Congresscritters used derivatives to profit from economic collapse - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/congressional-hypocrites-were-betting-against-stocks-as-country-collapsed-477789.html

<comment><USER2> I don't think much of your headline. Here's the original WSJ story: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870387190457521...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703871904575216491495135642.html?mod=WSJ_hps_SECONDTopStories)

tl;dr 13 members of Congress, from both parties, traded in the market or had their spouses trade. Some did so via managed funds, a few on their own account. One Republican made $28k, a Democrat's husband made $700. One of these 13 sits on the House Banking and Financial services committee. All info from public disclosure records.

Meh.</comment>


Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.doddcaldwell.com/post/20238528691/how-my-side-project-generated-sales-and-66-000-unique <comment><USER4> As a former hiring manager, I looked at your 100 first templates, and I must say that I don't like them. Yes, they look amazing and I would hire you to design my site's CSS, but for a job seeker, they are distracting. I want to see the job experience. I don't need special effects around "job experience", I don't need fancy backgrounds which make it harder to read the information.

Sorry to be negative. Again, the designs are very cute, but not "professional". My experience is limited to high-tech hiring.

<comment><USER5> Would you be impressed by more subtle qualities? Let's say a design with special effects, but printed with a professional printer on thicker paper. Maybe subtle effects like watermarks or micro embossing.

<comment><USER6> CVs are usually emailed and then printed on the office printer, so thicker paper may be redundant.

What is incredibly useful is understanding how those in a hiring organization read CVs, what they expect, and what they assume.

In terms of format: A lot of organisations, especially larger organisations for roles at more senior levels, output their internal candidate profiles, generated from internal systems, in landscape format. They will print a sent- in portrait document in portrait, but what is internally generated is often in landscape, with one left pane and one right pane. This spreads to computer- based viewing: Widescreen monitors are also becoming common place in offices, while laptop screens also tend towards a widescreen format. Why waste 2 large borders on each side of the page in default Word setup, Word being the default in large organisations.

I've never seen an externally sourced CV in landscape. Food for thought. Creative, or practical?

Also remember that eyesight tends to deteriorate with age. As an applicant, if the interviewer may be older, keep things legible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey just a free idea if anyone want to build it, I think a web app that generated stylish resumes automatically from your LinkedIn profile would be great. It could make watermarked ones for free preview and then charge you a few bucks if you wanted to download a real one.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard "Well, my resume's a bit out of date, but here's my linkedin.."

Also, if you are LinkedIn, you could do this.

<comment><USER8> This exists.

from linked in: <http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/>

There is another service (3rd party) that does this, but I can't recall the URL...

<comment><USER9> Looks like they may have just ripped off other designs:

<http://sampleresumetemplate.net/>

<comment><USER10> The resume image, but not the template.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OP here. I wrote this blog post to help the community - to share what I've learned and have done to get some traffic and have a fairly successful launch of a side project. Most of the discussion on this thread has been around resumes themselves and the business itself - which wasn't what my post was about. This really drives home one of the points that I made in my original post: Loft Resumes is polarizing. People seem to either love it or hate it. For some reason people seem to be passionate about resumes.

All that said, I'm really appreciative of the suggestions that people have shared both here and by email. I've learned a great deal from commenters on HN in general (a few have inspired another venture I'm looking at starting...) and appreciate the community, even though it can get a little harsh!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'll comment with another note, I love that this is coming out of Greenville. I live here and have traveled to Boston, SF, Seattle, DC and others but Greenville is up and coming. It's not too big but not too small. It's still small enough to have a piece of the intimate south, but big enough to feel a great part of the vibrant city.

It's also dirt cheap to live here compared to somewhere else. A 2-3 bedroom apartment for downtown in the heart of everything will run less than 2k if you find a good spot. Also access to CoWork is awesome like the OP was saying. You can find out more about Greenville here, <http://thenextbig.co/>. All this to say, if you want to kind of step out of the norm a bit and experience something different but not leaving great talent Greenville is an awesome place to be.

<comment><USER13> > It's also dirt cheap to live here compared to somewhere else. A 2-3 bedroom > apartment for downtown in the heart of everything will run less than 2k if > you find a good spot.

As an NYC resident who lives in Chelsea, I wept when I read this.

<comment><USER14> I have nothing against Greenville but the opportunity in NYC is well worth the increase in rent and/or loss of space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The templates look great, congrats on the success. How did you arrive at the $99 price point?

Also: the submission title implies the project earned $10k in a month, but I didn't see that in the blog post itself. Where did that number come from? Is it accurate?

<comment><USER11> Yes, we actually did better than that. I had tweeted about that so that's where the number came from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They look nice.

In my experience clean/light CV's are by far the best for almost every job - particularly engineering jobs. The exception being designers.

What sort of CV's are you seeing come in?

I know quite a few HR types who will find a snazzy looking CV and instantly demote it, on the basis that the sizzle is probably hiding some inadequacy (this is not necessarily a bad marker in my experience).

It would be interesting to see if the investment in this pays off for the candidate - whether the really high quality of the design flips it over that danger marker.

<comment><USER11> We've been surprised at the variety of professions coming in. There haven't been any real trends yet - we've had everything from CFOs to college students to marketers to folks in the legal field. We originally thought we'd see mostly careers that had an appreciation for design but where the job seeker wasn't necessarily a designer (like photographers or people in the music industry) as well as marketers. I guess that goes to show you don't always know your customer until you start selling

<comment><USER17> I'm not surprised you aren't seeing design types. A prebuilt template for that kind of position would be and instant red flag. Not to mention a merely "pretty" resume template would look bland amongst bespoke, polished portfolios and resumes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am amazed that this business works. I'm not saying it's a bad product, but rather that there doesn't _appear_ to be much of a product market fit.

Here's why: the fields that would see value in creative resumes like these are creativity driven fields - specifically graphic design, web development, visual design, print design, frontend, etc. Creative resumes can be valuable in these fields because they are a means to showcase relavent skills. If I'm applying for a job as a graphic designer, I would be stupid not to take advantage of the blank canvas that is a resume.

Concurrently, non design related fields likely do not see much value in a well designed resume, simply because it is unimportant and irrelevant. Yeah, the resume stands out from the pack, but surely this does not influence hiring decisions? Surely whoever is reading these resumes is not impressed by a bit of color and typography? Though I am probably being naive here - every little bit helps, especially when there are hundreds or thousands of other resumes to compete against.

So with that, if one assumes the highest demand for creative resumes is in creative fields, then this is like selling ice to eskimos. Designers can - <USER2> _should_ \- design their own creative resumes to market themselves.

But clearly I am wrong. So I wonder how well these resumes will convert? Somebody should A/B test and report back :)

<comment><USER19> Just because someone is in a non-design field doesn't mean they don't appreciate design. Even though two resumes might say the same thing in text, the better designed one will convey important information more efficiently.

By standing out, you show your potential employer that you cared enough to spent some time (or money) on trying to impress them.

<comment><USER20> While I completely agree with your point that a good design is important, I hope there's nobody on a tight budget reading this and thinking "damn now I have to spend $100 to keep up with the market".

My CV consistently receives praise. My secret? A standard Microsoft Word template that I have never seen anybody else use despite reviewing plenty of CVs myself :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Whenever I see a story like this, I have my hopes dashed when it turns out that the guy with the side project is just extremely talented.

Well done.

<comment><USER22> The psychology at work here is not unfamiliar to me. I once came up with lots and lots of reasons why I could not ship things. Then I stopped and shipped things. I suggest you ship things.

Life has brought me into contact with many folks who have side projects, for many values of "side project" and many levels of success. "Raw talent" explains very little of their difference from other people.

<comment><USER14> "for many values of "side project" and many levels of success. "Raw talent" explains very little"

Agree. Same reason why many pretty girls (or handsome men) aren't married but others with less obvious attributes are (and happily).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> \- I can really see this type of service blowing up, once you find the right product/market/fit.

\- The slider above-the-fold on the 'shop' tab distracts me from the rest of the page. It wasn't intuitive to me that I could scroll down to begin shopping.

\- A simple filter would be a great addition to the 'shop' page. It'd be nice to filter by type (e.g business, creative, etc.), price or design (rustic, elegant)

\- I wonder if you would see more sales if you tried a/b testing your pricing model a bit. Is there a reason why you charge the extra $5.00 for edits? If the shopper pays $99 to own the theme, shouldn't he be entitled to edit it as much as he pleases?

\- You're looking for resume writers. Have you connected with Hagan Blount? I believe he designs Infographic resumes. (<http://haganblount.com/resume>). Some of your designs require users to highlight a quote, etc., and I wonder if they could use help writing out these areas.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the advice.

\- Any suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down?

\- We've thought about filtering but we've honestly seen no trends in which professions pick which designs - it's been all over the board.

