Oil traders are watching workers' phones to spot problems at refineries - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/traders-can-now-spot-oil-refinery-problems-by-tracking-phones <comment><USER2> I've heard from a friend who used to work in Houston refineries, that it's not unusual for refinery workers (who do carry mobile phones, by the way) to call their brokers immediately when they hear an explosion or see an unexpected plume of smoke from a neighboring refinery.

Also smoking on the job is apparently much more common at refineries than I would have expected.

Edit: this comment reflects the state of the industry 20 years ago, second hand. Take it for what it's worth.

<comment><USER3> _Of course_ people smoke where it doesn't make much sense.

I mean, think about it for a second.

<comment><USER4> I thought about it and couldn't figure out why it's obvious. Care to share some light on that?

<comment><USER3> Smoking a cigarette has its downsides no matter how flammable the greater surrounding environment happens to be.

<comment><USER5> So in your world, if you're willing to be X amount self-destructive or accept X risk, you're also willing to accept X + Y risk or self destruction regardless of how large Y is. Got it.

<comment><USER3> No, I just expect that acceptance of X is correlated with acceptance of Y.

(and really, much of the time, acceptance is the wrong word. Indifference or something like that often fits better)

<comment><USER6> Which also doesn't hold. I'm willing to invest my money, but I'm not sticking it into penny stocks. Your reasoning ignores any sort of reasonable boundary people have wrt risk.

<comment><USER3> That's not what correlated means.

<comment><USER6> You're right. Correlated does not mean "people who have historically take risks will take any risk regardless of the danger."

<comment><USER3> Which shouldn't have quote because it wasn't what I said, and isn't even a fair reading of what I said.

Correlated implies a _statistical_ relationship, ruling out phrases like "will take any risk regardless" and requiring phrases more like "may tend to" and such.

And then I even said that I "expect" the correlation, so it's probably reasonable to read the usage as more conversational than scientific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not surprised in the least. The industry is full of stories that started out as rumors but have ended up proven as true about the lengths they will go for more or better information.

I've heard an apocryphal story that I'm still waiting for truth on. It was of a soybean prop trading firm quant who reverse engineered a cross-town rival's trading strategy, allowing them to front run their strategy. The way that they did it was taking a number from the firm's name, and using it as a random number seed, and then using that seed to find the randomized order sizes would result from their iceberg order algorithm. They would use those sizes to match to l2 passive limit order flow to try to identify activity coming from the firm. Once they discovered the direction the firm was going, they'd place a huge market order and suck up all of the liquidity that the competitor was trying to acquire passively, effectively moving the market before their competitor could fill their position.

Stuff like this still blows me away, but it's just crazy enough to be true.

<comment><USER8> I heard that story from a quant friend. However, the way I heard the story, the targeted firm found out about their rival's attempt to game their strategy, and faked a bunch of activity. The rival's algorithm acted on the activity and placed a large market order...in the wrong direction.

<comment><USER9> This is called spoofing and is illegal.

<comment><USER10> From a place of total ignorance, why would telegraphing a particular false strategy to your competitor in order to get them to respond in a way that is profitable to you be illegal?

<comment><USER11> Because you're not just telegraphing it to your competitor, you're moving the entire market and affecting the bid/ask and price transparency for all its participants. That affects liquidity, derivatives, a lot of downstream negatives.

That said, there are narrow instances where you can place less-than-real orders in a market [0]... it just has to be a market that is nearly and completely illiquid.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-04/trying...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-04/trying- to-buy-stuff-you-want-is-not-manipulation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Soooo

1\. Generate fake phone profiles of a made-up disaster crew

2\. Wait for minor disaster at random refinery

3\. Feed trackers with location data showing your fake crew moving into that refinery

4\. Repeat 2, 3 to associate your profiles with disaster

5\. Short some fine $refinery stock

6\. Move your crew to $refinery

7\. Profit

I wonder whether this has already been pulled off :-)

<comment><USER13> 8\. Indicted for fraud

<comment><USER14> don't think this is fraud. Oil refineries aren't lying about their oil production to the general public. It's the hedge funds' fault for relying on their location data.

<comment><USER15> It is market manipulation. In the United States it is prohibited under Section 9(a)(2) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. [1].

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How are they gathering this data?

Are they placing detection equipment at/near the target locations to monitor for cell phone signatures in the vicinity, or are they gathering from mobile apps who resell location data to aggregation firms?

<comment><USER17> Yea that wasn't clear. The article made it sound like they're aggregating data from various sources that collect location data (probably from those app metric providers like Tune and others). So if someone ran an open source phone with F-Droid or just installed zero apps with metrics (and Google isn't one of their sources), they wouldn't ever show up in this data set.

I'm guessing location data comes from the Apple/Google location APIs that can map peoples aprox locations based on their proximity to Wi-Fi points (I think they register Wi-Fi points and then the first GPS signal the phone gets after; like when someone walks outside, and use a set of those to get approximate triangulation for indoor Wi-Fi APs).

<comment><USER18> Google and apple done sell data from their location APIs that would be suitable for this.

I reckon it'll be coming from catriers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've envisioned an application like the following for construction sites and industrial installations:

There would be a "supervisor" app with a schematic 3D model of the site, with dots or tags indicating the location of smartphones of workers, who have installed a satellite app.

There would be messaging between the satellite apps and the supervisor app, and a worker with a satellite app could stream video or post pictures to their tag, which could then be accessed from the supervisor app.

There could also be a VR/AR version of this. No video stream would take over the POV of the VR/AR users. Rather, the streams would be available as pop-up "screens" from the location tags on the schematic model.

For bonus points, interface this with CAD/CAM, so that not only the schematic model can be imported, but the design details can be accessed and drilled- down, and relayed to the workers on-site.

The purpose would be to provide answers and clarifications to workers very quickly, as well as providing contextual information localized in the 3D space of the design to supervisors, architects, and engineers.

Is there already something like this?

<comment><USER20> You're loosely describing BIM (Building information modeling)[1], but you definitely bring up some novel points that aren't covered by existing BIM softwares, to my knowledge.

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

<comment><USER21> Yeah, this is pretty much what a plethora of punchlisting platforms do currently, but in the form of annotated photos captured on an iPad and automatically tagged to the site plan rather than realtime video feeds (which is both more practical and preferable from a liability standpoint, as the GC and architect both have incentive to maintain a paper trail of who approved X change, etc.) The AR angle certainly sounds cool but even aside from the HW not being there yet, I'm not sure how it would add much value.

<comment><USER19> _photos captured on an iPad and automatically tagged to the site plan rather than realtime video feeds (which is both more practical and preferable from a liability standpoint, as the GC and architect both have incentive to maintain a paper trail of who approved X change, etc.)_

There's no reason why the realtime video feed and the voice communication between the architect and GC couldn't be tagged and timestamped as well.

 _The AR angle certainly sounds cool but even aside from the HW not being there yet, I 'm not sure how it would add much value._

For plans/models which have some 3D complexity, being able to crane your neck and move your POV around might be valuable for understanding exactly what's going on. This might be more applicable to building the 1st iteration of something like a large jetliner than to a building, though I've heard of situations in the building of stadiums where this would've been applicable.

The point is really to save the project time by letting the workers ask clarifying questions quickly, while enabling engineers and architects to understand the situation quickly, all while communicating in realtime. The turnaround for answering such questions probably couldn't get faster than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm confused, throughout the article it mentions _contractors_ being in oil facilities. But it also says "Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it."

So how do they know these people are contractors? Or are they just measuring the raw number of people in the oil facilities?

<comment><USER23> If you have lots of location data say in Houston, and then suddenly in a refinery that's not in their normal day-to-day location data you could assume it's a contractor being called into investigate an on-site problem. or if you detect increased activity from devices that don't have a history on-site. Not 100%, but then they're not going for 100% either.

<comment><USER24> Step 1: Get list of recent past problems at different refineries from news or people there after the fact or any number of ways.

Step 2: Get past location data that includes these periods (but spans a much larger time).

Step 3: Analyze what's different about the problem times compared to normal operation.

In some cases, it might actually be as simple as X% of work force doesn't come in for normal shift on what is otherwise a normal day.

<comment><USER25> The discoveries through big-data analysis and visualizations can be endlessly counter-intuitive, mindblowingly unpredictable but also dynamic and powerful, even visceral when you have massively voluminous data that can be fed into systems like Tableau where you can actively tweak data queries, aggregations, transformations and visualization types.

The result can often be something akin to: "wow, who could have ever predicted that this data would extrapolate out to show such a unique visualization or trend"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Satellite companies also track shale drilling rigs. There are a few 'stages' in the lifecycle of drilling rig, with a focus on "DUP" rigs -- drilled but uncompleted -- which can be brought online on short notice( _). The various stages of development require crews of different experience or expertise. I was told that some /a company is able figure out the phone numbers of crews accustomed to (I think) bringing DUP wells fully online. Then they are able to monitor as they move around the permian or bakken and assess how many wells are brought online. I'm not sure that they know phone number (333)2920-2920 is Frank Jones the Expert, but they do know that the arrival of (333)2920-2920 and a cluster of other numbers is associated with a DUP well turning on production shortly after.

