To outsource or build ourselves? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a UX lead who's going to be the product guy in a new start-up. It'a data driven financial services product for a niche but high spending market.
We're well funded but we don't currently have a tech director on board.
We're considering outsourcing the initial build of the platform/site while we create an internal team.
Is this a good idea or nuts? Anyone had a similar experience? <comment><USER2> What do you consider as a tech director role?

Outsourcing works if you have all of these:

\- solid understanding what technology you are using and how the contractor party will provide you the implementation

\- solid understanding what the business requirement is and how you will communicate with the contractor party

If you have a single person who is able to communicate both, the outsourcing should be OK. Another consideration is the know-how: if your services are easy to copy, handling out the implementation part to a third party might not be a good idea at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. That was pretty much my thinking too.

I understand the technology (just can't create it myself) and I've been balancing Business Requirements and User Needs for years so have that covered.

And while our idea/implementation might be easy to copy (in fact it's already been done by others in different markets) our data is proprietary and unique. And that is our real value differentiator.

The tech directors role as I saw it was to oversee the product from a technical perspective. Choose the technology, hire and manage the development team etc.</comment></comment>


One Person Startup  5 to 10 million a year revenues. - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117987775136211487.html?mod=technology_featured_stories_hs <comment><USER2> I think there's two hidden forces involved here:

1) It started out free when everybody else was charging something.

2) Social psychology, where people want to connect with other people, in communication, physical and emotional levels, so without restrictions it prospered.

<comment><USER3> Vote this guy up. 1) is a key feature of plentyoffish

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you believe SEO created any major site i've got a bridge to sell you. 100 uniques a day from SEO gives you 20 signups a day. How do you get from 20 signups a day to millions of users using seo?

<comment><USER4> Digg is mostly about SEO. They get something like 50% of their traffic from Google. Same with Wikipedia. Those are examples of where SEO can be win for everyone, good content that ranks high because of well structured pages and relevant content.

How much is that bridge and where is it located?

<comment><USER5> I don't think Wikipedia's Google traffic is from people randomly bumping into it; I get to Wikipedia through Google because Google's search is faster and less finicky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"The site became popular in Canada and, later, in the U.S. Mr. Frind says he doesn't know exactly why."_

He's being dishonest here, but if that journalist was worth anything they'd have discovered he's an SEO guy:

<http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/>

<comment><USER6> For some reason, worrying about the Google dance to drive folks to your site seems like not the coolest way to build a product.

<comment><USER7> Really? What aspect of it is unappealing? Personally, if I were to go the startup route, I would feel pretty successful if I had a salary of ~$6M a year. I imagine you would too.

So, you object to his SEO work. Why is SEO any different than opening up a restaurant at a particularly busy intersection? Seriously, I'm curious why SEO is not the coolest way to build a product.

<comment><USER4> Because SEO is not a product. The way most people (including Markus) do it it's all about gaming the system, tricking users, and generally being very scammy/spammy with your site. SEO requires a ton of work too, and you could take that same energy and put it into actually creating something new and valuable. If you do it well the world is richer and so are you.

<comment><USER8> If you really believe that, you should learn more about SEO. A big part of SEO is:

1) Making sure search engines can find and understand all of your pages. 2) Making sure that people want to visit your site when your pages show up on SERPs. 3) Making sure that LOTS of people link to you and talk about you online (the PlentyofFish guy has nailed this). 4) Assorted markup tricks that help people find your site better. 5) Understanding what people are googling for when they are looking for products/services like you provide.

If you think dissing SEO is taking the high road-- you're half right. There are "black-hat" tricks that you should avoid. But throwing out SEO as "meaningless if you have a great product" isn't taking the high road. It's taking the stupid road.

<comment><USER4> I do agree. That's why I said "the way most people do it" and not all. When people talk about building a site through SEO they're almost always talking about those black-hat tricks. I'm all for the kind of SEO that Digg or Wikipedia does. I'm not suggesting you _ignore_ SEO altogether. My point was that SEO is not a product in and of itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Um .... PG was not right :)

<comment><USER3> Not right about what?

<comment><USER10> ivan is probably referring to PG's insistence that startups should have multiple founders (preferrably two).

<comment><USER9> Exactly, I'm referring to that claim :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Article also fails to mention he got a boost from adding fake profiles (mostly of women) early on.

A forum post of his asking about how to do this is archived on the net somewhere.

... not that I've never done anything greyhat either.</comment>


Nutella 'riots' spread across French supermarkets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42826028 <comment><USER2> The supermarket is being investigated for "product dumping":

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2018/01/30/581843472...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2018/01/30/581843472/fraud-officials-are-investigating-sales-that-caused- nutella-riots-in-france)

France has strict rules about when a product can be sold for below cost.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the share, this is even more interesting than a small scale black Friday. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really don't see why this is international news.

One supermarket chain in France gives a substantial discount on a product that kids love, some people in _a few_ of these stores go nuts, this is then filmed and uploaded to the internet.

What are we to make it of? Depends. My guess is that lot of these people are presumably low-income and aren't always able to buy Nutella for their kids. Or they are, but it's a significant part of their weekly grocery bill. So I suppose it was kind of a big deal in that regard, to be able to buy their kids the real deal instead of generic supermarket brands. (Pretty much the same thing, but try to explain that to little kids). In which case it's all a bit tragic, really. Or maybe that's not it at all and the story is about the lengths to which deal-hunters will go for a few euros. But the news doesn't go into all of this — the report was that people went crazy and fought each other for cheap Nutella across French supermarkets.

In any case, it's odd for such an isolated, specific incident to receive international coverage. This isn't even that interesting to people living in France unless you want to try to understand understand the sociology/economics of it.

 _shrugs_

<comment><USER5> And the worst part is, a lot of the pseudosociological analyses I've seen of this event were uninteresting. Since I'm french, my fb feed was flooded by that. And people acted surprised and looked down on that. Some left politicians decided to play the "this is proof of misery, these people have no money to buy that". And even the few posts I adhered to (that it was mostly just an instance of the power of marketting and consumerism) were just too obvious and shallow to be interesting.

This is interesting for left politicians who want to intrumentalize that. For smartasses who like to look down on others because they are soo free of consumerism (they are not). But to be interesting for sociologists, it'd require a more in depth study implying those concerned. Or maybe... A study of the media coverage and reception of the "phenomenon", which would imo be way more interesting when it comes to analysing today's society than yet another show of black-friday-like craze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any chance Nutella would stop using palm oil as the base of their spread?

People love nutella so much, it's a real shame it has such a terrible impact on the planet.

<comment><USER7> Ferrero apparently only sources "sustainable" palm oil. Don't know how reliable that is but if it's true then it's not a big issue.

<comment><USER5> Probably as reliable as cigarette propaganda of mid XXth century. At least that's my wild guess

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now France will understand Black Friday

<comment><USER9> We have the same discount days/weeks in France and the same riots at the opening of the stores. It's just not called Black Friday.

<comment><USER10> Black friday's riots are on a whole other level than "les soldes" in France... Part of the reason might be that black friday is a single-day event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> " _Intermarché supermarkets offered a 70% discount on Nutella, bringing the price down from €4.50 (£3.90) to €1.40._ "

I think this tells us so much about the financial literacy of today's society. And also quite something about the human psychology.

<comment><USER12> Do you care to elaborate? What exactly does this tell us about our financial literacy?

<comment><USER11> Sure. I see several points:

\- It seems to me that people buy stuff they don't really need just because it's discounted

\- When the relative discount is large but the absolute discount tiny, people tend to overestimate the value they're getting

\- Lower income folks tend to spend more on materialist things that they don't really need, but when it comes to essential items like food, they try to save money

I just can't believe that people go this crazy over a couple of euros in savings. Maybe someone with a psychology background can help me out? :-)

<comment><USER5> You mean marketing tricks people into buying stuff they don't need ? Now that's news

As for your question, it's mostly marketing plays with knowed biases and affects. And low-income people are all the more pressured to buy stuff on discount because they feel like they can only get it now. When you earn 5k a month, you don't really care about a discount, you can buy that Nutella whenever you want.

As for their saving on important stuff while spending on consumerist stuff, they just follow the norms we push down their throats. Nobody knows you eat pasta and shower with cold water. Everybody can see your 5 years old smartphone and dirty cloths.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that makes sense, thanks for expanding. Do you think better financial literacy education could decrease this problem?

<comment><USER5> I guess it would, but teaching financial litteracy, like any kind of litteracy, goes beyond just teaching facts. It's a whole culture, a whole set of behaviors that needto be taught. And I don't see it happening in a society which "needs" docile consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish peanut butter would be more popular in France. Nutella is basically the breakfast AND the break of 4PM for millions of people here. This country is addicted to sugar.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is nutella better in France? I find it too sweet and not very nutty. Not worth rioting over.