\- The shopper doesn't own the theme. Due to the copyright agreements that we have with the designers who created the resumes and the font foundries who created the typefaces, we aren't able to release the source files to be edited. Also, most folks don't have or can't use inDesign, which is what we use to typeset the resumes. We've tried to keep the price of edits low at $5 as a service to our customers because in early testing, we came across this as an objection. People need to revise their resumes or have different versions. We wanted to reduce friction there. We obviously don't make money on this but we just think it makes good business sense and is good customer service.

\- We don't want to get into writing resumes. Instead, we'd rather partner with resume writers. They have a captive audience that's shown they're willing to pay for resume services. We'd rather get referrals from them than compete with them.

<comment><USER23> re: suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down:

On the shop page: An anchor link that sits above-the-fold with a call-to- action like "start shopping" or "browse designs" would probably make it more intuitive. Anything that shows me a peak of what's below-the-fold would help.

Since the main slider occupies all of the above-the-fold real estate and has its own horizontal navigation, I just assumed I was 'done' with the page once I had scrolled through each slide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Few questions:

1\. How did you manage to get all these awesome resume templates?! That's fairly impressive for a one month project.. I could have had only one of them and I would be proud!

2\. There's no talk about the 10,000$ in the blog.. where does it come from? Is it 100 sales? Is it less but with more urgent need (For instance, clicking "1 day" or "custom color").

3\. About the process of converting the html template to a pdf.. how does it work and how good is it? For instance, is it a simple html->pdf which could give ugly conversion or end-of-page text to be displayed wrongly on the next page?

And as a suggestion, it'd be interesting to give a demo of the cv. For instance, I'd enter my data, it'd show me the resume but with a clear "Demo" written on each page of the pdf.. or something similar.

<comment><USER11> 1) The project wasn't 1 month. This is just what we did in the roughly 1 month since we launched.

2) Yes, if you multiply the over 100 sales by our purchase price, we did over $10,000.

3) We don't convert html to PDF. Customers pick a resume design, upload their resume content (in Word or TXT or whatever,) and then we custom typeset it and send them a PDF as a digital file. Our graphic artists are great at making multiple pages look outstanding. There's also a revision process to make sure it pleases the customer.

4) The demos are really the designs you see on the site. Since all of our resumes are custom-typeset in inDesign by a graphic artist, we can't demo a customer's actual resume until we go through the entire process.

<comment><USER5> I think you should market your manual process more aggressively. Generating from templates is easy and cheap, but that a professional graphic artist is doing it, makes quite a difference.

<comment><USER24> I agree. I had no idea it was custom made by a graphic designer.. that would explain a lot more the 100$ cost and the fact that there's no demo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just e-mailed this to them, but how they get regular sales leads is through the Universities. The universities want to get their students jobs, and if you have a real value-add service that will do that, they should have no problem posting your link and being aware of you in their offices. Your startup should be the first thing mentioned by their Career Development offices and resume courses when students ask "how do I get a job?". It won't be easy to get in front of all of them, but I bet you can get the ball rolling really fast with this exceptional product.

<comment><USER26> I wouldn't recommend students pay $100 for a resume printing service.

<comment><USER11> We actually don't print the resumes. We do the visual design.

<comment><USER27> Why is this getting downvoted? He's only describing what they do: the visual design. Presumably, the customer prints the résumé. Is that correct, dcaldwell?

<comment><USER11> That's correct. Some people think we do the printing but we actually provide the visual design service. We're considering adding a printing service down the road. Even in doing our photo shoots for the site, we learned a lot about what makes resumes look great in the printed format.

Right now, we send out 2 hi-resolution PDF files - 1 is for full bleed and 1 is for normal printouts on an office or home printer. That way the customer has the option of how they wan to print out the resume.

<comment><USER28> I'm curious if you found a local pro photographer or diy because the photos look outstanding. They definitely provide a huge level of credibility from my perspective.

<comment><USER11> We used a local photographer. We provided a lot of direction the entire time but he's also really good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Those are the most beautiful and amazing resume layouts I've ever seen. You have yourself a serious winner here!

<comment><USER30> The site design itself is really beautiful too. Loft Resumes isn't the only case where I've heard projects getting a lot of useful traffic from CSS galleries.

While in my case (Candy Japan) I'm not sure if the possible improvement in conversions would justify spending money on the design, I wonder if the side benefit of getting listed in CSS galleries would make it worth it.

<comment><USER11> We actually haven't gotten many orders directly from the CSS galleries. While some designers do order our resumes, they aren't our primary target market (many of them will design their own.)

From our standpoint, it helps out with getting some solid back links for SEO purposes in the beginning and also helps from a referral standpoint. We also just like seeing and spreading great design. We're kind of passionate about that. Some designers will send the link to their non-designer friends because they don't feel like doing it pro-bono for their friend and the money their friend can pay just isn't worth it to create something from scratch.

However, if you have a product or service whose direct customer is designers, then you might be able to get some conversions from the CSS galleries. Your's could be this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congratulations on the launch and the beautiful work you're producing. I'd love to hear your feedback on the very popular discussion from a few days ago here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134>) on Raganwald's blog, "I don't hire unlucky people" (<http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire- unlucky-people>) . Specifically, I'm curious as to how much you as the creator of this service think making a resume standout really helps an applicant compared to a bland resume from a measurably more qualified candidate? Thanks!

A snippet from the blog... \--- "First, I stopped caring so much about little things like how 'professionally' a resume was formatted or whether the cover email had spelling mistakes. I realized that throwing people away because of a spelling mistakes was really another way of discarding half the resumés because you don't want to work with unlucky people."

"Wait," said Oscar, "but surely all things being equal, the person who takes the time to get the email right is better than the person who doesn't?"

"Sure," agreed Ernestine, "But all other things aren't equal. What if the email with the spelling mistake came from someone who's really busy because they're talented and have a lot to do in their current position?" \---

<comment><USER11> I read that post on Raganwald's blog the other day. I think there's a difference in having a "professional" resume format in standard Word document black and white and having a resume that's been designed by an artist. My guess is that in that story, Ernestine would at least give a Loft Resume a good look - sometimes that little bit is enough - you've stood out and gotten noticed. That can be half the battle if an employer is looking through hundreds of resumes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like a beautiful site. However I was disappointed to see that nothing about the 10k figure in the link title was mentioned in the article. I would be very interested in another article if you'd be willing to detail your revenue, expenses, profits, conversion rate, and such. I understand that is sensitive data and you may not want to, but it can't hurt to ask.

Best of luck, and your resumes look beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm not sure why the focus here is that they gained that amount of revenue inside of a month. Looking at their traffic chart it seems like the site was never very popular until one specific date when they suddenly jumped to 20,000 users thanks to one highly successful promotion they did. So if anything this is more about how fab.com was really good for them.

<comment><USER34> Because many of us would like to imagine we are five weeks away from being part owners in a business pulling in over $100,000 a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've got to say I'm amazed at the number of templates you have. It must've taken quite a lot of total designer hours to create all these.

Any plans to code them and let people generate mini-sites from them? I could see that doing pretty well too.

In any case the service and site looks great, congratulations!

<comment><USER36> <http://zerp.ly> already covered that one :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Make it automated and mobile: build a beautiful CV from an iPhone app, pay via in-app purchase and get 5 physical printouts delivered (also PDF in email and HTML version hosted for sharing).

Your sales will jump from $10,000 to $100,000.

<comment><USER38> Why mobile? I'd much rather edit my résumé on a computer with a full keyboard.

<comment><USER37> 1\. You're a geek, you prefer computers. Random people who need help with CVs don't see it that way. They take whatever they find.

2\. They find the app because it's cool to try and use. Websites are boring and obstruct. Apps generate huge traction way faster. The in-app payments are also easier for users, no credit card forms.

3\. Smartphones outsell computers by 20% every day.

4\. Once you find a way to make the interface great on a phone, you can deliver to tablets easily.

Build future now. Change the pain to fun.

<comment><USER16> I think a CV is something you have more investment in; I don't think as many people would be searching on their phones for an app... especially as writing a CV generally happens on a PC.

You're more likely to be sitting in front of a word processor bleakly wondering how to prep it up - and go do some Googling for CV tips...

<comment><USER37> What's more likely - that you go to a resume builder website when your mate recommends, or download an app? What would you recommend - a cool app, or a website?

Apps are physical and cool. CVs should be fun to do. That's the future. Assuming that the desktop is a primary device for people in 2012 is just wrong. Also, CVs don't need to contain huge amounts of text; better keep it simple.

<comment><USER39> You're right about apps being popular and continually growing in importance.

However, you're talking about a task (creating/updating a CV) that takes a lot of manual work and editing. It could certainly be automated to a large extent by grabbing existing information from LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever. But when you get down to the details, there's a lot to write. That will never be fun to do in an app.

