Moving a piano in New York city - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/arts/music/ny-piano-moving.html <comment><USER2> Since we're on piano moving war stories, there is a messy ongoing case in Dallas.

[http://dallas.culturemap.com/news/city- life/11-26-19-preston...](http://dallas.culturemap.com/news/city- life/11-26-19-preston-tower-grand-piano-lawsuit/)

Decades ago, a man had a large grand piano moved into his condo. It had to ride _on top of_ the elevator. Recently, he moved out of that unit and found that the city building codes no longer allow this.

Then a bunch of complicated drama happened with the former condo owner, the condo management, and a piano moving company, and it all turned into a lawsuit.

<comment><USER3> It's even worse than that, there's a freight elevator in the building, but the other moving companies were either not told about it or not allowed to use it. The company that ended up moving the piano used the freight elevator. All of this could've been solved long before by just using the freight elevator, perhaps there's more to this story?

<comment><USER4> > perhaps there's more to this story

I think so. Consider that Marcus was one of the owners of the building for many years. Why didn't _he_ tell them about a freight elevator if that was an option?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The scrolling is like going down stairs. Get it?

<comment><USER6> I think my forehead caught every step along the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish the NYT would cut it out with this super interactive article format. It might make sense for some (very limited) set of things, but a photo album is not one of them

<comment><USER8> _I wish the NYT would cut it out with this super interactive article format. It might make sense for some (very limited) set of things, but a photo album is not one of them_

It's probably tailored for the NYT app.

The Times is one of the few real journalism sources willing to try new things. When they do, the HN crowd says The Times crap. When they don't, the HN crowd says The Times a relic and should die.

I'm a subscriber, and happy that it's at least trying. Some of the visualizations and AR stories are remarkable.

<comment><USER9> I've seen the NYT praised in the HN top-level comment for neat digital article features multiple times. This might just not be one of those times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Compare and contrast the NYT article to the sublime beauty of a classic in the genre:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s4nVg_W_6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s4nVg_W_6Y)

</comment><comment><USER11> How much of this is really specific to NYC? Not sure if it's just the NYT an their NY centric view, but most of the stuff shown and talked about seem to be about moving pianos in general, and not about NYC.

<comment><USER8> It's a New York-based publication with most of its circulation and staff in New York, founded in New York by New Yorkers, headquartered in the NEW YORK Times building, and has "New York" in its title, and you complain about it having a New York-centric view?

It's a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER11> The HN headline seems to have been modified, away from the actual headline: "The Miracle of Moving a Piano in New York City".

If I wrote an article with the headline "The Miracle of building a chair in Hawaii", and then described the normal process of building a chair which is location agnostic, wouldn't you bewildered as to why I included "Hawaii" in the headline?

I understand that they are based in NYC, I just don't understand why that's relevant enough to be in the headline. "The miracle of moving a piano" would've done just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was the reason this article was posted because of the horrible ux? I found that way more interesting than the article tbh.

<comment><USER13> How is this going over so many peoples heads? It's intentionally clunky and confusing, much like moving a grand piano up several flights of stairs would be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> At what point does a grand piano become a fixture rather than a chattel?

I unboxed a foam king mattress at my new house once it was in the bedroom. It is literally impossible to get it out of that room without destroying it or I guess putting a hole in the outer wall.

<comment><USER15> A large bag and a vacuum cleaner might help in getting it back to a more manageable size, especially if you roll it up before applying the vacuum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I admire the vision of that webpage, it was really a pain on mobile (Firefox android).

</comment><comment><USER17> Articles says that moves are 'rarely less than $350'. The question is really what did this 5 man move cost? What, if any, were the other bids? Realize NYT is not a business angle but would be nice to know.

<comment><USER18> The article contains the number of moves they do per day. It includes the number of movers needed. It includes the typical wage of these movers. From some back of the napkin calculations wages were probably at least $400. The moving company is also going to charge for the truck, gas and "overhead." Then there are fees for stairs. Then you have to tip the 6 men. And lastly don't forget the moving company needs to make some profit. I could imagine this is easily $1000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Did they take off all the handles? And the thing that holds the candles?

[https://youtu.be/Ge_4SlJWfl0](https://youtu.be/Ge_4SlJWfl0)

</comment><comment><USER20> > "The movers are here to protect the piano, not the hallway."

I don't know about you, but I like it when my movers protect my stuff _and_ the walls.

</comment><comment><USER21> That site is a hot mess on mobile

</comment><comment><USER22> Great, now I feel nauseous.

</comment><comment><USER23> To all designers: Present your website as if its a piece of paper on your desk. It is rectangular, it has a specific size and it can be manipulated by the standard means that the browser provides (scroll). You can have different sized papers for different screens.

What if every book you buy is one of those origami popup castles that explode upon opening a book? That would get pretty frustrating to read and understand the book. What if some pages move and shuffle unpreditably? What if it autoplays music without user invoking anything? That's essentially what you're doing with websites.

What are they teaching in Design universities these days?

<comment><USER24> As mentioned above, it's supposed to mimic stairs.

<comment><USER23> Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because a core theme in this story is the difficulty of moving heavy objects up and down stairs. I agree the web implementation is clunky (in a way that doesn't aid the overall reading experience) but I do see what they were trying for.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SF Bay Area Drivers Could Be Tracked By GPS to Tax Miles Driven - <AUTHOR> http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/07/18/bay-area-drivers-could-be-tracked-by-gps-taxed-per-mile-driven/

<comment><USER2> I'd be taxed $9.00 per day just to get to and from work. There's no chance this thing is going to pass.</comment>


PHP-CGI Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2012/05/php-cgi-vulnerability-exploited-in-the-wild.html

<comment><USER2> I just tested the vulnerability on one of my websites and successfully managed to get the source of my index.php.

However, I then also tried to run remote code execution and couldn't. The only differences to my stack is that it's running Nginx and hops accross a few proxies (nginx -> varnish -> nginx (for SSL and SSI)) in between. I'm not sure why I can't run -d or -n, but any other options seems to always return the source.

Anyone else running nginx in fastcgi noticing similar? It seems like it's vulernable to the source download, however not remote execution. I'm about to work on a rewrite rule now just in case.

(Not sure why it's vulnerable to the source download, as comment below says, it's set up to not be vulnerable?)

Edit: Not sure what part of my comment deserved the down vote. I trust that what you say is true, in that fastcgi is _explicitly set up to negate this vulnerability_ , but the truth remains that I am experiencing it. If anything I'd have wanted to reach out to other nginx users...

The only way I could ever show that fastcgi under nginx is vulnerable, would be by linking to my live vulnerable server running nginx.. and the wiseman inside of me knows that to be a bad idea! Ha.

<comment><USER3> fastcgi setups are explicitly not vulnerable to this attack (<http://eindbazen.net/2012/05/php-cgi-advisory-cve-2012-1823/>)

Edit: Are you proxying to an Apache server that runs PHP-CGI?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "FB playing with the vulnerability" - <https://facebook.com/?-s>

They really do have a sense of humour...

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of reddit's http headers, which are something like this:

        Server: '; DROP TABLE servertypes; --

<comment><USER6> Not just reddit :)

<http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=DROP+TABLE+servertypes>

And other companies offer job offers in their headers as well:

<http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=X-Hacker+jobs>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone find any interesting sites with this vulnerability? I found a Chinese exchange program and an 'ask Army' *.mil site that has since been patched.

<comment><USER8> I found that army site too, though I didn't find anything interesting there. I found a Sony site. Some .edu's. Most everything I found seemed to have the exact same source code.

<comment><USER7> That's strange. I forgot about the Sony site. The best one was the Exchange program. Was cool to see a connectdb.php file with 3 credentials to 3 different servers...

<comment><USER8> [http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/ssa.cfg/php/enduser/std_...](http://ssa- custhelp.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/ssa.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?-s)

[https://help.us.army.mil/cgi- bin/akohd.cfg/php/enduser/std_a...](https://help.us.army.mil/cgi- bin/akohd.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php?-s)

[https://help.auctions.overstock.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/...](https://help.auctions.overstock.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/699?-s)

[http://askus.columbia.edu/app/answers/list/p/0/kw/student%20...](http://askus.columbia.edu/app/answers/list/p/0/kw/student%20financial%20services/search/1?-s)

[http://help.station.sony.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10404?-...](http://help.station.sony.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10404?-s)

[http://nam-en.apc.com/cgi-bin/nam_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp...](http://nam- en.apc.com/cgi-bin/nam_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?-s)

[http://help.linkedin.com/cgi- bin/linkedin.cfg/php/enduser/st...](http://help.linkedin.com/cgi- bin/linkedin.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?-s)

[http://askdrs.ct.gov/Scripts/drsrightnow.cfg/php.exe/enduser...](http://askdrs.ct.gov/Scripts/drsrightnow.cfg/php.exe/enduser/std_adp.php?-s)

<http://askfsis.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1249?-s>

[http://linksys.custhelp.com/cgi- bin/linksys.cfg/php/enduser/...](http://linksys.custhelp.com/cgi- bin/linksys.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?-s)

[http://ubisoft.custhelp.com/cgi- bin/ubisoft.cfg/php/enduser/...](http://ubisoft.custhelp.com/cgi- bin/ubisoft.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?-s)

[https://ebay.custhelp.com/cgi- bin/ebay.cfg/php/enduser/std_a...](https://ebay.custhelp.com/cgi- bin/ebay.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?-s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "In the wild" in this case was just their honeypots. Actually vulnerable site should be very rare.

