Ask HN: Any tech founders applying to YC Fellow and want a non-tech co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
I am a non-technical individual looking to get some experience in startups. I tried two before as a sole founder and failed.
One idea I had for a startup was called Genghis: technical founders can list their profile and Genghis will send you non-technical individuals that actually want to work on your ideas/startup.
I see Genghis as a solution to the question so many non-technical entrepreneurs ask (while pissing a lot of people off): "I have an idea, what do I do next?"
I believe if you're asking this question, the best thing a non-technical individual can do is to put away their own ideas and go out and help a technical founder execute on THEIR ideas/vision.
What do you all think about that? Is it something you would find useful and helpful?
Anyways, I'm going to roll the ball here myself. I am looking to join a startup as a non-technical founder and help you with your startup idea. I can help you validate your idea, market your product, and get traction.
Cheers, Ari. <comment><USER2> I like the idea, and good for you to start trying with yourself.

I'm not interested, but 3 years ago I might have been. Let me give you the perspective of someone who might have bitten at this offer:

1) @cokokr1sp gave you good advice. You posted to Ask HN to get attention. Now you are getting it, so don't just offer to Skype. Post an answer showing what you offer, in terms of experience, accomplishments, enthusiasm, etc. You say you had two failures - doing what, and what did you learn?

2) I actually really like your idea, but similar ideas have gone bad in the past. The classic example of something like this going bad is the so-called Invention Submission Corp. If you are unfamiliar with it, and why a technical person might avoid it, google it. It is easy for technical people with a dream to get taken for a ride by non-technical people "helping" them. Adopting a co- founder model eliminates some of the problems with the ISC model, but you still need to have some safeguards against the "he just stole my work and took the profit" scenario. The world is full of bitter tech people who feel they got screwed over by their business partner. The better the safeguards and the reputation you build, the more technical people will be willing to join with non-technical people.

3) You also have to have safeguards and methods of evaluating the technical people and their ideas. A bad idea can take you for a ride too. How does a non-technical person know that they are not working hard to sell something that will never work or is a bad idea? This is a hard problem that VCs and institutions spend a lot of resources trying to get right. VCs can deal with this with by taking a lot of bets - that doesn't work for a single person. I know that there have been some ideas about sharing risk among startups, does Genghis have any solutions regarding this?

Just some feedback on your idea. I wish you well and hope you find a good fit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you so much for your feedback and advice. I really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _I see Genghis as a solution to the question so many non-technical entrepreneurs ask (while pissing a lot of people off): "I have an idea, what do I do next?"_

I think the question from non-tech people that infuriates those that are technical is, "I have an idea, want to help me build it?"

I like your approach here, but I don't think you've sold yourself enough. What experience do you have validating ideas, marketing products, and getting traction?

<comment><USER4> Understanding this perspective will be a huge benefit to anyone who wants to contribute as a non-technical founder. About 6 years ago, at the end of undergrad, a technical friend and I started working on a project. I had made websites, built computers, dabbled in minor coding, but really wasn't _that_ technical. I had no clue what to do and he probably wasn't comfortable giving direction. I left the project when I felt I couldn't make an equal contribution.

Working for six years made it obvious how valuable it is to be able to get things done offline, in a nontechnical way by planning, finding resources, etc.

Now I've become a lot more technical, the programmer of the office (VBA, ugh) to a programmer without caveats. Non-technical friends ask me to be their tech co-founder, but they have no clue how much work the technical side entails -- they probably still think freelance programmers should cost them $20/hr.

Also, non-tech friends will ask if they can help with my project. I can see what I would need in a non-tech founder, but a lot of times its hard to convey that to people. It's especially hard convey to someone how much effort you expend maintaining a codebase or implementing features to a non-technical person.

Best luck with Genghis and your co-founder search. I hate to be a downer, but personally, I'd never take a non-technical founder that I didn't know beforehand. It's hard enough to gauge the skill/reliability of a tech co- founder/freelancer (with structured, defined abilities and past projects). I wouldn't be comfortable assessing someone as a cofounder based on soft-skills. It's not a statement on their relative contribution, but more on my confidence in my own estimation.

*By technical, I'm also including people with domain knowledge.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback and advice. It's very valuable. And much appreciated, especially considering that you are both technical and non-technical.

I don't think I will actually do Genghis, it was just an idea that popped up! I saw it as something to help first time founders get started in startups: both technical and non-technical people.

I think the message I would have personally tried to get across is that your first one or two startups are going to fail, so your best bet would be to get started, meet new people and get some experience. I saw data that that indicated that the majority of successful technology companies are founded by an average of three people, all of which have known each other for many years and have worked together on previous projects. The conclusion from that was to "just get out there and start your first company. It's the best way to make the contacts and find the cofounders for your next startup."

What are your thoughts? Would love to hear them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> would you work with remote teams?

</comment><comment><USER6> @iamari Where are you located?

<comment><AUTHOR> Australia!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Metamon – A Vagrant/Ansible toolkit for kickstarting Django apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tryolabs.com/2015/01/20/introducing-metamon-for-kickstarting-django-development/

<comment><USER2> Not related to Metamon, but in support of it. If you are looking for intros to Vagrant, or Ansible, I have a couple screencasts on them [1, 2]. Both are amazingly awesome tools that I just cannot promote enough. Looks like these Metamon files create a virtual environment using Vagrant, then stand up an application stack, from top to bottom, using Ansible.

[1] [https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/42-crash-course-on- vagran...](https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/42-crash-course-on-vagrant- revised)

[2] [https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with- ansibl...](https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansible- part-1-4)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool!

> Metamon has hitherto been an internal tool that provides a reusable set of > Ansible Playbooks that help us quickly start new projects by skipping > environment configuration and automation.

Having built your tool for a specific purpose means it can avoid scope creep.

I built something somewhat similar [0], but use Puppet, added a GUI and keep adding more and more features. Right now you can set up a VM with PHP, HHVM, Ruby, Python, Node.js or a mix of all these. High on my to-do list is to allow setting up Python/Ruby/Node.js apps using Apache/Nginx.

[0] - [https://puphpet.com](https://puphpet.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm here to answer any questions and take feedback.

<comment> shawn-furyan Without a good counterindication, I'll probably end up forking this and adding VirtualEnvWrapper because I like the workflow better than plain VirtualEnv. Is there any particular reason you don't include it? Perhaps the deployment automation mostly moots the VirtualEnvWrapper wins, making it not worth the increased complexity?

P.S. This is a very timely release for me. I've done a few manual deploys of almost this exact stack, and have a major project for my company that I need to port to Django. However, I wanted to learn and use Ansible before attacking the job to lower maintenance costs. This looks like it will be a tremendous leg up on that task.

<comment><USER4> Shawn,

There isn't really a reason not to use Virtualenv wrapper, but there is also not really a reason to use it. Activating it is rather simple, so I just didn't really want to add something else to the installation (that would make it slightly more complex and slower). However, take a look at the development role[0], it actually activates the Virtualenv on login.

If you're going to be logging into the production machines (where the development role does not make (total) sense to have) you may want to install it, or turn off everything in the development role[1] except virtualenv activation and add it to those machines.

In short, I'm not against it, I just think it's not needed since the development role makes it redundant to have.

[0] [https://github.com/tryolabs/metamon/blob/master/deploy/roles...](https://github.com/tryolabs/metamon/blob/master/deploy/roles/development/tasks/venv.yml) [1] [https://github.com/tryolabs/metamon/blob/master/deploy/roles...](https://github.com/tryolabs/metamon/blob/master/deploy/roles/development/tasks/main.yml)

<comment> shawn-furyan That's in the ballpark of the reasoning I expected. Thanks for the reply and the specific pointers. I tend to develop from the command line and have heretofore deployed manually, so I've found the subtle streamlining offered by VirtualEnvWrapper to be worthwhile. However, I think I'll try to go without it initially to reexamine its value under more automated deployment.

Also, this change would mostly serve as an incentive to ssh onto production servers, which is usually not going to be the optimal solution to issues that arise. I hadn't really thought about it this way until your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool, my org uses something similar internally as well. It's been adapted for our own specific purposes but was originally based on [https://github.com/jcalazan/ansible-django- stack](https://github.com/jcalazan/ansible-django-stack), a similar project to yours.

</comment><comment><USER6> Question here. Assuming I am developing something in pure Python, is there any advantage to using Vagrant if I already have a Virtualenv setup? They are the same principle of isolated environments, but implemented at different levels.

