Pornoscanners trivially defeated by pancake-shaped explosives - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/11/pornoscanners-trivia.html

<comment><USER2> I was in 4 different airports in the US recently. Didn't have any problems in any of them.

I will note though that the big scanner off to the side that I saw in one airport had the product name:

"Rapiscan"

... which probably doesn't seem like such a good idea now to their marketing team.

</comment><comment><USER3> The question is: is anybody surprised? (particularly curious about those at DHS/TSA, and scum like Chertoff... I'm guessing not)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm against security theater, but this sounds like an information visualization problem: if the image contains enough signal that a theoretically optimally trained eye can detect the contraband, they should be able to use machine learning algorithms to detect suspicious items and make them show up with higher contrast.

In other words, the software should magnify anything out of the ordinary, like contraband. It's not foolproof of course, but would help.

<comment><USER5> I think the issue is that if you can produce anything approximately the size and density of a gut, you can get it past a scan - no machine learning is going to be able to pick up something that for all intents and purposes looks like a normal beer belly.

<comment><USER4> Fully agreed that that's a real problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great headline based on a simulation. Says so in the second sentence of the abstract. Is it hard to do a test using real machines? What's stopping them?

<comment><USER7> Why should the company that makes these machines allow access to them?

<comment><USER6> Shouldn't the airports or governments (or whoever is paying for these) test them properly?

<comment><USER8> That's true if their main concern is security, as opposed to security theatre.

<comment><USER9> I'm not even sure security simulation is the main concern at this point. it rather seems to be giving as much tax dollars to the companies who helped politicians get into office in the first place.

<comment><USER10> To me it seems that at this stage it's purely a matter of refusing to back down on any "security" measure because that could be interpreted as "letting the terrorists win" by political opponents or voters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's say a terrorist had a plastic container with a wirelessly detonatable bomb inside surgically implanted in his abdomen. After a few weeks to allow the incision to heal, the guy went through airport security. Given the number of implantable devices on the market, I bet the TSA folks are quite used to feeling the odd lumps of pacemakers, etc. on people's torsos. While the backscatter xrays might show a bunch of wires and such, would the image look much different than someone who had a pacemaker implanted with various leads into the heart? What if that guy was rubbed down with the bomb detection cloth pad (name?) which is then placed in the explosives detector? After a few weeks of being sewn up, would he trigger an alarm?

What's interesting about this scheme is that the bomb would be ready-to-go, and the terrorist could throw himself right before hitting his remote control button toward the area of the plane deemed to maximize the likelihood of death.

Is this scenario at all possible? How could the TSA possibly deal with it without harassing a bunch of people with pacemakers installed? If a single terrorist tries such a scheme, I predict that everyone with any sort of implanted object will have be added to some sort of pre-screening registry so the TSA can sort-of verify the legitimacy of the thing which shows-up on xray/pat-downs/etc.

As is obvious to most HN readers, the TSA's security measures can only make it more difficult for terrorists to operate. However, the scenarios thought to still be possible do not seem terribly sophisticated compared to the incentive to commit these acts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow. There is a "Journal of Transportation Security"...

</comment><comment><USER13> Cut the foreplay, TSA, we all know eventually we will have to get on the plane naked!

After a good cavity search.

Because, let's face it, all it takes is one bra-bomber and panty-bomber for this to become a reality.

<comment><USER14> Cavity searches aren't profitable.

<comment><USER15> Not sure why you got downvoted. You are correct in that the government can't exactly hand out a giant contrract for a cavity search scanner to some shadowy corporation with expensive lobbyists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be very hard to conceal such conformally-packed explosives from sniffers and dogs.

<comment><USER17> I've been through a few airports since 9/11 and I've yet to see dogs patrolling security checkpoints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Admittedly early for me, but I read the headline _very_ differently.</comment>


NSA chief: 'Nation state' intervened in presidential election - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/16/1600424/-NSA-chief-Nation-state-intervened-in-election-to-achieve-a-specific-effect <comment><USER2> Hypothetically speaking lets say that Russia did in fact intervene in the election but Trump did not collude or have any part in it. Is there any written law or established precedence as to what to do in that situation?

</comment><comment><USER3> Way too many weasel words. I could easily say that nation was ecuador because they kept assange safe.</comment>


Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time? - <AUTHOR> For those of you in the HN community that get paid to work on open source full-time or almost full-time, while still making a decent income, how do you do it? <comment><USER3> I don't get paid to work on open source full-time (only part-time), but I do know a number of people whose full-time job is contributing to open-source projects like Chrome or Android.

The way to do it is to find an open-source project which is strategically important to a company, and yet which can't be made proprietary without destroying its strategic value. For example, the reason Android is open-source is because it would be hard to convince a broad base of hardware partners to support it if were closed-source (and now that one particular hardware partner is starting to dominate, it's getting more closed-source). Webkit is open- source because it started as open-source, and yet it is strategically important to Apple, Google, and Opera (well, until the Blink fork, but Blink is also open-source because it was derived from Webkit). Linux is strategically important to IBM, RedHat, etc. because they sell enterprise consulting services; having the source code available gives businesses confidence that they can continue running even if the vendor goes out of business, and yet they still drop a lot of money on consulting services.

It generally does not work to start a company based on open-source principles without also thinking about the strategic implications of who else will use the technology and what incentive they have for keeping it open. For example, LiveJournal was based on open-source principles and developed MogileFS, memcached, Gearman, and LJ itself. The effect of this was that every time they did something wrong, someone would start a clone of LJ and a clump of users would move over. And then Facebook took memcached and used it as a core part of their architecture, and won the whole social networking space.

<comment><USER4> I love your comment, but I disagree with your assessment of LiveJournal in the last paragraph. The reason Facebook beat LiveJournal had nothing to do with their ability to use memcached or other open infrastructure developed by the LJ/Danga team. It likely had a lot more to do with Six Apart, resources, energy, etc.

<comment><USER3> I don't think memcached was the specific reason Facebook beat LiveJournal, but I think a general hemorrhaging of competitive advantage and failure to secure additional resources was, and I think a large reason for the latter was the former. It's not really any one competitor or technology responsible for it, but the combined effect of it.

Whenever anything went wrong with LJ - server issues, PR headaches, unpopular feature decisions - a large clump of users would often very vocally say "I'm leaving", grab the opensource codebase, and start a competitor. Facebook faced all the same hiccups, but users generally stayed with them even when pissed off, because there wasn't the same option of grabbing the codebase and all your friends and opening a competing site. Moreover, it's just _demoralizing_ to see your hard work appropriated by people who hate you and are trying to compete with you. This isn't really about Facebook, it's about DeadJournal and uJournal and Journalfen and all the other competitors.

It's also much harder to convince investors to back you when one of your primary competitive advantages is given away to anyone. I think _this_ was probably the major problem; LJ wasn't really backable as a separate VC-funded entity, and when it was a subsidiary of Six Apart (itself VC-funded) it competed with the mothership for resources and got little attention.

<comment><USER5> The Affero GPL is partly motivated by this use case. It doesn't fully solve the problem, but it means that your competitor who grabbed your code base and set up an open-source clone, will at least have to keep open-sourcing all their stuff, too, leveling the playing field a bit. Alternately, it can serve as a kind of poison-pill to keep some competitors and would-be competitors from using your tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work for a community college in their IT department. My job is paid for by tax payer dollars, so it is my opinion that all my work should be publicly accessible. My boss agrees with me on this. As such, I've done very little that can actually be useful outside of our scope of work. Whatever I can though, I either blog about in the form of a tutorial/how-to or publish code on github (only 1 project so far). I like the idea of writing blog posts/how- tos which can double as internal documentation.

Right now though, I'm working on trying to develop a consortium of other like- minded individuals in which we can brainstorm ideas, implement them in open source tools, then distribute them in the various forms -- either VMs, puppet manifests, docker templates, openshift gears, etc. The idea is to lighten the duties for the typical sys admin and make it easier for smaller schools to implement highly tested, rigorous deployments with minimal insight on the actual workings. It's amazing how much academia suffers from large corporations/consulting firms that gouge these smaller schools based solely off the fact that they _can_ because they lack both qualified individuals as well as competitive salary offerings.

