British exam board removes C and PHP from Comp-Sci A-Levels - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/12/aqa_c_php/

<comment><USER2> I'm not from the UK, but I think this is silly. Consider their goal:

"The Computing A Level is not intended as a programming course but a course that covers the fundamentals of computing of which programming (and problem solving) form a key component."

I'd say that C is a key component of computer science; it is the closest thing to the hardware withholding assembly and machine code.

I think schools should teach C, Lisp, and Python. Paul Graham tells it well in his "The Roots of Lisp" essay (<http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html>), where he asserts that C and Lisp are the two clean programming constructs in which languages of the future will be based off (and this has held true in my opinion). Python falls in the middle of C and Lisp and thus is a useful comparison (and everyday-living) language.

<comment><USER3> In addition to C, some Lisp, and Python, I'd say that a strictly typed language would also be good. Some ML derivative would probably be good. At that point, you've at least touched the whole spectrum. (Well, outside of assembly, but as much as I love it, its usefulness is dropping every day...)

<comment><USER4> "Touched the whole spectrum"? Hardly. What about logic programming languages (eg. Prolog), stack-based programming (eg. Forth), concurrent programming (eg. Erlang)? And that's leaving out more esoteric ideas like FRP (Functional Reactive Programming), the funky type systems needed for efficient purely functional languages, and the less-well-known OO constructs (multimethods, metaobject protocols, etc).

No CS curriculum can ever both touch the whole spectrum of what there is to offer and be reasonable to mandate for all students. Inevitably, some students will want the minimum necessary for practical work and others will want to explore as many avenues as possible. The importance is in striking a good balance: exposing students to enough different paradigms to produce good computer scientists without requiring so much that they never get enough real experience with specific languages to be good programmers.

<comment><USER5> _and the less-well-known OO constructs (multimethods, metaobject protocols, etc)_

Using Common Lisp provides the option to do that, but there's still plenty from the realm of programming languages that would be left out. It might me a mistake to try to do too much at the high-school level though; C, Lisp and ML would allow access to a very broad range of programming concepts - far more than any three of the approved languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pascal/Delphi? Visual Basic 6? Those are still in the wild? As TEACHING languages? That is the definition of "please, think of the children".

<comment><USER7> Pascal was _invented_ as a language with which to teach procedural programming. Using it for "real work" came later.

<comment><USER8> Pascal was one of the first languages I learned, only after learning Pascal did I really understand a lot of fundamental concepts. That said, I never used it to make anything half-useful. I used C, C++, PHP, Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _I understand that the reason for AQA dropping C#, PHP and C from the AS Computing examination is one of demand_

The institutions choosing the languages to teach to students are crazy if they think choosing Delphi, Python, or VB will provide them with better opportunities in the future than C, C# or PHP. And if practicality isn't concern #1, then why not pick a language that's _really_ well-suited to a CS education, like LISP/Scheme?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is just bizarre: _"Teachers planning to use Java are warned that many universities are considering dropping it from their first year computer science programmes, "as has happened in the US"."_

There certainly are some places where Java is on the outs, but this makes it sound like US universities have entirely moved away from Java, which is completely untrue.

<comment><USER10> Carnegie Mellon Universities new undergrad curriculum has no mandatory Java courses. The students will be able to learn Java, but will not be forced to.

In case you were curious, the intro class will be python, and then later classes will be ML and a new language that is a typesafe C (currently in development at CMU). After that, they'll learn C.

Of course, CMU is just one school, but it definitely represents a departure (and the lack of any mandatory OO-focused languages (yeah yeah, Python HAS classes, but you don't HAVE to use them) is weird).

<comment><USER11> Stanford still uses Java for the intro classes (as well as a number of grad AI classes - info retrieval, NLP, general game playing, and probably others I'm not thinking of). I don't see it getting replaced here for a while...too much starter code that no one wants to rewrite.

<comment><USER12> Once more, the legacy of marketing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Most centres offer Pascal/Delphi and Visual Basic as the language of choice for their students. This selection is based on the experience of the teacher in that centre and their own comfort with that language."

I would argue that any teacher not comfortable enough with C to teach it at the high school level should not be teaching computer science fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER14> Although I don't actually take Comp-Sci myself, a few of my friends have in the past and still do; at all colleges near me all default to VB with absolutely no consideration to other languages to the point of running windows on brand new iMacs for better support.

VB is a horrible language to learn, but the UK system of learning computing is the worst I've ever seen anywhere; I took it as a GCSE and at the same time as getting through a fair amount of Google Code Jam, Getting a job building web apps I managed to fail the web design module - was my site valid? yes, did it follow the spec? yes. I failed because I didn't submit my write-up as a .doc; instead I used a valid open .rtf format.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this a joke? VB may be "easy" but it's terribly verbose. VB 6 was end-of- lifed two years ago. Pascal was a good idea 30 years ago. And Delphi's designer was hired by MS to build a better language 14 years ago, which became C#.

Now, let's look at the languages with momentum. MS has bet the farm on .NET and C# is the primary vehicle. The Mono project is going strong. The most important web programming language (if brain damaged) is PHP. And the language underlying ALL OF COMPUTING AND THE INTERNET is C and C++.

Um.

<comment><USER12> _The most important web programming language (if brain damaged) is PHP._

If we went with "the most important, even if brain damaged" then VB would've been the language of choice years ago. I'd rather go with, "whatever will produce the most savvy programmers." In this light, there are good reasons to pick Scheme. Before that, I would also opt for a simplified assembly language, with a simple compiler targeting that language. For the first intro course, Python isn't a bad choice. Look how many programmers in their 40's got started in BASIC, then graduated to 6502 Assembly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did a computing A level in the UK , and I had no idea languages other than pascal and visual basic were options. Good to see python on the list.

The computing a level is a massive mess, though. The extent of programming taught is practically an afterthought and the curriculum is polluted by massively outdated stuff - i had to learn a textbook definition of baud rate and how to do binary subtraction on paper. The whole thing is in need of an overhaul.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I was at school (in the UK) we learnt LOGO, BBC Basic, then Borland Turbo Pascal.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would agree that this should be kept to university only (where hopefully it will be taught correctly). Schools need to concentrate on the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic, mathematics and traditional sciences). I'm from Scotland so we don't do A-levels (our equivalent is standards, highers and advanced highers) and although we did get C/C++ it was never covered very well. Its such a critical component of computer science that it has to be done right.

</comment><comment><USER18> While I'm sorry to see C go, I can't see any possible reason why a high-school level computing course should allow eight different languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it's not that each institution offers 8 languages, but that the exam board offers support and syllabi for 8 languages that the schools can choose from. They're chopping the languages that the fewest schools are choosing to teach.

<comment><USER19> Yes, exam questions ask you to "write program code", <http://alicious.com/2010/aqa-computing-exams-2009/> rather than specifying the language. I wonder if they'd accept languages not in the syllabus? LOLCODE anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd pick that language that entirely uses whitespace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It looks like the AQA A-level is called "Computing", <http://alicious.com/2010/aqa-computing-exams-2009/> gives an example paper on scribd, at page 6 you can see the type of questions being asked.

</comment><comment><USER20> Comp-Sci A-Levels? I have no idea what this means, is this like first year of university?

<comment><USER21> A-Levels are taken by UK Students before University (typically aged 16-18), I guess the last 2 years of US High School.</comment></comment>


Show HN: jQuery.pin – a plugin for making stuff stick - <AUTHOR> http://webpop.github.com/jquery.pin/

<comment><USER2> As a best-practices criticism, this is using a direct window scroll handler, which can be a bit of a performance nightmare. It's often better to use some sort of throttling to make sure your scroll handler only runs every X ms. The tradeoff there, of course, is that you get a slightly less buttery-smooth pinning experience... but in return your pages will still scroll nicely on non-zippy machines.

Resig wrote about this after it horribly mauled Twitter a few years back: <http://ejohn.org/blog/learning-from-twitter/>

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone wondering "why do we need jQuery plugins for simple things like this?", you may be interested in position: sticky. Here's an article: [http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/08/Stick-your-landings- po...](http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/08/Stick-your-landings-position- sticky-lands-in-WebKit). Worth noting that this hasn't actually been adopted as part of the spec, but it certainly would be a welcome addition in my opinion.

This plugin looks well-done, but I'm looking forward to a day when we don't need JavaScript to control layout like this.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is good but there are some more mature solutions out there, bootstrap has a very basic 'affix' plugin built in. However I have found the waypoints plugin to be absolutely amazing and flexible for any sort of sticky stuff:

<http://imakewebthings.com/jquery-waypoints/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Waypoints is more mature and can do much more complex stuff, but as with my earlier response about affix, for our use-case of pinning an unpinning the descriptions of the screenshots in our gallery, Waypoints didn't really come with anything out of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I built something like this about a year ago called sticky-panel. <https://code.google.com/p/sticky-panel/> Mine only has a couple added features like before and after detach events and support for overflow divs.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a demo for it somewhere?