<comment><USER4> It really depends on what you're doing. If you're working on multiple projects that depend on other services to be running then it probably helps to use Vagrant. If you just need libs virtualenv is enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice! I have been using something similar, but mine is only for setting up a dev environment in vagrant, not deployment. I will definitely use this as a reference for when I extend my provisioning to include deployment.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not surprising to see something like this for Django, is it? If anyone were still using Zope, there would be similar needs.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for releasing it.

Was thinking about using Ansible for some time, but haven't. Now this is easy to get started.

</comment><comment><USER10> link to the actual Github repo: [https://github.com/tryolabs/metamon](https://github.com/tryolabs/metamon)</comment>


LinkedIn sued by users who say it hacked their e-mail accounts - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/linkedin-sued-by-users-who-say-it-hacked-their-e-mail-accounts/ <comment><USER2> I deleted my LinkedIn account some time back, but I still get email like this (copy from actual email, not paraphrased)

Subject: [Freind]'s invitation is awaiting your response

Body: [Friend] would like to connect on LinkedIn. How would you like to respond?

[Photo of friend] Confirm you know [Friend]

... and ...

Subject: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

Body: [Photo of friend]

[Me],

I'd like to include you in my network to share updates and stay in touch.

\- [Friend]

All emails sent from friend's email account, _not_ LinkedIn. I've confirmed with friend that they were completely unaware of this and were quite embarrassed.

Not cool, LinkedIn, and most definitely dishonest.

<comment><USER3> Same. Cancelled my account a year ago, still getting those emails. The worst part? Actually considering getting a new account, as I've been told by multiple people not having a LinkedIn account is 'suspicious' and that it's costing me job opportunities. Genuinely wishing someone would make a (less evil) LinkedIn-killer. At least for the tech world. Was hoping Stackoverflow Careers would do that, but sadly that hasn't happened.

<comment><USER4> Why don't you just make a completely empty account with a throwaway email account that tells people not to trust linkedin and pointing them to a place on the web that you control?

<comment><USER3> that is not exactly perceived well by the average HR/recruiter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I abstain from LinkedIn deliberately and I can confirm that I am sick from their spam.

Every time a friend joins their network, I get tons of "invitations to connect", despite the fact that I have "unsubscribed" from their spam-list (to which I never subscribed in the first place) enough times.

Real professionals should not need spammy social networks to prove themselves.

<comment><USER6> > _Real professionals should not need spammy social networks to prove > themselves._

Yup. As far as I can tell/am concerned, the old fashioned 'meatspace'-networking method never stopped working.

I get recruiter spammed without them, so even for that they don't seem necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone felt like they are "typecast" into a certain industry or job position by their LinkedIn profiles?

What if you don't want to stay with the same industry for the rest of your life? All your contacts probably already endorsed you for your skills in a that industry. It seems like a situation that increases friction in trying to move between fields, industries, and job positions.

Should you delete your profile? Would it seem weird to potential employers/business relationships that you are missing a LinkedIn profile?

I think this will become a more visible problem in the near future.

<comment><USER8> How does it harm your future? It's nice to have someone who has multiple skills.

<comment><USER9> To some people, having multiple skillsets means you're unfocused, because you haven't focused on a single skillset.

<comment><USER10> And those people aren't worth working for.

<comment> alok-g Unfortunately, they seem to be the majority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "People You May Know" feature of LinkedIn is downright disturbing. Everyone in my third-party email's Address Book shows up as a person I may know. This includes people without LinkedIn accounts, people who've been dead for years that I never removed, people that I've only ever exchanged a single email with.

I never gave LinkedIn my email creds (I'm astounded that they have the gall to ask for my email password). Also, it is 100% inconceivable to me that all of these people would have given LinkedIn access to their email accounts.

<comment><USER12> People without LinkedIn accounts? Are you quite certain? I worked at LinkedIn and know exactly how People You May Know used to work (I've looked at the code). Unless they changed something in the last couple years (and given their dev cycle, I doubt it), every single person who it recommends has signed up to LinkedIn. Of course, I heard people make these claims while I worked there too.

Also, it really isn't that hard to guess how it works (hint: are you sure you need every single person to give address books access to build a graph?).

<comment><USER13> My friends cats (who have email addresses but have never signed up on Linkedin) show up as "People You May Know."

Explain that one.

<comment><USER14> What an appropriate comment for your username. I'm still trying to figure out what LinkedIn have done to my email, but basically my wife and I are inundated with spam from them. It's non stop. I only signed up to learn more about the person who hit our car and has been slow to pay. It was helpful, but despite opting out of every option I could, somehow its learnt that my wife exists and is nailing us both with spam.

<comment><USER15> Apply a spam filter...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used to think people were just being ignorant, and that if they had read the screen they would've known to not give out their passwords.

Then I got a LinkedIn account and almost got tricked into typing my credentials... it was only when the Google authorization screen came up that I realized what had happened.

<comment><USER17> _Then I got a LinkedIn account and almost got tricked into typing my credentials_

More detail needed here. how did they almost trick you? what did they say or what did they display that made you think it was something different.

surely when you were entering the details, it was still clear you were on linkedin's website? No? (this is a genuine question.. I don't have a linkedin account)

<comment><USER16> Right after you log in, they display a page that looks almost exactly like a login page asking for your email address and password.

I didn't read the page -- I assumed it was either a "verify your email" or "authentication failed" page of some sort, so I entered my Gmail email address and password. (No, I didn't enter my Gmail password. Read below.)

There is REALLY easy-to-miss "skip" link (I forget the exact text) on the page, but the page looks so much like a login window or "verify your address" window or some other window like that that you don't realize it (and think the "skip" link is probably saying something typical like "Forgot your password?"), so you go ahead and type your credentials -- even though you've already logged in.

The only thing that saved me was the fact that Google asked me if I wanted to "Allow Access" or not, and that made my heart skip a beat and I finally realized what had happened. Thanks Google.

The scary part is that you DON'T have to type in your Google password for this to work! In fact, I typed in my LinkedIn password (I'm not quite stupid enough to type in my Google password on LinkedIn's website) -- but Google still popped up a window asking me for permission, because I was already logged into Google and it didn't even bother checking my password.

So LinkedIn almost got my permission without me ever entering my Gmail password... I almost granted access (thinking it might have been an OpenID thing) before I came to my senses and thought, WTF just happened right now?! Hell no!

<comment><USER12> _I didn 't read the page -- I assumed_

This is really the heart of it isn't it? Even if LinkedIn has text in a 40pt font that says, "Import your address book, we're going to log into your email account and download your contacts so that we can link you with them and here is exactly what we're going to do with them," you probably still wouldn't have read it.

<comment><USER18> LinkedIn went _significantly_ out of their way to position and format that page to phish people. I used to fall for it periodically because I just assumed I'd been signed out and my linkedin credentials were pre-filled in waiting to fail to gain access to my email fortunately. That is the heart of it.

If they'd put a 40pt font message, or simply not positioned the "other" email + password sign in screen straight after the "real" email + password sign in screen, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The most damning part is that's not even what they're being sued for - they're being sued for _another_ way they scammed their way into people's email accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> LinkedIn is the primary reason I'm cautious to link my different services to something external (facebook, twitter, etc.). Even those I'm a bit more lax on compared to my email.

Nothing, but me and my devices, should ever have a reason to access my email. If someone or something is trying to access my email, even with explicit permission, there's no way they can be up to anything good.

The activities that originate from LinkedIn touching your email account is definitely sketchy at best, and definitely spam. There doesn't seem to be a good way to stop unwanted emails going to a single address.

Hell, I've found that even getting them to stop sending you emails regarding your account / groups you joined doesn't always work. Speaking to their support department ends in a response with something like "our engineers are aware" with no change in behavior.

Half of me wants to just get rid of LinkedIn, the other half of me likes seeing old acquaintances getting promotions/moving on to greener pastures.

===

Dear LinkedIn,

Please stop being scummy...we'd all appreciate it.

Cheers!

-Everyone from the Internet

<comment><USER20> > _LinkedIn is the primary reason I 'm cautious to link my different services > to something external_

I've gone further. I routinely create email aliases for any new services I may need to use. (Yes, I have one dedicated to HN too.) That gives me quite a few nice features:

1) My email addresses are not generally cross-service

2) It's somewhat harder to consolidate my data even when the addresses are "leaked" (read: sold) from one service to another

3) I see with absolute clarity which service my email address was siphoned from.

4) I can trivially delete the address. It's just a line in /etc/aliases.

