Yoga guru Ramdev launches a messaging app Kimbho to take on Whatsapp in India - <AUTHOR> https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/baba-ramdev-takes-on-whatsapp-after-patanjali-sim-launches-kimbho-desi-messaging-app/1187414/ <comment><USER2> Patanjali's Kimbho taken down from Play Store; major security flaws discovered in first few hours.

[https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/patanjali- kimbh...](https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/patanjali-kimbho-taken- down-play-store-major-security-flaws/story/278137.html)</comment>


Geckoboard: "It's Chartbeat For Everything Else" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/03/geckoboard/

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting, but I don't understand the pricing model at all. If I want to give all my 16 developers access to a company Geckoboard I'm paying 16 x $X for that, and if they want access from their laptops and iPhones it's even more. And they'll also be logging in from home. So that's even more devices.

I assume Paul is here: what's the thinking behind that?

I could imagine paying for integrations with specific services and I could imagine paying extra for different update speeds, but this client level licensing looks prohibitive for my use.

<comment><USER3> Hi John, to say there was some deliberation on the pricing model would be a gross understatement. I sweated over this for some time but ultimately it came down to looking at the data on how beta testers were using the product, a number of pricing surveys with different user groups and one-to-one chats with individuals.

The most common use case was users hooking it up to a cheap netbook plugged in to a HDTV in the office or displayed on a 2nd monitor. In this case most small companies would use 2 devices max, a machine to configure and another to display. Perhaps unsurprisingly larger companies used it on more HDTVs (some use upward of a dozen) but they would rarely have more than one dashboard.

However, there are certainly a number of different use cases. Solo users, SMEs, large enterprises and agencies all have different usage patterns and finding a one-size-fits-all is almost impossible. I evaluated 'per device' to be the least bad option based on the data at my disposal. That said, it's early days and there are no sacred cows here, I'm always open to suggestions.

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. This makes a lot of sense to me because that's probably how we would end up using it (we have an in house equivalent called, jokingly, Boiled Parsnip) that it visible on two monitors in the office.

The thing I find restrictive is that sometimes you'd want people to be able to access it to get status information while on the road or at home etc.

Have you thought about a 'simultaneous users' model. I could imagine paying for something like that where I know I've got say three monitors set up (two here in London, one in California) and then I could allow up to three other people to log in temporarily if they needed to.

<comment><USER3> The 'simultaneous users' model is intriguing and certainly something I'll explore further in this context. I had originally discounted it when focussing on agency users but, while not a perfect fit in all scenarios, it's probably more palatable for most than the existing model judging my much of the feedback today. Thanks. edit: grammar

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love the product, have been testing it, but the idea of paying hundreds of dollars a month for the services that there are APIs for, and then another $9 a month doesn't appeal to my bootstrapped startup at this moment in time. And there's no free plan...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Congratulations on launching, Paul! Huge accomplishment. How did you get the coverage on TechCrunch?

<comment><USER3> Thanks Lachy! As for how I got coverage on Techcrunch, I got an intro. Given that our initial target market (tech startups) are their core audience, I thought it would be a great place to announce the launch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everytime I see something like this I wish I had a startup/company/job where I could be actively referring to a dashboard to make sure things were humming along.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations on the funding too! I remember trying this out when you floated it on HN a while ago. Nice one!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! The quality of feedback I got from my Ask HN post back in July was pretty incredible.

Since then I've spoken to a number of regular HNers who continue to use the product and provide feedback and again, been bowled over by just how helpful people are.

<comment><USER6> Great to hear! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of what beebole.com wanted to do. They seem to have pivoted from that idea.</comment>


Show HN: hack:now – 36-hour online hackathon tackling issues caused by COVID-19 - <AUTHOR> https://hacknow.calhacks.io <comment><USER2> This post got 10 votes in less than 10 minutes, but it's not on the front page. Looks like the anti-voting-ring software is working.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941)</comment>


Terminal Snake Game - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/leimao/Console_Snake <comment><USER2> Great to see this little tribute to NIBBLES.BAS. Anyone else who learned coding Microsoft QBasic/QuickBasic with Nibbles at an age of six?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_\(video_game\))

<comment><USER3> Age of 9 or 10 here. But yeah. That and GORILLAS.BAS. Then the MSDOS manual, batch, Visual Basic, POVRAY, Slackware 3...

<comment><USER2> great, those were the days! However, you got me with Slackware, I started with SuSE Linux instead.. ;)

<comment><USER3> crobots[0]?

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

<comment><USER2> Oh cool! Have never heard about that but it looks like quite an interesting idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> cool, here's mine in python [https://github.com/jquast/blessed/blob/master/bin/worms.py](https://github.com/jquast/blessed/blob/master/bin/worms.py)

looks like [https://asciinema.org/a/8682](https://asciinema.org/a/8682)

</comment><comment><USER5> You can also watch snake in the terminal being live coded here

[https://youtu.be/U-gdJQeOVAk?t=1501](https://youtu.be/U-gdJQeOVAk?t=1501)

</comment><comment><USER6> cool, although if you want to play snake in the terminal without building C++ from source, and you use the debian/ubuntu package:

       apt-get install nsnake

[http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man6/nsnake.6.htm...](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man6/nsnake.6.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Because of using a rectangular ASCII symbol the snake seems to be moving much faster vertically than horizontally ...

<comment><USER8> This problem can be easily solved using the unicode half block character. People who make these terminal toys rarely leverage unicode (I suppose for aesthetic reasons?).

Here's an example of what you can achieve just with unicode chars:

[https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer](https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer)</comment></comment>


Should a Programmer Learn to Design? - ux-app https://medium.com/@ux_app/should-a-programmer-learn-to-design-5101e1bd1025#.gxfrm8ftg?v=2 <comment><AUTHOR> IMO, a book every developer should read is "The Non-Designers Design Book" by Robin Williams (no, not _that_ Robin Williams).

It's short and to the point, so it won't take long to read, yet it covers all the basics of design to just the right level for the average developer.

"Design for Hackers" by David Kadavy is also quite popular, but IMO it just takes longer to say the same things.

Amazon links for the lazy:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin- Wil...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin- Williams/dp/0321534042)

[https://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design- Book-4th/dp/0133...](https://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design- Book-4th/dp/0133966151)

Edit: Since several of the latest comments seem to be saying similar things about programmers not "getting" design, I think one thing that may come as a bit of a revelation is that design starts with a hierarchy of information and there are certain rules for how that information should be presented. There is an artistic aspect to _compelling_ design, but when it comes to things like wireframes and UX modelling, your average programmer probably has more design skills than they realise.

<comment><USER2> I'd tend to agree with this assessment. I've never been a designer, from scratch...but once I have a design to work within I don't have any issues with making UI/UX decisions that keep things smooth for people.

This is probably one of the reasons that Twitter Bootstrap has done so well for people like me.

You ask me to worry about visual recognition, spacing, minimizing number of steps, 80% interfaces, etc and I'll have no issues.

You ask me to come up with a color scheme, tones, gradients, proper fonts, line spacing, negative space, etc and I'll curl up in the fetal position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good question, I think _everybody_ should learn to design. Because everybody is _communicating_.

It's not about being a master in PS, Sketch or Illustrator. It's more about understanding basic principles of design, colors and composition.

With everybody I mean literally everybody. The CFO who makes his spreadsheet better, properly arranged, using sufficient white space, complementary colors, etc. The CEO who can do proper presentations himself without calling a freelance designer. The CTO who can quickly sketch a neat flow diagram for his backend code.

You don't have to be Jony Ive but some design skills help everyone in communicating better.

<comment><USER4> And understand (basic) use cases for fonts, font weights, colors, arrows, etc.

<comment><USER5> Do you know of any good resources to learn about use cases for fonts and typography in general?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No. But they should start to appreciate it, and the people who create it, more than they do.

All too often, it appears that programmers see design as a lipstick-on-a-pig kind of process, i. e. a replaceable skin that possibly improves the color scheme.

My favorite example is the guy who bragged that he saved xxx kb of page weight by replacing the fonts on nodejs.com (or rubygems? one of these repositories) with Arial, because "all sans-serif fonts are the same anyway".

I'd also point to the frequent complaints about medium.com. It doesn't even matter if that design is any good – it clearly succeeds at what it's supposed to do.

The most obvious path to a better appreciation of the meaning and methods of good design is probably Edward Tufte's books[0], which is one of the "crossover" works that appeal to both designers and the more scientific-minded crowd.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative- Informati...](https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative- Information/dp/1930824130/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=telomere01-20&ie=UTF8)

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe the answer to this question is clearly a "yes", if you are building UIs (web or otherwise).

As a 10+ year UI developer I have found that my work is often judged by its design as much as the quality of the code, and that I will not be successful unless good design is a part of the work, and I cannot always depend on having a solid dedicated designer contributing to the project.

<comment><USER8> Quality of code _is_ design [1]. Eg, copy pasting is not only a maintenance nightmare for other users of the code but also breaks Exupery's perfection principle.

[1] Not implying that interaction and appearance aren't also design, but rather that code and SCSS rules are designed too.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but I think what he is getting at is that no one other than devs gives a shit about code quality. Users do like a nice pretty looking interface.

