Time Warner Cable owes $229K to woman it would not stop calling - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/07/us-twc-robocalls-idUSKCN0PH2H920150707 <comment><USER2> I find it odd that there's no universal system for blocking calls from specific numbers. I'm guessing you could implement a spam filter, so Harassment/telemarketing wouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER3> My phone has a call-blocking feature, and I even use a service that routes private callers through an 800-number to get their unspoofed ANI. Yet one debt collector calls me from 200 different numbers. They change the number every 2-3 days. (it's for a debt I consider invalid, and beyond the 10 year statute of limitations anyway, so I won't ever pay it.)

I think what we need is an Adblock for phone numbers that categorizes all spammers, debt collectors, etc and blocks them instantly on everyone's phones.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like the practical near-term solution would be a white list: only allow calls from a list of known callers.

<comment><USER5> If you mean what I think you mean I think that is unworkable for most of us. Drop your car off at the shop for some work. Mechanic calls you from his cell phone because it's handy and the shop line is tied up. You never get it. Or school nurse calls you about an emergency. Neighbor calls you to tell you your dog got out from the back yard. That kind of stuff is about the only reason I have voice service - I don't use the damn thing to talk for the most part.

<comment><USER4> I do mean what you think I mean, and I understand what you're saying, but if the sort of volume of spam people are talking about became the norm, for me it would be either white list or stop owning a phone at all. Between those two options, white list seems the better one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a lawyer who makes a nice amount every year (more than an average Silicon Valley salary) suing the telemarketers that call him.

I was wondering if such a lawyer would partner with others -- but anyway he released a book on how to be a parasite on parasites and get paid doing a service to society. Does anyone have a link?

[http://www.amazon.com/How-Sue-Telemarketer-Stephen- Ostrow/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Sue-Telemarketer-Stephen- Ostrow/dp/0615338178)

</comment><comment><USER7> I sued a telemarketer once and got a few thousand dollars: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4023834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4023834)

<comment> squeaky-clean That was a great read! And thank you for providing sources on the laws.

I've been getting cell phone calls for years now, several times a week, from companies asking for someone who isn't me, mostly debt collectors, but also home security sales. It's always the same name, and I'm pretty sure this person is using my phone number as a fake number for themselves (or maybe it's just an area code mistake or something). I've told them many times they have a wrong number and to stop calling.

Do you know if this still applies when someone else has a relationship with the business but is providing false information?

I'm not great at reading legal documents, but it seems like the definition of telemarketer only applies to sales and charitable donations (so it won't apply to the creditors)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have an old analogue modem hooked to our phone line, so when we receive an incoming call the number pops up on my computer screen (and the lounge TV screen if XMBC is being used at the time.) It is also cross-referenced with my address book so if it is a known number, it also displays the name of the caller.

One problem though is here in Australia, a lot of telemarketers, etc., have the caller ID comes up as private. Also, my mum, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and one of my clients all have private numbers, so that's five likely sources when I see a private number. The problem is there's only one of those sources I actually want to talk to (not saying which one, but it aint the telemaketers.)

Would love a device similar to the one cmdkeen mentioned available in the UK that will screen unknown numbers and voice prompt them.

I've occasionally pondered using Asterisk or similar open-source PBX to create a system like that. However it is in the queue behind about four other pet projects…

<comment><USER9> Telstra are selling the "Call Guardian 301" as well now which sounds like the same device as cmdkeen mentioned: [https://www.telstra.com.au/home- phone/handsets](https://www.telstra.com.au/home-phone/handsets)

<comment><USER8> Hey thanks for that! I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Better yet, _encourage_ nuisance callers! If you're in the UK, it's possible to set up a 'premium rate' phone number - which means the caller has to pay to call you.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23869462](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23869462)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there anything I could do in a similar situation? I receive robocalls from several sketchy locations multiple times a day. I installed a call blocker on my phone which sometimes works, but would love to make it stop.

<comment><USER12> I use Google Voice. It picks up the spam pretty efficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is refreshing to see the common person prevailing against Big Corp.

</comment><comment><USER14> $229K for 150+ calls? Please tell TWC to call me! Unfortunately for me though, there is never such crazy amounts when suing in the country where I reside.

<comment><USER15> It seems reasonable. The article states that almost half the calls occurred _after_ she had sued them and well after she had objected to the calls and corrected her identity with the company.

<comment><USER16> A payout of $229k is a terribly large payout for a minor irritation caused by sheer incompetence on the part of the defendant. Lives and limbs are frequently valued lower.

I mean, the average British mobile phone owner probably receives 100 or so irritating automated telemarketing calls a year, all of them worthless spam and many of them originating from the same party - can we all have $229k too?

<comment><USER17> Part of the reason it's so high is due to contempt-of-court issues

<comment><USER18> I miss clicked. How do I un-down vote you?

<comment><USER19> You can't, but I sent an upvote to balance it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> She won the lottery.

</comment><comment><USER21> $229K? Time Warner won't even notice that's gone. Should have been $229 million otherwise they won't learn anything from this.

<comment><USER22> Why should business units that are part of a large company be punished harder than those who are part of a small company? Do you also believe that people with high life expectancy should stay longer in prison?

A fine should be based on the damage done. The 1500$ per phone call in this case already seem excessive to me. What's the damage of getting distracted by an unwanted phone call? 2$? 10$? 15$?`Certainly not 1500$.

<comment><USER23> That is one way to do it, but not the only way. Scandinavia, for example, bases fines on income:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland- home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/)

The theory here is that punishment is meant to change behavior, so the impact has to be proportional.

> What's the damage of getting distracted by an unwanted phone call?

Even on this theory, you have to scale the damages in relation to the odds of getting away with it. Suppose I run a store and steal a dollar from each customer. Let's say only 1 in 1000 notices and cares enough to talk to the police. Should my fine be $1, which is negligible? $1,000, so I break even? Or greater, so that there's an actual penalty?

<comment><USER17> The public transport system in my hometown of Melbourne has a two-tiered fine system if you're caught travelling without a ticket. ~$75 if you pay on the spot (but you forfeit the right to contest in court) or $250 if you don't. They were actually losing a few court cases, so brought in the two-tiered system.

I call it the 'fuck the poor' system, because poor people generally don't have the ability to pay $75 on demand. Paying $75 is a lot more convenient than having to find time and the know-how to contest things in court. For comparison, a day's travel costs ~$7.50.

I'd heartily welcome an income-scaled penalty system, even though I am not poor myself. A fine that is crushing to poor people is a mere momentary inconvenience for wealthy people, which isn't the point of being penalised.

<comment><USER24> Or you could buy a ticket, like the rest of us do.

<comment><USER17> Frankly, that's a pissweak argument against significantly harsher penalties for poor people vs wealthy people. The transgression committed is the same, so the punitive impact should be the same. Instead we get a much reduced penalty for wealthy folks (both relative and absolute) - and the difference has zero to do with the nature of the transgression.

This particular penalty is 25% of the full amount if you happen to be decently monied at the point of being fined - it's almost explicitly a 'poor tax'. Almost.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Winning the SOTD on Awwwards:How We Got 27K Qualified Visits in a Week - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@thefln/winning-the-sotd-on-awwwards-how-we-got-27k-qualified-visits-in-a-week-f83fb74878 <comment><AUTHOR> I hope our case will also get a reward! [https://www.awwwards.com/sites/time- will-tell-messaging-app](https://www.awwwards.com/sites/time-will-tell- messaging-app)</comment>


Humiliation in Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.mkrecny.com/entry/21/

<comment><USER3> I grew up on military bases around military people, and in that environment I learned one bit of wisdom that has helped me many times when managing people:

If you're in charge, and your people screw up, it's not _their_ fault. It's _yours._

Yes, they made a mistake. But _why_ did they make it? Did you not train them sufficiently? Did you not give them the mentoring they need? Did you fail to get important tools or information to them? Did you put them in a position of greater responsibility than they're currently equipped to handle, or where their skills don't match the needs of the position?

At first when you try to wrap your mind around this line of thinking, it can be difficult. Why should I be held responsible when Jack the Junior Coder is the one who actually screwed up? But eventually, if you stick with it, you learn something important: on a real team, _who_ screwed up is irrelevant. If one person fails, the whole team fails. And your job as a leader is to help your people get to a place where they _fail less and less every day_ , not to pin blame.

This is the difference between a manager and a leader: a leader is someone who accepts responsibility not just for his own actions, but for his team's as well.

<comment><USER4> "If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders are clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers." - <USER2> Tzu

I think startups have a lot to learn from the military community. Yes, for the most part modern militaries are extensive bureaucracies, but military thinkers and intellectuals are really at the forefront of management science. John Boyd basically wrote The Lean Startup 30 years before Eric Ries did.

<comment><USER3> I have had a blog post rattling around in my head forever introducing Boyd's leadership principles to non-military folks. Should probably get around to actually writing it one of these days...

<comment><USER5> One of these days is, empirically, none of these days at least for me, so could you just post a link to some introduction?

