through on a daily basis and ask yourself whether you can fix something that's broken or do something to make it easier. The next question is, how better will your target customers' lives be when you solve that problem. If the answer is "a lot", then eureka! you have it. It's perfectly okay if the initial user base that you have considered is very small. But your solution has to make them love you very much

</comment><comment><USER5> Im always looking for what bugs me about doing xyz. Scratching your own itch is always a great place to start. So maybe keep a swipe file somewhere of notes on things that you think don't make sense/could be better.

Once you have a few ideas, then go about validating whether there really is a market for your ideas (ie Problem/Solution fit) and then take it from there.

Perhaps reading up on the lean startup methodology will help you in terms of practically progressing from idea to validation to mvp and beyond.

Also, if whatever that thing is, is something you're passionate about - <USER2> likelihood of your sticking with it over the long term is far greater than just doing it because it seems like a great idea/for the money.

</comment><comment><USER6> You don't know if the market is too small until you get out there and do some testing. Speculation isn't going to go far.

If you have an idea and discover that someone else did to, great! It's been partially validated. Which particular edge of it are you going to take? What differentiates it from their execution?

The subset of good ideas that have no current executors is way smaller than the subset of good ideas that can be successfully executed.

Don't give up only because someone else is already executing; do it better than them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I assume you've had jobs since then. What did you learn about the industry you're in? Where do you see problems that could be solved with software? And did you meet anyone on the business side of that industry that you think might want to be in a startup instead?

I didn't start from "I want to have a startup" and go looking for an idea. I started with an idea based on industry experience, and realized a startup is the way to get it done.

</comment><comment><USER8> I get startup ideas just from noticing things that are missing. For example if someone says "Man I wish there was a way to do that", I find opportunity in it and see if I can make a product for it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I took an entrepreneurship course a while back that would have us do daily "opportunity reports". These reports were a list of 50 business ideas. They could -- and most were -- awful and not feasible ideas, but the point is to produce 50 ideas every day. After the course of a few months, I noticed it started changing the way I see the world. Everything that I came across (blogs, standing in line at the grocery store, etc) I would be looking for opportunities.

I think that's a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER10> As always, PG has a great post on this: [http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Read Incessantly, business and tech blogs. The subconscious is this amazing place where startup idea incubation occurs. For me, as I read about all of the new things that exist, and all of the cool new technologies that are surfacing, my mind starts to make connections. I am then able to consider how such technologies could be expressed differently to solve other existing problems.

</comment><comment><USER12> Inefficiencies in life.

Anytime I notice something takes vastly longer than it should, then I know there must be a solution to fix that problem.</comment>


India's Nuclear Scientists Keep Dying Mysteriously (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qbepmd/why-are-indian-authorities-ignoring-the-deaths-of-nuclear-scientists <comment><USER2> Not only India's. Any developing country's nuclear scientists are either missing, given citizenship in a first world country or "went abroad" for research. There are many actors who do not want developing countries to progress in anyway. Be it nuclear,social or economic.

China is a good example in resisting these warfares/sabotages by foreign actors. They have effectively controlled foreign actors in meddling with their social & economic aspects (controlling fake news, social engineering by controlling the internet). Supporting homegrown technology companies than foreign ones. India should follow the same.

<comment><USER3> > India should follow the same.

I hope not. Just because it is effective doesn't mean it is right.

<comment><USER2> Though this does not appeal to the pro west crowd. If you have noticed, recently there is this anti China sentiment floating around on the internet and even on hackernews as well. This IMO is purposefully engineering to make China look bad, because they have had huge progress lately. China has effectively blocked all these social conditioning tactics from their population by wielding a greater control over the internet. It is effective and it is right for their progress as a nation.

If India starts to make progress, India will also be targeted. In a country divided by many languages and cultures, India is very vulnerable for social conditioning. The case of missing nuclear scientists is one of them.

<comment><USER4> "It is effective and it is right for their progress as a nation."................I'm sorry, what?

What about all the journalists and activists who are arrested, harassed, tortured and disappeared in China? Is it right for their progress?

<comment><USER2> The so called first world countries, its media, and its people, with good encouragement from certain sectors in the west, often confuse themselves with the world. US fears and dislikes loss of power and being irrelevant in Asia Pacific. The public digests news from these media houses and resonate the same elsewhere.

