Eyewitness Memory Is a Lot More Reliable Than You Think - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eyewitness-memory-is-a-lot-more-reliable-than-you-think/?WT.mc_id=SA_TW_MB_NEWS&sf88257361=1 <comment><USER2> The article is good but the title is false. Eyewitness testimony is, as a rule, always filtered through layers of perception contaminated by various unchecked influences, which is largely the point of the article. The fact that _properly isolated_ witness testimony is surprisingly reliable has no practical benefit for anyone, since, in practice, no witness testimonies are properly isolated.

<comment><USER3> > no witness testimonies are properly isolated.

Can't we _make_ them properly isolated?

The article says you need 3 things for reliable witness testimony: 1. Do not repeat the lineup, 2. Ensure the suspect doesn't stand out, 3. Record the confidence of the witness when identifying the suspect.

If law enforcement follow these 3 rules _and_ the witness identifies the suspect with a high degree of confidence, it seems the identification is very reliable. That would be a practical benefit.

<comment><USER4> The witness is also susceptible to suggestion. If they are reached over the telephone, or have a conversation with a family member, or the police accidentally (or intentionally) suggest something in an interview, then they are tainted.

If the defendant is resourceful, then the chance of any of these happening blows up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This gets complicated at public events where something goes wrong and the reported story is not consistent with the facts. Bystanders can witness the event with their own eyes and then go home to watch the news, to then believe the news-worthy version of the event. A spiral of silence sets in so all observers of the original event fall under the same spell and assume they are wrong and adjust their view to the world view rather than what they saw with their own eyes.

At public events you also get a completely different view of what happened depending on whom you ask. Not everyone gets the complete story or picks up on all the clues. People bring their own expectations of what they expect to see and have cognitive dissonance to make it so they do see what they see and not necessarily what happened.

The JFK incident was in this realm of unreliable eyewitness memory, those that thought they saw and heard the second shooter changed their view over time to align with the accepted story. This is how it works.

</comment><comment><USER6> I few people have already commented on needing to properly isolate the memories, and how difficult it is, and a few others have said that's better than nothing (and I agree replacing the officers who know which is the suspect in a line up with those who don't is a basic but massive improvement).

The problem is how easy /accidental/ compromise is, even if you're trying to avoid it. Just imagine you reading back their testimony to verify it is correct and misspeaking, that is enough.

That said the wonders of CSI, etc have gone a long way to over represent the fallibility of people and to over promise the capability of science/equipment/magic.

#MakingGUIinVBtoBacktrackTheKillersIP

</comment><comment><USER7> Given the title, the article presents little evidence as to the achievable reliability of eyewitness memory. The closest it comes is the experimental result that identification by eyewitness is 97% accurate in those cases where the witness is very confident of the identification. I am skeptical as to whether witnesses to actual crimes would accurately estimate their confidence level in actual line-ups.

Nevertheless, the suggested reforms are well-argued and seem to be sensible.

</comment><comment><USER8> A problem with lineups may be that memory is _too_ good. There is an experiment that has been done several times that shows how surprisingly good our memories can be in some ways.

The experiment is to show someone a very large number of images or normal things, showing them each image for a short time. The images might be things like 5 apples on a table, a man petting a dog, a couple of people talking, and that kind of thing...just normal things you might see every day.

Then later, sometimes days later in some versions of the experiment, you show those people _pairs_ of images, where one of the images was from the set they were shown earlier, and one is not. You then ask them which of the two images they have seen before.

This has been done with sets as large as 10000 images, and people get 80% or more correct two days later [1]. There was a version where in the identification portion the two images shown were one from the set they had seen earlier and one that was similar. Examples might be a stack of $1 bills and a stack of $5 bills, or a bell with a narrow handle and a bell with a wide handle. Even with these similar images people did well. The one I've seen discussed used 2500 images and 2500 similar images, and people got 90% correct [2]. That particular one tested shortly after the people were shown the images.

I wonder if this works when instead of the recall test being one image you have seen before against one that you have not, it is one you have seen against several you have not?

And I wonder if it works when it is something live you are seeing instead of images?

And how important is it that when shown the initial set of images people know they are being shown images and are going to later undergo some kind of test involving them?

If the answers to these three questions are "it still works", "it still works", and "not important", then it suggests lineups may be inherently problematic. In the course of an ordinary day in city most people are exposed at least briefly to a large number of strangers.

If a witness only got a brief look at a criminal, and then is shown a lineup that contains a suspect that is _not_ the correct criminal but _is_ someone that the witness happened to see a few days ago out and about in the city without thinking about it, is there a high chance that person will be picked in the lineup?

It seems that with human memory, three things are true. (1) We actually remember a _lot_ more than we think we do, (2) we are not very good at accurately consciously recalling it, and (3) when we recall it we may unconsciously update the memory to better match the inaccurate version we recalled.

Unfortunately most use of memory as evidence depends on accurate conscious recall, and requires the witness to recall it multiple times between the events witnessed and their testimony at trial, giving many opportunities to mutate the memory to match the prosecutor's narrative.

If I am ever on a jury I am going to greatly discount eyewitness testimony unless the side the testimony is for explains what steps they took to address these problems.

[1] Lionel Standing (1973), "Learning 10,000 Pictures", Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 25, 207–22.

[2] Timothy F. Brady, Talia Konkle, et al. (2008), "Visual Long-Term Memory Has a Massive Storage Capacity for Object Details," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 38, 14325–29.

</comment><comment><USER9> The problem still stands. You can't really rely on it to convince someone wrongly.

</comment><comment><USER10> How does scientificamerican.com know how reliable I think eyewitness accounts are?

Why do people and publishers use that line? It can't be accurate and I find it presumptuous and offensive. It's a form of emotional click bait. "You don't want to be wrong about something do you?? Click Here!"

A nice calm "a lot more reliably than commonly believed" would be better.</comment>


Survey of Dropout Methods for Deep Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.13310 <comment><USER2> When in doubt, use random dropouts

<comment><USER3> Is drop out still empirical or are there any proof of why it works in the overall model?

I recall reading up on CNN and playing around with it and it was interesting to add random drop off in there but was never explained why it works. I think the general thinking of why it works is that the network is overfitting so randomly dropping node is required for generalization?

<comment><USER4> Addressing your second question. Informally, dropping nodes fights overfitting by creating subsample architectures of which are essentially thinned out networks of the one you've designed. Having trained on these sub nets means you've effectively combined the learning of a few different models and in doing so have generalized beyond the capabilities of your original "single" architecture.</comment></comment></comment>


XWallDock, The charging dock which will stay put - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vertexpd/257236238?token=c0d1cb3e

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer - this a project of a friend of a friend, at first it looks like there are millions like this, but not exactly... I like it.

</comment><comment><USER2> I need one!!</comment>


Ask HN: Why so many solo applicants, against the odds? - <AUTHOR>

Seems like every third applicant team went at it solo, despite clear indications that this wouldn't be helpful to their application.
I also see plenty of fishing for co-founders, though interestingly enough there's almost never a co-founder looking for a founder with an idea.  How many founders could find cofounders if only they dropped their ideas?
It stands to reason that the ideas solo founders have occupy a continuum ranging from brilliant and groundbreaking to derivative and pedestrian, and that the talented solo founders working on the low-grade ideas could table their existing projects in order to combine their talents with another solo founder to make an awesome 2-person team with a whiz-bang idea.
If this is true, that means that half our (solo founders') ideas have negative value, but nobody knows (or can admit to themselves) who.  Any thoughts on how to agglomerate solo founders into powerful teams when both sides are already committed to their own ideas?
Or is it possible, post-rejection, that there really is no need for cofounders outside of YC, and we're all just better off going it alone? <comment><USER2> I think the whole "you must have a cofounder" thing is silly. There's no hard and fast rule, except for the one where almost every startup is going to fail with or without cofounders, with or without YC.

