Stackoverflow needs redesign - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40063367/qt-compile-error/40063560 <comment><USER2> If stack overflow users hate newbie questions they should add a filter option to ignor questions with users under 100 points.

<comment><AUTHOR> SO is useless for serious questions since 1) It is not easy to answer them and get some karma fast. 2) To answer tough question you have to discuss. Discussions are not the format of SO. Every question which can not be answered in a YES/NO/USE THIS SNIPPET is getting downvoted.

The whole format "This is not a forum" is ill by design.

<comment><USER2> [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30948205/excel- customtask...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30948205/excel- customtaskpane-with-webbrowser-control-keyboard-focus-issues)

This was a very tough issue SO helped me to solve. I used a comment someone left to help me start my own research and create the code snippet I needed. I then asked someone for a indepth description on why my snippet worked and what was really going on.

While I don't use SO as much as my early coding days, I still feel it's very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> On behalf of Stackoverflow I'd like to apologize and offer you a gift certificate for one free question of your choice. Offer not applicable to sale items or anyone using Angular.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some previous discussion on this topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11890140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11890140)</comment>


Apply for our $5 Million TinyFund - <AUTHOR> http://www.tinyco.com/tinyfund <comment><USER2> Place holder as its blocked from work.

Can you provide more details about TinyFund?

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> From the site: "The TinyFund is designed to provide monetary assistance of up to $500,000 per title to game developers creating any type of game played on iPhone, iPad or Android including paid and free titles. TinyCo will offer marketing, development and business assistance as needed."</comment></comment>


Inside Nick Denton's phony, hypocritical class war against tech workers - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons-phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/ <comment><USER2> This is a long and very entertaining read. If you want to skip to the main accusation of hypocrisy, it is:

        Speaking of facts: While presenting itself as the champion
        of the working classes, the fact is Dentons Gawker empire is
        guilty of almost every crime it accuses the tech industry of
        committing, and several it doesnt. Denton, who now
        encourages others to sneer at Silicon Valleys elite social
        clubs, made his own millions as co-founder of First Tuesday,
        an elite social club which spanned Europe during the first
        dot com boom. While crying foul at the off-shore tax dodging
        of San Francisco tech companies, Gawker Media is registered
        in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying US taxes, an
        arrangement which the New Yorker described as like an
        international money-laundering operation. As Valleywag howls
        that Google interns earn more than you, Gawker Media is
        currently the subject of a class action lawsuit over its
        earlier refusal to pay its own interns a dime for their
        labour. And how about Valleywags mockery of lavish Silicon
        Valley workplaces? Why not ask Denton about that when you
        visit his steampunk office, featuring a lounge area that
        looks like its straight out of the blue pill/red pill scene
        in The Matrix, an office surfboard and a rooftop party deck?
        Business Insider claims its one of the 15 coolest offices in
        tech. And while youre there, make sure to also ask him about
        Gawkers Privilege Tournament, a smug little contest in which
        Gawker readers were invited to vote on which underprivileged
        group (choices include: black, blind, transgender, people
        with AIDS, the homeless, overeducated, and fat) should win
        by virtue of its sweet, sweet moral superiority  or as
        Salons Katrina Richardson called the tournament: a
        shamefully racist, sexist, homophobic and classist attempt
        to silence large swaths of people.

<comment><USER3> Holy shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jesus, this is scathing.

I think in an abstract and idealized sense, stuff like Valleywag serves the tech industry by providing the role of watchman and magnifying glass. But on a post-by-post basis -- and if you think Paul Carr cherry-picked his examples, go on Valleywag, they're pretty much all just awful posts of out-of-context tweets -- it fails that goal tremendously. Just like Gawker itself, there are occasionally very well-put posts and actual newsbreaking -- they broke the Uber financial data a couple weeks back -- but it's hard to hold them in high esteem.

On a semi-related note: incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links.

<comment><USER5> > On a semi-related note: incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links.

I think censorship is a terrible idea, even when the censored articles come from places you don't hold in very high esteem.

<comment><USER6> I don't consider it censorship. I view it as curated content, which is what I strongly desire. Censorship would mean you or I _couldn 't_ get access to valleywag to see what it has to say. That clearly is not the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh hey look, Pando (well, Paul Carr) has decided to go after Valleywag's "class warfare" posts. I'm actually surprised it's taken this long. I think Valleywag has actually made some excellent points over the past few months, but has also managed to undercut their position by posting a bunch of irrelevant crap that doesn't matter.

If Sam Biddle actually cares about this stuff, I'd love to see him leave Gawker and strike out on his own. SV needs someone talking about this topic regularly.

Pando, being a de facto mouthpiece for today's top tier VCs, doesn't really carry much credibility on this subject, even though I do like Paul Carr.

</comment><comment><USER8> The craziest thing to think about is that because a few kids at Instagram were dicks or because one or two of the thousands of Twitter employees did something bad, we extrapolate those behaviors to every tech startup worker.

My fiancee and I both work very hard, live in a modest house in the east bay and volunteer in our community quite a bit. I left San Francisco 2 years ago after being priced out of affordable living and I have no resentment to anyone working at a company that provides a lot of perks. So why am I lumped in with some guy at Instagram driving his Lambo to his mansion? We could not be any more different, beside the fact that both of the companies we work for are funded by VCs.

<comment> brown9-2 Is that crazy or just human nature to lump people together based on profession or what region they live in? It's a good sign of simplistic reasoning.

<comment><USER9> Or you know, it's not about individual people, but about what they do and cause AS a profession (or region or whatever).

That is, this or that individual X (say, tourist in remote beach) might be an OK guy, but the activity of all of them combined might be causing a certain phenomenon (say, pollute and disturb the beach, alter the local economy towards dependency on tourism, etc).

<comment><USER10> eh comeon tech workers are just people doing a job. the same issues/judgments apply to any profession (law, finance, journalism) but these guys are clearly just demonizing tech workers as a group when... they don't really cause anything en masse, are we blaming them for accepting salaries and being a little eccentric at times? they are just people with jobs.

this is real misdirected anger as the author points out, simply because tech workers are doing a _little_ better than most. maybe there is resentment because people don't respect the work that they do ("they just press buttons and are overpaid") or there is jealousy because it is a profession where there is a huge amateur rank (people without degrees who are trying to bootstrap themselves into the tech world & making less than most of their college/masters-educated peers). I really think its something along the lines of this kind of phenomenon. Otherwise why not just complain about predatory lawyers/financiers etc.

Tech workers are not notoriously predatory so why should they be demonized as a group...? They are labor for hire, non-unionized at that. if you think they are harming the world in some other way, it may be better to blame the businessmen designing the requirement specs, or the users whose interest keeps the projects funded

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For the people who read the HN comments before reading the article: This is like 3000 words from one shitty technology website talking shit about another shitty technology website. Don't waste your time.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is really sad because there is real inequality in this country but its between the bottom 40% who combined have less wealth then the heirs of Walmart.

These protestors been have duped into fighting amongst ourselves instead of focusing on the real problem. Thats why "we are the 99%" was such a powerful slogan, solidarity is the only way were going to fix the problems in this country.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not as hard as it sounds to report on Silicon Valley from NYC. It turns out, you just have to copy and paste tweets, add a bit of snark, and then contact the tweeter's employer for comment. It probably adds 10k pageviews if you get someone fired.

It helps that you don't have to be accurate. For example, take this juxtaposition:

"Anti-Foreigner VC Also Supports Hiring Discrimination" by Sam Biddle[1]

"Y Combinator reaches farther beyond Silicon Valley" \- including startups from _22_ different countries in the latest batch[2]

[1] [http://valleywag.gawker.com/anti-foreigner-vc-also- supports-...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/anti-foreigner-vc-also-supports- hiring-discrimination-1215372055)

[2] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator- reache...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-reaches- farther-beyond-silicon-valley.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Controversy drives page views. That's all you need to know about Gawker/Valleywag.

Stop worrying about every troll. Just ignoring them is the best revenge.

<comment><USER15> logically speaking, for "Controversy drives page views" = P and "Just ignoring them is the best revenge" = Q, in this case P implies not Q. if controversy drives page views then by definition they're hard to ignore (as long as they're controversial).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yeah, getting kind of sick of residents of the home our two most evil industries (media and finance) talking shit about SV tech firms. New Yorkers drove our economy off a cliff but would rather bitch about fucking Google Glasses. Please.

