Tesla employee writes of low wages, poor morale; company denies claims - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/02/tesla-employee-writes-of-low-wages-poor-morale-company-denies-claims/ <comment><USER2> > Speaking to Gizmodo through Twitter Direct Messages, Elon Musk said, "Our > understanding is that this guy was paid by the UAW to join Tesla and agitate > for a union,"

I guess he got this tactic from Trump, claiming that any dissent comes from paid protesters. While offering no evidence that it's actually the case.

> Update 10/2/17 9:20am EST: In a statement this morning UAW categorically > denied that Moran had ever been paid by their organization.

[https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-responds-to-claims-of-low- pay-...](https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-responds-to-claims-of-low-pay-injuries- and-a-1792190512)

<comment><USER3> Ugh, this is just a terrible conflation. And it ignores very real and well- understood union tactics like this. You can be pro- or anti- union all you want but if you don't think unions seek out individuals to use as essentially "seeds" for a union - including paying them - you're woefully naive.

<comment><USER2> If you don't think we've entered an era where "facts" are invented from thin air without fear of repercussion because the media portrays opposite sides of a demonstrable fact the way it portrays differences in opinion, you're woefully naive.

Recent events may have had a side effect of making honest people need to work harder to prove their claims. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, we could have used more discipline and scrutiny there before the era of fake news anyway.

<comment><USER4> Facts have been invented in order to push agendas since the dawn of time. Nothing has changed.

The day the printing press was invented is the day it was subverted to push propaganda.

The "era of fake news" is fake. It has always been this way.

<comment><USER5> I think something has changed:

 _I want to start with Trump 's lies. It's now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good. But all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all. Trump's lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald- faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly chilling._

From Andrew Sullivan, a conservative blogger, here:

[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew- sullivan...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the- madness-of-king-donald.html)

<comment><USER4> So you're trying to convince me something has materially changed by posting a quote that compares the current scenario to what the Soviets used to do?

Either things have changed, or the Soviets were doing it in the past. Only one of these statements can be true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow this article looks like it was written using Gizmodo as the only source. Not only that, it is almost a verbatim copy. Generally Ars has great coverage but this is horrible. Also fun fact the title had to be updated due to being misleading.

        Update: This story went up with two headlines. One of them, "Tesla employee calls for unionization, Musk says that's 'morally outrageous,'" could have been construed as Musk claiming that unionization itself is morally outrageous, which was not the case. We have replaced that headline with the other.

<comment><USER7> Ars hasn't been anything approaching "Great" for years.

<comment><USER8> It's really more the individual reporters. Eric Berger, for example, puts out a lot of great and balanced space-related articles.

<comment><USER7> I'd agree with that, but I think when we're down to naming individuals and their merits, my point about the organization as a whole not being good is supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > employee writes of low wages, poor morale; company denies claims

Lol this could be any organization in the world. :)

<comment><USER10> If that's your image of working, you should consider working for different companies. This would not describe my workplace, or most of the ones I've worked for.

<comment><USER11> I think you can find at least one employee complaining anywhere, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just a note I really appreciate how ARS documented the title changes at the bottom of the article explaining their reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER12> This isn't anything new; apparently SpaceX is the same way. It's why I don't want to go work for an Elon Musk company. I have respect for myself, and it seems like you have to be willing to undercut yourself to work there.

<comment><USER13> I was looking at SpaceX software engineering jobs and the listings said that the position would be expected to work overtime and weekends "as needed". Yeah, no thanks. I guess at least they're up front about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this compare to Nissan (US), also non-union?

</comment><comment><USER15> Usually whenever I see one of these "expose" posts on Gizmodo, it's usually an employee that was a miscreant/unhappy person.

The other theme that doesn't get exposed, is that the employee in question has the same attitude no matter where they work.

I was working at Best Buy/Geek Squad when they had their big "unhappy employee" expose, and my last point was very true.

There are plenty of happy employees at all these companies, people (especially Giz) loves the bad story.

<comment><USER16> It takes unreasonable people to change the world.

<comment><USER15> Yes but one "unreasonable" person complaining on Gizmodo about a company doesn't mean there is some systemic problem at the company or the culture.

It's a confirmation bias problem. If Gizmodo posted a bunch of stories about "People at company X say things are awesome!!!" it would probably be deadpanned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That Tesla pays poor wages is well known. But this is expected since they are more a startup and do not have that much cash to go by. I guess the sad part is they don't hand out much shares either

<comment><USER18> Tesla is not a startup. It's a big company with real products. Their startup days are long gone.

<comment><USER19> Being a startup in the automotive manufacturing business is not the same as being a startup in the software business. A software company with 1000 employees is huge, an automotive manufacturing company with 1000 employees is tiny.

<comment><USER20> Out of curiosity I checked the number of employees of a small car manufacturer no too far from my hometown: Bugatti. 91 employees for an output of about 40 cars a year. I'm actually surprised that is possible at all to be so small in the automotive industry (though to be fair they belong to Volkswagen Group). Of course not trying to compare that to Tesla, the goal/scope/market is just too different.

<comment><USER18> Gumpert produces a super sports car with around 50 employees. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Automobil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Automobil)

It really doesn't take many people to produce a car.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ready-made templates to build apps without code on Bubble - <AUTHOR> https://bubblestore.io/?utm_source=hn <comment><USER2> Good job. The landscape for creating apps will never be the same. Stick with it, keep making it better; the audience is there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks amazing, I wonder how much is possible without writing code?</comment>


Improved seam carving with forward energy - <AUTHOR> https://avikdas.com/2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-forward-energy.html <comment><USER2> Intuitively I would guess that this could profit from using a more sophisticated color difference function [1] which accounts for human color perception better than simply RGB component differences. And even if one uses RGB components, making sure that gamma correction is handled properly might make a noticeable difference.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right that RGB differences are not very meaningful to humans. I chose to stick with the easiest approach for educational purposes, but I'd love to hear if anyone tries out a different color difference function.

Note that the authors tried other types of energy functions in their original papers, ones that didn't simply use color differences. No one energy function seemed to be perfect across a variety of images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> After reading the first article [1], I was inspired to implement the algo myself. Great to see a follow up! Would be cool if there was a third that explained what's going on in this [2]... :D (was mentioned in the comments here [3])

[1] [https://avikdas.com/2019/05/14/real-world-dynamic- programmin...](https://avikdas.com/2019/05/14/real-world-dynamic-programming- seam-carving.html)

[2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20110707030836/http://vmcl.xjtu....](https://web.archive.org/web/20110707030836/http://vmcl.xjtu.edu.cn/Real- Time%20Content- Aware%20Image%20Resizing.files/real_time_content_aware_image_resizing.pdf)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269998)

<comment><AUTHOR> I must have missed the real-time adaptation of seam carving, so thanks for bringing it to my attention! I'll certainly take a look at it.

<comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, this method does just calculate the seams once, but it makes sure they don't overlap. Then you can go through the seams in order and remove them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I haven't dug too much into seam carving but have a quick question, do any of these algorithms blend the pixels of a removed seam into the surrounding pixels after removal? Maybe as high as a 50/50 split, or lower like a 90/10 split. Does this end up with a better image or a blurry mess?

<comment><USER5> You can do something like that. For example, enblend does multi-scale "blending", where it builds an image pyramid and runs seam carving on each level before re-combining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seam carving was one of my favorite CS projects I did while in school. This was a cool read, thanks

<comment><USER7> Never did it in school, but when I came across it as an assignment from a Brown CS class I decided to give it a go on my own, since I'd done Racket stuff at school and new my way around it decently enough. I agree wholeheartedly -- it is just insanely cool.

Literally everything about it. The concept, visualizing intermediate steps by producing a picture that shows the energy of each pixel, then the CS with finding the path, then seeing the image it produces. Just an incredibly interesting (and very modern issue given different screen sizes), a clever algorithm, challenging to implement, visually interesting results... It literally has it all.

<comment><AUTHOR> 100% agreed! I came at it from the angle of someone asking me about real-world applications of dynamic programming. DP is usually covered only in an academic setting, so there's one more plus for seam carving.

<comment><USER8> dynamic programming shows up a lot in image processing. another cool application is in the image quilting algorithm, where you're trying to synthesize a large texture from a smaller one by stitching together small patches. to reduce the visible seams you can use dynamic programming to find the "best" path through the overlap of two adjacent patches.

here's a link to the paper, which has some cool results to look at: [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~efros/research/quilting/qu...](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~efros/research/quilting/quilting.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do the seams need to be continuous? Intuitively it feels like the seam being carved out doesn't need to be made from pixels touching each other. What if the best seam has a slope of about 1/3 (i.e 1 vertical pixel for ever 3 horizontal pixels)?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the first paper, the authors discuss what happens if you take the lowest energy pixel from each seam. The problem is that visual coherence is not maintained, because there is no connection between the removed pixel.