<comment><USER5> [http://sticky- panel.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/jquery.stickyPa...](http://sticky- panel.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/jquery.stickyPanel/Main.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare to say Bootstrap's affix plugin? I see that it supports a min-width property, but personally I'd rather deal with this myself via media queries (matchMedia API in JS) than have a limited option via the plugin.

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference is being able to specify a containing element, so the pinned part gets unpinned once you scroll past the bottom of the container.

We first developed the plugin for the Webpop gallery page (<http://www.webpop.com/gallery>) to make the description next to each screenshot stick to the top while you were viewing that gallery entry.

Later we also used it for the pinned navigation in our documentation section to make sure it didn't stay fixed and overlapped the footer once you scroll down to the bottom of the page. As far as I know Bootstrap's affix doesn't really help you there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This and all other solutions on this page doesn't work, when sticky block height is more than window height. Always showed the top of the block, but it should be scrolled to the bottom, when you are scrolling content, in other way to see the bottom is possible only in case when page scroll to the bottom or container where this sticky block is embedded is over.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there something like this that works properly in the mobile browser?

<comment> bink-lynch I have had reports that <https://github.com/bigspotteddog/ScrollToFixed> runs on mobile. Here are the confirmed combos:

\- iPad 4 running iOS 6.0 (10A403) with dontCheckForPositionFixedSupport: true

\- iPad 4 running iOS 6.0.1 (10A523)

\- iPad 1 running iOS 5.1.1 (9B206) with dontCheckForPositionFixedSupport: true

\- Nexus 7 running Android 4.2.1 with dontCheckForPositionFixedSupport: true

Unfortunately, I am mobile challenged so I cannot test these out for myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> another similar plugin: <https://github.com/bigspotteddog/ScrollToFixed>

<comment> bink-lynch I am the author of ScrollToFixed, which has been out in the wild for a couple of years and does docking top, bottom, middle and still allows the fixed elements to move with the horizontal scroll, which is great for table headers.

I was thinking about posting it on HN when I got a break in the action. Haven't had a break in the action yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> every time this kind of plugin comes up, i link to this one from years ago <https://github.com/terkel/jquery-floating-widget>

</comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't work on IE10

<comment><AUTHOR> Pushed a fix - should work in IE10 as well now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could do with some smoothing and polishing. Jerks all over the place.

Also, what is with this new fashion of declaring functions as anonymous methods?

        var recalculateLimits = function () {
           /* snip */
        };
        var update = function () { recalculateLimits(); onScroll(); };

Have I missed a memo?

EDIT: I forgot to say apart from my moaning, does the job, good code, good job! And it's only jerky when you use the scroll button on a mouse.

<comment><USER14> I learned this method with the book JavaScript the Good Parts, though it was a while ago and I can't remember the specific reasoning behind the books' recommendation.

From the other commenter's SO link, I found this link to go more in depth into the differences of declaring functions, and it seems to come down to having stricter control on the order of events with no surprises.

[http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/function- de...](http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/function-declarations- vs-function-expressions/)

And here's an example of one of the surprises you'll run into if you don't declare your functions in this way: [http://www.adequatelygood.com/JavaScript- Scoping-and-Hoistin...](http://www.adequatelygood.com/JavaScript-Scoping-and- Hoisting.html)

<comment><USER13> That's definitely not in javascript the good parts. It's a new thing and its spreading like some sort of horrible virus. It has quite the opposite effect that you're prescribing to it.

Your second link describes both variable hoisting, a real problem which causes serious problems, and function hoisting that has never been a problem as almost every other modern language behaves that way.

You don't seem to be a polyglot or you'd understand the problem immediately. Variable hoisting is just downright bizarre if you've worked in almost any other language, whereas function declarations can be anywhere in most languages and so _when_ they are declared is almost completely irrelevant to a programmer.

Artificially assigning them to a variable so that suddenly function declaration order does matter is just downright weird. The 'normal' function declaration is better and clearer.

<comment><USER14> I'm probably not the best person to have a debate about this since I don't have a traditional CS background. I dabble in many different languages, but I'll never claim to be an expert in any.

To your point about this not being in the book JavaScript the Good Parts, I re-downloaded my purchase from Oreilly to double check, and throughout the book, all functions are declared as variables. Here's a screenshot from the second page of the "Functions" chapter, which is the first time a function declaration is introduced in the book: [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1517499/Screen%20Shot%202013-03-26%...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1517499/Screen%20Shot%202013-03-26%20at%2010.17.13%20AM.png)

Edit: Just an edit to add that I quickly perused the pdf and couldn't pick out anywhere where he explained why he recommends this way. In any case, I'm always open to any arguments one way or the other.

<comment><USER15> I don't think that's what he's addressing, though.

It's this:

var foo = function() { redeclaration(); }

that I believe he's referring to, unless I'm mistaken.

<comment><USER16> I don't believe so. It sounds like he prefers using function declations to function expressions. And this is incorrect according to most js gurus. For example:

[http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/function- de...](http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/function-declarations- vs-function-expressions/)

From that link:

"b) Function Expressions are more versatile. A Function Declaration can only exist as a "statement" in isolation. All it can do is create an object variable parented by its current scope. In contrast a Function Expression (by definition) is part of a larger construct. If you want to create an anonymous function or assign a function to a prototype or as a property of some other object you need a Function Expression. Whenever you create a new function using a high order application such as curry or compose you are using a Function Expression. Function Expressions and Functional Programming are inseparable."

Also this link: <http://kangax.github.com/nfe/>

brings up these disadvantages to function declarations:

* can't conditionally declare functions with consistent results across browsers * function declarations cannot appear in blocks (technically), though many implementations allow this in practice

finally, i'd argue that function expressions encourage you to think of functions as the first class objects js intended them to be

<comment><USER15> He included far more code than was necessary, if that's the case. I don't see why the implementation of the function expression would be relevant if so. Clarity would help here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unhackable Kernel? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730392-600-unhackable-kernel-could-keep-all-computers-safe-from-cyberattack-2 <comment><USER2> Note that the SEL4 kernel is only a small portion of this project. They've secured the entire stack, top to bottom.

HACMS leverages a number of other projects including the CompCert verifying C compiler, Verve OS Theorem prover, model checkers. You also need need proofs for the communication protocol, the IP stack, secured device drivers, memory protection units, control systems that can detect attacks, etc.

Just a proven kernel won't keep the helicopter flying, you've got to secure everything. Additionally you need to reason about execution time and memory constraints.

Slides: [http://www.cyber.umd.edu/sites/default/files/documents/sympo...](http://www.cyber.umd.edu/sites/default/files/documents/symposium/fisher- HACMS-MD.pdf)

Presentation from Kathleen Fisher, the researcher who's won the DARPA grant for the program:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRdbgRPYw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRdbgRPYw8)

<comment><USER3> So can you create a general purpose OS with something like this, or is it only useful for embedded stuff, like say voting machines?

<comment><USER4> It is unlikely that anyone is going to create a general-purpose operating system based directly on an L4 kernel. L4 is incredibly simple. The more reasonable thing to do with L4 is to run another OS on top of it.

<comment><USER5> I know of this effort: [http://genode.org/](http://genode.org/)

More specifically, I'd wonder about efforts to create not (necessarily) POSIX based stuff on top of seL4 etc.

<comment><USER6> NICTA/UNSW have apparently started working on a QubesOS port

[https://my.cse.unsw.edu.au/thesis/thesis_topic_details.php?I...](https://my.cse.unsw.edu.au/thesis/thesis_topic_details.php?ID=3289)

[http://sel4.systems/pipermail/devel/2015-March/000312.html](http://sel4.systems/pipermail/devel/2015-March/000312.html)

<comment><USER7> Huh, I'm surprised I'm seeing this first in a HN comment.

I read qubes-devel with interest and have not noticed anything from these guys, but it sounds like a great project.

I really hope it's something that turns into an actual maintained project instead of dying after the paper is out like so many security-focused research projects, but the lack of communication doesn't give me great hope.

<comment><USER8> That's because Joanna is against it and will aggressively defend their platform choice. After our argument online [1], she posted this essay [2] comparing QubesOS to other things. She censored my piece-by-piece counter, too, lol. She did eventually do something with trusted path and mentioned QubesOS could be ported to different platforms. So, there's some progress... Honestly, it wasn't clear whether she really understood INFOSEC (esp TCB concept) based on her replies so I avoid QubesOS.

