Self-published design book sells $20,000 in first two weeks - <AUTHOR> http://generalprojects.com/blog/?p=603

<comment><USER2> According to Google, they have a traffic value of over 220,000 visitors per month which is roughly 50,000 visitors per week. Since they have sold 500 copies in two weeks, or 250 in one week, they are converting only 0.5% of their traffic. While that is a very small number of sales to visits, we can see just how important internet traffic is.

That said, $15 for a quality e-book seems a fair value. Check out the sample pages here: <http://www.underconsideration.com/flaunt/>

<comment><USER3> Unsure how valid those figures are. One of their more well-trafficed sub- blogs, Brand New, doesn't even mention the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good deal, amazing it sold as much given how bland the cover is.

I expect they already have an audience and a reputation and didn't have to deal with getting noticed on a store shelf.

<comment><USER5> Fancy typeface. Grid layout. Purple. Bunch of stats and info about the contents. It's not _that_ bland. And seems to be their aesthetic: minimalist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We sold $6k in the first 48 hours of our self-published JavaScript performance book (<http://jsrocks.com/>). For the record.</comment>


Tennis Racket Theorem - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_racket_theorem <comment><AUTHOR> Stumbled upon this while studying solid mechanics, easily testable with a smartphone.</comment>


Privacy is an illusion and you're all losers - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/ransbottyn/privacy-is-an-illusion-and-youre-all-losers-cryptocow-infosecurity-2013

<comment><USER2> Chart of 2010 terrorism is missing a key: it looks like Britain is a hotbed or terrorist activity.

"Please demonstrate you can spot a rhetorical question when you see one". I stopped reading.</comment>


Debugging with Hypotheses - <AUTHOR> http://ayronwohletz.com/debugging-with-hypotheses/

<comment><USER2> _" Again, do not fix if you do not understand."_

I think that's the most important point of the article. If you don't understand the code you're fixing well enough to be able to explain what the bug does or why your fix fixed it, you'll have no way of knowing that (1) the bug (and not just a particular limited case of it) is actually fixed and (2) that you haven't introduced additional bugs by fixing the first one.

If you're reviewing someone's code and they can't explain to you how their fix removed the bug (e.g., they just changed random stuff around and the bug "went away"), that's a bad sign.

</comment><comment><USER3> _In sleep, your "background mind" will process all the information you have gathered. I often find that when I come back to the problem the next day the solution jumps out at me._

This happened to me so often and in such striking ways that when presented with a problem now, unless the answer is obvious, I always say I'll be sleeping on it and, no, I won't be solving it today - it's interesting how many people think this is laziness at first, and will even tell you so, but are then thankful the next day when you come up with a creative solution.

</comment><comment><USER4> Andreas Zeller's Why Programs Fail is an excellent read for anyone who wants to learn to debug rigorously.

</comment><comment><USER5> I once asked someone "how is this function used?" He put a breakpoint in it, ran the code, triggered it, and showed me a stack trace. "Here's how it's called." That was a nice specific example, but I wanted an understanding of intent or architecture or something he clearly didn't have. I almost never use a debugger, but my approach was developed in a time of 8-bit machines that didn't have debuggers. That said, I have seen bugs that could probably not be found without a debugger - including compiler errors.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice! I wholeheartedly agree - even so much I wrote a thing about this a while back: [http://yellerapp.com/posts/2014-08-11-scientific- debugging.h...](http://yellerapp.com/posts/2014-08-11-scientific- debugging.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> The science of debugging. :)

<comment><USER8> Actually, security hackers often write scientific papers about bugs :)</comment></comment>


How Much Your Time in College is Worth - <AUTHOR> http://jayshah.me/blog/how-much-your-time-in-college-is-worth-literally

<comment><USER2> If you're a coder (CS major), _do not go to college just to earn more money. You need to have better reasons than that_.

Why? There is no doubt in my mind that if you're the type of student who can get into MIT/Stanford/CMU/Berkeley/etc (at least Berkeley Engineering), you _will_ earn more by not going to college (at least in tech hubs like SV and NY). Assuming you have a marketable skill (iPhone, Android, front-end, Django, Rails, etc), entry level (including internships) starts at $80k. If you don't have such a skill, you can teach yourself over a summer. In four years, you could be making $110k+ (very conservative). A CS grad straight out of a top college will probably make $93k (EDIT: revised to $95k, which is average for a Stanford/CMU/Cal CS grad) [1], depending on the market climate.

You factor in the anywhere between $0-250k tuition you're spending on college (financial aid depending), and the ~$380k you'd earn in 4 years, and, at least on the financial side, you come out _way_ ahead if you don't go to college, anywhere between $380k to $630k ahead, just from those 4 years alone†.

In fact, this probably applies to most colleges, not just top-tier ones, but in which case the salary numbers are more variable.

You also won't be behind in terms of knowledge as long as you're proactive - the resources for self-teaching theoretical CS have never been more numerous than they are today.

Now, that being said, the reasons I'm attending college instead of dropping out (I did take a year off to work at a YC startup): I value the unique social experience of college, my parents are paying for everything ( _huge_ mitigating factor - if I had to pay for everything I would not be going), and I see the value in pushing myself out of my social, academic, and extracurricular comfort zones - hanging out with business students, doing debate, taking classes in literature, etc.

[1] <https://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads>, [http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and- destinations/2012-sur...](http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and- destinations/2012-survey/pdfs-one-pagers/2012_SCS.pdf), <https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm>

†Tax not included (subtract ~22%). The effect of having a higher salary due to work experience not included. Number varies depending on your housing costs. Number varies depending on student loan interest. Number varies depending on yearly tuition increases. The $250k figure for college tuition usually includes housing, your employment take-home money will depend on where you want to live in Silicon Valley (SF = big hit; East Bay = fairly affordable).

<comment><USER3> Your argument is quite sensitive to the numbers, and your estimates of the numbers are questionable. Maybe someone from CMU CS is starting with $90k, but everyone I've talked to has offers significantly higher. Two of my closest friends have starting offers over $150k. Instead of spending their time sharpening how quickly they can map the shape of a button to the appropriate API call, they acquired deep knowledge of computing, and thus can do things in an hour most people couldn't in a month.

<comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, and if you don't mind answering, are these offers $150k base? Or is that the value of the whole compensation package, including signing bonuses and stock options?

<comment><USER3> One offer is $150k salary, plus stock (somehow, the company still has its own stock, despite having already been acquired for $300 million). This person is finishing a 5th-year Master's though.

The other offer is $110k salary, plus $40k annually in stock. Since the company is Google, it's pretty fair to treat that as $150k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I shake hands with the top 10% of SAT scorers in the country, then 10 years down the road determine that their average earnings are greater than that for their age cohort, does that mean my handshake is worth $200,000?

This is precisely what universities do and argue that buying into the massive education bubble is still a "good investment" since you earn more.

I have no doubt there is value to classroom lecturing and the "soft" features like interaction with a wide range of your peers (assuming you choose to leave your dorm room), but the value of college can't be estimated by earnings differentials between college graduates and non-college graduates.

</comment><comment><USER6> These comparisons compare salaries of largely illiterate and innumerate people who dropped out of high school to people who have graduated with an engineering degree. They articles always then declare the difference in salaries to be the value of any college degree. These comparisons are absurd and statistically invalid.

People who drop out of high school are more likely to be mentally incapable of doing high paid engineering work than those who are also able to graduate from an engineering program. The people capable of graduating from an engineering program were capable before graduating. Those who are high school drop outs are more likely to be incapable.

There's a cool study (can't find the cite) where they looked at lifetime wages of people who were ACCEPTED to a given university and then compared those who actually went to college and graduated to those who decided not to go to college after being accepted. The lifetime wages were the same, showing that it was the selection process of getting admitted to college that was simply choosing for talent and not anything that college does to anyone. Those who benefit from burdening the next generation with massive education debt don't discuss this though and claim that it is not selecting for talent. To show that is the case, take people who are in that illiterate high school dropout category, send them to college, and then compare their lifetime salaries to the ones who were not illiterate. This study has not been done. Yes, I am aware there are hundreds of studies proving that college graduates make more than non-graduates, I am not contesting that there are such studies or that they are the majority of studies on this topic.

In any case regardless of whether you believe in the existence of the unnamed study I regret I can't name, I hope it is obvious that the set of people who are high school drop outs and the set of people who have graduated with an engineering degree are not randomly selected people differing only in if a machine called college molded them into a higher earning resource asset. Since they are not randomly selected people differing only if a engineering education has been applied to them as a black box function, it is not correct to assume that salary differences between the two are solely attributable to whether or not they have been run through this black box.

<comment><USER2> There was the Krueger study: [http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekru...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekrueger_More_Selective_College.pdf), but it compared grads who applied to top universities (like Ivy League) and got rejected vs. those who applied and got in, and found no difference in lifetime earnings, when you adjusted for class rank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of the shortcuts taken by these quick studies are always really interesting to me.

First, I wouldn't assume the same career duration for both GEDs and College Grads - generally, a dropout will start working earlier.

A general "GED average" also pretty highly weights the comparison for other reasons - poverty, area (areas with higher education and wealth levels have higher average earnings, even among those with GEDs), career type. It's an okay generalization to make in this case, but it does bias the results somewhat. People with similar levels of education/wealth tend to group together, which means a lower salary in a poorer area may have similar buying power to what seems like a higher salary in a more expensive area.

