Show HN: I created a feature I wanted in Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://mppr.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> So, I've always been frustrated by the inability for me to "push" addresses to my iPhone from my computer. Specifically, when I have to go somewhere new, like a Dr's office or co-working space.

I created mppr.me - a "mashup" of sorts taking ideas from bit.ly (to shorten link locations), google maps (for making it embeddable) & using tropo (a twilio competitor for sending sms).

It's free & I've been doing some minor promo the past few weeks, on the usual tool sites (<http://www.listio.com/web20/app/MpprMe/> \- [http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/mpprme-people-send-business- add...](http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/mpprme-people-send-business-address- smartphone/) \- [http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/mppr-me-mppr-me-enables-your- we...](http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/mppr-me-mppr-me-enables-your-website- visitors-to-take-your-location-with-them/22584) \- <http://www.netwebapp.com/view/Mppr-Me>).

I wanted to share the idea with HN. I'd really love to get some feedback on this & see if you guys think this is useful.

Also: I've got stats publicly available here: <http://mppr.me/statsboard>

<comment><USER2> I put in my email address I clicked on Create Listing, but nothing happened.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, did you put in a US address? I probably should have stated that currently, it only works for US addresses.

A good way to see if it supports your address is to click the "preview" link once you've put in your address.

<comment><USER2> I put a non-US address.

I'm OK with the fact that you choose to limit your website to US for pragmatic reasons, but I'm curious, what is the reason here? Google Maps is universal. Though I admit I don't quite understand what your website is supposed to do. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if I'm slow but I couldn't figure out what this does in the first 30 seconds. Now that I know, it seems cool, but an example or something more explicit/clear would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I definitely need to work on properly exhibiting the value prop. Thanks a ton for the feedback!

<comment><USER4> Short-circuiting the above user who figured this out and instead just asking you (the creator) - what does this do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the question: It creates a widget for your business' website for people to send that business' address to their cell phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah this is a great idea. It's like a more universal chrometophone extension

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool, this looks like one of the features of Agendize: <http://www.agendize.com/toolbox/phone> I guess that could be taken as market validation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Thanks so much for this link, that looks like a cool product!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I couldn't get it to work... Do I have to embed it for the texting to work?

Also, I gave my email but I never received an email.. ?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes & i dont send any emails right now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool. The map preview didn't work for me (using a non-US address, Firefox 4.01, Win7), but the embed code etc. was fine.</comment>


Asia's new aristocrats - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/17929037?story_id=17929037

<comment><USER2> This story reminds me of my experience. I immigrated from China at a young age, but the impression I got from my family is that even in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, people were almost universally poor. I remember my dad telling me that even if you had the money, buying a television or refrigerator required connections.

My father and mother both came from rural areas, where mud huts were not uncommon. Even in China, my dad didn't eat rice until he was in his teens. My father did extremely well on the national exams and managed to get into a university with most of his expenses paid by the socialist system at the time. After getting a PHD, he immigrated to the US with me.

Having visited China a few times with my family, I met some quite successful businessmen, all of whom have humble roots in poor countryside villages. Some of them didn't even graduate from elementary school, but due to connections with the government (the military for example), they managed to start businesses and acquire factories during the time of China's economic growth.

There are a lot of rag-to-riches stories in China, but at the same the time, the sheer size of the population means that there are even more stories of poverty. In my father's family, only he and one of his brothers out of a family of 6 or 7 managed to escape the rural area. Although life is getting better even in the rural areas, it seems there is a massive difference between the skyscrapers of Shanghai and a traditional farming village.

<comment><USER3> _Even in China, my dad didn't eat rice until he was in his teens._

What did he eat?

<comment><USER2> He said that he mainly ate sweet potato or yam (I'm not really sure of the difference).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am surprised no one is talking about "hukou" system? Heck, I didn't know that!

In India obviously we do not have anything like that, but there is a hint of resentment towards outside people who throng cities for jobs. North Indians were beaten up in Mumbai. You will hear faint _sigh_ of a Bangalorean, how city has lost its culture and beauty. A Bank clerk in Chennai - for example can no longer afford auto rickshaw fair.

<comment><USER5> Learning about the hukou system disturbed me at first, but the longer I live in Beijing, the more I approve of the system in some form. There are too many people here. Live with Beijing's traffic for a couple of years, or push more people than you can imagine can fit into a crowded subway train. There are not enough resources to go around. How would you deal with it?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps deporting you to the countryside would be one small first step. Or is restriction of personal freedom only okay when it isn't applied to you?

<comment><USER7> Wut? hukou is just a citizenship system. Much like how mexicans just can't wander into the US, or Chinese can't wander into Korea. Every country operate the same way, just that in China it's more local because of its feudal history persisted longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Help out a poor, ignorant American: what's a "social class"? One of the Gazillionaires mentions that "everyone in his social class" lost someone they knew in the Mumbai terrorist attack. In 25 words or less, what's a "social class"?

<comment><USER9> Oh come on, I know everyone in the US is judged by where they're going, not where they're from, but you do have the concept of working and middle classes right?

<comment><USER8> Not so much. Almost everyone claims to be "middle class", the definition is so vague as to be meaningless. People who are obviously very, very well off claim middle class status.

Only a very few would claim "working class" status, and typically, that's claimed for ideological reasons, not actual tradesman or craftsman membership.

<comment><USER10> ... but you obviously understand the concept then, and that it may apply more readily to India?

<comment><USER11> I think he was wondering what the concept means to Indians since the referenced phrase is not at all idiomatic for U.S. English. Upon my initial reading, I wondered whether or not it referred to a caste.

<comment><USER8> Thank you! That clarifies what I meant, as I was indeed struck by the "social class" phrase as out of place or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's interesting in India is that you'll often find a slum right next to a super luxurious hotel like the Oberoi or the Taj. I've never been able to understand why squatting "sticks" there but not here (I've seen police trying to "clean up" the slums -- you'd think the violence would scare people away).

<comment><USER4> Because it is political. Besides I find nothing strange about a slum next to a 5 star hotel, but I am an Indian. :)

<comment><USER13> In a country with rule of law and transferable property rights (most of the western world), one would expect market forces to prevent this. Underutilized land (such as a slum) would be purchased from it's owners by investors hoping to make more efficient use of it. Both parties would wind up richer because of the transaction.

The phenomena of nontransferable property rights exists only in a few parts of the US, so most Americans are unfamiliar with it. NY is one such place - claims on public housing or occupancy in a rent control apartment are a form of property rights (it's very difficult to deprive you of them) which is not transferable. NY is also one of the rare places where we have land used by very rich people directly adjacent to land hugely underused by it's occupants [1].

Most of the US is better run than NY, so phenomena like this are absent from most people's experience.

[1] Most of the value of the land is caused by it's proximity to institutions like GS or Bloomberg, but the lower middle class occupants of public housing and retirees living in rent controlled apartments do not make use of this proximity. Thus, the land is underused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So can we conclude that parts of Asia, primarily China and India, are experiencing what the US went through in the early-mid parts of the 20th century?

A development of the middle class and a wider gap between said middle class and the upper class?

</comment><comment><USER15> _Some Indian gazillionaires are flashy_

I wasn't really expecting to read the word "gazillionaires" in an economist article. Has to mark some sort of a first for the publication.</comment>


Show HN: A school student's website - <AUTHOR> http://nibnalin.tech <comment><USER2> On your sieve project

"Below is a screenshot of the time it takes to produce all the prime numbers from 0 to 100,000,000 (100 billion, in other words!)."

100,000,000 != 100 billion

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this only a single page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, right now it's only this. You can see one of my projects at [http://nibnalin.tech/internet-history/](http://nibnalin.tech/internet- history/)

<comment><USER3> you should put something up on github.com</comment></comment></comment>


Exploring Johannes Kepler's 'Somnium', the first science fiction story - <AUTHOR> https://somniumproject.wordpress.com/somnium/ <comment><USER2> An even older science fiction story from ancient Rome: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_History)

<comment><USER3> Rome? It's the Roman times, alright, but it's by Lucian who was an Assyrian / Greek author (the Mark Twain of his day).

(He was born in the area of the so-called "hellenistic kingdoms", where Greek culture had been established for several centuries after Alexander).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A little bit later, there's this one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World)</comment>


Is Freedom Zero such a hot idea? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sicpers.info/2018/07/is-freedom-zero-such-a-hot-idea/ <comment><USER2> My understanding is that Freedom Zero (et al) doesn't mean "it's okay to use software to rain death on people" but that "hey, if you think X is bad enough to stop with legal force, you should prohibit it with a general law against X, not by binding the software itself with some complex prohibition against using it for X".

</comment><comment><USER3> This is frontloaded with proclamations of "extremism" upon things the author disagrees with and doesn't give us any technical evidence that the foundations of open source are helping in some major way to perpetuate big government -- Isn't the US Government very keen about acquiring proprietary software? (obviously the party referenced in the brief subjective opener)

It's interesting how faced with ethical issues, people with vocal opinions about tech resort to coming up with some over-designed workaround that has no technical feasibility (this is my opinion of GDPR incidentally) instead of standing by the principles we should defend in the face of bad actors.

"contact me or my agent, tell us what you're doing, and we'll decide whether to grant you an additional licence for use"

seriously?

