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Thoughts on making regexs easier to read - fogus
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ComposedRegex.html
======
FluidDjango
I'd appreciate it if tutorials on regex would use such methods.
Sorry, but it still hurts this noob's brain to try to decipher (let alone
write) regex. ...and I feel really bad about "cookbooking" by cutting and
pasting someone else's regex solution (even just for checking validity of an
email address) without making sure it makes sense to me.
------
skwaddar
The easiest way to read regexs is to learn the syntax!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Pantsuit: The Hillary Clinton UI Pattern Library - blopeur
https://medium.com/git-out-the-vote/pantsuit-the-hillary-clinton-ui-pattern-library-238e9bf06b54#.n7xkkz4nq
======
jonathanyc
I thought this would be more interesting. But really it is just a template for
Hillary Clinton's campaign website -- nothing novel about the design or
approach.
------
technimad
Somehow, based on the link title, I expected to find a library of UI elements
based on Hillarys _actual_ pants.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
French Entrepreneurs: Apply by Midnight and Join Silicon Valley's Incubator - alain94040
http://founderinstitute.com/apply/paris
======
matthieulefort
Best experience ever! You guys should give it a try, it's worth it!
If you want more insights, read this Quora thread: [http://www.quora.com/Is-
Founder-Institute-a-good-deal-for-en...](http://www.quora.com/Is-Founder-
Institute-a-good-deal-for-entrepreneurs-Why-or-why-not)
------
myqaa
Just do it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Database for sports betting lines and results - pjharrin
Are there any databases that have where betting lines started, where they ended and the result of the match? I'm interested in doing some analysis on it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
======
kineticac
That kind of data may be hard to find for free, at least in a nicely
digestible way. At FanPulse, we pay for a feed of stats, which includes live
stats as well as historic data as well. These stats providers keep their info
tightly cutoff from non-paying clients. I wonder where else you could find it.
Some stats providers we know include: xmlteam and sportsdirectinc.com
------
coryl
Best I know of is bestfightodds.com for MMA betting, they record changes in
the lines from start to fight time. Not exactly open for use though, may have
to contact/friendly up some.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is TypeScript really that productive? - prmph
Been using TypeScript for a while now. While the concept is excellent, the implementation in various IDEs and release process seems very much to work against really getting work done.<p>On my machine, the tsc compiler seems to use a different version from the one in VS Code, because I see highlighted errors in the editor that do no show up when I actually compile, and vice versa. I cant even find an easy way to know the version of TS that the VS Code editor is using.<p>Also, there seems to be a thousand different ways to reference and/or import other modules, and they vary with each version, such that I'm never sure. Implicit referencing sometimes works, sometimes does not.<p>Why Typescript can only compile .ts files is beyond me.<p>As usual, Microsoft is long on ideas, and short on execution. Until they fix the tooling issues, I think I will just say no.
======
jmlee2k
\- You can see which version of typescript is being used in VS Code in the
bottom-right corner while a typescript file is open.
\- It does take a lot of time to get a TS environment setup, but I have to
agree with the previous commenter, the benefits are completely worth it. This
is just my opinion of course, but it's allowed me to finally treat JS as a
development option.
~~~
prmph
> You can see which version of typescript is being used in VS Code in the
> bottom-right corner while a typescript file is open.
No, you can't, and I have the latest version of VS Code (I can link to a
screenshot if needed). This illustrates the confusion around the tooling. Many
TypeScript answers on SO do not even work with the latest versions of the
tools
~~~
jmlee2k
That's very odd. I'm quite new to VS Code, so this could be confusion on my
part. I am running on the latest TS (typescript@beta and typescript@next
before that), so perhaps that's why I see the version number.
------
mattmazzola
There seem to be two different questions in your post.
1: Is TypeScript really that productive? Yes, absolutely. Intellisense, Go to
definition, and compile time errors greatly increase productivity.
My opinion is that if you're working on a brand new project that has small
code base you probably won't see much benefit from TypeScript. You would
already know every function signature and connection between logical layers
because you wrote all the code and it's small enough to keep all this in your
head. However, if you start working on larger projects or get handed a new
library / framework and you need to quickly ramp up on how to use it, the
features I listed above basically mean the code is self-documenting (you no
longer have to go to the API/docs website because the code is fully typed) and
this forces you to learn how to use the new code correctly and with a short
feedback loop because there are compile time errors.
2\. Does TypeScript currently have a higher barrier to entry? Yes, absolutely.
Although it's getting significantly better with every release and the next
version which allows customizing module resolution and more flexibility for
location type definitions through npm will help this significantly.
More detail on your other points: "tsc compiler seems to use a different
version from the one in VS Code" VS Code should be using the local version
installed in your project or the one located globally.
"I cant even find an easy way to know the version of TS that the VS Code
editor is using" You should be able to see the version by typing `tsc -v`
"I see highlighted errors in the editor that do no show up when I actually
compile" There's not enough information to know how you're compiling the code
outside of VS Code, so I can't say for sure, but it would be recommended to
setup a tsconfig.json file in your project (which is just json representation
of the command line options you can pass to tsc) and then a basic setup would
use `tsc -p .` to compile using this configuration in the current directory.
You can always extend with gulp webpack ect..
"Why Typescript can only compile .ts files is beyond me." I believe there is a
newer "allowJs" option that does support something like this. I believe it
uses JSDoc comments as substitutes for types and allows you all the benefits
of TypeScript for libraries without .d.ts files if they have thorough JSDoc
comments, but I haven't experimented with this myself.
In most cases you can just declare a module as "any".
"there seems to be a thousand different ways to reference and/or import other
modules" I would agree this has been a problem. For me the confusing came from
typescript having introduced 'module' keyword before es6 modules were
standardized. Avoid using 'module' keyword and use ES6 style modules. If you
really must you can use namespaces but there are often better ways to
restructure files for same effect.
Also, avoid using /// <reference path="path/to/lib/index.d.ts" /> and use
typings tool instead.
Lastly, there are some libraries which don't have correct type information and
have to be imported like this:
import foo = require('foo');
which is a combination of es6 and commonjs formats, this caused me much
confusiong as well, but from my understanding it's a necessary workaround to
allow people to use those libraries TypeScript. IMO, avoid this syntax
whenever possible.
"Until they fix the tooling issues, I think I will just say no" You're not
alone with this opinion, TypeScripot definitly has more things to learn to get
it setup and it's own set of frustrations, but at least you can know they are
working on it and hopefully if you look back in few months the ecosystem will
be ready for you.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
It’s Unreal Just How Awful ‘Real ID’ Is - klenwell
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/02/11/real-id-is-awful/ideas/connecting-california/
======
JohnFen
Avoiding a Real ID is a great idea if you don't have to fly. If you do,
though, it's a nonstarter. I'll have to investigate how feasible it is to take
alternate forms of transportation for business trip...
~~~
angryasian
use your passport. I personally won't opt in to a real id unless needed.
~~~
JohnFen
That would work if I had a passport...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why I Left My Big Fancy Tech Job and Wrote a Book - arkades
https://medium.com/s/the-big-disruption/why-i-left-my-big-fancy-tech-job-and-wrote-a-book-b64c40484774
======
yosefzeev
The thing this article highlights is that in order to HAVE a voice that also
allows one to write a book with perceived value is that it better conform to a
"sex club" mentality or else you better write under a pseudonym. And really,
this is all just a coded way of expressing a dimension of the same problem--
unless you are directly supporting the "Whore of Babylon" your voice and ideas
don't matter.
------
schizoidboy
I'm surprised this didn't get more upvotes. Sure, there's some blatant and
repetitive self-promotion, but it could start some great threads of
discussion. I guess HN has gotten so big that some important articles are
falling through the cracks.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Britain’s Oxygen Accelerator Hopes To Breathe Life Into Startups - kanny96
http://gigaom.com/2011/05/09/britain’s-oxygen-accelerator-hopes-to-breathe-life-into-startups/
======
hugh3
I learned something today. I learned that Birmingham was Britain's second-
largest city.
Anyway, best of luck to these dudes. There's certainly more than enough
success to go around. Why Birmingham? Why not?
PS. Is there a YC-clone in Australia yet? Does anyone want to lend me a couple
of million to start one? :)
~~~
JacobAldridge
Startmate launched not that long ago - I'm out of the Aus scene these days, so
not sure how it's going. I reckon you need the mentors more than the millions
- and indeed, if you could get the mentors then the money would likely follow
from somewhere.
I'm off to Birmingham for a weekend at the end of this month. I shall now
delight in knowing that it's the size of ... Brisbane.
~~~
hartror
Yeah they have done their first round of companies. A friend did it and it
seems they got a fair bit out of it. Only time shall tell if it was truly
worth it for them or not.
<http://www.startmate.com.au/>
------
dmix
20k _loan_ for 6% and the founder has no software experience?
Doesn't sound that appealing to be honest.
~~~
fredoliveira
I hate a me-too comment just as much as everyone else, but people need to read
this before getting tricked (perhaps not on purpose, but by not noticing it's
a _loan_ they're getting into). I know these guys want to help as many
companies as they can (actually, i _hope_ that's the reason), but 6% for a
loan sounds like a bad deal unless the mentorship/advice/connections they're
getting it are _extremely_ valuable.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Redditor's solid explanation of memes and anti-meme behavior - mkr-hn
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1arq1y/til_that_when_the_store_hot_topic_attempted_to/c90cj68
======
sophacles
I believe this is a large component of it. However, I think there is also a
certain amount of response in the form of:
"We made this and shared this, why are you getting paid for it?" Which is
different than the tribal notions. Basically if someone is going to profit
from my free work, from my community, why shouldn't they at least offer me a
cut? It is not a case of legal requirement, it is a case of decency. Something
is built on sharing, then someone else decides to make a profit - without
sharing that - goes against the grain of the idea to begin with.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Symbolics.com, the first registered domain name, has been sold to a link farm. - asciilifeform
http://symbolics.com/
======
icey
Don't encourage them by linking to them.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bootstrap Editable Grid - DaveJn
http://www.prepbootstrap.com/bootstrap-template/bootstrap-editable-grid
======
antman
tried on mobile, the header scrolls horizontally independently from the cells
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What happens when you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator - mpweiher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFJUYFlSYsM
======
stevesimmons
My mother, a statistician, used a motorised mechanical calculator at the UK's
Royal Aircraft Establishment around 1965.
She used to say if you accidentally divided by zero, it jammed itself and you
had to call a repairman...
------
HocusLocus
I once did something like this once on a mechanical Olivetti... only it was a
million times a million.
Not even unplugging it would reset the mechanism. We had to open it and find
and pull a master release bar, forcing it to end calculation and print a
partial answer.
------
takeda
Perpetum Mobile ;)
------
ohiovr
Captian Kirk would be proud.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Traffic Cop’s Ticket Bonanza in a Poor Texas Town - colinprince
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexcampbell/the-ticket-machine#.akZrRROqd
======
warmwaffles
> Councilman Felix Barker pointed out that the extra cash the city had brought
> in far exceeded the cost of jailing all those people. “We increased the
> profits,” he said.
Uh, that's not what police are supposed to be. They are not supposed to be a
revenue source.
> “You have a heart and you feel for those people,” he said. “The judge could
> charge a dollar. I don’t care.”
Except he can't, there are minimum fines and they will only go down to that
level. Other times it could be a dismissal fee, but other than that, no.
~~~
tfinniga
Reminds me of this article about the link between excessive policing of
traffic offenses, police as a profit center, and getting a huge chunk of your
budget from your poorest citizens:
[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-
shootings...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-
traffic-stops-excessive-fines)
Once you lose sight of 'Protect and serve', things can go very wrong.
~~~
Aloha
It really depends on the nature of the fines levied, on its face, you'd not
convince me that speed enforcement alone is disproportionately levied on the
poor.
There is another class of fines, like Failure to Appear, fix it tickets
resulting in a warrant (warrants shouldn't be issued for non-moving violations
ever), unable to provide proof of insurance, and failure to pay fines - that
are very likely levied excessively on the poor.
------
whack
The real problem is not with the cops doing their jobs and enforcing the law.
The real problem is that the laws are so dysfunctional to begin with. For
decades, stupid laws were patched up by a police system that simply chose not
to enforce them widely. This is of course as ugly a "hack" as you can possibly
get. People lose respect for the laws, and it gives the police immense
discretionary power that they can wield on the basis of their subjective
whims. But the system chugged along like a 20 year old computer valiantly
running Windows 95... until one day, a cop shows up who decides that his job
is to enforce the law, and that's when the sheets come off and people realize
just how stupid the laws really are.
If you find yourself shaking your head when reading the article, and are
looking for someone to blame, don't blame the cops. Don't blame the police
commissioner. They are simply doing their jobs, and that's a good thing. Blame
your lawmakers for writing into law, or not repealing, absolutely idiotic
laws. This problem does indeed need to be fixed, and we need to fix it by
actually changing the law so that it makes sense.
1) The speed limit should be set at a level that people are actually expected
to follow. If you don't mind people driving 70mph on the freeways, change the
speed limit to 70.
2) Traffic fines are not meant to be a revenue source for the government. They
are meant to be a form of punitive punishment and deterrent. A $400 fine is
overly punitive for an unemployed person, but it's also too lenient for a
millionaire. If the goal is for the fine to be punitive, it needs to be
indexed to the person's income.
3) People shouldn't have to leave their jobs and go to court, and sit around
for hours, just to have 5 minutes in front of a judge to ask for a payment
plan. This sort of thing should be completely automated and doable online.
Judge appearances should be reserved for special cases, not for rubber
stamping.
The sooner the police start enforcing the laws strictly, the sooner people
will realize how broken the laws are, and the sooner we can get to making real
fixes like described above.
------
bryanlarsen
Traffic fines are set high based on the assumption that enforcement will be
light. The canonical example is a $500 fine for littering. Because your
chances of getting caught are so low, a high fine is needed to provide an
incentive. If your chances of getting caught were 100%, a $5 fine would
probably be sufficient.
If you're going to increase enforcement you should probably lower the fines.
~~~
Aloha
I'd have no problem with aggressive enforcement so long as the fines and
consequences were light - as you noted, both the fine structure and the way
external agencies (insurance companies for one) treat moving violations assume
for light enforcement
------
overdrivetg
I'm curious how is it legal to pull over a vehicle based on the license plate
without knowing who is actually driving the car?
On a related note, my driving school teacher told us if we're married register
your spouse's car in your name and _your_ car in theirs.
The logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against
them if you ever get a red light/speeding or other automated ticket in the
mail, and it seems like a good defense for these kind of plate-reader
shenanigans as well - unless you are both wanted scofflaws, of course.
~~~
DrScump
<the logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against
them>
In certain limited circumstances, a spouse cannot be _compelled_ to testify
against a spouse... but in what jurisdiction are witnesses being called by the
prosecution for traffic infractions in the first place??
~~~
overdrivetg
As he explained it, they will only dismiss the ticket against you (the
registered owner receiving the ticket in the mail) if you identify the actual
driver - so _you_ have to go in and roll over on the driver if you want to get
out of the ticket.
But if the driver is your spouse you can invoke spousal privilege and you both
get off, IIRC. I'm not sure of the legal convolutions that lets you say "I
can't identify that person due to spousal privilege" and _not_ identify that
person as your spouse but there it is.
------
jfoutz
Don't let the buzzfeed source put you off of the article, it's pretty good.
I really like the day fine idea, seems like it would lessen the incentive to
ticket to generate lots of revenue. An obvious fix for the overworked courts
is simply bring in a pay stub or tax return. If you don't you get the max
fine. (Perhaps a week or two to bring in the documentation and revise the fine
down)
~~~
fr0sty
>seems like it would lessen the incentive to ticket to generate lots of
revenue.
That still doesn't align the incentives. It just shifts the focus from
quantity of stops to quality of stops (the correlation between vehicle cost
and yearly income is very stong).
Law enforcement should not be about generating revenue. Full stop.
~~~
jfoutz
This feels like the "Perfect solution fallacy".
Fines are effective. Governments are going to do something with the money.
Picking a price curve that closely matches actual cost of running the
department seems better than what we do now. Yes, officers will have a
preference for pulling over a ferarri instead of some beat up old honda, but
with all of the automation the article talked about, it seems like the times
an officer has a choice between the two are rare. If the policy is pull over
everyone breaking the law, officers would have to account for not pulling over
cheap cars.
Now, i could see a good argument for simply requiring public service from
everyone. The thing we're all limited by is time. 10 hours of a rich guy's
time is just as valuable as 10 hours of a poor guy's time (to them at least).
Of course, you're not really proposing this as an alternative, you appear to
be saying because it's not perfect, it's not worth doing.
~~~
fr0sty
I guess my point is that unless you change the monetary beneficiary of the
traffic fines you retain perverse incentives even if you try to make the costs
more equitable.
------
wahsd
I like how they provide the cost of jailing people and the revenue, but no
mention of the administrative cost and the "expensive" cost of the system. I
have a suspicion that if you did the accounting properly, you would probably
come up with a net decrease in income, not to mention the economic impact of
debtor prison.
~~~
ajmurmann
It also might deter people from doing business in that town. If I have the
choice to get a coffee I this town or a neighboring town that's not known for
hyper active ticketing, I'd rather avoid this place.
~~~
warmwaffles
I live in Texas, and used to love going to Port A as a kid. Now, I will not
even give it a second thought to avoid the city entirely.
------
soneil
As much as the article makes this sound horrendous .. I'm not sure.
"Back in 2007, his bosses at the Port Arthur Police Department tapped him for
a brand-new kind of job: writing up driving infractions full-time"
[http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur-
Texas.htm...](http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur-Texas.html)
It's interesting to compare the actual data from the 5 years before, and the 5
years following 2007. It may be a coincidence, but .. something has changed.
Something that's roughly halved their fatal accidents.
------
skorecky
> Police higher-ups say the traffic unit has made Port Arthur a safer place to
> drive
They don't show any data to back up this claim that they make throughout the
story. IMO part of the problem is that the speed limits are far too low for
modern vehicles. They keep them low so they can continue to collect.
It's not about safety it's about money. How is going around with plate readers
making anyone safer? Unless they were using that technology to find a
fugitive, but they're not they're using it to collect.
~~~
bryanlarsen
The article links to a study[1] in the Lancet that says that aggressive
traffic policing results in fewer car accidents and fewer deaths.
1:
[http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673...](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673603137701/abstract)
~~~
skorecky
Ah, I missed that. However that doesn't mean increasing the speed limit would
be bad. Instead of speeding tickets they could focus on aggressive drivers
constantly changing lanes and other more serious maneuvers that could cause
more danger.
~~~
bryanlarsen
There are hundreds of studies on increasing the speed limit. Most say
increasing the limit causes increased fatalities, others say the effect is
negligible. Most of these studies focus on highway speeds, though.
But lowering street level speed limits has a dramatic effect on fatalities.
Sweden reduced their street speed limits to 15-20mph and strictly enforced
them.[1] This dropped their fatality rate to essentially zero. It didn't
reduce accidents significantly, but reduced their severity massively.
1:
[http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/](http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/)
------
derobert
_" Traffic safety is equally important for poor people and for people with
money. But traffic fines, as they are typically imposed, inflict far more pain
on poor people."_
The first part of that is quite an assertion. Richer people probably have
newer cars (thus benefiting from newer safety features), better maintained
cars, bigger cars, live in areas with less traffic, have better access to
healthcare, and can afford to take time off due to injury. In addition, their
jobs overall are probably less physically demanding.
I wonder if that's a good part of why they aren't doing things that would cost
taxpayers money, like re-engineering roads to improve safety and lower speeds?
------
outworlder
> License plate recognition software is often touted as a way to catch
> terrorists
Huh? How does that work?
------
anon987
Off-topic and not appropriate for HN.
If you want to circle jerk about how terrible the police can be, do it
somewhere else - this isn't the place.
Flagged.
~~~
Aloha
I've concluded there is very little off-topic for HN - and if you'd read the
article, it actually paints the police in a fairly positive light - aggressive
enforcement is not the same a zealous enforcement.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Update on Metro - KwanEsq
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/03/14/metro/
======
polshaw
If you don't care about touch, then frankly you won't care about this
announcement. I think this is the perspective of most posters here. But as
someone that wanted a better touch-optimised full-fat browser, I am very
disappointed.
Metro is all about touch, and the problem with Firefox in that context is that
its touch performance sucks-- zoom is irresponsive and stepped, and scrolling
performance is sub-par too; IE on the other hand excels at both of these--
which is why I use IE-metro in touch scenarios despite having a strong
preference for Firefox normally.
If Mozilla fixed these core issues (which I should note are 'solved' on their
android browser, and I believe are important anyway for their desktop mode),
then I think they would have had a lot more interest in using Firefox in metro
mode.. which is essentially what I have always wanted when using tablet-style,
but have been waiting it out until they had something usable. I think their
'marketing' has been really poor too.. I can't say I really had any idea there
_was_ a metro mode to the existing Firefox.. why didn't they try giving some
kind of notification to windows8 users who had touch screens? And, personally
(perhaps naively?), I just don't see that Mozilla don't have enough resources
to handle this alongside existing projects, dumping it seems very short-
sighted to me. Regardless, a big set back for those looking for a great full-
fat browser experience with a touch-focused UI.
~~~
banachtarski
You should qualify the "care about touch" phrase to be "care about touch on
windows."
People have been using touch browsers on ipads and iphones and androids for
years now. Windows mobile and tablet market share is just astronomically small
compared to everything else. If you're a metro user, I honestly feel bad for
you.
~~~
polshaw
Perhaps your correction is valid, but your scoffing at windows (touch) users
is very short-sighted. There is no mobile browser that lives up to the promise
of a properly optimised _full_ Firefox on windows. Frankly, I would say IE on
metro is already better than any of them.
~~~
banachtarski
Well yea and nobody would want that. The touch interface necessarily limits
the amount of functionality you can bolt in without excessive UI overloading.
> Frankly, I would say IE on metro is already better than any of them.
Care to qualify this? Chrome on ios for example is fantastic.
------
bri3d
Their cited use metrics seem a bit bizarre. I had absolutely no idea Firefox
for Metro existed and would gladly have tried out a prerelease build if I had
any idea it were available.
I certainly don't disagree with the idea, though. Mozilla have limited
resource and by almost all accounts the Windows tile UI isn't being adopted
rapidly or willingly.
~~~
mbrubeck
Hi, I'm one of the developers who built Firefox for Metro.
It's true, we don't know what the usage would have been like if we did some
real marketing of the Metro feature. We briefly had a "what's new" page that
promoted Metro for users of Firefox Aurora on Windows 8, but we never did a
similar promotion on the larger Firefox Beta channel. We had another in-
product promotion planned for after the release of Firefox 28, but that's no
longer in the cards.
In the absence of that, we have to rely on metrics from desktop Firefox (e.g.
what portion of our users are running it on the touch hardware that our Metro
app was designed for) and on any data we can get about the PC industry as a
whole.
I'm torn about this decision (understandably, I think), and I still think that
Microsoft has a good chance of eventually building a much larger user base for
its touch platforms. But the improvements we wanted to make to the Metro
browser (like making the scrolling as smooth as possible) would have required
ongoing work not just from my team but from other groups like the graphics and
layout teams, whose energy may be better used on other platforms (desktop,
Android, Firefox OS). So we had to think strategically about what's right for
us to ship this year.
~~~
nsxwolf
Why do you still call it "Metro"?
~~~
mbrubeck
We used "Firefox for Metro" only as a code name for the project; it doesn't
appear in user-facing strings in the product.
We've been using that project name for a couple of years, and haven't seen a
good reason to change. Microsoft hasn't settled on a useable replacement. For
a while they used "Modern style" but now they've dropped that too. Now they
mostly use "Windows Store app" in their developer documentation, but we found
that too confusing, especially since Metro-enabled desktop browsers like
Firefox and Chrome aren't necessarily installed through the Windows Store.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft white paper on _" Developing a Metro-enabled desktop
browser"_ was retitled _" Developing a new experience enabled desktop
browser"_ [1], which is even less... wieldy.
[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/apps/hh46541...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/apps/hh465413.aspx)
------
orky56
This type of news really breaks my heart. I'm part of a team developing a
Windows 8 app for Metro. On the one hand, we have faced lots of challenges
(8.1 isn't compatible with 8!) and understand the issues regarding adoption.
However, we still continue to believe that the Metro experience is a great
concept and apps like ours have a chance to significantly turn the tide on its
reputation. It's really a free-for-all where whoever creates the strongest
end-user experience can really own that category on Windows 8. That
brand/product recognition can follow to a user's other devices whether it
phone/tablet/laptop.
~~~
isaacwaller
What is your app?
~~~
orky56
Still unannounced but happy to share details privately.
------
fournm
That's actually kind of disappointing. It was nice to use it on my
underpowered laptop, and it tended to work fine.
I can't imagine the intersection of "people who use Aurora" and "people who
use Windows 8.1" and "people who will set their default browser to Metro mode
and then use something else in desktop mode" was ever that great to begin
with, though (myself and... maybe 2 others?) so I can't really say I'm
surprised.
------
AaronFriel
This is an understandable decision from Firefox's perspective. Windows 8/8.1
are okay on tablets, but if the interface and implementation requires a lot of
polish, they need the user base to get it there.
I think one problem with Metro adoption has actually been the way one browser
vendor in particular treated its users. I'm talking, of course, of Google
Chrome. For a long period of time, reinstalling Chrome meant getting dropped
into a hideous, single-window "Metro" implementation that offered none of the
benefits of the environment, and every downside. I would prefer to use IE in
full screen mode over "Chrome in Windows 8 Mode" and that's saying something.
Now Google's "Windows 8 Mode" is essentially a ChromeOS implementation in
Windows, which I sort of think is cool, and mostly think is just perplexing
for users.
I wonder why no one - Mozilla, Google, Opera - has implemented exactly what IE
does. A very simple interface with not a lot of bells and whistles, an address
bar, a tab picker, and a full screen browser. Maybe it's because Google Chrome
doesn't seem to work well with multitouch - support seems to be based on the
whims of the version number - and Mozilla's engine similarly seems to have
interactivity issues.
As a result, I get the feeling when using these browsers on a Surface Pro that
no one at Google or Mozilla is too. For over a year, pinch to zoom and other
multi-touch gestures didn't work on Chrome. Or they would on Canary or Dev,
but only for a few weeks, before suddenly not working again. Pinch to zoom is
abhorrent on Firefox - a clunky experience that makes me regret doing it every
time. And scrolling requires two fingers on Firefox - or at least it does in
Nightly now - and so for the longest time I thought it didn't work at all. I
don't know why they've decided their browser is the only one that needs two
fingers to scroll. Chrome works terribly on a mid to high DPI display. I can't
for the life of me close a tab.
The result is clunky. Users don't want clunky things. Chrome defaulting to
Metro mode for Windows 8 users during a period when the browser barely or
intermittently supported touch leaves me with only foul things to say to a
Chrome dev or their program manager if I ever meet one. Likewise, I can't
understand why Firefox is making Firefox in Metro a major project - give me a
full screen interface to Gecko with a big address bar at the top or bottom and
let me use that.
EDIT: WHOA! Firefox Nightly's (30.x) Windows 8 mode is actually decent.
Pinching to zoom doesn't inflict masochistic terrors on me, and one finger is
all that's necessary to scroll. When did this happen and why doesn't someone
tell people about it?
~~~
mbrubeck
Firefox for Metro was pretty much what you described -- at least, that was our
goal. It has a very simple UI, which is very similar in spirit to IE11 for
Metro.
However, this meant adding entire new input/graphics/widget backends to the
Gecko platform using a combination of WinRT and Win32 APIs, and a long slog to
get those stable and responsive enough to ship to millions of users. And
designing and build a new UI (even a minimal one) means we don't get existing
desktop Firefox features "for free" \-- stuff like private browsing, add-ons,
bookmarking, password management, sync...
Even minimal browsers have a surprisingly large surface area if you want them
to be usable for daily browsing. We cut out a lot of that stuff for the first
release, but that also means we had a long road ahead toward a feature set
that was competitive with other browsers (including desktop Firefox, or
Firefox for Android). And that's not even getting into technical issues with
the Metro environment, like the inability to run the NPAPI version of Flash
Player...
Just as one example: When writing a browser, you need to do your own text
rendering and layout. That means you can't rely on the OS to handle things
like select/copy/paste. So you end up implementing your own touch-friendly
selection UI, and making it match the OS behavior as much as possible. This
turns out to be a minefield of subtleties and edge cases.
~~~
AaronFriel
I've played with the Firefox Metro UI for about half an hour now - obviously
since my post - and I really like it. It's a solid start.
Is it possible that the reason you're seeing low use is because users aren't
aware the option exists? Also, why are features in Firefox Metro not ported to
Desktop? Touch zoom and scroll for example, are vastly superior in Windows 8
Mode right now.
~~~
JohnTHaller
It's likely that a combination of these:
1\. Low percentage of Windows 8/8.1 users among Firefox testers
2\. Low percentage of Windows 8/8.1 users among Firefox developers
3\. Low usage of the Windows Metro/Modern UI (I don't know anyone that uses it
on a desktop or laptop besides playing solitaire)
4\. Low adoption of Windows RT tablets/convertibles (these are the ones that
are forced to use a Metro/Modern browser)
~~~
makosdv
The first thing I did after getting Windows 8/8.1 on my new laptop was to
install StartIsBack and disable all the Metro/Modern UI stuff. I find it very
annoying (especially in a non-touch environment).
I'm fine with Mozilla focusing on Firefox for Desktop and Android. I'm a big
user of both.
~~~
JohnTHaller
Yeah. Firefox on desktop (Mac, Linux, Windows), Firefox for Android, and
Firefox OS (for that mobile phone competition angle). No need for Firefox on
Metro right now (hardly any users and the ones there are don't know what
different browsers are anyway) or Firefox on iOS (since it would just be a UI
skin over the gimped version of Mobile Safari thanks to Apple's anti-
competitive rules).
------
tomp
Meta comment: That is how titles should be on HN. _Metro_ or _Update on Metro_
would not tell us much, but with a short description in [brackets] it's much
more relevant.
~~~
rlpb
The title is now "Update on Metro".
~~~
tomp
It was "Metro [Mozilla decides to not ship Firefox of Metro]" or something
similar...
------
the_unknown
Unfortunate. I use Windows 8.1 every day as my main OS on both a traditional
desktop and on a Surface RT. I had no idea that Firefox had a Metro version
available. And I happen to use Firefox as my main browser on my desktop.