What you're talking about--expanding the number of pixels the seam can move from row to row--is certainly possible. This will require more computational resources, as each seam can continue from five different seams (or more if you choose to widen your slope parameter). And, I'm not sure you'd get enough visual coherence from these types of seams.

That said, the best way for to know for certain to is to try it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Follow-up from the related article last month (which was discussed in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20285242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20285242)).

</comment><comment><USER11> For those who have no idea what it's all about: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg)

</comment><comment><USER12> Question about the algorithm:

Is the algorithm run from scratch each time a seam is removed? I.e. energy function computed again on the resized image, all seams recomputed, then only the lowest energy seam is removed.. and repeat.

Or are all the seams from the first calculation used for resizing?

<comment><USER13> The algorithm is re-run, but is usually implemented using a dynamic programming approach to avoid completely recalculating every seam from scratch.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using dynamic programming, but I'm still computing seams from scratch on each "frame" (each time I resize the image). Dynamic programming is useful for solving the seam finding problem on each frame, but it's an orthogonal concern to what computation can be saved on the next frame.

For illustrative purposes, I didn't optimize storing the cost data across frames, but that's something I could do.</comment></comment></comment>


Julia founders commercialize language, create new startup - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/julia-founders-commercialise-language-create-new-startup/articleshow/47211869.cms <comment><USER3> I don't know what the actual news is but it sounds like the article is misrepresenting what is happening here.

Julia and JuliaBox are both MIT Licensed: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md) [https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaBox/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaBox/blob/master/LICENSE.md)

The only factual content I was able to gleen from the article was that they plan to have a paid offering for: [https://www.juliabox.org/](https://www.juliabox.org/) ?

<comment><USER4> I'd say that the actual news is that the Julia founders have found a way to make a living through consulting, enabling them to keep working on an free (in both senses) software. They've also managed to scale to bring on some large contributors too, which is even better. There are three choices, as I see it:

\- They would have had to go work for another company that doesn't care about Julia. Its now a free time project.

\- They would have had to go work for another company that does care about Julia. They get to work a bit on Julia, but focus shifts to what this company cares about.

\- They work for themselves.

Not quite sure why this isn't a more common situation for open-source, it seems like the ideal situation for everyone.

I work on Julia, not for pay, and something like this only encourages me as it is a strong signal of demand by Real People writing Real Code.

<comment><USER5> idunning this is very well articulated. We are completely committed to open source, and working for ourselves just is so much better.

As for JuliaBox, we are grateful to AWS for the credits. They rescued us once, but going forward, we have to figure out a way to make it self-sustaining. I feel it is reasonable to have some level of sustainable free JuliaBox access, with charges for higher compute and storage - kind of like github, although it is not an apples to apples comparison.

<comment><USER6> Is the startup going to follow in the footsteps of Enthought ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR: "They have launched a startup, Julia Computing, to provide services such as support, training and consulting services for Julia, for a fee."

Basically, consulting and services. For all those who're getting worried by this, I don't think there's any inherent problem. After all, this is exactly what Red Hat has been doing with Linux for years.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, I still feel a bit uncomfortable when hearing about something like that. When a company (especially if it's a company making a software product for "internal" use, like programming language or monitoring service) provides "support and training for a fee" I cannot help but imagine how all the documentation disappears or becomes more and more outdated, until only enterprise customers are using that stuff. Because if you are paid for training, why would you care to teach people for free, right?

Of course it's probably only my imagination, but… that's it.

<comment><USER5> Yes, certainly imagination. :-)

The documentation is community created and under the MIT license as is the rest of the code. Our customers like Julia because it is a high quality open source project. Our incentives are fully aligned to make Julia the best open source project it can be, in all aspects.

I did not work on Julia for the last 5 years to see it become cripple-ware. I have worked in a startup before where all the amazing engineering work disappeared. That is why we started Julia in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems a little hasty on the part of the Julia guys. This is a promising language and I for one was looking closely for alternatives to Python. Yet Julia hasn't built enough traction yet, and here we are with a commercial arm run by _all_ the founders, already. There is of course nothing wrong with wishing to monetize one's hard work, but I fear that the OSS community will now shun Julia because they'll be afraid that new features might be added only to some commercial version in the future, and/or, the incentives of the founders will be to make it hard not to pay for consulting. We've seen this before ("Open"gamma, I'm looking at you).

If this were some cloud service with an "enterprise" version I'd be less worried, but when we're talking about breaking into scientific computing against a very entrenched Python/Numpy, and rising candidate Lua, not to mention R, you're going to need as much goodwill as possible from the scientific and academic communities who are so crucial to growing an ecosystem, and many of these are hostile to commerce.

Perhaps the siren song of Matlab's high pricing still sings for Edelman.

<comment><USER10> I don't know about Matlab... I heard they had a big layoff just recently. So I suspect they might shake things up and make Matlab cheaper.

That said, I recently went from Python to Matlab for the work that I do, I wish I had done it sooner. Documentation is much better, support is nice, and folks in my lab are good at Matlab so I can get quick good help. Bottom line is I get stuff done with Matlab much faster and with better results. YMMV.

<comment><USER9> That is a decent counterpoint to my original comment I think. I work with clients who are very happy and very productive with Matlab, precisely for the reason you cite: fantastic docs and support. I just cannot justify the huge spend on every new module, nor is Matlab an option if you want to distribute software widely. Also my sense is that the somewhat more chaotic world of Numpy is more innovative, if less stable and user friendly.

But I definitely think there is a strong case for high cashflow when it comes to supporting a technology. Perhaps this might be good for Julia if (and only if) they can keep the OSS people motivated and onside.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious why you consider Matlab not an option to distribute software widely? They have the Matlab Compiler that allows you produce executables that work with the freely downloadable Matlab Compiler Runtime.

I know of at least one software product, Imatest, that is produced and distributed this way.

[http://www.mathworks.com/products/compiler/](http://www.mathworks.com/products/compiler/)

[http://www.imatest.com](http://www.imatest.com)

<comment><USER9> I am given to understand that some functionality is not compilable or redistributable. I work in a fairly specialized field (fixed income term structure optimization) and this page is not encouraging (see "cannot be compiled" column):

[http://uk.mathworks.com/products/compiler/supported/compiler...](http://uk.mathworks.com/products/compiler/supported/compiler_support.html)

Also, finance is a field ripe for disruption, and if you're going to disrupt, you probably don't want to be doing it by relying on an expensive piece of highly proprietary technology, is my view.

<comment><USER11> Ah yes, great point.

I suppose that ties into the whole trade off one has in using Matlab in the first place: locking in to a proprietary commerical product to spend more time on problem-space work and less on managing memory and I/O etc. You get to pay up front to get working on your problem more quickly, and you pay again later on with a potential lack of flexibility.

I have been burned by such a lock in before in a personal project where the commerical make an app easily SDK was discontinued and left in the dust with all the developers left holding their collective unupdateabale apps in their hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great news. The core developers had said that this was in the works at last years JuliaCon. Now they can make a living through consulting while continuing to work on Julia.

</comment><comment><USER13> Julia is an extremely ambitious project -- more so than most other languages being developed now, due to the number of things they're trying to do, and the novelty of Julia relative to previous projects. I used Julia for a couple of toy projects, but I then started running into various odd bugs in the language and libraries, so I stopped using it.

It's great news for me that they're starting a company, and the core developers will have the opportunity to step up development as part of their livelihood. I hope they hire some full-time developers to iron out all of the kinks.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hm, how did they get the initial funding? I want to do the same thing for Octave, for which I'm sure a similar market exists, but I have no idea where to get the money to get started. This isn't a startup that just grows indefinitely. It's not a build once, sell infinitely often kind of thing. Each contract requires constant labour and upkeep.

So how did they manage to attract a hedge fund? And are they losing any autonomy in that? Also, will this distract them by making them work on customer-specific software and installations instead of working on Julia itself?

<comment><USER15> yeah... raises a lot of questions, did they blog somewhere about what they're doing? which hedge fund? how is it going to help/change evolution of the platform?

<comment><USER16> Does it matter which hedge fund? According to the article, the hedge fund offered them a contract for what seems like an open-ended engagement while simultaneously encouraging the core developers to go out and raise funds. Seems like Julia Computing partners decided not to raise funds and instead are trying to bootstrap themselves as per the article quote:

"The startup is currently completely bootstrapped and has about a dozen employees including the founders, with no immediate plans for raising funds."

The term "startup", probably chosen by the publication and not by the consulting practice partners, is definitely confusing. However, since Shah also discussed potential products that the LLC would be trying to commercialize, the choice of words and resultant confusion is understandable.

Stefan Karpinski lists himself as a founding partner as of 2013[1], so the idea has clearly been percolating in the back of the core developer team's heads for a while, and rightly so since how else can they sustain the development of the language full-time?

