Ask HN: Who has had a great Engineering manager? - <AUTHOR> I've always had very bad managers in the past, even working at some of the big 5. It seems that it's going downhill year after year. Every time I believe we hit the bottom (can't get worse), I get someone even worse. There are ways to find out about a hiring manager style during the hiring process, but it usually takes about 6 months before getting the full picture.<p>Am I the exception to the rule?? <comment><USER2> I've had 2 great managers, 2 average to bad ones, and the rest falls in the average to ok category. I'm a manager myself and I think I fall on the good side of the fence (actually I'm pretty sure of it but it's always difficult to judge oneself so I'll err on the side of caution).

Beyond good and bad, I believe a lot of the fit or lack thereof is linked to behavior (which can be worked on), motivation (which is pretty hard to change so you better make sure it's aligned with the job's objectives) and communication (which you can never work on too much).

As a team member, understanding your boss's objectives, pain points, and default behavior / failure mode is a good place to start. A great manager will spell those out to you when you join the team so you don't have to guess at them; if not, I absolutely encourage you to ask these questions as early as you can (during the hiring process if you can).

Discovering MBTI has been tremendously helpful in figuring out manager-managed relationships. In particular, there are 4 sub-categories (NT, NF, SP, SJ) with markedly different behaviors, motivations, and managerial expectations. Reading about these and making connections to past managers (and the people in my team at the time) was a lightbulb moment for me. Often you can take a good guess at your future manager's category in the course of an interview, especially if you know what questions to ask. Based on this info + your type and preferred way of working + the role you're applying for, it's possible to detect a potential misfit and steer clear.

Of course, all the items above assume a modestly competent manager to work with; they don't do much good when you run into clinical cluelessness, unabashed douchebaggery or the aftermath of the Peter principle (although they do help you rationalize the situation).

</comment><comment><USER3> I am an engineering manager.

Some of the people I manage/have managed seem to think I am great. My evidence for this is two-fold:

1) multiple people that I have managed before have moved on, and yet treat me as a friend/mentor: invite me to social events, still reach out to me on a regular basis with requests for advice, etc.

2) I get regular feedback via performance reviews as a manager that some people I am managing think I am great.

Likewise, some of the people I manage seem to think I could improve. My evidence for this is likewise, two-fold:

1) Some people tell me directly what I could do to improve in my style of managing them specifically.

2) Some people only give feedback on areas where I could improve anonymously via previously mentioned performance reviews.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that I am a mixed bag, but I am not universally terrible, and therefore my opinion shouldn't just be dismissed as "oh, you are just one of them". With that preamble out of the way:

What do we think of someone who, for example, says "I've never had anything but bad boyfriends / bad girlfriends". Well, the common wisdom is that if you are consistently having shitty personal relationships, you are at least part of the problem.

Likewise, If someone says "I've never had anything but bad managers", I apply the same pattern: you are probably not really putting in much effort into your professional relationships with your managers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually had one good manager, we're friends beyond just our professional environment. So indeed, that seems to be a valid case. Unfortunately, all the other managers felt much less friendly and kept spreading their authority rather than trying to elevate individual contributors. There's so little a manager can do when it comes to making big decisions. After all, a low level manager is more of a dispatcher rather than a decision maker. It is a role where you have to say "no" most of the time. That "no" usually looks like "let me see what I can do and I'll get back to you... never" or "there's a long way to go still but in the mean time, could you look at this because that's what we need to do..." type of answers. It's a good shield for senior managers so they don't have to deal with all these requests and can focus on the roadmap.

It's a pull relationship versus a push relationship from IC's to managers, these days it feels like IC's don't get anything unless they ask for it. This should be the other way around. There's no team building anymore, no more team spirit we're almost in competition mode with our colleagues rather than learning from each other.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure that if you thought of a way to help your manager spread his/her authority you'd be mentally promoted to "trusted sidekick" category rather than kept in the "dumb peon" category

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Following this, what did the great engineering manager do? Also, what are some of the traits of the bad managers?

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> I've largely had managers I thoroughly were very good to great managers, although about 10% of my time was spent with a miserably bad mananger (who was unceremoniously let go for being terrible)

Importantly, I've managed to have good relationships with my managers even when the rest of my team thought they were terrible.

The key has been figuring out what is important to your manager for them and their career and trying to align to that, as well as generally being empathetic and friendly to them, and delivering strongly on the work I do. Which, of course, are the same activities that I find make a great manager. It's a two way street.

Then again there was the guy who gave 6/8 people on his team a bad review. That guy was just a clueless jerk.

<comment><AUTHOR> "what is important to your manager for them and their career and trying to align to that".

I think that sums up pretty much everything. I don't believe it's the right approach at all for a manager and that's exactly what I mean by bad management. A manager is successful if his team is successful. The goal of a team is not to make a manager happy or to work for someone specifically. The goal of a team is to help the company achieve its business goals and a manager should be the one putting directional signs and building roads for people to help them reach their destinations.

<comment><USER5> You are right that that is the ideal manager, but managers are flawed human beings like the rest of us. What's more, a managers view of the company's business goals and an individual contributors view of business goals aren't always the same (great managers succeed in making them so, but see the flawed human comment.)

An example of why investing understanding your managers world can pay off- a few years ago my team needed some servers for a reason I don't recall. Our manager had said no because she (legitimately) didn't have the budget. I knew there was a huge push to people in her role to utilize our cloud environment, so I reframed our request to get access to that.* She put in the request, we got our virtual servers, she got to check a box on her review, and everyone was happy.

Point being, while you can't always have a amazing manager, you can still have a great relationship with an adequate manager that gets you close to what you'd have in the best circumstances. You just have to work at it more (although if your manager can't do organizational politics you might be in for some hurt regardless.) And there are some truly awful managers out there who you just leave.

* Ok, it wasn't just me who worked winning her over, but the story got weird writing in the plural.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No most managers are bad. Some says less skilled people are promoted because they are useless at their previous position.

My advice is to take the leadership as soon as you can. Don't fear the responsibilities. Better be in charge than have an average incompetent manager.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think I've ever had a truly bad manager. One manager was exceptional: I don't remembered him actually telling me to do a single thing. Instead, he would say something like: "Could we make it do this?" or "It would be great if it could that." He acted more like a target designator pointing out what we, as a team, wanted to hit. In addition to that, he was a fun, happy guy and very smart.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe you can comment a little on what makes the managers so bad?

<comment><AUTHOR> I originaly wanted to avoid negative feedback. This thread is more about positive feedback, I'd love to hear about good experiences and what made these experiences so great. I could rant for a while... not sure it would be uselful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "At the big 5"?

IME, larger companies have the worst quality employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree and disagree :) Sometimes smaller companies don't have time for career growth because of work overload and lack of budget. Having a manager in this kind of setup does not bring anything special to IC's besides an extra layer of dispatch from the top.

Though you are totally right. In order to become a manager in a larger corporate, you have to push a lot of people to the side in order to make your way up. Meaning you're not necessarily the most friendly person to hang around.

<comment><USER9> :)

The last smaller company I worked for knew they couldn't compete on salary, and knew they had to rely on training up novice coders. So, they made the environment as positive as possible, with weekly group training, pair coding, and round-robin technology presentations from the entire team.

I'm currently contracting at a large company, refactoring code that was clearly written by people with no time or motivation to learn their tools, who were just trying to get their feature to 'pass' the tests. New technologies are incorporated without fully reading the docs, and then never upgraded as fixes and improvements got published. Time for training and development? Nobody has making the time for refactoring. And, the source code is evidence that it has been this way for years.</comment></comment></comment>


Ted Dziuba is starting over - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/

<comment><USER2> Sorry for his loss. Maybe I'll stop skipping over his name now, which was my reaction to his work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I always liked his posts. Sorry for his loss.</comment>


A trading platform that outlaws what it sees as abusive practices  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/2/8877203/this-man-is-building-a-stock-exchange-that-will-screw-you-over-less <comment><USER3> _In 2006, if I saw 100,000 shares of AMD offered, and I wanted it, I could go out and buy it. It was a simple as that. In 2007, if I tried to buy 100,000 shares, I would get 80,000. Then in 2008 I would get 60,000. The market is showing me a volume at a price that I can no longer buy or sell at. I can't buy or sell what I see on my screen._

Another way to put this:

"Once upon a time, I was paid a fortune by a giant investment bank to move large blocks of stock on behalf of their spectacularly wealthy clients. As recently as 2006, if one of those clients needed me to move a block of 100,000 shares, I could do that at literally the click of a button. This despite the fact that I earned a commission on the trade; it must have been a very expensive button my bank owned! And this despite the fact that my 100,000 share order was bound to move the market, and so I was in effect acting on inside information. But that's just how this is supposed to work, right?

"Anyways, the markets evolved, and my giant investment bank could no longer earn massive commissions just by pushing a single button. Even though I knew my giant hedge fund clients were going to dump vast numbers of shares on the market, depressing prices for all the other investors, the markets no longer allowed me to trivially profit from that information! My 100,000 share orders get broken into small numbers of lots just like everyone else's. No fair!"

"So I started a new exchange to rewind the markets back to the glorious, equitable, fair, transparent days of 2006."

<comment><USER4> whose money do you think is in those hedge funds? it's all a question of what game you want to play. the players are always the same. it's capitalism after all.

