What's the worst job you've had outside technology? - <AUTHOR>

What's the 'worst' job you've had outside of technology, and did you enjoy it more or less than what you do now? <comment><USER2> Telephone survey taker. Much less. In fact, I hated it worse than being a nighttime post-event arena janitor.

Most people assume you're a telemarketer if you call them to do a survey, so they hang up. By policy, anyone who hung up had to be called back because we officially assumed their phone line spontaneously glitched. Anybody who said they weren't interested and hung up _before we clarified we were taking a survey_ had to be called back because we officially assumed they thought we were telemarketers. (They weren't called back right away, but put back in the hopper for future autodialing.) So I'm pretty sure my employer was evil. On top of that, one of our common survey techniques was to mail people a videotape with a terrible sitcom pilot on it, and then ask them about the ads we put on the videotape. On the initial setup call we act like we want them to review the sitcom, and they're like, "Sure, I like sitcoms!". I never saw the tape, but I was told the show itself was atrocious, and the technique was simply to get them to see the ad.

There were interesting parts (doing a survey for a bank, I spoke to a Texas millionaire who was more than happy to talk, in detail, about how much he hated Smith Barney, and made disparaging remarks about "yankee banks"; old lifelong female smokers whose gender I couldn't easily distinguish over the phone; drunk hockey fans upset at me for calling during the Stanley Cup Finals; being briefed on the proper pronunciation of California placenames for a political survey, and then listening to strong political opinions and suspicions of bias when in fact I knew little and cared less about the issue in the first place). I had fun using a pseudonym, met a girl at work, lost my virginity. As far as bad jobs go, it definitely had its good parts.

In any job where you have to deal with the public, you have a facade of fake niceness which overcomes you. You call everyone "sir" or "ma'am", talk calmly, try to sound like you're smiling. Well, I was working on Father's Day, and apparently some people _get really pissed off about being called on Father's Day_. Specifically this one guy, whose voice and tone and anger had exactly the right qualities--ironically, very similar to those of my _own_ father--to instantly piss me off. He started cussing me out, and instantly the calmness and patience wore off, with just enough left of my facade of fake niceness left to vigorously shout into the headset " _fuck you too, sir!_ " I was more or less fired on the spot for lacking the mellowness of my coworkers, who by and large smoked copious amounts of marijuana.

Epilogue: For the next couple weeks, I went into work with aforementioned girl every Friday to pick up my last paychecks. The managers seemed somewhat displeased about that.

Some time later, I got back in touch with the girl (who I had stopped seeing). The whole dialing system was routed through a computer, which also handled timekeeping and statistics and so forth, so if you took a break you'd log that on the computer. She told me someone found a bug in their computer system so you could actually take an indefinite paid break and no one would be the wiser. Shortly after that the call center went out of business.

</comment><comment><USER3> Working at the Baskin Robbins in the mall that was the scene of Dawn of the Dead.

Much, much less.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pay-wise, worst I ever had was my first job as a kitchen porter at a 'local' hotel. £1.60p/h and it was a 3 mile walk to get there (buses were once every 2 hours and 2hrs wages). I once did a 22hr shift with one half hour break when the other 2 KP's failed to show. Earned just over £20 after tax for that :) The minimum wage kicked in a year later and would nearly tripled my pay if I hadn't quit.

Worst otherwise: cardboard box production line. Worked on the gloriously named ZOR-D machine. It had a speed dial that went up to 21 but anything over 8 resulted in instant jamming. Of course the floor boss would always run over and turn it right up to prevent slacking. Cue 40 minutes unclogging machinery. Worst part though was washing your hands at breaks/end of day. You'd have thousands of tiny paper cuts and applying water would cause what we knew as 'involuntary fisting' (ooh er!). Your hands would clamp shut as the acids reacted.

I enjoyed both these jobs considerably less than my current work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Lots of interesting posts, and not exactly what I expected, so I thought I'd chime in with mine.

The only three non-tech jobs I've ever done were working as a dishwasher in a small Scottish hotel, driving taxis in my hometown, and selling cars in Houston Texas.

The kitchen porter job was my first job out of school, and was great money for university, maybe a few hundred dollars a week equivalent, and it turned out to be a great way of getting exposed to parties, booze and the attractive young women also working in the hotel, who were picked mainly for their looks. I did wait tables on weekends, but my main task was washing dishes and silverware, and cleaning the kitchen one the rest of the staff had gone home.

Driving taxis in my hometown was also a fun job, but with long hours and the risk of finding yourself many miles from home at 2am on any given morning. Since cell phones weren't that commonplace in 1989 or so, and the radios were quite short-range, there was scope for improvisation on fares and passengers, so you could be your own little company for short periods. The worst aspect of this job was fending off drunks and making people who knew the 'boss' actually hand over money.

Most recently, and probably the worst job was selling cars in the Texas heat. Still a lot of fun at times, with some interesting customers, with the worst aspect being the fact that dealerships use your honest face as a wedge for their lies about, well, everything. Wasn't too upset to see the back of that job.

Thanks again for all the responses. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Stand in front of a giant injection moulding machine and wait for the clamp to open up and the finish product would drop into a box.

of course, it never did, because the air blowers were broken, so every 30sec I had to open and manually remove the product (I think it was miniature plastic tree) from the clamp and close it, otherwise it would close with the product in it. Repeat this all day. Thats when I decided I hate routines.

The boss was my grandfather, and I couldn't say no to the job.

</comment><comment><USER6> I came to USA for my masters degree in Computer Engineering. Coming from a financially weak family, I had to work in my university's dining hall for my day to day expenses. There were variety of jobs in the Dining hall, one could be a Chef's assistant, a salad bar attendant, or cashier. The job I hated the most was that of dish washing, just because you don't have to use any brain, its a very mechanical job. Looking back at my career now, I think this is the worst job I ever had.

<comment><USER7> huh. I worked in a dining hall for a while, but only as cashier. I think I might have liked dishwasher, though, because my favorite non-programming jobs have all involved manual labor. Top 3: moving sound equipment, moving students' stuff in and out of temporary storage, and moving furniture into and out of dorms.

<comment><USER6> I am surprised with how you are surprised my _my_ preference. Well I guess its each man to his own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Scraping bird poo from the inside of large outdoor bird cages. While the birds scream and flap from above, I wear a rain jacket and scrap the cement floors with a putty knife. This was my first job and lowest paying job when I was 10. It was also only 3-4 hours a week.

Obviously, I like what I do now more than that job. But I am not currently working in tech.

</comment><comment><USER9> In my early twenties I worked as an entry-level property agent (realtor) in Hong Kong for a small-time agency. No minimum wage system exists so I got paid about US$650 per month and had to work 6 full days (right up until 7pm on Saturday nights). Job involved wearing a suit running around showing flats, meeting clients in 35 degree C heat and 99% humidity (no joke). In the office I had to cold call property owners and large companies to pitch our services. At slow times I stood on the sidewalk handing out flyers for properties. All the while having to swallow my pride in huge amounts when dealing with rude and unreasonable clients.

I enjoyed this much less than my current job and feel stupid for having fallen for the con of potentially lucrative commissions that never happened. Live and Learn I guess.

</comment><comment><USER10> I worked in a canteen kitchen at the dish-wash end. The diners would put their trays on a conveyer belt and we would scrape the leftovers into the waste disposal, sort the dishes, cutlery and glassware into their allotted crates which we then fed into the giant dishwasher. It was fast, frantic, filthy and hot work. Among the diners were bastards who made things difficult in interesting ways; I remember digging teaspoons out of elaborate mashed potato sculptures, and there was the time when some joker trapped a wasp in an upturned glass on their tray before handing it in to us.

I got on very well with my fellow workers there, though, many of whom did that for living, whereas I was just passing through, earning some cash as an undergraduate.

</comment><comment><USER11> I actually worked on a garbage truck for a couple a years in my early 20s. And not in a unionized situation where the weight was regulated. Lovely weather in upstate New York with bitterly cold winter more than offset by sweltering summers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Construction crew on a group building a golf course. One day my job was - literally - to walk around and pick up rocks and sticks and what-not. In the 98 degree heat and sweltering humidity of NC in the summertime... with no shade to be found. For not much more than minimum wage.