Among the state and non state actors, China is deeply disliked by global journalists too. It is also deeply disliked by Human Right Propagandists/Upholders, and the so called "global civil society on the internet". The problem is that these people have an ultra large impact on the perception because these are the people who control media, and a general person's access to information. They have abject monopoly over access to knowledge, and are deeply ideological. So much so that, these people are often found lobbying the United States and on the internet forums for policies that may harm the world. But they have huge power in Western discourse, and if they get pissed, they will start a whole ideological parade against their perceived nuisance. For US, it is simply their loss of influence that they are worried about.

The biggest people, and the most vocal, which leads to this perception, are the Global Civil Western Society, who just can't tolerate a state like China's to succeed. It is against their almost fanatically religious form of worship for some ideas, systems, and ideologies most of them tend to be under the guise of pro humanitarian but in reality is borderline jealousy and the fear of losing out. This also should be read in tandem with the fact that this is the very same society which supports the NRA, African American suffrage etc.

A similar phenomenon happened in the 1980s and 90s with Japan. The United States, not the world, was desperately concerned that Japan would not just pass over them in the future, but had already done so economically and culturally. The American mindset is extremely fickle, superficial, paranoid, and shortsighted when it comes to the possibility of foreign rivals. They just cant stand the very thought of competing in a global economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if there was any update to this in the last 4 years.

>But the most pressing issue isn't who might be behind the murders, but that the Indian government's apathy is potentially putting their high-value staff at even greater risk. Currently, these scientists, who are crucial to the development of India's nuclear programes, whether for energy or security, have "absolutely no protection at all. Nothing, zero," Madhav told me. "Which is amazing for people who are in a such a sensitive program."

That strikes me as odd, the possibility not mentioned in the article is that the Indian government is responsible. The behaviors of the Indian government in the article do sound suspicious. I understand not wanting to signal to your scientists the level of danger they're in but, given how valuable an asset these people are to the country, that India would've tried to protect them if it was aware at all of a threat and not complicit.

<comment><USER6> I doubt they can ultimately protect them, research takes decades and they want to live normal lives. Even the US Presidents hate their security bubble.

Short of putting them in military bases for decades...but even then, a bomb from above will take them out.

<comment><USER3> > Short of putting them in military bases for decades...

That's how the successful nuclear programs have done it, from the very beginning.

<comment><USER7> Not really, the nuclear physicists were largely allowed to travel freely. I am currently reading (listening to the audable book actually) "The making of the atomic bomb" by Richard Rhodes. I highly recommend the book.

<comment><USER3> I didn't interpret that as travel restrictions. Just put them under protection in everyday life, via secret cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Iran's too. [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/haggai-carmon/iran-nuclear- sc...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/haggai-carmon/iran-nuclear-scientist- killed_b_1206591.html)

[http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/11/world/meast/iran-who- kills...](http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/11/world/meast/iran-who-kills- scientists/index.html) Another profession not to get into. Thank God my second choice is crab fishing in Alaska.

Nukes are the ULTIMATE weapons, expect no mercy from your geopolitical enemies.

<comment><USER8> as far as i'm aware india has nukes. what would scientists have to improve on that.

<comment><USER3> More powerful nukes. Smaller nukes. More nukes per kg of material. Dialable yield nukes. Source obfuscated nukes. Optimal bombing strategies. Interpreting intelligence on foreign powers' attempts at same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could this just be weird statistical patterns? See other ones:

microbiologists post-9/11 [http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/deadbiologists...](http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/deadbiologists.html)

Russian diplomats [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/07/i...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/07/is- a-grand-conspiracy-killing-russian-diplomats-or-is-it-demographics/)

<comment><USER10> If by statistical pattern you mean that political enemies of Putin are statistically more likely to be assassinated. [https://extranewsfeed.com/the- trail-of-dead-russians-da27ee4...](https://extranewsfeed.com/the-trail-of- dead-russians-da27ee4a2bdc)

Erovinkin in particular is generally considered a key source in the Steele dossier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The United States recruited (or even pilfered) Nazi Germany's nuclear and aerospace engineers. Wanna bet they'd have had them killed if they hadn't agreed? Israel did it with both Iraq and Iran's nuclear engineers.

<comment><AUTHOR> The CIA has been known for its attempts at sabotaging Indian nuclear weapons efforts around '74 and '98 tests. One conspiracy theory is that CIA killed Homi Bhabha, considered the father of Indian nuclear program, in a plane crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > 11 nuclear scientists had unnatural deaths during 2009-13 in the country, > latest data provided by Department of Atomic Energy shows.

> In one case of Barc, police claims that he committed suicide because of > prolonged illness and closed the case while the remaining cases are still > under investigation.

