Ask HN: What do you give work experience kids to do in your office? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've had a couple of work experience students work on my teams. I started them off with manual QA and, as they learned our product, I asked for their help reviewing documentation and tutorials.

Having fresh eyes learn the product and then focus on user experience yielded some great insights. From there, most of the time, we slowly moved into user support. Afterwards, I'd assign special projects depending on personality and interests. One had a really amazing knack for front end design, so she ended up rebuilding most of our support site. Another was just a brilliant, compassionate writer. She rewrote most of our tutorials and translated many of our support materials into French. A few months in and she had advanced enough to become my replacement's most important resource. I still can't quite believe her growth over a short time.

In retrospect, I don't think the particular tasks matter as much as the mindset. I gave them important tasks that they could handle and, as they learned more, I gave them more. And, I know that our entire company trusted them. Finally, this only worked because upper management completely supported me.

<comment><USER3> QA/Support - I have seen in my current company graymatrix, transition from entry level here to various roles. Even marketing

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did an internship at an engineering company during highschool and they gave me various tasks with pretty minimal guidance.

The one that stuck out the most was downgrading their desktops from Vista to XP. Most of the drivers on the XP disc didn't work on the newer hardware so i was pretty stuck. One of the engineers told me to research slipstreaming drivers, which led me on a 3 day journey to creating custom boot discs & successfully installing XP

Give them work that will challenge them & also serve a business purpose if possible</comment>


Ask PG: what's YC's / PG's opinion of the lean startup / bootstrapping movement? - <AUTHOR>

Obviously you're not opposed to venture funding, but do you see it as a requirement? Are there YC startups that have chosen to eschew or severely minimize post-YC funding in favor of growing based on revenue and profits? Or does YC both select for and encourage raising larger amounts of funding? <comment><USER2> This came up a couple days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736166>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That answers the question about the startups, but what about your view on the subject? Do you think it's generally better for startups to raise if they can get good terms?

<comment><USER2> It turns out you can give a fairly precise answer to that question: <http://paulgraham.com/equity.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to remember what all you've covered in your essays :) Thanks again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell <comment><USER2> People interested in Orwell's _1984_ might also be interested in C. S. Lewis's' _That Hideous Strength_ , a pre-Atomic treatment of the dystopian sci-fi future from an unexpected author that actually predates _1984_. Here's a review... by Orwell. [http://www.lewisiana.nl/orwell/](http://www.lewisiana.nl/orwell/)

> His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a > nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, > perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human > feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then > the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the > universe under their control.

>...

> There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a > moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced "obsolete" – > has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it > sounds all too topical.

<comment><USER3> Interesting to note that Orwell railed against tyranny, control of the understrength masses by a powerful few, and the obliteration of individualism and C. S. Lewis wrote thinly-disguised Christian propaganda targeted towards children.

<comment><USER2> _That Hideous Strength_ is anything but "thinly-disguised Christian propaganda targeted towards children." First, as a novel, it's openly Christian (which, combined with the sci-fi dystopia, makes it a pretty unique entity - I find it fascinating, myself). It may also help you understand the sort of things the Christian right fears from the likes of people like yourself.

Secondly, it's not targeted towards children. Even assuming a child would be paying attention after the first ten minutes' read: there's a sadistic lesbian police chief (a character of the sort whom Lewis is theorized to personally fancy), several open (if brief) discussions about sexuality and eroticism... to say nothing of the violent murders, suicides and tiger maulings.

It's not exactly what you'd consider child-safe, let alone targeted.

But I guess if you already know all there is to know about Lewis from the five-minute treatment in your local left-leaning literature class, or if you gleaned most of it secondhand from reading Neil Gaiman's _The Problem of Susan_ , then you have no need to see anything that might interfere with your expectations. Go ahead and congratulate yourself on truly understanding the man.

Also be sure to avoid: his WWI poetry. [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2003/2003-h/2003-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2003/2003-h/2003-h.htm)

<comment><USER4> > Christian propaganda targeted towards children

I think this is a reference to The Chronicles of Narnia

<comment><USER5> More a reply to oneeyedpigeon than pstuart, but,

Most people seem to think C.S. Lewis wrote nothing except Narnia. This isn't the case; Lewis was a _convert_ to Christianity and wrote forcefully and critically about it, even while he subscribed to it. A good example of this is Mere Christianity.

Narnia itself was a critique: yes, Aslan is Jesus, but Lewis' point wasn't "Jesus loves you!" It was "Jesus is a force of nature and he is REALLY FUCKING SCARY."

He's not the kind of man I like defending, but Lewis wasn't doing "propaganda" any more than Dante was doing "propaganda" when he wrote Inferno. He was trying to speak truth to power and using fiction to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting article but of course the writing deadline was only a part of what killed him. His health declined during the period of being a tramp and working menial jobs in France where he was hospitalized with pneumonia. It didn't help being shot through the neck by a fascist sniper in the Spanish Civil War and also being a heavy smoker. Lastly, wintering in cold, wet Scotland isn't a good plan for anyone with bad lungs.

</comment><comment><USER7> I read that book my senior year in high-school, and to this day I will cite it as one of the - if not THE - most influential books I've ever read. I know Orwell was no libertarian, but what I took from the book (probably influenced by a genetic proclivity towards rebellion and anti-authoritarian thinking) was a tremendous mistrust of government... which I suspect was a strong influence on my eventually settling into a libertarian worldview.

Some people say that Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't written to be a warning, and maybe it wasn't - but I have a hard time seeing how anybody could read it and not discover something of a warning inside. And I think that's even more true given the various revelations over the past few years, vis-a-vis surveillance and diminishing civil liberties.

I encourage anybody who hasn't read Nineteen Eighty-Four to go read it immediately. If you aren't either angry has hell, or sad as hell, or both, at the end, you're a rare breed.

[http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt)

<comment><USER8> Left-libertarian, or royal-libertarian?

[http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html](http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html)

<comment><USER7> Meh... I don't much care for labels, and leaving it at "libertarian" is probably specific enough. But if you really care, I associate a lot with the "voluntaryist" and/or "anarcho-capitalist" schools of thought. My beliefs about the ownership of land are in a state of flux and I'm not actually convinced there is any truly objective way to settle that issue.

<comment><USER9> Look up Henry George, specifically "Progress and Poverty."

His land taxation regime is to say the least controversial, but it's still compelling and it's _something_. It's also considered responsible for much of the rapid progress out of medievalism in the Far East late in the 19th/early in the 20th Century. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan all had periods of very rapid industrialization under land taxes.

No less than William F. Buckley referenced Henry George more than once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems to me, this book is more relevant today than ever. Orwell might have erred with the date, but I think he didn't with the direction of human kind.

<comment><USER11> The state of the world is improving, sorry but it is, but that doesn't fit into the epic narrative that so many want to believe. Your life is not as epic a struggle as your parents or their parents, all men are essentially kings today in terms of freedom and opportunity and a million other metrics. No one reports good news, progress is not as exciting as doom.

<comment><USER10> I don't want to believe, that the world is rapidly being corrupted, but it is.

Freedom and opportunity?

Opportunity might be true in some areas (particularly IT), but not in other areas. Just because you think you are king, you are not!

Freedom, no, not at all. Democracy has brought much freedom to the people and after the 2nd WW freedom lived up to it's maximum, it seems to me. But in the last decades it declined rapidly.

Do you mean, freedom in Iraq? Or in Afghanistan or other Arabian countries? Think twice! There might be some countries, yes, but they are far away from being real free.

Freedom in western countries? Europe?? The US???

Think again! Just think!

<comment><USER5> Yelling "think" is not actually the substitute for evidence that you seem to believe it is.

<comment><USER10> I do not yell. I am just wondering. I am wondering, how people have been blinded. Maybe I have just to big expectations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The world of _1984_ was based on James Burnham's book _The Managerial Revolution_. Orwell even wrote a couple reviews of Burnham's work. Here's the first: [http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh](http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's worth re-reading this wonderful book every couple of years. Every time I do, I see something new, either in the story itself, or in the writing craft, or in the story's context in society, as our world changes.

It's also worth asking ourselves each time we re-read 1984, are we farther away or closer to the life depicted in the book, than last time we read it?

<comment><USER7> I last re-read it about 5 or 6 years ago, IIRC. I'd say we're closer to that life now, than then.

<comment><USER13> This is about about as far as I can remember society being away from 1984. The NSA bulk surveillance is bad (doubleplus bad?), but remember the most pernicious influence in the actual book wasn't the surveillance, but the criminalization of actual ideas and corrupting the language in order to accomplish that ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak)).. in particular whiteblack (not to minimize your own nom de plume).

<comment> grey-area Some examples of Orwellian terms in common use:

Enemy combatants, Collateral damage, Leader of the free world, National security, War for peace, Premptive strikes, Enhanced interrogation

Some Orwellian concepts: War on abstract nouns (e.g on terror), Pervasive surveillance, Pervasive propaganda, Casual use of torture, Widespread hysteria and hatred over minor threats, Former hated enemies now allies and vice versa, Stark divides between the haves and have nots, A distant and poorly understood enemy necessitates perpetual conflict and sacrifice

It's a really interesting book and I disagree that we are any farther on in these respects than we were in orwell's time. His book is of course a fantasy intended to illustrate our failings by exaggerating them, not a strict prediction of the future, but it still has a lot to teach us.

