Carnegie Mellon Offers New Master's Degree in Product Management - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/carnegie-mellon-offers-new-masters-degree-product-management <comment><USER2> Hi All,

I'm the academic head of this new program on the School of Computer Science side of things. Happy to answer any questions you might have about this program (though it will have to be in the morning since it's about 1am on the east coast and well past my bedtime) And no, I didn't plant this link. :)

One of the key strengths of our Master's of Product Management program is that it combines elements of computer science, user experience design, and business skills (including strategy and management). We also have a significant component devoted to communication and leadership skills, based on interactive workshops and personal mentoring.

On a personal note, this notion of marrying business skills with UX design and computer science has been a long-term goal of mine. I'm a techie at heart (I got my PhD from Berkeley CS), but I feel that having strong skills in user experience or CS only helps so much if you don't have decision-making authority. And to get to those decision-making positions, you need to be able to manage technical teams well, understand how a product fits within the existing market, and know about best practices in prototyping and evaluating user interfaces so that your product has a compelling user experience.

<comment><USER3> $65k is way too expensive to charge for this. Just how greedy is CMU to charge this much? Furthermore Product m Managers are not CEOs, the departments which align to deliver the product don't report to them, nor do they control what resources are allocated or have budgetary control.

PM's have to negotiate and gain consensus on what is to be built and contend with resources available. In software you can be at the mercy of the development manager and what they want to build, can sometimes be at odds with what you want built. Other times you may have a dev lead who just decides that like as they are building it, they will code what they damn well please, and ignore your architecture team (if you are fortunate to have one).

Those are just some of the things a Product Manager learns to deal with to get their product built and shipped.

<comment><USER2> Good points, it turns out that $65k is lower than many of our other master's programs. We also ran through the numbers and that tuition x #students doesn't cover much more than our basic costs. We are a non-profit after all, and one that has a very strong track record in its educational program.

What you're telling us is actually very well aligned with what we've heard from our alums and from some companies. Yes, product managers are not CEOs and can't always just tell people what to do. Product managers work with their direct team (typically some engineers, QA, 1-2 UX designers, possibly a data scientist), but also need to know how to interface with marketing, sales, and others. Part of our curriculum looks at how to work with and positively influence others to achieve desired goals. But you're right, that's not easy, though there are some strategies and tactics that work better than others.

<comment><USER4> Can't say this is a compelling argument. Being lower cost than other programs just tells me those programs are overpriced too. Also the whole nonprofit argument is baseless; did you know the NFL was structured as a nonprofit until 2015? Universities and nonprofits in general are well known to waste funds, especially on administrative positions and vanity projects.

Not to call this a vanity project, and obviously I am not privy to all of the financial information at CMU so I may be wrong and this program may just be quite expensive. The main problem I see with something like this is that

1: As with most Master's programs, it's probably just a cash grab by the university. Although since this is CMU I assume the placement will be very good, I'm also of the opinion that programs like these _can_ , but not necessarily will, taint the overall reputation of the university by setting lower standards.

2: It's fine for a few universities to offer degrees in Product Management. But the thing is, the market (at least within tech) for this role isn't THAT large, especially when you consider that a lot of product managers start out as developers to begin with. If enough universities start also offering these programs, I assume the placement and utility of the program will suffer greatly. We don't need a glut of PMs the same way we had a glut of lawyers following the recession.

<comment><USER2> Well, if you honestly believe that Carnegie Mellon University is the same as the NFL as a non-profit, especially given our long track record of education and research, there really isn't anything I can say to convince you. So let's just end this here.

<comment><USER5> His/her point is that being a non-profit is often just a legal structure with tax protection. It is not a valid reason to charge a high price for something. Not addressing his/her point does not make it any less valid.

Importantly, faculty and admin staff at both the NFL and CMU are both highly paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a product management discipline lead, I interview product management candidates.

For some stupid reason someone in HR still puts "MBA preferred" on the posting... but I have yet to meet anyone without hands-on experience that I want to hire. I don't care if you have an MBA, I don't care if you have a college degree... what I want to know is can you do the work?

If I ask about the SLDC, what I want to hear is that they know enough to keep everything balanced -- that they aren't going to get all flustered and just try and shoehorn devs and QA and content and UX designers into something you read out of a textbook but have never really implemented.

A PM should be a shit shield, they should be comfortable saying, "No," to stupid suggestions from people up the food chain -- this leads to success of people down the food chain. An MBA doesn't prepare them for that. They will have to be able to put themselves in other peoples' shoes... lead by example. (My ideal candidate has a few years Dev or QA experience... I can go with UX even... but they have to have done some real delivery work prior to being a PM in order to not suck at it -- my opinion.)

Anyway, long way of saying, "Undergrads, save your money. Go learn how to code, get a job doing that, then make the transition a few years in once you actually know how things work. At that point, if you want to go to school -- cool, you may find it useful to augment what you already learned on the job."

<comment><USER7> Heh. Can I work for you?:)

I switched in the end of last year from Team Lead Engineer to PM position and have had blast since then. The job is very challenging and I'm keep learning new and new things about our customers and users. Previously working with PMs who are not from engineering background was often very frustrating, because google can find any answer right?

<comment><USER6> That's about the best compliment I can think of, thanks!

Worse than just trying to Google for the answers are the Product Managers who come over from Marketing and tend to just make up answers. Ha! You have to go over with them the whole notion of compromise, and how just because it's on a Gantt Chart, doesn't mean we want to commit to all the dates for all the features 6 months out... Perpetual compromise, stuff is going to come up, we adapt and reprioritize and if we're lucky (and a good bit of it is luck) then the wheels don't come off the car while we're driving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't speak to the cost but it sounds like they are trying to fill a validated market need. I disagree that just working for a startup for a year will give you the same experience.

I predict a near 100% placement rate.

<comment><USER9> > I disagree that just working for a startup for a year will give you the same > experience.

Why? Actually working on delivering a product seems like far better experience than any educational program, internship or not. Since most people go to school with the end goal of getting a job, it seems far better to skip school if you have the option. What are they going to teach you that you can't learn on the job?

I'd much rather a manager have real experience in the role of the people he's managing than come straight out of school with a pretense of expertise.

<comment><USER10> My experience is that it is a nightmare to hire product managers who will "figure it out as they go". There are so many skills that a talented product manager needs to be successful. Leadership, communication, technical expertise, and so on are all mentioned in the announcement.

The cost of engineering makes product missteps extremely expensive over time in both the large and the small.

<comment><USER9> So hire a product manager with previous experience in another position, ideally the kind he'd be managing. Sure, if the program _can_ impart all of those skills onto its graduates then it sounds great. But having gone through school to the point of quitting my PhD, working at various companies of various sizes and starting my own company, I put very little weight in degrees - especially anything with an emphasis on business.

Yes, I am biased. But I would be happy to be convinced otherwise if someone can provide the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Graduate student at Cornell Tech, amazing program to learn graduate level machine learning and cs topics with a deep dive into product/startup development. I am in the 2 year program, and the program is top notch for only being 5 years old. Ping me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you have any interests or questions :)

<comment><USER12> A good friend is one of the organizers of the Cornell Tech program and he pulled together a ton of great PM's and Eng's from NYC to get feedback and idea when designing the program. Glad to hear that the program is going well :D

<comment><USER11> Thats awesome! I hope the leadership for the product development curriculum stays as that makes Cornell Tech a really unique experience. They do an amazing job getting companies from all over NYC to advise on our product projects.

Also a side note, I would love to hear about your experience as a PM in the VR industry, as I am both passionate about developing Augmented Reality products and looking for opportunities to break into the VR industry!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To people who consider to join this program:

Just dive into a startup then learn.

3mons in a startup > 1y in Master's Degree in Product Management

Save your money please.

<comment><USER14> You're not considering an important factor: connections and opportunities. If doing this course makes you multiple steps closer to getting hired at Big Cos, then I think the tuition fee is worth it. Same applies for almost every degree in the world. Courses are easy to replicate; environment is not.

<comment><USER13> Like you said: Courses are easy to replicate; environment is not.

Do you think the connections and opportunities in CMU program are better than the connections and opportunities in a YC startup? If you don't, then I suggest you can just jump in a YC startup then learn something REAL.

<comment><USER15> Most people can't just "jump in a YC startup".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> pay 65k for just this, spend another 65k throughout that period on other living/study expenses, then work at 35k for 5 years because they need somebody with experience:)

</comment><comment><USER17> Funny to see the use the now commonly derided by well regarded PM's* line of "A product manager is first and foremost the CEO of the product"

*Josh Elman + David Cancel for starters.

<comment><USER18> Maybe such quotes have an appeal with aspiring PMs who think it's a good idea to pay a small fortune to the Shake'N Bake school of product management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can you provide the program online though Coursera for free and charge like $50 for the certificate? that will be more practical and cheaper.

<comment><USER20> Is there any good MOOC for product management? I had been looking for it last year but could not find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What a scam. 65k? Honestly, this will not be recognized in the market as the same as a "real degree", so why should people pay that kind of price?

</comment><comment><USER22> " _Tuition for the Master of Science in Product Management program is charged at a flat rate of $65,000 for the 12-month program. This cost covers tuition only. It does not include university fees, summer electives or other miscellaneous expenses._ "

Ouch.

