Performance comparison of parallel ray tracing in functional languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/athas/raytracers <comment><USER2> Interesting that Haskell is so slow, I thought it was supposed to produce pretty performant code. Anyone have any idea why?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the time it takes to generate an image the sum of 'BVH' and 'render'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.</comment></comment>


Where can you get a (cheap or free) digital certificate (for Code Signing jar files)? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> This is one place where cheapest may not be best.

We went through a similar thing a few years back with SSL certificates.

GoDaddy offered super-cheap (relatively speaking) certs, but none of the major browsers had GoDaddy in their default list of certification entities at that time.

So the upshot of using a GoDaddy cert was that every visitor would get a "not trusted" warning, even though the cert was legitimate.

That's not something you want your users to see when they're in the middle of signing up or downloading something from your site.

I don't know whether or not this concept applies to java & jar too, but you might want to confirm it before making a decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds like a startup opportunity - issue cheap but trusted certificates.

<comment><USER3> It worked for Mark Shuttleworth during (before) the first boom. It could work for you, too!

There's a lot of competition out there these days, and the cost/time of getting accepted by all of the browsers put your time to revenues sometime two or three years into the future. In other words, it's a hard business to get into to, and you'll probably need a source of revenue while you wait. That's why folks who sell domains are getting into the business...they have some revenues from the domain business for those two or three years, and then they have a large customer base to sell the certs to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's worse in the mobile space.

If you're trying to sign a jar to go on handsets, you pretty much either have to go a thawte certificate ($200), or a verisign certificate ($400) in order to guarantee compatibility with most handsets that are out there.

</comment><comment><USER5> cacert are free certificates but the root certificates are not frequently preinstalled on browsers and mobile phones. I was told that Microsoft asks around 10k$/year to add a root certificate in its browser. Add to this the cost to validate the certification process.

If you can get user's cooperation so that they can install the root certificate, you may go with cacert certificates.

The more web sites uses cacert, the more chances you will have that the cacert root certificate is preinstalled.

Regarding startup opportunity, as long as there is a problem and/or the opportunity to do something useful, the opportunity exists.

You might also be interested to follow the progress of my project <http://dis.weebly.com> because one of my objective is to do something in this field. But I am afraid it won't help juwo for is current problem.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thawte wants to charge me $249 just to renew - I paid $50 for the certificate last year.

I heard you can get them free from CA Authority but when I looked it up, they have some procedure where you have to know someone who is a CA and attend their events, (which are mostly in Europe or California).

<comment><USER6> I think the cheapest ones are from comodo.com , $179.

<comment><AUTHOR> that is ridiculous. all they are doing is calling you up to verify you are from where you say you are, and doing a quick lookup. At the time of purchase.

After that, it is just the certificate file.

<comment><USER6> Well, when IE 6 and Vista first came about a couple of years ago, I could not find code-signing certificates listed anywhere except comodo.com and verisign.com. They are being offered in more places now, but also for a lot more money. It's $500 for 3 years from comodo.com--that's only a savings of about twenty dollars a year. I believe multi-year savings used to be much more substantial before. Yet more reasons to create web applications.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness "will remain a mystery" - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/world-s-smartest-physicist-thinks-science-can-t-crack-consciousness/ <comment><USER3> Personal opinion: I can imagine that the reason of how we _experience_ consciousness might be unsolvable, much as the question how the color blue feels is hard to answer objectively.

However, I think there are a lot less fuzzy questions that are strongly connected with consciousness that I'm hoping can be find answers for - <USER2> that could shed some more light on what consciousness is and what it isn't. Such as:

\- what are memories? Could we build some machine to extract or even manipulate them? Is it possible to compare memories of different people?

\- what are dreams?

\- different parts of our body are affected differently by our consciousness: Some things we can control directly, like hands, feet, speech, etc; some processes we cannot control but we do experience them, such as hunger or sleep; and some we neither control nor experience such as digestion, homeostasis etc, even though they are also regulated by the brain. Even more couriously, many of those autonomous processes _are_ greatly affected by conscious thoughts even though we don't experience them as directly controllable - such as fear and arousal. Inversely, conscious actions often have autonomous "sub routines", such as walking. So what what mechanism in the brain governs which processes are conscious and which are not?

\- Suppose we could actually do brain transplants. Assume we put an adult human brain in a jar and connect it with some kind of VR. Could the brain learn to control a non-human body such as a spider? How about a human body with different proportions?

<comment><USER4> These are all part of the easy problem of consciousness, so yes, I don't think anyone doubts that they can be answered in principle. But there's the hard problem of consciousness, which this article talks about.

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

<comment><USER5> In particular see the "Mary the super-scientist" thought experiment for a nice explanation of the difference between the two.

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

[http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/F...](http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/FrankJacksonphil1.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I would also read Daniel Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_ for a counter- point about why "Mary the super-scientist" is based on a faulty premise, and why the Hard/Easy distinction is fallacious.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Witten:

> But I think there probably will remain a level of mystery regarding why the > brain is functioning in the ways that we can see it, why it creates > consciousness or whatever you want to call it. How it functions in the way a > conscious human being functions will become clear. But what it is we are > experiencing when we are experiencing consciousness, I see as remaining a > mystery...

Understanding the difference between __workings__ and experience of consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness [1], is crucial for understanding what Witten says. Witten says that while science will figure out how mind works in great detail the hard problem of consciousness remains outside science.

It's easy to be sympathetic to Witten. The problem with consciousness seems to be with intuitive meaning of a word and concept.

Imagine that someone builds small programs -- or really small brains in a vat -- that are conscious of color blue, or feel universal love and nothing else. Program's attention and awareness never goes elsewhere and it performs no other cognitive tasks than being conscious in the moment without long term memory. Can you imagine scientists going trough the __workings__ -- code, neuron diagrams or state representations -- of it's mind and going, oh this thing clearly conscious, we can see it now and agree.

There seems to be assumption that the hard problem of consciousness is tied to multiple high level cognitive capabilities. I don't see the connection. The crux of being conscious is having the cognitive ability of aware-consiouns- attentative-reflective at least tiny amount of time. If we could scientifically determine what consciousness is, we should be able to make nice hyper-aware-of-blue-and-knowing-it program and it would be relatively simple one.

[1]: [http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciou...](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness)

</comment><comment><USER8> The article is based on a video from 2014. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfwsvSjXkJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfwsvSjXkJU)

<comment><USER9> I you want to check the video I'd recommend to skip to approximately minute 13, as the beginning is pretty boring - 1 minute of musical introduction, then the hand of Edward Witten looking in his notes, and then some introduction in what I believe is Dutch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rather than physics, I think computational neurology and machine learning / deep learning / AI have a much better chance at elucidating what consciousness is.

<comment><USER11> I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not. Machine learning has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. From where people get that connection?

<comment><USER12> Does human learning have anything to do with consciousness?

<comment><USER10> I don't think there is something magical in flesh. Consciousness is a process of constructing compact and effective representations of the external world which are necessary in order to learn behavior that maximizes rewards (survival). More sophisticated organisms also develop a model of the world and operate on it by imagination or memory recall, so there is also consciousness of internal mental processes. Such mental processes look like a neural turing machine (read from memory, write to memory, focus on specific parts of sensory field / attention). The mental programs to operate over memory and attention are learned by reinforcement learning. Physical control and operating in the external environment are learned by RL too. The notion of self and language emerge naturally from the need to cooperatively solve problems together with other agents. The teaching signal (reward) is based on the environment and inborn instincts (such as hunger, sleep, defense, sex, cooperation) which are evolutionarily evolved. Part of the perception process is based on unsupervised learning, where raw sense data is encoded in the latent semantic space and then, by a top-down process, is tested by regenerating the original input data. It learns by propagating the error (differences) from the data it generates compared to the original sense data. All these processes have been already implemented, albeit crudely, by machine learning.