(_)I'm not very familiar with the shale fracking process, so don't jump on me for technical inaccuracy.

Also there are many tongue-in-cheek or naive comments about refineries feigning problems, or knowledge of refinery issues being licenses to print money in futures. It's not even close.

Many of the important refineries in the US are monitored 24/7 by third party companies (eg. Genscape) who stare at refineries with thermal cameras. These immediately notice potential problems, as flaring occurs, or some unit dramatically changes temp (gets hotter or cooler), updating subscribers in moments. There are similar services that scrape all the public-warning systems that refineries must use to inform residents when they have emissions or problems.

Finally, while no doubt there are times when refinery upsets (particularly for major gasoline-producing refineries) occur there is an immediate, clear, exploitable move in futures markets [in fact recently], there are also many times when that knowledge would have been swamped by some other force. *I recall reading a few months ago that someone analysed a literal insider traders' trade history and realized they weren't able to exploit to nearly the level you'd expect. It just turns out that markets are absurdly complicated.

</comment><comment><USER14> And the next step in this race will be oil refineries buying a bunch of put options, then intentionally getting a bunch of strangers with smartphones into their refineries to trick hedge funds that there is something wrong, then watching those put options skyrocket. Would that be insider trading?

</comment><comment><USER27> A clever person could defeat this entire system in a day.

If you look at the graph, currently we're talking about a fluctuation of about 7 devices.

All you'd have to do is set up a handful of devices (or emulate them and spoof the GPS).. download some sketchy apps, or look for apps that have ties to this company, to bump the location information up. Then turn the devices on or off, so that there's never any change.

If I was the oil company I'd probably set up a shell company to buy the data feed as well so I could get it perfect.

<comment><USER28> If you're the oil company you probably don't care one bit if a trader is making money on the price of oil, because it isn't coming out of the oil companies profits. It's coming from other traders.

<comment><USER29> if that were true they would just publicize their production numbers

<comment><USER28> They still don't want their competitors to know how well they're doing or their suppliers, who might increase their prices if they know the company is doing well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if there's companies who sell ELD info similar to other examples listed in here about carriers and apps selling user info. Having ELD info from truckers around refineries and drill sites would give you a pretty good insight as to what's going on.

<comment><USER31> ELD info?

<comment><USER32> Google suggests that it's electronic logging device, which is used to track transportation regulatory compliance. It likely includes location data.

Top google result - [https://eldfacts.com/eld- facts/](https://eldfacts.com/eld-facts/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 'Humans as sensors' could be the next tech "big thing". And 'human body as power source for gadgets' will follow.

We are closer to The Matrix with each year passed.

<comment><USER34> How are you sure we aren't already in The Matrix?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think many people will agree with me that this kind of data collection is creepy and unfortunate, but if it's the world we live in then we should try to use it for good. I'm struggling to think of a way that a non or for-profit could use aggregate data to predict events in a way that would generally be considered a net positive to society. Does anything come to mind?

</comment><comment><USER36> Well, I must say I didn't expect big corporations would get their "privacy" violated by tacking apps.

Do you think it's cheaper to just buy back the data or to set up their own cell towers and block the app traffic?

<comment><USER37> Or just buy a load of cheap burner phones and fake out the data - use some cheap drones to make them move around :-)

A bit like some people hire actors to pretend you have more employees.

<comment><USER38> _A bit like some people hire actors to pretend you have more employees._

Could you expand on this or link to an example? It seems like this wouldn't be cost effective (or useful).

<comment><USER39> This is done to simulate popular launches (eg. hire people to wait in line when your new store or restaurant opens, to give the impression that the new place is hot) or for faking headcount metrics for investors (eg. hire people for a day when the investors come, so they can gawk at the open office full of people).

It's ethically dubious, but if it's done for a day or two, it's not that expensive compared to actually hiring that many people on a full time basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Wouldn't it be quicker and more accurate to just survey contracting firms? Seems massively over engineered and not very reliable.

<comment><USER41> They are traders not oil refinery managers. If a trader has the knowledge that a refinery is having a problem minutes or even seconds before other traders they can use that to their advantage and maybe make profit in the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Perhaps I am being horribly naive, but how is this relocation data being sourced?

</comment><comment><USER37> Why would you allow a mobile phone with its spark hazard any where near an oil refinery.

<comment><USER43> Probably because no one has ever actually documented sparks caused by mobile phone RF emissions, at least any in current use. That was essentially a bunch of pseudoscientific FUD.

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fuelish- pleasures/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fuelish-pleasures/)

Power switches with mechanical contacts on older phones might be a different story, but again, there's no smoking gun (or flaming refinery) that points to this having ever been an issue.

<comment><USER44> My thought was that it was always older style cellphones with detachable batteries, and careless user dropping phone, detaching battery, and -that- caused a spark, not RF emissions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> sounds like what they really need is an app with 6 choices, and subheading on when to use the choices

BUY OIL when explosion or war constricts the supply

SELL OIL when new resource is found increasing the supply

BUY OIL COMPANY when new resource is found increasing the supply AND when the company increases its ability to sell more oil at higher margins

SELL OIL COMPANY when explosion happens on company property

BUY OIL PRICE ETF when you want to go long oil but are too poor/risk averse for futures contract

SELL OIL PRICE ETF when you want to go short oil but are too poor/risk averse for futures contract</comment>


Women as Background Decoration (in Video Games) - <AUTHOR> http://www.feministfrequency.com/2014/06/women-as-background-decoration-tropes-vs-women/

<comment><AUTHOR> This was posted by another HN member a couple months ago but received no comments. I reposted since the video has received more attention in the past several days and Anita Sarkeesian and her family have now received death threats, simply for Sarkeesian's commentary on women in video games.</comment>


The new bower.io - <AUTHOR> http://bower.io/ <comment><USER2> In a fair world, the time and energy that went into Bower would have been spent making npm just a little bit better for front-end stuff. `npm dedupe` is halfway there. Now I have to deal with two arbitrary sources of dependencies.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't you say the same thing about time spent on npm which could have gone into apt or yum?

<comment><USER4> The problem I have with apt, yum, etc... is that the packages for development are so old that you're going to be compiling from source and managing your own updates, which is exactly the problem a good package manager should solve.

<comment><USER5> The big difference is that packages that land in the official apt repositories have been heavily tested by the apt repository maintainers. Anyone can push a package to PyPI for example. There is a clear trade off between using packages from apt/yum and your toolchain's package managers.

In practice, I do find it much easier to pin dependencies and install from my toolchain's package manager (pip/PyPI).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Possibly a stupid question, but ... Can anybody explain to me the use case for Bower/Yeoman?

Whenever I am adding javascript to a website I just use a cdn such as [http://cdnjs.com/](http://cdnjs.com/)

Why would I use Bower instead of this? Is it more of a node.js thing? Or is it something to do with hosting your own copies of the libraries instead of a CDN (I thought this was frowned upon)

<comment><USER7> Dependencies. For example, Backbone depends on Underscore, and simply writing <script src="underscore.js"/><script src="backbone.js"/> encodes nothing about that fact. There's nothing stopping you updating Backbone to say a 2.0 that requires features in Underscore 2.0, but forgetting to update Underscore. On the other hand, bower update backbone will see dependencies: {"underscore": "^2.0"} in bower.js and update Underscore as well.

<comment><USER8> Is it something like NuGet for .NET packages but for Javascript? Does that mean that an ASP.NET MVC application using NuGet wouldn't really have any "need" for Bower?

<comment><USER9> It's similar but for you to not "need" bower but get the same from NuGet, you'd have to make sure that every JS library you need is on NuGet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are reasons to use bower over NPM? I know that bower mainly focusses on front-end libraries (such as jQuery or Bootstrap). But does it offer functionality NPM doesn't have?

<comment><USER11> bower manages your script tags in the html file. It also supports partial inclusion of libraries.

<comment><USER7> > bower manages your script tags in the html file

no, it doesn't. bower has nothing to do with module loading.

<comment><USER11> you are technically right. It's the grunt bowerInstall.

<comment><USER12> FTFY:you are right

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've always thought of Bower as an easier-to-use Git submodule manager.

<comment><USER14> That's an interesting idea. Does it work well with non-js repositories?

<comment><USER15> Yes. Twitter Bootstrap is a popular Bower repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So I use a package manager (apt) to install a package manager (npm) to install a package manager (bower). Am I going to blow my stack soon?

</comment><comment><USER17> has anything changed other than the site design?

