The Ada Initiative: Salaries for women to participate in open source - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/428075/3824bdd3ce2f7151/

<comment><USER2> I wonder why women are so unwilling to contribute gratis to the world's informational commons?

I used to think the reason women didn't contribute to open source was simply a lack of relevant skills - programmers are primarily not women. But Wikipedia exhibits a similar disparity, and I seriously doubt there is a skill gap in writing neutral point of view articles on every topic. The data on wikipedia strongly suggests my skills hypothesis is wrong.

An interesting empirical question: do women contribute to open source proportionately to their involvement in programming for pay? A quick google search finds weak evidence [1] that they do not:

<http://www.oscon.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/10173>

[http://infotrope.net/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd- my...](http://infotrope.net/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon- keynote/)

If not, then that might indicate a more general phenomenon: women are less willing [2] to contribute (gratis, at least) to the informational commons than men. It's an interesting question, and I'd love to see more data/speculation.

[1] This is the only primary source I've found. A number of other secondary sources cite this one.

[2] Wikipedia demonstrates the issue is not skill. Women's contributions to Facebook strongly suggest the issue is not free time. The ATUS also suggests time is not a factor - women have about as much free time as men (men spend 8.1 hours/day on work related, household and care providing, women spend 7.85 hours/day). <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t08.htm>

<comment><USER3> To offer a possibly way oversimplified theory: In a typical workplace, sexual harassment and random acts of male chauvinism are constrained by corporate culture, so at least from my experience, women can be somewhat comfortable being themselves as paid programmers.

From my experience in open source projects, the number of trolls trolling is quite a bit higher, especially when the primary channels for communication are mailing lists and IRC, which people have an easier time being trolls on due to anonymity and lack of face to face interaction. Not having a boss to yell at trolls for trolling or not having the possibility of getting cockpunched for saying something stupid might be another factor.

<comment><USER2> Is there a lot of sexual harassment/chauvinism on wikipedia also?

Personally, I've observed vastly more sexist/chauvinistic behavior on Facebook (where women seem quite happy to contribute) than on OSS mailing lists, but that may just be an artifact of the people I interact with.

Another question: can anyone think of other free/for-pay intellectual activities which do/dont exhibit a gap? We can compare OSS to paid programming, Wikipedia to Demand Media, are there other comparisons of this sort one can make?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All these initiatives to help women in tech, make me ponder if the same courtesy is extended to men in fields dominated by women. Is there the same desperation to attract new male recruits? The same incentives? For example, does anyone know of similar initiatives to increase the number of male elementary teachers or nurses?

<comment><USER5> The organizations, communities behind those female dominated fields need to feel there is a value in increasing their representation of the male perspective.

I don't think communities feel that nursing or elementary school teachers are missing out on the male perspective.

Society is still exploring how to handle the wide variance in what individual women and men want to do with their lives, what men as a group and women as a group are culturally interested in doing, and what men as a group and women as a group are innately interested in doing.

<comment><USER2> Apart from a few activists, I don't think computing communities feel we are missing out on a female perspective [1]. But for some reason, this attitude is often a point of criticism by the activists. Why is that?

(Incidentally, nursing does need men - a lot of men are uncomfortable having a woman assist them in personal care activities. More male nurses = increased patient satisfaction.)

[1] Near as I can tell, the only place we could possibly be missing out is in some UX fields, and even there it seems that empirically-minded men are doing a good job (see: Facebook, Zynga, Apple).

<comment><USER6> You are definitely suffering from a lack of female perspective :-) Women are raised with different priorities and different habits of mind, different strengths and mental and emotional tools.

<comment><USER2> The communities that don't feel male teachers/nurses are important are definitely suffering from a lack of male perspective. That's the point I'm making - the moment you flip the genders in grhino's argument, you immediately get objections.

(That said, in general I don't think gender balance matters much. Either women's different priorities/habits/strengths result in them producing good code, or they don't. It's only in unusual cases involving human interaction where it actually matters - e.g., doctors/nurses working on your privates.)

<comment><USER5> There are organizations that specifically encourage men to join nursing.

[http://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-receives- recognition-e...](http://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-receives-recognition- encouraging-male-nurses)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The Ada Initiative—named for Countess Ada Lovelace, the world's first woman open source programmer..."

Or rather, the world's first programmer, who was also a woman and open sourced her programs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Some research shows that the majority of OS core developers are FT paid employees, not volunteers: <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1248869>

In addition, there's research showing that OS culture is both explicitly and implicitly unfriendly to women: <http://www.ncwit.org/cultureos>

</comment><comment><USER9> From what I understand at a cursory glance the salaries are meant to be for the members of the organization, not for programmers working on open source projects (which would be a bad idea for so many reasons...)

<comment><AUTHOR> "It is clear from the FAQ that TAI hopes that fundraising will provide the financial resources to allow the organization to dig into projects that are difficult or impossible for all-volunteer organizations to take on."

This implies to me that it will actually pay programmer salaries. Why would this be a bad idea? Most open source software is developed by developers paid to do so.

Secondly, I certainly hope that Valerie Aurora does more than administer the project. I want my union mounts!

<comment><USER10> I think when they use the words project and program to describe their work, they don't mean software. Their focus seems to be on "helping women get careers in open technology through recruitment and training programs for women, education for community members who want to help women, and working with corporations and projects to improve their outreach to women."

The initiatives they have listed so far are

* Development of guidelines and policies to encourage women's attendance at conferences, recruitment of women to your company, and participation of women in community projects. * Workshops to train community members and employees on practical skills for encouraging women. * Public relations advice for developing and maintaining a women-friendly reputation. * First Patch Week, a week in which companies and communities sponsor open source software developers to mentor women while they write and submit their first patch. * Women in open technology and culture survey, a survey of a representative cross-section of projects and communities to develop a baseline for measuring progress in women's participation. * Improving women's participation in Wikipedia and other open data projects.

This seems very different from, and more valuable than, paying programmer salaries.</comment></comment></comment>


Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html <comment><USER2> Awesome write up, I've only made it about 1/4 the way through.

It's a huge article and wonderfully approachable.

Loved the image of the speed of signal transfer with and without mylin sheath and how why that causes the issues that MS patients have (it's under note 13) [0]. A friend has MS and it's great to be able to better understand the condition.

> Multiple sclerosis is caused by a glitch in the body's immune system that > causes it to destroy the myelin sheaths of neurons, which as you can see > from the GIF below, would seriously disrupt the body's ability to > communicate with itself. ALD, the disease in Lorenzo's Oil, is also caused > by myelin being destroyed.

[0]: [http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/wp-c...](http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/ezgif.com-optimize-2.gif)

</comment><comment><USER3> They seem to have also updated the homepage of Neuralink with specific job opportunities. Last week or so it was still showing only an email link.

Check it out! :) [https://neuralink.com/](https://neuralink.com/)

"Neuralink is developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers. We are looking for exceptional engineers and scientists. No neuroscience experience is required: talent and drive matter far more. We expect most of our team to come from other areas and industries. We are primarily looking for evidence of exceptional ability and a track record of building things that work. All positions are full time and based in San Francisco."

</comment><comment><USER4>
      Neuralink co-founder Flip Sabes doesn't get it.

It's not so much that I'm worried about _me_ getting ahold of one of these things. I'm really just worried about other people having them. Rotten people. Terrible people. The people out on the street, that if I had to share a room with them, I'd jump out a window.

There's this idea that these things will make them better people. What a can of worms that concept is.

      But to Elon, the scariest thing the Human Colossus is
      doing is teaching the Computer Colossus to think.

This is the brute-force hack to achieve the same outcome. One way or another, the equation is the same. Humans and machines collaborating, to produce an outcome.

We can either level the playing field, so that each of us has implicit, private, immediate, instant interaction with our own implanted systems, or, we can defer to intermediary system administrators holding the keys to machine rooms around the world, portioning out bandwidth that permits each to siphon off some compute time from a massive cluster, be it for algorithmic day trading, personal medical diagnostics, nuclear fission/fusion detonation simulations, image processing for astronomical observations, winning a Go tournament, or whatever.

But if an implant changes a person, from what do we derive our concept of self, and authenticity? Without that, how do we know we haven't died? How do we know that others are not animated corpses? What prevents us from becoming pzombies?

What's the difference between a truly convincing Real Doll, and a person after this?

<comment><USER5> I don't think we can make that distinction, even now. We might die every time we go to sleep, similar to how you would if you were to be teleported; destroyed at one end and recreated at the other.

I'm not worried in quite the same way as you are. I'm worried that once I've put on the wizard, I'll change, and I won't be who I once was. Maybe I'll lose my humanity. But maybe my humanity isn't doing me any good.

There are a lot of things I said I would never become when I was younger, which I have now become. Maybe this will be the same thing on a larger scale. I might change, a lot, but that's all. I don't see the change as good or bad.

Once I put on the wizard hat, I may miss what it was like without it, but I probably won't want to take it off again, similar to how I miss my childhood, but I'm not sure I actually want to regress back to it.