<comment><USER3> The best overall study of Boyd and Boydism is Robert Coram's book _Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War_ : [http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The- Fighter-Pilot-Changed/dp/0316...](http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The-Fighter- Pilot-Changed/dp/0316881465)

The best general-audiences intro to Boyd-as-philosophy is probably Chet Richards' book _Certain to Win_ : [http://www.amazon.com/Certain-Win-Strategy- Applied-Business/...](http://www.amazon.com/Certain-Win-Strategy-Applied- Business/dp/1413453767)

Wikipedia has some brief descriptions of Boyd's work and thinking in his page on him: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_%28military_strategis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_%28military_strategist)

 _Fast Company_ magazine did a decent article on Boyd-for-business back in 2002: <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/59/pilot.html>

Many of Boyd's original writings have been preserved and made available for download here: <http://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/> (Warning, though, these were not written for a general audience and can be quite dense.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The idolization of Steve Jobs has a lot of issues, and this might be a good example of one. We don't know whether Apple succeeded in spite of or because of Steve's management behaviors.

It's also worth noting that the original Mac (the same time period most of those 'crazy Steve' stories originate from) was a huge commercial 'meh'.

<comment><USER6> Word, when I read that he said to Jon Ive "your ideas are shit" I couldn't believe that guy would keep working for him.

<comment><USER4> Wow, really? Source?

<comment><USER6> His bio, check it.

Also I didn't know (before that) that he refused to pay his daughter's tuition and some friends of his wife had to do it instead.

Awkward at the least...

<comment><USER7> Why awkward?

<comment><USER6> Guy is a billionaire and wont pay for his own daughter's college? hello?

<comment><USER7> Whereas most people in this situation would be qualified as assholes (and rightly so), Steve Jobs gets a mild look of disapproval. For me, "awkward" does not begin to convey how screwed up that is. It seems that people have a real hard time accepting that the guy they worship for delivering some of their gadgets was in fact a major douchebag.

This tendency to make Jobs into a person he was not it very disturbing. Of course, on HN you risk being banned for saying something bad about His Holiness because some of its highly ranked people are also members of the cult of Apple, but that alone should not be a reason to tip-toe around the obvious.

<comment><USER6> You are barking at the wrong tree dog...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, a surprising number of comments on that blog post agree with the manager.

Ya, it's a stupid bug, but the way the manager dealt with it was totally out of line. Whether or not that "style" of management results in better output is moot, you just don't treat people like that. It's not like the developer shot the manager's dog or anything.

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope no company YC makes this mistake, considering _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ [0] is recommended reading in YC [1].

For example: _Don't criticize, condemn, or complain._ and _Let the other person save face._

That is, criticize in private, give praise in public ( _give the person a fine reputation to live up to_ ). Calling someone a retard is a counter-productive thing to do.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People)

1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5584> (can't find where I read it, but this thread points to pg recommending it)

<comment><USER10> Is there a YC reading list somewhere? I've been looking to do more reading lately, and this looks like a good title to start with.

<comment><USER11> <http://ycombinator.com/lib.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Similar humiliations used to happen to me at my first job. It was the first time I was programming professionally and made a few mistakes that would've cost the startup a lot. On my second week opn the job, I commented out, by mistake, the initialization of variable $user (arrrgh!!). The website crashed on all the signed-in users. My boss being the stressed nerv-ball that he was crictized me in the same way described in the article.

I think there's a lesson to be taken here. Not for managers (clearly good management would criticize privately) but for the employee. Learn to take a yell. It's not good style but it's widely common, people above you scream at you when you screw up. Learn not to take it personal, and not to let such incidents affect your passion for your work. The yelling is bad form, but it's not direct criticism at you. In large entreprises, it's the result of a chain of screaming starting at the top. In startups it's the result of the nerve- wrecking stress, founders go through.

'Constructive criticism' is an advice we give would-be managers, but it's a luxury starting employees rarely get. You're lucky if you meet one such boss in your career. Learn to take criticism, the bad kind, leaving out the humiliation. I found the best way to cut a yelling short is by answering loudly: "You're right I screwed up, I'm sorry. At least now I learned it, it won't happen again". After getting yelled at like this a few times, you'll realize it's really not against you, and such an answer would calm down your boss quickly; make sure not to make that mistake again, because then you'd really deserve a humiliation ;). This is easier said (written?) than done, but it's a natural part of one's career. I take it as a mental strength test.

Also, you won't be the junior on the team forever. One day you'll be responsible for an intern screwing up. Remember that moment and don't be too harsh.

<comment><USER13> Yup, I also find it's best to say stuff like "Yup, you're right. This was a dumb mistake. I should be fired for this"

<comment><USER14> Never EVER say "I should be fired for this". You probably mean it as a little joke. Getting yelled at for screwing up is not the right time to make a joke. Unless of course you are serious, in which case you're an idiot.

Saying something that weird will just make it seem like you don't care or you're weird.

The fact you say you 'find it best' suggests you get shouted at a lot or you are making this up. Either way, you shouldn't be dispensing this kind of nonsense advice to other people who may well follow it.

<comment><USER13> This is an internet message board, not an concentration camp. Lighten up.

<comment><USER14> I'm just asking you not to lie or give stupid advice to other users who might take your advice seriously.

You need to grow up.

<comment><USER13> You're a god? You determine what's stupid or not? You grow up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's not just startups where that happens. Senior developers, especially the "man in a box" geniuses that don't work well with anyone else are downright abusive of other developers (and God help the poor customer support or QA people that talk to them).

On the other hand, guys I really respect just call those "rookie mistakes" and expect them to happen. Hopefully you catch them in code review before customers are impacted.

</comment><comment><USER16> Humiliation is poison in a work environment. There is no quicker way to make people resent their jobs, stop interaction, create hate and mistrust and send a signal that "you don't matter".

<comment><USER3> The problem is that bad managers regard those things as features, not bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think adherence to "compliment publicly, criticize privately" is an absolute requirement of a good manager.

<comment><USER18> While I totally agree with you, this example goes beyond that. Whether it's in public or in private, calling someone a "retard" and asking them how they could do something "so fucking stupid" is inexcusably abusive and a reason to quit on the spot, at the very least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately I've done something similar to this to some outsourced contractors in India as we were doing a final code review of their deliverables. I regret it still and have tried to make amends. On the one hand we're paying them good money to do work we don't have time to do ourselves so at the time I felt it was ok and warranted. On the other hand they're human beings just like me with feelings and pride and i took them down a notch in front of their peers. Yes, I'm a better coder than them, yes we were paying them lots of money for work I felt should have been better. But the way I went about it was totally wrong. Sucks but at least I learned from it.

</comment><comment><USER20> One of W. Edwards Deming's "Lesser Categories of Obstacles" contends that the system designed by management is responsible for 85% of mistakes and unintended consequences in a business, while workers are responsible for about 15% (src: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly_Diseases) ). Deming's 8th Point of Management is to drive out fear so that everyone can work effectively for the company (src: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles) ). Publicly humiliating the programmer seems to be simultaneously disregarding the symptoms of a systemic issue (namely, a lack of code reviews) and putting everyone on the team into a state of fear.

</comment><comment><USER21> In the UK employers have a legal duty of care to protect their employees from harm in the workplace, and this includes stress.

This is written in law, and has been supported by court cases.

One incident like that is wrong, but could perhaps be explained by someone having a really bad day. Recognition, apology, and no further incidents would help.

But continued incidents? The company is leaving themselves open to lawsuits. ("Constructive dismissal" and employment tribunal in the UK.) I'm pretty sure that toxic work environment leading to poor health is something that has been through US courts.

I mention this because sometimes the only way you get through to PHBs is to talk about costs and risks, and not "don't let employees be dicks to other employees".

<comment><USER22> Holy crap... nanny state?

I'm not agreeing in any way with the manager in this situation; public humiliation of employees by managers is both morally cowardly (bullying someone from a position of power) and ineffective over the long run (in my opinion). But still, stress happens in most jobs. Often times it is caused by a combination of home and work factors. It's ridiculous to make "preventing stress" a legal duty of employers, because that's not wholly within an employers control. Example: Faulty machine used to serve customers blows up at work at now you have a lot of angry customers. Stress ensues.

<comment><USER23> It wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that the stress (and business impact) could be reduced by making sure any critical machine has a hot-backup should it fail.

Making sure employees are happy and safe in their work is good business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would have quit on the spot- you should never put up with that kind of second-class behavior.

</comment><comment><USER25> (x-posted from the OP's comment page)

The people on that page that are saying the abuse as well deserved are part of the problem.

Sure, it's not good code, and causes problems in production. It's certainly not the right way to do this -- but constructive criticism, gentle corrections, and rewards/acknowledgements of successes when they occur are _far_ more effective in the long run than this public tirade bullshit. AFAIC, the PM that humiliates an employee in public for any reason is (a) immature, (b) short-sighted, (c) unprofessional, (d) a poor choice for a PM, and likely (e) insecure and feels the need to strut his/her intellectual "superiority" in front of others lest their authority/superiority be called into question.

I also would have quit on the spot -- life is far, far too short to deal with that kind of crap, and there _are_ other work environments in our field where one can do what one enjoys and where it's okay to be a fucking human being instead of being viewed as merely a code generation resource that can be kicked around when it doesn't "behave."

The proper response to that kind of public humiliation is "Okay, you're right, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. But not as stupid as abusing your employees and creating an environment where the primary motivators are grounded in FUD. I'll collect my things from my desk because...how to communicate this part adequately...oh yeah: fuck you."

</comment><comment><USER26> > "How many times do you think the client can connect to the DB per second? > Thousands!"

