Triplebyte Engineer Genome Project - <AUTHOR> http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-project <comment><USER2> When we started Triplebyte, we'd thought there would be pretty much a straight line from being a bad to great programmer and we'd just have to figure out where to put the cut off when deciding whether to work with an engineer. The biggest surprise has been just how much disagreement there is amongst companies on what a "great engineer" actually means.

That's when we realized we were actually working on a mapping problem and the first step was figuring out a universal set of criteria that all companies care about. Then if we could assign the right weight for each attribute to specific companies, we could route engineers only to companies they'll be a strong technical fit for.

It'd be great to get thoughts on the criteria we chose and experiences from engineers who have done a lot of technical interviewing,

<comment><USER3> I assume the (very broad) criteria listed on the blog are supersets of very specific sub critera. Maybe if you could elaborate on what exactly those sub critera are, it would make things clear.

<comment><USER4> We have specific guidelines / process that we use to measure each. For example, professional coding is a focus on writing clean code, that is well designed on the micro level (good names, good modularity on the function / class level), and good testing. We measure this using a rubric as we watch each engineer code. Low-level understanding is knowledge of how computers work, under the hood (bits, bytes, character encoding, operating systems, networking, etc). Again, we have a rubric (and these topics are covered at multiple points as each engineer goes through the process). Our measurements are not perfect, but companies really do vary widely in how much they care about different areas (understanding how computers work say, vs. having a great coding process). By mapping this and matching we save everyone pain. No one had tried to do this before, and I am pretty excited about it.

<comment><USER5> I recall part of the Triplebyte screening process was to implement a solution to a whiteboard-type problem under a time constraint. It occurred to me that not all companies would necessarily place heavy weight on solving whiteboard problems in the interview process, yet Triplebyte seemed to filter applicants right out of the gate based on this measurement. I am curious if the genome project will alter this aspect of the screening process?

<comment><USER6> I went through the Triplebyte process (to the end) and did not ever implement a solution to a whiteboard problem under a time constraint.

<comment><USER7> I went through the triplebyte process twice; once in the take-home project track and once in the "normal" track.

Their feedback to me on the take-home project track was "we thought you did a great job; very impressive. But you interview so poorly that we decided not to move forward." I don't see anything to do in response to that other than to keep trying to interview, so I tried to do the "normal" track.

It was _entirely_ time-constrained, supervised whiteboard problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still don't understand why I would want to go through the hassle of doing an onsite interview with TripleByte only to have to go through further onsite interviews at the hiring companies?

If TripleByte's onsite interview allowed me to skip the onsite at the hiring company, then I'd be all for it, but it is like it's just a layer of friction.

For the record, I've had zero problems applying to companies by either emailing them or getting contacted by them via LinkedIn, email, etc. I just don't understand what benefit they bring at this moment. Maybe if the job market tightens and they were exclusive providers for companies, then sure, but all the SV companies have teams of recruiters emailing people all day long. As a hiring candidate there's no reason why I would want to go through their onsite.

<comment><USER2> Finding the right company to join is hard, you have to find which companies are doing interesting things that match your interests and then narrow down to the ones where you'll be both a technical and cultural fit. Failed interviews are a big time suck and we see that most people only have the stamina to interview with a few companies and they'll often accept one of the first offers they get, rather than optimizing for the companies they're most excited about. We have the data to match you with companies you'll be a strong technical fit, which saves you wasting time speaking to companies who don't value your particular engineering skills. The end result is a more efficient job search process, giving you more options by speaking with less companies.

We do also reduce the total amount of time engineers have to spend in technical interviews. Triplebyte candidates skip the technical phone screens, usually an hour per company at least. If you're speaking with at least 3 companies (which everyone working with us is), you've already saved time as our technical interview is 2.5 hours.

Happy to talk more about this, harj AT triplebyte.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, I appreciate that you're trying to add value but I still don't see it.

Until you can get the hiring companies to eliminate their onsite interviews and only rely on you to test candidates programming abilities, then there really is no advantage to going through TripleByte. There are only disadvantages.

If I have a bad day and mess up the TripleByte interview, then I'm automatically excluded from a bunch of top companies through TripleByte. But if I apply to each company individually, I get the same chance to perform and a poor performance won't affect the others.

However, if I do well, the only thing I get after doing a TripleByte onsite is to skip is a 1 hr phone screen, which, if I'm good I'll be able to pass anyway. And also I'm still relying on you to give me access to the companies which may or may not be the ones I want.

There just doesn't seem to be any practical advantage to using TripleByte over any other recruiter. I'd in fact skip TripleByte because it requires me to do a lengthy onsite which would require me to take a day off (presumably you don't do this on weekends) on top of the onsites from other companies. And the advantage of skipping phone screens doesn't seem worth it.

<comment><USER2> We've worked with enough engineers to be confident they're finding value and advantages to using Triplebyte. The feedback has included finding interesting companies (especially earlier stage ones) they'd not known about, skipping technical phone screens (even if you know you'll pass, they still suck), getting feedback on the Triplebyte technical interview, having interview scheduling handled by us, getting a high offer rate and help thinking through offers.

Assuming you can get companies to engage with you (i.e. you already have the right resume credentials) you could invest the time in achieving these same goals yourself as you're saying. For people who don't want to make that time investment, we can save time in a way that other recruiters can't by filtering companies using data about your technical skills and skipping those phone screens. The companies we work with don't trust other recruiters to do this screening correctly.

Our interview also doesn't require taking a day off work, it takes 2.5 hours and is done remotely via Google Hangouts.

<comment><USER9> Technical phone screens don't have to suck if both parties have a good attitude toward them - they should be fun! Just like our jobs should be more or less fun. Can Triplebyte match me only with companies with this perspective?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While hiring is indeed a big problem that can be addressed with a data-driven approach, I'm not sure the approach of "we have data, _just trust us_ " is fair to all parties.

The naming of Engineering Genome Project is styled after Pandora's Music Genome Project. The difference is that Pandora uses data to provide relevant and immediately verifiable results by the user, such as music along the same genre and artist. In contrast, an Engineering Genome Project uses criteria such as "applied problem solving" and "professional code" that is impossible for a user to interpret intuitively.

<comment><USER4> Well, the engineers who go through our process are in a good position to verify the effectiveness of the matching. Granted, the bar to reach that point and check the quality is higher than it is for Pandora (readers can't go check right now what their matches would be). But I don't think that's an argument against trying to do a better job matching engineer with companies. This is an important area that's been largely overlooked.

The categories that you mention (applied problem solving and professional code) really are important. Companies differ widely in how much care about those two things (solving problems in the interview effectively vs. showing clean, well-structured code and good testing process). When an effective but iterative (and sometimes sloppy) programmer interviews at a company that values process highly, the result is wasted time and pain for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Link to their blog post: [http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer- genome-projec...](http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome- project)

<comment><USER12> Ok, we changed the URL to that from [http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/04/technical-recruiting- platfo...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/04/technical-recruiting-platform- triplebyte-launches-pandora-like-engineer-genome-project/), which points to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a second I thought they were going to start sequencing genomes of engineers and start screening via DNA...

<comment><USER2> That's under the "Long Term" section of our product roadmap.

<comment><USER14> I think (or hope) that you forgot the "/s" at the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this writeup is a tad lengthy. It's not until the fifth paragraph that I understand what's even going on

>Intelligent matching with software is how hiring should work. Failed technical interviews are a big loss for both sides. They cost companies their most valuable resource, engineering time. Applicants lose time they could have spent interviewing with another company that would have been a better fit.

I feel like that should have been the headline for this. For a company that is meant to match people to companies, I think their external communication should be excellent not just good. How can I trust that this company will communicate my strengths and weaknesses in a way other people can understand if it's difficult for me to follow one of their flagship blog posts?

</comment><comment><USER16> Whenever someone decides to hire someone, all of their criteria are heavily biased towards what kind of skills the candidates posses.

I wonder if someone can come up with a reasonably accurate way to determine how well or easily can a candidate acquire particular skills.

I realize this line of thought might not be popular for most startups who would want someone to get going as soon as they start. But if you're having a tough time hiring a Machine Learning engineer and you get applications from a bunch of smart folks who want to gain experience in Machine Learning, would it be a good idea to give them a shot?

