React v0.8 is out - <AUTHOR> http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2013/12/19/react-v0.8.0.html

<comment><USER2> Any framework like React (which embeds html tightly with javascript) is flawed at its core.

HTML itself is declarative in nature. All frameworks should embrace this.

By looking at React docs, I can tell you from my experience that it'll be pain in the __s to maintain a large scale React application.

AngularJs' declarative way gives an app maintainability and highly test- ability. These two things are not the luxury but a must have requirement for any large scale long-live application.

<comment><USER3> 1) I totally disagree about embedding HTML, but it's optional anyway. Cohesion counts. See Pete Hunt's video.

2) React programs tend to be very "dearative" in my eyes. Any declarative language still needs abstraction facilities: ie functions.

3) you can trivially implement any "more declarative" model you want on top of React's stellar core.

4) all of the benefits of test ability from angular apply to react too

Sorry about typos, on phone

<comment><USER2> <tabManager background=blue> <tab closeButton=true> Hello {{propertyName}} </tab> </tabManager>

This is what you typically get at the end in an Angular app. You don't need to "figure out" things where they are and what they are, and what they do in DOM.

Show me this declarative thing in React.

And this is just one part of Angular.

<comment><USER4> For what its worth,

<tabManager background={'blue'}> <tab closeButton={true}> Hello {this.props.Name} </tab> </tabManager>

Would be valid in react.

Check out [http://facebook.github.io/react/#todoExample](http://facebook.github.io/react/#todoExample), specifically the render function.

I think this is pretty easy to understand:

TODO

            <TodoList items={this.state.items} />
            <form onSubmit={this.handleSubmit}>
              <input onChange={this.onChange} value={this.state.text} />
              <button>{'Add #' + (this.state.items.length + 1)}</button>
            </form>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As I said here the last time a new React version came out, we're using React for more or less all new JS development at Khan Academy, and we're loving it.

Happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER6> What does it give you above other frameworks, specifically Angular?

<comment><USER7> Two great posts by Pete Hunt

[http://pt.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/1oo1y8/i_know_ang...](http://pt.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/1oo1y8/i_know_angularjs_are_there_any_reasons_i_should/)

[http://www.quora.com/Pete-Hunt/Posts/Facebooks-React-vs- Angu...](http://www.quora.com/Pete-Hunt/Posts/Facebooks-React-vs-AngularJS-A- Closer-Look)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just read through all the React docs and the tutorial. My first impression is it looks and reads like Flex for Javascript, both for the JSX markup and the component lifecycle events. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, just an observation.

</comment><comment><USER9> Damn, from misreading the headline I thought ReactOS had jumped up a few version numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to get your hopes up! I'll try to remember to make it a bit more obvious next time.</comment></comment>


People Snapshot Dataset – Video Based Reconstruction of 3D People Models - <AUTHOR> https://graphics.tu-bs.de/people-snapshot <comment><AUTHOR> Source code was published two days ago and is available at [https://github.com/thmoa/videoavatars](https://github.com/thmoa/videoavatars) (The dataset needs to be requested separately by email.)</comment>


How to Prepare for That Interaction You're Dreading - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2017/10/25/prepare-interaction-dreading/#.WfCRJhabwjk.hackernews <comment><USER2> I don't mean to be negative, but this seems like just generic advice (probably what you'd get from any counsellor or advisor). Why is it particularly interesting for Hacker News?</comment>


Wartime Albert Camus letter lays bare his Vichy-era anguish - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/03/wartime-albert-camus-letter-lays-bare-his-vichy-era-anguish <comment><USER2> War is obviously awful in many ways. Camus discusses some of its worst aspects: The death of human creativity and the destruction of our physical and intellectual abilities and histories.</comment>


Ask YC: Four Year Roadmap - <AUTHOR>

Over the last week I've submitted several questions to YC regarding startups and programming. Your responses have been intelligent, thoughtful, and inspiring -- thank you.
I realized my questions all revolve around a central issue and I should have just addressed it from the start. I'm 23 and work as a manager in a nontechnical field and won't be able to pursue another career full time for another 4 years. I have a computer science degree and consider myself a very good hacker, but my web programming experience is currently limited to HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and some JavaScript.
In four years I either want to be able to work at a tech startup (or a company like Google) or have the technical and business savvy to start my own. The question is: How should I spend my time to give myself the best chance of success? <comment><USER3> Why wait 4 years? Why not join a startup (or technical company) now and start doing the things you want full-time instead of fitting them in around a job you don't value? You can learn _a lot_ getting hands-on at the ground level, and if you want a mix of tech skills _and_ business savvy then why not work at several startups (over time) and help grow them - you may get to do everything and anything from software/service design to marketing and PR. It is probably the best experience you can get if your aim is to start your own startup and will also equip you well for applying to places like Google.

If you really have to stay at the job for some reason, then I'd say in your spare time practice programming and building web apps around what _you_ are interested and that solve problems _you_ face. Launch them and see what happens. You may suck/fail at first, but over time you will definitely learn a lot, and will get better with each iteration you take - you never know one of them may really take off. You can practice business skills in growing your apps and once you have done it a few times, try doing it for other businesses (ideally in other fields too for some diversity to other markets). There are many courses/books that can teach you the skills, but if possible, find someone whose expertise you respect to mentor you.

Many successful businesses were, and still are, started by people in the same boat so please don't let worries about lack of skill/experience stop you from starting.

<comment><USER4> The problem is to find a startup since almost all of them prefer to work in stealth mode and second is to convince them that you're right guy. So for example, I realy would like to work (even with $0 salary) on interesting project/startup, but all attempts to find something literally failed. Just for the record, I was looking for Python/C++/Java/Erlang (one or all languages) startups.

<comment><USER3> What type of attempts? Have you tried going to events, meetups, and (un)conferences etc.? It is a great way to start. Meet people, learn what they do, let them learn about you. Once people see you at several events over time, and you get a chance to bond with one another, they are more inclined to take you on, especially if you can demonstrate skills/portfolio (even if, for example, it is just your own personal projects on a blog).

If you are in London, email me and I'll see what I can do to help. There are several startups here that can always use extra hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "You can't wait for inspiration. you have to go after it with a club." - <USER2> London

First of all congratulations for having a long-term plan. You know where you want to end up. That's big. And you're flexible enough that it can be a startup or a prestige company.

Micro-apps. Build something small like a Twitter visualization (twistori.com was built in a day, twittervision.com in 4 hours!), release it, build a blog to record your projects.

And I'd like to suggest broadening your portfolio: If it's all technology, it's all in one basket. Entrepreneurship is about taking on and managing risk. Outside the controlled world of compilers and stack traces, there is opportunity.

Consider taking on activities of varying risk. What are you scared at getting better at? Does it scare you to give a presentation? Join Toastmasters. Or ask a question at the microphone in a public forum (that's p.s.) Does it scare you to mingle in a room of strangers? Get a group of guy friends and go practice. Nothing to lose. Or start by going to a lecture and talking with the person you sit down next to. Does not having control scare you? Mentor or tutor a teenager. Or be the new guy in an interest group.

<comment><AUTHOR> i really like this post because you not only give specific advice (micro- apps), but you focus on the bigger picture of personal development. it reminded me of a blog post by marc andreessen where he suggested putting yourself in really tough, uncomfortable positions because as an entrepreneur, thats what you'll be facing on a day to day basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One option would be to do what Joshua Schachter did. He built Delicious in his spare time. When he was ready to quit his job, he transformed Delicious from a hobby into a startup by raising money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. His interview in Founders at Work hit home. Well, at least the part before he had a successful company and sold it for like $25M.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hadn't really done any web programming before starting tipjoy. With a full time commitment, we went from start to launch in 3 months.

You should certainly be able to do side projects. The best part is that you don't need to try to make money, so you should focus on building something interesting and useful.

If you want to do tiny free projects for tipjoy, let me know :)

<comment><AUTHOR> ivan, thanks. question: what programming languages is tipjoy built on?

<comment><USER7> We use Django, a Python framework.

Here is a quick installer I wrote up. <http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php?id=install_django>

You might also consider building on Google App Engine, which uses Django. There are parts of Django you can't use that aren't a big deal if you start with App Engine. Basically there is no MySQL, but that should be fine for most applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Make something. The only way to keep your skills current is to use them, and the best way to expand your skills to to build something.

A great video interview appeared here a while ago. It's about how it takes a couple of years to really get good enough at a creative field to produce good work. You go through a period of creating work that's not as good as your ambition would like it to be. Here's the link: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE>

It's worth the time to go through the process of creating a body of work. After doing it for a couple years, you'll be able to focus far more on doing something wonderful, rather than just doing /something/.

<comment><AUTHOR> A recurring theme with these responses seems to be to just go for it and don't worry about messing up because as long as you're learning along the way, you'll be better prepared for whatever the future holds. I think thats terrific advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If your 4 year tenure is absolutely non-negotiable (or if you're not ready), then fiddle - let your hacker instincts take you places. Learn a scripting language (python ruby etc), write a blog, dissect apps, join an opensource project..

After four years of quality exploration, you'll have built up some formidable experience that isn't easily replicable.

</comment><comment><USER10> Four years is a lifetime! While I'm sure there is a good explanation (jail, military?) I'm having a hard time imagining what you're up to.

As you're apparently captive, I'd recommend making the most out of it. Technologies and trends shift, but your dreams and competencies will stick with you. Do whatever you want, with gusto.