Is this a source of concern for the DB? If it is, you might want to consider limiting connections on one side or the other at a deeper level. Self- inflicted DoS bugs during development aren't fun, but actual DoS attacks in production are even less fun. If there's a potential way to bring your DB to its knees and you get popular enough for trolls (let alone actual crackers) to take notice (and if you're writing video games that presumably have high score boards or something similar this isn't that unlikely) expect people to find it.

It's good to get yelled at some number of times throughout your life to help you grow a thicker skin, but I've never been yelled at in the work environment. If it occurred I'd be strongly motivated to quit like others here. Stating matter-of-factly "That was stupid" is one thing, joking and exaggerating stupidity of yourself or others is another (and is dependent on implicit understanding of such and also requires a certain culture of the group), but when it gets to a manager actually screaming at you about a possibility of something bad happening then that's the line, at least for me. If I wanted to get screamed at, I'd join the military.

<comment><USER27> If I wanted to get screamed at, I'd conclude I was a masochist and seek therapy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Speaking of awful code. 17 days ago, when the new Galaxy "demo" page launched from Samsung, they had that webpage, www.tgeltaayehxnx.com with the countdown.. you guys remember?

Anyway, I was interested to see what was happening with that page out of interest so I checked out the source.

What I found made me laugh so hard. Given the fact that I knew that second perfect cache invalidation is pretty hard...and given time zones... I knew that this wouldn't end well. What happened as a result? They created their own distributed denial of service that was set to fire off every connected user at the same time. They ended up taking down their new launching page for their phone.

This was the code:

          if (timediff < 0) {
                   //console.log("LIVE!");
                   location.reload(true);
          } else {
                // Do stuff.
          }

Whoever wrote that code, was basically checking if the time difference between the countdown was zero and then refresh the page. Guess what? This ran continuously. For thousands of clients...

I wonder what kind of jokes they had at Samsung over this one.

</comment><comment><USER29> What a terrible environment. Fear from humiliation does not make better code.

Code reviews, instruction, and collaboration help make better code.

<comment><USER5> Code reviews are just opportunities for institutionalized bike-shedding.

And in cases like this ensures further humiliation.

Instruction can work, but it requires a smart programmer who can do it right. Collaboration can work but it reduces the speed you can think at to how fast two people can communicate instead of how fast one person can think.

And no, I don't have good solution (other than to ensure you only hire the best people).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Please can you increase the font size on your blog? Not only does small size font make no sense, it is also unreadable for me (chrome, Windows): <http://i.imgur.com/TZUVi.jpg>

Anywhere from 16px to 22px would be fine, we are here to read the text afterall. It's the focus!

<comment><USER31> Can you zoom in to make it more readable?

(ctrl + mouse-wheel for me)

e: VVV Good point.

<comment><USER21> I could make it more readable by tweaking my settings. But that only helps me. Asking people to remember to make stuff accessible helps everyone who needs it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> That has nothing to do with startups - the PM is an asshole.

> so afraid of being publicly railed-on that they wrote pretty much bug-free > code all the time.

That's a non sequitur. Programmers try to write bug-free code all the time anyway. No one tries to introduce bugs.

</comment><comment><USER33> > It makes me sad to see recent portrayals of Silicon Valley hold up > humiliation as a recipe for success.

This is an interesting statement in the article and I think it is worth bringing up. It contrasts significantly to the other article I just read that said that "public shaming", which is just another word for public humiliation, is a desirable practice needed to stem the existential threat to engineering of "brogrammers".

[http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/10/opinion/trapani-brogrammer- cul...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/10/opinion/trapani-brogrammer- culture/index.html)

> Sometimes the road to enlightenment is paved with public shaming.

</comment><comment><USER34> A much better approach (from a piano teacher, but it generalizes:

 __Tags like "stupid," "bad at ____", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why." Once you move it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings," ... it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity. Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus. It's not you, it's the bug. __

<http://celandine13.livejournal.com/33599.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> "You retard! There's no delay in your while loop. How many times do you think the client can connect to the DB per second? Thousands! I can't believe you'd do something so fucking stupid!"

Wow, was it that hard to keep it down a little? see:

"Dude there's no delay in your while loop. How many times do you think the client can connect to the DB per second? Thousands! go fix that"

See? is not sugar-coating it, simply not being a gigantic asshole about it.

<comment><USER35> I think with anyone who cares about doing good work, simply asking the questions that will lead the person to realize what a fuckup it is should be enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Perhaps a good way for such a rookie mistake to be handled would be to turn this in to playful ribbing. (WAT? WTF?)

I too have been the subject of manager outbursts like this. Only do it if you're deliberately trying to get rid of the person, and if you're doing that, be aware of the precedent you're setting. There's too many things to know about programming for any one person to be expert in everything, and never make a WTF mistake.

</comment><comment><USER37> Humiliation is not isolated to startups. In fact every industry has these type of characters. Such behaviour is not the best method of motivating your team. Sadly it exists.

What will you do differently next time?

Would you call this behaviour out to your other manager or directly to the perpetrator?

If you want to avoid it happening again you should speak up. Unless you don't mind the abuse?

</comment><comment><USER38> Would this have helped how you feel better? Or would you feel the same way?

"This is retarded! There's no delay in the while loop. How many times does the client have to connect to the DB per second? Thousands! I can't believe this implementation is so fucking stupid!"

In this case we try to refer to the code directly, taking our reference to the person.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't know about Steve Jobs but every company Ive been in where this has started to become the culture it has been a sign of a sinking ship... and every time that sign was accurate.

If you think public humility is motivating it probably is in the short term. But its the most motivating for getting that resume spruced up again.

<comment><USER8> I dunno, I think we could all use a bit more pubic humility ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The behavior you experienced from the "manager" was, at best, grossly inappropriate. It may or may not help now, but I think it's important to be mindful of where other peoples' perspective is. The "shoe on the other foot" mentality sounds like it has been forgotten both both the manager _and_ you. It's a two-way street.

</comment><comment><USER41> i wonder how you didn't notice this while developing app.

<comment><USER42> Rookie error. It happens. That's the point of code review.

<comment><USER23> Absolutely. We have code reviews because we all make mistakes. Sometimes really dumb ones.

It's crazy to be mad at a programmer for a bug in their code found during a code review. Discuss it, learn from it, and not only does the code get fixed, everyone involved becomes a better programmer by some small amount.

The only time it's justifiable being mad is if something gets through code reviews and into production - and at that point it's not the programmer's fault, it's the fault of procedure which enabled buggy code to ship undetected. So you get mad at the system, review the failure and fix it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ouch.</comment>


Is Spotify Going Bankrupt in 2017? - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/02/02/spotify-bankrupt-ipo/ <comment><USER2> It really pisses me off that a company to which I pay €120/year, for a service that costs pennies to operate, is milked to death by the labels and has to "find a path to profitability". Makes me think of just stop listening to mainstream music at all and just live off my old MP3 collection.

<comment><USER3> Pretty much anyone can self publish on Spotify. I listen to a lot of Folk Punk that is independently produced. I really hope none of these record companies are trying to take a cut for music they didn't even produce.

<comment><USER4> Bandcamp is a good source of indie songs. The cut is less than spotify too.

<comment><USER3> I've bought a couple albums off bandcamp. I like how they usually make the tracks available in lossless format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Back to torrenting music for me and many others if Spotify goes under. The record labels dont seem to be able to see the forest for the trees..

<comment><USER6> On paper, there's alternatives. In practice, I strongly prefer Spotify's UI, cross-platform apps (which are dying but still work for now) and social functions. So for me and many of my friends, it would also be back to mp3s (+ last.fm?) instead of a different streaming service.

This wouldn't be the first time one of the more user friendly streaming services have been taken down. Happened to Rdio, too.

<comment><USER5> Yeah there's no streaming services I like better than Spotify.

I would love it if there was some sort of self hosting version that could read from a torrent folder haha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, back to torrenting for the digital and slowly building a vinyl collection for the physical, gonna hold out as long as possible, since the service if fantastic. Nothing in the space , that I've seen, approaches the quality.

This is unfortunate for all, since if labels think they'll see any of the money they currently make off Spotify, they're fucking insane. Nobody likes labels, and all the people I know who are technologically literate enough to torrent music, DO torrent their music. As another commenter said: Milking spotify dry is not seeing the forest for the trees.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't really see these types of services staying alive independent of a larger company. Google and Apple can afford to pay what the labels want and can justify it through improving brand recognition, getting lock in, or whatever else they dream up. Spotify has nothing else to prop up, and will get priced out by the big corporations in the same space.

I'm not really happy about it. Spotify has warts but it also has some things I really like that the competitors don't have. The social features are great and I often find links to Spotify playlists around the net, but not for Apple Music.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a Spotify premium subscriber, I'd happily pay an extra $5 a month (as in, $15 total per month) and I feel like many people would be in the same boat (okay, maybe not $5 but $1-$2 per month). I use Spotify nearly every day and in the US any music I could ever want (I don't listen to Taylor Swift) is on there. I've had some issue with less common music, especially from Asia, but in general this is not the case and I really like the service.