Applications and acceptance don't mean anything. _Applying_ isn't helpful for 97+% of applicants. Rejection doesn't really mean much either.

<comment><USER3> There is a fair bit of information out there that strongly suggests a correlation between founding teams of 2 having more success than single founders. 3 appears to be the maximum before it becomes detrimental again.

The startup genome project has done good work collating and analysing this stuff.

(I'm a solo founder btw, but with a great group of advisors, some trusted mentors I can mitigate a few of the issues this creates.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Look, a great idea and a couple bucks will buy you a grande americano.

A mediocre idea however, can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. The trick is to reproject that idea into working code -- and if you aren't going to do it without YC, you wouldn't have done it with YC either.

If you actually build something of value, some of your friends will be so excited about it that you won't have to search for a cofounder.

So really, a YC rejection IMO should be interpreted as "just build the damned thing already".

Build it and cofounders will come.

<comment><USER5> Didn't apply to YC but, I can attest to this first hand.</comment></comment>


Ten rules for writing 	 - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one <comment><USER2> "X rules for writing" articles are inherently stupid. Writing (as so many other forms of art) means following a set of arbitrary rules. Make up your own arbitrary rules, be the best at that and enjoy the fame.

<comment><USER3> Generally, I agree with your point: articles like this one are inherently misguided.

But I would argue that this is because the best writing often breaks many such "rules."</comment></comment>


Lwan: A high-performance and scalable web server - <AUTHOR> https://lwan.ws/ <comment><USER2> Jeez this is amazing. Just end to end, rock solid engineering. I came to chime in that this basically hits all the same design beats as go with it's standard library (relatively low foot print, compiled binary, async user-space threading, etc.) But that sells this work short.

This is amazing work!

<comment> le-mark I agree with the caveat I didn't read anything similar to go's work stealing thread scheduling, useful for tasks with synchonized IO for example.

What appeals to me is the Lua integration. I'd love for a Lua application server to become widely available. The http servers out there now don't really fit the bill for (Xavante, Luvit for example).

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with openresty?

<comment> le-mark FYI "what wrong with X?" is not the same conversation as "Are you familiar with X? It has these great features ...". Great that you want to promotoe you're favorite tech, but there are more effective ways to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Low memory footprint (~500KiB for 10k idle connections)

> Small disk footprint: x86-64 executable has 110KiB (~52KiB if packed with > UPX)

> No copies between kernel and userland for files larger than 16KiB

Looks perfect for embedded stuff (and generally impressive).

It needs a separate TLS terminator, though.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the small footprint was a deliberate choice, specifically for the embedded scenario. One of the things I did back in the day was to run Lwan+Lua on an Intel Galileo board, without an SD card (it has only 4MB of flash memory, which has to fit the Linux kernel, some minimal userland, and Lwan+Lua).

TLS is hard given the current architecture, but I've been investigating kTLS, so maybe it'll happen someday. I would appreciate help on this front, though.

<comment><USER6> If you haven't seen, openbsd added a new api to simplify tls programming, "as a response to the unnecessary challenges other APIs present in order to use them safely."

I don't know how portable it is yet though

[https://man.openbsd.org/tls_init.3](https://man.openbsd.org/tls_init.3)

<comment><USER5> Ah, yes, I'm very aware of libtls. The API is indeed nice, but it would require some changes in Lwan that I'd rather avoid; for instance, every socket call would need to be virtual, and it would not be possible to use something like sendfile() or mmap() a file and writev() it to the socket.

I'd like to use BearSSL, which is a nice, clean implementation of TLS, makes no memory allocation (so it fits Lwan architecture very well)... but only for the initial connection handshake; I'd then hand over TLS to the Linux kernel with kTLS ([https://netdevconf.org/1.2/papers/ktls.pdf](https://netdevconf.org/1.2/papers/ktls.pdf)). However, there's not much beyond some tests in that front.

<comment><USER7> BearSSL is a great library, I also implemented TLS support with it recently in my low-resource rust webserver project wwwee [1]. It's one of the nicest designed C libraries I've ever seen. I hope more projects start using it so it gets out of beta.

For static files, I ended up using the aio syscalls in Linux as they work quite well for reading files on a supporting filesystem (mainly ext4, xfs). I also couldn't figure out how to guarantee that sendfile doesn't block, but didn't look into it too deeply.

Very nice project, seems very mature.

1: [https://github.com/bwindels/wwwee/](https://github.com/bwindels/wwwee/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

I don't think there's a way to guarantee that sendfile() won't block on Linux. On FreeBSD, you can specify a "go as much as you can without blocking, and then return" flag; Linux doesn't have a flags parameter for sendfile() (maybe it needs a sendfile2() syscall with that?).

You can maybe use readahead() and keep the file open, but that may also block as it does its work behind the scenes. A thread just for this kind of blocking calls would be nice. But even then, this doesn't seem sufficient; so you might want to use multiplex sendfile() calls in bursts.

Also, yeah, Linux aio syscalls are interesting, but they're quite tricky to use and not very portable. I'll check out your project, thanks for linking to it -- should be useful reading material while I learn Rust.

<comment><USER7> Right, wrt sendfile, I remember coming to that conclusion as well. I really wanted a thread-less design, mostly for simplicity's sake and to support single core SOCs well. Is that what you do in Lwan for large files? Use a dedicated thread for socket writes with sendfile? I guess mmap + madvise could also help, but there is just no way to know for sure, so you sort of have to assume the worst?

Which ever way you do it, it's so easy to end up blocking without realizing, strace is great here to see how much time you actually spend in the kernel.

How much the aio calls block is highly filesystem-dependent. I was hoping to use btrfs for my project, but when testing aio support, I saw my demo was spending around 80% in io_submit and less than 10% in epoll_wait, where as with ext4 it was more than the opposite.

Interesting stuff, and doing it in Rust was a pleasant experience I must say, although if you are trying hard to avoid copying and allocating, the borrow checker can get a bit naggy. Worth it though IMO, and should improve in the future.

<comment><USER5> No -- in Lwan, files that will be sent with sendfile() are kept open for a while; when they're first open, the same thread that opened (and this might block) will call readahead(). Files are sent in 512kB bursts. It might use mmap()+madvise(), but only for small files (<16KB)... but, yeah, there's not a lot of control here. I'm not that worried, though; this is but a toy. :)

Registered I/O (RIO) or I/O Completion Ports (IOCP) in Windows seems to be better in this regard, but I don't have a lot of experience in that platform. Trent Nelson, from the PyParallel project, has a few talks about it; it's quite neat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note: this is not related to the phony GWAN project, except maybe to poke fun at it.

Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11373719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11373719)

<comment><USER9> Also note the weird initial drawn term... must be a very fun oriented team

<comment><USER5> Yes. Team. [http://www.commitstrip.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/05/Strip-...](http://www.commitstrip.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/05/Strip-Vision-Open-source-650-finalenglish.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > For Round 10, Lwan has taken the crown. But we expect the other top > contenders won't leave this a settled matter.

Am I just blind or is Lwan missing here: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r10&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r10&hw=ph&test=json)

<comment><USER5> It's a known issue with TWFB. I don't know if they're planning on fixing it, but most frameworks that are not in newer rounds are not appearing in older rounds any longer.

<comment><USER10> Oh, that's a shame. Why is lwan no longer in the newer rounds?

<comment><USER5> Because I failed to move the benchmark harness from the Lwan repository to the TWFB repository. Also, I'm not really spending a lot of time on Lwan any longer; there are so many things I'd like to do, and so little time. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am only a spare time C coder myself and was surprised that I can follow the code. Nice! Any reason why typedef struct is avoided?