<comment><USER14> It's exactly the same product in France. Nutella once was primarily a hazelnut paste, flavoured with cocoa and a bit of sugar. Over many years it became primarily a sugar and palm oil base, flavoured with a little (13%) hazelnut.

In Italy, however, you can buy many other locally-made brands of hazelnut spread which still contain 50% or more hazelnut. Much tastier, probably healthier, and in Italy they're not all that much more expensive than Nutella!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pr stunt out of control.</comment>


Show HN: Transform Google spreadsheets into a ready-to-embed widget table - <AUTHOR> https://blog.updatefy.co/transform-spreadsheet-to-widget-table/ <comment><USER2> Getting a video error when I try to watch. Does this let me display certain spreadsheet cells or arrays as say, an Android widget?

I've been looking for something that lets me do that in a manner that offers solid privacy and security. Of the solutions I've seen in the app store, I'm not sure I feel convinced about those aspects of them.

I wish Google would release a native Sheets Android widget.

<comment><AUTHOR> The video is here if you want to watch it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpkde3eMqG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpkde3eMqG4)

The widget can be used in any platform that supports javascript :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://updatefy.co/documentation#types](https://updatefy.co/documentation#types)

Err.. so there are only 3 widget types right now? This looks like a neat idea. More widgets needed.

But i am not a UI or front-end guy. Am i mis-understanding? Are users supposed to design our own widgets?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) At the moment we have 3 widget types we are planning to release more. No, all widgets are coming from us :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That looks fantastic! Have been looking for a way to embed a roadmap into my app while keeping the data disconnected from it in a frictionless way.

Wonder if there could be a way to two-way-bind so that users can actually make changes to the data when displayed as a table.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! and happy to hear that you might use it :) No, at the moment is only visible data, we don't support writing in the spreadsheet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool! I like the logo a lot. I also have a web application that relies on spreadsheets but as an Excel file upload. Cool to see what is possible with Google Sheets.

<comment><USER5> There's an idea for you. Create a static widget from a users uploaded .xlsx file..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great idea and clean demo.

Do you know what some of your customers are doing with this in the real world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes! For example one of our customers is using Updatefy to update order status in their websites, so any employee with Google Sheets knowledge can do it.

<comment><USER7> How do you know that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I talked with them :), also is as a testimonial in home page [https://updatefy.co](https://updatefy.co)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool idea! Looking forward to see what's coming.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great product! Looking forward to see whats coming.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Solid demo video.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> how long with smartsheet last?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, what do you mean? Theres no limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great demo

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tools to call REST API and export to CSV? - <AUTHOR> I've written my own in JavaScript, Python, PowerShell, and I've used Microsoft Power BI/Power Query, but they are slow, don't work well, require custom code, etc.
I need to:
1. call REST APIs (with Authorization HTTP header) and get JSON (arrays of objects), also parent-child endpoints (parent has IDs of child objects) -- nested loops
2. paginate using the Link HTTP response header, observe rate limits (HTTP response headers, to avoid 429 errors) and concurrency limits
3. (nice to have) select certain fields from the JSON object; also, data can be "L-shaped" (not every record has the same fields)
4. export to CSV
Open source, cross-platform would be good. Needs to be easy for not-very-technical end users to use. <comment><USER2> datatables.net is a good modular javascript library that handles pagination and child tables and export to csv/excel. you will still need to write some code for formatting the api calls into a useable format.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip.

I gave it a try, and got something really basic to work. It took me several hours (part of it was my fault, part of it was the documentation and its defaults that expect the data in a particular format, and the error messages that weren't very helpful).

It's a complex tool, and it does a lot, but not what I need.

<comment><USER2> There are no silver bullets here. It is always alot of work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I've already written 1,000s of lines of code for this. I was trying to a) see if the problem had already been solved, b) see if it was worthwhile for me to continue trying to solve it.

The MS Power Query / BI tools come really close, but not quite.

As I like to say, they do the first 80%, but it's that last 80% that you still need :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What was wrong with powershell ? You could make it faster if you run using jobs/runspeaces and/or distribute on several machines. Should be dead easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing was wrong with it. It works fine, but I need, basically, a GUI or something simple that non-programmers/non-technical people can use.

I guess I need to wrap my code with something easy. I was trying to avoid reinventing the wheel, but, so far, I haven't found a wheel.</comment></comment>


Show HN: my weekend project - <AUTHOR>

I built a small website this weekend where people can show off their figurine collection. The goal of this website is just to be in my portfolio. So I want it to look "cool".
Any advice on how to improve the landing page, the register page and the dashboard?
URL : http://www.figurine-fan.com/
- account: email@example.com:hndemo
- http://www.figurine-fan.com/hndemo
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Looks nice. I have a bit of pixelation on the button & font. But overall it's nice, clean and a simple idea. I like it.

You should share it with the guys at -> <http://www.reddit.com/r/figurines>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable link: <http://www.figurine-fan.com/></comment>


Show HN: Serverless Free Text Search with AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rlingineni/Lambda-Serverless-Search <comment><AUTHOR> This was a project that I built to explore if we could build a cheaper elastic search alternative using a FaaS service model. I didn't use a DB. Just S3, Lambda and API Gateway. I even did a performance analysis for latency times. It was a fun experiment, just deploy from the Serverless Repo and everything will work out of the box.

<comment><USER2> This is an awesome idea. I love ElasticSearch and use it all the time but I can see using something like this for smaller projects where running an ES cluster makes no sense.

I haven't tried running but assuming the best... great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, there's still a lot of performance improvements to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> But I don't understand, why are the run times so incredibly high? 15 seconds to looks through 18k records? Should be <10ms (ignoring network latency), or what am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have been more clear. That's indexing latency, so the time it takes for a document to appear after you add it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Checkout the graph below. That should show the search query latency</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is BitCoin D.O.A.? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a consumer-oriented BitCoin product (like PayPal for BitCoin.) I believe the idea has promise if BitCoin continues growing as it has recently, but I'm debating whether or not I should continue after seeing an unsettling number of problematic issues with BitCoin recently, including the $500,000 theft, the big drop in price on the exchanges last Friday, rumors of impending government intervention, etc.<p>What are your thoughts on this? <comment><USER2> The banks don't seem all that secure lately, either. I think that puts things into perspective a little, compared to Bitcoin.

Considering that Bitcoin is a new digital currency and the software for it is not that mature yet, I don't think what happened recently should be that surprising.

It's beta software that is quite appealing to hackers because there are money involved, so attacks or flaws like these should've been expected. It's the risk the early adopters had to take, and some or most of them made a lot of money in the process by taking that risk.

The only mistake was in believing that Bitcoin was going to be 100% safe forever with no further improvements, and securing the clients and transactions as much as possible. But this is because it's still early for it, and it does have a lot of potential, so I wouldn't give up on it.

Bitcoin also needs a real economy behind it, not just speculation, so the faster that bitcoin economy grows, the better it is for bitcoin.

<comment><USER3> > The banks don't seem all that secure lately, either.

Are you referring to the attacks that leaked user information? That is a little different than someone stealing 500k from your account right? Furthermore, most major banks will cover fraud charges and by design there are no such protection with Bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The $500k theft isn't a vulnerability with Bitcoin. If you stick half a million in your mattress and your house burns down, who's to blame for that? The price on the exchange has always been volatile with a small amount of volume. So, basically, nothing has changed. If it's unsafe to put your eggs in the Bitcoin basket now, it was before too.

</comment><comment> mark-r The more useful BitCoin becomes, the more of a threat it becomes to the governments of the world. You'll be creating a huge lightning rod. The two most likely outcomes are BitCoin is a flop and so are you, or the government shuts you down. Not very promising prospects.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not trying to be clever, but aren't startups all about solving _problematic issues_? I'm not too familiar with all the issues with BitCoin, but maybe a pivot can help solve them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bitcoin is a massive opportunity still going through growing pains. I think there'll be second generation cryptocurrencies, but nothing to compete with bitcoin in this round.</comment>


Fixing the Talent Gap in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://beehivestartups.com/blog/fixing-talent-gap-still-exists-utah/

<comment><AUTHOR> This post is directly addressed to the tech industry in Utah, but the ideas are universal.

It makes the argument for investing in junior tech talent. Thought it'd make for great discussion here on HN.

What is the right balance between investing in senior level developers, and investing in junior talent?</comment>


Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/

<comment><USER2> Our brains already do this for us. It's called the bullshit detector (technical term).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Meh I love how I got ignored for proposing basically the same thing five years ago:

<http://bit.ly/QJFb0>

<comment><USER3> How is your idea "basically the same thing"?