I would have loved for a notice to appear when starting it up one day to say
"Hey, we see you use Windows 8 - did you know there's a Metro option
available? Find out More or Never bother me again."
~~~
mbrubeck
Note that browsers like Chrome and Firefox aren't allowed on Windows RT.
Browsers for Windows RT can use IE's rendering and JS engine, but other
existing engines won't work within the restricted "Windows Store app"
environment.
Windows 8 has a special exception to these restrictions. This exception is
available only to the app you choose as your default web browser, to prevent
other apps from using it. And it's available only on Windows 8 for x86
hardware, since Microsoft claims that's sufficient to satisfy the terms of
their 2001 anti-trust settlement with the US DOJ.
------
rblatz
This is disappointing, I've been looking into touch interfaces for kiosks.
Currently the best option for us is using IE on Windows 8.1.
OS X isn't really built for touch, and the browsing experience isn't that
great on it with a touch screen.
Chrome and FF in desktop mode doesn't deliver the visual cues that the pages
are loading the same way IE does. Which I didn't even realize until I got my
hands on it. For some reason people (read me and everyone that has tested it)
feel like a response should be instant when you click a link on a giant touch
screen. IE does a great job of popping up UI to communicate that it is
working. Chrome just sets the tab's favicon to a spinner.
~~~
r00fus
Why not just use an iPad or Android tablet (Galaxy Tab 12.2)?
~~~
rblatz
We are thinking of a much larger touch screen than a tablet.
~~~
moron4hire
There are some desktop-sized Android machines these days. The one I saw at
Staples wasn't very impressive, but apparently it's possible.
That said, I'm also building a touch app on Windows 8. But it's not consumer-
facing, it's going out to state DOTs. I've stuck to using regular, ol'
WinForms, mostly because I still find it loads easier to actually program than
any of the newer shit MS has floated.
------
RyanZAG
Here's hoping more developers follow suite and Microsoft is eventually forced
to drop this whole failed experiment. The changes coming to Win8.1 and the
terrible sales figures as people stick to Win7 are hopefully very good
indicators that this will happen - and then the rest of us can get back to
actually using an OS and not fighting it.
~~~
codeulike
Metro is going to work out well eventually, maybe in Windows 9. Microsoft are
playing for the long term here. When you use it on a touchscreen it really
makes sense, and one day all screens will be touchscreens.
~~~
bambax
Yes all screens will eventually be touch screens, but as Nursie said below,
touch will probably never be the primary input medium for any productivity
task.
For one, it's much too slow because you have to cover the whole screen to
interact with it. The mouse operates on a translation of the screen that is
much smaller, making moves much faster.
For two, I sit over a meter and a half from my screen and couldn't touch it
without standing up.
------
sokrates
> In the months since, as the team built and tested and refined the product,
> we’ve been watching Metro’s adoption. From what we can see, it’s pretty
> flat.
Cue rimshot.
------
yaur
Seems like a good idea. I'm using windows 8.1 at work and home and the only
time I use metro "apps" is when I have a file association that needs to be
updated to use a desktop app.
------
Romoku
I've been looking to abandon Chrome and I would definitely give Metro Firefox
a try on my desktop. I enjoy the metro split screen with the Windows 8 Store
Twitter client (it's awesome to get push notifications). If I had a nice
browser for metro then I would definitely try to migrate.
------
zobzu
I command this VP for also actually saying "it dead jim" when it is - unlike
the "its going to community-mode". I think its a much nicer, transparent
communication from mozilla and exactly what i expect from mozilla, too. Props!
~~~
sirkneeland
I assume you meant "commend"...because "command" would be a bit aggressive ;)
------
liminal
I'd love to see a touch-optimized mode in their desktop browser interface to
use on my touchscreen laptop.
------
iriche
The Metro mode is awesome on my Surface - but thats about it...
------
DigitalSea
My understanding is that we can expect Metro on desktop to be a non-existent
feature in Windows 9 onwards if rumours and screenshots are to be believed.
The tiled interface works brilliantly on a Surface tablet and is definitely
way more user friendly than iOS' interface, however on desktop it makes no
sense.
I'm sure there will be few tears over this decision to cancel Firefox for
Metro.
------
chris_wot
Ouch. Turns out, the thing that has hurt Metro is the lack of competition. If
Firefox don't think it's a threat, then they've looked at the awful market
share of the platform and realized it's not something to put resources into.
------
crag
Windows 8 is fine if you take away Metro. First app I installed was a "Start
menu" app. I use Start8 from Stardoc.
I don't blame Mozilla for not supporting Metro. And just to point out, Firefox
runs fine on the Windows 8 Desktop.
~~~
runner84111
Well Metro is great for tablets, or even laptops if you have a decent touch-
pad.. That said, I don't think every software needs to support Metro since it
seems to be geared more for casual use programs.
~~~
crag
Oh of course. I didn't mean to suggest Metro wasn't great for tablets and
phones. Funny, I came "this close" to buying a Windows Phone - but I didn't
know anyone at the office, or personally who had one. So I stuck with the
iPhone.
I liked Metro (on the phone) better then iOS. I like the tiles. I wish more
people would buy the damn thing. ;)
And that does bring up something I've been wondering about: why aren't more
people buying Windows Phone and Tablets? Is it an image problem? Or was MS
just too late to the party?
~~~
moron4hire
Why does it matter to have other people share your phone purchase?
~~~
scholia
Because more users attracts more app developers....
~~~
moron4hire
One person could have written all of the apps I use on Android. They aren't
exactly master opuses of software.
------
velikos
Ouch
------
SunboX
So how about Firefox for Windows Phone 8?
------
devx
Designing for Metro was a waste of time from the beginning.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Help Turn the World's Largest Collection of Movies into a Nonprofit - sheltgor
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/644154729/the-scarecrow-project
======
sheltgor
As context, Scarecrow is the world's largest collection of home movies in
every format imaginable, 120,000 titles in total. They're based near the
University of Washington, and have had a huge cult following for years.
Problem is, with the increase in streaming and the huge drop in rentals
they've seen a massive decline in recent years and they've reached the point
where they can either close up shop and sell off their astounding collection
(which contains countless movies that simply won't ever be found somewhere
like Netflix or Amazon), or try a new operating model.
Their new plan is to convert the store into a non-profit with an emphasis on
preserving physical media, education on film history (they already do a lot of
great outreach to local schools and it seems that they want to expand on
that), and more.
Going to UW I can say that Scarecrow is a treasure, and it'd be a damn shame
for it to disappear. I'm a big cinephile myself, and the experience of
browsing through their incredible collection, or talking with their
tremendously knowledgeable staff, and finding a movie I would have never
before heard of, is one that I really hope doesn't disappear.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Node.js visit values util - ikessler
https://github.com/kessler/node-visit-values
======
mattkrea
I'll admit I'm having trouble imagining a use case for this but I must ask:
What happens with arrays?
What happens with deeply nested objects?
Also if you don't mind me asking what case might you want something like this
where you don't seem to care about the context of the key and value (i.e. top
level key and top level value version deeply nested key of, potentially, the
same name.)?
~~~
ikessler
The use case is quite simple, I want to iterate over all values in an object
(and possibly manipulate it, that is why the visitor function has access to
the parent)
Array members will be visited individually.
The entire object tree will be visited in a depth first order
hope that answers your questions.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
EU Commission presents draft directive to ban some plastic waste - dsego
http://www.dw.com/en/eu-commission-plans-ban-on-plastic-waste/a-43949554
======
ganzuul
I want to put 2D barcodes on trash-to-be. Then when you find it in nature you
should be able to trace it to when and where it was purchased. If this is one
of those 10% of users causing 90% of the problems - type situations this would
be an effective strategy to hold trashy people accountable.
~~~
jbob2000
You don’t even need to go that far, somebody has already studied where the
garbage comes from: [https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-
resources/blogs...](https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-
resources/blogs/ocean-plastic-rivers)
Summary: China and India.
We can and should curb our plastic use in the West, but there are 2 billion+
people on the other side of the world that don’t give a flying fuck. (Yeah
yeah, we polluted when we were developing too. But we barely had 100 million
people when that was happening. And no plastics)
~~~
ISL
One of the most powerful ways to lead is by example. If we can do the hard
work of figuring out how to get sustainability right, it will be easier to
help everyone else get on board.
------
avar
> Curbing the use of plastic cups for beverages
I wonder what this will mean for events & festivals. E.g. Amsterdam has made
it a policy that big events (including normal bars when the event is going on)
must issue plastic cups to curb broken class everywhere. Will we have to go
back to glass, or drink our beer out of paper cups?
> as well as plastic food containers, such as the ones used for take-away.
I'm open to this, it sucks to have to throw so much crap away after ordering
take-away, but I haven't seen a container yet that would be suitable for e.g.
80 degree centigrade soups, stews etc. What are the alternatives that are
cheap enough for disposable take-away use?
> Producers of fishing gear — which accounts for 27 percent of beach litter —
> will be required to cover the costs of waste collection in ports.
I'm worried about how making manufacturers pay for something like this will
produce unintended externalities. I can also buy thin plastic lines that _wink
wink_ totally aren't intended for fishing. Won't it be trivial to avoid these
taxes?
> Each member state should use a deposit system or other measure in order to
> collect 90 percent of plastic bottles used in their country by 2025.
I wouldn't mind such a system where you e.g. get 1 EUR back for each bottle,
but it's going to have to be something like that. The current deposit fees on
plastic bottles are too low, once you're earning enough money it doesn't make
any financial sense to return them.
~~~
houshuang
At most festivals in Switzerland, you have a single kind of reusable plastic
cup, for which you pay a deposit of a few Euro. You can then hand it back at
any venue part of the festival and get the deposit back. Of course it requires
some dishwashing facilities, but it seems to work very well, everyone is used
to it, and it avoids massive heaps of garbage.
~~~
avar
We have these in Amsterdam too. I'll buy a beer with one of these, then by the
time I'm ready to leave the lines are so long that I think "fuck it" and throw
it in my bike saddlebag thinking I'll bring it back next year. It's not worth
it to stand 15 minutes in a line to get 2 EUR back.
But of course I forget about it and just buy a new one at the same festival
next year, and each festival will only accept their own branded cups.
So now I have a pile of these things sitting in my shed, there really needs to
be some ISO standard for these plastic pints and it be made illegal to not
accept ones from other festivals. I now have like 20 EUR worth of otherwise
worthless plastic crap I can't exchange or sell except once a year at specific
locations.
~~~
jasonkostempski
They're not branded with custom design for the event? Seems like something you
could easily sell if it were. Either way, I like your idea about a standard,
similar to TSA Approved beverage containers.
------
siruncledrew
It's pretty insane that 90% of the plastic dumped into the ocean comes from 10
rivers (including many famous ones)[0]. Two are in Africa (the Nile and the
Niger) while the other eight are in Asia (the Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Yangtze,
Haihe, Pearl, Mekong and Amur).
What were once historically prominent rivers that greatly contributed to
agriculture and civilization are now disgusting cesspools of trash and
pollution.
[0] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-
plas...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-
tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)
------
DuskStar
This seems a little too "signal, not help" to me. ~90% of plastic in the ocean
comes from 10 rivers [0] of which 8 are in Asia and two in Africa - so
reducing the use of plastic in Europe won't have any global impact and will
probably have a variety of unintended consequences. But plastic in the oceans
is a problem and so we must be seen to be doing something...
0: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-
plas...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-
tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)
------
ldjb
It's important to consider that people with some disabilities rely on plastic
straws to be able to drink:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-
derbyshire-43879489...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-
derbyshire-43879489/plastic-straws-call-for-government-to-rethink-policy)
Plastic straws and polystyrene plates are also common materials for arts and
crafts.
Whilst pollution is certainly an issue that must be tackled, banning
disposable plastic products does have its drawbacks. I'm not saying a ban
should not occur, but its implications should be considered.
~~~
maskros
s/plastic straws/straws/ ... there's nothing to prevent you from using paper,
waxed paper, or reusable metal drinking straws except a price increase.
~~~
ldjb
As was said in the video, ordinary paper disintegrates and metal straws can be
dangerous. Waxed paper straws could work, though.
------
acd
Very happy about the EU plastic ban lets hope it gets passed. Plastic waste
which contains BPA bisphenol which is a weak estrogen and ends up in the
oceans. Fish eat the plastic waste, humans eat the fish and becomes infertile.
Plates can be made of paper, also cups can be made of paper.
Banning plastic makes it easy to avoid plastic waste in the oceans.
I hope we also ban all food packaging since a lot of that ends up in the ocean
and there is no need for plastic food packaging.
Bisphenol A of plastic
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A)
------
vincnetas
EC press release : [http://europa.eu/rapid/press-
release_IP-18-3927_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press-
release_IP-18-3927_en.htm)
------
hartator
It’s worth noting that I’ve seen poor families in France reusing plastic forks
and knives. Like always, this kind of policy hurts the poor a lot more.
~~~
api
Environmental policy is probably the main factor that has driven a wedge
between progressives/liberals and the working class. Nearly all environmental
regulations are regressive when considered as taxes. The rich can afford to
pay more for cleaner energy, durable goods, recycling, and so on. The poor
cannot.
I am not saying that either concern is invalid. Environmental concerns are
real. I am simply pointing out a political problem that needs to be solved.
~~~
DmenshunlAnlsis
Environmental collapse also disproportionately hurts the poor. When a drought
strikes, they’re the first to starve. At least the pain inflicted by
regulations can be mitigated, while collapse leads to something like Libya.
~~~
api
I was not arguing otherwise. Whenever I bring up issues like this I get a lot
of "shoot the messenger."
My point was not that environmental concerns are wrong but that they do tend
to decrease the economic well being of poor and middle class people more
_right now_ vs. the status quo. That in turn tends to anger these classes of
people _right now_ , causing them to vote for people like Donald Trump. Trump,
a super-hard-right Republican, won largely because of working class
traditionally progressive economic concerns.
The poor also cannot afford the luxury of thinking about the future. When you
are poor your primary concern is getting out of poverty right f'ing now. Screw
the future. The rich on the other hand can sacrifice for the future because
they have abundance.
Try some grinding poverty and come back and tell me how much you care about
what happens in 100 years. Now try some grinding poverty with children. Tell
me how much you care about the great Pacific garbage patch after you watch
your kids suffer a bit.
This is why I think what I call "abstinence based" environmental policies are
doomed. I draw a deliberate analogy with right-wing abstinence-based sex-ed,
which also fails pretty reliably. Abstinence based environmental policy is any
attempt to solve environmental problems by preaching and shaming the poor and
middle class into reducing consumption for the sake of some future ideal that
might as well be heaven-and-hell as far as they are concerned here and now.
The only way we will create a world where we care about the future is to
elevate as many people as possible out of poverty. This means we must build
systems that create abundance now and try to figure out how to do so as
sustainably as possible. If people can't afford the luxury of caring about the
future, nothing serious will ever be done about massive problems like climate
change.
~~~
DmenshunlAnlsis
_Try some grinding poverty and come back and tell me how much you care about
what happens in 100 years. Now try some grinding poverty with children. Tell
me how much you care about the great Pacific garbage patch after you watch
your kids suffer a bit._
That’s a strong argument for ignoring the desperately poor where long term
survival is concerned, is that really the argument you meant to make?
------
franzpeterstein
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17167261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17167261)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Best CV ever for a front-end developer - sirbrad
http://csswizardry.com/cv/
======
csswizardry
Thanks :D
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Here's what Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that really made me angry - Hansi
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-204754971.html
======
justin_vanw
It has nothing to do with being there on Saturday. It has everything else to
do with the kind of people and their ability to invest themselves in their
goal, and showing up on Saturday is a great indicator of that.
I interview a lot of programmers, and I can tell you with about 95% precision
whether they will work out and be great based on the single question 'tell me
about the programming projects you work on for fun'. If they have some project
they work on for fun, even one, that isn't for a class at school or for their
job, then they are very very likely to be a great hire. If they don't they are
very very unlikely to be a good hire. Side projects don't magically make you
smart and capable and good at problem solving and getting things done, but it
sure seems to be fundamentally related.
And from personal experience, I've worked for 2 startups, one where people
worked all weekend and one where they didn't, and interestingly they were
doing almost the exact same thing. One had an $80MM exit, the other just
slowly went away. Small sample size, for sure.
~~~
rahimnathwani
How do you know? I mean, how do you test for false negatives in the hiring
process? Perhaps you're rejecting lots of people without side projects, but
they go on to be successful anyway?
~~~
justin_vanw
Sure, I mean I didn't say I actually use this test to make hiring decisions. I
can just directly test lots of things like ability to code or problem solve
(not perfectly for sure, but I do my best to evaluate directly the skills that
can be evaluated directly). I am just making the point that there are often
very highly correlated attributes that people can have, and one that is easy
to test for can give you a lot of information about the ones that are harder
to see.
~~~
rahimnathwani
I agree their might be some correlation. What I'm saying is:
\- If you really meant you can get 95% precision in hiring from the answer to
one question, I believe you only if you're super-conservative in hiring (i.e.
will reject unless you're super-confident). In this case, your recall and
false negatives is also going to be really high, so your single-question test
isn't really helpful.
\- If you actually meant 95% accuracy (i.e. precision in the everyday sense,
not the math sense), then I don't believe you, because you probably can't
estimate your accuracy, unless you also hire some people who fail the
interview process.
There are awesome programmers and technical leads who don't have side projects
just because they are so focused on their work and being a good parent.
I'm probably over-analysing your original statement, so I'll stop here.
~~~
justin_vanw
Right, I understand what you're saying, but even being a parent people might
put a side project on hold or not have as much time to spend on it, but that
doesn't mean they can't talk about what they have done in the past.
------
pawadu
Honest questions: all the hard working Yahoo employees who worked many many
hours overtime under her instead of being with family and friends, what did
they get out of this in the end?
Marissa was paid big $, I understand she needed to work hard for that money
but everyone else, what reason did they have 20 hour days?
------
ralphc
I wonder what the actual work she did at Google that would make you work up to
130 hours a week, or at the least pull one all nighter a week. Was it heads
down programming? I don't think anyone can maintain a great level of code for
long at that level. Manager stuff? Maybe. Infrastructure, did she supervise or
help set up servers? Startups don't have to do that anymore, at least in the
beginning, just spin up servers at AWS. Like the blog author says, a lot of
things that needed to be done in house back in the day can be done remotely
now.
------
rezashirazian
I kinda get what she is saying. It takes a certain amount of passion and
dedication for someone to show up on weekends. They must truly believe in the
company or the idea to put in that type of effort.
This dedication and passion will also reflect itself in the product. Many
people can make a mediocre product by putting in the minimum amount required,
but for something outstanding it usually takes more. Much more. What she has
said is nothing outlandish.
~~~
pawadu
That is just a fantasy, Reza and Marissa live in a fairy tale where working
long hours equals passion. It doesn't.
I have had co-workers who practically lived in the office. Every time
something urgent came up they would volunteer to work the weekends and late
nights. Surprisingly the same guys were also known among the developers as
people who got the least amount of work done. And while the management was
initially impressed with their hard work and "commitment", every single one of
them was let go in the very first rounds of lay offs.
~~~
pawadu
Let me also add that when you are very passionate about something you _may_
end up working long hours and weekends. You will probably also enjoy it.
But the opposite does __not __apply. When management expects you to work long
hour you will not become more passionate about your work.
------
knavely
Common misconception.
Direction is more important than speed. If you are running in the wrong
direction it doesn't matter how fast, or if you come in on the weekend. _If_
you are headed in the rigt direction then speed and velocity can be important.
It's easy to want to believe that success is repeatable and due to an
observable formula...
------
ralphc
Wherever company she lands at, run. Not only does she have this attitude at
rest, she's going to have a chip on her shoulder to prove she's not a failure
at whatever venture she winds up at next.
------
triplesec
Her attitude comes from the privileged ideal of hard work = success, which
stems from the classic attribution error: "I'm successful therefore it must be
because I'm better than everyone else in x y or z ways", and often one of
those factors is a belief in one's own hard work pay9ing off. Which blithely
ignores all the less fortunate people working even harder at three jobs to pay
tthe bills.
------
ryanobjc
The weekend work = success is hardly a new item, there was a reference to it
in Microserfs... Written in 1992. The VC/money guy said he'd invest in
biotechnology but staff didn't work weekends. And as soon as he finds one that
did he could bet the farm and retire.
As for the rest of it, same tired tropes from the author. I already knew what
he was gonna say when I realized who it was.
As.for Marissa... She's kinda right. And every current Googler is thankful
they can reap the rewards.
------
JumpCrisscross
Zero attempt to find data to prove or nullify his hypothesis. Curious how the
data from co-working spaces pan out...
~~~
outworlder
Isn't this inverting the burden of proof here?
She made the extraordinary claim that she didn't even need to know who or what
people were working on, just that they were there on weekends. She provided
zero data.
It's just as likely that the weekend working startups are the one that will
fail. Obviously by burning out, but also by losing sight of the big picture.
This seems stereotypical of hackers coding the latest greatest features with
zero customers. They could be seriously misusing their available time.
Companies (startups or not) should be able to set their own pace. People
should learn to use their time well and save their energy for when they
absolutely need to burn the midnight oil. Besides, getting burned out or sick
doesn't help anyone.
~~~
justin_vanw
If you want to go 'slow and steady' and have great 'work/life balance' (and
work with a lot of mediocre people and play a lot of political games..) go get
a job at a big company.
Startups are not for that mentality, no startup has ever won by playing it
safe and making sure people get plenty of sleep.
~~~
outworlder
> Startups are not for that mentality, no startup has ever won by playing it
> safe and making sure people get plenty of sleep.
Who's saying anything about playing it safe? It's all about strategically
using your resources, not squandering them. Be it time, money or sleep. It's
about engaging your afterburners when you actually need them, not when you are
flying in circles.
~~~
justin_vanw
So what do you do when people work until 11pm every night and keep showing up
on Saturday? Tell them to go home?
There are teams where people are having more fun 'kicking ass' and getting
things done, and have a great time with the people they are there doing it
with, and frankly they would laugh you out of the building (literally) if you
even for one second referred to them as 'resources'. I have seen people wander
into the office on the weekend just because they were bored (including
myself), or were looking to hang out and hack on some stuff. It's not
something that burns you out, it's a passion for some people. The good people.
I think you have had a very limited (and limiting) work experience, to be
honest.
~~~
exclusiv
You're assuming the parent advocates discouraging passionate team members
which isn't fair. "Resources" and "resourcing" are pretty standard terms esp.
in the agency space and with companies using contractors as an example. Not
sure why you take so much offense. Perhaps you are referring to co-founders or
equity owners that would laugh one out of the building?
The notion that everyone has to grind on weekends to build something
successful is ridiculous. Mayer is right about hard work. But she's
simplistically equating "time logged" with "hard work".
What's success in this conversation? I'd be willing to bet most the startups
that go to her husband's co-working space will fail. That's based on data and
more accurate of a statement than hers.
~~~
justin_vanw
I'm not sure whether you even read my comments. It's not the weekend work that
makes the difference, it's having the sort of people that show up on the
weekend.
~~~
exclusiv
Yes I read them all, but I'm not sure you read your own.
"no startup has ever won by playing it safe and making sure people get plenty
of sleep"
------
jagtesh
Slightly off-topic, how did this get picked by Yahoo? Do they get enough
editorial freedom to publish something that doesn't favour their CEO? I'm
pleasantly surprised for one.
Could this also mean the editorial team believes this to be true?
~~~
NEDM64
It's CNBC content.
------
cmurf
$117 million over 5 years; $36.6 million for first six months.
But that was a 1 cent comment.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: A novice programmer asks you for one educational resource - Blockhead
You can point them to a book, a website, an online course, a screencast series, etc. The novice has no preference for a particular language or platform.<p>What would you recommend and why?
======
orangethirty
I would recommend my product: <http://protocademy.com>
Its a program focused on teaching you how to program to a level where you can
get a job doing so. It focuses on having you prototype and build many types of
applications with different languages. You also learn to work with the whole
stack (as in learn to deploy those apps that you write).
I developed the program after teaching people how to program (online and
offline) for a while. I realized that people usually have three main issues
when learning how to program:
\- They dont know how to learn how to program.
\- They dont know how to find answers to their questions/doubts.and the
\- They don't understand how programs work in general (breaking down
instructions into simple steps).
So, with that in mind, I created the program. Its been getting good results.
------
mcintyre1994
At the risk of this coming across as a 'one up the rest' post with something
so open-ended, <http://www.class-central.com/> would be my choice. They
aggregate MOOCs from the top providers, with a search capability.
------
adamtaa
www.markmyplace.com - I wrote this as an exercise to teach myself how to build
an application from start to finish. This is the third iteration, and while a
bit crude, it contains all of the resources I have found while learning
programming and related topics. It also has a good deal of the random things
in it that interest me. If it is related to programming and was useful to me
in some way it is probably in there. Hit the tags and find some stuff. Any
suggestions to improve it would be great too.
------
ahmad19526
Udacity.com - Design of Computer Programs, Web Applications Engineering,
Social Network Analysis (algorithms), and many more
Coursera.com - too many courses to list.
------
nikai
codeeval.com - projecteuler.net - rosalind.info - develop a habit of solving
problems, and you'll become a better programmer in no time. Try to use your
programming languages idiomatically. You may also want to review your
solutions once in a while as your skills improve.
------
3minus1
unquestionably, <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/>. It starts from the
very beginning and takes you step by step.
------
dylanhassinger
teamtreehouse.com
------
pramit
Basicversity - <http://basicversity.com>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Do you have business advisers? - Tawheed
I'm writing an article on why every startup (and startup founder) should have a set of business advisers -- whether it be for product, design or business advice. While conceptually this seems like an obvious thing to me, I'm curious to know how you think about it. Do you have a set of advisers? How do you typically communicate with them? Do you pay them? How do you go about finding advisers? Please share your thoughts...
======
Travis
My company went through several iterations of advisors before we found a group
that worked for us.
First group was SCORE, who didn't work out (they would've been more helpful if
we wanted to start a restaurant, rather than a tech startup). Then we tried a
pay-to-play group that would help us with our b-plan, and put us in front of
investors. Waste of money.
Finally, we found a group of volunteers who meet with us every 2 weeks. We do
a presentation every 2 weeks, usually on refining our b-plan and slide deck.
Just hit the point where they're happy with our deck, and now they're putting
us in touch with some PR and marketing connections to build out that part of
our business.
So, we don't pay them, although I expect 1-2 of them to be on our board. Can't
speak to how we found them -- just beating the bushes and trying out groups
until one seemed really professional, I guess.
And I would seriously look elsewhere as soon as your advisers start asking to
be paid. Your funds are limited, use them to build your market and product!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Bikeshed Email – PHKs Bikeshed - JDW1023
http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/
======
bradknowles
Note that the bikeshed t-shirts on cafepress apparently no longer exist. At
least, they don’t come up anymore when you search for them.
That’s a shame, because I think I created the first bikeshed t-shirts on
cafepress, and I wasn’t aware that my page had been taken down. I’ll have to
see if I can re-create them. I might even be able to find the original hi-res
graphic I created for the purpose.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: EasyDB – A One-Click Ephemeral Database - justjake
https://easydb.io/
======
tlb
db.Put('myKey', {some: 'data'}, (value, err) => {})
It annoys me that it reverses the standard (err, value) callback convention
that everyone else uses.
An advantage of the standard is that you might have 0, or 2 or more value
arguments to the callback. So you can return (err) or (err, value) or (err,
value, optionalExtraValue) and it's fairly consistent.
~~~
justjake
Wow, that's totally my bad (Write a lot of Go at my day job).
Can definitely fix that one. Will bump to 2.0.0 when I get home.
~~~
laurent123456
Method names that start with uppercase is also something you'll see more in Go
or C# but not so much in JavaScript. `db.put()` would be the JS way.
~~~
giorgioz
I agree on this one. The convention in javascript is that functions names
start with a lowercase case letter.
~~~
justjake
Also very true. Going into V2 deploy that I've open sourced. Will publish it
this evening.
Thanks for all the feedback y'all!
------
orf
Really interesting project. Couple of things:
1\. Your Python library (easydbio) doesn't have the correct requirements
listed. It depends on 'requests' being installed, add this to the setup.py
install_requires call.
2\. Make the DB class accept arguments instead of a dictionary. Just do
`DB(database, token)`
3\. The API is just a really simple CRUD to a single endpoint, why not include
curl/httpie samples in the homepage?
4\. The repository link for the Python SDK 404's (or is private). People often
look at the repositories for dependencies they choose to install, not having
it available is not a good signal.
~~~
justjake
1&2\. Python isn't my first choice language so really appreciate that
3&4\. Going home to open-source the JS and Python clients. cURL is a good
idea, will add that too.
------
anonytrary
This site is an embodiment of the idea that "good design is when there is
nothing left to take away". I was able to very quickly grok what this was,
thanks to the simple UX flow of creating a db and then being told how to go
play with it.
~~~
franga2000
And yet it completely shits itself when opened in an Android WebView ("An
unknown error has occured"). It's not that it can't render - it flashes the
site for half a second, then decides to delete itself and just show the error.
~~~
justjake
Do you have steps to repro this? I can attempt to fix it.
~~~
franga2000
I opened the page with the Androind HN app "Materialistic". I believe it uses
the default Android WebView to display the linked website. I don't have any
experience debugging things inside a WebView so I unfortunately can't help you
much more than that.
------
jjice
This is great! At hackathons in the past, I usually use SQLite for
development, and once everything is set, switch over to a more traditional
RDBMS. This is a great site that is definitely going in the bookmarks.
Out of curiosity, can you elaborate on the the technologies you used for this
(lang, frameworks, hosting services)? I've been trying to learn design
patterns for larger software like this, so your insight would be great.
~~~
gnahckire
SQLite is so awesome. I love how python has a library built-in for it.
That SQLite plus SQLAlchemy makes hackathon code so easy to port to another
RDBMS after finishing the initial PoC.
Also makes it super easy to run unittests; just load data into sqlite with the
memory connector and go!
~~~
justjake
SQLite is so great. We built this partially because we wanted SQLite's
capabilities without deploys blowing away the instance.
------
northstar702
This is neat. What's the actual database behind this? What kind of data
model/consistency/isolation does it offer?
~~~
justjake
From @tbtstl's comment
"We used NextJS for the UI, and Node + LevelDB on the backend."
Just to add: Both the frontend and backend use TypeScript.
~~~
justjake
>What kind of data model/consistency/isolation does it offer?