<comment><USER7> That sounds awesome! I always bemoaned the ridiculous prices of textbooks and the price of school itself when I was in college, so I applaud the efforts of MOOCs and the universities behind them. I never really connected the dots to extend that spirit to school IT departments. Surely, IT departments at different schools share similar responsibilities that can be consolidated in this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one path: [http://www.mozilla.org/careers](http://www.mozilla.org/careers)

Partial proof: [https://github.com/mozilla/repositories](https://github.com/mozilla/repositories) [https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/repositories](https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/repositories)

(that's 30 _pages_ of github repos, not including the stuff we do that's not on github: [http://mxr.mozilla.org/](http://mxr.mozilla.org/))

<comment><USER9> Case in point: Source code for the careers site linked above can be found at [https://github.com/mozilla/lumbergh/](https://github.com/mozilla/lumbergh/) (we just recently released a redesign, yay!)

<comment><USER10> It would sure be nice if there was a specific person/contact for each open position, or even any email address you can contact, on the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many open source projects - Linux, Firefox, LLVM, WebKit, etc. - have people paid to work on them. This can also be true for small projects as well, I am paid to work on Emscripten for example.

Basically, if an open source project is valuable to an entity with money - <USER2> be a corporation or a non-profit - then that entity may hire people to work on that open source project. Being open source, the project may not be directly profitable for whoever sponsors the work (the code itself is not being sold, might be support though), but indirect profits or non-monetary effects can be very significant and enough to make paid work make sense. (Of course this is just one kind of way to get paid to work on open source code.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Lots of people in thread are discussing about becoming a primary contributor to an open source product. I think there's an easier way, and it worked for me. I found a company that builds an open source product, applied, and impressed them enough to get hired. This seems far more direct.

edit: there is a downside. My job frankly isn't much different than many other software jobs; it just so happens that the output is open source. I still have a boss, we still have company priorities (though I help set them!) and strategic goals, etc. I don't get to just fuck around and work on whatever I want. So you should be careful: if what you want is the latter (work on whatever you want, get paid), you probably need to be someone like Linus. That said, the project I work on is damn cool and my job is better (for me; I don't think jobs are good but rather the tuple <job, employee> can be good) than almost anything else I can imagine.

edit2: I'm unfortunately not listing the company name because there are some real dicks on HN; you can probably figure it out if you're really interested but please don't post it.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is an interesting question, because I'm in the process of looking to hire an engineer to work full time on contributing to WordPress. The twist is I'm looking for someone _who is currently not part of the WordPress Community_ , which has made the search interesting.

I know WordPress has a mixed view here on HN, but that's kind of the point - we're ([http://wpengine.com](http://wpengine.com)) looking to bring some "outside blood" with experienced with best-practice lower-level, heavy-lifting PHP experience that we can help inject into the WordPress Core project.

Interestingly, a lot of engineers I've spoken to _don 't_ want to quit a full time job at a company to work on Open Source.

So, my reverse question is where would you go to find folks who want to work on Open Source.

<comment><USER14> Could you offer some insights why many engineers dont want to work full time on open source?

<comment><USER13> Sure, these are the kind of concerns engineers raise when you talk to engineers who are right for the job but not worked on OSS before:

* _Perceived_ job security, especially developers with mortgages, families, etc. Going from a core-function role within a company to working on OS apparently feels like less job-security.

* Don't want to move from working in office environment to (probably) working from home.

* Project politics and different working relationships of "peers" \- not aligned colleagues for same employer.

* Not considered the most financially lucrative engineering positions in terms of performance bonus or career progression

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a perrenial question that (I think) is very important to a lot of people.

I wish there were some kind of website or book that would answer the question, "Who is getting paid to work on open source, and by whom?"

There is good data for the Linux kernel, for example. On lwn.net you can always see the % contribution of each company. Presumably you could mine the kernel git repo to find out how many people that actually constitutes.

Getting this kind of data for other large/famous projects should be possible.

If anyone has pointers to something like this, please speak up.

EDIT: I guess an important metric would be, "For Company X, what % of code is open source vs. closed source." It would be nice to work at a company that is 100% open or reasonably close, other things being equal (which they aren't, but my point still stands).

EDIT2: I think providing a centralized site that collects these metrics and also allows people to submit them for smaller project/companies, would be awesome and very useful. Possibly even Kickstarter worthy.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be awesome if we could add a new "Who's Hiring?" thread each month but an open-source edition. i.e. any company or startup, large or small could advertise the open source project they are will to pay people to work on, if it is part-time or full-time and whether it is on-site or remote.

<comment><USER16> Please do it

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that getting this started just means getting up at 6am on the next first of the month and posting a thread. Or is there a special account or person that is responsible for those threads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I created a closed source plugin for an open source platform. I did that 4yrs full-time then got a full-time job because sales were slow & I had a son on the way. I open sourced the code, which reinvigorated interest, and paid support is ramping back up to previous levels.

When I was closed source, providing support was my downfall. People would do stuff like install other plugins that conflicted with mine, and expected me to fix it. That was very time consuming. Now I give the code away, but charge for the support so I'm compensated proportionally for the time spent fixing that kind of stuff.

I'm also releasing a SaaS version of the product - it's the same thing as the open source code, but obviously the users don't have to install anything or fuss around with servers, and they won't be able to break things [as easily], because they're pasting javascript into their website instead of installing server side code. I'm hoping this will be a huge market.

</comment><comment><USER18> A friend of mine at DeNA (Japanese mobile gaming company) spends most of his time at the office working on open source projects. Right now he's working on a language built on top of Javascript called JSX for large scale Javascript apps.

I did an interview with him a few months ago if you're interested: [http://jhackers.net/Kazuho_Oku.html](http://jhackers.net/Kazuho_Oku.html)

(come to think of it, every programmer I've interviewed so far on above site works on OSS projects for work to one degree or another)

</comment><comment><USER19> Mozilla has few open engineering positions, and many of which involve work on Open Source: [https://careers.mozilla.org/en- US/listings/](https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/listings/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I applied to work at Google, got hired, and was matched to the PageSpeed team. Now I work on [https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed](https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed)

It's nice working on free software, but I'd really be just as happy if I'd ended up in a different part of the company.

<comment><USER21> Didn't you have a chance to express the preference of where you'd like to end up? Also, did you were a fresh grad when you got hired?

<comment><USER20> I was offered the choice between three teams, all of which sounded interesting and only one of which worked on open source. I chose pagespeed mostly because I was interested in working on the A/B testing framework, which needed a new owner.

I wasn't a fresh grad; four years and two jobs out of school at that point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Red Hat. And we're hiring: [http://jobs.redhat.com/](http://jobs.redhat.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> for a year or two i worked for mulesource, who make the open-source mule esb (these days, if you visit their site, i think there's more not-so-open stuff as they try to make money, but back in the day it was pretty much open source + paid support).

anyway, i got that job by using mule in my previous job, and writing some blog posts explaining it - mainly intended for my co-workers, but i posted them on the net. that, plus providing patches / feedback, led to them offering me a job (and it was a good job in may ways - very smart people, and i learnt a lot).

which is all pretty much what you'd imagine people to say (get involved in a project that has money to pay developers), so nothing very new here....

[http://www.mulesoft.com/mule-esb-open-source- esb](http://www.mulesoft.com/mule-esb-open-source-esb)

<comment><USER24> I would like to spend some time in the coming months to learn to use MuleSoft's ESB.

Are there any resources outside of what's on the site that you would recommend? In particular, I see that there is onsite training but I would love to have more in-depth training material that's in a pdf or ebook type format or even just online.

<comment><USER23> it's been some years now, sorry - i have no idea what's available. all i did was download it and use it to implement various patterns (see enterprise patterns book).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I work at Microsoft full time on [http://orchardproject.net](http://orchardproject.net), a CMS based on ASP.NET MVC, Autofac and Nhibernate. I've been doing that for almost 4 years and many would agree it's kind of a dream job as there are absolutely no constraints from MS to drive the project one way or the other. It's also worth mentioning that our team is much involved in OSS: SignalR, Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC, Nuget, ... So it's a really bold bet on OSS in general.

</comment><comment><USER26> Me and my team work full-time on a popular open-source project. Based on our collective experience I can tell you about 3 different ways.