<comment><USER8> Users also care if something works, and code quality is part of that - eg, imagine what hits users when the same bug is copy pasted into 100 slight variations of some code rather than a single instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a problem is lack of respect for the fact that a huge part of design is _WORK_. It takes time and effort. Not innate talent or magic (though those help).

A developer thinks "I need another 5 values from a user, so I'll put another 5 text boxes on end of the form. Done! Wait, this looks like shit, I must not be a good designer."

No! It's shit because you didn't do any design _work_! It's not that you didn't finish a bad design, it's that you haven't even started any design.

</comment><comment><USER11> Once I learned some basic colour theory and applied it my work, customers found my products a lot more appealing. I now realise the right colour scheme can control minds - something I wish I'd realized years ago.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have never found comparison to peers' skill levels to be an accurate judge of my own capabilities. If I did, I never would have become a programmer. I started my first job programming without any computer science education. The average developer at the company had been programming for years and likely had formal education in the topic. My education was business, choosing quantitative classes when I could. My code was awful, my knowledge of data structures and algorithms non-existent, and my skill far below that of my peers. Yet, persistence and a determination to become proficient have made me into a "talented" programmer.

To anyone learning to acquire a new skill, especially one that is very different from the ones you already know, don't get discouraged. The beginning is hard and long. The breadth of the field will feel overwhelming, until you learn the lay of the land. Don't compare yourself against established individuals. Don't ask "why is it so easy for him/her and so hard for me?" Just focus on improvement, only on improvement. Skills are learned, not something innate like "height". That means you can learn them if you are willing to pay the price in humility, effort, and time.

</comment><comment><USER13> Design is empathy. That is, trying to answer the question "How can I make this easier to use or understand for someone else?"

So the answer is yes, we could all use more empathy.

</comment><comment><USER14> While I agree that design is _important_ , and perhaps a good thing to learn about, as a well-rounded human being, the author left me unconvinced of his thesis: "programmers should learn design." It's important? So is physics. Computers don't work without physics. It's loads of fun? So is physics. You'll get better at it the more you try? So is... basically anything. You'll recognize and appreciate the work of talented designers? And by learning physics, I'll recognize and appreciate the work of talented physicists!

Those same arguments could be used to persuade anyone to learn anything.

For my undergrad degree in engineering (and, to a lesser extent, in grad school) we had to learn to work the user experience process -- interviewing users, figuring out what drives them, how they interact with products, what their needs are, how to run product tests with users, etc. Why? Because we might actually have to do it some day. Not so much with visual design. Visual design courses were offered, but not compulsory.

While learning visual design (or UX, or product design, or whatever) might make you more useful in the workplace, and able to wear more hats, I'm still not convinced it will make you a better _programmer_.

<comment><USER15> My sister the Nurse thinks we should all learn basic biology, because, well, she's a nurse.

<comment><USER16> I learned basic biology and physics when I was a student, didn't you?

<comment><USER15> Had to choose: biology or electronics. Guess which I learned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm an engineer turned designer turned product manager (and sometimes backwards). Keeping yourself open to learning new skills is a growth opportunity that's silly to shut down in general. So the real question is given your life goals, would the set of skills that generally constitute design be valuable ones learn. Specifically, here's some common goals for programmers and how design helps them in it:

\- Entrepreneurship: Design is a lot of understanding human psychology. This helps you communicate in talking, documents, better pitch decks, recruiting effectively

\- Senior IC/Techical Leader: You can write more clearly, make great presentations that effectively train others, get buy-in more efficiently from management, be blocked less often by designers.

\- Engineering Management: So much people work here. Empathizing, creating effective feedback loops with your reports and peers (design teaches you a ton about the value of feedback loops and how to create them), presentations, effective writing.

\- Individual Hyperproductive Programming: You learn to understand yourself as a user better. I found that after becoming a designer, I optimized my editor to create the best possible user experience for me, wrote better tests, etc. Most good programmers implicitly do this, but having the vocabulary for how to think of yourself as a user, collect feedback, understand the visual elements that drive your interaction with your tools is massively helpful.

\- Product Management: Docs, slides and the usual. Importantly, leading teams of designers and engineers is much easier if you understand their craft well.

The code skills training as a designer made me much better at was feedback loops, understanding human psychology, visual and auditory cues to trigger certain reactions, hierarchy and organization, and many more. It's totally possible you learn these from different experiences in life, but there's lots of value in these skills for most goals programmers have.

</comment><comment><USER18> As someone with a decade+ long background in digital/product design and a 1 year fresh stint in full stack development, the answer from me is a resounding yes.

I can create apps that have perfect cohesion between design and logic without specs. I can skip the PSD entirely and develop my layouts and styles iteratively as I code. Whenever there are gaps in design decisions or stylesheet errors, I can smooth them out as I'm building the feature for the first time.

Between the UX and the database models, I know how it should work and how it must work.

</comment><comment><USER19> Before the web programmers often did designer because the whole idea of designers wasn't really so clear cut. Back in the 80's I never met anyone who just designed UI, they were also the developers of the UI as well (I did this for 10 years). Once the web appeared and UIs became more important to marketing, designers with art backgrounds took over. Eventually other specialties appeared to consider the UX, usability etc, which was not art. But in the beginning its was mostly programmers all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER20> In the context of startups you'll typically want the team to cover programming, business and design. I believe mastering 2 out of those 3 makes you much more valuable in the early stages of a company. I'm not sure why, but typically you'll see founders combine programming & business or design & business. Design & programming is a very rare combination.

</comment><comment><USER21> In the limit, design is a complete definition of how a thing (product, service, picture, story) should be- with due consideration given to all concerns (technical, practical, emotional, environmental, supernatural, whatever).

If you're solving problems, you're already designing solutions. Now at the moment, (for the programmers among us) when you're solving a problem you may only be considering some subset of the relevant concerns.

Therefore, the very specific question of should you learn _visual design_ can be reduced to: do you want your solutions to consider a larger subset of relevant concerns and be a better approximation of the best possible solution (product, pitch, voodoo doll, etc).

</comment><comment><USER22> No, but they also shouldn't be expected to produce work that looks well designed. It should be a common understanding that it takes multiple disciplines coming together to build a good product.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a degree in Graphic Design but a career in Front-End Web Development, I'm constantly asked to make design decisions (by people that may not even know my background). I feel I'm also able to see the bigger picture when I'm approaching a development problem, and I try to push modular development by asking the designers for modular designs.

All in all it's been incredibly useful to, at the very least, be able to speak design language when interfacing with the team.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a backend developer that studies ux because I do have to jump into the front end sometimes and take pride when something flows better because I know how frustrating bad sites can be. I also am a blender hobbyists with horrible 3D skills and I don't know why I like following along tutorials as at the end of the day 3D design isn't useful to my current job but I enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER25> WHat is the programmer coding? if it's backend algorithm heavy stuff, visual design doesn't really translate to that type of work. If it's anything having to do with front-end, the programmer can really compliment his/her programming skills with some visual design acumen

</comment><comment><USER26> Stupid question IMHO. Programming is always design.

<comment> ux-app I should have qualified it as _visual_ design

<comment><USER27> Programming is also visual design. The first thing that stands out when looking at a block of code is the contrasting outline made between the characters and the spacing, and first impressions will be made based on the design merit of that appearance.

This is quite intuitive if you take it to the logical extreme. If someone wrote a program that jammed all of the characters together into one long continuous block of text, you would immediately get negative feelings about the work, even without reading a single character.

The same holds true even when some care went into the visual design of the code. A codebase that does not present a good visual design will feel difficult to work on, even if it is well written from a technical standpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Often I see the two skill sets as uncorrelated. That is, rare in one person. I know that _I_ should never be trusted to design.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure they're uncorrelated, visual design is also about logic and consequences of structure.

In essence, it should be deduced from the end result, for example "the user wants to do X, so what does he need to do it, and what's the most efficient way to present it", similar to how you'd think about designing an API that other developers will use.

<comment><USER29> They are uncorrelated for me. I can easily grasp the logic and structure of html and css syntax, but the _spatial_ reasoning is what I struggle with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What books (or video tutorials) do you recommend? Related to this topic of course.

</comment><comment><USER31> well... Should a Designer Learn to Program?

<comment><USER28> If not program, getting a better idea of the constraints of the final application / website would be a start.

For example, learning that web fonts render differently in each browser (so, even if the desktop font looks great in Photoshop, it might not be readable enough in the real application), or the concept of fallback fonts, could be an eye opener for more traditional designers that only deal with static mockups.</comment></comment>


[Ask HN]Good book/tutorial on learning C++ - <AUTHOR>

So I just started learning programming and have only taken two classes of Java in school.  My next class will be more Java or C++ (not sure which yet since all the Computer Science classes are full so I might not get into either) so I thought I would spend my summer learning something.  Anyone know of a good C++ book or tutorial for noobs? <comment><USER2> It is probably best to think of C++ as an expert language; even if you learn parts of it well enough, you can easily be burned by what you don't know. There is really no such thing as a tutorial for C++ when a statement as simple as "a += b" could have dozens of different meanings in a program.

You are better off honing your skills in some powerful scripting languages such as Python or Perl, or even by starting with C itself, and perfecting that before tackling C++.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckels is good, and freely available online <http://www.mindviewinc.com/Books/>

The Stroustroup book is a good reference.

