Disney hotel workers try to stay ahead of the 'electronic whip' - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-1019-lopez-disney-20111018,0,4593135.column <comment><USER2> Looks like American business has taken a page out of the Soviet management playbook, though a bit late. This sort of inter-worker competition, with high score lists being publicly posted, attempts to use high-quota workers to motivate/shame/scare others to catch up, even adding "game-like" elements, etc., were all popular motivational tools in Soviet factories. (Cf: <http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Gamification.</comment>


Wanting the Unwanted: Why Eat Weeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.rootedfood.com/musings/2015/4/1/a-foraged-affair <comment><USER2> I believe the premise to be false, while it is true that you can eat many different "weeds" I cannot find any methodology or theory where that doing so increases the efficiency of land use. There are some key things like nutrients in == nutrients out and digestibility in humans which is not a given.

That said, there were some interesting recipes for what are nominally weeds in the Foxfire[1], and Euell Gibbons books[2] which were certainly edible although nothing I've tried really struck me as exceptional. As Boy Scouts we got a merit badge for creating a meal out of locally harvested plants, that was fun.

[1] [http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx](http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Euell-Gibbons-Handbook-Edible- Plants/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Euell-Gibbons-Handbook-Edible- Plants/dp/0915442787)

<comment><USER3> What "weeds" does do for you is increase the amount of useful land. Many of our favorite crops require very preferential choice in land.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that it makes economical sense once you subtract the labor cost to plant and harvest them (or plant, harvest, classify, clean, transport and sell them).

My family is form Jujuy (in the north of Argentina) and we went many times to visit the Quebrada de Humahuaca ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebrada_de_Humahuaca](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebrada_de_Humahuaca) ) that is a nice but not very fertile place. In every site that you have a little of horizontal land and some water there is a small farm, and you see there potatoes and maize.

<comment><USER5> While you don't have to plant them (because they're weeds and volunteer), you do have to harvest and it is a challenge that we're working on. Economic sustainability/feasibility is extremely important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something to keep in mind here is that once a viable market is found then the product will be fully commercialised and mass-produced. No longer will poor conditions be good enough when compared to the yield you get from ideal conditions.

Then we will start fertilising them, then tweaking the seeds etc etc etc. And before long it will be just like anything else grown on the land.

</comment><comment><USER7> Right place, right time, right plant. Don't eat weeds from places where they may have been sprayed by pesticides or pets. I put dandelion (literally "teeth of the lion" or dans de lion in french) in my smoothies weekly. It's pretty bitter and tastes of the earth, so if you make a smoothie use copious amounts of lemon juice and/or orange juice to make it taste a little bit better. There are all sorts of little-known health benefits to dandelion. They are PACKED with all sorts of nutrients. People even grow them deliberately in gardens in Europe. Some people also make dandelion wine and dandelion coffee. Google this stuff - you might be surprised. In an abstract sense weeds are a bit like startups because they take unwanted resources (heat, light, soil, space) and 'add value' through unique processes e.g. photosynthesis to turn them into something else. In a strange way I find weeds inspiring.

<comment><USER8> Packed with _micronutrients_. There is almost no macronutrient in dandelion, as besides water it's almost entirely indigestible cellulose fibre. But that fibre is actually the most beneficial aspect by far. By "packed" we mean a few micrograms of calcium, asorbic acid, & other micros dandelion offers, which is completely drowned out by the micros found in the other food one eats. Unless you're eating kilograms of it every week? Not that the reason you're eating it matters, the fibre is good for you no matter what you believe.

<comment><USER9> Sorry to correct you, but Dandelion was used as medicine for centuries and is packed with vitamins (A especially) and B1, B2, C and E as well as a lot of minerals. OP was correct.

I would however advise against eating too much of it because of its notorious laxative effect. :-)

<comment><USER8> Packed? A lot? In 100g of dandelion, how much vitamins & minerals do you think there are? I'd be surprised if it was more than 1 gram in total. It's more likely a lot less than 1%.

The fibre is the most beneficial component by mass by a huge margin.

<comment><USER10> I don't think mass is the right way to measure things. I think the correct way to measure things would be by % of daily target. What if you only need 1/100 by mass of some other nutrient vs fiber?

<comment><USER8> Recommend daily amount is tricky because it may not reflect our most current understanding, but it is a good starting point. For example the RDA of vitamin D is 600IU/day, but there has been evidence that up to 10x this dose continues to provide benefit. While once you have your RDA of other vitamins, any more will just be flushed out of you so it's irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of my favorites is rucola/arugula - it's a weed but it's really quite nice in a salad. Very strong nutty flavor.

You can buy a cultivated version in in supermarkets here (NL) but it's nowhere near as strong.

Peppermint + spearmint are also weeds which are commonly grown for use in cooking or tea.

<comment><USER4> Since a few years, rucula is mainstream here in Argentina. Every time you go to a restaurant most people order a rucula salad.

<comment><USER12> This has been my experience in the U.S. as well (at least where I am). It's a very popular crop at the local farmers' markets because it is easier to grow.

My family really enjoys it. Dumping it on pizza is quite good, and you can make a fine pesto from it (instead of basil).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is a very interesting topic beyond food.

When I first came to America, I was surprised and confused by the lack of diversity on vegetables in grocery stores. Around the small Midwest town I lived, there were many weeds that look edible. I had never heard any local Americans eat them, though. I thought it was simply because there were a surplus of food in America.

Many many years passed. In our backyard, there are many weeds that look edible. I have tried only two, dandelion and a kind of fern. I hesitate on the others, although some looks similar to what I had eaten before. I am concerned they might cause health issues, from minor stomach discomfort to serious food poisoning.

It is not like I had no experience in forage. I regularly foraged for weeds, ferns, mushrooms when I was a child. I love them better than carrots, celeries, cabbages, etc. They simply tasted better. But I hesitate at the weeds and mushrooms in my backyard.

Whenever I see some new vegetables in the fantastic Berkeley Bowl, I will get some, google recipes, and try them. Whenever I see these weeds in restaurant menu, I will order to have a try. First, because I love trying new things. Second, I believe it is sustainable, both from where I grow up and from my education. But I still hesitate at the weeds and mushrooms in my backyard.

One can explain it from the point of view of evolution. Somehow, I feel it is more than that.

<comment><USER3> Avoiding wild mushrooms is generally a good plan without a lot of education and training in mushroom ID.

Few weeds will kill you, but quite a large percentage of wild mushrooms are harmful. The ones you find in the supermarket are the exception.

<comment><USER14> Yup. It's generally a good idea to avoid any wild berries, nuts, seeds, or mushrooms that you aren't 100% certain you recognize. If there's even a sliver of uncertainty, it's not worth the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there any good information about the nutritional content and popular weeds and what they taste like?

<comment><USER5> There's some information about there about nutrition, but not much, which is why we're working on it! Also working on the digital field guide, but for now we have the printed guide with a $15 donation to Berkeley Open Source Food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty interesting, but you do have to be careful with eating a number of "weeds" that grow everywhere. A good friend of mine in high school ended up strapped down to a gurney for a few days after overdosing on jimsonweed. He was never quite right after that.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you definitely have to be extremely careful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know a fair number of old-timers that still eat dandelion greens and fiddleheads and pigweed. Fortunately, New England is a place with few very poisonous things, although it is important to check that you are picking fiddleheads and not wood ferns...

<comment><USER18> Dandelion greens are a pretty normal "green" in Greece, used in salads roughly the same way that the southern U.S. uses turnip greens or collard greens (i.e. boiled, w/ lemon juice, oil, and/or vinegar). But picking them wild is a different situation than buying them in a marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's a YouTube channel of a guy eating all sorts of foraged weeds and plants.

[https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds](https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds)

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem with eating weeds is that people spray them with toxins which aren't meant for things humans are going to eat. Do they wash off? Who knows? They haven't been evaluated for that use-case.

</comment><comment><USER21> A fun little video I made of a foraged brunch I attended last year:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpvKl11FABk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpvKl11FABk)

</comment><comment><USER22> "Open Source" Food is name only- they demand a $15 donation to see their field guide. Until then, good luck not eating something toxic.

<comment><USER23> Nothing inherently wrong with charging money to supply you with open source products.

The problem however is sustainability: once a customer gets the source they can give it away/sell it etc.

<comment><USER3> We are spoiled; "open source" has come to mean in many people's minds, "free as in speech AND beer"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The premise that weeds are a suitable food for humans is wrong. Most of these plants are loaded with toxins. You can't eat them in any quantity for calories without getting poisoned.

