Show HN: Cilantro - Chat 1:1 with employees at companies you'd like to work at - <AUTHOR> http://trycilantro.com

<comment><USER2> It's unclear from the post whether or not it's anonymous. I'd be more comfortable asking (and answering!) if I knew it was anon. Otherwise, it might be awkward, especially at a smaller company.

<comment><USER3> one of devs here...it's totally anonymous there's no login anywhere. Thanks for the feedback! please try it out and let us know :)

<comment><USER4> Any plan to prevent trolling? Honest question... curious about how you plan to catch me giving crazy answers about a company I don't like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an excellent idea. Kudos! Would love to see this grow and evolve as a primary way for prospective employees to do their due diligence. Quick Question - How do you guys ensure that the employees are actually employees at Zynga etc. once it expands beyond friends and family?

<comment><USER6> I also think this is a fantastic idea but further to your comment, its also impossible to determine if you are talking to an employee in a position you may apply for, or someone on the HR department who is trying to attract talent and so may give you a biased view.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We definitely want to be able to have more relevant matches in the future as we scale and grow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't hotlink the logos.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's a pretty rude move...

<comment><AUTHOR> hi josh! ah yes my bad :( will update soon. trying to scramble and upgrade a lot stuff since we hit firebase and server limits.

<comment><AUTHOR> no longer hotlink'd!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> this is crazy, i'm getting pinged every 5 seconds as a Zynga employee :)

</comment><comment><USER10> So how does this work? How do I know the people you're chatting with are actual employees of the respective company?

Details are very sparse on the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have past/current employees who have agreed to help out on the site for now. We imagine that we will expose some cred/job status later to indicate what type of background they have. But the anonymous aspect is something we'd like to keep since people tend to be more honest. Any feedback about that would be great!

<comment><USER11> How do employees sign up? Is that part still not open?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can sign up by clicking the blue button at the top of landing page that says 'I want to share my experiences'. Sorry we don't call that out more!

<comment><USER11> Ah ok I was confused, it says "name of your startup" and then you have a lot of big name companies down below. Are employees of large companies also welcome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> a very unfortunate name. There's a long un-known, part of the population that very likely has a genetic aversion to the stuff. It's a really strong aversion. And it may be up to 5% of the population, if you believe 23andMe.

[http://ihatecilantro.com/](http://ihatecilantro.com/)

<comment><USER13> No offense but I don't see how that matters at all in this context.

<comment><USER12> because if someone said, hey go to this site "trycilantro" to help find jobs - I would immediately have an aversion to it and the likelihood of me going there would be lower. I would also have an aversion to try helping out on that site.

You've lost ~10% of your client base right there.

<comment><USER14> Wow, that increased from 5% to 10% in half an hour! Or are you suggesting either that cilantro aversion is higher among tech workers, or that people who don't dislike cilantro will also be put off by the name?

I think if Wii and iPad can get past those names then this'll be fine.

<comment><USER12> 5% on one side, 5% on the other side (presumably independent varibables, but minus a little bit to account for overlap hence ~10% not 10%). "client base" was the wrong turn of phrase, should have said "traffic potential". I don't really know what I'm talking about, so I could have done the math wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I LOVE the idea! How does the request function work? Can I put multiple company names separated by comma, or should I put one request per company I'm interested in chatting with?

<comment><USER3> hey @jypepin you can put companies separated by commas! we'll handle parsing that :) sorry for being unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys server just crashed! we're adding more dynos now.

<comment><USER9> awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What do you need to implement a website background like that? I want to work something like it for my website, minus the hairy arms :).

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://dfcb.github.io/BigVideo.js/](http://dfcb.github.io/BigVideo.js/) is great! That is what we are using with a few modifications :)

<comment><USER16> thanks, I'll give it a spin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's blocked by my work firewall. Oh well!

</comment><comment><USER18> this is awesome guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! please let me know if there's any general feedback as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> that arm hair

<comment><USER20> And now, I can't look past it.</comment></comment>


Blogging is stupid - <AUTHOR> http://blogging.infogami.com/manifesto.html

<comment><USER2> Have a look at the blog posts at one of the programming language aggregators, and see how many of the article's criticisms apply. Examples:

<http://planet.haskell.org/>

<http://planet.python.org/>

Blogs can be very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> The site anticipated you:

<http://blogging.infogami.com/whats_it_good_for.html></comment></comment>


Latin American Startups - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/la/2011/05/16/10-latin-american-startups-you-should-watch-out-for/

<comment><USER2> Buscapé is far away from being a startup these days. The founder sold the company a few years ago to Naspers a south african media company.

EDIT: not a few months, a few years.

<comment><USER3> Yup, I was very surprised they are on this list. Hot startup missing: Peixe Urbano. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/06/brazils-peixe-urbano- takes-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/06/brazils-peixe-urbano-takes- significant-growth-round-from-general-atlantic-and-tiger-global/)

<comment><USER4> > Another interesting factoid about Peixe Urbano: They've imported a dozen > American engineers, product managers and designers.

Oh, wow. Are we (Brazilian engineers) that inferior to the American ones?

Peixe Urbano is one of the few well-designed websites in Brazil, I'm sad that it wasn't made by us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I only knew Smowtion because I use them in a couple of blogs. It's an ad network about one or two orders of magnitude worse in earnings than Adsense, as usual.

EDIT: Not their fault, of course. It's as good as it gets, talking about ad networks besides Adsense.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why edit the title? Now seems like these are the only Latina American Startups</comment>


The Trademarking of "Taco Tuesday" - <AUTHOR> https://priceonomics.com/the-trademarking-of-taco-tuesday/ <comment><USER2> Try "Tacos on Tuesdy," "We invite you to eat Tacos on Tuesdays," "Tuesday is a Taco eating day," etc.

You could even write in small but not too fine print at the bottom of your sign/ad that you have been told to cease and desist from using the Taco Tuesday mark. This is merely a factual statement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hope slackbot doesn't get sued...</comment>


How to manage Git workflow and stay sane - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dashersw/how-to-manage-git-workflow-and-stay-sane-e32405e9dbf0

<comment><USER2> Great advice on Git. Thank you.</comment>


Amazon Product Cleverly Scams Thousands of Buyers by Including Fake Test Kit - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/ANRRI-Blocking-Eyestrain-Lightweight-Eyeglasses/dp/B07GRPXNX4/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 <comment><AUTHOR> These clear "blue-light blocking" glasses doesn't actually block blue light at all, just UV.

They include a small "blue light flashlight" and "blue light reactive paper" to fool the buyers into thinking they work. However, it's actually an UV flashlight and the paper just reacts to the UV light.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6jDSozxaqk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6jDSozxaqk)</comment>


Introducing Mundane, a new cryptography library for Rust - <AUTHOR> https://joshlf.com/post/2018/11/06/introducing-mundane/ <comment><AUTHOR> Mundane is a cryptography library written in Rust and backed by BoringSSL. It aims to be difficult to misuse, ergonomic, and performant (in that order).</comment>


25 Solutions from a Builder's Perspective to Fix the California Housing Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder's-perspective-fix-california-housing-crisis <comment><USER2> I don't agree with all of these or consider all of them feasible, but really appreciate the concreteness of the suggestions and the grounding in real world experience from a POV we don't hear from all that often on HN regarding this topic.</comment>


NetBeans 10.0 - <AUTHOR> https://netbeans.apache.org/download/nb100/index.html <comment><USER2> I remember using netbeans around 15 years ago as a java IDE. Since then I changed it to eclipse which I also changed to Intellij Idea.

I wasn't aware that netbeans was still developed! Is anybody using it as his primary java (or other lang) IDE? How is it compared with Intellij Idea and friends? How resource hungry is it?

