On-Demand Startups Are Hemorrhaging Tens of Billions a Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-01/on-demand-startups-are-hemorrhaging-tens-of-billions-a-year <comment><USER2> It's a strange age to be living in. On the same day I've visited people in a WeWork, been driven around in an Uber, and had food delivered by Deliveroo.

All of them blowing a huge load of money for the privilege.

If they don't make back this money, it will represent a huge waste of resources.

It's private money behind, but I still wonder whether this a reasonable way for the economy to run.

For one, it means the little guy can't compete. Only people with deep pockets. And they might not be the most competent.

For the investors it means selling a dream of profits, but not profitable businesses. You make more out of convincing someone your OD empire will succeed than making it do so.

I wonder what would happen if there was a rule that you could only resell equity in a business whose financials had improved recently.

<comment><USER3> >>If they don't make back this money, it will represent a huge waste of resources.

Hardly; it'll just be a transfer from VCs with too much money to everyone else in the economy. We could probably use more of that.

<comment><USER4> > Hardly; it'll just be a transfer from VCs with too much money to everyone > else in the economy. We could probably use more of that.

The VCs are gambling with someone else's money though. They raise money from institutional investors: pension funds and insurance companies. Ultimately the little guy will pay via government bailouts, pension reductions, and higher insurance premiums.

<comment><USER5> I get they raise others' money, but which pension funds are being into this high risk stuff?

<comment><USER6> Almost all of them. They manage their portfolios like most other large fund managers albeit with a slight preference towards lower risk assets to ensure their short/medium term pension obligations are met, but they will almost always have an alternative investment bucket which VC will be a part of. They're also not interested in doing direct investments, so they'll diversify their early stage risk by investing in a couple of the more successful, established VC funds who spread the bets for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I asked in the recent thread how Meituan could possibly be affording to subsidize restaurant meals to be significantly below cost at restaurant as that didn't make any sense. Turns out according to this article that it's simply that. It doesn't make sense. They lost $17 Billion in 2018 for a shallow moat around an ugly castle.

The next recession is going to hit hard, and I'm guessing a lot of the gig economy jobs will get a lot worse if not disappear.

<comment><USER8> Why would "gig economy jobs" get worse?

If anything, during a recession, more people will want(need?) to become gig workers. Uber/Lyft are generally supply constrained today. If there's a surge of supply because people need money they won't have to pay new driver incentives, which is one the areas that cause them to bleed cash today. Demand side will fall a little, but people will still need cheap ways to get to/from places, maybe especially if their car gets repossessed.

<comment><USER9> This isn't about supply & demand, it's about profitability and if these companies are viable long-term. There can be no gig economy jobs if there are no gig economy businesses.

<comment><USER8> Uber and Lyft can be profitable today. They are in their most mature markets like SF and NYC. If they need to get to profitability they scale back and cut certain cities. That's it.

<comment><USER9> Which would mean eliminating upwards of 90% of their workforce. Thus not sustainable, and the jobs disappear.

<comment><USER8> You're conflating profitability, growth, sustainability etc. you're also conflating what is bad for Uber vs what is bad for drivers

It is sustainable to do that if by sustainable you mean have a profitable long term business that is cash flow positive

It would likely massively hurt share prices because you're trading growth for profitability

<comment><USER9> I'm not conflating anything, you're just mixing subjects. You said that gig jobs would get better or there would be more, and I countered that was not the case since a business cannot sustain that number of people if it's not profitable.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you understand how Uber/Lyft think about their drivers. They aren't employees. In fact, drivers _are_ their customers. There's no "sustaining" drivers because they aren't paying their drivers anything...they are just making a commission off of the driver's own earnings. Uber and Lyft can't and won't "fire" drivers since, again, they aren't employees.

The best way to think of drivers is that they are customers who are licensing Uber/Lyft software for lead generation for their own business. In a recession a seller of lead generation software (Uber/Lyft) is not going to turn customers (drivers) away. It just might not be profitable for you as a customer of lead generation software to buy it if there aren't leads, but I don't think anyone knows what will really happen to rideshare demand if the economy tanks. I think it will go down, but it might not go down as much as one might think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where does the money go for Lyft/Uber? The software platform can't be that expensive amortized across a million+ drivers.

It's not like the drivers are overpaid (and in many cases, they are barely (or not even) paid enough to cover costs)

What else do they spend it on? Marketing? Bribing...err... lobbying politicians for favorable treatment?

<comment><USER11> From what I've seen at other on-demand co's, the three most likely culprits are:

1- User acquisition costs (discounts, marketing, etc - for _both_ sides of the platform). this gets more expensive in the face of competition, and there's some hope that if you can "win" the market then eventually these costs will be reduced sharply.

2- Money as a band-aid for reliability/support issues. Frequently, an Uber driver refuses to take me on a long trip (SF to Mountain View, for example), makes me get out of the car, then marks me as a no-show or that _I_ canceled the ride. Fortunately, my rider score is high enough that I just fill out the form describing what happened, and Uber (usually almost instantly) refunds the fee and sometimes also gives me a make-up $5 credit to apologize. With food delivery options, a non-trivial fraction of the time, the wrong order arrives, and similarly any complaint to support usually results in an immediate refund + credit. Without an easy, scalable way for the support team to audit what really happened on the ground, chances are they are not penalizing the driver / restaurant for these incidents unless there is a clear pattern in the data with a particular provider. So this is just loss for the platform. With very small margins it takes a surprisingly low percentage of such cases to really eat away your unit model.

