Apple accepts Javascript in EPUB ebooks in iBookstore - <AUTHOR> http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2011/06/javascript-accepted-in-ibookstore.html <comment><USER2> I had no idea epub allowed js in the spec. My reactionary opinion on this is negative. Why do we need this? What reason is there to have js in epub when we already have js in html? What distinction will there be between html and epub if they are both just document formats that can also execute js?

<comment><USER3> JavaScript isn't in the current ePub 2.0 spec. Though it is suggested in the 3.0 draft. Like Apple extended ePub 2.0 with audio/video support, they seem to either support it or not prevent it.

<comment><USER4> Does the standard even really matter, since the content is wrapped in DRM anyways and can only be played in the eBooks app?

<comment><USER5> It does to producers, who often target multiple ebook platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a web developer who specializes in JavaScript, I'm really thrilled -- but as a person who reads books, I'm a little worried. What does the iTunes approval process for iBooks look like? Will any kind of HIG be enforced on the books? Do book publishers have good taste in interactivity? If I wanted interactivity, I would go to the internet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This brings a lot of interesting possibilities to technical books. End-of- chapter review questions that are automatically graded being the most obvious.

<comment><USER7> Or background/animated images in children' books. Or dynamic content adjusting to what you already know / had already read. I.e. I know what a prototype is, automatically, all the chapters/paragraphs explaining it could be hidden.

<comment><USER8> There are plenty of books with webkit animations already in the bookstore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hm... interesting security implications depending on how the code executes, what external info/code it can call

<comment> rm-rf So my ebooks can now contain executable root kits.

Cool.

<comment><USER10> Javascript is pretty well jailed up, you can't communicate with local and remote files in the same javascript file.

<comment> rm-rf How is this different than Adobe Reader, where the ability to execute code within a document reading application has resulted in world wide exploits of operating systems?

If my document reader can execute any code in any language, then any document that I read has the potential to execute malicious code on my computer, and I now have an exploit vector that I need to consider when downloading documents & opening e-mail attachments.

I understand that the code can be sandboxed, but before I implicitly trust the sandboxing technology, I'd have to see an example of an unexploitable sandbox. I don't know of any - but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

<comment><USER9> Chrome one has stood up the best thus far

<comment><USER11> Right, but "the best" being a very misleading term for anyone not in the know. It too has failed to do the job.. But, of course, no code is perfect. Just keep that in mind.

[http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/2295000...](http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/229500086)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was worried about the direction of iBooks and the growing interest in making app-based books instead of using the native iBooks store. This makes me more optimistic about the future of iBooks.

</comment><comment><USER13> Previously, in a kind of reverse thing, any booklike app that didn't have interactivity was refused as a normal app and had to go in the iBook store. But interactivity ie Javascript in iBooks did not seem to be allowed.

The ePub committee spent a lot of time trying to decide if ePub was just a browser and what an eBook was, but maybe Apple have decided.

Not sure they would accept an HTML5 game as an iBook though. A kids book with puzzles in might work though and still sell as a book not an app.

</comment><comment><USER14> An Young Girl Illustrated Primer, or, Diamong Age here we go!

</comment><comment><USER15> This is fantastic. I'm glad to see Apple doing what they do best... enabling content developers to be creative. Adobe has a long way to go.

<comment><USER16> " _Photoshop CS4 supports scripts written in AppleScript, JavaScript or VBScript. ..._ "

etc.. :)

What would you like to see from Adobe to change your mind?

<comment><USER17> Not rendering magazines as 500MB packs of PNGs would be a start.

<comment><USER15> Bingo. Their magazine viewer is bloated. RMSDK is garbage. Start by bringing their expertise in layout and fonts to things that people are actually using. Namely, WebKit and JS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Riddles have no place in job interviews - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/riddles-have-no-place-in-job-interviews.html <comment><USER3> The objective arguments are sound, in my opinion. I don't care for the flippant insults like "assholery," but I'm a big boy, I can filter these out.

One thing to remember about interviewers that ask poor questions is that many such people aren't full-time professional interviewers. They are to interviewing as a marketing manager who does some Excel scripting is to programming. They are often repeating what they've heard or read or been subjected to, much as an inexperienced programmer tends to use whatever programming pattern was espoused in the last blog post he read.

A terrible interviewer may still be a wonderful person to work alongside, just as someone who performs poorly under the pressure of an interview may be a fantastic programmer once hired and working on an actual project.

<comment><USER4> This. Also bear in mind that it is widely publicised that google and MS etc use these sorts of puzzles in their hiring process (whether or not this is true I have no idea).

So there's a certain element of "if it's good enough for.."

<comment><USER5> Not anymore (previous googler)...

My google interview was the best part of the whole time there to be honest. If the work had lived up to the people and problems presented in the interview, I would still be there, happy as a clam.

Instead, it was a complete forced bait and switch onto a team doing something irrelevant to my skill set, which is my way of saying there are plenty of problems with Google, but this is not one of them.

<comment><USER6> I've heard this a couple times now, and it worries me. I've got an on-site interview with Google soon, and my impression from the recruiter is that I would know which team I was joining at the offer stage.

Can you go into some detail on what happened between your offer and joining Google that resulted in you feeling like it was a "bait and switch"?

If it matters, I am not interviewing as a college hire, but as a senior engineer from another large tech company.

<comment><USER7> [I apologize in advance, I think I got a bit snarky there at the end]

Historically Google doesn't allocate jobs and then hire to them, rather they hire and then from the accepts various managers 'bid' on those candidates to fill their needs. Clearly I am a bit biased as I joined Google as a 'senior' guy, and went through this stuff, spent four years there, and now I don't work there any more. Its not for the faint of heart.

The reasoning for this is that smart people can do "any" job[1] and the when people join Google its so "different" than any other culture that your first assignment really won't matter anyway. The theory is you accept, they throw you into some random job, you get evaluated (used to be this was when your job level was also determined) and then you are expected to know what you want to work on, move there and work on it.

This system is especially hard on senior folks, it works ok on new college grads. As a senior engineer you can be assigned to write shell scripts that take the output of one program and make it input to another, or clean up performance issues in a code written by someone who had no idea how to write performant code. You are almost assured of landing on a project where the original developers of it have collected some 'cred' for "shipping" it after getting it 90% done and have moved on to something else. It will be the biggest waste of your time that you could imagine.

The good news is that if you survive that gauntlet then your _next_ assignment will be to get yourself out of the cesspool you landed in and into a project that you care about. The bad news if you don't create as much code as the young guy who is in the cesspool next to you but does his laundry at the 'plex' and eats three meals a day there, then your not going to do well on your evaluation. A good defensive strategy there is to do several side projects with folks at Google to build up a 'yeah he's a good guy' kind of relationship with folks on the committees. That way when the question of how many kLoc you produced comes up relative to your live-at-work cube mate your friends on the committee can counter the negative remarks with 'but hey, he's a really great guy.' which will help.

Now that you're successfully "in" learn to fail fast, go through a bunch of projects looking for one that will show up on the radar of some influential (low employee #) folks, there is a great tool called 'percent' that tells you how many folks joined after someone, you want to cultivate the 99.9 percenters. They will always be on the various committees that will be evaluating you at some point and you want them to both know who you are, and have a positive impression. Shine their shoes as they say. If you're an academic many of the tools you used to get your grant money, grad students, or onto the front of the author list on papers will serve you well here.

Once you've reached a level of credibility that your "calibration" score is pretty much not going to get knocked down because some early employee is pissed off at you, start thinking about what sort of problems you would like to work on. Go look for them and get yourself on the project, do the fun stuff (the wild designs, the crazy idea papers, the mocks, the prototypes) get it to the point where it works enough that it is clear it will actually work if someone finishes the code, "ship it" and take the credit, relish in your big bonus that year knowing that some new hires will be dummped into that project, now that you've moved on. to make it work. Not your problem any more, you're on to bigger an better things, your a Googler!

[1] I think of this as the 'fallacy of fungibility' where any employee can be moved to any job, when in fact depending on fit they may do well or poorly unrelated to their skill set.

<comment><USER5> And this is just it, I was indeed senior level. I do not have the patience to play a cultural game internally just to get to a project that makes use of my skills. My bad.

If that makes me a bad cultural fit, G O O D! If a company isn't smart enough to pair me with a problem I am adept at solving, then plenty of other companies are, and that's why I left after only 4 months. Got a raise too.

Google's hiring process is toxic[1]. It's probably costing them big bucks that they can't quantify properly as a line item in their budget so they probably won't consider changing. All I know is that whenever I recount my days at google on HN, lots of people upvote my story, a lot. I suspect others have similar tales to tell.

[1] Not that other companies don't have their own personal poisons, but yeesh, why not try something new once in a while?

<comment><USER7> I had an interesting conversation with Alan Eustace (who was in charge of engineering at the time) about this. We had just hired, abused, and lost a guy who had been the CTO of his previous company, got hired in and forced to clean up message catalogs in i18n code, and quit after the slotting committee decided he was really 'junior engineer' level and should be put on a performance improvement plan so that he could learn to "step it up."