That said, additional formal education is never a bad way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Four years is a lifetime!" - I know, belive me. And its not jail. I realized that being an entrepreneur is not the same as being a great programmer. There are lots of skills necessary, and the plan is to develop as many of those as possible with my current job so that I'm better prepared for my next one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So what is it, then? Military? If so, I'd imagine there are lots of opportunities for a "very good hacker" to use and expand his skill set. Experience is key, so go after it. At this point, the thing I'm most curious about is why you're not giving us a bit more detail on your current situation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Startup now!

Why wait? Find others or friends whom you can learn from or work a full time gig while paying a team or offshore developer to build your product.

THough you first need to have an idea. That is when that component of a startup is most vital. Later on not so much...

Who knew you had to be so adaptable. Learning that now being in Philly's incubator! Great learning experience!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ideas are a tricky thing, because without experience behind you, you may seriously misjudge the market for your product. But there's only one way to get experience, right?

What do you mean by "That is when that component of a startup is most vital. Later on not so much..."?

<comment><USER12> YouTube started as a dating site. Flickr as MMORPG.

That is the idea and vision that led them to something totally different.</comment></comment></comment>


12-Year-Old May Hold Key to Solar Energy  - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/232218;_ylt=At7wIJSXbEEWIPVwyKKT5KEDW7oF <comment><USER2> The kid didn't invent it, but he did make an implementation of a relatively new idea.

[http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/09/12-year-old- rev.html?n...](http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/09/12-year-old- rev.html?npu=1&mbid=yhp)

<comment><USER3> Did he actually build one? I haven't seen any indication that he did anything other than "design" one. And it's a lot easier to "design" a nanoscale device than it is to build one.

I mean, I'm sure the kid is smart and all (and no doubt has had some help from his parents) but the media-hype to technical-details ratio here is off the charts.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that is what would interest me: how to experiment with Nanotech at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-t > Most solar cells in use today are either photovoltaic, meaning they harness > only visible light, or thermal.

Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that's not the definition that I learned.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is free-standing actually a good thing? It seems to me if you're trying to maximize flux per unit material, you can't do much better than a flat sheet. The only problem is that the sun moves, but it seems like a free-standing array would only get slightly better performance for much greater cost.

<comment><USER6> From a related article (<http://www.katu.com/news/local/28432984.html>):

 _If he is right, solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells._

So apparently there is some advantage to 3D cells, apparently related to multiple light interactions:

 _"Regular solar cells are only 2D and only allow light interaction once," he said._

It's still not apparent what the basis is for the 500x light absorption figure. Seems to me that the most meaningful basis is the footprint of the device, but that is not clear from any story I've read on this subject.

<comment><USER7> _It's still not apparent what the basis is for the 500x light absorption figure._

Maybe it is a mis-paraphrase of 500-suns concentration capacity. Alternately, it might only refer to UV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think the 500 times boast is relative to percentage, but rather the standard of measurement used ...therefore the arguement of 3500% efficiency is a mute point...I'm no scientist, in fact my mind doesn't work even close to that of a scientist, but I paid attention in math class...if you are looking at something that is relatively inefficient as far as potential to begin with, 500 times the standard although very impressive is not unrealistic in the least.

<comment><USER9> Yes except that would imply that current solar cells have an efficiency of at most 0.2%. Which isn't true.

Maybe they are 500x more efficient _in the UV_ , but in that case it's a meaningless number because the Sun emits very little energy in the UV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 500 times the light of a traditional cell? And if traditional cells run at what, somewhere from 7 to 12% efficiency for standard ones?

So he's getting what, upwards of 3500% efficiency? Even accounting for the extra energy of using ultraviolet wavelengths, this sounds a lot like bad math.

Now if he boosted the efficiency to say, three times what we get now? That'd be amazing all on its own.

<comment><USER11> Maybe the efficiency only counts the visible radiation? So that the fact that it uses ultraviolent screws up the 7-15% (that is, if you include UV light, its much lower?) That'd be my guess...

Although it is rather low on facts and high on hype.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I think you're right.

From the article: _Most solar cells in use today are either photovoltaic, meaning they harness only visible light, or thermal._

Also: _they're engineered to stand freely in three dimensions_

So you have panels that catch both visible and UV light, and can do it in three dimensions.

<comment><USER3> The amount of energy coming through in the UV portion of the spectrum is quite small:

<http://www.sunwindsolar.com/a_images/solar_insolation-b.jpg>

Everything to the left of the "visible light" portion.

<comment><USER11> Huh. In that case, there's no way that '500 times' can have any bearing towards reality whatsoever. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow!</comment>


Gatwick Airport flights diverted to Stansted after drone 'near miss' - <AUTHOR> https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/breaking-flights-diverted-gatwick-airport-14913207 <comment><USER2> I'm a pilot and can't make sense of 'the plane had to take evasive action to avoid the drone' \- I'm skeptical I'd see a drone, unless it were huge, I'm even more skeptical I'd be able to evaluate and take action in time once I did see it. A drone is almost certainly below me in altitude which means it's against the ground as the background. I don't think I have much of a chance of seeing it at all unless it's painted in DayGlo and has strobes. Any else got an idea if you'd see anything in time? I'm flown near geese, they were definitely trying to avoid me, otherwise it wouldn't have ended well. So I've got a sneaky suspicion if I'm on a collision course with a drone, it's going to get hit unless the drone pilot prevents it.

<comment><AUTHOR> >I'm a pilot and can't make sense of 'the plane had to take evasive action to avoid the drone'

I think it is probably, judging from the last time where there could also have been no drone, the plane left the bit of airspace that someone on the ground had reported to the airport that they thought that they might have seen a drone in.</comment></comment>


U.S. mulls paying companies, tax breaks to pull supply chains from China - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-supply-chains/u-s-mulls-paying-companies-tax-breaks-to-pull-supply-chains-from-china-idUSKBN22U0FH <comment><USER2> Thank the lord</comment>


John Urschel's Favorite Theorem - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/john-urschels-favorite-theorem/ <comment><USER2> John Urschel is a mathematician who recently retired from being an NFL American football player, at least in part because of the dangers of brain damage from repeated concussions. There have been several HN posts about him, but the only one I can find with a lot of comments is this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866573)

His favourite theorem is described here [https://arxiv.org/abs/0808.0163](https://arxiv.org/abs/0808.0163). It's a theorem in graph theory, and it says that if you have any graph, you can find a subgraph with "not too many edges" that is "like" the original graph, in a specific sense.

"Not too many" means that for some value d which you get to choose, the number of edges is no more than about d times the number of vertices. (In general, the number of edges in a graph can scale like the number of vertices _squared_.)

"Like the original graph" means that a thing called the "graph Laplacian" of the cut-down graph is a good approximation to the graph Laplacian of the original. Here's one way to think about what the graph Laplacian is. Imagine a sort of "heat flow" process on the graph, where at any given time each vertex has a temperature, and at each time step you move each vertex's temperature towards the average of its neighbours' temperatures. All the possible temperature assignments constitute a finite-dimensional vector space; call it V; the graph Laplacian is a linear map from V to itself that maps a temperature assignment to the resulting _change_ produced by one step of the heat-flow process. It's a sort of discrete version of the _second derivative_ operator. And it turns out that lots of interesting properties of a graph can be computed just from knowing the graph Laplacian, or even just from knowing its eigenvalues.

"Good approximation" means that the relative error is on the order of 1/sqrt(d) where d is that value you got to choose earlier. So the more edges you're allowed to keep, the better the approximation can be made.

(All of the above is a handwavy approximation. If you understood everything I said and want the _correct_ version, you can find it in the paper itself.)</comment>


Mac App Store hits one million downloads on day one - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/07/mac-app-store-hits-one-million-downloads-on-day-one/ <comment><USER2> _Apple PR: "1 Million Downloads on Mac App Store!"

Twitter PR: "900,000 Downloads of Twitter for Mac in 24 Hours!"_

<https://twitter.com/shawnblanc/status/23391070813425666>

It's a joke, but I bet there is a heavy skew towards _free_ software and _new_ software. You're probably not going to pay for iWork a second time. It isn't all Twitter though; the guys at Evernote saw new sign ups from Mac increase by 1,800% (<https://twitter.com/evernote/status/23116726547775488>).

<comment><USER3> lol thats the first thing i said after reading about 1mil downloads... "bet its 90% the twitter client because nobody wants to spend 50 bucks on all the other apps..."

<comment><USER4> To be clear, the above is a joke. Twitter has not released their numbers.

<comment><USER3> i know - but i assume thats how it will end up anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is that a lot? Any numbers how how much software is acquired by any other means on any given day?

<comment><USER6> I don't think its much at all. I think WP7 gets about 600K downloads per day, and that's WP7.

The iOS store gets over 16 million downloads per day.

Given the existing user base and with it being the launch day of the store, 1M downloads looks pretty mediocre.

<comment><USER7> Could be, but remember that getting access to the store requires installing an OS update with a reboot, and that OS updates aren't forced onto everyone on their day of release, and that it takes a week or two for all users to be bothered with an update message. When you combine that with the rather low-key marketing (no marketing?), I think that 1 million is probably a lower bound on daily activity, and that it will only climb from here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How many of these are bootlegs?

[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/06/mac-app-store- bo...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/06/mac-app-store-bootlegging)

<comment><USER2> None, probably, because bootlegs are not distributed through the App Store and use an existing receipt.