I would guess that some people would initially balk at the idea of raising subscription prices (the same happened with Netflix I believe), and some people would move to another service, but I would guess that the majority of people wouldn't move. On the flip side, Spotify may have some negotiating power but the labels unfortunately have a ton of power and if they couldn't negotiate a contract with e.g. Sony and that music wasn't available, that would cause more people to move. I'm hopeful that Spotify can renegotiate with labels. Maybe they can pull a Netflix and somehow make their own content/become their own label.

I'm not worried about these loans and their terms causing too much issue for Spotify, but I am worried about their lack of profitability. They seem to not have a war chest full of money to run at a loss forever so eventually someone will come knocking, and I just hope the person on the other side of the door isn't asking for enough to cause the house to collapse.

</comment><comment><USER10> The comments here seem to conflict with the comments on today's other Spotify article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13556714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13556714)

</comment><comment><USER11> The one size fits all pricing model that Spotify has doesn't work well with how record labels want their royalties to be paid out.

Perhaps it's time Spotify became a record label, like Netflix became a content producer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Music should not live behind a corporate wall. If your overlords are unhappy with you, or they just decide to turn their servers off, no more music for you. Want to recover your costs by selling off the music you bought? No. Want to pass it down to your children? Not allowed. Remember the days when you could own and share things? Those were nice days.

These walled "gardens" are slowly reducing the human digital experience into a prison.

<comment><USER13> That's a bit overly dramatic. The Spotify model is just renting vs buying. You still have the option of buying, you have ever since the dawn of the iTunes Store. No one is going to take away songs you have digitally purchased.

<comment><USER12> This is the problem. I do not believe iTunes allows you to sell or hand down to your offspring your music "licenses." So yes actually, someone is going to take away the songs you have digitally purchased.

Try playing a game on release date when all the drm servers are overloaded as well. The people who didn't pay get to play, while the paying folk do not. Because truly owning a thing means not having to beg to use the thing.

<comment><USER13> I was under the impression iTunes songs haven't had DRM for a long time.

<comment><USER12> Physical access ≠ Legal ownership

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why don't the labels just build their own spotify? Because they would have to work together?

<comment><USER13> The labels have their own Spotify. It is Spotify. They have equity stakes in it.

<comment><USER14> well than it won't go bancrupt I guess... There is not really a competitor.

<comment><USER13> How is Apple Music not a competitor?

<comment><USER14> ah, not an apple person, didn't have it on my radar...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The oldest .com domain names - <AUTHOR> http://www.domainholdings.com/recent-sales/100-oldest-domain-names/

<comment><USER2> This is more accurately the 100 oldest .com domains - Wikipedia's list ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names)) includes the list for the other TLDs. For example, it looks like 5 .edu domains were added at the same time as bbn.com was on April 24, 1985.

<comment><USER3> Even that list is incomplete, as it misses the country-code domains. For example, ucl.ac.uk was in DNS sometime in mid 1985 ([http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk- doma...](http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk-domain)) But DNS registration wasn't the beginning of domain names - before DNS there was hosts.txt and some "new-style" domain names found their way in there before DNS.

This document ftp://ftp.maths.tcd.ie/src/mail/mmdf-Maths/doc/auth.ps from April 1985 by Steve Kille at UCL includes a server log (page 5) that lists hosts in cambridge.ac.uk, rsre.ac.uk, ukc.ac.uk, and rutherford.ac.uk in use all before the domain names were registered in DNS.

Disclaimer: I've had the same cs.ucl.ac.uk email address since I was a student in Sept 1985. Now I'm feeling old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Domain names have been actually been available for 28 years – yes, before > you even knew what a computer looked like.

:grouchface:

<comment><USER5> Oh you mean 2 years after I taught myself to program on a Commodore 64 hooked up to a black and white TV in my bedroom? #getoffmylawn

<comment><USER4> At 35 I'm not sure I qualify for greybeard status (perhaps relatively), but when you write something like this is there some illusion that everyone reading a tech piece is under 25?

<comment><USER6> Even that wouldn't make sense here, because then it would be "before you were born" rather than "before you knew...".

I'd hope that anyone writing about tech would be aware of the significance of the C64, Apple IIe, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Definitely check out the rather weird site at the oldest domain name in the list: [http://symbolics.com/](http://symbolics.com/)

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately the original was much more hacker friendly and awesome. Lisp Machines! They sold it off several years ago and now live here: [http://www.symbolics-dks.com/](http://www.symbolics-dks.com/)

<comment><USER9> And that site is downright embarrassing. It reminds me of the way a very different but still excellent kind of older software, Delphi, went after it lost steam and was sold off by Borland: it went to people who milked it for all it was worth while putting as little into it as possible.

<comment><USER8> my "awesome" referenced more of the product they were selling than the website they were/are running. But yes, they lost to Unix / AI winter and all the money dried up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Basically all the early ones were Lisp companies:

* Symbolics, Lisp Machines

* BBN, Jericho Lisp Machine running Interlisp, lot's of applied AI stuff - BBN also did a lot of other things

* Thinking Machines, _Lisp on the Connection Machine

_ MCC, Research Center with a hundred Lisp Machines used for research in AI (Cyc), chip design, object oriented databases (ORION), ...

* Xerox: Lisp Machine

* SRI: AI research

</comment><comment><USER11> Given that this list spans a little over two years, I'm surprised to see no microsoft.com, all the other tech giants at the time are pretty much in here.

<comment><USER12> Well, people say Microsoft didn't think internet was a big deal back on the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why does #45 have a space in it? "Data IO.com" If you look up dataio.com, it says the creation date is October 10, 1997:

[http://who.is/whois/dataIO.com](http://who.is/whois/dataIO.com)

I assume this is a typo? Or could domains have spaces in them back then?

EDIT: I see from the wikipedia page it is actually "data-io.com"

<comment><USER14> Creation dates are from the most recent domain creation record, and can be reset from a domain ownership transfer. I lost my precious domain creation date of September 1993 when I transfered my domain from the ISP who registered it /in their own name/ (argh) to my own ownership in 1998.

<comment><USER13> wow, 1993 - what domain?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A shame to see think.com redirecting to [http://www.oracle.com/splash/thinkquest/down-189973.html](http://www.oracle.com/splash/thinkquest/down-189973.html), which is broken by the way.

think.com is a great domain name...

</comment><comment><USER16> Glad to see we (HP) have a pretty old one and we have DEC as well, I'm guessing we're the biggest holder of class A addresses. Now we're splitting so it'll be interesting to see how that gets distributed.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are some real gems in there. mentat.com and then there's entity.com a resume of sorts for Marty Connor who is now apparently the Corporate Operations Engineer at Google.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pretty interesting. Number 49 (Tandy), brings back some nostalgia. Tandy was the first computer I had growing up and the first machine I learn to program on.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have to appreciate that I never stood a chance of getting the .com domain of my last name. It is #6 on the list.

</comment><comment><USER20> Symptomatic Microsoft's domain is not on this list. Looks like they missed the internet revolution.

<comment><USER21> Yes, famously. Bill Gates sent his "Internet Tidal Wave" memo in 1995 and admitted they were behind:

      Some competitors have a much deeper involvement in the Internet than
      Microsoft. All UNIX vendors are benefiting from the Internet since the
      default server is still a UNIX box and not Windows NT, particularly for
      high end demands, SUN has exploited this quite effectively.
      [...]
      Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats. After 10
      hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows
      .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format.
      [...]
      A new competitor "born" on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is
      dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network
      extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where
      they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating
      system.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet- memo/al...](http://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/all/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find adobe.com really interesting. What were they doing back then?

<comment><USER23> > I find adobe.com really interesting. What were they doing back then?

Adobe was founded by ex-Xerox PARC employees, so perhaps not surprisingly their first couple of successes were printing related: PostScript and Type 1 fonts in 1982 and 1984, respectively. By 1986 they were working in desktop publishing with the development of Illustrator.</comment></comment>


Designing VR interactions to allow users to interact at a distance - <AUTHOR> https://www.roadtovr.com/exclusive-summoning-superpowers-designing-vr-interactions-at-a-distance/ <comment><USER2> VR is being applied across all verticals and industries. We covered a company called PayScout who does VR donations for non-profits and helps them increase awareness around their giving campaigns.

[https://latechnews.org/non-profit-donations-go- vr/](https://latechnews.org/non-profit-donations-go-vr/)

I figured VR is the next mode of person to person communications with our already existing cell phones we carry everywhere.</comment>


Show HN: Bibcitation – next-gen tool for generating citations and bibliographies - <AUTHOR> https://www.bibcitation.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here. Bibcitation is a free online tool to help students easily create citations and generate bibliographies.

Last year, I came to realize that most of the citation tools that existed were outdated and had interfaces optimized for ad views, not for usability. They went so far into this that they became almost impossible to use.

I set out to develop my own citation tool that would be reliable and optimized for usability, both by not being designed around ads and by taking advantage of the latest advances in web app technology.

I'm still looking for more features to implement so if you have any comments or questions, I'd be happy to discuss them with you.</comment>


How Self-Driving Cars Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/14/technology/how-self-driving-cars-work.html <comment><USER2> This article misses a lot of things technology wise. OK, I understand that.

This article also misses a lot air companies like Daimler who showed off self driving car captibilities publicly in the beginning 2000 and on the web 3 years ago. It misses the prototypes shown off by Audi and BMW. It misses also the prototypes shown by Japanese car manufacturers.

