Introducing Airbnb Plus - <AUTHOR> https://www.airbnb.com/plus <comment><USER2> I travel a lot and have stayed at 50+ airbnb places all around the world -- but the biggest problem is that the reviews are always so artificial you honestly have zero idea of what you're getting into.

Worst of all is the amenities, which are more often incorrect than not. I generally filter for places with washer + drier, as I'd rather not be looking for laundromats. Probably over 80% of listings that say they have a washer and drier do not. Most of the time the "drier" is a drying rack or a hair drier. Other times the host explains that I can visit his house or a laundromat, so that counts. Or the last place there was a shared washing machine between 30+ places.

And because you can't leave anonymous tips, I just add the problem by leaving positive reviews even when I'm unhappy with the place. Currently my airbnb profile shows me an an exceptional guest (I have nothing but positive reviews for me, and have given nothing but positive reviews) so have never had a problem getting any place I want. I don't really want to pollute my profile with candid feedback.

When I'm staying somewhere for 1 or 2 nights, I tend to just get a hotel. There's too much friction and problems in airbnb for it to be worth it.

<comment><USER3> Hosts (or anyone) can look at your profile to see the reviews _about_ you, but not the reviews you've written. They would have to know the places you've stayed and then search through those reviews to find yours. So I don't think you should be worried about leaving honest reviews.

<comment><USER4> I think the worry is retaliatory reviews. I've been in a situation where if I left my host an honest review, I expected to get a nasty review in return.

It's honestly a problem with all of these bi-directional rating systems. As long as they make it at all possible for the ratings to leak before both parties have rated, there's a strong disincentive for any party to leave an honest rating.

<comment><USER5> Airbnb switched to a "double blind" review system several years go, so you only see the other person's review after you've written your own. If you don't leave a review within two weeks, the other review becomes public and you no longer have the option to leave a review. I did a search to see if there was any press about this, couldn't find much but there's a bit about it here: [https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/building-for- trust-503...](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/building-for- trust-503e9872bbbb) "The result was a 7% increase in review rates and a 2% increase in negative reviews."

<comment><USER6> My reason for not writing a negative review is because before staying at their place we exchanged phone numbers and other things, and now I don't feel comfortable writing a negative review and possibly having a confrontation. YMMV but I avoid writing negative reviews despite the 'double blind' review system.

<comment><USER7> Always contact them through AirBnB. You should be treating it just like contacting random strangers for sex on Craigslist, potentially dangerous. There's no reason to give a random stranger your personal contact details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is strange marketing as it almost sounds like the non-Plus listings aren't what people already expect to some degree from an airbnb.

> With Airbnb Plus, you can always check in effortlessly. Every home is > equipped with a lockbox, keypad, or a host who is on-call to greet you.

This is so weird. How would you otherwise check in to a home if it doesn't have self check in or a host?

> When you book an Airbnb Plus home, you get the focused attention of our > Airbnb Plus customer support team–a highly-trained team committed to great > service and faster responses

Okay, so if there is no self check in and no host to greet me at a non Plus home, I'm stuck with a poorly trained unresponsive agent.

I realize that they want to differentiate the hotel-like quality airbnbs from the others, so they can give it a badge and therefore justify a higher price for it, but the delivery is odd, as other commenters have pointed out.

An alternative approach could be to describe such listings as "Guaranteed X, Y, Z". I think with that language it wouldn't undermine the quality of the non Plus listings as much.

<comment><USER9> Airbnb employee here: Re: the check-in and on-demand requirement, this means that there is 24 hour check-in available vs. a pre-set check-in time that you would have to coordinate closely with a host. This would mean that there's a keypad, lockbox with a key and/or a doorman or local key person who will bring the key on demand when requested.

<comment><USER10> I already do this and this is standard with the local airbnb hosts I know. I get that this obviously does not happen across the board but I can assure you anyone serious is already doing this. In some cases I even pickup guests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This offering looks nice, but half the bullet items listed as benefits were things that I already thought were guaranteed by AirBnB... This seems like an excuse to lower their standards on non-Plus listings.

<comment><USER12> It's what you expect, but it costs them money to verify these expectations.

I'd guess this is about saying "we've verified this" .

<comment><USER13> But then again, they don't seem to make any hard commitment as a result of said inspection, something like "everything is verified in person so if something is missing/wrong we book you in the nearest five star hotel for free", only a vague promise about a more trained customer support agent if something goes wrong. Does not seem very reassuring honestly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> AirBnb sells feelings of authenticity, but it comes across in an uncanny- valley sort of way. I did an AirBnB cooking class experience in the suburbs of Mexico City. It was really fun, I got to meet a few great people, and it was in a lovely house. But how genuine are the host's laughs at my jokes when I'm paying him for the class? It doesn't feel real.

Staying at an AirBnB is a less homogenous than staying at the Hilton. There's a bit more risk involved (not necessarily safety, but cleanliness, noise, etc). Hotels, on the plus side, are run like businesses and feel more impersonal. It's more honest than an AirBnB experience in a way.

More to the point, I'm surprised the company keeps improving their product like this. It's not Dropbox or Yelp, which don't feel too different after 10 years.

<comment><USER15> I semi-regularly stay at Bed & Breakfasts when I travel. I've never booked through Airbnb but I observe that a fair number now list there. I expect this also fuels the perception that Airbnb is more expensive than it used to be. B&Bs (in the small inn sense) aren't typically all that inexpensive.

It really depends what I'm looking for. With a lot of business travel in particular, I'm looking for a consistent experience with a 24 hour desk in a convenient location. For a weekend getaway I often look for something that's a bit more "local."

<comment><USER14> AirBnB has also made it pretty easy to use their service for business travel. If you're under cap, you could possibly upgrade to a better plane seat. Personally, I prefer a cheap hotel and a good plane ride. A lot of the old- school business travel services like fax machines and gyms I don't ever use anyway.

<comment><USER16> I haven't been able to opt out of amenities that apparently AirBnB considers essential for business trips. I'm a scientist - I don't wear a suit and I don't need a hairdryer. Sadly this limits my choices of places down too much, so after looking at it once I changed back to the normal view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Airbnb is trying to make more money by offering experiences (events that generally seem very expensive to me) and moving to a more high-end branding. If I open the website I mostly see the more exclusive places first.

I think this opens opportunities at the bottom. A website that focusses on functionality and cheaper rooms. The public is now familiar with the concept. Some people do not want to pay above hotel prices to stay somewhere for the night only. They are looking for a simple, clean and cheap bed. I am one of those.

<comment><USER18> i don't see how a whole new company can exist to fill in the gap of what airbnb's price slider filter can fix in 2 seconds

<comment><USER19> It's not enough to have a slider, you also need to actively market to people looking for cheap places to stay in the first place, or they will never even think to use your precious slider.

This splits AirBnBs marketing on two fronts: high end and low end. This either doubles their marketing cost or halves their marketing budget for each audience. Take your pick.

A company focused on low cost listings only has to market to one audience, which results in significantly cheaper marketing cost, which means better profitability, which means longer staying power, which means eventually they own a large percentage of the low end market.

Game Over.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand, how would AirBnB segmenting their marketing cause it to cost twice as much?

Imagine AirBnB and the low cost company both exist as you imagine. Now suppose AirBnB buys the low cost company and doesn't change their marketing at all. Of course marketing ROI for each of the two segments doesn't change. Compare this to the case where AirBnB operates in the two segments without buying low cost company. How are these cases different?

<comment><USER19> When a marketing budget that once served a uniform segment splits to serve multiple segments, you must either divide the budget amongst segments or increase the budget to support the previous standard of marketing activity for a segment.

<comment><USER15> Yes but, if you serve multiple segments vs. just one, you presumably can amortize your marketing dollars over more volume. (And if you're not increasing volume by going after more segments, those new segments obviously aren't working out for you.)

<comment><USER19> In this case the low end market becomes a drain on AirBnB because the ROI is not nearly as high as their high end market. However the ROI would be acceptable to a smaller player. Is it worth for AirBnB to dilute their brand at this critical juncture just to hold on to as wide a market as possible?

No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They don't explicitly state this, but I really hope one of the things they guarantee with Plus is that the host isn't expecting you to cover up the fact that you're in an AirBNB.

I love the service overall, but I absolutely hate getting the morning-of- checkin email saying "Hey can't wait to host you, by the way, tell the receptionist you're my cousin and if any of the neighbors are in the hallway please just pace around the elevator until they leave." This seems to happen 90% of the time in New York places.

<comment><USER22> This happened to me in Toronto (my local coworkers said it was a common thing) and the doorman threatened to not let me in and to not return my bags that the airline temporarily lost and delivered there.

<comment><USER10> This often only happens in Cities where Airbnb is either illegal or is fighting with local cities.

<comment><USER21> Exactly - in which case, I don't understand why AirBNB allows listings in those places, or at least warn you. It's a _terrible_ user experience to find out you're an unwitting co-conspirator in someone else's crime.

<comment><USER23> Because they don't give a shit. They make money on the rental anyway and as long it doesn't threaten to wind up with terrible PR or cost them tangible money why would they care?

I used AirBnB twice in Japan and booked a couple experiences (which I thought were really expensive for what they were) and I always cringed at their email sig :

 _From AirBnb with Love_

It's not about spreading love. It's about a pretty ruthless business. Externalities be damned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. I wonder what those "checked for 100+ things that guests told us they love" are.