Cows and goats and sheep can eat these things, though, because they have more advanced digestive systems. The udder provides an added toxin filtration system.

In theory you might be able to design an efficient system to detoxify wild plants such as grass and weeds directly into a high quality human food. At this moment cheese is already an incredibly effective way to use wild forage to make human food.</comment>


29C3 Recordings - <AUTHOR> http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/

<comment><USER2> I've been watching the live streams since 25c3. First of all, it's a great thing there are so many volunteers make such a big conference possible. Since the 4 years the c3 was a highlight in the year for me. But I have to say I was a bit disappointed this time. I don't know why exactly, but it seems to shift focus. The 3rd talk about osmocom is not that exciting, so is the n-th about hacking outdated wireless smartcards. Yes, electro mechanical instruments are fun, but I haven't seen much new and not a single line of code.

Maybe it's me, maybe it's the congress.

<comment><USER3> There was quite a lot of dissent about 29c3 primarily because it moved. I think that is also the reason the schedule suffered, so hopefully it's just temporary. Here's Harald Welte discussing why he didn't participate this year: <http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2012/12/18/#20121218-29c3>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have some highlights or a suggested viewing list?

<comment><USER5> Jacob Applebaum Keynote: Not My Department - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNsePZj_Yks>

howto hack the law - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWdkSGuGOfQ>

enemies of the state - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH2tJcU9lqU>

<comment><USER6> I second this. Especially the first one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 45ehybujkjkm. njnmjjn, ..nnn jujjj ii

<comment><USER7> Sorry, guys. My 2-year old posted, and Im unable to delete it.

<comment><USER8> The parent (hah) is exactly why I should read child comments before thinking too hard. I spent a few moments trying to figure out what was said there, or what language it might've been, before I read this comment. Glad to hear you're starting them on HN early!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How best should I extract the audio so I can listen to these as a podcast on my mp3 player? More specifically, I have an iPod with 20 GB of space, of which 4 is free. This is enough for a couple of videos, but it doesn't want to play the .mp4 file, and I would rather have a dozen audio recordings than one video one.

For those cases where I need to see the video in order to better understand the talk, I'll watch it on my lap/desktop.

<comment><USER10> There are mirrors that have audio-only recordings as well (and are located in the U.S.):

[http://edge.lynxcdn.com/ccc/29c3/index.php?dir=audio%2Fmp3-a...](http://edge.lynxcdn.com/ccc/29c3/index.php?dir=audio%2Fmp3-audio- only%2F)

(full list of mirrors, mostly located in Germany: [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/wiki/Documentation#Record...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/wiki/Documentation#Recordings))

<comment><USER9> Sweet! I've used those links to make an RSS file containing the English language presentations. It's at <http://dalkescientific.com/29c3-en.xml> .

It's really nice that the final schedule is available in XML form. It was easy to pull out the various fields so that the RSS contains title, subtitle, description, dates, etc. I put my export script at <http://dalkescientific.com/ccc_rss.py> . "Share and enjoy" - I assert no copyright interest for it.

Both of these will be there for a couple of weeks, but they will disappear at some arbitrary point in the future.</comment></comment></comment>


The Reckoning - On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/business/18pay.html <comment><USER2> I couldn't read it all, it was too infuriating.</comment>


Sonos, Squeezed by the Tech Giants, Sues Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/sonos-sues-google.html <comment><USER2> I almost want to root for Sonos here, but just can't, after their acts to force account creation / login, hamstring the desktop setup application to force setup via mobile app, etc. They've transitioned to the "good riddance" category and any new speaker-type things in the house will be the old kind attached to something that may or may not support AirPlay 2--or else dumb bluetooth speakers.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention their acquisition of possibly the only mature local-network voice assistant (Snips) followed by immediately removing the local-only option.

<comment><USER4> Came here to mention this! Recently I spent some time evaluating snips, doing some research and looking at documentation without actually starting anything.

Decided to dive in, only to realize they blocked new console sign-ups, having been acquired by Sonos. Waste of time, I blame Sonos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's what you get for creating a closed system for connected speakers. You get trounced by bigger fish who can do it just as well and have wider integration.

<comment><USER6> Sonos speakers for a home theatre and multi-room sound system, still shits all over Google and Amazon. By Far.

So in my opinion, Google may be able to do better but they haven't

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sonos needs a pivot quickly. The high end residential control space is still up for grabs. Control 4 and Crestron with their dealer/programmer networks are the ultimate rent seekers. These homes have tons of legacy equipment that wouldn't work with newer systems from AMZ/Apple/Samsung etc.

<comment><USER8> Agree in principal but I fear it is too little too late at this point; Sonos has been leaning hard into thier "IP Portfolio" for a while now. To me their core technology was basically to patenting clock sync over wifi for the purpose of playing audio. Anyone developing a similar product who might even consider that Sonos holds a patent should have a trivial time of producing a non-infringing implementation. Nevertheless Sonos have somehow been able to win some cases against some decent enough names like Denon, and now it looks like they are going for real meat. I suspect Google to steamroll them in the courts, but it may be lengthy and expensive to undo some of the legal precedent they have established. Or Google could have signed a bad contract with them in the past, which could further empower Sonos (bad for everyone.)

Despite its proprietary nature, when Sonos first came out I heavily recommended it to many people because it solved a lot of problems and "just worked" at a price point that was high but fair, especially given the apparent quality and polish of the product. When it became apparent they were instead committed to bleeding their own customers dry I completely gave up on them. Was there ever any discussion on HN about how Sonos encourages their customers to brick their current players when upgrading by offering deep discounts? This practice is despicable.

I hate to say it but now I have come to judge people who buy Sonos negatively as I feel they are uninformed consumers contributing to a malicious company. This is a pretty dangerous place to be for a company reliant on their brand and reputation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google and Amazon could have stole nothing and Sonos would still be doomed by their walled garden strategy in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not name Amazon at the same time? Seems like it's mostly the same legal work to me...

<comment><USER11> They are attempting to set precedence with Google before going after Amazon and others. Going against them all at once would likely bankrupt them.</comment></comment>


CES 2017: Gorilla Glass makes the move from phones to cars - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2017/01/05/corning-gorilla-automotive-glass-ces/?utm_cid=hp-h-5#XXXy7aXmXOqI <comment><USER2> What's interesting is that this may be how Tesla Model 3 will look like. It's supposed to not have any physical controls on the dashboard, just one big screen.</comment>


Chinese economists warn Beijing to prepare for decoupling from US - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3017550/chinese-economists-warn-beijing-prepare-decoupling-us <comment><USER2> I examine things in my house, most items are made in China. Having a single country produce goods for the rest of the world, especially if the said country is an authoritarian regime, is a bad idea. Companies are looking to diversify their supply chains because when shit hits the fan in the political tit for tat, these companies (or farmers, etc.) have most to lose.

Along this line of reasoning, the human race has found small comforts of cheap goods, evidently, a trade off for a better quality of life - short term benefit but a long term risk of extremely concentrated supply chain. Just the way Japanese combated Swiss prowess in watchmaking, we need alternative sources for many industries that are dominated by China. We are starting to see this - Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India are becoming satellite hubs of manufacturing in Asia.

<comment><USER3> Putting supply chain in a single location reduces cost.

Most of it had little to do with China but decisions made by the US corporate sector.

Essentially the US Govt. cannibalized it's middle class to feed the electronic, military and finance sector.

It's hard to deal with voters and labour unions, its much easier to deal with authoritarian regimes when you are a multinational.

Yanis V. has documented this dynamic of globalization quite well in his books.

> Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India are becoming satellite hubs of > manufacturing in Asia.

Why do you think US multi. nationals avoid India ? Given it's a parliamentary democracy and has a large english speaking population ? Why did they set up shops in China ?

In India you can have labour strike of 31 million people !

A 2 dollar / day earning India voter has more power over its government than a 30 dollar / day earning Chinese citizen.

They will move to Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand and continue their exploitation there but will avoid India. This just shows how misinformed you are about Asia.

The key change in Asia has been China, who are setting up technology companies in other parts of Asia, including India ( often US stolen IP being shared ).

The main goal here is to get rid of the importance of dollar / yen swap lines. It has caused a lot of problems for trade between Asian countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is definitely going to happen. There'll be western/liberal/democratic trading group and the repressive/dictatorial/despot trading group. Actually, This has been the case for sometime but now it's clear that China has switched teams.

