The $8 an hour shuttle driver behind a Nobel Prize - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10069835-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

<comment><USER2> Here is the shuttle driver's (Prasher) original publication: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1347277> (which is the first GFP publication)

Here's a Science article 2 years later (with Prasher and one of the actual Nobel Prize winners - Chalfie): <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8303295>

And another in that same year with Prasher and a different prize winner (Tsien): <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7809066>

...crazy... why didn't Prasher get it too?

<comment><USER3> This sort of thing is irritatingly common when it comes to major scientific prizes (the most infamous example being that of Rosalind Franklin, whose research was _probably_ stolen by Watson and Crick).

Frustrating as that kind of oversight may be, I think it's a far greater problem that a talented scientist is driving a shuttle bus to avoid unemployment.

We clearly have a shortage of scientists in America -- let's train more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"It was more important to me to hand over the tool to other scientists with the funding than to have individual glory," Prasher told London's Daily Mail._

Wow. Honest to goodness nobility. Don't see that every day.

Perhaps he's driving a bus not because he's not worthy of us, but because we're not worthy of him.

</comment><comment><USER5> this is a crushingly sad story.

<comment><USER6> It's a shame he didn't get some official recognition, but he willingly sent his work to these guys.

He's obviously one of the few people around who cares more about helping people than money. He's got the respect of his peers, which in academia is probably one of the main things you strive for.

I'm sure he would have been greatful for few quid though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems as if something is missing... why couldn't he find a "scientific position" after 2006?

<comment><USER8> I think he probably couldn't move due to him taking out a large mortgage prior. He's most likely underwater and there aren't too many scientific jobs in Alabama?

<comment><USER9> Better to be foreclosed on than work as a shuttle bus driver if other options are available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335127>

</comment><comment><USER11> if it's any consolation, Prasher can take a page out of Garrett Lisi's playbook and get grants from new institutions who would be willing to fund someone like him now that his name is out.</comment>


Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1973) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson-ComputerLibDreamMachines1975.pdf <comment><USER2> Ted Nelson's magical inspirational book(s). A original, a large print, and a revised edition are mentioned on Amazon and are available only used from third parties.

The first edition was self-published. The second edition was published through Microsoft Press. Nelson, Theodor. 1987. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Tempus Books of Microsoft Press. ISBN 0-914845-49-7. Sad to say, this gem is now pretty much out-of-print and priced up. Still, recommended reading for everyone thinking computationally.</comment>


This will go down on your permanent record - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/i/status/1208473062196170752 <comment><USER2> I saw this video a few weeks ago and wondered, how does a video like this get released? It sounds like the person recording is also doing the questioning, and it also doesn't feel like this is the kind of video that would be willingly shared as propaganda. So why is it online?

It actually makes me slightly doubt whether it's real or faked. I mean, it's not that hard to get 2 fake police outfits and a room and put together a fancy chair. And they do pan away pretty suddenly from the police officers. And why even show the police officers, like hey check out these two totally real cops? Why are they even recording in the first place?

I'm not saying it's actually fake, but for me enough things don't quite add up that I personally chose to go with "this doesn't affect my opinions because I have no clue if it's true or not" on this one. It's slightly worrisome that outside of HN (I've seen this on Reddit and in other tweets) I have not seen doubt expressed in any way. I think it's generally good to doubt things and we may be in big trouble if the global trend is to believe everything you see.

<comment><USER3> 谢谢老板

<comment><USER4> This breaks the site guideline against insinuating that someone is astroturfing or a shill or a bot or a foreign agent. If you think you're seeing evidence of abuse, email us at firstname.lastname@example.com so we can investigate. But please don't insert this poison into the threads—it's the cheapest of cheap shots, and based on everything we've seen (which is a lot), is actually far more destructive than the thing it's imagining to combat.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> Sorry. Understood. Original comment also seems to suggest astroturfing, though. Apologies again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have seen this before and it is truly disturbing for those who have come to the comments first. It shows a man locked in a tiger chair being questioned as to why he talked badly about the police on a forum. He is completely restrained. I can only imagine the feeling. This is disturbing so please be warned. How can we make a difference as an individual?

<comment><USER6> All you can do is boycott Chinese stuff, and not invest in Chinese firms. And promote the boycott.

It worked against apartheid in South Africa. But that was pretty easy. Avoiding Chinese stuff is much harder.

<comment><USER7> Can you even buy a smartphone, or even a computer without buying things from China in 2019? Especially if you're not American.

<comment><USER6> Hey, I posted as honestly as possible.

But yes, it'd be very hard to avoid buying from China.

So what's possible? Political action?

That seems unlikely too. It'd be hard even as a country to boycott China. The US economy would collapse if it tried, I bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone was able to film this and make it public? I'd love to know the story behind that.

<comment><USER9> I would like to see the evidence that this isn't just some actors in costumes.

It's easy to believe something like this happened in real life and got video taped. Certainly more unbelievable things have been caught on film. But it's also easy to believe it's a hoax, and it'd be an easy hoax to pull off.

<comment><USER10> Yes to be the devils advocate get, what if this really is a hoax to get the rest of the world riled up against China?

Except that we do have leaks like the China cables which are generally viewed a as authentic. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Cables](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Cables) IMO the rest of the wield needs to realize that this is nazi germany levels of crazy that are starting up again, and realize that Bernie ww3 breaks out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have evidence that this video is real? If not, and you're having an emotional reaction anyway, you're part of the problem.</comment>


Despite Many False Starts, the Future of Hiring Looks Promising - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130704205430-15454-despite-setbacks-the-future-of-hiring-looks-promising

<comment><USER2> It's funny that this article was posted on linkedin. Maybe I know too many people who have never had one useful thing come from a linked in profile other than horrible cold calls/emails

I do agree with the overall sentiment though, hopefully someone will better the system considerably sooner rather than later</comment>


Ad Companies Love Google's Ad Blocker, but Hate Apple's Privacy Features - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/342297/why-ad-companies-love-googles-ad-blocker-but-hate-apples-privacy-features/ <comment><USER2> A good reminder that Google's customers are actually advertisers, whereas Apple's customers are the end-user.

<comment><USER3> (I'm a Googler, opinions are my own).

I'd say it's a lot more complicated than that.

If you are paying Google, you are definitely a customer. This would be anything from GSuite/cloud, Fi, Play store, Express, and many others. Google isn't just Ads, there are a lot of products and lot of teams that have different priorities and concerns.

Product teams here that you don't pay still care about their users. It's good to remember that there are still engineers behind these products. Many of them have similar opinions to those expressed on HN. When an unpopular decision is made, people are vocal with their concerns.

<comment><USER4> I absolutely believe that engineers and product teams do care about their users.

That said, I also completely believe that Executives at Google are driven by what drives the majority of Google's revenue, i.e. the people that pay them the most money, their customers, advertisers.

Engineers can have the best of intentions but what Google or any company, especially a publicly listed company beholden to their shareholders, ultimately ends up _doing_ is what ultimately benefits their shareholders as decreed by their leadership.

I'm not saying you should trust any corporation to ultimately have your best interests at heart. I'm saying you should trust what is on their balance sheets to determine what values they will hold and protect when they decide their lobbying budgets in Washington, Brussels, etc. for the year. After that, you can vote with your wallet, time, attention, or whatever asset it is you hold that a given corporation covets.

So can you say with certainty that if I pay for GSuite that Google won't mine my hosted data/metadata or other information any more or less than someone that doesn't? Does Google only track my purchases in the Play Store to keep track of what I have in fact purchased as a good storefront would, and not to store it in a larger profile they've constructed of me or just sell the info on to a broker? I pay for YouTube Red, so does Google not use any information from my YouTube profile for advertising purposes on its other properties?

<comment><USER5> I can say with certainty that Google does not treat paying G Suite customer data the same as consumers'. It is not mined, it is not targeted, and it is not used in any way for advertising purposes.

I can say this as a former G Suite buyer who signed the contract & ToS, a current googler working with G Suite and Cloud resellers, and as someone who has been a part of Google's internal GDPR readiness programs.

I cannot address the rest of your questions authoritatively, but I don't particularly care about those, either, comparatively.

<comment><USER6> _It is not mined, it is not targeted, and it is not used in any way for advertising purposes._

(For the curious, this has been repeatedly disproven.)

<comment><USER7> This seems to say otherwise (?)

[https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security- white...](https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security- whitepaper/page-6.html)

Does it have exceptions somewhere / am I not reading close enough?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good on Apple for allowing tracking cookies to be blocked, i'd next like to see them implement blocking of tracking scripts.

They are a nuisance to privacy as well as contributing to web bloat. I've seen sites with 20+ trackers each with their own javascript and all it takes is for one to be compromised for an XSS vector to be opened.

<comment><USER9> That's true, but this web bloat pays the bills. It is what brings you and billions of other people great services like maps, email, translate etc for free. Web without ads would not be the same as it is now and I'm not sure whether it would seem better to you

<comment><USER10> Honestly just charge for the services or take them offline I say. I want to pay for Facebook with money. I can't.

I'd really like to see a complete attack - technical _and_ legal - that goes even further than Apple's on the current ad business model even if it means 90% of ad revenue disappears over night, and a similar fraction of "free" services do too.