<comment><USER3> Whose money do I think is in those hedge funds? I don't know, a whole bunch of millionaires?

If the direction you're heading is "modern trading is scalping profits from pension funds and mom-and-pop mutual fund retirement plans", you'd probably want to be prepared to refute Vanguard's chief investment officer, who says HFT has in general improved outcomes for one of the world's largest and most trustworthy fund managers.

<comment><USER5> They may scalp profits from hedge funds that trade actively, but guess what, they're playing the same game: trying to trade at attractive prices. With two pros competing with one another, why does one side deserve sympathy? I don't see Burger King whining to the press when McDonalds outearns them.

For the average passive indexer who buys some ETFs or mutual funds every quarter it's meaningless at worst, and probably a net benefit since these products have tighter prices now.

<comment><USER3> I think we're saying the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's pretty silly to describe IEX as curbing "abusive" practices.

What IEX is attempting to do is build a platform where large traders can move lots of shares while their smaller counterparties are stuck absorbing the price impact. This is potentially useful for large traders (e.g. Goldman, JP Morgan and Citi, as mentioned in the article) but bad for small traders.

What's actually kind of "abusive" is IEX's marketing - they are encouraging unsophisticated investors to direct liquidity to them rather than having brokers route for best execution.

[http://www.iextrading.com/insight/letter/](http://www.iextrading.com/insight/letter/)

This letter directs your broker to route your trades to IEX, rather than the best available venue. This means you may be stuck paying IEX fees - <USER2> could be greater than other venue's fees - and of course, you are providing liquidity to sharks who want to make sure you absorb the price impact of their trades.

<comment><USER7> I think what you're saying is, in essence, IEX's current incarnation of handling stock transactions does not exist in a vacuum -- because they are only a trading _technology platform_ instead of an _exchange_ like NYSE & NASDAQ. As a technology platform, they are really just "clients" of other exchanges and therefore, they're the tail trying to wag the dog.

If they become a full-fledged exchange with stocks listings exclusive to IEX, then those stocks would have better "fairness" characteristics that Brad Katsuyama claims.

Therefore trading AAPL through IEX may incur a financial penalty for being on the "slow" IEX system but trading YC2019Unicorn stock exclusive to IEX may not.

<comment><USER6> Actually, what I'm saying is the following. Don't put resting orders out onto IEX - a big player will take your liquidity in a big trade and you'll suffer the inevitable price impact. I.e., putting your orders on IEX rather than the open market is just a way to funnel your money to JP Morgan.

It's far better to mingle your orders with HFT orders - that'll keep the big guys honest. You'll probably also pay lower fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > They could see my order at BATS, race me to the next exchange, and cancel > all their sell orders and buy whatever is left, buy everything up, then turn > around and try and sell stock back to me at a higher price. So that was the > game.

This is the heart of the problem with IEX's explanation of the markets, and why I think most people view HFT as unfair. But its not how cross exchange market making actually works. The HFTs are not rushing to buy up existing inventory from others who are selling it, in an attempt to screw others. They are the ones who are originally offering to sell it in the first place. They aren't rushing to buy, they are rushing to change the price of their inventory.

The metaphor I like to use is that of a chain of gas stations running down a highway, owned by the same people. If a tanker truck pulls up at the first two and buys up all their gasoline, it would be perfectly reasonable for those first 2 to call ahead to the rest down the highway and tell them to raise their prices, as they clearly were being used to supply someone else's industry at lower prices than they should.

That phone call is what IEX prevents, so that their customers (guys with big tanker trucks) can buy gas without impacting the price of gasoline.

<comment><USER9> Why would a HFT maintain a huge inventory of stocks? If you make money on the ability to execute trades faster than others on the movement of stocks, you're losing money by holding them. It feels akin to a car maker holding an overlarge inventory of parts - it's just tied up capital that's not making you money. In HFT, don't you maximize the profit by holding as few stocks for a little is possible?

<comment><USER8> The short answer is that they have to. Resting orders from yesterday are always faster than microsecond orders from right now.

So a market maker that was super fast but didn't rest orders, would be competing with one that is as fast as them and willing to rest orders. So, the resting order ones win and drive out the non-resting order ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> if you have continuous trading, you are going to have complicated interactions (such as outlined in the article.)

instead, an occasional crossing (once a day? once an hour?) would provide much more "fairness" since everything happens at once, at the expense of "timeliness".

back when I worked in this industry (a decade ago) POSIT provided something a lot like this

you can't have it both ways, though.

<comment><USER11> Their system is not fundamentally different from discrete trading, since they have delay lines going into and out of their servers. So while everything is continuous, if you want to observe the market, then do a trade, then observe the result of that trade, etc. there is maximum rate you can do this.

This is what prevents front running[0], according to my understanding. Once you submit an order, no one can react to that information within a time greater than round trip latency to the servers.

The problem with crossing at discrete intervals is that it introduces new kinds of strategic considerations that make it much more complex for people to play the "game".

EDIT [0] For the sake of the pedantic, I mean front running _in the sense of the article at the top of this page, not the legal sense_. The article defines a notion of front running that maybe not everyone agrees with, but that is what I am referring to.

<comment><USER6> _This is what prevents front running, according to my understanding. Once you submit an order, no one can react to that information within a time greater than round trip latency to the servers._

That's not correct. Front-running is the crime by which _your broker_ trades ahead of you after you state your intent to trade. Your broker does, in fact, see your trades before they reach the market (the broker is actually the one pushing them to the market). It's mainly a crime because your broker has a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, and because the broker occupies a privileged position as an intermediary, not because there is something inherently wrong with demand anticipation.

Of course, it is correct that no one besides your broker has the physical ability to react to that information.

<comment><USER11> But if someone, somehow, developed a legal technical means to eavesdrop on the order you sent to your broker, and traded based on that, wouldn't it be fair to say that this is, in some sense, similar to front running? That is what the article is claiming, although the information is the information available at one exchange before it reaches another.

And going on with this analogy, wouldn't it be the case that we would want to prevent this eavesdropping if possible, because it has a similar effect to actual frontrunning, namely that the intermediary captures the information rents associated with your knowledge of the order you are about to submit.

<comment><USER6> The purpose of laws against frontrunning is to enable you to have a trusted relationship with your broker. There is no benefit to creating a trusted relationship with your adversaries.

Similarly, doctor/patient confidentiality laws are there to created a trusted relationship and make you comfortable admitting to your doctor that you had unprotected sex with lots of heroin addicted hookers in sub saharan Africa and you now need all the STD tests. In contrast, passing laws against journalists reporting on who visits hookers has no such benefit.

<comment><USER11> I really don't care about the law. The point is that if front running was legal, brokers would try to find ways to guarantee to their clients that they wouldn't do it. Similarly, the guy in the article advertises his exchange as preventing the equivalent of front running at the exchange level.

<comment><USER5> Their ATS can only exist by free-riding on the public price discovery in displayed US markets under Reg NMS. They protect their customers from trading at "wrong" prices by letting traders on faster exchanges determine what the "right" price is for them.

As a thought experiment, imagine IEX captured 95% of market share as a displayed exchange. The 350 microsecond delay wouldn't matter since it's applied to everyone and there would be no reference markets for them to price against. It'd just be another market with a slightly slow matching engine. Relative speed still matters so fast traders would have an advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'Safe' markets are valuable even for insiders, because they attract more investors and volume. People naturally want to invest where they won't be cheated.

That has been forgotten in the (largely manufactured, IMHO) anti-regulation outrage. Even the big Wall Street firms should benefit from regulation that makes non-insider investors feel the market is safe enough to invest in.

That said, I'm confused and my theory fails: Despite the long run of incompetence and fraud on Wall Street, its reputation as the leading place to invest and for expertise seems to persist and it has resisted regulation to a great degree. You don't hear people say, 'don't invest in the stock market because you'll be cheated'; or 'don't hire (some major Wall Street firm) because look how they cheated these other people, and they demonstrated complete incomptence in events X and Y'. Their reputation seems immune.

Maybe there are no better options.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dan from IEX here. For folks genuinely interested in US equity market trading dynamics, this paper out of Columbia is an awesome primer. More objective than flash boys or what you'll read in the news.

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2580002](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2580002)

</comment><comment><USER14> Read "Flash Boys" for a better insight into how much difference variable latency between exchanges and clients makes to the profitability of fast execution of trades.

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

<comment><USER3> Flash Boys is a god-awful mess. Two better alternatives:

Kovacs' _Flash Boys: Not So Fast_ which in the best possible way reads like a long-form ELI5 Reddit post about modern trading and all the WTFWAT moments in Lewis' book: [http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective- High-F...](http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High- Frequency-ebook/dp/B00P0QI2M2)

Patterson's _Dark Pools_ which tells the story of Island and the ECNs and the advent of automated trading. Patterson is more ambivalent about HFT than Kovacs, and does a good job of explaining the Core Wars phenomenon of modern trading from '98 to the mid-'00s.

<comment><USER14> Read all three! Thanks for the reading list extension and gratuitous downvote :-)

<comment><USER15> As you very well know, HN votes are anonymous. Why make assumptions about who voted? It doesn't contribute to the discussion at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm no stock expert, but I still don't see how people are getting "screwed" by hft. If you are concerned about a price fluxation just place a limit order. Simple as that. If you don't care, then place a market order. There's always been someone out there with more information, smarter people, and now faster connections than you. It's never been a level playing field and will never be.

