Going bankrupt now because the lessons of its 1759 Founder have been forgotten - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/opinion/10flanders.html

<comment><USER2> I come from the city where Wedgwood was founded.

The one thing this article fails to mention is what I believe was the company's ultimate downfall. The pot works of Wedgwood and Royal Doulton (another pottery company bought by Wedgwood a few years ago) were slowly being closed down and replaced by production in Indonesia to save money. Towards the end, the company was even looking at moving its main HQ to Jakarta. Royal Doulton became just a label - the site of their old headquarters in Burslem lies empty. Thousands of people have lost their jobs in the pottery industry in Stoke-on-Trent (an area KNOWN as The Potteries) over the past ten or fifteen years or so.

What they didn't bank on was the fact that the predominantly foreign (American and Japanese) buyers of the top-end Wedgwood wares didn't want Indonesian-made pottery, they were buying into luxury goods made in England. By cutting costs, they took away their selling point and couldn't differentiate themselves from the mass-produced Chinese stuff you get in a supermarket. There are Far Eastern "Doulton" dinner services selling for a shade over a tenner in big discount shops - and they're absolute junk. They've killed their brands.

This area has centuries of heritage in pottery and thousands of people with the skills to design and produce excellent quality wares. We are, without a doubt, the best place to make pottery in the world. But it's soulless business people with their eyes firmly on the bottom line rather than on trading off that heritage that have killed it off and condemned our city to what feels like a future of minimum wage jobs in nail distribution warehouses and mobile phone call centres. You can make stuff cheaper by outsourcing it to the Far East - but do you really want to compete with everyone else doing that when you could be producing a uniquely British product?

<comment><USER3> _But it's soulless business people with their eyes firmly on the bottom line rather than on trading off that heritage that have killed it off and condemned our city to what feels like a future of minimum wage jobs in nail distribution warehouses and mobile phone call centres._

Oh boy, another rant about how "soulless" business people who worship the almighty dollar have killed off something beautiful and magical in the world because of their greed.

Please. Most manufacturing in the western hemisphere has been offshored because they simply can't compete with overseas firms who have dramatically lower costs. It's for survival, not higher profits.

I suspect that the demand for expensive and "uniquely British" pottery is no longer big enough to support those companies, forcing them to compete in a lower market. If the demand was there, someone would be starting a factory and hiring all those experts in your area to supply that demand. And if you think the demand is there, go raise some cash and do it yourself :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They will be writing this article about the New York Times within a decade: how the current leaders lost the winning recipe of the founders and drove it bankrupt.

<comment><USER5> I'll never forget how much I looked forward to getting the Sunday Times when living in NYC in the early 90's - it was the ultimate paper with objectively reported in depth stories from around the world. Now it leans so heavily I hardly recognize it - the bias started with the current editor - a shame to loose such an incredibly valuable source of news.</comment></comment>


Caustik's "Scaling Node.js to 100k Concurrent Connections" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodefly.com/post/53848753417/caustiks-scaling-node-js-to-100k-concurrent

<comment><USER2> old, what this blog innovate on top of Caustik's?</comment>


DotCloud acquires Duostack, rolls out MongoDB support - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/exclusive-paas-startups-unite-dotcloud-buys-duostack/

<comment><USER2> I've got some test deployments on DotCloud, the only thing I don't like is that I have no idea how much resources are going to cost, I can't find prices ANYWHERE on the website.

I love how it all works, I love how fast it is and the deployment stuff couldn't have been easier (using it with git).

Is there any word on pricing?

<comment><USER3> ditto on this. I'm up to 9 instances of various types and pretty comfortable with everything. I hope the pricing is reasonable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pricing is very important to us. We won't keep you waiting much longer!

<comment><USER4> Sounds familiar! :)

"shykes 152 days ago

Expect a pricing page very soon."

Seriously, when are you going to post the pricing details?

I hope it is something very straightforward such as $0.04/process-hour.

<comment><AUTHOR> Touche :)

We went through a few iterations with test paid customers. It took a while to properly convey that our value is in reducing complexity, not selling ram. It's a long process but we're very close.

I can tell you we have a date to reveal pricing, and we intend to stick to it.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a date to reveal the date to reveal pricing?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but if you're willing to take a customer discovery phone call, in exchange of your precious feedback I will give you _tons_ of details on our pricing. 90% of it is decided.

<comment><USER5> Glad to help; email is in the profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Contacted, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great news! I've been using Dotcloud at my job for about a month with an RoR app. We used to be on Heroku w/ Amazon RDS. And I needed a separate EC2 instance for stuff like phpMyAdmin and other misc scripts. We outgrew it quickly when we needed more control over Resque. Now with Dotcloud, I can run everything under one group with fine-grained control when I need it. Its awesome!

The only thing I am missing is Memcache and MongoDB support (but it looks like thats coming soon ;D ). Also, an invite for personal use would be awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually rolled out MongoDB this morning :)

Memcache is coming soon, along with lots of other cool stuff.

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER6> Any support for Sphinx (search, not the Python doc thing) on the roadmap?

<comment><USER7> We are currently experimenting to find the best way to roll out sphinx.

We already have one alpha user that seems pretty happy with it.

<comment><USER6> Great!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's a great day for the dotCloud and duostack communities! Both teams are lurking on HN to answer questions.

We're only getting started folks!

<comment><USER8> Congrats Solomon, it's a very interesting direction. You already have some crazy momentum, I'm sure this'll only boost you farther!

Excited to see what you guys roll out next!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if they'll finish the support for basic data import commands with Mongo. Currently on Duostack I have yet to find a clear way to load dev data via all the db.copyDatabase or mongoimport/mongostore commands.

<comment><USER10> You can run mongoimport locally and specify your DotCloud MongoDB service as the remote host. You could also SSH to your MongoDB service (run "dotcloud ssh <namespace.deployment>") and do the same.

<comment><USER11> One thing you may want to consider adding to your client is a "mongotunnel" command which will set up an ssh tunnel with compression between the user's computer and your mongodb servers. I've noticed some significant performance benefit to this vs. just accessing mongod normally over the internet, mostly due to the abysmal upload rate on my cable modem. Also this allows you to avoid sending data in plain-text over the open internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do you spend all this time building this platform, but then use Wufoo for your signup form? Doesn't give me a ton of confidence. Don't mean to sound cynical, just wondering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our signup form changed a few times, and used to be much more elaborate. Tweaking it with Wufoo saved us lots of time - time we could spend on improving the platform :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would love to see the duostack environment vars management added across the board on dotcloud.

</comment><comment><USER14> Duostack publicized upcoming support for autoscaling. Is that still in the roadmap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Duostack and love it (aside from the low db quotas). Should I be worried? What will the transition be like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Matthew, we'll work our asses off to make the transition as painless as possible. You should receive an email soon with all the details. Don't hesitate to get in touch with us directly.

<comment><USER15> I'll be in touch, I was hoping to launch in the next week.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll make sure you can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been thinking about something similar by using LXC with minimal capabilities. Using git, etc.. with 'stack' specific allowable file modifications (configuration and what not), is this how dotcloud works (minus the distributed FS and flow replication for HA)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we use container technology. We were the first to do so (first prototypes in 2008) although others are catching on. That's not the key differentiator of the platform, though, anymore than Xen was for EC2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I predicted that this would happen the first time I mixed them up.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, congratulations to both companies. That was quick!

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats to Dotcloud and Duostack! Exciting news.

</comment><comment><USER20> Any plans to support Tornado?

<comment><USER7> Yes tornado/gunicorn/thin/... support is planned. Stay tuned!</comment></comment>


Offer HN: Anyone want fastga.me? - <AUTHOR>

I was going to develop an app with this name, insert excuse, you know the rest.<p>Free for whoever wants it with a name-cheap account, first come first serve in the comments.<p>*please don't ask for it to squat or resell it <comment><USER2> i could use it for my next game.

what are your terms?

<comment><AUTHOR> free. shoot me your namecheap id and enable anonymous transfers or send me the transfer code.</comment></comment>


Inside the Extreme Machine That Mimics Bombs and Black Holes - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/02/inside-extreme-machine-mimics-bombs-black-holes/ <comment><USER2> I was expecting the article to be able a supercomputer simulating these events. Pleasantly surprised to find an actual physical/physics based machine.</comment>


Ethereum Is a Planetary Scale Computer–For Gambling - <AUTHOR> https://breakermag.com/ethereum-is-a-planetary-scale-computer-for-gambling/ <comment><USER2> Ethereum's dirty little secret is that the Solidity virtual machine is poorly written and full of security holes. The reason the most popular app on the platform is Cryptokitties is because you'd have to be nuts to trust Solidity with real money.

Even if it were secure, Ethereum already has a scale problem with the core dev team recently advising people to stop submitting new dapps because the system is already overwhelmed.

<comment><USER2> In case anyone is interested, just one example will make the point. Solidity requires _every_ machine on the network to run untested code that you can't see (without some difficulty). That code can branch to anyone else's code (which is even harder to see). Evening sending Ether to someone causes code to run that you can't audit in advance in any practical way.