<comment><USER5> I didn't realize repressive was the antonym of western.</comment></comment>


Ask: Do Mods Read Articles That Are Flagged? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed a few times I've submitted articles that are about both tech and politics; case in point one about the senate/congress race being 'rigged' because of how the jurisdictions have been adjusted recently (news to me). The article goes on to explain that various technologies were used to rework the districts.
Anyway, it's an interesting read, yet it is flagged after receiving several upvotes.
This makes me wonder if this is automatic (aka people flagging it) or is this something the mods do? And if it's the mods do you actually read the articles or do you just have a knee jerk reaction to the title and flag away?
Seriously wondering.... <comment><USER2> It's marked as [flagged], so it was killed because some users flagged it.

I read the article before it was killed. It's not the standard current rant of the race between Clinton and Trump. I think it was interesting, but it would be more interesting with more examples. Similar articles had been discussed before in HN, I guess the problem is that now some users are oversensitive to political topics. (I didn't flag this, but I'm slightly oversensitive to political topics now.)

More examples in [https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering) [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Gerrymandering%20&sort=byPopul...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Gerrymandering%20&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story). I knew the problem but I thought it was more bounded and only changed a few seats.

[We have a different system here in Argentina, with districts with many seats selected using [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method) It also has some problems because no one know the 5th candidate in each list.]

Anyway, IIRC the mods have some kind of notification for the flagged article, but I don't know the details. For this kind of questions it's better to email them directly to firstname.lastname@example.com because sometimes the threads are unnoticed.

<comment><USER3> > _It 's marked as [flagged], so it was killed because some users flagged it._

That's just right. That post was killed because users flagged it, and it can be unkilled if other users feel it should be discussed on HN and vouch for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool good to know, thanks guys.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the "big hack" technically possible? - <AUTHOR> I guess we've all read the big hack story by now.
Like all sensational tech stories, I have my doubts on it.
I cannot verify any claim made by either party, but what I can do is evaluate the technical feasibility of the hack.
As I understand, it was a tiny chip used to control the BMC of supermicro servers.
By the look of it, it has 6 pins, which 2 must be used for power, that let us with four for whatever it was doing.
I do a bit of electronics, I went as far as designing my own low power arduino like board. But that's not enough to have a clear idea on how this chip could attack the board. The chip must be using SPI or something similar but where would it be hooked?
I know that this is mostly speculations, but I'm interested in all possible theories about how this chip works. <comment><USER2> The Register has an interesting article about it, and how it could be possible. On the other hand, they point out that it would be more likely that the actual firmware to be changed. It reminds me of the fiction book "Ghost Fleet", where China starts a war with the US and a bunch of the US war machine is compromised.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/04/supermicro_bloomber...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/04/supermicro_bloomberg/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Feasible yes. Unlikely yes.

It would require multi master bus arbitration which isn't built into the SPI protocol so it would have to intercept the protocol's MOSI/MISO lines. Thus requiring more pins.

That means larger package.

And a larger piece of steaming evidence sitting there.

I can't see any logic however in doing this because there are tens of not hundreds of easier vectors involving the software side of it. Edit: which are all plausibly deniable.

Also rewriting SPI would be difficult to do fast without dedicated silicon (expensive dev cycle) or FPGA (physically large).

Edit: to note, eSPI was only formalised in 2016 by Intel to replace LPC so this either predates that or talks to the LPC bus which has a much higher pin count.

Edit 2: also these would be very easy to find. You pull the known components attached to the SPI bus off the board at a rework station, dump a few hundred volts down the SPI bus and look for where the smoke comes out. Then you buy another identical board and analyse that part of it. The change in impedance and current drain of the device would be evident as well.

<comment><USER4> Spinning custom silicon is not beyond the capability of a nation-state.

<comment><USER3> You're right. It isn't beyond it. But to do this you need access to the binaries and build process to do a differential analysis for injection. If you had access to that why would you not modify at firmware load time?

I can't see any logic in leaving a physical device on the board as evidence. It's like leaving a machete with your fingerprints all over it when you murder someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i2c/smbus is a standard 2-wire multi node bus that is used all over the place in motherboards.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for teaching kids to code - <AUTHOR> There have been a number of people in my neighborhood asking about a week long coding camp for kids in the area. One of the local universities runs such a thing, my wife and I both having degrees in computer science figured we could try our hand in running a camp like this out of our house for part of the summer.
We have been trying to track down good resources for teaching kids. We don't want anything simple enough that kids could get online and learn it themselves (like code.org) because we want this camp to have more value than being motivation to be self taught. We are thinking about doing two age groups, one for kids younger than middle-school age and one for kids middle-school and older.
We've found a few things that we are looking into (teachkidsprogramming.org and greenfoot mostly). Does anyone know of anything else that would be useful for what we are doing?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER4> Coding 4 Kids [https://www.tynker.com/](https://www.tynker.com/) tynker __*[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16464909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16464909) HN coding for kids [https://www.computerscienceforkids.com/beginningvisualstudio...](https://www.computerscienceforkids.com/beginningvisualstudioexpresstutorialsforhighschoolstudentscomputersciencecurriculum/) C# + SmallBasic curriculums __*[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13499626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13499626) how to teach kids to code - <USER2> [https://www.codingkids.com.au/careers/](https://www.codingkids.com.au/careers/) coding 4 kids - <USER3> [https://makecode.com/#about](https://makecode.com/#about) Microsoft – make code __*

[https://github.com/robotopia-x/robotopia/](https://github.com/robotopia-x/robotopia/) Github for Robocop

[https://developers.google.com/blockly/](https://developers.google.com/blockly/) Google Building Blocky with Javascript

[https://computationalthinkingcourse.withgoogle.com/unit?unit...](https://computationalthinkingcourse.withgoogle.com/unit?unit=7&lesson=28) chat bot

<comment><USER4> Just found this simple html + javascript game [https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/game_intro.asp](https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/game_intro.asp)</comment></comment>


When Hitting 'Find My iPhone' Takes You to a Thief's Doorstep - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/us/when-hitting-find-my-iphone-takes-you-to-a-thiefs-doorstep.html <comment><USER2> Something similar happened to me. It was a thursday , I was slightly under the weather and decided to take a cab to college as i had an imp exam that day. On my way I was doing some last min revision and i 20 mins the cabbie dropped me, I found my wallet to pay him for the ride and got off.

Less than and a minute later i realized that i left my phone in the cab. I could still see him driving off and decided to just run incase he got my attention, but the guy sped away.

I walked back to the college gate and found my friends who were wondering what had got into me and why was i running. On explaining them what happened my friend offered me his phone. I Used his phone to call my cell atleast five times , hoping the cab guy would realize that there was a phone in the back seat and come back. Unfortunately that didn't happen. I went and sat for my exam , but was annoyed at my carelessness.

Tried my phone again only to find it switched off. This time was more than annoyed. I went to the police and also spoke to the other cabbies near the area i got a cab from telling them what happened. A few months had passed , I got another phone and forgot about it.

interestingly enough had the same exam but finals this time and was on my way to college. I spotted the cab guy who previously took my phone parked waiting for a passenger to hail his cab. I went upto him and confronted him . he said he didn't hav it and maybe I was mistaken. I knew his face and told him i wasn't and asked him to return my phone. This time i took down his cab no and told him if he didn't i would just hand his details to the cops .

He hesitated and said he would bring it back the next day , as he had given it away . I asked him to whom and he plainly said ,"Ma'am I'll bring it back to you. He gave me his no voluntarily".

I did get it back but it was slightly broken.

<comment><USER3> And then you reported him to the local taxi commission, right?

<comment><USER2> nope! he was like i have young kids and i didn't really pursue it after that. was happy i got my phone back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Soo... The police won't help you get your stolen property back and encourages you to drop the issue altogether. Doesn't that count as encouraging crime? I would hope that they would start taking the smaller crimes more seriously, as they did in New York.

<comment><USER5> The college where I work has a bit of a reputation now for sending police to the thieves door with a nice printout of where the phone / iPad is. It also helps we have a good set of security cams. I have noticed we seem to have had a long period now where the little thieves know not to take any Apple product.

I figure its a big city vs little town thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "This would all be moot if we had an industrywide kill switch," Mr. Gascón > said.

And there you have it, the real purpose of the story, to push the killswitch agenda. Let's give the government full unfettered access to our mobile phones. What can go wrong with that?...

<comment><USER7> The kill switch, as designed by the civic agencies asking for it, would be undoable by the owner:

[http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/sen/sb_0951-1000/sb...](http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/sen/sb_0951-1000/sb_962_bill_20140206_introduced.htm)

A key quote: _" The rightful owner [...] may affirmatively elect to disable the technological solution"_

It's nothing like "giving the government full, unfettered access to our phones."

