Ask HN: How did you get avg 95% in University? - <AUTHOR>

In every year there are always a certain percentage of students who manage to achieve really high marks on CS midterms and exams. How do you study for CS or math exams? I am sure there are many overachievers on HN. Could you please share how you did it? Do you need to have a really solid background before tackling a course or am I doing it wrong?<p>P.S. I know marks are not everything but I am still curious on how some students manage to do it in a top CS school. <comment><USER3> In my experience, it's surprisingly easy to get through most classes without doing the recommended / assigned reading for a course. Often, the professor will basically go over the same material in class as was covered by the reading, so if you didn't do the reading you'll get the material in lecture—alternatively, if you do the reading you can get away with not going to class.

If you simply do all the reading for a class (a couple of days before the class session, so it has time to sink in), you'll be much more likely to absorb all the details the professor mentions in the lecture, or that you missed the first time around in the reading. You'll also be ready to ask more informative questions, that will get help you get ahead instead of catching you up.

Other tips (some might seem obvious): keep a notebook where you take notes on the readings and the lectures; review the reading with your notes shortly after the corresponding lecture; go to office hours if you don't understand something or are having trouble with a homework or programming assignment; start homework assignments as soon as they're assigned (especially for larger projects); plan on spending twice as much time as you expect on homework / projects.

If you keep up (or keep ahead) during the course of the semester, you shouldn't have to work too hard to study for the exams. Use whatever study guides (or hints about the contents of the exam) the professor gives you as a guide, and make sure you understand all of it. If you don't understand something, take advantage of office hours to get help.

There is also strategy to taking tests well. Some tips: skip a question if you don't know how to answer it right away and answer it later; show you work or explain your reasoning so that you might get partial credit even if you get the wrong answer; if a question is unclear, go ask the professor for clarification; often times questions later in an exam will give hints as to the right way to approach questions earlier in the exam; get plenty of sleep the night before, and a good breakfast and coffee the morning of; don't worry too much, because worrying won't help you to perform better.

<comment><USER4> This about covers it.

\- Read and highlight the textbook before class.

\- Go to class, pay attention, take notes and ask questions.

\- Go to TA sections and office hours. Come with questions.

\- Do the homework with time (ie not an hour before it's due).

\- Start studying for exams 2-3 weeks before the exam date.

But most importantly, you really have to want to get A's. Motivation is key. While your friends are out partying and getting drunk you need to be in the library. Sounds terrible, but that's the point. There is a tradeoff. I just graduated with a B+ average. I know I could have done better, but having a social life was important to me. (Also working for Techmeme took up a considerable amount of my time).

<comment><USER5> lol. You sound like a professor. Sadly, that is the way to (hopefully) get high marks and waste a great deal of time. There are lots of ways, many of which are completely legitimate and many which are questionable.

Case and point freshman year when you are joining fraternities. Pick one that has a few A+ students in your degree path. All (well most) fraternities keep old notes, quizes, papers, and tests on hand for new brothers. That and if there are brothers who are good students in your degree path, you'll have help at almost any time of day. Sure other people do it too, but frats are a sure bet.

That's just one method. There are plenty of others that work as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've just read through the replies here and I thought that maybe I'd throw in my two cents. First off, I do not have a 95% average. In fact, I failed 3 out of 5 courses last semester. I had piled Calculus I, Linear Algebra I, and Microeconomics into the same semester and apparently I wasn't ready to take all of those at one time.

Realizing that my GPA was so bad (1.63 as of now) got me pretty depressed. I started Googling how I could fix my GPA and how I could become a better student. I came across a site called StudyHacks (<http://calnewport.com/blog/>) that had a lot of great articles that were enjoyable to read. I'm going to go to the library in the next week or so and get Cal's book "How to Become a Straight-A Student" (I'd do it now, but I'm reading The Pragmatic Programmer) and I hope that the book will make things more clear.

In the coming year there are a few changes I want to make. The biggest once, contrary to what others on here have said, is that I want to become organized. I've always been the type of person to enjoy what I'll call "organized chaos". There is a place for everything, and that place is wherever it happens to be. That has to change.

The next thing I want to change is that I'm actually going to work on my problem sets. It's been mentioned that problem sets are usually only worth 10 or 15 percent of your final mark. What I find is that while they aren't worth much, not doing your problem sets will affect your test grades in a negative way. Not only are problem sets a grade, they are the best practice that you can get.

The last thing that I want to do is to get involved around my university. We have a CS society that, I'm sad to say, doesn't do much more than drink (not that drinking is a bad thing). I want to get involved with the society, generate new members, and help get the society more active. I have a few ideas that I'm going to bring up with some of the society "executives" that I hope they will like as much as I do.

Obviously I don't have a 95% average, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I hope it will work for me though. And I think that is the biggest thing there is to consider. Just because something worked for someone else, doesn't mean that it will work for you. Try out different things and see what you like.

</comment><comment><USER7> Greatest day of college was the day I stopped giving a crap about grades. Remember you're there to learn not get good grades. It opens everything up, you don't worry about taking difficult classes that will challenge you or overloading on credits. Took classes in every engineering field, economics, business, history, whatever I "wanted" to learn. Seriously it was the greatest realization I had up to that point in my life, never even opened a report card during my senior year or grad school. If you have a solid foundation to build off of learning new things becomes really easy later in life.

Still don't flunk, a B is fine, usually you can get 80% of the results with 20% the effort. Focus on what's valuable to you and forget about the rest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have stated that marks are not everything. I am just curious on how a (high) moderately intelligent student could do it, because some exams are impossible to get 100%; it seems like hack to me.

<comment><USER7> Step back from the problem, focus on developing your analytical/problem solving abilities. Any engineering, math, or science problem is just logical reasoning. Don't focus on the subject matter so much, focus on the process. Then you can solve anything

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I handed in 50% of the homework and got 100% on the exams. Most courses I took had 10% of the final grade based on homework.

And no, I didn't study; but I did read the textbooks cover-to-cover before the first day of lectures, so I already had a firm grasp on the material before it was presented to the class.

<comment><AUTHOR> could you be a little more specific about how you read entire textbooks cover- to-cover in the first day? Edit: Googling you up shows that you were a prodigy. Perhaps you knew everything already but just needed to review a little? Is that what you mean?

<comment><USER9> He said "before the first day", not "on the first day". Oftentimes the textbooks are announced and available for purchase about 2 weeks before the class actually begins, to give the students that order them online time to receive them.

It's not actually that hard. If you have 14 days and your textbook is 700 pages long, that's 50 pages a day, which is eminently possible, particularly if you don't have classes to go to.

Occasionally, I pulled a trick where I went to the first class, grabbed the syllabus, bought the textbook, read the textbook cover-to-cover during the "shopping period" where we could change our classes, dropped the class, and then returned the textbook for a full refund. All the material, 1/6th the time, and none of the money.

Actually, now that I'm employed and have an income, I do basically the same thing: buy the textbook online, read it, and don't bother taking the course. 1/6th the time, 1/50th the money (~$100 instead of ~$5000), and I learn just as much.

<comment><USER10> Why bother signing up for the class in the beginning? A quick Google search would result in good textbook recommendations.

<comment><USER8> Despite having a firm grasp on course material before it was presented in class, I found most of my lectures very useful, because they provided me with a different perspective on things.

<comment><USER10> He (original poster) dropped the class before attending any of the lectures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My current GPA is 3.95 (Purdue CS - not sure if it is top-ranked or not) and I try hard to maintain it. I focus a lot on grades because back in high-school, an accident in grade 10 destroyed my grades and closed a lot of education opportunities (I was restricted to the bed, couldn't go to participate in contests, exams, classmates attended top quality after-school sessions for math and science and I could do none of that - I had very shitty internet - <USER2> session would never last long enough to download Vim let alone Linux) When it was time to apply for college, my high school GPA was enough to deny me entry into schools I had dreamed of attending. That humiliation has stuck with me forever. This is one thing in my control, I try my best not to screw things up.

<comment><AUTHOR> So how did you do it?

<comment><USER11> The same way everyone else does it:

1\. Attend class irrespective of the time. 2\. Turn in all assignments. 3\. Start ahead of time on projects 4\. Regularly go to office hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> What happens when you feel bogged down by assignments? Do you just hand in an incomplete or completely skip it? Could you break down your typical schedule for a week?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its seem the comments here are all along the lines of pay attention, do assignments, take notes etc. But how do you keep up with the intensity of doing all this? Is it like weight lifting where at first it feels really uncomfortable, but once you get use to it, it's easy? Also, how do you avoid being bogged down by hard CS assignments (40 hours)? What would a 95% person do in this situation? For example, my cs friend who got 96 told me that he just doesn't sleep and he gets help when he needs it and also he tried to leverage off power of programming language or reusable code. Are there any other hacks?

