Explanation of the Asiana SF crash by a former UAL captain - <AUTHOR> http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-crash-san-francisco-63.html#post7931852 <comment><USER3> To save you from looking up the more obscure acronyms like I did (summaries where given are my own words):

RTO: Rejected take-off, when you have to abort a take-off (though it seems in the context of the post, the exercise described involved an edge case when you should go ahead with the take-off)

AGL: Above ground level

CAVOK: Ceiling and Visibility are OK: no clouds < 5000 ft AGL, with >10 km visibility

VOR approach: VHF omnidirectional radio range: navigating based on a radio signal, considered "non-precision"

IAF: Initial approach fix [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_approach_fix](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_approach_fix)

LNAV/VNAV: lateral/vertical navigation [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNAV](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNAV)

FAF: Final approach fix

UNSAT: unsatisfactory rating (paperwork)

FCOM: Flight crew operating manual

CRM/CLR: Cockpit resource management, a set of NASA-originating practices to limit and contain human error [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Resource_Management](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Resource_Management)

<comment><USER4> I was unclear on his example -- their manual says to ignore "aft cargo door" cautions during takeoff? Are those known to be false-positives, or just not that important? I thought the cargo doors were structural parts of the aircraft, and thus having them open would cause both structural and aerodynamic problems. Maybe they just continue takeoff and land again?

<comment><USER5> In modern planes there is a filter on the warning computer that doesn´t allow to show certain non vital failures between 80 knots (or 100 depending the plane) and V1. For example an engine fire is going to trigger the alarm, but not an engine EGT (exhaust gas temp) over limit. But the list of warnings not shown, and the ones shown but that must be ignored, are different from plane to plane. That´s why this instructor was doing this test, to make them learn that the 777 had a different list and requirements from the previous one. Mind you that after you´ve been in 2 or 3 different planes it´s easy to react automatically but with the previous plane list.

It´s known that pilots are oversensitive to warnings during take off. A rejected take off is a dangerous maneuver that must be avoided if unnecessary, and is trained in each simulator session. This is more important in wide body airliners like the 747, 777, A340 or A380, as their take off weight is so high that a RTO (rejected take off) will blowout some tires (of the main landing gear) due to the stress or the temperature increase inside the tire created by the brakes. Once the plane is stopped, it has to wait isolated at the taxiway because there are temperature plugs at the tires that may blow out, nobody can get close during that time. If the weight is too high they will even burn as the brakes will be white hot. Look at youtube for a certification RTO of a big plane to see it, or some brake energy absorption test at the laboratory, to see how much energy they have to mannage.

In this case(the simulator story) a after cargo door is one of those warnings that you have to ignore as the plane will flight without problems, then you may turn around and make a landing after dumping some fuel(to decrease the weight).

Hope this helps

Edit: some clarification

Below 80 it is possible to RTO without problems as the speed is still low. Once you reach V1 you will NEVER RTO! as this speed is calculated taking in to account the runway length, and in such a manner that if you RTO at V1, the runway remaining once you have stopped is just a couple dozen of meters. The V1 is so high because that way, when you become airborne, you´ll have a better climb gradient even with an engine fail. All this stuff is calculated with an engine fail, after all it is the most important and probable fail you will encounter (the reverse deployment on take-off is much more severe but thankfully very very rare), and that will affect your climb capability.

Edit 2: added-improved some punctuation.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXpjBxD0Rhg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXpjBxD0Rhg)

An example of the braking test - stopping a 288 tonne 777 travelling at 200mph. The disc brakes were on fire, and they then had to taxi around on wheels at a temp of 3000 deg for five minutes to simulate the time it took for fire trucks to arrive.

Cool

<comment><USER7> The entire 5 hour documentary I think this is from about the 777 is awesome and definitely worth the watch.

It was on PBS, called "21st Century Jet"

<comment><USER4> As amazing as the 777 is, the 787 seems to be even better (and there's talk of updating the 777 with 787 technology).

I really hope next time they go shopping for Air Force One they take budget into consideration, and the end of the cold war, and ETOPS, and seriously consider a twin engine (ideally a 787 with a reduction in passengers, but probably they'd go with a 777 and continue taking way too many people.) Outside of cargo and the military, four engine passenger jets seem to be a dying species. (and obviously the A380 and other airbus products aren't in the running for AF1. I still haven't gotten a chance to fly on an A380.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find air disasters a strangely compelling topic, so I've read all 82 pages of comments on that site. Lots of very experienced pilots post wide range of views.

Here is a list of the likely factors that contributed to the crash, based on my reading of the comments at pprune.com:

poor piloting skills, specifically not monitoring speed during landing, a very basic skill

recent switchover of flight pilot from Airbus to Boeing (Boeing planes have throttles that physically move when the thottle setting is changed by automatic systems, Airbus doesn't)

misunderstanding of details of automatic thrust control

inexperience of pilot conducting the training (new to being trainer, 1st flight apparently)

glide slope system on the runway was inoperable, otherwise would have possibly been used and the crash wouldn't have occurred

possible crew social status issues, a known flight-deck issue in some cultures, where those of lower status are hesitant to correct those of high status, but it doesn't seem likely a big factor here

FLCH 'trap', where if you use a certain type of autopilot setting, you might expect the thrust to keep the speed at or above a certain level with automatic throttle adjustments, but it doesn't happen

To summarize, it appears the two pilots at the control thought the jet was in a mode where it automatic thrust control would maintain an approach speed, but when they increased angle of attack just before landing (basically gliding decent up until then), the speed fell off and the throttles did not move automatically, and they failed to note the falling speed until it was too late to avoid crashing. (once you command full throttle from idle, it takes five seconds for the engines to spin back up.)

If they had actually had the plane in the mode they thought it was in, they would have had a perfect landing of the most routine kind.

<comment><USER9> There are dozens of compelling hypotheses as to why this happened. But op chose to submit this and people are up voting it and following the narrative that it is something about pilots being Korean and their training. I find it unsettling that the crowd of people whom I have thought to be more intelligent than the masses isn't all that better than the majority.

<comment><USER10> Personally I think the Korea angle is a red herring. The issue seems to me to be training and policy. Various air safety bodies around the world had complained to the safety body in Korea about the levels of training (including practice) of pilots. Foreign trainers were brought to Korea to up the quality and level of pilot training _but the training policies themselves don 't seem to have changed_. This seems to be a case of changing the/some of employees but not the corporate culture; I'd expect similar problems in other companies and countries, I don't think it is unique to Korea / Korean culture.

<comment><USER11> I think the forum poster also tried to indicate some of these problems are not unique to Koreans. The part at the end about inflated logbooks due to autopilot was interesting to me. Quote from cached page on google:

 _Finally, I 'll get off my box and talk about the total flight hours they claim. I do accept that there are a few talented and free-thinking pilots that I met and trained in Korea. Some are still in contact and I consider them friends. They were a joy! But, they were few and far between and certainly not the norm.

Actually, this is a worldwide problem involving automation and the auto-flight concept. Take one of these new first officers that got his ratings in the US or Australia and came to KAL or Asiana with 225 flight hours. After takeoff, in accordance with their SOP, he calls for the autopilot to be engaged after takeoff. How much actual flight time is that? Hardly one minute. Then he might fly for hours on the autopilot and finally disengage it (MAYBE?) below 800 ft after the gear was down, flaps extended and on airspeed (autothrottle). Then he might bring it in to land. Again, how much real flight time or real experience did he get. Minutes! Of course, on the 777 or 747, its the same only they get more inflated logbooks.

So, when I hear that a 10,000 hour Korean captain was vectored in for a 17-mile final and cleared for a visual approach in CAVOK weather, it raises the hair on the back of my neck._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You encounter _a lot_ of this behaviour in students when they show up in a research lab for the first time, having taken only lab classes and lectures before, and it isn't at all confined to East Asians. It's always a shock to see that your experiments don't turn out as intended and to recognize that all the class exercises have some bearing in real life, so to speak.

Some people never make the transition to independent work, and those are handed their ass fairly quickly, at least in a working lab. If what the fellow writes in this article is true, KAL and friends have some work to do.

<comment><USER13> makes sense, both the head and copilot on this flight were relatively inexperienced on the 777.

I wonder if the Airline had laid off their veteran (and hence high earning) pilots earlier (which would have exacerbated such a situation with inexperienced pilots); it's certainly not unheard of in the industry.

Lastly, apparently the Asiana Air CEO has been quoted as saying that all responsibility lies with the pilots and that he and/or the company are not responsible. Great to know that your boss has your back >_>

<comment><USER14> > Lastly, apparently the Asiana Air CEO has been quoted as saying that all > responsibility lies with the pilots and that he and/or the company are not > responsible. Great to know that your boss has your back

So who is responsible for hiring good pilots?

<comment><USER15> So who is responsible for hiring a good CEO?

So who is responsible for hiring a good board?

So who is responsible for getting good owners?

So where does the buck stop?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> An interesting thought experiment is speculate as to when the state of the art in automated flight control and supervision (AFC&S) advances to the point at which human intervention in the flight process causes more harm than good.

I'm guessing it will be about the same time that human surgeons are significantly less effective than fully automated systems.

30 years? 50 years?

It's probably already reached the case that for the non-corner case scenario (cross winds, flight emergency, exceptions) - that a fully automated system probably meets the performance of a human pilot, and the human pilot's major contribution is the ability to exercise executive judgement in the event of exception cases.

<comment><USER17> It'll be interesting to see which runs out: hands-on pilot skills, or cheap petroleum to fuel commercial aviation.