<comment> brown9-2 This argument blames an entire city of people for what a few do just like TFA criticizes Valleywag for doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some background: Over the past year, Valleywag has been taking shots at Pando and its editor, Sarah Lacy. Pando decided to return the favor.

[http://valleywag.gawker.com/search?q=pandodaily](http://valleywag.gawker.com/search?q=pandodaily)

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Blaming Biddle for rape or murder threats against Justine Sacco is a big stretch when he only posted about the tweet. I don't see anyone blaming buzzfeed for the same thing.

This article makes some good points but lumps them in along with several ad hominem and other pointless attacks (who his father is does not change the validity of any of Biddle's points). Farhad Manjoo's critique was much more fair.

Besides how can anyone read Valleywag and not see how desperate and reaching most of it's articles are? Why should anyone even take them seriously?

</comment><comment><USER18> As I was reading this article, I found myself wanting to click the links he was posting (to get context), but didn't want to give Valleywag my pageviews.

So I wrote a chrome extension that solves this problem. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969487)

</comment><comment><USER19> Valleywag is the TMZ of Silicon Valley. Remind yourself of that when reading it, and you'll be fine.

<comment><USER20> It wasn't something I'd read before, but having it summed up so succinctly assures me that it is _definitely_ not something I'll be reading any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not sure about the Gawker drama, but $155k for the train operator pay is quite remarkable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average train operator salary in the US is $46k: [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and- material-moving/tr...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material- moving/train-engineers-and-operators.htm)

<comment><USER22> Look at BART salaries, compare them with SV engineer salaries. There is some validity to the comparison of playing one working class against another.

Not everyone in Silicon Valley taking the buses is making bank, just like not everyone protesting is making minimum wage. Part of this is protesting gentrification, part of it is frustration with a company in regard to ones situation.

A broader, non tech blog dialog is likely more beneficial than pando vs valley wag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I actually read the whole thing :) loved every minute. Long long ago I enjoyed an occasional Valleywag article, can't say I've visited the site now for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER24> I always wonder where people learned the notion that hypocrisy instantly invalidates any argument in a puff of smug smoke. Yes, Valleywag are pots to the Silicon Valley kettle. It's still funny, and still shines a good light on the idiotic self-important traipsing of the tech scene.

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree with they accusations regarding Gawker. I didn't in the past. IMO, Back when Huffington Post and Gawker were relevant anti-establishment media outlets, they played a critical role in getting the message out about the corporate and political madness of the greed-obsessed right wing. Unfortunately, they both fell to the greed virus and became what they so vehemently claim they are not.

<comment><USER26> Neither has been anything more than a TMZ clone. Why would anyone in tech read either one? Especially Gawker. Gawker is about as relevant to technology (or anything besides the latest celebrity gossip) as People Magazine is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27>
      >>> import Levenshtein
      >>> Levenshtein.distance("pando", "pander")
      2</comment>


Bitcoin: a look at a promise unfulfilled - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/27/2588450/bitcoin-history-wired-currency

<comment><USER2> The link to this on the theverge.com adds nothing. Submit the link to the original article on Wired.</comment>


Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4297

<comment><USER4> OK, so I've learned from this paper that this sort of paid postings to influence public opinion occur systematically by trained teams in China. But my praises end there.

I don't trust much their machine learning detection approach. But before we get into that, let's describe what they did. These researchers collected about 21,000 comments from a news site representing 552 users. The researchers then manually selected which of these 552 users they thought to be paid posters without any external confirmation. According to their methodology they assumed stupid comments or contradictory comments were by paid posters. The approach from here was to do lots of fancy math on novel comments not screened by the researchers, and make a classification on if these novel comments were by paid posters or not.

If you haven't guessed it by now, the flaw here is the researchers assigning which commenters _they thought_ were paid or not, based on the stupidity of the comment. Its pretty easy to manually classify e-mail spam, but I'd have a hard time classifying a paid public opinion shill based on a comment. Furthermore, if the researchers are using the intelligence of the comment as a marker, my experience with youtube comments, r/politics, and a few other internet forums leads me to believe that there's no shortage of stupid, contradictory ideas espoused by real unpaid people.

<comment><USER5> _Automatic Detection of Stupid Posters_ would also be acceptable.

<comment><USER6> It's been done: <http://stupidfilter.org/wiki/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to study the social phenomenon of paid posters."

A simple Google search shows there are all sorts of papers that have been written on detecting astroturfing. This statement is an epic fail.

<comment><USER8> Well.. maybe you don't get those results in China.

But seriously, you're right, even a similar one posted to arxiv: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3768>

<comment><USER9> Sorry about following your OT here, but it's a very interesting thought - <USER2> the great firewall might be a factor in over-representing the uniqueness of your own work if prior art is censored from your view.

This reminds me of a video I saw a while back where they showed Chinese students the iconic "man in front of a line of tanks" picture and they failed to recognize it. I wonder whether irony will eat itself in the future - <USER3> some "capitalist" country will decide to use tanks on its people and they will try to stop it with a human shield. Cue "look at the failure of capitalism - using tanks on their own people who bravely stand up to it!" comments from Chinas statesmen.

Shielding your citizens from material that encourages dissenting thought is a cute plan, but you may end up making them look like fools on the international stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to see this applied to some of the "patriotic" Facebook pages (like the "Being American" page).

</comment><comment><USER11> In the USA, it is now law that bloggers have to mention any gifts of products, books, licenses, etc. that might influence blog posts.

I think this is good!

I am an author, and I get comped a _lot_ of books, and some software products. It just feels right to say something like, for example, "thanks to publisher Z for sending me a revue copy of book B" when talking about book B. If I get comped something that I don't like, then I won't talk about it.

Paid posters on Reddit, etc., are more insidious because you just have to guess if they might be paid by a company or government to push desired hype.

<comment><USER12> not actually a "law" -- more of an F.T.C. regulation

"The Guides are administrative interpretations of the law intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves." -- <http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm>

<comment><USER13> FTC regs are backed by truth-in-advertising law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Obligatory: <http://xkcd.com/810/>

</comment><comment><USER15> from the geographical distribution of users vs. paid posters on pg.7 the 2 provinces - SICHUAN and esp. SHANDONG - are noticeable by lower ratio of paid posters. Any idea why it so?

<comment><USER16> I guess their data example is not strong enough. I don't think the two provinces have any reason for a ratio so low.

<comment><USER17> or bad GeoIP db

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a fantastic study! The authors are top class in their field and I think we should all take notice of what they say!!!

<comment><USER19> I see what you did there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I suspect quite a bit of astroturfing is going on in app store reviews. My national iOS app store has a fairly small volume of ratings/reviews, usually single or double digits, only hitting hundreds for a very few apps. I've spotted two or three weird scattershots of desultory, ill-fitting, generic- sounding reviews. It even looked like the effort needed was overestimated out of ignorance ...

<comment><USER21> Oh, that's a certainty. I've seen Amazon Mechanical Turk work items that have you place a five star review and receive payment for having done so.

<comment><USER20> Hmm, that explains why they are "reviews" (with verifiable names) instead of just ratings (untraceable externally).

Fortuitous interesting excursion on arXiv: top-200 heavy physics papers readers, "2010 Institutional arXiv Usage Data" at <http://arxiv.org/help/support/2010_usage></comment></comment></comment>


Grunt.js: Tips and Tricks - <AUTHOR> http://quickleft.com/blog/grunt-js-tips-tricks

<comment><USER2> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://quickleft.com/blog/grunt- js-tips-tricks&espv=210&es_sm=119&strip=1)

<comment><USER3> Site's back up, we scaled up some dynos. Thanks Heroku :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article suggests splitting the configuration in many parts using the grunt.config method. Another interesting way to organize it in a larger project is to define config for each task in a separate module. I first saw this used in React: [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/9182100/Gruntfile.js#...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/9182100/Gruntfile.js#L17)

<comment><USER5> It's important to note that Grunt can be used in 2 (more?) ways:

1.) As a build tool

2.) As a continuous build tool (with watch and live reload)

React's Gruntfile is well organized and is a great option for #1.

However, use of this approach for #2 will cause a slower development process. Obviously, part of the performance hit could be offset by conditionally including only the files required for each task. However, reading files from disk will result in a slower reload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can someone please tell me what exactly they are using Grunt for? I just don't see what problem it solves.

<comment><USER7> I'm using it to automate testing/concatenating/minifying a front-end library I'm working on.

