Tray.io - powerful email assistant - <AUTHOR> http://tray.io/ <comment><USER2> Their pitch stole the show on a recent TWIST. <http://youtu.be/W_6h8XWfUO8?t=57m23s>

I was recently asking people for a way to translate emails into SMSs, so I could route my system alerts (from various places) to a single email and ensure I always get by SMS. It's a surprisingly hard problem right now, which Tray looks like it would solve elegantly if they get SMS right.

<comment><USER3> You could use <http://zapier.com> for that:

      1) set up a Zapier mailbox as the trigger, send direct or forward to.
      2) set up an SMS (or Gtalk or whatever) action.

We let you set up filters which you can use to control flow or routing. I even set up an easy template for this: [https://zapier.com/zapbook/mailbox/sms/2424/inbound- mailbox-...](https://zapier.com/zapbook/mailbox/sms/2424/inbound-mailbox-sms/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who don't like 3rd parties looking into mail and only have IMAP access to mail server, there is something called imapfilter. Basically, it acts as a headless e-mail client with Lua interface.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me a lot of the server-side procmail [0] and Sieve filters [1]. Perhaps this was even the inspiration for such a project, who knows?

But tray.io looks like it can handle far more advanced rules (or at least those somewhat comparable to procmail, and without having to do a bunch of manual scripting!), but in a more user-friendly, graphical way. And if it can automatically generate machine-learned rule suggestions based on user behavior, that would be even more fantastic.

The only major downside is that you have to be willing to let a third-party have access to your e-mail (and I know that when I've written server-side procmail scripts that have misbehaved, I've managed to unintentionally lose e-mail at least once or twice in my lifetime; of course, I didn't know that I had even lost the mail, since the server silently discarded it due to my malformed rules).

[0] <http://www.procmail.org/> [1] <http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sieve>

</comment><comment><USER6> How does the authentication work with email providers? Does the application access email through POP or IMAP? Does it have arbitrary access to my email account?

I fear I'll never benefit from apps like this as my email account is the skeleton key to my online identity. I'm not sure I could trust any other human being with the password.

<comment><USER7> At the moment the private alpha is just Gmail, because gmail provides OAuth Authentication, a much more secure/elegant way than requesting a users IMAP credentials.

Work is being done on supporting other email providers, which will obviously require storing the users credentials in a secure way & there is also a white label/internally hosted version in the works for the enterprise that mmahemoff mentioned..

Security for email is definitely our biggest issue so far, but we want to make sure we have it nailed before we go public...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure how they compare, but a friend of mine's company does something similar: <http://www.awayfind.com>

They provide similar filters and suggest filters from your communication behavior. E.g., you consistently respond to Peter Norvig quickly, perhaps you want an alert.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm I the only person who is reluctant to add a service hosted by a startup to your email process? What kind of plans do you have for when they close/exit/pivot/whatever were calling it these days? How is this not going to be another Sparrow or Fluent?

<comment><USER10> Off topic, but what do you mean about Fluent? I though it was chugging along, and I've been waiting on an invite.

<comment><USER11> You'll be waiting forever then[1].

[1] [http://fluentmail.tumblr.com/post/28767857337/fluent-is- clos...](http://fluentmail.tumblr.com/post/28767857337/fluent-is-closing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. I'd love if this integrated with SpringPad (which I prefer over Evernote), either by formatting for their e-mails or preferably through their API. IFTTT does neither.

If this allowed anonymous analytics in order to discover and suggest useful rules, either at the personal level or in aggregate over all users, that would be awesome. Likewise if you can publish, clone and fork useful rules then modify them for one's account. The less a user has to come up with their own rules, the better.

And there are things that IFTTT doesn't do for e-mail that this might do. And there are API's that IFTTT doesn't support (the big one for me is springpad).

As for time sensitive, this could potentially learn what you respond to immediately upon viewing, and what you wait on or don't view, (and even analyze that as a function of day, time, sender, etc.) If it had permissions to analyze e-mail texts and had enough users, it could use machine learning to learn what phrases were likely to prompt immediate action, IE "By tomorrow morning" vs. "By Tuesday morning" on a Wednesday.

As for non Oauth accounts, A browser plugin that stored your credentials locally could still be possible. I seem to recall reading about somebody working on a clever way to do this involving passing session information using a proxy and encryption or something like that, but my memory isn't great.

All in all, I wish them luck.

<comment><USER13> Thank you - I'll get springpad on our list. We are working on analytics currently, I'd love to hear of any other API's you'd like to see hooked up please feel free to email me: rich (at) tray.io

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I usually check email in the evening before going to bed. It's working marvelously since I can take an hour out of my day to handle everybody - really solves the problem of forgetting to respond to people.

The only problem are time-sensitive emails. For those I still need to periodically check my inbox to see if something urgent's come up.

If there's a way to tell Tray "If time-sensitive email, send me a tweet", that would be superbly magnificent. The landing page doesn't seem to indicate this.

<comment><USER7> we are working with our current alpha users to find the right sort of rules that help them with their email.

The idea would be that you could setup custom rules based on the people who email you, or other web services you use, for example if a hot lead in sales force emailed you while your in a meeting, then forward it via SMS.

Being able to pickout a "time sensistive" email would really depend on what you consider time sensitive, but im sure we could provide something that would help.. email dom at tray.io and we can talk more about how tray could help fix your issue..?

<comment><USER15> Is there any intention to add machine learning to the system so it can realise I never read email from particular people, but that something from a particular user I'm all over it?

<comment><USER16> yes, there is going to be machine learning and analytics processing.. Eventually rules would be suggested to you, and some rules would take advantage of all the information that has been learned about your account

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would have serious privacy concerns about this. You are basically allowing a 3rd-party to read your email.

<comment><USER18> _You are basically allowing a 3rd-party to read your email._

4th party. Most of their target audience is probably on GMail and has no privacy concerns to begin with.

<comment><USER17> Fair point. I don't disagree. It just bothers me to see how what little privacy we have left continues to erode.

<comment><USER19> I don't see an architectural alternative for such services yet. You'd need a client side app sandbox which allows servers to schedule routines to run locally on secret data, without leaking back data which the server can decrypt. It would also need to be cross-platform and have the same user accessibility as the web browser.

<comment><USER18> _You'd need a client side app sandbox [...]_

Or you could use, you know, a native client. It may increasingly become a foreign concept to the "facebook generation" but your computer is still fully capable of running a mail client on its own.

Of course you don't get to sell SaaS-subscriptions when you implement tray.io as a procmail GUI...

<comment><USER19> A native client without a user data sandbox doesn't solve the problem of networked applications leaking private data and spying on the user at all. The code needs to be open source, versioned, vetted, and only obtained via a trusted repository for every application the user wants to run each time it is updated. The user is no longer instantly able to access the latest version of the application by simply typing in a URI.

<comment><USER18> I meant it tongue-in-cheek when I said "facebook generation", but it seems we really have a generational gap here.

 _The code needs to be open source, versioned, vetted, and only obtained via a trusted repository_

<http://www.procmail.org> <http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/> <http://www.mutt.org/>

_The user is no longer instantly able to access the latest version of the application by simply typing in a URI._

Yes, that actually bothers me a lot. Can you imagine the crazy effort that I go through every time I update my mail-client?

It takes the better part of 5 minutes every time (I'm not exaggerating here) and last year I had to do it twice!

<comment><USER19> Would you be comfortable explaining to relatives, aquantainces, and the elderly in a casual conversation:

How to install, use, and maintain linux. How to install, use, and maintain their own mail server and spam filters. How PGP works. How to setup and use thunderbird+enigimail or mutt.

Compared to visiting a URI, would doing so be more technically demanding or less technically demanding for users who have not specialized in computing? Is the proportion of society which inevitably chooses not to specialize in a computing inherently more deserving or inherently less deserving of the benefits of encryption and privacy?

I think the gap in our perspective is most likely attributable to A) how widespread we wish to see encryption used by the general public in the future, or B) our expectations of the of the technical stamina of the general public when confronted with unfamiliar tasks, rather than generational effects.

<comment><USER18> Nobody talked about encryption. Nobody talked about "elderly acquaintances".

The conversation was about a product aimed squarely at GMail "Power-Users" who willfully run all their e-mail through one or more third partys.

And besides, you don't need to linux to run a mail program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What is the typical number of rules someone has to write if they get, say, 100 emails per day from any combination of 1000 contacts?

If you have 100 common contacts (as opposed to the other 900 who email once and a while) and I need, say, a rule or two for each to cover the basics... and a rule or two to cover groups of people (because one-to-one emails are the exception in business not the rule)... isn't that hundreds and hundreds of rules?