<comment><USER14> It has been a long time since I last read 1984, but I don't see the war on abstract nouns (poverty, drugs, terror) as particularly Orwellian.

<comment> grey-area I was thinking of things like sexcrime or thoughtcrime, though I don't think it is called a war in 1984. In a broader sense though, this sort of War on x is very Orwellian I think because it's directing the public to scapegoat segments of the population (drug users, muslims as potential terrorists) and blame them for their ills, and see themselves as perpetually at war with members of their own society, in the same way that in 1984 those guilty of vague, abstract crimes became the enemy and worthy of hate, simply by virtue of a government pronouncement.

War has become normalised and part of everyday life, with the implication that as we are at war special rules apply and the enemy, as designated by the government, deserves no mercy because we are engaged in an existential struggle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned "Brave New World" so far. IMHO, much closer to actual reality than 1984.

<comment><USER10> Might be. I must admit, that I do not know Brave New World as good as 1984.

Might be, that there are more exact descriptions of our future around. But one thing I think is dominant and alarming: The "free" world does not converge to a system of even rights and freedom for all, but into a new system of control and inequality, that might in turn even top the system of the middle ages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Orwell had tuberculosis, not uncommon for people from urban environment in his day. That's why the "bad lung". Whether he smoked or not is probably quite irrelevant.

Orwell fought against _Fascism_ ( both of the Lft and of the Right) , and _mercantilism /empire_. Not _capitalism_. Something can be one of those, but not both. These things are quite precise terms that have very specific meanings.

The point of 1984 is not that some sinister cadre has seized power ( that's more like Alan Moore in "V for Vendetta" ) but rather that people stopped wanting to think at all, and the resulting regime met their preferences better as they simply stopped thinking at all.

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29)

George Orwell averred that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be partly derived from We.

Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it. Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel."</comment>


2010 is becoming a good year in shutting down big botnets. - <AUTHOR> http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002056.html

<comment><USER2> I see evidence of this. Here's a plot of the spam I've received over the past few years:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/SpamByMonth.png>

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem with sending a message to people telling them they're infected isn't that it's unethical, it's that they'll just think it's some trojan trying to get access and close the window.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I agree, there really should be some guidelines concerning the messages government people leave behind on hacked computers. How are users supposed to know if the message is real or authtentic? Its not like they send you a PGP key to go with it..

<comment><USER5> >Its not like they send you a PGP key to go with it..

Sounds like a good idea to me.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, and like people will understand that. Given the current lack of uptake of encryption in email, and the abysmal undertanding of encryption in general, you'll never get the average computer user to understand what the hell you're on about.

And then the spammers will spoof it and get people to click on apparently legitimate messages.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, they'll fake it just like hckers fake Firefox security warning... [http://www.gdatasoftware.co.uk/security-labs/news/news- detai...](http://www.gdatasoftware.co.uk/security-labs/news/news- details/article/1338-firefox-security-alert-turns-o.html)

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why would the criminals put the command & control servers all in one place? Shouldn't they have backups elsewhere which will enable them to repudiate the seized servers and retain control of the bots?</comment>


The Jelly Bean Rule - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jelly_bean_rule <comment><USER2> This is a weird rule. Why those six nutrients? Was it just meant to catch a large number of junk foods without having to name them explicitly?</comment>


Nuitka – A Python Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html <comment><USER2> Would be great if they'd also fix Python's dreadful non-threadsafe C API. The GIL and all the global variables impede multiple independent interpreter instance performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand it. Am I supposed to be able to create standalone executables with this? How?

<comment><USER4> Yes. You can compile to .exe files.

>The resulting binary still depends on CPython and used C >extension modules being installed.

> If you want to be able to copy it to another machine, > use --standalone and > copy the created program.dist directory > and execute the program.exe put > inside.

[http://nuitka.net/doc/user-manual.html#use-case-1-program- co...](http://nuitka.net/doc/user-manual.html#use-case-1-program-compilation- with-all-modules-embedded)

<comment><USER3> Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Peter Ratcliffe's Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal - <AUTHOR> https://www.news18.com/news/world/27-year-old-letter-reveals-scientist-peter-ratcliffes-nobel-prize-winning-study-was-rejected-by-journal-2344475.html <comment><USER2> That's nothing.

The most extreme such example is that everything that Barbara McClintock published for decades about jumping genes was questioned because it seemed like an impossible result. It got so bad that she stopped even trying to submit papers for publication anywhere after 1953. Then in the 1960s and 1970s the mechanics of transposons was discovered and she became hailed as a pioneer and was awarded the Nobel.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock) for more.

<comment><USER3> That is indeed an extreme example, given how matter of factly they teach transposons in molecular bio these days.

When we couldn't get a paper published, my old PI would always joke, "There's always BBRC!", referring to the journal biochemical and biophysical research communications. The impact factor was and still is quite low, and it would make the post docs bristle when he said it.

But I once asked him, why BBRC? and he explained that Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Herschko published their first paper on ubiquitinylation (how proteins get tagged for degradation in the proteasome) in that journal [1,2]. It won them a Nobel prize 26 years later and exploded into a huge field. You just never know sometimes.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/)

[2] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78912494)

(The BBRC text is paywalled sorry)

<comment><USER4> There are many prestigious/important journals within specific fields with very low IF. For instance in acoustics the _Journal of the Acoustical Society of America_ or _Acta Acustica united with Acustica_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't say it explicitly in the article, but I guess the idea behind people sharing this story is to laugh at the original reviewer's foolishness, ignorance, or arrogance for rejecting Nobel quality work.

But it isn't that simple. What was the context in which the original work was presented? Does the Nobel Committee know more now than the reviewer did at the time? Maybe the original paper wasn't written well enough to sufficiently explain the full potential of the idea?

Rejection is usually a case of 'I'm not sufficiently sure this is good enough given the information I have in front of me', not 'I'm positive this isn't good enough even with hindsight from the future'.

I think the tone is a little unfair and unreasonable.

<comment><USER6> >Rejection is usually a case of 'I'm not sufficiently sure this is good enough given the information I have in front of me'

Last week there were a few articles about the rejection of numerous articles/papers that would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

Obviously this is a very small set, but goes to show how easily Nobel Prize winning papers could have been lost to history.

The rejections include everything from:

-reviewers not liking the name of the paper (politics/subjectivity at its worst...I think the journal was trying to take an active role in the propagation of the prevailing terms regarding the subject matter)

-Not the right journal for the topic (quasi-subjective and potentially political)

-a backlog of articles to be published (maybe a little subjective, not sure if the examiner(s)/publisher(s) could have shuffled things around, but that would get back into subjectivity/politics)

In most cases, as you can imagine, the authors were disheartened and frustrated. Some never even published again as a result of these experiences. To me it just makes me wonder how many papers/articles could/would/should have won the Nobel Prize but for some rejection, and as a result how much time/effort has been lost.

<comment><USER7> "Obviously this is a very small set?"

Nobel Prizes, by definition, are given for groundbreaking results. Almost by definition, most "groundbreaking" results are wrong. Even given everything else as equal, it is unsurprising that Nobel-winning results are rejected at least once.

<comment><USER6> To the best of my knowledge 8 papers were rejected that ultimately won the prize...over 500 Nobel Prizes have been awarded so I am not sure why you expect papers to get rejected at least once.

Again the basis of these rejections were not on the merits (or results) as you suggest, rather, because of issues with names of the papers, backlog, and deferring to other journals which may be better fits for the topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nature also rejected Fermi's paper on weak interaction ("contained speculations too remote from reality to be of interest to the reader") and Kreb's paper about the citric acid cycle ("It is undesirable to accept further letters at the present time") — both investigation would end winning the Nobel.

<comment><USER8> Karl von Frisch's Nobel-winning biology paper was rejected everywhere he submitted it also.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, bees doing cute little dance moves to talk to each other _does_ sound pretty crazy.

<comment><USER9> It wouldn't sound that crazy if Nobel Commitee members watched more musicals :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's inspiring to observe how long the path can be between initial forays (or even middle-career forays) and publicly-recognized success.

This seems a relatively universal truism with only rare exceptions (too rare to bet one's future on, certainly). I'm reminded of the video of Lin Manuel- Miranda performing at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE)].

The work he presented was already pretty well-polished, and the musical that included it wouldn't open for another six years.

<comment><USER11> In Miranda's case, it's a weakness in the format. He couldn't really publish a string of 30 songs about Hamilton's life over a 10 year career as a pop bard, but plenty of musicians do that on similar works of art. But packing them into one blockbuster she works.

* Then again, people do it in TV format, like Flight of the Conchords and Crazy Ex Girlfriend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This shows the letter: [https://twitter.com/pipcosper/status/1182799512621977600](https://twitter.com/pipcosper/status/1182799512621977600)

<comment><USER13> Not only did they reject the article, they sat on for ages. Great work Nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like most people here recognize it's silly to think Nature was foolish for not always recognizing Nobel-prize-worthy work when it first appeared. (The journal might be foolish for plenty of other reasons, of course.) But for those who are still surprised, you should just think of this like making fun of VCs for not recognizing the future success of AirBnB (or whatever your perferred example start-up that seemed weird/unpromising but turned out to be wildly successful). This stuff always seems obvious in hindsight.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I'm trying to understand is: do large numbers of people believe the work that goes on to the Nobel Prize should be recognized as such when it is originally published?

Put another way: could you train a binary classifier (NOBEL/NOTBEL) that predicted prizewinning status at journal submission time based on the information bits available in the article? (personally I really doubt it)

<comment><USER16> That's a tough questions.