[1] [http://karpinski.org/resume/](http://karpinski.org/resume/)

<comment><USER5> Yup, Julia Computing has been around for all of last year, and it has been publicly known, but perhaps not widely, as I gather from the comments here. We talked about it at JuliaCon 2014. See: [http://juliacon.org/2014/](http://juliacon.org/2014/)

The terms are used a bit loosely. Commercial support is what I think of as a scalable product, which is different from consulting and training, which are services we provide.

Having Julia Computing has meant that we can do Julia for a living, helping our customers who also love Julia. A win-win!

<comment><USER15> If the 'NY hedge fund' can be publicly named / give an endorsement, it would drive adoption in other hedge funds and financial applications. It's a pretty small universe and surely one thing holding back adoption is confidence that it's production-ready, availability of a pool of people who use it, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very misleading title. Wanted to read the article, was hit by yet another story that wants to be a minor novel before it gets to the point, and then skipped reading the article because... effort. Was left with the impression that you would now have to pay for using it and only upon reading the comments I finally get what it is they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER18> This was hinted at Chicago's JuliaCon about some consulting work. Some of the JuliaCon participants brought up a question - "I love Julia, etc, but how can you convince me that this isn't going to be dumped once you guys all get bored?" \- IIRC, Jeff Bezanson replied something along the lines of "I love this project and I'm comfortable starving on ramen while I work on this". Which is a noble thing for Bezanson to say, but actually made me nervous about Julia's future.

Considering it's obvious Bezanson and many of the core contributors works on Julia full-time * 2, I wasn't quite sure how he paid rent/food. And since everyone needs to pay food/rent ... this seems a very good thing for the contributors to continue working on Julia.

If you told me that the core developers were planning to eat ramen for years on end, I'd be very worried for a new language. Instead, this strikes a great balance for Julia to advance and keep the lights on.

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://juliacomputing.com](http://juliacomputing.com)

</comment><comment><USER20> > Second is in the embedded (devices and platforms) space ... It is almost > ready -- so in theory, by next year, Julia could be working on the iPhone > and Android platforms.

Regarding Julia on Android and iOS, Julia was recently ported to ARM v7 via a Raspberry Pi 2. I wonder what the other barriers are for getting it to run on a mobile OS?

</comment><comment><USER21> So putting a lot of time and energy into projects involving Julia is likely problematic for the time being?

<comment><USER22> I don't see why, the language is still free (both as in beer and as in freedom), they're just selling training. It's basically a consulting company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> are there any material differences between Julia Computing for Julia and TypeSafe for Scala? From my reading of the OP i didn't see any; if there are not then i should think this is a good thing for Julia.

</comment><comment><USER24> And another promising new tech goes down the kermit. Shame. And writing a book with the chap from infosys? Yikes, given what we have seen from the warm bodies drafted in as so-called developers from infosys, that cannot be a good sell for the book. Glad with stuck with the python numerical stack now - <USER2> more mature.

<comment><USER25> I honestly do not get the controversy. They work as consultants to fund development and the start-up has been publicly known for almost a year. How is this any different from companies hiring developers to contribute to the Linux kernel or Google hiring van Rossum back in the day? The language is still free, as in freedom. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER26> Yeah, this might offend some aesthetic sensibilities (people wanting no corporate flavor), but the mechanics of this surely would not even offend RMS.</comment></comment></comment>


On the fusion triple product and fusion power gain of tokamak pilot reactors - <AUTHOR> http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/56/6/066003 <comment><AUTHOR> Tokomak energy also made a YouTube video to walk you through the paper:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWW9kE2lUqo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWW9kE2lUqo)

This is a previous paper that has garnered a lot of downloads:

On the power and size of tokamak fusion pilot plants and reactors

[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/55/3/033...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/55/3/033001)</comment>


Design and Implementation of a Win32 Text Editor (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.catch22.net/tuts/neatpad <comment><USER2> I don't see it mentioned in the text, but essentially the best-known data structure for representing large amounts of random-location-editable text is called the Rope. It's based on my favorite data structure, the Finger Tree, which has very impressive asymptotic performance characteristics over a huge range of intuitively (but not actually) expensive operations.

It doesn't require you to break the text up into lines and hope for short lines or anything; you can insert, split, cut, paste, delete, whatever, with at worst O(log(n)) for "expensive" operations (like beginning to edit at a random point in the text, or cutting/pasting a huge chunk of text) and O(1) for "cheap" operations (like insertion/deletion of a character after you've started editing).

It's based on a finger tree containing densely packed byte or UTF arrays (strictly speaking, this isn't necessary, but gives an appreciable constant time/memory speedup), and tree nodes are tagged with the length of all text underneath them. Here's an implementation specialized to byte arrays (not UTF-8). [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/rope](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/rope)

<comment><USER3> I've read a lot about different advanced data structures for text editing, but in my experience the reality is that, with memory bandwidths and CPU speeds being what they are today, and the speed at which human inputs occur, one big linear buffer is the simplest way to do it and the performance is not as bad as you'd think --- indeed it seems inefficient to be moving blocks of memory up to the whole size of the file whenever you insert a character, but when you consider that ~30CPS is the fastest input rate you're likely to encounter for individual single-character inserts (keyboard autorepeat), and that a modern CPU can memmove() at >1GB/s, you are unlikely to notice any difference in performance until the file you're editing is several tens of MB; and that is a relatively rare use-case (large files are usually opened not for actual editing, but for browsing and searching --- like logs. In that case, the overhead of constructing a more complex datastructure upon open may actually be slower.)

Even PCs in the DOS era with memory bandwidths in the single-digit MB/s range were OK with text editors that use a linear buffer, simply because people didn't really edit nor generate huge text files very often ("huge" being more than several hundred KB.)

<comment><USER4> I agree to some point with you. Simpler data structures will not result with abysmal performance nowadays. However I would not use fastest human character input as a benchmark. In advanced editor you may want computer to do some edits/inputs for you. Code pasting, filtering of lines or search/replace should also be considered. That said it is probably easy to move blocks if you know the size of edits.

I am developing experimental text editor in C. What I am currently using is array of lines (strings). Entering new line is a memmove in array of pointers. Entering new character is a memmove in array of chars. I concatenated all sources of Linux kernel. Resulting file has 542MB and 19'726'498 lines. Insertion of line is slightly laggy then - probably on the edge of noticeability. I also tested it a bit with a file containing single long line and it was also OK. Based on what profiler shows me rendering takes much more time and that's what I have to optimize.

<comment><USER3> _Code pasting, filtering of lines or search /replace should also be considered. That said it is probably easy to move blocks if you know the size of edits._

I agree, but as you said in those cases the final size is known so it is not a series of one-character operations (which would be quadratic complexity and definitely noticeable.)

 _Based on what profiler shows me rendering takes much more time and that 's what I have to optimize._

That's been my experience playing around with text editing too; the time taken to modify the buffer is tiny in comparison to rendering the text itself. It is here that e.g. updating only the regions which changed will have a noticeable improvement in responsiveness.

I wonder what data structure the Atom text editor uses --- it's famously slow on large files, but I doubt that's where the bottleneck is; it's more like an IDE so parsing and rendering are taking the bulk of the time. It is written in JavaScript and browser-based, but having seen JS run a PC emulator and boot a usable Linux kernel, I don't think that is the bottleneck either.

<comment><USER4> > I wonder what data structure the Atom text editor uses --- it's famously > slow on large files, but I doubt that's where the bottleneck is; it's more > like an IDE so parsing and rendering are taking the bulk of the time. It is > written in JavaScript and browser-based, but having seen JS run a PC > emulator and boot a usable Linux kernel, I don't think that is the > bottleneck either.

There was quite nice post [1] commented here [2] lately on text management of web text editors.

Quote:

> Every time text is inserted, it's inserted as one "chunk", then split up by > its line endings. This is done by invoking a regular expression engine. > Personally I think this is overkill, but it certainly lets Atom continue to > be easily modifiable. I can imagine the same thought is running through a > few people reading this. It pushes all the new lines to a stack (or more > technically: a regular JavaScript array). Already I don't want to find > myself opening a large file. It then uses "spliceArray" to replace a range > of lines.

> So what is the actual data structure of the great Atom text buffer?...

> @lines = [''];

> A regular JavaScript array. Ooof.

I think that in JS simple operations on arrays of strings have much more impact than in C. Few things from the top of my mind: additional metadata that has to be managed behind the scenes and garbage collection. But I don't really know how it would add up to overall performance. Certainly performance would look different if text would be rendered by dedicated library instead of advanced layout engine that lives inside modern browsers. It could be an interesting project to write editor in JS, but use for example Pango [3] bindings to render text.

[1] [https://ecc-comp.blogspot.de/2016/11/a-glance-into-web- tech-...](https://ecc-comp.blogspot.de/2016/11/a-glance-into-web-tech-based- text.html)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12927173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12927173)

[3] [http://www.pango.org/](http://www.pango.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once wrote an HTML WYSIWYG editor for Windows 3.1. I had bid for a project but didn't check that the library I wanted to use would actually work with 16 bit Windows. So I had to do it myself. It took me several all-nighters to make it work.