This design flies in the face of the open source, trusted app model where responsible IT organizes audit code before they run it -- or have it audited by outside parties. Solidity creates a bleeding hole on every computer that runs its blockchain and this alone (although there are other terrible problems, too) makes it unworkable.</comment></comment>


Direct Fusion Drive - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Fusion_Drive <comment><USER2> Via the citations, I found a video on how the engine roughly works:

[http://www.psatellite.com/direct-fusion-drive-technical- anim...](http://www.psatellite.com/direct-fusion-drive-technical-animation/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The principle section of this article makes it seem like such a complex device with many intersections between various fields of physics and engineering to make it all work. Remarkable.</comment>


Volkswagen Engineer Gets Prison in Diesel Cheating Case (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/business/volkswagen-engineer-prison-diesel-cheating.html <comment><USER2> Good. But what about his boss, and all of the management all the way up to the CEO?

<comment><USER3> Germany does not extradite its own citizens.

<comment><USER4> Under any circumstance?

<comment><USER5> Unless the extradition is to another EU country or an international court, Article 16 II of the German constitution explicitly prohibits that.

<comment><USER4> That actually sounds perfectly reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just goes to show that fraud doesn't pay. If you're ever told to do something fraudulent as a programmer, it's your ethical duty to refuse. It might have consequences, but those consequences are less damaging than the alternative.

I was recently dealing with a company on a contract where I was tasked with cleaning up their analytics tags and implementing some new ones. I noticed one of their sites had multiple google analytics tags, meaning it was double counting, so I removed one thinking I fixed it, which I did, but apparently not in their eyes.

A month or so later i get an email saying that something was wrong with one of their sites and that traffic had plummeted. I explained the situation; that they were double counting page views before. They told me to put one it back saying "I know this might be unethical, but" I refused and the subject was dropped. I continued doing work for them thinking my invoice would be paid, but they apparently had other plans, so I fired them as a client.

EDIT: I'm not very aware of the space, but I assumed that the worst case scenario is that they were selling ad space to companies directly using their google analytics numbers and using double counted numbers would be fraudulent behavior.

<comment><USER4> Fraud seems to have paid off pretty nicely for the likes of HSBC and Goldman Sachs though. Repeatedly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like the designers of the test have to take more blame here. Having a test that was "just show us once and that's it" seems like a really bad test design.

Randomly testing vehicles after they've been produced should have always been part of the testing strategy. Shouldn't have been relying on a random researcher to catch them.

Would be like testing an Athlete once for steroids then never testing them again, ever.

<comment><USER3> Would not have caught this. Every time the vehicle is randomly tested it would have entered cheat mode.

<comment><USER8> "Random test" means taking a production vehicle of any age, and testing it in real world conditions. Basically putting measurement devices over the exhaust and driving it on the highway, not in a lab.

It's less scientific but also so much more scientific if you _expect_ the object you are measuring to be cheating in lab conditions - and they should be expecting that.</comment></comment></comment>


First gene drive in mammals could aid vast New Zealand eradication plan - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603533/first-gene-drive-in-mammals-could-aid-vast-new-zealand-eradication-plan/ <comment><USER2> My first thought when reading this is "What could possibly go wrong?" while audibly rolling my eyes. Scientists with safeguards in place LOL.

My second thought was that science fiction is writing itself in real time here, right in front of me. Re-engineer a planet . . . To make it "better". (Certain terms and conditions apply, no warranty express or implied . . . .)

My third thought was a memory of the eugenics movement of the '20s and '30s. This is a much cleaner and more scientific way to rid yourself of unwanted segments of the human population, and easier to execute at a distance and at scale.</comment>


Join the YC Software Team - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/join-the-yc-software-team <comment><USER2> I can't help but wonder.

They've been posting this job for several months in monthly "Who's hiring" thread (here's one from 227 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628215))

I can't imagine that they're hiring 100s of people.

I also assume that people do apply because it's YC.

And yet, the position goes unfilled for months.

Either they have extremely unrealistic standards (a dna-spliced cross-breed of Carmack and Torvalds with business acumen of Steve Jobs) or there's something extremely unappealing about this job (after all it does seem like building CRUD apps in rails; you get to rub shoulders with Greatness Of Other People but there's curious absence of "competitive salary", or any salary, in the job description).

<comment><USER3> Maybe they have a lot of employee turnover. Always hiring because there is always someone going out to work on a new idea.

<comment><USER4> Well, it you view this page's source. You'll see tags that haven't been used since the 90s like <center>. Maybe the jobs are to maintain legacy systems and alot of engineers don't want to maintain legacy systems. Still, seems like having Y Combinator on your resume would look great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you talk about engineering benefits for working on this team besides "you will get to network with hot startups and stuff"? Maybe a bit more color on the technical challenges / culture ?

<comment><USER6> I think the greatest engineering benefit is being able to take advantage of YC's reach to have a lot of influence.

For example, the YC startup school MOOC was built by one engineer in 2 months. It's now had a major effect on over 10,000 companies who participated. That's pretty cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the actual job listing ([http://bit.ly/1Od0T2l](http://bit.ly/1Od0T2l)):

 _> We [...] don't hire people who want to work remotely._

Boo. Hiss.

<comment><USER6> Sorry. Because YC is an in-person program, we've never been great at remote work. Lots of YC companies do it well - you should check them out.

<comment><USER7> _> Because YC is an in-person program, we've never been great at remote work._

Hmm. Is this seen (internally) as a problem that needs fixing?

<comment><USER8> Should it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome, Sam. I'm definitely applying!

</comment><comment><USER10> Total shot in the wild here, but would YC be interested in having an intern? (Waterloo student here, so something from Sept. to Dec.)

</comment><comment><USER11> How much do you guys pay?

<comment><USER12> That's a great question. One interesting bit on the job application page:

> We offer standard startup benefits, including equity in YC. As a member of > YC, you'll also have opportunities to get to know a lot of the best people > in the startup world.

But no mention of a salary. In this particular case I'll make an exception to the rule that you should value your stock at $0.

<comment><USER2> Actually, it's rather clear that Y Combinator has no plans for an exit event.

To quote Paul Graham himself ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13784)):

"Ordinarily a startup should be a C corp. It's cheaper to be an LLC, but if you plan to succeed, you may as well do things right from the start.

With an LLC profits don't get taxed twice like in a regular corporation. So it makes sense to be an LLC if you expect to have substantial profits, but don't expect to grant options, sell shares, or get bought. Consulting firms and law partnerships are often LLCs. YC is an LLC."

So the shares in YC are worth $0.

<comment><USER12> The idea that shares are worth $0 because there are no plans for an exit is ridiculous.

<comment><USER11> If there's no dividends or liquidation ability then why would they be valued anything but zero?

<comment><USER12> The valuation of a company is a reflection of the value of the underlying assets. In the case of YC that is the sum of the value of all the companies YC holds stock in plus intangibles such as the value of the YC brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there much interaction with YC portfolio companies on the technical side? Also, have there previously been folk on the Software Team who have joined (or founded) YC companies?

<comment><USER6> There is some. The job is not primarily to be a "technical advisor", but it definitely comes up.

The software team is too new (only about 2 years old) for people to have left to start YC companies yet, but I'm sure it will happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do you sponsor visas for people from India or China?</comment>


Keurig 2.0 DRM Freedom Clip - <AUTHOR> https://www.gourmet-coffee.com/Keurig-DRM-Freedom-Clip.html <comment><USER2> While I applaud the spirit of the Freedom Clip, I have a better idea if you object to the DRM in Keurig's new product: Don't buy Keurig. There are plenty of alternatives. Why participate in the ecosystem at all if it means buying a product from a company whose products you object to? Buy a Mr Coffee if you have to have a K-Cup brewer.

<comment><USER3> Or go to your local coffee retailer and aquire a french press and a grinder and start making better coffee.

There are about 80 better ways to make coffee than a keurig machine; you just need to figure out the two things keurig does adequately; delivering a measured amount of water that is hot but not too hot and a measured amount of properly ground coffee.

And really, does keurig have the faintest idea as to what you consider good coffee?

<comment><USER4> > a measured amount of properly ground coffee.

And it's not even doing this well. More accurate to call it "a measured amount of ground coffee, 'aged' 8 months in a warehouse."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nobody should be promoting this inferior, environmentally disastrous product on this site, really. Makes terrible coffee, the pod design is not recyclable, and hot water + plastic is a bad equation both for coffee quality and for human health.

Edit to add: I do of course concede that DRM is evil regardless of context and must be defeated.

<comment><USER6> Inferior to what?

What's wrong with the biodegradable pods used as an example?

<comment><USER5> Inferior to basically any other method of brewing coffee. Even among pod systems, for instance, it's markedly inferior in quality and environmental impact to, say, Nespresso, which uses all-aluminum pods which are fully recyclable (Nespresso even composts the coffee inside the pods).

Nothing's wrong with the biodegradable pods, although those aren't going to be ideal for quality either, and those are a tiny slice of the market.

The simple fact is that this is an awful product that is doing vast amounts of environmental damage. Read up a bit yourself and you will see what I mean.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_K- Cups](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_K-Cups)

<comment><USER7> I have a Keurig at home, and I exclusively use the reusable metal mesh filters you can find right next to the machines themselves at the supermarket. The only thing that gets "thrown out" when using those are old coffee grounds, and I don't throw those away, they get added to my garden soil for extra nutrients[1].

I realize that I'm probably in the minority among Keurig owners, and I certainly wish the company itself would be more responsible and make 100% recyclable pods. The way I see it though, the machines themselves are nearly loss-leaders; Green Mountain (parent company of Keurig) makes almost all of its money on the throwaway pods, and they aren't getting a dime out of me.

