Best Startups to Work for in Stockholm - <AUTHOR> https://www.seedtable.com/startups-stockholm <comment><USER2> This is a fantastic list. Thank you for sharing.

I moved from the SF Bay Area to Stockholm around 6 months ago to do my MS in computer science at KTH and I am still surprised by the amount of tech startups here. At the KTH career fairs I have met with developers from some very interesting startups that are eager to hire EU-based developers.

<comment><USER3> Did you learn Swedish to do your MS? I am moving to there and thinking on do an MS too.

<comment><USER2> No. Almost every MS program and course at KTH is in English, even for Swedish students. Swedish students who are doing their MS are typically in a 5 year degree program where you do your BS and MS combined. The first 3 years (BS portion) is in Swedish and the last 2 years is in English.

<comment><USER3> Excellent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am lucky enough to have lived and worked in tech in Stockholm for a little more than six years now. I originally moved here specifically for the game development industry and it is so nice to see it (along with tech companies in general) continue to grow and evolve here. As an employee there is a vast array of employer options and coupled with the work-life balance for me it's pretty much the perfect place to live and work (if one can handle the winter, of course).

<comment><USER5> Nice. Have you worked anywhere else in Europe? How does it compare to Berlin? Are the salaries comparable with other major European cities? You say work life balance is great but I hear it can be expensive to live there. What's your experience? Is English widely spoken in offices or do people have to learn Swedish in order to work effectively?

<comment><USER6> It is expensive to live there. If you're a programmer, you will live a far more comfortable life living and working in Poland than you would in Sweden, despite how much Swedes tend to look down their nose at the Polish.

I speak from experience.

If you're working a low/zero skill job, you would be far better off in Sweden, although the market is extremely competitive.

Sweden has a major problem with housing, so you can forget renting an apartment in a major city — you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting list to be able to rent anything in the centre of Gothenburg. This isn't hyperbole.

Just about everyone speaks English. Some younger people actually speak English more correctly than a significant proportion of the English population in England. Unsurprisingly, learning Swedish language and culture helps you blend in. It's not a particularly difficult language anyway.

<comment><USER7> > Sweden has a major problem with housing, so you can forget renting an > apartment in a major city — you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting > list to be able to rent anything in the centre of Gothenburg. This isn't > hyperbole.

You can forget a first hand contract from the municipal housing agencies. Second hand contracts and/or private landlords still work - but watch out for scams.

<comment><USER8> > you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting list

last I have read it's 10 years in Stockholm, in Åkersberga (less than an hour north of Stockholm) it would be a few years [https://www.armadafast.se/boende/bostadsk%C3%B6/k%C3%B6tider](https://www.armadafast.se/boende/bostadsk%C3%B6/k%C3%B6tider)

or you can buy for 2M SEK (200,000 Euro) a nice small house in a suburb and pay the mortgage back over 50 years.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's different wait times for different areas. The 18 year figure I gave was for central Gothenburg, like I said.

Where I was living — in Majorna/Kungsladugård — on average 2,400 people applied to rent each apartment. This was back in 2012. This would be worse now, given the refugee/migrant influx.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've often read that Stockholm, and Sweden in general, has great work-life balance. This list seems super cool for folks who may be interested in (what I've heard is) a more relaxed lifestyle while keeping some work excitement in their lives from a startup environment. It's really interesting to see how successful Sweden has been in pushing itself as a good home for startups.

Also, is the logo on this site messed up? It just says SEEDTAB for me without the LE, like this: [https://i.imgur.com/oEN7R2Q.png](https://i.imgur.com/oEN7R2Q.png). Kind of an odd bug; even the actual .svg file it links to appears like that for me ([https://www.seedtable.com/img/logo.svg](https://www.seedtable.com/img/logo.svg)). I would've thought it was intentional if not for the sliver of what appears to be an L at the right end.

<comment><USER10> You heard wrong. Sweden has one if the longest working weeks in the EU. Normal work day starts at 8am.

Most stuff that you read about Sweden (ie stuff that gets shared on socisl media) is false.

<comment><USER11> > Sweden has one if the longest working weeks in the EU. Normal work day > starts at 8am.

We're talking about startups on a website mostly for programmers, right?

Programmers enjoy nearly free work schedule. I've seen people come at work at 7 in the morning and leave at three in the evening. Or come to work at 10 and leave at 7.

Second, work-life balance is paramount in Sweden. No one will bat an eye if you have to pick your kids early from kindergarten/school, go to a doctor's appointment, take a day off because you're sick etc.

The government even tries to combat exploitative employers by making it mandatory that employees take at least 20 days of vacation a year.

<comment><USER10> "No one will bat an eyelid if you take a day off work."

You forgot to mention that you WON'T get paid if you take a single day off work, something that makes Sweden unique in the modern world?

Sweden is a great place to work in many ways, but there are severe problems for people moving here to work if they are accustomed to other EU countries.

<comment><USER12> That's only if you are taking sick-leave (and for the first day, then you get some part of your salary), also Sweden got 25 days of mandatory paid vacation days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice list but the information and presentation seems a bit lacking.

First: it says _funded_ not _founded_ in 2018. I was surprised by the amounts of money and employee numbers until I noticed that I had misread that.

It would be nice to know in how many rounds the amount of money was collected, assuming that it is the total amount of funding and not valuation or revenue.

<comment><USER14> Ah, I also read it as founded. Lots of the companies have been around for some time now. Kry, iZettle, MatHem, Natural Cycles and Lifesum are examples many people have known or used for years now.

And wasn't Tibber Norwegian? Hmm

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a fellow Swede, I was surprised to find so many companies on this list that I've never heard of before. Great read!

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice list. Though I'm pretty sure iZettle & Truecaller aren't founded in 2018, both were founded much earlier.

UPD: finally got it, the companies were funded in 2018, not founded

<comment><USER6> Funded.

<comment><USER16> fixed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there a way to filter or find out which support remote work without manually going through them all?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately not for now. But you can check this - [https://medium.com/@rdutel/900-startups-hiring-remotely- in-2...](https://medium.com/@rdutel/900-startups-hiring-remotely- in-2019-a82fa3f96aa7)

Alternatively, you can use =importxml to extract all URLs on my site, and run a VLOOKUP against the Remotive list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I seriously did not know that Stockholm had so many well funded great startups. This is impressive.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Natural Cycles: Enter your temperature into the app. Natural Cycles' smart > algorithm analyzes your data. The app will tell you if it's a red or a green > day and whether or not you need to use protection to prevent pregnancy.

Recipe for disaster

<comment><USER20> Yes, there has been a lot of talk regarding NC actually!

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/natura...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/natural- cycles-tech-contraception-condoms-coil-pill-birth-control)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The entry for company called "Peltarion" has UTF8 rendering issues. The description reads "... AI applications – at scale and at speed – with the ..."

</comment><comment><USER22> The dollar value seem to have been generated by random

<comment><AUTHOR> No, Crunchbase public data. I also reach out to all companies suggesting they can fix/clarify any inaccuracies, and update it as soon as they come back to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I apologize for this self-serving comment, but I consider it at least potentially relevant for anyone who reads this thread:

I'm publishing a weekly curated newsletter about the Swedish tech scene: [http://swedishtechweekly.com](http://swedishtechweekly.com)

Brief and straight to the point. Spend 3 minutes a week and you know everything that's going on in tech Sweden.

<comment><AUTHOR> subscribing now, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A question for Sweden specialists: what does Sweden do to attract talent, once other European countries, apparently, pay better compensation, like Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands (the 30% rule), etc?

</comment><comment><USER24> How hard would it be for a non-eu citizen to get a working visa in Sweden?

<comment><USER25> I live and work as a developer in Stockholm. I have registered as an employer and have been able to help people from abroad before by taking the fight with the governmental authority handling immigration.

The visa situation is a bit borked right now since the EU was unable to humanely handle the civil war in Syria so staying permanently isn't a given anymore. Right now we have to make do with "for the foreseeable future".

Feel free to reach out to me at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER5> Where do I start if I want to look for jobs there? Are most jobs mainly in Stockholm? Is it different in Gottenburg or Malmo?

<comment><USER8> Linkedin probably. Stockholm has a lot of jobs, I don't know about Gottenburg or Malmo but they are smaller places

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm mostly surprised at finding some very well established companies here. Should Paradox really be in the scope of "startup"? They have existed for 20 years by now...