Your idea seems to boil down to the calculation of a edits/views metric that supposedly implies something about the quality of the entire article. WikiTrust tracks the edits relating to each word, and the edits of the authors making those edits to determine the trust of that text.

<comment><AUTHOR> If my proposal had been discussed in 2004 then the consensus might have been that the specific implementation that works best is the algorithm they are putting in place today. That's fine.

The point was that I proposed that we had the same problem (and opportunity) in 2004 and came up with the same general approach, drawing on the same set of resources, and no one took me up on my offer to discuss it.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that there was disagreement that there would one day be a problem, even in 2004. But "drawing on the same set of resources" doesn't seem like a fair way to think of it, especially to conclude that your idea would have led to the same thing.

I am one of the researchers on this project, and there are no "resources" which are being made available to us -- it's been something of an uphill battle to do more than just talk. We came up with our idea in January 2006, and spent the year implementing it. Even now, with this attention and with it being open source, there are no volunteers stepping forward to help make it a reality on the Wikipedia itself. We receive very little funding (from CITRUS and LANL, not Wikipedia), and I pay my own tuition from my side-job. Our research group has been really focused this last year to make the code "production ready" instead of just research code, but don't forget that we are academics -- it's difficult to justify our spending time this way, except that we truly believe in the project.

In terms of "credit for the idea", the earliest published work that I have seen is the "Puppy Smoothies" article in First Monday ( [http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1400/1318) ) We cited that and every other blog posting (unusual for an academic paper!) we could find in our first paper. You'll see that there are actually several that existed at the time, but the real issue is in finding the man power to implement the ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha. By resources I actually meant the data available (timestamp, page views, contributor history, etc.), and not the actual financial support.

Anyway I wasn't trying to take credit for your work, I was just annoyed that no one wanted to discuss it at the time. Great job though, this is a really cool (and important) project!

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Okay, I see what you're saying. Actually, they still won't make that information available, though we have been asking a while. That was a big challenge when we started, but I think it was a good constraint because it pushed us in this direction to think about how the text itself evolves. Upcoming work will be looking at new signals to inform the page quality, such as activity on the Talk pages -- so there's no shortage of ideas, only of time to work on it.

On the page views signal - there was a great paper in the last few years that came up with a way to estimate it from multiple other data sources (eg, Alexa). I don't remember the title, but it was an impressive bit of stitching together. If I had the time/money/resources, I would love to get that as a signal in our work and see if it helps. I'm not 100% convinced it would, because of vandalism I've seen which lasted for years on a somewhat popular page -- so even many eyes does not help if no one will take action to fix incorrect data.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tcl scripting is like comfort food - <AUTHOR> http://www.controlq.com/blog/wordpress/?p=381

<comment><USER2> I agree that it's vastly usable and fun to use; it's like a power-enhanced UNIX/Linux shell. Useful to get things done, but, except for some testing positions, useless on a resume. I suspect part of its "failure" compared to other scripting languages is that it was so flexible that it seemed not to have an opinion, EG there are _several_ object systems commonly used with it.</comment>


Frizbee.io - <AUTHOR> https://frizbee.co/

<comment><USER2> Would it kill you to put some sort of description in the title?

</comment><comment><USER3>
        frizbee.io // submitted title
        frizbee.co // actual domain

Oops?</comment>


The tale from a phone pishing attempt - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/06/phishing-phone-calls-onlinesupport-com.html

<comment><USER2> I just visited www.onlinesupport.com, it would surprise me if they actually have anything to do with that scam.

They are based in Canada and even raised some money for charity according to their site.

<comment><USER3> They have a call centre in my hometown, handling calls for a cell phone provider and a credit card company (for the most part at least). My understanding is the company mostly does incoming calls, ie. customer support lines and the like. Their operators identify themselves by the company they're taking calls for, not as Online Support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Anyway, If you ever receive such a call, do not follow along"

But then perhaps stringing them along means less time for them to be calling other people who may not be aware of this scam?

<comment><USER5> Seems like a drop-in-the-ocean type of solution.

<comment><USER6> Worse, honestly, the value of your wasted time is almost certainly higher than that of the person on the other end of the call.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Curious, did anyone from here ever received such a call? Wondering if they always use the same company name/domain and other things they say.

thanks,

<comment><USER7> Here's a voicemail I saved of a phishing call:

<http://www.wikiupload.com/SWUSHQPIZSISWW3>

Contents (google voice text-to-speech * ):

This is not active. To activate computer protection go to www, dot G ohh Hey Al, yeah. H. Hey Al, dot com failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction. To activate computer protection go to www, dot G ohh Hey Al, yeah. H. Hey Al, dot com failure to do so may result in severe computer her W W dot G ohh Hey Al, yay. Bye. Yes, dot com failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction. To activate computer protection go to www, dot G ohh Hey Al, Yeah. H. Hey Al, dot com failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction. To activate computer protection go to www, dot G ohh Hey Al, yeah. H. Hey Al, dot com failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction. To activate computer protection go to www, dot, G, hello Hey Al, yeah. H. Hey Al, dot com failure to do so may result.

* er, voice recognition

<comment><USER8> Finally a case where Googles voice recognition (text-to-speech, incidentally, is the other way around) makes about as much sense as the original call...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think you mean phishing, not pishing. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> "Pishing attempt" could get one electrocuted if attempting this on a landline.

Oy Vay.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hahaha hilarious choice of names.</comment>


Earliest evidence of exoplanets comes to light, 100 years later - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0413/Earliest-evidence-of-exoplanets-comes-to-light-100-years-later <comment><USER2> Odd. I honestly didn't expect a proper popular science article from a magazine called "Christian Science Monitor".</comment>


Beyoncé's and Kanye West's listener numbers manipulated in Tidal - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fkultur%2Fi%2FA2m3RM%2FDN-Beyoncs-og-Kanye-Wests-lyttertall-manipulert-i-Tidal&edit-text= <comment><AUTHOR> The Digital Forensics Report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has more information, describing how they used statistical analysis to determine that there has in fact been manipulation of the playback number data at particular times, and shows the python code they used.

[https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dok...](https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dokumentar/strommekuppet/data/documentation/NTNU- rapport_til_publisering.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Getting: 403 Forbidden

<comment><USER3> It doesn't like the HN referrer, if you request it manually it works

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just some context:

DN is a financial newspaper in Norway, pretty important and trusted, if slanted towards "business" points of view.

NTNU is the second biggest university in Norway, focuses on science, and is well-regarded.

DN somehow aquired some files that purports to be logs of songs played in Tidal. The numbers in those logs seems to match up with other reported numbers, but Tidal denies the logs are genuine.

Researchers at NTNU analyzed the logs, and found that if they are genuine, then data was manipulated to boost play numbers for Kanye West's and and Beyonce's albums.

<comment><USER5> More context: Tidal is a music streaming website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only English language article I could find about it.

[https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/did-tidal-falsify- str...](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/did-tidal-falsify-streams-to- bulk-up-kanye-west-and-beyonce-numbers/)

I'm surprised this isn't bigger news if it is true.

<comment><USER7> > Another TIDAL subscriber, music critic Geir Rakvaag, supposedly played > tracks from Kanye West's The Life Of Pablo 96 times in a single day – with > 54 plays in the middle of the night.

>"It's physically impossible," he says.

>The list goes on.

The sql query that generated all those fake listens shouldn't have passed QA. /s

<comment><USER8> Is he using "physically impossible" for emphasis or is it really physically impossible for him to have listened to the track 96 times in a day? Because according to Wikipedia the longest track on that album is "No More Parties in LA" whose duration is 6:14 so it would take just under 10 hours to play it 96 times in a row. If you use shorter tracks and depending how short a play should be to count (I assume you don't have to listen from start to finish to count?) you could be done much faster. "I Love Kanye" is only 44 second long for instance. I wouldn't be surprised if some die-hard Kanye West fans had listened to more than 96 of his tracks in a day.

What if he simply put the album on repeat and left it running somewhere by mistake? There are 20 tracks in the album for a total length of 66:39, on repeat you'll rich 96 tracks played in a little over 5 hours. It doesn't sound implausible if it plays in the background while doing chores or other things. That would explain the plays during the night as well if he left it running on a muted computer.

Not that it invalidates the rest of the study or that it would surprise me if somebody had tinkered with the numbers, I just thought that it was a bit sloppy to use "physically impossible" when it's just "unlikely".

<comment><USER9> This is plausible in either direction.

I once turned down the volume for a streaming service one evening probably to talk to a friend. The playlist played through the night and well into the next evening. Depending on the playlist, some tracks could have gotten 15+ plays due to absent-mindedness.