The traditional 'puzzle solving' in interviews was probably geared in this direction, but I'm wondering if there are better ways to gauge this.

<comment><USER2> This is something we're able to do too by encouraging people to reapply and tracking how much they've improved between technical interviews. It makes sense for companies to do this too but they don't, mostly because it's never any single person's area of focus.

<comment><USER17> If people reapply wouldn't they know the interview already? Seems to me TB is obsessed with UDP and thinks it is 70% of what engineering is all about.

<comment><USER4> User Datagram Protocol? What gives you that impression? In any case, we run several versions of the interview, to allow people to reapply

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I understand why many people are skeptical, but you guys are doing something new in a space that has long been ignored. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER19> I got rejected by Triplebyte and then hired by Google a while later. I prepared much more for the Google interview though, so I don't know if Triplebyte was at fault.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have to say, my interest was piqued by your hiring strategy.

It's a shame it's limited to just engineers. I've been looking for a recruiter company like this for data science.

</comment><comment><USER21> Very interesting. How do I know what I value as an employer?

Edit to my own question....

The 7 genome dimensions looks really reasonable. But hypothetically thinking I still want it all!

<comment><USER4> Employers don't actually (in most cases) have a very good grasp of what qualities they select for. It's function of the engineers doing the interviews and the engineering culture, and most companies are not aware how much this differs between companies. We model what each company looks for by sending them candidates with specific attributes and reading their feedback (we get honest feedback from companies after interviews, which is pretty rare). We're then able to see how feedback for the same candidate differs between companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting approach. How do you plan to scale this since you also need data points from the actual interviews done by companies?

</comment><comment><USER23> How does one assess communication skill without humans? A leap forward in NLP?</comment>


Carbon Black S-1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1366527/000104746918002643/a2235165zs-1.htm <comment> rm_-rf_slash Five years ago all the chatter was about private financing being the "new" normal for tech, as it offered closer control with fewer disclosure requirements. Companies like Uber were raising insane amounts of private money while thumbing their nose at public markets.

Now all of a sudden it seems there's a new IPO filing every week or so. Does this indicate a stronger economy and/or pressure from shareholders to allow their investments to become more liquid, or are people smelling a downturn around the corner and hoping to cash out before valuations drop?

<comment><USER2> Personally I think it's both. We're seeing companies that normally would have gone public (enterprise software like Carbon Black) at the appropriate time, combined with some companies where it makes little sense to go public (Spotify, Snapchat) that I think are cashing in before the bottom drops out.

Carbon Black has nowhere to go but up, they're destroying the AV industry and every security consultant I know is pushing this style of endpoint protection over traditional AV. And they're in the enterprise market, so they can charge big bucks.

Spotify on the other hand is one player in a crowded and competitive market with some huge players who could destroy them in a heartbeat. And even with their exclusives and much bigger subscriber count, they're still struggling to beat much smaller competitors in actual engagement [1] (or at the very least struggling to properly count their streams which seems like a basic requirement). It makes little sense for them to go public when they could just as easily be out of business this time next year.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17192342/apple-music- the-w...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17192342/apple-music-the-weeknd- my-dear-melancholy-spotify)

<comment><USER3> As a carbon black victim who gets angry at CB consuming %50 of my CPU in the kernel as I do builds that touch many small files, it just feels like a combination of corporate spyware/rootkits, traditional antivirus and uploading that info to a backend. Am I wrong?

Why hasn't traditional AV created a similar product then?

<comment><USER2> Carbon Black is far from the only player in the space. Tanium, Crowdstrike, Trusteer, Cylance, Cisco AMP, etc.

The way these "next-gen" endpoint systems work is by doing a deep analysis of every file, and like you said, uploading the hash to a central server for faster processing later. Your use case is atypical for CB customers but I fully believe you're having these issues. There's a drawback to every kind of endpoint protection. It does seem that the more general population is worse off with traditional malware protection than CB, but your use case seems non- traditional.

I should note that I am not affiliated with any endpoint product and AFAIK the absolutely massive company I work for doesn't even have an endpoint product that competes in the next-gen space. I'm just a security consultant who sees a lot of Fortune 500 companies and notices the trends they set/follow. It's trending away from Symantec and towards Carbon Black/Tanium/Cylance/etc.

<comment><USER4> Do you feel it's technically superior or just people following the fancy new tech dragon (or something else like because it also lets you spy on employees, if it does, I don't know)?

(Not that it's really fancy new tech - checksum AV have been around even since DOS. I'd have thought the best thing would be a combination of the two).

<comment><USER2> I do think it's technically superior when used right. Namely, application whitelisting is technically superior. Most employees only have a small number of applications they need to run, and making sure everything else fails to start is the right choice.

Obviously it's not perfect for everyone and technical staff will often need to run esoteric and constantly-changing applications, so whitelisting isn't always possible. In that case, using a checksum and having the central server is a better way of handling it. Better yet is something like FireEye which can intercept your file downloads and scan them before it hits your machine. I can't speak for which next-gen endpoint solution works best since that's not my area of expertise, but I can say it's better than traditional AV (which is basically useless). In that case, blacklisting is the better choice, for software _no one_ should have installed.

"Spying on employees" is an interesting take on what I consider to be basic security. I'm heavily involved in technology that, if the end user saw what we could see, they'd be horrified. Basically, if you're in the US and using your employer's laptop on your employer's network, you have zero privacy and everything you do and every site you visit is being logged into a central log repository and can be made available to the security and audit teams at a moment's notice. Most of the time no one is watching it, no one except an AI looking for anomalies and reporting on outliers, but it's possible. If you're doing DNS lookups to your company's DNS server, they know every site you've visited. If you're using telnet or ftp or POP3, they know your passwords too, because they're likely sniffing internal network traffic as well and storing packet captures. And they may even be breaking SSL at the proxy or gateway level, so that doesn't help you.

Basically, if you're worried that Carbon Black sending a list of your installed applications is your employer "spying" on you, they're already collecting far more data than you think. Installed applications is the least of your concern. But again... that's not your laptop and it's not your network. It's all owned by your company, and governed by their acceptable use policy in the employee handbook.

<comment><USER5> Freehunter, grateful for your thoughts on the below in response to your comment about technical staff running esoteric and constantly changing apps and therefore whitelisting isn't always possible.

Can apply prevention for

PowerShell, bat, java, javascript(node.js), perl, python, php scripts

Default "Trusted Scripts" applies to msi, msu, bat, cmd, ps1, psc1, psm1, vbs, wsf, vbe, ocx, cab, py, pyo, pyw, pl, pm, pls, rb, rbw, js, php files

Any other specified interpreter can be added using an Enhanced Scripts feature

REGSVR32.EXE (2016) without disabling its use "Trusted Script" technology allows IT to continue using REGSVR32.EXE while blocking any untrusted scripts loaded

Dynamically generated scripts (Trusted Children) e.g. Apps that spit out constantly changing .BAT scripts HP Warranty Checker Dell's KACE Continuum RMM

And any application can be trusted by one click and that trust propagated across the enterprise similar to Active Directory's inheritance mode.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I honestly have no idea. I don't work with endpoint that closely, I'm more on the security architecture side. I have wonderful technical engineers on my projects who are paid to get that in-depth, but that's not me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I deployed Carbon Black, and it seems a nice enough product. But it seems to generate too many programming related false alarms.

Well, they could at least identify when I used ncdu on / and thought it was a crypto-locker, which is nice.

<comment><USER7> I have heard that if you get Red Canary, they offer a service on top of Carbon Black to give a higher level of intelligence. This will likely help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As long as Windows machines sit on employee desktops, there will be a compelling need for things like Bit9/Carbon Black. I helped with an enterprise deployment a few years ago and -- except the rule tweaking that required quite a lot of trial and error* -- it works as advertised.

* There wasn't really any "error", per se. It was really just a trial in deciding how much the CIO/CISO was willing to deal with knowing about, versus remaining ignorant by choice since that was far less work. Given where they ended up, I'm not sure whether the millions spent on the software was a smart business decision. <banghead>

</comment><comment><USER9> "Endpoints are the new front line in the cyber war, and organizations are shifting their defenses as a result" ... what do they mean by 'endpoint' ?

