Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers-stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html <comment><USER3> I have wondered for awhile whether the problem of post doc glut / suffering couldn't be alleviated by creating an alternative, more attractive avenue to the university science model. Universities charge massive overhead on grants which they use to support non-research related endeavors, place low ceilings on salaries, force investigators to do ancillary tasks like teaching, and don't promise tenure track positions.

There is no reason why someone couldn't create a for profit center which charged half the standard overhead on NIH grants making them very appealing, uncapped salaries, allowed investigators to own IP / arrange for favorable splits in a TLO model, and offered PI status to post docs if they could bring their own grants / industry money. Post docs would have a harder time staffing labs with grad students in this model, but they could get an affiliation with another university or simply hire students with BS's and pay them competitive rates.

<comment><USER4> Large research universities offer things that I think you would have a hard time replicating with this model. For instance, a research-grade fMRI facility costs millions of dollars to run and requires a large number of dedicated staff to maintain it. I can think of a lot of other resources like this -- primate facilities, certain kinds of DNA sequencing equipment, etc. Universities absorb this kind of cost with their endowment. I'm skeptical you could get a critical mass of scientists in a certain sub-speciality to be able to fund those things profitably, especially if they were doing basic science research (not pharmaceutical kinds of stuff that can make a profit on their own)

<comment><USER5> To echo Thriptic comment: you would be surprised to know how _little_ top US research universities actually provide for their, well, research labs!

The way it works today, _mutatis mutandis_ , is more like a "hacker space" than anything else: you get, if lucky, some shared shoebox as an office; a parked website domain maybe; and some rather vague and guarded promise of institutional support... But other than that you run your lab essentially like a startup: _you_ are responsible for securing funding for equipment, salaries --yes, including your own!-- and workspaces. And if you can't, you close down: as simple as that.

So the oft-cited 'advantage' of having a steady supply of quasi-indentured post-docs and grad students to horribly exploit is only half the story: if you just don't have the funding, you can't hire them. Note that in this (restricted) sense, throwing more money at the problem _would_ indeed help towards the solution.

It's quite grueling and ridiculous when you think of it, especially in this era of billions and billions of dollars in endowment at your typical RU/VH...

<comment><USER4> I actually would not be surprised -- I did neuroscience research at two major research universities, and I handled the lab finances as part of my RA duties.

Our grants and the university-provided lab startup funds bought the smaller stuff -- EEGs, eye-trackers, etc -- which ran in the thousands of dollars. The university financed the building and some of the maintenance of the larger stuff like the fMRI facilities we used, and we paid hourly to use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are many ways of looking at this, most disturbing. I imagine that my own experience working to support PhD candidates and post-docs a decade ago is instructive. The TL-DR: failed start-up.

I went back to school during the post-2001 recession and found myself with a job writing signal processing software to make sense of the data coming off an experimental mass spectrometer. I was offered a job by our lead researcher (a post-doc) upon graduation who saw an opportunity to turn a grant into a private lab. There were some political and University-inspired patent spin-off aspects, too.

The lab was built to create a product that used, but had little to do with, his research. I got a rag mag and a poster session publication credit from the early company efforts to build an in-house mass spectrometry device before he left and returned to being a post-doc (he is now a tenured professor). The people left steering the company ballooned the corporate efforts using off- the-shelf tech to rush a product to market just as the 2008 crash impacted and the targeted customer base (people wanting spa-like boutique medical tests to determine which vitamins they should take) evaporated. I was dismissed in the first wave of the toilet spiral and the company ceased to exist 18 months later.

The point behind my story is that as the pool of post-docs increases, we are more likely to see more adventures like the one I went through. Some of these start-ups will succeed, leading to a survivor-bias feedback loop at the policy level that we need even more STEM students to feed the start-up machine, leading to growth.

I have no doubt that this will, in fact, work as a growth engine. My question is whether this can be made more efficient by providing a few more prestigious fellowships and other funding to keep the most brilliant in the game before they kick off into business.

<comment><USER7> This is exactly why I started my startup nonprofit (details in info). Not too many of my peers are equally as crazy as I am though... I quit my postdoc and started driving for Lyft to make bills while waiting for 501(c)(3) status - <USER2> resulted in a net 20% pay increase, although since prices have gone down it's not nearly as good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article makes it sound like this is a new problem, e.g., "But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank." As was pointed out in the comments of the article, the grey- haired postdoc problem in biology has persisted for decades. It's difficult to sustain sympathy for people trapped in a endless postdoc when the problem is not a secret.

Also, have to say, the article picture showcases a great pet peeve of mine with media pictures of scientists in the lab: where is the rest of this guy's PPE? One of the nice things about industry is that safety is far more likely to be taken seriously.

<comment><USER9> I got my PhD in 1993, and the postdoc position was recognized as a holding pattern, already by that time. The other well known effect was known as the "birth control problem," which was that a professor only had to produce one PhD during her career, to replace themselves. Anything more than that was surplus.

But to be fair, nobody ever told us that becoming a professor was supposed to be our only option, and it would have been silly to expect such a thing because of the "birth control problem." Yet, silly is exactly how we managed our careers. Myself included. I intended to work in industry with my PhD, but didn't exactly do anything intelligent about making it happen.

It's been my observation, visiting lots of labs, that the "culture" of always wearing safety glasses doesn't extend into biology labs. My spouse, a chemist now working in a bio lab, is aghast. "And the kids wear flip flops too." Yes, industry takes safety more seriously.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I hate to stereotype biologists but it's true, there is a serious safety culture deficiency.

I learned cell culture from a guy that didn't wear gloves while working under BSL-2 conditions. Back then, I thought he was so cool. Now, what a moron.

<comment><USER10> My sister is a biologist, she was invited to work in a lab in her first year of university already, and her lab professor left her in charge of running the lab in general, even above PhD students because she was the only one that used all equipment correctly, safely and in an organized manner.... My sister even berates her professor when he is disorganized or forget stuff

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a problem we really shouldn't have. So many smart, dedicated people that we can't fund them all? After they survive how many years of schooling?

The fundamental research these people do is exactly the kind of research that our corporate sponsors won't do.

Where did the government funding go? Please, don't tell me to start a Kickstarter campaign.

<comment><USER12>
      Where did the government funding go?

Could be government funding is constant (or even increasing), just due to the perverse incentives involved, we're producing PhDs faster than we're producing funded positions for them.

According to [1] "Since 1982, [...] The number of [science and engineering] PhDs awarded annually has also increased [...] from ~19,000 in 1982 to ~36,000 in 2011. The number of faculty positions created each year, however, has not changed, with roughly 3,000 new positions created annually"

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F...](http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F1.html)

<comment><USER11> The article mentions a leveling off and "even contract(ing) over the last decade" of federal funding. I take the statement at face value, someone else might substantiate it.

Your point is taken. As we're producing more of these PhDs, we should be taking advantage of them; Not solely as cheap labor but as the scientific minds they were trained to be.

<comment><USER13> It's the price you pay for idiotic "privatize everything" policies. Without contracts and public works, there's no way for Ph D's to get exposure and contacts in industries where they can actually demonstrate their skills.

Australia right now is in the grips of horrifically bad government policy in this regard (the CSIRO pretty much fired 2000 post-docs, so the market is now completely glutted with people with more experience then anyone graduating recently).

And when you get right down to it, this is all a huge stupid waste. We sink the cost of educating these people, then proceed to toss them into menial jobs which don't use those skills at all, don't provide opportunities to maintain them or anything like that?

<comment><USER7> what does privatization have to do with this? One of the worst abuses of the system (in my opinion) is the IRTA program. This is uncynically called the "post-bac" program among the IRTAs of the NIH, to the cynic it's exactly what it sounds like - it's a postdoc, except even less paid - its unintended consequence is as a dumping ground for undergrads unsure of what they want to do and spending a few years in lab purgatory before committing to grad school, because they have sunk the sunk cost of a couple of years in 'academic' research. The lucky ones go to med school instead.

This program is run by the NIH (not privatized in any way), almost assuredly created with the best of intentions (let's give students a chance to try out science so they can learn to love it, choose it, and increase our national stature!).

<comment><USER14> I only recently learned about the Post-Bac program, and I wish I had known about it when I was just out of school- I went to a university that wasn't research oriented, and such a program would have been fantastic for picking up the research mindset before going to graduate school I ended up in a lab staff instead, and learned about real research in sort of a trial by fire manner that's been much more stressful than the postbac probably would have been. So it's got it's possible advantages- let alone working for the NIH looks pretty good on a CV.

<comment><USER7> I would argue that being a lab staff is better, because you know what you're getting into. You were probably paid better, too. "cushy" is not a good thing to "prepare you for grad school", especially not for students who are noncommital (not saying that you are, but a lot of IRTAs are). OTOH, I knew a postbac whose job was to counsel macaques that had pieces of their brains gouged out (and therefore wound up with severe behavioral problems). So her job was pretty stressful.

Upshot: You made the right "choice".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The system of incentives is all screwed up. The glut of postdocs is a boon for everyone involved, except the postdocs themselves.

Postdocs are very highly qualified and underpaid scientists, who can on a project without almost any supervision, and who are very motivated so will work really hard with little pay. For a group leader, it's a no brainer to hire as many of them as he can.