For #3, I haven't done any accurate measurements but it seems that an address finds its way to spammer lists about as often through the service selling it as it does from a user of that service inadvertantly placing it on one.

<comment><USER21> GMail has a little trick that you can postfix anything to your email address username separated with a "+". For example firstname.lastname@example.com.

Later this +postfix makes it easier to find out which source is the leak.

Most of the websites let you sign up with "+" in your e-mail but unfortunately not every site.

The other trick is that GMail ignores "." in email user so my.name can be just as well "myname". Not that it helps with the spam, just a sidenote.

<comment><USER20> Yep, the '+' as a separator is one of the many Postfix features.

However, the problem with using the "account+identifier" is that the identifier is simply ignored when delivering mail. With a real alias I can actually _revoke_ an email address, by simply removing it from the aliases. With an identifier I would have to explicitly _reject_ mails for a given recipient part.

I prefer to keep things simple. Bouncing spam is a bonus.

<comment><USER4> Check out gam [0]

        gam create alias idontwearseatbelts user crashtestdummy

The only problem with aliases is that it completely breaks using email as a unique id to link you with people. You basically fix spam but lose the "people you may know" feature on social sites where you actually care about knowing who you may know on it (i.e. not linkedin).

[0] [https://code.google.com/p/google-apps- manager/wiki/GettingSt...](https://code.google.com/p/google-apps- manager/wiki/GettingStarted#Step_5:_More_simple_GAM_commands)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> LinkedIn has tried phishing people to take email account using username(so the email address)/password entered when login.

I really scared on it when I discovered it. I could avoid this because I was using different password for mail account, anyway I think many people gave their email account to LinkedIn silently.

And now they are finally getting punished.

<comment><USER23> I had always purposefully avoided giving LinkedIn my email password, but when I just clicked the link to remove contacts given upthread, somehow LinkedIn magically had all of my email contacts. So, I gave it to them at some point. I am really displeased.

<comment><USER22> I recommend to participate on lawsuit if you're on america... You may get a lot of rewards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> thank god someone took this step. LinkedIn. I will never work for you. I don't like your service. One time I chose to only send invite to several friends. Instead, Linkedin sent out invites to every single person on my gmail contact list, some are public mailing list and it was embarrassing. Linus way: FU LinkedIn. Your UI sucks.

</comment><comment><USER24> I really do not understand how LinkedIn is still in business after all the crap they have pulled over time: they have been trampling on their users for years.

Is everyone so cheap that they wouldn't pay for a professional that would not have to resort to these fishy and downright scammy (scummy) tactics?

What does it say about the value of your professional life when all you can afford to further it is to give that much power to an organisation whose sole incentive is to make money off your back by whatever means necessary?

<comment><USER25> Maybe because most professionals think the costs outweigh the benefits, and because there are no suitable alternatives?

LinkedIn's value also seems to become dearer the higher up you go in organizational hierarchies. And their canny strategies to hook more of the C-suite (e.g. 'Influencer Posts') seem to be working quite well. I see superbly shitty posts like Vivek Wadhwa's "Facebook is Doomed" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424292)) doing great on the 'LinkedIn Today' home page for days [Edit: Just checked. It's been on my home page for 4 days now!]. Thus proving that the mediocrity (which tends to be rise to the top in large organizations) is truly flourishing at the top of LinkedIn's food chain :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > which allows the company to slurp up the contacts list of the third-party > e-mail account with which the member signed up, if the member is logged into > that e-mail account in the same browser.

Is this a thing? Can any website slurp my contacts if i have hotmail or gmail open in the same browser? How are they doing this?

<comment><USER27> They can't unless there's a vulnerability in Gmail that they're exploiting, and that wouldn't go down at all well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The saddest announcement about OS X 10.9 was that Apple will add LinkedIn support. No one should support a cheap scam company like them, much less bake them into the operating system :(

</comment><comment><USER29> There was discussion about this day ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421742)

</comment><comment><USER30> I deleted my account but it's not even deleted. Hope other lawyers take on them and sue the hell out of them. HATE LINKEDIN!

<comment><USER31> Agreed. LI has become far too intrusive as of late, and I really hate that some folks in different industries, specifically tech, value this as the end- all, be-all. If I have to miss out on certain opportunities due to my lack visibility on LNKD, then so be it. Just not a fan of what they're doing over there-at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would presume that their acquisition of Rapportive plays some part in their use of emails and recommendations.

I know for a fact I have never given them access to my email accounts but they have started surfacing 'people you may know' recommendations that are actually email addresses from my contact book where I have Rapportive installed.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone have any alternatives to LinkedIn? I think it plays a function that's useful, particularly the floating, easily discoverable resumes you can point people at plus recommendations. But the cons just drastically reduce its overall value well below zero.

The resume aspect is easy enough to host yourself, and the searchability is not clearly an overall pro anyways: I really don't want to be harassed by random recruiters who found me using a keyword search.

But would it be weird to host your recommendations of others on your own site? I.e. include a link to some canonical representation of their identity and vouch for them? That may be getting into the weird territory. And what about hosting their recommendations of you? That seems well into the weird territory.

Maybe the best thing that LinkedIn offers is a willingly creepy networking site that gives you an excuse to ignore social norms.

<comment><USER34> [http://careers.stackoverflow.com/](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/)

<comment><USER35> This. My LinkedIn profile contains only thing:

"To see my current online profile, please visit [http://..."](http://...") (link to careers.so)

I lost my first job after uni three months ago and started looking. People told me I'm severely limiting my chances by not having a full LinkedIn profile. They were wrong, I found an amazing job and the bulk of interview offers came from people seeing my SO, C.SO or GitHub profiles.

C.SO doesnt have all the meaningless social bullshit, also top companies and recruiters pay a lot of money to just use their search engine.

Also, all LinkedIn mail gets redirected to the bin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Gmail has a feature that lets you see what IP addresses you have logged on from. (Look for the little link at the bottom right.) Would LinkedIn's IP show up there if they are using your google password? Has anyone ever seen this behaviour?

</comment><comment><USER37> Any person who used their company email to sign up to linkedin and then leaked the password by giving it to linkedin should be sued by the company that employs them for negligence. They are the same people who re-use their passwords and write them on post-it notes.

Frankly I have no sympathy for them at all. As you can probably tell.

<comment><USER38> So, you're saying you want the majority of the working population to be sued by their employing company which itself is made up of people that by and large are guilty of the exact same behavior?

It has become abundantly clear this is a pet peeve of yours!

<comment><USER37> Sorry, I am probably overreacting. It does annoy me every time people complain about security or privacy when they themselves hold those two in the lowest regard possibly crossing over to contempt. And in some cases those people know what they are doing is lazy and wrong and do it anyway. I start looking for the bottle just thinking about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Surely they use deceptive techniques to try to broaden the base. I would not doubt they improperly accessing the email accounts when someone uses the same password to register.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's just Growth Hacking, nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER41> LinkedIn is great if you need more emails in your inbox to boost your self- importance quotient, but I haven't heard of anyone in my sphere that was discovered and hired due to LI.

It seems all of the technology companies are givin their best effort to invading privacy and undermining trust on a societal level. There will be lasting consequences for these behaviors.

<comment><USER42> really depends on your job profile. it is a big factor in consulting and similar jobs. very job mobile crowd, hard to keep track where they are right now - linkedin makes it easy.

self updating rolodex for people that change employers frequently.</comment></comment>


Implications of use of multiple controls in an A/B test - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2016/implications-of-use-of-multiple-controls-in-an-ab-test <comment><USER2> > Some experimenters at Twitter proposed running A/A/B instead of A/B tests, > to reduce the false positive rate due to "biased" buckets. An A/A/B test is > one in which in addition to the provided control (A1), an experimenter would > add another control group (A2) to their experiment.

I wonder what intuitions drove that suggestion? Would they be even happier with 3 buckets (each a third of the size)? With 4 (quarters)? 5 (fifths)? ..._n_ buckets, 1 for each sample? At what point did those experimenters think it would stop being an improvement over a single control group?

<comment><USER3> Multiple control groups will highlight the degree that a result doesn't have statistical significance yet. We know that peeking is a problem[1], e.g. you peek and see that B is outperforming A by 4% you might be more inclined to stop than if you saw that _A is also outperforming A by 4%_ ; it makes you stop and think.

Re: N buckets: you'll get diminishing returns and it will take N times more data points to get a statistically significant result in any bucket.

[1]: [http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab- test.html](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html)

<comment><USER4> So you have a random chance of noticing what statistics ALREADY tells you. Except that only sometimes do you notice the problem by chance, and statistics can let you always know about it.