<comment><USER10> Each node or computing device is an endpoint. Endpoint security is the new industry terminology for antivirus/antimalware/etc.

<comment><USER11> It's a very old term; endpoint security is in contrast to network security, where you try to block bad things at network boards. Firewalls are the archetypical network defense, antivirus (very unfortunately) the archetypical endpoint defense; osquery would be an example of a modern open-source endpoint security tool.

<comment><USER12> thoughts on CarbonBlack or Palo Alto's Traps? Separate category, but what about OKTA?? (I hear they are crushing it)

Do you think what ServiceNow is doing in ITSM is really special?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Next gen AWL/Endpoint solutions offer a simple and true default deny approach. Either an app (executable, script, dll) is trusted or it isn't. If it is not trusted it can't run - period. 100% successful at preventing zero day attacks and Shattered attacks and even malware that isn't written yet...

Trusted apps are cyber fingerprinted using 6 hashes - in order to use a Shattered like attack all 6, including file length would need to be simultaneously crashed.

No rules are required, no scanning is needed, instant protection on installation and can be managed/administered by non-technical staff. Can use an out of the box trust list with over 1000 apps already fingerprinted or build own trust list.

Can be deployed using standard tools and is scalable to global enterprise.

<comment><USER13> Are you assuming no one ever finds zero-day vulnerabilities in "trusted" code? What happens when a piece of code that you trust is compromised in a way you didn't expect?

<comment><USER14> They're talking about malware, not exploits. It's a habit of the non-technical side of the industry and means 'this hash hasn't been seen before'. Given the phrasing -- "Apps" are "cyber fingerprinted", hashes are "crashed" \-- I'd guess the post was written by a marketer or SE.

<comment><USER5> We are talking about file-based malware that needs to execute.

It doesn't mean this hash hasn't been seen before, it means that application X which is trusted, is on the trust list (and yes, fingerprinted by 6 hashes) is allowed to run. Application Y which is not on the trust list is blocked from running.

That malware can't get on the trust list (unless by a malicious admin) and therefore can't run.

A zero day exploit that allows the injection of malware onto an endpoint for example, doesn't really matter as the malware can't run. How application Y got there, is irrelevant. It could have come from any attack vector.

<comment><USER14> Exploits don't have to pivot to PE files, and even the exploits that go that route don't have to do it in a way that triggers standard loader hooks (e.g. PsSetLoadImageNotifyRoutine).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Fix Our Math Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html?_r=1 <comment><USER2> "Sol Garfunkel is the executive director of the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications. David Mumford is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown." Here are some examples of textbooks produced by COMAP:

<http://www.comap.com/product/textbooks/index.html>

I own one of the books. They are not designed for the students who are most able in math, but they do cover interesting, modern topics with accessible examples.

</comment><comment><USER3> The guys at <http://jumpmath.org/> have had some successes at teaching math in a way that involves and advances the kids, who were deemed to be bad at math.</comment>


Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1 - <AUTHOR> https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/19016 <comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but I'm not in SRE, oncall, etc.).

As the updates to [1] say, we're working to resolve a networking issue. The Region isn't (and wasn't) "down", but obviously network latency spiking up for external connectivity is bad.

We are currently experiencing an issue with a subset of the fiber paths that supply the region. We're working on getting that restored. In the meantime, we've removed almost all Google.com traffic out of the Region to prefer GCP customers. That's why the latency increase is subsiding, as we're freeing up the fiber paths by shedding our traffic.

Edit: (since it came up) that also means that if you're using GCLB and have other healthy Regions, it will rebalance to avoid this congestion/slowdown automatically. That seemed the better trade off given the reduced network capacity during this outage.

[1] [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19016)

<comment><USER3> Tangential question: does Google allow employees, not directly tasked with it, to represent the company online as they wish? Most companies I know of have a strict 'do not speak for the company' policy.

<comment><USER2> As kyrra says below, you're in the clear if you state that this is just your opinion. Naturally, prefacing something terrible as "just your opinion" doesn't make it fine.

In my case, Cloud PR knows me, but I also knowingly risk my job (I clearly believe I have good enough judgment in what I post). If Urs and Ben think I should be fired, I'm okay with that, as it would represent a significant enough difference in opinion, that I wouldn't want to continue working here anyway.

Finally, for what it's worth, I have been reported before for "leaking internal secrets" here on HN! It turned out to be a totally hilarious discussion with the person tasked with questioning me. Still not fired, gotta try harder :).

<comment><USER4> That's...that's some petty fucking shit. I didn't go through your comments but considering your email is in your profile, someone really had to have a hard- on to report you for leaks.

I would love to understand the though process of someone going out of their way to remove someone's livelihood from them because of a comment on HN (when applied in a normal circumstance of adding additional information or correcting a misconception — I'm clearly not saying that bonehead comments shouldn't have consequences.)

<comment><USER5> You're assuming that the person making the report said "boulos needs to be fired!".

Maybe the person making the report said "Hey, I found some internal details on this external site. I'm not sure if this is allowed. Maybe someone who knows more should take a look at it, here's the link to the page."

<comment><USER4> Their email is in their profile. I would think it is sensible to reach out to them directly or speak with your manager to get a second opinion.

Submitting a complaint to an internal review because "you're not sure it's allowed" is really petty.

In my opinion, and experience, folks who have good intentions usually pull you to the side to get a feel for a situation before filing a formal complaint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hacker News: The real status page and help desk for the internet.

Do companies realize how absurd this is?

ETA: It seems someone at Google had a change of heart, and most of what boulos posted in this thread has been added as updates to the official google status page. Better late than never, I guess, especially if this is the start of a trend in outage reporting.

<comment><USER7> seriously, they've got a text field on the official status page, why not put the text boulos posted here in that instead of the meaningless text they've got there?

<comment><USER2> Can you expand on why you find it "meaningless"? As my other comment says, I'm not in SRE and the real people fixing it are trying their best to remediate the problem. I agree that the text I posted (with blessing from SRE!) gives you some more detail, but you can't do anything differently with it, right? What about the new text do you prefer? (We're happy to improve!)

<comment><USER8> Your, even brief, description is interpretable by your clients and some customers - and is actually really informative. It helps estimate the magnitude of the issue, and the types of downstream problems to expect or avoid.

Knowing an astroid took out the entire continent tells you something about the repairability, resources required to fix the problem, and generally provides context for later updates, as opposed to other contexts like a cut fiber line, a burning datacenter or a bad power supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the original issue: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19015)

Not sure why they closed that one at 9:12 just to open a new one at 10:25. We didn't see any traffic coming to us-east1 during that time period so I would assume the original issue is still the root cause.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that happens sometimes based on which team notices, thinks it _might_ be different and then opens an outage.

Sorry for the confusion, and yes, the fiber link issue is the root cause. Draining the Google.com traffic presumably resolved the issue for you, though you may still be seeing elevated latency as the updates suggest.

<comment><USER9> Since we use GCP Global LBs I presume that "draining the Google.com traffic" also meant that you're diverting all global LB traffic, which is what we see. The second incident (the OP's link) indicates that but at first it was very confusing to a customer when the first issue was marked as resolved but we still saw no traffic being sent to us-east1 via our global LBs. If that makes sense.

<comment><USER2> This part was somewhat nuanced, so I wasn't sure to post it: yes, if you are using GCLB, and have more than 1 healthy Region, we will also rebalance to avoid us-east- for now (though not so statically as that sounds, mumble mumble).

Edit: added this to the top level comment so more folks see it.

<comment><USER10> There were reports of 404 from Google Cloud Run earlier today (I can confirm that I got both a 404 and a successful load after retrying that website): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336102) Was it related, it is a bit odd to get a 404 instead of a 50x?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I hadn't seen your post earlier. No, the Cloud Run (intermittent) 404s were unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anybody else feel like there have been a lot of outages in recent months? And I don't mean Google -- I mean lots of others too (I seem to recall CloudFlare, Facebook, etc.)... are they really increasing or are we just hearing more about them? Seems a bit odd.

<comment><USER12> That's more or less inevitable. As complexity increases (which it does naturally, if there's no effort to decrease it) at some point it begins to outstrip the limits of human understanding.