<comment><USER4> > helping in some major way to perpetuate big government

Is that supposed to automatically be something bad? I didn't see anything of the sort in the post.

<comment><USER3> the author is referencing government actions that are being taken at a federal level, hence "big government"

I am not pro-big government but I won't rip on anyone else for being so, just saying that if the author wants to say "Open Source" is fueling this level of authority they should really back it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good thinking, while we're at it, if we don't want people freely running code on their own hardware, why should they be able to freely think? The people who use software in ways you don't like, had to think about using it that way first, lets stop it at the source! Of course controlling what someone thinks is pretty difficult.

Oh I know! Any good person has nothing to hide, so we could try to normalize everyone knowing everyone elses details, down the the point that you pretty much know what everyone is thinking. Might be weird at first, but only people with bad intentions would be scared or really feel weird about it. Lots of almost-bad people probably would be safely controlled in such a system. It would be so _safe_!

</comment><comment><USER6> Why programs must not limit the freedom to run them

by Richard Stallman

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit- freed...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to- run.html)

[...] Some developers propose to place usage restrictions in software licenses to ban using the program for certain purposes, but that would be a disastrous path. [...]

A license condition against fraud would be superfluous in a country where fraud is a crime. But why not a condition against using it for torture, a practice that states frequently condone when carried out by the "security forces"?

[...]

A condition against torture would not work, because enforcement of any free software license is done through the state. A state that wants to carry out torture will ignore the license. When victims of US torture try suing the US government, courts dismiss the cases on the grounds that their treatment is a national security secret. If a software developer tried to sue the US government for using a program for torture against the conditions of its license, that suit would be dismissed too. In general, states are clever at making legal excuses for whatever terrible things they want to do. Businesses with powerful lobbies can do it too.

[...]

What if the condition were against some specialized private activity? For instance, PETA proposed a license that would forbid use of the software to cause pain to animals with a spinal column. Or there might be a condition against using a certain program to make or publish drawings of Mohammad. Or against its use in experiments with embryonic stem cells. Or against using it to make unauthorized copies of musical recordings.

[...]

It is not clear these would be enforcible. Free software licenses are based on copyright law, and trying to impose usage conditions that way is stretching what copyright law permits, stretching it in a dangerous way. Would you like books to carry license conditions about how you can use the information in them?

What if such conditions are legally enforcible—would that be good?

[...]

The fact is, people have very different ethical ideas about the activities that might be done using software. [...] If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might write a program allowing use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan might allow use only for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.

[...]

The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.

[...]

The conclusion is clear: a program must not restrict what jobs its users do with it. Freedom 0 must be complete. We need to stop torture, but we can't do it through software licenses. The proper job of software licenses is to establish and protect users' freedom.</comment>


Search traceroute in godaddy. Any idea why? - <AUTHOR> https://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchresults.aspx?checkAvail=1&tmskey=&domainToCheck=traceroute <comment><USER2> [https://www.godaddy.com/help?foo=traceroute](https://www.godaddy.com/help?foo=traceroute)</comment>


Nearly half the world lives on less than $5.50 a day - <AUTHOR> https://m.phys.org/news/2018-10-world-day-bank.html <comment><USER2> Although the report is cautionary, it definitely shows how far we've come in just the last 20 years!

> "At the $5.50-a-day threshold, global poverty fell to 46 percent from 67 > percent between 1990 and 2015. The bank reported last month that extreme > poverty had fallen to 10 percent in 2015."

The article just cautions this rate will slow down as the global economy slows, and although rates world wide are much better, certain areas (specifically sub-sahara africa) are not doing so well.</comment>


The Smithsonian is using 3‑D printing to copy artifacts - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/art-forgery/395282/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> When I read something like this I always think: "The future is fun"</comment>


Openprinter Project Wiki - <AUTHOR> http://openprinter.wikia.com/wiki/Openprinter_Wiki

<comment><USER2> It seems that they are missing a leader (or benevolent dictator)..

There are also two similar projects about graphics cards: "The Open Graphics Project" ( <http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php> ) which aims to build a "modern" graphics card, but unfortunately things are a bit too costly for people who might be interested :S As an outsider, quick look shows that this project has stalled :S

And an alternative called "Project VGA" ( <http://wacco.mveas.com/> ) that aims to develop a simple and low cost card. But also no news about progress for a year now.. :S

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that creating a print head will be the biggest difficulty an open printer project would encounter. They might be able to look at expired inkjet patents to avoid duplicating the last 40 years of printing research, but then they still have to find a way to manufacture the jets.</comment>


Color: We Are Not Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/color-says-not-shutting-down/ <comment><USER2> How on earth did it take over 3 hours for someone at Color or Sequoia to confirm the company is in-fact not dead? You'd think employees/founders/investors would have been tweeting like crazy to deny the rumor.

<comment><USER3> Because the last thing you want to do is have employees (even execs) shooting their mouths off in the heat of the moment and saying something stupid.

You want to regroup, figure out WTF is going on and how the rumor started, and figure out a sensible statement that is going to calm this down instead of rile it up some more.

<comment><USER4> > saying something stupid

What kind of stupid thing could you say? The company is either dissolving or it is not. Seems pretty easy to figure out.

<comment><USER5> In any normal population of sufficient size you're going to have some screwball outliers.

<comment><USER3> And in any situation of sufficient gravity and chaos _everyone_ becomes a screwball outlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, I guess they've found the person who leaks everything to the media... It says VentureBeat confirmed the email was sent to just one person. I wonder if this was a mole hunt.

Still, Color is gash and an embarrassment to the whole industry, and its death would not be mourned by many.

</comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately, not giving up and willing yourself to success isn't enough to overcome an nonexistent business model.

<comment><USER8> Why waste time on frivolities like a "business model" when you can dupe investors out of $40M and spend it on a lavish office and developing a lame photo-sharing app that could have been done with $100K?

If anything makes me think we're in a bubble, it's companies like Color and the people who pump money into them.

<comment><USER9> But... with that budget how could possible afford to buy both color.com and colour.com! Withour colour.com dozens of people around in countries using British English won't be able to be confused by your app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A similar pattern was recently in the news here: Onlive.

August 17, 2012 > _OnLive lays off all employees, assets sold to new company_ [0]

5:20 PM - August 17, 2012 > _OnLive Denies It's Shutting Down, Won't Comment on Layoffs_ [1]

08/20/2012 10:11:33 AM PDT > _Game company OnLive reveals new details of restructuring_ [2]

Winding down a business might mean they are trying to orchestrate a merger or aq-hire. Or a whole host of other things. For which you would not want your name in the news (sensitive negotiations, or wat-ever).

______________________

 _"We don't respond to rumors, but the service is not shutting down," OnLive said._ [3]

______________________

[0] [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176180/OnLive_lays_off_al...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176180/OnLive_lays_off_all_employees.php)

[1] [http://www.tomshardware.com/news/OnLive-Shutting-Down- Layoff...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/OnLive-Shutting-Down-Layoffs- Bankrupt-Statement,16993.html)

[2] [http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_21351760/game- co...](http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_21351760/game-company- onlive-reveals-new-details-restructuring?source=rss)

[3] "Just a short while ago reports emerged that the gaming and virtual- desktop software start-up had issued pink slips to all of its employees and was effectively shutting down the service. The first part, we're told by an OnLive spokesperson, is not the case." [http://allthingsd.com/20120817/onlive- denies-reports-that-it...](http://allthingsd.com/20120817/onlive-denies- reports-that-its-shutting-down/)

<comment><USER10> [update] > <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4667217>

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Assuming Color's statement wasn't a lie that's some pretty shitty reporting by Venture Beat. Reporting a companies board has voted to shut it down is pretty big news and should require much more verification that one single email. Tech 'journalists' need to do a better job when reporting this sort of thing.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. Both Color _and_ Venture Beat have some serious debriefing to do. Assuming Color is right, a lot of damage has already been done. In that case, in (serious, non-tabloid) print journalism, the publication's reputation would be tarnished; in online journalism, it may be just the company's. Somebody sure owes the public an explanation into what exactly just happened here.

EDIT: not _somebody_. It's Venture Beat that owes the explanation. Either they stand by the story even if they're willing to do that without full verification, or they must apologize for jumping the gun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to see an AmA with a Color employee to get the inside scoop on what's going on there. It must be devastating for morale for a rumor to spread that everybody assumed was going to happen at some point anyway (was anybody surprised when their shutdown was announced? I didn't even bat an eye) and then have to come out and vehemently deny the rumor. And all the while the absentee CEO is galavanting around the world on some exotic "sabbatical" as his company burns to the ground. Only a matter of time until this news resurfaces again, only next time it will be for real.

</comment><comment><USER13> My question would be: Why not?

<comment><USER14> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that most funds are only allowed to invest capital once, so any of the $40M they get back (which I'd hope would be a somewhat large chunk) can no longer be invested.

A smarter move may be looking at and pursuing several pivots, use that 40M to create a few startups within a startup and see if you can get something started that will provide a healthy return.

<comment><USER15> Exactly, although they have a tarnished brand. They could find the most talented developer and become somewhat of a Mobile incubator. They've got a lot of deals and scale having dealt with Verizon, physical space and employees. They could use Color labs as the shell for lots of products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That email felt weird, didn't look like an email you'd send to employees to tell them you were shutting down.