Shouldn't the general quality of the listing already be apparent from the ratings?

I'm always looking for apartments with a view. That is why I am starting a startup that will help locate these:

[https://nothingless.github.io/](https://nothingless.github.io/)

I will also list if an apartment has a table. Because I need one to work with my laptop on it.

What are other HNers looking for in an apartment that is not easy to find via the standard filters?

<comment><USER25> I hope their check includes people listing "whole homes" as actually being an entire house and not just someones basement or granny flat. Also a room with an attached bathroom isn't an "apartment". Seen quite a few of those being listed as whole rooms too. I don't really get it, if they fool me do they expect me to be happy when I show up and find out Im basically sleeping like harry potter?

<comment><USER26> How is a granny flat with it's own entrance, kitchen, etc not a "whole home"? those are often rented as apartments anyways

<comment><USER25> Because a lot of the amenities listed are actually in the main house. If Im renting a "whole home" I dont really want to be in the owners back yard, ya know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _Reliable check-in With Airbnb Plus, you can always check in effortlessly. Every home is equipped with a lockbox, keypad, or a host who is on-call to greet you._

Love the implication that the check in process for their regular listings is unreliable :^)

Otherwise, as others are pointing out, interesting to see where their priorities lie - certainly these high touch experiences are bringing them more money than people renting out a spare bedroom.

I do wonder how much of a pain this must all be for hosts - anyone who's ever been in a slightly expensive place knows how entitled people spending money can get, and that must be a huge pain to deal with when it's someone staying in your house making a fuss because you didn't offer them organic orange juice in the morning. This happened to a friend of mine who hosted someone for a few nights, on regular Airbnb, with no promise of breakfast whatsoever in the first place. Again, people can get really entitled when they're spending money. She stopped hosting as the result of that experience (they complained about more than the breakfast, but that's one thing they were weirdly pushy about).

<comment><USER28> To be fair, "BnB" = Bed and Breakfast. It's in the name, not the fine print.

<comment><USER27> Should he have also complained because he slept on a real mattress and not an Air Bed, as advertised in the name?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm just writing with respect to personal experience, but I would rather book a hotel even over an Airbnb Plus. The reasons? Rewards are harmonized, reliable rooms, cleaning, 24-hour person on site should there be a problem. With an Airbnb, I might get a few of the qualities listed above, but never all of them. And Airbnb pricing often is the same as comparable (if not better) hotels.

<comment><USER9> Airbnb employee here: That's a perfectly fine personal preference especially if those are the attributes you care about the most. There are tons of B&B's and boutique hotels that also satisfy those requirements that list on Airbnb. If you're looking for places with kitchens, a backyard, more interaction with a local host, larger space for a family gathering or a group event etc. then an Airbnb could do the trick. I personally also sometimes find that we have listings in places that hotels are not present in. For example, in San Francisco, all the hotels are pretty much concentrated either in downtown near the super commercial Union Square area or along Lombard St. in the Marina district. If you want to stay in the other 95% of the city, you're going to have very limited options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I rented a place with Airbnb. A lot of the reviews said it's 13th floor with a gorgeous view. The actual place was on the 2nd floor. I called airbnb and the angry lady said that they are not responsible for the reviews and advised me not to trust them. She said I'll get no refund.

<comment><USER24> Can you provide a link to that listing?

I am always looking for apartments with a view so I would like to see how booking one can go so wrong.

</comment></comment><comment> w-m To me the homes, people and their experiences in the video feel artificial. Thus the whole video makes me strangely uncomfortable, even though I am probably in the target audience.

<comment><USER31> Agree. I think a good counterexample is what Lyft did at the end of last year: [https://blog.lyft.com/posts/thank-you](https://blog.lyft.com/posts/thank-you)

It feels really authentic (and it probably is).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So they basically just used user feedback to sort their existing catalog into two catagories letting the upper one increase their prices.

Makes sense. You were able to find some killer deals with extremely nice places that where waay underpriced because the hosts were decent human beings. They'll likely get contacted by AirBnB with "You could join airBnB plus... and you can price it 40% higher than current with us only taking twice our usual cut" or similar

</comment><comment><USER33> Makes sense - a subset that's had a bit more oversight from AirBnB, to filter out the ghost hotels and places with one fork, no coffee machine, and furniture that's all basic IKEA stuff.

</comment><comment><USER34> I use Airbnb a lot. When the location is bad the reviews are often bullshit. People are afraid to leave a negative review. I would be willing to pay more to know the history of complaints that Airbnb receives directly through their support line. In the past I've discovered that Airbnb knew that there was a problem with a location but gave the owner another chance and did not follow up.

<comment><USER25> They should just show the complaints as a stat like "10 complains last 12 months"

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> How much of AirBnB's current valuation is predicated on the assumption that they'll eventually capture a hearty share of the business and high-end/luxury traveller segments (i.e., the high-margin profit drivers)?

I see moves like Plus as AirBnB trying to "professionalize" aspects of their product, but they'll never be able to provide the "guarantee (or recourse)" of an established hotel chain.

Outside of those who are cost-conscious, or those with unique accommodation needs (large groups, etc.), it's hard to imagine why any discerning traveller would opt for an AirBnB over a traditional hotel, all things being equal.

</comment><comment><USER36> Way to level up! I actually think this combined with the new superhost incentives are a very well-considered, combination to elevate the overall quality of the platform overall.

The down side is: it seems like this may alienate new hosts by creating an (overwhelmingly) high bar for a listing. Not everyone is a semi-professional hotelier. How will that be balanced out?

Be careful not make would-be hosts feel too self-conscious to list their space. It's a fine line between building community and alienating it when curation bias turns into a core pillar of a company's identity.

I think discouraging new hosts by setting the bar (and company identity) so high is a net-negative for long-term community building. It makes total sense short-term, and it makes sense for an OTA like Booking. Long-term: it shoots the notion of _home-sharing_ in the foot and without new hosts feeling welcome, a growing market can't sustain the demand.

Personally (I'm obviously biased lol), I'm obsessed with the notion that everyone is a host. Everyone would host someone, and it's a platforms job to help match those people to public listings, homes privately listed (networked via communities / friends), homes that have professional photos, homes that even have no photos (because if you're booking a friend's home, who cares). I'm not saying lower the standards, I'm saying change the frame; it's as a matching game threaded by community.

</comment><comment><USER37> Inching closer to a mainstream hotel brand. Can't complain about more competition, assuming it's zoned properly.

<comment><USER38> I usually check AirBnB but lately the best prices after fees are higher than mainstream hotel brands. To a certain extent this is controlled by property owners more than AirBnB itself, they've figured out they can charge more.

The result is that while I used to go to AirBnB for the discounts, it's now becoming a premium brand with a premium price.

It may be worth noting that I always opt for "whole place." It may be different if you're willing to get just a room.

<comment><USER25> Same, Always search for superhost, whole place, free onsite parking (rules out a lot of condo highrises), two bedrooms (Filters out basement apartments, granny flats, rooms being listed as whole houses).

Recently scored a whole house for ~60/day using this and you know what, it wasn't that bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The main part I like about this is Airbnb actually verifying things in properties. It's always annoying when a listing has tiny lies in it about wifi and other small things. I really want that Airbnb rewards program though

<comment><USER10> How much of a premium are you willing to pay for this verification? Secondly, it is going to be even more annoying when you expect it to be verified and your WIFI and small things are still missing or non-functional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 'with hosts known for great reviews..'

Thus far, for me anyway, not a reliable method of finding great hosts.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wow. First I was confused and then on reading closer I can only say - what a load of bs. So, they take the same experience and re-package it to charge more money. And here I thought Uber's packaging on some of their ride categories was bs.

</comment><comment><USER42> Honestly a little disappointed. Thought the "Plus" would be more like an offering like Amazon Prime in the sense that you wouldn't have to pay these "AirBnB fees" every single time you make a booking and instead pay a membership fee. (hate these fees displayed separately - why not display a single price to the customer - I don't care what it consists of - edit: and while we are at it, please get rid of these absurd "cleaning fees" that get misused by dozens of hosts)

</comment><comment><USER43> This seems like a smart and natural step for AirBnB.

Step 1) enable existing hosts who are great hosts to 'step up' to a prestige status which creates visibility and pushes more hosts towards wanting to get there too, thereby improving the overall quality on AirBnB.

Step 2) (I'm skipping a few steps) - eventually fill the void with AirBnB property/amenity management as a service for hosts.

Hosts who don't want to manage or deal with the pain of trying to get to Plus status will simply pay AirBnB for the cleaning, the linens, the supplies etc, no worries, no problems, and let AirBnB manage it all for you. Also gets more people wanting to host who are aloof to finding or trusting a manager they don't know.

It will take time but it's well worth it, even if it is only partially successful.

Good job.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's hard to get a predictable service quality from AirBnb hosts and locations, so the Plus program could be a step in the right direction.

Maybe, AirBnb should just become a platform on which a branded/franchised networks should appear that stick to certain standards. Verified by "Philton". Quality controlled by "Karriott".

Otherwise, AirBnb is always a lottery.

</comment><comment><USER45> Listen to Masters of Scale episode 1 ([https://mastersofscale.com/brian- chesky-handcrafted/](https://mastersofscale.com/brian-chesky-handcrafted/)) to understand what is (seemingly) behind AirBnB's strategy for AirBnB Plus. Highly recommended!