Not having seen the alpha, that feels like an insurmountable first threshold, UX-wise.

Also, just out of curiosity, other than general ease-of-use (which seems much nicer in your 3 examples), how is this better than typical filters (which I don't use)?

<comment><USER13> It really depends on how you manage your inbox, one of the drivers behind us building Tray was the customisation it offers. The triggers that define the rules can cover as many or as few contacts as you wish ie 'anyone I have a meeting with in the next 48 hrs' can be a trigger, or simply based on email content, pre-defined contact groups etc. In most cases this is a handful of rules.

Email rules that are setup within the client or service restrict filtering to contact, folder, content (in some cases). We can react to data that's outside of your inbox, anything from your relationship to the contact based on another web service, to accessing, storing, and sharing with services you use regularly. Beyond this triggers such as time, email load (driven from analytics), location can all come into play. We are really just getting started with the possibilities, a way to interact with custom web apps would be great for developers/companies that use bespoke tools.

<comment><USER20> I can't decide whether to focus on the interesting aspects/potential of your tool, or the fact that you circumvented the concern I presented, but thanks for the answer nonetheless.

The ease of this tool is inversely related to the need for it. i.e. — the more complex/high volume your inbox, the more you suffer while trying to set it up.

Maybe it would be worth implementing some "starter rules" or a "wizard" that allows the first-timer to leverage many basic rules at once, immediately.

It's the Pinterest approach, if you will. :) "Pick 5 things you like" and then they auto-follow 50 people based on your choices. Voilá! Good first experience.

Remember that features ≠ power ≠ satisfaction.

I apologize for the unsolicited suggestions; you hit my area of interest right in the middle. ;) Good luck with everything and congrats on getting to the alpha in the first place!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd add type="email" to your input to make it easier to sign up on mobiles.

<comment><USER13> Great heads up - we'll do this. Thank you

<comment><USER22> Actually, it might be just me, but I find this incredibly annoying. I use swift-text on android and while usually when I start typing my email address I get a suggestion for my long email address, but when type=email I don't get a suggestion, just a little @ key at the bottom. Might not be this way for all keyboards though. Just a thought.

Edit: Oh and great job on the app! I think this is an awesome idea and if some of the privacy and longevity concerns were addressed, I would use it all the time!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Have been trying it out for a month or so. Love it to bits.

<comment><USER24> Is it possible for me to join in during the private beta?

<comment><USER13> Sure signup to the landing page, we are releasing invites in batches.

<comment><USER24> already done, can't wait to try it, this looks pretty useful. good luck :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great startup from the SpringBoard program! Recently we interviewed Tray.io co-founder Dom Lewis <http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/2012/07/tray- interview/>

Check it out! During the interview Dom talks about startingup, their pivot and shares advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Job lads!

</comment><comment><USER26> This probably sounds negative but isn't this just adding needless complexity to something that's simple? I've tried rules in mail clients before, but in the end the best filter is myself scanning the from and subject columns.

<comment><USER16> This may be overkill for some people, but if everyone could just easily scan from and subject columns then there wouldn't be a global email epidemic that lots of people are trying to solve. Tray is trying to allow you to define how you use your inbox, rather than assuming that your like the next 100 people...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I love the ability to notify people that if they reduce the email length I am more likely to respond quickly. Awesome work. Keep coding.

</comment><comment><USER28> IFTTT for email.

Tray is awesome. Met these guys in London on their demo through our accelerator exchange program.

<comment><USER29> Really great idea, integration to non-oauth email providers seems like a hurdle though. Requiring full credentials is a less good idea.

If they add post-read-filtering of the inbox it would handle some sorting after the work is finished as well. For example, filter all mail from X flagged with label done to that customers folder.

<comment><USER13> We've just added some google labels support, so we'll be able to handle this in the not to distant future. There isn't enough time in the day to code fast enough :)

<comment><USER29> Sounds really neat, I've solved it for my own personal needs with some imapfilter scripts, but the thought crossed my mind to make a service out of it. The reason not to was the tricky part of needing customers imap credentials and store them safely.

Integrating to tightly with gmail would perhaps make it harder to support other imap platforms, since gmail can do more in some areas.

Good luck with your project!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Please figure how to do this for exchange. Then proceed to take over world.

<comment><USER31> Some later versions of Exchange have a SOAP API ([http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/exchange/dd877045(v=...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/exchange/dd877045\(v=exchg.140\).aspx)). I wrote this npm module to grab a user's current emails: <https://npmjs.org/package/exchanger>.

<comment> mike-cardwell Would probably be better to use IMAP for this. Then it will work for Exchange systems, GMail, and nearly every other mail system out there.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately, I don't think IMAP isn't enabled by default in Exchange. And, at least at my work, enabling it isn't an option.

<comment> mike-cardwell Why isn't it an option? If you work in the sort of environment that wont enable IMAP, you probably also work in the sort of environment that doesn't want you giving up access to your mailbox to a random third party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nice service, of course... Waiting for the launch of the stable version.

</comment><comment><USER33> Isn't this just IFTTT for email?

<comment><USER34> Seems that way. Is that a bad thing?</comment></comment>


Any webservice to search store hours - <AUTHOR>

Is there any webservice for searching w.r.t. store hours? For example, if I need ice-cream at midnight, only those stores around me should be listed which are open at this time! How difficult will be to build it? <comment><USER2> I haven't researched this topic at all, but gut-feeling: it will be very hard. Here are the three scenarios:

1). A central listing of business exists that can be crawled for service/product, location and opening hours information.

2). All local stores have sites that can be crawled for the information directly.

3). Only a small number of stores have that information online and would would have to get that information from the "manually".

I don't know about case 1, case 2 is a no-brainer (not all stores have websites) and for case 3: I think it would be a nightmare. Even if you do get this information initially you must make sure it is constantly up to date, etc. You must make sure all stores exist and offer what you say they offer, etc...

The moment I get out of my apartment at 2am and find out I just walked four blocks and the stores doesn't exist anymore, I will no longer use your service.

</comment><comment><USER3> yelp</comment>


Facebook Photos Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2406207130 <comment><USER2> It's always fun to see projects I was involved in being used in huge deployments. Squid, in this case. Too bad the mention was merely to explain that they use it but it's not fast enough!

</comment><comment><USER3> _happily scrubbing out EXIF data_

They don't keep any exif data? Thats a shame</comment>


L3C vs. LLC for startup accelerators - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a Social Enterprise aimed at creating a more engaging experience when donating to or volunteering for a charity.  I'm torn between incorporating as an L3C or an LLC.  Does anyone know if accelerators such as Tech Stars or Y Com will take on L3Cs?  I guess an extension of the question would be whether or not VC's will invest in an L3C.  Thanks. <comment><USER2> I would say no if you are specifically looking at VC. L3Cs are pretty uncommon and un-allowed in a majority of states. In structure they are like LLCs and thus cannot issue stock.

As of now they also don't get any of the tax exemption that a 501c3 non-profit would. If you plan to go the "full" non-profit route rather than a hybrid for- profit/non-profit, you would be best off forming a Corporation (C-corp) and then applying for 501c3 status.</comment>


The Board Game at the Heart of Viking Culture - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-hnefatafl-viking-board-game <comment><USER2> It's an interesting game, mostly because unlike most modern games it's massively asymmetrical. Goals, strategies and attitudes are very different for the two players, and despite the numerical lopsidedness in pieces it's _much_ easier to win as the defender, and a slow cautious style is much more important for the attacker.

See Fetlar Hnefatafl for a modern codification of the (very vague) historical rules:

[http://tafl.cyningstan.com/page/88/fetlar- hnefatafl](http://tafl.cyningstan.com/page/88/fetlar-hnefatafl)

<comment><USER3> I actually wrote a toy app recently following the Fetlar rules as a React exercise:

[https://htafl.herokuapp.com/](https://htafl.herokuapp.com/)

Not sure how it renders across machines but it looks ok on my Mac.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I did the same (VanillaJS) a couple of years back, and started thinking about implementing a computer opponent, but it's _really_ not clear what the evaluation function should be.

<comment><USER4> You need only codify the victory and loss conditions to build an AI using standard Reinforcement learning algorithms. Feel free to message me if you want more detail on how this would work. We should be able to hammer something out in less than a day.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the pointer, but I'm afraid I have zero knowledge of ML and wouldn't be any help.

I have to say I'm a _bit_ sceptical that this approach can work purely based on win/loss conditions - an attacker victory in particular can often take hundreds of moves in Tafl games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How many modern games are two-player asymmetrical? I only know of Android: Netrunner.

I hope we can continue learning more concrete rules for the ancient version of this game. It would be nice to have its history understood like chess'.