<comment><USER6> I've actually come to find that all-nights never help. I do terrible work when I'm tired compared to when I'm not and I'm a zombie the next day. The biggest thing you could do I suppose is just start something the day it's assigned. When you have more assignments, rank them based on difficulty, value (grade wise, projects should be important), and the time you expect the assignment to take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Top hacks: 1) Buy books, learn material before class starts. Then review each section before each class, with notes and questions. You know you are doing it right when everything is boringly obvious by the time you officially get to it. 2) Practice doing problems as fast as possible. During exams, do all problems quickly, keep doing passes through all the questions to fix mistakes until time is up. 3) Explain what you learn to others. This is where you actually start understanding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you find success with this approach? Is it enough to get 95%?

<comment><USER12> Every time I did these I got 98% or higher. I only got worse grades when I didn't have time to do all these things because of how many classes I was taking simultaneously.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you manage your assignments? Do you ever feel bogged down by them?

<comment><USER12> Start doing them as soon as you get them. Never spend too long on any one assignment or question. If one question is taking too long, ask for help as soon as you can. Practice getting and giving help, these are crucial skills. If necessary, cut your losses (but always turn in your best current attempt for every problem, never miss anything).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At the end of the day, if you have a strong understanding of fundamentals (basic calculus, number theory, C), the rest is just creative applications (eg algorithms, where the motivations for most of the introductory algorithms are easily deduced)

And if you organize your knowledge as such, you can power through 10 CS classes in a semester on top of 4 other required classes

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you done it? If you have could you be more detailed?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, and we probably should take this discussion to email. What's your address?

<comment><AUTHOR> jovekq(at)hotmail.com please reply to this comment when you want to communicate through email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I went to college, but was able to get 89% average with about 20 hours a week of homework/studying etc. The girl who beat me, as far as average goes got 99% but spent 60 hours a week on homework/studying.

I was able to tutor 10 students and build two serious web apps in that extra 40 hours a week, who do you think came out on top?

<comment><AUTHOR> which school did you go to and what were the web apps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You sacrifice a social life.</comment>


Perl: When DWIM Doesn't - <AUTHOR> http://bits.shutterstock.com/?p=131

<comment><USER3> re: _open() creating temporary file if file arg is undef_

Fortunately both IO::File (core module) & Path::Class don't do this:

      use IO::File;
      my $fh = IO::File->new( $config->{file_path}, 'r' )
                 or die "can't open $config->{file_path}: $!";

      use Path::Class qw<file>;
      my $fh = file( $config->{file_path} )->openr;

Both above spot the undef gotcha. NB. And _- >openr()_ throws an exception.

ref: <https://metacpan.org/module/IO::File> | <https://metacpan.org/module/Path::Class>

<comment><AUTHOR> > Both above spot the undef gotcha.

The builtin open() even tries to spot when it's not intentional. The documentation puts "undef" in quotations in the section where it introduces the feature (suggesting it has to be the literal), and the implementation goes to some effort to agree with it. For example, the following code dies:

      my $config = { file_paht => "/opt/config" };
      my $path = $config->{file_path};

      open (my $fh, "<", $path)
        or  die "can't open $path: $!";

In the case in the article it's a bug in the implementation, combined with a typo, which introduces the little known feature.

Using Path::Class obfuscates the open, to my eyes. Using IO::File is a nice suggestion. Your lock_keys suggestion below will probably be our update to the code for future protection, though.

<comment><USER3> re: _Path::Class_ \- Each to their own :)

However you can take your original full example of this:

      open (my $fh, "<", $config->{file_path})
        or  die "can't open $config->{file_path}: $!";

      my $data;
      {
        local $/ = undef;
        $data = <$fh>;
      }

And turn it into just this with Path::Class

      use Path::Class 'file';

      my $data = file( $config->{file_path} )->slurp

When dealing with lots of files/directories especially across different platforms I find Path::Class a god send.

NB. One good habit I currently do have is using Path::Class more ubiquitously :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe they should use classes and objects instead of hashes. I.e.

        $session->ab_variation_overrides();

This would prevent them from mistyping ab_variation_overrides everywhere they need it... But of course, it's a lot easier to solve everything with hashes in Perl. Been there, done that!

<comment><USER3> Another solution could be to lock the keys of $config after its been _configured_ :

      use Hash::Util 'lock_keys';

      our $config;
      $config->{file_paht} = "/opt/app/data_file";
      lock_keys( %$config );

Now any attempt to use an undefined key will throw an error. So on the _open()_ it would now throw error: _Attempt to access disallowed key 'file_path' in a restricted hash at..._

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what Kris Arnold (<https://twitter.com/wka>), one of the other hackers here at Shutterstock recommended. I like it.

<comment><USER3> Me to, especially as it covers both problems you've given in the post.

Now I just need to get into the habit of using Hash::Util::lock_keys more often myself :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I basically gave up on perl after discovering this:

      foo foreach @bar;

      sub foo {
        s/foo/bar/
        print;
      }

This clobbers the content of @bar due to mutating the $_ variable. Which is a useful feature. But imagine that foo, instead of directly mutating the value passed to it, calls into a complex set of other code. Now you have a bomb where working code can break in crazy ways if any of it gets changed to modify $_.

Having to audit code for this kind of thing is a real pain. I still maintain existing perl projects, but won't be starting any new ones.

<comment><USER6> You're funny. If this really pushed you over the edge, you were born -on- the edge, and didn't give Perl a fair shake.

<comment><USER7> Joey's example is bad (or, at best, fragile) Perl, but he's also written a fair amount of useful and popular code in Perl too.

<comment><USER5> Yes thanks.. to be clear, I have programmed in perl since 1995.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Both OPs examples would be spotted by unit tests and finding actual bug after that is quite trivial.

So I agree, you can trigger some features unpredictably, but this just shows power behind tool and remind you to be well self-organized =)

<comment><USER9> Frankly, the first one is a clear explanation of why you should have a config _object_ not a hash.

Don't use a freeform data structure for data that isn't actually freeform if you want the perl5 VM to be able to catch errors for you.

Shutterstock are legendary round the perl community for being a hive of badly written ancient code that never gets significant refactoring effort though; combine this with a significant tendency not to use libraries due to NIH syndrome and their experience of gotchas becomes more an inevitability than bad luck.

Or: You might love your programming language, but if your relationship with it tends towards the abusive, the problems end up cutting both ways.

(though it's only in the past half decade that the perl community as a whole has seriously moved to trying to make the sensible techniques standard - <USER2> any project started during the dot-com era is almost certainly a hive of badly written now-ancient code; there's similarly timed spikes of awful PHP and then rails code due to their popularity spikes since)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Shutterstock are legendary round the perl community for being a hive of > badly written ancient code that never gets significant refactoring effort > though

I like to think that we're legendary for choosing a sane upgrade path to a services based approach built on Modern Perl. For our help debugging Dancer's (<https://github.com/sukria/Dancer/issues/642>) and Feersum's (<https://github.com/stash/Feersum/issues/12>) header parsing troubles. For our continuous sponsorship of YAPC (<http://yapcna.org/sponsorship/our- sponsors>).

Heh, we're legends in my own mind! [grin]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
       use strict;
       use warnings;

</comment><comment><USER11> I love Perl. I wrote it professionally for 10 years. I have great friends who still do. The community is full of smart, fantastic people.

Five years ago, however, I learned Python for a job and never looked back. In terms of programming languages they're practically the same thing. But Python is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to hire for. And stuff like this (dereferencing, "array context," worrying about how to create my objects) makes me sigh.

Perl, I love you, but I'm not looking back.

(apologies for the language flame war bait)

<comment><USER12> Assuming you're not a troll, you have bad timing who left just before Moose and dependable grammar extensions. I've been doing some Python lately and regularly scream when I lack usable anonymous funs (>1 instruction) or can't find a lib I know exist on CPAN, etc.

ymmv.

<comment><USER11> Not a troll, real human, but I guess I was unconsciously trolling. Oh well.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I need a place to stay in New York (Manhattan) quick - <AUTHOR>

All,
I was planning a trip with a friend (girlfriend) to New York from June 20th to June 23rd. We had falling out earlier in the week, but I still have my ticket. I'd love to find some affordable accommodations so I can still go and experience the city. I'd like to keep my budget to less than $100 per night. You can reach me by email at email@example.com, email@example.com, or by phone at 713-562-4315.
Thanks in advance, Kenneth Miller <comment><AUTHOR> Also: I run my own startup (oil and gas software/electronics.) I'm into programming (Python/LabVIEW) and electronics design. I play guitar and feel I'm pretty easy to get along with.

