How to Get Rich Quick in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/17/get-rich-quick-silicon-valley-startup-billionaire-techie <comment><USER2> 'So if someone asked "What's your space?" and you had a deeply unfashionable job like, say, writer, it behooved you to say "I deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja".'

LOL. I personally would rather hear someone come out and say they're a writer, but I can see how the alternative can sound more interesting.

<comment><USER3> I'm no expert on Japanese culture or ninjas, but my idea of of a ninja is someone who is dressed in black, infiltrates your building, kills you with a thrown weapon, and then escapes without being seen. So, if you "deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja," then you're not a very good ninja.

<comment><USER4> Or, the alternative, they dress in black, infiltrate your building, and then gouge your eyes out and deliver them to their client. If you think of them that way, then yes, they can be a good ninja.

<comment><USER3> Okay, I can accept that perspective. But that's not exactly in the way they mean it in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, when they say "deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja," they mean, "I'm can get a quarter-million people to look at your website." Obviously, that means quite something different than carving peoples' eyes out, after which they won't be able to see any websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "We startup wannabes were not entrepreneurs. We were suckers for the shovel merchants"

Now for a little experiment: everyone reading this, go immediately to the mirror, look at yourself, and explain the business model of the company you work for. Can you do it? Doesn't it make you want to throw up?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is one of the most dystopian things I've ever read.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this can be a very good topic for an episode on Black Mirror TV series [1]

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

<comment><USER8> I'd say more appropriate for a TV series, where each episode the hero finds something else more depressing about this future. Maybe like the TV show "Silicon Valley" but with much darker humour.

<comment><USER9> "A Valley of silicon, tragedy, and despair..." \- sounds like some dark Lovecraft stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it even possible to get rich in SV? Obscene cost, no housing, high taxes, life time alimony... It seems like the worst place to start the business.

<comment><USER11> Yes. There are many rich people in SV. That is why the costs are obscene.

Even if a house costs $2M in SF, you can earn that in a few years on an engineer's salary.

If you pick the right companies, and are relatively successful, it should be possible to accrue millions of dollars in SV, even with the costs of living. That's rich in my books.

But really rich? There are of founders of tech companies who earn $100M or more from a successful startup. SF is probably one of the most likely place to make that happen.

<comment><USER12> > Even if a house costs $2M in SF, you can earn that in a few years on an > engineer's salary.

Yes, because everyone knows that average engineer in SF earns ~400k per year.

<comment><USER13> Don't forget tax and living expenses (rent isn't cheap). Saving two million on a single engineering salary is going to take closer to a decade than a few years.

<comment><USER14> Whoa, so it's going to take ten whole years to own a house? ...and that's considered bad?

<comment><USER13> I was addressing the original assertion that an engineer could save enough for a house in a few years.

My approach was to save and then fun as far from the Bay Area as I could. Much quicker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He junks the Silicon Valley culture by portraying how this it's a fake culture fueled only for some people to make money. I don't disagree with it, what I disagree with its portrayal as a scamming culture. Won't you expect everyone to be trying to make a buck when the time is right legally? Legality can be said to be objectively important, but morality is choice? And while it does represent the majority, isn't this the very same culture that enabled the unicorns from there? The descriptions of Zuckerberg or Musk or Jobs's lives before they got big would've sounded very similar to this.

</comment><comment><USER16> As an intern nearly done with work in the Bay Area I find the whole idea of permanently immigrating to Silicon Valley repugnant. Housing prices are in the millions, terrible healthcare, earthquakes every other week, dire state public transportation, apathetic attitude towards its homeless and, lots of groupthink. I suggest any YUPPIE (in a developed nation) with offers from a big four here reconsider their local offices imho. It is depressing to think this is the best place for STEM careers in the world.

<comment><USER17> Oh yes, I've heard about the earthquakes. If they're half as bad as I've seen in movies, that must be pretty bad!

I'll bet it disrupts your whole day when the Earth randomly splits open and your car falls in, eh? Every other week, too?

<comment><USER18> > earthquakes every other week

Ridiculous hyberbole is right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TLDR: writer with "a bunch of half-baked ideas" whose plan is to "pitch a tech startup and get obscenely rich while writing a book about how to pitch a tech startup and get obscenely rich – the Silicon Valley way" moves to "Hacker Condo" in San Francisco, conflates it (SoMA) with Silicon Valley, does other cliche tech bro things, namedrops an incoherent sequence of tech brands (Soylent, TaskRabbit, and then LifeHacker??), claims startup communities such as Hacker News are shovel merchants, reminds us that "profit-hunger, philistinism and misanthropy are and always have been at the core of the enterprise" and concludes "new breed of Silicon Valley billionaires knew exactly what they were doing. The plan was to take all the money and run – to Mars, if necessary"

This is what the author had to say about job security for programmers:

 _many programmers who had "made it" in Silicon Valley were scrambling to promote themselves from coder to "founder" ... the programmers knew that their own ladder to prosperity was on fire and disintegrating fast. They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software._

This seems to be a plug for their book "Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon." Here's one of the Amazon reviews and I quote, "If you don't have any ideas and can't succeed, write a book about it"

<comment><USER20> That's a little harsh, no?

It's an outsiders' take on what seems to have grown into a disconnected, insular culture. While under most circumstances one could dismiss such commentary as "he doesn't understand us and made little effort to get to know us," when that culture exists primarily to make stuff (products, software) for the masses it would do well to pay heed to its criticism, don't you think?

<comment><USER21> > That's a little harsh, no?

I don't think it's harsh. If anything it's falling for the author's narrative.

The author was clearly there solely to write a hatchet job on the SV startup culture. The stuff about getting rich is just there to make him sound a bit less parasitical.

I'm sure some of what he says is valid but the dystopia is just as fake as the idea that SV is paved with gold.

I'd go further and, given these kinds of articles usually follow a template, it's quite interesting what he didn't say. Usually the author will find people who are disillusioned/downtrodden to interview i.e. show the rotten underbelly.

It's noticeable that the only negative commentary came from a barman and a musician, and they were of the basic _change is bad_ variety. As a consequence, he's stuck with painting everyone as a witless man-child.

So either he's an incompetent journalist or he didn't find a rotten underbelly. As I've never been to SV, I can't comment on which it is but I can be pretty confident that this article won't help me find out.

<comment><USER22> Yes I thought it deeply ironic that the musician presumably one of the previous waves of incomers that pushed out the previous I habitants did them selves not see the irony</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SimCity's Sims Don't Seem That Smart After All - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/13/simcitys-sims-dont-seem-that-smart-after-all/ <comment><USER2> This is a _huge_ problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.

The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper.

Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a city _with no intersections_ , since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This _forces_ your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one.

Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains _some_ semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears _zero_ semblance to any real city, then it has failed.

The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need to build to statistically serve an area. You have to _grossly_ over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random.

I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.

<comment><USER3> "in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior"

It's actually the opposite, sims always go to the nearest source for whatever it is they need despite traffic or congestion. Some randomness in picking a destination might actually solve the problem without requiring any particular intelligence.

<comment><USER4> It's SUCH a better idea to simply weight paths based on their congestion. Like, that's A* path-finding 101.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure they're actually using A*. In the following video, some cars are going directly right, although it isn't the shortest "bird-view" distance to their destination.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_ufAd79bOA>

Edit: actually, they seem blocked by cars from the left lane. They'd go left otherwise!

<comment><USER6> Though I can't find any official sources to back it up, various internet citizens seem to claim they're using a D* Lite algorithm. I find it hard to believe. Either they're using some much cruder algorithm or they've implemented D* Lite horribly.