</comment><comment><USER46> Can't users already grep these type of homes by using price and rating filters? So the premium is based on a "verified" distinction due to an official inspection? I guess that's useful but it may make these kinds of gems harder to book (and more expensive) if they are easier to distinguish.

<comment><USER15> One would certainly expect that certification or other sorts of quality/service guarantees would allow properties to set higher prices relative to those that don't have them. There are reasons why many people (generally including myself) are more likely to buy used camera gear, for example, from reputable dealers rather than eBay even though the prices are usually higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Waiting for serviced apartments to show up in the US like they do in Australia & Asia.

When I travel over there, I always do it. The amenities of the Airbnb, plus a front desk and a consistency + cleanliness.

AirBnbs are great, but they're still very hit/miss.

</comment><comment><USER48> Getting that much needed 4.8 rating, reminds me of certain dark reflective surface.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why do they never link to the listings when they advertise these beautiful homes? It's such a simple thing to do, I wonder if they purposefully leave the links out. I'm curious how much that LA home is to rent.

</comment><comment><USER50> My one and only experience with AirBnB was horrible. I booked a place so I could take some family and friends on a nice little vacation. Fast forward to three days before check-in. The host messages me asking me to email them a copy of my photo ID. Obviously, I told them no. 1) You should never let anyone have a copy of your photo ID (identity theft). 2) You certainly shouldn't _email_ your ID. 3) Communication outside AirBnB is against their rules. 4) A copy of your photo ID is not required, again according to AirBnB's rules.

Anyway, I told the host it would be too dangerous to comply with their request and that I would be happy to _show_ the ID in-person at check-in. They ignored me and just re-iterated their request. At this point I was already ID verified by AirBnB, so there's really no reason for the host to personally verify me except at check-in. So I contact AirBnB support.

Well the host stonewalls me and support for the 3 days leading up to check-in. AirBnB support is friendly, but their messages are often confusing and contain broken english making them difficult to understand. Their helpfulness only extends as much as to say "yes, this is against our rules, but the host won't budge."

So I had to cancel the trip last minute and break the news to my family and friends who had already made plans around this vacation. Everything was ruined.

The best AirBnB offered was to give us extra "credit" to book someplace different. Oh, great. Let me just go book another AirBnB, who might _also_ break your rules, last minute. No thanks. I was too stressed by having to deal with all this garbage to work up the energy to try and book someplace last minute. The thought that I would have to cancel the trip and disappoint my friends and family who were so excited to go ... that ate away at me the _whole_ time I was dealing with that horrible host and the limp AirBnB support.

We were lucky in that our destination was a road-trip away, rather than a flight. Imagine if we had booked flights depending on this AirBnB booking?

I don't see how anyone could entrust their trips to the whims of AirBnB given this behavior. They clearly can't enforce their own rules and don't go out of their way to help their customers.

On top of all this, I had the misfortune of visiting the AirBnB subreddit. Wow. The AirBnB host culture is rife with self-entitled control freaks who are ready to throw guests under the bus under the guise of "well this is my personal home, so you have to obey my rules." No, this is a business. We're _paying_ to stay at your _business_ property. Not your home. It stopped being your home when you offered it for sale. Of course I would always treat people's property with respect, home or not. But the attitude that they somehow are above the rules of a business because they're renting their "home" is toxic.

Other commenters frequently point out how the rating system is also completely broken. Guests won't rate their stays low, even when there are problems. Which means you can't trust the ratings. And if you can't trust the ratings, how can you choose a place to stay? And how is AirBnB Plus supposed to work if every place has 5/5?

Since my stay was cancelled, I had no way to leave a review. I have serious doubts AirBnB themselves will take any action against the host. So I can only imagine all those poor naive souls out there just emailing copies of their IDs to strangers on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER51> Why not? I have not found airbnb to be cheaper than a hotel, and a lot less convenient. So why not go the full hotel route.

However, there is that rare chance you get someone who is interesting to stay with.

</comment><comment><USER52> A nice way for people to filter out, or even limit themselves to a more luxury option on the service.

You could see yourself never using it, or using it a lot, granted your circumstances or needs

</comment><comment><USER53> So they are basically a fancy hotel that skirts regulations?

</comment><comment><USER54> How about a guarantee that the guests won't throw a party in my house and disturb my neighbors? This has been a constant problem for me.

</comment><comment><USER55> New revenue stream for the company growing its presence in the premium segment.

<comment><USER10> Seems they may have missed the mark here. I would not classify hotel-like quality as the premium segment. Many of the standard Airbnb's I've stayed at beat hotel-like quality in every way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> No subtitles on the Shanghai video... 不好!</comment>


Hackers and Fighters - <AUTHOR> http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm

<comment><USER2> I must admit I don't consider learning a programming language something a university is supposed to teach you. They should teach you about concepts, and perhaps offer some optional seminars or workshops interested students could use for learning a programming language of choice.

Frankly, a "programming language" degree from a university would devaluate the value of the degree in my opinion (ie if a student would get points for knowing a programming language). Might as well just go for Microsoft Certification.

I also don't see why they have to agree on a standard programming language for the whole CS department. Why not let each teacher do their own thing, and let the students decide (teacher insists on Pascal -> students won't attend the lecture).

<comment><USER3> The problem with most CS courses (and any course in general) is that the class is taught to the lowest common denominator of students. Yes, a class can have pre-requisites, but the first required CS classes for freshmen cannot.

Some colleges don't require any previous computer experience to become a CS major, just as long as you can pay the tuition. In such cases, you can't assume any basic programming knowledge without turning the intro courses into programming language courses in some base language.

But I agree with you on the last part about not having one language for every course in the department.

<comment><USER4> > the class is taught to the lowest common denominator

Not the highest common factor?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think academia would generally respond that CS is about the concepts not the syntax.

Universities need to do a better job raising street fighters, but I don't think it needs to be through course load. There needs to be more programming competitions, more open ended assignments, more CS related clubs and projects, etc. Sure not everyone will participate, but if they don't, they are never going to be good programmers anyway.

And lets face it, if universities had more ways to allow students to implement fun things like games or robots (or startups), they would certainly be more willing to spend their extra cycles out of class learning implementation.

<comment><USER6> I totally agree. As acgourley said, not everyone will participate, but these sorts of programs would give a solid opportunity to develop more practical skills to people who aren't willing to take initiative to learn it entirely on their own. I'm strongly opposed to the idea that the Algorithms or Theory of Computation class should be traded in for a course on .NET GUI Development, Ruby on Rails, or some other API-du-jour.

University is about learning concepts and theory, not just a few programming languages and APIs. The real problem is that trade schools are unfairly stigmatized, and people who want to learn to be a programmer without wading through all the algorithms and theory have to still go to a University for social reasons when they'd be better served by a trade school.

<comment><USER5> if it isn't the street fighter himself...</comment></comment></comment>


Why we don't hire .NET programmers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ <comment><USER2> > But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I can't help > but ask "why?"

> Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen.

Has the author ever even used .NET? Maybe for their specific product it isn't useful, but just look at (for one example) all the games on the Xbox 360, a platform that dominated. Also, at least in my company .NET is _huge_ internally. Fortune 500's prefer stability, and startups don't (as much), but that doesn't mean the need isn't there.

<comment><USER3> Startup's seem to have always argued about price and vendor lock in.

This isn't really an issue anymore...

You can code on Windows, with a free IDE (Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Community) and deploy to Linux. Total cost: $0.

You can code on Ubuntu, with a free IDE (Visual Studio Code) and deploy to Linux. Total cost: $0.

And even then, you don't need to use VSCode, you can use Atom or Sublime. And jetbrains is working on Project Rider.

The 'vendor lockin' is now no more locked in than using Ruby or Go or any other language.

<comment><USER4> > Startup's seem to have always argued about price and vendor lock in.

This is not an argument here.

> You can code on Windows, with a free IDE (Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio > Community) and deploy to Linux.

You can't. You won't have access to Linux ecosystem and mindshare if you do that You limit yourself to _extremely tiny_ subset of things you can do on both systems. It makes no sense.

> The 'vendor lockin' is now no more locked in than using Ruby or Go or any > other language.

Roby or Go has no problem whatsoever with using full power of Linux, .Net does. Ruby and Go communities on Linux are several orders of magnitude larger then amount of people using .Net there. There is plenty of Ruby/Go developers who know how to dive into Ruby or system internals if they need to, this is not common in .Net world.

<comment><USER3> Have you actually tried .NET Core? It's really not hard to create a ASP.NET Core website and host it in nginx.

<comment><USER4> I am not arguing that it is. I am arguing that it hard to make full use of it. An example: I googled:

python sendfile: first three links point you to python modules implementing it ruby sendfile: same thing, first links point you to some middleware that uses that golang sendfile: first link points to stdlib implementing sendfile asp.net core sendfile, .net sendfile: I went through all links in the first page, still have no clue if it can be used.

You can use .net on Linux. But you are restricted by Windows limitations, and you miss on the mindshare.

<comment><USER3> So send file streams the file from disk out to the browser? FileStreamResult???

<comment><USER4> You don't understand what I am talking about, neither do FileStreamResult authors (I've looked at mono and ms implementations) and that's the problem I am talking about.

Linux users either know what sendfile syscall is and how to use it or use libraries whose authors know.