<comment><USER8> Thanks for adding the link!

Here's the latest version: [http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB962)

A part I'm concerned about: "(d) Any request by a government agency to interrupt communications service utilizing a technological solution required by this section is subject to Section 7908 of the Public Utilities Code."

Skip to 7908 here: [http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi- bin/displaycode?section=puc&gr...](http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi- bin/displaycode?section=puc&group=07001-08000&file=7901-7912)

So, this kill-switch may not be 100% controlled by the device owner.

I'd be OK with a required/opt-out kill-switch _only_ if I was the only person that could possibly brick my device with it. (That's a hard problem to make user-friendly and educate people about. A private key I create and store physically/securely somehow?)

Otherwise, I don't really own my device.

See also: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing) "TC is controversial as the hardware is not only secured for its owner, but also secured against its owner."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not iPhone, but it's related to my stolen MacBook Pro. 'Find My iPhone' doesn't always work and I think we can have a better solution. This is my story:

A few weeks back, there was a theft at my place and I lost all my valuables (cash, credit cards, headphones) but most importantly my laptop. I'm tired and frustrated of going to Police station to inquire about it. I want to fix it!

Here is what I propose:

We can use the power of crowd to locate lost devices. I think most stolen laptops are sold second-hand in grey markets. If we can tell a buyer somehow that the laptop he is about to buy is stolen, there is a high probability that he will not buy it.

We can make a mobile app/website where anyone who has lost a laptop can enter basic details of his device ( Serial No., Model etc.) and whenever anyone is about to buy a second-hand laptop, he can check our app/website and immediately know whether the laptop is stolen or not. This can help people locate their lost devices and can lead them to the thieves.

What do you guys think? This is just one idea that can help people recover their lost devices.  There might be many other ways, and we can brainstorm them here. Let's shoot!

PS: Please drop me a line if you are interested in working on this problem!

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "If we can tell a buyer somehow that the laptop he is about to buy is stolen, there is a high probability that he will not buy it."

I don't think this is true. People buying cheap laptops on the grey/black market care about 1 thing - price. Most know int he back of their minds there is something shady about the deal but it doesn't bother them enough to say no to a low price.

<comment><USER10> This. I've sold a lot of second hand thinkpads over the years and no one ever asks where I got them from (usually stock auctions - who can pass up 20x T400s for £20 each with a market value of £140+.

<comment><USER11> Do you have a contact email address? You don't have one listed in your profile information. (Please contact me by my email address, in my profile, if you want to keep yours off HN).

<comment><USER10> If you're after cheap thinkpads I've got no stock at the moment (other than a dead T420)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My iPhone was recently stolen. Within seconds, I had a pretty good idea of who had it. The insurance I had from carrier meant I'd have a new one in 2 days for a $249 deductible. What are the odds of a confrontation costing me more than $249? Even going to police has the potential of costing me more than $249 in lost time, and that's _IF_ I can convince them to do my personal bidding.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is disingenuous to position a "kill switch" as the best alternative. Kill switches can be circumvented. Phones can be sold for parts. And it's an excuse for police to be unresponsive.

Whereas if phones can be located, it seems like a great opportunity for repossession companies to offer a phone retrieval service, and for police to aggregate data on recovered phone to identify theft rings.

<comment><USER14> I believe that kill switches. In my area at around year 2000, when 'dumbphones' were common but still rather pricey, theft or mugging of phones was a common crime. It dropped significantly overnight when IMEI blacklists were implemented and reported stolen phones wouldn't work on local networks. There were still some thefts of luxury phones, where it made sense to export them abroad, but it was a huge reduction.

Even if kill switches can be circumvented and phones can be sold for parts - it significantly reduces the incentive for someone to steal phones, as selling them is more effort and less money; such changes do affect behavior of criminals.

<comment><USER8> The idea of a kill switch is great if it can only be controlled by the owner of the device. (The person that purchased it to use.) But we have not solved that problem yet.

We are still using short passwords instead of strong private keys; we give unencrypted access of our data to cloud providers to make things easier for us. How can ultimate authority/access of our property be made user friendly enough for joe user/sixpack?

<comment><USER15> One solution could be to prompt "do you want this computer to be able to killswitch the phone" first time you connect the phone to a computer. Under the hood it creates a shared secret that when sent to the phone bricks it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As ineffective as biometric unlocks (TouchID, etc) are in targeted data retrieval scenarios, I'd wager their wider adoption would effectively kill casual smartphone theft.

Every 5S owner I know actually uses TouchID. I'd guess around half of the 5/5C users I see bother to use the four-digit PIN, because it's a longer process to unlock.

Smartphones unattended on a bar will be a less attractive target when the default assumption is that it's locked, and would be a large undertaking to put it into a state useful for the thief's personal use or resale. Making locking convenient enough that _everyone_ does it (and the phone's physical security strong enough that it's an actual ordeal to bypass) would build a herd immunity for smartphone owners.

<comment><USER17> I don't think any current locks prevent clearing the device for resale, which is the main thing needed by thieves. An iPhone, for example, you just hold down power and home and connect to iTunes in recovery mode.

Apple may in the future decide to do this, but I don't think any other OEMs could. They all have romance the carriers to get into stores and the carriers want good serviceability since the way you make money at places like AT&T is by cutting costs down to the bone. More unrepairable, unrefurbishable devices that need to be replaced with new units causes the opposite.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, for this scheme to work, a locked phone would need to be a brick, short of desoldering the flash. Unauthenticated recovery modes destroy this.

I can see a scheme where each device has a specific unlock/recovery keypair in its keychain out of the factory (or first activation). It could be requested from the manufacturer from the service center. This would at least have accountability ("AT&T Store #451, Employee #8 requested unlock key for Device #123456").

The manufacturer's service could deny the request if the phone was reported stolen, or contact the rightful owner via other channels before releasing it. Or just revoke access to service centers with a history of abuse (e.g., the thieves have an "guy" at a strip mall).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting sentence. " The officer, who asked that his name not be used for fear that civilians would follow his example,"

</comment><comment><USER19> In India, when you loose a phone, you buy a new one ... often a less costly one. No one ever even thinks of trying to find who stole the phone.

<comment><USER20> It's not really about the value as much as it's about the principle of the matter. Maybe it's an American thing but we have a sense of justice that makes us do irrational things when rationally it shouldn't. For example, someone broke into my car and ended up taking a tennis racket from my trunk. It wasn't expensive to replace but I got in my car and drove around to see if I could spot someone walking around with it. I would have confronted them and fought them if they didn't hand it back. Even then, I would probably call the cops and report the person.

<comment><USER21> I'm an American, and I think a more important principle is you don't risk an encounter that may end in injury or death over mere "stuff". There's no justice in getting shot trying to recover a phone you were too drunk to keep in your possession. Replace your phone and be a little more careful next time you go out.</comment></comment></comment>


Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: Interactive Version - <AUTHOR> http://xuanji.appspot.com/isicp/ <comment><USER2> It's good to hear that this project is getting the attention that it deserves. I have been reading SICP using this text for the last several months and found it much easier for me, as I can immediately see and play around with the Scheme code. When I was learning Python, the same was true using the interactive version of "How to think like a computer programmer". [http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/inde...](http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/index.html)

<comment><USER3> I really wish that _The Little Schemer_ [http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/) and _The Seasoned Schemer_ [http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTSS/](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTSS/) were free, so that they could receive the same treatment.

<comment><USER4> Author of Interactive SICP here - totally agreed! Anyone on HN happen to know them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just want to say that as a sysadmin who is working hard at expanding my horizons, especially in my primary weak point, programming, the SICP book really helped influence the way I operate and understand programming in general. I couldn't more highly recommend a book, so it's really exciting to see an interactive version.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty neat.

To re-evaluate the code embedded within the text you need to press Ctrl + Enter.

Not sure if I missed some instructions somewhere, I had to press random keys until I worked out how to do it..

<comment><USER7> Clicking outside the code examples also seems to update it. I'd prefer it to 'live' update while you type, which should be a small tweak. Unless that has unwanted side-effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool!

Feature request: Remember if I've closed the sidebar and leave it closed when I go to the next page. If I opt to keep it open, load the page with it open instead of sliding it in every time.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issues page is here: [https://github.com/zodiac/isicp/issues](https://github.com/zodiac/isicp/issues)

I just found the link today while looking for browser Scheme interpreters; thought I'd share it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7149908)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060034)

</comment><comment><USER10> That's awesome! Make the learning more joyful.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool! What license is the code under?