Each DB is a full new instance (with a mutex for read/write and open/close).
Your data isn't shared between any other DB.
It offers read-your-writes consistency since there's no sharding/duplication
ATM.
Hopefully that covers it. Otherwise happy to clarify.
~~~
justjake
Oh also daily backups (Courtesy of
[https://www.render.com/](https://www.render.com/), which is great BTW)
~~~
anurag
(Render founder) Thanks for the shoutout and congrats on launch. An ingenious
use case for Render disks!
------
ryantuck
This is really elegant.
One note is that the python repl.it fails on an import error upon just hitting
'run', but it does work locally as expected.
Edit: Was able to get it working in repl.it by updating pyproject.toml like
so:
[tool.poetry.dependencies]
python = "^3.7"
easydbio = "*"
~~~
justjake
Oh no :(. I'll have to fix that one when I head home in an hour or so.
Thanks for flagging it!
~~~
amasad
I fixed it here: [https://repl.it/@amasad/easydbio-python-
example](https://repl.it/@amasad/easydbio-python-example)
Super awesome project and it could be great for our users as well. I just
posted to our community [https://repl.it/talk/announcements/EasyDBio-one-
click-databa...](https://repl.it/talk/announcements/EasyDBio-one-click-
database/22606)
~~~
justjake
Thanks! Updated on prod.
------
pbreit
I see the JavaScript has all the async and callbacks while the Python is
simple procedural. What are the benefits of the JavaScript version? It's
definitely harder to grok for this newbie.
I also wonder what a plain ole RESTful API would look like. Why does
everything need an SDK/library?
Ex:
import requests //wish this was built in
token = '07a3e79a-c34c-4603-9a87-3fa47678d37c'
db = '51e71cb3-a40d-46bc-af3a-7bb77fde04a9'
key = 'myKey'
r = requests.get(f'https://easydb.io/{db}/{key}', auth=(token, ''))
~~~
justjake
I've open sourced the Python and JavaScript clients
([https://github.com/EasyDB-io](https://github.com/EasyDB-io)).
I'm also writing up a cURL section to throw on the main page. If you want to
implement a client, have at err!
I'll even put a bounty of $5 (Paid in Stellar) for each client implemented.
~~~
pbreit
I appreciate that, don't get me wrong.
Mine was more of a general rant on why every API seems to think it needs its
own client. Simply passing JSON back and forth. What could be simpler? What do
the clients do?
------
nu11p0inter
The tool looks great, seems very easy to use. The UI/UX side of it is on
point. The missing information about what the product is makes me hesitant to
use it.
I looked through the pages... Tried a few times to find out what happens if I
decide to use your tool after the 24H. I looked for a pricing page and failed.
Makes sense if this is just your POC/demo.
So yeah, the ambiguity of all this makes it highly unattractive to even
evaluate. It doesn't offer any value that a terraform RDS script or even
docker-compose script that renders a template to give you the copypasta
database init blocks.
~~~
justjake
Yup, our landing could use some clarification. We'll change it from "You'll be
able to use it for 24h" to "Your data will be removed after 24h".
The target demographic is for demo/small projects ATM since it is our POC.
Terraform/docker compose is definitely the way to go for any project with
substantial mass. I just got really tired of writing all that when I just
wanted a JSON store.
Thanks for the feedback! It's much appreciated :D.
------
erikig
Quick Question - Are you creating an instance of the database when a user
clicks "Create a Database" or when they first connect to it?
~~~
justjake
The database is created when the first CRUD action occurs with a uuid/token
combo.
This choice was largely made to not hammer the boxes from the CDN.
------
vertoc
Awesome, this will be great for hackathons :D
------
didgeoridoo
Looks great! One thing isn’t totally clear to me: Does the database itself get
removed after 24 hours, or just the data?
~~~
justjake
Right now just the data is removed. Your writekey will stay (unless you
regenerate it from the dashboard).
------
jedieaston
Is this open-source?
~~~
justjake
It is not (Mainly because we have so many hard-coded API keys ATM)
Happy to open-source the clients and ingest them into the landing page if
people want to write their own for their favorite lang.
------
breck
I love this. I would also love an EasyVM.
~~~
jjice
Like an ephemeral VPS?
~~~
breck
Yes. Use cases are numerous. One would be if I want to fork someone’s GitHub
to make a pull request without setting up a dev environment. I wish all GitHub
projects had a “launch easyVM” button that would give me an ip to a micro
instance for 24 hours that I could ssh into. Then I can edit some code, Run
the tests (since all the dependencies should be there), push and submit a pull
request, with the server auto destroying that night.
~~~
UnbugMe
You should look into docker for this use case.
~~~
breck
Thanks, I've used Docker a lot. Too slow. I want something like EasyDB.
Instant. 1 second to get a new ephemeral VM with a preconfigured image. Under
the hood it could be launching containers but my experience should be that of
a vm user with ssh access.
------
yolo42
Any plans to add a Go library for this?
~~~
justjake
I've just open sourced the JavaScript and Python client under
[https://github.com/EasyDB-io](https://github.com/EasyDB-io).
I've also created a Golang repository (http. [https://github.com/EasyDB-
io/Golang-Client](https://github.com/EasyDB-io/Golang-Client)) just for you.
If you're really gungho, feel free to implement the 4 http requests using Go.
In fact, If you do, I'll send you $5 via Stellar.
Otherwise I'll have to do it whenever I have a free 20m, but no promises on
timeline.
------
wheelerwj
this seems cool, but... why?
~~~
justjake
I hate provisioning infra. It should be easy, and it never is.
I just want some damn state for my lambdas without spinning up
Firebase...again.
~~~
gitgud
> I just want some damn state for my lambdas without spinning up
> Firebase...again.
So true, we have 2 firebase servers (dev & prod) and it took ages to setup
them up even with scripts. Some of it; like backing up and restoring users
isn't even possible to script!
Fast creation of database instances is a huge benefit in testing
------
i_am_static
is it possible to clear DB instead of deleting DB after 24 or 72 hours?
~~~
justjake
This should be the behavior as of right now
------
keyle
what's running behind this? I mean the actual DB. Couch?
~~~
justjake
Powered by LevelDB
([https://github.com/google/leveldb](https://github.com/google/leveldb))
------
Sophistifunk
That's the worst splash screen I've ever seen.
~~~
samcodes
Hard disagree. There’s a button, I pushed it, I read the code... and said
“ohhhh that’s clever”
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Do you prefer to use your real name or pseudonym for domains? - redegg
This came up when I was trying to setup my own domain for receiving email.<p>Do you prefer <your_full_name>.<tld> or <your_pseudonym>.<tld>?<p>I feel a bit uncomfortable using my full name to receive email, what do most do?
======
lutusp
> I feel a bit uncomfortable using my full name to receive email, what do most
> do?
Well, first, most people don't have either the desire or the power to name a
domain after themselves. Don't you mean the "user" part of an e-mail address,
like this:
[email protected]
If I met someone who owned a domain that was named after him, and if he wasn't
a famous actor or something, I might suspect narcissism.
To answer your question now rephrased, I think it depends on whether you
intend to accept responsibility for what you post. It's my experience that
young people prefer anonymous "handles", but as one becomes older, the
advantage of posting under your own name becomes more obvious.
> This came up when I was trying to setup my own domain for receiving email.
A domain just to receive e-mail? Okay, now I feel out-of-date. There was a
time when a simple e-mail address served that purpose, say from Gmail. A Gmail
account is free and it can be set up to forward to a secondary email address,
so you don't even have to visit your Gmail account if you don't want.
------
grobmeier
I do business with my domain, so I preferred my "real name". I care very much
of what I write and so I have "nothing to hide". I believe, some of my
customers read my posts in clear name on mailing lists which they found
serious and finally contracted me.
I am an amateur musician by night. I spread my music only with pseudonym and
send only e-mail by pseudonym.
Not sure what kind of e-mails you are going to send. But if you want to make
business (and this business is not upsetting anybody basically) I would go
with real name. If you do want to make art, I would prefer pseudonym. I
actually have had problems in my day job in times when i published art with
real name.
------
compilercreator
I use a pseudonym as the domain with my name was unavailable. If my real name
was indeed available, I would use domain with real name.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else - mooreds
http://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/
======
RogerL
tl;dr: The only measure of on the job performance is on the job performance.
The only thing that _matters_ to your company is also on the job performance.
Why not focus on that?
It is utter voodoo.
I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were _maybe_ 2 hours long. You might be
handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information
distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some
for loops and a few logic statements.
Then you talked about the job. This is the job. Do you want to do it? What do
you have to bring to us? Do you have a lot of experience and want to lead, or
not a lot and want to learn - we'll adjust position and salary.
And you put a team together. Some were great, some were okay, some needed to
be let go. In total, all sw people had a job.
Contrast that with today's voodoo, where proxies are weighed more than on the
job performance (the only thing that matters).
In the end, you put a team together. Some are great, some are okay, some need
to be let go. In total, all sw people have a job.
It's all exactly the same, except the absurdity of interviewing by proxies.
It's simple logic - he average of everything is average. Why have we abandoned
logic?
So many things matter more than remembering red-black trees from your midterm
(I'm 49. I TA'ed a graduate level algorithms class back in the day, but I
don't happen to remember it. That's what books are for). Like being able to
run a project. Being able to write documentation. Being able to enter a room
with a combative and upset client and keep the business. Being able to mentor
your colleagues. Taking ownership. Leading by example. Ability to learn. So
many things that are not even discussed in the current interview environment.
I've watched companies spin their wheels for months, rejecting perfectly good
people, looking for that mythical person with exactly the right, esoteric
combination of skills, who, for some unknown reason, wants to stall their
career and get hired into a position where they learn nothing because they are
expected to know everything already. People that are eager to learn? No,
sorry, not rock-star material. All these prior successes mean nothing, no one
could possibly learn a technology or new algorithm, right? And, more than once
I've had people get downright snide about it. I'm sorry that you misread my
resume, contacted me, and I didn't have that absurdly specific combination of
skills. My fault, right?
Y'all have lost your minds. :) Which is okay, we're an eccentric bunch, but
jeez, let's inject some reason and introspection into it. The faces are
different, but the talent is no different than the 70s and 80s. There's zero
evidence that any of these interview techniques are reliable. There's tons of
evidence that interview techniques are horribly biased in many ways. Just
stop.
~~~
hoorayimhelping
Has it become more costly to fire bad hires since then? In my mind, a lot of
the idiotic behavior in hiring is driven by the fact that it seems to be way
more expensive to hire the wrong person than to hire nobody. The risk of
litigation from firing someone seems real to a lot of places I've worked.
~~~
Spooky23
Usually it's fear of confrontation and laziness. If you're not discriminating
against people, it's fine.
I've had a few folks that I've had to let go folks, including folks in .gov
with union contracts and motivated defenders. It is doable.
End of the day, don't be a wuss. Setting up some hunger games "audition" is
passive aggressive bs. If you're nervous, hire a contractor and get them on
the payroll later. Or just hire the person, and give them a months severance.
Problem solved.
~~~
abustamam
That's what my current company did with me. Works really well. Some people are
not okay with becoming a contractor first but sometimes that's the way things
go.
------
struppi
Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop.
The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can
teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth
was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university
education) and personally trained them for _several months_. Also, senior
people in the company were encouraged to also help them and guid them.
He had to fire some of those people later, mostly because they were not a good
fit for the company. But some of them became great programmers and software
consultants.
"Hire only the best" is really only half of the battle. Give people an
environment where learning is encouraged and failure is expected. And help
them wherever you can. Most will learn and enjoy it.
~~~
andrewstuart
"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer"
Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a
programmer then you will probably fire them.
This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their
development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get
overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.",
cause, you know, anyone can do it.
Programming is VERY hard and it takes a huge amount of motivation and hard
work to become any good at it. Sure you can learn how to do simple stuff
without any serious interest, but to be beyond ordinary it takes enormous work
and time and research and Joe Schlepp off the street is simply not going to do
that.
If you want to hire people and teach them then you need to look for these
things: enthusiasm for computers and programming, demonstrated willingness to
learn, energy and effort. You should value energy and effort more highly than
anything. Those are the raw ingredients for trainees, and people with those
ingredients are far from "anyone".
~~~
bad_user
You know what the irony is? Us programmers thinking that "everyone can be a
great programmer" is our preponderant liberal and very idealistic views
showing.
And we keep going around and shout that and other people believe it. And in
turn we are being taken advantage of with long hours, unfair compensation for
our contributions and the worse of it all? Ageism in our industry is rampant.
I look at physicians, surgeons, accountants, lawyers and others with envy,
because in those professions, the older you get, the more esteemed and
valuable you are. We peak at 30.
~~~
beat
Software engineers who "peak at 30" are not taking care of their careers. I'm
over 50, haven't worked a full year anywhere in years. I contract or consult,
and can usually find a new job lead in hours (or just deal with one of the
many sitting in my inbox), and get hired in one (max two) interviews. And it's
not because I'm a rocket surgeon. I know _lots_ of software people who are
eminently employable in their 50s and 60s.
A critical problem that exaggerates the "ageism" is people who sit in the same
corporation for 15-20 years, get laid off because companies change, and
haven't refreshed their skills for many years. I saw my spouse go through this
last year. She got laid off from the company where she'd worked in a variety
of roles for 13 years. Her field toward the end was product
management/ownership, and she liked it, but she didn't like Agile - she'd had
bad experiences at her employer with careless engineers using "agile" as an
excuse to have no process and no oversight. She had also spent many years
developing deep domain experience in a narrow specialty (international
e-commerce). She could find generic PM jobs easily enough, but they didn't
exercise her domain experience and they didn't want to pay her what she'd been
making just to be a generic PM. It took her six months to find a new job that
uses her domain expertise (educating herself about Agile along the way).
For people less determined and hardworking than her, the problem can easily be
much worse. If you've done nothing but Microfocus Cobol for the past 20 years
and suddenly have to find a new job because you employer finally ditched that
antique piece of crap, and you aren't interested in learning how to do
something modern, you're in a world of hurt.
~~~
shubb
You're describing one of two routes people go.
Some people stay in a job for 15-20 years. They are a programmer for maybe 10
of those, but over time they grow into a niche, the company grows, and that
becomes a job title.
Maybe they get called a project manager, or a product owner, head of QA or
engineering or lead architect. Either way they aren't a programmer any more
and they mostly manage something instead of doing - manage people, contracts,
processes, customers...
And that's why programming has a pay ceiling - careerist programmers become
something else, and footloose programmers become consultants and contractors
and leave the regular pay figures.
The value of a good programmer probably becomes diminishing returns after a
certain point. The best programmer in the world can't raise the sales of your
web app past a point - if they do what it takes to do that they become
something else, like a product manager. That point depends on the technical
difficulty of the task and the size of the opportunity, but most code needs a
good coder, not a great one, and beyond that it's all product fit, sales and
luck.
I'm footloose too, and I'm noticing as I get older that the people
interviewing me have often been in their job a long time. They bet on the
company and became less flexible in the general labor market in return for
better opportunities internally.
Honestly, when I work for them, I'm usually surprised how many normal things
they don't know. Maybe they've never seen proper unit testing, or don't know
what ITIL is, or think linux is still an immature product and you should stay
safe with a microsoft stack.
But they know why the code is the way it is. They know what was tried in the
past, and how it failed. And their boss has seen what they do in a crisis,
which is much better than trusting someone unpredictable.
My suggestion to someone young, if you have the temperament, is to stay for up
to a decade and grow into a new, higher value role. Then learn that until you
know it well enough to get a job elsewhere and move before you stagnate.
------
Animats
Look at the reasons startups failed. "Product didn't work" isn't even on the
list. For most appcrap and webcrap, making it work isn't that hard any more.
There are exceptions, where making it work is the hard part. Theranos is
poised to fail because they can't make their medical test technology work.
Cruise (YC 14) will fail if their autonomous driving doesn't stop crashing.
Space-X lives or dies depending on how often their rockets blow up. Those
companies need "the best".
Go down the current YC list.[1] Who has a hard problem?
Hard:
\- 20n: A computational synthetic biology company
\- Industrial Microbes: Upgrade natural gas to chemicals using synthetic
biology
\- Transcriptic: Access a fully automated cell and molecular biology
laboratory, all from the comfort of your web browser
\- Raven Tech: We are building the next generation OS (website sucks; all
giant images, no info.)
Not hard to implement:
\- Cleanly: Laundry & dry-cleaning delivered at the tap of a button
\- GiveMeTap: Each bottle purchased gives a person in Africa clean drinking
water for 5 years
\- EquipmentShare: Rent high quality equipment at the lowest price, guaranteed
\- Meadow: Buy medical cannabis delivered from local dispensaries
\- Cinder: Notifications when food is done. All in a countertop electric
grill.
If you're on the "not hard" list, you're probably better off hiring people
who've done something similar but aren't superstars. Otherwise, you'll get
overdesigned IT infrastructure, like Soylent. (Soylent does maybe two shopping
cart transactions a minute, and boasts about how elaborate their systems are.
They're bikeshedding. They're in the food business; IT is a support function.)
[1] [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/)
------
hitekker
The article is a real gem. One part I particularly like:
>This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie,
it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at
big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes
because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the
best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up
most days not even wanting to work with myself.
Jeff Atwood has the self-security to say something like this publicly. It's
really small-applause worthy in my book, since people will look for anything,
especially anything unrelated to leadership, to tear a leader down[1]
As an aside, I think the political cost to admitting faults ties in roughly
with the "Great Man Fallacy"[2] We're looking for an Iron Man to believe in,
but when Tony Stark can't actually write a program to hack into a government
mainframe in two hours, we get disappointed.
It reminds me very strongly of when Zuckerberg tried, for fun, to solve an
engineering problem after two years of being the CEO of Facebook. He had a lot
of trouble writing basic code; the engineers watching him struggle, who all
thought Zuckerberg was this amazing super-genius who could do anything, ended
up condescending him.[3]
[1] I do believe that plenty of so-called "leaders" are not actually good
leaders. Rather that those people who grow to learn to be leaders, should not
be detracted on certain details that are tangential to their business.
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory)
[3] There should be a specific term for "Gosh darn it, I may not have a
billion dollars b-b-but at least I'm better at this thing in this particular
way!"
~~~
JimboOmega
That's kind of terrifying. Whenever my work takes me away (or largely away)
from writing code for a few months, I worry that if I'm back on the job
market... Not only is my code a bit rusty, but my list of JS frameworks has
fallen behind too.
------
phamilton
We used to ask "What makes this candidate weird?" during the decision meeting.
It wasn't always a deal breaker, but it was very important that the team would
be different after hiring someone. We hired quite a few non-CS grads, whether
they came via a boot camp or were just self taught.
We ended up with a ragged team of misfits and it was awesome. I've never
worked on a team that was so effective at challenging assumptions and biases
and shipping features faster than anyone else. I'm convinced it wasn't through
Herculean efforts by individuals, rather the product of clear communication
and trust within the team.
Ive tried to explain why this worked. One observation: Very rarely did someone
make implicit assumptions. Such assumptions are often wrong, but they happen
because individuals are similar enough that extrapolation a partial
understanding into a full one implicitly happens. We assume that since we got
from A to B on the same path that the path from B to C is likely the same. On
a team of misfits, you have to clearly communicate the entire sequence of
events because everyone is on an entirely different page to start with. The
result is that the final product is 100% on target, whereas normally there are
a few deviations as the result of implicit assumptions.
~~~
kohito
Sounds like your team kind of backed into an insight psychological research
has identified and Google has attempted to apply. Something called
"psychological safety".
"Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure
or embarrassed?" \- from re:work
There's a great NYTimes article about it that looks at your hunch about the
weirdness of the team members being the key to awesomeness. But Google
ultimately realized that it wasn't so much about how different the backgrounds
of the team members were, but was instead that that internal diversity could
produce psychological safety.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-
learn...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-
its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?_r=0)
~~~
phamilton
An anecdotal effect of said environment. We stopped doing person based scrum.
We were able to get away from the "justify my personal usefulness on the team"
status updates. And it was awesome.
------
OpenDrapery
I work in the "boring" old insurance industry, based in the midwest. I love
reading articles like these, and as I read them I get excited and say to
myself "yea!" and "spot on!". But they seem to center around startups and
Silicon Valley.
The truth is, when it comes to building, maintaining, and supporting internal,
line of business apps, management isn't even pretending to look for high end
talent. They want predictability, reliability, and someone who will "fit".
I wonder how many people out there fit my profile. That is, they get excited
by reading blog posts like these from some of the thought leaders, and
desperately want to apply the thinking to their own workplaces, but then feel
like we aren't really the target audience.
~~~
bdavisx
Yep, me too, midwest huge insurance company. From what I've seen, there are
very few people in mid to upper management that think developers are anything
more than a cog in the machine (and only 1 who's ever stated that 'publicly')
- I'm looking to leave after 11 years - I've given up on it changing.
~~~
jrs235
As stated several times over the years, particularly on HN and by patio11
(edit: or was it Joel on Software? Perhaps both?), work for a profit center
not a cost center. The internal software to run insurance companies is a cost
center. It is in managements interest to reduce and keep costs down... that's
detrimental to what you do. Working on a software product or Saas is a profit
center. What you are making is to be sold. It's an asset. An asset management
wants to make as valuable and profitable as possible so they are willing to
invest in it. That works to your favor if you're developing that asset.
~~~
OpenDrapery
In addition to my previous comment, I'd like to hear people's thoughts on the
"consulting" gig. It seems to rule here. You know the routine. Consulting shop
places an individual at a client site and charges the client $100 an hour, and
then turns around and gives the consultant less than half of it. I can see the
argument of the consulting firm viewing their people both as profit centers
and cost centers.
Why are they even called "consulting" firms? They are really just contracting
agencies. And why are they so prevalent in the midwest and the
insurance/banking/healthcare segments? Is it so that employers don't have to
lay people off? Do they record the costs differently on their books versus
full time employees? It just seems so obviously not in the interest of a
company to use them with regards to culture, turnover, cost.
~~~
jsprogrammer
My last consulting firm accounted their consultant salaries as a cost center,
despite our hours worked being directly billed to the client. I left about two
weeks after finding out.
~~~
andrewflnr
Does that affect you financially, or did you just think it showed the wrong
perspective?
~~~
jsprogrammer
It was many. The numbers the company provided to me failed to account for a
significant portion of my billed revenue. Presumably the missing money made it
to the top level in some way.
I also objected to the idea that someone who _directly generates revenue_ was
being labeled a _cost center_. I left, as did my junior consultant, and
shortly after the company failed to gain ongoing contracts at the very large
financial services corporation they were trying to break in to.
My main problem with that job however, was that they recruited me as a
greenfield .NET developer, but then had me analysing some 800 columns over
dozens of tables looking for software errors that were causing incorrect
results in the 401k accounts for which our client was the steward.
------
karterk
This might be an unpopular opinion on HN, but another example of this problem
manifests in the sheer volume of companies that require a HackerRank screening
test these days. Apart from the clumsy web editor, recording someone under a
time constraint means nothing in the larger context of how a programmer's
actual work happens. Sigh.
By using such automated tests, companies want to identify top talent by taking
a shortcut and not investing any time on their side.
~~~
humanrebar
People who ask for more complicated code than "reverse a string" or "fizzbuzz"
in a remote code screen is doing it wrong.
People who can't code, compile, and run a fizzbuzz in an hour are probably not
fit to be hired.
Asking someone to implement a proper Diffie-Hellman over Hackerrank is
ludicrous, on the other hand. Interviewers should err on the side of stupidly
simple problems. A surprising number of people can't code a loop in the
languages on their resumes.
~~~
Tenhundfeld
>A surprising number of people can't code a loop in the languages on their
resumes.
I guess you can reach two conclusions from that:
1) A surprising number of applicants are totally misrepresenting their
abilities – either through deceit or wild ignorance.
2) Something about your interview process makes a surprising number of people
unable to perform at their normal level – from nervousness, unrealistic and
artificial constraints, etc.
Certainly many of those applicants fall into the first bucket, but I'm betting
a large portion fall into the second. So, you might reconsider whether the
false negatives and highly unpleasant experience for many interviewees are
worth the perceived value. Maybe there's a better way to get the same
insights.
~~~
webjprgm
Misrepresenting abilities ... yes, I did that in my first job interview. The
job posting said PHP, HTML, MySQL skills. Well, I knew HTML well enough but my
PHP and MySQL skills were from a few side projects doing copy-paste-modify
with PHP BB's code base to make my own web app, which I never did finish. So I
only kinda/sorta knew those languages.
But then at the end of the interview I was given a coding challenge to do at
home over the next few days. PHP and MySQL have good online documentation so I
was able to knock it out quickly and I got the job. So, yes I misrepresented
my skills, but I also knew I could live up to what I was claiming I could do.
~~~
shawn-furyan
Yes, it seems that most companies misrepresent their requirements in job
postings. It also seems that most candidates misrepresent their skills in
responding to those job postings. There's a certain symmetry there.
Employer: First job out of school pay, requires four years of experience in
our exact tech stack.
Candidate: Sure I'm willing to take first job out of school pay (BTW, just
graduated in May). Yeah, totally have 4 years of experience, and what do you
know, it covers exactly your tech stack!
------
ryandrake
This fear of not hiring the very best explains why everyone in the Valley
seems to be interviewing candidates like crazy but nobody is hiring. When I
interview I try to tease out potential, and look for signals that show the
candidate will work hard and learn fast. Then someone comes in and says, "Well
I hazed him and he couldn't implement a red-black tree on a whiteboard. No
hire." This mad pickiness causes the mythical "shortage of engineers" meme to
spread.
~~~
bitshepherd
This might explain the string of interviews I've taken place in where it's
typically down to one person that shuts everything down because they want to
play stump the chump. You know, instead of looking for qualities in candidates
that would bring value to the company.
------
cubano
I've said it for many many years...hiring selects for those whom interview
well and have good social engineering skills, not _necessarily_ for those whom
can get the job done and make the company successful.
The utterly meaningless "top 1%" metric always makes me laugh. By definition
then 99 of every 100 engineers don't make that cut, which means, again by
definition, your team has very few if any of them, no matter what hiring
practices you employ.
Plus I've found that very often management uses the "oh we hired the wrong
people" as an easy cover for its own failings.
------
p4wnc6
In the spirit of this advice, if you are serious about really finding the best
people, you should offer very comprehensive severance packages as part of
every offer -- on the order of 6-10 months of salary, possibly even "grossed
up" so that it results in at least 6 months of salary after taxes.
Instead of spending money on needlessly complicated hiring processes, with
back and forth phone calls, panel Skype interviews, foolish interactive coding
exams, multiple on-sites, etc., you can spend that money on severance.
Use a cheaper and more straightforward hiring process. Talk to people, dig
into their background and preferred working style a little. If they appear to
be competent, then just hire them. If they are not qualified for the job or
they are not a cultural fit later, just fire them.
Because you will have explained to them that their first month on the job is
still part of the overall fit assessment, and that you value the risk they are
taking by offering them severance to re-engage in a job search if it turns out
you made a mistake by hiring them, you are not doing a disservice to the new
hire. You're merely letting both parties gather more evidence about goodness
of fit.
This is money well spent, and for most companies, 6 months of salary is easily
affordable for severance. In fact, an unwillingness to offer at least that
much to each new hire would be a huge red flag.
~~~
pdevr
>Talk to people, dig into their background and preferred working style a
little. If they appear to be competent, then just hire them.
If I am very good at this assessment, then this may work. However, if I trust
my skills to assess someone accurately, I am unlikely to have a complicated
hiring process.
If I am a company owner (or manager!) who is not good at assessing people this
way, then wouldn't substituting my process with this proposal make me spend a
lot of money twice?
1) Paying salary to more people than open positions (Because I don't spend
money on a hiring process and rely on my assessment skills, I may end up with
many not-so-best-fits)
2) Severance package to let them go
~~~
p4wnc6
> I will end up with many not-so-best-fits
I am not sure I believe this. First, if you are aware that you're not good at
assessing it, then have someone else in your company do the assessment, or
hire someone who can (possibly on the advice of your investors or something).
If you can't do either of those, I am afraid your business just isn't going to
work out.
So, almost by definition, the person doing the assessment is reasonably good
at it. For otherwise, you won't be around very long regardless.
Also, if you find that you're hiring a lot of people who seem good, but
ultimately are fired, maybe look in the mirror. Maybe it is that your
expectations are unrealistic, or maybe you expect people to adhere to
"culture" standards that do not support human flourishing.
Unless the tech problem you need to solve involves lasering in on a fleetingly
tiny population of candidates (most don't), then a sequence of looked-
competent-but-needed-to-fire people is probably more a reflection on the
company than the candidate stream. It's unlikely that all of them were
elaborate fakers.
The costs of (1) should be low unless there's a fundamental problem with the
company (in which case the costs of (1) are way cheaper than hiring a
management consultant to help you not fix it).
(2) is a real cost, and yes, some companies can't afford it (so maybe they
scale back to 3 months severance? Maybe they add continued health coverage.
Maybe they let you pick a foosball table to keep) ... but it is just the cost
of getting useful information about an employee, instead of the not-very-
useful info that most hiring processes generate.
------
draw_down
My team does take-home project, a small problem to solve that should take at
most a couple hours. It's the same problem for every candidate so we're
judging them on common work. It's not real work, it's made up.
In interviewing discussions in places like HN, there is enough pushback
against this idea, which is a bit surprising to me. I thought a few hours work
was reasonable when I was interviewing. But my point is that just this small
bit of work seems already too big for many people, let alone working 10-20
hours a week moonlighting. It's cool that they pay for it, but that pay is
pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things. (Also, now you're not
really interviewing, you're doing client work. Different relationship.)
When I have tried moonlighting in the past I found the stress incommensurate
with the additional income. So I don't think I would do it as an interview,
personally.
It sucks that companies take a risk during hiring. But I'm not really
interested in making that my problem, as a job seeker.
~~~
ern
You allude to a bigger problem: anyone outside the industry who looks at the
hiring process for developers would be put off. I know anecdotally that the
industry is struggling to get students interested in software development as a
career, and good developers are loathe to leave their jobs. I don't blame
either group.
Would I want my kids to spend their careers being put through the wringer of
multiple high-stakes interviews or be forced to moonlight in order to get
jobs, something that gets progressively harder as people reach their thirties
and gain extra responsibilities? No. Rather stay away from the field entirely
and look for a more stable career.
~~~
draw_down
I don't disagree that we have our problems, but to me most industries seem
worse to work in than ours. Not that we should stick up for ourselves but
everything is terrible everywhere. Or you just don't get paid very much.