Outside of that, my dad was in the logging business when I was a kid, so I worked summers during high-school helping him cut down trees and load them onto a truck to haul to the paper mill. That was more being outside, doing hard physical labor, in NC, in the summertime. And I'm not even sure I got paid, now that I think about it... :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> My first job was working in the Pear Sheds... growing up in an agricultural area, the factories that would sort the pears coming off of the orchards would often hire HS students during peak season. Thankfully since I was underage I only had to work 60 hours/week (10 hours/day, 6 days/week), standing since we couldn't sit down, staring at a convener belt of pears going by and throwing the blemished/bad ones onto two other convener belts. F'ing monotonous, 7am to 6pm.

</comment><comment><USER14> I worked in a hospital's lab one summer. The three things I remember the most are counting sperm under the microscope (which smells really really bad), helping out with Pap smear analysis (which looks really really bad), and being the pee-on intern who, yep, gets first dibs in processing the urine samples as they come in (which smell really really bad).

Worst job? Yes and no. I went on to do a PhD in bacterial genetics.

</comment><comment><USER15> Being an assistant in a winter coats shop during summer holidays. I was 13 and it was my first job. I was bored all day because we never got any customers - this was in a seaside town and you can imagine that people do not tend to go buy winter coats during summer while they are going home from the day at the beach :)

<comment><USER16> That sounds like a great business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Working retail at cvs. For a given 8 hour shift on a saturday, I figured most of these people are coming in to relieve some kind of sickness. I can only imagine how many things I was exposed to.

Thinking about the job now, perhaps I came out of it all with a stronger immune system.

</comment><comment><USER18> Calling between 60 and 100 companies a day and asking why they haven't paid. I did that for three years while I saved up to go to college.

I'm a programmer so I'm unemployed and not doing anything now, apart from fiddling around with the Linux kernel which is much more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER19> Summer job working in a supermarket as a teenager. I actually preferred working the cash register to stocking the aisles. At least at the cash register you can have a little fun & try to rig the total bill. Most stupid job ever: turning apples so the red side points up.

</comment><comment><USER20> Industrial cleaning. Enjoyed it much less than what I do now.

<comment><USER20> Although car manufacturing (in a GM factory) was up there with worst jobs, but it paid well. You think repetitive strain injury in desk jobs is bad? Try putting the same screw in a car for 10 hours, for months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sanding dry wall. Oh so much less.

</comment><comment><USER22> Managed a fish market for a year. Was working 12 hour days cutting, smoking and preparing fish for customers. YOu'd get home and be so tired and used to the smell that you'd just go to sleep without a shower.

After a certain amount of sleep deprivation you start cutting yourself accidentally pretty often.

Every week we had to open up the counters and chop up the ice underneath because the drain was always clogged. The ice was usually yellow or red. We also had to periodically dump the giant bins of fish refuse and take out the trash to the street. We were pretty universally reviled because we stunk up the entire street.

If I did it now I probably would have gotten laid more, but I didn't then.

But I ate lobsters, blue marlin, and tuna with regularity. So it's not all bad (except that the fish contain potassium benzoate).

</comment><comment><USER23> The only job I've had outside of technology, I worked two summers on a neighbor's farm, age 12 and 13. Half of the day I would shovel chicken manure, the other half I would "bail" hay and straw. This process consisted of standing in a rickety wooden trailer, guiding bails into neat stacks with a big metal hook. The bails were about 40-60 lbs depending on how wet they were, and they flew at your head around 30-40 mph. If you're lucky the tractor driver is paying attention to your pace. If not you're picking up bails that just hit you in the head a moment ago.

I love working in technology.

</comment><comment><USER24> Warehouse stocking, nearly got pneumonia from working in a -20F freezer.</comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for a Xmarks replacement? - <AUTHOR>

So with Xmarks shutting down soon, I need a good solution to sync my bookmarks to replace Xmarks across computers/browsers. Chrome Bookmark sync doesn't work at all for me, and It's a pain to manually sync across browsers and devices.
Anybody have recommendation for a service (I'm ok with a paid service at a reasonable price) that has good plugins for chrome / firefox and allows me to tag my bookmarks and search them.
Historius? Delicious? etc.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Xmarks should work with a private server over WebDAV. You can register for a box.net account and get WebDAV access at box.net/dav. Of course, it is a short term solution. If nice folks at Xmarks decide to open source the code, this could work out be a long term solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been quite happy with Delicious and have used it for many years. Depending on how you use bookmarks, I would certainly suggest checking it out. I manage a large set of bookmarks between Delicious, StumbleUpon, Firefox's bookmarks, and Xmarks, and I am very pleased with the workflow of importing and tagging links in Delicious.

It's often overlooked, but remember that than even though Delicious is "social" bookmarking, you can set all your links to private. I use a combination of both public and private, but I also really value Delicious for discovering new content.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is the problem with Chrome bookmark sync?

For Firefox alone you can use Firefox Sync (previously Weave), it has worked great for me so far. [<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10868/>]

I don't know of any other usable cross-browser sync tools than xmarks.

<comment><USER3> > What is the problem with Chrome bookmark sync?

Well... [http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=68b132f5870a3cec&hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks like Xmarks may stay alive: <http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=1988>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone used Diigo?</comment>


Return Early, Return Often - <AUTHOR> https://jamesmonger.com/2019/08/06/return-early-return-often.html <comment><USER2> That whole function could be rewritten to just the following one-liner, no?

return !!(getEmployee(id) || getManager(id) || getAdmin(id));</comment>


Personalized deep learning equips robots for autism therapy - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2018/personalized-deep-learning-equips-robots-autism-therapy-0627 <comment><USER2> Rosalind Picard was the inspiration for my kid's Intel Science Fair project: "Constructing an Anthropomophic Robotic Agent for Emotion Recognition and Generation"

<comment><USER3> Any links? This is very intriguing. I would love any elaboration if not. Also, congrats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The whole point of autism therapy is to get to a human connection and social interaction. Robots seem like iPads or video chat at best... I guess this is more about AI that can detect engagement...

<comment><USER5> > Robots seem like iPads or video chat at best

No they don't. Being physically animated makes a difference in how robots feel to be around. Aspects of their movement, sound and appearance are interpreted as affect. Researchers are able to roughly manipulate the type and amount of affect and other social cues displayed by robots, which is what makes them useful for research and therapy with autistic children.

This isn't my area, but it's a well-established niche in robotics research.

<comment><USER4> Can you provide any references? These claims seem extraordinary.

<comment><USER5> Maja Mataric and Aude Billard are key professors in this area. Google finds them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, I would strongly encourage an optional _replacement_ for therapists altogether. Nearly no humans of the type we raise in the US are cut out for jobs which require compassion.

Of course, many (mental health workers) are amazing, even seemingly super- human, some of them. No question about that.

But, actively caring for and defending such a marginalized and misunderstood population are _never_ congruent with an astute professional career path in a capitalist society. I am from the US, and this may be different in other countries.

In US social mental health programs, we have been implementing scorched earth policing policies and enforcing them _in the mental health clinics._ One frightening issue at the moment involves state policies that give mental health facilities quotas for drug testing their patients. This is effectively leveraging mental health needs to criminalize and deny services. It's most common in Republican states but rampant everywhere. Professional mental health workers are by and large non-critical and uninspired to take action.

So how does this effect autistic patients? In the same way that autism leads to issues with hiring processes and, confrontations with law enforcement, housing, etc. Autism falls victim to prejudice of mental health professionals according to a bias at the level of communication.

The policies are of course described as safety measures. Despite their likelyhood of encouraging suicide, the rapid rise in the US suicide rate + opioid crisis is currently being leveraged as the justification for such policies. Nevermind that opioids are not used in mental health treatments and that both issues are geographically strongly correlated with trends in economic displacement. Nothing new under the sun.