Deep Mind has stated that their purpose this year is to build a rat level AI ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMuNUixKJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMuNUixKJ8)). That would entail rat-level consciousness too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course it will remain a mystery until we can get to an agreed definition of what consciousness is. Until then it is just an argument in semantics.

On a personal note I have never been very impressed with arguments over the importance of consciousness. I have had too many experiences in life where consciousness is grey to feel it is anything other than a just-so story of what happened.

</comment><comment><USER14> See, if a neuroscientist went and had an opinion on sub-atomic physics, people would say "that's nice" and pat them on the head in a patronizing way. But the problem is general. A scientist outside their field _is a layman_.

<comment><USER15> Is a neuroscientist more qualified than a physicist on this particular topic?

Personally I'd leave it to the philosophy guys since we're that far from any understanding of it.

<comment><USER14> If I was to give my unqualified, layperson opinion, I'd say "horse feathers". Consciousness probably isn't "hard" at all. It's a massively parallel brain architecture (which by its widely-spread and slow nature can't accurately self monitor) using theory-of-mind circuitry (developed to handle interpersonal social relations) to model and monitor its own operation.

But it feels more sparkly and special to treat it as a mystery.

<comment><USER16> Okay, fine, but why am _I_ in here experiencing it?

<comment><USER14> You mostly don't self-experience. Mostly you experience what's going on around you, and what you're doing and physically feeling. Mostly, you don't act consciously. But when you direct attention at your own experiencing, or at your own actions in a deliberate way, a subsystem dedicated to that task wakes up and provides you with a homunculus self-model. That would be the 'I'.

<comment><USER17> And how do you get from a homunculus self-model to the subjective experience of the colour blue? (Or any other colour?)

...Which would be a subjective experience that seems to have curiously objective elements to it, because colours have been shown to correlate with specific sensations and associations across populations.

And _then_ there's the much deeper question of the extent to which quantum phenomena need an objective observer.

If you think that question is trivial, try to design an experiment which provides objective evidence of change without ultimately relying on the subjective experience of a human experimenter.

<comment><USER14> They're separate, of course. People tend to over-attribute things to their consciousness. Blue is an analysis and categorization being done by the visual processing part of your brain. That part of your brain is grown by basically the same genes as everyone else's. It would be more surprising if it wasn't similar in operation.

Your subjectivity is your brain is you. But only tiny scraps of it are consciously accessible. Nearly all of it just _does_ , it doesn't reflect on the doing. You only notice your visual processing when you force it to glitch or strain with optical illusions and the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If the simulation theory is true, our memory, and all brain activity is done in the simulation (aka real world), but consciousness no. With no consciousness we could have a identical behavior, we would be intelligent zombies. Its cool to think that the world is rendered only when conscious beings see the world ("is the moon there when nobody looks?"). Or... are YOU the only one with consciousness? :)

<comment><USER18> > all brain activity is done in the simulation (aka real world), but > consciousness no.

The simulation hypothesis does not make such dualistic arguments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We understand consciousness perfectly, being conscious beings an all. It's the physical world that doesn't make any sense.

</comment><comment><USER20> A very good book about what we currently (minus 3 years, perhaps) know: [https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering- Codes...](https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes- Thoughts/dp/0143126261/)

<comment><USER21> The approach I like is:

[https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael- Gr...](https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael- Graziano/dp/0199928649)

An article by the same author:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/phlegm- th...](http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/phlegm-theories-of- consciousness/472812/)

<comment><USER20> I like his approach very much, but I think he is a bit too generous with the artistic license and short on actual research, which is the opposite with Dehaene. I might be wrong of course. But Graziano is perhaps the best writer among current neuroscientists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have no evidence or proof, but personally, I believe that the whole consciousness thing is an illusion. There's certain level of abstraction required for a bran as advanced as human's, but in the end, it's just matter following the laws of physics, same as everything else.

<comment><USER23> The problem with this language is that the very word "illusion" implies an observer.

To whom is it an illusion? And, what are the properties of this illusion? Can we make artificial minds that are also suffering from the same illusion?

The very fact that there is (let's suppose) such an illusion requires an explanation. Suppose the brain has somewhere encoded the idea of consciousness, but no "actual" consciousness. Why do we require the extra step of "actual" consciousness rather than mere "illusory" consciousness?

Of course the real explanation of consciousness will be both profound (beautiful, unexpected) and mundane (non supernatural).

<comment><USER24> > _Of course the real explanation of consciousness will be both profound and > mundane_

The expectation of something does not guarantee its existence. Words are created to define the expectation of something unexplained, only to be discarded when the expectation is unmet.

Take the word "miasma". At some point in history, a belief was born that all diseases came from gaseous poisons emitted by rot. Then the miasma theory got definitely discarded when we got the ability to view germs, which are simply distant cousins. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory)

Take the word "aether". Since waves on the sea were carried by water and sound waves by air, it was assumed that interplanetary space was filled with a substance that light (assumed to be just a wave back then) was carried through. It was called aether. It turns out the real explanation of aether is not profound nor mundane: there is nothing, and that nothing expands. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories)

I don't really understand why it is hard to accept that there is no after- life, that all our activities are the sole result of chemical transmission of signals in our brains... that there is no point of view, just local chemical storage of information.

But it was hard for our ancestors to fathom that humans were part of a phylogenetic tree encompassing all Earth life forms, that we as a species were not special. It was hard for them to fathom that space is relative, that there is no center. I suppose it is always hard to accept that there is no reference point in the universe.

<comment><USER23> > that there is no point of view, just local chemical storage of information.

You have just restated the problem of consciousness, except as an assertion that it doesn't exist.

The problem of reductionism is that it doesn't stop; just as there aren't really points of view, there aren't really any chemicals, and there isn't really such a thing as (classical, let's say) information. All of these things are "just" emergent phenomena.

The explanations which made "aether" and "miasma" obsolete are beautiful, unexpected at the time (in a trivial sense), and of course, not supernatural.

I agree with you about the afterlife. However consider this: if the universe is infinite, isn't it likely that there will be copies of you which arise spontaneously, in all conceivable circumstances? The older you get, the less likely you are to be in a place or time that is causally connected to your birth, because most causal chains involve your death. (This is just a specific case of a Boltzmann Brain[1])

Of course, this sort of nonsense thought experiment runs afoul of the Measure Problem [2]. But this is precisely the kind of problem that I hope the explanation of consciousness would help to resolve.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_(cosmology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_\(cosmology\))

<comment><USER24> > _You have just restated the problem of consciousness, except as an assertion > that it doesn 't exist._

Things that don't exist are rarely problematic. But in fairness, I cannot guarantee that there is no consciousness, just as I cannot guarantee that gravity exists — it could be part of a simulation in which I was put since birth, and the real world could have very different laws of physics. Nothing new here, it is Occam's razor.

> _it doesn 't stop; just as there aren't really points of view, there aren't > really any chemicals, and there isn't really such a thing as (classical, > let's say) information._

There is such a thing as a point of view. I object to the notion of consciousness solely because of how it is used. Plants have points of view too; jellyfish do too, without the need for a brain. They react intelligently to their environment. Are those conscious? It is clearer to talk about "brains" and "points of view" than it is to talk about "consciousness".

> _The explanations which made "aether" and "miasma" obsolete are beautiful, > unexpected at the time (in a trivial sense), and of course, not > supernatural._

I suppose that's up to each of us to judge. I don't find the idea that throughout my body, millions of tiny unicellular parasites are having a snack, particularly beautiful. Similarly, the idea that there is an invisible energy pulling everything apart always felt supernatural to me.