<comment><USER17> The fundamental idea of algorithmic trading doesn't really fall into the category of screwing-people-over. However, some techniques employed by institutions engaged in it can easily be seen as outright cheating. One common example is front running [1] where a player with access to real-time order information exploits the knowledge of pending trades from other players to turn a profit at the other players' expense. These techniques can also be used across exchanges.

The issue is a consequence of the lack of market transparency. The exchanges are only required to make order information public with a significant delay. However, they sell the real-time order information to a few market players enabling them to engage in the dubious tactics at the expense of other players.

Note that tactics like front running used to be employed by brokers before algorithmic trading and have since been banned.

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

<comment><USER18> >The exchanges are only required to make order information public with a significant delay. However, they sell the real-time order information to a few market players enabling them to engage in the dubious tactics at the expense of other players.

It's easy to see why you view this as unfair.

But it is fair. Anyone can buy the real-time information if they have the capital.

Obviously markets are going to be more friendly towards you the more money you throw at them.

Just like everything else in capitalism, the fairness comes from anyone being able to have money. If you think this is unfair, you're essentially opposing capitalism.

<comment><USER19> I'm having a hard time figuring out whether you are being facetious or not. What you are describing is nepotism and bribery, not capitalism.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Showcase of Rails 4 and AngularJS integration - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mkwiatkowski/todo-rails4-angularjs

<comment><USER2> Stupid question: Would I git clone this and run it locally to check it out? Getting my feet wet with Rails.</comment>


Researchers try Google approach to understanding photos - <AUTHOR> http://news.com.com/Researchers+try+Google+approach+to+understanding+photos/2100-1025_3-6196093.html?tag=nefd.top <comment><AUTHOR> Their results of being able to cut objects out of images and insert other objects into images with environmental color/light/scale integration is really impressive.</comment>


Clojure(Script): What do you think? - <AUTHOR> https://savo.rocks/programming/2019/07/11/clojure(script)-what-do-you-think.html <comment><AUTHOR> Just wrote a quick blog post about learning Clojure(Script), with the purpose to share my experience and to get advice from more experienced programmers about how would they approach this.

All comments are welcome.</comment>


You complain about Android Fragmentation? - <AUTHOR> http://tech.navarr.me/2012/06/and-you-complain-about-android-fragmentation.html

<comment><USER2> Hang on, you're telling me that you installed a new beta version of the operating system, went into an app that you develop that uses part of the SDK that was totally and completely revamped and updated today, and it didn't work?!

Pardon my french, but does a bear ____in the woods?

Of course it isn't going to work right out of the box, that's why you're the developer and this is a beta.

Android may be designed to work in a way so that hardware and software versions don't matter, but it doesn't always and it doesn't always do it out of the box either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, well, at least in Android backwards compatibility means something.</comment></comment>


Chromoscope: The milky way at different wavelengths - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromoscope.net/ <comment><USER2> What are those bars of darkness on xray view[0]? I suspect it's an artifact of stitching photos together rather than a real phenomenon, but I'm curious about the real answer.

[0] - [http://imgur.com/a/63tJD](http://imgur.com/a/63tJD)

<comment><USER3> The "What am I looking at?" section ([http://www.chromoscope.net/1.4.1/what.html](http://www.chromoscope.net/1.4.1/what.html)) says that they are:

"Don't worry, they aren't holes in the Universe being ripped open by creatures from another dimension! They are actually just gaps in the survey."

<comment><USER4> Good to know, though they could be better marked so as to less obviously mistaken for dark areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite of the wavelengths presented is radio, as right in the middle you see a bright radio source that I'm guessing is Sagittarius A _, (probably) the location of the Milky Way 's supermassive black hole.

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

<comment><USER6> To the upper right of that, another notable radio source is Centaurus A, the spiral-looking blob at roughly -50°, 20°.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder which of these images is the "realest".

The definition of "real" that first jumps to mind is how closely the image reflects the mass of the bodies in the galaxy, but I also wonder if there are other thought-provoking definitions?

<comment><USER8> I'm not astrophysicist, but I would think they're all as real they just give different information about the underlying structure and events of the universe.

Perhaps a the question should be, "which wavelength is more useful?"?

<comment><USER9> I think he actually means, "which one shows the most actual stuff." In that case, I'd say one of the infrared spectrums would be it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of the bright spots in the gamma ray image are supernova remnants (pulsars and blazars). You can sometimes see the gas from the explosion emitting in H-alpha around the pulsars (like near vela). Pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER11> My takeaway is that the galaxy is a much flatter disk than we think based on classic pictures of the milky way. The clouds that make it seem fat are just nearby rubbish, and the other wavelengths reveal there's nothing really there.

Can someone explain the dark streaks in the x-ray spectrum? (Edit: question is answered below -- they are gaps in observation, not actual dark streaks.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome, thanks for making this! Any plans to update the URL hash so a current view can be shared with a link? I would think it wouldn't be too difficult since there are only a handful of variables. I (and HN) would be glad to contribute if desired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I am not the creator - I merely stumbled across this site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Far-infrared and microwave look cool. Some keyboard controls for panning would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this says more about our sensor technologies than how the galaxy actually looks (the visible, infrared and microwave images look far richer than the others).

<comment><USER2> They're false-color so if anything, this says more about our Photoshop choices.

<comment><USER15> It would be awesome to see a separate grayscale (or at least same-color- gradient) image at every wavelength they've recorded, with color scaling based on radiant flux and consistent across images. (Could be log-scaled or whatever if some of the images would otherwise be too dim.)

Even better would be to show a large chart of all those images at once, so they could be compared on a large display without needing to scrub a slider back and forth.

With these false color images, it's impossible to know without careful investigation what the colors in each image represent or how they're mixed together, and it's impossible to make useful comparisons.

<comment><USER16> > Even better would be to show a large chart of all those images at once, so > they could be compared on a large display without needing to scrub a slider > back and forth.

See the "Multiwavelength Milky Way" poster from NASA: [http://mwmw.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmw_product.html#poster](http://mwmw.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmw_product.html#poster) They're still false-color and only show the plane of the galaxy, but you can at least see them all simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. It would be interesting to rework the slider as an RGB channel mixer that slides different observational wavelengths across the monitor's color channels, instead of just blending between images.

</comment><comment><USER18> From 2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979705).

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know what to make of the (black) streak feature that is only present in the x-ray?

<comment><USER20> Repeating solaris999's comment above: The "What am I looking at?" section ([http://www.chromoscope.net/1.4.1/what.html](http://www.chromoscope.net/1.4.1/what.html)) says that they are: "Don't worry, they aren't holes in the Universe being ripped open by creatures from another dimension! They are actually just gaps in the survey."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Completely unusable on mobile. (Firefox Android)

<comment><USER22> Then get off your telephone and open your laptop. It's a resource-intensive application, merging and stitching a hundred tiles simultaneously.

<comment><USER21> If I take the time to complain, it's because I don't have access to a computer, and that I believe the website's devs could improve it. I do believe they didn't test it with Firefox. It's all Webkit these days. :B

<comment><USER23> It's also fine on Firefox/Windows 10</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Call Congress and Tell Them Not to Let a Quasi-Court Bankrupt Internet Users - <AUTHOR> https://act.eff.org/action/call-congress-and-tell-them-not-to-let-a-quasi-court-bankrupt-internet-users <comment><USER2> Learn More -> No link to bills, or sponsorship?

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASE_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASE_Act)

<comment><USER2> Congress shall make no law...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congress.gov . Yes it is.

</comment><comment><USER5> is this for real?

<comment><USER6> EFF are jokers now?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever been unable to obtain a domain/business name you wanted? - <AUTHOR>

There's a domain name I want but is taken. What is the procedure for buying it off that person?
And as a side note, what happens if the name is already being used as a business in another country? What happens if they won't sell? Or want some crazy price?
For example: Facebook was originally thefacebook.com. Was the business originally called thefacebook? Was there another business called "Facebook" at the time and if so how did Zuckerberg get it and the domain name?
EDIT: Fixed formatting that HN messed up. <comment><USER2> The simple answer is a domain name is very similar to most other pieces of property. Everyone will eventually sell, if you pay a high enough price, because at a certain point the owners quality of life will actually start to decrease by not accepting your offer (due to the opportunity cost of not having the exorbitant amount of funds you are offering). The question is, are you willing to pay that much?

So short answer is pick up "Getting to YES" from Amazon, a book on negotiations, cold call the owner listed on the WHOIS record, and start negotiating. Hopefully they are reasonable, and you get a deal closed. The holding costs of domains are so low though that the downside from their perspective of not getting a deal done is pretty low, so keep that in mind while negotiating. Best of luck -

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't fixate on a single domain. There's no point. There are always multiple that would work equally well. It's _very_ easy to find yourself in love with one, so try to avoid that.

The procedure is simple enough: email the owner. Some times they have a contact form on their web site, other times whois will give you an email address. If you have a business email address use that. Email from gmail/hotmail/yahoo addresses tends to get ignored more often. If your organization is big and rich though you probably want disguise yourself otherwise people will ask for too much.

Be sure to tell the person that you want to make a serious offer. People constantly try to buy $10k domains for $100 and it gets annoying. Indicate you're not one of them.