[1] [http://www.sunset.com/garden/earth-friendly/starbucks- coffee...](http://www.sunset.com/garden/earth-friendly/starbucks-coffee- compost-test)

<comment><USER8> At that point, why do you use a Keurig at all? What's the benefit besides the convenience of the pre-measured, pre-ground pods?

<comment><USER9> Instant hot. You can buy a instant hot water dispenser for your sink, and decades ago they were really cool and lasted for a decade, but the modern ones are all precision engineered for maximum profit to fail in less than a year, requiring plumbing work to replace. There are desktop hot water dispenser products but they cost about as much as a loss leader k-cup machine.

Also my wife has one of those re-usable coffee grounds things but sometimes you just want a quick cup and don't want to fool around. Today I'm running late and if I had an extra 5 minutes I'd stop at starbucks and blow $5 instead of 0.50 on this disposable cup or $0.005 on home ground. I drink black tea and I have an emergency stash of tea kcups. I think it slightly inferior but not that bad. It is much more bitter than my looseleaf home brewed. Obviously my kcup tea always tastes kinda coffee-ish which is a little gross.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who is not a heavy coffee drinker can anyone explain what the attraction of Keurig is without ranting about something dumb like "Everyone's a sheeple!" or "Because the masses don't care about flavor!"?

Is it because it's quick? Or just hassle-free? According to some comments here their coffee pods also aren't recyclable, which seems like it wouldn't mesh well with coffee drinkers in SF.

<comment><USER11> Quick AND hassle free. I don't have time in the morning to prepare coffee - the kids have to get to school. The literal two button push to get coffee is a lifesaver.

<comment><USER12> Why not just take caffeine pills then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice! Now if only we could finish reverse engineering the Tassimo barcodes..

[https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3919/...](https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3919/reverse- engineering-t-disk-barcodes-for-tassimo-coffee-makers/6851#6851)

</comment><comment><USER14> I like what they are doing. But my response to DRM coffee machines is basically this:

[http://www.amazon.com/Bodum-Brazil-French-Press- Coffee/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Bodum-Brazil-French-Press- Coffee/dp/B00008WU9F)

<comment><USER15> My coffee-drinking life got so much better when a friend gave me one of these a couple years ago. Easier _and_ better-tasting than the alternatives (a "normal" coffee pot on the one hand, and Keurig-type machines on the other).

Note to anyone considering these: make sure you get coarse-ground coffee if you use a French press. It makes a big difference.

<comment><USER16> The next step is to get a burr grinder and grind the beans to the right coarseness just before you use them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every time this is mentioned, the discussion devolves into coffee aficionados saying this and that method of coffee delivery is far superior and it exasperates me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Love that this is by the Rogers Family. I but their coffee is k-cups at Costco - at first out of curiosity and price, but now because I've found that it's pleasant and helps bring clean water and education in their growing regions. Much like 3 Avocados, except for 3 Avocados doesn't do K-cups.

</comment><comment><USER19> Will be happy to replace my taped-on version with this in a few weeks. The fact that this is the company I already buy all my coffee from is quite satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER20> This makes me so happy. If they get a C&D, I'm sure/hope the schematics are leaked for a 3d printed version.

In the long run, you can't stop the signal, Mal.

</comment><comment><USER21> Aren't there different brewing temps/times? Shouldn't this have a little jog wheel on the side to select the possibilities?

</comment><comment><USER22> Why does it brew in the absence of the DRM code? Why would you ever design the null test be equivalent to the success case?!

<comment><USER23> The "DRM" seems to be a small led/sensor combination that tests to see id the lid of the K-cup fluoresces in a particular way. The clip obscures the sensor, and provided a surface with the right kind of fluorescence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you are getting your coffee from a pod, then DRM is the very least of your problems.

<comment><USER25> The holier than thou coffee aficionados on this site are hilarious. I wish I was in the K-cup coffee business and they were my non-K-cup competitors, since they do not seem to understand why so many people like K-cups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wait, why can't you cover it with tape?

<comment><USER27> According to the article, the machine reads a special ink from the lids of the cups. My assumption is that the orange dot on this clip contains that ink so as to fool the machine, not just block the reader.

<comment><USER26> Fair enough, cover it with a discarded cup+tape?

<comment><USER28> That's what these guys [1] did.

[1] [http://www.keurighack.com/](http://www.keurighack.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome

</comment><comment><USER30> Wait gourmet-coffee.com is touting a means to deliver coffee from a pod machine?

ripped-abs.com shows how to make load pennies into their satchel-socks

turbro-touring.com shows you how to adhere inlet vent stickers to your fenders

There is nothing gourmet about the brownness that comes out of a Keurig

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think I'm alone in think the only way I would use a Keurig system is if it was given away on Craigslist. I would then buy this devise that mimics their special ink, and buy a reusable cup. (I do see those little cups everywhere, along with plastic tooth picks. I know both products have a biodegradable units, but the ones I see are not biodegradable. Edit--I don't know why I see the used Keurig cups. Maybe, I'm mistaken? I do see the Dentek tooth picks everywhere, and Jonny you should be ashamed. I guess that sailboat in high school wasen't enough? Oh yea, I never see the biodegradable picks-- because they are more expensive. Lower the price, and do the environment a favor, before government steps in and bans your product--like Pull Tabs? Inside rant!

<comment><USER32> I actually saw a woman driving her car with one of those flosser things in her mouth today. First time I've ever seen one in the hands of a person outside of a house or store. I'm certain it's now free of captivity and back in its natural habitat of the street.</comment></comment>


Half A Billion Blog Posts Later, Google To Give Blogger A Revamp  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/half-a-billion-blog-posts-later-google-to-give-blogger-a-revamp/

<comment><USER2> I hope they also get rid of 'Blogger' profiles and make Google Profiles more unified instead, amongst all Google-provided services.

</comment><comment><USER3> That is good news. I used to host my own blog using a variety of CMS systems. A few years ago, I switched to Blogger, and use a blog.- subdomain from my main web site. Except for occasionally exporting for backup all my blog data (as I do with Google docs and GMail), it is all hassle free.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope that Blogger does such a great job of this revamp that they begin to attract users who would otherwise choose Wordpress.

If they do this, they will have an excellent platform that developers may consider returning to.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Blogger has been used for over half a billion blog posts (with over half a trillion words in total)."

The average blog post is ~1000 words? I would have guessed way shorter. The majority of posts I read are shorter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's the announcement <http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/03/whats-new-with- blogger.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> Competition is always good. Finally an overdue upgrade and nice to see continuous development. I think Blogger is one of the few Google product which still has relevance and consistency. If only they had worked a little faster to catch up with Wordpress and had controlled their spam earlier in the game.

<comment><USER8> _Competition is always good._

In some of your other posts, you've said that you support universal public education, but that seems to directly contradict the statement you've made here.

Government schools have no competition, at least where I live. When I was a child, my parents paid taxes, which paid for government schools. They had no choice but to send me to terrible schools because they couldn't afford anything else after paying their taxes (my parents were not rich).

Attempts to compete against government schools are always rebuffed by people as being "against public education". So which is it? Competition is always good or government schools are somehow sacrosanct, or neither?

<comment><USER7> You are comparing apples with oranges. I said competition is good because we are talking about blogging space. Imagine if there was only one blogging platform. It would not be a nice situation. So Wordpress and Blogger both developing actively is a good thing for the rest of us. It would be best if more blogging platforms could jump in and improve the space (not that there aren't others already).

Back to education and government. You are already blaming your paying taxes as a culprit for you attending bad government school. What proof do you have to back up your allegation? What if there was no public school and less government taxes and still no private school to provide you education? Do you think private schools are only going to crop up because government isn't charging more taxes? What guarantee is there that you'd have a good private school in the absence of any public school? Blaming taxes for all the ills of the government is a myth propagated by one of the political party. Check out the countries where there are no government schools of any quality (because people don't pay taxes and things are pretty much messed up all around). You'd be glad you attended public school in America irrespective of the quality compared to many other countries of the world.

<comment><USER8> _What proof do you have to back up your allegation?_

I served 11.5 years in a government school (not the customary 13 because I was able to graduate early). My time there was _awful_. I would have learned more just by staying at home!

Government school didn't even help with getting into college. I had a D average in high school, so I privately educated _myself_ for a few years in all kinds of ways, and got into a very nice university (and maintained a 3.89 gpa in a science major). So that's how I _know_ government school is useless.

On top of that, my mother was a government school teacher. The horror stories she has about the way they run things are awful. This was all in the the strongest teacher's union state in the country (WI), which made the problem even worse. (When teachers want to set up a system to rate each other so that better teachers earn more money, the union throws such a fit that the plan never gets heard. When teachers want to teach foreign languages before or after school, the government school administrators throw a fit and shut it all down. This could not happen at a private school.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rankdit , the 10 sec. video social network - <AUTHOR> http://www.rankdit.com <comment><AUTHOR> Rankdit , is the new video social network ios app , where users share 10 sec. videos every day to their country walls , to express their life styles , trending topics, talents and valuable moments and to enter an exciting daily challenge with other users around the world to vote for the best video of the day , and let users decide who deserve to be the Next world Celebrity .</comment>


On why learning to program is hard - <AUTHOR> http://hostiledeveloper.com/2014/04/26/on-why-learning-to-program-is-hard.html <comment><USER2> I suspect learning programming is hard because programming in any particular language isn't _just_ the language.