I can't imagine people caring how "fun" a CV app/website is so long as it helps them get the resume updated and get a new job.

<comment><USER37> I agree. But we also thought it's not possible to cut video on a phone before iPhone.

Look around, millions of people grab 1080p and cut on a pocket device. Not just that, much more.

I was suggesting to be creative and think ahead. I am biased, but I believe it would work great and bring revenue to the table fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Are you producing the resumes manually? or do you have software that handles it?

<comment><USER11> We have graphic artists that custom typeset the resumes manually. There are 2 revision rounds included in each purchase (additional revisions/edits/versions can be purchased) so there's back and forth with our artists.

<comment><USER17> You should mention his on your homepage. I assumed that the $99 got me a fill- in-the-blank Word template. Having a designer do the heavy lifting and polish sounds much more appealing. You could also easily upsell to editing and review too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I noticed you were using Shopify. You could probably add a lot to that $10,000 by selling a varient of your store's design on the Shopify theme store. It looks awesome.

</comment><comment><USER42> Good read, congrats and thanks for sharing! Did you guys come up with all of those resume designs yourself? Or did you have any outside help?

<comment><USER11> Emory, my cofounder, designed the website and a few of the resumes. We contracted with some really talented designers regionally and around the country for the rest of the resumes. We didn't want to have the same look and feel for all of them so we plan to continue to use a variety of great designers.

<comment><USER43> How did you go about finding these designers? I've had some success finding correct designers on odesk, but it can be quite hard and time-consuming to find a good fit (and it really depends on your budget, in your case you can afford to hire expensive top-notch designers I guess).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Love the idea, and your products look amazing. I've definitely got the site bookmarked if (when?) I ever need to hit the job market again.

My only concern with these types of resumes is that I've heard stuff like this can't be read by automated resume parsers used by some companies. I don't know how true that really is, does anyone know?

<comment><USER11> That's certainly been brought up to us before. We've run our resumes through parsing software and they've actually performed well. We don't advertise that because we haven't run every resume through every parser, so we can't say that they perform as well as Text files. Our advice for folks who are submitting to places where resume parsing software may be used is that they have a text version of their resume on hand as well and then use the Loft Resume for interviews and emails.

Most statistics show that 70% of jobs are found through personal networking, while 30% are found through career boards (like Monster.com.) We feel like we fit well with those 70%. However, even within the 30% of jobs that are found through career boards, most of those end in an email and an interview. We think a Loft Resume is a great way to stand out when job candidates do land that interview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> thanks for the article. one thing that i didn't understand when coming to the website was what to do.

choosing a design for example: i think many people won't understand that you have to choose a design below the featured block.

a headline like "choose a design:" or something could increase your conversion rates i guess.

nice project btw. have fun, witti

</comment><comment><USER46> Great stuff. I hope you earn more advertising/publicity from that blog post than you earn copycats.

May I suggest that you add more single column resumes. Having multiple columns and boxes etc. is something I associate with newsletters and magazine articles. If I was shopping, I probably wouldn't buy one like that.

</comment><comment> bill-nordwall How about testimonials? The designs are fantastic, but I want to hear the story of someone catching a recruiter's eye from one of these.

Figure out away to demonstrate social proof that your resumes are giving job- seekers the edge they desperately need.

<comment><USER11> We're working on that. We've just been live for a little over a month and are still doing it as a side project. But, that's something we have planned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Congratulations, great design and execution.

I'd be really interested to see how you phrased the emails you sent out to the bloggers to get them to write about you, and what your success rate was.

<comment><USER11> I'm thinking about doing another blog post about this specifically - how I research and contact bloggers.

<comment><USER48> Please do, this would be very helpful for myself and I'm sure others as well!

<comment><USER49> Yes. This.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The resumes are very attractive. However, in my experience looking at resumes I put 0-1% of the weight on attractiveness. Maybe it's more useful for other fields, however.

<comment><USER51> I could see such a resume getting a positive response in design related professions, but in my field (biotech), it would get a negative response. The immediate thought would be "why??"

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It would have been great to have some retargeting advertising going the whole time. It can be very cheap and makes people on average 70% more likely to convert.

</comment><comment><USER53> Congrats on the launch. I remember you telling me about this over pizza a few months ago (november? january? can't remember!) Great job on execution!

<comment><USER11> Thanks Michael. I remember that conversation and getting your feedback. Great to hear from you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> At Uber, we got a resume.txt from an engineering candidate once and thought it was pretty awesome. It's the only resume that still sticks in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER55> Congrats!

I think your designs are beautiful, and you're definitely fulfilling a need. I'll be sending a link to those who I know are looking for a job.

</comment><comment><USER56> Nice article. I live right near greenville. Loved the link to coworkgreenville, will check it out. =)

<comment><USER11> Please do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Can I ask how you're doing the shadow background on the menu elements? It looks gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER58> Congrats, Dodd. It's been a good few months for Co-Work.

</comment><comment><USER59> Any feedback from users on how effective these are?

<comment><USER11> We just launched about a month ago and have been doing our best to keep up with orders so haven't had time to do proper surveys. That's certainly something that we want to do in the near future. I think it would really help from a marketing perspective - having some great success stories. I actually got the idea for the business because a friend of mine hired a graphic artist to design his resume and he ended up getting a ton of call and interest - <USER3> of them saying that they were impressed with his designed resume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Great idea. Glad it's working out. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER61> congrats, great service! if you are considering video promotion, i'd suggest to compare google tv with my service virool.com We are better and cheaper. ping me and i will make you discount and give you some free credits. i can also recommend few production companies in case you want to create nice and inexpensive clip about your service.

<comment><USER61> also you should check out my friend's service ResumUp.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> hey, congrats. That's like the perfect step by step for a launch.

Good Luck.

</comment><comment><USER63> cool idea. and the layouts are gorgeous! good luck!

</comment><comment><USER64> Surely a resume should just consist of a screed of roughly formatted plaintext.

Or is that just not enough for Catbert in the current economic climate?

<comment><USER65> This tendency will keep growing and eventually an average resume will include a 20 minute video with music and interviews with all your previous bosses and co-workers; ending with fireworks that create the company logo and a bunch of cheer leaders screaming your name.... and eventually companies will get tired of it and just ask everyone to send _only_ a plain text version.

<comment><USER66> Suddenly I see where LG is going with this technology: [http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/124229-lg-begins- mass...](http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/124229-lg-begins-mass- production-of-flexible-plastic-e-ink-displays)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I think the idea is great, but what really stands out is the execution. The style the way it just works is why this idea could be huge congratz guys.</comment>


Death of a Product Manager - <AUTHOR> http://crankypm.com/2011/04/death-product-manager/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheCrankyProductManager+(The+Cranky+Product+Manager) <comment><USER2> Beyond death of employees, the issue of bereavment for 20-something startup employees is something we don't talk about much... but sadly it happens to a lot of us. I went through this with my mother-in-law last year, and it was very hard. My company was very supportive and did the right thing for me, which was basically "we support whatever you need to do" and then checking in with emails every couple days.

For me, it was the first close family member I've ever had pass away, so I hadn't even thought about what I would do in the situation and I ended up planning a funeral.

<comment><USER3> I learned what truly great leadership was at Microsoft in the mid-90s. My father passed away unexpectedly and I was devastated. My director at the time (who is now a VP), called me at my mother's home, and I was a mess. He told me how difficult it was to lose his own father and to take as much time as I needed to grieve. He told me not to worry about work and come back when I was ready. The call was short, maybe 2 minutes. I will never forget that call and its lesson. Empathy is the single greatest "skill" a leader can learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We outsourced our PM function some years ago. After a couple of years working remotely with an excellent PM in Mumbai, we noticed that the spelling and grammar in his emails had changed radically. We asked through discrete channels whether our guy had had a stroke or something that impacted his writing. It turned out Habarjahn had actually died and been replaced, but they tried to sneak the new guy in on us without letting us know. Funny how you can form attachments with a co-worker you never even saw or spoke with. Now, though, we're equally fond of Narendra (assuming it's still him.)

<comment><USER5> When you found the company would do such a thing as slipping in an employee without notifying customer in first place, isn't it right to NOT deal with that company anymore? Surprised you are saying you are fond of new guy "(assuming it's still him.)".

<comment><USER4> Well, one of the PM's duties is managing our outsourcing contracts, so we're kind of stuck until they fire themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Had a co-worker who committed suicide. I still vividly remember the all-hands we had when it was announced. The company behaved well; supported his widow (I am not sure of details, but I know that at least one manager was still in contact with her over a year later). We went to his funeral. I don't remember if counselors were available, but it wouldn't suprise me. About six months later the product shipped and we had put his name in it, in an easter egg. No one objected, at least that I heard of.

It was a depressing time in the middle of some of the hardest work I've ever done. I was single and unattached, and just dove into work as a coping mechanism, as did a number of other co-workers.