\- The first way is to become a key contributor and maintainer for an open- source project with significant financial backing, and then get co-opted by one of the organizations providing the backing. As an obvious example, a significant Linux contributor or maintainer will have no problem getting a job at dozens of technology companies. In our case, we are constantly scanning the mailing list and irc channel for the most consistently helpful and reliable contributors. If you follow this route, make sure you pick a project you're passionate about and won't mind working on for a long time, focus on being reliable rather than impressing with your technical skills, and make sure to go beyond adding cool features: help other users, improve the documentation, review patches, fix small bugs, etc. I can't emphasize reliability enough. In a really successful project, the maintainers are usually busy and overwhelmed with demands. Be the person they can rely on, consistently, and you will earn their trust.

\- The second way is to join a technology company with an open-source team, and be assigned to an open-source project. For example 2 of my co-maintainers joined as employees before the open-source project launched, and were assigned to this team via the normal company process. This will usually get you into a project in its early stages, when it is not yet large or popular enough to hire from the pool of existing contributors. In our case, we now hire almost exclusively out of the project's community.

\- The third way is to turn _your own project_ into a source of income. This means either hope that your project becomes popular enough to attract financial backing on its own (also known as "winning the lottery"), or secure funding yourself. Remember that open-source software is like music, writing and web apps: lots of people love doing it, and the barrier to entry is low, which means it's a buyer's market. There simply aren't enough dollars available for everyone to make a living scratching their own itch. Consider finding a job which can accommodates time for side-projects. Make sure your project is its own reward, see how successful it becomes, and adjust your financial expectations as you go. There are sources of funding like Gittip which might make this more feasible - I don't know. Or you could do what I did, and start a business around your project, keep at it until it's successful, find a great CEO to replace you, and finally enjoy your reward as the maintainer of the project you worked so hard to make possible. I'm not sure I would recommend it - it worked, but took me 6 years, most of which with very little time to write code, and an amount of work and stress I would not wish on anyone. But when it works, it's the best :)

I'm always happy to talk about this more if you're interested. You can find my contact in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER27> I got into evangelism at an open source company after an injury prevented me from hacking full time (less typing). I was already promoting open source projects for free, so I was a shoe in. This led to a full time FOSS gig with a company that wanted to popularize its open source offering. Half coding, half promotion, aimed at removing barriers to entry, improving documentation and ease of use.

Fun gig.

</comment><comment><USER28> I work for Oracle (MySQL team). It was going to a local meetup group in 2005 and giving a talk that eventually led me down this path.

</comment><comment><USER29> For me it was pure luck..i applied to work for a construction company and was assigned a project that ironically no one was able to take on because it required collaboration with different construction companies abroad.

The project was to implement a data integration standard among different construction companies who were competitors so it was actually a tricky job. The chair of the project were Bechtel and they decided it would be open source.

Three years later i had a great journey but i also had to quit. not only was i making good money relative to where i live, but i travelled to some beautiful places and met extraordinary people. Since that was my first job, i was totally spoiled because now i can't accept any job that is less exciting, so i am currently pursuing being independent, which is the only alternative i would accept.

There are corporate open source jobs out there and i recommend that you look for them, but be careful you might get spoiled.

</comment><comment><USER30> I work for ThinkOpen Solutions, which does projects and hosting based on OpenERP, an AGPL licensed software. As such, all the code we develop is AGPL licensed as well, and a fair share is published on launchpad, though some modules are only available to our clients.

As for how I did it, well, I replied to a job offer looking for Python programmers :)

<comment><USER24> I have looked at OpenERP and it looks very interesting.

What types of companies are targeted by your company? I have had thoughts of getting into this space but not sure how companies are willing to go with such a solution versus more established and recognizable solutions (such as Microsoft Dynamics AX, UNIT4, SAP, etc.)

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

<comment><USER30> Sure, we can talk, shoot me an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> You can work on academic projects funded by public money. The results are open source.

Ours, in bioinformatics: [http://intermine.org](http://intermine.org)

<comment><USER32> I definitely recommend scientific programming as a career.

I've worked as a programmer on bioinformatics projects in academia for the last 15 years. Everything has been open source.

Academia doesn't pay as well as the Real World but there are many benefits. As well as being able to work on open source software, the work is usually interesting. Job security has been excellent and I've moved jobs when I've wanted to (5 jobs in 15 years). Everywhere I've worked has had plenty of vacation days, sick days and a good pension plan.

The most useful benefit to me at the moment is flexibility: I mostly work remotely and I choose my hours.

Many bioinformatics jobs don't require prior experience of the field. I started with a computer science degree and no knowledge of biology and learnt the rest on the job.

<comment><USER31> Hi Kim!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ten years ago I funded my own company and became a Free Software vegetarian : not eating nor cooking anything but Free Software. I'm a developer and a few years later switched back to being an employee rather than a manager.

During the interviews I apologized for the inconveniences of exclusively using and making Free Software. The vegetarian image helped a great deal. What also helped a lot was that I already made the commitments years ago. It would have been a lot harder otherwise : how could you justify applying for a new job and at the same time apply new standards ?

I work as a Ceph developer in the context of OpenStack : very fashionable and easier to get jobs. That also helps a lot.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't exactly get paid to work on open-source, since our startup is still looking for our first customer(s), but my approach to _attempt_ this, was to start an open-source startup.

So, I founded Fogbeam Labs[1], started writing code, eventually recruited a couple of co-founders, wrote more code, networked a lot, pimped the startup shamelessly at every turn, and ...

... TBD.

All joking aside, the end of this story hasn't been written yet. But we're pretty optimistic. We made some great connections at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh last week, and our content marketing strategy has paid off in that a trickle of inbound leads has been coming in. We're also looking at a sort of not-quite-a-pivot-but-something-like-that (call it a "swivel" instead, maybe?) where we're probably going to bump up the prioritization on releasing some SaaS applications built on the fundamental technologies we've been working on.

On a semi-related note, I actually do get paid to work _with_ if not always _on_ Open Source, by virtue of consulting at Open Software Integrators[2]. We specialize in helping companies with deployments of things like Tomcat, JBoss, MongoDB, Hadoop, Neo4J, etc.

[1]: [http://www.fogbeam.com](http://www.fogbeam.com)

[2]: [http://www.osintegrators.com](http://www.osintegrators.com)

</comment><comment><USER35> I haven't seen it mentioned, but working for a university project funded by public and/or private grants (in my case for free educational software) is working quite well.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't know about full time, but sometimes when a client asks me to extend a piece of software I'll ask the upstream maintainer if they'll accept a patch for the change (with permission from the client of course). The client gets software with the fix included, where they don't have to worry about checking each future upgrade to see if the fix broke something.

</comment><comment><USER37> Red Hatter here. If you want to work full-time on engineering within an open source project, the easiest way to get noticed by a commercial backer is making many _quality_ contributions to the project. If we need to hire additional engineers, we'll typically ask some of the community developers first, prior to recruiting publicly.

That being said, there are _many_ opportunities to work on the projects, albeit a little less "directly". Companies like Red Hat have large teams dedicated to QA, support, etc. Most of them are actively involved in contributing bug fixes, test cases, and directly working with customers. These types of positions do not usually require as much direct experience with the project as the engineering teams do.

And as one commenter already pointed out, we're definitely hiring! [http://jobs.redhat.com/](http://jobs.redhat.com/)

</comment><comment><USER38> I work at Yahoo and I'm a front-end engineer on the YUI Team. My job is to work on a number of open source projects such as YUI [1], Pure [2], and Mojito [3].

[1] github.com/yui/yui3 [2] github.com/yui/pure [3] github.com/yahoo/mojito

</comment><comment><USER39> That's an incredibly broad question. I built my own business around a niche and established a client base through this while also doing jobs on the side that come about through that business.

</comment><comment><USER40> This reminds me that I have been working full time on open source projects for almost a decade now. Started maintaining some R packages in an extremely open source oriented environment [1] then accidentally moved to web development. Started an open source project [2] which has been growing in the last couple of years.

[1] [http://www.iq.harvard.edu/](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/) [2] [http://openscholar.harvard.edu/](http://openscholar.harvard.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I think that crowdfunding could provide one answer. Many open source projects are widely used by businesses for commercial purposes. In a lot of cases I think those businesses would be willing to pay money for improvements to be made to the code; if those contributions could be pooled, the amounts of money involved could be substantial.