<comment><USER11> People say this - but they rarely put their money where their mouth is.

History has shown time and time again that people are cheapskate. I know I'm guilty of this as well.

We like to signal that oh yes, we have money, and we'll pay. But then they seize up when they see the bill.

I subscribe to things like 1Password, Netflix, Hulu, Pocketsmith etc. If I sat down and added it all up, I assume it'd be several hundred a year. Even working in tech, I still sometimes think twice about paying for all these things.

How much would you pay for Facebook? $20 a month? $30 a month? $100?

I suspect you and I both have very little insight into how much it actually costs to run Facebook - but working for another internet giant, I can say it probably costs a lot more than the average layperson assumes.

<comment><USER12> I run a community site, with a lot of loyal long term users (most users check the site about 10 times a day and have been registered for years). My AWS bill is 15k per year, and the site earns 70k a year from a couple of advertisements.

Now, I also give users the option to pay per month to remove advertising and receive a number of additional perks for fun. However, only 100 of the 100k active users decide to do so, and that only brings in 5k a year in earnings.

In short, 15k in expenses, 70k from advertising, and 5k from users willing to pay money. So, if advertising fails I go from a 60k profit to a 10k loss per year, and the site would quickly close.

<comment><USER13> Uh?

_Only_ 5k a year in earnings?

100 users out of 100k is .1% (a ratio of 1,000)

If the other 99.9% of your users paid the same rate that'd be 5k x 1,000 = 5 million which is _way_ out of whack with what your advertisers think your site is worth which is 70k. You're overcharging your users by a substantial amount (a factor of approx 72 if my calculations are correct) so it's unsurprising only .1% have opened their wallets. The other 99.9% don't want to be fleeced by you.

<comment><USER12> There are a few things you need to keep in mind. Users that are willing to pay are typically from higher paying advertising regions, because those are areas where people have higher income. Therefore, I might generate $1 a year per user in advertising, but the average region where people are willing to pay is generating $3 per year.

That changes your calculation to a 24x increase.

Ok, then you need to realize only the most active users typically want to open their wallets. The users visiting 20x a day are going to pay before the people that visit a few times a week. So, if a paying user is typically 3x more active than a non-paying users, they're generating more advertising income.

That changes your calculation to an 8x increase.

Now, I should inform you users have 3 different payment options. All options remove advertising, but some users pay more because they want to support the site. So, users can actually pay 50% less than the average numbers I shared in the previous message, and still have advertising removed.

That changes your calculation to a 4x increase.

Ok, this is now looking more accurate, and I would agree the average user is probably paying 4x more than I earn from them in advertising. This is done on purpose to optimize earnings. If I lower payments by 4x so they're close to advertising rates, I'm not going to have 4x as many users sign-up. Even a 1 cent payment option will scare away 95% of people.

So, yes, I'm charging people more than they generate from advertising. If I charge them the same amount, then I would very likely have 150 instead of 100 paying users and see lower earnings. This doesn't influence my original message, and how advertising is the most important source of revenue for many sites. Without advertising there is no way I could cover my 15k in expenses, and no amount of fine tuning to my user payment system would get me to those numbers.

<comment><USER13> Are you just guessing or did you A/B test it to find out the optimal pricing structure that is also fair for the user?

<comment><USER14> Since s/he charges $50/year I think we all know that the answer is that s/he did no testing.

The option is probably more of just a cool way to foster community than to actually generate revenue/profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why should we, or Apple, care about how much money these ad companies are losing?

<comment> shaki-dora Most professionally-produced content on the web is ad-fianced. Quality journalism, for example, is necessary for a functioning democracy. And no, bloggers and other hobbyist cannot replace The New York Times.

While (some) publishers may be able to survive behind a paywall, the average citizen is unlikely to subscribe to more than maybe one or two. Where currently they may get their news from dozens of independent outlets, they will inevitably be restricted to far less diverse set.

You can easily do the following experiment: try not visiting any websites that have advertising for a month or so. Almost by definition, this is will be a loss for you (because otherwise you would not visit any such sites now).

Now, some people will argue that all these creates should simply adopt some other business model. I think that's obviously foolish, considering the sizeable number of failed attempts. But if you believe that, say, half of all publishers can somehow pull it off, the question becomes: Is avoiding ads worth cutting the amount of professionally-produced content in half?

And, if you are wrong and 90%+ of newspapers, literary platforms, trade publications etc. actually die in the process: would we not lose something far more essential than what we gained?

<comment><USER16> > And no, bloggers and other hobbyist cannot replace The New York Times.

...because?

<comment><USER15> At minimum, they probably aren't trained in journalistic integrity?

<comment><USER16> Would you be more worried about whether a reporter was formally "trained" in journalistic integrity, or about whether their reporting was accurate?

<comment><USER15> The former helps ensure the latter (minus the quotes, of course)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like customized ads. All my life I hated advertising. It was really weird when I started my own business and started to get postcards for things related to my business and I found myself actually enjoying them. Furthermore, I don't get the aversion to tracking cookies. I just don't see a likely downside to it, though I've heard theoretical ones like what if the U.S. becomes a communist dictatorship some day.

That said, my targeted ads online still haven't nailed it. Half the time they're for something I just bought. Like, I just bought a watch on Amazon, so now on Facebook I see ads for watches for three weeks. Too late. (Of course the example is fake. Nobody buys watches anymore.) Anyway, half the time they're too late, the other half they're just too off the mark. For example, I'm thinking of moving. So I research apartments in that city. So Facebook shows me ads for apartments for the city I'm still in.

The best ads for me have been the ones based on AdSense -- that is, the text of the page that I'm on. I'm reading an article about how to use a hammer, and at the bottom is an ad for a hammer. No tracking cookies required, and yet a better match.

<comment><USER18> I wonder if all those ads that are shown too late show up in some marketing department's data analytics with really good conversion rates...

<comment><USER19> Not if you've already converted. Those are likely wasted impressions that drag down numbers, not improve them.

Often what can happen is you can have retargeting lists setup that populate automatically, but depending on how they are implemented, how frequently they are updated, etc., they may have set things up as exclusion lists properly (or even just removed people from the retargeting list). Likewise, that data may not carry over super well across devices in all cases.

This stuff can be a headache to setup and maintain, particularly at scale, and I think a lot of people don't realize the complexity of what is involved when they haven't done it themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why would this be surprising? Apple has no skin in the advertising game, while it's the core of Google's income.

<comment><USER21> Advertisers are the core of Google's income. "Ad Companies" are to a large extent their competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Consumers love free content, hate micro-transactions and subscriptions."

It will will be interesting to see how this pans out away from LaLa Land where people work for free.

Personally I wouldn't be sad if a huge chunk of the internet content industry disappeared and we returned to the halcyon days of amateur bloggers. But many people being sold on the evils of advertising aren't fully understanding the economics of the market that provides their daily fix.

</comment><comment><USER23> A bit overblown on the reaction to Apple's changes, but this article is generally true. I'd love to serve only high quality ads on high quality inventory. There is a ton of cheap, low quality impressions in the market right now. It can be difficult to /not/ buy these, and this is a step in the right direction. Right now there are 3rd party vendors that analyze sites and block sites with 3+ ads, or certain types of content, but they aren't terribly effective and often block high quality sites too.

My biggest challenge is blocking sites I know are absolute garbage but they use strategies to stop me from blocking them. Fucking topix.com / topix.net is really difficult to block because they constantly create new domains (topixstars.com, topixparenthood.com, etc) so blaclisting their domain isn't even effective.

</comment><comment><USER24> Am I wrong to think that all of this is trying too little, too late? Why wouldn't people just use an adblocker st this point? Everyone I know and care about gets them installed by me, and I'm sure that not unusual. Getting uBO is isn't a technically challenging activity, and it works.

Am I missing the obvious again?

<comment><USER25> uBO seems to block ads well enough for me but not the tracking. I can easily see this by turning off uBO. What's a good way to block tracking within chrome?

<comment><USER24> uMatrix and a random user agent spoofer should do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google, first and foremost, is an advertising company. Their main business are ads and everything else revolves around creating products that attract users to use their services so they be monetized using their ad platform.

The whole purpose being Google's "ad blocker" is to protect their advertising business. They know that ads are starting to annoy a lot of people so they're going to ban worst offenders and try to stop users from installing an actual ad blocker that blocks all ads.

Apple is not an advertising company and they care about their end users and want them to buy their devices. Providing an unobtrusive and private browsing experience is what they care about.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not a big fan of Apple, but this is one obvious side benefit to the company that writes your software being the one that sells you your hardware. User experience extend to more than just the feel of you keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've always wondered how much a typical internet user generates in ad revenue. Basically, if I wanted to buy out my ads for a year, how much would it cost me?

I've never seen this number, and it seems highly relevant in the the debate over ad-supported services versus paywalls.

<comment><USER29> AVG PrivacyFix used to have a (probably biased and inaccurate but still) neat little tool that estimated how much you were worth to FB, Google, Twitter, etc after connecting your accounts. But I can't seem to find it anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> To be frank, Apple blocking 3rd party cookies really doesn't make that big of an impact. The Safari market share is small enough where it really doesn't matter, and there are already cookie-less tracking solutions in place that are more reliable than cookies anyways

</comment><comment><USER31> Does this popup block plan include exit popups and email capture js boxes? If so, some specialized SaaS companies like Sumo could be out of business

</comment><comment><USER32> Are they talking about PRISM privacy features? (IE: because the NSA doesn't let them tap into the data)

</comment><comment><USER33> Another reminder that with Apple you are their customer. With Google you are their product.