</comment><comment><USER2> AirBnB and if you want to stay w Hacker News folks, you can look through the AirBnB Hacker News group to see which accommodations are available.</comment>


Tell HN: GitHub Organizations not as free as it seems - <AUTHOR> GitHub informed us of something supposedly new: we could upgrade our pro personal account to a free organization account. Yay! Quoting the github page: "Everything the personal account has"... plus more fine grained permissions control.
Note the upgrade is a one-way process. Thinking it was free so why not upgrade we did.
Except we had a wiki. With a lot of valuable information. Which is now gone:
While its not documented anywhere in the happy sounding announcement, wikis aren't included in the free organization plan. Bye data! Or if you need it, thanks for upgrading your $4 plan into a more expensive one. All the best, Microsoft. <comment><USER2> But it is documented and from the very beginning. If you look at this page [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing) in the comparison table under Pages and Wiki it clearly says "Public repositories". I'm guessing you had a private one. I've also moved from Pro to Free Teams and I've seen this from the start.

<comment><AUTHOR> if you mean "clearly" by it shows a checkmark beside "wikis" and if you click a chevron to expand the paragraph and find it says "for public repos" then sure.

<comment><USER2> What are you talking about? There is no checkmark. Just the text [https://fally.ro/screenshots/chrome_q9YExThjo9.png](https://fally.ro/screenshots/chrome_q9YExThjo9.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well a loss of control of your own data on someone else's service isn't a feature and should be something you should be expecting (create backups of your own data more often), yet as soon as everyone takes the 'free' upgrade bait on a third-party service, then 'all bets are off' including Github.

Seriously for organizations, you're better of in self-hosting your own projects on-premise with open-source alternatives like GitLab (recommended), cgit or even Gerrit to avoid nonsense like 'centralising everything to GitHub' in the long term. [0]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406)

<comment><USER4> Seriously, you should store wiki pages as .md files in a /wiki folder in your repo, regardless of your git repo hosting provider. I'm positive wiki pages are stored in a separate git repo alongside your code, anyway.

The more that lives in the codebase itself, the better -- ideally this would not only include wiki pages, but also issues, comments, PR threads, etc.

<comment><USER5> Github treats wikis as another git repository. I regularly use this to backup the wikis I have on github.

If your project is named `username/repository` then your wiki can be cloned at `git clone firstname.lastname@example.com:username/repository.wiki.git`.

<comment><USER6> This approach is something I never quite figured out. What is the point of documenting your project in another repository? Based on what OP just explained this is one of the only explanations I can come up with (GitHub treats this as an extra that you must pay for).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yup, nobody in all the announcements or any other articles mentioning this new "github" has mentioned the WIKI (which is part of Gitlab) is not included in the free part of Github ... this is kind of critical IMHO

<comment><USER8> Really, the wiki is one of the worst features. Markdown based docs are far better and actually part of the repository

<comment><USER7> We have non-developers so they can handle markdown but not much beyond that ... having a website where they can type stuff (this is just like wikipedia) helps us get them onboarded .. then they also can help with the issues, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you contacted their customer support? I wonder if the data is still there, or can be recovered out somehow.

<comment><USER10> >contacted their customer suppor

The fact that this is even necessary just screams monumental f up.

Here is a free upgrade. (With surprise data loss)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is another bait-and-switch type announcement, for GitHub Actions:

Original announcement: 10,000 per month

Starting next month: 3,000 per month

:/

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm the PM on Wiki at GitLab - sorry to hear this happened to you! If you ever did consider moving to our free tier at GitLab, our GitHub Importer (in the docs) should handle importing the whole project including the wiki. You'd still need access to your GitHub wiki though so can't say for sure.

</comment><comment><USER10> Been toying with joining github, but think I'll stick with self-hosting gitlab after all

</comment><comment><USER12> > _Note the upgrade is a one-way process._

It reminds me migrating own GitHub repo Travis CI from [https://travis- ci.org](https://travis-ci.org) to [https://travis-ci.com](https://travis- ci.com), which is also one-way process.

Some of my repo older still use _travis-ci.org_ (ORG domain is cool here), but all new GitHub repos could be linked only to _travis-ci.com_ (COM domain little terrible)</comment>


No further development on Simple.Web - <AUTHOR> http://blog.markrendle.net/2014/07/25/no-further-development-on-simple-web/ <comment><USER2> > When I create an API, web or otherwise, it is rarely of the type popularised > by Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC and most other MVC frameworks. These tend to > think of an API as simple resources with HTTP methods – two GETs, a POST, a > PUT and a DELETE. That's not an API. That's just a basic Data Access Layer > over HTTP. Sure, I've written code where that is a valid pattern for certain > resources, but it's not an API. An API provides high-level commands and > operations, such as "activate this user" or "complete this order".

I disagree. A resource-centric "restful" http interface is most certianaly an API. These high level commands can be easily expressed with a PUT request on the user to activate, or a PUT on the order resource to complete it.

In theory, we could always go back to the days of JSON RPC where every request is a POST to /api.json with { action: 'getUser', userId: 123 }. IMO, the rails-esque API conventions are a significant improvement.

Is there an alternative routing technique which you prefer? I wouldn't know, but maybe the .NET ecosystem has a library for creating APIs with proper conventions for classes, objects, and methods.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm not sure how using a route table precludes having "an API". You can still have controllers and actions with fairly arbitrary names. More to the point, there is no reason why a DAL-style API can't do things like "activate this user". Just let them CREATE new UserActivation objects.

<comment><USER4> I think "activateUser" seems more semantic than "UserActivation/create" \- that's just Kingdom of Nouns again.

<comment><USER5> That seems incredibly easy to represent as a patch

        patch /users/1 { active: true }

or as patch for json

        patch /users/1 { "replace": "/active", "value": true  }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's funny how someone who doesn't want to "think of an API as simple resources with HTTP methods" can take inspiration from HATEOAS, where that's pretty much the whole point.</comment>


Chicago's Deep Tunnel: The solution to urban flooding, or a cautionary tale? - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2019/01/chicagos-deep-tunnel-is-it-the-solution-to-urban-flooding-or-a-cautionary-tale.html?via=homepage_taps_top <comment><USER2> The crazy thing about this article is that it presents Chicago's solution (make the combined sewer bigger), then solutions that are being tried in other cities (increase permeability), and then completely ignores the entirely successful solution that's been used by Grand Rapids (and soon Lansing) on the other side of the lake: Separate the storm and wastewater sewers. Grand Rapids used to regularly have sewer overflows into the local river (not flooding, though - there was enough capacity to actually get the crap and water into the river). Over the last few decades, a separate storm sewer has been built, and this water can be treated more quickly. The storm sewer skims off things like oil, etc. and then returns the rainwater to the river and lake. No impact on the shit sewer. No shit and piss in the river, no shit and piss in the lake. It works, and it's what should be done in other cities that have this problem (and maybe a little bit of permeability on the side).

<comment><USER3> > The crazy thing about this article is that it presents Chicago's solution > (make the combined sewer bigger)

Except that Chicago's publicly stated position is that the Deep Tunnel system is not the solution. This is not a new thing, either. It's been that way for more than 2 decades.

For more than 10 years, they've had a stormwater management building ordinance and (with few exceptions) any project (new construction or renovation) that changes the amount of stormwater exiting a piece of property is subject to it. It limits the flow rate of stormwater leaving, the volume of stormwater leaving, and the amount of sediment that can leave a piece of property. It is entirely math-based, with published formulas and coefficients and makes determining compliance straightforward, objective and fast.

They've received international recognition for their incremental approach to stormwater management, which recognizes that the vast majority of property in the city is private property built long ago. As for public property, whenever the city rebuilds an alleyway, it is done with permeable pavement and is disconnected from the sewer. Whenever the city rebuilds a road, it is disconnected from the sewer to the extent that surrounding private property allows. Last year an entire block of a road near me was rebuilt and the side that was adjacent to a railroad embankment was built with swales every 50 feet or so to manage stormwater. It was actually visually attractive as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Indy is undergoing a similar project - DigIndy - but it'll be separate from the sewer system. I think it's halfway through now.

[https://www.citizensenergygroup.com/Our-Company/Our- Projects...](https://www.citizensenergygroup.com/Our-Company/Our-Projects/Dig- Indy)

<comment><USER5> Wow, I had no idea this was in progress. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Minneapolis and St Paul separated their sewers. Took 55 years and $330 million investment.