When you put it like that, no, obviously not, or at least not always.

On the other hand, a lot of academia is predicated on the idea that the quality and impact of research and by extension, the researcher, is immediately apparent, so we're "correctly" selecting and rewarding the best people. Stuff like this suggests that we're not, and the moves towards relentless up-or-out pipelines (with fixed times at each stage) might be counterproductive.

<comment><USER15> I think there are many things that, when published in the context of the day, _are not distinguishable_ from other work in terms of "Nobelity". It seems like most impact is measured decades after an initial technology is discovered, reported, and published. CRISPR seems like a relative outlier (once the basic technique was perfected, it went from "nothing" to "everything" in just a few years, and has now completely changed the nature of biomedical research).

<comment><USER11> CRISPR isn't an outlier, it's a product of our modern fast moving tech world. If CRISPR were invented in 1950, all else equal,it would have moved much more slowly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be more surprising if it _wasn't_ rejected at least once.

</comment><comment> d--b > The journal in 1992 had concluded that Ratcliffe's study was unfit for > publication as the direction of research was something which was beyond > their understanding.

I think that this is a fair reason for rejecting a paper...

> "Given the discrepancy mentioned by reviewer 1, we have sadly concluded, on > balance, that your paper would be better placed in a more specialised > journal, particularly given the competition for space,"

Yes, that's kind of good advice too...

</comment><comment><USER18> I always assumed this was standard, at least for all the larger journals.

Similar to the way patents used to be. Expect to be rejected multiple times, while tweaking and submitting additional info. That's essentially what the editing process was.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hasn't Maxwell not mentioned Maxwell's equations when giving a speech about the state of the art of science? If a great scientist can be unsure about a theory, it's not surprising that an average reviewer can be, too.

<comment><USER2> My favorite variation was David Hilbert asking in a talk what "Hilbert Spaces" were.

In his defense, they were named after him by someone else. But it was still a funny irony.

<comment><USER11> From Hilbert's perspective, he did a lot of work that he cared about, but one random thing got his name on it out of proportion to his own sense of what his important about himself. That's disorienting.

Gauss avoided this problem by getting everything named after him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That is why need arxiv like pre-print system for every scientific field, So even if a paper is rejected it is still widely available, readable and reference able.

</comment><comment><USER21> How many people are smart enough to produce such work, let alone to see it's brilliance?

Reviwers aren't all geniuses....

</comment><comment><USER22> They nominated Obama simply because he won over Bush and before he was even in office. I have lost faith in the Noble prize system as a whole.

<comment><USER23> *Nobel, and for what it's worth, the peace prize was added after Alfred Nobel's death and is considered by many not to serve the same purpose at the other Nobel prizes, and so it has a different reputation. It is sometimes used as a nudge to people who have the power to do good things, rather than as recognition after the fact.

<comment><USER24> All of the Nobel prizes were established after his death.

<comment><USER23> Well, he established them in his will. I was under the impression that the Peace prize was not in his will, but I just looked it up on wikipedia and it was. Looks like I got it confused with the "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences", which shares his name and is administered by the same committee, but was established by others.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Maps may soon let pedestrians choose well-lit, safe walking routes - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7765887/Google-Maps-let-pedestrians-choose-lit-walking-routes-safety-traveling-night.html <comment><USER2> Perfect. Thanks Google, now I know where to setup my muggings! Theives have google maps too, how will this not become an arms race? Do businesses have a say when you get routed around them because someone had their window broken in the parking lot last week? So many issues for a tiny theoretical safety increase.</comment>


Guys Like This Could Kill Google Glass Before It Ever Gets Off the Ground - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/inherent-dorkiness-of-google-glass/

<comment><USER2> While I agree that if the 'dorks' adopt glass first, Google will have an image problem. Much of the problem with the segway was it's price. $10,000 is not how you introduce a society changing technology. Try $750, for what is basically some batteries, wheels, and an accelerometer. It surely doesn't help that after they had a hard time convincing the public to buy in to the segway, they sold the majority to mall cops, that virtually eliminating any potential further public sales.

<comment><USER3> Don't remind me of "IT". The hype surrounding its unveiling was insane. I remember being so excited that I was unable to sleep the night before (ah, how naive I was). The pricing was off, the utility was off, the image ...

I keep trying to convince my wife to let me get Google Glass. I find it interesting that we are even having discussions on the topic. I don't think I've bought any other piece of tech where such issues have come up. I wonder if Google Glass would have done better without the ability to record video. Your segway analogy carries on. If Google had released a first version with just the display, the utility would be far, far limited but public acceptance would also have been easier to get. The goodies could have come later. Oh well, the die has been cast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not that large in it's first incarnation and within a few years it will probably become small enough to fit in many designer glasses.

TBH This article reads like blogspam to get views. Write something polemic, opinionated and devoid of content and wait for the bikeshedding to begin. Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's not so much that he looks like a dork, but that he looks like an asshole. The article hints at this when it says, "There's a reason that Saturday Night Live put a Bluetooth headset on Jason Sudeikis in its recurring 'Two A-Holes' sketches." Dorks are cool now. Assholes, not so much.</comment>


Company Sues Kickstarter Over 3D Printer Patent, Maligns 'Hackers And Makers' - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121121/14111021117/company-sues-kickstarter-over-3d-printer-patent-maligns-hackers-makers.shtml

<comment><USER2> Earlier post linking to a better source: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818006></comment>


Ask HN: How did you pick your focus in Computer Science? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently a Junior at a University majoring in Computer Science. The upcoming spring semester will be my last of required CS classes and I'll be able to take from a wide range of 400 level classes of ranging topics that look interesting but I'm not even sure where to start. None really jump out over others to me and I'm not sure the overall benefits of taking 'Graphics' over 'Compilers' or if I'd be stupid to not take both.
So, for others that were in this situation or a similar situation in choosing a career or came to a fork in your education:
How did you pick your focus in Computer Science?
More about me if interested:
I started getting interested in Computer Science my senior year of H.S. (~3 years ago) through a Micro-computer Projects elective and my freshman year of College I decided to go Computer Science and switch out if I didn't like it. Well... I ended up liking it a lot and have breezed through the CS classes thus far just out of pure interest of what I'm learning from various data structures to CPU design to Operating System design concepts. Distributed systems recently sparked my interest while learning about program concurrency.
It is absolutely intriguing and humbling to me how CS can impact any field it's applied to. On that note I also have an internship doing Java development/management of a Desktop (with GIS capabilities) and Android App for the USDA building software which takes several field conditions (soil, climate, nutrients, etc.) and evaluates the field to optimize nitrogen application to conserve the land and maximize crop yield. We are currently in 4 individual states, and also in Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, and Puerto Rico. I love this job because I feel like I'm actually doing something and building a product that matters and is reaching people, but I'll eventually pass this along to the next intern and hopefully can move onto an even more impacting project.
~ Thanks for any insight and guidance. <comment><USER2> At the end of my first year I had to choose between Computer Science and Mathematics. I chose Mathematics because it seemed harder/more interesting. I've spent my entire working life as a programmer, but I still think I made the correct choice, and my career is probably better off as a result.

So my advice is to pick the area that seems most interesting, rather than worrying about any future applicability.

On the more practical side, don't bother with easy courses (they're a waste of your limited university time, you can learn easy things by yourself later), and pay attention to who's teaching them - a good prof makes a lot more difference than the actual subject matter. Students in higher years will almost certainly be happy to share their views - talk to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your insight. I realized many of the profs I took in my intro classes also usually teach a 400 level class and this will certainly help me decide what to take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I cannot guarantee that my advice is the best, because I'm a mathematician, and not a computer scientist, but my own experience might be helpful nonetheless.

I had originally decided to become a mathematician because I read "Jurassic Park" for an English class, and was intrigued enough by "chaos theory" that I looked into it, and discovered what mathematical culture was like, and decided that I liked it very much. When I started college, I declared myself a double major: Mathematics/Computer Science--but reduced the Computer Science part to a minor, when I decided that it wasn't mathematical enough to my liking.

Since then, I went on to get my PhD in math, and then decided that I'm not all that interested in teaching, so I've been working with computers since then. More recently, I've discovered Lisp and Haskell, but I have been finding it difficult to find the time to get through the "classics" like "Let Over Lambda", "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good", "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol", "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", and "On Lisp".

Do I wish I could have gone through these things while I was a Computer Science minor? Yes, I certainly wish so: these systems are almost pure mathematics! Having said that, I'm not too disappointed that I didn't go through the program. I spent a three-year hiatus between my first and second year of college, and between that time, there was a shift from C++ to Java as the core Curriculum Language; even before that shift, however, I don't think my school was enlightened enough to pursue Lisp properly in its higher-level courses. My only regret with my educational path, though, was that I didn't get a chance to take the second semester of "Computer Architecture"--thus, I took the class that taught me how to construct computer gates (and a couple of other things--like "flip-flops", if I recall correctly), missed out on the semester that discussed creating memory, arithmetic units, and so forth.

Oh, I would add, be wary of the grad school route: I do not regret going that route to learn the math I did, and I met my wife in the process, but I really wish I could have created a startup when I was younger! Having said that, I _really_ wish I could make use of my mathematical knowledge somehow, right now, to start something...but the catch-22 is this: had I not gone through to get my Doctorate, I wouldn't have the mathematical background that I would like to use to do interesting things...</comment>


Please, for your reader's sake, spend 30 mins making these changes to your blog - <AUTHOR> https://www.shanerostad.com/blog/how-to-design-a-blog <comment><USER2> "The worst offense I see around the web is super tiny font sizes."