I've been saying this repeatedly (and downvoted for it repeatedly): if you want truly reliable systems, use simple, boring technology, and don't fuck with it after it's set up, and run it yourself. 99.99% of all these outages are due to screwing up something that already works, something that if it was in your own rack you could just leave alone and not touch at all.

<comment><USER13> > 99.99% of all these outages are due to screwing up something that already > works

Fiber optic cables are a great technology, but they don't react well to being cut in half by a backhoe. Is the solution you are recommending that we stop using fiber optic cables, or that we stop using backhoes?

<comment><USER12> Stopping depending so much on remote datacenters unnecessarily would be a good start.

<comment><USER14> I'm a remote employee of a distributed company. Where do you suggest we deploy our code/services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like an external issue. "The Cloud Networking service (Standard Tier) has lost multiple independent fiber links within us-east1 zone. Vendor has been notified and are currently investigating the issue."

<comment><USER16> It's not independent fiber links if they use the same tube to get into the building...just ask any backhoe operator.

<comment><USER17> my brother-in-law's construction company actually did just that. ground wasn't properly marked and the fiber got cut, multiple links

<comment><USER18> It's not uncommon to see 500 strand in one tube get cut by a backhoe. So much so it's even jargon at this point [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/fiber- seeking-backhoe.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/fiber-seeking- backhoe.html)

<comment><USER19> 500? Those are rookie numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why so many problems at Google lately? Calendar down two weeks ago[0], and Google Cloud had a larger outage a month ago[1]

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20213092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20213092)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421)

<comment><USER21> Terrance here from Google Cloud Support.

There are only 3 things I can say about this situation. 1) These issues are currently unrelated. 2) We learn a lot from these situations. 3) A lot of these types of issues can be mitigated by running in more then 1 region.

I really cant promise that today's situations will never happen again. There are a lot of moving pieces in our system and sometimes there are things outside of Google's control.

<comment><USER22> "You should be using more than 1 region" could also be "you should be using more than one provider", no?

<comment><USER23> Well, sure, if you hate your devops team and you want to make sure they can't use any of the proprietary functionality of either provider. At which point, if you want to be managing a fleet of vanilla Linux boxes yourself, why use a cloud provider at all?

<comment><USER24> * You should not be locking yourself into proprietary functionality of a cloud provider unless you are deeply interested in what happened to Oracle customers getting raked over the coals happening to you.

* DevOps teams can be multi-cloud relatively easy when using infrastructure as code tooling (Terraform, Packer, etc) and traditional DevOps practices

* Why manage a fleet of vanilla boxes when you can use vanilla boxes with Kubernetes and not get gouged by cloud providers in the first place?

You don't need to jump off the hype train if you never got on in the first place.

<comment><USER25> if I voluntarily choose a provider at a price that's acceptable to me am I being gouged?

<comment><USER26> Not yet, but it seems obvious to me that the GP was referring to a situation where the price changes and then you are getting gouged. That's exactly what the negative connotations of lock-in refer to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> To whomever commented something like 'laughs in AWS' (comment was removed before I submitted the comment)...

please don't...

glass house and all that... but I also share the same glass house as you.. I don't want bad luck

... and it's only a fluke that this happened to google in eu-east1 and not AWS in X region and then you (and I) would be having a time of hell! :/

<comment><USER28> Google seems to be more forthcoming with their issues. We have seen incidents in AWS where the status never got updated, but support confirmed issues.

<comment><USER29> Show me a GCP post-mortem that's as detailed and proactive about future improvement as [https://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html](https://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html)

Their last one was laughable in it's lack of self-awareness.

<comment><USER30> [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19009)

Can you explain what's better about the AWS one? They both do, approximately, the same thing: provide a few paragraphs of background, approximately one paragraph describing the actual issue, and a few paragraphs describing concrete followups. The AWS one has more timestamps.

You aren't confusing this[0] with the postmortem, are you?

[0]: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google- cloud/an-...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/an- update-on-sundays-service-disruption)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Holy crap. It's an outage in all zones? What's the point of AZs if you lose whole DCs at a time.

<comment><USER32> Availability is hierarchical.

<comment><USER33> Can you explain that more?

<comment><USER32> There is no service with 100% availability. You put multiple AZs in one region but nobody was ever pretending that regional failures were impossible, just that single-AZ failures are more common than regional failures. You want high availability, you want multi-regional. Above that you want multi-provider.

The same decisions that make regions fail also makes infra-region traffic cheaper. This is true for all large cloud providers. If you are okay paying more for internal network traffic you can get multiregional. But multi-AZ is still better than single-AZ. Up to you to decide if it's worth it. For that you need good SLAs and (IMO) support contracts.

<comment><USER33> Thanks, I understand what you meant now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Cloudflare was returning a 502 this morning, wonder if they're related. Lots and lots of sites down for about an hour, including all of Shopify.

<comment><USER2> As jgrahamc (Cloudflare CTO) noted below, these aren't related. They had a push that they rolled back, we lost some fiber links.

<comment><USER35> Cloudflare took us down this morning, but also shielded us from the impact of this fiber cut, due to direct peering with google (I'm assuming over different fiber paths.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> In a moment that's likely to be very, very frustrating for a large number of you that have businesses and customers that depend on G cloud, let's try to remember that somewhere there's an engineer or an SRE having a really hard day just trying to fix things.

Please, be kind and decent to each other, especially when things are hard.

<comment><USER37> I don't follow comments like these, should people refrain from criticising giant companies because there are people working at them? I don't understand the purpose of this comment

<comment><USER38> Complaining about the communication and response time of a company is different from yelling in the direction of some stressed engineer that they are useless and incompetent at everything they do. Sadly you get too much of the latter around the Internet.

<comment><USER39> Who is yelling in the direction of the "stressed engineer"? Does anybody have direct channel to those guys or you think they rigorously monitor the comment section of HN in the middle of an outage for yelling?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > The disruptions with Google Cloud Networking and Load Balancing have been > root caused to physical damage to multiple concurrent fiber bundles serving > network paths in us-east1.

I am assuming some sort of construction zone at or nearby the facility and the backhoe operator dug in and accidently cut the cables?

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been working out of us-east1 all day and haven't noticed

</comment><comment><USER42> It's been down for 4 hours and it's just now being posted on HN? Is it intermittent?

<comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

There were (and continue to be) connectivity issues due to a subset of the fiber links having trouble. But that's different from being "down", it's "just" an outage. We won't declare the outage over until the impact is minimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I routinely see notices of outages like this posted on HN while HN itself never seems to be impacted. This begs the question: Where and how is HN hosted in a way that avoids being impacted by widespread network and provider outages?

<comment><USER44>
      $ host news.ycombinator.com
      news.ycombinator.com has address 18.104.22.168

[https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-209-216-230-0-1/pft?s=20...](https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-209-216-230-0-1/pft?s=220.127.116.11)

M5 Computer Security

[https://www.m5hosting.com](https://www.m5hosting.com)

Unrelated: [https://begthequestion.info/](https://begthequestion.info/)

<comment><USER45> The begs the question site is one of my pet peeves. Language is not moderated by a select few who want to claim it, this isn't France.

This is why Ebonics is still a valid form of English - as long as it is used consistently.

If everyone uses "begs the question" and everyone else understands it as "raises the question" then it is perfectly valid.

<comment><USER44> Vernacular creates validity, for sure. The site's author acknowledges this, but nonetheless maintains that preserving this particular phrase is useful because there's not really another synonymous and popular phrase that means this particular fallacy, just the Latin _petitio principii_ and the modern translation "laying claim to the principle" which is pretty clumsy if you ask me. Not that "begging the question" is crystal clear either, but at least it's googleable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Looks like all that high end engineering talent and processes still has its limits.

</comment><comment><USER47> > The disruptions with Google Cloud Networking and Load Balancing have been > root caused to physical damage to multiple concurrent fiber bundles

Is this concurrent damage to separated bundles or damage to colocated bundles?

</comment><comment><USER48> The title says "almost 4 hours" (was posted at around 3 PM EST), but the incident was created at 10:25 AM PST, which is 1:25 PM EST. Has it been more like 2 hours or is there more to this incident?

</comment><comment><USER49> Down or just high latency? For some folks that is the same thing.

<comment><USER50> is a 4 hr latency, "latency"?