<comment><USER7> Actually, pretty much everything _except_ the site design has changed: [http://web.archive.org/web/20140517000522/http://bower.io/](http://web.archive.org/web/20140517000522/http://bower.io/)

<comment><USER18> Pretty much everything? What exactly? I can't see much different

<comment><USER19> Off the top of my head, this is new: "Bower requires Node and npm and Git."

I remember thinking it was very odd that the old version of the site said that bower had no dependencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20279792/how-to-update- bo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20279792/how-to-update-bower-json- with-installed-packages) still the case?

e.g. I forgot to install a package with --save and I want to update bower.json. With pip I just do pip freeze > requirements.txt

</comment><comment><USER21> Why would I use bower over npm with browserify? Seems like a large step back.</comment>


What is the best way to consume Twitter Streaming API using python? - <AUTHOR>

I wish to use Twitter's Streaming API to search tweets having a particular keyword. Any modules, libraries or tutorials that can help? <comment><USER2> <https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy></comment>


Twitch – Changes To Audio In VODS - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitch.tv/2014/08/3136/

<comment><USER2> Content tagging like this will make games like GTAV not watchable in VOD or Highlight format. These changes plus the removal of the 'save forever' option for past broadcasts seem to indicate a new opening in the market.

It will be very interesting to see how these changes play out in the twitch community.

<comment><USER3> Or games like Ocarina of Time, or possibly even Final Fantasy series, which are popular for speedrunning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like a terrible move. Aren't _all_ video game soundtracks under copyright (not just ones that use popular/radio music)?

If that's the case, isn't the logical conclusion of this no audio on twitch at all?

I don't quite understand what Google is doing here. This sort of policing is one thing on a general video site like YouTube, but why would you buy a site who's entire raison d'etre is streaming copyrighted material and then start policing it in this manner?

Why buy it at all if you just intend to ruin it?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a very serious hit to the appeal of Twitch.tv IMO. And it really feels like they were strongarmed into this, given the site was designed from day 1 for this kind of use.

<comment><USER6> The site is a lot less useful now.</comment></comment>


Anonymous – IMPORTANT Message to the Citizens of the World 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycLa2wtOAcM&feature=em-subs_digest <comment><USER2> It's 26 minutes long... Cut out the chaff (and Russell Brand), and skip to here for the actual message:

[https://youtu.be/ycLa2wtOAcM?t=1534](https://youtu.be/ycLa2wtOAcM?t=1534)</comment>


California now has more than 1,300 charter schools – Alt.Ed gone bad - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-charter-schools-20190327-htmlstory.html <comment><USER2> Mods— why is the title completely rewritten? The source article is titled, "How a couple worked charter school regulations to make millions."

My son is having a great experience at a well-run LA charter school and the current headline seems in violation of HN rules. [edit; now flagged tfa]

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed the title because the title seemed to be click baity and a personal attack.

I didn't want the discussion to be about the couple but about charter schools.

<comment><USER3> "Alt.Ed gone bad"? That's far more of an attack (and clickbait) than the article's title. As for discussion, nothing wrong with posting your opinion in the comments -- we all can discuss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi...So, if you read the article, it does talk about how charter schools in CA are managed and how extensive govt involvement is and how there is no oversight. So I still stand by my title. Maybe I could add 'California' (if I have enough words left) but otherwise I am comfortable with my choice of words for change in title.

Eta: looks like I can't edit it now.

<comment><USER2> I read the article (well, 75% so far). It's primarily how this couple gamed the system; I don't see that it casts the LAUSD policy or leaders in a bad light.

We all know any sufficiently byzantine bureaucracy can be gamed by motivated players. Such is the case here, it seems.

Contrast with my son's school: it's well-run, has strong leadership and wonderful teachers ... and they still have to work hard, year over year, to stay right with the LAUSD policies.

Tl;dr This story isn't about charter schools so much as it is a public outing of the weirdo couple who runs (and profits from) one specific charter in the LA system.

<comment><AUTHOR> [..]Twenty-seven years ago, when California became just the second state to enact a law establishing charter schools, state leaders framed the experiment as a modest one that would allow only 100 schools at first. Free-market advocates saw charters as a way to empower all students to choose from a variety of schools. Other supporters envisioned them as laboratories for testing new teaching methods and then bringing successes back to traditional public schools.

The new, privately operated schools would be government-funded and tuition- free. They would unleash creativity by liberating schools from many of the state education code's rules. But to ensure that they lived up to their promises and spent public money properly, they would have to be vetted and overseen by governmental bodies, beginning with the school districts in which they were located.

That was sufficient check and balance for the civic-minded individuals who ran many charter schools. But as the number of charters in the state grew, the same law that allowed many founders to try new ideas with great success created opportunities for others.

The law allowed for a multitude of different bodies to serve as "authorizers," watching over the new schools. It gave oversight power not just to the state board, but also to each of the state's many school districts and county boards of education — regardless of whether they had the ability or inclination to properly police the independently run schools.[..]

[..]About 330 government entities have the authority to authorize and supervise charters in California. By contrast, Texas, the state with the second-largest number of charter schools, has 18, according to its state education agency. New York has two active authorizers.

Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second-largest school district, has an entire division devoted to overseeing the charters it authorizes and is considered one of the state's most robust monitors. But the roster of charter authorizers also includes school districts with colorful histories of corruption and financial mismanagement. Some are so small that they have fewer than a dozen employees in all, with insufficient resources to be effective watchdogs.[..]

<<<<<\- Gone bad.

<comment><USER3> The article makes no such blanket conclusion.

"problems exist" != "gone bad"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There doesn't seem to be a real market type motivator to encourage charter schools to operate legitimately. I'm sure many do operate legitimately, but just hoping the proprietors do so and then expecting local school districts to dedicate resources to police them (something that is far outside their core competency) seems like a recipe for things going sideways.

<comment><USER5> The check on charter schools is that if they provide a bad education, the students will leave. If they create a bad working environment for teachers, the teachers will leave. The latter actually seems to have checked the subject of the article effectively: teacher turnover was high, and the teachers profiled here both ultimately did leave.

<comment><USER6> Students aren't the customers, they don't write the checks and make the decisions. A charter school can provide a bad education and convince parents to fund them anyways - touting religious stuff seems like the easiest path for this.

<comment><USER5> There's a principal-agent problem with all parenting: you're making decisions on behalf of another human being and hoping that those decisions line up with the best interests and wishes of the person in question.

Obviously this isn't _always_ the case, but both common sense and Western legal traditions assume that the parent's interests will be _most closely aligned_ with their child, and that they're better suited to make those decisions than a bureaucrat, a CEO, or even a teacher. Societies that assume the state is better qualified to make decisions on behalf of children than the parents are have gone to dark places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Charter schools are vastly superior with only one exception: school districts like to keep them underfunded. Which is absurd considering how much better they are in every way.

Both my kids go to charter schools.

<comment><USER8> Oh, where do I start. Let's trade anecdotes. One of my children went to a charter school and my experience is the opposite of yours.

<comment><USER3> Charter schools live or die on their own merits, which means (a) they're likely to be more variable in terms of quality than public schools, and (b) the best charter schools will _far_ exceed public schools in quality. As long as we're trading anecdotes, the charter schools I know of near me are extremely high quality. Several kids I know attend some of them, and their experience has been phenomenal.

Why not institute whatever's necessary to weed out those that are abusing the system (i.e. embezzling, failing to educate, etc.), and give people the freedom to decide on the rest?

I suspect a lot of the attacks on charter schools are coming from folks who view education primarily as a means of propagating their political viewpoints.

<comment><USER8> I don't necessarily agree with your (b) but I'll concede it if you agree to a (c) the worst charter schools can fall _far_ short of public schools on quality ... in agreement with your point (a).

Just read the linked LA Times article to see what I mean.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Go 2018 Survey Results - <AUTHOR> https://blog.golang.org/survey2018-results <comment><USER2> Go and Rust are actually a great combo with only a little overlap. What's great is that they are both C family and have some shared principles and flow.

When you need a decent concurrency story, moderate speed, and have a problem that is concrete, choose Go. It's a good candidate for replacing Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and smaller Java projects.

Rust is better if you need maximum performance, are building a large project where more abstraction where parametric polymorphism can help, or need thread safety. It's a replacement for larger Java projects, C++, and C.

Generally I write more Go projects, but my Rust projects tend to be bigger and are doing very complex things like user space networking or wringing maximum performance out of a kernel subsystem or running in a very low resource environment.

Both languages have made my teams enjoy their work more. We also have empirically measured a decrease in time spent fixing bugs and other production issues, as well as reduced resource consumption (mostly from getting rid of Python for Go) and snappier cli tools that are saving us $$$$$$ in terms of time and hardware). Both languages are built for modern problems and getting stuff done.

Also Go and Rust position us to hit Wasm hard. I can't understate how important Wasm support is and how both of these languages are already miles ahead of the competition. This is containers right before Docker. Your company should be pivoting or have a strategy to get on deck with these languages.

<comment><USER3> > Your company should be pivoting or have a strategy to get on deck with these > languages.