I can definitely see a music critic putting together short playlists (e.g. 3 songs) for work on a specific album, article, or project. 3 songs at 3.5 minutes each in a playlist would take 10.5 minutes to play and loop 5.714 per hour. You could get 96 plays out of all 3 tracks by continuously looping the playlist 16.8 times.

Again, I'm not saying the numbers _aren 't_ inflated, but it's possible for some of these to be false-positives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The technical report from NTNU (PDF in English): [https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dok...](https://www.dn.no/staticprojects/special/2018/05/09/0600/dokumentar/strommekuppet/data/documentation/NTNU- rapport_til_publisering.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Tangential: Google's recently released Duplex claims to mimic natural conversation, yet there is not a single translation service that does not sound like a village idiot.

> "Several Tidal customers who have been confronted with these logs pretend to > have played songs by the artists as many times as illuminated."

Is translation so much harder, or simply not a priority, or are all the claims about neural networks and language processing exaggerated?

<comment><USER12> Duplex works because it's limited to a very specific domain. NLP has been working very well in those cases for decades: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028731)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So it looks like someone somewhere made up numbers of played tracks, which were then passed on through the system as gospel

And ... I am not sure now what. There is a online radio station thing (tidal) that has dishonest numbers.

But why would you trust those numbers outside of tidal unless you had some independnat verification ?

Is there any such independnat verification of say Apple store downloads ?

If not how do we solve both problems?

<comment><USER10> DN have «verified» the data by matching payments from Tidal to music companies

<comment><USER13> Yes, I am not disputing that they lied. What interests me is that we have so many unverified, and unverifiable sources of truth. If Apple just turned round and said "whoops, we were off by 2% for the past 5 years", would we know? If it was off by 200% there would be a lot of rumours and questions, but 2, 5, 10%?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Notice how kanyewest.com loads some analytics scripts multiple times. I think inflating stats might be part of "the game". Like renting expensive things for videos used to.</comment>


Tesla's Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405 - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-04/tesla-autopilot-is-found-partly-to-blame-for-2018-freeway-crash <comment><USER3> Fire truck driver here: People crash into parked fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars _all the damn time_. That's why we park the Big Red Truck at an angle behind the accident -- so that when the 2-ton car crashes into the 30-ton truck, the car will bounce off and the people behind the truck (us) won't be injured.

I don't disagree that Tesla's software is partly to blame here, but the null experiment also has a lousy track record.

<comment><USER4> This one time I go stopped at a fruit fly control point on the border between South Australia and Victoria, near Bordertown.

The person staffing the control point indicated with hand signals for me to stop on the highway in the lane I was in.

So I slowed down to walking speed and pulled off the highway into the car park next to the office.

The agent then lectured me about not following instructions and that she could fine me for disobeying.

I then calmly explained to the agent the reason I didn't stop in the lane on the highway: _drivers of cars and heavy vehicles are known to have a terrible habit of not seeing other vehicles stopped on the road._

<comment><USER5> It always blows my mind when a highway patrol scolds me for not stopping immediately on the side of the road, instead pulling off at the first exit/intersection to make it safer for us.

I'd estimate it's about 10% of the time. But on the contrary, I've also had them express appreciation for doing the same thing.

<comment><USER6> Jesus, how many times have you been pulled over that 10% of the time is more than once!?

<comment><USER5> There was a period of a few years where I drove a track-prepped race car on the street daily, with out of state plates for emissions reasons, and it resulted in a _lot_ of police encounters.

<comment><USER7> Has there been any studies of this? I think it's well known that if you drive a sports car you get pulled over more often, but I drive a beat up pickup in the south of USA and almost never get pulled over even though I'm frequently 5-10 MPH over the speed limit. Would be interesting to see pickup vs a normal mid range sedan vs sports cars in numbers. Maybe throw in out of state plates as an extra variable.

<comment><USER8> I drive a Subaru WRX STI which is one of the most expensive to insure vehicles due to it be one of the most ticketed and crashed vehicles. I have never been pulled over while driving it. I have been pulled over in my Wrangler many times while obeying all laws, but never had a ticket from it.

[https://insurify.com/insights/car-models-with-the-most- speed...](https://insurify.com/insights/car-models-with-the-most-speeding- tickets/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Figure 7 depicts the movement of the Tesla and the two lead vehicles in the last 15 seconds before the crash. In the left panel—covering 15 to 8 seconds before impact—the Tesla is accelerating from 9 to 18 mph while following a lead vehicle (red car) at 30 to 46 feet.In the middle panel—covering 7 to 4 seconds before impact—the Tesla is traveling at a constant 21 mph while following a lead vehicle (green car) at a distance decreasing from 148 to 108 feet. In the right panel—covering the last 3 seconds before impact—the Tesla is accelerating from 21 to 31mph, with no lead vehicle and a forward collision warning half a second before impact._

...

 _About 0.49 second (490 milliseconds) before the crash, the system detected a stationary object in the Tesla's path. The forward collision warning activated, displaying a visual warning and sounding an auditory warning to the driver. By the moment of impact, the Tesla had accelerated to a speed of 30.9 mph._

...

 _AEB did not activate during the event, and data show no driver-applied braking or steering before the crash. Tesla's AEB is a radar /camera fusion system that is designed for front-to-rear collision mitigation or avoidance. According to the company, the system requires agreement from both the radar and the camera to initiate AEB; complex or unusual vehicle shapes can delay or prevent the system from classifying vehicles as targets or threats._ [1]

Notice the last line. The system _still_ has to recognize an obstacle as being visually car-like before braking to avoid hitting it. If it's not recognized as a vehicle, the car will not stop.

This was in January 2018, but it was a 2014 vehicle, which would mean the old Mobileye vision based collision system, right? We know Mobileye works that way, trying to draw boxes around car rear ends, because people have bought them and made videos showing what they see. Did that get fixed? Can it be fixed with a vision-based system? This is the big weakness of a no-LIDAR system.

Here, the driver had 3 seconds to react, because the car ahead turned out of the lane to evade the fire truck well before reaching it. Compare this 2017 video of a Tesla hitting a construction barrier. The car ahead didn't turn until just before the barrier, only giving the driver under 1 second to react.[2] Same failure to detect a lane obstruction, but not enough time for the driver to do anything about it.

[1] [https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...](https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAB1907.pdf)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTdcWnGnnJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTdcWnGnnJQ)

<comment> matt-attack It only highlights how _incredibly dumb_ these autopilots are. They're incredibly diligent but completely fail at the _necessary_ skill of _understanding_.

What is the point of any of this if the car with all of its sensors knowingly plows into a stationary red 30-ton obstacle. It's something that a 4 year old human would understand _instantly_ as an object to be avoided at all cost.

I really think folks don't realize how critical all of our human understanding is to driving.

<comment><USER10> This is completely ridiculous. Adults drive into stationary objects all the time. 4 year olds walk into stationary objects all the time.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one criterion that matters when evaluating self driving cars: is it better than human drivers?

The fact that we are still discussing this _one_ accident that happened _a year ago_ indicates to me that the answer is a resounding yes.

<comment><USER11> Well, we could also talk about the time the Tesla accelerated into a gore point when the lead car followed the lane to the overpass. Or the couple of times the Tesla drove into a semi trailer. Or the several other stationary emergency vehicles they've hit. At least the semi's were moving.

We don't really know how well the Tesla automation does vs human drivers, because the statistics are complex, and Tesla only gives us deceptive summaries.

The capabilities that Tesla cars have aren't that much different than other luxury cars, but the other manufacturers don't have NTSB investigations, because their marketing isn't convincing people the car can drive itself.

<comment><USER12> > The capabilities that Tesla cars have aren't that much different than other > luxury cars, ... because their marketing

It's actually somewhat impressive, if frustrating, how well Tesla's marketing works.

In a previous article here a couple of weeks ago, a Tesla owner was touting "how much better" Tesla's blind spot monitoring was than "other manufacturers", because it took speed differentials into account, while my 2015 Audi A4 did exactly the same thing. If you were faster than someone in your blind spot, it wouldn't activate. If speeds were similar, it'd activate at close range. If they were vastly outpacing you (I'd see it when adjacent to a HOV lane), it'd activate well within a safety distance to factor in speed differential.

While there are "dumb" Blind Spot sensors, multiple Tesla owners were of the fervent belief that this was an example of how unique Tesla's technology is.

<comment><USER13> Even 2011 has it, and I am sure it wasn't the first year it was available either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The driver was found using his phone, over-relied on the autopilot system, and lied about what he was doing when being questioned. Sadly, we can't 100% trust these automated driving systems yet so folks need to stay attentive behind the wheel. The more accidents like this will cause lawmakers to create laws that can potentially slow down automated driving development.