I agree that you should start by learning Python, and then C (read K&R) and then worry about C++

</comment><comment><USER4> Learning C++ made me a better programmer overall. I suggest "Accelerated C++". It is the one book I most enjoyed. It gets you up and running with the STL quickly. I also like Bjarne Stroustrup reference books. C++ is my favorite language next to Python. I use them both daily. When you must have fast, native code, C++ is hard to beat.

</comment><comment><USER5> You seem young so let me offer some advice: pick an interesting language that will either (a) get you an interesting job, or (b) allow you to develop what is in your brain. C++, Java, C#, Python, Scala, Ruby - it doesn't matter. What is useless is learning a language that you then cannot use to get employment.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would recommend learning Python then Scala instead.</comment>


Web Browsers Reject About Two Thirds of Cookies - <AUTHOR> https://www.emarketer.com/content/web-browsers-reject-about-two-thirds-of-cookies <comment><USER2> "Cookies were originally designed to track users across the web on browsers."

No. Cookies were originally designed to temporarily store state information.[1] I would be astonished if any of the designers envisioned in 1997 the persistent cross-site tracking that has become "normal" in the late 2010s.

[1] See RFC 2109: [https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt)</comment>


Machine Learning and the Jargons - <AUTHOR> http://blog.prediction.io/machine-learning/ <comment><AUTHOR> It describes the real differences among Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Data Analytics, Classification, Pattern Recognition and Data Science, Statistical Analysis, Data Warehousing, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Artificial Intelligence and Business Intelligence etc....</comment>


BSNL - India's No. 1 Telecommunications company website hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.bsnl.co.in/tender1/

<comment><AUTHOR> See the last statement from hacker(he has got a good humor sense) "Hey Admin: sorry, just logs and database deleted"

Here is a link to the screenshot if BSNL fixes it before this post (<http://i.imgur.com/K1ciN.png>). I think the fix won't happen because today is a holiday</comment>


Transcribing Piano Rolls, the Pythonic Way - <AUTHOR> http://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/02/12/transcribing-piano-rolls/ <comment><USER2> The faster way of doing this:

        def fourier_transform(signal, period, tt):
            """ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform
            How come Numpy and Scipy don't implement this ??? """
            f = lambda func : (signal*func(2*pi*tt/period)).sum()
            return f(cos)+ 1j*f(sin)

is using the FFT.

What you want is the _power spectral density_ in the discrete case, called the power spectrum. It can be calculated by multiplying the discrete Fourier transform (FFT) with its conjugate, and shifting. NumPy can do it. Here is an example: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15382076/plotting- power-s...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15382076/plotting-power- spectrum-in-python/15388340#15388340)

<comment><USER3> I knew I was going to have this remark :) Now correct me if I am wrong, but I think the FFT (which computes the __discrete __Fourier transform) cannot replace the continous fourier transform in my case, because the optimal periods I find are non-integer values. In the first case, the holes are separated by 7.5 pixels. The FFT could only have told me that they are separated by 7 or 8 pixels, which is not precise enough. Same thing for the tempo, a beat corresponds to 7.1 frames of the video, and a FFT would have told me 7.

If someone knows a way to use the FFT to get non-integer periods (apart from oversampling the signal) I'll gladly change the code.

<comment><USER4> The maximum frequency you can detect is limited by your sampling rate, but there's not a limit on the precision with which you can break those frequencies up.

It's controlled by a parameter NFFT -- the PSD will compute (NFFT/2+1) values evenly spaced between 0 and the Nyquist frequency.

So say the frame rate is 15Hz and you compute with NFFT=2048, then PSD[970] contains the amplitude at 7.09Hz.

This was a really cool project by the way!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I learned something. I will try it and amend the blog when I have time.

<comment><USER5> Forgot to say, great post! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See a master at work making original rolls at QRS. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3FTaGwfXPM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3FTaGwfXPM)

If was a fun place to see in the 70's after watching my father rebuild our player piano.

<comment><USER7> Interesting that they used computers to make them. It seems obvious in hindsight; player piano music is digital!

<comment><USER8> Also interesting that we had digital data storage, in the form of punched cards and tape, decades before digital computers.

<comment><USER9> Longer than that. The Jaquard loom was invented in 1801 and the player piano was first demonstrated in 1876.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a fascinating convergence of math, music and Python. Many people I meet who don't specialize in math but have taken university-level courses in it seem to remember the Fourier transform as a highlight, probably because of its many applications.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love the abundance of Python. For those unaware, even the youtube-dl command line utility he used to download the video is written in Python.

<comment><USER12> And in contrast to what its name suggests, youtube-dl supports 150+ different services: [http://rg3.github.io/youtube- dl/supportedsites.html](http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool!

Relevant: Zenph makes "re-performances" of old piano recordings. They take a recording, do music transcription magic to get the exact timings and velocities of each note event, and then feed that into a player piano. So it's as if you are listening to the ghost of Rachmaninov sitting at the piano, as shown here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eevzbV6Hkkk&t=28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eevzbV6Hkkk&t=28) (music starts at 0:28)

(I just visited [http://zenph.com](http://zenph.com) for the first time in about a year, and it appears that they've pivoted into a music education company.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting question - is the author's transcription a derivative work of the video? And if so, is he actually allowed to release his transcription into the public domain (without the permission of the author of the video)?

<comment><USER15> No, it's only derivative in the sense of process. The video lacks originality; for the musical notes it is merely a mechanical reproduction of the punched holes. Similarly, a photograph of a public domain painting is also in the public domain. See: Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999). At least this is the law in the United States, which is sensible; absurdity of other jurisdictions may vary.

<comment><USER14> It's nice to know our system accounts for cases like this. Thanks for the detailed info!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What if you tried to transcribe the music solely from Fourier transform of the audio source? I expect the piano has an abundance of harmonics, but there should be some way to distinguish them from the keys. Hasn't someone done it already?

<comment><USER17> i've seen NNLS/chroma referenced in a few places, like the chordify papers:

[http://isophonics.net/nnls-chroma](http://isophonics.net/nnls-chroma)

Here's chordify: [http://ismir2012.ismir.net/event/papers/295_ISMIR_2012.pdf](http://ismir2012.ismir.net/event/papers/295_ISMIR_2012.pdf)

That conference has great references but unfortunately hasn't been repeated since 2012 [http://www.ismir.net/proceedings/index.php](http://www.ismir.net/proceedings/index.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That was a lovely read, thank you so much for writing and sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Really fantastic hack. Now try transcribing with just the audio track.

<comment><USER20> That's a hard problem. If you have some material like that with a clear recording, the only good commercial solution that I know of is Melodyne, and he's not saying how he does it. In theory you just look for multiple peaks in the FFT, but this is much easier said than done.

<comment><USER21> i built a plogue bidule patch before melodyne rolled out "dna" and it is extremely difficult to get the optimal fft parameters to get an accurate conversion. i cant imagine an algorithm that would get it right from analyzing the sample would be any less difficult. ableton's and cubase's options are pretty rough too. i am a drummer though, i am just trying to make up for my ears.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My favourite blog post of 2014. Thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this is a nice solution because it takes care of the hardware side of things by making use of a garden variety video camera.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is beautiful, it's one good idea after another, good job!

</comment><comment><USER25> This is really nice, thanks for sharing it with us.

</comment><comment><USER26> So, so cool. I love posts like this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice post, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER28> fantastic. with your permission, i'd love to use this to demo python!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, sure.</comment></comment>


Berlin's new Pirate Party might be here to stay - <AUTHOR> http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15397528,00.html

<comment><USER2> "Many saw the idea of blocking such sites as censorship of the internet"

Annoying inaccuracy! Of course pirates are not in favor of child pornography, nor of not blocking such sites. The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the government wanted/wants to install a system that enables them to block any site, without even being required to give reasons and no possibility of appeal against it.

Naturally even now if illegal content is discovered on a German server, the government/police can make the hoster remove it. No magic switch needs to be given to the police.

<comment> muuh-gnu > The issue was that under the pretense of fighting child pornography the > government wanted/wants to install a system

The Christian-led goverment party didn't even pretend that hard what the envisioned "Zensurinfrastruktur" will be later mainly used for and on several occasions mentioned "child pornography, copyright infringement and other crimes" in one and the same sentence.

This was exactly how the copyright lobby envisioned the strategy, linking child porn and copying.

"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites".

* [http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-chil...](http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/)

> No magic switch needs to be given to the police.

But it is absolutely necessary to be able to block "outsourced" overseas torrent sites.

<comment><USER3> For an international audience who might not be that familiar with German party politics, "Christian-led" might be a bit misleading… Also, you're mixing the German and the Swedish cases here a bit.

I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of malice, and not sheer incompetence on Von Der Leyen's side. But however it started, the fact that this "protection" can easily be extended certainly was a big reason for its support.

I remember that in the beginning it was all about "due to the rise of child pornography on the internet", but when an official inquiry was made (by the FDP, if I remember correctly), they had to admit that they had no such data.

<comment> muuh-gnu > Also, you're mixing the German and the Swedish cases here a bit.

There are not German and Swedish cases. The media industry efforts cross national borders. The quote being from a swedish MEP doesnt make IFPI's case somehow different.

> I'm not even sure if the initiation of that particular bill was out of > malice, and not sheer incompetence

If she actually mentions "child pornography and copyright infringement" one by another in one and the same sentence on several occasions, then it crosses the border of obvious intent, at least IMHO.

