TripAdvisor cuts hundreds of jobs after Google competition bites - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-23/tripadvisor-cuts-hundreds-of-jobs-after-google-competition-bites <comment><USER2> Reposting myself on the subject[1]:

For anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages pulled out of a db with keyword variations in mind, constantly refreshing content with user submissions, and, the killer, buying links to influence Google's naive ranking methods (which quickly evolved this to buying entire sites for their SEO potential). The billion dollar public valuation is entirely the result of a decade long SEO play.

(Source: was in online travel related business at the time. Was the first to buy links form Matt at SeatGuru, later acquired by TripAdvisor)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516006)

<comment><USER3> The truth is most companies tend to last ~20 years (from mom and pop to larger ones) if they are successful. You're lucky if you make it further. This is one of those that isn't going to last much further.

<comment><USER4> Google is eating the travel industry.

Search for anything travel related and you get pages of Google products and advertising widgets before you get to the first organic result.

The change over the last 5 years is huge.

<comment><USER5> When I first found Google flights a couple years ago it was ahead of all the other trip aggregators and unbelievably cheaper too. I think it forced the cheapo tickets craze because I had never seen $50 cross country tickets before that, and it practically destroyed all the little deals and gentlemens agreements that the other aggregators undoubtedly had.

<comment><USER4> Google Flights lack inventory (as they are powered by a GDS so anyone not filing to that GDS will be missing) and to get their incredible speed they cache and calculate prices which results in frequent pricing misses as well.

<comment><USER6> Pretty soon they'll have enough traffic nobody will be able to afford to fillng the GDS

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It really hasn't been covered enough just how much Google has replaced organic search results with their own features.

In some cases it's almost all of the above the fold real estate and for shopping they are starting to take over the checkout experience as well.

It's significantly reducing organic traffic and turning e-commerce sites into Google suppliers.

<comment><USER8> It's been going on a long time, Google's been killing off aggregators by cannibalising their market for almost a decade now.

I do wonder how sustainable it is, previously these aggregators did lots of things at Google's request, cleaning the noise out and laying everything out in nice data-annotations. More fool them, it turns out.

Google cross-references them all, builds their 'own' data and drives them all out of business.

It's pretty scary how much of the digital high streets Google has ruthlessly stolen from us all, and imposing a huge tax for doing pretty much sod all.

I occasionally wonder if anyone would every have the balls to nationalise the search engine, it should be a public utility, not infested with ads covering 90% of the first page as it's become. I'm even semi-serious :)

At the very least I wouldn't mind a nice ruling that Google are now deceptively calling themselves a search engine, and that they can now only show one ad per 10 real results per page.

<comment><USER9> "Nationalised search service" ... interesting thought. Legions of Librarians, finally compensated justly and lauded for their heroism. Wonder if they'd get uniforms and "be all you can be" recruiting campaigns too.

<comment><USER10> Something like DuckDuckGo operated like Let's Encrypt. If it can be done for key management, why not search corpus? What's the annual cost, $10MM? Maybe a bit more, but not crazy expensive. Someone with search experience (ChuckMcM or greglindahl) would be able to say with more certainty.

<comment><USER11> If you want to do something like DDG, proxying some other search engines results, a point of reference could be Ecosia, which publishes financial reports. It looks like they operate on somewhere in the range of 12M/year.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia) [https://de.blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-finanzberichte- baumplanzbe...](https://de.blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-finanzberichte- baumplanzbelege/) (in German)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google is pretty much taking your shit nowadays and there is nothing you can do about it. That shit is either a company you built or a product of theirs that you used. They are not a search company, they are a conglomerate. They'll buy you or break you. It's funny when they fail though isn't it? Remember Google+? Who lead that initiative? What a travesty that was. Outside of Gmail, Google's UIs really do suck.

But back to the point. There really isn't anything wrong with what they are doing, they are a typical business. Again, nothing wrong with that. They do stuff for their own self-interest. They are not your friends. Organic search results get in the way of advertising.

<comment><USER13> _Google is pretty much taking your shit nowadays and there is nothing you can do about it_

That sounds like Amazon -- if you've got a hot selling product on Amazon, you can expect them to copy it and start selling it under the Amazon brand:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a- hot...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a-hot-seller- on-amazon-prepare-for-e-tailer-to-make-one-too)

<comment><USER14> Same applies to Microsoft as well. Remember Ami Pro, WordPerfect?

<comment><USER15> Isn't Word Perfect still used in the legal profession, because of how it aligns the text with precision during print out? (Or something like that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google controls search. Google launches a competitor to a web service presented through search. Competitor takes enough of a hit layoffs are needed.

This screams of a problem. Especially for consumers and a competitive market. The kind of thing that traditionally caused governments to step in.

<comment><USER17> Google launched a service consumers preferred. What's the issue? That they have a sustained competitive advantage?

<comment><USER18> Imagine if 70% of roads were privately owned by one company. That company, call it roadle, opened a restaurant chain. There is free parking in front of all roadle restaurants. There are always roadworks around all non roadle restaurants.

This is what search is like today.

<comment><USER19> Not at all the same comparison. People that don't like Google or their additions to organic search results can simply switch to another competitor.

<comment><USER20> >Not at all the same comparison.

No, their comparison was perfect! They said roadle owned 70% of roads, not all of them. Sure, businesses can hope that they get their traffic from non-Google search, but if customers are going to Google for 70+% of search, that's a doomed business strategy.

Their point isn't that Google is bad for consumers, it's that it's unfair for businesses if Google is driving all the search to its own properties that you are trying to compete with.

<comment><USER21> Google is essentially a piece of international infrastructure at this point. If it went out of existence, the productivity of millions of people would take at least a minor nose dive and the funnels for user conversion for businesses would change drastically overnight leading to a macroscopic restructuring of business priorities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's a bummer. I've found that TripAdvisor reviews tend to have a higher signal to noise ratio than some other sites (including Google's own reviews, where you can tell a lot of the reviews are just being cranked out so that power users can get points and "level up")

<comment><USER23> They are no angels either, or at least their daughter company. Two weeks ago TheFork featured in Dutch TV program Rambam where they proved that they boost restaurant ratings. They listed their own fake restaurant (possible, no problem) and gave their own reviews, trying to become lowest rated in the ranking.

Giving rebates on couverts may boost your ranking too.

Restaurant owners interviewed are not too happy as well. They feel forced to subscribe because of popularity of the site, but have to pay 2 euro per person per reservation. Also it happens that without their knowledge TheFork arranges the Reservation button on Google search, so they flow through their platform.

edit: To clarify the boosting. If according to ratings the average should be a 5.2 then TheFork would up that and make it e.g. a 6.5

<comment><USER24> I used to work on the search team at TheFork years ago (we were already a TripAdvisor subsidiary) and don't know about the current practices but back then there was no foul play about the ratings, which is not even the default sorting on the site.

Also, not specifically related to TheFork (because I don't remember...), do all ratings should always have the same weight? Are old ratings as relevant as newer?

If you want to book a romantic dinner are ratings from groups as relevant as the ones from other couples?