~~~
ern
I wonder what the lifetime earnings of a new software developer/engineer would
be, compared to other careers, especially for those that turn out to be non-
rock stars in the medium to long term, which would be most. I suspect that the
great earnings initially would plateau and be overtaken by careers where time
in the game and cumulative experience are primary drivers of experience.
------
Gyonka
I really agree with the sentiment of audition projects. The interviews I have
enjoyed the most all involved some sort of take-home project, although I have
never been paid for one. On that note, how expensive does it become for a
startup to dole out many interview projects across a wide range of candidates?
I think a better strategy would be to conduct preliminary interviews and then
based on some granularity, assign projects. One more issue I have with take
home projects is that it is not always possible to tell who did the work. When
it comes to interviews at startups I doubt that there would be much cheating,
but for large companies where candidates are more easily able to slip through
the cracks, I image this may present an issue. Can anyone speak to this
experience?
~~~
majewsky
Here's a problem with audition projects: I would never be able to take part in
one, since my current job contract has a clause forbidding me from
simultaneously working for any competitor in the same field. (This is a German
job contract; I don't know if such clauses are common in the US or elsewhere,
too.)
So in order to work on an audition project, I'd have to be unemployed already.
~~~
lmm
Talk with your solicitor. A lot of companies like to include such clauses in
contracts even if they're not legally enforceable, particularly in the case of
US companies operating in a country with relatively strong workers' rights
like Germany.
~~~
majewsky
It's a German company, and my previous employer (a German SME) had a similar
clause, so it's likely not just them.
------
metasean
Jeff mentions some studies of something known as 'Implicit Bias'. One of the
leading Implicit Bias research institutions, out of Harvard, makes some of
their tests available online. I highly recommend going through a few of them -
[https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)
------
pcunite
Happy to see someone calling out what is happening in our industry, namely:
this morbid fear of "hiring the wrong candidate" is making people ... hire the
wrong candidate!
A word to the hiring managers out there, look to the future, cast the vision,
and onboard people who want to go there with you.
------
andrewstuart
The concept of "The Best" is meaningless anyway.
When someone says "We Hire The Best", ask them to quantify _precisely_ what
"The Best" means. They can't. They weasel around and avoid answering. And that
is because they can't define in a tangible way what "The Best" is. And if you
can't define it then how do you know you found it?
Assuming you can define "The Best", an even bigger problem is working out a
provable mechanism for measuring - in a quantifiable way - whether someone
meets the criteria for being "The Best".
And the final absolute ripper problem is that the more you strive for "The
Best", the less likely tou are to find _anyone_ so you'll spend months
interviewing and hiring no-one until the boss decides to pull the budget for
that position because you didn't hire someone and anyway the commercial
opportunity that validated the hire is now evaporated because we couldn't get
the code written.
My term for this is "Voodoo Recruiting" in which there are rituals and dances
and songs and meetings and processes and tests but it's all just a magic show
because in the end the decision is not scientific, it's a magical outcome
based just on personal likes and biases. In Voodoo Recruiting a company forms
a set of beliefs about its recruiting processes and practices that become
sacred and magical - such as "everyone has to do our test, and it actually
tells us something meaningful about the candidates and we know how to
interpret the results in a meaningful way".
Here's a few posts I wrote on the topic:
I sent one of the best developers I know to a job interview, he was rejected.
[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-
of-...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-of-best-
developers-i-have.html)
Employers don't want great developers, they want what they want.
[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-
dont...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-dont-want-
great-great.html)
Is your developer recruiting process just stroking your company ego?
[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/is-your-
poor-d...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/is-your-poor-
developer-recruiting.html)
~~~
ArkyBeagle
At the risk of being rude, some of it is just foam finger, jingoistic
narcissism. Much is swept under the rug of "fit".
And employers want what they _think_ they want. I've been forced to
(inadvertently) undermine the Great Developer too many places to think
otherwise.
Lest ye think otherwise, I'm not that good. I'm just rigorous but I can switch
modes and hack like a shameless... hacker.
------
sakopov
I worked for companies which "hire the best." My experience was always exactly
the same - a group of very talented engineers who couldn't accomplish a damn
thing together because egos got in the way.
My current company doesn't hire the best, but instead focuses on people who
enjoy making impact in a small team, share the same vision and have a bit of
an entrepreneur in them. We don't quiz people or give them tests. We just sit
down with them and start talking tech. The results are really amazing and make
for a great place to work because everyone feels like the project they work on
is their baby.
------
userium
Great post. "Try different approaches. Expand your horizons. Look beyond
People Like Us and imagine what the world of programming could look like in
10, 20 or even 50 years – and help us move there by hiring to make it so." We
are helping companies to do that at
[https://stayintech.com/](https://stayintech.com/). In the future people who
build technology should represent the people who use it.
------
timothep
I love the first graph on Jeff's article. It shows how versatile the
"best"-word can be in such a context: \- If you have the best programmers in
the world but they failed to help you identify when/where to pivot, you fail.
\- If you have the best programmers in the world but let them run too fast and
burn, you fail. \- If you have the best programmers in the world but let their
ego/drive ignore customer feedback, you fail. \- ...
There is no definition for "the best" beside a "well balanced human being"...
I have been researching this exact space for the past few months
(www.developersjourney.info) and am now more and more convinced that once you
reach a technical-threshold, in order to close onto "better-developers", you
need to hunt for the 3-C-values: create, care and criticize. A balanced team
should be a patchwork of cultures, backgrounds, desires and skills. But I
think the drive toward those 3-Cs isn't optional...
Plug: This is very much an ongoing thoughts-process for me. If you have
further input for my DevJourney Project and/or want to appear on my podcast on
this subject, please contact me!
------
ThrustVectoring
"Only hiring the best" can paradoxically lower the average quality of the
candidate you end up hiring, anyways. Suppose there's two ways for someone to
pass a strict interview: they're either a good programmer, or they're good at
bullshitting you. With a higher bar, you're giving bullshitters more
opportunities to bullshit you.
From the perspective of a subordinate doing hiring, raising the bar makes
perfect sense. You don't want to get blamed for a risky hire going bad, so you
optimize for making your choice defensible rather than good. Non-hiring is
also risky - it's just risky in a way that damages the company rather than the
person doing the hiring.
------
Chris2048
"We hire only the best"
"What do you pay?"
"Market Rate."
~~~
guy_c
Nice! The same conversation in the context of sports, where they really do
want the best:
"We hire only the best"
"What do you pay?"
"Between 10 and 30 million USD per year"
~~~
yongjik
So...... market rate?
(I know, I know, it was a terrible joke.)
~~~
guy_c
Good point :-)
------
spitfire
Tokenadult isn't around to chime in here, so I'll take his place today. Hunter
and Schmit did a meta-study of 70 years of research on hiring criteria. [1]
There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing
employees in intellectual fields.
- General mental ability (Are they generally smart)
- Work sample test (NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing).
- Integrity (The first two won't matter if the candidate is a sociopath).
This alone will get you > 65% hit rate. [1]
[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)
------
staticelf
I really like this post, that most companies require workers to be at a
specific location is very strange considering our type of work.
I don't want to work in Sillicon Valley, even if the work is interesting. I
live in Scandinavia and for me scandinavian countries are the best to live in
the world.
~~~
goldbrick
It boils down to 2 things: Management is incompetent to tell when work is
actually being done, and management doesn't trust their employees. I'm just
waiting for the day when requiring on-site commutes is regarded as backwards
as it deserves.
~~~
staticelf
Exactly, it costs more for the company (office space is expensive, especially
in a larger city). I am also waiting for it.
------
dorfsmay
A few things have happened in the last few years that make me believe that the
meaning of the best is a lot more influenced by our own biases than we will
ever be ready to admit. This is a huge issue with hiring:
1\. The study about blind interviews in orchestras mentioned in the article.
Think about it, most people in symphonic orchestras have a university
education, and often with more years of education than your average engineer,
they learned all about critical thinking etc... They are artists, whom are
usually considered more open minded (ok debatable). But, they as a group, were
able to acknowledge that they have strong biases to the point of trying (and
eventually adopting) blind interviews. This, tells me that these people have a
strong sense of the fact that they are aware that they biased, and able to
admit it, and aware that it might influence their interview process, yet, the
experiment showed that they were not able to see passed gender! This has
seriously made me rethink about my beliefs about being conscious of my own
biases.
2\. I have worked for company A, which hired only the best (besides me I guess
;-) ) pretty much as described in the article, I have recommended people I had
worked with previously and whom I knew were amazing, but they didn't get
hired. I was seriously surprised, but you know the "it's better not to hire
one of the best than err and make one bad hire". Ok.
3\. I then worked for company B. I recommended somebody who was hired at
company A. That person was not a friend, but somebody who passed all
interviews with flying colours at company A. I worked with that person and
they are extremely smart. Everybody at company A was amazed how smart that
person was, even after seeing them fly though all the oh-so-though interviews.
Working for close to a year with that person, and everybody was still positive
about how smart and good that person was, so they aren't just good at
interviewing. That person was turned down at company B.
PS: Yeah, maybe I just need to stop recommending people, I now realise I'm the
common thread in people not getting hired in my story!
------
FLUX-YOU
>I think our industry needs to shed this old idea that it's OK, even
encouraged to turn away technical candidates for anything less than absolute
100% confidence at every step of the interview process. Because when you do,
you are accidentally optimizing for implicit bias.
Now you've got to spend time optimizing your interviewing team. What if one
guy just says yes to everything? He might as well not be there but he's still
a weight in that decision. What about the opposite where he says No every
time? When do you decide he is actually going to say No every time and not
worth being part of that decision process?
The more people you put on this decision table, the lower the chances that any
one candidate will make it through. But there's an opportunity cost of
time/money to that, so you've got another thing to balance.
I think it would be really, really hard for one person to simultaneously
impress 10 people beyond a doubt just because of how many people have to reach
consensus. And can you imagine the stress of knowing one dude with a nitpicky
attitude (that none of the others know about yet) could sink your chances?
------
dworin
The missing part of the advice is that you need to hire the best _for your
company_. But there isn't an objective definition of 'best.' People can be
great at one job and not right for another, great in one company and not right
for another. Hiring and job hunting is about fit.
I've worked with people who were A players, hired into a new firm, and quickly
spun out. Other people were C players, found a new job, and quickly became A
players.
If you're a company who's great at training people, you can hire for energy
and eagerness to learn. If you expect people to know everything on day one,
hire for experience. The same people who succeed in one of those companies
will fail in the other. A big part of hiring is knowing yourself and knowing
what makes people successful.
------
quirkot
To put this in context, "Hire the Best" means: adopt an incredibly risk
tolerant nature, initiate an incredibly risky business venture, and then
tolerate zero risk in your hiring decisions.
------
elcapitan
tldr:
"The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to
work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real
tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the
job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their
current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic,
although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to
focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have
them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly
and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial
relationship."
~~~
de_Selby
That sounds like it would scale well for the applicant.
~~~
elcapitan
It works well in my experience, but we have only used it at smaller scale. 2-3
days working together with somebody is already way more telling than stupid
interviews, buzzword compliant skillsets and unrealistic tests.
~~~
OpenDrapery
How would it work in "your experience" if you were the job seeker and not the
interviewer? Taking a week of PTO to interview and then not get the job is a
pretty big sunk cost. I guess you can only do one of these a year.
~~~
falcolas
If you make weekends and evenings available, it lessens the cost of the job
seeker. If you allow for remote work using one of the many online
collaboration tools, it lessens the cost for both the job seeker and the
employer.
------
rl3
My favorite is when you see companies droning on about how they only hire "the
best" and their advertised salary ranges are at or below market.
------
mathattack
There's a very big time cost to hiring just the best. If you're afraid of even
one bad hire, then a growing company must be willing to have all their
managers and top employees commit 20+% of their time to hiring. Then you ask
"Is the 1-2 standard deviation in performance improvement worth it?" If the
answer is yes, then it's worth it.
And... Interviews are awful. Seeing how someone work is even better. This is
one reason why employee referrals are so important, and audition or temp-
projects a good second-best method.
In the end I think it's a Fools Game though - someone who is best in one
environment may not be that great for the next. Managing people post-hire is
something that can't be avoided.
~~~
notacoward
It's not just a time cost. The graph near the top of Jeff's article shows "Ran
Out of Cash" as the #2 cause of startup failures, ahead of anything else
hiring-related. I say anything _else_ because hiring the best means paying for
the best. If you hire nobody else, then salary costs rise. Attrition probably
does too, because the best are often among the first to jump elsewhere.
Every startup needs a few of the best. You should definitely seek out and pay
for those few. After that, even a startup has jobs that don't require the
best. Hire for potential, attitude, chemistry. Hire for special knowledge when
you have to (though you should try to avoid it). But don't demand that every
hire be among the proven elite.
~~~
mathattack
You could argue that the best pay for themselves, and that running out of a
cash could come from hiring bad people.
The absolutely best employees I've seen haven't been frequent job hoppers. At
most it's every 3-5 years. I'm thinking of an unscientific sample size of 5 or
6 people who have had sustained outstanding technical performance of 10-25
years. Companies don't let people like them go. And they tend to be loyal to
the mission if treated fairly.
Now a company with $1mm of seed money that's supposed to last 12-18 months
can't afford to hire 5 people like that. There's not enough cash or equity to
go around.
------
whatever_dude
This is one of those great articles that open up a collection of other
articles to look at, whether you agree with the author or not (or somewhat).
The links in the body are very informative.
Thanks for sharing.
------
blue11
I really enjoyed the article until he got to the audition process. That would
shrink the pool of candidates so much that all the previous advice about
widening and diversifying the pool becomes irrelevant. Almost no one with
significant experience would agree to that. Almost no one with a family would
do it either. And let's face it, it's a buyer's market, not just for "the
best", but even for the "just OK".
------
jldugger
> What I like about audition projects: > It's real, practical work. > They get
> paid. (Ask yourself who gets "paid" for a series of intensive interviews
> that lasts multiple days? Certainly not the candidate.) > It's healthy to
> structure your work so that small projects like this can be taken on by
> outsiders. If you can't onboard a potential hire, you probably can't onboard
> a new hire very well either. > Interviews, no matter how much effort you put
> into them, are so hit and miss that the only way to figure out if someone is
> really going to work in a given position is to actually work with them.
I'm finally sitting down to read Peopleware, and from what I can tell, this is
what they recommended back in 99 or 87 or whatever. Alongside portfolios of
work. I need to find a 2013 edition, to see if they mention GitHub portfolios
at all.
------
im_down_w_otp
The description of "Audition Project" as presented is questionably ethical,
almost certainly violates almost everybody's pre-existing employment
agreement, and puts Automattic and the contractor in a very compromised legal
position in many states over the IP that the employee of the primary company
is creating while on a spurious contract with Automattic.
It seems like a colossally bad idea almost all-around. I mean, would
Automattic tolerate an employee working contract gigs for a potential future
employer if Automattic were to be made aware that's what the employee was
doing?
Weird.
------
rockcoder
When every company hires only "the best" (top 1%), what are the rest of us
(99%) suppose to do?
~~~
bryanlarsen
When they say top 1% they generally mean the top 1% of applications. A very
large portion of the applications you get for an opening are sent by those who
need to send out hundreds of applications to get a job.
------
nullundefined
You hire the best? How come your offer package for a full stack developer is
100,000-115,000?
------
woodcut
In regards to the paid trial period method. My experience is mixed, on one
hand you get a real insight into how someone works and approaches their tasks
but you lose that crucial emotional distance, so to say... you go soft on
them.
------
willvarfar
A rehash of
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html)
Haven't heard so much from Joel these days - sad :(
------
criddell
> Using screens to hide the identity of auditioning musicians increased
> women's probability of advancing from preliminary orchestra auditions by
> fifty percent.
I thought that the increase was largely attributed to _more_ women being
willing to audition anonymously?
> if that describes you, and you have serious Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript
> chops, perhaps you should email me
I don't know why, but I always thought the Atwood was 100% invested in
Microsoft technologies. Not that it matters, it just surprised me.
Speaking of Atwood, has anybody ever used one of his keyboards? Any opinions?
~~~
emodendroket
Why would professional musicians be unwilling to audition in a non-anonymous
situation? That sounds quite dubious to me.
~~~
criddell
I had to Google for it and I don't have the story right.
Claudia Goldin was one of the authors of this study:
[https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.90.4.715](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.90.4.715)
She was able to attribute 25% of the increase in hiring of women by orchestras
was due to the blind auditions. She also found that there was an explosion of
auditions when orchestras adopted the blind format.
So it had an effect, just not as large as I thought.
~~~
Grishnakh
That's weird. From what I've seen of women in classical orchestras, if I were
the one in charge of auditioning and hiring musicians (not blind), I'd
probably be hiring mostly women....
Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why _wouldn 't_ you want pretty young
women working with you?
~~~
emodendroket
I'm not sure hiring women with the aim of sexually harassing them is really
what we're all talking about.
~~~
Grishnakh
Hey, I'm just pointing out that this common trope about men discriminating
against women for jobs doesn't really make that much sense, unless all the men
in charge of hiring are gay (which obviously isn't the case or the claim).
Seriously, what kind of straight man only wants to be around men all day long,
and then (assuming he's married) come home every day to the same woman, and
never get to socialize with any other women? Maybe a religious fundamentalist,
but not any normal man.
~~~
emodendroket
Well, there are a few responses:
1\. Why should women be judged on attractiveness? Men are not generally judged
on this standard to join orchestras or do office work. It also, perversely,
punishes women for being experienced while men benefit from it, handicapping
their lifetime earning power. Professional women probably do not want to spend
their lives judged as eye candy.
2\. Because of the first point you will still end up with a strong male bias
on top of whatever natural one training creates; after all, we're looking at
men of any age versus young women, for the most part, in this scenario.
3\. The numbers clearly do not bear out the assertion you're making in the
first place, since blind auditions significantly increase the likelihood of
women being hired after auditioning. It seems your "self-evident" reasoning
does not fit the facts.
4\. I do not think it is true that all men want to spend more time socializing
with women. I don't see how the logic you're positing works unless sexual
harassment is just outright permitted. If you're not convinced that sexual
harassment is bad then I guess you're operating on a different plane than most
of us.
~~~
Grishnakh
Thanks for the response, but I really don't understand where you're getting
the idea that I'm advocating sexual harassment at all.
I'll go backwards: 4\. So you think that most men would prefer to not have any
women around them most of the time, and only want to socialize with other men?
I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly isn't the case with me. I
don't really want to work in a monastery-like atmosphere devoid of females
(attractive or not).
3\. Maybe, but that's what I'm asking about: why would straight men only want
to be around other men? Seriously, I really don't understand this at all. Are
most men repressed gays or something? I actually like being in mixed
environments, even if I'm not attracted to most or even any of the women. Am I
weird that way?
1-2. You seem to be claiming that men aren't also judged on attractiveness,
and this seems wrong. I'm quite sure a lot of studies have shown that men are
indeed judged on attractiveness, though the standard is somewhat different
than for men (it doesn't disfavor older men as much). Just go find a short guy
(or worse, a short fat guy) and ask him how his life is going and if he
perceives any discrimination.
Anyway, my point all along has not been that only young pretty women should be
hired, as you seem to think, my point was that I don't understand why men
would discriminate against women in hiring, because to do so would mean you're
surrounding yourself with a bunch of dudes, and as I said above, I don't know
about other men, but I for one do not enjoy "sausagefests"; I like mixed
environments.
~~~
emodendroket
I've heard enough men vocalize such thoughts to think that a fair number of
them do.
The reason I get the idea that you're advocating sexual harassment is that you
keep casting this in sexual terms -- why would you want to be surrounded by
men, unless you're gay? Work is not a sexual environment (let's ignore the
exceptions for this conversation); why is sexual orientation relevant? Saying
"hey, aren't you heterosexual? Then why don't you hire women?" manages to
promote a progressive cause with regressive reasoning.
I will concede that men, too, are judged by appearance, but I think that the
standard is far more lenient and, as you said, tolerant of age.
In any event, the auditions are meant to judge skill. The conclusion I reach
from the success of blind auditions is that evaluators perceive playing as
less skillful when they know it is done by a woman.
~~~
Grishnakh
>The reason I get the idea that you're advocating sexual harassment is that
you keep casting this in sexual terms -- why would you want to be surrounded
by men, unless you're gay? Work is not a sexual environment (let's ignore the
exceptions for this conversation); why is sexual orientation relevant?
So you think that if I'm not actively looking for sex from women, that I
should be perfectly happy to live a life completely devoid of any kind of
female contact whatsoever?
That seems extremely disturbing to me.
Does that also mean that if I'm not actively looking to have a sex partner of
a different race/ethnicity, then I should be perfectly happy to never have any
kind of contact with people from other ethnic groups?
Wow, I guess on HN I'm just a real weirdo because I don't want to be
surrounded by white males and be completely cut off from contact with other
kinds of people.
~~~
emodendroket
No. I'm suggesting that arguing that you don't want to be surrounded
exclusively by white males _because_ "hey, I'm not gay" (implicitly, because
you want to have sex with these people, or at least would not object to doing
so) is somewhere between off-putting and troglodytic.
~~~
Grishnakh
I think you're projecting, or have serious mental issues, to come up with a
conclusion like that from what I wrote.
~~~
emodendroket
"From what I've seen of women in classical orchestras, if I were the one in
charge of auditioning and hiring musicians (not blind), I'd probably be hiring
mostly women.... Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why wouldn't you want
pretty young women working with you?"
This is what you wrote. So, no, I think you're just trying to walk away from
the implications of what you wrote because you are embarrassed. How do you
propose interpreting that without any sexual bent?
~~~
Grishnakh
You're taking one line I wrote and applying it to everything. I've made a
bunch of other statements in this conversation about how I prefer mixed
groups, not only of sex but of ethnicity too. One nice side-effect of a mixed
group is there might be some dateable people in there, but it's not a given,
and it's nice to have a mixed group (IMO) for many other reasons than just sex
or seeing pretty faces, but I don't see how it's wrong to want to work in a
mixed environment and have that possibility if you're single.
------
matchagaucho
The hidden, but most impactful message in this article is "be a remote first
company".
The best programmers are Internet savvy, therefore able to effectively
collaborate across time zones.
------
DrNuke
There is always someone better than YOU, even if you hire the best (and you
can't), so stop bullshitting wannabe slaves and learn to respect real people.
Signed: the best.
------
autotune
> Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript chops
One of these things is not like the others.
------
zpatel
In this world of open source software and super fast servers , hiring is over
hyped especially for apps & enterprise solutions. The best enterprise/web app
coder is not necessarily the best analytical thinker or apolitical individual.
Indeed, there are some domains where you will need specialists.
Any one who is hard worker (can learn etc) and has open mind to discussing
design pros and cons is a good hire for 80% of software.
------
beefman
A great company is not something that contains great people, it is something
that makes people great!
------
gargs
> The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to
> work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis
I guess that's another, more polite, way of saying that 'we require that you
don't need any kind of work permit sponsorship'.
------
emodendroket
Steve Yegge's old essay was arguably better. [http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...](http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html)
------
debacle
Encouraging hiring discretion and audition projects creates a situation where
a massive amount of people who don't want to work on a project for a few weeks
only to find out they aren't a 100% good match will never apply to your
company.
------
paulddraper
Just because everyone is trying to hire the best doesn't make the advice
wrong. It just means that some will be able to execute it, and some will not.
A successful sports team should hire the best, even if that's what everyone
else is trying to do too.
~~~
vonmoltke
> A successful sports team should hire the best, even if that's what everyone
> else is trying to do too.
Yes, but sports teams recognize "the best" is dependent on the other pieces in
the organization. Teams that try to stack their rosters with "the best" in
objective measure typically crash and burn. Teams that recognize "the best" is
whomever fits the team's scheme and current players the best succeed. Too many
software companies want the first sense instead of the second.
------
stillworks
Getting a job is an accident you get involved in (most of the times)
knowingly. The interview is the collision (or the contact event) The job
represents how well you survive after you come home after treatment. There is
no best... only better.
------
ArkyBeagle
If we didn't sort people, we would get better results. Of course we are all
different. But the madness of status makes us all crazy.
------
sandworm101
There is no "the best". There are only people. Some people work wonderfully at
one shop, but horribly at another. This can have nothing to do with their
skill or even their personality. Each working environment is unique as is each
candidate. You simply cannot tell which will work perfectly until long after
someone is properly hired.
So why bother interviewing? The goal is not "we only hire the best". Hiring is
only half the battle and a short term goal at most. The long term goal should
be "we only retain the best". Sometimes that means firing people, but more
often it means going to the mat to keep the people who work best: Treating
people like human beings and, most importantly, paying them. Pay well and the
good people will not leave. Actually fire those who don't work out in the long
term and even they will do nearly anything to stay.
Or do what most startups do. Pay next to nothing. Treat everyone like widgets
in a great machine. Fire only those whose admit having a life outside of work.
And hire only those who share similar opinions on ultimate frisbee because
culture!
~~~
artursapek
> Or do what most startups do. Pay next to nothing. Treat everyone like
> widgets in a great machine. Fire only those whose admit having a life
> outside of work. And hire only those who share similar opinions on ultimate
> frisbee because culture!
What happened that makes you this bitter?
~~~
kimdouglasmason
I would suggest that he observed reality.
------
maxaf
> The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to
> work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis.
Are you fucking kidding me? What am I going to tell my current employer while
I "audition" for the mere possibility of a next job?
Most working adults in the US don't even get three to eight weeks of
discretionary vacation that they aren't already using to spend time with
family or, you know, recharge after working the salt mines for meager scraps.
This is the wrong approach for anyone except - maybe - very junior candidates.
Fresh out of college, zero responsibility, wide open prospects. Those people
could actually use 3-8 weeks of paid auditioning. Those of us who have
families simply can not afford to do this.
~~~
dominotw
So its basically extended interview for like 8 weeks where your every move is
being watched/judged.
When did it become ok to treat people like shit and humiliate them with these
ridiculous "interviews". Seems like we keep coming up one worse idea after
another.
Shame on everyone who thinks its ok to humiliate people with your idiotic
algorithm/whiteboard/big O interviews.
This is getting so out of hand. Can we bring some humility and kindness to
tech interviews.
~~~
qmalzp
Am I the only person who thinks algorithmic/big O puzzles are kind of fun?
Like they're super high stress when you're interviewing, but basically
everything is super high stress when you're interviewing.
~~~
rdtsc
> Am I the only person who thinks algorithmic/big O puzzles are kind of fun?
They are fun. So company ends with a lot of people who can implement red-black
trees and so on, especially under high stress. That could be good in some
case. I can't see it that good in general.
"So customer reports server keeps restarting every Thursday, can you take a
look?"
"I am not sure how to do it, but I can invert a binary tree in under 10
minutes though, would you like to see that?"
~~~
dominotw
>am not sure how to do it, but I can invert a binary tree in under 10 minutes
though
Most ppl completely forget how to invert a binary tree in about 1 week after
the interview. Which makes the whole interview process based on that stuff
even more absurd.
------
a_puppy
> I think there is a real issue around diversity in technology (and most other
> places in life). I tend to think of it as the PLU problem. Folk (including
> MVPs) tend to connect best with folks most like them ("People Like Us"). In
> this case, male MVPs pick other men to become MVPs. It's just human nature.
This theory makes intuitive sense, but some evidence contradicts it. Several
studies have found that men and women discriminate against women equally, or
even that women are harder on other women than men are:
* Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke (1999) [http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Stein...](http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Steinpreis_Impact%20of%20gender%20on%20review.pdf) ; Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) [http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full) ; and Reuben, Sapienza, and Zingales (2014) [http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.abstract) found that men and women were equally biased against hypothetical academic job candidates in a study based on reviewing resumes with male or female names.
* Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) [http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/harvesting.GroupDyna...](http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/harvesting.GroupDynamics.pdf) found that in implicit association tests, women show slightly stronger implicit biases towards traditional gender roles in the "Gender-science" and "Gender-career" tests.
* Of course, there's Terrell et al. (2016) [https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/) (the GitHub gender bias study that was discussed on Hacker News the other day) in which the authors found that women are harder on other women than they are on men but decided not to mention this in the paper [https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gen...](https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gender-of-the-users-that/) .
On the other hand, I also found some studies that concluded that men have
stronger gender biases than women:
* Bowles, Babcock, and Lai (2005) [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=779506](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=779506) found that male managers penalize women who attempt to negotiate salary more than female managers do.
* Uhlmann and Cohen (2005) [http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%20...](http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%202005.pdf) found that men exhibited a stronger gender bias than women did in rating hypothetical applicants for a job as a police chief.
This is just what I dug up in an hour of searching; I'd be interested in
finding more research on this. Does anyone know of a review paper on this
subject?
------
adamkaz
Amen.
------
MajorLOL
>Those of us who have families simply can not afford to do this.
Then don't take the job? Your life choices (Children, wife, loan payments)
aren't the fault or social responsibility of your prospective employer.
Why get so uppity about a job you aren't even going to apply for?
~~~
kimdouglasmason
Children are a life choice? You're part of the problem.
~~~
dominotw
>Children are a life choice? You're part of the problem.
Are they not though? Aren't you consciously choosing engage in this optional
activity when you decide to have kids.
~~~
kimdouglasmason
And there we go again. 'optional activity'. And people wonder why there are
few women in tech and the situation is not improving. The post above is your
answer.
Have a family, it's the end of your career, because you engaged in
productivity limiting 'optional activities'. Yes, the tech sector IS that
toxic.
~~~
MajorLOL
This is a case of "cake and eat it too" -
If you have a family it's more important than your career. If you don't feel
your family is more important, you may abandon it or never have one to begin
with. Just because you have a different stack of priorities than another
doesn't mean you can blame them for ranking theirs differently than yours.
Analogy is; you wouldn't protest at the Buddhist temple door because you feel
that your time availably is less to become a full fledge Buddhist monk because
you have a family.
It has nothing to do with women in tech, try and keep on topic please.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Introduction to Algorithmic Information Theory - edw519
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/kolmogorov.html
======
JoeAltmaier
Quote "2. A truly random string is not significantly compressible; its
description length is within a constant offset of its length. Formally we say
K(x) = Theta(|x|), which means "K(x) grows as fast as the length of x". But
any finite random sequence can be found at some point in a pseudo-random
generated sequence of sufficient length; thus can always be described by the
generator function and the seed.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
TagSurf is tinder for hashtags - sfsurfer
http://www.tagsurf.co
======
sfsurfer
Surf the best of #reddit and #imgur on tagSurf! Swipe right for a better feed!