<comment><USER3> The industry's efforts cross borders, but we're talking about different governments. I understood what you meant, but especially if you're not following the link some readers here might be misled a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am loving this wake-up call to the established parties of Germany, whose elected representatives are bailing out countries and banks left and right against the will of their electorate. The only parties which seem to represent the will of the voters (on the surface) in this regard are the left and the extreme right. But for historical reasons, many Germans will never vote for them. So the pirate party fills a real void (mainly for youths): as a protest party for disgruntled voters, and as a party which gets the internet and the importance of free/cheap access to knowledge and education.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's quite interesting to see a _successful_ political movement not just unwedded to the IP establishment, but against it.

<comment><USER6> Hopefully if they actually stay in power for any length of time they'll figure out that there's a baby in the bathwater.

<comment><USER6> If the downvoters needed it spelled out, IP should be a _compromise_ , a middle ground between producers and consumers. These days, it's tilted too far towards producers, in my opinion, but with no IP, it would mean that people could not make money creating digital goods that are easily copied. Or they would, but in ways we might find distasteful. For instance, a movie might show a lot of people quenching their thirst with delicious, satisfying COCA COLA products, much more than they do already. Or perhaps things like writing and movies would be the preserve of the independently wealthy. This would mean fewer books, movies, programs, etc... etc... which would ultimately leave the consumer _worse off_ due to the lack of these goods.

Digital goods that are by their nature not rivalrous and not easily excludable share some of the properties of public goods:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_problem)

Hence the solution of creating artificial property, which has worked 'pretty well' for a while. Being a compromise, it'll never be "perfect", and is something that needs constant tuning, not throwing out in its entirety.

<comment><USER7> When your adversary is successfully framing the debate in radical and irrational terms ("You wouldn't steal a car, so you shouldn't steal a movie"), the only answer is to escalate your own radical rhetoric until a fair compromise can be reached; you create an incentive for your adversary to not be completely obliterated if/when you'll achieve total victory.

If you start by admitting that your adversary has a point, there is no incentive for him to come to a compromise: he's shaping your reality, so you'll never win.

At the moment we need a lot of rebalancing in terms of online rights and copyright, so the likes of PP can only be welcome.

(Besides, making the Bond franchise a feature-long advert "much more than they do already" is pretty much impossible!)

<comment><USER6> In terms of debate tactics, you're probably right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately the German "pirates" managed to kill the whole idea even before they were voted into parliament.

As far as I know, the original idea by the Pirate Parties was to have an opinion in the areas that unite their members (online privacy, copyright, etc.) and to leave the rest to the other parties.

Unfortunately the German Pirate Party now also tries to deal with all kinds of topics such as economics, education, gender politics, etc.

Maybe they've managed to get some additional voters that way, who don't care about the original topics that much. But at they same time they've made theirself unelectable for their original target group, as I guess that there are many people who don't agree with their opinions.

<comment><USER9> They are also about transparency of the whole political process and just being an alternative to the lobby-ridden decision making. Especially the German pirate party also has a strong position on privacy. I think they are still doing a good job on those things, especially when looking at the other parties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I never liked the choice of the word 'Pirate' for a political party even if I support some of their motives. Though 'pirates' means freedom (doing whatever you want) it also means killing, robbing and taking hostages (Somalia, Indonesia).

</comment><comment><USER11> I honestly don't know what to think about the PP. I want them to be more than a one-hit wonder but they seem to not have much of a political agenda other than "legalize warez" and "don't censor the net".

I hope their success stirs up the other parties a little.

<comment><USER12> I think PP shows how badly prepared are current democratic systems to handle a wider diversity of opinions. Politics got less ideological and more pragmatic, and that leads to a wider diversity of opinions, which the current systems aren't prepared to handle. The concept of all encompassing parties doesn't scale; we need a way for people to show their support for very targeted movements like PP without feeling they're wasting their vote away.

<comment><USER10> Very true indeed. Personally I could never join one of the many parties as they all have some opinions I just can't agree with. This really makes voting quite hard. In Switzerland we now have <http://smartvote.ch/?lang=en_GB> were you fill out a questionnaire and then get some politicians matching your profile. While certainly not perfect, it is already a good start.

<comment><USER13> Something like this exists in Germany, too for parties: www.wahl-o-mat.de

A possible solution, to the problem you describe might be Liquid Democracy. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You guys know about this right? <http://www.talklikeapirate.com/> [humour]</comment>


U.S. Legalization of Marijuana Has Hit Mexican Cartels' Cross-Border Trade - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/3801889/us-legalization-marijuana-trade/ <comment><USER2> Who would have expected that outcome?

Lets look back in history to see how well prohibition has worked in the past.

The exact same result happened back in the 1920's with the prohibition of alcohol. The 1920's prohibition resulted in nothing more than the rise of the Mafia.

Back in the 1920's there was similar waste of government money fighting alcohol, only to see the rise in the power of the Mafia.

Move forward to today's 'war on drugs' and once again government is wasting massive amounts of public money trying fighting a loosing war.

The harder the fight the richer the drug kings become.

But now the states decide to go softer on a 'war on what ever' and guess what, the 'drug kings' once again start to loose money.

Nothing more than history repeating :(

<comment><USER3> The only thing that makes me hesitate this popular view:

1) There was a mafia in Italy and US long before Prohibition and after Prohibition

2) The violence and deaths of police officers in the US started to rise in 1900 and peaked at 1921 and declined for another 30 years.

3) Doesn't explain the statistical violence peaks of the 1970s and 1980s in our society.

4) We are at one of the least violent and peaceful decades in US History

[1] Police deaths in London and NYC (I could use other markers just this was a lazy first choice [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586786/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586786/) [2] US Crime Rate (Which I would argue is flawed since the recording of crimes prior to 1960s was not tracked in the same way as records are now kept after JFK assassination [http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0109/US-crime- rate...](http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0109/US-crime-rate-at- lowest-point-in-decades.-Why-America-is-safer-now)

<comment><USER4> 3) Doesn't explain the statistical violence peaks of the 1970s and 1980s in our society.

I don't think the OP was making any correlation with crime in the 70s and 80s. You could however link that rise in crime to the spread of crack cocaine through NYC and LA if you _really_ wanted to.

4) We are at one of the least violent and peaceful decades in US History

Interestingly enough, while that is true, our incarceration rate is the highest ever and it started just as the drug war started. See also The New Jim Crow [1]

[1] [http://newjimcrow.com/](http://newjimcrow.com/)

<comment><USER5> Lead poisoning due to leaded gasoline has been one of the more interesting (and common sense) explanations of that rise and fall of crime.

<comment><USER6> And it's almost certainly bullshit. There is no correlation with crime rates and lead exposure. The pattern observed is a massive spike in crime during the '80s and '90s due to gang activity from the crack boom, which then falls back down to '60s/'70s levels afterward. What you'd expect to see if lead exposure was the problem is a very gradual increase over time and then a gradual tail off as exposure reduced. Instead the homicide rate _doubled_ for folks under 25 between 1983 and 1993, and then fell back to 1980s levels by the early 2000s.

The background crime rate increase from the 1960s forward is more readily explained by societal changes, as well as the start of the "war on drugs".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When will we legalize the hard drugs? Treating drug users is better than criminalizing them. I always compare drugs being illegal to the alcohol ban in the 1930s and the mafia like Alcopone that rose during that time. Legalizing all drugs is the way forward. Drug money is corrupting police and financing weapons for terror organizations.

<comment><USER8> > Treating drug users is better than criminalizing them.

Not having them become drug users in the first place would be even better. Let's not forget that a lot of drugs really are seriously harmful

Criminalizing drug _use_ is fucking stupid, sure, but I also really don't want to have big companies spend big advertising budgets on making people addicts.

<comment><USER9> Easy solution would be something like what we have here in Finland with alcohol. Allow sales but ban all marketing. There done.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how effective or practical banning advertising would be. I'm reminded of the song CoCo by O.T. Genasis [0] that proclaims the rappers love for cocaine.

That being said, drugs, including more dangerous drugs, are already very much part of our culture and glorified everywhere from music to movies. De- criminalizing them is the obvious course of path for harm-reduction and diminishing the influence of organized crime.

[0] [http://genius.com/Ot-genasis-coco-lyrics](http://genius.com/Ot-genasis- coco-lyrics)

<comment><USER11> Interestingly if you really want to look into that song and the culture that created it, it is extremely anti cocaine use. It's all about selling and profiting from cocaine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This shouldn't come as a surprise. It's pure logic. The most efficient way to fight crime is to not create the criminals in the first place. Instead, you control a legal trade with legal means. Heck, you can even raise taxes on it, instead of sinking money into hopeless "law enforcement".

</comment><comment><USER13> Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs for personal use in 2001, and their situation has actually changed for the better.

[http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blog/drug-decriminalisation- portugal-...](http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blog/drug-decriminalisation-portugal- setting-record-straight)

<comment><USER14> The only 'problem' now are the 'drug' dealers on so many corners of downtown Lisbon who sell fake drugs to tourists. They come up in your face and try to sell to you a few times per day and it's really annoying. Now, I spot them from far away and already make the no signal with my index finger w/o looking at them, but this doesn't always work. Once I was way in the back of a restaurant but with a clear view of the front door/street. One such dealer stopped at the entrance and pointed to his nose (to mimick snorting) until I shook my head so he'd go away. Since they sell fake drugs (basically to tourists but also they try with locals), the police can't do anything.