Edit: Even if you're right, and this is a bad idea, and it will change us for the worse, it still seems to be our best option. Either we pray that AI doesn't recklessly take off without us, possibly destroying us in the process, or we try integrating with it, with the chance that our humanity will be lifted up with it. At least making it so that we have the option is probably a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This may come across as ridiculous as the people who thought our bodies couldn't handle the high speeds of trains in the 1800s, but I wonder if there is a speed limit inside our brain. The post keeps bringing up bandwidth as the issue, but I still think our brain needs time to reflect on what has happened.

<comment><USER7> Well, neurons don't fire instantly.

Our reaction time to external stimuli is the "speed-limit" of our brains, but I guess it is to only some kind of stimuli. Inputs directly into our brains from a link/lace might have different speeds.

<comment><USER8> Latency and bandwidth are not the same. You could potentially have huge capacity for information processing, that would just be delayed because of "implementation details" of neuron biology.

I'm fascinated by brain's plasticity. One example is while we are watching a movie, our perspective constantly "teleports" around actors and across space and time many times in a minute. Yet this seems normal and doesn't overload our brain. There are biohacking experiments with installing extra sensors that seamlessly integrate into our experience of reality.

The unanswered question is how much information can our brain take, and what will happen if there's too much pouring in. Just temporary fatigue or more permanent damage? We cannot know because we never tried it before (aside from specific experiments like air traffic controller and pilot concentration tests).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the middle of reading this, and can't help think about the Nexus trilogy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm also only about 1/4 through. Cool to see that the first piece on Neuralink with quotes from significant numbers of the actual team chooses to be long form and in depth.

</comment><comment><USER11> It always sounds so much easier in SciFi novels...

</comment><comment><USER12> How long before invasive mind-reading is an issue?

<comment><USER13> Already there if you count inferring things people would prefer to keep private by looking at probabilities given their visible activity.

<comment><USER14> People will speak in generalities to torture someone in a social setting. I for one am almost dead having experienced this for over two decades.

<comment><USER12> Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER14> I actually wrote a detailed response, but HN blocked it, likely for the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone care to offer their 'tldr' version of the article? What exactly is Musk wanting to do?

<comment><USER16> TLDR I posted on Twitter: "If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn't be _other_ " It will be us, and we it. It will have no reason to destroy us.

<comment><USER8> This doesn't really do justice to the article. Decent BMI would be next big step for mankind, with applications such as practical telepathy, mind control of IoT devices, instant access to all information, huge increase of memory capacity, tapping into other people senses, and, yes, fusion with AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Besides everything: this is Planet 4 level _science communication_ happening right here and now.

</comment><comment><USER11> IoB - Internet of Brains

<comment> norea-armozel Just what I need, Russian hackers installing malware into my mind, threatening to delete my childhood. I might actually let them do it.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like fun!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can I do with vast amounts of text?  - <AUTHOR>

I've started collecting a lot of data in Arabic. the thing with arabic is that there's Modern Standard Arabic that's used in formal communication and then each country's dialect that's used in informal communication. I have a lot (like tens of millions of sentences) of each and I'm working on tagging them as either MSA or dialect (and which dialect it is).<p>But now what? Natural language processing? Something else? Any low hanging fruits I can work on? <comment><USER2> I could understand if you don't want to reveal the nature of the data, but what kind of data is it? IM Conversations? Reviews? Data mining wise, it would be neat to build something like a named entity tagger or doing sentiment analysis with it. If you're really ambitious, you could do something like relation extraction with it.

There are a lot of monetization options you could do with data like that. Using some of the tools already mentioned here, there's a lot of options available.

<comment><AUTHOR> The majority of it is newspapers, tweets, facebook statuses, wikipedia, tv show and movie scripts.

I've been able to do sentiment analysis with a high (80%+) level of accuracy using only a fraction of what I currently have. I don't think it's really monetizable even though it's (afaik) the only one of it's kind. Not that hard to make.

I'm interested in named entity tagging and other things like that that I know for a fact don't exist for Arabic or any of its dialects. Who would pay for that, though?

<comment><USER2> Since you have all of this text, I'm assuming you have access to that audience. You could easily fill a language specific niche that lots of others don't.

Here's an example: [http://blog.repustate.com/arabic-sentiment-analysis-a- long-j...](http://blog.repustate.com/arabic-sentiment-analysis-a-long-journey- is-complete/2012/09/17/)

Many of the text analysis APIs on the web only do english, spanish, and maybe chinese.

If you could come up with a semi decent system, you could talk to marketers, and actually other developers.

For example, I've had people come to me for something as obscure as recognizing locations so they could do geo tagging in a mobile app based on text.

If you have any particular industry verticals you're familiar with, there's probably a niche somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Low hanging fruit. Find and publish Character and word frequency. Character frequency can be used for the arabic version of dvorak, or something like that. That could actually sell.

If you are tagging, take a look at supervised machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER4> What do you want to do with the data? That can alter the tools/software one wishes to use with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are my options?

<comment><USER4> I'm just trying to understand your intentions for having the data, but it sounds like you didn't have a set reason for collecting the data other than for the sake of recording it? Not that one has to have a reason, but just presumed you did. If so, then you're looking not only for tools to work with the data, but also a reason to use the data to begin with?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I collected it for the sake of doing anything with it. Now that I have it all I'm not sure what to do with it.

<comment><USER4> I guess it depends on how the sample data is skewed as to what you can statistically gain from it. If it was collected fairly random without favoring any one audience, then there's lots of options. If not, then there's more restrictions.

Like for example, collecting data from somewhere that appeals to the general population is going to give different results than collecting data from a development community.

Tech wise, you could throw all the data into full text search engine like Sphinx or alternatively use something like Lucene or NLTK.

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

[http://lucene.apache.org/](http://lucene.apache.org/)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> check out [http://gate.ac.uk/](http://gate.ac.uk/) but I'm not sure wheter it supports arabic</comment>


IBM launches Linux-only mainframe system - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/17/us-ibm-linuxone-idUSKCN0QM09P20150817 <comment><USER2> By trade, I am a mainframe systems programmer at a large financial institution. My group is responsible for mainframe operating systems: z/OS (it may also be referred to as MVS), z/VM (the mainframe hypervisor), and z/Linux (Linux on a mainframe) and many of the software components that go along with these.

I'm really excited about this announcement. I think IBM finally realized they need to be more open if they want to grow the Linux on z community. I just hope they are not too late to the game.

There's a lot of mystery and misconception behind mainframes, so I am happy to answer any questions about mainframes that I can.

<comment><USER3> So, why use Linux instead of z/OS? Is it cheaper? Offer more tools?

<comment><USER2> It's hard to answer "z/OS vs Linux on z" generically, because there's use cases for both. But perhaps the most generic answer I can give you in favor of Linux is: familiarity.

z/OS has a long history. It's predecessor, OS/390, dates back to the 1990s. Before OS/390, there was OS/360 which dates back to the 60s. Back then, IBM was first to market on business computer processing. (That was the only computer processing.) Major industries, like financial, insurance, and airlines, poured their infrastructure into mainframes, because it was the only name in the game. IBM prides itself in assuring its customers that the COBOL code that ran your business back in the 80s will still run today on z/OS 2.1 (the current version of z/OS). Chances are, when you swipe your credit card, that transaction touches a mainframe and probably some code that was written in the 1980s. Or earlier. I know, because I've seen the timestamps.

This compatibility is really evident when you use z/OS. The green screen is perhaps the most obvious example. When you see a systems programmer (that's mainframe-talk for sysadmin) debugging a system, you'll see them page through a really archaic, unsexy TN3270 interface. Why? The same reason Unix (and thereby Linux) uses teletype. Because that's what the operating system was built on.

Sure. z/OS has Unix System Services. In fact, it's even POSIX compliant. But can you `apt-get install ruby`?. No. There's no Ruby for z/OS (unless you count JRuby). There's no package manager for USS. It's just plain, vanilla Unix. There's no new open source contributions. There's no Bash that comes with the operating system. You get a 10 year old version of Shell. There's all kinds of shenanigans with SCP/SFP and ASCII/EBCDIC. IBM has to maintain the tools. (Actually, it's been turned over to Rocket Software.) It feels very "round peg, square hole".

So z/OS has an image problem. IBM made a huge mistake back in the mid-80s. When commodity x86 PCs became available, universities realized they could teach their computer science programs on cheaper hardware instead of expensive mainframes. Compute Science is platform agnostic, right? What IBM didn't do is recognize this as a problem. They didn't give out free mainframes to universities, so schools quit teaching with them. How many people do you know under 30 that had a mainframe-based curriculum? And for the self-taught, how are you suppose to learn the basics of a platform if costs millions of dollars? Anybody can install Linux on their $100 laptop in a few hours. But mainframes?

Fast-forward a couple of decades and now you have a talent pool that's extremely saturated with x86 people. And the mainframe people? Well, they are all retiring and there aren't many replacements. Second-generation mainframers are far and few. (I'm one of them.)