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Code readability is important: not only for others (it's an open source project, and contributions are welcome!), but for myself... I have terrible memory. :)

The reason struct typedefs are avoided is because I prefer to be explicit (the "Zen of Python" isn't just for Python!). It's also common practice in most of the projects I work on, and it's not much of an issue for me as far as a little bit of typing goes: I'm a fast typist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazing I am planning to shift RaspChat on this. Would be nice if same engineering effort can be put into WebSocket. This will make it much more desirable everywhere to build pub/sub systems.

<comment><USER5> There is SSE, which, although unidirectional, can be used in lieu of websockets for a chat application (receive messages/events via SSE, send via another endpoint).

However, as I said before, this is an open source project; if you have an itch, you can scratch it. PRs are open. :)

<comment><USER13> What is SSE in this context?

<comment><USER5> Server-sent events: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server- sent_events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-sent_events) [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server- sent...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server- sent_events/Using_server-sent_events)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seastar does up to 8 million connections per second, performance due in part to a user mode TCP stack

Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440886)

<comment><USER5> The authors of Seastar used to use Lwan to benchmark their HTTP server implementation. When Seastar isn't using DPDK/usermode TCP stack, and drops to the POSIX API, Lwan is still faster.

<comment><USER14> Yes. And in other news a bicycle is faster than a Ferrari with no engine

EDIT: touché! i agree!

<comment><USER5> Curious that you compare Seastar with a Ferrari: those cars are known for an internal finish that's not compatible with their price tag... and Seastar is nothing like that. It's a seriously well engineered piece of software, and it shows: its readability and code quality is superb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Impressive all and all, even more for being written in (grokkable!) C. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER16> Lwan used to be at the top on Techempower Benchmarks, but I don't see it anymore. I do however see a Rust webserver, called Actix-Raw, which tops the list. acidx, what do you think of that project?

<comment><USER5> I'm not aware of it. I'm learning Rust (just bought the "The Rust Programming Language" book, FWIW), so I will check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this in any way related to the proprietary G-WAN high-performance and scalable web server? [http://gwan.com/](http://gwan.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Cool, if you want something similar but in Java: [https://github.com/tinspin/rupy](https://github.com/tinspin/rupy)

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how does this compare to H20.[1]

[1][https://h2o.examp1e.net/index.html](https://h2o.examp1e.net/index.html)

<comment><USER5> Depends how you measure it.

A long time ago I benchmarked it, and Lwan came out on top, performance-wise. However, performance isn't the only thing that matters in a piece of software like this.

H2O is a great project; in fact, the authors were tightly involved in the definition of HTTP/2.0, and it is one of the first servers to support this version of the protocol. It is well written, and easy to grok the code. Some of its byproducts include a nice (and reusable) HTTP parser library, and clever tool named qrintf (that pre-parses the format string passed to printf()-family functions and generates optimal code for that).

Also, there's a company behind it -- Lwan is just a toy I work on the weekends when I feel like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone chime how this compares to nginx and openresty? Probably a dumb question , but I hope to gain some insight

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks neat! Is HTTPS support in the works?

<comment><USER5> In the works? No. Planned? Yes. I've been playing around with kTLS/BearSSL but so far I haven't made any stride. PRs, my inbox, and the IRC channel are open, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would you recommend this to serve a C++ webservice, or should we stick with boost::asio?

</comment><comment><USER23> Lwan... that's the best name they could come up with?

<comment><USER5> Author here. It's a pun on another similarly-named web server. It's a terrible name, and I should have searched the web before, but it's too late now.

<comment><USER9> what about the l a m e thing ?

<comment><USER5> This whole project started as a joke, and I still see it as such.

<comment><USER24> And the praise for the code quality makes the joke even funnier.

My favorite kinds of projects are ones that end in a (relatively short) punchline, but required tons of time investment.

<comment><USER9> Similarly Flask was also a joke at first. And now a pillar.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can't stand imperial units in articles? Try this (Chrome) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoconvert-auto-currency/pbghjbbdfkjffaalmcfgelakmeckapnd?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

<comment><USER2> did you make this?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. I was thinking about building such a plugin, but - like usually - it was already made by someone. I do find it extremely useful, so I shared it here.</comment></comment>


George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the 'scam' of self-driving cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/13/17561484/george-hotz-comma-ai-self-driving-car-scam-diy-kit <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526973).</comment>


Who got rich off the student debt crisis? [Investigative Piece] - <AUTHOR> https://www.revealnews.org/article/who-got-rich-off-the-student-debt-crisis/ <comment><USER2> Just like government sponsored enterprises (GSE's) made housing more expensive, they are making college tuition more expensive.

Left out of the article are probably biggest recipients of the newfound largesse are University administrative employees whose employment "jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty"[1] In my opinion they are not just overemployed but overpaid.

Also left out are the billion dollar endowments that can generation over a billion in annual gains - all untaxed because the schools are "non-profits."

It's strange that these points are left out. Also strange is the bias in the article, where Republicans are at fault for everything and it's just the poor old Democrats left standing up for students when the reality is that student loan debt took off under Obama [2]

This is a serious, bipartisan issue. It's a classic case of special interests, wall street, and politicians colluding to rip off Americans. This article is biased and does a poor job identifying root causes for the crisis. Still, it's a subject worth discussing.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-21/the- troubl...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-21/the-troubling- dean-to-professor-ratio)

[2] [http://static.cdn- seekingalpha.com/uploads/2014/10/15/127859...](http://static.cdn- seekingalpha.com/uploads/2014/10/15/1278591-14133988994203806-Thomas- Hughes.png)

<comment><USER3> Even Trump is against the government profiting off of student loans.

>Donald Trump... on Thursday criticized the federal government for earning a profit on the federal student loan program.

>"I'll see so many young people and they work really hard for four years," Trump told the newspaper. "They borrowed money. Their parents don't have much. They work all together and they mortgage their future."

>"That's probably one of the only things the government shouldn't make money off -- I think it's terrible..." Trump said in an interview with The Hill.

Source: [http://thehill.com/policy/finance/248913-trump-why-is- federa...](http://thehill.com/policy/finance/248913-trump-why-is-federal- government-making-money-on-student-loans)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Students aren't the only casualties. Universities used to be (a while ago) places for enlightenment, learning for the sake of enhancing one's life, not just for teaching skills. Now they are almost exclusively for vocational training, and bettering the self, debating ideas, pushing discourse forward - it's all by the wayside except for the highest-level institutions.

Where does discourse go when academia becomes a business?

<comment><USER5> According to an Ethics Professor at the University I went to, which was a large public university that charges very high tuition rates, the school on average LOST money per student, and instead broke even through various other forms of revenue. Tuition rates are inversely related to state funding of higher education, suggesting that it is entirely the loan providers, local businesses, and real estate managers, who profit off of students and their parents.

That's my 2 cents at least.

<comment><USER6> Plenty of schools make money. Problem is they are constantly on a hyper growth track. The current way of doing things is unsustainable for students. And frankly instead of introducing young adults to the real world, they are doing a terrible job by shielding them from it until the kids find out they're in debt big time for the next decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it funny that university protects students from everything even remotely triggering. But on other side it exploits them with debt.

<comment><USER2> Is that a bug or a feature?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a fallacy here that I wish more reporters covered on the student loan crisis. Why did this student go to such an expensive school if all she wanted to do was join the Marshal Service? I feel like we do a disservice to the debate when we don't point out the mistakes students make in not only a) taking on massive amounts of debt, but also b) in their own poor decisions in choosing where to go to school, what to study, and not finishing.</comment>


Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year - <AUTHOR> http://coinsocial.io/2018/02/23/bitmain-largest-mining-hardware-manufacturer-made-around-4-billion-last-year/ <comment><USER2> As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms.

Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and other PoW cryptocurrencies. They often don't pay for the externalities — environmental costs. The specialization of mining also severely hurts the distributed and decentralized nature of these crypto-currencies.

I'm a huge fan of crypto-networks, and have made a career in the space. But, I want Bitcoin to die off and leave room for newer generation technology.

<comment><USER3> This is a one-sided comment. There's a lot of research going into different variations of proof-of-stake. 4 out of 10 largest crypto (by market cap) are PoS. There's a lot of work Ethereum community (Casper), Cardano folks, Tendermint etc are doing to create better consensus models.

<comment><USER4> Proof-of-Stake statistically equates to "Give the rich more money".

Consider Ethereum's stats (and other similar PoS minting methods):

      Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH  )
      = 72,009,990 ETH

      Total Supply today (Feb 23rd 2018)
       = 97,800,000 ETH

      Source:
      https://etherscan.io/stat/supply

Now imagine a financial system where all the wealthy have to do simply own money (spawned from software or premine) to get more money. Or where voting is done by merely by controlling a large sum of money/tokens.

<comment><USER5> What's your proposal for a more egalitarian reward model for block producers (in any consensus model)?

<comment><USER6> Proof of work, it requires continual investment if you want to get the rewards, not just sitting there watching the cash roll in.

<comment><USER7> How is that more egalitarian? It's still a conversion between capital and income.

It's like saying stocks that give dividends are more "egalitarian" because you have to reinvest them in order to gain the same return on investment.

Absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No sources cited. Random comments re: Nvidia and altcoins. Very poor article, if we can call it that.

May I suggest this one instead [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/secretive- chinese-bitcoin-mi...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/secretive-chinese- bitcoin-mining-company-may-have-made-as-much-money-as-nvidia-last-year.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.

<comment><USER10> Not if you're very high on the food chain. It inverts there.

It's better to be Aramco, Exxon or Shell than Baker Hughes or Schlumberger. Much less a lowely oil equipment maker (the shovel makers).

It's better to be the railroad (BNSF, etc) than the car maker (eg Greenbrier), or really any other rail equipment maker.

Better to be the largest natural gas companies, than the fracking sand provider (eg U.S. Silica), or the natural gas equipment makers.

It's better to be Glencore, BHP Biliton or Rio Tinto than the company that makes the mining equipment.

It's better to be DeBeers than a diamond jewelry equipment maker.

It's better to be Pfizer or Merck than a company making various equipment for big pharma.

It's better to be Intel than Applied Materials.

It's better to be Apple or Samsung than Foxconn or most any component maker.

It's better to be BMW, Toyota or Telsa than a parts supplier.

<comment><USER11> Are these things true or equivalent? These areas are not necessarily booming. They are stable with few consumers of the goods.

At this point, every scheming hustler is in the market for a bit coin miner. Same in a gold rush -- any fool can dig with a shovel. It's not until boredom or consolidation happens that the shovel maker margins start getting thinner.

<comment><USER12> Better is to think of it as making something a lot of people want. Lots of miners = lots of people who want shovels/ASICs. Whereas mature industries like those end up as monopsonies i.e. a single buyer with lots of suppliers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is that $4B worth of USD/CNY, or BTC?

If it's BTC then a) the real figure is much lower because they can't sell $4B of BTC without drastically moving the market, b) what portion of that is due to their BTC holdings increasing in value by more than 1000% in the past year?

Either way it's still a lot of money, though.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't matter much what the denomination is. Most sane businesses would convert to the currency of whatever their expenses are anchored in.

a) I think you're mistaken. $4B per annum is unlikely to move the markets much.

<comment><USER15> > _I think you 're mistaken. $4B per annum is unlikely to move the markets > much._

It sure will if you try to sell it. Holding it certainly isn't the issue.

<comment><USER14> The daily volume at the beginning of 2017 was $200M USD. The daily volume at the end was $8T USD. $4B over 365 market days is somewhere between 1-4% of the daily market.

If liquidating their bitcoin tanked the market in 2017, it wasn't too noticable.

<comment><USER13> I don't think you can extrapolate liquidity from volume, especially when there are exchanges with very low or zero fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > made around $4B last year

They're clever enough that they price it in USD and not in Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER17> Selling showels to gold diggers is the best business model during the gold rush

<comment><USER18> They also have about 28%+ of the whole network [https://qz.com/1053799/chinas- bitmain-dominates-bitcoin-mini...](https://qz.com/1053799/chinas-bitmain- dominates-bitcoin-mining-now-it-wants-to-cash-in-on-artificial-intelligence/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The increased demand for special hardware like GPU's and ASIC based systems > has created a black market where hoarders buy the hardware in the market and > sell for exorbitant prices on websites like E-Bay.

Since when is ebay considered the black market?

I always thought "buy low, sell high" was the ebay motto...

</comment><comment><USER20> Bitcoin mining is a real world version of Keynes' quote about labour productivity[1].

The important difference is that the money doesn't belong to any country, and is transformed purely into personal wealth. This will lead to wealth inequality the likes of which we have never seen. Governments should charge miners a lot more for just existing, and using all the infrastructure the public has funded to spin money out of thin air which will never help pay for that infrastructure or contribute to any of the economic activity which keeps a country going.

Why we let people dealing in financial instruments acquire so much wealth and power continues to baffle me.

[1][https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:John_Maynard_Keynes#%22...](https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:John_Maynard_Keynes#%22The_government_should_pay_people_to_dig_holes_in_the_ground_and_then_fill_them_up.%22)

<comment><USER21> "using all the infrastructure the public has funded to spin money out of thin air"

In what jurisdiction[1] is electric-grid transmission and distribution publicly funded? You're charged for the cost of your electric service.

[1] other than maybe communist or socialist governments

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Let's just sit back and think... $4,000,000,000 in 4 years. or $50,000 for 80,000 families.

On the other hand, how come they are making 65% net margins? Where's the competition?

</comment><comment><USER23> What is the source for this claim of profits? I couldn't see any in the article?

</comment><comment><USER24> No sources?

</comment><comment><USER25> Well, those oceans aren't going to boil themselves.

<comment><USER26> Conspiracy of the second law

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why not create a coin awarded for proof of AI-modeling and open-up the network to researchers? Seems like it would be a lot more productive if all that processing power went to neural networks.

<comment><USER28> Its called motocoin and it has kinda failed. [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1365986.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1365986.0) One person made a very good bot and took over and no one has made a better one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This can simply be explained with the fact that there's no competition.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've moved to coins that are asic-tough

<comment><USER31> "ASIC-resistance" just means "needs lots of RAM". Eventually someone will figure out how to make oodles of RAM sufficient for a many-core custom processor. Heck, modern SSDs (e.g. Intel Optane) might be fast enough to replace DRAM for these kinds of applications.

Another kind of ASIC-resistance might be using dynamically-generated algorithms employing self-modifying code. You'd have to own a Xeon Phi to get good figures for that, methinks.

It's a shame PoW is based on arbitrary hashing instead of, say, "Proof-of- Folding@Home" - that would do some good at least, methinks.

<comment><USER32> > It's a shame PoW is based on arbitrary hashing instead of, say, "Proof-of- > Folding@Home" - that would do some good at least, methinks.

It already exists, it is called Gridcoin and is based on Proof-of-Research. Coins are awarded based on contributions to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). There are many scientific computing projects you can contribute processing power to that utilize the network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The people who did the best in the gold rush were the ones who sold supplies...