<comment><USER27> I think sam altman said that a startup is defined by its rapid growth rate rather than its age. Dunno.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I guess Spotify aren't really a startup anymore!

<comment><USER2> I just had an onsite interview at their HQ in Stockholm this morning. The recruiter I spoke with in person mentioned their employee growth percentage in the last couple of years and it was staggering. They absolutely are not a startup anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, Spotify is too big to fit the list.

<comment><USER11> How is Paradox Interactive a startup? Founded in 1999, with dozens of games in its portfolio?

Same goes for quite a few other companies.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The best method for developing software: whatever works for you. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flowmingle.com/2009/02/09/the-best-method-for-developing-software-is-whatever-works-for-you b.vandgrift says do your own thing.  since you're going to do it anyway. <comment><USER2> I hope it's not just me, but there should be an equation based on objective measures about the desired product and the teams quality and experience that could determine the best development methodology.

Obviously this would require a lot more fundamental research, but I don't see it as an impossible task. I am continually surprised at the lack of this type of research in computer science.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the gist of this post but I would add that the best method is one that works for your team and your organization. After, software is generally a team effort and a large part of modern languages help you make the logic of your actions clear to those who read your code later</comment>


Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0025552 <comment><USER2> Disgust is a challenging emotion to study because it is so intertwined in the brain. Moral "disgust" activates the same region as the "man eating a can of worms" example in the article. It activates the same facial expression. Even our language fails to separate the emotions at times as dis- _gust_ (i.e., gustatory) can be in reference to disgusting behavior. VS Ramachandran discussed this in a lecture but I can't find a link.

Oddly before opening the article I had assumed it was about how moral "disgust" is positively correlated with left-leaning. But then the study was referring to digestive disgust which appears positively correlated with right- leaning.

Side note, the most disgusted I recall feeling in both senses of the word was hearing a military leader describe a delicious a piece of chocolate cake while simultaneously describing the bombing he ordered on a foreign country. He could describe the cake in great detail but he forgot what country we had bombed the previous day. My right leaning friends didn't see this as a big deal.

As an extra data point, I have eaten worms on a survival trip and was fine with it and I never really liked chocolate cake. So maybe this line of research has merit.

<comment><USER3> >Oddly before opening the article I had assumed it was about how moral "disgust" is positively correlated with left-leaning. But then the study was referring to digestive disgust which appears positively correlated with right- leaning.

Actually, even moral disgust is positively correlated with right leaning folks. The Righteous Mind ([https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided- Politics-Relig...](https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics- Religion/dp/0307455777)) is a great read that covers the research on the topic.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I should not have implied otherwise since how one leans is really a reflection of how one defines their morals, not a deficiency of morals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This general topic reminds me of Jonathan Haidt's TED talk on the moral motivations of liberals and conservatives:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind](https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind)

</comment><comment><USER5> A couple years ago there was a quiz going around based on this concept. You answer 27 non-political questions and the quiz guesses your political leaning. [http://www.metafilter.com/161320/27-non-political- questions-...](http://www.metafilter.com/161320/27-non-political-questions- reveal-your-politics)

<comment><USER6> More direct link (took me a moment to find it on that page): [http://chartsme.com/](http://chartsme.com/)

<comment><USER7> I just took it. 85% conservative it says. But the fact is I am more like 85% liberal.

Also, it's a little bit warped because some of the questions would evoke a different emotion than disgust, but you are required to categorize it as a disgust level.

<comment><USER8> >I just took it. 85% conservative it says. But the fact is I am more like 85% liberal.

Not poking at you as a person sincerely.

By whose standard/spectrum? I'm fairly liberal by US standards but fairly conservative by a lot of others. I have generally found unidimensional measures of political leanings really unuseful because of their summativeness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jordan Peterson describes the archetypal left/right axis as being something like Nurturing Mother/Fear of The Snake. It certainly makes sense as being a fundamental axis given that both are beneficial and both are harmful and a balance has to exist within a population.

<comment> shaki-dora I think modern times probably need nurturing mothers (and fathers) more than fear of snakes.

<comment><USER10> I think modern times probably need fear of snakes more than nurturing mothers (or fathers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is interesting that in nearly all articles on this (by now fairly well established) correlation, it is phrased as "higher than normal disgust sensitivity by people with right-of-center beliefs", not "lower than normal disgust sensitivity by people with left-of-center beliefs". It's like academia regards right of center political beliefs as a disease that needs curing...

<comment><USER12> You were on track to making an interesting point and then went off course. It's not unreasonable to conclude that academia has a left-of-center bias, it is unreasonable to conclude that left-of-center biased academics feel right- of-center beliefs are something that needs curing.

I expect that you wouldn't be receiving down votes if you had omitted that last sentence.

<comment><USER11> I expect you are correct in that. I wonder if a similar mechanism inside academia could be an explanation for the very phenomenon I was wondering about. Thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Both leftists and rightists have their strong shares of adorable and of disgusting stuff. I'd rather be a republican if not all the religious, nazi and false-moralist BS they use to promote. I'd rather be a democrat if not all the extra regulation, taxation, bureaucracy, hypocrisy/hyper-polite- correctness etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think there is likely a stronger correlation to wealth rather than politics. When people have it really good, they get sort of mentally spoiled by getting everything their way. So, when they encounter something that is not to their liking, the reaction is stronger because they've been able to successfully avoid it for longer. The disgusting thing threatens their on-a-higher-level equilibria and therefore is a stronger threat to them than it would be to a lower class person who has to encounter it more often. Less well-off people who have to get their hands dirty more often build up mental callouses to the grosser aspects of life, like handling compost, cleaning wounds, etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds one of David Pizarro's TED talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pizarro_the_strange_politics...](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pizarro_the_strange_politics_of_disgust)

</comment><comment><USER14> > of the 16 Wilson-Patterson items, gay marriage _is the only issue_ that is > significantly related (p<.05) to electrodermal response

My emphasis. Alternative headline:

"People less likely to stick to an individual party line item when it actually _affects_ them."

</comment><comment><USER15> Echoes of the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

</comment><comment><USER16> That didn't age well...

Anyone can come up with a correlation report. But if you really want to call yourself a scientist, you better really be careful about drawing political conclusions, especially when there's no way to actually "prove" your conclusion is true, unlike other fields of science where they're more objectively measure-able.

Here's a much better piece about how disgust sensitivity affects societal change [https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the- dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship- of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)</comment>


How Uber Is Changing Night Life in Los Angeles - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/fashion/how-uber-is-changing-night-life-in-los-angeles.html <comment><USER2> > in UberX, the company's lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, > can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes

This is absolutely false. Parking in downtown LA is much cheaper than this. Closer to $5 a night, maybe a little more on the weekends. Sometimes you can even find street parking within a few blocks of this vaunted Ace hotel that the author is so infatuated with. Parking isn't a problem on this side of town.

Moreover, Uber makes no dent on the fundamental problem in LA, which is that the distances are so great.

It is shameful that the article doesn't even mention the real good news in LA transportation which is that the Expo Line now stretches from downtown to Culver City, and will go all the way to Santa Monica in 2015. LA residents also voted to install a streetcar in the downtown area, although that's a few years off.

Totally agree with the comment about this being a "submarine article". More Uber cheerleading.

<comment><USER3> What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does, and if it did, Uber would win the cost-value comparison hands-down.

Americans subsidize parking by imposing fees on developers who don't include "enough" of it, and by reserving large portions of cities' streets for car storage. Multi-billion dollar highways enable sprawl and cheaper commercial parking lots. Driving & parking personal vehicles is incredibly wasteful from a broad economic perspective (but it was the correct path -- a necessary evil in the absence of density to enable effective mass transit).

Even with the government subsidies, Uber is an economically competitive alternative to driving & parking personal vehicles. That's the amazing part. Public policy favors the incumbent behavior, yet "ride-sharing" has still been able to expose market inefficiencies. Imagine if we killed all the parking subsidies, or better yet: used economic incentives to discourage driving & parking personal vehicles, and encourage the behavior that had a lower total cost.

I believe the future of personal transportation is computer-driven computer- dispatched vehicles, a game Uber and Google are leading. We can't get there soon enough.

<comment><USER4> > What I find more interesting is that parking SHOULD cost more than it does

No, not really. This is a sentiment that I see a lot in San Francisco and NYC, where it makes a lot of sense, but if you've ever driven in LA, you'd quickly realize that it doesn't really apply there because the LA met area is extremely broad, not dense.