The hardest part was rendering in a performant way. One page was fine but with several pages it got horribly slow. I had to invent some caching to avoid recalculating the layout all the time.

Definitely one of the most educational things I have ever done.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a really great series of articles, and I used a number of the techniques mentioned in them for a program I made - [https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/](https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/)

The files opened by the program are read-only, so I didn't need to look in to or worry about piece-chains, but it's nice to be able to open multi-gigabyte files, with highlighting, and scroll around instantly to anywhere in the file, and have very low CPU and memory usage.

</comment><comment><USER7> I always enjoy reading articles like this. I am a .Net developer and recently did an application for parsing some of our B2B PDF documents (different vendors, different document structures) and loading the data into a backend db.

It was an interesting project. Text parsing becomes so simple once you have a logic. And there are so many things to watch out for e.g. Different versions of PDF are structured differently, some vendors had HTML documents, flat text, some totally not in any structure.

Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER8> What did you use for parsing PDFs?

<comment><USER7> I used itextsharp library to convert the PDF files to text and then go from there. Once you have the file in text format you can then determine how to parse - that would be the structure you will see all the time for that document. In my case, each document differ by vendors, hence different parsers. That's the gist of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly very good article - are anyone aware of a similar type of tutorial for OSX that covers small to huge text file editing?

<comment><USER10> TextEdit, the actual editor that ships on macOS, is open source.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/content/samplecode/TextE...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/samplecode/TextEdit/Introduction/Intro.html)

Nearly all of the load is shouldered by the Cocoa text system.

<comment><USER6> And it's not very good with huge text files and long lines.

<comment><USER9> Yep, this is the problem, just because its bare metal sys-call wise does not mean it does partial/incremental loading correctly! :/

<comment><USER6> Incremental loading is one of the things I dislike about the native cocoa text/document components - especially if you have a large file and want to scroll to the end. Scroll and wait. Scroll and wait. Scroll and wait.

You can use the same basic techniques presented in the original article for loading large files instantly on macOS (I did), and then use Core Text APIs for rendering the actual text instead of the Win32 API calls.

You need to use Core Text APIs over the NS equivalent, or at least you do if you want to handle text with long lines, because all the NS* eventually gets down to Core Text and one of the functions (I forget which one, but likely CTTypesetterCreateWithAttributedString) becomes noticeably sluggish when processing long lines (think > 10k characters per line), especially if most of that text might not even be appearing on the screen. At least it does for Chinese, not sure about other scripts.

However if you break that same 10k chunk up in to a bunch of smaller text chunks first, and stop once you get off the visible screen, the combined time of processing each chunk is significantly less than processing them as a single piece of text. Checking my source code, I've currently got the maximum length to split on set at 1,024 and that works quite well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great article. Would be an interesting discussion to have with a developer canididate during an interview.

</comment><comment><USER12> Mirror?

<comment><USER13> [https://web.archive.org/web/20161129233642/http://www.catch2...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161129233642/http://www.catch22.net/tuts/neatpad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps add "2005" to the title?

<comment><USER15> Has the cutting edge techniques for implementing Notepad changed that much since 2005?

<comment><USER6> Actually yes!

The Unicode text handling in Windows has been significantly revamped from the APIs listed in these articles, as has the text rendering APIs which now go through DirectX.

<comment><USER16> You can still use Uniscribe in Windows 10 but as you said it has been superseded by DirectWrite (used in Microsoft Word, WPF, etc).

<comment><USER6> Yep, you can definitely still use it all, just like you can continue to use the even older APIs too - hooray for backwards compatibility.

Just pointing out that the technology for Notepad has actually changed and improved since 2005.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fonz.js – How do US phone numbers work? - <AUTHOR> http://dvt.name/2017/04/25/fonz-js-a-better-phone-verification-library/ <comment><USER2> nice catch. I've implemented libphonenumber on several production websites. Good to know. :,)</comment>


Practical Persistence in Go: SQL Databases - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexedwards.net/blog/practical-persistence-sql

<comment><USER2> > http.Error(w, err.Error(), 500)

This will send the sql error directly to the client. I don't think it's a good idea because it can leak important information to it; it's better to log this error on the server and send back a generic failure message to the client.

<comment><USER3> Yep, thanks. I've updated the examples to use `http.Error(w, http.StatusText(500), 500)` instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a guy who learns from examples, I find this to be just the kind of tutorial I've been looking for.</comment>


Show HN: docs for Mixture, running on Mixture - <AUTHOR> http://docs.mixture.io/

<comment><USER2> How about something that explains what Mixture actually is in a nice concise manner?

<comment><USER3> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=90GNrEZk9Yc)

<comment><USER2> A 5 minute youtube video is not concise. If I can't get it in two-three sentences I'll just assume whoever worked on it is not smart enough to understand people (or at least articilate the purpose of the product) and therefore not smart enough to build a product I want to use.</comment></comment></comment>


About to propose, Facebook can fuck off? - <AUTHOR> Would you be offended if you were asked (nicely!) to keep such a major life announcement off Facebook? I don't hate Facebook, but I do hate how impersonal it is. I literally can't stand the idea that friends on both sides would find out about the happiest moment of our lives on a "social media" service, doubly so for our closest friends and family...Or do I need to be dragged into the modern age? <comment><USER2> What my SO and I did: Tell close friends and family by phone, then "announce" on FB so all the distant friends and family can learn about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't marry someone who'd announce it on Facebook. It'd be like if you leaned in for your first kiss, and they said, "Wait, let me Instagram this".

</comment><comment><USER4> Lots of people we know do that / say that to people. A friend called me just last week telling me his wife was pregnant and to stay off of Facebook until they told everyone.

Most people comply - those that don't - get defriended.</comment>


Neural Network Evolution Playground with Backprop NEAT - <AUTHOR> http://blog.otoro.net/2016/05/07/backprop-neat/ <comment><USER2> I was following NEAT back in 2006-2007, but I sort of lost track with it. What happened to Ken?</comment>


Ask HN: Methods for Decision Making - <AUTHOR> I waste a lot of time making decisions, I want to speed it up. I get decent results with the well-known pros/cons table, but I feel like that misses some nuance, plus it's a bit cumbersome to use in some situations.<p>Any good methods or software out there? <comment><USER2> Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Explained)- [https://fs.blog/mental-models/](https://fs.blog/mental-models/)

Also, mind mapping is life saver ie. [https://whimsical.com/mind- maps/](https://whimsical.com/mind-maps/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oneslate [0, 1] was designed for decision augmentation. Certainly curious to hear if the Oneslate system applies to your method/software search to aid in more efficient decision making. Full bias disclosure: I designed Oneslate.

[0] [http://danwolff.net/platforms/oneslate.html](http://danwolff.net/platforms/oneslate.html) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6glmwOd9Lsc&list=PL8DgRr1QpM...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6glmwOd9Lsc&list=PL8DgRr1QpMi- bXCDd2GReisPHVRmJRRtN)

</comment><comment><USER4> It depends, of course. Are you making decisions in situations that are familiar or unfamiliar? Is this a one-time or recurring decision? What's at stake - is there a lot to lose, or perhaps is it a question of optimizing. What information is available to you situationally, and in terms of predicting what may happen? Is it just you deciding, or a group; in implementation is it just you or do you need to convince other people.

I am inferring that you want to get better outcomes from operational decision making, and quantifying something might help. I'd suggest looking retrospectively at the decisions you've made, the way you've been making them, and the role of those decisions in the outcomes you've seen. In terms of what factors shape outcomes, what is under your control, what is not? You'll want to model the range of possibilities and impacts of the stuff you don't control ultimately as distributions, and look to forecast outcomes as a combination of what you do and what else can happen, over the range of what you do and the range of what elses. That will look like a decision tree, and at a first pass you can model and evaluate that qualitatively, then shift to a quantiative model. The retrospective question is represent explicitly the factors your outcomes are most sensitive to, and then to focus more quantiatively from there - if it adds value.

Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets" is a good book on decision making under uncertainty in a landscape (poker) that can be modeled quantitatively and in an environement that punishes thinkers that are not dispassionate. Like is not poker but the book is good on dealing with uncertainty.

In terms of hard decisions, Groopman and Hartzband, "Your Medical Mind", is an informed, lucid, and humane book on personal decisions related to healthcare. It's hard to know what to do, given data and advice or not. One line take away: see what people like you have done in similar situations, and how they feel about it.

In terms of strategic decisions, "A Structured Approach to Strategic Decisions", Kahneman, Lovallo, Sibony, [1] is for me the state of the art.

[1] [https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-structured-approach- to...](https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-structured-approach-to-strategic- decisions/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Flip a coin or roll some dice. For the majority of decisions delaying making a choice costs more than making a mistake. You can always fix it later if you picked the wrong option, and most of the time it doesn't actually matter as much as you think it will.