</comment><comment><USER34> Mhm I wonder why non-mining altcoins are getting the most fud...</comment>


Apple takes aim at Adobe... or Android? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/apple-takes-aim-at-adobe-or-android.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> I seriously doubt Apple ever intended to let web apps as the only means for open iphone app development. They probably planned the SDK before iphone's even released. The "web" as app is probably just an excuse to buy time.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole matter seems pretty straight forward to me - Apple don't want to have 'just another phone' that can run the same Java and Flash and cross- compiled apps as every other phone, they want to leverage their market lead to pressure developers into focusing on iPhone development at the expense of other platforms. It's a pretty logical, inevitable outcome of the business situation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe Android is the real target:

" _Minority platforms are always going to be the biggest beneficiaries of cross-platform development._ "</comment>


Apple May Not Have Bought Nuance But... - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/06/apple-nuance-ios-siri/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting article! But it kind of undervalue Nuance as if it is really in need of iOS to expand. But Nuance is already used by many companies that embeds it in cars around the world to perform voice recognition on phonebook contacts or music.</comment>


Writing Makes Me A Better Designer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mengto.com/writing-makes-me-a-better-designer/ <comment><USER2> Ha, I saw Meng post this on facebook, nice to see it appear here too :)

I agree that writing these things down is very useful, even if just for yourself. In the interaction design course I'm taking at university, I don't have to hand in anything for a couple of weeks, and yet I'm writing all my thoughts down - just to have them organised, and because I know that once I write them down, I make sense of them, find flaws in them and get better ideas through them.</comment>


Ask HN: What PHP frame work is best? - <AUTHOR>

I've been asked to pick a framework for the development of a pretty big project (3 Month or so). PHP is the chosen language, but what framework should we go with? My professor seems to be suggestion CakePHP or codeIgniter. <comment><USER2> I've been using CakePHP on an existing project (Cake was already in use) and it does not completely suck. It provides the normal, useful MVC abstractions, an interesting way of integrating non-Cake libraries, and decent updates (on the 1.2.10 release as of last week).

Having said that, Cake does not enforce separation of business and display logic like the Django templating language does. Unfortunately, my predecessor took great advantage of this, defeating much of the purpose of MVC.

All in all, I like Django better, but CakePHP gets the job done.

</comment><comment><USER3> Drupal is a great framework and much more. IMHO using something like Drupal is a higher order of development and we should be building with the bigger pieces that such a tool provides rather than having religious wars over languages. Sure language X or Y may be more elegant or faster at building feature A but feature A has been built over and over again. So why not build on top of something that already provides commodity feature A and concentrate on building the unique features?

</comment><comment><USER4> PHP frameworks are lame. Seriously. PHP is simple enough that you don't need a framework. None of the frameworks are very well maintained. All the frameworks are more trouble than they're worth. Later on, you will end up spending more development time getting away from the framework than you did implementing it.

<comment><USER5> i think you'll have to back up your statement more than that. Symfony2 and other frameworks that require php 5.3 seem to be quite well maintained.

<comment><USER4> The only thing a framework does is give you new functions to call existing PHP functions. That slows down everything down and results in shoddy junk code. In over 10 years of php development, I have yet to see a single real-world case where using a framework was better than just directly writing lean php code.

<comment><USER6> Real world situation, you decide to move your database from mysql to postgresql because you're unhappy with something that oracle is doing and you want to move to a database that is completely free and open-source.

Using a framework, you change the $config['driver'] from "mysql" to "postgres" and you're good to go.

Without using a framework, you need to change every query your application makes. Good luck with that. If you don't have to do that because you standardized it yourself with a bunch of functions then you actually are using a framework, just one you made yourself rather than an open source one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Kohana for about a year now, and I'm really liking it.

<http://kohanaframework.org/>

Supports 5.2+ only, nice ORM, and has a cool autoloader system that I really like. Make sure you have an opcode cache in production though :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Depends on the project

clickable: <http://www.phpframeworks.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> My opinion is that one should set a requirement on php 5.3 as a baseline. if it doesn't match that skip it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can you give some more info about the project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its sort of a job site.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to distribute hundreds of terrabytes of data across servers? - <AUTHOR> I've found myself in a difficult situation. I have some kind of file sharing websites that grew unexpectedly fast and I can't seem to find any good option for file distribution.
I'm using bare metal servers from Hetzner, because AWS/Azure/Google Cloud would be too expensive.
Currently I have two ways of distributing the files: 1. GlusterFS, which doesn't seem very stable, is really slow and is using a ton of resources, but it made it pretty easy and fast to setup. I don't think this is going to be a viable solution as my data is growing.
2. The second thing I tried after getting disappointed by GlusterFS was application-level distribution. What I do basically is split every HDD into 1TB partitions (so I can mirror them easier,as I'm using different size HDDs) and upload the file randomly/to the emptiest one.
The second option works pretty good, but there are some drawbacks. Searching for files is easy, but very slow with GlusterFS, harder, but faster with the second option.
My question is: What better option do I have? Did I misconfigure GlusterFS or is it normal to be slow?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Do you need to be storing this data forever? I don't know how your application works, but you could always require some kind of payment from users to be able to store a file for more than a week or two. If you don't need to store data in perpetuity, your storage costs and the overhead of storing that much data should go down significantly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems that Hetzner is BETA testing "volumes" for their cloud, up to 10 TB per volume. Have you looked at this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know, but I'm gonna check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have a look at minio [0]

[0] [https://github.com/minio/minio](https://github.com/minio/minio)

</comment><comment><USER5> S3?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's more than 10 times more expensive than Hetzner. It's not viable.</comment></comment>


How Software Companies Die (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-beekeeping.html <comment><USER2> Other previous discussion. This one is 120 days ago <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4776844>

Personally I don't see why this resonates so much with the HN community. Its a great example of the worst attitude to take to work every day.

<comment><USER3> _Personally I don't see why this resonates so much with the HN community._

Really? This is like a nerd mantra, it hits so many stereotypes in so few words. Orson talked about it at BayCon once when it came up.

I don't have a clear memory of exactly what he said but I took away from it that smart, introverted, people have a terrible time seeing anything outside their pool of influence, like looking at your shoes in a crowd and saying "everyone is crowding around me because I'm the coolest" when if you looked up you would see a pack of wolves circling the crowd. So all of their evaluation in their environment is about them and how people around them are responding.

An artifact of that inward looking view is to construct an internally consistent explanation for why things suck now but didn't before. That always targets people who are not like them (the introvert) and for whom the introvert cannot understand their motivations or values. (and more often than not in a software company that is "suits", aka business people or managers)

You combine that with a changing market place, and the thing that made the software successful before isn't valid any more, but if the programmers don't know why the software was successful in the first place they can't understand what changed or how to fix it. Imagine an artist who paints with charcoal, gets discovered, people buy their works, and then fashion moves on, and the artist goes broke. To an external viewer, fashion simply moved on, the artist was there (and fashionable for a time) and then they weren't. But _internally_ the artist may have no concept of how briefly they were fashionable and now they weren't. Instead they construct an externalization of "discovery" where suddenly people begin to understand what it is they are doing with their art, and when they move on it is always some external force which has corrupted the minds of people seeing it or modified their vision. To accept the alternative, that their success was luck and fashion, rather than some deeper meaning, may be too harsh to think.

People cling to sense of destiny and purpose rather than consider themselves the random connection of ova and zygote and circumstance. Where is the _meaning_ in that?

Orson captured this tension wonderfully in his essay, it resonates both with the bees who desperately want to be special and with the bee keepers who want productive bees without understanding that the bee's production is a byproduct of flowers and normal bee activity, it's a side effect of where the hive is and where the flowers are. Many software companies are fashion objects, successful ones are constantly producing new concepts and new ideas to stay in the limelight. Unsuccessful ones take a single success and assume they are done, nothing left to do but iterate. But fashion doesn't work like that.