Is a new restaurant with two reviews at 7/10 average the same as another one with 200 reviews at 7/10 average ?

There's more to it than first apparent.

Example: [http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average- rating....](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html)

<comment><USER25> I used to work at TripAdvisor, and I can corroborate—while I was there the focus was really heavily on fighting back fake reviews and presenting the ones we got as effectively as possible. You can ding them for a lot (the UI has always been kinda painful) but, unlike Yelp, I don't think they are or have been dirty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is what happens when you pay huge amounts of money on Google Ads and traffic. They notice that you must be quite profitable if you afford to pay so much, so they come for your market. It will happen more and more and the more you pay to Google the more you help them take you out of the market.

<comment><USER7> Actually this is all about Amazon.

Apparently in some countries users are going to straight to Amazon for their shopping searches and bypassing Google entirely.

<comment><USER27> Isn't that a general thing? I hate the quality of Amazon's internal search, but Google's results for shopping related queries are just atrocious in my country. There's barely-related Amazon-Products on the top 5 places, SEO spam on the next 10, a few shops on pages 2/3 and then scam shops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The problem is not google. It's trip advisor itself. It's simply not helpful anymore.

Fake reviews, and they're pushing paid events etc using dark patterns.. it wasn't like that some years ago

Love the lonely planet

<comment><USER29> Whenever I want to look up the highlights of a place, I look up it's Lonely Planet page. They are written well and have good pictures. The way to compete against a million random reviewers is by upping quality and forming a brand. In some places, Lonely Planet is the only company providing accurate and complete information. It's marvelous.

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately Lonely Planet's old business model of getting people to pay for content itself has basically stopped working now that there's a million free digital competitors, and they've yet to come up with a replacement that does.

<comment><USER28> The app is really really cheap. Fair to say underpriced, especially compared to the books. No ads. Quality content. A good structure about essentials and the neighborhoods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really prefer TripAdvisor data and reviews, but it is really difficult to compete to a monopoly. Google also is better at search and integrates better with their own service.

If at least they would allow me to download any city data in advance in their app. It used be possible to download the main cities in advance, but now you must have internet always on. They think that in any country you have internet everywhere.

<comment><USER25> Interestingly enough, I'm in Italy this week and here Apple Maps sources most of its data from TripAdvisor. I've visited their site (clicks on Maps go to it) more this week than in the last five years.

They've been a lot more helpful than Yelp reviews etc., too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Google has also crammed the top of its mobile search results with more ads. > This has forced many companies, including TripAdvisor, to buy more ads from > the search giant to keep online traffic flowing.

That seems wild to me: not only does Google get more $ from ads, but they have this massive power to wipe out competitors this way, with minimal repercussions. Two-birds, one stone.

<comment><USER33> >That seems wild to me: not only does Google get more $ from ads, but they have this massive power to wipe out competitors this way, with minimal repercussions. Two-birds, one stone.

Crazy thing is they are using their competitors money to wipe away competition.

<comment><USER34> three birds

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any business without physical inventory that can be automated in a way to sell/buy should really worry about Google. Eventually Google will come for that market as their new crop of managers/execs will want to make the number to get their bonus and move up the ladder.

I know a guy who used to work at tripadvisor years ago. At the time Google was trying to start up their own hotel search business but they didn't have the reviews. So Google was initially using reviews submitted to tripadvisor by tripadvisor's reviews. I believe there had been prior agreement for Google to use tripadvisor's reviews for a fee/beter-search-ranking in return? Anyhow, tripadivisor didn't like what was happening so was in the process of telling google that they will stop the arrangement.

And a google exec in the meeting threatened tripadivisor execs that google will lower tripadivisor in the search results, if tripadvisor did stop the arrangement.

This bit was apparently shared in a regularly scheduled company wide meeting.

<comment><USER36> There's a similar story from Jeremy Stoppelman about Google scraping Yelp content in 2010 even though their licensing agreement ended in 2007.

Source is the Senate Antitrust Committee hearing in 2011 on Google's dominance, the BI link below includes the exhibits as well.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/yelp-ceo-on- google-2011-9](https://www.businessinsider.com/yelp-ceo-on-google-2011-9)

<comment><USER37> I'm sure they'll get fined $1M in 2036 or something. That'll even it all out.

<comment><USER38> There is a name for that right? "Be fucking evil if it doesn't cost much" or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "...The company had just over 3,800 staff at the end of September.." I am surprised why they need such high number of staff when the functionality of the website is limited to content, reviews, search itineraries. Unless they hire field agents and ask them go inquire and write about a new place.

<comment><USER40> This along with the comment about them being in the SP500 got me interested. They are doing more than just the site we all immediately thought of when we saw "TripAdvisor". There's also "InstantBooking" [0], widgets, tools, a platform (it seems) for marketing/buying sponsored listings, analytics, "photo tools", and probably more. All of that was just from what they listed on products. Besides this, they are surely doing research, prototyping, and otherwise developing products that haven't/may never see the light of day.

Furthermore, they seem to do a lot of marketing which for them is the obvious stuff like online advertising (probably in-house team), conferences, and I'm guessing also local events. They also do non-obvious stuff such as branding one of little shops inside the Toronto Pearson International Airport [1].

Finally, looking at LinkedIn, here's the breakdown of employees.

1,100 sales 939 engineering 768 operations 652 bizdev and so on. Full screenshot here: [https://imgur.com/a/JCoibId](https://imgur.com/a/JCoibId)

Obviously, there must be some overlap in job functions here, otherwise people are over-reporting that they are employees at the company (LinkedIn claims 5,679 employees). 160 people doing finance doesn't make sense, for instance (well at least imo).

The only conclusion I can make from this data is that they aren't having thousands of people working on just the main website. I'm inclined to guess that they ARE probably bloated, but without knowing anything besides some marketing copy for their other projects, it's hard to say with any confidence.

[0] [https://www.tripadvisor.com/InstantBooking](https://www.tripadvisor.com/InstantBooking) [1] [https://www.torontopearson.com/en/while-you-are- here/toronto...](https://www.torontopearson.com/en/while-you-are-here/toronto- airport-shops/tripadvisor-store-t1-after-canada-d20)

<comment><USER41> From TripAdvisors "About" page:

The subsidiaries and affiliates of TripAdvisor, Inc. own and operate a portfolio of websites and businesses, including the following travel media brands: www.airfarewatchdog.com, www.bokun.io, www.bookingbuddy.com, www.cruisecritic.com, www.familyvacationcritic.com, www.flipkey.com,www.thefork.com (including www.lafourchette.com, www.eltenedor.com, and www.restorando.com), www.holidaylettings.co.uk, www.holidaywatchdog.com, www.housetrip.com, www.jetsetter.com, www.niumba.com, www.onetime.com, www.oyster.com, www.seatguru.com, www.smartertravel.com, www.tingo.com, www.vacationhomerentals.com and www.viator.com.

That's a ton of subsidiary companies and explains a lot IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Trip Advisor has been fairly hit and miss for me. The star ratings especially for hotels have a weird value judgement in them that isn't at all congruent with mine. I'll see run down crappy hotels with 5 stars while much much nicer hotels with better amenities and locations are rated with 3 stars.