Surf On!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Can You Ever Really Know an Extraterrestrial? (2014) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/can-you-ever-really-know-an-extraterrestrial
======
lawless123
I don't think knowledge of aliens would significantly impact most peoples
lives at all.
A large proportion of the world already believe (erroneously in my opinion )
that aliens visit us, and they mostly manage to get on with their lives.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Generate a material deisgn avatars instead of Gravatar - lincanbin
https://github.com/lincanbin/Material-Design-Avatars
======
krapp
It looks nice. But as long as it's a Composer package, could you set it up to
use the autoloader? Then, using it as a dependency will be easier.
------
lincanbin
PHP version only.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
NSA Reports Data Deletion - uptown
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/press-room/statements/jun-28-2018-ufa-cdr-decision.shtml
======
a-fried-egg
There's something called a "betrayal of trust" and when you betray someone's
trust, good luck getting it back.
------
cremp
Funny because the whole 'we don't spy on US people.'
And now the 'whoops, we actually did, and are deleting them now, so nobody can
cry foul.'
They got their use out of them, and to make sure and current(?)/future
lawsuits won't have data; just delete it.
------
unstatusthequo
“...but it’s cool, don't worry about us. We will just make new requests for
clean data from the providers, and continue serving you the citizenry."
------
java-man
not wittingly
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Driving dataset for car autopilot AI training - EvgeniyZh
https://github.com/commaai/research
======
IshKebab
Cool, but this really confirms what I suspected about Hotz's car all along.
He's just done the 'easy' bit - output steering angle on easy highways. That
was done in the 80s (slower admittedly, but still).
Wake me up when it can drive here (to pick a random example):
[https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/London/@52.1986058,0.143...](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/London/@52.1986058,0.1433238,3a,75y,19.57h,82.48t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1saA9p1edgcTokW-f7AhejPg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DaA9p1edgcTokW-f7AhejPg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D80.355255%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x47d8a00baf21de75:0x52963a5addd52a99!8m2!3d51.5073509!4d-0.1277583!6m1!1e1?hl=en)
~~~
Animats
That's not a hard case. It's just a narrow, straight road lined with
obstacles. If you have sensors that can get a height field, that's no problem.
Our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle could have done that in 2005, using a LIDAR.
Google wouldn't have any problem with that. Tesla would have a problem;
they're dependent on lane lines.
~~~
ghaff
The main difficulty with a side street like that is there isn't actually
enough room for 4 vehicles across--2 parked and 2 going in opposite
directions. Humans can deal with this pretty easily because it's usually
fairly obvious who can most easily yield or even back up a little bit. It's
not an especially hard problem and 2 vehicles that could formally communicate
would make it easier yet. However, if the behavior depends on essentially
social signals, that's somewhat harder but far from impossible to model. (You
probably program the computer to politely yield if at all possible.)
However, as you say, this is yet another case where vehicles aren't expected
to unthinkingly follow lane lines--if they even exist.
------
metafunctor
This is very cool. I believe scientific papers, especially in the AI space,
should habitually share all data that was used so others can repeat and build
on the results.
That said, a few hours of highway driving is of course woefully inadequate for
learning anything but steering in normal conditions on that particular
highway, if even that. So this is not the "build your Tesla Autopilot" kit,
even though the OP decided to use the word “autopilot” in the title.
~~~
ocdtrekkie
The big question for me is... does comma.ai intend to continue to build a
public dataset? Because for companies like Google, their primary "value" is
their data, that's what they won't share with everyone else, it's what gives
them their edge.
If a company was truly willing to share their large datasets down the road,
that'd be a Big Deal.
~~~
EvgeniyZh
When you think about it, at least in Russia many people have video cameras in
their cars, and you probably can buy their data for relatively small money,
acquiring many hours of driving video. I'm surprised no company have done it
yet.
~~~
trhway
probably you just wouldn't want to train your AI on Russian driving. I mean it
is like R rated movies - you don't want to expose unprepared mind to it until
it reaches stage of maturity that would allow to handle it :)
~~~
Animats
Using videos from vehicles in accidents could be useful. Take the last seconds
before the accident, extract a top-view model, and try to train for ways to
detect imminent trouble and avoid it.
------
bbayer
Author George Hotz, also known as geohot, is the author of first working iOS
jailbrake. He decided to enter self driving car area[1]. Apparently he founded
a new company called comma.ai [2]
[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-
driv...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/)
[2] [http://comma.ai/](http://comma.ai/)
~~~
denzell
Once I read George Hotz.. I knew i recognized the name.
------
Animats
This creates a model for driving that totally ignores things that can go
wrong. It will work great in the normal case, and totally screw up if anything
unusual happens. There's no model of "obstacle" or "oncoming vehicle". That's
unsafe.
This is a field where bug reports are written in blood.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
First YC Fellowship Virtual Demo Day - degif
http://blog.ycombinator.com/first-fellowship-virtual-demo-day
======
dineshp2
Pramp is particularly interesting, though I'm not sure if there are ways for
the Pramp team to maintain good levels of quality as the user base grows.
When compared to YC companies, the YCF companies seem a little earlier stage
by demo day.
Nit picking: A lot of the websites of YCF companies use RapidSSL, Comodo or
GoDaddy domain validated certificates. Why not Let's Encrypt?
~~~
Alex3917
> Why not Let's Encrypt?
Because if you're really running a business then any decision other than just
paying the $200 to not have to think about certs more than one day every three
years is probably not justifiable.
~~~
koolba
> Because if you're really running a business then any decision other than
> just paying the $200 to not have to think about certs more than one day
> every three years is probably not justifiable.
From the same data I came to the reverse conclusion, having auto-renewing
certs from LetsEncrypt is awesome. Combined with bog standard cron jobs you
now don't have to worry about any manual intervention down the road.
Compare that with creating a new key, creating a CSR, comparing SSL cert
prices, getting aggravated at paying $10/year for 1ms of compute time (to sign
the cert), grumbling to yourself, buying the cert, waiting for email
confirmation, confirming domain ownership via insecure SMTP email, waiting for
the cert to be issued, downloading a zip of the cert that somehow isn't the
same name/format as your notes from last time, unzipping the zip file,
figuring out the order for the cert chain, uploading it via SCP to your
server, copying it over the old cert yet also accidentally keeping a copy of
the cert/key in the default ubuntu@myhost home directory with 644 permissions,
and finally testing it from your browser (only to find that you didn't send a
SIGHUP to nginx so it's still providing the old cert).
So yes, having to think about certs more than one day (the day I set it up) is
not justifiable.
PS: Why the hell are you paying $200 anyway? At most it should be $30, i.e.
$10/year x 3 years. That looks more in line with wildcard SSL prices.
~~~
Alex3917
> That looks more in line with wildcard SSL prices.
Because I'm buying a wildcard cert. (Which Let's Encrypt doesn't currently
offer.)
------
tedmiston
> Bulletin - Airbnb for Retail
A marketplace to setup popup shops is something new.
It looks like they're augmenting that with something like their own Etsy, but
with less homemade and more well designed objects.
~~~
gatsby
Storefront - [https://www.thestorefront.com/](https://www.thestorefront.com/)
\- raised almost $10m for a similar idea, and just shut down last month after
four years, so I wonder how/if Bulletin will approach the market differently.
~~~
keithwhor
It's not a "similar idea", it was the exact same thing. Google "AirBnB for
retail." :)
This company is going to face a really tough road ahead if they don't execute
properly. Including convincing Storefront's old customers that they're going
to do it right.
------
seibelj
> _realistiic_ reloading, slide action, [0]
Typo alert, right on front page, first paragraph
[0] [https://iliumvr.com/](https://iliumvr.com/)
------
euroclydon
It's exciting to see these companies execute on their ideas. But can we have a
little fun with it?
\- Crimson Labs: Fitbit for Period Sex
Your turn.
~~~
tedmiston
"So what's your market size?"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The main trick in machine learning - tlarkworthy
http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/12/the-main-trick-in-machine-learning/
======
tel
A professor of mine stated it very well. If you can imagine that there is a
_true_ model somewhere out in infinitely large model space then ML is just the
search for that model.
In order to make it tractable, you pick a finite model space, train it on
finite data, and use a finite algorithm to find the best choice inside of that
space. That means you can fail in three ways---you can over-constrain your
model space so that the true model cannot be found, you can underpower your
search so that you have less an ability to discern the best model in your
chosen model space, and you can terminate your search early and fail to reach
that point entirely.
Almost all error in ML can be seen nicely in this model. In particular here,
those who do not remember to optimize validation accuracy are often making
their model space so large (overfitting) at the cost of having too little data
to power the search within it.
Devroye, Gyorfi, and Lugosi ([http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Recognition-
Stochastic-M...](http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Recognition-Stochastic-
Modelling-Probability/dp/0387946187)) have a really great picture of this in
their book.
~~~
joe_the_user
_In order to make it tractable, you pick a finite model space, train it on
finite data, and use a finite algorithm to find the best choice inside of that
space. That means you can fail in three ways---you can over-constrain your
model space so that the true model cannot be found, you can underpower your
search so that you have less an ability to discern the best model in your
chosen model space, and you can terminate your search early and fail to reach
that point entirely._
It seems like you can "mis-power" your model also.
For example, the Ptolemaic system could approximate the movement of the
planets to any degree if you added enough "wheels within wheels" but since
these were "the wrong wheels", the necessary wheels grew without bounds to
achieve reasonable approximation over time.
~~~
rcthompson
> For example, the Ptolemaic system could approximate the movement of the
> planets to any degree if you added enough "wheels within wheels" but since
> these were "the wrong wheels", the necessary wheels grew without bounds to
> achieve reasonable approximation over time.
That would be an example of over-constraining your model (i.e. imposing the
arbitrary constraint of a stationary Earth).
~~~
joe_the_user
I don't think this is useful way to phrase the situation.
A system of Ptolemaic circles _can_ approximate the paths taken by any system.
So the system really isn't absolutely constrained to follow or not follow any
given path.
You could claim you have constrained your model not be some other better model
but that, again, seems like a poor way to phrase things since a more accurate
model is also constrained not to be a poor model.
Even specifically, the Newtonian/Keplerian system has the constrain of the sun
being stationary as much as the Ptolemaic system has the constraint of the
earth being stationary.
Edit: As Eru points out, the Ptolemaic system basically uses the Fourier
transform to represent paths. Thus the approximation is actually completely
unconstrained in the space of paths, that is it _can_ approximate anything.
But by that token, the fact that it can approximate a given path explains
nothing and the choices that are simple in this system are not necessarily the
best choices for the given case, estimating planetary motion.
See -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle)
~~~
rcthompson
That's a good point, but after re-reading tel's original comment, I think my
statement is still correct. Notice that tel's statement was that "you can
over-constrain your model space so that the true model cannot be found". This
doesn't necessarily mean constraining your model so that the true model is
excluded from your parameter space. If your constraints technically encompass
the true solution but only admit an overly complex parametrization of the
solution, then it will still reduce (perhaps drastically) your power to find
the true model. In this case, "overly complex" means unnecessarily many
nonzero (or not almost zero) coefficients in the Fourier series.
~~~
joe_the_user
My argument is that there are two kind of situations:
* The model could encompass the behavior of the input in a smooth fashion if it's basic parameters are relaxed.
* The model would tend to start finding models that are wildly different from the main model at the edges (space and time) if its parameter are relaxed, even if the model would eventually find the real model with enough input and training.
one has to handle these two conditions differently, right?
------
hooande
I applaud the author of this post. I've seen a lot of people suffer with
machine learning because they don't understand this basic concept. Taking MOOC
classes and reading textbooks is a great way to learn, but they tend to focus
on a lot on the mathematical principle and not the start-from-nothing
practical considerations.
Machine learning is almost like learning chess in that there are certain
obvious mistakes that noobs continue to make. And like chess there are
multiple levels of thinking and understanding that are almost impossible to
teach to someone that doesn't have lots of experience. Hopefully more blog
posts like this will help people get past the novice level.
Regarding technical content:
N-fold Cross validation [1] can be a more effective approach to having a
single held out or validation set. You split your data into N groups, say N =
10. Then you use groups 2-10 as a training set to make predictions on group 1,
then groups 1,3-10 to make predictions on group 2, etc. Recombine the
prediction output files and use the measured error to tune and tweak your
predictor. It's more work and can still lead to overfitting, but it's
generally better to overfit the entire training set than it is to overfit one
held out sample.
[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-
validation_%28statistics%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-
validation_%28statistics%29)
~~~
glifchits
The Coursera ML class has a week of lectures specifically regarding practical
considerations. The prof discusses how to solve for underfitting/overfitting,
and spends a lot of time on this idea of a cross-validation set. To whomever
reads this, its a good course!
------
waterside81
I work at a company that sells applied machine learning services, so I'd like
to add a few more tricks to machine learning:
1) Have lots of data
2) Accept the possibility that your problem domain cannot be generalized.
I always find, whether in academic literature or in message boards, a desire
to fit every round peg into a square hole. The reality of real world data is
that sometimes, it's just a 50/50 coin toss. This might be because the
features that _really_ indicate some sort of pattern can't be defined or they
can and the data can't be reliably retrieved, or the humans running things
have a poor understanding of the problem domain to start with.
TL;DR: There's no magic
~~~
tel
My experience with real world (but still academic) data has been that there is
lots of magic---feature selection to be specific.
(I'm not disagreeing, just referring to a different kind of "magic")
Everything else matters, but when your ML doesn't work it's 100% a feature
selection problem. Which usually means it's 99% a problem of getting lots of
domain expertise jammed up against a lot of ML experience and mathematical
understanding. It's also a bear.
~~~
nabla9
The way 80% of real real world (non academic) data mining problems are solved:
1\. Feature selection.
2\. intelligent data massage. Real world data has usually noise that humans
can easily identify as irrelevant or erroneous.
3\. logit regression.
Starting with simple, well understood algorithms first should be the second
lesson after knowing about validation sets. In those cases where they are not
enough, they set the baseline for comparison against other algorithms.
~~~
larrydag
I would add 4. Ensemble methods. Having a few models helps to generalize the
data fairly well.
~~~
tel
That's a good point.
------
pyduan
It's quite sad that this post is even necessary. That said, having a proper
training/cross-validation/validation setup is sometimes not that obvious, as
you have to stop and think about possible sources of contamination -- some
sampling biases, for instance, can be quite tricky to detect, or your
algorithm design might be flawed in some subtle way.
Personally, I wish people emphasized more the importance of a general
understanding of econometrics when doing machine learning. In most of the
introductory courses I've seen, the link between both field is never made
explicit, despite the obvious analogies (coincidentally, there was an article
by Hal Varian on the front page two days ago that discussed how both fields
could benefit from sharing insights [1]). Understanding the idea behind
minimizing generalization error is one thing, but I find that thinking in
terms of internal/external validity and experiment design often gives people a
more intuitive understanding of validation procedures, both regarding why and
how we should do it. The same goes for understanding effect size, confidence
intervals, causality (and causality inference), and so on.
[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6870387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6870387)
~~~
zmjjmz
>stop and think about possible sources of contamination
One great one from my Machine Learning professor was an assignment where we
were required to normalize our data to [0,1]. After doing this and then going
through the typical cross-validation cycle, he had us try and figure out where
we contaminated our validation sets. As it turns out, we all normalized our
data _before_ splitting it up, which meant that training data influenced
testing data.
It's a simple fix, but if you've done that and gone to run a large
convolutional neural network for a week only to find that you made a stupid
error like that, it can be pretty painful. (Especially since the bad
generalization error might not be obvious until you use it the model in
production)
~~~
im3w1l
Maybe one could benefit from a sort of blinding procedure, where the person
designing the learner is never allowed to even look at the validation data.
------
tedsanders
I strongly disagree with the idea that validation sets are central to machine
learning. The whole point of machine learning (usually) is to predict things
well. Validation sets are merely one technique among many to gauge how well
your predictions are doing. Because they are so easy, they are very common.
But just because they are common doesn't mean they are central to the field.
There are many other techniques out there, like Bayesian model selection (as
the author mentions at the end).
~~~
mjw
Good to see Bayesian model selection get a mention. Bayesian model averaging
is pretty interesting, too, in that it comes, in a sense, with built-in
protection against overfitting.
I still think there is something quite fundamental, though, about validation
sets and other related resampling-based methods for estimating generalisation
performance (cross-validation, bootstrap, jackknife and so on).
The built-in picture you get about predictive performance from Bayesian
methods comes with strong caveats -- "IF you believe in your model and your
priors over its parameters, THEN this is what you should expect". Adding extra
layers of hyperparameters and doing model selection or averaging over them
might sometimes make things less sensitive to your assumptions, but it doesn't
make this problem go away; anything the method tells you is dependent on its
strong assumptions about the generative mechanism.
Most sensible people don't believe their models are true ("all models are
false, some models are useful"), and don't really fully trust a method, fancy
Bayesian methods included, until they've seen how well it does on held-out
data. So then it comes back to the fundamentals -- non-parametric methods for
estimating generalisation performance which make as few assumptions as
possible about the data and the model they're evaluating.
Cross-validation isn't the only one of these, and perhaps not the best, but
it's certainly one of the simplest. One thing people do forget about it is
that it _does_ make at least one basic assumption about your data --
independence -- which is often not true and can be pretty disastrous if you're
dealing with (e.g.) time-series data.
~~~
ced
I agree. As a Bayesian hoping to understand my data, P(X|M1) is useful: it's
the probability I have for X under M1's modelling assumptions. Of course M1 is
an approximation, but that's how science is done. You get to understand how
your model behaves, and you may say "Well, X is a bit higher than it should
be, but that's because M1 assumes a linear response, and we know that's not
quite true".
Bayesian model averaging entails P(X) = P(X|M1)P(M1) + P(X|M2)P(M2). It
assumes that either M1 or M2 is true. No conclusions can be derived from that.
It might be useful from a purely predictive standpoint ( _maybe_ ) , but it
has no place inside the scientific pipeline.
There is a related quantity which is P(M1)/P(M2). That's how much the data
favours M1 over M2, and it's a sensible formula, because it doesn't rely on
the abominable P(M1) + P(M2) = 1
~~~
mjw
Yeah good perspective -- I guess I was thinking about this more from the
perspective of predictive modelling than science.
Model averaging can be quite useful when you're averaging over versions of the
same model with different hyperparameters, e.g. the number of clusters in a
mixture model.
You still need a good hyper-prior over the hyperparameters to avoid
overfitting in these cases though, as an example IIRC dirichlet process
mixture models can often overfit the number of clusters.
Agreed that model averaging could be harder to justify as a scientist
comparing models which are qualitatively quite different.
~~~
ced
_Model averaging can be quite useful when you 're averaging over versions of
the same model with different hyperparameters, e.g. the number of clusters in
a mixture model._
Yeah, but in this case, there's a crucial difference: within the assumptions
of a mixture model M, N=1, 2, ... clusters _do_ make an exhaustive partition
of the space, whereas if I compute a distribution for models M1 and M2, there
is always M3, M4, ... lurking unexpressed and unaccounted for. In other words,
P(N=1|M) + P(N=2|M) + ... = 1
but
P(M1) + P(M2) << 1
Is the number of clusters even a hyperparameter? Wiki says that
hyperparameters are parameters of the prior distribution. What do you think?
------
bravura
In more formal terms, you are trying to minimize the expected risk
(generalization error).
The expected risk is the sum of empirical risk (training set error) and the
structural risk (model complexity).
In many instances, having low empirical risk comes at the cost of having high
structural risk, which is overfitting.
------
danso
I was just browsing through the classic "Mining of Massive Datasets" book
(which is free!) when I noticed this apt passage in its introduction that
explains the difference between data mining and machine learning:
[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html)
> _There are some who regard data mining as synonymous with machine learning.
> There is no question that some data mining appropriately uses algorithms
> from machine learning. Machine-learning practitioners use the data as a
> training set, to train an algorithm of one of the many types used by
> machine-learning prac- titioners, such as Bayes nets, support-vector
> machines, decision trees, hidden Markov models, and many others._
_There are situations where using data in this way makes sense. The typical
case where machine learning is a good approach is when we have little idea of
what we are looking for in the data. For example, it is rather unclear what it
is about movies that makes certain movie-goers like or dislike it. Thus, in
answering the “Netflix challenge” to devise an algorithm that predicts the
ratings of movies by users, based on a sample of their responses, machine-
learning algorithms have proved quite successful. We shall discuss a simple
form of this type of algorithm in Section 9.4._
_On the other hand, machine learning has not proved successful in situations
where we can describe the goals of the mining more directly. An interesting
case in point is the attempt by WhizBang! Labs1 to use machine learning to
locate people’s resumes on the Web. It was not able to do better than
algorithms designed by hand to look for some of the obvious words and phrases
that appear in the typical resume. Since everyone who has looked at or written
a resume has a pretty good idea of what resumes contain, there was no mystery
about what makes a Web page a resume. Thus, there was no advantage to machine-
learning over the direct design of an algorithm to discover resumes._
[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html)
~~~
apw
Will you need to change that definition if I show you a machine learning
algorithm capable of significantly outperforming the best human algorithms on
the resume classification problem?
------
khawkins
I would say, to be succinct, that the main trick in ML is Occam's Razor
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)).
It has been found that, for most problems, a simple model which well
represents previous experience should be accepted instead of a more complex
one with marginally better representation. I would claim that the reason this
generally works is an empirical discovery, as opposed to a mathematical
result, but probably has philosophical implications in its success.
~~~
JASchilz
Check out Bayesian Model Selection. It's the mathematical expression of
Occam's Razor.
~~~
khawkins
My point is that it shows up everywhere, just in different forms. Sparse
coding has a penalty for large basises. Gaussian process regression tunes the
density of its representation using Bayesian model Selection. SVMs have a
slack parameter which dictates how many errors you'll tolerate to reduce the
number of hyperplanes.
~~~
JASchilz
I apologize, my reply was aimed too low.
------
sampo
Andrew Ng emphasized this quite clearly in his Machine Learning course on
Coursera.
------
rcthompson
It's not directly related, but I always liked this little "koan":
A man is looking around at the ground under a street lamp. You ask him what he
is looking for, and he says "I'm looking for my keys. I dropped them somewhere
in that parking lot over there." "Then why are you looking inder this street
lamp?" you ask. He answers: "Because this is the only place I can see!"
------
stingrae
Seems like HN is causing them problems. I saved the articles text at:
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s360/sh/4e19f93c-8425-440c-b9...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s360/sh/4e19f93c-8425-440c-b978-cdd7aa6461f9/309dce824d9b6697b37b4c61251b6cfb)
------
yetanotherphd
I think the situation is more complex than the author states.
For example if I have a linear model, Y = a + b * X, I will choose a and b to
minimize in-sample fit. Choosing a and b to maximize out of sample fit goes
against all theory.
However, if I want to choose which parameters go into my model, maximizing out
of sample fit would be a good approach.
So at the end of the day, there is not a huge philosophical difference between
using in-sample and out-of-sample fit, only different approaches to the same
problem. In both cases, the assumption is (usually) the the data is i.i.d.,
and in both cases, you are choosing some
coefficients/parameters/hyperparameters with the intent of maximizing out of
sample fit, but using different methods.
~~~
nkurz
Are you coming from a theoretical math point-of-view or background? It's hard
for me to say exactly why, but I feel your response is evidence of just that
"huge philosophical difference" between traditional stats and machine
learning.
To me, even the statement "if I have a linear model" makes very little sense
from the perspective of ML. Contrast with "if I think I'm dealing with a
situation where a linear model might offer a good fit".
Regarding "maximizing out of sample fit would be a good approach", I think ML
is always and just-about-only concerned with maximizing out-of-sample fit, for
if it wasn't, the solution would be a lookup table.
I'm not trying to imply that you're wrong, rather that I think the 'gulf' is
real. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your point. For example, I feel that mjw's
comment in this thread captures my view, which I think is more ML centered:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6878336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6878336)
Is that comment also in accord with your view, and it's me that's on the wrong
side of that gulf?
------
girvo
Great post. It's like maths, you have to check your answers. Validation sets
are a way of doing that.
I've been getting into ML lately for my startup, it's a personal finance
system that will learn your habits and use that to predict things in the
future. It's been overwhelming attempting to move into this domain of software
engineering (so much so that I am currently just hard coding certain important
patterns and using basic statistical modelling instead) but it is absolutely
fascinating!
------
shiven
Funny, that this idea is so foreign to ML. As a macromolecular
crystallographer, R _free_ [0] is something drilled into every student's brain
from day one!
TL;DR: Randomly, a certain percent (5-10%) of data is 'hidden' and never used
for building/refining your model, but is only used to evaluate how well your
model fits (or explains) that unseen data. This is absolutely, fundamentally
essential to prevent _over_ -fitting your data!!
EDIT: Think that you are solving a huge jigsaw puzzle, but made of thousands
of jello pieces. You randomly hide a 100 or so pieces and try to solve the
puzzle. Having used all the pieces (except the hidden 100), you think the
puzzle forms a Treasure Map. Now, you take the previously hidden pieces and
try to fit those into the puzzle and if after using the hidden pieces your
puzzle still looks like a Treasure Map, you may have found a (mostly) correct
solution. But, if you are unable to fit those hidden places in a way that
still keeps the Treasure Map intact, you must question if you did in fact find
the correct solution or if there is another, slightly different, solution that
may be (more) correct because it will account for the hidden pieces a little
better?
[0]
[http://reference.iucr.org/dictionary/Free_R_factor](http://reference.iucr.org/dictionary/Free_R_factor)
~~~
m_ke
Don't kid yourself, the idea must have been foreign to the author of the post,
but you won't find a single published paper that doesn't test its results
using cross validation or at least on some standard test set.
------
mendicantB
Honestly, calling validation a trick isn't helping.
Understanding the motivation behind validation is an absolutely fundamental
concept, and lack of coherence on the topic shows an inherent lack of
understanding of the goal of building the model in the first place;
GENERALIZATION.
This is synonymous with one checking in code that has no issues locally,
without testing in the stack or a production environment.
I work and hire in this space and it's actually a bit shocking how widespread
this lack of understanding is. Asking a candidate how to evaluate a model,
even at a basic level, is this field's version of FizzBuzz. Just like
Fizzbuzz, a lot of candidates I've encountered who are "trained" in machine
learning or statistics fail miserably, and my peers seem to have similar
experiences.
These issues are expected, given how popular data science is these days. We
all win when more people are getting their hands dirty with data, but it's
extraordinarily easy to misuse the techniques and reach misleading
conclusions. This can potentially lead to people pointing fingers at the field
and it's decline. The only thing we can do is correct the wrongs and do our
best to limit incompetence that only serves to tarnish the field.
~~~
pmiller2
Count me among those who thought validation was a thing you just had to do
when training ML algorithms. After all, the most beautiful theoretical model
in the world is of no use if the predictions it delivers are terrible.
The real trick (for most algorithms) is to select the correct features to
train against. This really is more of a black art than an exact science, so I
think labeling it a trick is justified.
------
sadfaceunread
Link appears to be /.'ed (HN'd). CoralCache/NYUD.net doesn't seem to have it
in cache. Anyone got a cached page/mirror?
------
orting
I think you need to view whatever process generated the answers as part of
your model. In some cases, and in all textbook examples, we have a ground
truth that is correct. But in real-world applications, such as segmentation
problem in medial imaging, we have a gold standard which represents our best
estimate, but is not necessarily correct.
Validation is not a magic bullet, we need to be critical of any part of the
model that is given as truth, otherwise we might end up fitting a solution to
the wrong problem.
More generally I think that textbooks should emphasize the need for the
scientific method and stress that any model (or theory) is only as good as its
ability to explain the entire problem domain.
------
tocomment
How does the brain generalize to data it hasn't seen before? Any theories?
~~~
Maria1987
According to Piaget's theory of development while we grow up we have different
experiences from which we acquire new information. If we lets say, are naive
with no experiences or memories at all, otherwise known as a "tabula rasa"
stage, then we will start learning this new information and grouping it into
correlated structures of knowledge, known as schemas. For example, different
types of dogs can be one schema as they share characteristics and they are
correlated knowledge..As we learn we not only create these schemas, but we
also adapt them when new unknown information arrives. For example, if I only
experience dog in my life, then when I see a cat I know that this is likely to
be an animal and share characteristics with dogs, as this is similar to dogs
and will most likely belong to the same or a similar schema..And that's how I
personally believe we learn and interpret new information that arrives...
Of course there are many different theories, but that's my favourite.
~~~
YZF
I think in the context of machine learning the brain's ability to model the
real world has evolved and a better model for the world represents a survival
advantage. I don't know too much about how the brain actually models reality
(and I don't know if anyone does) but the theory of machine learning still
applies in the sense that each individual brain of each animal is a model and
if you have a model that is too complex it will generalize poorly and
therefore the owner of that brain is likely to do poorly in the real world.
It's very interesting in the sense that the totality of brains over time is
essentially a sort of supervised learning with huge amounts of input data.
------
michaelochurch
Validation isn't "a trick", or shouldn't be. It's just being responsible. I'm
sure there are people getting funded who don't know about it, but they're
charlatans if they don't understand the dangers of overfitting (and
underfitting).
~~~
tlarkworthy
see the early history of learning, it was a discovery that is actually counter
intuitive and a common trap for beginners. (don't minimize the training error)
I have seen new PhDs read about it "in theory", but not internalise it for
practice, and then they go off an do Bayesian structure learning without a
validation set. This DOES happen.
This post is to hammer into the brains of any beginner thinking about machine
learning that understanding the validation set's purpose is the most important
thing to internalise first.
e.g. Machine learning is easier than it looks:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6770785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6770785)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: A nice Robot Reviews website \{•̃_•̃}/ - zerzeru
https://www.personalrobots.biz/?robotics
======
Kemejii
Amazing!
Feedback: Site is pretty good. Information is easy to search. I would like to
see how they are made. (what hardware and software used in the process of
making them)
Thanks!
------
zerzeru
please add your feedback here !
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New holiday report shows Apple leading phone activations - electic
https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/27/flurry-analytics-2016-apple-leads-holiday-phone-activations/
======
andrewclunn
I'm seeing a trend among my own social group and family (so warning anecdotal
evidence). Everyone seems to start with Android as their first smart phone,
but as they gain upward mobility economically they switch to iPhones, and then
the more people around them who have iPhones the more they want to switch.