Unfortunately what might be the most telling metric is much harder to define: how much would person X make in her lifetime if she went to college, and how much would she make without? Even simplifying to the same field (their strengths would be similar in both cases), it's extremely difficult to plot her career trajectory.

Of course, this may all be due to my personal bias - college dropout, doing fine, and making well above the average starting salary for a CompSci grad by age 25. Decent savings, no debt - it was a much harder road, but I'm not sure I'd make the tradeoff knowing what I do now.

Personally, though, I can't discount the value I've felt in not having the average $27,000 in student debt hanging over my head [1]. It's enabled me to take risks, try new things, change career twice, and follow my passions.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/pf/college/student-loan- debt...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/pf/college/student-loan- debt/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you took statistics in college, you might recall that correlation does not imply causation. There's a hidden third set of factors here; your intelligence, wealth, etc. That people who go to college make more does not mean that college means you make more. The way I see it, those with higher future earning potential more frequently decide to go to college.

<comment><USER9> +1

Also think we are shooting a bit behind the bird to try to make current/future value conclusions on any present data as the value of a degree relative to other options is changing so rapidly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> By trekking through a great deal of intellectual territory in college, way more than you will in an equivalent span of working years, you're mitigating a big risk. That's the risk that you will find it difficult to span gaps in your understanding as your occupation and your career go through earthshaking changes. As a software developer it is pretty well certain that you will be affected by these kinds of changes. With college behind you, you will have a greater range of topics in your repertoire and the confidence of knowing that you have faced plenty of difficult topics before. It's not as though a bright developer who bypasses college cannot dealt with change. But college helps.

</comment><comment><USER11> This thread reminds me of one of my minor pet peeves with HN: a lot of people here repeatedly speak of SF and NYC salaries as if they were universal across the country and nobody would ever want to work anywhere else.

It's not a big deal because most of the arguments here are relative and not dependent on specific numbers but rather differences. I also understand HN began as a place to discuss Silicon Valley startups. But still I think it would be nice if HN were generally more cognizant of salary variations across location.

</comment><comment><USER12> You have 40+ years of working for the man, why start so early? Getting a CS degree is fun if you like CS and are good at it. Drinking beer and hanging out with friends at all hours for 4 years are much better than working as a code monkey straight out of high school. Your average comp over your lifetime might be the same, or maybe a little more if you avoid debt and get 4 years of extra coding experience, but I bet the college grad never regrets going to college.

</comment><comment><USER13> I feel like people are looking at this the wrong way. Of course you could make an extra 80k/yr by going to college than not, but I imagine if you're an amazing developer and you go to Stanford, you're basically set for life with the combination of prior coding skills, network and things you learned at Stanford, thinking about working an 80k/yr job would be laughable, right?

<comment><USER2> Well, in 4 years you would be making a lot more than 80k, and you would probably have 10x the number of connections if you've even made any marginal effort to network (going to meetups, inviting people to have coffee/lunch, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Discount rate is too high, salary growth rate is too low.</comment>


A New Species Discovered ... On Flickr - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/08/11/158570034/a-new-species-discovered-on-flickr <comment><USER2> Shame the entomologist didn't offer to let the guy who actually discovered, photographed, and collected the bug name it. I was waiting for that to be the happy ending of the story, but surprisingly he just named it after his own daughter.

[(optional) insert lame joke about proper attribution]

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this sentence: "The new species was dubbed Semachrysa jade — not after its pale green color, but after Winterton's daughter." just bothered me. A total dick move by Winterton.

<comment><USER4> It's pretty presumptuous to call someone a dick when you know none of the details of the situation. It's entirely possible that he asked the guy if he wanted to name it and he turned it down.

<comment><USER5> Only if anecdotal, I find people from English speaking nations outside of North America being incredibly opportunistic in these things.

This observation purely emerges from my experience.

<comment><USER6> Some are in for the fame, others for the money.

I find North Americans incredibly opportunistic in registering patents. A friend that does network support outsourcing was complaining that their (American) boss was setting targets on _number of patents registered_ by their _support_ gig.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And the museum refused to fund an expedition for finding this? And the Scientist waited a year until the photographer went back there. It doesn't look to me that it was hard to find (especially since thy had an uncataloged specimen). I see that in this case the Scientist didn't want to be bothered very much with it. Furthermore he named the specie after his daughter and not the finder.

When has the exitement for discovery got so casual?

<comment><USER8> > When has the exitement for discovery got so casual?

When we realized that the number of species on the planet is large enough to give up on any hope of ever cataloging them all.

I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos...

<comment><USER9> > I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr > photos...

You have to be careful with those things. My alma mater has a tale of a student 7 or 8 years ago who built a neural net to detect lizards in photos. He fed the system a bunch of pictures to teach it what lizards look like. When it came time to test he got remarkable results: it was 100% effective in positively identifying lizards. Then he fed it a picture of empty ground and the net happily confirmed that this picture contained a lizard as well! Turns out, if all of your training data is positive the computer just learns "everything is a lizard".

Of course, real-life researchers would never dare make such a mistake but this tale always amuses me so I couldn't resist :)

<comment><USER10> So he really didn't understand neural networks?

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't say that. I've always seen it like a physicist dropping a negative: he understands and when he sees the result he immediately knows what he did wrong but a little careless thought at the time led to a silly mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No shoutout yet for Project Noah?

<http://www.projectnoah.org/>

"Backed by National Geographic, Project Noah is mobilizing a new generation of nature explorers and helping people from around the world appreciate their local wildlife. Our community is harnessing the power and popularity of new mobile technologies to collect important ecological data and help preserve global biodiversity."

<comment><USER12> I put it up at projectnoah a moment ago:

<http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12572689>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone want to speculate on the evolutionary reason behind that interesting pattern on its back?

It's odd because it makes an insect that otherwise is very camouflaged much more noticeable. This makes me wonder if it's biomimicry of another dangerous/poisonous/distasteful local insect.

<comment><USER14> My son and I both thought it looked like a spider on its wings. Maybe it's a trick to make predators think it already got caught.

<comment><USER12> Yes, that's what I thought too when I photographed that beautiful lacewing. The marking really resembled a jumping spider!!!

kurt (orionmystery)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just how big of an unclassified specimen backlog do most museums have? When does it make sense to go through this rather than browsing insect tags on Flickr? Or, better yet, crowdsource the backlogs via Flickr...

<comment><USER16> pretty hard to crowdsource something like this, just how many people are there out there that would even know how to tell if a given image represents a "new" species or not. Not many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Winterton comes across as a big of a jerk if you ask me. Without the photographer taking the photo initially and then a year later returning to the same spot and capturing this insect there would have been no discovery. Fair enough Guek not some recognition and has his name published co-author in a scientific journal, but seems like the importance of Guek is lost here.

All the scientist did was go, "Compare to any other lacewings we have on record, if no match, new species. Presto, new species give me my accolades" - the bug should have been named after Guek not Winterton's daughter.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious: how do they know it's a new species? Seems like it could just as easily be a small mutation that does not affect interbreeding. From one (presumably dead) specimen, how did they determine it was an entirely new species, and not just a local population?

</comment><comment><USER19> "I swear this crazy weather has created new insects. Have you noticed that we have new insects this year?" - My brother, we live in Michigan, says this to me all the time.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't help feeling that this story would have gotten more media attention if only the photo had been posted to Twitter or Instagram

</comment><comment><USER21> cool

</comment><comment><USER22> Fairies! I've seen them do it.

</comment><comment><USER23> This may be totally off topic. But Flickr? While the story may be true It seems to be another new marketing things under new management to generate more buzz.

<comment><USER3> It's NPR, not your mom-and-pop radio station. I'm sure they verify the story before publishing it.

<comment><USER24> Just like This American Life verified every story, until they didn't and it blew up in their face.

<comment><USER3> "This American Life" is not a news program. But you already knew that.

<comment><USER25> "The Picture Show" is not a news program either.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand where the hate is coming from. What are people disputing here? That the picture was found on Flickr? That the scientists didn't really see the picture?

What is it, exactly, that's getting in your craw?

It's a trivial little story. The thing that got me to comment here was the fact that it (the new species) wasn't named after the photographer; that's all. But I am really surprised to see people questioning the veracity of the story which is so insignificant (there are 100s of new species being discovered all the time; it's not like they found Sasquatch or something), and the baffling assertion that it's got something to do with the management at Flickr.... really?!?!?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Haha, Skype's April Fool's joke was subtle but the best I've seen today - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/jTSBHTm.png

<comment><USER2> Jokes apart, I switched to Bing recently to try how it works and I am impressed. Realtime udates on showtimes and ticket prices, price compare. Pretty cool stuff. The search has improved too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, some of the "criticism" is pretty outdated. Myself, I'm actually really impressed by Bing Webmaster Tools. They're quite a bit better than Google's. Unfortunately, not much traffic via Bing to analyse is coming in in our case</comment></comment>


How We Value the Super-Rich - Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/weekinreview/28stone.html?ref=weekinreview <comment><USER2> I'm taking a Money, Media, and Power class that looks at the history of the United States since the 80s in great detail. It considers how America has become extremely capitalistic, which isn't bad as long as open, competitive markets are encouraged.