It's also an eco-system. Libraries, learning how to find things that others have done. It's what your program is connected to, how to interface with other devices and things written in other languages, (and so on.)

Most tutorial books I've read are tours of the standard library functions that the author uses regularly. Perhaps communicated via toy programs, perhaps not. If that's the interface people are initially presented with, (and I'd be amazed if that's not most people's experience of Learn To Program tutorial books,) then of course programming is going to be hard to get into.

<comment><USER3> It's all those things and the ability to see how very small parts form to create a larger thing.

Or in the words of Donald Knuth: "the psychological profiling [of a good programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large."

Note that he doesn't necessarily mean "low level" as in "machine code and system calls" just smaller parts of a system.

<comment><USER4> One of my favorite programming tutorials is "Write Yourself A Scheme." It's not "Here's the language, here's the API, etc" it's "Let's accomplish this task. Here's some documentation. Here's a breakdown of what you need to do. Figure out how to do it." There's no answer key to the exercises, either your solution worked or you need to redo it.

[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who doesn't know Ruby, I would like to point out that this program is an excellent demonstration of why Ruby's non-standard syntax is awful, confusing and hard to learn!

Ruby's syntax for defining a function is apparently:

        fizz_buzz = ->(number) do
            ... stuff ...
        end

This is very confusing if you've used C where -> is a binary operator. I understand what it does, but only because I've used Coffeescript. And the "do" keyword in most languages is used to signal loops, apparently "do...end" is a block delimiter in Ruby instead.

Having functions be defined with expressions is confusing.

The string mess on the next line is an awful feature that makes languages such as shell, Perl and PHP bug-prone -- and no exception here. Apparently double quoting in Ruby means next to nothing, because it seems like a damn-near Turing complete language which has magic meaning inside quotes. The double quotes, pound sign, braces, and question marks have meanings here that are rather non-obvious.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pff easy.</comment>


You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-draw-it-how-family-income-affects-childrens-college-chances.html <comment><USER2> As somebody who's spent some time studying the impact of various levers (income, educational achievement, maternal education etc) on university/college enrolment I'd like to throw in an economist's perspective that the NY Times did not include in the chart.

You may draw the conclusion from the chart that income prevents the poorest from attending university because they can't afford the fees. This is highly misleading. There's substantial evidence [at least in rich countries, see US example below] that when you control for educational achievement (i.e. how well students achieve in pre-uni schooling), income level is a much weaker predictor of whether someone attends university. The primary driver of low university enrolment is educational achievement. i.e. the main chain of causation is this: low income -> low education achievement -> low college attendance. The key to raising university enrolment among poor students is to provide better education/development opportunities and aspiration.

This is important because the policy implications are vastly different according to how well you understand the data. The UK is an interesting case in point where tuition fees (£9k per year) have been levied in England for almost a decade; whereas this has been abolished in Scotland. Despite this, Scotland has the worst university enrolment among its poorer students within the union. [1]

Edit: Ok I found the paper with US data [2]. The Evidence on Credit Constraints in Post Secondary Education by Pedro Carneiro and James Heckman (FYI, a nobel laureate).

Note the graphs on pages 17 and 20 which illustrate the point most clearly. When you compare them, you can see that once you control for a range of important variables - peers within the same AFQT test scores have very similar enrolment rates across all income quartiles.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Fre...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Free- fees-does-not-help-poor-attend-Scottish-universities.html)

[2] [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > The key to raising university enrolment among poor students is to provide > better education/development opportunities and aspiration.

I'm going to risk calling you out on this, because I think what goes unstated here is that public resources cannot compete with private ones when it comes to education. It's sad to look at Johnny Trust Fund, and see that he is born with a true educational leg up over poor children, and there's really no way around it. If Johnny's parents have the will and motivation to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year educating Johnny, they can. I'm sorry, but no country can compete with that. Even increasing per-pupil spending in public schools to that of the Phillip's Academies is arguably impossible in all but a handful of the top GDP/capita nations, let alone all the private tutoring and traveling and internships that Johnny has access to.

So, yeah, if you manage to educate poorer children as well as wealthy children, they would achieve similar university performance, but getting their educational background to parity with one-another is so far out of the realm of possibility for most nations that I don't think it should even be mentioned.

<comment><USER4> It's not clear that _money per student_ is the metric that matters.

Parental involvement, for example, is crucial for motivating students, imparting various skills (ie time management, studying) and setting appropriate expectations[1]. This is more a matter of cultural and structural factors. Parents that have the time and motivation to care for their children's education could have a significant effect without worrying about per-student outlays.

Perhaps there's a way to replicate this by restructuring school to provide positive parent-like influences? I don't know, but it's not a matter of throwing money at the problem, one way or another.

[1]: I remember seeing a few studies on this. "Student Motivation: An Overlooked Piece of School Reform" looks like a reasonable overview of the subject: [http://www.cep- dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=405#sth...](http://www.cep- dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=405#sthash.ABEwXRV0.dpuf)

<comment><USER3> I don't think I claim that's the only metric that matters. If I did, that was a mistake. Money is a big influencing factor in-terms of saying what kinds of resources a child has access to for their education, because it's simple to turn money into tutoring or other life experiences. But obviously, for example, having parents who themselves are well-educated and understand how to educate children is a resource that can be more valuable than just having parents with money. There are, of course, many many other examples of non- monetary resources that are accessible by some children and not other, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are so many things I like about this data presentation:

\- it uses percentiles rather than absolute numbers (though, some scaling would be great, e.g. on the top axis),

\- it presents a full dependency rather than squeezes it to a number or two,

\- it makes you engaged by prompting to take a guess,

\- it shows other guesses.

I added it to my list of good examples of data vis/presentation.

</comment><comment><USER6> A lot of great comments here on the content and presentation.

I'm really interested, also, in the technical aspects of how this was put together.

For instance, the app was able to recognize the shape of the line I drew. On my first attempt, it correctly identified that my line was an S shape; then when I started fiddling around, it was able to identify that my line was (roughly) straight. I wonder what method they used to identify those shapes.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I was really interested too. From what I can get from playing around in the console, they (probably jashkenas and his cronies) they're using d3 to do the rendering. Since d3 has convenient map / filter / reduce chains, I assume (though have no proof), they can figure out the shape of your line by doing ye olde' rise / run calculation for each point. If your slopes gets significantly bigger at some point, you must have a S shape. They also force you draw only 1 point per x-increment, so they don't have to handle bad users drawing vertical lines.

<comment><USER8> Glad to see so much discussion of this here! Always cool to see our work on HN.

To answer this question, yes, we (Jeremy's cronies) are indeed using D3 to do most of the drawing and interactions. He also forced us to use Underscore.

The heat map showing everyone's responses is done in Canvas.

Hope that helps.

-KQ

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So do we keep bikeshedding and tweaking little levers or do we actually try and fix the fundamental problem?

I can't be the only one who is tired of seeing all of these snippets about small parts of a large system.

We need to deal with wealth inequality. We live in a world... hell, we live in countries, in cities with 10 orders of magnitude wealth difference.

A western person earns 10e6 - 10e7 over a lifetime, revenue.

A western person stashes away 10e0 - 10e7 over a lifetime, balance sheet.

Why? It is predominantly not about decision making and choices to save. Yes, people do make suboptimal decisions. But mostly, people are simply unable to save because the baseline of living sucks up all of their work.

In the UK a poor person rents instead of owning because we allow the group of capitalists to own all housing and restrict new building.

Until we deal with that we are just pissing around.

<comment><USER10> Savings rates: US 17% India 32% China 51%. Apparently the Chinese manage to save without having that "baseline of living" sucking up all their work. Yet Chinese people earn far less than Americans .

How is that possible? It's almost as if your "baseline of living" is actually "living high on the hog as if tomorrow doesn't exist".

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNS.ICTR.ZS](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNS.ICTR.ZS)

<comment><USER9> The average person in the UK cannot save 51% of net income. It is totally impossible. Difficult even for someone earning above the median wage.

Is paying the rent 'living high on the hog'? I don't get it. Rent alone on a studio flat in loads of places is 10K. If you move away you earn less than you save on the rent.

What's the suggestion? Live 2 to a room? Live in a car?

Theoretically possible if you're determined I suppose.

<comment><USER10> The 5'th decile in the UK earns a little under double what the 1st decile does. Since the people in the 1st decile aren't dying, that suggests that yes - someone in the 5'th decile could live like a person in the 1'st decile and save 50%.

[http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes- how-...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how-salary- compare)

Pretty much every story you could tell to explain this away (e.g., folks in the City earn 2x as much but cost of living is 2x higher) kind of undermine any real inequality story.

<comment><USER9> How does that follow?

A person working in London cannot live like a person working in Preston (for the same amount). The same quality of life costs more.

Surely you understand this? Do you work FT? I don't really know how to go further with this, it feels a bit like trying to prove that the sky is blue.

<comment><USER10> If that's the case, then you need to adjust your income/wealth/etc inequality numbers by that same factor. I.e., the inequality for a person living in London and earning 2x as much as someone in Preston might need to be adjusted down to perfect equality (assuming the cost of living in London is also 2x Preston). So why didn't you adjust your numbers in this way?