Given the pretty resounding lack of positive news from biofuel replacement projects (where _is_ that MASBI report that's due out this year). Ah, here we go: [http://www.masbi.org/content/assets/MASBI_Report.pdf](http://www.masbi.org/content/assets/MASBI_Report.pdf)

US commercial and military aviation consumes 20 billion gallons of jet fuel annually.

Best biofuel generation from crop seeds (canola) runs 80-120 gallons/acre/year. Let's call it 100 gallons even.

Replacing that fuel would require 200 million acres of land. The US has 409 acres of arable land.

Would you prefer to eat as much as you are now, and stick to ground (or airship) transport, or go on a 50% calorie reduction but retain the ability to fly at speeds over 130 MPH?

<comment><USER18> > which runs out: hands-on pilot skills, or cheap petroleum to fuel commercial > aviation

Are you kidding? Have you seen the numbers for fracking and methane hydrates? The age of cheap hydrocarbon fuel seems to be _beginning_ , not ending.

What that means for the environment I don't know, but the numbers, if they bear out (and they certainly are for fracking) are stunning.

<comment><USER19> Methane being a much more potent greenhouse gas is worrying, especially with regards to hydrates.

<comment><USER18> Definitely. If the methane thing pans out .. well, in 10 years time we'll probably be totally desensitised to news headlines that read something like "Reflective cloud seeding program starting over Pacific basin" or "Mirror assembly nearing completion at LaGrange Point".

I just don't think we have the ability to stop ourselves huffing at that hydrocarbon crack pipe so I think we'll have to switch to management rather than prevention in this generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Original forum post was deleted. A mirror:_

Low-down on Korean pilots, (From a friend).

After I retired from UAL as a Standards Captain on the -400, I got a job as a simulator instructor working for Alteon (a Boeing subsidiary) at Asiana. When I first got there, I was shocked and surprised by the lack of basic piloting skills shown by most of the pilots. It is not a normal situation with normal progression from new hire, right seat, left seat taking a decade or two. One big difference is that ex-Military pilots are given super-seniority and progress to the left seat much faster. Compared to the US, they also upgrade fairly rapidly because of the phenomenal growth by all Asian air carriers. By the way, after about six months at Asiana, I was moved over to KAL and found them to be identical. The only difference was the color of the uniforms and airplanes. I worked in Korea for 5 long years and although I found most of the people to be very pleasant, it is a minefield of a work environment ... for them and for us expats.

One of the first things I learned was that the pilots kept a web-site and reported on every training session. I dont think this was officially sanctioned by the company, but after one or two simulator periods, a database was building on me (and everyone else) that told them exactly how I ran the sessions, what to expect on checks, and what to look out for. For example; I used to open an aft cargo door at 100 knots to get them to initiate an RTO and I would brief them on it during the briefing. This was on the B-737 NG and many of the captains were coming off the 777 or B744 and they were used to the Master Caution System being inhibited at 80 kts. Well, for the first few days after I started that, EVERYONE rejected the takeoff. Then, all of a sudden they all got it; and continued the takeoff (in accordance with their manuals). The word had gotten out. I figured it was an overall PLUS for the training program.

We expat instructors were forced upon them after the amount of fatal accidents (most of the them totally avoidable) over a decade began to be noticed by the outside world. They were basically given an ultimatum by the FAA, Transport Canada, and the EU to totally rebuild and rethink their training program or face being banned from the skies all over the world. They hired Boeing and Airbus to staff the training centers. KAL has one center and Asiana has another. When I was there (2003-2008) we had about 60 expats conducting training KAL and about 40 at Asiana. Most instructors were from the USA, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand with a few stuffed in from Europe and Asia. Boeing also operated training centers in Singapore and China so they did hire some instructors from there.

This solution has only been partially successful but still faces ingrained resistance from the Koreans. I lost track of the number of highly qualified instructors I worked with who were fired because they tried to enforce normal standards of performance. By normal standards, I would include being able to master basic tasks like successfully shoot a visual approach with 10 kt crosswind and the weather CAVOK. I am not kidding when I tell you that requiring them to shoot a visual approach struck fear in their hearts ... with good reason. Like this Asiana crew, it didnt compute that you needed to be a 1000 AGL at 3 miles and your sink rate should be 600-800 Ft/Min. But, after 5 years, they finally nailed me. I still had to sign my name to their training and sometimes if I just couldnt pass someone on a check, I had no choice but to fail them. I usually busted about 3-5 crews a year and the resistance against me built. I finally failed an extremely incompetent crew and it turned out he was the a high-ranking captain who was the Chief Line Check pilot on the fleet I was teaching on. I found out on my next monthly trip home that KAL was not going to renew my Visa. The crew I failed was given another check and continued a fly while talking about how unfair Captain so-and-so was.

Any of you Boeing glass-cockpit guys will know what I mean when I describe these events. I gave them a VOR approach with an 15 mile arc from the IAF. By the way, KAL dictated the profiles for all sessions and we just administered them. He requested two turns in holding at the IAF to get set up for the approach. When he finally got his nerve up, he requested Radar Vectors to final. He could have just said he was ready for the approach and I would have cleared him to the IAF and then Cleared for the approach and he could have selected Exit Hold and been on his way. He was already in LNAV/VNAV PATH. So, I gave him vectors to final with a 30 degree intercept. Of course, he failed to Extend the FAF and he couldnt understand why it would not intercept the LNAV magenta line when he punched LNAV and VNAV. He made three approaches and missed approaches before he figured out that his active waypoint was Hold at XYZ. Every time he punched LNAV, it would try to go back to the IAF ... just like it was supposed to do. Since it was a check, I was not allowed (by their own rules) to offer him any help. That was just one of about half dozen major errors I documented in his UNSAT paperwork. He also failed to put in ANY aileron on takeoff with a 30-knot direct crosswind (again, the weather was dictated by KAL).

This Asiana SFO accident makes me sick and while I am surprised there are not more, I expect that there will be many more of the same type accidents in the future unless some drastic steps are taken. They are already required to hire a certain percentage of expats to try to ingrain more flying expertise in them, but more likely, they will eventually be fired too. One of the best trainees I ever had was a Korean/American (he grew up and went to school in the USA) who flew C-141s in the USAF. When he got out, he moved back to Korea and got hired by KAL. I met him when I gave him some training and a check on the B-737 and of course, he breezed through the training. I give him annual PCs for a few years and he was always a good pilot. Then, he got involved with trying to start a pilots union and when they tired to enforce some sort of duty rigs on international flights, he was fired after being arrested and JAILED!

The Koreans are very very bright and smart so I was puzzled by their inability to fly an airplane well. They would show up on Day 1 of training (an hour before the scheduled briefing time, in a 3-piece suit, and shined shoes) with the entire contents of the FCOM and Flight Manual totally memorized. But, putting that information to actual use was many times impossible. Crosswind landings are also an unsolvable puzzle for most of them. I never did figure it out completely, but I think I did uncover a few clues. Here is my best guess. First off, their educational system emphasizes ROTE memorization from the first day of school as little kids. As you know, that is the lowest form of learning and they act like robots. They are also taught to NEVER challenge authority and in spite of the flight training heavily emphasizing CRM/CLR, it still exists either on the surface or very subtly. You just cant change 3000 years of culture.

The other thing that I think plays an important role is the fact that there is virtually NO civil aircraft flying in Korea. Its actually illegal to own a Cessna-152 and just go learn to fly. Ultra-lights and Powered Hang Gliders are Ok. I guess they dont trust the people to not start WW III by flying 35 miles north of Inchon into North Korea. But, they dont get the kids who grew up flying (and thinking for themselves) and hanging around airports. They do recruit some kids from college and send then to the US or Australia and get them their tickets. Generally, I had better experience with them than with the ex-Military pilots. This was a surprise to me as I spent years as a Naval Aviator flying fighters after getting my private in light airplanes. I would get experienced F-4, F-5, F-15, and F-16 pilots who were actually terrible pilots if they had to hand fly the airplane. What a shock!

Finally, I'll get off my box and talk about the total flight hours they claim. I do accept that there are a few talented and free-thinking pilots that I met and trained in Korea. Some are still in contact and I consider them friends. They were a joy! But, they were few and far between and certainly not the norm.

Actually, this is a worldwide problem involving automation and the auto-flight concept. Take one of these new first officers that got his ratings in the US or Australia and came to KAL or Asiana with 225 flight hours. After takeoff, in accordance with their SOP, he calls for the autopilot to be engaged after takeoff. How much actual flight time is that? Hardly one minute. Then he might fly for hours on the autopilot and finally disengage it (MAYBE?) below 800 ft after the gear was down, flaps extended and on airspeed (autothrottle). Then he might bring it in to land. Again, how much real flight time or real experience did he get. Minutes! Of course, on the 777 or 747, its the same only they get more inflated logbooks.

So, when I hear that a 10,000 hour Korean captain was vectored in for a 17-mile final and cleared for a visual approach in CAVOK weather, it raises the hair on the back of my neck.

<comment><USER21> The problem here is clearly political. Somebody made the decision to fire these instructors; that decision was surely supported by senior management and then the government.

What should happen here is that the FAA, EU, and other countries that were originally involved in getting the Koreans to hire these expat instructors in the first place -- these countries should demand final say over all instructor personnel decisions.

This will mean the Koreans basically giving up control of their training program, which will be a huge piece of humble pie for them to eat. But there is no other solution. Either the pilots will be trained properly or they will continue making entirely preventable mistakes and killing people.