What we've seen happen in history is the massive consolidation of companies. Look at the media industry, for example. It is now impossible to create your own TV network, and it will probably soon be impossible to compete freely on the Internet because the same conglomerates that dominate the cable and phone industry are trying to do the same thing with the Internet. I have two words that can summarize the entire thing: network neutrality. Complete deregulation is a bad idea; what happens if you take all the rules out of a football game? Everyone will cheat.

How does this relate to the topic? We don't like people who get their money for two reasons, in my opinion. We don't like people who are anti-competitive, and who try to dominate markets (such as the Internet, cable, and television industries) and intentionally want to stifle innovation. That's not contributing to society, and we all know that once a monopoly is established, a company has no incentive to innovate.

The other reason I personally dislike people with great wealth is because they're not being fiducially responsible. If America is going to be more capitalistic, the people with the money should be driving innovation, not stifling it. They need to act responsibly with their money, and that includes being philanthropic and charitable. When they just hoard it all and it becomes a competition to see who can hold the biggest pot, I don't think you deserve to have it in the first place (think Elon Musk, and how much money he has invested into SpaceX and Tesla Motors). What we have now is a massive gap in income disparity, and that's pissing off the lower and middle class. It's actually driving the middle class out of existence, and I would say at that point the wealth isn't being distributed evenly enough.

That's my take on why we dislike wealthy people. At least some of them. As the article pointed out, I really do think some self-made rich individuals rightfully deserve it and are acting responsibly.

<comment><USER3> "What happens if you take all the rules out of a football game? Everyone will cheat"

Technically, if you take all the rules out of a football game then _nobody can cheat_.

<comment><USER2> Ha! That is true. I should have said what happens if you take all the regulation out of a football game. I was trying to emphasize the point that deregulation (or taking away neutrality rules) is bad and will allow larger media companies free reign to do whatever they want. With that much power, they're bound to exert absolute control over the whole system.

The idea of regulation is not to stifle younger, newer innovators. It's to prevent the larger players from taking over and locking out competition. At one point, it was illegal to own more than 40 TV stations.

<comment><USER4> It's always a bad idea to confuse intent with effect.

I've no doubt that fans of regulation want good things. However, the result of said regulation rarely matches those intentions.

Not to go all Dr. Phil, but insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result.

Media control regulations lock in big media. Note that we didn't even get a fourth network until TV started to lose marketshare. (Yes, no one owned more than 40 stations, but that restriction didn't affect media control.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This also goes back to pg's article on where you live and what defines "power". In the past 7 years, I've lived in the following places and definitely have seen what constitutes wealth/doing well:

Cambridge- Definitely education, but in a weird place. I studied for the summer at Harvard. Everyone was unique, some cases weird, but absolutely brilliant in their specialty. It was about being the best in their area of study.

New York/Northern NJ- I grew up here, and this is where I was before going back to Boston. It was about more traditional routes of money, and nothing earth shattering. You were a dentist, a doctor, or wall street trader. There were some celebrities around too. It was all about the traditional path. Go to a private high school, go to a good college, get the right internships, slave away 9-5, then become rich via Goldman Sachs or something. Boy did I break that mold...

(Went to Boston College next, but not adding that in since Cambridge covered that area well enough)

Miami- Now this is interesting. The whole Miami Vice attitude you see is 100% real. My thoughts on this area are indicative of it as a whole, NOT the technology sector, which is flourishing very nicely down there. Success was measured by how nice your material possessions were. Lamborghinis, bottles of Cristal, and overpriced penthouses. Most money here wasn't really earned, but through family inheritance or foreign overseas money. Yes, drug money still powers part of the town.

Silicon Valley- This can include SF, even though my experiences are from living in Palo Alto. It's all about what you're building, who you're going to help, and what the "delta" is. How were things before hand, and how are they once you're done? No doubt money is important, but it's a by product of the previously mentioned statement. In my 5 months here, I've met the founders of insanely successful companies, billionaires,etc. Honestly, you wouldn't know it, if it wasn't for the companies they founded. Everyone is also willing to help out here. In short, wealth is valued by what you have created and the people you help achieve that same goal.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of PG's essay on how to create wealth:

"his essay is about how to make money by creating wealth and getting paid for it. There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these."

There was a time when inheritance was considered more honorable than trade (typical of most aristocratic societies), but that's been pretty well dismissed by now. In most free market democracies, the social respect for huge fortunes tends to be closely correlated with the proximity of the activity to the direct creation of wealth.

So high tech tends to be viewed very favorably. Seeking wealth through marriage is viewed unfavorably ("gold-digging"). Flipping condos is tolerated but not highly respected, but renovating for a profit is viewed more positively. Vast sums won through litigation tend to be irritating (though people generally reserve their scorn for the big share taken by the attorney, less so for the litigants). These activities aren't despised, but they are respected less than the true wealth creators.

And lastly, of course, there's genuine hatred for the illegal (or legal but predatory) practices like extortion, robbery, cartel-building, and so forth.

Finance probably isn't _despised_ (or at least wasn't until the recent bail- out), but because it's perceived as further down the chain from high-tech, it will generate more resentment than admiration.

By the way, high tech isn't completely clean here - Carly Fiorina did receive a huge retirement package - worth about $40 mil, I think.

</comment><comment><USER7> In light of the Wall St bailout, here's a question to ponder: Is Google too big to fail?

In the event of capital inadequacy due to fraud/investments-gone-wrong, should the government bail out Google with taxpayers' money since Google is so integral with the Internet economy?

<comment><USER8> The whole Internet economy is small enough to fail. It's still just a tiny sliver of the US economy. And ready substitutes for Google's wares exist all over the place; not as good in some cases, but more than adequate.

Besides, Google is mostly a facilitator of transactions. The might get fractions of a penny from every dollar spent on the interwebs. So if that price is fair, presumably we would just have to pay a few micro-pennies more per item for distributors to find alternative ways to market their goods or spend a few micro-pennies more effort in searching for it ourselves.

That seems wrong to me somehow, as it can be very hard to find some things on engines other than Google. But it seems to make economic sense. Unless we consider the very low "cut" that Google is taking to be an anti-competitive measure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is on similar lines to PG's essay on wealth -> <http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html> (One of my all time favorites, wish i had learnt about it earlier).

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of Paul Graham's `cities and ambition' essay...

</comment><comment><USER11> "Rich" isn't the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they hear about Steve Jobs, any more than "powerful" comes to their minds when they hear about Barack Obama. People think of them as "successful", because they like those who have vision and succeed at implementing it, but "the rich" and "the powerful" have negative connotations. There's a one-step mental transition in realizing that, in fact, Steve Jobs is rich (but that's okay) because he is successful, and likewise for Obama.

Silicon Valley is ostensibly positive-sum. Some of what occurs on Wall Street is also positive-sum: for example, arbitrage and market-making provide liquidity to markets. Some financial activity, however, is not. Unfortunately for Wall Street's reputation, people tend to focus on the activities that are excessive and destructive, such as the subprime mortgage fiasco.

In general, people tend to resent most those who make money in manners that are zero-sum (or negative-sum). Examples of this would be NYC landlords, who are becoming inordinately rich based entirely on others' pain and misfortune, and health insurance executives, who enrich themselves by charging ridiculous premiums and then denying care to sick people. Most people, when they think of Wall Street, think of traders; few would draw the distinction between, say, corporate finance and what traders do. Trading isn't actually zero-sum, given that it provides liquidity, but it seems to most people like a zero-sum game, and so it's not well respected.

<comment><USER12> I agree w/ your point except the part about trading being a value-added activity. Liquidity, if you ask Warren Buffett, is overrated.

When people trade AAPL, for example, there is a loser and a winner. The real value is not created by those trading AAPL it is created by Steve Jobs and those working at AAPL. While trading is not zero-sum, it is a mostly zero-sum activity.

You might say. AIG may beg to differ, since it went under for liquidity, rather than solvency reasons. However if you don't employ dangerous amounts of leverage, it is not an issue. There are plenty of insurance companies in business who didn't dance too close to the edge like AIG did.

<comment><USER13> Yes and no. The price of AAPL is whatever people are willing to pay for it. AAPL is effectively a currency; Apple can use it to acquire other companies. Without an active secondary market, stock can't play this role at all.

<comment><USER12> Sure. I am not saying we shouldn't have a secondary market.

I am saying: "Hey if professional traders did not exist, the markets may be a bit slower but it'll still work."

So yes, they provide liquidity but...at least in today's markets the CDO traders are not doing their job on the liquidity front! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article makes it look like bankers get paid for nothing. That is simply not true. Wall Street allocates capital. Somebody has to decide how the capital available in the US gets distributed. For startups, its VCs, for mature companies, it is large institutional banks and the stocks and bond markets. The salaries are large because of the sheer amount of money that floats around. Consider the banker(s) who decide whether to give a loan to GE or handle a mutual fund. Chances are good that that single transaction has several million USD attached to it. Even a few %age of that is a very large amount. The larger comercial banks like JPM and Citigroup have upwards of half a _trillion_ dollars of deposits. Suddenly multi-million dollar salaries don't seem that extravagant anymore.