<comment><USER8> I do the same with a PHP project, it's nice because I just don't include the original JS source files when I push to staging/production

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Grunt has done nothing, but piss me off since I've used it. The one plugin that it is missing is a JS library dependency resolver (put in the file paths, put in the dependencies, and spit out the file paths in the optimal load order). I've used grunt standalone (which sucked when I spent half the day in the config), I've used it with Yeoman (which suffers the same problem as using Grunt standalone), and I've used it with Lineman (which essentially sidesteps the problem by concatenating all the files together in an order you specify).

Grunt is simply too complicated for a lightweight such as myself and I wish the tooling existed to make the pain go away.

<comment><USER10> I feel your pain with JS dependency resolution and management, I have yet to get it with grunt, either. I solved that problem with RequireJS. Have you given that a shot?

RequireJS is incredible when it comes to managing dependencies and organizing JS code in general. Combine it with a requirejs task in Grunt to automatically optimize your JS code and you've got a real slick development-to-production JS pipeline on your hands.

Granted, RequireJS may seem a little funky at first, but I promise you taking the couple of hours necessary to learn its basics will make your life (at least when it comes to developing JS) much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> HN continues to amaze me. I was just looking for a solution to creating multiple build files using grunt and requirejs. Found out how exactly under the "Dynamic Tasks" section.

</comment><comment><USER12> I know this is off-topic, but I really liked this site's page title banner interaction. I haven't seen anything like it before!</comment>


Ask HN: What hours do you work? (and what country/job) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER4> I work remotely from home, in New York (U.S. Eastern).

My work day on paper is from 9 am until 5 pm.

In actuality, I generally wake up at 9 am or so, shower, eat breakfast and catch up on news until 10 am.

10 am until 1 pm I am productive and "working."

From 1 pm until 2 pm, maybe 2:30 pm I go to the gym (unless it's a rest day) for 45 minutes, then come back home and eat lunch. Then I sign back on.

From 2:30 until 5 pm I am "working" again. If there isn't a pressing need for me to be available I might do a self-debrief of my to-do list and sign off at 4 pm or 4:30 pm. I then leave my office and don't enter it again until work the next day - I completely compartmentalize work life from home life (and respective hours) even though I work remotely.

I've made this sort of schedule very much a priority in my life. I am paid very, very well and it allows me to pursue a comfortable work life balance, health, relationships and other projects outside work. I strictly will not work before 9 am or after 5 pm.

If I need to run errands during the day, I basically just make it known that "I'm afk" for some estimation of time and come back later.

If I receive emails after 5 pm for work, I don't check them until the morning.

I'd estimate I have about 25 hours per week of truly pure, productive work getting accomplished.

I believe most people who can work like this in the software industry should. I have very generous vacation time, but I actually need to focus on scheduling it before the end of the year simply because aside from actual trips I never feel the need to use it.

Combine this with the financial and professional fulfillment this setup gives me and it's basically a dream.

<comment><USER5> If you don't mind me asking, what sort of work do you do?

<comment><USER4> Happy to answer.

Information security; specifically web and mobile penetration testing, source code auditing and security tool development.

I clear close to $300k per year in cash salary, pre-tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work in an early stage start-up in NZ. To extent our runway, we all took part-time jobs. I work in the Operations Team of Uber.

Monday 9am - 7pm Tuesday 9am - 1pm, 1pm - 7pm (part-time job with Uber) Wednesday 9 am - 1pm, 1pm-7pm (part-time job) Thursday 9am - 1pm, 1pm - <USER2> (part-time job) Friday 9am - 5pm, 7pm - 12am (part-time job, every 2nd week) Saturday 10am -12pm (part-time job), 12pm - <USER3>

Usually take a 10 minute break every 2 hours, plus get lunch most days at 12.15 and return to the office by 12.40.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are you asking how many hours people work, or at what times of the day people work? From the question, this is not really clear, although the former seems more likely. Furthermore, no indication of intent or reason for asking was given. For example, someone may want to know whether there are regional trends among HNer workloads. In that case, it would be useful if participants included whether the job were local, remote, contract, and or employment.

</comment><comment><USER8> I work 8am - 5pm with 30min to 2hrs to eat. I'm a software engineer in France.

Usually the work hours for office work is more 9am - 6pm or even 6:30 at the places where I've worked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. I always thought the stereotype of France was that they don't work a lot. That sounds very similar to my experiences.

<comment><USER8> The stereotype is that we don't work a lot because we're on strike ;) (Aside: There are a lot of strikes and demonstrations because our industrial and public sectors are very unionized and that's how unions negotiate here: a good strike (with or without demonstration) as a show of force.)

We also have a (theoretical) 35 hrs work-week which means around 7,5 weeks of holidays per year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 9pm to 1am - 4 hrs for overlap to the guys in PST timezone

the remaining 4 hrs I do it anytime of the day.

Software Developer (Philippines)

</comment><comment><USER10> US/Software Engineer

Work remote so the day starts at 8 or 9 and typically ends around 7. Usually average around 37-42 hours per week of actual "work"

</comment><comment><USER11> 8 am - 4:30 pm, 30 minutes lunch (optional: 60 minutes/5 pm finish) and two 15 minute breaks.

US, programmer, state-education.

</comment><comment><USER12> 6-6 US, analystish job in finance

</comment><comment><USER13> CA, US/Software Engineer

~9am - 5:30pm

</comment><comment><USER14> Argentina - 9am to 6pm

</comment><comment><USER15> Hours: 4 to 5

Location: india

</comment><comment><USER16> 0500-1400

US/writer</comment>


Waymo's self-driving cars are now available on Lyft's app in Phoenix - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18536003/waymo-lyft-self-driving-ride-hail-app-phoenix <comment><USER2> Is Waymo still the frontrunner on self-driving? Elon Musk recently said that Tesla is far ahead of the competition, and that it's not even close.</comment>


HD Trade Services (YC S12) Lets Small Logistics Providers Track Shipments - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/pics-or-it-didnt-happen-yc-backed-hd-trade-services-lets-small-logistics-providers-track-shipments-like-the-big-boys/

<comment><USER2> I wish I didn't have to read Techcrunch's hollow journalism to learn about the latest YC class, because many of them seem like legitimate business cases working on fairly ambitious ideas.

The problem is, every Techcrunch post about a YC startup reads like a press release; completely devoid of any independent research, analysis, or, well, journalism. This author's most insightful analysis about the market is that "shipping and distribution" are "an essential part" of global trade. Wow! I never thought about it that way!

What's the size of the "small logistics services providers" market, who are the major potential customers and partners? How hard will it be to compete with established players like UPS and FedEX? How much is the company charging for the product? Isn't it ridiculous that the founder thinks he can pull a viral coefficient of 50?

I know this is nothing new, but seriously Techcrunch: you can do better than this.

<comment><USER3> The startups need TC to reach other publications, but maybe there's a market for a YC (or all major accelerator) focused journalist who does in depth interviews and analysis of each startup. I'd trust an entrepreneur or investor in that role, rather than a journalist.</comment></comment>


Lists Browser App is finally approved - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/list-browser/id490514286

<comment><USER2> Simple and useful</comment>


Don't Lose Your Visitors: Better 404 Pages - <AUTHOR> http://www.devlounge.net/articles/dont-lose-your-visitors-better-404-pages <comment><USER2> Here's something I'd like to see tried: fetch the text of the referring page, and use Google to figure out what they meant to link to.</comment>


Ask HN: What antivirus do you run on Windows, if any? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Windows has had its own antivirus (Security Essentials / Windows Defender) for some time now. Do you have any reason not to trust it, or that it isn't adequate?

Most large antivirus vendors don't fill me with a lot of confidence, and my theory is that at least Microsoft's own solution is going to integrate well and stay out of my face.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that Windows Defender uploads your files to the MS cloud for scanning. [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/03/window...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/03/windows-defender-advanced-threat-protection-uses-cloud- power-to-figure-out-youve-been-pwned/) And generally any "large antivirus vendor" is going to integrate just as well and can be non-intrusive as any other.

<comment><USER2> I used McAfee's suite once because I had to (corporate environment). It popped up all the time wanting this or that. It relied on ActiveX for a lot of what it did. Updates to it failed if your _system default browser_ was set to something other than Internet Explorer.

I'm guessing it's moved on since then, but it lost my trust. I've had to use Norton's suite before too and it had similar reliability issues.