> Two research fellows at died in a mysterious fire in the chemistry lab of > Barc, Trombay in 2010.

> A scientist of F-grade was found murdered at his residence in Mumbai. It is > suspected that he was strangulated but the murder accused remained untraced > till date.

> A D-grade scientist at RRCAT also allegedly committed suicide with police > closing the case.

> Another scientist posted at Kalpakkam allegedly jumped into the sea to end > his life in 2013 with the case is still under probe whereas a Mumbai based > scientist committed suicide by hanging, with police citing personal reasons > for the same.

> One scientist allegedly committed suicide by jumping into Kali river in > Karwar, Karnataka with police again pointing at personal reasons.

From: [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/11-nuclear- scienti...](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/11-nuclear-scientists- died-in-mysterious-circumstances-in-4-years/articleshow/49272275.cms)

similar article from Sunday Guardian newspaper.

> Atomic energy department saw 70 unnatural deaths in eight years

> The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre alone saw 38 of its officials die > unnaturally, primarily because of accidents, between 1 January 2008 and 1 > October 2016.

From: [http://www.sundayguardianlive.com/investigation/7559-atomic-...](http://www.sundayguardianlive.com/investigation/7559-atomic- energy-department-saw-70-unnatural-deaths-eight-years)

Now compare the noise made in those cases with noise made in following incidents.

Gauri Lankesh Murder:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/gauri-lankesh- ind...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/gauri-lankesh-india- dead.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/who-is- nex...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/who-is-next-killing- of-indian-journalist-gauri-lankesh-sparks- protests/2017/09/06/e0f2e6f8-9271-11e7-8482-8dc9a7af29f9_story.html)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia- india-41169817](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41169817)

[https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/gauri- lan...](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/gauri-lankeshs- death-bengaluru-on-high-alert/articleshow/60386107.cms)

Lynching:

[http://www.indiatomorrow.net/eng/killers-of-pahlu-khan- shoul...](http://www.indiatomorrow.net/eng/killers-of-pahlu-khan-should-be- prosecuted-under-terror-laws-swami-agnivesh)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/asia/india- lynching...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/asia/india-lynchings- attacks-on-muslims.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/world/asia/india-cow- mob-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/world/asia/india-cow-mob-hindu- vigilantes.html)

Of course leftists(Maoists?) are controlling the media narrative in India, otherwise it is just not possible that death of seventy scientists from Bhabha would go unnoticed, whereas deaths which are potential source of political mileage and further polarization in society, will cause international noise.

Assuming NDA government to be pro-Nuclear power, as it was NDA government at the time of PM Vajpai who did Pokhran-II, I am sure that nuclear scientists will be provided critical security.</comment>


How To Use Source Control Effectively - <AUTHOR> http://grokcode.com/717/how-to-use-source-control-effectively/

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing I don't really agree with is the last one: "Integrate source control with other tools" I actually find this quite annoying. Not only does it often become very talking, but often it is not as good as its "not integrated" counter part.

<comment><USER2> I agree. I often find the stand-alone tools do the job better and making the switch from an IDE to another tool helps me focus on the task of committing the code with correct comments, bug IDs etc.</comment></comment>


Django Software Foundation Calls for Applicants for a Django Fellow - <AUTHOR> https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2014/sep/18/dsf-calls-applicants-django-fellow/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting development. Will this fellow report to the newly elected inaugural technical board?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Fellow's immediate reporting chain is to a subcommittee of the DSF. Effectively, they're "working" for the DSF (although as a contractor, not as an employee); that committee is responsible for working out if they're doing what they're supposed to do, whether the DSF is getting good value for money, and so on.

The technical board is there to provide decisions on technical issues, whether they come from the Fellows or from the general population. I'd be very surprised if the Fellows didn't regularly identify issues that needed the technical board to render a decision, but the technical board doesn't have any specific control over the fellow.</comment></comment>


"Website Passwords Hacked" headlines can be less scary - <AUTHOR> https://privasectech.com/2013/11/website-passwords-hacked-headlines-can-less-scary/

<comment><USER2>
      The two most common methods, md5 and sha-1 are
      both susceptible to collisions, or birthday attacks.
      As of writing this, I would recommend using
      SHA-3-256 which has no known attacks.

Don't do that. Hashing algorithms without salt and iteration counts is a bad idea. Thankfully, languages and frameworks are starting to take this responsibility away from the programmer (or at least they're making it easier) – consider using has_secure_password in Rails, password_hash in PHP 5.5, etc. Don't use standard hashing algorithms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I have updated the article to include a paragraph on salting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You totally forget about hash salting - this way a hacker can't use rainbow tables or precomputed hashes for common passwords.