<comment><USER15> The best way to stay attentive behind the wheel is to actually be the one driving. There's virtually no way of being both attentive and passive for long periods of time. If a driver can't check their email or whatever on their phone while autopilot is on, then autopilot is not safe to put in cars. And while I'm okay with not-exactly-safe for most things people willingly consume or use, driving is not an area where it's okay to roll out a feature that may cause people to stop paying attention to the road.

<comment><USER16> > There's virtually no way of being both attentive and passive for long > periods of time.

How do aircraft pilots manage it?

<comment><USER17> Extensive training, restriction of hours worked, health restrictions (pretty sure my ADHD would prevent me from being a commercial pilot)...

Also, my understanding is that aircraft autopilot systems are designed to allow for pilot response to take up to three seconds. Three seconds on the highway is a lifetime.

<comment><USER18> Car driving also has health preconditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> KT-222 Did the sun play a role in this? This picture from the report shows a low sun directly ahead. (Southbound 405 is going SSE in Culver City. 8:40AM accident)

[https://imgur.com/a/OaHNqdQ](https://imgur.com/a/OaHNqdQ)

Assuming it was taken ~1 hour after accident, the sun would have been lower and to the left at time of the accident. The slightly askew firetruck might have been basically facing the sun, and its prominent rear features would have been in as much as shadow as possible. Obviously there were other factors involved (yes, ultimately driver's fault), but do Tesla's cameras have the dynamic range to be looking directly at a low sun and also see details in shadows? Originally I thought this was a high-speed accident and am surprised to learn it happened between 20-30 MPH.

</comment><comment><USER19> If Tesla is unable to brake for a stationary fire truck with 3+ seconds of visibility, why should I be confident to pay $6k for "Full Self Driving"? Recognizing a stopped fire truck (effectively a wall) in front of me is a prerequisite for me to invest further. A part of me believes that the public is being intentionally misled on the capabilities, and Tesla's lack of transparency, coupled with their financial incentive to obscure, makes me more cynical.

What Tesla needs to do is to classify every known accident, and then recreate the accident (video please) followed by a recreation with their fixes. If the scenario can't be prevented in software, it needs to be disclosed to the buyer.

Would Tesla crash into that same fire truck again with the newest software? I suspect yes. I even suspect there are a bunch of engineers sitting around Tesla confident that crashing into that fire truck was the right thing to do.

Heck, I think Tesla should be required to have an asterisk next to every self driving claim, with an asterisk for every known scenario where their product has failed, including links to the crash reports, including full video evidence. The public should have a right to know exactly where/when/why the system failed as long as those failures aren't prevented in software from happening again.

<comment><USER20> Why should anyone buy a feature for $6k that basically gets them nothing until _a future point_ when they could buy it anyways?

<comment><USER21> It will be more expensive later.

<comment><USER22> The thing is, it almost certainly still won't exist later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Report...

Highway Accident Brief: Rear-End Collision Between a Car Operating with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and a Stationary Fire Truck

[https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HA...](https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HAB1907.aspx)

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the link. Interestingly, the NTSB's page appears unable to scroll at all with javascript disabled, but I was still able to view all the content by resizing the viewport(?) in both Firefox and Chrome. A very odd design decision...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This shifting blame to the cloud is a bad trend. It's the driver's fault.

<comment><USER26> ... but the driver was the car...

<comment><USER27> Not legally. Has Autopilot got a driver's license?

The fact that software was in control at the time is no more relevant than the guy who asks his twelve year old son in the passenger seat to reach over and steer while the driver rifles through stuff on the back seat.

Responsibility for an accident doesn't ever rest with whatever entity is steering the car, it rests with the licensed driver. (Which could be software, when it gets good enough.) Anything else is madness.

<comment><USER28> This report is about determining what features are inherently dangerous. It is very relevant that autopilot can't detect vehicles.

<comment><USER25> A common marketing trick is to steal a word by naming your product it. Suddenly you have Autopilot when it's really "Autopilot". Or better "Tesla Autopilot".

<comment><USER27> Yes, a respectable company like Chrysler wouldn't use such an inaccurate term.

[https://i2.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp- content/uploads...](https://i2.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/Chrysler-1958-Auto-Pilot-Brochure-03.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I worry much more about public overreaction to rare incidents slowing and overregulating self driving technology than I do about the rare crash here and there. Overall statistical safety is what matters, and statistics goes out the window when the public emotionally fixates on specific mishaps and demands regulation that slows and cripples overall-safe technology.

Everyone believes, without reason, that _he_ is a good driver and will always beat those janky autopilots. HN threads about autonomous vehicles are always full of unrepresentative anecdotes and angry moral denunciations of technology. It's sad.

<comment><USER30> Overall statistical safety just now for Tesla autopilot is probably worse than plain human driving. You can reasonably argue though that allowing research now will save lives in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> NTSB Report here: [https://ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAB1...](https://ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HAB1907.pdf) (found it here: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20849499/tesla- autopilot-c...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20849499/tesla-autopilot- crash-culver-city-2018-ntsb-report))

Copying: _When the last lead vehicle changed lanes—3 to 4 seconds before the crash—revealing the fire truck on the path of the Tesla, the system was unable to immediately detect the hazard and accelerated the Tesla toward the stationary truck. By the time the system detected the stationary vehicle and gave the driver a collision warning—0.49 second before impact —the collision was imminent and the warning was too late, particularly for an inattentive driver. The AEB system did not activate. Had the driver been attending to the driving task, he could have taken evasive action to avoid or mitigate the collision._

So there you have it: "particularly for an inattentive driver".

Not really an expert in the field, but I think a major problem with self- driving in general is handing over from an autopilot to a human. This is something that cannot be easily solved just by throwing smarter technology at the problem. Even if autopilot technology manages to be reliable 99.9% of the time, this won't be good enough, because people will invariably think they can rely on it 100% of the time and fall asleep or get distracted. So this 0.1% can be potentially catastrophic, because you cannot go from being asleep to full alertness in 0.5 seconds. Besides, even if one _actually wants_ to maintain alertness, it may be harder to be alert and not doing anything than being alert and doing something (driving).

So, unless autopilots can really really handle anything thrown at them, this will be a real issue. Although there is much willingness for people to convince others and be convinced that this kind of autopilot is very close to being a reality, I suspect it may be not.

<comment><USER32> There was an interview with George Hotz from comma.ai where he talked about this.

His fix is a very attentive driver monitoring setup. So if you are not paying attention, it will barf at you. IIRC he was also talking about how this driver monitoring setup is worth something in itself for trucking companies, fewer damages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think we should look at this probabilistically. Yes, autopilot should be improved to prevent this, but no system is perfect. Certainly not human drivers. IMO the correct comparison is whether Teslas are on average more likely to hit firetrucks while on autopilot than normal vehicles while being driven by humans.

I'm sure this data most likely won't be forthcoming, but I think it's important to keep in mind that we should be looking at accidents fleet-wide and not in isolation. Autonomously driven cars will have accidents. More importantly, their failure modes will be different than human drivers. However, as soon as they are even a small margin safer than human drivers, their adoption would save lives. Besides, the systems will continue to get better. Human drivers have proven stubbornly difficult to improve.

We ought not reject autonomous driving technology only because it sometimes gets in accidents that appear to be strange or arbitrary to us. I consider the carnage perpetrated by human drivers to be arbitrary, but most people just take death on the roads as a fact of life.

</comment><comment><USER34> Hey Elon, why don't you build a car course and fill it with all the things your cars have failed to avoid. Why haven't you made some OTA for large obstacle non car thing?

</comment><comment><USER35> Even with Autopilot, everyone I know who owns one: Its their little baby... they don't even dare risk it, at all. These people doing stuff like this are either really stupid, or really rich... or both. Because I have never seen anyone I know dare drive recklessly with autopilot.

<comment><USER36> I was looking to get a leaf or Cadillac in a few years when their autopilot is on used vehicles.

Isn't the point that its... Autopilot?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _The vehicle's design "permitted the driver to disengage from the driving > task"_

Which vehicle's design does not permit a driver to disengage from the driving task?

<comment><USER26> Autopilot. By design it encourages drivers to stop paying any attention - <USER2> fact that it has a "signal the driver" to try and maintain driver focus indicates that the core design produces this behavior.

If the core design produces the same behavior, in a large enough portion of the user base to require such a feature, that's a fairly good indication that the core design is causing a problem.

<comment><USER38> You are answering the opposite of the question.

 _all_ cars allow you to stop paying attention.