<comment><USER3> I'm not talking about Mono. And you're talking about premature optimization. We're barely out the gate with 1.0 and you're optimization how a file is touched. An optimization that would benefit very few people in the real world. If you're worrying about perf when you're streaming a file out of Ruby or Python to a browser then you need to rethink what you're trying to solve.

It doesn't change the fact that right now, you can write a asp.net core web application on windows and run it on linux. For free.

<comment><USER4> > And you're talking about premature optimization.

Why premature? And why should a basic library be deciding if they are premature or not? I am using Linux _only_ (and most startups do that too).

> We're barely out the gate with 1.0 and you're optimization how a file is > touched.

Sorry, who are "we"? I am discussing using .Net in context of all startups, not some particular one. What if my product is entirely about sending files? Or anything else where some Linux specific feature can make a big difference in performance, convenience or ability to share code with other people _who are also using Linux only_?

> An optimization that would benefit very few people in the real world.

It was added to operating system. That means pressure to do so had to be pretty high. And nearly all web framework on Linux are able to use it, so its no so uncommon as you may think.

> If you're worrying about perf when you're streaming a file out of Ruby or > Python to a browser then you need to rethink what you're trying to solve.

Its not uncommon to stream files Python or Ruby never touched, just decided they should be sent. Its a perfect fit for this case, and performance of interpreted languages is not an issue here.

>It doesn't change the fact that right now, you can write a asp.net core web application on windows and run it on linux. For free.

Yes, you can. But you _can not_ make full use of it. Which for me means that it makes no sense to use it there, when its competitors have no such issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> can we put the date in the title?</comment>


Ask PG: can you invite Alexis Ohanian to speak at Startup School? - <AUTHOR>

I don't think I need to provide objective reasons for why it would be awesome to have him, those are obvious enough -- so I'll just stick to my personal reasons: I think he can deliver a witty inspiring talk, like what DHH did 2 years ago. The kind of speech that can literally push you and "force" you to do stuff. <comment><USER2> He spoke at Startup Bootcamp last year: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdDGVhqMuWI>

<http://startupbootcamp.MIT.edu>

</comment><comment><USER3> Fwiw, I'll still be _at_ Startup School. Thanks for asking PG, but I know he's got a lot of top tier speakers to choose from.</comment>


Are You Ready for the Internet of Things? - <AUTHOR> http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsysm/are-you-ready-for-the-internet-of-things.html?dni=103173401&rni=94281755 Strategic marketing manager Rob Marson identifies how network administrators can prepare for a world of interconnected smart devices. <comment><USER2> I'm a computer engineer and I have so many mixed feelings about this. I know is not logical... I just don't feel that in a long term is something is actually going to help as humans...</comment>


Boost 1.55.0 beta 1 release candidates available for testing - <AUTHOR> http://boost.cowic.de/rc/

<comment><AUTHOR> Documentation is at [http://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_55_0.html](http://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_55_0.html)</comment>


Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310#more-1310

<comment><USER2> _The best remedy for hate speech is not suppression of that speech but counterpropaganda that makes the hater look both vile and ridiculous._

Im not sure I agree this is a better solution than suppression.

Where does _this_ stop; all of the arguments for dangerous precedents he makes are just as valid in the current "solution".</comment>


Is a New SARS-like Virus Spreading in the Middle East? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/11/24/is-a-new-sars-like-virus-spreading-in-the-middle-east/ <comment><USER2> The actual news release from WHO sticks to the facts, and doesn't have all the FUD of the Forbes article:

<http://www.who.int/csr/don/2012_11_23/en/index.html></comment>


Launching a PWA in 4 seconds, and 3 lines of code - <AUTHOR> So we created an open source toolkit/framework with which yiu can build Progressive Web Apps. It includes a server (nodejs) with graphql and standard connections to f.e. Wordpress and Magento, and a client side with extensions including ready to go shop extension (reactjs, but could be any). To give all developers the great experience of working with a PWA, we made create-falcon-app to launch in just 4 seconds. It will give you the storefront extension, and connect with Magento 2 and  Wordpress headless from our server. We have offline mode, add to homescreen and super super fast experience ready, reaching 100/100 chrome lighthouse scores from the start! After trying it out, you can then replace the magento, wordpress with your own backend just by api/graphql. Enjoy not only fast User Experience - but more important for us: super fast Developer Experience! (If you like it, please leave a star on Github and join our slack.deity.io to spread the word :) )<p>Get started here/ https://falcon.deity.io/docs/getting-started/installation <comment><AUTHOR> [https://falcon.deity.io/docs/getting- started/installation](https://falcon.deity.io/docs/getting- started/installation)</comment>


Thanks for breaking our connected homes, Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/snips-ai/thanks-for-breaking-our-connected-homes-amazon-c820a8849021#.8whs3pttj <comment> chao- Why would anyone be passive-aggressively mad at Amazon for this?

Shouldn't we rag on the companies who built their infrastructure without any failover plan?</comment>


The C# difference between "true" and "not false" - <AUTHOR> http://thebillwagner.com/Blog/Item/2016-07-26-TheCdifferencebetweenlsquotruersquoandlsquonotfalsersquo <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I'm convinced by the use case for something that's neither true nor false when you have nullable bool, but I suppose that happened after 1.0. In any case, neat.</comment>


When Your Competition Gets Bought by Apple: The Melodeo Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/01/12/melodeo-making-big-push-in-online-music-eyes-apple-in-the-cloud/

<comment><USER2> Sounds at least a bit familiar: <http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Single Page: [http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/01/12/melodeo-making- big...](http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/01/12/melodeo-making-big-push-in- online-music-eyes-apple-in-the-cloud/?single_page=true)</comment>


10 Ways to Improve Usability When You Thought it Was Too Late - <AUTHOR> http://usabilityfriction.com/2008/11/05/10-ways-to-improve-usability-when-you-thought-it-was-too-late/

<comment><USER2> Some good advice, however, a few things I disagree with here.

Firstly, regarding the 80/20 rule -- sure, only 20% of your features are used 80% of the time, but it's rarely the same 20%. That's why Microsoft Office has so much cruft.

Regarding fields for MAC addresses, etc, how do you handle credit cards? The standard is currently to have a single textbox, and it's what people are used to. Shifting that to a split box model introduces all sorts of other problems. A smarter option is to have good input handling (that strips out spaces, dashes, etc)

Splitting out forms can actually decrease task completion. If you're going to reduce cognitive load by doing this, you need to let them know where they are in the task.

Also, I was a little disappointed at how common-sense a lot of this was, and also thought there'd be some good "easy fix" stuff for people who already had a completed site. This is going around fixing a lot of stuff which should've been done correctly in the first place.</comment>


Venezuela and Russia Teamed Up to Push Pro-Catalan Fake News - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-is-venezuela-waging-cyber-war-in-europe <comment><USER2> Money quote: _analysis of more than 5 million messages about Catalonia posted on social networks between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5 shows that only 3 percent come from real profiles outside the Russian and Venezuelan cybernetworks._</comment>


Permafrost Thawing Below Shallow Arctic Lakes Due to Winter Climate Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/42442/20160618/permafrost-thawing-below-shallow-arctic-lakes-due-changing-winter-climate.htm <comment><USER2> There are more ads on that site than information...</comment>


Ask HN: How much programming experience you need to become a data scientist? - <AUTHOR> Makes more sense to have a statistic background than computer science background, right? <comment><USER2> If you are serious about this question, you should begin by specifying what "data scientist" means in this context. Otherwise, whatever answers your query engenders will be lost in the noise.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have read that it is much more important to have a strong mathematical background than a strong programming background to really be good at data science. Many data science positions in the world are looking for individuals who specialized in statistics and related math fields in school.

</comment><comment><USER4> According to what I have read, "it depends":

[http://blog.udacity.com/2014/11/data-science-job- skills.html](http://blog.udacity.com/2014/11/data-science-job-skills.html)

[http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data- analytics/3...](http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data- analytics/3-key-skills-of-successful-data-scientists/d/d-id/1111123)

</comment><comment><USER5> i've heard it characterised something like this: you need to program better than the average statistician, and apply statistics better than the average programmer.

<comment><USER6> I think the bar is a LITTLE higher now. If I could add one skill, its being able to read math language. It's a great skill to be able to read about a new technique on arxiv or a blog and be able to understand it beyond the surface level.

In fact being mathematically literate is really the bee's knees. Its why I suggest anyone in a stem undergrad to take their math department's Real Analysis or (my favorite) Abstract Algebra. The content is rarely relevant any jobs, but then you'll be able to teach yourself almost anything in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It really depends on if you are only responsible for analysis, or for gathering data and analysis.

The former is more math focused, the later is a pretty solid blend of Math and Comp Sci / DB work.

</comment><comment><USER8> you could probably get by with R, but the real meat is with the Math as others have said.</comment>


Show HN: "Who's Hiring" Trends - <AUTHOR> http://austinhutchison.com/hntrends/

<comment><AUTHOR> I built a tool that analyzes the frequency of strings in the monthly "Who's Hiring" posts over the past 12 months. It works with one word or two word strings.