I don't know how common his situation was, I was fairly outspoken (no surprise) and he had reached out to me early on when he was trying to figure things out. The PIP (which is basically a pre-cursor to being fired) basically put him over the edge, and he quit. The sad thing was of course this guy was really smart, had excellent design sense, and knew more about the way Java worked than I did and I was one of the original developers of Java at Sun! A real top notch kind of guy.

He had been caught in the 'perfect storm' of which there were many, of a manager whose project was strategic to the company and understaffed, a skillset that waaay out ranked his assignment, so even doing perfect work it wouldn't begin to show his capabilities, and a 'peer review' system that primarily tested social engineering skills rather than technical skills. Everybody lost. He lost his job, Google lost a great engineer, the system lost an opportunity to improve.

The essence of the discussion with Alan boiled down to "Its a complex system and its going to have some failures, but by and large it works well so unless you can come up with something better we're stuck with it."

So in some ways the interview process is a good test to see if you might be the kind of person that would do well at Google.

<comment><USER5> Well, given that I _aced_ the interview (plenty of evidence besides the job offer I got within 24 hours of it and some of it I probably shouldn't know but I do), I should have been a _wonderful_ fit then, no?

Tell ya what, how about trying one of those infallible(tm) A/B tests where half the incoming people get the Hogwarts hat and the other half get to meet their team upfront before accepting a job? Do this for a year. Now one year after that measure which set of employees is happier/present/more successful.

<comment><USER7> I did say "might" :-) if it were a perfect predictor neither you nor I would have been hired.

I like your suggestion, you should put it on the Alumni list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having spent the last year interviewing for jobs. It has become clear to me that companies have no idea that they're being interviewed as they are interviewing me.

Can't find a time to call me when I've given you 5 dates and times? Red flag.

Can't get my resume into the hands of the folks who are interviewing me? Red Flag.

Tell me it will be a week and it takes two? Red Flag.

Call me 30 minutes after the scheduled time and not apologize. Red Flag.

Tell me I'm a perfect fit for the job, then the HR person calls me 5 minutes later to say that they will not be moving forward with the interview process. Red Flag.

Set up a time to Skype call me, cancel hours before the call, send an email 2 days later saying the job was filled before my interview. Black listed

Tell me on the phone interview that I will be called in for the face to face, send me an email 2 weeks later saying the job was filled. Black listed

Delay the hiring process because you want to hire another position first. Red Flag.

I could go on, and all of this has happened in the last year.

<comment><USER9> Are your "black lists" based on poor communication, or making an offer to another candidate while they haven't interviewed you yet?

<comment><USER10> If an interviewee said they'd do something, and then didn't do it, it would be regarded as an integrity problem.

<comment><USER9> So, you'd regard a candidate as lacking integrity if you scheduled an interview with them, but they then cancelled because they'd accepted another offer first?

<comment><USER8> Yes I would and this happened when I was on the other side. The candidate reached out after 2 weeks and asked if the job was still open and that he had made a mistake. The job was filled.

<comment><USER9> So, knowing that he was going to take another job, you'd rather he still came to your interview and used up hours of your employees' time? To me, that's the action that would lack integrity.

Your example of the guy who made a mistake is certainly a bummer for him, but presumably he didn't know he was making a mistake when he turned you down. And that's got to be a very small fraction of hiring situations.

<comment><USER8> I think the integrity test came when he made up his mind and accepted an offer before the interview. If I knew he had already accepted the other position then it would be a waste of time.

The problem wasn't that he cancelled the interview, it was that he made up his mind before a scheduled interview with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure the author understands the difference between a riddle and a logic problem, a riddle typically uses misdirection and veiled meanings to hide an answer while a logic problem is one that can be solve by applying logical analysis.

So for example "What has two heads, four eyes, six legs and a tail?" is a riddle because it's so open ended and relies upon linguistic trickery. On the other hand most bridge crossing problems are logic problems, you typically have a finite number of options and by deduction and logical analysis you can arrive at the correct answer (i.e the answer is not a trick answer).

The advantage of logic problems as opposed to domain specific problems is that they let you separate an individuals logical reasoning ability from their experience. When you're hiring you want to make sure that the person you're hiring can deal not only with more general problems of the type they've seen before, but also that they can deal with esoteric problems that are very specific to the nature of your product. And that's when the ability to reason logically becomes much more important.

Obviously if the candidate you're interviewing is already familiar with the logic problem you're presenting then you probably won't get much value from the candidates answer and you need to ask alternative questions to ascertain the same information.

<comment><USER12> Two lettuces each impaled with two needles, running a six stage race, being chased by a private investigator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this should be taken with a grain of salt, and I say this specifically for this crowd, who I've noticed more and more aren't the prospective founders and outliers that it once contained but young, inexperienced new-grads or almost-grads that are just getting into the business and think starups are a good option.

My advice, to be blunt, is this: Know your role.

It's all well and good to rail against these (frankly) really dumb hiring practices. A lot of us are in the position where we don't have to put up with this crap. Of course a lot of us are in the position where we aren't interviewing at all anymore. Simply saying "I did such and such in the past" or even better "I worked with so and so" is good enough for many of us to land nice cushy gigs. Such is the benefit of a reputation, and you will build one, one way or another, in whatever niche you are in, over time.

However, young Padawan, this is not you. Not now. You - like it or not - <USER2> simply a number on a job application. And discounting the few who are lucky enough to have completed a project that means something in your short lives, or to have the fortunate grace to share acquaintance (and high opinion) with someone the hiring person knows and respects, you are NOT "interviewing the company".

You are a nothing. And just like all the other nothings that come through the door, if you want to get noticed you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. You will likely not always be a nothing, but right now, you are. And so, your lot in life is to jump through hoops and toe the line until you can start to stand on your own two feet.

Please don't take the approach that the interview is an equal transaction unless it actually is. I've 'not hired' far too many of you, to be honest. You'll know when the transaction is equal, and if you are asking the question, it isn't. That isn't to say you should take any offer that comes to you; just that you are in no position to be picky. And if you are bitching about interview questions, this is the position you are in.

<comment><USER14> By the time I was done interviewing someone, they weren't a nothing to me any more — I had an idea of who they were. The whole point of an interview is to cease being a nothing and gain the respect and interest of the interviewers; if you're interviewing people as though they're nothings, you may notice that a lot of your best candidates turn you down. Finally, _everyone_ is interviewing the company; if the interviewee isn't willing to turn down an offer, someone will take advantage of them.

<comment><USER13> Of course a person isn't a nothing. The issue is that many recent grads (especially those that are smart/have done well) somehow seem to forget that as far as the work world goes, they are back at the bottom of the pile.

I'm simply pointing out that many of them - particularly in this generation - don't seem to have any idea of their overall place in the grand scheme of things.

There are close to 50 years of "top of the class" grads floating around out there. That's the competition.

 _if the interviewee isn't willing to turn down an offer, someone will take advantage of them._

While I don't disagree, the fact of the matter is that a new grad rarely, if ever, has this luxury. It's true that it may very well be in their best interests to not take a job despite not having an income. I've seen far to many though that never get the right start because there idea of "being taken advantage of" is so far out of whack with reality that they don't take _any_ viable position. Given 1-2 years of unemployment, they become less and less valuable, and more and more desperate.

9/10, as a new grad, you should take an appropriate offer from the first company that makes it. The experience you need is much more valuable to you than the interview quiz, the dress code, or yes, even the pay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've noticed that more and more topics are being labeled as inappropriate in interviews for developers. I have heard complaints about interviewers asking candidates to complete short programming tasks, producing past code samples, doing a whiteboard exercise, completing a pairing exercise, and objecting to a wide variety of questions. I understand that highly experienced professionals may get frustrated by some lines of questioning, but it's getting to the point that programmers feel they should walk in with a resume and say 'Trust me, I'm good', and immediately get a job offer.

Keep in mind some interviewers will ask questions that they don't expect you to answer in order to learn something about you. Will you lie, admit not knowing the answer, describe how you'd find an answer, get frustrated and rant (as this author does with riddles), etc? It could reveal how you'd treat a customer or a co-worker.

Candidates obviously have the power to walk out or not interview with places that are going to be more rigorous (or transparent) in the process, but what many candidates are classifying as 'unreasonable' for interviews these days is becoming a bit too long a list.

I just published an article about this very topic <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791>

<comment><USER16> Working with one bozo ought to be enough to convince anyone that you need an anti-bozo filter, even if it eats up a few hours of time for your team.

<comment><USER10> The same should really apply to people interviewing for jobs. It's not too hard to find companies with bozos, including bozo interviewers.

<comment><USER16> Given that you are going to work for a company for months or years, and interview with them for hours, you care much much more about the quality of the coworkers than the quality of the interviewers.

<comment><USER10> Hopefully you interview with some people who might be involved in managing or working with you, or you will not have any basis for this assessment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> First off I am not really pro riddle per say, however we do use some 'riddles' at my current employer.