So let's say you have a new workload. It's undeveloped. What platform should you choose? There's probably not many technical reasons why you could not accomplish what you want to do in z/OS. But how many people do you know that consider themselves proficient with debugging z/OS? Outside of "dead languages", your options are pretty much limited to Java. (There's a few exceptions to this, but Java is the biggest modern language player.) But that's not to say there isn't any new development happening in the z/OS space. There's plenty of new workloads coming to WebSphere on z because porting a WebSphere application could be pretty easy. There's also performance benefits when you are on the same system where all your financial records are stored. z/OS is definitely an option, but it varies by use case.

With Linux on z, you get real Linux. And the majority know Linux. The majority can debug Linux. And you get the same benefits of being on rock-solid mainframe hardware and you get memory-speed I/O against mainframe data and services through a special networking interface called Hipersockets. Mainframes are also pretty good a virtualization, because they invented it. (z/VM has it's roots dating back to the 70s.)

<comment><USER4> That was definitely where they screwed up: universities. They have recent program pushing mainframes to universities more. However, they would've been better off (a) giving them to Universities at physical cost, (b) donating time to their students from a pool IBM themselves use, or (c) supporting the Hercules emulator for use in educational institutions that acquire licenses. This would've gotten more exposure. Each are still good moves today.

Not sure what they're actually doing but closing it off too much holds them back. It can still be proprietary. However, people need to be able to hack on it or a VM of it for best results. Preferably, a way for people to learn it in pieces so they don't have to know all mainframe stuff at once. Think the pre- configured, appliance VM's for various services. Have those for z/OS admins, CICS users, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cm-t Note: Canonical seems to be a partner to bring Ubuntu on it

See [http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/16/ibm-teams-with-canonical- on...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/16/ibm-teams-with-canonical-on-linux- mainframe/)

<comment> cm-t Confirmed here: [https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/08/17/ibm-and-canonical- pla...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/08/17/ibm-and-canonical-plan-ubuntu- support-on-ibm-z-systems-mainframe/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "IBM said LinuxONE Emperor can scale up to 8,000 virtual machines or thousands of containers, which would be the most for any single Linux system."

I wish article (or IBM) provided some specs. Thousands of containers is just too broad of a statement- what are these containers doing? Running just a bash script _hello world_ program or minting bitcoins?

<comment><USER6> In an article which states "..IBM's z13 mainframe computer, which had been designed for high-volume mobile transactions.", all bets are off with respect to reality. I mean, what does 'designed for high-volume mobile transactions' even mean in the context of having Linux running on the hardware?

<comment><USER7> Not sure if this is still correct for the z13 but in general: "System z servers offload such functions as I/O processing, cryptography, memory control, and various service functions (such as hardware configuration management and error logging) to dedicated processors."

(from Wikipedia)

<comment><USER8> It's called a zIIP engine ([http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/features/ziip/](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/features/ziip/)) and it utilizes the IFL also ([http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/solutions/ifl.html](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/solutions/ifl.html)). We use the zIIP on our z13 basically to offload any work that takes a ton of I/O (DB2 data serves, dataset scans for performance monitoring, RMF and CICS reporting). It ends up saving a lot of money monthly because we are charged by maximum number of MSU's during any four-hour window of the month. The zIIP reduces the number of MSU's needed at any given time. In our case, 5-10.

Back in 2005, I installed SuSe on an s/390 box. If you could throw a lot of memory at it or MIPs, then it would run pretty well, and could be used as a file or email server. But anything that crunched data was horribly slow. Can't say that it's any better now, but if it's utilizing the zIIP, I'm sure it's miles above where it was 10 years ago.

Still, pretty high cost of ownership on the mainframe to get this. I can't imagine many people buying a million dollar mainframe just to run Linux. Seems like those who have a mainframe already would have been like us: let's partition out a Linux instance and try it out.

<comment><USER2> To clarify, zIIP processing is only relevant under z/OS. Linux processing runs under IFLs. But that's not to say you can't get some offloading in Linux. By design, mainframes can hardware accelerate some processing. The crytpocards [0] are an example of this.

But you are right. A lot of shops go through a lot of effort to maintain their zIIP window in their z/OS processing. And a big selling point for many mainframe software vendors is that their product's processing is "zIIP- enabled".

[0]: [https://share.confex.com/share/120/webprogram/Handout/Sessio...](https://share.confex.com/share/120/webprogram/Handout/Session12687/Share12687_IntroToCryptoOnSystemz_20130203.pdf) (slide 30)

<comment><USER8> Yes, you are right there, and thank you for clarifying that. I should have been more clear that the zIIP is useful to Linux through accessing data via z/VM. You can't offload all of the I/O, but you can offload some of it if accessing the mainframe for data. Or so I remember at this point. It's been a few years since leaving my mainframe systems programmer position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From my experience with zLinux environments I would be inclined to scrutinise any density claims very, very carefully.

Interesting they're working with Canonical on this - the Z has historically been a SuSE stronghold, with a lot of the development of Linux-on-Z happening in Germany, and Red Hat trailing behind. I'd be wary it will be another increasingly typical adware effort from them.

(I follow the main zLinux mailing lists for my day job, and I see a lot of folks from SuSE, some folks from Red Hat, a bunch of people from IBM, and basically no-one from the Ubuntu/Canonical world. Usual disclaimers apply.)

<comment><USER10> > _Interesting they 're working with Canonical on this_

Ubuntu's distributions are the reference root FS for Cloud Foundry, to which IBM is the second largest contributor of treasure and engineering effort.

Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, who are the first.

<comment><USER11> Ubuntu also inherits quite a bit of 's390x' platform compatibility work from Debian. For a user coming from a non-mainframe Linux background who wants the normal packages to "just work", it might be further along than other Linux distros (but: I have not quantified this). Debian-on-Z doesn't have as much testing as x86, of course, but since it's one of the five officially supported Debian architectures (x86, ARM, PPC, MIPS, S390x), it gets constant autobuilds of the whole archive, a reasonable amount of debugging effort, and release- engineering attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Frankly, my experience on mainframes is that UNIX is a stronghold there for a reason. I'd be far more interested in this ecosystem opening up by having strong mainframe vendor support for running Illumos and/or FreeBSD, and less concerned with running Linux. Among other things, Zones are more useful than lxc, and in this type of environment you often need strong kernel support for specialized high-speed interconnects and real-time operations, which Linux only has experimental support for but is integrated well in the UNIX world. I love Linux and what it's done for the world, but UNIX isn't dead for a reason, there are still many things it is superior at.

<comment><USER13> This is an odd remark - apparently AIX/ESA, the AIX version for mainframe hardware was discontinued "in the late 1990s", roughly the same time when IBM started to invest in Linux.

[http://www.lookupmainframesoftware.com/soft_detail/dispsoft/...](http://www.lookupmainframesoftware.com/soft_detail/dispsoft/1581)

There was also Amdahl UTS, which was sold to a company UTS Global around 2000 that appears defunct now.

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

So where is this stronghold of AT&T descendant UNIXes on mainframes then?

<comment><USER14> Nowhere, but some people call System I/(A/400)/I-Series a mainframe. It's midrange, but people call it what they call it.

Anyway, IBM i and AIX run on the same hardware. They used to be called System I and System P. Now it's just Power Systems.

Maybe thats what he ment.

Or well, come to think of it. There is a UNIX side to z/OS itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's about time. This is long overdue. The combination of the mainframe architecture's strengths with Linux's API/ecosystem could be pretty awesome. Anyone wondering why buy a mainframe should focus on these areas:

1\. Reliability. Some have gone 30 years without downtime. Probably strongest selling point.

2\. Channel I/O [1]: dedicated I/O processors plus scheduling that lead to high utilization (80-90+%) and throughput vs commodity servers. Second strongest point in mainframe's favor. I wish my desktop & servers had this rather than a knockoff.

3\. Hardware partitioning that's more robust and rated at stronger security than most virtualization. Certain cutting-edge projects in INFOSEC are doing similar things at CPU and I/O layers. Mainframe's version, although not as cool, is decent and field-proven.

4\. Built-in, proven software virtualization.

5\. Hardware acceleration for some things such as databases and crypto.

6\. IBM's ecosystem of apps, third-party providers, and services. This might matter to existing IBM customers.

So, those are a few advantages I hear from people who use mainframes. The z/OS-based mainframes have extra benefits in terms of software reliability, security through obscurity (obfuscation), and seemingly better use of both security (eg memory key) and functional (eg decimal) aspects of mainframe processors. The z/VM product has also been doing for decades what modern virtualization systems only recently do, even self-virtualizing since 70's.

So, there's some things to ponder. Whether it makes since financially vs other setups is a whole, different discussion. However, mainframes do retain strong, technical advantages over commodity architectures. They were doing cloud in one box before it was a thing. Their reliability is still unmatched with only VMS clusters and NonStop architecture getting close. So, it's a sensible choice for a business to spend extra $$$ to get high-throughput with no downtime and strong isolation of logical partitions.

Channel I/O [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_channel)

</comment><comment><USER15> So for a business with a complex AS400 system still in place, would this be a replacement for that or an augmentation of that? Their page isn't very clear.