A minor problem, all in all, considering what has changed here regarding decriminalization, but thought I'd share.

<comment><USER15> A variation on this theme occurs in most major cities I've visited though, whether it's fake designer sunglasses, candy, demo CDs, or bootleg DVDs. I suspect this has less to do with decriminalization and more to do with earning some quick cash.

<comment><USER14> It's both what's being offered and the frequency of it. Regardless, unemployment is high here so the quick cash argument is also valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Few days ago I watched "The Culture High" ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1778338/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1778338/)) which highlights the connections between:

\- Prison-industry

\- Militarization of Police

\- Pharmaceutical industry

\- _and_ Marijuana prohibition

I highly recommend this flick. It is exceptionally well made in artistic as well as subject-specific regards.

Also watch-worthy are "How to Make Money Selling Drugs" ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276962/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276962/)) which features a similar approach to the subject _and_ "Narco Cultura" ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2504022/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2504022/)) if you are interested in how this drug-crap even detrimentally influences what's left of Mexican culture.

<comment><USER17> "The house I live in"[0] is the another highly recommended documentary for people with interest in the subject.

[0] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/) [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_house_i_live_in/](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_house_i_live_in/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> People have been saying this for years, with the securistas basically avoiding an answer. Now there's data. Will they still avoid having a conversation?

<comment><USER19> Legalization may provide a net health benefit for Mexican gang members. Whether legalization will provide a net health benefit for American citizens is still a point of contention.

<comment><USER20> While the health effects of marijuana are debatable, the health effects of prison are pretty clearly established.

<comment><USER19> The war of drugs has been done badly. Of course it's ridiculous that people's homes get raided because they have some pot. That doesn't mean legislation needs to jump to the other end of the spectrum. You can forbid trade of cannabis and at the same time NOT put users in jail.

<comment><USER21> Why forbid trade?

<comment><USER8> To avoid having someone who has an incentive to work towards more widespread use.

<comment><USER22> We currently prohibit trade, and yet there are still drug dealers...

<comment><USER8> So?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Of course.

If you want to empower the thugs and the terrorists and the human traffickers, make as many things illegal as you can.

Like many, many things, this should be handled locally. People should be able to the drugs they want as long a neighborhood or city wishes to profit from it and deal with the costs. And others should be able to live without drug use in their neighborhoods.

</comment><comment><USER24> UK political party, Cannabis is safer than alcohol (CISTA) is fielding candidates in the UK general election next month.

[http://cista.org/](http://cista.org/)

Funded by one of the co-founders of Bebo, a social network.

</comment><comment><USER25> There are many organizations working to end the failed policy of prohibition. I believe one of the most effective is the Drug Policy Alliance. DPA is a national advocacy leader of drug law reform that is grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. If anyone know of a more effective organization please share it. [http://www.drugpolicy.org/](http://www.drugpolicy.org/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if the the Mexican Cartel's have a good Lobby here in the United States that is pushing for the re-focus on the _criminalization_ of Marijuana. How ironic would that be.

<comment><USER27> Their lobby is probably the DEA (who would also prefer to _keep_ their jobs I imagine):

[http://world.time.com/2014/01/14/dea-boosted-mexican-drug- ca...](http://world.time.com/2014/01/14/dea-boosted-mexican-drug-cartel/)

<comment><USER28> Dont forget ATF (Fast and Furious).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is the vid that i thinks carries the best all round anti-prohibition argument [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yYJ_oV6xk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yYJ_oV6xk)

</comment><comment><USER30> After reading the article, the title makes me question correlation/causation.

"A key problem is that cartels have diversified to a portfolio of other crimes, from sex trafficking to stealing crude oil from Mexican pipelines. They also make billions smuggling hard drugs. Seizures of both heroin and crystal meth on the U.S.-Mexico border have gone up as those of marijuana have sunk..."

EDIT: The title _sounds_ like it is impacting overall drug traffic, as opposed to simply a shift in the type of traffic.

<comment><USER31> U.S. Legalization _of Marijuana_ Has Hit Mexican Cartels' Cross-Border Trade ( _of Marijuana_ )

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The question is, what will those gangs of violent, well armed men start doing when smuggling isn't profitable any more?

<comment><USER33> The key problem is that cartels need money, and have moved on to what is more profitable to them, and more violent: crimes affecting the general population:

Kidnapping people, Organ trafficking, etc ...

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands This makes sense if you think about it from the cartel's standpoint, but it won't change much in the big picture. All the cartel's are doing is switching products, producing more cocaine, more meth, heroin, and ecstasy. All of which are vastly more popular and generate tons more revenue in the US than marijuana anyways.

Most of the articles I've read, talk about how marijuana is effectively a third or fourth tier product to them. Sure they bring a lot of it in, but it's not a huge money maker like other drugs are. This isn't hardly going to put a dent in their operations. When you have an organization generating BILLIONS of dollars, a few million here or there isn't going to affect them very much.

<comment><USER34> How did you come to the conclusion that those drugs are more popular than marijuana in the US? I've never met anyone who did coke, meth, heroin, or ecstasy and didn't also smoke weed.

<comment> at-fates-hands What I meant was the numbers for these drugs seems to be increasing while those numbers for marijuana seem to be staying steady or increasing slightly. There have always been high numbers of marijuana users, but in the last 5 years, usage for the other drugs is increasing, giving the cartels an easy way to pivot to those drugs to recover their losses from legalization here. Sorry if the wording was misleading.

 _" Across the U.S., heroin abuse among first-time users has increased by nearly 60 percent in the last decade, from about 90,000 to 156,000 new users a year, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)."_

source: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2014/01/14/why- is-h...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2014/01/14/why-is-heroin- abuse-rising-while-other-drug-abuse-is-falling/)

 _" Emergency room visits related to MDMA -- known as Ecstasy in pill form and Molly in the newer powder form -- increased 128 percent between 2005 and 2011 among people younger than 21. Visits rose from about roughly 4,500 to more than 10,000 during that time, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration."_

source: [http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20131203/ecstasy-use- on-...](http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20131203/ecstasy-use-on-rise- again-among-us-teens-report)

 _" A report by the National Drug Intelligence Center released last August, "National Drug Threat Assessment 2011," stated methamphetamine use was increasing, especially among the young. The report attributed the rise to Mexican drug cartels that control smuggling routes across the Southwestern border, which can produce, transport and distribute the drug. "_

source: [http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/methamphetamine-use- ap...](http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/methamphetamine-use-appears-to- be-on-the-rise-reports-suggests/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised that even a small amount of legalization is having such an effect on the drug trade, and I've always cited this as a reason to legalize. Seizures being down a third in mexico and a fifth in the U.S. should just be hard evidence that the way to win the war on drugs is to kill the pipeline.

More sweeping measures, including federal decriminalization and the passage of recreational use in the American Southwest, would probably sink the black market altogether. Let's see if republicans get the message or if they'll continue to cover their ears and eyes.

<comment><USER36> A lot of the reason is due in part to having new suppliers, a lot of people in non-legalized states are now getting weed from Colorado/Oregon as opposed to Mexico. If you casually browse /r/darknetmarkets and/or /r/worldnews you'll see that the USPS are starting to scrutinize outbound packages from weed legal states for more heavily as of recent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Somewhat off topic: A lot of the people commenting in this thread seem like they have experience with illegal drugs. Please be careful with what you publish on the public Internet; you never know what the DEA is up to.

An HN post could lead them to your front door, and then parallel construction could cover the trail.

<comment><USER38> Please, stop with the paranoia. The majority of US middle-aged and young adults have experience with illicit drugs. Illicit drug use is extremely common in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> That really doesn't come as a surprise in the U.S : one must only observe what happened at the Prohibition.

</comment><comment><USER40> Legalization has been always proved to be effective as coutermove to illegal traffic and, on the other hand, it's a great money source for the state applying taxes. Now, the problem now is that regulations must be clear and the price well balanced to avoid the black-market price war.

</comment><comment><USER41> How surprising.

Actually, let's have Samaritan from Person of Interest explain how it works: [http://imgur.com/a/yaLPk](http://imgur.com/a/yaLPk).

(This is _the best_ infographic I ever saw on the topic.)

</comment><comment><USER42> I grew up around a lot of friendly country weed growers, but I cannot believe how many of my old friends are in the business now. California Weed Rush.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Americans spend about $100 billion on illegal drugs every year

So that's $350 per capita on average. That's a lot higher that I expected.

<comment><USER44> Wikipedia:

>The Organization of American States estimated that the revenue for cocaine sales in the U.S. was $34 billion in 2013. The Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that $100 billion worth of illegal drugs were sold in the U.S. in 2013

34 sounds more realistic to me

<comment><USER45> $34b refers to cocaine; $100b refers to everything.

It's not an unreasonable guess.

The numbers are hard to get right. Here's something about different statistical methods that end up with very different numbers (about 650,000 people who used heroin in a year vs about 1.5 million people; about 60,000 people who use heroin nearly daily vs neary a million people who used heroin nearly daily.)