I think the idea behind autopilot is that it reduces your workload (like cruise control, or automatic wipers, or automatic headlights or any other labor-saving device)

<comment><USER26> Tools like autopilot _encourage_ lack of attention.

The problem isn't "you don't have pay attention to X" it is "you don't have to pay attention to _anything_ during normal operation". It is human nature, if not outright physiology that it is incredibly difficult to keep someone engaged, and paying attention to a task that they are not actually doing.

The problem with halfway solutions like autopilot isn't that they control the car some of the time, it's that they can, essentially without warning _Stop_ controlling it.

Self driving cars will happen. But the current model is essentially "do enough of the driving to maximize the likelihood that the human 'driver' is not going to pay attention, but don't do enough to make their lack of attention safe".

My statement isn't "cars allow you not to pay attention", it is "systems like autopilot actively encourage a lack of attention", that's backed up by the need for alert systems when they have obvious signs that the driver isn't paying attention, like "no longer holding the wheel". If the system didn't in general usage result in lack of attention then such a system would not be necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The Tesla damage control astro-turfing is out in full force.

Between the surveillance state they've built and their complete disregard for safety, Silicon Valley will eventually be forced to atone for this from the public at large. Make sure you're on the right side of history.

<comment><USER30> Historically the right side has generally been technology making peoples lives better. At least in material terms such as life expectancy, diseases cured and so on. They still moan though.</comment></comment>


Android Hardware Comparison (Google Spreadsheet) - <AUTHOR> http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rdm8c2ZfSDKd5l-dVy4SrnA&output=html

<comment><USER2> A huge list, and it's already way out of date (from July 2009 last year).

This is proof that developing for Android has to be device agnostic. Query the device for what's available and assume nothing. It's not quite the fragmentation nightmare people make it out to be, but it is something you have to be aware of.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's out of date - it was started in July 2009 but seems to be decently updated.

Agreed, though, hardware fragmentation is a chore, but the assume-nothing-and- create-layouts-for-all-three-resolutions seems to be the wisest way to stay sane.

I wonder if anyone's gonna start offering an app testing service across a massive range of hardware for those apps that are targeting a truly broad userbase...

<comment><USER2> I stand corrected. I didn't see the Droid X on there and misread the chart as if the devices were grouped by manufacturer. On closer examination I see it has been updated more recently.

How much of the hardware compatibility can be accurately tested in the emulator. I haven't run into hardware issues on my applications, but I don't have the wide device exposure I'd like to have. So I don't really have experience in having something slip by the emulator.

I think it depends largely on your type of app. Business/utility applications are less likely to be affected than games. Anything that uses a service is going to run into issues, and anything directly controlling hardware (camera, sensors). The quirks are definitely there, but I think they impact a much smaller group than people like to claim.

A service for testing would be good - $x/hr to load on X devices and click certain buttons. It'd have to be cheap, though, or most developers would probably simply opt for market-based testing. You'd probably have to offshore it to get a decent cost.

I wonder if you could get a decent response farming this out on the Turk or similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This really illustrates the diversity of hardware Android manufacturers are using - both the versatility of Android and also the burden of developing for a diverse (and constantly growing/changing) system specification.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice - although swapping the X and Y would probably make it a bit more useful.

<comment><USER5> I think it would be even more useful if it were inverted, so it was organized by feature value instead of by phone model. It's like web development: you don't do browser sniffing, you sniff for features and specialize your code for that. If you're developing for android you do the same thing, you code for specific features. Some you simply require, some you require a certain range of value/capability, some are optional, and some you don't care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Already, shopping for Android devices is starting to suck. I say this as a fan of Android, but non-reader of Engadget and the likes. With the latest devices, I was able to ask some friends who keep better tabs on new devices. But as a consumer without such friends, how are you going to choose?

<comment><USER7> The big billboard signs on the highway advertising Droid and its ability to do apps? [http://blog.qik.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/04/DroidDoesApps...](http://blog.qik.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/04/DroidDoesApps-13.jpg) (I totally get where you're coming from; this spreadsheet is super helpful.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Holy... it's true the ARM dominates the mobile phone market indeed. Most processors are ARM.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any such chart that also shows the _version_ of Android for each device?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that varies, as different carriers have made different updates available to different handsets, but a range would be handy. There's a link on the spreadsheet for suggestions</comment></comment>


A lightweight dynamic instrumentation library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/googleprojectzero/TinyInst <comment><USER2> Bad news if you primarily develop on Linux, from the readme: "Currently Windows only (32- and 64-bit). Mac OS support might be considered in the future"

</comment><comment> c-smile > can be used to instrument only selected module(s) in the process

Sigh, what does it mean "to instrument" in this context?

<comment><USER3> Inject arbitrary code ("instrumentation") at arbitrary locations in the target program.

This can be used to build tools for profiling, measuring code coverage, tracing memory accesses, counting instructions, etc.

Some examples: I think vtune uses Pin (linked from the readme) to inject profiling instrumentation, and valgrind is a heavy instrumentation framework that's used to build tools like memcheck and cachegrind.</comment></comment>


The Business of Fake Hollywood Money - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-business-of-fake-hollywood-money/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8104559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8104559) (172 points, 248 days ago, 74 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> (2014)</comment>


A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

<comment><USER2> I like [https://github.com/Xfennec/cv](https://github.com/Xfennec/cv) approach better, but still pv sometimes is the only viable option on systems have policy to install software from vendor repositories only.</comment>


Japanese scientists invent floating 'firefly' light - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-lights-floating/japanese-scientists-invent-floating-firefly-light-idUSKCN1G7132 <comment><USER2> I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something, but how is this in any way novel?

You can get a cheapish acoustic levitation kit from Tindie[1], and inductive power transmission is hardly a rare technology these days, so where's the innovation? It seems to me all they've done is made a tiny LED with a tiny coil attached to it, right?

And how the hell do they expect to achieve any of the ridiculously speculative things they talk about in the article anyway? Fleets of these things flying around drawing messages in the sky isn't particularly useful if you need to position a massive bank of ultrasonic speakers and a power coil underneath them.

It all smacks of the Hendo Hoverboard[2] bullshit which bad "science" "journalists" breathlessly obsessed over a few years ago, which was similarly just a rebadging of existing technology that was utterly impractical in any context except marketing, coupled with thoroughly nonsensical claims of future utility (levitating buildings during earthquakes, for instance.)

[1] [https://www.tindie.com/products/Makerfabs/acoustic- levitator...](https://www.tindie.com/products/Makerfabs/acoustic-levitator- kit/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ2cyNxPwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZ2cyNxPwg)

<comment><USER3> It is cool but the goals they have are total bs and they know that themselves because noone who unserstands how this works would believe that stuff

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "New study links widespread ultrasonic 'firefly' devices with disappearing insect populations and [other unintended ecological disaster]." \- Headline from 2042

<comment><USER5> "Hated in the Nation" was written in 2016.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although I haven't looked into the exact mechanism here, I think people who find this interesting may also be interested in optical tweezers.

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

<comment><USER7> The mechanism here is more like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_tweezers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_tweezers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of Navi from The Legend of Zelda, in a way.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navi_(The_Legend_of_Zelda)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navi_\(The_Legend_of_Zelda\))

<comment><USER9> This was my thought to.

"and be built to float about, helping us in our everyday lives"

This guy has grown up on Ocarina of Time and thought "I'm going to make that happen".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm confused. The article implies that it can hover around independently, but in the gallery, it's only seen levitating inside a fat loop of copper wire connected to a stationary structure.

<comment><USER11> It requires 285 audio speakers working at 40Khz to fly so it's going to be a stationary display like a potted plant with a light that moves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Localizers from A Deepness in the Sky. That was a great book

<comment><USER13> Finding out that it was actually a prequel bummed me out so much.

<comment><USER14> was A Fire Upon the Deep not good?

<comment><USER15> A Fire Upon the Deep is good. It might not be what you want out of a follow up story set in this universe. It has a heavy focus on a low technology world deep in the slow zone.

<comment><USER16> I didn't like the Tines stuff. I'd have rather read more about the Qeng Ho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's exciting even if we are still far from a real product. There is a place for a new way of manipulating light and giving that to artists. For me, it can le be linked to the demo that Intel is going with drones and light, but on another scale...

<comment><USER18> But there is nothing new here. Artists are free today to levitate things above ultrasonic speakers. Google ultrasonic levitation. Just dont expect any local cats to be happy about your next street art installation.

<comment><USER17> There is a place for something smaller and more flexible, it's not clear from the article it this method can scale, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Japanese scientists invent floating 'firefly' light" followed by "Japanese engineering researchers say..." I'd guess it doesn't involve any new science and is purely an engineering project.