</comment><comment><USER7> I actually thought this post was going to be about the 'death' of the Product Manager role in general. It's something that is implied all the time on HN - that product management is everyone's job but not discussed enough.

 _(I was toying whether the above was insensitive as it is off-topic to the somber post - but given Cranky PM's post isn't about a specific person or recent event and is just a set of guidelines to follow in general I hope no one takes offense)_

<comment><USER8> I was hoping for a "Death of a Salesman"-style story of the downfall of a self-deluding developer trying for managerial greatness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my experience, this is a good opportunity to gain insight on how sane a company really is. If a company puts there business before such a unique event, something is wrong.

I had such a case with the (rather expected, as in "old age") death of relative. Working freelance, we had to call a number of clients that I would have to take a few days off for funeral arrangements spontaneously. Luckily, all of them were very supportive and adjusted their timelines accordingly.

I don't know what I would have done if any of them had a problem with that situation. Chances are high I would have dropped the client as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a manager, you better be especially careful and sensitive if it was suicide or homicide. I am not sure about the grief councilor thing, I have my own experiences there and am still not sure about the value.

<comment><USER11> I would imagine that if it was suicide I would be mad at the deceased more than anything.

Also isn't notifying next of kin usually something the police do?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it is either the police or doctor who does the notification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If a company bungles this badly, one can only imagine how poorly they handle everything else.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, that's a great blog (overall)! Thanks for linking to this!

</comment><comment><USER14> i hate to say it, but the last sentence of this article is hilarious.

<comment><USER15> you're right though, wonder if it was intentional given the first sentence of the article.</comment></comment>


Leveraging the Encrypted Token Pattern - <AUTHOR> http://insidethecpu.com/2013/09/23/encrypted-token-pattern/

<comment><USER2> Maybe I missed something, but I was surprised there was no mention of JSON Web Tokens (JWT). See [0] (overview) and [1] (example usage).

[0] [http://self-issued.info/docs/draft-ietf-oauth-json-web- token...](http://self-issued.info/docs/draft-ietf-oauth-json-web-token.html)

[1] [https://github.com/mattupstate/flask- jwt](https://github.com/mattupstate/flask-jwt)

<comment><USER3> At the time of writing (September 2013), the JWT spec would have been only on it's 12th draft--it's had 19 follow-up drafts since then. It's possible that the author didn't know about them at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> As you say, the JWT spec was not as mature at the time of writing.

<comment><USER2> (Assuming you're the author -- who knows though.) Now that the JWT spec is mature and there are some nice implementations of it, do you think it's a good option for token-based authentication?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm the author. Long as the JWT spec implements a strong method of encryption , it's a good option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did I miss something in that pattern or is this just some kind of OAuth2.0 Bearer Token implementation within one domain?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no explicit relationship between this pattern and OAuth. The structure of the token itself is open for extension. The pattern focuses on the manner in which the token is leveraged.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk's Mini Submarine to Save the Thailand Soccer Team Stuck in Cave - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3qySXPJ2WE <comment><USER2> On the first couple of reads I thought the mini sub had also become stuck in the cave. If you've already seen the sub then saving a click -

"Elon Musk's Mini Submarine to Save [the Thailand Soccer Team Stuck in Cave]"

not

"Elon Musk's [Mini Submarine to Save the Thailand Soccer Team] Stuck in Cave"</comment>


Are VCs Lemmings? - <AUTHOR> http://larrycheng.com/2009/10/28/are-vcs-lemmings/

<comment><USER2> s/VCs/investors/ is also true</comment>


Why You TGIF Even If You Don't Have a Job - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/why-you-tgif-even-if-you-dont-have-a-job/ <comment><USER2> >"but he worked four days a week, Sunday through Thursday"

This could use some editing. How is Monday-Friday a 5 day work week but Sunday-Thursday is a 4 day work week?</comment>


Hundreds of dietary supplements are tainted with prescription drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-dietary-supplements-are-tainted-with-prescription-drugs/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18202205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18202205).</comment>


The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee's early programming career - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hrc.utexas.edu/2017/06/28/the-computer-poetry-of-j-m-coetzees-early-programming-career/ <comment><USER2> If, like me, you were hoping to find code that is poetry, a few recommendations:

whytheluckystiff, or _why, was a very colorful persona in the early English- speaking Ruby community who wrote some very poetic code (some of it production grade) and inspired a lot of people (me included), and eventually disappeared one day when he was outed. Maybe start with Why's (Poignant) Guide to Programming that is a literary work that is also a Ruby tutorial, available at [http://poignant.guide/](http://poignant.guide/), and continue by reading archives of his blog (where he posted hand-drawn and sometimes animated poetry in Ruby) and libraries he wrote (I strongly recommend Camping.rb, a 4k minimal MVC framework, that was at once very poetic and production-ready.)

Other than that, if you can read x86 asm I recommend this book of Koans/Poems/whatever you call them, written by someone I know and extremely beautiful: [https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html](https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html)

And in the Perl community there's a long tradition of polyglot perl/English poems: [https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/prog3/ch27_02.htm](https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/prog3/ch27_02.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Coetzee wrote the best description of programming I've ever read : _" The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them."_

</comment><comment><USER4> He fictionalized his time as a computer programmer in the book 'Youth'. It's superb.

<comment><USER5> I read that book in college and it frightened me so much. I was worried by the prospect of selling your soul in a thousand pieces. I.e. making many "compromises", which individually don't mean much, but taken together will turn you into exactly the kind of person you wanted to avoid becoming.

<comment><USER6> Should one's younger self's ideals get to trump one's older self's values?

<comment><USER7> >Should one's younger self's ideals get to trump one's older self's values?

yes, of course. Haven't you seen Citizen Kane? Do you think Larry Page and Sergey Brin would enshrine "don't be evil" today (in fact this has been retired) - or have as a mission statement, to make all information universally accessible and useful?

would they write in a prospectus, today, as a risk;

" Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed."

back in the day, every byte on Google's homepage was counted.

cf. Chrome's memory usage today.

Absolutely, young ideals trump old ideals. (Technically, ethically, culturally, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Michel Houellebecq worked as a programmer, too (and he didn't like it).

I suppose Kafka would work in programming, had he been born in our time.

<comment><USER9> A really interesting thought. I wonder what languages and platforms Kafka would favor...

<comment><USER10> I remember feeling like Josef K. when writing C++ and getting error output from gcc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing. Disgrace is one of my favorite novels of all time and I always found it fascinating how versatile Coetzee is. The man seems to be good at everything.</comment>


Learn Enough Command Line to Be Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial <comment><USER2> This is a great beginners introduction. It takes a very short time to go through, even while doing the examples and afterwards, you can feel the productivity increase in the command line (if you where a beginner)

Am looking forward to his GIT book

</comment><comment><USER3> A "for dummies" style take on the command-line. Not a lot here.

When you learn enough X to be dangerous, the take away is you didn't learn X at all. That's why you are dangerous wielding X.

<comment><USER4> That seems unduly dismissive. There's nothing wrong with introductions, and the title is just an idiom.</comment></comment>


Why Midsize Cities Struggle to Catch Up to Superstar Cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/business/economy/winston-salem-convergence.html <comment><USER3> I dont think that these cities are going about this in the right way - <USER2> arent going to become biotech hubs just by transplanting a few scientists. That's a pretty zero sum way of thinking, let's just steal enough bnb people from boston until we are new boston. The people in the article themselves had a hint of what I think is the tight idea - make the city check off the things on Amazon's HQ2 list. Make the city walkable, invest in transport and education. Attract bars and yoga studios, put in bike lanes. Actually make the city attractive so people will gravitate there naturally instead of being lured there by other promises.</comment>


An Introvert's Guide to Networking - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/01/the_introverts_guide_to_networ.html <comment><USER2> Ruben Gamez (founder of bidsketch.com) actually did a course on Mixergy entitled "networking for introverts" :)

That course, and this article, were of tremendous interest to me personally.

I don't consider myself to be an introvert, but I had shunned networking as being lame, for losers and confined to desperado salesmen that would crowd into a vinyl floored foyer in cheap suits trying to sell each other financial services before they lost their houses.

What I'm starting to realise is that networking is the single most important business activity one can undertake.

I'm starting to believe that the more people you know and make connections with, the greater your chance of success in any industry or pursuit.

People have long said "it's not what you know, it's who you know" and I've always heard that as a defeatist remark - like you can't fight city hall type of thing.

What I never realised is that networking isn't hard and you can meet really influential people - that you can become one of the "people who know people" by simply being a friendly and helpful person.

There's no secret to it, no tricks and no "gaming the system", just "reach out and touch somebody".

<comment><USER3> Here's a very simple fact: what you know is very highly correlated to who you know.