</comment><comment><USER34> Finally HTG! Love the website and it is a gem. (Not sponsored)</comment>


Weird Number - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_number <comment><USER2> I do believe mathematicians have co-opted a great many dictionary words to describe obscure and unique properties of numbers, so they may converse at parties and from a distance it sounds like a normal conversation.

<comment><USER3> The anthropomorphization of numbers is strange. It seems awfully subjective to describe numbers meeting certain qualities as "weird".

<comment><USER4> Wait until you find out what "awfully", "subjective", "certain", and "qualities" mean to mathematicians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> core-questions Was introduced to this idea a while ago by the venerable Boards of Canada: [https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Smallest_Weird_Number](https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Smallest_Weird_Number)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this! I've been a BoC fan since 2000 after discovering "Music Has The Right To Children", I think in part due to John Peel. Amazingly this site has slipped under my radar. Hard to believe it's 20+ years since that album was released.

<comment> core-questions Right on. Yeah, I got into them in the 90s thanks to the odd way in which Napster introduced me to new music. Typically I'd find an electronic artist, search for them, and find songs by them on compilation albums or on mixtapes that people had painstakingly separated into tracks with good ID3s. Download those whole albums, listen, and then whatever was good from them, I'd put back into the system. It was sort of like manually crawling through a curated recommendations graph.

Ironically, it made me buy a ton of CDs, so the industry probably made more off me than if I'd had no access to this sort of thing. $50 import British double-CDs off Warp Records et al? You know I was shelling out for it. Beautiful Warp20 collection with an unheard, virgin-vinyl cut from Boards of Canada? How could I not, back when I was younger and had disposable income?

The cult aspect of BoC is what turned me into a follower, because there's all these insane references that add a ton of depth to the music that still isn't really there with most of the artists that have filled the space they carved out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like the observation that all known weird numbers are even is almost built-in to the definition of weirdness.

Having two as a prime factor is the single most effective way to increase the number of integer divisors, as it is the smallest integer that you can multiply by a larger prime to get a product different from both operands. If there is an odd weird number larger than 10^21, the first one found would probably be divisible by 3.

Finding the first primitive odd weird number seems like something you could put on a CV.

</comment><comment><USER7> Clifford Pickover has some really interesting books about numbers, including The Wonders of Numbers or the Loom of God: [http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/noodlead.html](http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/noodlead.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I hate to call a single Wikipedia user out, but every time I see a diagram on a math or science related wiki page that does absolutely nothing to contribute to an understanding of the topic and in fact only serves to confuse the viewer, it always ends up having been made by [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee)

A lot of the time, I think it's better to simply not have any visual on a wiki page than to have an utterly unhelpful visual.

<comment><USER9> Here's the _Weird number_ Wikipedia entry with the diagram, as it seems to have been edited out very recently by an anonymous editor:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weird_number&di...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weird_number&direction=prev&oldid=925992441)

<comment><USER10> What anon taketh away, anon giveth back. Long live Wikipedia

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Examples

> The smallest weird number is 70. Its proper divisors are 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, > and 35; these sum to 74, but no subset of these sums to 70. The number 12, > for example, is abundant but not weird, because the proper divisors of 12 > are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, which sum to 16; but 2 + 4 + 6 = 12.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why are they called weird?

<comment><USER13> Because most numbers that are abundant are semi perfect. Weird numbers are abundant but -not- semi perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> example 312-202-9901

home recording????</comment>


Osmo-FL2k: The $15 DTV transmitter, FM radio hijack and GPS Spoofing device - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tomac/osmo-fl2k-a-15-dtv-transmitter-fm-radio-hijack-and-gps-spoofing-device-68ac08ba7d76 <comment><USER2> It says it can also do FM, so....how would I play music files over FM with this? What would keep it from doing AM?</comment>


Looking for Junior Freelance Developers - <AUTHOR>

We are looking for junior freelance developers based in the US to do API integrations and smaller projects on matchist. We're always looking for talented devs to join the network, but this is one example of a place where we have more projects than devs right now. <comment><AUTHOR> website is: <http://matchist.com/talent></comment>


HP EDS ordered to pay BSkyB £200m interim payment - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/it-business/supplier-relations/news/index.cfm?newsid=18660 <comment><USER2> Bet the poor HP workers end up paying for this mess tehir bosses got them into</comment>


The Jaguar and the Fox (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/07/the-jaguar-and-the-fox/378264/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> > _Up quarks, down quarks, strange quarks, charmed quarks, top quarks, bottom > quarks -- in addition to these six "flavors," quarks come in three "colors": > red, green, and blue. There is no end to the inventiveness that has become > part of the subculture of particle physics._

Or the confusion suffered by many a layman (or young student) when encountering these for the first time.

> _Still the overeager schoolboy, he pronounced foreign words perfectly and > corrected new acquaintances on the pronunciation of their own names._

Can't imagine why that wouldn't make someone popular.

> _Gell-Mann had become notorious for his bad temper. Among his cronies, the > nasty names he coined for rivals were as familiar as the catchy terminology > he applied to particles. Leon Lederman was "the plumber," because he was an > experimenter rather than a theorist. The distinguished theorists C. N. Yang > and T. D. Lee were "those two Chinamen from New York."_

How dare his contemporaries not exalt him as he'd like to be exalted.

> _" I'm writing a book for peasants," Gell-Mann would say dismissively._

And that's why Feynman is a household name (well, or much better known name) and Gell-Mann is not.

Gell-Mann may well have been the more accomplished physicist, but Feynman was the one that had the ability to explain the things he understood in ways that idiots like me could almost follow.

The stories of Feynman embody a lot of the traits I respect the most -- curiosity, fun, a kind of unsettled creative energy and a complete disregard for putting on airs. Gell-Mann embodies a lot of the traits I dislike the most.

<comment><USER3> Or as Winston Churchill once quipped; "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Favorite quote:

      "The intimidatingly smart top players in particle physics compete on a
      level playing field. The field is also rather constricted, with only a
      few big ideas being batted around at any one time. Most prizewinning
      discoveries are made by two or more thinkers simultaneously. What makes
      one a superstar and relegates another to obscurity often depends less on
      the work itself than on political acumen."

I find it interesting how the glamor of physics has ebbed over time and wonder how that's affected the level of competition.

</comment><comment><USER5> (2000)

</comment><comment><USER6> Feynman would never have the popularity today that had then. Roguishness would've tanked him.

We're living in a time now when scientists are made to cry for wearing a shirt with drawings of women.

<comment><USER7> And kicked out of their job for making a humorous comment about females in the lab followed by a 'but seriously ....'.</comment></comment>


How to Give Criticism - useful if you have co-founders (I need to improve on this myself...) - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/2007/10/how-to-give-kind-criticism-and-avoid-being-critical/

<comment><USER2> This is the wrong way to do things because it's still focused on the person. Criticise the work. The product. What's on the paper, the screen, whatever. If you're being kind (or unkind), you're still focused on the person -- quit it! Focus on the work!

If someone digs a hole in the wrong freakin' place, you don't say "gee, I really appreciate your work digging that hole as deep as you did but it seems something wasn't made clear enough to you, which is that the hole is intended be located over there, where, as you can see, it would work much better." Argh! Just say "Oh no, the hole is supposed to be over there!"

I know this seems like a tone-deaf socially ignorant approach, but here's the thing. You're on the same team as the person whose work (not them) you're criticizing. If it might seem like you're not, make that clear first. Criticism must be a cooperative thing. Purely antagonistic criticism is evil.

And make clear what your taste is. There's a huge difference between "I hate it" and "it's horrible," between subjective and objective. A front page with a out-of-place word-art logo? That's an "I hate it" -- I just think it's ugly. A user registration page with two screenfuls of fields to fill out? That's an "it's horrible" -- it just doesn't work.

But maybe I'm wrong. A side project for me is studying creative leadership, and this is some of the stuff I've picked up. So if you have a different view, please blast away; I'd like to hear it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article does touch on this, but in a different direction:

"Relate to actions. Never criticize the person. Always criticize the actions. And when you're making suggestions, make suggestions about actions, not about the person. Not: "Maybe you could become a less lumpy person?" Better: 'I suggest you get face smoothener ... it did wonders for me!'"

Moreover, I could be wrong but I feel when you criticize someone's work (especially in the case of a programmer) it may not have an ideal result.

ex. "This code is pure garbage because ..." ~= "Your kid is retarded..."

Unfortunately I learned this the hard way during my internship years ago.</comment></comment>


Counting Votes Is Hard - <AUTHOR> http://blog.forcerank.it/counting-votes-is-hard <comment><USER2> I've always thought that descriptions of Condorcet methods are harder than they need to be. Even the wikipedia page describes them badly.

The Condorcet criteria itself is easy. If a candidate would beat every other candidate in a one-on-one matchup, that candidate should be the winner. There, that's it.