<comment><USER6> Agree. Differences in information input and processing of a human should not be tied to capabilities of a human, and humans are awful at assessing humans and assisting development . Although incredibly expensive I suppose, I'd also advocate for early stage fmri as an assessment tool: [https://youtu.be/rdEX67wAuMk?t=12m29s](https://youtu.be/rdEX67wAuMk?t=12m29s)</comment></comment>


Nike's Vaporfly running shoes and tumbling records - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-athletics-shoe-idUSKBN1ZN0MJ <comment><USER2> When I was a young boy, nothing made me feel faster than new tennis shoes. (In reality, I was never a fast runner or really much of an athlete at all.) But man, when I had new shoes I just _felt_ faster, and I'm sure I put forth a better effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this a smaller version of jumping stilts? There's no battery or other energy source inherent in them, but you can run really fast while wearing them, not sure a marathon in those would be considered legitimate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Read the article and I feel like this is an advertisement disguised as an investigation article.

<comment><USER3> I see what you're saying, but I guess that's a side effect of how effective these shoes are. If you're any kind of serious runner who wouldn't want an extra 4% performance for free (or $250)

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind that's over $1 per mile.</comment></comment></comment>


Oodle Attack On Craigslist Falls Flat - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/03/oodle_attack_on.php

<comment><USER2> He didn't really think that one through, did he? All he had to do was look at it in terms of a % of traffic and see if it was a concerning number.

But, Craig Donato covered that for him:

"The post went on to say that Craigslist had 550 times the amount of page views and 1000 the number of listings that Oodle had and that if Oodle had just one crime connected with it in a 12 month period, Oodle's crime rate would exceed that of Craigslist by almost two times."

Ouch.</comment>


Apple translates portion of Google Natural Questions data set into 26 languages - <AUTHOR> https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/mkqa <comment><AUTHOR> I'm told this is the first NLP dataset released by Apple. It translates a portion of the Google Natural Questions data set into 26 languages, [https://ai.google.com/research/NaturalQuestions](https://ai.google.com/research/NaturalQuestions).</comment>


Open Source Apps Should Start Innovating - Not Recreating - <AUTHOR> http://cli.gs/PS1JzP

<comment><USER3> Who is that guy called Open Source, anyway? It seems like he is some maniac that craves nothing else but world domination!

OK, sorry, no more sarcasm. When I see that "open source monster" character I can be sure that the article will be superficial, boring and useless. Why put all software with a chain less license in a pile like its all the same - <USER2> a single author, company, business plan?

OK, so now a bit about the office suites:

Some people need an alternative to MS Office, so they come together with some other people who also need a alternative to MSOffice and pay a third group of people to make in (obviously sharing and thus lowering cost of developing the software). MS Office is a collection of clones of previous software, but that hasn't stopped it, right? Has it slowed down the adoption? Yet it seems to stop OO.o - it isn't "innovating" whatever that means. Maybe innovation means making a new shiny interface with colorful buttons to push? Yeah, the millions of people who just want to make a simple document with some bullet points and a page number on bottom will greatly appreciate the innovation. Although in my anecdotal experience "consumers" are more impressed by the ability to easily make a PDF..

 _Just because you opened up some code doesn't mean anyone CARES. The consumer is all about flash, dazzle and speed. The newer the better… no matter what the price is. The iPhone/iPod are great examples of this._

Because everyone wants to play the Apple game, right? Maybe some people want to do their dirty job quickly and cheaply, especially during a recession and all, but given how confident the author and the shiny magazines are I'm really afraid to say it - please don't laugh at me.

 _Songbird is the exact same as iTunes th main difference is leveraging a plug-in platform._

Another gem - the author cannot "leverage" a modern innovation called spell- checking, but knows that Songbird is a iTunes clone with plug-in platform which means it will not "succeed"[1], unlike Firefox which "innovates" (of course Firefox is far more than a clone of a clone, but with a great extensions eco-system). I don't even use iTunes and I don't know what are the chances but I can see an obvious self-contradiction.

[1] What is "succeeding" anyway? Getting the most lip-service? Obviously that is the kind of world-domination we are talking about, since Firefox doesn't have the biggest market share and Google Chrome have even less, but they are succeeding.

I don't like Facebook and MySpace with all the conformism, small talk and general herd behavior displayed there and I'm starting to dislike blogs and even some aspects of forums (points, post-count, ranks).

I spend too much time in the Internet.. gotta do something useful, bye.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have had this discussion occasionally with friends of mine.Always a little confused where they are coming from, since where I sit in academia most of the innovation I see is built on open source.

In particular, open source software tools provide platforms for experimentation that would not otherwise be available. For example, the Linux and BSD kernels made it possible for operating system researchers to try out lots of different ideas on everything from security to memory management with real hardware and real workloads. Without this open source software, your options are 1) write everything yourself, 2) license a kernel from someone, or 3) go work for a company that writes a kernel (e.g. Microsoft, Wind River, Green Hills).

For another example, the Valgrind memory checking tool includes a platform for binary analysis and translation. That platform has let people innovate by building tools that run on large, real Linux programs. I know of at least two academic theses that build on Valgrind (including mine), and there's now three community-contributed data race detection tools.

Both of these areas also have closed source software with innovations, of course. Still, they seem like cases where the open source software platform has lowered the barrier to entry and made it possible for a wider range of people to contribute, therefore spurring innovation.

So I don't buy the broad claim that "open source" software fails to innovate. Maybe we could talk about more specific segments, like office software or microblogging to focus the discussion?

<comment><USER5> I don't think focusing the discussion would help. The problems I see are the following:

(1) The question -- when properly understood -- is empirical by nature. One would need to select a random sample in both fields, measure the innovation within the samples for a given period of time, and publish the results. While this is not rocket science, the problem is in the details: What is innovation? How would one operationalize the term?

(2) In most cases when I've read such opinion articles, the discussion does not seem to be about innovation -- in the sense of "new way of doing something" (wikipedia). There are a million new ways to do something, but only a small fraction thereof is useful. That often seems to be the unsaid meaning to those who say Open Source is not innovating. Sure, nothing stops Open Source suppliers to innovate. However, they often don't care, simply because they don't profit by doing so. There's just one exception to the rule: Software by developers for developers. This is where Open Source shines because developers understand the needs of fellow developers (or technical people, in general). In general, however, Open Source developers don't care enought about common consumers to develop a new and useful product that helps them solve their problems. Thus, they just copy existing stuff.

(3) Slightly related to (2), another problem is attention and presentation: Innovation usually doesn't sell despite the glory of the term. See the "Myths of innovations" by Scott Berkun. The first chapter points to many examples and is free to download. To sell an innovative idea, one first needs the attention of the audience. Second, one needs to present the innvovation so that it's understood. Open Source developers often lack these skills, according to their own statements. A proprietary vendor can simple hire people with these skills but Open Source developers often cannot due to lack of income. Consequently, open source is often percieved to be less innovative, even when it is.

This is why I think, pointing to examples is pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Open source should do both, this is not an either/or issue.

Open source should innovate where it can, but at the same time it should offer people that are locked in to certain vendors free and open alternatives to those solutions.

Breaking vendor lock in is an excellent reason to develop an open source package, even if that means that you are not 'innovating'.

</comment><comment><USER7> Has the author used songbird?

Granted the interface is purposefully similar. Also it plays music. Outside of that though songbird is greatly different then any music player I have ever used. The entire idea behind songbird is to integrate music listening in with your browsing. For this purpose it works great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi author here.

I have used Songbird and while I do agree that it does offer some interesting features it borrows "A LOT" from iTunes.

Simply if I was a consumer I would look at that and say "why"? I have iTunes... it plays my music and works with my iPod... this looks exactly the same. Heck, even I thought that.

<comment><USER8> You shouldn't make assumptions on what the "consumer" sees. Personally, I have been using open source software for over a decade and can't understand this "open source should innovate" argument.

By it's very nature open source software is innovative. Twenty years ago the concept would have been unheard of (in the broader world than academia). Open source has pushed many boundaries and has also forced closed-source shops to "innovate". Granted, this loses it's influence over time and simply being open-source is not enough to be a unique piece of software.

You are cherry-picking the software to compare. Spend a good amount of time with the latest-and-greatest that's out there and you'll see the innovation. You have to pay attention though. By "pay attention" I don't mean just reading blogs and news aggregators.