[http://www.minneapolismn.gov/publicworks/stormwater/cso/cso_...](http://www.minneapolismn.gov/publicworks/stormwater/cso/cso_history)

[https://metrocouncil.org/News-Events/Wastewater- Water/Newsle...](https://metrocouncil.org/News-Events/Wastewater- Water/Newsletters/Sewer-separation,-inflow-and-infiltration-reductio.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://outline.com/URJEBs](https://outline.com/URJEBs) \- because of obnoxious illegal click-past "I agree" page.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems to be taken as a given that it's too late to segregate the storm water system from the sewers.

<comment><USER9> I think it basically is a given. To segregate storm water from sewer would require a rebuild of the system. Pretty impractical at this point. It can be done in some cases. I live in the west suburbs of Chicago, and the storm water from my (less than 5 year old) complex drains into the Salt Creek. I don't think my city is connected to the big dig, but we do have the capability to dump into a local quarry. The quarry has also been used to dump snow into for large winter storms. We've also been through a large expansion in recent years of green areas and detention drainage areas to alleviate flooding. Living right on the Salt Creek, I routinely see the water level fluctuate by around 10 feet or so after even a decent storm. We're probably about 5-6 feet above normal right now after recent storms.

<comment><USER10> You don't need to fix this in a weekend. Chicago is likely to be around in 300 years. So, solve 3% of the problem every decade and it gets fixed. Meanwhile runoff becomes a 3% smaller problem every decade.

<comment><USER11> Grand Rapids is proof you can do it faster than 3% per decade.

<comment><USER12> I agree it's useful evidence, but Grand Rapids is an order of magnitude smaller than Chicago. Geology could be very different too for all I know. Being able to do it in one place does not necessarily make it feasible in the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ironic. The project makes Chicago more livable, which increases development / population which...is not sustainable.

Cities close to water used to be a necessity. Now such locations are a liability. It's difficult to imagine politicians and local leaders coming clean on such things.

Side note: I wonder if Amazon factored such things into its decision(s) for picking its new HQ city(s).

<comment><USER14> A growing population in CHicago proper is not a problem. It's the solution. The problem is the growing population in the Chicago suburbs, getting more and more land paved, and thus worsening the stormwater problem.

<comment><USER5> It's a hard sell to tell someone to pay ~$100k-$500k more for a home, and spend $8k-15k/year more in property taxes to live in Chicago (or Cook County in general) out of land development concerns. Chicago's population is decreasing for a reason, and it isn't stormwater management.

Sprawl is not unsustainable. More costly, yes. But people will pay to not live densely and should have the freedom to do so if urban development and building techniques that prioritize mitigating environmental harm are practiced.

<comment><USER14> Chicago's population isn't sprawling out because of stomrwater problemns.

But the stormwater problems are because of Chicago sprawling out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Docker can forkbomb the host system: `docker run busybox ":(){ :|:& };:"` - <AUTHOR> I didn't expect this to to be able to lock up my machine :-S. <comment><USER2> If you didn't set lxc CPU quotas then this isn't very suprising!

See: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16084741/how-do-i-set- res...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16084741/how-do-i-set-resources- allocated-to-a-container-using-docker)

<comment><USER3> That information is quite out of date as docker doesn't use lxc as it's execution driver by default. This explains how to control cgroups with docker [https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stick to VMs for production use, for now. With thin provisioned storage and in-memory de-dupe.

<comment><USER5> This. Containers are not ready for production, except for fault- tolerant/distributed payloads. You can't even live migrate them to another host, and CRIU is nowhere near production ready (assuming it ever will be).

Everything else? VMs it is. The overhead is so low nowadays that it's totally irrelevant for the vast majority of use cases.

<comment><USER6> Sorry everyone's downvoted you, despite that you're correct.

I do Devops, and Docker provides very little benefit in production (unless you're an org with your own non-cloud computing resources, where you're going to orchestrate with something like Kubernetes; even then, there's dissent in the ranks between that project and Docker).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if I am missing something but this shouldn't be all that surprising. The process you execute in the container is being handled by the same kernel as the host. I think this is a common fundamental misunderstanding of what docker is. If it's a fork bomb on your host (and this is) it's a fork bomb with docker too.

Now the interesting thing about docker is you can control this in similar ways you'd do to control this via VMs and that is via kernel primitives (cgroups) to control resource allocation. In general if you are running docker containers in production you should be explicitly allocating resources via cgroups according to the needs of your applications. If you are writing and deploying software that fork bombs (why?) then you should mitigate the effects of the noisy neighbor via the kernel features. The benefit here is you don't need the (extremely, IMO) heavyweight overhead of running separate OSes in VMs.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why shouldn't it? ssh can do the same on a remote host, yet no one complains about that ;-)

<comment><USER5> Yeah but people tend to mistake containers with VMs, and you cannot do this with VMs.</comment></comment>


Zenefits Faces Shutdown in Utah for Giving Its Software Away for Free - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/01/zenefits-utah/

<comment><USER2> We were kind of casually considering Zenefits (we have our own insurance broker we are happy with and don't want to change) but this makes me want to use them for the rest of our HR system.

I expect a lot more of these legal / lobbying group confrontations now that Benefits, Tesla, Lyft, AirBnB etc have moved onto these regulated sectors.

I have some sympathy for the taxis and hotels in the Lyft/AirBnB cases. Taxis are generally required to pick up any fare and deliver anywhere as long as they can be paid. That can be scary, dangerous, or un lucrative. Lyft (and those assholes Uber) cream skim this business, offering better & cheaper service to a more lucrative subset.

Likewise AirBnB can provide a great service (I love it) but can mess up a residential neighborhood.

The fix isn't banning them of course, nor is it fettering them with the same stupid rules that favor the incumbent.</comment>


What Atlanta Can Teach Tech About Cultivating Black Talent - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/what-atlanta-can-teach-tech-about-cultivating-black-talent/ <comment><USER2> Nice! It is also worth mentioning that in addition to the work at Clark Atlanta University, Spelman, and Morehouse, there is Black leadership in computing at Georgia Tech. Charles Isbell is the Dean of the College of Computing and Ayanna Howard does robotics research there. It helps that many of the "100 black " people in machine learning referred to in the article reside in Atlanta.

</comment><comment><USER3> What can Atlanta teach tech?

<comment><USER4> Not much, reading the article.

The fundamental reason that their are fewer Black people working in computing as that they score at the very bottom for Math in the SAT:

[https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2017/...](https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_1.png?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1)

And the explanation for that is probably deep in history and DNA: Africa as a continent has forever been far less developed than any other region, yielding no overall selective pressure for any of the traits which today produce high Math scores.

<comment><USER5> Or, perhaps, much less magical non-genetic factors like more likely being brought up with less access to higher-quality education, nutrition, stability, and safety.

Here's an article from the institution whose graph you reference about why this gap exists - [https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity- race-...](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and- education/) \- which explains that many of the differences in education available. Black children are more likely to go to schools that have less funding, offer fewer advanced classes, have more students in them, and have lower-qualified teachers. And experiments that involved children going to better schools showed they had better outcomes.

So, yeah, let's control for things we actually know affects these outcomes first before jumping to genetic factors.

<comment><USER6> To downvote him or to say genetics may not be part of it is just being ignorant. Men an woman have completely different genetics, while Black vs Asian do as while. We are not all equal in terms of genetics, so don't discount that argument. Having lived in Atlanta and having hired devs in Atlanta, I can easily comment on this since I have first hand knowledge. Unlike other parts of the country, Atlanta has a large black population (18% of the US is black, and mainly concentrated in south eastern US). In my last hiring, 80% of interviews were with black developers. Due to the demographic, the talent in that region will likely be black. If you go to Texas, the talent may likely be white. I'm really tired of this PC stuff with black vs white. The black population as a whole is very low outside the southern US. Companies will cultivate the best they can afford. While there are racists out there, the very large majority of hiring managers could care less of your skin color and care more about your abilities. As far as schools and funding, this has to do with regions and parents need to step up. We live in a capitalist society. There are no hand outs. Be the best or get run over by someone better than you. I grew up extremely poor in a broken home, with no college education. I worked hard and built everything I have on my own through sweat and tears.

<comment><USER5> It's easy to take a statistical summary of two groups, and discover that attribute X has some distribution for one group, and another for the other. But figuring out why requires much more effort.

In order to say something is genetic, you need to rule out confounding factors that apply. For example, twin studies attempt to reduce the effects of upbringing (cultural influences, home stability, access to education and other opportunity). This is effective in things like trying to determine whether there may be a genetic component to homosexuality - for example, there's a statistically significant likelihood (that doesn't exist for non-twin siblings) that if one twin is gay, the other one is.