Some way to specify the profile of the rater's you care about would be a huge improvement. Things like traveling with children, back-packing, splurging on vacation, would be helpful criteria to make the reviews more relevant and informative to me.

<comment><USER43> check out what i'm making at [https://dokomaps.com](https://dokomaps.com) a simple travel recommender based on lists of what people shared previously. Just find someone that matches your interest and follow their recommandations

<comment><USER44> Very nice site!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Pretty much every site that depends on Google search and organic traffic is in trouble. Trip Advisor, Expedia, Booking.com, most OTAs. Their lunch is being eaten.

<comment><USER46> Yup, next up: Yelp.

Personally I stopped using TripAdvisor in favor of Google Maps. Also stopped using Yelp in favor of Google Maps. It's all integrated so nicely, no need to open another app for reviews.

<comment><USER47> I'm as surprised as anyone, but Yelp seems to be holding on. G's reviews just aren't as good, and don't seem to be as critical. Not sure if it's just easier to game? Pretty much everything on Google maps is a 4.0.

<comment><USER33> Yelp hasn't grown outside the US though while Google Maps/Local has gotten bigger worldwide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I eat out and travel a lot, I rarely use TripAdvisor anymore. When I want to find a decent restaurant nearby I open Google Maps, for hotels booking.com reviews haven't failed me yet. I mostly use TripAdvisor when I want to be more specific with the reviews eg. filter by couples in winter

</comment><comment><USER49> Oddly enough they were head-hunting super intensely last year. I wonder if they were doing that to hire devs for lower pay in order to let go more senior individuals to save money...

</comment><comment><USER50> How can I read this article, it is behind a paywall?

<comment><USER51> Try deleting cookies? (click the padlock by the url in Chrome)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> this killed Trivago too

<comment><USER53> I see a ton of Trivago ads on tv for many years now, but I never used it, nor do I ever heard of a friend using it or recommending it

<comment><USER54> > The [Federal Court of Australia] ruled that from at least December 2016, > Trivago misled consumers by representing its website would quickly and > easily help users identify the cheapest rates available for a given hotel.

> In fact, Trivago used an algorithm which placed significant weight on which > online hotel booking site paid Trivago the highest cost-per-click fee in > determining its website rankings and often did not highlight the cheapest > rates for consumers.

[https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/trivago-misled- consume...](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/trivago-misled-consumers- about-hotel-room-rates)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> why do people keep having their content for free for google to use? it doesn't make sense anymore. the google web social contract is broken, there is no tit for tat anymore. only paywall sites get it right now.

<comment><USER55> I have added from pictures to missing places into Google. For me, the tit for tat is to help other travellers to find interesting places, to not get lost or to know what to expect when in a foreign country/city.

But, I always contribute similar content to Wikipedia/Wikicommons. Because I see that as a more fitting philosophy for sharing knowledge. The type of information and the format is not the same, thou.

Google is just practical. It is frustrating to plan a visit to a museum in a city that I will spend one day to find out that has been closed for half a year.

So, I agree as I have my own self-doubts about giving things for free to Google when they are going to use that data to send me or others more targeted advertisements.

<comment><USER34> i probably should clarify, i was referring to businesses, not people. Right now, opening up your website to google, is basically an invitation to steal your content. Paywalls are the only way to keep them from doing it.</comment></comment></comment>


Rewiring the JavaScript Console in CodePen - <AUTHOR> http://joshbassett.info/2014/rewiring-the-javascript-console-in-codepen/

<comment><USER2> Josh what really bamboozles me about your code is this..the console function returns an object, yet at no time is the text being forwarded to the function ie. var console = function(text) { ... } so when you say console.log("information...") how is function getting the string??

cheers PK

<comment><AUTHOR> You're mostly right.

The console var is assigned the result of an immediately-invoked anonymous function ([http://benalman.com/news/2010/11/immediately-invoked- functio...](http://benalman.com/news/2010/11/immediately-invoked-function- expression/)).

The result of this function is an object which contains the console functions (log, warn, error, etc). Moreover, these functions only exist inside the scope of the anonymous function, so the only way to access them is through the returned object. This prevents the global namespace from being polluted.

So when you call console.log('hello'), you're applying one of those functions in the object returned by the anonymous function.

<comment><USER2> Wow! Once more many thanks for your time and effort. It is much appreciated. You are a Javascript GOD :-)

Cheers PK

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I love it. Cheers PK

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, hope you find it useful.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: From a regular consulting job to a remote startup worker – thoughts? - <AUTHOR> I'm current working at a IT services company in the Netherlands as a consultant for everything Microsoft for 3 years after graduating with honours from a local university. I'm mainly specialized in the Microsoft Web stack and Xamarin: got my MCSD's for Azure, Web Applications and I am a certified Xamarin developer. This means I know my way in full-stack architecture, DevOps, ASP.NET MVC, but also stuff like PHP, Angular, React and D3 aren't unfamiliar to me.
My consulting job takes 50h/week (with traffic), I moonlight another 24 hours a week as a freelancer, honing my skills as broadly as I can. As long as I learn something (and the pay is reasonable) I'm up. I've always been driven by passion and ambition, and by the need to do something new (preferably impossible at the time of saying 'yes'), and I'm thinking about applying for a remote worker position because my consulting job no longer triggers my passion and amibition....
I've been doing lots of jobs on the side, learning new technologies as they appeared, and that makes me think a 'remote' job as a worker for one of the "who's hiring" companies would be a good bet. Something new every day, being pushed to the limit by your teammates, working as a whole to crank out those awesome features for clients every day. I think I can be a a great asset with my knowledge (I'm full stack after all), allbeit knowledge of another stack (MS). Obviously I would only choose a startup if a) they would have me and b) I believe in the product (-:
I'd love for some of the readers to share their experiences with working for a startup (especially remotely). Some questions out the of the top of my mind are:
- Would you want to go back to your previous job? What if they paid you double?
- Working for a startup means putting in a lot more than the regular 40 hours / week we're used to in Europe. Is this hard on you? Does this affect your social life much?
- What are some of the downsides to working for a startup?
- Did you find your passion? <comment><USER2> Las3r, we are a startup on the MS/Xamarin stack, let's get in touch. You can reach me at bogdan_at_teravive_com</comment>


Unsupervised Data Augmentation - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12848 <comment><USER2> The authors make bold claims to outperform recent SOTA methods on CIFAR10 and SVHN but they are using the much bigger architecture: WRN28_10 instead of standard WRN28_2.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I am one of the co-authors. Thanks for reading our paper! We are actually using the small architecture WRN28_2.

In the experiment settings, we wrote: \citet{oliver2018realistic} provided evaluation results of prior works with the same architecture and evaluation scheme, hence we follow their settings and employ Wide Residual Networks~\citep{zagoruyko2016wide} with depth 28 and width 2 as our baseline model.