<comment><USER7> D* Lite Source <https://twitter.com/MaxisGuillaume/status/311218564600315905>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am the guy who builds agent-based models for fun. A lesson you learn quickly is that heterogeneity is your guardian angel - varying the path-finding model a little bit from agent to agent hedges against the resonance structures on display here. Additionally, you periodically check the accumulated micros against a macro model and correct gross deviations. Neither step is computationally strenuous.

<comment><USER9> Could you explain a little bit more about how that works - you used words I don't understand :) It seems as though something as simple as a random selection when presented with intersections is better than the behaviour here. I guess there should just be a weight on the streets though, right?

<comment><USER10> Let me translate this to physics talk for you: when you use a greedy algorithm with no interaction between agents and no randomness, it's effectively like bosons at zero temperature, they will all fall in the lowest energy state and form a Bose-Einstein condensate.

This can be avoided in one of two ways, make them aware of each other, so that they can't all be in the same state (like fermions) or raise the temperature, i.e. add randomness. Probably you'll need to do both and find an energy function that's less retarded than choose the first branch you see…

<comment><USER11> Apologies for going meta, but - Only on Hacker News will you see a "simpler" explanation involve the mention of _Bose-Einstein condensate_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _and you absolutely cannot follow a Sim anywhere – once they've entered a building, whether residential, commercial or industrial, the game stops following them, and good luck finding them after._

This made me laugh sadly. I remember playing SimTower when it was released in 1994, and you could follow any Sim around as he went about his day. It's now almost 20 years later, with vastly more powerful computers, and the AI engine is actually worse.

<comment><USER13> You're comparing apples and oranges. I'm sure the simulation engine in Sim Tower was wildly less complicated than in Sim City 5, or any other Sim City game after the original, for that matter.

Honestly, I don't really _care_ about following individual Sims in a Sim City game. It's out of scope. If anything, they went too far in that direction in the current Sim City game, wasting resources on individual entities as opposed to having a solid macro model. I assume that's why we ended up with these pathetic city sizes.

<comment><USER14> Is SimTower really less complicated?

They each have multiple methods of transportation. SimTower has stairs, escalators, elevators, and express elevators. You can see congestion as your sims' silhouettes pile up in front of elevators. To get to their destination, they can switch elevators once, and take four staircases/escalators. Sure everything is orthogonal and not curvy like SimCity5, but cities could be build that way too.

<comment><USER13> I don't have any special insight into the internals of both games, so I can't say for sure. I certainly think you could make a tower management game that has a simulation engine that is just as complicated as SimCity 4 or 5. On the other hand, I think that in principle a game attempting to simulate, to a degree, an entire city is bound to offer more complexity than a game attempting to simulate the goings-on in a single building.

I can make an argument from observation: Sim Tower is a 68030/386-era game, and from what I remember, my 68040 ran it very well. SimCity 4, OTOH, can still bring (a single core of) a modern CPU to its knees. Of course it's possible that SimTower was incredibly efficient and SC4 incredibly _in_ efficient, but it seems much more likely that SimCity 4 is in fact vastly more complicated.

<comment><USER15> Simtower definitely seemed to simulate individuals and had a population cap of 15-20k. Its path finding was drastically simpler though.

Every floor (110 floors max) was essentially a single zone that could be crossed instantaneously so each person needed a path only from floor A to floor B. There were strict limits as well about how many transfers were allowed per path and how many total stairs, escalates, and elevators were build able.

Sim City 4 allowed many millions of "people" on networks of significant complexity. The SimTower simulation was simple, satisfying, and relatively bug free. It also wasn't complex enough to continue to be satisfying for 10+ years the way SC4 has been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> With games you always have to create illusions of complexity in order to get acceptable performance. Smoke isn't real smoke (no real time smoothed particle hydrodynamics) but instead you billboard couple of semi-translucant textures. Bullets don't use real physics, but act as a point mass with specialized collision detection mechanics. Enemy AI is often just a simple state machine and hacked together heuristics. Everything is fake.

With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region. SimCity has to model the economy, happiness, education, water, waste, power, pollution, traffic, industry, and much more. So if you want to do this for 100.000 Sims in real-time you've got to cut many corners. There's just no other way. And the illusion in SimCity 5 is pretty damn good, from what I've seen. Cars drive with purpose from one place to another. Traffic congestion seems to make sense. Air flow affects pollution in a sensible way. Sure, there are a bunch of bugs but in general the illusion holds up. It's really quite impressive.

<comment><USER2> That's just it though, SimCity 5's problem is that it _insisted_ on agent- based micro-simulation even though technical limitations would require these agents to be lobotomized.

In previous SimCity games simulation was performed on the macro scale - not on each citizen. Any micro-scale view was just a visualization of the macro simulation. This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back, but it also meant scalability and the freedom to have a _proper_ simulation model rather than a grossly dumbed-down one.

Agent-based simulation is the _correct_ implementation (i.e., closest to reality) technically, but only in a world where we have infinite CPU power. A macro-simulation like previous SimCity games would have meant _far_ fewer corners cut and a much less buggy behavior that are the result of emergent negative agent-agent interactions.

To take your analogy - SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 use billboards and textures for fake smoke. SimCity 5 tries to go all-in and simulate the hydrodynamics of each particle - but has to cut so many corners to run that it doesn't even look like smoke anymore.

<comment><USER17> > _This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back_

Note that in SimCity 2013 you still can't really do this. A sim finds a new job every day and finds a new home at the end of the day. Really.

<comment><USER18> I believe I read that the sims find the nearest place that has a job available and the nearest house at the end of the day.

<comment><USER19> That's correct, but it's not carried over from day to day. Every morning a new job, every evening a new house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chao- The single biggest question on my mind is how this ended up functioning _worse_ than the community-made solutions such as NAM (Network Addon Mod) for Sim City 4. If all they did was monkey-copy that behavior, available for many years now, I would have been more satisfied.

I am reminded of Gabe Newell's recent comment of how _"[Valve] can't compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us, not by a little, but by a lot."_ [1] and am starting to understand what he meant in a more visceral way: My low-bar for the experience, my expectation of quality, was _not_ for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4. My expectation was for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4 Plus Community Content, because to my brain in consumer mode, those last 3 words don't exist, and it all just gets the label "Sim City 4" on the experience.

[1] [http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe- ne...](http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-newell- claims-users-have-defeated-valve-created-content-and-thats-a-go)

</comment><comment><USER20> The response from the community in regards to SimCity is understandable -- but also disturbing.

SimCity isn't unplayable. Quite the opposite. It is an engrossing, beautiful, rich game with plenty of gameplay available. I've played the game for probably forty hours so far, across four different cities -- and the game has only been out for a week. That's amazing. A game hasn't captured my attention like this in quite a while.

And yet, many players seem to believe the game is completely unplayable. The top comment on this thread as I write this says that the game is a 'travesty' and shouldn't have been shipped. That's unreasonable.

I can only begin to imagine what SimCity's developers are feeling right now. They built this beautiful, different, rich product that is objectively amazing. And yet the players they wanted to please can't stop talking about how shit it is.

Usually I place the blame at the feet of the developers, but not this time. This time, I think it's the community that needs to get over it. There is a rich, great game here if you just look past your own expectations for half a second.

<comment><USER21> It is broken when things such as this happen all to regularly: <http://i.imgur.com/7cd6VZV.jpg>

Every single police car in the entire city will respond to the exact same crime in progress, ignoring all others, creating a traffic black hole, and leaving you with no police.

<comment><USER22> Things like that could not help but have been noticed. Somewhere there is a bug report: "All police cars respond to every crime". It is marked something like "WONTFIX - by design" or "WONTFIX - no time before release" or "WISHLIST".