Since using Security Essentials / Defender on Win7 and later it just works and never needs any hand-holding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For my personal computer I use Microsoft Security Essentials / Windows Defender. My biggest threat is when my kid is using my computer and playing on some flash game websites, so all my user accounts are currently non- administrators which atleast might mitigate some attempts.

However, at work it's a different picture. We have 300 "lusers" and everyone are eager to click on the newest malware on the block with no thought of consequences.

We've tried several AV products and right now we're using BitDefender which seems to get the work done for the most parts. First time we ran it, It found our (IT dep) 10 year old Red Alert 2 .exe crack so that was quite amusing. It also has few false positives and hardly ever makes itself noticeable in resource monitor.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm currently running Bitdefender, there's no real good reason for that except the license for it was a cheap offer. There are some antivirus test like av- test.org and av-comparatives.org and no doubt others. Personally I think an adblocker and, notdownloading anything illegal and a decent spam filter are more effective. The last time I had a virus was 10+ years back.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use ESET Smart Security.

[1] [https://www.eset.com/int/home/smart- security/](https://www.eset.com/int/home/smart-security/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Kaspersky has served my family very well. It's not free, but it's effective (usually one of the top three in all the rankings I've seen) and it stays out of the way. Good UI, too.

</comment><comment><USER8> Avira offers a free one that's served me well. In fact, I also started using it on my OSX.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you don't download any cracks or whatnot the built in is perfectly fine.

</comment><comment><USER10> For my home pc I use Norton Security since 2006. I'm still satisfied.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am using Avast and prefered it over AVG which I tried earlier.

</comment><comment><USER12> I use Bitdefender Free edition and no issues so far!

</comment><comment><USER13> I using kaspersky internet security and it ok.

</comment><comment><USER14> I run Sophos for last 4 years.</comment>


Snipt - Like Pastie, but for your own commands you frequently forget - <AUTHOR> http://snipt.net/

<comment><USER2> * Putting the field title inside the field is not a win. It looks elegant before you starting filling the blighter in, but it's a hindrance during. I fill in field 1, tab to field 2 (forgetting to look inside the field to note what I need to enter), guess it's asking for my email, shift-tab to check, find I'm correct, tab again and then fill in my email. Repeat.

* "Whoops" is the first word you see after you sign up. The context is, "Whoops, looks like you don't have any snipts yet", but it's still jarring.

* It won't let me save a snippet without tags.

* Can the type drop-down not be a text field where I can type a file extension? Way quicker. Perhaps default it to txt.

* You need to make the most efficient use of space possible for showing my snippets. The only vertical space taken up by snippets should be the text itself. Put all the other stuff (edit, copy, add, My snipts, Public snips etc.) off to the side.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should post this one their feedback page. I'm not behind this site :)

<comment><USER2> Oh, whoops - I assumed it was a critique-my-site style post. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A simpler alternative may be to use make.

Here is what I do: <http://ergo.rydlr.net/?p=37>

<comment><USER4> I can't believe you put "simpler" and "make" in the same sentence. Most of the time you're better off writing a bash script unless you're doing something particularly crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was just browsing and saw this (changed to protect the innocent):

       0123456789ab
          - Akismet key

People should probably be careful about just throwing out sensitive data on snipt.

<comment><USER5> I hope this is obvious to most coders, plus the "Public" checkbox is unchecked as default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Design rocks. Very nice.

I think it really needs search. I use Evernote for this and it's super-useful to just start typing whatever I remember and the rest shows up in the results.

Notational Velocity is another example (in a desktop app) of how I think search should/could work. <http://notational.net/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I checked this page at work, and IS still only supports IE 6. The page that returned said this:

 __ _Hey there! I see you're running Internet Explorer 6.

That's neat. This reminds me of my grandpa. He had this old car that he kept having to fix. He spent so much money on it that he didn't want to get rid of it (even when it stopped running).

You guys should hang out.

Here's a free sports car from Snipt.

_ __

I understand where they're coming from, but I usually find out that insulting your customers is a bad idea.

<comment><USER8> Nick from Lion Burger, here. We would never want to insult our customers, either. In this particular instance (the audience of Snipt), IE6 users do not represent a significant number of our customers (less than a tenth of a percent, actually).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's pretty awesome. i added the command that grabs your wireless router's MAC address, adds it into a skyhook URL, and returns your gps coords.

</comment><comment><USER5> Useful app, I was just using txt documents that were getting unwieldy. Bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does that copy link work for people in Firefox? Fails in FF+Mac for me

<comment><USER8> This is Nick from Lion Burger, the folks behind Snipt. We're still toying with some better copy functionality - our current solution is a little flaky. Stay tuned, thanks!</comment></comment>


Air Pollution in Our Homes - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-hidden-air-pollution-in-our-homes <comment><USER2> If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants.

In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air.

Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo palm).

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

<comment><USER3> From [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-p...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor- plants-clean-air-best-none-them/584509/)

 _Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much._

 _Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. "You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air- cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system," he said. That's 10 plants per square foot of floor space. Even if you chose the most effective type of VOC-filtering plant, you would still need one plant per square foot, Waring said._

<comment><USER4> That is spot on. The only solution is to build houses with better materials that release less VOCs and/or use an air filter with a good activated carbon stage.

Carpets have become very popular. But cheap ones release tons of VOCs due to fire retardants and anti-stain treatments.

I've switched to a house built in the Scandinavian style, with oiled wooden floors and simple soap-treated furniture. Not only beautiful, but also lacks the typical brand new smell. Theoretically much better in terms of nasty VOCs.

<comment><USER5> Most modern European housing also has to abide by strict energy efficiency and air leakage standards, so they come with heat-recover air exchange systems.

<comment><USER6> Air leakage standards in which direction?

<comment><USER5> Building envelopes need to be tighter

<comment><USER6> Got a Netatmo CO2 sensor recently and i think that needs to be rethought. That shit builds up fast inside a well sealed system.

<comment><USER5> That's why there are requirements around installing an air exchange system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always wonder about small acrylic hairs and such that float about the house. In a bright room just flex your jumper, there's thousands of these weird impurities, and I can't imagine they can be filtered out easily before or after getting into the lungs.

The biggest shocker is when you disturb loft insulation. They claim it's not terrible (specifically if undisturbed), but floating glass strands can't be all that nice.

<comment><USER8> They don't need to be filtered. They get trapped in mucus. The constant flow of mucus from all your mucosal membranes pushes these outwards.

In the case of your lungs they get delivered to the great acid bath that is your stomach.

<comment><USER9> This. We evolved in an environment with plenty of particulate matter. It's the exotic stuff that has no analog from the time when we evolved that causes problems.

<comment><USER10> As opposed to acrylic?

<comment><USER11> Without knowing for sure, I imagine acrylic to be inert and most like any other dust on the time scale it takes for our bodies to expel it. But I could be wrong. Certainly, there _are_ modern dangerous materials which do affect us, such as asbestos and heavy metals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Indoor air quality means different things to different people. There are so many chemicals and particles that qualify as air 'pollution' that I find it helpful to rank how important they are. This article does a good job of quantifying the damage by pollutant, using a metric called 'Disability Adjusted Life Years': [https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/which-indoor-air- polluta...](https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/which-indoor-air-pollutants- matter-most)

You can see that while there are a lot of things to consider, PM2.5 is by far the most dangerous. Surprisingly to me, mold is actually the next most dangerous, implying that indoor humidity control is also very important.

</comment><comment><USER13> I got a laseregg 2, and highly recommend it or a similar monitor. It's been very eye opening to see how various scenarios affect air pollution:

* frying indoors generally swiftly puts things in the unsafe range. Especially if it led to browning.

* a neighbour's bbq would do the same if the window was open

* idling truck on the street for construction? Unsafe range

* surprisingly, the toaster would raise levels if it was on high enough to brown toast

Really helped me make better decisions about when to open/shut windows and how to cook.

I got the laseregg after reading reviews of air quality monitors used in china. Apparently it holds up well to specialized lab sensors. It has a battery and can be moved around

<comment><USER14> I've recently borrowed a similar device, and this one also measures formaldehyde. To be honest I'm quite anguished by it, because I can't find any indoors object with formaldehyde concentration less than 0.1ppm, which is the "safe" (by some legal standards) margin. Only outside or in a room with a wide open window it comes down under. It's even borderline higher in buildings not recently renovated. I've tried researching how dangerous is 0.3ppm or such, or how to keep it under control, but no luck. All sources are very academic...