3- Subsidizing low-utilization markets. Markets with a much higher density of supply/demand will be more efficient and profitable; newer markets will often need subsidies to get over the cold start problem (eg when uber launches a new city, you're gonna need to pay some drivers to sit idling on the road, or else someone opening the app won't see a driver; you might also discount rides even more heavily to get past this phase quicker). Compared to the other two factors, this is probably the best-case scenario for why a company might be bleeding money, and why you sometimes hear people say "Uber is profitable in XYZ cities", but it's hard to say from the outside if this is actually what's happening or if there's something more fundamentally wrong.

<comment><USER12> $5 to apologise for somebody trying to steal from you and leaving you without a ride? That's not a great deal imo

<comment><USER11> Eh, while I was pretty upset in the moment, I could get a ride eventually, and it wasn't enough to make me stop using Uber/Lyft, since in the specific scenario where this would always happen (late on Friday/Saturday nights after going out in SF headed back to MTV), I had very few options besides Uber anyway with Caltrain service stopped and no designated driver lined up. And looking at it from the drivers' perspective, you're asking them to miss out on one of the most valuable times of the week by taking them out of the city, often taking them much further from their home (often East Bay or even Sacramento, where drivers sometimes come all the way to SF for the weekend evening rush specifically).

Add into it how easily this could be abused on the passenger side if there was an even bigger incentive, and quick $5 from the app and finding another driver (there were always enough drivers so that even if half of them would pull this trick, I'd find one eventually) wasn't too bad. Much worse would be having to do something more like talking to a rep on the phone or having to go through a lengthy appeals process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My summary of where all the money goes:

\-- Every on-demand service struggles with the problem of peaky demand, variation of >50% in peak to average traffic / demand

\-- Peaky demand is inherent in our consumer / passenger / people behavior, not going to change any time soon -- think of the daily hours typical for commuting, eating, etc.

\-- These services make their money / entire value prop on serving peaky demand quickly, but you need labor willing to match those times, otherwise people are sitting around underutilized

\-- Until you have automated cars / labor, you have a really hard time recruiting people who are happy only to be paid part-time

\-- Drivers / labor have to be paid pretty much on a full time basis to keep people working for you (whether overtly or implicitly through promotions, marketing, sign up bonuses), otherwise they sign up with hopes of steady income, and then quit. ("I love being able to set my own hours", etc is the exception, not the imaginary bulk of people working for a living)

As long as these conditions prevail, this is where those companies' cash is hemorrhaging to.

<comment><USER14> The trends in future of work, particularly remote / non-office work, would favor people being more economical and de-peaking usage.

Working at home saves you daycare. It takes a commuter off the road and off public transport. It lets people eat lunch at 11am or 2pm. It lets you build houses instead of empty office buildings. It lets you spend a lot more time with your partner. It keeps you cleaner and healthier. It makes you care about your local community a lot more.

Peaky demand will still exist for longer cycles, like school enrollment, housing, vacations, entertainment. It will settle down a lot for our office day. This is the condition where subsidizes can decrease and the way our time is squeezed will change favorably for everyone.

<comment><USER15> Lots of claims in this comment I'd love to see backed up.

==Working at home saves you daycare.==

Is this true? Most people I know who work remotely don't have enough free time to also watch their kid, they are doing their job. It does save the 1-2 hour round trip of commuting each day.

==It lets people eat lunch at 11am or 2pm.==

Can't most people in an office environment already do this? I do.

==It keeps you cleaner and healthier.==

How does it do this? I see very few overweight people on my daily train commute. I figured that the walking involved in commuting plays a role in health, but maybe the stress of commuting is a net negative. On the flip side, my wife works from home and although she likes it, the lack of human interaction frequently has a negative impact on her.

==It makes you care about your local community a lot more.==

In what ways?

<comment><USER16> > maybe the stress of commuting is a net negative

Commuting is considered one of the _most_ negative parts of a person's day, such that common advice is to seriously consider living closer to work at the expense of other amenities.

<comment><USER15> ==Commuting is considered one of the _most_ negative parts of a person's day==

I think depends on the method of commuting. I do a combination of walking and train each day and it is one of the best parts of my day. I get exercise and free time to read, watch videos, or just space-out. I think people who bike or walk to work have a similarly positive perspective.

If I was driving on a gridlocked highway for 2 hours a day, I would hate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As both a startup programmer and having worked in the financial industry, it's really hard to know how companies like these will be viewed by history.

The technologist argument is: we are enduring losses, even large ones, in the short term so that we can bring inevitable future tools forward in time (i.e. "Of course everyone can get anything delivered on-demand in the future, so why not now!?")

The value-based investor argument: This is a gross subsidy to "tech" companies that is distorting/subsidizing markets and creating huge opportunity costs where all these billions could have been invested in better, even more fundamental technologies.

There is a third argument which is what's really giving these companies legs: they do genuinely have a lot of users who love the services. Who wouldn't want a VC-subsidized meal brought to your door?

<comment><USER18> > they do genuinely have a lot of users who love the services.