That is all anyone needs to know about the game to judge it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _"rather than individual little Simmy lives, they instead operate as an homogeneous mass, distributing themselves like a collection of marbles rolling down a board covered in holes. As they reach a job, whichever job, ignoring their previous day's job, they take it, until all the jobs are taken. It doesn't matter if it's a commercial or industrial job – they just roll until they fall into the next available slot. ... They don't trundle off back to their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There's no consistency to their lives, no permanence."_

This reads like a terrifying vision of a perfectly optimized post-fordist near-future dystopia.

Maybe the Maxis gang have deeper ideas in mind than we realised...

</comment><comment><USER24> I've noticed some weirdness with this as well. I'm not sure if this is intentional behavior or not, but I had a Nuclear power plant in my city, which has more than enough capacity for the entire city. However, when you look at the power view which shows how electricity is flowing through the streets, it seems as if the units of electricity travel randomly through the streets and would actually not reach certain streets and just pass by them. This caused blackouts in certain areas of the city, and required me to build a smaller power plant by this area of the city to restore power. Is this correct behavior? Is electricity supposed to have some sort of limit of how far it can travel?

<comment><USER25> There are transmission losses when moving electricity along wires (I seem to recall it's up to 10-12% on long-distance lines in the US).

But the electrons don't do stuff like bypass entire streets...

<comment><USER24> Yeah I mean certainly power can't travel forever in long distance wires, but the "electrons" we're passing right by a side street when they got to an intersection. There was no issue in other cities when I starting exporting that extra power to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've found that the biggest problems have actually been in the emergency dispatch stuff. For one, police, ambulances, and fire trucks /get stuck in traffic/. Hugely obnoxious and unrealistic (at least, when there are open lanes on the other side of the road). The other problem is when if you have multiple events in the city at a time, e.g. two fires. Usually all or most of your fire trucks will go to the first building (and get stuck on each other in the process) and ignore the second one until its burned down. It's like there's nothing actually coordinating the vehicles and it's purely first- inferno-first-serve.

</comment><comment><USER27> Notwithstanding all the bad press SimCity got since launch; I got the game 3 days after it's release.

I had seen one or two beta gameplay videos and was seriously impressed by the stunning graphics and seemingly awesome gameplay. Reasoning any of the initial server issues would be resolved sooner rather than later made the purchase.

During the installation and initial launch I was rather curious, as the plenitude of bad reviews would have you believe that the game could explode any instant now. Nothing happened. I connected to the by default selected server 'Europe West 6' and started playing.

Since the first launch I have not experienced any of the initial server related issues. Yeah, that's right, NONE at all. Once or twice I got a message that connection to the server was lost but the message never lasted longer than 5 seconds. What's more those messages had zero impact on the gameplay.

I have played the game for about 15 to 20 hours (I was sick over the weekend). All I can say : It's great!. Sure I have noticed the flaws in the AI when 10 of you 12 dump trucks keep going back and forth on a single street and leave the rest of the city piling with garbage. Yeah that are a few bugs with the snapping and routing of buildings and streets, but the game is still freaking great to play!

"This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.

The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper."

Comments like these are as bad, if not worse than EA/Maxis explaining or denying the initial server problems.

"...- but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken."

Seriously? A travesty? If that's your opinion I think you are either a fanatical SimCity gamer who's deeply disappointed at the unforgiving decline in quality. Or you are too closely related to the gaming industry and have very high expectations. Or most likely have a very biased perspective.

<comment><USER28> You've only been on HN a month, but give it a year. You'll get used to the wild hyperbole, especially in the top comment. It's how people get attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to > "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior.

To be fair, this was also the case with SimCity 4's "always the shortest path, no matter how congested it is" pathfinding, until fans fixed that part.

I actually found that part kind of fun! I do think that the cycle of gaining deeper understanding about how the simulation works, then redesigning your cities to work around it is pretty fun in a general sense. Really, the only problem with 2013 is that a) redesigning your city around 2013's pathfinding issues makes you end up with dumb, intersectionless cities, which feels "cheap", and b) even in the extreme case, there's only so much you can do about some of the pathfinding issues.

Last night, I had 3 school busses going to the same 2 stops over and over again, ignoring the rest of the city. No wonder my city's children are such little hoodlums.

[EDIT] I originally intended this to be a reply to potatolicious' post. Whoops.

</comment><comment><USER30> RPS already knew this is how it worked prior to release.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_dont_seem_that_smart_after_all/c8uux82)

<comment><USER31> This was clear to anyone that followed the development of the game. It was made clear in many developers interviews and videos about the GlassBox engine. Hell, there are official developer videos that describe the GlassBox engine in detail dating back to early 2012. RPS knew about this behavior before the release of the game, to act surprised now is rather disingenuous and malevolent.

<comment><USER32> You mean "disingenuous".

<comment><USER31> Thanks, I'm a bit tired and English isn't my native language. I've edited the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> _"They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There's no consistency to their lives, no permanence."_

Strangely enough, I can relate.

</comment><comment><USER34> How wasn't this discovered in beta? Why didn't reviewers catch any of this?

<comment><USER35> It was discovered, but someone decided it was worth the risk to release with the known bugs.

This is becoming quite common with games, on PC or consoles. You just patch it later. Some games even have patches available on release day.

<comment><USER36> I used to rag on the whole "patches on release day" thing, but you have to compare that to the idea that getting a "final" build through 1st parties like Microsoft and Sony is a _long_ process that can go for weeks (or much longer, if you're actually doing a physical disc). If you wait until you have an actually final gold master version of the game, you then have developers working on "Day 1 DLC" (which gets quite a lot of flak as it is), or sitting on their hands. So what you actually do is ship your version 0.98 with the bugs that you expect to be able to fix within your window, start both the process for submitting the game and the process for submitting a patch, and hope that you allocated your development time properly.

Needless to say, this comes back and bites a lot of people in the ass, but for a lot of small game studios a 2-6 week delay in a game ship can be the difference between solvency and firing everyone in the office.

*Needless to say, this is probably a completely inappropriate workflow for someone like EA/Maxis, who probably had some suits that said said "well, other people do it, so we should do it too".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> My impression is that EA has some great creative talent, but that the business management function is entrusted to people who have honesty and competence issues.

One of the big problems with American business is the focus on academic credentials, particularly with regard to "soft skills" (no skills?) in areas such as management. You will not learn management in a classroom. Furthermore, if you can't grasp the fundamentals of what you are supposedly managing, then you are just in the way.

The path ought to be:

Become an engineer -> Become a high-performing engineer -> Get some business education -> Do management

If you can't handle the engineering phases, why on earth should anybody put you in a decision-making position in an engineer endeavor?

While the practice should not be barred, it is unproductive for universities to offer "management" degrees at the undergraduate level, unless such degrees require the demonstration of significant prior work experience. Graduate management programs should not accept twentysomethings arriving straight from undergraduate programs.

Less fluff, more umpf.

<comment><USER38> It seems your experience in the business/corporate engineering world is vastly different than mine.

The problem with your path to management is that many engineers have no desire to manage, and anecdotally, those who do, end up being ill-suited for management.

The best managers I've had are not top engineers, rather they're managers that are willing to understand and listen to their top performing engineers.

Google/Microsoft/etc. offer PM positions to students directly out of undergrad. From my experience, the skillset between a top-performing engineer is vastly different from that of a top-performing and well liked PM.

<comment><USER39> They still hire people from engineering and math backgrounds. People who you know have the competence to understand any technical problem you throw at them, at least at a shallow operational level.