<comment><USER17> Then it's weird that the board did not go out and deny that the email was authentic at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a slight aside - is it just me, or is their logo basically a rip-off of the Royal Air Force roundel?

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I'm still trying to figure out how a company who has $41 million in funding and over 400K users can't seem to come up with a business plan that generates revenue.

Is this another example of buyer beware when you invest in these kinds of companies?

<comment><USER19> 400K users? total registered users? surely that can't be active users.

<comment><USER20> AppData says 460,000 active monthly users[1]. The original VentureBeat article quoted AppData at 440,000, which is where the ~400,000 number is coming from.

Edit: In reply to the grandparent, because of the huge amount of money Color raised, they would need to make something like ten thousand dollars per user at their current user numbers to meet expectations. Since that's obviously impossible, it makes sense for them to avoid revenue entirely until their user numbers hit eight digits at least.

[1] <http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/200067376723055-color>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I bet color is getting way more traffic than normal with this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER22> In other news, Paris Hilton stated "I'm not quitting"</comment>


SimCity: 10 Minutes of Gameplay Footage  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpjZkAzXKQ&feature=g-u-u

<comment><USER2> This looks really neat. Is there a release date yet?</comment>


Drag and drop programming environment - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sharendipity.com/unveiling-our-new-user-interface-part-2 Tipping their cap to Scratch, Sharendipity has a cool drag and drop interface for defining behaviors and control flow within custom software. <comment><USER2> These visual programming environments take the wrong approach. All they really help with is the syntax, which is the easy part.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> check out the rest of their message... sharendipity is building a platform where all of these programming elements can be re-used without the need to program. you can build a complete application without punching a single semi- colon.</comment>


Bank of America Website Still Down – Cyber Attack? - <AUTHOR> http://ontechies.com/2011/10/01/bank-of-america-website-still-down-cyber-attack/

<comment><USER2> Warning for iPad users: the submitted site has the OnSwipe malware installed. (Yes, it is malware--it is typically installed without the site owner's knowledge and it crashes visitors browsers)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are funny... the submitted site is a blog hosted by wordpress.com.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and wordpress.com by default checks the user agent, and if the user is on an iPad it replaces the theme chosen by the blog author with the OnSwipe theme. (The blog author can disable this by going to their blog settings, and finding the setting laughably labeled something like "optimize for mobile devices" and turning that off).

There's no obvious warning when you set up a blog at wordpress.com that it will do this, and I expect it is contrary to what most blog owners expect--one of the whole points of iPad is that you do NOT need a special mobile site for it.

There is a link at the bottom of the OnSwipe theme to switch to the standard site. Unfortunately by that point the damage has been done. OnSwipe uses a lot of memory--enough that if you have any other pages open they are likely to be forced out of cache, which is annoying. Worse, there's a good chance that it will run iPad Safari out of memory completely and cause it to crash.

If it actually did something useful, there might be some excuse for this, but for most blogs the OnSwipe theme isn't more readable than the theme the blog author picked, and the OnSwipe them has horrible scrolling performance. (It apparently is handling scrolling itself via JavaScript, overriding the native scrolling in the browser, so the result is the scrolling is jerky and doesn't feel like any other scrolling on the iPad).

Hence, I have concluded it is malware, because it provides no benefit to the user, and often provides harm (such as browser crashing), and neither the user reading the page nor the blog author whose blog it is on consented specifically to it (any consent was buried in some wordpress terms and conditions saying they could mess with your blog if they wanted to).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Of the 30k they're planning to lay off, they may want to whitelist a few network security guys.</comment>


Dark web finds Bitcoin increasingly more of a problem than a help - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/dark-web-finds-bitcoin-increasingly-more-of-a-problem-than-a-help-tries-other-digital-currencies.html <comment><USER2> took them long enough</comment>


Theshadowbrokers releases key for hacked NSA tools along with manifesto - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/dont-forget-your-base-867d304a94b1 <comment><AUTHOR> In case you don't want to slog through the headache inducing nonsense that is the manifesto, password is at the bottom. You're welcome.

<comment><USER2> You are doing God's work.</comment></comment>


An insight into bipolar disorder - <AUTHOR> http://adamhutchinson.co.uk/an-insight-into-bipolar/

<comment><USER2> This is theology, not science.</comment>


In praise of the Trekkiest "Trek" of all - <AUTHOR> http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/now-voyager-the-least-beloved-star-trek-offered-some-of-the-franchises-strongest-feminist-messages

<comment><USER2> I love Voyager. It's my favourite. I didn't like the original series and I dislike the "new" films even more, but at least they have nice visual effects.</comment>


Why France is eyeing nuclear power again - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614579/why-france-is-eyeing-nuclear-power-again/ <comment><USER2> The answer is simple - because its better and more reliable than renewables.</comment>


Mathematical Treasures - <AUTHOR> https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasures-from-the-smith-and-plimpton-collections-index <comment><USER2> This index only includes "treasures" from two collections - there's a more comprehensive index here: [https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/index- to-m...](https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/index-to- mathematical-treasures)

My personal favorite is this one, the only mathematical proof ever published by a U.S. President — James A. Garfield's 1876 proof of the Pythagorean Theorem: [https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...](https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical- treasure-james-a-garfields-proof-of-the-pythagorean-theorem)

</comment><comment><USER3> Oxford's Bodleian library also recently (partially) opened its post-1500s books and manuscripts collection online:

[https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk](https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk)

(Doesn't include their famous illuminated medieval manuscripts collection though.)</comment>


A General Theory of Reactivity - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kriskowal/gtor/ <comment><USER2> Until I saw the github link, I was a little excited -- chemical kinetics is still a somewhat empirical field, and the ab initio methods of calculating reaction rates an area of active research.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244005)</comment>


Lolcats: deeper than you think? - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/11/15/pathos_lolcats/print.html

<comment><USER2> He might have somewhat of a point, but he utterly kills it by playing up the pictures. Something funny becomes signs of deep, passionate regret. (Was the walrus saga really clever at all, or tragic at all, past the first one?) Lolsecrets has "world-weary" cats. Lolsecrets is not very funny. It's a very poor example of lolcattery. And I know it's snobbish, but I don't like how it completely avoids talking about Caturday, which would have explained why people like lolcats much more succinctly (it depicts animals, which we see as having subhuman intelligence, saying things in a broken manner; the humor comes from being able to imagine certain cats saying certain things) and without the drama.

<comment><USER3> What is undeniable is the culture woven under it all, of which lolcats are just an expression channel.

The article is worth a read. The author argues that, beyond those merely comic, best lolcat pictures spark a giggle because of the human tragedy they depict.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but I'm really not certain they do. Lolcats don't exist as measures of tragedy.

There might be some amount of recognition there: we laugh because we imagine the cats as humans, saying the things they do. But that isn't the same thing as all as reflecting tragedy.

I think a better article would be one analyzing just how willing people are to laugh at things that aren't funny, given any reason at all. The first bunch of lolcats were funny. Now, most of them are pretty stupid. All of the spinoffs - lolpresident comes to mind - are incredibly stupid. And yet, people enjoy them, and laugh hard at them, because they've been conditioned to think that big words over a picture are funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"...depicts a male and female unicorn standing on a sliver of land in the rain as Noah's Ark sails away. Having arrived too late, all the unicorns can do is watch the ark recede into the distance as the waters rise around them. The image conveys so much regret -- the idea that we were so close, that we could still have these magical creatures among us today if only we'd been more patient. It's the sadness of missed opportunities."_

Am I the only one who has no idea what the article's point is? Hehe.

I mean, I imagine you could write an article all about, say, reading lamps. If you _really_ wanted to. But what's the point?

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the real "web 2.0" story, percolating under the surface is 4chan.org.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?i...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?incamp=article_popular_2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated._

Damn it, Icanhascheezburger.com is _not_ Web 2.0.

<comment><USER8> "Web 2.0 describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies."

Wikipedia seems to think it is. How is ichc different in any significant way from youtube?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think lolcats just represent infantilism.

<http://xkcd.com/231/> (<\-- you've already seen it)

Take a glance at the comments at Icanhascheezburger if you don't believe.

</comment><comment><USER10> Somehow, I'm having a really hard time taking an article about lolcats seriously. (btw I love lolcats. But _analysing_ them?)</comment>


Ask HN: A reverse proxy with shareable requests and reponses logs? - <AUTHOR> We are currently using Runscope at my company, to proxy some of our external calls to third-party services.
Their traffic inspector is extremely valuable to us as it allows us to share nice error logs with a particularily crappy PSP when things go wild on their side.
Example request log: https://www.runscope.com/public/037911f3-7b8f-4992-b30e-46735aad4425/0bb2105d-243b-4e7b-8640-42a308c84f05
Unfortunately, Runscope is deprecating their traffic inspector after the CA Tech acquisition.
HN, do you know any alternative offering this feature? <comment><USER2> I can't speak to alternatives (I don't know of any with a comparable feature set unfortunately) but I do want to clarify that this was not due to the acquisition. You'll have to take my word for it, but the planning for this deprecation was underway more than a year before we started talking to buyers. This product was just not commercially viable despite being very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear from you, thanks for the clarification. I agree this feature was becoming more and more of a niche as the reverse-proxy market evolves along with K8s and the whole ecosystem. I really liked the simplicity of this Runscope product ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you want a custom solution to this using open source technologies, I'm a software consultant and have built this many times. Send me an email if you need any help/advice.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use stackdriver tracing. Somtimes, mitm proxy.</comment>


A complete Internet web server built into an Ethernet (RJ-45) jack - <AUTHOR> http://www.inventables.com/technologies/miniature-web-server

<comment><USER2> Off topic-ish:

Is inventables actually just linkbait garbage which happens to also sell things? They never list the vendor of their products, the prices are always high (often twice that of retail), and they never have any technical details or volume pricing.