<comment><AUTHOR> As indicated at the bottom of the index page, it's a CC BY-SA license: [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/3.0/deed.en_US](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thank You. Looking Good and inviting.

</comment><comment><USER13> this is quite awesome.</comment>


Tales of SugarCRM Security Horrors - <AUTHOR> http://karmainsecurity.com/tales-of-sugarcrm-security-horrors <comment><USER2> The SugarCRM administration panel has a button labeled "remove XSS". We have a picture of it up in our office.

Yes. A button that attempts to remove XSS payloads from the database that admins can click. That's the level of security competence we are talking about here.

Edit: Here is the button: [http://i.imgur.com/hC9KmWh.png](http://i.imgur.com/hC9KmWh.png)

<comment><USER3> I'm a numpty. Can you explain why this is bad?

<comment><USER4> (a) It's clearly such a persistent problem that they explicitly added such a button.

(b) If* the button really performs as advertised, why on earth should it be a manual step? Do it automatically.

(c) Best practice here is to escape-on-output, negating the need to remove in- DB XSS, so the fact that this button exists strongly implies they aren't doing that

* I would guess that the button is very unlikely to perform comprehensively as advertised

<comment><USER5> I think we could address all of your issues if only we could design it such that something clicked the button as often as possible.

cron, maybe?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps SugarCRM should create a new "Secure Enterprise Edition" of the product. The fees would be substantially higher, of course, with the proceeds used to hire overseas IT shops whose 24/7 staff would remained logged in, clicking the button repeatedly. To mitigate the privacy concerns, SugarCRM could create a special version of that administrative page with nothing except the "Remove XSS" button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > there are still chances for both authenticated (CVE-2012-0694) and > unauthenticated (KIS-2016-07) attackers to exploit PHP internal memory > corruption vulnerabilities which do not require objects declarations, like > this ten years old vulnerability which requires just an array definition or > this one which relies on references and arrays declarations

The two bugs linked were both fixed around 10 years ago. If you're running PHP v4.4, your problems are basically infinite. It would be nice to make a clearer distinction between PHP problems and SugarCRM problems.

<comment><USER8> I said "like this 10 years old vulnerability", which means there could be other 0-day vulnerabilities affecting even the latest PHP versions and that could be exploited without relying on objects declarations within the serialized string.

Using the unserialize() PHP function itself is not security issue, unless you use it with user-supplied input, and that's the reason why this is a SugarCRM problem and not a PHP problem.

<comment><USER7> It's a great post, by the way, no criticisms of that. But I interpreted that specific bit as "this core PHP bug was reported 10 years ago and still hasn't been fixed", so makes it sound like a huge and ongoing PHP vulnerability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How timely; I recently evaluated sugarcrm/suitecrm but similar to author was dismayed by their code quality.

Does anyone have any recommendations of other open source CRMs?

<comment><USER10> I won't consider SuiteCRM to be part of this. Understand that even though SuiteCRM was a fork of SugarCRM CE, the community has made so many changes that I will consider it at this point a completely different product. All the vulnerabilities listed above do not apply to SuiteCRM in its current release and if you look at the blog of SuiteCRM, it is heavily advertised that SugarCRM CE is full of security issues and everyone should migrate out of it[1]. Here is the quote: "SugarCRM Community Edition users need to migrate to an alternative platform as soon as possible. The number of current vulnerabilities in Community Edition is worrying. There will be no more support for Community Edition after April 2017 and the vulnerabilities will increase as the software ages. Simply put, if you're running SugarCRM Community Edition, you're becoming a soft target."

[https://suitecrm.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=entr...](https://suitecrm.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=entry&id=116)

<comment><USER9> FWIW SuiteCRM has the exact same "remove XSS" button in the admin panel that Sugar has - doesn't exactly scream "we're confident in our security"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, this kept getting better and better, I didn't expect to make it through the entire text. Some parts are shocking.

</comment><comment><USER12> Whoa! That's horrifying. Not only don't they update their open source version when fixing security bugs (Great argument against choosing open core solutions btw), they don't even fix most bugs!

<comment><USER13> This isn't a great argument against chosing open core solutions, it's a great argument against chosing SugarCRM.

Many open core solutions (I'm thinking of gitlab, but there are probably many other) fixes bugs in both versions.

<comment><USER12> It is. If there are two versions, it's possible (it even "adds value") to fix bugs in one version and not the other. If there is only one, you can't do that. Simple as that.

<comment><USER13> It makes the company (look at sugarcrm) look bad when they do that.

Open core can be done well, just like proprietary software can be done wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A few years ago, my team and I tried building a small CRM solution based on SugarCRM; we figured, "hey, it's basically a simple CRUD app with some reports and somewhat-dynamic objects, right"?

We gave up after a week (ended up building the thing in Django). vTiger/SugarCRM is most likely the worst PHP codebase still in active development/production.

</comment><comment><USER15> The core issue is that sugar crm uses PHP built in `unserialize` on user controlled input, and they don't want to switch to json ostensibly because of performance issues.

Why don't they hmac the payloads (with a timestamp and something tied to the user (an ID, the username, whatever)) and verify the hmac before deserializing?Verifying an hmac prevents undetected tampering, is fast, and there are libraries for it in ~every language.

<comment><USER16> The performance part doesn't make sense to me either. What are they serializing in a CRM that is so time-critical? I found a benchmark [0] that shows differences of like .2 milliseconds for a 904 byte array.

[0] [http://techblog.procurios.nl/k/n618/news/view/34972/14863/ca...](http://techblog.procurios.nl/k/n618/news/view/34972/14863/cache- a-large-array-json-serialize-or-var_export.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what's the use case for serializing and unserializing objects using php built-in functions. Is this some kind of "I'm too lazy to json encode a subset of properties" or are there some edge cases where one would use this extremely sharp knife?

<comment><USER18> Sharp knives are the least dangerous if you're cutting something.

A sharp knife will just cut the thing.

A dull/less sharp knife will not cut, causing you to add more pressure, causing the knife to slip, which is when you're more likely to cause yourself harm.

<comment><USER17> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You need to run a WAF like modsecurity in front of any PHP application these days.

</comment><comment><USER20> The good thing is that Sugar is slowly but steadily replacing the old codebase but they should be more transparent on addressing these serious issues.

<comment><USER21> Yes. For example, SugarCRM is adding prepared statement support which mitigates any potential SQL injection problems. I mention this since it was posted just this last week. These changes are very large and far reaching so it does take time.

[https://developer.sugarcrm.com/2017/04/17/use-of-prepared- st...](https://developer.sugarcrm.com/2017/04/17/use-of-prepared-statements- in-sugar-7-9/)

<comment><USER20> Great stuff again Matthew :), your blogs are always easy to read and helpful! Personally I think that string concatenation in query building throughout the Sugar code base (campaigns, workflows) is very problematic and could also be exposed in a couple of scenarios. But like I said, this seems to be the work in progress currently at Sugar.

Hopefully Sugar will come forward with a response to these allegations because these are serious security risks.

<comment><USER21> Thanks. Yes, I am hopeful that a response will be forthcoming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Other CRM providers would probably deserve a closer look too.

Marketcircle for example has never been able to offer reliable SSL support for its CalDAV / CardDAV server. And they are switching to a cloud solution too – closed source and proprietary …

</comment><comment><USER23> SugarCRM stopped public development long ago. Most people use Sugar non-CE or SuiteCRM (a maintained fork) which probably has similar/same vulns.

</comment><comment><USER20> response to the blog: [https://blog.sugarcrm.com/2017/04/24/important- security-upda...](https://blog.sugarcrm.com/2017/04/24/important-security- update/)

<comment><USER24> Their latest update (4/25/17):

Based on impact and reach, none of the vulnerabilities in in the second section scored higher than 'medium'... It's important to note that updates based on issues scored as 'medium' are no longer provided to our last- generation open source Community Edition (CE), so the bloggers post no longer aligns with our current commercial products and solutions.

So, I just replied to their blog post with this comment (awaiting moderation, so will probably never be published):

Hi Rich, I'd like to know more about your latest update, the one with regards to the second section of my post: you're saying you rated all of the vulnerabilities I reported with a "medium" CVSS score (which version btw? v3.0?). However, I reported two SQL injection vulnerabilities and according to your security advisories ([https://www.sugarcrm.com/security/sugarcrm- sa-2016-003](https://www.sugarcrm.com/security/sugarcrm-sa-2016-003) and [https://www.sugarcrm.com/security/sugarcrm- sa-2017-001](https://www.sugarcrm.com/security/sugarcrm-sa-2017-001)), in the past you rated SQL injection vulnerabilities in SugarCRM with 'High' or 'Important' risk level... May I know why now they're considered of 'Medium' risk level? They same applies to the remaining vulnerabilities, which might allow a malicious user to execute arbitrary PHP code, and so far in your security advisories this kind of issues has been rated with 'Critical' risk level (like this: [https://www.sugarcrm.com/security/sugarcrm- sa-2016-001](https://www.sugarcrm.com/security/sugarcrm-sa-2016-001))... The numbers don't add up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone recommend a CRM? Preferably open source and free?