Also, one would assume that any website still using php-cgi has plenty of other security vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER10> You would be surprised:

<http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=PHP-CGI>

<comment><USER11> Just about all the results there appear to be abandoned cPanel placeholders and similar — very few even have domains. I couldn't look at all of them, obviously, but this seems to bear out the idea that nothing anyone cares about is run on PHP-CGI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think a lot of well-maintained websites still use the CGI option. Even without this vulnerability, it's a bad idea to run that configuration (as every single request starts a complete PHP process, compiles all the script files, runs them and then shuts down again). It's just incredibly wasteful, comparative to starting and terminating e.g. a complete servlet container with every request. PHP-FPM is now being bundled inside the standard PHP distro, there is really no valid reason to use plain old CGI.

<comment><USER13> Shared hosting.

If you use mod_php, every customer's code runs as the apache user, which is bad for security. If you use PHP-FPM, you end up needing at least one long- running process per user, which wastes resources.

<comment><USER12> You're right, I hadn't thought of that. The only shared hosting environment I use at the moment is mediaTemple's Grid Service, and it looks to me like they are configured for FastCGI regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel this needs to be stressed again: FastCGI implementations are NOT vulnerable to this bug.

I myself run LigHTTPD and PHP through FastCGI, and this was worrying me a lot, until someone pointed me to the Eindbazen site which stated this.

(BTW: Eindbazen is Dutch for "Final boss" in a video game context.)

<comment><USER5> Isn't FastCGI not really CGI?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For a while all sites that deployed "Answer Center" by RightNow (recently acquired by Oracle) were vulnerable, but it seems they've patched it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Go make sure your hosts have this patched up.

<comment><USER4> If you have to contact your host to make sure they are patching vulnerabilities - you are with the wrong host.

<comment><USER17> You don't have to contact them, but you absolutely should make sure that vulnerabilities are being patched. It's your responsibility to your users.</comment></comment></comment>


Indian Americans Came to Dominate the National Spelling Bee - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shankar-national-spelling-bee-indian-americans-20190530-story.html <comment><USER2> It's not just Indian Americans. It's other students of immigrants as well. My belief is that it's because their families instill education from a young age as a path to success and this is ingrained in the culture.

You don't see this nearly as often in the US. Instead, we look up to movie stars and sports figures.

When I was a kid, I won every classroom spelling bee I was in and would almost always make it to the school finals (but never the nationals). The majority of students didn't even try or care that much, so competition was really easy at the classroom level.

<comment><USER3> How does studying several hours per day for a spelling bee, for years, lead to an improved education?

I mean, I can see how there would be some advantages, but wouldn't it be better to spend that same effort on a broader range of academic study?

<comment><USER4> I don't think the OP is implying that becoming stars at spelling bee by studying several hours per day leads to better educated kids.

It is the process, the principles behind the discipline required to study so much, and the intent of the parents to inculcate the value of getting a good education, and the consequent values they pass on to their kids, is what creates the difference in how such kids look at the value of education versus others.

<comment><USER3> I consider all those part of the "some advantages". Debate club is one of many competitive academic pursuits which can, for the right people, set up those principles. I imagine chess club would as well, as it also requires much study and discipline.

That's why I did the follow up "wouldn't it be better to spend that same effort on a broader range of academic study?"

Spend an extra three hours per day on history, or literature, or math, or learning new languages, and it would not only help instill those principles, but the actual knowledge, after graduation, is more likely to be useful than knowing how to spell a lot of words, yes?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Exit Interview: I Curated Rare Books for a 200-Year-Old Library - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stanley-cushing-interview-rare-book-curator-boston-athenaeum-library <comment><USER2> Fascinating read. I've always loved books ever since a school librarian introduced me to Volume 1 of The Belgariad Series [0] of books "Pawn of Prophecy" [1] by author David Eddings [2]. I read through that book over the weekend and at the end of the book was a promo for the next book of the series, Volume 2 of The Belgariad Series "Queen of Sorcery" [3].

Monday morning came and I rushed to the school library to get the next book. Imagine my disappointment after checking the card catalog and shelves and realizing that Volume 2 was not there. As I returned Volume 1 to the librarian that had introduced me to the book she asked me if I had liked it. I told her that I had very much enjoyed the book but, was sad because the library didn't have any others in the series. As I was leaving to head to class the librarian said that she would look into finding other books I might like. Being a moody teenager I replied with something along the line of "Yeah whatever" and walked out sure I'd never return.

Friday comes and as am I waiting for the bell to ring to release me from school who shall appear in my last class of the day? That's right, my school librarian. Not only was she able to find Volume 2, she had also found and had delivered Volumes 3, 4, and 5 as well. I spent the weekend reading Volume 2 and on Monday I returned to the library to thank my librarian and to pick up Volume 3, "Magician's Gambit" [4].

All told that sweet librarian sparked a fire in me for reading which has turned into a love of books. It all started with one book suggestion and could have ended there if not for the care and interest she showed in me by acquiring more books for me to read. In total she purchased 14 books by David Eddings.

After graduating from school I moved to my local library for my book fix and was blessed with another amazing librarian who ended up acquiring the remaining books by David and Leigh Eddings [5] that my school did not have, all because I had an interest in them.

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

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgariad#Pawn_of_Prophecy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgariad#Pawn_of_Prophecy)

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

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgariad#Queen_of_Sorcery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgariad#Queen_of_Sorcery)

[4]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgariad#Magician's_Gambi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgariad#Magician's_Gambit)

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

Edit: spelling.</comment>


Analyzing URLs as Links to the resource using a PHP function. - <AUTHOR> http://9lessons.blogspot.com/2009/01/split-url-from-sentence-using-php.html This is PHP function split_url_fuction() writter for twitter like application that i am developing, useful to split URL from the updated sentence(posted message), then URL changing like tinyurl and link to the resource. <comment><AUTHOR> Split URL from sentence using a PHP function like twitter</comment>


Salesforce has eclipsed Oracle in market cap - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/10/salesforce-eclipses-oracle-in-market-cap.html <comment><USER2> With a PE ratio of 200. Oracles is less than 20.

So Oracle earns 10x more as I understand it....</comment>


Scaling Financial Reporting at Airbnb - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/tracking-the-money-scaling-financial-reporting-at-airbnb-6d742b80f040#.alfxjkhrn <comment><USER2> If this is generalizable, and it looks like it is, it would be pretty smart to spin this out as a new company, make Airbnb the company's first customer, and go after Oracle's financial products.

(Disclosure: I used to work at Oracle on Financials Cloud.)

</comment><comment><USER3> There seems to be an accounting equivalent of Greenspun's tenth rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated financial reporting system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementation of double-entry accounting."

It's such a powerful yet simple way of thinking about money that anyone who builds a billing or accounting system should be intimately familiar with it.

<comment><USER4> Related, might be interesting: "Building a powerful double-entry accounting system" -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw6y4r4NAlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw6y4r4NAlw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Going from imperative programming to functional programming has been a powerful paradigm shift for us to think about financial processing and accounting. We can now think of this system as a straightforward actor/handler system rather than getting mired in complicated SQL-join logic."

Though whether SQL is a functional language (or a programming language at all, if you're talking ANSI SQL) is a subtle question, I would at the very least not describe it as a traditional imperative programming language. I think this is an important distinction for the article because, contrary to what this article suggests, I've found SQL to be quite helpful for understanding functional and declarative programming concepts. That said, it might be a lot easier to express the types of tasks in the article as straight-forward functions rather than getting wrapped up in all this set-based talk in SQL.

<comment><USER6> Hi, I'm the author. Yeah, you have a good point. Imperative programming was just the way that we were using SQL to build that system.

<comment><USER7> Did you consider an off the shelf ERP product?

I've written something similar to the first part - extract raw data out of various source DB's using SQL queries then push it to our organisation's ERP product (SAP) using A2A messaging.

From my view SAP is black box but it handles the actual accounting/ financial logic part i.e Ledgers, product tracking, inventory management etc. Our Accountants all seem pretty comfortable using it.

<comment><USER6> Airbnb's data models weren't initially designed to be financially reported on, and by the time we needed better financial reporting, it was too late to change those models. 90% of the work was about rethinking the way to think about all of this, what financial impact should be booked, and how it could be derived from the data. None of the ERP solutions fit our use case, and I think it would have been very difficult to integrate.

We still use a general ledger to book the outputs of our new financial pipeline, but I don't think we have a traditional business model (no traditional inventory management). That's more in the finance and accounting department though, and I can't speak much to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very interesting, but I would love to know more details. Are they using something like Amazon Kinesis or Kafka to send events and handle missed events? What serialization format are the messages? How do they manage keeping the schemas of the events in sync?

</comment><comment><USER9> At my company we built accounting on top of Xero.com API. Even at our small scale we're already busting their capacity. Some reports can't even be generated anymore because we have too much transactions.

This post is a fascinating outlook of how things can be ran at big corp. I always wondered how big companies did accounting. This stuff can't be outsourced since it's so tightly coupled to your business logic.