</comment><comment><USER20> Five to ten years, eh?

[https://www.xkcd.com/678/](https://www.xkcd.com/678/)

<comment><USER6> This is a very relevant comic for quantum computing. Mainstream seems to think useful QC is 10 years away. It's cute.

<comment><USER21> Imagine how people in nuclear fusion research feel! 50 years for 50 years... and in 50 years? 50 more years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you had really perfect sound/airflow control you could maybe get what looks like a movie hologram I guess, if you really miniaturize each light

</comment><comment><USER22> I assume they are pumping enough power to a single point to ionise the air and produce light.

Would that much ultrasonic power be enough to burn human skin?

<comment><USER23> It's an LED on a tiny PCB with an inductive loop around it. One of the images in the gallery has a picture of it.

The ultrasonic puffs of air keep it suspended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The first image is a composite, the actual light is not microscopic.

<comment><USER24> I think it's a long-exposure shot, with the LED moving around in space and blinking in a specific way to generate a floating R

<comment><USER23> I think you're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I expected something more like Groot's free-flying fireflies:

[https://youtu.be/SdZvguUeiB0?t=18s](https://youtu.be/SdZvguUeiB0?t=18s)</comment>


Method overloading is possible in PHP - <AUTHOR> https://murze.be/2016/10/method-overloading-possible-php-sort/ <comment><USER2> I can't really see how this improves anything. It gets really messy when you try to simulate patterns that aren't there/supported.</comment>


World's priciest cities for expats revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36587681 <comment><USER2> I have to confess I'm a lot surprised that Luanda and Kinshasa are on the list. If you'd asked me to pick what I thought were the top 10, I wouldn't have thought to put any African cities on the list. I'd have expected expat costs to map closely to GDP plus some factor for housing costs of being in major cities.</comment>


Javascript game of tron in 221 bytes - <AUTHOR> http://alokmenghrajani.github.com/tron/ <comment><USER2> I can barely play the game because I keep trying to use vim keys and going the wrong way, but the breakdown of each section of code (press the numbered tabs at the bottom, if it's not immediately obvious) is interesting - lots of byte- reduction tricks I didn't know.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool little game. It's a little sluggish for me and the command line changes, but overall, I love it.</comment>


Why Python [1999] by ESR - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 <comment><USER2> It's interesting that Python is as old as Java.

Most languages either succeed by immediate take-off or fail.

Python, on the other hand, led a quite "dead" life for its first _decade_ . As the article says, Perl and tcl were all the rage back then.

All of a sudden, in the past 15 years, its use exploded.</comment>


Man Posing as Delivery Person Hides Resumes in a Box of Donuts - <AUTHOR> http://abc7ny.com/careers/man-hides-resume-in-box-of-donuts/1545729/ <comment><USER2> I actually met Lukas a few days ago, very nice guy. I was in San Francisco for Salesforce's Dreamforce conference and was staying at a shared AirBnB where he was my roommate for the week.

One night there was a party hosted by Salesforce that I thought Lukas was planning on attending so when I noticed it seemed like he was turning in soon I asked him what changed his mind; he told me he had an interview in the morning with ABC. Not knowing his situation I assumed it was for his startup so I told him congratulations and asked what kind of work his company did. He saw I was confused by his answer that he was actually looking for a job so he just showed me a clip from Good Morning America that talked about the story and said it was probably easier to understand if I just watched the video.

I have a feeling I'll be seeing him again next year--leading a session on marketing at the conference.

</comment><comment><USER3> File this under "more evidence that hiring is broken". It's just so silly that companies set up elaborate HR departments and job postings and internal recruiters that collect resumes, and then when you look at how they actually hire it's through popularity/celebrity, friends of friends, and stunts like this.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with your statement that "hiring is broken", but the evidence you use to come to that conclusion is not particularly convincing. It's essentially, "There are multiple hiring channels."

<comment><USER5> What are the mechanisms of those channels?

What the resume-in-pizza-boxes channel offers over, say, the resumes-in-email channel, is _a lot fewer resumes_. You've got some intention signalling in the RIPB version (it's expensive in terms of time and other committments), but low informational signalling _otherwise_ as to overt qualifications, outside some general concepts (hustle, motivation, time availability / opportunity costs, charisma, confidence, or simply having heard of the trick somewhere).

There are a bunch of selection hueristics whose primary benefit is _they eliminate a large component of the choice process_. You'd do fairly well in simply randomly sampling from amongst the submissions, or applying some very rudimentary filters to eliminate the most obviously bad choices.

This is why mechanisms such as racial, gender, age, and cultural bias are so common. They're easy to apply, aren't _entirely_ wrong (relatively homogeneous groups tend to operate better than nonhomogeneous ones, though there are many arguments about resilience and creativity/diversity), _and hugely reduce the decisionmaking costs of the selector._

Unfortunately, knowledge / infotech / creative work hinges hugely on intangibles which are quite difficult to effectively communicate, _especially_ to someone (say, an HR flunky) not intimately familiar with the field.

Toss in a ton of employer biases and control incentives (e.g., anti-poaching, anti-union, and similar concerns) and the situation starts getting messy quickly. Sure, there might be some alterative opportunities created as a result, but these tend to have far less commercial/financial potential and viability.

<comment><USER3> > There are a bunch of selection hueristics whose primary benefit is they > eliminate a large component of the choice process. You'd do fairly well in > simply randomly sampling from amongst the submissions, or applying some very > rudimentary filters to eliminate the most obviously bad choices.

I'm reminded of the hiring manager that randomly tosses into the shredder 90% of incoming resumes. "I don't want to hire someone who's unlucky!"

<comment><USER5> If that 90% is selected randomly, it's at least not a _biasing selection_.

I'd suggest a below-bar elimination check (e.g., spelling, gross formatting), and an high-level check in case, say, Ted Ts'o happens to be applying. Take the bulk of largely undifferentiated but not obviously bad resumes, shuffle them, and select randomly from them. Pick your sample, apply your assessments, and proceed.

The low-cost primary selection, and the unbiased secondary selection, leave the expensive selection process (resume screen, phone screen, interviews, background / portfolio assessment, etc.) with a tractable number of candidates to deal with.

Aeon's "How to Choose" is an excellent article on the use of randomness: [https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose- ran...](https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a brilliant insight into how little I understand the world.

If I was applying to the same company I'd be VERY upset this guy gets an interview.

If I was the person he got delivered the donuts I'd curse him out of the office and tell him to apply like everybody else.

What makes him special or give him the right to basically break the rules and disrespect everyone who tries their best to get through the recruiting door? What would happen if everyone acted the same and started stalking execs and managers trying to "serve" them whimsical resumés?

Clearly I'm the one who's strange since everyone else thinks it's great... maybe it's a cultural thing?

<comment><USER7> First, he was applying for a marketing position. A position that demands creativity and the ability to stand out and be noticed...so, essentially he proved himself with this gimmick. In other words, this wasnt just a gimmick but rather a demonstration of his skills.

It just like an engineer getting interviewed after finding a bug in your code.

On a more critical note, applying for a job is a zero sum game. Only one person gets hired. If you are more concerned with rules and respecting other applications by not standing out, you are just playing the game poorly. Your job as an applicant is to a)get noticed and b)beat out everyone else for the job.

All this is to say that if followong the rules are so important in your organization, this guy is a bad fit. If it requires scrappiness, creativity, and "hacker" mentality, it is a perfect fit.

In this case, as a marketer, it was brilliant!

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your comment you make a good point in that he is applying for a marketing job and his attitude can be perceived as a great example of guerrilla marketing.

However I think you're treading a thin line by focusing solely on the desired outcome of one individual. If everyone thought like that'd it'd be a race towards some pretty unethical and/or immoral behaviours.

This "what matters is that we got ours" mentality can lead to a lot of resentment.

But again thank you for your response.

<comment><USER7> >If everyone thought like that'd it'd be a race towards some pretty unethical and/or immoral behaviours.

Strategies like this have been around for decades, yet somehow most people are NOT willing to put in the extra work to execute on it.

Donny Deutsch did something similar, "Donny pitched a TV account, Tri-State Pontiac dealers. (Just to get into the pitch, Donny sent car parts to the home of the Pontiac rep. He sent a fender with a note that read, "We'll cover your rear end." [http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/n_8669/](http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/n_8669/)

There was that fellow who ran linkedin ads to get investors attention to get into Angelpad [http://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made- me-120000](http://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000)

8 Years ago I was trying to get an interview at Neo@Ogilvy as a search marketer. I sent my resume several times with no results. I spent the extra time to really think about what would make me stand out and I designed my resume to look like a search results page and got a call from them within 10 hours of applying. This was because the key to advertising design is imagery that supports the message. It demonstrated my appreciation of the nuances of effective advertising.