However, you can't aggregate twin studies of one group ("white people") and another group ("black people"), since you're not getting around the underlying confounding factors. So, while such twin studies do find that genetics play a role in academic performance (since if one twin does well, the other is statistically significantly more likely to do well too), it isn't helpful as a mechanism here.

Anyway, jumping to genetics for things that have clearly more local causes is at best lazy. I don't doubt there's some genetic factors out there, but we don't have an easy way to untangle them from other factors.

But we do have several different studies that show a connection between family income and academic performance (even at the same school), parental education levels and academic performance (ie, generational effects), class sizes (in early education) and academic performance, teacher quality, school funding, and so forth.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: FreakonomicsBooks – List of All books discussed in Freakonomics podcast - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomicsbooks.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am a big fan of freakonomics podcast, I think it is the only podcast that I have listened to all of its episodes (more than 300).

what I like more about freekonomics is the quality of the great books they usually discuss in their podcasts, they do even interview their authors sometimes.

Since I'm always seeking new good books to read, I've gone ahead and collected all of their books in one easy to use website, not only to fill my own need, but for anyone interested in this great list.

If you and me are in the same club, feel free visit and share</comment>


The State of Autonomous Transport - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/acing-ai/the-state-of-autonomous-transportation-b7b69db4e3c0 <comment><AUTHOR> First article of my new publication on AI. Any constructive feedback is appreciated.</comment>


Trusting transferred root certificates - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2017/10/31/statement-digicerts-proposed-purchase-symantec/ <comment><USER2> (To be clear, this comment isn't targeted at Mozilla specifically.)

It seems to me that, if you are a business incorporated in the United States, whose primary/majority source of income is being a CA; then the browser vendors & their policies are now more important than, say, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission or the U.S. Department of Justice, in terms of getting signoff on a corporate transaction (in this case, a merger).

So, the life or death of one corporate entity is placed directly in the hands of a small group of other corporate entities.

And although some might respond by saying "Well, you can build $BROWSER yourself", or "Well, you can re-add that CA, if you still trust it.", I don't think that would be enough to keep the CA going, because the number of people who will do that are going to be infinitesimally small, compared to the total number of users of $BROWSER.

I think I dislike it because the post is so open-ended. The sentence fragment "While Mozilla does not intend to micro-manage any CA…" also rubbed me the wrong way.

I guess it points (again) to the fundamental issues of how we ensure that we are connecting to the web site we expect to.

<comment><USER3> As one of these companies (CAs), I think I would certainly worry a little that any one of a few other companies (Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple) could effectively kill my business.

However, I'm not one of these companies (CAs). I am a customer of a couple of them (by necessity, of course) but, primarily, I am just a consumer/end-user of the (CA) service that they provide. From this position, I'm actually quite glad that there are other companies -- the browser vendors -- who can serve as sort of an "overseer" of the CAs.

The browser vendors don't have any actual authority over a CAs daily operations or how they choose to run their business, of course. Instead they simply act as representatives of the Internet-using population in ensuring that the Baseline Requirements and their own (root inclusion) policies are adhered to.

As an example, I think it's pretty much a given that Equifax is going to emerge from the recent compromise relatively unscathed. They might have to pay a fine or settle a class-action suit or something but, for the most part, it's going to be business as usual for them. Time will pass and we'll forget about this incident. Those of us who are/were affected are left without any real recourse.

If a CA had a major compromise like this, however, the CA would almost certainly not get off so easily. We have the corpse of DigiNotar [0] as proof as that. The browser vendors' decisions to remove the DigiNotar roots from their trust stores was, effectively, a death sentence for the company and, in my opinion, a well-deserved one as well. It should -- and, I'm sure, did -- serve as a warning to the other CAs.

If nothing else, the "authority" that the browser vendors _do_ have is a benefit to everyone. I think the CAs clearly understand what can/will happen if they choose to flagrantly violate the BRs and/or allow a major security incident to happen and I believe that is motivation for them to ensure that they do their job properly. It's reassuring to me -- as an "end user" of these CAs -- to know that their will be repercussions if they don't.

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

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately we the public have little visibility into how browser makers choose which CAs will live and which will die. This seems to be a governmental like function, one which companies are now operating, with no record of the court to speak of.

DigiNotar died, but Comodo[0] was too big to fail.

[0]: [https://www.infoworld.com/article/2623829/authentication/wea...](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2623829/authentication/weaknesses- in-ssl-certification-exposed-by-comodo-security-breach.html)

<comment><USER5> This is true for the two biggest commercial trust stores, Apple and Microsoft. But Mozilla conducts almost all its activities in public and this is no different. The group m.d.s.policy is open to public participation, as well as having some participants from other trust stores and CAs. You should probably lurk for a while before posting (people who show up one day writing that all the CAs should be kicked out get basically the same reaction as if you stumble into a bar demanding an end to alcoholic beverages at the top of your lungs) but if you have something worth saying that's somewhere it will be seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad to see DigiCert appearing to make a good faith effort to make sure this transition is handled in a responsible and trustworthy way, and hope they can follow through. It's easy to appear transparent and have the best intentions, until the suits see the bill.

For what it's worth, I talked to my partner rep at one of the CAs who issue certs under the Symantec roots a few weeks ago to see what their plan was to get us through this transition (i'll have to reissue a significant number of certs under the DigiCert root) and he seemed really excited about what's coming, referring specifically to the superior systems and processes offered by DC. So we'll see but I'm cautiously optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there a list somewhere of trustworthy CAs?

Something akin to lists of recommended TLS versions and cipher suites? [1][2]

[1]: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS)

[2]: [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/TLS_Cipher_String_Cheat_Shee...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/TLS_Cipher_String_Cheat_Sheet)

<comment><USER8> Yes, there are a few lists. According to Microsoft, it's the one they embed in Windows, Edge, etc. According to the Chrome team, it's the one in their store. According to Debian, it's the one in Mozilla's CA bundle, etc.

<comment><USER9> The irony is, these companies that operate trust lists accept zero responsibility in the case you are defrauded using a certificate issued by a CA they deem trustworthy.

<comment><USER10> You are of course free to maintain your own list and not use the lists they provide for free if this is your concern.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oracle Buys NetSuite for $9.3B - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-28/oracle-buys-netsuite-in-deal-valued-at-about-9-3-billion <comment><USER3> > The relationship between Oracle and NetSuite goes back decades. Zach Nelson, > NetSuite's CEO, previously ran Oracle's marketing operations in the 1990s. > Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison is NetSuite's largest investor. As of March, > Ellison and his family owned about 45.4 percent of NetSuite's common stock, > according to a company filing. Ellison has "control over approval of > significant corporate transactions,'' according to the filing.

Hmm, I wonder if the NetSuite board will approve this:)

Man, Microsoft has its OS and Office revenue to

Google and Facebook have their advertising revenue

Oracle has its licensing revenue

Amazon has its everything store revenue.

Apple has its iPhone revenue.

The big tech incumbents all figuratively print money each quarter.

If the long reported bubble burst ever gets around to happening, it's hard not to see them as the big winners. With piles of cash on hand and cash reserves growing can anyone make the case that they don't become the lender of last resort to cash strapped startups?

Side note, I'm surprised that Oracle is still running with Safra Catz and Mark Hurd as co-CEO's. I figured that that setup along with a very strong willed founder in Ellison, would cause some spectacular implosion at some point:)

<comment><USER4> Can't Amazon, Google, and Facebook (less sure about the others) all essentially be characterized as Berkshire Hathaway?

I.e. Develop a business that generates large cash flows, then relentlessly plow that money into more profitable side ventures. Except in this case they didn't buy an insurance company and instead developed a product that generated those flows.

<comment><USER5> I think you're missing the way Warren Buffett and Berkshire invests.

He takes low risk, profitable companies with proven track records and strong management teams. Geico, Fruit of the Loom, building products and materials etc. Its a very different mindset then what Google is doing when it invests in self driving cars.

Every company thats profitable re-invests those profits in some way. Trying to lump the way Google or Amazon uses their excess cash is different then the way Facebook does (Facebook builds moats mostly) and definitely different then the way Berkshire does.

<comment><USER4> My main point on making the comparison was the scale at and frequently with which it's done rather than the investment strategy.

(1) Core technology & monetization -> (2) Cash Flow -> (3) M&A to Fuel (1) -> (4) Goto 2

Looks different at that size than it does for smaller entities. And if you have a revenue stream generic enough to feed on a variety of inputs, then you have huge flexibility in what you can purchase. And you can likely afford to pay more because you've got efficiencies of scale on your side (including access to hyper-scale amounts of data).

<comment><USER6> What you've described looks more like Amazon's strategy. It's probably more correct to say Google & Facebook are copying Amazon rather than BH.