<comment><USER4> I've also seen a fair bit of misunderstanding about hashes - you do not want to apply a global salt to all your hashes. Salts should be generated on a per hash basis, and should be stored within the hash itself. Most hashing libraries will do this. It's usually much easier and safer to use a library than to roll your own.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, yes, and I do this for all my projects. But even a global salt is way better than no salt at all.

That aside, doesn't Wordpress still use lots of global salts?!</comment></comment></comment>


An ASCII train for when people confuse ls with sl - <AUTHOR> http://orvtech.com/en/howto/tren-ascii-consola-confundan-ls-con-sl/

<comment><USER2> The other fun one to swap is 'more' with 'mroe', at school someone create a 'mroe' command that returned lines from the file by swapping every second and third line in the output, that lead to folks adding 'alias mroe more' in their .cshrc files :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> that is awesome, will make a video about that one this upcoming week.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems that we just DDoS'd the website, anyways, this is the video of the article <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNbEDmPzrGI>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I head that there is also one for service, it might be considered not political correct and offensive by some but it basically works when one misspells the word "restart" in `service XXXX retart`

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It is the perfect prank for multi-users environments. I mean it is funny and not as bad as an alias to `rm -Rf`. It might make you win a one way trip to HHRR with no return tho.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fun fact: `sl`, `sl -a`, `sl -l` and `sl -F` produce different trains.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was sure that everyone knew about this already...</comment>


The FCC has voted to approve the T-Mobile-Sprint merger - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917162/fcc-tmobile-sprint-merger-justice-department-ajit-pai-geoffrey-starks-jessica-rosenworel <comment><USER2> I'm interested in how this plays out. I just ventured back onto AT&Ts pay as you go plans as my former provider, Ting, doesn't cooperate with the frequencies my Moto G xt1032 can access in Montana. Ting doesn't have the frequencies/permissions for my Moto G to operate on 3G in this state.

Before Ting I was on StraightTalk, before StraightTalk I was on AT&T, before AT&T I was on Alltel, specifically because less than two month's later the contract was dissolved when AT&T purchased them and I sold the phone to a NewEgg partner so that I could buy a Noctua NH-D14 for "free".

Everyone go buy a contract phone?

</comment><comment><USER3> This article makes it sounds like the merger approval was a republicans vs democrats issue. Why?

<comment><USER4> In short, it basically was. ATT and Vz are in bed with the Republicans, historically; and, also historically, ATT and Vz do not fund Democrat elections except in strongly blue states where they need to get the usual bullshit going.

ATT and Vz in the cell phone arena _need_ only two major names, and basically set Sprint up to fail in a way that it exists as a zombie company and allows them to pass regulatory requirements by claiming they're a viable alternative (Sprint has not been one for like, oh, 5+ years).

So, T-Mobile being an actual contender for the #1 network spot in the country fucks up their shareholders and most of the Republican party: ATT and Vz need a party in their pocket to make sure companies cannot fairly compete.

As much as I hate the Democrats, they aren't as corrupt as the telecom/Republican relationship is.

<comment><USER5> > and basically set Sprint up to fail.

Disagree.Who bought Sprint around 2013? Oh, that's right, the company everyone is screaming about whenever WeWork comes up.

Even while the merger was still going on, Sprint was letting their networks degrade (by that, I mean we were told to not replace certain equipment when it broke).

That was only one component however. Other big mistakes included:

\- WiMax

\- Partnership with HTC. While this ties in to WiMax (because they were the main maker of WiMax handsets) The Evo series was full of problems unacceptable for a flagship product.

\- I'm not sure how much of it was regulatory/ROI or whatever, but the amount of time it took to actually sunset the iDEN network (Boost/Nextel) and replace it with a better long-term tech seems like a missed opportunity. How much is up for debate, since it's not like WiMax was ever going to operate in that spectrum range.

However, Agree that the major telcos (and cable providers) are absolute corrupt garbage.

<comment><USER4> I think WiMax was what killed Sprint altogether, but I don't think Sprint was the sole entity in control of Sprint adopting it.

ATT and Vz had unexplained shady dealings to make sure Sprint was unable to buy LTE gear at an acceptable volume and/or price to adopt LTE; in addition, they were unable to acquire conventional 4G-friendly frequencies from the Bush-era FCC auction (the same auction that locked T-Mobile out of a growth path until the Obama-era Digital Dividend auction).