Currently we are considering odoo but any advice appreciated. [https://comparisons.financesonline.com/sugar-crm-vs- odoo](https://comparisons.financesonline.com/sugar-crm-vs-odoo)

</comment><comment><USER26> The page is unreadable on mobile :(

<comment><USER17> Looks very good in Reader mode on Firefox for Android but the bare layout is indeed not mobile friendly.

<comment><USER27> Android Firefox readermode is _fantastic_. I absolutely love it. I wish it was the default view for most pages with a toggle to see the original!</comment></comment></comment>


Visualizing TSNE Maps with Three.js - <AUTHOR> https://douglasduhaime.com/posts/visualizing-tsne-maps-with-three-js.html <comment><USER2> PSA: Try UMAP instead of t-SNE

[https://github.com/lmcinnes/umap](https://github.com/lmcinnes/umap)

It's much faster and usually results in better clustering / representation.

<comment><USER3> I'm a huge fan of UMAP, but this [0] paper suggests that t-SNE can be tuned to produce UMAP-like results (the algorithms are extremely similar—you can recover t-SNE with certain UMAP parameter choices). One of the insights is to use PCA first to better preserve the global structure.

For example, see figure 9 in the paper: the plot on the left is the typical result of default t-SNE (distance between global structures not well- represented, since everything is jammed together), and the plot on the right is very UMAPish.

Basically, there are a lot of preprocessing and parameter choices involved in producing these embedding plots, so it's advisable to try to understand the effects of these choices regardless of which algorithm you choose.

[0]: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13056-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13056-x)

<comment><USER4> I thought UMAP's main advantage was being able to project new data without having to recompute the embedding, whereas tSNE still does - making persistent plots difficult

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neigh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-distributed_stochastic_neighbor_embedding)

In case someone wondering, like me, what TSNE is. Which I still don't understand after reading

<comment><USER6> it's an algorithm for projecting data to lower dimension. I.e. you have an Excel sheet with 20.000 lines (representing customers for ex) and 200 columns (representing blood pressure, height, weight, etc).

What you want to do is "visualise" those 20.000 points in 2D or 3D so you can get an idea of how the data is distributed. So you use t-SNE to "compress" those 200 columns to 2 or 3, and you display that.

Traditionally you would use Primary Component Analysis, but that only uses linear projection, and will not be able to project data that has non-linear relationships in the distributions.

Another algorithm, sometimes more powerfull and scalable is LargeViz.

<comment><USER7> UMAP has largely replaced t-SNE in our toolkit as one of our top go-to viz pipelines. Unlike most examples out there, we post-process with k-nn to expose the graph of correlations over arbitrary data sets -- bank accounts fraud scores, cancer protein mutations, twitter bots, malware files, etc. -- and then investigate. Algorithms like UMAP figure out this connectivity anyways (see also: TDA), and useful for guiding subsequent explorations. If you're doing an interactive analysis, like looking at data in a Jupyter notebook, super powerful to expose that inferred connectivity and make it interactive (on-the-fly filtering, clustering, etc.) on it.

Tool-wise, we do it in a few lines over tables with many rows/columns via end- to-end GPU acceleration using [https://www.RAPIDS.ai](https://www.RAPIDS.ai) (GPU dataframes + UMAP) + Graphistry (GPU viz, which we make).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is another, very good, interactive visualization of t-SNE on distill : [https://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/](https://distill.pub/2016/misread- tsne/)

<comment><USER9> I was about to post that article myself; good write-up on the pitfalls of interpreting t-sne viz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've built an implementation of t-SNE in Go ([https://github.com/danaugrs/go- tsne](https://github.com/danaugrs/go-tsne)) and really like the fact that your visualization has a short Z dimension. Very interesting effect.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here is a fun demo of TNSE, projecting MNIST digits interactively in your browser. To start it hit "iterate". [https://nicola17.github.io/tfjs-tsne- demo/](https://nicola17.github.io/tfjs-tsne-demo/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd highly recommend [https://github.com/react-spring/react-three- fiber](https://github.com/react-spring/react-three-fiber) it reduces a lot of threeJS boilerplate. I'm using it to visualize reactive programs in [https://rx-store.github.io/rx-store/](https://rx-store.github.io/rx-store/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Writing an OSM map renderer in JS was the first modern JavaScript I ever wrote. I did it to prepare for my last summer internship which was some pretty intense modern JS.</comment>


What Thomas Edison expected job candidates to know - <AUTHOR> http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40F10FB355B1B7A93C3A8178ED85F458285F9 <comment><USER4> [http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein- edison...](http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison- education.html) 'While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. (...) A reporter asked him a question from the test. "What is the speed of sound?" If anyone understood the propogation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not "carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison's view of education. "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he said.'

<comment><USER5> Thomas Edison invented the cylindrical Phonograph, and movies were beginning to just show up in 1921. I'd imagine knowing the speed of sound - <USER2> how it relates to syncing with video - was of major importance to him, much more than it was to Einstein.

Context is everything.

<comment><USER6> Regardless of the context, it's still a fact that that information is readily available in books.

<comment><USER7> Why is that so many people on this forum feel that the information pointed to by this link is of such great importance: <https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832>

I don't know if that information is contained in a particular book, but it is certainly readily available all over the web.

Why do we care? Could Edison have had a similar interest, though focused more on his own business?

Separately, what good is knowledge of theory if you have no practical experience upon which to understand it? The candidates given this test were also supposed to be in line for the executive ranks. Having a general knowledge of geography, geopolitics and trade would seem to be fairly important.

It's also unclear from the article exactly how Mr. Edison interpreted or used the results. Frankly, it sounds like many of those quoted in the article were offended by being asked such "simple questions"... despite not being able to answer them. Perhaps Mr. Edison was interested in finding executives who didn't believe that common sense, mundane facts or important business details were beneath them and best left to others.

<comment><USER8> Those numbers are of practical importance to programmers in particular. They directly affect nearly everything we do to some degree. On the other hand, without knowing anything about you, I can pretty confidently guess that the identity of Leonidas and the process of tanning leather are not practical concerns for you at all.

Also, I would argue that memorizing those numbers themselves is unimportant and putting too much stock in them is a mistake (some are very likely a bit different on the computer you're working with than they were on the one used to compile the list — for example, hitting L2 cache is slightly faster than a branch misprediction on the i7 IIRC). The important takeaway IMO is the orders of magnitude at work.

<comment><USER9> If you were developing technical products in 1921, the process of tanning leather was probably very relevant, as were questions about the density of different kinds of wood, the sources and production of various metals, etc.

Just as a programmer should know the orders of magnitude of latencies, an industrial engineer in Edison's time should have a sense of the characteristics of materials he might be choosing between. For example, should the handle of a new tool you're inventing be made of leather-wrapped steel, or hickory (traditionally used for ax handles)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Basically, it seems Edison wanted his executives to have his intense intellectual curiosity (he was a notable autodidact). If he knew the kind of people he felt he could lead effectively, and this was his perhaps-crazy way to identify them, this seems like a good test for those circumstances.

One of the most damaging things is when you have what Gabe Newell calls "rent- seeking inside the corporation," which is a neat economic way of describing bureaucratic political power struggles. And this is totally normal, expected behavior unless you find someone who is pre-aligned with the mission, goals and values of the organization. This becomes totally crucial at huge corporations like Edison's.

So this, in a sense, is a cultural test more than a knowledge quiz. Thomas Edison didn't want people who could win at 1920s Jeopardy!, he wanted people who were driven by the same non-monetary pursuits he had, possibly because it was his best chance to avoid BS artists, pleasant-but-ineffective workers and political strivers. I also have to think that it was because he was a pretty narcissistic dude, but that's another story.

</comment><comment><USER11> To be sort of fair, Mr Edison was an engineer, and it was back in a time when there was more 'empirical' methods rather than predictive theories of why such and such happened. So, when there's an emphasis on building things, knowing all of this can be helpful. There's also a business type question in there, perhaps to keep an engineer's awareness of business needs in mind.