The prerequisite is deep mathematical, rational and process-oriented thinking. You can get that lots of ways, but an MBA alone won't give it to you.

<comment><USER38> I don't disagree with that. If you run a technical company, managers shoudl demonstrate an ability to think and understand technical problems.

I disagree with the notion that the path through management should be through demonstrating your value as an engineer. If a high performing engineer desires a move into management, I think that should certainly be considered, but I have no evidence that top engineers transition into being top managers.

<comment><USER39> I would certainly argue that it is easier to find engineering-trained people who can become successful businessfolk, than business-trained people who can competently manage tech companies.

Being a successful engineer is evidence that you understand processes and systems very deeply. What remains is interpersonal skill and basic economics. Being a successful business person is evidence of the complement.

Couple this with the observation that it is easier to find people who picked up economics and interpersonal skills without training than it is to find people with deep untrained technical skill, because interactions with other people and decisions about money occur every day so any motivated somebody with a curious disposition may well have been pondering and improving those skills their whole life.

Remember, it's not that every engineer you find will be better rounded, it's just that those magical omnibus people are more likely to be found among the engineering ranks than the business ranks, especially when engineering jobs give a much more reliable salary out of college so that anyone with engineering skill _and_ business skill is incentivized to study the former in school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you watch their videos on the glassbox system on youtube you'll find that this is exactly how they billed it. It was users who expected more. Not that it's bad to expect more.

The thing that the new sim city does that all previous sim cities didn't do was it models every agent visibly. Most previous sim city's simulations were based on locality, there was a radius of effect around buildings and that modified properties. In sim city 4 for instance, if you look at the roads you'll see cars appearing and disappearing because there was no "car" on the road, there was an area of high traffic density based on some linear algebra.

In the new Sim City, there's a few components,

There's areas, which tell things like pollution levels, crime impact, property value, water tables, natural resources, etc. These areas change the rate of certain events, trigger certain events and limit buildings that are build on the area.

There's resources, that's things like simoleans, happiness, water, power, pollution, profit.

There's agents, agents are things like people, power transmission, water transmission, garbage trucks, fire trucks, etc. Agents go from one building to another and carry resources.

There's buildings, and buildings have resources and release and accept agents.

So the simulation at it's simplest level is basically:

You build a residential zone, the residential zone sends a notifier agent to the highway saying "I'm here and I'm empty" the highway sends a construction vehicle agent to the residential zone. The construction vehicle has building material resources which deplete when it builds the house. If it still has building materials, and another request for building reaches the vehicle it will travel to that building and create a house there until its construction resource is depleted.

A built house will be empty, and it will send a notifier agent again to the highway, from there a new tenant agent will be sent to the building. This will occupy the building. Note that even a building that can hold 100 population will be fully populated by a single tenant from the highway. None of the names of the people in the building are recorded. Low density buildings will have names, like "Smith Residence" and people agents generated from "Smith Residence" will likely have Smith as a surname.

From there, at periodic times of day, buildings will send notifier requests along the roads looking for workers. A commercial building will for instance send a request at 6:00 AM. If the notifier reaches a residential building with a resident resource available, the building will generate a worker agent and decrement its resident count by 1. That worker agent will have a destination of the requesting commercial business.

During the night, the commercial business sends requests for goods along the roads. If an industrial building with goods intercepts one of these requests and it has available delivery vehicle resources, it will deploy a delivery vehicle agent, decrease it's deliver vehicle resource by 1, increase the goods resource by 45 on the delivery vehicle and decrease the goods resource at the factory by 45. The vehicle will travel to the commercial building and unload some goods. If the vehicle intercepts another request for goods on its way back it will respond to it.

When the worker count at the commercial business is not 0, the business opens. When the commercial business has enough goods, it puts out souvenirs and begins to make items to sell. Once there are goods to sell, the commercial business sends out notifier agents saying they have goods available.

If the notifier agents reach residential buildings with money and residents, the residential building creates a shopper agent and puts one unit of money on them. The shopper agent goes to the commercial building that notified it. Once the agent arrives there, the shoppers value of the commercial building increments.

Periodically, when the commercial building has shoppers, it will decrement the number of shoppers, increment profit and decrement goods. It will put a resident agent on the street and they will travel to the nearest unoccupied residential building. Once there they will increase the residents count by 1 and wait for a job or an opportunity to spend money or have fun.

It's an interesting simulation, but you have to treat it as that sort of simulation. For instance, if you have a highly concentrated commercial area, residents from all over will go to the shops there. When they return they will have different names. They will have no memory of their home. They will go from door to door, to the closest unoccupied residence. When you have a flock of people it gets worse, because they are all playing follow the leader as they all want to take the shortest path to the closest unoccupied house. As soon as the leader fills that house they all choose to go to the next closest unoccupied house. They don't communicate together and spread out. If you had a circle of houses and you dropped 10 sims just left of center in the circle, instead of each sim picking a house and heading there, they would all head to the leftmost house, and then they would slowly work their way around the circle.

In terms of gameplay, once you recognize this behavior it can be kind of fun to play. You do things like put your commercial properties sort of like a hub with residential spokes around it, you keep commercial density as low as it needs to be to effectively service nearby residents. The further the commercial property draws residents from, the less efficiently they can return home. Industry is less important because industrial work has longer shifts. A sim might like to shop multiple times during the day if given the money and the opportunity, but they are consumed for much longer working at a factory.

Ultimately, the game is about increasing density, density is increased by increasing happiness or profit. Happiness is most easily earned by spending money and not having negative effects like no power or no water. Once density is increased the only thing you might care about is education, education is increased on a per-building basis, it's a resource that the building holds. Either students going to school, or residents going to libraries increase education. Residents will go to commercial buildings with money to increase happiness, but if they are out of money they might go to parks or libraries to increase happiness or education.

I'm pretty sure they do take traffic into account, it's just that the traffic happens spontaneously. 30 sims decide to take the same route because it's not congested -- now it's congested, but they can't take a u-turn. If you have another path to the same destination that's more efficient some will break off when they reevaluate their paths.

The problem is mostly when a lot of sims manage to get on a highly congested road with no way off. Then they're stuck. The "major roads" example is that way because they don't think ahead, once they're on that road, they're stuck, and they don't choose the other path because they'd end up having to merge into another congested road on the other side anyways.

The Intersection trap is probably due to something like a ton of sims being dropped off by mass transit after work and then having their connection to residential areas demolished. Another thing that might happen is a high density residential buidling that was available before burns down or gets demolished. Then they have nowhere to go, and they just circle while trying to find an opening in a residential building.

If you notice the last pathfinding experiment, the congestion on the main road doesn't really let up when the one-way street is demolished. It does initially but starts to back up again because of the traffic lights.

I'm not trying to be an apologist. It's a better simulation than the previous version, but the people don't act like people and the city doesn't act like a city. Even ants have more things they can react to than the sims in this game. However, the simulation is pretty consistent and it can make a reasonably fun game if you try to play the game instead of build a city. The simulations in previous games were probably better at building a city, and while there was mystical teleportation and individuals weren't generally modeled, those abstractions mean that the city can make more sense without needing to do really complex modeling for 100,000 units at once.

Once you start to notice these limitations and play within those bounds, it can be a fun puzzle game; maybe even strategy game. But city simulation? I'm not sure about that.

</comment><comment><USER17> If EA thinks that the vocal minority is worth saving, they need a hero. They need to hire somebody popular and smart that can say "hey everybody, EA asked for my help, I'm helping them figure out how to solve this. The server issues are mostly resolved now and we thank you for your patience. Over the next few weeks I'll blog about Sims behavior and modeling, and what changes you can expect to see. SimCity is already simulating an incredible amount of detail but many of you noticed situations where we didn't do so well. Expect to see improvements over the next few months that will address these problems."