I use Songbird when I'm not streaming directly from someone's own player (like last.fm, etc.). I have used iTunes in the past. Other than a similar presentation structure it's not similar to iTunes. I don't even see how iTunes has innovated outside of tying the consumer in to the iTunes store. Not really something I _like_ either, hence one reason I don't use that product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is with this article is that the author doesn't realize that the main interest of open source apps for most people is that they are free and that they provide similar functionality to proprietary ones, otherwise they wouldn't switch.

<comment><USER10> It is still possible to provide similar functionality while still innovating. The author provided two web browsers, Firefox and Chrome, as examples. Both of these applications let you browse the same websites as Internet Explorer, but both also bring more to the table (Firefox has tabs and extensions; Chrome has a streamlined UI).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Auther here

Thanks for reading and thank you for taking the time to voice your opinions on the matter.

I will reply throughout the day to all of your comments.</comment>


Dangers of Trump's Executive Order Explained - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/05/dangers-trumps-executive-order-explained <comment><USER2> This is the first time I can remember disagreeing with EFF's take on something. I've read the text of the EO a few times now looking the "threats to free expression" that supposedly should outrage me more than the already- ubiquitous and often-automated censorship of people online. I'm honestly floored to see EFF pull an "I'm not censorious, but…".</comment>


Some sexist tropes in the Martian - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@pandemona/some-sexist-tropes-in-the-martian-8e265f485ea9 <comment><USER2> This article is really trying to force through a conclusion based on some evidence that doesn't seem to hold up that well. Then the author challenges me (the reader) to question why I did not pick up on things like being mentioned as "beautiful" before highlighting career achievements.

Alright - I'll admit that I didn't think through these tropes when I read the book. I was too busy reading and enjoying the book. I can't help but wonder if the author's characters were slightly sexist. What if the characters were written this way on purpose? It's certainly a real problem in our society - why wouldn't it be reflected in a book. So am I to criticize the author for writing it or the character for thinking it? Or are we lumping it all into a general critique of the author's predispositions. I'm not sure I care to find out the answer. I also feel for the blog author's point of view because it's trying to combat a very real thing. I'm flustered.

<comment><USER3> Generally speaking, post-modern critical theory doesn't care much about the author, to the extent that it even rejects the idea that the author knows best about what they wrote. Instead, it seeks to understand how the prevalent culture in which the author lived shaped their work, and therefore, how their work exemplifies and illustrates the culture in which the author lived.

So, the point here is not to attack Weir. It's to bring to his readers' attention some subtle cultural cues that they might miss on their own. Weir might have put those in there on purpose, or they might have ended up in there because he wrote (like almost every author) in the way that felt most natural to him.

<comment><USER4> While I see you were explaining - I criticize their reasoning.

If you are looking for something, you will find it. Sometimes the reasoning is easy to follow - other times it demands such illogical leaps as to question the validity or reasoning of the person trying to show the connection.

Give me any two numbers and I'll find a way to transform it to 9/11\. For a time, people had even made a game out of doing just that.

For example, I have a can of Pringles on my desk. It has 190 calories. 190? Divided in a way makes two numbers, 19 and 90. 90 minus 19 is 71. The original 190 minus 71 is 119. Reverse 119 and there you have it, 9/11!

What you have is a group of people intent on finding messages that aren't there. Sometimes they have some claims easily understood by others and other times they delve so far into absurdity where only they can follow the train of thought that led them down their path of reasoning. Even if I can follow the logic, that doesn't necessarily mean I should give it any credit or significant meaning.

<comment><USER3> This is a common complaint about literary criticism, but it's wrong. "You can find anything you look for" is usually said by people without any training or experience in literary criticism. It's equivalent to a literary critic saying "you can make a computer do anything"; while computers are incredibly powerful, any knowledgable programmer understands that that is not true.

The blog post carefully lays out the evidence for what they are talking about. But that also exists against a cultural background, and if you don't have that background, it will be less persuasive because you won't recognize the referenced patterns as easily.

<comment><USER4> To which I say "give me any two numbers".

 _> It's equivalent to a literary critic saying "you can make a computer do anything"; while computers are incredibly powerful, any knowledgable programmer understands that that is not true._

There's physical constraints and constraints on our own knowledge. What someone means behind a statement and their motivations behind that statement are a lot more within human constraints. There are no limitations on interpretation. Linguistic interpretation is a lot more open-ended than that and when I say people can make up whatever they like, as long as they have some strands of logic to prop up behind it, I mean it.

How many different interpretations of Romeo and Juliet do you think can be found within each scene? Each interpretation will be colored by the observer's experiences. If they are pre-determined to find a certain message, they'll find it.

I know this for a fact. Humans see connections, patterns, and meanings that aren't really there. As an example, the puzzle _Masqurerade_ has already been solved. Yet there are people who are _so certain_ that their solution is the correct one. They see patterns that aren't really there, and readily convince themselves of the truth of their solution. Many of the solutions are quite logical, some even give a close answer. The problem is that the puzzle has already been solved.

[0] [http://hazlitt.net/feature/goes-all-way-queen-puzzle-book- dr...](http://hazlitt.net/feature/goes-all-way-queen-puzzle-book-drove- england-madness)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Here's a letter Watney writes for Johanssen in case he dies. Johanssen is > the "hot chick" on the mission. He also tries to tell her how to dress and > how to act. Perhaps Watney also wanted her to smile more.

> > Johanssen: Your poster outsold the rest of ours combined. You're a hot > chick who went to Mars. You're on dorm-room walls all over the world. > Looking like that, why are you such a nerd? And you are, you know. A serious > nerd. I had to do some computer shit to get Pathfinder talking to the rover > and oh my god. And I had NASA telling me what to do every step of the way. > You should try to be more cool. Wear dark glasses and a leather jacket. > Carry a switchblade. Aspire to a level of coolness known only as…"Botanist > Cool." Did you know Commander Lewis had a chat with us men? If anyone hit on > you, we'd be off the mission. […]

I haven't read the book but isn't the "dark glasses and leather jacket" bit here Watney paraphrasing what he was told by NASA to do? Not Watney telling Johanssen what to do?

</comment><comment><USER6> blah blah blah - more from the "let's take every comment and twist it into something sexist" crowd.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some of those examples are kinda meh. The third example is just (taken out of context, I'm inferring here) a list of relevant things happening in the kid's lives. I don't know how old the kids are, or what their interests are, but maybe the only interesting things happening happen to be a crush and becoming goalkeeper.

The fourth example (again, no context, so maybe am incorrect) is not "women being talked about like they aren't there" so much as "one manager defending choices to other manager, with subordinate in same room because reasons".</comment>


What Android-only app is better than (or has no equivalent to) anything for iOS? - <AUTHOR>

Why? <comment><USER2> Firefox!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice!</comment></comment>


The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine <comment><USER2> A great piece called "Disruption is not a strategy" by Jerry Neumann ([http://reactionwheel.net/2016/05/disruption-is-not-a- strateg...](http://reactionwheel.net/2016/05/disruption-is-not-a- strategy.html)) illustrates the difficulties of taking the lofty ideas from The Innovator's Dilemma and applying them to new companies. He also makes the observation that Christensen was writing for Fortune 500 CEOs who care about risk management, not upstart companies trying to find product-market fit.

I think it's most prudent to acknowledge disruption theory as one of many interconnected factors that influence the outcome of business ventures instead of an unshakable dogma with a dominating impact on all things.

<comment><USER3> Agree thats a great essay.

Christensens writing was almost mostly an analysis and never a "how to" although in innovators solution he did venture into that. But the most important book he wrote was the first one. That's at least how I read him.

Contrary to what many think about I.D. it was mostly a book about the failure of (good) management, rather than one of innovation. It was a book that tried to shed lights on how to avoid being disrupted rather than how to disrupt.

It's clear from his writing that you don't set out to disrupt industries. You make solutions for those industries that might end up disrupting them.

And so they should mostly be seen as historical and cautionary tales rather than as cookbooks for disruption. I think many people get this wrong about his writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I liked Innovator's Dilemma quite a bit. Most economic historians consider Christiansen's original study of disk drives in the 1980s a weak foundation for theorizing. Even so, there are useful insights like the tendency for companies to move up in established markets and hence miss emerging, initially lower-value markets. Anybody who has seen how sales works in a large enterprise will recognize this pattern.