<comment><USER6> Steve Jackson Games first title was _Ogre_, a tactics game that pit an entire army against a single super unit.

Mr. Jack is another reasonably popular modern one.

The asymmetric tag on Board Game Geek is probably a good place to start. [https://boardgamegeek.com/tag/asymmetric/page/1](https://boardgamegeek.com/tag/asymmetric/page/1)

<comment><USER7> Love board game geek. A little buried on that page is a link to ranked list of asymmetric games: [https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/82677/asymmetric- games](https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/82677/asymmetric-games)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hnefatafl (and possibly other, similar games) inspired a fictional game played in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, _Going Postal_ and _Thud!_. From wikipedia:

 _The game, supposedly called in Dwarfish "Hnaflbaflwhiflsnifltafl" (a reference to the Viking game Hnefatafl which it resembles), represents the famous "Battle of Koom Valley" between dwarfs and trolls.

The game was first directly referenced in Going Postal, being played by Vetinari, and became a central concept in the immediate sequel Thud!. (...)

Terry Pratchett devised a fictional history of how Thud was invented similar to the Shahnama theory of the origins of chess. In short, the clever dwarf who invented the game was asked by his king to name his reward. The answer was that he wanted his board filled with gold: One small gold piece on the first square, two pieces on the second, four pieces on the third, etc. Needless to say, this is more than all the gold of the Disc combined. The king then got angry and threatened to kill the dwarf who was 'too drhg'hgin clever by half'. The inventor then hastily changed his reward to 'as much gold as he could carry', whereupon the king agreed and simply broke one of his arms._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_of_the_Discworld#Thud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_of_the_Discworld#Thud)

</comment><comment><USER9> There was a game called "Ragnarok" for the NeXT, which I believe was a version of this.</comment>


Show HN: Thicket – Back up your policy arguments with research - <AUTHOR> https://thicket.io <comment><AUTHOR> Thicket is a platform for rigorous thinking about policy.

What should you think about a what that politician is saying? On Thicket you can browse argument maps that others have created--and backed up with direct links to research papers. Thicket puts your beliefs about policy in context, connecting them to relevant academic research and to opposing arguments. Thicket is aimed at students, researchers, journalists, and everyone interested in politics and public policy.

I recommend starting with the video introduction since there aren't really any sites quite like it: [https://thicket.io/about#intro- video](https://thicket.io/about#intro-video)

Examples of Thicket in action:

[https://thicket.io/List/11426361746953](https://thicket.io/List/11426361746953) \- Public vs Private Currencies

[https://thicket.io/List/11425711571394](https://thicket.io/List/11425711571394) \- Immigration

[https://thicket.io/List/11425711242115](https://thicket.io/List/11425711242115) \- Universal Basic Income

There are, however, plenty of sites doing similar things:

[https://sequiturs.com/](https://sequiturs.com/)

[http://en.arguman.org/](http://en.arguman.org/)

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

[http://debategraph.org](http://debategraph.org)

[http://metacademy.com](http://metacademy.com)

[https://learn-anything.xyz/](https://learn-anything.xyz/)

...but nobody else combines published research with an argument builder.

Tech stack: vue + D3js; node + express; ArangoDB</comment>


Hitler Youths – the rise of teenage far right terrorists [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/HnH_Hitler-Youths-report_2020-09-v2.pdf <comment><USER2> I don't know if I know any far-right people, but going through college I've lost count of the number of kids who'd casually joke about guillotines and mean it.

<comment><USER3> Like, how did they mean it? Did they build guillotines? Did they kidnap members of the ruling class and subject them to public sham-trials before executing them?

It's important to examine this claim carefully, when compared with the existence of for-profit prisons, prison labor, concentration camps; also when compared with gun-toting culture, like concealed carrying, brandishing, gun salutes, standing one's ground, shooting to kill, bringing guns to school...

To be blasé and use your phrasing, going through high school, I happenh to know _exactly_ [0] how many kids were lost because of gun and prison culture. Meanwhile I've yet to see kids using guillotines for anything beyond novelty- slicing melons.

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

<comment><USER2> If you use "guillotines" talk as an indicator of ideological fervor that culminates in something like CHOP where kids are getting murdered under the guise of social justice revolution, idk yea there's extremism there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "hope not hate" is funded by George Soros.

<comment><USER5> And?</comment></comment>


The Biotech Empires - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/04/the-biotech-empires-of-silicon-valley-and-europe/ <comment><USER2> I find it very bizarre that there is no mention of Boston / Cambridge when talking about major biotech hubs.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Or San Diego.

I also thought the comment "our unique position in micro/nanotechnology coming from a long tradition of watchmaking" was very odd. Basel's long history with the chemistry industry goes back to 1800s, with more influence from the dye industry than than clock making.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think the person writing this article knows much about biotech. It's as if someone said Austin and Berlin were emerging as the leading software hubs and forgot about the Valley.

<comment><USER5> I came here to say exactly the same thing. The article completely omits Cambridge/Boston, which IMO belongs in the same league as SF if not a notch a higher.</comment></comment>


Features we really use from personal finance web aplications - <AUTHOR> Which features you really like from Mint.com or quicken.com or any personal finances application.
I am working on side project which involves personal finances. Could you please help me, if any features you guys really want and should be part of such type of applications.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I really would like something that just automatically scrapes my bank website and credit card and texts me every day with how far off my discretionary spending target I am.

This requires:

\- a plugin interface for bank scrapers, because you aren't going to write all of them.

\- a UI with hotkeys for tagging expenses as discretionary/nondiscretionary

\- a database-backed chron job with a twilio frontend

I've used YNAB, mint, and budgetsimple and Going through and sorting all my expenses into specific categories manually is just way too much time and doesn't help with decision-making.

<comment><AUTHOR> YNAB, MINT and BudgetSimple, they do have Bank account/ Credit card link. You can link your financial institution and get the daily transactions.

Why do we need to scrap? Is there any specific reason ?

<comment><USER2> I assumed that those sites had web scrapers. Do most banks have an API for getting access to customers' transaction records?

<comment><AUTHOR> No..several third party applications can help you do that -

[https://plaid.com/](https://plaid.com/) [http://www.ofx.net/](http://www.ofx.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I budgeted I liked YNAB4 for ease of use etc. However I think a lot of budget programs miss the point. In ordinary life it is harder to bucket budget than in business. Too many unexpected expenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply. Yes, it is hard to maintain each and every expense. But at least for large expenses like home loan, credit final payment amount(Grocery amount will comes under it), utility bills, gym etc.

<comment><USER3> Some kind of AI to guess what category is for each expense would be helpful. For the bigger stuff there will be a 1-1 correspondence of payee to expense. However when you go to a supermarket it could be a mix, given then supermarkets kind of sell everything from clothes to computers. So working those out would be helpful.

It would be helpful if receipts were emailed to you by stores and can be parsed later - although there is no pressure on stores to provide such a service I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be an interesting service of AI to categorize expenditure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been coming up empty in my search for a particular function that's be an instant sell to me should it turn up.

I'd like to set a goal date to have a dollar amount, & have a self-correcting weekly goal I'd have to deduct & set aside to meet the target. So if some weeks the paycheck is fat I can add more, & when it's slim, less. And always have a handle as to what I need to do to meet said goal(s).

</comment><comment><USER5> Isnt quicken related to accounting, or how to pay more tax ?

Actually I understand something different by personal finance, something more like ethereum bitcoin</comment>


Automation Myths: The NSA Can't Replace 90% of Its System Administrators - <AUTHOR> http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/08/automation-myths.html

<comment><USER2> Hi, I'm a sysadmin.

90% was always a bogus value, but that's not the main problem that I see.

Intelligence agencies are in the business of gathering, recording, analyzing and cross referencing information, and then producing reports -- all while maintaining compartmentalization to a degree that would be insane in most other contexts.

You should never outsource your value proposition. What's the key differentiator between the NSA and, say Arbor or Stratfor? Ignore the lack of need to be profitable. The main difference is that the NSA needs to make security its religion. To do that, the principle of least privilege applies. The concept of Need To Know applies. And whenever possible, decisions need to be implemented by two or more people who can't/won't conspire with each other.

Sysadmins set those systems up and run them. Sysadmins understand security as it actually is -- bits without Colour, c.f. yesterday's discussion -- and can turn the Colourful requirements documents into reasonable facsimiles of working systems.

The NSA should never outsource computing expertise, be it development or systems administration. If they were to eliminate 90% of their contract sysadmins - by bringing them in-house - the problem would be with the remaining 10%. But reduce their operational workforce like that and claim automation can do it?

That's so much bull.

<comment><USER3> _You should never outsource your value proposition._

Probably that literally is true. But the phrase itself generally goes with the unsaid assumption you should outsource _something_.