Give a phone number if you're comfortable negotiating on the phone. Otherwise keep it to email.

Abso-fucking-lutely use Escrow.com (or Sedo's escrow service) to handle the transaction. Split the fee if you can, otherwise pay the whole thing. It's worth it.

Facebook.com was bought for $200k by not telling the owner who they were. It's covered briefly in The Facebook Effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely suffer from falling in love with names. I had the perfect name but I sat on my idea too long and it got taken (but isn't being used which just sucks). I had finally moved on and came to the current one I want.

I checked the whois records and the domain expires (very) soon. I doubt the owner will let it go but if he did, what's the best way to get it? Does backordering it on GoDaddy alert the owner that someone wants to buy it?

I will look into Escrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-go-about-acquiring-a- potenti...](http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-go-about-acquiring-a-potentially- high-value-domain-name-from-an-apparent-squatter-link-bait-owner)

[http://www.quora.com/Domain-Names/How-can-I-buy-a-parked- dom...](http://www.quora.com/Domain-Names/How-can-I-buy-a-parked-domain-name- for-a-reasonable-price)</comment>


Open Letter To All DJs Playing In Germany - <AUTHOR> http://de-bug.de/musik/10423.html "Make sure not to copy in our country" <comment><USER2> GEMA is a relic, a dinosaur, designed to distribute license fees to the top mainstream artists. Many know this, but as long as artists sign up with them, it won't stop.

</comment><comment><USER3> also please note: doing drugs in clubs is totally illegal. so we'll have none of that while you are over here, m'kay ? danke für ihr verständnis

in other words: laughably unenforceable.

<comment><USER2> doesn't matter. not everyone is willing to break a law or risk a lawsuit.

<comment><USER3> I can just imagine the court case. how does a GEMA lawyer (€500/hr) prove that in fact the visiting DJ copied the file in his hotel rather than before getting on the EasyJet from London ?

did they get a judge to authorize seizure of the USB stick to perform forensic evidence ? are the Berliner cops going to come into the club to enforce the seizure ? or extradite the DJ with his USB stick from London ?

this same copy law was implemented in the UK in 2006 and is almost universally ignored and will probably be repealed soon.

There are 20,000 clubbing tourists coming into Berlin every weekend. They are doing drugs. No club raids. A huge amount of the Berlin economy comes directly or indirectly from club income.

I am a DJ and I live in Berlin. we've been following every detail since the beginning of GEMAs clueless war on club culture. trust me, nobody is going to pay GEMA anything for a copy fee. its a total joke.</comment></comment></comment>


Take two video games and call me in the morning - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=video-games-by-prescription <comment><USER2> I'll stick to my belief that video games doesn't do any bad to a person, it's the person who has control over himself so it's up to him to embrace the good effects he could get from it. There's a lot of inspiring video game stories and you can find one at [http://www.area219.com/computers/computer- games/5849/wow-gol...](http://www.area219.com/computers/computer- games/5849/wow-gold-saves-the-day:-how-rmt-helped-a-starving-student.htm) \- yeah that's an amazing story.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this disregards the fact that children in the past watched a lot of TV.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what that has to do with the article. The article was primarily about how playing video games might affect kids' brains and didn't come to any conclusion either way that would've required knowing that kids in the past watched a lot of TV.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Storing spatial data in SQL - <AUTHOR>

What's the best way to store spatial data in SQL in a way where the query "find all points within x miles of point a" can be performed efficiently.
My initial approach is to store latitude and longitude, and create an index on both longitude and latitude. However, since I'd be querying both longitude and latitude with a range, only one of the indexes would be useful. Basically, the index could narrow down the search to one vertical bar of the entire earth, and then a table scan to find the locations within that bar. (Of course, clustering on latitude first would have the opposite effect: one horizontal band of the earth, and then within the band would be a table scan).
I know there are spatial data types in some of the SQL implementations, but can anything really ever be more efficient than that when doing a "find all points within x miles" type query? If so, how's this possible? <comment><USER2> Postgres: <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/indexes-types.html>:

"PostgreSQL provides several index types: B-tree, R-tree, Hash, and GiST. R-tree indexes are suited for queries on two-dimensional spatial data."

PostGIS: <http://postgis.refractions.net/> :

"PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object- relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS)"

Also see "Programming the K-means Clustering Algorithm in SQL": <http://pdf.cx/6gc9a>

</comment><comment><USER3> To roll your own:

      - Interleave the bits of the coordinates to form a "z-value".
      - Index the z value.
      - "X miles around a" is a circle. Approximate with a bounding box if you'd like.
      - Generate 1-d search regions to yield a set of z ranges,
        and search the index using it.

For more details, look up z-order, or see books by Hanan Samet.

But a spatial index will probably do something reasonably close to this.

One big thing to watch out for: The spatial index or z-value index should be clustering, so that the points you retrieve are packed tightly into pages. If the index is not clustering, your index lookup will be fast but you'll pay a lot of IO to bring in all the pages containing the qualifying points.

</comment><comment><USER4> SQL Server 2008 has Spatial Support.

They also let you perform spatial operations/queries. You can even store GPS 'polygons' and perform queries such as find ones that overlap, find the polygon which covers a specific point, etc. The spatial query support is amazing.

Indexing the Geography datatype is also supported.

[http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/spatial- data.a...](http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/spatial-data.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm hoping to use PostgreSQL (because I'm using Heroku;) ), but I read up on how MS Sql Server implements spatial indexes. Basically, it recursively divides the coordinate system into quadrants. Then, when looking for a range of coordinates, it can figure out which quadrants are covered by that range and efficiently query them using b-trees. Very cool. I wonder if PostgreSQL spatial support works similarly...

<comment><USER5> Use PostGIS!

Heroku supports it -> [http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg04556...](http://www.mail- email@example.com/msg04556.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The lazy way is to hash coordinates to tiles, and then index on the tile identifier. To query a bounding box, calculate the tiles that would cover the bounding box, and then query for those tiles.

</comment><comment><USER5> I recently built a site for finding vineyards, and used GeoDjango with Postgres+PostGIS.

Setting up was a small PITA, but a bounding box query looks like this:

      footprint = Polygon(((ullon, ullat), (lrlon, ullat), (lrlon, lrlat), (ullon, lrlat), (ullon, ullat)))
      vineyards = Winery.objects.filter(loc__within=footprint)

If you're interested, check it out: <http://finelocalwine.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, that looks like it's along the same lines as what I'm trying to do. How did you test this locally? Does Sqlite support this? Or did you set up PostgreSQL on your development machine?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, you have to set it up locally, but again, it's worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using sphinx for georanking, on top of mysql. Works really well.

If you're using ruby, be sure to have a look at thinking_sphinx which provides a great dsl to configure the index and query it.

Also MongoDB has a built-in geographical index.

I would not personnally roll my own here.</comment>


Cur: Pain relief anywhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.cur.me

<comment><USER2> Pain relief is tricky. TENS machines have conflicting data.

For long term lower back pain: [http://www.cochrane.org/CD003008/BACK_transcutaneous- electri...](http://www.cochrane.org/CD003008/BACK_transcutaneous-electrical- nerve-stimulation-tens-versus-placebo-for-chronic-low-back-pain)

> Four high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs; 585 patients) > comparing TENS with placebo for chronic low-back pain were included in this > study. Due to conflicting evidence, it is unclear if TENS is beneficial in > reducing back pain intensity. However, there was consistent evidence in two > trials (410 patients) that TENS did not improve the level of disability due > to back pain. There was moderate evidence that use of medical services and > work status (e.g. loss of work, sick days) did not change during treatment. > Finally, there did not seem to be a difference between conventional and > acupuncture-like TENS.

For long term lower back pain people are probably better of (after ruling out the rare but scary causes; and with medical supervision) if they lose weight and get exercise, especially physiotherapist guided exercise to strengthen back muscles; and combining this with better ergonomics at work.

For cancer pain: [http://www.cochrane.org/CD006276/SYMPT_transcutaneous- electr...](http://www.cochrane.org/CD006276/SYMPT_transcutaneous-electrical- nerve-stimulation-tens-for-cancer-related-pain-in-adults)

More research is needed.

Pain in labour: [http://www.cochrane.org/CD007214/PREG_tens-transcutaneous- ne...](http://www.cochrane.org/CD007214/PREG_tens-transcutaneous-nerve- stimulation-for-pain-relief-in-labour)

Not sure if it makes any difference, but women should be offered the choice.

So, this device probably isn't harmful; is possibly helpful; seems nicely designed; and is priced about the same as other nice tens units, a lot more expensive than budget tens units.</comment>


Ask HN: How to prepare for a Back-end Developer interview? - <AUTHOR> Yesterday I saw a topic about how prepare for a Front-end developer, now i think maybe you tell me about Back-end interviews.
I'm a django developer and I want to know how prepare for interviews.
What should I know? How can I prepare for that?.
If you help me i'll apreciate :P <comment><USER2> A Django developer doesn't necessarily mean back-end to me. Lot of Django developers mostly work on websites and most of their time is actually spent on form validation, templating, sessions and so on which I would say is more of a front-end.