Sprint was then forced to adopt WiMax, which at the time, didn't look so bad, as it looked like Asia was mass adopting WiMax, and thus, LTE would be the one of two major worldwide standards, not the sole survivor. WiMax opened up the CBRS band, something LTE did not yet have access to, giving Sprint cheap usable frequency space nationwide (useful, since they could not transition to 4G without it after being cockblocked by ATT, Vz, and the FCC).

However, that ended up not being _that_ useful, Huawei and several other companies had promised handsets and backend equipment for WiMax, but decided to pull back from the US market instead and _also_ pull out of WiMax entirely and back the Chinese-lead LTE-TDD adoption instead (which is also the part of the LTE spec that adopted the CBRS band for fixed position LTE usage, which also happens to be where WiMax excelled); the parts of Asia that still use WiMax are switching (or have already switched) to combined WiMax 2+ + LTE-TDD equipment to eventually transition to 5G LTE over the next decade.

I think Sprint played a bad hand badly that the house had conspired to give them. I think they could have easily pushed their existing WiMax holdings into a very powerful fixed Internet offering for home users, and went after the ATT/Vz cartel in other ways. T-Mobile seems to be hot on acquiring that CRBS band for that exact purpose, thus the Sprint merger.

I'm not arguing that Sprint's leadership wasn't staffed with complete morons, that much is self-evident, but that they did not start out this journey with the intention of destroying a company with bad decisions. They clearly had help with that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/571/

<comment><USER2> Saw it this morning too :) Not as good as the perl and regex one (<http://xkcd.com/208/>) but really nice.</comment>


How to stop pollution and destruction of natural resources - <AUTHOR> http://www.mises.org/resources/ab1ba643-dc19-462f-82ff-2d34f46bb7f6#p242 Murray Rothbard brilliantly analyzes the issues in conservation, ecology, and growth and presents realistic solutions. This is material you won't hear from either political party. <comment><AUTHOR> This material can also be accessed in audio form at [http://www.mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audiobooks/rothbard/fora...](http://www.mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audiobooks/rothbard/foranewliberty/13.mp3).</comment>


Genetically Engineered Mice, a Journey to Space, and a Decapitation - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/why-the-russians-decapitated-major-tom <comment><USER2> This title is bordering on clickbait. Maybe HN should offer custom subtitles for links, especially for those articles with awful, nondescriptive titles?

<comment><USER3> Enjoy: "There is a lizard sex satellite floating in space and Russia no longer has it under control"

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/24...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/24/there- is-a-lizard-sex-satellite-floating-in-space-and-russia-no-longer-has-it-under- control/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surprised that they had so many problems during the space flight. Would have thought that by this time a lot of this stuff had been figured out.

<comment><USER5> Three mice died with their tails stuck in the feeder. A malfunction of the feeding system killed another 15. Then other eleven died (no reason given). That's 2/3 of the sample. A failure in the oxygen supply killed the animals of a whole experiment. A failure in the lighting system killed all the animals of another one. The video that was supposed to document the life of the mice stopped working after the tenth day because of dirt on the lens.

This for a project that costed, in total, $100 million. Can I say that this sounds very amateurish?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Etiquette on reposting job postings to other boards? - <AUTHOR> Is it considered bad etiquette to repost jobs (e.g. from the monthly who's hiring) to other job boards?
I would assume most wouldn't mind getting more eyeballs on a posting, but there would be a problem with not being able to control where people are seeing it, and with not being able to delete it should the position be filled.
How do people who post open positions feel about this? <comment><USER2> You want to take someone else's job posting and post it elsewhere? I wouldn't, unless you explicitly had their permission.

Even if they are posting them on other sites, what they post on HN is very possibly tailored to HN. If they were to put a job posting on other sites, it may read very differently.

<comment><USER3> They may also be very picky about where they post their job ads, to avoid being overwhelmed by unqualified applicants. HN may meet their quality criteria, but someone else's favorite job board might not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad I checked first, thanks for the input guys :)</comment></comment></comment>


NYSE OpenMAMA: Wall Street Won't Share the Wealth, But It Will Share the Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/nyse-open-mama/

<comment><USER2> This code is useless to consumers. It doesn't give you access to the markets, it just an attempt to make other exchanges use the same tech to make it easier for quants to code to any exchange.</comment>


Google Gets US Approval To Buy and Sell Energy - <AUTHOR> http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/19/0421242/Google-Gets-US-Approval-To-Buy-and-Sell-Energy?from=twitter

<comment><USER2> Before the theories start going _too_ crazy, I'm going to venture a guess that this has to do with their datacenters. Didn't google build a hydroelectric dam somewhere in the northwest to power one?