That said it seems to me that Innovators Dilemma neglects an even simpler reason for company failure: many corporate bureaucracies simply aren't very responsive to external economic signals because career success is only distantly related to market success. This is one of the reasons that companies run by decisive, technically oriented founders often seem to do better than their more corporate peers. It's easier to turn the ship to deal with something like the Internet if the company is driven by somebody who feels the change in their gut.

p.s., Anybody else like the New Yorker writing style? The dismantling of university innovation was pretty funny.

<comment><USER5> Its not that the Innovators Dilemma neglects things, it was simply the first part of the work. Since Christensen is an academic, he has spent many years(Innovators Dilemma is 20 years old) refining his theories(and creating new ones) since the first book was published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really liked _The Innovator 's Dilemma_, but it struck me that the application of it to situations could be post facto rationalization, because applying to new situations required classifying the aspects of the situation. Christensen seemed to find it diffuclt too, because he classified the most disruptive innovation of current times as non-disruptive (i.e. sustaining):

 _But Apple 's just about to launch the iPhone.The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won't succeed with the iPhone. They've launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It's not [truly] disruptive._ [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-06-15/clayton-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-06-15/clayton- christensens-innovation-brainbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and- financial-advice)

<comment><USER7> So a disruptive technology is one that disrupts the marketplace, but markets are impossible to predict, so disruptive technologies can only be identified in hindsight. Have I got that right?

<comment><USER8> This is 100% correct, 50% of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not only is this an excellent essay -- it's one on my list of "I need to write a response / answer filling in some additional bits" pile -- but Jill Lepore is pretty much on fire with most of her writing and speaking.

I strongly recommend taking a look at her _New Yorker_ contributor page, as well as seeking out what she's written elsewhere.

Her recent (April, 2017) talk at the University of Kansas on privacy also includes several interesting, and fairly novel, concepts, well worth considering:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=51G6eii4ZGk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=51G6eii4ZGk)

</comment><comment><USER10> older threads: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901612)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683)

<comment><USER11> Christensen's response, linked to in those threads:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-20/clayton- chri...](http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-christensen- responds-to-new-yorker-takedown-of-disruptive-innovation)

Innovator's Dilemma is way better thought-through than most business theories. If Clay is right, and the article author simply ignored most of what he's written in the last 30 years on the nuances of his theory, then her article is a (very eloquent) hatchet job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Question: is there a canonical list (or a good set of lists) on what are considered to be disruptive innovations?

As I recall, Christensen's initial set were hydraulic earth-moving equipment (vs. steam shovels), disk drives, and ... I forget exactly. Possibly the Japanese auto industry starting from small engines (motorcycles, etc.), then cars (Honda). Possibly PCs, disrupting minis and mainframes?

My copy of the book seems to have gone walkabout.

</comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR Business theory based on cherry-picked case studies, post hoc rationalization and survivorship bias fails to make a compelling case, but nobody cares, because it tells an appealing story.

</comment><comment><USER12> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638683)</comment>


Babies don't have a sweet tooth, so why is their food full of sugar? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/03/babies-sweet-food-sugar-childhood-obesity-industry <comment><USER2> I haven't read the article, but babies like sugar more than anyone I've ever seen before. In fact, when doing procedures to a baby like inserting a cannula, we often give them a tiny tube of sugar water to suck on. You can then do pretty much anything you like to them and they don't even notice. They're too busy voraciously sucking out every last molecule of sucrose.

By the way, I've tasted that sugar water, and it isn't even all that concentrated.

It also works if they're sucking on a breast, but it doesn't look like they've just discovered the best thing in the world in that case.

Edit: I just thought I'd clarify (it's not the sucking itself) that when I said they suck on a tube of sugar, it's more like someone is occasionally placing a drop of the stuff on their lip. That keeps them occupied for about 30 seconds at a time. There's less than 1mL of liquid in those tubes, so it'd be gone in a few seconds if we let them suck on it straight away.

<comment><USER3> As you said that sugar water is not very concentrated. But baby food tends to be excessively sweet, almost dessert-like. I have struggled with this first hand as a parent.

<comment><USER2> But babies obviously love sugar, so this title is ridiculous. Just because you don't love dipping a moist steak in a tub of salt doesn't mean you don't love salty foods. That's too much of a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hell, half the time, when I suggest that people should avoid sugar, someone says, "but, people need sugar to survive." How do you correct decades of disinformation?

If I could estimate the top 3 causes for disease in modern western culture it would be Refined Sugar (high fructose intake), Low Fat Diets (too little for a healthy body) and Refined Vegetable Oils (linoleic acid leads to increased intake of carbs). All centered around diet.

The standard of care, of course is to prescribe medications that lower markers for several diseases even if it doesn't help the causes for the elevated markers, exacerbates the problems, and has worse mortality.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm unsure if it's true and haven't come across any data backing up the claim but I was once told that babies don't necessarily enjoy salty food. However, manufacturers would add salt to the food in the expectation that parents would pre-taste it, project their own preference for salt, and then not purchase the same brand of baby food again if it didn't meet their own personal "saltiness" expectations.

<comment><USER5> While that may be true, everything I have seen has told me to absolutely not give my baby salty food.

<comment><USER6> The recommendation in the UK for babies under 1 is super low, like under 1g a day or something.

I always pre-tasted my kid's food, however the result of this is not that he ate more salt, but that I now eat significantly less.

Then again, I cook. The kid eats what we eat, and that is very rarely processed/packaged food for either toddlers or adults.</comment></comment></comment>


Slack Themes - <AUTHOR> http://slackthemes.net/

<comment><USER2> I have to say, I resisted trying slack for a long time, but once I did I was really impressed. It's value was immediately obvious, as I see it as "A nicely skinned IRC client with lots of useful bots included and easy to configure, with good mobile clients." That's an easy sell for someone like me.

It's actually influenced my thoughts on how I want to structure one of my own projects. The actually useful free version that as you start using _more of_ the advanced features (but not specific ones) starts costing seems like a good model to get people in and using your product while also incentivizing users to become customers.

<comment><USER3> In the case of the IRC-like channels (public etc), the fact that you can ask something + close the browser, and when people reply to you buy mentioning your name you get an email follow up with the answer make it an ideal Q/A platform too, not needing to lurk after asking your question or scroll for a while to find if anyone answered you is an immense value.

<comment><USER4> Don't basically all of the services do that now? Skype doesn't, I know hipchat does.

<comment><USER5> A bit of a single data point but I had issues not getting notifications all of the time from Hipchat. How they are doing push notifications must be different :(.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wasn't expecting such a simple color-scheme change to evoke such a strong reminiscence of each theme's brand/name (most strongly with Spotify, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix).

It's funny how the color-schemes of well-known UIs are so embedded in our memory!

</comment><comment><USER7> Using history.pushstate for each theme is really obnoxious; after clicking a few radio buttons, I had to hit "back" a dozen times to get back to this page.

<comment><USER8> Hi! Author of the project here... Sorry you found it disturbing, the intention was to encode the selected theme in the URL so that it can be easily linked to, etc. Maybe I should look into trying to do that with replaceState. Having said that, the code is open-source and PRs are always welcome. ;)

<comment><USER7> replaceState would be quite welcome! It's good to allow specific themes to be linkable, but it's bad to pollute the history when you click radio buttons, IMO.

Other than that, though, good work. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for this. Just brightened my day!

<comment><USER8> So pleased to hear that. I'd had enough of hunting around different sites trying to find and test different themes for Slack, so I built one as a weekend project. Enjoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Been using this for a while. It is especially helpful if you are part of multiple teams.

</comment><comment><USER8> Author of the project here... Thanks for the visibility and all the comments. Feel free to ask me anything and/or submit PRs.

</comment><comment><USER11> this is so cool! new theme everyday :)</comment>


Windows Subsystem for Linux Distribution Switcher - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-Switcher <comment><USER2> Weird not to see Arch in the list, [https://github.com/alwsl/alwsl](https://github.com/alwsl/alwsl) did the trick for me.