</comment><comment><USER42> Yes I would. With the recent revalations reguarding the total disreguard of basic human rights, I see no other choice except fully open ecosystem designed to empower the user, and keep them Free. I personally hate Stahlams politics but he was right, and as he was right early, he was shunned, but now his idea is right for right now.

<comment><USER30> If you agree that he was right, why do you hate his politics?

<comment><USER42> I think only externalities should be regulated by governments and not full and total redistribution. I see the push to systems that favor a total socialism as a push into the very thing he fears, as I do. When I hear him shout about destroying companies because they unfairly lock users into crapware, as well as use there Money/Power to do what anyone would do, what is in there best self interest, I cringe inside. No I am not happy that all the work TR did in busting the Trusts has been undone. But we should fix that in the system we have now, not destroy what little bits of the free market we have. Punishment for the sake of enjoyment is what I hear when I listen to his personal politics and that is what I don't like. Lets just be rational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm sorry that I can't tell you how to get paid to work on oss but great question!

I suggest to watch the first part of Aaron @tenderlove Patterson's closing keynote at Rails Conf 2013[1], that touches upon this topic.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kgUL_FfUZY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kgUL_FfUZY)

<comment><USER16> in a related note a friend of mine that's rails core member is interested in getting a job working full-time in rails, anyone want to hire him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> WalmartLabs has a few teams working on mostly open source stuff: github.com/spumko and github.com/walmartlabs. The spumko team (the one I am on) used to be 100% open source work but has recently cut back in the short term to help out other internal teams. But, OSS is still a major component of our jobs.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have been working on a small project: [https://github.com/tthieman/dagobah](https://github.com/tthieman/dagobah) for the last few weeks. The plan is to improve it for internal use and contribute it back.

</comment><comment><USER46> I used to work at Sourcefabric (sourcefabric.org) which pays you to work on open-source projects. They have offices in Berlin, Prague, Toronto and Romania.

</comment><comment><USER47> RedHat?

</comment><comment><USER48> I work at Cloudera. We work on Hadoop, HDFS, and other open source technologies full-time.</comment>


U.S. jobless rate hints at permanent structural change - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/us-jobless-rate-hints-at-permanent-shift/article1696060/

<comment><USER2> I think this "structural change" argument is nonsense.

An example: much of the unemployment is in the construction industry -- mostly due to the housing bust. But look around you. There are billions of dollars worth of infrastructure projects that need doing: potholes filled, sewer systems upgraded, rail lines built, bridges fixed...The list goes on and on. Yet construction workers sit idle because local and state governments have cut back, and the federal stimulus was too small (and ill-targeted: tax cuts instead of spending) to cover the gap.

The one thing that is true is the lack of labor mobility due to underwater mortgages. That will take a long time to reach equilibrium, and in the mean time, people will be reluctant to move, making the problem worse.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Not sure where the ideas that a country where people cannot afford any goods because they have no money need more tax cuts, especially for the rich.

Poor people don't get many advantages from lower taxes because they often don't have to pay that many (especially if they are not working). And rich people will use the extra money to invest... but they may very well invest abroad, and in the current situation they actually just prefer to keep their money to their chest.

A government that paid for construction work, or subsidised jobs useful for the community would help a lot more than one cutting the taxes.

Though of course it doesn't follow common sense, so there's no way society will stop believing Fox news and friends.

<comment><USER4> Here comes the arrival of Reddit Kensyian fanboys.

<comment><USER5> Keynesian teaches wealth is created by fooling people into investing in things that they would not ordinarily invest in.

But all it does is misallocate investment into things that are unsustainable and that ultimately collapse, like the housing bubble. Or the dotcom bubble. Or the recent mini-bubble in the stock market.

And the only response offered by the Keynesians to their collapsing bubbles is an even bigger bubble.

Nothing can ever be allowed to return to normal in this bankrupt theory. A return to organic growth with investments in things judged to be a value to the people who actually are playing with their own hard-earned money is somehow vastly inferior to the judgement of the illustrious leaders who spend other people's money to make it through the next election.

In other words, when you've used up one credit card, its time to obtain another. And this is the only way to become successful, according to the Keynesians.

To defer consumption and invest in one's ability to produce works for the individual and it works for societies in the long run. And societies that cannot act sustainably, that eat their seed corn before it is even harvested, will fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think the example they came up with is really useful - how many engineers are really in the market for 50k/year jobs? It seems very low, so it is no wonder that he can't find qualified applicants.

As for the structural change, yep that is partly what is happening, but there is also a cyclical downturn.

<comment><USER7> No doubt! I took a web development job for less than that 10 years ago in higher ed when I was 22 and had no professional experience... of course they also gave me free healthcare, free tuition for my whole family, generous vacation, sick days and holidays, and a fantastic retirement system that when I turn 65 is slated to pay me $650 a month until the day I die, even though I only worked there 5 years.

Now I'm not sure what "qualified" means in this case, but it doesn't sound like they are hiring people fresh out of school, which they should be at that rate.

<comment><USER8> I have to ask: California state employee? (Edit: on reflection, the skimpiness of the retirement plan makes me doubtful.)

<comment><USER7> Nope, Minnesota.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A government _cannot_ fix the job market, for the very simple reason that structurally, the economy reacts slower than "before the next election". Anything it tries to do in the short term will almost certain make the problem worse. The best thing it can do is try not to.

We see this pattern repeated again and again in the UK. The voters, sick of austerity, will vote in the high-spending Labour Party which promises all sorts of largesse. Then they'll wreck the economy with high tax and high borrowing, and voters will turn back to the fiscally responsible Tories, who will balance the books but slash spending on public services in the process. As soon as they've "fixed" the economy they'll be voted out again...

Another good example is the health service. All political parties promise to improve it. But a government lasts 5 years and it takes 8 years to train a new doctor. So rather than invest in skills, they spend the money on very visible projects like new buildings, the boast about how much they've spent, not what has actually been gotten for the money.

<comment><USER10> The Labour/Tory thing isn't that simple. The UK's economy is strongly focused on London. When the Tories (conservatives) are in power, most of the money goes to the South East and the rest of the country suffers _really_ badly. When Labour are in power, they attempt to spread that wealth to the outskirts, but they aren't good at doing it, so waste a lot. They are polar opposites, each creating their own long term damage, especially to public services.

<comment><USER9> Mmm, this is exactly my point - no-one focussed on "the next election" can safely undertake to deliberately make structural changes in the economy. The timescales are all wrong. It probably takes "a generation" to do it, 20-30 years. The best thing - for the country as a whole - for either party to do is just stop interfering. But, as is human nature, each will prioritize the interests of its core voters.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps the biggest opportunity the UK had was when regional parliaments were proposed for England, that would have made the central government less influential and let locals focus on their main concerns. It was poorly implemented but an interesting first step if the public had gone for it.

<comment><USER11> Yeah - like that has worked so well in Scotland. All it has given us is a crazily expensive extra tier of government who feel that they can spend English taxpayers money to give Scots things that the rest of the UK don't get.

And yes, I am Scottish and no I have never voted Tory (in fact I used to vote SNP until I met Alex Salmond).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The US economy is built on debt. And all that borrowing pushed up wages in the US and caused trade deficits and migration of workers into the US.

After all, it is not paper we are borrowing. It is the labor of others that we are borrowing. We must take delivery of it somehow.

And it seems likely that our borrowing will continue until it becomes impossible to continue. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats have the balls to break the debt habit in a downturn. And this downturn is far from over.

But the US keeps committing to more spending and absorbing all of the risks of private risk takers in favored industries. It insures many pension funds, is on the hook for your social security, your medicare and your house when you finally decide to walk away.

No individual would ever make such a grand series of errors and anyone who did would face consequences pretty quickly. Only the United States has the resources, trust and good will to piss away on this stupidity.

<comment><USER3> Where does this economic theory come from?

If the government cuts expenditures to pay the debt, then more people are without a job or without services. Therefore the economy cools down and the government gets even less money from taxes. At which point they may not be able to pay the debt, so they need to take more cuts and so on.

That's what happened to Argentina a few years back, and I think (though I may be wrong) it's what has happened to Ireland now.

The problem you have in the USA is that what should be done is government taking debt to support the economy in the bad days and paying it off in the good ones. But unfortunately the Repubblican are suggesting exactly the opposite: they wasted a surplus and got you a huge debt when the economy was doing fine, and now that's in a mess they want you to cut expenditures.