Imagine how much the cost of science would increase if instead of being able to hire 3 or 4 postdocs at 50k each, you actually had to hire someone with a similar skillset at market pay.

<comment><USER16> >> Imagine how much the cost of science would increase if instead of being able to hire 3 or 4 postdocs at 50k each

Doesn't that just mean that 50k is the market rate?

<comment><USER17> That depends on the field. At least in my field, doing identical work in industry starts at 100k, while a postdoc salary would be 35-40k.

Which one is the "market" rate?

<comment><USER18> Since the private sector/industry work is competitive, it is considered market rate. The reason that post-docs are not considered market rate is that the institutions do not compete with each other, and the rate is determined without concern of the applicants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is simple: science does not pay off.

I have a friend, respected marine researcher. He is 50-something and he finally got permanent job, only problem is that he has to move across Europe and learn new language. He was very upset, when I told him I already quit 6 permanent jobs before I was 30.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I think one culprit is misperceptions that the term "STEM" encourages (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). It's become a widespread marketing term, especially towards young people choosing education and careers. People are told that there's big demand in "STEM careers" so they should get a "STEM degree". But there isn't really a shortage of people in this cluster of fields across the board, mostly just of programmers and some kinds of engineers. For the most part, not of natural scientists, or of most kinds of mathematicians.

I think it's retained because it _is_ a good marketing term, and lets technology (where the jobs are) benefit from an association with "hard" areas like pure math and astrophysics (where much of the prestige is). But that's a bit of sleight of hand: we get kids excited about "STEM" with documentaries about marine biology and astronomy, but then oops, that's not where the jobs labeled STEM actually are.

<comment><USER21> There are two reasons policymakers promote STEM, beyond the shortage of programmers and engineers.

1) STEM graduates learn how to think critically and mathematically, two skills that will serve them well in almost any business pursuit. For example Jack Welch, the famous CEO of GE, held a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. I don't know of evidence that STEM degrees hold people back, even working outside the sciences.

2) We don't know, in advance, who the next Einstein is going to be. Giving as many children as possible the chance to make great discoveries is just good odds.

The chances are that most STEM graduates will not even be a full professor, let alone the next Einstein. But that is largely true of any degree we can imagine. Most English majors will not be a successful novelist or critic. Most business graduates will not run a company. Most history graduates will not become a full professor. Etc.

There is a shortage of leadership positions in any field, and a full professor with research funding is a leadership position. I think the most important question is whether the absolute best STEM graduates achieve these positions; that's best for society overall. If the postdoc crisis keeps the most promising new researchers from pursuing new knowledge, that's bad.

But it's not a volume problem. For the volume of STEM grads, the question is whether they can achieve at least a middle-class career and lifestyle. That might be in the sciences, but it might not. That doesn't mean that STEM education is pointless.

<comment><USER22> >2) We don't know, in advance, who the next Einstein is going to be. Giving as many children as possible the chance to make great discoveries is just good odds.

Problem is, an opportunity to make discoveries is _not_ a degree, it's a stable job as a researcher _after_ the degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wrote about this here five and a half years ago, before it went "sour so quickly": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181)

As a grad student back then, I saw a pyramid scheme. Training programs were (and are) funding way more students than there is room at the top. If funding at the top level stops expanding, the current scenario unfolds.

If I have undergrads in my lab who want to go on to graduate school, I give them sufficient information on these numbers that they can provide "informed consent". If they still want to go ahead, they receive my full support.

</comment><comment><USER24> Postdocs – The Middleman of Academia

[http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1744](http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1744)

</comment><comment><USER25> Can someone shed light on why it takes 6-7 years in the US? My European friends tend to manage in 3-4 years. The opportunity costs look quite different at that stage in life. Much better to find out you need a new direction at 25 than 29.

<comment><USER14> Lack of unions might have something to do with it. Was in Copenhagen recently and was surprised that even as a PhD student, your salary is negotiated based on your experience- and the negotiation is done by the union representative. When unions aren't abused it sounds like they can be quite useful. But yeah, in the US, PhDs and post docs are used as cheap but knowledgeable labor, and kept around as long as possible by constantly giving them other things to do that aren't directly related to their project.

<comment><USER26> Most EU PhDs have an MSc (1-2 years) already. Many US PhD programs admit directly from undergrad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Aha, it is postdoctoral treadmill: [http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html](http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html)</comment>


Chain, Chest, Curse: Combating Book Theft in Medieval Times - <AUTHOR> http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/07/10/chain-chest-curse-combating-book-theft-in-medieval-times/

<comment><USER2> Reading about books before the printing press always reminds me to appreciate the amazing free flow of information I have access to from the internet and the public library down the street.</comment>


Sikuli Script - <AUTHOR> http://www.sikuli.org/ <comment><USER2> I used Sikuli back in 2011-12 for some random automaton tasks, and often wish I would remember to use it more.

\- Advisor wanted a one button way to run a convoluted research prototype I had made, and I didn't want to have to dig into Cocoa to figure out how to programmatically click/select options in a few desktop apps.

\- Worked at a company and there was silly employee training slideshow+quiz, so I had Sikuli wait for the next arrow to show up once the audio was finished and click it.

\- Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie, so I opened one of those WebGL water demos and had Sikuli repeatedly pick up a ball and drop it in the water.

<comment><USER3> > \- Wanted to heat up my GPU to warm a brownie

Please elaborate.

<comment><USER2> Sure thing. I was an intern at Adobe working on a new programming language. The office has a cafeteria, and I would often buy lunch there and get a brownie to save for later.

I like brownies better when they're warm, so I came up with a few ways to warm the pre-packaged treats while still sitting in my office. I first tried sitting the brownie atop my laptop charger: [http://images.reclipse.net/warmed_brownie.jpg](http://images.reclipse.net/warmed_brownie.jpg)

This worked fairly well, but the charger was less hot when my laptop was at 100% charge, so I sought alternate methods for heating up the brownie. For some reason, I had stumbled across some recent WebGL demos at the time, and noticed that the fan on my laptop would spin up on that particular demo. ([http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/](http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/))

This provided a more consistent heat than the charger, since usually my laptops would be completely charged by the end of lunchtime. I had my own laptop and a company-provided laptop, so it wasn't hard to set one of them aside as a brownie warmer.

<comment><USER4> Wow. I thought the "to warm a brownie" thing was a joke about WebGL performance. That's a hilarious story.

<comment><USER2> Nah, it's real. Adobe had a WebGL competitor, Stage3D, at the time, but I didn't work on that at all. As an intern, I would run a few useful benchmarks per day, but it was more reliable to run things I knew would heat up a laptop instantly, so I used WebGL demos.

Brownie-wise, I would wait a while because lunch would fill me up. But at 3 or 4 pm, I'd be hungry again and something the size of a brownie would really hit the spot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to use AHK a lot for interacting with a game. Sikuli seemed neat when I heard about it, but it turns out that it only supports pretty much a single method of capture and only a single method of relaying mouse events. This made it completely unusable for that purpose. AHK supports pretty much every method available to Windows. The simplicity of use was attractive, but it needs a ton of work under the hood before it'd be viable as a general purpose automation tool.

<comment><USER6> I also experimented with it a few years ago trying to build an automated GUI testing framework, and it turns out that its way too fragile and non-portable to be usable for that use case.

I remember running into issues as soon as anything changed regarding resolution, scaling, graphic settings, color scheme etc.

Pretty fun to make toy programs in to automate stuff with though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sikuli is freaking great, though not sure how this is news, it's been around.

Super useful for automating things that are easy to handle by looking for patterns/things on screen and hard to handle with APIs (or lack thereof)

</comment><comment><USER8> We used Sikuli for test automation in a pretty large project with a Windows UI. Got kicked off by a TeamCity agent for every build and worked really nicely.

Thumbs up.

You do need to be careful about timing and getting the right images so tuning things to work under all conditions is a bit of an art. Also being able to recover from a failure so you can continue testing is another bit of art.

As to why this is news there seems to be a new release out (or soon?) 1.1.0 ... Sikuli development seems to have almost died a few years back but it's made a comeback over the last ~2.5 years which is nice.

<comment><USER9> I do a similar style of UI test automation for set-top boxes / smart TVs, with stb-tester[1].

We've found that the "Got kicked off for every build" continuous integration process you mention is the crucial part to achieving success with this type of test automation -- if you're going to invest the effort in writing reliable tests, you want to be getting value out of them by running them as often as possible and as early as possible.

[1] [http://stb-tester.com/](http://stb-tester.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice to see sikuli on the front page. I'm currently using it to test a legacy application.

Sikuli is good at image matching. For me sikuli broke when I started to take images of text. The font would render differently in gnome and the vm (vncserver/twm) jenkins ran the tests on. I ended up creating docker images of the test environemt so the docker image would be the same on jenkins and the testers machines.

Debian has a sikuli package libsikuli-script-java and sikuli-ide. I've also written a docker file for sikuli on debian wheezy [1].

[1] [https://github.com/jesg/sikuli](https://github.com/jesg/sikuli)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wrote a WoW fishing bot with Sikuli a few years back - it worked pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was a big fan of Sikuli back in the day, but I found it a bit unreliable for automation. No matter how much I tweaked it, it seemed to be a bit unpredictable.