Oh, you're interested in this Sorghum based "Non-Toxic Decorative Wood Composite?" [1] Well, you can buy a 4"x3" sample for $15 but they won't tell you who makes it (Kieri USA [2] does) or the cost for boards.

The manufacturer is usually only a Google search away, and I'm willing to pay a premium for a small sample, but I'm not going to order even samples unless I can get more detailed information. Does Inventables actually serve any purpose other than to act as linkbait for a bunch of interesting products?

[1] [http://www.inventables.com/technologies/non-toxic- decorative...](http://www.inventables.com/technologies/non-toxic-decorative- wood-composite) [2] <http://www.kireiusa.com>

<comment><USER3> Yes, basically. Its a storefront for someone who sells at 100% markup stuff you can get elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK, it's got an Ethernet jack and a Web server on one end. What's on the other end? If I were designing a clothes dryer or coffee machine and wanted to Internet-enable it, how would I hook up the signals from the control panel to the jack? Is there some standard bus or serial protocol that appliance manufacturers use for their onboard computers?

<comment><USER5> It's a manufacturer-specific serial protocol--NOT standard. You can find the command reference here: <http://www.lantronix.com/pdf/XPort-Pro_CR.pdf>

But, if you're really interested in internet-enabling a new product, you'd likely be better off selecting a microcontroller with built-in Ethernet (or an Arduino with Ethernet shield, if prototyping). In my experience, products like the XPort were better for manufacturers looking to internet-enable a legacy device with a free serial port.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm. $200.

You can get an Arduino with an ethernet shield for about $75-80.

This does not appear to have any detailed tech specs on the linked page,detail on customisability/programmability or on the interconnects offered. But even if we allow it some leniency on that I figure an Arduino is still the no brainer choice :)

<comment><USER7> It looks like a Lantronix (<http://lantronix.com>) XPort, which can be had for much less than $200 from various electronics suppliers. For example, I just found the XP1001000-03R variant for $51 (qty. 1) at Arrow.

As far as the product being designed for hobbyists - hmm - it doesn't really have that feel to it. I think the intended market is more along the lines of one-off or low production volume industrial control hardware, test equipment, etc. One use I've seen documented was as an out-of-band control channel on a very high end FPGA board.

<comment><USER8> A classmate of mine (Junior-level EE) used the Lantronix with an ATmega 8-bit controller. Lantronix sent him some Java, and the thing just worked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Certainly not new, I know digi.com sells a lot of these things since at least 2008. Look for the Digi Connect products. The interfaces on the other side can be as simple as RS-232.

<comment><USER10> They've been on the market for a lot longer than that, actually. But it looks like some incremental improvements have been made over the years, quite interesting really.

[http://www.digi.com/products/wireless-wired-embedded- solutio...](http://www.digi.com/products/wireless-wired-embedded- solutions/solutions-on-module/digi-connect/)

[http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded- device-s...](http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded-device- servers/xport.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That appears to be a Lantronics XPORT, been using them for over 7 years. Interesting they are selling them for over 200 we buy them for 70 each, Now that's markup....

<comment><USER5> Yeah, looks like an XPort. Maybe this is the evaluation kit, which comes with the carrier board for ~$150-200. It's been a while since I used one (probably 7 years ago), but the serial interface was rather limited. To develop firmware for the XPort itself, you needed an SDK only available under NDA for customers they were willing to support (we were such a customer and the SDK was reasonably usable). It was a cool idea & a great way to Ethernet-enable serial devices, but nowadays something like the Arduino with Ethernet shield is probably more accessible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish someone would design a firewall that is just an RJ-45 jack with a few dip switches to open/close commonly needed ports, the rest closed by default.

<comment><USER13> There's was a company who tried this kind of thing: Selling a wireless card which embedded a linux powered firewall:

<http://www.yoggie.com/New_Yoggie/Welcome.html> <http://www.yoggie- gatekeeper.co.uk/>

I don't know but it seems they failed a funding round.

<comment><USER14> The "Killer Nic" is semi-sucessful in the gaming arena:

<http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/killer-nic-m1/>

It basically is linux on a NIC card that does packet reordering for lower latency, with varying degrees of success depending the situation.

They're also moving into wireless:

[http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/bigfoot-networks-killer- wirel...](http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/bigfoot-networks-killer-wireless-n- adaptors-deliver-breakthrough-wi-fi-performance-for-notebooks/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting product. Doing a quick google search I have seen prices under $100. Unfortunately, it looks like it only has serial out.

I have been looking for a small single board linux computer (preferably open source) to use as a gateway and/or web server for embedded projects. I would like something in between an Arduino and Beagleboard.

Arduino is great for running simple web servers, but it would be nice to have a Linux OS with some familiar tools to be able to build more complex web apps. Products like the Beagleboard fill this need, but they are complex and expensive if you decide to bundle it with your product.

If you don't mind external hosting you can always send your data to the cloud, but I like the simplicity of a self contained product.

The closest I have found to these requirement is at Dangerous Prototypes (sill in development).

      Web Platform v2
      - 210MHz ARM926             - 2x SPI
      - Hopefully 2 layers!       - Linux
      - 4x USART                  - 2x 10 bit a/d
      - ethernet                  - < $100?

Forum: [http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&...](http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=935&start=180#p16876)

Wiki: [http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Robert:_AT91SAM9260_Linu...](http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Robert:_AT91SAM9260_Linux_development_board)

<comment><USER16> Try a SheevaPlug. Its a little ARM with a full-on debian install. About $80.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug>

Or if you're into x86 try something from pcEngines. A bit more expensive, but no crosscompiler required to build packages on your desktop.

<http://www.pcengines.ch/>

<comment><USER15> Ahh yes. I forgot to mention that. Plug computers seem like the best option right now. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I sure hope its IPv6 if everyone is going to start putting web servers into their socks.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's not RJ45, it's properly called 8P8C.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is one of the smaller devices like this I've seen. I am really curious about the photographic opportunities that could be open with such a device. Footage could be directly streamed online via ethernet cable connected directly to the camera...

</comment><comment><USER20> could this be used the same way those wall outlet/pluggable web connected computers were for hacking networks? i.e. you replace someone's existing ethernet wall jack with this one w/a server in it, and they would NEVER find your machine piggy backing off their internal network.

</comment><comment><USER21> does it means that interface jacks have not advanced even a bit in the last few decades??

<comment><USER22> If you're referring to the physical jack, then, essentially, no. They were standardised in the 1970s, and the form factor hasn't changed at all, while electronic parts have become much much smaller over the same time frame.

There may have been advances within the connector itself, to improve the signal-carrying properties of the internal connections, but the overall design of the connector is basically unchanged.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who are marketing technology influencers? - <AUTHOR> I want to connect to tech-saavy marketing influencers who have a decent audience. I'm particularly interested in advanced email marketing, personalization, friends referral programs, funnel optimization etc. Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> Look at Marketo and their account based marketing. Definitely the best with personalization. Salesforce's blog is also great.

Convince and Convert, Kiss Metrics, Avinash Kaushnik (Google analytics evangelist) are also must follows.</comment>


LIGO gravitational wave detectors that hunt for ripples in space-time upgraded - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/03/19/701498785/massive-u-s-machines-that-hunt-for-ripples-in-space-time-just-got-an-upgrade <comment><USER2> [paraphrasing]

"there's a lot of confusion about if space stretches, doesn't that also stretch the light being mesured...

... notice that I didn't say whether space stretches or that time slows down (in response to a passing wave) - since we don't know how exactly space and time are mixed up, we just record that it took longer for the light to come back, but we don't say whether it was a difference in time or a difference in space that cause the slowdown"

The Technical Challenges of Measuring Gravitational Waves - Rana Adhikari of LIGO [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D2j8nTjOZ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D2j8nTjOZ4)

<comment><USER3> This article tries to explain:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/09/15/ask-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/09/15/ask- ethan-if-light-contracts-and-expands-with-space-how-do-we-detect- gravitational-waves/)

"Ask Ethan: If Light Contracts And Expands With Space, How Do We Detect Gravitational Waves?"

It also links to the FAQ at LIGO:

[https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/faq](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/faq)

which for this question ends with:

"This varying pattern of misaligned laser beams, observed and recorded over the time it takes for the gravitational wave to pass tells us two things: 1. How much the arms changed length during the light-beams' journeys and, 2. the frequency at which, or how quickly the arms changed lengths (longer then shorter then longer, etc.) in response to the gravitational wave. This information can tell us what generated the gravitational wave in the first place.