In the caption of table 2, we also wrote "Comparison with existing methods on CIFAR-10 and SVHN with $4,000$ and $1,000$ examples respectively. All compared methods use a common architecture WRN-28-2 with 1.4M parameters except AutoAugment$^*$ which uses a larger architecture WRN-28-10.".</comment></comment>


Twitter and Ubiquitous Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.brianlash.com/2008/04/blogs-tweets-an.html

<comment><USER2> Twitter accelerates communication between the extended edge(s) of one's extended network and brings them virtually closer:

For example, I was fascinated to follow the successful launch of Quotably.com on News.YC from the creator, Ben Tucker ((<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144253>). manvsmachine read the same post and twittered about quotably.com and brought a very positive response in <30 minutes from Robert Scoble, creating a real-time snowball effect, culminating? in a techcrunch news blip and a twitter blog entry in <24-48 hours ([http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/quotably-the-perfect- tw...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/quotably-the-perfect-twitter- tool/) , [http://blog.twitter.com/2008/03/quotably-helps-you-follow- co...](http://blog.twitter.com/2008/03/quotably-helps-you-follow- conversation.html) ). manvsmachine had been a twitter publisher only about a week prior to his quotably.com twitter.

<http://quotably.com/manvsmachine/statuses/776053962>

manvsmachine: the most useful twitter app I've seen so far... it even makes sense out of @Scoble 's feed <http://quotably.com/> 15 days ago

Scobleizer: @manvsmachine <http://quotably.com> rocks. Thank YOU! See, there is signal in the noise.

I agree that it is an always-on network and it also allows mob computing, on- demand emergent and/or just-in-time networks (SxSw)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great anecdote of Twitter in action. I was around to watch that whole thing unfold for Quotably. It was neat to see a conversation which began here gain so much traction so fast.

How exciting for those guys...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't say I ever expected those two concepts to be put together, but after reading the article I can see the connection - not sure I really agree with it though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback Tim. I replied on the blog (and posted an update for those who don't read the comments), but here's my take for the YC community:

I think you're right... by virtue of the interface/function issue, Twitter isn't an example of ubiquitous computing per se. But I do think it's an important milestone on the path there.

As I said, you're more "expert" than me. Thanks for adding your opinion.</comment></comment>


S.js – Simple, Clean, Fast Reactive Programming in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adamhaile/S <comment><AUTHOR> Someone recommended this to me as a simpler alternative to Preact (for certain simple use-cases) and I think it's just absolutely brilliant. It's React's logic of this.state and this.setState, separated out into generic function. Beautiful.</comment>


Python editor with linting, Jupyter, refactoring, unittests, debugging and more - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=donjayamanne.python <comment><USER2> Better title: Visual Studio Code with Python</comment>


Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle – R. P. Feynman (1986) - <AUTHOR> https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt <comment><USER2> What's changed since is that our general infrastructure and our most critical institutions (think electronic voting machines) now all hang by this same easily unraveled thread.

There's a book by a Dutch fellow about the disaster that is truly harrowing, it paints a picture in which NASA engineers fully understood the shuttle was going to blow, soon, and that's precisely why they were willing to cut so many corners - they knew that so many faults had already been built into the Shuttle that the chances that their additional cheat would be the final straw - rather than some other department's cheat - were very small.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_of_Richard_Feynman)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _"I think the 1 in 100 figure is very obviously accurate at this point, given 2 losses amid 135 missions."_

Source: [https://lobste.rs/s/213ye9/personal_observations_on_reliabil...](https://lobste.rs/s/213ye9/personal_observations_on_reliability#c_lwdnpg)</comment>


Ask HN: Extracting book titles from comments - <AUTHOR> Using named-entity recognition, how to extract book titles from HN comments? Should I train NER chunker on HN data? <comment><USER2> There is one project[0] that accomplishes the same thing, but instead of searching for the titles, it searches for the links to online stores (like Amazon) and then checks if the links are indeed books or not. Might be relevant to you.

[0] [http://hackernewsbooks.com/](http://hackernewsbooks.com/)

<comment><USER3> Ha, that's hilarious because I created one that searches all Reddit comments for products from Amazon[0]. And I'd always been thinking of moving toward searching for all proper nouns, but obviously that's more difficult on this front. So if anyone has suggestions about whether or not to expand and in a certain way, let me know!

[0] [http://www.productmentions.com/](http://www.productmentions.com/)

<comment><USER4> This concept I believe represents a good enough sample size to provide a good overview of "most commonly linked-to items." If 100 people link to the same product across many domains, chances are that most of those will be Amazon links. You don't get all of the links, but you get most of them.

The exception will be items from sellers of products not available on Amazon. And there may be some communities in Reddit that are more loyal to another e-commerce platform or site you would miss (crafters to Etsy, antique collectors to eBay, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did this a while ago (www.hnreads.com, bookbot.io). Manually labelled ~2k comments, trained a NER system, then validated the titles via amazons api. Was pretty easy once I had manually labelled comments. Don't recall my F1/precision/recall scores - they were ok but lower than the state of the art reported in papers.

<comment><USER6> That's interesting. Which labels were you assigning to them?

<comment><USER5> I had a macro in emacs that wrapped the highlighted text in some xml tag (say <book></book>). Processing that I could label it however - e.g. IOB or whatever you fancy. The labelling didn't really take that long to do, maybe a few hours over a couple of days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would do something like this:

1\. Get a few thousands book titles that are "long enough" so that the probability they appear in a sentence without meaning the book is low

2\. Search these spans in HN comments and use this corpus to train Stanford's CoreNLP NER

3\. Run the NER on all comments

4\. Check on Openlibrary or another book DB that the extracted spans are real books titles

<comment><USER8> This is known as bootstrapping or semi supervised learning, just in case you want to look for some theory behind it.

<comment><USER9> How so? I don't see reference to sampling with replacement or a suggestion to re-use the unsupervised results to further improve the model. Seems like I'm missing something...

<comment><USER8> You're creating a small classified dataset without manually labeling them, in order to train a supervised learning model.

I'm not an expert, but I think that a boostraping technique doesn't imply continually improvement of the model.

<comment><USER9> Ahh, I see. I was confused about whether semi-supervised approaches rely on using predictions on the unlabeled data to improve model performance. Wikipedia seems to suggest this is a key component which isn't mentioned in OP:

> Semi-supervised learning may refer to either transductive learning or > inductive learning. The goal of transductive learning is to infer the > correct labels for the given unlabeled data.

Agreed on bootstrap, but in the proposed approach you're not artificially expanding your sample size by sampling with replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I built the simmilar stuff for Reddit using Amazon links. [http://booksreddit.com](http://booksreddit.com)

I'm in the process of adding Goodreads and other book websites to get better suggestions.(Using Amazon API is limiting on scale)

As for your question: I've been researching python natural language processing to get probable named entities and check them against Amazon API. I suggest [https://spacy.io](https://spacy.io) that has reasonable named entities extraction. However doing it at a scale might produce lot of books that are named as a common phrases.

<comment><USER6> Haven't heard about spacy, been struggling with Stanford's NER for a few days. Looks great, will check it out. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've found experimentally that doing a search on amazon for a book title, even if you're only close, almost always turns up that exact book. However, the product API has really restrictive terms.