[1] [http://pastebin.com/5fnh8g2S](http://pastebin.com/5fnh8g2S)

[2] [http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-is- qubes-...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-is-qubes-os- different-from.html)

<comment><USER5> I remember one good argument she made, a reductionist one that if the firmware on your Ethernet adapter can be hacked without recourse or relief from the OS (she gave a specific example), reducing the Xen part of TCB was not too relevant.

It's worth noting that the seL4 people haven't tried to formally verify it on x86 (and there's no 64 bit port to date that I know of, outside of possibly the lowRISC GSoC effort which I should check up on), only ARMv6 and v7 (which, I'll grant, also has to do with academic efforts to verify ARM in general). If you're that serious, seL4 serious, there's a good argument you should eschew Intel and start with some of the less chaotic ARM systems (i.e. not so much kitchen sink ones from the mobile world like the Broadcom chips the Raspberry Pies use).

I take her as trying something rather different, the pragmatic approach of getting the best security possible out of our existing infrastructure, hence the use of x86, Xen, Fedora, etc., based in part on her experience when figuratively putting on a black hat. She's discovered a lot of exploits, hasn't she? (lowRISC also includes an effort with tags to make our existing C/C++ infrastructure safer).

And without the prospect of a "secure" web browser aside from perhaps Servo someday, maybe....

<comment><USER9> QubesOS would have saved that Bitpay executive $2mln who fell for an old phishing trick [http://www.americanbanker.com/news/bank- technology/bitcoin-p...](http://www.americanbanker.com/news/bank- technology/bitcoin-payment-processor-bitpay-loses-1m-in-phishing- hack-1076722-1.html)

Just logically separating administrative VMs with credentials from email VMs would have been good enough to thwart this. We can always fork Qubes and play around with whatever other VM templates such as OpenBSD, seL4 x86/genode port or experimental encrypted overlay kernel.org kernels

<comment><USER8> The article states that he's just guessing at what happened leading up to the fraudulent request. (If I'm reading right.) So, no way to know what would stop the first part. The actual attack was a common one where a request comes in _without strong authentication_ and an _authorized user carries it out_. Neither QubesOS nor any other low-level architecture I mentioned would stop that as it's an application-layer concern. There's a little irony in your comment, though, given that one of the Nizza demonstrators in mid-2000's was doing eCommerce by splitting the UI and security critical parts over a microkernel. Did that for GPG email, too. So, even they recognized the problem and demo'd a two-part solution. I sent that to Joanna in our exchange.

"We can always fork Qubes and play around with whatever other VM templates such as OpenBSD, seL4 x86/genode port or experimental encrypted overlay kernel.org kernels"

That's true. It's why I found the seL4 and QubesOS work interesting. Additionally, as they showed up, I've suggested various projects to those interested in improving QubesOS assurance. These included capability extensions for Xen, the Xenon project, several projects that knock risk out of Dom0, components like Nitpicker, and so on. To be clear, I don't see QubesOS as worthless or all bad so much as redundant in some ways, weaker technologically in others, and a vast usability improvement in yet others. Use and improve it if you want for sure with definite benefits over a vanilla Windows or Linux box. Just know the limitations of the security approach and that efforts might be better spent elsewhere.

Here's a recent report on the 2005 Nizza architecture's design along with other projects that built on it if you're curious what it was like. Notice how they understood where the software risks were, systematically eliminated what they could, and kept metrics on the TCB to back it up. On other end, I couldn't even get Joanna to agree user-mode drivers were more robust despite a decade plus evidence of this.

[https://os.inf.tu- dresden.de/Studium/KMB/WS2014/11-Security-...](https://os.inf.tu- dresden.de/Studium/KMB/WS2014/11-Security-Architectures.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure about the _unhackable_ claims part but it seems at least to be an interesting project. This is a formally verified L4 derived micro-kernel, its code is open-source (GPL2, BSD).

Homepage: [https://sel4.systems/](https://sel4.systems/)

Github: [https://github.com/seL4/seL4](https://github.com/seL4/seL4)

Related course (already posted on HN i think but can't find its associated thread): [http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9242/14/lectures/](http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9242/14/lectures/)

<comment><USER11> They also have [http://sel4.com](http://sel4.com) \-- why wouldn't they use the .com as the canonical site instead of a more obscure .systems? (I say this because sel4.systems is linked from within the original article).

Also, the link [http://sel4.systems/FAQ/proof.pml](http://sel4.systems/FAQ/proof.pml) is a 404 (linked within the article where it says "Last year, Heiser's team proved mathematically that their kernel is unhackable."). I guess this is meant to link to [http://sel4.systems/Info/FAQ/proof.pml](http://sel4.systems/Info/FAQ/proof.pml) (where the claims are far more measured).

<comment><USER12> I don't think claims are more measured. It is more detailed, yes, but claims are still extremely strong.

"Integrity means that data cannot be changed without permission, and confidentiality means that data cannot be read without permission." seL4 claims both. I think "unhackable" is a good enough summary.

<comment><USER11> I didn't mean to imply that the claims were not strong. Just that they're more careful/specific (which is a good thing for this kind of work).

Also, saying a piece of software is "unhackable" is akin to saying a ship is "unsinkable".

<comment><USER13> It seems like, in light of the mathematical proof, it may be reasonable to say "does not contain exploitable software vulnerabilities".

Unfortunately, it's true that might not be enough to prevent attacks in some settings. For example, see Govindavajhala and Appel's "Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine".

[https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/memerr.pdf](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/memerr.pdf)

In this case, they show that even given correct software safety guarantees, they can write a program which requires only one bit flip in any of a large number of RAM locations in order to achieve privilege escalation or violate the safety guarantees. They can then heat or irradiate the DRAM chips and make such a bit flip likely to occur. Since they can't control which bit will flip, it might sometimes crash the computer, but it's more likely to make their attack succeed.

So, one thing to study with systems like this is whether hardware fault injection can compromise the security guarantees in a way that would allow an attack to succeed.

<comment><USER8> This is why you address system security holistically. There are countless projects that sprang from the Aegis processor that address the fact that RAM and devices aren't trustworthy. One had the start of an EAL7 argument for security of software from all those attacks via the hardware mechanism without modifying the processor's internal RTL. Another shows security of information flow of a design down to the gates. Others are about just synthesizing correct designs that arbitrary parties can produce for a fab and composing them into a trustworthy system.

The problem, if not specific attack, has been known a long time. The Tandem NonStop architecture assumed that its memory, I/O, and key components could fail. So, they designed system to work correctly regardless plus linear scaling of resources. My proposal was to integrate above technologies with older, non-patented version of NonStop for high security and availability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Current cream of the crop:

IBM System z is EAL5 rated (Semiformally Designed and Tested)

Integrity-178B is EAL6 rated (Semiformally Verified Design and Tested). It's used in aviation systems: Airbus A380, F-16, F-22, F-35 and B-2.

Currently the only EAL7+ rated (Formally Verified Design and Tested) devices are data diodes. Maybe seL4 can be first OS to get this rating?

<comment><USER15> I went to lookup EAL in Wikipedia and discovered something interesting: The exact same information as above on the EAL page (with a little on the Integrity OS page).

Either the info above is from Wikipedia, or perhaps the commenter above also wrote those sections of the Wikipedia pages, or the commenter read something else that was based on those Wikipedia pages. The web is an interesting place.

<comment><USER8> Use Cygnacom's breakdown as it has a nice summary of what each EAL means:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130718103347/http://cygnacom.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130718103347/http://cygnacom.com/labs/cc_assurance_index/CCinHTML/PART3/PART36.HTM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the most worrying aspect of proven-unhackable kernels is that eventually these projects will be used to prevent people from modifying their system.

Proven unjailbreakable phones are the wet dream of the mobile carrier industry - finally no piracy anymore and no way for users to get rid of bloatware.

<comment><USER17> ...until someone develops a hardware exploit and starts selling kits. Which is already happening for many devices, by the way.

<comment><USER18> That raises the barrier substantially, however. Also, you can bet that the hardware will be secured too - just look at the technology available currently for things like credit cards and payment systems (where I think the security is somewhat more justified.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The primary paper to read is "Comprehensive formal verification of an OS microkernel" (2014).

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2560537](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2560537)

<comment><USER19> That is $15 for non-members. First Google result for "Comprehensive formal verification of an OS microkernel" is a PDF link on ssrg.nicta.com.au. Good enough for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> But still software running on top of it might not be secure and proven. And as well the hardware is another area for attacks and failures.

</comment><comment><USER8> The slides "achille" posted are a must-read for people understanding what they're _actually_ doing rather than nonsense about "unhackable." For instance, the seL4 team is clear on risk areas of their proofs:

[http://sel4.net/Info/FAQ/proof.pml](http://sel4.net/Info/FAQ/proof.pml)

What's really going here is significant work in high-assurance design and security of two systems. They're using best modern tools to help prove or even synthesize about every layer and component in those systems. They're also developing and improving tools to argue that they integrate in a way that's secure for the whole system. In the past, similar, high-assurance methods led to the most robust and secure software ever created per the experience reports. This work expands on such techniques while attempting to make the tools, methods, and software produced reusable in other projects. In short, they're applying The Right Thing philosophy to as much as possible.