<comment><USER5> Is it the government's job to ensure that everyone has a job? Should it be hiring everyone? Where does this economic theory come from? And why is its logic never questioned?

Yes, the government can continue to borrow massively to spend so much that everyone has a job and subsidize lending so that otherwise unviable economic activity occurs.

But this is the economic thinking that produced the housing bubble and the dot com bubble before it, both of which left economic disasters in their wake.

More of the same faulty action will not resolve the underlying massive structural problem being created.

Some day, the bill will come due for borrowing trillions that do not result in an improvement in our ability to produce products and services the world is willing to pay for.

Both parties have wasted massive amounts of money on things which add no value. The difference between Argentina and the United States is that the US has far greater wealth and ability to borrow and thus can piss away vastly greater amounts before the bill comes due.

The government is like a rich child that is never disciplined by his parents. Its easier to throw money at all of the problems created than to impose the same discipline that created the wealth in the first place.

Yes, more people will be without jobs. But the

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's the government job to grant everyone a job (at least in the USA, in other countries it is). But that wasn't my point.

What is important for a country is the ratio of debt to GDP. Currently if you keep cutting like this the debt may decrease, but the GDP will have decreased so much more than it will be HARDER and not EASIER to pay the debt.

Government economics are not the same as household economics. When the economy is picking up steam, then the government can start to withdraw support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been bouncing an idea around in my head related to this for a little while now. While I don't think it's as specific as 'no engineers qualified to fill 50k/year job' I have a feeling that in general it is lack of computer skills that is keeping these people unemployed.

There is a huge amount of the population - in America at least - who cannot handle the most basic of tasks on their computers without assistance or a large waste of time. Not that I'm blaming them, as they got along just fine (though less efficiently than their more computer literate co-workers) before the downturn, but now that they have been laid off and are looking for new jobs, the employers willing to hire people who don't have the basics down are few and far between.

<comment><USER13> A friend of mine recently finished a 5 year architecture program, but for whatever reason her curriculum didn't include computer aided design (more traditional focus she said), but now she can't find a job because everyone wants people with CAD skills.

<comment><USER12> Wow, I wasn't really even thinking about recent graduates not knowing how to use the software particular to their industry.

I'm worried the article may be right, that there needs to be a massive re- training effort or there is going to be a whole generation of people spending the second half of their lives jobless or underemployed. I imagine the only thing keeping it from being a more pronounced effect year round is big corporation's typically slow adoption of new technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey, can't have it both ways! If productivity goes up, and low-productivity jobs get outsourced to developing countries - which, by the way, is probably one of the reasons productivity goes up in the rich world - of course we will need less working hours to be done. But what should be regarded as a success - and to some extent as neo-colonialism against the world's poor - is seen as a problem. I think this speaks worlds about how backwards and still stuck in a work-and-produce mindset we are...

<comment><USER15> > If productivity goes up, and low-productivity jobs get outsourced to > developing countries - which, by the way, is probably one of the reasons > productivity goes up in the rich world - of course we will need less working > hours to be done.

You're assuming that consumption doesn't go up.

If we're paying unemployment benefits, those folks should either be looking full-time or doing public service. Yes, that includes things that might otherwise be done by public employees.

<comment><USER14> I'm not assuming that consumption won't go up. I'm hoping it won't go up. Bigger, better, faster can't go on forever. We have this thing called the "economy" and instead of trying to "economize", we want to consume more and more forever...

Also, did I speak about unemployment benefits? I think we should try to keep as many people as possible employed, and have them all work fewer hours, whenever it is possible. Obama can't really relax too much, or share his job with another co-President, and of course if you're launching your startup and it's the challenge of your life you have to give it all - but not every job is really that important. To a large extent, the truth is that the world is full of small people who have trouble finding value and joy in their lives and want to "seem important" by working way too many hours (nor does the system help them give up part of their working hours, truth be told).

<comment><USER15> > I'm not assuming that consumption won't go up. I'm hoping it won't go up. > Bigger, better, faster can't go on forever.

Doesn't it depend on the goods in question?

For example, it's unclear why more digital books would be a bad thing. Same for digital music and maybe even movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At the core of the economic problem is the mismatch between the price of basis necessities (which include healthcare, shelter, energy, mobility, education, clothes, food and water, etc) and a normal income: The last century wages haven't increased at the same rate as the real cost of living.

The only way to get out of this mess is that either the incomes at the bottom must rise or basis necessities must come down. At the sometime jobs have become more mobile then people, moving to places where the labor force is even less expensive. Failing that, there is automation which increases productivity per worker, which also will result in less jobs overall.

So we get to a point where a large part of the population will be permanently unemployed because there are not enough jobs for everyone. These people will need to be able to pay for basic necessities just like anyone else. Even the people who do have a job will find that their wage is not enough: Giving the surplus in workers the wages will go way down.

The only way to solve this is to introduce an unconditional livable basic income for every individual citizen. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee>

<comment><USER17> This is a completely ridiculous statement -- there will always be more work than can be completed. The problem is in identifying what it is. The more the government manipulates the market they more difficult this is.

The problems with healthcare a largely government created - why is health insurance tied to employment?

The large population that is unemployed needs to change jobs , or what their expectation of compensation should be. The wage is directly correlated to the value that they produce, the more value the higher the wage.

<comment><USER16> At which price is doing the work still viable?

What if the added value of the work being done is lower then the minimum wage? Then no employer will pay you to do it. Or consider a machine which can do the same job cheaper then some employees earning minimum wage: How long before the job will be automated?

In a world where much physical work is automated away there might not be enough remaining work left for everyone. And the simple law of supply and demand a labor surplus will lead to increasingly lower wages. As soon as this hits minimum wage the work will either move to a place with a lower minimum wage or none at all, or the work is just eliminated (not done) if one can get away with it.

It all ends up the same… With a surplus of (some kinds of) labor, wages will decrease so that some people are unable to earn a livable income. At the same time a shortage of (some kinds of) labor will lead to higher wages, which means that automation becomes viable at higher prices. In either case, given enough time most people will end up without a job, without an income: Only the owners of businesses will share in the profits.

<comment><USER17> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite_fallacy>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since Corporations have become bigger and smarter, Govt cannot monitor their day-to-day illegal & immoral activities. It is better to breakup these corporations into smaller entities to promote competition and solve unemployment crisis. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue>

</comment><comment><USER18> If there are only 2 options for America,

       1. H1B
       2. Outsource

What would you choose?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've a somewhat radical solution to US unemployment problem. Breakup all mega corps for e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_Divestiture>

<comment><USER19> That would increase efficiency in those corporations and INCREASE unemployment.

When I have worked for "mega corps" I saw more people getting paid to much to do nothing.

<comment><USER3> What? So now mega-corporations are less efficient than small companies and hence we have to keep them?

You break up the big corporations and with many suppliers suddenly they need to fight it off in the free market. It will lower prices and despite the efficiency going down (because you have no economy of scale).

You may get a lot of people losing their job at first as the economy resettles which is why it's probably not the best time to do it. But generally I think it would be a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Globalization, outsourcing, war on terror and internet will saturate America. And USA will be inhabited with people living on Passive income</comment>


Careers And Marriage - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2006/08/23/Marriage-Careers-Divorce_cx_mn_land.html

<comment><USER2> So a woman with a college degree who earns $30,000 per year or more ("Career Woman") is more likely to divorce you, cheat on you, or express displeasure at the thought of having children. Wow. Compelling research.

But isn't $30,000 a bit low to lump into the "Career Woman" category?

Do you think these studies controlled for the (obvious?) fact that women below this already-low bar are either 1) trophy wives happy to play their part or 2) going to get punched right in the mouth for any sort of dissent? I grew up around both types and neither got divorced. Most miserable people I knew.

In other news: Stressed people often find it difficult to get along with others, while people at the spa do not.