Turns out selling $10 bills for $5 is extremely popular. MoviePass did in fact get people go to the movies.

<comment><USER19> The counter example is Amazon with Prime.

<comment><USER20> Probably contrarian, but I refuse to sign up for Prime out of principle. The quicker and easier I make it to buy things, the more money I'm going to spend, which is orthogonal to my savings/investment goals. I'm not going to pay extra to have the privilege of making spending my money any easier.

<comment><USER19> I am with you on that, I am "this close" to cancelling Prime. Dont order on it anymore, strangely enough only reason I have it around is that I use the free photo storage as a second backup for photos (After Google photos)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Like Warren Buffet says "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked". Most of these companies didn't exist when the last recession happened. Let's see how many will exist after the next one.

</comment><comment><USER22> In addition to the many excellent points raised by other commenters, I would like to add: Amazon is raking in a ton of money from Lyft, and probably many other on-demand startups. When they (all? mostly?) go bust, a lot of VC-fueled business to Amazon will disappear, perhaps rather abruptly. Not that I think Amazon will go away or anything, but there may be a step function in their profitability whenever the bust in money-burning startups comes.

</comment><comment><USER23> man there goes my idea of uber for toaster strudels

<comment><USER24> Don't give up on the dream. Toaster Struberlder could be the next big thing!

<comment><USER23> You have given me hope! I will incorporate the latest hotness app tech stack, blockchain proof-of-strudel, drone delivery, and baking on-demand. Ycombinator here I come!

<comment><USER25> "Blockchain proof-of-strudel" is a fantastic little phrase. Well done. I'd use the :joy: emoji if HN would let me.

<comment><USER26> If necessary we can strudeliver it to you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> i would've appreciated a bit more breakdown on where all the spending was going. i mean, the user acquisition cost, will eventually go away for the most part once they reach a certain size. After that it's all about operations. the question is how do the scalability of providing service fundamentals look like, long term cost vs revenue.

<comment><USER28> In the case of Uber/Lyft while I'm generally expensing it when I rarely use them and don't care about price much, I expect a lot of people who use them day-to-day would drop them in a heartbeat if they could use cheaper options. I'm not sure I understand why "rideshare" should be cheaper than cabs. I think it's mostly better than cabs which is why I use them. But that's maybe not the majority view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Imagine if we could of used some of that money to educate children, provide healthcare, and other things.

<comment><USER30> Since much of that is subsidizing wages, which are the most highly taxed form of income, we _are_ using some of that money to do those things, _more_ than if the business were operating with costs in line (much less profitable) with revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe we should just recognize that Facebook / software business models don't work for operating, boots on the ground services. Network effects don't work with negative unit economics.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't see how this can be anything but a bubble unless fully-autonomous cars come around, which it's seeming more and more likely that they're further off than expected, if they're possible at all. From what I've read the economics simply don't work otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is sort of a wealth redistribution. From oil funds, hedge funds and private investors to the middle and upper-middle class. Hope it won't end up with a bailout.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been working with Avis Rental Car. The CEO recently went to see the CEO of Uber. The vibe was that of a pauper begging from a King, which is odd because Avis is profitable and Uber is losing insane amounts of money. You'd think it would be the other way around, but everything nowadays is dominated by future expectations.

<comment><USER34> Why would this be downvoted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It was a similar bubble 20 years ago. Not a good time to be IPO investor.</comment>


Ask HN: If you could crack encryption, what would you do first? - <AUTHOR> Let's say you've got a magic wand that instantly cracks any encryption. What do you even do with it? <comment><USER2> 1\. Find out if UFOs exist.

2\. Find out who really killed Kennedy.

3\. Become a monk and live a life of seclusion.

</comment><comment><USER3> decrypt the quantumvacuum</comment>


Show HN: Tired of Lorem Ipsum, I made my own generator with badass movie quotes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Kovah/DevLorem <comment><USER2> I think all of these are really great, and really crafty. I went to use one of these one time and it was even harder to explain than Lorem Ipsum.

"That is not what I want my website to say"

"Why is my website in Latin"

"My website / app / program is not about movie quotes."

The closest one that I'd actually use is probably "corporate ipsum" or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you go: [https://github.com/Kovah/CorporateLorem](https://github.com/Kovah/CorporateLorem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "f __*ck " instead of "fuck"

Really badass...

<comment><USER4> censorship of words seems kinda useless, people will still read it like it wasn't censored anyway, so why would he even censor it

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> why is this not in my ide already? should be a key selling feature!

</comment><comment><USER6> how about generating sentences based on cfg rules ?</comment>


Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator.ars <comment><USER2> _"One of the fun aspects of a cartridge-based system is that you are literally plugging a PCB directly into your system. Thus, you can put extra coprocessors, often digital signal processors, right inside of the cartridge. This gives you an extra edge against your competitors' titles. The most popular SNES coprocessors were the SuperFX for polygon rendering and sprite rotation (used in Starfox and Super Mario World 2) and the DSP-1 for 3D math (used in Pilotwings and Mario Kart.)"_

Very interesting. I never thought about this even though I've recognized the differences between games. I just attributed it to better game software, but it could literally have been better hardware available to certain games. You can't do that with CD/DVD/downloadable games.