In the bay area, you might spend 45 minutes driving from Palo Alto to San Francisco, and then another 30 minutes - an hour driving in circles looking for parking, depending on the time/day.

In LA you have the opposite problem. Traffic gets so bad that it's not uncommon to spend 1-3 hours driving across town on a weekend evening. But once you make it to wherever you're going, you can usually find parking in under 15 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Even Mr. O'Connell, the über-Uber devotee, is peeved. "The company is > turning into a soulless psycho monster," he said. He sides with the drivers. > "I would much rather they pay them fairly than have to deal with surge > pricing at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday," he said.

I grew up really respecting the NYTimes as an institution, but now when I read what they have to say about things I actually understand I am quite underwhelmed by their investigative prowess. I feel like they have a serious habit of using quotes and other colloquial (mis)understandings that are incorrect to spread FUD about specific tech companies. Check out their record on AMZN, for instance. In this case they use this guy to set up a completely false dichotomy: who _wouldn 't_ rather that? I'm sure even Uber would rather that. But that's not how life (read: the economy) works at all.

<comment><USER6> If you haven't noticed the recent flurry of Uber articles... Let me try to explain whats going on here.

These days you go to boomberg, nytimes, any blog I know of and say "we'll pay you X amount of dollars to write an article about Uber changing something." The "news" outfit gets to write whatever they want but the underlying message of "uber changing something" has to be there to get paid. The splitting hairs part is how people think they retain credibility as a "news" outfit because they use their own words. I think a lot of people would say otherwise if they saw the whole process from beginning to end.

If that all sounds like unfettered mass manipulation, thats because it is. You can be in the news all year round if you have the money to burn out fishing. Pick an source, they all have their price these days.

<comment><USER7> You actually think this is an advertorial masquerading as legitimate trend- piece by NYT?

<comment><USER8> Yes, this piece is bought. It reads like a classic advertorial for Uber (with a subtle attack against Lyft).

Read it again and you'll see it.

<comment><USER9> Native Advertising is the industry term

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another thing about Rideshare in LA is that being a driver is the almost perfectly complementary job for a struggling actor. You need a car anyway to get to auditions and you get to set your own hours and make a decent enough wage to survive in LA.

<comment><USER11> Totally agree, almost every one of the Uber's I hop in and strike up a conversation with the driver they end up being a struggling actor/comedian/musician. Seems as if it is a welcome alternative to getting a job as a server at a restaurant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like an example of a submarine article:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think a lot of folks are nitpicking. Yes, the $4 is a shortest ride. Yes, you can park overnight in DTLA for $7. Yes, there is still traffic congestion. Yes, there is a false dichotomy or two. It's not stellar reporting of the economics of it.

The real point is cultural. Planning a drive is real. DUI is a way a life for a lot of people, so much so that the it is viewed as a revenue generator. Fueling and parking take a significant amount of time. Uber and similar are changing these things, at least partially because the price is right and it's pretty reliable, which the article points out.

It's more convenient to take Uber to a meeting. It's more convenient to take Uber for a night out.

Anecdotally, Uber changed the way I do things, and I think it's generally for the better.

On the other side of the coin, I absolutely _hate_ Uber in NYC. I've never had a good experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> As an Angeleno, I generally resent NY Times trying to tell the rest of the nation about life in Los Angeles. Every single article I've read in that vein has had the same trite, vaguely condescending cliches like "America's most auto-centric place", etc. Los Angeles is vast, and some areas are as walkable as Manhattan. We're also building more rail lines than anywhere else in the country.

Uber is popular here (like any large city I'm sure) but Lyft has a strong presence (especially in West Hollywood). Frankly, most people I know choose to live near their favorite nightlife spots to avoid the driving problem, or near mass transit.

<comment><USER15> I've been in LA for 13 years now, and it's a mixed bag.

The traffic is even worse than most people can imagine, if you're driving across several neighborhoods and/or on the freeways. Most other cities don't come close, DC being a notable exception. But even then, the traffic here lasts longer and stretches further. Angelenos don't measure distances in miles, we measure it in how long we expect it to take.

Parking can be a hassle in specific places, but for the most part you can find space near where you're going at rates that are reasonable. Although there is less free parking than many other cities.

But at the same time, LA is a city of neighborhoods all mashed together, and some of those neighborhoods are quite walkable. I live within a block or two of a ton of restaurants and shops, and within a short 5-10 minute drive of 90% of my needs.

It's sucked when I've had jobs that required cross-town commutes, but otherwise it can be quite pleasant.

Lot of taxis here. Lot of Uber/Lyft. Lot of Town Car services for the entertainment industry (when you see that town car heading in the neighborhood for a 4:30 AM pickup, you might not envy the actor's life too much).

As an aside, I'm actually impressed at how fast the subway system is currently growing. Unlike some cities, projects here are getting completed in years as opposed to decades. The subway/light rail is very different from 10 years ago, and will be very different again in 10 more years. It's still a huge, spread out city, but Metro is tying it together relatively quickly.

<comment><USER16> I keep hearing over and over how traffic sucks in LA but I've learned two things since I got here: don't drive cross-town too much (I live near the busiest intersection in Hollywood, yet 90% of shops and restaurants I need are within 5-10 mins drive) and live where you work (30 min walk).

<comment><USER17> Live where you work sounds nice in theory but practically it's not u usual in tech to change jobs every 2-4 years and I don't want to move that often (especially with a family and mortgage rather than rent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If anyone is curious as to what the taxi regulation looks like in Los Angeles which has lead to this, this paper looks like a good start.

[http://www.taxi-library.org/driving-poor.pdf](http://www.taxi- library.org/driving-poor.pdf)

> The Taxicab Commission determined how many taxicabs were needed for Los > Angeles and divided the city into five geographical zones. Taxicab > franchises then bid on the zones and for an allotted number of taxicabs to > operate in each zone

> the taxi industry is among the largest source of political campaign > contributions to members of the City Council. The Los Angeles Times reported > that in 2000 (the last year new franchises were awarded), taxicab companies > paid lobbyists $288,000 in that year

</comment><comment><USER19> _"I can just, like, YOLO with Uber," she said._

I nominate this for Millennial Sentence of the Year.

</comment><comment><USER11> While I'm not overly impressed with the post I have to agree with the sentiment of it as Uber/Lyft has made living in LA without a car much easier. Coming from another major city my wife and I were dreading the idea of having to buy a second vehicle for me just to live daily. Thanks to rise of ride sharing services we haven't had to and that makes living here, not just nightlife, a lot easier given the lack of useful public transportation.

</comment><comment><USER20> Didn't they have cabs in LA before Uber came along? I smell some hyperbole in that story.

<comment><USER21> Yes there are cab companies in LA. There aren't many and they are just _awful_. Never any place you need them, you have to call a dispatcher and they never show up remotely on time (sometimes not at all, or in bizarre cases three show up at once and fight over you), incredibly expensive, in very short supply at peak times. I left LA before Uber hit but I've heard from friends basically the same synopsis of what this article states, it's transformed cabbing it on weekends which is a huge deal

<comment><USER20> Thanks - that is the first argument I heard in favor of Uber. I mean thinking why cabs sucked so hard, I suppose it is difficult to create a new cab company to fix things. So maybe Uber makes it simpler to fix things by starting a cab company (a cab company of one car+driver).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> so, in the towns where uber is popular is there a perfext storm of really unreliable taxi service + a large desire to use a car that doesnt look like a taxi?

<comment><USER23> I think so, I can use a smartphone app / web page to order a taxi now. There's no surge pricing, the cost is predictable as well as the drivers income, they are not expensive and they are reliable, at least in cities, in Australia.

Maybe I've hit middle age, but it sure looks like evangelising uber is a desire to carve some bohemian fashion for ones self by simply making a materialistic change to a brand of taxi, it's only skin deep really, fashion.

Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi company with OK service would have succeeded.