<comment><USER8> Ah, okay, thx - I didn't realise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> btw. did anyone ever discovered a purchasing history on itunes/app store?

<comment><USER2> The Mac App Store has a purchases tab and iTunes on the Mac shows you your purchase history under your account (click your Apple ID in the top right corner and select _Account_ ).

<comment><USER3> you sure itunes also shows buys made from the iphone?

<comment><USER2> It will show any purchases or rentals made in iTunes (including the App Store) on any platform. Apple will also email you a receipt after a purchase (including free "purchases").</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Canadian, physics degree, in aviation, want to move to tech in US, how? - <AUTHOR> Basically the title. I'm 27 and am not in a relevant field. The job is great, but I just want to be part of more important things.
If I change my time horizon to, say, 3 years, is it possible for me to get sponsored to get a job in tech in the US? I have a bit of relevant experience in Python from computational physics courses and labs (lots of work with numpy and scipy).
My plan: - Finish cs50, (currently week 4) - Finish freecodecamp (currently done most of JS) - Then from there I have a huge list of courses and am unsure of what to focus on. E.g. cs50x for react native, cs193p from stanford, leetcode projects, project euler (I have about 20 done), I've found a bunch of courses on MIT OCW for algorithms and data structures.
Writing it out now, it seems a bit scattered as I'm not sure what exactly I would need to get a position as a data scientist or software developer at say, Google. <comment><USER2> if you want to jump through the interviewing hoop at a major software/tech company make sure you grind through a basic entry-level computer science algorithms course.

where i went to univerity (in australia) this would be something like "algorithms 1" as a second year course for students focusing on computer science or software engineering. you want to come out of it with a decent understanding of how to implement and when to use basic data structures (not that you should ever need to implement them in the real world, but its good to understand the fundamentals) and an ability to do informal (i.e. not formal mathematical proof) asymptotic analysis ("big oh" notation) for time and space complexity of algorithms. (on the other hand, if you ever took some math courses and soaked up epsilon delta or epsilon N formal definitions of limits, then you might enjoy the formal definition of big-oh stuff, but i dont imagine anyone is ever going to ask for a formal proof for a hands-on software dev/eng interview)

apart from some knowledge or intuition of when to use which data structure, which you probably need to use every day, you dont need to use the above in most actual industry software dev roles, but it does tend to get measured in software engineering interviews.

there's a reasonable amount of advice over in this thread -- look for the comments from people who have experience interviewing for the big K (for small finite K > 1): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17755688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17755688)

A completely different angle is not to focus on the big tech companies, and instead focus on tech roles in large non-tech orgs, or delivering value to businesses that happens to be partially implemented using technology. there tends to be a much lower bar to entry in terms of needing to clear hoop- jumping technical interview processes (for better and for worse).

</comment><comment><USER3> If by "tech" you mean programming, then it's not likely you will get a TN for a programming job with a Physics degree. Your degree has to match your job, and Physics won't pass for Programming.

Trump may get rid of TN visas anyway. Getting an H1B from Canada and not working for the company in Canada is basically impossible since you need to be hired before April so that you can try for an H1B via lottery, but you couldn't start working until October.

Your best way to get in is by getting a job with a US company in Canada and then transferring to the US. Or you can go get a Master's Degree at a US university, get internships, and then a subsequent job afterwards via OPT.</comment>


Plivo (YC S12) Launches the first SDK that connects WebRTC And SIP - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/15/plivo-launches-the-first-sdk-that-lets-developers-connect-webrtc-and-sip/

<comment><USER2> It should be embarrassing for TC when the first comment on their story points out their mistake-

"""The first? Phono (<http://phono.com/webrtc>) has been doing this for nearly a year now on Canary and now Chrome, even won in the best WebRTC tool class at the WebRTC conference in the San Francisco Bay Area late last year. Further, AT&T announced their Call Management API where Ericsson did the same thing in Las Vegas using their IMS (which is all SIP BTW):

[http://www.att.com/gen/press- room?pid=23651&cdvn=news...](http://www.att.com/gen/press- room?pid=23651&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=35916)

Congratulations to Plivo, great to see more folks entering the WebRTC space. But would be great to see just a tiny bit of research done by folks at Techcrunch before declaring firsts."""

</comment><comment><USER3> Switching from Twilio to Plivo was one of the best decisions we made at our company. Glad to see Plivo keeping up the innovation and progress :)

<comment><USER4> Same here!

After this incident - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4866677> \- we gave it a try and its now in production!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to work for Twilio. Their Twilio Client JavaScript SDK has supported WebRTC for two months now. You can use it to connect to the PSTN or SIP addresses. [http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/11/webrtc-for-twilio- client-...](http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/11/webrtc-for-twilio-client-now- available.html)

As I said in another comment, I should know better than to expect simple fact- checking from a TC author. But somehow I'm still disappointed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you brought this out. Plivo not only allows calling out to SIP addresses, but also allows any SIP Device (hardphone, softphone) to call to a WebRTC endpoint.

I am not sure, how the SDK you mentioned here would allow you to do that as Twilio does not support inbound SIP. And thats why the TC article says its a first!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Be,

Are you also passing video or just audio for now?

Also, are you doing any encryption on the signalling or media? Great job rapidly iterating and building new products. Always nice to see innovation in the voice apps business.

</comment><comment><USER5> From the SDK example it looks like I am supposed to put my Plivo credentials in plain text in JavaScript. Am I missing something? Because that seems like a really terrible idea.

<comment><USER7> The credentials can be generated dynamically from any server side language like php, python or ruby and sent to the js. Once the call is done or after a certain time these credential can be deleted using server side APIs too.

Edit:

Creating an Endpoint - <http://plivo.com/docs/api/endpoint/#create>

Deleting an Endpoint - <http://plivo.com/docs/api/endpoint/#delete>

<comment><USER5> I see. So I can create an endpoint on the server when the page is generated, give it a random password, and drop that into the page. And then to expire it I would have some background process that deletes endpoints n minutes after they are created or something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of webrtc and sip just try sipml5.org I've just tested it with asterisk 11.2.0 and after a bit of fighting I was able to make it works (I'm not affiliated).

</comment><comment><USER9> Almost ended up working for the fine fellows at Plivo. Very smart and very ambitious guys. This is likely only the start. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER10> Excited to integrate SIP, PSTN and WebRTC. Any docs?

</comment><comment><USER11> Funny. I get a warning from chrome that tc is showing content from d.adsbyisocket.com which seems to dangerous. Anyone else?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah.. something funny with chrome..

<comment><USER11> i'd say something funny with tc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> this is pretty great, I wonder what Twilio is doing in response

<comment><USER5> Twilio already has a WebRTC bridge to SIP and the PSTN with its Twilio Client SDK. I should know better, but I'm actually disappointed at the complete lack of fact-checking in this TC article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stanley, Plivo not only allows calling out to SIP addresses, but also allows any SIP Device (hardphone, softphone) to call to a WebRTC endpoint. I am not sure, how the SDK you mentioned here would allow you to do that as Twilio does not support inbound SIP. And thats why the TC article says its a first!</comment></comment></comment>


Introduction to Digital Image Processing in Python - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/lessons-on-digital-image-processing-2-983d8bab98c8#606a-9ddad05217f7 <comment><AUTHOR> This is my attempt to introduce image processing to newbies through Python. I would really like to hear feedback and suggestions.</comment>


2006 Apple Patent: multiple cameras embedded within LCD display - <AUTHOR> http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220060007222%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20060007222&RS=DN/20060007222

<comment><USER2> It's an application, not a patent.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there anyone with whom I can do remote research work? - <AUTHOR> I am a recent graduate in Computer Science degree. I have excellent coding skills, but now I want to shift to the research side. Along with my job, I want to collaborate on research ideas and want to do something. Is there anyone looking for such candidates? Or can someone recommend me some research labs or professors?<p>Link to my profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishi-shah-78103bab/ <comment><USER2> >I want to collaborate on research ideas and want to do something.

Nobody will feed you because your proposition does not make sense for corporations or academy, so I have a one year plan that will hopefully put you on the right path: help yourself by browsing the 2018 arXiv.org literature in a CS domain you really like for the long term of your career, start reading some papers in detail and try implementations, slowly but steadily learn more and become an expert in that niche while interacting with its communities and conferences, finally produce a case study showing that you can make a contribution. If all goes well, this is like a remote MSc that might be enough to get your foot somewhere on your terms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that makes sense. Thank you for your advice :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not an answer, but just wanted to give a heads up that your linkedin URL shows a blank page with a linkedin login dialog and you may be losing good contacts because of their auth wall. Consider posting your CV on your own website or some publicly accessible website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your point. I should have thought about it. I will make my website soon :)

Here is the link to my cv - [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RUpDfhM1Un1_Pg14smt_Nhd7f7f...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RUpDfhM1Un1_Pg14smt_Nhd7f7f07uXF/view?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER4> Very impressive CV. You had a busy and productive last couple of years.

Major point: you have worked on a large variety of very different tasks, which is exactly the right thing to do at this stage and will benefit you hugely in the long run. However, that means you will need something other than your CV that indicates some sort of focus in an area that will likely interest you longterm. People that hire want to know that you will still be around tomorrow. For academics, "being around" does not necessarily mean their research group but extends to the general field. You should start by communicating the direction(s) that you would like to pursue when making something like this post. Long term, I would try to build a portfolio of small projects or one larger project in that area.