<comment><USER3> I prefer Netbeans for what little Java programming I do anymore. It doesn't seem more intensive than Eclipse is (I've never used Intellij. I know, I know). I love Netbeans' code completion engine, in that it takes types into account, e.g. if it knows that you need a string for this parameter of the function you're calling, it will suggest string variables first, but in, say, Eclipse, it will put everything in there alphabetically (down to things like ints), regardless of type.

<comment><USER4> IntelliJ completion takes into account both type and name. For example, if you have two string variables, it will suggest the one that matches or is similar to the method parameter name.

In general, IntelliJ has a lot of features that feel like magic (likely a pile of smart heuristics that have been added over the years).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still prefer NetBeans having tried the alternatives. Something just makes sense to me about how certain features worked that I couldn't get comfortable with in IntelliJ and Eclipse. These included:

\- Jumping around code with clicks on functions

\- The code completion with verbose JavaDoc/comment details

\- The profiling and debugger tools were supper easy to use

\- Automatic Maven dependency management resolutions

</comment><comment><USER6> It still is my favourite Java IDE, even if it has lost quite some love from the community.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wish they had an installer and a bundle with JDK that did everything automatically, as Sun used to provide back in the day. I mean, sure, it isn't much of a deal to go to netbeans.org, go to apache.netbeans.org, download netbeans, uncompress it somewhere, go in the bin folder, doubleclick on the netbeans64.exe, get a weird message about jdk 1.8 not found, go to adoptopenjdk.org, wtf, google, go to adoptopenjdk.net, answer one million questions so they give you one link instead of providing a page of all versions available, download the linked zip file, uncompress it somewhere, go to system settings->advanced->whatever->path->dialog->whatever to edit the jdk to path, go back to wherever you had netbeans64, double click it, get same weird message about jdk 1.8 not found (why doesn't it ask me??), go back to the netbeans download page to see if there is any info anywhere, go to netbeans github site, look for the source code of the netbeans launcher, read the code to see that the launcher uses a configuration file under ..\etc, edit the configuration file to make it point to the JDK location, try again running netbeans64.exe, finally have it working, right-drag-drop the exe to the desktop, rename the shortcut to Netbeans and finally wonder where the world went wrong.

Sure, not much of a deal, but i don't know, it looks kinda sloppy to me and i'd like a proper installer.

(ps. just because this is kinda sorta negative, doesn't mean i dislike netbeans, it is just that i don't have anything positive to say that isn't already said... well, ok, here is a bit of positiveness: i don't write java often anymore, but when i do, i prefer netbeans because i like how simple it feels)

</comment><comment><USER8> Any PHP devs here? what IDEs are you using currently. Is netbeans considered crummy for modern development?

People keep making offhand comments about it lately, and i wondered if there is a much better(and free) alternative I am overlooking.

<comment><USER9> IntelliJ ultimate with php plugin, it's basically phpstorm but I also use the python and some others.

A single unified IDE for everything makes sense to me.

<comment><USER10> Took this route after using PhpStorm for a year or 2 as sometimes I do ruby and will likely work on Python and Go as well. And after 2 years, you only pay $7 a month instead of $4 with PhpStorm, which is nothing.

It's especially good if a project contains multiple languages, like core written in Go and scripts written in Python.

But I do keep Android Studio as that's what Google targets as development IDE and Googleability helps by using the same app.

<comment><USER9> Pretty much the same as me, I'm full stack so the backend is either PHP or Java, the deploy scripts are ansible (so python/yaml, dev virtualisation is vagrant so ruby and frontend is ts/html, Intellij has first class support for all of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Relevant related post about a NetBeans distribution, which I haven't used but if you're in this thread then it will likely interest you:

> Show HN: CoolBeans, an IDE distribution - > [http://coolbeans.xyz/](http://coolbeans.xyz/) > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758867)

</comment><comment><USER12> I used Netbeans to develop EJB3 based web applications about 10 years ago on top of JBoss. At that time it was superior to IntelliJ in terms of code generation, templates, config support and others. It is not the most beautiful UX, but it works.

</comment><comment><USER13> My beef with Java 11 has been that the detection of Java.dll has not been perfect for Program Data\Oracle\JavaPath, the IDE installers and common executables. Did Oracle break something with JDK 11?

</comment><comment><USER14> What is the difference between netbeans.org and netbeans.apache.org?

</comment><comment><USER15> good to hear and congratulations to all who contributed. Any update on Javascript front?

</comment><comment><USER16> It was the best rails ide.</comment>


Ask HN: what do you think of our idea? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
Could you please provide feedback and let us know what do you think of our idea? Also, provide feedback on the design?
http://jackpotbuddy.com/index.aspx
Thanks for your help in advance. <comment><USER2> I think you have a good niche, I don't think it will be huge but it could definitely provide a good income to a small team.

That being said, there are some trust issues that you will have to deal with and you should address them right up front. Basically right after a prospective users knows what you do, the next question in their mind is going to be how do I know I wont get screwed? you will have to solve for this problem.

I looks like you are letting them form their own groups, but I would assume for it to be truly powerful, users will eventually have to group up with people they don't know. Some people are going to want to pull in large number groups and their network will not be able to support that.

You should also track winnings if it is possible, so that you can build a winner rating for people. While it may not be a relevant state gambling is based of a lot of emotion so emotionally people with a winning record will be looked at as having a badge of honor and will be sought out to pool with.

You should research the laws to see if you can be a purchasing entity for tickets, that you then hold in pools for groups. You should check with state lotteries to see if you can become a retailer of tickets, if so you could build a revenue stream by selling tickets into a trust for pools. I would disclose any quick pick type numbers selected by the pool before the lottery drawings so their can be no question as to transparency of what is being purchased by the pool. Further, a system where you can estimate winnings would be valuable, basically taking the payout of the lottery and splitting it by the amount of people in the pool that way people get a good view of what joining a pool will return if it wins. I would use real immediate payout dollars and not the funny math the states use for advertisement.

<comment><USER3> Also since one person is getting paid and then paying others, you will lose a lot of money in taxes on every payment. Are you planning to deal with that and how?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking to let users pay the overhead of each transaction or setup a monthly plan that will allow only certain # of transaction per month. Regarding taxes, I havn't thought about that yet, maybe I can have group users directly pay the person who formed the group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Playing lottery in groups can increase your chances of winning by 4000%

Can you explain why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why? You buy one lottery ticket by yourself then you only have 1 chance of winning. If you play in a group of 10-20 friends, then your chances just went up by 100's of percentage. Hope this help?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wouldn't it be more beneficial overall if you threw everyone into the same pool. Then the win chance as high as possible and anytime anyone wins, everyone wins? I don't really gamble, but if I did I'd try it as long as I felt sure I could trust the service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Throwing everyone in a same pool could be a problem. One lottery cannot cross state-lines. Also, It would get complicated to claim the prize when 100's of people are involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The ideas is little weak- playing the lottery in a group does increase the chance you will be a winner, but the risk/reward ratio remains the same. I'm not sure I get it.

The design is a good start, keep pushing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Connor, actually your risk of loosing too much money is also reduced. Because In a group you will not be pooling as much money as you would if you play alone. For example, if you play alone you might buy $10 worth of lottery. But if you play in a group of 10, you can get away with playing with only $2 and still have double with chances of winning. I'll add this to the landing page and hopefully it will make sense?

<comment><USER7> I think connor is referring to the expected value of the returns, not just the odds of winning.

<comment><USER8> Yep, There's no free lunch. Rephrasing it to make it sound sexier still won't improve anything. It's the same as the Martingale strategy - there's no free lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The design looks like a standard wordpress template. And it looks like it actually is based on your gallery images here: [https://img.skitch.com/20120128-1gbrkerrmatub6d6c461xku3ht.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20120128-1gbrkerrmatub6d6c461xku3ht.jpg)

As far as the idea goes, it seems like you could come up with something that finds a better niche in the market than this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Click-able: <http://jackpotbuddy.com/index.aspx></comment>


Ask HN: What if my startup is acquired twice? - <AUTHOR> Hi all,<p>Quick question for those in the know. If I sold off the assets of my startup for stock in the private acquirer and then 1 year later those exact same exact assets were sold off for 10x value in cash to another acquirer am I basically screwed? How would my current stock be valued since only a portion of the acquirer's company is being sold off? Anyone have any clue!?! <comment><USER2> You sold something. What happens to it after that is no longer your concern.