I did find some use for it. My girlfriend got addicted to some online flash Mahjong game and no matter how hard I tried, I could not post a better score than her. With a bit of Sikuli scripting, I was posting top scores in no time!

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me a bit of Scratch[1], a tool that came pretty popular when the Raspbery Pi came out. Very simple programming interfaces that work with simple graphics, but can do a lot of things.

[1]: [http://scratch.mit.edu/](http://scratch.mit.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Sikuli is being used to create test plans for the VistA system (documented at [http://www.osehra.org](http://www.osehra.org) ) It works with GUI stand-alone executables and with web pages from a browser.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone use this for web scraping dynamic links created by javascript, pulled from dev tools "network" tab?

</comment><comment><USER16> Works with the browser, right? So this is the ultimate visual scraping tool, import.io and ParseHub are useless now?

<comment><USER17> One of the founders of ParseHub here.

Not quite. Sikuli tries to figure out where things are by doing a visual match. This works very well for things like automating applications or sites where page elements are fixed (e.g. finding an option in a menu or using a search engine). But it works terribly when trying to overlay semantic structure on dynamically-generated data. For example, it has no way of knowing that a list of movies is split up on multiple pages, with each movie having multiple genres, a cast, and multiple reviews, each of which has a rating and an author.

There's also the additional drawback that it is hard to parallelize things in Sikuli (you would need heavyweight vms, and there are no obvious "breaks" in the flow). So doing something at scale is not feasible.

With ParseHub, one of the goals is to make it easy to express relationships (and we think we've done a really good job). We also automatically figure out how to split a job up across an entire fleet of servers.

Hope that offers some insight. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you have any other questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What are it's capabilities with OCR?

<comment><USER8> It has OCR but wasn't working so great. It uses Tesseract. I'm not absolutely sure why it wasn't working well in the past, possibly something to do with different fonts/display rendering (e.g. ClearType and such). It "almost" worked so maybe it got better or maybe there's some tuning you can do. Didn't spend too much time on it.

<comment><USER9> OCR is never perfect. I do a lot of automated UI testing in a way similar to Sikuli, and while we do rely on OCR a lot, you have to use certain workarounds (like fuzzy matching instead of looking for a perfect match of your expected text).

Ultimately Tesseract was primarily designed to operate on text which had been printed and then scanned, whereas the text on screen is lower resolution, anti-aliased, on a coloured background, etc etc.

Some further details of our OCR investigations here: [http://stb- tester.com/blog/2014/04/14/improving-ocr-accuracy...](http://stb- tester.com/blog/2014/04/14/improving-ocr-accuracy.html)

The TLDR version is: Training Tesseract on your font doesn't help; scaling up the text 3x before passing it to tesseract gives a massive improvement (I don't know if Sikuli does this); normalising ligatures & punctuation gives an additional slight improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great project, used with great success to automate testing of legacy app across multiple virtual machines.

</comment><comment><USER20> How is this news? Sikuli has been around for many years.

<comment><USER21> [http://xkcd.com/1053/](http://xkcd.com/1053/)</comment></comment>


"Apple's New Ad Slogan" - the Tech Wankers blog is just too funny. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techwankers.com/2010/01/27/apples-new-ad-slogan/

<comment><USER2> It's actually pretty lame, and not the original title either.

Don't bother clicking.

<comment><AUTHOR> "..and not the original title either." - of what?

<comment><USER2> Of the article.</comment></comment></comment>


Statistics vs. Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://brenocon.com/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learning-fight/ <comment><USER2> From one of the comments in the article:

"Economists, of course, broke away hard from mainline stats a while ago, calling it "econometrics" and reinventing names for EVERYTHING, plus throwing in a bizarre obsession with the method of moments. In terms of intellectual arrogance and needless renaming/duplication, economists are much worse than computer scientists and engineers."

This guy couldn't be more right about [most] [academic] economists. I laughed at the renaming of terms part because it is so true (classic example is RSS/SSR/ESS/SSE). Taking a course in the stats department alongside an econometrics course was bound to confuse any student. But just ask the economist, they'll tell you which one is right. :)

<comment><USER3> > I laughed at the renaming of terms part because it is so true (classic > example is RSS/SSR/ESS/SSE). Taking a course in the stats department > alongside an econometrics course was bound to confuse any student.

Come on, this is silly. Calling things RSS vs. SSR might confuse an undergrad, but I've taken both classes (stats intro to linear regression + econ intro to linear regression) at the same time and saw barely a difference in the material. The stats class had a greater emphasis on finite-sample properties under normality and the econ class on asymptotics. Not a huge change, and the differences were complementary.

We both know that the "bizarre obsession with [generalized] method of moments" is because moments come out of models with rational agents, not distributions.

<comment><USER2> I've taken PhD Econometrics where we touched zero data and was 100% theoretical over the 9 months, so I don't think we are talking about the same thing. I don't like spewing out economically technical non-sense on HN, so I wasn't going to go into the methods of moments part of that comment as it applies to the current state of econometric theory.

In econometric theory, method of moments comes up in the largest way in the form of generalized methods of moments (or GMM). The idea behind GMM is one that is in competition with maximum likelihood, with the point being that GMM doesn't force you to make arbitrary assumptions about the true probability distribution of the data, purely for the implementation of the model. This seems obviously attractive, because then the results of our model won't be jeopardized just because one of our assumptions was false. In other words, GMM provides a way to estimate the parameters of a model with out making assumptions about the population.

Oh, and the topic of rational agents is not relevant here. This is a purely statistical/philosophical argument.

But there goes the economist in me again... I'm sorry.

<comment><USER3> I've taken just as many stats classes that don't touch data; I don't think either of us want to argue pedagogy of teaching on HN (fuck, I didn't even want to spell it and it's likely I didn't), but I don't think that there's a huge difference in how Econ and stats departments teach the same material or use terminology. (there are big differences in the material selected, obviously).

This statement can't be true: "GMM provides a way to estimate the parameters of a model with out making assumptions about the population.". You need assumptions, just different assumptions. Frequently those assumptions involve agent rationality, but not always (after all, MLE is a special case of GMM).

<comment><USER2> "MLE is a special case of GMM"

You have it backwards. MLE is actually a special case of GMM.

I'm done here.

<comment><USER4> You seem to have just repeated the quote? Presumably you mean "GMM is a special case of MLE"?

<comment><USER2> Mistake is on my side, I apologize. I read what the poster said backwards myself. :) The repeated quote is a true statement: MLE is a special case of GMM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Philipp K. Janert, author of «Data Analysis with Open Source Tools», spends a few pages for explaining how he perceives this «difference».

From his point of view Machine Learning is a fake science. Fragile, secretive and specific techniques for big problems that need secret parameters that have never been published for their application. This parameters will be supplied to you for a price by the inventors-researchers' companies.

In the other hand, statistics is real science, where everything is published and studied by a whole community. A science that has accumulated hundred of years of experience and that offer all its knowledge in any university. The methods offered by statistics are of broad application, robust and open.

And I think he has a point in this reasoning.

PD: Statistics works, ask in any hard sciences. Its contributions has been essential for the science in the last centuries. Machine Learning was bashed (like old AI) because it never offered real solutions or helped us to advance in our understanding of anything. Machine Learning is a tool, not a science, that tries to cope with the limitations of our knowledge, which means that it's a very convenient tool for engineers and problem solvers, as are numerical methods are, but it means too that its results share the problems of numerical methods.

<comment><USER6> I disagree with a few things about your comment. Your criticism of machine learning feels off-base, and is too specific to describe such a wild field. Who sells parameters? What does that even have to do with whether it is a science? I can think of other fields where every detail of an experiment isn't spelled out in every paper.

It's hard to separate machine learning and statistics because so much of machine learning derives directly from statistics. Motivation is probably the most important distinction; machine learning is applied statistics. I'd say it's a mix of science (the scientific method plays a big part in model building for example), engineering, and math. Statistics is first and foremost a branch of mathematics, not science; the scientific method does not play a role in the vast majority of the field.

<comment><USER7> > machine learning is applied statistics

It really is hard to separate ML & statistics - any competent practicioner of ML appreciates the statistical achievements that made Machine Learning methods possible. And statisticians must understand that to help automate decision- making systems, using learning methods/boosting is a viable option.

The debate around nomenclature (ML/stats/AI) seems limited to the academic community. Most data scientists I've met tend to accumulate a repertoire of tools from different fields, rather that side with either Machine Learning or Statistical communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The site isn't loading for me, here's the text-only cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://brenocon.com/blog/2008/12/statistics- vs-machine-learning-fight/&hl=en&tbo=d&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER9> When you remove steering, both groups simply do statistical modelling. From my observations, the main difference is that stats people make simpler models, test well, but are a victim of mathematical tendency to build on too optimistic assumptions; CSists are closer to the data, make more complex models and do poor verification (but thus report better accuracies). Regardless of the actual performance, stats has traditional monopoly in biomedics (minus neuro* stuff) and CS in engineering.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe a moderator could change the link title to highlight that it's from 2008. Not that the date necessarily makes it irrelevant, but it's not really "news".