This is a net loss.

<comment><USER3> Oh I totally agree, people _should_ just be using statistics correctly. But I would argue that the poor tool that's used is more effective than the perfect tool that's never touched. Perhaps it would be a teaching tool/stepping stone to get people to understand and use statistics correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is interesting to see the math behind why it did not works and probably it is a good approach to never discard an idea just because it sounds stupid. But I see really a little value in this line of thinking.

One of the big issues with experiments is how much value they really drive, which is the real effects. In many situations we do A/B testing for changes whose real impact is a fraction of a percent of the tracked metric. If anyone followed the discussion about p-hacking in science [1] should really start wondering if the way we run experiments, considering the little changes we see, is not nearing p-hacking, especially when I see this ideas floating, and if we don't need to find more significant way of running our experiments.

[1] One of the first article I found about the issue [http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...](http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002106)

<comment><USER6> co-author of blog post here.

We covered some of this, at a high level, here: [https://blog.twitter.com/2015/the-what-and-why-of-product- ex...](https://blog.twitter.com/2015/the-what-and-why-of-product- experimentation-at-twitter-0)

Certainly not everything needs to be A/B tested -- depending on the nature of the change and the kind of insight one is looking to get, MAB may be better, if it applies, or a number of other approaches can be more beneficial, including not running an experiment at all. After all, Twitter itself came from a side project at the podcasting company Odeo. If Twitter was a/b tested, I'm sure it wouldn't move any podcasting metrics in a meaningful way :).

I'm obviously biased -- but I've seen really important insights gained from A/B tests, and wouldn't dismiss them too easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It saddens me and depresses me greatly regarding the job prospects of working with statistics in modern tech companies when I read articles like this.

I know others will disagree with me, but my feeling after working in a number of jobs in which large systems were built to automate large-scale frequentist hypothesis testing operations is that these methods just wholly fail, and that business politics leads people to read whatever conclusions they'd like to from the results, and give credit back to the statistical framework even if it is not deserved.

I should be careful not to over-state this too much. I understand there is a mathematical framework for these tools and despite being trained in machine learning and Bayesian methods, almost all of my professional experience has been working with frequentist statistics. Sometimes you have enough data that it would probably swamp out whatever prior you might choose; often you don't have (or want to invest in getting) expert priors, and "non-informative priors" and that ilk sort of rope in some of the same problems as what frequentism has. You can get a limited amount of evidence from doing simple frequentist things, but you also open the door for all of the misunderstandings of p-values, ignoring effect sizes, doing model selection by directly comparing t-stats, etc., which just seems to be way, way less of a problem if you use other methods.

Some of the main sources of enlightenment for me on this have been:

[0] [http://lesswrong.com/lw/g13/against_nhst/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/g13/against_nhst/)

[1] [http://www.columbia.edu/~gjw10/achen04.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/~gjw10/achen04.pdf)

[2] [http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/Kruschke2012JEPG.p...](http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/Kruschke2012JEPG.pdf)

The last article, by Kruschke, spends a lot of time on exactly the type of issue from the Twitter article -- something like two-group mean testing.

In general, I cannot understand why people continue to use frequentist methods on policy problems -- that is, problems where you are inherently looking for Pr(Hypothesis | Data), and where, due to all of the many, many pitfalls from the above sources and elsewhere, you can be sure that Pr(Data | Hypothesis) is not at all a suitable proxy for Pr(Hypothesis | Data).

I would view any labor costs associated with figuring out why A/A/B testing is not a useful idea to be pure waste, not because the math is wrong or anything (the math is interesting and good!) but because, from first principles, this just seems like totally and completely the wrong way to approach this kind of applied problem.

And yet, everyone is doing it, and baking it right into their huge production analytics systems -- most notoriously all of the modern fly-by-night marketing tech startups.

<comment><USER6> Co-author of the Twitter post here.

I don't necessarily disagree with you! Though I hope you are not calling Twitter a fly-by-night marketing startup :).

As a company, we've found A/B testing very valuable, but it certainly has limitations, and pitfalls that one must be fairly experienced to avoid. You can see some descriptions of what we do to achieve that in other posts in that series. But it's fair to say that this takes some work (like the work described in the "second control" post) to avoid badness, and it's fair to question if other methods can get us to the same end result -- ability to evaluate impact of proposed product changes -- cheaper, or more accurately.

<comment><USER7> > Though I hope you are not calling Twitter a fly-by-night marketing startup > :)

That remains to be seen.</comment></comment></comment>


CNN Worked with Army PsyOps Group During Kosovo War (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/apr/12/julianborger <comment><USER2> Looking back, it wasn't a time when there seemed to be a big ideological axe to grind, and Clinton was pretty hesitant to get involved in anything abroad that could affect the economy. They were just trying to avoid getting criticized for letting another genocide happen under their noses in the former Yugoslavia.

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

Seems plausible that it might have been just as banal as the army claims it was.

<comment><USER3> _it wasn 't a time when there seemed to be a big ideological axe to grind_

So, neoliberal intervensionism and bombing for human rights happened in a vacuum?

There has never been a time when people did not have ideological axes to grind and this period was one of the launching pads for the Project for a New American Century.

<comment><USER2> If you had to assign percentage contributions to decision-making by the Clinton Administration regarding western intervention in Kosovo, where would you put them:

% decision due to horrified peers and constituents pressuring the President to do something to stop another potential genocide

% decision due to Neoliberal puppetmasters playing 3D chess

<comment><USER3> 1\. 10 2\. 90

[https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Crusade-Yugoslavia-Western- Delu...](https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Crusade-Yugoslavia-Western- Delusions/dp/158367084X)

<comment><USER2> Fair enough.

Diana Johnstone has an interesting take on the situation. It is a fringe opinion, however, and I default to the simpler, more widely-held narrative of what took place. It's just supported by more journalists who were there, and it lines up with my heuristics regarding the behavior of the US government (the Clinton administration in particular).

Yugoslavia Death of a Nation [https://www.amazon.com/Yugoslavia-Death-Nation- Laura-Silber/...](https://www.amazon.com/Yugoslavia-Death-Nation-Laura- Silber/dp/0140262636/ref=rtpb_6/144-8428569-8854747?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0140262636&pd_rd_r=160b6135-882d-42a5-9720-fd0cd7c0c2df&pd_rd_w=7aoS0&pd_rd_wg=We8LQ&pf_rd_p=8e29e6d3-1af9-49e1-9000-62311a8a6943&pf_rd_r=3M624AY2X4HACP1XT339&psc=1&refRID=3M624AY2X4HACP1XT339)

The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War [https://www.amazon.com/Fall- Yugoslavia-Third-Balkan-Revised/...](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Yugoslavia- Third-Balkan- Revised/dp/0140257713/ref=rtpb_5/144-8428569-8854747?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0140257713&pd_rd_r=160b6135-882d-42a5-9720-fd0cd7c0c2df&pd_rd_w=7aoS0&pd_rd_wg=We8LQ&pf_rd_p=8e29e6d3-1af9-49e1-9000-62311a8a6943&pf_rd_r=3M624AY2X4HACP1XT339&psc=1&refRID=3M624AY2X4HACP1XT339)

The Death of Yugoslavia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Yugoslavia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Yugoslavia)

<comment><USER3> Are you claiming that those references support the idea that Bill Clinton's administration acted motivated primarily by humanitarian motivations unalloyed with the longstanding desire (and repeated demonstration¹) of the United States to systematically destroy all oppositions to its control of most of the world's economy?

That seems like a "fringe" opinion to anyone that has looked in even a half- objective manner at the easily available history.

1\. [https://sites.evergreen.edu/zoltan/interventions/](https://sites.evergreen.edu/zoltan/interventions/)

<comment><USER2> Yep. I do claim it.

Clinton did not want to get dragged into a potential quagmire in the former Yugoslavia.

Sometimes the United States does things to systematically destroy opposition to its control of most of the world's economy.

Kosovo wasn't one of those times.

I poked through Zoltan's stuff, but I don't see anything that makes any attempt to look at internal decision-making by the Clinton Administration during the period.

This Brookings article, however specifically addresses internal decision- making by the Clinton Administration during the period:

[https://www.brookings.edu/articles/decision-to-intervene- how...](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/decision-to-intervene-how-the-war- in-bosnia-ended/)

If you CTRL-F to "Why was the summer of 1995 any different?" There's a paragraph that explicitly addresses the key elements to Clinton's decision to pursue an interventionist policy in the former Yugoslavia.