> _if the universe is infinite, isn 't it likely that there will be copies of > you_

The probability is above zero, but given that space is overwhelmingly empty, and given how much information defines my identity (including my average DNA, which is inherited from millions of years of evolution in extremely specific circumstances), it seems unlikely. If there is a copy of me in the universe, the most probable location would be on Earth, extremely close to where I sit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In my experience all those "consciousness is otherworldly magic" people are at least heavily influenced (1) by the religious interpretation of the "magical uniqueness" of the humans compared to the all other living beings. Wishful thinking. Then comes the "free will" and other also "magical" thinking. Especially easy to sell in the US (2)

And we aren't made of anything other than what all the animals are made of, and the underlying processes in our brains aren't physically unique. And there's no "spirit" or "soul" needed to explain anything.

The word spirit comes from Latin spiritus "breath." Ditto for the term for soul "psyche" which comes from the ancient Greek psykhe with the original meaning "breath." That's all that "leaves us" when we die (as we "have our last breath") and from where all the magical thinking came.

The consciousness is just a product of evolution, and "a kind of self awareness" exists by animals too. Not much different from what we observe by ourselves, and actually of direct evolutionary advantage.

More about all that:

[http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human- consciousness...](http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human- consciousness-is-just-a-consequence-of-evolution)

[http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel- pain.html](http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel-pain.html)

[http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is- dead-l...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-lets- bury-it.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon- Haunted_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World)

\---

1) if themselves not explicitly declared believers or at least philosophers, the latter having all the incentives to mystify the topic and stay away from the hard sciences

2) 4 of 10 in the US believe "that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago: [http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist- view-h...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human- origins.aspx)

<comment><USER18> > The consciousness is just a product of evolution

Exactly. Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution) ).

Why do some digger wasps only count their own contribution to a nest ( [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245965580_Do_Digger...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245965580_Do_Digger_Wasps_Commit_the_Concorde_Fallacy) ), and why do some perform redundant nest-checking ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex#Uses_in_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex#Uses_in_philosophy) )?

For the same reason we don't calculate exact solutions to large travelling salesman problems; it's much more economical and evolutionarily advantageous to use heuristics, even if they have quirky side-effects and edge-cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It may be a mystery for some time, but I suspect we'll figure it out eventually. Given the rapid pace medical science understanding has gone through in the last several hundred years, it seems likely.

</comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me rather of Roger Penrose's foray into consciousness in The Emperor's New Mind.

If you wade your way through it, you'll find the tl;dr is 'consciousness must be a quantum thing because quantum things are mysterious and so is consciousness- oh and look at those microtubules in those neurons - you might get quantum effects in there.'

Rather disappointing for such a brilliant man.

<comment><USER27> Yep. Penrose's argument goes something like this (oversimplified): 1) Turing machines can't solve the halting problem. 2) Humans can solve the halting problem. 3) Therefore, humans can't be Turing machines.

There are two problems with this line of reasoning. The first problem is that 2) is unsubstantiated. A human can see immediately that 15 = 3 x 5, but this doesn't mean that we have a magical ability to factor integers instantly. By the frivolous theorem of arithmetic, almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large. We have some ability to analyze formal systems, but the systems we have managed to understand are very simple in the grand scheme of things. Almost all formal systems are very, very, very complex, and there is no evidence that we can understand them all and/or that our understanding process actually is correct (consistent) when extended indefinitely. Penrose's actual argument is of course more technical, and others have made more precise rebuttals.

The second problem is that the argument does not solve the problem of consciousness. Scott Aaronson put it nicely: "Even if we supposed the brain was solving a hard computational problem, it's not clear why that would bring us any closer to understanding consciousness. If it doesn't feel like anything to be a Turing machine, then why does it feel like something to be a Turing machine with an oracle for the halting problem?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> And he would know... <insert punchline here>

</comment><comment><USER29> Insert opinion on consciousness here, because having it means I understand it at a low level.

<comment><USER30> It's a subjective experience, so I'm not sure we can reason very well about what anything fundamentally unlike ourselves subjectively experiences. I mean, I can program my computer to print out "I calculate, therefore I am" but who knows what, if anything, the processor experiences as it calculates that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Consciousness is based on a fifth fundamental force in the universe, and certain structures, like DNA, are tuned into that force, like an antenna.

<comment><USER32> Statements like this, without any arguments to support them, are quite uninteresting.

<comment><USER31> Nothing is intrinsically interesting. Everything is just habit, based on what you are used to.</comment></comment></comment>


System Failure – The Smiler Roller Coaster, Alton Towers, England - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11647755/The-Smiler-Why-did-the-Alton-Towers-ride-crash.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Yesterday a car carrying sixteen people crashed into empty car that got stuck midway, severely injuring four.

The roller coaster opened two years ago Has been plague by technical difficulties and downtime since. They have already fired an operator, but you have to ask how much of this was human error and how much was system failure.

A find it amazing that this was allowed to happen. Sending an empty car around the track when they start up is standard practice, they shouldn't be able release another until the test car has returned. Also, why were two cars allowed to enter the same section of track?</comment>


CTO vs. Lead Dev - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/working-with-developers-9-ways-to-make-their-life-easier/

<comment><USER2> Seems like good advice! Thanks for the article!

The one bit I don't think is a good idea is: "An alternative is to negotiate a rate for a trial period for a small feature, and tell her you'll pay the full rate if the project goes well"

Just pay the full rate! Sure, hire for a trial run but don't insult your developer with old "just do this one thing cheap and there will be properly paid work later" line. For a good developer there is properly paid work available NOW, why should she work for you cheap?

<comment><USER3> Agreed - That part stood in stark contrast to the rest of the section, which otherwise is good advice, imho.

<comment><USER4> I don't know. Take contractors. For many types of heavy lifting, a good contractor who is also a lead dev etc may be justified in asking for 100 dollars an hour or more, simply due to the complexity, their accumulated experience, and just how good and fast and right they are in a tech that's in demand. However, for every person like that, there are n who do not justify a hundred dollars an hour. So, isn't an OK compromise to start at 40 dollars an hour and see if they can do the work of 3 days (or a week or three weeks, or 'unusable') of one of the 'other' devs, more quickly or just better and more reliably, and if so, bump their rate to 100 dollars an hour as they're asking for? Think like Oracle/SAP specialists etc who would do something like build a complete database and web shop, front-end, back-end, everything from scratch for a traditional brick-and-morter store.

To take an opposite example, consider a designer and logo creator. Short of a portfolio, which many designers are not able to provide except to say, look at this, this, and this web site, which they did not work on alone, it is simply hard to know how much they contributed and how much was the art director, other designers, etc. Some designers are independent and bring customers who pay well and basically justify any rate for themselves. (e.g. fifty thousand dollars for a new worldwide corporate logo for a fortune 500 company). Others are worth fifteen dollars an hour. Don't you think a good compromise might be a decent rate (25-40 dollars) for something small, then bump to awesome rate if, well, they're awesome?

Naturally this only works if there is actual trust from both sides. But you would never pay fifty thousand dollars for a logo by someone who only knows microsoft paint and sucks using it -- or even ten thousand or even five thousand -- nor would you pay 100 dollars an hour to a "hadoop engineer" (your requirement) who turns out to not be a hadoop engineer, barely know some html and php, and even with php can't do anything that you want or need. Nor would you pay 80 dollars nor 60 dollars an hour to that person.

So if there is trust that you're really looking for top talent -- and the dev's bullshit detector doesn't go off -- why not do this: "Rather than you doing 10 hours of unpaid phone calls, resumes, interviews to get to 100 dollars an hour -- your next gig -- why don't you do 8 hours of work for me and get to the same place. This applies only if you're worth 100 dollars an hour"

Then if the person is not lying (they're worth 100 an hour, they're an actual hadoop contributor and ju one of the best in the world), and you're not lying (you really want to pay that, for really such a person), it all works out.

<comment><USER5> No.

You have an adverse selection problem. If you're looking to hire really great contractors, then you're mostly looking to hire people who have continuing work with their extremely happy customers, leads that their extremely happy customers referred to them, etc. They don't need you that badly.

