Elite Soccer's Culture of Graft - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/152954/elite-soccers-culture-graft <comment><USER2> Tax minimization schemes go through trends and fads just like any other area of creativity. When the accountants and lawyers come up with a scheme for one celebrity footballer, it is likely to get used again for others. Once it becomes common enough the government closes the loophole and the creatives go back to finding the next scheme.

Sometimes the court decides the scheme is illegal and then they go after all those that used it. Politically it looks good to grab money from millionaires that look like they were exploiting your system. I doubt the footballers know much, if anything, about the details of the schemes they are involved in. The accountant says 'leave to me, I can save you millions' and the footballer concentrates on playing.

<comment><USER3> > Once it becomes common enough the government closes the loophole and the > creatives go back to finding the next scheme.

Creatives? Do you mean criminals. I do believe it is necessary to socially stigmatize the crime, if we do want to improve things. Pedophiles can be creative, but we do not go around saying "then, the creatives find a new to continue distributing child porn". (Extreme example chosen on purpose.)

> Politically it looks good to grab money from millionaires that look like > they were exploiting your system.

Sure, or maybe it actually _is_ good, because you get funds to use for public projects?

</comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux You can watch an excellent summary about Ronaldo and Messi's tax fines in this short video from Tifo Football published today:

 _Ronaldo & Messi's Tax Fines & Suspended Prison Sentences Explained_:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP5vuflIdrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP5vuflIdrQ)

In fact, Tifo Football on YouTube is one of the best sources of news, information and analysis on football (soccer) - regardless of whether you like football or not. The quality is excellent:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGYYNGmyhZ_kwBF_lqqXdAQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGYYNGmyhZ_kwBF_lqqXdAQ/videos)

<comment><USER4> TIFO football is fantastic, they really go underneath the game and show that Football is not just a game but a branch of international Politics and finance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It boils down again and again to how elites in general can avoid taxation anywhere by being everywhere. Related:

[https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1088793422113185794?s=2...](https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1088793422113185794?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is just a result of the culture in the areas where soccer is most popular. Most notably, south america, where the sneaky underdog grifter that defrauds others is almost a cultural icon and hero rather than a scoundrel.

<comment><USER7> If you're interested in seeing the prevalent philosophy in these places, watch "Nueve Reinas (2000)".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that Messi had tax problems in Spain as well.

Neither of these guys are filling out their own taxes.

Why did their accountants think it was a good idea to complete their taxes in a way that wound up getting them in trouble?

Or why did Spain think these guys were alluring targets to spend finite prosecutorial resources on?

<comment><USER9> The answer to both questions is surely "several million dollars"?

This stuff happens a lot. Celebrities don't make money through a business front nor do they get to class it as capital gains. It's all "income", so the incentive to turn it into a cheaper tax category or hide it offshore is huge.

See also the Glasgow Rangers collapse due to tax fraud.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure celebrities can easily package their offerings as an LLC or the like. It's just that then you can't spend it however you like.

You want to spend your money however you like? That's income. "They can't play tax tricks to avoid income tax" is the system working, not a bug

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Off topic but

"Rui Pinto, a Portuguese national"

Now I remember doing a case study on the Ford Pinto in South America, Pinto translates into a rude word in Portugese doesn't it???

Is it like Dick (Richard) in English. Or am I missing some subtlety here.

Edit: Link for Translation [http://www.youswear.com/sitemap.asp?language=Portuguese+(bra...](http://www.youswear.com/sitemap.asp?language=Portuguese+\(brazil\)&word=pinto)

<comment><USER12> Yes, you are right! Pinto is a very common surname that can also mean "dick". When used in this context it does not call a lot of attention - but it would be unthinkable to call a product "Pinto"

<comment><USER13> In Brazil only. In Portugal it's just the name of the little chicks (chicken after they hatch).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I always find interesting is that if a professional soccer player is caught only a (in absolute terms) substantial amount of money is fined, while "ordinary" people would certainly go behind bars in addition to paying the money. The 23 months seems to be quite a joke to insult the intellect of these ordinary citizens.

<comment><USER15> Which ordinary person in Spain has gone behind bars for their first time offense of tax evasion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So under 2 years no jail for first time offenders and he was conditionally sentenced to 23 months :)? A lot of these guys might not understand the laws, lawyers suggest ways to "pay less taxes" and "John did it too" and it's done. Their taxes aren't as simple as entering the W2 info on a web form.

</comment><comment><USER4> Football hasn't been about the game for a long time but a branch of International politics and finance.

</comment><comment><USER17> In this article 'graft' means corruption or similar, rather than 'hard work'. Slightly confusing.

<comment><USER18> Graft is a funny word. It seems to come from horticulture and means "to join or unite". Then it's used as a synonym for work, especially hard work, which doesn't have an obvious relation to the horticultural use. Then there's the corruption meaning, which is a metaphor of how a parasite forms a union with its host, I presume. So if you're being metaphoric, "graft" can be used for a harmonic union and an abusive union. There aren't a lot of words like that, I think.

<comment><USER19> According to [https://www.etymonline.com/word/graft](https://www.etymonline.com/word/graft) ...

graft (the horticultural concept) derives ultimately from the Greek for "stylus", after the knife used in the process, and this etymology is considered reliable.

graft (British English for your job) is not well understood but speculated to come from the word graft (meaning ditch/trench), possibly from Dutch.

graft (American English for corruption) is speculated to come from the British word for your job. It's not felt to be related to the horticultural term.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the link, I think I'll be coming back to that site from time to time. My long time favorite dictionary is thefreedictionary.com, but with graft, for the first time the description was subpar.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Haystack:  A New Alternative to Tor - <AUTHOR> http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2010/08/comparing-liberation-technology.html

<comment><USER2> Link to project page: <http://www.haystacknetwork.com/></comment>


"the first, last flight of Atlantis" - <AUTHOR> http://cfnews13.com/Space/DestinationSpace/2010/6/9/hidden_treasure_found_aboard_atlantis_last_flight.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "He said the note must have been written on orbit. Otherwise, the astronauts would have had to stand on their heads."</comment>


Ask HN: How to make self-hosted software without open sourcing it? - <AUTHOR> Are there examples of ways one can make software that companies can host internally without open sourcing the code to said software?
Looking for some guidance as to how to be able to do that.
Cheers <comment><USER2> License under proprietary terms?

Like "This software is copyrighted by Picklevick Corp, you don't hold any rights we grant you mere permissions to use it. Don't poke your head around it".

You can't have GPLv2/v3 or similarly licensed components in it though. If you do and later caught, you'll be obligated to either cease its use and distribution, or completely revise your term and supply the source code to recipients(you don't have to put it on the Internet)

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't ship the source code?

<comment><AUTHOR> How would I give users the ability to self-host the software then?

<comment><USER4> Either you use a compiled language like C/C++ and distribute the binaries or you obfuscate the source when you distribute it.</comment></comment></comment>


JMAP: Modern Mail Standard - <AUTHOR> https://jmap.io <comment><USER2> Three months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720630)

Four months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20477212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20477212)

Six months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19839104)

Ten months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18996200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18996200) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766709)

Also, 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14283659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14283659)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894)

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8785894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8785894) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141152)

</comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant stuff, but kind of sad that this hasn't caught on already. I realize that standardization has only firmed up recently, but other standards like HTTP and TLS see preview releases supported in major products well before they are finalized.

Who uses JMAP besides FastMail?

<comment><USER4> Isn't email mostly consolidated to a handful of providers with published APIs? (Office365, Google, Yahoo) I'd be curious to see the market share of just those 3 combined.

And they don't have any incentive to move to this.

<comment><USER5> Imagine if some company offered a $5/month service that connects to o365/gmail/yahoo via imap, and then presents your email via jmap. After a few years of that company making money, I could see at least one of the big 3 offering a $1/month option to cut out the middleman. And if more of them start offering the same, then it's only a matter of time before one of them offers up jmap for free.

Unlikely, but seems plausible to me.

<comment><USER6> That sounds a lot like Fastmail to me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IMO, as a user the biggest advantage is mail being sent via the same protocol as it is received. Someone made an IMAP extension to do that but unfortunately it was never widely implemented.

Some aspects of JMAP haven't made it through the standards process yet, like calendars, quotas, and server-side S/MIME signature verification. Hopefully it will get wider implementation from the big email companies once those are complete.

</comment><comment><USER8> > JMAP is therefore not introducing any new measures to address end-to-end > encryption.

It seems like a wasted opportunity to not make E2EE a primary focus of a new email standard. Hopefully there will be standard extensions down the road to add this if JMAP takes off.

<comment><USER9> I've been reading about this, and there seems to be a lot of debate still on implementing E2EE via the email providers. From what I have gathered most email providers use TLS and encrypt data on disk at rest, but they feel like its pointless to implement E2EE, because by default as 99% of incoming emails are all unencrypted, and 99% of emails need to leave your email unencrypted(otherwise the receiving email party would be unable to read the encrypted message)

<comment><USER10> On the page they also bring up a great point: a bunch of optimizations allowed by JMAP (including storing attachments as blobs and separating their payloads from other content) wouldn't be possible if the individual messages were E2E encrypted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How do various mail clients talk to their respective backends? I.e. what does iOS Mail use to talk to iCloud? The GMail iOS app speaks a bespoke binary protocol to Google's servers, not IMAP.