At least you are a shareholder of a company that has just made a good deal in cash. But from what you wrote it seems that that company is privately held, so your shares are not so liquid, i.e. may not be so easy to sell. As a shareholder you should have access to company info.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best long-form essays or articles you've ever read? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Death Note Anonymity by gwern:

[https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity](https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note- Anonymity)

Tenure by matt:

[http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/](http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/)

Mitchell's suicide notes:

[https://web.archive.org/web/2015/geenstijl.nl/archives/image...](https://web.archive.org/web/2015/geenstijl.nl/archives/images/suicide_note.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I came here to say the Death Note Anonymity one as well. It was my intro to gwern

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You and Your Research by Richard Hamming: [https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

It's rare to have a researcher of that caliber give nitty gritty advice on having the greatest impact in your research.

<comment><USER5> It's great advice, but can be depressing. The question of "why bother doing anything if you're not advancing your field?" feels like a bucket of ice water on the head.

The world still needs a few workers doing non bleeding edge stuff, and they deserve to be content with life, too. People doing CRUD work aren't necessarily a waste of life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a- pr...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/)

Best in terms of ROI (I've gotten raise / more consulting project) and changed my thinking on my career.

</comment><comment><USER7> High Tech Cowboys of the Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace [https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff- seacowboys/](https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-seacowboys/)</comment>


Ask HN: state of the art in source code visualization - <AUTHOR>

I am interested in:
"Given a large source code (say in C), how can I most efficiently figure out how it works?" The best I have so far is emacs/vim + gdb, which has been around for > 1 decade.
Intutively, it seems like there should be tools that can help me better visualizae what's going on inside the code.
The closest I can think of is: doxygen that can generate pretty graphs using AT&T's dot for function call graphs; ... but I hope something more can be done.
[Slightly OT: when I first came across Valgrind, it changed the way I debugged memory errors because it can pinpoint to me exactly the line number and the stack state when I wrote to unallocated space or read in an uninitialized value]
I'm hoping to find a similar tool for understanding large source code bases. <comment><USER2> Check out some of my research on this topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.sigmod.org/dblp/db/indices/a-tree/m/Michail:Amir....](http://www.sigmod.org/dblp/db/indices/a-tree/m/Michail:Amir.html) ?

I'm not seeing any in top tier conferences (for visualization) ... what are the top tier conferences for source code visualization?

<comment><USER2> ICSE is a 1st tier conference in software engineering.

<comment><AUTHOR> why didn't you submit any to graphics / visualization conferences?

<comment><USER2> I do have a publication in VL'96, which is for visual languages. It's about a new method for teaching binary search tree algorithms using visual programming.

My publications tended to be rather unusual approaches to problems, rather than refinements of existing approaches. They were well suited to software engineering conferences.

Not sure how suitable they would have been for graphics/visualization conferences...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fall of Certificate Authorities - <AUTHOR> https://www.tokendaily.co/blog/the-fall-of-certificate-authorities-and-the-rise-of-handshake <comment><USER2> Wait, IdenTrust is the largest CA on the internet? This is surprising - I'm not saying he's wrong, but I'm shocked not to see Verisign, Thawte or Comodo in there at all...

<comment><USER3> IdenTrust crossigned the LetsEncrypt root. LE is def the number one player in this space today. Its not technically correct to sat IdenTrust is no#1 as LetsEncrypt is its own root. This article fails to mention LE at all.</comment></comment>


From Pandas to Scikit-Learn – A new exciting workflow - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dunder-data/from-pandas-to-scikit-learn-a-new-exciting-workflow-e88e2271ef62 <comment><USER2> Thanks for the share. Happy to answer any questions on the new workflow.</comment>


The nepotistic linker - oscar-the-horse http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1740

<comment><AUTHOR> What's bad about linking to your own stuff? If your own stuff isn't good enough to link to, you shouldn't have published it in the first place.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's bad per se, but many of these online "content sites" really overdo it, I assume to keep people on the site, or perhaps out of some kind of internal-link SEO black magic. Some of the links are even auto-generated, not inserted because the article author genuinely thought they were relevant.

A different version of the debate comes up in academic paper citations. Of course, some of your own previous papers, or those of your friends and collaborators, are likely to be relevant, since you often build on that work. But if 50% of your citations to are to papers by yourself and a small clique, some of them related only by a stretch, then reviewers may start asking if you're _really_ citing the most relevant papers in your bibliography, or have some kind of ulterior motive to give more attention to your own work and less to others' work (or are even trying to game impact factors).</comment></comment>


Code to go: Find updated snippets for common JavaScript use cases - <AUTHOR> https://codetogo.io <comment><USER2> Site is being blocked by FF and Chrome due to insecure certificate configured.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it work now?

<comment><USER2> Yes, works on FF, Chrome and Edge now.

Good stuff!</comment></comment></comment>


Is Bing.com broken for everyone else too? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bing.com

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=975712>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And its back, carry on</comment>


Historian deciphers hidden "Plato Code" - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/manchester/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8773000/8773564.stm

<comment><USER2> Sounds like bunk to me.</comment>


Learning from Failures: Better Crash Reporting for Better Incidence Response - <AUTHOR> https://www.circonus.com/2020/05/learning-from-failures-better-crash-reporting-for-better-incidence-response/ <comment><AUTHOR> Effective crash reporting can accelerate the debugging process and help isolate root-causes. In this article, Data Scientist Dr. Heinrich Hartmann discusses the key items a crash report should contain as well as progress made towards acquiring these items using various tools and techniques.</comment>


Ask HN: What cities are or becoming health tech startup hubs? - <AUTHOR> I'll be going back to school this autumn to learn CS and will be looking to work in the health tech sector once I graduate. Which cities around the world are growing hubs for health tech startups? <comment><USER3> Health tech is relatively scattered with hubs all across the US. I suspect that you may be looking for healthcare startups. There's a large concentration in San Francisco, NYC and Boston. The DC area has the government agencies, which may be of interest to you.

My suggestion is to look through the techcrunch healthcare section for companies that look interesting: [https://techcrunch.com/tag/healthcare/](https://techcrunch.com/tag/healthcare/) and look through each month's HN Who's Hiring for healthcare

Additionally to add some nuance to angersock's comment: healthcare has a lot of compliance requirements and there are few incentives to adopt new tech. This can be a pain as you have real limitations on what you can do compared to other industries. That said, healthcare startups are doing some really cool things and there are bright spots among insurers and hospital systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips. Completely agree that healthcare can be a very limiting industry to work in, but it's also the reason why I'm attracted to it too

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously Boston is massive. And I believe it's the top calibre medical schools that set it apart. Strong interdisciplinary research and clinical programs creating a feedback loop. Fed by a legion of hungry and talented MD / PhDs inventing the future in all areas from gene therapy to robotic surgery. And ready access to Route 128 venture capital.

Check out Boston Bio 2018 to appreciate the shear scope

[http://convention.bio.org/](http://convention.bio.org/)

But the up and coming contender may be Miami - Ft. Lauderdale. Doctors have always been attracted to South Florida as an ideal practice and convention location. And state incentives are driving pharma manufacturers to open factories in the region. With the added value of proximity to Latin American markets.

There are a number of incubators currently accepting startup applications in the area. Best of luck!

[http://www.bioflorida.com/](http://www.bioflorida.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Think you're right about Boston. Interesting insight about Miami - <USER2> really considered that area. How is Philly? (I ask because I'll be going to UPenn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Houston, Boston, and San Diego are all good spots.