1) Sometimes they can point out really big gaping holes in basic logic ability, for instance we ask about basic logic with the NAND gate riddle, we explain you can compose the common logical operations just using NAND. Ask the interviewee to construct NOT using NAND, usually if they have never seen anything like this, we walk em through it as a freebie... so now they have NOT and NAND, and we ask them to construct AND. How many Architects we have interviewed, with 10+ years of experience who could not logically figure out how to combine NOT and NOTAND to get a logical AND...

2) Second, we mostly dont actually care too much about getting the correct answers to the riddles. Its partially to look at the way person solves problems, but mostly its psychological. In software dealing with non tech, high level biz people, you get all kinds of bizarre requests. If you throw a hissy fit in the middle of an interview, or storm out because someone asks you a riddle... Are we to expect you to keep your head when the VP of Sales asks you for something 'crazy'?

</comment><comment><USER18> This article reminds me to ask a pointless mind-bending riddle to each applicant just to weed out prima donna programmer types who can't handle a little mental poking and prodding during the course of an interview designed to see if he/she will be a good fit for spending a good part of his/her waking day with me every day.

If you're too "good" to shift contexts beyond regurgitating your work experiences or coding a for loop for a few minutes -- then I don't want to be stuck in a room with you when there's a lot of pressure to meet a customer commitment that could mean our livelihood.

<comment><USER19> I interviewed a candidate that had quite an alphabet soup and buzzword compliant resume. He was pretty much convinced he was the world's greatest programmer.

I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do.

But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence.

If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.

<comment><USER20> Great comment. There are a lot of those questions that are repeated over and over and over...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The same can be applied to pre-interview screening problems as well. I recently send my resume to a company that was advertising on the Hacker New job board (I'm not going to say which company it was). They replied to my email telling me that in order to get to the next step in the process, I need to solve a problem and send them my code. They wanted me to send them a conway's game of life board that, after 1000 generations, could be converted to a GIF and would make up a black and white image they included in the email. Basically they wanted me to take their image, convert it to a conway game of life board, and then figure out how to calculate backwards game of life generations. Sounds to me like a fools errand. I deleted the email and never thought about it again. I have better things to do to fill up my free time. Maybe if they had me do something actually useful or meaningful...

<comment><USER22> That sounds like a fun challenge, and if it's at all representative of the sorts of problems they take on, I'd love to know who the company was so I can apply.

<comment><USER21> The fist task is converting the GIF into a data structure. That could take anywhere between one hour and one day. Since I personally have no experience reading data from GIF files, it is probably going to take me one day.

The next step is to figure out how to reverse generate conway's game of life. If you have previous game of life experience, you may already know how to do that. But I'm not a game of life expert. Its going to take quite a bit of research and trial and error to get that working. It will probably take me at least a day.

It all boils down to this: I don't want to waste two days of programming time for something as pointless as this. Especially since they could very easily say "sorry you're not a cultural fit" after spending all that time. Thats actually what happened to me a few months ago when I spent 4 days doing a programming problem for a job at reddit. They called me about a month later and had a 5 minute conversation with me, and then never heard from them agan. Assholes.

My new rule is that I don't spend any ore than a few hours on any one single problem, unless they pay me, or if it's interesting enough.

<comment><USER23> How I feel about things like this: If you're interested in doing the programming challenge, you should do it, because it's interesting to you (and so that company tries to give its employees problems that are interesting/has employees that find the same problems interesting as you do). If not, then you're right, it's a lot of time to spend on it. But learning how to go about programming that is certainly not, in my view, a waste of time, or at least no more a waste of time than doing an edifying class assignment. So, in essence, they're filtering for people that enjoy solving interesting coding challenges in their free time. If I'm a company, that is probably a reasonably good filtering mechanism, and if I'm a potential employee, I likely want to be around people who like solving these sorts of things on their own.

Also, this isn't as tough a challenge as you make it out to be: writing the game of life is, at most, a 2-hour assignment. So writing a game-of-life- reverser might tack on an extra 30 min. to hour. Then, you just hand-code in the gif into a game of life board, and run it through your reverser. Unless your gif is really large, in which case it might be a little more annoying, but probably not drastically so.

<comment><USER21> Just to clarify: It was a 800*800 image (or there abouts), and the GIF was pictoral (it was actually lena). It wasn't a typical GOF board. The question even hinted that if you can't get an exact match, then return a board that "comes close as possible". Without posting the whole problem, it definitely seemed like the kind of problem that would take at least a few days.

On the other hand, I once had a company give me a problem that was essentially to build a page that displays products from an API endpoint, and have that page infinitely scroll. That was something interesting, because infinite scroll is a useful skill. I had never implemented infinite scroll before, so in order to complete the task, I'd have to educate myself. And infinite scroll is a skill that I can use again. Conway's game of life in reverse is not a skill I'm ever going to use again, except for the next job interview busy work.

<comment><USER22> > I once had a company give me a problem that was essentially to build a page > that displays products from an API endpoint, and have that page infinitely > scroll.

I'd probably have the same reaction to that as you did to the reverse-GOL. Sounds dreadfully boring, if that's the sort of stuff they do every day. I don't want to re-use old techniques over and over and over; I want to continuously discover new ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Having been hiring developers, designers, and product managers for the better part of the last ten years ..... I agree.

I also hate the actual interview itself. So little time to try and learn something that for the most part cannot be learned in a high pressure, nervous, anxiety ridden situation (I realize I am also being interviewed, assessed, and reviewed). However, this is a different point altogether from what the author is discussing.

I do think it's great to try and understand how someone

1 - Problem solves 2 - Approaches asking questions, interacting with other people, etc

And quizes can _sometimes_ be a way to figure that out.

I've just found that when using quizzes it's better to openly communicate with the person what you, the interviewer, are trying to better understand. I always pre-amble a quiz (if and when I do use one)

"hey, I'm going to ask you a question/quiz/riddle. It's important to note I could CARE LESS about the answer. I'm really looking to better understand how you would go about solving this. So please, make sure to walk me through your thought process and don't hesitate to ask me any questions along the way".

I also like to make it clear how it ties into what the person will be working on. For example

"the reason I ask, is one of the first projects you will be working on is ___________, so knowing how you approach nebulous problems will be important"

The best response I had to this is

Well, I might do X,Y,and Z, but to your real question, I have a great example, mind if I share that?

Also, this is just a data point. Going back to my second paragraph, I've never once "not hired" someone based on how well they think on their feet in an anxiety ridden, pressure filed, hour of their life in a room with total strangers.

<comment><USER18> _I always pre-amble a quiz_

I dunno. That sort of defeats the objective of assessing that person's natural reaction to a little interview pressure. It's not water boarding, it's a simple programming or logic puzzle that requires most people to think.

<comment><USER24> People (on average) are nervous, anxious, etc during an interview. I don't really care how they "naturally" react in that situation as THAT situation isn't day-to-day (at least not in the software companies I've spent my time) so I'm almost don't really care about that.

I really just care about how well they problem solve, not problem solve in a fox-hole with bullets flying over their head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's funny to see that developers have so much leverage on the job market that you can read phrases like "don't hire this employer, you're better than that" and act like that's the most normal thing in the world. I guess it's time for having paid interviews again.

<comment><USER26> When you think about all the time and care most developers will spend on there jobs one should be picky. It is literally one of your life's most important decisions.

<comment><USER27> Hear, hear. The good software engineers are worth the money; they care about your product and apply years of expertise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What falls into the riddle vs. "acceptable" role? In my mind, it's perfectly valid to ask, for instance, "Given a binary search tree, write a program to return all elements between a low and high." or "Write a program to return whether or not a given string matches a regular expression." Are these "riddles," as espoused by the article? Sort of: they do take some element of an "aha!" moment to solve, whereas the "recommended" questions were mainly just domain-knowledge questions. But if you solve these problems using convoluted coding techniques, then I as an interviewer would be really worried that you'd muddy our codebase unnecessarily, and if you can't see how to solve them, I may discover that you have a problem thinking recursively, or logicing through complex issues. Or, I may find that you tend to dive into a problem before thinking about it and designing your solution. All of these seem fairly relevant to any job, and I've actually turned down employers that asked me too many "domain-knowledge" questions and not enough "how do you think about things" questions, because I don't want to be somewhere where I'm just expected to "know" the answer.

</comment><comment><USER28> To me interviews are like weddings. High expectations and not enough practice - a great setup for some memorable mishaps.

I'd just offer the following from lots of experience on both sides.

\- Make sure to write down a sample input and output. Sounds simple, but is often not done and the cause of a lot of wasted time.

\- After you're on the same page about the input and output, allow for a minute to think. Silence should be perfectly okay here.

\- Always discuss the strategy and various options before implementing the solution.

</comment><comment><USER29> I tend to agree with the author, but there are indeed some things you can infer from the type of response you get. I have a friend who was doing a technical interview, and things seemed to be going weird. It seemed that the candidate knew the answers to most of his questions, but when pressured further he couldn't come up with alternative solutions. It was like those people who know the motions of math, but don't understand what it's for.