<comment><USER12> iCloud mail in iOS uses plain IMAP. The synchronization stack for iCloud is surprisingly based on open standards: IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its JSON via REST - so totally different than IMAP. Which may be good.</comment>


Why, in China and Japan, a copy is just as good as an original - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original <comment><USER2> "the copy is closer to the original than the original, for the older the building becomes, the further it is from its original state. A reproduction would restore it, as it were, to its 'original state'"

"We might also say that originals preserve themselves through copies. Nature provides the model. The organism also renews itself through continual cell- replacement. After a certain period of time, the organism is a replica of itself. The old cells are simply replaced by new cell material. In this case, the question of an original does not arise. The old dies off and is replaced by the new. Identity and renewal are not mutually exclusive. In a culture where continual reproduction represents a technique for conservation and preservation, replicas are anything but mere copies."</comment>


Designing the Nteract Data Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nteract.io/designing-the-nteract-data-explorer-f4476d53f897?gi=4c224b89aca1 <comment><USER2> From 2018.

I'm trying to do a bit more Python notebook stuff and it seems worthwhile, easy to do. I can understand why scientists like it.

But as a programmer no longer in science or academia, I don't quite understand the context of nteract versus Jupyter. Pandas data frames, sure.

Is this a precursor to Jupyter?

<comment><USER3> The project [0] looks more like a peer to ObservableHQ [1], in the sense that both appear to be working toward combining editing source, REPL, visualization, and collaboration into an broadly adopted platform. Jupyter- next.

From my perspective, a Jupyter notebook is a kind of commented script. It integrates rendering into python REPL. Code, commentary, and charts, all in one interactive frame. Cells serve as functions. The overall navigation is linear, but you can replay the script from different cells. So, rather than REPL, read-eval-render-script.

As a pre-notebook era REPL plus IDE coder, to me notebooks offer the advantage of integrated data viz and a new kind of delivery medium for code tutorials and for analytic & data projects. They feel like a better way to script-n- tell, not a better way to develop - as long as you have an easy means to viz from the commandline.

My impression is that part of what ObservableHQ is doing is to create a substrate below a cell as an explicit evaluation graph that a developer can work with directly. And that leads to a better programming experience for developing notebooks, and for better developing within notebooks. I hope that does not mis-state the vision. But the more I work with notebooks, the more interesting something like an Observable [0] or perhaps Nteract [1] looks.

[0] [https://nteract.io/](https://nteract.io/) [1] [https://observablehq.com/](https://observablehq.com/)</comment></comment>


B2B SaaS in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonathanbrun.com/b2b-saas-in-china/ <comment><USER2> Most important question - is it profitable?

My experience was that Chinese companies are loth to pay for _anything_ , let alone software (and let alone EHS software).

Also, I'm more interested in hearing about Fight Club Politique.

<comment><USER3> This has changed a lot in the past few years. My company started as an outsourcer with a WFOE in China doing custom development for clients in North American and Europe. Today much of our business is driven by Chinese clients. About 2 years we noticed ago that Chinese companies were willing to pay the same rates as our North American clients. There is a lot of money on the table, a big push by the government find tech solutions to modernize existing industries, and a massive shortage of skilled engineers.

This is also why we've seen so many Chinese companies in the tech and games spaces outsourcing to North American these days. It seems every week another Chinese company is opening an AI research lab or game studio somewhere on the west coast of North America.

I would add, it's still more difficult to do business in China than North America. And you will still find bad actors who don't want pay the final instalment post-delivery. But the are increasingly rare these days. As China matures it's becoming more and more like any other stable market.

<comment><USER4> > a massive shortage of skilled engineers.

I keep hearing that a lot in every other country. And every time I wonder - what is the criteria for the shortage? If it's skill, what is the skill? If it is from a value perspective, what is the expected engineer output vs salary?

<comment><USER3> In the case of China, a big part of the problem was that the government was too slow to encourage CS education. While it has been pushing CS for the past 10 years, the result is a pyramid with a very very wide base as many juniors are produced every year but very few engineers with the 10+ years experience you'd expect from a senior engineer. So the main problem is the ratio to true seniors who can lead teams or solve problems that reach into many domains are in small compared to the total number of developers. Over time this will work itself out.

Salaries for seniors are rapidly approaching NA rates, it's no longer viable to outsource to China purely for cost reasons. I expect in 4-5 years if the trends hold they will reach parity. But right now the issue isn't about money -- those senior engineers have their pick of their projects and it's very common for them choose lower paying roles if they can work on problems and tech that interests them.

10 years ago, Chinese dev offices looked like sweatshops with as many people crammed in as possible. Now there isn't much difference between NA dev offices and Chinese ones -- at least in 1st and 2nd tier cities. Really the whole development culture has shifted from everyone wanting to work at big foreign firms with safe jobs to everyone wanting to be in a startup. It's done a complete 180.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paying For Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/01/21/On-Books <comment><USER2> Writing a million words is a walk in the park. Picking the best 40,000 of those words is a grueling pinions-and-ropes ascent up a mountain. Selling those 40,000 words to people is reaching the summit of Everest while wearing a bathing suit and coated in Crisco.

<comment><USER3> I remember reading somewhere that the first million words you write are crap, anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't that what Ray Bradbury said about his own first million or half million words?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I buy and read about 2 books a month in addition to using the local library so I share Tim's desire to keep the pipeline full of interesting things to read. Publishing has been a good business for centuries, but we do need a way to encourage writers given lots of free material on the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems to miss the point. The hard part of writing is editing, not producing. Nobody wants to read 40,000 random words; the internal act of curating is the hardest part.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some guy likes another guy's blog post?</comment>


It is now a federal crime to bring a Galaxy Note 7 onto an airplane - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/16/13298846/galaxy-note-7-federal-crime-federal-aviation-administration <comment><USER2> Laws like this are exactly what's wrong with the legal system. First, they're overly drastic - why ban the device outright instead of just mandating that they remain powered off at all times. Second - the punishment doesn't fit the crime. Not even close. $100k fine because someone brought a specific model of tablet on a flight? The punishment is so severe, that it's almost guaranteed to never be enforced in full. Just imagine the PR nightmare the prosecutor would have if he tries to fine someone's grandma $100k because she didn't realize that the tablet her son gave her is actually a "galaxy note 7." No prosecutor in hell is going to take that chance. Instead, the vast vast majority of people who break this law will get a slap on the wrist and then walk away. Unless you happened to have an affair with the AG's wife 5 years ago, in which case he might decide that rules are rules and he simply has to prosecute you to the full extent of the law. And all of a sudden, you're fucked.

Have laws that are as minimally restrictive as possible, and have punishments that are fair enough that you don't mind enforcing them every single time someone breaks the law. This is so simple, and yet, the people who draw up these rules never seem to get it.

<comment><USER3> Apparently, a recent fire was caused by a powered off device.

And I wouldn't trust end-users. I was just in US customs today where they said not to use your phone, 3 people within my reach were talking on their phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There were reports from Melbourne (Aus) Airport this morning about queues 4x or 5x times normal length (for a Monday morning). Security were checking every mobile phone going through and not letting anyone carry Galaxy Note 7s on.

<comment><USER5> We are such a foolish species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's wrong with our legal system? The penalties mentioned are really steep. Up to 10 years in prison and/or a $180K fine for bringing a galaxy note 7 onto a plane.

<comment><USER7> Imagine one blows up in the air and forces the plane to be grounded. Someone has to pay for that emergency landing. $180k does seem excessive though.

<comment><USER8> Maybe Samsung should pay that bill?

<comment><USER9> Why should they? If you take a Note 7 onto a plane that's on you.

Your idea would shift the disincentive not to fly with a Note 7 away from the passenger.

<comment><USER10> It's reasonable to expect your phone to not act like thermite randomly. Until they have 100% of sold devices accounts for, they should be accountable for producing something which malfunctions so spectacularly with potentially deadly consequences. I'm sure there are many people who still don't know about the recall (or who don't understand the actual risks and thus don't care). I'm sure that their notification system to urge owners to bring the device in for recall is not without bugs and didn't reach every last owner. I'm sure there are plenty of GN7s sitting in boxes.

It's not really the fault of a person to know that what they though was a normal phone is now considered contraband because the manufacturer goofed epically. Consider also all of the tech-illiterate who may have received one as a gift or whatever, and they don't know / care what model it is. It's not really fair IMO to fine them. I guess this is why they're checking all phones now.

I'm not sure of the exact mechanisms employed by them, but they likely need to work with every telco on which their phone can connect and go through all active IMEIs and ESNs to identify any still-active GN7s, likely at great expense to Samsung. They should also probably then blacklist those so the devices become unable to connect to the carrier, so any people still using them will actually bring them in for disposal.

<comment><USER11> This is still a massive over-reaction for a device with a manufacturing defect that affects less than 0.01 percent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some people flew out with their Note 7, sometimes across continents. Now, how can they go home and return the phone to get a refund?

</comment><comment><USER13> I've really not been paying attention to this; I'm still working along on my busted-ass, cracked Galaxy 4 and I've got a ways to go before I'm due for a handset upgrade on my plan.

Did Samsung really screw the design, or did they blunder into a bad batch of batteries? How many times has this catastrophic failure actually happened? Is it anywhere near frequent enough to make something like this a proportionate response to the risk?</comment>


Comdb2 – Bloomberg's distributed RDBMS under Apache 2 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bloomberg/comdb2 <comment><USER2> Reading through their VLDB paper [1], Comdb2 appears to be a moderately scalable (up to dozens of nodes (?)) RDBMS with a strong emphasis on consistency and availability. Benchmarks show numbers comparable to Percona XtraDB (MySQL with a different storage engine), at ~2,000 writes/s and 2,000,000 reads/s against a 6 node server cluster. High availability and global sequencing is provided by using GPS clocks, similar to Spanner/Truetime.