EDITED to add clarification: I know nothing about flying planes. My comment is about organizational dysfunction.

OH, and another thought: I don't know anything about this forum except that it calls itself a "Rumour Network". The fact that this post was deleted makes me wonder -- who is keeping issues like this from being aired? It's clear that the author has nothing against Koreans per se -- he just doesn't like to see incompetent pilots flying aircraft.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/british-airways-executive- clu...](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/british-airways-executive- club/416219-ot-ryanair-sues-balpa-pprune-pilots-website-posted- complaints.html)

It is very easy to sue under UK libel law, and pprune has been compelled to identify OPs before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For anyone as confused as me, the post that this linked to was deleted from the conversation.

<comment><USER24> Still mirrored in various web caches, such as Google's: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5Q2LM3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5Q2LM3XCXkJ:www.pprune.org/rumours- news/518568-asiana-flight-crash-san- francisco-63.html+http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight- crash-san-francisco-63.html%23post7931852&client=opera&hl=cs&gl=cz&strip=1)

<comment><USER25> Now also deleted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One interesting aspect that the poster brought up was attributing some of the deficiencies to culture. Cultures which emphasize rote memorization in their education are usually maligned by western cultures because they result in individuals who lack the ability to improvise and adapt. Does anyone have any examples that go the other way (i.e. cultural aspects of western education that result in an individual being poorly suited for an occupation...even to the point of causing fatalities like being an airplane pilot)?

<comment><USER27> Specifically, I think teaching k-12 is an occupation that requires a great deal of knowledge acquired via route memorization.

Anecdotally, my third grade teacher didn't understand long division, my eighth grade history teacher didn't know what an annotated bibliography was, and my 9th grade geometry teacher was debilitatingly dyslexic. While this didn't kill me, millions of Americans graduating college are crippled by debt - <USER2> because they couldn't do the simple math required to make a budget and understand what would be required to pay it back?

<comment><USER28> My experience is that it's not a problem when a teacher doesn't know some particular fact from memory as long as he can say "I'll get back to you on that," and subsequently go and look it up.

I suspect the people falling into the college debt trap are by and large not doing so because they couldn't do the math. I suspect they are doing so because they didn't realize in the first place that they should make the decision with the part of their brain that does math calculations rather than the part that does social status calculations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Since a lot of this has been coming up I thought many people might like to know the basics of how the auto-thrust system is used. Some of this information could be slightly inaccurate so if a real pilot wants to correct anything here, that would be great. The auto-pilot setting for autothrust ( _A /T_) has a lot of modes. You don't specifically set the mode so much as a combination of settings can affect the mode that it's in. The modes are the following (this is fairly generic and probably not exactly how the 777 system works):

 _A /T_ by itself will simply hold a specified airspeed by adjusting the Thrust Levers.

 _A /T_ \+ _FL /CH_ \+ _V /S_ \+ _Alititude Hold_ : (Auto-Thrust + Flight Level Change + Vertical Speed + Altitude Hold) climb or descend to the set altitude by the set vertical speed at the specified airspeed. The thrust levers are maniplated by the system. Generally once the altitude is attained, V/S and FL/CH will turn off.

 _A /T_ \+ "V/S": The same as the above but with no set altitude.

 _A /T_ \+ _Thrust Hold_ : I looked at the 777 main control panel and I couldn't find the setting for Thrust Hold, however it seems to be referred to in various things on the internet and I just don't know what to look for. This setting is normally used for takeoff (maybe landing?) where the pilot sets an airspeed and a thrust (via the thrust levers) and the airspeed is regulated by pitching the aircraft up or down.

 _A /T_ \+ _Thrust Hold_ \+ _FL /CH_ \+ _Altitude Hold_ : This setting is similar to the one above, but without setting a vertical speed. The indicated airspeed is controlled via pitching the aircraft up or down until the specified altitude is reached. I believe once the altitude is reached FL/CH mode is switched off as well as Thrust Hold.

This is my best guess as to what the 5 modes the NTSB says the 777 has. If any pilots could correct anything I'm missing or that is simply wrong, that would be great.

Switching between modes is really not intuitive because you're fiddling with settings and it's hard to know what button press is actually going to tell the system to do something. If you're interested in how confusing it can actually be, I'd recommend installing the x-plane trial and trying to mess with these settings.

If you want to give it a go, the beginner's tutorial for x-plane & the 777 has you do a visual landing on 28L @ KSFO

[http://wiki.x-plane.com/777_beginners_tutorial#Landing_the_7...](http://wiki.x-plane.com/777_beginners_tutorial#Landing_the_777_at_KSFO)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious about what the other pilot was doing. According to news articles, the second pilot was more experienced and qualified for that aircraft. Shouldn't he/she have been monitoring the approach ?

<comment><USER31> He/she was the far junior of the two pilots and was reluctant to challenge authority. Or so the story goes.

<comment><USER32> But we don't actually know for sure that this is what happened, right? At this point it seems to be just speculation that is being repeated as hearsay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm going to ask a dumb question.

I have a commercial drivers license, I've driven semi tractors, large straight trucks, and a wide variety of passenger vehicles.

Is it safe to presume that flying one type of widebody airliner is the same as flying any other kind of widebody airliner?

I can drive a Pete, Freightliner or International and they all largely drive in the same broad generalities.

Just as I can drive any full size car, and they all drive the same.

Would two similar classes or aircraft be the same?

<comment><USER34> (In the US) for airplanes with a maximum gross weight over 12,500 lbs, you require a "type rating" on your license to fly the plane. The type rating is for a specific make and model (type) of airplane. So if you have an Airline Transport pilot certificate with a 777 type rating, you cannot legally fly a 757 (unless you have a 757 type rating)

This distinction shows up not just in the law. I have many hours flying a Cessna 172, but when I recently bought a 182, some insurance quotes required as much as 10 hours of instruction, even though I could legally fly the 182 without any at all.

(Disclaimer: I haven't actually flown large airplanes or driven tractor trailers - someone more experienced is welcome correct what comes below)

Tractor trucks are all pretty similar. Hydraulic power steering, air breaks, unsynchronized transmissions, one engine, 18 wheels. They have similar stopping distance, similar handling around turns, and nearly identical controls.

Large planes on the other hand can have very different handling characteristics and controls. Different approach speeds, different after- takeoff checklists, different emergency procedures. Different navigation and autopilot systems. Fly-by-wire systems even change the basic relationship between control inputs and their effect on the plane.

<comment><USER35> There might be a special case for the 737 & 777\. What I have read is that Boeing designed the cockpit of the 777 to match that of the 737, and so the type rating is mostly transferable between the two.

<comment><USER36> The 757 and 767 share a common type rating. 737 and 777 do not. (The FAA doesn't much live in a "mostly" world... :) )

Source: FAA Advisory Circular 61-89E [http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAdvisor...](http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAdvisoryCircular.nsf/list/AC%2061-89E/$FILE/Ac61-89e.pdf)

<comment><USER35> Thank you for spotting that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This just made me instantly search for the Malcolm Gladwell Korean air story, which of course I'm not the first to think of.

[http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/07/malcolm- glad...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/07/malcolm-gladwells- cockpit-culture-theory-everywhere-after-asiana-crash/67058/)

</comment><comment><USER38> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kREPMzMLk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kREPMzMLk)

</comment><comment><USER39> > "The X are very very bright and smart so I was puzzled by their inability to > fly an airplane well"

Turns out to be true for most X as long as: 1\. The speaker does not belong to group X 2\. Speaker has one data point to support said inability.

Humans error. Humans that program machines error. Machines error.

Buckle your seatbelt.

<comment><USER40> > Speaker has one data point

If we trust him, the OP is a flight instructor with many years of experience training X. So, your dismissal is completely invalid.

> The speaker does not belong to group X

Clearly, your are subtly accusing the instructor of at least some kind of racial prejudice; otherwise, this point would be completely irrelevant. And that accusation doesn't seem warranted.

<comment><USER41> I was thinking about prejudice as well here, however this is not a racial culture thing but a corporate culture thing. If an airline improves training and quality assurance pro forma due to a formal threat of being shut down, something is very, very broken. I'm not sure if I'd ever board a KE or OZ airplane again. If the accusations here are true, both should be shut down immediately.

<comment><USER42> The fact that the instructor may perhaps (or perhaps not) be mistakenly attributing to Korean ethnic-culture certain worrying aspects is completely unimportant. The real cultural problem is that an instructor perceives pressure to pass students he believes should fail. That simple perception, regardless of underlying cause, is a problem that sabotages efforts to improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Looks like the pilots were blinded: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6025618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6025618)

</comment><comment><USER44> What NTSB has now said is that Auto-throttle has not 2 but 5 modes. Im not a pilot so all I knew of was 2. That may be a combination of different auto- pilot modes combined with auto-throttle modes.

But what seems clear is that the moment that the pilot turned off auto-pilot, the flight was doomed to crash as the auto-throttle was not in the right mode for landing. As in, a mode that would actually use thrust vs elevators to maintain airspeed.

NTSB also revealed that course corrections were being done not at the latest moment of 500 feet, but at 4000 feet 2.5 minutes before landing the plane was off course, in which case supervision, and correction would have been appropriate in a training scenario.

I hate to draw conclusions like this, but in today's modern aircraft pilots only fly about 20-30 mins of a flight, takeoff and landing at most with autopilot managing most of the rest under normal conditions.

The inability to hand fly an airliner, is a disqualifier to be a professional pilot.

NTSB revealed that several modes on autopilot and autothrottle were being cycled in the last 2.5 minutes of the Asiana descent perhaps indicating a reluctance to hand-fly the plane and an over-reliance on automation.