<comment><USER3> I knew alwsl (Arch Linux as Windows Subsystem for Linux) long before this WSL distribution switcher ;-)

Anyway, I run Linux as workstation so I don't really need WSL. Plus I have never laid my hands on Windows 10 so far (I ran Cygwin on the only Windows 7 machine we have at home).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a way to chroot the linux distro? I'd love to be able to have multiple systems (even if I could only have 1 active at a time). It would be great for experimentation ala VMs.

<comment><USER5> That is why we have VMs this is not a VM but a subsystem that is sharing the same space as Windows.

<comment><USER6> His request is not really all that unreasonable. And given how the subsystems work seems to me like it might be within reason to implement.

<comment><USER5> But you don't really have a distribution you have Linux Tools in Windows. I have seen some github work on switching between the Linux in Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great work, I'll definitely be checking this out. I find myself using the WSL more and more recently. It still has plenty of rough edges, but Microsoft seem to be committed to improving it. The lack of a full Linux like terminal is probably one of the bigger reasons I can't switch fully over to Windows.

<comment><USER8> The lack of a full Linux like terminal is also my current hold back. I know I can use VcXsrv and run xfce4-terminal, but I would rather use something that is more native to Windows than some hacky solution. In addition, now that the Windows Console supports 24-bit color, using things like ConEmu feels like two steps back (ConEmu doesn't support 24-bit color).

<comment><USER5> This drives my crazy BUT I have found mobaxterm [http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/](http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/) is the best solution for me. So much so I threw money at them.</comment></comment></comment>


Google does it again. 'Gives' Pakistan occupied Kashmir to Pak - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/Google-gives-PoK-to-Pak-again/articleshow/6329410.cms

<comment><USER2> it sows distribution of Kashmir according to UN Line of Control. Thats unbiased of Google.</comment>


This Is a Generic LinkedIn Rant - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/this-is-a-generic-linkedin-rant <comment><USER2> Comments:

"Thank you for being so brave and sharing this with the rest of us"

"This very much resonates with me, I went through a personal phase in which my core values blah blah spirit animal blah blah blah get in touch if you want to discuss further"

"Great thought! Please contact me if you are interested in pursuing a career in disrupting the cereal industry"

"<gandhi or MLK quote>"

"I fundamentally disagree with the premise, +500 lines of tedious rant"

</comment><comment><USER3> The premise of " _influencers_ " is an anachronism at best, and a sad joke at worst.

When media was centralized, celebrities were rare, and had professional handlers and budgets. The influence of celebrity was a measurable outcome, based on control of the message and a filtered amount of contact with fans, all of it operated by agencies, to produce results backed by evidence.

Celebrity status doesn't obey predictable rules anymore, and everything is too volatile to take seriously. Combined with highly variable tastes and interest fragmentation of "The Long Tail" the idea of celebrity, recast under the guise of the "influencer" buzzword, is a shadow of an idea from a generation ago. It's concptual remains are grasped at by operators of the ad tech economy, who still trade on the idea that advertising even works at all, barely 10% of the time.

Celebrity isn't gone, but the artifice of it is harder to manufacture, given the "always on" mobile internet, and how leaky or totally absent privacy is now. Any would-be celebrity fucks up in public before they're half baked enough to retain something that resembles credibility, and the previosly perfect media narratives of the 20th century die on the vine. No matter, because ten more crop up right behnd each sacrifice, all eager drop like flies. I'm not sure when the picture of a steady state begins to develop, but we might still be a full generation (10 or 20 years) away from that, if such a thing is still possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> Favorite part of this is perhaps the banner requesting money after the end of the article. A generic subscription website mocking a generic LinkedIn rant.

</comment><comment><USER5> s/LinkedIn/Online/</comment>


New Letters Added to the Genetic Alphabet - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150710-genetic-alphabet/ <comment><USER2> So these guys come along, casually expand a well-established code and test it under precisely one small condition. And when this one test gives them some nice data, they say: "Hey, our stuff is better than everything all of nature has ever done!"

A very intellectually stimulating endeavour no doubt, but I expect some more tests before I would call this good science. Claiming that "the new additions appear to improve the alphabet" is simply extrapolation to the nth degree. [1]

Oh and by the way, when the article claims that

> "the three-biopolymer system may have drawbacks, since information flows > only one way, from DNA to RNA to proteins"

that is not correct either. For more information, read up on epigenetics.

[1] Note that this quote comes from the article, not the original paper. The original paper is not quite as cocky (at least not in the abstract, but I don't have full access).

<comment><USER3> I can't help but notice the irony in your comment. So this guy comes along and having read one article, says "I can't call this good science."

A very basic summary of molecular biology of the cell:

DNA - library of blueprints, basically instructions on how to build proteins

RNA - copies of blueprints you take out of the library to build proteins so you don't expose DNA to unnecessary hazards

protein - catalyzes reactions so the cell can do stuff, including make new DNA when replicating.

A fundamental conundrum exists when it comes to evolution of this mechanism. DNA is needed to build proteins, but proteins are needed to catalyze the reactions necessary to build DNA. It's a chicken and egg problem... what came first?

When it was discovered that RNA can catalyze certain reactions, presumably because of their slightly higher chemical reactivity, it suggested a way out of this conundrum. What if life originated with RNA only, where RNA acted as both the hereditary and catalyzing machinery?

The problem with this RNA World hypothesis is that the reactions that current RNA can catalyze is very limited. But what if, at the origin of life, when nature could experiment, the genetic alphabet that RNA could play with was bigger, potentially leading to expanded capability? Scientists like Benner have worked for three decades to try to answer this question.

So, your characterization of "comes along, casually expand" a well-established code and claims it's better is grossly unfair.

<comment><USER2> I am well aware of the basic molecular biology of the cell, as well as the RNA world hypothesis.

All due respect to Benner for his work - my comment was rather too pointed, I'll concede that. Nonetheless, I am always wary of too much theory being induced from too little data.

Benner's experiment shows that an expanded genetic code can form molecules that show greater chemical functionality in a given situation than that of natural DNA molecules. Now a quote from the abstract:

> This suggests that this system explored much of the sequence space available > to this genetic system and that GACTZP libraries are richer reservoirs of > functionality than standard libraries.

Already he is starting to extrapolate when he starts talking about the extended libraries in general. The Quantamagazine article then goes on to say:

> In other words, the new additions appear to improve the alphabet, at least > under these conditions.

That is true, but for a rather narrow definition of "improve", and a very narrow set of conditions. The result is that the superficial reader goes away thinking "they've made a better DNA".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are actually 84 possible combinations with 4 base pairs if you accept sequences of length < 3.

However, if you assume all sequences are length 3, you still get 64 combinations.

We only use 20 out of that space. And if you look at how base pairs encode to amino acids, for half of them, only the first two base pairs even matter - since it's prefix-free you can guess the amino acid if you see those two and even ignore the third.

Given how underutilized this space is, I'm not convinced that increasing the domain to 216 will lead to much more than the ability to express our current amino acid space with only two base pairs.

<comment><USER5> Minor >> Underutilized may not be the best way to think about it. There is a lot of redundancy that affords protection against mutations.

<comment><USER2> And actually, even the redundancy is not complete. A recent paper showed that seemingly "redundant" variations of triplets led to a slightly different 3D folding structure of the DNA, with effects on the physiology of the cell.

<comment><USER6> did the have an effect on the translated amino acid sequence or translation? Do you have a reference?

<comment><USER2> [http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2014.00140/abstract)

Sorry, made a mistake in the comment above. It's not the DNA's structure that is changed, it's the resulting protein's. (Different codons slightly alter the rate of translation, leading to a different folding of the protein.)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for replying with the reference. That is very interesting

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would have been nice if the author would have at least acknowledged that in reality they are nucleobases and not tiny, tiny letters curled up in our cell nuclei. Sure, 6-amino-5-nitro-2(1H)-pyridone and 2-amino- imidazo[1,2-a]-1,3,5-triazin-4(8H)one doesn't say much to us laymen, but just saying letters and not mentioning once what they stand for is really poor reporting.