So he decided to ask one of these riddle questions: "How many hairs does a dog have?" and the candidate answered that it depended on the dog. So far so good. But then he started rambling: "Well, if it's a dog from the street, the dog might have scabies, and thus this dog has less hair.

Of course, this is a perfectly valid answer, but it is the failure of applying math/statistical thinking into his answer what was telling.

Now, I'm sure some people are thinking "that's anecdotical evidence" and it is, but what is the alternative if your intention is to hire mathematically inclined candidates?

<comment><USER10> Test them more directly on tasks similar to what you will need them to do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Riddles are useless interview tools. When I am building a new dev team or adding to an existing one, I care about two things:

1\. Did the candidate make a critical contribution to a piece of technology that I respect. I will start by asking them for examples of this in a lot of ways including asking them to present something they're proud of to the team. I will not rest until I have verified they did this through my network and back references.

2\. Is their chemistry compatible with the team, or as it is more popularly put today, are they a good culture fit? That opportunity to present to the team is an important test. Another one is that the interviewing team has to catch them out being wrong about something and then see how they react to that. You can learn a lot about how someone deals with learning they're wrong about something. Lastly, we look for opportunities to socialize with the candidate. They can't be a good culture fit if nobody wants to spend non-work time with them.

</comment><comment><USER31> Interviews are a two way street, but in any negotiation there's different leverage. Most of the time, in the current job climate, the interviewer is the one with the leverage over the employee.

For many people, a job interview ends up being "how much crap am I willing to put up with to make a living wage" and whether the interviewer (who may not even be someone you will ever work with again if you're hired) asks stupid riddles might factor very little into the equation.

I think this article would be better suited if it targeted the interviewers to say "Look guys, asking riddles is pointless and might turn off the best candidates who /can/ afford to fire you and look for another company to interview with."

On the other hand, you might consider whether you actually even want an employee who is willing to abandon the whole enterprise when they realize that an interviewer has the NERVE to ask them to solve a riddle or logic puzzle.

Like raganwald said, the interviewer is probably not the best interviewer, and you can decide whether you want to work with him and make the best impression. Or you can decide that you will only work under the strictest of conditions, and if someone asks you a question you don't like, that you may as well just walk out of the room right then, because they're obviously an braying alphadog assholey jackass.

If I was conducting an interview, and felt like asking a riddle like the article ("Four people want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have twelve minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time"). If my candidate just said, calmly, and without agitation "Heh, you know, I'm not really good at on-the-spot logic problems like that. I don't know how long it takes for a trip anyways. But 4 people, weird restrictions, would probably take more than 4 and less than 4^2 trips." I would get a lot more out of it than if they blurted out a correct answer.

On the other hand, I'd probably learn a lot if they slammed their hand on the table, called me a braying asshole and stormed out of the interview.

</comment><comment><USER32> It makes me want to ask an interviewer to code a solution to fizzbuzz or solve a riddle.

<comment><USER16> If I am interviewing you, I wouldn't mind you giving me a puzzle. Depending on how you do it, I would think you are either the world's biggest asshole, or a very easy guy to work with, and that's very valuable information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think there is some value in trying to see if a person can have a Columbus moment. After all the simplest solutions are hard to find. And it is nice to see how a person deals with problem outside his domain of knowledge. We don't want to hire someone that can have a nickname like Complicator or Rube Goldberg. But the questions must be rooted in reality. The correct answer to how much a Boing weights is check the manual.

Аsk them how to minimize datacenter flooding or how to lift fuel 20 floors upwards with no pumps working - that were real things that real people had to solve just a few months ago. And they weren't hired for that.

</comment><comment><USER34> The worst company I ever worked at (now out of business, fortunately) had an interviewer / hiring manager who asked these sorts of riddles.

He also had a really thick accent. Later, he also proved to be technically incompetent.

I quit after 6 months.

<comment><USER9> What did his accent have to do with the rest of this?

<comment><USER35> I assume he is implying that the technical incompetence caused people to second-guess what they heard when confusion arose. This confusion can be misunderstood by the interviewer as confusion over the subject matter. I know I've had that problem before over poor telephone connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surely all of these arguments boil down to balancing how important general intelligence vs domain expertise is to your hiring procedure.

You could see these riddles as a stand in for just giving the candidate a full blown IQ test.

<comment><USER36> I agree 100%. There seems to be 2 camps when it comes to what makes a programmer great: aptitude versus domain knowledge. I think both are important but aptitude is harder to train someone on.

I'm a big proponent of tough, small problems in an interview, that the candidate has never seen before. Much like the author is against. This is because it has been the best indicator of performance in my experience.

<comment><USER37> The author is not against small, tough problems, by all means a well designed generic programming question that doesn't tie in to any specific domain knowledge can be a great test.

What the author was against are the riddles, which are proven to be ineffective in determining the general aptitude of the engineers, and that's why the companies that used to use them (MS and Google, for example) have mostly banned those.

<comment><USER4> I guess the question is, how do you design a programming problem that doesn't tie into specific domain knowledge?

Even fairly general stuff like implementing balanced search trees will likely be biased towards younger candidates who are fresh from university.

<comment><USER37> You can still do it, it doesn't have to involve a complicated CS topics such as self-balancing trees or graph theories or anything, but I've seen plenty of good algorithm questions that the solution involve nothing more than understanding of Strings and for-loops.

You can also test the interviewee's knowledge of Big-O, time efficiency vs space efficiency, etc without going into obscure data structures.

<comment><USER4> Big O would be something I was much more familiar with out of university, although I could probably muddle through some basic questions around it.

For loops that manipulate strings in various ways however is probably something that most programmers will have wrestled with reasonably regularly I imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Towards the end of the interview the interviewer told me, "your turn to ask me questions". I said, "I have this puzzle for you...". He turned pale for a moment and then laughed at the joke. I wasn't joking.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is not a trivial career so why trivialize it? I'm more keen on seeing a person's past work or hearing about their experiences. Asking them how they've solved past problems and how they've faced past conflicts gives me insight into if we can start working together. That's all an interview is. There's no guarantees it will all work out and I believe no amount of interviewing techniques will change that.

</comment><comment><USER40> Riddles, logic puzzles, "write some code on the whiteboard" ....

It took me years to realize that these are _not_ tests of technical ability, they are tests of _submissiveness_.

For example, if you are being interviewed by someone at the same level as you for some position -- and they pull such crap -- now you know how low their expectations of the employer are.

And if you are being interviewed by someone fairly senior relative to the position -- and they ask you such BS interview questions -- you can be _damn sure_ that they themselves would laugh at and walk away from any interviewer that did that to them.

So when you give the clever answer and wait for your gold star... you've established your place in the order of things.

</comment><comment><USER41> The best question was asked by Steve Jobs: "How do you re-invent the phone?"

All of you smartasses hiring with your riddle questions couldn't answer that.

</comment><comment><USER42> I keep my interview questions in my "github résumé": [https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to- startup...](https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to- startups.markdown)

I recently had a headhunter e-mail me, offer no job description, but directed me to the website of the company, which makes iOS/iPhone apps. Two hours later he pinged me again asking if I read his previous e-mail.

Nowhere in my many online résumés do I say I have iOS experience or that I am even interested in that kind of work. Moreover, I stress, emphasize, my interest in hypermedia and W3C Standards.

This market is saturated with mismanagement, and there is a clear bottleneck. So, for instance, "hypermedia." Most developers and "techs" I mention this term to obviously have no idea what I'm talking about. And just entertain the fact that I made some jargonish sounding word, thus giving me the benefit of the doubt.

But now I cannot find work I want to do because hardly anyone knows what hypermedia is, and that is _not_ my fault. I'm staying abreast with my industry, and now I am suffering for it.

There is a bottleneck here, as with most "recruitment" industries. I don't even want to begin thinking about open source typography, with all the Microsoft Web Safe Fonts flying around.</comment>


Show HN: No YC interview, but here's my application - <AUTHOR> https://www.penflip.com/loren/yc-application <comment><USER3>
        > [ http://www.lorenburton.com/ ]
        > [...] I posted the site to HN and dropped a "share on twitter" button on
        > the bottom of the page, racking up tens of thousands of hits and hundreds
        > of tweets. I was in touch with Joe Gebbia (thanks pg!!) within hours, who
        > expedited the interview process, and I flew to SF the next morning. Though
        > I didn't get the job [...]

Wait, _what_?! You made [http://www.lorenburton.com](http://www.lorenburton.com) ... and then didn't get a job at AirBNB? Goodness gracious. The job was for some frontend stuff, right? You seem pretty good at making frontend stuff, I can't imagine why you didn't get it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a solid history of failing remarkably. Good lessons learned, though.

To be honest I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was completely unprepared and under qualified, and it was my first job interview _ever_. I bombed it.

