A list of lists of interview questions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questions <comment><USER2> Impossible to mention a list of interview questions without acknowledging David Thorne's 10 interview questions on 27bslash6.

They're almost entirely ridiculous though I've used a couple when interviewing people.

"How is this an issue?" and "Are you pro-active or reactive" can both lead to exceptionally telling answers. Or just confusion, despair and upset... but certainly have the possibility to almost....

[http://www.27bslash6.com/interviews.html](http://www.27bslash6.com/interviews.html)

<comment><USER3> Surprised to have never heard of him. That was really funny!

<comment><USER4> If you're new to him, you're in for some fun. The spider article is great: [http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html](http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I looked at the first few Android question lists and the questions were terrible. "What are the four API classes used for sensors?" Are you kidding me?!? I have over 10 years of experience building Android apps and I have no idea of the answer -- and I've probably used them! Along with the thousand other apps and classes in the framework. If someone asked me that question I'd kindly explain that I'm no trivia master, that's what documentation is for and walk away.

<comment><USER6> When interviewing for senior (read: C-suite) positions, I sometimes try to gauge how someone reacts to dumb questions. Ignoring it is bad. Walking out is bad. Explaining why it's wrong is good. Trying to get at the intended question is best.

Probably not what's going on here. But human systems require debugging as much as technical ones.

<comment><USER7> Well if thats what you practice on your interviews then you might miss out at some people that might react the way you want them to react and be a good fit.

I would personally walk away as well, its not like am some kind of superstar, I just feel that I won't be a good match to a company that asks questions that I feel are not needed. The way I see it an interview is always two ways. The company is interviewing me to see if am a good fit and I am interviewing the company to see if they are a good fit for me since I'll be spending at least 8 hours a day 5 days a week of my time working for that company.

Personally so far what I've seen working ok for us in human systems is to just have a talk with the person we are interviewing, see what his/her hobbies are and generally feel if he/she is a good fit.

<comment><USER6> > _I would personally walk away as well, its not like am [_ sic _] some kind > of superstar_

You're a perfectly-reasonable person. I also think you'd find the work those positions do frustrating.

You can't tell a multibillion-dollar client they're asking stupid questions. You also can't ignore the potential problems their asking them hints at. Walking away, usually, isn't an option. Similarly, a CEO and CFO must be able to productively field "dumb" questions from potential investors, acquirers, distributors and yes, employees. "Dumb question" shouldn't frankly exist as a category in certain relationships. Only opportunities to improve mutual understanding.

Not every role is for everyone. And not everyone is for each role. Part of interviewing, in my opinion, is not only qualifying for fit with the company but also fit with the role. (For solely internally-facing roles, I prefer a let's get a walk/beer/take a hike together chat.)

<comment><USER8> Purposely saying something wrong seems a little dishonest, like you are setting a trap. It really sets things off of the wrong foot if your first interaction proves that not only can you conceal your true thoughts and express something that you aren't thinking, and not only are you willing to do it, but on top of it all it doesn't take much motivation before you start. It would be a lot better to wade in to something you honestly didn't know about, so that your expression of not knowing enough to ask good questions was not only completely realistic but also truthful. If you can't think of anything that you don't know enough about to ask good questions, then you either need to evaluate yourself better or get out more. ;)

To see it from another perspective, imagine what your response would be if you found out that someone you were interviewing was pretending to know something they didn't, just because they preferred to work with people smart enough to notice they were faking.

<comment><USER6> > _Purposely saying something wrong seems a little dishonest_

I agree. I never proposed that. I said I purposely ask questions the person at hand might consider dumb.

Note that many classic "dumb" questions are actually interesting, if not in their specifics then in _why_ so many people ask them.

> _imagine what your response would be if you found out that someone you were > interviewing was pretending to know something they didn 't_

Again, asking dumb questions doesn't require lying. Everyone goes through a dumb-question asking phase when learning. (I do.) The worst effect of this might be the interviewee walking away thinking me uninformed. Which, if I'm interviewing them, I probably am (relative to them). That's why they're being sought! In any case, people thinking I'm dumb is a fair price to pay for a well-tempered executive.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the last set of interviews I've conducted (for junior/midlevel C#/vue.js devs - still hiring if anyone wants to experience this for themselves and is in London - link at the bottom) I've settled on a list that more or less all start with "can you tell me about a time when...", or some other variation on asking about experience. One's I've had a some success with...

\- A bug that was particularly difficult to track down? (What did you learn? What would you do differently?)

\- A time you disagreed with your manager/lead? (And a time when in retrospect you think you were right/wrong/got your way/didn't get your way?)

\- a piece of work took much longer than you anticipated? (what did you/would you do to prevent it happening again?)

\- you had to quickly learn a new thing?

For more specific technical stuff I like to try and find questions that allows someone to show off, rather than tests if they know just one thing. We're using Typescript, C# and TDD...

\- what new or upcoming features in C# do you most like using/would like to get the chance to use/really wish were out already?

\- what parts of Typescript do you find most useful vs Javascript?

\- what makes a good test?

\- what makes a bad test?

I don't see why anyone wants to ask anything of the what does using `ref int foo` mean, especially when there's lots of competition in the job market at the moment!

[https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/full-stack-c%23-vuejs- typ...](https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/full-stack-c%23-vuejs- typescript-2-years-experience-at-appraisd-965026309/)

<comment><USER10> That style of question is perhaps the most horrible one to subject someone to.

Instead of focusing on the task of talking to someone, you end up trying to recollect instances of each kind of event, evaluate them on whether you can talk about them openly, whether they can sound impressive even if they actually are, whether they will sound plausible, whether you can recall enough details to avoid being called out as a bullshitter etc.

The people who can appear to answer these questions best are either a) prepared for them specifically or b) psychopaths who can comfortably lie and twist stories with a smile on their face on the spot.

<comment><USER9> Well I'm very happy if people have prepared for these questions beforehand, and I try and give people hints and nudges to help get good answers out of people (I want people to do the best they can!).

Do you think there are any style of questions that do work well?

<comment><USER11> I think a healthy mix of open-ended questions (such as those in your post) and closed-ended questions is key. Open-ended questions are useful for getting at how an engineer goes about solving a problem. Closed-ended questions reveal whether that engineer has the tools to solve the problem to begin with.