That's really how it should be described. And then as a next step, we can then describe "tiebreakers". Instead, wikipedia (and others) describe Condorcet only in terms of their tiebreakers, making Condorcet methods themselves appear flawed[1].

You see, loops are possible. In a vote, it's possible that A would always beat B, B would always beat C, and C would always beat A. And the various Condorcet tiebreakers (like Schulz) are ways to resolve those situations.

But the point is, if that happens, the vote really is accurately uncovering an indecisiveness that actually exists in the voting population. So it makes sense that a "tiebreaker" would be non-ideal in some sense. And they all are in some way. The problem is not with the tiebreaking methods. The problem is with the voting population.

I've always thought a good voting system would be the following:

First, rank the votes. If a Condorcet winner exists, the election is over. If not, restrict the candidate pool to the Schwartz set, and start a new round of campaigning so the voting population can research more and better educate themselves.

[1]. Yes, we can argue that the Condorcet criteria is "perfect" if a Condorcet Winner exists, with one caveat: it implies the value that all votes have equal value. If you have that value, it's a logical implication that the Condorcet Winner (if it exists) should be the winner. But other values are possible, such as a utilitarian mindset of wanting to meet greatest social utility, such as some voters being far more passionate or educated than others. Following those implications bring up other tricky problems, though.

<comment><USER3> Why not ditch the ordinal voting and go with a cardinal system? People have seen and understood the system used in judging competitions such as figure skating, diving and gymnastics for many years. Wouldn't it be completely straightforward for them to see it on a ballot? Range voting is the name of that system and, unlike Condorcet methods, it is not subject to Arrow's impossibility theorem.

<comment><USER4> Because range voting devolves to approval voting. Why rate a candidate 4/10 if you don't want them to win? You insincerely rate them 0/10\. Why rate a candidate 8/10 if you want them to win? You insincerely bump them to 10/10.

On top of that, you then have to consider the potentially lower popularity of your favourite choice against that of the current lead contenders. Do you reduce your vote for the better of two evils so that your sincere preference has a better chance? Ugh.

I'm not trying to suggest tactical voting doesn't exist in other systems, but to suggest that it doesn't in Range voting is either misinformed or disingenuous.

<comment><USER5> Now suppose there's a candidate I like pretty well, not as much as my favorite, but better than several others. Do I vote 10/10 or 0/10? Which is more tactical? It's a little hard to say.

With approval voting I have to make that decision, setting some kind of threshold of approval. With range voting it might be easier to just vote honestly.

At worst, everybody votes tactically and you get approval voting, which is still a good system. But sometimes the tactical decision is difficult, in which case range voting gives you the option of just voting honestly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neither the blog post kindly submitted here nor the comments (so far) nor the Wikipedia article mentioned in one comment mention the impossibility theorem proved by Kenneth Arrow,[1] which shows that we can't build a perfect voting system to take into account preferences among three or more candidates. As a voter in a state with as many as ten candidates on the ballot in a typical presidential election, and some amazingly close three-way statewide elections,[2] I'm surprised that the Arrow paradox (Arrow impossibility theorem) isn't more widely known. I learned about it in an article in Scientific American back in the 1970s. My state has three "major parties" that have automatic ballot access for nominated candidates, and I expect that this year we may add one more political party to the list of major parties by the rules established in state law. If voters have more than two choices, odd results can happen in elections.

AFTER EDIT: A comment posted while I was typing the first version of this comment mentions "range voting" as a response to the Arrow paradox. A commentary by an economist[3] and a problem set by a mathematician[4] may suggest to thoughtful readers here some issues to ponder while discussing whether or not range voting provides better trade-offs than our current voting system, and whether it indeed escapes the theorem proved by Arrow.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem)

[http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/arrow.pdf](http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/arrow.pdf)

[2] [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-c...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken- coleman.html)

[http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24383.html](http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24383.html)

[http://www.amazon.com/This-Is-Not-Florida- Minnesota/dp/08166...](http://www.amazon.com/This-Is-Not-Florida- Minnesota/dp/0816670382)

[3] [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/ran...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/range- voting.html)

[4] [http://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/Summer2008/anema/approval.h...](http://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/Summer2008/anema/approval.html)

<comment><USER7> Range voting still has its issues - every voting methodology has some issues - but range voting pretty well dominates plurality voting IMO.

<comment><USER8> That depends on how much you value electing a candidate who is the _top_ choice of the most voters. The value proposition is completely subjective.

<comment><USER9> I think this is insufficiently talked about in discussions of voting systems. For some situations it's better to have a divisive winner with passionate support and in other situations it's better to have a compromise winner that nobody hates too much.

Different voting systems can give you different angles on picking the option with the most direct support versus avoiding picking options that stir up a lot of dislike in the voting body.

<comment><USER7> While that's true and important, plurality doesn't do as good a job as other methods at either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny how the website authors failed to do research on voting systems _before_ writing the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally did look into them, I just didn't think it would matter much for our use case. As a general rule I find that time spent with fun complicated algorithms is rarely connected to actually creating business value..

Just turned out I was wrong this time :)

<comment><USER2> As someone who spent time with the fun complicated algorithms, I quite like the UI and usability of your ballots - it matches up rather exactly with how I imagined doing it myself before I got distracted messing with more algorithms. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heh, it always sounds easier in a meeting, "Bill, set up some sort of simple voting system, should be a cinch, by the end of the week should be plenty of time."

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't do a lot of this kind of work, but as an interested party with sunday spare time, I think the problem here is that you're scoring anything other than the first picks.

If you just look at first picks, Newbie HBase wins 3 to 1. If for some reason Newbie HBase was in a 2/2 split with Mapreduce and KIR (flip James's top 2 votes), you then take into account 2nd rankings, which in this case means Newbie HBase wins again.

I don't believe you ever want to take into account someone's griefer vote, too much potential to game the system with no benefit to the group as a whole.

<comment><USER13> Griefer votes are hard to do in Condorcet.

You're proposing plurality voting (plus a weird tie-breaker), which is the worst method on basically every criterion except for "simplicity" and "familiarity to Americans". It leads to really obvious vote-splitting, and people will vote strategically, because they know perfectly well what happens to honest votes in plurality voting. They will also simply propose fewer things.

If the computer is counting votes for you, simplicity shouldn't be the highest priority.

There's a reason people have put years and years of research into voting methods. The best method is unlikely to be the one you think of off the top of your head and post in an HN comment.

<comment><USER12> I don't believe there is anything 'weird' about the tie-breaker, it's a pretty standard technique - local elections, tournament tie-breaking, movie night voting. What's weird about using second and third choices to determine the best when there's a tie for the first choice?

What I think is really weird is why would a system put much weight, if any at all, on someone's 4+ choice? We might be coming up with a result that received the most points, but are we actually coming up with a result that the most people will be happy with, or is it the least boring thing that people will put up with?

<comment><AUTHOR> (this is Jeff from ForceRank)

The thing to note about our particular situation is that we're really only a little interested in the #1 result. The app is primarily about helping groups prioritize things, for instance "What features do we need to build next".

Rating systems are a no go, because the whole point is to force people to choose and hence consider the tradeoffs (hence "ForceRank" :)

In this case, some of the voting system criteria such as "susceptibility to burying" play out a bit different than in a regular election. eg If everyone thing "Project C" is a great idea but Frank _hates_ Project C, we want to do what we can to highlight that fact, not just continue on our merry way with the majority vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Every voting system incorporates certain preferences. They are built in, and cannot be removed from the system. In this case, the voting system used essentially incorporates the idea that relative ranking is important - something that the voter ranked #2 is more preferable to the voter than something the voter ranked #10.

So the idea that the algorithm ended up picking something ranked #2 by everybody over something ranked #1 by some people and #10 by some people is not actually crazy.

If you choose a system with ten gradations of voting, that's what you get - choices that are #2 for everyone are preferred over choices that are #10 for some people. If you don't like that result, don't choose that voting system. That's what a ten-point voting system _is_.

By the way, the images are wrong - the text implies that Matt ranked Newbie Hbase very low, but the image shows the opposite.</comment>


Ask YC: Anyone seen the Aardvark'd movie with Paul Graham? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys,
has anyone seen this:
http://www.projectaardvark.com/movie/
I saw PG appears in there.
Is it good?
There's an awesome quote by PG in this:
"There's this custom among programmers of being nice, right, just like there's this custom among Wall Street people of seeming like a dick" :-) <comment><USER2> PG is shown cooking pasta in the movie. But it's mainly about FogCreek.</comment>


Plato was right: Earth is made, on average, of cubes - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200720112214.htm <comment><USER2> From the Timaeus "To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form ; for earth is the most immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies, and that which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature. Now, of the triangles which we assumed at first, that which has two equal sides is by nature more firmly based than that which has unequal sides ; and of the compound figures which are formed out of either, the plane equilateral quadrangle has necessarily, a more stable basis than the equilateral triangle, both in the whole and in the parts. Wherefore, in assigning this figure to earth, we adhere to probability"</comment>


VPN Service to Encrypted SOCKS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/freeboson/openvpn-ssh-tunnel <comment><AUTHOR> I sometimes want to use a VPN service as a simple proxy for 1 or 2 applications. Most VPN services provide authenticated (unencrypted) SOCKS access, but I would like encryption from me to the VPN provider. So, I shoved OpenVPN into a docker with OpenSSH and I can just tunnel whatever I want in through SOCKS.