<comment><USER24> _Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi company with OK service would have succeeded._

This is how I see it. Uber is not particularly revolutionary, but the existing taxi system in many areas was so regressive and unpleasant to use that it didn't take much more than a decent app to upstage them.</comment></comment></comment>


Elizabeth Holmes Discusses Theranos at WSJDLive 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/video/elizabeth-holmes-discusses-theranos-at-wsjdlive-2015/20CE68A0-CAEE-48E0-BAB4-FD6C47D283BE.html?mod=e2tw <comment><USER2> She talks about ex-employees being confused. Not the only ones. What reason should I or anyone else have to believe that Holmes, an uneducated person working in a highly technical field has made a breakthrough in blood analysis aside from her saying she has? If she explained what she's about and it made sense she'd probably garner massive support for what would be regarded as a brilliant step forward. Surely patents can cover the IPR?</comment>


Ask HN: Will spending time working with CloverETL hurt my career? - <AUTHOR> Our company's "data wrangling" team, which I'm a part of, is working to implement/migrate much of our ETL process to CloverETL. In searching for "CloverETL" there are no books on Amazon, there are no results on "Search Hacker News", and there are very, very few results on job sites. CloverETL seems like a solid product for our use case, but I just don't see it being used. I'm wondering if I'm being set-up for a career set-back.
Does anyone else have experience with CloverETL or have an opinion on hiring people with a background using it?
For additional context: Prior to CloverETL everything was implemented in BASH (I know, not good, I was semi-horrified). There was a push by one person to move to Python, but they botched the job and now he's gone, the remaining folks don't know Python, and we're dismantling the little Python code we had. The CloverETL push is by the group's manager, and no one else has expressed an opinion. <comment><USER2> Never used cloveretl, but I'm not sure why you see it as a setback. It requires programming in standard Java as far as I can see, so it's not a "we made our own silo environment" kind of project. Some skills will be transferable to other approaches and the Java extraction / processing will surely bring its own chunk of interesting projects. ETL itself as an idea is going to be similar across many solutions. And that's transferable experience.

It sounds like you need some ETL solution and you're either buying one or writing one from scratch. If you need it now and have money, you're probably just going to buy something.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would not be afraid of working on something that isn't famous. If this project succeeds you have a great story of how you picked up technology X and did something great with it. Then when somebody else needs technology Y, you can do the same.</comment>


Sketch to App Store - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/clusterinc/SketchToAppStore

<comment><USER2> so the 3.5" screens are just cut off?</comment>


Florida joins U.S. government in probing foreign ties of researchers - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/florida-joins-us-government-probing-foreign-ties-researchers <comment><USER3> All: if you comment in a thread like this, please take a moment to ensure that you're following the site guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). Note this one: " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ " Otherwise it's too easy to end up with nationalistic (in this case) flamewars, which damage the container here and don't help anything.

Some good qualities for HN threads: curious, factual, neutral.

Some bad ones: indignant, denunciatory, flamey.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most Thousand Talents Program recruits are Chinese nationals studying and working in the U.S. Some of them may have green card, but mostly are not U.S. citizens. This is not a patriotism issue.

The money is not just the directly reward from the Thousand Talents Program. Being a Thousand Talents Program recruit, you can easily become a professor and lab director in China. This gives you money and status.

I knew a physicist worked in a 100~150 rank state University as a research scientist for a decade, low pay, cannot find a tenure position. But he got in the Thousand Talents Program, so he left the U.S. and became a professor in a top 10 University in China.

<comment><USER5> Why can't US schools and companies offer those scientists competitive salaries and status, if their research is so important?

<comment><USER6> Because their research is not important. If it were, academia would pay more, and have better working conditions. If it were, immigration to the US would be easier[1].

That everyone is wringing their hands over this issue today is quite telling. The people doing it aren't interested in advancing research - they are interested in using public money to make privately capitalizable discoveries.

If a single penny of public money was used in research, the results should be public. At that point, it doesn't matter whether or not that research ended up going to China.

[1] Yes, it's possible for researchers to immigrate to the US. But it's not exactly easy. It's a mountain of beurocracy, stress, legal fees, arbitrary restrictions on travel, and a big drain on your time. Combine that with all the other costs of permanently moving to another country, and you shouldn't be surprised that a lot of people opt not to do it.

<comment><USER7> > _Because their research is not important. If it were, academia would pay > more, and have better working conditions._

This assumes academia cares for the research (as opposed for milking students, getting grants, and so on).

<comment><USER6> Does the person making your latte at Starbucks deeply care about making coffee, or about getting a paycheque on Thursday?

It's obviously the latter, yet cafes exist, and lattes get made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is appalling that cancer research in particular is being hamstrung with such extreme mercenary motives as protecting IP

<comment><USER9> Protective IP on medical research probably means more investment is done in medical research.

The recognition of private property in intellectual endeavors necesarily means that more capital is invested in intellectual endeavors.

Personally I think that creating an artificial wall to make more people devote time to entertainment, or certain research, etc is pretty dumb and would be better not to exist at all.

<comment><USER8> the problem with capital is that is only motivated by potential profit

<comment><USER10> Nothing is stopping you from giving all of your capital away to cure cancer

<comment><USER8> but then it would not be capital anymore

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked for a lab ran by a Chinese national at an Ivy when I was in graduate school. He would go on frequent trips to China touring major Chinese universities. He was something of a celebrity. He did not do this at US universities FWIW.

He had a pipeline and dedicated spots in our lab for Chinese graduate students who wanted to do a "postdoc" in the US. He was talking to one of his non- Chinese postdocs (with me present) who was considering taking a tenure-track faculty position at a university. He says, "You don't want to work there." She says, "Why do you say that?". He says, "The majority of students there are white. You won't get any quality students."

On another occasion, I was speaking with a S. Korean member of the lab who was well recognized at our university and in the field. He said to me, "When I first got here, I was bullied heavily. I was told: Koreans are stupid. Koreans are lazy. At least you're better than the white students."

This is all anecdote. But I personally saw that a lot of what we learned, discovered, developed, or otherwise worked on in our lab was taken on the road to share with Chinese Universities. I never once learned of something that was brought back to help us. I was told by a couple postdocs, actually, not to trust papers published by Chinese journals unless the same finding was corroborated by a non-mainland journal.

We did not share this kind of information very frequently or at that kind of volume with any other lab or university in the US. As a matter of fact, when I discovered a variation of a protocol that was much more effective and when I also had some preliminary findings on my own research and wanted to share this with another lab in the US that was doing similar work (to help them, and to learn from them - respectively). I was told I couldn't even tell them I was working on this because we didn't want them to beat us to publish.

Science is supposed to be about collaboration. It shouldn't know borders. But I have never seen such shady, unethical practice. When I raised concerns, I was told to keep my head down. I'm not in that field anymore... and it's always just a "Can you believe this happens..." story that I like to tell. But every time I see reports like this... I expect to read my old PI's name. Odd stuff.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article is written from the standpoint that something is being lost, IP, to foreign governments. What I don't see it saying is that something has been lost and/or stolen.

Science being funded across borders isn't a bad thing. Collaboration leads to greater understanding and faster discoveries. The article doesn't seem to mention any positives, only painting everything as shady back room dealings that need to be exposed. I'm curious if anyone in the science community has a more positive perspective than the one that's being written about here? It seems to only mention China as the threat, but I see research is constantly shared with European universities. Will those also come under investigation?

Basically, are the issues brought up in the article actually bad things that we want to prevent? If these new policies are carried through, will we be better off or not?

<comment><USER13> >This article is written from the standpoint that something is being lost, IP, to foreign governments.

The target here is China. They alone are responsible for the largest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen (Trillions $$ in IP theft from western tax payers). There is a great book called "Future Wars-Mark Goodman" that details some of this theft of technology that the Chinese Gov and their agents have carried out not just from the US but Europe also.

<comment><USER14> Taking IP is not a "wealth transfer"; it's wealth copying. The productive capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not decreased by someone else also having it, although their revenue might be. This is different from if I go and steal your factory, which prevents you from producing whatever you were using the factory to produce. Intellectual property and property are qualitatively different, and many people argue that society would be better off without the former (see for instance the massive support for SciHub and movie piracy on HN).

<comment><USER15> >The productive capacity of the original holder of the IP/technology is not decreased by someone else also having it, although their revenue might be.

This is the contradiction. A reduction in revenue directly translates to a reduction in productive capacity.

<comment><USER16> Which makes us go down the slippery slope of "if I'm going to the toilet on my employer's time it means I'm reducing its revenues". Which in turn brings us to the employees of the most wealthy men on this planet having to literally piss themselves on the job.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't _make_ us go down that slippery slope. Those who slide down it are deliberately choosing to do so.

<comment><USER16> So it's ok to go on the slippery slope of seeing IP infringement as theft (at least I regard that as a slippery slope, and I'm not the only one), but going further down the slippery slope thingie is not ok. So the question becomes: who decides where we should stop the slipper slope-ness?