For example, as Engineering Guy Bill explains, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo>, the method for discovering light bulb filaments was very much a search problem, so knowing as much seemingly distant facts about barrel wood, cork, optical facets might actually be important.

Questions about Cleopatra and so forth may have been to see how educated an applicant was. I wonder if those helped or hurt a candidate. I.e., did this person learn this on their own through curiosity or did they pick it up at school...

Disclaimer: I am not qualified to give opinions on any topic.

</comment><comment><USER12> All of those are what I would call common knowledge that an average human being should know. Not that they are relevant in any way to the job Edison was offering - but they would serve as a GREAT way to indicate whatever a person answering these questions is well educated and well oriented in the world surrounding them.

<comment><USER13> Really? You think the voltage on a street car and the wood that kerosene barrels is made of is common knowledge? I would say that I knew _maybe_ 1/3rd of the questions in that list.

<comment><USER12> Yes. Will I boast if I say that I honestly don't know just 3 things on this list?

Back when I was at school, we had all the subjects as mandatory, chemistry, physics, biology, history - there was no choice like you get today. So yes, I happen to know the weight of the air,or the lightest/heaviest types of wood. And if you like researching things(in my case - spending hours on wikipedia) questions like the one about optical lenses are easy.

And I am pretty sure that's what Edison was looking for - people who are curious about stuff and research it themselves. Common knowledge in my opinion,because in an ideal world I would like everyone to be that curious about the world that surrounds them.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't say you were boasting, I'd say you were lying. You happen to know off the top of your head that: African black wood is the heaviest lumber. That's the first thing you thought of? Really? What wood kerosene barrel would have been made of in the 20's. What the voltage of a street car was in the 20's. Where Spitsbergen is (unless you have been there or in the area). What war material Chile exported to the USA in WW1. What the highest rise of tide is in North America . What state has the largest amethyst mine. Who invented the modern paper making machine (modern in the 20's). What ingredients are in the best white paint. What the populations of Germany, Japan, England, Australia, and Russia are. What part of Germany you get toys from.

Uh-huh. You should go on Jeopardy, you would make Ken Jennings look like a clown.

<comment><USER12> First one,yes. Second one - I actually used to work in a wolframium mine in Panasqueira, Portugal,when I was 17 and learned A LOT about mines in general in my spare time. Kerosene has been used a lot in mining lamps,so yes, I did read about it. I did research about one of the first electric cars in the UK,that was used widely as a milk delivery truck - back from the same period, so I happen to know the voltage. Why did I need to be near Spitsbergen to know where it is? I used to know a guy who was a fisherman on the Barents Sea - <USER3> would tell stories of where they went, hence Spitsbergen. Also, I live in Europe, so I am fairly comfortable with pointing out where stuff it. I mentioned before, we had all the subjects at school, there was no choice like you get now. Write a couple of essays about WW1,you will come across random stuff like the war material exported from chile, guaranteed. Highest rise of tide I remember from looking up the tides when I was wondering as a kid how comes that Netherlands is not flooded by tides constantly, so I read a lot about it. No, I don't know which state has the largest amethyst mine, one of those 3 I didn't know from the top of my head. I know what is used in the white paint nowadays - I guess that counts,since I have no way of knowing what could be the best answer in the 1920. The same goes to population - but again, living in the middle of Europe helps with that. And toys are easy if you live in a country that imports loads of things from Germany,having a border with it.

And no, I am not interested in Jeopardy.

<comment><USER15> "All of those are what I would call common knowledge that an average human being should know."

"I actually used to work in a wolframium mine"

Credibility shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the test very interesting. You have to keep in mind that Edison was a prolific inventor, who at the time was in the business of disrupting as many industries as he could. From that perspective, he was looking for people who knew a lot about the current state of technology and business, and also able to bring to bear knowledge from apparently unrelated areas.. Many of the questions are trivia related to the technology of the time ("who invented photography?", "where is platinum found", etc.). I think the expectation was that someone who was actively interested in technology would have picked up a lot of that sort of trivia along the way. Some of the less technological questions ("what's the capital of Alabama?") are probably just trying to evaluate how aware the candidate is of the world around them.

A similar list today, say for a candidate to help run a high-tech incubator, might consist of questions like "who founded Google? which is preferable to a seller, a 2nd price auction or a standard auction? where was the web invented? what's the geopolitical and technological significance of tantalum? are lithium batteries riskier than other battery technologies, why or why not? what's a typical price for web advertising (per click, or per impression)? what's a zero-sum game? what's a derivative?" (Those are just off the top of my head, I could probably come up with a better list if I thought about it for 15 minutes). In other words, not things that you must know in order to do the job, but things that anyone capable of doing the job would likely have picked up along the way.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if Edison viewed a lot of these bits of information as truly pertinent to his work (e.g., many of the questions seem to be about building materials and where to get them), and then just tossed in a few items of random trivia for good measure.

</comment><comment><USER17> These... honestly aren't that bad. Not that I know all of them, but many of them, totally. And those that I don't are pretty context dependent, particularly those about sectors of the economy that have been de-emphasized or historical tidbits that have been de-emphasized.

Replace "what city produces the most laundry machines" with "which American city is known for producing cars" and "from where domestically do we get sardines" with "what part of the United States is known for producing wine"?

Note also that there are some ostensibly hard questions that seem blindingly obvious to people here now: "Where is Korea?"

<comment><USER18> Why are any of these good interview questions?

<comment><USER19> They aren't good questions for, say, a software engineer, but they might be useful for executives, which is how the Times article says they were used. If you're going to be analyzing potential business opportunities you probably should have a sense of different markets, their size, their relative strengths and weaknesses, etc. You should probably have a basic idea of where we get products and materials from and a basic sense of what different types of materials do. In our post-industrial society we don't care so much about sulphur and rubber and borax, but would you hire a tech executive who didn't know where electronics are manufactured? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify the regions of the US where the tech industry has a large presence? Would you hire someone who couldn't identify "six big businessmen in the United States"? If you can't answer these questions than you don't know anything about the industry and you probably aren't curious or engaged enough to keep yourself well informed.

If we updated this list to include things that are relevant to today's world, I would expect that a well-educated, well-informed person would be able to answer most of these questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just like a software interview - demonstrate that you know a bunch of stuff that we, in our company have & never will use. For many software jobs...its like hiring a mailing man based on his understanding of mail-delivery-cart mechanics.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of Google's fabled interview process. And on that note, I find it very interesting that virtually all of these questions could be answered almost verbatim by Google or WolframAlpha.

<comment><USER22> I don't work for Google. However, I have never heard of their interview process involving trivia factoids. There are several other companies in the valley that are guilty of this crap but Google at least focuses on algorithm questions, scaling etc.

To give you an example of what I am talking about:

1\. Figure out if a binary tree is a mirror image of another binary tree.

vs

2\. Describe X where X is a language specific feature. More amusingly, in machine learning interviews, pick one out of millions of algorithms that are out there that the interviewer knows very well, demand that the candidate answer and derive every single part of that algorithm.

There is a distinct difference between demanding that people rely on memory to solve a problem vs problem solving abilities to solve a problem. While both are certainly useful for a job, I am honestly not sure how exclusively devoting yourself to the former is better than the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My first response was indignation. A lot of those questions are seemingly irrelevant. However, I think we need to put them in perspective of the business and time. Once you do that, A lot of them become something I would expect people to know.

</comment><comment><USER24> Would he appreciate an intelligent guess?

If I didn't know how much a square foot of air weighed, could I represent it with x and then give a formula?

If he asked me who discovered the south pole and I asked him to clarify whether he meant who first reached the south pole, who first postulated that the earth, being spheroid, must have a southernmost extremity, or who first realized that the earth produces a magnetic field, would he be impressed or merely annoyed?

I'd be more interested to know how he reacted to the answers than the fact that he asked the questions.

<comment><USER25> From what I've inferred by reading about Edison, he probably would have feared you more intelligent than himself; and wouldn't have hired you on that basis, after taking the opportunity to chastise you for your lack of knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me so much of so many software engineering interviews.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have mixed feelings over this.

On the one hand, knowledge is different than education. Knowledge is the possession of information. Whereas education is the ability to find information quickly and efficiently, and pass it through a filter of critical thinking. Questions like the ones on Edison's list measure knowledge, but not education.

On the other hand, in my personal experience people who possess seemingly "random" pieces of information such as the location of countries on a world map or the birthday of a jazz singer tend to be much more productive. Not because the random bits of knowledge they possess are related to the work they are doing, but because information like that gives them a wider perspective on everything and allows them to be better at "pattern-matching", i.e. drawing connections between seemingly unrelated fields and subjects. This is a very, very important skill for any knowledge worker.