<comment><USER4> That's crazy that you didn't get the job. Considering AirBNB's growth rate, it seems they could have taken a risk that someone like yourself would grow into the position.

<comment><USER5> This isn't the 1970s where you could get hired as a novice and trained on the job. In today's world you need to be a rockstar programmer right out of college. Training? No start up wants to gamble resources on that.

<comment><USER6> A person's capacity for learning complex concepts quickly matters more than their current body of knowledge. Startups are marathons, not sprints.

If Feynman were still alive and wanted to work as a programmer at your startup, it'd be foolish to turn him away. This was a guy who went from "zero knowledge of how a space shuttle works" to "knows the design of the Challenger shuttle in detail, and is able to spot overlooked problems" within a couple weeks. So he'd certainly have no trouble reaching rockstar programmer status at your startup within a couple months.

But I'm getting the feeling most startups would turn him down if he wasn't already a rockstar programmer the day his interview rolls around. That seems a little nutty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the support, HN. I appreciate it.

To be clear, I have no intention of quitting. I started working on this project without even thinking about YC as a possibility, driven only by excitement and the desire to see it exist. In fact, I wasn't going to apply to YC at all, but changed my mind at the last minute.

Against my better judgement, this little idea has turned into a full time, 18hrs-a-day-7-days-a-week project (with the occasional burnout day), and I plan to keep working on it is successful or I run out of money.

=]

<comment><USER7> Nice of you to share your whole application. How much time did you take to prepare it, by the way ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Worked on the bulk of it over the course of a day, on and off. Thought about it for a while before that though (when I was unsure if I was going to apply). This was my third time applying[1], so I basically have the questions memorized at this point.

Oh, and I've been recording every thought and idea for the past three months (some of my lists: [http://grab.by/rKOY](http://grab.by/rKOY)), so filling out the application was mostly compiling those thoughts into readable form.

[1] Different ideas each time, spanning 3 or 4 years. Funny enough, last year I got an interview. By that measure, this is a regression :)

<comment><USER8> What app to make that list?

<comment><AUTHOR> it's just the sidebar for textmate2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's an overall strong application, but it's missing a few key components - namely, you're a single founder, and you're a bit early in terms of product and traction. That might've been enough to get in a few years ago, but competition and standards have gone up with each new batch (the single founder thing might've still held you back).

You'll probably have a better chance getting in the next batch, if your product continues to mature and you have more traction by then. If you're interested, I wrote about my experiences reviewing about 300 applications for a different accelerator, 500startups - might be useful [http://www.techfounder.net/2013/08/22/after- reviewing-300-st...](http://www.techfounder.net/2013/08/22/after- reviewing-300-startup-applications-this-is-what-i-learned/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Market this thing as "The easiest way to get your book sold on Amazon"

Figure out the process for people to sell there e-books on amazon and assist them all the way.

Make sure this tool outputs in what ever format it needs to be to be sold on Kindle/Nook/what ever.

Offer conversion from Word/Google Doc/ to pen flip

No one knows what Markdown is.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like the project a lot.

Why do you think there was no YC interview? Any retrospection? Was it due to you being the only founder? How strict is the video time limit? The video sounds not really geared for YC but for general audience. Also, did you have a friend go through the application? A lot of it sounds like bragging, which is not bad at all but can be abrasive after a bit.

I like the project a lot, and may you reach heights with it.

<comment><USER12> Personal thoughts (trying to channel pg with a huge stack of applications to get through - I imagine the guy who first applied Naive Bayes to email spam being quite comfortable making snap decisions over small variables):

This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.

Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" \- come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - <USER2> wasn't the first person to do something like this.

Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' \- he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".

Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.

For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.

I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am not 100% certain but signal has it that they let one of your competitors in. And with that I mean one of the handful of other "github for writers" which were showcasing on HN.

<comment><USER14> Just use that as fuel. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Create yourself an [http://angel.co](http://angel.co) profile and solicit funding & advice on there. The startup world is a tiny bit bigger than YC.

</comment><comment><USER16> I just wanted to chime in and say (though possibly off topic) that Loren is an extraordinary developer. I saw penflip on ShowHN when he first posted it, and before that when it was simply an idea he threw out here, and immediately signed up. I began writing a book on Clojure using the platform and I couldn't be happier. He also is great at engaging users. Just look at the twitter. He's personally helped me multiple times and even contributed to my project.

So, if you're looking to write. Use penflip. It's awesome. But this really goes to show YC is a cutthroat place to try and get into. It really is amazing how much this system pg has started up has inspired. Just think of the entrepreneurs who have sat and thought of ideas because they know networks like this exist. It's truly an awesome thing for the world.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thank you very much for sharing this. I found it very helpful as I am also preparing some applications. One thing that I noticed though, was that the video you submitted is both well beyond the 1 minute restriction, and you also spent a lot of time talking about the project and not about yourself ("1 minute video [...] introducing the founders").

When recording our previous video we were very worried about being on the 2-minute mark and straight to the point, spending more time introducing myself and my colleagues. Do you (and the HN community) think that may have caused some serious loss of points? Good luck from Brazil!

</comment><comment><USER18> I wouldnt have thought the market was huge for this. You mention "Textbooks" \- most commercial publishing companies would already have internal version control software, you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs. Where is the target market? It's neither casual nor a power tool. Thats probably why your pitch failed, their is adequate substitute products already in the market place.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _commercial publishing companies would already have internal version control > software_

You'd be surprised. I've talked to published authors, and here's the inside scoop: the writing/editing process is often, amazingly, word documents emailed back and forth with hacked up homebrew version control 'systems' and inline comments. Believe it or not. I've seen them. And it only gets worse when there are more editors involved (depending on the content, there can be _many_ ).

O'Reilly is working on a similar idea ([http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com](http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com)), which means there is at least some demand by commercial publishers for a system like this. If O'Reilly is working on it, it can't be solved very well.

Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.

> _you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs_

For short essays google docs is fantastic. I don't plan to touch that. But have you tried writing any kind of long-form group research paper (as in, over the course of a semester), especially technical, with google docs or dropbox? I have. It's a nightmare.

> _their is adequate substitute products already in the market place_

Craigslist and couchsurfing.org were _adequate substitutes_ for Airbnb, Yahoo search was an _adequate substitute_ for Google, and flash drives were an _adequate substitute_ for Dropbox.

<comment><USER19> well to be fair, your hitting a very crowded market that already has very established services with large userbases (If Google Docs, Word or Github just takes the idea then your basically done for) and there is a whole bunch of startups in the same exact space as you (Atlas, Editorially and Draft), that might of scared Y Combinator off because chances are one will thrive and the rest will fizzle out

<comment><USER20> I've seen a lot of PG's interviews where he literally says "Don't worry about competition". Dropbox released at a time when Google Drive was looming in the horizon. Still they succeeded. It's the execution that matters.

<comment><USER19> honestly though there was a pretty large gap between the time Dropbox came out and Google Drive did though, Dropbox was already established and had a large user base when Google Drive launched

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The application in the application. Upvoted for meta :)

</comment><comment><USER22> The Git learning curve is far too steep for non-technically inclined people.

You must write a DropBox-like client.

Example UX:

In the special folder, each folder starting wit a "+" is a repository.

Each user has his own branch. No master. Provide a good online UI for diff reviews and merging, and a way to locally commit (the how is left as an exercise to the reader).

You can branch by creating another folder with the same name plus the branch as a suffix.

        +foo          // user1 branch of the "foo" repo
                      // It may be displayed as "user1+foo-bar" in the web UI,
                      // to avoid confusion.

        +foo-bar      // "user1-bar" branch of the "foo" repo

        baz/+qux      // the username branch of qux
                      // "baz" is just a location, and may vary
                      // on a per user basis.
                      // If user2 wants to place it elsewhere, let it be.

        baz/+qux-quux // you get the idea...

Educate the users to pick unambiguous repo names.

Profit!

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems immensely cumbersome and error-prone. Why not just a client with a simple GUI (ie buttons)?

<comment><USER22> Maybe... It looks straightforward to me, but it is off course highly subjective.

Creating a folder is something that most people can do, and you don't have to do it often.

Even if what I propose is not your cup of tea, the general idea is that you have to think of a streamlined workflow for writers.

Another thing I'd add to the above idea would be a local, private branch for each branch, that would keep every step on save (no need for a commit message), and then rebase the private branch on its public counterpart on commit (message required) for sharing with others. The WIP branch may also be pushed, for backup purpose.

Now that I think of it, the above would better be implemented using tags. Only share tagged commits with you collaborators.

"CTRL + S" is ingrained in most people's hands, and having an automatic time machine would be a nice addition.

I'm just throwing out ideas, hopefully, you'll like some :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> An early pivot maybe?

Have you considered a on-premise hosted version for the enterprise?

For mundane and painful things like requirements documents. User manuals , documentation etc.

Certainly not as cool as going consumer but enterprises have way more money than hungry writers looking for feedback.

Let me know when you're ready and/or interested and I can schedule a demo at my company. I work for a large semiconductor company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a pivot, this is a planned subset of penflip. Just realized this was one of the redacted bits from the application I posted here.