<comment><USER23> As a resident of a country where education of all levels is basically free, this always sounds so unreal to me. I would never even think about it, how would you make that kind of money back in a reasonable amount of time to be worth it ?

<comment><USER24> PMs at established tech companies can make $200k+ in salary and usually have extra massive stock options to boot. An Amazon PM averages something like $600k/year if they stick around for 5 years.

<comment><USER25> Factcheck: Senior Product Managers at Amazon HQ with 4-6 years of experience self report an average salary of $123K and average total comp of $162K.

Even if a single Amazon PM has made $600K in one year, it does a disservice to readers to imply that that's commonplace.

[https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-Senior-Product- Manag...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-Senior-Product-Manager- Seattle-Salaries- EJI_IE6036.0,6_KO7,29_IL.30,37_IM781.htm?filter.experienceLevel=FOUR_TO_SIX)

<comment><USER26> Ask yourself: even if you disagree with the parent's numbers, do _these numbers_ from Glassdoor make sense to you?

A friend of mine has a younger sister who was offered $120k _base salary_ out of college to work at Google in NYC, and another 30k in RSUs. She's told me this compares favorably with what friends of hers were offered at similar companies on the east and west coasts.

I'm going to avoid a discussion about merit, but suffice it to say that I believe seniors PMs working at Amazon for a few years are far closer to $600k than $100k.

<comment><USER27> Numbers at Glassdoor are at least based on some kind of aggregate data. You can argue about their methodology, but I would trust it over "that guy on HN who swears his brother's nephew's roommate knows one guy who makes $600K at Google."

<comment><USER26> Sure, that's fair. I was specifically attacking Glassdoor and how low their numbers are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm a mobile senior software engineer at a startup.

How can I jump into product management? I founded a startup previously so I can say I have a strong product vision, and I can just feel intuitively that it's the position i'd be good at.

I'm reluctant to put 65k to make the move though. Anyone else made the move Senior software dev -> PM, if yes, how did you go about it?

<comment><USER29> Does your startup have PMs and is looking for more? If so I would just ask if there is an option to switch. This is how I did it years ago. Shadowed one of the PMs for a bit and then slowly took over more responsibility.

<comment><USER27> That's exactly what I did. Watch PMs in action at your current company, take notes, get interested, and wait for a position to open up internally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Getting that first bit of experience seems hard for a product manager. Most places will only hire people with experience as a product manager, and for those who will hire someone without prior experience, they seem to prefer MBAs. This at least seems like a path to product management that isn't a MBA.

<comment><USER6> A lot of people who aren't technical see the Product Manager role as something they can do in tech. This leads to a lot of poorly qualified people applying for positions, and HR responding by trying to have them self-screen out, "Must have 3-5 years..." (The number of Product Managers with some sort of fluff History / Political Science / Sociology degree is pretty high... some get in, but you have to sift through a lot of Philosophy degrees to find a good one.)

Instead of going right for the Product Manger role, people should aim for some sort of delivery internship. And from there a Business Analyst role, Software Engineering role, UX Designer role, Quality Assurance Engineering role... anything hands-on. This sets them up to be good at Product Management -- better than the kids who come straight out of school anyway.

There's a good amount of "inflation of self-worth" (for lack of a better word) around people coming out of college right now. It's true that college costs a lot, but virtually everyone has a degree. AND we all know that there's massive grade inflation going on -- so it's hard to take a college degree seriously. Also hard not to have one... not an ideal situation, to be sure. (There's a lot of role inflation too... people now are "senior" with a year or two experience? Come on.)

Anyway, requirements are inflated to screen people with 0 experience out. If you have done well for a few years at a staff role, nobody is going to care that you don't specifically have N years as a product manager. But it's a HUGE risk taking someone out of college and giving them a leadership position. Better for them, and the company that hires them, if they spend a little time in the trenches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This sounds more promising than getting a "decorated" MBA degree from an overrated "top league" school. It makes sense to hire a person whose managerial skills are forged in technical training.

</comment><comment><USER29> Spend the $65k on starting your own thing for a year. You learn similar things and if you're lucky you end up with a successful business or at least a positive ROI.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sorry for not doing any googling before askig; is there an online Product Management course you could recommend?

</comment><comment><USER33> CMU was also the first school to offer a masters in Financial Engineering in the mid-2000s.

<comment><USER34> I thought Cornell was? It was part of the M.Eng in ORIE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good luck.

Right now Harvard has the best course in the US. Stanford and Berkeley are a joke.

The best path into PM is still doing something hands-on in that area. If it is enterprise, then start in consulting or pre-sales. Consumer is pure chance.

</comment><comment><USER36> Or get a MBA for 1/5 the price from literally anywhere and be able to do whatever you want with it, including being a PM/Director but also just about anything else.

<comment><USER37> Where can you get a good MBA for 10k?

<comment><USER36> Total price for this new masters would be above the listing price, after housing and other things are factored in. Good MBA can be had for 25k.

<comment><USER38> Not at a top 20 program in the US.

[http://poetsandquants.com/2011/01/08/how-much-does-a-top- mba...](http://poetsandquants.com/2011/01/08/how-much-does-a-top-mba-degree- cost/)

<comment><USER39> You are right- but the average MBA cost is 26k.

<comment><USER38> Do you mean average MBA cost, or tuition per year. 26k is very low for two year tuition, even at a state school, and if you are out of state it is going to be a lot higher.

This site says average two year tuition is 60k.

[https://www.thoughtco.com/cost-of-earning-an-mba- degree-4662...](https://www.thoughtco.com/cost-of-earning-an-mba- degree-466266)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Richest 1% of people now own half the world's wealth - <AUTHOR> https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-business/richest-1-of-people-now-own-half-the-worlds-wealth/articleshow/61657574.cms <comment> ni-hil Mhh, ok. I remember an oxfam report of 2016 that stated that the wealth of the 62 richest people in the world was equal to the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population.

[https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2016-01-18/...](https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2016-01-18/62-people- own-same-half-world-reveals-oxfam-davos-report)

<comment> ni-hil And apparently that the top 1% was equal to the other 99%. Is oxfam a questionable source?

Anyways, doesn't seems like a big surprising news...</comment></comment>


Should We Teach Literature Students How To Analyze Texts Algorithmically? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3016699/should-we-teach-literature-students-how-to-analyze-texts-algorithmically

<comment><USER2> _Gottschall believes that these problems (the humanities' increasing irrelevance, decreasing popularity, and the subjects ' inability to ever answer questions conclusively) are not only connected, but can be solved by implementing the kind of data mining tools and computational textual analysis carried out by the likes of Patrick Juola._

I can't see this saving the humanities. I see it further burying the humanities. The humanities live by asking deep fundamental questions about, well, being human. Being upstaged by a computer hurts them more than helps.

I'm a big believer in the power of algos like the ones discussed. I'm also a big believer that humanities are one of the few fields that can retain value in a post-MOOC world. (You can learn accounting and programming online. Small group discussions are best for Shakespeare.) But I think that algorithms in literature will hurt the field.

<comment><USER3> One can have a discussion online. In person might be preferable but it's a pretty good alternative.

I don't know much about the field but it doesn't seem like algorithmic analysis would be terribly useful. But there are some really interesting things that can be done.

And enough with the "computers vs humans thing". It's just a tool that helps analyze doing things that would be extremely time consuming for a human, like counting words, or looking for statistical patterns, or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd would argue the question is rather "CAN we teach literature ...".

tl;dr -> you can't in european, post-modernism-influenced universities, because it's a math-less culture.

Not so long ago I was still a linguistics student, trying to specialize in NLP. Eventually I dropped. I dropped when I was asked to apply a multivariate model used to classify english texts in genres, to a corpus of texts written in french. Mind you, i wasn't asked to follow a specific methodology and re-do what had been done for english texts. No. I was asked to directly "translate" english-specific linguistic features, and then use the associated weights of the original model. I guess this would be the equivalent of trying to, say, classifying pictures of cats using a model to classify pictures of cars, by somehow translating cat pictures to car pictures beforehand. I have a few more examples of this kind, but really there was little to no mathematical culture in my uni linguistics dpt, where it can take 2 mins for a NLP researcher to figure out 95% of 10000 = 9500. So I dropped.

I dropped yeah, but why did I even got into this cursus in the first place ? Because, we, continental people, don't believe everything can be reduced to a universal formalism. Especially in fields such as semiotics. There is always deeper truths to whatever absolute formalism you bring on the table. A text is an alchemy and, to us, it is unconceivable that some kind of periodic table of semiotic-elements is ever to be discovered. Meaning has no pre-defined ontology waiting for us to discover it. Adios Mendeleïev.

What does it lead to ? It leads to intellectual confrontation. Confrontation against the american devil. We gave you a name : formalist-positivist. You're in the wrong. We shall impale you eventually and thus we spit on your dictatorial formalisms (even shannon's information theory, shhh...), even though leaders as important as Saussure or Levy-Strauss called for a mathematization of the field.

So why did I embark on this boat ? Because there was a promise. The promise to study language in itself and by itself. You start by reading Saussure Cours de linguistique generale, then you're asked to shed lights on his definitions of langue and parole. It's hard. It's very hard because a) it's not formal b) you're subject to the arbitrary judgement of whoever rates your work just like in ... philosophy. So you dig, deeper and deeper, and at some point you figure out : a) Saussure never wrote the aforementioned book (his disciples did, just like ... Jesus) b) and he wrote in one of his last letter that he did not believe there was any concept in linguistics grounded on solid basis. But they don't really care. It's in the goddamn book. It's worth teaching, heh. And that makes you want to quit. You might ask : "So it's like philosophy ? There is no real foundation, it's just a field culture ?". I don't know. What I know for sure is that I've NEVER had any philosophy courses (this includes philosophy of language).