So, you ask them to work for $40 an hour for, say, a week. They could make at least 4x that if they worked for other clients. Why should they, the super awesome coder, take you on as a customer? You're asking them to pay a big opportunity cost for business they don't need that badly, and you're showing that you're price-sensitive, and are likely to try to get a discount off their full rate after the trial too. The people this will most scare away are the very best, the ones who don't need you, the ones you really want to keep.

So yes, do a trial if you're not comfortable committing to a big contract with them. But treat the difference between the rate you want to pay for the trial and their rate as part of the cost of finding great talent. Don't squabble over what's going to end up being a very small percentage of what you pay the person over their whole time with you at the risk of sending the best talent straight out the door. It's too great a cost.

Also, if you want great talent, double your expectation of what contract rates should be. $40 an hour as a contract rate in a 1st world country is not a "decent rate".

<comment><USER4> I guess I didn't make what I had in mind more clear, as I didn't finish "if they can do the work of 3 days (or a week or three weeks, or 'unusable') of one of the 'other' devs" correctly." I meant, "in a day".

What I really had in mind is about a day's work, like an extended interview, but paid. Basically, someone saying, "Look, I don't know how to tell a hadoop expert from someone who can only code bad html and bad php", so instead of three unpaid interviews before you land your next job, how about one 8-hour paid interview (320 dollars). If you're what I'm looking for I'll hire you on the spot, but if you're just full of BS like the last three guys I couldn't tell were BS artists, when I'll just have to make do with a tiny bit of progress.

My point was, interviews are also an opportunity cost, and that not being able to tell apart bad php coders from awesome database engineers is also an opportunity cost. Also I don't know what market you have in mind, but 40 dollars an hour is more than what someone who just does some html and php badly (i.e. couldn't complete fizzbuzz) is worth in almost every city. That would be 80k per year salary.

I think the point is to bridge the gap between "completely unpaid interview" and "I have to pay you 100 dollars an hour for a week". How about an 8-hour or 4-hour "free trial" before I take you on full-time at 200k per year? Only instead of actually free, I'll actually pay you 320 dollars for your audition. Seems like this beats the hell out of doing two or three unpaid interviews...

<comment><USER4> I guess you just don't like this idea. But samples are typical in loads of professions, you can get sample tiles, and so on. Not for free. Why shouldn't you pay for a sample at a rate that is not the rate you will be buying the full product.

Maybe my specific examples are for a different market (always hard to say where people are writing from: is it the bay area, or a smaller city) but depending on what the developer and company are looking for and their stage of financing, etc, this can enable fits that otherwise just can't happen. Both of them take a risk (the shop that is non-technical and can't tell who is the right one, the developer who doesn't really want to work for 4 or 8 hours for 160 or 320 dollars) but if they do, it can pay off. When there is trust I just don't see why this is so bad. Loads of long relationships form this way (paid at normal market rates or higher - higher, explicitly due to the fact that the client is not in a position to shop around, can't do technical interviews, etc. Wouldn't you want a client like this? Where if you prove your ability above their other candidates, they can't find a replacement for you and are going to pay you approaching the "monopoly price" - what the business case makes your services worth to them?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen "You can negotiate with a developer on her rate, but if it sounds reasonable, it probably is. Keep in mind that there are plenty of other people out there willing and able to hire her for what she quoted. And, if she feels like she's been out-negotiated and she's not being compensated what she's worth, chances are she won't prioritize your work over other work (or over other, more fun things). Or, she'll find someone else who will pay her rate, then leave you hanging. I've seen it over and over again."

So true. The lowest price is only the best price if you're never going to deal with the person again, but in general you want people who do business with you to make money too _so that they keep doing business with you._ The price you pay for something, and the degree to which you negotiate, sends a strong signal. You don't want that signal to be adversarial in situations like these, for the reasons described.

Finally, a lot of people see margins from negotiations as easy money, or say things like "I'm a good negotiator." The first is only somewhat the case, saying the latter is not only bad manners but reveals what a person thinks of the role of others is in their success. A negotiation sets the terms for the relationship, and if your terms are bad, people will get out of that relationship or set you at a low priority, at best.

</comment><comment><USER6> Shameless self promotion:

After many years of being a CTO/Head of Dev I started to write down (Toc exists ;-) the stuff I know. This is based on the CTO School workshops I did.

<https://github.com/StephanSchmidt/CTO-Manual> (will be CC)

You can leave comments and later pull reqs there. Every input much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER7> The author provides excellent advice in this article. I'd like to add one point. Developers, who work close to a UI, should really start learning more about design. You increase your own value by having a good eye for UX and how a UI embodies it.</comment>


Over 400,000 Apps In The Apple App Store Have Zero Downloads - <AUTHOR> http://www.ijailbreak.com/applications/over-400000-apps-in-apple-app-store-have-zero-downloads/#.UBpFNroQUt0.twitter

<comment><USER2> I think it is pure link bait.

I dont believe not even one download theory, maybe apps without a rating is still a possibility.

As a developer you promote it to friends/relatives/ put a site, mention on Twitter, Facebook , Get it reviewed.

Even the apps which we have not promoted/abandoned got downloaded couple of hundred times annually . On android it was about 1/10th of the apple downloads.

</comment><comment><USER3> Zero? It's a bit funny if even the developer hasn't downloaded their own app to test it..

It's true however that if you just publish an app with no marketing (or some kind of existing brand leverage), you pretty much get zero downloads from anybody else than yourself. Unless maybe you're a SEO guru.</comment>


Chinese proposal to meter Internet traffic - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8417680.stm

<comment><USER2> This does not make _any_ sense. It appears that neither the government agencies involved nor the reporters writing the stories understand how internet connections are built or sold.

For example, why does/would there need to be an ITU proposal to "use BGP routers to collect traffic flow data, which could be used, by bilateral agreement, by operators for billing purposes"? This is what virtually all internet transit providers do right now in order to bill their customers.

Massive WTF; no information content.</comment>


Health Insurers Make It Easy for Scammers to Steal Millions - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurers-make-it-easy-for-scammers-to-steal-millions-who-pays-you <comment><USER2> Before I worked in healthcare, it all seemed so easy. The doctors were the good guys, and the insurance and drug companies were the bad guys. Now I see it differently.

Healthcare companies are massive bureaucracies because there are people at every end trying to scam them. All that redundant paperwork is for a reason.

You wouldn't believe some of the things that people try to get away with. Plastic surgeons billing tummy tucks as emergency C-sections. People pretending they were the hospital so they can get the insurance company to reimburse them for the IV "hangover cures" they got every morning while partying in Vegas. People walking into office buildings and play-collapsing in the lobby so they can get an ambulance ride to the hospital across town, then once they arrive they run out of the hospital and down the street because all they were really looking for is a free ride. People who have six or seven dependent children from multiple partners on their insurance, then yell at us because the partner they're living with didn't know about all those other children from all those other spouses until they opened some piece of mail from us.

I'm not saying that insurance companies are all good. IME, most are not. But if people were just honest and decent, a large part of the healthcare system dysfunction wouldn't exist.

<comment><USER3> >Healthcare companies are massive bureaucracies because there are people at every end trying to scam them. All that redundant paperwork is for a reason.

And what about other countries with way lower healthcare expenditures (by % of GDP)? Are people scamming the healthcare system an American problem?

<comment><USER4> NHS and other nationalized healthcare providers, doctors and nurses working in hospitals get salaries, so they could scam some overtime but that's about it. I think local primary physicians get paid per visit, but most are way overworked anyway so kinda hard to fake extra visits.

<comment><USER5> There's still fraud in the NHS.

People who suspect fraud can report it to the NHS Counter Fraud authority.