> _For mundane and painful things like requirements documents. User manuals , > documentation etc._

Yes. This is huge. Actually, lots of this happening on the platform already.

Not quite ready for a demo, but I'd love to chat about this. lorendburton [at] gmail

<comment><USER23> Cool. I'll send you an email

Enterprise is often ignored by cutting edge technologies. Sounds like it could somehow eat into sharepoint confluence enterprise wikis etc. market share. of course harder to demonstrate traction but you should consider (amount of money you make + amount of money a large existing enterprise solution loses) as what makes your company valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems like collaborative editing is not hot.

No YC interview neither, and somehow related:

[http://sharepad.co](http://sharepad.co)

<comment><USER25> YC has invested in many real-time collaborative editing tools. Most similar to sharepad: [https://hackpad.com/](https://hackpad.com/)

<comment><USER24> Thanks akanet.

As "The idea doesn't matter much; it will change anyway", we mostly see SharePad as a foundation to build something awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Application Intros, might be useful. [https://www.youtube.com/results?filters=month&search_query=y...](https://www.youtube.com/results?filters=month&search_query=y+combinator+application&lclk=month)

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks very nice. Most likely the biggest problem is the single founder aspect, I'm in the same boat as you there.

I have a feeling that when you select "yes" on that red flag option, your application goes straight into PG's queue.

Keep at it, my man.

<comment><USER5> Single founder applications are probably a red flag that the founder isn't good at networking, and YC is all about networking. They probably fear you'd be reclusive at YC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thanks for sharing your application. It takes guts to be open about this kind of stuff.

One thing I didn't see in the application was what your distribution strategy will be. I understand the collaborative nature of GitHub for Writers, but are there established channels that you could take advantage of to help your customer acquisition. Publishers are one group but perhaps they don't closely manage writers in that way. Perhaps advertising firms or print media might be a way to go. A couple big enterprise customers might be good validation for your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _but are there established channels that you could take advantage of to help > your customer acquisition_

Yes, absolutely. See "How will you get users" question. I listed 6 different growth/distribution strategies, but redacted 3 of them for the purpose of sharing publicly. They are not necessarily groundbreaking, but I'd rather not just hand over my growth strategies to competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wasn't aware LOC is used as a heuristic of sorts at YC.

Good luck Loren. It seems like you're not really targeting scientists and are willing to concede that to the Harvard folks. As someone that was recently involved in sending tex-files back and forth I can assure you there's a need there (and probably some money from volume licensing, univerities tend to buy this stuff with "wtf-don't care" money if you get a champion)

Edit: You could also sell it to conferences as SaaS. Call for papers -> use our amazing tool to write it link.

</comment><comment><USER30> This seems like it would be an immensely useful tool for government. In many regulations/rules scenarios, there are multiple agencies or offices (spread widely across the bureaucracy) vying for impact on a the in-progress document and the person or entity initially in control often loses ownership due to political, bureaucratic, funding or other reasons.

A product like this would significantly improve this process and provide the kind of historical record needed create transparency in lawmaking. Just a thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you work in government or know somebody that does? If so, let's chat.

<comment><USER30> I spent the last 3.5 years running a company that provides professional education to government contractors and was a government contractor myself. Before that, I worked in government for a couple years. Shoot me an email - happy to discuss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Awesome product! Don't give up hope, I can really see it doing well. One of those links I click and instantly see the appeal and benefits! Great job!

</comment><comment><USER32> I can't remember where I saw it before but ever since then any instance grates on me: describing your product in terms of other product. \- GitHub for writers \- Facebook for Pearl Divers \- LinkedIn for Horse Whisperers \- Twitter for Ornithologists

Merits of the idea aside it really turns me off, smacks of a lack of creativity, a lazy route to explaining your product benefits.

Very superficial I know, it may be just me.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually recommended by YC:

"One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It's like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It's like an answering service, but for email. It's eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Don't worry that it will make your idea seem "derivative." Some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas no one realized could be combined."

[http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html](http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html)

<comment><USER32> Good to know where it comes from. I still hate it I have to say, probably for the reason they mention i.e. it comes off as derivative. But yet I don't argue that some of the best ideas in history began by sticking together two existing ideas. I'm conflicted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Love the idea, been using iA Writer for MAC to work on my book. But since I'm co-authoring with somebody else this would be the best tool to use. Too bad you didn't get into YC (just like me and many others), but you got a user (an possibly many more after getting on HN)!

Just apply again next time when you're able to show some traction!

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't know if this idea will be successful or not, but as a long time lurker here at HN I think the way you are putting yourself out there is fantastic. Keep up the good work and see this thing through.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think one founder is an automatic no at the amount of applications they have now, even if they say it maybe ok. I'd just check off all applications with one person and not have to worry about them.

<comment><USER36> It isn't an automatic no. If it was, they would just say that. It is probably an easy no and gets passed by quickly without a really compelling idea/product, some revenue already, past success and you don't really need YC, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think penflip is a great idea, and if you have a usable product already you might want to consider marketing it to people attempting NaNoWriMo

<comment><AUTHOR> Already on it! A small barrier is the $6000 donation to become an official NaNoWriMo sponsor, but I'm managing to get some NaNoWriMo writers on the platform through other means.

<comment><USER23> See if you can scrape emails off public library websites They often advertise book writing month on a board and might happily add the web link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What caught my eye - number of n/a answers. It shows a certain level of ignorance on the applicant part. If these questions are included, they are included for a reason.

Second, single founder is a not a good fit for YC - everyone knows about it. Not addressing this issue wasn't very smart.

The Airbnb stunt is another proof that Loren wants more to stand out than to fit in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ignorance? Not at all. YC has thousands of applications to read in a short period of time. If a question says "If you're already incorporated, when were you?" and I go on to explain why I'm not incorporated, I'm wasting their time. N/A means "I'm not incorporated, this does not apply to me." Go and read the questions that have N/A as answers. They simply do not apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Github for writers is big though dude. Get some traction and everybody will lick your toes!

</comment><comment><USER40> This is an Great idea man! I would like meet up and get to know more about your project.

</comment><comment><USER41> don't lose heart. YC is not the end of the road for you. keep on trying.

</comment><comment><USER42> Penflip is similar to a project I'm working on. We should talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, shoot me an email (see profile for email)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Thanks for sharing this, interesting. However, why don't you mention Google Docs and Dropbox as competitors? Google docs already does this, and Dropbox seems to be clearly heading this way.

<comment><USER44> He does, right there in the section called "Who are your competitors?":

"Indirect competitors: (...), Google Docs, Dropbox, (...)"

Edit: BTW, he also mentions them in the video linked to near the top of the application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Really like the editor of the penflip.

</comment><comment><USER46> BTW: I really like the clean design.

</comment><comment><USER47> Are you still seeking funding?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not actively, right now, but possibly in the future. Going to bootstrap and possibly attempt to monetize soon.

I wasn't even looking to YC for the funding, really, mostly just the network and mentorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Getting into YC shouldn't be your goal. Build your own business is.

</comment><comment><USER35> What's up with the n/a on your application?

<comment><AUTHOR> certain questions were not applicable - no cofounder, not incorporated yet, no other incubators, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Good work man!</comment>


What sort algorithm is this and what is it's runtime complexity? - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/en0/bd07ba2a82b88873a4790b79e94a7f7f <comment><USER2> a variation of bubble sort, so O(N^2)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's more a variation on Selection Sort. I agree on O(n*n)</comment></comment>


How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus - <AUTHOR> https://features.propublica.org/blood-spatter-analysis/herbert-macdonell-forensic-evidence-judges-and-courts/ <comment><USER2> See also: The dubious accuracy of fingerprint analysis, errors and contamination in DNA analysis, and the fortune telling that is criminal profiling ([https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous- mind...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous-minds)).

</comment><comment><USER3> These kinds of issues seem to crop up so often that it really makes me doubt the virtue of jury trials. People aren't experts, so they can easily be fooled by a good show. Wouldn't it make more sense to have trials with 3 judges who must agree to convict?</comment>


Single-Click Double-Tap Murder - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/22/single-click-double-tap-murder/

<comment><USER2> > psychotic mass murderers.

"Psychosis" is a real word with real meaning. It's frustrating when people use it as a slang word because that use stigmatises people with mental health problems.

It's possible that someone in a spree shooting has never had a psychotic episode and was not psychotic when they were shooting.

(<https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001553.htm>)

Psychotic episodes are not just caused by mental illness. They can be a symptom of other illnesses - Brain diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease; Brain tumors or cysts; HIV and other infections that affect the brain; Some types of epilepsy; or Stroke.

(It's a shame that 'psychotic' is similar to 'psychopathic'. And that most people have almost no understanding of either condition.)

> The same applies to drone warfare. It's suddenly so much easier to pull the > trigger, and you're not putting any of your own people at risk. And so more > people die.