From technology companies it misses Bosch who will show off at CES their own developed car and as such their expertise. It misses Delphi who works with MobilEye on self-driving platform to be used by the OEM, and it misses other TIER1 like Conti who have also shown their work.

By the way, the Mitsubishi Outlander is currently the best equipped series car who can do self-driving capabilities, it has a stereo camera system and Lidar combined with other other radar sensors. Next are the luxury cars from Audi, BMW, Daimler, and Volvo. Tesla here is last with only a simple radar and camera system (no stereo view), which has also no night vision capabilities like the others have.

<comment><USER3> the nyt is always off the mark on topics i know something about, and nothing leads me to believe they are any better about topics i know nothing about.

<comment><USER4> That's known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

[https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann- amnes...](https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia- effect/)

<comment><USER5> I agree with this so much. However, playing the devil's advocate, I guess it depends on the journalist's background.

For instance, a poli-sci major writing about a scientific/tech topic will likely get a lot of things wrong. However, the same journalist might likely have a lot of interesting things to write about international politics, because that's what his background is about.

that being said, I don't know how much journalist writing about politics have studied it in the past.

<comment><USER3> my gut assumption is that most journalists have journalism or communications degrees, which seems to be corroborated by the data.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=KUyOAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=KUyOAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=degrees+held+by+journalists&source=bl&ots=yWXCzSYUgV&sig=agHimYej06oDWHFn_YjLW4S4E-0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigsK_y5ZHRAhWHsVQKHRUjAWQQ6AEISTAI#v=onepage&q=degrees%20held%20by%20journalists&f=false)

not that it really matters, i have an econ degree but wouldn't call myself an economist by any stretch.

the real issue, at least in the US, most news is really just either direct or indirect PR. curiously, i think 'X writer' is the term you are looking for. i.e., someone with a background in technology or fashion that reports on things is more likely to be called themselves a 'tech writer' or 'fashion writer'. it's almost like real experts don't even want to be called journalists. i certainly wouldn't.

i've found that you're much more likely to find accurate reporting in industry-specific media rather than general media, because then at least the sources of funding and agenda are pretty clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd pass on reading this if you clicked through to the comments first. There's very little detail about how self driving cars work. This is a very basic survey of brands. Remember the Murray Gell-Man amnesia effect. Does anyone have real examples / links / videos of how self driving cars work?

<comment><USER7> Firstly, there are different approaches. Google and Uber seem to have a similar LIDAR + map approach. Tesla and Mobileeye have a camera focused approach.

The CEO of Mobileeye (who is an ex-machine learning professor) gave a very good, mildly technical talk on _their_ approach at CVPR: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8T7A3wqH3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8T7A3wqH3Q)

<comment><USER8> > The CEO of Mobileeye (who is an ex-machine learning professor)

The CEO of Mobileye is Ziv Aviram and he was never a professor. Amnon Shashua is the CTO, and he is still a machine learning professor at the Hebrew University.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article seems to be a summary of Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW.[1] That's worth a watch. It gives a good overview of how Google does it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj- rK8V-rik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik)

</comment><comment><USER10> Going by some of the recent antics of companies like comma.ai and Uber, it sounds self-driving cars mostly work via hype & publicity stunts. Any actual technology that is involved is purely coincidental.

</comment><comment><USER11> What about Novideo and baidu?</comment>


Reddit Gets Two New Donation Options Powered By Crowdtilt And Dwolla - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/27/reddit-gets-new-donation-options-powered-by-both-crowdtilt-and-dwolla/

<comment><USER2> For a moment there CrowdTilt had me really excited, but then I came across:

1) Need to be in the US and have a US bank account

2) Need to be on Facebook

I'm weeks away from starting a £25k funding round by tapping up my users (who have been badgering me to do this for the longest time).

The biggest issue I've got is that I'm in the UK.

I dislike that the most cost effective and convenient way to do this is to use PayPal and build my own front-end.

PayPal.

I want to use Kickstarter, or Crowdtilt, or Stripe (if I have to build my own front-end). Anything but PayPal.

PayPal it looks set to be though. I can't find another <4% method of doing this if you're not in the USA.

If anyone knows a UK or EU based crowdfunding solution with fees 4% or lower, then I'd love to hear about it.

<comment><USER3> For the UK, perhaps GoCardless is an option? <https://gocardless.com/paylinks>

<comment><USER2> Good suggestion. I'll ask the users how comfortable they are with paying via direct debit.

<comment><USER2> Initial indications from a small sample size says that they strongly prefer direct debit for recurring subscriptions of any kind, and still like the concept for one-off payments.

What they like is the direct debit guarantee and that they have visibility and control of the payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool guys! :)

Flattr support would be nifty too

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats, CT team!

<comment><USER6> thanks man. and while we're on hackernews, we might as well use this as a good opportunity to say something we've been dying to say for a while... perl, bitches! :P

<comment><USER7> Hahaha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great move, way to go CrowdTilt & Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER9> _There are also some differences in pricing between the two donation options. Crowdtilt is waiving its fee for its service for this collaboration, but charges 2.5% for credit card processing. Dwolla is free for transactions under $10 and 25 cents for those higher. Meanwhile, Stripe is 2.9% + $0.30 for any transaction._

This has the potential to be really powerful. More frictionless sharing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Amazing news, Crowdtilt!</comment>


Junkfood ZSH/Bash Prompt - <AUTHOR> http://www.tylercipriani.com/2012/12/18/zsh-prompt-customization.html

<comment><USER2> Of course it's a matter of taste, but I think that some of the information that some people like to put in their prompts would work better somewhere else. For example, time of day and battery status. I use the dwm window manager, which lets you write a script whose output is displayed in a thin bar at the top of the screen.</comment>


Joel Sposky: Response on Job Application (through Twitter) - <AUTHOR>

When Joel Sposky tweet this message - Don't get it. If you're a "Senior .NET Professional" why can't you figure out how to format plain text email? http://i.imgur.com/kAG5h.png - what does he mean? <comment><USER2> The email is badly formatted. There are many unnecessary paragraphs / line breaks in the middle of sentences. It looks unprofessional, and does not reflect well on the sender's technical abilities.

There are a number of other problems with the email, such as the ALL CAPS SUBJECT (which people _hate_ ) the fact that the sender has started an email with "Dear Sir/Madam" when they know the recipient's name (sir/madam is used when you don't know their name), and the coupling of Dear Sir/Madam with the signoff "Thanks", which is also incorrect. Also, why is the word "very" capitalised? And other such bizarre mistakes.

It just looks extremely unprofessional.

</comment><comment><USER3> You have line breaks and weird spacing all throughout the email - at least judging by the .png that you posted. It looks like you have copy-pasted the text from somewhere. Also, your grammar sucks - if your English isn't that good, at least have somebody proofread your email - you are applying for a job where English is the language that is to be used, and advertising that you don't speak English very well is hardly going to help you land a job...

</comment><comment><USER4> Dear Sir/ Madam, This is in reference to your requirement for Software Developer. would like to represent myself as a Freelance .NET Software Professional

from New Delhi, India. My technical stack includes .NET Platform and related

Technologies. I have over 5.5 years of experience in Handling Implementing

/Windows Applications in diverse domains. I have a Very good Infrastructure with latest

Hardware/Software, fast Internet Broadband lines and Telephone line for communication.

Please have a look at my CV. If my credentials

matches your requirement, kindly let me know so that we can proceed further.

Thanks,

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Dear Sir/Madam,

This is in reference to your requirement for Software Developer. would like to represent myself as a Freelance .NET Software Professional from New Delhi, India. My technical stack includes .NET Platform and related Technologies. I have over 5.5 years of experience in Handling Implementing /Windows Applications in diverse domains.

I have a Very good Infrastructure with latest Hardware/Software, fast Internet Broadband lines and Telephone line for communication.

Please have a look at my CV. If my credentials matches your requirement, kindly let me know so that we can proceed further.

Thanks,</comment>


Can We Ignore the Alarm Bells the Bond Market Is Ringing? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/can-we-ignore-the-alarm-bells-the-bond-market-is-ringing.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Other than central banks (and index funds....), who would want a negative interest rate bond? And when the rest of the world is going negative why would the the fed raise rates here at home? And why on earth are governments everywhere not taking advantage of these wildly low rates to invest heavily in infrastructure and stimulus?

This is a totally surreal environment, unprecedented.</comment>


Can an algorithm replace the pill? Natural Cycles app wants to do just that - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/natural-cycles-ovulation-app <comment><USER2> There already is a method that works like that: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_roulette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_roulette) It doesn't work that well.</comment>


Increase in Protocol 47 (GRE) traffic since end of December 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/More+on+Protocol+47+denys/21867/ <comment><USER2> There is a probably a consumer device that has a GRE listener running, and it is possible to send it a small packet, and it will return back some sort of error response. So classic amplification.

Thought given the moderate amount of traffic, maybe it isn't a hugely effective DDoS method.

Even if a consumer device doesn't use GRE, it doesn't mean it isn't there. GRE is often included in Linux kernels.

<comment><USER3> If that's the case it's possible they're just testing it out right now to figure out a good way to use it. Be interesting to watch this unfold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is when somebody gets the bright idea to block all protocols other than TCP and UDP.

Hey you can just tunnel via udp right??

<comment><USER5> Not sure if you are joking or not but that is exactly what VXLAN does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Makes me wonder if someone has a comms protocol based on backscatter for the back haul.