It's been said that security is different from everything else in that it can't be bolted on later and it can't be the job of some of the organization. That's probably true too. And if the NSA's "value proposition" is security, then one assumes they shouldn't outsource _anything_.

But there's this small problem that the NSA metastasizing has gone hand-in- hand with the whole government contracting revolution. Especially, the various private entities sucking the teet of the state are the ones best placed to lobby for more and more funds for the various agencies, the "revolving door" is now well established as the means by which agency officials are rewarded and so-forth. So you can't stop subcontracting yet you can't do it securely.

Well, bummer for them. Hopefully there will be more, not fewer, breaches in the future. They seem more in our advantage than otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Charles Stross deals with this somewhat humorously in the "Laundry Files" novel series. The protagonist is a hacker who was drafted into a (paranormal) spy agency. He still has to do computer support and go to committee meetings, though (lest his supervisor outsource the network rebuild, or have the BSA do a software audit).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HN, and many of the technical writers covering this story, are missing out on a major subtext of this story. I'm on my phone, so I can't cite my source, but look at the actual quotes from NSA staff.

They're not laying off 90% of the people that performed system administration tasks, they're revoking the administration rights of 90% of the people that have them.

That means that their Windows domain was so badly administered that only 10% of the people who have Administrator roles were performing administration tasks.

I doubt anyone is actually losing their job nor do I think they're adding significant automation.

<comment><USER6> Here's the Reuters quote from NSA Director Keith Alexander that most people (myself included) are using for this: "What we're in the process of doing – not fast enough – is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent."

<comment><USER5> The piece that's missing that I can't find right now, but was fully quoted by the BBC, is the adjacent sentence, which was about how they had been too permissive with user permissions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reads like the rest of the industry's pitch for automation against the cries of, "but you're automating me out of a job!"

Automation, done right, _does_ replace low-skill labor. In QA (my perspective), automation replaces the need to run regression tests for each build. That means if a person's job is primarily comprised of executing regression tests, they're not likely going to have much to do once regression tests get automated.

Similarly, if the NSA hired systems administrators to primarily do things like deploy servers etc., then those people can be replaced by automation.

However, your "average" systems administrator job is as much about firefighting, troubleshooting, and customer service (internal customers) as it is deploying servers and managing other (automatable) technical problems. Some of NSA systems administrators are possibly working on optimizing and scaling, or implementing what the NSA's developers and architects have designed and written - stuff that can't realistically be automated.

That said, they probably could play games with titles if they really wanted to get this done without losing their ability to function. Rename a bunch of sysadmin positions as "automation engineers", or reclassify their current sysadmins as "developers" or "systems engineers", and continue on their merry way, happy to have satisfied some congressional pressure without having slowed operations.

<comment><USER8> But the NSA CIA etc is not low skill labor and has specialized needs I could see replacing 90% of the contractor Sysadmins bringing the job in house would mean better control.

And in high security environments you want to strictly limit what one person can do this is security 101. The NSA has talked about implementing the two-man rule and presumably making much more use of discretionary access control which increases staff requirements.

<comment><USER7> Why wouldn't there be some low-skill labor involved? Someone has to physically place the server blades into the racks, install operating systems and necessary libraries, manage raid setups, configure the network, etc. Sure these government orgs have special needs as well, but they don't magically do away with the mundane needs. They are, after all, building a _huge_ data center - someone (or something) is going to have to manage the space.

Sure, Ed Snowden wasn't a low-skill labor IT worker, but I bet when they did an internal audit, they discovered a bunch of low-skill IT workers with more access than they needed, and it was at that point they realized not everyone is doing a job a human has to.

But again, I bet this is going to be more reclassification than it is going to be actually having less warm bodies on the project.

<comment><USER8> Well building a secure system for a TLA isn't low skill labor It needs to be built to very high standards googles data centers have poor physical security for example.

For this sort of use case you need to trust the people who are building your DC's just as much as your sysadmin with root access.

Why do you think the FO in the UK has people whose job is to design and build secure sites and to oversee contractors - to avoid the unfortunate experience of finding bugs in your embassy as the USA has done in the past.

<comment><USER7> Designing? Not low skill. Actually building? Possibly less skilled. Frank Gary doesn't need master carpenters to get his dream created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the sysadmin staffing was at the level truly needed, I don't see how they could reduce it without playing the games described her in other posts - bringing work in house, reclassifying positions, etc. But it could be that the staffing level was bloated to begin with. . .not uncommon with government contracts. And - being slightly facetious here - they might just choose to reduce the multiple of human redundancy that the staffing level represents. . .from say quintuple to triple redundancy. Comb through the remaining system admins and remove those viewed as most likely to "leak" information. . .although they are obviously not that great at it.

</comment><comment><USER10> We can hope they make it impossible to get any work done. I say eliminate 100%.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was thinking the same thing when I saw that. If you have too few people doing the job, the sh*t will really hit the fan. If everyone's too busy to do their own job, nobody will watch the watchers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well it's possible if they are switching from a leviathan sharepoint setup.</comment>


Discovering Senior Developers from Source Code History - <AUTHOR> http://www.garysieling.com/blog/discovering-senior-developers-from-source-code-history

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a useful tool for tracking answering questions like "who knows the most about file/subsystem/internal concept X". Questions where false positives are more or less in inconsequential and easily corrected.

But number of commits is a horrible way to infer seniority. Unless you value "frequency of checkpointing changes" above all else. You get what you measure, so I suspect OP is going to get a lot of small commits in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's not like you'd use this to figure out who should be paid the most, - it's "who should I hand the phone to" when someone calls several years after a project finishes, and if that's wrong occasionally it's ok. And, there's no incentive to be #1 in the result :)

The reason it works is that people write commit message like "Fix X for ACME Corp", and the project leads tend to work on the project for the most calendar time - they may not have the most commits if they have to attend meetings, but after a project/release "finishes", one person ends up sticking around for a while to handle any issues that come up. That naturally gives them some small commits.

To me the risk to me is that this may not generalize, since different projects/products are run in varying ways.

<comment><USER3> Sadly there are people who would use a tool like this to make decisions like what to pay their employees. I guessed based on the title that you might fall into that camp. Glad to hear I was wrong.

I could imagine search with some standards (commit message format, branch/rebase strategies, requiring an associated tickets) would be really effective, though not so much the general case. Hope you can share in a follow up post if you find ways to deal work around these problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> The people who've been most interested so far have either been in some type of architect role where they had some advisory involvement in what a large number of teams are doing, or people who took over a flailing project. Part of the idea of this is to show something that's useful and relatively easy to set up, it could easily show attributes other than the author - it'd be nice to tie together tickets involving database issues or browser rendering for instance.

I have some material for a couple follow-ups to this, so stay tuned - <USER2> with code separate from natural language text is an interesting topic as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do something similar with bash when I start a new project. Code's here:

[https://github.com/gilesbowkett/rewind](https://github.com/gilesbowkett/rewind)

It's just useful to profile the team in terms of who writes the most code, or to profile the project in terms of when it's seen the most activity. The first time I did this, it was a rescue project, and the people who we were rescuing didn't even bother to properly introduce us to the rest of the team (the real thing they needed rescuing from was team dysfunction), so I'd have been at a real disadvantage if I hadn't done the analysis.

</comment><comment><USER5> Check out git-extras from TJ Holowaychuk. It's git-summary function is excellent for finding solid contributors that are not the maintainer on open- source projects:

[https://github.com/visionmedia/git- extras](https://github.com/visionmedia/git-extras)

</comment><comment><USER6> You can also look at their driver's license. That should tell you a thing or two about seniority.

<comment><USER7> Age does not correlate in any way to seniority.

<comment><USER8> Except it often does. I've been in multiple situations where people who knew less then me were more senior, simply because they had been around longer.

<comment><USER9> A better measure might often be time-at-the-company. I'm older than some of my coworkers, but they wrote 3/4 of the codebase I work in. Commits seem like a good proxy for knowledge.

You could also graph commits over time in particular repos/apps/folders, and see who is has been the main maintainer/developer for those sections of the codebase at various times. Cool stuff!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/5859796/coronavirus-us-worst-day/ <comment><USER4> I have to say, living in NYC I'm pretty thankful for the quarantine requirement from anyone coming in from outside the tri-state area. I like to at least think we're on the downswing, although who really knows.

It's not like anyone will listen anyway, but it's a nice thought...

<comment><USER5> FYI, only applies if coming from high-risk states. This included nine states originally. Not sure if further states have been added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wear a mask and do social distancing ... jeepers it is not difficult.

</comment><comment><USER7> Give us liberty, and give us death!