The military kills people. We stopped caring whether those people were civilians during WWII. Our military kills people with a variety of weapons. Shock and awe didn't feel particularly targeted. The cluster bombs that kill and maim hundreds of people each year don't feel particularly targeted. Cluster bombs are currently illegal, but the US and Britain have been trying to get the ban over-turned.

I don't understand why drones, as a weapon of war, are getting so much attention at the moment compared to other weapons of war. Dead civilians are dead whether they're killed by drones or landmines or cluster bomblets or whatever.

<comment><USER3> I think if one is going to have a war or be at war, it's reasonable to use a method which tries to minimize 'friendly' casualties first and e'enemy' collateral damage second. Ie. does it reduce 'friendly' casualties? Does it reduce collateral deaths on the other side? I think the answer is yes to both.

I think drones reduce both and as such are a good thing, if one is going to be at war. Recall how in VN the VC suffered 2million casualties? Lots of that was due to collateral damage. Or in Afghanistan how the Russians decimated the enemy? That's traditional warfare.

The issue with remoteness and 'coldness' is an attempt to make this approach less palatable (appeal to some kind of war ethics?) on the other hand, if we were sending personnel on foot (a la vietnam) and people (soldiers) were dying by the dozen daily, people would feel aggrieved too (naturally).

Therefore I think what people should protest is 'war' not just a 'kind of war' because, to be honest, this new kind of war, if there needs to be one (and that's debatable of course), has its advantages over traditional (and that's becoming less traditional) warfare. It's less bloody and incurs less collateral damage is more targeted and effective.

So I think psychologically perhaps UAVs seem asymmetrical and unfair to a technological backward foe but realistically, they are at a huge disadvantage in traditional warfare anyway.

As weird as it sounds, I think UAVs are more effective and antiseptic than traditional warfare and thus 'better' as compared to boots on the ground.

<comment><USER4> I think that the general fear is that war will turn into a 'video game' played by a bunch of people in a secure warehouse in middle America. This will remove the human aspect of what is going on at the other end of the controls, and we'll be less likely to get 'soldiers' doing things like questioning orders.

<comment><USER5> I think that's a rather silly fear.

If the targets on _your_ screen were real people, would you not take the situation seriously?

Or, let's put it another way. Bombers don't interface with targets personally; they're on the screen. Fighter pilots, too, for the most part. Artillery? Definitely. How about SAM operators? All they see is radar blips. Cruise missiles? ICBMs? People have to operate and launch those. How about an AWACS doing command and control? Their screens look like Starcraft with crappy graphics.

Do _any_ of these people see themselves as gamers rather than soldiers? I don't know any who do.

The gravity of the situation comes from knowing that you're really involved in combat. Not from how good the graphics are.

<comment><USER6> The Milgram experiment [1] showed that people who perceived themselves to under the influence of an authority will hurt other people when told to do so. The idea that soldiers are immune to this effect is irrational; in reality, this influence is probably a factor in their training regimes.

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

<comment><USER5> Soldiers, at least in our military, are also trained to counter this effect: they take an oath to obey lawful orders, and they know they have a _duty_ to disobey unlawful orders. In fact, the modern soldier knows that if he obeys an illegal order, _he can be prosecuted for it_.

This experiment hasn't been done, to my knowledge, but how do you think milgram would have gone if they had begun the experiment by explaining the difference between ethical and unethical orders, and telling people they could be prosecuted for following the unethical ones?

Most normal people haven't thought that through, and are unprepared to make that kind of decision. But soldiers have. Like a doctor professionally worries about malpractice, a soldier spends his entire career thinking that through.

<comment><USER6> That's fair. It'd be interesting to examine your perspective viz Milgram with regard to non-American military groups.

<comment><USER5> I think it's present, but not a dominant factor. Depends on culture and training.

What Milgram measured was how inexperienced people react to a new ethical situation. If he had tested people who were familiar with the context--fellow scientists--I very much suspect the results would be different. That's true in many fields. You might be able to intimidate a junior engineer into including a substandard part in a safety-critical area, but a senior engineer will refuse. And then he'll quit. It's not that he has more character; he has more experience.

Soldiers have a lot of experience. If you order them to hurt people immorally, their reactions are more like the senior engineer than the junior one: measures of character, not measures of how quickly they can think about a new situation.

There have always been soldiers who said, at the eventual trial, that they were "just following orders". I think they're generally inexperienced, but I'm sure there are cowards who think that way at the end of a career, too. I'm sure the prevalence depends on culture and training, but that does show that the effect Milgram measured is present.

I do have some evidence that it isn't dominant, though. Historically speaking, conquering armies have behaved in conquered countries pretty much as they pleased--sometimes very badly. But to get a soldier to kill his own countrymen, it has generally been necessary to threaten him or his family with death -- mere orders have not been enough. The soldier has a limit on what he'll do for authority, and he'll quit sooner than Milgram's subjects did.

It takes courage to make a high stakes moral decision correctly; I won't claim that everyone has it. I don't know what the rate is, and I expect it varies widely by culture and training. But I do think that in order to measure it, you need to test professionals. Extrapolating from amateurs isn't good enough. Perhaps a repeat Milgram would be a start: test all the same subjects again a week later, after they've had plenty of time to think about the experience.

<comment><USER7> Moreover, the Milgram behaviors were pretty much par for what young enlisted men do when left to their own devices on a good day. The senior NCOs know this and _make sure they are not left to their own devices_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Drones really needs to be studied badly in terms of how they are going to change the future of warfare, especially as more and more new countries gets access to them.

If I was a secret service coordinator, I would be shacking in my boots when I think about how to protect the president when any enemy, whether they are a country, a terrorist group, or just a lone nutjob (and how do you even identify a lone nut job? The norwegian police pretty much admitted that they couldn't, after the debacle with the loser who shot up a kid camp), can make or adapt a drone and fly it from far away?

The president is safe now, because very few people are completely unconcerned with their own lives, but with drones we may never know who was really responsible for the attack.

Drones even have the potential to be more dangerous to political groups than nukes, because nukes are so difficult to make that the only entities who could make them are the large, advanced, countries that have too much to lose if they were ever used. Drones are much easier, especially as all it really takes to make a lethal killing machine from a standard drone is to strap a rocket launcher on one.

And yes, private people can buy drones (<http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar- drone/select-site>) for surprisingly little money (less than all but the cheapest computers) -- true they can't carry any load at present, but that is almost guaranteed to change in the future since drones have plenty of business usages, in industries such construction and transportation (and possible in the service industry, if the tacocopter takes of).

And if there is one thing a terrorist could get their hands on with relative ease it is rockets and even if they somehow can't you can properly do pretty decent damage just putting an AK47 on it.

There is a final, perhaps more sinister issue with drones -- unlike nukes you don't have much, if any, idea of where they came from; and if you don't know where they came form, how do you make sure that the enemy knows that you will retaliate? And if they don't know that, what is to stop them from using the nukes on you? Heck isn't it better, all things considered, that you attack first?

<comment><USER9> One of my hobbies is FPV flying with RC planes and quads, so I can comment on "consumer grade" drones.

The ARDrone is completely a toy. It has a range of about 20m before the video cuts out and the quad flies away by itself, crashing into a building or just falling out of the sky.

That said, you can make a long distance plane complete with video, gps and autopilot for $1000 - $2000. Depending on setup, flight time is between 15 minutes and an hour, with effective ranges up to 20km.

HOWEVER, very few people are capable of pulling off long distance FPV. Hell, most people fail at short distance FPV. The gear is hard, radio interference is a huge bitch (especially if you are near any urban area) and frankly, it's hard to fly a little plane made out of foam. They get knocked around by wind gusts really easily.

Any rotor platform (tris, quads, etc) are limited in range to 1-2km max, simply because you can't strap enough batteries onto the thing for longer range. Flight times are 15-30 minutes with current technology

Obviously, technology is going to continue to advance. And if the project is bankrolled by a government, all bets are off. But lone terrorists are going to have a hard time pulling off a drone attack. You can simply triangulate their signal (both the radio control and the video feed, which also usually includes a GPS downlink) and know exactly where they are transmitting from. Interfering with a drone is as simple as jamming the radio spectrum they are using...most drones (planes or quads) have about 10seconds before they crash into the ground when uncontrolled.

Lastly, carrying gear is really hard for any rotor platform. Max payload right now is a couple of kilos, usually a DSLR on a gimbal. These have to be lifted by octocopter setups (8 rotors) which absolutely kills battery efficiency. You get 15 minutes flighttime max, and the thing sounds like a swarm of killer bees.

<comment><USER10> I doubt terrorist-made drones will be remote controlled for exactly the reasons you just described; the skill level required is just too high. I'd expect them to work more like cruise missiles, a hand grenade strapped to a fixed-wing plane with a crude GPS-based autopilot that simply flies straight at the target. They might miss their targets more often than not, but that's not a big problem if your primary goal is to cause terror and mayhem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An easy way to spot a bullshit article with more concern for their agenda than truth is implying a comparison between numbers that can't be compared.