<comment><USER13> What device measures formaldehyde?

I've ordered an awair, I think it does vocs but not sure it does them in any specificity.

And I think the only real solution is venting. Open a window. Other than identifying the source and removing it of course. But in many places I think it's wall materials, furniture, etc

Dhh had a talk on indoor air quality you may find useful.

<comment><USER15> There are many devices out there on amazon, since formaldehyde inside your house == bad is a chinese health meme where air meters will measure it specifically.

[https://www.amazon.com/Air-Pollution-Formaldehyde- Detector-T...](https://www.amazon.com/Air-Pollution-Formaldehyde-Detector- Temperature/dp/B078ZS8RVL/ref=sr_1_9?keywords=formaldehyde&qid=1557356477&s=gateway&sr=8-9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have serious food allergies and celiac disease in addition to allergies/sensitivities to ingredients of cleaning products. I have problems entering are staying in a lot of environments, pretty much anywhere that I don't have control over the air or access to fresh air.

The results on the toaster are not surprising. I've worried about toast smoke in coffee shops before because small amounts of gluten or allergens can make me sick.

It's great that they are measuring concentrations of chemicals in the air related to cleaners. Something like someone spraying air freshener or mopping the floor with Pinesol makes me feel ill, and continued exposure will make me sneeze and my eyes turn red and so forth.

It's amazing how casual people are about this. I sat down at the bar the other day and immediately the bartender started spraying Windex all over and wiping a wall. I had to rinse out my nose, and gained a headache. It definitely ruined the experience for me, but most people don't think twice.

The possibility is raised that "The dominant source of VOCs in Los Angeles is now emissions from consumer products, including toiletries and cleaning fluids." Again, not a surprise. A statistic that quote to people is that about 5% of VOC emissions in the United States come from dryer vents, from mostly unnecessary chemicals in detergent and dryer sheets. Almost every single chemical product that is packaged for consumers and sold in plastic bottles at stores makes me very, very sick. Conditioners, shampoo, clothing detergent, pesticides, air freshener, candles soaps, fabric softener, floor cleaners, dish soap, glass cleaner. The annoying thing is that while the base formulation of these is bad enough, the part that is the worst for me is the completely unnecessary fragrances.

<comment><USER17> _It's amazing how casual people are about this_

Only if you think of it that way really, considering a) the majority of people don't have problems and b) long-term effects of those products are sometimes not known at all, let alone known by the general public. Don't forget things like allergy information for food etc are fairly recent developments even in the western world. And studies showing/hinting at links between cleaning produtcs and premature deaths etc are also fairly recent I think, so unfortunately the general population isn't really aware of the dangers.

<comment><USER16> Sure, I distinguish between my specific problems and everyone else. Of course the common food items I'm allergic to are all over. That's no surprise.

What I'm really objecting to is the needless chemicals and fragrances. There is growing awareness that fragrances bother some people. There's a growing trend of fragrance free workplaces, for instance the entire state government of Oregon.

City of Portland: "Fragrance Free Workplace Employees who are sensitive to perfumes and chemicals may suffer potentially serious health consequences, triggered by exposure to scented products. Consequently, employees are asked to refrain from the use of personal scented products in the workplace where the sole purpose is to produce a scent, such as perfume, after shave, and cologne and to avoid the use of strongly scented personal hygiene products such as laundry soap, dryer sheets hand lotion, powder, hair spray, and deodorant. All City managers and supervisors are expected to enforce this rule. An employee who is experiencing health consequences due to another employee's use of scented products should report the problem to their supervisor to ensure appropriate action is taken."

We can divide fragrance problems into allergies, sensitivities, and the mere fact that fragrance is distracting. In the bar example, I'm there to consume an expensive spirit that supposedly has a price based upon the flavor. Spraying a bunch of chemical cleaner in the air with a distracting fragrance right when I'm about to consume in my drink is a poor choice in that regard. You also see this in cannabis stores – some of them burn incense. When they are charging sometimes three times as much for certain products, mostly based on the aroma and flavor, why would the store be filled with fragrances that coat everything, dominate the air, and even soak into the product? If you were attending a winetasting, and there's a heavy air freshener scent or somebody there is wearing an extremely strong cologne, it distracts from the entire purpose of the event, which is tasting wine, not perfume. It's like shining a light and someone dies when they're trying to read.

I woman I dated for years used to have problems with her mother blasting the bathroom with some sort of Clorox cleaner. She would complain of headaches and watery eyes. Her mother paid absolutely no attention, as if her headaches and watery eyes were somehow less important then sanitizing the bathroom floor. I don't understand that attitude. Now that more testing has been done on cleaners like that, it's not that question at that concentration of toxic chemicals in the air exceeds safety levels in such a situation. It baffles me that common sense doesn't tell people this, too. Reading the label would help. The concept claimed by manufactures that people use things like raid and roundup in accordance with labeling is ludicrous.

As far as premature death, there is a long way to go from healthy to dead. The spectrum in between is a wide range of discomfort and illness. Studies have long showed a correlation between use of indoor cleaners and fragrances and respiratory problems such as asthma. Also, the trend of natural and non-toxic cleaners has been on the rise for years. So, there should be some awareness in the average person that certain consumer products pose a hazard if not for everyone for some people.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5773620/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5773620/)

But yes, the general population is definitely not aware of the dangers. I would say that's for many reasons. Certainly manufactures are not seeking to spread information they would expose them to liability or make them change their formulation. Instead they do things like cover up severely toxic contaminants in their products and lobby against labeling. And then, given the propensity of society to engage in activities that everyone knows can be harmful such cigarette smoking, alcohol, speeding, eating fried foods, fast food and so forth, it's clear that most people don't heed warnings of well- known dangers. Cigarette smoking causes all sorts of illness, impairment and discomfort before death, but to hear people talk, the only risk is death. Social pressure and marketing are stronger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been exposed to air toxics risk assessments through my work. The problem, in my mind, is not the toxics we're facing in our homes (or even outdoors). It's that humans are really bad at understanding risk. Let's imagine an annual Thanksgiving dinner presents an excess lifetime cancer risk of 2 (made up number -- probably much lower). Many people would find that unacceptable. But why? Many activities we engage in every day present much more material risk. For instance, this article says the odds of dying in a car crash are approximately 10.7 per 100k. That is 10,000 in a million. Yet we gladly get behind the wheel every day.

Noncancer effects are gauged in terms of multiples of the lowest observed effect level or the no observed effect level. If across a spectrum of exposures, we observed no effect at a certain level, that would be our NOEL. Of course, the observed effect could be a runny nose. 100x the NOEL could still be a runny nose (it could, in fact, be no adverse effect at all), but people see 100x the benchmark level and freak out.

In my mind, we really need to reshape this discussion around toxics. People are willing to suffer great costs to avoid hazards that do not, in fact, present material risks.

[1] [https://www.cars.com/articles/are-the-odds-ever-in-your- favo...](https://www.cars.com/articles/are-the-odds-ever-in-your-favor-car- crashes-versus-other-fatalities-1420682154567/)

<comment><USER19> > For instance, this article says the odds of dying in a car crash are > approximately 10.7 per 100k. That is 10,000 in a million.

There are ~30k automobile deaths in the US per year. Your figure is off by several orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER18> I would point you to the quote in the article I cite: "'Motor vehicle traffic' deaths in the U.S. in 2013, the most recent full year of data available, totaled 33,804, for a death rate of 10.7 per 100,000, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." I believe the denominator is confined to drivers. No matter, there are dozens of other good examples to support my point that ordinary activities are much riskier than the levels of risk we talk about in the context of air toxics.

<comment><USER20> The problem was with your math. 10.7 per 100k != 10,000 in a million.

10.7 per 100k == 1.07 per 10k == 107 per 1000k (1m)

<comment><USER18> You're correct. Moving too quick. And that, in turn, is still two orders of magnitude greater than 2. I think my point still stands. Thanks for the help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I got a air quality monitor when we had the California wildfires, and I was shocked to learn that my air quality was worse indoors when cooking than outdoors during the wildfires. (I am now in the process of getting a properly vented range hood instead of the dinky recirculating one we have).

<comment><USER12> I bought an AQI / PM2.5 monitor and was shocked to find the same thing. I placed it in an upstairs bedroom, far removed from the kitchen, and the PM2.5 readings jump to unhealthy levels within minutes or cooking, even that far away. HVAC systems do a great job of circulating bad air throughout the home. I've also observed measurable CO level increases in the upstairs while running a gas oven, using a low-level monitor.