</comment><comment><USER8> This explains it: [https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1276172320965636099/...](https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1276172320965636099/photo/1)

Jokes aside, I'm afraid this is truly the administration and leadership that will take down the US for good. We somehow made it through Bush Jr and Clinton but by golly, this administration cannot do anything constructive.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really don't understand why we're not doing full contract tracing right now, especially in for example my state where there are only 50 new cases a day. Are we really going to wait till it's 5000 to do something? It's like there's just literally nobody in a position of power with any initiative whatsoever.

<comment><USER10> Are they really not doing contact tracing? In this country we've been contact tracing all cases since they fell to manageable numbers. It's expensive, but not all _that_ expensive in the scheme of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jeez the protests really took their toll

<comment><USER12> If that were the case wouldn't we see a surge in places like NYC as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still flat in Calif., same for months.

<comment><USER14> Nope; CA is one of the highest-growing states.

The Bay Area _was_ flat, but it just spiked yesterday and reopening is now paused.

<comment><USER13> Nope, just checked the data on the Santa Clara hospitalizations link - <USER2> the number of tests is increasing, not admissions or mortality. Same for months.

The press is saying one thing, but the official stats say flat - month after month.

I guess newspapers value outrage over public service.

You would need a magnifying glass to see anything significant. Only 72 hospitalized patients today (2,278 more available), historical average is a little less.

[https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx](https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx)

Shame on HN for letting non-technical people dictate public policy with a false narrative. If anybody told me that a technical group the size of HN in 2019 was this oblivious, I would have been skeptical. But here we are - <USER3> center of SV refuses to actually read a graph, month after month.

Can somebody explain that to me? Is everybody else incapacitated with fear, virtue signalling, mass hysteria, or what is behind that?

Dr. VDH, who noticed the above in parallel with me, said something like, "[We're captive to 1%'ers who have a nice life and feel it's unfair they could lose that.]"

Is that it? Destroy our economy for individual selfishness?

Do I need to make a video on how to read the graphs?

<comment><USER15> Are you serious? You seem dangerously self-absorbed and misinformed. Your original comment referred to CALIFORNIA. Now you are arguing about Santa Clara hospitalizations (a very lagging indicator), which is many levels different from your original (and incredibly incorrect) point.

<comment><USER16> I'll just put the data in front of you and let you decide:

[https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test](https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test)

Go to the chart for California. Percent positive tests and hospitalizations are the most important factors here. Hospitalizations have gone up, undoubtedly (from 4,500 to now almost 6,000). That said, percent positive tests has remained flat. Deaths in CA also continue to trend down.

What conclusion do you draw from that? To me, it appears that the concentration of Covid in the population of California has not increased. At the same time, there are more hospitalizations. Perhaps Covid is not getting worse in CA, but more people are finding out that they have it due to increased testing and are then going to the hospital out of an abundance of caution.

As an aside, you and the guy you're replying to are obviously extremely emotional about this. Learn to recognize that and realize that if you're feeling emotional when looking at data, some part of your brain cares way too much to remain objective. Both of you are clearly biased.

<comment><USER15> Your own data shows that you are just plain wrong. Percent positives at the beginning of the month are 4%. Number of tests have skyrocketed, if true cases are flat, then percent positive would plummet. Instead they have almost doubled to 7%. Your supposed lack of emotion is BS. You obviously have some internal or external motivation to believe there isn't a problem when there clearly is one. I live in the mountains in NorCal, there ain't a case around. However, as a one-time virologist (it's been almost two decades since I published a peer reviewed paper on SARS-1), I can assure you there is no chance that you are correct in your "hypothesis" that "Covid is not getting worse in CA."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We. Shut. Down. Too. Early. In. Most. Places.

For the love of God. Texas didn't have an outbreak when they shutdown! Nor did Oregon, or California. That is the difference. All of Europe shut down _after the virus had already grown exponentially_ in most places. We shut down Oregon when there were fewer than 100 cases. After three months of being shut down in Oregon the curve had nowhere to go but up!

What in the hell did people expect? We shut down before there is spread, wait three months and then reopen. How is that a plan? Did anyone really expect that places where shutdowns were early and strong would somehow come out unscathed?

It has been true since day 1. You either need to shut down HARD until there is a vaccine (not possible, not sustainable, more deaths caused by this) or you deal with the surge of cases and do your best to protect the elderly/vulnerable.

What you don't do is panic, shut down too early, burn through all your money and political capital, reopen and then be all "golly gee there are cases now!". If we had waited until there was growth in cases, we could shutdown and actually flatten the curve enough to handle the shock to the system.

It is so. damn. frustrating. that this isn't more obvious to people. What materially changed between today and March 1?

Lockdowns where a bad idea from there start as there is no way to continue them until there is a vaccine.

I am very curious to see if NY and the other early hot spots avoid a resurgence like Europe has. That is what I am most interested now. If they do, perhaps the folks who are talking about cross-reactive immunity are on to something.

<comment><USER18> By and large, places that weren't hit as hard as NY and western Europe assumed that they had some inherent privilege or immunity, and many of them are being proved wrong. It's a basic human behavioral characteristic. Even if you don't understand why you are better off than someone else, the default assumption is that you are intrinsically better. It might be true! But it's dangerous to assume it when you don't know the reason why.

So I think it's more of a tragic flaw of human nature than a particularly unlucky failure of timing.

The other issue with human nature is that people need feedback, so when you have 2-4 weeks of delay in the loop, things get out of control. You have weeks of believing falsehoods before reality starts to kick in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 47341 new cases yesterday. Skyrocketing fast. But you know, gotta reopen everything to keep the stock market happy.

<comment><USER19> No, we have to reopen so people can have jobs and feed their children and pay their housing bills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They don't mention hospitalization or deaths. Those are the two to keep track of. I'm guessing far more people are getting tested than previously, hence the larger numbers.

<comment><USER21> Those are immune to the sampling rate bias, but they are lagging indicators. Based on the recent widespread failures to socially distance (e.g. George Floyd protests, campaign rallys, etc), I suspect those lagging charts will start trending upwards.

You can also correct for the sampling rate bias by looking at the number of cases per 100,000 tests (or similar). Does anyone have a link tracking that? EDIT: percentage positive tests: [https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual- states](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states)

<comment><USER22> Areas with BLM actions have not seen an increase in rates of infection.

[https://www.popsci.com/story/health/black-lives-matter- prote...](https://www.popsci.com/story/health/black-lives-matter-protests- covid-19-transmission/)

<comment><USER23> That seems... very suspicious. I doubt that the virus cares what the reason for a large gathering is. I don't think the BLM actions were using proper social distancing. But what does that leave? People who went haven't bothered to get tested since? Everybody wore masks, and that's way more effective than we thought? The gatherings were outside, and the Vitamin D is saving everyone?

<comment><USER24> There have been epi efforts to oversample people in the blm protests specifically to examine its impact on infection rates and find it didn't matter. They didn't have an explanation but suspected it had to do with the protests mostly being outdoors.

<comment><USER25> I suspect being outdoors makes a huge difference.

If the protests were a hotspot for new infections the states that are doing contract tracing should show that. I haven't seen any evidence of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Need both raw and averages. But not ease for reporter. Stat telling "lies" and the truth at the same time. And said you have to dig in. Like % of test positive per test, death and hospitalised vs recovery. The fundamental is you want to use a number to say it all, but one number cannot tell the truth in many situation. One might not work, even simple like average vs median and mode. And a random bell shaped curve need two parameters.

Multiple angles are hard.</comment>


Build a lean and flexible blogging platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.git-tower.com/learn/build-your-own-blog/introduction/introduction

<comment><USER2> anyone here used Kirby before?</comment>


How TS compiler API helps us use web workers while staying type-safe and modular - <AUTHOR> https://www.obvibase.com/dev-blog/how-obvibase-uses-web-workers <comment><AUTHOR> An article I just published on how Obvibase uses TS compiler to make it easy to massively use web workers with no detriment to type safety and project structure</comment>


Mecanismo - <AUTHOR> http://www.mecanismo.org <comment><USER2> I get an error:

> _Warning: mysqli_connect(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: > Name or service not known in > /var/www/vhost/mecanismo.org/home/html/configbd.php_</comment>


Ask YC: Contributing to Mathematics Journal? - <AUTHOR>

While working on a (coding) project I had need of a particular numerical method/algorithm which is pretty popular and used in many places. While working with it, I noticed that with a small change to the fundamental idea of the method would result in a pretty decent improvement in terms of efficiency and accuracy, and rewrote it. A friend recommended that I try to publish the revised algorithm in an academic journal as it would be good for my career, etc.<p>What's the general opinion about coders contributing to scientific journals in the community? Keeping in mind that I've never even read a mathematics journal (though I have read many individual articles here and there), what would be a good journal to approach and how does one go about submitting an article for peer review with them (process, steps, requirements, etc.)? <comment><USER2> The process varies from journal to journal, but often you can just submit a paper online (see <http://ams.org/mcom/mcomsubmit.html> for example).