<comment><USER17> Society, collectively.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm saying "why, this is simple, obvious to even the most casual of observers" \-- what I'm saying is more that this is in line with the kind of decisions societies and individuals have to make all the time about what is and isn't acceptable.

I'm a fiction author myself, and I'm not against giving my work away for free! But I don't think it's unreasonable for me to think I should be the one to make the decision whether or not to do so -- and that means that, at some level, I need control over the "intellectual property" of my fiction. I don't think that having my work digitally available means I somehow automatically forfeit the right to that control that I would have had thirty years ago when you pretty much would have had to buy a physical copy on paper. What readers are ostensibly paying for, after all -- or what I'm giving away, if I choose -- isn't the medium, it's the work _expressed_ in that medium.

And, you know, there are nuances and arguments to be made around that. There's a lot of things about IP law as it exists now I disagree with. But seriously making the argument that we can't let a book publisher enforce their copyright against a pirate ebook site because to do so will inexorably lead us to the Triangle Shirt Fire -- I'm just saying, I think that's a pretty damn hard case to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> US universities have been offering generous scholarships and green cards to German PhDs for a long time, with the obvious goal of making their research available for US companies to use.

In fact, cherry-picking the worldwide top talent is one of the core aspects of silicon valley culture.

Why is it offensive that China is using the same approach as the US for building their own silicon valley equivalent?

</comment><comment><USER19> What is the problem being solved?

Intellectual property concerns _seem_ to be the issue at hand which definitely does not grok.

If the NIH is giving out money for research, the results of that research should be public, un-patented, free, to benefit the whole species, not Florida, not the US.

If there are concerns about training people with funds in the US who plan to leave, I get it. If there are concerns about sabotage, I get it. Otherwise, wtf?

There are many arguments, but no thesis. "China bad" isn't good enough.

<comment><USER20> One argument would be that China for some time has maintained the world's largest biological weapons program which _dwarfs_ anything the US and the Russians have even when combined.

In fact there is a rule of thumb from the Cold War...US - Nuclear, Soviets - Chemical, Chinese - Biological. Indeed most plagues have originated in China due to the population density and the prevalence of swine (there is a reason many religions don't consume certain types of meat and in particular pork, it's correlation with plague goes back thousands of years).

Besides these biological weapons which can be quickly looked up online at US Think Tanks and places like the Army War College...China has also maintained a pretty firm grip on HackerNews.

Twice now as a cybersecurity researcher I've come across Elasticsearch clusters employing Logstash in combination with a filebeat that streams in HackerNews topics and comments. This ingestion pipeline seems to be set off if you hit enough "hot words" after which time an Elastalert is sent out to presumably trigger human-in-the-loop to comment and pounce on any criticism. Based on the architecture that I saw in both cases this is a straightforward if not modest and not that sinister interpretation of the infrastructure. Yet it is still very concerning in the aggregate.

In conclusion, China could use these innovations for weapons to kill not as much us as their own people. Additionally their attempts to monitor and at times squelch free speech abroad goes against...a lot of things that people who live in Democracies would agree is valuable and worth protecting.

<comment><USER21> The automated response pipeline I something I always assumed existed but couldn't prove. Is there a way you can anonymously publish info about this?

<comment><USER20> Lol my full name is in my profile. I published about the Wyze Breach, and a couple of other things, here: [https://blog.12security.com](https://blog.12security.com)

These posts were rapidly put up as I wrestled with the cloud hosted Ghost platform, so excuse the grammar mistakes.

Further posts on the topic you're referring to, broad surveillance of the forums, comments, and chat rooms of the internet using streaming timeseries databases, I am working on now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't fully understand what they did that is wrong? I strongly suspect this is a pharma grift to prevent new cancer treatments from being made available in China so they can profit off them dressed up as xenophobia and insinuation.

I guess if they are at a "shadow lab" and are not working their grants that's something, but lol at how often professors just take time off to do consulting for companies!

<comment><USER23> I'm affiliated with a university, and every year for the past 5+ years I have to fill out a conflict of interest (COI) form in which I testify that I haven't accepted gifts or compensation from outside entities without filing a disclosure form for that gift/compensation. I forget the exact dollar threshold, but it's like $100. Basically anything above a coffee mug or t-shirt.

The point of filing the disclosure is clear, if you give it some thought from the POV of the university.

For instance, suppose a professor is performing research for NIH. When the grant/contract application is filed, the university is promising NIH that X research will be performed at that university. There is an agreement between the university and NIH, and the university has the duty of monitoring funds and activity. (This is part of the rationale for the ~30-50% overhead charge that everyone also likes to argue about.) If it's a contract (opposed to a grant, both are given by NIH) there are also deliverables to NIH that are guaranteed _by the university_.

[Aside: above is pushing back against some people's notion that NSF/NIH grants/contracts are a mostly-unrestricted dollar award to a specific faculty member to do cool stuff; that may the the informal working-model especially for grants to long-time faculty but it's not the letter of the law]

For this reason, the university itself has a direct interest in making sure an investigator is not taking money from another source for the same (worst case!) or similar research/deliverables. This is why major universities now require COI disclosure for outside consulting, etc. -- basically anything where flows of external funds could affect the course of work that the _university_ is supposed to monitor.

If you read the article with this in mind, it appears that the university discovered that these researchers had taken money from these outside entities _without disclosure_ to the university. This is a big no-no, and it is indeed _very_ surprising that the CEO of the entire cancer center would not have disclosed.

In some cases, the failure to disclose is the real issue, because it gives the appearance of "hiding something." Hope this helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Aren't strong foreign ties for researchers a good thing?

(shrugs)

</comment><comment><USER25> McCarthyism is cool again.

</comment><comment><USER26> At what point are we going to stop with this Nationalism bullshit and realize that research, regardless of who pays for it, is good for all of mankind.

<comment><USER27> As soon as we have removed all of the silly lines on the map.

<comment><USER28> Everytime I see someone mentioning no nations, fictitious as it is, it reminds me of [https://acecombat.fandom.com/wiki/A_World_With_No_Boundaries](https://acecombat.fandom.com/wiki/A_World_With_No_Boundaries) which was branded as a terrorist group in the game. Don't think national boundaries will ever be erased without economic incentive and hardship in the process. How would you refer to each land?

As far as I can see there is always going to be boundaries be it cultural, tribal or artificial. Tendency is just there. Look at SF for instance where there was one neighborhood that rebranded itself (The East cut).

<comment><USER29> Nation-states are a fairly recent invention historically speaking, and their benefits are somewhat questionable - it's entirely possible that they simply don't provide more benefits than the price of administration.

Humans lived in city-states for most of our history, I see no reason why we shouldn't expect the city-state to be resurgent in the current century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is this the result of a decreasing amount of patriotism across the US? Or maybe it's just money.

<comment><USER31> The Chinese "Thousand Talents" program listed in the article has one-time awards of up to $150k USD.

<comment><USER32> That's not a lot money..I'm pretty sure many researchers that qualifies that program could get a 200-400k or much more sign-on package from major tech company. The Chinese program might come with much more benefit and privileges though that couldn't be measured by money

<comment><USER33> I think the downvotes are because it's 150k one time stipend for R&D, i.e. a grant for research. Salaries may be separate.

<comment><USER34> It's because it actually is a lot of money for academia. The "make 200k-400k signing bonus at a tech firm" is approximately the same as "just have the truck drivers join FAANG for a 50k signing bonus" \- as in, there aren't _that_ many positions that pay that well, there's a ton of competition for them, there isn't enough for everybody, so the vast majority of people are going to take this option for a variety of reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone here have any idea what [https://usaviationacademy.com](https://usaviationacademy.com) is? A 7,000 foot runway, they also own a total of 3 airports in central Texas...with dozens of planes, 10 helicopters, and multiple private jets? All owned by about 7 different business names it looks like and 7 different non-working numbers? Apparently they teach...air to air refueling. Lol sure that is standard pilot training for Delta.

They also conveniently left open an Elasticsearch cluster with 600,000 US Air Force personnel PII records.

Yesterday it was posted about front companies acquiring massive resources in the US. Who are these people?

[http://18.104.22.168:9200/airmen/_search?size=100&pretty](http://126.96.36.199:9200/airmen/_search?size=100&pretty)

<comment><USER35> Those aren't USAF records. They're FAA (civilian) pilot records. I think that info is all scraped public record - <USER2> [https://amsrvs.registry.faa.gov/airmeninquiry/](https://amsrvs.registry.faa.gov/airmeninquiry/)

If you want help getting media attention on the breach to try to get it shamed into being closed, I'd suggest reaching out to Troy Hunt (HIBP?) or Brian Krebs.