Yes! So much so that I've been forcing 16pt DejaVu for everything for years and it makes the web so much nicer that it is worth the annoyance of working around sites that it breaks. Every time I use a default profile browser I cringe at how small most text on the web is. I would use pt rather than px but I guess it doesn't matter in CSS (and em/rem when possible as your link suggests).

I don't mind wide text that much, but I agree it is usually better to limit the width. Similarly, your image suggestions seem like good defaults. It would be great if more people followed most of these suggestions.

The one I really disagree with is featured image being a must. There are way too many useless images on the top of posts (and sometimes inside posts also) just for the sake of having an image. My local newspaper is the worst at this, where I often look at several stories a day with the same (sometimes misleading) stock image, but lots of blog posts do the same thing (including this one). Wost is like this one where the useless large stock image is in the blog header.

I would also add no popups or fixed headers or footers. Don't pop up share icons anywhere (this page provides a good example why not :(). Just leave the share icons at the bottom. Follower side bars are often annoying (particularly when they have share icons) but occasionally useful and at least don't obstruct anything on a larger display.

<comment><USER3> I think it is good that you can set your own preference for font size rather than that being defined by the webpage designer; my own preference is much smaller than 16pt. I also dislike the narrow page width, and prefer it to fill the window; it should be the user's job to set their own preferences (there are browser extensions to apply your own CSS to webpages; I use this to alter the styles of many webpages, including even Hacker News).

I generally design webpages with no CSS at all (and no scripts either); it can use whatever preferences the user has set in the browser configuration, instead.

I agree there are too many useless images. I say: do not include any images at all unless it is a major part of the article. Stock images are not helpful. (Again, I sometimes use CSS to suppress them.)

I agree with you no popups, no fixed headers/footers/sidebars, no popup share icons. (Many kinds of share icons should be outside of the scope of the document anyways; you do not need to include them at all. The user can use a browser extension or bookmarklet or something to do sharing if wanted. Anyways, the document author does not necessarily know what the user wants to share, with whom, and how.)

<comment><USER2> I agree share icons (at least for off site sharing) shouldn't really exist at all in web pages, although I think it would be a good idea for browsers to have a share function integrated so that you could add a new share option similar to how new search options can be easily added with one click. At least one of the many benefits of the blocking I use is no share icons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just because there might be bloggers out there reading this looking to improve things - SHOW ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATES! This is especially critical for tech blogs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the user's own settings should be used, and they don't need to worry about that. If you want it wide or less wide, to resize the window. Many webpages use CSS and often I have to correct them by applying my own CSS on my side, but some webpages do not use CSS and they are usually OK without needing any CSS added. And yet, often just plain text is OK you do not even need HTML.

<comment><USER2> Not all content is the same an it is annoying to keep resizing windows (which is why I use the ratpoison window manager). I wish it was easier for the user to indicate with preferences, but I'm not sure if there is a good way to do that right now.

I agree plain text can be fine, but page width has also been an issue with plain text for a long time :/. Although 38 character width works well most of the time IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is how I see things. As a user, I don't want to have to set custom specifications for my browser (especially since a lot of sites will break them).

I just want a site to look good as a _baseline_, and then I can resize / adjust if I really need to.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is WebAssembly the next big thing? Is it worth investing in learning? - <AUTHOR> I know very little about WebAssembly and I trust the opinions of most on HN.
Do you think WebAssembly is the next major internet development disruptor? Why or why not?
Do you personally see asymmetric gains for investing in learning it while its young? <comment><USER2> It probably depends on what you're interested in working on.

My guess is that there will be a 5-year period of explosion in a) compilers for existing languages; b) frameworks for working with the DOM and other web APIs in said languages; and c) a few new languages built on top of it. Then there will be a few more years of transition where the winners and losers among all these new tools gradually sort out.

And then we'll all go back to developing in higher level languages and compiling down - you'll just have more options besides JavaScript, typescript, and coffeescript, basically. A few jobs will remain that involve tuning compilation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I always saw it as a compile target for higher level languages.

As in, unless you're interested in working on compilers or web applications that need low-level optimizations on the client-side despite existing WebAssembly compilers, you won't need to "learn" WebAssembly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I gotcha. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> WebAssembly is an awesome technology and I'm super excited about it, but IMHO it's probably best to assume you don't need it unless you can convince yourself otherwise.

That said, here are a few examples of where it shines (warning: shameless plugs incoming):

\- In data analysis apps, you can replace slow JavaScript calculations with WebAssembly and see significant speedups--I wrote this case study on my experience with that: [https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/04/webassembly- speed-w...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/04/webassembly-speed-web- app/)

\- It's super helpful in porting games from languages like C/C++ to the web without having to rewrite the game from scratch. Here's a post I wrote about how to port a game like Asteroids to the web: [https://medium.com/@robaboukhalil/porting-games-to-the- web-w...](https://medium.com/@robaboukhalil/porting-games-to-the-web-with- webassembly-70d598e1a3ec?source=friends_link&sk=20c835664031227eae5690b8a12514f0)

\- WebAssembly is really good for building playgrounds out of command line tools. Here's how I built one for the jq CLI: [https://opensource.com/article/19/4/command-line- playgrounds...](https://opensource.com/article/19/4/command-line-playgrounds- webassembly), the benefit being more secure than hosting it on the backend + much faster runtime

\- I'm also excited to see how WebAssembly will impact work outside the browser: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/standardizing-wasi-a- webas...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/standardizing-wasi-a-webassembly- system-interface/), especially with Function-as-a-service offerings that support Wasm like Cloudflare/Fastly workers, where the benefit is that I can write my function in any language + the time to initialize the function could be much faster

Another shameless plug: if you want a practical intro to WebAssembly, I self- published a book about it recently: [http://levelupwasm.com/](http://levelupwasm.com/)!

</comment><comment><USER5> Next big thing? Probably not. Next big things are usually innovations that open up areas to computerization that had previously been resistant to computerization. The GUI opened up all the users who couldn't memorize hundreds of command-line commands; the Internet opened up distribution and let software publishers bypass the retail distribution chain entirely, and also SaaS billing & delivery that creates markets where transaction costs would previously have made them impractical; mobile opened up situations where users couldn't physically have a laptop or desktop computer with them; blockchain opens up trust & exchange of value; neural nets open up classification, extraction, and generation tasks of unstructured speech or video data. The reason these are so highly valued is because they open up whole new markets to computing, ones that could support potentially billion-dollar businesses.

It's like a decent technological investment, though, one that could support a long-term career if you're interested in compilers or language tools. The trend long-term is away from Javascript as the sole language of the web, and WebAssembly is also finding its way into other platforms (eg. EOS) in the crypto & SaaS spaces.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh okay, that's really informative. So is the idea that you send compiled binaries to the client to run in xlangs runtime?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's useful for any platform that wants to run third-party code in a remote sandbox. That includes cryptocurrency platforms that run arbitrary code as part of the mining process; PaaS or FaaS ("serverless") offerings that handle the scalability aspects of running your code while letting you supply the business logic; or other runtimes yet to be developed. It's handy for these platforms because it lets users write their code in any language with a WebAssembly backend without being locked into a specific language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Been following along with WebAssembly (wasm) for a while, mainly from a Go perspective.

WebAssembly looks like it'll be a major thing, but from the Go side it's still not really ready for production usage:

1\. Generated binaries (by mainline Go) are still too large.

There's no good dead code elimination (my wording, it's actually a bit more than that) in generated Wasm, so the binaries are still MB instead of kB. :/

eg "Hello world" in Go is about 2MB, as it embeds pretty much the entire Go runtime instead of stripping it down to just the println() equivalent code.

These large binaries do compress ok (eg 2MB -> to 500kB), but still, that's pretty big.

2\. There is an alternative Go compiler (TinyGo: [http://tinygo.org](http://tinygo.org)) that generates much smaller binaries (eg 2kB), but it doesn't yet support all of the Go spec. When it's coverage is wide enough to generate Real World useful webasssembly, that should see a large increase in Gophers creating Wasm things. :)

3\. Wasm doesn't yet have a good debugging story. eg no support yet for being able to breakpoint a wasm binary, step through it in an IDE, etc.

There's an official "WebAssembly Debugging" Subgroup putting time into adding the needed support to the spec:

[https://github.com/WebAssembly/debugging](https://github.com/WebAssembly/debugging)

Yury Delendik seems to be the main person doing the work:

[https://yurydelendik.github.io/webassembly- dwarf/](https://yurydelendik.github.io/webassembly-dwarf/)

\--

If there are Go people around interested in WebAssembly, the #webassembly and #tinygo channels on the Go Slack are fairly active, with lots of development co-ordinated there. :)

[https://gophers.slack.com](https://gophers.slack.com)

\--

The WebAssembly page on the Go wiki has useful info too: :)

[https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WebAssembly](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WebAssembly)

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're interested in Rust or Go, learn rust and go... if you want to use them with WASM in browser (for now) or out of browser with an existing runtime, then there's room to learn that too. All the same, best to just learn a language that already has decent WASM support first, and go from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I'm definitely interested in Rust! How is rust binary sent to an arbitrary computer and executed? I thought rust binaries are platform specific and would require compiling on the clients OS.