That said, it's a moribound industry. Don't do healthcare if you can avoid it --you'll get paid better as a developer nearly anywhere else, and it won't be a third as frustrating.

<comment><USER6> Can you explain how healthcare is a moribound industry?

<comment><USER5> I've gone into length on this elsewhere, but a few questions sum it up:

How is money made in healthcare? Is it made by administrative paperwork and compliance? Is it made by selling drugs and treatments aggressively? Is it made by finding ways of cutting corners and increasing efficiency of care so hopsitals can pay less? Does any of that have anything to do with the perceived quality of life increase for a patient? Insofar as it _does_ , what market forces exist to keep those things in check?

Who actually pays for healthcare? Under what circumstances? How much administrative overhead is introduced to make that happen and protect against fraud? How much of that overhead does your software have to deal with/take into account?

How resistant are healthcare systems to change? Is there any significant difference in the mindset of physicians today than there was back when they mocked folks for washing hands before delivering babies? What roadblocks exist to prevent systems from wasting time with crazy ideas from motivated and noisy physicians--and how do those roadblocks impact people doing software?

Who are the main players in healthcare IT? How did they get there? What measures have they taken to decrease competitiveness in their sectors, and how have they achieved vendor lock-in? To what degree, if any, can hospital systems work to circumvent or reinforce that lock-in?

What does the regulatory environment look like? How long does it take to do a "simple" FDA 510k filing (personal experience suggests a year and change depending on how you do bookkeeping, but that's neither here nor there)? What standards must you comply with? Are those standards public, or do you have to pay money for each and every one?

I could go on, but this should help.

<comment><USER7> I talked to a startup at Pycon that was trying to grow under the Medicare Advantage program. I asked how this would help in reigning in costs to the tax payer, and she kept repeating "oh we will save money because we are given a max $ amount per patient, and so it's in our benefit to save money".

Well, that is true only for the startup. The dollars they save are the profits they make up to a max of 15%. But there are no long run incentives to overall reduce the tax bill per client as they will always ride close to that allotted amount set by Congress.

The startup representative took offense when I pointed out that at no point would they ever return money back to Medicare. That they would always consume every allotted dollar allowed by law.

Just another rent seeker by a different name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There seems to be a lot of health tech in the Denver Metro area. I don't know if it's a 'hub,' but I've heard of several companies and startups in the space.

<comment><USER9> This! Catalyst HTI is a health industry incubator for HealthTech.

[http://www.catalysthealthtech.com/](http://www.catalysthealthtech.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oxford has Oxford Nanopore, Immunocore, Genomics PLC and a few others. Cambridge has Astra Zeneca HQ, Microsoft Research (with a unit focused on healthcare) and many spin offs.

</comment><comment><USER11> Madison, WI has Epic Systems, a EHR company, as well as several startups that create software that works with Epic.

</comment><comment><USER12> I live in St Louis, we have Centene, Express Scripts, Mercy and some Allscripts branches</comment>


My Job Is Trying to Save a Billion Internet Virgins From Being Scammed - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exit-interview-im-a-cryptospecialist-working-to-secure-the-internet-for-a-billion-people

<comment><AUTHOR> "I'm the person responsible for the security and privacy of all these new internet users in India. I make sure the scammers and the phishers don't abuse these internet virgins."</comment>


Lawsuit Against Google and Waze for Allegedly Copying Competitor's Database - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150901006209/en/Kronenberger-Rosenfeld-Files-Lawsuit-Google-Waze-Allegedly

<comment><USER2> Here's the Complaint (PDF): [https://ia801503.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.cand.2...](https://ia801503.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.cand.290737/gov.uscourts.cand.290737.1.0.pdf)</comment>


Jaiku Presence archiver - <AUTHOR> http://jaikuarchive.com/

<comment><USER2> Great initiative. I just looked through my old updates, and there are lots of fun stuff there. Would hate to loose all of that just because Google can't properly run a microblogging service.

I used the script at <https://gist.github.com/1562129> to archive all of my updates (installs a couple of ruby libs, I'm fine with that).

<comment><AUTHOR> You can also attach /all to the end of your profile page (username.jaikuarchive.com/all) to run a slurper on our servers. It will over time archive all of your content. Like magic ;)</comment></comment>


Mark Twain's Investment Portfolio - <AUTHOR> https://marktwainstudies.com/mark-twains-portfolio-part-1-existential-hedging-the-united-fruit-company/ <comment><USER2> The unethical investor. hard choice in life.

Are you sided with the empire that become very strong, but suppressing million or billion? Killing 30 millions along the way is just a lesson to learn.

In a movie and tv soap opera speak, Should you agree to the finger act so we solve the population crisis? Or burn the whole capital to break the chain?

Or we just do his way - use of the money from united fruit to undermine the long term mental war in America.</comment>


Apple settles iPad trademark dispute in China for $60M - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57464626-37/apple-settles-ipad-trademark-dispute-in-china-for-$60m/

<comment><AUTHOR> NYT also has a story: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/business/global/apple- sett...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/business/global/apple-settles-an- ipad-trademark-dispute-in-china.html)</comment>


Technology from the perspective of the developing world - <AUTHOR> https://digital.newint.com.au/issues/111/articles/2736?utm_source=D0FWzgRJqRywjTkrlFnFpA <comment><AUTHOR> I'm constantly inspired by the resourcefulness of the developing world to find solutions using just recycled materials.</comment>


'Reputational' Media—Where Yelp Has an Edge Over AirBnB, VRBO, etc. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/reputational-media-where-yelp-has-an-edge-over-airbnb-vrbo-etc/250574/

<comment><USER2> Hi folks, I'm a co-founder and the CTO of Airbnb.

The author did not book the property through Airbnb. Had he done so, he would have learned what we do in these rare situations. His article missed a couple key points:

1) If a host cancels a reservation on a guest, a default review is generated stating that the host canceled X days before arrival. The guest can modify this auto-generated review if he wants to add color to it.

2) The host is penalized monetarily if he cancels on guests more than once per 90 days. The penalty is $100 if the cancellation is within one week of arrival, otherwise $50. Hosts that repeatedly cancel on guests may be removed from the site.

As a result of these policies, host cancellations are rare. Most occurrences are honest mistakes and not from repeat offenders.

<comment><USER3> I also work at Airbnb and would like to follow up on what Nate just said. Our review system is actually stronger than all the aforementioned sites because it is transaction based, i.e., only people who complete the transaction through Airbnb can leave a review.

Non-transaction based review sites like Yelp, VRBO, etc., are plagued with fake reviews by owners, guests, and competitors. On sites like that, how do you know that those glowing reviews you just read weren't written by the owners, their staff, or their friends? You don't.

By tying our double-sided review system to actual transactions you can have almost complete confidence that the reviews you are reading are the result of someone staying with, or hosting, another member of our community.

We have reached out to the author of the article to articulate this, but rest assured, had he booked through Airbnb he would have been able to write the review he wanted.

In addition to that, he wouldn't have sent money blindly to someone. We would be holding it until after he checks in and reminding the owner via email of the booking to prevent exactly this kind of situation from happening. And in the rare occasions when it does, our 24/7 customer team would have stepped in and helped to find him a new place or issue a complete and fast refund.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but no. If I was an unscrupulous host and wanted to boost my listing, the first thing I'd do is have a bunch of friends (or fake accounts) book nights on my listing and leave glowing reviews. I'm out maybe $100 for Airbnb fees and now I have a slew of awesome reviews. What are the odds that this doesn't happen all the time?

<comment><USER5> Do you really think the Airbnb guys haven't considered this possibility?

People who do that sort of thing leave lots of tracks they don't realize they're leaving.

<comment><USER4> Like? If I emailed a few friends around the country and asked them to help me out like that, how would Airbnb know?

I'm not saying they haven't considered it, I'm saying they can't stop it. Making the claim that a transaction based review system is inherently trustworthy seems either naive or disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I'm a vacation rental owner who advertises on nearly all the mentioned sites, and before that I was a customer who stayed at vacation rentals.