<comment><USER9> Interesting thoughts. What would you think of as a good closed ended question? I always worry that if I'm to specific I'll get false negatives (do they really not know what protected means or have they had a brain fade under pressure?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I looked over the Linux questions, and they were pretty bad:

Q.1: What is the core of Linux Operating System? Shell

Kernel

Command

Script

Terminal

I mean... If they asked me about that at an interview, that'd be a huge red flag. I wouldn't consider this list when studying for interviews... It is sad for me how many stars and forks this list has. Hopefully, it's much better for other languages/topics.

<comment><USER13> Is it supposed to be a list of good questions you should ask, or crap questions you should prepare to get asked?

<comment><USER14> The repository name is "awesome-interview-questions". So far, of the 3 lists I've looked at, [1] was a page where someone apparently deleted random swathes of text in the middle of the content and utterly unusable as a result, and [2] and [3] were both full of grammatically poor questions that ask about minutiae of C++, get it wrong, and don't realize that C++11 exists.

I think it's supposed to be a list of good questions to ask, but it's actually a compilation of lists that people sent the author with very little to no curation actually done.

[1] [http://placement.freshersworld.com/power- preparation/technic...](http://placement.freshersworld.com/power- preparation/technical-interview-questions/C-programming-answers-21419)

[2] [https://pangara.com/blog/cplusplus-interview- questions](https://pangara.com/blog/cplusplus-interview-questions)

[3] [http://a4academics.com/interview-questions/57-c-plus- plus/41...](http://a4academics.com/interview-questions/57-c-plus-plus/419-cpp- interview-questions-answers)

Edit: Just opened up a Java list for #4... and it said that LinkedList was usually better performance over ArrayList. That is not correct; ArrayList is usually better (because of cache locality). So I'm now 4 for 4 on bad lists out of this site.

<comment><USER15> This really seems to be the trend with "Awesome" lists. It's not often they appear to have much curation at all, it's frustrating to see them end up with thousands of stars. Often an order of magnitude more than many open source projects.

I quite enjoyed the Erlang questions. Apparently "what is Erlang" is a common Erlang interview question.

<comment><USER16> Generally speaking, I consider them a noobtrap for two reasons.

First off, many of the resources are written and submitted by people who have no place teaching others - and are writing almost purely to self-promote and have something to show to employers.

Second, even if some of the resources in there are of decently high quality, the probable best schema for how to use and integrate that resource is going to be bound up in a textbook written by Someone Very Important. Along with all the stuff you really need to know anyway.

Scrap that, three reasons. Finding and aggregating these kind of links for your personal use is of value: it develops your taste and sense of what resources to veto, and what to collect, and is a meta-skill applicable everywhere you have a search engine and some curiosity.

In '17 and early '18 I wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours collecting "the perfect" set of bookmarks for various things I want to learn, and my collection method has basically been to scrape these kinds of lists and apply a surface-level "ooh sounds cool" filter to what I pick up. Obviously, I learned very little doing this, and almost never open such links except as part of a half-hour flight of fancy.

Perhaps if you're of intermediate/expert-level, these factors aren't that important to you - if a couple of links are handy they've served their purpose. But you're probably not going to star the repo. It's mostly thousands of perma-beginners who should be opening textbooks and playing with fundamentals in a REPL who are starring this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of the Python ones seem like fairly poor phone screen questions to me. I like to ask my candidates to solve a realistic problem just like they would if they were working at a desk with me. Q&A where they either know the answer or do not are awful. "Me: Do you know this random fact about python? Them: No... Crickets: <awkward cricket noises>". <\-- All I've learned from this is that they don't know that fact and I have zero idea of their coding and problem solving ability.

Instead we ask them to pair program on a live IDE and tell them that using Google is okay (copy/pasting code is not). I don't care if you have the standard library memorized, I care if you can solve problems and have the experience to understand how your code can fail and how to make it robust. I care if you can write clean code and then later easily refactor it when I add some complications to the problem. I care if you know how to make it perform well, etc.

Testing for Linux skills? Give them a broken VM/Vagrant image and ask them to troubleshoot it, fix it, and install and configure some things. Testing for Ansible/Puppet/Chef knowledge? Ask them to do all of the above and send you the playbook to recreate the fixed image from your broken image.

Interviewing is hard and if you haven't spent many hours thinking on it, setting it up, testing it against your current employees, and figuring out some kind of score sheet so it isn't 100% subjective, then everyone is going to have a bad time.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looking at Rails, first list, first question: "What does ruby name refer to?"

I interpreted the question as: "What does ruby's name refer to?" so I guess the precious stone... but no [https://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?id=2439](https://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?id=2439)

Anyway, this seems exactly what a typical clueless recruiter would ask and try to pattern match the answers to

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome lists shouldn't just be "huge lists". The first item for Python is pretty awful. Spelling and grammar aside, there's no code formatting so some of the examples don't even make sense.

</comment><comment><USER20> Rule of thumb - outside the original lists by Sindre Sorhus, most "awesome" GitHub lists are of very poor quality and curation. They're made with good intentions but rarely checked or updated.

</comment><comment><USER21> I haven't yet reached the stage of giving interviews but I've given some thought to it. Based on the experiences I've read, it seems that technical proficiency should be addressed in a basic way prior to any in-person interview; the latter can then be devoted to gauging fit and personality.

My idea for the technical side is this: procure a fairly subtle, simple, real- life bug that you yourself have had to fix. Ideally it should involve a single class or function and require about an hour for a competent person to fix. Email the code to the candidates along with the parameters that fail, and ask them to resolve the bug and return the code.

This tests a lot of skills that should immediately filter out unsuitable candidates - such as code comprehension, bug-finding, and problem-solving - all in a real-world scenario. You can also change up the scenario every couple of months, and very quickly test whether a candidates' code passes. Has anyone come across something similar to this?

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview- questio...](https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview- questions/issues/126)

Suitable question given the apparent level of the list...

As for my current job, I think I only got one directly programming related question. They asked if I had done any work with public key crypto, ie generating and verifying signatures etc. I hadn't, though I knew about the theory and math involved.

Maybe they checked out some of the OSS contributions I referenced though... I'll have to ask now.

</comment><comment><USER23> From looking over some examples, there doesn't seem to be much curation: many linked articles are pretty bad (typos, and questions that ask for regurgitation, not understanding).

</comment><comment><USER24> > 15\. What is the best multilingual plugin for WordPress?

What???

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone have good resources for the whiteboard side of things? Preferably example questions I can go out an practice? I passed a couple of screens with flying colors with the company I'm interviewing at, but now I'm about to go onsite again and do the final whiteboard+general interview. I tend to blank on basic concepts in front of an audience on a whiteboard and then suddenly I'll figure out the answer in seconds after walking out of the interview.