Minor point: "Wrote couple of technical articles" is a bit colloquial and jars with the language in the rest of the CV. Use "several" instead of "couple of".

<comment><USER5> "couple of" means 2.

"several" means more than that, generally 3 or 4.

They have equal levels of formality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you tried contacting any academic staff from your degree you're on good terms with?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi barry0079

Yes, I did. Unfortunately no one interested in working remotely. That's why I posted it over here.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does a company CTO need to be a coder? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not necessarily. In small companies you'll need to code whereas in big companies you'd just manage staff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assuming your company is not a startup using fancy C-titles early, it's not a requirement for a CTO to be a coder but it helps to understand the complexity of problems and gain trust and respect from direct reports if your CTO used to be a coder.</comment>


Jobless claims, total unemployment level worse than expected - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/04/weekly-jobless-claims.html <comment><USER2> Interesting note that during WW2 people expected another great depression, so policy makers coordinated (GI bill, etc.) and we actually had an economic boom.

We now understand much better how to tweak a country's economy.

Some key points for the next recovery phase:

-Give tax incentives for automated robotic farming, our food supply should not be dependent on poor migrants, we need to transition to pesticide/herbicide free produce that can ramp up supply on demand. Workforce will be highly skilled as well.

-Make massive investments into local micro-grid community solar. This will make us more robust to cyber attacks and black outs and provide lots of jobs. Solar is now the cheapest power generation method.

-Ditto on batteries. Make 10 more gigafactories, invest in Lithium extraction from the ocean and recycling infrastructure.

etc.

<comment><USER3> I enjoy how you suggest that there might be an social/employment problem but then you proceed to suggest things that will actually eliminate employment.

<comment><USER4> Resource extraction is extremely productive these days. What required thousands of laborers a century ago can now be done with mere dozens of laborers. Replacing coal/LNG with solar and batteries would be a net job creator (and, in the case of solar, distribute the jobs more evenly across the country).

Robotic farming is an interesting case. First, successful robotic farming for labor-intensive crops would be a huge deal. Think John Deere v2. Tons of great paying jobs. Try telling Moline, IL that tractors kill jobs. Second, most of the jobs offset by a successful product in this space are migrant jobs; farm workers enter the US for the growing season and then go back to (usually) Mexico once the growing season ends. Without those jobs, the migrant farm workers simply wouldn't migrate into the US. So, you'd eliminate jobs globally, and Mexico in particular would suffer, but the overall employment effect would probably shake out net positive in the USA (because most of the displaced laborers aren't permanent residents).

Also, _not_ automating work for the sake of keeping people busy seems... immoral.

<comment><USER3> You bring some good points but I am more simply contrasting the suggestions (tax incentives for business) with the actual GI bill (massive benefits for millions of people)

<comment><USER4> Right. So, what are "Ground Infantry" in World War Covid?

Apparently not nurses or farm laborers. Nope. Cops with zero accountability. Not hospital workers. Not food producers. Police Union Memebership. All others be beat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And the stocks continue to rise, I wonder how far this dead cat can bounce

<comment><USER6> Q4 this year and Q1 next year just have to be bloodbaths this year - but then again, I'm literally always wrong about this stuff. It really seems like I should be right.

I say this because I think now that callbacks are starting slowly and lots of offices have said Sept - Oct time will when they 'open the office' again properly - the redundancies will be made before then - then belts tighten, budgets get slashed, spending goes way down due to layoffs - and then Q4 and following quarters will be abysmal.

I should probably buy calls on the S&P to be at record highs by year end instead though because we live in clown world now.

<comment><USER7> We live in weird times. I too am shocked and constantly shown wrong by the SP50 rising while many millions file unemployment.

I've read that part of the rise is from the Fed lower rates to 0. It essentially pushed banks to buy into the market for their only sources of interest.

I know from the past that company stock usually rises after they announce reorganization. Investors may be seeing opportunities for profit down the road from more optimized org charts following the mass unemployment.

I do believe Dr Fauci and other medical researchers comparing this to 1918. If past is precedent we will see a far worse outbreak and economic fallout in the fall and winter then we did this spring. If the valuation decrease were over pessimistic this time around then next time may be more muted. If the decrease prove to have been over optimistic then expect further devaluations next time. Both of those assuming rational actors and reactions, neither of which assured.

I also think we haven't seen the full fallout from even the spring yet. I think we won't know until the end of august how all of the unemployment affected rent and mortgage payments during the spring outbreak. We also don't know whether the protests are going to spark super spreader events. That could necessitate closing the economy yet again and sooner. On the other side, we don't have a monthly stimulus or cancelled obligations-those could have up or down impacts respectfully.

I see a lot of really grave uncertainty in the future right now. The pandemic is a very real thing. The protests are too. The political desires to stimulate the economy despite any other affects is perhaps greater still. So I think there's lots of noise and uncertainty here-which makes for volatility in valuations.

Edit-I also just want to point out that the 1920s were marked by more than just Black Friday in October(date?). I'd suggest we all go back and refresh on how things played out back then to compare to today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought they were expecting 8m (nonfarm payroll) job losses and saw 2.something in May instead.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/03/adp-private-payrolls- may-202...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/03/adp-private-payrolls- may-2020.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's the official chart for continuing claims that the article references. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCSA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCSA)

The default chart does a good job of showing how severe this is.

Have to zoom in to the one year chart to get context around this week's rise.

</comment><comment><USER10> > called back to work slowly What % would you guess are ever going to be > 'called back'?

</comment><comment><USER11> The 8 weeks from when the first PPP loans started going out is about to elapse. Weird they don't mention that at all.

</comment><comment><USER12> The shut downs were a drastic overcorrection. I'll say it until I'm blue in the face. In retrospect, we will look at it as a dire mistake that triggered a great depression-like event.

<comment><USER13> We shut down fairly hard and fairly early in Denmark. Our neighbour Sweden didn't shut down at all. Their economy suffered roughly the same as ours, but the number of deaths per 100,000 population is 43.9 and ours is 10.

We're pretty much reopening everything that isn't big concentrated gatherings or night-clubs. Even things like Zoos are opening. Our border to Germany and Norway is also semi-open now, but remains closed toward Sweden for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER14> We did shut down in Sweden. It's a myth that needs to be debunked. I (and many others) have been working from home for several months now. All events (like sports, cinemas) have been postponed or canceled. Most people in larger cities are ordering groceries and stuffs online. Sweden is a very digital, even cashless society. Sure, it's open in some ways but many stores are shutting down because everything have went digital.

<comment><USER15> The net effect was that the death rate was vastly higher in Sweden than their northern Scandinavian neighbors. Over 4000 deaths more based on population size. Not having more aggressive stay at home policies doomed thousands more people to die than were likely if you had followed policies of your neighbors. Sweden has now joined the ranks of the worst performing countries in Europe based on death rate. The UK, France, Spain, and Sweden.

Here's the opportunity Sweden missed: The disease had an early outbreak in those other countries, it was already raging before the countries shutdown (Spain and Italy were overwhelmed). But as we saw in Finland, Norway etc, if it wasn't raging, by shutting down you could tremendously reduce the infections. I know Sweden tried to protect elderly in sr citizen homes as we call them in the US, but you failed. People could still go out to bars and restaurants, your economy was somewhat more functional that other countries, at the cost of currently 3-4k extra deaths.

It's a terrible situation, but in my opinion the wrong one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: how do you know if your systems are rooted? - <AUTHOR>

I have been upping all my security lately at the expense of downtime. The first signs I knew that something was wrong is when my logs were logging to /dev/null, and I had unknown ip routes. There are many tools out there for prevention and analysis (clamscan, nmap, wireshark), but I'd really love to know some methods to KNOW when something IS wrong. <comment><USER2> Some tools of note here: ossec, alienvault ossiem, selinux, pf, iptables etc. what you need is a hids, system accounting, and hardened os (proper acls, selinux, upto date binaries, firewalls etc).

Log correlation helps too. Oh and chuck in notifications for all the above (e-mail, pager etc.) and I think you should be set for future. But please remember, these are not silver bullet.</comment>


Be Careful When Checking If A Domain is Available! - <AUTHOR> http://kevinboss.net/website-design/be-careful-when-checking-if-a-domain-is-available Domain Front Running: Domain name front running is the practice whereby a domain name registrar uses insider information to register domains for the purpose of re-selling them or earning revenue via ads placed on the domains landing page. By registering the domains, the registrar locks out other potential registrars from selling the domain to a customer. <comment><USER2> I don't trust any registrar anymore. When I want to know if a domain is available I do a DNS lookup on it's NS records instead of using their web interface or whois. It will just hit the root servers and no registrar will know that I did this. Maybe it is paranoia, but I too have lost some domains that I wanted in exactly the same way you describe.

</comment><comment><USER3> The blog entry crosses into paranoia. Coincidences happen. A company with a related name bought a shorter domain name that he also wanted. It's not mysterious. Instead of seeing the obvious, the blogger seems to imply that somehow godaddy magicked into existence a company with a related name as a front to buy his 9.99 domain name.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any post w/ "Network Solutions" in it scares me</comment>


Show HN: horbito – The new Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.horbito.com/ <comment><USER2> Web desktops are back again! It seems it's been a long time since I last saw one. This topic always generates a big debate whether a cloud os is the future or not. In my opinion, the idea of running a universally accepted "computer" accessible from anywhere and any device is actually really powerful and centralizing all our internet lifes in one place so we can control our data is huge.