If you are concerned that the Brookings Institution may be a biased source of information, I welcome you to review it's rating on Media Bias/Fact Check: [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/brookings- institute/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/brookings-institute/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tip to free up gigabytes of space if you are a Node.js developer - <AUTHOR> Crawl (cd) to the folder where you have you node projects (eg. /dev) and then just run the following command:
find . -type d -name node_modules -exec rm -rf {} +
Works great before backing up or moving files. <comment><USER2> Also, upgrading to NPM >= 3 is a big deal for storage space as it flattens node_modules by default, which means fewer duplicate copies of some of the shared libraries you use. (It also means fewer long path issues for us Windows users.)

</comment><comment><USER3> You're welcome BTW</comment>


At Multiverse Impasse, a New Theory of Scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140818-at-multiverse-impasse-a-new-theory-of-scale/

<comment><USER2> "Illusion" really needs to be stylistically banned from these sorts of articles. Derived quantities are not "illusions", and no amount of figuring by our particle physicists will do anything to "mass". It just means it may be a derived quantity from some more fundamental things, which is fully interesting enough in its own right without having to invoke the sophomoric wonder that this, that, the other, and everything is an "illusion".

(What if we're just dreaming the illusion that you're a butterfly dreaming the illusion of mass arranged in the illusory shape of man dreaming he's an illusion? That's, like, deep man... pass the Doritos.)

</comment><comment><USER3> 2008 Discover Magazine explanation of Multiverse Theory, [http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences- alternative...](http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative- to-an-intelligent-creator)

</comment><comment><USER4> Buried deep inside the article is a link to this preprint: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.4226](http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.4226)</comment>


Ask HN: What was the chances the poland president die in a plane crash ? - <AUTHOR>

I already heard it's about 1 on 10.5 millions for anyone, but what about the chances it was the president ? <comment><USER2> Tupolevs aren't exactly the safest of planes, and I think the President flew a lot more hours than most people.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if there was pressure put on the aircrew to not divert from their schedule/destination, due to VIPs.

I wouldn't rule out conspiracy theories, but I would definitely say there was a higher than baseline chance that the official story is what happened.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently it should be taken as significantly higher for Polish politicians, given the safety record of their air fleet. They had a previous prime minister survive a helicopter crash in 2003.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reasonably low ... but I can't see appointing Putin to head the investigation as anything other than a slap in the face.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's a complex question. The answer depends on whether there were more Poles on the left side of the plane, or the right.</comment>


Mistakes in Web Design  - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

<comment><USER2> 1\. Bad Search

2\. PDF Files for Online Reading

3\. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links

4\. Non-Scannable Text

5\. Fixed Font Size

6\. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility

7\. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement

8\. Violating Design Conventions

9\. Opening New Browser Windows

10\. Not Answering Users' Questions

<comment><USER2> I find myself wishing HN didn't violate 1 and 3.

<comment><USER3> I don't know what you're talking about when you say HN violates #3 on the list.

<http://skitch.com/sant0sk1/1sfy/top6>

Can you guess which stories I've already clicked thru?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but we can't tell which comment threads you've looked at.

<comment><USER5> The problem is, there might be new comments even if you visited the thread.

But there's a remedy for it and it's simple: the link includes the number of comments in that discussion, so that your browser can change the color if the number of comments has changed since your last visit.

Edit: e.g. [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268389&c=21](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268389&c=21)

<comment><USER6> Very clever. I may do that. But it would take more than 5 seconds, because I have to think about the best way to distinguish between visited and unvisited links.

<comment><USER7> Why not just use the same slight-fading that's used for submission titles?

(Also: simply changing the link URL would mean users could make a change in their local stylesheets, even if there's no styling change at News.YC.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The power of #7 continues to amaze me. I've had times where I scan a page for something I know is there, and after a minute I realize I was skipping over it because it looked like an ad, completely subconsciously

</comment><comment><USER9> #5 is a flaw in IE, not a web design mistake.

Edit (since my original brusqueness earned a downvote):

The flaw is that IE6 cannot resize text sized in pixels. IE7 fixed this with its new zoom feature, but left the old, broken resize method untouched. _Every other modern browser_ can resize pixel-sized text.

I personally prefer sizing text in pixels because browsers handle ems and percents differently. Usually it works out fine, but it's really annoying to futz with fractions of an em because one browser rounded it up while others rounded it down.

Pixels also make the translation from mockups to code a tad easier.

<comment><USER10> Indeed — and it's almost irrelevant now anyway as IE6 is dying off.

<comment><USER2> It's falling, but not that quickly. IE6 still has 25.3% market share: <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

<comment><USER11> And of course: "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _"The worst example of not answering users' questions is to avoid listing > the price of products and services. No B2C ecommerce site would make this > mistake, but it's rife in B2B ... Price is the most specific piece of info > customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it > makes people feel lost ..."_

QFT. I pretty much immediately leave a site if the price is hard to find or figure out. If your pricing model doesn't fit in a neat little table (like <http://github.com/plans>), then you are going to lose a lot of customers who just want something now, and are willing to pay for it.

Making the customer call to negotiate some 'custom solution' (with associated 'custom price') just makes it a hassle for them to _give you money_. Instead, make it _easy_ for people to give you money.

<comment><USER13> OTOH, if your product does not work out of the box then the customer who wants something now should not buy your product. Not listing the price prevents these customers from buying the product and then clogging the support line. :-)

<comment><USER12> I think that is why I avoid such sites. No price says to me that they don't actually have a product, but are willing to string me along with buzzword bingo until they can build something half-assed for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know <http://www.searchyc.com> et al exist, but _still_ do not understand why HN does not have its own search facility.

<comment><USER6> Because I have a lot of things to do and don't have infinite time. Implementing search right is not trivial.

<comment><USER15> Use google custom search?

<comment><USER16> But "real" Google's just as good for that: [http://www.google.com/search?q=globalrev+site://news.ycombin...](http://www.google.com/search?q=globalrev+site://news.ycombinator.com)

I think it's reasonable to assume on a "Hacker News" site that the clientele will be up to figuring that out.

<comment><USER15> ok didn't know exacrly how it worked but "search YC" is actually awesome, why not just integrate their service?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ironically because of a flaw in Adobe reader #2 is also a security hole which allows malicious 3rd parties to run arbitrary javascript on your domain.

You should force all PDFs to download.

</comment><comment><USER18> _2\. PDF Files for Online Reading_

This should be #1. You can always search the site with google if I have to.</comment>


Facebook: MVC Does Not Scale, Use Flux Instead (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/05/facebook-mvc-flux

<comment><USER2> I really wonder if a startup that is 2-3 years old should worry about frontend MVC not scaling.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a better way to put it is, sufficiently complex social software doesn't work on an MVC model that was originally developed primarily for single user interactions.

I've encountered it in my work work on ultra large social projects. The complexity and number of states created from so many players leads to a mess of user journeys and exponentially more code.

But in my experience this is more of a product design problem than a architecture one. Social software is funny in that two user clients can technically work fine but social bugs can still arise due to poor design. Sorting these out requires a great deal of care in the initial product design and goal setting, the later complexity problems in the code being an outgrowth of this stage.

</comment><comment><USER4> "This was becoming a serious problem for developers new to a certain codebase because they were afraid to touch the code"

Sounds like "We don't write tests and blame MVC for that"

<comment><USER5> There is a good video on Flux's website that explains through an example. They make a very good point about dependencies between Models and Views.

According to that video, Flux isolates concerns in a more modular way than MVC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is from 2014, but if you are at the scale of Facebook, maybe Flux is a better pattern.

</comment><comment><USER7> This managed to get 15 points in under an hour despite being a not-extremely- interesting article from 2014 with an inconclusive 'update' that was simply a reportage of the subsequent discussion on reddit.

Details on the submission:

The account was created 698 days ago, but there is no record of any comment or submission until 240 days ago.

Submissions are infrequent (6) until 90 days ago; since this time there have been 30 submissions. Six of those are marked [dead] or [flagged].

Most of the submissions only score two or three points. Two were very successful.

Also starting 90 days ago is the account's run of three comments. All of them are root-level comments. The first, 90 days ago, is a lengthy quote with the words "Couldn't agree more" added to it. At 14 days, the most recent is a citation of a fact to a link with the putative source. The remaining comment, at 45 days, is a simple inference of a fact not mentioned in the associated article, albeit one that would impress me if an automated system had made it.