<comment><USER3> This is why the NES had the insanely long life it did. Every game was able to provide custom hardware (called 'mappers') to offload computation. I've said for a while now that the next generation of consoles will go one of two routes: completely downloadable titles, or PCI-e-based cartridges. I'm inclined to think the latter, despite the evidence to the contrary. It's just such a huge benefit, and they love shipping physical items. This would also largely eliminate piracy.

<comment><USER4> The cost savings of downloads are just too ridiculously huge to really think about going back to manufacturing circuit boards. Beyond the marginal circuit board cost, there's a huge physical goods infrastructure that just doesn't have to exist when you go with downloads. Servers are a good bit easier to manage than manufacturing plants and shipping infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> Yah, but what if physical goods gave you that edge over your competition? That neat wow cool factor that all of the other 'download' devices don't get because they can't change?

<comment><USER6> "Neat, wow, cool" is insignificant compared to the advantages of digital distribution. Done right (see: valve, humble bundle, even xbox live to some extent) it enables you to slash incremental delivery overhead for each copy of a game, which means that the purchase price can become almost entirely profit margin. Which further means that you can cut prices down to levels that will massively increase the volume of sales and increase your total profits, especially on older titles.

Higher profit margins, lower operating costs, and the ability to massively extend the profitability window of a given game (from only a few months to a year to more than a decade) make digital distribution extremely advantageous for anyone who can take advantage of it properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been follow Byuu's progress on BSNES for a couple of years, and I would like to state for the record that the amount of effort he had put into this project far exceeds the majority of "hobby" projects.

Just in the past few months, several SNES co-process chips that remained un- emulated for years, have been deciphered and fully emulated in BSNES. Without Byuu leading the charge into the last bastions of SNES emulation, I absolutely believe that some of these devices would be lost to history.

<comment><USER8> You would think that the OEM's are leaving a fair amount of money on the table by not offering a true software emulator.

Have you heard of anyone from Nintendo getting involved (in a positive or negative way) with Byuu's project (or maybe they already offer one via the Wii --not sure)?

<comment> T-R Nintendo offers the "Virtual Console" on the Wii and 3DS.

Unless my knowledge is out of date, Nintendo's business model revolves around licensing for publishing software for their hardware, so it's in Nintendo's best interest to sell hardware, and not to support emulation on other hardware.

On a related note, when Sony sued 'Bleem!', it argued that running the software on other hardware destroyed Sony's control over the player's experience, and as a result hurt their brand.

<comment><USER9> I believe Nintendo intends to profit via software licensing and hardware sales. The Wii was profitable at launch[1].

But I wonder how the Virtual Console works on the Wii. Does Nintendo have an SNES hardware-to-software conversion guide? Do their VC releases turn out perfect? I've bought a few, and while they're certainly faithful, I'm not enough of a connoisseur to spot the flaws.

[1] [http://www.next-gen.biz/news/fils-aime-wii-hardware- profitab...](http://www.next-gen.biz/news/fils-aime-wii-hardware-profitable- launch)

<comment> T-R I'm under the impression that each Virtual Console download includes an instance of an emulator. If that's the case, they may tweak the emulator for compatibility with each game (or hack the game itself). If you want to look into it some more, the guys who do 'Virtual Console WAD injection' might have an idea. ROM Hacking and (NES/SNES) console development sites/forums might have some information, too.

I vaguely remember hearing of instances where games weren't emulated accurately (or even as well as on other emulators), particularly with regard to slowdown on PAL consoles.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, in the one case where I tried the wii virtual console with a game that was big in my childhood (Contra 3), it just doesn't feel quite the same. Noone's gotten an SNES controller quite right, either. So I hang on to a SNES to bring out every now and then.

<comment><USER10> <http://www.retrousb.com/> has adapters to connect the original NES or SNES pads to either USB or a Gamecube/Wii. I've used their SNES-to-USB adapter and it works perfectly.

<comment><USER4> Oh awesome, thanks! I'm gonna pick one up just for zsnes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if such accuracy is necessary for emulating newer systems. I don't think my PS3 games are updating the graphics hardware mid-scanline. If modern systems have more relaxed timing requirements, then a much simpler binary translation may be enough. You no longer have to model the hardware, just the abstraction layer that the game itself is written against.

<comment><USER3> This is the premise of HLE, or high-level emulation. You emulate the CPU (if it doesn't match the current one), and then implement all the APIs it hits. It's more like WINE than BSNES.

The one place where you may end up emulating something with precise timing is the audio processor; the Gamecube and Wii for instance used a custom DSP that had to be emulated fairly precisely, after the instruction set was revere- engineered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This might be a lot easier on an FPGA.

<comment><USER13> Replicate each component of the original SNES hardware? That has been somewhat done: you can buy hardware clones of the SNES in many stores.

<comment><USER14> The majority of the clones are using "NES On a Chip" or "SNES On a Chip" - they have the same issues as the original minimal requirements based emulators and are generally quite quirky.

Though it looks like at least one person is attempting to create a better one using FPGA: <http://cegt201.bradley.edu/projgrad/proj2006/fpganes/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A similar (and IMO, better written) story on emulating the TRS-80: <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1755886>

</comment><comment><USER16> this makes me think of full brain emulation.

how far are we from an in silico silicon virtualization suite?