Probably everyone on Hacker News would agree that learning Python is usually easier and a better career move than learning FORTRAN. But how do you know that? From the social influences in your life...people, the places you hang out on the internet, etc. But most business people couldn't tell you the difference between any two languages.

The difference is even greater with soft skills. Look at the job or salary negotiating advice that a typical career office or google will provide you, and compare that to, say, Ramit Sethi's or Patio11's advice. You're talking about a massive difference in value.

The more you are in touch with highly successful people, the more you'll be on the cutting edge of this kind of news, when it's the most valuable. If you have a weak network, though, you'll frequently be years behind without knowing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> a general comment, so sorry for picking on this particular article when it is a wider problem.

when i read something that ends with a single line, trying to provoke comments, i feel like a dumb fish on a hook. my immediate, gut reaction is that i am being sold to. before: i am reading an opinion someone wanted to share. after: they are bullshitting me and will write whatever they think sells. it loses my trust instantly.

what do you think? ugh.</comment>


Crypto 101 – Introductory course on cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://www.crypto101.io/ <comment><USER2> This is about to eat my weekend, I think! :)

Quite seriously, this is exactly what the tech world needs - personally, I know that in terms of understanding of crypto I'm streets ahead of the average Joe, but orders of magnitude behind people who _actually_ know the field. I'm certain I'm far from alone in that set, but the way the world's going means that we with the generalised technical know-how have a moral impetus to bring the rest of the world up to speed with the whys and wherefores.

<comment><USER3> > I'm streets ahead of the average Joe

Has anyone seen "streets ahead" being used by anyone else besides Pierce Hawtorn and the OP? I mean, is it widely used now? (I'm not native speaker, obviously)

<comment><USER4> I'm using it as much as possible just to push it into language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The old Cryptopals challenges ([http://cryptopals.com/](http://cryptopals.com/)) seem to cover the same material in a pedagogically very different way - they don't feed you the information as this book does, but give you a practical task which can be easily done with e.g. reading the specification of an algorithm from wikipedia, but figuring out the implementation of the attack yourself gives a much better understanding than simply reading about it.

Although this book claims a "Learn by doing" approach, I didn't find any specific assignments or data samples to facilitate that.

<comment><USER6> Hi! I'm the author. Also a big fan of Cryptopals; I was one of the reviewers for Set 8, and working with some of the authors. It's interesting to hear that point of view; because I thought C101 took the same approach as Cryptopals in the sense that it focused on teaching crypto by breaking it. When I say "learn by doing", I'm referring to stuff like walking through a bit-flipping attack just like cryptopals does. I recommend (and have organized/will be organizing) study groups where we work through cryptopals using Crypto 101; and I think that's a great idea. I was originally going to add exercises for C101, but honestly, Cryptopals was already that, and there wasn't much point in reinventing the wheel. I guess I should probably link to them?

<comment><USER7> I think it would be good to link them, I started reading, got to page 30 and thought it would be nice to try the challenge. This reminds me when I thought I could handle myself in Linux, but when I played OverTheWire wargames, I still learned a ton of things that you only learn by doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I was taking Aikido, there was a day when the sensei was going through all of our techniques and showed how the _uke_ (initiator of the attack, receiver of the technique) could turn things around on the _tori_. (receiver of the attack, initiator of the technique) It seemed like there were a half dozen ways each that a technique could go seriously wrong, and that many of them didn't require much skill, only determination and the opportunity provided by a mistake. That day made me question the validity of the entire notion of self defense.

I wonder if there shouldn't be a software engineering class where people try to set up a secure web app, with their own homegrown algorithms and protocols, which is then attacked by a tiger team which includes a conspirator on the inside? Perhaps there are such classes now.

<comment><USER9> This is slightly tangential since you specified a conspirator on the inside, but how easy is it to break a homegrown encryption algorithm if you don't have the source code? I assume there are tools (what are they?) that will break a simple caesar cipher if you have more than a sentence or so of plain text to work with. But if you strung together 2-3 broken algorithms and your attacker doesn't know which ones, is it still trivial to decrypt?

<comment><USER10> People who can break it won't spend the time breaking your homegrown crypto, so you won't get proof it's broken. But it's still broken. If lots of money or lives of political dissidents are at stake, it will be broken.

To have really capable people work on breaking your crypto for free, you have to be an insider. You become an insider by breaking other people's crypto. You can publish a break in an insider's crypto even if you are unknown. After you publish a few such papers, you become an insider and can publish your own crypto other people will spend their time trying to break.

People can learn the state of the art and develop an alternative to the common (NIST) choices which are no worse, but also no better. Some of those are blessed as "national pride ciphers" (GOST, Camellia, SEED, etc.).

<comment><USER8> Ciphers aren't the place where security most often fails. The failures have to do with implementation. More commonly, they have to do with implementation of protocols and systems using the protocols.

<comment><USER10> I agree, but I replied to someone who talked about ciphers.

<comment><USER8> Of course. I was also (mainly) posting for the benefit of 3rd parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With everything in Crypto I have to wonder: Is the information correct? I really have no way of verifying if I'm learning the correct DHE, and I know that it's easy to get wrong. Perhaps I can do some testing in code, but I may test it incorrectly too, and those small errors can be exploited.

<comment><USER6> Hi! I'm the author of Crypto 101.

Firstly, I'm a real, honest-to-God cryptographer. I don't know if there are any particular people you had in mind whose recommendations you'd like to see, but there are a few HN bigwigs who'd probably be willing to generally endorse it :-) Also, it's been posted on HN a few times before, so it's had some scrutiny. That doesn't mean I don't make mistakes, but generally speaking, an active reader should be OK.

The other thing is in the way the book is structured. I teach you to break crypto; so when I say something is broken, I prove it by showing you how to break it.

Finally, the goal of this book is absolutely not to help you implement DHE. In an ideal world, the primitives we offer people are hard to misuse. Crypto 101 then only exists to satisfy programmer curiosity. It is not a replacement for a traditional academic education that will help you design new primitives; it also doesn't show you how to write secure implementations. However, Crypto 101 is still useful beyond merely satisfying curiosity now, because most cryptographic libraries _do not_ provide that easy-to-use API. Using regular hashes for password storage, various forms of broken AES-CBC (unauthenticated, key=IV, static IV...), et cetera are very real problems for real code, and Crypto 101 teaches you how to avoid that minefield.

I'm also working on the "better, more accessible" crypto part, but I only have so much free time :)

<comment><USER12> My trust chain: I don't know crypto and didn't know who you were (so I might have asked the same question) but a few days ago I found out you are involved with tptacek with latacora.com so that was all I needed to know and trust what you said.

<comment><USER13> That's a little scary but I appreciate the compliment.

<comment><USER12> It's sort of the HN version of 'yeah, he's a goodfella'.

Separately with latacora I suggest that you wrap in some ongoing residual that carries on far past the 'eventually you staff your own security team' phase (as added insurance for 'leadership').

<comment><USER13> Thanks! We're not looking to make money from clients in perpetuity. One of the things we like about the model is that we plan our own obsolescence and then get out of the way. It lines up our incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also here is is a Dan Boneh cryptography playlist [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9oqNDMzcMClAPkwrn5dm...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9oqNDMzcMClAPkwrn5dm7IndYjjWiSYJ)

<comment><USER15> And as context, Professor Dan Boneh teaches the main introductory crypto class at Stanford (CS255) - it's a great intro for someone with some good CS fundamentals. The course syllabus is here:

[http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cs255/syllabus.html](http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cs255/syllabus.html)

(Disclosure, I took the class a few years ago)

<comment><USER16> This is a great course. I also took it a few years ago and have been waiting for his Crypto 2 course since then. It seems like it's always "Coming Soon Fall 201x" though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Applied Cryptography is also one of the free advanced courses on Udacity:

[https://www.udacity.com/course/applied-cryptography-- cs387](https://www.udacity.com/course/applied-cryptography--cs387)

</comment><comment><USER18> There seems to be a lot of comments asking about the quality of this piece. I read through this the last time it was posted to HN, and I just have to say that this is the _perfect_ balance of having enough detail to understand how things work, but not so much that it's overwhelming. That's a really difficult balance when it comes to crypto, so major props to the author. Fantastic work.

</comment><comment><USER19> Whenever I have taken the small amount of cryptography knowledge I already have and tried to use it in a project, I've often been shutdown with "the system already does that" when it doesn't, or "this will be too complicated for the user, instead lets just roll our own [ad-hoc cryptography method]".

For those reading:

How do you convince people that it's worth using best practices?

Is there a good heuristic to measure the value of something, when deciding how much time and money to spend on securing it?

What are good library/SaaS solutions to help build secure applications with less chance of shooting yourself in the foot, better UX and lower cost? (Keybase, etc.)

<comment><USER13> For normal application work, you should use NaCL (or it's repackaged version, libsodium) to the exclusion of all else.