Hopefully there are some cognitive linguistics. With numbers and stats, with stddevs and error margins. What are these things ? What's the role of these meta-numbers in understanding the phenomenon being observed ? You ask about it. You're replied it's not in the course. You insist because, well the devil is in the details, and these numbers seem pretty important. Alas, it's too complicated for a freshman. Finally, you're expected to do a mongoloidly difficult exercise : to constitue a word-list for a priming experiment. You work your ass off, taking inspiration from the little physics you know (because THAT is real science) and deliver a 60 pages-long paper only to see other students just dumped a one-page explanation. The professors frowns at your work. Something must be wrong with you.

So, that's basically the state of linguistics in my country (France). It's not really philosophy, it's not real science, it lies between heaven and underground caves : right in a pool of mud.

My conclusion is that you can't teach algorithmic methods to literature students here, because almost nobody in the field can. We want the irreducibility of alchemy but still think we can reach this goal while still getting away with Maths. Are we hoping we'll find a way to whisper magic words at the cauldron and get results out of the process ? Probably.

It's really a shame, because there are plenty of good theories, unfortunately, very few have the skills to implement them, and they are very badly marketed (publishing in french for instance ...). And the post-modern flavor the whole field has, is not even something bad. I recently read Deleuze' "What is philosphy" and it's just amazing - of course, it's not crystal clear, but if you can read between the lines, you start making connection with recent advancements : vector space model, compositional distributional model of meaning (Oxford quantum-categoretic grammars), dynamical models of cognition (Polythechnique, Petitot), Fractal Patterns in Reasonning (Groningen, Atkinson). All of them using advanced maths. Can I understand the details ? Absolutely not. Does my guts tell me these guys have put their hands on something promising ? Absolutely yes. But I suck at math, I suck, so I dropped to avoid sucking at math even more.

Anyway it doesn't matter. I'm looking for a crappy 9-5 job, now, cobbling together web-forms or something.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised this article doesn't mention Franco Moretti[1], who is probably the foremost literary scholar using algorithms to analyse texts. Moretti advocates what he calls "distant reading" (the opposite of close reading), which would allow you to study trends across the whole history of world literature, rather than just in individual books one at a time.

[1]: [http://www.versobooks.com/authors/64-franco- moretti](http://www.versobooks.com/authors/64-franco-moretti)

</comment><comment><USER6> This sort of thing does nothing to undermine the very real criticisms raised by literary theory. I understand that it's confusing and frustrating for people not versed in the theory (much like the code made to process the texts would be to somebody who does not know how to program), but the naive turn to "objectivity" in this case isn't just a step back from today's theory- it's a step back from New Criticism, which peaked in the mid-20th century.

That's not to say that NLP and things like this aren't vitally important. It can be convincingly argued that they're more productive and important in terms of immediate social good. However, I'm pretty sure we already have a field (besides computer science) that does this sort of work: it's called forensic science.

<comment><USER7> Well for me actually having studied this, theories like Structualism, Russian Formalism or Semeiotics actually are better suited for literature, then theories not so rooted in "objectivity".

So no, not a step back (imho) - but could provide some good takes on literature with interesting tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article isn't discussing pedagogy by any means, but whether Literature as a _profession_ should take up algorithmic text analysis as a scientific tool to promote or refute literary theories and analyze writing style.

I think the latter is good but teaching students to appreciate literature is far more pressing then teaching them to tally up word counts to unmask JK Rowling's latest book.

<comment><USER7> Sadly this post isn't really about teaching students (from university) anything on literature. If it were so, they would have to look at very different theories/schools of study of literature.

There are quite a lot of schools/theories that could greatly benefit from a technical supported empirical method.

For example inter-textuality[1], the school that practically says every text has links to other texts, quotes, parts that are plagiarism, different stances on the shared topics or are just in the same genre.

So yeah, Detecting hidden "links" between texts could give you interesting insights, or might tell you, that there could be "hidden" texts, still unknown to us, as they were lost.

Reading (and writing my final thesis on on of his books) a lot from Umberto Eco showed me, what it means, that literary works are nodes in a network. Reading "The Name of the Rose" (and not just watching the movie) really drove home this point.

Especially, if you know a little bit about history or the basic structure of the genre "detective stories" ;-)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsests:_Literature_in_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsests:_Literature_in_the_Second_Degree) (the German version is much more elaborate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Historical Literature students, sure.

They are still working out who authored the Federalist papers and they're using NLP methods like those described to do so. Of course, you'd be surprised the amount of effort that might have gone into obfuscating that information.

"Hey, Jefferson, you write like you're me or Adams, I'll write like I'm Adams or you, and he'll write like..."

</comment><comment><USER10> if English majors won't do it -- I will. My guess is that machine learning can approximate and formalize some of their delicate and thoughtful intuitions.

From what I have browsed in bookstores, graduate level English and Sociology can resemble data structures in computer science textbooks</comment>


Growth Hacker - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22growth%20hacker%22&date=1%2F2012%2012m&cmpt=q

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4309345>

This could be one of the reasons :)</comment>


768-bit RSA, now officially not enough - <AUTHOR> http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006 <comment><USER2> The relevant numbers from the paper:

      1230186684530117755130494958384962720772853569595334792197322452151726400507263657518745202199786469389956474942774063845925192557326303453731548268507917026122142913461670429214311602221240479274737794080665351419597459856902143413
      =
      33478071698956898786044169848212690817704794983713768568912431388982883793878002287614711652531743087737814467999489
      *
      36746043666799590428244633799627952632279158164343087642676032283815739666511279233373417143396810270092798736308917

<comment><USER3> Hey look, I can play my DVD in Linux now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me, posts (and the community comments) like this are a large part of the value of HN.

Read the title, scanned the linked page, read the insightful comments. Gained a bit of information on the current state of cryptography. On to the next item. The accumulation of all such tidbits that appear here that has been incredibly useful.

fogus: thanks for posting all: thanks for the perspectives.

Back to my irregularly scheduled program...

</comment><comment><USER5> Only 2000 compute years of a single AMD 2.2GHz were reported to be used. Using the rough estimate of 9GFlops for that chip, the current top supercomputer (that we know of) is very roughly 200,000 times as powerful.

The paper estimates 1024 would be "about a thousand times harder". 1000 times harder than 2000 compute years on that chip is roughly ten compute years on that supercomputer. Closing in...

1024 is widely not recommended anymore, though.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand why 1024 bits is just a thousand times harder than 768 bits. Shouldn't it be like 2^256 times harder?

<comment><USER7> I don't pretend to understand the deep details, but the core point is that the GNSF algorithm _is_ exponential in the bit length of the number being factored, but the exponent turns out to be distressingly small.

Edit: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve> gives the complexity as O(constant ^ ((logN^1/3)*(log logN ^ 2/3)). Which grows really slowly.

<comment><USER8> _the GNSF algorithm is exponential in the bit length of the number being factored_

No. First, it's GNFS, not GNSF; and second, it's approximately exponential in the _cube root_ of the bit length, not exponential in the bit length.

<comment><USER9> Isn't that the same thing?

(n^1/3)^c = n^(c/3)

Still an exponential relationship, just a smaller constant.

<comment><USER8> Those are polynomial, not exponential.

Polynomial time: O(n^c)

GNFS time: O(c^(n^(1/3))

Exponential time: O(c^n)

<comment><USER7> I'm still not understanding where your criticism is directed. GNFS (see? no typo this time. Do I get a cookie?) is quite clearly outside of PTIME, though I'm not sure to which definitions of SUBEXP and EXPTIME it belongs. Thus RSA remains an algorithm which is infeasible for tractable key sizes, even if the early guesses of 512-1024 bits turned out to be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And so time marches on...

It'd be neat to have a graph of when various algorithms and numbers of bits were cracked, and see what progress looks like, long-term and on average.

<comment><USER11> <http://valhenson.livejournal.com/3580.html>

<comment><USER12> This is a summary of cryptographic hashes being broken via cryptanalysis (breaking the algorithm), not RSA keys (big primes) being factored. I'd love to see the same chart but for prime factorization.

<comment><USER13> The Wikipedia page for the RSA Factoring Challenge has a nice chart that shows the dates RSA numbers have been broken: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's always good to see confirmatory experiments like this, but I don't see anything surprising in these results. We've known for the past few years that RSA768 was within reach of anyone who could be bothered to coordinate it; and nobody serious trusts RSA1024 against sophisticated attackers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Correct my ignorance, please, but people are talking like cryptosystems using 768-bit keys have been cracked.

These folks showed that you can factor a single 768-bit number in under four years, if you have the computing power of a moderate-size cluster at your disposal and approximately one terabyte of memory. Interesting, certainly, but this exposes no vulnerabilities we weren't already aware of.

Brute forcing a 768-bit key would require multiple, potentially billions, of such factorizations, correct? Proving that you can factor an n-bit number in time t simply demonstrates that the time required to crack a cryptosystem with an n-bit key on the same hardware is an integer multiple of t.