<comment><USER3> There it is. Also: this "research" is irrelevant; the one-income, stay-at-home parent model is probably dead forever. Throughout much of the middle class, a single income simply isn't viable. Which, from a social science perspective, makes you wonder about any statistics they may home come up with: did they control for all the other socio/econo/cultural stuff that's conflated with this? A single income is more likely to be viable in rural areas, where competition, social mores, and lack of mobility disadvantage divorce inherently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am married to a stay at home wife. We have two boys, ages 4 and 5. It takes a lot of effort to keep the environment stable and happy at home. Living on one income, we can't afford to live in a good school district or pay private school tuition. So, we're looking at either having her go back to work, or homeschooling. We might get lucky, and I'll make enough money as a consultant to move to a nice neighborhood (or farm) AND homeschool the kids -- that would be ideal.

Homeschooling can be a really neat option, if you're willing to make it interesting for the kids, by taking time off to travel, hiring tutors, or involving them in a business like a niche farm.

<comment><USER2> My mom home-schooled my little sister and it was wonderful.

My sis left grade school below average on all standardized tests. She was home-schooled for a few years. I'm pretty sure she only did about two or three hours of school work per day--but my mom does all sorts of "field trip" type stuff so there were plenty of learning opportunities outdoors.

Anyway, sis went back to school and smoked the tests. She just graduated from undergrad as the top student in all of the sciences and 2nd highest grades in the university. Bam!</comment></comment>


Mapping Brexit: Where the Finance Jobs Are Heading - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/graphics/mapping-brexit-where-the-finance-jobs-are-heading/ <comment><USER2> Paywall no tldr</comment>


Show HN: TapeRecorder – Videos that help you understand how people use your app - <AUTHOR> https://taperecorder.io

<comment><USER2> Looks reasonably useful. What would be alternatives to this and what sucks/is great about them?</comment>


'Ghetto Tourism': New York's disturbing new trend - <AUTHOR> http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/36160/1/ghetto-tourism-new-yorks-disturbing-new-trend <comment><USER2> This is not really new. It is no different from touring San Francisco neighborhoods, there is even local guides for this: [https://www.vayable.com/experiences/187-scout-for-street- art](https://www.vayable.com/experiences/187-scout-for-street-art)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not really a new phenomenon, at least globally. Similar 'slumming' tours were popular in London, during the 1880's.</comment>


Ouch Are open source platforms (including WordPress) on the decline? - <AUTHOR> http://wpmu.org/open-source-platforms-including-wordpress-on-the-decline/

<comment><USER2> I'm a WP developer - just today, I started thinking that I'm getting tired of WP magic - magic that reads php comments, makes it so that you can't connect to a custom database without messing up $wpdb, and generally does things you don't expect. It's the best thing out there that I know of, but there's room for improvement.

</comment><comment><USER3> I consider 2010 the year of site clones and affiliates. You can also say horrible google results peaked then, and I wonder how much of it attributes to the use of apps such as wordpress. Perhaps with the decline of a clear revenue slice less people are visiting these sites.</comment>


Emacs from scratch: Comes close to spacemacs with minimal config - <AUTHOR> https://huytd.github.io/emacs-from-scratch.html <comment><USER2> Or you could just use DOOM Emacs. Starts up in 1 second, gorgeous and built around evil.</comment>


My article has been copied - <AUTHOR>

I recently had an article do well on my blog, which was my first time.  After a few days I was searching on google and I noticed some people had copied me, one in particular flat out copied the article.
I've tried emailing but no response, they are located in China somewhere according to whois lookup.
Is there anyway I can submit this to Google or something? <comment><USER2> Welcome to the internet. You're one of millions of victims. Your best bet is just to kindly email the blogger to take it down. if not, then you can do a DMCA and cross your fingers, but the chances of something happening is 1:1000000. Just continue writing content, and building reputation and the blog that copied your content will not rank as high as you do. That's about all you can do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try this link for google:

[http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905...](http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs)

I'm sure yahoo, bing, etc have similar process...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well, the guy finally emailed me back with a bunch of stuff in Chinese...I think. I translated it, but it came out like some wonky English, anyway he took it down, so all is good.

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER4> You can probably file a DMCA takedown to Google.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are special agencies that can take down this article for you.</comment>


Screenshots of Twitter's internal admin interface - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/what-twitter-looks-like-for-twitter-employees-screenshots-2009-4

<comment><USER2> I will never, ever understand people who have large displays but still run fully maximized browser windows.

It seems a bit half-assed to run these images uncropped... not like they couldn't provide links to the originals.

(a bit OT and negative, but seriously folks...)

<comment><USER3> I like to run _all_ apps maximized. That way, I can focus on the task at hand and not be distracted by stuff going on in other apps. Also, less clutter = more productivity.

<comment><USER4> You must not develop a website, or you must have a small monitor.

As a web developer. I always run two monitors - one has my emacs, terminals, process manager, and browser, all nicely tiled on a 30" monitor.

On my other screen, I keep iTunes, skype, and other distractions.

<comment><USER5> I work on a website and I use two 24" monitors. Firefox maximized on one (Firebug takes up tons of room you know!), and screen (with emacs/terminals/etc) on the other.

I think this is more a personal preference thing than anything else. (And I use my laptop for music and IM, but its usually displaying the Vista enter password screen anyway.)

<comment><USER4> Someday Vista will stop hurting you :)

<comment><USER6> Someday around June, 2010.

<comment><USER7> More like 2012

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised by how basic it looks. They clearly put the features they needed and didn't go further.

<comment><USER9> I guess it's a question of priorities: work on something 15 people use, or something 15 million people will use? :)

<comment><USER8> Oh yeah, absolutely. It's just that it seems that half an hour of CSS would make it cleaner and I'm surprised that nobody at Twitter finished something on a Friday afternoon and thought "ok, let me clean this up a little bit" instead of starting something else :)

<comment><USER10> Judging by Twitter's uptime record in the past, they probably have had an experience where someone thought that, started coding, and crashed the whole site.

<comment><USER11> I like making fun of Twitter as much as the next guy, although in all fairness when I saw this graph I decided to give them a little more credit. They're facing ongoing, unbounded growth. I can't claim to have handled that kind of scaling, let alone handled it without a hitch.

<http://alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com>

(make sure to set the timeframe to 'max' to see what i'm talking about)

<comment><USER12> _They're facing ongoing, unbounded growth._

...on an app that consists of a solved problem (pub/sub). Cry me a river.

Or better yet, give me a million dollars and I'll build you a twitter that doesn't fail. In 60 days. You'll just have to bring the users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Poor PerezHilton every celeb blocks him :( I guess to make his work harder

<comment><USER14> I'm sure he just uses another "following account"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can't these by easily unblurred to reveal Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher's email addresses?

<comment><USER16> The addresses are likely for their publicists.

<comment><USER15> Possible but I'd be surprised if Ashton Kutcher's publicist was using an aol.com email address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really enjoyed these screenshots, and learned more about Twitter in 5 minutes than by reading 10 Techcrunch posts about Twitter combined.

It could make an interesting site even, backendwatch.com (or something else more palatable)

<comment><USER18> You do seem to read a lot of TechCrunch then ;)

<comment><USER17> It's in my reader, the headlines are good but that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Impersonated by admin."

Ah, good ol' Darth Vader complex.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow...According to these screenshots Britney Spears has more followers than Obama.

<comment><USER20> Not just according to those screenshots. A quick twitter search shows Britney has 1.25M [1] and Barack has just over 1M [2].

[1]<http://twitter.com/britneyspears>

[2]<https://twitter.com/BarackObama>

<comment><USER16> HA! Good point =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if someone is going to get in trouble for leaking these...

<comment><USER22> From the first sentence of the article: "hackers sent them screenshots"</comment></comment>


The Open Goldberg Variations - <AUTHOR> http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/ <comment><USER2> This is an excellent recording. The voicing is very clear, the touch light, and the phrasing clear. My gripes are tiny, things like in variation 13, I'd love to hear a little more leading through the phrase with the pedal, but honestly, that would probably break something else in the phrasing. I'm a violinist, not a pianist, so I don't know the Goldberg inside and out the way I do the Sonatas and Partitas.

However, I'm confused why Gould came up at all, since his recordings of Bach are lousy. His tempos are often so bizarrely fast or slow that the music is lost (particularly in the two and three part inventions). His voicing ranges from pedestrian to wrong. As for his messing with tuning and his piano, he was largely an eccentric crank who pretended that no one else was doing that, had been doing that, and was doing a better job than him. Look at the Goldberg recordings on harpsichord by Wanda Landowska (my favorite) and Anthony Newman for much, much better renditions than Gould. As for greatest pianist of the 20th century, let's be honest: Rubinstein and Horowitz were both better pianists and incomparably better musicians.