Schema changes happen lazily, with old rows being rewritten on the next update, and a background job doing bulk rewriting.

Scalability: "While reads scale in a nearly linear manner as cluster size increases, writes have a more conservative level of scaling with an absolute limit. The offloading of portions of work (essentially all the WHERE clause predicate evaluations) across the cluster does help scale writes beyond what a single machine can do. Ultimately, this architecture does saturate on a single machine's ability to process the low level bplogs."

This doesn't provide the horizontal scaling that Spanner does, CockroachDB aims at, or FoundationDB presumably has.

[1]: [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p1377-scotti.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p1377-scotti.pdf)

<comment><USER3> << or FoundationDB presumably has >>

You mean FaunaDB?

<comment><USER3> Down voted for asking a question? The system is definitely broke in such instances.

<comment><USER4> You worded the question in a way suggested you thought the previous commenter was wrong. That reads like either being a FaunaFB fanboy or not taking time to learn about Foundation, both of which will reliably attract downvotes. Had you worded it differently I doubt you'd be getting downvoted.

<comment><USER3> So essentially the HN commenting UX is one of walking on egg shells.

<comment><USER5> I mean, a two-second Google could haven't shown you what FoundationDB was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some assorted interesting points:

* optimistic concurrency control (sometimes you need to retry, but often the optimism pays off)

* serializable transaction isolation (something like but not exactly like ssi, rather than 2pl)

* ieee 754-2008 decimal floats

* undo-based mvcc (writers don't block readers)

* group (network) sync replication

* paxos based failover

* lua stored procs

Interesting technology and I'm very happy to see it open-sourced. Kudos to the team. (I used this when I worked there. Few firms can pull off something like this in-house; they could. You wouldn't believe how much data they store in this thing.)

<comment><USER7> You know, I never really understood the point of decimal floats. Why use floats at all if the point is to express beeps and dollar ppm? You might as well just pick a fraction size and use uint64_t to my mind, or just some bigint type (which is still going to be faster than decimal floats).

<comment><USER6> The point is that it's hard to pick the fraction size. US national debt vs Italian lira/Swiss franc exhange rate, humans generate numbers of wide ranging scales and yet it's convenient for computers to deal in fixed size datatypes. Hence floating scale. But yeah, it's a compromise. I expect these new types to catch on and be added to various language standards over the coming years, but we'll see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really cool but I'm curious why Bloomberg would need this. Ie, what special needs does Bloomberg have that would lead to a primarily non- engineering company investing the resources to create this. Was there nothing off the shelf that would have fit their needs?

I don't mean that in a derogatory way, I'm just curious what motivated making this.

<comment><USER9> >Was there nothing off the shelf that would have fit their needs?

I can't think of any solid distributed RDBMS that would have been around in 2004. Does anyone with more knowledge have any idea (open or not)?

<comment><USER10> IBM DB2 and Oracle 9i were around for sure. Other solutions as well. DB landscape was well-established back then.

<comment><USER11> They were, but rediculously expensive at the time. $100k+ at the time to have a non-replicated version on Oracle running on a multicore server. Dealing with Oracle was like dealing with the mob.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, but that's a whole other issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the motivation for Bloomberg to open-source this?

<comment><USER13> Probably the same motivation Yahoo had to release Hadoop, FB to release Hive, Netflix to release so much of their libs and so on and so forth:

\- if nothing else, it does no harm (no 'secret sauce' competitors could benefit from)

\- it buys karma (think recruiting goodwill)

If the project catches on though then there are many advantages:

\- it can spark a self-sustained ecosystem that can further drive the product, at much lower cost for original creator (think Hadoop leading to Cloudera, Hortonworks etc). Product improves, bugs are fixed, toolset matures

\- newhires come with know-how to use your internal tools, lower ramp up, better productivity. Anecdotal, but when I was at Microsoft no newhire knew how to use the internal Cosmos stuff, and even among old timers more folk were familiar with Hadoop...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see Comdb2 requries SQLite to install. So, I'm guessing Comdb2 is a distributed storage engine for SQLite, or?

<comment><USER15> I believe originally it wasn't sql, and they added SQL by using the sqlite parsing engine for SQL. They are a massive contributor to the sqlite project. It is in no way supposed to be compatible with sqlite

<comment><USER16> I think you're mixing 2 things. This is a complete rewrite of an old key-value store (hence the 2 in the name) but comdb2 was always SQL. Comdb2 shares a few things with comdb, but they're really just to make migration easier (the preference for tags in csc2 files instead of usual DDL, and then a tag based API that it looks like we got rid of for this release). Under the covers comdb2 is completely different and as far as I know shares no code with comdb.

<comment><USER17> It wasn't always an SQL system. SQL was added a year or two in its development (with lots of databases already live).

<comment><USER18> Yep. With a false start or two along the way. One of the most interesting things on this project was repeatedly changing engines while the plane was in the air.

<comment><USER19> We've had databases literally up for 10+ years, through 5-6 major version upgrades. There's been one file format change that required downtime very early on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somewhat annoying you have to copy data to nodes manually:

        copycomdb2 mptest-1.comdb2.example.com:${HOME}/db/testdb.lrl

This sort of stuff is why I loved RethinkDB. They handled all these complexity details for you.

<comment><USER21> I'm not too offended by letting the administrator figure out the best way to do an uncommon operation. As a point of comparison, Cassandra does have a proper way to bootstrap new nodes but I've found that in many cases it's better to short circuit it and rsync the initial data myself (and use its repair functionality to clean up the mess).

Some reasons include throttling load on the "old" servers, better feedback on progress, the ability to pause/resume, or even being able to do it faster than the DBMS can e.g. by snapshotting the disk on the source machine and making a CoW clone of it. Heck, if you're running your own hardware and feeling a little reckless, pull out one of the drives from the source machine's RAID mirror and you've already got a full clone right there.

I guess you could build all of that into the DBMS, but it's a rather specialised manual operation that's not happening all that often and it's one of the cases that the administrator almost certainly does know better

<comment><USER22> How does that work? As near as I can figure, you need to have all the sstable files from all nodes in a rack on disk. Most will be discarded on "nodetool cleanup", but I would expect it to have to rewrite all the files due to the new token range.

<comment><USER21> > you need to have all the sstable files from all nodes in a rack on disk

If you're not using vnodes, then you need all of the sstables from the previous $RF nodes in the ring. So with RF==3, it will briefly have about treble the amount that it will finally carry.

It's a lot of temporarily wasted disk space for sure, but now you're in full control of how you get the data there

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice they have a JDBC driver... makes it a lot easier to hook into. After looking at all the C++ jobs on Bloomberg's website, makes sense the schema format looks C++ish.

<comment><USER24> They have a few people on the ANSI C++ process, including Bjarne. :)

<comment><USER25> I think Bjarne works for Morgan Stanley. Bloomberg has John Lakos, Alisdair Merideth, Dietmar Kuhn and others (although I'm not sure which of those are officially on the committee).

<comment><USER24> You are right, I mixed that up and did not check before posting.

<comment><USER25> I usually have to check [http://stroustrup.com/](http://stroustrup.com/) because I can't remember if he works for Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan or Morgan Stanley. And, in fact, his statement used to say that the nice bank Morgan Stanley not the ruthless JPMorgan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how this compares to CockroachDB

</comment><comment><USER27> Neat! It supports wsl! Even better! O_o</comment>


Skype app for iPhone not available in Canada - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/03/30/skype-iphone.html?ref=rss <comment><USER2> This really pisses me off! We don't get Skype in Canada and we Also don't get Kindle for the iPhone.

We probably aren't going to get Tethering either. And we pay more than anyone else in the world for our wireless.</comment>


A pink $16 pocket spectrum analyzer - <AUTHOR> http://ossmann.blogspot.com/2010/03/16-pocket-spectrum-analyzer.html

<comment><USER2> What you can do with spectrum analyzers is pretty awesome. In my first year in a lab I built a program that scrapes the NIST spectral database, reads the data from a spectrum analyzer attached to the computer, and figures out which types of atoms the thing the spectrum analyzer is looking at contains. This is harder than it sounds. Essentially you're trying to match tens of thousands of sets of spectral lines of varying strength to a noisy spectrum measurement (something like this but noisier: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5d/Spectra-...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5d/Spectra- Philips_32T8_natural_sunshine_fluorescent_light.png/800px-Spectra- Philips_32T8_natural_sunshine_fluorescent_light.png)).

The problem is that one element, say natrium, has many spectral lines of varying strength. You're trying to find a set of elements that best explains the measured spectrum. If you plotted all spectral lines from all elements on a spectrum, it would be completely black because there are so many. In the end it only worked well for fluorescent tubes, but it could tell you what's in them, even things a human would have a very hard time discovering by looking at the spectrum and manually comparing it to the NIST database (the university has all kinds of weird lamps like natrium lamps, blacklights, and fluorescent tubes in many colors all containing different stuff, and looking at computer monitor pixels is fun too).

My program output an element X who's name I forgot for many of the lamps, but when I plotted its spectral lines over the spectra I couldn't see the match clearly, so I added a parameter to the algorithm so that it would be more restrictive on the number of different elements returned. In the presentations of the lab the prof commented "many of these tubes also contain element X, but you can't see it with the spectrum analyzer you used, you need a higher quality one". Bummer.