Galois's Ivory and Tower languages can be found here:

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

seL4 is found here:

[https://sel4.systems/](https://sel4.systems/)

CertiKOS, VeriML, and other FLINT work here:

[http://flint.cs.yale.edu/certikos/](http://flint.cs.yale.edu/certikos/)

Termite Driver Synthesis here:

[https://github.com/termite2/Termite](https://github.com/termite2/Termite)

CompCert here:

[http://compcert.inria.fr/](http://compcert.inria.fr/)

A how-to on certified programming that's more accessible for newcomers:

[http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/](http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/)

</comment><comment><USER15> SEL4 previously discussed at HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7938149)

</comment><comment><USER21> "unhackable"? After reading "How to Write Unmaintainable Code" [1] earlier, I expected to find some kernel code implementing all those valuable principles, not an article about a kernel proven secure against any attack :)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10237636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10237636)

</comment><comment><USER22> From the title I readily thought about the Windows kernel and how it can't be tweaked and recompiled and improved like Linux. Now I know better...

</comment><comment><USER23> How practical is this, does it have sata? usb? network? bash? some compiler?

<comment><USER12> It is practical enough to autopilot UAV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It can be just like that "Unsinkable" ship!

</comment><comment><USER25> "a prank"? Crashing a car is a prank?

<comment><USER26> Honestly, I still have issues with that story. Either someone shouldn't be allowed to put computers in cars or someone is lying.

I almost refuse to believe it's possible to jump from the entertainment system to the computers controlling the car. Designing a car where those two systems are connected in any way other than maybe power and one-way signalling from the car to the entertainment system would be reckless to an almost criminal extend. Honestly, what engineer would suggest something like that?

<comment><USER27> The guys who did the hack chose the Jeep exactly for this reason -- an unregulated data pipe between the entertainment computer and the critical- systems computer. They analysed hundreds of cars and chose the worst-designed one they could find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is no such thing as an unhackable system.

<comment><USER29> Not yet. But there may be in the future. Many things proved impossible have shown to be possible in the past.

<comment><USER30> Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem might be abstractable to this. Any system so inaccessible as to be unhackable might be functionally impaired beyond usefulness.

<comment><USER31> Godel's theorem is great for claims like this. Have they proved that the "theorem proving" software has no mistakes?

<comment><USER5> There's this: [http://proof-technologies.com/holzero/index.html](http://proof- technologies.com/holzero/index.html) and I see some other things that I interpret as moving in that direction.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Generation stupid - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bad-words/generation-stupid-b2bc21dc3ed5

<comment><USER2> Umair is a total bummer and is being misled by his own intelligence. He's Nostradamus but with better marketing.

People have been saying the world is burning for as long as there have been people, and they often have compelling arguments, yet we are still here. You'd think after 10,000 years of buying losing lottery tickets, we'd stop playing that game.</comment>


Knoppix 8.6 first wide public release to abandon systemd - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/knoppix-8-6-first-wide-public-release-to-abandon-systemd/ <comment><USER2> I know systemd is controversial, and frankly I think its lame because it doesn't follow the simplicity and reliability of previous designs, but this sounds like "yet another linux trashfire" issue.</comment>


Ethics, Morals, and the Law: Where do you draw the line at what to develop? - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2007/10/wheres_the_line.php

<comment><USER2> I enjoyed the post until we hit Kant. This "imperative": "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." is the kind of idea that makes it "rational" to go out and kill all the Jews as the Nazi's so aptly demonstrated. They felt that the elimination of Jews should become a universal law. Note that this is a very different idea than: act only as you would want others to act towards you. It is rather: act only in a way that you think all others should act. A very different story, and a complete void as to the defining of "should".

Kant was not only confusing to himself and others, but his ideas were "dangerous" to the extent that ideas can be when used to justify actions.

<comment><USER3> This is a misapplication of the categorical imperative. Of course, I suspect that you knew that; it's only a naive viewpoint that would cause someone to miss that.

The correct "universal law" to use in this case, would be "Eliminating people who you find problematic." It would take a truly insane person to actually want this as a universal law. Tying the rule to any specific group of people makes it not universal.

Of course, if someone only understands "philosophy-lite," it becomes an easy thing to mix up.

<comment><USER4> You say "the correct 'universal law' to use...". I think this shows very well why Kant's imperative is so useless. It simply replaces judgement on the original question with judgement on the right way to generalise it.

<comment><USER5> It's a lot more useful than eg. "Don't be evil". No, it does not free you from having to use your judgment. But no philosophy or religion will do that for you.

<comment><USER4> Nothing frees us from judgement of course. But science is about giving us tools to make better judgements. I don't see how Kant's imperative does that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My personal ethics would prevent me from developing surveillance tools, anything which is mostly military in nature, or any kind of video game which requires a heavy investment of time.

<comment><USER7> What games do you consider to _require_ a heavy investment of time? A Korean who was obsessed with Starcraft died after playing too long. Do you believe Blizzard is somehow responsible?

<comment><USER6> I'm mostly thinking about the type of online role playing games which people throw their lives away on, but I would consider Starcraft to be a borderline case.

I do believe in general that people are responsible for the consequences they create even if they could not have possibly predicted them. I certainly don't think that Blizzard should be punished for the death of that man. I would only hope that when they heard the news that as individuals they stopped and spent a couple of quiet minutes asking themselves if what they are doing contributes to improving human society or not.

<comment><USER8> Have you considered the alternative that for many people, online games like World of Warcraft are truly better than real life?

<comment><USER6> If WoW is better than real life for so many people maybe that's because there are some severe and imminent problems to solve in this world. The last thing we need right now is for everybody to be drugged out on video games.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nfusr: A userspace NFS client for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebookincubator/nfusr <comment><USER2> Hi, primary author here, just want to add a few notes: this client was developed at Facebook and is heavily used internally as an alternative to the kernel NFS client. The primary advantage is increased reliability (fewer stuck / unresponsive mounts); there are cases where performance can be be better (using round-robin mode) but for the most part performance is a wash.

I expect this to be of particular interest to the Gluster community, it's a great match for their filesystem.

Shoutout to Ronnie Sahlberg whose libnfs does a lot of the heavy lifting.</comment>


Ask HN: Best companies to work for in the US which don't have media coverage? - <AUTHOR>

I really wonder after complaints about Google last week what companies have same benefits but are not known as much as much Google or Facebook. There were some comments that such companies exist and some of them even have more benefits than mainstream companies. <comment><USER2> Companies that always appear on "best places to work" lists include:

[http://www.gore.com/](http://www.gore.com/) \- Gore Industries, a truly astonishing workplace in almost every write-up I've ever read.

[http://www.semco.com.br/en/](http://www.semco.com.br/en/) \- The book "Maverick" by CEO Ricardo Semler shows how he set the culture. It's grown a lot since then, but still an amazing firm

[http://www.sas.com/](http://www.sas.com/) \- employees love it

[http://www.netapp.com/](http://www.netapp.com/) \- ditto, and the hardware is everywhere interesting.

[http://www.qualcomm.com/](http://www.qualcomm.com/) \- Qualcomm is best known to sys admins of a certain age for producing qpopper and for some of their staff being killed in Iraq. The company is apparently great to work for

[http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/](http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/) \- more code than you might think

[http://www.amazon.com/](http://www.amazon.com/) \- I know a guy who works in operations who loves it. For developers it has downside (you own your code in deployment), but he really rates it highly. YMMV.

[http://www.salesforce.com/](http://www.salesforce.com/) \- Rated highly by staff

[https://www2.wwt.com/](https://www2.wwt.com/) \- I'd never heard of them, but they appear on about half a dozen lists

[http://www.rackspace.com/](http://www.rackspace.com/) \- Biggest cloud provider outside Amazon, I think

[http://www.autodesk.com/](http://www.autodesk.com/) \- Personally I'd rather eat my own head than work there, but well regarded by employees

[http://www.hds.com/](http://www.hds.com/) \- Everybody forgets about HDS, but they do some really amazing work and do staff love it

EDIT: added more companies

<comment><USER3> Didn't quite understood drawback about Amazon - what do you mean by owning your code in deployment?

Also, what's wrong with Autodesk?

<comment><USER4> "Owning code in deployment" = "on call for any code problems in your group, even code you didn't write".

At least that's how it was explained when if interviewed there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do not overestimate Google's benefits. There is nothing magical in what they offer. The only reason why you should consider working at Google is people and your CV (if you will manage to get job in Google).