<comment><USER7> What's backscatter in this case? Could you elaborate on this with maybe some more technical details?

<comment><USER6> Let's say you wanted to create a (nominally) covert channel to site X, you take your message text M and encode it with some forward error correction. Next you find a set of host IP addresses H which have as their last octet the values 0 - 0xff (or perhaps you use every other bit and find hosts where the last two octets are 0b0x0x0x0x 0b0x0x0x0x through 0b1x1x1x1x 0b1x1x1x1x. Now you take the octets you want to send in your message and your botnet bounces a packet of the host where the spoofed source IP is the real destination host. That destination host looks at all these errors that are coming in, collects the last two octets of the addresses, and reconstructs the message M. All while the world sees "oooh DDOS by script kiddies" but really its someone communicating with low detection risk across a deep packet inspecting firewall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> GRE Tunnel bonding rollout maybe?

<comment><USER9> In that case, the source/destination IPs would not resemble backscatter traffic. Unfortunately, SANS forums aren't much for analysis..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mirai, state sponsored botnet.</comment>


If Humble People Make the Best Leaders, Why Do We Fall for Narcissists? - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/04/if-humble-people-make-the-best-leaders-why-do-we-fall-for-charismatic-narcissists? <comment><USER2> Narcissists are good at telling people what they want to hear; if any flaw in human nature is going to make us end up like the dinosaurs it is probably how much people don't like to hear things they don't want to hear.</comment>


Ask HN: Employees not receiving promised option grants - <AUTHOR>

If a company promises stock options to new employees but doesn't deliver the actual agreements nor any written notice of the specific quantities and prices, what should the employee do? Does this violate the law in California after many months of employees asking and not receiving agreements? <comment><USER2> Before going 'legal' (especially as you seem to have nothing specific in writing), why not talk to your manager, or the most appropriate person about it.

Explain, why you're worried ("We agreed there would be options grants, and I know you're a man of your word, but it has been a little while now, and I wonder if you could explain why there has been a delay, and when we can expect to get them").

Odds are that it is nothing malicious, or dodgy, but if you're at a fast growing startup there are probably lots of other things on your CEO's plate, and these might have been put near the bottom of the queue.

But it is worth talking it through (there are lots of reasons why it might be taking a while- lawyer on holiday, investors need to sign off etc).

If your boss is evasive or refuses to discuss specifics, then you can start to worry!

(I'm in the UK, and my options took a year and a half to get finally sorted and signed off, but I trusted my boss, so didn't feel I needed to worry about it!)

</comment><comment><USER3> Were you ever promised these grants in writing? If not, you probably have a very difficult case to make.

The management of a company, and potential acquirers, have a zillion ways to screw employees out of the value of their options. If your management is trying to screw you now pre-money it's only going to get worse. I say leave at the earliest opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is clearly written down that we have grants, but the specifics are not written (at least for most employees, it seems). The options are definitely in the money already.

<comment><USER3> Like what, "there will be option grants"?

Seems dubious to me but I'm a layman. You can hope that a wild lawyer appears on HN but you should really get your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I have letters on company letterhead that say things like "We will get you your option grant paperwork soon. Sorry for the delay." unfortunately it has been a while since then..

<comment><USER4> Did the founders promise you a certain amount of equity?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, verbally. More than once and many months part. I believe they will come through with an agreement of some kind, but I worry about receiving the specifics of what I (and others) got promised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You're supposed to get something written in your offer letter. After that, there might be some delay, usually until the next board meeting, to get the real paperwork (which includes # of shares and strike price). But what you are describing is worrisome.</comment>


Adding a List data type to Lox - <AUTHOR> https://calebschoepp.com/blog/2020/adding-a-list-data-type-to-lox/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this! How did you find it?</comment>


Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis, and 15 (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/magazine/25STOCK-TRADER.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> It's very gobsmacking that the SEC finds the time and energy to make an example out of a 15 year old but can't muster the backbone to prosecute actual players in the investment banking industry, who regularly engage in pump and dump schemes exactly like the one this kid was doing!

it's almost as gobsmacking that the kid's Yahoo Finance stock pitches are _completely indistiguishable_ from the blather on CNBC that occurs every single day of the year. WHO THE FUCK IS TRADING ON STOCK TIPS FROM YAHOO FINANCE MESSAGE BOARDS?

<comment><USER3> > WHO THE FUCK IS TRADING ON STOCK TIPS FROM YAHOO FINANCE MESSAGE BOARDS?

Not "is"; "was". This was during the dotcom bubble. A lot of people were paying attention to Yahoo finance boards, most of them pretty unsophisticated investors (obviously). Everybody knew someone who had made $10,000s to $MMs on the stock market and nobody wanted to be the only sucker to miss out--like the teachers in this story, taking stock picks from their students. Pretty crazy times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He's stopped tweeting a year ago and his website is gone, but he grew up to be a professional stock manipulator:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFcgwZ3xjJg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFcgwZ3xjJg) Fox Business host confronts him (2010)

[https://twitter.com/LebedBiz](https://twitter.com/LebedBiz)

[http://www.northjersey.com/news/97250879_Still_touting_stock...](http://www.northjersey.com/news/97250879_Still_touting_stocks.html)

<comment><USER5> He's right here...site is still being updated...still making suggestions...

[http://inflation.us/](http://inflation.us/)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/InflationUS](https://www.youtube.com/user/InflationUS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The linked article is a terrific inside look at the S.E.C.'s efforts to define illegal market manipulation -- and failing.

</comment><comment><USER7> The main point of the article: that all stock prices are artificial, and so there is no such thing as market manipulation, is wrong.

Stock prices reflect the expected future dividends of a stock given current information. If a person intentionally gives wrong or misleading information to the public, and this results in shift in the stock price, then this could be market manipulation.

The author _is_ correct in stating that it is hard to distinguish a person giving their honest opinion about a stock they own, and market manipulation. However, that doesn't mean that the concept of market manipulation is ill- defined.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll chime in: Me too! Me too! Me too! I also think it's a great story, well told by Michael Lewis.

This teenager figured out exactly what was happening in the stock market in the late '90s up to the 1st dotcom crash (IMO the 2nd crash of Internet momentum stocks is coming soon). The kid was very wise for his years. The SEC, on the other hand, appeared to be clueless clowns.

I was, however, disappointed to see the links here to the kid's recent activity. It looks like he's simply continued his promotion of penny stocks. I hate to sound cliched, but "meh". I see a lot of wasted potential.

Why? Because this isn't 1999. His activities can't be nearly as profitable. There's too much noise on the Internet, he's now a little fish in a very big pond.

But what do I know? Not much. In 1999 I was an American "salaryman", watching incredulously while stocks levitated almost to the moon, and yet I wasn't smart enough to make a few bucks speculating before the whole thing imploded.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well-written article! Wryly amusing in a laugh-out-loud. Thanks for this!

</comment><comment><USER10> This story would make a tremendous satirical comedy.

<comment><USER11> William Gaddis already did it, back in 1975: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_R](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_R)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really good read, scrolled up to see the author, 'Michael Lewis', the author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, et al</comment>


Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy - <AUTHOR>

I feel a business that doesn't get mentioned that often around here is Etsy.  While the money raises and investors behind it can be read about on Tech Crunch, not much is mentioned about the business.
Thought I would get some discussion going on it: -How do you feel Etsy was able to overcome the Chicken and the egg problem?
-Were they able to just find a great market that was being underserved by eBay?
-Do you see other markets that could flourish by being "spun" out of eBay? -How were they able to market themselves to not only shopkeepers but consumers as well?
I am sure there are other good questions as well.. <comment><USER2> Over 90% of Etsy users are women. Their market isn't underserved by just eBay–but rather the entire web.

My wife loves Etsy. She's tech-savvy, loves to craft, loves fashion, and loves to shop.

My guess is they overcame the chicken/egg problem because a lot of their sellers are also buyers–which allowed rapid initial growth. Mix in some good PR, people complaining on Ebay forums, VC connections, and there you go.

<comment><USER3> What is your source?

<comment><AUTHOR> How does Etsy determine what people can sell and can't sell on the site? I know its all hand made, but how do they draw the line?

<comment><USER4> AFAICT, there's not much line-drawing happening. In terms of handmade vs retail, I've seen people essentially buy retail items, paint a little something on it, then sell the "customized" items... but it doesn't seem like it hurts Etsy much for people to do that.

And in terms of controlling quality, there definitely isn't much... :) <http://www.regretsy.com/>

<comment><USER5> _And in terms of controlling quality, there definitely isn't much..._

In some cases, that goes for safety as well. My wife (a EE) noticed that there are a lot of sellers on Etsy selling jewelry made from recycled printed circuit boards (earrings, necklaces, bracelets, etc). Unfortunately, a lot of the sellers don't know that PCBs are full of heavy metals that should not be exposed to the skin without some sort of varnish coating. Especially since some sellers like to remove components and sand the boards down so they look cooler.

Lead poisoning FTW!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Etsy tapped into one of the most passionate communities out there, which happened to be on eBay not by choice, but by necessity. If you want to find opportunities, I'd say look at who is using eBay, Amazon, etc. (as a platform) out of necessity due to a lack of alternatives. Once you find those niches, you've already established that there is a market, and if you design a product for that community, customer acquisition should be directly related to the quality of your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think when they made those initials pitches investors had a hard time seeing the market potential for hand made items?