<comment><USER3> The original posting describes a spectrum analyzer that shows the strength of radio-frequency signals. It's built by reprogramming a toy that uses the Texas Instruments CC1110F32 RF system-on-a-chip (<http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/cc1110f32.html>)

You (jules) are discussing a spectrometer, that shows the strength of optical spectral lines to identify materials (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrometer>). These are two totally different things - radio-frequency vs optical. (Just want to keep the discussion from getting totally confused.) Also, Natrium == Sodium (Na)

<comment><USER2> You are completely right. Now that I'm reading it again they are repeating "radio" a lot of times and there are a ton of clues that this is radio frequency, but the picture of the device on the yellow peppers just triggered "oh they are measuring the light spectrum of yellow peppers". Sorry for the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone reversed the USB transceiver dongle too: [http://blog.hodgepig.org/2010/10/22/im-me-usb-dongle- hacking...](http://blog.hodgepig.org/2010/10/22/im-me-usb-dongle-hacking/)

Of course not forgetting the GPL drivers for the same: <http://im- megpldrivers.sourceforge.net/>

Also, $16? I paid £0.99 for mine on ebay :)

</comment><comment><USER5> > The frequency ranges supported by my device are 281 - 361, 378 - 481, and > 749 - 962 MHz. This is about 50% more than the chip is advertised to support > and covers quite a bit of interesting activity in the US including ISM, LMR, > television, amateur bands, pagers, and mobile phones.

Do hackers of this device risk running afoul of laws against intercepting mobile phone transmissions?

<comment><USER4> Quite possibly, but you would likely not get prosecuted. If you actually want to do online GSM decryption you need a lot fancier software radio than this thing, because GSM involves a lot of algorithmic frequency hopping/multiplexing.

Also there is no realistic practical way to passively detect a passive detector. Plus how would they distinguish you from someone on a normal mobile phone?

<comment><USER6> > Also there is no realistic practical way to passively detect a passive > detector.

Is that true? I heard that the BBC license police used "receiver detectors" to find unlicensed TVs.

<comment><USER4> This is well known to be a a lie. The vans are fake. It's basically just extortion.

Just think of it as part of our eccentric british ways.

EDIT: just to add, I pay my license fee, happily, even though I dont have to because its not required to watch the iPlayer streaming service, which is how I watch almost all my TV. The fee is pretty cheap considering the sheer breadth of services the BBC provides. The UK would essentially fall apart without it culturally.

<comment><USER7> It may be fake, but it is possible. All televisions have a number of local oscillators for super-heterodyne reception. With sensitive equipment, the radiation from these oscillators can be detected because they are not well- shielded.

<comment><USER4> This is the case, but this technique will not allow you to distinguish between my television which I have paid for, and that of my nonpaying neighbour which is 12" away on the other side of an internal wall, on the 20th floor of a towerblock with hundreds of televisions in it, from the street. Which is what the Television Licensing Authority (the BBC dont actually have any involvement in collection or enforcement) claim they can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Travis Goodspeed gave a talk at HOPE about the RFID badges, and touched on his work with the IM-ME. Smart (and neighborly!) guy.

</comment><comment><USER9> For some reason this reminds me of ... <http://megatokyo.com/strip/1107> (towards the bottom of the page)

Very cool mod, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> How do you get them so cheap? Amazon lists them for $29.99.

<comment><USER11> quote:

 _I found mine for $15.99 and free shipping on eBay._

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where's my iPhone spectrometer!!!

But this is a frequency analyzer for finding overtones to determine broadcast frequency at close distance.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why pink?

EDIT: I didn't see that the keys were alphanumeric and thought that was its intended purpose. I thought maybe they were going for the "science girl" demographic, which would have been cool.

<comment><USER13> It's a toy for little girls. It just happens to be easily hackable for other uses. Which is neat.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are there so many companies making TODO lists? - <AUTHOR> It seems like there are a lot of TODO or notes companies* (along time) in HN's front page and that they are constantly on the news; how can this overly saturated market be so popular? Is it because of the simplicity of the product to do/launch?
One would expect there to be 1-2 leading companies and the rest not to offer a differentiating advantage strong enough to warrant their existence.
Note: this is a serious question, I'm not complaining at all nor suffering TODO fatigue.
* with this I literally mean companies whose main product is a TODO list or a Notes app/web. <comment><USER2> On the surface, it looks simple enough the execute (it just a list, right?). I think that's why everyone is giving it a go.

But once you get into it, it is a bottomless rabbit hole..extremely difficult to get right for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess, it's a simple as everyone gets a share... people create news lists all the time and use the first one found on google. Awesome ad-words potential both in and out.</comment>


PostgreSQL 11: something for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/764515/82d5619a7b6fa131/ <comment><USER2> I have already had the opportunity to work with MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle and, more recently, Postgres (on AWS RDS). I see no reason to choose a commercial RDBMS or MySQL nowadays, specially when you take into account the improvements AWS Aurora or Citus are doing on top of it. Postgres is so robust and feature complete (80/20) that is my first option for relational database (and sometimes for key/value as well).</comment>


What iOS7 should look like - <AUTHOR> http://tristanedwards.me/what-ios7-should-look-like

<comment><USER2> The thing I most dislike about iOS 7 is that it has caused every designer with a blog to write about how much better they could make iOS 7.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meh. It doesn't seem like an obvious win to me. Especially the notepad.

<comment><USER4> Seriously.... I think the Apple iOS7 designs have some weird points, but they're overall decent enough, and hardly deserving of the shrill reactions I've seen. None of this guy's "fixes" really seems very compelling, and I'm left wondering why he bothered to write an entire blog post about them...

[and I'm no Apple fanboy, I like Android...]

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> typical designer. they just look at static mockups and don't think about interactions. okay if you have the 2x2 icon, how will other icons move relative to it when the big icon is moved around?

<comment><USER6> You might want to take a look how Windows Phone 8 does it. WP8 has different size tiles and moving them around is a piece of cake.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. WP tile resizing is fantastic. I'm not sure I could go back to iOS, even with it's app ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMHO this a far, far better design than Apple's. The saturated colors in Apple's design are just too garish. Some of the app and icon designs are really messed up, as the OP notes. (e.g. Notes, Calendar). How did Apple's GameCenter icon even make it past 1st draft. It is just mind-bendingly awful.

Although the configurable-size widgets are a good idea, perhaps the OP could outline how the interface should work when these are moved around (as another commenter suggested).

<comment><USER9> Now I want you to take that brightness slider, and drop the brightness on the phone 30%. Oh look, you just bought a good chunk of extra battery life. And with the bright colors you can still see stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Those suggested interfaces look very messy and inconsistent.

</comment><comment><USER11> Most of these are big improvements, mostly because his designs don't ask the user too think too much. They are a modern,but more gradual and evolutionary than Apple's.

His idea of widgets would be great way to bring them to iOS. Just an oversized button with changing text, like a little iPod nano. A simple way to make that work would be to have a little resizer when you click and hold.

<comment><USER12> He absolutely nails it. There are so many things wrong with the new design, but the biggest issue is a loss of clarity. If I would hand an iOS7 device to my mother, I would not be sure, she would have an easier time with it than with an Android device. They give up so much clarity, which was their last remaining big USP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like how in the :( versions the top status bar is all cluttered with low battery, gps, bluetooth, wifi etc. And the :) version is clean & minimal. Subtle persuasion! I don't think the app icons are an improvement, I dislike both. The final redesign, the lock screen, I way prefer the iOS version. The time is hard to read on the redesign.

</comment><comment><USER9> >This is crucial if Apple wants the OS to continue to look consistent, because there is no way all developers are going to go back and redo the icons for all of their 900 000 apps!

And this is part of the point I think about the huge change here: Old unmaintained apps will look OLD and apps with active teams behind them will not.

</comment><comment><USER14> I doubt anyone will come out with a mockup that everyone can agree on. That being said, I think there are a few nice decisions in this mockup which I prefer over the current release.

</comment><comment><USER15> Tired of this bulshit...

</comment><comment><USER16> I like most of your ideas. Agreed 100% on the icons. You lost me on the reminders screen though, yours looks 100x's worse to my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER17> The calendar looks a lot better. I also vote up the use of the subtle buttons instead of colorful text buttons of iOS.

</comment><comment><USER18> Meh, still looks like it took less than an hour to create each of those icons.

</comment><comment><USER19> Imagine looking at the current IOS 7 interface in the dark. Blindingly bright.

<comment><USER20> In practice it's no brighter than iOS 6.

<comment><USER14> That's not true. There was a zoomed out and pixellated comparison days ago between the default apps on both versions, and iOS7 was clearly brighter.

<comment><USER20> I've been using it on my phone for the past week and in practice there is no difference.

<comment><USER21> It is. Safari is all white (instead if blue), and the keyboard is also much lighter. The same is true for Mail, Settings, Music and Phone. Folders are all white too, and the "dock" is much lighter. And don't get me started on calendar and notes! Even the stupid clock is bright as sun :)

<comment><USER20> I guess I don't use mail or music or phone. Maybe I'm a weird user. iMessage is brighter, and the animations are janky at the moment. The clock redesign is annoying. It looks terrible. The new APIs available are great but I'm afraid the redesign is not growing on me. I hope Apple sorts this out in the next few months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is so much better than iOS7 that Apple should be embarrassed.</comment>


Early drafts of great work are encouraging - <AUTHOR> http://sivers.org/early

<comment><USER3> I also love seeing code repositories in early version. Seeing a code base grow and become polished is encouraging, especially looking at a mess of functions in the first few days of my projects.