EDIT -
Could be how annoying it is to get those iMessage group messages on a non-
iPhone phone.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do you get notifications if something doesn't happen? - jjeaff
I have searched high and low for a service and I could have sworn I saw a solution on HN but I cannot find it.<p>In particular I am looking for a solution that can notify me if my hourly backups were NOT completed.<p>What I have come up with is a script that checks the modified timestamp of my backup file and then checks if it is older than 1 hour. If it is, then the script returns 200 success headers. If it doesn't then it returns a 404.<p>I am then monitoring that page with an uptime monitoring service.<p>I'm curious what everyone else does and how well it works for you.
======
bramgn
If this is a Unix-like environment, have you thought about running a cron job
that runs your script and decides to send a message based on the results?
~~~
jjeaff
Yes, I have. But I think the job never running at all is the problem I am
trying to avoid. If the cron didn't fire or if the entire command just failed,
or if maybe the server was offline when the cron was supposed to fire, a check
after the job is finished would never happen.
------
bramgn
Then i think the solution you came up with is pretty good for your situation.
If this external service is stable, of course.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/we-should-not-accept-scientific-results-that-have-not-been-repeated
======
misnome
Define repetition.
It's not as simple as that, for all sciences - once again an article on
repeatability seems to have focused on medicinal drug research (it's usually
that or psychology), and labelled the entire "Scientific community" as
'rampant' with " statistical, technical, and psychological biases".
How about, Physics?
The LHC has only been built once - it is the only accelerator we have that has
seen the Higgs boson. The confirmation between ATLAS and CMS could be
interpreted as merely internal cross-referencing - it is still using the same
acceleration source. But everyone believes the results, and believes that they
represent the Higgs. This isn't observed once in the experiment, it is
observed many, many times, and very large amounts of scientists time are spent
imagining, looking for, and measuring, any possible effect that could cause a
distortion or bias to the data. When it costs billions to construct your
experiment, sometimes reproducing the exact same thing can be hard.
The same lengths are gone to in order to find alternate explanations or
interpretations of the result data. If they don't, they know that some very
hard questions are going to be asked - and there will be hard questions asked
anyway, especially for extraordinary claims - look at e.g. DAMA/LIBRA which
for years has observed what looks like indirect evidence for dark matter, but
very few people actually believe it - the results remain unexplained whilst
other experiments probe the same regions in different ways.
Repetition is good, of course, but isn't a replacement for good science in the
first place.
~~~
return0
We don't need to 'define repetition', we need to foster a culture that a)
accepts repetition and b) does not accept something for a fact just because
it's in a journal. Right now, (a) is not even acceptable; nobody will publish
a replication study. Ofc, LHC is impossible to replicate, but the vast
majority of life science studies are.
I should think this is mostly needed in life sciences. Other, more 'exact'
sciences seem to not have this problem.
~~~
throwaway729
_> we need to foster a culture that a) accepts repetition_
Do we?
I don't think we do. I think we need to foster a culture of honesty and rigor.
Of good science. Which is _decidedly_ different from fostering a culture of
"repetition" for its own sake.
Paying for the cost of mountains upon mountains of lab techs and materials
that it would require to replicate every study published in a major journal
just _isn 't_ a good use of ever-dwindling science dollars. Replicate where
it's not far off the critical path. Replicate where the study is going to have
a profound effect on the direction of research in several labs. But don't just
replicate because "science!"
In fact, one could argue that the increased strain on funding sources
introduced by the huge cost of reproducing a bunch of stuff would increase the
cut-throat culture of science and thereby decrease the scientist's natural
proclivity toward honesty.
_> and b) does not accept something for a fact just because it's in a
journal_
Again, it's entirely unclear what you mean here.
It's impossible to re-verify every single paper you read (I've read three
since breakfast). That would be like re-writing every single line of code of
every dependency you pull into a project.
And I'm pretty sure literally no scientist takes a paper's own description of
its results at face value without reading through methods and looking at (at
least) a summary of the data.
Taking papers at face value is really only a problem in science _reporting_
and at (very) sub-par institutions/venues.
I don't care about the latter, and neither should you.
WRT the former, science reporters often grossly misunderstand the paper
anyways. All the good reproducible science in the world is of zero help if
science reporters are going to bastardize the results beyond recognition
anyways...
~~~
devishard
> I don't think we do. I think we need to foster a culture of honesty and
> rigor. Of good science. Which is decidedly different from fostering a
> culture of "repetition" for its own sake.
No one is proposing repetition for its own sake. The point of repetition is to
create rigor, and you _can 't do rigorous science without repetition_.
> Paying for the cost of mountains upon mountains of lab techs and materials
> that it would require to replicate every study published in a major journal
> just isn't a good use of ever-dwindling science dollars. Replicate where
> it's not far off the critical path. Replicate where the study is going to
> have a profound effect on the direction of research in several labs. But
> don't just replicate because "science!"
I could see a valid argument for only doing science that will be worth
replicating, because if you don't bother to replicate you aren't really
proving anything.
~~~
throwaway729
_I could see a valid argument for only doing science that will be worth
replicating, because if you don 't bother to replicate you aren't really
proving anything._
Exactly. A lot of the science _I 've_ done should not be replicated. If
someone told me they wanted to replicate it, I would urge them not to. Not
because I have something to hide. But because some other lab did something
strictly superior that should be replicated instead. Or because the experiment
asked the wrong questions. Or because the experiment itself could be pretty
easily re-designed to avoid some pretty major threats.
The problem is that is that hindsight really is 20/20\. It's kind of
impossible to _ONLY_ do good science. So it's important to have the facility
to recognize when science (including your own) isn't good -- or is good but
not as good as something else -- and is therefore not worth replicating.
I guess the two key insights are:
1\. Not all science is worth replicating (either because it's too expensive or
for some other reason).
2\. Replication doesn't necessarily reduce doubt (particularly in the case of
poorly designed experiments, or when the experiment asks the wrong questions).
~~~
adrianm
This is a really good post which contributes to the conversation. Why make it
on a throwaway account? We need more of this here!
------
mmierz
I see a lot of people commenting here that there's no incentive to repeat
previous research because it's not useful for getting grants, etc. This kind
of true but I think it misses something important.
At least in life sciences (can't comment on other fields), it's not that
scientists _don 't_ repeat each other's results. After all, if you're going to
invest a significant fraction of your tiny lab budget on a research project,
you need to make sure that the basic premise is sound, so it's not uncommon
that the first step is to confirm the previous published result before
continuing. And if the replication fails, it's obviously not a wise idea to
proceed with a project that relies on the prior result. But that work never
makes it into a paper.
If the replication succeeds, great! Proceed with the project. But it's time-
consuming and expensive to make the reproduction publication worthy, so it
will probably get buried in a data supplement if it's published at all.
If the replication fails, it's even more time-consuming and expensive to
convincingly demonstrate the negative result. Moreover, the work is being done
by an ambitious student or postdoc who is staring down a horrible job market
and needs novel results and interesting publications in order to have a future
in science. Why would someone like that spend a year attacking the work of an
established scientist over an uninteresting and possibly wrong negative
result, and getting a crappy paper and an enemy out of it in the end, instead
of planning for their own future?
If enough people fail to replicate a result, it becomes "common knowledge" in
the field that the result is wrong, and it kind of fades away. But it's not
really in anyone's interest to write an explicit rebuttal, so it never
happens.
~~~
odbol_
This is why I'm always skeptical of people zealously claiming "all GMOs are
perfectly safe! It's been _proven_!"
Yeah, proven by expensive studies that were funded by the company making the
GMO. Who is going to pay for another study to try to disprove it?
There's a reason we sprayed DET all over our vegetables for years before it
was banned: there was no scientific studies proving that it was harmful, even
though it clearly was harmful in hindsight.
Science is not instant, and there's no way someone can claim that some brand-
new GMO is "perfectly safe", without any long-term studies on its effects over
10, 20, 30 years of exposure. That's just not possible. And yet you try to
explain it to these science zealots and they just brush you off as being
"anti-science".
~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
Do you mean DDT?
Anyway, beyond the 'philosophy of science' issue of whether you can prove
something, there is good affirmative evidence that existing GMOs are safe for
numerous reasons.
First, there's no mechanistic reason to think they would be dangerous. T-DNAs
are not somehow magically toxic to humans; everything you eat is riddled with
millennia of t-dnas, old viruses, transposon blooms, etc. etc.
The technologies themselves should be safe as well. BT is well understood and
embraced by the organic community as an applied natural pesticide, so you
would need to find evidence that the localization somehow makes it toxic.
Glyphosate resistance is also unlikely to have any effect _a priori_ because
it affects a metabolic pathway completely absent in animals.
Argue all you like about how nothing can be 'perfectly safe', sure, but
there's no reason to think that GMOs are dangerous, and people have looked
quite hard. ______
Finally, just look at the Seralini pile-of-bullshit for evidence that there's
plenty of incentive to publish anything critical of GMOs. No one is sitting on
career-making evidence.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair)
~~~
odbol_
> First, there's no mechanistic reason to think they would be dangerous.
That's like saying "there's no reason to think peanuts would be dangerous"
since humans eat them all the time. And yet, they are deadly to some humans.
No one knows why.
But they do know that food allergies are far more prevalent in the U.S. than
in other countries. And now, suddenly, people in Africa and China are starting
to exhibit food allergies that the U.S. has had for a while. So what have we
started shipping over to them that's causing these allergies? Who will fund
that study?
~~~
philovivero
What you've hinted at here is fascinating to me.
Do you have some references?
In case it's not clear, I'd like to read articles about food allergies that
have been common in USA for some time now becoming common in countries that
are coming out of 2nd world status and into 1st world.
------
undergroundOps
I'm a physician and I've been suggesting this to my colleagues for a few
years, only to be met with alienated stares and labeled cynical.
The doctors and doctors-in-training I work with have altruistic motives, but
place too much stock in major medical studies. They also frequently apply
single-study findings to patient care, even to patients that would've been
excluded from that study (saw this a lot with the recent SPRINT blood pressure
trial).
And don't even get me started on the pulmonary embolism treatment studies.
What a clinical mess that is.
It's frustrating.
~~~
appleflaxen
but in medicine, what is the practical alternative?
how do _you_ incorporate these findings? ignore them?
if so, it's probably bad for your patients. the only thing worse than a
single-study finding is a zero-study finding.
~~~
undergroundOps
I was simply suggesting what we all learn in medical school and residency: to
appropriately evaluate clinical studies. Just don't think most doctors do.
Let me give you an example of how I approach things. The guidelines for acute
pancreatitis recommend using a fluid called LR instead of NS for volume
resuscitation. This is based on an single study that included 10 patients and
simply noted slightly better lab numbers; there was no difference in clinical
outcome. Lots of problems with that study, right (small, underpowered,
confounders, validity issues, etc)? However, there's no major disadvantage for
using LR in those patients (unless hyperkalemia is a concern), so I use it
since it might have a benefit.
This is a very simple example. It gets much more complicated than that.
"Probably" is one of favorite words in medicine, btw :).
~~~
mablap
"Probably" is one of favorite words in medicine, btw :).
Right as it should. If somebody answers my question by "It depends", then I
know I'm in good company!
------
ythl
> Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening (not repeating
> experiments), even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of
> an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator
> Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy
> hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use
> data from someone else's experiment on light, hydrogen, which was done on
> different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get
> time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive
> apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus
> because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of
> programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money
> to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--
> possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole
> purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to
> complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
\-- Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", pp. 225-226
~~~
gohrt
Current top comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12186295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12186295)
, specifically rebutted 30 years before the comment was written.
~~~
throwaway729
This _isn 't_ a rebuttal of the linked comment.
The linked comment doesn't state that it would be a waste of time to replicate
on a hypothetical LHC clone.
Rather, the linked comment states that we can accept the Higgs result with
reasonable confidence _even though_ it's currently infeasible to replicate
that experiment.
Feynman's issue was also qualitiatively different -- the scientist was
_comparing_ results from two different instruments. The people in charge of
one of the instruments wouldn't allow the scientist to run both experiments on
a single instrument. In fact, from context, it's not even clear to me Feynmann
would have insisted on re-running the original experiment if the scientist
were not using a different accelerator for the second one. Anyways, in the
Higgs case, there's no potential for a "comparing readings from instrument A
to readings from instrument B" type bug.
More to the point, and FWIW, I somehow doubt Feynman would insist on building
a second LHC for the sole purpose of replicating the Higgs measurement. But I
guess we have to leave that to pure speculation.
------
cs702
My first reaction to this headline was "duh." _Of course_ we should hold off
on accepting scientific claims (i.e., predictions about the natural world)
that to date have been verified only by the same person making those claims!
My next reaction was, "wow, it's a sad state of affairs when a postdoctoral
research fellow at Harvard Medical School feels he has to spell this out in a
blog post." It implies that even at the prestigious institution in which he
works, he is coming across people who treat science like religion.
~~~
nxzero
Of course you as a reader of said claims confirm at the very least that
they've been independently reproduced, right?
(If so, this shouldn't be news.)
~~~
lrem
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do it. Confirmation studies are not
easily accepted by impactful journals/conferences, thus nearly nobody bothers
to do them. Even if there is one, it can be surprisingly hard to find it.
As a point of anecdata: my wife's master thesis was a confirmation study of
using LLDA for face recognition. I remember seeing it included in some book by
the university press. I gave up Googling for it after 5 minutes.
~~~
randall
There needs to be better scientific protocol. More linking through data
instead of annoying cites. I think anyway.
------
jbb555
We shouldn't "accept" or "reject" results at all.
It's not a binary option. One poor experiment might give us some evidence
something is true. A single well reviewed experiment gives us more confidence.
Repeating the results similarly does. As does the reputation of the person
conducting the experiment and the way in which it was conducted.
It's not a binary thing where we decide something is accepted or rejected, we
gather evidence and treat it accordingly.
~~~
bbctol
So many scientists I talk to don't have a basic understanding of philosophy of
science. I don't necessarily blame them--I understand why "philosophy" as an
academic field is seen as a soft, speculative, and pretentious field compared
to the rigor of science, but as Daniel Dennett said, “There is no such thing
as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage
is taken on board without examination."
These days, if you ask a scientist "So how do we prove something is true using
science?" they'll be able to recite Popper's falsificationism as if it's a
fundamental truth, not a particular way of looking at the world. But the huge
gap between the particular theory that people get taught in undergrad--that
science can't actually prove anything true, just disprove things to approach
better hypotheses--and the real-world process of running an experiment,
analyzing data, and publishing a paper is unaddressed. The idea that there's a
particular bar that must be passed before we accept something as true is
exactly what got us into this mess in the first place! There's a naive
implicit assumption in scientific publishing that a p-value < 0.05 means
something is true, or at least likely true; this author is just suggesting
that true things are those which yield a p-value under 0.05 twice!
What's needed, in my opinion at least, is a more existential, practically-
grounded view of science, in which we are more agnostic about the "truth" of
our models with a closer eye to what we should actually _do_ given the data.
Instead of worrying about whether or not a particular model is "true" or
"false," and thus whether we should "accept" or "reject" an experiment, focus
on the predictions that can be made from the total data given, and the way we
should actually live based on the datapoints collected. Instead, we have
situations like the terrible state of debate on global warming, because any
decent scientist knows they shouldn't say they're absolutely sure it's
happening, or a replication crisis caused by experiments focused on propping
up a larger model, instead of standing on their own.
------
mydpy
I agree in principle. There are a few concerns:
1\. How should we receive costly research that took special equipment and lots
of time to develop and cultivate? I.e., CERN?
2\. A lot of research is published, ignored, and then rediscovered. In this
case, we may want to accept the research until it cannot be repeated (i.e., in
another journal publication).
3\. Reviewers of academic publications probably are not qualified or have the
time to recreate all scientific research.
4\. Isn't the academic system at its core kinda... broken?
~~~
thefastlane
"Isn't the academic system at its core kinda... broken?"
can your elaborate on what you mean?
~~~
hdra
I gather its things like misaligned incentives. Like funding sources dictating
the "desirable" result, reluctance to publish negative results, pursue of
(vanity) metrics that leads to quota system by universities, etc.
------
gnuvince
Maybe conferences should have a "reproducibility" track for that purpose?
Also, I don't know about other fields, but I'm pretty sure that in CS, if you
just took a paper and tried to reproduce the results, you'll get rejected on
the ground that you offer no original contribution; no original contribution
=> no publication => no funding.
~~~
studentrob
For CS, reproducing should be easy given the code and input data right? Other
sciences' input isn't so easily shared
~~~
dagw
Ideally you should re-implement the algorithm based on the description in the
paper to verify that the description of the algorithm is correct. You should
also test with your own data to make sure that the algorithm works on all
reasonable data and not only on some provided cherry picked data. If you can't
get the expected results with your own implementation and your own data then
the results aren't reproduced.
~~~
eru
Yes. So being able to rerun with the same code and same inputs to get the same
outputs is a lower bar. Many papers don't meet even that bar.
(Mostly because they don't publish code nor data; and academic code is often a
horrible mess, and the code was mucked around with between different stages of
running.)
------
fhood
Many people have mentioned that replicating an experiment can be expensive,
but I don't think anybody has really brought up just how expensive this can
be.
Not all science is done in a lab. Replicating an experiment is obviously
feasible for a short term psychology experiment, but in earth sciences
(oceanography for instance.) it is far less often possible to reproduce an
experiment for the following reasons. N.B. This is all from my personal
experience of one field of science.
1.) Cost. If you got funding to take an ice-breaker to Antarctica to "do
science" it required several million dollars to fund. It is difficult enough
to secure funding for anything these days, none the less prohibitively
expensive attempts to reproduce results. (honestly any serious research vessel
will run costs into the millions, regardless of destination.)
2.) Time. Say you are on a research vessel taking measurements of the Amazon
river basin. This is a trip that takes months to years to plan and execute. If
you return to duplicate your experiment 2 years later, the ecology of the area
you were taking measurements of may have changed completely.
3.) Politics. Earth sciences often require cooperation from foreign entities,
many of which are not particularly stable, or whom may be engaging in
political machinations that run counter to your nationality's presence in the
country, or both. Iran and China are two good examples. Both are home to some
excellent oceanographers, and both of which can be very difficult to Science
in when your team includes non Iranian/Chinese nationalities.
------
bontoJR
The big issue right now is funding of replicated research, who wants to fund a
research to prove someone else was right? Most of these funds are granted
based on potential outcome of the new discovery like: potential business,
patents, licenses, etc... not being the first one would probably wipe most of
these benefits, cutting down to a small probably getting funded...
Now, straight to the point, who's going to pay for the repeated research to
prove the first one?
~~~
wodenokoto
On a low level, I think it should be mandatory for masters students to do a
pre-thesis project, which is replicating findings in a published paper.
It would do something about low hanging fruit in terms of testing
reproduceability and since there is a published paper, the student has access
to guidelines for setting up and reporting on a large project, which will help
them learn how to do their own, original thesis.
~~~
tnhh
I had my Masters students do this as part of my wireless networking class this
year. It was very instructive for me and the students seemed to enjoy it, so
I'll definitely keep it in the syllabus.
------
guaka
Totally agree. I'd go even further and make free licenses on scientific source
and datasets mandatory. Research that is funded by public money should lead to
public code and data.
~~~
jeremysmyth
What about defense research?
~~~
amboar
Well, there's the GPL-styled approach: anyone with access to the results must
also have access to the associated data. This doesn't mean it is mandatory to
make it public, though you'd have to restrict the redistribution freedom.
~~~
wodenokoto
I recently used a large dataset of tweets in a research project. As far as I
know, I do not have the rights to distribute these.
I also used a dataset consisting of newspaper articles. It cost me $1.000 to
get access to, and I definitely do not have the rights to redistribute it.
~~~
dagw
As long as you provide a detailed enough description of the source of your
dataset that I can reproduce it myself then that is fine. So in your first
case tell me what criteria you used to select your tweets and in the second
tell me where to send my $1000 and what to ask for.
~~~
tnhh
Unfortunately not everyone reports this information. Here is a study that we
did of over 500 papers using online social network data:
[http://tnhh.org/research/pubs/tetc2015.pdf](http://tnhh.org/research/pubs/tetc2015.pdf)
While most authors would report high-level characteristics (e.g., which social
network they measured), fewer authors reported how they sampled the network or
collected data, and very few people reported on how they handled ethics,
privacy and so forth.
------
Gatsky
Lots of scientific results are repeated but not published. If it doesn't work
then people just move on. The problem is journals. There is no way to publish
your attempts to repeat an experiment, unless you put it into another paper.
The other issue, especially in the life sciences, is inaquedate statistical
input. If someone performs an underpowered, confounded experiment and gets a
positive result, then someone else performs the same underpowered confounded
experiment and gets a negative result, what have we learned except that the
experiment is underpowered?
------
unabst
With science, the profession and the product are distinctly different, and we
are failing to hold the profession to the standards of the product. Science,
the profession, is political, incentive driven, and circumstantial. Scientists
need to get paid. Science, the product, is apolitical, existential, and
universal. So those who love and believe in the products of science may wish
upon themselves to be these things also. I know I do. Except, sometimes it
just ins't practical, or even possible.
But repeatability actually matters more professionally. Scientifically
speaking, if the science is bad it just won't work when others try to make use
of it. All bad science will be identified or corrected as we try and make use
of it and convert it into new technology. Technology mandates repeatability.
So those scientists who fail to produce repeatable science, regardless of how
professionally successful they may be, will inevitably fail to produce any new
technology or medicine, and vice versa.
------
jmilloy
Obviously I agree that scientific results must be reproducible. But I also
realize that it's simply infeasible to repeat the entirety of every study, and
much less to also go to the effort to write and peer-review those repeated
results.
What I think is overlooked in this discussion as that a lot of confirmation
work already happens. Most (all?) scientific results are incremental progress
built on a heap of previous work. In the course of normal research, you
reproduce existing results as necessary before altering conditions for your
own study. If you can't confirm the results, well then perhaps you have a
paper (though it can be politically challenging to get it published, and
that's a separate problem). But if you do, then you don't waste time
publishing that, you get on with the new stuff.
Ultimately, I don't think scientists do accept results _in their field_ that
they have not repeated.
------
nonbel
Cue all the people justifying their pseudoscientific behavior. If it is too
expensive to fund twice, it shouldn't be funded once. If that means the LHC
and LIGO wouldn't get done, then we should have only funded one of them. We
need to remain skeptical of those results until replicated by a new team. Even
one replication is pretty weak...
Independent replications of experiment (and the corresponding independent
reports of observations) are a crucial part of the scientific method, no
matter how much you wish it wasn't. Nature doesn't care if it is inconvenient
for you to discover her secrets, or that it is more difficult for you to hype
up your findings to the unsuspecting public.
~~~
daveguy
You do realize that scientists who work on the LHC have the highest
repeatability standards of any science profession, right?
~~~
jomamaxx
The LHC experiment is not the issue here.
There is a lot of transparency there, a lot of well meaning people with a lot
of oversight.
I suggest most would admit 'there could be a problem' there, but it's out in
the open if there is.
The problem of lack of repeatability I think has to do with subconscious bias
on the part of the experimenters which will be less pronounced when there are
5000 people working on it.
------
cube00
Having wasted time trying to replicate someone else's results who 'lost' their
code, I agree! Maybe repeating the experiment should be part of the peer
review.
~~~
closed
So frustrating. Lost = "I didn't think anyone would hold me accountable for
it."
------
hudathun
Looking good is, sadly, better rewarded than doing good in many areas of life.
It's doubly sad that this affects our body of scientific knowledge. Even
claims that are reproduced can suffer from funding bias and confirmation bias.
The truth hopefully comes out in the end, but I'm sad for the harm that's
caused in the interim.
------
jernfrost
I don't get why this is not top on the agenda for the scientific community and
the government. Huge amounts of research money is lost in repeating stuff that
doesn't work. Huge amounts of money is lost chasing broken science.
I blame this on the neo-liberal ideology. This intense focus on getting
money's worth, on tying grants to specific goals, counting publications etc.
Driving research exclusively on a very narrowly defined money incentive has
driven us further into this sort of mess. The money grabbing journals which
has prevented any significant innovation in how science is shared.
I think what science needs is a model closer to that of open source. With open
projects anybody can contribute to but where verification happens through
personal forged relationships. The Linux kernel code quality is verified by a
hierarchy of people trusting each other and knowing something about each
others quality of work. Work should be shared like Linux source code in a
transparent fashion and not behind some antiquated paywall.
I don't think the grant system can entirely away, but perhaps it should be
deemphasized and instead pay a higher minimum amount of money to scientists
for doing what they want. Fundamental science breakthrough doesn't happen
because people had a clear money incentive. Neither Einstein, Nils Bohr, Isaac
Newton or Darwin pursued their scientific breakthroughs with an aim of getting
rich. Few people become scientists to get rich. Why not try to tap into
people's natural desire to discover?
------
framebit
This problem, like many in modern day science, can in large part be traced
back to unstable funding. On the Maslow's-style hierarchy of research lab
needs, the need for funding is a lot lower on the scale than the aspiration
for scientific purity, just as a human's need for food is lower on the scale
than their desire for self-actualization.
If competition for research dollars ceases to be so cutthroat, it will go a
long way towards solving this and many other seemingly entrenched cultural
problems.
------
habitue
A big distinction here is that different fields have different levels of
dependence on prior results. In fields like psychology etc, you don't need the
previous results to work in order to run your own experiment. In other words,
if you cite a well-known paper saying "people seem to work faster near the
color red" and your paper runs an experiment to see if they work faster near
the color yellow, if the red paper is later unreplicable, it doesn't change
the outcome of your experiment in any way.
In contrast, if you are in machine learning and you are extending an existing
architecture you are very directly dependent on that original technique being
useful. If it doesn't "replicate" the effectiveness of the original paper,
you're going to find out quickly. Same for algorithms research. Some other
comments here have mentioned life sciences being the same.
So I think there's a qualitative difference between sciences where we
understand things in a mostly statistical way (sociology, psychology, medical
studies) where the mechanism is unknown (because it's very very complicated),
but we use the process of science mechanistically to convince ourselves of
effectiveness. e.g. I don't know why this color makes people work faster/ this
drug increases rat longevity / complex human interactions adhere to this
simple equation, but the p value is right, so we think it's true. Versus
sciences where we have a good grasp of the underlying model and that model is
backed up by many papers with evidence behind it, and we can make very
specific predictions from that model and be confident of correctness.
------
kayhi
In the world of chemistry, biochemistry and microbiology a huge step forward
would be for journals to require a complete list of products used. The
publication should also include the certification of analysis for each item as
they vary over time.
For example, here are two product specifications for a dye called Sirius Red,
the first by Sigma-Aldrich[1] and the second by Chem-Impex[2]. The Sigma-
Aldrich product contains 25% dye while the Chem-Impex contains equal or
greater than 21%. These two dyes could be quickly assessed with a
spectrophotometer in order to determine an equivalency, however you need both
dyes on hand which doesn't seems like a good use of funding. Also this touches
on another problem in replication which is, what is in the other 75%+ of the
bottle?
[1]
[http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/Graphics/COfAInfo/SigmaSAPQM/SPE...](http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/Graphics/COfAInfo/SigmaSAPQM/SPEC/36/365548/365548-BULK_______SIAL_____.pdf)
[2]
[http://www.chemimpex.com/MSDSDoc/22913.pdf](http://www.chemimpex.com/MSDSDoc/22913.pdf)
------
Mendenhall
Look at research done on many political hot button topics. They love results
that have not been repeated. I see all sorts of posts even on HN that
reference such "science" as well. The root problem, people who are pushing an
agenda.
------
yiyus
> The inconvenient truth is that scientists can achieve fame and advance their
> careers through accomplishments that do not prioritize the quality of their
> work
An even more inconvenient truth is that scientists cannot even keep their jobs
if they prioritize the quality of their work. The pressure to publish novel
results is too strong and it is almost impossible to get any support for
confirming previous ones.
------
bshanks
I agree with the main point of this article but in terms of its analysis and
prescriptions I think it gets two things backwards. (1) Most scientists seek
fame as a means to the end of getting tenure and funding, not the other way
around; if you gave them tenure (and the ability to move their tenure to
somewhere else if they wanted to move) and perpetual funding and told them
they could choose to be anonymous, I think many would choose that option. (2)
Replication is not done/published enough because the incentive to do so
(measured in: increase in probability of getting tenure per hour spent) is not
high enough, not because people are overly willing to accept unreplicated
work.
In order for a lot more replication to get published, what would be needed
would be for people who spent their careers replicating others' results (at
the expense of not producing any important novel results of their own) to get
tenure at top institutions (outcompeting others who had important novel
results but not enough published replications).
------
doug1001
"repeated" in this context is not incorrect, but i think "replicated" is
perhaps a better choice.
That aside, i think _repeatability_ is a much more useful goal (rather than
"has been repeated"). For one thing, meaningful replication must be done by
someone else; for another, it's difficult and time consuming; the original
investigator has no control over whether and when another in the community
chooses to attempt replication of his result. What is within their control is
an explanation of the methodology they relied on to produce their scientific
result in sufficient detail to enable efficient repetition by the relevant
community. To me that satisfies the competence threshold; good science isn't
infallible science, and attempts to replicate it might fail, but some baseline
frequency for ought to be acceptable.
------
VikingCoder
This is wrong-headed in the extreme.
What we should demand is scientific results that have FAILED.
When we see a p=0.05, but we don't know that this SAME EXACT EXPERIMENT has
been run 20 times before, we're really screwing ourselves over.
Relevant: [https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)
------
pc2g4d
Replication isn't enough. It's also necessary to know how many non-
replications have occurred but got swept under the rug. It's not the existence
of replications that matter---it's the rate of replication relative to number
of replication attempts.
So I agree with the title "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have
Not Been Repeated". But I would add to it "We Should Not Accept Scientific
Results from Studies That Weren't Preregistered". Registration of studies
forces negative results to be made public, allowing for the positive result
rate / replication rate to be calculated.
Otherwise the existence of a "positive" result is more a function of the
trendiness of a research area than it is of the properties of the underlying
system being studied.
------
aminorex
More pragmatically, we should not accept scientific _publications_ and
_conferences_ which do not publish negative results and disconfirmations.
------
dalke
I disagree.
One part of science is observation. Including observations which cannot be, or
at least have not been, repeated. For example, consider a rare event in
astronomy which has only been detected once. Is that science? I say it is. But
it's surely not repeatable. (Even if something like it is detected in the
future, is it really a "repeat"?)