Any commercial pilot that cant hand-fly a 777 on a perfectly clear day at SFO should never see a commercial cockpit again.

<comment><USER45> What I find odd is that with such an increase in the use of simulators most pilots should find flying an airplane by hand to be second nature.

<comment><USER46> (a) Real flight simulators are expensive (cost is an order of magnitude less than a real airliner, but still in the millions, and they require skilled operators to put the pilots through their paces),

(b) _As I understand it_ , commercial pilots get paid on the basis of a rather paltry salary, topped up to a much higher rate per flying hour. So there's a strong wage incentive for them to jump in the cockpit of a real plane as fast as possible and get their experience that way rather than spending lots of time training in the simulators.

(c) Modern airliners spend a lot, or even most, of their time on autopilot. Which is not "the plane flies itself" \-- it's more like a very complicated cruise control system in a car: you still need to observe and monitor what's going on around you and periodically change some settings governing the vehicle's behaviour. (Just as cruise control won't save you from a bend in the road or an idiot on the other side of the highway crossing the central divider, autopilots need constant supervision.)

But this is not "hand flying". Hand flying mostly comes down to take-off, landing, and brown-pants moments, which is a small fraction of the time a long-haul jet spends in operation. And most commercial airlines are going to take a dim view of pilots who spill the drinks in business class by playing at being a stick-and-rudder hero.

<comment><USER47> Spill the drinks, or rip off the rudder and kill 265 people: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587)

Relying on the autopilot there would have avoided the crash. Of course, not overreacting to minor turbulence would have avoided it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This post was on /r/flying and was thoroughly debunked to be a hoax.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for not posting the link.

Here was the best I could find:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1hz2hc/former_ual_pi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1hz2hc/former_ual_pilot_talks_about_korean_flight/)

Also this: [http://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1hyd5b/an_interest...](http://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1hyd5b/an_interesting_spin_on_asian_flight_training/)</comment></comment>


Chladni Figures - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Chladni#Chladni_figures <comment><USER2> There is an interesting music video[1] by Nigel Stanford featuring Chladni plates among other cool phenomena. That's how I first learned about Chladni plates

[1] [https://vimeo.com/111593305](https://vimeo.com/111593305)

<comment><USER3> That was really cool, thanks for the pointer. I also found the behind-the- scenes stuff for the video to be enlightening: [http://nigelstanford.com/Cymatics/Behind_the_Scenes.aspx](http://nigelstanford.com/Cymatics/Behind_the_Scenes.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These figures could be the universal pictoral symbols for numbers. I especially like the triangle figures since the triangle is the 2D simplex.

[https://domodernlife.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/nodal- lines...](https://domodernlife.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/nodal-lines.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER5> Also known as vibration node patterns or modal patterns. Useful to find resonances.

</comment><comment> loa-in-backup > When Chladni showed the technique in Paris, Napoleon set a prize for the > best mathematical explanation. Sophie Germain's answer, although rejected > due to flaws, was the only entry with the correct approach.

Science and Mathematics visibly take time and effort not a contest and some goodwill.

</comment><comment><USER6> which programming framework would best allow the coding of an app to generate Chladni figures on an arbitrarily user drawn shape? And perhaps with a knob to allow frequency modulation. Or perhaps two or three knobs to allow visualization of harmonics. Would this allow a graphical solution to Schrodinger's equations for one, two, three electron models?

</comment><comment><USER7> What's with the habit people have of posting random things they just discovered and found interesting here. This isn't news.

<comment><USER8> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.</comment></comment>


Ember and Sails.js: Getting Started - <AUTHOR> http://www.hutchinson.io/ember-and-sails-js-getting-started/

<comment><USER2> awesome</comment>


Leap Motion sets a course for VR - <AUTHOR> https://community.leapmotion.com/t/leap-motion-sets-a-course-for-vr/1642

<comment><USER2> I've used the leap motion, and so far the accuracy is nowhere near what they show in the video. simply forming the index finger and thumb into an O-shape was enough for them to disappear from existence.

If this is an active demo of their next generation software, I'm very impressed with the improvements, but I suspect its a mock-up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, it's not a mockup, that's what the new SDK looks like. They really improved it.

Source: I have a Leap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For a hacknight back in April, I tried mapping my arm into a 3D pointing device that recognized a recoil wrist gesture as firing a gun. Sound effects like "pew pew pew" were optional but heavily encouraged.

I initially tried the Leap Motion mounted on the Oculus Rift. As this blog notes, the top-down recognition was iffy at best but things really went to shit the moment the sensor was moved. I was unable to get even gun orientation working in the 6 hours or so that I tried, so maybe the new SDK + sensors can fix that.

I did end up building my demo, but with a alpha Thalmic Myo instead of the Leap. Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lihaqf3COw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lihaqf3COw8)

</comment><comment><USER4> Shark Punch is an example compelling game design using this type of tech. Hahaha. [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/10/shark-punch- oculu...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/10/shark-punch-oculus-rift- trailer/)

</comment><comment><USER5> They had a hacky demo of this at the Leap booth at Unite in Seattle last week. The Leap Motion was taped to the front of the Oculus, and you could (sort of) interact with a floating sphere. It's a neat idea, but the tech has a long way to go if that demo was anything to go by.

I am excited for the advancement of input relating to VR though.

<comment><USER6> Given that the dk2 uses IR LEDs as markers to augment it's gyro/accelerometer for position tracking (by imaging them with a webcam pointed at the user). The leap dumping IR out of the front of the visor is going to be problematic, a combination of washing out the DK2 tracking camera and messing with the tracking algorithm by adding extra points.

Though maybe the frequency of the IR LEDs is different enough...

<comment><USER7> For IR LEDs you have not only the wavelength of light, you also have a repitition rate. Typically you modulate the IR LED with a square-wave in the 10s of kHz; this lets you have a much higher instantaneous power with a much lower average power. If done right, it also means that 2 IRs with a sufficiently different clock-rate will interfere with each other less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been a developing with leap for a while now and have been waiting for something like this to come out for me to justify buying an oculus.

Anyone know if Oculus or Leap developers are making any decent profit these days?

<comment><USER4> Oculus has sold like 100K headsets at most. They raised 75M in funding then got bought for $2B. Definitely not profitable if you consider money invested to profit made.

Another metric might be burn rate to income. 100000 units x $350 = $35M, so maybe to this point they haven't spend that $35M. Something feels off about this. Oh right, cost of devices. So it's burn rate to profit. 100000 units x $50 = $5M. They may have spent less than $5M so far, but I'd be surprised.

<comment><USER9> I think "Oculus or Leap developers" was referring to developers making software that uses Oculus or Leap, not the companies producing the hardware. I also assume that the answer must be no (for now) since the install base is still quite small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think I've ever heard of a /hardware/ company pivoting like this. Pretty cool.

<comment><USER11> It's not really a pivot: it's still tracking hand gestures and it's even validating one of the ways the device was used by customers, which is great because natural interactions are one of the big upcoming battlefields of VR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a killer peripheral for Oculus.

<comment><USER13> Sadly no one's figured out how to adapt the DK1 mount to fit neatly on a DK2. I have a very nice holder printed off of Thingiverse, but it's a little tricky figuring out how exactly to get it onto the Oculus.

I really hope Oculus actually add some mounting threads or something to the front of the visor for this type of thing in the CV1.

<comment><USER6> Because of the IR marker LEDs I'd be hesitant to strap a leap on there considering it's dumping IR light out of it to illuminate your hands.

<comment><USER13> The sync cable should mitigate that. I haven't heard of people having problems when they try it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The field of view makes me nervous. But wow, I hope they pull this off.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, my first thought was "Does it work if you're not looking at your hands?" Not a deal breaker though. I could see this combined with some hand mounted sensors to track out-of-view gross movement and just augment with the fine movement when in view.

EDIT: found this in the article: "It possesses greater-than-HD image resolution, color and infrared imagery, and a significantly larger field of view."

<comment><USER16> I imagine that without haptic feedback, so far it makes more sense to be looking at your hands while you're using them in VR. But I had the same thoughts -- would it be better to have a setup where the Leap Motion is on a pendant or something so it's mounted on your chest?

<comment><USER15> Even given that is has a wider than visual FOV I think you're onto something. The Oculus DK2 already has an IR camera for tracking the rift in three space. Why wouldn't they partner to extend the Leap functionality using the existing camera?

Edit: Spelling

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They will be bought by FB in less than a year..

<comment><USER18> I will bet you $100 to the charity of the winners selection, that they won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cool, but still pretty useless. I'd like to see leap tackle a useful situation, perhaps commercial. I can think of dozens off the top of my head and none involve a consumer controlling a PC interface for which we already have multiple superior options.</comment>


Brython – A Python 3 implementation for client-side web programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.brython.info/ <comment><USER2> My only issue with Python being used for client-side web programing is that significant newlines/whitespace would be an incredible pain if you're inling things in HTML. Although you would pretty much be forced to use GZip rather than just minification, which is good-ish.

Plus, loading a 900KB file to run the Python client-side is probably a terrible idea when you could either transpile to JS or asm.js or (in the future) WebAssembly.

<comment><USER3> It probably could be minified using ;

<comment><USER2> Which part? A new line is the same amount of data as a semi-colon.