</comment><comment><USER4> _If you like great poetry_ check out the drafts of Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for a Doomed Youth' - Sigfreid Sassoon helped him redraft it into possibly the most iconic WW1 poem, but the original version was relatively weak. Fascinating to see the changes, for example: [http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic1b/2ant...](http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic1b/2anthem.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree growing things is the way to go, and it's worked for me. Mistakes in some areas are harder to fix, such as in public APIs that others rely on - <USER2> they still _can_ be fixed by deprecating older approaches. It's painful; but perhaps even worse to keep delaying til it's perfect...

A hard one is patents: you can't patent after launching, selling or even demoing it publicly, so you have to finalize the design well-enough to describe it in detail, without the benefit of experience with actual users.

You can file a provisional application beforehand, but it has to be as complete as a full application, because you can't add materially to it. I Believe that in the USA, you can apply up to a year after inventing it, but you'll still need sufficiently good documentation to be able to prove that the invention date, if challenged. A meticulously kept notebook is probably sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a superb point. I recall the first time I went to a museum and saw pencil "studies" of famous works of art... it really brings the whole process of art down to earth and you realize it's a simple, creative but iterative process, much like software engineering.

</comment><comment><USER7> Karma be damned! Video in article is best watched while drunk.

</comment><comment><USER8> As I commented when the link to pg writing his essay, that this story cites as an example, was submitted to Reddit:

 _I think it [is] rather encouraging to would-be writers to see that someone that is [..] succesful rewrites his sentences many times. It can be quite disheartening to find it necessary to rewrite the same bit over and over again, if you suffer from the illusion that good writers pen down everything in one go._</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to get pre-orders for software products? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a way to get pre-orders for a software project. This would useful for validating an idea before sinking to much time into it. I'm imagining something similar to Kickstarter, but for whatever reason Kickstarter seem to work particularly well for software other than games. <comment><USER2> You're going to find it very difficult to get people to invest their money in something that has no demo or detailed information. Your best bet is to create a minimum viable product and get feedback from the community (HackerNews could help).

The "Ghost" blogging platform's Kickstarter is one of my all time favourites (notice how they had something to show their users before asking for money): [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost- just-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a- blogging-platform)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words :) I wrote a series of posts a while back about all of the thinking which went into the campaign [https://john.onolan.org/the- anatomy-of-a-successful-kickstar...](https://john.onolan.org/the-anatomy-of-a- successful-kickstarter-campaign/) \- OP might find that useful. We borrowed a lot from other campaigns that came before us (Ouya/Pebble/etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was asked to take a contract project that I recognized as an UI component / app lots of businesses in that industry would need. I gave them a good price in exchange for me retaining the resell rights on the code. The contract was profitable, and afterwards I invested a few days time into creating a basic landing/sales page with an email address/contact form.

I then searched on Google for forum posts from other developers posting on programming QA sites & forums, trying to create the same UI component / app & having issues. I gave them advice about their code, and also shamelessly plugged my commercial UI component / app & suggested purchasing it as another solution to their problem.

Even if no one else purchased it, I was already paid to create it once. But it did work, I sold my UI component / app 1,000 times. I would sometimes make deals where I'd promise to add some new feature in exchange for them purchasing the app. Eventually I decided to open source it & move on to bigger projects.

So basically my advice is start with consulting, so you're getting paid for your time. Then if you happen to re-sell the code you wrote a second, third or 1,000x great... or if not, at least you were already paid once.

For example you found a client who wants a "todo app". Create a simple todo app & then try to find more clients who want the same thing, over time build it up to be the most sophisticated "todo app" on the market, with rules engines or all sorts of bells & whistles & customization built in. Eventually there will be no more market for hiring consultants to build "to do" apps, instead the de factor market solution is your app. I feel this is a solid strategy for creating a b2b startup company.

Lots of great programmers can create a CMS or a wordpress clone. But until you consult for some real companies with real world problems & understand where those systems fall short, you don't understand the market needs. Eventually you get tired of hacking on permissions/access control to some open source CMS as a consulting job, and you build your own CMS, or a plugin for that open source CMS & [re]sell that to your clients instead.</comment>


Chart: Brexit Costs Nearly Match UK's Total EU Contributions - <AUTHOR> https://www.statista.com/chart/20544/forecast-cost-of-brexit-compared-to-the-uks-eu-budget-contributions/ <comment><USER2> Remember that the UK's contributions weren't just going into a black hole, so this isn't a zero-sum game. The UK also received an enormous amount back for those contributions despite being a net contributor, such as EU project funding in deprived areas, access to the single market, a strong position in global trade deals as part of the EU negotiating team and so on. The sums are much, much worse if you take that into account.

<comment><USER3> What people keep on forgetting is that Leaving the EU was never about money. Micheal Caine said it best "I'd rather be a poor master than a rich slave".

<comment><USER4> Well, then what about that

 _350 Million£ a week for the NHS_ bus the Brexiters were so proud of displaying?

If that's not about money I'm not sure what is.

<comment><USER3> Nobody I know who voted leave ever mentions the bus. Sure it was part of the "Leave Campaign" but that doesn't mean it is why people voted.

[https://ukandeu.ac.uk/research-papers/peoples-stated- reasons...](https://ukandeu.ac.uk/research-papers/peoples-stated-reasons-for- voting-leave-or-remain/)

Note the Bus or the NHS isn't mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Calling this a "chart" is a bit of a stretch. Several sentences and a picture of two flags.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are already comments on this post about leave voting people having no brain or being stupid. This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that only makes the situation worse! Let's not forget that over half the country voted for it, calling these voters stupid only makes the divisions in what has become a divided country worse.

We have to except the decision has been made and move forward. Continuing to argue about who was right and wrong only holds us back, and I say that as a passionate remain voter. Let's make the best of the new direction the country has taken!

<comment><USER7> I take this as a proof that it is an immense Monty Python sketch.

"Let's not bicker and argue about who killed whom: this is supposed to be a _happy_ celebration!" ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I came away with a very negative reaction to this infographic. I mean visually, not the data. Some how I come away feeling very underwhelmed. The embedded flags, which are at the same height, draw my eye and make it harder to gauge the relative heights of the bars. Also, there is too little white space between the subheading and the graphic. Same for the footnote. I'm far from a competent graphic designer, but I think Statista could have done better with this one.

</comment><comment><USER9> Brexit isn't about economics, macro-economics rarely has an influence at the individual level. It's the story that wraps around the numbers and emotion that's important.

That's why Leave won. Not about net contributions, billions for science experiments most people don't understand. It won on the back of "money for more nurses to take care of your nan", "control of our borders to stop illegals taking your mate Dan's job".

So for an anecdote: if the UK pulls out of the EU data-roaming regulations, I'd have spent more on mobile data in just one holiday last year than my yearly total EU contribution from my tax (and that's with a very fair operator travel plan).</comment>


Ask HN: Jobs in Spain? - <AUTHOR> How is the startup scene in Spain? Either Madrid or Barcelona? Salaries? I have an MS (from the US) and about ~5 years of experience in full stack (everything from embedded to backend to web dev to mobile to ML) and I'm wondering what my quality of life would be relative to the US. I speak passable Spanish. <comment><USER2> Cannot tell for Spain, but I assume it's similar to neighbouring countries like France. Compared to the united state, it's a much more equal society, which means unlike the US, you won't make 15 times what a barista is making. I'd assume salaries to be around 40, 50k euro at best.

Now that can be enough to make a decent living, have your own flat etc. but it's not, "let's go on holiday to the other side of the world twice a year" sort of money either.

Also there is much less a culture of senior developers, the idea being that to progress in your career you need to stop coding and start being a manager (not true everywhere but the norm)

<comment><USER3> > Compared to the united state, it's a much more equal society, which means > unlike the US, you won't make 15 times what a barista is making

Yeah, that's why salaries are so low.

What's Messi make again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in Spain, outside of those two hubs but always keep an eye on them. Both have healthy dev communities that organize monthly meetups and conferences where it's easy to connect with local startups. Lots of open opportunities, often open to foreign folks, and at least a few companies with very strong technical teams. Salaries aren't near the SF range but should allow you to afford a healthy work/life balance and enjoy your time here.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are some startups in Madrid[1], also, apply with LinkedIn and Glassdoor[2] to companies in Spain[3]. Speaking English and somewhat- entendible Spanish you shouldn't have any problem getting and interview. Indeed your English native level can be an asset.

Thus, you should bring to the interviews that have experience working in USA. I think that is pretty valued in Spain.

On the other hand, Madrid seems to have an American expat community, there are some meetups [4][5] and facebook groups, etc.

Don't know about Barcelona.

Good luck!

[1] Take a look at [https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/madrid-spain- start...](https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/madrid-spain- startups-2018) and [https://www.seedtable.com/startups- madrid](https://www.seedtable.com/startups-madrid)

[2] [https://www.glassdoor.com/Job/jobs.htm?suggestCount=0&sugges...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Job/jobs.htm?suggestCount=0&suggestChosen=true&clickSource=searchBtn&typedKeyword=Senior+Software+Engineer&sc.keyword=Senior+Software+Engineer&locT=C&locId=2664239&jobType=)

[3] I know you want to work for a startup but Amazon is in Madrid, maybe you are interested in that?