</comment><comment><USER10> I've taken courses from people in a few of these overlapping but historically- different camps recently, e.g.:

\- Frequentist statisticians \- Bayesian statisticians \- Old-school AI researchers \- Statistical learning theorists \- Bayesian machine learners \- Engineers working on optimisation with noisy data \- Information retrieval folks \- ...

I'm really keen to see these guys starting to talk to each other and unify more of what they're doing around statistics (Bayesian and frequentist, parametric and non-parametric, generative and discriminative) as the common language and framework. Hopefully expanding the horizons of statistics a bit as a field in the process.

I imagine it'll take a while longer though, and some of the differences in terminology and talking-past-each-other can be a bit maddening in the mean time for those learning. What would be really nice would be a course offering a broad, well-rounded introduction to the various different philosophies to modelling data, their histories, interactions and overlaps, differing goals, strengths and weaknesses. It can be hard to get a sense of this when most introductory courses are taught by someone who's implicitly from one camp or another, even if (as is usually the case) they're not overly ideological about it.

One criticism of (some, not all!) statisticians is that they can seem to have a strange and rather limiting fear of computation which leads them to give undue preference to computationally simple models, even when the dataset isn't big enough to make compute time an issue.

I can see an argument for pedagogical reasons why one would rather not teach (or learn!) the details of fiddly optimisation algorithms -- but having a basic literacy in optimisation can free you up to treat the algorithm for optimising your objective as a black box to some extent. Feeling less "guilty" about this (whether the compute time itself, or remembering all the details of the optimisation algorithm) can be quite freeing in allowing you to think about the modelling itself in a more powerful, modular framework. This seems to be where machine learning has gotten a big advantage.

On the other hand machine learners can be frustrating in the way they reinvent statistical terminology and methods. Also in a gratuitous tendency to skip the modelling stage and go straight to inventing different objective functions to optimise, or even straight to the algorithms. Leading to opaque black-box methods which (due to the lack of probabilistic motivation) make it harder to reason about uncertainty in a principled way.

With the increasing popularity of Bayesian machine learning I think this is less of an issue though, it's bridging the gap between the two camps. One can also find a lot of more modern ML research using Statistical Learning Theory as a nice framework for principled frequentist analysis of their models.

</comment><comment><USER11> Machine learning is more accurately described (in my view) as an interdisciplinary region that involves computation _and_ statistics both. It's when you have to use statistics to push the bounds of computational work, or CS to tease out statistical relationships that require so much data that the size of the data itself is part of the problem.

When I think of "statistics", I think of problems where there are a few well- studied parametric approaches, in large part because there aren't enough data (in most cases) to do anything extremely complicated. If your data set is small and you need to build a generally adequate model, you can often use linear regression to get something good enough, and that may the best you can do, because model simplicity is often valuable in its own right (low risk of overfitting).

Many of the more non-parametric machine learning algorithms (e.g. neural nets) are computationally intense and often a bitch to debug. They work best in situations where (a) you have a lot of data, but (b) you have no idea what the structure of the relationship should be.

Parametric models perform extremely well when the structure is known. You have inputs X1, X2, X3 and Y, and you know that a linear model will work well. You fit one, and it captures 65% of the variance. Good. That may be enough.

What do you use, however, if 65% isn't good enough, or if there's a special case that becomes economically important. You can look at the residuals. They may be random noise. If they're truly "random", then the linear model is the absolute best you can get. That may not be, however. There might be a region of the X2-X3 space where atypically high Y-values occur for a structural reason. These atypical points may be connected to an X4 that would otherwise be discarded (because it had no general correlation with Y).

I think that machine learning approaches start to be worth their additional complexity in these cases where (a) there are important relationships yet to be discovered-- no one knows about them!-- and (b) those are, or might be, economically critical.

<comment><USER12> We can prevent overfitting by adding a regularization term to the expression we are minimizing, such as the sum of the squares of all coefficients scaled by a factor.

Also, if you do testing (using a separate test dataset to determine how well your model works on unseen inputs) you can determine if you are overfitting (learning even the noise present in the data - which is detrimental) or underfitting (not learning enough from the data - which is detrimental, too). In the end it's a sweet spot, and many times the features number in the hundreds or thousands, so you can't analyze by hand.

Automatic feature selection and disentangling is an amazing new advancement that came 7 years ago with the deep learning papers. Watch lectures on Restricted Boltzmann Machines by Geoffrey Hinton and Andrew Ng for this. It's what allowed Google to achieve the best speech recognition and image recognition results ever recorded.</comment></comment>


Automation and the Use of Multiple Accounts - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tips/2018/automation-and-the-use-of-multiple-accounts.html <comment><USER2> Is it just me or did Twitter just remove a large honey pot for identifying fake accounts?

For example, a recent anti Net Neutrality marketing push was allegedly done by AT&T paying a company who owned a large amount of accounts to tweet members of US Congress the exact same message at roughly the same time. I can't think of an easier way for Twitter to round up a ton of potential fake accounts than watching for these type of events.

I'm not saying that if 100 accounts all post the same thing at the same time, they're all fake accounts. I'm just saying those 100 accounts are worth looking into with other automated checks.

<comment><USER3> Maybe, but instead they added measurements that the event itself shouldn't occur at all in the first place. Since tweets are very short-lived I feel it's more important to proactively prevent spam rather than reactive.

Besides that, while it's quite easy to "detect" some spam wave as a human within a given context, implementing such a detection in an automated manner is a lot harder, because a machine doesn't have intuition and have the context required to notice it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious if enforcement is going to also thrash legitimate human accounts that have been - underhandedly - oauth'd authorized to be remotely controlled by a third party.

I hope Twitter introduces a screen informing who and what caused suspensions or bans

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't Twitter be able to see who access was delegated to? It sounds like they'd just ban the app rather than all its users.

<comment><USER6> The idea is to find and kill bot _accounts_ , not bot-control aps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Posting multiple updates [...] to a trending or popular topic [...] with an > intent to subvert or manipulate the topic [...] is never allowed._

Good thing _intent_ is super easy to infer without ambiguity.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does this mean that tools like [https://www.thunderclap.it/](https://www.thunderclap.it/) are in for a hard time?

<comment><USER9> when I read this i thought of thunderclap too, wonder how much they are affected

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice to see that they actually do something. I have never heard Facebook publish anything about what they do...

<comment><USER11> Well bookmark the following and be prepared. Because Facebook posts a lot about what they do.

[https://newsroom.fb.com](https://newsroom.fb.com)

[https://code.facebook.com](https://code.facebook.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't this imply the end of any usefulness of twitter for business and marketing purposes? Big companies have multiple accounts and no one is tweeting directly, it all goes through some central tool in marketing dept. Weird move, twitter.

<comment><USER13> No?

First of all, big companies _don 't_ usually have multiple Twitter accounts; rather, all their representatives communicate from a single account.

Second of all, even if a company did want to use a multitude of Twitter accounts for some reason, the ban is on posting _the same_ content to multiple accounts, aka spam. Not simply having multiple accounts available to choose from in the same interface.

<comment><USER14> Multinational corporations often have different accounts for different regions. Corporations that operate in multiple sectors often have different accounts for different sectors.

Some are both multinational and cover several sectors, for example Yamaha.

Here are just a few Yamaha twitter accounts: @YamahaMusicEU, @YamahaMusicUSA, @YamahaUK, @YamahaAV, @YamahaMotorEU, @YamahaMotorUSA, @YamahaMotoGP.

When a company makes a product they may or may not wish to make the same announcement on the accounts for that vertical across different regions. Most often the really big ones will probably make different announcements due to both differences in desired wording and in launch dates, but still the point stands that they might sometimes wish to post the same news.

<comment><USER15> I'd imagine that Twitter would gladly offer a paid program for companies that wish to use the service in that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the use case for Twitter to allow outside write API access?

If twitter banned all API write access, what would be the problem?

The vast majority of people would still use Twitter via the app or their website, and it would obviously solve a lot of spam problem. But do we really need automated emergency alerts that don't filter through a human?

<comment><USER11> Just a few use cases. I suspect there are quite a lot:

1) Allowing a delay between creation and posting e.g. Buffer.

2) Posting updates to Twitter whenever CMS content changes e.g. Wordpress.

3) Large companies who need tools that work across all social media sites e.g. Hootsuite.

4) RSS -> Twitter.

<comment><USER16> Those all are automated spam, and doesn't really facilitate discussion. They just increase noise on the platform.

Edit: Reminder that Twitter filters out posts that don't receive much interaction.

<comment><USER17> Pretty much none of what I use Twitter for is discussion. You're assuming everyone uses Twitter for a very specific, limited purpose.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Machine Learning for Relational Data - <AUTHOR> I've been dabbling in machine learning and trying to find a way to apply it to some of the data at work. I work in a custom fabrication / construction company and I'm trying to build a regression tool with Tensorflow to predict fabrication time at a piece-level using time data at a higher "project-level." A simplified model of what I'm looking at:
Project-level data: Special requirements [Feature], Time taken by various departments [welding, painting, shipping, etc.] [LABELS]
Piece-level Data: Type of piece [F], Weight [F], Length [F], # of attachments [F], [Desired output time] (does not exist historically)
Attachment-level Data: Type [F], Length [F], Weight [F]
All of the classification and regression examples I've been able to find are for "flat" non-relational data. Some of the features can be flattened (such as requirements), crucially the existing labels cannot be flattened without making very broad assumptions (i.e. distributing the time among the pieces by their weight).
Are there any examples anyone is aware of that could help me build a framework for this problem? Is ML even the right approach for this? Thank you for your help.
(edited for clarity) <comment><USER2> I'm not sure ML would be required, depending on the data you have, but maybe.