In this scenario, the actual wavelengths of the beams of light have no bearing on the much more important interference pattern. The effects of the length changes in the arms far outweigh any change in the wavelength of the laser, so we can virtually ignore it altogether."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case anyone is interested, here is an Iron Python tutorial for finding colliding black holes in some LIGO data.

[https://www.gw- openscience.org/s/events/GW170104/LOSC_Event_...](https://www.gw- openscience.org/s/events/GW170104/LOSC_Event_tutorial_GW170104.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=701498785&rid=1002](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=701498785&rid=1002)

</comment><comment><USER6> I attended a conference recently here in India about the Ligo India project. I am on the team that will do the data pipelines for Ligo. The sheer engineering feat makes my software engineering bit like a kindergartener undertaking. Truly massive and impressive.

</comment><comment><USER7> The detectors are a big L-shaped pipeline that lasers bounce around in. Doesn't that just measure the X and Y axis of gravitational waves? What about Z-axis? Shouldn't they drill down as far as they can and add another arm?

<comment><USER8> I forgot to add, the reason they don't drill down is because it's hard and expensive. The arms are 4km, and to get the required sensitivity they bounce the light about 300 times before detecting it.

Drilling down 4km would be quite expensive, especially since you need a large mirror assembly[1] and vibration isolation system[2] down there. The mirror assembly and vibration isolation systems would also have to be of a different design, further increasing cost and complexity.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/ligo/status/601848954645401601](https://twitter.com/ligo/status/601848954645401601)

[2]: [https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration- isolation](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation)

<comment><USER9> It would be waaaay easier to put additional detector 90 degrees away on the surface of the Earth than it would be to drill 4km into the ground (and service mirrors there!).

<comment><USER8> But having three arms on the surface still makes the detector blind to the third dimension.

<comment><USER10> Imagine a giant cube around the entire earth that touches in 6 places -- one on each cube face. Pick 3 faces and place a detector where each touches the earth -- on the surface. You can rotate the detectors around on the surface so that you get an arm in each axis relative to the center of the earth.

<comment><USER8> Right, that's basically what they do now by building multiple detector facilities. I was talking about multiple arms in a single location.

<comment><USER9> This isn't necessary since the wave looks the same at all locations on Earth.

<comment><USER8> It can come directly from above, in which case you can't discriminate between from above or from below as it'll hit all arms at the same time if they're at a single location. You'd also have poor directionality.

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't the Spacetime Cube be just as vulnerable to the perpendicularity problem, though? It might have more sensitivity in near-perpendicular cases, but that's simply because there are more detectors.

<comment><USER8> As mentioned, if multiple detectors are not spatially coinciding, then one can use the time difference between detection events as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to recommend this talk by Daniel Sigg about LIGO [1]. It's technical and explains the design choices that went into building the detector. I found it to be very interesting.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4gE- hSQm68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4gE-hSQm68)

</comment><comment><USER13> > Einstein realized that when massive objects such as black holes collide, the > impact sends shock waves through space-time that are like the ripples in > water created by tossing a pebble in a pond.

What? AFAIK, "like the ripples in water" describes opposite theory.

<comment><USER14> Uh, what opposite theory?

The "ripples in water" only refer to the radiation behaving like classical waves, of which water vaves are an example.

<comment><USER13> Theory of Ether, of course. Waves in Ether is like waves in water. :-/

<comment><USER15> The visual simile is, of course, not perfect, but the simile is not provided for people that knowledgeable on the science in the first place. If you happen to find a more appropriate simile that people follow, please make it known.

<comment><USER13> The visual simile is Ok, but it contradicts theory of Relativity developed by Einstein, because theory was based on _absence_ of these ripples in vacuum, as proven by Michelson–Morley_experiment, which leaded to assumption that c(vacuum) = const.

IMHO, author should change text to "like the ripples in fabric of pond created by tossing a pebble in a pond", to be in line with Einstein.

<comment><USER16> Michaelson-Morley was about a medium in which electromagnetic waves traveled (and in fact proved that it didn't exist). We're dealing with gravitational waves here, which travel... on... space-time itself? But it's not a medium in the sense that the aether was supposed to be.)

At any rate, even the simile doesn't contradict either SR or GR. It's just hard to describe what the waves are traveling on.

In particular, the problem with aether is that it was a non-relativistically- invariant medium (that is, by moving, you could change your speed with respect to the medium). Whatever light and gravity travel in is relativistically invariant, but the waves-in-water analogy for how waves spread is still perfectly appropriate.

<comment><USER17> > We're dealing with gravitational waves here, which travel... on... space- > time itself?

It's probably easiest to get there by considering the breaking of symmetries of spacetime.

Let's start with the maximally symmetric spacetime: Minkowski spacetime AKA flat spacetime. We can choose any point in the entire spacetime and measure the same field values everywhere. Conventionally we'd normalize the everywhere-and-everywhen-identical measurements to zero.

Let's add a spherically symmetric central mass of uniform density, giving us the Schwarzschild spacetime. This spacetime has two new properties: firstly, there is a location-dependence of the field-values, and secondly the spacetime is asymptotically flat. The gravitational field values will depend on spatial distance from the central mass, and conventionally we normalize so that they will be larger closer to it and smaller further from it. If our central mass emits light, we get the same result: a falling-off of the _local_ intensity of the light with distance, and the "light field" is just the value everywhere of the intensity of the light. At great enough distance, the measurement of gravitational field values is practically indistinguishable from what one would get if measuring Minkowski spacetime anywhere. Likewise, if the object is bright, then at great enough distance we fail to gather up enough light to see the central object: in every direction we look, we see the blackness expected of an empty spacetime. Our field values depend on one particular _space-like_ coordinate; we can vary the other two, or the time-like coordinate, and the field values remain unchanged.

Let's now add a bump on the surface of the sphere, much like a large mountain made up of the same uniformly dense material. Now our gravitational field values will depend on where we measure relative to the bump. The field values at a pair of adjacent points in this spacetime will differ from those we would get in Schwarzchild spacetime. For example, if we see the bump as on the left of the sphere-with-bump then if we measure slightly clockwise or counterclockwise around the object we will see a change in angle reported by a sensitive mass detector that we would not see in the case of the perfectly smooth sphere. If our bump is much brighter than the sphere, and they are both mutually transparent, then we can also tell that the bump is on the left, or behind, or in front of the sphere on which it rests.

This is still an asymptotically flat spacetime: at great distances, our measurements barely register the difference from true Minkowski spacetime. The source of light and gravitation is pointlike at large but closer-in distances so is asymptotically Schwarzschild. Closer in still we begin to register observables that betray the presence of the bump. This is still a time- independent spacetime, though. The field values (gravitational or visual) at a given point are identical at all times; they only differ between points where there is a difference in at least one of the _space-like_ coordinates.

Now let's add some angular momentum, and have the bump be on the equator of the spinning sphere. Now if we choose a point in spacetime, and with a fairly tame choice of coordinates (polar, say, or Cartesian, or their 4-d extensions Schwarzschild coordinates or Minkowski coordinates) if we choose a point in the equatorial plane and hold the three space-like coordinates constant then the field value is _time-dependent_ \-- it varies with the angular momentum of the rotating sphere-plus-equatorial-bump.

Let's make the bump bright, and the sphere it sits on dim, and both opaque. Visually, in this time-independent spacetime, if we are in the equatorial plane and not too far away, we will see the bump disappearing behind the bulk of the sphere, then reappearing, brightening as it gets closer, reaching a brightness peak when it closest to us, then dimming prior to its eclipse. If the rotation rate is constant, then the field-values at our chosen equatorial- plane point rise and fall according to the rotation rate. If we choose different points anywhere in this spacetime, we can predict what the field- values will be based on straightfoward laws.

One thing to note is that the gravitational and light measurements line up: gravimetry and optical telescopes will agree that the "bump" is visible or not, or is closest to us, or not.

The instant of contact during a neutron-star/black-hole (NS/BH) inspiral corresponds to the bright bump on our dim sphere. Future to that period the spacetime looks more and more like Schwarzschild. Past from that period, the bump resolves into a separate roughly spherically symmetrical body (the NS) in a mutual orbit with the BH, and further past the orbit is wider and slower. So we have a more complicated, dynamical time-dependent spacetime; it's still asymptotically flat (and far out but less far, it's still Schwarzschild-like): at enormous distances one might not be able to resolve the two objects -- you get a pretty stable point-like system with all but the most exquisitely precise (to the point of physically implausibly precise) instruments --and at even greater distances, this spacetime will look like empty gravity-free void.

The real spacetime around an astrophysical NS/BH merger has a lot of other masses, and a metric expansion of space at large distances. However, we can remove some of that "foreground" and adapt to the difference between the expanding background and an asymptotically flat one, and reasonably predict the field-values a given NS/BH merger would create at a point in spacetime corresponding to a laboratory on Earth at a given time.

> waves ... which travel

The distribution of the electromagnetic (tensor) field-values generated by the objects in the paragraphs above obey the massless wave equation. Since the distribution of the curvature (also tensor) field-values generated by them line up everywhere, then they too must obey the massless wave equation.