[4] [https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/expats-and-americans- madrid/](https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/expats-and-americans-madrid/)

[5] [https://www.internations.org/madrid- expats/americans](https://www.internations.org/madrid-expats/americans)

EDIT: formatting.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love Valencia if you work remote, we just got back from 3 months there and I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER7> I recommend the Wayco coworking there, really charming and well-managed space in the city centre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can work remotely from Spain :). There are many tech companies that will allow working from EU.

</comment><comment><USER9> > I'm wondering what my quality of life would be relative to the US

What's your quality of life currently in U.S.?

</comment><comment><USER10> Have you looked at the who's Hiring for this month?

</comment><comment><USER11> Twilio is hiring Java developers in Madrid</comment>


Single Objective Problems with Python - <AUTHOR> https://datacrayon.com/posts/search-and-optimisation/practical-evolutionary-algorithms/single-objective-problems/ <comment><USER2> Have you heard of Prioritized Grammar Enumeration?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've come across it during literature searches but I'm no expert!

<comment><USER2> I'm the author of you have questions!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice work and good job getting into GECCO! I think my real curiosity is actually off-topic, e.g. did you leave academia, and why!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Java is becoming the new Cobol - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/12/28/52FE-underreported-java_1.html <comment><USER3> Does this article contain any facts that are actually correct? Java losing marketshare to AJAX?

"One bit of good news: developers and analysts agree that Java is alive and well for internally developed enterprise apps." Has Java ever been alive for anything else?

Java's big problem is incompatibility across platforms?

Ruby gaining popularity because of built-in shopping carts?

And what's the connection between losing marketshare and becoming the new Cobol? I mean, Perl is losing marketshare...

This article is utterly clueless.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's so much bashing of Java lately. It reminds me of the kind of daytime TV rants that begin with "Well, Oprah, I think that man needs to..."

When people decide to end a relationship, they often start to think of all the ways they have been wronged to justify it. I always think, eh, maybe "that man" was fine, you just got tired of him. You don't need to justify a break-up to me - feel free to go.

Personally, I don't feel as aggrieved by Java as some people do. It was certainly better than working in C++. It certainly made web programming easier. Tomcat was simple to install and configure. Ant was a good build too (but I did start to wonder why all the XML configuration for something that could probably be standardized). Struts was heavy and cumbersome. Hibernate got on my nerves - why do I have to deal with all this XML. Spring was an improvement, but I broke up with Java when I started reading about Inversion of Control and all the design patterns. Why am I doing this when the actual code I care about is going to be, oh, maybe a thousand lines, tops?

"Well Oprah, Java is no good, let me tell you about what he did, in the beginning he was so nice, always bringing me flowers, but now he just sits on the sofa an plays video games, why even last week, when I got home, working hard to pay the bills, he's just sitting there..."

Eh, my take on it is that technologies and programming frameworks move on (often by finding something that was done better in the past and modernizing it, or even just dressing it up). Many if not most of the "breakthroughs" in rails were already present in other languages.

There's really no need to hate Java or decide it's a foul language that has wronged you. Maybe you're just ready to move on. Nothing wrong with that.

(of course, if you're a Lisper who suspected Java was stupid from the very beginning, I suppose you are entitled to your victory fist pump when everyone starts to wake up and get it).

I'm sick of programming in Java now. I'm not sure what's next, but Ruby and Rails certainly opened my eyes to how much more pleasant and productive other frameworks and languages can be. I just don't feel any real need to hate Java, because it did make my life a little better (almost) a decade ago.

<comment><USER5> The reason people get irked with languages is the lock-in and network effects that essentially force people to use things that they don't want to.

<comment><USER4> There's more freedom of language choice now than there was in the past, especially for web applications. But I do agreee with you - there is certainly pressure from network effects, which does make it harder to just "break up" with a language as a purely personal choice. Not impossible, just harder.

As for me - I'd disagree that I'm _forced_ to use java, but I am definitely under pressure (financial and otherwise) to do so. For instance, I use an API for a mathematical engine (ILOG) that is available in java, C#, or C - <USER2> everyone around me at work uses Java. Technically, I could write an extension for ruby in C (maybe there's already one out there?) But I have a feeling this wouldn't fly with my company. I could also quit and find a new job - there are plenty of good projects in Ruby out there. So to some extent I am "forced" to use Java, but if I'm totally honest with myself, I have to admit that there's more than a small element of personal compromise (as opposed to pure coersion) in the language I use at work.

I read an interview with David Heinemeier-Hansson where the interviewer repeatedly asked him about "why not use X for reason Y" (X= Java, .NET, etc, Y=performance, availability of programmers, scalability, etc)... and his response was something like "previously I was direct, now let me be blunt: I don't care about you."

That's what I'm getting at with the "well, oprah" analogy. At some point, you just have to decide what you're going to with. Keeping an open mind is extremely important, but it's equally important to remember that you don't need to convince anyone other than yourself. If you find yourself justifying things too often to other people, maybe you need to restructure your life a bit (not meant as a criticism: I know I do).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the "Info-Tech Research Group" paragraph, this looks like submarine PR by Microsoft.

<comment><USER7> With no less than 3 favorable mentions of .NET? Do ya' think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cobol doesn't have useful libraries like Lucene.

Cobol didn't convince pointy-haired bosses that technology which only 10-15 years before was considered an academic curiosity ought to be standard for business application development.

</comment><comment><USER9> Relative to the other languages mentioned, I think the only significant way Java is similar to Cobol have is that common conventions require a lot of typing.

Consider an example from the programming language shootout:

Java:

       public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
          int sum = 0;
          StreamTokenizer lineTokenizer = new StreamTokenizer(System.in);
           while (lineTokenizer.nextToken() != StreamTokenizer.TT_EOF) {
             sum += lineTokenizer.nval;
           }
           System.out.println(Integer.toString(sum));
       }

Ruby:

      count = 0
      l=""
      STDIN.each{ |l|
        count += l.to_i
      }
      puts count

<comment><USER10> I don't think that Java programmer was up to scratch, although admittedly Java won't get as short as Ruby. I would count that readline construct of Ruby as kind of cheating, though. It's a specialized feature that doesn't say much about the brevity of Ruby in general.

<comment><USER6> Cheating would be putting an open paren at the top of the file, a close paren at the bottom, and implementing it in Scheme as

       (apply + (read))

<comment><USER11> I've done things like that often enough (putting parens around file contents or each line of an ascii file) that I wonder if it would be worth writing a macro that inserted the parens for you on the fly as you read the file before handing it off to the code you want to execute.

I know that was vague, but I just get the feeling I'm often doing something semi-manually in Emacs that my code should be doing for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think I first heard the phrase "Java is the new COBOL" about 3 or 4 years ago.

 _Ronen says Ruby offers pre-built structures -- say, a shopping cart for an e-commerce site -- that you'd have to code from the ground up using Java._

Fact-checking 101:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22java+shopping+ca...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22java+shopping+cart%22)

<http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ruby+shopping+cart%22>

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22ruby+on+rails+sh...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22ruby+on+rails+shopping+cart%22)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what _Infoworld_ was saying about Java 5 years ago. But I can probably guess.

<comment><USER14> Title: Java Under Siege

[http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/03/22/020325fejavastrat_...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/03/22/020325fejavastrat_1.html)

Can't seem to access the website right now, though. Google cache at [http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:UmQdAoYGKp0J:www.infowo...](http://18.104.22.168/search?q=cache:UmQdAoYGKp0J:www.infoworld.com/article/02/03/22/020325fejavastrat_1.html+java+2002+site:infoworld.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=ca)

Also, "Java Web Services High in Potential" at <http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/02/22/020225feweb_1.html> , but the website isn't responding right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Though that means that if the adoption of Ruby on Rails in the enterprise becomes widespread enough, it too will take the crown of "the new Cobol". Or it might be .NET

What I mean is the rising population of unskilled so-called programmers who have no business programming entering into the marketplace. I've already seen crap Ruby code floating around, including ones that were "ported" (I use the word lightly) from PHP or Perl. (They copied-pasted the code and change things here and there to make it Ruby-like ... doing things like retaining the $ in front of variables, or ...)

The DailyWTF is a monument to these pseudo-programmers.

When a language is sufficiently popular enough that pseudo-programmers perceive it as a way of getting secure income ... without having to expend skull sweat ... that language is flooded with utter crap. The result? COBOL.

People have said you want the top n-th percent of the programmers. For me, I just want to work with programmers that don't suck.

</comment><comment><USER16> And the memory footprint thing....

I understand the concern for mobile/embedded stuff and don't know much about how well Java does there.

However, when a half gig of RAM for a server costs well under $100, it just doesn't matter much for regular 'ol server apps. Even a "bloated" J2EE app doesn't usually require more than a gig of heap (unless you're doing massive, in-memory caching). Yeah, it's nice to use less memory, but there are 50 other things I'd give equal weight to (the availability of libraries being about 25 of those 50).

As I write this comment, I am tuning a Java rules (rete) app that is using an 11 gig heap :)

</comment><comment><USER17> In related news, black is becoming the new white.

<comment><USER18> And they both run things in Treasure City...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I haven't seen anyone else comment that this whole thing is just a friggin' PR piece from Twiki. And before all you 19-year-olds-fresh-out-of-logic-101 scream "ad hominem!", let me remind you that in the _real_ world you should always consider the source.

I'm not about to defend Java, but what a lot of the Ruby newbies are too young to know is that we _had_ a dynamic language in the enterprise. It was called Visual Basic - you just declared everything "Variant". The result was a bunch of god-awful messes.