That's a bold blanket statement. Besides the fact that I would die inside a little if I had to use Go every day of my life, Go is in no position to replace any of the aforementioned languages (Python, Js, Ruby, C++), let alone all of them, not by a mile.

<comment><USER2> Not C++, but definitely the other languages outside of some non standard SWE domains like ML, where Python is going to be an obvious winner. Otherwise Go beats them by having a type system but still supporting duck typing through interfaces, having a modern concurrency story, being easier to learn (the Go spec can be read in one evening), having less features to abuse, faster development loops with lightning fast compile times and catching more errors at compile time, and just generally being faster and having a garbage collector that is tuned for low latency (a good fit for web services). We can also start faster which is really important for container workloads, idle with less memory which is important for horizontal scaling, and use less CPU which means smaller machines and more colo.

Go also favors libraries over frameworks and is super thoughtful about using too many untested dependancies which means we don't get stuck in frameworks that become legacy (rails) or use stuff that has security holes or that will change out from under us (npm).

<comment><USER4> >Go also favors libraries over frameworks and is super thoughtful about using too many untested dependancies which means we don't get stuck in frameworks that become legacy (rails)

The Go standard library doesn't come close to replicating the functionality of Rails, let alone the gem ecosystem of Ruby/Rails. If you don't need it, great! Otherwise, you're spending time re-implementing what already exists and probably doing a worse job of it.

<comment><USER2> > The Go standard library doesn't come close to replicating the functionality > of Rails

Why would it? It's the standard library. Go has a massive ecosystem of third parties libraries, and unlike Ruby, which was a one trick pony, Go has libraries for pretty much anything you could want to do. It's exceedingly versatile and it has _better_ integration into modern infra. Why? Because it's all written in Go. Prometheus, Kubernetes, etcd, terraform, docker, caddy, fleet, influxDB, synthing, coachroachDB, gogs, mino... all written in Go. Go is cloud first, and has first class support for multicloud abstractions written by the go team. It's got great support for rpc through grpc and protocol buffers both of which are much easier to use in a statically compiled C like language that resembled the protocol buffers primitives.

Rails literally offers nothing you can't get from Go, and it doesn't make you pay for the stuff you aren't using. With Go you don't write in a DSL based on the language, you just write regular Go code. You aren't a rails developer, you're a Go developer.

<comment><USER5> Err, both Python and Ruby have a much bigger ecosystem than Go. Not only that but you're speaking as if Python or Ruby were usually used in the context of building infrastructure-level services (k8s, dbs, consul, docker, etc.) instead of business logic / applications kind of services ( gitlab, shopify, your usual startup CRUD).

Why would you even compare both? You wouldn't want to create gitlab V1 with Go just like you wouldn't want to write Kubernetes in Ruby.

<comment><USER6> > You wouldn't want to create gitlab V1 with Go

Does Gitea[1] count (fork of Gogs)?

I understand your point (I love Python, too), but I can't help finding some amusement in it since it _has_ been done. :)

[1] [https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea](https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Moving to Go at work has made me incredibly happy. It really is a fun language and I tend to use it for my side-projects as well

Coming from Java, I find that I don't miss generics and exceptions as much anymore as I thought I would :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a big fan of both Go and Rust, and it's really interesting to see Rust ranked #3 in preference but #17 in expertise.

Rust is not a simple language by any means -- it's a great replacement for C++, but I'd be pretty surprised if it displaced the popular general purpose languages (which Go has actually managed to do.)

<comment><USER9> Go has not displaced anything around here.

Still plain old Java, .NET and C++ as always.

<comment><USER10> Where I'm located, .NET has died years ago. Just Java, Go and C++ now. I guess these things are regional.

Unity is increasing C# popularity, though. So maybe .NET is not going away, at least yet.

<comment><USER11> Same here... .net core is around but the APIs and runtimes MS created aren't really loved by anyone. With WPF seemingly abandoned and UWP being ... itself, there isn't much enthusiasm left. A little sad, since I believe C# to be superior to JAVA, but I haven't used it for anything for about two years now.

It maybe won't go away, but I think it lost a lot of relevance.

<comment><USER9> WPF is one of the corner stones of .NET Core 3.0, and one of the UI frameworks mostly used in life sciences device management UIs.

UWP isn't going anywhere, as much as haters would like to.

<comment><USER11> Maybe not. But users might go somewhere else. I have yet to meet anyone in real life that developed anything with UWP because it allegedly (has been a while) still lacks very basic features relating to UI at least (i know it is not restricted to that). I have nothing against WPF, although I am not a fan of XAML. But I think MS isn't really focusing on it. We will see.

I used WPF in medical applications like you said, but that was around 4-5 years ago.

Currently I believe UWP will never significantly take off on the desktop outside of Microsoft.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I guess Adobe, startups creating HoloLens content, might be told otherwise then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not surprised that the official Go survey showed: "..Go is the top language they'd prefer to use..."

It doesn't really say much given the selection bias.

<comment><USER13> The question on its own is useless given the audience - yes. However if you combine that question with the - e.g. - primary field a person works in it gets interesting.

Say a person said they're mostly writing finance software and Go isn't a language they'd prefer to use for their next project. Those two data points on their own also don't tell much - but if multiple people answer with that combination the Go team knows that they aren't covering the needs of the finance sector appropriately. With that knowledge they can e.g. request more information from those people and start working to fix those issues.

<comment><USER14> As a person who is mostly writing finance software I can tell that Go is not very well suited for any kind of rich application domain (which finance definitely is). OOP and Java + C# in particular have a very strong hold in finance. We can argue whether composition is an adequate substitute for inheritance, but the lack of generics is pretty much a non-starter.

Go works very well in domains with a well-defined and limited set of entities.

<comment><USER15> Sincere questions, I don't come from a OOP background, and do have plenty of Go! experience, so I feel like I'm missing the nuance of this post.

What causes OOP to be well suited for finance's use case?

What are the short-comings of structs/interface methods that Go! provides in the financial space?

If Go! had generics, would that change it's suitability for finance?

I would think that first-class concurrency would be useful in that space, is it?

<comment><USER14> > What causes OOP to be well suited for finance's use case? What are the > short-comings of structs/interface methods that Go! provides in the > financial space?

"Things" in finance are amenable to the classical PIE of OOP. Many concepts, e.g. financial instruments are extended version of something that was invented earlier. E.g. you have an abstract concept of an interest rate swap and specific versions of it (like fixed-fixed, foxes floating, cross-currency etc). This works pretty well with inheritance and polymorphism.

When you talk about money, finance is very particular about what you can do and what you cannot do. E.g. if money are subtracted from one account, they should appear in another, or balance cannot go negative. It is easier to enforce rules like that on a language level with encapsulation.

> If Go! had generics, would that change it's suitability for finance?

I believe so. You have built in "generics" for most popular collections like maps and arrays, which is fine for command like utilities and lots of system- level software. But in finance (an other problem domains tbh) you often need a generic version of a more complicated data structure, e.g. dataframe, tree, implementation of flyweight pattern, or data cube.

> I would think that first-class concurrency would be useful in that space, is > it?

Good support of first class concurrency is useful everywhere. Just so it happened that given that C++, Java, and C# together reign in different domains of finance, we are already quite comfortable with concurrency primitives of these languages (usually some kind of multithreading)

<comment><USER16> You can define methods on structs which is not unlike classes.

You can define an interface with methods that allow objects to be processed in a more generic fashion.

I think that more than anything it would require a change of mindset that people understandably don't want to deal with.

<comment><USER17> There's also always a package to handle that issue. [0][1][2]

As well as other options. [3]

I like to imagine that the "no generics, no way" crowd would never use the stairway in their building if the elevator broke down.

[0] [https://github.com/clipperhouse/gen](https://github.com/clipperhouse/gen) [1] [https://github.com/cheekybits/genny](https://github.com/cheekybits/genny) [2] [https://github.com/cosmos72/gomacro](https://github.com/cosmos72/gomacro) [3] [https://appliedgo.net/generics/](https://appliedgo.net/generics/)

<comment><USER9> Ah, but the generics building was conceived with an elevator to start with, and it will eventually be repaired.

Go's building architects decided an elevator was superfluous, as everyone should walk 20 stores high every single day, it is good for their health.

<comment><USER17> More like Go's building comes building-agnostic, whether you have 20 stories or not. Anything you need (such as a generic elevator) can be added on. No need to walk 20 stories every day because you can just add what you need in through reusable packages.

<comment><USER9> Actually no, because in the end it will look like an Escher building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > VS Code and GoLand are surging in popularity and are now the most popular > code editors among survey respondents.

I wish the package situation for Go was better for SublimeText. Currently most of the worthwhile golang packages that add vet, goimports, fmt, etc support are either abandoned or buggy. Margo bailed on using Package Control so it's difficult to install, not to mention buggy.