[http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/linux- one.html](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/linux-one.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the KVM on zSeries thingy is actually open source and upstream. From what I can see they (IBM) say it's "based on open source" which is market droid speak for "actually it's not that open".

<comment><USER17> It appears to be pretty open source.

[http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/s390/kvm/](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/arch/s390/kvm/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When would this type of thing become cost effective? Let's say if you compare it with your typical X amounts of Dell servers also capable of running 8,000 virtual machines.

</comment><comment><USER19> At the last user conference for some iSeries-based software that we run, IBM had a booth where they displayed a 2U server with dual 16-core Power7 CPUs. They bragged that it only ran Linux and would save us a ton of money. They started out at about $20,000 US.

How small is this market? You'd have to have apps that were written to take advantage of Power7. Equivalent x86 Linux servers are 1/4 the price.

<comment><USER20> I think the horsepower on those machines shouldn't be underestimated, because they are not entirely as equivalent as you think... I was thoroughly surprised when an unoptimized (but correct!) ChaCha20/8 implementation I wrote on a 3.0GHz POWER8 little-endian machine was about as fast as the latest 3.5gHz Xeons @ AES-256 with AESNI (about 1.3cpb vs 1.0cpb IIRC, but the latter has a dedicated hardware unit for it!) On that same Xeon, the ChaCha20 code only hit somewhere around 5cpb - that's software vs silicon!

It also has 170 cores and was actually a QEMU instance (w/ hardware virtualization extensions) vs raw dedicated metal. If you're doing any kind of numerical or analytic workloads (even databases), I wouldn't throw them aside so quickly. You can even get CUDA for them these days, and certain physical addons like CAPI allow you to map and coherently share physical CPU address space with FPGAs or GPUs. If I could get those things in a reasonable workstation configuration, I'd probably go for it tbh.

(I'd be more than willing to repeat this and post some more accurate numbers if anyone cares. I also need to get around to benchmarking AESNI vs that POWER8 machines _actual_ dedicated AES unit. The benchmark above was only flexing its vector/integer unit capabilities. ;)

<comment><USER21> If you're getting a 4x difference in IPC using a crypto microbenchmark from compiled C code (i.e. it doesn't sound like you're bandwidth or I/O limited), there has to be something else at work. POWER8 is a nice core, but it's not _that_ wide. Maybe the compiler was recognizing your operations and replacing them with AES primitives?

<comment><USER22> Caches and memory latency/bandwidth can have serious effects as well.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but at this kind of multiplier only in the case where the entire test is 100% cache-resident on one CPU and spilling on the other. Crypto stuff tends to have small working sets, so my intuition is that it's got to be something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071679).

</comment><comment><USER24> How much does the 8000 core thing cost?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'd _really_ like to see that number. I bet it's so big that it's highly negotiable and still highly profitable. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > (The story was refiled to correct the name of the server to "Emperor" from > "Empire" in paragraph 4 and names of software to "MariaDB" and "PostgreSQL" > from "Maria" and "Posture" in paragraph 5)

These are the journalists specialized in IT news for a giant like Reuters?

<comment><USER26> As I read the bit about the correction, I figured Empire and Maria were understandable mistakes to make. But what in the hell is posture.

Also, I know this is a newswire/business site, but this is super skimpy on the details.

<comment><USER27> Autocorrect? My phone corrects postgres to "postures".</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp experiencing major issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/instagram-down-whatsapp-facebook-not-working-loading-error-a8986446.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345060)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous coverage:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346039)

<comment><USER4> and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346093)

('hacker' 'news' dupe detection stuff is really terrible at this)</comment></comment>


BigQuery vs. Redshift vs. Athena simple benchmark - <AUTHOR> https://www.gab.lc/articles/bigquery-vs-redshift-vs-athena <comment><USER2> For a dataset this size, though, you'd probably realistically be using ORC/Parquet rather than CSV with Athena, which would cut query times and cost dramatically. Note that the table shows that Athena is scanning all the data each time; that would not be the case if ORC or Parquet was used.

<comment><USER3> Do you know of any good ways of outputting log data directly into Parquet format without hadoop/spark?

<comment><USER4> I'm curious about this as well. I was evaluating Athena a few months ago and was surprised that there was no good way to get my data into Parquet or ORC format without spinning up an EMR cluster and loading into a Hive table of the desired format.

My guess is that in the past there was no real use for these formats unless you already had a Hadoop cluster running. If Amazon wants these "Hadoop as a service" concepts to take off it seems like it would be wise for them to make it easier to get data onto S3 in a better format than CSV.

<comment><USER5> Mostly what I'm hearing here is:

"You're using it wrong"

"You should start up a Hadoop cluster, create a table, load the CSV into that table, then export it as Parquet, and then load that into S3, so that Athena can scan it"

Wouldn't you be honestly just better off creating a table and loading the CSV into a columnar database directly, like on Amazon RDS (Even if it means you bring the server instance down after you're done)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Loading a single, large file into Redshift? I get the impression the author has a passing knowledge of Redshift at least. I'm not too familiar with BigQuery, but for Redshift, loading files in batches of total slices in the cluster is the recommended approach. No wonder it took 9+ hours to load that file. And the author also doesn't mention distributing the data on a particular column. I wonder if he did random distribution.

And his problem with the field delimiter really shows lack of experience; of course you can't use a multi-length field delimiter. I've never seen anyone use a comma+space for a delimiter. That file could probably be about 75% of the original file size if he re-created it with just the comma as the field delimiter.

Sorry to bash on the author - don't mean to sound harsh but a lot of people are trying to do benchmarks but with minimal context and whatnot

<comment><AUTHOR> > of course you can't use a multi-length field delimiter

It is indeed a non conventional format but thats how the source CSV was formatted on [https://sdm.lbl.gov/fastbit/data/samples.html](https://sdm.lbl.gov/fastbit/data/samples.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The redshift loading result seems suspect to me. I know firsthand that redshift can scale to load over a trillion records / hour (with a big enough cluster). Even with a basic setup this should be at least an order of magnitude faster. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, maybe try breaking the file up into smaller batches and load those.

It would also be helpful to see what schema you used for redshift, specifically the encoding and the distribution and sort key(s).

To give Athena more of a fighting chance, other people have mentioned Parquet or ORC, but also remember to partition the data. Generally you're supposed to give Athena a directory with data partitioned into different subfolders based on field values. Like if you're dealing with time-series type data you can partition your data in the format "year=<xxxx>/month=<yy>/day=<zz>/<uuid>.csv". I'm guessing you should do that for this data partitioning by eventTime but it kind of depends. Of course then you need some other component to put the data into S3 into the desired format, and you should probably count that as part of the loading time.

DISCLAIMER: work for AWS, not on the redshift or athena teams, though I do use redshift for work.

</comment><comment><USER8> Difficult to draw much of/any conclusion without the Redshift schema.

From direct experience of working on a moderate Redshift cluster performance is horrific once you start querying tables outside of their designed with sort and distribution keys. This is fine when you have defined use but when you're doing ad-hoc analysis or want to query across lots of dimensions we couldn't make Redshift work.

In contrast, I've seen BigQuery perform much more consistently in the face of large datasets with varying workloads.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think you can get the "data scanned per query" from Redshift by querying the STL_QUERY_METRICS table.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/r_STL_QUERY_ME...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/r_STL_QUERY_METRICS.html)

I would be interested in seeing the settings for the table in Redshift. I don't know much about how BigQuery works, but Redshift relies heavily on distribution and sort keys to efficiently query data.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will look into that, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> @gabriel_b - can you describe the process / command you used to upload data into Redshift from S3? I have a hard time believing those huge load times.</comment>


America Is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/america-regressing-developing-nation-people/ <comment><USER2> Although an interesting write-up, I hesitate with anything that dichotomizes complex systems into only 2 options, as there are many spots on the spectrum and continuum of economic means and balance. Although "developing world" is true, and I can see the visual of rich people behind fences and poor people in the streets, there is actually a lot of gradation in our economic system(a) that does not support a "two party approach." I find it very intriguing that most researchers on the American continent split thinks into binary systems, like organizing your wardrobe into left socks and right socks, it really glazes over a lot of fidelity.

<comment><USER3> Whereas I tend to reject analyses (literally meaning splitting) that can't even come up with one meaningful division. The whole point of the article is that while there's still some variety, we're losing a huge part of the economic ecosystem in the middle, that is, that we're dichotimizing; if you have contravening statistics, by all means provide them.

<comment><USER2> I have no data to contest this article, I agree with the findings just based on my own common sense. There is not enough elaboration on how to fix the situation, though, which is my main interest these days.

>What can we do?

 _We've been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging. If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly. The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions. We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans. We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector, reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and focus on embracing an integrated American population. We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital._

 _The cost of not doing these things, Temin warns, is incalculably high, and even the rich will end up paying for it_

It's true! Even the wealthy would benefit tremendously from wealth redistribution. It's sad that it's not a more ordinary thought in the US. But, the nation is not becoming a dual economy, it is becoming a singular economy with a growing class of people completely un-involved in the economic happenings of the land. A more inclusionary, participatory system would solve a lot of the issues right off the bat, but to fully embrace capacity-economic- participation our culture needs to grow more kind and inclusive in tandem.