One of the worst travel mishaps is accidentally double-booking a space. This is something that happened with frequency in the old old days - prior to the rise of large hotel chains - often enough that it is a plot device often seen in books and old movies. The protagonist finds they have to quickly arrange another place to stay, hijinks ensue.

Since hotel chains have come along, double-booking has become almost unheard of. They have many identical rooms, they're overbooked counting on people not showing up, as airlines do. But with this slight reversion (people are sick of generic hotels with little character and few amenities; the rush to stay in houses and apartments commences) the nightmare of double-booking is a possibility for the traveler once again.

On reviews via the vacation rental sites: Nobody is happy with the current review system at the vacation rental sites. Nobody. Search the <http://community.homeaway.com> forums to see the owners' side of this. The owners feel HomeAway is geared far too much toward helping the guests, who aren't the ones paying big bucks to use the site. The guests feel the company isn't allowing their voice to be heard when there's a true problem. As in this instance, good guests find they can't properly review a property. And good owners find they can't stop a wayward review from appearing on the listing they paid a lot of money upfront for. Both ends of this are exploited by the few bad apples - the owners and guests who lie for their own ends.

Yelp's model of reviews, on the other hand, has its own similar problems. Fair reviews by genuinely happy or pissed off customers end up filtered. Unfair, spammy reviews (whether owner plants or one pissed customer writing 12 reviews) don't get filtered. There is no 100% way to get around this. The companies whose websites accept, review, and host these reviews have to do the best they can, and keep working at perfecting the filtering mechanisms.

Having said all that, I think the author has a right to be pissed off. Finding you have no place to stay because the owner made a mistake is a nightmare. And he should be able to say to others looking at the property that the owner made a mistake and double-booked him (but paid him back on the spot - obviously, situations exist where the owner gets snippy and refuses: new level of nightmare). The fact that he can't state this publicly is a fault in HA's review system. But they also have a point - that's all he could say, because all that happened was that his space was double-booked. He didn't actually stay there.

What's the solution? I don't know. In a matter of dispute, a dispute resolution where an agreed upon statement of fact could be posted in the reviews might work. The place this idea would fall down is when dealing with the true psychos - the liars who are out to take your money (on the owning side), the liars who are out to threaten you into giving their money back (on the guest side).

</comment><comment><USER7> Why did you change the title? The author didn't make any claim of Airbnb filtering potentially negative reviews. Airbnb didn't allow him to post a review in the first place since he didn't actually end up staying in the room (which I think is a reasonable policy that covers 99% of cases just fine). The point of the article, and what the original title of the article conveyed, was that there are some situations where this is not optimal and where Yelp's review model has an advantage.

(Edit: Fixed now)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is something I've been wondering about as I've noticed increasingly high stakes items being reviewed on sites like Yelp.

For example, I'm trying to figure out where I want to move next and it's commonplace for high rise apartment buildings to be on Yelp, but now that we're talking about a $25,000 lease rather than a $40 meal, the incentives to play around with the sentiment of the reviews are significant, as well as the potential financial reward for doing so. How can we trust the neutrality of the venue in these circumstances?

<comment><USER9> "The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."

When you understand that Hemingway quote, you will realize that all ratings services are inherently useless when it comes to the value of trust. In the case of Yelp, there really isn't any reason to trust them when their [financial] existence is maintained by the businesses that are reviewed on their site.

So when you're about to decide where to take your parents for Sunday dinner when they come to visit, don't reach for your iPhone. Go to a nice part of town and walk into a restaurant and be seated. And in the case that you don't like your parents, just take them to Denny's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yelp? Yelp is the home of people who post stuff like "they didn't serve chicken fingers!" for Sushi restaurants.

A fundamental feature/flaw in the apartment/house rental place is inconsistency. You're dealing with one rental owner by proxy via some listing joint. If you want consistency and reliable reviews, go to the Hilton and check TripAdvisor.

</comment><comment><USER11> I too had a bad experience with a vacation rental and was unable to post my review to VRBO. That's why I founded Dwellable, a vacation rental site. Here's the full story on GeekWire from a few months ago:

[http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hawaiian-beach-vacation-hell- sp...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hawaiian-beach-vacation-hell-sparks- urbanspoon-cofounder-start-dwellable)

This behavior on the part of HomeAway (VRBO) is really a natural consequence of their business model. When the property manager is your only customer, it doesn't make sense to post negative reviews.

We're doing things differently at Dwellable, of course.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are complaints out there about accepted VRBO reviews going away later. Yelp has even been accused of proactively offering this as an incentive to spend (perilously close to a protection racket). And of course there's nothing AirBnB wouldn't stoop to with Blecharczyk involved.

It seems to me we have a need for a fully independent system of reviews with some kind of social trust metric (maybe degrees of separation) and technical measures to prevent them from being silently unpublished by anyone (maybe signed authentic distributed copies).

</comment><comment><USER13> I also feel there is inherent conflict of interest when users post negative reviews at sites like Seamless, Grubhub, AirBnB, VRBO etc. As these companies receive revenues from their partners they might be biased against negative reviews. It would be interesting to see some statistical analysis between reviews on Yelp and reviews on these sites on the same merchant (restaurant, property manager etc.).I would not be surprised if the analysis shows that some of these sites have an artificial upward bias in their reviews/ratings.

<comment><USER14> I'm not so sure. Bad reviews give credibility to these websites. Imagine a rental website with only good reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It sounds like his review was blocked as a side-effect of a rule aimed at something else (fake reviews), rather than an attempt to filter bad reviews.

</comment><comment><USER16> VRBO sucks as a rental seeking user.

Two years ago I tried to organize a ski trip for my then employer (Scribd). VRBO stats: I contacted ~30 places. Only thirteen called back, not even 50%. Of the 13 that responded (over a period of 9 days), many of them had sold the cabin for my desired time but couldn't be arsed to update the availability calendar. I managed to make it happen, but in the future, I can't recommend vrbo; it was an enormous waste of time. For Tahoe, you'd be far better off googling then calling the rental management agencies up there directly, because they at least have their shit together and can give you accurate availability.

Also, VRBO doesn't seem to take any responsibility for accuracy of the advertisements. The sleeps number, a key criterion for group vacations, is almost useless and not consistent across homes: some houses seem to think you'll stack sleeping bags like a jig saw puzzle in the living room.

<comment><USER6> VRBO sucks no matter who you are. We don't use that site. (We do use HomeAway, who bought them out, but they're being maintained separately.)

VRBO's sucktitude is summed up quite nicely by clicking on any state:

 _New Feature Alert! You can now see the availability for each property in the search results. Simply enter a date range and hit the "Apply" button._

Yes, that's a new feature. They didn't have it before. But they'd like us to pay $600 to be listed for a year.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are unicode symbols allowed in domain names? - <AUTHOR> A search of web whatsapp on google yields : https://web.whatsapp.com//en. I wonder if these symbols can be part of the Rest API / Domain name? <comment><USER2> Punycode-encoded Unicode characters can be rendered correctly, depending on whether the TLD in question allows them. Not all TLDs allow punycode, and even those that do limit the allowed codepoints for security reasons.

This should get you started:

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://[poop](http://\[poop) emoji].la (HN seems to filter it out)</comment>


Microsoft shuts down giant Rustock spamming network - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2011/03/17/microsoft-shuts-down-giant-rustock-spamming-network/

<comment><USER2> Huge win for the M Team. Happy to see MSoft is still trying their best to protect their customers. I imagine money spent to do it this way was much cheaper than removing this content from users computers world wide.

They probably found it pretty simple after shutting down Waledac earlier. Same team, different target.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it was very different. A quote:

"However, Rustock's infrastructure was much more complicated than Waledac's, relying on hard-coded Internet Protocol addresses rather than domain names and peer-to peer command and control servers to control the botnet."