To really underscore that you are a back-end developer, I would try to concentrate on your Python skills instead of specifically Django:

* Python data structures (lists vs sets, tuples, dictionaries)

* List/dictionary comprehension

* Python 2 vs 3 (unicode, str)

* Decorators, Python "closures"

* Generators

* Modules and packages

Then be prepared to answer questions related to a specific subset of back-end work the job you are applying for entails.

For example, if the job description is you will be building web services consumed by third parties (mobile apps etc), then be prepared to demonstrate good understanding of HTTP, different data interchange formats (JSON, XML), APIs, REST.

Then I'd look at things such as Celery which is a library often used to process tasks from a message queue.

Also tooling around dependencies (virtualenv, pip), be able to explain how to package and deploy Python applications (could be Django apps but that's not important).

And then of course, last but not least, general CS questions about data structures, databases, OOP, design patterns is something you should always be prepared for.

Additional skills in dev ops area / networking are a big plus for back-end work.

</comment><comment><USER3> \-- OO Programming

\-- Databases, SQL, NoSQL: what they're good for. How to design DB schemas, sharding,

\-- Multithreading and concurrency, events

\-- Server/service distribution

\-- REST Design

\-- Proficiency in one server side framework (Rails, Django, ASP.NET, Java- something, Node-something, etc)

\-- Caching

\-- Algorithms and data structures

\-- HTTP/2

<comment><USER4> To go a little deeper on a few of these: Take a look at queues like Celery as part of events/concurrency. You'll also need to look at design patterns as part of OO like factories or adapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some things I ask for when interviewing (I'm also a Python Dev that uses Django at work):

\- Given an arbitrary task what framework would you use and why? I like hearing peoples answers to this as you get to see what they think is important as dev. Do they like a framework because it's modular? Because it is unopinionated? Because it's easy to modify?

\- Given a set of requirements how would you implement an API to satisfy them? I like to see what questions they ask. Are they thinking about performance? Database impact? How will they handle errors? Are they introducing coupling between resources? I'm more interested in how well you can justify your reasoning than it being the "correct" choice. You should be able to defend your choices/opinion without being belligerent.

\- Then there are "target of opportunity" questions. Questions that sort of just pop up during the conversation.

\- Lastly I ask what questions they have for me. These are important as it shows what's important to you. Some good ones I have been asked: \- How much ownership do you have as a dev over a project? \- How much impact do devs have on technology decisions? \- Why do you like working here?

I tend to ask more high level questions and don't really do a ton of whiteboarding unless the candidate feels more comfortable writing things down. During a loop we have more than one tech interview so others whiteboard questions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Have a clear understanding (and be able to explain) how to design different systems. For instance, you should be able to walk through (and sketch on a whiteboard) how to design a web service like Pastebin, Imgur, Pingdom or other such services.

You should be able to solve many common algorithmic problem patterns. It sucks, but the only way to get a job these days is to do well on coding interviews that are heavy in algorithmic problems, so do a lot of practice. The best way to practice is with a pen and paper, don't type up the solution until you're done and you've walked through it yourself.

Have a basic sense for social skills and learn to tell the company what they want to hear and make them feel special.

If you can do all three of those steps you've got a job.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would say focus on:

data structures databases algorithms services logging</comment>


Gom – A visual interface to work with runtime profiling data from Go programs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rakyll/gom <comment><USER2> Super nice although it's a shame the name clashes with [https://github.com/mattn/gom](https://github.com/mattn/gom) that is pretty well established at this point.

Naming sure is hard.</comment>


UBS Says It Had $2B Loss From Unauthorized Trading - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-15/ubs-may-have-unprofitable-quarter-on-unauthorized-trade-s-2-billion-loss.html

<comment><USER2> A fraud, electronic or not, is a hack on a system. It gets interesting when the monetary costs are so high _and_ quantifiable.

Perhaps someone who knows how investment banks work could tell us how they do threat modelling against fraud. What lessons from everyday embezzlement by bank staff could have been applied to prevent these?

</comment><comment><USER3> So do they tell their traders "We only authorize you to make profitable trades."?

In seriousness, it boggles my mind that institutions of this size don't have automated monitoring systems in place to keep an eye on their employee's activities.</comment>


Giving Back to jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/1322793711/giving-back-to-jquery

<comment><AUTHOR> I always wanted to try SproutCore but never had a full JS application to code to try it.

With the integration Yehuda announces with JQuery and the creation of JQuery plugins extracted from SproutCore I'll give a go on some components.

I'm wondering if Yehuda was the origin of this decision as an (ex ?) core developer of JQuery.

Anyway, all of this is very exciting !

</comment><comment><USER2> Was wondering what would happen to Yehuda's Jquery involvement when joining the SproutCore team, see: <http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/14/heres-to-the- next-3-years/>

I guess this is the answer! :-)

<comment><USER3> > Charles said "SproutCore is now and will always be totally free and open > source. I think this business of charging for a commercial license is not an > effective way to grow a project. Sure you make a little cash, but at what > expense to the community? My goal is to make SproutCore and all of the > developer tools that surround it totally free to everyone.

Sounds great, but I wonder how do the SproutCore guys plan to make money though. Anyone knows?</comment></comment>


The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-case-for-digital-public-infrastructure <comment><USER2> There is a desperate need for a publicly backed, ethical digital infrastructure hub. Just like NPR,PBS are the alteratives to profit driven CNN,NBC,Fox... we need an NPR for digital services: alternatives to Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and maybe even Google search.

If one were to run the above services at cost, and publicly fund the costs, we'd all be a lot safer

</comment><comment><USER3> The Debian project demonstrates the strength of transparent democratic infrastructure.</comment>


Why Zynga is failing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/06/04/why-zynga-is-failing-in-basic-napkin-math/ <comment><USER3> Although there are compelling changes in the gaming ecosystem described in the article, there's a pet theory of mine I wish to forward: people can become resistant to skinner box addiction. We get bored with just simple mechanics, eventually.

I see this with my kids (all under 12), they crave more interesting gaming than they did a few years ago; they do still play skinner type games occasionally, but more often they are searching for higher quality content.

This is cool! It makes me hopeful for gaming.

<comment><USER4> This only downside here is that your sample size is maturing and we'd expect them to crave more interesting, complex games. So not sure we can agree with your conclusion based on your data set. Not saying you're wrong......

<comment><USER5> "It's like testing with a moving target."

(overheard in a recent interview with Alan Kay on testing out new interfaces with users, which is problematic because they get keep getting familiar with it! The remark was by the interviewer, actually)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Napkin math?

Math. I don't think it means what he thinks it means. All I see here is "proof by picture" with some stretched definition of "proof". The only relevant part of this entire piece was this:

>Because when something is easy to build and sell — and appears to make money — a lot of people are going to gold rush the market and drive your margins into the ground. Now there are a million alternatives.

The low-cost gaming industry makes money off one-hit-wonders. You can't consistently manufacture one-hit-wonders.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like the "gold rush" going on now for RSS readers, which are easy to build and which apparently people will pay for.

<comment><USER8> I never got it, given that most browsers and email clients already provide readers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I love the snark... _is_ Zynga "failing?"

My initial reaction is that this is the same kind of knee-jerk reaction that says Facebook is somehow doomed and irrelevant.

I think this is good and worth reading, but the title is hyperbole, and if they're actually concluding that Zynga is done, it's premature. The term "right-sizing," used in another article quoted here, is at best manager bullshit; however, it's not necessarily wrong in this case.

I dislike many of the things they do and have done, but "napkin math," particularly prefaced by "basic," is pretty much Tarot card valid. Like so many unsavory companies and ventures of questionable value before them, Zynga has a serious user/cash/revenue base, and it entirely remains to be seen whether they're just hemorrhaging value or whether they're actually making moves that will keep them solvent and push their business forward.

<comment><USER10> Title is link bait, but he never claims Zynga is dying.

> I don't think Zynga fades into the sunset. They are going through tough > times, but they're not done. Zynga still makes money. (In fact, they could > do a smart pivot and get into the data center game, though that is another > race to the bottom.)

I read all the knee-jerk reactions to Facebook and Zynga as the next IBM/Yahoo/etc. They not the monsters they used to be. Now they have to find a way to exist in a world that no longer revolves around them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this misses the point entirely. Zynga is not failing because their products are cheap to recreate. Plenty of companies, in tech and beyond, have easily recreatable products but do just fine. Zynga is "failing" (if you can call it that) because they depended on cheap user traffic from Facebook - <USER2> through free virality and later cheap ad buys. Facebook is maturing as a business and ad prices are going up. And Facebook realized that all that game spam was just not worth the 30% vig they charged (probably the hard way - through testing for user engagement). Take away those temporary advantages and Zynga is just like any other gaming company.

This is a right sizing of the company and its revenues to reflect the games they own, once you take away the cheap/free traffic.

<comment><USER12> I don't know that it's so much Facebook ad prices going up (they haven't gone up much really) as it is Zynga having burned through all of the potential cow clickers. When you run a Facebook ad, the price per user increases as you saturate the market, even if the overall network's prices remain steady, due to clickthroughs dropping.

Zynga games are typically low-RPU, mass appeal, which as you mentioned relies on cheap traffic (mostly from other Zynga games.) You can only keep shuffling people internally from one game to another for so long until they all leave for Candy Crush Saga.