</comment><comment><USER6> Have you tried using mental models?</comment>


Concise, opinionated history of the BSD/SystemV split - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox/1890 <comment><USER2> Also, inaccurate. Consider just this paragraph:

> Sun customers responded by using alternatives, and the closest thing to a > working freely downloadable compiler was an obscure project called "gcc" > from the guy who did one of the three main emacs variants (gosmacs from the > maintainer of java, xemacs from the maintainer of netscape, and gnu emacs).

The unbundling occurred in 1990. Gcc was hardly obscure. In this USENIX schedule from 1989 ( [http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm](http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm) ) you see Stallman gave a tutorial on "Introduction to the Internals of the Gnu C Compiler". It's unlikely they would consider that for obscure software.

Lucid forked emacs, and released lemacs in 1992. (See [http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht...](http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html) .) "The initial authors of Lucid Emacs were Matthieu Devin, Harlan Sexton, and Eric Benson, and the work was later taken over by Jamie Zawinski, who became "Mr. Lucid Emacs" for many releases."

Only later was it renamed xemacs. Zawinski writes: "When Lucid went out of business in 1994, and I came to Netscape, I passed the torch for the maintenance of Lucid Emacs to Chuck Thompson (at NCSA) and Ben Wing (at Sun), who renamed it from ``Lucid Emacs'' to ``XEmacs.''" ([http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html) ).

Hence, 1) it's not true that gcc was effectively obscure in 1990, 2) there was neither lemacs nor xemacs in 1990, only GNU emacs and Gosling emacs, and 3) xemacs wasn't directly from one of the Netscape developers.

<comment><USER3> Whether or not gcc was "obscure" in 1990 really depends on which circles you were in, I'm sure, but it's true that it was hardly an unknown project, and that Sun's decision to unbundle the C compiler helped it to become much more popular.

Also missing from the article was a nod to Cygnus Support. A lot of the engineering work for gcc was done by the engineers at Cygnus, who basically collected support fees that were substantially cheaper than the Sun Pro C compiler. To be fair, I doubt Sun at that era had anticipated the rise of the "sell support and custom engineering for free software" business model. Cygnus was one of the first companies who was able to show that it was in fact workable.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050525231654...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050525231654621)

> In 1990 I became Executive Director of the Sun User Group. That December I > headed for San Jose for SUG's Eighth Annual Conference and Exhibit. ... The > second group was irate because Sun had "unbundled" its software. That is, > rather than getting all of Sun's developer tools together, they had to be > purchased separately. And of course, they cost more this way.

> But wait. Why purchase the C compiler from Sun, when you could get a better > one for less money from the FSF? That's what a large number of Sun's users > asked themselves. And the net result was a real jump in CD sales at the FSF. > (Several years later, when I organized the Freely Redistributable Software > Conference [February 1996] and then was Vice President of the FSF, I > realized more fully just how much Sun had benefited the FSF. I'm certain > this was not a foreseen consequence.)

I think that something a "large number of ... users" know about cannot meaningfully be called "obscure", else my lack of knowledge about European football/soccer teams makes it an obscure sport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After his illustrious career driving Sun into the ground Ed Zander proceeded to drive Motorola into the ground. But he's still richer than you.

<comment><USER5> It's funny because it's true. On all three points!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some inaccuracies in the timeline. Solaris 2 (the sysv one; the BSD SunOS 4 was after-the-fact renamed to Solaris 1) didn't ship until 1993, not the 80s. Also he says that gcc's support for 68k was important but Solaris never ran on that platform -- Sun made the switch from 68k->SPARC a few years before the BSD->sysv change.

The wider point is correct, but it isn't limited to just Sun. The decision for many UNIX vendors to charge extra for the C compiler was a big reason that gcc caught needed momentum. If that hadn't happened the whole free *nix history might have been very different.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that timeline error stuck out to me as well. Recently I found Solaris 2.1 physical media, and the date on it is 12/92\. My goal is to get old GCC running on it, but first I have to get it running at all. My sun4m is a SparcStation 20, so will probably have to find a sun4c or SS10.

Note to anyone trying to image old Sun CD-ROMs: anything below Solaris 2.4 (?) is a CD-ROM with a partition table. If you dd out /dev/cdrom on Linux, you may get only the first partition, in ISO9660 format. You will be missing the small UFS boot partitions. There should be one small UFS partition for each supported arch.

Seems like using /dev/sr0 on Linux works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I'd link to the message in google groups, but google crippled their groups > search functionality a couple years back so finding the message in their > archives even when you know the message id and the exact date is > unreasonably difficult these days.

I still don't understand why Google made searching the Usenet archive impossible to do.

Some important bits of computing history lurk in those archives and Google just has it all boxed up. The future people are going to shake their fists and wonder why all that information is really hard to get to.

<comment><USER9> Search by group to arrive here:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix)

Search group for "linus posix". On first response, click the 'No really, search for "linus posix" button, to discard the helpful "linux posix" correction.

Look at 23 message subjects lines and arrive here:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C2oixEP6qQJ)

Perfect? Probably not. Difficult? No.

<comment><USER8> That convoluted process works for that single exact message.

What if you want to search for the early appearance of some two word phrase on Usenet? This used to be easy. It can't (as far as I can tell) be done now.

And that convoluted process is -considering Google has excellent search engine- a fucking stupid mess.

<comment><USER9> Sorry about the tone, reading it now it doesn't come across well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" So [Torvalds] went through the Sun Workstation manuals in the university library and started implementing each system call listed there until he got tired of that and had his system call handler print the call number of the next unhandled call bash tried to make, implemented that, rinse repeat until he had bash working."_

This seems culture defining somehow. Linux seems to me to be mix and match and the modern BSDs seem to be more planned. Excellent.

</comment><comment><USER11> Important point: AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move.

<comment><USER12> > AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move.

The all-caps reminds me: SUN was an acronym at one point; it stood for Stanford University Network.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord For what it's worth, the same author (Rob Landley) has another opinionated article on the SysV/BSD split which also touches today's OS X and Linux, under the context of init systems: [http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014](http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014)

An interesting read, if bound to ruffle some feathers.

<comment><USER3> That article clearly omits one of the primary failures of Ubuntu's upstart, which was Canonical's insistence on copyright assignment. This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions, just as Canonical's control-freak nature over being able to re-license free software under a proprietary license doomed many of their other initiatives.

(Some Ubuntu partisans would claim this was only a perception issue, but the legal framework they insisted on using gave them the right to do it, and given that they were a commercial company, and given that people saw what happened with Sun after it was taken over by Oracle, it was extremely unlikely more than a handful would have ever given Canonical the benefit of the doubt.)

<comment><USER13> > This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions

Didn't RHEL ship with Upstart?

<comment><USER14> It's well documented, and even Scott James Remnant, the original author of Upstart, didn't sign the Canonical CLA after leaving Canonical.

[https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq](https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Funny how he brings up the Bryan Cantrill comment. Many years later, that same guy threatened to fire a guy he didn't even employ for reverting a gender neutral pronoun.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to see the business side of things at Sun, it's rarely under the spotlight compared to other companies such as Microsoft or Apple.

</comment><comment><USER17> "... as the project grew beyond a boot sector, he wrapped his assembly as C inlines..."

he = Linus Torvalds project = Linux

</comment><comment><USER18> To this day, I still think of Joyent's CTO as Bryan "Girl Kisser" Cantrill.

<comment><USER19> Can we not forgive and forget a single, isolated mistake made many years ago? I'm sure bcantrill has already been punished quite enough for that one mistake.

<comment><USER20> The Internet is not especially forgiving. This is a good case study in why it's probably not ideal to quote (especially unattributed) snippets of popular culture[1] to try and convey deeper feelings -- especially frustration -- when you cannot read the room.

[1] [http://www.screeninsults.com/saturday-night-live-get-a- life....](http://www.screeninsults.com/saturday-night-live-get-a-life.php)</comment></comment></comment>


Business school grads and quants are winning the battle to create the next P&G - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/12/business-school-grads-and-quants-are-winning-the-battle-to-create-the-next-pg/ <comment><USER2> The CEOs of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services all have MBAs. There are also lots of examples of MBA founders.

This has happened despite the fact that historically most MBAs have gone to banking and consulting. With MBA grads shifting toward tech, we should expect that many more tech CEOs and founders will have MBAs.

edit: added Apple.

<comment><USER3> "CEO" and "founder" are very different job descriptions. An MBA can be very useful for a peacetime CEO [1]. It is basically useless for a wartime CEO or founder (all of whom are wartime CEOs).

An MBA basically teaches you how to apply rational analysis and best practices to the running of an existing business unit. This works great during normal times, when your company has a competitive advantage, you know what it is, you have a large and growing customer base, and you are making a profit on every transaction. It works terribly when the default outcome, if you follow all the best practices and do everything you're supposed to, is that you'll fail miserably. This is the situation most founders are in - if their market opportunity were obvious to someone with an MBA, then someone with an MBA working for a big company with lots of resources would already have done it.