Read the whole thing at [http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2011/03/18/taking- down-botnets-microsoft-and-the-rustock-botnet.aspx)

<comment><USER4> This should be made into a movie

<comment><USER5> "The Asocial Network"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Weird. I thought modern botnets are P2P, with control nodes disguised as ordinary infected machines.

Well, it's nice that this was not the case.

<comment><USER7> Most of the advanced ones are. They're also mostly using overlay network topologies, which can be hard to distinguish from other P2P traffic and forms a considerable amount of resiliency. Just turns out that this was one of the older, more primitive botnets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Senderbase has some interesting spam statistics which are reported from Cisco/IronPort security appliances around the world. After today is over and the stats are calculated, there might be some interesting data.

<http://www.senderbase.org/home/detail_spam_volume>

</comment><comment><USER9> To be fair, Microsoft made the Rustock spamming botnet possible.

<comment><USER10> In what way?

<comment><USER9> Do you honestly believe market share is the only reason we don't see malware for other platforms?

I can assure you the zillions of Linux servers you see sitting unattended for years on very fat pipes are really attractive targets. Yet, you don't hear about server botnets... There must be a reason for that.

<comment><USER11> These "unattended" servers have far, _far_ fewer security mechanisms in place than even XP SP2. If someone _wanted_ to target them, they would. However, it's insanely easy to find Windows machines, which is all that's important for botnets. It's not hard at all to take over either an unpatched Linux machine or an unpatched Windows machine, but volume is all that counts here. You want hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of machines to send spam from.

Market share is _all_ that matters here, not technology at all.

<comment><USER9> > servers have far, far fewer security mechanisms in place than even XP SP2

According to your reasoning, IE6 is the most secure browser because it has the most security patches. If you have fewer vulnerabilities to start with, you'll end up with fewer, simpler (and thus more reliable) security mechanisms.

Windows has improved a lot. I suppose 2008r2 is reasonably secure and should be able to stay secure when exposed to the net, but the internal complexity of its security mechanisms is huge and, therefore, a lot can go wrong.

<comment><USER11> Except that mechanisms like DEP, ASLR, heap cookies, etc are being applied to all systems. Why? Because _all_ of these OSes are vulnerable to the same classes of flaws.

Since XP SP2, Windows has led the way in protecting code itself. Linux is largely on par these days, with OS X trailing way behind (they're playing catch-up now).

As far as complexity, I _strongly_ recommend you actually look at the protections in place. Those on Windows are significantly simpler (and more effective) than those on Linux, as of Windows Vista. The new heap, the simplified ASLR, etc all made things considerably simpler and harder to attack.

<comment><USER9> > all of these OSes are vulnerable to the same classes of flaws.

They are. It's an unavoidable fact of life for the kind of computer we use (read x86 PC). But don't confuse being potentially vulnerable to a type of attack to actually being vulnerable to a specific attack of this type. In order to be vulnerable, you not only have to, say, allow a user-mode program to write on a page marked as executable (something I remember some high-end processors from the late 80's could prevent) but you actually must have a buffer overflow to go with it. Unless both conditions are met, you are not at risk.

As far as actual complexity of the implementations are concerned, I can't evaluate Microsoft's, as the implementation is secret. I cannot, however, imagine how the Windows implementations can be simpler, for Windows is a much more complex operating system than either Linux or *BSDs. As alexandros pointed out, a larger surface means more to defend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Best thing Microsoft has done in years? ;)

<comment><USER13> Best thing since Kinect, and, before that, DOS 4.0!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The real news here is that while Microsoft is losing the smart phone market they are the market leaders in the bot net market with a clear 100%!

Thank you Microsoft for helping to clean up your mess!

<comment><USER15> How is it their mess?

<comment><USER16> Presumably, because most botnets consist of Windows computers. If Windows security were better, building a botnet would be difficult.

That said, most botnets consist of old unpatched Windows computers or spreads via third-party software (e.g. Flash/Acrobat Reader), and MS' market share means that it will be targeted even if it their security is no worse than their competitors'. Windows security still could be better, but I don't think blaming Microsoft is as justified as it was before e.g. XP SP2.

<comment><USER17> The only reason most botnets consist of Windows computers is because Windows is ubiquitous, difficult for the average Windows user to secure, and full of security issues from add-ons and plugins.

Look for future malware to be spread using the biggest rarely updated smartphone platform (currently Android).

<comment><USER18> Cell carriers _really_ need to realize that they're effectively selling perpetually-connected pocket-sized computers, and that refusing updates because they're "not in the business plan" is going to cause them an inordinate amount of grief due to malware.

<comment><USER19> The carriers are not the sort of businesses who are well-known for thinking ahead.

<comment><USER9> They still won't be able to bend reality to their convenience. When this can of worms is opened, it will be nasty.

The only thing that may come to their aid is that telcos have a power over the phones that connect to them no PC OS maker has. Well... Maybe Apple will get there...

And, BTW, once phone manufacturers realize they need to provide security updates for the life of the phones, they will trim their lineups down to very manageable levels.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ActionScript Programmer Likes Lua, But Not Obj-C - <AUTHOR> http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/01/4812/

<comment><USER2> How is this surprising? Lua is a small, clean language, and Obj-C is a hideous mess.</comment>


Hacking my eyes with Tetris - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN denizens-
You might have seen the article about how Tetris can help adults with a lazy eye teach their eyes how to work better - here's one of the news links.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/tetris-lazy-eye-adult-amblyopia-_n_3141981.html
I want to try and do this on my own, but am not really sure the best way to implement this on my laptop without any fancy equipment. It'll be easy enough to implement Tetris in Python and make whatever changes that need to happen, but I would appreciate some suggestions on how I could split the feed to my eyes without spending hundreds on new equipment.
Ideas I've had so far-
1) 3-d glasses, although the Anaglyph kinds seem to let through both colors
2) Putting a piece of cardboard down the middle of my screen to separate the feed to both eyes... but then they're not looking at the same thing
What sort of ideas do you "real programmers" have? <comment><USER2> If you used Anaglyph glasses to block red and blue, then you could make your tetris game where falling blocks were red and the landed blocks were blue to achieve the effect they talked about. It'd take some tweaking to get it perfect.

If you wanted to make the cardboard idea work, you could make a tetris with two displays, where one side shows falling blocks and the other side shows that they've landed. This seems like it'd be harder to pull off correctly than the other idea.</comment>


How does your distributed team do Scrum? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Sype</comment>


How Elon Musk Is Making Engineers Cool Again (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://samoburja.com/how-elon-musk-is-making-engineers-cool-again/ <comment><USER2> ...till he opens his mouth in public and provides yet more fodder for the world to ridicule silicon valley libertarian techno-utopianism. Somehow, the papers have also decided that one should care about his bizarre child naming schema, like some lumpy paypal Kardashian reduced to the gossip PR pages of Parade Magazine...

Tesla seemed rather an IT brand until he became just another spoiled corona- minimizer driven by blatant greed, which is odd, considering that he devalued his own ass $400 million trying to be cool on the Joe Rogaine show, but I digress, as I am wont to do. (often)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a name for the idea that there is no beginning to the universe? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to find any further reading on the idea that there is no beginning or end to the universe and that things just exist.
It is only because we experience life through a 3D representation that we feel there must be some sort of start and end to things but I imagine that in some higher dimension things just simply 'exist'.
Anyone else agree or disagree with this and have any recommended reading for me? <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model)

</comment><comment><USER3> "World without end", and "Eternal Return" are two I know of.

Roger Penrose is in this camp and attempting to prove it. Although he does incorporate the big bang theory, which is a kind of a "beginning", I suppose. I would recommend his book, "Road to Reality".

You might gain more insight from ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts, but I can't recommend anything specific.