In practice, we divide up spacetime into time-and-space, and the tensors into time-varying vectors and scalars. We choose an idealized background -- Minkowski or Schwarzschild -- and then "correct" it to match what our less- and-less symmetrical systems generate. At reasonable distances, we can ignore most post-Newtonian corrections, and do perturbation theory on linearized gravity. In that, we take a view of a detector at a point (here on Earth, say, sufficiently far away) gathering up a field value that is the result of some past configuration of the inspiralling-binary source. The detector-result is essentially a deviation from the value one would expect from the background that would be sourced by the inspiralling binary in a much more symmetrical (i.e. Schwarzschild or even Minkowski) configuration. The signal is, importantly, periodic.

The theoretical object which encodes gravitational waves is the _difference_ between an idealized time-independent maximally-symmetrical metric and the dynamical time-dependent metric as inferred from actual measurements, minus all contributions to the real metric other than that of the target binary. That is, a perturbation field. One would write this as g_{\mu\nu} = \eta_{\mu\nu} + h_{\mu\nu} + O(\\{h_{\mu\nu}}^2) + ... where g is the real, measurable metric, \eta is the Minkowski metric (although one could use a less symmetrical background if one wished), h is the perturbation field, h^2, h^3, ... are higher-order perturbations caused by general-relativistic effects. If those higher-order effects are small because the binaries are moving slow compared to light and aren't too far away in the universe, then we can ignore them, and \eta combines with h linearly.

Electromagnetism is a linear theory in this limit too, handily, and there are analogies that can be drawn in this limit. One of those is that gravitational radiation propagates in a wave-like way very similarly to electromagnetic radiation, and further that we can analogize between the electric and magnetic parts of an EM wave and the squash and strain parts or + and x parts of a gravitational wave.

PS: I didn't have time to proof-read this before submitting, and hope I won't have to come back in some hours and apologize for howling errors or crazily- hard-to-follow leaps. :-)

<comment><USER13> It's very good post, except for the fact that you missed the point of discussion completely.

Minkowski space-time is math. Time is used as coordinate. In reality, we cannot walk 10 seconds to the left.

Math is important (major) instrument for physicist, because it's allows us to make predictions for things, which we cannot see with our senses, but here we are talking about nature of the vacuum.

In short, about 100 years ago, the dominant theory was Theory of Ether. Ether was imagined like completely transparent gas or fluid, which transfers light and EM waves like water transfers sound waves.

This theory was replaced by Theory of General Relativity, because ToGR makes much more precious predictions than ToE. The one of the key experiments was Michelson–Morley experiment, which tried to answer is Ether is moves with Earth, so we are moving with our Ether, or is it static, so we are moving trough it at high speed (because of rotation around Sun and around Milki Way center). However, experiment found no disturbances at all, which leads to assumption that there is no medium for EM waves at all.

With time, we have more and more evidence that vacuum is not empty space. (I will use word vacuum instead of Ether, because, like with atom or +/-, it is well-known therm).

1) QM in general. Especially Heisenberg principle of uncertainty. Small particles displays something like Brownian motion: their position is uncertain when they at rest, except that we cannot see that with eyes because, photons are too massive.

2) _Linear_ Sagnac interferometer demonstrates that light is captured with medium, which leads to assumption that physical vacuum is attached to objects like atmosphere is attached to planet. If so, then it's impossible to find distributions of physical vacuum in well isolated room, because vacuum will be still, like air in cabin of airplane. Only major events, like massive explosion, can shake air in the isolated cabin while plan travels through air.

3) Hubble constant is not a constant. It's measured with high precision, but it has different values for different frequencies. If these values are plotted, then they for exponential curve. It's means that light is just ages with distance traveled, i.e. it loses some energy to the medium.

4) LIGO found gravitational waves at 1E-18 precision, which means that Michelson-Morley experiment had much lower accuracy than necessary.

And so on.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla bear says Elon Musk makes Donald Trump look like an angel - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/10/tesla-bear-says-elon-musk-makes-donald-trump-look-like-an-angel.html <comment><USER2> I was hoping for an expose on Musk's treatment of employees and expectations and communication style for management, but this was not that.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. It's an article about nothing.</comment></comment>


"Black Mirror" isn't just predicting the future–it's causing it - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1513524/black-mirrors-bandersnatch-creates-the-future-not-predicts-it/ <comment><USER2> Netflix is already collecting a profile of every user based on what he chooses to watch. If users only watches violent series and movies, they will only get more violence in their recommendations.

Black Mirror isn't giving Netflix anything that they don't already have, but I agree that we should be worried with the overall scenario. The problem is that we aren't.

What happened with Facebook should have changed the way in which we see those big corporations that regularly register personal and behavioural data, but it didn't. Most still use Facebook, and they don't care.

It'll take much more for us to really worry.

<comment><USER3> So does Google with Youtube. But the step by step, sometimes in weird places, specific contextual questions is a more direct and personal survey, not so influenced by who are with you, or recomendations/trends on social networks.

Anyway, is not just social media or video sites, some games may be (or will be) collecting that kind of direct information too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How risky is it to hire a Product Designer on contract? - <AUTHOR> What has worked for you in the past and where have you faced issues? Have you found sites like Upwork to be reliable? Thanks! <comment><USER2> What is your definition of this role? Product designer could be anything from a web designer to mechanical engineer to business development focused. What's the key thing you need this role to do?

In general if you care about your product hiring based on lowest cost bidder isn't smart. I get cost is always a factor but race to the bottom sites like upwork are generally not the place to start. With some exceptions.

Last point if you don't have super solid and thorough requirements documentation already then avoid using someone in too different a time zone or culturally so you don't lose time in translation or time zone waiting. There are awesome people all over the world it isn't a talent situation but a communication one to avoid a learning curve on what can be such an important role.

Edit: contractor is totally fine and very common.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed response. To answer your questions

Looking for someone with a design background (strong creative + Figma + wire frame) skills to help build a prototype for web based software.

Have a detailed PRD/requirements doc so ideally would work together with this person to translate the requirements into a high fidelity MVP

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am a contract product designer, what do you need?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a portfolio I can see?

<comment><USER3> rwoodall.com - can email you more examples</comment></comment></comment>


The Willpower Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-willpower-paradox

<comment><USER2> I've felt this when starting on challenging programming tasks. "I WILL DO THIS" usually ends up with procrastination, or no real solutions coming to mind. Gently nudging my mind into wondering about the problem, poking it, thinking of ways to do it, thinking of ways to get out of doing it, then finally a tipping point is reached and I hold on for the motivational ride. It helps when you work for a company tolerant of this creative cycle, where motivation for a particular problem or project may come from nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> Original research paper: "Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense"

[http://www.psych.illinois.edu/~dalbarra/pubs/Wll%20I%20I%20w...](http://www.psych.illinois.edu/~dalbarra/pubs/Wll%20I%20I%20will.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Willfulness is the determination to implement my will, while willingness is the faith to base my actions on possibility.

As I've taken definite steps towards entrepreneurship, I've been having an emotional experience that feels like falling. Falling requires faith, but it is much better than standing. When I'm on the ground I know what I've got, and known outcomes are not compelling, but when I'm falling I don't know what might be, and the sense of discovery keeps pulling me forward.

<comment><USER5> This reminds me a lot about a blog post I wrote some weeks ago: [http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2010/05/07/the-cloud-or- the...](http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2010/05/07/the-cloud-or-the-ladder- choosing-a-career-strategy/) The cloud or the ladder, it's two different ways to view your career or even your life. I think most people on HN are clouders.

<comment><USER4> That is an interesting post. Your idea of an opportunity cloud is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. I even made a decision recently to stay at my current job instead of taking a somewhat better job, because I believe the opportunity potential is higher if I keep with what I am doing for a while longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do I apply this in my life? I want to get into shape... doesn't that already put me into the "I will" mode? How do I switch into the "Will I" mode?

<comment><USER7> Pick an easily measurable quantity related to your goal (like weight or waist circumference), measure it regularly and try to figure out how your behaviour influences it. Will regular exercise reduce weigth? How do the changes in weekly averages compare to the day-to-day (or even within the day) changes due to the normal food processing of the body? How long will it take me to undo the effect of thanksgiving with the family?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That is a cool article.

</comment><comment><USER9> Simplistic. Often in the real world both I will and will I are found together at different parts of the activity.

<comment><USER10> See Dijkstra's second rule:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504402></comment></comment>


Creative & Concept Design Logos - <AUTHOR> http://9lessons.blogspot.com/2009/04/creative-concept-design-logos.html

<comment><USER2> The reader may find the link below more helpful since it contains information about studios, profiles etc.