"Meanwhile, only 2 percent of the victims of the American drone war — a body count that now far exceeds the number who died in the World Trade Center — were "high-level militants" and hundreds upon hundreds were civilians."

Aside from quibbling with using "victims" to refer to "high-level militants", I would expect similar numbers from any military operation ever. How's this sound "only 2% of the victims of the american invasion of Iwo Jima were field- grade Japanese officers"?

Then we see the switch to comparing percentages to raw numbers. American's likely killed significantly more civilians in European bombing campaigns than we did in Hiroshima, but anyone with a shred of moral judgment can differentiate between civilians killed due to proximity to military targets (European bombing) vs. what we would call today state terrorism -- the intent to kill large numbers of civilians at Hiroshima to demonstrate our power.

So what percent of those killed in the drone strikes are civilians? To what extent does the military weigh the risk of killing civilians when evaluating potential missions? Is any of this unique to drone strikes?

I can't come to any conclusion but that this was just a generic collection of musings to generate outrage. It has nothing to do with Connecticut. It has nothing valuable to say about the ethics of drones. It's just troll baiting.

<comment><USER12> Dresden.

<comment><USER13> Dresden: 200K

Hiroshima: 100K

Nagasaki: 70K

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like the article is mostly empty scaremongering. Drones are inevitable, you can't stop technology marching forward. They may not be a bad thing, however. More drone warfare means fewer soldiers involved in conflict and fewer deaths. I think a lot of the handwringing over drones is just because it's OMG ROBOTS, rather than considering that these deaths would have happened anyway but would have also caused casualties and psychological damage to the troops that would have been in their place.

<comment><USER15> The criticism of drones isn't of the technology, but the attitude of those operating them. The article mentions that it doesn't put the operator's own people at risk, and is trying to point out that this creates a detachment from the consequences. Before, taking out a target required people on the ground in some capacity, actually carrying out the mission or just identifying the target. Drones undoubtably save the lives of troops on a per-engagement basis, but now that there isn't that risk, and without some process or oversight, it's becoming too easy to just pull the trigger and destroy some pixels on a screen.

<comment><USER16> I think it's actually the other way around. The stress of combat, the instinct to self-preservation, close contact with the horrors of war, and the loss of comrades likely makes troops on the ground more, not less, likely to commit atrocities or act callously towards civilians. Drone strikes are also easier to supervise and review.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Drones are only the beginning. The US military leads the World in developing military 'bots. The problem with having such an excessive military as ours is that the civilian leaders use to commit more and more stupid acts. With robotic weapons, so far fewer body bags returning to Dover, what will our "leaders" do then?

<comment><USER18> Another problem is that we, in other countries, don't think of America as the pinnacle of democracy or progress, don't think your causes as just, nor we believe you have any moral or other right to play global cop or to have access to cheap oil.

And yet, a large part of the US public and lots of its leaders, thinks those things about the US, and gives its blessing to foreign intervention.

Add to that that we also (what a shocker) value our lives and our cultures, and don't consider ourselves inferior barbarians to be "civilised" or "invaded", and you can understand our problem with drones.

In fact, some of us, view the US as the barbarians, burning villages 15.000 away from their country or throwing chemicals that kill and harm hundreds of thousands of people (Agent Orange), throwing nuclear bombs at civilians, doing medical tests on unsuspecting people ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment> ), invading sovereign countries with BS pretexts, keeping at "beyond law" prison, pushing for mass surveillance, ACTA and such. Heck, you even have segregated buses until 50 years ago. Even today, 70% of the prison population is non whites, while at the same time you have the highest incarceration rate on earth ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate) ). Heck, you guys still have the death penalty!

A country like that PLUS drones? The stuff that nightmares are made of...

<comment><USER19> The U.S. was founded by hypocrites who didn't want to be enslaved to a regime, so they killed off the natives, and enslaved people of color then called it freedom.

Hypocritical idealism from the U.S. should probably be expected. Though at times the U.S. was probably the least evil option.

<comment><USER20> You really have this backwards. The slaughter of Aboriginal Americans was done under the flags of multiple European Empires, long before independence was even a catchphrase in the colonies.

If we want to play the historical blame game, both Europe and the USA need to STFU. Along with every other country on Earth, each of whom have a litany of abuses and atrocities they won't own up to.

<comment><USER19> No, I do not have it backwards. The persecution of the Native Americans and Africans continued well after U.S. became a nation. Just because abuses started before the U.S. was founded, doesn't excuse the hypocritical foundation the U.S. was built off of.

No doubt that other European countries have their own bloody histories. However, the ease with which history is glossed over, and propaganda is spread regarding the supposedly democratic freedoms the U.S. ushered in, seems predominantly a U.S. issue.

<comment><USER5> Hypocracy implies no desire to change. The US did, eventually, deliver on its promises. That says to me that the ideals were aspirational, not hypocritical.

<comment><USER18> > _Hypocracy implies no desire to change. The US did, eventually, deliver on > its promises. That says to me that the ideals were aspirational, not > hypocritical._

Did it though? Or was it just forced to change some things due to mass protests or because it found other ways to get the same conveniences?

I mean, who needs slave labor when you can have an industrial revolution, factories and tractors? That doesn't mean that the old slaves are not equal -- you then have Jim Crow laws, segregation, 70% of prisoners being non-white and other methods of control.

Plus have you talked with native americans, say, in the South Dacota? They have some interesting things to say about the country "delivering on its promises".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You can buy remote control aircraft that can carry up to 10kg weight. We make custom built octocopters for carrying a RED EPIC digital cinema camera, large lens, gyro and a hefty bunch of batteries (check <http://londonhelicam.co.uk>).

Right now, drones larger than Parrot AR Drone are fairly complex pieces of technology, which will hopefully help to keep them away from crazy people. But I admit it's scary to think what they could be used for once they become a commodity.

<comment><USER22> Cool stuff! What is the price range currently, on order of magnitude - 1k? 10k? 100k?

<comment><USER21> DenisM - depends on your requirements, definitely not 100k, but not 1k either. Feel free to drop me a line if you have something in mind?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very serious charge. Whether it's with drones, artillery, rifles, or bare hands doesn't matter. If they have solid evidence of the military intentionally (or recklessly) targeting civilian first-responders, I'd think they should be looking to have charges filed against the individuals responsible.

<comment><USER23> You are correct that they should charged if they were to target a civilian, but you are neglecting the definition of "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.".

Once that male first responder is in the US-determined strike zone (ie, his country of birth) he is a combatant -- and hence an justified target ---until proven otherwise, which can only be after he is dead. By this definition, there is legally no such thing as a living male adult civilian first responder.

Sadly, the US doesn't even deny that they make follow-up strikes: 'We don't discuss classified programs or comment on alleged strikes.' Anyway, who else would attempt to aid a wounded combatant (male funeral goer) other than another combatant (grieving male relative)?

[http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama- terror...](http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror- drones-cia-tactics-in-pakistan-include-targeting-rescuers-and-funerals/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A fascinating parallel field is the development of EMP weapons - and they're no longer science fiction as Boeing recently detonated the first "successful EMP bomb" (1) w/the help of the military.

A well placed EMP could literally knock out a Drone operator's electronics (even if the operator is deep in a bunker (2)), or target a drone itself.

(1) [http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/boeings- new-m...](http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/boeings-new-missile- takes-down-electronics-without-touching-them-1C6663618)

(2) <http://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb4.htm>

</comment><comment><USER25> "Worse yet, the way things are going, it's only a matter of time until alpha insurgencies like Hezbollah and the Zetas have their own fleets of armed or kamikaze drones."

And who will make and sell them those drones? Probably the same companies that are selling them to the US Army today. The way things are going right now, I envision warfare in the future being much like in the Terminator Salvation movie. The only difference is that the "machines" might not be self-aware (although they could be automatic), but they will be controlled by other humans. But in places where the war will actually happen, all you'll see is a battle between machines and men being slaughtered by them.

<comment><USER8> Steal a tacocopter and stick a granade under it -- that should enable you to take out the target (and leave a pretty decent mystery for the local authorities to solve. How do you prove who flew the plane? Who fixed the handgranade?).

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's that simple. For starters, there's probably a very short list of people who own tacocopters, let alone people who own grenades.

If it becomes a problem, I can think of countermeasures -- register the things, ban them in public spaces/require flight plans, detect and triangulate the control signal. Heck, you could just look around; with a low tech system like that, whoever's flying the thing needs line of sight to it in order to identify the target. It's noisy and slow and I'd expect not nearly as effective as stealing a car and doing a drive-by shooting.

But more than that, I'd be very surprised if that sort of thing becomes a problem. Normal people aren't murderers. Think about all the poisons, explosives, and highly kinetic pieces of equipment normal people have access to _right now_.

<comment><USER8> Getting a grenade is pretty easy, and I meant stealing the tacopter to get around the flightplan issue you can order him the taco using a stolen credit card, the intercept it using a butterfly net.</comment></comment></comment></comment>