I've used VSCode for a while but it chokes sometimes and you can't beat the speed, ease, and power of SublimeText.

<comment><USER18> At the end of last year, a great systematic rewrite of Sublime's Go grammar was merged. So at that (admittedly surface-) level, it's doing very well.

I just maintain my own on-save hooks, build systems and plugins to integrate various quality-of-life Go tools. With the benefit of being able to tailor any such functionality to exactly the way you like to work and nothing more, it's far less effort than it would be to create the all-singing-all-dancing comprehensive package that is absent.

<comment><USER17> Agreed, this is actually on my todos, just haven't executed yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Off topic but it's quite interesting to see that on HN, a great amount of the comments of a GO post talk about Rust, and vice versa.

As a system guy, I am also happy to follow two OS projects in these two:

[1] [https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit](https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit) [2] [https://github.com/redox-os/redox](https://github.com/redox-os/redox)

<comment><USER20> Probably because these two communities are the most involved in flinging propaganda about their language. Of course, sometimes their courses collide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be particularly interested in seeing a low-expertise / high-expertise comparison on satisfaction / desired improvements. It takes a while to learn (in every language) what's going to bite you and how to deal with it / how well it works.

</comment><comment><USER22> unrelated but the charts are very nice what lib is used to render those?

<comment><USER23> Given the mix of Arial and Roboto as well as the style, I think they used Google Sheets.

<comment><USER24> Or Google Data Studio.</comment></comment></comment>


Size of the Web – Why the drop off? - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Why the huge drop off? The size halved in like two days?

</comment><comment><USER2> GDPR</comment>


The zipper's history shows how even great ideas can fail at first - <AUTHOR> https://quartzy.qz.com/1315839/the-zippers-history-shows-how-even-great-ideas-can-fail-at-first/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating read. Interesting to see how zipper's evolution into today's ubiquitous household utility went through many stages of evolution, including the classic S-curve that today's _successful_ tech products almost (inevitably) go through -- a testament to robustness of economic theories across widely varying industries. [0]

Another interesting fact that blew my mind recently -- 80% of all the world's zippers are manufactured in a city entirely dedicated to manufacturing clothing harnesses (hook-and-eye, Velcro et al.) in southeastern China. [1]

[0] [http://innovationzen.com/blog/2006/08/17/innovation- manageme...](http://innovationzen.com/blog/2006/08/17/innovation-management- theory-part-4/) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiaotou,_Yongjia_County](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiaotou,_Yongjia_County)

<comment><USER3> I hate the way the big-shots at all the Aerosol Velcro manufacturers get together and put different amounts of hooks and loops into the two cans, so you always have some left over. Kind of like the Hotdog Conspiracy. Well they're not ripping off this nitwit anymore!

[https://www.exploratorium.edu/blogs/tangents/hotdog- conspira...](https://www.exploratorium.edu/blogs/tangents/hotdog-conspiracy)

<comment><USER4> One day, I said to myself, why is it hot dog buns come in packages of 8, but hot dogs come in packages of...8?

I guess it depends on the brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read or heard somewhere the major clothing brands consider YKK zippers so reliable they won't even look at competitors product, even at substantial discounts, the zipper being such a small portion of the total cost of goods, but a critical point of failure that could easily ruin their brand.

<comment><USER6> That may have been true 10 or 20 years ago, but YKK is not the biggest zipper supplier any more. That honor goes to SBS, a Chinese company.

<comment><USER7> Citation needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I guess we can trace back the origins of Lean manufacturing back to 1851 ;-)

I wonder if the wealthy / successful (outside of science fields) back then shared insights and knowledge in a similar wat as we do today, so many more could benefit.

</comment><comment><USER9> And then, one day, Superdry was born :)

[http://www.ewelinakolaczek.com/images/pic/A1f9lbzZ-683_11431...](http://www.ewelinakolaczek.com/images/pic/A1f9lbzZ-683_114312.jpg)

<comment><USER10> Oddly I have a superdry jacket like that and one of the zips failed

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would not surprise me if MOST successful things failed at first.

</comment><comment><USER12> See also: the Quooker story. There was a fantastic article about it but I can't find it anywhere, highly frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is silly. What is the great idea? A way to quickly connect and disconnect things?

Zippers may have failed early on. But that is going to be more about difficulty of making them than the idea failing. This is closer to saying computers failed see first because the machines of Babbage fight factually do anything useful.

<comment><USER12> But that they failed is what is interesting. They look so obvious and so simple and yet if you look at them closely they are super clever.

<comment><USER13> I have never thought they were simple to the point of obvious. In large because I can't fix many when they break. So, to that point, I'd imagine most attempts at zippers fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Many great ideas fail at first, and for a long time, because they're massively ahead of their time. The helicopter, airplane, submarine, gun, and many more are fine examples. The submarine though has literally hundreds (or thousands if you stretch the definition) of years of abject failure before about a hundred years of resounding success.

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

That's a long time to be essentially sending people to a watery grave (with a few limited successes) before materials and engineering technology caught up to the vision of submersibles.

<comment><USER15> I would go and say that for most innovative things, the invention and the implementation are almost always 2 different phases (sometimes years or even decades apart).

Sometimes the technology for implementation is not there and sometimes people have a hard time grasping what they're looking at, even if an implementation is done.</comment></comment>


How to Write Like a Thought Leader - <AUTHOR> https://medium.dave-bailey.com/how-i-reached-two-million-views-on-medium-7aad4e5a8cc5?source=friends_link&sk=9e97a3f085fd44eb98ca472d636feb9e <comment><USER2> Can confirm that working with an editor was a game changer for me. I was surprised at how cheap it is too :o

How has your structured questionnaire influenced your writing? I've tried something similar before, it generally worked well, but I found it too constraining at times.</comment>


Stealthy Passive Spliced Network Tap - <AUTHOR> http://www.janitha.com/archives/146

<comment><USER2> I am surprised at how good this post is, given the topic. Something corporate security consultants become painfully aware of very quickly: it is startlingly easy to compromise the physical network of a huge company, and, having done so, an attacker has essentially limitless access to the victim's business processes.

The notion that a network team would actually use a TDR to find passive spliced taps on their network --- or, for that matter, even take the time to spot unexpected 802.11 wireless activity --- is laughable. Pick any company in the Fortune 100. Put on a dress shirt and a tie. Follow someone with a proxcard in through the side door after their smoke break. You will have their mainframe batch apps for months or years afterwards.

<comment><USER3> TDR?

<comment><AUTHOR> Time Domain Reflectometer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't it be possible to do an inductive tap? You should be able to pick the signals up without severing any wires or actually connecting anything to the wires themselves. You would have to split the outer jacket of the cat5 cable, but once you isolate the pairs you should be able to get something going. The pairs are differential loops, so you should need only one inductive pickup per pair. Just an idea, not sure how feasible it would be, but I would have thought that this would be a standard way to do a tap. You'd need power for this though, so maybe that limits its usefulness. Could use PoE to power it though.

<comment><USER5> They're not differential pairs for no reason. They're differential pairs because they need to be, to keep the signal integrity at the edge rates needed for that bandwidth at those distances.

The system is not that over-engineered, that you can throw away a bunch of the engineering and still have a working link. To look at a single line on a scope is often to see almost no signal at all. It's all noise. Only by looking at the signal differentially, does the data appear.

As for inductive coupling. Even if you used the entire differential signal, you still will fail, I think. The currents are quite low, which means your inductive pickup will need to be extremely sensitive. So sensitive, that I would anticipate the system noise of your inductive pickup to be on the same level as the signal you're trying to read, resulting in too much misread data to do anything with.

Plus, it's not worth it. There's no way to tell that another high impedance device has been added to the system, It won't change the impedance that some hypothetical tamper detection system would be able to measure, in any measurable way, so why not just add it using a direct connection?

<comment><USER4> Looking at one side of a balanced transmission line is not really very useful on a scope since there is no reference that is meaningful other than the other side of the line. Of course there would be lots of noise looking at only one side, since the whole idea of a twisted pair line is to take advantage of common-mode noise rejection at the receiving end.

Thinking about things more, you'd need to do the same common mode rejection in the tap in order to not be overwhelmed by line noise, necessitating the use of two pickups per pair. Careful physical design could allow a very sensitive pickup to be designed while canceling noise common to both. However, as you pointed out, low current could make things impossible still. But... the line is driving an inductive coupling in the form of a transformer at the end in order for things to work in normal operation though, so instinctively I think that something could be made to work.

As for not being worth it, you are probably right, especially since both approaches could be detected with the proper equipment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An old coworker of mine wanted to use a tap like this to set up a secondary tamper-resistant syslog server alongside our central syslog server.