<comment><USER15> The resource I'm surprised never gets recommended is _buy a whiteboard_.

I found it incredible how much code you can write and feel competent in before finding out crunch time you literally can't write legibly on a board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> More is not better - definitely not in interviews.

I only skimmed a couple of bits but there ought always to be more "thinking" questions rather than "remembering/knowledge" questions.

And of course if you wanted to use some sort of list of interview questions the cultural non technical questions (which isn't the scope of that curation I think) are the most important questions of all I believe.

</comment><comment><USER27> Jeez... Why don't we cut the crap and convert this to every single CS school curricula.

<comment><USER28> As many comments here have mentioned, they're not very good questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The very first Swift question has a partially incorrect answer. It says that "var array2 = array1" creates a copy of array1. But it's incorrect because a copy isn't actually created until one of them is mutated.

</comment><comment><USER30> Also from the authors: Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory)

</comment><comment><USER31> So do job interviews for computing-related jobs only ask about your skills and not your personality, goals, or motivation? Or is this list of "interview questions" just focusing on the computing?

<comment><USER32> In my experience with technical interviews, the majority of time is spent on algorithm questions. This was especially bad at a recent interview I had at Google... all 5 interview rounds were almost entirely focused on one or two algorithm questions without any regard to any of the usual open-ended questions about past challenges, motivation, etc. I even had one interviewer start out asking about an interesting technical challenge I had, and basically cut me off after a minute or two with kind of a "ok thats great lets get on with the whiteboard now."

<comment><USER33> What algorithm questions did they ask?

<comment><USER32> Technically I'm not supposed to reveal the exact questions they ask because they have candidates sign an NDA that covers the questions they ask during an interview. But it really shouldn't be too surprising the type of questions they ask, basically similar to stuff you see on sites like Leetcode or books like Cracking the Coding interview. Although very heavy on trees and graphs as opposed to the easier linked list/string/array type problems. Since it was an embedded position, there was on interview round where they asked some stuff about device drivers and Linux Kernel internals. Overall I thought it was a pretty bad interview for how "smart" Google is supposed to be. I thought Amazon actually did a much better job with interview questions, although they were still very algorithm-heavy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Curated" seems rather strong. One of the C++ lists has some let's-trip-you- up-on-trivia questions, with bad answers to boot:

> 1\. Explain mutable and volatile keywords.

> Volatile keywords are designed to prevent the writer from applying > optimisations on objects over which he or she has no control. Any objects > that are declared as volatile are just omitted from optimisation to prevent > values being changed by coding outside the scope of the original code.

Volatile is a keyword which tells the compiler to not optimize away loads or stores to the relevant memory location (note that volatile is actually a property of memory accesses, not variables, so there's lots of fun corner cases such as volatile bitfields). Actually, strictly speaking, it was originally meant to tell the compiler that the variable was being used to access memory-mapped I/O registers, but it has been shoe-horned to serve other deoptimization uses as well.

> 5\. When would you use virtual inheritance?

When you want to find bugs in your compiler. :-) Well, the "correct" answer given in the guide is to not use it, but let's explain what it does anyways. The question really should have been to explain the difference between virtual and regular inheritance, although this does venture into obscure trivia territory because I'm not sure I've ever seen someone use it or want to use it in over a decade of C++ programming...

> 9\. What does the acronym OOPS stand for?

This is a worse-than-useless interview question. For starters, I've only heard it as OOP (object-oriented programming), so I have to guess at the S. It has nothing really to do with C++ in particular, especially as C++ has been growing in non-OOP ways in the past decade. Finally, the question doesn't ask to explain or contrast OOP with other paradigms, it just asks you to say that you know its abbreviation. You can know an abbreviation without understanding anything else--I know that SU(3) means Special Unity group of degree 3 but I literally know nothing else about it.

> 13\. Define an inline function.

> This is when a function is prefixed and the keyword 'inline' is placed > before the function definition. They often work faster than normal functions > as the compiler replaces the definition of inline functions at compile-time > instead of the referring function definition at run-time.

... That's not correct. In C and C++, a function can only have one definition in general. An inline function--which can be specified either by adding the inline keyword or by giving the function body within the class definition-- circumvents this rule, instead supplanting it with a rule that the linker must discard all but one copy of the function.

Note that compilers do not generally treat inline as a hint as to whether or not to inline a function, they use their own heuristics instead (incidentally, the register keyword falls in the same boat). Obviously, the function cannot be inlined if its body is not present, but equivalently replacing inline with static would generally have the same impact on inlining.

<comment><USER21> It's "special unitary" but I fully agree with the sentiment =]

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would like to see something like this for statisticians and data scientists.</comment>


Reddit and LinkedIn apps also caught copying and pasting clipboard contents - t-writescode https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/reddit-and-linkedin-apps-also-caught-copying-and-pasting-clipboard-contents/ <comment><AUTHOR> The Reddit app is an absolute monstrosity and its design apparently driven by the same dark patterns that have befallen the original website. Do yourself a favor and use any of the third-party apps or even old.reddit.com on your favorite mobile browser

[https://www.akendi.com/blog/i-dont-want-your- app/](https://www.akendi.com/blog/i-dont-want-your-app/)

</comment><comment><USER2> One could probably poison the cookie jar by having a revolving list of nonsense copied to the clipboard that is disabled for a time when the user purposely copies something to it.</comment>


Asset Deal of the Week: Annuity with Integrity Life Insurance - <AUTHOR> https://www.inforuptcy.com/asset-deal-week-annuity-integrity-life-insurance

<comment><AUTHOR> For the finance geeks on HN, this is a sealed bid auction of life insurance proceeds.</comment>


Uber's technology is reportedly 'hanging by a thread' - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-technology-is-reportedly-hanging-by-a-thread-but-the-company-has-a-new-cto-to-get-it-together-2015-9 <comment><USER2> > The engineers in charge of these systems have been "at odds," which has > created friction, according to The Information.

> Uber's chief technology officer, Thuan Pham, later wrote to his staff that > the mistake "reflects an amateurism with our overall engineering > organization, its culture, its processes, and its operation."

This makes it sound as if the two engineers in charge of the Node.js and Python systems are bickering over which technology stack is better and refuse to compromise. I get there is worry about career progression if your backend option loses, the glory of being _the_ engineer in charge of the entire backend of Uber, and the different specs of different technologies. But to hold the entire company hostage seems like it would be a career-ending move to me, regardless of sides. Then again, I am not in management.