Am I misunderstanding this, or are the people claiming "768 bits are not enough" just the usual paranoid element?

<comment><USER3> _Brute forcing a 768-bit key would require multiple, potentially billions, of such factorizations, correct?_

No. There is only one possible factorization of an RSA public key. RSA public keys are, by definition, the product of exactly two primes.

Once you have factored the public key, it is trivial to derive the private key from the two factors.

RSA is only secure because it is hard to factor numbers. This work shows that it's just hard, not impossible.

<comment><USER14> I see...thank you for correcting my false assumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://mathfail.com/2010/01/the-232-digit-number- rsa-768-has...](http://mathfail.com/2010/01/the-232-digit-number-rsa-768-has- been-factored.html) has a good summary as well.

<comment><USER16> Yes. the 6 months of 10k computers churning required to factor is certainly instructive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It must be really aggravating spending 100 days breaking a long key, only to find a short one-time-pad message dropped into the middle of a long string full of 'neenerneenerneener!'.

</comment><comment><USER18> The way I see it, is that if someone's willing to go to these measures to compromise your data and hurt you, you're pretty much screwed no matter what you do.

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't the default for ssh-keygen RSA 2048? That should be safe for a little while longer.

</comment><comment><USER20> Every bit makes it exponentially harder to factor and 1024 bits is the standard, so I'm not worried.

<comment><USER3> Not correct, see above.

The factoring algorithm is not "try every possible number". If it was, then your statement would be correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As I understand it, PGP uses RSA just at the outset to generate a 128-bit (or 256-bit or whatever) key for the rest of the message. So the PGP key length is a one-time cost (per message).

Many years ago (early 1990s) I generated a 1024-bit public key which was the limit at the time. A lot of Moores have passed since then. Since key generation and usage is no more than O(bits^2), possibly only O(bits log bits), I don't see why people aren't creating >= 8192-bit keys these days.

Or maybe they are. The MIT keyserver is down at the moment, at least if I ask it for anything.

<comment><USER8> _Since key generation and usage is no more than O(bits^2), possibly only O(bits log bits)..._

A private key operation with N-bit RSA takes O(N^3) time using classical arithmetic, while key generation takes O(N^4) time using classical arithmetic. Your numbers are correct for public key operations, though.</comment></comment>


Solar-Panel Roads to Be Built on Four Continents Next Year - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-24/solar-panel-roads-to-be-built-across-four-continents-next-year <comment><USER2> Click baity title. At $2000 USD a square foot, they're only building test roads.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who is paying for this idiocy?

Solar Roadways's test installation has been an absolute disaster.</comment>


Ask HN: Montreal meetup? - <AUTHOR>

Anybody interested in meeting up sometime in November for talking about technology, programming or whatever holds your interest?<p>edit: You can leave a comment here or you can find my email in my profile too. My primary area is compilers but I am interested in tech and science in general so meeting up with similar people will be cool. <comment><USER2> This time of the year is extremely busy for me but I'd try to join.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great. Keep in contact and drop me an email at my hn id on gmail. I will update you if something starts.</comment></comment>


Welders Make $150,000? Bring Back Shop Class - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303663604579501801872226532?mod=trending_now_1 <comment><USER2> So, as somebody who works with these guys, that payrate comes with a few caveats:

1) Most of the pay in welding comes from contract jobs. When looking at salaried/shop welders, you're looking more in the range of $50k-$100k USD/year. When the welders are on contracts, they're typically on 4 week on / 1 week off rotations or further out (6/2 and 8/2 are not unusual).

2) When the welders are on contract work and on rotation, they'll be working 12 hours/day, every day, on them, or that's how the pay agreements work out. So 84 hour weeks, and you're not paid for your off rotation.

3) This works to annual work of roughly 3500 hours. At $150k, assuming they're paid straight time (many do get overtime but I don't feel like doing the math), the hourly rate works out to $42 / hour, which is not that great (it's not terrible either).

Many do make more than $150k, however some are on elevated pay for hazard rate (subsea work, politically unstable areas, etc), and other have additional modifiers (hot bunking adds $250/day in some cases). Keep in mind as well that most of this work goes on in fairly horrible places (deserts, jungles, subsea), and they welders are spending weeks if not months away from not only their families, but often any communication to the outside world. _The pay is there for a reason._

Note: On many vessels and offshore platforms there's extremely limited bandwidth for personal use, often just a 256k satellite connection of which at least half is used for operations. So that's 128k-256k between 16-40 people who can only use devices for 2-3 hours a day.

Ask away with further questions, I'm a corrosion and materials engineer who works in conjunction with a lot of welders and others on contract projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do other fields in that industry make, such as material engineers?

<comment><USER2> About the same, usually engineers have less time in the field but more consistent pay and a slightly higher hourly rate. Drill engineers though are a whole different range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Paywall article.

</comment><comment><USER4> Welders who make $150,000 make me want to make a welding robot, Even if it only handles a small subset of welds.

Maybe shop class should become robots and automation class.

<comment><USER5> There are a great many cases where it's cheaper just to hire a welder and stick them in strange places where putting a robot doesn't make sense.

Underwater welding, or welding in confined spaces, or up in strange places doing structural work are all cases where a robot capable of autonomous operation is either currently too expensive or outright impossible.

<comment><USER4> I've known a few welders over the years. High end industrial painters also get paid large amounts.

I genuinely do think though, that things like welding and painting are ripe for robotization. Even if it starts out as human augmentation at the low end. Think clayton Christensen here.</comment></comment></comment>


I made the switch from Aperture to Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/i-made-switch-aperture-photos <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: ~600 GB photo library, took ~3 weeks to migrate, some things are awesome (access to all my photos everywhere, on any device), some things less so (faces don't get synced, no loupe, no five-star rating system, no pro-level editing/batch workflows). All-in-all, I wish Apple didn't ditch Aperture... but it's not the end of the world moving to Photos.</comment>


My 7 Year Old Son Found His People at the Maker Faire - <AUTHOR> http://jackcwest.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/last-saturday-my-son-found-his-people-at-the-maker-faire/

<comment><USER2> "... walked the half mile to the San Mateo County fairgrounds to join thousands of others where I discovered that my son was probably adopted"

Nope, you were probably like that when you were a kid. Unfortunately, the "look, but don't touch" mentality has been thought relentlessly to children for the past N years. In some cultures kids, after a certain age, say, 10, are supposed to be _totally_ focused on studying so that they get to a good school, so none of that tinkering stuff. Unless, of course you wanted to belong with the grimy, poor souls who had to work with their hands, e.g. the young boys who were taken out of school and given as an apprentice (my mom made an argument similar to this when I was studying for the middle school entrance exams, when I was 11.)

<comment> guard-of-terra I would take studying in quotes: "studying" Because they do not actually earn any useful or marketable skills during those almost ten years. My wife told me this is called academism.

<comment> excuse-me Some do. The smart ones learn to read and then sit at the side of the class reading - ignoring the "education" that is going on around them.

<comment> guard-of-terra This is in class; but there is a huge pressure on them to "study" after class, spending all time on it.

They because myopic, weaker from vitamin D deficiency and still do not learn anything (adult would consider) useful.

<comment><USER3> I still don't understand how the typical adult can talk about work / life balance with a straight face with what we do to children.

<comment> guard-of-terra Many adults do long hours of rather unproductive work so it's the natural state of life for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Direct link: [http://jackcwest.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/last-saturday- my-s...](http://jackcwest.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/last-saturday-my-son-found- his-people-at-the-maker-faire/)

</comment><comment><USER5> As a parent I cannot express how profoundly useful it can be for your child to find their 'people' at this age. Some people don't find their cultural match until college or even later.

And as I have told my kids, find one other member of your 'tribe' and you can find the rest, since finding someone who knows others like them is more common than discovering people who have yet to identify their common interests. I was lucky in that I discovered the 'hacker/makers/tweaker' community when I joined the Amateur Radio club in High School.

<comment><USER6> That is one of the greatest things about the internet: it makes finding your tribe pretty trivial, no matter your location or circumstances. Even if you grow up in the middle of nowhere in a homogenous social context, you can find a culture that intrigues you, learn about it from afar and then you have a direction in life when you leave home.

Of course it makes it easy to then isolate yourself inside that tribe as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A good story, and the best closing line ever:

"Mommy, I'm not that weird."

<comment><USER8> I found the story interesting, but it was this single line that made it for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel for the "look but don't touch" part. I did the same thing to my son, but in my defense, he's 4 and wasn't quite as into how things worked. He was more interested in anything that was his favorite color (red).

What I did learn about him though was that he has good geek potential, and that he could be entertained for about 2 hours there.

I can't wait to take him back next year.

</comment><comment><USER10> One of the aspects of living in the Bay Area that I enjoyed most was the feeling of not being the only geek in the room, or not even being the geekiest person in the room.

Never been to a Maker Faire yet, but I used to particularly enjoy the Psychotronix Film Festival that way: <http://www.kfjc.org/promotions/psychotronix/index.php>

<comment><AUTHOR> Love it! I still have a 16mm projector in my lab store room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The wonder of childhood curiosity. Fantastic!

I wish we had something like this in Germany.

Lots of photos here: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/makerfaire/>

<comment><USER12> Where are you based? I'm from Frankfurt, maybe we could organize something.