Here is interesting list of companies:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/07/12/the- bes...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/07/12/the-best- enterprise-software-companies-and-ceos-to-work-for-in-2013-2/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Forbes' 2013 list of the best financial services companies to work for: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/07/31/the- be...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/07/31/the-best- financial-services-companies-to-work-for/)

<comment><USER7> For tech people interested in finance, it would be hard to beat Two Sigma. [http://www.twosigma.com/](http://www.twosigma.com/)

<comment><USER8> Jane Street would be another one, especially if you are interested in OCaml. [http://www.janestreet.com](http://www.janestreet.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I came across this article[1] that has a list of "hot" tech companies. It's from 2012, but I think it's still relevant.

[1] [https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley- com...](https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-companies/)

</comment><comment><USER10> If you're ok with being in LA then Cornerstone on Demand is a great choice, they're public, great benefits, 40 hour workweeks etc.

That said I don't work there I just know people who have and who have interviewed with them as well.

All around good things to say about them as a company

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238592/100_Best_Plac...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238592/100_Best_Places_to_Work_in_IT_2013)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll nominate the company I work for - Canonical (although the part about no media coverage has been somewhat untrue the last few days ;).

Let me tell you why.

1.) 100% work from home (minus ~2 one week trips per year) 2.) Get paid to write cool open source software. 3.) Work with smart people from all over the globe.

#1 can't be overstated. This isn't just "flex time" or "work from home when you want to". There is literally no office to go to for most people at Canonical. Working at home is the default. The difference is huge. My last company let us work from home as much as we wanted, but most of the company worked from San Fransisco... which means when there were meetings, 90% of the people were in the room, and the rest of us were on a crappy speakerphone straining to hear and having our questions ignored. At Canonical, everyone is remote, so everyone works to make meetings and interactions work well online... and these days it's easy with stuff like Google Hangouts and irc and email and online bug tracking etc.

Working on open source is like entering a whole different world. I'd only worked on closed source before, and the difference is awesome. There's purposeful openness and inclusion of the community in our development. Bug lists are public, and anyone can file one. Mailing lists are public (for the most part) and anyone can get on them. irc channels are public, and anyone can get on them. It's a really great feeling, and puts us so much closer to the community - the people that have perhaps an even bigger stake in the products we make than we do. Not only that, but we write software for people like us. Developers. You _are_ the target market, in most cases. And that makes it easy to get excited about the work and easy to be proud of and show off what you do.

Finally, the people. I have people on my team from Germany, the UK, Malta, the UAE, Australia, and New Zealand. It's amazing working with people of such different backgrounds. And when you don't have to tie yourself down to hiring people within a 30 mile radius, you can afford to be more picky. Canonical doesn't skimp on the people, either. I was surprised that nearly everyone on my team was 30+ (possibly all of them, I don't actually know how old everyone is ;) That's a lot of experience to have on one team.

Canonical's benefits don't match Google or Facebook (you get the standard stuff, health insurance, 401k etc, just not the crazy stuff). However, I'm pretty sure the salaries are pretty comparable... and Google and Facebook don't let you work 100% from home. I'm pretty sure they barely let you work from home at all. And that is a huge quality of life issue for me. I don't have to slog through traffic and public transportation to get to work. I just roll out of bed, make some coffee, and sit down at my desk.

<comment><USER5> You are late to party and you made me check job offers at Canonical and there is position where I potentially fit. Thanks :)

One question: how long does hiring process take?

<comment><USER12> Missed this - For me it was a little less than a month from inquiry about the job to an offer. That didn't seem unusual for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I met a few people who work at Zappos in Vegas. They couldn't stop talking about how much they enjoy working there.

<comment><USER14> Then you ask them what else is there to do in Vegas than the strip and there's a long pause...

<comment><USER15> I lived in Vegas for a few years, and never ran out of interesting things to do. There are lots of great outdoor activities like mountain biking, hiking, golf, etc. that you can enjoy at least 10 months out of the year (depending on your tolerance for heat in the summer). You can even ski at Lee Canyon.

Although you're dismissive of the strip, and I can understand why from the typical visitors' perspective, there are literally tons of things to do there and many of them are significantly discounted or free to Las Vegas residents. I did the math and over the course of 3 years I went to tens of thousands of dollars of things for free.

There are concerts, some of the best restaurants in the world, conventions, boxing, shopping, and more. Traffic is manageable. Cost of living is low. Flights to most places are cheap. You can be in Southern California or doing outdoorsy stuff in Utah for the weekend with a few hours drive, or easy 1 hour flights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://grammarly.com](http://grammarly.com)

<comment><USER17> bahahaha street teamer

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> arbor networks

ch2m

</comment><comment><USER19> Anybody supplying contractors to the NSA. From the central banking database you know how much money they have in what bank account. From Facebook you know if they could be dead by now. The sum of all monetary holdings of any of these targets forms collectively a bounty on their heads. Do you really need to see Edward Snowden's stash of documents to understand this? I don't.</comment>


T-shirts, not technology, might save the record industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/shirtify-helps-musicians-make-money-from-their-online-music-2011-12-07

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the submit techvibes. We're counting on t-shirts doing their part!</comment>


Could 1989 Have Led to Democracy in China? - <AUTHOR> https://nationalinterest.org/feature/could-1989-have-led-democracy-china-56437 <comment><USER2> This is an intriguing estate but I think there was sufficient institutional momentum that nothing would have changed. In particular this line jumps out:

> What if China's hardline military ruler, the eighty-five-year-old chain- > smoker Deng Xiaoping, had passed away at the beginning of 1989 instead of > hanging on for another seven years?

I think the same authoritarian system would have survived, however we would instead see statements like "if only the radical reformer Deng had survived and continued his reforms then 1989 could have been a turning point of democracy." It's like the people who say "what if Kruschiev had not been deposed"

<comment><USER3> > "what if Kruschiev had not been deposed"

if Khruschev had not been deposed by Brezhnev, he would've been deposed by somebody else.

Yes, the West erred judging Khruschev's character as a "typical communist," but it was not wrong in judging the innate characteristics of a social construct like a communist party.

For single party system, electing somebody like Brezhnev or Xi is pretty much like for a thermodynamic system to reach its equilibrium state. For a communist party not doing that will mean to stop being a communist party.

The goal of such system is a pursuit of an ultimate status quo and rejection of all change — a good analogy here will also be thermodynamics: the heat death of the universe.

The principal point on which Brezhnev or Xi were put in power was the need for "reliable men to keep things as they are"

Some people ask me when I state that point "How this stands when Xi totally decimating the same establishment that brought him in while doing so?" I say that it is perfectly consistent with the stated goal: Xi purged people who rocked the boat, risking bringing "the dreaded change."

It is a collective interest of party members to preserve CCP's power, as it is needed for preserving their own personal power, but preservation of individual party member's power is not necessarily a part of that overarching collective interest.

Thought some people who wanted that were purged along the way, in overall, the CCP as a political institute benefited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "A hypothetical Chinese transition to democracy would probably have followed the East Asian pattern, not the Eastern European one. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union didn't so much democratize as disintegrate. China might have started a transition to democracy in 1989, but it wasn't on the verge of breaking up."

China would have disintegrated like the Soviet Union ( or like the china of the 1800s after the opium war ) rather than democratized like South Korea. You can't compare an ethnically and linguistically united country like South Korea ( buttressed by the US ) with a large multiethnic nation like China. Especially considering foreign powers, especially britain, europe and the US, have a vested interest in destabilizing china.

If china "democraticized" in 1989, we'd probably see a replay of post opium war china. A country that large and diverse, with a weakened central authority, would have been dismembered and picked apart, like in China in the 1800s and the Soviet Union/Russia in the 1990s.

Looking at what the soviet union and russia in particular went through in the 90s to even today and what china went through in the 90s to today, I doubt any chinese citizen is upset at the crackdown. But it is an interesting "what if".

<comment><USER5> > I doubt any chinese citizen is upset at the crackdown.

Tibetans and Uygurs may beg the differ.

— Or maybe you already discounted them from being Chinese? I'm fine with that definition too ;)

<comment><USER4> I said china is a multi-ethnic nation unlike south korea, didn't I. I highly doubt tibetans or ugyhurs would celebrate going through 90s russian life.

Tibet and Xinjiang ( and to a limited degree hong kong ) are interesting because europe in particular wants to use them to break china. And interestingly enough, the both tibet and xinjiang were invaded by foreign powers ( britain and soviet union ) in order to destabilize china. Both times, most tibetans and uyghurs sided with china.

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

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

My point is that most people just care about their well being. As long as they are getting wealthier, they don't care. If china's economic situation worsens dramatically, then I suspect things might be different. But I doubt any chinese citizens of any ethnicity wants their family to experience 90s russia or 1800s china. Just like no one here wants to go through a great depression ( which was mild compared to what 90s russia and 1800s china experienced ).