Is there any _tech_ conferences geared toward this stuff?

Any accounting saas that can scale indefinitely? As opposed to Xero?

<comment><USER10> > Any accounting saas that can scale indefinitely? As opposed to Xero?

Need to wait for AWS to release a version of Airbnb's system. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great, thanks for the writeup! We are actually building something quite similar. We have a rough landing page up at hireross.com. Airbnb folks, I'd love to chat if you're up for it. Just to learn more. email is at the bottom of the landing page.

<comment><USER11> changed the landing page a bit to include a signup form instead of email. Email is email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "...On the date of the reservation confirmation, we have a guest receivable of $100, and a future host payable of $90..."

The one thing I hate about AirBnB.... Looking to rent a nice place for 10k 9 months in advance? Ok...we'll charge it RIGHT NOW.

Why not do it like Amazon and charge when the package is shipped (trip date has arrived)? I get the cashflow thing but come on... (100 bookings and counting...)

<comment><USER13> I bet if they didn't charge now, suddenly they have to deal with "card charge failed the day before the flight and now the reservation isn't paid for and the person is in front of the door"-style issues.

Of course AirBnB could forward the money to the host but doing it they way they do cuts out the problem entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've previously worked with enterprise financial systems, and most of what was described here was standard functionality, or would be customisable to do so without too much effort. I would have loved to have heard more about whether they evaluated traditional ERP systems and why they chose to build their own event sourcing system instead.

<comment><USER15> Same story with Superset, their homegrown BI system. Why re-invent the wheel?

<comment><USER16> If it was not for "reinventing the wheel" we'd all be coding in cobol or Fortean against IBM supplied mainframes.

In other words - because they can and should (and can afford to and not be hooked up to some third party vendor milking them for the rest of their companies existence).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Did you consult your auditors through this? I would expect their answer to be something along the lines of "Spark? Scala? We don't think we can trust this so we'll need to do a full audit." versus "Oh, you're using SAP, ok."

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm worn out on articles dissing the performance of SQL databases without quoting any hard numbers and then proceeding to replace the systems with no thanks of development in the latest and great tech. I have nothing against spark, but I find it very hard to believe that alarm code is now readable than SQL. In fact, my experience is just the opposite.

AirBnB is using an extract, load and transform architecture. No mention of the hardware, data through put, whether they have a message broker/queue to ease the burden of peak volume but work.

I have a strong feeling that they could have 1.) Kept the system exactly how it is and done some performance tuning. But that's not sexxy anymore. Things are just supposed to scale. Which brings me to

2.) Moved transformation logic to its own server or multiple servers using a message broker and queue to aid the transfer of data between systems. It would have been more readable and could have been done in a mo the or less.

In summary I believe they should have put some effort in to keep SQL. Especially for the purpose of accounting because spark does not lend itself to readable logic.

</comment><comment><USER19> Alice, do you recognise guest receivables the day a booking is made, not the day after check-in ("services rendered")? If that's true, not sure if this is correct, i.e., this event doesn't seem to meet the asset recognition criteria... My intuition would tell me Dt Accounts receivable - Cr Revenue on the day after check-in.

<comment><USER19> On a second look, I don't seem to understand the flow of your accounting entries:

 _Booking date_ (I understand that on that day, the booking is confirmed, but the guest's payment method has not yet been charged)

      Dt Receivables from guests 100

        Cr Future host payout 90 (Problematic: how can you pre-recognise a liability on your balance sheet? Unless this is an off-balance sheet account...)

        Cr Deferred income 10 (Problematic: deferred revenue arises when you receive a pre-payment from customers and have a standing obligation to them to render the services)

_Payment made by guest_

      Dt Cash 100

        Cr Receivable 100

_Check-in date_

      Dt Deferred revenue 10

      Dt ??? ??? (seems to be missing to balance the double-entry)

        Cr Payable 90

To me, the natural way to do this would be:

 _Booking date_ \- no accounting entries, no effect on books. You did not render a service to the customer yet, nor fulfil or incur any obligations yet.

 _Payment received from guest_ \- you received a prepayment for future services to be rendered, so now have a liability to the customer to fulfil this obligation, i.e., deferred revenue.

      Dr Cash 100

        Cr Deferred revenue 10

        Cr Payables to host 90 (unsure about this one, as this goes into the whole gross vs. net revenue recognition discussion for marketplace-type businesses)

_Day after check-in_ \- recognising the revenue on one single day might work now, but it's only a makeshift solution - what if your customer stays for a longer period of time, or between two accounting periods, and this becomes material? By definition, you recognise revenues proportionally, but I get that the cost vs. benefit of doing this now might be unfavourable.

      Dr Deferred revenue 10

        Cr Revenue 10

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This new system that uses events looks more flexible since it is decoupled on the application logic. I think the downside with this one is that the new system has a lot of moving parts. Also, changes in logic/new events must be communicated and should be supported before the main app is put into production.

</comment><comment> d--b Is it really that big that we need to talk about "scaling" it? 4-5 hours of processing time is a lot... I mean how many transactions would they do on a normal day?

<comment><USER21> Yea - it does seem a bit high. We use Spark for our adtech data pipeline and we're handling tens of billions of events a day in less time. It may be a function of how much data they're pulling in from other systems or dumping the data back into a variety of systems. Spark itself is parallelizable so in theory can be sped up just by running more nodes.

<comment><USER16> financial processing is typically sequential - can't calculate some metric until some other thing was calculated (or pulled data for)... not well parallelizable in other words. or so it is with some systems I deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> tldr; They built an event/messaging system. When an event occurs they broadcast that event with meta data. (EG. event: reservation_booked, meta {..}). Before they tightly coupled reporting sql inside the business logic.</comment>


Forty Years Later, a Tip With Potential in a Famous Case - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/us/02dbcooper.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Notice anything about the money?</comment>


AWS Glacier's dazzling price benefits melt next to the cost of tape - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/aws-glaciers-dazzling-price-benefits-melt-next-to-the-cost-of-tape-7000003068/

<comment><USER2> The author's analysis omitted power, staffing, and floor space costs for the tape calculations. Downloading the whitepaper from the Quantum web site, I see "With data center construction costs running as high as $2,000 to $3,000 per square foot", and the i6000 requires about 15 sq. ft. so that's a $30,000 up front which wasn't included in the estimate. Granted, that's only 5% more to the estimated tape costs, but it isn't the only real estate cost. I see estimates of about $2,000 per square foot for operations cost, so there's another $150,000.

It omitted any discussion of off-site backups. How much will that cost?

It ignores growth rate. Do you get the 5TB hardware solution now, when most of it isn't needed, or expand when needed? While with Glacier you just add data and don't worry about it. Assume you start with 1TB now, and grow by 0.8TB per year, to end with 5TB at the end of 5 years. That's almost a 2x reduction in price over the author's estimate.

But hey, that's all in the Amazon Glacier's front page: "Companies typically over-pay for data archiving. First, they're forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth. This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money. With Amazon Glacier, you pay only for what you use."

</comment><comment><USER3> To me, this is comparing apples and oranges. A lot of indirect costs are built into Glacier. With a local tape system you need to factor in: backup software, backup server, operators, power, off site pickups, fire suppression, cooling, security, etc. Sure it might be cheaper in the long run, but it's a lot more to manage.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is dumb, because he's taking the price per gigabyte for some low tier where Glacier's pricing is tiered. In fact, for an amount of storage as large as his thought experiment assumes, Amazon asks the user to "contact us" for pricing information.</comment>


Google is slowly phasing out Google+ - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/tech/google-is-slowly-phasing-out-google-112517429669.html

<comment><USER2> This is inaccurate and has been spammed here at HN many times already</comment>


Ask pg.news.yc: How do acquisition prices get settled? - <AUTHOR>

For instance, PG, how did Viaweb and Yahoo agree on a sale price?  Arbitration by investment bankers, the board, etc?  What is the process?  How can you trust the negotiators to work in your best interest? <comment><USER2> After the introduction of the topic of acquisition from the buyer to the seller, the first major milestone in an acquisition deal is usually a terms sheet. The terms sheet would be essentially a non-binding high-level agreement to the basic terms of the deal. Price is just one of many terms. It is clearly one of the important ones, but there are other sometimes equally important terms in a given deal, such as associated non-compete and consulting contracts. Also, "price" is a nebulous term and is usually not just one isolated number. For instance, there can be earn-outs, hold-backs, escrowed amounts, consulting fees, etc., and all of these can be tied to indemnities, conditions, etc. And the structure of the deal, e.g. stock vs asset, impacts the net take home to the shareholders, which is what most people are ultimately interested in.

Both parties agree on the terms sheet through negotiation. That sounds obvious, but the point is there is not one set process. There are many strategies to negotiation and some make more sense than others in the context of a particular deal. It is not uncommon for parties to walk away and come back to the table at this stage, and in fact, at all stages. The "price" could easily move up or down significantly depending on a number of factors. It really comes down to what the seller is willing to sell for and what the buyer is willing to buy for. If there is an overlap, there could be a deal. If not, then no deal. The rest is jockeying for the overlap. Walking away until you get x is one tactic to get to the top of the overlap from your perspective.