In any case, the easiest thing to do is to create flat data from your existing relational data.</comment>


Lessons from Rypple and Facebook, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rypple.com/2010/10/10-startup-ninja-lessons-from-rypple-and-facebook-part-1/

<comment><USER2> What have I learned? That I'm beginning to really hate the word ninja!

It used to be such a cool word... I mourn it.</comment>


Hillary Clinton Announces Tech Plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/06/28/clinton-tech-plan-reads-like-silicon-valley-wish-list/86474144/ <comment><USER2> > attaching a green card to the diplomas of foreign-born students earning STEM > degrees.

HAH! I knew this was going to be in there.

Of course it's a gigantic bailout to the universities. STEM grad programs are already full of foreign nationals trying to get a slot in the advanced degree H1-B track.

This would absolutely turbocharge that: buy a degree from whatever fourth rate American university for $xxx,xxx and value is less in the degree than the golden ticket that comes attached.

<comment><USER3> That is a pretty myopic thing to say. One of the biggest issues for the US higher ed system is that foreign students who receive an education here often can't stay or have to face ridiculous hurdles. In many thousands of cases, you are also wrong about buying the degree: research grants to universities fund those students' tuition and stipends, in exchange for good work.

Address the inflation of university budgets at the source of the problem. Rejecting highly educated, successful foreign nationals who we have already invested money in and who want to stay here and be productive in the workforce is one of the stupidest things this country currently does. Rejecting this proposal because you think it's a bailout for universities is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

<comment><USER4> _> In many thousands of cases, you are also wrong about buying the degree: research grants to universities fund those students' tuition and stipends, in exchange for good work._

I think your parent was primarily referring to masters programs, not phd programs.

FWIW I am pro-immigration in general, but I do worry about expensive diploma mill masters programs becoming a way for wealthy immigrants to buy preferential treatment. It's a legitimate concern with any "masters == green card" scheme.

That said, anyone who opposes such a scheme for Ph.D. students or for highly quality masters programs is insane.

<comment><USER2> Because we have such a serious of shortage of people with PHDs?

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B9Hv9N6bi1w/V2WBuW96arI/AAAAAAAAE...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B9Hv9N6bi1w/V2WBuW96arI/AAAAAAAAExk/KyBUngeJYwEwMqLKZ_Zn_WyfOebhPrSGgCLcB/s1600/median%2Bscientist%2Bsalaries.png)

<comment><USER4> No, because as a nation we are actively investing in each funded Ph.D. we train.

If we have too many PhD's then we should decrease the number of PhD's the federal government funds. But as my original parent observed, paying hundreds of thousands to train someone just to kick them out of the country is silly.

(Also, I think downward pressure on PhD salaries has very little to do with over-supply, but that's for another article.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It proposes investments in computer science and engineering education . . . > and attaching a green card to the diplomas of foreign-born students earning > STEM degrees.

These sound good in theory, but in effect they're an industry-specific labor subsidy. When the government "invests" in STEM education, what happens is that the companies that need to hire engineers save money both as a result of reduced training costs and as a by-product of increased supply driving down wages.

It's worth keeping in mind that STEM education isn't necessarily a public good.[1] The benefits of education aimed at developing industry-specific skills accrues mostly to those in an employer-employee relationship. Under those circumstances, it's most economically efficient to force the employer and the employee--rather than the public--to bear the cost of that education.

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

<comment><USER6> Isn't that a good thing? What would be some negative consequences?

<comment><USER7> Wages going down and competition going up for people in the tech industry.

<comment><USER2> Not just the tech industry too. There are plenty of areas of STEM which are totally saturated with smart effective highly educated people and the result is low wages and poor employment outcomes. Just look at chemistry or biology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 2 things to remember.

1) "Fix Copyright" probably means TPP

2) Hillary uses a blackberry because she doesnt know how to use a computer [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/hillary- clinto...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/hillary-clinton- state-department-email-inquiry.html) nor does she password protect her own computer [http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/26/shocking-deposition- hillar...](http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/26/shocking-deposition-hillary- clueless-on-using-computer-emails/)

<comment><USER8> well im getting downvoted for this, BUT my point was

Hillary clearly didnt write this laundry list, it seems like almost a time cube esque wishlist of every tech initiative possible. It just comes off as political word salad, so different news aggregators can bite quote it, like throwing paint at the wall.

"Hillary is committed to increasing the security of our government networks, making it harder for hackers to gain unauthorized access."

Really?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> there is no reason to link to usatoday over the actual post, i move to replace the link

[https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/06/2...](https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/06/27/hillary- clintons-initiative-on-technology-innovation/)

<comment><USER9> Good catch. In fact, after a quick glance, the original post appears _more_ informative than the usatoday. I 2nd the motion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Trump said something to the same effect in his campaign launching book (Crippled America) where he lamented how the US makes it easy for illegal immigrants but difficult for honest people who studied and graduated in American universities but then have to go back to their home countries because the US doesn't want them to stay.

<comment><USER11> It is kind of difficult with Trump because he has actually said everything. In a complete system of logic, you will find an argument made in support of every good idea out there (but also, every bad idea out there).

In the case of Trump and tech immigration, he had argued for H1-B/green card reform for skilled workers, as you have said, and against it, see [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2015/oct/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2015/oct/28/donald-trump/donald-trump-didnt-realize-his-own- website-called-/)

<comment><USER10> The thing with his position on allowing university graduates to stay and work in the US is that he only said it in the book. I've never seen him say it in a public speech, which makes sense given that the majority of his audience seems to have been blue collar workers who would not be so thrilled with the idea of immigrant students taking well paying jobs while they and their children are stuck in a rut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. I expect a series of highly detailed policy announcements on complex issues from Hillary over the coming months. I'm guessing she's realised Trump will be completely out of his depth on anything like this and unable to respond effectively.

<comment><USER13> I suspect Hillary is out of her depth on the subject as well. Her advisors, on the other hand, may not. I see no reason Trump cannot hire advisors just as experienced in the field as Hillary.

<comment><USER14> >I see no reason Trump cannot hire advisors just as experienced in the field as Hillary.

The "he can get experts too" argument is fine, except for the fact he has publicly spoken out saying all experts are "terrible."

>Referring to criticism that he could be better schooled on matters of foreign policy, Trump suggested he would do just as well, if not better than the current or past administrations without anyone providing input.

[http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live- updates-...](http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and- results/2016/04/donald-trump-foreign-policy-experts-221528)

<comment><USER13> Just because he's publicly stated all experts are terrible doesn't mean he doesn't have them now nor will not in the future. If he didn't listen to other people and their opinions then I seriously doubt he would be where he is today. He's just letting his ego speak for him.

As for your quote, I could easily explain that is him saying he would do better than previous administrations without anyone providing input, before he seeks such input. He will do better without them, and he could do even better than that with them.

<comment><USER12> We're talking about Trump though. The time between his experts issuing a detailed complex policy document in his name and him completely contradicting it in public is likely to be measured in hours, not days.

<comment><USER13> Well, since you know so much of the man and how his teams work, I'll defer to your expertise.

<comment><USER12> I'm extrapolating from his repeated and persistent contradictions of himself, which are a matter of record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I realize that Clinton -- like _any_ candidate -- has a platoon of advisers for a wide variety of topics, and it is these people (rather than the candidate) who comes up with the proposed policy.

But I can't help but immediately think that this was the candidate who disregarded the sound advice of the IT and security professionals in the State Department and had an entirely different bunch of people set up a faulty alternative email service for her own convenience.

And then I wonder how much of a rosy "tech plan" will also be so casually discarded when it becomes inconvenient.

<comment><USER16> > ...faulty alternative email service...

Do you have a source for this? It was my impression that nothing was out of the ordinary about her email server, and the rules around it were vague.

<comment><USER17> Do some Googling.

Anyone who isn't Hillary Clinton would be in prison right now for doing what she did.

<comment><USER18> I'm not a particularly big fan of Hilary, but as far as I'm aware, this used to be pretty common among members of congress and senators, so you might have to broaden your criteria a bit.

<comment><USER17> I actually like Hillary, and think she'll be a good president.

But she pretty obviously committed a felony.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >attaching a green card to the diplomas of foreign-born students earning STEM degrees

This should be for all accredited degree programs. Attaching it to specific degrees is going to have all kinds of unintended consequences.

</comment><comment><USER20> So you can host your email server at home. /s

<comment><USER21> Alternative headline: "FBI Suspect Announces Tech Plan"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Where can one find the source for the tech plan? Is it on her website somewhere? I have not been able to find it.

<comment><USER23> i posted a link + comments in another thread

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12001367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12001367)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Has she said anything about continuing the expansion of 18F or other government digital services?