<comment><USER11> Up in Bremen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was in SF for work last week and was delighted to see the Maker Faire was in town. Was a great way to kill a Sunday afternoon. About half the place was awesome activities for kids, and the other half was awesome demos/products for adults.

The first thing I thought to myself when getting inside was "this would be an awesome place to bring my kids (when I have some)"

<comment><AUTHOR> And a great place to bring out the kid in yourself - for me, the one that I regularly have to be reminded not to tell to be quiet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Time to take Cody to a hackerspace.

Get that kid an arduino, some welding classes, and a set of basic tools.

ASAP.

<comment><USER15> My six year old son and I attended the maker faire. It was nonstop fascination and engagement for both of us all day. He loved the Lego Jeep, building squishy circuits with play-doh, 10mm LEDs and DC motors, building switches with aluminum, foam core, and alligator clips. When he asked, "Dad, can we build circuits and a robot too?" I got a huge smile on my face and felt really great.

The Arduino controlled fire breathing machines scared the hell out of him and he wouldn't go anywhere near them no matter how much I tried to convince him that they were safe (you could feel a heat blast from them and they were loud).

We watched the future engineers of America compete with their TETRIX robots, moving bowling balls and picking up racquet balls.

Overall the Maker Faire gave me confidence that in the U.S. there are still a lot of smart inventors shaping the future. Not everyone is tapped out watching "American Idle" blaming red states and blue states.

3D printers were everywhere and fun to watch. I have no use for one, but suddenly I want to build one. Luckily the price tags north of $1500 brought me back to reality.

We bought a few inexpensive electronic projects that we look forward to building and plan on attending both days next year. It was crowded, but the people running the booths were so nice and knowledgable, there was so much there to spark the imagination that it was worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man. We were only there for about three hours. So I missed a lot of that. Next year I'll have to get the full weekend ticket.

<comment><USER16> You can do one better and submit a project with your son. Non-commercial projects that are accepted get in for free. (I'm a grown up and I can't tell you how proud it made me feel to present this year) :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Redox OS: Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc - <AUTHOR> https://www.redox-os.org/news/focusing-on-rustc/ <comment><USER2> I've re-submitted it and it got to the front page with a bit of discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657504)

A bit weird that the stories weren't deduplicated as they usually are. Next time I'll search on agolia first.</comment>


Beyond Source Maps - <AUTHOR> http://fitzgeraldnick.com/weblog/55/ <comment><USER2> In case anyone else is wondering what a source map is, it's apparently Javascript's version of C's debug symbols. That is, given a chunk of optimized runtime code, it will show you which part of your original source code generated it.

<comment><USER3> Source maps are barely like debug symbols. All they do is map lines to lines. No information on where variables went, no info on name mangling...

In practice they are only useful for less-aggressive minifiers and 'basically sugar' compilers like coffee script. Trying to use them for something like emscripten or JSIL output is a mess.

<comment><USER4> That is not true, the fifth field of the mapping is the original name of the variable.

<comment><USER3> I just reread the spec and no mention of variables exists in it. That was definitely not added as a feature when I read the spec initially. Can you cite the relevant part of the spec and demonstrate how it is used?

P.S. Variables live in scopes, so attaching variable information to line mappings is pretty gross... I suppose if it works it works, so better than nothing.

<comment><USER4> [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U1RGAehQwRypUTovF1KRlpiO...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U1RGAehQwRypUTovF1KRlpiOFze0b-_2gc6fAH0KY0k/edit)

The 'names' field is a list of all original symbols in the program. Each mapping is 1, 4 or 5 fields long. If 5 fields long, the 5th field is an index into this names field, e.g.

Or see a more readable description on html5rocks [http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/sourcemaps/)

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Even now, rereading the spec and looking at the part you identified, I can barely tell it does what it does. That html5rocks overview is much better.

It'd be great if they revised the spec to not use such opaque terminology, and directly describe what the 'names' list is used for. The only reference I can find that explains this is 'If present, the zero-based index into the "names" list associated with this segment', which I only understand how that you said what it means.

Since one of your other comments made it unclear: Does this apply to _all_ variables, or only global variables?

<comment><USER5> I haven't seen the names field actually used by a debugger, so it's somewhat theoretical.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you've seen them in Chrome Dev Tools with GWT because I don't believe we are generating the source maps properly. IIRC, I asked about this before and was told Dev Tools does support deobfuscating globals as far as the stack frame is concerned. The fact that we are still seeing obfuscated function names on the call stack I think is our bug.

Edit: I take that back. I just looked at the Blink source code, as far as I can tell, it throws away the name index. Therefore, Chrome Dev Tools won't deobfuscate symbols, but Google server-side JS deobfuscation framework will, which is a pitty. I guess it is time for a Chrome Dev Tools patch. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see people thinking about making source maps useful for more real world scenarios. As mentioned in my other comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7388775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7388775)) they are not useful for most 'js as compilation target' scenarios.

<comment><USER6> I think that's a bit negative. Yes, they don't provide important things like identifying variables as you mention, but mapping back to the original source is still extremely useful by itself.

<comment><USER3> A large subset of scenarios do not have a 1-1 mapping of output source to input source. Source maps have been represented as a solution to various debugging woes when they strictly seem to handle 1-1 mapping and nothing else. The linked blog post addresses this to a degree, and that's why I think it's great to see it cover this topic.

The misleading presentation of source map features is problematic because I think it leads end-users of transpilers to believe that it will solve their problems and ask for it as a feature addition, when in reality it won't do them much good.

I do think the people who specced source maps were correct to start with the narrowest possible feature set, though, even if the resulting spec seems strangely micro-optimized in ways that make it much harder to generate than it would be otherwise.

<comment><USER4> I think the motivation of the original design was probably efficiently. Google ships many very large JS bundles, Gmail, Calendar, G+, etc. I think Gmail may be on the order of 4Mb obfuscated. Loading up large maps would hog tons of memory and be slow.

SourceMaps originally came out of a need for better stack trace deobfuscation I think, use inside of debuggers came way later.

I am totally onboard with fixing the deficiencies of the current format to make debugging better. Now that neither Firefox nor Chrome support the JSVM hooks we needed to make GWT DevMode work, we are stuck with sourcemaps for debugging, and Java programmers are not pleased with having to look at mangled symbol names in their scopes and watches.

I don't really care what the format of the file is, as long as it preserves a number of features:

1) can still ship and debug 'stripped' binaries, doing deobfuscation offline on the server 2) memory and network efficient. Don't make my JS debugger freeze loading these things in, or each up hundreds of megabytes 3) supports cascading and merging. We have hybrid apps at Google, that is, apps that are compiled with multiple transpilers and linked together. We 'merge' sourcemaps from these together in a unified sourcemap. So whatever the future format is, it should support efficient composition.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I think they did a decent job of optimizing for constraints, other than the use of JSON and VLQ (Honestly, protobufs would have been a universally better encoding for this, since they provide fixed-size records you can seek through and already offer a superior variable-length encoding.)

I think extending what we already have instead of reinventing the format is smart. All of your concerns listed at the end are things I care about too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not completely sure I'm reading this proposal correctly, but at first blush it seems like it would only support lexically scoped variables. If so then that would be an unfortunate limitation.

ClojureScript, for instance, supports dynamic bindings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect example of why having an extensible format is so important! It should be easy to just add a new debugging annotation for dynamic bindings without changing the format at all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We've had some of these problems with GWT, but I think some of them can be solved with a much simpler mechanism than serializing an AST.

For example, for each symbol we record, we can simply introduce something called a 'scope identifier' and then define a language specific mechanism by which debuggers can compute scope identifiers.

Consider the following problem for GWT:

class Foo { String hello; }

class Bar { String world; }

Both of these can be compiled and obfuscated an an object with field 'a'. So when encountering a heap reference to an object with field 'a', does it deobfuscate to 'hello' or deobfuscate to 'world'?

We have many kinds of scopes: global scope, object scope, function scope, etc. In this case, its an object scope. If we uniquely identify each scope, we can perform the mapping as long as there's a way to compute runtime type, e.g.

Store 'a' as '2:a' (scope identifier '2') Put a mapping in the sourcemap that 'Foo' maps to '2', and now we can introspect the heap reference, determine it is 'Foo', map it to '2', and properly display it as 'hello'

Different languages may have different ways of setting up classes and defining runtime types. GWT for example, does not rely on JS constructors, but instead hangs a classId off of the prototype. I think Dart does something different. In any case, it is a simple extension to the existing format and backwards compatible. The only runtime API needed is a function getScopeIdForReference(obj) which takes a compiled object and gives its scope.

The AST approach I think has several problems:

1) if the annotations are present in the shipped obfuscated code, it leaks information that people don't want. Many people do not want to leak the source filenames or directory structure of production apps.

2) it increases the download size for consumers who are not developers and don't need the maps

3) if written out as a separate file that co-exists with a stripped binary, it increases memory requirements of the debugger.

The way Google deploys Gmail, for example, we use sourcemaps in production as well as development. When exceptions are thrown on the client, the stack traces are reported back to servers, deobfuscated via sourcemaps, and put into a triage system. A person looking at a bug report sees a deobfuscated trace, but the consumers aren't burned with having to download the sourcemaps in annotated js.

I think the idea of defining an actual sourcemap API for the debugger (getDisplayValues, getLocals, eval, etc) has a lot of value, because these function are source-language dependent, so having GWT/Dart/Emscripten/CoffeeScript/etc generate them is useful.