The core of BH has ~20 employees. Warren Buffet always calls out his subsidiary CEOs for doing a great job, because BH couldn't exist in its current format if he had to manage day-to-day operations in any subsidiary.

The steps in Buffet's algorithm are the same, but the emphasis is different. Amazon _builds_ moats and cashflow, while BH _buys_ stable companies that already produce cashflow. BH doesn't need moats, only profit. Amazon, Google, FB need both moats and profit.

Buffet's algorithm looks more like:

      - (1) Identify stable, profitable businesses that WB understands
      - (2) if they're a good bargain, and it moves the needle on BH stock, buy
      - (3) goto (1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did Larry Ellison just transfer billions of dollars from himself to himself in a taxable transaction? I'm surprised the deal was all cash.

<comment><USER8> One could argue that Oracle's money is not technically his. This is how he gets a large share of Oracle's money into his own personal accounts without having to give other shareholders anything.

<comment><USER9> I'm calling it now. If this deal goes through Larry Ellison will buy a huge new boat.

<comment><USER10> Larry Ellison will buy a huge new boat regardless of this deal. It's just what he does.

<comment><USER11> Or purchase the other half of Malibu he doesn't own

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At least it is not a software I use an like, that is devoured by Oracle this time.

(Of course Oracle makes great stuff. In a company as big as Oracle, there are always niches that create great things. But most offerings are dreadful. And most open source acquisitions did not fare especially well under Oracle)

<comment><USER13> VirtualBox has done quite well under Oracle.

<comment><USER14> MySQL has done well also.

Disclosure: I work on this team. Take a look at new features in 5.7 for example: [http://www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com/](http://www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com/)

<comment><USER15> .... Oracle bought a domain name just to list the new features in a minor version release?

I know MySQL doesn't use Semver at all, and I know the domain probably cost 3/5 of fuck all, but still...

<comment><USER14> I bought the domain name.

It's not a minor release.

MySQL predates semver. It is not alone here (see Mac OS X; PostgreSQL etc.). But you will be happy to hear that the next version will be called 8.0.

<comment><USER15> 5.7... to 8..

Oh right, Oracle. Like how Java 1.5 became Java 5, eh.

Is >=8 going to be Semver?

<comment><USER14> 6.0 was a canceled release.

7.x. is used by Cluster.

8.0 is the next number along, and makes it easy to follow as "it just drops the 5".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This news is interesting because with NetSuite's acquisition, it leaves no _significant_ SMB SaaS player for SAP or MSFT to acquire immediately. All eyes are on their next announcement.

Anybody got a few hundred million sitting around and wants to build another SaaS ERP/SCM solution? :)

<comment><USER17> Microsoft bought Great Plains software several years ago which was SMB focused (renamed as part of Microsoft Dynamics); they say this is available in their cloud, I don't know if that's real or not, or how it stacks up competitively

<comment><USER18> Except GP doesn't have a SaaS offering...it's just a hosted version by MS partners.

<comment><USER19> Microsoft Dynamics 365 is coming soon: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/dynamics/dynamics-365?WT.mc_...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/dynamics/dynamics-365?WT.mc_id=azurebg_ENAzureNewsletter_July)

From their email newsletter 3 days ago:

Microsoft Dynamics 365 available later this year

Available this fall, Microsoft Dynamics 365 evolves our current CRM and ERP cloud solutions into one cloud service with new purpose-built apps to help manage specific business functions, including: Financials, Field Service, Sales, Operations, Marketing, Project Service Automation, and Customer Service. Dynamics 365 apps are designed so they can be easily and independently deployed. That means you can start small and pay only for what you need. Yet they work together seamlessly so, as your business demands, you can grow into additional capabilities with ease. For more information, visit the Official Microsoft Blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> On perhaps unrelated note, I think it'd be important for NetSuite to make sure their site's up the day Oracle buys them out, otherwise it 'd make both them and Oracle look bad. ( [http://www.netsuite.com/portal/home.shtml](http://www.netsuite.com/portal/home.shtml), click on Free product tour - Oops )

<comment><USER21> Working for me at the moment.

<comment><USER20> Excellent. I was genuinely interested to learn about their product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mr-ron Larry Ellison owns 45.4% of Netsuite Stock.

This means he is aiming to make $3.75 Billion from this trade.

Holy crap.

<comment><USER22> Larry Ellison is a very interesting business leader. From reading accounts looks like he is a very dynamic business leader inside of Oracle. Certainly there are both positive and negative interactions. But he was also supportive of some of his top people leaving to start their own companies that have gone on to do really well. Often times he would invest into their businesses and personally capture upside.

On a long enough time line many of those businesses also went on to become direct competitors. So not surprised to see that he has a stake in the business, though have 45% is pretty amazing.

<comment><USER23> Can you name his competitors?

I can only recall Salesforce, although I don't know the extent to which their offerings overlap.

<comment><USER10> For the record, Salesforce was founded with Larry's money by Larry's employees -- pretty much like NetSuite, in fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would imagine we'll continue to see Oracle acquire mature software companies that are built upon their database. It makes a ton of sense for them - <USER2> instantly cut the primary cost of the business (Oracle licensing). Quite frankly the Oracle licensing alone will probably justify the purchase price.

As long as it isn't a startup where the braintrust instantly fleeing makes the product essentially worthless, it makes sound business sense.

<comment> tuna-piano I don't think this makes any difference at all (besides possibly tax reasons... I'm no expert). I wouldn't think there's much operational synergy between owning a customer.

But you seem to imply a financial reason. Say Netsuite's Oracle fee was $1M a year. If Oracle acquires them, Netsuite saves $1M a year sure, but Oracle also loses $1M year in external revenue. The result is the same.

<comment><USER24> For starters, they aren't paying a not-so-insignificant portion of that GP to a sales guy. There are absolutely tax benefits to it. And finally they don't have the cost of support, which can be quite large, of taking care of an external entity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've never understood why Oracle was so highly valued by Wall St. Databases have always had FLOSS alternatives. So how did an expensive proprietary solution (with lots of closed and open competitors) become so all-powerful and valuable?

On a related note: anybody on here want to work on some kind of innovative enterprise database startup? (I don't have any ideas, I just want to work on one because I see a lot of potential).

<comment><USER26> Oracle hasn't been a "database" company for a long, long time now. (You can license the RDBMS but that's not the real business.)

Yes, they have a very robust database. But what they've been selling to enterprises for at least 20 years is better thought of as ... schema.

When you buy Oracle Financials (or whatever modules / pieces / etc.) what you're buying is "how to set up and run your business." All of the non- physical parts of your business operations are now entities inside Oracle SW (and, as it happens, stored in the Oracle RDBMS, too, but that's practically speaking irrelevant).

Once you're "on" Oracle, or SAP, or whatever, every invoice you send out exists only because it's in that software. The software is your system of record, your single point of truth for your whole enterprise. You might think you are physically a human employee or a box of nuts but if you're not entered into Oracle with a row ID, you don't exist.

So, yeah, Oracle has an RDBMS. But what they really have is the "operating system" or the "schema" of a large enterprise which otherwise would have to rely upon a vast pyramid of specialist operational knowledge (bureaucrats / paper pushers / functionaries) in order to know how invoices got approved, sent, dunned, paid, reconciled, etc., or how orders got quoted, approved, picked, packed, shipped, etc.

(Not meant to sound condescending; I certainly wouldn't have known had I not spent some time seeing Oracle deployed in real life. It was certainly super- instructive for me to have spent a summer during college working for a midsize enterprise on Oracle, in a role kind of bridging ops and IT, and seeing what it really did. No SELECT statements involved.)

<comment><USER25> Fantastic explanation. Thanks.

What are some promising open source efforts out there to create such a universal schema?

<comment><USER27> Odoo, formerly known as OpenERP

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

<comment><USER25> I also found webERP.org

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> At first I thought this purchase was a "holy batshit batman" event, but because of ""Oracle, which sells software to big corporations, has been trying to shift to cloud-based products, which made up only about 8 percent of total sales in its fiscal fourth-quarter."" then I guess it makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER29> Am I the only one looking at the NetSuite patent list and trying not to foresee Oracle's next move.

Ref: [http://stks.freshpatents.com/Netsuite- nm1.php](http://stks.freshpatents.com/Netsuite-nm1.php)

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems like a perfect marriage. The oracle cloud transition is a work in progress from what I can tell so this solves part of that problem for them.

</comment><comment><USER31> On a slight, but related side note, is there a way to stop Chrome from auto playing audio when you first open a web page?

I'm supposed to be working here - not surfing Hacker News!