Here's a blog post with more explanation and a few interesting trends: [http://blog.austinhutchison.com/2014/07/23/hacker-news- whos-...](http://blog.austinhutchison.com/2014/07/23/hacker-news-whos-hiring- trends/)

And the Github repo: [https://github.com/austinhutchison/hntrends](https://github.com/austinhutchison/hntrends)

</comment><comment><USER2> It would be cool to do this for not only the "whos hiring" posts but for every post on HN going back a 5 years to see the trend of what people are talking about.. Just a thought.</comment>


Placement Papers - <AUTHOR> http://viharri.blogspot.in

<comment><USER2> Questions 1, 2, and 3 are rather interesting and have what I'd judge to be reasonably correct answers. Question 4 is boring and questions 5 - 7 don't really have correct answers at all, which is a little surprising for Yahoo. Who messes up their technical geekery this bad?

Question 1 can be done by first renumbering all weights under w = 55 + x, so that in x-space the equivalent problem is [0, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11].

The benefit of starting with 0 is that you know that the first two numbers are -k and +k, because they have to sum to 0. They aren't both 0, so starting with -1 and +1 gives you the answer pretty simply in a generative way: you say "the next largest number I need to make is 2, that requires 2 - (-1) = 3, the next largest number I need to make is 3, that requires 3 - (-1) = 4, the next largest number I need to generate is 6, which requires 7, check that I'm done, I am, so there you have it, (54, 56, 58, 59, 62).

Question 2 requires calculating the two line extrema which aren't triangles: 12 - 5 = 7, 12 + 5 = 17. Then rule out the middle zone where (5, 12, x) is acute -- this happens between the two right triangles (5, 12, 13) and (5, 10.908..., 12). So we rule out (11, 12, 13) and we're left with (8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16), which has length 6.

Question 3 required a bit of mental insight. Let f(n, x) mean "the numer of ways to form x with bills denoted 1, 2, ..., n". Then f(1, x) = 1 and f(n, negative) = 0, and f(n, 0) = 1.

Then there is a recursion relation: you can either form x using the largest bill n, or you can form it without; the number of ways to do it the first way is f(n, x - n) and the number of ways to do it the second way is f(n - 1, x). Thus:

       f(n, x) = f(n, x - n) + f(n - 1, x)

Which means, following the recursion:

       f(n, x) = f(n - 1, x) + f(n - 1, x - n) + ...

For n = 2 it's clear that f(2, x) = ceil((x+1)/2), just following out the pattern. All you need to know is that asymptotically this is x/2. This means that f(3, x) will sum for large x a set of linearly increasing terms. They will average x/4, since they start pretty much at 0 and go pretty much to x/2. There will be x/3 terms. So the sum must asymptotically grow like x^2/12.

So, right, question 5. The first of the stupid questions. As far as I can tell the loop intended is while(0);, and because it loops precisely zero times, every predicate -- even the false predicates -- are true all of the times that it loops. All five options are technically correct. (And even if we restrict them to the ones which happen when the loop decides that it's not going to happen in the first place, there still seem to be multiple true assertions.)

Question 6 is bad first off because it starts with an incomplete and irrelevant sentence; the question has no single answer because it depends on what the exact model is on disk. If you store all the records in a single file on disk, and you only naively count disk IOs, then in principle the lookup without the B+ tree can be done in _one long_ disk IO whereas with the lookup _with_ the B+ tree will probably take more disk IOs as we skip the irrelevant parts to save memory. (This is especially true if the B+ tree is stored on disk alongside those records, since the access pattern would be highly nonlinear.) If they're in different files scattered across the drive then that's a different question, and the unindexed content needs to query all N records, requiring you to request N separate IOs, while the indexed content does not ever need, as far as I'm aware, to backtrack, and therefore can do it in N or fewer IOs.

Question 7 is also horrible because it only has a valid answer under the assumption that peoples' marks are unique, and the most obvious way to make this assumption is to assume that the kids are being marked 1 for top place, 2 for second place, et cetera. If they are being marked with normal grades, some kid gets 100, another kid gets 98, two kids get 97, and so on -- then uniqueness is trashed and none of the answers are valid. First off, it's not the "8th highest mark" in the sense of the "8th highest person with the highest mark" because that person might share a mark with the 7th highest person, and therefore would not fulfill the NOT IN clause. It is not the "8th highest mark" in the sense of the "8th highest mark awarded" because the inner select is not UNIQUE and therefore there is no good way to say how many unique marks there are therein.

After that many screwups on Yahoo's part I just decided that this test annoyed the crap out of me. I try not to program in C when I can help it, which turns out to fortunately be most of the time, so the barrage of questions about what exactly certain C programs do would be educated guesses anyway.</comment>


The secret U.S. stockpile meant to save us in a bioterror attack (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/24/inside-the-secret-u-s-stockpile-meant-to-save-us-all-in-a-bioterror-attack/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.md/xpFjQ](https://archive.md/xpFjQ)</comment>


More College Students Selling Stock–in Themselves - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-college-students-selling-stockin-themselves-1438791977

<comment><USER2> Interesting... my entrepreneurial side is kinda fascinated. Another part of me finds it a bit sad.</comment>


The Magic of Providing Less - <AUTHOR> http://naysawn.com/the-magic-of-providing-less-2/

<comment><USER2> Interesting topic, but the discussion could have been a lot more in depth, I thought. If anything, Grouper seems like a relatively complicated product relative to the many "feature" products out there these days - from Gantt Charts to Underwear Subscriptions...

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article. It seems that the ends of the spectrum are what are working. Either you curate heavily like GroupOn, Fab, Fancy, etc. or sell anything like Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc. Is there anyone in the middle?</comment>


Government mandated backdoors is Really not a good idea - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/01/evaluating_the_.html <comment><USER2> The original title of this article is "Evaluating the GCHQ Exceptional Access Proposal", but I'm not sure that's better than the description given by the submitter.

However, I am pretty sure this link has been posted here before, and probably pretty recently. I'd look it up, but the search interface on this HN reader is nonexistent.</comment>


Amazon fired these 7 pregnant workers. Then came the lawsuits - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/features/amazon-fired-these-7-pregnant-workers-then-came-the-lawsuits/ <comment></comment>


Equifax Breach Caused by Lone Employee's Error, Former CEO Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/business/equifax-congress-data-breach.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> [http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...](http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf)

7) Post-accident attribution accident to a 'root cause' is fundamentally wrong. Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated 'cause' of an accident. There are multiple contributors to accidents. Each of these is necessary insufficient in itself to create an accident. Only jointly are these causes sufficient to create an accident. Indeed, it is the linking of these causes together that creates the circumstances required for the accident. Thus, no isolation of the 'root cause' of an accident is possible. The evaluations based on such reasoning as 'root cause' do not reflect a technical understanding of the nature of failure but rather the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes.

<comment><USER3> That quote sounds good, but I don't think it's necessarily applicable to this situation. The author seems to be talking about complex systems that are designed and operated to be robust against failure, like the space shuttle. Saying that Challenger blew up because of an O-ring is technically correct but also horribly wrong, as an example. Equifax IT does not appear to be operating at a level to prevent a single failure from causing terrible damage all on its own.

That aside, it's hardly true that one person can bear all the blame for not patching their systems, even if they did successfully prevent patches from happening. For one thing, how the hell did they keep their job after doing that? Unless it was the CEO (well, now that they have a new CEO maybe they'd like to put all the blame on him), there was someone up the chain who could insist that the patch get applied. I think you definitely could apply root cause analysis techniques here, and I strongly suspect that such analysis would uncover numerous serious deficiencies in Equifax's IT operations. Of course, guessing that a large boring corporation has terrible IT practices is similar to guessing that a given duck quacks and has wings, so there's that.

<comment><USER4> > Equifax IT does not appear to be operating at a level to prevent a single > failure from causing terrible damage all on its own.

they're operating at a level where over a hundred and thirty million people could have their ability to get a mortgage, open a bank account, or start a business harmed. If you think that such responsibility does not mandate the highest requirements for data safety, you should not work in this industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good to know.

And what about the person who's job was to make sure that one guy did his job?

And the guy who was in charge of that person?

And the department who's job was makin sure nothing was insecure?

And the guy managing them?

Yep. All one guys fault. Poor guy, ruining the American credit monitoring system for the rest of us.

<comment> blubb-fish As somebody with full IT administration access I am just too aware of how easy it is to entirely destroy an entire company with a single inadvertent command. And the risk of this happening increases swiftly with stress levels and work piling up and "just get this done quickly!", "why aren't you done yet?", "we need this tomorrow!" etc. And that work environment is the norm - not the exception.

<comment><USER5> I've been there, and I've seen someone come really close to ruining a company with that one mistake.

But even in a small company there were others who could patch things. There were people above me who kept an eye on if patches were applied (or at least reported to be applied).

It wasn't just 'we told guy X to patch and never followed up'.

<comment> blubb-fish it is also worth noting that the experience of being "responsible" for a company being destroyed could cause suicidal risks for the respective person. I once accidentally didn't close the door to the office with a key - the door had a defect which caused it to not lock sometimes - this made me realize how heavy of a burden it would have been if the company would have gotten robbed or something - which could have been very well its end. That was a very tough experience - luckily nothing happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> $3B/yr in revenue; 9500 employees

One person responsible for the security of the enterprise.

If there is truly one person for a company this large, then he was setup to fail from the beginning. The management is negligent and incompetent for not creating a system for this. That's his job.

I think more likely, the CEO is full of shit and they're scape goating some poor person. But even if that's not the case, this is a terrible thing for him to admit. If he's really that incompetent, he has no business in management. Hopefully he never works in management again. Kiddo needs to go back to school, he's clearly forgotten all of his training.