I've also come to the conclusion that a vented range hood is really an essential for indoor cooking of any kind. It should definitely be the #1 priority for any home to improve air quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have a sensitivity to certain cooking fumes. I've tried to assess it objectively like it's a nocebo, which would be great if it were.

There are two cafes in SF I used to frequent who do their cooking in the same main space as guests, do not have much if any ventilation, and, if I was there hacking on my laptop around lunch time, I would always get headaches and need to leave. (one is a trendy workspace cafe, that I feel bad naming). It has not happened at other SF cafes despite a lot of working-in-cafes. I also used to have a roommate who didn't like the sound of our ventilation fan and wouldn't open the kitchen back door (to the outdoors) because of the cool air. Anytime she cooked with the oven I would get a headache and need to leave the apartment, while having no problem with the third roommate's cooking who preferred to ventilate.

<comment><USER13> If you got an air quality monitor you'd likely see shocking levels in those scenarios. I got a laseregg two, and normal frying can send indoor air quality to unhealthy levels if something gets a bit browned. Even with a fan on.

It's portable and has a battery. Quite eye opening to test it in various scenarios.

<comment><USER12> I'll second the LaserEgg 2. Great product and I've also had some eye-opening experience with cooking and indoor AQI. These used to be tougher to find in the US but I think you can get them on Amazon, now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've found many houses I've been in to be extremely stuffy and stale inside...I think most American homes fall into a bad middle ground for indoor air quality: well enough sealed to trap indoor pollutants, but lacking the more sophisticated HVAC systems that can efficiently exchange fresh air.

Additionally, it seems that many Americans also really hate opening their windows (and indeed the climate often doesn't really lend itself to opening the windows, in some places ever). I grew up in a drafty old house with no A/C, and even as a kid felt other people's–newer, not drafty, air conditioned–homes had an airless feeling.

It's been interesting to follow the recent studies on indoor CO2 and other air pollution...I don't feel quite so crazy for wanting to open the windows all the time when visiting family.

<comment><USER24> Agreed, but many houses in the Bay Area were built in the 1920's (both the houses I've owned were). The windows in my house are not sealed well. The double-hung sash windows have space for the rope and I can feel a draft on windy days.

All this talk of CO2 recently has made me value that my house is drafty.

<comment><USER25> It would be nice to have a house where you can regulate the draftyness better. In some seasons, draftyness is a feature, not a but, in others, not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > CTRL+F "smoke"

> CTRL+F "smoking"

> 0 results

The dominant source of air pollution for almost all of human history has been smoke of one sort or another (see: historical dramas that show indoor light/heating with candles and fireplaces, [https://samharris.org/the- fireplace-delusion/](https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/)), to the extent that I personally doubt banning secondhand smoke indoors would have made much difference to non-smokers' health before open wood fires and coal fires were phased out.

I suppose it's a notable achievement of our society that both industrial pollution and domestic smoke has been reduced so much that VOCs from other sources indoors are our greatest worry.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, I recently read about the health impacts of nicotine, as distinct from smoking. There are many, including cardiovascular trouble.

But as far as I can tell, nicotine doesn't cause lung cancer. That's from the smoke itself - any smoke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have used 3M Filtrete room-air purifiers as white noise generators for my kids since they were born > 7 years ago. It's amazing how much is in the air...

I believe growing up in a dusty environment contributed to my asthma...

</comment><comment><USER28> Off-topic, but this lab got $4.5M for equipment and still couldn't pay the students analyzing the data? What's up with that?

<comment> Harvey-Specter "Student volunteer" probably refers to undergrad students who are working on their theses.

<comment><USER29> Ah, then it's okay not to pay the going rate for the labor.

<comment><USER30> A lot of students benefit from this unpaid labor. I know many people who volunteered in labs to get real experience that they translated into high paying jobs else where.

Those people would not be able to get the job if it was paid

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The narrative in this article is heavy, but basically if I understand this right..cooking food indoors pollutes the air, and because you are in your kitchen indoors, you're polluting your own living space's air?

<comment><USER32> The kitchen exhaust fans in American homes are very weak (at least, every one I've lived in, and visited...). When cooking, you can smell what people are cooking, so it's not really doing its job of pulling the air out. I upgraded begrudgingly to a Chines brand called Fotile. It's expensive and I fought tooth and nail with my wife because my natural instincts was not to trust Chinese brands I never heard of. Admittedly, it's one of my best purchases. We can be frying stuff on the stove and standing 5 feet away, you won't smell it.

And like the link below says...it's the biggest appliance company I've never heard of. I have the one pictured on the left.

[https://www.treehugger.com/kitchen-design/chinese- manufactur...](https://www.treehugger.com/kitchen-design/chinese-manufacturer- fotile-designs-exhaust-hood-actually-exhausts.html)

<comment><USER33> God I fucking hate the nonsense "range vents" on the bottoms of microwaves that is typical of many American homes (mine included). They do _literally nothing_. It's infuriating that in my new-construction, rather nice, home I get this pretend bullshit in my otherwise lovely kitchen.

I'm tempted to get a proper range hood just because this infuriates me so much, but the cost of redoing the whole cabinet above the stove is steep.

<comment><USER32> Lol I was in the same boat. House is new construction, GE appliances... I took down the microwave and replaced it with the Fotile hood. The microwave (its huge...) sits on my counter.

Needed to do minor custom wood work to mount and make it look nice, but it's doable. My dad was a carpenter so it was easy to get done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you want to reduce the pollution in your home, stop using dryer sheets, fabric softener, Downy, or any laundry detergent that is scented.

Instead of fabric softener, use white vinegar as a liquid fabric softener in your washer. It will make your clothes smell fresh - not vinegary.

That scent that comes off of clothes that are treated with scented detergents and softeners is air pollution.

<comment><USER35> Care to explain _why_? Or what mechanism specifically is contributing to pollution? Seems like "pollution" might need some defining, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am on the fence about research like this. On one hand, as an engineer by training it's hard for me to countenance the idea that any research (properly conducted) could be bad. On the other hand, people have been cooking indoors since time immemorial, and even things like toasters are more than a century old. If they were dangerous, we'd know by know. The risk is that such research gets oversold by the media into a panic, as we have seen time and again. Look at what "science" has done for nutrition in the last few decades--upset a bunch of traditional norms, without offering any meaningful advance. Are VOCs (for the most part, "smells") going to be the subject of the same circus as salt and fat?

<comment><USER37> People in some countries have been cooking with indoor wood-fired stoves forever, yet we know for sure that these stoves are bad for respiratory health. That doesn't mean all the research is wrong!

I think the big take away is that you should pretty much always turn on the exhaust hood over your stove top when you cook. Doing so removes many of the particles generated by cooking.

<comment><USER38> In most homes the "exhaust hood" doesn't vent to outside. It filters the big particles out and mixes the rest. I'm not sure if this is better or not, but the difference isn't much, and after a short time they are the same.

<comment><USER12> The big particles are not what is most dangerous. Range hoods that recirculate air are not helpful. All kitchens should have externally-exhausted vent hoods, and it's even more important when using gas ranges, since a lot of harmful combustion byproducts are also being created (NO2, CO, etc). Sadly as you point out, this is far less common than it should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've always tried to air my home out as much as I can while cooking. Pretty much all windows are open. Article reaffirms my core avoidance of things like toasters/microwaves.

<comment><USER40> The article does mention toasters as a particularly bad culprit, but the word `microwave` doesn't appear anywhere in the text. Curious how you have arrived at this connection between two very different devices.

<comment><USER39> Erroneous jump to conclusions from my side, I think I naturally group electric appliances in the household in the same 'bad' category. I admit that is an error on my part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It took me a while, but I eventually ended up getting a indoor air quality monitor. I'm in California, and when the fires happened, I expected my brand new condo building to have decent filtration. According to my Awair monitor ([http://getawair.com](http://getawair.com))... my indoor PM2.5 (Fine Dust) went up to 150 ugm3. 150! We definitely had a chat with the building after that.

But yeah, cooking, cleaning, air fresheners... all of them negatively affect my home air quality. Just need to ventilate at the right times. After the DHH video about this topic, I pulled the trigger and got the monitor, which fortunately also tracks CO2 and chemical (VOCs).