<comment><USER32> Volume on mute is clutch

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> We're seeing brutal, brutal consolidation now. Better buckle up.</comment>


After near-disaster, Oroville Dam spillway about to face its first big test - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-oroville-dam-spillway-20190329-story.html <comment><USER2> As the article is already 2 weeks old, in the meantime the test has been performed successfully. The problem with the old spillway was, that it was just put on top of the soil. Over the decades, the soil got eroded away by water in some places, destabilizing the spillway. The other part of the disaster, after the main spillway failed, was, that the emergency spillway basically didn't work, so they had to use the main spillway even if it was completely destroyed.

Rebuilding the main spillway was very thorough work, they removed all soil completely from the bedrock and filled the space up with concrete. On top of that they built the new spillway, up to modern standards and much thicker than the original one. There is all reason to assume that this new spillway will hold up much longer than the old one, which did work for 50 years. Also, they are completely rebuilding the emergency spillway so it can be used by adding massive amounts of concrete.

A great source for in-depth information about the failure of the old and the rebuilding effort is the blancolirio-channel on youtube ([https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio/videos))

<comment><USER3> And Juan, the man behind the blancolirio channel, has to be the best citizen reporter out there. He sought many of the real facts and avoided the mainstream media trap of looking for blame purely to sensationalize the issue. He seems to have sound engineering knowledge, even though he is an aircraft pilot by trade. And he was able to put his plane to good use as a great viewpoint during the construction.

He has also provided wonderful interpretation on recent air incidents including the 737MAX ( he flies 777 commercially)

<comment><USER4> I'll have to check that out, I do have one question tho (maybe someone asnwerd it already somewhere?)..if everyone knew soil was underneath then wasn't this preventable ? or was it one of those..well we can't get the money to fix it until after something bad happens? I'd say it's pretty obvious soil erodes by now, and that having it underneath large structures alone is not a great idea.

<comment><USER5> It's not that straightforward; there was concrete on top of the soil, it had functioned as designed for many years.

There are problems with infrastructure maintenance at a national level, and lots of deferred maintenance/upgrades. Given that, there's no reason to suspect that upgrading the spillway prior to failure would have seemed like a higher priority than many other remediation projects. There was not an a priori way of knowing it was going to fail, instead of a bridge abutment or whatever else was presumably repaired first, and would have had to wait if the spillway work had happened first instead.

<comment><USER6> That's right. If they'd cut down that one tree in time we probably would still have the original spillway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Video of the new spillway being used [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFZNUyS89fg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFZNUyS89fg)

<comment><USER8> The end of the spillway with the enormous waterfall makes me uncomfortable since erosion back from that point working backwards along fissures to undermine the spillway basin seemed to be an aspect of design contributing to the previous failure. But presumably they have accounted for all that. It would be interesting to read the post-mortem of the previous failure and the challenging new engineering decisions behind the new design.

Fortunately the article contains such a source: [https://issuu.com/asdso/docs/independent_forensic_team_repor...](https://issuu.com/asdso/docs/independent_forensic_team_report_fi?e=16355058/57087615)

<comment><USER9> At the end of the spillway the water is send upward. This is a way to dissipate the energy of the water coming down and avoid digging a hole or eroding the river itself. This appears to be a common feature in most spillways.

<comment><USER10> Here's a (pre-repair) photo of those energy dissipator blocks at the bottom of the spillway, including people for scale:

[http://media.fishreports.com/reports/img-20170303-78a7bb40.j...](http://media.fishreports.com/reports/img-20170303-78a7bb40.jpg)

Hard to comprehend how massive those blocks are...

<comment><USER11> Yah, it's kind of hard to show the magnitude of the spillway and the repair work in a few pictures.

Juan (blancolirio) posed a very good time-lapse/montage (including footage from the DWR) that shows the entire repair project. The audio has comments from Keiwit's executive project director of the repair project about the insane amount of material and work that was needed.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6lus- PXS4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6lus-PXS4k)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have the numbers on how much money was "saved" by not doing maintenance? Was it more or less than the $1 billion required to rebuild it?

<comment><USER13> I think in someone else's link there was a figure about the rejected 2005 improvements to the emergency spillway being $100M. I don't know if that's correct, if there would have been overruns in cost, if that's inflation adjusted, or if that would have even prevented the 2017 crisis.

I briefly looked it up, and found some information correlating this under [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis#Timeline_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis#Timeline_of_crisis)</comment></comment>


The IPhone is killing the internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.co.uk/digitallifestyle/news/index.cfm?newsid=20953

<comment><USER2> He's wrong about it all. I refuse to listen to that propaganda crap.</comment>


Share & discover awesome keyboard shortcuts - <AUTHOR> http://key.bo/

<comment><USER2> for Mac. can we get PC? Like the outlook; did you design the little guy or bought it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not my site. I just think it's an odd idea. Never would have thought we needed a website to discover keyboard shortcuts. And never would have been clever enough to think of using a Bolivian TLD.</comment></comment>


Do Non-Competes Make States Non-Competitive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/08/08/ca-reaffirms-that-non-competes-are-non-starters-will-ma-and-wa-listen/ <comment><USER2> Basically, non-compete agreements allow corporations to become complacent and lazy. They don't have to worry about their competition getting their employees and the knowledge they hold so they don't have to be as vigilant about improving their product. It also means that employers don't have to compensate their employees (monetary or otherwise) as nicely since the employees don't have another option.

On the flip side, it breeds an environment where employees do just the minimum to get by because they aren't likely to be rewarded by their own firm and proof of good work won't help them get another job because of the non-compete.

<comment><USER3> In other words non-competes are bad for economy, just like slavery is bad for economy. The similarity is more than skin-deep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bijan's right. The enforceability of noncompetes probably does harm Massachusetts. It's not the main reason Boston lags Silicon Valley, but it doesn't help.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wasn't able to take a job at a startup in Cambridge a few years ago because of fear that a lawsuit from a non-compete I'd signed could stall a product launch at some ambiguous point in the future.

I was really pissed about it at the time.</comment>


Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We've terminated this account - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Mailchimp/status/1217073200414306304 <comment><USER2> Earlier today:

Mailchimp has terminated Stefan Molyneux's account [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048173)

Another sudden termination from 2018:

MailChimp deleted my account with no warning [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866)

</comment><comment><USER3> The bottom line is that whether or not Molyneux is any of the things he was accused of, kicking him off the service is a PR win for MailChimp. I don't think this disconnect between facts and accusations before punishing is a good thing, but the majority of people clearly don't care.

</comment><comment> core-questions So Molyneux, who is a libertarian and hardly a "white nationalist", can't even have access to email services where he was utilizing his right to free speech to send mail to subscribers? People who _voluntarily_ signed up to get this communication?

This is asinine and just a further erosion of our rights in the name of "keeping us safe" from people instead of engaging with their complaints. I'm sure this will never bubble over into real problems in the world.

<comment><USER4> How does his right to free speech require Mailchimp to participate in broadcasting it?

<comment> core-questions It's easy to not see the forest for the trees on this one. When someone gets locked out of public discourse at every door (sometimes literally, as was the case when he was unable to speak for the UBC Free Speech Club some time ago due to threats of violence), what is to be done?

Deplatforming is the visible evidence of what one might call the starts of _totalitarian neoliberalism_, since it's not actually reasonable to call this radical left or right wing behaviour. This is the elevation of corporations to be the arbiters of our rights because they've put themselves into niche or bottleneck positions where they can control the flow of information. I respect the service that a good mail provider does, but that doesn't mean they should be able to use their business as a gatekeeping mechanism to restrict public discourse - _especially_ in the case where it's not going to anyone that doesn't want to see it.

If you find yourself on the side that's arguing in favour of deplatforming and of removing people's right to free expression, you're literally on-side with exactly the sort of evil that every fine 20th century work of speculative fiction decried. Being okay with this is far worse than anything Molyneux says, but then, it's not like you'll actually have listened to any of that.

<comment><USER5> Has anyone prevented him from standing on a soapbox in the park? If not, then he still has a perfectly available avenue for his hate speech

<comment> core-questions It's not hate speech. In Canada, there is actually a definition of hate speech, and it has to be something a reasonable person would consider to be an incitement to violence. Nothing he says would count as that. In America, there is actually no such thing as "hate speech" \- free speech is absolute. So either way, there's no reason he should not be able to speak in a normal venue.