Furthermore, if top level execs were really overpaid, we would see competition from outsiders capable of offering similar quality at lower price. It is not unusual for corporations to hire outside the company. That executive pay is still high is an indication that maybe, CEOs really are worth a few million dollars a year.

This is further complicated by federal regulation surrounding this sector of the economy. Banking regulations make it nearly impossible to start a bank. Other financial institutions are similarly constrained (though maybe not to such an extent). This artificially decreases supply and therefore, increases prices.

Are there some abuses in pay? Sure, just like there are abuses in everything else. However, because business execs are paid X times the average American and some demonstrably bad CEOs are rewarded extravagantly for their incompetence does not imply that capitalism has failed and _all_ high-level pay needs to be regulated.

<comment><USER15> Absolutely not true. It seems that a lot Wall Street allocated the money where THEY would make the most profits. And this happen to be the housing mania. For few years the profit from housing was so juicy, that they decided to ignore the fundamentals, and their myopia brought us to this situation.

In a good scenario, wall street will be allocating money to where it is more efficient, in our case, they just shuffled money around in esoteric papers, and pinched a bit of it every time it changed hand, which contributed nothing to the economy, except their own pockets. Now the music has stopped, and a lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand, and brought us to this mess.

<comment><USER16> _Now the music has stopped, and a lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand_

Now that you mention it, hot potato and musical chairs at the same time could make a pretty good game. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Do You Create An OCR Web Service? - HNY 2014 HN - <AUTHOR>

HNY 2014 HN. Im trying to create an ocr web service with Tesseract OCR, but I dont know how to get started. What should I do? Do I need dedicated hosting service or virtual private service? <comment><USER2> There are a number of existing OCR web services, both free and paid (try Googling "online ocr"). I think some of them use Tesseract. What advantages would your service offer compared to these ?

<comment><AUTHOR> \- Thank you for the response tgflynn and happy new year. I just wanted to understand the architecture of how one is created. Like I want to understand how it works. If somebody points me to a paper or a book, I would be glad to look at it.

<comment><USER2> I doubt there are any books specifically on the subject of how to build an online OCR service. If you're interested in the underlying technology of OCR or the orthogonal question of the mechanics of building web applications in general you may find something.

The most basic workflow would be to implement a simple web app that allows uploading an image file, save the the file to local disk, run the Tesseract program and generate a new web page that displays the Tesseract textual output to the user.

There is going to be much more CPU utilization per query than for a typical web application so if you want to scale you'll probably need some sort of distributed load balancing architecture with multiple (possibly virtual) servers.

If you don't care about scaling and just want to test something out you'll at least need a hosting provider that allows you to compile and install software. That probably means a virtual server like EC2 or something similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- Okay thank you for the knowledge tgflynn. I really appreciate your time and patience.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I test my personality - <AUTHOR> I never had time for personality test like Meyers Briggs, but recently discussed with colleagues who have designed their careers around their results. Should I do the same? Are such tests a good starting point for workplace focussed self discovery? Is workplace focussed self discovery worthwhile in a career? For context I am a well paid mid level employee in an IT services division. <comment><USER4> Meyers Briggs is fantasy and doesn't mean sh*t. Do Big 5 or HEXACO, they're built from reliable statistics not made up stuff. Do a little research on 'em, you'll see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that. What are the key points, in your mind, against Meyers Briggs?

<comment><USER4> There's one big one for me, it's not based on statistics so it's not accurate or predictive.

There's little more here about it's utility:

[https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk?t=343](https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk?t=343)

The big five/HEXACO, however, correspond roughly to neuro-chemical/structural pathways/circuits in brains.

tl;dr Meyers Briggs is makes you feel good about yourself. The big 5 /HEXACO can tell you if you're a piece of shit. I know which test I'd rather people take.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My suggestion - do not opt for personality tests. I have been tempted in the past to take these tests. But you have to understand that those who take these tests, are highly likely to believe the results - and the placebo effect takes place because they believe in the results - they start behaving around the results - and end up propagating the benefits of such systems.

This is a defeating cause. You are the best person to understand yourself - placing that responsibility to system outside of you is foolish. Add to that, if you carefully observe - we are always evolving as a person. Are you sure the results you obtain from these tests will hold true 5 years hence ? And if you choose to believe the results - aren't you limiting yourself of the possibilities ?

Your life keeps exposing your vulnerabilities and flaws - if you observe and learn from your life that itself is the biggest discovery of your self - <USER2> you are when presented with a situation is the best indicator of your personality.

Spend time reflecting on who you are that's far better than relying on external systems that try to frame and model and limit people's personality.

No system is exhaustive enough to capture the combinations of traits to come up with a list of personality types. And generalizations are just that - <USER3> generalization.

Its better to be a little skeptical of these tests - Just sharing my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just don't take it overly seriously and try more than one type of test. Do not let this dictate anything to you. If it gives you an epiphany, awesome. If not, no big.

We all struggle to see ourselves accurately. Think of these tests like a mirror helping you get an idea of what you look like, while recognizing that you can never actually see your own face, merely reflections or images of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> If your serious about it, my recommendations would be to take it in the context of working with a mental health professional such as a licensed psychologist. That will keep it in perspective, provide a context for interpretation and a resource for discussion of the results.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> go for it if you like horoscopes.</comment>


As a full time hacker  how do you manage your health - <AUTHOR> As a full time hacker nomad how do you manage your health, back, wrist and other pains that lead to burnout?
What diet do you follow?<p>Do you use acupuncture? Therapy, any tips appreciated to manage burnout <comment><USER2> I use a device ([http://zap.intergate.ca/](http://zap.intergate.ca/)) before going to bed, which induces electroporation & destroys harmful organisms living in my body. I ride my bicycle 5 miles to work & 5 miles back home every day. I limit my caloric intake to less than 1,500 per day. I drink a lot of water and also teas that reduce stress.</comment>


Serverless runs Nordstrom systems in real-time at massive scale - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/designing-an-event-driven-serverless-system-to-run-real-time-at-massive-scale-c4de3f7539fc <comment><USER2> The article makes serverless sound like magic. I thought we called this microservices, like AWS Lambda and AWS DynamoDB aren't serverless, they just dont run on YOUR server.

I'm already looking at ways to use lambda to replace some functions. I would have loved to have this for file encoding years ago for mobile updates, instead of kicking off ffmpeg jobs. I never used the AWS Transcoder, yet...</comment>


How to Slow Down Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.raptitude.com/2018/05/how-to-slow-down-time/ <comment><USER2> That's been a personal theory of mine. Though I phrase it more like, the sense of time passing correlates with the number of mind-blowing or life-changing or non-routine experiences that happen during the given time span. You have a lot more of those, the younger and less experienced you are. So it's somewhat related to age, but not directly.

Never have been able to get into the whole meditation thing though, so I always figured the only way was to just find ever newer things to do. But then that would put you on the 'hedonic treadmill' as it were...</comment>


How to see all HN articles I've read? - <AUTHOR>

In a list, preferably with active links... <comment><USER2> [http://getpocket.com/](http://getpocket.com/)

<comment><USER3> To add to this, their extension has an option to save HN links from the homepage if you spot an article to read later.</comment></comment>


Functional programming in C++ with the FC++ library - <AUTHOR> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~yannis/fc++/

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks promising, I haven't used it yet. Does anybody have any experience with this?</comment>


CEO to CTO: What Is Your RewriteRatio? - <AUTHOR> http://codemonkeyism.com/ceo-to-cto-what-is-your-rewriteratio/ <comment><USER2> > Web frameworks are no longer supported, in Javascript we have seen Backbone, > Knockout, Angular, Ember and React in rapid succession, with older > frameworks massively losing momentum and community.

Uh, all of these are supported quite well. Each has a place in the ecosystem and will be around for a long time. Anyone who considers rewriting an app because a new one of these comes out has a serious problem. My old apps use older ones and my new use newer. What is the problem?

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is punctuation; reading that sentence it looks like "Web frameworks [that] are no longer supported[.] In JavaScript we have seen Backbone, knockout, angular, ember, and react in rapid succession..." Which is a true statement, though you're right that it looks as though the implication is that they're no longer supported when in fact it's simply that the older frameworks are losing momentum and mindshare.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here, any feedback appreciated.

<comment><USER4> Is this really a KPI? It is really only measurable, not directly improvable. In addition, what does "improving" it mean? Is low good or bad? If we had a highly functional system and were growing 1000% then this number goes way up. Is that bad? This number, IMO, communicates very little between a CTO and CEO.

In additon, this number has no intrinsic value component. What is the value of being able to migrate to another system? Who cares? Rewrite for what? Does code rot? Are there bad spots like an apple? Does recreating the apple keep bad spots from being created next time?

There are only 4 states for a rewrite value judgement:

1\. App is small and provides little business value..so who cares.

2\. App is big, but low values so what's it matter.

3\. App is huge and high value so better be very very careful.

4\. App is small and high value, so why?

Your ratios restate that and provide no additional information in the only state that matters which is number 3.

<comment><USER5> It's not even measurable: its the ratio of two numbers, neither of which is actually measurable.

OTOH, the cost to migrate can never be greater than the cost to rewrite from scratch, since rewriting from scratch is a method of migrating.