They have a fraud awareness toolkit here: [https://cfa.nhs.uk/fraud- prevention/fraud-awareness-toolkit](https://cfa.nhs.uk/fraud-prevention/fraud- awareness-toolkit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tip of the iceberg.

I know a fellow that got a bill a drug testing company didn't mean to send him. He was meant to check for a single restricted medication because of some treatment regimen he was on. Instead, it checked for pretty much everything and automatically rechecked both positive and negative results.

Long story short, a $50 test turned into a $2500 test, invisible to all but the testing company and the insurance company.

The testing company told him to ignore the bill and, indeed, he wasn't charged that amount. It piqued his curiosity and offended his sense of fairness and it led him down a disturbing rabbit hole of uncovering some very bad behavior and desperately trying to get folks to do notice what was happening and do something about it.

Basically, this company seems to be in the business of bribing doctors through ridiculously priced leases in their medical office that they pay for to house their 'testing advisors'. We're talking on the order of $15K a month for a broom closet. In return, doctors use the testing company's pre-filled documents for requesting testing -- standing orders for the whole suite of tests with re-checks rather than just what is needed.

By the time the insurance companies caught on they'd amassed a huge war chest and were more than happy to tie up the courts fighting claims that they're doing something wrong.

One reason I support universal healthcare even though, generally, I'm a free- market proponent, is because it would make this kind of fraud a lot easier to spot and the federal government has a lot more tools to bring to bear to stop it.

<comment><USER7> I agree that if we are to maintain this opaque system where customers (patients) pay a flat rate for ludicrously overpriced insurance, and then have no insight into prices nor ability to reduce them because they don't pay for the actual services, then universal healthcare is better.

However, universal healthcare is not a panacea as evidenced by many angry patients waiting for procedures in Canada and the UK - although they are leaps and bounds better off than many in the current USA system.

An alternative would be to have transparent pricing and open the market much more to for-profit businesses. Notice how vasectomies and laser eye surgery, 2 procedures not typically covered by insurance, have become safer, cheaper, and more effective over the past 20 years as they have been forced to advertise directly to consumers and compete with other vendors. This is the opposite trajectory of almost everything else in the healthcare system. I'm not saying all procedures can become like this - obviously a heart attack is a heart attack - but there are many other specialist procedures that are indeed scheduled in advance that could benefit from a heavy dose of transparency and competition.

As another example, I've been on the same medication for the past 8 years. I get the same dose, and it's never changing. Yet my provider makes me visit every 3 months for a refill. They put me in a room and "check up" to make sure the meds are "going well". Often this 30 minute scheduled meeting is less than 5 minutes because my doctor just hits a button on the computer to refill it. Yet insurance pays 4 times a year for this unnecessary visit to a specialist doctor. It doesn't cost me anything (other than deductible) so I'm most annoyed about the time wasting, but I also know that the system is being bilked for thousands of dollars.

Multiply that anecdote by a million other situations. I should just be able to buy my meds without being forced to go through a doctor.

<comment><USER8> > As another example, I've been on the same medication for the 8 years. I get > the same dose, and it's never changing. Yet my provider makes me visit every > 3 months for a refill.

Know the feeling, my girlfriend has to get pap smears every 1 or 2 years in order to get birth control and she despises those checkups. Yeah, let's put more barriers to women getting birth control... Fortunately, I only have to deal with yearly eye exams to get contacts which are still super annoying but the pap smears sound awful.

<comment><USER9> It's ridiculous that birth control even requires a prescription in the US but it's not an issue you ever hear debated or discussed. The reason? If it were OTC (and no longer covered by health insurance) it would be prohibitively expensive for many of the young women who need it the most. So instead we end up getting annual pap screening even though it's only necessary every 3-5 years. Quite a corner we've painted ourselves into with this whole health insurance mess.

<comment><USER10> Birth control can safely be prescribed without a pap test. A pap test is merely a screening for cervical cancer. The fact that a medical provider would require a pap for a birth control prescription when that's not medically necessary is a problem. Overscreening for cervical cancer is also a big problem. Once every year is an inappropriate screening interval for most people.[1]

In some states pharmacists can prescribe birth control pills after a consult.[1]

There's no reason why we can't require insurance to cover birth control pills even if they are OTC. We can still have a pharmacist run it through insurance, you just don't need a doctor's note.

[1] [https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cervical-cancer/prevention- and...](https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cervical-cancer/prevention-and-early- detection/cervical-cancer-screening-guidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services makes the entire National Provider Identifier database searchable [0] and downloadable (6M rows, 7.25GB)[1], in which you can find all of the story subject's many fraudulent entries. Interestingly, even though CMS tracks and disseminates a file of deactivated NPIs, several/many of this guy's entries are still "Active" [2]

[0] [https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/](https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/)

[1] [http://download.cms.gov/nppes/NPI_Files.html](http://download.cms.gov/nppes/NPI_Files.html)

[2] [https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/registry/search-results- tabl...](https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/registry/search-results- table?organization_name=KINESIOLOGY+SPECIALISTS&addressType=ANY)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've never really liked the "the business screws up and _you_ pay for it" narrative so common in articles like this. I don't remember my microeconomics class too well, but the inefficiency affects the supply/demand curve, and I believe that the business and the consumer both typically take a loss. Not really so simple a story as "they just raise the price by the amount they lost and take it from you easy-peasy" like the line makes it sound, like consumers have just simply absorbed all cost/risk on the company's behalf.

At any rate, fraud like that should increase the inefficiency of the business, and in a competitive market, companies handling fraud better should get an edge, then we end up with a bunch of companies doing the optimal amount of fraud policing. Of course, we have the real problem of not _having_ real competition in the US health care market.

<comment><USER12> It seems pretty obvious the cornerstone of that narrative is a poorly functioning market, lacking competition, price transparency, freedom of choice, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe 40 years ago only MD doctors were qualified to perform medical procedures and thus to have NPI's, but things change. Now states are all over the place on what professional is qualified to provide what service. Most states probably require some kind of registration, but I also wouldn't be shocked to learn some ancillary physical therapy or acupuncture or chiropractic service can be billed somewhere by someone who only has a PhD. Not in Texas apparently, but somewhere.

The article was about a brazen 'slam dunk' fraud, but for the 99% of other schemes that inflate a bill 5%, 10%, 15%, the blame is laid more correctly at the feet of the AMA and it's CPT Codebook (the 99215 in the article) which at once makes billing for things an awful chore and makes prosecuting less brazen schemes a total headache.

Look up 99215, for example. First of all, the description is copyrighted IP not freely available for use. Second, if you find it, it's a timed procedure that _doesn 't_ have a specific time attached to it. Just proving 'you billed for a long examination and didn't actually spend much time with the patient' generally will _not_ suffice to prove fraud. Instead you need to delve into medical notes, interviews and compare the lengths of other examinations, just to demonstrate falsity for one occasion, one exam. This, and all the secrecy attached to medical records, is a big reason why medical billing anomalies are so unlikely to generate legal department responses.

</comment><comment><USER14> A bit unrelated, but states make it easy to scam unemployment insurance too!

I've had a rando collecting unemployment benefits from my company's account for a year now because my company's name is similar to a grimy company that hires contractors and operates in a different industry. I've never had a relationship with the claimant and don't even know who they are.

My theory is: The scammers search for businesses with similar names to whom they contracted for and submit unemployment claims to whomever looks similar on the state business registration website. The state doesn't check to see if there was actually a record of employment and just puts the burden of proof on the business. If the response by the business isn't timely or things get lost in the mail, the state pays out whatever they claim.

At this time the risk appears small to the scammer as our fraud reports went nowhere, the cost to my business is large as it screws our UI experience rates up and has now lead to having to change/rebrand the business's name.

</comment><comment> word-reader The scammer ended up with $4M in his pocket, for providing personal training services to 1000 people. Now, it sounds like he would also fraudulently bill the insurance companies for exercise sessions that didn't happen. But let's say only 800 people got personal training: that's $5000 per person. That's not an absurd amount for personal training over a long period of time. And their health was surely improved by the exercise.