Finally, investment bankers and their equivalents in these situations are not necessary, but they can get you a higher price. Their basic usefulness is connecting you to potential buyers, i.e. through their roladex. You, alone, may not know or have access to these potential buyers. By engaging multiple buyers you can get an auction scenario, which is often ideal because usually buyers willing to pay more for something if they are taking it away from someone else in addition to getting it for themselves. However, certain tactics can turn off and ultimately dislodge particular buyers from the process, which could be net negative for the shareholders depending on which buyer(s) walked away. Also, brokers usually take a significant % fee, and if they do not get an auction going, this could just be wasted money.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's always pretty much the same kind of haggling you'd see in a bazaar. Usually both sides send signals in advance about the ballpark figure they'd consider. If these aren't too far apart, you haggle. That's usually stressful, because you can only haggle effectively if you are truly prepared to walk away from the deal if you don't get what you want. So deals are always about to fall through till the last moment.

</comment><comment><USER4> >How can you trust the negotiators to work in your best interest?

Be one of the negotiators. Sounds stupid, but if you aren't at the table, you really aren't being represented, no matter how wonderful the high priced help is.

<comment><USER2> This doesn't sound stupid to me. It rings true. Quite simply, of course you can't "trust the negotiators to work in your best interest." The only person you can trust to work in your best interest is yourself.

<comment><USER5> > The only person you can trust to work in your best interest is yourself.

If only that were true! A great many people have psychological difficulty in following through on what they believe to be in their best interest.

Other people can often be better advocates for you than you are. They may demand more for you than you would be comfortable asking for yourself.

<comment><USER2> You are totally right. Of course, this makes life really difficult because it means you can't trust anyone absolutely, not even yourself. This is yet another reason that these types of negotiations are so stressful!

<comment><USER5> You might be making soap while you sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How can you trust the negotiators to work in your best interest? Make their cut percentage-based.

<comment><USER3> It usually is, for investment bankers. But that doesn't guarantee they'll work in your interest. Investment bankers selling a small co to Microsoft might sell it super cheap, in the hope of earning good will with Microsoft that could be cashed in later in much bigger deals.

<comment><AUTHOR> This opens up a level of intrigue I didn't initially consider. How low can they go?

<comment><USER2> They can go as low as the seller is willing to accept, who ultimately has to sign off on the deal. However, the broker can essentially make stuff up to make the seller think they should take the deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant 'low' in a slimeball, backstabbing rhetorical sense but I see what you are saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Acquisition 101. Thou Shall Not Give A Price First 102\. Thou Shall Triple Any Offer 103\. Thou Shall End Up With Double What They Offer</comment>


Lenin statue toppled in Ukraine protest - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/08/world/europe/ukraine-protests/

<comment><USER2> I was actually surprised that there were still statues of Lenin around after the fall of the Soviet block.

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle) :-)

<comment><USER2> Lenin in the US :) That's like a Trojan Horse! Thanks for the link!

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a good one: [http://pic199.zizaike.com/824/862824.jpg](http://pic199.zizaike.com/824/862824.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> scarily similar to the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad. video here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAhfS9R1Kvg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAhfS9R1Kvg)</comment>


The nytimes they are a-changin' - <AUTHOR> http://okayfail.com/2011/nytimes-timelapse.html <comment><USER2> This did well on HN a week ago too: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2778219>

Seeing so many signs in the last year that HN is formed of different overlapping audiences that visit at different times of the day. Tons of dupes lately.

<comment><USER3> While I have also noticed many duplicate articles, one way the community could try to avoid them would be by making sure that they are posting original sources (as suggested in the official guidelines), and not random blog posts (like the post a week ago).

edit: I have just noticed <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777508> , which AFAIK links to the same URL as this.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, although sometimes it's not particularly obvious. I've noticed a lot of links to a site called <http://ontwik.com/> being posted in the last few months (a Google search for ontwik on news.ycombinator.com shows over 100 results). It's a site that seems to take embeddable videos from YouTube, Vimeo and the like and turn them into pages like [http://ontwik.com/html5-2/html5-games-with-rob-hawkes-of- moz...](http://ontwik.com/html5-2/html5-games-with-rob-hawkes-of-mozilla/) .. I can see why people are linking these things up, even though it should be the original YouTube video getting the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is based on an incorrect assumption: _... no one is storing their frontpage layout data._

The Newseum has this _covered_ for over 800 newspapers. A recent front page of the New York Times, for example:

[http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=NY_NY...](http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=NY_NYT)

<comment><USER5> The NYT also stores their data... see my reply further up: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801652>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I had no idea the ads were so huge and invasive. It made me wonder how much Ralph Lauren spent to have their ads take what seemed to be over 50% of the on-screen real estate.

<comment><USER7> Just to be fair, many of the most intrusive ads I saw there were interstitials - they show for a few seconds then disappear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting to see the typo fixes and how long different stories last. At 2:11 a story relevant to us all. I wonder (with regards to his point about things disappearing forever) if a distributed effort among "tech people" to catalog a lot of websites would work, different people run nodes that are given tasks. Would be neat to keep a track of the top 1,000 article driven sites for a year (not just news, reddit, hn etc.)

> Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour

This has happened to me a few times. Recently I had _accidentally_ collected over 100,000 copies of a website over a 3 month period after forgetting the thing was running.

</comment><comment><USER9> Somewhat off-topic: watching the Chilean miners story in the video was heartwarming as the number rescued increased.

</comment><comment><USER10> Perpetually.com solves this problem. In fact, they're already working with newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and for every major federally elected political candidate. More than just random screen captures, every article, every change, every link and state are preserved. It's like Apple Time Machine for the Internet.

<http://www.perpetually.com/>

Full Disclosure: I advise this company.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of Spock's Tricorder in the Star Trek episode 'The City on the Edge of Forever'. Playing back history at high speed. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, completely agree about how the layout, and emphasis on different headlines, topics, categories, advertising etc.. are all huge indicators of society's interests and conceptions of the world. That said, I would be surprised to learn that the nyt doesn't store their front page every day into some archive? If they don't, then someone must!

<comment><USER5> They do.

The CMS has all the rankings. Rank meta data is stored with articles, including (if published in print) where it was in the physical paper and what editions(s).

On the web site front, there are internal process capturing the Homepage HTML and that goes back maybe 10 years at this point.

On a more public level you can still find the Homepage from a given date here:

<http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/02/06/>

you can extrapolate the rest:

<http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/02/06/business/>

Those would represent the last view of the day before the date rolled over in the CMS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If they collected the html and not just screencaps, it would be interesting to see a word-cloud evolve and change over time too.

Too bad there isn't an annual follow up for every major story.

</comment><comment><USER14> The pace of news is the pulse of the day

<comment><USER15> Counterpoint: "news" is the lie that something important happens every day.

<comment><USER16> Depends on what you define as "important", but with 6.5 billion people on the world, there are certain to be remarkable or notable events with great regularity and frequency.

<comment><USER17> Important to whom? What people find remarkable and notable varies wildly. What may be notable to one group (say the residents of X-town may find the mayoral election notable) might not be to another (Y-town doesn't care).

Something remarkable or notable may happen every day, but it's not necessarily the case that something remarkable or notable to a specific person happens every day.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


5G Is Where China and the West Finally Diverge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/5g-where-china-and-west-finally-diverge/604309/ <comment><USER2> Once upon a time (2G), Europe had GSM and European vendors, America had CDMA and American vendors, and Japan had PDC and Japanese vendors.

Since then the industry has massively converged, down to a single standard (LTE), and consolidated, down to a few vendors none of them American when it comes to radio access.

That's still the case for 5G. The issue is that the industry has converged and consolidated so much that there is little choice of vendors: If you're banned from buying from Chinese vendors (Huawei/ZTE) you essentially have to buy Nokia, who can then name their price.

Champagne must be popping at Nokia HQ every time Trump tweets about Huawei...

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree, just mention that there's also Ericsson, which is leading the RAN market in North America [1].

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/09/04/wh...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/09/04/why- ericsson-is-doubling-down-on-the-u-s-market/)</comment></comment>


2017 is not just another prime number - <AUTHOR> http://weijr-note.blogspot.com/2017/01/2017-is-not-just-another-prime-number.html <comment><USER2> Verifications of all the statements using SageMath, in case you want to be convinced or explore further: [https://cloud.sagemath.com/projects/4a5f0542-5873-4eed-a85c-...](https://cloud.sagemath.com/projects/4a5f0542-5873-4eed-a85c-a18c706e8bcd/files/support/2017.sagews)

<comment><USER3> > 2017 can be written as a sum of cubes of five distinct integers.

This gives no results in SageMath...

<comment><USER4> The greedy algorithm works here: 2017 = 12^3 + 6^3 + 4^3 + 2^3 + 1^3

<comment><USER5> Technical note: 5 cubes is not enough for every number, so this property of 2017 is not trivial.

From

> _Every positive integer can be written as the sum of nine (or fewer) > positive cubes. This upper limit of nine cubes cannot be reduced because, > for example, 23 cannot be written as the sum of fewer than nine positive > cubes:_

> _23 = 2^3 + 2^3 + 1^3 + 1^3 + 1^3 + 1^3 + 1^3 + 1^3 + 1^3._

I couldn't find if it's common that 5 cubes is enough. [This looks like a nice exercise for the reader.]