<comment><USER6> The Uyghurs siding with China was before China started rounding them up and putting them in camps. The Uyghurs now live under the worst dystopian future humanity could envisage -- Checkpoints with phone scans, mandatory government spyware that scans for illicit content, deep facial recognition and social profiling EVERYWHERE. Its a different time, and a different China. I hope the Uyghur rise up and smash this. I wouldn't bet on it happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> China has seen the days of democrats coming to power and China killed them. It has the experience in doing so. IMO when a democratic power is rising in China, China knows how to kill it swiftly. So uh, China becoming democratic is still highly unlikely, at least within 30~40 years I guess.

<comment><USER8> I think the most likely route at the moment is schism and fragmentation within the existing power structure along geographic lines, as happened with the Soviet Union. I suspect this would only be possible in the face of sever economic crisis, in which the economic and political interests of the regions severely diverged from those of the central authorities.

It's difficult to see this actually happening though. China is pretty prosperous and can probably weather even a severe economic crisis. The Soviet Union was far more ethnically and regionally diverse. It also had the Eastern Bloc countries under a loose enough control that it was possible for them to slip out of it's fingers, which started a domino effect that China isn't really vulnerable to in that way.

<comment><USER9> Russia was also hilariously poor, even when it was relatively powerful. Saying Russia is more ethnically diverse than China is an interesting statement, given the enormous breadth and width of China and all the different subcultures and people living there. Unless this is a skin colour thing? I don't really understand ethnocentric reasoning

<comment><USER8> Ethnic politics in China is like everything else a complete stitch-up. China, though big, is a fraction of the size of the USSR, which was 70% Slavs while China is 91% Han. That's less than a third as much ethnic diversity. The problem is a lot of even that diversity is fake.

There are some powerful members of the ruling Chinese elite that 'belong to minorities', but the threshold for that is having one ethnic minority grandparent, who themselves might have had only one ethnic minority grandparent. Oh, and ethnic minority groups get some educational advantages, so it's an advantage to get the classification. This means the ranks of minorities get heavily packed with people who are in practice indistinguishable genetically and culturally from the average Han, but have the right to represent and speak for their minority group.

Thus in theory minorities are very well represented, get various advantages and have a voice in politics and society. In practice the people who get to do so are hand picked by the party and have the most tenuous links imaginable to the minority they supposedly represent.

<comment><USER9> Leaving aside the frankly problematic amount of veiled racism, China is _large_. There are a lot of people in it so even if 91% is Han, they might still have more other people in it than Russia does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has the CCP ever seemed to WANT to lean towards democracy?

I'm not convinced that simply a leadership change would be enough to change the fact that the CCP first and foremost wishes to preserve its own power, ideology or anything else is secondary.

</comment><comment><USER11> The article's author (just) wrote this book:

[https://www.amazon.com/New-Authoritarianism-Populism- Tyranny...](https://www.amazon.com/New-Authoritarianism-Populism-Tyranny- Experts/dp/1509533095/) "The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts"

 _" In this provocative and highly original book, Salvatore Babones argues that democracy has been undermined by a quiet but devastating power grab conducted by a class of liberal experts. They have advanced a global rights- based agenda which has tilted the balance away from the lively and vibrant unpredictability of democratic decision-making toward the creeping technocratic authority of liberal consensus. Populism represents, contends Babones, an imperfect but reinvigorating political flood that has the potential to sweep away decades of institutional detritus and rejuvenate democracy across the West."_

Also, The National Interest has some notoriety for having published [https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-bear-the- elephant-1...](https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-bear-the- elephant-13098), by Maria Butina, the convicted Russian agent.

Just for context.

edit: even more curiously, he has also recently written [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00X668R0K](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00X668R0K) "Sixteen for '16: A progressive agenda for a better America":

 _" The progressive movement is on the march in America and this accessible book points toward a destination. Sixteen for '16 offers a new agenda for the 2016 US election crafted around sixteen core principles that all progressives can believe in, from securing jobs to saving the Earth. Decades of destructive social, economic, and political policies have devastated poor, working, and even middle class American communities. It is now clear to everyone that the emperor has no clothes, that harsh austerity does not bring prosperity, and that the wealthy have no intention to see their wealth trickle down. Each generation is no longer better off than the ones that came before. America now needs jobs, infrastructure, a rededication to public education, universal healthcare, higher taxes on higher incomes, a more secure Social Security, an end to the rule of the bankers, stronger unions, a living minimum wage, better working conditions, an end to the prison state, secure reproductive rights, voter equality, a more moral foreign policy, a more sane environmental policy, and action on global warming. Sixteen for '16 is a manifesto which makes the argument for each of these positions, clearly, concisely, and supported by hard data. As ambitious as these policies are, they represent a beginning, not an end. The progressive agenda laid out in Sixteen for '16 charts a realistic path toward a better tomorrow."_

What the heck is this Babones guy? This is inadvertently a much more interesting submission than it seemed, for very different reasons than intended.

<comment><USER12> Would you be providing similar context if The Nation or Huffington Post would be the source? What about New York Times or CNN?

<comment><USER13> I mean, the name of the source implied that there was likely to be some material of that kind to find, so it's helpful in its way. The fact that you find the context damning but seem to be unhappy that it was revealed is worrying. I don't actually agree with the author, but it's not -that- bad of a position.

EDIT: it's actually a lot stranger on a second read

<comment><USER12> I don't find it damning. You are the one that does. But would you mind answering my question please?

<comment><USER13> I'm not the parent poster, but I'm somewhat confused now about the author and need further reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The title is big but the amount of substance in it is low.

Not sure if there is anything new discussed in this short essay.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say, very unlikely even if Zhao and Hu were given a go. Both of them were held pretty much like a decoration to appease the West.

A lot people exaggerate their role. Even back then, very few Chinese ever heard of them.

> What if the students in Tiananmen Square had peacefully dispersed, but > continued to work quietly for democratic reform throughout the 1990s?

Then they would've been quietly hunted down to the last one without making much of a bang. People entertaining themselves with such scenarios have little understanding of the way the mindset of totalitarian regime leaders work: in 1989, the CCP was _scared to death_. Loss of power in any form for such people invariably means either a trip to Hague, or to their own secret jails.

Peaceful political change don't happen when the power holders are ready to do anything to keep their power. In such cases, only violence works.

I truly despise people who call for "peaceful resistance" in time when people are being showered with bullets. Such people bear as much responsibility for loss of human life as one who do the killing.

<comment><USER15> > Then they would've been quietly hunted down to the last one without making > much of a bang.

That's pure conjecture, of course.

One thing to keep in mind is that the events of Tiananmen (and beyond, actually, as they did not involve only Beijing and only the students) scared the government, as you mention.

That's why the reaction was so harsh and the backlash so durable.

The government might have taken a softer stance if the events had been less threatening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another question to ask is: _did the fall of the Soviet Union led to democracy in Russia?_ This fellow [1] whom you might've heard of has been leading Russia in one way or another since 1999.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin)</comment>


What I Learned from a Sex-Crazed Short-Order Cook - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130313143038-5434591-best-advice-what-i-learned-from-a-sex-crazed-short-order-cook <comment><USER2> As a former dishwasher and line cook at the local steak house when I was growing up, I relate almost exactly what this guy said. I was 15 and sucked at washing dishes. We had this one guy, Snoopy was his nickname. Dude was so fast at washing dishes I wanted to be exactly like him. But it was how he attacked it that stuck with me. Organize what you can, soak the stuff with caked on crap, wash what needs washing first (plates for cooks, silverware and cups for waitresses, biscuit pans, then baking pans), sling plates around like a madman, get soaked to the bone, and never let your feet stop dancing. And exactly like this guy, I too can sort silverware with each hand independently (I have to admit I'm pretty awesome at this). Speed, speed, speed was what Snoopy drove into me. To this day I do the same things as a developer/devops person at work. Organize, prioritize, speed, speed, speed...iterate.

<comment><USER3> Ya, spent 10 years in the restaurant industry. Started as dishwasher, then busboy, salad cook, etc, then waiter, bartender, doing deliveries, and finally manager. Here's the lessons I took with me to coding:

You can't pass the problem to later. Steak is not cooked right? Wrong salad dressing? Let's have a meeting tomorrow and talk about it. No. Gotta address it RIGHT NOW.

When you get in the weeds, meaning you're overwhelmed, you gotta stop doing what's not 100% required and hustle, hustle, hustle. Don't talk to people, just do your job super fast.

Last rule: you have to be prepared for the day: gotta have the food ready by the time the front door opens. You can't say at 12:03 that there's no iced tea. Everything has to be prepared ahead of time. If you've not prepared everything as well as possible, you're gonna be screwed. Even small things like rolling silverware in napkins will kill you if you have a party of 15 ready to sit down clogging up the front lobby and you can't sit then down because you're out of freaking silverware.