<comment><USER4> Items that are on the same "level" of indentation, I.e. in a codeblock can have all of them prepended with the whitespace, and then separated with semi- colons.

        def func(param):
            for i in xrange(5):
                print("Inner");print("AnotherLine");print("YetAnotherLine")

From the example you see that whitespace is still necessary, but you could "group" items and not have to repeat the whitespace that forms their level of indentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the thought of being able to use Python on the client side of the web. We need more commonplace asynchronous paradigms, however.

I do like how this project makes sure to point out that the DOM interface is intended for consumption by any language and on any platform -- maybe one day we'll have browsers that come with several languages' runtimes baked in, or perhaps that can leverage the runtimes for languages already installed on the local machine.

<comment><USER6> > maybe one day we'll have browsers that come with several languages' runtimes > baked in

asm.js/WebAssembly takes care of that.

<comment><USER7> I don't see how it does. You'll still have to download the language runtime (including a garbage collector for a language like Python). Perhaps it can be cached, but that's a heavy requirement for a web page, particularly on mobile.

By contrast, a language that compiles to regular JavaScript can use the GC built into JavaScript.

<comment><USER8> If I understood correctly, WebAssembly, unlike current asm.js, will be able to allocate and use GC objects.

<comment><USER9> Note: a future version of WebAssembly may be able to use the browser GC.

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related project:

[https://github.com/replit/empythoned](https://github.com/replit/empythoned)

It's a pity it didn't get more traction. The effort invested seems a bit more worthwhile.

<comment><USER11> What makes it more worthwhile?

<comment><USER12> And given "Empythoned is a build script that uses Emscripten to compile CPython for use in a browser", isn't compiling Python to C to Javascript going to end up a bit clunky compared to just writing Javascript?

<comment><USER13> [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript) is non-fiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see that to use Brighton you need to import a bryton.js file and call "bryton()" on the onload event of the <body> element, and this rings my bell: isn't this a downside compared to normal javascript code?

Non-trivial web pages will take a bit to download fully and load, and sometimes you need your javascript code to act as quickly as it can (that's why very often the js <script> tags are all over the place in the HTML code, not just at the beginning and activated by the onload event).

<comment><USER11> Yes, Javascript will still be the fastest option with the cleanest support. That's because browser vendors have intentionally put everything else at a disadvantage (Mozilla ensuring nobody puts Brendan Eich's baby in a corner). The most anyone can really do is generate slight variations on the spelling of Javascript, which has other big disadvantages. All of this is a downside compared to normal programming.

<comment><USER15> It's all a huge conspiracy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> it would be nice if the site or github repo had some information about how it actually works

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure why we need python for the client side web programming, when JS is already used everywhere for that. Does it have to do any issues with JS or it's because Python is easy ? Please enlighten me here.

<comment><USER18> Because if Python is a hammer, Javascript is a Fisher-Price toy hammer. It's amazing that such a shit language has become so ubiquitous.

<comment><USER19> I've been using both for a while now -- JS for 15 years, Python for five. I expected some big revelation given the consensus that Python is clearly better.

I like working in Python, but I'm still waiting for that revelation. As I can tell, if you can't be as productive in JavaScript as you are in Python, you're either not actually productive in Python, or you never bothered to learn JavaScript.

(I appreciate people who are nevertheless insistent about Python's superiority without bothering to provide any kind of supporting argument, though -- it lets me know how safe I am in disregarding an opinion where I used to think I was probably missing something -- so if you want to recapitulate the quality argument I'm responding too, feel free.)

<comment><USER18> Python doesn't have the whole == vs === debacle.

Python has a string library that makes some kind of goddamn sense (because it matches the C implementation). When I realized that in JS, foo.replace('bar','fizz'); only replaces one instance of 'bar', my head exploded. Then there is the lack of real integers, and all the bullshit ToStringing() that can happen at runtime if you aren't hyper-vigilant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks very interesting! But I don't understand how python is being executed in a web browser. Is there any run time in the browser that I'm missing out(like V8 for JavaScript)?

<comment><USER12> Apparently the brython.js script translates Python into Javascript, on the fly in the browser and because of this the programs tend to run 3 to 5 times slower than normal javascript. (from the Brython faq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Writing a firefox module or addon that adds native python support seems like a nice idea for an open source project...

I wonder if Guido has suggestions.

<comment><USER12> Guido in 2013:

[Question: ...] is it time to give up on python in the browser ?

Guido: I gave up on it in 1995, so yes. And please don't try to compile Python to JavaScript. The semantics are so different that you end up writing most of a Python runtime in JavaScript, which slows things down too much. (CoffeScript's strength is that it is designed to map cleanly to JavaScript, and the two are now co-evolving to make the mapping even cleaner.)

<comment><USER21> I wonder why he gave up. I guess if it's mostly for technology choices, or if there are genuine reason to not put python in the browser.

Thus I really wonder why javascript is better suited for a browser than python.

<comment><USER22> It's politics, not technology. One could make a browser scripted via python, but it would be an extreme minority position and would fail to gain adoption. One could add python support to any existing browser, but none of the stakeholders care enough to do it; they will always argue it is a waste of time because <insert other popular browser> doesn't do it.

There is nothing about JavaScript that is uniquely suited to the browser, it just "won out". It's hard enough to get browser vendors to agree to standards at all, say nothing about multiple standards for a single feature.

<comment><USER9> I think the lesson that the last few years have taught us is that you can do ambitious things, but to get buy in it needs to be an incremental and gradual. This is the cost of a large system with >4 largely independent implementors with significantly distinct plans and goals.

It's not too hard for me to imagine a near future with smooth python support in the browser. A webassembly python runtime with GC integration in the browser served trustlessly and with a high cache hit rate from a CDN using subresource integrity (and perhaps with even the popular runtimes packaged ahead of time in browsers). It might be possible to load and run the python source through the webassembly runtime using the ES6 module loader. I wonder if we'll even see JITs in webassembly-based interpreters that compile code that they're interpreting down to webassembly.

<comment><USER23> > I wonder if we'll even see JITs in webassembly-based interpreters that > compile code that they're interpreting down to webassembly.

Almost certainly. PyPy.js does this with asm.js today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This has potential but why 3? Why not 2.7?

Also, what about asynchronous operations?

<comment><USER25> 2.7 is a dead end. Python 3 is now at least 7 if not 8 years old. Brython was obviously created with the future, not the past, in mind.

<comment><USER24> lot of libraries won't work with python 3 which is why 2.7 still matters, besides, plenty of people prefer 2.7 over 3, 3 is kinda weird.

<comment><USER26> > lot of libraries won't work with python 3 which is why 2.7 still matters

A lot of libraries actually work with python 3. And most of them that don't have a python 3 version in the pipe.

[http://py3readiness.org/](http://py3readiness.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> just a heads up

if you are using python on your server to parse and process Python dont use eval, and escape whatever quotes the input is coming in with... there at least 10 ways to spawn a command console on python.</comment>


Show HN: I trained a GPT-2 1.5B Subreddit Simulator in 3 days using 88 TPUs - <AUTHOR> https://pastebin.com/5qKQs2Hk <comment><AUTHOR> This was done using preemptible TPUv3's, but you can get similar results with TPUv2's. It would just take about 3 times longer.

I'm excited about the multi-TPU technique. We've been calling it "swarm training". [https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2#gcp](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2#gcp)

It's cheaper than a TPU pod by a fair margin, and you can scale your usage up and down rather than having to do a 1-year commitment for $1M/yr.

Here's a typical tensorboard example: [https://tensorboard.dev/experiment/MEXO9GEWR0Wjdb6bz6yjsw/](https://tensorboard.dev/experiment/MEXO9GEWR0Wjdb6bz6yjsw/)

We're able to process about 1 billion GPT-2 tokens every 12 hours, which seems about equivalent to a TPU pod. It's hard to get a direct comparison because so little data is available. (Each TPU is currently getting 256 tokens/sec, and we've been running with 88 TPUs in the swarm.)

As for the sample quality, I'm pretty happy with it. It seems good at philosophical debates, trolling, writing prompts, and several other tasks.

The dataset was provided by the creator of [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/) and was gathered via pushshift.io. It's about 10GB.

Beyond that, I wrote some code to dump samples using a rolling context window. You'll notice that this file is one continuous sample. You can try it yourself:

      git clone https://github.com/shawwn/gpt-2
      cd gpt-2
      sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt
      python3 download_model.py 117M
      python3 src/generate_samples.py --prompt "What a lovely day today!" --model_name 117M --length 256 --step 64 --top_p 0.90 --temperature 1.0

Once it's running, it will look like someone is rapidly typing into your terminal. (--step 1 is even cooler in that regard, since it looks like it's typing out one word at a time.)

Sometimes it will get stuck in a loop. If so, you can reset the context window manually while it's running by executing `rmdir commands/clear_context`

The command system is kind of a funny hack. I wanted a way of interacting with the AI training while it's running, and using `rmdir` seemed like the easiest way to "press a button". You can also do things like attach a debugger, save a snapshot, change the learning rate, and so on. Bonus: it works in Colab, since you can remove directories while a cell is executing.

<comment><USER2> How much did the parallel training cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing, thanks to TFRC. [https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc](https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc)

Without TFRC it's about $4k per day. Which is orders of magnitude less expensive than a TPU pod.</comment></comment></comment>


Identifying People by Their Browsing Histories - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/08/identifying_peo_9.html <comment><USER2> So researchers at Mozilla have replicated the findings of a 2012 study that allows users to be identified through the collation of data from third-party trackers as the users browse popular websites.

Question: Was Mozilla replicating using a "vanilla" browser (e.g. no adblocking/tracker protection)? Or is this even _after_ tracking mitigations are put into place? Mozilla's own Firefox now has built-in "tracker" protection in all versions of its browser, so it seems like they would be well-positioned to test whether the de-anonymization is thwarted with tracking protection toggled on or off.