</comment><comment><USER2> The three dimensions don't have much to do with whether there is a start or an end. It's really our perception of time that fools us. We traverse through time in one direction at a pace we can't control (much.) It's very unlikely we have the capacity to understand existence with our animal brainz

</comment><comment><USER4> In addition to the cyclic model already posted about by noemit, there is "steady state theory":

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

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the insight that being does not arise out of non-being; and being is not --and does not become-- non-being. Parmenides would be the first philosopher that comes to mind for this metaphysical perspective, but we only have fragments of his work.

</comment><comment><USER6> You might be on to something, our inherent nature as human being, is to narrate things. Known as Narrative fallacy. maybe if we didn't care about the future, we wouldn't care so much about the past.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lawrence Krauss' "A Universe from Nothing" might be of interest. Can't say I've read it but it's on my reading list and sounds good, and exactly on topic.</comment>


EasyJet plans electric planes by 2030 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/electric-easyjet-planes-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> What is a "battery propelled jet"?</comment>


Four Ways to Protect Your Career from the Next Economic Downturn - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhall/2018/04/03/four-ways-to-protect-your-career-from-the-next-economic-downturn/#1ed3384b41db <comment><USER2> Ignores the most obvious strategy: Always Be Learning. That can benefit both yourself, and your employer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Economic downturns are great catalysts for change; why not embrace the forces beyond your control and change with them?</comment>


Ask HN: Need some advice - <AUTHOR>

A "friend" and I decided to  go into business together. It was and still is a great idea. Long story short he screwed me over and has never admitted to it. False promises were made. So now, the company has a new CEO and a decent team of people(Due to the VC firm that had made the original investment). Out of the blue this person decides to give up some of his ownership in the company because he now admits that he did screw me over. The company is closing more funding soon and I have to make my decision today. I have no time to seek legal advice, I know that I have grounds to sue not only him personally but the company as well. I'm being offered 2% of the company, however once the new round of funding closes it will go down to 1.4% When I left the company I was told I was entitled to 10% of the company. I shot back and said I would sign the documents for 6%. He shot back with, this is a gift and nonnegotiable as well as make it so he is not in majority control. This whole thing doesn't feel right and one of the documents they want me to sign is a Separation Agreement as well as give up my rights to sue the company. This person has lied to me in the past and has reason to lie to me still. So my question to the community is should I just so say fuck it and take a small deal or does someone have some other suggestions. <comment><USER2> Ouch. Sounds like a really bad deal dude. If it were me and I didn't have anything else invested in the company, I'd walk away with what you have now (which it sounds like nothing).

If the business practices are as shady as it sounds -- in an ideal world -- they won't be around long. Piss off the wrong person and it's over. I wouldn't want to be associated with the company.

\-- my 2 cents</comment>


Earth is not at risk of becoming a hothouse like Venus - <AUTHOR> https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-risk-of-becoming-a-hothouse-like-venus-as-stephen-hawking-claimed-bbc/ <comment><USER2> Exaggerations like this remind me of the anti-drug adds of my childhood. So much harm is done by over reaching the bounds of reality when trying to convince someone that an action could lead to harm. It's a quick way to have them doubting every part of your message.</comment>


German Startups Request Google to Defer or Cancel Payments as a Result of Covid - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/google-under-fire-for-squeezing-travel-startups-hit-by-coronavirus-refunds/ <comment><USER2> > This means the startups are now on the hook for substantial payments to > Google for bookings that did not convert into revenue for their own > businesses.

Here's how it went down

1\. First, it's only 8 travel companies not all German startups

2\. The startups placed ads

3\. Ads converted to bookings

4\. Covid happend

5\. Startups refund users

6\. Startups now want the transitive refunds for the ads that once converted but that they have now refunded

The sum is roughly $80M between the "startups"

Not sure how Trivago is a startup

Another complains about Google's policies after stating they spent half a billion dollars on Google Ads last year...</comment>


Are Rich People Parasites? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mises.org/story/2700 <comment><USER2> _Lewis suggests that donors to charity be able to deduct the full amount of their contribution from taxes_

This brings up a comparison in my mind: Bill Gates (philanthropist) vs Paul Allen (investor). Whose post-Microsoft activity is more valuable? Who should be able to deduct more off of his taxes due to his cash distributions?

Gates seems like a nice guy...but I think that's what he's going for: To make me (and the federalis) think he's a "nice guy". History has shown rather completely that charity is useless or harmful. Investing in companies, by contrast is useless or useful. I don't think we should encourage policies to make Paul Allen, like Gates, throw his money away rather than utilize it.

<comment><USER3> "History has shown rather completely that charity is useless or harmful."

Oh?

Anyone here go to UChicago? That was Rockefeller's philanthropy. How about CMU? Carnegie-Mellon. Who watched Square One as a kid? Also Carnegie & Mellon. Ever aspired to being a Nobel Laureate? Alfred Nobel, the person who got rich off dynamite. The math competitions I went to were sponsored by a variety of corporate charities. The Intel and Westinghouse science competitions are Intel and Westinghouse's charitable programs, respectively. Olin College was started by liquidating the Olin Foundation.

My high school was started with a grant from the Annenberg Foundation. I credit it with getting me interested in startups in the first place. It's now doing teacher training with a $500K grant from the Gates Foundation.

One of my mom's friends is involved with schools in Africa. She says that the Gates Foundation has made a _massive_ difference over there. Children who would otherwise die from childhood illnesses are going to school, learning to read and write, and even learning how to use computers.

I think a better lesson to draw from history would be that attempts to distribute money are always fraught with unintended consequences, so tread carefully. However, you don't get to be a billionaire if you're _not_ careful with money. Gates and Rockefeller and Carnegie don't need our advice on how to put their money to good use. I'd hardly say that Gates is "throwing away" his money.

(Paul Allen, OTOH - really, can you say that the Portland Trailblazers are worth more than saving 70 million kids from measles?)

<comment><USER2> To be sure, when I said "philanthropy" I implied the "giving to the poor" variety. Schools and Universities for whatever reason don't seem to spring up through the profit motive [1], and so giveaways of various kinds are typical. Many universities sprung up from Churches but that doesn't validate all the quantifiably harmful activities of churches. More to the point:

 _She says that the Gates Foundation has made a massive difference over there_

Here's the thing: MAYBE Gates manages his money better than everyone else. I'm willing to accept the possibility, but I doubt it. It's always nice to hear that such-and-such is going well, but when it comes to massive boondoggles, you're unlikely to hear anything else. "Yes, yes, all the billions were well spent." The problem is, Africa is dirt poor despite endless charity from the west.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_>(nominal)

I'm inclined to look at verifiable results rather than anecdotes. Here's the question: Do you think the presence of a well-run Emerging Markets investment fund through Gates' money would help Africa more or less than free Vista- loaded computers?

[1] I don't know why this is. Why is CMU better than Devry? The best single answer is: Reputation. I'm inclined to bet of the free market, but educational systems seem resistent to the free market.

<comment><USER3> "Do you think the presence of a well-run Emerging Markets investment fund through Gates' money would help Africa more or less than free Vista-loaded computers?"

Until Africa has the institutions necessary to support a free market, Gates's philanthropy (which actually is aimed more towards health and basic literacy than free computers) is _much_ more useful than an Emerging Markets fund.

Many die-hard free-marketers don't realize this, but markets require _significant_ institutional support before they even become workable, let alone efficient. You need private property rights. You need contract law. You need courts that enforce laws in a predictable, non-arbitrary way. You need literacy. You need a culture that believes that it's worth sacrificing today's pleasure for tomorrow's happiness. You need a rational belief that there _will_ be a tomorrow, and you won't die from some random illness or machete- toting warlord in the meantime. You need transportation infrastructure to move goods and services between locations. You need a stable currency that's accepted by everyone you're likely to do business with and won't be hyperinflated away on a warlord's whim.

Africa has none of these.