I'm glad to see 2 topics about air quality trending today. I had to finally register to get in on the one topic I actually know about.

</comment><comment><USER42> My house is a bit drafty, and I couple that with a very effective air cleaner on the HVAC system, and convince myself that it pays off with breathing cleaner air.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think the article is selling home air purifiers

</comment><comment><USER44> It's not just cooking, it's all the spray cleaners, liquid detergents, and so on, too.

</comment><comment><USER45> And what about the lack of natural light? Has anyone seen this? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yv8gcFaJL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yv8gcFaJL0)

<comment><USER46> This ad campaign from a window company?</comment></comment>


2010 Startup School: October 16 at Stanford - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupschool.org/index.html <comment><USER2> Can anyone who has attended a past Startup School share their experience? What's the general atmosphere of the event? Is it similar to other conferences you've attended? Does it offer value on its own merits, or is it simply a day- long sales pitch for YC?

<comment><USER3> A question in the similar category: how many people were invited to past Startup School? Less than one hundred? In the hundreds?

<comment><USER2> Googling reveals 750 attendees: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eU-e6C9...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eU-e6C9Afl8J:startupschool.org/)

No idea how many applied, of course. Given the HN audience, it could have been thousands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone on the East Coast, we're having a similar event at MIT in September, open to anyone.

<http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu/>

<comment><USER5> Any details on the speakers?

<comment><USER6> <http://www.startupschool.org/speakers.html>

<comment><USER7> I assume he meant for Startup Bootcamp

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I misread. Apologies. I too am interested in the speakers for Startup Bootcamp

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few interesting new speakers this time: Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun), Ron Conway, Tom Preston-Warner (GitHub) and Brian Chesky (Airbnb).

<comment><USER9> Brian gave the student commencement address at RISD the year we graduated, it was a masterpiece, unrivaled in the annals of higher education. I have HIGH hopes for this talk.

<comment><USER10> I wasn't there, but I can imagine. Brian is a beast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will this be recorded for those of us who can't make it down to the bay area?

<comment><USER6> Last years talks were live streamed if I recall and are still accessible at: <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool>. I'd say its safe to assume that'd also be the case this year.

<comment><USER12> Yes, you can catch the talks on Justin.tv again this year.

<comment><USER11> Thanks!

I'd personally prefer having talks downloadable in a standard format (say, mpeg) rather than only via justin.tv, but they're still much better than nothing. (Or maybe they have a download feature I haven't been able to find?)

<comment><USER13> I just let them load in my browser and grab them out of my Flash cache

ls -ltr /var/folders/jH/jH90qqJaGnOB1gJOwGbGKE+++TI/TemporaryItems/

on my Mac

<comment><USER14> Not the most elegant solution, especially from an encoding / portability perspective.

BUT, happy they're stream-able period! I will sadly not be in the area, but look forward to seeing it online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The lack of startup school this year is a big reason why I organized the founder conference. And then I bump into pg, and ask him how come there was no startup school this year. Of course there is one, he said. We just didn't announce it yet.

Now he did :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> You could have just emailed me and asked.

<comment><USER15> Here was my thought process: I had attended AngelConf last year, and wanted to see if it was going to happen again. I checked that site, and it was still the old stuff, and the time was up. So I assumed AngelConf was a one-time thing.

Later on, I wondered about startup school and did the same thing: I checked the web site, and nothing new... So my brain recognized a pattern: you guys must be too busy this year to do those conferences. So I was convinced that startup school was not happening. Therefore I didn't even think of asking you. Until I met you and asked you _why_ you were not doing it anymore, which proves how convinced I was that my brain was smart :-)

[apologies for the long and boring explanation, but now you know - next time, I suggest putting a small link saying it's coming again in 2010, and my brain won't make the wrong inferrence]

<comment><USER16> AngelConf was run in 2010 too. <http://angelconf.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Paul, is there any way we can get a confirmation email that our submission was added? A confirmation email would set me at ease after submitting something I care so much about.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you got the confirmation page afterward, we got it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm semi-technical — designer and front-end developer and building my own startup at the moment. However, since the conference is centered around programmers, I'm wondering whether I'll be accepted to go (application already submitted). Any other designers/front-end people go to last years?

</comment><comment><USER19> Anything planned for the Midwest?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://hipmunk.com>

<comment><USER20> So, no then? I'm pretty sure he didn't ask his question because he was unaware of the existence of flight. Your link initially led me to believe that there is actually some other conference called Hipmunk in the Midwest, but instead it was a LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com-style flight search page.

For those of you actually interested in events in the Midwest, I can tell you that we're doing some interesting things in Cleveland that I can scrounge up more information about. Nothing conference-level that I'm aware of, but events with founders and incubators are becoming more and more frequent.

Edit: Cleveland Startup Weekend is in November and there's some sort of kickoff party in a few days. <http://cleveland.startupweekend.org/>

<comment><USER21> I think PG hears a lot about location ("We're the YC of Alaska!", "Do we _have_ to move if we get into YC?") and is getting tired of it. If you want to start a startup, moving to a startup hotspot will help a lot. If you want to attend cool conferences, move somewhere that frequently has cool conferences, or be willing to get on a plane for a good event.

The Midwest won't have a successful Startup School clone (at least not with speakers of this caliber) because it's not dense enough with startup people. Maybe there are enough people to make the event worthwhile in all of the Midwest, but it's such a huge area that a lot of people would still be facing very long drives or flying.

When people say "I want an event like this in <my region>", they really mean "I want an event like this within a 2 hour drive of my house, preferably closer." They don't mean "I live in Ohio and would happily travel to Kansas for this event." If someone were to announce an event like this in, say, Minneapolis, a lot of people form Indiana and Ohio would realize that that's not what they had in mind when they asked for a Startup School clone in the Midwest.

And now PG's invested in a flight comparison startup, so just as people sometimes link to <http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/>, he can link to Hipmunk to say "just fucking fly here."

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't mean anything quite so rude. I meant it more as invitation. Lots of the people who come to Startup School fly in to do it. That's why we have 2 weeks between acceptances and the date of the event-- so people can buy cheap plane tickets.

<comment><USER22> No cheap tickets from Chile on such short notice though... :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there typically ancillary events planned before/after? If accepted I'll be flying some distance to attend, and would love the chance at more time for conversation with the like-minded.

<comment><USER24> Last year, there was some sort of food-based reception right afterwards on campus. For the evening, a few YC companies threw after-parties at their offices in SF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the session should be live streamed or recorded and hosted somewhere for non valley people. pg?

<comment><USER26> Always is. Details will follow, I'm sure.

<comment><USER27> It will be on justin.tv

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great

</comment><comment><USER29> I'll not apply for this one, but for the next one, I'll apply, and (big) maybe I get accepted. I think it would be a pretty interesting experience.</comment>


How did low-level employees access national secrets? [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57596218/how-did-low-level-employees-access-national-secrets/

<comment><USER2> That's the first time I've ever seen a story about this.

I am astounded that none of the press wrote about the failures of the intelligence community to provide operational safeguards for the control of classified information, particularly in the Manning case.

There is supposed to be an air gap. But no one enforced it? Heads should have rolled all the way up the chain of command for that.

It's not even clear to me that the bulk copying of these memos triggered any alert or even left any kind of audit trail. If that's true, then more heads should've rolled for that too.

What if Manning had been an operative of a foreign government? He could have been shipping those files out of the country and we'd still be none the wiser.

Now they're doing 'two man control', according to the article? I have no confidence that that will be enforced either.

Seriously, no one is concerned about this devastating revelation that our classified information is not protected?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think its because most 'bosses' don't want to do work. You need to farm it off to someone else and thus they need clearance. See the government outsourcing to Booz Hamilton, etc...</comment>


Statistic 'proving' student debt was a rich person problem was a coding error - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-college-debt-plan-bad-stat-urban-institute-code-error.html <comment><USER2> The top quarter of earners owe 34% of college debt, not the 49% originally reported:

> Based on an analysis of federal data, its researchers concluded that 49 > percent of all outstanding education loans belonged to highest-earning > quarter of American households. ... It turns out that statistic was also > wrong. After a bit of poking around this week, I learned that it was the > result of a coding error by Urban's researchers. The correct stat is that > the top quarter of earners owe about one-third of all U.S. student loan > debt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, and to add context to the error, here is a Twitter reply from Matt Chingos, who directs the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute:

 _So, not fun story: This morning, Adam Looney told me that he found that 33% of student debt is held by the top income quartile, not 49% as reported in an @urbaninstitute blog post from 2018. He was right and we are correcting the post this afternoon.