<comment><USER11> You're probably right, FB prices went up for Zynga more so than others because they saturated their market (which just took longer cause it was bigger). However, anecdotally, I've seen FB prices rise 25 - 35% over the last 18 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Supercell makes two social games that generate more revenue than all of Zynga. Had Zynga created these hits (or bought Supercell early), then the story would completely opposite.

I am not sure why Zynga is struggling, but I am certain it is not because social+in-app games is a failing business model.

<comment><USER14> It's not that social games is a failing business model - although I can see it dying out - but that it's a failing business model _for Zynga_. The barrier to entries is so low, that the market which used to be dominated by Zynga is now getting divided up among a million developers, including Supercell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One issue with Zynga that I haven't seen explored enough is that the cost of making a Zynga Facebook game has increased dramatically, while the potential revenue from the same Facebook game has not. Zynga tried to apply their own version of AAA quality to games like CastleVille, and the result was that they spent a ton of money and still didn't make as much as they did with FarmVille (a game which took six weeks to create). Same problem with Mafia Wars 2 and FarmVille 2.

None of the surprisingly profitable breakout games mentioned here have been particularly expensive to make - Kixeye's three released games were supposedly built with very small teams, same with Supercells' enormously successful Clash of Clans and Hay Day.

Zynga is still making money. Lots of it. They just got too big too fast and had unrealistic expectations of their market's ability to sustain their games. Granted, user acquisition costs are much higher than they were before, partially as a result of Facebook making their viral channels more difficult to use... but IMO Zynga would have had these problems regardless.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the key point is that the Zynga formula was easy to recreate, and so competition entered and started to splinter the market pie up. Basic market economics principle.

<comment> __--__ Except that's not what happened here. Zynga dominates the facebook games market and always has. Everybody else, including any newcomers looking to become "the next Zynga" all fight over the small piece of the pie left by Zynga. I can't remember who here said it, but nobody's going to be a better Zynga than Zynga.

The problem is the market itself was never as lucrative as it was made to seem and it's shrinking fast. I can't say a whole lot about that last part, but let's just say Zynga isn't the only social gaming company laying off staff to refocus on mobile...

<comment><USER17> Part of the point of the article was that maybe everyone doesn't want to be the next Zynga. If you are a two-man development studio, a tiny piece of the pie goes a lot further than if you're 3000-employee Zynga. And there are a lot of two-to-ten-man studios to take a lot of small pieces of pie...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think they're just too damn big. Zynga should be a 100 or 200 person company. They'd be a _very_ successful company with that kind of overhead. They simply scaled up far in excess of what their long-term business could support.

</comment><comment><USER19> _"Social games didn't cost much to build. In fact, once you had the underlying code and frameworks — provided the game's play and goals were roughly the same; earn points/money/whatever — you could turn "Sorority Life" into "Mafia Battles" by just switching the graphics and text, a staggeringly cheap process called "reskinning." (Doable in a weekend) Bam, another product to push. "_

I love it when non-technical people underestimates the task of pushing / building a new product. (or technical people who consistently super underestimate the tasks in hand).

Good luck with "reskinning" a game in a weekend.

<comment><USER20> This is just plain wrong anyway. Creating a social game is much more expensive than a iOS title for example. Sure it's still cheaper than most AAA console games but really cheap game making is thriving - in indie companies and actually interesting new products they make.

In a social game, the back-end has to scale for insane growth, your users might be going from 100 users to millions of users in days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Zynga had always felt like a fad to me. I just never saw any long term value. Oculus Rift though, there's a gaming company i'd actually put some money in. They have creative people, some kind of barrier to entry, and a real passion for the industry as opposed to a pirate mentality Zynga always seemed to exhibit.

<comment><USER22> What games are the Oculus Rift guys making?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what the corporate culture is like at Zynga, and if it promotes creativity and innovation with its developers. I suspect it doesn't, and that that is the real reason it is failing at creating good new casual games.

<comment><USER23> I can't find the article right now, but I'm pretty sure I remember something about Zynga's CEO explicitly saying "I don't pay you to be creative."

That said, a citation or refutation would be useful, I could be remembering wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hmmm...I don't know. I look at Zynga and feel like it is/was in a position to really continue succeeding. Games may be easier to build but it's still difficult to get users. Zynga should have been the best at building cross- platform. Zynga should have moved much more forcefully off Facebook (I never really understood the idea of going to Facebook to play Farmville). Zynga should have been snapping up/copying cool new games before they got too big. True, it is a hits business to some extent but there is a lot more you can do with data and an installed base/captive audience.

<comment><USER25> >(I never really understood the idea of going to Facebook to play Farmville)

You clearly don't understand why Farmville was a success then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Virtual goods are a small byproduct of the gaming industry. You can't expect to make serious money from them. Even World of Warcraft with tens of millions of dedicated _hardcore_ gamers makes little money from virtual goods. And those are people who pay to buy the game and also pay for a monthly subscription, not the average freetard user of Zynga.

If they had created an MMORPG or something like Eve Online which would evolve through time then maybe they would stand a chance with this model of income. But then again you can't make that kind of games on Flash.

<comment><USER27> This opinion is pretty behind the times. Like, two or three years behind the times.

Just a few examples of games that make the majority of their funds from virtual goods:

League of Legends(the most played game worldwide right now) DotA 2/Team Fortress 2 Maple Story Planetside 2

It's actually generating a huge amount of cash. WoW just wasn't ever set up for it, and still to this day sells around a total of 15-20 virtual goods products IN TOTAL. Most services that rely on it for revenue have that many _at release_ , let alone years down the road and long into maturity.

<comment><USER28> Indie game Kingdom of Loathing is entirely supported by optional item purchases (a new unique, powerful, funny item every month).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Social gaming still has plenty of life in it, with Pocket Gems games, Puzzle and Dragons, and other games continuing to do well.

Until the entire category of social games dies globally, I'm not going to entirely count Zynga out (as much as the misanthrope in me would love to see Pincus bite the dust).

Besides, Zynga still has the online gambling play coming up for them, which could be a serious game changer if adopted in the States.

<comment><USER30> I think Zynga will continue failing simply because they were wrong about human nature and user needs.

I've seen my acquaintances on Facebook, playing less and less games, sending less and less invites. I'm connected to a lot of regular non-technical folks on Facebook and I barely see any traces of games in my feed, whereas 1 or 2 years ago, my stream was chocked by games.

Zynga games seemed like fun. Users stayed for a while for whatever reason. However advancing the game by pressing buttons to increment counters is simply not fun. Once the novelty passes, you start realizing what a stupid game it is.

There's also a new breed of games on iTunes. Games that require slightly more skill, but after the first level or 2, they become next to impossible to advance unless you pay up or spam dozens of your friends. Again, at some point users realize that the game is not at all about skill or fun, but about willingness to pay up.

Basically this new breed of games is depending on _new_ users for survival. At some point the market will get saturated by people that tried these games out and that have grown tired of them.

Also, what the hell does _social_ mean anyway? 10 years ago, social meant to play CounterStrike or StarCraft with your high-school buddies, games that are still played by groups to this very day. Does _social_ mean spamming your friends with annoying invitations? Or does it mean multi-player games where you and your friends can have fun together? I'm asking because I'm seeing a lot of the former and not much of the later ;-)

<comment><USER31> I don't think your acquaintances are a good representation. Social games are still doing well. Maybe not the Zynga-style games, but check out <http://www.appdata.com/>. #1 is Candy Crush Saga, which is kinda like a social Bejeweled. I'm getting requests from people I didn't even knew played games. King seems to be doing well lately. But note that Zynga's games still reach 171 million users per month. That's huge.

Zynga may have too many games, employees, and expenses, but the category has plenty of life yet.

<comment><USER32> My fifty-something aunt plays that candy crush thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Articles like this are generally useless. Once and event has happened people can come up with all kind of explanations citing why the product failed. There is no wisdom in it.

This is not to say the article has nay false assertions but liking them to Zynga's failure may not have any lessons for you and me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Zynga did not steal away casual gamers from other platforms. They tapped the endless realm of social dynamics. As soon as facebook's growth started stalling, they should have created their own gaming network.

</comment><comment><USER35> Zynga never did that well to begin with. It was all hype and misleading numbers. They only go down from here.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a gross mischaracterization of both Zynga's troubles and the industry as a whole.

<comment><USER36> Care to give, or point to, a correct characterization of those?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Failing? the hell, this napkin math is going to be huge. Two words, Mr Hoffman, `napkin math'.</comment>


Fix your tracking and privacy from Google - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jainmukesh/slow-browser-1-hack-to-speed-it-up-2c6d90152b7b <comment><AUTHOR> The article shows a simple workaround for getting around any tracking or privacy. This works even if you are browsing in incognito mode.</comment>


How do you get traffic? - <AUTHOR>

How you get traffic after initial launch? How you market your startup websites? <comment><USER2> Well there is a few standard things we did at our startup.

* BUILD SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT - it isn't so obvious what people want though.

1\. Social Bookmarking - Reddit, Digg etc

2\. Add any Feeds to RSS Directories

3\. Keep a blog and update at least 3-4 times a week about your industry area. We created the first Blog Carnival focusing on Journalism. That made us friends in journalism community and we got some write ups.

Interview people on your blog.

4\. Network - there are countless events in which to attend here in London so there must be more in the valley. That being said, they may be crap.

5\. Get mentioned in the Press or on Blogs (best way is to meet the people face to face first). Random emails seldom work.