I'm curious if this is a good approach.</comment>


Facebook revenue to be billions in 5 years: board member - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE56531X20090706

<comment><USER2> Wow, talk about forward looking statements. When companies start making comments like this, it's evidence of a loss of rationality. If MySpace had said this 4 years ago, they would have gotten press too and everyone would have believed it and it _could_ have been possible.

But seriously folks, look around. The unpredictability of the internet is just too high to be making statements like this, I don't care how much evidence you have.

 _Andreessen told Reuters that the world's most popular online social network could pile up $1 billion in revenue this year if it pushed harder on selling advertising._

Seriously? Like how much harder? Putting more ads on the site? Charging more for them?

This is bubble talk if ever I heard it. He wants to get press for his new investment fund. He has to say big things so that people talk and want to give him money and want him to invest in their companies. So transparent.

They say: _[Twitter] needs to focus on increasing its number of users and improve the features it offers so that no rival can swoop in._

Oh boy. Really? So no rival can swoop in? The more Twitter develops its features, the easier it is for a rival to swoop in. Just copy them. It really isn't that hard. Facebook could copy them. Google could copy them. Lots of people think Wave is a more advanced twitter already.

And then he says this: _MySpace focused too much on selling advertisements_

Isn't that exactly how he said Facebook could be making billions? So really what he is saying is, "If facebook sold more ads, they'd make more money, but then they'd lose their users, so they wouldn't make money, so really, facebook can't make much more money."

Read between the lines and you'll see that the whole scheme is faulty.

<comment><USER3> This. Anyone who is predicting _specifics_ about the internet 5 years from now is selling something. This guys predictions are hedged-bet sensationalist double-speak. Boo.

<comment><USER4> precisely, facebook just turned 5 years old a few months ago

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I'll bet Marc Andreesen $100 that facebook will _not_ make multiple billions of dollars in 5 years.

2008: $210 million, 2009: $230 million. Extrapolating wildly maybe 600 million, but they'd have to _double_ their revenue increase for that to work (10% / annum to 20% per annum). I fail to see what magic they're going to pull in order to make that happen.

Also, revenue definitely isn't profit, look at youtube.

<comment><USER6> I'll take that action. To be specific, I will bet $100 that Facebook's annual revenue will reach $2 billion/year by 2014. Do we have a bet?

<comment><USER7> This doesn't seem like an outlandish bet to me. It seems to me that Facebook has, up to this point, spent much more time and energy on their core product rather than improving advertisements. Six months ago the ads were totally worthless, now I notice they are beginning to tailor their ads to my interests and my group of friends. If they continue optimizing the ads those revenues should increase.

There is also a virtually untapped market on Facebook for virtual objects. The gift system does exist, but I feel needs improvement. Social networking sites in Asia make the bulk of their money off of this feature, not ads. If FB beefs up this aspect of their business I think 2 billion by 2014 is a reasonable goal.

All that being said, the sentiment that "he is selling something" seems reasonable. They could be ramping up for an IPO or, more likely, going for another round of private investments to fuel growth.

<comment><USER5> I'm not too scared. Google made 21 billion over the whole of 2008 on advertising, both on their own site and in the 'channel'.

To be taken with a grain of salt:

<http://alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com+google.com>

So, at a daily reach of 2/3rd of googles they have managed to score about 10% of googles income.

I don't see facebook getting several times the size of google and I don't see how they could possibly get close to the clickrates / cpms that google is getting for their traffic.

It doesn't get much more targeted than search traffic, facebooks citizens revolt whenever the company tries to pull in a direction where they can monetize the traffic better.

'Facebooks' come and go, geocities, myspace and so on...

To my feeling they're already over their top, but then again I could be mistaken, which will cost $100 :)

For FB to make that 2 billion (that's a lot of dough) on their users they'd have to become roughly 10 times their current size at the same conversion rates, so they'd have to have a reach of 200%, which is impossible.

I think they'll top out somewhere in the 600 to 800 million range and then they'll either stay there or they'll be upstaged by someone with a better idea.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't bet either way, but remember that profit isn't a linear progression. Right now, Facebook's not making much money per user. If they figure out a way to convince its _average_ user to pay for something, suddenly they'll be in for a shitload of cash.

I dunno if they'll find something like that, but it's not something to be instantly ruled out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I somehow believe according to personal value of Facebook (read none) that it's aiming for its peak. It is a time waster in the time where constructivism is a necessity to overcome all present issues. Just take a look at the feeds, it seems to me that it is social gossiping and social gaming rather than anything to do with friends. As (an older) student, I can see the trend that most students are falling in the already mentioned time wasting. Those that graduated though, I don't even see them on Facebook, they are busy doing something, working, building and using their time with physical friends and family.

Facebook's crowd will always be difficult to monetize. I am already pissed of by the banners I see around (never ever clicked one), so the only reason I go there is to notify people of something from time to time. It really has taken the functionality of an Address book, and hell it is annoying climbing up that www for a small piece of information. The board of Facebook says that if they placed more ads they could start earning a lot. I say if they do that, I am a goner same moment. Same if they try to sell me something.

Valuing Facebook in 5 years? Ridiculous. I doubt it will even exist in 5 years in the form of today. I see a major shift in computing coming up in the next few years, and Facebook and Google and all those disconnected clusters of multiple identities merged.

Value of Facebook currently is (-) minus all the money they've spent. I doubt they will ever compensate for that. Investing in Facebook though is a good scheme to launder money.

I also see the next bubble. Overestimation and over-expectations of "startups" and websites that will never create value. I see a clear shift to desktop computing again away from the ill-responsive web.

<comment><USER10> _Facebook's crowd will always be difficult to monetize._

I have ad-blocking turned on on all websites, by default, so I don't get a good sense of what advertises on Facebook unless I happen to see someone else's Facebook feed (as, for example, a family member's) on a computer without ad blocking turned on. It all looks like schlock.

What I have seen on my own home page feed on Facebook is a small number of some of my more remote Facebook friends who go absolutely NUTS over the Facebook quiz applications. I enjoy posting links via the Facebook link application to webpages on the marketing tricks and security holes embedded in Facebook quizzes. (Many thanks to HN readers who post some of those links here on HN.) I'm trying to use positive peer pressure in my circle of Facebook friends to make it uncool to respond to Facebook quizzes at all, and I'm gratified to see that several of my friends immediately put all my new links about the perils of Facebook quizzes up on their personal Facebook feeds.

So I think this is the problem: sophisticated users will not only not fall for the schlock on Facebook, they will try to educate their friends about the schlock. I don't know if Facebook has a revenue model that overcomes the cost of serving up lots of pretty pictures and videos to unsophisticated users. (I don't think Facebook is anywhere near as technically savvy about reducing bandwidth or running server farms as Google, but I could be mistaken.) It may be that a lot of the users who have the highest-quality conversations to share will jump ship and find yet another online community--that has happened many times since the 1990s, and I always follow the flight to quality.

And, yes, I agree that sometimes Facebook has appallingly poor response time. That might get a lot worse as the user base expands.

<comment><USER8> I think you're right that over time, pressure will stop people from publishing quizzes publicly. In my own sphere I've seen almost none in the past two weeks. It's like how "tag-other-people" notes got old half a year ago.

I agree with all the stuff you said, good points all, but I don't know if I agree about Facebook's serverfarmrunning-bandwidthreduction. They offer a lot of services to their millions of users and they're rarely down. I don't know how to compare them outside of that, but I doubt they're at all poor at this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They'll have a serious growth problem with the number of 30+ aged folks jumping on the site right now. In 5 years, when the 8 year olds of the world turn 13 and start looking for social networks to join - I have a feeling they aren't going to use the one old mom and dad are using. They better start now focusing on us older folks so we keep spurring growth.

<comment><USER12> My personal path has been Friendster, MySpace, Facebook. I am already seeing the end of Facebook. Perhaps I need to go Ning?

<comment><USER12> I'm just saying, that I use and like social networking. I only moved to Facebook because of the 'social pressure" of people leaving MySpace. Exactly like I left Friendster for Myspace.

That said, I look at with a combination of nostalgia and pity. I miss aspects of it, and I pity their loss of self as they attempt to become MySpacebook.

MySpace wants to be Facebook, Facebook wants to be Twitter and what I want is a foggily undefined thing that is none of the above.

I see the end of Facebook, veteran that I am of three generations of social networking.

Just saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Facebook revenue to be 0 billion in 5 years: me

</comment><comment><USER14> marc has a talent for selling companies for a lot of money that tank after being purchased. Facebook is no different.</comment>


In Defense of Offense - <AUTHOR> http://quillette.com/2018/02/05/in-defense-of-offense/ <comment><USER2> Agreed, free speech is the ultimate (meta) right. Censoring speech rights for good and noble causes, has always created dire for some group of people.</comment>


Inside the Anglo-Saxon Classroom - <AUTHOR> http://www.historytoday.com/kate-wiles/inside-anglo-saxon-classroom

<comment><USER2> A nice comeback when people equate Anglo-Saxon culture with suburban boredom

<comment><USER3> Because Anglo-Saxons entirely different (both culturally and ethnically) from modern "whites" had shit jokes at school and teachers molesting children?