<comment><USER17> The best estimates I know of is Sandberg and Bostrom's 2008 Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap: [http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...](http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain- emulation-roadmap-report.pdf)

And yes, this is pretty relevant - it demonstrates that perfect emulation is extremely expensive (in line with the critics of the idea of AI or brain emulation), but it also demonstrates how this doesn't matter in practice. (eg. I'd be happy to be a nigh-immortal upload if the price was a few glitches in an obscure memory I never think about.)

<comment><USER16> thanks for that link - very interesting.

i think the question in my post has been misunderstood. i'm wondering, when will it be possible to simulate a SILICON device - such as the super nintendo.

instead of emulating the functional profile of the snes, we could run a physics simulator (at some level of abstraction) that contains all of the silicon circuitry and so forth which actually produces the functional profile.

that seems like a milestone towards simulating neural "devices" like the human brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm really impressed by the dedication of this guy. Kudos.</comment>


Ask HN: Really hard take home interview, what to do? - <AUTHOR> I got offered an interview at the research division of a tech company. They sent a take home test that am supposed to work on.
It involves building a backend with some sort of machine learning/AI, basically pretty advanced stuff.
I only have a weekend to do it, since I have a job and can't work on it on a week day. I would love to work in a research division but don't think I can deliver sth meaningful within such a short time span. I've also been brushing up my algo skills in readiness for a gruelling on-site interview so that's another time sink.
I am very comfortable with interviews but I don't feel confident about this one.
What should I do? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand the question. What do you think the options are? I only see a few:

* Give it your best shot

* Bail and tell them you can't/won't do it

* Tell them you need more time to show you what you're capable of

Not knowing what the test actually involves it's difficult to provide any meaningful advice. There are a lot of packaged solutions for ML these days, and many of them are relatively easy to get started with. There are even books that walk you through the process.

If I were doing it I'd just resign myself to the fact that a weekend, even assuming you could be productive for 48h straight, is only 48h.

If I really wanted the job I'd take a good portion of those to giving it my best shot, but I'd sleep and take breaks to avoid the burnout and poor quality that would come through.

If, on Monday morning, I felt comfortable enough with my result, I'd send it to them and say "this is what I had time to do". If I didn't feel like it was at the caliber I believed they'd accept, I'd tell them I took my best shot, but it wasn't up to my _own_ standards, and ask what they thought the next steps should be.

I'd be honest about wanting the job, I'd be honest about the holes in my knowledge, and I'd ask for advice.

<comment><AUTHOR> My options are:

* Give it my best shot (but is it worth it? I could as well spend so much time on it and still get declined).

* Bail on it (am not desperate for the job).

The task is up to me to settle on sth, what's being looked for is extraction of meaningful insight from things like images, audio etc, and an illustration of the extracted info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can either be honest, try your best, and submit whatever you're able to produce. At that point it'd be up to them to decide if it makes sense for you to join their team.

Or, you can be like everyone else and enlist help from others to complete it. On paper you'll look better (initially) as you'll have passed whatever test they've got but it could balloon into problems down the road as you're exposed. Essentially you'd be in a "fake it till you make it" situation.

I suggest being honest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I barely have any machine learning experience, I would need hours of research to come up with sth good enough to show.

<comment><USER4> Is it possible you're not qualified for this job, and you'd be more successful (and happier) at a job with better fit?

<comment><AUTHOR> From my own estimation, and my current boss, I'd say am a competent Software Engineer, so with time I would be very productive in this job. I've also been curious about machine learning and this could be a potentially good opportunity.

<comment><USER4> That makes sense if the employer is OK with you learning ML at the company. It doesn't make much sense if they want to hire someone already experienced in ML.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Using laser mouse sensor in a body of pen. Possible? - Come-rad

Hi, I'm thinking about the stylus (pen) you can use on your table. To track it's position I'm thinking about the sensor as laser computer mouses have. Is it possible to place that sensor into a pen? Anybody seen prototypes? <comment><AUTHOR> You can buy a pen mouse on Amazon. A friend of mine has one and he swears by it, but I find it more difficult to use (or at least get used to) than a regular mouse for everyday things.

<comment> Come-rad Oh, God. Those are huge. I see why you find them difficult to use

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually my problem is not necessarily with the size, but more with the just reaching over and using a mouse. With the pen you either put it in the base or you leave it laying there. If I am working coding or something where I use the mouse rarely having to reach, pickup, use is more time consuming and frustrating to me. With a traditional mouse it is more natural just to move my hand to the right, use the mouse, and go back to typing away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Very possible. The problem is how chunky the pen is to fit the sensor and illumination.</comment>


How 20 mbps Internet can be slower than 8 mbps - old-gregg http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/verizon-fios-versus-comcast

<comment><AUTHOR> Does the author realize that the actiontec router can be disabled and used just like a cable modem? That's what I do at home and use a WRT54G instead. I also use opendns instead of Verizon's DNS servers. Latency is pretty low for me.

<comment><USER2> OpenDNS is nice, but they give you their crap redirects instead of a proper failure message.

Consider the Level 3 dns servers: 126.96.36.199 - 184.108.40.206

<comment><USER3> Did you mean 18.104.22.168 - 220.127.116.11?