We've already heard EA's leadership say there's nothing wrong with the game. Even if they admit to any problems, they have little trust with the community.

I have to admit to some schadenfreude about this whole fiasco. On the surface it is a very pretty game, it'll be interesting to see how EA addresses the community discontent.

</comment><comment><USER41> As a network engineer who spends his days routing packets around the internets I find this hilarious.

What if every intersection were to function as a sort of router with each road leading from it as a link? Then distribute routes between intersections and calculate shortest path using the Dijkstra algorithm(OSPF). They could even implement congestion control by having clogged intersections stop advertising routes periodically.

Have a problem with cops, fire trucks and ambulances not getting through? Put them in a different QOS queue that prioritizes them.

This is a solved problem in so many ways. They could literally buy these algorithms from people with decades of experience working on this class of problems.

</comment><comment><USER42> Relevant: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU>

<comment><USER14> It would be nice to be able to see the invisible agents so you could find out what craziness is afoot when people start walking around in circles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> EA should just hire Toady one from dwarf fortress to do the Sim simulation. Dwarf fortress has very complex and very accurate path-finding as well as excellent creature simulation.

That model can be simplified and used in Sim City. Of course some performance improvements may be necessary, but that can be done by a large company with a lot of resources, like EA.

<comment><USER44> Dwarf Fortress can also bring my 1 year old quad core computer to a crawl.

I also seem to remember that once he left debugging symbols in a build and people managed to use it to determine that all path-finding is done twice for some reason.

Not the person I think that could help EA with performance problems :p

<comment><USER45> You ever misplace something and have to retrace your steps to find it? Dwarves are pretty dumb so they have to do that all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What's disappointing to me is that, unlike Settlers 7, Caesar 3, or Stronghold - we don't have 100% intelligent agent simulation creating emergent properties and markets.

I used to spend hours, with all three of those products, watching agents go about their various chores and skills, and be either gated on another agent's behavior or resources, or have a clear pipeline stocked up for them to perform.

Sounds like I'll get sub-optimal non-intelligent behavior from SimCity, which is sad. I rather have a smaller environment, that was 100% intelligent agent based.

</comment><comment><USER47> After purchasing the game and enduring the mess that is forced logins, I thought the game was pretty good. I haven't encountered any of the path finding issues discussed or demonstrated in the article. However I haven't put that much time in to it and haven't bothered to look. As a casual player it seems like a pretty rock-solid game so far.

I'm curious how the alternatives stack up. I'm not terribly pleased with Sim City 5 due to the online-only component. Has anyone tried CitiesXL Platinum for example? Are there others?

</comment><comment><USER48> I feel like my latest HTML5 website is somehow pertinent to this discussion: <http://lisperati.com/nfc/>

<comment><USER49> i dont know why you are downvoted, i see the link and think it's pretty cool. almost feel bad i dont live near the meetups :)

maybe you should submit it to the frontpage ?

<comment><USER50> It's cool, and he's proud of his work. But it really doesn't have anything to do with the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No big deal, obviously all they need to do is push out a server update since all of the calculations are being done there.

</comment><comment><USER51> I love these videos! You could almost teach a class on graph theory and AI with enough of them, and they look great!

</comment><comment><USER52> man...and all I wanted was basically SC4 in 3d with mixed-use zoning, curved roads and a more robust transport network. I would have thrown money at them for that game.

</comment><comment><USER53> Makes you wonder if the backend issues were geniune or if it was a way to buy more time for finishing the game (and to release _something_ on a promised date).

</comment><comment><USER54> They should call it SimCity Lemmings :)

</comment><comment><USER55> Will somebody please write a positive review of this game and put an end to the incessant trolling ... For example, the attention to detail in the design is astonishing. It is truly the best, and most 'realistic' Simcity to date...</comment>


Show HN: Preserver is an notes organiser built on angular2, pouchDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hsbalar/Preserver <comment><USER2> Nice, a clean and simple Electron-based note-taking app reminiscent of Google Keep.

Any plans for synchronization between devices?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its great idea. yes planing for it. soon will add login functionality will allow to sync notes with server' data.

<comment><USER2> How are you planning on doing that? Paid accounts on your own backend, the user's cloud storage (Dropbox, GDrive) account, or some P2P approach?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to be built it with nedb & angular2. I'll probebly use P2P aproach at first phase.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Website Proofreading Service - <AUTHOR> Can anyone recommend a website proofreading service based on a personal experience?
I have a project in beta and I need someone to go through all pages on the website and check spelling and grammar. What I'd like to avoid is needing to scrape pages into a Word document and having it processed instead of the actual website (which appears to be a typical requirement).
Also, since there is a ton and half of services of this kind, a personal recommendation from someone who successfully used one of them would be of the greatest help.
Thanks <comment><USER2> A quickie hack just for spelling. In Firefox at least, use the following bookmarklet to make the current page as loaded "editable". Any text not matching the dictionary will get the "mispelled" marker (by default, a squiggly red underline) -- the same marker that normally appears in textbox entries under unmatched words. Note that it doesn't handle/descend into frames.

There's also an about:config setting that turns on spell-checking for single- line widgets/entries. I forget whether that needs to be on in order to aid the coverage/effectiveness of this hack. I'm thinking not.

\--

Toggle document.body.contentEditable (non-recursive)

javascript:%20document.body.contentEditable=(document.body.contentEditable=='true'?'false':'true');void(0);

</comment><comment><USER3> How many pages? How many words? Shoot me an email ...

<comment><USER4> Ditto. If it's not huge I'll do it gratis. Oh and IAAL. (I am a Librarian).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, guys. I think I have sorted it out for now.

Mankhool, not sure how you can do it gratis if you have no email in your profile :D

<comment><USER4> I'm such a noob. It was in the email field. ? I've put it in the about field too. Thx!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I use textmate I get spell checking even when I am coding.

<comment><AUTHOR> But does it check the grammar and style, this wonder tool of yours? :)

<comment><USER5> no, but I never thought microsoft word was good at that to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, you misread what I wrote. The Word document is needed to submit the content to the proofreading services, not for in-Word spell checking.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Testing C Compiler Performance (1991) - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/testing-c-compiler-performance/184408603 <comment><AUTHOR> The reason I am submitting this, the talk of porting Chromium to VC2015 reminded me that the PC compiler space used to be incredibly diverse. Borland C, Metaware High C, Microsoft C, etc.

Metaware used to have a great compiler (as benchmarks indicate), they were local here in Santa Cruz, rumors were they prayed during the work day, but their compiler back in the day was pretty darn good. Then they disappeared.

Borland was also local to this area. That era of competition and innovation was really requite interesting to be apart of.</comment>


China Agrees to Return Seized Drone, Ending Standoff, Pentagon Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/world/asia/china-us-drone.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Every single drone should have a self-destruct rail inside. When the drone disappears, or is seized, it can be activated. The terms of the destruct can be set on deployment. For example, if you're deploying the drone in a theatre of war and it is moved outside of the scope, it can be set to explode unless a cryptographic key is transmitted in time.

My guess is as more and more parts of war are automated with drones, the latest tech will have to be protected somehow.

<comment><USER3> "The Chinese government were hailed as heroes today, as they foiled a plot by the US to terrorize key shipping lines with a mobile targeting bomb."

<comment><USER4> "Two seaman were killed and another critically injured when the explosive was remotely triggered"

<comment><USER2> Yep, after they seized a U.S. drone and attempted to dismantle it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> China also seized South Korea's newly developed K21 IFV few years ago.