<comment><USER7> Well, this is what happens when people call for jail time. The moment someone goes to jail for something like this, it will change security issues forever: People will stop reporting breaches, and developers themselves will be at risk of going to jail.

Also, if you try to kill Equifax, companies will stop reporting breaches.

I don't know what the ultimate outcome of all of this will be, but it's important to keep perspective. People are out for blood, and it's both scary to watch and unsettling to think of the precedents it might set.

<comment><USER8> > Also, if you try to kill Equifax, companies will stop reporting breaches.

The US government killed Arthur Andersen. Financial fraud is still reported. Equifax is not too big to dissolve.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Enron_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Enron_scandal)

<comment><USER9> Many reasonable people seem to believe that the backlash and horror inm response to the US government killing of Arthur Andersen and the subsequent job losses were what led to the later toothless reactions by the DoJ to subsequent corporate scandals:

[http://www.npr.org/2017/07/11/536642560/is-the-justice- depar...](http://www.npr.org/2017/07/11/536642560/is-the-justice-department- shying-away-from-to-prosecuting-corporations)

[http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/slate_money/2017/07/t...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/slate_money/2017/07/the_chickenshit_club_sexual_harassment_in_silicon_valley_and_hobby_lobby.html)

[https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Justice- Department-C...](https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Justice-Department- Criminals/dp/1501121367/?tag=slatmaga-20)

<comment><USER8> I mean this entirely seriously: perhaps its time we be less reasonable people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >"The company sent out an internal email requesting that its technical staff fix the software, but "an individual did not ensure communication got to the right person to manually patch the application," Mr. Smith told the subcommittee."

So someone forgot to forward an email? What else does ensuring email communication got to the right person mean?

When the security or hundreds of millions of people's data relies on a process of selective email forwarding, the "lone individual" in question is the CEO.

<comment><USER11> Relying on email alone for this is negligence.

But a ticketing system at least should have been used. How were they planning to check compliance with that email? Obviously there was no audit to check that the email was followed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was clearly a failure on the CSO's part, for which the CEO should take responsibility (after all, he hired her).

One thing I don't get, though. How did the CSO get hired? It seems obvious that she had no qualifications or skills whatsoever for the job. How do I get a seven-figure gig like that? (I'm kind of serious — how do these positions get filled by people who are so fundamentally incompetent, when many, many individuals could do a better job?)

</comment><comment><USER13> That's even worst. In most cases there are failures in multiple levels to reach to such a catastrophic event. If this hack is because of the error of a single employee, it means the have no safeguards or procedures setup to prevent such failures of happening. In other words he and his CTO have failed miserably at their job. A company should never depend on a single employee for anything.

Also we should expecting to be see more issues in the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> The DESIGN of their whole infrastructure was terrible for years.

I work at a school district. If someone broke into our public web server they'd realise the entire webapp points at an WebAPI interface that will still only let you make requests as a logged in user. Meaning it does the same thing as the GUI, nothing less, nothing more. To get "full access" they have two different layers they have to break through.

But even worse for the attacker, in this case full access doesn't even get you full access. Our credit card processing, employee SSNs, and accounting system isn't part of our main database/WebAPI system, and has IP restrictions. In order to log into that you need username/password and 2F provided by SMS.

A completely flat design where a single breakin gives you the keys to the kingdom is unacceptable for any organisation that holds sensitive information. The school district's system was only improved after an external security audit flagged our flat design as dangerous, and they were correct.

No, a single employee was definitely not responsible. This is a systemic issue likely starting at the top. A CEO who thinks a single employee COULD even be responsible is ignorant.

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU >The company sent out an internal email requesting that its technical staff fix the software, but "an individual did not ensure communication got to the right person to manually patch the application," Mr. Smith told the subcommittee.

Why.. why did you just not send this person the email instead of having someone send the email to this person? This sounds like BS.

(as an aside, managers are now going to start constantly asking "did you get that email, bob?" to cover their asses)

</comment><comment><USER15> That's not a valid excuse.

The job of a leader is in part to identify and mitigate risks, or hire a competent person do it for you, while still being responsible for it.

The fact that risks of these magnitude were being mitigated by a single lone guy is a leadership issue.

Then, the problem was not only in the risk mitigation but also in the handling of the incident as well. That's again on the leadership.

Then, the exfiltrated information is not secondary to Equifax's business. It's the core of their business. It's not that they were Target, for instance, where the core of their business is retail... the proper handling of that information was Equifax's only goddamn job.

</comment><comment><USER16> No it's not.

It may be the actions of a single employee that finally caused the breach to occur, but there was a series of failures that lead up to this point. There should have been no way that it was possible for a single employee's error to cause such a massive failure.

</comment><comment><USER17> Lone employee, meet bus.

Talk about a failure to take responsibility. Maybe it's the CEO's error to allow a single employee to oversee a catastrophic security breach.

</comment><comment><USER18> Absolute rubbish! For a company that needs to protect sensitive data, the data breach could be traced back to the decision to put that much data on a publicly accessible web application without any defense in depth. I stand by what I wrote the in the week after the breach [https://rietta.com/blog/2017/09/18/equifax-defense-in- depth](https://rietta.com/blog/2017/09/18/equifax-defense-in-depth).

</comment><comment><USER19> Equifax is going to turn into a business school case study on what not to do... and what not to say.

You could read any PDF or Kindle eBook on leadership to realize that this headline will play very badly.

On a more technical note, how is it possible for a single person to ignore that they needed to upgrade Apache Struts and nobody else notices or cares?

</comment><comment><USER20> The CEO may blame a lone underling, and congress may blame a lone CEO, but congress shares in the overall blame. Regulation and stiffer penalties are needed to balance incentives so that corporations are motivated to invest in security. As things stand, executives seem to rationalize skimping on security as a smart business decision.

</comment><comment><USER21> Thanks alot, Bob. Over half the country's information got stolen and it's entirely and solely _your fault_.

<comment><USER22> actually, if you only count adults with credit history, it more like 80%+

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yeah, that's pretty bad blaming one employee when a single security hole on a single server resulted in the loss of personal information for 146 million people.

</comment><comment><USER24> To summarize what is actually going on (and pretty much what has been repeatedly said in here): a lone employee's error did cause this, and that lone employee is the CEO himself.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ok even if you accept that it fell on one person that caused the error why did disclosure take two Months ? Why were incentives or policies not in place to correct the mistake ?

<comment><USER26> Disclosure took two months because one employee forgot to send an email about the incident.

/s

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Error, Singular?

One single employee developed the requirements for these errors, implemented these errors, tested the errors, documented the errors, and signed off to ship the errors.

What a piece of scum.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you really think your security is dependent on the practices of _one person_ , then _that is the problem._

</comment><comment><USER29> What's the best way to a) structure the credit system so this doesn't happen and b) incentives to ensure compliance with that structure?

I suspect most people here find the CEO's explanation lacking (and most people who read the NYT, hence the headline): it's no use venting here.

I'm more curious about how to move forward, but I'm not a security expert. Let's assume credit bureaus are here to stay: we, as a society, have decided to lower the price of loans by reducing risk for lenders via easily available credit histories (with all the benefits and drawbacks).

How have some companies and agencies have managed to keep data secure, and how can we encourage other companies and agencies to do so, via carrot and/or stick?

</comment><comment><USER30> That lone employee would be the CEO...

<comment><USER31> right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would like this CEO to tell me this one employee's pay grade. How is this worker high enough on the org chart to be capable of this sort of impact?

A chief surgeon doesn't blame the lab tech when a patient dies, lead council doesn't blame the paralegal for botching a death penalty case. They would consider it a public humiliation to blame an underling, especially a paraprofessional.

</comment><comment><USER33> _On multiple occasions, Mr. Smith referred to an "individual" in Equifax's technology department who had failed to heed security warnings and did not ensure the implementation of software fixes that would have prevented the breach._

If an employee isn't heeding a significant warnings _(plural!)_ then it sounds like a management problem too.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well I mean that one person must have been paid $40 million + a year right? If they were the sole source of protecting a multi billion dollar enterprise surly their worth is more than that of the CEO...oh wait they didn't get paid that...oh..never mind.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yeah it was one guy, the CEO.

</comment><comment><USER36> What this Guy is going to say about not encrypting DOB , SSN , name and address etc and storing everything in plain text. is it also a single employees fault ?

<comment><USER37> Equifax clearly never cared about security or protecting people, because we aren't their clients. But yeah, some of this is just laughably bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Culture of the the company, not this one guy, is to blame.

</comment><comment><USER39> If this falls on one employee's head, well, the CEO might not be stoked to when he realizes who is _actually_ responsible.

<comment><USER40> Former CEO. Who had to quit.

<comment><USER41> "Retired". With full pension, etc.

<comment><USER40> Firing someone for cause is difficult. Everyone likes to complain about uncontested golden parachutes, but the lawsuits that result in the few cases that are contested are never pretty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This reminds me of the story about the intern that wiped the DB with a single command except it's worse.

</comment><comment><USER43> The individual responsible is him.

</comment><comment><USER44> Pin the tail on the scapegoat, House subcommittee edition

</comment><comment><USER45> With great power comes no responsibility, apparently.

</comment><comment><USER46> "human error" is not a root cause.