</comment><comment><USER25> Here is a link to the source.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997844)

</comment><comment><USER26> > _Hillary rejects the false choice between privacy interests and keeping > Americans safe. She was a proponent of the USA Freedom Act, and she supports > Senator Mark Warner and Representative Mike McCaul's idea for a national > commission on digital security and encryption. This commission will work > with the technology and public safety communities to address the needs of > law enforcement, protect the privacy and security of all Americans that use > technology, assess how innovation might point to new policy approaches, and > advance our larger national security and global competitiveness interests._

Unsurprisingly, it's more Orwellian garbage.

To these "people", what's done at airports is security, even though it manifestly makes everyone less safe by separating us from our luggage, unpacking and displaying our stuff for all to see, stripping us of our tools, and creating a perfect chokepoint for the scene of their next 24 hour tragedy.

It's not surprising that captains of the private surveillance industry endorsed these policies, but individuals would have to be fools to think this means anything besides more regressive information totalitarianism.

(also, "Doesn't she look tired?")</comment>


"SimpleDB simply sucks" - <AUTHOR> http://www.stucharlton.com/blog/archives/000177.html

<comment><USER2> I can't speak from experience yet, but I think it is premature to say SimpleDB sucks just because it's not your run of the mill relational dbms.

SimpleDB is really a distributed, durable, indexed tuple store with read-often write-seldom in mind. It looks like a great platform for implementing something like a directory server.

If rumors are to be believed, SimpleDB is really just Erlang + BerkeleyDB with some cpu limits (which makes sense since BerkeleyDB really only gives you access methods and raw storage).

Personally, I'd like to see Amazon start providing a little tighter integration between their services. I'd like to be able to register a callback on an S3 upload that would enqueue an update to SDB via SQS and then bill the customer via FPS.</comment>


We'll keep your details on record - <AUTHOR>

After receiving an email this morning with the words:
"We'll keep your details on record"
has an employer ever come back to you with an offer for a job?
Me?  Never.  I don't even respond any more.  The employer doesn't perceive me to be good enough for the role that I believe I am suitable for for, so presumably at best they would only invite me to apply a for a role that was less suitable to me, that's if I were to ever hear from them again anyway. <comment><USER2> As an employer, I definitely have gone back through older apps and called people back in for another try at a different/same position.</comment>


Meth and murder: New kind of drug war makes Tijuana one of deadliest cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-tijuana-drug-violence-20190130-htmlstory.html <comment><USER2> The so-called drug war is a great tragedy. It is unwinnable because we can't wage war against inanimate objects and expect to win. War-as-a-metaphor [1] is usually a bait-and-switch campaign: war on poverty, war on cancer, etc. Real wars are always between people. The so-called "drug war" is really a war on ourselves.

Johann Hari wrote a book about the futility of this particular societal auto- immune disease [1]. He points out that Portugal has decriminalized drug possession, and uses the resources that were formerly used to subjugate their struggling people to help them instead.

Switzerland has made heroin legally available to their hopeless addicts. Over the last 20+ years, they haven't had many (any?) overdose deaths of the people in their legal heroin program.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor) [1] [http://chasingthescream.com/](http://chasingthescream.com/)

If the donkey party wanted to win in their ideological struggle against the elephant party, they'd make the case that the government should put the cartels out of business by taking care of our own addicts, and that it's a better use of funds to put people in treatment programs than in prison.

<comment><USER3> Easy solutions to the drug problem are mostly populism. Unfortunately there is literally no known society-wide cure.

Lots of well-meaning people think that offering rehab to addicts is some type of magic cure. Unfortunately, the average addict has to go through rehab 7 or more times before it 'sticks', and the cost of providing rehab to anyone who needs in it a country the size of the US is about as unrealistic as an AOC economic plan. There is literally not enough money in the federal budget. I think of lots of well-intentioned middle & upper middle-class folks who have never done a hard drug in their life imagine addicts as desperate to get off the drugs. In fact, tons and tons of addicts are at least moderately happy with their situation and not really looking to change. And/or, they enjoy the street lifestyle more than their likely other option of a boring, low-wage life of 40+ hours a week. Source, have tons of family & friends who are lifelong addicts, and I did plenty of hard drugs recreationally myself in my misspent youth (now many years in the rear view mirror).

While I am no fan of the War on Drugs, the Portugal decriminalization story is the classic fallacious argument I see a lot on the left- 'let me compare this tiny culturally homogeneous country of 10 million people to your wildly diverse nation of 330+ million'. Solutions that work in tiny countries often don't scale, and the US is simply culturally different than Portugal around drug abuse.

As a thought experiment- opioids are legal with a prescription in the US, and also kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam War. Let's imagine instead that no prescriptions were required, and for the last 20 years anyone 18 or 21+ was able to walk into a store and buy Oxycontin directly off the shelf with zero restrictions. Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher. Americans really enjoy getting extremely high. That's great that people in Portugal appear able to resist the temptation of cocaine/heroin/meth/whatever, but that is clearly not the case in the US.

While I do support more money for rehab and other anti-Drug War policies like federal marijuana legalization, the sad fact is that there are no solutions whatsoever to widespread hard drug abuse. It's a part of American society that's not going away anytime soon. Rehab for everyone and complete drug decriminalization are unfortunately not realistic policies

<comment><USER4> > Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same > than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher.

My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what or how much of what they are putting in their bodies. If your point stands, why did the clamp down on opiod prescriptions correlate with a massive increase in overdoses and fatalities?

<comment><USER3> >My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what or how much of what they are putting in their bodies

I don't see how that's possible with opioids, they are manufactured in a professional pharmaceutical factory with precise dosage. Percs, vikes & oxys are described by dosage amount (there are Oxy 20s, Oxy 40s, Oxy 80s, etc.) Nothing like street drugs. Not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence (my impression is that lots of recent ODs come from fentanyl)

<comment><USER4> Once the government and industry took measures to try to reign in the pills, ODs starting rising dramatically as people turned to street drugs (sometimes dangerously spiked with Fentanyl without the consumer's knowledge).

I'm pretty sure we're agreeing now, but in your original comment you were saying more people would OD if it were legalized. Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal, but the data here shows more people OD when they can't procure it in normalized and knowable amounts.

Also, relying on a black market to stay high is likely to have other consequences on your life in all sorts of ways not related to the act of ingesting an illegal drug, but more the fallout from engaging in (by definition) illegal actions to make it possible for you to ingest the drug. This complication is likely to further, rather than reduce, risk-taking behaviors that are not organic using the substance itself. When combined with the general volatility of the the market in general given chaotic measures that temporarily create false scarcity for a product that someone suffering from addiction cannot fathom going without, individual behaviors and decision making will definitely be negatively affected.

Basically the argument for the criminalization of drug use/commerce is:

Drugs are addicting and can be abused, so we decided to criminalize them with penalties that may seem excessive but are definitely warranted. And you know what? After putting this in place, man, you should see just how dangerous these drugs actually turned out to be. Turns out, once you make drug users criminals, they start committing more crimes and they lose their jobs and neglect their children and started overdosing and end up in jail and on a macro level violent organizations have come into being with the means to subvert whole nation states and law enforcement has a whole lot more to do. Could you imagine the anarchy if we legalized this shit? Overdoes would go up, violent organizations would take over the world, a whole generation of kids will be fucked and our prisons would be bursting from addicts committing crimes while law enforcement would collapse from being underfunded and stretched too thin.

Don't get me wrong, I believe drugs are Stupid, it's just the consequences of making them illegal is like Stupid started doing drugs and then began committing crimes to pay for the price Stupid artificially inflated against it's own interests so that it could in fact continue claiming to stupidly be trying to be less Stupid while (with near preternatural stupidity so sublime it becomes indistinguishable from Genius) preventing itself from ever being anything other than just Stupid while also convincing everyone it doesn't have a problem, in fact anyone who even stupidly suggests that what Stupid is doing to Stupid is Stupid is themselves in fact Stupid for suggesting something so Stupid.

<comment><USER3> Just saw your response. Not sure if you'll get mine, but-

>Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal

This x1million, basically. As mentioned in the 'different cultures enjoy getting high to various degrees' point that I was making- Americans show extremely high (ha ha) levels of interest in illegal drug usage. If hard drugs were openly available in retail stores, casual experimentation would absolutely skyrocket. (Especially in depleted Rust Belt cities, rural areas, etc.) There might or might not be a reduction in the number of ODs. But it seems to me there would be a massive increase in the number of new addicts from the extreme ease of experimentation.

Decriminalization is a different story, I'd be more open to outright decrim for small amounts of any hard drug

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is now one of the deadliest cities in the world"_

That's pretty insane. Compare to the worst year of the Iraq war: _" in 2006, people living in Iraq had the highest risk of dying violently in conflict. In that year, there were 91 violent deaths per 100,000 people in the country"_ [1]

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039690/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039690/)

<comment><USER6> At the same time, we also see official promotion of Tijuana tourism:

 _Tijuana has been recommended by the New York Times as the eighth best site to visit in 2017. Here you can traverse its streets and immerse yourself in its multifaceted and vibrant culture._

[https://www.visitmexico.com/en/main-destinations/baja- califo...](https://www.visitmexico.com/en/main-destinations/baja- california/tijuana)

<comment><USER7> But isn't that like saying Chicago is one of the deadliest cities in America, but it still shows up on tourist recommendations? As a Chicago native, it is dangerous, but only if you go way deep into the wrong area, which you would have to do on purpose -- everywhere else is pretty safe in general

<comment><USER5> Curious if Tijiuna has safe areas.