<comment><USER20> Fascinating and thank you. Airmen is a uniquely military term, and entering into Wikipedia immediately brings up an article on Air Force ranks. It is interesting 1). That the FAA uses this term as well and 1). There seems to be an entry input for country. I guess that's for foreign pilots? Or for US citizens who move abroad?</comment></comment></comment>


Letter from a Region in My Mind (1962) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind <comment><USER2> One of the truly great essays of the 20th century. It's too nuanced and complex and terrible and wonderful to summarize but I strongly suggest taking some time to read it in full.

 _God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!_ has stuck in my head since i first read this essay in high school.</comment>


Ny haskell talk: who you gonna call? Ghc and its primops - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/69025829

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a talk I gave at the NYC haskell meetup last month. Feel free to ask me any questions.

Due to time limitations and trying to make it accessible to experts and non experts, its a bit broad rather than deep as such talks go.

[edit: also see reddit discussion [http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1gzmw1/who_ya_gonna...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1gzmw1/who_ya_gonna_call_getting_dirty_with_cmm_the_ghc/)]</comment>


Show HN: Woz threw an amazing party. Twice. - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Festival

<comment><USER2> "Show HN" is for things you've made that other people can play with. Please don't put it on general-interest articles.</comment>


Non-Tech Founder of YCW12 Daily Muse Learns Code & Builds New Feature in 6 Days - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/07/24/non-techie-cofounder-learns-code/

<comment><USER2> Being any kind of founder is all about shipping - closing the gap between idea and execution. Melissa learned to code on the side, while running a business, and most importantly, she actually shipped that code.

This isn't about perfect code or Melissa becoming a software developer, it's about a kickass founder doing whatever it takes to see her vision become reality. So much respect for this lady! She is exactly the kind of non-tech founder worth working for.

</comment><comment><USER3> First the title is misleading, considering she took two months to learn Python, etc.

"It took about two months for her to learn Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript — all of which were required to complete the feature"

It should be called: "Non-Tech Founder of YCW12 Daily Muse Learns Code; Builds New Feature In 6 Days".

Second, just because a feature is built in 6 days, doesn't meant that it will be able to run for 6 days without problems. It isn't hard to copy and paste code without knowing what it is doing.

On the other hand, it is good to see her taking initiative and getting her hands dirty with her own product.

<comment><USER4> Further, she's done some of this before:

"With only one high-school coding class under her belt — in a language that is no longer used — McCreery spent her evenings learning to code."

Regardless of the language she learned in high school, this is a huge leg up. Coding principles transfer easily, especially at the introductory level. Even an 8-week elective will get you over those first few humps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations to her for learning the basics, but I find it annoying that this article seems to consider "knowing how to code" as a binary variable, either you know it or you don't. What she really did is learn to add a basic website feature in Python, which is cool but not comparable to a lot of other real "coding" going on out there.

<comment><USER6> Actually, either you do know how to do it or you don't. After that there's degrees of capability, but before learning to write software in any language there's a period of "duhhhh i don't get it" and at a certain point people get a "oh! i get it". For some that's very quick, for others it takes forever.

Once they're past that stage then it's a matter of improving skill and building a style and repertoire of techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Company Muse's database is in Python with displays in HTML, CSS and JavaScript."

Better than the average tech article, I guess, but still incorrect.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps they are using <http://gadfly.sourceforge.net/> (Gadfly is a simple relational database system implemented in Python)? :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let's face it, not all types of coding are hard.

</comment><comment><USER10> "A kid grows up & finishes college in 4 years."

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how the co-founder got her story on mashable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like the "Learn to Code in 10 Days" books have finally got their charm right.

<comment><USER6> Just wanted to say, my book is specifically the antithesis of "Learn X in 10 Days", which is why they have the title they do. I push people to work hard, take their time, and build skill gradually. That's why what I'm doing works for beginners while the stupid "10 days" books are basically horseshit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is kind of cool. I was actually talking to her about it after this event:

<https://twitter.com/chriszf/status/226074915940491264>

I didn't realize she was actually implementing a feature. She was talking about it as if it was a prototype so she could use it as a spec for the programmers. Turns out it was good enough for them to push:

<https://twitter.com/melissa_quino/status/226471710940090368>

I'm going to find out more information from her on the story and write it up, so if there's specific questions you have then let me know.

</comment><comment><USER13> this is all good and fine, but, i would like to see the quality of that code and how much extra time it added to refactor, test and clean up to their developers?

<comment><USER14> The "feature" is a simple crud application for job postings on their corporate website. How much re-factoring and testing is necessary?

I doubt the code would need to be re-used in their main product, and why would you need anything more then user testing?

I doubt the co-founder is now prancing around talking about how coding is easy. She spent 36 hours developing a simplistic feature that would take an experienced developer less then a day.

<comment><USER15> This is a "feature" (simple crud) that would take 6 clicks to build in Visual Studio (just saying) :-)</comment></comment></comment>


GPS error caused '12 hours of problems' for companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35491962 <comment><AUTHOR> This is one reason why Spanner [1] uses both Atomic clocks as well as GPS for TrueTime. I wonder if it came into play during this event?

[1] [http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/spanner- osdi2012.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is it just me or is there very little technical detail, to the point of not even explaining the headline?</comment>


Why do small frontend teams fail? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.500tech.com/why-do-small-frontend-teams-fail/ <comment><USER2> I don't think this applies strictly to front end teams, it applies to any team where the manager does not understand the complexity of the project or the tools needed to complete the project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems more prominent in frontend team, cause "that shit is easy"</comment></comment>


Why fighting aliens in outer space isn't as fun as it sounds - <AUTHOR> https://pausebutton.substack.com/p/why-fighting-aliens-in-outer-space <comment><USER2> When I was a kid, I wondered why the Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars fighters were able to turn such sharp corners. And for Star Wars, I don't mean just the X-wing, but mostly the Tie Fighters. That's some mad science right there.

I was told not to overthink it. But the same problems I noticed then are still here today. They can zoom by in space, but they won't be doing those high speed weaving asteroid avoidance maneuvers in real life any time soon.

The next (and last) Star Wars is sure to forget this bit of physics we all know instinctively today, but didn't know so much about in the 70's and 80's.</comment>


Learn Prolog Now! - <AUTHOR> http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~kris/learn-prolog-now/lpnpage.php?pageid=online

<comment><USER2> What's a good, current Prolog implementation?

<comment><USER3> Check out <http://www.gprolog.org/>

Edit: Beaten to it! So I'll add that I've played around with it a little, and it seems good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Make me.</comment>


Keynotes from Web 2.0 Expo - <AUTHOR> http://web2expo.blip.tv/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the best were:

Steve Blank talking about the history of silicon valley (it didn't start with silicon).

Hilary Mason talking about what Bit.ly knows based on all the links that are getting posted.

Tim O'Reilly talking about the Internet Operating System.

</comment><comment><USER2> Here are the slides from all of the presentations as well.

<http://www.scribd.com/web2expo></comment>


The Hardware Hacker: Bunnie Huang's Tour-De-force - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2016/12/30/the-hardware-hacker-bunnie-hu.html <comment><USER2> Prominently featured in a recent documentary on manufacturing in Shenzhen. Recommended: [http://www.wired.co.uk/video/shenzhen-full- documentary](http://www.wired.co.uk/video/shenzhen-full-documentary)

<comment><USER3> I second the recommendation. The documentary talks in detail about the differing views on intellectual property between Western countries and China that is mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bunnie is also responsible in no minor way for both Chumby[1], and the Novena[2] open laptop.

Met him briefly at Maker Faire and I made sure to thank him for all his excellent work.

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby) [2]: [https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio- kosagi/novena](https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena)

<comment><USER5> I really loved the idea of Chumby. Would have killed it if it had come out more recently as an IoT device.

<comment><USER6> I didn't know about the Chumby at the time; I only read about it after the fact. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can think of one detail in the execution that probably didn't help the product's longevity. In 2009, at around the time that the iPhone 3GS and newer Android phones were using ARMv7-based processors and 256 MB of RAM, the Chumby One used an ARMv5-based chip (the i.MX233) that could only handle 64 MB of RAM. [1] Not exactly a forward-looking move. But I don't know if Bunnie could have done it differently. Was there any ARMv7 or even ARMv6-based chip available to startup companies at that time with the i.MX233's high analog integration and low cost?