<comment><USER3> This sounds very much like two little pigs arguing about the merits of straw vs twigs when they should be building in brick to me.

<comment><USER4> By brick, which language would you want to use?

<comment><USER5> At that scale my choice would be Java. Proven, reliable, plenty of devs, vendor support, good type system, and plenty of open source code to leverage. Plus it's it's a mature ecosystem.

<comment><USER6> Java the language or any language that compiles to the JVM and can leverage existing Java libraries?

<comment><USER5> I'd go with Java itself. It's the most mature and stable. Uber is not a startup. It needs an enterprise solution.

<comment><USER7> Scala, Go, Python, Haskell, Erlang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some serious link bait in that article title - sounds like they've got issues but they are working through it. The article ends by pointing out that New Years Eve went off without a hitch.

<comment><USER9> A more accurate title would have been "Uber's new CTO is doing pretty okay," but that doesn't entice people to click nearly as much

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The company's engineering staff has grown to 1,200 — a quarter of Uber's workforce — from just 400 people."

 _1200?_ I'd be very interested to know what they're all doing. Not saying that what the company is doing is easy on that scale, but it's hard to see how throwing _a thousand people_ at the problem can be an effective solution. Unless many of them are working on new products? But Uber seems pretty young to be investing that much in R&D.

<comment><USER6> Driverless Cars. They've basically hired the entire engineering department at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where their R&D offices are located.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What benefits would they see/get from using their own co-located servers instead of using VMs on a cloud provider?

For a fast-growing business, it would seem a huge win to not have to worry about physically scaling your infrastructure. And I can't imagine that their infrastructure size is so large (they're not, for example, indexing the internet) that they would get a huge cost savings from using their own hardware.

But certainly, I must be missing something?

<comment><USER12> What benefit would they get from using cloud? A lot more money for much worse performance. It's like buying a monthly bus pass when you could buy a Honda Civic for less.

Despite what Cloud providers want you to think, scaling (for most of us) is largely an architecture, design and software issue and it tends to be rather specific to your system (until you get to the point where you have to build your own). "Auto-scaling" doesn't help you make sure you aren't opening too many forking connections to your database, it doesn't eliminate coarse locks, un-optimized system calls, making sure you take advantage of cache locality, sharding, denormalization or really anything that requires effort.

The game changes a bit with the SaaS stuff that PaaS vendors are selling (dynamodb, for example), but then you pay a lock-in price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "reflected an amateurism with our overall engineering organization, its culture, its processes, and its operation."

That is not going to get the engineers on your side to solve the problem. Instead it will create even more friction between managers and engineers.

<comment><USER14> One nice thing about friction is that if it's done correctly, it can rub away the problems. Forcing people to deal with the reality of the situation often forces positive change.

<comment><USER15> Indeed.

"Uber Raided By Dutch Authorities, Seen As 'Criminal Organization'" [http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/09/29/2328232/uber- raided-b...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/09/29/2328232/uber-raided-by- dutch-authorities-seen-as-criminal-organization)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "setting up servers in a new data center on Halloween"

That kind of problem seems remarkably common - the end of months and years can be peak times for businesses but it's also the kind of date that people pick for their project milestones ("we'll have the servers in by the end of the year").

<comment><USER17> or "lets have new capacity in place a month before busy Halloween" ... progress slips... the project manager pushes and everyone forgets the reason for the original date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yeah, this article is in "Business Insider" rather than "Tech Insider." Ya can tell by reading it. The real WTF is having that many developers without a solid ops team to match. At least they can charge extra for peak loads, which many of us cannot do.

<comment><USER19> Uber can't legally do it either. They just don't give a shit and do so anyway.

<comment><USER20> What laws ban surge pricing?

<comment><USER21> The anti-capitalist ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> agarcia-deniz I wonder why the original article wasn't posted rather than the businessinsider article.

edit:

Paywall. I get it.

</comment><comment><USER22> They need EEs like Twitter has.

</comment><comment><USER23> From my perspective, Uber backend can be sharded trivially. No driver in LA is going to get matched with a passenger in NYC.

<comment><USER24> I generally find it wise to avoid calling engineering problems faced by other organisations trivial. There are often a lot of complicating factors that aren't obvious from an outside perspective.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but it's fun to talk about how you'd build it given some assumptions. I agree with your parent that it seems like a shardable dataset. To boot, I imagine that you could _easily_ store all cars for a city/region in memory (type, x, y, driver id, status, ....).

Next I'd grid the area (maybe 250m2?) into blocks. When a user does a search, figure out his or her block, and start looking for cars in the current block, expanding outwards. You read-lock the blocks as you examine them. You only write lock 2 blocks as a car moves from one block to another (the blocks themselves would have a list of cars, maybe an array, maybe an rtree, maybe another grid).

It all falls apart when a single server can't handle all the load for a region. But then you could sub-divide the region, connect the servers with a queue (this car is now your responsibility), and let clients (not necessarily devices, but the api servers consuming these data servers) join the data.

<comment><USER25> If you can have one server per city then I agree. Especially if those cities are small and you never travel between them. But places like LA totally blow that theory as you're going to have to have multiple servers or shards to cover everywhere.

<comment><USER12> Why LA, # of drivers, size of the city or # of users? Quick googling says LA is 500 miles squared, with Beijing being 6500.

The only case where I see 1 server failing is # of requests. All their drivers in the world probably fit in a few GB of memory (if that). 99% of a car's movement requires no locking (they stay in the same block), so there's very little write locking...I dunno...give it a 24 core server (or more)...

Maybe the problem is node and python. I don't know python runtime well enough, but this kind of setup is a nightmare for node. Sharing data across processes just isn't what it was meant to do (it rather fork and have a copy, but then your memory doubles per fork, and you have to keep it in sync). That's true for a lot of dynamic languages.

<comment><USER25> Just using the google answer for "how big is LA" doesn't really cut it as there are millions of people that live outside of LA proper but still in the region that most people would call "LA". If you go to Wikipedia for Greater Los Angeles it's 34,000 square miles. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles_Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles_Area)

sqrt(34000) is nearly 200 miles on a side. And that doesn't really even cover all the areas that one might Uber from or to. So you'll have a lot of people crossing shard boundaries.