You make a good point though. Downtime seems to be awfully overloaded.

<comment><USER51> On our tests the latency is surprisingly low (20-40ms) but it has an error rate of 10-30%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What's the actual number of 9s for the major cloud services these days?

My impression from their PR seems to mismatch the number of outages and issues lately.

<comment><USER53> AWS EC2 promises 4 9's (4.3 minutes of downtime/month) before their SLA kicks in, but they only give a 10% discount until availability dips below 99% (7.5 hours of downtime/month) when they give a 30% discount. If availability is below 95% (36 hours) in a month, they give a full refund.

For an individual instance, they only promise 90% availability.

<comment><USER54> Availability of what? I've noticed entire afternoon where it wasn't possible to provision instances of some types, when I was working with AWS daily.

<comment><USER55> Availability of network access to existing instances.

What you're talking about with provisioning capacity is a totally different matter. Provisioning availability is not guaranteed (unless you purchase reserved instances) and there are frequently periods where certain instance types are not available in certain AZs, though they do try to resolve that as fast as practicality allows them to. It really stinks sometimes though - especially if you get into a situation where something fails in your autoscaling group and there is no capacity available for a replacement instance. Usually you can get around that though by making sure your ASG is set up for multiple AZs, or worst case changing instance types (though that can be problematic in it's own way).

source: I used to work for AWS Support.

<comment><USER56> Yeah, you can now provision multiple instance types in an ASG which mitigates this somewhat.

I think people sometimes forget that the cloud isn't magic, and a sudden burst of requests for new instances needs somebody to actually rack up some servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> App Engine and Cloud functions were apparently returning error rates of > 30 percent overall between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., with some projects experiencing a 100 percent error rate. GCS was also experiencing issues for the first half, which was attributed to the networking issues. Google said the networking issues were resolved initially but then stated they were investigating the GAE issues. Those issues were resolved, and the networking issue has been reopened as of 2:35 eastern: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19016).

GAE and all other services still show green here, of course: [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Bad config push again?

<comment><USER59> Running a betting pool on cloud service outage root causes would be fairly fun.

I'm going to guess load balancer cascading failures.

<comment><USER60> Nope. Physical destruction of fiber-optic cables is to blame, according to the GC status page. [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19016)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> When choosing a big cloud provider people forget that it's many orders of magnitude more complicated to run something at Google scale then to maintain _one_ single server. For example the whole Stack overflow website runs on one or two servers. World of Warcraft also used to run on one single (blade) server. Chances are one server will be good enough for most use cases. And if you don't want to have it in your closet there are plenty of dedicated hosting and colocations.

<comment><USER62> How can Stack Overflow run on a single server? Do you mean single cluster?

<comment><USER63> As of 2016, Stack Overflow ran on dozens of servers in two data centers.

[https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the- ha...](https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the- hardware-2016-edition/)

<comment><USER11> Also interesting what their minimum requirements were in 2014 :[https://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to- run-...](https://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-stack- overflow/#core-hardware)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Another day, another Google outage. It feels like it's once a month this year

</comment><comment><USER65> 2019 has been a really rough year for GCP

</comment><comment><USER51> Longer than 4 hours. We have stackdriver setup to monitor uptime/latency and its been acting up since 2am PST.

<comment><USER66> ObPedant: notice in google's status page "...as of Tuesday, 2019-07-02 09:11 US/Pacific." This notation is useful because it's stable year round. I don't recommend 'PDT', instead colloquially 'out here on the left coast' or specifically US/Pacific.

<comment><USER51> Thanks. Good point. Regardless, gcloud has been having issues for nearly 12hours. (timezone agnostic)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Notice they did not get around posting the next status update on time.

</comment><comment> awinter-py do they not have extra hands on staff to dedup the messages? what's with the identical messages at 14:31, :44, :48? This happened last time too.

</comment><comment><USER68> Pretty sure I've read before that us-east1 is one of the older Google data centers presumably with older equipment

<comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I think you're thinking of AWS's us-east-1 in Virginia. I don't recall when us-east1 for us was constructed, but this wasn't any sort of "old equipment" issue. Even there, while your experience may vary, AWS certainly has both old and new equipment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Wow. GCP is always a networking issue. Their QA on networking changes needs work. Maybe they should spend 20% on it.

</comment><comment><USER70> Kind of related to this, but these types of outages are why I moved from Google Play to Spotify for streaming music. Their infrastructure seems so large that things that should be a standalone service, like streaming music, are bound to be collateral damage when they mess something up on another service. Having everything provided by one company is convenient until it all goes down at the same time and you can't access your email, videos, or music because they all run on the same infrastructure.

<comment><USER71> Spotify is hosted on google cloud: [https://www.wired.com/2016/02/spotify- moves-itself-onto-goog...](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/spotify-moves-itself- onto-googles-cloud-lucky-for-google/)

<comment><USER72> I think the point OP was trying to make was relating to google services and their dependencies on each other.

<comment><USER73> I have the opposite conclusion as OP. Google doesn't use Google Cloud for anything critical, so I wouldn't use Google Cloud for anything critical or services that run on Google Cloud for that matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Google engineers ran into a coding problem that wasnt on leetcode

<comment><USER75> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Former R&D manager for Xbox Kinect sensors, this is my new project - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/milestonepod

<comment><USER2> Quick thoughts from an active runner (70-80 miles/wk):

\- Figuring out when my shoes wear down is not, IMO, a big problem. I can look at the soles and tell or I know after about 500 miles it's time to switch it up.

\- That said, it is incredibly important to switch shoes (or replace soles) when they wear down. I've been fortunate to not run into too many injuries, but I've been hobbled more than once by not taking the time to get new shoes. There is definitely an opportunity for some shoe company online to send me an email every X months with a 20% of coupon for the SAME PAIR of shoes I always buy. I'm sure they could figure out how serious of a runner someone is by the shoes they buy or repeat purchases.

\- Now, I might buy one of these to see what kind of data it stores because I believe the future of pedometers/activity tracking is they'll be cheap enough they'll come built into shoes. In 5-10 years I expect to buy shoes that come with a $5 pedometer/tracking device built in and that would be a killer feature. No FitBit to wear, etc., just something that shoes come with. That'll be awesome.

<comment><USER3> Though I completely agree with you, the problem these guys are trying to solve is when does the mid-sole break down, which can happen before your shoes look worn.

The bigger problem is that depending on the shoes and milage and runner, I believe the destruction of the shoe will vary.

Having said that, I too don't think there is a market here, but think your idea of a discount on my next pair of shoes is a great idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm an amateur runner. On average, run about 20 miles per week at a fairly good pace of 6-8 minutes/mile. Anyone would think that I go through a lot of shoes, but I don't. I have only changed shoes _once_ in more than two years of running. All of my shoes have been asiics, which I can not stop recommending.

Now, what I have changed (like 6 times/shoe) are the insoles. Runners know that they are the secret to less injuries and comfortability. Right now, I have a pair of insoles that cost the same amount that the shoes did (and they weren't cheap). And worth every penny.

Do I need a product like this? No. Do I want it? I don't seem to see the real value in it. I guess you need to sell me better on it.

Now, if you could invent a passive sensor for my insoles then that would be great. Sort of like something that changes colors when the insole stops cushioning the impact as well as it should I would pay $50 for a reusable one.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would check the sole of your shoes. Based on the way many people strike the pavement with their foot, the shoe's sole wears out unproportionally. It's possible that you have a balanced, proper foot strike so it's not a problem, but I pretty certain that majority of the runners aren't as lucky.

As a fellow runner, I invite you to follow our progress, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by what our roadmap holds.

<comment><USER4> Will you be sharing the marketing aspects of the crowd-funding campaign with the community here?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do not consider ourselves marketing experts but will be happy to share whatever we learn.

If you're looking for someone who has been successful, have you seen this:

[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2012/12/18/hacking- kick...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2012/12/18/hacking-kickstarter- how-to-raise-100000-in-10-days-includes-successful-templates-e-mails-etc/)

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the link.

I believe that we learn more from our failures than from our success. Though I dont think you will fail. But learning about your experience and the learning process would positively impact all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting product.