<comment><USER2> Who said anything about "whites"? I never mentioned that word in my post. I was talking about people who specifically refer to "Anglo-Saxons" in a derogatory way. Are those people using the wrong word?

EDIT: also, in my school we would make jokes about teachers being "pervs" although I'm pretty sure no teacher of mine actually was. This sort of thing happens in every culture, the article was about the jokes, not the actual act.

<comment><USER3> The idea that people are going to make fun of you for being Anglo-Saxon, and then you are going to turn it around on them by referring to the content of this article, is just absolutely cringeworthy.

<comment><USER2> Seems like you've run out of arguments and are resorting to social status games. Unfortunately that doesn't work so well online.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in 1966 - <AUTHOR> http://www.coal-seam-gas.com/accidents/ussr.htm <comment><USER2> ... as well as once in 1968, twice in 1972, and once in 1981. 0.o

The USSR had a whole program to investigate peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs), called Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy. [1] Sadly, some of these experiments went rather wrong, unexpectedly releasing lots of radioactive nasty near populated areas. The US also did this sort of thing from 1961 to 1973, and the program was cancelled in '77\. [2]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy)

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

<comment><USER3> Here's a timelapse of every nuclear explosion since 1945. It really puts into perspective just how many nukes have gone off for purposes other than to kill people. It's amazing that only two were used for violence.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY)

According to the video, people have detonated 2053 nukes, and America has the dubious distinction of having detonated over 1000.

<comment><USER4> Only two were actually used to kill people. Most of the rest were preparations for it.

<comment><USER5> Arguably most of the nuclear tests were done to prevent war. Each side wanted to show the other they could match and one-up them in nuclear tech. Neither really wanted to ever actually use them to kill people.

<comment><USER6> Plenty of people on both sides really wanted to use them. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kissinger, being one of them. Fortunately, cooler heads held the launch codes and we all prevailed.

<comment><USER7> Is this what you are referring to? [http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff...](http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuclearwar?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER6> This and a few others. Going through the wired archives you'll find many examples of nuclear false alarms and brinkmanship where the only thing stopping annihilation is an officer ignoring or delaying the order to launch [1][2].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The US proposed many peaceful uses of nuclear explosives, mostly in the 60s. The catchall term for these proposals was "Project Plowshare" or "Operation Plowshare" [0].

 _> And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more_ \- Isaiah 2:3-5

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

</comment><comment><USER9> This puts me mind of Herzog's fantastic documentary, _Lessons Of Darkness_ [1], about the crews putting out the oil well fires in Kuwait. Also, the Door To Hell [2] in Turkmenistan.

[1] [http://www.fandor.com/films/lessons_of_darkness](http://www.fandor.com/films/lessons_of_darkness)

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

<comment><USER10> the odd thing about the Herzog film though is that it includes a narration that casts the images into a kind of scifi story unrelated to Kuwait/Iraq, rather than a documentary. The filming is amazing though.

<comment><USER9> Herzog has this concept of the ecstatic truth, which means his documentaries are rarely as simple as they can seem; it's almost a third form of film.

I'm an unabashed fanboy, but in any event, _Lessons Of Darkness_ is highly, highly recommended.

<comment><USER11> > ... it's almost a third form of film.

What are the other two?

<comment><USER12> I'm presuming "documentary" and "narrative".

<comment><USER9> Yes, exactly. I'm sure that there are more forms, but those are the two that Herzog traffics in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "no radioactivity above background levels was detected at the surface of the > ground during post-shot surveys."

the wording on that makes me very suspicious of what was found "under surface of the ground" after they resumed drilling the gas/oil...

Edit: yep. apparently this is Public Relations Speak. The wikipedia for the US plowshare tests do mention that all gas they extracted after using nukes to open way had very high levels of radiation and they could only be used in a few industrial places.

</comment><comment><USER12> Eric Schlosser's _Command and Control_ is an eye-opening read on this subject. It's hard to fathom how seemingly cavalier the US and USSR were about nuclear explosions in the decades after their invention. Nuclear landmines! Nuclear rifles!

</comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately the mere mention of "Nuclear" is a trigger word for most people, which is a tragedy considering that due to all the mistakes that were made in the past we have started to (finally) move to safer ways of using Nuclear Power.

If we were realists about Nuclear energy like other forms of energy, we should have been entering a golden age of Nuclear right about now.

<comment><USER15> A golden age of nuclear waste? It's not a silver bullet.

<comment><USER16> Honestly, I'd rather deal with nuclear waste than I would what we're currently doing to our environment.

<comment><USER17> Fire that crap into the sun and be done with it.

<comment><USER18> You are getting downvoted without explanation here. It's a reasonable thought except for a few things. First of which is our space launch and delivery systems aren't 100% reliable. Even one failure means nuclear debris spread over a wide distance - something that would be very difficult to recover from.

I couldn't find a good document from a quick googling, but this was high on the list: [http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2013.html](http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2013.html) 81 launches and 3 failures. I don't particularly like those odds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of my visit to Centralia, PA, where the underground fire has been burning since 1962. Took lots of interesting pictures.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania)

<comment><USER20> Burning mountain has been on fire for 6,000 years... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The big countries had their way with peaceful nuclear technology. Now, the smaller/weak ones are denied their own nuclear research and tech. forced to buy tech from the rich or get sanctioned to oblivion.

<comment><USER22> Yep. Life isn't fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned Project Orion[1] which involved using atomic bombs to propel a spacecraft.

Seems a little hare-brained to me, but they took it pretty seriously back then. Of course, it was all just theoretical, which might be the reason nobody brought it up in this discussion.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propul...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29)

</comment><comment><USER24> The US also had several plans for using nuclear explosions for non-military purposes:

 _The project team wanted to blow a path for a railway line through California's Bristol Mountains; they wanted to use nukes to expand the Panama Canal; and they wanted to use underwater explosions to carve out a harbor in Alaska._

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-us-once- wanted-...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-us-once-wanted-to- use-nuclear-bombs-as-a-construction-tool-1957380/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I believe nuclear charges are not only used to stop spill but also to release natural resources. However I did not find a reputable source of information to confirm that.

<comment><USER26> You might be thinking of the natural gas stimulation experiments performed by the US in the 70s[1]. From that article, "it was found that the three blast cavities had not connected as hoped, and the resulting gas still contained unacceptable levels of radionuclides" so it never went past the experimentation phase.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare#Natural_ga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare#Natural_gas_stimulation_experiment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They've also used them to stop underwater oil leaks. If we had done that with the last BP spill things would have been solved a lot quicker!

<comment><USER28> We quickly realized that bacteria have evolved to eat oil, so it wasn't quite as big of an environmental disaster as first expected. I would not expect radiation to improve the situation at all.

<comment><USER29> i suggest you investigate the side effects of corexit that have emerged since the incident

<comment><USER30> I note that the FDA didn't find a problem with food safety ([http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencie...](http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencies/UCM250307.pdf)) the Wikipedia page references an unreliable Vice/MotherJones article. Not finding much on its side effects from research though. Do you have some additional pointers?

these guys [http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=24108904](http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=24108904) suggest that it doesn't help the bacteria work, but doesn't suggest any enhanced toxicity.

<comment><USER31> Here's the wikipedia page for anyone curious: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit#Toxicity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit#Toxicity)

There are plenty of links to reliable sources there. Which page were you looking at?

<comment><USER30> I was mostly using Google Scholar to look for peer reviewed work with the keywords 'corexit toxicity' There are a about a dozen papers on the first page, of the ones I could read without jumping various firewalls the conclusions tended toward 'less toxic' than 'more toxic'. Would love to see a meta analysis too but didn't dig one up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> When I saw the date and the location of Uzbekistan, I thought it was related to the huge earthquake (7.5) of 1966 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. But it looks like the bomb was exploded in September but the earthquake was in April.

More about this earthquake: [http://www.tashkent- info.narod.ru/en/e_ze.htm](http://www.tashkent-info.narod.ru/en/e_ze.htm)

</comment><comment><USER33> Suddenly the scenes in the movie Hellfighters (1968) (starring John Wayne) don't seem so dangerous or exciting. Somebody should do a reboot, but using a nuclear bomb instead of TNT.

(Although in terms of safety I suppose I'd much rather be on team nuclear than team TNT. But Hollywood can add the requisite tension and danger.)

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminded me of this cool invention.. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E16g1_ibpBM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E16g1_ibpBM)

</comment><comment><USER35> Video says no radiation detected at surface. What is the effect of the radiation underground? How long until the gas is harvestable from a new well?

<comment><USER36> > Video says no radiation detected at surface.

Soviet Russia was not big on detecting radiation in public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Actually, controlled explosions are the best strategy against big fires.

<comment><USER38> What do you mean "actually"?

This whole article is about how a controlled explosion was the best strategy against a big fire, and then you rock up and chime in with "actually controlled explosions are the best strategy against big fires".

Duh! That's what the article was talking about!

It's like everyone was talking about how the sky is blue, and you come along as say "actually the sky is blue".

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Putting out a gas fire with a nuclear explosion... what can go wrong?

<comment><USER40> Well, it's got the word "nuclear" in it, so obviously doomsday is the only possible result.