Greater LA has some 18mm residents, and again that doesn't count some of the places very close but not really IN the area. Places you might drive to in 15 minutes from the edge, over a pass.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fix problems, don't just come up with ideas - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hirehumans.com/fix-existing-problems-dont-come-up-with-new-i

<comment><USER2> The problem your fixing is probably the most important part of the investor pitch.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Why am I speculating on solutions to problems that I am not sure even exist?"

It's called 'preventative maintenance.' You'll want to keep thinking about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Preventative maintenance implies that there could be a problem if you don't do 'x', I am talking about the 'ice cream glove' type of speculation.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me choose a business name? - <AUTHOR> Hey subreddit.
I am looking at going solo and creating my own creative agency. I would love your advice to help me choose a name as this is what I am struggling with the most.
My company will provide: - Web Development - Graphic design - SEO - Email Marketing - iOS App Development
I am looking for short words, easy to remember and spell and not too fancy or pretentious.
Thank you for your time. <comment><USER2> It's a lot easier to find a good, memorable name, with the corresponding .com still available, if you go for two words instead of just one.

[http://www.leandomainsearch.com](http://www.leandomainsearch.com) is a good tool for English names. Pick one base word and let it find the second.

</comment><comment><USER3> In one word 'Context' The interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs. It is succinct and sounds professional.

</comment><comment><USER4> Creancy = Creative agency

I don't know, just an idea.

What name did you think?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a huge list and of words but nothing is taking my fancy

I was thinking about @: Solo ?

<comment><USER4> Soloting? Soloment?

Combine things usualy works

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Macaw Digital

</comment><comment><USER6> Solo-dev.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Drat</comment></comment>


Brutal Feedback on our new facebook app? - <AUTHOR>

While our main applications are b2b, we decided to create a Facebook app in Ruby on Rails that targeted consumers.
I'd love to hear any feedback about bugs, anything that's unclear, and how the concept can be improved.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=20356475262
Thanks so much!!! <comment><USER2> Put a log of recent prizes on this page. I would also make the text less salesy, but what do I know? At least A/B test it.

Also, I see this on the right: "This application cannot be added to some of your Pages. Learn more." I don't know why it's there, but if you can get rid of it, do.

Of course, seed the app with 50 installs and a few discussion threads before you launch for real.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Shawn, Thanks so much for the feedback! I'll start investigating the cannot be added to some of your pages... Which text was particularly salesly, in your opinion?

Thanks again so much!

<comment><USER2> Hi! I didn't install the app, as I should have mentioned in my suggestions. I'm thinking of the two paragraphs on your splash page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here are my notes:

* The error page seemed a bit cramped (I tried things like entering A points, or -3 points)

* Your Current Bid: 36 points. Bid More! (What does this mean? I'd like a breakdown of which gift cards I selected, rather than a running total. This information seems to be lost).

* I don't see how: <http://99b600c6.fb.joyent.us/how-to-win.html> explains that "The more you bid, the more likely you are to win a prize today. Your prize vote increases the likelihood of that prize being awarded today." In fact, it seems to contradict what you say on your "How it works page": "At the end of the day (Midnight Eastern) we collect all of the bids made throughout the da" ... (i.e. to prizes are always awarded, and do not correspond to the # of bids placed)....Plus that URL looks spammy for some reason (even though it's not)

* Your button after bidding says: "« Go back to Easy Money, and Bid More or Get More Points!" ... but I can't see how I'd get any more points. Sigh.

* I happen to hate the ads use Facebook style buttons to assault me with (that you see after you make a bid): "You Have 1 New Message Someone On Your Friends List Has A SECRET CRUSH on You. Find Out Who! www.Crushmessage.com"

* I like how you're not sure what gift card you'll get. Keeps it exciting and I think would cause people to want to invite others to bid on the gift card they want.

* As a counterpoint to above... I'd think that the more people got invited to this app, the less likely I am to win anything. So what's my incentive for sharing this with friends? Perhaps you could have a mechanism to give me more points for inviting users (or get a constant 10 point override whenever one of my friends whom I invited places a bid)

* Ok NOW I see that you did exatly what I mentioned above. However I had to click on the "Learn more about this game »" to find out that I could invite friends for more points. The invite friends and the more points div seems to be buried at the bottom right.

* So I just invited a friend, and I didn't get my 25 points as a referral. :( Sigh. If you're going to put restrictions on when my 25 points are rewarded, as I'm guessing you're doing (perhaps only when the user actually signs up as opposed to me sending the invite), you should let users know that clearly (which you currently don't do).

* Oh and even if I do invite a friend, its a net loss for me. I get 25 more points one-time, but my friend gets 50 points to bid... Assuming they bid, I'll be less likely to win anything. Plus if they continue to bid day after day, I'll just be even more in the hole.

* I'd like to see a better countdown clock than a simple, static string: "Feb. 15, 2008 - 6h, 17m Remaining"... make it dynamic and thus more exciting.

That's all I have for now. Good luck with the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey David - thanks for the feedback! We're adding a lot to our project roadmap based on it.

I totally agree with the annoying ads. Do you have anything that can work on facebook? =) We might also do video ads from Google, if we can. We can most likely target according to the gift cards people want.

We're also going to add a history of bidding so you know exactly what you've done...

Perhaps we should be giving a LOT more points for friend invites :)

I'll throw it up on our todo list! Thanks again man!</comment></comment>


Kiva Brings Microlending To US-based Entrepreneurs In Need - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/10/kiva-brings-microlending-home-to-us-entrepreneurs-in-need/

<comment><USER2> I think this is a good idea. I already lend/invest via Kiva and would support it expanding to cover the whole globe. I don't see why the micro-financing model should just apply to the so called developing world. Why not any cash strapped small business anywhere? This makes more sense since the global financial markets accidentally flushed themselves (and all our money) down the toilet. The actual function of traditional banks in an economy is to enhance liquidity by buffering money and lending where required, keeping the money flowing around the economy. I think we could probably cut out the middleman and do this mostly peer-to-peer, without traditional banks - via micro- financing over the internet, kiva style. Now might be a good time to get this working.

<comment><USER3> If kiva ever manages to give a small interest on the loans, I expect it explode in popularity. But there's probably huge legal hurdles to doing that? Or are they ideologically opposed?

<comment><USER2> Probably a bit of both. At present I don't see why they shouldn't be at least as popular as a normal charitable donation. With Kiva, your money goes to some real individual, they use it to build their business, tell you about what they did, then the give the money back - and the cycle repeats indefinitely. One donation lasts forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love this idea. One of the entrepreneurs has her business a couple blocks from where I live.