I would look at the OpenLibrary dataset - you might be able to match titles in there to comments, or use it to validate the NER output, if you don't want to go the Amazon link regex route.

The entire dataset is available for download, or you can build a prototype with their API - I did this to map speakers to books with [https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com) (you can see it if you hover over a name - e.g. [https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&speaker=-Barack%20Obama](https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&speaker=-Barack%20Obama)).

</comment><comment><USER4> A pretty common structure in comments:

"name of book" by "author_first_name author_last_name"

If you could determine the most common words written before the title begins (read, liked, loved, recommend, etc.) you could probably parse out a lot of titles plus their authors.

</comment><comment><USER12> You would probably be better served starting with an ISBN database and just looking for spans that match book titles. Not sure if there's one you can download for free, but I saw one on sale for $675.

NER will give you a lot of entities that you need to resolve against something to check if they're actually books anyway, depending on volume you may not find a free API tier.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking about querying Google Books API to check if NNPs are book titles/authors, however, as you mentioned, NER produces a lot of entities. Luckily, there is Open Library dump[0] which has around 16 million book titles (IIRC) with some metadata.

[0] [https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps](https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps)

<comment><USER13> I've been using Amazon Product API for Booknshelf (www.booknshelf.com) by passing "category => book" in the search to query only on Amazon Books. The book search by title is quite relevant. I thought this might be useful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One problem that you will run into is that X (the phrase in the comment) might be a permutation of a book title. Or perhaps even a title of a book being mentioned in a comment where the author did not intend on it being interpreted as such. This is mostly due to ambiguity & information density in language as well as how we assign names/titles to things.

Ex. If I write a comment saying "The number of our clients went from zero to one instantly", in this sentence, "Zero to One" will match Peter Theil's book.

If you are willing to put up with such "noise" in the output, then you don't need to train a thing or even use ML. Just chunk the given piece of text and look up all the tokens permutations of given length (from 1 up to N) in your SQL Entities Database.

You can generally find this kind of Entities Databases by aggregating a lot of datasets from all over the web or even use something like google books datasets: [https://books.google.co.uk/](https://books.google.co.uk/)

[https://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2...](https://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html) \- This is an ngram set but there should be one with only book titles somewhere. Can't find it atm but you can search for it yourself!

You could even (if you are brave enough) try to use wikipedia's dumps to mine book titles from articles</comment>


Canery Mail: E-Mail App for iOS and MacOS with OpenPGP Support - <AUTHOR> https://canarymail.io <comment><USER2> Typo in title: Canery -> Canary</comment>


Financial collapse shows failure of free markets? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/03/27/financial-collapse-shows-failure-of-free-markets/ <comment><USER3> It's intensely frustrating that blame is being heaped solely on "wall street". The resulting legislation is completely reactionary and will create all sorts of unintended consequences not the least of which will result in restricting funds to support the growth of firms that create real value. (Sarbanes-Oxley anyone?) Perhaps even more irritating is the equivalency that critics place between criticizing Wall Street and "free markets"/capitalism.

I don't think anyone would say that "wall street" did not play their role - but it was a role played on a field designed by regulators - many of whom are the same ones who now disclaim all responsibility. To quote Daniel Hannan, a British MEP in a recent interview: "Don't make the same mistake that a lot of people on the left make that financiers are for free trade. They're really not. All financiers are monopolists. All financiers will grab a subsidy if they can. Every big businessman left to himself is a corporatist and the beauty of the capitalist system is it doesn't let them indulge that instinct or at least it didn't until the last 6 months when we've suddenly turned the clock back."

(As a side note, I used to be a financier)

<comment><USER4> As counterpoints, first consider that blame for the current situation and the proper next steps are two separate issues. The myopic (to put it gently) decisions made by "Wall street" most certainly are the single largest contributing factor to the urgency and depth of this crisis.

Second, I think it's rather difficult to pin much blame on regulators. The two levers used that have made this so particularly awful, CDOs and CDSs, were almost entirely over-the-counter, unregulated affairs, and the extent of our economy's exposure was and still is cloaked behind regulatory loopholes that allow these firms to keep it at least partly off their books.

Funny, the language you use (financiers, corporatist, monopolists) makes me think of Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism." Saw it in a bookstore and flipped through, but I decided it would be too cynical for me to buy it.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough to consider the situation and next steps as two separate issues. But I really don't think that saying that Wall Street is the largest contributor is fair. It is quite easy to pin the blame on regulators who encouraged high levels of debt and large levels of regulation that financiers sought to work around and game. They were given the incentives to pursue destructive policies (ironically those with the lowest levels of regulation - hedge funds, private equity, etc aren't causing the level of systemic risk that was initially feared).

CDS and CDO products were not to blame (they may well have have been contributors) - but if you look at the aftermath, their role was overblown (net everything out and the amounts are relatively small). Maybe that's the issue here in that there isn't a lot of understanding as to what the causes have been - and there clearly were several. Rich Kilgaard calls the problem as being one of "capital on strike". Credit markets have been freezing up because no one really knows who to trust and whether stated numbers are real and what the values of assets are. The levels of leverage is either a primary or secondary problem depending on who you ask.

The chairman of FedEx has been talking about the problem and relationship between high taxes and leverage for a long time. High taxes and double taxation of dividends means that the tax code favors companies taking on greater amounts of debt over what would be more stable but already expensive equity (ie you can expense interest but you can't expense dividend payments).

And then finally - something that we can definitely squarely lay the blame at the feet of regulators is the promotion of home ownership to those who couldn't afford it. Look at the levels and amounts of subprime lending post revisions to the CRA in 1999. Heck, if memory serves, the first subprime MBS was about a week after its passing. Bush working with a Democratic Congress was also to blame in encouraging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue buying up basically any mortgage that was written. What Wall Street did - <USER2> really complicated the mess was create investment vehicles that weren't transparent relative to the underlying assets making them difficult to understand and subsequently break apart.

Then you have such things as mark to market which really sped up the decline of financial institutions in the US. As a principle, it's laudable - the basic idea being that your assets should be valued as close to what the market thinks as close to real time as possible. The problem when it comes to regulatory capital calculations is that when you have a large market essentially stop trading, or collapse in value (even if the loans will be held to term), is that you rapidly have "undercapitalized" institutions in the worst of markets - made particularly worse by the levels of leverage they have (the situation in Europe here is far far worse - and the irony is that they are far more regulated).

Then there's the fed which kept interest rates too low for far too long which allowed for an asset bubble which in turn fueled demand for debt. And now Geithner is attempting a massive power grab in the middle of all of this. He wants to have the power to force unregulated institutions into insolvency - this despite the fact they're not like banking institutions where they are obligated to guarantee deposits up to a given amount per FDIC. So now the end result is that venture capital funds and private equity firms may need to report to the SEC resulting in higher costs and regulations - costs I would add that mean aren't going back into investing in productive parts of society for problems that may or may not even exist!

It's a big mess but everywhere you look, regulators and government agencies had their grubby little hands everywhere.

<comment><USER4> Further counterpoints... (warning; I'm a touch sleepy).