But I don't think annotating the actual JS, or switching the sourcemap format to an AST is a big win. Yes, it is a simplification, but it also trades off other useful properties of sourcemaps.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> 1) if the annotations are present in the shipped obfuscated code, it leaks information that people don't want. Many people do not want to leak the source filenames or directory structure of production apps._

You would be able to continue using the approach you describe for GMail. There is no reason to publicly serve the debugging information unless you want to.

 _> 2) it increases the download size for consumers who are not developers and don't need the maps_

No, the debugging information would still be an auxiliary file like it is now.

 _3) if written out as a separate file that co-exists with a stripped binary, it increases memory requirements of the debugger._

Debuggers need to keep the source map around now, anyways; this is no different.

Regarding the scope identifiers: it would solve scoping for the most part, but it fails to handle the last three requirements I defined:

\- _It should provide a way for the JavaScript debugger to display values in a meaningful way._

\- _It should optionally provide an eval capability, for use from a REPL, watch expression, or conditional breakpoint._

\- _The format should be future-extensible. That is, when SourceMap.next v2 rolls out, any SourceMap.next v1 consumer should still be able to parse and use instances of SourceMap.next v2 (although without the new features, of course)._

Inspecting values would still be a pain, and you wouldn't have watch expressions or conditional breakpoints, etc.

Also, much of the value in what I described in the blog post is the future- extensible format. It allows us to fix our mistakes post facto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Or just sit back and hope for a super cool Google dev tools update.

<comment><USER9> did you read who the blog post was written by?.. Nick co-authored the paper that defined source maps, and implemented the Firefox dev tools part of it. In other words, if there's going to be a "super cool [Google/Firefox] dev tools update", there's a pretty good chance he's gonna (help to) write it.</comment></comment>


Chicago-Area Leaders Call for Illinois to Abolish History Classes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-area-leaders-call-for-illinois-to-eliminate-history-classes/2315752/ <comment><USER2> Cancel culture eating it's own ?

<comment><USER3> How is "temporarily halt instruction until an alternative is decided upon" because "current history teachings lead to a racist society and overlook the contributions of women and minorities" part of "cancel culture"?</comment></comment>


Facebook Launches "Nearby Friends" With Opt-In Real-Time Location Sharing - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/facebook-nearby-friends/

<comment><USER2> >The feature could spell trouble for other location sharing apps like Foursquare and Google Latitude

That could be difficult: Latitude was retired in August. [https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3001634?hl=en](https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3001634?hl=en)

<comment><USER3> I was assured that FB Check-Ins would kill Foursquare, so I assume it is also dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an _incredibly_ old feature. I found this in their binaries over a year ago, and it doesn't look like much has changed in the mean time. Still creepy as all hell.

</comment><comment><USER5> More discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604792)</comment>


Best(cost and scalability) hosting solution for a web application  - <AUTHOR>

We're preparing a web application that realistically has the potential to quickly escalate to a large number of users. On the other hand, we would not be the first to be wrong in that assumption :p
We are doing this "pro-bono", so we would prefer to cut on initial costs - later maybe advertising can cover hosting -  but at the same time we don't won't to compromise too much our ability to deal with the hoped/expected fast growth of our user community and therefore traffic.
The options we see are:
a) to start with in-house hosting and if we start getting a lot of traffic, then migrate to external hosting as quick as possible. However, I wonder how fast and easy such migration would be, since we wouldn't want to have the site down for 2 months while we migrate to a separate infrastructure.
b) immediately invest on external hosting, which would provide us the scalability, but require a significant investment from the start...
c) ?
I'm sure we're not the first facing this dilemma. Any suggestions? For those suggesting b), any recommendation on providers?
Thanks.
PS: The application will be GWT+Google Maps+Tomcat+MySQL. <comment><USER2> If you don't mind developing for their data structure, I think Google App Engine makes scaling pretty easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually looked at that. But for what I read, the cost is then based on user base, 8$ per user per month at a max of 1000$ per month. So we would probably reach that on the first month...

<comment><USER2> I think that is just their App Engine for Business costs: (for others' reference: <http://code.google.com/appengine/business/>)

You may want the extra services that this gives, but it is not the standard App Engine offering.

If you are not using App Engine for Business, the costs are for CPU and bandwidth, etc., and not for users, and so should be significantly less than that.

edit: The standard pricing structure is at <http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html> and there is a free quota as well which is pretty generous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah...cool, thanks :) I'll definitely look into it again then. Like you pointed thought, it's also a case of analyzing if the datastore is worth the extra effort...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why haven't Docker apps become mainstream? - <AUTHOR> I only have a limited practical experience in Docker but one of the foremost thing that it sells is running an application anywhere. The most immediate benefit that struck me with this was the ability to create software that can have hassle-free deployment anywhere.
Doesn't it make sense for people to create business around offering Docker apps on private servers? It could be related to analytics, monitoring, or content management. Although, cloud server will always be more convenient but there might be numerous reasons for businesses to choose the other.
But so far I haven't noticed anyone who has made a similar attempt. Is there a reason why this has happened yet? Am I missing something? <comment><USER2> Business outside of IT works and innovates slowly.

Try to explain your average 50-year-old middle manager in ManufacturingCorp why Docker (or anything conceived in the last, say, 5 years) is a good idea even when implementation costs money instead of staying with what is known and appears risk-free at no extra cost.

<comment><USER3> This is a huge factor. Newer companies/startups are starting to use Docker, but it will be very difficult to come into a company that is already running and convince them to change their entire workflow/infrastructure over to something different.

I think over the next few years you will see a lot more docker infrastructures in production as these newer applications begin to mature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Full disclosure - I work for nanobox.io, a company that is trying to do this.

Deploying a "Docker application" is complicated, especially when you throw things like K8's into the mix. Container networking and communication isn't easy.

You're right though, it does make sense for there to be a service that does this, and thats why there are things like flynn.io, dokku, and nanobox.io, each trying to tackle this problem and make creating and deploying docker applications easier.

</comment><comment><USER4> perhaps they've realised docker isn't all it's cracked up to be: [https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an- upd...](https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-update/)

.deb/.rpm packaging isn't that hard, and for more complex setups it's probably more realistic provide vm images to run on esx/xen/etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Azure, AWS, and many other IaaS support deployment of Docker. Is that what you mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant why there haven't been apps that could be purchased and simply deployed with a Docker command. For instance, a simple Log management solution that could be deployed this way for a cloud network of a business.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How have you transitioned into a new technology as a freelancer? - <AUTHOR> What are some of the ways that you have managed to transition into a new technology as a freelancer? I am currently working as a freelance business intelligence and analytics architect with 10+ years experience delivering data warehouse and analytics solutions, predominantly using Microsoft technology.
I am currently trying to find a way to transition into data engineering and more data science oriented roles. I am doing a lot of self study and proof of concepts for clients where the opportunity arise. However most companies would only offer an opportunity to transition into such a new role if you join them as a permanent staff member.
How have you managed to stay a contractor / freelancer while changing technology and discipline during your career? <comment><USER2> I am a backend developer, I had an opportunity to be a contractor for a frontend angular project (which I never had played with before).

I basically thought I could do it and then did it. I spent around 160h in the project even tho I only billed 80h. So I basically worked "for free" half of the time but that was me "paying myself" in knowledge.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you land the opportunity yourself or how did it come about? I see one of the biggest issues being that people always hire contractors for their area of expertise. It is thus difficult to convince people that you can do a new technology without having done it before for a client.

<comment><USER2> I was already doing backend work for them and they asked if I knew anyone to do the front-end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I set aside about two months every year to pick up new technology.

I'm 26, have no mouths to feed, and no debt. Losing two months of income in return for better work prospects is not a big deal to me.

I start by building a small project using whatever bit of technology I'm learning, put it up on GitHub, write a blog post or two about it, and do a show and tell at a local tech meetup or conference. This results in a bunch of leads that I can then choose from.

My process works fine for skills that don't take much time to learn, or are in the same lane as what I already do. E.g, going from Angular to React or Python+Django to Node+Express.

However, if I were to move to a completely different field I might have to take a different approach. I haven't done it so I have no experiences to share. I imagine I'd have to take out a bigger chunk of time, perhaps ask somebody from my desired field to mentor me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your approach definitely has value and can most certainly work. If you make enough from current contracts in 10 months it definitely is possible to set 2 months aside for learning new tech and not feel financial strain.

Having no dependents also help and I am also in the fortunate position to not have any big financial commitments. The difficulty I find is in consciously setting aside 2+ months. Physiologically I always feel like I need to work while there is work available. Thus I am contributing to my own problem instead of solving it.</comment></comment>


FastMail Is Down [502] - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/FastMail/status/1138511340098789377 <comment><USER2> And their status page[0] actually indicates it as well!

I'm used to the status pages from Amazon, Google, etc. pretending everything is okay for about the first hour or so of an outage.

[0] [https://www.fastmailstatus.com/](https://www.fastmailstatus.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Might be a good idea to replace link with [https://www.fastmailstatus.com/](https://www.fastmailstatus.com/)

Of course this happens on the one day I actually have time sensitive emails. Sigh.

<comment><USER4> IMAP and SMTP are still working for me (imap.fastmail.com and smtp.fastmail.com), but if you have not yet created an "app specific password" you will not be able to log in as their servers will not accept your account- level Fastmail password.