It turns out that using aweights with Stata's collapse command produces the wrong answer for sums (pweights are the correct option for a survey dataset like SCF).

May you all learn from our mistake and never confuse weight types!

Thanks to Adam Looney and @JHWeissmann for helping us identify and correct this error._

[https://twitter.com/chingos/status/1121843437165318146](https://twitter.com/chingos/status/1121843437165318146)</comment></comment>


Bogus search engine pulls plans for IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/technology/22accoona.html?ex=1345435200&en=29767cf603e05bea&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> I interned for the company that provided Accoona's search engine software. This same software has been deployed successfully in many enterprise environments, is based on solid IR theory and research, and had powered a large web search engine in the late 90's.

However, any company trying to use it to compete with Google/Yahoo/MSN today, has 0 chance of succeeding. It's like trying to use Lucene to compete with Google. While these IR systems are solid and great for special purpose deployments, they provide little means of dealing with spamdexing, and all the other things a full web search engine needs in modern times.

It was obvious to me two years ago that Accoona was founded to capitalize on the search engine craze of the time as opposed to delivering a competitive product. I'd stay really far away from their stock if they ever go IPO.

</comment><comment><USER3> How on earth did they get the likes of Bill Clinton and Eckhard Pfeiffer to associate with such a sham?

<comment><USER4> Money talks.</comment></comment>


Facebook's Trojan Horse - <AUTHOR> http://newsletters.iafrikan.com/issues/facebook-s-trojan-horse-188470 <comment> fbi-director The article states that the real (long-term) goal of Facebook here is being an authority on proving identity.

They will be, or want to be, a worldwide provider of a kind of service, which is proving your identity. Which would tie the entire world population to their platform(s) even more.

I'm pretty sure most people have switched social media platform (geocities, MySpace, Facebook, snapchat, etc) more often than voluntarily switching banks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please elaborate.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Nanostyled – a 1kB library for styling React components with atomic CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chrisfrank/nanostyled <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. This library aims to be a compromise between the expressive APIs of CSS-in-JS libraries like styled-components, and the extremely low overhead of plain CSS.

Would love feedback on, in particular, whether it seems like a useful compromise, or whether it fails to capture enough of what's good about either CSS-in-JS or plain CSS on their own.

<comment><USER2> I was thinking about this recently. I've somehow avoided CSS-in-JS up to this point. I generally find functional CSS frameworks to be the most readable in that I like to be able to look at the classes and know essentially what's going on. I'm glad you made it and I'm bookmarking it for later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's a tiny library and my team is using it in production, so I plan on maintaining it for a very long time.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Has Declared War On Porn - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-war-on-porn-is-just-getting-started-2010-2

<comment><USER2> Hasn't anyone told them make love not war.</comment>


Why Americans Get Conned Again and Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/americans-con-fraud-balleisen/535281/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is kind of a boring ad for a book. The book itself may actually be an interesting history of fraud in America but, eh. There isn't really as much insight here as you may expect from the title.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to know if there's a correlation between the percentage of devout religious people and the incidence of fraud.

When people are raised to believe fantastical things without evidence, they're probably less able to reason from first principles about offers that are too good to be true.

<comment><USER3> I don't think people believing fantastical notions without evidence is purely constrained to the religious. There are plenty of pseudo-religious belief systems within atheist thought circles - mostly consisting of political and philosophical conceptions (as well as the ever-pervasive scientism). And after all, isn't that what a religion is anyway? Most religious people I've met don't believe the bible in a completely literal sense.

<comment><USER2> Studies have shown that regardless of whether or not people start as religious or not, they hold irrational beliefs at same rate as other people with their level of education.

The real interesting thing is that the irrational things that non-religious people believe in tend to satisfy the same psychological needs as religious beliefs. The Illuminati secretly ruling the world provides the comfort to people with an external locus of control that _someone is in charge and they have a plan,_ just like God (or the Devil or whoever). The fact that most people are sheep who can't see the Illuminati's schemes but a few special people can reinforces the idea that some of us are special people, just like how the Israelites were chosen. Etc.

<comment><USER3> yep, we may live in an age and a culture where religion is rejected as irrational but our brain circuitry for faith and existentialism is still there. We all have deities whether they are conventional (God, Allah, etc), political (the invisible hand of the free market, social progress, individualism), spiritual (new-age-ism, karma, universal consciousness) or pseudo-scientific (utopianism, scientism, singularitarianism). We all feel a need to believe in something higher than ourselves and if it isn't an archetypal expression of our cultural values and lessons (i.e. a religion) then it'll be some other way to answer the hard questions of life like what is good, what matters, what should I aim for and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I kind of guessed when I clicked it would be about Trump. Fuck off.

<comment><USER2> That's the thing; it isn't really about Trump. Trump is just mentioned gratuitously by the reviewer in order to make a history book "seem current."

It's pretty sleazy.</comment></comment>


Finding Maximum Cliques on the D-Wave Quantum Annealer - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08649 <comment><USER2> "We demonstrate that on random graphs that fit DW, no quantum speedup can be observed compared with the classical algorithms"

However, if you choose special graphs whose structure happens to be similar to DW ("chimera graphs"), then DW solves them faster and/or better than classic algorithms, which basically means DW simulates itself faster than general software for the Maximum Clique problem software simulates DW.

When it comes to larger graphs that must be split to fit in DW, they have an approach that "works", but the part that runs on a classical computer (the splitting) is exponential in runtime with respect to graph size. They also note that doubling the size of the DW in in qubits only gets you the ability to embed a graph √2 times as big. So for real, general graphs of plausible sizes you still don't escape having an exponential-time nonquantum "part" to the process, even if DW manufactures bigger and bigger devices over time.

The part where they state that the combination of the subproblems is optimal assuming that the solution to each subproblem is optimal puzzles me, but that may be because I didn't read closely enough. Generally with problems thought to be in NP, you can't recursively subdivide them, then combine the subproblem solutions into an optimal solution; if you could do that in general, you'd have a golden road to a polynomial time solution to the problem. But that's assuming the subdivision is trivial (like, you divide the nodes in your traveling salesman problem into those west of chicago and those not west of chicago). Since they chose an algorithm for splitting the problem which runs in exponential time on a classical computer, they probably have time to choose special subdivisions where this property of combinability holds--but they haven't escaped "we have to run exponentially many steps on a classical computer", which is not a very good result for DW.</comment>


Foreign national cofounder - <AUTHOR>

Hello, there have been numerous posts on this topic but I have yet to figure or find out a solution for my situation. Am a
software engineer on the H1 visa, based in New York, work full time for a tech firm in the city. Over two years ago started working
on a fashion tech startup on the side, last week we secured some angel funding. Its more than the prevailing wage in NY for H1 but
since we have no full time employees yet and only few K of revenue a month, chances of securing visa transfer seem to be slim
(consulted immigration lawyer). Am an Indian national so other visa options are very limited. Also checked with a lawyer for the
genius visa(O1) and it seems I don't qualify for one, no surprises there :). Have been putting in 120hrs/wk to do the two jobs
and was hoping I could quit my job and focus on the startup once we had some cash, liberty seems elusive though. Other than going
back home and working remotely was wondering if any of you are aware of any solution for this situation. Any advice would be much appreciated. <comment><USER2> I've had a ton of success with O-1s for founders and key hires for early stage companies; it's definitely not a "genius" visa. I sometimes refer to it as a founder's visa. It's even easier that you've secured angel funding.

Shoot me your contact information, and we'll find out within 15 minutes whether it's worth a shot.

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL but have you tried looking into consulting firms? A friend of mine was in a similar situation and he essentially hired a consulting firm that sponsored his H1 transfer to the firm and then essentially put him on contract with his startup. He had to pay the consulting firm some fees for the service. I don't know if this is on shaky legal grounds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @palakchokshi. Yeah, have been looking into that option. My only worry is many of the smaller consulting firms who would be willing to do such an arrangement usually follow shady practices, some even exploit immigrants, so am a bit worried about taking this option. Will have to dive and take the risk if nothing else works though.</comment></comment>


NYC Startup Grabs 21M to Automate Persuasion - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/22/persado-scores-21m-to-become-the-moneyball-of-marketing/

<comment><USER2> This looks like it would be a great place to work!</comment>