<comment><USER20> Why the hell is this being downvoted?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The video claims that the Python standard library doesn't check certificates by default. In fact, it has done for at least a couple of years ([0] quotes the documentation as saying that it changed two years ago - in 2.7.9 and 3.4.3).

Although the video is marked 2015, the overlay at the start shows it's from PyCon 2013.

[0]: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/28325763/2492](http://stackoverflow.com/a/28325763/2492)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm really disappointed that (9.4) Elliptic curve cryptography is still under TODO.

If anyone is interested in ECC, ars has a pretty good introduction [0].

[0] : [http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/a-relatively-easy- to...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/a-relatively-easy-to- understand-primer-on-elliptic-curve-cryptography/)

<comment><USER13> You can also mail Sean Devlin to get Set 8 of the Crypto Challenges, which cover ECC. Finding the right place to mail I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Suggestion: Add some notification medium for when the book is ready.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. The one time I actually want to sign up to a mailing list, and there's no way of doing it.

<comment><USER6> Hi! I'm the author.

I should really remove that pre-release stuff. There's no useful point for "done", and it already includes most of the stuff I wanted to talk about.

<comment><USER24> Oh, well in that case I'll get reading! Thanks so much :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I checked the PDF and this looks very interesting and comprehensive, any change you could give an eta for the final release and more specific the epub release?

Thanks!

<comment><USER6> Hi! I'm the author. I should remove that "pre-release" notice. Sure; there's plenty more that I could talk about, but there's also plenty of stuff there that you can use right now (and most of the stuff I wanted to talk about). Suggestions come in faster than I have time to implement them, so... Maybe this will never be done, and maybe that doesn't stop it from being a useful resource :-) I hope you enjoy it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Quick question, I had apparently Pinboarded this in March 2014. I see the PDF is still pre-release. Has anything changed with this, or is it kinda just coming up again because of recent political climate.

I'm fine either way, just curious if this has changed drastically from what I had looked at previously.

<comment><USER27> Paragraph "Development" (page 14 in the current version) answers your question:

 _" The entire Crypto 101 project is publicly developed on GitHub under the crypto101 organization, including this book: [https://github.com/crypto101/book](https://github.com/crypto101/book) "_

 _[...]_

 _" The copy of this book that you are reading right now is based on the git commit with hash 3f89ec3 , also known as 0.4.0-22-g3f89ec3"_

Then, looking at the commits, yes the book changed a lot since 2014: [https://github.com/crypto101/book/commits/master](https://github.com/crypto101/book/commits/master)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For idiots like myself, I found this video, Public key cryptography - Diffie- Hellman Key Exchange (full version), to be completely enlightening using mixed colors to explain the most basic features of a cryptography algorithm.[0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv- _do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv-_do)

</comment><comment><USER29> For anyone interested I found this to be a good book on working through some cryto implementations in Go:

[https://leanpub.com/gocrypto](https://leanpub.com/gocrypto)

Its free to read online but its also very reasonably priced. Its written by an engineer over at Cloudflare.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is great! Kudos to the author and thanks Rackspace for sponsoring this as well.

It's really encouraging to see this increased democratization of crypto not necessarily in the engineering of it per se but rather the awareness and understanding of it.

</comment><comment><USER30> I put this pdf on my phone and read through interesting sections over a vacation involving long flights. It's a very nicely written text that you can read over a few days with some basic computer-science/mathematical background.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks for this my guy! Maybe I'm telling on myself here, but I get the impression that your average developer doesn't know much about security outside of the basic (sql injection/cross site scripting)

</comment><comment><USER32> Can any crypto people here on HN verify that this gets it right?

<comment><USER13> I'm biased, since LVH is a partner at our new firm, but I've always liked his crypto writing. He's also a trained cryptographer.

<comment><USER29> Can you elaborate on his being a "trained cryptographer"? I'm not sure what that means.

<comment><USER13> He has a postgraduate degree in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> cryptography textbooks get very difficult. I get lost in a sea of hashes and the prime number theorem

</comment><comment><USER34> I downloaded this about a year ago and loved it. Incredibly informative. Is this an updated version?

<comment><USER35> It gets continuously updated, so yes.

<comment><USER34> Nice. Will have to get it again. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why is the url a hash? Also I'm getting privacy error on chrome mobile.

Thanks for this, seems pretty useful.

<comment><USER6> Hi! I'm the author. It's hosted on a CDN; I don't choose that URL. Sorry about the privacy error; could you take a screenshot and submit a ticket on [https://www.github.com/Crypto101/book](https://www.github.com/Crypto101/book)? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Looks interesting, but I can't open it with Adobe Reader on my Android.

</comment><comment><USER38> good work, lvh

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe I am being too harsh, but it is clear the author does not have a formal education in the subject [0] nor any track in breaking non-toy crypto implementations [1]. This alone makes me a bit wary of any recommendation one may read in the material.

There seems to be more attention to listing all the beasts in the cryptographic zoo than to the few fundamental tools required to really understand the mechanics (e.g. birthday paradox, PRFs, some prime number theory).

Sure, I can't spot anything fundamentally wrong and it all reads pretty smoothly, but calling this a "course" is highly misleading. If the intention is to guide people in selecting good crypto primitives, then maybe "guide" is a more honest word?

For those interested, I would strongly recommend to bite the bullet and dedicate time to Boneh's course on Coursera.

[0] I don't have any either [1] Ditto

<comment><USER6> Hi! I'm the author. You're mistaken about [0] and [1]. I'd like to address your specific point about being a guide rather than a course. I agree that a crypto zoo would be a guide and not a course; although I disagree that either the book or the talk are a zoo. It's possible that that hasn't come through effectively enough. I could understand why someone might think that from looking at the table of contents for example; it's certainly a lot clearer in the talk. The approach is instead to walk someone through the kinds of primitives that exist, but more importantly, why they exist. In that context, when I say "primitive", I mean "block cipher" or "MAC"; not something like "AES". That includes incidentally talking about PRFs, although I dance around that term and use terminology they're going to find in their crypto libraries. Similarly, there's an appendix on modular arithmetic; but I try not to get too lost in proofs about group theory.

I could say "IND-CCA2" with a formal description, but in my experience that makes people's eyes glaze over. It's a lot easier to show them a bunch of reasonably-looking-yet-fatally-broken unauthenticated encryption to drive the point home. My target audience is curious programmers, not new academic cryptographers. If that's your criticism, that's absolutely valid. If you want to be the person to design SHA-4; this book isn't for you.

It's true that I take a different approach than Dan Boneh does. That's not a criticism: Boneh's course is great, it's just different. I think showing people how to break stuff is a useful educational tool. If your threat model is random web apps that have the letters "AES" or "MD5" in their code, I think it's a more effective one than a rigorous mathematical approach that will quickly dissuade the curious programmer.

<comment><USER29> Congrats on your book, I'm looking forward to reading it. What was Rackspace's role or interest in the project?

<comment><USER40> lvh was until very recently an employee at Rackspace and Rackspace provides the hosting for the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is currently on edx. Its more advanced that the courses mentioned here. I do not know what edx will do after the course ends, but if you want it you can get it while it ss still available.

[https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-cryptography-caltechx- del...](https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-cryptography-caltechx-delftx- qucryptox)

Quantum Cryptography by Thomas Vidick (Caltech) and Stephanie Wehner (Delft University)

<comment><USER42> So-called Quantum Cryptography is largely snake oil. The most important things you need to know about it is that:

* In order to do QC you need an authenticated channel first. QC proponents hardly mention that or try to obscure it, but it basically means you can't have QC unless you already have some other secure cryptography.

* QC has severe practical limits. It needs a point to point connection capable of sending physical particles. That means: No Wifi, no mobile Internet and no connections over large distances. Given that these people recently started talking about a "Quantum Internet" makes this simply ridiculous.

<comment><USER43> Of the first point I shall plead Wittgenstein and not speak, but as regards the second: In what way are photons, the medium of wireless telecommunication, not physical particles? In what way are, indirect connections not decomposable into multiple direct connections (broadcast vs. point-to-point is a more robust difference, I agree)?

<comment><USER44> For QC to work, the receiver must receive the exact same photons the transmitter created. Those photons can not be tampered with, what means they can not be relayed, or reflected by most surfaces.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows 8 Plans Leaked: Numerous Details Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://msftkitchen.com/2010/06/windows-8-plans-leaked-numerous-details-revealed.html <comment><USER2> I work on the Windows team and was front row at the big Win8 planning meeting. It was good fun with Steve Ballmer shouting right in front of me (I'd never experienced that before... he's amazing at getting a crowd going).

I can't say much... but these slides are laughable (and _if_ real, designed for some other company's execs/marketers) I joined Microsoft this past September having never been a Windows person. I've done most of my professional development on linux, and you can pry my macbook pro from my cold dead hands.