<comment><USER4> Fashion is never finished.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why- do-...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why-do-business- analysts-and-project-managers-get-higher-salaries-than-programme)

<comment><USER6> > closed as not constructive by Mark Trapp Sep 26 '11 at 8:16

I previously commented here on this in a slightly snarky fashion. I deleted that, but almost simultaneously, an upvote came through. (Sorry about that, whomever...)

So, I'm recommenting, but hopefully without the snark. For me, this aspect of "Programming" was a serious, career-level question at times. This comment is now OT with respect to the OP, I guess, but... then again, maybe it's not. Because... isn't this a serious, career level question for many programmers?

And, if so, where else would one discuss such things?

In some ways, the out and out coding can be easier. It's the "career", and the politics, that can be the biggest pain in the ass with regard to the job. Depending upon circumstances. (Healthy hive, or smoked, as it were.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussion on HN <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552821>

<comment><USER8> 1435 days ago- that's almost 4 years. I wonder if one day in 2034 someone will post a "done that" link with a conversation over 10k days old?

<comment><USER9> The classics remain classic. Still wonder same about "The Mythical Man-Month" So true...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> came from a big company, escaped to start-up world but also a marketer. take offense that marketers are the problem here. coders aren't the only ones who get the life blood sucked out of them by too much management. good marketers love to work with good coders and relish in creativity and risk-taking.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's as true today as it was in his time.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a good start, but ultimately doesn't have much insight into _why_ companies die. Venkat Rao opened this discussion with his Gervais Principle series, which is very good: [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or- the-office-according-to-the-office/)

I continued it with my (ongoing) series on my blog (8 parts and counting, will take a while to read): [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais- princ...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-principle- questioned-macleods-hierarchy-the-technocrat-and-vc-startups/)

Companies start out as a risk transfer. Those who can tolerate financial volatility and change and social upheaval (MacLeod Sociopaths) start to trade risk with those who don't want it (MacLeod Losers). The risk-seekers become the entrepreneurs; the risk-averse become workers. This is benign for a while, but as the company becomes stable, the upper class becomes entitled, established, and complacent. They want to keep the perceived risk trade going, but the business is actually de-risked, so now they're just grabbing for unjustified or legacy superiority. They've won, and now they want to _stay_ where they are. In order to keep the risk-transfer between them and the (expectancy-sacrificing) Losers, they have to create a middling buffer class of Clueless. This style of organization becomes resistant to change, systemically underperforming, and bland, but it's _extremely_ stable on its own terms. People don't want the jobs above them enough to break the rules. Losers (who value comfort and stability) see the ranks above them as being harder, riskier, and are happy to stay put. Clueless are oblivious to the Effort Thermocline (the point in an organization where jobs become _easier_ \-- but also more political-- with ascending rank instead of harder) and run the organizational day-to-day while oblivious to the agendas of the Sociopaths above them.

The most common end state of this is the organization with the full MacLeod hierarchy: Losers at the bottom, Clueless in the middle, Sociopaths at the top. It's a mature rank culture where position and subordinacy matter more than creative excellence and technical improvement. But why?

The process is complex, but the truth is that this form of organizational corruption was, for a long time, _harmless_ from a business perspective. When you're providing commodity products or services, the MacLeod rank culture works. It does the job.

What's changing (first in software, increasingly in other areas of business) is the convexity switch. Concave work is work on which the difference between excellence and mediocrity is insignificant compared to that between mediocrity and zero. It's "get-it-done" commodity work where creativity isn't necessary or even useful. Convex work is that in which the difference between excellence and mediocrity is huge, and mediocrity is close to (or might be) zero.

The difference between the (winding down) industrial and (soon to come) technological eras is the convexity of the work that the world needs. In the industrial era, most needed work was concave and the hierarchical MacLeod organization worked well. In the technological era in which the commodity work has been given to machines (who do it far more reliably and cheaply than any human) what's left is _convex_ work. Traditional industrial management, though successful for 200 years, just falls down. The reason why is that it's all about reducing variance. For concave work, variation is mostly to the downside, and variance-reduction (the goal of most management) improves expectancy. For concave work, variance is mostly to the upside, and variance- reducing management drives expectancy to zero.</comment>


Show HN: I made an app that will read and save recipes you find online - <AUTHOR> https://trycookup.app <comment><AUTHOR> Maker of CookUp here, I wanted to share this with the Show HN community to get some feedback and see if others find value in the software I've created. My wife and I love to cook, and this has helped us find and save recipes we like online without having to wade through ads and life stories on lengthy blog posts or having to juggle several recipe apps. Looking forward to any and all feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> I've never been able to find a recipe online that had an accurate time estimate. Maybe if there was a way for users to give feedback in this particular area, and then display it to you when you browse, that might be really cool. Who knows though, maybe I'm just slow at slicing and dicing :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat idea! I could see a "trending recipes in your city" feature being really cool to try new recipes. Good luck with the app</comment>


Ask HN: How to make TechCrunch talk about my startup? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I am going to launch a new startup within 2 weeks, and I need to know how to let guys at TechCrunch talk about it in their articles?
And can I list my startup there with a description about it?
I see that Tech Chrunch and other IT talks are supporting Ycombinator startups all the time, so I am seeking the same marketing support.
Do they get money? How much? and how to reach them?
Thanks so much in advance. <comment><USER2> I don't want to ignore this because I'd truly like to help you out. The truth is, there is no surefire way to "make" Tech Crunch write about your startup. There are literally hundreds of startups that want coverage and typically it is difficult...very difficult.

Don't offer money or incentives to TC writers (or any writers). That is insulting them. Getting coverage will come from relationships. Mark Suster has an excellent article about developing relationships for getting funded, coverage, etc. It isn't going to happen in a day. Good luck, but don't waste your time trying to bribe them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is another good article about getting your site out there. It includes info about getting it on TechCrunch. The post is from Feb 2011 so it should still be relevant. I was searching for similar information the other day, which is how I found the article in the first place. I submitted my site to TechCrunch two days ago and I'm waiting to hear something.

If you want to go directly to the submission page: <http://techcrunch.com/contact/>

For the entire article: [http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get- your-first-...](http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your- first-1000-users/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The more important question is "Why do you want TC to cover you?" Does your target audience read TC? If not, you shouldn't bother.

Get your product in front of your target customer. Get some relevant blogger to cover you. Cold call potential customers and buy them lunch in exchange for trying out your product.

Getting coverage in TC should be a means to an end - getting your message out to your customers, helping with credibility/recruiting, etc. TC coverage shouldn't be viewed as an end in itself. Getting customers to love your product - and be willing to pay for it - is much more worth your time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Build a good app/site that people want. You won't get coverage if it isn't good or is essentially a clone.

If your app/site is good then here is a good article for you to start with: [http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-i-pitched- te...](http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-i-pitched-techcrunch- and-13-ways-to-get-press-when-you-launch-your-startup/)

Remember TechCrunch coverage does not mean that your startup will be successful and if they don't cover you it doesn't mean you won't be successful either. What is _important_ is building a good app/site that people want.

With regards to offering them money etc... NO. Daniel Brusilovsky was fired from TechCrunch over a bribe attempt - [http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/05/techcrunch-daniel- brusilov...](http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/05/techcrunch-daniel-brusilovsky/) \- and this isn't a route you should be looking to go down. Although, if you are looking for paid reviews of your website/app which does not mean they will be nice about your app and they are also disclosed that they are a paid review - there are several websites that will connect you with bloggers that will do this for you.

Remember the _important_ thing which is building a good app/site that people want and if you do that, not only will you get coverage but you will get users.</comment>


Busting the iOS 6 Transit Map Myths - <AUTHOR> http://waxy.org/2012/06/busting_the_ios_6_transit_map_myths/

<comment><USER2> Transit directions are rarely available outside the USA anyhow.</comment>


What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mixlr.com/2013/11/what-happens-when-the-president-barack-obama-uses-your-startup-for-a-conference-call/?