<comment><USER7> It seemed really obvious at the time. It was one of the clearest good ideas I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Etsy has three revenue sources: a 20 cent listing fee, a 3.5% sales fee, and an in-site ad system named Showcase.

Their board is Jim Breyer, Fred Wilson, Caterina Fake and Rob Kalin (founder, CEO).

They are profitable as of earlier this year, founded in 2005, based in Brooklyn, and put on a good show fo' sho'.

<comment><USER9> So it took them 5 years to be profitable? Does that mean they've made back the investment, or just that they make more money than they spend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My 2c on Etsy. My mother is a freelance artist by trade and I witnssed a radical change in her web savvy and understanding in her first 6 months on Etsy. The reason was that she was participating in the Etsy community forums which provide a lot of technical direction. Generating facebook leads, optimal posting strategies, how to make white backgrounds on photos of inventory, etc. In short, they have a passionate self-training community that increases seller efficiency rather than just punishing the inefficient.

One odd side effect of this passion and sense of community is that sellers see selling on Etsy as a hobby rather than a profession, and their effective compensation reflects this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Etsy does really creative product search - it might be the best site out there. <http://www.etsy.com/buy.php>. It's a really fun site to navigate.

They probably get less attention in the tech space because their user base is mostly women.

<comment><USER12> Are you sure? The general consensus among sellers is that the search tools are lacking. They are great at finding fairly random collections of items, and some of the tools are fun toys, but it's not the best if you're actually looking for something specific. About half of the sections on the page are fairly useless for serious shopping.

The number of items on Etsy has increased by 100 times in the past few years, but the lens through which you can see the items has stayed the same size - search pages of 20-30 items. Few people are going to page through more than 20 pages of results.

Basic search has improved significantly since Chad Dickerson came on board, but I think even the tech staff acknowledges that there's a long way to go.

One major problem is the tagging system, and the lack of true categories. It used to be that your first tag functioned as the 'top level category', but they didn't make this clear in the listing creation step. You could (can?) also choose contradictory tags/categories with no problems. The top level categories are rather disparate conceptually, and aren't particularly well chosen (i.e., 'Quilts', with 24k items, has it's own top level entry, same as 'Jewelry' with 1.4 million, and art, with 500k). Also, the tags and titles are completely in the hands of sellers, some of whom mis-label items inadvertently or intentionally. It's a bit of a tricky deal.

<comment><USER9> I remember they got some good buzz going with the information architects and UX people with their browsing tools early on.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the creative flash tools drew good attention and may have engaged people early on. I think now though, with the overwhelming wealth and variety of items for sale on the site, and with the large number of experienced shoppers, the interest of most people is in efficiently sifting through the items. I've heard more than a few people say they were turned away by seemingly random search results, and that they have grown tired of playing with the color search and whatnot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One interesting tidbit about Etsy is that the most successful sellers are the ones selling supplies to the crafters.

As an aside, if you are in the market for an external hard drive, this is the most beautiful one I have ever seen: [http://www.etsy.com/listing/47397822/walnut-and-maple- wood-e...](http://www.etsy.com/listing/47397822/walnut-and-maple-wood- external-500gb) (I'm not affiliated with that seller in anyway, I just dig his product).

</comment><comment><USER14> I heard they have a pretty kickass tech blog though! <http://codeascraft.etsy.com/>

<comment><USER12> > Chris Munns, Etsy Sys-Ops Team.

Wow, where'd you hear that? :)

<comment><USER15> That kind of self-linking would get you banned at MetaFilter ;)

But tell Gerry I said to pop on over here and chime in.

<comment><USER16> Hey Joshwa, thanks for the tweet-vite, I'm glad to share.

Etsy is successful, ultimately, not because of some putative secret sauce (though we do have very powerful and unique behind-the-scenes tech).

We are successful, ultimately, because we are providing tools that support and enable the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, help their artistic and creative achievements be seen and recognized around the world, and subvert the common shopping experience people have to add a personal connection to the creators of the goods they buy.

If anyone were to identify a similarly unmet need, another ignored and under- served community, and created a place online that had a positive impact on the lives, they would also succeed. What "business model", which metrics or revenue streams make sense, depends on that community's characteristics, and it doesn't have to be complicated or some sort of trick.

That all said, it's of course crucial to have reliable, flexible, scalable, rapidly evolving technology behind you. I have been working here relentlessly to get our team to the point where we are free to innovate as much as we can. To be honest, there is already abundant information on the web and elsewhere about what works, and what doesn't; it's not really a mystery.

But you need the resoluteness to actually execute on these best practices, and the courage to innovate even in the face of occasional mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They also completely bypass the chicken/egg problem. The site can work with a small number of sellers. If I'm an artist I can set up a store on etsy and use it as my professional website. I then give out the etsy link to people I meet in the "real world" to buy my work online.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey, some of the investors are here on HN. At least, I am, anyway.

<comment><USER17> What did you like about the way they built the site and community? What don't you like, if anything? Is there one lesson in particular people can take away from Etsy?

<comment><USER7> It was more the novel marketplace I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Josh,

I have kinda asked this to the group, but thought I would direct it at you. Do you think other sub-markets of eBay could flourish as a separate entity? Or was Etsy just able to find a really good balance of a good market with a good audience?

<comment><USER18> I have this gut feeling that local furniture could be a huge market. Almost all my friends (even the ones with lots of money) got a large portion of their furniture from craigslist and other people.

<comment><USER7> I always wanted to build a couch search engine.

<comment><USER18> I'm kind of tempted to build this in a visual manner. I'd have to find a novel way around getting craigslist data due to their draconian API policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would argue that Etsy didn't identify an underserved market inside of eBay but rather intelligently saw a need to service the 'flea market' circuit. Based out of Brooklyn, there's no doubt that Etsy's founders frequent places like the Brooklyn Flea and other places where jewelers, knitters, and other small time crafters hock their goods on weekends to escape their day jobs.

This, to me, was the win, not going after a piece of eBay's pie.

Rather than asking "Other markets that could flourish by being spun out of ebay," I would search for more organizations helping 'micro-entrepreneurs' (i.e. from the bedroom to a small booth rental) make their living.

</comment><comment><USER20> Long time HN reader, but this is my first comment. My wife and I have been planning our son's 5th bday and have used etsy for the first time for party favors, labels, etc.. My experience with etsy sellers is A+. We searched ebay, craigslist, and amazon before deciding to make our purchases on etsy. Maybe, evite should team up with etsy, so I can buy my crafts for the carnival party, while I send out the evite. Hmm...maybe I just found an idea for a side- project.

</comment><comment><USER21> They just tapped into an area -- crafting, artisan designers, etc. -- that was underserved by the market. eBay's client won't recognize these types of vendors as much as they seek out stuff like major commercial brands so the selling capacity was likely limited.

I don't care for etsy as a customer but it's a great company from a business standpoint.

</comment><comment><USER22> My girlfriend used to like Etsy, but she was burned by several sellers there and now actively avoids it unless she personally knows the seller offline. It seems that their mechanisms from protecting buyers from sellers who don't perform aren't really that good.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think these guys have also done a great job in showing how to chip away at eBay. Do you see any potential markets/customers/products that could also benefit from a dedicated site?

</comment><comment><USER14> Also heard they are hiring like crazy! <http://www.etsy.com/jobs/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Can someone describe the basic business model of etsy, and how they manage to make $ (and how much) first? traffic, ...</comment>


Debian, FreeBSD and CentOS now supported by EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/aws-marketplace-additional-operating-system-support.html

<comment><USER3> For some reason I'm really getting a kick out of the notion of "FreeBSD: Sold by Colin Percival".

At any rate, this is excellent news! I've been looking for an excuse to do more with kqueue/libdispatch in a server setting, and this looks like just the excuse I need. Congrats, Colin, and thanks!

<comment><USER4> _FreeBSD: Sold by Colin Percival_

Right now this is something I'm doing as an individual -- the project has "blessed" it to some extent (e.g., the core team said it was fine for me to call what I was providing "FreeBSD"), but it isn't "official FreeBSD" since it has local changes to make it work under EC2. At some point this will probably turn into "FreeBSD: Sold by The FreeBSD Project" or "FreeBSD: Sold by The FreeBSD Foundation" (even if I'm the person actually rolling the images).

 _Congrats, Colin, and thanks!_

We're not finished yet -- I'm still hoping Amazon will find a way to let FreeBSD run on all the instance types without any Windows tax, and I still have to tie up some loose ends up get "stock" FreeBSD running on EC2.

<comment><USER3> > We're not finished yet

Still, I think this is yet another strong vote of confidence coming from Amazon. Enough to encourage me to pick up some projects that I had mothballed since AWS has become the "go to" solution for so many clients these days. With any luck, all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything production ready, but even just seeing this progress from "blessed hack" to "mostly official" is a strong indication that effort in this direction will likely not be wasted.

<comment><USER4> _I think this is yet another strong vote of confidence coming from Amazon._

Yes, I'm certainly glad to have this. Amazon is very secretive, and while I've talked to enough people over the years to know that Amazon definitely wasn't ignoring FreeBSD, it's very nice to have something _public_ I can point to and say "look, they really do care!"