<comment><USER8> I suppose the heading and maybe opening paragraph could be seen to give that impression, but the article makes note of the fact these are new nucleotides numerous times throughout the article. I found that pretty sufficient for showing that there are not in fact actual letters in DNA.

<comment><USER9> It still goes the entire article without naming the chemicals, which is really annoying.

And a picture of the three pairs wouldn't hurt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nitpick: it wouldn't be a potential 216. Some three-"letter" sequences code for the same amino acids, so instead of 4^3 (64) possible amino acids, only 20 are generated. Adding new letters doesn't change what these _old_ words create, so I think there would only be a possible maximum of 172.

(I think I did my math right, but maybe not.)

(edit: thanks duaneb, had my basic bio facts wrong - codons code for amino acids, not proteins.)

<comment><USER11> Nitpick two, codons don't encode for proteins but rather components of proteins (amino acids) that the RNA/ribosome "interprets".

At least that's what my high school bio taught me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not convinced that this is necessarily a good idea biologically, especially after talking to a couple of my friends that are researchers in this space. However, this seems quite interesting for non-biological applications. Take cold storage, for example--with a third base pairing, we can obviously develop an even denser data storage format than with regular DNA.

</comment><comment><USER13> Neat, but extending amino acids would be even cooler. DNA is mostly "just" a string encoding for information, like binary or hexadecimal. Proteins on the other hand are the actual machines whose blueprints are written in DNA, and they're built out of amino acids. Extending the set of amino acids could extend the set of basic building blocks available to create biomolecular machines.

Of course, teaching ribosomes to handle them and etc will take a lot of additional work, but identifying promising new amino acids would be a nice and major first step.

<comment><USER14> >> Of course, teaching ribosomes to handle them and etc will take a lot of additional work, but identifying promising new amino acids would be a nice and major first step.

There are a couple other amino acids in the tree of life. The mapping from base pairs to aminos is not completely static. And then there's Selenocystine (Sec) which is coded in a very unusual way.

I've often thought the redundancy in the encoding allows mutations to have no effect, so a protein that is well established and important could have a more stable encoding and new things still in flux could be more prone to evolving (less stable encoding). But I have no real data on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This sounds a lot like a story from 20 years ago, that was probably in Discover Magazine or Scientific American. The new nucleotides at that time were labeled kappa and chi.

And as a point of fact, three-base segments of DNA to not have a one-to-one mapping to amino acids. I also believe that a non-standard use of one of the three stop codons can change an encoded methionine to selenomethionine, with similar special cases for other proteins using rare amino acids.

Furthermore, 6^3=216, but that doesn't mean that adding a new base pair can code for that many amino acids. The original set of 4, with 64 possible codons, usually encode for 20 amino acids (excepting special cases as with selenomethionine). mRNA also employs uracil and tRNA adds hypoxanthine. These lead to " _wobble pairs_ " which in turn allow a single tRNA to match several different-but-synonymous codons.

As it stands now, every codon without a matching tRNA would be a different variety of stop codon.

Now, what would be interesting to me is if the P-Z pairs could match some tRNA anticodons that translate stereoisomers of the standard 20 amino acids (or actually just the 19 that are chiral). That way, the D-(KLAKLAK)2 apoptosis promoter sequence could be synthesized directly by the ordinary transcription- translation mechanics of a cell.

</comment><comment><USER16> This article is ignorant.

>Why nature stuck with four letters is one of biology's fundamental questions. Computers, after all, use a binary system with just two "letters" — 0s and 1s. Yet two letters probably aren't enough to create the array of biological molecules that make up life. "If you have a two-letter code, you limit the number of combinations you get," said Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

This simply isn't true. Even with regular DNA, the word size is 3 nucleotides long... giving you 64 instructions. If I remember my highschool biology, only some of these are even used, the rest are duplicates or unused.

Binary would work too, assuming ribosomes and mRNA could expand the word size... you only need 6 bits to do the same as natural DNA.

Is there something I don't know that fixes word size at 3 nucleotides?

</comment><comment><USER17> Not sure I understand the benefit, it's denser, on the other hand from what I understand DNA generally does have much in the way of size constraints. If I remember large swathes of DNA is inactive and there isn't selective pressure to clean up this wasted space. Coupled with the fact that it is apparently more error prone and seems to show why evolution didn't go down this path.

Probabably will be very useful for synthetic purposes where there isn't too much concern about fidelity after 10 million years of copying.

<comment><USER18> > Not sure I understand the benefit, it's denser, on the other hand from what > I understand DNA generally does have much in the way of size constraints.

I'm a layman, but they could use the new base pairs to code for unusual amino acids allowing for proteins with novel chemistry.

Also, I think DNA is pretty much only used to encode information, but RNA has important chemical roles (e.g. ribozymes), and the new base pairs open up similar possibilities with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sequel to GATTACA(PZ)?

<comment><USER20> 18 years ago, and I just now realized the title was chosen because they are all DNA letters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh, good. Bioinformatics data wasn't big enough with two bits per nucleotide.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting concept. One thing I noticed after developing several genetic algorithms on my own is that they tend to give a good creative _hint_ at what the solution to the problem should be, which the human mind can then interpret and produce what the genetic algorithm was "trying" to approach. I wonder if the same could be true with biological evolution, that there are better ways of storing genetic information than DNA and all that, but that DNA is a good guideline to what should be done.

</comment><comment><USER23> Even with PZ DNA would have major and minor groove rather than being a symmetrical double helix beloved by virtually all illustrators, sadly also those of pop sci articles...

</comment><comment><USER18> IIRC, E.T. (from the movie) had DNA with six nucleotides.

<comment><USER6> and humans have 40 DNA memo groups (5th element)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The "enhanced" DNA escapes into the wild where a new pathogen spreads over earth. All life is defenseless against the bizzare genetic alphabet...

<comment><USER25> And since p and z are synthesized in the lab how would this escaped organism eat?

<comment><USER6> Life finds a way.

<comment><USER25> Why hasn't life found a better way to fix nitrogen yet? Nitrogenase is a godawful enzyme... Wastes three hydrogen gas molecules for each turn of the crank.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steal These Freelance Business Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://casjam.com/steal-these-freelance-business-ideas/

<comment><USER2> "A podcast is a very effective channel for building an audience and building exposure for your company. "

I'll be honest. I never use podcasts. Is it really an effective channel for building an audience?

<comment><USER3> I only recently warmed up to Podcasts, actually wrote a blog post with short "reviews" of my subscription list this weekend: <http://neubertify.tumblr.com/post/41503145301/podcasts>

I think of all online publishing media, podcasts are the hardest to execute well, harder than blogs, and harder than video. This might not be true for everyone, but while I can tolerate shitty writing and shitty video editing, I just can't stand bad audio production. Bad speaking, weird accents, breathing sounds, "uhm", each of those steal divert my attention from the content.

If you decide to start a podcast, please get some professional production help. One podcast I found that is not produced by NPR but still doing a good job (as well as being relevant to the HN crowd) is "This Developer's Life" (<http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com>).

<comment><USER4> "weird accents", really?

Where are you from and what do you think is "normal". I'm an Australian (currently living in America) who has traveled a lot, I have a lot of friends from all over the world. I've never considered any one of them to have a "weird accent".

Can you give me examples of podcasts which you've found difficult to listen to due to "weird accents"?

<comment><USER3> Weird wasn't in a negative sense, just as a qualitative descriptor of difference from what happens to the kind of English I hear every day. I am from Germany and I would probably find it difficult to listen to myself in an English language podcast due to my accent.

What sounds familiar and what strange or plain wrong is probably highly personal. For example, I've heard enough Australians speak to have a feel for that particular variant of English. When I hear it, I notice the different "melody" of it, but there usually isn't a sound that surprises me or comes unexpected. It's like when I go into the Biotech building on our university campus: They have a weird floor layout and the main staircase isn't anywhere near the main door, but I find my way around because I got used to it.

However, when I had just moved to London as a freshman and first heard my Australian professor speak, every other word seemed out of place. That was just like my first trip to the Biotech building where the simple process of walking through the corridors was constantly interrupted by doors covered 100% in hazard signs and trying to remember the turns I took. Sure I could understand the Australian professor just like I could find my way around the Biotech building back then. But it took more energy than listening to a well produced radio program or walking around the building I work in every day.