</comment><comment><USER47> Sure, throw that one guy under the bus, CEO.

</comment><comment><USER48> The one person is the CEO, right? Right?

</comment><comment><USER49> Yeah that would be the CEO then!

</comment><comment><USER50> Hiring this guy as CEO?

</comment><comment><USER51> All of these revelations read like xkcd comics. I mean really? One guy in a corp of 9000+? Critical email threads? This situation is a joke.</comment>


You Don't Really 'Own' That Movie You Bought, but Pirates - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/you-dont-really-own-that-movie-you-bought-but-pirates-180915/ <comment><USER2> How is this news for anyone? Also, as not to just leave a negative comment, I've been collecting media ever since cd ripping became a thing. I've "invested" maybe a couple of thousands of dollars into HDDs, SSDs and dedicated servers that my collection remains owned by me and my family. And the funny thing is that people look at me as if i were a some kind of idiot when i say "well i don't really use streaming media services".

<comment><USER3> I get the same sort of bemused condescension when I talk about continuing to buy the Blu Ray, the book, or this strange dance of rotating out on and off- site HDDs and (gasp of all gasps!) occasionally putting my most important documents on WORM media.

I might think that attitude stems from a lack of awareness regarding control of digital data. You and I might know that if we put our movies, books, backups in The Cloud, they are really just going on someone else's server and that such an action causes us to lose some control over it, but others not so much.

Once I took the time to explain why I did all of this 'old school stuff' to someone who kept everything in their Google Drive, only downloading to local storage if they had to, and their response was a lengthy worded version of "I don't feel confident doing all that so I won't try to learn and instead trust in Google since they are the experts."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the exact issue I sought to solve when I invented the system that I later sold to VidAngel.</comment>


Show HN: Get stories written about your brand on blogs (sponsored stories) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cooperatize.com

<comment><USER2> Do you have public examples of completed campaigns? It'd be very helpful to be able to look at the posts quality before needing to register or to do anything else.

<comment><USER3> Good point. We are working on the user sign up flow so that new users can see live examples. Here's one from LG: [http://thechicagochic.com/art-meets- technology/](http://thechicagochic.com/art-meets-technology/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Am I In College? - <AUTHOR>

I have been rejected twice from the Computer Science department at my college, which severely restricts the CSE courses I am allowed to take. I skip most of my classes, instead teaching myself everything out of the textbook, only attending class to turn in homework or take tests. With this state of affairs, I find myself wondering why I even bother to go to college when I'm working on a startup and only attend college to learn more about programming. Could college doom my startup to stagnation? Could it retard the startup's progress so long that by the time my product is released its already irrelevant? I've talked to several people about this, and there are 3 main arguments for staying in college:
1. Networking. The people I could meet in college are too important, even if I can't get into the CSE department itself.
Counter-argument: This only works if there isn't a better way to network with like-minded people.
2. Ensuring I don't miss out on important concepts. By taking CSE courses, I ensure i'm on an equal educational standing with everyone else and that I didn't miss any important concepts that I wouldn't have picked up during self-study.
Counter-argument: You can't possibly know everything and trying to write a perfect program gets you nowhere, so self-study would be far less time-consuming but just as effective, and I know that I am already very good at my chosen area of expertise.
3. It's a safety net. Unnecessary risk is stupid, and most startups fail miserably. The time spent at college is worth spending to ensure I don't get thrown on to the street.
Counter-argument: The time spent during college could doom the startup before it even finishes its product. Alternatively, if the startup did fail, my situation wouldn't make it unreasonable to go right back to college and find intermittent work to support myself.
I may be confidant in my ability to craft a product that can support me, but I'm sure everyone whose startups fail miserably is too. What concerns me is that, of the two internships I had, all I learned was that I absolutely detest having a normal job. If my startup fails, I'd just try another one, and then another one. I probably would never even apply for a job that required a college degree, so if I'm not going to use the scrap of paper they give me at the end, and i'm teaching myself everything out of a textbook anyway, am I wasting my time and putting my startup in danger, or would dropping out be a stupid thing to do?
For reference, the startup is not web-based - it involves games. I have 2.5 years of college to go and live with my parents somewhere on the west coast of the United States. <comment><USER2> If you are are as skilled as you seem to be, why is the CS department rejecting you?

All the benefits of going to university only come into play if you actually leverage your experience (i.e. go to class, work with professors, network with profs and classmates, get decent grades & follow the structural rules necessary to get the right degrees, etc.). Getting into the right departments (and meeting their standards) is a key ingredient of this (sure, their rules might be quirky but they are the established social benchmark right now).

If you don't want to leverage your experience then you are in the wrong place. Though keep in mind that the inability to leverage a opportunity-filled environment like university is also a big warning sign for your future entrepreneurial career.

<comment><AUTHOR> The CS department rejected someone with a 3.7 GPA. I have a 3.4 GPA and scored so high on the AP exam I was exempted from both introductory courses. Their "standards" are exactly the problem here - I'm learning a lot from all of my classes simply by reading a textbook I can check out from the library, and I've taught myself everything I know about programming. Why should I subject myself to unreasonable standards for no benefit? Leveraging a situation only benefits you if it doesn't waste your time.

<comment><USER2> A high GPA bar like this has its benefits: Climb over it and you will share access to higher quality resources (fellow students, profs, likely also higher quality teaching facilities, labs, etc.).

I am not an advocate of achieving high GPAs for its own sake, but there is a huge dividing line between somebody in a high quality CS department and somebody who isn't. Trust me, you will learn more from good teachers than you will ever learn alone (libraby books or not).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your post is pretty long so I may have missed it, but can you afford college? Does paying for a degree and getting mediocre grades work for you / whoever is paying for it?

If so I would say go ahead and stay there, take classes, pass, but also start shipping your own products (if you're not already).

Like a lot of people I got a degree (not CS) at some bullshit private college because I felt I had to.

I'm now on my second career (CS) and my second successful business and I can tell you that my degree has meant almost nothing to me. It's probably true that my first career (in marketing) wouldn't have taken off if I had to tell people I was a college dropout, but programming is pretty unique in that regard and in my experience many/most people just want to know if you can ship a quality product or not.

Having said that, I've seen a lot of people who say they must to do their own thing really mean that they can't commit to whatever they're doing. I used to be like that. You say you're confident that you can build products that can make money. Have you done that? If not then get there first (while in college) and see how you feel.

If you're really a startup person, you can manage both college and a product to prove yourself. I don't know how your CS department works, but having a product on the market might also open that door. If not, screw them and go your own way.

Also, failure in business is not binary or permanent.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on this project for almost 3 years and have finally gotten to a point where I'm close to getting a finished product, so no, it's not a matter of commitment. College financials are not a concern (and my grades are very good, the CS department is just anal). I can _make_ a quality product, but shipping it and making money off of it is what's up in the air.

You are correct in that it is entirely possible for me to do both college and startup at the same time, I just don't want to be carrying a 5 pound rock with me on a marathon if I don't need it.

<comment><USER4> Well, you could take a semester/quarter off and see if this product is something that could work. You don't have to full-on drop out.

Honestly, from reading your post, it doesn't sound like you're getting too much out of college (at least educationally, dunno about socially). It may not be worth your time/money/brain power. College isn't a necessity for networking with like-minded people these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Change majors. Try business or liberal arts. Have fun with it and learn some things outside of computers, which you seem to have down already.

<comment><USER6> Also this. I started teaching myself programming when I was in middle school, and by the time I got to college the only thing I found in our CS department was disappointment and boredom.

However, the economics department was fantastic. We also have an entrepreneurship program that is amazing. If you have a handle on Comp. Sci. stuff then I would say find some business/entrepreneurship related program to get involved in. You'll be much more prepared to launch viable products if you have some business background. Also, I think you'll find that networking is far more important (and worthwhile) in the business community at a college than in the CS community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why go to college if you're not going to attend classes (aka being lazy), study, or attempt to get good grades?

Sure, I agree that college is over-rated and not for everyone. However, you are in college, and don't seem to be making any effort to learn or be productive. If you're going to college on taxpayer dollars or your parents money, then you are just wasting someones hard earned money. IF you stay in school, at least attend classes.

</comment><comment><USER8> The greatest thing I took from college was the ability to approach a problem and truly explore it from different angles. (I'll admit to a liberal arts education.) The state of the art, by definition, is constantly changing, so have the ability to learn and attack challenges is very powerful in the "real world" beyond college.</comment>


Ideally round rotating ice circle on a lake - <AUTHOR> http://englishrussia.com/2019/01/16/ideally-round-rotating-circle-has-appeared-on-one-of-lakes-3-photos-vid/ <comment><AUTHOR> Actually, there is a wikipedia page about that natural phenomenon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_circle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_circle)</comment>


How to Start a Business with a Significant Other - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3051447/lessons-learned/how-to-start-a-business-with-a-significant-other <comment><USER2> great article. particularly good point here "Needing time alone is completely natural."</comment>


Unreal Engine 4.9 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-49-released <comment><USER2> I'd say at least a week just to write the release notes. Perhaps even a month.

This page doesn't end.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if this is a blessing or a curse. 3D games are very complex. It takes years to grok all the concepts from linear algebra, to scene management, occlusion culling, shaders, physically based rendering, network synchronization, scripting and ai, game design and thousand other things.