First, there is the primary issue, severely undermining almost everything you write, of "encouraging" vs "doing". (I'm making an assumption here:) It's really quite ironic to see a libertarian claiming that one who encourages a decision bears greater responsibility than the individual who actually made the decision him/her/itself.

In other words: if I take you at face value, the regulators encouraged bad behavior, individuals and institutions behaved badly, and it is the former who bears the majority of the blame. Pardon me if I don't buy it. Sure, the regulators screwed up, but to a tar-and-feathering degree rather than a torches-and-pitchforks level.

Further complicating the "regulators are more to blame" approach, even if we overlook the basic contradiction at its core, are the issues of regulatory capture: Wall Street and the regulators in question are pretty much the exact same people at this point, and their motives pretty much identical (due to many reasons; e.g. the revolving door). (I digress, but I believe this is a big part of the reason the current response has sucked so badly: too much Wall Street, not too much regulators!)

Finally, although I'm sleepy, I believe I detect huge amounts of spin in your response here. A couple of examples: CDS contracts entered into by AIG were rather larger than the entire value of the company, for example, not what I would call a "relatively small" amount. And Geitner doesn't want to "force unregulated institutions into insolvency" ... the institutions in question are already insolvent! What he wants is, presumably, is to force them into something along the lines of a slowed-down, taxpayer supported restructuring (aka: bankruptcy). This may or may not be a good thing but to cast it as "forcing an organization into insolvency" is duplicitous.

<comment><USER5> > Further complicating the "regulators are more to blame" approach, even if we > overlook the basic contradiction at its core, are the issues of regulatory > capture:

Regulatory capture is a consequence of regulation, so its effects are problems with regulation.

> CDS contracts entered into by AIG were rather larger than the entire value > of the company, for example, not what I would call a "relatively small" > amount

And they were hedged by contracts that were of comparable size. That's how insurance companies work.

And all of this was approved by regulators. In AIG's case, by both bank and insurance company regulators in the US and (at least) bank regulators from other countries. (I don't know if other countries also regulated AIG as an insurance company, but I suspect that they did.)

Note that the foreign banks that bought AIG policies did so with the express permission of their regulators. We know that because banks get no benefit from unregulated assets.

<comment><USER4> > Regulatory capture is a consequence of regulation, so its effects are > problems with regulation.

My point was that if we are looking for people to blame, whether we chose to point the finger at Wall St or at "regulators," it turns out it will be the exact same group.

> And they were hedged by contracts that were of comparable size.

Not at AIG they weren't, which is why so much of our taxpayer money is flowing through them to the counter-parties of their CDS contracts -- e.g., Goldman Sachs.

> Note that the foreign banks that bought AIG policies did so with the express > permission of their regulators.

So when a regulator gives you permission undertake an activity, by doing so they also lift all responsibility from you when you choose to go ahead with it? Regulators have made it possible for me to drink, does that mean it is their fault when I contract alcohol poisoning?

<comment><USER5> > My point was that if we are looking for people to blame, whether we chose to > point the finger at Wall St or at "regulators," it turns out it will be the > exact same group.

Actually, it's not. Unregulated Wall St has fared far better.

>> And they were hedged by contracts that were of comparable size.

> Not at AIG they weren't

Yes, they were - that's how regulated insurance works.

> which is why so much of our taxpayer money is flowing through them to the > counter-parties of their CDS contracts -- e.g., Goldman Sachs.

The money is flowing because the assets backing up the liabilities weren't actually worth enough and the risk was underestimated.

> Regulators have made it possible for me to drink, does that mean it is their > fault when I contract alcohol poisoning?

It means that you can't say that regulation solves alcohol poisoning.

<comment><USER4> > Actually, it's not. Unregulated Wall St has fared far better.

Like Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs?

> It means that you can't say that regulation solves alcohol poisoning.

I never claimed this. What it _does_ mean is that you cannot say that regulation causes alcohol poisoning.

<comment><USER5> > What it does mean is that you cannot say that regulation causes alcohol > poisoning.

Since, in your case, the regulator was providing the alcohol, it's fair to say that the regulator deserves some blame.

We're somewhere between "regulators were completely useless" and "regulators actively caused problems". It's hard to see how that leads us to "we need more regulators".

And yes, the regulators and the banks were the same folk. That's another argument against expecting them to help.

<comment><USER4> "we need more regulators"

When did I make this argument? No, it is a convenient strawman for you, and a way of changing the topic away from "Who is to blame for the stupid, stupid, stupid decisions on Wall Street and their rather disastrous consequences?"

I'm willing to apportion _some_ blame to the regulators, but it's quite amusing to see the hypocrisy of some libertarians when they rush to shield the banking and finance industries from the scorn they so richly deserve; blaming anyone and everyone (usually regulators and/or the government, conveniently in line with their ideology) except for the individuals responsible for the decision!

To paraphrase a common libertarian lament, whatever happened to individual responsibility?

<comment><USER5> > When did I make this argument?

All of these discussions are in a context of "what do we do?" with "more regulation" being one of the options.

<comment><USER4> No, these (specific) discussions are not in a context of "what do we do?" I think it encourages clearer thinking to tackle one thing at a time. Allow me to quote myself in the first sentence of my first post in this thread:

> As counterpoints, first consider that blame for the current situation and > the proper next steps are two separate issues.

<comment><USER5> >As counterpoints, first consider that blame for the current situation and the proper next steps are two separate issues.

Knowing how you got to where you are is relevant to knowing what to do. If you prefer, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

I'm not interested in punishing anyone, so "blame" has the wrong connotations. It's actually credit assignment. Do more of what works, do less of what doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There never were free markets.

<comment><USER7> Nor will there ever be, free markets are a fantasy. The only real free market is the black market.

<comment><USER3> Free markets require rule of law and property rights to thrive. That's the problem with black markets. You can't monetize some of the less tangible assets required to operate in formal markets. This is something that Hernando De Soto has written a considerable amount about.

For an example - developing markets because of the lack of property rights, a lot of people don't have the ability to borrow against their homes - or even properly sell them. And what prices they do get, are at a discount because they have illegal additions, or what have you. Same thing for businesses that can take years to start and formalize (that's just for the paperwork!).

Check out the World Bank's doingbusiness.org - and the places that are most difficult to do business consistently have the largest thriving black markets. Those markets definitely are not free. Black markets are definitely not the answer.

<comment><USER7> You make good points, but you misunderstand, I wasn't claiming they were the answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> financial collapse shows that the incentive structures in the financial industry were completely insane. Only in a world where dubious loans could be sold off en masse to government lenders does the so called "predatory lending" occur.

what incentive is there to do honest business when you're going to collect your commission and then wash your hands of the loan?

</comment><comment><USER9> If only shuffling money couldn't make a profit.</comment>


Norvig's Law - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/norvigs-law.html

<comment><USER2> While this law is obvious, it highlights how we are so obsessed with growth.

Everyone has a PC ==> PC is not growing ==> The PC is dying. Everyone runs Windows ==> Windows isn't growing ==> Windows (and Microsoft) are dying. Everyone has a Facebook account ==> Facebook cannot grow much more ==> Facebook is stagnant and no longer interesting.