<comment><USER6> [http://oeis.org/A003328](http://oeis.org/A003328): Numbers that are the sum of 5 positive cubes

5, 12, 19, 26, 31, 33, 38, 40, 45, 52, 57, 59, 64, 68, 71, 75, 78, 82, 83, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 101, 108, 109, 115, 116, 120, 127, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 138, 143, 145, 146, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 162, 164, 169, 171, 172, 176, 181, 183, 188, 190, 192, 194

It seems this is fairly common (1757 is the 1000th such number), but of course that says nothing.

Reading [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CubicNumber.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CubicNumber.html), it is true that every sufficiently large integer is a sum of no more than 7 positive cubes.

It also states _"the only integers requiring nine positive cubes are 23 and 239. Wieferich proved that only 15 integers require eight cubes: 15, 22, 50, 114, 167, 175, 186, 212, 231, 238, 303, 364, 420, 428, and 454 (OEIS A018889)."_

Even stronger (same page): _"Deshouillers et al. (2000) conjectured that 7373170279850 is the largest integer that cannot be expressed as the sum of four nonnegative cubes"_ (nice title for a paper: _"7 373 170 279 850."_. See [http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/2000-69-229/S0025-5718-99-0...](http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/2000-69-229/S0025-5718-99-01116-3/S0025-5718-99-01116-3.pdf))

If that is true, it is indeed common that 5 cubes is enough (since 4 almost always would be sufficient)

<comment><USER7> yes, but 2017 is the sum of five _destinct_ integer cubes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Meh. A prime number year last happened in 2011. Just kidding... happy new prime number year!

BTW I'm really looking forward to the next perfect square year: 2025 (45^2). It last happened in 1936, and won't happen again until 2116.

<comment><USER9> I'm hoping to to see the only power of two in a millennium: 2048

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The sum of the cube of gap of primes up to 2017 is a prime number. That is > (3-2)^3 + (5-3)^3 + (7-5)^3 + (11-7)^3 + ... + (2017-2011)^3 is a prime > number.

For the non-mathematically inclined, how do mathematicians come up with these? Are these just observations that they happened to witness, or are there underlying theoretical properties that allow one to derive this claim?

<comment><USER11> There has been a great amount of research to find ways to check if a number of prime or not in polynomial time[1]. Many of such _facts_ are a observations from this conquest. Number theory reveals fascinating facts about spacing in prime numbers determining properties within a range. Sometimes such results emerge from there.

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

<comment><USER12> To expand in a way that answers the grandparents' question, part of the mentioned "great amount of research" came about from people looking for patterns anywhere they can, and patterns can be anywhere.

Someone thought to check how often there is a number and that number plus 2 that are both prime, and there seems to be a pattern there, which is the twin primes conjecture [1]. Along the way, a lot of other places are investigated in this search for patterns, such as the sum of the cube of gap primes that the grandparent mentions.

Recording investigations made along these lines is often done by recording it in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences [2]. (Significant findings merit publication in journals.)

The end result is that one can perform a search for a particular number and see in which sequences it appears. This is how the linked post came to be.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime#Conjectures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime#Conjectures) [2] oeis.org

<comment><USER6> Also, searching oeis is easy: [http://oeis.org?q=2017](http://oeis.org?q=2017) currently produces 528 sequences containing the number 2017.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here are 17 facts about 2017 in 2:17 from Matt Parker:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jMU- AwX34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jMU-AwX34)

(Some repeats, but plenty of non-prime facts as well (plus Matt's excellent dry humor))

<comment><USER14> Huh wow, I went to uni with that guy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> They forgot to calculate how many certificates on the Internet use 2017 as one of their primes :-)

<comment><USER16> Or, how many use a prime <= 2017, for that matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I always wonder though, is 2017 really a special number or can you fit things like this to every number?

<comment><USER18> What I like to do to measure the "mathematical interestingness" of a number, is check how many times it appears in OEIS. A database of sequences of numbers found in mathematical research. 2017 appeared in 453 sequences. For comparison; 2016 appears 833 sequences, and 2018 appears in 113.

[http://oeis.org/search?q=seq%3A2016&sort=&language=english&g...](http://oeis.org/search?q=seq%3A2016&sort=&language=english&go=Search)

<comment><USER19> Every number is special.

Proof is by contradiction: Assume that not every number is mathematically interesting and let X be the first such number. However, the fact that X is the lowest such number is itself pretty special, right?

<comment><USER12> This "proof" seems to be popular, and it always bothers me that it's invalid. It uses self-reference in an invalid way.

Allow me to formalize; we take as a rigorous definition of an "interesting number" that a number has a unique property. Specifically, a number n is interesting if there is some predicate P(x) which is true only for n. In formal first order logic, n is interesting if there exist a predicate P and a number n such that P(n) is true and if m != n then P(n) is false.

Let I, as a subset of the natural numbers N, be the set of interesting numbers. There are two cases: either N - I is empty, or it is not. If it is not, let n be the least element of N - I. n is therefore interesting, having a unique property in that it is the smallest integer not in I; however, this is a contradiction, because we defined I to include all interesting numbers, and so N - I must be empty; in other words, every number is interesting.

Edit: Actually, my definition of "interesting" seems to be in second order logic [1], since I'm using an existential quantifier for predicates. It doesn't seem possible to give a definition of this sense of "interesting" in first order logic.

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-higher- order/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-higher-order/)

<comment><USER20> > Specifically, a number n is interesting if there is some predicate P(x) > which is true only for n.

Well, if you read the "every number is interesting" "proof", this clearly doesn't capture the proof's criteria of interestingness.

I see it as analogous to Berry's paradox - the proof isn't "wrong" per se, but the relevant notion of interestingness is not well defined

<comment><USER19> What's not captured by this criteria?

You can express whatever idea of "interestingness" you like in this framework by finding a predicate that expresses it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm feeling more excited about this year already!

</comment><comment><USER22> 2017 is the sum of five distinct cubes TWICE OVER: 2017 = 10^3 + 9^3 + 6^3 + 4^3 + 2^3. 2017 = 12^3 + 6^3 + 4^3 + 2^3 + 1^3. As a bonus, it's also the sum of EIGHT DISTINCT CUBES: 2017 = 9^3 + 8^3 + 7^3 + 6^3 + 5^3 + 4^3 + 3^3 + 1^3.

</comment><comment><USER23> * (loop for i from 1 to 15 do (loop for i2 from i to 15 do (loop for i3 from i2 to 15 do (loop for i4 from i3 to 15 do (loop for i5 from i4 to 15 do (if (= (+ (* i i i) (* i2 i2 i2) (* i3 i3 i3) (* i4 i4 i4) (* i5 i5 i5)) 2017) (print (list i i2 i3 i4 i5))))))))

(1 2 2 10 10) (1 2 4 6 12) (2 4 6 9 10) NIL

</comment><comment><USER24> 44^2+9^2

</comment><comment><USER25> Definately a case of OCD. I am guilty of it too while interpreting license plate numbers in boring traffic.

</comment><comment><USER26> Pretty Cool!

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice! Although I think it's amusing that they said "odd primes" as if there's any even primes

<comment><USER28> 2 is a prime number...

<comment><USER27> True!

<comment><USER29> The oddest one of them all

<comment><USER30> Yup, it's so odd it's even!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18134681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18134681)

<comment><USER3> And previous: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811)

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article doesn't mention the most ridiculous example: Affilia, a women's studies journal, published a rewritten chapter from "Mein Kampf."

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/fake-n...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/fake- news-comes-to-academia-1538520950)

<comment><USER5> I think the most ridiculous example was the one where they advocated for "privileged students" (ie: white men) to sit on the floor chained in classes and not be allowed to speak, so that they can "experience reparations":

> _I wonder if that 'progressive stack' in the news could be written into a > paper that says white males in college shouldn't be allowed to speak in > class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good > measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can 'experience > reparations. That was our "Progressive Stack" paper. The answer seems to be > yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to > it._

<comment><USER6> That was mentioned in the Atlantic article, though they didn't mention that the journal rejected it conditionally because the proposed "reparations" of sitting chained on the floor and being spoken over weren't harsh enough for privileged students -- the author was offered acceptance upon revision.

<comment><USER7> Source?

<comment><USER8> Not proof, but more commentary:

[https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies- scand...](https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scandal-five- academics-respond/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not surprising that these kind of things happen in social studies and it's easy to make fun of.

However, lots of junk is also published in science and engineering, it's just not as egregious and apparent.

<comment><USER9> There are much more egregious examples in computer science publishing. A paper that just repeated the words "get me off your fucking mailing list" over and over [1] was published in a journal. I also remember there being some automatic paper generators that resulted in several publications several years back. This is 100% an issue with bogus for-profit publishing, not with any particular area of study.

[1] [http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf](http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf)

<comment><USER4> That's not a fair comparison.

That's not a peer reviewed journal — it's a publication that will publish anything for a fee.

All of the papers in the original article are peer reviewed.

<comment><USER9> The papers in the article were published in journals that will publish anything for a fee. The "get me off your fucking mailing list" paper was also peer reviewed. The reviewer asked for formatting changes and citations, very similar to the reviews that these other hoax papers got.

<comment><USER10> No, that's completely incorrect. The papers in the article above were published in top (or close to top) journals in their respective fields.