<comment><USER3> There's no shortage of data about steeply growing inequality, here's just one recent article that caught my attention, by Ray Dalio, no less, saying it's up by six times: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-biggest-economic- social-p...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-biggest-economic-social- political-issue-two-economies-ray-dalio)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on betting app idea - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I have an idea for an app but I am not sure if something similar already exists or not (and if the whole idea makes sense).
My idea is about an app for betting among friends. Base case scenario:
- User A sends a bet proposal (ex: "Mercedes will win the next week F1 GP", "I am able to run for 20km", "Tonight I will drink 10 beers" etc.) to some of his contacts (let's say users B, C and D) and fix a bet price (ex: 1 $) and expiration time (ex: 2 days). - Users B, C and D receive a notification about the proposed bet - Users B and C accept the proposal and 1 $ is "blocked" form their account in addition to 2 $ from user A's account - User D refuse the proposal - Bet expires and each user is called to vote for the result of the bet - Users A, B and C vote that the bet is lost by A - 2 $ are removed from A's and 1 $ is added to both B and C's account
This a very broad and draft workflow. Do you think it makes sense? <comment><USER2> As described, it appears growth will depend on social network effects. The current standard strategic advice would be to build something a few people love. Out of that falls the tactical advice to make something that can be put in front of a very few potential users right now, collect feedback, and quickly iterate.

In the US, and possibly other markets, there are potential legal impediments due to gambling laws. Worldwide, there may be acceptance issues among payment networks.

In broad strokes, I wonder how an app is better than exchanging cash in terms of "the important thing isn't that I won, it's that you lost" in the social context.</comment>


Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson - <AUTHOR> http://boole.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menuitem.eb7d70008ce52e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=computer_level1&path=computer/homepage/0599/thompson&file=thompson.xml&xsl=article.xsl& <comment><USER2> What's amazing about this interview is that it takes awhile to realize that it's from 1999. Are we really that far behind?

<comment><USER3> I actually didn't pick that up - I was about to comment on his somewhat harsh view of Linux. In 1999? Completely understandable.

<comment><USER2> Imagine what he must think today!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft -- a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run... My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up...."

<comment><USER5> He was probably right, in 1999.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-05-07-01...](http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-05-07-016-05-NW- SM)

ESR clarifies with Ken Thompson.

</comment><comment><USER7> Heh, this was an assigned reading in my Computing Languages class. Coincidentally, my professor is also one of the interviewers.</comment>


PHP approach to random number generation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/fd838ccb2b1d37bda02eecdf09c324863f050812/wp-admin/setup-config.php#L211

<comment><USER2> What does this have to so with PHP? This is a Wordpress problem, not a PHP problem. That Wordpress is implemented in PHP is completely irrelevant in this case.

Note: in case the ridiculous title the submitter picked gets changed and this comment no longer makes sense, the title was "PHP approach to random number generation".

<comment><USER3> Definitely. My first reaction was, "haha, I wonder if that response is logged along with your server ip somewhere."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stupid linkbait title. Sure WordPress, not PHP.</comment>


Google acquires Israeli security startup SlickLogin - <AUTHOR> http://www.geektime.com/2014/02/16/google-acquires-slicklogin/ <comment><USER2> So this requires an always-on "hot mic" app. Does anyone see any issues with that?

<comment><USER3> Some Android phones (the Moto X, off the top of my head) already have an always-on microphone - for better or for worse.

<comment><USER4> Only if you enable and set up that feature. My Moto X doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This TechCrunch article from last year goes into more details on the implementation, including a Q&A with the founders:

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/slicklogin-wants-to-kill- th...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/slicklogin-wants-to-kill-the-password- by-singing-a-silent-song-to-your-smartphone/)

And here's a ShowHN thread (unfortunately light on interaction with the submitter):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6359450](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6359450)

</comment><comment><USER6> Their website is not usable with my 1024 pixels wide browser window.

<comment><USER4> If you disable their CSS, it works much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Their tech would be a great addition to Google's Smart-Auth mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER8> If this is already possible, then having NSA register your keystrokes on the PC keyboard through your phone like we saw that research a few months is probably not too far fetched.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats. The irony is that the last thing I think of when I'm using Google's long-convoluted account management system is "slick login".

<comment><USER10> Then it should really make sense why they are purchasing a company that does login better.

Side question: What is long and convoluted about Google's account management? It's one account with a single login which works across all Google products. Seems pretty straightforward to me. It only gets a bit more complicated if you try to disable parts of your account, but that's not the normal use case.

<comment><USER11> When you're trying to use Google Apps for business, for one, and you go to email.MyURL.com and get redirected to a standard Google login screen where you now have to click a button to not sign in as your personal account, then come back and sign in as a business account, plus also add the "@MyURL.com" at the end (didn't used to have to do this), and you're doing that with multiple different accounts, it gets pretty tricky pretty in a hurry.

<comment><USER12> Yep!

I have my own domain email on google, plus a personal @gmail, and have my work email hosted...

It can get laborious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome! Saw the team pitch at AngelHack, one of the more technical teams I have seen amongst all of the "Me Too" consumer social startups. Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm assuming this won't work on desktop computer if one does not have a mic.

<comment><USER15> Actually, it's the other way around. On the demo video the presenter says "the audio signal is transmitted from the computer to the phone".

here at 2:15 : [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5I6qV2b5iw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5I6qV2b5iw)

I am more curious about if the phone has to be always listening and what happens if there is noise in the environment.

Also what if the attacker manages to bring a recording device close enough? Is the distance important because of the amplitude or because of the delay due to the speed of sound?

<comment><USER16> what good would recording be if the audio has a timestamp in it?

<comment><USER15> what if the attacker transmits the audio in real time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They're good friends of mine, and are an absolutely awesome team!

Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know how much was the acquisition for?

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there something like HN for the Israeli scene?

</comment><comment><USER20> So... if my speakers are off (which mine are most of the time) it doesn't work?

</comment><comment><USER21> I already don't care. Amazing!</comment>


Pete Warden's / Parallel Curl   - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/petewarden/ParallelCurl

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool. I've never really had a problem just implementing curl_multi, but if I need to do something with parallel requests in PHP I'll definitely check this out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like people sharing cool tiny utility snippets occasionally

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> MCS, I liked this for the back end in prep to resolve migration of two huge construction company databases. Curl is like a ghost but its stability to hold both patterns is pretty cool for dual extraction methods. It works better as a seam between two existing sources rather than a compliment to any new gear.</comment>


Paper plane launched into space captures Earth images - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-11734084

<comment><USER2> For anyone interested in getting into high altitude ballooning, check out #highaltitude on Freenode, its full of amazingly talented people!

And their website at <http://ukhas.org.uk/>

</comment><comment><USER3> For those interested, here is the article that kicked it all off over a year ago!

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/30/reg_space_mission/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool, but is 27km altitude "space"? I thought the "official border" was at 100km.</comment>


Gamerbet – An Electronic Sports betting platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamerbet.co/

<comment><USER2> I like the idea, however, I am still hesitant to bet on eSports especially given the recent cheating scandal in games like CS:GO.

[http://kotaku.com/top-counter-strike-players-caught-in- big-c...](http://kotaku.com/top-counter-strike-players-caught-in-big-cheating- scand-1662810816)

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't ask for upvotes on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/collinglass/status/540156490125148160](https://twitter.com/collinglass/status/540156490125148160)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's the offer of this site over say, CSGOLounge? They bet based on in-game currency-like items so I'm assuming you're targeting the real cash market?

<comment><USER5> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope this also offers real cash betting! I signed up! Pretty excited to see this happen!

</comment><comment><USER7> What's wrong with the email validation? Keeps rejecting my address, email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll input you manually!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just signed-up! That's a badass idea.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks wicked. Sign me up!</comment>


Genomic epidemiology of novel coronavirus (HCoV-19) - <AUTHOR> https://nextstrain.org/ncov <comment><USER2> Has anyone tried to play the "movie" in the map. As I understand it, there has already been back-propagation of the virus from North America back to Asia. Can anyone confirm this is actually the case?

Edit: On a separate note, this tool is one of the best "web meets science" websites I've ever seen. Really nice work for those involved in its creation.

<comment><USER3> That backprop is most likely an artifact of a sample on a lineage being sequenced in North America, but the lineage also continues in Asia, where that lineage had not been sequenced yet. As in, someone in Asia spread COVID-19 to two people, one of whom traveled to North American and had their virus sequenced. The lineage also continued in Asia and was eventually sequenced days/weeks later, so the inferred tree includes a North American sample seeming to give rise to more Asian infections.

<comment><USER4> My father in law is a pilot (currently not showing any systems virus) has been back and forth between China, Korea, HK (Guangzou most recently) at least 3 times since January. His last trip he was one of only 30 people in the hotel, being monitored every 30 minutes or so for fever while on a layover. His company is still scheduling him trips there, so I have no doubt with companies still requiring similar travel that it could have easily gotten back to China from someone who has been in the US over the past few months, now that we know it has been in the wild here for at LEAST 6 weeks.