<http://logopond.com/gallery/></comment>


Status Quo Is Not God - <AUTHOR> http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/07/status-quo-is-not-god.html <comment><USER2> The "status quo" is bullshit. I can't speak for and in many ways don't understand the new generation, but if you have skill, you have skill. It shouldn't, and in my perspective, doesn't matter, what gender you are or what culture you're from or what your socio-economic status is. If you rely on your ethnicity, gender or economic status to succeed then you are not successful. Ego means nothing compared to knowledge and skill.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite podcasts? - <AUTHOR>
 I love podcasts - if I get stuck on a hard problem they're a great way to take a pause and let the mind wander while feeling productive.
(Or to reclaim time other wise lost to chores, commutes and other unavoidable time sinks)
For example as someone interested in infosec, Darknet Diaries and "Cyber" are both very good at keeping me in the loop on major trends.
For more "edutainment" Planet Money and Hidden Brain are great resources on behavioral econ and cognitive psych research.
What podcasts are my fellow hackers listening to? <comment><USER2> Planet money

How I built this

This American Life

Criminal

Civics 101

Fresh Air

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it just me or has TAL gone downhill? I've been listening to Reply All instead.</comment></comment>


Synopsis: Plasma Mirror Mimics Evaporating Black Hole - <AUTHOR> http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.045001 <comment><USER2> This seems to share at least some engineering commonality with a demonstration of the dynamic Casimir effect [1], in which an accelerated superconducting region functions as a moving mirror, generating microwave photons out of quantum vacuum fluctuations.

I think it's cool and amazing that we can experimentally investigate such phenomena with tabletop experiments.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect#Dynamical_Casim...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect#Dynamical_Casimir_effect)</comment>


What-aboutery - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-spot-a-lame-lame-argument-1667373.html

<comment><USER3> _when you can't justify your case, and it is crumbling in your hands - <USER2> snap back: "But what about x?"

You then raise a totally different subject, and try to get everybody to focus on it - hoping it will distract attention from your own deflated case. _

Isn't this just a Red Herring fallacy?

From Wikipedia: _Red herring (logical fallacy), a deliberate attempt to change a subject or divert an argument_

<comment><USER4> It's a bit more than that, because it is an attempt to accuse the other party of hypocrisy.

<comment><USER5> One of the comments claims it is called a Tuo Quoque (You also) Fallacy. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Independent of the Dubai issue, I think he is right about the "what-about x" argument. I have seen it many times before. Like in religious debates, an atheist might hear the argument, "so if you don't believe in God, where do you get your morals from?" as though that has anything to do with whether God exists.

<comment><USER7> I'm fearful of sounding like a redditroll, but Hitchens handles this particular topic well. He asks people to name a single moral act believers can do that nonbelievers cannot do. Then, when no one has an answer, he asks a corollary; name a single act of evil done entirely in god's name.

<comment><USER8> That sounds like he stole it from Peter Weinberg:

 _With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion._ \-- Steven Weinberg

<comment><USER9> That attitude makes me uneasy. Atheists are tempted to dismiss religion and sit back, confident in our superior rationality. But what we should do is try to learn even more from theist errors. The errors are not just limited to the obvious (to us) errors like faith in the supernatural. There's also obedience to authority. The Milgram Experiments show that plenty of good people will do evil in certain circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People here are not used to hearing open criticism of their country or their rulers. The "Dark Side of Dubai" article really didn't spare anyone's feelings, to say the least.

That kind of disrespect beckons retaliation of some kind. Since Mr. Hari is safely out of reach in the UK, the only response is to openly dis the UK - even if it means dredging up stories from WWII.

<comment><USER11> > That kind of disrespect beckons retaliation of some kind.

Not for everyone it doesn't. It's highly dependent on culture, and it's personal too. When 37 signals criticized Get Satisfaction, Get Satisfaction replied with grace, and addressed the points raised by 37 Signals. Of course it wasn't perfect, but it certainly didn't fall in the camp of retaliation.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it's very cultural. I have observed first-hand how people here go ballistic at the slightest perceived slight.

This spirit of vengefulness has gotten worse as the city has mushroomed with foreigners who now outnumber locals 20 to 1, making them a small minority in their own city. Their culture and way of life are under attack, from their own leaders' ambitions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree with the author. Bringing up "what about x" has many valid uses. For example:

"Look at my perpetual motion machine!" "What about the cable plugged into the outlet?" "Don't change the subject!"

"You are a murderer because you killed Mr. Jones." "What about the fact that Mr. Jones broke into my house and was trying to rape my wife?" "Two wrongs don't make a right!"

Certainly it can be abused but very often the "what about x" argument can be a valid way of introducing new and relevant information.

<comment><USER10> Not all all. In both cases, your "what about" stayed on topic.

<comment><USER12> That was exactly the point I was trying to make. "What about" arguments can be valid.

<comment><USER13> Splitting hairs, he was specifically referring to the deflection-style "what about" argument, as if the sins of others justifies one's own.

<comment><USER14> How does one differentiate "deflection-style 'what about' arguments" from valid "what about" arguments free from bias?

<comment><USER15> If that was a serious question and not a troll, check philosophy courses; should be some online. They have a bit of history in that discipline of logic and analyzing arguments...

<comment><USER14> I wasn't trolling. I was just pointing out that it seems like a subjective distinction as a practical matter and asking if there was a way to make it less subjective in the context of online comments, argument rebuttals, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While we're on the topic, this is an exceptional blog that covers labor issues in neighboring Qatar. <http://qatar.livejournal.com/tag/rights>

</comment><comment><USER17> The original Dubai article was very interesting and a good fit for HN, imho. This one feels more like a Reddit submission.

<comment><USER10> Really? I disagree. The original article was written in tones of anger and disgust. Most of what he said there is accurate by my reckoning, and these facts stand on their own without the need of his London-tabloidesque prose. Yep, I just made that word up.

This new article is a calm discussion about rhetoric and dealing with trolls, something HN seems quite interested in.

<comment><USER17> I actually agree almost %100 - the initial article's tone was very, well, Johan Harri in The Independent (London-tabloidesque is putting it mildly :)), but the subject was interesting. This one is indeed about rhetoric and trolls - while an interesting subject, not sure this is where I'd go for advice on it..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is presumably going to get flagged, but I would accuse Mr. Hari of dishonesty here. His original piece gave the impression that Dubai was a total hell on earth, totally beyond redemption. From reading his article, I got the impression that human rights are vastly more respected in Britain than in Dubai. If this is his belief (and not just my impression,) then he should defend it, instead of hiding behind "the world is not divided into a Block of Light and a Block of Darkness."

(I thought his Dubai piece was long on opinion and short on facts, but that is neither here nor there.)

<comment><USER19> You're falling into the exact same fallacy he's pointing. Why should he start defending a position he never expressed? There are many things you can "get the impression that". Why would you hang on to them and not address the main points, which are as big and visible as a painted target? As for the rebuttal, it didn't even try to address the original article. It just tried to change the discussion to a more favorable position.

<comment><USER18> It's not just my impression: "This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

Al Qassemi seems to say that one could draw a similarly broad and misleading conclusion about Britain. Maybe Hari should at least address this point. I mean, he hints that the answer is yes, and such a conclusion is valid, but he never says it.

EDIT: On second thought, I'm making exactly the same mistake he's pointing out.

<comment><USER20> > EDIT: On second thought, I'm making exactly the same mistake he's pointing > out.

Congratulations on recognizing that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lambda School threatens ex-employee for coming forward - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/9/21166640/lambda-school-former-employee-threat-coding-bootcamp-nondisclosure <comment><USER2> Naturally the article is leaning towards putting Lambda in a bad light, but honestly if she signed a document saying "don't do X, collect Y$" and then goes and does X, it's pretty simple, she should give back the money. You can't both take the payday, and then am also try to take the high moral ground, even if you try to do it anonymously. "I didn't think you'd figure out it was me" isn't a valid defense against breach of contract.

<comment><USER3> Maybe there isn't a moral high ground here?

You can't sign a contract that allows someone to murder you -- there's case law supporting that.

But you _can_ sign a contract that limits your future ability to speak freely.

Regardless of what case law says about this, a lot of people appear to feel that this really shouldn't be a thing, particularly when there's a large power imbalance between the parties, and when the more powerful party is obviously trying to hide evidence of malfeasance, embarrassing secrets, etc.

What is the moral thing to do if you're the less powerful party and you feel that your counterpart is acting immorally in offering you a contract like this?

Maybe the moral position is not to take the money.

Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.

I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't _always_ be considered sacred.

<comment><USER4> She could have left without signing.... there isn't anything to indicate there was more than money at play.

<comment><USER5> She was 5 months pregnant being threatened with termination for not complying with a performance plan she had never seen before. They were trying to get rid of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any measuable fashion.

Depending on her other financial situations she might be facing financial disaster including uninsured, life destroying, medical bills plus the inability to get any other position while visibly pregnant.

It's highly likely that she was pretty much obliged to take the money regardless of how she felt.

<comment><USER4> You talk to a lawyer in that situation... you don't take the cash.

<comment><USER6> And the lawyer tells you something like "maybe we could win against them in court, but it will take a year. Even if they settle, we're looking at 3 months." Meanwhile, she's still uninsured, _etc._

<comment><USER4> Potentially, but then you make that call in an informed way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> She signed a deal not to talk for cash... and then talked.

Maybe Lambda stinks but it would seem she chose to violate the agreement.

Maybe she was concerned about what she experienced later, but how much does someone care about a topic when they choose to make money by not talking about it....

<comment><USER7> Lot of people in hackernews seem to stick up for bad guys, why is that?

People sign things without looking at them, especially when in desperate situations. Why adopt a stance that further weakens the position of the poor and unconnected, are the rich and connect not powerful enough already? Do we really need to allow "don't tell the truth" contracts to stand?