<comment><USER9> I have never seen someone claim that before. Can you back that up?

<comment><USER11> "Gender, Place and Culture" ( [https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cgpc20/current](https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cgpc20/current) ) has an impact factor of 1.594. No idea whether that's enough to make it a top journal in feminist geography or not.

The retraction notice for the "Dog Park" paper is currently the most recent publication on that site.

<comment><USER9> That certainly contradicts what I've heard about these papers before. Gender, Place and Culture does seem to be a top journal. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A common response to this thread is "the review process must not have looked closely enough".

This tweet[1] contains screenshots of the review process of the dog park paper, and claims they received constructive feedback. As originally written, the journal wouldn't publish it.

[https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/104781375318043852...](https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1047813753180438528)

</comment><comment><USER13> Always fun to see that the Sokal Affair is reproducible science :). ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair))

Edit: Hah — interestingly enough, The Atlantic refers to this as "the new Sokal Hoax" in the <title> tag and the URL, but as "an Audacious Hoax" in the page proper.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Other means superior to the natural sciences exist to extract alternative knowledges about stars and enriching astronomy ... incorporation of mythological narratives and modern feminist analysis of them, feminist interpretative dance (especially with regard to the movements of the stars and their astrological significance), and direct application of feminist and postcolonial discourses_

I cracked here.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think there are a number of variables that should be controlled for on probably separate studies.

1) how likely can renowned academic get published with gibberish

2) compare #1 to how likely can an unknown get published with gibberish.

3) how likely can an unknown get a serious paper published when it was actually the renowned academic who wrote it.

4) compare #3 to how likely a renowned academic can get a serious paper published when it was actually the unknown / lesser known peer who wrote it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Journals are broken. A lot of people recognize that.

Peer review is also broken. A lot of people recognize that.

The fact that we don't publish negative results is a tragedy. We're losing so much collective knowledge that way. We learn by failing, but somehow we're ashamed to fail in public in academia.

I personally hope that arXiv and things like it keep taking off. And that we end up funding respected people to review articles publicly. And that we end up funding people to try to replicate interesting results, and publish their findings.

And that the news media learns to explain to people what p scores are, and what p-hacking is, and what the half-life of knowledge is, and that one new research article with p=0.05 doesn't mean jack squat. Basically the news media shouldn't cover leading research, it's just too noisy and it's difficult to understand the context and relevance of new research.

<comment><USER17> I think that's a good summary. My favorite relevant quote from Dr. John Ioannidis:

> "Science is a noble endeavor, but it's also a low-yield endeavor," he says. > "I'm not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is > ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality > of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies- da...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies- and-medical-science/308269/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Social Sciences are the quintessential BS job generator. It serves a purpose but not the one it thinks it does.

<comment><USER19> > It serves a purpose but not the one it thinks it does.

Pushing political agendas and keeping forever-students employed?

<comment><USER18> Somewhere around that. There is an "Angst" in society, deep inside we all know that there isn't a sunny place for everyone, while in the surface we pretend we can do it like the Baby Boomers. Making people SJWing around dog rape is a dummy load that keep them from demanding structural changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am slightly cautious that this hoax is itself a hoax and no actual hoax papers were published by actual academic journals.

<comment><USER5> Unless you don't consider "Gender, Place & Culture" an actual academic journal, it did happen:

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2018.14...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender,_Place_%26_Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender,_Place_%26_Culture)

<comment><USER21> Just as a comparison for folks - Gender, Place and Culture's impact factor is about 1.

Nature, one of the most impactful, is 40.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think anyone that was triggered by this experiment has self-identified themselves as part of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> Let us see some absolute gibberish paper get published in a solid SCIENCE journal (e.g. Impact Factor > 5) before we all go "PEER REVIEW IS BROKEN ARGHH!!"

</comment><comment><USER24> Relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/451/](https://xkcd.com/451/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I think there is a real disconnect between what peer review is and what the public seems to think peer review is.

The public seems to think that peer review indicates that something is true, but that's clearly not the case because we have no way of verifying any of the data used, etc.

The paper that got published in a top journal "Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon", while silly, doesn't seem like it has to be rejected if it were an honest paper that actually did the experiments they said they did. It seems no more silly than the lobster nonsense Jordan Peterson peddles and conservatives eat up. I don't personally think it's a useful paper, but most individual papers rarely are, even in CS.

<comment><USER26> The methodology section of the article says that one person spent almost an entire year sitting in a dog park for up to seven hours a day (for a total of 1,000 hours). During this time, that person allegedly inspected up to 10,000 dog genitalia, or approximately one every six minutes. Even if the alleged institution was real (which it wasn't - they didn't even put up a website until after the article was submitted), the author had valid credentials (which they didn't), or someone knew of them personally (academia is a small world) there were enough red flags that the reviewers should have questioned the article's validity.

<comment><USER25> > Even if the alleged institution was real (which it wasn't - they didn't even > put up a website until after the article was submitted), the author had > valid credentials (which they didn't), or someone knew of them personally > (academia is a small world)

Not sure about these journals, but a lot of peer review is blind, so the reviewers do not have access to any of this information intentionally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there a full list of journals that published these?

This sort of hoax seems to happen every few years, but often to journals that will explicitly accept anything and let anyone who wants to give a talk, so long as it's related to the journal's mission (which means there's nothing alarmist about it).</comment>


Intwition - A new Twitter app that lets you see whose linking to your site on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://intwition.com Put this together over the last few days.  Let me know what you think! <comment><AUTHOR> Let me know what you guys think!

<comment><USER2> Clever name.</comment></comment>


PeixeUrbano Keeps Beating Groupon and Holds Leadership of the Brazilian Market - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pinggers.com/2011/09/peixeurbano-keeps-the-leadership-of-the-brazilian-market/

<comment><AUTHOR> This proofs that regardless of how effective the daily deals model can be, it is still important to know each country's culture in order to successfully sell deals to its people and be a front runner in that market.</comment>


How To Fail A PCI Audit - <AUTHOR> http://www.darkreading.com/security/news/240004877/10-ways-to-fail-a-pci-audit.html <comment><USER2> How to not fail a "multi-page click-through" article: [http://www.darkreading.com/taxonomy/index/printarticle/id/24...](http://www.darkreading.com/taxonomy/index/printarticle/id/240004877)

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's not forget, most of the large credit card hacks over the last years happen to merchants who are either PCI compliant, or to processors themselves. PCI is not what it's cracked up to be aside from being a pita.</comment>


Facebook's iPad App Has Been Done Since May, But They Won't Release It - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/26/facebook-ipad-app-saga/ <comment><USER2> I want to clarify here that feature complete and "done" are two different things. The app was not finished when it leaked and is still actively being worked on.

I also really want to emphasize that my time at Facebook was incredible and my reasons for moving on were remarkably complex, none having to do with any dislike for Facebook or ill feelings. The number of hours I put into the project were out of genuine passion for the product, not because anyone was forcing me to do so.

<comment><USER3> How is this going to affect Three20 or your work on Nimbus? I'm really looking forward to seeing Nimbus develop as I've been fairly frustrated with Three20 so far. Best of luck on the new job and thank you for your contributions to the iOS community.

<comment><USER2> Three20 is mostly in a bug-fixes only state right now. The fact is that the framework is complex enough that the cost of adding a new feature often outweighs the benefit. This is the main reason why I've decided to start anew with Nimbus and so far the progress has been really great.

Going forward I'm planning to dedicate a chunk of my mornings to working on Nimbus, splitting my time between going over pull requests and building new features. I love building tools to accelerate the development process of other iOS developers and plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER3> I'm definitely watching it and hope I can contribute in some way to the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The lack of a Facebook app for the iPhone hurts Apple more than it hurts Facebook, in my opinion. Facebook has a near-monopoly in feature-rich social networks (yes, the specifier was inserted to discount Twitter, but I believe Twitter has a very different market/userbase from Facebook and isn't in direct competition; I'd be happy to argue about it) and its most threatening competitor, Google+, probably isn't going to have a native app for iOS anytime soon.

In addition, a native app will make it actually harder for users to run Facebook apps; apps that require micropayments will be especially problematic within Apple's framework.

Is the user goodwill from releasing an iPad app worth potentially driving users away from Facebook apps? Probably not. Apple, on the other hand, lives and dies by user experience.

</comment><comment><USER5> Techcrunch seems to relish in taking a little bit of fact and embellishing it with enough drama and politics. Now when the developer in question tries to correct it he looks like he was pressured into backing off.

Facebook's iOS app has been buggy for some time. There's no reason to justify a delay unless Apple blocks them so it's plausible that management is interfering in some way.

<comment><USER6> > Techcrunch seems to relish in taking a little bit of fact and embellishing > it with enough drama and politics

Welcome to the press...

And I agree, Facebook's app is bloody awful. Crashes randomly, sometimes doesn't load for unspecified reasons, and it randomly logs me out and forces me to log back in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Normally I don't think companies should focus on making tablet specific versions of their site (normal desktop pages work just fine), but Facebook relies too heavily on Javascript for the limited power of today's tablets.

Edit: I have an iPad version 1

<comment><USER8> Huh? Fb works just fine in my iPad browser (except for the flash games, but that's not related to java script).