The static model had been shipped on Maersk shipping for display at an international arms convention.

The Maersk cargo ship made a stop in Hong Kong and Chinese authorities seized it on some technicality and kept it for weeks before returning it.

<comment><USER6> "Our basic directive is to rely on the war industries of the imperialist countries and of our enemy at home. We have a claim on the output of the arsenals of London as well as of Hanyang, and, what is more, it is to be delivered to use by the enemy's own transport corps. This is the sober truth, not a joke."

\-- Mao Tse Tung

It looks like nothing has changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "We've finished X-Raying and scanning it, you can have it back now"

<comment><USER8> Exactly this

Lots of American equipment have self destruction/disablement systems for occasions like this

I wonder if this drone has similar capabilities

<comment><USER9> Aquatic drones can't have that capability.

It's pretty hard to transmit and receive radio waves underwater, so these drones are autonomous. They're given a mission, they go do it, and then they return to a spot to be manually retrieved. Apparently, while a group of drones was being retrieved, china "accidentally" snagged one. Back to the capablities though, since these drones are autonomous, you probably wouldn't know one was taken until you do a count after retrieval. Once it's gone, you might know where it is by GPS, but not who has it. Even if you can say, "Hey, it's in China", you don't know what it's immediate environment is. All of those things make self destructing a pretty dangerous/irresponsible thing to do.

<comment><USER10> Self destruct doesn't have to mean a huge kaboom. "rm -rf /", followed by a high enough voltage to fry the chips might be enough.

I wonder if it has some GPS bad zones programmed into it, if it finds itself in e.g. Chinese territory, it could do the above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is the opinion of almost every other country in the world that these are international waters. China doesn't get to change the facts of international law just by claiming there's a "dispute".

I looked back through your comment history. I don't mean to accuse you of anything, but if I were someone from the Chinese government whose job was to argue for the positions of the Chinese government on HN, I think I would sound...a lot like you.

<comment><USER12> That's a personal attack, albeit with a fig leaf of nasty insinuation. You can't comment like that here, and smearing other users as shills without evidence is also not ok. Please don't do these things again.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13202981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13202981) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER11> Understood.

I wonder if you could suggest a better way to phrase this point. Like, is it out of bounds to say that someone's comment here and comments in the past sound to me like Chinese propaganda? I guess that is what I was trying to say (and I grant that I didn't say it well).

Sorry for causing a scene.

<comment><USER12> I don't think there's a civil way to say that because it's fundamentally a personal slight for a political reason. In fact it's a kind of name calling, which the site rules don't allow.

I do think it's ok for users to remind each other that HN isn't for pure politics. But not to score a political point.

Thanks for replying so politely!

<comment><USER11> While I have your attention, I'd like to register a concern about this bright line it sounds like you're trying to draw.

A tactic currently being employed by Trump is to claim that questions of fact or science are actual political questions. For example, his surrogates have said that NASA is "politicizing" climate science [1].

I'm concerned about this expansion of the boundaries of what are considered political questions into things that aren't because it has a chilling effect: Once something is deemed political, there are certain places where we can't talk about it. But for my part, I think a world where a politician can prevent us from having a (civil) discussion about e.g. climate change, or net neutrality, or the implications of tax cuts for the rich, or whatever, on HN merely by declaring it to be "political" is a pretty bad world. Not just because I like talking to smart people about science and technology, but because it prevents us from organizing to become a force for good.

The OP's point was, it seemed to me, about the facts of international law and a critique of the media. It certainly was inflamatory (as was my response), but if law and the media are off topic because they're political, well, doesn't it follow that net neutrality, Google/Facebook's responses to fake news, and so on, are also political? Do you want to cut off conversations about those topics too?

Maybe there are certain topics you'd want to rule out from HN because they inevitably lead to flamewars. Moreover maybe most or all of those topics are things politicians also disagree about (and thus are "political"). But perhaps the thing that you are against isn't "political" discussions per se, but rather flamewars on touchy subjects. Or, something like that?

I am afraid that over the next four years, things we used to think of as factual or scientific questions will be reframed as political questions, on which everyone is entitled to their opinion, and which we can't discuss in civilized places like HN. In fact I think we're already seeing this reframing.

Anyway, running an online community is hard, I don't pretend to know how to do that. Good luck, and I'll try to follow the rules, whatever you all decide.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa- ear...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald- trump-eliminate-climate-change-research)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unpresidented

</comment><comment><USER14> History buffs will realise that situations like this can be done purposefully. For example the _" Gulf of Tonkin"_ incident in August 2, '64\. [0] A wary China inspects the device, hands it back and defuses the situation.

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

<comment><USER15> The Gulf of Tokin involved an actual "attack"/rounds fired not seizure of equipment. It's a different order of magnitude.

<comment><USER14> _" even today we're finding that--as in the Tonkin Gulf incident--very equivocal, limited evidence as to who did what and why and what happened is being used right now by hawks to encourage us to engage in hostilities again."_ \-- Dan Ellsberg [0]

This is history, so I tend not to get too worked up about it. What I will say is we only know, what we are told and the truth is getting pretty slippery. That quote above was by Daniel Ellsberg who was the ^Snowden^/^Assange^ of his time. An insider who saw the nonsense behind the LBJ/McNamara explanations of Vietnam and released the Pentagon Papers.

Read the post below and if you have questions about this, ask Dan himself ~ [https://twitter.com/DanielEllsberg](https://twitter.com/DanielEllsberg)

[0] _" Why the Gulf of Tonkin Matters 50 Years Later (1/2)"_ ~ [http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=...](http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12180#pop1)

<comment><USER15> Hence "attack".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article presents many opinions as though they are facts.

One of the crucial aspects to understanding the South China Sea situation is the dispute of the sovereignty of the waters. The New York Times doesn't provide context on the sovereignty disputes, or provide the Chinese argument. Instead misleads its readership by quoting "international waters in the South China Sea."

This is an editorial error of enormous magnitude affecting the quality of the publication. An non politicized publication would write "disputed waters in the South China Sea."

Indeed, you can read back only a couple of years where US media reporting did exactly this. The recent propaganda push inside US media has been to use the term "international waters" in association with the geography to affect public opinion.

<comment><USER17> This is a great article for a role reversal. Imagine a Chinese military "research" ship off California gathering data on "water salinity". There would be calls for nukes.

<comment><USER18> Actually, no. Back during the Cold War, Russia sent "trawlers" close to the US all of the time. No nukes were fired.

<comment><USER17> This makes the point. (We are still around after all, so yes, "no nukes were fired")

<comment><USER18> I think you're missing the point. The US policy is symmetric. Here's the agreement signed with the USSR to try to reduce the possibility of collisions etc with the "trawlers" that the USSR had parked in international waters outside US naval bases:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Soviet_Incidents_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Soviet_Incidents_at_Sea_agreement)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good CV template for a Software Engineer - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I was just looking into updating my CV but I don't know what template would be good for a Software Engineer. Most of the templates i found where either artistic (for designers) which i think aren't suitable and some templates don't conserve space. Can someone point me to a good template (MS Word or GDoc) for the CV.<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> [https://www.resumonk.com/resume_templates](https://www.resumonk.com/resume_templates) and [https://jsonresume.org/themes/](https://jsonresume.org/themes/) are good for inspiration but you can't edit them in MS Word.

An example CV structure I quite like is [http://kelly-dunn.me/](http://kelly- dunn.me/) (HTML and PDF version).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep jsonresume has good themes but don't use space efficiently. Resumonk has some decent themes, i might try that out. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A Wikipedia entry

<comment><USER4> I share the same name with an accomplished AI researcher who has a Wikipedia page. Sometimes I wonder if I've received offers just because of that.