EDIT: I've been playing around with horbito for a while and it's pretty badass, it works quite fast and integrates really well with Microsoft Office, kudos for the team

<comment><USER3> Great point, I'm checking out office now... I use to be a heavy excel user, but ever since arch, I've been stuck on gsheets

if this could run excel smoothly, it would be pretty amazing, I've been trying to find a solution but yet to find a good seamless one. Wine/virtualbox are both mediocre solutions atm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These guys are amazing, I met with them a couple of years ago at MIT while they were going through GFSA and showed me an early prototype of horbito, weren't you called Inevio back then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! We recently changed our name to horbito, do you like the change?

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure some of us still have WeeZeel t-shirts around!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This feels like it has potential. Can someone give me a specific use-case where this should shine?

The major worry I have is that it will turn out like the Citrix system at my university. It's hard to give all the reasons why Citrix is annoying, but the top three are: 1. speed (horbito seems fast though), 2. awkward feeling of two operating systems, 3. pesky, unanticipated clunkiness when saving and retrieving data.

I'm not knocking this, just curious.

<comment><USER7> Don't think about horbito like an OS (yet), think about it like Google Drive on steroids.

Right now horbito is a great solution for teams, being able to work online with a much better user experience than old cloud (introducing windows and multitasking inside a website) and collaborating on real time while always being up to date on everything that's happening on your team thanks to Cosmos.

I really think Cosmos is a big revolution for teams because it's a well executed Yammer/Facebook for work due to being perfectly integrated with your workflow, you needn't stop work to report what your doing, as soon as you save you can share and post all the changes with your coworkers.

<comment><USER6> That makes sense. I guess I don't work enough in teams to have instantly seen the value. It's weird, actually, I see a lot of references to collaboration, either indirectly while reading articles, or directly on videos promoting collaboration tools. But in reality I don't collaborate very often other than via Slack. I wonder if it's just me or if collaboration is portrayed/perceived in an unrealistic way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sorry but I don't get it, why would I want another layer over my OS to access my apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> The web wasn't really created for the use that is given today and we're using our browsers like a pseudo-OS, this causes that webapps can't talk between each other and it requires a specific integration with each one of the services you want your app to communicate with.

However, when you develop an app for Windows or Mac you needn't worry about integrations, it's already integrated with all the installed programs on the computer out of the box, it's the OS who is in charge of managing the communication between apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is actually pretty impressive... How much money have you guys raised so far?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello! We've actually raised around $200k and received around $100k from awards

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazing, I would love to read technical details, and how it's made.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!! We use ArangoDB, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, Node.js, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, we might be doing a blog post explaining our tech in the near future!.

By the way, we are having a discussion right now on Product Hunt, feel free to leave an upvote if you like horbito!

<comment><USER11> For what you are using ArangoDB?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You should totally turn this into a Mac app.

<comment><USER7> We're actually developing a Mac & Windows App right now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just hunted this on Product Hunt, absolutely stunning! Awesome job guys :)

<comment><USER7> Thank you! We weren't expecting anyone to hunt us!</comment></comment>


Google Analytics alerts for Slack - <AUTHOR> http://alerts.ryanbrink.com/ <comment><USER2> We use this on a couple of our sites. The screenshot doesn't show it, but one of the items that can be included in the Slack attachment is the top referrers and/or top landing pages for that period. Very handy to see if some topic is suddenly interesting to others, or to have a more organic feel of the "long tail" of a piece of content.

It's a slick Slack integration.</comment>


Unprecedented Fires Burn the Arctic - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/arctic-fires-alaska-2019/ <comment><USER2> The Nullschool Earth Visualiser is particularly good at revealing events and patterns.

Current (as of this comment) PM2.5 patterns over the North Pole show major fies in Alaska, Yukon, and Siberia, as well as Greenland.

[https://earth.nullschool.net/#2019/07/13/1800Z/particulates/...](https://earth.nullschool.net/#2019/07/13/1800Z/particulates/surface/level/overlay=pm2.5/orthographic=-92.09,86.85,461)

(Note that not all PM2.5 is combustion or wildfire related -- Sahara dust and hurrican/typhoon/cyclone salt-spray also appear, as do human sources particularly[1] in China and India.)

________________________________

Notes:

1\. So to speak.</comment>


The Strange Paradise of Paul Scheerbart - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/16/strange-paradise-of-paul-scheerbart/ <comment><USER2> Technological utopianism is a great thing and we should have more of it as a thread in the great global conversion. It has a very interesting history if you're prepared to go chase it down, something in every decade from the late 1800s on. Cosmism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism)), Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil ([https://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/ind...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/index.htm)), and the more recent paradise engineering of the Hedonistic Imperative ([http://hedweb.org/](http://hedweb.org/)) spring to mind among many, many others.

People like the author of this article have a way of looking at the early transhumanists and saying "well, then the ugly parts of the 20th century happened," and somehow then discarding the original point, the goal, the wonder of the possible. The point still stands, however: that we can in principle engineer utopia, build technologies to eliminate pain, suffering, and death, and create wonders of macroscale engineering along the way. As a species we continue to move in that direction. Despite the intervening mass upheavals and deaths in the past 100 years, isn't 2015 so very much better to live in than 1915? And the 160 million people who died due to war in the 20th century are a small fraction of the ~3 billion (very approximately) who died in total. War is not a big part of the problem, for all that Serious Thinkers seem ponder little else.

More people should be for technological utopianism, with eyes open. It shouldn't be remarkable to sit up and say "we can and should do more to stop suffering and death, and there is no point in stopping until it is all gone." Perhaps it would go faster if it wasn't just the science fiction authors, scientists, and philosophers who gave a little time to appreciate the bounds of the possible.</comment>


Racket on the Playstation 3? It's Not What you Think [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c

<comment><USER2> It should be noted that the speaker is one of the lead developers at Naughty Dog, likely one of the greatest game studios of all time. Definitely recommend a watch.

</comment><comment><USER3> The speaker actually begins talking about racket and how they use it at about 6 minutes into the video. Here's a link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c&t=6m0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c&t=6m0s)

Interesting to hear how they replaced GOAL in their toolchain. The people I've met who used GOAL in the past talked at length about how much they miss it.

<comment><USER4> Parent is referring to GOAL/GOOL [1], Lisps that were developed internally at Naughty Dog for game scripting (the first iteration for the Crash Bandicoot series, the second on for the Jak & Daxter era. It is said that these were very powerful systems that could compile to some very mean PS1/PS2 assembly. If you read about how they had to optimize Crash Bandicoot to be able to give that "wow"-factor at their first E3, blazing past all other PS1 games and setting a new standard, you'll know what I mean.

There's a very interesting blog series about it [2].

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp) [2]: [http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash- ban...](http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot- part-1/)

<comment><USER5> Could not just Sony open source it? I am very interested to get a feel.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: iOS app with algorithms to reconnect missed connections - <AUTHOR> https://slipperapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I started working on Slipper because I've long been a fan of the missed connections section on Craigslist. Each post provides a genuine glimpse at human action (or inaction) and the resulting vulnerabilities. However, I've been frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the current system. The ultimate disappointment of missed connections currently lies in the fact that most posts die a quiet death in the endless internet ether.

Slipper takes on this challenge through algorithms that continuously match posts to people. We determine the probability that each post is about each of our users, or that a user may recognize the target of the post. If the algorithms provide a strong signal, we send the user a push notification telling them to check out the relevant post. Our servers are continuously calculating these probabilities to create a fresh experience each time the app is opened.

Still early stage, but I'd really appreciate your feedback. Thanks!</comment>


A Net Before the Web, Part 4: The Rogue, the Yuppie, and the Soldier - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2017/11/a-net-before-the-web-part-4-the-rogue-the-yuppie-and-the-soldier/ <comment><USER2> This is such a fantastic blog! Well worth going back and reading all of it!</comment>


How to get a job as a programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.typemock.com/blog/2012/06/22/how-to-get-a-job-as-a-programmer/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=programmer

<comment><USER2> edit.. didnt realize this was /new. hfgl</comment>


J. Crew Files for Bankruptcy in Virus's First Big Retail Casualty - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/business/j-crew-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html <comment> 1-6 People are interested in what makes them look good in front of the camera. We hardly spend our lives with each other in real life anyway. If I can do AR to put various clothes on, I'd spend time/money on that instead.

</comment><comment><USER2> Bought by a venture capital firm in 2011, quality and revenue have been falling since. Jenna Lyons (the reason jcrew style had a real style) left in 2017, there have been other big departures since.

They've been on the bubble for a while, covid just accelerated the popping.

<comment><USER3> Yeah a lot of borderline stable or not companies will vanish and yeah it's COVID... but also not COVID.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They used to have a unique look, now it's barely differentiable from GAP

</comment><comment><USER5> been going downhill since Jenna Lyons left</comment>


Why Europe's Trains Are So Much Better Than America's - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/how-europe-gets-high-speed-trains-right/404515/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I dont think american trains have any incentive to get better. it works sort of good enough and people pay, why care about speed or comfort?

in "europe" and really they mean germany and france, switzerland in particular, not actual "all of europe" \- there is a minimum coverage the company has to achieve ands it cant "get out of it".

Same thing for cellphone coverage and internet coverage. Heck, France is starting to get a lot of FTTH everywhere (free install, less than 30e/mo for 100mit) because of these requirements. The bay area can keep dreaming on getting something else than comcast at 30mbit coaxial cable for 60 bucks/mo + have to buy modem and tech if not wired.