[1] [https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime- ceo-2/](https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/)

<comment><USER2> That is a really strange theory. It is also demonstrably false.

Many of the founders of the top unicorns have MBAs (Grab, StitchFix, CloudFlare, etc) [1] Also, I wouldn't categorize building AWS from scratch as a "peacetime CEO" job.

1\. [https://poetsandquants.com/2016/02/24/38-mba-founded- unicorn...](https://poetsandquants.com/2016/02/24/38-mba-founded-unicorns/3/)

<comment><USER4> Not sure how it's incompatible with your stats. If the degree is useless then you would expect MBA holders to have no advantage over non-MBA holders in founding companies. Not that MBA holders wouldn't sometimes be successful. You're missing a data point showing that MBA holders are more likely to succeed at founding startups, which I have yet to see anywhere.

Realistically, an MBA _can be_ helpful to a startup founder if that founder lacks basic business acumen from prior education or experience (basic accounting, financial planning, marketing, etc.). It can also be a hindrance because MBA coursework tends to trivialize many of the core skills needed to be successful at starting a company in favor of the higher-level thinking and planning needed for large corporations (you won't learn how to make your first sale, for example, or how to hire your first employee, setup a billing system, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brought to mind "Over 400 Startups Are Trying to Become the Next Warby Parker. Inside the Wild Race to Overthrow Every Consumer Category" [https://www.inc.com/magazine/201805/tom-foster/direct- consum...](https://www.inc.com/magazine/201805/tom-foster/direct-consumer- brands-middleman-warby-parker.html) and the corresponding YC discussion from a few months ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16992301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16992301)

<comment><USER6> Which reminds me, I went to the drugstore, a few weeks ago, to get a razor and blades; I took a look at Harry's, I think, and, surprise-surprise, they are priced about the same as the incumbents...

<comment><USER7> What's your point?

<comment><USER6> That often times "disruptor" is just marketing to get people on board thinking it's novel and advantageous to the consumer. But in reality, after initial buzz, they are mostly just another player in the market offering little in the way of differentiation, including price.

<comment><USER8> Also see all the foam rolled mattresses "different companies".

They buy from the same OEMs, they just have different websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just found out today that I helped my client potentially double or triple their sales on Amazon. They went from $5k daily sales to $10k. I'm still trying to process that that could be $1-2m in revenue. They're basically for the time being now one of the top 3 products on Amazon for their category, beating other established brands.

My colleagues and I are building new brands on Amazon every day. There are other ecommerce entrepreneurs building brands on Facebook ads and social media. It is now easier than before to find customers, build that list, and retain customers. There's been a shift and I see new brands challenging dominant sleeping brands every day. The craziest thing is that all these new challengers have very very small teams. I'm working on launching a product to challenge P&G, but I already know one startup, 3 founders, backed with VC money, that are already doing $50k+/mo on Amazon on that product.

<comment><USER10> Are these products fundamentally different? Or are we just seeing a new wave of marketing and fulfillment?

<comment><USER9> I think it might be too rapid change within the last 5 - 10 years.

Amazon and Shopify made it possible for anyone to start their own internet D2C business. Facebook ads/social media, make it easier than ever before to find and reach potential and current customers. China's manufacturing opened up and became easier than ever with Alibaba.

1\. Fulfillment became easier and more accessible.

2\. Marketing became easier and more accessible.

3\. Manufacturing became easier and more accessible.

Quality in my experience differs a lot. I don't have that much experience but these are two examples. One electronics startup is still trying to make it work and dealing with a lot of QC issues. Their hardware and design expertise is not up to Apple's standards but they are able to work with a smaller factory. I've also worked with shoes and it seems that for some of my clients, they seem to get their shoes from the same place...

Another trend I've noticed is affordable luxury. Most of my clients have been doing well in "affordable luxury". I read an article that Dollar Tree stores are doing well. I think it's making good quality products more accessible and affordable- and this is possible by cutting out A LOT (90%+) of middle men and offshore manufacturing for better or worse.

In the past, it was a lot harder and much more people were needed to get a product from factory to customer. Now for some of my Amazon colleagues, they go straight from manufacturer to fulfillment centers. Then there are Chinese manufacturers on Amazon going straight to the customer. Or dropshippers, going straight from manufacturer to customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Micah is an HBS alumnus. I'm not saying he's wrong, but he brings his own biases to the table, as we all do. I also went to business school, and while I wouldn't say it was worthless as a founder, the things that are valuable are not always what people believe are valuable.

There are three reasons to go to business school: knowledge, network and brand. People go for many reasons, such as feeling insecure, wanting insurance and taking a break from their job. These are not good reasons. Here is my evaluation of the good reasons:

\- Knowledge (overall grade C-) Yes, you will learn things if you study. Could you learn these on your own? Sure. Will you? Likely not. If you weren't an accounting/economics/finance major in undergrad you may find the academics particularly valuable. Some of the classroom experience is useful for things like negotiations, management and other "soft" skills. My experience was that the greatest intellectual advancement I found was through cross registering in the engineering and statistics departments. Go to a large research university, particularly if you went to a small liberal arts school for undergrad, and make the best use of a world class institution!

\- Network (Depends mostly on the competition to get in, B+) This is the biggest reason and often cited as the true reason people go. Academics are a joke and going for the brand seems gross, so people default to this answer, which is cronyism, but at least it's not as superficial as branding. In my experience, this was incredibly useful. I've landed three of my seven clients through business school classmates. The alumni network is good too, although not terribly strong unless you go to a smaller program, which lowers your odds that the alumni will be usefully placed for your purposes.

\- Brand (depends entirely on prestige, A+) This is vastly underrated, at least in polite conversation. Nobody like a braggart, and playing the "I went to Stanford GSB" card is an ugly move, so savvy MBAs resort to more subtle signaling. It's hard to measure the value here because it makes everything easier, from pitching and starting conversations, to being taken seriously and getting access to programs and resources.

Finally, a word on digital vertical native brands. Developing a valuable brand is low probability event (that's why people buy a brand by going to business school!). That is not to say it's difficult, or any more difficult than winning the lottery, but it is rare. Intentionally creating a brand can be hard, but I doubt there's much correlation between effort and success. Besides brand, these digitally native vertical brands have no sustainable competitive advantage, and I fully expect their profits to get competed away. The market, however, can stay irrational long enough for many people to get rich. Best of luck to anybody starting or investing in a digital brand!

</comment><comment><USER12> Well I'll start by saying I'm a bit biased. I've worked for a media agency where it had some of the world retail behemoths accounts. I was a digital media strategist on a specific market - though some of the stuff we did was indeed by global guidelines, so we had visibility on what was being done at a global level, still my bias is towards the reality of the market I was in.

I've dealt with their management and executives (brand managers, marketing managers, etc) and even by their criteria of HR choices, and it's pretty clear what kind of people they want: they want smart, orderly people who can execute well.

Some they get them from specific business universities early - people above average - and enroll them on some internal college for some time.

They are not very creative and innovative, even if they were they will dry out because they don't have margin for it - and maybe that's part of their success: they need to have a multinational oiled machine that outputs results.

Even the product launches came either by market alignment, or simply from an internal catalog.

Most of their insights came from internal dashboards fueled by Nielsen, GFK, Kantar (amazing sources by the way), and many private studies.

The thing is, they got to where they are because they had the Mass Media(Communication) and Distribution upper hand for years. TV, the king for many years, was the most effective way to get to the masses but it was extremely expensive - yet they had the financial muscle so they just had to pump GRPs.

Same goes for Retail Distribution, they built good distribution channels/partnerships - people wanted their products, they had emotional relationships with their brands.

But times change... first it started with retailers creating their own brands (distribution brands) because they built the financial muscle to advertise them, and had the distribution channels, they just had cut down margins to win in price and win the volume game...

Now it's the internet - people who know what their doing can reach a specific audience, deliver great messages, build amazing brands, and have great distribution channels - such as Amazon.

It's a loud market, and they mumble terms, jargon's and keywords they don't fully understand. They have historial brands, with amazing value, yet they are not connecting with people like some of these brands are doing.

Maybe they are so big they don't even notice it in their market shares, but some of these numbers aren't even known in their holy reports... and it chips off, day by day. They are also too proud to assume their are not doing a good job - they rather blame agencies and create pitches instead of taking accountability.

I've quit the agency job because my goal was to learn from with their mistakes and successes - and I believe it's quite doable to out-pace them, since they are extremely slow. I'm working on that right now.

In my opinion they need to employ entrepreneur minded people and give them the opportunity to fail.

It's a weird-amazing time to be alive as a marketer :)</comment>


Potential major security flaw on HP laptop? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rtl-sdr.com/potential-major-security-flaw-hp-laptop-discovered-rtl-sdr/

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant slides from a Defcon talk by Melissa Elliott / @0xABAD1DEA: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Z_IRt6R2FL7POeY4J-pY...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Z_IRt6R2FL7POeY4J-pYGLDAIAdEHprQY13f-NVIfwE/edit#slide=id.p)

<comment><USER2> That's one of the most engaging presentations I've seen for years. I laughed out loud at slide 38.

Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems unlikely that the flaw was intentional - there are much better ways of leaking audio that are much more difficult to detect. But it's interesting that the design and the cheap components or whatever have all conspired to leak the audio in FM.

If nothing else, it's a great lesson in how security is just a very difficult subject, and 'secure' an almost nirvana-like state in terms of the impossibility of achievement.

<comment><USER4> Yep I'd definitely chalk this down to being unintentional myself. I'd guess that there's leakage from the ADC on the mic which won't likely ever be turned off since clock gating it would be difficult (many of those guys talk on SPI or I2S or some such, which doesn't make that easy) and gating the power could have all kinds of noise issues during power on and off. Why it's that easy to pick up and why around 24mhz i'm not sure myself.

<comment><USER5> Forgive my beginner question:

What makes clock gating of SPI & I2S difficult?

As an example component, here's a SPI mux by Maxim that has 8 separately- controlled SPST switches for <= $3.30 (probably much cheaper at scale). [http://www.maximintegrated.com/datasheet/index.mvp/id/1281](http://www.maximintegrated.com/datasheet/index.mvp/id/1281) So, if you utilize this fully, you could clock-gate 8 separate SPI components for < $0.42 each, right?

Is a mux the wrong way to do it? What's the proper implementation?

<comment><USER6> Nothing. SPI and I2S is usually not implemented with free-running clocks anyway, the clock only runs when there's data on the interface. Sorry, grandparent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> </conspiracy> This one explains the issue quite well: [http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1le3if/so_i_discover...](http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1le3if/so_i_discovered_that_my_hp_laptop_leakstransmits/cbykrqq)

Learn your electronics and don't believe in rumors ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to see if others are seeing this same behavior on the same model. Maybe he has some weird malware that keeps the microphone live?

<comment><USER9> Malware, though, would likely not be able to actively send stuff out via the air.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, but I'm not convinced that a weak FM signal isn't just some electronic artifact of a crap board crammed in with a bunch of other tiny components that happens to be triggered when the microphone is on.</comment></comment></comment>


OnionShare: securely and anonymously share a file of any size - <AUTHOR> https://onionshare.org/ <comment><USER2> Does it use the new hidden services technology yet?</comment>


Microsoft Translator - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsofttranslator.com/

<comment><USER2> Damn, before clicking through I actually thought it was a translator translating between "Microsoft" and English.

<http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/04/15/nativity-scene>

<comment><USER3> My initial impression, too. I'm disappointed. :)

<comment><USER4> I work for the Microsoft Translator team... I would appreciate you guys not giving away our future roadmap :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The translations themselves seem good enough from the handful that I tried, but the auto-detect feature has room for improvement. For ex, I typed in "ciao" (the Italian equivalent of hi/bye), but it auto-detected German and subsequently had no translation.

<comment><USER4> auto detect generally tends to work best on longer strings. try something like "ciao amico mio" and it works fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just gave the Japanese to English a quick check, and it's no better than Google or anything else I've seen. And by that I mean it completely loses the meaning of anything but the most simple sentences.

I know Japanese to English is going to be harder than languages with similar structure, but I'd still expect machine translations to be farther along than they are now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, I tried a couple of articles from lemonde.fr, translating from french to english. The first worked ok, but the second... The title was "Apple dément pister les utilisateurs d'iPhone" which should translate to "Apple denies tracking iPhone users". It got translated to "Insane Apple tracks iPhone users"

For the record, Google comes up with "Apple denies iPhone users track"

</comment><comment><USER8> Not impressed, it can't handle simple everyday phrases like "Fars ma loon?" ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> The indonesian to english translation looks just as good as google's.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Tbot is pretty cool - does Google Chat have that feature?

<comment><USER4> You can add bots that go from 1 language to another. Tbot is interactive, and works for all languages that the service supports.You can also use the tbot to act as a translator in a group conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch</comment>


Is Google+ a Jumpino rip off?? - <AUTHOR> http://jumpino.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Got the discussion from here

[http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/27103/what-if- google...](http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/27103/what-if-google-stole- my-idea-can-i-do-anything-about-it-should-i)

<comment><USER2> Got the answer from here[1].

 _So what exactly did Google steal? The idea of grouping people together is not exactly new, and people have referring to their social groups as "social circles" for a long time now. Honestly I doubt they even saw your site—you have very little marketing or exposure, so they probably don't even know you exist.

As far as I'm concerned this is just sour grapes. To answer your question, just move on. You're reading far more into this than you should, and even if they did take your "ideas" there isn't anything you can do unless you patented them._

[1] [http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/27103/what-if- google...](http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/27103/what-if-google-stole- my-idea-can-i-do-anything-about-it-should-i/27104#27104)</comment></comment>


CIA espionage orders for the 2012 French presidential election - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/cia-france-elections-2012/#Press%20Release%20%28english%29 <comment><USER2> So... The Russians (or associates) leaked to Wikileaks a set of CIA operations that were spying on an election to distract from the Russians influencing an election?

Or is the allegation that the CIA used this information to influence the French election?

I find the similar-but-lesser-degree of this and the timing to be highly suspicious from Wikileaks, who seems to have taken a not-really-neutral tack as of late.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like the CIA was tasked with gathering intel on presidential candidates of a major European nation.

What exactly is a revelation here?</comment>


Car Engines: The incredible shrinking machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21679767-internal-combustion-engines-are-getting-smaller-more-economical-and-cleanerall <comment><USER2> Most people remember the analogy that if car engines had progressed at the same rate as computing then a rolls Royce would run at 100,000 km/h and have an engine the size of this full stop. Or something similar.

Ironically, it seems we're now at the end of the internal combustion era and the abacus makers are desperately trying to refine a soon to be redundant craft.

<comment><USER3> I think it will be a long time (100 years) until ICE's get replaced in semi trucks and container ships. The energy storage requirements are massive, and batteries for such applications have a much harder time justifying themselves.

<comment><USER2> You make a good point - small nuclear powerplants though?

<comment><USER4> While the technical hurdles may be surmountable, the political issues are probably intractable.

About the only viable green solution for container ships is going back to sails. Some ships already fly sails (really kites) to reduce their fuel costs, but it's not practical as the ship's only propulsion.

The best solution is probably to switch ships over to burning natural gas or biodiesel instead of filthy heavy fuel oil, but the cost structure is all wrong for this right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So "PS" is metric for horsepower. Who knew. (it's _German_ for horsepower, but German horses are just as powerful as imperial ones, and not particularly metric: PS literally means "Pferdestärken", i.e. "horse-powers")

The metric measure would be kW.

<comment><USER6> Metric horses, though obsolete, are 98.6% as powerful as imperial horses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Europe really needs a Kei car classification.

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

<comment><USER8> What difference should this classification make compared to existing car legislation?

Among the financial advantages mentioned on the Wikipedia article, only the VAT (presumably?) break has meaning in Europe, or at least in France, since the other advantages are either on taxes or requirements that don't exist here (weight tax, road tax, adequate parking requirement) or insurance (which already depends on engine power here).

It seems to be closer to the existing license-less car category, actually (which are also limited to 50 km/h and barred from entering highways).

<comment><USER7> Cars taking up physically less space could be taxed less (or, my preference, large SUVs taxed more). You use less road space, less parking space, less materials, so that is a reasonable tax policy. The UK has a road tax which could cover this, but VAT could also be used to tax the car less at time of purchase.

Current cars have settled on a certain size, for historical reasons. In fact they seem to be getting a bit bigger. But there's no particular reason for a car to be bigger than a single human being, or other sizes (two humans + one suitcase perhaps). We can use the tax system to change that for the better.

This isn't a pie-in-the-sky unproven idea either. Kei cars are hugely popular in Japan, demonstrating that the market exists.

They're pretty practical - I've driven in a 6 seat Kei-car in Japan, and there are Kei vans and Kei flatbed delivery trucks (all fitting into the smaller dimensions).

<comment><USER9> _Cars taking up physically less space could be taxed less (or, my preference, large SUVs taxed more)._

Norway essentially does this. Taxes are based on engine size and (I believe) weight. The relative price difference between a large SUV and a small, low horsepower, hatchback is much greater than in most other countries. However based on casual observations in and around Oslo, it doesn't seem to have a huge effect on the size of cars people drive.

The real effect is the 'everybody' owns a Tesla since they are exempt for many taxes and thus cost literally half the price of an equivalently performing petrol powered car.

<comment> david-given Car tax in the UK is based on carbon emissions. The table's here:

[https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars- re...](https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars-registered- on-or-after-1-march-2001)

It used to be based on engine size; for years I would get cars with as small engines as possible, simply because it would drop my tax by about 1/3.