[1]: [https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=611](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=611)

<comment><USER7> Not really. That little chip is /still/ about the fastest chip you're gonna get for any sort of hardware hacking project for which you want a display, and the ability to prototype using one of the super cheap pcb makers.

<comment><USER6> Really? Can you explain more about why the i.MX233 has those unique benefits? Might it be better to use something like the CHIP ([https://getchip.com/](https://getchip.com/)), based on an Allwinner R8, instead? Yes, the CHIP is itself a PCB, but it's so small and has enough pin headers that I guess you could treat it as a system-on-module and solder it to a carrier board.

Starting a new project with an ARMv5-based processor today seems really stupid to me, even more so than in 2009. But maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive about obsolete hardware because a community that I care about has been burned in that area before. I'm talking about PDAs designed specifically for blind people. I explained more about that in a mailing list posting here:

[https://www.mail-archive.com/arm- email@example.com/...](https://www.mail-archive.com/arm- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg01176.html)

<comment><USER7> The big advantage comes from its packaging and everything built into the chip. It comes in a 144 pin lqfp package, which means that routing pins can be done by a couple people with real minimal amounts of training, and it can be laid out onto a two-layer board, which tends to be a lot cheaper than a four layer board which a bga package pretty much requires. It's also got a dac and adc built in which has the circuitry to directly drive headphones, so you don't need amplification circuitry to do that. Similarly, it's got integrated power regulation, so you don't need those chips either. Finally, all the info on it is available in a datasheet you don't need to jump through hoops to read [1]. It's not as fast as a chip, but because of everything it has, it's much more flexible for when you are designing something.

[1] [http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/reference- manual...](http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/reference- manuals/IMX23RM.pdf)

<comment><USER8> The Allwinner R8 is available in eLQFP176 and also has a built in audio DAC, ADC and headphone amp. Of course, it requires external memory and all the routing headaches that go along with that, but so does the i.MX233. Power management is generally done by a companion chip from X-Powers, the AXP209.

<comment><USER6> If the CHIP from Next Thing Co. is any indication of the capabilities of the R8, the built-in audio DAC and headphone amplifier are somewhat lacking in low-end frequency response (i.e. bass) compared to what one can get in a PC, smartphone, or any other consumer-level audio player. Indeed, NTC told me on an email support thread that for their upcoming product, the Dashbot, they're using a dedicated DAC to get better audio.

I'm tempted to buy one of Olimex's i.MX233 boards to find out if the audio capabilities of that chip are better. But as I said, starting any new project today with an ARMv5-based processor just seems wrong. Technology moves on, even in applications that don't require a screen. I doubt that an ARMv5-based processor could run a modern speech recognition engine, even if only to listen to a wake word for something like the Alexa Voice Service or the Dashbot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excited to give this a read - he's also got a good reference book for non- native Mandarin speakers on navigating the Shenzhen markets[1]

Just bought mine from the publisher as an ebook + hardcover package for about $10 more than Amazon price for just the book, includes early access with code EARLYBIRD: [https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker](https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker)

[1] [https://www.adafruit.com/product/3189](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3189)

<comment><USER10> I bought a copy too. I was a little disappointed that the early access ebook has the last few chapters missing.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/cjoxjb1pk1lmo5b/Hardware%20hacking...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/cjoxjb1pk1lmo5b/Hardware%20hacking%20early%20access%20PDF.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you haven't had the chance to read one of Bunnie's hardware teardowns, you're missing out. His teardown of the Form 2 3D printer ([https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4641](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4641)) is a great example of his work.

<comment><USER12> That's a nice description of the Form 2 3D printer. You don't see that grade of engineering from most startups. That Formlabs makes their own mirror galvanometers is impressive, but probably necessary. The off the shelf units are either low-precision ones for light shows, or small-volume scientific instrument components.

<comment> joatmon-snoo Can confirm the necessity, having interned there. COTS galvos at that price weren't good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Non-affiliate link to the pre-order for Bunnie's new book: [https://amzn.com/dp/159327758X](https://amzn.com/dp/159327758X)

OP is ~450 word announcment summarizing each half of the new book - if you're interested (hardware manufactring and hacking), you'll already know it and can skip the ads.

<comment><USER14> It's published by nostarch, so if you get it from them directly you can get a DRM-free ebook: [https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker](https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker)

<comment><USER15> There is also a coupon code on that page to get 30% off. Total cost for the ebook and the dead tree copy is $20 + shipping. A steal for Bunnie's usual high quality work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a table of contents of the book at: [https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker](https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker)

I'm really looking forward to getting my copy :)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for linking to a place that actually has the (early access) e-book available _right now_ rather than _real soon now_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In addition to this and the Wired doc, I'd recommend the keyboard.io blog post from October for those who haven't been to Shenzhen yet, but are in the 'deciding' stage: [https://shift.newco.co/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei- the-w...](https://shift.newco.co/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei-the-worlds- most-fascinating-electronics-market-f0384d9fca32#.vsst8sjtu)

<comment><USER18> and to these, I would add a talk that he gave at FOSS Asia earlier this year about a hardware devicde made for Burning Man: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNtQsyysaGk&t=5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNtQsyysaGk&t=5s)

The amount of thought put into the design and implementation is remarkable and inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I believe this book is a print edition of a selection of blog posts that have appeared on [http://www.bunniestudios.com/](http://www.bunniestudios.com/).

<comment><USER20> It's based on bunnie's blog but one of our editors poured her heart and soul into this. She's a EE with incredible passion. In other words, this isn't just a print out of his blog. It's a real book.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> His SoC ISA reverse engineering through FPGA MitM made me smile a lot.</comment>


Fridge0 - <AUTHOR> https://fridge0.branchable.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Found in the discussion about Googles new data centers that will adjust the load based on the availability of renewable energy available: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945942)</comment>


Ask HN: Attending Eric Ries's 'Lean Startup' talk tomorrow? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone else planning on attending Eric's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo on lean/agile startups on Wednesday? <comment><AUTHOR> I should have mentioned that it's in San Francisco. See here:

[http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/detail/7...](http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/detail/7789)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'll be at the Expo, and I'll certainly try to come.

Will any other HN readers be at Web2 this week?</comment>


Are there any HNers in the Melbourne, FL Area? - <AUTHOR>

Putting together a HN meetup in Melbourne, FL. There are tons of Engineers in this area & FIT.  Hoping there a others here who also want to get the startup culture going here! <comment><USER2> Just RSVP'd.

I can't believe that there is so little going on here considering all of the nearby schools (FIT, BCC, Kaiser, UCF Cocoa Beach Campus, etc.) and all of the industry (Harris, Northrop, Lockheed, GE, NASA, etc.).

I guess these two factors don't necessarily contribute to the startup pool, but it DOES mean there are a lot of technically minded people around. Thanks for taking the initiative and starting this. If there's anything I can do to help, just let me know!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> URL for meetup: CodersHackersFounders.com/MeetUp</comment>


Anne Frank and her family were also denied entry as refugees to the U.S - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/24/anne-frank-and-her-family-were-also-denied-entry-as-refugees-to-the-u-s/?utm_term=.5230c9fd2675 <comment><USER2> Among other folks as well [0]. Of note, the US was not the only country to turn away refugees during WWII. Also of note, from what I've read, refugee immigration has been temporarily halted from certain countries with the exemption being refugees from minority religions in those countries.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis)

<comment><USER3> I also read the same regarding minority religions. Although the price I saw was only citing a draft of the executive order. I wonder when, they haven't already, publish the final version.

The countries to which the bans apply are all majority Muslim, so the exemption would apply to non-Muslims.

<comment><USER2> Had similar exemptions been applied in war-time Europe the Franks may well have been saved.

<comment><USER4> This specific exception would obviously not have made any sense back then, considering the vast majority of refugees belonged to the minority religion.

I actually just tried to find out what the attitude towards jewish refugees was in the US and happened upon this eerily pertinent passage:

        Out of fear that the Nazis could smuggle spies and
        saboteurs in with refugees, immigration officials
        tightened visa policies for immigrants and non-
        immigrants. The State Department urged its diplomatic
        consuls in Europe to screen potential immigrants
        carefully, including those fleeing persecution,

(from [https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007094](https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007094))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Under the British Mandate of The League of Nations Britain was obligated to allow Jewish immigration to what is now Israel. In fact originally Hitler wanted European Jews to go there.