<comment><USER8> We call those "San Diego".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For detailed daily reporting on the Mexican drug war with translations of Spanish language articles see Borderland Beat:

[http://www.borderlandbeat.com/](http://www.borderlandbeat.com/)</comment>


Facebook.co.uk owned by ConnectU ?!? - <AUTHOR> http://tinyurl.com/ywysjg

<comment><USER2> linking to a whois lookup will invariably exceed the query limit

<comment><USER3> it just did.</comment></comment>


What Could Protect U From Copyright-Troll Lawsuits - Threat Level/Wired.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/dmca-righthaven-loophole/ <comment><USER2> Duplicate from 25 days ago ...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840732>

... where there are many, many comments.

Comments there are closed, however, so new discussion requires a new submission.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are you leaving Ruby? - <AUTHOR> Fewer and fewer people are talking about Ruby or create things with it. What drives you away and where are you going to? <comment><USER2> Shameless plug but… we left Ruby and then came back ;) - [https://blog.appcanary.com/2017/hard-isnt-simple-ruby- clojur...](https://blog.appcanary.com/2017/hard-isnt-simple-ruby-clojure.html)

It's tricky, it's definitely not the bleeding edge like it used to be but – if you already know the toolset well, it does a good job at what it's meant to.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not leaving Ruby, or Rails. Neither should you!</comment>


Web Development as a career – the realities - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rU5-t09tEBym1wD3NUr7s9mMgFBmfGJNBz3F8TGzDsU/edit?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> I like pretty much everything someone takes the time to write about development, but this rubbed me the wrong way. I'm not sure what it is exactly the author is trying to express here: that engineers need to stay current on new, hot technologies? Everyone knows that. But then he seems to deride people who, based on his interviewing, haven't used a <new technology X> in production / in a new project.

You can't have it both ways. You need to find a way to evaluate people and, through that evaluation, grok whether or not they can pick up a new technology that they aren't already familiar with. If you can't figure that out, your interview process has failed. Think about it: the complexity and difficulty of your own problems vastly exceed the difficulty a senior engineer faces learning a few new frameworks or APIs. If not, you're doing something pretty trivial.

The best people I've ever worked with weren't people who a priori understood the technology stack we were working with -- instead, they have been seasoned engineers who know how go out and learn, and then apply what they already know in a new environment. This seems so obvious I feel silly even writing it down here, but this is on the front page, so it must be resonating with folks.

What tptacek has said about .NET developers working at IT departments at huge organizations really rings true here. If you immediately write someone off because they work with technologies you don't work with[1] then you're doing it wrong.

1\. Assuming you're not looking for a quick, contracted hired gun for something fairly straightforward.

<comment><USER3> _If you immediately write someone off because they work with technologies you don 't work with[1] then you're doing it wrong._

I've had a hell of a time interviewing for just this reason. For the first set of interviews, I was emphasizing my experience with _patterns_ as opposed to _technologies_. That didn't work. I was routinely dismissed, despite decades of industry experience.

When I decided to grind through the latest buzzwords, and build a few sample apps, that's when interviewers got much more positive.

It's not how I would have interviewed people, and I do agree with you and tptacek, but it was an eye opening experience on how to play the game.

<comment><USER4> The obsession with experience in Technology X always reminds me of the story recruiter who turned down someone for not having 10+ years of Rails experience ([http://www.strategic-options.com/insight/you-cant-have- more-...](http://www.strategic-options.com/insight/you-cant-have-more- than-10-years-of-experience-on-rails/)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > They have been working in the same job, with the same technologies, on the > same product but when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer > "Because I have been coding for 5 years".

> The sad fact is that these people have not been aware of the realities of > the industry they have been working in. Their job and their job security is > no longer secure. Never let this become you!

It sounds like the author values language/framework knowledge above expertise. Speaking as a backend dev I find as you move up in seniority it becomes impossible to keep up with the latest technologies. Learning management skills, being move involved in architecting and business development all take time. You may end up doing code reviews, project management and cleaning up the 'legacy' (read broken) parts of the system. Does that make you less valuable?

To a company that insists on every part of their project being built in the latest cool language/framework (and yes, I still class NodeJS as this) then yes. To a pragmatic company, which may choose NodeJS if it's the best fit, or Rails, or PHP, or Java - no.

We're back at the skills vs language debate, one which I thought has been done to death.

<comment><USER6> NodeJS? That thing is already dead. You must have a year of IO.js experience.

<comment><USER7> IO.js? That is so yesterday. You need to have at least three years of fozbaz.js experience, which has a pre-alpha release tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer 'Because I have been coding for 5 years'."

Maybe 5 years is insufficient, to be considered senior, but isn't the amount of time you've been coding what defines how senior you are? I get that technologies come and go and you have to stay up to date, but I would think that if someone were looking for a senior developer they would be looking for someone with a lot of experience, not necessarily someone who knows the ins and outs of technology X.

Can anyone shed some light on this? It just seems bizarre to me that if you want to be a senior developer you'd need to either stick with the same technologies you used before..

<comment><USER9> 5 years! A career these days is 40-45 years. If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there?

20 years experience, on a wide range of technologies, in a variety of roles, then we'll talk senior. Until then calling yourself "senior" just invites people not to take you seriously.

<comment><USER10> 20 years in this industry invites people to treat you as a fossil and not even hire. Technology moves too fast, nobody cares what you did in 1995 anywhere near as much as what you did in 2013.

<comment><USER9> As I said on another thread, 2010's MongoDB is just 1970's MUMPS. Once you have been through a few cycles, you see that actually technology comes round and round again. Centralize, distribute, centralize again, just one repeating pattern. Thick clients, thin clients, thick again. Compile, interpret, compile again. Just the buzzwords and the syntax changes.

<comment><USER11> Oh, sure, trends in the libraries come and go, but if you don't think they're only going in circles, you should consider whether you'd rather be programming: a Ruby on Rails web app, or a COBOL-backed green screen application on an IBM AS/400.

Myself, I'll take those 45 years of progress, thank you kindly :)

<comment><USER9> Do you think there is a difference, other than you have a bigger screen to do it on now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The sad fact is that these people have not been aware of the realities of the industry they have been working in".

IMO the observations provided by the OP are not sound reasoning for the above conclusion.

In a recent gig where I was responsible for helping the company hire new developers I made a conscientious effort to avoid making such sweeping generalizations. Web development is one of the most diverse fields that I know of. So much so that in my mind you can't assume a qualified employee has ever touched the specific technologies you use in your stack.

I think the hiring practices described by the OP may be the dinosaur here.

</comment><comment> UK-AL This is why development is ageist. Keeping programming skills up to date after work, and spending hours after work trying different languages and libraries is fine when your young.

Its not so fine, when you have kids and a wife to look after.

Probably have about an hour to myself everyday.

<comment><USER13> It's not only ageist. As long as developers keep accepting that they have to spend 15 hours a month on their own dime just to keep up, it's outright exploitative. Developers are generally expected to keep current in the breakneck technology rat race with no support from their employing organization. This _could_ (maybe) be considered reasonable if technology moved more slowly, but not the way the world of computer software works.

It's one thing if you're a consultant in a web development position where your team is constantly jumping from the previous best practice to the next; keeping up in such an environment is easy and you'll get paid to do it. The problem occurs if you're in (e.g.) a back-end position where your job duties require you to focus on slower-moving technologies that might have lesser demand in the market. What happens if you lose your job after 5 years? Unless you spent all your weekends working with the latest hot frameworks, you're (mostly) screwed.

There was a good essay a while ago which stated that software developers need a professional association. If we were organized, we could put forward the very reasonable demand that a small portion of our on-the-clock time should be spent for education. I think this is a requirement if we are not aiming for a world of 40-year old burnouts and early retirees.

<comment><USER14> _As long as developers keep accepting that they have to spend 15 hours a month on their own dime just to keep up, it 's outright exploitative._

Why? How is this any different from working an extra... 4 hours a week? It sounds like long hours are fairly common, and we tend to be on salary and not get paid extra for that either.

<comment><USER13> I think the US system of salaried employees and no overtime restrictions (or even pay) encourages exploitation in the first place, so that is my background for making this statement. I live and work in Europe, and I will never work for any US-based company that does not place firm restrictions on how overtime is managed. Most US companies simply have the wrong incentives in place.

But yes, having the legal right to take 4 hours a week out of your schedule to stay up-to-date would go a long way towards alleviating the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One minor point I disagree with is mobile development. For certain apps it's extremely important... But there's a lot of complicated applications that don't work on mobile at all. So if you wanted to support mobile you'd have to design and build two separate applications. That requires a lot of resources and manpower. Another alternative is to hide most of the functionality that won't work well in mobile, but depending on what problems you solve, this could make your application useless.

As for the overall topic, I think I agree. It seems to me that server-side technologies are better researched and understood. But then you look at client-side technology, it's chaotic. Building and maintaining user interfaces is hard... Recently I've been playing around with flux and react, and I feel like it's definitely a step in the right direction towards building simple components that can be easily maintained and extended.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Some people love to cook in their spare time. Would these people be as > enthusiastic about cooking if they were doing it for 40+ hours a week every > week and there was a superior telling them what and how to cook?

> The honest answer for most people is no!