<comment><USER41> I know some nuclear families that are disasters waiting to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The US and Russia cooperated on a program to do this in space in order to stop a asteroid from destroying the planet. Bruce Willis led the mission.

<comment><USER42> Wow. That's a lot of down votes for a joke/movie reference that shouldn't have offended anyone. Maybe this community isn't for me!

<comment><USER43> I doubt that anyone was offended. But you will find a very strong negative reaction to jokes in the comments. I think there is a (very wise) desire to avoid a reddit type culture that rewards extended jokes and similar things.

This may well be the community for you, but just be aware that a lot of people are justifiably frightened of what can happen to online communities.

I think a good rule of thumb would be 'would be a waste of someone's time to read this comment'. People value the possibility that we can learn valuable things on Hacker News, but that becomes impossible if you have to wade through layers and layers of pointless jokes.

Not intending to be unwelcoming, but I think it can be a surprise.

<comment><USER44> > _' would be a waste of someone's time to read this comment'_

That's not a good example to use for jokes because people can justify lighthearted humor as an improvement to their day. Having fun is healthy for you, and whatnot.

I think a better way to deal with it is to say that there's a time and place for comedy and HN is not usually that place.

<comment><USER38> "Having fun is healthy for you"

The problem is that some vague reference to a shitty movie isn't fun. There's no witticism in his comment is there? He's effectively saying "this situation can be related to one in a movie".

Not exactly hilarious, is it?

<comment><USER42> Not exactly hilarious. For sure.

But I viewed the parallels as interesting and thought others might be interested as well. In the future I'll be sure to make my comments dead pan serious without any humor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An open letter to Wikipedia by Philip Roth - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia.html

<comment><USER2> Obvious guy says: this situation was entirely Roth's fault, for failing to address the issue through the usual channels by which authors correct misunderstandings of their work: in an essay, an interview, or, oh, I don't know, an open letter to critics, published somewhere substantial. He has now kicked the dog for eating its dog food, then fed it more dog food.

</comment><comment><USER3> And now that it's in a secondary source (The New Yorker), someone will correct it.

EDIT: has corrected it.</comment>


Ask HN: Career advice for a new grad - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I've been agonizing over a decision between two offers.
The first one is from a company in Ottawa (Canada), doing systems programming (C/C++) with an above-average salary (for a new grad). The second one is from a company in London (UK), with ~ £40k salary. I'd be working with a more "modern" stack (think Python/JS/Ruby/Go/etc).
Following is a somewhat unstructured collection of thoughts.
Location: London >> Ottawa. I'd be looking at a ~40-60min commute (by bus) in Ottawa. For London, public transit and cycling infrastructure seem good. I'm more familiar with Ottawa as I've done an internship there, while my impression of London is based solely on a short visit. Generally though, London seems to be a more exciting (but expensive) place to live.
Type of work: The first offer seems more interesting as I would love to work on performance-type problems.
People/team: When interviewing with the first company, I met with two people from my would-be team (including the manager), and with multiple senior engineers from other teams. The company has a high proportion of senior engineers. For the second company, I got to meet a larger portion of the team. There were a couple instances during the interview and several post-interview phone calls where I thought "man, I'd really love to work with this person".
Immigration: For the sake of future stability, it is important for me to get permanent residency regardless of where I end up. Based on my research, getting a PR in Canada is much faster compared to getting an ILR in the UK.
Some of the questions on my mind are:
- Would it be irresponsible to give up the PR in Canada and move away?
- Would I later regret not moving to London in my early twenties?
- What's more important: work or people?
- How important is compensation for the first job out of college?
Would really appreciate any help/input/advice, especially from people later in their careers who have had to make similar choices. <comment><USER3> The moment you take your first job, it starts defining your career. If you tend to lean towards C++, I'd go there. Otherwise, in 5 years time you may end up being a well paid senior "modern" stack developer who really wish he could work on low level stuff instead. At this point it'll be too late though - it's hard start over and take a pay cut from say 100k back to 40k.

Having said that, the "modern" stack is definitely safer. The C++ market is great for really awesome, technical people, but there's not that many offers for people who are average. With modern tech it's the other way around - it is generally easier to use so there's less need for awesome people (which can make it boring if you are very talented), but it's very safe (in terms of job security) for average people. Also, in the C/C++ world you'll be competing against guys who've been building up their domain knowledge for 20-30 years...

My story is that I went with the safe side and my salary and working conditions are excellent now. The jobs themselves are completely uninspiring though. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I had the mental firepower to be a really great c++ programmer (say, senior engine programmer at a game company), as I get tired rather easily. So, even now (10+ years into my career), I'm not sure if I made the right call.

Re: London, it's huge, feels old/dirty (when I touch a building's wall, I wonder how many hundreds of people and dogs have pissed on that spot in the past), crowded and absurdly expensive. On the other hand, it is great for job hopping, so it might be wise to stay there in the formative years of your career.

<comment><AUTHOR> Over the years, how has your perspective on the stack + the type of work you're doing changed? I feel like due to my age I don't have the context to make a decision based on factors that will actually matter in the long term.

<comment><USER3> It definitely changed, I started with what's easy to learn, available and well-paying, and that meant Java jobs - I thought that programming is just fun enough to make these jobs cool. Now I seriously doubt that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi from Ottawa. If you are moving back here for a job, why wouldn't you move closer to work? Also note the new light rail system is under construction, so that could also factor into where you might live wrt where you work. Long commutes may be standard in other places, but unless you want to live in the burbs for family reasons and then have a commute to work, I'd advise against that in Ottawa (or anywhere!).

I've not lived in London, but grew up in Montreal and lived in Toronto. I've been fortunate enough to visit many US and European metropolitan areas. In saying all that, I really find Ottawa to be a nice-sized small city. It's a government town for sure, but there is also a lot of Aero & Defence (where I ended up) as well as high tech (Shopify, Apple, Amazon, QNX/Ford's new self driving car centre). It's big enough to have pro sports teams, but small enough that you can be in the country in 20 minutes if you want to. No 16 lanes of highway anywhere in sight, either.

At the end of the day though, try not to worry about it too much. As others have said in this thread, the first job will define _a_ path in life, but so will the second job, or that next person you talk to on the bus, it's all a big random walk. You are fortunate to have two interesting opportunities in front of you, so have fun and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be working in Kanata and would prefer to live somewhere closer to downtown, hence the estimated commute times (by public transit).

Thank you for adding some perspective. It seems whatever choice I end up making, my brain will find a way to rationalize it post-factum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd go with the London offer solely based on _" man, I'd really love to work with that person"_. In the early stages of your career, it's best to optimize for people. The best investment you can make is work with people you admire and want to learn from. In the long run, relationships matter more than anything else. All other things - stack, languages, cost of living - <USER2> temporal. Quality of people and relationships are valuable long term. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER6> You will do OK in London with 40k as your starting salary (if you are single). Senior Python devs would do north of 55k here. Though be prepared you will move flats several times before you land at your perfect spot.

London is huge, so is the market. So is the competition :-)

I have never been to Ottawa. I have moved to London 7 years ago, feel free to ask more questions if you have some.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where did you move from? Curious to hear about things you like and dislike about living and working in London.

<comment><USER6> It all depends on your circumstances. If you are single then London will work well for you, and if you like travel you have all other countries at hand - Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland.. Very diverse and very colourful. And it feels like London is a startups heart of Europe (at least this is what I feel compared to Geneva, Munich or Berlin). Some people will argue in light of Brexit but I personally think this will work for better to both Europe and Great Britain. A step back towards what EU used to be (in a good way).

To rent a whole flat for yourself will cost you 1k+ PCM (that's flat, you need to remember about council tax and TV tax and utilities, so probably closer to 1150+ PCM), you will be better to go for a room (did I mention it all depends if you are single? and you meet new people too)

Taxes here depend on your formal situation with the company. If you go PAYE then you'll probably see about ~30k of what you earn. Go and look at pay calculators. But once you get your permanent stay your option might look better. Also you mentioned 40k is a starting point, so you'll end up on better wage once your probation/review is done. Maybe your employer would go for paying your flat and travel expenses which would work better than doing this for yourself.

I would try to evaluate which option (Canada or UK) look better from your pocket perspective and then would look into tech and future perspective. Python seems to be quite on top at the moment, though C++ is not too bad neither :-) so not simple choices here!

\---

Just spotted you edited your question.

Q- Would it be irresponsible to give up the PR in Canada and move away?

A- I don't know :-) What's the PR in Canada?

Q- Would I later regret not moving to London in my early twenties?

A- older you get more difficult it becomes.

Q- What's more important: work or people?

A- growth. And that might mean either work, or people, or both, or neither - depending what's your end goal.

Q- How important is compensation for the first job out of college?

A- you would not (probably) consider moving if you was not offered a job, would you? Compensation is important but at some point you get to the glass ceiling and you need to think about other options. You need to value yourself, does not matter what point in your life you are at.

Think what you want to be doing in 1/3/5 years from now. That might give you the right perspective.

\---

Oh and commute - it is not unusual to see people commuting 60+ minutes (one way). You need to target the area near your office or near the fast tube (some are faster than the other). I live in suburbs and it takes me only 30 minutes to commute :-) it used to take 70 minutes when I was in zone 3 (but I was on slow line).