<comment><USER7> Wasm is a compile Target... You run wasm in browser or if it's for a server, there are wasm runtimes out of browser.

If you start with some Google Foo, you should be able to get your feet wet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No threads. no deal. There are also concerns about the ability to unwind the stack for non-local exits in manners that satisfy some languages' specification.

Our compiler is ready to target WebAssembly, but we can't run anything useful on it without those two.</comment>


Show HN: Kvrocks – High Performance SSD Redis which supports replication and HA - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/meitu/kvrocks <comment><USER2> What's the use case for async replication: backup? failover? read-slaves?

I would be good to have a summary of unsupported groups of commands/options rather than have to scroll through a long list for x's.

What's the command execution model? Is it equivalent to a single thread? E.g. do requests overlap in an externally visible way?

</comment><comment><USER3> Just out of curiosity.

If you are running off of SSD, why Redis? Why not use FoundationDB on multiple fast nodes? That way you get ACID transactions..

<comment><AUTHOR> the intention of kvrocks is to replace the function of Redis in some scenes, to scale the capability and cost of memory compared to Redis. and our company severe using the Redis in production, so it's a good choice to compatible with Redis protocol. we are also focusing on how to do the distribution now.</comment></comment>


Congress Pushes Bills To Promote Cybersecurity - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2011/12/09/143462911/congress-pushes-bills-to-promote-cybersecurity

<comment><USER2> Please don't editorialize the title of the HN submission. If you listened to the story, you'd find that they talk to a few different people with differing opinions, including someone from the Tor project who seems to have mixed feelings about it, and is generally pretty informative. Their headline is somewhat misleading, if this is actually about SOPA, but your headline is just as bad.

 _edit_

Is this actually about SOPA? This is the bill discussed:

[http://intelligence.house.gov/bill/cyber-intelligence- sharin...](http://intelligence.house.gov/bill/cyber-intelligence-sharing-and- protection-act-2011)

</comment><comment><USER3> The actual audio piece doesn't mention SOPA/PIPA or pirates, best I could tell. It was about a cybersecurity data sharing bill and even gave the Tor Project the last word.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this show that they hiding/massaging the actual name?</comment>


Vancouver has more entrepreneurs per capita than any cities in North America - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenetworkhub.ca/vancouver/2011/03/21/vancouver-entrepreneur-meetup-expect/

<comment><USER2> I live in Whistler, BC and I'm Canadian, so please don't take this as being super negative towards Vancouver, but this seems like the other 72% of statistics which are made up on the spot.

How can Vancouver have more entrepreneurs per capita than Palo Alto? Menlo Park or most other Silicon Valley cities?

I'm curious also as to what they are qualifying as an 'entrepreneur'.

But really, isn't the most important statistic which city has the most successful entrepreneurs? and why?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about this Android app? - <AUTHOR> I am the developer of the Medical ID app on Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.medicalid.free
What do you think about this app? I am looking for honest feedbacks and idea to improve it.
Any comment is welcome ;) <comment> n-gauge Great idea! The only thing I could think of adding, is when you last took your drugs, you could have some sort of button you press on the lock screen and a tick list.

Going further you could have a progress bar next to each drug which slowly goes down depending on when you should take it next .

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you n-gauge. Your idea is really interesting. I will try to consider it for next versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The app seems to require some permissions that seem, at least to me, a bit orthogonal to the primary function and perhaps are at odds with the user's intent.

If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Though the engagement with mobile apps tends to be lower. 'Show HN' guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> If I understand, you suggest a better onboarding which explains what is the purpose of the app and why and how permissions are used?

Thank you for the hint about "Show HN", I was not aware of it. I will probably give a try.

<comment><USER2> I was wondering why the app needs access to my all contacts and usb storage and requires full network access.

<comment><AUTHOR> Read contacts permission is for enabling emergency contacts auto completion. Usb storage is for saving image photos. Network access is for Crash reports and fetching first aids techniques Web page content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Android already natively has a similar feature (at least in the last versions, not sure about kitkat and lower). So how does this app improve on that ?

<comment><AUTHOR> What I have seen until now on Android is limited to a list of contacts to call in case of emergency. Furthermore, this last is not always trivial to access.

The app I have developed aims to go further. First, its availability on the lock screen is clear. You don't have to look for a tiny icon on top left/right side. Besides, it allows to create multiple profiles, which is useful if you have for instance young children.

For each profile, you can specify, emergency contacts but also the blood type of the person, its/her height, weight, allergies, medical conditions and any other information you may consider vital.

In addition, the app provides some utilities that allow to display your location (address, GPS coordinates, altitude), find nearby hospitals, send an SMS alert (e.g. if you are not able to speak in case of emergency).</comment></comment>


Autism symptoms reduced nearly 50 percent two years after fecal transplant - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190409093725.htm <comment><USER2> A completely open study. The parents, students and evaluators knew people were getting the actual treatment. No control group and no blinding at all

The study authors themselves acknowledge the placebo effect although they naturally minimized the effect on the results.

<comment><USER3> 50% reduction, even if placebo, is really good! Is there a better placebo on the market currently?

<comment><USER2> If a placebo works as well as the trial treatment then you can conclude the trial treatment is ineffective. You can't conclude anything about the placebo. The definition of a placebo is a substance or treatment with no medical action.

Well you could also conclude that you picked the wrong placebo since perhaps it's not an ineffective substance or treatment. This is the issue with acupuncture studies - turns out placebo treatments actually have an effect so you can't use the results of those studies in any substantive way.

This autism could be working the same way - just the fact that someone is caring about your child can cause a ripple effect that improves the child's behavior or influences the parents and/or evaluators evaluation of the child's behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >He discovered that three months of daily FMT was required to treat his autism patients,

That's quite the catch

<comment><USER5> Getting something shoved up your butt every day until expected results emerge, resulting in you behaving the way they want you to.

Sounds like false admissions through water boarding, or gay conversion therapy to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That gut brain axis is going to usher in a new wave of treatments for mental health issues we can't even imagine yet.</comment>


Peppermint: Desktop Linux for the cloud generation - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/peppermint-desktop-linux-for-the-cloud-generation/

<comment><USER2> I think it's neat that people have been working on projects like this. It's good to play around with things and make your own thing...

That said, I think that if you're doing all the work to create and "market" your own distro (even if it's largely built on Ubuntu), you should have some kind of problem it solves. Mint, another popular Ubuntu-based distro started as a solution to the deprecation of Gnome 2. Not for me, but it solved a problem. I'm just not sure whose problems Peppermint solves.

Most people who only need a glorified web-browser box (grandparents and older parents, for example) are better off with something that hand-holds a bit more, like Chromium OS or ChromeOS, where you get "apps" using an app-store like interface.

On the other hand, people who are more savvy and don't need the hand-holding typically don't get as much utility from web-based solutions. And if they do use some online services for certain things (like word processing), most are comfortable just using something like the Chrome Launcher and using a more mainstream distro. That's the tack that I take, and it works well for me.

To each his or her own, though. If this solves problems for the developer and other people like it and use, then I suppose my critique doesn't hold up. And if someone enjoys doing it, and even a few people use it, the more power to them. I just worry sometimes about the ever-greater fragmentation of the Linux desktop.</comment>


How to be a Hacker? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to understand how Hackers actually operate when they are breaking through boundaries.
What is the actual process that makes them see beyond and how do they proceed to bring forward something new? <comment><AUTHOR> 1) The starting point is always the observation of anomalies in an existing system or pattern. 2) You reason on those anomalies in your head, alone. 3) You come up with a possible response, alone. 4) You visualize in your head how this response would actually works. This should be practiced until you see it working smoothly from beginning to end. You do this alone. 5) Finally you set to work in order to bring this response into our physical world. Either alone or in a group-work</comment>


Google Fiber: 151Mbps down / 92Mbps up - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/google-fiber-shows-its-potential-with-151mbps-download-speeds-20110823/

<comment><USER2> _The obvious question now is, if Google can do this, why aren't network operators banging down the company's door to get involved and roll this out everywhere. Yes, there's big investment involved, but these companies are kidding themselves if they think waiting and dealing with a lack of bandwidth in the future is going to work for them. Whoever jumps first and starts investing in these fiber-to-the-home initiatives is going to be rewarded with a lot of new customers in years to come._

They don't need Google to do it. FTTH/G-PON solutions are available to any ISP in the country and have been for several years. They haven't done it yet (besides Verizon FIOS who provisions at much lower speeds) because the demand really isn't there yet. Most customers do not pay more for faster speeds even when they are available. You've got a lot more customers who downgrade to _slower_ speeds to save money than customers who pay more for faster speeds. More competition would certainly help but until you can convince normal people they actually need faster Internet connections it's not much of a competitive advantage. (as long as you can match or slightly exceed your competitors)

Once you hit about 20Mbit/5Mbit faster speeds are almost completely unnoticeable by most people who are just doing some normal browsing, IP video, e-mail, FaceBook, etc. That's what most people are using their Internet connections for these days. We really need a killer app that pushes the limits of most Internet connections and you'll see more companies betting on (expensive) upgrades to deliver those speeds. I don't see much on the horizon. You can already do pretty decent 1080P video at 10-20Mbit/sec. What type of apps are going to push the demand?

<comment><USER3> How about just convincing Verizon to sell the higher speeds to those who want them, at a higher price? The hardware's there, but their most expensive FiOS business connections are far short of Google's numbers.