In a podcast, ideally you'd want a speaker whose voice sounds natural and familiar so that their words convert into thoughts effortlessly, yet there are so many different ways to speak. This is a problem you have to deal with as a podcast producer that writers rarely have (except when writing about aluminum/aluminium).

<comment><USER5> Fair enough, but have you considered that an unfamiliar accent may give a podcast a unique personality for free?

That may require extra cognitive effort for the listener, but it is possible that it could lead to better retention in the long term. Just speculating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the metrics idea. A lot of people collect data, not many are doing anything with it. An easy way to turn collected data in to actionable items would be awesome.

<comment><USER7> I would definitely pay someone to handle this and do reporting for me on this.

<comment><USER8> This is something that I've been doing for clients for the last two years. I could do this job for you. It's something I really enjoy, and I'm familiar with a fair few analytics packages, GA, Mixpanel, Re-invigorate and so on. I also think I can pick new ones up pretty fast as the principles are more important than the technology.

Is there some way I can get in touch with you to discuss this further?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do a lot of metric analysis for other companies. It's actually one of the ways that my company starts engagements and eventually leads to selling other services. We start by analyzing what data is already collected.

I love looking at data and now that I've seen dozens of Google Analytics properties and a handful of MixPanel/Flurry/Apsalar/misc. It's really easy for me to dive in and provide actionable recommendations.

Unfortunately, most sites don't have goals with conversion rates or Webmaster Tools (to see SEO) or have their eCommerce transactions hooked up. So it's a bit of a pain to try to teach a new business how to set that up. We're happy to do it for a small fee, but it takes time to get the clearance or work with the engineering team. Then it's a matter of waiting to collect that data (if we're talking startups or smaller businesses). Also, it seems to be a low margin business because many businesses already don't value their existing data so they aren't going to pay much to have someone collect even more data they won't look at.

However, when the data is collected, you can start making easier pitches. If we can increase your total revenue by X% we get Y% of it in the first year. If we don't, you don't pay us.

I'm happy to provide an initial consultation for free to anybody on Hacker News. If you find value in it, we can discuss on-going work.

Contact info is in my profile.

<comment><USER10> Getting a cut of the revenue increase would be great, but how do you prove how much influence you've had on the revenue increase/decrease as compared to other steps the company took to change their fortunes? Are there any methods that can be used to tease apart each cause and effect?

<comment><USER9> Generally the businesses that we have pursued this path are ones who neglect to treat their online selling motions like a product.

For example, we are working with a client who makes "99%" of their money from physical retail. Their focus is on opening new physical locations and their eCommerce side is an after-thought. Their offline business is booming, but their online visits and conversion rates have been flat for 6+ months. My team will be taking over their site.

There is certainly a bit of faith that any change to visits will be from our SEO, though we can specifically target long-tail terms and build reports to show that they previously received X visits a month on these highly convertible terms now they receive 5X. However, with conversion rate optimization, the split-testing makes it pretty clear which changes performs better.

When the business gets an increase in highly convertible traffic after a flatline and additional $50,000-$500,000 in online revenue, they are very happy.

This type of contract only works with businesses that bring in millions. For smaller businesses or startups generating $50k-$100k/year, there are generally smaller budgets or not enough traffic to make split-testing possible in short- term engagements. So we'll do fixed bid consultations and short-term contracts for $1k-$20k and possibly do a follow up 3+ months down the line. Or we will use the split-testing and CRO service as a feeder to build trust in my team and then try to cross-sell our other service (build a custom mobile app, web app, or immersive advertisement).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> thegrugq had a good idea. he recommended somebody should start a biz in making online disposable social media identities. this is easy to do but takes time. time is money so this could be a viable service though and with an easy python script could pump out identities automatically after amassing all your fake pictures.

you would pay them with bitcoins to create a whole online persona for you on facebook, twitter, linkedin ect that you would use as a backup in order to fool competitors, hackers, and govt authorities trying to track you down.

for instance your anonymous identity that publishes a democracy blog about china gives very subtle hints to this new fake online persona you've created, so when chinese authorities think they've found you they are in reality chasing nothing. kind of like when hackers sit together in a channel and if you log an entire month's worth, they start dropping personal information either purposely or accidentally by slipping up their opsec 'hey bro i went to that school too'.

only this time it leads to a maze of confusion instead to your front door like Jeremy Hammond.

could bundle this with other anonmity service like running a .onion newsgroup server for alt.binaries.messages retrieval

</comment><comment><USER12> For those of you that hire video producers, how do you go about selecting who you work with?

Since I'm coming from a career as an audio and video engineer into the startup world, this would seem like an obvious area to do some freelancing, but it also seems like a chicken and egg problem with finding work and having demos/references.

<comment><USER13> A portfolio is a must. Then I just interview you to see if we have work chemistry. Afterwards I just leave you alone to do your job.

I'm actually searching for a good audio freelancer. Get in touch if you are interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If anyone here is looking for a "Startup Data/Metrics Analyst" as per the blog post, please get in touch. I've done this for companies here in the UK for the last two years, and I'm looking to expand this part of my work further. Happy to discuss working arrangements and deals, and am open to offers.

Please see my business card if you'd like to learn more about me: <http://krmmalik.com/me>

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd pay for any of these; email is in profile.

</comment><comment><USER15> The metric analysis freelancer idea really spoke to me. Anyone with experience in this field have any suggestions for how one might break into this type of work? I'm always drawn to blog posts and the like that deal with metrics analysis but lack much real world experience. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love this post....thought they would be 'lame' ideas, but I love them.

I run 5KMVP and am interested in doing the metrics idea.

If you are interested in having your startup data crunched and you sent the key metrics on a weekly basis - reach out to me: marc+metrics @ 5kmvp.com

</comment><comment><USER17> Full Service Blogger sounds ever so slightly shady; like someone who would write pay-for-play stories and not care about the reputation they'd be burning.

I realize that's not the intent here, but it seems like that would be a natural equilibrium state for commercial writers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're describing the majority of freelance blog writers you'll find on places like Elance, etc. these days.

What I meant was the blogger should deliver not only articles but all the other (very important) tasks for running an effective blog: editorial calendar, topic development, blogger outreach, etc. A premium blogging service, if you will.

<comment><USER18> As someone with a little experience and some modest success in this area, a good full-service blogger would be _expensive_. Not only because it requires a cluster of skills that are only tangentially related to each other and so are relatively rare to find together, but because a person who possesses these skills can build a good income for themselves will little investment aside from their own time. The opportunity cost of such a person selling their time is massive because they're exchanging long-run passive income for short-term work-for-hire income.

I'm hesitant to estimate how much such a service would reasonably cost without thinking about it some more, but I am very curious as to how much a startup in a position to benefit from this kind of outsourcing thinks they could reasonably pay.

<comment><USER19> I agree that a person who is competent and creative enough to write solid blog posts in a space that isn't his or her specialty is exceedingly rare. They often have their own ideas and projects.

Honestly, most guest bloggers and freelance writers may be affordable (or even cheap) but simply aren't that good. The writing is often bland or immature. Not content I would want representing my brand.

To get a creative and smart wordslinger to run your blog and manage your brand like that would be expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for the shout out Brian :)

</comment><comment><USER21> How about video interview producer? I would pay for someone to make weekly interview videos with my clients.

</comment><comment><USER22> good convo, data, metrics</comment>


Have you been to this meeting?  - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/04/have-you-been-to-this-meeting.html

<comment><USER2> Previously posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513182)</comment>


Host your own social counter servers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tfrce/social-buttons-server

<comment><USER2> Good, but if you really want fast performance, I'd suggest that you further cache those numbers in a local database and hardcode them into the page. If using Jekyll (or your favorite static site generator), you can have it go pull up-to-date numbers when you generate the site.

I've done this on some of my sites and it's wonderfully efficient. Most users don't care what the current count is and you can reduce page load times by dropping additional DNS lookup and removing the iframes from DOM rendering. You may not realize it, but these social buttons take a lot of cycles on page rendering engines so it's an easy win to reduce overall page load time. Assuming you can convince marketing. :)</comment>