Also, if inequality is merely a matter of where one lives, why do you care?

As I said, this sort of observation seriously undermines basically every complaint about inequality.

<comment><USER9> Well, my argument is that most cannot save. Relevant amounts, anyway (a grand a year isn't going to really get you anywhere).

Your rebuttal was that the 5th decile earning twice as much surely can, because the 1st decile survive by spending less.

My argument is that the 5th decile are predominantly in higher cost of living areas and end up in roughly the same situation.

But let's just concede and say that they can. No doubt some can - there are people earning median UK wage in the north.

The bottom guys still can't save at all. Do they just not matter? Should 10/20/30/40% of the population be stuck renting for their entire lives? Is that reasonable?

I am not making the claim that a London worker earning double a Preston worker is a problem.

My claim is that people earning far more than that being able to build masses of capital whilst others cannot build capital at all is a problem.

It's not really about the numbers at all; it's more the idea that me "owning" 20 homes and forcing others to labour if they want to live in them is OK.

I dunno. I kind of don't have enough interest in continuing this, I gain nothing from convincing you. I know people who cannot save, many of them, they exist. They aren't intelligent enough to get out of that hole unless they won a lottery or similar. I don't need to convince you that they exist, because I can like, go and visit them. I want to fix that, you seemingly don't, best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate being the typical negative commenter who points out that correlation doesn't equal causation, but in the case of this article I think it's warranted.

Just because high-income families send kids to college more does not mean that high income causes it. A recent study of Swedish lottery winners showed that the kids of lottery winners did not do better on measures of health or education, suggesting that wealth does not have a direct or short-term impact on child outcomes. [[http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/wp/2015/1060](http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/wp/2015/1060)]

<comment><USER12> So... why are you doing something you hate?

<comment><USER11> That's a fair question. When many people make the correlation!=causation argument, they do so to express skepticism, often without any evidence or positive contribution to the discussion. However, in this case, I think the argument is warranted because there is a large body of evidence that suggests wealth does not directly affect whether kids go to college. I linked to one interesting study, but I can link to more if you'd like.

In any case, I hoped my comment and link added value to the discussion. If not, I'd be happy to remove them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do not understand why poor people have kids. There should be a guideline for married couples, which tells them that if family income is less then 90K in NYC, you can not afford to have kids, if it is more than 120K then they can have one kid etc.

"Having kids" not for everyone. Kids degrade your lifestyle, drain you financially and limit your chances if you are poor. It's a SCAM.

<comment><USER14> If that's what you think, having kids is certainly not for you, regardless of what any "guideline" would say.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, like having a vacation home in Florida is not for me. If I want i can have it, i can apply for mortgage and buy one tomorrow, but i can not afford it. I should not do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does it matter? (for reference I went to a decent university having had a poor upbringing).

Are we substantially better off in a world with 1000 arbitrary people going to e.g. Cambridge vs one in which 1000 upper class children go? (expand the concept to university in general if you wish).

You still have unbalanced outcomes based on what eventually comes down to a lottery of some sort. Even if you choose the absolute best 1000, are the next 10000, 20000, 30000 actually materially worse?

Going beyond that, surely the concept of prestige in and of itself is problematic? Should you get a better life because you have a higher IQ? Why? Do we actually want that? Would we design the world that way if we actively chose?

I certainly wouldn't... why should my friend have a shit life due to quirk of birth? Why should my other friend have a dramatically better life due to the same?

We seem to strive to normalise things that are/were seen as handicaps, like race, disability, sex, etc. etc. But we are seemingly unwilling to accept that the idea of ranking humans is broken. It only makes sense as a hack to encourage productive behaviours - it might not even be needed any more soon.

<comment><USER15> Great line of enquiry.

I suspect it matters because we assume those with attributes such as greater IQ would utilise the education better then a random group of lottery winners. We then assume that that would result in greater communal good.

We also live under the illusion of attempts at fairness rather than perpetuating privilege.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it's great exercise, but why don't they just use an absolute scale for parent's income? "About $2,400 in annual income separates the bottom two dots, while nearly $1 million separates the top two", I would never have guessed this either.

<comment><USER17> I think this way scales better - it's easier to visualize than the massive gap would be. And where we are in the news cycle is to focus on problems common to all classes, not the problems that divide classes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would be great to see the results from this without the provided point.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like a great A/B test. Show half the users the 50th %ile and half nothing, then compare the resulting curves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Results are interesting, though unfortunately not too surprising.

As an aside, I did really well in drawing the curve. The website asked me "Is that you, Raj Chetty?" [[http://imgur.com/XU4UNya](http://imgur.com/XU4UNya)]

</comment><comment><USER21> How would the curve change if the sample were cut to reflect only those students who scored in the top 1/3 on the SAT?

<comment><USER22> That would be very interesting. I would expect the higher income side to remain practically unchanged while the lower income side would move up to 50% or so, but still be far below the higher income side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> link is 404... [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you- dra...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-draw-it-how- family-income-affects-childrens-college-chances.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think a more interesting line to see would be graduation rates...At least in the US, the average graduation rates from college are surprisingly (at least to me!) low at around 55%.

</comment><comment><USER25> Dragged a line, it locked my windows 7 office box and forced windows explorer to restart after about two minutes of waiting. I expect more from them.

</comment><comment><USER26> If your family makes just above $150K per year in the US (not uncommon, especially in high cost of living areas like NYC, SF, DC, etc), you fall in the category where you have no "need" and according to some outdated government formula can afford the whole tuition, usually 20-60K per year.

The reality, however, is that 150K is the minimum living wage for a family with two kids in a place like SF, and usually not enough.

The sad part is that someone who makes $500K a year or has millions in the bank falls in that same category.

<comment><USER11> No offense, but your claim is ridiculous. $150K is not the minimum living wage for a family of four in SF. Plenty of families get by on less.

Here is a map of incomes in SF: [http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San- Francisco-Califor...](http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco- California.html)

And here's a better map, though it doesn't seem to have household/family incomes: [http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/](http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/)

<comment><USER27> Living wage is different than the poverty line. I wouldn't be surprised if $150k was really tight for a family of 4 in SF proper.

Running the calculations, a payroll calculator indicates that $150k/yr turns into $3925 take home every 2 weeks or just over $100k/yr. The housing alone for a three bedroom (assuming everyone shares a room) would run at least $60k/yr. That leaves $40k/yr to support 6 people. That may be possible, but it's not easy and it's damn near impossible to be saving for college on that amount of money.

<comment><USER11> (1) A family of four means four people

(2) $40k/year is enough money to support four people (or even six), if you've already paid taxes and rent. That's more than $500-800 per month for food/clothes/transportation/entertainment, etc.

(3) Middle-income parents spend about $7,000 a year per child (or $600/mo), not counting housing. [[http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2014/...](http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2014/08/0179.xml&contentidonly=true)]

Of course, many people would like families to get more than $150,000 of income, but I hope we all agree that it's common to get by on less than $150,000 of family income, as most families do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Drew a oscillating curve. Definite lulz in the outcome.

</comment><comment><USER29> Tangentially, how is that "applet" created?

<comment><USER30> Its mostly d3.js

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is nonsense. If you correct for Socio-economic status, you'll find the best predictor is IQ. You can give a kid an IQ test at age 10 and know whether or not he'll graduate college.

Since IQ is heritable, kids from more successful homes will be more successful.

<comment><USER32> _If you correct for Socio-economic status_

...which is the entire point

<comment><USER31> You'll find SES isn't what this is showing--it's IQ differences.

<comment><USER32> It isn't, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What does "Connecting the dots backwards" mean ? - <AUTHOR>

I have big dreams and I read a lot of Self help books. Though I work tirelessly on things but I often get distracted among multiple projects and eventually none of them brings out substantial result. That's why I took a job to ensure that I am not completely wasted.<p>I have read the phrase "Connecting the dots backwards" so many times but I am sure that I couldn't get it's meaning correctly. I read it again in "http://www.jonathanfields.com/what-lucky-people-do-differently/" , so please help me in knowing it. <comment><USER2> Here, let me Google that for you:

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22connecting+the+dots+bac...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22connecting+the+dots+backwards%22)

Top hit:

[http://www.quora.com/What-does-Steve-Jobs-famous-words- conne...](http://www.quora.com/What-does-Steve-Jobs-famous-words-connecting- the-dots-backwards-really-mean)</comment>


The Nuclear Sins of the Soviet Union Live on in Kazakhstan - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01034-8 <comment><USER2> Similar story about US Nuclear Test Site in Nevada - [https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/new- health...](https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/new-health- survey-at-nuclear-test-site-details-decades- of/article_4cfc0b66-67ae-5a5d-a542-6977b5164e7d.html)</comment>


The Rise of Privacy Tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.riseofprivacytech.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> For innovators, investors, experts, and evangelists of privacy tech.</comment>


Project Amy - App.net messaging integrated natively into Messages for the Mac - <AUTHOR> http://informalprotocol.com/2013/03/project-amy/

<comment><USER2> Wait, this is an official Apple api to add additional networks to Messages? I'm surprised it exists. And even more surprised I haven't heard about it until now.

> > [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/AppleA...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/IMServicePluginFrameworkRef/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009478)

Two years old. Woah. This is very interesting. I feel silly for asking but does anybody know if this sort of thing is possible for the iOS Messages? (Probably not, but since this exists I don't know what to think anymore)

OP where's the source to Project Amy?