<comment><USER2> YES. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Many of my friends in their 20s and 30s have dropped their cable TV subscriptions_

Never had one, never wanted one. Watching shows in just one room, wired to a wall, switching between groups called "channels", interrupted by commercials... isn't that all legacy from the time these things were grouped by-frequency, channeled straight onto your screen?

How do people put up with such crap when it's all TCP/IP now?

<comment> old-gregg "It's all TCP/IP", really?

[http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet- video-...](http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/)

<comment><USER5> That's for a TV company. As a consumer, I find Bittorrent perfect for all my TV needs - I don't even own a TV set -, but then I only watch japanese stuff so YMMV.

<comment> old-gregg You don't have any TV needs because you don't watch anything in real time [which is how TV is different from, let's say, DVD rentals]. Sports programming is a big part of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No matter what type of broadband line they're connected to, Actiontec modems have always sucked; what's more important is that FIOS is finally rolling out to a decent portion of the population. A firmware upgrade (or new brand of modem) will hopefully follow soon.

Now it just has to drop to a reasonable price. $160 (or even Comcast's $99 triple play) is a testament to how badly the telecom industry is broken in the US.

In France, DSL(22mbps up/1.5 down) + HD Cable TV + a landline with unlimited calls to 70 countries is $27/month including all taxes and fees.

</comment><comment><USER7> What was much more shocking than the main point of the article was the statement "Comcast promised 768 kbps up and 8 Mbits down. That's what they delivered, more or less reliably for several years. It seemed quite fast except when I was uploading 12 MB camera RAW files to a server. "

I have had Comcast for about 6 years off and on (I keep moving, and they keep devouring local service providers) and have had problems with pretty much every tier of our interaction. We're supposed to have 10 Mbps and get maybe half that on a good day. When I call to ask them about it, they claim that their equipment just can't handle the loads of the area. They also have difficulty accepting that that is not my fault.

On simple matters of installing a new router - customer service is a crapshoot at best. Anything beyond that, be prepared to be "transferred to a technical service representative"... often times more than once.

It's not all bad though, we did get showtime for free about nine months longer than we were supposed to, karma, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER8> Summary: For most internet use Verizon's 8bmps connection with low latency was better than FiOS' high latency 20mbps connection.

<comment><USER9> Correction: it seems the fault of the Fios ActionTec router's DNS resolution, not necessarily the Fios service itself. I would be rather interested to see latency statistics gathered, comparing the use of the default router's DNS with direct OpenDNS usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Latency on my cablemodem has always been abou 60ms until I negotiated my monthly bill with TW/RR that I just purchased AT&T dsl. I found it fascinating after several years of 60ms ping times, my cable latency dropped to 20ms to match the dsl service. Didn't ask for that. How odd. Name lookup latency improved by many times also.

It pays to negotiate. Service just might improve.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out.

Old fashioned land lines often continue to work when the power is out.

<comment><USER12> Only if the power goes out for an extended time, there is a battery backup. Not that it's a big deal, home phones are dying off rapidly.

<comment><USER13> Wired home phones, which do survive without the power, _are_ extinct. I think we have 1 in the house and no one is exactly sure where. It'd be less effort to rip the computer out of the UPS and plug the cordless' station in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've had a similar experience with AT&T Business ADSL. For years I had problems with my router just hanging and needing a reboot (Cayman 3456). Early on, I wrote a script to ping the router just on the other side of mine, and to reboot the router when it noticed a connectivity drop for more than a minute.

So, a few weeks ago I just got fed up. After a while on the phone, I was lucky to get a local tech. She told me to get a modem (not router) at Best Buy and do the routing on my Linux box. I did and I haven't had one connection problem since. 6 years of pain, and it was the router all along, which had been replaced (then SBC) with the same model.

</comment><comment><USER15> re. dns, he could run something like djbdns locally on his machine and that could connect to opendns.

the other thing he could do is increase the mtu size, from the std 1440 to 2x-5x of that.

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=2490...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=24909591)

</comment><comment><USER17> i too have suffered the pain of the actiontec router from verizon fios. i placed it behind another router as people advise. since the internet speed is much slower than ethernet, I figured the extra hop isn't going to kill me, but it does add some tiny amount of latency i suppose.

</comment><comment><USER18> what _really_ kills the speed is packet drop

a 1 gbps wireless will be slower than old pots service on heavy rainy day

<comment><USER19> only if it's your neighbors...

<comment><USER20> I believe the OP is talking about stationary wireless, as used in rural areas.</comment></comment></comment>


How Should I Tell My Brother His Work Ethic Is Awful? - <AUTHOR> I've been confronted with a situation I can't merely overlook because we're family. My Brother, whom I love just doesn't get it when it comes to coding although I'm sure it doesn't only pertain to his work. As an example and the reason why I'm posting today my brother and I are working on a project that needed to capture sensitive data, e.g., social security numbers, date of births, etc. The task was to capture and make specific fields available to analytics, e.g., subscription type and other user-specific demographics useful for analytics. Today I just happened to be looking in the analytics and low and behold I see ALL the data in there, social security, etc. I couldn't believe it but what made me even madder is when I confronted him about it he said do you really think I'm that stupid that I would leave it in there? In other words, trying to avoid the fact that it's even in there in the first place, why would it be? It's a constant pattern with him I find something and explain what I see, and he has an excuse. Really silly things that any developer that's been coding for a year or two should know like make sure there are messages (error, success, etc.) after form submission doesn't just redirect to a page that for one isn't even logical to redirect too and two there's no explanation of what happened after the user interacted with the website. To me these are very jr web dev things you should know yet time after time he will mark a task as complete and not do these things, he doesn't check his work. At times I wonder if I'm too hard because I am overly analytical, borderline OCD... am I wrong? I need help, can anyone tell me if I'm being a complete ass and need to chill or?
Advice and your guys' input is very much appreciated.
(There was no real user data yet in the application, thank God)
Edit: not sure this is formatted correctly it just shows a scroll bar on my end. <comment><USER2> Work ethic vs details-oriented are two diff things. Maybe have a pull request model where you approve and give feedback?