<comment><USER3> Not sure about with Firefox's built in tracker protection. But I recall reading that having ad/tracker blocking could actually make a user easier to uniquely identify, because the browser now behaves differently than most: [https://panopticlick.eff.org/about](https://panopticlick.eff.org/about). My hope would be that built-in tracker will make ad-blocking browser traffic more ubiquitous.

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure mine is highly distinctive for exactly that reason, no cookies + no JS, but if all you can tell from me is when I'm online, what useful info will that give you to sell me to advertisers. Nothing. I'm worthless. Track away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "High uniqueness hold seven when histories are truncated to just 100 top sites." This is similar to the app finger printing they do with mobile phones, identify you by the unique assortment of apps on your device.

Should the top concern be about identification or deep collection of browsing history?

<comment><USER6> Does iOS allow access to that information?

<comment><USER7> Making a request to any 3rd party domain on every page of the internet is what gives people access to that information.

It's not talking about a browser.getHistory() API. Owning the 3rd party resource (CDNs, analytics) that is loaded on most big websites is far better than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Page 11 of the original doc has "Theoretical third-party reidentifiability rates" by company: [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/soups2020-bird.pdf](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/soups2020-bird.pdf)

I'm surprised how many companies (Facebook, Verizon, Adobe, Oracle, Twitter) are almost matching Google's tracking networks. Google's makes sense based on the amount of Adsense / Analytics trackers there are out there, but I hadn't realized these other companies are just as pervasive.

Edit: typo.

</comment><comment><USER9> ELI5?

I get that a browsing history C is unique, but if I clear it, how can you identify that my new history D is tied to C and not unique?

<comment><USER7> Because you visit the same domains across sessions. Throw in some less common domains like HN (i.e. top 1000 instead of top 100 website), and you're trivial to reidentify. (This is what "reidentification" is referring to in the quoted part of the paper in TFA)

<comment><USER10> Also even if say you and I visit the same exact 100 sites. Order, time on site, sub pages visited, and time of day I use the sites, all can mater. Ad network can also leak out data as you may see a different set of ads than me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now I feel even better about disabling my browser history in Firefox.

<comment><USER12> The only thing that does is prevent _you_ from getting anything useful out of your history. It does not prevent the topic at hand.

<comment><USER13> Exactly, for this they'd need to run an ad blocker and a script blocker, such as uBlock Origin and NoScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I doubt you could accurately identify a specific person

<comment><USER15> 33 yes-no questions which each split the audience in half, uniquely identifies slightly more than the world population.

But any given website is much tighter than that: a regular visitor to Cambridge Evening News is unlikely to be based in राजनांदगांव, and vice versa.

Someone is regularly accessing the website of one local take-away restaurant in Larnaca, a gay men-only dating website, and Ars Technica? That's probably already got you down to 2-15 people out of the ~3e9 on the internet, with just three specific websites in their history.</comment></comment>


Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Build Systems (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/174763.html <comment><USER2> As the author of a build system, which took 5 years to bring to completion, and is now used in commercial applications, I feel like this list is not that helpful.

A modern build system does sacrifice generality in order to improve performance and simplicity.

e.g. A build graph with cycles is non-deterministic, which is not a great property of a reliable and repeatable build tool.

Most modern build tools will impose limitations to respect people's sanity, and I'm personally of the opinion that a build system should really expose high level rules for the most common tasks.

<comment><USER3> Is that [https://github.com/kurocha/teapot](https://github.com/kurocha/teapot) ? ( [https://teapot.nz/](https://teapot.nz/) )

The link on [https://www.codeotaku.com/projects/index](https://www.codeotaku.com/projects/index) goes to some other place.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it's teapot. Thanks, I fixed the link :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first real build system I used was Maven - ie. huge declarative XML files for Java projects. Despite its boons for resolving dependencies, its declarative style and assumptions about build phases hit the limits on every project I used it for. I've come to see any build script as programming, however declarative. These days, I simply use Python scripts where separate functions describe what's to be done for each build target. Yes I have to write some basic functionality myself. But it's extremely flexible. YMMV for larger projects, but I am very happy with this.

<comment><USER5> Maven was the fourth build system I got to use, and coming from Ant I kind of hated it, because the company was trying to shove our Ant workflows into Maven plugins, and the experience was quite bad.

A few years later I embraced the declarative way, and changed my mind about it.

In fact, I only use Gradle instead of Maven on Android projects, because Google forces me to do so.

From my perspective many projects have issues with Maven, because it is easier to think imperative instead of declarative.

<comment><USER6> I also embraced maven.

My rule of thumb is: if it doesn't "just work" with Maven and Netbeans I (or maybe sometimes someone else) is doing something wrong. (Although that "wrong" could be using a project that isn't ready for production use.)

At one place we had this saying: I fixed more and more problems by removing my bosses code (i.e. falling back to the relatively sane defaults.)

<comment><USER7> >I fixed more and more problems by removing my bosses code

Very interesting phenomenon!

Paraphrasing the Peter principle: incompetent people will be promoted until they can inflict the least harm.

In some sense, this is a natural self-defense mechanism of an organization, like how the body encapsules benign tumors in connective tissue.

<comment><USER6> FWIW: I wasn't the one downvoting.

<comment><USER7> Thanks man, here's an upvote for letting me know :3

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having spent some time working on build tools at my current company, I agree with some of those, and have repeated some others. That's pretty deliberate though, software is designed to meet a set of needs and for ours assumptions like "we never need to build on Windows" are fine. Making assumptions (some of which the author surprisingly doesn't capture well, like "file timestamps are monotonically increasing") which ultimately lead to incorrect builds are much less acceptable though.

</comment><comment><USER9> These are not falsehoods. They're intentional limitations of the build system. A build system that attempts to avoid all of these is useless.

<comment><USER10> What use do we have for a build system that is less capable of the one that is very widely used, is available on nearly every platform, and on the ones where you're likely to need it most, it's usually already installed?

The biggest falsehood is that programmers want such a build system. The chance of this system replacing Make is zero. The only way a build system is ever going to replace Make is by being 95% backward compatible with Make. If you're intentionally adding limitations to your build system such that most existing Makefiles can't be directly ported onto it, then your build system will never gain wide use beyond your niche cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It does not inspire confidence when the first two bulletpoints are already redundant with each other. A tree is literally defined as an acyclic graph.

> All the code you will ever need to compile is written in precisely one > language.

And that's why make is still popular. There are a ton of new-fangled build systems that only work with $language_du_jour.

Particularly outrageous is Go, which is supposed to have its own builtin build system with "go install", but each vendoring tool has its own opinion about how to run a build, leading to unnecessary compilation instructions in a README that could just as well be thrown in a Makefile target. I always make sure that my programs build and install cleanly with

      make && make check && make install DESTDIR=...

regardless of language.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't say the first two are redundant. Trees are directed graphs where each node has at most one parent. Most build systems assume DAGs though, hence the second bullet point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The title says "build systems", but the author is actually speaking about direct replacements for 'make'. Many of the points listed deal with limitations of the compilers involved, and the inability of 'make' or its replacements to work around those limitations. It is, in my opinion, not useful to treat the compiler as something external to the "build system".

For example, "It's possible to tell the compiler which file to write its output to." For a sufficiently advanced build system, of course this is possible. Just add a command-line option to the compiler that tells it to.

What this article is actually saying is that writing a good build system is hard to impossible if you think that 'make' alone is the problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> Waiting for "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Falsehoods Programmers Believe" :P

</comment><comment><USER14> Yet another Make hater; it's disgusting how many wannabe programmers misunderstand Make and then embark on some unholy crusade to kill or replace it.

And then we end up with garbage, toy build systems limited by the programmer's understanding of what the build system should be capable of. After suffering through several of those toys (never by my own choice), I don't ever want to find myself in a situation like that again.

Learn Make, truly learn and master it; don't just claim that you do! It functions the way it does for several reasons! Buy the O'Reilly book (on original Make, not the GNU Make version); go through the examples; UNDERSTAND THEM. And stop trying to build unnecessary replacements. There is enough garbage in the world of software already. Way too much in fact.

<comment><USER15> You seem to imply that once you understand make, you won't dislike it anymore or don't want to see it replaced or will stop criticizing it. For one thing, the better you understand a tool the more correct your critique on it can be.

I learned quite a bit of make and msbuild and cmake (yeah it's not a true build system but that doesn't matter here) at practically the same time. I can't say I really really like any of those. I also don't truly hate them. Yet one thing is clear: I understand how they work and how they were intended to be used. But none of them are _the_ perfect answer.

No matter how well e.g. make works, that doesn't somehow magically make it's sometimes awkward 'let's cram as much meaning as possible into as little characters as possible like we're still programming on 75 character terminals' syntax good. Just like msbuild's overly verbose xml is no better. Though it still is more readable to me.

So just like you understand make, you should try to understand why people build replacements. If you can't, you're just blind for the downsides of your favourite build tool.

<comment><USER14> _You seem to imply that once you understand make, you won 't dislike it anymore or don't want to see it replaced or will stop criticizing it._

Criticising it?!? Make is an ingenious tool! It's a phenomenal tool, if one just looks at the flexibility of it, never mind all the super useful built in rules that it comes with out of the box!