Some experiments are immoral to repeat. For example, in a drug trial you may
find that 95% survive with a given treatment, while only 5% survive with the
placebo. (Think to the first uses of penicillin as as real-world example.)
Who among you is going to argue that someone else needs to repeat that
experiment before we regard it as a proper scientific result?
~~~
ebbv
> One part of science is observation. Including observations which cannot be,
> or at least have not been, repeated. For example, consider a rare event in
> astronomy which has only been detected once. Is that science? I say it is.
> But it's surely not repeatable.
First off, you can accept the observation at face value as an observation, but
conclusions drawn from the claims which have no other support or means of
verification should not be accepted and would not be accepted. Fortunately,
most of the time even if something is initially sparked by a very rare
occurrence, it will have some kind of implications that are verifiable by some
other means other than just waiting for something to happen in space.
But even something that is rare and relies on observation, like gravitational
waves, we have already been able to identify more than one occurrence.
> Some experiments are immoral to repeat. For example, in a drug trial you may
> find that 95% survive with a given treatment, while only 5% survive with the
> placebo.
What's more immoral, releasing a drug that's only had one test, even a
striking one, on the public as a miracle cure that you have not truly verified
or performing another test to actually be sure of your claims before you
release it?
> Who among you is going to argue that someone else needs to repeat that
> experiment before we regard it as a proper scientific result?
That's how science works. If something is not independently repeatable and
verifiable then science breaks down. Look at the recent EM drive. Most
scientists in the field were skeptical of it, and once it was finally
attempted to be independently verified the problems were found.
Independent verification is the cornerstone of science and what makes it
different from bogus claims by charlatans.
~~~
dalke
> conclusions drawn from the claims which have no other support or means of
> verification should not be accepted and would not be accepted
I disagree. In _all cases_ , even with repeated experiments, the claims are
only tentatively accepted. The confirmation by others of Blondlot's N-rays
didn't mean they were real, only that stronger evidence would be needed to
disprove the conclusions of the earlier observations.
Astronomy papers make conclusions based on rare or even singular observations.
Take SN1987a as an example, where observations from a neutrino detector were
used to put an upper limit on the neutrino mass, and establish other results.
> "or performing another test"
This question is all about _repeating_ an experiment. Repeating the experiment
would be immoral.
There are certainly other tests which can confirm the effectiveness, without
repeating the original experiment and without being immoral. For the signal
strength I gave, we can compare the treated population to the untreated
population using epidemiological studies.
But under current medical practices, if a drug trial saw this sort of
effectiveness, the trial would be stopped and _everyone_ in the trial offered
the treatment. To do otherwise is immoral. As would repeating the same trial.
~~~
hx87
> But under current medical practices, if a drug trial saw this sort of
> effectiveness, the trial would be stopped and everyone in the trial offered
> the treatment. To do otherwise is immoral. As would repeating the same
> trial.
Then perhaps current medical practices should change. The benefits to those
who were previously given the placebo should be balanced against the
probability that the observed outcomes may not occur in other circumstances.
~~~
dalke
Are you for real? You would sacrifice people upon the alter of
reproducibility?
Down that path lies atrocities. The system was put into place to prevent
repeats of horrors like the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro
Male".
~~~
hx87
I'd rather not sacrifice people on the altar of a single study, no matter how
significant the results. Down that path lies atrocities, too, albeit of a
quieter sort.
~~~
dalke
As I said earlier, there are alternatives which are both moral and can verify
effectiveness without having to repeat the original experiment.
You chose to not verify, and insist upon repeating, thus likely consigning
people to unneeded pain and even death.
I'll give a real-world example to be more clear cut about modern ethics and
science. Ever hear of TGN1412?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412)
It went into early human trials, and very quickly caused a reaction. "After
very first infusion of a dose 500 times smaller than that found safe in animal
studies, all six human volunteers faced life-threatening conditions involving
multiorgan failure for which they were moved to intensive care unit."
([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964774/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964774/)
)
Here's a publication of the effects:
[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa063842](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa063842)
.
Is it moral to reproduce that experiment? I say it is not moral, and must not
be repeated even though it is possible to do so.
Can a publication about the effects still be good science even though medical
ethics prevent us from repeating the experiment? Absolutely.
What say you?
------
webosdude
Didn't John Oliver say the same thing few months ago in his episode on
scientific studies,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw)
------
leecarraher
It's not just money that prevents people from repeating experiments, it's
recognition.
The general idea for research to be accepted is that it makes some novel,
albeit small, impact on the field, acceptable for publication in a peer
reviewed journal or proceeding. Repeating someone else's experiments wont get
you that, so in general it wont help you graduate or move you toward a higher
position at a university or in your profession, meaning there is very little
motivation for researchers to pursue such endeavors.
So instead of just throwing money at the problem, we may need to entirely
revamp how we recognize the pursuits of researchers.
------
ehnto
We learned the importance of this in high school science and it baffles me
that it's not already the case.
~~~
wccrawford
We have some kind of weird hero-worship of scientists where the general public
just believes what they say, even if they never even attempt to replicate
their results. They do an experiment (which may or may not be scientifically
sound to start with) and then publish results, and the public eats it up.
And then people have the nerve to say, "Last week chocolate was bad for me,
now it's good? Make up you mind!" No, _stop_ listening to un-replicated
studies! Jeez.
~~~
hudathun
Good point about the public involvement. The public and the news systems are
part of the problem.
I've lost count of how many 'battery breakthrough' articles I've come across,
but they seem to pass the newsworthy test.
~~~
eru
Wasn't the problem with battery breakthroughs that they don't commercialise
well, rather than that the science doesn't repeat?
------
ramblenode
I have an alternative proposal: do a study right the first time.
That means:
A) Pre-registering the study design, including the statistical analysis.
Otherwise, attaching a big label "Exploratory! Additional confirmation
needed!"
B) Properly powering the study. That means gathering a sample large enough
that the chances of a false negative aren't just a coin flip.
C) Making the data and analysis (scripts, etc.) publicly available where
possible. It's truly astounding that this is not a best practice _everywhere_.
D) Making the analysis reproducible without black magic. That includes C) as
well as a more complete methods section and more automation of the analysis
(one can call it automation but I see it more as reproducibility).
Replication of the entire study is great, but it's also inefficient in the
case of a perfect replication (the goal). Two identical and independent
experiments will have both a higher false negative and false positive rate
than a single experiment with twice the sample size. Additionally, it's
unclear how to evaluate them in the case of conflicting results (unless one
does a proper meta-analysis--but then why not just have a bigger single
experiment?).
~~~
physicalist
Your proposal is comparable to saying that checks and balances are not needed
in a democracy, politicians just need to govern "right". This is about
incentivising scientists to do the right thing instead of merely demanding it,
like you do.
~~~
ramblenode
How is advocating for a new set of best practices any more "demanding" or
wishful than a regime of obligatory replication? And how is this categorically
different from current practices such as peer review, disclosing conflicts of
interest, an IRB, etc.?
------
csydas
I think with the increased visibility of scientific research to the general
public, it's less that science needs to stop accepting unrepeated results, but
instead the paper process needs to be updated to reflect the new level of
availability, and journal databases need better relationship views between
papers and repeated tests.
As an outsider looking in on the Scientific process, I am not really sure how
applicable my opinions are, but I see these as useful changes.
Basically, in reverse order, my suggestions for science to adopt are as
follows:
Papers in databases need to have fields related to reproduction studies, and
it needs to start becoming a prideful part of the scientific process; just as
there is a lot of pride and money, researchers should start to thump their
chest based on the reproducibility of their work, actively seeking out
contemporaries and requesting a reproduction study as part of the pubilshing
process, and subsequently updating.
The papers published themselves should take a moment (perhaps no more than a
paragraph) to include a "for media" section that outlines the "do's and
don't's" on reporting on the research. For example, cancer research should
clearly state examples of acceptable understandings in lay person terms as a
sort of catch for sloppy reporting. Something like "Do not write "cure for
cancer found" or "Effective treatment", instead write "progress made, etc".
Basically put a sucker punch to outlandish headlines and reporting right in
the paper itself, and let journalists who want to be sensationalist embarrass
themselves.
This seems like two very simple acts that could raise the bar for science a
bit.
~~~
ebbv
Those are both good but the key here is the media needs to understand that
scientific papers that have not been independently verified are in a "maybe"
state.
Of course, they probably do know this and just choose to ignore it because
"Unverified Study that MIGHT Point to M&M's Being Good For You" won't get as
many clicks as "M&M's Are Good For You Says New Study!"
~~~
csydas
This is sort of why I think having it stated explicitly within the paper, not
just an aside but part of the actual process. It's to pit less scrupulous
journalists against one another, in an "honor among thieves" sort of way I
guess. If someone wants to go ahead and write clickbait, they can, but it
leaves them open to someone else looking to discredit them going "well, did
you even read the paper? they told you not to write that."
it's not so much checking for the public purpose, it's for others.
------
munificent
Most disciplines where correctness is important seem to end up having some
adversarial component. It is explicitly how the justice system in the US works
[1]. Many software companies have separate QA departments that are
deliberately kept at a remove from the engineers to encourage some rivalry
between them. Security issues are almost always managed in an adversarial way
(though here, you could argue that's because it reflects how the system itself
is [mis-]used). Markets are intended to allow fair competition between
producers to find an optimal price and product for consumers.
Peer review is supposed to do this, but the fact that peer reviewers are often
colleagues leads to collusion, whether intended or not.
Maybe we need a separate body of scientists whose sole job—and whose entire
prestige—derives from taking down and retracting bad science.
[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system)
------
dahart
It's unfortunate that the suggestions at the end don't seem to offer a
realistic attack vector.
> First, scientists would need to be incentivized to perform replication
> studies, through recognition and career advancement. Second, a database of
> replication studies would need to be curated by the scientific community.
> Third, mathematical derivations of replication-based metrics would need to
> be developed and tested. Fourth, the new metrics would need to be integrated
> into the scientific process without disrupting its flow.
Yes, absolutely those things need to happen, but the problem is how to get
this funded, how to get people to not see reproducing results as career
suicide, right? Items 2-4 will fall out as soon as item #1 happens.
How do we make item #1 happen? What things could be done to make reproducing
results actually an attractive activity to scientists?
~~~
dragandj
The problem is that, if you put mere reproduction as a goal, many scientists
would see that as low hanging fruit to beef up the resume, so we'd get
countless unnecessary "experiments".
I'd say the goal that gets credited should not be merely reproducing the
results, but finding errors in the previous research. That would count as
novel, and is something that is presently recognized as contribution. The only
problem is that journals or conferences treat it as unattractive, so good luck
publishing something of the kind...
~~~
dahart
> The problem is that, if you put mere reproduction as a goal, many scientists
> would see that as low hanging fruit to beef up the resume, so we'd get
> countless unnecessary "experiments".
Only if you assume the incentives for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. reproduction
experiments remain the same, right? I wouldn't assume that, both because the
first reproduction is the most valuable, and for the reasons Ahmed discussed
in the article - that scientists are motivated by their perceived ability to
do something novel. So first reproduction might be novel, but the fifth would
certainly be less valuable, so I wouldn't personally assume we'd get a flood
of useless experiments.
> I'd say the goal that gets credited should not be merely reproducing the
> results, but finding errors in the previous research
Reproducing an experiment is meant to, without prejudice, either confirm or
deny the previous research. It's not meant to confirm the previous results, it
is meant to ask whether there could be errors in the research, but without
assuming there are errors.
It _is_ novel to validate a result the first time, whether it's positive or
negative, and for this incentive system to work, it has to appeal to people
who might not find something dramatic or contradictory. It _must_ be appealing
to do the work, regardless of the outcome, or it's not an incentive at all.
------
middleman90
I thought this was in the definition of "scientific"
~~~
nxzero
Peer review is how most science is defined as science and peer review does not
require reproduction of the work.
~~~
seanmcdirmid
Much of what we peer review is not real science, at least in its definition of
applying the scientific method.
For example, much of computer "science" is not. Math maybe, engineering
probably, design sometimes, but "science" is rarely done. BUT the science envy
is there, especially post 1990s, and it is as confusing as heck when multiple
definitions of "science" collide in a conference culture.
Yes I'm a researcher, no I'm not a scientist.
------
lutorm
Define reproduced? Do we mean "conduct the same experiment multiple times so
we can assess the variance on the outcome"? Or do we mean "conduct the same
experiment multiple times to figure out if the first result is a screw-up"?
Those two aren't the same, and I think far too many think that the point is
the latter when, imho, it's actually the former. Pure screwups will likely get
found out, just like glaring bugs are usually found. It's when your result
actually has a huge variance but you're looking at only one (or a few) samples
and draw conclusions from it that's insidious, like the fact that it's the
bugs that just change the output by a tiny bit that are the hardest to notice.
------
typhonic
I've always been amazed by how widely the Stanford Prison Experiment results
are accepted when a) the experiment has not been repeated and b) the
experiment didn't even get completed. It was stopped when the researchers had
made up their minds about the results.
------
westurner
So, we should have a structured way to represent that one study reproduces
another? (e.g. that, with similar controls, the relation between the
independent and dependent variables was sufficiently similar)
\- RDF is the best way to do this. RDF can be represented as RDFa (RDF in
HTML) and as JSON-LD (JSON LinkedData).
... " #LinkedReproducibility "
[https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LinkedReproducibility](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LinkedReproducibility)
It isn't/wouldn't be sufficient to, with one triple, say (example.org/studyX,
'reproduces', example.org/studyY); there is a reified relation (an EdgeClass)
containing metadata like _who_ asserts that studyX reproduces studyY, _when_
they assert that, and _why_ (similar controls, similar outcome).
Today, we have to compare PDFs of studies and dig through them for links to
the actual datasets from which the summary statistics were derived; so
specifying _who_ is asserting that studyX reproduces studyY is very relevant.
Ideally, it should be possible to publish a study with structured premises
which lead to a conclusion (probably with formats like RDFa and JSON-LD, and a
comprehensive schema for logical argumentation which does not yet exist).
("#StructuredPremises")
Most simply, we should be able to say "the study control type URIs match",
"the tabular column URIs match", "the samples were representative", and the
identified relations were sufficiently within tolerances to say that studyX
reproduces studyY.
Doing so in prosaic, parenthetical two-column PDFs is wasteful and
shortsighted.
An individual researcher then, builds a set of beliefs about relations between
factors in the world from a graph of studies ("#StudyGraph") with various
quantitative and qualitative metadata attributes.
As fields, we would then expect our aggregate #StudyGraphs to indicate which
relations between dependent and independent variables are relevant to
prediction and actionable decision making (e.g. policy, research funding).
------
dschiptsov
According to old-school philosophy of science truth could be discovered only
by removing all the nonsense, as a remainder, not by pilling up nonsense on
top of nonsense out of math and probabilities.
Probabilities, for example, are not applicable to partially observed, guessed
and modeled phenomena. It should be a type-error.
As for math - existence of a concept as a mathematical abstraction does not
imply its existence outside the realms of so-called collective consciousness.
Projecting mathematical concepts onto physical phenomena which could not be
observed is a way to create chimeras and to get lost in them.
Read some Hegel to see how it works.)
------
triangleman
Ironically, one of the reasons Semmelweis's colleagues rejected his "hand-
washing" hypothesis was that it did not have a good enough
empirical/statistical basis.
[http://www.methodquarterly.com/2014/11/handwashing/](http://www.methodquarterly.com/2014/11/handwashing/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_Semmelweis)
------
macspoofing
Or at least, the media shouldn't report on results until they have been
repeated. This would cut down on the daily "X causes cancer / X doesn't cause
cancer" media spam.
------
aficionado
The solution is easy and it applies to most sciences: all research articles
should include a pointer to download the dataset that was used and an annex
with the details on how it was collected.
------
michaelbuddy
Agreed, which means 50% of social science at least is disqualified and should
not be making into future publications or become part of curriculum.
------
VlijmenFileer
Like climate science, right? Let's set up a statistical meaningful set of
equivalent earths, and start doing some serious peer review.
------
tudorw
this increasingly includes code that needs to run in the future, and citations
within code, see this group working in that field
[https://www.force11.org/sites/default/files/shared-
documents...](https://www.force11.org/sites/default/files/shared-
documents/software-citation-principles.pdf)
------
collyw
Just to play devils advocate, won't there be a self correcting mechanism?
If results are genuinely useful, then people will want to build upon that
work, and will have to repeat the science. On the other hand if it can't be
repeated, then it will not get further work done and fade into obscurity.
Curious what other peoples opinion on this are?
------
bane
I think a better way of thinking about what we want than "repetition" is
"independent corroboration".
------
grashalm
Sometimes in cs if your research is embedded in a huge ecosystem, it can
become quite expensive to reproduce results. I mean proper reproduction, not
just rerunning the Benchmarks. If you are dealing with complicated stuff, the
reproducer might also just not be able to do the same thing technically.
~~~
osivertsson
Maybe, maybe not. Do you have something specific in mind here?
I hope researchers and scientists don't considers others not capable enough,
and therefore withhold info on how to reproduce.
Even if the experiment is crazy expensive and complex right now it might be
considered much more tractable in 10 years, or someone builds upon your work
and invents a simpler method to show the same thing.
~~~
grashalm
I am thinking of huge endeavors like building an asic or huge complex systems
like virtual machines. Not always a comparable system for Repetition is
available and must be built from scratch. Affording such rebuilds require huge
sums.
Of course nobody does consider others not capable enough. Its just that there
are not so many people experienced enough to build certain systems in a decent
amount of time.
------
chucky_z
In for instance, a bioscience lab, I don't believe that results should even be
accepted unless they're repeated with similar reagents. Some reagents are so
specific they only prove something.... for that one single thing, which could
be unique on this planet.
------
vonnik
In that case, macro-economics is simply disqualified from being scientific.
It's almost impossible to repeat large-scale events, controlling for all
variables. Have to say I'm not particularly impressed with the quality of
Nautilus's analysis.
~~~
T-A
> In that case, macro-economics is simply disqualified from being scientific.
Well, duh? (In other words: of course it's not a science.)
------
twoslide
One problem is that there is no incentive to replicate. From the PhD onwards,
academia creates incentives for original research. Replications, particularly
those that confirmed existing research, would not benefit the researcher much.
------
tedks
From the authors of "Why Science Needs Metaphysics" this rings a little
hollow.
Nautilus is just a slightly less vitriolic version of the Aeon-class anti-
science postmodernist blog. Like Aeon, it's garbage.
------
Zenst
Independently verified and repeated I would add.
After all any scientific test that fails when somebody else repeats it is not
science but the domain of magic and religion, so clearly not science.
------
colinprince
I searched for the word "tenure" in the article, but didn't find it.
The drive to get tenure is a big reason that scientists publish so much, funny
that was not mentioned.
------
mankash666
What we need is accountable statistics - something that cannot be manipulated.
One idea is to enforce storing or indemnifying a time-stamped data base of the
raw data on the block chain
------
cm2187
How do you that in the medical field? Studies are often based on a small
number of patients affected by a particular condition.
------
jheriko
wait! we should use the scientific method for science?
its a radical suggestion. sad that it is, but true... ;)
seriously though... you can't have falsifiable results if you don't constantly
try to falsify them. then it just becomes a result, which means the conclusion
you can draw is close to nothing.... not quite nothing, but exceptionally
close. :)
------
vorotato
There is no science without repetition.
------
sevenless
We also should not accept historical claims that have not been repeated :)
------
return0
We now have the tools to do it , and we should be doing it. The fate of
scientific findings is not to publish papers, they belong to open and
continuous scrutiny. And someone should build a github of scientific facts.
~~~
ipstone2014
let's try it, if interested, send me a tweet at @isaacpei, seriously thinking
about creating something for this
~~~
return0
There is no lack of efforts to get scientists discussing (shameless related
plug [http://sciboards.com](http://sciboards.com)), but unfortunately there is
a disincentive for scientists to do so (politics).
------
Eerie
UGH. Scientists are not getting funds to repeat result.
------
known
Lottery < Statistics < Science
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Literal Ask HN: What Is the Cost of Running Hacker News? - deanstag
======
detaro
I'd guess: dangs salary, and some rounding error for hosting (afaik it's still
just on a single server, so even if that's some managed offering somewhere it
won't be that much)
------
mytechtoday
Hacker News pays close attention to the content on the main page. They purge
anything that doesn't trend left leaning or counters the standard left's
corporate interests.
For example, I posted a link to Michael Moore's film in which he eviscerates
bio-fuels. This post was mysteriously removed. It was also removed the second
time I posted it. This was despite the link the "A year wearing shorts to
work" as another HN article link at the time continued to exist.
~~~
deanstag
I get you! It is even harder for a few of us who are leaning down in the
political graph. Atleast the political right gets an acknowledgement of
existence. The political down are accused as outright quacks.
~~~
verdverm
The 0,0 (owl eyes) party gets ignored by all the eigenparties who can't seem
to find any alignment
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Google: My interview experience - gil_vegliach
http://gilvegliach.it/?id=17
======
ender7
As always, remember that even technical interviews like this one have an
incredible amount of random chance built into the hiring process. This is
especially true at a big company like Google (where I work and do interviews).
Do they happen to have positions open right now? Did you happen to get asked
questions that clicked with you? Was the hiring committee feeling grouchy that
day? Did you get an especially harsh interviewer for one of your questions?
Did they just hire someone with your skillset and so don't need a duplicate
right now?
There's a decent amount that you can do to prepare for one of these things,
but there's also an incredible amount you don't have control over. If you
don't get the job, it's not a signal regarding your quality as an engineer and
you shouldn't interpret it as such (however tempting it may be to do so).
Remember, there are many great places to work right now, and your skillset is
in demand. If we didn't get lucky enough to hire you, someone else will quite
soon.
~~~
cmahler7
You think a company like Google would be able to implement a non-subjective
and fair interview. Their current process must cost them a lot of talent
~~~
rco8786
> Their current process must cost them a lot of talent reply
They optimize to reduce false positives. They're completely fine with false
negatives. They don't have any shortage of talented engineers willing to
interview there.
That last bit is why I think it's quite silly for smaller/unknown startups to
be copying Google's interview process, as seems to be the trend.
~~~
kamaal
>>They optimize to reduce false positives. They're completely fine with false
negatives.
Getting too many false negatives is a very sure way of getting a lot of false
positives.
>>They don't have any shortage of talented engineers willing to interview
there.
You might be wrong there. Apart from huge money opportunities, there are
little incentives for any body to waste their best years in large company
political middle levels.
~~~
wdroz
>>Getting too many false negatives is a very sure way of getting a lot of
false positives.
Why ? IMO if you reduce the False Acceptance Rate, you will up the False
Reject Rate. Good chart at [https://www.tractica.com/biometrics/in-biometrics-
which-erro...](https://www.tractica.com/biometrics/in-biometrics-which-error-
rate-matters/)
------
drewg123
Xoogler here:
If you want to work for Google, my advice is to try again when you get a
chance. IMHO, getting an offer is about 50% the luck of the draw as to what
questions you get, and what interviewer you get. If you were close this time,
you might get an offer next time.
If it makes you feel any better, people who I knew were smarter and better
coders than me got declined, yet somehow I got hired.
BTW, I thought so little of the HR process that I refused to participate while
I was there. I did not do interview training, and never did any interviews or
committees in my time there.
~~~
shshhdhs
Why didn't you participate if there was room for improvement?
~~~
drewg123
Two reasons:
The idealistic reason is that I didn't want to participate in a corrupt
system. AFAICT, an individual interviewer is powerless to change the system.
I've I'd have rated every candidate a must-hire, they would have thrown my
feedback out.
The more practical reason is that I was a SWE embedded in a hardware group.
Interviewing (and writing up the feedback) takes time. My spending time on
interviewing would not have helped my boss (or his boss), so when I told my
boss I didn't want to do interview training, he didn't care. This kind of paid
off, because I got to spend enough time doing stuff my boss (and his
peers/bosses) cared about that I got promoted while I was there.
------
bit_logic
It seems many acknowledge that the Google process (and other similar ones) is
very flawed with a high false negative rate, but it's considered ok because
there's a flood of talent always applying to Google.
Maybe this used to be true, but I don't think it's true anymore. It's very
likely still true in the fresh graduate to early 20's age range of candidates.
But at this point, senior engineers know what this process is about. And I
think many are deciding to just avoid this process since it's very biased
against senior engineers (who are rusty on DS and algorithms and don't have
time to study it like a second job). So the flood of senior talent is probably
less now than it used to be. But Google doesn't care. The main reason is,
success hides all failures. They're still generating billions in revenue every
quarter. Until those numbers change, no one is going to care about fixing a
broken process like this.
Next time I look for a new job, I'm going to start with this list:
[https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-
whiteboards](https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards) and give
priority to companies that don't have this type of process. I hope more
companies recognize that they can get a big competitive advantage for senior
engineering talent by not copying the Google process.
~~~
tsukikage
Of course processes are biased in favour of hiring grads. Graduates are
awesome from an employer's POV. They don't know their own worth yet, they
don't have families competing for work/life balance, and they're eager to
prove themselves. So you can pay them a pittance to burn the midnight oil
crunching through the most miserable parts of your workload.
------
kstenerud
Better than my interview experience.
Sailed through the phone interview, went in person for the day long interview.
Most were no problem except for one that took longer than it should have. And
then...
Nothing. Radio silence. No emails. No answered emails. I had ceased to exist.
After that colossal waste of time, I decided to only work remote.
~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _Nothing. Radio silence. No emails. No answered emails. I had ceased to
> exist._
Actually, that seems to be the standard behavior for rejected candidates these
days, at least in my personal experience. (I've seen some references calling
it the "California no", suggesting that the practice is widespread.)
It's really kind of annoying.
~~~
dsacco
> the "California no"
Never heard that before. That's going to be my new go-to phrase for this
though.
------
powera
For those of you not familiar with what a "2.7" means on the Google hiring
scale, the rough scale is:
1 - I will resign if Google hires this person.
2 - I don't think this person should be hired, but I could be convinced otherwise.
3 - I think this person should be hired, but I could be convinced otherwise.
4 - This person should definitely be hired.
(interviewers can use decimal scores)
~~~
gil_vegliach
Right, with 4 being basically impossible to get, and scores being normalized
wrt the history of the interviewer.
~~~
sulam
I haven't worked at Google, but I have interviewed with and reviewed feedback
from Xooglers, and 4's are not impossible -- but they are rare and you have to
essentially be smarter than your interviewer about the particular problem to
get one. This can be pretty hard, since many interviewers pick problems that
they are extremely familiar with.
~~~
thwd
On my Google onsite (in Zürich as well), one of the interviewers told me that
if he gave me a 4.0, he'd have to argue on my behalf if the hiring committee
wasn't sure of hiring me.
~~~
EmployedRussian
Arguing to HC on behalf of someone I gave 4.0 (which _is_ rare, and which I
_did_ give a few times) is something I would do _gladly_ (and I expect most
others will do as well).
It's not like going in front of HC is an inquisition or anything -- they are
just your peers.
------
c0achmcguirk
I didn't see you mention this, but the point of the coding interview is not to
see how optimal your solution is (although it helps). It's also to see if
you're a good person to work with.
If you nail the problem right away but you don't talk it through with the
interviewer you'll be scored lower. They want to see if you'd be a person
they'd like to work with on the team, not the quiet person that never
collaborates.
~~~
duiker101
The point of the coding interview is whatever the interviewer thinks it is.
Sure, it SHOULD be to see if you are a good person to work with, but that's
not always the case, if the interviewer thinks that you should produce a
working and optimal solution(for whatever reason), that's what you will be
judge on. Unfortunately not everyone uses the tools at their disposal in the
best way. And it might not even be a case of intentionally doing it wrong, it
might be that the interviewer doesn't know any better. If you take an
experienced dev and you put him to make interviews he will not always know the
best practices to interview someone.
~~~
bitexploder
For Google that simply isn't true. Check out Work Rules some time. Google has
put a ton of effort in having a repeatable hiring process that specifically
avoids this problem of interviewer bias. Most people, even Googlers do not
really understand their hiring process and how it works. It isn't to hire the
best coders.
------
yoandy
At least they give you some feedback in the end. I had the experience to be
rejected after an onsite interview at Amazon, and they did not take the time
to give a word of feedback, after I even asked for it. I see the past
interviews were of great help to you to finally get the position at Amazon. I
am looking forward to read your third post. Complimenti collega!
~~~
bmpafa
I had the same experience with Amazon--dinged with no feedback.
Normally I'm a sucker for irony, but when they sent me an auto email a few
weeks later asking _me_ for feedback (ie, a survey on the hiring process), I
didn't find it immediately funny.
~~~
Terr_
Bonus annoyance: After rejection, get 15 contacts from Amazon recruiters in
the next 5 months.
Those made me wonder if it wasn't for the best.
~~~
hocuspocus
All from uncoordinated business divisions! And I've heard it also happens when
you got an offer (while waiting for your visa/relocation).
I'm not hating on Amazon but their recruiting process is by far the sloppiest
of all big tech companies.
------
br1n0
My experience: I applied for an open position at google on their website,
during the university, an interview was arranged after some mails, I was
positively surprised by their care of detail: about setting the inteview at
right time during the day for me, wow!. When I recieved the call i was
suprised, but because call me at wrong day, at wrong time, It was on dinner on
my time, and I drinked a couple of beer, it was stressful, the interview was
difficult and unsuccessful, after a couple of days by mail told that inteview
was not successful. I'm from italy, here the company adopt the Hollywood
Principle: “don’t call us, we’ll call you”, because there are too much
applicants and few good jobs. I digested: maybe I'm not good for the position,
but also them are not perfect, but at least they try to be gentle. After a two
of year I recived a mail for an interview, I was suprised because I did not
solicitate it, I was very relaxed because I was discard the previous time, so
why this time should be different? (I'm fine that better developer exist), the
interview seem goes easily, at the end interviewer ask me where I'd like to
work if I could decide and describe some offices on google on different
coutry, It was too exciting to be true, and replied all are the same for me,
but why you call me, on the other interview I was discarded, he was suprised,
told some 0info and asked some info on precedent inverview. Also this time I
was informed by mail that the interview was not successful. Lesson 2: I
thinked they call me by error, so two mistake in two interview:. nobody is
perfect.
------
eatsleepmonad
I had a similar experience my first time, but I applied again a year later and
passed. I did study algorithms (mostly DP and graph stuff) via HackerRank for
two weeks before each onsite, but I never did fully succeed with any of the
algorithms questions.