My own conclusion:

Probably fifteen of us clicked the arrow without reading the article because the link text contained the words 'Facebook', 'MVC', and 'Flux'.

I realize having written this that it's actually a bit small-minded and mean- spirited to think like that, and I would love to hear anyone's defence as to why this article about Flux would be a good one to read over a year after publication, if in fact I am _wrong_ about the (current) value of the article in the opinion of anyone who has read it.

<comment><AUTHOR> WOW!!! I got a HN submission sentiment analysis! I normally don't comment on the submissions in general but I always submit stuff when it looks interesting to me, no matter if the article, video etc was made yesterday or 50 years ago. In this case I was reading about a new JS framework called REDUX[[https://github.com/rackt/redux](https://github.com/rackt/redux)] and started to think about trends in software development before I ran into this "updated" article. It's interesting to me how we went from from sync to async, from MVC to a flow and vice versa, now what seems funny is that it only takes a big company to throw a "new" pattern or framework to make everybody think that if THEY are doing it then we should also do it. And if people clicked just because it says "AAA company says you should use (insert current hipster framework)" kind of proves my point.

So no, I'm not a robot @escape_goat but thanks for making me pass the reverse Turing test =)

<comment><USER7> Hello fellow non-robot @betolink! I too an a non-robot. We should go to a vendor to purchase units of food sometime.

A big company throwing weight behind a paradigm is a good predictor of continued relevance, so I can understand the response, given the volume and churn of overly-evangelized javascript frameworks/patterns/concepts out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Article was confused and pretty much irrelevant anyway because Facebook.</comment>


Studying my car's sensor data with Open Torque Viewer - <AUTHOR> http://ryancompton.net/2015/02/28/mpg/ <comment><USER3> I wouldn't be so certain that the error in speed measurements is due to the speedometer. Car speedometers work by measuring wheel rotations, using knowledge of the wheel diameter and calculating the speed. You can get errors when the wheel slips (very unlikely except at very low speeds), and when the wheel diameter is less or more than the assumption (level of tread wear, tyre inflation). For a given journey (and over a period of days) this error will be pretty constant and linear in nature - the faster you go, the greater the error by some factor. Regulations mean that it's much more likely to over- report than under-report the speed, but I'd assume that this would be by a fairly constant amount.

GPS speed is calculated by distance travelled between 2 positions in a given time. The problem is that GPS positions aren't completely accurate. Rounding errors, atmospheric effects and signal reflection can all affect the accuracy of the position. At low speeds, these errors can be as big as the distance travelled between measurements. The GPS speed may not take into account altitude (which is considerably less accurate on consumer GPS receivers), and so would under-report speed going up or down hills. It will also assume perfectly straight lines between points, while your car may in fact be travelling a less straight path. There's also likely to be a degree of averaging involved in the calculation, which would filter out small speed changes reflected in your speedometer data.

Your plot shows times when the GPS speed was as high as 20 mph when the car speedometer was reporting 0 mph. No car with a functioning speedometer will report 0 mph when it's actually moving at over 20 mph.

The convergence at higher speeds is probably more to do with the accuracy of GPS speed measurements at high speed than it is to do with the accuracy of a car speedometer at high speeds.

<comment><USER4> Car speedometers also tend to read fast [possibly for safety]. By spec, I believe that they are allowed to read 10% faster than actual speed but more severely penalized if the read slow.

Best / Quickest source : [http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/how- to/a3127/4260708/](http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/how-to/a3127/4260708/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been using Open Torque Viewer combined with the Torque App and a basic OBDII bluetooth sensor to log my car's sensor data over the past month and a half. Charts are in the link.

Plotting was done with seaborn - the code is available as an ipython notebook : [http://ryancompton.net/assets/torque/mpg_plots.py.html](http://ryancompton.net/assets/torque/mpg_plots.py.html)

<comment><USER5> Aren't these Bluetooth sensors a great access point for hackers?

I can't find the article but I think this was in the news lately.

<comment><USER6> I used to develop OBD diagnostic software[0], the ones used by mechanics.

For the cars I developed for, usually actuators had some preconditions that had to be met before they could go off. For example you shouldn't be able to tell the car to brake via OBD if the car is not still.

At the moment, I can't think of something 'dangerous' that could be done via ODB.

[0] [http://www.texa.com/](http://www.texa.com/)

<comment><USER7> One thing you can do without connecting is sniff -n- track. Regardless if you connect, you can sniff things like tire pressure monitor transmitters or bluetooth addresses.

At least officially there is no publicly known database of license plate pix and sniffed MAC addresses. Obviously being blindingly obvious idea, there probably is a secret one. So you only need enough optical data gathering to match MACs to plates with excellent lines of sight and OCR and so forth, then you can get away with deploying simple RF sniffers all over the place that don't need LOS and can be much cheaper.

Note that you can track cops this way, not just victims ^H^H err consumers I mean. And obviously the "smarter" the car the easier this tracking works, you're not going to track a restored 1972 Gran Torino off its bluetooth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yep, reading out data from your car through an OBD2 port is super interesting. I used to drive a 4.4L V8 Land Rover and it was very interesting to find out that it would use ~$0.50 worth of petrol within 30 seconds of starting, just to warm the engine up. Then the consumption fell down significantly - <USER2> high in city driving,then lowest I have ever seen while cruising at 120-140km/h(80-90mph), and peaking at its highest at top speed of 200km/h(120mph). It was very interesting to see.

<comment><USER9> >> I used to drive a 4.4L V8 Land Rover and it was very interesting to find out that it would use ~$0.50 worth of petrol within 30 seconds of starting, just to warm the engine up

The reason is to reduce emissions. An ex-GM guy once told me that you'll produce more NOx and CO starting your car than the entire trip. The catalyst need to be hot to clean the stuff up. They probably run it rich to get more fuel into the catalytic converter to heat it.

<comment><USER10> This is likely right, it's also the reason when you start up most car you'll see the rpm stay higher than normal idle for a couple seconds. Heating up the catalyzer so it can do its job.

<comment><USER11> Not only heating up the catalytic converter, but heating up the engine in general. Efficiency is pretty low when the engine is cold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for putting that together! Charts and the statistics are quite interesting and its good to know about driving habits. I am gonna give Open Torque Viewer a try soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> Author came very close to demonstrating some other cool Torque feature such as coupling the GPS and car position data to the mass of the car (which you manually enter) and torque outputs a fairly accurate measure of instant or peak measured horsepower. Oh look my ancient '97 Saturn really does accelerate at 120 horsepower as calculated based off 2nd derivative of position and input mass. And, likewise, by continuous monitor of the stats and doing some very simple timing, torque can output 0-60, 0-100, quarter mile, etc, you hit reset, it waits until the throttle position sensor is slammed or it sees over 0 mph then times until it sees 60 or 100 or whatever. I think it can do braking distance the same way although its been awhile since I tried.

Its interesting to watch the other readouts like coolant temperature. How long does it REALLY take a car to warm up in the winter vs the summer and stuff like that.

I believe I have the same no-name adapter the author has, and it works well. One common discussion topic for torque users is finding a BT adapter that auto powers off when the car shuts off, so you can leave the device plugged in all the time if you want without killing the car battery.

And a final additional commentary is the community is always discussing / trading map files. So on my wife's prius if you download the special prius map file you can do deeper diagnosis and see the voltage across battery #11 or whatever which is moderately interesting, but without the map file it doesn't know how to map the additional telemetry packets into individual cell voltages or whatever. Google will help. Not all cars have enhanced mapping data of course.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just FYI, AutoZone and places like that will read a check engine light for free. Did this once and found out I needed a new gas tank cap.

<comment><USER14> Wow, that's a pretty epic sensor coverage on that car.

How does that work? I had to Google it, and came up with this example status: [http://www.obd-codes.com/p0452](http://www.obd-codes.com/p0452). It seems to be based off a fuel-tank pressure sensor. Neat.

<comment><USER13> It was the OBD code + expertise from the AutoZone employee. He read the code that corresponded to a fuel leak detected somewhere and said the most likely cause is that the gas cap was not on tight enough. He said I can either try to re-tighten the cap, or just get a new one for $6 or so.

<comment><USER15> The only time my 1990 Honda Civic (original owner, looks like shit (both of us)) failed emissions test was a worn gas cap. When to $AUTO_PARTS_STORE, bought a cheap cap, passed test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anything like this for iPhone or USB to a laptop? [Edit] Obviously the USB OBD II connection exists: Any recommendations for hardware/software?