<comment><USER5> yes you would have ,if you are the same age and sex. Try putting the link for fun and see what happens

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can start with LaTeX templates from sharelatex.com. They have some really good templates.</comment>


Free To Use. Pay To Play. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/23/free-to-use-pay-to-play/ <comment><USER2> What I would pay for is for someone to read through stuff and only bring interesting stories to me. Depending on quality I would pay many hundreds of dollars per year for it.

<comment><USER3> wasn't that what newspapers were for?

<comment><USER2> No, newspapers were in business of printing that which appeals to majority of people (with some segementation - e.g. conservatives vs liberals or some other division in large enough groups to support the business). Conforming to majoirty's interests is counterproductive when my goal is to learn what's behind the next turn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would pay 2 to 3 dollars a month for HN. Sometimes I I think I would pay up to 10 dollars per month.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it could probably get away with charging $99.99 and still avoid losing most users

<comment><USER5> You underestimate how many of us are college students.

The functionality of Hacker News is very basic. It's the community that matters. Charing money would reduce the community, and somebody would quickly make an alternative site for people to jump to.

<comment><USER2> Reduction in community size might actually be beneficial. It may be able then to reacquire a set of common interests, thus making stories and comments more relevant to everyone.

Of course using monetary barrier may not be the best way to achieve this. I don't know what would work better though.

<comment><USER5> Money works for some things. It worked for Metafilter. It would not work for Hacker News, where until recently the best thing it had going for it was how nobody knew about it. Its apathy towards gaining users gave it a real edge.

But hackers are often the penniless idealist sort, and you need that sort to complement the actual businesspeople. As I said: college students are valuable for this site. And for something as generic as a social news site, money isn't worth it unless there's something very specific gained for the purchase, and there are already pay-for social news sites taking our valuable cash.

<comment><USER6> I think charging a $1 registration fee would kill spam pretty effectively without too much downside.

<comment><USER5> Until very recently, I had no faculty for buying things online. It wasn't poverty, it was lack of a credit card. So I have a latent bias against blunt user fees without any trial first. That may be coloring my opinion here.

<comment><USER6> It's possible to get a PayPal account with just a bank account, so that's one solution.

Alternatively, perhaps a "submit a paragraph explaining why you want an account" screen could also be used for people who won't/can't pay $1. Someone would have to weed through the entries, though (maybe make it open to votes, like stories).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


macOS Catalina and Osquery - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kolide.com/macos-catalina-osquery-a6753dc3c35c <comment><USER2> The mobile and the desktop security has to merge. To wide or too or too narrow no good. Windows different era</comment>


Louisiana DA's Used Fake Subpoenas to Trick People into Talking to Prosecutors - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170428/20250437262/louisiana-das-office-used-fake-subpoenas-decades-to-trick-people-into-talking-to-prosecutors.shtml <comment><USER2> Should every case be reviewed now? Is this coercion? Has corruption envaded so deeply into the justice department that deception and crime are the only tools they know.</comment>


The Depenguinator, version 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-01-29-depenguinator-2.0.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This may not be useful for answering the "hacked a (non-computer) system" question on the YC application form, but I think a script which can run on a linux system and construct a bootable FreeBSD image qualifies as a cool hack nonetheless.

<comment><USER2> Want to try my Exorcist script version 6.66 that turns a FreeBSD system into a Solaris system?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not particularly, but I love the idea. The depenguinator isn't really about making people switch from linux to FreeBSD; rather, it's about allowing people to install FreeBSD where they otherwise would not be able to -- most commonly, on servers rented from cheap dedicated server hosting companies which support linux but don't support FreeBSD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did they ever fix the security flaw you found?

<comment><AUTHOR> Who is "they", and which security flaw are you talking about? I've found several over the years...

<comment><USER3> They being Linus,et al, and the flaw being the one referenced here: <http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/17/201253>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some linux distributions disabled hyperthreading by default as I recommended; others didn't. Some cryptographic libraries have fixed some of the more obvious ways that this can be exploited, but no library is completely immune. Intel hasn't done useful at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pinterest Raises $200M - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2014/05/15/pinterest-funding-5-billion-valuation?utm_campaign=&utm_source=t.co&awesm=readwr.it_c1lW&utm_content=readwrite3-orionautotweet&utm_medium=readwr.it-twitter#awesm=~oEnyPbNPuqcMEH <comment><USER2> I thought pinterest was a waste of time. Then I got engaged to get married.

Searching for something like 'wedding favours' on google gives a pretty boring list of top10 lists and other cruft, but a similar search on pinterest gives a great view of peoples ideas, descriptions, alternatives, etc.

For me, this type of searching is pretty rare, but pinterest is definitely the best tool I've seen for this

<comment><USER3> It's great for design ideas of almost any kind. For example, I wanted to see how people were setting up their stacked washer and dryer units: [http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=stacked%20washer%20d...](http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=stacked%20washer%20dryer)

Another source for home decor is Houzz, which is more of a professional designer portfolio + marketplace, but also a good source of inspiration. [http://www.houzz.com/stacked-washer-dryer](http://www.houzz.com/stacked- washer-dryer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pinterest adds considerably more value to my life than any other social network.

It provides inspiration that plans my meals, my vacations, my clothing, the style of my home, etc.

<comment><USER5> Pinterest disturbs me somewhat in that it is the distillation of what society has become these days: pure consumerism.

'These are the _things_ I _want_ '.

Actually it's quite clever, on reflection, to have found a way to make money from consumerism without actually selling anything.

<comment><USER6> Well, they're not making any money yet, and to do so, they'll have to start selling something to someone.

<comment><USER7> They just made $200 million. They sold a dream to some VCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The one thing that annoys me about Pinterest is that it's one of those ideas I really could have thought of and done (but obviously didn't).

I don't mean this in a way to take away anything from the Pinterest team. They had a great idea and seem to be executing really well.

It's just one of those ideas that seems so _obvious_ in hindsight, particularly if you've seen how, for example, women scrapbook for wedding preparation and the like, the rise of "selfies" (and just having a way to list what you're wearing) and so on.

There are many other services that have tried to allow you to share "things" in a given context (eg locations in Foursquare, purchases on Blippy, social integrations with the various music streaming services and so on) but the real genius of Pinterest for me is that it's really about sharing the _combination_ of things, which is of far more value than the individual things themselves.

Pinterest is probably the startup I'm most bullish about. Seriously, congrats guys.

<comment><USER9> One of the most impressive things I've found about Pinterest's success, is that they stuck with it for over three years before it finally took off. Much like Twitter, it was anything but an overnight success. As with most concepts, getting traction is by far the most difficult aspect.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-pinterest-an- overnight...](http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-pinterest-an-overnight- success-four-years-in-the-making-2012-4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I get why Pinterest is interesting. I don't use it, but I get why people use it although maybe I should. But what I don't get is why a site with pictures to pin needs $200M. It's basically still the same site it was when it had $500K in funding. Does it cost $200M to scale from thousands of users to hundreds of millions? Wikipedia doesn't need $200M to run.

<comment><USER9> They'd be crazy not to take $200m for 4% give or take. Given the beating high flying tech stocks have taken lately on Wall St., and the continued Fed tapering, who knows how much longer the easy money gates will remain open. Better to take it now, and have tons of cash to ride out any eventuality. Bull markets don't run forever, and clearly Pinterest is hardly even in the first inning of monetization, so they're going to need the money. The public markets, even in semi-euphoric mode, will not react well to zero sales and $200m a year in losses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always admired Pinterest. As a guy I don't really understand the appeal of it myself, but my soon-to-be wife absolutely loves it, so does her mum, her sisters, my sisters and my sisters friends. They seem to have done a fantastic job at capturing the female demographic and it has paid dividends for them.