So: prepare well, resolve problems as they arise, and hustle when you're overwhelmed.

Last rule: don't whine. If 19 years old Becky can do it, you can too.

<comment><USER4> This sounds a lot like stage management.

That problem you just heard about? The audience is going to see it too if you don't fix it. Right. Now. And it's not going to get fixed unless you do it yourself or have someone else capable do it - you are in control, and if you don't make something happen, it doesn't happen. And while you're managing crises, you still have to fly the airplane - the performance crashes without your voice guiding it along.

You have to think through plans, make sure they will work and nothing will get in the way, and then execute them quickly and correctly, or you and the people you're responsible for are detracting from the quality of other people's hard work. Sure, you can get it right next time, but this is live. There is no editing. If you screw up, you screw up, everyone knows it, and you've blown the suspension of disbelief. But there isn't time to get flustered or argue over blame, because another cue is rapidly approaching. And sometimes, things that are nobody's fault will arise, and you'll have to work around those too. (Actor injured? Call 911, get them out the rear loading dock, and keep calling the show. Or know when to stop it. Building power outage? Get out there and get control of the audience, get some flashlights, and lead a safe evacuation.)

I don't think there's any exercise in high school with more real-world significance than that.

<comment><USER5> And the screw-up: calling the wrong backdrop on the wrong scene with an open curtain; realizing it 10 seconds later; calling it back up to drop the right one; thinking "everybody is going to notice that...I look like an idiot."

And then finding out nobody noticed or saw. Taught me an important lesson: The world is much less likely to notice my mistakes than I am, which means I can screw up more without worry as much.

Yeah, I was an uptight kid, still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, yes, if you put 'Sex-Crazed' in the title of your blog entry I will read it. I won't feel great about it, but I'll read it.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. I felt a bit cheated by the end that the only appearance of this "sex- crazed" side was: "He sexually harassed waitresses using a long pair of tongs to increase his range. After drinks in the parking lot, he drove them around on his Ninja 1000."

Then I thought about it some more and decided to give the writer the benefit of the doubt - he stresses the sex-crazed aspect of the cook to paint a clearer image of the type of person, even though it doesn't really come up in the story. Starting the article with that fact planted in my head even before the first paragraph probably made a big difference to my reading of it.

<comment><USER8> Lack of a sex-crazed mentor aside, I'd like to go on record to say that this was the most enjoyable 5 minutes I have ever spent on linkedin.

<comment><USER9> didn't even realise I was on linkedin.

<comment><USER8> I managed to escape the site without being asked to "connect" with every single person I've ever contacted via gmail. Hooray!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I liked this story a lot, but I had a slightly different experience. I started washing dishes in a bakery over the summer, at age 12. Somewhere in the summer of my 16th or 17th year, I think the boss finally realized that I was simply better at other things, after years of what must have been charity on his part to keep me on. He could bang out a full sink of dishes in about three minutes. For me it took closer to 30, so while we generally never quite ran out, there was never an opportunity for me to do anything else. I just couldn't leave them dirty, not even a little bit. I found the concept of not doing a 100% job to be repulsive for some reason. I sometimes still do, and it does cause problems when I should have just stopped at 90% (or more like 30% with the dishes) -- perfectionism definitely has some drawbacks.

I did much better as a cashier.

<comment><USER11> Hah! That was me at McDonald's. One night everyone else was waiting impatiently in the dining room at 1:00 AM as I was furiously scrubbing pots sparkly clean. The team lead came over, observed my technique for a few minutes, sighed, and said "Most people just knock the worst of it off. We want to go home."

They wouldn't let guys be cashiers, though, so it was making burgers and cleaning pots for a whole summer.

<comment><USER12> Is not letting guys be cashiers a corporate rule, or just in that particular McDonald's? What's the reasoning behind that?

<comment><USER13> There is a male cashier at my local McDonalds, so it can't be a universal rule today.

I think it sounds more like a dumb quirk of one store than corporate policy.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I don't think it's corporate policy. I don't think it was corporate policy even decades ago when I worked there. Probably illegal now.

When we complained about it the manager said "If you came here to buy a meal, who would you rather see?" As a teenage boy I couldn't argue with that logic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For more stories from the kitchen, perseverance, entrepreneurship and debauchery, I highly recommend Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential.

[http://www.amazon.ca/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony- Bourdain/d...](http://www.amazon.ca/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony- Bourdain/dp/0747553556)

<comment><USER15> Yes, yes, yes. It contains this chunk of text that is perfectly applicable to coding:

 _If you let your mise-en-place [your working area, your setup] run down, get dirty and disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook's station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He'd press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs, and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. "You see this?" he'd inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef's palm, "That's what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!"_

Any time I catch myself trying to rush through some piece of tricky coding, Bourdain's chef steps behind me and says, "Work clean!"

<comment><USER16> He's right. Constantly redressing entropy keeps your mind free for the big picture once it's time to make hay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I learned from reading the Nth variation of this story:

People love hearing about what a bad situation you were in before and how it leads to your success because you are more desperate than everyone else.

<comment><USER18> As a child I used to get rather irritated whenever my nanny or butler complained about their impoverished circumstances.

People definitely love telling these stories. Hearing them, maybe not so much.

<comment><USER19> What you may not have considered is that people like even less when someone complains about trivial problems during their wealthy upbringing.

"Mother! The staff is whinging again!"

<comment><USER20> I'll assume your comedy detector is mis-calibrated, I have a hard time thinking someone could post here about the "tiresome whining of their servants" in anything but a joking manner.

<comment><USER19> I surely hope so. It was such a derivation from the topic at hand (rags to riches vs. complaining servants) that, if it was satire or irony, I don't get what the joke or lesson was supposed to be.

Edit: Perhaps the lesson it that they are tired of reading hard work your way to fortune stories? That does make sense, I was probably wrong in my comment above.

<comment><USER17> I don't mean to put down any rags to riches people but if we were to believe the often repeated lessons, then we should be shipping ourselves to Africa in order to become the next billionaire.

I smell survivorship bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "WHEN IN THE HISTORY OF THIS RESTAURANT HAS ANYONE EATEN FROM THE BOTTOM OF THESE PLATES?"

While not quite the same, I'm reminded of Jobs' comment regarding a furniture maker who made sure the backs of the furniture were finished

<comment><USER22> In my world, plates are stacked on top of each other prior to use.

Cleaning both sides is a good idea.

<comment><USER23> He was probably referring to cleaning (scrubbing, rinsing off, etc) the bottom of the plate prior to putting it on a rack that was about to be pushed through the dishwasher. The bottoms would be clean at this point, but it would be wasted time to spend extra seconds clearing visible food from the bottom of a plate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _a wider world where hardly anyone else had ever washed dishes for a living_

There's around half a million restaurants in the US, and turnover of kitchen staff is high, so I don't understand how he concludes this. Maybe he's talking about his social circle, but there's no shortage of people out there working hard at shit jobs. I can't say I care for this style of humblebrag.

<comment><USER25> Have _you_ washed dishes for a living?

<comment><USER24> I have. I call it a shit job because it's very hard for not much pay. It's also repetitive and reactive, so once you've achieved competence, there isn't really anywhere you can go with it; it's up (to a better job in the kitchen) or out. I moved up to cooking, but I don't feel the same nostalgia as this writer for being a dishwasher. Of the various manual labor jobs I've done, I preferred construction work because it provides a sense of progress and offers more opportunities for skills development and variety as well as teamwork. YMMV.

<comment><USER26> I suspect that the percentage of knowledge workers in Europe & the US/CA who have held menial jobs prior to entering the professional workforce is significantly higher than the percentages in developing countries. I could be way wrong, but it seems there's far less social stigma attached to holding service jobs in countries where everyone knows there are attainable, relatively straightforward to achieve, better options, compared to countries where the middle class is still much smaller and a large percentage of service workers know going in they'll be holding those types of jobs for life.

<comment><USER27> Yes in Asian cultures there is much more of a stigma with manual labor. It is a huge difference with western countries where work is valued no matter what it is.

<comment><USER24> That's a good point; I overlooked that context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "When all hell is breaking loose, organize yourself first" - My favorite point in this story.

<comment><USER28> Completely - "when all around you are losing theirs"

I always used to say every university student should tend bat or tables for a month - it teaches you more about customer service than a year of once a week customer meetings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for this, had a good laugh reading it! Cooking is my other passion right next to programming and I've worked in kitchens quite a bit, an occasional plunger but mostly a chef, on-and-off since I was 14 (don't ask...). Haven't been back to chef-ing in about 5 years, but I miss it quite a lot for various reasons.

It's taught me stuff about handling stress I don't think I could have learnt anywhere else, and making a bad situation fun is definitely a good place to start.