That said, if you're not familiar with the journal your odds of getting a paper accepted on your own are rather slim. A better approach would be to find someone with publication experience in the field and get them to look over your work before you submit it -- if you don't have anyone else, I'd be happy to help with this.

As for which journal to approach -- it depends on the material, of course. A good place to start is with whichever journal is most frequently named in your list of references. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I have a pretty good relationship with some university professors who I could ask for a hand - but I've heard scary stories about professors taking all the credit?

<comment><USER3> Only a small minority of jerks would bother to try, so just make sure that the professor you're approaching isn't a jerk. Frankly most professors don't have time to bother trying to steal credit, especially for something which isn't close to their core research.

Ultimately you're just asking them for help in refining it into publishable form, so you should be first author, they should be second author.

Also, note that the first professor you go to is likely to think that what you've done isn't sufficient for a publication. That's OK. But if you try three professors and they all think that, you might want to give up trying. Based on your description (small change, decent improvement), what you've done may or may not warrant a publication all on its own.

<comment><USER2> _Ultimately you're just asking them for help in refining it into publishable form, so you should be first author, they should be second author._

Only if you've feeling very generous. I would acknowledge help received in a section at the end of the paper, but I would never list a co-author who didn't contribute any of the ideas.

<comment><USER4> If I had to guess I would presume the OP has not done a formal analysis of the algorithm. This would undoubtedly be the contribution of the professor/researcher assuming the analysis proves it is an improvement over prior algorithms. This analysis/proof is certainly worth being a second author even if it is not a contribution to the algorithm itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The possibility of it being accepted depends on the nature of the improvement. If your improvement, for example, takes it from 100n^3 to30 n^3 operations, your odds of being accepted are very low. If you go from 100n^3 to 100n^2 (or even 10000n^2), and that has never been discovered before, it is _definitely_ publishable. However, even so, it is important that you write in the correct style, because (unfortunately) there are certain conventions, and many journals aren't that friendly to "outsiders". So the advice of getting someone who has published to look at it is very good.

Nevertheless, it depends on the nature of the improvement, as I said above. If you have that, you can be sure that it can eventually be published.

<comment><USER6> 100n^3 and 30n^3 are both O(n^3)...no improvement, hence it won't be published. Depending on the problem the algorithm is solving O(n^3) to O(n^2) can be a massive improvement.

<comment><USER7> Constant-time factors matter to everyone working with finite resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think you have to limit yourself to journals--conference papers are another alternative. At least in Computer Science, a good conference is a totally respectable way to go. (It's been awhile since I've been in grad school, so my info may be stale.) STOC and FOCS come to mind. SODA, as I recall, has some sort of "short paper" conference which might be good.

<comment><USER4> I think this is dead on. The OP should look towards publishing in a conference proceedings. In CS this is much more common than journals and his odds of getting it accepted are probably much higher. You nailed the top conferences in this area. However, these are still quite competitive. Perhaps the OP could be more specific about the area where he made an improvement and experts on the forum can try to suggest the best places to submit it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What algorithm and what type of improvement did you make? Also, can you prove the correctness/accuracy of your improvements?

The answer to these questions significantly affects the journal you should submit to. I can offer you suggestions if you give a little more detail.

You might want to work with someone at a local university on it. Doing research is hard, and writing papers is also difficult (especially your first paper).

</comment><comment> mark-t Journals are really picky. The whole process takes ages. I'd recommend just writing it up and posting it to the arXiv.

<comment><USER10> The time argument is the thing that really turned me off. In my one published paper we wrote the draft a full two and a half years before it saw the light of day. One referee didn't like it, so it went through a review process, then got bumped down to a lower journal (PRL to PR-A for the physics folks) started the acceptance process again...

Even in CS where things are mostly conference oriented, you're still probably looking at close to a year between finishing the research and seeing it published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Make sure you hook up with someone who has written papers before. Aside from the procedural stuff there's all sorts of stylistic issues when writing math papers (I call it math-ese).

</comment><comment><USER12> Back in grad school when I was working on papers, it seemed pretty essential to have an experience PhD involved in the process. No matter how "great" the idea I had, there were always a lot of complications. For example, making sure I had the appropriate literature review done, did controlled comparisons against best of breed algorithms etc. I would write an abstract of your improvements with hard numbers and the conclusions that you draw from them and also a 2 page summary explaining all this, and email it to a friendly applied mathematician.

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://arxiv.org/help/submit>

<http://arxiv.org/list/cs.DS/recent></comment>


Ask HN: Before accepting a job or interview, what are red flags to look out for? - <AUTHOR> Bonus round: Is it worth it to spend $100 just to travel for an interview?<p>At least once a week some of the companies interviewing me for jobs have their offices located four hours from where I am situated <comment><USER2> This reminds me of an old joke. A guy travels to the USSR for the first time. He arrives to the airport, takes a taxi to the hotel and, as he walks from the taxi, falls into an open manhole. In hospital he tries to complain about this. "What do you want us to do?" somebody asks, "Well, put something around it, maybe some red flags?", "Did you get here by plane?", "Sure", "So you have been to the airport, right?", "Of course", "Did you notice a giant red flag flying over the gate?", "You mean the USSR's official banner?", "Here you are, that was your red flag".

The point is that you need to research the company. There are sites like glassdoor, there are forums and blog posts, news about layoffs, acquisitions, contracts etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if it's almost hard to find information about the company? Like if they are a new startup, that is profitable and their team doesn't have any info online?

<comment><USER2> Research people then, especially the management. If people are fresh grads with no info too then, here you are, it's your red flag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Bonus round: Is it worth it to spend $100 just to travel for an interview?

As someone else mentioned, there is your red flag. If a company can't put up a good face for the interview and compensate your for your time to travel there, that is a good sign they'll be stingy with bonuses, benefits or other things in the future.

I was impressed by one company I interviewed with, there were prepared to pay me for gas for visiting them because I drove there. Other company which flew me over, gave me an extra $50 for the cab on the way back and for getting a dinner at the airport when I flew back. It is a small, relatively cheap token of appreciation that makes a good first impression.

My advice is don't ask explicitly as the first thing about it, but as they invite you, when picking a time, ask the person making arrangements, what company will compensate you for amongst other questions. This should probably not be the deciding factor and if you really like the company otherwise, still go, but it is just another heuristic to use.

Other red flag -- they give a very small decision window. They don't want you to have time to get more offers in and compare. In that case, ask to midify the date to think longer. That is a good test how agreeable they are. If they don't want to, that is another red flag.

<comment><AUTHOR> About your last point what is a reasonable timeline to get more offers and compare? I'm asking as I have some companies wanting to hire me, but I've been recently given a shot to interview with great companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is specifically for dev jobs, c# in particular:

1\. The biggest red flag is that they talk about agile a lot, often they list it in the job title. I like agile, but they ones that talk about it the most are almost always the worst at it. Interviewing at these companies it becomes quickly apparent that they don't have a clue what agile means (or they think it means stand up meetings). The ones practicing agile don't have to talk about it.

2\. A short list of OSS libraries in use. They are probably either doing a lot of things sub optimally, or even worse, reinventing a lot of wheels poorly.

3\. They use TFS for source control. Much like VSS before it, the only reason it gets used is ignorance on behalf of the developers/company. Quite frequently you'll find that they use it because it's all they've ever known.

2 and 3 are both great indications that when they run into a problem google is not the first port of call.

</comment><comment><USER5> I once interviewed with a company that would not pay for travel. I saw it as a red flag but I went anyway. They are in a city I was interested in visiting, so I scheduled a half day interview for a Monday and took a long weekend. The trip was a lot of fun and I was happy to have a weekend away. I don't regret the trip.

Every interview went well and we had a good lunch before I left. Two hours later I got a call from the team lead. He was very excited to tell me that an offer was being put together and I'd have it by the end of the day. On my way to the airport the salary offer came. It was lower than the ballpark figure we discussed before I came in for the on-site interviews and lower than my current salary. I immediately declined and declined further negotiation. Lesson learned.

</comment><comment><USER6> Recent acquisition means that employees often have culture changing underneath them. This often results in high attrition.

Fad perks, like kegs.

Open work spaces that are also quiet.

Large number of new hires.

The overuse of the word startup from large companies.

The use of the phrase drink from the firehose as if it is positive

Companies may be better set up for new employees of specific skill levels. If you are fresh out of school, then be aware that some companies will have poor onboard support.