<comment><USER7> The AJAX content loads were slow, the action buttons were too small and easy to hit by mistake, and I don't recall pinching and zooming being smooth either.

<comment><USER8> I have a iPad 2, maybe that does the speed difference, I don't have speed issues and pinch to zoom is smooth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For any UW students out there he's from University of Waterloo Velocity.

</comment><comment><USER10> From the article:

"The Facebook iPhone app is the most downloaded app of all time."

Is this really true? I don't recall seeing it at the top of the charts.

<comment><USER11> It's rarely at #1, but it has been a permanent fixture in the top 20, while most other apps are only on the chart for a short time. That adds up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is Facebook's plan for credits? I rarely even remember that they're there. Does anyone use them?

</comment><comment><USER13> Definitely just waiting until iOS5...

</comment><comment><USER14> Facebook's new corporate statement should be "Let's be evil".</comment>


News.ycers in San Francisco! Want to try out Xobni? - <AUTHOR>

Over the next few days, we are looking for Outlook users who are interested in trying out Xobni.  Our software will bring you email happiness.  An NDA is required, we'll pay for your cab ($30 cash), and we'll give you a beer during install.
Please bring a machine with Outlook! We have monitors if you need them for a desktop.
Our office is at 211 Sutter St; San Francisco.  Please e-mail email@example.com if you'd like to come! <comment><USER2> :(

1) Don't live in San Francisco.

2) You couldn't pay me to use Outlook.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Bummer. We'll be available for you soon enough, I hear the Internets go outside SF. :)

2) Lots of people are paid to use Outlook, and we know a lot of them hate it. We want to brighten their day first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I look forward to Xobni's offerings I wonder how many new.ycers use outlook...

<comment><USER4> Probably quite a few... they might not like it, but many are still forced to use it because of their work...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love it how the initial knee-jerk reaction is "BOO OUTLOOK!!1"

I see these kinds of comments and I now see the market opportunity for Xobni.

</comment><comment><USER6> Up modded for beer.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow - I'm there except I finally gave up Outlook for google apps and gmail a month or so ago - bummer. (It's been great not having to use Outlook though)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm interested... I actually uses outlook quite heavily (I'm not proud of it... but it gets the job done... :P) so I'd love to see what xobni can do...

</comment><comment><USER8> This is odd. I thought most people did not use Outlook.

Even Paul G. says that everyone uses Macs these days?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to go, you guys are just a few streets away from where I live!

But can you accept mutt as a mail client? :P

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to give it a try... unfortunately, I am down near Santa Barbara. Maybe the next time I am in the bay area (I visit often).

webmaster -at- michaelwales -dot- com

PS: I'm an Outlook user (2K7).

<comment><USER2> OT, but do you really think you'll avoid spammers with cutesy things like "address at domain dot com"? Googling for "(star) (star)at(star) (star) (star)dot(star) com" returns addresses like rasterman |at| rasterman |dot| com, dane AT abetterplacetowork DOT com, and other silly variations that are actually easy to deal with.

Spammers know enough Perl to split by spaces and strip non-alpha characters or whatever you'd need to do to get most of those addresses.

<comment><USER11> Does spam bother people still? I get 150 spam emails a day. But maybe 1 of them gets by Gmail. Even if you use Outlook, why not have your mail routed through a free GMail account first?

<comment><USER2> Filters are part of the solution, but you have to remember that spam is a low- grade denial of service attack. It hurts the Internet.

<comment><USER12> Yeah all you New.YC's that send spam! Stop it! You're hurting the internets!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just got back from xobni. The product looks great and the they guys were great to talk to. I can't wait till it gets released and IC an use it on my own PC at home :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's cool stuff... definitely worth it if you're an Outlook user.

(I wasn't even paid to write this comment!)

</comment><comment><USER15> Will the tools be available for Outlook/Exchange WebMail? I'm forced to use it today.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm moving to the area in a week, so I'd love to, but I also don't use outlook.</comment>


A sustainable start-up - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/06/management

<comment><USER2> I guess the european definition of a startup is different that the american one.

European startup : able to buy back shares, carefully select employees, refuse 8 digits funding because it doesn't want to go public, rent a country house so that the funders can keep working in this ambiance.

American east-cost startup : cries for funding, hires like crazy wishes to sell and go public ASAP so that the funders can no longer work.

I don't know, maybe it's partial, but these remark aside, I'd guess the european startup might be able to do this because it's profitable, which is the #1 thing. Everything else is eye candy.

<comment><USER3> I guess making broad generalizations from one article is kind of useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm... I wonder if there'd be people in the US willing to relocate to the middle of nowhere for a job that promised some good perks plus an extremely comfortable wage relative to cost of living (but not necessarily any larger than in San Fran or something).

I do kinda think that having a tech company set in the middle of some rustic mountains or something has a sort of crazy "code from an adirondack chair" appeal.

I'm not sure _I_ would, personally though. I enjoy living in urban areas a little too much.

<comment><USER5> There are advantages and disadvantages. (I live and work in the Sierra foothills, I've organized a local group of fellow hackers, I've been working on building a startup community here.)

For me, the foremost advantage has to be lack of traffic. Nearly all of the essentials here are a 5 minute drive or less. The traffic flows well. The locals complain about a "traffic jam" somewhere if they have to wait in line at an intersection for more than thirty seconds. It seems like a silly, minor thing, until you've lived here for a while and then go back to southern California or the Bay Area for a bit.

It's fairly peaceful here. You can get a beautiful home, with no neighbors in sight, surrounded by trees and tranquility, for a fraction of the cost of such a thing elsewhere. This has a huge effect on stress. I live "downtown" \-- literally a stone's throw from main street -- and I can still sit in my backyard and code in the sunshine and have it be fairly quiet and distraction- free.

There are farmers' markets and lots of other great community events. There's a sense of community, overall, that isn't really present in metropolitan areas.

It's 45 minutes from one of the Pacific Crest trailheads, if you need to get away. Or, drive for 20 minutes to one of the local rivers and relax in the water for a bit.

There are downsides though. There's a perception that there just isn't any talent here, and that makes some things difficult. There is talent, but not in the quantity you'd find in Palo Alto or Chicago or New York. We recently had an incubator / funding group meeting, where a member related that an investor told them directly that he'd never fund anything from our area code.

Some of the residents are a little ... odd. That's the case everywhere, but they're a little more noticeable here. They write lots of letters to the local newspaper. Our regional Craigslist is embarrassing.

We have some fantastic people that work hard on bringing culture to our area. We've had some big names performing at the hall across the street from my house. Bill Cosby, this week. A couple of really good theater companies. A local top-notch juggling club. Ultimate frisbee. We're one of the top downhill mountain bike destinations in the world (supposedly). We've got a great concert group that brings in talent from around the world. (I got to see violinist Stefan Jackiw play, it was indescribably beautiful.) Still, we're a bit short on "culture" \-- art museums, ballet, clubs, that sort of thing.

Overall, I much prefer it to urban living. But, it lacks the image and style associated with the hubs of activity in metropolitan areas, so I expect it's difficult to convince people to move.

If anyone's interested in re-locating to about an hour from Sacramento, please feel free to contact me. I'm close to a number of local business groups, and I've just started building a partnership with a nearby capital network. I've been here for long enough now to know where a lot of great stuff is. I'd be happy to give you a tour and some introductions.

<comment><USER6> Know anyone who needs an iOS developer in Tahoe?

<comment><USER5> I can check, I have a couple of contacts in that area. Send me your contact info (my email's in my profile).

edit: Sorry, misread that as Truckee for some reason. If Truckee's OK with you, offer still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like a great company, but I think that in the VC-funded US startup ecosystem, this would be negatively described as a "lifestyle business".

Which is sad, because I would love to build a business like this. However I think it has become exceedingly difficult to build such businesses and compete effectively in any industry with VC-funded competitors.

<comment><USER8> I've seen this come up before and I wonder, why do lifestyle businesses have such a negative connotation? It seems like building these sort of sustainable businesses would be a lot more appealing to most people (or at least to me) rather than the VC-funded/start-up lottery approach you refer to in the US.

<comment><USER7> For some people, working at a startup is synonymous to working crazy hours for a few years and getting a big payout in the end. This is the compressed schedule that PG talks about in his essay. In such startups, there are multiple people (including non-founders) who take part in reaping the benefits of the startup's exit. Because everyone gets some benefit, you have the ability to attract better quality talent.

In a lifestyle business, there is the viewpoint where a non-founder is effectively working to support a founder's lifestyle. There is no promise of a good payout and at best, only a steady income with a predictable workload. For some individuals, this feels undesirable since you may end up with a less passionate, lower talent workforce due to the incentives you are offering. Also if the market opportunity grows at any point, you aren't well equipped to take advantage and you can easily get overtaken by a more mobilized, funded competitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> excellent job!

Afaik United Internet / 1&1 — the company they had a bad marriage with — still uses the original code and makes a lot of money with it.

Personally, I would not approach 1&1 with any idea after reading that story.

</comment><comment><USER10> > "The decision to buy back shares was really to keep our people on board"

So are these guys really still a startup? Once you hit profit and pay off your debts it's a little strange to continue calling yourself a startup.