Basically, capitalism-all-the-things don't work very well with monopolies and corrupted organizations/cities/countries.

socio-capitalism isnt the greatest but it works a little better.

<comment><USER3> Its also got to do with culture.

Americans have a deep love for car culture - and look at public transportation as social welfare [1].

American capitalism is also responsible for america having the most profitable multinationals in the world. Its just that it doesn't work very good for society but does allow money to multiply really well.

[1] [http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8764819/why-american-trains- are...](http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8764819/why-american-trains-are-bad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Also, the Milbrae and Burbank station locations will be in less accessible areas"

Millbrae isn't a "less accessible area". You've got both BART and Caltrain. Do a little research author? Millbrae is actually the best place IMO in the Bay Area to stop, especially if they ever expand BART.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you understood the article. It claims that, for speed purposes, train stops should only be in major cities and not on the urban periphery. Millbrae is hardly a major city. Nor is Millbrae particularly accessible: there is poor parking near the bart station, few options for public transport, and I doubt even 2k people live within walking distance of the bart station.

Millbrae is also obviously not the best location in the bay area to stop. Millbrae population: 22k. sf population: 837k.

<comment><USER6> You want to draw a high-speed train line into SF proper? You'd be looking at clearing tens of miles of housing or digging a comparable amount of tunnel, which would be either politically difficult or $EXPENSIVE.

What's your plan?

<comment><USER7> They _are_ building the HSR into SF proper, and they're doing the obvious thing: using the existing Caltrain alignment from Millbrae into the city, terminating at the Transbay Transit Center (already under construction and build with this in mind).

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/California_to...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/California_topographical_map_of_proposed_HSR_route_%282014%29.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Which is also the sensible thing--leaving aside other pro/con HSR arguments in general. It also doesn't seem to be what the article is arguing for.

That said, you start having lots of connections and the value of transit systems goes down. I was just looking last night and I'm told that the time to get from SFO to the Santa Clara Convention Center/Great America/Stadium is still about 2 hours which, while theoretically doable, isn't something I'm going to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone from Germany I find the description in the first chapter a bit idealized.

The truth is: Trains in Germany are also notoriously late. And the Wifi quite often doesn't work as another commenter already mentioned.

(that doesn't change the fact that of course the German rail system is much better than the one in the US - but one shouldn't overidealize it, it has lots of problems itself)

<comment><USER10> I don't have data on this, but I am willing to bet your German definition of "notoriously late" is much more stringent than an American's. (Not that you're wrong to think that: we've just gotten used to extremely low standards in America because all of our public projects are run incompetently.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Utopic intercity train travel in Europe is a myth. In Germany it is good, but expensive and most under 30 are trying to find an affordable alternative, e.g., BlahBlah car or a bus. France is just prohibitively expensive: I had a group trip cancelled because people balked once they saw what the TGV costs were. In Czech republic inter city is cheap, but there is no AC in the cabins and dodgy heat, infrequent high speed corridors, no WiFi, and often it is standing room only (keep in mind this might be for a 2-3 hour trip). Intracity transport is much better than the us almost all over Europe, but don't by the hype otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm European train rides tend to be quite bit more expensive than in the US, even if you take the craziness of the UK train system which is much costlier than mainland Europe (London to Newcastle costs more than London to Brussels), yearly train tickets in the Netherlands, Germany and France are also quite expensive...

<comment><USER13> > even if you take the craziness of the UK train system which is much costlier > than mainland Europe (London to Newcastle costs more than London to > Brussels)

Not if you book in advance; a single journey London -> Newcastle in 3 months will cost £29.10, vs. traveling today which would cost £121.00.

<comment><USER14> For regular trips that is true, and great. For more urgent trips or trips where the date may be flexible you are kind of stuck paying that huge cost most the time.

I used to live in Cambridge and had a similar problem on my frequent visits to Newcastle which I couldn't pin a date down for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > And on German trains, the wi-fi actually works.

That is a lie. Source: I'm German.

<comment><USER16> I'd heard rumors, so I was excited to get some work done on a bus from Hamburg to Berlin a couple months ago. Was disappointed when the wifi cut out after 10 minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Because Europe is older, smaller and more population dense.

<comment><USER18> A nice map

[http://static.persquaremile.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/u...](http://static.persquaremile.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/us-europe-high-speed-rail-and-density.png)

Wyoming, in particular, has a lower population density than Siberia!

<comment><USER19> But that just shows how difficult these comparison are - Siberia has an extremely uneven distribution of population. If you chose one part of Siberia - Krasnoyarsk Krai, it is nearly ten times the area of Wyoming and has a much lower population density 1.21/km2 rather than 2.26/km2.

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

[NB And there appears to be an even bigger and emptier bit of Siberia next door but I haven't worked out what it is yet!]

<comment><USER18> Precise comparisons are aside the point, which is simply that the middle of the United States is incredibly population-sparse, in the same ballpark as Siberia. Which, coincidentally, is not exactly known for its convenient commuter rail network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Without having read the article: because we prioritize freight (CSX, etc.) over passengers. Freight liners own a lot of the rails; Amtrak merely leases time on them.

There's a LOT of trains going through Denver these days--mostly laden with coal and petroleum. Who needs pipes when you've got rails?

<comment><USER21> "We" is who? Europe or USA?

<comment><USER22> CSX is an American railroad. Amtrak is the national passenger agency in the US. Denver is in the US, not in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The difference is because in America, there's 2(3) countries. In Europe, you travel between ~10 countries. The budget/mentality is different since you operate in international level with international import/exports.

<comment><USER24> Wouldn't the hassle in coordinating things across multiple countries be much higher?

Not sure why anyone would make excuses for the US on trains. There are some great opportunities to get it right. Or ignore it and wait for automated bus services.

<comment><USER25> Yes, and international trains are not where the European network shines. It's getting better, but it has historically been hard to even figure out how to buy a ticket involving multiple countries. Deutsche Bahn is one of the better ones. _If_ you originate or terminate in Germany, their booking engine can figure out how to get you to a neighboring country (and they actually have these countries' timetables in their system, too). But if you want to go through Germany, say from France to Poland, good luck getting that booked, unless you split it into two tickets, each terminating in Germany.

Specific through services make it easier a few routes, such as the CityNightLine sleeper services, since there is one train and one operator for the whole route.

<comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV) Might be worth a read. While it may not be up to par to your standard, it's one of the train system the most complex and speedy in the entire world.

<comment><USER25> Oh, TGV is great in France, or if you travel on a TGV-operated train to a neighboring country. I'm just complaining about timetable engines and ticketing for international trips across Europe, when they involve more than one operator. For example if you want to buy a ticket from Paris to Copenhagen, there isn't an integrated timetable/booking system. For this, bahn.de is better than most national train companies, because their search engine at least includes other operators' timetables (though they aren't always able to actually sell you a ticket).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The parity of zero, the primality of two, and other mysteries - <AUTHOR> https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2017/7/18/the-parity-of-zero-the-primality-of-two-and-other-mysteries <comment><USER2> > _There seems to be a weak relationship between time spent and the number of > correct answers (though the people who answered almost everything wrong did > so pretty slowly), but maybe this isn 't surprising._

How are the people that mark "None of the above" counted? It's very difficult to not get at least one answer correctly by chance.</comment>


High-process-count support added to master - <AUTHOR> http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2017-August/313552.html <comment> le-mark My question is: why am I paying cloud providers for virtual machines with some imaginary virtual cpu count (or dynos or whatever) when I could be paying for M process running my server executable (capped at N threads per process)? Why can't I just write a server, bundle up the exe and assets, and run it somewhere? Why do I have to futz about with admining, patching, and hardening the OS when that's not what I care about?

Edit, to clarify, it just seems like an os with the capability to host a large number of user processes as here would really allow an order of magnitude reduction in hosting cost. Ie if a machine can host 1,000,000 paying accounts vs 10 vps/containered apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not to sound cheeky but it sounds like you want to pay for timeshare on a mainframe.

(and I agree, it'd actually be nice if cloud providers framed cost based on processes count not vCPUs. Heroku kind of does that with their concept of "dynos")

<comment><USER2> Given the incessant push towards treating the web as a front end for "cloud apps", timeshare is back baby. Only that now the terminal is replaced with the web browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR>
      xeon126# uptime
     1:42PM  up 9 mins, 3 users, load averages: 890407.00, 549381.40, 254199.55

Seeing load averages of ~900,000 blows my mind.

<comment><USER3> > Seeing load averages of ~900,000 blows my mind.

More impressive is that you can run "uptime" and it actually responds with an output in reasonable amount of time with said 6-digit load-average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just make sure that your process destruction doesn't involve a lock in kernel space. 900,000 threads waiting for a lock... yikes!

[https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu- and...](https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and-i-cant- move-my-mouse/)

</comment><comment><USER5> 6 digit PIDs? These aren't actually stored in decimal, right?

<comment><USER6> No, but they are constrained to be less than or equal to 999,999.

See [http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/586c43085f...](http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/586c43085fc900273732f99de6c9ef43f73ded76:/sys/sys/proc.h#l445)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > With the commits made today, master can support at least 900,000 processes > with just a kern.maxproc setting in /boot/loader.conf, assuming the machine > has the memory to handle it.