Personally, I like flavors of Lisp. But I don't know that I'd prescribe it for the IT department at Wells Fargo.

</comment><comment><USER20> great, all my cs classes are taught in java.

<comment><USER21> Trust me, if you were planning to ride on the language you learned in college, you've got a rude awakening coming. :P

Ideally the classes are trying to teach language agnostic principles and techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> About time...

</comment><comment><USER23> It really is true. Nobody wants to program in Java anymore, if you do it's just because you don't know any better. However, just like Cobol, there is going to be money available for a long time for anyone that keeps their Java skills sharp.

<comment><USER24> I do. For my shrink-wrap web-app I will do next year, Ruby, Python and PHP are not a viable choice.

<comment><USER25> JRuby or Rhino? Why not have best of all worlds.

<comment><USER24> Shrink-wrap is the keyword here. Imagine FogBugz written in IronRuby.

<comment><USER25> Fair enough. Yes shrink wrap is not "in vogue" so the particular issues it has are often ignored on the internets ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Malcolm Gladwell's Reponse to the Culturalism Post - <AUTHOR> http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/malcolm-gladwells-reponse-to.html

<comment><USER2> The response by Malcolm Gladwell is very thoughtful. The key point is that when the airline company Korean Air (which had already had to change its name after an earlier pilot error disaster) went into problem-solving mode, the airline itself identified changing cockpit communication culture as a step in solving its pilot error crash problem. Whatever else you can say about an airline company owned and based in Korea, you wouldn't expect it to have an inherent prejudice against Korean culture.

It was thoughtful of the blog author to quote Gladwell's reply in full (as it appears he did). Gladwell is easy enough to misunderstand that I have had occasion to mention this on Hacker News before. Gladwell is a professional writer, and he does quite a lot of research on unfamiliar subjects that promise to include interesting story angles. In the subjects that I research for my own writing, I have more often than not discovered that Gladwell does a better than average job of finding and citing good sources. He originates few new scientific hypotheses himself, but he writes interesting and thought- provoking stories about leading scientists in disciplines facing tough problems. Any reader of a Malcolm Gladwell book (as I know, from being a reader of the book _Outliers_ ) can check the sources, and decide from there what other sources to check and what other ideas to play with. Gladwell doesn't purport to write textbooks, but I give him a lot of credit for finding interesting scholarly sources that haven't had enough attention in the popular literature. He is equaled by very few authors as a story-teller who can tie ideas together in a thought-provoking assembly.

Gladwell has said in an interview by a journalist that he writes to try out ideas:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html)

"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?

"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."

<comment><USER3> [http://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm- gladwell-2/](http://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/)

"Malcolm Gladwell began as a college right-wing Reagan supporter, was trained by the tobacco-funded far-right National Journalism Center, and throughout his career has inserted pro-tobacco, pro-banking industry and pro-PHARMA messages into his books and articles. Gladwell can earn $1 million a year as a paid corporate speaker, sometimes from the very same corporations and industry groups he happens to promote and defend in print."

<comment><USER4> If I am understanding what you are saying, since MG's career and how he makes money is in a way you disapprove, then both his facts and opinions should be dismissed? Discuss.

It is a bit pathetic to attack the person instead of the concepts they espouse.

<comment><USER5> It's not the concepts, it's the conflict of interest: We assume Gladwell is telling us the unvarnished truth in a journalistic manner.

You might find Gladwell's disclosure statement (or at least its length) revealing: [http://www.gladwell.com/disclosure.html](http://www.gladwell.com/disclosure.html)

<comment><USER6> That's an interesting link. Reading it improved my opinion of Malcolm Gladwell (not easy - I've generally held him in low regard).

Could you point to anything specific in his disclosure that would cast significant doubts on his ability to be objective?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gladwell notes how military culture differs from civilian culture in Korea. Surely, differences of similar magnitudes exist in the US.

I wonder how the US military has changed culturally over the past few decades. As an outsider, I have presumed that the purpose of degrading training programs, continual demonstrations of the power of officers (parade reviews, etc.), and required social proof of the officers' power and authority (stand and salute upon the officer entering a room) all were designed to avoid argument, hesitation, or doubt when an officer tells his soldiers in battle to charge forth toward an enemy firing upon them. To win an infantry battle, such obedience probably is necessary. Imagine if only a small fraction of the soldiers were willing to advance -- they would likely be much worse off than if all the soldiers advanced at once.

However, this nearly blind obedience surely comes at a price. Can a junior guy tell an officer that he is unsure of a drone target's validity? It strikes me that a modern military operation is much more like a large scale construction project or perhaps software development than traditional trench warfare. In these civilian endeavors, the price of hesitation to consider alternative opinions likely is low compared to the cost of being wrong. Has the military changed?

<comment><USER8> I would guess that there's a much greater difference between the military and civilian cultures for the US than for South Korea, simply because the SK military conscripts all able-bodied males.

<comment><USER7> An interesting lack of selection bias which I had never considered. I presume that those choosing to be career officers opt-in or at least are chosen based on desire/talent/etc.?

<comment><USER8> The vast majority of conscripts obviously have no interest in continuing after their mandatory period is up, so yes, the ones who want to be career officers probably go in with that intention. There are probably some who develop an interest after joining, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised by the supposedly ultra-rational hacker news crowd to be swayed by this feeble defense of a theory, charitably being called "culturalism"... (but which is basically a rehashed version of oriental exoticism made slightly more palatable for the highly educated, western upper middle classes he's pandering to.)

My simple question to Gladwell is this: If Korean culture explains the bad safety record of Korean air, what explains the excellent safety record of the japanese airlines. All Nippon (No fatal accidents in more than 40 years) and JAL (last fatal crash in 1985 and even that due to mechanical failure) ? Does that record prove that Japanese culture is not only completely different from Korean culture (in-as-much as respect for elders and superiors is concerned) but it would also imply that Japanese culture is somehow better for air-safety than that of all the other national airlines of the world who've had a far worse safety record than those two airlines.

I'd be really interested in hearing how Gladwell's cockamamie, quasi-racist theories explain the above. Either directly from Gladwell or anybody else who might care to defend him in this matter.

<comment><USER10> I'm not a Gladwell fan, but surely the idea that people in different cultures behave differently is not too surprising, is it? After all, you said yourself that the HN culture is ultra-rational. Or maybe I misunderstood what you are upset about.

<comment><USER9> The idea that I'm objecting to is that the culturally prescribed behaviour is somehow the root cause of so many plane crashes.

The argument I've presented is that Korean and Japanese (and indeed, most Asian cultures -- and just to be clear, Asia includes India too.) are very similar when it comes to deference towards elders, teachers and other people considered socially superior. And yet there's a large gap between the airline safety record of these two cultures. The japanese airlines I mentioned are not just safer than their Korean counterparts, but actually two of the safest airlines in the world. Any theory pinning Korean airlines' safety record on the Korean (really, Asian) culture must also include an explanation of the exactly contrary observation seen in japanese airlines.

<comment><USER10> Ah okay. Well, Asia is a really big place so let's just say East Asia.

I don't know anything about the culture at Japanese airlines vs. the culture at Korean airlines. Obviously they are different? Maybe the deference becomes more of a problem in Korea due to other cultural issues. I agree that blaming it on deference alone doesn't make sense. Wild guess is that Japanese people are more perfectionist? But I don't have any evidence for this, not even anecdotal.

<comment><USER9> _Wild guess is that Japanese people are more perfectionist?_ ...

 _But I don 't have any evidence for this, not even anecdotal._

In that case, may I suggest another wild guess? Maybe Japanese pilots are and have been better trained? You know, just to get away from another instance of unnecessary stereotyping.

<comment><USER10> Well it's obvious that they are better trained, because there are less crashes. The question is, what factors lead to them having better training? More money? Japan's relationship with America?

As for "perfectionism" being an unnecessary stereotype, if you're looking for a cultural explanation you're necessarily dealing with stereotypes. It's just as stereotypical to argue that all of East Asia shares the same culture of deference, just this time it works to your advantage because it means it isn't a factor. It's even relying on stereotypes to talk about the training across an industry. Who's to say that the lives of the individuals in charge aren't fully responsible?

Stereotypes can be okay, as long as they are accurate and not applied indiscriminately. I know that Japan has a culture of perfectionism (Google "Japan perfectionism" to start), I just don't know about Korea and what the differences might be.

<comment><USER9> _" As for "perfectionism" being an unnecessary stereotype, if you're looking for a cultural explanation..."_

Who is looking for cultural explanations ? I pointed out the difference between Japanese and Korean air-safety records specifically to point out the cultural explanations are devoid of any credibility in this case.

Ahh right. I get it. You must be of white northern European ancestry. There seems to be a cumpulsive cultural need among your people to explain away performance difference between different human beings based on where they come from.

<comment><USER10> Training programs are cultures. Japanese pilots are better trained because the culture of their training program is different. What other explanation do you have?

If you don't believe culture has an effect on behavior, why do you think my ancestry has anything to do with my behavior?

You're also picking and choosing bits of my posts to hear what you want to hear. I specifically asked, "Who's to say that the lives of the individuals in charge aren't fully responsible?"