<comment><USER5> mmmrtl's explanation seems more parsimonious.

<comment><USER6> That's a really good word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So am I reading this correctly that for example the strain in Lombardy Italy/CDG1/2020 (GISAID EPI ISL 412973) from 20.02.2020, has its origin in the strain collected in Bavaria Germany/BavPat1/2020 (GISAID EPI ISL 406862) from 28.01.2020.

So the outbreak in Bavaria that was thought be contained somehow made its way to Italy? Or do these kind of interpretations not make any sense?

<comment><USER8> That seems like the right interpretation. The second case in Washington State appears to be a descendant of the first case on January 19, so we've also had about 6 weeks of undetected spread here from a case that was believed to be contained. It goes to show that "contained" doesn't mean much when you only test people with symptoms but you know that the virus can spread asymptomatically.

Early on the official guidance was that asymptomatic spread while possible is not playing a major role in global transmissions. Now we're seeing the results of that position.

<comment><USER9> Or people having just a mild variant which does not cause fever and airway problems. If they think it is something else, or don't care, it is just as well a transfer risk as asymptomatic individuals and in my opinion at least as likely.

<comment> core-questions Well, what are you supposed to do?

If you have the snuffles, are you supposed to react like it's COVID, or react like it's just one of the million other colds and such going around every winter until things get bad enough that your symptoms concern you?

If you react like it's COVID, then what - go to a hospital or otherwise burden the health system? All they can tell you is to quarantine yourself, unless/until it gets bad enough that it's worth testing you.

<comment><USER10> > If you have the snuffles

If you just have the sniffles you probably shouldn't panic and go to the ER, but you should stay the hell away from big conventions and not go to work, at least within reason.

I work for a company that has unmetered sick leave (that you can take without people judging you), great VPN/work from home policy, and will actively shun people who come to work sick (that is, no one is even remotely close to being pressured to come for butt in seat time).

And people still come to work sniffling and coughing. I keep having to kick them back home day after day. Like, wtf, seriously.

<comment> core-questions I agree 100% for myself - I always self quarantine and work remote when I have a cold. However, you gotta remember that the vast majority of people still need to be physically present and can't work remote; and most of them have far more limited sick leave policies, sometimes including only partial pay, etc.

<comment><USER10> For sure. I did add clarification that even some people with very generous sick leave policies and who can work from home still go to the office for no good reason.

Actually, as I'm typing this Im hearing someone coughing and sneezing a few rows from me, and yet again Ill have to talk to them and maybe even their manager, because here we're super privileged and there's exactly zero reason to come in sick.

I agree not everyone has that privilege, but if those who DO actually exercised it, it would at least have SOME impact on the spread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could it be the case that the least symptomatic variants of the virus will be the winning ones in the long run? I suspect that variants that do the most damage will be the ones quarantined and the ones that do least amount of harm (least symptoms) will spread faster.

If so, will this virus just domesticate itself (or rather domesticated by humans filtering out those more deadly versions)? By domesticate I mean that it lives with us just like the common cold without causing a 10% dip in the stock market.

<comment><USER12> That's normal. Diseases act as parasites on their hosts and its not in the best interest of a parasite to kill its host, or at least not quickly. That's what tends to make zoonotic diseases so dangerous, they've calibrated themselves to exist in an equilibrium with a host animal population but when they transfer to humans that balance is out of whack and they either are immediately wiped out by the immune system or they tend to overdo it and kill the host. COVID-19 seems to have "gotten lucky" in that it found itself with, from its perspective, a thankfully low lethality allowing it to spread widely.

This can apply to bacteria even more than viruses, see [https://aeon.co/essays/when-bacteria-kill-us-it-s-more- accid...](https://aeon.co/essays/when-bacteria-kill-us-it-s-more-accident- than-assassination)

EDIT: I should say, though, that you shouldn't expect that to happen _quickly_. The selective pressure for COVID-19 to become less lethal is far less than it was for, say, MERS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Iran is ominously missing any cases according to this data. I guess you could say Iran is a known unknown.

<comment><USER14> Iran isn't represented in this dataset. Neither is Africa or New Zealand. I'm not sure what's meant to be ominous about any of this.

<comment><USER15> We know the virus is widespread in Iran. We don't know if it is widespread in Africa or New Zealand.

<comment><USER14> No more so in Africa or in New Zealand [1] than in Finland, which _is_ represented in this dataset. I'm not really seeing the basis for whatever conspiracy theory the original parent comment seems like it wants to point toward, is what I'm getting at here.

These are the early stages of what looks to be a pandemic of a disease at least an order of magnitude, possibly several orders of magnitude [2], more lethal than seasonal flu, which is no picnic already. Isn't that enough to be worrying about, all on its own?

[1] [https://coronavirus.zone](https://coronavirus.zone)

[2] CDC headline numbers for the 2019-2020 flu season, vs. the commonly given 2% lethality guesstimate.

<comment><USER16> Estimates are dropping down from 2% as we discover lots of cases that were mild or asymptomatic.

The New England Journal of Medicine says it may likely be considerably less than 1%:

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387)

People should remember the context of a respiratory disease in China. 2/3rds of men smoke, and air pollution is common. Things also spread faster there as it's densely populated with lower hygiene standards than developed countries (for example: spitting is still common in some areas).

<comment><USER17> Suppose you're right about reasons why it spreads fast & lethally in China. How do you explain the fast spread and lethality outside China?

<comment><USER18> The two "fast"'s are relative. Epidemic dynamics are likely to differ in different countries for a bunch of reasons.

And, it does appear to be less lethal outside of China. That may be because healthcare systems are not yet overwhelmed, or it may be because of the smoking and pollution exposure in the different demographics. It is probably even both of those things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Am I reading the documentation correctly, that you have to register at GISAID to download the sequences, and that you can't publish any part of the sequences in subsequent papers? Would it be problematic in any way to just release them under a CC-BY-SA-NC license?

<comment><USER20> you can download a bunch of sequences here (i filtered for lung and 'oronasopharynx'):

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/virus/vssi/#/virus?SeqType...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/virus/vssi/#/virus?SeqType_s=Nucleotide&VirusLineage_ss=Severe%20acute%20respiratory%20syndrome%20coronavirus%202,%20taxid:2697049&Isolation_csv=lung&Isolation_csv=oronasopharynx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Had no idea that we could trace tiny differences so elaborately, this is amazing and gives me hope.

</comment><comment><USER22> China always wants to be seen as a global influencer. Now they certainly are, to their great shame.

<comment><USER23> Please do not post nationalistic flamebait, or any flamebait, to Hacker News.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to handle over-entitled-ivy-graduate who wants work on shiny things - <AUTHOR>

I have been coding for many years in big co. I got to work with a young guy who came from reputable college in CS as a peer.  My management thinks he is A level player thus pretty much he is on free rein.    But I am left behind with mass because I don't want to leave things in loose ends.
He asks for help for any kind of stuff and asking me to take a look at his compilation errors.  His lack of team playership makes me frustrated and not so motivated because my work is not appreciated.  How can I improve here?  Is this common with smart guy?
I have talked to my boss but he doesn't seem interested on lecturing etc.
Sorry for grumbling. <comment><USER2> It's hard to understand you fully because your writing is so unclear, eg 'But I am left behind with mass [...]' Realistically, interpersonal communication skills are just as important as programming skills. If this is how you communicate to your boss, no wonder he is ignoring you - your English is as bad as your young colleague's code. Sorry to be so blunt, but it's true. If you just wrote this in a hurry, then do yourself a favor and rewrite it to be clearer - and I will delete this criticism.

On to your main problem - your boss likes his new employee, from a combination of novelty and because it sounds good to say 'I have an Ivy League guy on my team.' This is very unfair to you but it's a common situation in human psychology. As you are at a Big company, you should have some way to talk to someone in human resources and explain your problem in general terms, to ask what the appropriate strategy is. Definitely get that advice before making a decision.

It seems to me that you have 3 basic options here: ask for a raise, ask for a transfer, or work-to-rule. Asking for a raise, you are basically saying 'hey, I am having to manage this guy in addition to my own job, it's a lot of extra work.' Ask for a transfer gets you out of the situation, and while it's disruptive for you it means the new guy becomes Someone Else's Problem. However that's a rather passive-aggressive strategy, which I don't think is a very good idea. Third option is to say 'of course I'm here to help you understand our in-house libraries and our codebase etc., but handling compiler output errors and so on are the sort of skill you have to build up for yourself.' If he still can't cope, bring him to your manager and say 'he (or we) need/s some more training with this compiler, Big Co should send him/us on a training course to improve his/our skills.'