And I'm not sure this ratio is ever meaningful. I get that the idea is to have a simple, scale independent measure of the impact of technical debt, but the proposal here is neither objectively measurable nor meaningful, IMO, in that role.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I had a paragraph is on getting the number but this is obviously thin ice, so I dropped it for now. I'm out of ideas on how to measure it, I probably would ask a group of developers, let them make an educated estimation and then make a best effort estimation based on their answers, perhaps something like the Delphi Method [1]

"OTOH, the cost to migrate can never be greater than the cost to rewrite from scratch, since rewriting from scratch is a method of migrating."

Interesting point. I need to work on the definitions as obviously 'migration' is not clear cut enough.

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


The Children and the CIA (1977) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbaKn6qIOOM <comment><USER2> What a different era. Can't imagine any television show today would investigate the CIA.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now they openly hire them as pundits and give them guest slots on the evening news circuit!</comment></comment>


Feedback needed – Reward your team with equity - <AUTHOR> https://quid.li <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, here Florent from Quid.li We focus on enabling companies to easily share equity with anyone on their team who creates value. We've been using our own solution to build ourselves: you can try our open demo in CEO view to get an idea of how we use Quidli to reward and incentivize our own team: [http://equity.quid.li](http://equity.quid.li) Would love to receive your feedbacks!</comment>


Ask YC : x86 books? - <AUTHOR>

I have just started a compiler project targeting x86. Can you suggest some books which will get me upto speed on the the x86 instruction set? I have worked with other ISAs in the past so I am not an assembler noob. Just want something to teach me x86. A book which gives an overview of newer intel chips (intel core microarchitecture?) will also be helpful.<p>edit : I also need to understand the SSE instructions since the compiler is expected to do some vectorization. <comment><USER2> Intel's docs. Huge and comprehensive:

<http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/>

NASM docs:

<http://www.linuxmedialabs.com/nasm/html/nasmdoca.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks.</comment></comment>


Dropbox, my grandfather, and existentialism. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-humans/d637e74a8378

<comment><USER2>
      "Everyone is a creator in one way or another - and it's important to know someone cares about whatever it is that you're creating."

Couldn't agree more. My grandmother, in her last few months, used to love to sing _bhajans_ and other religious songs. She'd sing to herself sometimes; she'd sing with her visitors, too. My family certainly made an effort to involve ourselves and appreciate those precious moments. My only regret is that I wasn't able to capture them to save for the future.

I love that you have a little window on your grandfather's life, even if you're not communicating every day.</comment>


Last Week on My Mac: The Mystery of the Supplemental Update - <AUTHOR> https://eclecticlight.co/2018/07/29/last-week-on-my-mac-the-mystery-of-the-supplemental-update/ <comment><USER2> Documented at [https://support.apple.com/en- ca/HT201222](https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201222)

[https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208937](https://support.apple.com/en- ca/HT208937)

[https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208934](https://support.apple.com/en- ca/HT208934)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This update was disgraceful. Shame on Apple.

I encountered one side effect that wasn't mentioned in this excellent article: the root password stopped working after I installed the update. Because I was using root as my admin account, I was unable to do anything that required admin authorization. I called Apple Support and they were no help. Their only recommendation was that I erase my SSD and install a fresh copy of macOS. Ouch.</comment>


This Week in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://blog.octayn.net/blog/2014/05/17/this-week-in-rust-49/ <comment><USER2> What about the Servo project updates? I really like those, to watch it's progress.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't jemalloc get reintegrated as well?

</comment><comment><USER4> Any idea how they keep up with the breaking changes in Servo? Do they have some kind of rule so that whoever introduces them in Rust needs to patch Servo?

<comment><USER5> Last month they introduced rules that one should mark breaking changes in the git log and that removed functions should have a clearer fail message. At least I think that's what #[deprecated] does?

[https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust- dev/2014-April/00954...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust- dev/2014-April/009543.html)

<comment><USER6> Yes, #[deprecated="some text"] causes the compiler to emit a warning message (that includes the specified text) whenever, for example, a function marked with it is called.</comment></comment></comment>


Reborn - <AUTHOR> http://www.theotveteras.com/reborn/

<comment><USER2> I sort of feel I need to dedicate some time to understand this. Not great for a short attention span morning.

</comment><comment><USER3> Upvoted just because it's something different.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure if drugs or just art...or possibly both.

</comment><comment><USER5> Weird story. I bet he died or something.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually quite entertaining. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> What do you smoke, and can I have some?

</comment><comment><USER8> New windows? That's a paddlin.</comment>


Bash Tricks - <AUTHOR> https://wizardzines.com/comics/bash-tricks/ <comment><USER2> 'set -o vi' and away we go!

<comment><USER3> Good call. I don't use emacs either, so the shortcuts don't come to mind as easily as they would if I did.</comment></comment>


Programming is not a craft - <AUTHOR> http://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/ <comment><USER2> Yes, it is a craft, as in crafting:

\- It is labor-intensive

\- It is creativity taxing

\- It produces better results the more skilled the craftsman is

\- It can only be learned by practicing

That extends to all professions that can't be automated and benefit from highly-skilled labor. They are all crafts.

The author is just confusing craft and art.

<comment><USER3> I'd also argue that it's also art, just with a smaller target audience. Open source software is a great example of this. A lot of open source projects are really just experiments in expressing an idea in a new way, or basically saying, "hey guys, check out this cool thing I did." _why was the trademark example of taking this concept and constructing an entire persona around it, but art is about expression, and programming allows for some interesting forms of expression.

Just like it takes a little training to appreciate the intricacies involved in the construction of a piece of literature, classical music, painting, or other work, it takes training to appreciate beautiful software.

Code is just a much newer canvas for ideas, so it's not as mature.

<comment><USER4> Art is a poor metaphor for software. A bad painting just looks ugly. It doesn't hurt anyone.

A better metaphor is a block of Legos, but where none of the pieces fit together well and 2/3 of them are of such poor quality as to make them almost worthless and, worse yet, you can't choose not to use them because the people setting requirements don't know or care about block quality and "just want it to work".

I'm experienced both in software and creative writing. I've read (and written) some awful short stories and poems. Bad writing is embarrassing. Bad software is a much higher dimension of evil. Bad code kills businesses.

<comment><USER3> So the question could be rephrased to a better analogy: is architecture art? A faulty building can kill people, but buildings can be expressions of ideas. In other words, there is a utilitarian form of architecture, which involves making the most efficient/simple/effective solution to a problem. But there's also the side that produces iconic and truly beautiful buildings for no other purpose than beauty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a fantastic title, right up there with 'Dynamic typing is 1000x better than static typing' and 'Tabs vs Spaces: winner spaces'.

It really just leaves us arguing the finer points of what the definition of craft is. Could you argue that knitting isn't really a craft as most people just want sweaters _that work_ over sweaters that show some amount of professional craftsmanship quality? What about coffee tables since Wal-Mart sells cheap coffee tables and people generally own cheap coffee tables that must mean that woodworking isn't a craft.

ugh... we may as well argue the merits of calling something 'Art' with one side holding firmly to the position of _since I consider it art it therefore becomes art because art becomes art once someone identifies it as art_.

As for the artistic nature of code I'm reminded of reading someone's quote years ago "On a whim one afternoon I decided to browse the source-code for Nethack. I looked at it, and it looked back at me, and I was afraid"

</comment><comment><USER6> I find it interesting that the two examples he gives of "proper professions" are highly regulated guild-like professions whose values are artificially inflated, at least to some degree.

I'm only a very new programmer, but I'm reading Martin Fowler's _Refactoring_ and, even from my limited experience I'm finding that one of the differences between software and other products is that software must be maintainable. So the end user isn't the only end user. Software has to be read and worked on by other programmers in future, and most of the _craft_ involved is not in making a program simply work as it's supposed to, but making the code easy to read, easy to maintain, and easy to modify.

So the aesthetic quality of the code and the craftsmanship involved is very important, for pragmatic and eventually end-user-facing reasons.

But hey, what do I know? I haven't gone to programmer's school or gotten a programmer's license or anything.

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember seeing a shift in CS student populations, say around 1999, from people who already had a self-developed interest in computing to people who wanted to learn programming as a trade to make money. The first group had probably taught themselves programming and had already been tinkering with system internals and hardware. They were programming because they were drawn to it for whatever reasons.

I think the author of this piece is from the latter group. To that group, software as craft just doesn't fit into their world. Whereas I think the first group has an understanding that beauty on the inside of a program shows on the outside too, especially over time.

<comment><USER8> It's the same in a lot of technical fields. In my mechanical engineering courses there was a minority who truly loved everything to do with machines. The people who work on their car at weekends or build projects in their spare time. They were truly excited just to be able to do what they loved and get paid for it.

The majority though are people who have some affinity for maths and sciences and have made a career choice to study engineering. They put in the hours to do the coursework, but if it's not proscribed in the course they simply won't do it. They go home and don't think about engineering at all. Big companies are full of these people, chugging away at their job but not particularly interested in spending their spare time honing their skills or working on other stuff because it's actually pretty awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _non-plumbers don't care about the aesthetics of plumbing_

Of course they do. Nobody wants crooked pipes in their house, or pipes visible where they need not be.