Congratulations to the team, curious to see how Pinterest can take it to the next level. Most likely the e-commerce route is the one they will be taking.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is important to ask -- what on earth could this be _for_?

SpaceX achieved orbital flight on that amount of capital...

</comment><comment><USER13> "Pinterest has raised a total of $764 million to date."

That is a lot of money to be able to pin some photos.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps don't read it as "raised" but "was given". Giving away 4% for $200M seems like a fairly slick deal for a company with no revenue(?) yet.

OTOH, in 2012 Twitter spent over $250M on staff and R&D. Pinterest is nearing(?) that size of application (perhaps more as Pinterest has more photos than Twitter had), although Twitter had many more employees then (I think 1500 or so compared to "140+" WP says for Pinterest). Billions is a hell of a lot to share some SMSes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe they can use this money to hire someone who can fix their !$!@# pinit button [the small gray button with numbers on the right] to actually stay where I put it (and not move to the right 20px and bleed over other content).

Really, it's the only social button I put on each of my wife's blog posts [echoing what others have mentioned, she likes pinterest for the 'bridal trends', recipe ideas, art, ...], and it's easily the most annoying thing on the page... sure let's have the JS totally remove all the css/elements that were there and recreate it differently.

<comment><USER16> I've just pushed a test fix; if you will please add data-pin-pad-count="true" to a Pin It button that has data-pin-config="beside" you should see whitespace under your pin count.

I'm not pushing this out to everyone until I understand how badly it will break other sites that have already implemented fixes like yours.

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER15> Thanks, but doesn't change a thing for me. It's still breaking out of a containing div to the right.

And I forgot to mention that the vertical alignment was/is also a PITA. Got the image where I want it, and other text elements bottom-aligned to it? Great, now once the JS munges things it's all changed - the image gets higher.

edit: submitted a ticket to pinterest support, keyword kentbrewster

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shouldn't they have their own $200M by now? No but seriously.

Oh. [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pinterest](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pinterest)

<comment><USER18> You must have a developer account or something. Pinterest, for me, is free and they don't seem to be placing ads or monetizing sales like Etsy. I only connect to Pinterest at 3 distinct times/places: waiting rooms, king conference room (toilet), and when I'm looking for inspiration and ideas (sometimes all in one :)...so I am probably not considered a hard-core user.

How does google search attempts equal 200 million USD...if that were the case searches for Obamacare or Affordable Care Act would have paid the national debt thrice over. [I just used a gov't example, I don't care what the healthcare bill is called]

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can hear the sound of Yahoo! getting its Alibaba money ready…

<comment><USER20> They better watch out for Alibaba getting its Alibaba money ready

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I did the math right, Instagram when Facebook acquired it, was worth ONE FIFTH today's Pinterest.

Does that make sense to you?

<comment><USER22> by today's math, Instagram was a bargain for fb...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "In the future search will be a discovery tool" ... I think this sentence needs some work. It feels empty of meaning. Am I missing something? Or does the sentence really simply mean: "in the future search will be a way to discover things"?

Because in that case the future may already be here :)

<comment><USER24> It may possibly be that search today is used to find a particular thing that you are looking for (directions, a way to fix code, a specific book). Whereas in the future, search will lead you to new things that you didn't specifically know you needed to find. More like browsing random sections of a book store.

But yes, it definitely sounds like it's saying that search will be a tool to search for things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I imagine Facebook will try to acquire Pinterest - if there is any money left.

<comment><USER26> Pinterest would be fools to accept their money at orders of magnitude better valuations. Pinterest has a solid product, a vastly better user experience (albeit solving different problems), is not pressed to find or invent business models, and could easily expand into more commercial areas. Facebook is a brand people love to hate, it has a stench of evil, and a highly uncertain financial future. What could Facebook do for Pinterest?

<comment><USER6> Pinterest makes literally no money today. Facebook made a billion dollars in profit this quarter. Who, exactly, has the "highly uncertain financial future"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Slightly off-topic - my wife has 20k followers on Pinterest. Is that a lot, relatively speaking? Any suggestions as to monetisation? She already gets invited to events via Pinterest.

</comment><comment><USER28> This values it 27% higher than Yelp and 4.2x Trulia for perspective

</comment><comment><USER29> I use it as a tool to collect and save infographic data... quite a good tool but the valuation is kinda beyond my understanding!

</comment><comment><USER30> Remember the dot com bust days, when companies with ZERO revenues raised BILLIONS on user (vanity?) numbers ?

</comment><comment><USER31> Alternate title considered... "Pinterest adding $200M to it's debt"

<comment><USER32> Where did you read that the $200M raised was debt financing?

<comment><USER18> Think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What exactly is the "Visual web"?

</comment><comment><USER34> I've heard the name and ignored it. But what the hell, let's take a look. Obviously, this website is very popular with some people but if you go to the default page you get this:

[http://imgur.com/XWdkO8i](http://imgur.com/XWdkO8i)

...a popup that says "He used Pinterest to start his collection" on top of a blurry background. Who's "He"? Sign up with Facebook? Why? And all this confusion in a popup? Really? The very worst aspect of 1990s web design-- pointless popups--on the front page of a trendy website? And with no obvious way to close the popup? And I kept expecting the 45 seconds to go to zero, like a time bomb, but nothing happened. Not only are you annoying and threatening me with a timer, but it's totally static. Really? Why not put a dancing William Shatner next to it? That would really bring back the memories.

But you can, in fact, close the popup. Go to the bottom and click "About Pinterest", and you get this:

[http://imgur.com/6NDBdUm](http://imgur.com/6NDBdUm)

"It's helpful. New descriptive guides help steer your search in the right directions" ...with a picture of a phone and links to install pinterest on my iphone or android devices. ...but, why would I do that? Even after reading an article about the company and looking at their "about us" page, I have no clue what their reason for existence is. Visual Web? You mean "img" tags? That part of the web?

What am I doing wrong? Am I like a person outside of the 14-22 year demographic watching MTV for the first time?

<comment><USER35> I am in agreement with how jmduke responded to your comment, but wanted to add a couple things.

I contracted with Pinterest for several months on a team directly adjacent to the team responsible for designing, testing, and building the logged out home page you see here. It was very thorough, going through immense amounts of research with a multitude of completely different design experiences, and this page (and the others in this set) tested better than everything else throughout the process. And the team didn't simply A/B test what had the highest conversion, they tested sentiment in terms of: "After converting from this specific experience, is using the actual product in line with what that landing page led me to believe?"

I got to see this process firsthand, be in meetings that involved discussions around how to handle a massively important project like this, and I couldn't imagine the team doing a better job.

It's easy to dismiss this when you aren't a user and don't see it as useful for you specifically. But the landing page isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at many demographics who could find it useful if they arrived here. And in that regard, after seeing the improvement in actual conversion data myself, I find it successful thus far.

<comment><USER36> Exactly! They are optimizing for their current users (or soon to be users). In other words, you may be a little out of their target market. Second, if someone came to the site directly, then they have at least some brand awareness. So they have some idea what Pinterest is about in the first place.</comment></comment></comment>


PayPal goes after Apple in a full page NYT Ad - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/09/15/paypal-drops-the-gloves-calling-out-apples-icloud-security-in-new-payments-ad/ <comment><USER2> Paypal should probably spend more time trying to speed up their interface. It has been painfully slow for years... decades, even.</comment>