The secondary syslog server would only be connected to the "receive" pair of the primary syslog server and therefore only physically able to receive data - making it difficult to tamper with logs.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could, but for a _legit_ purpose such a logging traffic on a network, doing a tap like this is not the best way to go. Use a switch with a SPAN port, or alternatively there are commercial taps (for example from NetOptics) that does exactly what you want... just in a much nicer/cleaner/proper way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of this story that surfaced around the time of the AT&T vandals

> Within minutes of cutting the cable, three black SUV's pulled up carrying > men in suits who complained that their line was severed.

"The construction manager was shocked," a worker told the Washington Post. "He had never seen a line get cut and people show up within seconds. Usually you've got to figure out whose line it is. To garner that kind of response that quickly was amazing."

AT&T crews arrived the same day to fix the line, an unusually prompt response.

<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/blackline/>

</comment><comment><USER8> What a cool, brief but informative, post. I want to try it out now!

</comment><comment><USER9> Some firewalls, like the open-source, FreeBSD based pfSense can operate in bridge mode, and thus not addressable via IP.

</comment><comment><USER10> I approve of this article. ;)</comment>


Automating Your Way out of the Dark Ages With (And Without) PhoneGap Build - <AUTHOR> http://blog.helloburin.com/post/47533914638/automating-your-way-out-of-the-dark-ages-our

<comment><USER2> Thanks for pointing out github.com/mattt/shenzhen. Very cool/useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> mattt has a ton of useful gems that interact with Apple's products. <https://github.com/mattt/cupertino> is another one that interacts with the Apple Dev Center</comment></comment>


What should be the skill set of the founders for a start-up in the early stages? - <AUTHOR>

What should be the skill set - programming, design, marketing, etc. - for a start-up in the early stages? Put differently, what are the skills that should be present in the founders (and what would be the ideal distribution among them)? <comment><USER2> I think one of the most important thing in the early stages (of a tech startup) is building a prototype to show others what the idea is really about. I think this requires a good mix of programming and design. Most of the time good design is not needed for the initial prototype but that depends on what you're making.

To fully answer your question I'll say that it depends on the way you plan on creating value and what you need to prove your idea. If you have a new idea for a better way for people to interact with the cable TV then design will probably be the most important first step. If you plan to revolutionize a business process by bringing it online then a good understanding of the business and enough programming ability to build a prototype (you're not trying to solve a hard problem here, just create a decent website) is far more important then the design. For example I currently work for a company that has product that looks terrible (by my standards) and yet it's doing great in terms of growth because it solved the right problem.</comment>


Have you deleted your Facebook account? - <AUTHOR> https://deletefacebook.xyz/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to cancel my account, but due to being an old semi-curmudgeon, I've never _had_ a FaceBook account. People kept telling me that I was missing something, and now I see what they meant, I think.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to, but what is a reasonable alternative? I mainly want a social place to share and connect with friends, many of whom are not technical people. If they were, things would be much easier...

<comment><USER4> Meatspace. Other alternatives would be skype chat, IRC, email.

If you just want to share and connect with friends then facebook has nothing unique.</comment></comment>


Discover company e-mail addresses by domain - <AUTHOR> https://emailhunter.co/domain/stripe.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Sales guys are going to go nuts with this.</comment>


Stories of Google, Apple and Amazon using bullying tactics to crush small firms - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/enterprise/news/a-group-of-small-tech-firms-told-congress-that-google-apple-and-amazon-used-bullying-tactics-to-try-to-crush-them-here-are-some-of-the-most-astounding-stories-they-shared-/articleshow/73343987.cms#facebook-violates-privacy-to-fuel-a-devastatingly-effective-ad-machine-no-single-company-should-have-access-to-that-much-data-basecamps-david-heinemeier-hansson-said-4 <comment><AUTHOR> > "There's such a dominant power that exists with these companies that when > Google or Apple asks for something ... you have no choice but to provide > that to those companies"

> At some point, all companies will be competing against Big Tech simply > because Big Tech is bent on expanding until it does absolutely everything</comment>


Show HN: Vero – True Social - <AUTHOR> http://www.vero.co

<comment><AUTHOR> Ad-free social network with one-to-one, one-to-group and one-to-many communication.

</comment><comment><USER2> how does it make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty sure any thoughts of monetization are a long way off. Need to worry about building network density first.</comment></comment>


Extracting Text & Images from PDF Files - <AUTHOR> http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=343

<comment><USER2> This is really interesting. For those intrigued, there is a business here. I have a friend working at a fincial services firm [willing to pay $$$$$] finathat really wanted a feature for an internal intranet where they would be easily able to 'take images from PDFs and put them on a blog.' "You can't do that," I said. "I mean, you could, but..."

I'm sure there is a semi-real market for some good innovation around the annoyance of PDFs.

;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, you're telling me.

This is one of the thorniest problems my startup (<http://fifobooks.com/>) has had to deal with, hence my work with PDFMiner.</comment></comment>


Ranking the top angel groups - <AUTHOR> http://tydanco.com/2010/11/24/ranking-my-favorite-angel-groups/ Some great suggestions and information. <comment><USER2> I ran Open Angel Forum in Seattle...and have to say the event was great. High quality angels meeting high quality companies in an intimate setting provided for a fun night....and some good financing conversation and activity!</comment>


Why the real promise of virtual reality is to change human connection - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17242326/virtual-reality-vr-peter-rubin-future-presence <comment><USER2> Oh goodie, another technology promising to connect us better than ever. I can't wait to see how this one backfires horribly.</comment>


Jerry Cooperstein gives an "Intro to Linux" course on edX - <AUTHOR> https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx-lfs101x-introduction-1621

<comment><USER2> I'm a little surprised at the $250 minimum for the verified track.

While that's a tiny fraction of what one could expect to pay for a typical certification prep class and likely less than a single credit hour at an accredited university it's quite high relative to the norm on edX.

I've taken some _very_ good courses on edX, primarily from MIT and Berkley, none of which have required even half as much as a minimum.

Still, I intend to give this a look when it launches.

</comment><comment><USER3> Intro video is by Torvalds :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmDricQGK6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmDricQGK6w)

Good to attend courses with lectures given by creators themselves and great teachers.

<comment><USER4> I'm a bit bothered by how Linus is deified as the sole creator of Linux. This phenomenon of course is not unique to Linux and Linus, of course. We routinely look for heroes and lone wolves whom we want to believe did all of the work by themselves, but the reason I single out Linux is because it was "just" the missing component of the GNU operating system.

Whatever the relationship between GNU and Linux nowadays and despite the examples of GNU without Linux and Linux without GNU, for many years in the beginning they were inextricably tied together and would have never succeeded without the other. To say that Linux is by Linus and nobody but Linus is not fair to all the work that Linus based Linux on top of.

<comment><USER5> It's not just unfair, it's really confusing. Judging from the course description, the "Linux" that Linus Torvalds wrote / maintains (the kernel) is not the "Linux" that you learn about in this course (the UI/userspace).

We will probably arrive at a consensus about what to call Linux + GNU + everything else around the same time we agree what line endings should look like in text files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks like a good starting point for people from a predominantly Windows background that want to make the jump to Linux. Does anyone know if it is worth doing the Verified Certificate? I would be more than happy to sign up to it if it has any worth in the job market.

<comment><USER7> Getting your way around the command-line is, IMO, a great skill to have. With more and more companies using Amazon and other cloud services to host their apps knowing linux is very handy even as a developer. Most of the job listings, especially for startups do require the developer to have linux / command-line familiarity.

<comment><USER6> I definitely agree. The question I have is if it is worth paying for a verified certificate? It is $250 for the certificate and if it does not really count towards anything I would rather take the course for free and then go write a Linux certification instead.

<comment><USER2> _> 'The question I have is if it is worth paying for a verified certificate?'_

I'd say that depends on what you want to get out of it.

I have a couple of verified certificates. I haven't had the chance to put them on a resume yet, but I fully intend to for a number of reasons. I'm already pretty well established in my career, I believe in what these programs are doing and I'm plainly proud of my accomplishment.

That said, I expect people will look at them the same way they do technology certifications or most degrees - _worthless_.

I understand where they're coming from as we've all encountered incompetent people with such credentials, but I think it's a bit unfair to toss these certificates in the same bin.

Reason being, these certificates have no established value.

Logically and anecdotally, people sign up for these courses because they want to learn something. If someones goal is scamming their way into a job they'd be better served by shopping at a diploma mill than slogging through an edX course.

It's an interesting problem.

How do you popularize these courses while establishing and retaining value for them - goals which are to some degree at odds with each other.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Read Hacker News filtered by categories - <AUTHOR> http://hackernews.demos.monkeylearn.com/ <comment><USER2> What's the default sort? It's not chronological, or by points, or grouped by topic; it looks random.

</comment><comment><USER2> Also, if I click on any category, I just get a text dump of URLs.</comment>


Remembering Your First Computer Is For Old People - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/remembering-your-first-computer-is-for-old-people/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> I may be old, but when the apocalypse comes, I know how to assemble a 286 from junk parts, edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and play games in stunning EGA graphics.