Then someone with a personal vendetta against him got his business records because of bad OPSEC. I'm sure a lot of other people involved (clients, business associates) also knew it was a questionable operation, but they were probably pretty happy to have health insurance actually pay for things that improved their health for once. I don't feel like this type of fraud would increase healthcare costs in the way many other actors in the system (who are not about to go to prison) increase them.

If this guy had been ordained as a doctor and was just a little more careful with the billing, he'd be hailed for _getting_ insurance companies to pay for exercise treatment. "You say you have pain? I prescribe 'physical therapy' where you work out with one of my assistants for an hour and I talk to you at the end." Easy as that.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's kind of a stretch to say that this guy Williams was a hardworking health provider who just wasn't lucky enough to have an approved degree and good opsec. According to the story, his first felony conviction came from using his son's autism to submit fake invoices to get gov't reimbursement (nevermind the felony child abuse that landed him in prison).

And then there's the allegations that he highly exaggerated his services (describing "typical fitness exercises" as treatment for "lumbago and sciatica"). And then there's the several examples of clients who _did_ notice and call out the egregious mis-billing:

> _Another client texted Williams with concerns that her United insurance plan > had been billed for 18 workouts in December 2015. That couldn't be accurate, > the woman wrote. "I had to take December off due to my work schedule and > family in town," she wrote. "I understand that people need to be paid but > this seems excessive."_

<comment> word-reader The guy is a grifter, no doubt. But the general tone of the article implies that I should be concerned about some random sleazeball for raising my healthcare costs, rather than the insurance companies themselves (who in this case basically _administered_ the defrauding of their client, Southwest Airlines, by not having proper vetting procedures), the MDs who undoubtedly commit the vast majority of insurance fraud, or policymakers.

edit: First-line treatment for sciatica includes typical fitness stretches and "lumbago" just means "back pain" which is treatable with typical fitness exercises: [https://www.verywellhealth.com/back-pain-stretches- exercises...](https://www.verywellhealth.com/back-pain-stretches- exercises-2549756)

<comment><USER12> _implies that I should be concerned about some random sleazeball for raising my healthcare costs, rather than the insurance companies themselves_

We must have read the title differently.

<comment> word-reader Ah, true. But they had lots of family sources and court records for Williams, and I suppose no spokesperson from the insurance companies wanted to talk, so most of the article is just about him. I wish journalists would develop some more sources inside insurance companies, PBMs, etc. How they operate internally is just like a void that nobody wants to look in to, apparently. Like how do they decide what they'll pay for? Or how do they decide who gets to be part of their network? How long will they let a doctor send in fraudulent claims? There are probably 1000 analysts or programmers inside UHC alone who would happily help answer these.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The thing to take away from this: Doctors, Insurance companies and big and small Pharma (small meaning pharmacies) are in cahoots with each other. Doctors charge for unnecessary operations and insurance companies don't care because they can pass on the costs to people who must have insurance.

But then why doesn't competition keep insurance companies more alert? Is it because it is really oligopoly, a bit like either you use Spectrum or Verizon there's really other choice?

<comment><USER16> Mergers and Acqusitions. Once insurance providers get large, they tend to get acquired.

Im sure there is more to "why", but this is one reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hospitals in California now requires Chinese patients to pay upfront, and from what I gather, you don't even need to ask the doctors and hospitals for them to unknowingly sign you up various healthcare benefits.

Some birth tourists in fear of immigration policy changes need to specifically stress and request to not being signed up.

</comment><comment><USER18> This guy doesn't seem like a fraudster so much as an honest practitioner trying to make his skills available to people. Did he injure anyone?

</comment><comment><USER19> A lot of this would be solved by knowing how much people make, what they spend it on and where the money came from.

If you want democracy, let people vote on who is a scumbag, investigate those people's financial history and if it's confirmed, ex-communicate them from society.

That'd border on real democracy however, so I don't see it taking place anytime soon :)

<comment><USER20> > A lot of this would be solved by knowing how much people make, what they > spend it on and where the money came from.

> If you want democracy, let people vote on who is a scumbag, investigate > those people's financial history and if it's confirmed, ex-communicate them > from society.

I may be reading your point too narrowly but it sounds like you are advocating for a judicial system.

<comment><USER19> A judicial system is concerned with laws.

We'll always have scumbags who twist the law in ways to profit themselves.

This system is so broken we even have names for sub-categories of scumbags who literally abuse the law - one of them is called patent trolls!

That's why we need democracy - to vote on ex-communicating scumbags that try and do that. Law alone is not enough - I don't know why that's not immediately obvious.

There's also the question of incentives - if you can't spend money you steal without getting caught, you're far less likely to be a scumbag and steal in the first place. These seem like incredibly obvious things.</comment></comment></comment>


If architects had to work like software developers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.monochrome.co.uk/2009/02/if-architects-had-to-work-like-software-developers/ <comment><USER2> As mentioned elsewhere, this is so old that the original is thought to have been written in cuneiform around the time of the Sumerians.

But since it may be new to some... Here are some of the observations on this post I have found interesting:

1\. What makes you think Architects don't have to deal with fickle customers who have no concept of time, space, or budget?

2\. Every project of any description needs a change control process. If yours consists of exchanging emails, it is going to go this way whether you're a web developer or a tailor.

3\. The more expertise a customer thinks they have in the subject matter relative to you, the more comfortable they are micro-managing it. What have you done to educate the customer about how much expertise you bring to their project?

<comment><USER3> Funnily enough, my cofounder _is_ an architect. And from the tales he (and his architect friends) tell me, yes, architecture clients are just as fickle.

They have loads of self-contradicting stakeholders too (particularly for larger buildings). And they change their mind about the costs. And they get architects to design something to get bids in and then change their mind about half the building. And they want everything, done quickly, cheap, and the highest quality. And they change their requirements. And they expect the architect to adapt to this. And if the architect makes a mis-step in this complex client management process, they will typically get sued and lose money.

I think one way in which architecture is actually much more difficult than software development is that architects often have to pour their heart and soul into a project to design the most amazing building, only to have it cancelled at the last minute. It's a common practice for developers to get architects to design a cool building and get planning permission for it, only to raise the value of the land (by showing that cool stuff can be built on it) so that they can sell it on to someone else (who will of course want something completely different).

To me, that would be very disheartening, because those buildings are often quasi-artistic creations that take a lot of creative energy, and giving it my all time and time again only to have my projects regularly canned and forgotten would just depress me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <rant>

Yes it's funny, yes it's clever, yes it's too close to the truth, but he's quoted it without even mentioning that it's been around for years. Author unknown, but a brief Google search shows references at least 16 years old, but it's been around longer than that.

At least he could have the decency to admit he didn't write it.

</rant>

Edited as I find still older references.

1993: <http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~mikeb/Architects.pdf>

<comment><USER5> Uh, it does say the author is unknown

<comment><USER4> That's been added. Google's cache of the page doesn't have it. I don't know how long this reference will last, I don't know how Google's caching system works, and the wayback machine doesn't seem to have it. However, here's a link:

[http://220.127.116.11/search?q=cache:xnQVWK8a5AsJ:blog.monoc...](http://18.104.22.168/search?q=cache:xnQVWK8a5AsJ:blog.monochrome.co.uk/2009/02/if- architects-had-to-work-like-software- developers/+%22Please+design+and+build+me+a+house%22+site:blog.monochrome.co.uk)

Clearly he's noticed that people are dissing him for plagarism and changed it without acknowledging it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OTOH if software developers had to work like architects, you would need to have a degree and several years of experience making coffee for more senior engineers before you were even allowed near a text editor. After that, you could write your own programs, but to actually run them through a compiler you would still need someone who has passed the bar exam, and you'd have to give them a cut of whatever you make off your software.