I don't think you should blame your colleague too much for his lack of a team player mentality. Bear in mind that not only may he lack experience dealing with production code, he is probably also unfamiliar with professional and social 'rules' of the workplace. He has mostly been in college with peers of the same age and school year surrounded by supportive faculty and the ability to work on new projects rather than deal with legacy code. So he probably does not understand how much of your mental resources he is consuming. At worst he thinks you are biter and burnt out because you are not so obviously excited to be working at Big Co and you probably don't think it's cool to eat cold piazza and write code until 4am.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the critique. Sorry that my english was poor. I wrote it in a hurry for sure and that was my rant really. I didn't bring this up to my management explicitly. I will try that route. The project is interesting and I learn a lot from it. And I don't think this is a unique problem of mine. I like to solve this problem.

I have worked hard to give him better environment as senior in the org reaching out my network to look at his issues and resolving ops issues. Our legacy system is big and not agile and document is not up to par. I produced documents to help sort out this situation. But rather than being appreciated, he thought I would work for him. That's really odd result after my hard work. This is new experience to me.

My workstyle is more working on behind scene talking to the person directly as a first step because I believe in that personal interaction is better than seeking help from outside like my boss. I have sat down with him on his work ethics because he missed work deadlines a few times. He was not motivated to work on legacy system. I encouraged him to give different perspectives on his work.

I just want to learn from other people if they have this kind of experience with younger folks working in big co meaning young ambitious new employee who doesn't want to work on legacy system but they still want attention from management.

How can I ask or teach him to listen and recognize other's work more effective way?

<comment><USER2> I think you're going about it the right way. Document everything, although it's tedious, and if it doesn't settle down then ask HR for guidance. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your English seems less rushed than non-native.

The red flags that are going off for me are related to the possibility that what you're seeing is an Ivy League white male discounting you as a foreigner.

Management in large companies doesn't like complainers. Bringing a problem to management when you don't also have a good solution to offer risks you being labeled a complainer.

Going to HR should be a LAST RESORT. HR is not there to help you; it's there to keep management from getting sued.

You need to see if you can work with this guy or not. If he's going to continue to discount what you know while still depending on you, you may need to draw very clear boundaries between your work and his, making him responsible for his own compile errors.

It may just be that he's gotten off on the wrong foot. You may be able to teach him if his head isn't already full of his own importance, or if you are willing to take a secondary role to his "Ivy" leadership. If neither of these things look to be happening, I'd be looking for another job, not going to management with a complaint that effectively says, "This guy thinks he's better than me, but he isn't!" No management wants to have to deal with that kind of complaint, so will start making your life more difficult in small ways.

Your non-native English is going to cause people to underestimate your intelligence in many places in the U.S., however. May work better for you to find a job in a company with a strong international presence, which will be less likely to equate English fluency with intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER4> Give him concrete actionable critique as close as possible to the time of his "offenses". He's new to professional coding and probably doesn't know what he's doing wrong. For instance, after you help him with a compilation error that you think he should have figured out on his own, recommend him the resource that you think he should have learned it from. Take the lead in training him and putting together technical documentation around common problems new members of your team might have. It's more productive to recognize this as a flaw in the system your team has created for on-boarding new hires.

Using name-calling like in the title of this post will not help.

<comment><AUTHOR> True I know. I wanted to avoid name calling.

Please read my response above. I have worked hard to my knowledge working as ops guy in a team and had reached out my network to solve the problems and produced document. But he seemed to think my work as granted. But personally I spent a lot of time troubleshooting his issues in our legacy system and that doesn't get recognized.

It affects my morale. But at the same time, I do recognize that it is a good management experience working with smart juniors. I have kids. I see same behaviors but I cannot yell at him like I do to my kido. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are the experienced one on the team, and he is the new guy. Make sure he understands the hearty, and take a few weeks to mentor him in how things should work. Teach him the culture that you want to have at work. The fact that he is having some trouble is a good point for starting this relationship, but isn't necessary. You should be able to fix this.

</comment><comment><USER6> _" My management thinks he is A level player"_... and yet he's _" asking me to take a look at his compilation errors"_.

A-level players don't need help fixing compilation errors. In fact, A-level players rarely have compilation errors. Routinely writing code that doesn't compile (except for obvious typos) is the sign of someone who doesn't know the language they're using very well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the compilation issues and others were due to his lack of attention. How would you motivate young folks and foster team player mentality at the same time?

<comment><USER7> Maybe some sort of pair programming could be good for everyone involved?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It turned out as a rant but I do recognize it as management experience that I want to learn from. I have worked as ops in the team and reached out my network to reduce frustration that blocks his productivity. I don't think this is my unique problem. If someone has fixed this issue successfully, would you like to share?</comment>


Microsoft to Alert Users to Suspected Government Snooping - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-to-alert-users-to-suspected-government-snooping-1451528624 <comment><USER2> [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Microsoft+to+Alert+Users+to+Suspec...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Microsoft+to+Alert+Users+to+Suspected+Government+Snooping&t=ffcm)</comment>


Rejection Emails Starting to Come Out - <AUTHOR>

I know some of you didn't want HN to make a big deal of it but I thought it at least deserved a post.<p>Please place your pithy comments here. (And yes, my app was rejected. Or rather, since HN funds teams and not ideas, I personally was rejected for a second time compared to the other teams that submitted) <comment><USER2> I still wish they'd give reasons why. even if it was a checkbox thing. 'primary reason of rejection: no-cofounder' or 'bad idea', 'need more demo', 'not our area of interest', 'try again with this team and idea in 6 months' etc.

<comment><USER3> why does it matter? they're not the experts on your business - you are. unless they're buying your product, keep calm and carry on - the best validation comes from customers.

<comment><USER4> _why does it matter?_

Isn't it obvious? Presumably if you cared enough to apply, you care enough to hear why you didn't get in.

<comment><USER5> So you applied for the validation?

<comment><USER6> I applied soley for the validation. I really dont want to work in Mountain View

<comment><USER7> You're going to have to get a new account and a fake name if you want to apply again.

<comment><USER6> Funny. Not going to apply again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well.. to be honest, I don't understand why you would apply as an individual (for a second time)!

Getting a team together is no easy task, it requires discipline amongst other things. YC has been pretty vocal about favoring teams than individuals. Put a solid team together and people will notice, not just YC.

Sorry if my comment came out as harsh. there's no sugar coating it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not harsh at all -- I upvoted you -- but your comment was easily made and not very insightful.

I already know I don't have a team. I already know the YC deadline. I already know that time stands still for nobody.

Is it better not to apply at all? Did YC say they wouldn't fund any single- founder teams at all?

Do you make do with what you have and move forward, or keep trying to find a founder instead of trying to find a business model? At some point you have to make a decision and run with it, and I'm happy with applying solo.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough.

Personally I would want to have the highest probability of being accepted when/if I ever apply to YC. Frankly speaking, I don't have the time to wait around for another term if I got rejected. I would dramatically shift my product/process or pitch.

YC is not a late stage venture fund who brings cash to the table. These guys are making a big bet by validating your idea/business. A rejection from YC should make you rethink your business/people/idea.

<comment><USER9> I'm with Daniel.

If you only try things you think have a high probability of success, then you're probably not going to embark on being an entrepreneur period. The percentages of success are very low.

Applying to YC was fairly easy and didn't take much time. There's really only upside to it. The only downside is your ego when you're rejected and the remote chance that your idea/startup would be undervalued.

I also disagree with your final notion that YC is THE yardstick for success. If you read their "whynot" post, it's obvious they go through very many applications and really your idea could be skimmed and rejected quite easily. Also, the companies that have come out of YC haven't ALL been successful (no discredit to those that have been).

Lastly, at such an early stage I think entrepreneurs are always thinking through changes in business/people/idea. That's just the nature of the beast whether YC accepted you or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> hey guys: I have news for you: Zuckerberg would not have done ycombinator. I think ycombinator is great and all. But to make it in this cruel world as a startup founder, you need to be arrogant enough to be able to say $25,000 is not worth 5% of my company. To be honest, if you are not disciplined enough to moonlight and work on your startup and give away zero equity and actually earn the $6,000 it takes to live on for a few months to then quit your job and build your idea full time, you probably shouldn't start a startup in the first place. no, I have not made it yet; but I'm damn sure I'm right about the above. Thanks for reading. Don't give up.

<comment><USER11> If your argument for why YC isn't worth it is the whole cash/equity/valuation bit, then you definitely haven't talked to enough YC alumni to get a feel for the real value of the program.

OTOH, if you're saying that those who think they _need_ YC for their startups to be successful should strap on some plums, then 100% agreed. ;)

<comment><USER12> ycombinator makes sense for 2 kinds of people: 1) people who did not go to stanford/mit/etc. (if you went to those schools and you can't get a meeting with Sequoia, or anyone you want, you don't know what you are doing and should not be an entrepreneur.) 2) first time entrepreneurs who are age 24 and under and thus, do not know what they are doing as entrepreneurs. And thus need guidance.

for both of those subgroups of people, it makes a lot of sense.

ironically, you can only get into ycombinator if you went to stanford or other top university. hahaha... this will get refuted big time by the one or two cases where it is not true; but I'm sure it is largely true.

<comment><USER7> What are your chances if you went to an Ivy but were a biologist there? ^-^

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Survey for those rejected... might give some insight into how close to the cut teams got.

1\. How many questions did YC ask your team?

2\. How many views did you get on your video?