6\. Create Facebook Group, get your friends to join. After Google, Facebook is our number 1 referring site. Get your friends to add your site as one of their fav sites on their facebook profiles. We've got a lot of traffic from that.

Create Facebook App?

7\. Create a Podcast? But this is a bit of an effort, prob best focus on blogging.

8\. SEO! work on it from day one!

<comment><USER3> One small suggesion: do STRESS tests before submitting your page to Digg/Reddit/TC. On the off-chance that it does make the front page, it will get hammered, and any scalability bugs will instantly bring the site down. It would be unfortunate to miss all that traffic.

Also, put the company name in your signature whenever you send e-mails, forum or blog comments, etc..

<comment><USER4> Any recommendations on how to do stress testing?

<comment><USER5> i know apache has some benchmarking tools, and httperf is useful for stress testing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See this link: 10 Simple Steps To Social Media Success In 2008

<http://searchengineland.com/080108-134105.php>

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems to be entirely word of mouth and blogs-- we don't do any marketing effort.

For many/most startups, I think the best strategy is one where users generate users. Viral/widgets, word of mouth, or SEO/UGC.

[http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/11/why-...](http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/11/why- bloggers-an.html)

Read that 10 times. ;-)

For a b2b startup, obviously that's not entirely practical...

</comment><comment><USER8> Just as important as getting traffic is converting it and retaining it, track your conversion statistics along each step of the way, find your major pitfalls and fix them.

Split users randomly so they see different landing pages for example and track the changes in conversion.

This will improve your virality as only active users spread the word.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> hmm, i have started a news site <http://newskicks.com> but its not receiving much traffic and spamers are attacking it so i m wondering how to fight with that as most of my time is goin in deleting the unwanted posts rather then addin new features :(

<comment><USER9> I would definitely add a captcha to cut down on the spam.

Show it for every post to anonymous users, and only once for registration for users with accounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks foe the suggestion how the hell i forgot that simple thing!! added now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Blog, blog, blog. We haven't fully launched yet, but we get a tremendous amount of traffic to our blog. We talk about the insides of our startup experience, but also a lot about the ideas and movements that we're passionate about. Don't forget the importance of being earnest!

</comment><comment><USER11> Ask yourself this question: what is it that makes you want to visit another website? Whatever channels you use to receive information will probably work for getting the word out to others about YOUR website.

</comment><comment><USER12> Depends on the site. Google AdWords is a good place to start.

If there are small niche sites that your customers may visit, buy banner ads and post on their forums (but obviously don't spam).

</comment><comment><USER13> PR is also important I think. If you build something people want, then it.s just about letting ppl know about it. We're in the media industry thugh, so it may be diff for others.

</comment><comment><USER14> word of mouth can win you if you give people something simple to talk about, may not necessary be your core competency. SEO is the key, get your site crawled by Google.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've found most of my traffic coming from google on articles I have written in the past.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've just got a little blog going, mainly for fun and possibly for some minor supplemental income. We have seen a surprising amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. I'd recommend you hit that up (along with JohnN's excellent suggestions). Join it, get some friends on it, and get yourself stumbled up.

<comment><USER17> SU does send a lot of traffic, but don't let the numbers fool you. SU users are channel surfing, and usually don't stay for more than 2 seconds. Divide the number of users you get from SU by 10 to get it's equivalent in Digg users. And divide that by 10 to get it's equivalent in users coming from a blog post. If you didn't follow that, here is the simple equation:

1 user refered by your blog = 100 SU users</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does HN detect visited URLs? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> HN doesn't detect visited links, but your browser does.</comment>


Show HN: More HN - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/melvinroest/more-hn <comment><USER2> Would be nice if the Github repo had an explanation of what it actually is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, I was hoping this HN discussion was enough. I wanted my code to be a discussion piece, or a starting point to improve. I don't think it's that usable for many people.

<comment><USER3> > I wanted my code to be a discussion piece, or a starting point to improve.

Easy improvement: A readme.md It'd be much easier to grasp what it is trying to achieve if it actually were described.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I quickly made this Chrome plugin in an hour or so to get all HN comments on one page. I hope there happen to be better versions of this out there, which is why I opened this thread to start a discussion about it.

And if there aren't any alternatives, then let's improve this together!

<comment><USER4> There's a couple of Chrome extensions on [https://github.com/adriel/awesome- hacker-news#browser-extens...](https://github.com/adriel/awesome-hacker- news#browser-extensions)

<comment><USER5> Imagine a future where we could put our code into a search engine and then get back apps/programs that have similar functionality...

<comment><USER6> We used to have it, and it was glorious, until Google tooketh away:

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

It was amazing to see similar code and to see how they approached things. Of course, if only really worked with snippets, but as a learner it was truly amazing.

I really wonder if they kept it for internal use.

<comment><USER7> If you're looking for a GCS replacement, Sourcegraph is a thing! We've taken a lot of inspiration from Google Code Search (both the public version and the internal version which was even better): [https://sourcegraph.com](https://sourcegraph.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like if enough people use this then they should just make it the default. Or give people a user setting.

<comment><USER9> The 'More' link is apparently required due to server load; dang has stated that he'd like to get rid of it as soon as he can fix the underlying performance problems: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20more%20performance&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER10> why not autoload it on scroll... like after you get past 75% or something? Many sites have never-ending scrollers, FB as an example and you'd think as big as YC is they could afford someone who can figure out endless scrolling.

<comment><USER9> Endless scrolling was specifically rejected [1], and given how vociferous the HN community can be about such things I don't blame them.

Also, comments can shift from page to page as their ranking changes, so a naïve implementation would end up with duplicates (for comments that fell down past the page boundary before the next page loaded) and missing items (for comments that rose up), and a more sophisticated implementation probably wouldn't be worth the effort for something they want to get rid of.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23195291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23195291)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tempgres – Temporary PostgreSQL databases on demand - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ClockworkConsulting/tempgres-server <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

I'm the author, and I'll be around to answer questions you might have. (Not that I expect many, tempgres is quite simple.)</comment>


U.S. Alleges E-Book Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577337573054615152.html

<comment><USER2> Great Article! eBooks prices will eventually rise.</comment>


No more entrepreneurial masturbation - <AUTHOR> http://pranavdharma.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/no-more-entrepreneurial-masturbation/

<comment><USER2> "It was time to stop being an entrepreneur by association but rather by action. "

And the title of his blog: "Musings of an entrepreneur"

Thing is he isn't an entrepreneur. And there is no such thing as an entrepreneur by association. He's an armchair entrepreneur and yes he should move off the coach and actually do something.

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont get what point you're trying to make with the relation between the quoted line and the title of the blog.

As an aside, arent you being too quick to judge ? I quit my 6 figure job and have been working on my product for the last several weeks. Still a few more weeks away from launch, but I'm 100% invested in it.

<comment><USER2> Well first sorry for the snark. Otoh you have to have a thick skin to be an entrepreneur so keep that in mind.

"arent you being too quick to judge ? I quit my 6 figure job"

The world is quick to judge. (Remember that.)

Seriously though why did you quit your (6 figure) job as opposed to trying to get something started or prototyped while maintaining a salary?

How long have you thought about this particular idea you are almost ready to launch - or did you try to just come up with "an idea" so you could be an entrepreneur?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do have a thick skin - so I wasnt offended. I have been researching this idea for quite some time -- I've tried several other ideas / side projects over the years - some (like my earlier blog) have been successful, some not so much. After my research and some basic prototyping, i quit to pursue further and not create any conflict of interest with my job.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html <comment><USER2> The author argues that failed software projects are nonetheless beneficial:

 _Their development employs many bureaucrats, consultants and contractors and their expenditure supports an even larger number of people throughout society._

... by the same argument I should stroll around the city and burn some cars, thereby offering employment to many firefighters, car producers, actuaries and all their suppliers.

The point about ever-expanding bureaucracies is well noted however. Perhaps it is our duty to design really bad programming languages and methodologies, to sell them to government organisations and similar bureaucracies in order to drive their likelihood of success even lower. Reminds me of the true purpose of Ada ... [http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-0...](http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-04.html)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but let's be fair, this is an incidental parenthetical to the main point, which is that the true value of these failed projects comes from the fact that the projects never increase the efficiency of the bureaucracy. If you simply cut that paragraph the essay is, if anything, improved, demonstrating it's not a critical point.

<comment><USER2> I agree, the point about employment was nitpicking. I should have made that clearer. I liked the essay overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Automation frees people from doing something productive, not from working. If we (as a society) leave them alone, they'll just clutter around their formally useful job, and become banking middle manager or something similar, which moves a lot of paperwork around, but produce little actual value.

This is similar to what we experienced in Europe with nobles: the end of feodal times made noblemen mostly useless as warriors or local mobsters; since they had nothing useful to do with their free time, they became passionate with court intrigues, ballroom dancing, fancy wigs, duels, and other improductive occupations.

However, it's been fixed: after centuries of wasted potential, capitalism created a draft toward productive activities, and the dominant classes worked at organizing the workforce, eventually leading to the industrial revolution.

We have (again, as a society) to find a way to make today's socially useful activities attractive: most people will concede that an eldery care person is way more useful than many middle managers; yet the latters get more money and social recognition. I suspect that such issues aren't fixed spontaneously by the so-called "invisible hand of market".