They are just four bits away from hitting a really big number.</comment>


Visit Your Musers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.idonethis.com/post/28908014808/visit-your-musers

<comment><USER2> TL;DR Get out of the building & talk to your most fervent customers - it will result in learning & (hopefully) improvement of your product!

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey Walter/Rodrigo. We interacted with Shopify a lot building Wishery and I agree, they're a great "role model" as startups go. Their API is well thought- out and I found interacting with Tobi to get Wishery approved was a very enjoyable process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey David, absolutely -- the Shopify guys are awesome. Glad to hear that you had a positive experience with them as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any 'honest' crowd funding sites? - <AUTHOR> By 'honest' I mean those that would do 'proper' background checks and ensure there is a refund process in place. Just heard about the Dragonfly laptop - https://igg.me/at/dragonflyfuturefon/x/9192747 and am beginning to think that Indiegogo doesn't give a damn about the backers. Kickstarter too seems to be having its fair share of scams.<p>So are there any other good crowdfunding sites that I can confidently contribute on? <comment><USER2> I was burned by a hardware vendor on Indiegogo. All that it took for the person running the campaign to remain (indifinitely) in compliance was to regularly keep us updated on project progress. Of which there was none. So we'd regularly receive updates, which never contained any information about project progress.

I'd be very cautious about hardware on these sites. Don't donate money that you can't stand to lose.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've contributed to several campaigns on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe without an issue, so to say you can't "confidently contribute" is a slight exaggeration to me. With that said, you absolutely do need to do your due diligence before contributing. Yes there are plenty of scam products/campaigns on all the sites, but that is not the site's fault. That's like saying it is eBay, Craigslist, Freelancer.com, or your local newspapers fault for having scam listings associated with them. Simple due diligence is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Also, if a hardware company is trying to raise funds for the engineering and development of a product, and their ask is relatively low, most likely there are going to be issues.

I don't agree that refunds should be required in all cases. If a company legitimately raises money to produce a product and in the end that product fails to be delivered, that is a risk you made as an "early investor" to contribute. Like the stock exchange, or any investment product, there is no guarantee you will get your money back or see a return on that money.

In the end it doesn't take but 5-10 minutes of your time to do some basic due diligence and make a determination if you want to invest or not. Look at who is behind the project, are they open about who they are and their backgrounds. Look at the product itself, is it to good to be true. Look at the time and updates, are they updating regularly and have they described the product in detail. Look at the rewards, are they legitimate and doable, or are they too good to be true as well. That all falls on you, and you can't expect the site to know whether a product will succeed or not ahead of time.

With that said, I do think the sites could offer an additional level of "identity verification" to potential investors. Where campaign could agree to a slightly higher fee to undergo a background check or verified identity. That itself would be useful and I think would instill trust. However, there's a fine line there in that it could push people to not invest in campaigns where the identity has not been verified. Maybe have different levels of verification at different price points.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only contribution I have ever made was for the Jolla tablet and thankfully they are issuing a refund.

Not everybody does their research, a 'honest' site has a moral obligation to protect its users. In the age when even free browsers give out warnings against phishing sites to protect their users, is it too much to ask them to block far fetched projects like the dragon fly?

<comment><USER3> I get what you are saying, but I still think your expectation is misplaced. The question becomes who makes a determination as to what is "far fetched". Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers had people telling them they were crazy with their ideas. Kickstarter and those sites are about innovating. Many people said Pebble and the cooler were far-fetched Kickstarter ideas.

It really comes down to what risk you are willing to take. Because someone doesn't want to do their research, that is not the site's fault at all. In fact the site is very clear that you should do your own research and that there is risk ([https://www.kickstarter.com/trust](https://www.kickstarter.com/trust)). There is an enormous difference between a browser determining a site is a phishing site vs whether a product that has yet to be made will be a success. Maybe these sites aren't for you and the risk level you are willing to take, there is nothing wrong with that and I am not knocking you for it, but that's not the site's fault.</comment></comment></comment>


If you've automated yourself out of a job, it wasn't much of a job to being with - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why you would brag about it on Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER2> This should be a URL submission, not text.</comment>


The Nexus of AI? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Palashio/libra <comment><AUTHOR> my team and I have been working on this for quite a long time. proud to say it's finally gaining traction. our goal is to reach 1k stars by the end of the month. please help us out hackernews :)</comment>


An application of Linear Programming in Game Theory - <AUTHOR> http://alabidan.me/2012/12/23/an-application-of-linear-programming-in-game-theory/

<comment><USER2> Always happy to see some game theory on HN. If you're looking for a good book that focuses more on how game theory is actually used in practice versus the more computational exposition here, then I'd recommend a very readable and cheap book called "Game Theory for Applied Economists" by Robert Gibbons (Google Preview: <http://books.google.com/books/p/princeton?id=8ygxf2WunAIC>). The book has only 4 chapters which cover the 4 different types of games:

1\. Static Games of Complete Information

2\. Dynamic Games of Complete Information

3\. Static Games of Incomplete Information

4\. Dynamic Games of Incomplete Information

This segmentation covers all possible types of games. It's great because then you only have to decide if the game is static vs. dynamic and whether it's a game of complete vs. incomplete information (remember, perfect/imperfect information is not the same as complete/incomplete information). If you can answer those 2 questions, then you know what kind of equilibrium is relevant. For example, if it's a game of incomplete information (meaning that there is a move of nature, or equally, that the players don't necessarily know the types/payoffs of the other players) then you know that you are playing a Bayesian game, and hence the equilibrium (it if exists) will be some kind of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium.

You can always express a game of incomplete information as a game of imperfect information (see: Harsanyi transformation). However, here's something to think about: What do you lose when you transform a game from extensive form (a tree) to strategic form (a matrix)? The answer: Timing.

<comment><USER3> For me it's less intuitive than a tree, but you can use a matrix to express all possible strategies of a two-player sequential game. This can help you visualize credible vs. noncredible threats from the second player. Ultimately I think the tree is more helpful in solving it visually, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll take a small issue with the end of the article that claims linear programming is used for game theory work in poker. With the exception of Andrew Gilpin's work using the "Excessive Gap Technique"[1], almost no poker game theory work relies on linear programming. Instead, the majority of work is on iterative game tree solutions like "Counterfactual Regret Minimization" [2].

In general, real-world games with imperfect information and stochastic outcomes (like poker) are just too large to represent in normal form.

[1] <http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/2007/AAAI07-008.pdf>

[2] [https://www.cs.ualberta.ca/system/files/tech_report/2007/TR0...](https://www.cs.ualberta.ca/system/files/tech_report/2007/TR07-14.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> "Note that this doesn't mean that Daniel will always lose the game but that he can lose by at most 1/12 the value of the game. If Nick doesn't play optimally (Nick doesn't use his optimal mixed strategy), Daniel will most likely win!"

I don't think this is correct. I think if Daniel plays his optimum strategy, Nick will get the same payoff no matter what he plays.

I think this is a fairly general result, if one player is playing the optimal strategy, once the other player has eliminated options he should never play, it doesn't matter how his choices are distributed among the remaining options.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm fashinated by Combinatorial Optimisation (I'm followinf course, too). Do you have other article or interesting resource about that?

<comment><AUTHOR> This could serve as a starting point: <http://homepages.cwi.nl/~lex/files/dict.pdf>.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Long term data archiving for Individuals? - <AUTHOR> I've spent many hours trying to find the best physical medium for long term (30+ years) archiving on individual budget.
External HDDs: good option, but lots of moving parts and could die if in storage for a decade.
SSD & SDcard: both start losing charge if not powered after ~5 years.
Tape (LTO) trouble with gen9, issues with drive-tape backwards compatibility, rather expensive.
Blu-ray: archival grade Panasonic is great but impossible to buy in Europe. M-disc is expensive. I have doubts of drive availability in the future.
Cloud: not for archiving; imagine trouble paying the rent because a transtacion fails leading to destroy your archives.
Any other options I'm unaware of? <comment><USER2> I don't think anything can beat LTO here. The only problem is the price of the controller...

I worked in the TV industry a few years ago, and LTOs were (and still is) the only viable archiving technology for heavy 1080p (or 4K, now) videos.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Should Resign; If You're A Technology Reporter, So Should You - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Mark-Zuckerberg-Should-Resign-And-If-Youre-A-Technology-Reporter-So-Should-You

<comment><USER2> So, I am reading this and I try to understand if anything at all is of any value. But I can't find any reasons.

Zuckerberg stole his idea? Not the first time this ever happens, not the last time it happens. And, although not nice, not illegal either (unless, of course, there were contracts and stuff involved).

Facebook is evil? Google is evil? Cool, don't use them then.

We have far more important things to worry about than...nerd wars (and this comment comes from a nerd).

<comment><AUTHOR> You missed the point. This is about the media and the standards to which we (and they) hold public figures in positions of power.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Stichy – Collaborative picture and video slideshows - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stichy/id937638442?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to chat about how we made this and what our stack is. We were able to get this out just in time for the holidays. A great way to capture the holidays collaboratively with your family</comment>


The Google attack: How I attacked myself using Google Spreadsheets  - <AUTHOR> http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-how-i-self-attacked.html?m=1

<comment><USER2> Discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890328></comment>


What's the Most 'Cinematic' Programming Language? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/theres-a-python-script-easter-egg-in-ex-machina <comment><USER2>
        ACCESS GRANTED</comment>


McCain, Obama headed to Washington for bailout talks - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/24/campaign.wrap/index.html

<comment><USER2> politics.reddit is this way, new HN reader:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/politics>

Don't mod me up for this; just please don't mod this story up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the link. I'll be sure to use it next time.