Observation: Am I wrong in thinking that both amateur and serious runners keep a general idea of how far they've run (just like in the video, "Hi I'm Meir and I run 80 miles a week"). If that's the case, then he'll need to replace his shoes every 5 weeks (given a 400 mile limit). Even if he's got races or marathons or friendly runs between then, he's still got about 200 miles of wiggle room. For someone who just runs for general health (say every other day at a rate of 2 miles per run), one's shoe will last at least a year upwards to two years. At that point, aren't most people thinking of getting a new shoe anyways?

Question: While I like the medical bracelet idea, how does that actually become implemented in real life/what usecases do you guys see being used? The benefit of a medical bracelet is that LEO or medical professional can immediately identify what is wrong (he's having a seizure, check his bracelet, it might be due to diabetes). Is there a precedent for a LEO to take out his laptop which is presumably connected to the department's network and plug in an unknown and unsecured USB storage device?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Regarding your observations, while you are right, I don't run 80 miles a week all year long, me as others use few pairs of running shoes, gym, track, field, race, walk, etc...that makes it very hard keeping records for all.

Regarding your question, the fifth death case in the US is wrong treatment, over 100K people a year. Speaking with emergency rooms and paramedics led us believe this is an essential feature, which they will use, the amount of data needed might be too big to have on a bracelet, and people keep forgetting them. a treatment usually is an on going one and not finished after the first few seconds, which I agree with you is the most critical one.

<comment><USER5> The question become data security though. If doctors, medics, or law enforcement officers randomly plug in devices from an unknown source into their network, that's a serious breach in security. I can't imagine that that would change even if they know about your product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I misunderstanding the product, or does it look like it solves not that much of a big problem? So, this device let's you track how long you've been running on a particular pair of shoes and when they would wear out, so you can have them replaced on time.

How different is this from installing an app on your smartphone and tracking the miles walked (on that particular pair of shoes)?

Could someone please clarify? Given the fact that this is a product coming from a big-shot (or an ex-bigshot?) at Microsoft, I am somewhat disappointed (I was expecting something _radically_ different)

<comment><AUTHOR> Everyone must start with an MVP. We wanted to be very cautious with what we promise and can deliver for the first version, so we're only including the basic functionality. Please follow our progress to see the radically different things that are coming up in the future.

However, even this "basic" product already has advantages over having a phone. You lace it to your shoe and forget about it. No need to have the phone on you while you're running, remembering to start/stop the app that counts your mileage. What if you have two pairs of shoes, than the mile counting app will not be all that useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just use one of a thousand other pedometers that attach to shoes? Really disappointing that you left working on something cutting edge to produce something that countless other companies already make. Good luck to you, though.

I'm not really your market anyway. I wore out my knee doing track in school and can only run on my forefoot now. This eliminates the need for shoe padding since you just cushion your step using your ankle as a shock absorbing hinge sort of. Have had no injuries since moving to Nike Free and then Vibram Five Fingers and I don't replace them until I wear through the soles.

<comment><USER8> What a weird comment - critique of his career decision, admission that you're not in his market, and a pretty irrelevant backstory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I run 20-30 miles/wk, and have a very different take on this than bialecki -- I find when to rotate my shoes really problematic. Explanation: I log every single workout and know exactly how many miles I run per week, but the issue is that I actively rotate between 2-3 pairs of shoes (one of my previous running coaches once told me that you should never run in the same pair of shoes back to back, and rotating has worked very well to help me avoid injury). In 2012, I ran around 1000 miles, but I honestly have very little idea what the distribution of the miles was between my shoes (keeping in mind that I might wear one pair for a 10 mile distance run, and another for a 3 mile track workout). Looking at the wear on the soles generally helps, but this method is crude at most.

Thus, for the runner who has one pair of shoes and logs their workouts, I agree that this device has little if no use. For someone like me, I would appreciate a solution where I could attach this to each pair and "set and forget it". A $15 or below price point is an attractive solution, especially if these devices have a long life (multi-year).

</comment><comment><USER10> Another data point: I bought shoes, the guy at the running store said to get a new pair in about 500 miles. I marked down my year-to-date distance traveled in my fitbit and got a new pair when I had gone about 600 miles (some padding for when I wasn't wearing my running shoes). Personally, this hack worked well enough that I wouldn't buy this sensor.

</comment><comment><USER11> Has potential.

Could you add an "ICE" button on the device to scroll key information - e.g. contact details, medical conditions etc. without having to plug it in.

Also inclusion of personal attack alarm could be additional benefit (e.g. pressing ICE button twice)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great feedback...we actually have these features in the pipe, but wanted to present as low cost device possible for start, something people will be willing to spend on top of their new running shoe purchase. We have currently 3-4 characters display and browsing information over 4 letters might be too annoying...again thanks for a great feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys. This is my new startup. I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have about it.

<comment><USER12> In your calibration tests against GPS, what sort of error do you see after 500 miles of accelerometer data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Initial test showed over 95% accuracy, and we are working on make it even better. On one hand it's not intends to be instead of your GPS to count each and every run mileage, even though you can. BTW, it will clearly count also treadmill runs, while a GPS will not...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool project! Aside from price, is there a big difference between this and say, Nike+?

<comment><AUTHOR> great question, For Nike, the issues are: 1\. The Nike+ does not have the digital tag feature so there is no emergency information available. 2\. The Nike+ is much more expensive. If you already own one then you may benefit from their mileage counting but if you do not you can get this functions (plus the digital health tag) for significantly less money. 3\. The MilestonePod offers an on the shoe display for constant update and reminders. Also, with Nike you have to run with a smartphone, our device is self contained. 4\. The Nike+ is a Nike product built primarily for Nike shoes. It can work with other shoes but you need to attach it to the shoe in a way that it was not meant to be used and I have heard it impact accuracy.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is very interesting. As a runner myself I can see a lot of application here. Especially at the price tag of $15, and re-usable for different shoes its almost a no brainer to grab.

Now, if it could make me run faster....

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. very excited to get this up and running

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Related question: What did you choose indiegogo over Kickstarter?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kickstarter implemented new rules in late September (you may have seen their "Kickstarter Is Not a Store" blog post and since then it is very hard for tech projects to get accepted on their site.

So far, Indiegogo has been awesome. We've spoken with their staff a few times and response time and quality has been excellent. A very good group of folks.

<comment><USER15> I heard about the new rules, but since it seems you have an actual prototype, not just some renders, I guessed that wouldn't be a problem for this project. Not saying you made a wrong choice, just interested. Thnx for the answer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks very cool. For the cost it seems like a no-brainer. I usually wait until a feel the shoe is too old before replacing, that may be too late.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can't you just flip over the shoe?</comment>


Why Do We Say "Big Red Barn," But "Red Big Barn" Sounds Wrong? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_good_word/2014/08/the_study_of_adjective_order_and_gsssacpm.single.html <comment><USER2> There's a good post about this subject on the English SE:

[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is- the-...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for- adjective-order)

It goes into some other theories on AOR (Adjective Ordering Restrictions) and I'd recommend it if you find the subject interesting. A quote from the top answer, which I enjoyed:

"I am reminded of how J.R.R. Tolkien's mother once famously corrected him at a very early age when he said 'a green great dragon'. She told him that it had to be 'a great green dragon', but when he asked her why, she couldn't answer, thereby starting him down the road of puzzling over matters linguistic and philologic his whole life long."

<comment><USER3> Came here to post the same link. English adjective order is one of those things that we're never taught as speakers of English as a first language, but I'd imagine it's taught to those learning it as a second language.

<comment><USER4> Another great example of a rule that exists in English that native speakers generally follow without knowing, but is taught to learners of English as a second language, is the rule of which adjectives form comparatives and superlatives by suffixing '-er' and '-est', and which by prefixing 'more' and 'most'.

As a native English speaker I was never taught a rule that explains why I would say _hotter_ or _wrigglier_ or _redder_ or _wildest_ or _shiniest_ , but _more emphatic_ , _more open_ , _most excellent_ or _most orange_. I'd always assumed adjective -er and -est suffixes were just irregular, with no pattern to them at all.