<comment><USER5> Humans tend to assume that their experiences are normative, and are surprised to see instances where their experiences are not shared. As a personal example, my friends are usually significantly shocked to learn I haven't seen the movie "The Boondock Saints". Yet they think nothing of the fact that they haven't seen Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", which I have. Our values are informed by our experiences, so we also tend to assume our values are shared by others.

Assuming one's values are normative leads to assuming that the fact they aren't reflected in the world must be the result of some external entity, a secret society, or this nebulous "the system". Instead, if one assumes that one's views aren't normative, then it is clear why one's views are not reflected in the world in aggregate: it's a simple tautology. Occam's Razor applies.

"The system" is not an entity unto itself, it is intractable from the people within it, it is _nothing more_ than the people within it. The "invisible hand of the market" is merely a short-hand, anthropomorphizing term for "the aggregate activity of the people within the poorly defined borders of 'the market'." If something isn't a particular way, it's because "most people" demonstrably do NOT concede your point, or if they do, do not assign such great importance to it as to warrant change.

I don't like that elderly care personnel are paid less than middle managers either, but I'm not suggesting to force everyone else to make that valuation. When you say, "we as a society have to find a way...", and if you are suggesting that way be via government intervention, then really you're saying, "I want to force everyone else in society to pay for my way..." (undemocratic, even totalitarian). Then we have to write a new tax code to pay for it, and we get this situation here in the OP. If instead you are suggesting that you will live by example and proselytize to your fellow man to do the same, then really you're using "the invisible hand of the market" to enact the change you desire.

<comment><USER6> As an aside: it's not uncommon for groups of people to say they value one thing but, in their aggregate behavior, act as if they value other things instead. This is particularly blatant where moral obligations are involved.

 _If instead you are suggesting that you will live by example and proselytize to your fellow man to do the same, then really you're using "the invisible hand of the market" to enact the change you desire._

It sounded to me like his point was more that it doesn't work to just sit around waiting for the "invisible hand", i.e., someone else, to fix a problem like that. Someone has to get up and actually _do_ something and persuade people.

<comment><USER5> Correct. There are any number of things that a person can _do_. The problem is, what are things that one can do that are effective, as well as avoiding trampling on other liberties in the process? The "use government" route is fraught with moral hazard and unintended consequences.

<comment><USER4> > The "use government" route is fraught with moral hazard and unintended > consequences.

Actually, "use government" to fight pointless bureaucracy sounds at best as a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While bridge building may always be successful (as asserted by the author), close to budget really depends on how you define "close".

Fixed link projects (bridges and tunnels) tend to cost 33% more than estimated (sigma=60%). Rail is even worse at 44% more than estimated, coming in under budget only about 12% of the time.

<http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/JAPAASPUBLISHED.pdf>

<comment><USER8> And even if successful (in that the bridge does not immediately collapse), many bridges have been rendered inoperable due to misuse or neglect.

Anyways, other interesting links on the subject: [http://blogs.msdn.com/dave_froslie/archive/2005/03/07/389113...](http://blogs.msdn.com/dave_froslie/archive/2005/03/07/389113.aspx)

[http://blogs.msdn.com/steverowe/archive/2005/02/28/381910.as...](http://blogs.msdn.com/steverowe/archive/2005/02/28/381910.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Hard working couples struggle to buy the basic food and shelter which their grandfathers had purchased while their wives stayed at home._

Is this an example of truth through mere assertion, or of pluralizing anecdote to equal data?

In any case, I disagree with the assertion, because I think it's a stretch that such a couple would consider what was "basic" in 1955 to be acceptable. It's tough, though, since quality of life is so, well, qualitative.

Another aspect I question about the mid-50s is how war surplus affected cost of goods. How many of those single income households were buying goods that had been subsidized by their wives' work for the war effort? There are strong hints of this effect in early computer power supplies, as 400Hz wasn't historically common in commercial power.

</comment><comment><USER10> If I'm following the author, increased efficiency (successful software projects) leads to increased time on the hands of bureaucrats. Increased time leads to increased meaningless tasks. So, the author's solution is not to find something meaningful for people to do with the time, or to simply give people more time off work (because according to the 2 references he cites, that would be impossible), but to celebrate the destruction of efficiency (failed software projects).

There are many things wrong with the way our society rewards work/ constructs bureaucracies. I think, however, that it wouldn't be too hard to come up with some practical solutions rather than encourage subconscious intentional failure.

<comment><USER11> >I think, however, that it wouldn't be too hard to come up with some practical solutions rather than encourage subconscious intentional failure.

Your hubris knows no limits!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That kinda reminds me how when you upgrade hardware for your webapp new features quickly crawl in that utilise the hardware. They might not be needed but they become possible so they come into existence.

To reduce amount of bureaucracy you'd have to pick some work-consuming area of the operation, make it obsolete by government act and fire all the people that were doing that work so they will not be available for other tasks inflating them.

To avoid their complaints you should still pay them salaries for few years but allow and encourage them to find themselves another job outside government sector.

<comment><USER13> This also happens when you upgrade to a new version of a programming language or operating system. You start to use features that previously did not exist or restructure your code to utilize such features. However, many times this is a great benefit to help with the readability of the code. I have done this myself with hardware and software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wasn't Fred Brooks who said something along the lines of "always build one to throw away"? Even though, this is not supposed to be a satire (or is it?) , the fact that software engineering is a very young subject needs to be taken into consideration. On the other hand, We need failed software projects to know what not to do.

</comment><comment><USER15> On an everyday level, this reminds me of an observation made by one of Crichton's characters (I think it was the mathematician in Jurassic Park) that despite all the appliances and conveniences of modern technology, housekeeping still takes the same number of hours a week as it always has.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's a very strong Libertarian case. Government spending must be cut very significantly.

<comment><USER17> It seems to me that the problem the OP describes is not confined to governments.

If some layer or department of a large company's bureaucracy is consuming about 1.5% of its revenues (just as the Australian tax office consumes about 1.5% of Australia's GDP), then the upper management will never have much interest in driving that proportion down to 0.5%. So as the company grows, that layer or department will grow as well in spite of automation, just as the tax office has grown.

<comment><USER6> If anything, the article could be taken to show that _any_ large organization is inherently destructive to efficiency and should be cut down for the good of society.</comment></comment></comment>


The Robinhood API - <AUTHOR> https://api.robinhood.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Lot's of the Robinhood API is publically accessible.

Note: trailing slashes are required for some reason on all endpoints.

Want a real-time Apple quote? [https://api.robinhood.com/quotes/AAPL/](https://api.robinhood.com/quotes/AAPL/)

Want some fundamentals on Apple? [https://api.robinhood.com/fundamentals/AAPL/](https://api.robinhood.com/fundamentals/AAPL/)

Want more information on a given instrument (Apple)? [https://api.robinhood.com/instruments/450dfc6d-5510-4d40-abf...](https://api.robinhood.com/instruments/450dfc6d-5510-4d40-abfb-f633b7d9be3e/)

<comment><USER2> Publicly accessible isn't the same as "public" or "will continue to be usable"</comment></comment>


IE 10 differences between Windows 7 and 8 - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/jj819730(v=vs.85).aspx

<comment><USER2> The differences all appear to be related to touch, which is not too surprising.

<comment><USER3> Yep, apparently it's solely the new MS touch/pointer API which is missing. Which is kinda weird considering they submitted their pointer API to the W3C as an alternative to Apple's touch events, it's not going to help their case if they don't bother implementing it themselves.

<comment><USER4> There aren't a lot of Windows 7 touch devices, and the ones that do exist have proprietary drivers since Win7 doesn't support touch. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to spend a lot of time back-porting the whole touch system to Win7 and then pleading with OEMs to provide touch drivers there as well. Even assuming they were able to do both of those successfully, you'd be stuck using touch with Win7 desktop apps unless they back-ported Metro to Win7 as well.

Doesn't make a lot of sense once you write it all out.

<comment><USER5> Windows 7 _does_ support touch. Vista didn't and thus needed proprietary drivers.

<comment><USER6> Windows 8 has a new set of touch APIs (including on desktop). The Windows 7 touch APIs are still there for compatibility. They'd have to either port the web touch stuff to the old native APIs or port the new native touch APIs to Windows 7, and I guess there's not enough Windows 7 touch interest to bother.

<comment><USER5> That was what I was guessing in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4783393> as well. Still, the point I was complaining about was clearly wrong in the post :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IE10 behaviour differs between Windows 8 Metro and Desktop. If you're on metro, websites that use flash for certain things (e.g., our web site uses it for image zoom, video and audio file previews.) We have to submit to Microsoft for whitelisting, or more hopefully we can finally convince our business to let us switch to HTML5 but that will require reprocessing hundreds of thousands of videos and audio files that are huge.

<comment><USER8> FYI Flash no longer needs videos in an FLV container. If you use h.264 video in an MP4 container that can be directly played by Flash, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Android, and iOS. You still may have to reprocess legacy videos but going forward you wont have to maintain different versions of videos depending on platform if you use an MP4 container and h.264 video.</comment></comment>


Examine.com Coronavirus Guide - <AUTHOR> https://examine.com/guides/coronavirus/ <comment><AUTHOR> Extremely good. Basically a whirlwind guide on how to be healthy</comment>