As for car sizes... it does seem to be having an effect here. A lot of people I know go for small cars, preferring the little five-door hatchbacks. My last one was a Honda Jazz, with a 1.2 litre engine and an absurd amount of space inside; under the new tax system it'd be classed in category D (£110 a year), but I'd be totally unsurprised if the next model made it into category C (£30 a year). My father has a diesel Nissan Note, about the same size, and that _is_ in category C. He's very smug.

<comment><USER10> I drive a Vauxhall Insignia with a 2 litre 160ps engine. Also in band C. Also smug. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently switched from a 15 yrs old VW Golf IV with 1.6l and 100HP to a 2009 Tiguan with just 1.4l but 150HP.

I can't say that it has a better mileage but the power is there, the 50% more HP makes a real difference. I was really skeptical at the beginning, but the progress in engine design is indeed visible.

<comment><USER12> Your golf was a non-turbo petrol right? The Tiguan is a TSI which means a turbocharger and a supercharger :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >Three-cylinder engines have a tendency to rock backwards and forwards around the middle cylinder. Carmakers have come up with a number of ways to absorb the vibrations and make sure such engines don't shake, rattle and roll.

I'm skeptical how effective that is. Smells like planned obsolescence.

>These include more new materials, such as what the industry calls diamond- like carbon (DLC) coatings for the surfaces of moving parts.

"Diamond like" sounds nice. But it's soluble to steel. I'd prefer Boron Nitride or TiN by physical vapor deposition. But if other contact surface is coated, then you might be able to use that DLC stuff. But if I recall correctly, it's wear characteristics are not that miraculous in bearings.

<comment><USER14> > I'm skeptical how effective that is. Smells like planned obsolescence.

I'm not sure why it smells like that to you. Perhaps the word "absorb" is insufficiently precise. The correct term is perhaps "counterbalance", and it's purely mechanical. Some modern parts have fluid chambers and flexible rubber components to damp oscillation, but that's not "planned obsolescence" because the parts will very likely outlast the rest of the car.

<comment><USER13> Four cylinders is inherently more balanced than three. Fatigue is the second worst killer of mechanisms, right after corrosion. Vibration causes fatigue. The best ideas to balance inherently unstable engine involve balancing axle. But even they usually are not as good as inherently balanced.

<comment><USER14> But the entire point is that they've invented a novel mechanism for counterbalancing vibrations that are unique to the three cylinder. When you do that, you reduce vibration. This reduces fatigue.

It's worth noting as well that there's no such thing as "inherently balanced" when you're talking about ICEs (except perhaps the inline 6). Four-cylinders are inherently balanced in one mode (first harmonic), imbalanced in another (secondary imbalance), and exhibit torsional effects that may as well be imbalance.

<comment><USER13> You have point there. No ICE is really balanced, there are 16(?) different vibration modes and the best boxer 6 engines can deal with maybe 4 of them.

I have pretty strong gut feeling that the 1st harmonic is more important than the 15 other modes combined. This far engines with odd numbers of pistons have been exception. Until we go to single row star engines, but they got replaced pretty quickly with two row star engines. Which can take the 1st harmonic into account.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quay.io has been down for over 14 hours - <AUTHOR> https://status.quay.io/ <comment><USER2> It's a bad outage, it seems. 16+ hours now, and counting, and they don't seem to have a root cause or a hot standby.

We just cut over all of our stuff (Ambassador API Gateway) to Docker Hub. Lots of the Kubernetes ecosystem is on Quay. I wonder how this affecting others. Our users are definitely affected, as well as our development team.

</comment><comment><USER3> This literally cost me sleep last night, paging me for new Kubernetes nodes that failed to transition to 'Ready' because they were unable to pull Calico images during bootstrapping. After some duct-taping to get those initial nodes up and running, we just moved the Quay-hosted images to a GCR repository and moved on with life.

But that doesn't diminish the fact that this outage is a complete disaster for Quay.

</comment><comment><USER4> For those on k8s: quick reminder, unless you're in development mode your image pull policy should be IfNotPresent so you have at least some measure of caching to protect you from further degradation of service.

Beyond this, I'm updating things to use GCR so that if this bleeds into tomorrow my team's development timeline isn't impacted any further.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yup, we also had alerts for our k8s nodes not getting ready (calico images). We moved to Docker Hub, but experienced timeouts there a few times. I guess they got a sudden spike in traffic.

This will be bad for Red Hat's reputation.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was just going to post it. I am unable to work currently because of it.</comment>


Solving Clasical AI Planning Problems with Fast Downward and Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2018-12-25-fast-downward.html <comment><USER2> I love these kinds of problems!

Question: is there a reason we would choose a solver like this instead of encoding the effects in prolog and let it generate plans for us? Why would one approach be better than the other?

<comment><USER3> Prolog does not, by default, remember conflicts and avoid them. Solvers do, most of them.

Look for Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) SAT solvers for one example. The pseudoboolean and integer programming solvers and optimizers learn cutting planes marking subspaces where no (better) solution exists, for another example.</comment></comment>


Banish the Kardashians from the web - <AUTHOR> http://kblocker.co/ <comment><USER2> If you're reading sites that report on the Kardashians, you're better off just not going to that site. That's mostly worked for me, until now.

<comment><USER3> Should kblocker block itself?

<comment><USER4> Can somebody please check?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the false-positive rate like? It would be terrible if it blocked people like Garak and Dukat.

Just a note: the "How does K-blocker work?" link just goes back to features, instead of actually telling how it works.

</comment><comment><USER6> I loathe the day where such apps isolate people from thought they do not like on a wholesale business. Can you imagine a world of safe spaces and such where you never have to be challenged? It would be like exporting the current college culture to the world and that if not a true dystopian future, one where the thought police exist through intimidation and threat is still one I don't want.

<comment><USER7> I used to have a similar opinion until I read this thing from Banksy on our choice to consume media like the Kardashians: [http://adsoftheworld.com/blog/letter_from_banksy_on_advertis...](http://adsoftheworld.com/blog/letter_from_banksy_on_advertising)

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Update at the end there, "This may no be Banksy's words."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Possibly the greatest use of iOSs new web filtering API. Excellent work.

</comment><comment><USER10> And now I'm reading about them even on HN...

</comment><comment><USER4> Herold of a dystopian future where individuals isolate themselves, and become increasingly radical in a bubble formed by their personal bias. Is there anything I can use to block Republicans? :-)

<comment><USER11> herald

<comment><USER12> Maybe Harold was a time traveller! Harold Titor perhaps?

;)

<comment><USER13> You don't surf without Kblocker.

<comment><USER3> You mean Harold from the future doesn't? And they're still around...perhaps we do eventually end ageing but only for people as rich as the Kardasians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Jeer if you must, but here's an iOS app that any of us could have written, yet will make several house payments' worth by week's end.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what FB and Google think about this filtering API. If one day Apple blocks all ads by default, it would be very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've always wanted Google to provide a BlackHole option on all their products. Every person, organization, subject on my black hole list would never appear in any search results, or News articles... I would BlackHole the Kardashians, Chris Brown and many others.

</comment><comment><USER17> >Less Kardashian spam makes your battery last longer

IMO filtering will use extra processing power which will infact increase battery consumption.

<comment><USER18> Uh no, matching a few compiled regexes is very cheap compared to requesting additional images over a cellular connection and and then having the browser lay out the additional text/images.

<comment><USER10> But those regexes are matched on _every_ request, not just on the ones blocked. Over time that surely adds up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who are Kardashians? Googling gives me result about some obscure photo model. Is she leader of some clickbait company?

</comment><comment><USER20> Why would I have to know about that?

</comment><comment><USER21> I downloaded the app, so shouldn't it block this post?

<comment><USER22> I see what you did there!</comment></comment>


Strange show spotted high above Mars' surface remains mysterious - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/strange-show-spotted-high-above-mars-surface-remains-mysterious/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting. Not about wild speculation and crazy theories but actually interesting which is kind of rare. I guess the huge storm would be the most interesting one if true, since it's not been observed at the past. Not at this level, at least.</comment>


Show HN: Personalised newsletter with tech and non-tech remote jobs - petr-nagy https://remoteweekly.cc <comment> petr-nagy Hi HN! I made this.

How it works:

a) Subscribe on the homepage [1]

b) Choose your interests and skills [2]

c) The system will now crawl various job boards or social posts and send you _weekly_ summary with the best picks based on your preferences from previous step

d) You _can_ upvote/downvote each pick allowing the system to learn from you for the next round (week)

Disadvantages:

Clearly the weekly interval which can cause some positions to be already filled when you get the email.

Final note:

The ideal persona for this product is not actively looking for a job. He/she already has a job, but is thinking about going remote for some reason (traveling, commuting, family).

Appreciate any feedback!

[1] [https://remoteweekly.cc](https://remoteweekly.cc) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72QoeorAo5Q&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72QoeorAo5Q&feature=youtu.be)</comment>