> [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2014/03/10/how- > many-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2014/03/10/how-many-daily- > heroin-users-are-there-in-the-u-s-somewhere-between-60000-and-1-million- > maybe/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I heard that U.S. Legalization of Marijuana has had other side effects in Mexico, like making harder to get good quality weed in Mexico

<comment><USER47> was there ever good quality weed in mexico?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> yes. its nice to see the common sense, with tons of historical data that indicates it, being backed by some data we are collecting right now today.

well done to those bits of the US for being progressive and intelligent instead of reactionary and ignorant. i'm glad its paying off. :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Man there are a lot of half-baked ideas in this thread regarding drug prohibition, the prison industry and crime rates.</comment>


The Worst Password Tips - <AUTHOR> http://xato.net/passwords/the-worst-password-tips/

<comment><USER2> >Better advice: Use a long password rather than a random password.

 _facepalm_. You can't use both? I do. This is horrible advice if taken on face value. To be fair, the author mentions things like KeePass. Use that. Make very long, random passwords.

>See, when it comes to a brute force attack, entropy makes no difference at all, because a brute force attack is a sequential attempt at every possible password, starting with the shortest first.

I think this is the biggest misconception regarding passwords. If we're using the phrase "brute force" literally, then yes. But if I were to write a cracker, I wouldn't be limited to that. The first thing it would do is grab the low hanging fruit. Examples:

1\. Regarding the post, check all variations of a single digit repeating (say up to 100 times) in 1000 attempts. That's faster than I could check all variations of 2 character alphabetic passwords.

2\. Check the same thing, but with all common keys on a keyboard layout (e.g. $$$$$$): < 10,000 attempts

3\. Check common words in english dictionary: ~100,000 attempts

4\. Check 10,000 most commonly used passwords: 10,000 attempts

Let me stop here and say that I can check ALL of the above in less time than it would take to check all variations of 3 characters using alpha, numeric, and common special characters. To put it another way, I could grab all that low hanging fruit in _a billionth_ the time it would take to grab all the passwords in the "weak" format (8 random characters) given by the author.

What I have come up with above is my armchair ramblings. For some people, it is THEIR JOB to break your password. Please don't think you're going to create a good password by being clever. And please stop dismissing the issue by repeating the words "brute force"

<comment><USER3> > facepalm. You can't use both? I do. This is horrible advice if taken on face > value.

Of course you can!

I think you are taking many of my statements much too literally and misinterpreting the perspective of this article. Of course a long, completely random password made up of multiple character sets will always be the strongest password, but that really isn't the point of this article and it really isn't the most practical advice for most users.

There is a big difference between addressing where we need to be and moving away from where we actually are. Short passwords are not strong enough no matter how random they are. Therefore, I personally would rather see users out there _focus_ on making longer passwords rather than focusing on random passwords. The typical user is much more likely to memorize a less random but longer password than trying to memorize an 8-character random password. I didn't mean to imply that randomness is bad, and I thought that most people got that from my article.

> Let me stop here and say that I can check ALL of the above in less time than > it would take to check all variations of 3 characters using alpha, numeric, > and common special characters.

These are all valid points and I could have gone into great detail on all the different ways our passwords could be cracked, but that just isn't the point of the article. I also didn't cover other things such as avoiding password reuse, regularly changing passwords, etc., but that doesn't make them any less valid and I cover them regularly through my other blog posts.

> And please stop dismissing the issue by repeating the words "brute force"

Not really sure what you mean by this or what issue you think I have dismissed by mentioning brute force. Brute force attacks are by n o means dismissing anything as they have become increasingly effective with ever-increasing computing power. Nevertheless, if an attacker has to assume that you will be using all character sets, the effort to crack your password grows exponentially with the length of your password.

<comment><USER2> I guess I don't really disagree with you on that, especially if you're specifically targeting nontechnical users. However, the thought of someone reading this and choosing something like an all numeric password does freak me out because....

>Not really sure what you mean by this or what issue you think I have dismissed by mentioning brute force.

Let me explain through analogy. I've often heard the story that a company will request a penetration tests and then restrict what can be done: "you can attack using method X, but not Y. A hacker wouldn't use Y."

That's a silly perspective, right? A black hat hacker is going to use any means available. When you say brute force, you seem to be specifying the method by which attackers will come at your password (and it's certainly not just you, many other people are repeating the meme). I think that's the wrong way to look at it.

Perhaps the confusion arises because you're making the assumption that someone will use some off the shelf, automated cracking software. That's reasonable. But automated != brute force. Again, if I were to write a cracker, it would first grab low hanging fruit. I've already given examples. Having a long password doesn't save you in that situation. That's why we think in terms of entropy.

>Nevertheless, if an attacker has to assume that you will be using all character sets, the effort to crack your password grows exponentially with the length of your password.

Agreed, but my point is they don't have to make that assumption. We don't get to decide what assumptions they start with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not so sure about #3 (random password generator). This might be true in the case of a true brute force where each attempt is almost free, such as somebody getting your password from a database secured by a single round of md5.

In reality, most brute force attacks are attempted remotely where there is a bottleneck in terms of bandwidth and many services are rate limited. In such a case it would always make sense to try the most common passwords first.

The problem with letting people choose their own passwords is that most people just aren't that good at it and will choose stuff like p4ssw0rd1982, because people's minds are somewhat similar they will tend to converge on similar "good" passwords.

I ran an IMAP service for a time. We would constantly get bots attempting to brute force email accounts, we had fail2ban set to ban them after 5 attempts but they could get more guesses simply by having a lot of IP addresses.

When I looked at the sort of passwords they would try they didn't start with aaaa and move on from there, they would start with stuff that looked like it had been pulled from a common password list.

About once every 3 months we got a call from somebody who's email had been hacked. They all insisted that they were using strong passwords that nobody could have possibly guessed, however when I enforced a strong password policy on the server and offered a random password generator these problems went away.

<comment><USER5> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you describing a dictionary attack, not brute force?

<comment><USER4> I guess I just see a dictionary attack as a subset of brute force in that it's still a pretty naive attack, but it's not raw brute force.

OTOH I don't see why anyone would bother using a raw brute force attack against a password rather than just grabbing a dictionary of the most common passwords and exhausting those first.

In reality you are likely to run out of guesses before you hit the end of a common password list anyway.

<comment><USER6> A good system should take a significant but not intolerable amount of time to reject a bad password. Just a few seconds will impose a huge burden on a remote dictionary attack, while not diminishing the experience for a user who legitimately fat-fingers a password.

Also use fail2ban to impose a lockout after a certain number of failures. The lockout does not have to be permanent, it just has to make a remote dictionary attack so time-consuming as to be infeasible (of course this does open up a DOS vector, depending on how you implement the lockout).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR:

* Simple Substitution < Add a whole word

* First Letters from a Phrase < Take the 3-4 words from a common phrase, add some punctuation

* Random Password Generators < longer password

* Personal Algorithms < longer passwords

</comment><comment><USER8> There is certainly some truth to this post, especially right at this moment in time. But it's the most exuberant example I've yet seen in a new category of bad password advice, to ignore everything but length.

A truly random eight character password containing upper and lowercase letters and digits is a keyspace of size 2x10^14. A four word passphrase containing random words selected from a 5000 word dictionary is a keyspace of size 6x10^14. They are comparable.

Right now, since almost everyone uses short passwords, length gives you amazing protection, because attacks are geared to find the common short password. But to the extent that the tech elite convinces the world to move to longer passphrases, that will quickly stop being true. It's no harder to program a brute force attack to try phrases of very common words, or very long, very low entropy phrases of other sorts (to be or not to be), than it is to try variations of dictionary words.

To the extent that we are giving people advice on security, it should be advice that is robust against the possibility of its own success.

</comment><comment><USER7> While this list is not unhelpful, the most likely risk is that your password will be captured when a single site that you've signed up to is compromised.

This means that the most important password choice you can make is to have a completely different password on every site.

<comment><USER4> Or, of course a keylogger which will can just sit on your PC until it's got them all.

<comment><USER9> That requires that you do something stupid to get a key logger installed on your machine. And yes, in that case you're screwed. However, you're far less likely to have that happen than some random site you're on getting hacked. You are one target, the site is thousands or millions.

<comment><USER10> Out of curiosity, would a key logger be able to capture of the contents of a cut and paste? I currently use 13 character randomly generated passwords and, usually, I don't type them in manually.

<comment><USER11> If you're storing them in plain text, then they can grab them regardless.

If you're storing them in lastpass, then they can grab them regardless.

If you're storing it in an encrypted partition, then they can grab them regardless.

Once somebody has access, it's game over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree with his "First Letters from a Phrase" point. I find mnemonic passwords very useful and keeps me from having to open up KeePass every time I want to log in to a system because I can't remember the random password.

I agree that longer passwords are better, which is why I use very long phrases to generate my mnemonic passwords (typically 20-26 characters in length).

<comment><USER13> I find "first letters from a phrase" harder to type than the phrase itself, because it doesn't behave like the rest of the typing I do. Given that it also has less entropy (necessarily, because of collisions), why not just type the whole phrase?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not good advice.

1\. Use a different password for every application, especially every site.

2\. Use a strong random password generator, typically software, to generate your passwords.

The first tip, which is not mentioned at all by the article, is particularly critical.