<comment><USER3> > I'm confused why Gould came up at all, since his recordings of Bach are > lousy

You're not confused. You're just taking this opportunity to voice your (minority) opinion on Gould. I _love_ his interpretation of Bach, and so do many others. His Goldberg Variations are among the most popular classical recordings. Of course his name is bound to come up.

As for "As for greatest pianist of the 20th century," why didn't you respond directly to the (single) person making that claim?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also <http://musopen.org/> ... initally funded by kickstarter, they use donations to produce pro recordings of classical music which are then released to the public for free.

<comment><USER5> I donated to that through KickStarter. He recently emailed us to say that the editing had been completed ...

> Good news. Editing is complete, we are now mixing the music and adding > finishing touches. I am spending all of my time listening through everything > very carefully. We are close enough that I'm going to be submitting an order > for t-shirts this week, and begin preparing everyone's gifts.

> I will send an update before everything is mailed, in the meantime I am > figuring out a way to get the original ProTool files online so donors can > download them and mix things themselves

> Thanks for your patience and for sticking through this with me, hopefully > you will all be as pleased as I am with the final result.

It has taken about 18 months since he KickStart funding was successful. I think it was a lot more work than he anticipated.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and- relea...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and-release-free- music-without-copyrights)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would recommend the various accounts of Glenn Gould's GV recordings, his Chickering and how it was voiced, as an example of the scope of the project. Voicing a grand piano by itself is a serious undertaking (read about inharmonicity and octave stretching). "Glenn Gould Reader" and "Romance on 3 legs" are good places to start.

re: microphone placement

<http://glenngould.org/f_minor/msg04070.html>

re: Simone Dinnerstein's GV

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/arts/music/28simo.html>

<comment><USER7> Gould's home piano was a Chickering, but the GVs were played on Steinways in both the '55 and '81 recordings. The "condemned" CD318 he preferred was very like his Chickering, with a lot of lateral play. After it was fixed and brought to spec, it was just another piano.

I would love to have had the tech available to have him record his '81 remotely. The rhythmic continuity may have given it a less-than-traditional presentation, but I found the whole to make an engaging, coherent piece. But there was no getting around his voice by that point. Perhaps there could be a dynamically identical reperformance made some day (like the Zenph rendition of the '55 with a good deal more accuracy). Until then, I can put up with the sing-along, I guess. But I find I have trouble with traditional pacings now.

Both the DVD (in which the '81 is put together, largely in post) and the interview in the combined box set are well worth a listen.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the info. I made an acquaintance of a concert pianist maybe 8 years ago, and started reading about Gould, different pianos. My friend has a mental catalog of all the pianos she's performed on, the hall acoustics, and the tuners (she told me there's a tuner around Santa Cruz, CA who's a magician).

Gould also purchased a Yamaha, i remember, I was surprised since it has a very different action, starting with 10mm key dip (vs. 3/8" on most European concert grands).

regarding singing: Keith Jarrett's older solo recordings feature humalongs, along with moans and groans too. It would be a pity to avoid those 2 artists because of that

<comment><USER7> Except that Jarrett did not, himself, want to get rid of the vocalizations. Gould _did_ , but found that they had become such an intrinsic part of his learning of the piece that he was unable to play to his satisfaction without vocalizing. (Note that he's doing a sort of meta-riff much of the time rather than simply singing along with his playing. It bothered him that the non- Bachness of his singing has to be recorded along with what Bach wrote.)

It's not that I avoid Gould (or suggest anyone else does)—in fact I've got his entire Bach catalog and love it (Beethoven and Sibelius, not so much)—but one of the immense pleasures of listening to Bach in any form, and particularly in Gould's performances, is that one can listen to the whole of a piece _and_ follow the voices individually _at the same time_. (Or, I guess, you can sort of Necker between the two if you can't quite hit the enlightenment listning.) That was where Gould blew the "reference" Landowska out of the water in '55 (she played a much more "chorded" performance). Listened to at low volumes, I can still do that with Gould's later recordings, but if the piece is played loudly enough to make the piano's voicing and dynamics distinctive, then the voice-over clouds the texture. I'd just love to hear it as Gould imagined it rather than as it was captured, not as a replacement necessarily, but as a companion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm excited by the idea of a sizable library of works like this available to the public. However, I noticed some high-pitched squeaking in the 128kbs MP3 and the Soundcloud widget; initially, I thought it was an encoding artifact. After downloading the FLAC version, the chirps are even more pronounced, suggesting they were present at recording, possibly some sort of mechanical sound made from the piano. I find them really distracting, especially at the beginning of track 5, "Variatio 4." It sounds like it's up there in the 10khz- ish range. Anyone have any ideas on what it might be?

<comment><USER9> I can't hear it with my equipment, but it's definitely visible in the spectrum around 14kHz. [http://seanpalmer.smugmug.com/photos/i-4Z4GXQm/0/O/i-4Z4GXQm...](http://seanpalmer.smugmug.com/photos/i-4Z4GXQm/0/O/i-4Z4GXQm.png) I tried isolating it. <http://soundcloud.com/sep332/isolated-artifacts-from- kimiko>

<comment><USER8> This was my attempt: <http://soundcloud.com/antiterra/variatio4squeaks>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I expected something of low quality, but these are actually very good! Impressive piece of work. Was this funded through kickstarter?

<comment><USER11> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimiko_Ishizaka>

_She is part of the Open Goldberg Variations, a Kickstarter funded, and Bösendorfer sponsored, team that recorded Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations and released the score and recordings into the public domain in May, 2012._

<comment><USER12> The sound of the Bösendorfer is beautiful and really special, maybe they should sponsor more like that. I'd love to listen to some 19th century stuff on that piano, in particular.

Check out Friedrich Gulda's 'Mozart Tapes' for more of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would be neat if midi files were available too. (Not mechanical ones generated from the score, but rather recorded via performance on a good digital piano by a proficient pianist.)

<comment><USER14> @klipt they are available, as the recording was made on a Bösendorfer with CEUS technology: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open- goldberg-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open-goldberg- variations-setting-bach-free/posts/78977) The CEUS MIDI recording will be made available in the near future. Follow @opengoldberg

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> since Gould is going to come up again and again, might I recommend checking out his recordings of the french and english suites, and the art of the fugue, all as good as the goldberg variations in my opinion!

</comment><comment><USER16> To those interested in a MIDI file derived from the piano itself, there is this, from <http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/node/157>: "CEUS is a system that allows suitably equipped pianos to faithfully record and reproduce real, live performances by playing the recording back on the piano exactly as played. Every detail, from the velocity of the key stroke to timing and pedaling is reproduced as in the original performance. The CEUS recording of the Goldberg Variations will also be released to the public domain." It might not be too much of a stretch to devolve the CEUS data into MIDI.

</comment><comment><USER17> Besides the studio recording of the Goldberg Variations is the new score, "engraved" in Musescore: <http://musescore.com/opengoldberg/goldberg- variations> \-- "source code", if you will, that can be used. I'd love to see work done on integrating the video display of the score with the actual recording, using the "page turning recognition" technology shown in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLYCWFboieM&feature=plcp](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLYCWFboieM&feature=plcp)

<comment><USER14> @rdhyee we'll demonstrate the score following made by SampleSumo with the MuseScore sheet music in 2 days in Munich at Classical:NEXT: <http://www.classicalnext.com/program/showcases/showcases>

"In a special performance that marries the music of Bach and cutting edge internet technology, internationally acclaimed pianist Kimiko Ishizaka will perform Bach's Goldberg Variations at Classsical:NEXT. Thanks to an audio tracking technology developed by SampleSumo and a special new digital edition of the Goldberg Variations score, the audience will be able to follow along with the score as Ishizaka plays. The score, which was created using the open source notation software MuseScore, as well as Ishizaka's recent recording of the Variations, were crowdfunded by fans and released to the public domain as a part of the Open Goldberg Variations project."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> where's the torrent?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> jsb simply rocks</comment>


Wheel Electronic - <AUTHOR> http://www.doepfer.de/we.htm <comment><USER2> What a great time to be alive for music electronics hobbyists! When people say immortality would get boring I just think of all the things I could add MIDI to for centuries.