If it's truly work ethic, then your call on whether to continue the project. Projects/startups are like romance, don't try to change the person (to each their own), or expect change to happen, just let people be who they are and decide if you want to continue given their disposition.

Be humble, be chill, and know you have your own faults that he probably has to put up with. I'm an only child. I wish I had a brother, so for my sake (lol), prioritize your relationship above your project.

<comment><USER3> If you're a "bit OCD" and about to embark on code reviewing your developers work, might I suggest you think about what your standards are and document/communicate them before bombarding devs with change requests? That makes the whole process less frustrating IME. Also, to begin with, you might want to ask yourself "Would i go and ask the person to change this after it was committed" as a self check as to whether stuff needs changed - just to ease people in, until those guidelines are fleshed out. You could well say you plan to tighten it up - and eventually rely on developers to _review each others work_.

Another process is a mini show and tell, where before each user story / feature is committed its shown in action to the person who requested it / QAs etc at the developers desk. Problems seen here may not even be the developers fault. A tendency towards reactionary defensiveness, and the recent goings on, might be best considered before doing this right now though. (It may well be you don't give the leeway you would a non family member for this as well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is often said that it is a very bad idea to go into business with friends and family. Your situation is a good example. If you had hired a programmer and he did work like your brother does, then you would probably fire him after a couple of warnings. But you can't fire your brother -- well you can fire him as a programmer and keep him as a brother. Other people have done that and once they get over the short-term upset, things tend to work out for the better.

If you want to go down that path, it might be advisable to have a trusted and respected family member to mediate. If there is no such person then somebody independent would be a good idea. But do not try a friend for that role, it would only cause rifts.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually the best advice I've heard all night, thanks @CyberFonic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two thoughts come to mind:

1\. I've had people who like to "check in" too early.

They audit while I'm still developing something and create all kinds of reports about non-compliance yet I'm no where near completion. Their advice was "we need to catch this early." These people literally logged unfinished stub functions scheduled for implementation next week as "requiring serious refactoring / dead code".

This is like complaining about the lack of coffee because you've grabbed the cup away while someone was pouring the coffee into your cup.

2\. Expectations management / assumptions.

Perhaps you need to schedule meetings where features are assumed to be complete by that time. And you have standards agreed up front. How the user experience is meant to be. Eg storyboards. Basically no UX surprises.

Misunderstandings and lack of communication around expectations are too common.

He may need training and exposure to real world customers who are complaining in his face for dumb UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really good points @adiusmus. I do think we get lost due to lack of communication, that's something I know I can do on my side to better help him... but if he still doesn't do it we're boxing. =oP

<comment><USER5> Wear gloves. Keep score. Enjoy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When my older daughter (8) was upset because my younger daughter (3) destroyed her art work I taught her that, while her younger sister would not go without consequences for her actions, it was ultimately her own fault for leaving her artwork in a place where her younger sister could get access to it - especially when similar lessons had been experienced before.

So, in the end, you have to decide if your priority is your sanity, your integrity, loyalty, or something else. Then you should act in that best interest. Once you do this you will be at ease with the outcome no matter what it might be.

edit: You have as much right to your 'OCD' as he does to his 'lack of work ethic'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly hadn't looked at it like that... I think it's more of that fact that it is him that I want to be working with and that's why it continues. Appreciate the advice @mamanisalco!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't talk down on your man unless you're helping him up.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1</comment></comment>


How Silicon Valley joined the superstitious fringe as the enemy of open inquiry. - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/murderofmystery/article_print

<comment><USER2> _In 10 years computers will be able to use a combination of artificial intelligence and massed data from the Internet to generate music better than human musicians._

One can see how this conversation might drive one straight up a wall.

"Better" in what sense? In the sense that recorded music is more definitive and consistent than live performance? Or that synthesized tones are more accurately pitched and timed than the sounds from a Stradivarius? Or does he mean better in the sense that it is more satisfying to win a chess game against a 3200-rated computer than against the merely 2851-rated Garry Kasparov? Or better to watch a dolphin race another dolphin than to watch a slow, human swimmer like Michael Phelps race against other slow, human swimmers?

Humans prefer other humans. Though we like all kinds of things, for most people the sight and sound of other humans has a special, extra level of fascination. So I seriously doubt that AIs will ever successfully compete with human musicians, except as occasional fads, in selected genres and niches (they make pretty good ambient music), or in disguise. The problem is not that any specific musical feat is impossible for a machine (humans are themselves machines, after all). Rather, the problem is that humans control the metagame: Sooner or later, subtly or overtly, we will change the rules arbitrarily so that only humans can be fully human in our eyes.