<comment><USER17> I purchased this hardware from Amazon that is iOS compatible: iKKEGOL WiFi OBD-II ODB2

And I downloaded EngineLink from the appstore. You connect to the sensor via Wifi (dont need to be on a wifi network, the sensor creates one that you connect to), then start up the app and you are good to go. There are many apps that will work with the sensor though, so check out a few and see which works best for your needs.

<comment><USER18> Possible to export the data out of the EngineLink app?

Make more sense to create your own and shoot that data to a box in the cloud for analysis? Or this already exists in some open source form?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Glad you're enjoying Open Torque Viewer.

It's my creation. :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for this. This is awesome! I have been wanting to monitor my car, and was wondering this in the last couple of months.</comment>


People Renting Out Their Facebook Accounts for Cash and Free Laptops - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-account-rental-ad-laundering-scam <comment><USER2> >One person who said they analyzed what the Pi was doing found it was buying ads on Facebook as well as connecting to a botnet

Why does Buzzfeed assign any credibility to the analysis by a person who claims the raspi "records EVERY KEYSTROKE sent of the network, even SSL connection"? It's really obvious that this guy is completely clueless, he can't even spell "botnet". [https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/2vd1g8/scam_rentyour...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/2vd1g8/scam_rentyouraccountdotcom/cq9840d/)

Props to buzzfeed for finding some really funny reddit posts though, like this one where the guy goes on a paranoid fit and cancels his bank cards(???) after finding his roommates raspi [https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/9ixdh9/fou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/9ixdh9/found_hooked_up_to_my_router/e6nh61r/)

<comment><USER3> It is buzzfeed after all. They are just living up to their reputation.

<comment><USER2> Buzzfeed news actually has a pretty solid pulitzer-winning team behind it, this story definitely isn't one of their best.

<comment><USER4> This is the third time im seeing them messing up- the news yesterday about trump was something

<comment><USER2> I don't think its very clear that they messed up the Trump story, special counsels office called it inaccurate but I don't really see any reason to blindly believe them.

<comment><USER4> Look I'm a liberal and all but at this point im beginning to wonder if my side is really stupid or just doesn't want to believe in reality?

<comment><USER2> I certainly don't blindly believe the BuzzFeed story either. Actually, I haven't even bothered to read it as I don't really care very much about the US president.

I find it bizarre that you think that being a liberal has anything to do with this.

<comment><USER5> Proclaiming yourself to be a member of the "other" side to try to undermine their arguments by association is becoming a favorite tactic of trolls.

<comment><USER6> Especially the way this is phrased. "I am a liberal" is not something liberals actually say.

For Reddit there is a Chrome plug-in that lets you highlight users who frequently post on specifically troll-heavy subreddits such as The_Donald so you can spot this kind of shit easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So is this a good way to delete your Facebook account and get payed doing it? I wonder if the banned accounts content gets deleted or the login is just blocked.

<comment><USER8> When you delete intentionally they claim they delete your data. I have no idea how or why you could get paid for that.

<comment><USER9> I think the distinction is that accounts deleted for abuse may actually be removed. Where accounts voluntarily deleted may just become hidden.

<comment><USER2> Accounts banned for abuse are definitely just banned, and not deleted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could facebook not easily destroy these companies? I mean facebook could sign up for literally thousands of these accounts and the article even lists many of the sites that will buy accounts. Then after receiving payment let the guys run the ads so you can get a sense of their campaign and just shadow ban anything they do. The companies would be paying for useless accounts and eventually lose all their money. Is there a reason facebook would not do this?

<comment><USER11> Is there any reason FaceBook _would_ want to crack down this? It doesn't hurt their metrics of "Daily Active Users" or cut into their as revenue. It's not as though they care about integrity after all!

<comment><USER12> If Facebook wanted these parties to buy ads, they wouldn't have to pay users to hijack their facebook accounts in order to do it.

<comment><USER13> I tend to agree with you, but it wouldn't be the first time that a company came out with a policy to block some action with a super-obvious (and likely intended) workaround or loophole that they have no inclination to close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Facebook has done a good job of choking this practice. I think this article had a lot of fear mongering and speculation in it, doesn't appear that he spoke to anyone on the other side of this. It's profitable, but I wouldn't say wildly successful.

On the flip side, I'm not sure how important choking it off completely really is to facebook, why get rid of ad revenue if you can pretend to chase the bad guys and keep everyone happy?

<comment><USER15> > On the flip side, I'm not sure how important choking it off completely > really is to facebook, why get rid of ad revenue if you can pretend to chase > the bad guys and keep everyone happy?

It's pretty important. In short, there is no incentive for FB to really keep "bad" ads, "fake" accounts, "spammy" pages and so on, as it creates crappy experience for user. If Facebook would be full of fake accounts, the there would be less people using it, and ads would be less effective (that means less money for FB). If there would be shitty ads, people would use more ad- blockers...

Disclaimer: I worked in Facebook's anti-spam team for couple of years.

<comment><USER14> I guess this makes sense in the light that fb claims to have a shortage of inventory, so maybe they don't need the money and they are trying harder then it appears.

That said there are some obvious and simple ways to kill this at the root that fb seems to have been ignoring for years. Maybe they are just obvious from the outside looking in when you know how the black hats operate these endeavors.

<comment><USER15> > Maybe they are just obvious from the outside looking in when you know how > the black hats operate these endeavors.

Or, they are just obvious from the outside when you haven't actually tried to solve that problem, but that solution actually don't work. I've seen a lot of "why don't you just do X" in my career questions, where X is something that looks good on first attempt, but in fact is really easy to circumvent by any blackhat (or it was even tried and it didn't work).

I am not saying that your solution don't work, but without you saying which it is, it's impossible to judge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FB may not like it, but I just see that as the free market correcting the inadequate price of FB ads.

The marginal cost of a FB ad is about 0. If the price charged differs too much from that, resourceful companies will move in to fix that situation!

Anyway, people can (and do) post stupid stuff that litters other people feed. If companies move in and arbitrage, giving money to people and reducing the cost of FB ads for companies, I see that as brilliant!

Besides the difference of intent, it is in practice no different than this weird family member we all have who's spreading questionable content. At least they'll get something out of it!

</comment><comment><USER17> If you can't delete, rent it out for abuse. Data will become so unreliable it should hurt their advertising business models. Similar to "social cooling".

<comment><USER18> I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. I recently had my facebook account "accidentally reactivated" against my will after I had deactivated it on facebook. I deactivated it a second time, and am currently hoping that it doesn't "come back to life" again for one reason or another. The last time it happened, it was because I was right in the middle of a big california fire and I think facebook was trying to be "helpful" or something by giving me the option of alerting family members that I was okay.

I wouldn't mind deleting everything, loading up facebook onto a VPN-facing VM and selling it for cash and watching it burn. Maybe my old account would become so cluttered with garbage, that they'll be forced to finally let me open up a blank new account with nothing on it that I'll park and forget the password to one day. Only then will the illusion of privacy finally be complete.

<comment><USER19> Then just permanently delete your account instead of deactivating it?

<comment><USER20> FWIIW it doesn't really delete the data here either.

Citation: I deleted my account, asked friends if my side of old conversations was still there. It is.

<comment><USER19> That would be a big violation of EU laws.

Maybe it depends on jurisdiction.

<comment><USER20> Yes it would be: but I used the Russian nuclear testing site as my address, so they may not apply GDPR to it.

<comment><USER21> Russian troll spotted? Maybe that's why Facebook "reactivated" the account so easily.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I'm sure most Russian trolls use the Russian nuclear test site as their home address when posting from Berkeley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is yet another reason that FB should be transparent about adverts run on their system.

In other media, all adverts are visible to all. FB should publish a searchable DB of every advert live, with parameters used and general info about purchaser.

They would then effectively crowdsource the policing of the ad network. The Russian dezinformatsiya & influence campaign that they missed in 2015-16 would have been quickly flagged, to all of our benefit. Also scams -- all it would take is one motivated person with decent search skills to track it down.

As it is today, a total black box, thousands of ads can run that nobody notices, and do real harm, and it's directed at the FB user base.

<comment><USER23> I think [https://www.facebook.com/ads/archive/](https://www.facebook.com/ads/archive/) might do what you want. You can also view the ads that individual pages run if you go to their pages (it's under the 'Info and Ads' tab)

(I work for FB)

<comment><USER22> Cool, looks like a good start! Can it be accessed via an API so that journalists can monitor activities of various groups? Any reason it is restricted to just political topics, and how do you expand or limit that inclusion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious whether this is actually as dangerous as the article implies for the people participating.