Lack of age diversity, diversity is potentially difficult to come by, age diversity is not. This requirement may not apply to startups that cater to persons without children.

Bonus question: in general the company should pay for your travels. If you feel weird about asking and you can afford it, then drive out for the interview. Getting good interview practice is worth time and money investment. Do not feel that they owe you something because you made this decision. The company should also be willing to pay for your move to their location. This should be a requirement if you are going to accept an offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Large number of new hires

If they are hiring lots of people, count how many empty cubicles they have; sometimes it's a sign they've laid off lots of people recently

Yea I've done lots of interviews and some companies offered me a job on the start. I passed their interview because they've asked me generic questions that I've been asked numerous times.

Your point about getting interview experience from doing interviews is great advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a rule, never travel to a job interview on your own expenses, unless it's just a few USD/EUR for a local bus/train ticket or something similar. That would demonstrate to them that you don't value your time and money and that they can potentially abuse you further down the road. You will also encourage them to continue with that strategy in the future.

As for the red flags, google the names of the people who you will be working with and also of those who manage the organization. Go through their public activities and get an idea of their personalities. Sometimes you will find out that your potential colleagues are real jerks, and it can happen that the organization (especially if it's a startup) is run by a 24-year-old arrogant kid. In both cases I would skip that "opportunity" and would look for something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, in a way it kind of is a bad precedent.

That second advice is gold. I've been doing it since day one and it definitely helped to paint a picture the type of culture a company has. Luckily, most of the people that have been interviewing me seem like genuinely nice folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A good article on this: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html)

Joel goes into depth on these 12 points:

"Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do new candidates write code during their interview? Do you do hallway usability testing?"

<comment><AUTHOR> I've noticed most companies posting jobs on StackOverflow have information which checkboxes they've checked in Joel's list.

I think it would be even better if there was another complementary list about culture and the company's motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Too many changes in who will interview. This shows that they are not organized.

They expect you to use your magic wand to make their problems go away.

<comment><USER3> Ha, Amazon's AWS fits. Didn't call on the agreed date for phone interview. Then when visiting on-site, future manager, probably the main person I should have been talking to, wasn't there. Quickly assembled together an interview schedule in 20 min with people who , except maybe two, seemed distracted and just wanted to go do something else. Forgot about me during lunch. So was left sitting in an office for an hour without anyone checking on me (eventually got up and started wondering the hallways hoping someone would stop me and ask me -- "Hey I don't think you belong here" and I was hoping to reply with a silly joke about trying to steal AWS's root CA private keys). Then of course they promised to call back with a decision in 2 days, which was more like 2 weeks. Didn't get an offer, no surprise (I did get snarky about the "leadership principles", they probably didn't appreciate that), but it did make a good story I like to tell every time interviews come up.

<comment><USER9> If you have to pull their head out of their ass during the interview process, you will have to do it everyday several times. It is better not to work there. If they give you an offer, give an outrageous salary range as your compensation to work in that kind of environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > what are red flags to look out for?

Ask to speak with the actual hiring executive first for 30 minutes via Skype. Have good, solid questions prepared for them. That's YOUR initial scorecard.

If they won't grant access, or can't give satisfactory answers-- those are Big Red Flags.

Incidentally, it's customary that the party requesting an interview cover reasonable travel expenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you've mentioned crossed my mind during the trip. I agree that I should've done those beforehand

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you have to pay more than you would to normally commute, they should compensate you for the travel expenses.

Personally when a company goes through the effort of organizing an interview (especially with travel) and I get there and some amount of chaos/disorganization is apparent I get extremely cautious and is a big red flag for me. Nothing like flying across the country (paid for) to arrive and have the person I'm interviewing with change and leave me waiting in the lobby 30 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've just realized this yesterday. I've noticed that I've started to burn out when I had to travel 8 hours to the company and back to my city in one day, which does not include the four-hour interview.

It's taxing to the body and mind, especially to the pocket :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think asking to be compensated for travel is more acceptable in the US. In the UK if you were to ask for compensation I think the answer would always be a resounding "No". It just seems to be something you generally don't do.

I may be completely wrong though, is there anyone from the UK here who has asked for travel costs to be covered and been successful?

<comment><USER13> NHS will sometimes pay travel costs for interview if you ask for it, they don't always offer.

Some trusts will also pay transport expenses for candidates to make a visit to the trust to talk to people about the job before interview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Always check glassdoor.com reviews. Those have saved me from even wasting my time on quite a few companies.

Also, watch out for interviewers who are more focused on asserting their alpha nerd status than communicating effectively.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had companies interview me with an employee count of greater than 600, but no glassdoor review :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So you have a 4 hour drive there, an interview that could be anywhere from 4-6 hours (if they are through) and a 4 hour trip back, 12-14 hours all told. Adding in time to eat and whatnot you are talking about a 12-16 hour process. After a long day a 4 hour drive home could be a little sketchy. They should probably be offering to put you up somewhere for the night.

For comparison, when I interviewed at Amazon I told the recruiter I was within walking distance and she still sent me an expense form.

</comment><comment><USER16> This may be relevant: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449133](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449133)

</comment><comment><USER17> Expert beginners. Expectations that I can't wait to work under their superstar. "You'll get a chance to work with our Lead Principal Engineer Matt as closely as you like!" Looking at Linkedin Matt has less than five years experience.

<comment><USER14> This one kills me. I've had recruiters pushing me to interview for senior/lead positions with 2 years of experience.

<comment><USER6> 'Senior Developer' Is a useless title.

If you want a title that reflects your expertise, use 'Subject Matter Expert : <TOPIC>' somewhere on resume. This makes very clear to future employers where your strongest skills lie.</comment></comment></comment>


ClojureScript on Android - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fikesfarm.com/posts/2015-07-15-clojurescript-on-android.html <comment><USER2> This is great, huge thumbs up to all the people involved in this effort. We use ClojureScript on the web and we love every second of it, I'm sure the experience on Android will be the same, especially with the reduced startup time.

<comment><USER3> And... with React Native for Android, perhaps driven by Om or Reagent. :)

<comment><USER4> Reagent + React Native is kinda my dream mobile stack ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is the startup time so much less for ClojureScript than for JVM-based Clojure? That's quite surprising to me.

<comment><USER6> Remember that the JVM was originally developed by a company that sold big-iron server hardware; the software on it would typically run for weeks at a time. If you have to make a trade-off during development that sacrifices startup time for overall performance, take a guess as to which one is going to win.

<comment><USER7> Android does not have a JVM and Android's Dalvik/ART is not optimized for dynamic languages like the official JVM is. And you won't see this difference when comparing Scala against Scala.js on Android.

At this point you're comparing design choices in Javascript vs Java. Except that I don't buy that the JVM's bytecode is less efficient to interpret than Javascript is. The official JVM actually has a very similar execution model to modern Javascript VMs, with code being first executed in interpreted after which it starts optimizing and compiling the hotspots, with Java's bytecode being optimized to be interpreted first. Android's ART does it differently though, compiling the bytecode ahead of time to native, which is cool for the purposes of Android but misses runtime optimization opportunities for dynamic languages like Clojure.

So no, what actually happens is that normal Clojure insists on loading all namespaces that are used in the program, setting its symbols, vars and functions in the process. Clojure is also a dynamic language and this involves call sites that are not very inline-able and that Android cannot optimize as well as Oracle's JVM can. These problems don't exist with ClojureScript, which in the end is just plain Javascript that also happens to be tree-shaken by the Google Closure compiler.

<comment><USER8> Didn't realize clojure was dynamic typed when I made my previous comment in the discussion. That explains a lot about performance, ART and java 6 though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it OK to post our blogs here? - <AUTHOR>

I am new here. Please suggest whether it is OK to post our blogs here and get insight on it.<p>Cheers <comment><USER2> The prevailing opinions in the past have been that it's fine to post links to your own material, provided it's relevant, and you don't swamp the site by posting lots in quick succession. If it's relevant, interesting, insightful, and/or useful, then it doesn't matter if you wrote it, or you found it somewhere else.

Try posting one and seeing if you get any response.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're really looking for insight and engage (discuss, respond) it should be OK. If you're just submitting every blog post for marketing like (random examples) [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vijaygirija](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vijaygirija), [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Lemeowski13](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Lemeowski13) then it gets boring really quick.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am looking to share some of my idea such as [https://medium.com/@lalwani/what-should-microsoft-do-to- save...](https://medium.com/@lalwani/what-should-microsoft-do-to-save-windows- phone-1a07d054c447) to get insight on my thoughts... Plus it may help someone to get ideas for the business.