<comment><USER2> Verizon does offer up to 150Mbit/35Mbit for their business packages. They probably don't see a market for it on the residential side. CableVision, Comcast, TWC, etc do offer 100Mbit+ connections for residential use in some limited markets. From what I've head they are not big sellers. (less than 1% of customers upgrade) That has probably slowed down wider deployment.

<comment><USER4> Over here in Helsinki, Finland there's a cable operator that offers connections that go up to 200/10Mbit (54,90€/month) and one of the biggest ISPs is putting together a 1000Mbit residential connection trial (they already offer 100/10Mbit fibre connections).

I think the demand is there if the pricing is decent.

<comment><USER5> I don't know if I'd call $80 reasonable. I pay $35 for my 25/5 with FIOS and am very happy with what I get and wouldn't pay more just for fast speeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me, the 5ms ping is the most impressive part. I might not use 100Mbps on a daily basis, but the low latency is nice all the time.

Edited for clarity.

<comment><USER7> A lower bound for latency to the 'other side of the earth':

(20 000 km) / the speed of light = 66.712819 milliseconds

[http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...](http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=A+lower+bound+for+latency+to+the+other+side+of+the+earth%3A\(20000+km\)+%2F+the+speed+of+light+%3D+0.066712819+milliseconds#sclient=psy&hl=da&source=hp&q=\(20000+km\)+%2F+the+speed+of+light+in+ms&pbx=1&oq=\(20000+km\)+%2F+the+speed+of+light+in+ms&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=9481l10628l0l10691l7l4l0l0l0l0l218l638l1.2.1l4l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=e829e03d004bbee2&biw=815&bih=702)

<comment><USER8> Since we're talking hypothetically, the lower boundary would really be the diameter of Earth.

        12,756.2 km / c = 42.5501031 ms

[http://www.google.com/search?q=diameter+of+earth+%2F+the+spe...](http://www.google.com/search?q=diameter+of+earth+%2F+the+speed+of+light+in+ms)

<comment><USER9> not with a molton core, unless I misunderstood you...

<comment><USER10> Fiber optic cables may not be able to penetrate the molten core of the Earth, but there is no law of physics that prevents information from traveling through the core of the Earth. Compare this to the speed of light, which is an absolute upper bound on how quickly information can propagate. There is simply no way, in this Universe, to do better than the straight-line distance through the center of the Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These 151/92 Mbps numbers are almost certainly flawed results because speedtest.net is a _very poor_ tool to measure high-bandwidth connections.

Let me show you why.

I was in Tokyo in August 2009 at my sister's house. She had 100Mbit/s to the internet. I could easily reach close to the maximum theoretical bandwidth by downloading multiple kernel images from jp.kernel.org, at 95+ Mbps. However speedtest.net would only give me download speeds of 50-60 Mbps. My system was running Linux, so I ran top, and saw speedtest.net's Flash app (npviewer.bin) at 100% CPU... it was being bottlenecked by the CPU! It was an old Pentium 3 1.2GHz, but still. Even a modern 2-3GHz CPU core is only about 3x-4x faster.

Bottom line, speedtest.net, due to the _high overhead of the Flash VM_ , is a very poor choice to benchmark high network speeds, as it is CPU-constrained at about 150-200Mbps even on a modern CPU, which is exactly the number reported by this Google fiber user. I am shocked that no one knows this.

<comment><USER12> Sorry but I'm having a hard time believing that any modern CPU would only be 3-4x faster than a Pentium 3 1.2GHz. Just generally looking at the difference between levels of modern processors in something like 3D mark vantage [http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/desktop-cpu- charts-2010...](http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/desktop-cpu- charts-2010/3DMark-Vantage-High,2418.html) shows massive performance differences.

If I'm missing something obvious here let me know

<comment><USER13> The flash app is probably only running in one thread and therefore only one core without any hyperthreading and doesn't take advantage of modern vectorized instructions. Moving from 1.2 GHz to 3.6GHz will give you a 3 times speedup. So sounds about right.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Speedtest.net does not take advantage of the multiple CPU cores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cologne, one of the bigger/biggest German cities, has a provider that tries to give fiber to every household. You can get a 100 MBit plan from them (not sure about the upstream right now. Probably much less, maybe 10?).

The call it the most modern network in Europe (are they? No clue), market it as CitynetCologne. It's affordable and available for a good part of 1.000.000 people.

Is Google Fiber really big news? And - tin foil hat on - would you want Google to be your ISP..?

<comment><USER15> If I had a choice between Google and Comcast?

Yeah I'd take Google.

<comment><USER14> You're arguing service (I guess. I've no clue about Comcast).

I'm arguing that your ISP knows _everything_ about you, unless you are really making sure that you're using encryption everywhere.

Now - you'd opt in for a plan that gives you great access to the network where all traffic is handled by the company that stores everything forever and ever and already owns most of your online activities? Really?

Maybe I'm _seriously_ paranoid, but I'd never fall for that. Free, like in the article? Maybe. With precautions. But that won't last forever, so they will be announcing a plan. And at that point I cannot imagine supporting G anymore. You're feeding the beast..

<comment><USER16> Google is not going to look at your traffic, because if they did they'd be hit with something ten times worse than the street view fiasco.

<comment><USER17> Your ISP likely looks at your traffic. What makes you think Google will not?

<comment><USER18> Unless you live in a country with basically no privacy laws your ISP will almost certainly not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why is the up speed so much slower than the down speed? I thought that fiber was symmetric by design. Is google throttling?

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm wary of speedtest.net's results. Comcast operates a speedtest server nearby, and it consistently reports exactly 20Mbps/4Mbps, which (no surprise here) is exactly the service I pay for. Another nearby server, not operated by Comcast, hovers around 12-13Mbps/1-2Mbps, which I suspect is the reality of my connection.

<comment><USER21> That may not be completely inaccurate, if the bottleneck is on the link leaving comcast. You get your full bandwidth for internal network stuff, but get less once you leave the internal network. So, technically, you are getting what you pay for, even if that is meaningless.

That said, I've often wondered if Qwest (my provider) prioritizes packets for speed tests.

<comment><USER22> That's funny, I've usually had the opposite experience with Qwest (in Seattle): inconsistent results in speed tests, but very consistently good download times for large files. Tis strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The 151mbs down might be a limitation of speedtest.net and not google's fiber.

Speedtest's minimum requirement for a test server is 100mbs.

<comment><USER24> No, I can get 400 from speedtest.net occasionally. I get inconsistent results sometimes though: (300mb/200mb on the first one)

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447015910.png>

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447014970.png>

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447013001.png>

<comment><USER23> Nice that refutes my point. I was basing it on this link <http://speedtest.net/support.php> under "What are the requirements to be a testing host".

Edit: But now I noticed that they follow it up with "[in some countries] we are now requiring gigabit connectivity."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what kind of router they put in at the home. I doubt your standard Linksys WiFi router will be able to cope at that speed.

<comment><USER26> <http://routerboard.com/RB750GL> current retail is $59.95, I am sure they would make Google a deal ...

Actually there are many single-chip, 4x Gigabit ethernet solutions on the market. These do wire-speed gbit "in hardware" as it were.

<comment><USER16> According to the very page you linked its maximum _routing_ throughput is 631 Mbps which is respectable but hardly wire-speed.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. I have a Soekris router with a gigabit card, but the best it can do is around 400Mbps. Packet filtering and NAT require some computation, and 1Gbps is a lot of data.

Then again, I can actually use Bittorrent without having to reboot the router :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It seems like giving all of the people in the test area Chromebooks would be a really great move by Google, because people would associate Chromebooks with "lightning-fast" once they advertised the two products together.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER28> Based on my month with a Chromebook, the only thing lightning-fast about it was its bootup. It was pretty choppy at rendering pages, while Chrome on my desktop was in fact lightning-fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You have to wonder at what point the speed test server itself becomes the bottleneck. I bet the connection is actually faster and I'd try running a few of these simultaneously to different locations.

<comment><USER16> The server is probably not a bottleneck; this test is actually quite slow compared to the Internet at the 'plex: [http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/03/29/how-fast-is- the-...](http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/03/29/how-fast-is-the-internet- at-google-mind-blowing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is not accurate. He is testing a server which is 50 miles away.

I use a 3G internet connection, location: Tunisia

Server: San Francisco: (6450 miles) Latency: 264ms. Down (0.37mbps) Up (0.32mbps)

Server: Tunisia: (50 miles) Latency: 133ms. Down (0.93mbps) Up (0.39mbps)

<comment><USER31> It does make a difference, but there's a very good chance a lot of traffic goes to nearby servers when you live in the bay area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I tried to read this article on a few occasions today, but all I get is an empty (what may be) OnSwipe page from both my iPhone and iPad. All I see is the TOC graphic in the corner and the gear at the bottom, neither of which go anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER33> Unfortunately Google Fiber at Stanford does not allow torrenting.

<comment><USER16> No offense, but [citation needed]. After all their net neutrality lobbying this would be hard to imagine.

<comment><USER33> I have a friend who lives at Stanford, where his mother is a professor. After he torrented some legitimate software (but used a Pirate Bay tracker), he was contacted by Stanford authorities. That was the first warning he received, he did not try to appeal the decision or break it again.