Direct mail marketers have been promoting Lumpy Mail or 3D Mail as a way to make sure your mailer gets noticed, opened, and read. (i.e. putting bulky thinks in the mail so It can't be put on the bottom of a junk mail pile.)

These are not really even hacks, it is one of the rules of the game. If you go the extra mile demonstrating you care enough to stand out, you earned the attention you get.

I don't think these tactics are a slippery slope at all. It's no different than Sam Altman flying across the country to meet a company (that didnt want to meet with him) that was about to sign with a competitor, or PokerShare.com training a Chimp to play poker and bring it on tour.

There is a world of difference between being clever and being unethical.

Edit: Grammar

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your response, between your comments and someone's previous answer it's clear how I disregarded how a Marketing professional would view this.

I find your résumé example acceptable and easy to understand, by what you did, I as a recruiter looking for someone with graph design skills would get a better understanding of your skills.

The direct mail and poker playing monkey examples I find poor - for me they get classified as the "who screams louder" type tactics they don't add anything of value, they just benefit the individual who wants an outcome of their target.

Someone else here said something about how "Analytical types" find comfort in rules and I have definitely been described as an analytical even though I'm very comfortable breaking certain rules (bureaucracy mostly) I'm uncomfortable feeling like a "cheater", in other words: I want to deserve.

Also coming from a 3rd world country where a lot of benefits, specially in government, are achieved through bribery and nepotism I'm probably overly sensitive about it.

Jesus! Enough about me though!

<comment><USER8> I think this particular candidate was comfortable breaking the usual hiring process as he felt that was bureaucratic.

I don't think the cost of a box of donuts amounts to bribery in Silicon Valley, and he's not a friend or family member so it's not nepotism.

What he did was get noticed, even though it's a bit of a gimmick. Do you remember the Million Dollar Homepage? That worked because it was a novel idea. Nobody made it big on a copycat site. Similarly, this fellow stood out and that got him interviews. However if lots of people start trying this same method it'll fail quickly as a means to get interviews.

I do think sending a portfolio of work is much better than just a resume. This guy made himself part of his portfolio, which for a marketing position is a great thing but which won't scale to every candidate showing up with donuts for every position. Thankfully programmers can send code and graphic designers can send images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Guy's probably here on a tourist visa and won't be able to convert even if he receives an offer.

He needs to be starting a company. Philippe Kahn started Borland while he was illegal alien. He got to a $500 million run rate without venture capital! It was only when Borland was going public that he was able to obtain a green card!

[http://articles.latimes.com/print/1992-02-23/business/fi-511...](http://articles.latimes.com/print/1992-02-23/business/fi-5118_1_borland- international-chairman-philippe-kahn)

<comment><USER10> Won't he get sponsored for a visa if he gets an offer?

I mean, it's not a must that a company would offer sponsorship, but if they didn't I think there'd be no use in an offer.

Good story about the Borland guy though.

<comment><USER11> If it's an H1B they would have to apply, submit on Apr 1st next year, see if he gets the VISA through our lottery system, and start around October if he gets it. It might be faster if the company has an international office and he can work from there.

<comment><USER12> After all the press he got, I'm sure that an O-1 visa is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My start in marketing was as a professional actor - where you spend 98% of your time doing marketing. If you do that well, you get to go to an audition. If you do that well, you get to go do your real job and get paid. (Eventually I moved into the tech world.)

Funny thing - this technique is as old as Hollywood. I've heard of tons of similar stories over the years. Heck, Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) got his role when the producer saw his headshot in a pizza box.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Furst#As_actor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Furst#As_actor)

<comment><USER14> Using publicity stunts and showing up at people's offices with food are both classic job seeking tactics. But sneaking into people's offices dressed as a delivery person is a terrible idea. Some people might be receptive to it, but a lot of other people are going to feel unsafe and like their physical space has been violated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This sounds like pretty high-quality penetration testing; maybe he should pivot his career and work in security.

<comment><USER16> I don't think so. People let delivery guys in so they can deliver something. They don't let delivery guys in and then leave them wholly unsupervised to do whatever the hell they want.

<comment><USER5> Having personally witnessed a delivery guy walking out with a half-dozen or so engineering laptops (I realised this seconds too late, after walking into the office area), tucked into his messenger bag, it's been known to happen. Lax security was a confounding issue.

Also: that guy had brass balls.

<comment><USER16> It may be known to happen, but what I'm saying is the act of letting a delivery person into a building does not equate to a lapse in security.

<comment><USER5> It is an attack surface. An awareness of that fact is helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just in case anyone is wondering about the startup in Lithuania, it's a car sharing scheme called CityBee:

[http://www.citybee.lt/en/](http://www.citybee.lt/en/)

I've used various schemes around the world, but this has the best selection of cars and is the fastest growing. They now have over 500 cars, which given the size of Lithuania is crazy. Their emails have a real personal feel which is no doubt down to Lukas work!

</comment><comment><USER18> This is fairly brilliant for a marketing guy. What it comes down to, is he got the attention of the people he was trying to reach. In the end, it's like the guys that do _very_ targeted advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook for similar goals. If you can reach the selective audience you are trying to for the job, in creative ways, odds are you can reach that company's audience as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd hire this person just to improve his life for a while. Hiring him will probably help him more than someone else.

If you can hire or promote or help someone, then do so.

Recently had to choose to promote either a single mom (stable home) 11 yrs in the job or a part-time just graduated woman renting a house for free in exchange for child care. Both were equally qualified. Which would be helped more? The part time student. Once promoted into FT position she gets benefits. Easy choice. Plus, the company stresses helping employees as #1 priority.

Even if this guy does not work out and he is termed after 90 days, he is better off trying and I improved his lot.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would never be brave enough to try something like this.

<comment><USER20> Why not? The only thing preventing you from doing this is your self-formed limited beliefs in what you can or cannot do. You could literally decide to just do this and start doing this tomorrow.

Don't sell yourself short, everyone else is already doing that for you.

<comment><USER21> And ... uh ... legality? If either Postmates or the companies he infiltrated took this the wrong way, he could end up in a bit of trouble.

<comment><USER20> You're missing the forest for the trees. You can replace "brave enough to do this" with "brave enough to play at that open mic night" or "brave enough to talk to that cute girl in class".

In all cases, the reason that the OP doesn't believe he can do this has to do solely with his false limiting self beliefs about his abilities.

<comment><USER22> > You can replace "brave enough to do this" with "brave enough to play at that > open mic night" or "brave enough to talk to that cute girl in class".

Seems like the potential downside to doing this is a lot higher than the examples you gave.

<comment><USER23> Not really. At worst you get arrested for trespassing and Postmates sues you. But the unlikelyness of both seems sky high to me. It's not like impersonating a police officer.

<comment><USER22> I agree that the odds of any one place giving him trouble are low, but he hit up 40 different places.

If just _one_ of them decided to call the cops, he'd be arrested, and that might end up with him being banned from re-entering the US. If each place only has a 1% chance of calling it in, we're talking about cumulative odds around 1 in 3.

That seems like a pretty bad worst case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This been done on advertising field by interns since ages... come on.

</comment><comment><USER25> Gimmicks make for very poor hiring filters, though they make for great article clicks.

</comment><comment><USER26> Huh. If this works I should be way more aggressive about finding a ME/EE oriented product design engineer job in SF.

</comment><comment><USER27> That "Hi" after the headline just sucked all of the momentum out of it for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> Can't tell of this is an onion article or real life

<comment><USER29> It's a clever marketing from Postmates. He's been working for them all along.

<comment><USER30> After reading "Trust Me, I'm Lying", I can't help but view stuff I read online even vaguely relating to a company in this light.

<comment><USER31> Searched for it thinking it was a blog post; turns out it's a book I can buy. Hope you are not related nor getting a royalty from each sale (;

<comment><USER29> Doubt it. However I wouldn't trust any of his posts on how to get some tasty candy from Japan, cause he is the leading supplier of those.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A theory of jerks - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/if-youre-surrounded-by-idiots-guess-whos-the-jerk/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of one of my favorite transportation-related quips: "You're not stuck in traffic. You _are_ traffic."

</comment><comment><USER3> The tricky bit is to decide when not go to along with his demands and take a stand to not get trampled. Sometimes giving in too much makes the situation worse, other times it's the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER4> Loved this and want to share with friends, but afraid they'll think I'm calling them jerks.

</comment><comment><USER5> whatever helps you sleep at night</comment>


Flocking behavior of birds perfectly simulated with .js - <AUTHOR> http://defonic.club/?birds <comment><AUTHOR> More visible in night mode</comment>