With that in mind, Win8 is looking awesome and it's something that I want to use right now. Microsoft is really getting their shit together. Win8, if it's even a fraction of what is planned, is going to change things permanently. This is a good thing considering Steve Jobs seems to have given up on the desktop as of this most recent WWDC.

<comment><USER3> The thing about Microsoft, speaking as a fan of Linux and Mac, is that it doesn't really matter if they get their shit together. Mac and Linux already exist, and they can beat Windows in the premium/shiny and cheap/utility departments, respectively. Those two right there are going to satisfy a lot of people's needs. About the two biggest factors in Microsoft's favor remaining are (1) selling home consumer PC's to folks who want/need something cheaper than a Mac, and (2) legacy application inertia. iPad and Linux desktops can somewhat attack (1), and the advantage of (2) will slowly wear away over time I think as more and more ppl/bizs find acceptable replacements on Mac, iPad or Linux.

<comment><USER4> The biggest factor in favor of Microsoft is (and will be for some years at least) the bulk of orders from BigCos that are placed for hundreds of HP or Dell machines with Windows preinstalled. Apple's (or Linux's) share in the corporate segment is still tiny.

<comment><USER5> > Apple's (or Linux's) share in the corporate segment is still tiny.

Yes, but ever since the iPhone it's growing. My old Java/.NET corporation now has teams doing iPhone/iPad applications. This is huge! Long ago it was all Windows with Linux/Solaris on the server. Now they are actually buying macs for developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's so telling that a slide like this is needed somewhere at MSFT: [http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/All- Eyes-o...](http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/All-Eyes-on- Apple.png)

<comment><USER7> It looks like this slide isn't intended for internal Microsoft use, so likely they are trying to get across the intentions/direction of focus to the audience.

<comment><USER8> More specifically, I think they are trying to convince Dell/HP that _they_ can build an Apple-like brand without leaving the Windows ecosystem (e.g. in favor of buying/building their own OS, e.g. via Palm). That's what the hardware- manufacturer-branded app stores are also about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> According to one of these slides, "humans" is short for "mainstream consumers".

[http://msftkitchen.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-...](http://msftkitchen.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-Consumer-Target-Audiences.png)

<comment><USER10> I giggled at the "Why Humans Matter" on the right:

1\. Substantial in size

<comment><USER11> Erghh meant to upvote this. Stupid little unchangeable close arrows on a touch interface...

<comment><USER10> Granted, it's not terribly insightful.

<comment><USER11> True, but it didn't deserve a downvote either

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if they will call it Windows 8, given that Windows 7 is a homophone for "Windows Heaven" and Windows 8 is thisclose to "Windows Hate".

Just my personal tinfoil hat marketing conspiracy theory.

edit: removed unnecessary potshot.

<comment><USER13> Change Windows 8's name. Not that big of a deal.

<comment><USER14> Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, ...? Could they be more inconsistent?

<comment><USER15> iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 .... naming means nothing, every company gets wooed by slick marketers and pro _naming people_ who mess up any consistency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The one feature that would make me consider using windows again is if it supported bash as a first class shell option and had a built in x server.

<comment><USER17> Powershell, isn't bash, but it's pretty kick ass.

Instead of piping text from one command to the other, you pipe entire objects back and forth. A lot of bash commands are aliased to Powershell commandlets out of the box. And, as of Powershell 2.0, you have remote scripting similar to SSH.

I choose to do Python Web development on Windows, and I spend my whole day on the PS command line, and I'm really pleased.

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

<comment><USER18> > And, as of Powershell 2.0, you have remote scripting similar to SSH.

What, instead of actually using the ubiquitous, widely installed SSH? Some things don't seem to change.

<comment><USER19> That's my problem with PowerShell. No matter how good it may be, I don't really feel like relearning everything just to accomplish the same things, only on Windows instead.

<comment><USER20> Are you sure you are in the right business if you don't like relearning?

<comment><USER21> Yes, throw away everything you know every now and then, instead of building knowledge on top of knowledge.

That will get you far, right?

<comment><USER22> Who says you have to throw away everything you know? I don't magically stop knowing C++ when running around in Ruby or SQL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought it was telling that many of the slides are full of the same kind of meaningless waffle you see in management or sales/marketing presentations at other big companies. I'm actually a little surprised at that. For all its past transgressions, Microsoft does have a reputation for hiring smart technical people, and in recent years a lot of the technology it has produced has been respectable again. I somehow assumed the people running the show would be of the same calibre, with clear ideas and well structured plans for realising them, but that doesn't appear to be the case if whoever wrote the presentation(s) used here is representative.

<comment><USER24> Windows seems to happen as a bottom-up thing. Feature teams conceive, design, and implement features, and a bunch are put together and shipped. Thus, any top-down view will be necessarily meaningless until the details float in from the teams actually doing the work.

<comment><USER25> At the same time, you _need_ some top-down direction. You can't just tell a team of thousands of engineers to go build something, and expect it all to have a unifying theme, and work well together.

It works well for small teams, but breaks down pretty quickly as team size grows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The eMac is back!</comment>


Ask HN: Is it normal to have no explicit expectations? - <AUTHOR> I work in a non-technical supervisory role at a 30~ person software startup. My past work experience is all from Fortune 100 companies.
My direct manager is one of the original cofounders. I will often receive delegated projects verbally/over email and given a timeframe. Example: "can your team get me an X report on X in 3 days?". If I ask for specifications (e.g how far back do you want the report to capture, will you need X subcontractors included in the report, etc) I'm hit with hostility or told to "figure it out, that's your job".
Is it normal to have no clearly defined expectations when you're given a project/task?
I've been doing this for about 12 months now and it seems like I'm constantly flying in the dark. 50% of my vague projects are met with excitement and shock and the other 50% is screamed at as a waste of time/wrong.
I try to lay out my expectations clearly when delegating the sub-tasks from these projects (e.g can you generate an export of X data over the past 12 months for X report?"). Is this something that's not required the higher you go in management? <comment><USER2> In large corporations, people have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Junior level people are given clearly defined tasks and are expected to carry them out and as they grow more senior, they are expected to mature enough to take on more and more nebulous goals and work out what tasks are necessary to accomplish that goal by themselves.

In a start-up, it's more the case that everybody is expected to do whatever they have to in order to keep the ship from sinking. There is less structure and supervision and employees are given the latitude and responsibility of what would be a rather senior role in a large corporation right from the beginning. That's the culture shock you're experiencing right now and only you can decide whether that's a role that will allow you to flex more of your talents or whether it's too ill-defined a role for you to be successful in.

<comment><USER3> This is a good answer. Certainly the difference between F100 and a startup that's pre product market fit must be pretty intense. On one hand you have very explicit role definitions and often near unlimited resources. On the other you have near unlimited autonomy but severely constrained resources.</comment></comment>


China's Social Media Censors Are Blocking Panama Papers Discussion - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/beimengfu/chinas-social-media-censors-are-working-overtime-block-panam?utm_term=.ebmpD4X2M#.fg98O6Lgk <comment><USER2> Not surprised. Also not surprised at most of the stories told by the panama papers. Corruption seems to be part of human nature. There is historical evidence of corruption from every era and every generation if you look carefully. I wonder if anything will change now that some light has been shed....I hope so... I wouldn't be surprised if nothing changes though. Power is addictive and righteousness is relative. If every person of power has such stories of corruption, would the following people of power have similar stories as well? I would say highly likely.

<comment><USER3> While not evidence of wrong doing, the PM of Iceland, the country which imprisoned bankers who engaged in fraud and lauded for that by some, being on that list is a bit surprising.

<comment><USER2> haha right...and he stepped down...I wonder why?</comment></comment></comment>


Building a Better PHP with HHVM and Hack: Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/hhvm-hack

<comment><USER2> Would this benefit you if you ran a large Wordpress site for example?

For example if you already had nginx/varnish setup and optimised, would it be worth setting this up to squeeze some more performance out of it?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's weird they're not just calling this a fork of PHP.

<comment><USER4> You're not really allowed to as part of the PHP terms. (IANAL)

[http://www.php.net/license/3_01.txt](http://www.php.net/license/3_01.txt)

      3. The name "PHP" must not be used to endorse or promote products
         derived from this software without prior written permission. For
         written permission, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com.

      4. Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor
         may "PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission
         from firstname.lastname@example.com.  You may indicate that your software works in
         conjunction with PHP by saying "Foo for PHP" instead of calling
         it "PHP Foo" or "phpfoo"</comment></comment>


10 reasons you should never have a religion - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/10-reasons-you-should-never-have-a-religion/

<comment><USER2> For a guy whose entire life revolves around smartening the smarts of smart people to make himself seem smart so he can sell stuff to people who aren't so smart, he sure does come off as a moron. Has he even read the Bible? I mean, of course, beyond the minimum required to construct some artificial and arbitrary "contradiction" (Lookie! The Old Testament and New Testament say different things! That proves that religion is for idiots!).