<comment><USER3> I got bitten by the synth bug a year ago. I just soldered a 10 port midi splitter from Tindie. Like you I can't imagine ever getting bored with music gear. It's the best hobby I can imagine for someone who likes electronic music, math, software, electronics, and blinking lights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> this is a simple board for generating midi messages from a potentiometer, in order to implement physical user interfaces. theyve got boards for buttons or note input as well. to convert in the other direction, try-a paia: [https://www.paia.com/midi2cv.asp](https://www.paia.com/midi2cv.asp)

<comment><USER5> I'm glad paia is still around.

Just before I was born, my father built and entire 4700j... that was neat to be around when I was little. Eventually I sold it to a collector who had more time and money to refurb it... keeping old hand built synths like that alive is a labor of love.

But I still have a collection of euroack stuff that I've put together. It's a neat hobby even if I make a lot more music with plugins in Logic.

<comment><USER6> Modular seems to be a craft of sorts, even if most people don't use it for life performances it still awesome to create unimaginable patches. Oh Lord please forgive us for our synths. Amen</comment></comment></comment>


Python implementation of Stripe's description of their event processing system. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/texuf/pymonster I watched Greg Brockman's talk about how Stripe used MongoDb for processing events [1] and thought the emphasis on clean syntax and flexibility was nice, so I tried to implement it myself. <comment><AUTHOR> I watched Greg Brockman's talk about how Stripe used MongoDb for processing events [1] and thought the emphasis on clean syntax and flexibility was nice, so I tried to implement it myself.

I'm looking for feedback from anyone who has deployed something like this in the wild. There's only about 200 lines of code in the whole library, I'm wondering if this will actually do what I intend it to do, of if there are a million gotcha's waiting for me. Thanks in advance.

[1] [http://www.mongodb.com/presentations/theres-monster-my- close...](http://www.mongodb.com/presentations/theres-monster-my-closet- architecture-mongodb-powered-event-processing-system)</comment>


The Web-based version of Apple Music has officially launched - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-web-based-version-of-apple-music-has-officially-launched/ <comment><USER2> Certainly good for listening while on a Linux laptop.

I think Apple may be a bit late. Google premium music is our family choice since for $15/month everyone gets music and non-commercials YouTube. This bundling may keep us there long term.

Amazon music is also a contender. Not sure how typical I am as a music listener, but for years, back in the old days when I wanted to own music, I slowly bought all my favorite songs for about $0.99 a song, DRM free. Because of this I also use Amazon's music player when I want to focus on my old favorites.</comment>


KnightOS – an open-source operating system for TI calculators - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KnightOS/knightos <comment><USER2> I've watched this project on Github and have been impressed by its rapid evolution. At least on certain models, KnightOS is only possible thanks to a private effort to factorize the firmware's 512-bit RSA keys. [0]

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

<comment> ryan-c I liked the way the factorization was announced[0].

        Fun Number Theory Facts

        Gentlemen,

        A mathematical morsel for your entertainment and edification.

        The number
        6,857,599,914,349,403,977,654,744,967,
        172,758,179,904,114,264,612,947,326,
        127,169,976,133,296,980,951,450,542,
        789,808,884,504,301,075,550,786,464,
        802,304,019,795,402,754,670,660,318,
        614,966,266,413,770,127

        is the product of
        5,174,413,344,875,007,990,519,123,187,
        618,500,139,954,995,264,909,695,897,
        020,209,972,309,881,454,541

        and
        1,325,290,319,363,741,258,636,842,042,
        448,323,483,211,759,628,292,406,959,
        481,461,131,759,210,884,908,747.

0\. [https://web.archive.org/web/20090805011013/http://www.united...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090805011013/http://www.unitedti.org/index.php?showtopic=8888)

<comment><USER3> I mean, really - they used a non-trivial but practically workable _math problem_ to block features from _calculator enthusiasts_. What did they expect to happen?!

<comment><USER4> Maybe at the time the problem was intractable?

<comment><USER5> It's always seemed somewhat tenuous to tie our operational security to our rate of technological advancement. Though maybe it's more of a statement about our ability to generally understand our rapid advancements.

<comment><USER6> It is the recognition that almost all secrets are only valuable for an amount of time, and that you generate keys on the basis that within that time, it will be much more expensive to attack the keys than to attack something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Past comment thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896990)

More info/online demo: [http://www.knightos.org/](http://www.knightos.org/)

It's really neat how you can target this to write C applications for TI-84s. Take for example, [https://github.com/MaxLeiter/CoreLibCDemo/blob/master/main.c](https://github.com/MaxLeiter/CoreLibCDemo/blob/master/main.c) . If you don't want to use assembly, you don't need to. It's pretty neat.

<comment><AUTHOR> the issue with using C is that filesizes are huge compared to an equivalent program in asm

<comment><USER7> Of course. But it's neat, no? It could make prototyping for the platform a lot easier, before one commits to writing out the ASM for their app/game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, it's super cool (I made the demo you linked d:), just pointing that out for people potentially interested in writing C programs for KOS (as it is a limitation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lead dev and project founder of KnightOS here. Nice to see it on HN again :)

Happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER9> Do you see some practical benefits of KnightOS or is it more just because we can and its fun? I mean is KnightOS equipped calculator really useful/convenient for something that vanilla TI is not?

In contrast the other open calculator project I know, WP34s, aims to create the best HP style calculator they can based on HP HW. Is your aspiration similarly to make a really good TI style calculator?

<comment><USER8> Well, from a design and usability perspective, KnightOS is much more sophisticated. It supports multitasking and has a package manager and so on. That being said, there is poor support for math (yeah, really). I want to polish that up until it's suitable for classroom use, and then use it as a platform for promoting open source in schools and getting kids interested in programming/hacking in school. KnightOS is basically a Unix system, so it'd be nice to help bring those concepts into the hands of student tinkerers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Which make me to check and... a TI-89 is still over $100.

<comment><USER11> The product doesn't need updating and they have no competition so why lower the prices?

If you want something newer with more power and more features they also have the Nspire line of calculators but the TI-89/TI-83 basically the staple calculator for highschool math.

<comment><USER12> > they have no competitors

That is exactly why it would rub people the wrong way on a site where people are interested in entrepreneurship and also in disruption. Being approved by standardized testing institutions becomes a barrier to entry and a means for rent seeking. Of course there could be far better calculators for lesser cost that aid learning better, and more clearly reflected the types of tools that should be the default quality for practitioners in the real world.

Compare the HP-12c in finance. It's extremely well-designed and optimized for a lot of patterns, and it even has a moderately steep learning curve that seems to enamor it to its users, yet it is absurd to argue that absent certification as an approved calculator for the CFA that there would not be be even better handheld calculators used more often that people spent time to learn.

The TIbcalculator doesn't address either demand that goals of high school mathematics should address. It doesn't expose students to the state of the art, _and_ despite its constrained capability it is costly enough to shrink the talent pool of high school students who get to take the tests that show off their aptitude and achievement.

<comment><USER13> A calculator is necessary for the AP calculus test; calculators are allowed, but not necessary, for the SAT.

<comment><USER14> Genuine question: It is nearly 20 years since I was in post-secondary education:

Why would calculators be needed for a calculus test?

<comment><USER13> To calculate certain definite integrals that you wouldn't expect a person to do by hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I got a TI-84 Plus CE, which is the most recent version of the calculator (same screen as the Color Silver Edition, but with a faster CPU and a different case). A bit dissapointing to see that nothing has come out for it yet, but Doors CS is working on it - [https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11997](https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11997)

</comment><comment><USER16> I learned to program on my TI-85.

First I read the manual and made simple Basic programs by hand.

Then I found online resources to copy and modify.

#ticalc on Efnet was a great community. They turned me onto making a homemade PC link cable, loading custom firmware, and downloading and writing programs in Assembly.

The screenshots in the KnightOS header are extremely nostalgic.

I'm glad to see the TI hacking tradition continue.

<comment><USER17> TI's were the closest thing that some one who was born in the mid to late 80's to early 90's had to an "old school" PC's. If you were born after 84's most likely the 1st computer you had to deal with would've been already running Windows, (MS-DOS)Norton Commander/Customized Shell or something similar and came with a manual which thought you how to call a 1-800 number to load a disk rather than BASIC.</comment></comment>