3\. How many unique visits to your prototype from YC?

4\. How many hours before the rejection email did they last visit your site?

Ours:

1\. 2 questions

2\. 3 or 4 video views

3\. 3 prototype visits I think

4\. 2.5 hours

<comment><USER14> 1\. 0 2\. 0 (well, no video) 3\. 0 (looking for ip from ycombinator.com) 4\. 0

Somehow I'm kind of relieved that I got rejected, as the real fund raising process is kind of distracting the building of the product and business. I sort of used the YC deadline as an external event to set milestone for finishing up the website, which was mostly done now.

<comment><USER13> I hear you... I burnt out in the weeks leading up to the YC deadline. Then the 2 weeks between my submission and rejection I felt like I was in limbo. I'm looking forward to getting my head down and focusing on my product.

Don't skimp on the video next time... Its the one external thing PG says he'll (definately) look at. If they like your vid, they'll probably visit your site. I put links on the vid page to my site, I'd have to check my logs to see if they clicked them from there.

<comment><USER14> Well, I looked hideous in video. :) Besides, building the product and business is priority number one, not the funding process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I got rejected but at this point it doesn't worry me too much, I'm on my way to the top regardless. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I was denied ("rejected" sounds so harsh :)). But I'm still moving forward with my idea.

I'd love to meet up with other YC rejects who are looking for a support group-- I mean people to share ideas with. :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191553>

I'm located in SF. I'm sure there are lots of bright people also looking to partner with others to form a great team.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand something. YC rejects groups because they have a limited number of slots. They say it's not that your idea is bad, but because they cannot fund everyone. Then they open up the field for late applications. For me, that means that they find my idea bad and they are still looking for good ideas to fill up their roster. Does that make sense, or am I just bitter?

<comment><USER13> I think they are just keeping the door open for the 'killer' idea & team.

<comment><USER16> It's just so demoralizing for someone to tell you that you aren't that 'killer idea and team' combo.

<comment><USER13> True, but funding is tough... Most entrepreneurs get used to hearing 'no', they press on and eventually get a 'yes'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wouldn't refer to it a rejection letter, rather understand that they just aren't investing in your company/team at this time.

Maybe do a "Ask HN: How can I improve my team, business model, etc." and we can all crowd-source improve your idea so that another angel group would be interested in investing.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an excellent idea, and it's exactly what I'm going to do in a few days.

But rejection is rejection. I wouldn't try to sugar it up too much. Reality is a good teacher.

I used to be a freelance writer. You pitch people, they reject you. When asking girls out, you ask them, they reject you. If you're a salesman, you make friends and offer people help, they reject you.

Nothing wrong with being rejected. In fact, it should be a point of pride. Life is a numbers game. You have X rejections to get through to get where you are going. You got rejected. Now you have X-1. The faster you can crank the decrement loop the faster you'll reach your destination (assuming you are learning each time through the loop, of course!)

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, what was your idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> EDIT -- Totally re-done for clarity.

You're in a conference. The keynote speaker says something cool. You go to tweet it to your friends -- but it's longer than 140 characters. So you key it into your iPad on my app and choose to share it with your FaceBook and MySpace Friends. Over on FB and MySpace, the longer quote appears and has a link back to my web app where the quote is stored.

You're reading a political or science article. About half-way down, the author makes a really cool point -- all the ideas seem to be coming together and this text just jumps off the page. You highlight the paragraph and enter it into my app, choosing also to share it on Twitter and FB.

You're looking for something pithy to tweet or put on your FB status. You visit my app and read the latest quotes from sources all over the world, sorted and ranked especially according to your tastes. Choosing the one you like the most, you upvote it, make a comment, and choose to automatically email it and post to your status updates.

You're looking for the best of the web today. Visiting my app, quotes from much longer articles and speeches are listed, customized to your tastes. Finding one that looks especially interesting, you click the link and go to the longer article, spending 10 or 20 minutes reading the full text.

Your friend hears something incredible at a news event. He quotes the speaker, links to the video, and notifies you by using my app. You visit his quote on my app, make some comments, and vote it up. Soon you and your friend have made several comments -- other people have also joined in. Your conversation about this quote is saved for you to return to when you like.

Finally, you're reading a book on your Kindle or other device. You find a particularly interesting passage. Quickly you copy it out, tag and save it, perhaps also choosing to share it on your status update. Later on, when you are not at your e-book reader, you can visit the web site and view your quotes -- along with the comments from your social network and other folks who share your same interest.

Does that describe it well enough?

<comment><USER19> You should figure out your elevator pitch. I would've preferred, "personal blurb aggregator and it's better than Twitter or Tumblr because _____"

I still don't know why anyone would use this when you can do all this using existing microblog services like Twitter, Posterous, or Tumblr and it's obviously already exists in social networks like Facebook and Buzz (status updates with comments).

<comment><USER20> Sorry Daniel, but I'm going to have to agree with Brice. Strikes me a bit as a solution in need of a problem -- someone might think "I guess it could be useful to have" but I don't know if many would think "I can see this being a core thing I really need to use every day" or would pay for.

I think there could be room for single-use publishing ("I want to store and share something easily, but not make a habit of it like a blog"), but I don't think saving quotes and inspiration in the way you've described will take you places.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree.

After all, the entire point is to have a solution to start with, which might just be a personal itch, then pivot the more you interact with customers.

The pivot is key. You and I or a hundred other folks could debate for hours the merits or drawbacks of a particular solution. The key thing here is that there is a direction that is very clear, yet also very changeable. Customer development is much more important than initial vision, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have an initial vision.

EDIT: One of the interesting things I found looking for a partner was dealing with folks and initial visions. Either nobody could agree on one, in which case nothing could get started, or potential partners were so attached to a particular vision that it was going to impeded the required later pivot. It's hard to be motivated about something you know is wrong (to some degree)

<comment><USER19> Is there space to compete with personal organizers like Evernote, but with a stronger focus on user-sharing? Like Google Reader or Delicious focused not on pages, but snippets of content?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Don't give up guys... "Success is a lousy teacher because it teaches successful people they can do no wrong." -Bill Gross #embracefailure

</comment><comment><USER22> That's too bad.

Don't let it get you down though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ain't nothing but a thing, my friend. It certainly isn't slowing me down or changing my direction, although I reserve the right to grumble a little bit. After all, I may be determined, but I'm not a robot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In the time you were first rejected to the time of the 2nd rejection, you could have done some things to save up the same seed money for yourself, established relationships with angels/VCs through networking, come up with an alternate idea (perhaps the one that was just rejected), or just started working on the idea that was originally rejected. You would have been better off than waiting around and trying to get permission to start something from YC.

</comment><comment><USER24> I got rejected, so sad but not depressed. It won't stop us moving forward simply because we believe our product concept and there are many things we could do to get traction.

<comment><USER22> That's the right attitude.

I'm going to do an ask HN on the biggest success that YC missed out on by rejecting them, it's interesting to see who made it in spite of being rejected.

Edit: Ok, it's up: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191566>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some of my thoughts on rejection, hopefully helpful:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192204>

Of course, I'll happily continue bootstrapping, iterating designs with potential customers, and building a market. Y Combinator is just an awesome way to accelerate parts of the process, not a sole gatekeeper of the startup world.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hope that didn't sound too sore. Life goes on and in the scheme of things YC is just a little thing.

Having said that, I am reminded of a quote from William Jennings Bryan, who told the story of a man getting kicked out a bar for the third time. The man picks himself up off the street, brushes himself off, and says "I'm beginning to think those fellows don't want me in there" (wink)

</comment><comment><USER16> I didn't make it either. I still think I have a great idea though, but what really intrigues me are those 60 companies that made it through to the interview round. They must have some insanely great ideas!

</comment><comment><USER26> Now I only regret that I described some of my ideas in detail. There is no any guaranty it is not gonna be shared with existing yc companies...:(

<comment><USER27> You might want to read the section "Will you sign an NDA? How do I know you won't steal my idea?" on <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html> which also refers to the section on the application form which says "Though we don't make any formal promise about secrecy, we will try to avoid disclosing your plans to potential competitors."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Questions: [pre-rejection] 1) Did you have a plan B? 2) If so, what was your plan B and your plans moving forward?

<comment><USER15> My plan B was just to keep at it and build my business regardless .... the networking was the main opportunity I saw in YC, but I've been in SF the last week and a half busily introducing myself and my platform to the largest names in the casual games industry. I'm leaving SF without YC, but I've got the support and business of 5 (and possibly a couple more) of the biggest companies, and several have made private offers to help fund me through this year.

I'm going back home tonight so I can get back to work finally and just stop meeting people. I find something really daunting about talking to a group of people but fortunately most have been young, technical, and immediately seen value in my platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can someone post the actual text of the rejection letter. I'm curious what it says.

<comment><USER13> We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

<http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html>

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff

<comment><USER27> Wait, you mean this wasn't the standard one: :D

Are you _crazy_???

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can someone post the actual text of the rejection letter. I'm curious what it says.

<comment><USER13> More interesting than the rejection letter - <http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html></comment></comment>