[http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about...](http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=113783)

I went to check it out and said hi. I really like the idea of being able to meet the entrepreneurs on Kiva.</comment>


Foment – Australia's Wine and Tourism Tech Revolution – Applications Open - <AUTHOR> http://accelerator.foment.com.au/ <comment><AUTHOR> FOMENT is Australia's Wine and Tourism Tech Revolution, it is currently accepting applications for its Accelerator Program. Kicking off in October, with participants from around the world thanks to its virtual delivery model, FOMENT will help founders of cutting-edge tech products or services in the wine and tourism sectors, scale their business for growth.

When: Applications close August 12th and the accelerator starts on October 5th, 2020 Where: FOMENT uses a blended virtual and in-person model to deliver a four week intensive program, designed to scale your wine and/or tourism tech business. If an applicant joins from outside of South Australia, they'll still be able to participate, thanks to the FOMENT team's tried and tested methods for delivering online activations, networking and course content. Cost: $2500 AUD for individuals or teams.

Find out more here: www.accelerator.foment.com.au</comment>


Observations on the Immunization Controversy - <AUTHOR> http://wkstafford.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/observations-on-the-immunization-controversy/

<comment><AUTHOR> As a note - I've known this Dr for a good # of years. He's part of a dying breed of general family practitioners and sensible doctors that you don't see much anymore.</comment>


Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure  - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/anticensorship-internets-infrastructure <comment><USER2> Is it just me or does this smack of security by obscurity - as long as the great firewall of China/Iran/Whomever does not recognise the packets are hiding the real destination in their headers, then they will let the packets pass and anonymous surfing can continue.

But somehow the telex station does, without initially decrypting every packet. So I guess the arms race will be a short one as whatever telex uses as a decrypt me signal will be replicated.

Unfortunately, and rather ironically, my client's proxy is blocking telex.cc so I cannot read any details on the steganography.

<comment><USER3> From telex.cc:

How does the client tag connections?

When establishing a normal HTTPS connection, the client sends a random number (called the ClientHello nonce). To create a Telex connection, the client replaces this number with what we call a tag — essentially, an encrypted value that looks random until it's decrypted. Decrypting Telex tags requires a private key contained in Telex stations. Since the censor doesn't have this key, it can't tell the difference between tags and the random numbers used in normal connections.

In addition to marking connections that are requests for anticensorship service, Telex tags convey information that allows Telex stations to decrypt the secure HTTPS connection that the client establishes with the non- blacklisted destination website. This lets the Telex station replace the contents of the connection with data from a blacklisted site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting idea. The approach assumes that the only way governments censor is by inspecting destination IP addresses (or DNS, etc.), which may be true for some countries, but not others. If the censoring government were to operate a huge TLS proxy, then I can imagine an ISP doing a Telex-stripping attack that downgrades the tagged-TLS connection to a normal one. I think this can be detected...

<comment><USER3> The whole ides of it is that it looks indistinguishable from a normal https connection. You could perhaps detect it by requesting the same page yourself, and comparing the size of the data, but with things like sessions and dynamic content this too would fail.</comment></comment>


The real spotify for artists - <AUTHOR>

www.spotifyforartists.com <comment><USER2> An idea that drastically needs to be implemented (and implemented well). I hope that Spotify can accomplish what they set out to do and put one more nail in the coffin of an industry that currently under-values artists.</comment>


How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media-destruction-gary-webb/ <comment><USER2> It's really good to see Webb's story reaching a broader audience. I imagine the current generation may never even have heard of it.

For those interested in further reading, Narco News[1] has been an invaluable resource over the years continuing on with muckraking reporting on the drug trade. They broke two big stories over the years with Banamex and with the "house of death" in Ciudad Juarez. Kudos to Al Giordano and others who have carried on exposing the players behind the trade in the spirit of Webb.

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

<comment><USER3> Why is that page covered in seemingly unrelated anti-Trump propaganda? What does alleged white supremacy have to do with the narcotics trade?

<comment><AUTHOR> NarcoNews and Narcosphere (and Giordano) are unrepentantly activist in both tone and aspiration. I think it would be a great disservice to label the outfit(s) as anti-Trump; there is a lot of thoughtful criticism of Sanders, Hillary, Obama, and left-wing movements in both sites. As for intersection between narcotics and politics, note that NarcoNews is perhaps best known for its coverage of the reach of narcodollars in the politics of LatAm and corporate motivation behind the War on Drugs. The pages are littered with this sort of coverage (in fact, it is mainly how they started out).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a gem that describes a new standard of journalistic rivalry we haven't seen before or since:

 _Rather than some dastardly, covert plot to destroy (or, as some went so far as to suggest, murder) Webb, Schou posits that the journalist was ultimately undone by the petty jealousies of the modern media world. The CIA "didn't really need to lift a finger to try to ruin Gary Webb's credibility," Schou told The Intercept. "They just sat there and watched these journalists go after Gary like a bunch of piranhas."_

..And a view of the elevated conduct of the CIA

 _In "Managing a Nightmare," Dujmovic attributed the initial outcry over the "Dark Alliance" series to "societal shortcomings" that are not present in the spy agency._

 _"As a personal post-script, I would submit that ultimately the CIA-drug story says a lot more about American society on the eve of the millennium that [sic] it does about either the CIA or the media," he wrote. "We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times–when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community."_

Co-incidentally the second paragraph came near the end of the article when I was about to stop my reading anyway.

<comment><USER5> Just because the declassified material plays the witch hunt on Webb as a happy accident of petty jealousy that obviously does not mean it was not an orchestrated conspiracy.

<comment><USER4> That was the point I obliquely tried to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you look in the history you'll see that drug trade was always controlled by an empire. British have imported opium into China via Hong Kong. French have joined them in the Second Opium War. And, now the US empire controlls both the major opium producer (Afghanistan) and major opium derivates distributor (Kosovo), using it - as the two, now small, empires I just named - to finance wars and for the benefits of the Oligarchy.

<comment><USER7> Isn't Albania the distribution center for heroin for Europe?

<comment><USER8> Albanian Muslims make 95% of Kosovo inhabitants and in connection with drugs and other crimes a lot is written about "Kosovo Albanian Mafia." It seems it makes a difference, probably also because the Albanian Albanians effectively weren't able to travel abroad at least until early 1990-ties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The 3-part installation can be found here [1] and here [2]. Be warned, it is about 2-3 hours worth of your time, but makes for a really shocking read. [3] provides exhaustive coverage of the aftermath. Giordano's recount of Webb's memorial service just a month after the latter's suicide and his eulogy of sorts is especially moving [4].