<comment><USER3> Even IMAP and SMTP are not working for me. I have it set up on my phone and neither pulling nor sending emails work. Luckily the emails were locally cached though so I sent notifications that my email was down through my Gmail and that took care of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a DDoS, apparently:

> We're experiencing a distributed denial of service attack. This affects your > ability to login on the web & mobile. It may also create delays sending & > receiving mail. We're working with our network provider to resolve this. > We'll post more information as it is available.

[https://www.fastmailstatus.com/services/general](https://www.fastmailstatus.com/services/general)

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like it's back up now.

<comment><USER3> Back up for me as well. Status page says it's a DDoS.</comment></comment>


Website guided tours to engage visitors - <AUTHOR> https://www.spotclarify.com <comment><USER2> If your website is so complex you need a guide, you don't need this, you need a new website. - said every UX person ever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very valid comment, I totally agree that the best approach is to fix the flawed flow, make things more clear, etc... Unfortunately sometimes it's not possible to spend months of development effort on such task. Especially for early-stage startup that needs to validate the idea.

The fact that the website is confusing does not mean that it has no value. SpotClarify can help show it to users, and maybe prevent the total failure.</comment></comment>


I will build your MVP - <AUTHOR> I have shipped two products (both of which I am bootstrapping).
www.compversions.com www.leadsriver.com
For some reason, the clients from HN are of a much higher caliber than those elsewhere (testament to the community PG has created here). The last time I did this, it worked out well, so I figure I would try it again.
Either email me - marc {at} compversions {dot} com   or leave a message here if you are interested.
You tell me what you want to do, I will give you a quote (and payment terms) and we get started.
As easy as that. <comment><USER2> I remember comversions from back a while ago, and I liked it. LeadRiver is not in my space - so no comment.

With that said... what skills do you have/offer? Do you do iOS? Server/back- end anything? Or just web front-end...

What if my MVP (and I have money to back it) is iOS client with a server component? Can you do this?

<comment><USER3> In case OP is not into iOS, I would love to help. Will use parse for backend if thats cool!

<comment><USER2> Send me your vitals: email@example.com

I'd like to see what your background is etc..

but, with the .de I assume you're german and not in the SFbay? If so, are you compelling enough to do this?

I am really looking for an in-office hire...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> email sent :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You sure you sent it to the right address? Been 50 mins and haven't received it :|

<comment><USER4> yep sent it to marc {at} compversions {dot} com last night :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Who should I have received it from?

<comment><USER4> just got your email and replied back</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PP-YOLO Surpasses YOLOv4 – State-of-the-art object detection techniques - <AUTHOR> https://blog.roboflow.ai/pp-yolo-beats-yolov4-object-detection/ <comment><USER2> This isn't directly relevant to PP-YOLO, but I'm surprised roboflow is still promoting "YOLOv5" \- despite that model not having an associated paper and it not being made by the authors of the previous YOLO's.[1]

The ML community has been asking the authors of that model to rename their project[2] because they are basically stealing publicity by making it seem like the next version of YOLO, despite its performance being worse than that of YOLOv4.[3]

Roboflow has deflected this in the past by claiming they don't know if "YOLOv5" is the correct name[4], but by continuing to promote it, they are directly supporting it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that their claim of not being affiliated with Ultralytics to be either false or a half truth, given that all the top pages about "YOLOv5" were done by roboflow, including the first official announcement.[5]

[1] [https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet/issues/5920](https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet/issues/5920)

[2] [https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/issues/2](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/issues/2)

[3] [https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet/issues/5920#issuecomment...](https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet/issues/5920#issuecomment-642812152)

[4] [https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov4-versus- yolov5/](https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov4-versus-yolov5/)

[5] [https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov5-is- here/](https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov5-is-here/)

<comment><USER3> We're also the top result when you google eg "How to train yolov4" and several of the top terms for training efficientdet. Hopefully we will be a great source of info on all computer vision models someday. Our mission is to make these things easier for people to use and understand.

Regardless of what you think about its name, YOLOv5 a great model for a lot of use cases. And hundreds of our customers are using it in production and are very satisfied with its performance. Just as many are using YOLOv4. And EfficientDet. And MobileNet SSD v2.

They're tools, not sports teams. It's kind of weird that they've developed fanbases.

<comment><USER4> Why are you attacking a "fanbase" mentality when there is none? YOLO stood for a series of networks and subsequent improvements by PJ Redmon, derivative work like PP-YOLO still signals that it's derivative work, but ones like "YOLOv5" signal that it's an updated/ improved version, which it is not.

This weird defence pretty much confirms that Ultralytics and Roboflow are related though.

<comment><USER5> Just chiming in: I had the similar concerns about Roboflow initially, but to my surprise @josephofiowa from Roboflow reached out to me to discuss it. They set aside time to specifically address a lot of the concerns I raised – e.g. that they seemed to be hyping up a model without doing appropriate benchmarks (they later did a thorough benchmark: [https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov4-versus- yolov5/](https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov4-versus-yolov5/)).

They didn't need to do this. Part of my conversation was "I get it, you're a startup, you have to focus on business value rather than research concerns." But they made the time, and put in the effort, and I feel compelled to at least mention that that happened.

Also, @pjreddie has said that he's "happy for anyone to keep using the YOLO name! Just try to avoid version number collisions": [https://twitter.com/pjreddie/status/1272618558254534657](https://twitter.com/pjreddie/status/1272618558254534657)

Anyway, as a fellow researcher, I just wanted to put in a good word for Roboflow. Their priorities seem to be in order. I've also learned some interesting things from their yolo breakdowns, e.g. that training time on the newer models is significantly lower.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the kind words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a sidenote, can they get Redmon's name correct? In [1] and [2] they call him Redmond, and in [3] they call him PJ Reddie, which is his username and not his real name. It's not even that hard to be correct here...

[1] [https://blog.roboflow.ai/pp-yolo-beats-yolov4-object- detecti...](https://blog.roboflow.ai/pp-yolo-beats-yolov4-object-detection/)

[2] [https://blog.roboflow.ai/a-thorough-breakdown-of- yolov4/](https://blog.roboflow.ai/a-thorough-breakdown-of-yolov4/)

[3] [https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov5-is- here/](https://blog.roboflow.ai/yolov5-is-here/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the copyedits - I've updated to "Joseph Redmon."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was using "YOLOv5" (hope they merge all the efforts or relabel) yesterday and was amazed on how easy it was (no input image scaling or manipulation) and how fast it was with my model (<1h on RTX2080). Also on how easy it was to use in general (runs, ...) and how easy it was to install (Ubuntu 20.04).

To me PyTorch is much more convenient than Darknet.

<comment><USER8> not only to you :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Suppose someone wanted to train a model to identify which decade a photo was taken in. What would be the current SOTA architecture for that type of task? (Suppose also that you had a few million labeled examples.)

I like yolo because it's a production grade object defector. It seems harder to find a production grade classifier.

One amusing but dumb idea would be to use yolo for this: train the model on "photo from 1930," "photo from 1940," etc, where the bounding boxes cover the entire photo. But I'm curious what the professional solution might be.

<comment><USER9> Out of curiosity, what would such a model be used for? I worry that as ML is becoming more popular and powerful, people are jumping to use it on problems from which the answer cannot possibly be identified accurately from the inputs alone. This model's predictions would entirely based on historical trends of what images looked like, rather than something objective like carbon dating.

I am not discouraging someone from building such a model, but it would be really helpful to know the context for which such a model is being developed. If it's just a hobby investigation, it would be cool to see how "predictable" dates are from images. I could even see it being used in forensics to provide a "first guess" as to when an image occurred, and helping with triaging of evidence. However, things become deeply problematic if the result from the image is fed to people as "ground truth" simply because the model was found to be accurate on a validation dataset. I certainly wouldn't want this model to be used to determine whether a suspect is innocent / guilty, or to be used naively by museums to date photographs.

<comment><USER10> For example, creating a scrapbook of somebody's life from scanned photographs that lack any metadata.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think at a certain point, FLOP count will be more important than FPS. Like once you're running at real time, there aren't a lot of applications that care about 120 FPS vs 110 FPS. But there are a lot of situations where you care about the total number of operations (regardless of GPU parallelism) because you want to run on an edge device or have power constraints.

<comment><USER2> There actually is some work ([https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13630](https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13630)) claiming that FLOPS are a poor measure of real-world performance - with some of the more recent FLOP-efficient models actually running slower than older models.

<comment><USER12> Forgive me if I'm being dense, but shouldn't we expect performance to degrade if flop count per unit time is decreased, assuming performance is defined as overall runtime (FPS in this case)? It's a trade off scenario where runtime performance is being balanced by other concerns such as power consumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slightly tangential, but has anyone had a chance to use PaddlePaddle? I played around with it for a little bit a few months ago, and found it to be generally a regression in use-ability when compared to Pytorch or Tensorflow V2. I'd be interested to know what someone more experienced with it thinks.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do the image collections that these models are trained on have EXIF data? Is that included in the training?

<comment><USER3> Usually, it is not.

There have been some attempts to combine image and text data into a hybrid model but I'm not sure how widespread it is. Ex: [http://cbonnett.github.io/Insight.html](http://cbonnett.github.io/Insight.html)

<comment><USER14> I've been thinking of enduring some exit data (lens focal length, aperture, gravity vector, focus distance, etc) directly into the image as a band of scale bars across the bottom to inject a reference frame into the image directly.