<comment><USER9> _" Japanese pilots are better trained because the culture of their training program is different"_

This statement is basically devoid of any informational content. You can just insert the word "culture" in any similar statement. Watch:

"Google search is better because google has a superior culture oriented around search"

"Italian espresso is tastier because of the superior espresso-loving culture of Italy"

 _" If you don't believe culture has an effect on behavior, why do you think my ancestry has anything to do with my behavior?"_

\-----Whoosh----->

 _" I specifically asked, "Who's to say that the lives of the individuals in charge aren't fully responsible?"_

Another nice sounding statement that's irrelevant for the topic at hand. The whole debate is about Gladwell specifically blaming Korea's national culture of deference on the airline's safety record.

<comment><USER10> I agreed with you about Gladwell and deference. I agreed with you about the Japanese having better training. I'm not sure what you want out of this. It seems like the idea that culture influences behavior is deeply offensive to you. How come?

<comment><USER9> My reason is that I just don't like sloppy reasoning to spread dangerous tribalist memes.

What's your reason for continuing to insist on using the word "culture" after you had already agreed on the non-factor of deference and importance of training ?

<comment><USER10> I believe culture is a real thing that influences behavior. The word simply refers to group norms around behavior and attitudes. Any group of any size will have a culture.

I believe that culture is a poor explanation for events in some cases. As you pointed out, it is probably not a good explanation in the case of deference (although I am not well-versed in the differences between Japanese deference and Korean deference), but that doesn't mean that cultural explanations are invalid altogether.

In particular, a training program will have a certain culture (set of attitudes and behaviors that get inculcated in the trainees), partly influenced by the national culture (including financing levels, collaboration with foreigners, etc.), and partly evolved on its own.

If not for culture, how do you explain the differences in training? I'm not saying your view is invalid, I just haven't heard what you think about this yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not a huge Gladwell fan, but it is always a pleasure to read a considered and respectful reply that shows a depth of research, no matter who the reply is coming from or going to. I only wish I was an expert at everything so I could actually judge whether Gladwell is right or wrong.

<comment><USER8> Since "The Korean" (the author of the linked blog) is not an aviation expert either, but is a well-known cultural apologist (see his (admittedly quite well-written) post rationalizing fan death, a widely held Korean superstition: [http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/01/fan-death-is- real.htm...](http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/01/fan-death-is-real.html)), I would give Gladwell the benefit of the doubt for now.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, defending the belief in fan death is really damaging to his credibility in my eyes.

<comment><USER12> Does the same hold for EPA?

"> _This pamphlet from the EPA, at pages 49 and 51, clearly states the hazard of using portable electric fans during high heat. It specifically says "Portable electric fans can … increase the circulation of hot air, which increases thermal stress and health risks[,]" and "DON'T use a portable electric fan in a closed room without windows or doors open to the outside._ "

<comment><USER11> If the EPA tried to explain random deaths as being caused by fans when they weren't actually? Yeah. It would.

<comment><USER12> > _If the EPA tried to explain random deaths as being caused by fans when they > weren 't actually? Yeah. It would._

How exactly do you know that "they weren't actually"? Do you have an autopsy that states otherwise? [1]

That the EPA marks such use of fans as increasing "thermal stress and health risks" is an indicator that there ARE health risks associated with the use of fans. If those risks can involve death is up to dispute (without further analysis), but it's a first step towards this hypothesis.

You characterizing them as "random deaths" is a circular argument. It pressuposses what it's supposed to prove. I'd rather go with science and choose my words carefully.

[1] Oh, and to prevent any reading comprehension challenged idiot (tons of them on the intertubes) that would jump and shout: "the lack of an autopsy is not proof that they were indeed caused by fans", I never implied such. I only imply the reverse: that without an autopsy we cannot say they WERENT caused by it.

<comment><USER12> Donwnvotes? It seems some people hate the scientific method, and only pay lip service to science as some kind of religion ("who needs experiments and proofs").

Which is kind of sad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Eh, I think Gladwell has a point here. "Captain, Guam condition is no good." doesn't count as "speaking up" when a situation is potentially life- threatening. Then you say something like "This approach is very dangerous, _I_ think we should try something else."

<comment><USER14> The set of practices known as Crew (or Cockpit) Resource management formalize this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management#Commun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management#Communication)

So in this case, the proper action would be:

1) Get attention: "Captain ..."

2) State concern: "I'm concerned that a visual approach is too risky in this weather."

3) State the problem: "Visual approaches only work in low wind (or whatever conditions), and the weather report says we're not within those conditions."

4) State a solution: "I suggest we change plans and prepare for [alternate landing method], starting with [first step]."

5) Get buy-in: "Do you agree with that course of action, Captain?"

(Note that the pilot did just the first two ... or maybe only half of the second or third.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would like to see his response to this article by Phillip Greenspun that argues that the real reason why American airlines have a better track record than Korean ones is that American pilots have roughly 30 times more hours in the air by the time they become a pilot at a major airline: [http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline- safety](http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety) .

It sounds like Malcolm Gladwell's publisher never bothered to fact check the piece with an actual airline pilot before publishing.

<comment><USER16> > It sounds like Malcolm Gladwell's publisher never bothered to fact check the > piece with an actual airline pilot before publishing.

"Why did I fail to interview a Korean pilot? If you had bothered to ask me before your published your article, I could have answered that question for you. I researched that chapter over the course of many months. I spoke to numerous pilots, Korean and otherwise. I interviewed crash investigators and human factors experts I interviewed the pilots who ran the Korean Air training program. I read internal Korean Air memorandum, the audit by Delta Airlines, as well as every relevant NTSB document related to crashes involving cultural deference. The only thing I did not do was interview current Korean Air management. They repeatedly declined my requests for interviews. "

From: [http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/my-thoughts-on- gladwe...](http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/my-thoughts-on-gladwells- response.html?showComment=1374062410180#c2015340896628841675)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think Gladwell makes some good points and that cultural factors can play a role in these things.

But I can't help but wonder if these same cultural factors can go both ways and maybe we're obsessively focusing on just one effect. For example, it might be that deference to hierarchy and older people leads to children taking responsibility and care of their parents in old age more. It might even be that the elderly in these places live longer and more happier lives as a result and that this outweighs the (still tragic but rare) plane accident.

It reminds me a bit of the terrorism situation in the US. We obsess over these things which are relatively rare and spend great effort to eliminate. But what are we losing in the process?

<comment><USER18> But no one is talking about whether or not Korean culture is superior or inferior _in general_ , we're talking about whether it's optimal for the very specific situation of airline cockpit communications when the more senior pilot has made an error in judgement.

<comment><USER17> Let's say a country had a higher than average rate of infant mortality. Let's also say that it was speculated the cause was cultural... due to parents in this imaginary country allowing their babies to sleep in their beds. And although very rare, a story gets out in the news about a baby that suffocates in bed. Thousands of articles come out speculating about how this cultural habit is killing innocent babies.

Let's also say that it turns out babies that sleep in bed with their parents turn out to have a higher survival rate that those that don't, after the first year. These babies do better in school, have much lower suicide rates as teens and are happier in their life. Maybe a higher percent actually make to adulthood than the ones who sleep in cribs even accounting for the rare suffocations.

What would you think if the media ONLY discussed the rare infant deaths and not the other effects? Don't you think it would be a bit unfair and biased? You could even argue it might be harmful.

BTW, the example above is made up and I'm not claiming anything about parenting or Korean culture, good or bad. I'm just saying the media and public usually only look at horrific deaths and ignore everything else. This applies to terrorism, plane accidents, roller coasters, etc.

<comment><USER18> I'm sure if you wanted to find examples of systematic bias in the media and public perception you wouldn't have to look far.

But (for once) we're not talking about that. Gladwell based his chapter largely on the conclusions of official investigations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't really have a dog in this fight but as a response "Lots of people thought Koreans make terrible pilots" sort of ignores the fact that racism kinda by definition involves a widely held systematic bias.

<comment><USER20> Racism is the belief that some people or cultures are inherently inferior.

I think it should be obviously clear that all cultures have their weak and strong points, and sometimes cultures should change and fix these problems. This is true for corporate cultures and cultures of whole nations.

<comment><USER12> > _Racism is the belief that some people or cultures are inherently inferior. > I think it should be obviously clear that all cultures have their weak and > strong points, and sometimes cultures should change and fix these problems._

How is the second idea different from "racism"? The "fix" part?

If we believe (and it's a legitimate belief) that "all cultures have their weak and strong points", then we can also find that a culture (A) has more weak points than another (B).

If A's weak points are far more, or are in the more important aspects of life, then, can't we say that "A is inherently inferior to B"? In this case, I wouldn't call it racism, but a fair assesment.

I'd rather stick with the old definition of racism: "the belief that some people (members of an ethnic group) are genetically inferior to others".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> After I read:

[http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/malcolm-gladwell- unma...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a- look-into-the-life-work-of-americas-most-successful-propagandist.html)

I was no longer able to take Malcolm Gladwell seriously on _any_ subject.

<comment><USER22> How does your ad hominem attack add to the discussion of this article?

<comment><USER21> I'd say it adds to the discussion by pointing out that widespread respect for anything Mr. Gladwell has to say is misplaced. Though I can't deny it's at best tangential to the specific point at hand. Well spotted. [no really, guilty as charged.]

<comment><USER23> In any case, commentators above have done the exact same thing by pointing out the askakorean blog author's post in defense of fan death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Gladwell also needs to learn a few things from the Indian parent -

[http://statspotting.com/malcolm-gladwell-meet-this-genius- ca...](http://statspotting.com/malcolm-gladwell-meet-this-genius-called-the- indian-parent/)</comment>