<comment><USER8> Lots of techies have lots of money and assume everyone else is as financially secure as them and just able to walk away from a bunch of money when their employer fucks them over.

Lambda has been documented screwing people over. Of course they'd screw over their own employees. It's their modus operandi.

<comment><USER9> no one is faulting her for taking the money

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm confused,the article itself says she signed a confidentiality agreement and that she broke the agreement. What did she think would happen? She got 36k for signing it. Was that just free money in her mind!?

<comment><USER11> It is free money until Lambda School actually gets it back. It's up to Lambda School to decide the if money and/or the precedent are worth the public relations cost of fighting about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have always had a bad taste in my mouth for Lambda school. I bought into the YC hype though and when friends asked me for a bootcamp I reluctantly told them that Lambda was a good place to go.

Really regret ever spreading that advice and glad that none of my friends actually went into the program.

<comment><USER13> If it helps, they probably still would have done it, regardless of what you said. I've found that even friends and family you explicitly tell "bootcamps are a scam" will ignore your advice, quit their jobs, drop 10's of thousands of their limited savings into them, then avoid the subject afterwards when they can't find those much promised programming jobs. That's how good bootcamp marketing is.

<comment><USER14> On the other side of the table, interviewing bootcamp grads... Only granted interviews for about 10-15% of the ones presented. Of those, most _only_ did what was assigned, which really wasn't enough to be close to productive in terms of ramp up, and indicated that they wouldn't put the effort needed to being productive employees.

In the end, I'm really supportive of those who come into software outside college. I never went to college and some of the best developers I've worked with never went. What we do share in common is a _LOT_ of effort beyond the minimum in terms of self driven learning and projects on the side. Open-source gives a huge amount of potentially highly visible work to demonstrate.

Yes, some may turn their noses up at someone who didn't go through a college program. Regardless of the path you take, you have to do more than just show up, and some really just don't have the natural ability to do certain kinds of work.

My advice to people is grab a book or two, and try to make something useful to you. Do it on github/gitlab if you can. It may be a crappy, one-off implementation, but you'll probably learn more than a bootcamp, and in the end you get something you and others might find useful.

<comment><USER15> I know a Lambda student that's now on what they call labs. Not sure how to explain it but students are in teams & meetings with project managers, designers, other teams, etc. It kind of resemble working in a big organization. They are actually working in a real project with a real investor. I'm no expert, but think that the exposure to real interactions in an environment like that could help in the job search.

<comment><USER14> I cannot speak for Lambda specifically... but have been on interviews on the other side. When your only technical understanding as a developer is literally what you were assigned, with no personal effort beyond that, you will be very unlikely to be able to fit into most development environments, which imho requires a certain amount of discovery, research and ongoing reading.

You cannot just sit on your knowledge for 20+ years in this career path... some come close, but they hit a wall... I've also seen that when interviewing those with 20+ years of experience with nothing more recent.

In the end if you cannot/will-not grow, and this can include taking time during work hours, you won't succeed. When you're starting out, you have to bury yourself with learning to get a leg up for at least a few years. Later, you can get by with reading a few articles a day and maybe a couple experiments over a year. But you can not stop learning. And not putting extra effort in when starting out, to me at least, is a bad sign that you won't do well without someone holding your hand.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for sharing. May I ask, how can an applicant demonstrate "certain amount of discovery, research and ongoing reading"?

In this specific case, the student have a few GitHub repos of courses taken before enrolling in Lambda. One repo is in a different programming language. Would that help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Regardless of the specifics of her contract, it's a really, _really_ bad look for a well-funded startup to sue a former employee for $36k.

Good luck hiring from here on out.

<comment><USER17> I think the suing part is not about the $36k, rather it's to give a message that they won't tolerate it (otherwise other people who signed similar agreements might feel empowered to speak up as well).

<comment><USER18> This is a PR disaster not just for Lambda school but also for YC.

<comment><USER19> YC has had its share of bad publicity. I don't think one more company full of seemingly-bad people will shock them any.

So long as 'pg or someone doesn't double down on their love of them, at least, but that'd be incredibly unlikely.

Then again...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The media have had their knives out for Lambda for quite a while. A reporter's instinct is to view anything that's booming with skepticism; and to lionize the underdogs. There is a certain tension and surprise in both takes (even if they are, in their way, predictable perspectives). Both of those trends are at play in Lambda coverage, which reveals the weird and systemic conservatism of the tech press.

The problem with lionizing underdogs is that, if you take a broad enough sample of underdogs, they represent the general population, and the general population has its share of jerks and liars. We can't assume Lambda's former employee is good just because she is less powerful than the company.

But the story implies, with its choice of verbs in the headline (Lamba "threatens" while Baez "comes forward"), which player the reporter wants us to sympathize with. They could just as easily have written that Baez "breaks her word" or "defrauds" the company, while Lambda "enforces agreement".

I deeply disagree with the people questioning whether contracts should be honored, particularly after you walk out the door with the cash.

<comment><USER18> ok old blueyes.. you are not helping the argument here. In my opinion Lambda has an ex-employee who left under allegations of performance despite allegedly not being notified and yet being 5 months pregnant and now Lambda is suing her for 36k which is a trivial amount of money. What Lambda needs to do is IGNORE the negative press and FOCUS on customer satisfaction. Do not SUE former employees. It will not end well.

<comment><USER21> >ok old blueyes.. you are not helping the argument here

Whose argument are they not helping - your bleeding heart narrative?

> In my opinion Lambda has an ex-employee who left under allegations of > performance despite allegedly not being notified and yet being 5 months > pregnant and now Lambda is suing her for 36k which is a trivial amount of > money.

You kind of leave out the part where the adult female who since she is 5 months pregnant should be really balancing all risks to her financial well being if she has been terminated signed a contract saying she wouldn't do X and then went and did X anyway.

> Do not SUE former employees. It will not end well.

Do not break contracts - it will not end well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find NDAs rather problematic. The main purpose they seem to serve is to hide corporate malfeasance. It would be nice to have a public register for NDAs, such that one could determine how many are being issued by a particular entity (obviously without knowing the content of the NDA). If I was a student, and I found that the bootcamp I was thinking about signing up for was issuing a lot of NDAs, it would be useful information.

<comment><USER23> The primary purpose of NDAs is to keep confidential information confidential. Every business has information about their operations and plans they want to keep confidential, in order for their competitors and suppliers not to have an advantage.

Essentially every knowledge work employee signs a nondisclosure agreement during their employment. Most who leave reaffirm the agreement in return for severance. So statistics of NDAs would just tell you how many employees an outfit has.

An employee who knows of actual lawbreaking can report it to authorities and be protected as a whistleblower. There's no protection for telling journalists that the company had execution problems.

<comment><USER22> I see, thanks, my original comment was not very well informed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Nothing like those statements was reported to us by her or anyone else about her, and if they were, we'd take immediate action. Out of respect for the employee, we can't comment in deeper detail on this situation."

That's the most cyclomatically complex, passive-aggressively voiced weasel wording I've read in a long time. How about a little respect for the English language, huh?

I sure hope they don't teach people to write code like they write PR legal speak.

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

<comment><USER25> It looks like a straightforward denial and refusal to comment. What is complex or passive-aggressive about it?

<comment><USER24> It's aggressively passive voice. You do that when you're trying to avoid responsibility. Or in other words: Responsibility was avoided.

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

It also uses Trump's favorite template: It isn't, but if it is, it doesn't matter. That means it is, and it matters.

<comment><USER25> The first line uses the passive voice. Despite that it's a clear statement.

The main action in the other two ("we'd take" and "we can't comment") are active because "we" is the subject and acts on the object. A negative statement like "cannot comment" isn't passive voice.

Also, passive aggressive doesn't mean using the passive voice aggressively. It means assenting to some encroachment in a way that signals hidden belligerence.

Hopefully that was helpful (passive aggressive! Sorry.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would expect pg or sama to look into this. This is a situation that needs high level attention.

</comment><comment><USER26> I didn't know about the working conditions. Now I know, because they are threatening her and because of this article. Next time I hear about them, I am going to remember this article.

Sometimes it is best to keep quiet, is it not?

Yes, I do understand she got paid for her silence.

</comment><comment><USER27> They had many students sign NDA-like terms as well to get out of their ISAs. This school is not to be trusted and Austen is known to lie frequently.

<comment><USER28> Citation?

<comment><USER29> Whilst accusations without evidence can be problematic, you don't see the irony in asking someone to violate NDAs in a discussion about how willing this company is to sue people to prevent them violating NDAs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Baez claims that Lambda tried to fire her in 2018 for not living up to a > performance plan. When she told her manager she hadn't received any > documentation about this plan, she claims he walked back his comments and > said she could stay. Baez says she decided to leave anyway because she no > longer felt supported in her role. She was five months pregnant at the time > and signed a nondisclosure agreement to get severance. Because of this > agreement, The Verge agreed not to use Baez's name in the article. She has > decided to come forward publicly in this piece since the school is > threatening legal action.

<comment><USER31> It seems pretty clear she violated the NDA. And I'd imagine she was the one who reached out to the journalist, not the other way around.</comment></comment>