Not sure if it will do anything, just curious if it would help.

<comment><USER15> You can inject any data (in numeric form if you want) as a second data input into your neural network (assuming you are doing something custom).

For example we do this to represent the position of specific sub-image parts we extract in an original image.

> just curious if it would help

Depends what you are trying to do.

For example normal CNNs aren't rotation invariant[1] so if you know a gravity vector it can be useful to make your image upright.

(Whilst CNN's aren't rotation invariant, it's common practice to augment training data by applying some rotation to the same image, so depending on how the CNN was training it may be fine)

[1] [https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/239076/about- cnn-k...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/239076/about-cnn-kernels- and-scale-rotation-invariance), [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41069903/why-rotation- in...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41069903/why-rotation-invariant- neural-networks-are-not-used-in-winners-of-the-popular-co)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty interesting that the conclusion supports a slightly worse detector with a better framework.

</comment><comment><USER17> Baidu should be sanctioned. It is one of the companies responsible for what's happening to Uighurs and other minorities.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ5LnY21Hgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ5LnY21Hgc)

Computer vision technology, face recognition, object detection, image segmentation... it's all being weaponized.

AI/ML frameworks should have more restrictive licenses that forbid mass surveillance.</comment>


Calif. awarded $2.25B for high-speed rail - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/01/25/daily63.html?ana=from_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bizj_sanfrancisco+%28San+Francisco+Business+Times%29 <comment><USER2> Transportation infrastructure is a great investment in the future: where would we be today without our highway system? With air travel becoming more of a hassle each year it'll be great to have an alternative. Note that about 8 billion in total was approved, SF to LA is only one of the routes planned.

<comment><USER3> I think transportation infrastructure is a great solution to yesterday's problems.

Look at the newspaper industry: some commentators think their problem is that delivering news on dead tree is overly expensive relative to what people want to pay for it. Even if you accept that diagnosis, increasing investment into dead tree processing, dead tree distribution, and dead tree delivery is _not_ the way forward.

I use trains to commute to my job as a computer programmer. My commute is fairly inexpensive, hassle-free, and uses the best distribution system for human bodies the world has ever seen. My commute is also a jaw-droppingly stupid waste of resources.

My company and I waste three hours a day five times a week shuttling a few pounds of grey matter and a pair of eyeballs from one glowing screen to another glowing screen. The glowing screens connect to each other instantly, for so cheap next to my (cheap) train passes it doesn't even make sense to measure.

<comment><USER4> Meat-space bandwidth is currently unbeatable.

Telecommuting works for some people, in some jobs.

If eye contact, body language, serendipitous personal interaction, and shared experiences are not important to the social and communicative aspects of a job, then maybe staying home works well.

<comment><USER5> Maybe there is need to _develop_ means/skills for it to work in _more_ jobs. As Pascal hyperbolized:

"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room. "

[If not _all_ human evil... at least we can now append: "burden of transportation infrastructure + CO(2)."]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hopefully this one won't lose $32 per passenger.

"The Pew Charitable Trusts SubsidyScope Project has just released a new report that finds 41 out of Amtrak's 44 routes lose money."

[http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/27/riding-the-subsidized- rail...](http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/27/riding-the-subsidized-rails-of)

<comment><USER7> Why would it need to make _any_ money? Look at roads: they cost huge amounts to build and maintain, yet the vast majority don't bring in any direct revenue whatsoever.

Let's turn this statement on its head, and reframe it as a question: why isn't all mass transit free?

(Yes, I understand economically why this isn't the case, and I still think it's a worthwhile viewpoint/question to ask.)

<comment><USER8> Roads aren't free. You pay a toll to the government for their use every time you go to the gas station. And they shouldn't be free, although gas should be taxed additionally for its environmental externalities.

<comment><USER9> Gas taxes pay for the interstates, but they don't cover the local road network in most parts of the country. Road maintenance is a massive part of most municipalities' budgets and it comes from general tax revenue.

<comment><USER8> And that is truly unfortunate. There should be a tax on gas (mostly) and automobiles that completely pays for roads, and compensating tax cuts should be made against whatever the municipality collects; perhaps property or sales. Above all else I think we can all agree that people should be taxed especially to pay for what they use when it is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Because near-term job creation is the government's job, right? If this were such a good idea, it would have been privately funded. It's nice to know I'll be paying for another state's rail system for years to come

<comment><USER11> _Other funding sources for California's bullet train include $10 billion in voter-approved bonds and cash from private investors, which the California High-Speed Rail Authority hopes will provide about $10 billion._

<comment><USER3> Californian voters are in the unique position in American history where they can unilaterally approve bonds that will probably be repaid by other people's taxes. (Its similar to the position California unions have been in for the last few decades, where they can unilaterally approve pay/benefits raises which will be repaid by other people's taxes. These two situations are not unrelated.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> $33B for Afghanistan but only $2.25B for California?

<comment><USER13> Don't forget the $30B for Israel to keep occupation of Gaza. So a total of $63B for foreign occupation, and a total of $8B for domestic infrastructure transportation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sadly, the new California "High-speed rail" is slated to go 75MPH.

<comment><USER15> According to the CA High Speed Rail Authority [1], a trip from San Jose to Los Angeles is 384 miles and will take 2hr9m. That is an average of 180 MPH.

[1] <http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/map.htm>

<comment><USER14> Interesting. This is completely different from the hyped up CAHSRA plan about 6 months ago that was saying "high speed raiL" when what they really meant was "catching up on existing track maintenance"

<comment><USER16> Honestly, if all they did was take old rail tech and make sure passenger rail gets its own track (instead of being preempted by freight) I'd be pretty happy already. This is where the bulk of the speed limitations come in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tommy Thompson, a Ship of Gold, and Investors Still Looking for Treasure (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.columbusmonthly.com/content/roundups/2014/11/man-overboard-a-tale-of-tommy-thompson-a-ship-of-gold-and-the-columbus-investors-still-looking-for-treasure.html?page=?page=all

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted this because "Columbus treasure hunter Tommy Thompson, a federal fugitive for more than two years, has been arrested and jailed in southern Florida along with his assistant and girlfriend, Alison Antekeier."

<comment><USER2> The link you gave was only a paragraph long, and not very informative. Thanks for the followup that he had been arrested! That brought me to [http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/01/28/tom...](http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/01/28/tommy- thompson-arrested.html) which had more details about the arrest.

I learned about him a couple of years ago through the book "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea", only to find at the end that he had sign-off over the final publication, which made me wary about how to interpret the book. I then looked for more recent news about him, only to find that he had recently deserted his rented mansion in Vero Beach.

I'm pleased that he's been arrested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, the link goes to the first page of an 8 page story. I also read "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea"... ever since I've wanted to play with a side-scan sonar. I see them on ebay for ~$7K.

<comment><USER2> Ahh, it's just that "view all" doesn't work for me. I could page through each one though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lou Gehrig May Not Have Had Lou Gehrig's Disease - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/08/lou-gehrig-disease?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> He may not have had ALS, but I'm pretty sure he still had Lou Gehrig's disease.</comment>


Which language is easiest to learn: Chinese, Japanese, or Korean? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is-easiest-to-learn-Chinese-Japanese-or-Korean?share=1 <comment><USER2> The answer is always, 'it depends on what you mean by "language," "easiest," and to "learn."'

</comment><comment><USER3> I suspect the one with which you're raised is easiest.</comment>


Automated Failure Testing - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/01/automated-failure-testing.html <comment><USER2> I love failure testing, this is a great article. Molly looks pretty interesting. Netflix is remarkably bold for enabling their failure tests in production.

Shameless plug for libfaultinj [1], a fault injection library. It's remarkably simple (and still not quite as feature-rich as I'd like). You can use it in a unit-testing context to make sure you do something sane for things like file- not-found, disk-full, or extraordinary-delay-on-open. Or you can use it in a larger-scale integration style testing with random likelihood of failures popping up.

[https://github.com/androm3da/libfaultinj](https://github.com/androm3da/libfaultinj)

<comment><USER3> > Netflix is remarkably bold for enabling their failure tests in production.

This is almost a best practice these days, isn't it? I mean, once your reliability engineering teams are mature enough from a visibility and tooling standpoint to be able to identify and prevent issues. Of course, this all assumes a relatively robust architecture from the get-go...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe a bit off topic, but I couldn't find any info on the origin of the name "Molly". Am I guessing correctly that it has something to do with this[1] anecdote?

[1]: [http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/molly- guard.html](http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/molly-guard.html)

<comment><USER5> That's what I immediately thought of as well.

Presumably, Molly (Netflix's tool) is the kid that goes around and switches everything off. As in, it intentionally causes the problems Molly Guards protect from.</comment></comment>


Customize Blogger Comment Message to Boost Post Replies - <AUTHOR> http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/06/customize-blogger-comment-message-to.html <comment><USER2> It suggests that instead of displaying "0 comments", you invite the user to be the first to comment. It's one more of those little tips that in the aggregate raise a blog or website above the pack. The article is well written and worth a look.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot Russell. I've been blogging for over a year, so I've had time to come up with little tricks and experiment with different techniques such as this which in the long run can have a big effect on how your blog or website performs.</comment>