<comment><USER2> I disagree with this point, which is not supported by the facts:

"The press are now all over the OFA team and criticising their ability to procure technical solutions or web services (rightly or wrongly). But in this case, obviously we're a third party service provider so this really has nothing to do with the President's team's ability to execute."

It is indeed a reflection of the President's team's ability to execute when they reach out to a vendor on a Friday for a Monday call, mangle the details so that the vendor and the audience have mis-set expectations, and, most importantly, did not do testing to determine whether or not their event will reflect well on their boss and organization.

They've done these calls before - for example, after the State of the Union: [http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing- ofa-c...](http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-ofa-call- after-state-of-the-union-156672.html) \-- so dropping this order in the lap of a new vendor with 72 hours to go almost guarantees that some mistake will happen.

I understand this is OFA, not the White House, and perhaps for a seat-of-the- pants campaign style event under normal circumstances, this would be excusable.

But these are not normal circumstances.

When your boss is under fire for his rollout of the most important government tech program since the Moon landing, and you arrange a call to discuss that rollout, it is imperative that you make sure the technology works. Guaranteed. No questions asked.

If you can't guarantee that, then don't use that vendor, don't do the event as a conference call, or don't do the event.

Why? The resulting PR mess, which might not be germane to a start-up tech audience, but is very germane to the Office of The President, will come and will be costly.

The post serves to reinforce the image of a management team around the President that does not understand that making very urgent requests of technologists does not mean that the technology will automatically obey.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Greg is too close to the events: I still mostly don't know what happened when Obama used Mixlr. Can anyone help out? Some specific questions:

>Unfortunately the call was marketed and promoted as a "conference call" ... which does happen to be what Mixlr is intended for

Okay, so what _is_ Mixlr for? I poked around and found out briefly, but I'm still curious what Mixlr allows that they didn't use and could have. What did you mean by "nor to the extent of what Mixlr allows"?

>This led to some pretty mis-set expectations and disappointed users which wasn't a great tone to recover from.

How do you know users were disappointed? Do you have any data, or at least anecdotes, that you could show? Do users rate their experience, for example? How did you recover? And how did you decide that you recovered already?

>Even 10 trolls are a lot louder than 30,000 supporters

What actually happened? What features enabled a few people to effect the experience of the other listeners?

>Note to self... disable comments

I gather that disabling comments is not a feature available to the broadcaster? Maybe it should be; are you considering adding it? What other changes will you be making as a result of this experience? How will you "do better next time"?

>the press are now all over the OFA team

The write up makes it sound like the whole event went smoothly, yet you're also saying that there are negative reports in the press. I read the DailyMail article, and it sounds possible that they are exaggerating by citing the minority of users who couldn't connect. What is your takeaway here? Do you have to be perfect in such high profile situations? Or are a few errors expected? Are you getting flak or losing credibility because of the press, or is it all falling on the OFA team?

> the call was flawless for the vast majority of those listeners for more than > 99% of the call

Are more details available? Maybe it's just me, but this sounds wishy-washy (99% always sounds to me like "a lot, we swear!")

> we think we can do even better next time

Great! Is there going to be a next time? And, more generally, have you noticed any effect on the call on your user base?

<comment><USER4> The article linked in the Mixlr blog post ([http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thecaucus/2013/11/18/another- website-another-problem-for-obama/)) seems to tell a different story. From the NYT's perspective, it seems that a significant number of people had problems even hearing the audio stream. The way the NYT article is written implies that many of the listeners, rather than the 0.1% claimed by Mixlr, experienced problems. And it wasn't due to trolls, but rather the basic problem of people not even being able to hear the audio.

I don't see what the incentive for NYT to overstate or mischaracterize things, unless just to cast Obama further into a negative light, so I'm tempted to believe what the press says over what a self-motivated startup CEO would write. The NYT article makes no references to trolls, but rather what seems to be valid claims from would-be listeners that they can't access the audio stream.

If the audio problems were truly experienced by the insignificant minority, and a small number of trolls caused the majority of problems, then why was the article written in the NYT as if the glitches were the primary story, rather than the content of the broadcast (which is not even covered in the NYT article). The truth is somewhere between the NYT article and Mixlr blog post, but most likely weighted more to NYT's side.

I think Mixlr should thank their lucky stars that the blame was placed on OFA and not on them. In fact, I would be thankful the Mixlr name didn't even appear in the article. Had they not written the blog post, no one would have associated the event with their service. Having the president use their service serves as a good reference, but this one teleconference would not be what I would consider to be a positive testimonial.

<comment><USER3> Well, I wouldn't discount the bias in the New York Times; they have every incentive to maintain ongoing controversy. Also, notice that it's a NYT _blog_ , which I take less seriously than a news article.

<comment><USER5> I don't think this can be understated. The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 24-hour news cycle.

I agree with the parent poster that the truth probably lies somewhere in between, but like you, I don't think we can give NYT much extra credit here.

I'm also surprised to see that more technologists aren't empathetic to the "tens of thousands of end users" matter. In a group of people over 100,000, we can begin to expect a fairly sizable number of users who have configuration issues that would cause their own host of problems. I'm not indemnifying Mixlr, but it's worth keeping in mind when finding the middle ground about what really happened.

<comment><USER6> > The media have a voracious appetite for controversy, because 2-hour news > cycle.

I think you mean "...because advertising".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I were their VP of Engineering, the questions jmilloy asked would be top of mind for a post mortem.

I'd also raise the issue of whether the $9.99 all-you-can-eat plan should have a specific limit in terms of absolute number of live connections. From their pricing page, it looks like OFA could have just used the Basic (free) plan. Even still, they will never recoup their costs from this one call even if OFA remains a $9.99/month subscriber for a decade. If "We worked all weekend..." means two engineers worked 4 hours Saturday and 4 hours Sunday, that's 8 hours/engineer * 2 engineers * $100/hour = $1600 of time was spent. That's 13 years at $10/month, not even factoring in infrastructure or bandwidth costs from the call itself. And I'm guessing that estimate is an order of magnitude less than the actual time spent. If I were a potential customer evaluating providers, I would be scared off by your current offer of what appears to be unlimited usage and unlimited priority support for $10/month as I'd have serious doubts of your ability to remain in business a year from now.

No doubt the effort invested in preparation for the OFA call will pay dividends for future scalability, but I doubt the people at OFA would have blinked an eye if you told them that there's a $5 CPM rate for connections beyond the first 100. 140K connections would have been a paltry $700. Obviously, only an analysis of your customer usage patterns would indicate whether you'd impact any serious customers if the basic plan was capped at 100 simultaneous live listeners, with additional tiers for higher peak use. Check out PubNub's pricing model for peak connections as this model makes financial sense: [http://www.pubnub.com/pricing](http://www.pubnub.com/pricing)

<comment><USER8> There is a tremendous benefit of grabbing hold of an opportunity, and doing whatever the hell it takes to strangle the value out of it. Which is what these guys were trying to do.

This was such an outlier in terms of standard use cases of their system so far, I think the way they responded was great. There's little value in going back and saying "Ohh... this will cost $700, but it's not written on the website, is that still ok?" and risk dealing with rejection.

The value of having POTUS use your service far outweighs the engineering time spent on this. This is now a fantastic leading story for all sorts of marketing efforts and meetings moving forwards, such as this blog post.

Calculating the return on this effort through short-term ROI measured in days seems a bit shortsighted.