Also as far as I'm aware it's about 5 years before you get permanent residency in UK. So this would be long term plans and you might decide to go back once you are fed up of being here :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley isn't the gold mine it used to be - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/21/vcs-say-silicon-valley-isnt-the-gold-mine-it-used-to-be/ <comment><USER2> _A lot of Bay Area VCs have been blind to the droves of tech talent located outside the region. Believe it or not, there are great engineers in America's small- and medium-sized markets too._

<comment><USER3> Having had to interview hundreds of candidates during my career I've never understood the infatuation with the Silicon Valley talent pool. The problem with there being enormous piles of what amounts to accountability-free money being handed out on often the flimsiest pretext is that nobody actually has to be all that good at anything to have worked at some impressive sounding places with impressive sounding titles.

Certainly there's a lot of talent in SV, but it's not the end-all-be-all of "the best and the brightest" that investors seemed incapable of considering more critically until recently.

<comment> shady-lady > nobody actually has to be all that good at anything

It seems as long as they can regurgitate grad level algorithms, most other things are non issues.

The brightest are people who look at quality of __life__ (that thing you only get one of) & decide that a life where you can actually __live__ (nice* home in nice* area/< 40 min commute/~40hr work week) and then choose to live that life.

There absolutely are very bright people there who make 7 figures a year and can do all those nice things. But that's a tiny minority.

barring the weather argument, i don't get why people choose SV. Great, you can work with "scale" but that's about it. Unless you're looking for massive funding, why bother?

the novelty of moving fast & not mastering a technology so somebody else _might_ get rich loses it's appeal after ~5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh no, not another "Silicon Valley is dying"article. Here's the numbers for VC investment in 2018, if anyone is interested. [1] California companies raised $12B and $12.7B in Q2 and Q1 of this year. Almost 90% of this is in the valley. Next is MA at $2.8B. Texas is a DISTANT 5th with $606M. And no Midwestern state even makes an appearance in the top 10. Just this month Lucid motors raised $1bn, Postmates raised $300M and Proterra raised $155M.

[1] [https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/technology/moneytree/ex...](https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/technology/moneytree/explorer.html#/type=quarter&category=Sector&currentQ=Q2%202018&qRangeStart=Q2%202013&qRangeEnd=Q2%202018&chartType=bar)

<comment><USER5> As a separate point, I've heard some complain that access to talent is more difficult for tech companies than access to capital. Raleigh-Durham has the second highest number of CS PhDs(1)

(1)[https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/12/where-us-brainpower- ten...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/12/where-us-brainpower-tends-to- cluster/420102/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You mean in 1849?</comment>


Integrating Log Management into Your DevOps Workflow - <AUTHOR> https://www.keycdn.com/blog/log-management/ <comment><USER2> I'm disappointed by this advertisement. Initially looks like an article, but it doesn't convey anything that wasn't laid out before (and more exhaustively), then it mentions two competing services (to disguise as a review, I suppose), and then, of course, the service sold by the company that wrote the advertisement.

If this is how "native advertisement" is supposed to look like, I find it very sad.</comment>


Google OAuth Login Issues - <AUTHOR> https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-iam/19001 <comment><USER2> Our incident management includes chatops automation that, among other things

\- generates a per-incident Google Doc

\- opens a per-incident Google Hangout

\- pages appropriate people via PagerDuty

During this incident (which affected our customers who use Google to log in), people had difficulty accessing all three (our PagerDuty uses Google Oauth).

This was a good reminder to have alternatives for all crucial incident management services. (We have backup plans in case Slack or our automation scripts are down, but didn't have backups for Google...)

<comment><USER3> Good advice. Within Google, they have backups that depend on no production infrastructure. Something as simple as an IRC server that is always running on prem can be invaluable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me the problem is Google-wide, got kicked off my gmail accounts, and I can't sign in again- get an error telling me to clear cookies and cache (which doesn't help).

Lots of people having the same issue: [https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/4399961?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/4399961?hl=en)

<comment><USER5> In fact it makes it just slightly worse, as deleting cookies potentially logs the user out of other services (some of which require Google).

<comment><USER6> Google should host backup services in AWS. I like cognito very much, even if it still lacks some features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. We are aware of this issue and our team is working on it.

<comment><USER8> Your dashboard that shows outages doesn't seem to show OAuth. Has caused us some issues working out what's going on in our organization!

<comment><USER7> You can see our outages here: [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/). OAuth is included under "Identity & Security": [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- iam/19001](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-iam/19001)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This kind of thing has the tendency to paralyze my organization. And these outages happen with surprising frequency. Isn't this terribly disruptive to lots of people?

<comment><USER10> Kinda dispels the myth that Google is better at uptime than your own org. Sure they have SREs, sure they have global infrastructure, but they still have outages like everyone else just the same.

<comment><USER11> ex-SRE here. Of course Google has outages, but it would be crazy to think that nearly any smaller outfit could manage the level of service $GOOG provides.

<comment><USER10> The gap between 3 9s and 5 9s isn't that wide. Gmail itself has already had ~4-5 hours of downtime for the year [1] [2]. A couple more hours and they'll hit 3 9s (99.9%) for 2019.

A small org can do about the same, and they're not paying what Google pays for infra and staff. Does Google have it harder at their scale? Of course, but they also argue they're better than most at it, at scale.

[1] [https://downdetector.com/status/gmail/archive](https://downdetector.com/status/gmail/archive)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/13/googles-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/13/googles- gmail-and-drive-suffer-global-outages) (Google's Gmail and Drive suffer global outages; Users in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia report problems with various applications for several hours)

<comment><USER11> How could a smaller org run a million+QPS service with petabytes of storage and have the same uptime as google. that doesn't even make sense.

<comment><USER12> Commenter is highlighting that a small org doesnt need that scale, so it's easier, maybe also cheaper, to run yourself.

Also worth highlighting that for the "email user experience" pretty much any system is better then Gmail these days.

<comment><USER11> Personally (and I think many others do) consider "Availability" as being uptime * bytes, not uptime. Any true distributed system is going to have partial availability all the time (small ranges of data which cannot be fetched within a reasonable latency limit, or somebody's ISP being down). Google accepts tiny ranges of data unavailibility for limited times to not be a real service outage, while the service being hard down for 25+% of users to be a service outage.

It doesn't even really make sense to compare. And since we're dealing with cloud services where the large players have billions of users increasingly providing these services to everybody from small shops (I work for a startup and we use gSuite) to enterprises (many large companies host all their email on one of 2-3 major email providers).

Nothing I said above has anything to do with user experience as you describe it- that's a non sequitur.

<comment><USER13> It absolutely makes sense to compare. Because the comparison is generally made in the context of using Google services or hosting your own or going with a much smaller provider. One could easily host their own email or other similar service for a very small org and likely have better uptime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I couldn't even get to google[.]com for about 5 minutes yesterday.</comment>


Legal Hackers website design fight - <AUTHOR>

Hi folks, my friend (a pentester) asked me to design a simple theme for his website and he wanted to know what's better in your opinion:
This one is mine http://crackpl.com/v2/
This one is his design: http://legalhackers.com/
What do you think guys? <comment><USER2> As an outsider both look too similar to make a judgement. Both have the same information and just the color and fonts are different. I couldn't decide which is better. I wouldn't use a domain containing the word 'crack' though.

[nitpick: there are women on HN, too]

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just a temporary place for the html files ;)</comment></comment>


Microsoft calls time on OneNote for desktop as Office 2019 looms large - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3030518/microsoft-calls-time-on-onenote-for-desktop-as-office-2019-looms-large <comment><USER2> I've got about 15 GB already stored in my OneNote since starting it in 2014.</comment>


Top Business Books Recommended by Founders - <AUTHOR> https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-business-books-from-interviews-with-600-founders-and-investors <comment><USER2> Links are affiliate links.</comment>


Ask HN: Why doesn't HN have a Search Bar - <AUTHOR>

I've been forced to use site:news.ycombinator.com in Google.   Could you just use Google CSE (http://www.google.com/cse/).   Just a suggestion. I am probably the 20th person asking for this.  Let me do search...dohhh... <comment><USER2> <http://searchyc.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's in the works.

<comment><USER4> Is there any reason why you don't simply give your stamp of approval to <http://searchyc.com> ?? I use it constantly, and it's great.

<comment><USER5> Seconded. Searchyc is the one _essential_ third-party app anyone has built for this site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't forget DuckDuckGo. HN has several !bang aliases tied into SearchYC: !searchyc !newsyc !yc !hackernews !hn

</comment><comment><USER7> there is - go to google.com - enter "site:news.ycombinator.net <search term>"

cheers!

</comment><comment><USER8> How about Favorite? So you can save some interesting postings and comments...

<comment><USER9> I don't think there is anything for comments, but for favorite posts, look at "saved" in your profile. It isn't quite the same feature, but works as a lesser favorite.

<comment><USER8> I saw "saved" in my profile. How do you save? Thanks much.

<comment><USER10> Voting up a submission saves it as well.

(I believe the equivalence between "upvote" and "save" is intentional, to encourage people to only upvote things they actually find interesting enough to want to save.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Also, <http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hacker+news+search></comment>


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