Obviously for most people on HN installing random software and turning over the keys to a social media account is a bad idea. But I know people who have mostly quit Facebook and have an old laptop lying around they never really use with nothing particularly sensitive on it.

Now morally it sounds like this is a bad idea, since the ads are promoting sketchy drugs and gambling. But as far as computer security risk? I'm not sure.

<comment><USER2> >I'm curious whether this is actually as dangerous as the article implies for the people participating.

It almost certainly is not. There's no reason these guys would be significantly more likely to screw you over than literally any software vendor.

Lots of weird scaremongering in the article:

>"They can easily install a backdoor or steal your personal files including but not limited to personal photos, electronic tax records, banking information, etc," he said.

... Yeah? It's perfectly normal for people to pay money for software capable of doing all these things. On the other hand, these account rental people are actually compensating you.

I wonder how this guy would feel about Steam for example, millions of people paying for videogames that can easily install a backdoor or steal your personal files.

<comment><USER25> > There's no reason these guys would be significantly more likely to screw you > over than literally any software vendor.

No reason? Compared to literally any software vendor? The fact that their entire business model revolves around shady if not illegal practices designed to circumvent others' terms of service isn't a reason?

<comment><USER2> Why would that be a reason? Why would they want to harm their existing business by acting like that?

How would they benefit anyway? Installs aren't worth shit. They'd be better off going to a forum and buying thousands of installs for their malware if they wanted to spy on people, the kinds of people renting out their facebook accounts certainly won't be particularly interesting targets.

If someone wanted to "install a backdoor or steal your personal files including but not limited to personal photos, electronic tax records, banking information, etc," this would be the worst imaginable way of achieving that.

<comment><USER26> >> Why would that be a reason?

In short, because of Bayes' theorem.

That is:

\- X% of people with "questionable" morals are willing to scam you when given the opportunity

\- <X% of people with "standard" morals are willing to scam you when given the opportunity

Given that these guys have "questionable" morals, the likelihood that they are taking advantage of their software to inflict harm is higher than those with "standard" morals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When will people rent Hacker News accounts?

<comment><USER28> Who says that isn't already happening?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I assumed these were scams to get unique combinations of emails and passwords. Surprised they're real. What's to stop people from generating new accounts and signing them up?

</comment><comment><USER30> It's cool that such opportunities exist - basic capitalism. I always thought that Facebook should ether hare revenue for great content with its users (who they like to call their "community" but apparently their door swings only one way) or that companies should emerge that pay users to share ads to their followers as predicted by Bill Gates in "The Road Ahead" and "Business at the Speed of Thought".

<comment><USER31> Such as instagram ? «Influencers» paid to post photos with native ads (products).

<comment><USER30> As an option for everyone, not just a select few influencers. You're more likely to buy a Lenovo Carbon laptop if one of your friends post an ad about it than if Kylie Jenner posted about it.</comment></comment></comment>


Pachyderm (YC W15) Challenges Hadoop with Containerized Data Lakes - <AUTHOR> http://thenewstack.io/pachyderm-aims-displace-hadoop-container-based-collaborative-data-analysis-platform/ <comment><USER2> Very cool. I have been thinking about analysis reproducibility lately and this is an interesting approach. I have two questions:

1) what is your business model? I see a great open source project and some good information about why this is needed. However, I don't see any pricing for products or consulting. How are you making money?

2) It is good that you have shed the overhead of java and have the capability to interface with multiple languages. However, one complication I see that you have adapted is containerization. I understand the need and simplicity with respect to saving snapshots and reproducing results. However, interacting at the level of container manipulation is quite a bit of overhead for the average user. Is there a plan to add an simplifying interface layer on top of the container abstractions?

<comment><USER3> Good questions both.

We make money by offering support and services for Pachyderm. This includes a couple of things. Implementation services in which we help people setup a working Pachyderm cluster on their own infrastructure, help train their engineers on how to use the system and establish a plan for getting the company's data and analysis running on the new system. Support, where we help people with any issues that arise using the system. And consulting, where we get a lot more involved and help people actually build things on top of Pachyderm that their company needs.

If you're interested in these services feel free to drop me a line at email@example.com

We totally agree that containers aren't a suitable interface for everyone. We see containers as the ideal interface for developers. Over time we're expecting developers to build simpler interfaces on top of it. We'll also be building a lot of those ourselves. For example one feature we have on our near term roadmap is a SQL layer. We're going to implement that in terms of our container API which means that it should be very possible for a developer to implement a totally new access pattern just by throwing some code in a container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not really sure what the use cases are for collaboration on this kind of thing or what that means. Are there real-world use cases I'm not thinking of? "Collaboration" is a great buzzword, but what does it have to do with a data store?

<comment><USER5> (full disclosure - pachyderm employee)

Good question. It's funny how much collaboration is overlooked. And you're right - it's not obvious how a data store can enable collaboration.

In the software engineering world, collaboration by means of git is so prevalent its like breathing air. There's no such thing today for data scientists! That's crazy! Because doing data science involves more variables than writing software alone.

Pachyderm stores your data in a git-like manner. We store the deltas and version the data so that its consistently reproducible. We also give you some nice tools to run any code alongside your data.

This enables some very basic workflows:

1 - You're trying to develop your analysis - so work on your code & lock your data

2 - You're trying to vet new data - develop and version your feature extraction and data together

3 - You're trying to work on some analysis w colleagues - fork the data + analysis to do your work ... then merge to make sure your work is compatible before deploying

There are many more ... but hopefully that makes it a bit more concrete

<comment><USER5> And I should add we talk about Collaboration and other design goals more here: [https://pachyderm.io/dsbor.html](https://pachyderm.io/dsbor.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am delighted by this. I tried hadoop in past and found it quite complex with badly designed APIs which changed drastically between ver 1.x and 2.x. I see Hadoop as a manifestation of Java culture: big, complex, memory hog.

Since Pachyderm is written in Go I hope it promotes a Go culture: Simple, consistent and not a resource hog.

<comment><USER3> I'm happy you're delighted!

I agree very strongly with what you've written here too. I think it's unavoidable that programs wind up taking on some of the cultural qualities of the language that they're written. It's a very interesting phenomenon that I could probably talk about at length... but I digress. This was a very conscious part of our decision to use Go. Its simplicity, consistency and reasonable resource requirements have been hugely influential, but the biggest one has been its pragmatism. Go is laser focussed on actually getting things done, and the most prominent things written in it clearly have taken on this ethos, etcd, Docker, Kubernetes to name a few. All are relatively new tools with alternatives written in other languages that have existed for a while. But they've all found use because of how well they've embrace this ethos and how appealing tools like that are to people. We use those tools internally and have very much tried to make Pachyderm fit in with the ethos as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uses Kubernetes underneath, which is pretty interesting. Whole premise of containers as MR primitives is also good. It will boil down to how the filesystem, the pipeline service and the clustering is implemented and how well they work together.

<comment><USER3> Kubernetes has worked really well for us, it's given use distributed systems primitives that just work which has allowed us to focus on the parts of the system that are unique to what we're doing.

We get a lot of questions about why we choose to implement our own filesystem and computation layer and the answer we gave is the one you have here, it allows us to make sure they work well together because they're built from the ground up with containerized workloads in mind. We could have tried to containerize Hadoop, but I doubt it would have resulted in the fully integrated system that we have today. Too much in the Hadoop ecosystem was written for a precontainer world for it to make sense to containerize it after the fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It uses Kubernetes underneath, which is nice for scaling but how do you run automated functional, end-to-end or integration tests with this on your development (or CI) machine?

<comment><USER5> Great question!

For local development - we recommend connecting to a dev k8s cluster, which is easy enough to setup.

CI is actually something I get really excited about. Similary for CI you can have a separate k8s cluster for any tests you need to run. But because we version everything, you can run 'unit tests' on sample data sets that you know should be rock solid ... and also 'integration tests' on the _same_versioned_data_ you would see in production.

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify, a dev k8s cluster doesn't require anything more than a stock installation of Docker. K8s has actually gotten pretty easy to test against recently thanks to being deployable as containers.

<comment><USER8> Do you have some examples or links to share?

<comment><USER3> This is the script we use to start k8s for tests: [https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/blob/master/etc/kube/...](https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/blob/master/etc/kube/start- kube-docker.sh)

There's k8s docs on this somewhere but unfortunately they move around a lot so I can't find a link right now. It's just 1 docker run command though and you're good to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems very similar to Joyent's Manta.</comment>