Maybe this is one reason why Facebook are so eager to buy smaller, growing social networks like Instagram and Whatsapp: It almost allows them to count the same users twice or three times.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know, unless the numbers go down for a while and then they double again.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if wristwatches break this law in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of "Herbert Stein's Law" which he expressed as "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop".

</comment><comment><USER6> So Norvig's Law is a truism?

<comment><USER7> Yes. It's useful for pointing out the fallacy of endless exponential growth.

<comment><USER8> The bubble always bursts.

<comment><USER9> I think the analogy would be a bubble that grows but never enough to pop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unless the size of the market is also doubling.

<comment><USER8> Nope. 50% is 50%. It doesn't matter how big the market is, and that's Norvig's point. Once you penetrate 50% of the market, you're done.

<comment><USER11> He does admit that you can sell more than one item to the same customer, so you can have > 100% if you compare units sold to potential customers.

<comment><USER12> Indeed - maybe a corollary should be "in the same colour".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PC/Mac Software to create SQL webapps in minutes - <AUTHOR> http://appshare.co <comment><AUTHOR> I built Appshare as I was frustrated with how long it took to build simple CRUD apps on my intranet at work. So as an experiment I have made a VueJS front end and Sqlite Electron app which lets you create and test intranet webapps really fast.</comment>


Programming Error - United Airlines $35 Ticket to Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-united-hong-kong-072012,0,6915920.story

<comment><USER2> Been there, done that... Something like this happens at least a few times a year, so I am not sure why this made the news. it usually happens because of human error overriding the many protections that software have to prevent it from happening.

To make matters worse, the tickets are usually sold in mater of minutes because the algorithms that calculate the most efficient route from point A to point B lock on to the fare and use it for everything.

<comment><USER3> From someone on the inside, I've heard that they (well, the "line workers", at least, as opposed to Management) have been going through hell since launching the integration of their systems with... Continental's, IIRC (so many mergers; I'm forgetting which involve who). Apparently, they've escalated from SNAFU to FUBAR.</comment></comment>


Rails 5.1 Released: Loving JavaScript, System Tests, Encrypted Secrets, and More - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2017/4/27/Rails-5-1-final/ <comment><USER2> I love the way Rails does new releases, always some good features in there. Been working with 5.1 since the initial rcs and using the Capybara, encrypted secrets and webpack integration - all have been working well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was at the RailsConf when they announced the official release. People were so excited about. Probably one of the most enthusiastic communities out there.</comment>


Determining Browser Market Share - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/determining-browser-market-share/

<comment><USER2> "Instead, most developers should be monitoring one statistic: What is the browser share for my web site."

I was expecting some meaningless statistics, but it was refreshing to read this...

<comment><USER3> I would have thought that "think about your own audience" was just common sense.

<comment><USER2> As someone who idles in a few web dev channels on IRC, I think it's something that bears repeating. ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your current side project? - <AUTHOR> ...looking for inspiration how to spend a free time during next few months. <comment><USER2> While I don't work too much in it due to the current lack of time, I built cryptocoinalerts.net ([https://github.com/AlexITC/crypto-coin- alerts](https://github.com/AlexITC/crypto-coin-alerts)) some months ago, decided to be an open source project from the beginning and while it has served its purpose (put real work in a project that potential clients could evaluate), I ended up extracting a library from it ([https://github.com/AlexITC/playsonify](https://github.com/AlexITC/playsonify)) which I have being used in other projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> Writing a book about contemporary occultism.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay $3,500 for an Interview Bootcamp?  - <AUTHOR> In 3 months you are guaranteed placement into top 30 companies or you get money back. (Google, Facebook, Quora, Palantir, etc)
The program lasts for 12 weeks. You need 2 hours per day commitment, everyday.
Any takers? <comment><USER2> Why not give it away? People come for the bootcamp and after the 12 weeks you represent them during their job search. The companies will pay you $5-15k, depending on the candidate, as a referral fee. No cost to the participants.

<comment><USER3> >The companies will pay you $5-15k, depending on the candidate, as a referral fee.

I have tried, and from what I've seen, it is quite difficult to get that sort of a relationship with a company. If you have a recruiting agency that has that sort of relationship with a big company? You can sell your recruiting agency for a lot of money.

If you don't have a relationship with the company doing the hiring, you have to go through recruiters who do, and you will get $0-$2500 per referral. I've placed a lot of people at this level. I've gotten $2500 once. The rest of the time? I get a "thank you" (and the person I placed, often, feels they owe me a favor.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 12 * 7 * 2 = 168 total hours of commitment for a program I know nothing about, except that if you ask me to do something I believe is a waste of time I have to burn five figures in billable hours to ride it out and get the refund or sacrifice the $3,500.

I highly recommend you provide details of what precisely you are selling -- you've raised the stakes for all customers, so pitch me that I'll have more success with you than on my own.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> you ask me to do something I believe is a waste of time

You can see the proof for yourself when you burn through the following two books within the three months. a) [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming- Interviews-Inside...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Interviews- Insiders-Guide/dp/1479274836) b) [http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding- Interview-Programming-...](http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview- Programming-Questions/dp/098478280X)

You need to spend 4hrs+ on weekends though. You will get to talk to candidates already working in the top companies and will be working in a group of 20+ highly motivated and intelligent peers.

<comment><USER5> The work required for passing programming interviews is rote practice of solving problems for which you cannot immediately think of a solution.

There's already hundreds of resources available to do this. Top-coder, practice-it, project euler, coding interview books, etc. etc.

Teaching negotiation and soft skills are probably more valuable for the general programming population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I were looking for a job, then yes, I would. A signing bonus would easily cover the 3.5k.

But why not work with the companies directly as a recruiting agency? Or work with already existing recruiting agencies to train their recruits? There is a lot of money to be made in the recruiting business, you definitely could make much more than 3.5k per hire.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting idea, but I think it will be difficult for you to find people who can actually land jobs at those companies (and need you to help them do it).

I though of covering interview questions on my site [http://www.learneroo.com](http://www.learneroo.com) , but I decided for now to focus on general learning (though there's a lot that's relevant for interviews too).

<comment><AUTHOR> We are betting on the idea that a reasonably smart person would surprise themselves on how far they can get ahead if they can diligently work in a consistent manner. 2 hours per day may not seem much but over the course of 3 months it is pretty effective in hacking the interview process.

We will actually call/text the candidate before and after study period is over to ensure focus. Kind of like having a personal trainer for interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting idea. Would there be any sort of pre-requisites? I could see something like this being pretty successful at private universities (where parents sometimes have more money than their kids have ambition/drive/talent). It would resonate with the same folks who pay big bucks for SAT and ACT prep classes

<comment><AUTHOR> The only pre-requisite is that the candidate should be reasonably intelligent. Someone who is already working in a big company/school and is putting off preparation for the interviews is ideal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd commit. However an easier model to attract more people is percentage of income (annually or monthly).

I seen people work with headhunters before, giving up 1 months salary as the commission to land a job they want and in the end it seems like a win/win situation. Both people are happy.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've seen companies offer similar deals in Denmark. It can't possibly be a new concept in the US, can it?