<comment><USER34> Stanford gives out automated warnings if you have a lot of torrent-y network activity (I got a few back in the day after downloading some linux distros), but as I recall they are only to notify students that if they are pirating music/movies/etc, they will be held accountable if someone from the RIAA or some other group contacts Stanford about it. If you're downloading legitimate software you shouldn't have anything to worry about (except for some occasional automated spam)

<comment><USER35> I'm not sure what my uni's stance on torrenting is, but it definitely has not stopped me from downloading over 1TB of... "legitimately vague" content <http://i.imgur.com/oQE4J.png>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> France fibre provider: <http://www.universfreebox.com/article13240.html>

Eat that google :P

</comment><comment><USER37> Not Google Fiber

Local ISP with fiber

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447021540.png>

<comment><USER38> The speed isn't there but that latency is to die for!

<comment><USER37> Well according to my ISP I have 8Mbs down and 4Mbs up ... or at least that is what they bill me for and yes the latency on my connection is good. I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can someone please explain the ISP to be Tata Communications in a US city? It is an Indian company. So is it because it owns some broadband company in US?

<comment><USER38> I've got a friend that have had to deal with Tata Communications in a UK datacenter and he said they were the absolute worst company to deal with.

Comcast has a link with Tata Communications that it apparently runs at a 100% capacity day in day out ... there was a story about it not too long ago.

<comment><USER16> _Comcast has a link with Tata Communications that it apparently runs at a 100% capacity day in day out_

<http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15911.html>

To be clear, that is Comcast's fault because they're too cheap to buy more bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Ahh Speedtest.

Running a speedtest and reporting the results is akin to running a ApacheBench on your index.html, recording how fast it goes, then telling everyone your PHP server can serve pages that fast.

Speedtest by default finds a local server, which is almost always delivered over local uncontended peering. Of course you're going to see great results, you might as well be testing to a Speedtest server plugged into your LAN.

Run speedtests to ~10 sites around the country and a few around the globe and report those figures.

<comment><USER41> But that's not what they want to measure. All they want to know is the speed of the local link, and speedtest measures that.

It's not everything you need to know, but it does provide the desired measurement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> And people say that Google are competing with Facebook. Give it 20 years and see ...

</comment><comment><USER43> Who do I have to kill for this?

</comment><comment><USER44> Will this extend to the greater Palo Alto area?

<comment><USER16> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> can anybody explain how is Google able to do this or point to an explanation of it?

<comment><USER16> Gigabit FTTH is not technically difficult; it's just expensive to install. Google is supposed to be working on some secret sauce to make it cheaper, but they haven't revealed anything yet.

<comment><USER37> How is Gigabit FTTH different from ordinary FTTH ? Is it the fiber itself or the equipment on the endpoints ?

<comment><USER16> I guess these days FTTH is all Gigabit, but I remember a few years back when some companies were talking about 100 Mbps FTTH; that's nearly pointless now that cable can deliver that speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Cross site poll: What would you pay to get something like Google Fiber?

[http://www.wepolls.com/p/2028308/How-much-would-you-pay- for-...](http://www.wepolls.com/p/2028308/How-much-would-you-pay-for-Google- Fiber-with-150Mb/s-down,-92Mb/s-up,-and-5ms-ping)

<comment><USER47> I need to know more.

Right now (though without any contractual guarantees I'm aware of) Time Warner hands me via DHCP a publicly routable IPv4 address that doesn't change except during extended outages, which don't happen very often (the address stays the same through brief outages - less than an hour every month or so). Effectively, I can initiate a connection to my home machine. There are no explicit data caps, though if TWC were to start slowing things down after more thann 100Gbyte per month, I wouldn't know. Tomorrow I could find out that TWC has decided to use NAT'd private addresses and quenching at 40Gbytes, and I'd lose all that, with the only recourse being to use AT&T ADSL.

I haven't adopted use of any dependencies on high bandwidth - no internet backups, no TOR participation, yell at the kids when they torrent anything already available to them on Netflix.

TWC business class effectively guarantees the features which I'm getting but not paying for - for an extra $200/month. I would pay that if I were running a server for customers, but I'm not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Googles owns all your surfing.

</comment><comment><USER49> speedtest.net at WWDC download area was about 700Mbps down, so I am waiting for Apple Fiber )

<comment><USER50> Because Apple supplies fiber to Moscone Center, right? ;)</comment></comment>


Literate Emacs config - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/munen/emacs.d <comment><USER2> I appreciated this, it's well-commented and contains a few tips I didn't know about</comment>


Tell HN: Why I will Pirate 'Crossing The Chasm' . - <AUTHOR>

I have waited for months for Geoffery Moore's  classic book Crossing The Chasm  to be "available as in my country" .
Normally, changing my country to US will make the Kindle verson available to me.
So here I am, literally card in hand, unable to pay for a product that is available. I still cannot phantom the reason a Kindle book (a digital product) is available only in 'certain regions'.
So in 24 hours, if I do not find a way to pay for this book I will find a pirated copy.
I just hope this is not the beginning of a bad habbit. <comment><USER3> There are numerous such situations; it's a common pain point.

The problem with taking it as a business opportunity is that it usually results not from anyone wanting to "fill the gap" but rather from licensing conflicts.

There have been a few specific examples of companies profiting from this e.g. companies with roots in anime fansubbing who license material then port it to the US shortly after the Japanese broadcast and with higher standards of translation. However, these cases are very rare and usually hinge on the company's ability to negotiate with underserved rightsholders - <USER2> underserved end users.

</comment><comment><USER4> > I still cannot phantom the reason a Kindle book

That's one of the most interesting phonetic substitutions I've seen in a long time. (The expression is "cannot fathom the reason", BTW.)

<comment><USER5> Funny story, I am dyslexic and it took me close to 2 minutes to figure out why you where telling the author that what they wrote was wrong by writing the same thing that they did. 2 minutes to spot phantom/fathom in 4 words, it's going to be one of those days. I assume that English is a second languadge for the author, but I could easily make that same mistake, then choose a spell check word and never see it until someone pointed it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not dyslexic but wondered the same thing. It was until I saw your phantom/fathom comparison.

English is a first language but I think my poor spelling has stayed at the level it was in high school due to 'F7' and Google's 'did you mean....'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Email me your address and I'll send you one.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love HN. Thanks buddy! Emailed you.</comment></comment>


The Making of an Evil Genius - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hackensplat.com/2010/01/making-of-evil-genius.html <comment><AUTHOR> Or "How I learnt to attribute my own failings to others."</comment>


You're a Bad Programmer, Really? - <AUTHOR> http://codemonkeyism.com/bad-programmer/

<comment><USER2> This article is selling snake oil. He cites 3 major causes of failure in large projects: "wrong estimation", "wrong status updates", and "wrong way of change management". Then:

 _> You've guessed it, Scrum adresses all of these resulting in 99% – 100% on target delivery. So it's not due to bad programmers if an agile process can fix this._

At that moment I was tempted to perform a violent facepalm. He cites these issues as if a large project is just a five-person team sitting in a room failing basic communication. These aren't even straw men, they're more like paper dolls in a forest fire.

The obvious difficulty in managing >$10m projects is gathering and coordinating requirements, and distilling out from that workloads that can be implemented by individual programmers. This is a monumental problem. I'm guessing the majority of large projects never even come close to having an internally consistent spec without logical conflicts. The problem is that for software of this complexity it is impossible for any one person to have visibility into the whole scope of the project.

In order for projects of this scope to succeed what you need is several levels of extremely talented management with good technical sense in order to allow requirement conflicts to travel across team boundaries efficiently, and to make sure that the right domain experts can be brought into to correctly solve any conflicts that do come up.

To simply parrot the name of some agile methodology and then claim 99% success is an embarrassing display of ignorance for someone with ostensibly decades of experience.

<comment><USER3> Good points. There does seem to be a trend for articles to have a theme of: "X is bad, embrace it." (Although, a lot of the time this is simply intended as irony, it can still be misinterpreted by a reader.)

In my humble opinion, the positive take away of this article is rejecting that mantra and focusing on becoming better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the author missed the point of Richardson's article. It's not about just accepting that you're a "bad programmer" and calling it a day, it's about accepting your limitations and constantly trying to improve your abilities and the tools you use. I think both of these guys are arguing for the same thing - don't get complacent.

</comment><comment><USER5> I also read the original article as meaning that you should be humble about your skills and acknowledge to yourself that you might not be the rockstar developer your pretend you are. Less posturing and more knowledge that's what I want.

The only real wisdom is knowing you know nothing (Socrates)

</comment><comment><USER6> completetely missed the point of the original post, it looks like he just got insulted by its premise without reading it or at least figuring out what it was supposed to convey</comment>


Color Hunt – Color Palettes for Designers and Artists - <AUTHOR> https://colorhunt.co/ <comment><USER2> DO visit quadibloc's color page,

[http://www.quadibloc.com/other/colint.htm](http://www.quadibloc.com/other/colint.htm)

It is one of those pages that has been around forever and keeps getting better. I was glad to discover it years ago (it had a grey background then, how old does that make me?) and its intriguing re-organizations of the author's own 240 hue color wheel loosely based on the Munsell system,

[http://www.quadibloc.com/other/images/240ccf.gif](http://www.quadibloc.com/other/images/240ccf.gif)

that is a mighty fine hue base for a color picker. It embodies the author's human perception of color. For example -- compared to raw RGBspace, the massive area of green is relegated to a smaller area, and the small area of violet is expanded. Also the space between red/yellow is expansive enough that once you branch off these hues into tangents of lightness and saturation, you can pick better flesh tones, more vibrant pastels, and fewer 'muck-yuck' tones such as the ones you get most often when you poke randomly into RGB space.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to like these sites, but after doing a bit more design work I've realised they're never enough. You need a bunch of different shades for each colour, a set of neutrals, and set of complimentary colours too (and that's just the colours).