<comment><USER3> When Apple announced this framework back then at WWDC they showed a cool sample plugin: The plugin would receive a message, feed it through ELIZA (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA>) to create a response message. The demo ended with two iMessage instances chatting to each other and both used ELIZA. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks, Steve. Really insightful integration of the best new API's in APP.net into a mainstream app. Many of APP.net's API's are truly superior, a jewel in the rough.

I agree that it's even better than Apparchy - the best hack at last Oct's hackathon.

It's devs like you (and others) which belie APP.net's long-term strength and genius.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is so great!

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome!</comment>


Tell HN: RTP Hackers & Founders meeting is tonight - <AUTHOR>

Any of you folks in the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill area, please come join us tonight in beautiful Morrisville NC for the first ever "RTP Hackers & Founders" meeting.  We'll be at the Texas Steakhouse & Saloon on Airport Boulevard from about 6:30pm until ... <comment><USER2> I can't make it tonight but I hope you have a great time!</comment>


Goodhart's Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed? - <AUTHOR> https://thegradient.pub/over-optimization-of-academic-publishing-metrics/ <comment><USER2> Glad to see this important piece here (disclosure: I am one of the editors of The Gradient).

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5089308](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5089308), from RCIS 2009 (Beel and Gipp) noted that "Google Scholar seems to be more suitable for searching standard literature than for gems or articles by authors advancing a view different from the mainstream."

Unrelated, but interesting: scraping Google Scholar is remarkably annoying if you want to actually use the data. The easiest way (in my experience) seems to be regex hacking on the BibTeX files, but this seems truly broken.

<comment><USER3> Blocking scraping is the norm for Google, for instance the Public Youtube API allows you to view a grand total of 3 or so videos per key per day before it starts blocking you.

Google has basically got as bad as twitter in terms of giving a big middle finger to third party devs, but they have been smart enough to maintain a completely useless public/free tier for most things.

<comment><USER2> That makes sense. I'd hope that Scholar would be different, though.

A piece on how a researcher spent a summer filling out CAPTCHAs / scraping: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04190-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04190-5)

<comment><USER4> Scholar should be different, considering that they are the only ones in the world who are given access to everything

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something seems a bit wrong with the graph "Publication rate by career length" \-- should the y-axis be "Average number of published papers _per year_ "? (I can't imagine that someone whose first paper was in the 1950s only published 1 additional paper in the next 30 years)

<comment><USER6> They got their PhD and entered industry. Publication was no longer a priority and maybe not even an option.

<comment><USER5> If the axis labels are correct (which, after referring to the full paper, they seem to be) then I think this is the only reasonable explanation. I.e. that the dataset tracks _all_ authors of scientific publications, rather than those who are active researchers (or had research careers and subsequently passed). [Note: I did not see any attempt to take this into account upon skimming the full paper]

Given the high attrition rate in many academic fields (and the small number of publications typical in early years) this would then rationalize the low numbers seen here. Though, I would say the meaning of these numbers would be quite different than if this were presented for those who had research careers (the more relevant number I think).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fantastic over view of current trends in academia. There is truly a huge bias in the research publications. I think blogging is a better way to put forth your ideas and research rather than getting a publication in some cases.

<comment><USER8> Why not both? Berkeley AI Blog, Stanford AI Blog, CMU ML blog... all show that you can do both. Reviews (part of paper submission process) are legitimately useful, if done well. As a researcher, having Arxiv as a standard medium and conferences to help filter interesting papers (if imperfectly) is also useful.

<comment><USER7> Yes, agreed. Arxiv is also an awesome platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent article. A relevant link would be the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) [https://sfdora.org/](https://sfdora.org/)

Back to the article, lots of gems, like:

>Today's researchers can publish not only in an ever-growing number of traditional venues, such as conferences and journals, but also in electronic preprint repositories and in mega-journals that offer rapid publication times.

Did I just read a very normal point of view of a researcher putting on equal footing electronic preprint repositories and mega-journals?

The BOAI Open Access preachers surely can't believe their eyes :) Heresy! (No researcher was involved in the BOAI flawed definition of green OA as archiving and gold OA as publishing.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Do people benefit from gaming the system? Then it surely is being gamed. And they do. Funding and tenure depend on these metrics.

> Overwhelmed by the volume of submissions, editors at these journals may > choose safety over risk and select papers written by only well-known, > experienced researchers.

There is a bit of a "circle jerk" in this process: if you know the right people, you can get better reviews. In return, you review their papers or requests favorably. That also leads to repeating authors.

<comment><USER11> Sometimes people idealize academia though. It's important to realize that everything has its flaws :).

<comment><USER12> The thing to realize about academia is that the vast majority of people in it have never experienced the real world. They went straight from grade school to college to _working_ in academia, and stay there until they retire or die.

Academia is literally all these people know, and they've been sheltered their entire lives. No one should be surprised that this produces strange results.

Obviously there are exceptions, but there's no denying it produces some interesting world views.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes. But a good department will know you for who you are. Plenty of great science takes a long time do do, and it is known it's hard to get funding for long-term monitoring experiments. Most grant money is for new and innovative ideas and no one is pushing out one of those every year. And if you are then you're not doing 90% of the work on any of them.

</comment><comment><USER4> They should have limited the analysis to the most popular journals. There are tons more journals nowadays because its so easy to run one - but it s more important to know what's happening at the well known ones. The lesser know are largely ignored

</comment><comment><USER14> Tough call: Goodhart's Law says yes, metrics will be gamed, but Betteridge's law says the answer is no.

<comment><USER15> One of those is a fundamental condition of a game-theoretic scenario, independent of environment. The other is a marketing trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> No. We're all being gamed. Academics were just nearer the front of the queue.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wish there was a Google n grams for Google scholar...</comment>


#RSAC: Open-Source Software Is a Public Health Hazard - <AUTHOR> http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/rsac-opensource-software-public/

<comment><USER2> Seems like the author may have misunderstood him?</comment>


Why LayerVault and DesignModo battle over profit while others build open-source - <AUTHOR> http://www.compylr.com/post/open-source-flat-ui-now-sue-me-sue-you-blues

<comment><USER2> This is absolutely ridiculous, and misses not only the point of open source, but the entire point of the creative economy.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's entirely accurate. The point of the creative economy isn't to largely regurgitate the ideas of others and then slap a price tag on it. The idea of a creative economy, at least in my eyes, is to reward those who are exceptionally talents and create something new and of value. Taking an amazing open source project, putting some new makeup so to speak on it, and calling it a product hardly seems to fit with the spirit of what I call the creative economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great point. Seems like designers are missing out on the whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing.</comment>


Opportunity '08: Browsers?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/01/02/opportunity-08-browsers/ <comment><USER2> Curious how all the browser logos are round. It's as if people have unconsciously assimilated the idea that a globe represents the web.

<comment><USER3> "world wide web" arouses pretty specific imagery, I suppose</comment></comment>


Refactoring if statements for readability - <AUTHOR> http://www.codereadability.com/refactoring-if-statements-for-readability/

<comment><USER2> Lets not limit it to if statements. Writing or refactoring existing code by using meaningful variable names can go a long way in increasing the readability of the code. I follow a simple rule to make my code easy to follow: 1.variable names should indicate what they will be containing

2.name the function with atleast one verb denoting what the function does.

3.file names indicate what code in it is trying to do.

Small changes like this can help more than comments some times to understand and read code.

Finally code is meant for humans to read. So be expressive!</comment>


Memo: 'Gawker tech team didn't adequately secure our platform' - <AUTHOR> http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/111549/gawker-tech-team-didnt-adequately-secure-our-platform/ <comment><USER2> You don't say?

The most appalling aspect of this whole thing was the response of gawker as it was happening. Had they been the victim of people with malicious intent rather than merely a group of pranksters things could have turned out far, far worse.</comment>


Focus on Core - <AUTHOR> http://davidlanger.co.uk/2008/08/11/focus-on-core/ <comment><USER2> First time I've seen Gandhi quoted in support of pg. Really good reading summary.

August is always a good month for personal productivity, as so many other people are away on their holidays.

</comment><comment><USER3> totally agree... it is all-to-easy to convince yourself that BPMF is a phase you pass through - rather than a phase you have to obsessively monitor in order to work you way out from.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really interesting article, thanks.</comment>


Pets vs. Cattle - <AUTHOR> https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/pets-vs-cattle <comment><USER2> edit: apparently it's Bill Baker of Microsoft who originated it: [https://www.pistoncloud.com/2013/04/announcing-enterprise- op...](https://www.pistoncloud.com/2013/04/announcing-enterprise-openstack- version-2/)

Afaik the analogy was first used by Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud

'"The servers in today's data center are like puppies -- they've got names and when they get sick, everything grinds to a halt while you nurse them back to health," Joshua McKenty, co-founder of Piston Cloud, is quoted as saying in a recent company press release. "Piston Enterprise OpenStack is a system for managing your servers like cattle -- you number them, and when they get sick and you have to shoot them in the head, the herd can keep moving. It takes a family of three to care for a single puppy, but a few cowboys can drive tens of thousands of cows over great distances, all while drinking whiskey."'[1]

[1] [https://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/041113-servers- cows-p...](https://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/041113-servers-cows- puppies-268650.html)

<comment><USER3> Unlike the iPad, the iPhone, Dropbox, and "The Web," credit for this metaphor may fairly be given to David Gelertner. Although he applied it to naming files rather than servers.