I find this weird. I advertised for calculator program requests in high school because I wanted someone to tell me what to code. (There were no takers. One guy wanted a program to convert decimal numbers into fractions, but that's already built into the calculators.) To me writing a program is solving a puzzle. You can't do that unless there's a puzzle to solve.

I was baffled and enraged by the prevalence of the question "what do you _want_ to work on?" and its related forms in job interviews. My philosophy of work is that the whole point of having a boss is that they tell you what to do and you do it. Sure, I don't want to fix cars, but that's why I'm applying as a software developer and not a mechanic.

<comment><USER17> You can literally work on software for any industry, company or government in the world. I would think you would have some sort of preference. At the least you should be interested enough in the place your are interviewing at to find out what they do and and then tell them you are interested in working on that. Otherwise you just come off as a mercenary or desperate.

<comment><USER18> The thing is some people really don't care what they work on. As long as the pay is good and they are getting to program(or whatever other task they enjoy doing), the actual application doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Okay, so he doesn't like that someone is a senior developer because they have been coding for 5 years. Fair enough, I guess.

Then they go onto say that you need to keep your technology current, and always be moving on. Okay....

So how does one become a senior in his position when you're always suppose to be moving on? By being a master with PHP? Not much has survived/been popular for >5 years that will make him happy.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reality. Talk to people. Help people. Preferably, help people make money. You'll be okay.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a debate I am having right now. Should I go the sysadmin route (hadoop clusters, etc), become a data scientist, or choose to get into cybersecurity. I have been leaning against choosing the web development career path

<comment><USER22> DevOps! ;-)

<comment><USER23> Trite, but accurate. This role is currently in high demand, with correspondingly good salaries. It's worth noting, though, that companies expect DevOps to do more more operational tasks than programming or procedure generation.

There aren't a lot of folks who understand how to administer a modern Linux system anymore; even companies using AWS or Rackspace or GAE will need someone versed in the arcane ways of System Administration as they grow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This applies not just to Web Development...Mobile Dev is most challenging as well...As a iOS developer, every iOS update, there will be new features..and lot of guidelines..now even new Programming Language...

</comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR: glorified web developer only likes his kin.

</comment><comment><USER25> My take is different:

For "Web development as a career", the OP seems mostly to mean as an employee. Then I'd say, go down that road if you have to, but ASAP learn the _business_ side, get your own software development _environment_ (likely you already have it) in your own room at home, and then just be a _sole proprietor_ in _business_ much as a guy who owns and runs, say, a pizza shop, is a CPA, mows grass and plows snow, is a plumber or electrician, a car repair guy, an auto body guy, etc.

Then you get some big advantages:

(1) You are the one who gets the revenue and, thus, keeps the earnings.

(2) Likely for each dollar of revenue, you have lower overhead than any employer and, thus, get more money. In particular, you get to cut out the fraction of the revenue going to the owners, managers, marketing guys, lawyers, HR, landlords, business insurance agencies, etc.

(3) You have some tax advantages, often well known to sole proprietors.

(4) For your technical qualifications, you only have to learn and use what you actually need and find useful. So, you don't have to play buzz word ice hockey with some HR clown who doesn't know fixed from float but has a checklist of C++, Python, Ruby, MongoDB, Jason, HTML5, ....

Point (4) is crucial: Likely your customers just want their Web site developed, running, and occasionally revised. Okay, that's what you need to be able to do. But, you get to select the _framework_ , languages, libraries, development environment, etc. If you need a new tool, then, sure get, learn, and use it. But you don't have to spend a lot of time learning, say, HTML5 or SVG if you don't need to use them yet.

"The business of America is business", and in practice from crossroads up to the largest cities a lot of sole proprietor small businesses.

</comment><comment><USER26> To me, it's interesting that an article on Web development is hosted on Google Docs. This is not to point out an irony, but that like any technology, web development can be democratized pretty rapidly. The website for my side business is hosted on a similar platform.

 _What was considered best in class 5 years ago is literally frowned upon now as the technologies and the standard of our applications have evolved rapidly._

Moreover, what was considered best in class 5 years ago can now be set up by a non-expert.

<comment><USER4> My guess is that the author is afraid their website can't handle a HN view influx.

<comment><USER26> That's perfectly fair. They might also not want to use their employer's website for their personal writings. And using the right technology for the job is a good attribute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just wanted to note that this was posted to the CSCareerQuestions subreddit[1] 6 days ago, and there's a bit of discussion there that may interest people as well.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2yb11f/i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2yb11f/is_web_development_the_right_career_path_for_you/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I fear there is a new generation of developers who have jumped into programming using nodejs as their core language and fit this description you mention "On more occasions than I could count, the candidate for this type of role would have some cool technologies listed on their resume and completed an adequate coding test which is part of our hiring procedure.". If you don't know algorithmic complexity, how to run all sorts of tests, or have any clue about security measures but can set up a nodejs express webserver in 5 mins you are a script kiddie at best. Unfortunately these type of developers are now getting jobs because its the new web development buzzword

</comment><comment><USER28> As a recent student in a coding bootcamp I believe your essay is very informative. It will be useful as one of a guiding docs for beginners. Thank you

<comment><USER29> Fwiw, don't take it as cannon, and expect exceptions to every rule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice Topic. Actually i'm in the web development field for past three years. The reality of the web development was difficult to understand.

</comment><comment><USER31> All good thoughts, but not specific to web dev! Applies to any career path you're serious about.

</comment><comment><USER32> what new technological advances in back end web development have occurred in the last five years? why should senior developers spend their spare time learning new ways of doing exactly the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER33> What has that google page turned into xD</comment>


Ask HN: if you were Google, will you release Maps app on iOS 6? - <AUTHOR>

I believe most users will happily pay $2.99 or even $4.99 for Google Maps app, especially if they include turn-by-turn, voice based driving directions. Assuming 100s of millions of devices will be on iOS 6 in the next 2 years, that is Billions of dollars in revenue for Google. Why, even Billions of dollars in extra profits for Google, as they anyway continue to support and upgrade Maps on earlier versions of iOS as well as on other platforms like mobile web, Android, etc. So, potentially Maps on iOS can be a huge sweet spot for Google, as lucrative as any of their other mobile products including Ads and Android. But there are some cons too. For one, if they do not release Maps on iOS 6, at least for some users, an Android based device will be more attractive. And lastly Google may not want to share 30% of revenues from Maps on iOS with Apple! So, dear HN User, if you were in google's place, what would you do? <comment><USER2> If I were Google I'd be twisting Apple's melons pretty hard right now.

I'd love to see Google release a Maps app containing some form of cool functionality that directly breaks the App Store's TOS. This leaves Apple with two options:

1) Reject Google's new Maps app and incur the wrath of the public. This then leads more negativity towards iOS and the potential for Google to talk up its own platforms.

2) Break their own rules by allowing it, incurring the wrath of developers and app makers that had to tread the line with the App Store policies.

Either way, Apple lose and Google/Android looks great. If Google act while people are still pissed off they can drag this out for as long as they wish.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are missing the key difference between Google's Youtube app and Maps app. The key differentiating factor is that iOS 6's built-in Map app maybe sufficient for, let's say, 50% of the casual map users, whereas pretty much everyone who wants to use Youtube on iOS 6 has to have some sort of Youtube app. If Google were to make a paid Map app, that might cause some (or many) of other 50% users to continue using the build-in app for maps. So for the remaining 20-30% of the power users who would want to pay for a Google Maps app, I am not sure if it's worth the effort. Then again, all this might be incorrect and we might see Google Maps app in the coming days.

</comment><comment><USER4> Like Google have done to their search app, by having a native app allows Google to make more revenue off their application on the ios. Also keep in mind that Google has a much larger database of stores/locations/bus routes than iOS so they have an edge in usability that will take years for apple to catch up.

As long as apple does not ax it from the app store, sounds like a good business plan.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd do a survey... talk to a bunch of iPhone owners and find out if they would pay for the app and try to get a handle on what percent would buy a paid map app.

Another angle: Release it for free and integrate with Google+ Places and Zagat.

<comment><USER6> Google maps with Zagat and turn by turn could be a valuable product offer. It would be interesting to see if in the us, Google could get $5-10/per head X% of I-phones sold. The issue, for them, though is opportunity cost: how much revenue is lost from books not sold, or Android devices not adopted, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, I would. And I'd keep it free.

Google Maps is a solid app with a great brand that users trust. It would be silly not to give iOS users who love Google Maps access to the product.

What's there to lose?

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously some of their negotiations with Apple failed, hence Google Maps are not included in iOS 6 by default. If Google now just releases it free to users, isn't it a complete win for Apple? Contrast this to YouTube app, where Google still can make big money through ads in the free app. So, I think Google is not exactly thinking "what's to lose?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I were Google, I would release the whole suite of ecosystem apps wherever I can get them to run, including iOS, and all the significant Android-derived OSs: Kindle Fire, OPhone (OMS), and Aliyun.

Android doesn't need the crutch of app exclusivity.</comment>


GremlinBin - <AUTHOR> http://www.gremlinbin.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> GremlinBin is a new tool for working with the Gremlin graph traversal language from Apache TinkerPop. "Here you will be able to test and share your gremlin queries with the world."</comment>