We've found that standing on a soapbox in the park doesn't go so well either, as Antifa protests can cause violent conflict (virtually always started by the Antifa side). Ironic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dupe.</comment>


HP bans T-shirts at work - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/hp_dress_code/ <comment><USER2> This is a reblog of a Register article, in which they _appear_ to have done some actual journalism:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/hp_dress_code/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/hp_dress_code/)

Nice story in the comments: [http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/07/24/hp_dress_...](http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/07/24/hp_dress_code/)

> Years ago I was invited to visit HP by the head of a department there. I was > interested in possibly selling a company to them, so on the appointed day I > hopped up the coast for a look. The man had forgotten, and was out of town - > I was shown round by an embarrassed group of his managers, said a polite > thank-you, and left.

> I had parked facing outwards, as I usually do so I can see what's there when > I leave. When I got back to my car there was a little sign on the windscreen > saying "At HP we park facing inwards."

> That day, I learned everything I needed to know about HP, and soon after > sold my company to one of their competitors (who fell about laughing when I > told them this story.) The HP department in question was in due course > closed, HP itself has lurched from one managerial disaster to the next, and > here's one more buffoon with an MBA, putting one more nail into the coffin.

<comment><USER3> I understand that when IBM visited Digital Research the head guy was out flying his airplane. This left them with no operating system for the IBM-PC, so Bill Gates licensed QDOS from a friend then licensed "Quick and Dirty Operating System" to IBM as MS-DOS.

Eventually Microsoft exceedd its QDOS license so its dveloper sued, settling for $50 million.

<comment><USER4> I've read that the Kildall-went-flying story is apocryphal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, HP... what your shareholders (and many others) expect from you is "memristor", and what they get is no memristor, but a silly dress code for employees. So sad.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reads like an instruction pamphlet on how to lose your best and brightest. We need you to dress in arbitrary fashion X to prove we're "professional". In other words, some uptight dickhead executive from large customer Y complained about engineers in t-shirts. Here's a hint: the guys that are willing to suffer through wearing a tie everyday aren't the guys you want creating your product.

Then again, maybe those guys are already gone.

<comment><USER7> This smells more like an old managerial trick. Make the place uncomfortable enough that anybody who will leave, leaves on their own. If people take the bait it makes the press release less sensational when the layoff numbers are announced. It also solves the issue with severance packages and unemployment benefits. Last but not least, there are less decisions that need to be made by management.

All this suggests to me is that HP(s) will be announcing rounds of layoffs in the not too distant future. The "reason" for the dress code is for the media, investors, and employees to swallow. "No troubles here! Just some complaining customers visiting the office."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh Register.. it must be a slow news day. Smart casual rule was already in all contracts AFAIK. It's not a huge change, "slapping", or "banning".

</comment><comment><USER9> Arbitrary fucking with employees who have mobility doesn't end well for the organization.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe the cluetrain manifesto needs another chapter.

</comment><comment><USER11> Standard issue asininity.

</comment><comment><USER12> HP is still around?</comment>


NATO & Al-Qaeda War Crimes In Libya (don't miss video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.federaljack.com/?page_id=37933

<comment><USER2> In case you were wondering, content is extremely graphic/disturbing.</comment>


NEEDED HELP in reversing Skype. Is here yet any good reversers? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/7GJq34V3 So, is this yet any good reversers? Here is almost plain-text skype chat messages. ( http://wiki.epycslib.ru/index.php/Newdump4_with_41_from_scratch auth: skype/skype ) Here is skype binary, ready for olldydbg, and well commented ida database ( http://dev.epycslib.ru/reddit/skype_55_deobf.zip http://dev.epycslib.ru/reddit/skype55_last_idb.zip ) Here is code, with session setup, crypto stuff & etc. ( http://dev.epycslib.ru/reddit/multysend.zip ) Can i get any help with these, or you are all to stupid for this simple task?<p>its not harder, than reverse ICQ proto or any plain-text network protocol for now. So, is there yet heroes for this? <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone?</comment>


What the Uber accident scene really looks like at night - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=30s <comment><AUTHOR> The location of the accident appears to be at 0:36 of the video.</comment>


Texas School District will let Teachers carry Guns - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,404721,00.html

<comment><USER2> This thread of comments is a great illustration of why we can't have a productive conversation about guns in the US. Gun control advocates, and anti- gun advocates, jump straight to "that's a dumb idea" without ever considering it, or without giving the idea the respect of a reasoned rebuttal.

There are plenty of cases where having an armed "good guy" present at the time a "bad guy" starts shooting has had a positive outcome. The good guy stops the bad guy by shooting him. If you refuse to accept this, you are part of the problem, not the solution, regardless of your stance on guns.

The down side to the "more guns" argument is that the very presence of guns leads to a probablistic increase in gun accidents and gun incidents. A gun accident is when a gun is discharged unintentionally, like in the case of the DEA agent who shot himself in the foot [1]. Here we have a highly trained individual who commits a cardinal sin of gun safety. He reverses the order of the drop mag, clear chamber ritual. Whoops. A gun incident is when someone decides to use the gun for evil, which also occurs all too frequently in the US.

Humans are falliable. We're prone to mistakes and departure from sane thought. That's the point that everyone should make in counter to the "more guns" argument. It's not "dumb", it has additional negative consequences that we'd rather not accept.

There in lies the problem with the entire conversation though. Each side looks at the problem, proposes their solution, then the other side says "that won't solve the entire problem!" Let's take a step back and re-frame our expectations. Let's not try to conquer Rome in a day. Let's just say we want to _improve_ the situation, and stop calling each other stupid for proposing non-aboslute solutions.

1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ufT_6Kgy0>

<comment><USER3> To be clear, gun accidents are not only limited to foot-shootings but to fatalities as well. One happened just last week here. A father shot his 7 year old in the chest in the parking lot of a gun store. While in high school one student was shot and killed by a friend with a gun.

I don't disagree with your argument but if you want to be honest about it you have to admit that there are a non-zero number of a accidental shootings that result in death, usually among family members.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely. It wasn't my intention to represent that deaths don't occur. Rather, I wanted to preempt the argument that training makes guns 100% safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Published August 15, 2008"

Therefore, this is not in response to the recent CT shootings as the "will" part in the title suggests.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh christ. Who do they think they're protecting themselves from specifically?

<comment><USER6> I think the intent of the OP was to address a possible solution to the problem of school shootings as was seen recently in CT. The article explained this quite succinctly as well.

I personally think it's a good idea. Texas has a strong gun culture, so it's a completely reasonable solution to a potential problem. The kids would be accustomed to it, and I'm sure the parents would support it. This type of thing would most likely not work in CT though, given that they have a strong culture of gun control:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- fix/wp/2012/12/17/co...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- fix/wp/2012/12/17/connecticut-gun-laws-among-the-nations-strictest/)

America as a whole has a pretty strong gun culture, so I doubt any bill that tries to emulate the UK's gun laws or anything similar would ever be signed into law. Since we can't get rid of guns, I think putting guns into the hands of people who have been trained on their use isn't an entirely terrible idea.

I don't even own a gun, but I do think that gun-free zones can be more dangerous than allowing trusted people to have guns if there's no mechanism to detect guns. Adding metal detectors to all school entrances is not the answer, so I think this article posits a very plausible solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Guns to solve the gun issue.

Great thinking, 'murrica.

<comment><USER8> Now we only have to wait for the respons of the "attacking gunmen"... will they increase their firepower? Body armor? Hand grenades? Tanks?

Fighting violence with violence will only result into more victims!

<comment><USER9> Spoken like a true Neville

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know how it is in the US, but as far as I remember, in France, teaching is one of the professions with the most suicides. Not so long ago, a teacher put herself on fire in a courtyard, in full view of the children.

</comment><comment><USER11> How many months ago was it that Fox was calling Teachers overpaid, lazy, and incompetent? Definitely within the past year, right? Yet now it makes perfect sense to arm those same incompetent slackers who co-parent their children for the school year? This level of hypocrisy and short-sightedness hurts my brain.

In gaming terms, this amounts to an egregious level of power-creep; the crutch of overwhelmed and inexperienced game balancers.

<comment><USER12> Fox runs whichever story fits their current agenda. Need to cut funds? Call teachers lazy and incompetent. Need to keep guns unregulated? Give teachers guns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Next on line: let the children carry guns to protected themselves from bullies. Sometimes I think The Simpsons is not really a parody.</comment>


Running WebAssembly on ARM with Wasmer 0.11 (Demo on a Raspberry Pi) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/wasmer/running-webassembly-on-arm-7d365ed0e50c <comment><USER2> Hi HN! I'm Syrus, from the Wasmer team.

We are very excited about this release as it enables running server-side WebAssembly on ARM devices. If you have a Raspberry Pi or any other ARM (Aarch64) device... now you can use WebAssembly there!

<comment><USER3> This is awesome Syrus!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well done!

Just wondering, has someone managed to get it work with Termux?</comment>