Indeed, it's all we can do to prevent ourselves from redefining _other humans_ (except those who are our own close relatives) as undesirable aliens -- if you doubt this, just talk to a member of a local minority group.

In such an environment I don't think AIs stand a chance in hell except as part of a cyborg team in which humans front for them. And, in music, we will call those humans "professional musicians"!

<comment><USER3> You're talking about a marketing problem. If the RIAA can sell britney spears, I'm quite sure they'll find a way to sell AI music.

<comment><USER2> Britney Spears is a musician. I know it hurts to have to admit that, but it's true.

Moreover, when Britney is performing songs that are written by AIs (and how can we tell that this hasn't already happened?) she will _still_ be a musician. If you think that singers are passive conduits of a composer's will, I invite you to visit an opera set and voice that opinion. (You can ask either the singers or the composer; it doesn't matter. Though if you ask the singers you had better carry earplugs, lest you risk being sonicated to death.)

I was actually thinking about Britney Spears at one point, in the context of my post. She strikes me as a prime example of one path that pop music will take in a world where, say, ABBA tunes can be written by a AI box that sits on my desk. One thing that boxes can't do so well is to perform a piece in which the musicians have simulated sex in the middle of the performance. Another is to simulate a complete nervous breakdown in the middle of a set. I've never seen Britney perform, either live or on video, but my understanding is that much of the drama of her act derives from anticipation of one of these events.

Of course, Britney Spears is only one facet of music (one that I frankly know little about). Another is jazz, which I tend to regard as another generation's solution to the artistic problem of abundant mass-produced music: Make each performance a unique, live, semi-improvised expression of the artist's technique, taste, and composing skills.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.youtube.com/user/ninaflute>

I came across that musician some time ago. She complains that listeners today are overly fixated on accuracy. A generation that grows up on the internet might not be as concerned with authenticity as you might think. Or they might find other qualities more important once the visuals become 'good enough'. The recording industry will probably drive this & i doubt they get most of their cash from live performances.

Anyway synthetic intelligence is the future, whether it's ten or a thousand years. Human arts might end up being the least important part of this.

btw i've been doing some algorithm work & I assure you improvisation is not difficult _at all._</comment></comment></comment></comment>


mysql in-memory table as a cache? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious if anyone has used an in-memory mysql table as a cache.  I've got some ad-hoc data browsing needs that memcached is not well suited for.  The data doesn't change often, so there is no real need to be making normal SQL calls.  I've read that the ACID overhead on these memory tables is almost insignificant, and since the data is all in memory it sounds like a reasonable caching solution.<p>I'm just curious if anyone has used this approach before. <comment><USER2> There's a lot of overhead in running a MySQL instance compared with running a memcached instance (in terms of system resources, personnel, building it redundantly). I would revisit your problem and see if you can't get memcached to fit before you decide to reinvent the wheel.

If you're set on MySQL, assuming you are on Linux (or a similar platform) you should consider perhaps using BDB or MyISAM for your storage engine and just keeping the data on a ram disk. This will give you wicked fast reads.

</comment><comment><USER3> What you suggest is pretty much what everyone did before memcached: load your database server with ram and use various tricks to pin the important stuff in memory.

However the memcached code path is pretty lean and will give you better performance than in-memory mysql for single key/value lookups.

<comment><USER4> There's a patent for storing a specific database structure in memory and therefore MySQL Server memory tables use a hash structure to avoid this patent. This would very well when you lookup a row which is present. However, the entire hash is enumerated when an row is not present. So, perversely, you'd get more performance with MyISAM, a RAID card and a big disk buffer.

You could use memcached. However, if you are developing REST web services, you can retrospectively introduce Squid without changing your code.

<comment><USER3> Do you know the number of the patent for this?

<comment><USER4> No idea. However, it specifically affected B-trees in memory. A search revealed US Patent 5283894: Lockless concurrent B-tree index meta access method for cached nodes ( <http://www.patentmonkey.com/PM/PatentID/5283894.aspx> ) which may or may not be relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why even bother using a database then? Why not simply build a convenient data structure in memory? Or do you need something global that is shared by multiple servers?

<comment><USER6> I agree. The only practical reasons I can think of using a DB would be if sharing between machines, you needed rigid data synchronization at all times, or you wanted to utilize some existing DBMS backup routine. Otherwise why deal with the headache and overhead?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> the idea is to have a single place to cache a data structure, so that duplication is avoided and invalidation is easier.

The problem with memcached is that I want to access the data sequentially, page by page. I can't seem to find a feasable way to store an ordered list (without really bad insert performance).</comment>


SpaceX may try a daring rocket fairing recovery tonight, too - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/spacex-may-try-a-daring-rocket-fairing-recovery-tonight-too/ <comment><USER2> Do they separate the fairing straight after getting out of the atmosphere, before the circularizing burn? That's Interesting, for some reason I had supposed that they did it right before releasing the cargo.</comment>


Amiga Ireland Podcast - <AUTHOR> http://amigausers.ie/listen/ <comment><AUTHOR> While from the folks at Amiga Ireland, they discuss far more than just their conference and local scene.

Turns out there are plenty of things still happening...</comment>