From [http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-second-coming-a- manifes...](http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-second-coming-a-manifesto) (1999)

> If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of > cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on > your computer is ridiculous.

For what it's worth he was also the first to use the metaphor of a cloud, although in his sense the cloud represented your personal data and it drifted to follow you, casting a shadow over pavestones representing computers, as opposed to the usual sense of the cloud being an amorphous body of computers.

<comment><USER4> That's not really the same metaphor. The naming is almost incidental, it's the individual effort going into each item that matters. Most of my 'pet' files are nameless, but they are individually pampered and treated and difficult to recreate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have a citation, but I used this analogy in 1999 for terminal server as a replacement for desktops.

Y2K was pushing people to dump whole networks. Rather than upgrade people were just buying all new, but losing data on the machines was a huge scary thing. And migration tools sucked at the time.

[http://www.cdstoledo.com/](http://www.cdstoledo.com/) where I was working at the time, under my direction started to role out commodity computers. Computers that used Hardware Compatibility list components, and were supplemented with Terminal services to allow important data to always be backed up "in the cloud".

When a computer "died" or had an issue, we could just swap the hardware. No local files were needed as everything was on the server as either part of the Terminal Services, or a Roaming Profile. We could then fix the computer at the shop quickly.

It had highs and lows. At the time it meant better service at a lower price. But that meant less money for the company. We could offset this to some degree, but the reliability was so high that in many cases we ended up with support contracts that wouldn't get renewed because the hardware never needed support.

I can't claim that I invented the analogy. I think someone at Microsoft told it to me when they pitched terminal services to me. Or maybe I pitched it to them, being a farm boy as I was.

In any event it is an analogy that is 15 years old at minimum.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh. That's a great anecdote. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another term for this is "snowflake server"––every one's a little bit different. Good for skiing, bad for a data center. [http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html)

<comment><USER7> An extension of this is The Noflake Manifesto [http://noflake.org/](http://noflake.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is fantastic. Thanks. I will integrate this into my next post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of the "10th floor test" in _Bootstrapping an infrastructure_ , a Lisa'98 paper which was pretty influential for me and a whole wave of sysadmins getting excited about this transition from individual machines to shapeless "infrastructure" where the individual machines mattered less.

It doesn't mention pets or cattle, but makes a similar point:

 _The test we used when designing infrastructures was "Can I grab a random machine and throw it out the tenth-floor window without adversely impacting users for more than 10 minutes?" If the answer to this was "yes", then we knew we were doing things right._

[http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.ht...](http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! That's cool. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The disposable nature of factory farmed cattles is so common and accepted knowledge, that it's ok to make crappy analogies out of it. That's particularly sad because it's the idea of an extremely smart mind.

<comment><USER10> Well, given 20,0000[1] head of cattle died[2] in a early blizzard (October 4, 2013) in South Dakota and it wasn't the number one story on any national news site pretty much tells you where cattle rate.

1) estimates go from 10,000 to 100,000 depending on source - it seems like 20,000 was the conservative estimate by veterinarians

2) cattle hadn't grown winter coats, rain, 70mph wind, snow = frozen cattle [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131022-cattl...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131022-cattle- blizzard-south-dakota-winter-storm-atlas/)

[edit: these were in the summer pastures still and I doubt they'd be defined as factory farmed cattle]

<comment><USER11> It's mostly the rain that got to them. Cattle have been genetically engineered, I mean bred, for cold tolerance. They can't handle moisture combined with the cold.

<comment><USER10> They didn't have their winter coats and it was early enough that they were still in the summer pastures, so later in the year, even with the rain, they would have been fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I liked this analogy, and found it informative.*

*Not a farmer, not a vegetarian, just a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like this analogy... puts words around a concern of mine. I'm building a startup around dealing with server configuration problems, but the problems tend to be more "pet" problems than "cattle" problems. In fact, my primary competition is switching from pets to cattle.

So I'm thinking hard about how to best apply my idea to cattle as well as pets, to reach a larger market and take advantage of industry trends.

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone have any tips on how to make the transition from pets to cattle? I ask because we are a cloud deployed company (EC2) still largely doing things in an old-school "pets" based approach. I'm fully onboard for why the cattle approach is better. Getting there, on the other hand, is non-trivial.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope to cover this in my subsequent posts. Stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7313882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7313882)

this was on the front page for a brief moment, but apparently engine yard's attitude that servers are cattle had fairly disastrous consequences for Groove.

</comment><comment><USER16> We named our (soon to be announced) start-up after this principle. The company is called "Netkine", as in a kine of cattle on the net.

That, and we thought it sounded kind of cool.</comment>


Here's why Apple made the stylus that Steve Jobs hated - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/9/9298117/apple-pencil-stylus-ipad-pro-steve-jobs <comment><USER2> Jobs hated devices that are operated by a stylus. Apple made an accessory for drawing. Nothing's changed.</comment>


Ask HN: I Predict the End of Email in 5 Years, What Do You Think? - <AUTHOR>

Email's a standard dating back to the 1970's, but amazingly continues to be widely used by enterprises as well as consumers.
My contention is that the email standard hasn't  evolved much over the last few decades and that it's quite crude, take for example the process of responding to questions in an email; most users reply with the original text quoted and then proceed to answer inline with a colored tag to distinguish text author--1970's??
So upon thinking about how to simplify this, I came to the conclusion that Social Apps like Facebook already have the answer!  Facebook provides a means to post and receive comments without having to quote text, the flow of conversation is much more contextual (and efficient in terms of text stored).  ever read an email with 20 or so replies that logarithmically expands because everyone's quoting the previous mail?  The concept of a social group and belonging to groups is synonymous with an email alias.  you can control access by deciding who's your friend.  Attachments can be added.  So what can't you do with Facebook or your favorite Social App that you can do with email??  For the record, Facebook has its own email service i'm certain for legacy purposes.
The only thing i could think of is that email is more anonymous in that you could send anyone an email so long as you had their email address.  With a Social App, you'd have to be befriended first before having an actual conversation.
So the ultimate question remains, is email still needed!  let's say your office got rid of email and adopted some Social App in favor, let's also say that there was some Social App standard so that they were all interoperable, i.e. you wouldn't have to join a Social App every time, you could just use your own.  There are a lot companies that use a CRM which is a natural integration point for a Social App Portal.
I'm predicting the end of email in 5-10 years, what say you hackers?!
And if email didn't exist anymore, what's a blackberry to do?  can you imagine the interface? <comment><USER2> Can you define what you mean by "the end of email" please. Do you _literally_ mean no use of protocols like smtp, imap and pop? Or do you _figuratively_ mean no use, so a 90%/95%/99% reduction in legitimate (non-spam) use?

It's worth noting that mailing lists could have been replaced by blogs and web-based forums a decade ago, but they were not. Before that, usenet was arguably superior to mailing lists, but it was usenet that died out{1} and mailing lists survived and thrived.

It's worth noting too that though newspapers are being killed off by the internet+tv+radio, they are still around, and will continue to be around for much more than a decade, despite repeated predictions of their _imminent_ demise.

So, even if you can persuade me that e-mail will die out (you haven't), I will remain sceptical that it will happen within 10 years. Certainly not within 5.

{1}: Usenet is still around. Apparently.

P.S. _"Email's a standard dating back to the 1970's, but amazingly continues to be widely used..."_ AM radio dates back even further and continues to be widely used also, despite the long-available superior technology of FM radio.

<comment><AUTHOR> great points, it's more figurative, i just needed a catchy title ;)

i think social app communication features are much more usable than email, there's also a linkage between users in social apps that can be leveraged to provide even higher levels of usability: CRM integration with contact management, calendar, customer support, etc.

imagine that your company got rid of email altogether and used something like a facebook app for all communications.

i view facebook and social apps as a communication tool with multiple dimensions as compared to email, a social app being a superset of email. so why carry forward email, other than that it's a legacy standard being used by a lot of users at the moment.

imagine business cards of the future:

Name

Social App ID

there would obviously be some time before this would effectively take hold of the greater amounts of users, but i think that time is soon.

if facebook added an administrative interface and made it multi-tenented, the pitch could be to throw out your exchange server over time. i'm not sure what the worth to their strategy would be in the future to take on enterprise users, but i imagine it's quite valuable.

<comment><USER2> I think it is more likely that social network sites will incorporate e-mail clients that come preintegrated with calendars etc.

E-mail would be part of how different social networking sites interoperate.

E-mail is a patchwork of _proven_ standards.

E-mail might vanish into the plumbing of the internet --- as ip addresses have and urls might --- but it will still be there.

If my company got rid of e-mail altogether and used Facebook instead, we'd lose customers.

Catchy titles grab attention, but they obscure meaning. I still don't know what you are predicting.

<comment><AUTHOR> i answered in another thread so didn't feel like repeating; but basically you'd need a phased approach to get off email, it wouldn't happen overnight. from day one at company x, you'd get an email address and social id, you'd have both mechanisms for communication. over time the benefits of a social app would most likely outweigh the benefits of email and a natural progression would occur, i.e. lots of companies will start to adopt it.

i use email now only because it's a legacy standard though this is definitely decreasing in favor of social apps. this is analogous to television and internet.

my prediction is that a social app will take over email as the primary internet communication method and you will start to see this manifest itself very soon, even inside of corporations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A recent report by Comscore stated that: email usage declined among those aged between 12 and 17 by 59%. (<http://bit.ly/eSiT93>) - perhaps social media will be the answer?