But it turns out there's basically a simple rule - if it ends in '-y' or has only one syllable, you suffix it; otherwise you use the 'more' or 'most' form. It's remarkably solid as a rule, and even when I come up with a word that sounds sort of right to my ear that doesn't follow the rule - like, for example, I can kind of see 'wickedest' as being a valid form - it turns out that if I think about it, it probably doesn't sound right after all, and I would probably prefer 'most wicked'.

<comment><USER5> It's good practice to check your intuition on things like this against a searchable corpus. According to [http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/](http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/), "most wicked" just barely edges out "wickedest" in terms of frequency, 22 to 20.

An example that strongly goes against the rule:

 _simpler_ (3185) / _more simple_ (153)

 _simplest_ (2191) / _most simple_ (87)

<comment><USER6> And a single-syllable counterexample: funner (24) / more fun (1860)

<comment><USER7> That analysis is probably confounded by the fact that "more fun" can be used with "fun" as a noun, as in "We had more fun after you arrived."

<comment><USER6> Good point. A google search also shows that since "fun" has only recently migrated from a noun to an adjective, the -er/est forms are not yet accepted, but will likely become standard over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was a bit disappointed that this article focused on "pure" adjectives without mentioning demonstrative and possessive modifiers. I learned about adjective order differences between languages way back in the 1970s when I took my first course in linguistics. These differences can be quite striking between noncognate languages like English and Chinese. Both in English and in Chinese, most grammatical relationships in sentences are communicated by word order rather than by inflection of words. But the word order rules can differ, particularly in the order of demonstrative versus possessive modifiers of nouns (what we call "adjectives" in English). In English, it is very anomalous to say * "my that book," as the standard word order would be "that book of mine," but in Chinese it is expected to say, "我的那本書," which corresponds to the anomalous word order in English. And so on for most phrases like those contrasted between English and Chinese. One thing that gives native speakers of Chinese an "accent" in English, besides phonology, is grammar differences like that, and of course the same is true when a native speaker of English speaks Chinese as a second language.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking something similar but along a different line of thought using English alone. Possessive modifiers behave differently than other "pure" adjectives and whether it's anaphors.

1) Jim's red barn 1a) My red barn 2) Red Jim's barn (Not awkward like in the headline example, but the meaning has changed completely) 2b) * Red my barn (invalid, period. even if my -> mine - I can do this word order in Korean or Japanese easily due to more explicit case marking)

We have to start using some syntactic movement to make the construct syntactically acceptable and semantically natural and equivalent, but doing so makes it possible to be free with word order:

3) Jim's barn that is red 3a) My barn that is red 4) Red barn that is Jim's 4a) Red barn that is mine (my -> mine) 5) Barn that is red and Jim's 5a) Barn that is red and mine 6) Barn that is Jim's and red 6a) Barn that is mine and red

The preferences aren't as clear-cut to me as in the headline clause, but we'd rather keep the possessive separate from the pure adjective (3-4 > 5-6, higher is more natural). Using only "pure" adjectives, it looks like the semantic binding preference still sticks though:

7) Big red barn => 7a) Red barn that is big 7b) Big barn that is red 7c) Barn that is red and big 7d) Barn that is big and red

Naturalness: 7b > 7a and 7d > 7c. And since 7d > 7b, we have 7d > 7c >= 7b 7a. I'm thinking 7b > 7c but wasn't quite sure because both sound awkward and comparing two mildly awkward clauses is probably not valid here.

But hopefully other native speakers roughly agree on the precedence of awkwardness with me and understand why this article is just the tip of the iceberg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting subject that I hadn't thought much about, but the cutesy writing in the beginning almost stopped me from finishing. Fortunately I did finish, as the meat of the article is farther down.

In summary, it turns out that we subconsciously order adjectives, most likely by intrinsic quality.

That order is _" general opinion or quality ('exquisite,' 'terrible'), specific opinion or quality ('friendly,' 'dusty'), size, shape, age, color, origin, and material."_

</comment><comment><USER10> Im curious if anyone has looked at examples of writing that have short sentences or phrases around the adjectives for example:

 _When I was a child we would visit grandma 's farm. There was a barn there I loved to explore. It was big, it was red, it smelled of hay and had been abandoned for years._

vs

 _The big red hay-scented abandoned barn._

And if the phrases follow the ordering rules as much as strings of adjectives. Further, if there was a strong correlation, what would that say to us about language and maybe even brain structure?

It would be interesting as well to know if that construct, which comes to mind as a way to highlight intentionally out of order adjectives, is actually used that way commonly or I'm just cherry picking random examples in my head.

</comment><comment><USER11> I doubt there's any set rule but it seems to depend on strength of association. For example it's natural to say "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association. Another case where "big" has a stronger association than color would be "white big brother".

On the other hand "red barn" has its own strong association [1]. Hypothetically if we lived in a community of farmers where "big barn" and "small barn" were structures with very different purposes (but color didn't matter much), it may be possible to conceive of "red big barn" instead.

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

<comment><USER12> > "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association.

That's because "big toe" is a compound noun that refers to one of your innermost toes only. "big red toe" and "red big toe" mean different things. The set of things they could refer to is different. In your barn example the same thing is true.

<comment><USER11> I see your point about the compound noun, but is there something in between when we care more about size than color? I'm thinking of a phrase like "we all went fishing and caught little fish, except for John who caught a black- striped big fish". Does this sound natural to anyone else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that when Tom Scott did a (great) video on this topic back in December, he used "Big Red" as his example as well.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M)

</comment><comment><USER14> Apologies if this seems like an inappropriate fork, but the author uses a convention in the introductory paragraph that I find jarring, at best, and I wonder if anyone knows what it's called? It's this (emphasis added):

"...You're not wrong (though not entirely right, _because descriptivist linguistics_ ): An intuitive code governs..."

Is there a name for this? It feels, to me, like an "abbrev" or something, where the speaker wants to either convey cleverness or assume common understanding with the audience. Maybe it could be called a "redditism" \- that's where I think I normally see the form. Does it have a name? Just curious...

<comment><USER15> This is a recent usage, or even meme -- "because science," etc. She's no doubt using "because" ironically. See:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/englis...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english- has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/)

<comment><USER14> Many thanks - that's exactly the discussion I was looking for :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why does "large red barn" sound wrong, despite the supposed synonymic status of "big" and "large"? Or, if it doesn't sound wrong, why does it tend to give the impression of a very different meaning?

I don't think there are such things as pure synonyms, and I also don't believe that "big" and "red" are distinct adjectives in the headline phrase. Rather, they have formed a new "adjective phrase" that has new meaning beyond the sum of the meanings of the individual words. This isn't so strange, the words themselves have more meaning than the sum of the letters' meaning.

Thus if you say "red big barn", not only are you avoiding the meaning of the more orthodox phrase, you're showing off that you're not describing it the way others do. If I called a red balloon green, you'd point that out too and think I spoke funny. Same thing here.

"Big red barn" is not just saying that the barn is big and also red. It conveys the sense of a certain type of barn, in a certain part of the world, in a certain era. Surely if we were to find some large cattle shack in the Scottish highlands and paint it red, it would fail to become a "big red barn". Or if we found some Sound-of-Music-esque farm building in Switzerland and we diligently painted it, that too would fail to become a "big red barn".

The most amazing part of all this, to me, is how blind everyone is to it.

<comment><USER17> It's because inventive language use is dying.

Imagine if Dr. Seuss tried to write something today. The big book publishers wouldn't even take a second look at his stuff.

<comment><USER18> If you wander around the children's department of a book shop (especially here in the UK) you would soon realise what a ridiculous statement that is.

I was in Waterston's children's department (UK bookseller chain) this weekend and found myself amazed at the sheer diversity of kids books. There was a multitude of amazing kids titles full of bonkers ideas and fascinating fun prose (a lot of it made up of made up words and interesting sounds). There were also weird and wonderful illustrations to join them.

Myself and my kids browsed and laughed and (in one case - 'Goodbye Mog' \- cried (although the language of the book is traditional, the subject matter - death - was unusual for a kids book)). lemony Snicker is also a case of inventive ideas rather than inventive language. But we picked up all sorts of weird books with strange language and big colourful pictures.

I came back impressed thinking that the kids book market was in a healthy imaginative state and wishing I went to 'rea'l book shops more often — you don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore. I'd forgotten how wonderful browsing was.

<comment><USER19> > you don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore. > I'd forgotten how wonderful browsing was.