So pouring _any_ sort of money into Africa, whether it comes from charitable donations or a hedge fund, means pouring it down a black hole. There's nothing special about the private sector that makes it immune to this. Normally, private firms do better because ones that fail get replaced by ones that succeed. Well, fine. They'll all fail, as will all their replacements.

Gates is working at trying to supply the basic infrastructure necessary for a market economy to emerge. In order to have markets, you must have contracts and private property. In order to have contracts, you must have literacy. In order to have literacy, you must have education. In order to have education, you need a reasonable belief that you won't die next week from a random illness.

So the Gates Foundation starts the process there: ensure that people have a reasonable belief that they won't die next week. It finds villages that already have a reasonably stable food supply and are not in the middle of a civil war (those, for the moment, are beyond help unless you get the U.S. military involved). It then vaccinates the children, installs pumps for clean water, teaches them some basic sanitation rules like "don't shit upstream of your water supply", and so on.

Education only becomes realistic once children have a reasonable expectation that they won't die. Once they do, you can work on literacy. Once you have literacy you can try to change the institutions of the host country. More likely, you'd want to get some small-scale trade going among villages and between villages and the West. This is why the Internet is potentially so important over there - it lets African villagers bypass the corrupt warlords and governments above them.

But not before they have the basics down. It's meaningless to speak of an Emerging Markets fund going into many African countries. There's no market at all, let alone an emerging one.

<comment><USER2> _Africa has none of these._

Wrong. South Africa is a passably modern country, and it became that way through its sheer money-making opportunities. The existence of rich resources, mixed with a decent climate made SA more workable than other countries. The Africans in SA didn't need handouts in order to work in mines. But currently, you have two types of prospering Africans in SA: Those who made it on their own, and those who received "handouts" from the affirmative-action-drunk post- Apartheid government. Guess which group _might_ eventually sink the ship? Which sunk Zimbabwe?

Improvement comes through mutually beneficial exploitation, like it or not. I'm an asshole, but I'm right. My (little) money's where my mouth is: Almost all of my investments are in foreign companies, with a large share in undeveloped countries. I've done quite well... I don't give a fly about Africa's well-being (believe me), but there's growth opportunities there.

<comment><USER3> I thought I'd left in a clause where I excepted a few African countries, but it looks like I edited that out. There are _some_ African nations that are not doing too poorly. South Africa, Egypt, to a lesser extent Kenya, Botswana, and Ghana. What I wrote above does not apply to them.

I'd very much disagree about your assessment of why South Africa developed, though. The rest of Africa is rich in resources too, and many of them have free (as in lack of regulation) markets.

South Africa became a passably modern country because it was colonized by the British. Unlike other European colonial powers, the British brought their institutions with them _and trained the local natives to govern them_. When other European colonial powers pulled out, they took all trained administrators with them.

Take a look at the list of British colonies in Africa (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization_of_Africa>): Egypt, Sudan, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Gambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Mauritius, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Now take a look at the most successful economies in Africa (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa#Economy>): South Africa, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, Egypt, and until recently, Nigeria. Notice any similarities?

<comment><USER2> _the British brought their institutions_

Shopkeeping. Checkmate.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I'm building a service to help people schedule cron-like tasks - s-stude http://scheduleworkers.com <comment><AUTHOR> [http://i.imgur.com/kqMXyip.png](http://i.imgur.com/kqMXyip.png) I think the colors are wrong.

</comment><comment> s-stude Please let me know if you think it's worth of it.</comment>


Ellen MacArthur Foundation Circular Design Challenge Submissions - <AUTHOR> https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular-design/ideas?order=applauds%20#contribution-list <comment><AUTHOR> Ever since hearing about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch[1], I've been getting interested in what people are doing to try to reduce the amount of plastic waste that is landfilled or is released into the environment. This weekend I came across the challenge I linked, which seeks to fund promising ideas to implement a "circular economy". I've become a little dismayed about the limited benefit that most of the proposals there would have on the plastic pollution problem.

Take Funcap[2] for example. Their idea is to turn the plastic caps of drink bottles into Legos. Unfortunately, this doesn't reduce at all the demand for plastic bottles (and thus bottle caps), and so we're still left with untold numbers of bottle caps to do something with. Sure, kids will probably end up using some of these, but (a) eventually they'll get bored of them or just have more than they really need (like Happy Meal toys) and (b) ultimately they'll be disposed of and probably not recycled (even plastic bottle caps today are often not recycled because it's hard to sort them efficiently at the recycler[3], and Legos are made out of ABS, which is harder to recycle even that bottle caps).

Many of the other ideas submitted so far propose some form of reusable packaging, in particular bringing reusable containers back to the store to be refilled (for example [4] -- bonus: IoT buzzword bingo!). This is such an obvious idea (evidenced by the number of submissions to this contest using that idea) that if it were feasible and actually desired on the consumer level, it certainly would have been done. Trends are pointing in the direction of more disposability if anything -- people now would rather have Amazon deliver their goods to them and throw out the packaging at home than go to the store for any reason, let alone lugging containers to reuse them.

As far as I can see, the only real solution to the plastic waste problem is to make it economically feasible to separate plastic waste from the wastestream and turn it into products whose value will repay the effort of separation. Ideally, we could even "upcycle" this waste into raw materials that are more valuable than recycled plastic, especially because recycled plastic is lower quality than virgin plastic and eventually becomes too contaminated to reuse.

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

[2] [https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular- design/id...](https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular- design/ideas/funcap)

[3] [https://livegreen.recyclebank.com/because-you-asked-what- s-t...](https://livegreen.recyclebank.com/because-you-asked-what-s-the-deal- with-plastic-bottle-caps)

[4] [https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular- design/id...](https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/circular- design/ideas/sustainable-low-cost-customized-sachet-replacement-for-the- bottom-of-the-pyramid)</comment>


Fox News' Lies Keep Them Out of Canada - <AUTHOR> http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/9037-fox-news-lies-keep-them-out-of-canada.html <comment><USER2> Liberal bias isn't any more truthful than Fox news, yet I see it all the time on Canadian news. Although I don't agree with everything on Fox, this is just a way for Democratic leadership to silence the opposition.</comment>


Show HN: Morning Short – One Amazing Short Story, Every Morning, in Your Inbox - <AUTHOR> http://morningshort.com/#HN <comment><USER3> Love the idea; signed up. Do I have to wait until tomorrow for my first story? You got me in the mood, now I'm off to find something to read on my own...

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the initiative! Today's short already went out, but I'll make sure you get in for tomorrow morning. See you at 9AM EST tomorrow! - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> you might gain more traction by presenting a sample story or two that can be read without signing up.</comment>


Why I read The Economist, and why you should, too - <AUTHOR> http://shadyacres.tumblr.com/post/25976708870/why-i-read-the-economist-and-why-you-should-too

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why the Economist gets so much credibility. I've never actually seen a worthwhile policy analysis from them - their content is regurgitated ideology, but they try really hard to appear intelligent and balanced.

When something is wrong they always recommend 'reforms' and they avoid specifying what they are but its implied its privatization, low taxes, trade liberalization, deregulation. No matter the circumstances.

Anyone can do that. The only mildly interesting things are the trivia.

<comment><USER3> It's a matter of tone. Write in a dry voice, sound as disspassionate as possible, try to sound academic, and middlebrow readers will assume you must be a fount of un-biased, rational analysis.

<comment><USER3> See also: the New Yorker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No you shouldn't! It's terrible! You will come to understand this when they write about something you actually know about. What the Economist is good at is a tone of wry authority.

<comment><USER5> I've actually have read articles about something I actually know about, and my immediate reaction usually is, "I'm not the intended audience." I usually find The Economist's article to be much more cursory, but frankly, I appreciate its brevity in areas I am not well versed.

I've come to respect The Economist more in those situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting read, but I couldn't help thinking of this onion piece throughout:

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/according-to-the- economist-...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/according-to-the-economist- nasa-is-an-industrial-s,11532/)</comment>