I think the tech world lacks this sort of attitude drastically ; I also notice that a lot of people in our sector simply can't handle stress and high workloads very well. That might be part of the reason I did pretty well when I went back to programming.

The problem with most jobs requiring a higher level of education (very generally speaking) is that they separate the maker of the product (or at least the person who delivers it) from the client. What it means is that there's rarely any direct feedback either way. Because of the shift in knowledge, you could deliver a sh*t product that your client will love, and vice-versa.

In most cases, this wouldn't happen in a kitchen. You most likely wouldn't even be able to get through the first day without communication. Your work would be meaningless without feedback from your clients and your team (good and bad), chances are you wouldn't even have a job any longer.

I'm not saying this doesn't apply to tech jobs, but there seems to be a certain latency in and "transformation" of the feedback that's passed around. It basically misses that social and professional rawness which I often miss :)

<comment><USER30> When has a dishwasher ever talked to a diner?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder why nobody found _a way to completely automate the dish-washing process_? Is it really that hard? Couldn't you have dish-type-customized trays and a "monster machine" you could load them into and get them out clean and dried? (This is one of the jobs I've really like to be _made to disappear_ , viscerally, no matter how many people depend on this type of job. I've worked as a dishwasher myself but even as a young boy I realized I'm not gonna stand doing it, so I used all my cunning and reality-distorting abilities to get out of it to a better position in less than 3 days).

<comment><USER32> That kind of equipment is expensive. Dishwashers, not so much. Many times, dishwashers are under the table workers anyway.

In high school I was paid $10/hour in the 90's to unload wagons full of hay and stack them in a barn.

There are machines that will bale, load, and stack hay. But they cost like $80k and require a modern tractor that costs $150k new. The farmers I worked for used a tractor from the mid-1950's, and didn't have enough land to generate the cash flow necessary to pay for the equipment.

So they paid about $10-12k/summer for people to do the work manually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Fun story, but I'm gonna guess that the things he thought he learned on that job, he already had inside him. It was the first time he got to really apply his natural drive.

</comment><comment><USER34> working out of the weeds is great because there is a two-sided battle being waged in your own mind the ENTIRE time

the side that says "this is an impossible situation" and the side that says "you've done this a thousand times before, keep going."

</comment><comment><USER35> When I was a teenager I worked in a kitchen. A few times. Worst. Thing. Ever. 20 hour day, 4 hours of sleep, then a day off (regular work). Then another shift, sometimes. Back breaking. Absolutely worst. Still wonder how people do that. Shudder. Had recurring nightmares for the next 20 years about being drafted again.

</comment><comment><USER36> Scrubbing? I really have to wonder.

I worked in restaurants as a high-school student 40 years ago, and at that time the dishwashers (human) put the plates into racks and shoved them into dishwashers (appliances). Manual intervention for tableware was limited to transfer to the racks at one end of the appliance, and from that the other.

<comment><USER37> I quit my first job out of college and did a few months of part time restaurant work as I figured out what exactly I wanted to do with myself professionally. We actually scrubbed dishes and that was 2010. We had a sanitizer that heated dishes to kills germs but it didn't clean them. This was in Brooklyn and a pretty common setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Not to be (too) dismissive, but anyone can work a crap job for a summer in college. Have a shit full time job after college (hypothetically: file clerk at a nursing agency in in emeryville) -- that teaches you a different level of life lessons & desperation.

<comment><USER39> The thing about this entry, though, is that it tells you how he had to change in order to _succeed_ at that job. Which is a job, by the way, that I _failed_ at, for exactly the reason he was failing. I just didn't have the mentorship he did. Or maybe I did, but I didn't listen. I don't know, it's been a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Love. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up useful.

<comment><USER41> _Love. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up useful._

Isaac Newton is evidence that you're mistaken. If young person with talent and ambition were to mistakenly believe you, the most common outcome is that they'd become shadows of their former potential a few years later.

<comment><USER42> When Isaac Newton came to Cambridge, he matriculated a subsizar, meaning that he effectively worked as a menial servant rather than paying fees.

Relevant section of Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton - [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA71&...](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA7)

<comment><USER41> The commentator said, "Love. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up useful."

I took this to mean, "Every young person needs to experience love to grow up useful." i.e. a relationship.

I hope nobody who upvoted me felt that hard work is unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This resonates particularly well with me. I've worked at 3 places in my life. The first was a summer camp, where I was often a dish washer.

Being exposed to the skills of maintaining precision, order, and process under extreme stress is a massively valuable skill that you can cary through life. I'm just glad I learned it when the highest stakes were the lunch backup delaying dinner from being cooked - and not managing millions of dollars of investor's money.

(Ironically my only place of employment between my company and that summer camp was at Microsoft, about 5 minutes away from the Red Robin mentioned in the post)

</comment><comment><USER44> Hmm, I am not sure his points really apply to programs given that it would be trivial to program if we knew exactly what the problem we were trying to solve was.

Hard to prioritize when we don't know what is more important (relatively to the amount of time it takes), easy to prioritize when you have 10 different kinds of things to wash.

And yes, I would fail as a dishwasher. That is why I am a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER25> Reminds me of Thomas Keller's famous clock in the kitchen, with the words "Sense of Urgency" printed below. It hangs in the kitchens of all his restaurants.

I try to remember it when I start to lose that sense of urgency, and it works well.

<comment><USER30> When I lose my sense of urgency, my mind unlocks and I can see the forest for the trees and solve big problems.

<comment><USER38> Really? I'm back and forth on this, and the unlocking usually comes after periods of urgency even if I've moved on to something else. But "urgency" definitely is different than "panic" or "frantic".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I had a few high school dishwashing gigs myself. The rib house was the most memorable. Cleaning up BBQ sucked. I learned I never wanted to do that again.

</comment><comment><USER46> most people are missing the point, it's not the dish washing or the food industry, it's these lessons learned:

1\. create some type of order (clean env) in the chaos 2\. coach 3\. trust those that you hire old saying in chinese, leverage those you trust, dont leverage those you dont trust) 3\. motivate/reward/acknowledge

purely management, great!

</comment><comment><USER47> You can't beat a good hard graft. Massive self esteem ensues after you SMASHED it @ work.

</comment><comment><USER48> [ETA: original title was "YOU'RE AN ANIMAL" (linkedin.com)]

I was really fucking hoping to see a LinkedIn profile for somebody's dog or something.

</comment><comment><USER49> this is a boring article about an overworked dishwasher with no life lessons to gain and using 'sex' as a cheap title catch. skip it.

<comment><USER26> Bullshit -- plenty of people, especially technical folks or individuals working in IT more generally -- still haven't learned the lessons of hard work and problem solving + prioritization of tasks under pressure. Even if it's treacly, it's still worth hearing the same thing for the millionth time. I can tell you, for one, that I'll reshare this link in a place where my team might see it (especially for the benefit of the remote teams in Mexico, Brazil, and India, where programmers tend to come from upper-middle/upper class families anyway and may never have held a manual labor position in their lives).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> TLDR?

<comment><USER51> Hard work builds character.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Work harder, and faster.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Don't sweat details that don't matter.

It doesn't matter how hard you work if you aren't getting the work done. You don't get points for trying.

Practising ambidextrous cutlery sorting increases proficiency at ambidextrous cutlery sorting ( <http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/01/19> ).

So many common TLDRs of this story template.</comment></comment>


Amazon threatens to fire employees who speak out on climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/amazon-threatens-to-fire-employees-who-speak-out-on-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> Please stop posting this story to Hacker News.</comment>


Ask HN: What percent of YC companies had former YC-mafia connections? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering how many of the companies that have been accepted in the last few years (2008+) that were introduced by former YC members. Trying to measure how much of a referral thing it actually is. <comment><USER2> Maybe 10 or 15%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It isn't like its hard to reach out to YC startups, they are generally, almost by definition, easy to contact.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I know. I meant more like personal, face to face connection. One conversation on a coffee shop is ok, but 5 emails back and forth, not really what I meant (not to dismiss the founders who sent 5 emails back and forth to me, you were really helpful, but this is not what I'd like to measure here).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think using the term 'mafia' is pushing it.

Having connections never hurt anybody, I'd assume that having YC connections doens't hurt either. Being on HN already gives you an 'in' with plenty of YC alumni and current start-up operators so by that definition pretty much everybody has a YC connection.

You'd have to be pretty specific about what kind of connection you mean and I think you should probably try to leave references to criminal organizations out of it.

<comment><USER5> In the startup context, I don't see it as having particularly negative connotations or referring directly to the criminal organization. After the "PayPal Mafia", it's become a fairly common term for just alumni of a particular startup/incubator/whatever. See e.g., this aggregator of Boston- area startup tweets: <http://bostonstartupmafia.com/></comment></comment>