<comment><USER11> A startup is a company meant to grow quickly. They grew, _quickly_. From 2011 to 70 employees and turning down 8 digit figures? I consider them a startup, they scaled very fast.</comment></comment>


Motorola patented a display that can heal its own cracked screen with heat - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/8/16/16156558/motorola-thermal-heating-patent-cracked-screen <comment><USER2> Title needs to be changed. This is __not __a patent. It is a publication of a __patent application __.

See the linked pdf: "Patent __Application __Publication "</comment>


6 Reasons Not to Build a Team Before Building a MVP - <AUTHOR> http://brainhub.eu/blog/2016/02/09/6-reasons-not-to-build-team-before-building-mvp/ <comment><USER2> This may be true for a very broad definition of MVP. Specifically the "product" part.

Could be re-written as "6 Reasons to Validate Your Idea Before Building an MVP"</comment>


Piston Cloud's Awesome Team Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.pistoncloud.com/company/team/

<comment><USER2> If Quentin Tarantino is surfing HN, he needs to contact these guys right now.</comment>


Mixing 64-bit and 32-bit code in the same process - <AUTHOR> http://www.tingiant.com/blog/2012/05/21/64-and-32bit-code-in-the-same-process/

<comment><USER2> Great exploration!</comment>


Go and a not tiny amount of memory - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/go-and-a-not-tiny-amount-of-memory-a7a9430d4d22 <comment><USER2> I wonder if libraries such as freecache[1] and bigcache[2] wouldn't offer a better solution for this use case.

[1] [https://github.com/coocood/freecache](https://github.com/coocood/freecache) [2] [https://github.com/allegro/bigcache](https://github.com/allegro/bigcache)

</comment><comment><USER3> Every time I read one of these it's like watching someone in college learn about databases, but it's actually a company.

<comment><USER4> Regardless of how wrong or ignorant someone is, please don't be a jerk in comments here. That's far worse in its systemic effect on the site. It looks like the entire thread needs to learn this.

If someone is wrong or ignorant, teach them something. Then we all learn. Alternatively, it's fine not to comment.

<comment><USER3> Uh. I never said anyone or anything was wrong or ignorant. My comment was a meta comment; there's nothing to teach.

<comment><USER4> Maybe I misunderstood you, but to me it read like a putdown. Snarky putdowns are the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here, especially when the putdown is apparently for lack of knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So you use a GC and have occasional CPU usage spikes. You correctly identify the cause. You then use "unsafe" code to go behind the GC's back and build some stuff which probably has crash bugs or worse, and by your analysis solves a problem which was not significant.

I shouldn't be surprised. The red flag was flying as soon as IOP was used in singular form.

Input/Output Operations Per.

<comment><USER6> > I shouldn't be surprised. The red flag was flying as soon as IOP was used in > singular form.

> Input/Output Per.

IOPS can also be "I/O operations per second" and in that context "1 IOP" is a meaningful quantity.

Particularly when AWS and other cloud providers sell capacity in units of IOPS: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs- io-c...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-io- characteristics.html)</comment></comment>


J Allard's resignation message to Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/j-allards-goodbye-note-no-chairs-were-thrown/6334

<comment><USER2> A kind of trivial comment, but: do people at Microsoft really call it The Tribe?</comment>


A blazingly fast mobile and desktop browser based HTML5 game framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gamelab/kiwi.js

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting, but raises some questions:

1\. What is "blazingly fast"?

2\. Is it just WebGL rendering that is "fast" or e.g. physics is also "fast"?

3\. Which target platforms are _practically_ supported _today_?

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks great for casual games!</comment>


Ask HN:Can you master AngularJS without prior Javascript experience? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently studying "Javascript:The Good Parts" and was wondering if I would do just fine by jumping into AngularJS. <comment><USER2> I agree with Dimitris: you'll be fine with basic JS knowledge. Although I would describe the AngularJS learning curve as Ben Nadel puts it in his blog =) (which by the way is a great resource for learning a bit more advanced AngularJS) [http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2439-My-Experience-With- Angular...](http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2439-My-Experience-With-AngularJS- The-Super-heroic-JavaScript-MVW-Framework.htm)

I can also recommend the screencasts at [http://egghead.io/lessons](http://egghead.io/lessons) to get a hang of the basic AngularJS concepts (site seems somewhat broken now however...)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have basic understanding of JS, I think you will be fine. The learning curve for AngularJS is steep so you are going to spend a lot of time going over new material.

As soon as you are able to write a basic program in JS then jump right to AngularJS.

Tkae a look at this book as well. [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596805531.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596805531.do) It's really helpful.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would recommend: [http://www.packtpub.com/angularjs-web-application- developmen...](http://www.packtpub.com/angularjs-web-application- development/book), You may have to read several times over but it is a good guide for a real Angular application. And, yes jump into making a real application with Angular, you won't regret :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I would recommend Eloquent Javascript[1] over Javascript: The Good Parts.

[1]: eloquentjavascript.net/contents.html</comment>


A Skeleton, a Catholic Relic, and a Mystery About American Origins - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/07/a-skeleton-a-catholic-relic-and-a-mystery-about-americas-origins/399743/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970033)</comment>


Show HN: I made a site that highlights makers who build with Django - <AUTHOR> https://builtwithdjango.com <comment><USER2> I do really like your idea to make a Django base, it may be very useful for someone who just started to work with this platform, and I've found it's really pretty how you've designed the page, because it looks simple, clear and organized.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great stuff, looks very nice and good addition to the django community.</comment>


Why is distributing a react component so hard? - <AUTHOR>

Things were so swell. I built a react.js component, I was so chuffed. I even put a gif on the readme https://github.com/jarsbe/react-polyselect.
I wanted to share my work for others to use (including myself). A simple request right? I remember the days (I'm so old) when I could make a jQuery plugin, and use it in my project by adding a script tag. It was easy.
We seem to have believe now that those methods are a childish way to build a project. You should use a JS tooling system in order to concat, minify, transpile, compile and require. Oh and configure. Configure, configure, configure.
I've spent more time working with these tool chain than working on my component. It shouldn't be like that.
Why is it harder now to share code than when jQuery plugins were popular? Shouldn't it be easier now than ever?
I don't have answers - I'm simply good at complaining! But I can clearly see that without a simple and easy way to share and use code we are being inefficient. I'm a programmer. I don't like being inefficient.
So please, I beg of you, don't make me spend hours lurking on irc channels, nagging for answers or rummaging through github projects in order for me to share my work! Instead enlighten me with an answer to this small question - how can I distribute my component? <comment><USER2> From my little search, it seems like all you need to do is include your component to the project folder and then "require()" it. Seems straightforward enough - same as with any other node modules.

You can also upload your component to the npm, so that other could use it. By adding "react-component" keyowrd to the description on npm, your component should be available at [http://react-components.com/](http://react- components.com/).

If you want to use in on the frontend right away, then maybe write it in AMD format, so that you could load it via require.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's that part at the end there - "write it in AMD format, so that you could load it via require.js" \- it just isn't straightforward. Why can I not just use it as is?

I know I'm being a bit silly silly here but it seems awfully difficult to get started. Too difficult if you ask me. Am I missing something fundamental?

I can certainly get there in the end but there are a lot of configuration tasks to get there.

<comment><USER2> Checked some of the available components and it seems like it should be possible to "just include" .js with the component and use in in the app. Not the best way to go about it as it is not that good of a practice, but possible nevertheless.

This is all about modules. It is a good programming practice to turn piece of code that can be used in multiple projects into the module, so that it is easier to load them up in the next project.

You can check node.js docs on the example of modules and how your code should work so: [http://nodejs.org/api/modules.html](http://nodejs.org/api/modules.html)

In node.js it is trivial - just like loading external modules in python (if you ever worked with it).

RequireJS is a tough nut, I give you that. That's mainly because of the asynchronous nature of the script loading on the web. Can't really recommend anything on the topic. I myself spent quite some time before it clicked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the advice. I will forge on as I suppose that is the only option!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Major challenges in recruitment? - <AUTHOR>

Hey Everyone!
Currently working on a job board concept that aim to simply recruitment with extremely well organized niche websites. I know Revolutionizing Recruitment is quite a challenge that many tried to achieve but failed. I am willing to take on  that challenge.
I did some recruitment in the past: the posting part on behalf of my HR and interviewing, etc, mostly construction related as well as in IT. Also dealt with headhunters. Recruiting very specialized candidate can take weeks if not more.
From what I've seen, believe or not, hiring can get quite messy (specially for startups or small businesses).
Beside a simple and straight-forward design and UI, I was thinking of pre-populating the job description for particular position (based on the box you check) and more features that aim to help you gain time when recruiting.
As a recruiter, what are the major challenges that you would like (us) to resolve? I would love to have the prospective job-seeker answer this question as well: What is you main pain when trying to look for a job?
Note: I do not intend to store candidates data on our databases.
Also partnerships are always welcome. The sites will be released by the end of September.
Thanks for your feedback! <comment><USER2> The more I think about it, the more I think the challenges of recruiting are pretty close to identical to those of online dating.

If I were going to do anything in the "revolutionizing recruitment" arena, I'd be looking to folks like OKCupid for inspiration and ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> Many have tried. It's hard to succeed. The guys at startuply seemed to manage to find a niche that works for them. Good luck.</comment>