Most often they'll ask for 50%-100% of the first paycheck (hopefully after tax, or else nobody can pay that in Denmark!)

</comment><comment><USER11> If you'd take the $3500 fee after I have the job, I think anyone would do it.

I'd even go so far as to say I'd be willing to give you guys 40-50% of my pay for 3 months.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sign me up. I'll commit 6-8 hours, how to contact you?

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes definitely

</comment><comment><USER14> guaranteed? right...</comment>


Google Web Fonts on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/fonts

<comment><USER2> "This is not an official Google project, and Google provides no support for it."

I guess the intended message here is "We don't promise to maintain or update this or fix your bugs/issues/concerns", but it seems weird to say it's not an official project when it's on Google's namespace

<comment><USER3> There are a lot of projects in the google namespace that are just experiments by employees. Being there just means "done by someone affiliated with google", not "officially supported or endorsed". A bit confusing sometimes, but that is how it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This might make it easier to use Google Web Fonts in offline environments.

<comment><USER5> The fonts were always available in a repository format: [https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/](https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> are all google fonts available here? I see only few to [http://www.google.com/fonts/.](http://www.google.com/fonts/.).</comment>


Ask HN: iPhone 5 or Galaxy S4? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for an upgrade, and after reading and watching a lot of comparisons, I still think it's very close between the two. Which one do you prefer and why? <comment><USER2> If you want simplicity and are already invested in the ecosystem with other products and such, you may prefer an iPhone. It will give you what you want if all you need is a phone that always works, gets OS updates not on the whim of the carrier and has lots of good apps. It may not be quite as configurable (can't change the default browser and other default system apps) and modder friendly as many Android devices, but that doesn't always matter to a lot of people. I like messing around with the under-layers of the devices I use for fun/learning, so I mostly have Android devices for my personal use.

If you want something you can hack around on without jailbreaking or paying for a developer's account, compiling the OS source (via Cyanogenmod, AOSP or others), change the default application for things like the browser, etc, then the S4 might be what you want. One thing I can say about Android is that I've seen it motivate and encourage quite a few people with no programming or hacker experience beforehand to go out and learn how to compile the source for their device, retheme it directly from the xml markup and pull up debug logs to give proper bug reports to the developers they follow. There's a lot childish behavior online and also in the Android modding communities, but it always makes me feel a bit better when I think of the people I've helped learn more about modding their device and how it works beyond what a typical user would care about. There may be a trolls and some sterotypical "man-childs" on XDA, rootwiki and other modding sites, but there's also many knowledgeable people that are willing to share what they know to anyone.

I know I got off on a tangent there sorta, but anyways, back on subject...

If you want something that works without a lot of modding and bloat, opt for a Nexus Device (either the Nexus 4 or the upcoming [though 600+ dollars] AOSP Galaxy S4). While it can be nice, the Samsung (Touchwiz skinned) S4 is going to have carrier bloat (a lot of useless junk) and could also have a locked bootloader that cannot be unlocked (if you like to mod stuff). Nexus devices are the closest Android equivalent to an iPhone as far as intended user experience by the creator of each OS.

I've only played around with my friends and relative's iOS devices. I own a handful of Android devices, mostly for development, but my primary phone is a Galaxy Nexus. Don't recommend the Galaxy Nexus though (at least not the Verizon Wireless LTE/CDMA Version [Toro]). Battery life is only 2-3 hours of screen time for it and 8-12 hours of total use. That's enough for me, not not for someone that uses their phone more heavily. The GSM variant is much better than that though and the S4 battery life will blow either one out of the water.

Honestly, it comes down to what you want, not what we can suggest. You don't give much in the way of details and background about yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your detailed comment. I definitely think iOS is more polished and has a better app selection than Android.

My biggest gripe with Apple devices is the closed-wall garden; I have no Apple devices at home (the only one I've owned was a 3rd gen. iPod Touch) . As a longtime Linux user, I don't see a lot of interoperability between the iPhone and Linux. The S4 also has a removable battery and an SD card slot, which is nice.

Also, thanks for the reminder about the Google Edition S4, might want to get that over the current bloatware-filled one.

<comment><USER2> AOSP S4 would be what I would get (and will get depending on if the modem chipsets support cdma/lte). After dealing with prior OEM devices and the ugly hacks I had to do to root them and compile the source (as well as laggy updates), I don't think I could ever deal with one again (though my experience was based on Android <= 2.3). Devices you can unlock the bootloader to and access the /data partition where the apps lie makes doing things like working with sqlite super easy when you can just mount the Android device via sshfs and go right to the app directory you're working on to change the sqlite db without reinstalling the app. Not a thing most are aware of, but it makes life so much easier that way for development.

If you are looking into development at all, Scala works well on Android if you prefer something other than Java. I only moved to using it the last couple of weeks (used C#/Mono and Java previously), but it's better than I thought it would be. I got it working without any external building or extra plugins in intellij idea as well (setup guide I put on github earlier today [https://github.com/yareally/android-scala-intellij-no-sbt- pl...](https://github.com/yareally/android-scala-intellij-no-sbt-plugin)).

I'm stuck on Verizon for now and torn between keeping unlimited data and getting a newer device I won't hate. AOSP S4 is probably going to win me over in the end though and the nice AMOLED screen it has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, that comes down to a very specific question: Do you like iOS or Android better? If you are indifferent, what do you like/dislike about your current phone? Also, if you're thinking about mobile development, go for the one you'll be developing on. You will have a much better understanding of what users want from their smartphone if you are a user yourself.

</comment><comment><USER4> HTC One?</comment>


The Animal-AI Testbed - <AUTHOR> http://aaitestbed.us-west-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/AAI/ <comment><USER2> I failed (ran out of time) in one of the problems during Challenge 1 during manual play. The physics seem a little wonky to me. It's easy to miss running at a ball, the floor is slippery and takes a long time to reorient and build up speed.

Guess I am not an animal.

</comment><comment><USER3> i'm waiting for AI to pass that test [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NCw83LVWFo&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NCw83LVWFo&feature=youtu.be&t=56)</comment>


The One Wheel Micro-Cycle - <AUTHOR> http://rynomotors2.wordpress.com/ <comment><USER2> Is its top speed really the snails pace shown in the video? For heaven's sake, why not ride a bike?

</comment><comment><USER3> It only goes 20 mph?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know seems so slow</comment>


Use React and JSX in ASP.NET MVC - <AUTHOR> http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2014/04/04/reactnet.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There's more under [http://reactjs.net](http://reactjs.net)

I'm surprised to see facebook interested in ASP.NET MVC development.</comment>


Show HN: Searchable career-paths built by scraping publicly available resumes - <AUTHOR> http://www.careercomposer.net <comment><USER2> I think there's some parsing issues, because I would hate to end up at the end of my career as "Software Development Intern 12".

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually intentional to avoid infinite loops in the graph, I have to add an integer to common titles. Thanks for the feedback, its obvious now that this may be confusing as I don't explain it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really cool idea. Nice visualizations. I like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. I've had lots of students and new graduates ask me about career options - so i thought this might help.</comment></comment>