I'm guessing they're just looking to sell off the excess energy they're producing at places like that, I doubt they're looking to become your utility company.

<comment><USER3> IIRC, they didn't build that dam, they simply built a data center near it. It was near the dalles in oregon, if that's the one you're talking about. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/14search.html>

I don't believe they want to start building power plants. I believe they want to be able to buy energy wholesale to lower their energy costs by buying power directly and avoiding middleman markup.

<comment><USER4> I would point out that we have investments in solar thermal, geothermal and EGS (hot dry rock) power generation technologies.

That said, I don't think this is about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Q&A: Google's Green Energy Czar

[http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/qa-googles- gree...](http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/qa-googles-green-energy- czar/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone else see Google becoming the Stark Industries of the Informatics Age complete with their own Arc reactors?

</comment><comment><USER7> Google appears to be thrashing around like a conglomerate trying to have another hit record.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They already announced plans for broadband distribution and now Energy. What is next?

<comment><USER8> Google will ultimately build a self-sustained ad distribution platform. ;-) Let's imagine, company which will not depend on any other company.

Maybe one day they will buy some small country and became even independent from U.S. government.

<comment><USER9> > Let's imagine, company which will not depend on any other company.

And, pray tell, where would they get the cash?

<comment><USER10> consumers

<comment><USER11> Consumers will be buying advertisements?

<comment><USER10> consumers will see the google ads for google products and buy them</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Stadia just a prototype for thin client? - <AUTHOR> When I tore apart my gen1 Chromebook, I was surprised at how little hardware was actually in there. I hadn't expected much apart from a wifi card and a flash drive... but still it was minimal.
Now with Stadia going full blown streaming I wonder if this is just a monetizable prototype for a thin client technology for a leaner versio of Chromebook/ GSuite (cringe) businesses.
Someone else made an awesome Sun Microsystems post that made me hypothesize. <comment><USER2> SunRays didn't work out too hot for Sun.

Local processing will always be relevant for minimizing latency. An SoC that can comfortably manage the amount of compute that is needed for everyday office productivity costs pennies today. Outside of very specialized applications, there isn't a strong engineering argument for clients that much "thinner" than a web browser.

Whole-application streaming is a solution looking for a problem, and I'm extremely dubious of Stadia.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it is pretty obvious that this is their long-term plan. Funnel all computing activities that could be happening locally into their private little cloud.</comment>


Techniques to Improve Regex Performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.loggly.com/blog/five-invaluable-techniques-to-improve-regex-performance/

<comment><USER2> I was distracted by this: including .* at the start or end of a regex feels like a pathological anti-optimization by itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Related (and also from the same site/poster): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765900)</comment>


Show HN: Clean My Feed – Clean Up the Twitter Accounts You Follow - <AUTHOR> https://cleanmyfeed.xyz/ <comment><USER2> I've been planning to make this for a long time, so some suggestions:

\- Remove the buttons and switch to a Tinder swipe. Saves space on mobiles

\- Prefetch content for next follower

\- only show last 3 tweets

\- option to hide RTs

\- Sort by last activity. The people I just followed are the ones I'm least likely to unfollow now, so show either old accounts or older follows first.

\- bio is important. It needs to be present for context.

For a rough implementation of the Tinder idea, see [https://github.com/captn3m0/quick-list- select](https://github.com/captn3m0/quick-list-select) which I made to help me filter large lists manually.

Disclaimer: I've only tried it on my mobile so far

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the feedback! Mobile was definitely an after thought so I'll have to look into the swiping idea.

\- Prefetching next follower makes a lot of sense

\- I originally only wanted to show the last 5 tweets, but Twitter's API is weird. Adding the option to hide retweets should be doable.

\- "Sort by last activity": YES! I 100% agree it makes way more sense to list by oldest follows first, however, again Twitter's API limits this :( I could go through and pull ALL follows up front, which I may do eventually.

\- I can definitely display the bio

Thanks again for the feedback!

<comment><USER2> >pull ALL follows up front, which I may do eventually.

This is what I was thinking of as well. (The twitter API is really terrible at this). Most people won't have enough followers to cause issues.</comment></comment></comment>


Nothing is random - <AUTHOR> http://thechocolatechronicles.blogspot.com/2008/12/nothing-is-random.html

<comment><USER2> Fortune favours the lucky.</comment>