<comment><USER10> To make the analogy work I think you have to assume he's referring to the complex of pipes hidden in the walls.

<comment><USER11> Pipe hidden behind the wall still has to be beautiful in relative to how the plumber have to work with it. If some plumber hide pipe behind the wall in a way that makes any maintenance impossible, then it's probably "ugly" for plumber standard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "PROGRAMMING IS NOT A CRAFT"

And then the TLDR basically says: "Non-programmers just want programs to work". As if the two are mutually exclusive... as if craftsmanship forbids pragmatism.

No, just no.

</comment><comment><USER13> Carpentry craftsmanship risks putting the furniture at the centre rather than the benefit the furniture is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Carpentry is about having a place to sit, a place to put your coffee cup, and a place to store things that fits in with the client's desired style and other requirements.

Non-carpenters don't care about the aesthetics of joinery in the same way non- plumbers don't care about the aesthetics of plumbing – they just want their furniture to support their weight and drawers to not stick.

End of parody. If software isn't craftsmanship, then the only reasonable alternative is that it's a branch of engineering, but most software is developed in an environment and via a process that is much more like a customer furniture maker's shop than a proper engineer.

It looks like what he actually wanted to argue was something more like "we should learn lessons from other more developed craft professions" but I didn't read beyond the link bait title and inflammatory introduction.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think we admire good engineering because it has some "aesthetic" merits. It's beautiful because it fits its purpose.

Planes are beautiful, but if they looked differently, they wouldn't be able to fly. Cheetahs are beautiful, but every feature in their body has been designed by nature to make the fastest animal on earth.

I think it's the same with software engineering. We don't think a program is "beautiful" because the author decided to use that particular algorithm or fancy data structure, it's because this algorithm or data structure allows them to solve the problem at hand correctly and within imposed limitations on resources. It fits nicely with the overall purpose.

<comment><USER15> My remarks here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906217> probably should have been posted as a reply to this comment, which is what inspired it. The rest of the remarks here make mine seem out of context, but there were a lot fewer remarks at the time I started my reply.

So, basically, I was agreeing with you.

Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >It would be great if programming were a proper profession, but it isn't. A profession has a structured model for advancing [...] We need some sort of apprenticeship model, and a way to identify masters, both to apprentices and other masters.

Bullshit. It is precisely because programming is not straitjacketed in such medieval rigidities that it can create so much value these days. Forcing today's youngsters, who may be like Gates, Zuckerberg or the Collison brothers, into an X-years long "apprenticeship" program before anyone takes their code seriously is a spectacularly bad idea.

<comment><USER4> Proposed compromise:

1\. Anyone can write code. 14 years old? No school? Fine. Doesn't matter. If it's good, people will voluntarily use it. Absolutely anyone can write code, and if it's good, people will use and pay for it.

2\. No _manager_ can make _me_ read your code as a requirement of my job unless you've proven (by certification) yourself to be at a level where less than 5% of professional programmers currently are.

This would work for me.

<comment><USER17> No manager can make you read code as it is. There is said to be an unprecedented shortage of developers. It is easy to walk to another company who has code that aligns with your beliefs.

I don't see anything wrong with companies that want to have bad code. They'll probably suffer for it, but that's not your or my problem.

<comment><USER4> I'm not talking about "me" here, except rhetorically. Yes, _I_ can walk away from bad code (although I might be walking into worse code). I don't think a junior developer in Iowa City can.

What I'd like is a world where as few people as possible deal with bad code, and no one is stuck with no other options, because bad code tends to beget more bad code, and because it's wasting time that could be spent writing a bunch of new good code.

The evil of bad code isn't that unskillful code exists. The problem is that there are plenty of managers out there who don't know any better and will insist that people use it, and who never learned the processes that lead to good code (most important: keep program size _small_.)

Also, my experience is that over 90% of corporate code is absolutely terrible-- unusably, mind-stoppingly awful. Rolling the dice doesn't have the best odds.

<comment><USER17> > Also, my experience is that over 90% of corporate code is absolutely > terrible-

Which is kind of funny because those are the businesses who rely most heavily on vetting done through colleges and universities. They have, on paper, the very best programers available. I guess that goes to show how poorly credentialing actually works in the real world.

<comment><USER4> +1. You win this one. At least, we haven't shown that we have the machinery to build a _useful_ credentialing system for software quality.

I think the pain of what we do in the software industry, from the low respect to the bad code, goes back to the fact that our work is extremely difficult to measure, although the importance of quality could not be higher. Corporations have traditionally responded with a 3-4 year bug-fixing evaluative spell, but that's now leading to adverse selection because people like us (as you noted) won't stand for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Software craftsmen should be egoless, humble, with a focus on the outcome > rather than the code or the process.

That sounds good. But developers aren't like that. We are concerned about getting the job done in a way that promotes our career and/or keeps us from getting fired, well- most of the time.

> I also think there should be a way for passionate, skilled programmers to > differentiate themselves from the mainstream commodity bodies, and also to > recognise one another, and demonstrate their value to potential employers. > What could that be, and how could we make it work?

These are called certifications, and their value has diminished. Here's why:

Many of us survive by Google searching, using stackoverflow and better documented frameworks. And, there still aren't enough of us. Many of us feel we are overpaid, but most would never admit it.

By deciding on a way to determine who is proficient and who isn't, you risk a lot of people not being able to find work, and for what goal? Right now programming is an art. If you make it into a trade with the federal, state, or county regulations saying that the developer must be qualified in X, and they have tests for X (that become irrelevant daily), then you are going to (1) eliminate a lot of developers from the workforce and (2) stagnate the art because right now it develops at a faster pace than any of us can keep up with.

<comment><USER19> "Many of us feel we are overpaid, but most would never admit it."

Really? I've always felt underpaid. Most business owners don't understand software or deadlines and me (and my developer co-workers) have always had to suffer as a result of this by working insane hours for weeks at a time to get things done.

But keep thinking this way. It will only help me when I need to hire developers for my own business.

<comment><USER20> > Really? I've always felt underpaid.

I think the sentence before the one you quoted clears things up:

>> Many of us survive by Google searching, using stackoverflow and better documented frameworks. And, there still aren't enough of us. Many of us feel we are overpaid, but most would never admit it.

If you're shipping real software for real businesses that weaves a half-dozen technologies together in a way that none of the business guys knew was even possible, and you proposed and executed on the idea.

If you're in a large corporation working 40 hours a week, always clocking out at five, and there are no consequences for dates slipping, then yeah, I could maybe understand feeling overpaid.

But if I'm building the systems that make the business? The business could not operate without this software? About to make 5 salaried employees 1.4x productive? Yes, I'll charge a lot, and yes, I'm worth every penny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Although it's true that people want programs for their functionality, not their beauty, there _is_ a reason why it's a good idea to focus on the "beauty" of the program that lies beneath the functionality, and that's because unlike bridges, which rarely need to change once they are built, programs often do need to be improved and modified after the 1.0 release.

More importantly, other people will need to be able to revise and extend upon your work, and if it is easy for other programmers to understand your code, and be able to work on your code, this makes your code far more valuable in a way that might not be visible to a customer who is only interested in the functionality.

Now, there may be cases where this doesn't matter. If it's a startup where it's not even clear whether you're going to get the next round of funding, maybe taking the time to invest in making your software more maintainable doesn't matter; letting technical debt build up might be acceptable.

But there is a reason why open source projects care very much about the underlying quality of the code from an aesthetics point of view, and that's because we need to worry about the long-term maintainability of the code after we accept a code contribution. Even if the startup goes belly up, you can reuse open source code. Proprietary code is much less likely to be reused, and besides, once the startup fails and you are fired and the assets get sold off, why would you care about how maintainable the code will be? It's very unlikely you'll ever get the chance to work on it again....

But in the case of open source code, caring about the craft of writing good, maintainable, elegant, easy-to-understand code _is_ important. And in that way, I do respect programmers who respect their work as if it were a craft.

</comment><comment><USER22> T-12 hours before "Programming is a craft" post on HN

<comment><USER23> That timer is long expired. This article (which uses "craft" as a synonym for "art") directly opposes Knuth's [1] from 1974 -- I'll let you guess which one carries more weight.

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone who chooses to use "TL;DR" at the start of an article where professionals put "Abstract" or "Synopsis" (or, God forbid, "Introduction") is, whilst not necessarily a posing hipster, at least subverting their own credibility.

</comment><comment><USER25> There are two kind of "technical" people. The "Science" kind, and the "engineering" kind. If you appreciate the "beauty" of an mathematical equation, or the "elegance" of a proof, you are the "Science" kind. If you appreciate the preciseness of a tool, or speed to achieve a task, you are the "Engineering" kind. Science provide the backbone behind engineering, but engineering re-invigorates science. Unfortunately, programming can fall into either categories. Argument like this is mostly pointless without a specific context. As a programmer, it is a life long effort to find the "zen" of the two.

</comment><comment><USER26> Does he really think this sort of invisibility just happens?

A road goes over a bridge so smoothly that drivers don't notice the bridge. The result of the bridge-builder refraining from decoration? Mostly the result of the bridge-builder very, very carefully lining things up. With a level of planning-time rarely seen in the software world.

Non-craftedness is just a style, one that only the most skilled craftspeople can achieve.