<comment><USER7> Well, that certainly would make for better software, albeit more expensive...

<comment><USER8> I have to disagree. It would make for less buggy software, but I suspect not for software that people want. The best way we know how to make products people want is to get a basic version released and iterate rapidly.

<comment><USER9> As the architecture model fails to construct buildings people want?

People's wants are easily defined once cash money is involved in most industries...

<comment><USER3> Applying these hurdles to software would be senseless, because the cost of bad software is infinitely smaller than the cost of bad architecture.

99.999% of software is never in a position to kill someone if it fails catastrophically. 99.999% of buildings are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe the problem stems from a misconception on both sides of the table. What passes for design in the software world is little more than what an architect might sketch on a napkin over dinner.

The code is the design. What other deliverable of the software development process contains the precision and specificity of a blueprint, which can then be followed to actually build (the double entendre is no coincidence) the thing?

A contractor equates to a compiler, albeit an expensive, time-consuming, and buggy one.

I don't think clients are so much to blame... it's just that software is so abstract and a house so, shall we say, concrete. We need to do a better job of helping clients understand and visualize what we are doing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some architects do. There is an old BBC (I think) broadcast showing Christopher Alexander building a house. He goes to the site with the people who will live in the house, asks them what they have in mind. He has a scaffolding built, then asks the people to sit on the scaffolding in different places and talk about how it feels. Based on that, the rooms are decided, and so on. The house is built incrementally using feedback; there is no up-front plan. Admittedly, Alexander is far beyond the pale of mainstream architecture, but this is way cool.

<comment><USER12> That was in the BBC adaptation of "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand. Both the book and the miniseries (which is on Youtube in segments) are excellent.

I heard about Christopher Alexander from his renown in programming circles. I wonder how he is viewed in the architectural mainstream?

<comment><USER11> I believe he's largely held in contempt, either ignored or dismissed as a loon. Unfortunately, Alexander has done a few things to paint himself into this corner. He seems to have a need to be regarded as a world-historical genius, which isolated him and turned his work into something a bit cultish. That's a great pity because his core ideas are so vital.

<comment><USER13> That's correct, in the USA, at least -- although they seem to think better of him in Germany (at least, they did a decade ago). He did pioneering work on using computers for design at MIT in the sixties -- but it never really took off, or even worked terribly well. "Pattern Language" is seen as naive and ridiculous in the "top" schools -- but I agree with gruseom that there's a lot of wisdom there. We'll come back to it, as the cycles make their slow turn away from mannerism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am formally trained as an architect and I believe there are plenty of overlaps between architecture and programming. In fact, it was a series of computer science programming classes in college that reinforced my desire to study architecture. I found the problem solving and methodology very similar in both disciplines.

I now split time between the two domains (programming and architecture) and find that my work continues to overlap, but that's what makes it enjoyable.

</comment><comment><USER15> Architects do contract work with those types of situations. A lot of IT best practices come from decades of learning from the world of construction. If it costs 80% of your budget to fix a mistake after you're pouring concrete, you're going to make sure you know just where every joint and truss is going to be.

The cost of change for IT can be similarly daunting. The better we do at understanding what people are looking for up front, the better we're able to deliver what they want. And if they're unsure what they want, perhaps we can help them figure out what they need.

Just like in designing a home.

</comment><comment><USER16> The missing stipulation is that the owner would like the move from his old home to his new home to be seamless, without disrupting his family life in any way.

</comment><comment><USER17> Roof falls in - oh well, tenant didn't move in yet. Hit undo, problem solved. The design part may well be more difficult, but the build cycle's pretty damn easy by comparison. You can get away with a lot more as a programmer than you can as an architect, I think :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't find these so funny, because it's obvious to me that there is no single paradigm that fits all disciplines. Architects are not like software developers, operating systems are not like airlines, etc'...

</comment><comment><USER19> This also applies to any form of web design.

</comment><comment><USER9> In Soviet Russia, architects _do_ work like software developers.

</comment><comment><USER20> Perfect! I am sending this to every one of my customers now.

</comment><comment><USER21> This sounds like a passage from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

</comment><comment><USER22> why not - just $75/h.

</comment><comment><USER23> Incidentally, that 3D tag cloud makes me want to punch myself in the face.</comment>


The new Palm is a tiny phone to keep you away from your phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17974850/new-palm-smartphone-android-lifemode-time-well-spent-verizon <comment><USER2> I could just buy a Moto E for $99 on Amazon and swap out my SIM card, and oh look it works with carriers other than just Verizon:

[https://www.amazon.com/Moto-4th-Generation-Unlocked-T- Mobile...](https://www.amazon.com/Moto-4th-Generation-Unlocked-T- Mobile/dp/B06ZZVZKTR/ref=sr_1_3?s=wireless&ie=UTF8&qid=1539619175&sr=1-3&keywords=moto+e)

<comment><USER3> Moto E is twice as heavy and significantly bulkier.. anyone aware of a closer candidate?</comment></comment>


Vault 7 Megathread - <AUTHOR> As a European, this specifically drew my attention.<p>"U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt is a covert CIA hacker base "<p>Germans are usually privacy nuts. I know many who maintain no presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I wonder how Germany will react to this. <comment><USER2> That's been known since 2013.

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story- how-...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-nsa- spied-on-merkel-cell-phone-from-berlin-embassy-a-930205.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagged.

We don't do "megathreads" here, we discuss specific submissions. Of which there are quite a lot right now in /new. You don't get to redirect all Wikileaks stuff of the day to your submission.

It's fine as a comment, as a submission it borders on abuse.</comment>


Amazon's latest patent, the Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement, reads like scary sci-fi - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/04/03/2211258.shtml <comment><USER2> It doesn't sound that scary to me. There are lots of systems which employ the use of work queues. For instance, a tech support employee might log into his or her system and see a list of tickets that need troubleshooting. It seems like the difference here is that smart software determines who gets the work based on capability and/or training. I don't think the intent is insidious.

Isn't that a lot like Amazon's mechanical turk, but automated?

<http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome></comment>


More Evidence Of Overwhelming Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-evidence-of-overwhelming-piracy.html

<comment><USER4> Welcome to software and the internet. Distribution is far easier, but so is copyright infringement. If you've released your own software, 10:1 shouldn't be surprising. Stuff like audio software is even worse, where the ratio spirals completely out of control and small developers will often need a second job.

Would all those people have bought the game if the bootlegging weren't available? No way. But it definitely would have been better. Well, maybe? Hm.

It's a trade-off you're basically forced to make now, even if you don't want it. It also doesn't help that lots of sales still come from boxed copies for some reason (which costs money to produce..) and all of the piracy happens over the internet (where it costs extremely little to distribute over) so developers looking to increase sales of games have to pony up even more money upfront to get boxed copies into stores.

<comment><USER5> I've seen a 90% piracy rate mentioned in several articles now; I wouldn't be surprised if it's industry standard. If so, Stardock is actually _doing much better_ than mainstream publishers.

[http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo- has-90-piracy...](http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo- has-90-piracy-rate/)

[http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/06/soccer-game- has-90-pi...](http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/06/soccer-game- has-90-piracy-rate-will-not-add-drm)

<comment><USER6> World of Goo was later revised down to a little below the 5/6 seen here.

[http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo- pira...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-piracy- rate-82/)

Conversion rate appears to be 1:1000 with piracy numbers this high.

<http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really sad. I am in the process of making a game and am just thinking of calling it quits after reading stuff like this. It seems like MMO's are the way to go business side - since it is setup in a way that does not provide piracy vehicle. Which is bad if you don't wan't to make a MMO. Also, it seems PS3 hasn't been cracked yet and there are alot of PS3 owners deprived of good, non-casual games.

<comment><USER8> I too, is in the process of making games. However, I alway thought of piracy as a business problem or just "underserved" customers.