 _For one thing, the better you understand a tool the more correct your critique on it can be._

Correct, but therein lies the rub: the author of the essay clearly does not command understanding of Make, and even worse, he believes he does. Worst of all, he is not alone: this Make hate pops up every so often here, one can clearly see who is learning build systems and who eventually hit Make (all build systems' roads lead to Make sooner or later) and just didn't get it. By my own experience, it's mostly Windows users turned GNU/Linux.

I would be curious to learn whether I'm correct in the case of the author of the essay, really curious.</comment></comment></comment>


Now Open – AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-europe-stockholm-region/ <comment><USER2> We've just added support for the new region in our Aiven DBaaS platform. You can launch managed Kafka, Cassandra, PostgreSQL & other clusters in AWS Stockholm at [https://aiven.io/](https://aiven.io/)

Our services utilize T3, M5, R5 and I3 instance types, so we offer e.g. 4GB RAM PostgreSQL service which isn't available in RDS, but right now we don't have instances smaller than that in AWS.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can see various instance prices (EC2, RDS, Elasticsearch) being 5% cheaper in Stockholm than in Ireland.

However, eu-north-1 has very limited instance types available when compared to eu-west-1, which could make you pay up to 10x more in Stockholm if you have been comfortable using t2 RDS instances in Ireland for your (test or even production) environments.

<comment><USER4> It makes no sense for AWS to launch old instance generations in a new region. Also what do you mean by 10x more if you were using t2? t3 is available in Stockholm and cheaper than t2 (and t3 in Ireland).

<comment><USER3> T3 RDS instances are not yet available anywhere (that I know of), only T2. T2 is not available in eu-north-1.

[https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/pricing/) [https://aws.amazon.com/rds/mysql/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/mysql/pricing/)

If you were running your databases on T2 instances on regions supporting it, migrating to the cheapest available RDS instance type in eu-north-1 would cost $0.374/hr on-demand. That's over 9 times more than the price of db.t2.micro in eu-west-1.

<comment><USER4> Oh, you were talking about RDS, sorry missed that.

<comment><USER3> No worries! Thought so much but double checked the numbers just in case I had mixed something. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In Naples, Gift of Coffee to Strangers Never Seen - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/world/europe/naples-suspended-coffee.html <comment><USER3> As a Neapolitan, born and proudly raised, I would like to explain that there is no charitable spirit behind this tradition. There is instead a strong celebratory meaning to it, that seems to be understated in the article.

Originally the recipient of such act was not meant to be someone in need, but simply the customer right after the one 'suspending' the coffee.

It is very hard to really understand the meaning of it without understanding how socially ubiquitous coffee is in Naples. It is always good to start a pleasant evening out with a shared coffee where friends usually fight over who has the honor of paying the bill for everyone. Also, in the city lingo, "let's go have a coffee" can be a clear invite to an easygoing date.

Paying a coffee to a stranger, just a random person passing by, is a way to say "I'm happy and I wish you the same".

<comment><USER4> Most of the stuff you say easily extends to a large part of Italy. I know coffee in Rome is often not as good as in Naples, but we also go on coffee dates and fight to be the one to pay for everyone.

I would like to convey the pleasure of paying for 5 friends when I come back from abroad: 4.20 € and a a coffee that actually tastes like it should. Really makes you feel like some small generous deity!

<comment><USER3> I think coffee is an habit in most of south-western Europe, and people do drink a lot of it in northern Italy too (how they can manage to drink the stuff is beyond me, though)

U.S. people have Starbucks and as long as they do not try anything else they also manage to enjoy it.

In Naples it is a proper, religious, ritual :D

<comment><USER4> Don't be too snarky about Starbucks: coffee before Starbucks was much worse than it is now. From the wikipedia article linked in the sibling comment you'll see that Starbucks pretty much sparked the good coffee revolution in the US.

<comment><USER3> I do understand the role of Starbucks in bringing coffee on the hip-train. I only tried the stuff they sell to our European cousins and now I no longer wonder why there is maybe just one or no Starbucks in Italy.

I hope I will be able to try their brew in the US, hopefully it will be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a place here in Philly that sells $1 slices of pizza and for an additional $1 you can buy a Post-It note to stick on the wall that someone in need can then redeem for a slice.

[http://articles.philly.com/2014-06-03/news/50275817_1_pizza-...](http://articles.philly.com/2014-06-03/news/50275817_1_pizza- shop-homeless-fresh-pizza)

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks, now I have a name for something I was introduced to in my small town when the person in front of me paid for my coffee without my knowledge - <USER2> I went to pay the bill. So I, in turn, bought for the next car (drive through local espresso shop).

I have done it a half dozen times in the last few months, and hope it is helping to spread holiday cheer right now, something many of my fellow towns people could do with more of. Too many scare tactics in national media, good to remind people to take care of each other locally with anonymous acts of generosity.

</comment><comment><USER7> _(Not an important point, but it 's kind of an unfortunate title. As someone who knew about the practice and its supposed origin in Naples, I thought the article was saying the practice does not (did not) ever actually exist in Naples. (In Naples, Gift of Coffee to Strangers Never Seen), i.e. despite the myth that it's common there.

It would be unambiguous if changed to "In Naples, Gift of Coffee to Unseen Strangers.")_

<comment><USER8> The NY Times is known for their characteristic headline style: [http://observer.com/2014/02/for-the-new-york-times- headlines...](http://observer.com/2014/02/for-the-new-york-times-headlines- ultimate-style-reached/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of the pay it forward coffee stunt. Here is the economics behind it: [http://m.fastcompany.com/3034747/fast-feed/breaking-a-pay- it...](http://m.fastcompany.com/3034747/fast-feed/breaking-a-pay-it-forward- chain-isnt-being-a-cheap-bastard-its-good-economics)

</comment><comment><USER10> That's a great tradition, that could be applied to not just coffee and pizza. Hope it takes off at other food joints as well.

On a side note, you wonder how many poor people go to coffee bar Gambrinus, featured in the article. It's well known, but a caffè costs more than 2 euro's there, whereas coffee bars in living neighbourhoods charge 70 euro cents. Gambrinus is a place where tourists and well-to-do's frequent.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's a great tradition! From an economics perspective, I would gain way more than $2 worth of utility from discovering that someone had randomly paid for my coffee, it would really make my morning.

I wonder if the benefit would decrease if the practice became more common though. Would I start expecting my coffee to be free, and become disappointed when I had to pay for it?

<comment><USER12> That assumes that it would have to happen more often than %50 of the time, which I think is impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have seen suspended coffee cause problems for a local coffee shop, because it brought in a number of rather obnoxious users that would scare the paying customers and/or frighten the staff. Obnoxious could be drug abusers, rank smelly, threatening or violent (they had to call the police to deal with two different ladies), or just antisocial (one guy stole the cook's mobile). Maybe because it was in a poorer suburb?

Not sure how to resolve that, because the insane and antisocial really deserve a coffee and a break in life. If it were my business, I would need to come up with a work-around so that the business wouldn't be affected so badly.

Apart from that, I love the idea (and have paid for suspended coffees).

</comment><comment><USER14> Just a correction:

> mostly to older people, migrants and the Roma I think they misinterpreted > this part. "The Roma" does not make much sense. I think the person they > talked to said "the rom" (that in English may sound like _gipsy_ ). They are > a very spread ethnicity in Naples (and around Naples) and the majority of > them are poor people who panhandle around to make some money.

<comment><USER15> As an italian I was about to point out the same thing. Thanks for your correction. The roms (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people)) are spread through all Europe and are not a Neapolitan only phenomenon. Shame for NYT for not doing their homeworks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> related:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579218)

</comment><comment><USER17> Naples' "suspended coffee" keeps coming up in the news every few months, especially since Italy as a whole is in the grip of a long-running economic crisis that will likely continue for a very long time.

The hard truth is that this sort of individual charity doesn't make anything better in the long run. It's little more than grandstanding, as most charity is.</comment>


Devops needs feminism - <AUTHOR> http://danslimmon.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/devops-needs-feminism/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, but people-based metrics are _subjective_ , even if they have hard numbers stuck in there. That's the problem.

The mistake here is viewing the entire system as simple, instead of emergent. Emergent systems are not usefully measured by simplistic top-down metrics.

You have one piece of code, yep, you set up some measurements and have fun with it. You have a thousand programs, running across a hundred different platforms? _The idea that you can determine cause and effect by a simple top- down metric is a problem in itself_. Yes, you may be able to determine that overall the system is not working as you would like it to be, and you may certainly decide that some kind of action is required, but that gives you no clue whatsoever what the required changes would be! In fact, by looking from the top-down in an aggregate fashion, it's even arguable whether or not your metric is the one to be optimized!

That's the difference between complex systems and simple systems. Stop over- simplifying. We all might be able to agree that some aggregate statistic is out of whack. Maybe. But that's a freaking long way from actually knowing anything about the problem or what to start doing to address it. Instead, we wrap it all up like that answer is straightforward, wave our arms around, get all emotional, and demand action. This is not a recipe for success, whether in complex systems of programs or complex systems of people.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't express how infuriating I find the "we just need to treat everyone equally, that's it!" type of comments, and these analogies help me understand why. It's like saying "we just need to write maintainable modular code, that's it!"

<comment><USER4> I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields. After all, if men would just treat women equally, then women would represent half the workforce in those fields, right?

Women are underrepresented in _applications to engineering school_. Are adults who are already in the workforce responsible for that? Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering schools before they spend a single day there? If we want to actually solve this problem, we need to go all the way to the beginning: middle school, where girls mysteriously start losing interest in technical fields.

<comment><USER3> > Do high school girls somehow sense the "hostile environment" in engineering > schools before they spend a single day there?