Meanwhile my kids will be digging into piles of radioactive junk looking for Lightning adapters.

<comment><USER3> And even with our super-long life spans, those old PCs will still work 100 years from now long after all the MBPs and iPhones are completely dead. I remember my old IBM XT, it could probably derail a train and still boot up.

<comment><USER4> I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but even now, some of the EPROMs of that era are exhibiting bit rot. The floppies aren't doing so well either.

<comment><USER3> I guess I'll have to reserve mine for breaking out of security-glass-walled cells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get excited not, because I revel in what it was like. I get excited because everything that was promised in the day I opened that C64 and connected to a BBS via a 2400 baud volksmodem is coming true. I am living my childhood dream, and this is why I always have a smile when I look back at my younger days. It is not reveling in nostalgia, its that everything I dreamed about is coming true, and I am playing a small part in it!

<comment><USER6> I couldn't have said it better, myself! I do enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but my fondness for computer history is mostly about understanding how to build the future.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As much as I believe an iPad is a true computer that can be used to create and consume, it just isn't the same as the old computers. They weren't as slick as the current post-pc, appliance computers. As someone in one of the old magazines (Creative Computing, Byte, or maybe Antic) said, "computer from the moment you turn them on are instruments of the twilight zone". Everyone can work an iPad, but that blank prompt was pretty intimidating.

Time-wise, I am one of the second generation. I didn't build my own computer, but came before the IBM PC era. My Dad took my brother and I into town and traded our Atari VCS (later called the 2600) and 23 cartridges for an Atari 400, 410 cassette recorded, and two cartridges: Pac-Man and Missile Command. He then bought the Atari BASIC cartridge and an issue of Antic for us. I learned to program and have had a lifelong love of it (younger brother hasn't done bad either).

I would have loved an iPad at that age, but I would have never been a programmer with it. I remember my first car and all the work I did on it too (Buick Rivera with a 455). They weren't appliances.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd guess that's because unless you are old enough your first computer could be an Apple II, an Atari, a Commodore, a Sinclair or Beeb, chances are your first computer was not really that memorable ;-)

<comment><USER8> I remember a lot of the "first" of a thing I owned, including very commonplace things like my first bicycle, my first car, my first TV, my first stereo system, my first apartment away from home, as well as my first computer.

People just like to reminisce. There's nothing unique about computers in this regard.

<comment><USER7> Out of curiosity, what was your first computer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Technology is anything that was invented after you were born." - Alan Kay

I find this quote to be surprisingly true. It boggles the mind to think that mundane stuff such as sewing machines once was high technology, but there you go. My grandmother still remembers the marvel the day she got her first sewing machine.

<comment><USER10> A sewing machine is a mechanical marvel. Take one apart sometime, and look at the genius that went into its design.

I have my great aunts' sewing machine that is powered by a treadle and a flywheel. It still works perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not actually sure I agree with her hypothesis. I remember devices because they were important to me, not because I was the only cool kid on the block with a C64.

If anything, it seems that devices are getting _more_ important and more personal. I'd rather get my wallet stolen than my phone.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm going be contrarian here and suggest that this is going to come back into fashion (at least for hackers).

What the author says is true, for a lot of 'old' people their memory of their first computer is intimately linked with the notion that "nobody but me and maybe a handful of my friends had one." I was in a computer club in Las Vegas growing up and there is a picture of me and the Digital Group Z80 based computer I built in the newspaper, I was called out as the youngest person in Nevada who had 'built their own computer.'[1] But really it was the that "computers" were these things you couldn't easily get too and here I had one of my very own. That was awe inspiring.

We've gone through an amazing period of growth, and during that time seen a tremendous amount of change in what folks think of as a 'personal computer.' and starting around the turn of the century things started changing. People got computers who could care less that they were computers, they needed them as _tools_ to get something done, whether it was computing the variance p on a set of measurements, or balancing the books of a corporation, or putting together a flyer for the next newspaper insert. For these folks, who grossly outnumber the 'techno' folks, the fact that all this 'computerness' was exposed made problems for them. I clearly remember a friend of my Dad's who bellowed "I don't need a god damn computer science degree to draw, I've been doing that since was was six!"

That level of pain has made 'ease of use' and 'appliance' salable features of devices which use computation and software to help folks do their jobs. The finally flipped completely over in the 'smartphone' which we all know is a computer but for millions it is a phone first, a camera second, maybe a pager third. There are people with an iPhone or Android phone in their pocket and will tell you with a straight face _"I don't own a computer, I get everything I need done with my phone."_

Hold on to that thought, they don't own a 'computer.' The thing they have lets them access stuff like the web and call people and take pictures, it isn't that thing you write programs for.

Now that seems like a game of semantics, and initially it really was indistinguishable from such a game, but the fact that 'computerness' was such a non-issue to these people that it becomes something that can be removed, and if it saves money to remove it, it gets removed with extreme prejudice. I expect my kids will have a 'phone' for carrying around and a 'tablet' for composing emails and stuff and they won't have a 'computer.' And that brings us around full circle.

So their kids will have a strong association with the first technology device they got which let them change the way it worked in anyway they wanted, it was a 'computer', not your padd or TV or web viewer thing, this thing you could design programs for and it ran them, what ever you thought up, bam you could make it happen. And the cycle will continue. As they get older they will tell stories about the first computer they got and bore the crap out of people who have been printing circuits on their 3D printers or what not.

[1] This wasn't true, I was the youngest member of the club but there were other kids in Nevada who had built computers by the summer of 1978.

</comment><comment><USER13> (Old guy story ahead)

The interesting thing is how subtly middle-age and old-age catches up on you. I remember watching some kid ask a 90-year-old what it felt like to be old. He said, "It feels just like it damned always has. I'm only old on the outside"

I didn't understand that at the time.

I used to joke about TV shows as part of helping people out with learning programming and technology management. One day I'm in a room teaching something and I say "That's about as likely as Gilligan and the rest of them actually making it off that island"

Total silence. Nobody in the room knew what "Gilligan's Island" was.

That happening more and more over a few years' time, and finally I decided that I don't tell jokes based on TV shows anymore. For one, most of my frame of reference is in the 80s. For another, I don't waste my time with that much network TV. I don't think it has the cultural significance it used to have.

But there was never a bright line when it happened. I don't wake up one day and somehow realized I'm a middle-aged person. Life feels just like it damned always has.

<comment><USER14> I'm 35. Until I was about 33/34 I felt like I was in my early-twenties.

I know to some that's still young, to others that's over a decade away, but over the course of this year I think I have crossed over a bright white line as you put it (although not the middle aged one I hope).

That's not to say I feel worse, just different. Where I once felt invincible, I now feel experienced or where I once had endless energy to throw at something I now have the nous to work out a way of doing it with less energy.

<comment><USER4> I'm slightly younger than you. I think there's a certain point in adulthood when you realize that you are just like all those old people who came before you.

You realize that your parents, perhaps in late middle age and hopefully in good health, still just think of themselves as adult people, not that much different than you probably think of themselves. But, they're "old", you think. And then your brain finally makes the leap and realizes you're getting old -- because everyone is getting old -- and that in a few decades, you'll be old and eventually dead too.

It's not a bad thing really -- certainly it makes it easier to put aside many of the trivial hangups and foolishness of youth, but I think it brings with it a certain sense of urgency.

<comment><USER15> I'm 43, single, no kids and did feel young until last December when both parents in their 70s became sick. Mom diagnosed as diabetic Dad with IPF (incurable lung disease, among other blue collar stuff).

Now I feel old. Nothing makes you feel old like realizing there is a definite point in time when your way of life will change, significantly.

I'm in the forever alone club but thought one day I'd meet a girl, no luck yet. I wanted to have kids and have my parents be grandparents since I never knew my Dad's father since he died at age 56. At most my parents have maybe ten years but their health is rapidly declining which is a shock.

Anyway at some point there will be some event that makes you go from feeling like 20 to feeling like 50.

It makes you give up Red Bull, stop eating crap and exercise but that's nothing like being healthy all your life, a last minute rush just won't do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember programming a TRS-80 Model I with 4k of memory and thinking I'd never write a program to fill "All that memory".

Soon after the owner of the computer (My High School Physics teacher) coughed up money to upgrade it to 16k. Then I was convinced this is it.. I'll never use all that memory.

Today I was working on a program that will service BILLIONS of transactions per day and 100,000's of queries per second and consume terrabytes of memory across many machines..

What a difference a couple years makes! :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> "I'm not one of those "old people." After all, it's not like I remember punch cards."

Well, my first programs were on punch cards!

My first computer was a Digicomp 1.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is true, but the same applies to any technology. I grew up taking central heating, TV and electric lighting completely for granted, but a few decades prior to that those were wonder inspiring inventions and people would have recounted tales about their first television set or the first time they had light bulbs installed. Mass electrification didn't really arrive until the middle of the 20th century.