</comment><comment><USER15> The cathedral example does not work. The author clearly explains how the aesthetic of a cathedral helps put people in the right reverent frame of mind to worship, which is the action they are there to perform, then dismisses that beauty as not functional, as mere aesthetic. It seems clear to me if the design helps them get in the right frame if mind, it is functional. Furthermore, historically, the point of stained glass windows was to share some of the stories of the bible with a largely illiterate population. Again, it was beautiful but not merely decorative. The art of the cathedral had purpose and function.

I have a Certifucate in GIS. The mapmaking class I took emphasized the fact that a good map -- one well designed for its intended purpose of efficiently conveying information -- will be perceived as "beautiful" in much the same way that good engineering is typically perceived as aesthetically appealling but a beautiful map is not necessarily a good map. In organizations where GIS is not well integrated, you wind up with "map shops" who are not involved in any really important part of collecting the data or using it. Their only role is to make maps for the people who do use the data. Map shops inevitably become obsessed with making beautiful maps, to the point where embellishment may well interfere with effective use of the map.

I have come to believe that beauty (of all kinds) is valued because it is a qick and dirty proxy for real value since things which are well designed seem to universally have visual appeal. Therefore, if it is not aesthetically appealling, it probably is not really all that good in terms of quality. I think beauty then also gets routinely maligned because it can be a quick and dirty means to fake value, to falsely signal value, when it doesn't really exist. I think this conflict will never be resolved because both things will remain true. We will continue to remark with awe and wonder on the "beauty" of high quality work and continue to deride low quality work which tries to cover up its defects by slathering it in prettiness.

For those adequately in the know to understand the code, there will continue to be people who talk about programming in terms of "beauty". For those not in the know, it is too abstract to "see" the beauty of it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think of it like this, Craftsmanship is about having the discipline to dot 'i's and cross 't's. It's about scrubbing out the pans after your done cooking a meal, because while you might be able to keep reusing a skillet without cleaning it to produce delicious meal after delicious meal quickly, eventually, you're going to send a customer to the hospital.

Keeping code in small readable chunks that have automated tests makes it easier to maintain and if this hasn't been your experience then I would say you haven't been doing it correctly.

</comment><comment><USER28> There is an internal property of a software system wherein it is better suited to accomodate the future (new requirements, change). Better suited means it can accomodate the future more efficiently and stably.

Two software systems may delight the customer, for example, but one could be far better positioned to evolve, grow, delight future customers and more customers.

The ability to create such systems lies with some not all and usually comes with experience.

What is this ability called, if not craftmanship?

</comment><comment><USER22> "Non-programmers don't care about the aesthetics of software"

<https://www.google.com/search?q=market+cap+apple>

</comment><comment><USER29> > _So here's my concern with the idea of Software Craftsmanship. It's at risk > of letting programmers' egos run riot. And when that happens… well, the last > time they went really nuts we got Web Services, before that J2EE._

I'm pretty sure it wasn't programming _craftsman_ that created J2EE, but rather the programming _tradesmen_ that this guy seems to be glorifying.

</comment><comment><USER30> As a programmer of 13+ years ... YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES

<comment><USER31> As a programmer of 29+ years, I'm not sure I agree! :)

<comment><USER30> I hear ya. It's all about balancing short term vs long term.

My general reaction to Craftsmanship is they pull toward an equally unhealthy end of the spectrum. Only focusing on quality is equally as bad as never focusing on quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Since when is it legitimate to self-label yourself a craftsman? It's pure vanity.

Repeat after me: you are a computer programmer.

</comment><comment><USER33> "With a craft, the product has intrinsic beauty in its own right." - Is he talking about art?

</comment><comment><USER4> Code beauty is different from aesthetic beauty (e.g. cathedral). Code should be straightforward and almost boring. You don't need to start complex; it will come to you. Complexity should come from the problem being solved. Self- modifying code is "fun" and also completely unmaintainable. Same with code that uses a lot of inheritance (except in GUIs, where inheritance is a natural fit). It might be "fun" to write but it's hideous to maintain. It's better to point that creativity in the direction of _clean_ code that teaches other people how to use it and how the problem is solved.

Code aesthetics cannot be compromised, but code beauty doesn't mean complexity or adornment. It means functional simplicity and ease of learning. It should trigger the, "Why didn't I see this problem so simply?" reflex.

 _A really great programmer (and I've been lucky enough to work with a handful over the years) can out-perform a doing-it-for-the-money programmer by orders of literally hundreds, delivering in hours or days what would take an average developer weeks or months._

True, if that great programmer doesn't have meetings or interruptions, get to choose her tools, and has full autonomy in how she does her work.

I used to think that mediocre "day-jobbers" (to borrow a word from the OP) made the crappy corporate software environment and bad software. I now am pretty sure that it's the reverse. The corporate world limits people and turns them into day-jobbers. You have to be constitutionally insubordinate in order protect your creativity through the grunt-work 20s and not a lot of people have the nerve to deal with the result of that (e.g. frequent job changes).

This is compounded by the fact that the people who climb the corporate ladder tend rarely to be of that insubordinate type. After 15-25 years, they're finally in positions that would use that creativity... and don't have it anymore; it's gone forever.

<comment><USER34> [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why- do-...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why-do-business- analysts-and-project-managers-get-higher-salaries-than-programme)</comment></comment>


DIY Alloy Junction Transistors - <AUTHOR> https://bootlicker.party/posts/diy-alloy-junction-transistors/ <comment><USER2> How expensive are germanium wafers?

Wikipedia states that historically cuprous oxide is one of the most studied semiconductors: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper(I)_oxide#Semiconducting...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper\(I\)_oxide#Semiconducting_properties)

Do you know of any comprehensive reviews of cuprous oxide, referencing the most important theory and applications, and (lab or commercial) devices constructed?

Do you think it is possible to make cuprous oxide transistors?</comment>


Anxiety simulator: Adventures with Anxiety (open source) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ncase/anxiety <comment><AUTHOR> There's a cuss free mode [0] for kids and educators. The default version [1] is live.

[0]: [https://ncase.me/anxiety/?c=1](https://ncase.me/anxiety/?c=1)

[1]: [https://ncase.me/anxiety/](https://ncase.me/anxiety/)</comment>


Google and Apple's wearables are the face of their health agenda - <AUTHOR> https://4thquadrant.io/exclusive/transformation/google-and-apples-wearables-are-the-face-of-their-health-agenda/ <comment><USER2> The article says "In preventative healthcare this model is flipped on its head, the entire population becomes a potential customer base. While there is no ceiling to the number of available customers – this model faces the challenge of converting customers on a want-basis rather than a need-basis. The more proactive the preventative tool requires the consumer to be, the harder it is to scale. For this reason, industry players that are able to provide ease of use will be best placed to transform preventative health from a latent desire into a baseline habit, for a larger customer pool."

In fact a move to preventative is mostly the business of habits, i had a non branded sport watch and switched to apple watch recently. Tracking metrics became like a sport in and of itself - especially during runs. I'd be more interested to see how these wearables transition from heavily leaning into the exercise related metrics into even more health functions - what are the possibilities with that?</comment>


Algebra in Wonderland - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/opinion/07bayley.html?hp=&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Her exposition of math concepts is ridiculous.

"De Morgan had proposed a more modern approach to algebra, which held that any procedure was valid as long as it followed an internal logic. This allowed for results like the square root of a negative number"

Imaginary numbers were introduced by Descartes in 17th century and were widely accepted by the middle of 18th (think Euler: e^(i \pi) + 1 = 0).

"This principle (now an important aspect of modern topology) involves the idea that one shape can bend and stretch into another, provided it retains the same basic properties — a circle is the same as an ellipse or a parabola (the curve of the Cheshire cat's grin)."

Huh? You can bend or stretch a circle into a parabola?

<comment><USER3> _Huh? You can bend or stretch a circle into a parabola?_

In a sense, yes. A parabola is simply an ellipse with one of the foci at infinity.

<comment><USER4> you cannot stretch a parabola into a circle because a circle is a closed loop, while a parabola is not. any stretching would necessarily have to tear the circle. a topologist would say they have different fundamental groups.

the author of this article should stick to what she knows...english literature, not algebra.

<comment><USER3> _a topologist would say they have different fundamental groups_

In the affine real plane, yes. In the projective real plane, all (non- degenerate) conics have the same fundamental group.

<comment><USER5> To elaborate on cperciva's (correct) point:

On a projective plane a parabola contains a single point at infinity, connected (both figuratively and topologically) to the two open ends. A hyperbola contains two distinct points at infinity each connected to one end of each of the two usual components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read this argument before, in a paper by the author I think. I thought it was nonsense then and this article doesn't change my opinion about it. The purported explanations are really unconvincing, the analogies very strained.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, the author just doesn't supply any strong evidence for her thesis.

Would it be impolite to point out that she's an "English Major"? Then again, her A Levels might have given her a far better grounding in math than is the norm in the US.

<comment><USER8> _Would it be impolite to point out that she's an "English Major"?_

You already know the answer to this question. Also note that she's not an "English Major" in the sense you imply, she's getting a PhD in English Lit from Oxford.

If indeed her arguments are incorrect, you should be able to frame a refutation on ideas alone instead of resorting to an ad hominem argument. Ironically, this is a basic skill even "English Majors" possess.