<comment><USER15> I'm a human: I'm too dumb to rememer more than some passwords (even worst if they must be 16 letters long). And I'm too lazy to use a software to manage my passwords. And worst of all, now, I've my bad habits with passwords.

The password problem is here to stay...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've used the same 6/8 char passwords (no symbols or caps) where possible for the past 20 years or so with no discernible problems. I'm not sure what to make of this post beyond relief that I don't make myself miserable trying follow such guidance.

<comment><USER17> And sure, let's say in 90% of cases using the same 6 char password for everything is okay. But let's take a not unlikely scenario - one website that you frequent is compromised and an attacker gets an unsalted hash of your password. Because your password is so commonplace, they can easily get it as well as a lot of other users' passwords.

Now for every password and email combo they have, they try to log onto a google account or bank account with the same information. Since you use the same password everywhere, they succeed. You're essentially now screwed and the attackers could do all kinds of devastating things.

Perhaps you say the scenario is unlikely - I'd say it happens more often then you would think. And this is the case where you're not even being individually targeted.

Overall - a little preventative action is hardly a burden and goes a long way to securing yourself online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Relevant XKCD: <http://xkcd.com/936/>

<comment><USER19> That's another common misconception as that advice is only true for brute force attacks, which are usually only the last resort for password crackers. Dictionary attacks are pretty sophisticated these days so I really wouldn't gamble on a short list of common words being secure these days.

<comment><USER20> You misunderstood the algorithm. Any single word is subject to a dictionary attack. But given a list of 4096 words (12 bits), choosing 4 of those randomly gives you a 48 bit password. There are no feasible dictionary attacks against a 48 bit space.

Or think of it this way, this algorithm can create a secure password from just 48 words chosen from a dictionary with just two entries! (let's call them "1" and "0" just to be contrary).

<comment><USER19> Using your example, it's equally secure to an 8 character password using base64 characters. Recently a pen tester published[1] that he can crack a 9 char pass (w/o punctuation, so 62^9) password in _90_ seconds by parallel processing across several top end graphics cards. So I really wouldn't argue that a 48bit password is secure any longer.

[1][http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/passwords-under- assa...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/passwords-under-assault/2/)

<comment><USER13> Right, the necessary strength of passwords increases. Thankfully, the comic gave us a good method of generating passwords to an arbitrary strength, by increasing either the size of our alphabet (dictionary from which words are drawn) or length of our string (number of words), and shows how to calculate the resulting entropy. As I've pointed out elsewhere, 5 words drawn from alphabetic entries in /usr/share/dict/words (over 62 thousand) is very nearly 80 bits strong, or stronger than a 13 character completely random base64 string (which is going to be quite substantially harder to remember). If 62^9 (54 bits) takes 90 seconds, 80 bits takes nearly two centuries, and computing the hashes for phrases is actually going to take longer for each try to boot.

<comment><USER19> You keep thinking of dictionary attacks as being based on a verbatim English dictionary and I keep telling you that they're not. It's a refined dictionary with common terms used in real life passwords. However I do completely agree with your point about adding a number of more words. Passphrases are definitely another option, proving the service in question doesn't impose a restrictive maximum character limit (it's idiotic practice, but some do)

<comment><USER13> > You keep thinking of dictionary attacks as being based on a verbatim English > dictionary and I keep telling you that they're not.

That has never, ever been my assertion. I keep saying a dictionary attack is a variation of a brute force attack (in that you're not looking at the hash itself), but adjusting the order in which you try words based on a priori guesses about what passwords are likely to be more common. My point has been that Randall's approach _ASSUMES THIS KIND OF ATTACK_. It, in fact, assumes a much more targeted one, where the dictionary the attacker has is completely accurate. IN THE FACE OF THAT, these passwords have the computed amounts of entropy.

(There is a separate discussion to be had of just how much entropy is necessary, but that's obviously going to increase as time goes by.)

I couldn't agree more that a maximum character limit (that's anywhere in the range anyone might conceivably type) is idiotic.

<comment><USER19> So basically the first part of that argument is tryingto rebuttal an argument I never made (I had already said that passphrases -so long as they are that and not just 2 concatenated words) are secure). And you're last part of that is also agreeing with me.

Internet arguments are fucking dumb. Half the time it's just miscommunication lol

<comment><USER13> FSCKING HELL. Okay, at this point I'm inclined to think you're just trolling, but one last swing...

Yes, the last bit was agreeing with you; the lead-in with "I couldn't agree more that..." was something of a clue.

Regarding the earlier pieces, you said in your original comment:

 _"That's another common misconception as that advice is only true for brute force attacks, which are usually only the last resort for password crackers. Dictionary attacks are pretty sophisticated these days so I really wouldn't gamble on a short list of common words being secure these days."_

That is what I have been rebutting (in various forms, in various sub-threads), and it is incorrect. THE ENTROPY ESTIMATES IN THE COMIC ASSUME A MAXIMALLY 'SOPHISTICATED' DICTIONARY ATTACK, so "dictionary attacks are pretty sophisticated these days" is inane and misleading AT BEST. If you want to avoid miscommunication, communicate clearly, and either own what you say or say you were mistaken.

<comment><USER19> I WAS HUNGOVER AND TYPING ON A TOUCH SCREEN PHONE WHILE TRYING NOT TO THROW UP ON A MOVING BUS. Of course I was going to explain myself badly, I did after all appolagise for the confusion and tried to explain myself better but you've been too fucking stubborn to even care about what my point actually was.

I really don't know who many fucking times I need to say this before the penny finally drops for you. Or maybe you just prefer acting like a dick online? Perhaps you're the troll?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's a subjective impression, but it seems that most password compromise comes from phishing not brute force cracking. Maybe those are just the ones that make it into the media.

</comment><comment><USER22> It is safe to use dictionary words: <http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html>

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra The worst password tip is using a password-protected system in the first place.

Passwords are neither theoretically or practically reliable. They off-load security to the user, who is the weakest part of all the scheme obviously. Who is obviously uncapable of remembering by heart dozens of long passwords of random gibberish.

We should know better than use passwords.

<comment><USER23> What should we use instead?

<comment> guard-of-terra Something based on public key cryptography. Private keys contained in some kind of protected device where they can't be easily stolen from. Or, even better, distributed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you going to protect your private key with a password? Or are you recommending we use password-less private keys?

Also, please let me know when you've convinced the major banks and web service providers to use public key cryptography instead of passwords.

<comment> guard-of-terra I'm going to store my private key in an arrangement you can't read it from even if you control the system.

For stupid services we can generate long random passwords, store them along. Not bothering the user with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> echo "mykitten name"|sha1sum. will get me a very good password?

<comment><USER13> Not if anyone knows that's what you're doing (or can guess because others are doing similar). It would be slightly better than the bare string in terms of crackability, because running the hash would take some time if they're doing it live, but only slightly.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Why Facebook or Google?  Do what SOPA would do... - <AUTHOR>

From my understanding SOPA will make sites go dark by doing dns blocking.  Wouldn't it make sense to convince even a small number of dns server operators to show support or solidarity?
It might be a hard sell, some dns server operators have pretty serious contracts and SLAs, but even getting a small handful of more flexible providers (Universities, non-profits, OpenDNS, maybe that one small part of Google, etc) would have a massive effect.  Having them return the IP address of a single anti-SOPA site for all requests would cause huge swaths of the internet to become anti-SOPA in the eyes of the general public.  Can you imagine if even one root server joined in?
There are some obvious downsides and issues, but I think those could be worked out creatively;
-- You may not want to disrupt non-http traffic (email, IM, WoW, etc), because the user would have no idea what went wrong.  Not sure if theres an easy technical solution to hover this aspect.
-- The dns poisoning might last for days, so maybe that just means they are only going to do 30 minutes of true darkness in solidarity -- counting the residual dns poisoning as the day.
-- If it can be isolated to HTTP and you wanted to play nice, the single anti-SOPA site could redirect to the original site somehow (but I'm not sure how since dns is wrong).
Is this worth thinking about more or pursuing with dns experts or server operators? <comment><USER2> What about the potential PR backlash? The Pro-SOPA response could be that internet providers are taking matters in their own hands, disrupting their own customers service for their political gain. They'd then argue to the masses (not just the customers) that SOPA puts the government in control to prevent internet companies from working against the interest of their customers, or some such.

I think you might be onto something, but this specific suggestion leaves the anti-SOPA lobby and DNS providers open to a serious PR attack.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, theres definitely some details to work out. I was kind of throwing it out there as a seed of an idea and hoping people would either thrash it or expand upon it until it made sense.

I was also thinking about the trust schism that could occur. Many commercial entities would lose faith in those dns providers, they would over time need to build in business resumption plans that included working around a dns block. But that would be good right? It would commoditize the ability to work around SOPA, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very bad idea. The whole idea behind the anti-SOPA movement is that DNS is NOT to be messed with for anybody's gain. No matter if you stand on the side to gain or to lose.</comment>


Why Johnny Doesn't Use Two Factor – A Study of the FIDO U2F Security Key [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/111.pdf <comment><USER2> Why I'm using my three or four U2F keys rarely: almost nobody supports them.

Yeah, Google, GitHub, Facebook.

But my bank doesn't. My insurance companies don't. My broker doesn't. It's all very sad.