</comment><comment> cant-be-serious There are blogs that lack of comment section and put "discuss on hackernews" instead.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, you can post your own stuff here. I have done so, with mixed results. It might help if you participate in the community a bit first. I don't mean you have to in order to be allowed to post, I am just saying that participation can help you get a better feel for what flies here.

Even if you do get that feel, there is a lot of random chance involved in what does well. I have written some on my blog about that if you care to read it.

Best of luck.</comment>


Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' to return to German bookshelves after 70-year ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/02/hitlers-mein-kampf-to-return-to-german-bookshelves-after-70-year-ban/ <comment><USER2> I had a tour guide in German who told me he was one of the few people he knew who had read any of it because he'd spent time in the US as a exchange student.</comment>


Robocalls–and complaints about robocalls–are booming - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/robocalls-and-complaints-about-robocalls-are-booming/ <comment><USER2> This has became the most complained problem since years ago. I just read an article that might be helpful for anyone at [https://www.lemberglaw.com/what- are-robocalls/](https://www.lemberglaw.com/what-are-robocalls/). It talks about robocalls, and how we could avoid them. Hope this helps.</comment>


Ask HN: Self-Hosted Mailchimp Alternative that you Use? - <AUTHOR> I want to send some emails to my customers and MailChimp is annoying me in so many ways. What are some self-hosted alternatives that I can set up myself? <comment><USER3> Sendy is a popular self-hosted alternative: [https://sendy.co](https://sendy.co)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Looking into this right now

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> AWS has a bulk/templating mail option that might be more like what you were hoping for.

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and- targeting/introdu...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and- targeting/introducing-email-templates-and-bulk-sending/)

My concern about truly self-hosting this would be my sender reputation - <USER2> might find you end up in more junk mail boxes compared to using a service like SES.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man. Sender reputation is something I worry about. But half my clients get the email I send them using a simple phone script already. So I'm hopeful that is a good indicator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not self-hosted, but less annoying than MailChimp - TinyLetter. It is a MailChimp company, but TinyLetter has fewer features, I found it more friendly for simply emails sending.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the time less features is preferable

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently signed up for MailChimp, and I am still learning the interface.

I am curious what parts of the service annoy you?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can get around with the interface I guess. But, if you collected emails by some other means other than their widget it just complaint non stop. I think it has with all the new regulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking for this as well. Something with a good template editor and that works with any SMTP service?</comment>


The Museum of Modern Art Research Dataset - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MuseumofModernArt/collection/ <comment><USER2> The Cooper Hewitt (to my knowledge) was the first museum to post their museum metadata on github:

[https://github.com/cooperhewitt/collection](https://github.com/cooperhewitt/collection) [http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/releasing-collection- githu...](http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/releasing-collection-github/)

There are a few other museums that have done so since: [https://github.com/tategallery/collection](https://github.com/tategallery/collection) [https://github.com/artsmia/collection](https://github.com/artsmia/collection) are the two I can think of right now

The Rijksmuseum and the Walters both have CC0 metadata + images, but through a queryable API instead of downloadable csv/json.

[https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/api](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/api) [http://api.thewalters.org/](http://api.thewalters.org/)

<comment><USER3> It would be awesome if someone would use datasets like these to create a valuation of those musea.

Did you know musea do not know / publish the valuation of all of their works? And that they only ever sell works, even those they will never show to the public, to buy new works. And that buy selling a few percent of their assets they could basicly provide free access, with no loss to what works they show to the public. All these gems, and more, from a great article and podcast [1], [2]. (Totally not affiliated, but major recent eyeopeners for me.)

[1] [http://www.democracyjournal.org/36/museums-can-change- will-t...](http://www.democracyjournal.org/36/museums-can-change-will- they.php?page=all) [2] [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/michael_ohare_o.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/05/michael_ohare_o.html)

<comment><USER4> [It might not seem so, but this is a constructive criticism]

You clearly have no idea whatsoever about what museums are, how do they work and what do they do.

No, museums don't sell heir works. Only some US museums do so, and they are harshly blamed by all other museums all over the world.

No, works in deposit aren't "works that the public won't see", but essential works to ensure the longest lasting to the pieces usually shown (but periodically put to rest through a planned turnover). No, deposits aren't a trove of unexploited treasures: some important gems and a lot of rubbish.

A museum is not a shop, but a conservation institution: it works on a hundred years perspective. Sure, sell a couple works to grant gratis access for 100k people over 10 years. And what do we do for the 390 next years?

Do you know anything about the art market? Clearly not: there is no value, just trend and fancy. Do you know something about economics? The simple fact that a work is kept in a museum (and thus is outside the market) changes the prices of similar works (if ever such thing existed: we are talking about unique pieces, no one is ever "similar" to another) available on the market. Thus you can't use the market prices of an artist to estimate the value of an artwork (putting another one on the market will dilute value of the other ones). But yet, you should know about history and how a provenance might affect the market price of an artwork.

Do you know something about art history? Because that would teach you one thing or two about how museums are for keeping works and transmit a legacy that outgrows small periods of time, like a lifespan. A museum isn't to sell works, because it isn't to follow present trends (you might want to find out how praised was Caravaggio in the XIXth Century, or Georges de La Tour around the same time).

And please, please, tell me: how would you evaluate museums? The one with most value is the best one? The one with the most items? Well, make an inventory of a museum, first, and then let me know if you changed your mind once you find out that "item" has absolutely no meaning.

Also: your latin purism is plain silly and clearly makes it a bit harder for your reader to understand you (I had to think it over a little bit before finding that it wasn't a typo). Neither Greeks nor Roman (Latins) had museums. The first one was established in Rome in the XVth century: the world "musea" was never a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Ha! The data is completely useless. None of it is uniform. Some artists are repeated twice with different names. The dates are totally unusable. The author field may contain one or more authors, etc.

MoMA wanted to look tech-savvy and trendy by publishing this data to github. But it just makes them look like an old institution that doesn't know how to keep their data clean and meaningfully structured. This is a bit sad. Plus Github's really not meant to publish content. Of course you can but it's weird.

Yes, art is hard to classify, but come on... we're talking about one of the richest museums in the world, and they can't properly manage 200k of data? I would be pretty afraid lending them anything...

<comment><USER5> I suspect art cataloging has a very specific taxonomy, or even deliberate examples of flaunting taxonomy for artistic reasons.

Normalization risks equating Prince and the artist formerly known as Prince, which is a worse picture of reality for a lot of purposes.

<comment> d--b I understand it is impossible to make these things fit in a proper relational model. For instance, modeling dates when artworks are made circa a date, between 2 dates, started by someone and finished by someone else, is very complex. That said, they should at least try. Being able to sort artworks by date seems pretty fundamental to me!

Look at the data released by the Cooper-Hewitt that someone posted below. They actually have some kind of structure!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I took a look at the data. The data schema is disorganized to the point that a _lot_ of janitorial work would be necessary to get it useable and perform any analysis or visualization.

For example, some works have a date of "1896" and others have a date of "1976-77" or "c.1937"; artist bios can have nationality, year-of-birth and year-of-death but not necessarily all 3; dimensions can be "12 1/2 × 12 1/4" (31.8 × 31.1 cm)" or "204 x 48 x 48 inches (variable)", etc.

<comment><USER7> > I took a look at the data. The data schema is disorganized to the point that > a lot of janitorial work would be necessary to get it useable and perform > any analysis or visualization.

In other words, it is real world data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is so cool! (but I can't help but be a little disappointed that there are no image resources include - even some low-res thumbnails would be great!)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've only briefly perused the dataset...but there is a URL data, and many of the works have this filled in. The MoMA has always had one of the better structured websites, so it wouldn't be hard to write a scraper to grab the associated image.

e.g.

[http://www.moma.org/collection/works/101730](http://www.moma.org/collection/works/101730)

[http://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIxNzgzOCJdLFsicCIsImNvbn...](http://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIxNzgzOCJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCItcmVzaXplIDIwMDB4MjAwMD4iXV0?sha=ecf15b9af177b4ed)

(I guess one thing the MoMA could improve on is moving their image assets to a CDN...that thing took awhile to load)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its absolutely amazing the vast collections inside of Museum storage, most items will hardly ever see display.

<comment><USER10> Not just museums do this, a lot of collectors I've read about do something like it: [http://bit.ly/1N49UaR](http://bit.ly/1N49UaR)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to work here and think its an amazing API: [http://developers.artsy.net](http://developers.artsy.net)

The playground is very cool.</comment>


That accessibility thing: we are failing to build accessible digital products - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/newline/that-accessibility-thing-78e1e83ae46#.4ycqni9jl <comment><USER2> The web won't be accessible until Google starts penalizing for inaccessibility in page rank. It has little incentive to do so.</comment>