If they paid for the bandwidth, the computer, the hardware upgrade than surely they have no problem for paying for goods and services that can't just be simply be provided for free.

Gone are the days you can just sell a new game. You have to maintain existing projects and games as if you were a open source developer developing your own little corner of the world.

You may even have to sell t-shirts.

Whining about piracy make for great drama and gain sympathy, but it is not going to help you win a single penny.

Whether or not you have the right to control what other people can do with their copies of the game is another matter entirely.

I think we can agree on one thing, the importance of having something to eat.

<comment><USER7> I had a same train of thought up until a year or two ago. It is pretty much unrealistic and too optimistic to think of piracy as undeveloped opportunities. I lived last year, for half a year, in Thailand due to the nature of my job (I am an animation director by training and it is my day job) and was introduced to the wonders of SE Asia - and Asia in general, since I had more time to explore it than several day trips. What struck me as obvious is that people there behave regarding piracy in more open ways then we do - <USER2> western world - however, it is pretty much the same way most of the people think. For example, you can openly buy a pirate copy of whatever in the malls in Bangkok and get a receipt for it. There are shops with pirate stuff as well as shops next to it with legal stuff.

I've noticed that there are games, for example from EA, that are price- tailored to Thailand, so that games are really affordable to Thai people. However, I've talked to the sales people and everybody confirmed that pretty much everyone buys pirate stuff next to the legal stuff, even when price is close to it. For example pirate copy is around 90-100 Baht and Thai legal version is around 200-250. Only games immune to piracy there are MMO's.

Now, consider that Thai model to other cultures. I live in SE Europe and I can vouch the train of thought is the same. Why would I pay if I can have it for less or free. There just isn't way around that, people do not like to pay if they don't need to - does not matter if it is legal or not.

There are, luckily, people that _GET_ the consequences of this and pay up for stuff - so that they can get new games, more stuff in the future etc... if not moral satisfaction only.

Business-wise I don't think you can rely only on that kind of people. If you read up some of the post-mortems on gamasutra and gasp at A title budgets, you can clearly see that in order to make any money out of this is that you have to have atleast 3 games in production in parallel and to break 200K+ units push to the market. That goes for A titles, of course, but model is scalable.

I would just like to state that _the game_ I am doing is purely out of love for games and my secret life as a programmer. If it makes any money when/if it will be out, good - I can do that stuff then all the time with ramen on the table, if not I don't care because I have other "stuff" I do. However, think about it for a second if it where your full time job and people steal stuff, ludicrous. No good demo, trial or whatever can compensate for the idea that you can get something for free if you are average joe who cares only about that game and dozens or so hours he will have fun with it. He doesn't care about future of it, about you, about moral issues... No. Same goes with movies/music. Only thing you can possibly monetize on is that if you have advertising tie ins, online fee, collector/special editions where you actually sell toys/package more than a game itself, and stuff like that - <USER3> but the game itself. Sad, because if at least 30-40% of people payed up, instead of sub 10%, it would open up larger budgets for greater games, and not only for run-of-the-mill sequels that take less budget because return is not great.

sorry for the long rant, I just feel angry about all of this - not because of piracy per se. Piracy is and always will be around, everybody pirated something sooner or later, but not always damnit. Looks like both software and entertainment industries are shifting towards some future model of business that is still not on a horizon. Alternative would be that people who do both software and entertainment will shift to other stuff, which will not happen. I guess we are all in a twitter stasis now - great and all, but need a new way to make money.

<comment><USER8> I don't look at this "sad". If people don't want to pay for it, they don't want to pay for it. If it happen to be that 99% of artists/muscicans/programmers etc can no longer find work in a post-copyright world, so be it.

I don't even believe that there is some sort of moral obligation to pay for copyrighted stuff anyway. Rather, I believe that the copyright system is an artifical insitution that modify the result of the free market. It distort incentive and direct resources to part of the economy where it wouldn't be in the first place.

The fact that the free market is starting to break into and killing all the players is simply reality intruding on people's illusions.

I am not here to suffer for a cause or anything but I want to survive so I can make a living on games, whether or not the market size has drastically shunk or expanded.

The thing that irate me the most is that game developers think that players have a moral obligation to support developers or not do something that percevied to hurt their revenues. We don't even have a moral standing to control what other people can do with their copies of the game. So we used words like "stealing" or "piracy" to justify oursleves as victicms of plunder when in reality, they're just copying stuff.

Yeah. Life is really harsh that way. Sometime we can only blame oursleves for being fools.

(on the other hand, 99% of all pirates are pussycats, losers, and cowards in term of their characters, but that's just another matter entirely)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's too bad.

I think in a few years America will be where China is today: you'll be unable to buy PC games. Instead, you'll rent access to data on servers under the game company's control. It is already pretty much happening -- the American PC game industry might as well be called "WoW and friends" at this point going by the sales charts.

That is the ultimate solution to piracy. And _it will work_. It works in China. You can no more torrent a game residing on a server than you can pirate Basecamp by downloading Firefox.

<comment><USER5> Yup. In fact, some groups are looking to push this solution even further, so that all the game processing/rendering takes place on the server:

[http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/2009/03/27/server-side- rend...](http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/2009/03/27/server-side-rendering- back-in-the-spotlight/)

It sounds like they still have some issues with latency and bandwidth to work out, but not all games need low latency. And this solution neatly solves the piracy problem -- even for single player games -- as well as eliminating publisher concerns over modchips, game resale, and client-side hacks. And it has much lower client-side hardware requirements, too, so you don't need to worry about who has what console.

<comment><USER10> Server-side rendering actually will turn out to work amazingly well, and will surprise most of the naysayers.

I think the strategy around bandwidth and latency is going to wind up being parking container datacenters near various isp's so everything but long- distance game state syncing stays on the local network; not perfect, and higher upfront, but it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problems were exacerbated by Gamestop breaking the street date even after they were specifically told they couldn't. I think this all would have been a much smaller issue if Stardock had been able to release the game when they planned to.

In addition, I don't think that Stardock is necessarily surprised with the piracy numbers.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this article will increase their sales, btw... wouldn't be that surprising. I, for one, never heard of this game, and now I'm going to go check it out. I may not buy it, but certainly it's a decent marketing move. If 100'000 people are willing to play this thing (pirated or not), it's probably decent.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pretty surprising that they would allow network play without a valid, paid account.

<comment><USER11> They don't. The updates require you to have a valid account with Impulse and the updates are what point you to the correct servers.

The problem was that with Gamestop breaking the street date, people were playing with legitimate and pirated copies of the game before Stardock was ready to support the rush of people playing. The issues were compounded by various not-so-great decisions like having the game try to connect to the servers and check for updates whenever it is booted up. So, you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems for the legit owners.

<comment><USER13> _"you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems"_

A few thousand failed _login attempts_ caused problems? Sounds like they need a new systems administrator/DBA. A well configured authentication system should be able to easily say "no" to practically unlimited numbers of login attempts. "High value target" production systems often decline many thousands of invalid auth attempts per _minute_.

Unless the client is unbelievably badly coded (ie keep trying to login every second, indefinitely), that's not even the beginning of a good explanation.

<comment><USER11> I did say among other things, and one of the issues was that things were still running on the beta servers initially, which were not configured for the load they had come Monday through Tuesday.

I am trying to mention this from memory, so I may have the specifics wrong.

Edit: Again, this all stems from Gamestop breaking the street date, and not by only a day or two either but the Friday prior.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough, sorry for sounding like I was jumping down your throat!

Ha, I can imagine how it went down now. "Yes boss, we'll bring the production servers online over the weekend, all ready for the launch on Monday" ..

<comment><USER11> Actually, the game was supposed to launch that Tuesday. I think they said a lot of employees were supposed to have that Monday off for Easter weekend.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>