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember visiting a relative that did not have an indoor toilet. It was a tad of an eye opener and quite cold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I even had a typewriter[1], but I was a quite old-fashioned kid.

[1] Typewriter: combination of a thick keyboard and a printer without cable (but no bluetooth also). In order to print a letter you had to press a key. For every single letter! The best part was that I never had to charge the battery. The lack of copy & paste was a bit annoying though.

</comment><comment><USER19> Jobs may have built the best designed computers but if it was only up to Steve and his way, the world would not have adopted the desktop computers as they did with IBM clones.

It was 286/486's with Windows95 which made common people adopt desktop computers and plethora of commonly available software which were easily installable.

</comment><comment><USER20> My first computer was a Powerbook 100 in 1992. Apple had authorized a firesale on them, because they couldn't move them. I paid $700 for the base model with 2MB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive, and a SCSI external floppy drive.

It was shortly thereafter that I bought my first computer book, a Hypercard book by Danny Goodman.

</comment><comment><USER21> My first computer was a Brainiac kit. My next ones were an IBM 7094 and a Bendix G15. And I still remember keypunching 1401 machine language in my first computer job. And now I'm studying neural networks and Scala: what a trip.

</comment><comment><USER22> _"I'm not one of those "old people." After all, it's not like I remember punch cards."_

Ha, that's nothing. Some people remember their first transistor radio.

Instead of a heavy valve box plugged into the mains, you'd have this small battery powered case proudly sporting a label saying "6 transistors" (in emulation of the mechanical watches that stated "17 rubies").

Amazing stuff. Except that back then it was harder to leave comments on the tweets/blog posts, of course.

Also pretty insightful of Marshall McLuhan to observe, around that time, that we were building up an external, electrical, nervous system.

</comment><comment><USER23> A macintosh that could dual boot into windows 95. High tech.

</comment><comment><USER24> .. Just like provoking headlines are for the immature? :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I really hope she's right. There is almost no conversation as boring as a group of nerds going around in a circle trying to out-do each other on who was the first to do such-and-such:

 _Well, my first computer was a 486 with only 1MB of RAM_

 _Oh yeah? Mine was a 286 and it didn't even have a 3.5" drive!_

 _Oh yeah? Mine was a TRS-80..._

...and so on it goes...

<comment><USER8> Nerds will always have conversations that are boring to normal people. That's why they are called nerds.

<comment><USER26> I'm a nerd through and through and I find this conversation boring every time it comes up.

<comment><USER25> Exactly my point. I'm as nerdy as they come, but this conversation never leads anywhere interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


From Pickup Artist to Pariah (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/jared-rutledge-pickup-artist-c-v-r.html <comment><USER2> I feel for the guy, to be honest. I've been in a good relationship for years now, but I know that bitterness and resentment. If I'd made the mistake of broadcasting my honest thoughts during that time and somebody linked them to me, it would not be pretty.

<comment><USER3> Bitterness and resentment when one out of dozens of dates leaves you on read? This guy has problems that he brought to the "game". How can a person be anything but gracious to and happy for people that they are dating?

And a reminder, the first rule of Fuck Club is you don't talk about Fuck Club. He dragged his dates and that's antisocial. It creates problems in the community

<comment><USER2> So the ideal is to adopt an "abundance mentality", right? One where you're so confident and successful that you really don't care if any individual reaction doesn't go your way. It takes a loooong time to get there if you're starting from a point of having dealt with rejection (whether explicit or imagined) for years.

I don't know if everybody's experience is the same, but I was a virgin well past the normal age and every attempt to get into the romantic game crashed and burned for one reason or another. Sure, the first few times can be explained away with truisms and platitudes, but after a while, the thought that you're just broken, undesirable, unlovable starts nagging at you. Every time that some girl dances with you then disappears without giving you her number, when that OKCupid date doesn't get a followup, it's all reinforcing that thought that there's just something wrong with you. Even when you do start seeing success, that thought, that fragment of your self-image, it stays with you. Shedding that part of your identity can be rough transition, and that's if you're aware of it and trying to move past it. Otherwise it just colors all of your future interactions.

<comment><USER3> You seem like you understand the internal native of your feelings. The guy in article does not.

The proper response is, "I feel terrible that she's not texting me back. But, it's not, in fact, terrible. I can handle it. I'd rather she did text me back, but there's no rule that says people have to be interested in me. I may very well meet someone soon that is interested in me as much as I am in them. I had better do something today to try and meet them instead of sulking."

The guy in the article is more like, "How dare she not text me. She's not even good enough for me. She's old and not that hot."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One lesson to draw from this story is how it is easy to fail to stay anonymous despite what a normal person may think is a good amount of caution.

>Even as Jared tried to build a following in the manosphere, he hid Holistic Game from his friends and customers, with the exception of Jacob. Then, last August, someone — it's still not clear who — created "Jared and Jacob Said," which meticulously built the case that the guys behind Holistic Game were Jacob and Jared from Waking Life and then proceeded to lay out the men's most offensive social-media musings. (Most of the comments were Jared's; Jacob participated in the podcast but didn't write any of the tweets or blog posts.)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's amazing the way people are unwilling to engage with honesty these days. The story about Trey was very sad to me because it showed that even a quintessential Asheville type couldn't get the people to put away the pitchforks. It really doesn't bode well for the country that communities that are "accepting", like Asheville, are unwilling to forgive. Compare to the people calling for forgiveness (after due process and punishment) of Dylann Roof, a hateful mass murderer.

<comment><USER6> It's all about tolerance and acceptance until it isn't. I understand why people are mad at the guy, but the black-and-white worldviews are on both sides of the polarized divide. Conflating his actions with rape is disingenuous at best, at least from the information presented here, where all the sex was consensual. The way this has progressed is symptomatic of a bigger problem in our society right now. I have no answers, though, since it is nearly impossible to have a discussion with either extreme, at least in my view.

<comment><USER5> In reality, I don't think there's a polarized divide. The guy's worldview was kind of messed up, a simulacrum of the misogynistic community, which he developed because of his own ok insecurities and the encouragement the misogynists give when you parrot their creed. Most people don't agree with that stuff. But most people don't call for the shunning of the guy. It's more the outrage that surprised me, because Asheville is usually peaceful. But the double standards are strong. You don't see them picketing Bikram yoga centers in spite of the apparent rapey-ness of the founder, who gets franchise money from each center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Women wear makeup to simulate beauty and men act "alpha" to simulate success. If we accept one we should be willing to accept the other. The undercurrent of bitterness and negativity prevalent in the online pickup community is a consequence of the fact that most of these men lived most of their lives with little sexual success and harboring an idealistic view of women. When the bubble breaks they're prone to going too far the other way.

<comment><USER8> some

> Women wear makeup to simulate beauty and

some

> men act "alpha" to simulate success. [...] we should be willing to accept

that different people do different things.

<comment><USER7> What's your point?

Most women wear makeup and if men knew acting a certain way would increase their chances with women, most would probably do it. Do we really need to add caveats for every special case in every situation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From what I remember from this "Game" stuff is that it was rather for self development in the first place. And yes, then it's a power tool that comes with great responsability.

Rating girls and writing those stories online has very little to do with the spirit of the original book, which was about having a good time in a respectful manner, really. In other words: this guy got what he deserved.

</comment><comment><USER10> I mean don't those words mean the same thing?

<comment><USER11> Ha - I was gonna say "...Is Not That Long of a Trip"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's as if the angry mob, the paragon of innocence, never talked behind someone's back... /sarcasm

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the most hilarious thing posted to HN in a while

</comment><comment><USER14> don't be an asshole.

don't cargo cult confidence.

there. done.</comment>


Google Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy, "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees" - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html <comment><USER2> There are a various underlying assumptions here which aren't necessarily true.

First, it's hard to measure candidate and employee quality on one single scale, with a standard deviation of only 15%.

Second, people you hire aren't always going to perform at the level of performance you estimated, independent of the project you put them on.

Third, your candidate pool won't always contain people who are smarter than the mean. I'm sure Google is now attracting the best and the brightest, but will the same be true 5 years from now?

<comment><USER3> Plus the candidate pool is of finite size, and Google has been drinking pretty deeply from it for a long time now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's pretty awesome that Google has invented a magical machine for determining an employee's worth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aye, I'm curious where this magical employee vaule number comes from and how you can tell what it is before they've even worked for google!

<comment><USER5> You'd be surprised how much you can learn about a person's ability by interviewing people correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Trust me, they don't use the Lake Woebegon stratgey. In Lake Woebegon, "all the women are strong, and all the men are good-looking". I don't want to make any assumptions about the women, but any visit to Google will reveal the men are not very attractive.

</comment><comment><USER7> I find their 'hiring at the company level' the most interesting. Whenever I've hired people in the past it has been on a project or department level, but it does make a lot of sense not to do it that way.

</comment><comment><USER8> Come on, Peter, start the axes at zero or at least do us the favor of using a broken axis.</comment>