 _all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything production ready_

FWIW, even with the loose ends, I consider FreeBSD/EC2 production ready -- and I'm using it in production, both for Tarsnap and for FreeBSD Portsnap mirrors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since there's a bunch of people asking questions about FreeBSD/EC2 here, I submitted my page on the topic separately: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4823941>

<comment><USER5> That submission got demoted from the first page. <http://hnrankings.info/4823941/>

I suppose it rose too fast...

<comment><USER4> Either rose too fast or someone flagged it for some reason...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the FreeBSD product page[1]:

        Please note that for technical reasons this AMI
        only runs on high-performance (cluster & high-I/O)
        instances.

Looking at Mr. Percival's other resources, other contributed AMIs don't run on arbitrary instances, either.

Being a broke student, I wanted to put it on the smallest micro instance. What are these technical reasons that prevent me from doing so?

In any case, thanks for the great work.

[1]: [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/ref=sp_mpg_...](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/ref=sp_mpg_product_title/189-3526635-0298104?ie=UTF8&sr=0-2)

<comment><USER7> I believe it's because the "normal". EC2 instances are paravirtualised through Xen, whereas the types listed are hardware virtualisation. Not sure though.

<comment><USER8> Used to be that only the Windows instances were HVM (thus the defenestration hack using them to get FreeBSD onto AWS) and all the Unix ones used paravirtualization - has this changed?

<comment><USER7> I think cluster instances are always HVM, not sure about high IO.

<comment><USER8> Ah, so we could've had FreeBSD by coughing up the cash for one of those - <USER2> was there any special porting needed for it?

<comment><USER4> Porting was needed, but I've done it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just spent an hour installing and documenting every step of a new 12.04 deploy for my rails-powered API.

I wanted to do this on FreeBSD! I check HN mid-install of a bunch of software and boom what do you know. Time to start over!

That being said, there seems to only be one result for FreeBSD in the marketplace, from our bud cperciva. I'd really love to deploy a base 9.0 on a Small.

<comment><USER4> You can run FreeBSD on an m1.small, but it costs more (Windows license) and isn't in the marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Better late than never. The defenestration hack always irked me since it meant paying for a Windows license that I didn't want to use.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is FreeBSD such a big deal? What advantages does it have over Ubuntu?

<comment><USER4> Some of the common answers to that question are clang/llvm, ZFS, DTrace, pf, superpages, geom, journalled softupdates, and capsicum.

<comment><USER11> Incidentally, some of these things work on Ubuntu: superpages, zfs, and clang. & I wouldn't call Journalled Softupdates an advantage, more of a catch-up to the various journalled filesystems supported by Linux.

<comment><USER4> Journalled softupdates is much better than mere journalling.

I don't know what the current state of ZFS on Linux is, but last time I looked it was done with a very fragile FUSE setup.

I remember hearing rants from FreeBSD VM people about how Linux did superpages wrong, but I don't know any of the details there.

<comment><USER12> Actually there is a native ZFS port for linux: <http://zfsonlinux.org/>

The license doesn't allow to distribute a binary build of it, but you can build your own rpm and deb packages and install it to your own servers.

(According to their FAQ: "In a nutshell [...] This means that a single derived work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed."

Honestly, besides some quick tests I don't have any experience to judge how stable it is, but definitely better than the fragile fuse setup you are mentioning.

Anyone has more experience with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FreeBSD support is huge. Many thanks to Colin, who's been working on this for quite some time.

Now we need a more agnostic EC2 platform so it can run on all instance types. The Windows fee situation is _not cool_.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amazon linux was already a variety of CentOS wasn't it? We used it where we would use CentOS on other providers.

Very pleased this has happened!

</comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean I can get Amazon built AMIs for CentOS instead of building my own or using untrusted community images?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller- profile/ref=mkt_bl...](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller- profile/ref=mkt_blg_jb_OSS_Centos)

"official version" sold by Centos.org

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone give me a simple comparison between the three if they are to be used as web servers for simple sites?

</comment><comment><USER17> having freebsd is a great decision. i don't have a nice experience with mysql on freebsd but for apache or nginx on serving on freebsd is a breeze.

<comment><USER6> How was your experience with MySQL on FreeBSD different than other systems? Were you installing from binaries or ports?</comment></comment>


Theranos Executive to Depart Amid Regulatory Probes - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-executive-sunny-balwani-to-depart-amid-regulatory-probes-1463015943 <comment><USER2> "Mr. Balwani, the Journal reported, told them in an email, "I am extremely irritated and frustrated by folks with no legal background taking legal positions and interpretations on these matters." He wrote, "This must stop."

He then ordered the employees to only report to the accrediting organizations results from proficiency tests performed on conventional devices, and not the results of those tests obtained from the company's proprietary Edison machines, according to former employees."

Yikes.

<comment><USER3> He's frustrated by people with no legal background making legal judgments.

We're frustrated by people with no medical background making fake devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

\-- Richard Feynman

</comment><comment><USER5> She said the following a while back:

"I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you've admitted that you're not going to succeed."

I bet she wishes she had a backup plan now...

[http://www.inc.com/deborah-petersen/elizabeth-holmes- avoid-b...](http://www.inc.com/deborah-petersen/elizabeth-holmes-avoid-backup- plans.html)

<comment><USER6> Their backup plan was already executed: they switched from their testing methodology to acting as a service provider for somebody else's testing methodology ([http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maris-explains-why-gv- di...](http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maris-explains-why-gv-didnt-invest- in-theranos-2015-10) """So, we just had someone from our life-science investment team go into Walgreens and take the test. And it wasn't that difficult for anyone to determine that things may not be what they seem here."

That employee found that when he went to get a test done, Theranos wanted more than just a drop of blood in one of its "nanotainers." He denied a full venous blood draw, and ended up getting called back a week later because they wanted him to give more blood.""")

<comment><USER7> Were they even able to get their Edison device into a functional state?

<comment><USER6> it was approved for a single test. [http://fortune.com/2015/07/02/theranos- fda-approval/](http://fortune.com/2015/07/02/theranos-fda-approval/) dunno if they ever got the device in a functional state, _outside of extremely controlled conditions in a lab_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't imagine the stress that Holmes goes through on a constant basis. There is the usual startup founder stress, but this feels like another level.

<comment><USER9> Isn't this what one deserves if one tries to peddle something that doesn't work to investors, and then gets hundreds of millions of dollars for it?

<comment><USER10> This is advocating revenge, and being pleased to see someone suffer. Imagine she had a breakdown due to stress and her life went off the rails - would you feel that was fair? How much would she have to suffer before you are satisfied?

<comment><USER11> She benefited greatly from a cult of personality on the way up and is now finding out it goes both ways. I myself don't feel bad for someone who enriched herself while peddling snake oil and _knowingly giving junk test results to real patients_. It is despicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So Balwani has been thrown to the wolves.[1] Who's next?

[1] [http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=27...](http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2707&context=greatplainsquarterly)

<comment><USER13> Thrown to the wolves? Sounds like he was deserving to be sacrificed.

<comment><USER14> The article clearly states: "Mr. Balwani isn't being blamed for the company's regulatory problems."

<comment><USER13> Of course that's what the PR person says.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anybody have any clever ideas about how to short Theranos?

<comment><USER16> Start a blood testing company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Will there be a perp walk?</comment>


Apple Hiring a Team to Build "the Future of Cloud Services" - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/apple-hiring-a-team-to-build-t.php

<comment><USER2> No new news, just a job listing.

edit: Meaning, this is a job listing that could normally apply to a MobileMe position, but given recent speculation about apple expanding their "cloud", the job listing is used as fuel for that fire.

<comment><USER3> Given their new DC builds in NC though - and the recent purchase of 12 petabytes of Isilon storage... the writing is on the wall.

<comment><USER4> 12 petabytes isn't really that much nowadays.

<comment><USER5> 12 petabytes makes Apple Isilon's largest customer: [http://www.geekwire.com/2011/apple-plans-huge-digital- storag...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/apple-plans-huge-digital-storage-buy- isilon-backbone-media-locker)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FTFY: "...Cloud Services at Apple"

I can't imagine Apple being open enough to actually become the future player in this.

<comment><USER7> They have a pretty big trojan horse to push cloud services. iOS.

<comment><USER8> Isn't ITMS the largest distributor of digital music in the world, and 3rd or so large of music generally? I can imagine if they let you stream your music/video purchases from the cloud that they'd end up with a few customers for that.</comment></comment></comment>


Google - Klingon - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon <comment><USER2> C'mon. Hacker is probably more suited for this forum.

<http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-hacker>

Having said that, Bork Bork Bork is my favourite, due to too much time watching The Muppet Show as a child.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, Google lacks Lojban, Quenya, Toki Pona, Ithkuil and many other conlangs.

(I'd personally try Lojban if it was available.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like they cant translate Advanced search and Language tools into Klingon.</comment>


Alibaba reaches 1 trillion RMB to become the biggest ecommerce company in world - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/03/alibaba-reaches-1-trillion-rmb-157b-in-sales-to-become-biggest-e-commerce-company-in-the-world/

<comment><USER2> Please add currency. Doesn't walmart have more?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I had to cut short the title because of the 80 character limit. (I've updated the title now). I don't have the figures for Walmart, sorry, I just don't know :(</comment></comment>