I think a large part, why smaller, "indy" engines like haxeflixel, godot, cocos-2d etc are surviving is because of the much lower entry level. I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse sometime under their own weight... How are they even adding all those new features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me most.

<comment><USER4> > I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse > sometime under their own weight...How are they even adding all those new > features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me > most.

I haven't looked at their code, but I would bet they have fantastic regression tests. Something I've added to my own engine in the past year is "pixel perfect" tests: for a given test scene employing specific effects (soft shadows, reflections, refraction, etc) the renderer should produce an image that is a pixel perfect match with a known correct image. If you begin optimizing shaders and rendering code, regressions are caught very quickly, in an automated way. Sometimes the images are close enough to be acceptable (for example, if an optimization changed floating point precision, resulting in a color that is a shade different). In that case, the test fails, and you can replace the test image with your new rendered image, after you've vetted that it "looks correct" manually.

It's not anywhere close perfect in testing all code paths, but the payoff is rather large for the effort put into creating the test.

<comment><USER3> Things get interesting when the number of possible code paths increase. One such beast is the Unity Standard Shader. There are dozens of combinations depening on Metallic/Specular PBR, Multi-Texturing, Shadows, Light Types, Light Baking, Forward/Deferred Rendering and so on. Combine this with different backends (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, DirectX, Vulcan) and graphic card abilities and at some point adding new stuff gets quite complex.

I guess they simply throw money and play testers at this problem. (Unreal probably more so than Unity) But how long can you scale this up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's fascinating to me that they've already hit 4.9 and we've yet to see a major AAA title running UE4 -- all the big Unreal titles we've seen so far this year (Batman: Arkham Knight, Mortal Kombat X) have all been UE3.

<comment><USER6> AAA titles dont get done in a year, which is about how long UE4 has been out. On top of that, I would say UE4 is just now getting to a place where it would be ready to be used in an AAA pipeline, so unless they spent a ton of time on asset creation before hand, I wouldnt expect to se any AAA titles for at least another year or even two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> All the mainstream engines now support a linux target (and in fact UE supported it for donkeys years) but so few developers release it, partly due to a dependency on an external service or framework. But I'm hopeful now, especially if that service is steam.

</comment><comment><USER8> _> Microsoft's engineers added support for DirectX 12 to UE4_

Don't you love it when everyone is competing on a level ground?

<comment><USER9> AMD Engineers could have added support for Mantle just as well.

<comment><USER10> AMD has 'discontinued' Mantle in favour of OpenGL Vulkan. Vulkan borrows heavily from Mantle.

<comment><USER11> It's called Vulkan, not OpenGL Vulkan. It's not related to OpenGL, other than being made by the Khronos group.

<comment><USER10> Well, it used to be referred to as the "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative", but yes, its not technically the old OpenGL API any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's an entire section for Playstation 4 improvements but only a few scant mentions of Xbox One. Are consoles done in parity, or is UE4 favoring PS4 development over XB1?

<comment><USER13> I would say that MS once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and the latest sales trends were not good for the xbox.

[http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselli...](http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselling- the-xbox-one-by-almost-2-to-1-and-that-s-the-good-news--1298498)

Engine vendors follow where the install base is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've never programmed with Unreal before, but I'm just curious:

What method does one use to wade through such a large list of changes? Do you look for something specific, or read the whole thing, or just assume the changes will bleed flawlessly into your project?

Very impressive update, congrats.

<comment><USER15> They specifically publish upgrade notes at the bottom, so that helps (as many changes won't break your project).

I'm only working on a small hobby project, but I read the bulk of the notes. I mostly look through the subsystems I use most often, and skip over others that aren't super important to me.

As always, the most important notes are at the top. Also, if you follow the live streams, you're aware of some of the bigger changes far in advance (same if you use the preview builds).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is mobile support now? I'm interested in making simple mobile titles, but Unreal seems targetted at making super high performance games on high end mobile devices, rather than simple games that most devices can run. Tappy Chicken would make my phone get super hot and destroyed my battery-- and that's about as simple as a game can get. Is Unreal a good choice now for making straightforward mobile games? A year ago, I felt like Unity was a better choice for that, but wonder if that's still true today.

</comment><comment><USER17> How Blender and OS X friendly is Unreal these days? I'd like to dabble with it, but I heard that its Mac support started off rocky. I also don't feel like learning an entirely different 3D tool when I'm already familiar with Blender.

<comment><USER18> I use it on OSX just fine. I also work sharing content with colleagues across filesystems.

Regarding Blender, Unreal accepts FBX file format, and I've had no issues with imports from Blender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That is an epic list of changes!

<comment><USER20> Don't you mean... an Epic list of changes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The rendering engine is good, for sure, but you need to give it the right stuff to make look good. If you don't have the budget for art assets, Unreal isn't going to magically make your game look awesome.

<comment><USER15> I mean, that's kind of goes without saying, doesn't it?

No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team.

That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics without using programming, so thats a plus.

The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store. More content gets added each week though.

<comment><USER21> Judging from the number of people jumping on to Unreal and Unity, I don't think it does go without saying. And if you use the marketplace assets, you're going to end up with a game that looks like everyone else's game that also uses assets out of the marketplace.

It makes certain aspects of connecting art assets with gameplay code _easier_ , but I don't think it at all makes it "very easy". We're still talking about a non-trivial amount of programming here. If you're not a programmer already, gameplay code is still going to be a struggle.

<comment><USER22> uhh... What's your point? Game development requires knowledge of game development and that you won't have a good looking game without decent art assets?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Go Epic! Everyone should check out the new Unreal Tournament pre-alpha too, very fun games to be had!

<comment><USER24> any benchmarks on this? this will be the next game I upgrade my GPU for

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What are the best VR experiences built with Unreal?

<comment><USER26> What, like most demanding/nicest looking? Or most entertaining and fun? I believe the DX12 "Elemental" demo works with the Oculus dev units. I haven't gotten around to testing it but this thread has reminded me to give it a run after work.

As far as most entertaining, that'll probably depend on what you're looking for and what your platform is. I've only got a Rift DK2 so I don't know about GearVR or Cardboard or Vive, etc.</comment></comment>


Cable 1971 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_1971 <comment><USER2> I don't understand... this seems so random. Why is there a wikipedia article about this? It doesn't appear to have some larger historical significance (like, say, the Zimmerman Telegram). It says it's known for its "coincidentally numbered" title, but doesn't explain the coincidence. Baffling...

<comment><USER3> > Why is there a wikipedia article about this?

A sort of incomplete answer would be that the article is covering an important historical fact regarding the sixth-largest miltary in the world (by active personnel). [0]

[0] [https://www.newsweek.com/how-strong-pakistans- military-12350...](https://www.newsweek.com/how-strong-pakistans- military-1235091)

<comment><USER2> Oh please, that's a _thouroughly_ incomplete answer. I wasn't questioning the importance of Pakistan's military, but the importance of this particular military cable. My question was _why_ it constitutes an "important historical fact" about said military.</comment></comment></comment>


Is it necessary to run the latest Git release? - <AUTHOR> I noticed that some linux distros ship with an older version of git. For example, my CentOS7 setup is using 188.8.131.52. As of now, the latest is 2.19. My question is more specific towards the precautions of running older versions of Git that may come preinstalled on a system.
Are there any precautions or issues with running older versions?
What are they and can they pose as a significant threat in your development?
I noticed there are a wide set of tools for git like gitk, git-lfs, etc... Are there older versions of git that may not include these tool sets and therefore require the user to install them manually?
Where do I find release notes per each release of Git? <comment><USER2> Make sure your distro provides security updates for git. For instance, CVE-2018-17456 (another RCE via submodules bug) was recently disclosed and patched in Debian Jessie (oldstable), even though jessie has git 2.1.x which may not be getting updates from git core developers.

Otherwise, old and new git interact really quite well. You'll miss out on new features, naturally. Because of reasons, I still make daily use of 184.108.40.206 and it's fine! (but only when interacting with trusted peers within my organization, that thing hasn't seen a security patch in a decade or so)

As for release notes, every release gets its own file here: [https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/Documentation/RelNote...](https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/Documentation/RelNotes) \-- you'll get the highlights of major features by reading the x.y.0 release notes.

Git is not a hard build from source as such things go, but it leaves you to track security fixes on your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> @jepler Could you explain the part on security updates regarding CVE and jessie or point me somewhere that does please? I'm sorry but I don't understand this terminology.

This is very helpful thank you!

<comment><USER2> Sure thing. CVE is a list of software vulnerabilities [https://cve.mitre.org/](https://cve.mitre.org/) and Jessie is an older version of the Debian operating system, a flavor of Linux [https://www.debian.org/](https://www.debian.org/)</comment></comment></comment>


HR experts share the skills they say employees will most need in the future - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/01/hr-experts-share-the-skills-employees-will-most-need-in-the-future.html <comment> chupa-chups In my experience most of what is mentioned is true.

On the other hand it is also true for HR. In our (quite big, international) company HR staff gets more and more reduced. Also, more divisions deny inviting a HR person to job interviews, most of them replacing them by the manager and members of the respective team. So far I could only notice that this didn't cause a decline in quality.

<comment><USER2> In my opinion what's mentioned is true, because they didn't really say anything. Reading the "article" felt like reading a horoscope. They used very general skills that everybody would like to have (and think they have).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> HR experts...lol

</comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR filthy millennials need to get off their phones and talk to people instead of texting them while in the same room</comment>