<comment><USER3> You seem to be a fast learner, you'll fit right in here :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If it's for real, I respect him for the decision. But the truth is that he's leading in most polls and so his suspending the campaign will force Obama to do so as well and thus lessen the time for Obama to campaign to garner more voters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Latest polls actually show Obama with a pretty good lead after last weekend. The main reason for that is because Economy has moved up as the pivotal issue and Obama polls better when it comes to that issue.

So, I think he's doing this to generate some more credibility on the economy and shrink Obama's overall lead by appearing more concerned about the economy. McCain is hoping this concern will translate into becoming more respected in the economic arena, thus leading to better polling.

<comment><USER5> That sounded like you were explaining some code snippet..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good to see that McCain, which publicly has admitted he knows next to nothing about economy, now is going to fix it.

Time to exchange those dollars for pesos before it's too late.

<comment><USER7> haha, I've got a bunch of pesos if anyone is interested.(I'm in Mexico)

Seriously, you guys (the U.S.) are going to be fine. You've got great people, great land. It may just get rough for a while.</comment></comment>


Show HN: icon2x - Apple Icon Testing - <AUTHOR> http://icon2x.com

<comment><USER2> By "testing" you mean.. showing what the image looks like at different sizes? I'm not seeing the point. Maybe I'm missing something though. Maybe changing the description line from "just upload your 512x512 icon image and we'll do the rest..." to something more explicit would help?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it's made for iPhone developers/designers so they can test their app icons on the device without having to deploy builds for each icon iteration... thanks for the feedback

<comment><USER2> MUCH better. You know what would be cool? If you implement an SMS service like Sendhub so people can text themselves the link. Just an idea..

<comment><AUTHOR> that would be much more convenient, i'll look into it</comment></comment></comment></comment>


British challenger platform Monzo wants higher staff turnover - <AUTHOR> https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/monzo-turnover-fintech-talents-bobbi-nicholson-151510038.html <comment><USER2> There's something that makes me feel very uncomfortable about this article. It's a fact of life that companies change and sometimes they need to focus on different technologies/projects/challenges. That's fine and it causes problems you have to face and it's not going to be good for the people you no longer need. Especially if the people you no longer lead took a risk to join your company and have a vesting schedule.

So let's break it down >Something we could do better at is making it really possible and a really great experience

First thing: It's not going to be a great experience to be redundant or have the company you've helped build to no longer need you or you're no longer contributing.

> for people to leave when they know that it's time

What is that even meant to mean? 'they know it's time'? How do they know it's time. Is it time because you've fired them? Is it because they're redundant.

They say they've got great management, but it sounds less like they've got good management, it sounds like they've got management that's been lucky. The company has grown quickly and hired quickly and their options scheme means people are massively incentivized to stay. But if you don't want people to stay why don't you just modify their vesting schedule, or offer them redundancy? Or retrain them? Or move them a different project. The reason you're having a problem getting rid of the people you don't want is because your management team is failing to make the decisions that are best for the company because they prefer feeling popular. This seems like a bizarre thing to brag about.

I think what it comes down to is that I really object to this disingenuous double speak where the company is trying to say "Isn't this great! This is a great thing we're really happy trying to solve this challenge" \- when actually it's not a good thing, and it's fairly obvious to anyone with a brain, so it's quite insulting to have someone to lie to your face like that.

<comment><USER3> Something about it does seem a little odd - and it's tricky to read between the lines to figure out what caused this (exactly as you say, because they've phrased it entirely within positive messaging rather than just stating the problem).

My guess would be that they feel (or some employees feel) that they've over- rewarded some early employees who are now motivated to stay at the company largely for the purposes of vesting stock options rather than to engage fully.

That said, there are a whole slew of really tricky things around options and compensation here. What's the comparative stock/option holding granted to executive/C-level staff, and are they under the same scrutiny to measure their performance and output?

Generally I think it's typical for there to be an order of magnitude difference between stock holdings for investors & high-level executives relative to even the first few full-time hires.

To play devil's advocate, it's 'understandable' that if you want to run the fastest, cheapest ship that you would simply want to get an employee in a seat, have them build/ship/market/sell the product for a few years and then have the employee move on if & when their productivity drops.

Continuing that idea (and I'd hope that Monzo nor many other tech startups are culturally this cynical) - it reduces the need for career growth planning, management expertise, and reduces the risk of pesky situations like the employee remembering bad company decisions or gaining too much access or influence within the organization, etc.

There are more successful ways to handle those cases (although they require effort from the company, and their results should be scrutinized by staff), and employers that want to retain knowledge workers will find ways to incentivize them to keep their staff on-board and effective.

There are few better incentives than continued business success (particularly where the employee can engage in force-multiplying their own success via building the company/product) and challenging technical or business problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of employees at Monzo today asking themselves if their HR person was subtly telling them they should quit</comment>


Ask HN: Best place to seek remote jobs in Europe? - <AUTHOR>

I know there are websites like https://weworkremotely.com/ and http://careers.stackoverflow.com/, but those jobs that are remote require you to be located in USA. Since I live in Estonia, I would love to search for remote jobs in Europe. <comment><USER2> There are quite a few companies that do not really care where their workforce is located. Examples that come to mind immediately are basecamp.com, wpmudev.org, buffer.com, zapier.com,... I don't think there is a directory of these companies or a job site focusing on these kind of jobs, but if you search for remote or distributed workforce you will find many examples.. then just browse their job listings.

This is slowly becoming the new way for companies to operate imho. In the key metro areas office space and employees have become way to expensive and scarce. Hiring talent where ever that talent chooses to work is a much better strategy. We do the same at my company but unfortunately, we do not have any open positions right now :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Apply for them anyway.

Let them know that although you live in Estonia, you can definitely match up with their timezone. Your advantage is that you can offer a competitive rate compared to others in the US.</comment>


Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) on "Eventually Consistent" - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/12/eventually_consistent.html <comment><USER2> For those interested, here are some more references on this sort of thing:

Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems by Bernstein, Hadzilacos and Goodman - <http://research.microsoft.com/~philbe/ccontrol/> (downloadable zip/pdf available there)

Recovery in Parallel Database Systems by Svein-Olaf Hvasshovd - <http://tinyurl.com/2dku75>

Transaction Processing Systems by Krishnamurthy and Murthy - <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=131334>

Readings in Database Systems by Stonebreaker - <http://tinyurl.com/22btgh>

and of course

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques by Gray and Reuter - <http://tinyurl.com/ywrx7a></comment>


SOPA Actions - I just emailed a friend at McGraw-Hill - <AUTHOR>

I am very concerned about SOPA and similar legislation. Though I am in Canada, I will be affected by this legislation.
As I am sure many of you do, I have some friends at some of the organizations that support this bill. I decided to email one of them, though this will not change the tide, making young people in these organizations aware of the bill and its negative impacts is one avenue for influencing the higher ups and getting them to remove their support.
Anyways, here is what I sent, feel free to copy or comment.
Hey Matt,
Hope all is well. I don't usually do this, but I wanted to send you a quick email. You might be aware that the US Congress is currently debating the SOPA Bill against online piracy.
This is a horrible bill that will fundamentally alter the internet and society.
McGraw-Hill Education is a main sponsor of the bill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_that_support_the_Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
and as such, I wanted to bring this legislation to your attention. I do not know if you have the influence or power within the organization to change anything, but I think it is worth raising with your peers and superiors. While I understand McGraw-Hill and other publishers wish to prevent piracy of their copyrighted materials online, this bill goes way too far.
I won't bore you with details, but I think it is important that McGraw Hill re-evaluate their support of this bill that will wreak havoc on the internet and do serious damage to freedom of speech.
One good thread on the issue, along with video can be found here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3425973
Hope to see you soon!
Cheers,
Jonathan <comment><USER2> I work at McGraw-Hill and had no clue they supported SOPA. Ah well....</comment>


Ask HN: The best way to track performance? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I'd love your help to save me from re-inventing the wheel – what's the easiest way to track and analyze all business metrics in one place?
Currently I use Google Analytics for web and Excel & Powerpoint for financials and marketing, with dashboards and a traffic light system for things like target vs actuals. Pretty standard stuff. I can manipulate Excel to analyze data…but I don't enjoy it, it's time consuming, prone to human and formulaic error, it's not realtime, and I'd like a s*xy interface where I can 'tick the box' to produce results. Obviously every business has unique key metrics, but I'm looking for a system that has a large universe of formulae already built in, which can be applied to my own data at the click of a button.
For example, if I want to look at virality I choose the dates, click the 'Virality' button, and there it is. Then with a click I can overlay that with the activities I've done that week to induce virality (referral program, social media, advertising or whatever). Then I choose to overlay that with churn rates, and then finally I overlay it all with revenue for that period. What a nice little snapshot. Then I can choose to compare all that with, say, 4 months prior. Sweet. The results can be easily shared, and with a click I can choose to look at percentages/real figures/graphs. And I'm right-brained so would love it to have color and classy UX.
Suggestions would be awesome. Cheers! <comment><USER2> Try webcontrolroom.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man! I'll give it a try. Basically I'm looking for one platform that integrates and automates website/marketing/product/revenue/engagement metrics...so I can focus more energy on the things that I love ;) (brand, customer acquisition)</comment></comment>