<comment><USER7> Impolite does not mean irrelevant.

What I'm trying to point out is that there is no sign in what little we know of her biography _or_ in this article that she knows math at this level, the modern math she thinks Carroll is skewering.

Let's put it this way: how certain is anyone here that she understands how quaternions are non-commutative and how that was such a leap from all previous algebra? Such a leap that it took Hamilton years before he made it, such that it is commemorated on the bridge where he first wrote (carved) a solution?

Something I impolitely point out is that all too often I've seen people from "the humanities" make incorrect claims about "us" without any understanding of our work _or_ our culture, which they don't realize is a superset of their's. (And I'm annoyed about all the attention they get in doing this, but I suppose that's obvious.)

<comment><USER8> I'll join you in being annoying that she got published in the Times and I'll agree there are blatant inaccuracies in the article, but there are more effective arguments than insulting the author or the humanities at large. There's plenty to disagree with in the article without resorting to that.

As for mathematics being a superset of the humanities, that is just patently false. Here are a few counter examples [1,2,3]. I always find it interesting when fellow engineers/scientists argue for the superiority of their discipline when compared to the humanities. Personally I find the hard sciences awe inspiring enough to stand by themselves.

[1] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Brueghel-...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Brueghel- tower-of-babel.jpg)

[2] <http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1760/>

[3] [http://books.google.com/books?id=lZDCequ4E4kC&pg=PA170#v...](http://books.google.com/books?id=lZDCequ4E4kC&pg=PA170#v=onepage&q=&f=false)

<comment><USER7> I think I was unclear WRT to your last point. I'm saying that "we", the STEM types, live in a popular and to a certain degree also a higher culture that is a superset of the culture that those in "the humanities" live in. It's a _very_ broad generalization, perhaps colored by my being a part of a sub-group that would go to the ballet, Shakespeare productions, Ring Cycles (and each of us had at least one poet and painter we really liked, etc. etc.) ... but then again those who didn't like attending "operas [that] last three or four days" nonetheless had at least a minute appreciation, e.g. we weren't denigrated for our particular interests.

I was told an anecdote by someone in a course by Sherry Turkle: he said that one day there were many absences due to a Grateful Dead concert and that she couldn't comprehend this. Unfortunately I can't remember the details of her incomprehension, but at least as of the early 80s I didn't know anyone who knew her who thought she had a clue about what she was studying.

Perhaps I should say that there was nothing in the culture (as construed above) of those in "the humanities" that was out of bounds for us, whereas e.g. they'd never get jokes like the ones about an Abelian Grape, or better, a spherical cow ("Let us solve Schrodinger's equation for a cow. First assume...").

<comment><USER6> I don't really like where you're going with this.

For every lit-crit type who'll never understand what quaternions are, I'll find you a math geek with a shelf full of Star Trek novels, who'll never understand what real literature is.

(I once tried, and failed, to convince a mailing list chock full of some of the most brilliant programmers I knew that there's more to fiction than science fiction).

The humanities and the STEM fields (I didn't know this abbreviation) are not exactly balanced in this way; there is something to what you're saying; but the something that's there is not anything like a "superset" relationship, not even close.

Once you restrict to people who both understand what quaternions are, and prefer Kafka to Zelazny, you're talking about a superset of both sides, not a STEM subgroup that also assimilated knowledge from the humanities, but remained essentially STEM. I don't think it works that way.

<comment><USER7> I agree that "superset" is too crude a term for what I'm trying to say, but as you acknowledge, there is _something_ to what I'm saying.

E.g. the equivalence you draw in your second paragraph is not relevant to my point, which is more like "while there are math geeks who understand what real literature is, there are essentially _no_ lit-crits who will ever understand what quaternions are".

(And Star Trek novels might be a bad choice, seeing as how Patrick Stewart introduced a lot of Star Trek fans to Shakespeare. :-)

Let me take this further by discussing people who I'll call "bridges". In my subgroup of "lit-geeks" there was one seriously into philosophy. and she got some of us to appreciate some of it. Similarly, I was the one who dragged people to the first showing of the Ring Cycle (although pretty quickly that became a larger group thing as someone else e.g. dug up a fantastic Wagner scholar, it's a _real_ shame he died as he was finished his commentary on _Die Walküre_.)

Despite your lack of success with the members of that mailing list, what I'm suggesting is that it's in theory possible to make that bridge and that it's not so with lit-crits and quaternions (well, not without years of math study they've essentially shown they won't or can't do).

<comment><USER6> I agree that it's much more likely for a math geek to develop serious knowledge of lit-crit than it is for a lit-crit type to develop serious knowledge of math. That's the something that there is to what you're saying.

However, being that either scenario is astonishingly rare and unlikely, I just don't see that as a good argument for asserting any kind of superiority of STEM culture over humanities culture. And when, astonishingly rarely, that does happen, I suspect the human in question doesn't see themselves as primarily STEM or primarily humanities, but just, you know, curious about stuff. Knowledge-hungry, culture-hungry, and screw the tags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 19th century writing in general makes a mockery of today's level of education. I believe this is due, in part, to the more limited availability of print at the time. most of the people printing things in any sort of quantity that ensured it would survive to our times was generally pretty worldly.

not that i'm arguing that such times were better. the diaspora of artistic expression fueled by cheaper means has been a boon for humanity.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue that the limited availability meant that only the extreme few who could afford to print did so, and when they did they kept things to what their elitist groups would find interesting. Meanings hidden within meanings not because they were any more intelligent than others, simply because they needed to do so to fit in with the elitist habits / aesthetics.

You see the same thing in art prior to the modern art shift. Art was _so_ elitist that it wasn't focused on being artistic any more, it was instead a conglomeration of meanings that could be examined and critiqued by the social elite. All social elite groups do this, it raises them above others who don't know the language and gives them a feeling of superiority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think everyone who posted here would be well served reading Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. Gardner, who was the puzzle editor for Scientific American for decades, is also a Lewis Carroll scholar, and his annotated versions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are tremendous.

[http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Alice-Definitive-Lewis- Carro...](http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Alice-Definitive-Lewis- Carroll/dp/0393048470)</comment>


How Steam key reselling is killing the little guys - <AUTHOR> http://blog.indiegamestand.com/featured-articles/steam-key-reselling-killing-little-guys/ <comment><USER2> I can only imagine the crazy things individuals and companies would do if this developer got his wish and Valve offered up some API to screw peoples Steam accounts up. I'm thinking rival sellers framing one another or random someone's high valued account. Obviously if the credit card is stolen, then the items are going to a new steam or a stolen account.</comment>


Why #NewSpotify is doing it right - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lqd.io/learn-and-adapt-from-user-behavior/

<comment><USER2> Are there any other apps doings this kind of dynamic changes based on user information?

<comment><AUTHOR> As for the moment Spotify is the only one I have spotted. I have also written an article about how Starbucks could achieve higher engagement with marketing personalization based on weather information (matching with device location).

You can read it here:

[https://blog.onliquid.com/data-driven- awesomeness-2/](https://blog.onliquid.com/data-driven-awesomeness-2/)

If anyone else knows of any other apps or companies doing the same thing, feedback is always welcome ;)</comment></comment>


NP-Complete Problems and Physical Reality (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0502072v2.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> This has already been discussed on HN[1]. There have been some minor updates to the paper, here is the diff:

        < are the gear-based computers of Vergis, Steiglitz, Dickinson , and
        > are the gear-based computers of Vergis, Steiglitz, and Dickinson , and

        < (called Steiner vertices) other than the pegs themselves.  Garey,
        > (called Steiner vertices) other than the points themselves.  Garey,

        < spacetimes cannot be globally hyperbolic; that is to say, they must
        > spacetimes cannot be globally hyperbolic; for example, they could

        < a polynomial number of bits (or qubits) around that curve.  Bacon
        > a polynomial number of bits (or qubits) around that CTC.  Bacon

        < I thank Al Aho, Pioter Drubetskoy, Daniel Gottesman, David Poulin,
        < John Preskill, and others who I have undoubtedly forgotten for
        < enlightening conversations about the subject of this article.  I
        < especially thank Dave Bacon, Dan Christensen, and Antony Valentini
        < for critiquing a draft, and Lane Hemaspaandra for pestering me to
        < finish the damn thing.
        > I thank Al Aho, Pioter Drubetskoy, Daniel Gottesman, Klas Markstrom,
        > David Poulin, John Preskill, and others who I have undoubtedly
        > forgotten for enlightening conversations about the subject of this
        > article.  I especially thank Dave Bacon, Dan Christensen, and Antony
        > Valentini for critiquing a draft, and Lane Hemaspaandra for pestering
        > me to finish the damn thing.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8942220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8942220)</comment>


Show HN: Your anonymous emotional outlet for work stress - <AUTHOR> http://youroutletnow.com/outlet <comment><AUTHOR> I made this as an experiment to see if people will think it's useful for them.

The idea came from me thinking about why some of my friends in the corporate world often want to talk to me about their work stress and issues at work.

I think people just want a way to share their emotions because it makes them feel easier. Often they can't tell their colleagues directly, but maybe it's good if strangers can read it.

The posts are in Redis and expire in less than 24 hours.</comment>