1\. The Dark Alliance ([http://www.mega.nu/ampp/webb.html](http://www.mega.nu/ampp/webb.html))

2\. San Jose Mercury News ([https://longform.org/archive/publications/san- jose-mercury-n...](https://longform.org/archive/publications/san-jose-mercury- news))

3\. Inside the Dark Alliance: Gary Webb on the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion ([http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/6/inside_the_dark_allian...](http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/6/inside_the_dark_alliance_gary_webb))

4\. The Life and Times of Gary Webb. His Journalism Was Vindicated, Yet the Industry Kept Him in Exile ([http://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1154.html](http://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1154.html))

<comment><USER9> The problem is that his journalism _was not vindicated_. It was supported after his death by the same people who supported it when it was first published.

Maxine Waters made partisan hay out of Dark Alliance before the story was vetted by any other news paper (and more power to her! I don't like Waters, but I'm on her team politically).

Too, Robert Parry defended the story immediately after it was published. Parry is a very reputable journalist, but if you can find the piece where Parry connects the dots this eulogy does, I'd really like to read it, because all I can find are places where Parry writes, in effect, that the government isn't trustworthy and thus a story like Webb's is plausible.

But nobody's argument is that the story is _implausible_. The problem is that the story isn't _reported_. There aren't facts that back the accusation up.

It's even worse, because this eulogy _doubles down_ on Webb's original argument. The dodges employed by The Intercept and the rest of Webb's defenders are that Dark Alliance is "true enough" \--- that CIA-backed paramilitaries were involved in drug trafficking, and the CIA knew it. _But that 's not what Webb argued_. He made a stronger claim: that the CIA knowingly allowed the Contras to ignite the cocaine epidemic in the US. Even The Intercept isn't willing to back that claim up --- but this article, which you're pointing us to as further context for the story, does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head."

How did he manage to remain conscious enough to pull the trigger again a second time?

<comment><USER11> I have a family member that was a police officer in a rural location. They have often had cases of farmers who kill themselves with shotguns, and it surprisingly often occurs that they have to shoot themselves more than once in the head.

<comment><USER12> In this particular case you're comparing apples to oranges.

Shotguns are very different from a standard .38

First is the obvious difference in projectiles, which can make a huge difference.

Second the .38 (in all likelihood) was a pistol, whereas a shotgun is the length of a rifle. A pistol you can hold it to the side of your head and pull the trigger.. you can't really do this well with a shotgun, which means you're more than likely going to put the gun under your chin and try to get to your brain the long way.

It's somewhat logical that someone might need to shoot themselves twice with a shotgun, not so much with a .38.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll again volunteer to write the un-fun comment here.

The subtext of this Intercept piece isn't the abuses CIA or the drug war. It will seem like it is, if you aren't already familiar with the Webb story, but that's not really what it's about. It's about the Intercept, and the kinds of people who support the Intercept, and their perspective on the state of journalism and their distaste for the journalistic establishment.

The basic Webb story is that he published a bombshell piece for the San Jose Mercury News, establishing a link between the CIA and the crack epidemic of the 1990s, and then had his career destroyed in retaliation.

The full Webb story is more complex than that; in fact, it's complicated enough that it's taught in journalism ethics courses.

Webb's "Dark Alliance" story was important, but Webb prosecuted the story overzealously. The major news outlets of the time --- including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times --- _unanimously_ tore the piece to shreds. Many of the reporters involved had already been on the national drug smuggling beat and noticed factual problems with the piece. All the newspapers involved --- _including Webb 's own paper_, which conceded faults in the story and eventually disavowed it --- noticed that the piece simply failed to present evidence for its most important claim.

In the alternate telling of the Webb story, his career fell apart because he became enraptured with the fundamental truth he perceived in the story he was telling (the CIA introduced crack cocaine to black America) and stopped doing the nuts and bolts job of journalism.

The Intercept sees this as heroic. The piece we're reading is from 2014 because it's in support of a hagiographic movie about Webb. Other journalists don't see it that way. The Washington Post originally had Walter Pincus write the takedown of "Dark Alliance", but Pincus is himself a highly problematic figure in American journalism. But this piece by Jeff Leen at WaPo in 2014 doesn't have Pincus's baggage, and goes into detail about the intersection of Webb's reporting and Leen's own from the same time period:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gary-webb-was-no- jou...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gary-webb-was-no-journalism- hero-despite-what-kill-the-messenger- says/2014/10/17/026b7560-53c9-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html?utm_term=.a4abae46fc2b)

I'll add: pretty much nobody on the left (where I too reside!) likes Leen's piece. But their criticisms of it are essentially the same as The Intercept's: there's a deep truth to Webb's story --- surely the CIA must have had some hand in the crack epidemic, we feel it in our bones! --- and it's immoral for reporters like Leen to expect Webb to put professionalism ahead of the truth.

Whether or not you believe the CIA of the 1980s could have been involved in the US drug trade (and I would put very few things past the CIA of the 2000s, let alone the 1980s), the question of how reporting should work and what the standards of professionalism are is a vital one. A huge fraction of us believe in fundamental truths that transcend reportable fact, of the power of first principles reasoning and of a web of credibility extending from sources to journalists to our favored analysts. I find this world view terrifying, but I understand why other people have it.

But it's worth reflecting on a little?

<comment><USER13> > A huge fraction of us believe in fundamental truths that transcend > reportable fact, of the power of first principles reasoning and of a web of > credibility extending from sources to journalists to our favored analysts. I > find this world view terrifying, but I understand why other people have it.

I would argue that there's some (good) reasons to have this kind of belief though, given what we've seen.

The very basis of the CIA's clandestine operations is to abuse people's usual reliance on those mechanisms by subverting some part of that process. That's "plausible deniability" in a nutshell -- that there exists at least one place you can't actually connect that logical chain you suggested.

Once you "lift" every step of the chain to include the idea of "this step is likely being manipulated by experts to misinform me", the minimal explanatory model is often not the same as the minimal explanatory model would be without that. I would argue that this is the discrepancy that you're pointing out when people deal with the CIA/NSA/etc: the minimal model people think of must account for the massive amount of lying, including to their nominal overseers like Congress; the minimal assumption for lying is that they're up to something, not that they're just lying, because lying (even for them) does have a slight cost, and historical data shows that when they were lying in the past... they were usually experimenting on humans, building up blackmail profiles of civic leaders, illegally performing their duties, etc.