There is of course a function question here as well, i.e. younger people are simply communicating with each other socially (as you note), and so it makes sense to go via facebook.

I think in the work place, email is still needed, as you say it's the only 'anonymous' method of communication. Unless collaborative tools such as group chat, instant messenger, or others, become so ubiquitous that there is no need to have a simple form of direct communication.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for adding data points, and one thing i failed to point out is that email is a standard. the standard is what allows different vendors to provide interoperability. so a microsoft exchange server can talk to a mac mail app and mail generated by lotus notes could be stored and processed by gmail.

until a standard is created to say what should be included in the "communication tool to supercede email", you're stuck using email and loosely coupled instances of apps x, y, z.

it would be pretty hard to get a large company to shift off email, perhaps getting employees onto a social platform in conjunction with email will be a nice transition path.

imagine stepping into a new job and on day one getting an email address and a social app ID. i think this could be a big play that could get more and more users off of email, the old way, and onto the new way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personal communications ("Hey, how are you doing? / Are you busy tonight?") are increasingly drifting to text and social apps, but there are some significant barriers (IMHO) to businesses adopting any existing social _platform_ for communication (namely, loss of control). However, I think it's very likely that mail clients will more closely resemble social apps. Google Wave was a step in that direction, but it wasn't quite ready for prime time.

<comment><AUTHOR> what's to say that facebook couldn't add an administrative interface and multi-tenancy so that businesses could manage and use this without any privacy fears?

<comment><USER5> I think you made a typo because you have "business," "Facebook" and "no privacy fears" in the same sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think any Social App will be able to replace email unless it is just as distributed and private as email is. Maybe if the Social App ran entirely on the users machine or they could run their own servers then it would have a chance to overtake email. Maybe something like Diaspora? The fact is, people send IMPORTANT emails. People who send these emails aren't going to have their correspondence in the cloud being raked through to squeeze advertising money out.

<comment><AUTHOR> i think the privacy issue could be very easily taken care of by providing multi-tenancy and administrative access so a company could control everything to do with the content.

your point about social app companies trying to make money out of the companies using this is valid, however, today Salesforce.com provides software in the cloud that stores tons of information about sales deals (including dollar figures), contacts (which is priceless), user behaviors, etc. yet lots of the fortune 500 trust them to host and keep this data.

<comment><USER6> I think the difference, for me at least, is that I have to pay for Salesforce's products. I trust a company with my data much more if I am paying them than I do a company that is not charging but instead using my data for advertising purposes. There is a lot more incentive to look at the data if you need to target ads at people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Do you have any evidence that email use is declining? Email isn't just the end user application, email is a massively distributed and open messaging infrastructure

<comment><AUTHOR> social apps are also not just a an end user application, it's also a massively distributed and open messaging infrastructure. :)

<comment> mike-cardwell I wouldn't call any social messaging apps that I've seen "massively distributed". "Painfully centralised and proprietary" maybe. I wouldn't use the term infrastructure for them either.

If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, the Internet would continue to function just fine. If email disappeared, we would be royally screwed.

Facebook could disappear for political, legal or financial reasons. Email can't.

<comment><AUTHOR> regarding facebook, it's just an example, it could easily be twitter, orkut, mixi, etc. what i mentioned in other threads is that there should be a standard created for the new communication method to supersede email. that way vendors could start to produce their own solutions just like email does with ms exchange, lotus notes, gmail, zimbra, sendmail, etc. different clients could also be created: mac mail, gmail, thunderbird, pine, elm, etc.

i agree that facebook is proprietary, but i disagree respectfully that facebook is centralized, they have many datacenters around the world, it's a necessary when you're getting 400M page hits a day and whatever many TB's of photos being uploaded. so do friendster, myspace, orkut, twitter, linkedin, etc.

<comment> mike-cardwell I was also just using Facebook as an example. The other examples you just provided are the same.

What is wrong with the current group of email standards? And why can't those problems be fixed by extending the existing standards?

Facebook is centralised. It is run by a single profit motivated company. I can't set up a Facebook messaging server. I can set up an email server. Email is distributed because anyone can set up a server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nobody I know interleves their response when replying. How about an email client that doesn't allow this, like facebook.

<comment><USER8> I _always_ interleave my responses:

      A: Because otherwise it doesn't make sense
      Q: Why do questions always come before answers?</comment></comment>


Blue teams, what has had the most impact protecting against cyber attacks? - <AUTHOR> Security blue teams or defenders of HN, what were the changes you made that have had the most impact in improving the resilience of your organisation to cyber attacks ? <comment><USER2> Maybe someone will disagree, but I believe there is no shortcuts or one-fits- all solution when it comes to security. Structure of modern information systems is extremely diverse making single path approach not working in vast majority of cases.

My answer would be quite boring I guess but it does the job to improve resilience:

\- Analyse your system and identify potential vulnerabilities; \- Analyse you vulnerabilities against your risk model (identify the most crucial ones); \- Mitigate risks from most important to least one; \- Rinse, repeat regularly;

<comment><USER3> What you said improves your known attack surface for sure. But what do you mean vulnerabilities? CVE's? If so that's inadequate.

What I mean is, system and network architecture on it's own often creates vulnerabilities for that risk model. Let's say you have product X,it is well patched and well configured. Except!, anyone can access it from the intranet and internet. Is this a vulnerability? Can a random attacker password spray product X ,gain access and leverage that access for $profit? It's not exactly a CVE but it can be a vulnerability.

I say invest in good security/IT architects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1) Implement a good EDR solution. By far, I can't think of any other change or investment that has had better ROI. So much visibility! And you can quickly implement detections and controls based on attacker TTP which has a greater ROI than playing whack-a-mole with CVEs or rely on updated firewall rules,av rules,selinux rules,etc...

2) Log as much as possible and do something with the logs. Log everything and continue to improve your SIEM or security stack based on new threat intel.

3) Low effort,high ROI low hanging fruits. 2FA everything. Mutual certificate auth where i can. Turn on bitlocker. Make people use password managers,ssh pubkey auth. If you have typical corporate firewall/proxy: block any domain that isn't categorized or newly registered.

4) this is what I think will be good ,haven't done it IRL: segment network well. Remote management can only happen from jump boxes. Be hostile against removable drives. 5) Taking first step of NIST's incident response lifecycle seriously,preparation: Playbooks(Online and Offline),checklists,emergency communication channels. Document important assets and related contact when SHTF. And actually have a routine table top excercises and penetration tests (as the corporate wallet allows)

6) I hate that I put this last,but: good security tooling. Typical stuff like an in-house sandbox,dedicated DFIR platform.

This should go without saying: you need people to do this and it really does start from the top (leadership).

<comment><USER4> 2) Log as much as possible and do something with the logs. Log everything and continue to improve your SIEM or security stack based on new threat intel.

This is a good one. If you have a SIEM + Log Aggregation setup and you don't have robust logging and/or aren't feeding those logs into it, you should have saved yourself some time and burned the money you spent on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> \- Keep up with the latest trends (supply chain, credential leaks, etc.) and published CVEs (a CERT can help)

\- Risk analysis with business stakeholders (maybe they care nothing for confidentiality, but tons for integrity, or there are market regulations a security expert has no knowledge of)

As said by jesterson, there's no silver bullet in security, only adequate counter-measure given a threat model.

<comment><USER3> Keep up with it and do what? Threat intel is nice but quite a waste of time if you can't adapt to new threats by implementing or adapting security controls fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Practice some red team exercises against your apps and infrastructure, or do it against a site in the wild and responsibly disclose what you found to them - then harden your systems against your tactics.

<comment><USER3> Assuming you have staff that can do red teaming and more staff that can review the results and implement changes. Purple teaming is also nice and works better (my opinion) than red vs blue teaming for smaller teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Title is lacking the "Ask HN:" preface which probably explains the low response/activity.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a new one most aren't thinking about yet...

Set up live early warning system for spoofed/deep fake news feeds [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20748195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20748195)

</comment><comment><USER9> The key is basic competence in configuration management, siem and most importantly segmentation.

Patch and have configuration standards.

Segmentation is harder. Keep systems separated and minimize admin privilege.

</comment><comment><USER10> Continuous, ongoing end user education, by far.

It must be a regular thing. Threats change, people forget, people lower their guard.

<comment><USER11> I agree but it can be almost impossible to scale efficiently. My organization has ~20,000 employees and at-least another 5000 contractors that use our email system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://giphy.com/gifs/wolf-gladiators- vulcan-l3mZ95PCx30Mxb...](https://giphy.com/gifs/wolf-gladiators- vulcan-l3mZ95PCx30MxbW3C)</comment>


Ansible Docs + Van Halen Idiosyncrasies Surfacing in Projects - <AUTHOR> http://docs.ansible.com/glossary.html#van-halen

<comment><AUTHOR> While reading the Ansible docs, I came across this gem. I'd like to know if other HN users have moments (discovery or creation) of such entertaining idiosyncrasies/creator self-expression occurring in projects they've worked with.</comment>