My wife, who has a solid head for mathematics but majored in German once explained to me why she didn't go into engineering: 1) because she didn't want to be surrounded by dudes all day; 2) because she didn't want to enter a field where she wouldn't have women bosses and mentors.

So if you're a high-school girl doing even a minimal bit of career planning, yes, of course you take into account the fact hat you'll be a minority in your field if you go into engineering, with all of the career hurdles that being a minority in any field entails.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem.

I also have some doubts about this being the sole issue. As an undergrad, I watched my school work hard to try to play up the fact that there were female students, female professors, and famous women in engineering. This was done whenever potential students were visiting. This was done in pamphlets sent out to high schools. The effect was not even measurable. I see the same pattern in my graduate program, and the same pattern in other engineering schools, and even among recruiters for corporations. I am not sure what else people in the field can do to try to dispel the notion; if indeed this is a cause, I suspect that girls are learning to dislike engineering from somewhere else, but I think that something happens earlier in life, at least if we believe the research on when girls lose interest in technical fields (somewhere around middle school or early high school).

<comment><USER3> > Perhaps so, but there is nothing people working in the field can do about > that. If women are a minority because they are unwilling to join a field > where they are a minority, then nothing that men do to change their > behavior, attitude, or whatever else will solve the problem.

Sure they can. They can simply hire more women. Once the gender ratio is sorted out, the new equilibrium will be self-sustaining.

<comment><USER5> > Sure they can. They can simply hire more women.

You're smart enough to know it's not that simple; even if one were willing to "just do it" it's not clear the unintended consequences would not result in a net-negative effect on women in engineering.

Fundamentally, if the source funnel is unbalanced, and you assume that there is a scalar "skill" quantity that is the economic factor of production employers actually desire, then it is mathematically impossible to hire- toward-parity without having a lower standard for hiring from the less- represented pool [0].

If you accept that ratio-correcting hiring mathematically necessitates lower standards for women then you need to answer some thorny economic questions.

Will the women whose skill is below the minimum skill of the men in your quota system be paid the same as the men (all of whom by mathematical necessity, will be more skilled)?. If they are paid the same as the men, it is a subsidy paid by the employer, the employer's customers, and the disemployed men who otherwise would have been hired but-for the quota. It's not clear to me that they bear any culpability for the social problem, or that the economic costs of this subsidy are sufficiently small not to have significant negative effects on those businesses. I know, I know: boo hoo, those poor businesses won't have two golden swimming pools of money, just one. But the reality is that the margins most businesses have between the cost of employment and the productivity of that employment is not, for most companies, rich Google-y numbers like 50%. If the margins are more like 10% it is entirely credible to me that such a subsidy will drive various arms of the business from ROI- positive to ROI-negative (or at least, ROI below just investing that cash in stocks). And then all those jobs we were planning to give to women will no longer exist.

If, on the other hand, the lower-skill women are paid sufficiently less than the men to balance the opportunity cost borne by the employer (for not being able to hire everyone above a minimum skill level) then the women need to be paid _less_ than an open market wage (i.e. less than their skills would justify without a quota system, because the quota system is costing the employer lost productivity in men they would otherwise hire). So now the _women_ are paying for the parity-seeking hiring. This will exacerbate the already high level of concern about fairness in compensation and will provide an additional disincentive for women to join this work force. Never mind that it seems perverse to have the women pay the employers for the privilege of working in a quota system.

Let me make a defensive statement lest it seem I am suggesting that women are less skilled than men: I am emphatically not. I'm saying that if you take the best five of 30 people and the best five of 100 people, the latter group will, with significant statistical regularity, be more skilled.

So what to do if ratio-correcting hire is DOA? It seems that there's an easier solution that has its roots in a long history of women conquering other obstacles; a generation of high-school aged women need to decide, en masse, that they will join engineering departments as a group and that they will stick to it with mutual support. This is direct action by the people whose well-being we are trying to improve, can be done without getting permission or cooperation from anyone outside that group, and solves the "boys' club" problem on day 1 of freshman year classes (because the club will be, by construction, full of women as well). I even have a slogan ready for them: "We're here, we're engineers, get used to it." I realize that coordinating this kind of movement is hard, but it is run-of-the-mill political and social organizing, and it seems to me like something that can actually work (as opposed to solutions that attack the symptoms of a skewed sourcing funnel).

[0] Proof sketch (hand-waving law-of-large numbers arguments, and assuming women's skills are distributed identically to men's):

1) If you reject quotas and hire simply for skill >= min_skill, then you will find more men meeting that criterion because there are men in the source funnel. So fixed-skill cutoffs are out.

2) If you have quotas (say 1 woman for every 1 man) then you can't hire everyone >= min_skill; you will instead hire _the best_ among the people >= min_skill. The men will be pulled from a larger pool, and taking the best from a larger pool will result on average in a higher minimum skill level. So simply by taking the best N of the women and the best N of the men, the source funnel imbalance forces you to have lower standards for women

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lots of human groups are underrepresented in technology (africans, older people, latinos etc). Why are feminists the only ones that always make it to the frontpage (even superficial pieces like this one)?

<comment><USER7> Why do people instantly put up ideological blinders at the first mention of feminism in response to an interesting article?

I mean, do you find anything at all objectionable in what it says? Please share! Or a subtlety that it leaves out? Totally!

I agree with you that racial issues are underemphasized in technical communities, and in the same way we should use feminism as a framework for achieving the organizational and social goal of equality, we should try to do the same for race.

<comment><USER6> I find it objectionable that blindly applying feminist recipes in IT will have any effect. Feminism is not a framework but a set of ideologies, and even if we assume it is, applying it out of context, it is just stupid (e.g. a company claiming it is 'pro choice' in order to attract women). Most IT jobs are in countries where feminism already works for decades. Clearly you need something more than feminism to achieve total equality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The term 'equality' is frequently used there, but never defined, which seems odd for an article that revolves around performance metrics used as a metaphor for feminism.

</comment><comment><USER9> The biggest issue I've come to see in this industry is the denial that there's even an issue. That's what makes sexism so hard to address.

You'll find no shortage of those who don't experience that marginalization deny its existence. Meanwhile, those who do experience it and try to share how they experience it are ignored or talked over.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a founder in tech field, I use a few steps to detect feminism,

1\. If they have equal opportunities/equipments?

2\. If the statements are bias based on other people instead of looking problem within themselves first.

3\. Do they have the right/enough knowledge in the field.

In my experiences, Number 3 is very important. I never meet anyone with enough practice & knowledge about programming complains about gender problem. Stories I read is about people cannot write a single line of code but wants to be the executive/Project Manger.

</comment><comment><USER11> The current title on HN of "Feminism is to equality as metrics are to performance" is far more interesting than the title at the blog of "Devops needs feminism", but it's never really elucidated.

<comment><USER12> The original title was indeed interesting. I expected a different case to be made, though - that much like metrics can be necessary to improve performance, feminism can be necessary to improve equality, but in both cases it's possible to focus too much on the means and not enough on the end. I'm not entirely sure how much I'd have agreed with such a case, but it's an interesting lens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Devops needs feminism like a fish needs a bicycle.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't care how many women are in tech. Likewise I don't care how many straight men are in fashion or Mexicans in the NBA.

There - I said it.

</comment><comment><USER15> The author doesn't seem to know much about feminism (self-admitted); he seems to be using the first and best definitions he can find, find that that definition/decription resonates with him, and then tries to sell it. So anyone who believes in equality (and isn't an asshole) is a feminist. Okay. Then I'll similarly assert that everyone who believes in equal opportunity is a communist, that everyone who believes in freedom is a capitalist, etc. Now, everyone is at least superficially acquainted with these ideologies, so they won't simply take such assertions at face value, even if I say that 'there are many definitions and this is just my definition'. To assert that an ideology (or school of thought, or what have you) is about this and that, a handy 'definition' is not enough for me, personally. One should perhaps make an assessment based on what it's members do and say, such as bloggers, academics, etc.. Or restrict oneself to a particular wave of feminism. At least a more comprehensive description and/or analysis is in order if you want to _correct others_ , than to simply cite a single definition from a single Wiki. That is just my opinion, OP.</comment>


Ask HN: SSHD Rootkit? - <AUTHOR>

Curious if any of the security-minded folk here have heard or looked into this file mentioned in a discusison on webhostingtalk.com :
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1235797
Archive(single page) view for quicker perusing: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-1235797.html
I just submitted this and I guess the post was marked as dead because of the domain name? <comment><USER2> Just checked my servers, and not infected (but neither even have libkeyutils, so I don't think I'm vulnerable to this).

After being burned in the past, I always install iptables and block incoming connections. Plus I only allow ssh access to certain ip addresses. This means that even in the worst case if a vulnerability lets a rootkit get installed, there isn't much they can do after that.</comment>


The "Digital Native", a Profitable Myth - <AUTHOR> http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/07/the_digital_native_a_profitable_myth <comment><USER2> "stories about... disdain for email... Odd behavior for a group of "digital natives" who supposedly know the Net like a spider knows its own web."

Just because someone is a digital native doesn't mean they like or understand everything digital-related. Email is a terrible communication platform for the way people communicate in casual settings.

While I agree that digital natives can't be simplified to just "anyone under the age of 34" (and I'm not sure anyone would seriously try to apply that age range across the board), there is something different between people born into a culture (and lets face it, the Internet has created a new culture) and someone who is merely trying to adapt into it. However, the author seems bent on arguing that age isn't the only factor, which is a straw man in my books.</comment>