Ergo, you get people with models that have HUGE priors that those agencies are up to something targeting various communities, and so stories which doesn't have the usual amount of evidence are still enough evidence to suggest that the CIA/NSA/etc is up to _something_ targeting that group. I'm not arguing that most people are reaching the correct priors -- just that the overreactive priors are "less wrong" than the null priors your complaint suggests they should use.

I would argue that the insistence on "background" priors, in the face of decades of consistent and premeditated behaviors on the part of the CIA/NSA/etc, is the exactly opposite of journalistic integrity: it's specifically refusing to report what you know (and is good for the public to know, too), by getting rid of your knowledge of what the real priors are and not reporting on that. I find a lot of the same "dishonesty" in reporting on issues of culture or race, again, often presented behind a veneer of integrity, when really, it's capitulation to social power -- either to not offend the government or cultural norms.

<comment><USER9> I understand what you're saying and I understand why people believe this to be the case. But help me understand something:

How are you not arguing that journalists should report what they feel, rather than what they know?

I'm very ready to believe you aren't saying that, but I can't reconcile what you wrote with that question.

<comment><USER13> > How are you not arguing that journalists should report what they _think_ , > rather than what they know?

I changed your question slightly, but I hope I preserved the intent of it. If not, please let me know!

I guess my point is that "knowledge" I have is just a special class of "thoughts" (or "beliefs") I have, where my surety in them is above some particular threshold. It's certainly not the case that most of my knowledge is absolute and couldn't (theoretically) be wrong. (At least, as I think you're meaning it, we could reasonably say I "know" my bed is in my bedroom, even though, strictly speaking, I'm in my living room and it might be elsewhere.)

I would argue that the journalists are then reporting knowledge: that they have good (established, documented) reason to think that the priors are some particular way (which would be knowledge), and given those priors with some facts, the CIA/NSA/etc is up to some _class_ of actions, of which the told story is an _example_ member, which is again knowledge, because we can have a stronger belief that the class of actions is correct than the particulars. An example might be: you're not sure that I cut the victim with a knife, but the slash marks all over his body indicate _some_ kind of cutting instrument. Is it not useful to talk about me slashing him?

Similarly, I would argue that I expect journalists to report knowledge in the usual sense, but allow them to present knowledge about things like priors or that something is in a class of behaviors, rather than just knowledge that a specific behavior occurred. (Which is what I get out of your text, but I don't think is actually what you're trying to claim.)

It's certainly common in mathematics to introduce talking about a class of objects with a few definite examples, and I feel that the reporters telling "fictionalized but consistent with facts" stories to exemplify the class of things we know the CIA is up to (or capable of) is meaningful and useful journalism. That kind of writing helps us picture and understand what the class of (likely) actions really looks like, particularly if we read multiple sources which picked different examples from the class. Of course, I think we both agree that journalists could be clearer about when they're doing that kind of thing, and the field of journalism could obviously do better on epistemology in general.

I guess my argument could be summarized as: the knowledge being shared by those kinds of reports isn't about the specific actions of the CIA being discussed in the story, but rather, the CIA priors versus background priors (in context and historical pieces) and the knowledge that the CIA is up to _something_ of the flavor in the article.

I also have a lot of sympathy for your position, and get where you're coming from, but let me ask you this: how do you think journalists should professionally convey information about CIA behavioral priors (eg, that they're systemic liars and career criminals) and sufficient evidence (in light of those priors) to suggest the CIA is doing _something_ against a community when they don't have sufficient evidence for any particular claim, eg, that it was actually CIA officers selling crack versus enabling selling crack by claiming drug dealer phone numbers were agency ones to police versus just not doing anything to stop it because it served their ends?

Surely you agree that journalists should be able to present the claim that the CIA willfully failed in their duty to protect black communities from foreign drug interests, and even probably actively worked against them, without having to get bogged down in the specifics of which actions you think they perpetrated when if there's sufficient circumstantial evidence that _something_ unusual occurred.

Otherwise, how would you ever write a story about the actions of experts in plausible deniability?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So even just recently, we have had several shows " __ _Holywoodizing_ __" the narco crap:

* Narcos (S1,S2)

* The Infiltrator

in both, the CIA are fucking criminals

now we have this... im confused. there is blatant BLATANT corruption in the US - and instead of doing anything about it we turn it into ___ENTERTAINMENT_ __???

<comment><USER15> How about finding and killing bin laden? In my opinion CIA acknowledges the multi-dimensional and grey world, we live in. They are human they make mistakes, but if past 60 years are a record, they did a good job.

<comment><USER16> What if Ben Laden was the instrument of the CIA like the contras were? What if no jounalist dares to investigate it after what happened to Webb?

<comment><USER4> >

What if Ben Laden was the instrument of the CIA like the contras were? What if no jounalist dares to investigate it after what happened to Webb?

That's the whole point isn't it? Terrorize the internal opposition to silence</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Analysing the total points on the "newest" page over time - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/Writings/TotalNewestPoints.html?HN

<comment><USER2> Oddly enough, I performed this analysis earlier in the week. I quickly realized it would be random because there's only a tiny number of items getting votes at any point. Total points depends on submission quality more than anything else.

Hmm, it does tell us _one_ thing: there seems to be enough people voting on the new page regardless of day of week.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty significant!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a follow-up to the item about how long submissions stay on the "Newest" page as a function of time of submission:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022547>

<comment><USER4> My hunch is that there is a threshold for social news sites of this general model (voting on items on a "new" page) where the volume of traffic swings the balance of power sharply in favor of upvoting cabals. (Rapid fall of items off the "new" page dilutes the power of the ordinary voting user, but has less effect on the targeted actions of cabals.) After that point, the site's "market" gets severely distorted. Deliberate manipulation by disparate parties all motivated to redirect the maximum number of eyeballs to their site, and this tends to pull excellent sites strongly back towards the average.

This would also imply that upvote cabals can manipulate conditions at a given site in their favor simply by submitting more links.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is why PG has to have logic in the HN code to detect and punish or lock out voting rings. The Sybil attack [1] is well-known and there are methods to detect it. Harder is when a circle of genuine users all decide to watch each others' posts and upvote them purely on reputation.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack></comment></comment></comment>