I can play this game, too: in each of his points, substitute "knowledge", or "choosing a major in college", or "going to alcoholics anonymous" or "being trained for a job" or "obeying the law" for "religion" and "spirituality", and boom! Nearly everything you do in life is stupid, and is just a hindrance to the enlightenment that Stevie is here to sell you (which is as much a religion as anything else).

I can sympathize with those who have problems with organized religion, or even an antipathy toward God (or the idea of God), or particular groups; but what Pavlina spewed here is just drivel.</comment>


JSHC: a haskell compiler/interpreter written entirely in javascript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/evilcandybag/JSHC

<comment><USER2> It looks like this is for a Bachelor's degree at the university of Gothenburg. From the abstract of the project report[1]:

 _Development of large web based applications using scripting languages such as PHP or JavaScript can be difficult given the lack of static type checking and abstraction through module systems in many such languages. We argue that static type checking and module systems can help programmers avoid common errors when developing large web appli- cations. The literature indicates that adding an extra layer of abstraction on top of the scripting languages that provides these features can be a solution to this problem. We suggest a solution where the statically typed functional language Haskell is com- piled to JavaScript code, enabling programmers to create web applications in a modular and type safe environment.

An implementation of a compiler, supporting compilation of a subset Haskell to JavaScript, JSHC, is presented as a proof of concept. The compiler has a graphical interface in the form of an Emacs-like text editor extended to contain an interpreter terminal, to allow execution of arbitrary expressions. To allow for client-side compilation, the compiler is written entirely in JavaScript. A comparison between JSHC and another JavaScript based Haskell implementation is presented, as well as some unexpected issues with the Haskell specification._

[1] [https://github.com/evilcandybag/JSHC/blob/master/report/proj...](https://github.com/evilcandybag/JSHC/blob/master/report/project- report-2011-06-03.pdf?raw=true)

<comment><USER3> yhc, uhc, hjs, ghcjs,"haskellinjavascript", jshc, haskell -> llvm -> emscripten, etc, etc

In fact I wanted to start my own -- except I don't have a single clue of how to even go about doing something like that. Though now that I think about it, I wish all the effort was put into a single project that wouldn't die off within a few months of going public.

<comment><USER2> If you want to give something like that a go, then a good place to start is by modifying or adding to an existing compiler. It will give you some exposure to other peoples code too and a good place to start - you'll always have something with tangible results.

Either that or read op on writing interpreters. They can be amazingly simple...

Interestingly, the report mentions that none of the authors knew Javascript before they started.</comment></comment></comment>


Hadoop 0.18 Highlights - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/hadoop/2008/09/hadoop_018_highlights_1.html

<comment><USER2> Do you guys think Hadoop would be a good solution to parse and convert 16 GB worth of XML files to SQL? I'm thinking of using EC2 to distribute this in the cloud, as on my desktop it can take days.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the exact solution? If it's a massive parallel parsing operation.. then maybe.

If you want it to parse the XML and put into a database - probably not. You're going to be bottlenecked by the database, so not much point increasing the parallelism of the parsing.

<comment><USER2> I have 750 x 150 MB XML files, I just want to generate a huge .sql to import it all at once which is much quicker.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you'll be constrained by the inserts - even if you use bulk insert.

You are probably better off using a bulk loader to get the data in - SQL*Loader on Oracle. I believe MySQL has an equivalent.

You could use Hadoop to process the data into whatever intermediate format (SQL or Bulk Data), but my instinct would be that getting the data loaded/inserted will be the slowest part by far.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blockstack Updates Community on Q4 2018 Developments - <AUTHOR> https://www.btcwires.com/c-buzz/blockstack-updates-community-q4-2018-developments/ <comment><USER2> This looks to be an uncredited rip of

[https://btcmanager.com/blockstack-apps- doubled-q3-2018-accor...](https://btcmanager.com/blockstack-apps- doubled-q3-2018-according-q1-2019-report)

with authorship credit replaced.</comment>


Is "Learning by Doing" a Myth? - <AUTHOR> https://avilay.rocks/is-learning-by-doing-a-myth/ <comment><USER2> No. Both in theory and in practice, there is burn-in time needed for people to adapt to new strategies and workflows.

<comment><AUTHOR> The question I am trying to examine is whether it is possible to do both at once - e.g., can I learn Haskell while using it in a work project, especially when I don't know functional programming?</comment></comment>


Neural network AI is simple. So… Stop pretending you are a genius - <AUTHOR> https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/02/neural-network-ai-simple-genius.html <comment><USER2> If they are so simple why do they take 4 months of 15 hours a week on an online course to learn? Or, why do I (who did pretty well in my AI class in my Computer Science program 10 years ago) have such a hard time with it?

The way I see it there are two options based on this article:

1\. Either I am stupid - I hope not :(

2\. The people who teach these courses are terrible at teaching

Third option:

3\. This article is vastly oversimplifying

I'm actually leaning towards a mix of #2 and #3 but I'm biased against #1.

<comment><USER3> Which course are you doing? I've been doing fast.ai and can't recommend it enough, it's extremely practical and based on an outstanding library built on PyTorch. The person who teaches it is exceptional, so if #2 was your problem then you won't need to worry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was more fun than I expected. Loop the loop is now officially stuck in my head.

I do think it is more harsh than needs be. Sometimes, the little accomplishments aren't for others. Essentially many people use public journals nowadays.

Though ultimately, I think that logic applies here, too. Specifically for this rant.

<comment><USER5> It is a solid rant in that there are many people at there getting paid well (or selling) dubious models that will never work outside a narrow training set. Their bosses or customers will be none the wiser, but the results are dangerous.

I witnessed similar problems in search where data retrieval was not guaranteed. Often systems were fragile and needed to be closely monitored for document feeding problems and index health. Some companies _cough_ (autonomy) _cough_ were selling complete shit for insane prices for critical applications like legal doc searches. Many companies keep in business by easily snowed/biased/bribed tech journals and paying off client execs with strippers, parties, etc.

BTW, search hasn't changed much and it is still dangerous to just assume it works for things as 'simple' as ELK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd say a fairly large portion of people getting involved in neural networks do so out of a desire to be better than others. A domination mindset rather than a curiosity mindset. Another large group is the pragmatic mindset since there's so much money.

The domination mindset leads to arrogance and in my opinion a chain a dehumanization that results in an inhuman product because it is not rooted in happiness.

The chain starts with the dehumanization of human graders. Incredibly complex and amazing neural networks that are paid minimal wage to improve much worse ones. The developers and managers above them feeling snug in their much higher salaries (and implicitly higher ability and worth). Not realizing that they are viewed the same way by many deep learning folks.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a very poor article. It manages to both be demeaning to people who want to learn something new while also being riddled with factual errors.

Here are just a few factual errors:

1\. The 11-line example is the simplest possible neural network with a very basic implementation of gradient descent in a high-level vectorization framework (numpy). It's exactly what you'd cover in the first week of a course on neural nets. But obviously there are many things to learn beyond that before you can solve real problems effectively with neural nets. In fact, the example code is 100% lifted from Hacker News user williamtrask's great article [1] which ironically closes with a list of 10 topics to investigate next to start learning the additional things you'd need to make your neural net useful for real problems.

2\. This section:

> '"Deep Learning" and n-Layers of depth is just a neural network that runs > its output through itself. This is called Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), > because you loop the loop.'

..is full of errors. RNNs are Recurrent, not Recursive. They have nothing to do with having more layers, but with having a memory of previous states. And in deep learning, having more layers is often a strategy to reduce the dimensionality of the input and learn higher-level representations of data by using a variety of tricks/layer types/connections. It's not just "looping the loop".

3\. The whole section about not initializing the random state and thus getting different results on a Desktop vs. a mobile phone shows a total misunderstanding of how things work. You aren't typically re-training a neural network on a phone, you are using the pre-trained weights from a different machine to make inferences. That is typically 100% deterministic.

4\. The description of TensorFlow as a wrapper to provide visualization tools is totally wrong. It's a framework for running mathematical operations defined as a graph data structure. That makes it possible to do cool things like split up the work across multiple processors efficiently and it provides pre-made operations that are useful for building machine learning models more complex than a single layer neural network.

The only area where the author is really correct is that there's a lot of misunderstanding of neural networks as a magical solution to problems when they are really just fancy statistical models that are subject to learning relationships that aren't there.

Yes, the word of AI/ML is full of hype and bad reporting. But there are great ways to talk about the limitations of ML and it isn't by belittling people. Here's an example of a great article: [2]

[1] [https://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/12/basic-python- network/](https://iamtrask.github.io/2015/07/12/basic-python-network/) [2] [https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl- hard.html](https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl-hard.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah... the result may be relatively simple, but getting there isn't.</comment>