Yeah, I've found great stuff just browsing near other category-sorted books in a university library. It's so disappointing that nothing similar exists online, either for fiction or nonfiction.

I'd love to see someone build a properly "curated" virtual bookstore with a great interface. Sell me things I don't yet know I want. Give me weird niches like occult bookstores as well. This can all exist online, but nobody has really done it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is "big red" the best example to use? We might be primed to thinking "big red" is correct because I've seen/read/heard it in other contexts:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(gum)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_\(gum\))

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(drink)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_\(drink\))

<comment><USER21> Hmm, but also "small green frog" vs "green small frog".

<comment><USER22> It works in that context too. It would have to be a Small Frog (proper noun) to make sense as "green Small frog".

What an interesting and unexpected thing to find on HN :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's interesting. I was reading about Lojban the other day, and I was thinking to myself that the placement of "sumti" around a given "selbri" was complicated to remember. For example, the word "vecnu" (meaning "sell" in English) is used like this:

       x1 x2 vecnu x3

where x1 is the seller, x2 is the good being sold, and x3 is the buyer.

But I guess now that I think about it, English is just as full of arbitrary ordering rules, even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 _to_ x3".

<comment><USER24> > even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 to x3".

indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him".

<comment><USER25> > indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him".

I've never seen that kind of construction used except by very young children or non-native English speakers coming from languages where the role of the prepositions would instead be served by inflecting the noun or pronoun. I don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in English, insofar as "required" means anything in a natural language.

<comment><USER26> Sure you have. Here's an easier example:

"I told him that." instead of "I told that to him."

<comment><USER25> > Sure you have.

I'd rather you not try to speak for my experience, since clearly you have no basis for doing so. In any case, you are wrong, possibly because you are confusing two different constructions for the same construction.

> Here's an easier example: "I told him that." instead of "I told that to > him."

That's _not_ the same construction as "She sold it him" in place of "She sold it to him"; its a different construction in which _changes to word order_ conveys the same relationship that is conveyed by prepositions in the form with preopositions. The same construction would be "I told that him".

There's a difference between being able to simply drop the prepositions and with there being an alternative mechanism of using word order to replace the prepositions.

<comment><USER27> You're just moving the goalposts here. Look upthread and you'll see yourself saying that we're talking about examples "where those things [directional indicators like the preposition _to_ ] aren't required in English". You've already picked up two comments pointing out that gioele made an obvious mistake when referencing a rule we're all familiar with. Since the only claim was that directional prepositions "are not always used or needed" even when they're permitted, the details of how you might avoid using them are completely irrelevant -- it's sufficient that it's possible to omit them.

<comment><USER25> > Look upthread and you'll see yourself saying that we're talking about > examples "where those things [directional indicators like the preposition > to] aren't required in English".

And you'll see in the same post that I quoted that that I criticized not the concept that the indicators were not required, but the particular _example_ given as being a poor example as it was not an example of a construction that was idiomatic English in current use by native speakers.

"I don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in English" in reference to a particular construction is not a claim that there are not _other_ constructions which would be a valid example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> In French some adjectives come after the noun, some come before, and even though my French is not that great, I know enough for some reason to have that gut feeling that "le grand rouge <noun>" sounds weird, and it should be "le grand <noun> rouge". Interesting how even with a second language these habits become ingrained.

</comment><comment><USER29> What if it has something to do with the adjectives that are most important/specific? Suppose I were categorizing my big barns by color, but not my little barns (Nobody cares about the little barns). My red big barn is pretty standard, but my green big barn is hard to see because it's camouflaged.

<comment><USER9> Again, this is covered by the article. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can see it going the other way around depending on the emphasis of the narrative. For example, if I were to say "Oh, it was a big, red barn", that sounds wrong, because "red" isn't something you'd usually emphasize. Whereas "It was a red, big barn!" sounds good.

</comment><comment><USER31> Red Big Barn does not always sound wrong to me. If there are ten big barns and ten small barns, and one of the big barns is red, I would call it the red big barn, not the big red barn. But if there is just one isolated barn, and it is red and big, then red big barn does sound weird to me.

<comment><USER32> That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to stand out. The other option, which I don't think the article covered, would be to change the rhythm and speed of the phrase slightly and put an audible emphasis on red.

<comment><USER17> Yes rhythm and speed of reading matters too.

A writer and poet also has that in their toolbox.

<comment><USER33> If you're interested in the linguistic term, it's "prosody."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not the same, but in the same vein this blog caught my attention. [http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing- finni...](http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finnish.html)

Complex rules that just seem natural.

</comment><comment><USER35> In case anybody's interested in an application of machine learning to this problem area:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287)

</comment><comment><USER36> "varnished blistered wood" describes wood which is blistered, if such a thing can happen, whereas "blistered varnished wood" says the varnish is blistered which makes more sense. Just a poor example I think.

<comment><USER37> Your example is an exception to the rule, though. Usually, two adjectives don't modify each other.

In fact, I find your second example a bit ambiguous because of that very fact -- it could mean that the varnish is blistered _or_ that the wood is blistered. The first seems to make more sense in terms of semantics, and the second seems to make more sense in terms of grammar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> while "bad little dog" sounds better than "little bad dog", "big bad dog" sounds better than "bad big dog". I wonder if that means that we might be subconsciously interpreting strings from right to left, and in that sense: Little(bad(dog)) would represent less our intended meaning than bad(little(dog)). Whereas Big(bad(dog)) would intuitively enhance our meaning when compared to bad(big(dog)).

</comment><comment><USER39> The font property in CSS requires me to say "italic large serif" instead of "large italic serif" which sounds wrong too.

Now I know why.

</comment><comment><USER40> [https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M)

</comment><comment><USER41> The English language is a nonsense.

For example, "Black box":

In French this would be called a "boîte noire" or literally a "box black". This seems more logical as first you identify that it is a box you are looking for, secondly that it is black.

<comment><USER42> It's a strange choice to choose the french language as a example over this matter when it's even worse.

Adjectives can be placed in front or after a word and you also have to guess instinctively which is right.

Ex :

"Un grand homme" (a great man)

"Un homme grand" (a tall man)

Both are valid but don't mean the same thing.

Source : I'm french.

<comment><USER41> My example used literal translations, so for example:

[https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man](https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man) a great man => un grand homme

[https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man](https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man) a tall man => un grand homme

In both of these examples, the ordering is the same as English.

So yes by that logic, you're right, French is equal to or worse than English.</comment></comment></comment>


Driverless Uber runs red light in downtown San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4 <comment><USER2> I hate to be glib, but: those driverless cars will fit right in in San Francisco.

(But seriously, traffic enforcement around here is terrible and is reaching preposterously dangerous levels for pedestrians. The intersection in that video is next to the MOMA downtown; human drivers block the crosswalk regularly, and I've seen them run the red exactly as depicted in the video at least a few times.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm more curious why the Uber employee sitting in the driver seat didn't pump the brakes.

<comment><USER3> I think the answer is obvious: he wasn't paying attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was the car in this video in driverless mode, or was it in manual mode with a human driver controlling the vehicle? AFAIK, most current driverless cars still have a manual mode.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really hope they don't "move fast and break things" with human lives.

I don't recall Google's self driving cars having run a red light. Do we have data on this?

<comment><USER6> If they are indeed running the self-driving car on Ubuntu, a full desktop operating system, then I think we're already way past moving fast and breaking things, and well into "how X11 can kill you" territory.

[https://i.redd.it/nnvqmprcjj3y.png](https://i.redd.it/nnvqmprcjj3y.png)

<comment><USER7> That's gotta be a separate system which just reads data and displays it right?

right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Human drivers run red lights all the time /s

</comment><comment><USER9> Meh, could have been in manual mode.

Which they have stated it would be in downtown driving.</comment>


Skyscrapers Made of Wood Are Making a Comeback - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-08/skyscrapers-made-of-timber-make-comeback-nudged-by-google-unit <comment><AUTHOR> These are being built all over the place and I can't help but wonder how they will stand the test of time.

This article explains that many of the large skyscraper structures are being built with new material known as Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT).

[https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/world%E2%80%99s-mo...](https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/world%E2%80%99s-most- advanced-building-material-wood)</comment>