Give me a 30 colour generator then I might be interested

<comment><USER4> 30 may be out of range again, but your point is exactly right.

None of these color palette sites & service ever work for actual interface or brand design work. They encourage picking harmonic sets of 4-5 colors, which is only a secondary parameter when actually designing - you need contrast & workable combinations first and foremost, while you seldomly really want more than two different hues (unless you know what you're doing with them).

I consider offers like this a nice starting point, get an impression of different ranges. But even if I end up picking a set from there, I'll seldom be using all of the suggested colors in a set to build my palette.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not being difficult, but how is this different / better than the other similar sites?

I'm not seeing / feeling anything compelling. Is it because I'm in a small screen device?

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel comfortable with simplicity and minimality in the interface.

<comment><USER5> Well as one of the principals, you should ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These are the sites I use for colour combinations [https://color.adobe.com/create/color- wheel/](https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/) [https://color.review/](https://color.review/) [https://www.color- hex.com/color-palettes/popular.php](https://www.color-hex.com/color- palettes/popular.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> I used to use this site: [https://www.colourlovers.com/palettes](https://www.colourlovers.com/palettes) but I see it's become a bit bloated. It used to look more like colorhunt

</comment><comment><USER8> This would be much more useful with text shown using these as foreground/background colors.

</comment><comment><USER9> My favorite color hunting ground is the packaging in a good-sized supermarket.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are the palettes Free? I did not see a license, for instance under About.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is from About page: "Each palette is a public property and not owned by a specific creator, nor by Color Hunt."

<comment><USER2> The phrase,

"Each [object] is a public property and not owned by a specific creator, nor by [organization]"

is closely derived from my own original intellectual property and I will now proceed to sue Color Hunt for appropriating it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really?! Is it possible for you to provide any reference?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Invented at Duke, Financed in Beijing: Powerful Camera Shows China's AI Ambition - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-powerful-spy-camera-invented-at-duke-ended-up-in-chinas-hands-1528714895 <comment><USER2> > Mr. Brady, who remains Aqueti's biggest shareholder, said he has no qualms > about aiding China's surveillance system, which critics claim leads to > humans-rights abuses.

> _"A government doesn't need the hand of technology to be oppressive,"_ he > said.

<comment><USER3> Such a stupid argument. So you have two factors: X and Y that contribute to bad thing Z. Decreasing X (surveillance technology in this case) will decrease Z, even if Y (oppressive-minded government) remains the same. But his statement is aimed to occlude that obvious fact through sophistry.

I don't really need to point out the other obvious place where the same argument often gets used.

<comment><USER4> This exact argument is used by the Indian Government too when questioned about the very-real surveillance possibilities enabled by Aadhaar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ironically the thick air pollution seems to drastically impair the performance of their surveillance solution.

<comment><USER6> How is that ironic?

<comment><USER7> In the Alanis Morissette way, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "A government doesn't need the hand of technology to be oppressive," he > said.

I interpret that as meaning "They will do bad things with or without me". An interesting twist on the usual "I am not responsible for what my customers do with my product".

</comment><comment><USER9> I often wish security cameras in the US were more powerful. They're terrible at identifying useful information from a crime in progress: license plates, face and clothing... the important bits are always blurry.

<comment><USER10> Curious about the circumstances which cause you to often wish that.

<comment><USER9> Usually at parking spots outside businesses. Or parking areas in general - another friend's catalytic converter got stolen because he drives an SUV and the ground clearance allows for very easy cutting.

In both cases, the camera footage was utterly useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The worst mass deaths under Chinese Communism occurred during the huge famine of 1959-1961. About 50 million people died who shouldn't have died. Mass numbers of anything are hard to wrap our minds around, but essentially this was the Holocaust times 4.

I wish I could say Justice would be dispensed to the Western collaborators of totalitarian regimes, but both the Koch's and IBM sold extensively to the Nazi's, and only grew richer later.

<comment><USER12> It's Holocaust times 10: 4,5 million of Jews were died (6 millions if children are counted, children are not counted back then). But you may want to compare Chinese Famine with Holodomor: 7 millions of Ukrainians are killed using hunger by Stalin communists in USSR (30 millions if children are counted), so Chinese Famine is 6x larger.

<comment><USER13> The Nazis didn't just kill jews in the Holocaust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good quality general purpose video cameras + FPGAs to flatten and combine video.

<comment><USER15> ... and a very willing investor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The US is falling behind in allocating sufficient capital to develop technological advances. Thank God there are backups.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hedge funds will love this

</comment><comment><USER18> More propaganda backed by clickbait. Ban news sites please.

Here's a guideline: If different people write the story than the headlines ban the site.

</comment><comment><USER19> Paywall?

<comment><USER20> [http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how...](http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how- a-powerful-spy-camera-invented-at-duke-ended-up-in-chinas-hands-1528714895)

<comment><USER21> Can I suggest the alternative of [https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a- powerf...](https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-powerful-spy- camera-invented-at-duke-ended-up-in-chinas-hands-1528714895) ?</comment></comment></comment>


Ways Elon Musk's Bad Writing Habits Hurt Tesla's Performance - <AUTHOR> https://slab.com/blog/elon-musk-writing-mistakes/ <comment><USER2> The author provides no evidence that any of this actually hurt Tesla's performance.

For example:

      Overly optimistic forecasting creates normalization of deviance

Maybe, but perhaps it also pulled in deadlines overall. Would workers have worked as hard to ramp up production without those deadlines and pressure? Sure the forecasting misses may have resulted in a short term dip in the stock price, but that was likely worth it overall if it pulled in the delivery date substantially.</comment>


Boom! Google pays $1B for Yahoo Sunnyvale sites it bought from Verizon - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/24/boom-google-pays-1-billion-for-sunnyvale-sites-it-bought-from-verizon/ <comment><USER2> So how long until an annexation request for Googleopolis combining all these purchased parcels and becoming a city upon itself. That seems like a likely endgame here. Invokes a bit of a mix between a company town a mining operation might have, and a dystopian future.

<comment><USER3> Or maybe it's a utopian future. I'd love to see how cities could operate differently if designed from the ground up with lots of funds to get it right. I wouldn't be too worried for Googles who would choose to live there, since they wouldn't at all be economically trapped if they didn't like it.

<comment><USER4> Wasn't that the idea behind EPCOT?

<comment><USER5> Details about 10 min into this video: [https://youtu.be/sLCHg9mUBag](https://youtu.be/sLCHg9mUBag)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Remember when Yahoo turned down $1 million to buy Google ?

<comment><USER7> They would have run it into the ground. Maybe their search would have gotten a little better but Yahoo wouldn't be what Google is today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this going to drive up property prices in Sunnyvale? Amazon, FB, Google, LinkedIn/Mountain View, Apple are all in Sunnyvale. I heard that Uber is moving there as well.

<comment><USER9> Apple's mostly in Cupertino, including the spaceship.

These parcels are between 237 and the bay. There's no residences around there. A lot is former Lockheed land.

<comment><USER10> I was at Lockheed while they were selling off some of that land and the [then new] "Moffett Towers" were being constructed [constant, unavoidable pile- driving for years]. When the CEO was talking about such things as "cost savings in the coming year" it was clear that meant "reducing the land footprint in Sunnyvale" amongst other things such as layoffs at same. At the time I imagined which few, minimum buildings would remain if//when the trend continued.

The only "residence" there is the dump for the goats. For humans, it's just about 3 miles directly south on Mathilda Ave; I lived there for a couple years while I was at Lockheed.

<comment><USER11> It's so strange to drive up Mathilda and not see the Blue Cube or buildings 101-102 anymore.

<comment><USER10> I agree.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Karnataka state elections 2013 - Consolidated results in one csv - <AUTHOR>

Karnataka state elections 2013 - Consolidated results in one csv  (https://github.com/rghv/kar2013election-results/blob/master/Karnataka_2013_election_results.csv)
Wanted to go through the consolidated list of Karnataka (a state in India) 2013 legislative assembly election results, for a quick analysis of trends and patterns (number of votes, candidates etc). But could not find any such consolidated list. So wrote a small script to fetch the data from eciresults.ap.nic.in. Made it into a csv so that others could use too.
Source: https://github.com/rghv/kar2013election-results
Written in Python hence anyone could use and extend/modify as required. Code isn't pretty but does the job. <comment><AUTHOR> CSV: [https://github.com/rghv/kar2013election- results/blob/master/...](https://github.com/rghv/kar2013election- results/blob/master/Karnataka_2013_election_results.csv)

Source: <https://github.com/rghv/kar2013election-results>

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</comment><comment><USER2> Good work. Thank you</comment>


JSON Schema - the next standard for defining schemas. - <AUTHOR> http://json-schema.org <comment><USER2> Please don't let JSON go the way of XML, with namespaces and complexity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not meant to be this. It's there to validate data coming from an untrusted source to fit to your data model. The best usecase is a document database (like MongoDB, CouchDB) that uses JSON as data representation. The logic and validation has to be done somewhere and to have standardized way to define constraints is a good start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wrote this a long time ago: <http://github.com/igorgue/py2json>

A Python classes to JSON-Schema SMD translator.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even disregarding schema validation, I like that it defines standard JSON representations for vCards, events, addresses, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just another textual factoring of a data composition structure?</comment>