<comment><USER7> I agree that they responded in the only way they could and I hope they can leverage this to greater success. I wasn't referring to retroactively making up bogus prices given that their pricing page specifically says it's "unlimited", even for the Basic free plan. Rather, I'm proposing a hypothetical scenario whereby future subscriber plans are capped for simultaneous connections with an overage rate. Had such a pricing plan existed when OFA initially signed up, I'm speculating that OFA would have happily paid $700 for the extra capacity for the 140,000 simultaneous listeners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 40 comments, not one trace of "Congrats", who cares what Obamas intentions were, for any founder out there you know this is exciting -- HN is becoming difficult to read.

Congrats guys, it has to feel great having something like this go so well!

<comment><USER10> Seriously, it's a huge accomplishment, and they deserve to be proud of it. When the president uses your product (even if it's not good) you know you've made it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> $9.99? This is why most people offer an enterprise plan.

<comment><USER12> I'm surprised OFA thought it'd work at their scale at that price point. I'd definitely be cautious and offer to pay more if I was their procurement officer. It could definitely ruin your night.

<comment><USER13> The blogpost says that OFA contacted them and forewarned about the size of the call. I guess that's the point where Mixlr could have asked an extra to handle the scale, while it sounds like they just said "no problems, go ahead".

<comment><USER12> Right, I was implying that even after they said 'no problems, go ahead' (perhaps by opening the discussion about an enterprise plan). My reasoning is because it makes it easier to shift blame for the procurement officer. In the event of a service failure instead of being picked on for hosting a presidential conference for the price of a chipotle, you can blame the company you paid a good amount of money to for their crappy service. Anyhow, glad everything worked out and I'm sure they made up for it in marketing.

<comment><USER13> I see. I reckon it doesn't work either way. Think of how wonderful would have been to run a flawless presidential conference call with $9.99, instead of, for instance, procuring a custom-made IBM+Cisco contract for $200k.

Maybe there's a number in the middle, but I think it's hard to draw a line. At the end of the day, if I were a US citizen, I would prefer my government to attempt with a $9.99 service that went almost flawlessly, rather than ditch it just because "it's cheap, it can't work, we must pay at least $X".

<comment><USER12> Although they're private and won't be paying using tax payer money, I agree and kudos to them. I was just addressing the risks associated with such a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never understand the decision behind blogs not putting a link anywhere on their blog to their actual website.

1\. Mixlr in the header points me to blog.mixlr.com.

2\. Footer links, all of them link to the page I'm on...

I know there is a link in the content of the post, but what about other posts? Why is there not an easy way for me to get to your main site without manually modifying the URL in the address bar?

<comment><USER15> Man, I'm gonna start a list and track sites that do this, like plain text offenders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool story, but I hope permission was received first to divulge those account usage details.

<comment><USER17> what account details?

<comment><USER18> Normally businesses don't disclose who their customers are without prior approval.

<comment><USER19> Really? The president does a mass mailing to millions of Americans telling them about the conference call, where it is hosted, and how to participate.. and you're concerned about revealing him as a customer? I think only the Swiss are that much of a stickler for privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> one suggestion after signing up for an account and using the service. I misread and thought there would be video for some reason, i just assumed webcast would mean streaming audio and video. My mistake, but regardless when i went to delete my account i found i couldn't actually do that. I had to send a request to email@example.com to remove an account. Fix that! Overall though, nice product and the app seemed well laid out and easy to use.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _Meanwhile, even though we're not US voters, our hats are off to the President and his team for being agile, using third party web services and trying to be as engaged as possible with his constituents. We love that he's done an AMA on Reddit, that his team uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram regularly, and we're seriously proud they now use Mixlr too._

\</comment><comment>-

Hardly.

They do maintain some sort of vain presence, so as to appease the college crowd that make use of large amounts of social media, but no actual debate or interesting conversation has been inspired by it.

The AMA on Reddit in particular was one of the most pathetic PR stunts I've witnessed in a while. A few generic responses to mundane and chauvinistic questions. But, since his campaign team ended up referencing the "NOT BAD" meme, Reddit swallowed it all up with gusto.

It was sad to watch.

<comment><USER21> didn't they have planted questions too?

<comment><USER22> What evidence was there of this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> From an achievement point of view, are there are any challenges after this?

<comment><USER24> Yep, it turns out that post Obama's use of Moderator (and then hangouts with moderator) we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you have a really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady Gaga. Made Obama look downright pedestrian.

<comment><USER25> >"we realized that this was only a taste of what can happen when you have a really popular person using your systems. Yes, I'm talking about Lady Gaga. Made Obama look downright pedestrian.*

If you work at Mixlr I recommend you kill this comment. It's not best practice to compare your "pedestrian" customer to someone "really popular".

<comment><USER26> You are replying to Chris DiBona, who oversees open source policy at Google. He is referring to Google Moderator.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


California power lines spark wildfires&prompt blackouts. Why not just bury them? - sahin-boydas https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/10/11/bury-california-power-lines-wildfire-blackout-fix-unlikely-work/3946935002/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm reminded of the awesome engineering story about replacing a high powered buried cable in Los Angeles years ago.

Here's a link to the story (one step removed because of hacker news vs jwz)

[https://hackaday.com/2015/07/27/find-and- repair-a-230kv-800a...](https://hackaday.com/2015/07/27/find-and- repair-a-230kv-800amp-oil-filled-power-cable-feels-like-mission-impossible/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Why not pay ten times the cost of overhead wires - to save on legal awards...

<comment><USER3> why not pay a tenth the cost of legal awards to bury them?

<comment><USER2> Costs are huge in rocky ground to bury high voltage wires. Low voltage (120 to 240) is less. This deals with it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrounding)

The largest barrier to safe rural wiring in California is the huge wage, benefits and pension costs which is on the order of $80-100 per hour, a position that politicians reached because the politicians did not care as long as they paid themselves very well. Huge areas are running huge unfunded pension positions cause by the lack of laws mandating 100% funding of all pensions every fiscal year end. Some states have these laws. These places are balanced and have lower pensions because the politicians were stiffened. Look at Detroit, Chicago and many others - dead men walking...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Underground lines are subject to animals burrowing through them, backhoes digging them up, etc.

If the power is transmitted AC, then the insulation gets heated up as the alternating current interacts with the surrounding ground. If the ground is below the water table, the losses get high. The underground power cables in our neighborhood are in wet ground, and recently had to be dug up because the insulation failed.

In Norway, they use DC to transmit power out to oil platforms as it does not have this problem.</comment>


Sizeof(void) == 1 in gcc - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/bcantrill/status/61503550966087681

<comment><USER2> GCC just happens to not even print a warning about this (even with -Wall). That is pretty bad. The warning can be enabled by specifying -Wpointer-arith or by using -pedantic, though. (Warning: "invalid application of 'sizeof' to a void type")

IBM's xlc compiler produces a warning and compiles the code and it also returns 1. (Warning: "1506-043 (W) The operand of the sizeof operator is not valid.")

Oracle Studio compiler has the best approach and fails to compile. (Error: "cannot take sizeof void")

</comment><comment><USER3> What does the standard say?</comment>


Ask HN: Introducing my Wife to Programming for Data Analysis - <AUTHOR>

TLDR; Person with MSSQL query background is new to programming wants to learn.  Should she learn R or Python and where is a good place for her to start?
--
My wife is an economist for the state of Minnesota.  She and her department deal with data on economic growth and unemployment statistics. The mostly rely on SQL to parse their data.
She is in the position to introduce a new way of handling statistical computing and took my advice and bought an R book.  The book makes too many assumptions about her background, so it's not very helpful.  When we began discussing this, I started to think that Python may be more helpful and more generalized for their needs.
Where would be a good place for her to start?  Is R or Python the "correct" way to introduce her to this world of ours and which should she consider if she eventually wants to become the evangelist in her department to get others to adopt it? <comment><USER2> Since Python is easy to grasp, it will be easy for others to adopt it. R on the other hand has a very steep learning curve.</comment>