But the British broke their mandate with "The White Paper" in 1939 which severely limited Jewish immigration to their land.

If America had run the mandate instead of the British there probably would not have been The Holocaust and many millions more Jews would be alive today in Israel including presumably Anne Frank.

See: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939)

<comment><USER6> If only Britain, France or the US had stopped Germany with force when it invaded the Rhineland, then the war may never have happened.

<comment><USER7> If only the Dawes and Young plans didn't make another war inevitable, solely to generate wealth for US businesses.

We can go on in this silly vein all day...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Saudi men committed the terrorist act of 9/11 and the Orlando shooter was of Afghani origin. But Trump banned people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Yemen & Sudan. What kind of logic is that?

I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea that the United States of America should ban people based on their country of origin. That is UnAmerican. But I do find the above illogical and very fishy.

</comment><comment><USER9> The way the US and other countries abandoned Jews to genocide was shameful.

And I do think that Western countries (such as the US and my own country of Australia) should take more refugees, including Syrian refugees.

However, I'd question the parallel the article tries to draw between between victims and survivors of the Holocaust and contemporary Syrian refugees – every Jew fleeing the Nazi regime was under a very serious risk of falling victim to genocide, whether or not they realised it at the time. By contrast, I don't think the vast majority of Syrian refugees are fleeing genocide. While genocide has been occurring in Syria (e.g. ISIS' genocide of Yazidis), the actual or potential victims of those genocides are a small minority of the total Syrian refugee population.

<comment><USER10> Everyone in the west always forgets thats Jews were not the only ones that were victimized by the Nazis, and I feel that this is too often misrepresented from the general knowledge pool of most people in society.

More soviets died there than Jews, and in fact more Non-Jews died there than Jews. Why does everyone ignore that?

Number of Deaths Jews: up to 6 million Soviet civilians: around 7 million Soviet prisoners of war: around 3 million Non-Jewish Polish civilians: around 1.8 million Serb civilians: 312,000 People with disabilities: up to 250,000 Roma (Gypsies): 196,000–220,000 Jehovah's Witnesses: Around 1,900 Repeat criminal offenders: at least 70,000

[https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193](https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193)

<comment><USER2> All true, but that's standard warfare stuff. Only certain populations were targeted for extermination. Jews were not the only ones but Russians certainly were not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Number of Syrian refugees let in to Israel: ZERO

And it's right next door.

<comment><USER12> Israel has been treating wounded Syrians since the conflict started.

The number of Syrian refugees fleeing to Israel is also nearly zero, 70 years of propaganda would do it for it as well as Israel not being a welfare state.

Overall you can say the same thing about most Gulf nations, only with one exception they have more cash than both Israel and Sweden and they are both culturally and ethnically more similar.

Considering that many of the Muslim refugees are Sunni, a better question would be why didn't Saudi Arabia and rest of the Oil club didn't take most if not all of them.

<comment><USER11> Which country is geographically closer to Syria? Israel or Sweden?

<comment><USER12> Which country is geographically closer Turkey or Sweden? Greece or Sweden? Italy or Sweden? Bulgaria or Sweden?

They run to Sweden for a lot of reasons geography isn't one of them, and it's not because all of the other countries are hell holes.

They don't go to Israel because 70 years of government propaganda makes them think they'll eat their babies.

It didn't stop Israel from treating 1000's of wounded and many of them are not reported because crossing to Israel is a death sentence to anyone who wants to return to Syria or their families.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> policy by anecdote?

<comment><USER14> I make all my political and ideological choices based on analogies using Hitler or Nazis. Then I post about them on sites related to technology and downvote anyone who doesn't tow the line. It's called being a decent human being!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Didn't Einstein come to US as a refugee? I guess we'll never know what we're missing out on.

</comment><comment><USER16> What does this have to do with hacker news?

<comment><USER4> Hackers are people, my friend.

<comment><USER17> So are all the other people on earth. There are other outlets for general interest news. The appeal of HN to me is that it's limited specifically to tech-related news.

<comment><USER18> I just don't get these types of complaints (on dying ./ they are doing the same thing over and over). There are hundreds of tech-related stories every day and it's not as if somebody forces you to click on the Anne Frank link so you can complain about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Controlling who may enter your country is exactly what the Nazis would do.

<comment><USER12> Darn, I guess the 190 or so nations that issue passports and check them at the border are all Nazi's... man I didn't realize that the TMITHC on Amazon was reality TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Over the top political agitation like this (or Scott Aaronson's from yesterday) used to get flagged reliably. Why not anymore?

<comment><USER21> Because it's no longer over the top?

<comment><USER20> If you mean that "elected president is literally Hitler" and related themes have been mainstreamed so thoroughly and quickly as to be the new normal _already_... I think you should be afraid of the power of the press more than of any merely elected president.

<comment><USER22> Hitler wasn't Hitler when he was appointed.

A multi-car pile-up isn't one 5 minutes before it happens either.

I agree that one shouldn't cry wolf and exaggerate too often, but it's equally ignorant to not take things seriously, whether it be a fact-opposing president, mass surveillence legislation or anti consumer net unneutrality, that are all just steps that are hard to reverse once in place, and are building towards something much worse.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pitching VCs: Present Flexibly - <AUTHOR> http://getventure.typepad.com/markpeterdavis/2007/09/keep-your-prese.html When most entrepreneurs practice these presentations they focus on smoothing out the pace of the presentation. While it's good to practice and get comfortable with the content of your presentation, it's important to keep the order and pace flexible; I can guarantee that you won't go in the order or at the pace you expected. <comment><USER2> "I can guarantee that you won't go in the order or at the pace you expected. You will need to adapt the pace of the presentation to the needs of the VC."

\-- This is something I can relate to based on our YC interview last year in Boston. We actually prepared a pitch thinking we'd actually have time to parrot it out. How wrong we were :) Well, at least we know what to expect if we get called again.</comment>


SearX: Privacy-respecting metasearch engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asciimoo/searx <comment><USER2> Even with a pool of proxies, I would expect an instance of this "metasearch engine" to quickly get banned by the other search engines. The same IP running thousands of queries and scraping its content (which is against their ToS) should be easily detectable.

<comment><USER3> Building on that issue, I'd like to add that it would be nice to have a feature that alerts a user that certain a search engine is denying requests. It's visible in the logs or settings somewhere, but usually I find myself wondering for a while why my search queries aren't accurate before heading off to figure out why.

Still a great project though, I use it every day.

<comment><USER4> At least for me, next to each result is a list of the engines that returned that result. I run searx through Tor, so I occasionally find that Google stops returning results for a few minutes.

It doesn't happen often, but it's easy to tell when it does because none of the first page results have "google" next to them, while of course normally most of them would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, have any of you tried FindX?

[https://www.findx.com/](https://www.findx.com/)

[https://github.com/privacore/open-source-search- engine](https://github.com/privacore/open-source-search-engine)

Looks promising but haven't used it much yet.

<comment><USER5> I like this part "it draws its results from its own bot that crawls the web". There aren't too many that use their own bot.

Tsignal ([https://deepsearch.tsignal.io/](https://deepsearch.tsignal.io/)) is another that uses it's own bot with a little AI tossed into the mix. And... it's currently not accessible:(

Wanted to add that I'm currently on Opera and using an extension named _Search All_ [0]. After conducting a search via your default search engine, this extension places a bar with a list of user configurable search engines. This allows you to search alternatives easily using the same keywords.

One great feature is that if you go directly to a search engine, click on the _Search All_ icon, it almost always identifies it with correct parameters and can be easily added. Just added findX to my bar (for testing).

I plan on going back to Firefox and wish FF had something like this (part of the reason I'm posting this).

[0] [https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/search- all/?d...](https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/search- all/?display=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is also [http://yacy.net](http://yacy.net), peer-to-peer distributed free search engine.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what the rationale behind listing the site's CA in the public instance list ([https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx- instances](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances)).

</comment><comment><USER8> Does this have any advantages over StartPage?

<comment><USER9> * Can be self-hosted.

* Queries other search engines besides just Google.

* Has more search options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome. I have been wanting to build something like this for a while but never had the time.

<comment><USER11> There's also pears search, which died sometime after being funded by Mozilla. I don't think it was malicious intent, but no one can explain why the project is inactive.</comment></comment>