<comment><USER27> There is a compound effect to knowledge though. The more of the bits you've got the more the bits you already had start to make sense. And at some point knowledge starts to beget new knowledge all by itself, ideas and hypothesis about how unknown stuff could work based on what you already know, and sometimes completely new stuff.

So even if knowledge does not automatically mean understanding or education it can be a precursor to it and it can make it easier to attain the latter.

Silly facts (baseball scores for instance) do not have that effect. So there is a definite division between the kinds of facts that you can digest and their future effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reads like a "smart test" rather than anything written by an actual engineer. Of course, I've never seen any evidence that that Edison had any engineering ability other than the ability to demand engineers invent things, and then to engineer that he receive the credit for them.

</comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for sharing the link to the interesting series of questions. As I read along, I tried to think about what the correct answer was--or how it would be defined--for the various questions. I imagine that today many of the questions about geography would be less asked, although knowing about other countries still matters for international business.

We often talk about company hiring procedures here on Hacker News. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

[http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24)

interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain- teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. Thomas Edison's test might face the same challenge today. Thomas Edison or anyone else defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv- GZkw6...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv- GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv- GZkw6...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv- GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi- deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.

<http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full>

[http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false)

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."

[http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...](http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."

One thing I have to say about this whole issue, after a thoughtful comment from another HN participant off-forum, is that hiring managers have to be prepared for the development of their workers. The programmer you hire today may be a manager three years from now. Being sensitive to how workers grow in the workplace is at least as important for managers as making a good hire at the beginning.

<comment><USER30> This is useful information, and a good, well-documented discussion.

However, I'm finding it kind of tiresome to see it at the top of every job discussion, particularly since it's so lengthy. I don't think this Edison post was meant as a serious suggestion for how hiring can be done.

Perhaps you could make a blog post or pdf that contains the copy-pasted text, and then produce a summarized comment that links out to this info for anyone interested?

I'm sensitive to the argument that hiring related submissions will give bad advice if this context isn't provided. But on the other hand the status quo is tiresome for those of us who have seen this comment over and over.

<comment><USER29> The FAQ included in my comment is slated to be a new page on my personal website. I certainly intentionally miss some opportunities to post the FAQ here on HN, as discussions of somebody's article or post about how to hire come up here more than once per week on average. Those threads often have very active discussion. Sometimes I post the FAQ, and other times I just lurk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Many of these have ambiguous answers, like the country that makes the best optical lenses, who invented photography, axe handle wood etc. There are different answers because they are either subjective (Leica, I presume he meant, but Zeiss would be a solid choice too), Photography was possible the french guy Niépce, or Fox Talbot in the UK and there were many US contenders for the title also. Axe handles are made out of many types of wood...

These questions seem rather pointless, it's a case of I know this, so you should too. If Edison had been born on the west coast he would have likely asked a different set of questions.

<comment><USER32> He probably relied on the popular options. If all your neighbours think of Leica as the best, there's no way you'd pick Zeiss in a pre-internet world without a Wikipedia that has a disambiguation page for every other term. Sure, people on the other coast might pick Zeiss, but how many people were willing to travel across a whole continent for a job interview in those days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm speaking only from my own experience but as a software engineer observing other software engineers a surprisingly large percent of the the (imo) very best have striking degrees of general knowledge. That is, that could speak very well to many topics other than just software engineering and they have eclectic and deeply developed 'outside' interests.

I believe this runs counter to the current politically correct understanding of intelligence or if you prefer intelligence(s) - although I do believe in the latter.

</comment><comment><USER34> Link is to a pdf... (Don't we normally indicate this in the title?)

<comment><USER35> So what? It's not like a research paper or anything, just an article that has been scanned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> <http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla>

yes - and we should we give a f.ck about Edison's views? The man was no better than a lowlife

<comment><USER37> And you're willing to admit that a webcomic convinced you of that?

<comment><USER38> That's just a neat visual summary that everyone can quickly scan. Kinda like that post about another thief of ideas - Zynga.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think this list would certainly fail a lot of good, smart candidates, but it probably didn't pass many idiots. It's not likely that someone would know all of these facts and not be well-educated and intelligent. If he was truly getting hundreds of applicants and he didn't mind skipping some geniuses who didn't know facts, this seems like a good way to weed people out. Plus, it's pretty easy to grade.

</comment><comment><USER40> More than anything, this makes it sound like Edison only knew how to get useful work out of somebody whose brain worked like his.

</comment><comment><USER41> > "Only some thirty of the several hundred applicants have managed to pass the > test, it is true, but those who did and thus became inspectors of the > factory have made good in every case."

Of course, there's no control group... One might expect his half-baked trivia test to work a little bit (being a poor IQ test), but there's no way to know.

</comment><comment><USER42> Part of me wonders if Edison wasn't concerned so much with the actual answers to the questions as how an applicant went about answering the questions, and how the applicant reacted in the face of the test. Or perhaps he cared about some questions, and threw in a bunch of random ones to see what the applicant would do.

</comment><comment><USER43> Still, before there was no google/wikipedia so common knowledge and general interest was much more important.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is there any reason to believe the connection between this list and the questions Edison actually asked is any better than, say, the connection between what a Google interview actually looks like and how the newspapers like to portray it?

</comment><comment><USER45> Did Edison treat his engineers well? If not, should I care what trials he put potential candidates through? If he was the overly manipulative type, perhaps he was mostly interested in humbling the candidate...

</comment><comment><USER46> +1 for use of ampersand ligature in "&c", i.e., "et cetera"

</comment><comment><USER47> And the most important question of all, "Are you a big enough sucker to believe I will give you the $50,000 I promised for building the invention I asked for?"

</comment><comment><USER48> I wonder what Nikola Tesla asked prospective assistants?

<comment><USER25> [T/F] Thomas Edison is a brilliant man of impeccable morals and character.

* And I bet if you circled "T", he'd zap you with a Tesla Coil and have you thrown out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Some of these might have been more valuable in the days when you couldn't just Google anything in an instant to find the answer.

</comment><comment><USER50> Was he serious with these questions, or were they sideways questions designed to suss out how the tested person thinks?

</comment><comment><USER51> So what you're telling me is that people have always sucked at evaluating job candidates.

</comment><comment><USER38> Useful if you want to hire someone you could steal ideas from... Someone like Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER52> The prune question must be very important; it's on there twice.

<comment><USER7> You could say it came up regularly...</comment></comment>


Using Markov chains for HTTP benchmarking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.andrewvc.com/markov-http-benchmarking

<comment><USER2> "What Markov chain generation does is give a nice mix between two different ways of generating load, combining the fuzzing of random request generation with the feel of replaying logs. I think of it as a happy medium."

Why do we need a medium? Replaying access logs at a high-velocity gets the job done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, because there's no one right way to test is why.

Strictly repeating logs doesn't tell you what happens when your access patterns change. Markov chains give you an idea of how your site acts under variations on your current traffic.

<comment><USER3> It looks interesting, but does the added complexity have any tangible benefits over a benchmark app using a url-frequency table (a 0th-order markov chain)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. Maybe, maybe not. As I said, it just depends. Every test answers its own question.

Here's the thing about orders, they're like a sliding scale of similarity between source and generated text. Whether that scale is worth toggling for your data is up to you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers in (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/95.html <comment><USER2> I don't want the rest of the world competing for my job and driving down wages. This may be good for companies but I have to look out for my own interests and if they let the other 95 % in it would affect me by decrease pay, more likely to have ageism discrimination, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assume that everything he says is right. When Google, the data analytics company, openly admits that there is no correlation between interviewing and job performance, how do you identify that tiny fraction of amazing talent you want to let in?

<comment><USER4> Where did Google say this?

<comment><USER5> They said that given you are hired, there is no correlation between job performance and your interview score, not that there is no correlation between someone's interview score and how that person will perform. It's analogous to saying people who scored 1600 on their SAT perform no better than those who scored 1500, not that SAT scores are unrelated to performance.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, i really can't believe this had to be spelled out. Btw what they did find correlating with job performance was candidate's GPA =)

<comment><USER4> Only if they recently graduated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wonder how many people there are who would be good programmers but never had the opportunity to code in the United States? Have there ever been studies on the programming capability of people who never coded before who are given some training?

</comment><comment><USER8> Definitely what someone who's business is making money off of them would suggest</comment>


Tesla Reliability Doesn't Match Its High Performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.consumerreports.org/cars/tesla-reliability-doesnt-match-its-high-performance <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10420929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10420929).</comment>