<comment><USER3> Recently I tried adding U2F support to my chat bot. It was so complicated and I couldn't find comprehensive documentation for it so I gave up.

Admittedly, the chat bot is a hobby project so I was only looking for a couple of weeks in my spare time, maybe I "looked wrong" but everything I found was focusing on clients and rarely on servers.

<comment><USER4> The MDN docs look adequate to me.

You do need to go into this either understanding what's actually going on or open to just being told what to do rather than trying to plug it into a model you have from, say, using password authentication.

Your code (typically JavaScript) running on the client is going to feed input from your server (getting it to the client is your problem, inline it in the HTML, read it from a WebSocket, whatever) into this API and get back a result. The result needs to go to server - again how you do this is up to you. The server verifies stuff, I guess that could be handled in a library or something, and then you've authenticated the user, done, set a session cookie or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title (original from TFA) is very misleading. The study is too late in the process of setting up 2FA. No one in the study was motivated to set up 2FA in the first place. This is "merely" a UX study that benefits Yubico. It doesn't address (at all) why people do or do not want 2FA in the first place.

To use my own insight: regular joe does not want to buy an expensive product and install some hardware. (the "cheap" $20 ones are literally worse than useless. but even $20 is too much.) 2FA's future is in touchID (integrated into touch bar on mac) and push to a phone app. The latency of push to a phone app is more acceptable than the confusion and vagary around adding an expensive usb key that you don't understand and then doesn't work on your mobile anyway.

<comment><USER6> "then doesn't work on your mobile anyway." The yubikey neo works perfectly on your mobile, as long as it has NFC support.

<comment><USER7> U2F through the yubikey doesn't work on iOS devices because iOS NFC is only 1-way outside of Apple Pay.

<comment><USER8> I hate private APIs. There ought to be a law that vendors can only use public APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is good as far as UX goes. Myself, I love my Yubikey. I use it to store my ssh keys, then tunnel them using ssh-agent/gpg-agent, something along the lines of this article. [https://www.bootc.net/archives/2013/06/09/my- perfect-gnupg-s...](https://www.bootc.net/archives/2013/06/09/my-perfect- gnupg-ssh-agent-setup/) and this article [https://wiki.gnupg.org/AgentForwarding](https://wiki.gnupg.org/AgentForwarding). It's set up so that you have to have the key to get into the bastion host first, then you have to tunnel your key through the bastion to get to the other side. If you remove the key it breaks your connection. A good way to ssh w/out having your private keys sitting on a disk.

</comment><comment><USER10> A usability study prsented in a pdf that is quite difficult to read on mobile. Funny.

</comment><comment><USER11> Johnny does not want to use a physical FIDO U2F security key, because he regularly loses his phone and regular keys, and does not like to think about losing his entire digital life because he mislaid this FIDO U2F key.</comment>


Snap is laying off about 100 engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/07/snap-layoffs-engineering-team-said-to-see-up-to-10-percent-cut.html <comment><USER2> I'm honestly curious if the massive headcount of some of these companies is even necessary. I was taking a look at Bumble[0] the other day. They are the #2 dating app in the US, turning down acquisition offers, and are profitable with >$100mm in revenue, yet I have been unable to find a single engineering job listing or find anyone on LinkedIn that is on their technical staff. Plenty of Fish[1] was built and scaled to hundreds of millions of users by a single person. When all you're doing _technically_ is recreating functionality that has existed for decades now (messaging), and using 100% cloud infrastructure, why build out a huge engineering org?

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/08/23/women-f...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/08/23/women- first-app-bumble-turned-down-450-million-buyout-offer-from-dating-giant-match- group/)

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind- bootstrapped...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped- plentyoffish-and-sold-it-for-575-million-2015-7)

<comment><USER3> What exactly do all of these engineers do at single-focus companies like Snap? I guess I don't understand where you could find enough work for hundreds of engineers on a product like that?

<comment><USER4> There are so many features in the Snapchat app. If you really dig in, there are teams dedicated to each portion of the app. I'm not sure if that means a bunch of separate PMs as well, but it is a big complex app once you account for all the features... DMs, group messages, Discover, Memories, Stories, the map, filters/lenses, integrations like Bitmoji, ...

<comment><USER5> Still doesn't justify anywhere close to 1000 engineers.

<comment><USER6> I think a lot of the engineers are working on new filters.

Then a bunch are working on 'location based promoted filters", these are basically just graphic designers, or maybe web designers, but they are getting lumped in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got an email from them no longer than a month ago that they were expanding like crazy and opening a new office in Seattle. I don't completely understand their situation.

<comment><USER8> same here. got a linkedin message from a recruiter in Seattle

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Former Snap engineers in Venice feel free to get in touch. We're hiring at our Santa Monica office for all types of engineering roles.

<comment><USER10> what's your email?

<comment><USER11> Their history is a lot of job posting for sureapp.com. Though not sure where their careers page is

<comment><USER9> BTW, from the February 'Who is hiring' thread I'm happy to report that we hired a new front end team member in our NYC office!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could be hardware engineers after the Spectacles failure.

<comment><USER13> Have they confirmed whether they are giving up on their hardware play or not?

<comment><USER14> They are reportedly working on two new versions: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/12/snap-is-developing-a- secon...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/12/snap-is-developing-a-second- version-of-spectacles-which-may-include-augmented-reality/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ten percent of all engineers is pretty significant. Curious what the motive is.

<comment><USER16> I can posit a few things. My work is "down the street" from them and they hired extremely quickly. From murmurs I've heard that seemed to actually work out ok. Having experienced really fast growth at my work, but not their rate of fast growth, I can trow some spaghetti on the wall that will probably hit somewhere near the mark for some set of the 100 firings.

1\. Managing out.

If you hire quickly and perhaps not carefully, you'll hire people who don't necessarily perform as well as you thought (generally), don't perform well in _your_ environment in spite of their talents (i.e. Chris Lattner's short stint at Tesla), or don't get along with the team and hurt culture.

2\. Under the same fast growth, you may also hire a specialist for some technology you decide to get rid of.

While the ideal situation is finding a new role or moving them to a different team with a similar technology (i.e. one NoSQL DB to another), you may not be able to do that if you hired lots of folks all at once.

3\. They simply over hired.

This can mean they don't have enough managers and people are being poorly utilized, they hired opportunistically, or they were just poorly coordinated.

4\. They need to make their accounting look better.

People cost money, until you stop paying them. Not much to say here.

<comment><USER15> Insightful...thanks for sharing. It's a shame companies don't consider the personal turmoil they create when moving that fast.

<comment><USER17> Meh. Remember, they're paying you for a service, and they can terminate the relationship largely at-will when that service is no longer required.

I'm not saying I agree with how the US employment system currently functions, but them's the facts. If you value stability or loyalty, definitely don't join a hyper-growth startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Headspace is Santa Monica is hiring for engineering talent. Feel free to email me at email@example.com for more details

<comment><USER19> Headspace is such a cool product. I love what you're doing, hope you have luck with hiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Snap Engineers interested in working in Santa Monica - Join us down the road at YogaGlo! [https://www.yogaglo.com/careers](https://www.yogaglo.com/careers)

</comment><comment><USER21> adding to the set of hiring comments. Factual in Century City is hiring across engineering.

firstname.lastname@example.com

[https://www.factual.com/company/careers/?gh_src=1pt2v8](https://www.factual.com/company/careers/?gh_src=1pt2v8)

</comment><comment><USER22> clearly a bad sign from management as the co is looking for growth: $22b can't afford it and if you're left, you're next ..

</comment><comment><USER23> Poor Snap. Long live Snap.

</comment><comment><USER24> Layoffs? Oh snap!

</comment><comment><USER25> Probably gearing up to spend more on compelling original content as that's harder to produce than the software at this point.

</comment><comment><USER5> And they'll probably end up losing 20-30% within a year. Engineers aren't stupid, and know they have tons of other options. This smells like VCs pressuring them to grow, grow, grow and management thinking they can just throw devs at the problem until the accountants stood up and said enough.

<comment><USER26> > _This smells like VCs pressuring them to grow, grow, grow_

They are already public

<comment><USER5> That's a very recent development. And who do you think owns most of the company and controls the board seats?</comment></comment></comment>


AngularJS: Advanced Topics - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MartinChavez/AngularJS-Advanced-Topics

<comment><AUTHOR> AngularJS : Advanced Topics

A project aimed to help the user master AngularJS advanced topics. Each unit contains a tutorial with concepts, examples and best practices.

Topics:

\- Routing and ($routeProvider and $routeParams) \- Directives ($scope and Scope) \- Directives (Require and Link attributes) \- Services (Factory Pattern and $resource) \- Provider Service Pattern</comment>


Hidden HN Pages - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/best
https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories
https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Some of these are listed at:
https://news.ycombinator.com/lists <comment><USER2> These aren't really hidden, the "lists" link is at the bottom left of the page. I did upvote this however because lots of people might not know about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors](https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors)

<comment><USER4> What is this exactly?

<comment><USER5> After you reach a certain karma level - no idea what, but it's not that high - you are able to change the color of the top bar to something else of your choosing.

If I had to guess, that page has the colors people have chosen, sorted by most popular.

<comment><USER4> That makes sense, I didn't realize you could change the top bar color. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was about to make a Ask HN post asking for these. Thanks.</comment>