The second time, I think I was just lucky with questions I liked. I don't
think my programming ability changed drastically in the year between.
------
akhilcacharya
I'm becoming convinced that the only way to get into Google is to get in as an
intern or new grad if OP studied for 6 months and still didn't get an offer.
It doesn't seem that way at other top companies like FB, Amazon and MS from
the people I've talked to.
~~~
JabavuAdams
Meh, just try again in a year. High variance.
~~~
akinalci
"Just try again in a year" is a good option when you're young. But it gets
less attractive as you get older, especially if it means abandoning an
interesting project or senior role you accepted after "Company X" rejected
you. There are too many good opportunities out there to get hung up on any one
company.
~~~
ryandrake
I've lost track of the number of times I've gone through the interview wringer
at Google. It sounds like a great place to work, which is unanimously
confirmed by a number of people I know who work there, but I'm no longer going
to go out of my way looking for the chance. Prepping and going through the
process is like a second full-time job.
And so unnecessary. Think about it--it's Google. They should have enough data
on me by now to know my skills and potential with high confidence, to the
point where their interview shouldn't even need humans in the loop.
~~~
Operyl
I could only imagine the legal shit show that'd occur if they tried to do
that, however amusing and novel the idea may be.
------
Artlav
> In this model, the sourcer discovers a talent
> The talent is then picked up by a recruiter
Am i the only one who trips over such terminology of calling a hired worker
"talent" and finds that it feels like it's manipulative, PC or doublespeak?
What meaning does the word "talent" have in casual English?
~~~
CommieBobDole
It's jargon from show business (movies, music, TV, stage, etc)- the "talent"
is generally the performers or maybe just the star.
I don't think it's insulting, but it may be manipulative; it implies that the
potential hire is a star performer and/or brings something unique to the role.
------
rifung
> The recruiter also said I was borderline, which might be just a nice empty
> word from her, but made me feel better.
I don't think this is just her being nice; I was also told I was borderline
and they actually ended up letting me interview again for a different position
(SETI instead of SWE). Alas I got rejected again, but the year after they
called me back because I was borderline, or so they told me, and I am working
there now.
As others have said, there is some element of chance, both on their part and
also likely on yours. Hopefully you'll apply again as it seems like you have a
good chance.
~~~
steelframe
I've heard of Google hiring committees rejecting candidates who got all "Hire"
recommendations from the interviewers. I've also seen candidates get hired who
seemed on the wrong side of "borderline." There are many more factors at play
than just your interview performance.
------
itake
Is that photo of "Google" really the culc at Georgia tech?
~~~
gil_vegliach
It is the Zurich office from the street.
------
mawood20
What other professions are like this? Do lawyers, accountants, civil
engineers, bartenders, etc. take massive time to memorize stuff every time
they want or need to go job hunting?
~~~
dev_head_up
A friend of mine was shocked when I told him how things are looking for a job
in the software world. He's a civil engineer. I guess it makes it easier in
their world owing to accreditation and certs. He just found it astounding the
amount of prep time it takes your average dev to get ready for an interview.
------
johnrob
I'm curious if the people giving the interviews have an incentive to be
conservative with scoring. Maybe it looks bad when your score is the highest?
As if you're lowering the bar? If true, I could see that contributing to how
these interview stories play out (candidates thinking they did better than
their no-hire outcome).
~~~
EmployedRussian
There are no such incentives.
When writing feedback, you simply look back at 20 other interviews where you
asked the same question, and write "candidate X's performance on this question
was was in {top,bottom} {5,25,50}% of ... at this level".
You also have _no idea_ how other interviewers will score, and if your score
is 1.5 when everyone else's is a 3.9, it's likely that the HC will ignore you.
The HCs do see multiple feedback from you and your peers, so they build a
model of your feedback for themselves: P is a soft interviewer, so we'll
adjust his score down but Q is a very hard interviewer so we'll adjust her
score up ;-)
~~~
steelframe
My hires are uniformly distributed across the score spectrum. Not sure how the
HCs "adjust" me. I have gotten props for the quality of my written feedback
though.
~~~
EmployedRussian
It doesn't matter how your candidates are distributed across the spectrum (and
I _do_ hope that your _hires_ are not uniformly distributed ;-)
What matters is how your scores compare to other interviewers scores on the
given slate.
> Not sure how the HCs "adjust" me.
Maybe they don't. Maybe you are the most precise and best-calibrated
interviewer on every slate, and never make a bad call. Good for you ;-)
------
jacekm
Does anyone know how Google's interview looks for QA/Software engineer in
test?
------
expertentipp
> Alas, rejection
Is anyone getting accepted to Google at all? So many stories of applications
which failed at some point. Calls, tests, onsite, over a month of teasing.
Maybe person in his/her 20s has enough time and energy to throw away for
something like this.
~~~
str33t_punk
Yes people are getting jobs. It's just the ones that don't who write the blogs
that get up voted. Many college seniors I know have gotten offers without
preparing that much outside of their usual work
~~~
cableshaft
Well, college seniors should have the easiest time getting a job at Google,
since they are closest to the material that Google tests on and would have it
fresh in their minds, so I wouldn't be surprised that many of them do get
offers.
I have a feeling there's a significantly higher rate of failure for people who
have been in the industry for 5-10 years and haven't had to most of the things
they'd get tested on since college.
------
employee8000
At google, I was given some code that manipulated some bits and the
interviewer, in inexplicably terrible English, kept asking me what the purpose
of this code was for. He has a very thick Eastern European accent which was
not understandable and I don't know how he was able to get into interviews. I
could tell it was doing some sort of overflow detection but other than that I
had no idea. I hadn't done anything with bits since college. He kept insisting
that I keep trying to understand what the code was doing even though it was
obvious I had no idea. After a 40 min, excruciatingly awkward conversation we
moved onto his next question which I also couldn't understand due to his
terrible English. What a complete waste of time.
~~~
ryandrake
Thick accidents and borderline language proficiency is even worse on phone
screens, where interviewers always seem to sound like they are talking through
a sheet of plastic placed over the phone. I've lost count of the number of
times I've had to get someone to repeat their question over and over and over
on (not Google) phone screens. Once did a phone screen with an exec who I'm
pretty certain was conducting it from his handsfree in an open-top convertible
car (clearly heard traffic noise). I've always wondered how many opportunities
I've missed out on due to poor audio quality.
~~~
steelframe
I have a very hard time with accents. I've done a couple of phone interviews
where I hardly understood a single thing the candidate said. In those cases I
usually write my question verbatim in the shared document and focus on the
code the candidate produces. It has probably hurt the chances of at least one
or two interviewees.
------
ycat
If you have a Google account why should they still need to do an interview?
~~~
gil_vegliach
Apparently they are thinking about it (perhaps just a rumor):
[https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/3332120/google-creates-
jobsite...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/3332120/google-creates-jobsite-
google-hire-but-does-that-mean-employers-will-be-able-to-snoop-on-your-grubby-
digital-history/)
~~~
expertentipp
Having completely blank account means hired?:) Hard to escape google in
today's internet:)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The utopian currency Bitcoin is a potentially catastrophic energy guzzler - nullobject
https://theconversation.com/the-utopian-currency-bitcoin-is-a-potentially-catastrophic-energy-guzzler-88871
======
kneel
>In essence, the creation of a new Bitcoin requires the performance of a
complex calculation that has no value except to show that it has been done.
This is incorrect, the massive amount of electricity that goes into
cooperative bitcoin hashing also contributes towards the security of bitcoin.
It would take, at minimum, an equally massive amount of electricity to
compromise the network.
~~~
mhurd
I think the point is, there are alternatives...
------
billions
How much energy does it cost to build, power, and commute to bank office
buildings?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Frugality won’t make you rich, it makes it possible for you to get rich - joshuacc
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2011/09/13/frugality-wont-make-you-rich/
======
jellicle
Ah, simple, worthless advice from the internet.
Project not going well? _Work harder_.
Not enough money? _Save more_.
Not attractive enough? _Be more attractive_.
I know I'm enlightened. Sigh.
Median income in the U.S. is $40K. Which is about $110/day. Telling people to
cut out some "small thing", a $5 daily expense, is telling them to magically
save 5% of their total expenditures. Except he moves quickly to saving
$250/month, which is now 10% of their total expenditures. Easy as pie! Just
stop eating! Stop renting shelter! Stop purchasing clothes! And then you'll be
free to have money to eat, rent shelter, and purchase clothes.
Utter brilliance.
~~~
trebor
Frugality helps me survive on what I make.
$40k salary a year actually comes out to ~$154/day. Assuming 2080 hours/year
of workable time, this is 40k / 260 "work days".
I get less than this at the moment.
If you _can_ afford to invest 10% of your income for 2 years, then drop to 5%
for the rest, in a mutual fund that averages 15%/year (they do exist) you'd
have ~$813k after 30 years (at $250 the first two, then $125 the remaining
years). At no further investment you'd have $323k after thirty years from the
first $6k invested.
This ain't no drop in the bucket, but we post-modernist consumptive Americans
aren't interested in self-sacrifice.
~~~
alttag
> Assuming 2080 hours/year of workable time, ...
I've had recruiters try to sell me on this figure for salary calculations, or
even worse, use 2085.7 (=365 * 5/7 * 8). That only works if you don't want a
vacation.
I use 2,000 hrs/yr both to factor in some vacation time and also to make the
math easier to do in my head.
~~~
trebor
Sure, this is why the young kids with no family and no life outside work make
buckets of money: they spend almost _all their time_ in the office.
A salaried position is nice, but even then some industries put the salary low
and give bonuses to "dedicated" people like that.
I'm not going to sugar coat it for myself, or for anyone else either. It's
really hard for everyone in this economy, but especially for young folks like
me who don't already own (or at least partly own) houses.
------
aculver
I've found the interest rate on outstanding debt to be a tremendous motivation
to try and limit the number of frivolous things I buy.
For example, our interest rate is 5.5% and we're not due to pay off our
mortgage for 28 years. That means (more or less) that for every dollar I
spend, I could have put that on my mortgage and saved 5.5% interest
(compounded) over 28 years. Another way of looking at it is that I'm going to
be paying 5.5% interest (tax-deductible) on anything I buy instead of putting
the money in an extra payment on my mortgage.
Given the terms of my mortgage, that makes an $500 iPad actually cost about
$500 now and another $481.06 in interest over the next 28 years. My $2300
MacBook Pro will actually end up costing me $4512.88.
The great thing about this approach is that it doesn't discourage me from
buying _nice_ things that are actually worth their value. The MacBook Pro for
example produces incredible value, much more than I paid for it.
However, knowing that for every $5 smoothie I buy now, I'll be paying another
$4.81 for it in 28 years? I don't buy $5 smoothies 2-3 times a week anymore.
Instead I go to Rita's when they're doing $1 kids cones on Monday and I go
again on Wednesday for the $1 Italian Ice.
Anyways, I found this so helpful in curbing frivolous spending that I created
a small iPhone app to help folks do the calculation on the fly.
<http://whatll-it-cost.limelightapp.com/> . I'd be happy to give a promo code
to anyone who thinks it'll be helpful. (After all, that $0.99 would actually
be $1.94 after 28 years at 5.5%. :p)
------
GeneralMaximus
> _Joe Average has $80,000 in student loan debt, $25,000 in credit card debt,
> and a $10,000 car loan. His total monthly debt payment is about $1,200 and
> he’s going to be making those payments for the next, say, ten years._
Okay, I'll just go ahead and ask: _why?_
Why are so many young people so heavily in debt? Is this an American thing? Or
a Western thing in general?
I see people like this in every online community. They barely make enough
money to pay for housing, food and utilities, yet they use credit cards to
purchase Xboxes, e-readers, smartphones, expensive computers, Netflix,
Pandora/Last.fm/GrooveShark/whatever, iPods, tablets, games off Steam and FSM
knows what else[1]. And then they go eat at the local fast-food chain because
it's cheaper than eating real food. Sometimes I have serious doubts about the
sanity of these people.
Why are young people who don't make money being given credit cards? Why are
they purchasing cars with money they don't have?
I'm curious. This cultural phenomenon of spending more than you make is
completely foreign to me.
\---
[1] List not limited to technology, of course.
~~~
Woost
A big part of it (I think) is the student loan debt. 80,000 is huge, and can
lead to just giving up and spiraling(I already owe 80k, what's another 2?)
The car loan is really low, 10k is just about as cheap as you can get a new
car for, and you'll never get a loan for a used car (so if you don't have 2-5k
in savings to buy it used...you're SOL) Biking/walking is only really feasible
in certain cities.
And if you really want to know why young people are being given credit
cards...it's because they don't make money! No, really. Not a conspiracy, but
without a steady income they can only make the minimum payments for a while,
which gives the card issuers more money than someone who has a job. Plus, they
get to charge higher interest on it.
~~~
philwelch
_and you'll never get a loan for a used car (so if you don't have 2-5k in
savings to buy it used...you're SOL)_
This isn't true at all. You might not be able to get a car loan in the 2-5k
range, but for a used car, especially a certified used car in the 10k range,
those are almost always financed. One also makes a down payment on a car, so a
10K car loan may be for a car that's up to $15k. $15k is plenty for a decent
used car.
~~~
Woost
Yes, that was my point. A decent car will put you at least 10k in the hole,
unless you have the cash to buy used from someone who isn't a dealer.
------
bricestacey
For those that wrote negative comments about this article, imagine for a
minute you weren't such a hotshot and couldn't negotiate a $10,000 increase in
salary at your minimum wage job as a ticket taker at the movie theater.
Imagine you were one of those mechanical turk workers that you use in your
shiny web application being paid next to nothing for your time. Then shut the
hell up. This article isn't for you.
------
d_r
Taken within the context of HN audience, this is generally poor advice. I'm
not sure why it is being upvoted other than for the discussion itself. Don't
scrounge those $9 Netflix dollars, and don't skip your coffee. Don't even
spend countless hours lurking on SlickDeals to save twenty bucks here and
there. Your time would much, much better spent if you work on increasing your
income stream. Work harder and ship your darn iPhone/Android/web/whatever app.
~~~
mdda
But it's also partly to do with the kinds of businesses that the HN crowd are
setting up.
If your business is a plain old-style cash-flow business, rather than having a
fast-growth trajectory, it does much sense to optimize for the cents, since
they turn into dollars because of the repetition.
When first-mover advantage is important, don't let the small stuff get in the
way of getting your product out ASAP.
------
lchengify
I've seen a lot of people who are penny-wise pound-foolish, and I think that's
actually a lot more damaging then not being frugal overall. Wasting $8/mo on
Netflix doesn't matter that much, but having a habit of saying "screw it" and
dropping $500 on a night out for no reason can be a much more damaging habit
and much more cost-effective to stop.
Also it's hard to write an article about smart money and not point out that
some people simply do not know when to negotiate. You could spend all year
depriving yourself of coffee or decent food to save $10,000, or you could
spend 5 minutes remembering to _make a counter offer_ on your salary or your
next car purchase.
~~~
LiveTheDream
There was a deleted reply that said:
> On the other hand, a daily habit of frugality makes it easier to not
> splurge.
My response: that might not be true based on the recent information about
decision fatigue[1].
[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-
fro...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-
decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all)
~~~
philwelch
From experience, that doesn't seem to be the case. If you worry about spending
money at a certain level, you've defined the battle lines, and splurging
desperately on the other side is utterly unthinkable.
If $10 for a day's worth of food seems lavish to you, something like even
setting foot in a decent restaurant becomes unthinkable. You start to lose the
ability to even imagine splurging, because to you spending $15-20 on pizza is
splurging. You understand from an intellectual perspective that you can easily
spend over $100 at a good restaurant ordering dinner for two, but you don't
consider it as a possibility for your own life.
------
jdietrich
"The only people who are obsessed with food are the anorexic and the morbidly
obese" - Stephen Fry
Likewise, it seems to me that misers and spendthrifts are both defined by
their obsession with money. This sort of 'frugality' seems a particularly
unpleasant fixation.
~~~
MikeCapone
"This sort of 'frugality' seems a particularly unpleasant fixation."
To some people it is, and to others it's actually fun and rewarding to do more
with less and figure out new ways to save money for something more important
in the long-term.
If it's not for you, fine, but let's not generalize.
------
dev_jim
Not really. What is going to help you get rich is to focus on increasing your
top-line income. Doubling and tripling and more of your income is going to
make whatever bottom line improvements described in this article irrelevant.
Not to mention that you should be enjoying the money you make, not constantly
worrying about whether you should brown bag it or eat $5 crappy street meat.
~~~
hammock
I don't think your idea and the OP's are at odds. Abundant wealth growth comes
from reinvestment of capital- the more capital you have the more you can
invest. And cost-cutting, naturally constrained by current top-line revenue,
increases earnings to be reinvested.
Two sides of accounting, happening at the same time- cost and revenue.
------
tomjen3
That is nice in theory, but in practice it is a lot easier to double your
income than to find that 25th hour a day.
And much of what he suggest takes so much more time that you still couldn't
make a business.
~~~
ebiester
There are positive frugal actions and negative frugal actions.
Negative actions include not spending as much money on the car, or the house,
and skipping the starbucks. Negative actions are half the battle.
------
yason
Real frugality starts when you've over with the fact that you don't really
need most of that stuff you think you needed anyway. And, further, those
things you do need you choose because you like them, not because what you
think others will like--and thus, think they like you too.
However, there's an interesting issue there. Having little income but
consuming even less approaches a certain point--a point that is the same point
as consuming a lot but yet having even more income.
Either way, at this point you consume less than you earn. And this point
happens to be the one that calls you to think what is it that you're here, in
life, for. The "what would you do if you had a million dollars question", but
just in reality. You don't need millions; to reach this point you just need
more income than you spend.
This calling is always there but you really start hearing it louder as soon as
you don't have to be so busy merely making a living. And that is a dreadful
point for it takes away all excuses you're used to, and makes you either a
weasel or someone who will begins to think hard, really hard.
------
Hyena
My effective income is $17,280, pre-tax. Even pared back to that, I've
accumulated about $3,000 in savings over a year. It helps not to buy stuff.
Like, at all. I have only 14 major physical possessions, including where I
live and "clothing" and "tools" as single objects. I have much more software,
most of it purchased at steep discounts through Steam or the App Store/Market.
Spotify provides music.
Surplus monthly income is roughly $500. It's been a pretty successful
experiment. So saving at low incomes is very possible. What I think bears
mention is that this is mostly possible because of my age and disposition; I'm
young and I'm picky, so I neither pile up expenses nor have a burning desire
to possess most things.
~~~
Impossible
Do you still live at home with your parents? If not where do you live? I saved
a ton of money back when I had a low income but very little expenses because I
lived with my parents.
------
gfaremil
I'm not sure this is a smart advice. Of course, frugality is good thing. But
it does not help you to become rich.
There is a saying which says: Don't waste your time thinking about how to
spend money, think about how to make money.
------
gonepostal
Author makes some good points but comes to an incorrect conclusion. It is very
important to live within your means (income + some delta > expenses). I don't
think anyone would disagree with that statement. There is some debate how big
that delta should but that isn't the root of the issue.
But then concluding being frutal will provide opportunities is false. All
frugality enables is the ability for one to take advantage of opportunities
that someone that is in a lesser financial situation could not.
~~~
lotharbot
If you can't take advantage of it, it's not really an opportunity. Frugality
turns "can't take advantage of" situations into actual opportunities.
------
danielrhodes
How does frugality help you when you have no debt?
~~~
dakr
There are three major and important reasons: for retirement, to provide a
cushion, and to be able to capitalize on opportunity. If you save more now,
you can retire earlier or maintain a higher quality of life. If you save
enough to provide a nice cushion, you can ride out the bad times or worse
(child sick, lose job, car falls apart...). Again, and perhaps most
excitingly, being able to draw on a reserve lets you leverage opportunity.
This is not about debt. It's about making sure you have the ability and the
freedom to live beyond the day to day.
------
fleitz
Frugality also makes you hungry.
When you start your business after being frugal it makes your business frugal
which makes it lean, which means that you'll raise (if necessary) on much
better terms.
Caesar:
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
~~~
LiveTheDream
I disagree with the general sentiment of the article, but this comment rings
true. If you are aware of how to survive on a limited budget, that could give
you the strength, knowledge, and confidence to power through a tough financial
situation with your startup.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Lost transcription of Tale of Genji chapter found in Japanese storeroom - apophasis
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/10/lost-chapter-the-tale-of-genji-murasaki-shikibu-found-japan
======
gwern
It's amazing that a millennium later, Teika manuscripts are _still_ turning
up.
For those not familiar with the context:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujiwara_no_Teika](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujiwara_no_Teika)
was a minor aristocrat of a clan specialized in court poetry. He was one of
the greatest Japanese poets of all time, a striking accomplishment given his
rather ornery personality and the strife-torn times he lived in. Late in life,
however, he also became something of an antiquarian, and began spending a
great deal of time studying old classics and attempting to restore them:
_Genji_, obviously, was one of them, but he also helped study or preserve many
others, like the _Man'yoshu_ (already then almost completely unreadable). If
you read the textual history sections of translations, it'll be not
unsurprising if you happen to see Teika's name come up as involved in the
chain of transmission. We are indebted to him for being able to read as much
of early Japanese literature as we can.
------
idoubtit
I've read this yesterday and thought the Guardian's title was misleading. If I
understood rightly, the chapter found was already known, although it was
through a later copy. So this discovery will bring minor changes, which a few
scholars will enjoy the most.
The original text from around 1010 is lost. From the copy written before 1240,
only 4 chapters, now 5, have been preserved. And all of the 54 chapters are
known through later copies from around 1500.
~~~
dang
Ok, we've edited the title above to make it be the transcription that was lost
and found, not the chapter.
------
mirimir
It's arguably not the first novel.[0]
> Using a very lose definition of a novel as a long prose narrative describing
> fictional characters and events, it’s hard to understand why some older
> works don’t qualify. The Golden Ass, which involves the journey of a man
> whose insatiable curiosity gets him turned into an ass and who ends up
> joining a cult of the goddes Isis, arguably meets these criteria. Still, the
> distinctive writing style, often including verse, interwoven tales
> (including, in the case of The Golden Ass, the myth of “Cupid and Psyche”),
> and distinctive mix of seriousness with satire, humor, and downright
> vulgarity does support differentiating early works of extended prose from
> the “modern novel”—although the boundaries of this differentiation vary from
> one scholar to the next and are being broken regularly by today’s fiction
> writers.
Indeed, some of my favorite novels feature some or all of those "non-novel"
features. But whatever ...
0) [https://latelastnightbooks.com/2016/02/04/first-novel-and-
th...](https://latelastnightbooks.com/2016/02/04/first-novel-and-the-winner-
is/)
------
einpoklum
So, as idoubtit mentions - it's not a lost chapter, it's another copy of the
non-lost chapters.
Anyway, if you want a taste of the "Tale of Genji" \- try here:
[https://www.learner.org/courses/worldlit/the-tale-of-
genji/r...](https://www.learner.org/courses/worldlit/the-tale-of-genji/read/)
------
wazoox
Ah, that's a funny coincidence, I've just read this book last week.
~~~
sramsay
It's been on my list for, well, decades I suppose. But I've always understood
it to be an exceedingly long novel.
I suppose I'm surprised to hear that you read the whole thing in a week?
~~~
wazoox
I was on holidays, so I've read quite a lot. The book is very special; it's
taking place in a very alien world (Japan in the 11th century) and very
poetic.There are lots of characters, which aren't always called by the same
name (they're generally called by their current role in the Imperial palace
administration). Overall it wasn't that tough; and it's much shorter than
"Water Margins" that I've read previously.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves - tartoran
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46604625
======
will_brown
I just told this story on HN, but my car window was smashed on 10/13/18 and
the theives got my wallet and house keys.
They used my credit card at foot locker (~$500), The Store Manager confirmed
two guys made the purchase and corporate said they would turn over the video
if police just ask.
A month later the bank fraud dept informed me someone was trying to cash a
fake check ($1,600) against my account at an ATM using my ID (stolen from the
car) and they ATM video shows the guy and the would turn it over to police if
they requested it.
I even emailed the detective with chain and all he had to do was reply all,
but the detective refuses (“we don’t look into these things”). Meanwhile these
people have my address and key (even though I rekeyed) they may be lurking and
try to come in, and I should be entitled to know what these people look like.
I was attacked on HN for suggesting this but I’ll suggest it again, since the
author of this post already had video of these theives, there needs to be a
platform to post these videos for the public to crowdsource the identity of
these people.
I know there are not police resources to pursue every amazon purchase, but in
my case it was grand theft and it’s ongoing, and likely to escalate, but the
police are unwilling to do anything to help (but be damn sure they’d look into
it if they were the victims).
~~~
iamdave
_there needs to be a platform to post these videos for the public to
crowdsource the identity of these people._
And then what? Will the platform also have a portal that will let people en
masse vex the local PD with messages containing links to the video until the
precinct assigns an officer to the case?
What happens next? Is there going to be a timer or some kind of SLA on the
platform that notifies people in the crowd "Sergeant Jones still hasn't found
the bastard who stole from the Smith family down on the corner"?
Crowdsourcing criminal investigation, even a passive element of it like
identifying mugs from home security footage seems like a rabbit hole I'm not
sure we're prepared to go down (it also scares the bajeezus out of me because
the general population, sorry to say this, aren't the rational actors I want
involved in trying to identify perps so casually through 'platforms').
~~~
will_brown
>What happens next?
Well let me tell you of another event that occurred to me in 08/17.
I was kidnapped at gunpoint from a gas station, forced to drive my attacker
with a gun on my for 30 minutes, eventually after getting off the highway I
jumped out of my own car in gear, escaped and called the police.
First words out of the sergeants mouth responding, “cut the shit what really
happened.” Despite my insistence I’m an officer of the court myself (attorney
at Law) that there will be video from the gas station to prove my version of
events, I was even told, “we aren’t even sure if you own a car and if you are
just calling police for a free ride.”
In that case, in 24 hours I located my car and the gunman and called the
police and had him arrested. That’s not to say I did this voluntarily, luckily
the gunman connected my WiFi only iPad to the internet and I got the location,
of course I called the police first, who told me “they heard about my ‘story’
yesterday, and wouldn’t be going to the address until I drove to the station
and showed them the Apple email”. I did just that and after keeping me in the
parking lot for an hour and laughing at me 2 officers came out to me (this
station was closed on Sunday) and took down the address, drive away and called
my cellphone and told me go home they don’t see my car. Unsatisfied I went to
the address myself, found my car and the gunman, called the police yet again
and they finally came and arrested him.
He bonded out Monday at 8AM. He has since been rearrested, bonded out yet
again, rearrested yet again for violation of his bond vis—Avis his GPS tracker
I insisted on.
His trial is still ongoing. Someone stole my keys and ID, I should be entitled
to know what they look like when 2 videos are available, crimes against me are
ongoing, and the cost of the officers time (since you are so concerned about
their $150/hour rates...which seem entirely made up, no offense) is a 1 minute
reply to an email I forwarded him from foot locker loss prevention.
Edit: I forgot my conclusion, which is, people who engage in these activities
in many cases will even have friends and family who turn them in (i.e. the
unibomber). But even if they don’t a public platform would be very helpful in
deterring these activities, which is the ultimate goal.
~~~
loftyal
Jesus this reads like it's from some super corrupt 3rd country, not the US.
~~~
tokyodude
Get out of your bubble?
I used to think the USA was a "safe" place. Maybe it is compared to Somalia
but it isn't compared to Japan or Singapore. Once I got used to the safety of
these places I never feel safe in the USA anymore.
I used just take it for granted there were bad parts of town and that even in
the good parts of town I should be leery of people, avoid dark alleys etc.
Don't walk alone at night, etc. Then I lived in these other places where that
concept mostly doesn't exist.
As a concrete example it's common sense in the USA if I get a 3rd party car
stereo I should get a removable car stereo and always take it out or hide it.
I had 5 of them stolen and my car once and just took it all as "sucks but
that's that way life is, my fault for forgetting to take the stereo out or not
buying a lojack". But it's not the way life is. It's the way we've let it
become.
There's lots of other examples and AFAIK most of it is cultural. An example,
find a dropped wallet. In USA/Europe a large percentage of people have the
attitude "score for me! found free money!" Not sure if that percentage is 20%
or 80% but in Japan (and I think Singapore) the more common response is "OMG,
someone is really going to be in a tough spot. I'd better try to get this back
to them if possible". In the USA even if people had that attitude they might
rationalize that the police won't care and it might be true the police don't
care which is just another symptom of the same problem.
I have no clues how to spread the nicer culture to the West. It seems the
opposite "me me me" culture is impossible to fight.
PS: these kinds of posts always illicit irrelevant responses of the problems
in Japan and Singapore. I'm not saying Japan and Singapore are perfection. I'm
only pointing out this one area where they do better.
~~~
dang
> Get out of your bubble?
Swipes like that break the HN guidelines. Can you please edit them out of what
you post here? Your comment would be better without that sentence, and maybe
also the patronizing bit at the end ("these kinds of posts always illicit
irrelevant responses").
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
~~~
iamdave
I'm going to disagree with this being a "swipe" because at the root of it is a
critical cautionary tale that I think we should be sharing _more_ of on HN:
What you (the global "you") experience in the world and the results of your
interaction are not a template, and other people's experiences may sometimes
preclude them from truly realizing, appreciating and unpacking why people in
other social groups might see interactions with the constabulary (keeping in
context with this comment thread) or other systems of society a bit
differently.
As a matter of personal perspective, the suggestion to break one's bubble
isn't a swipe, but a request to entertain the thought that one's preconceived
notions about a given affair might change with the knowledge that their
experiences are not universal and exposure to a different angle.
Maybe the curt nature of the suggestion doesn't meet some arbitrary ideal of
discussion, but that doesn't invalidate the root point of the suggestion.
~~~
dang
That all makes sense. I called it a swipe because it was a personal ("your")
pejorative ("bubble"). It's not necessary to do that—posts get better without
it—and it routinely has negative side effects.
~~~
iamdave
_I called it a swipe because it was a personal ( "your") pejorative
("bubble")_
Matter of perspective, no, Dan? Would it have been less of a pejorative to
borrow a phrase from the latest incantation of our discussions of race and
culture in the US to say "check your privilege?"
Granted this isn't the place for a protracted discussion on dialogue here, I
just find the strong reaction to what is a very important clarion call to
evaluate ones own biases and experiences against a spectrum of biases and
experiences shared by every other human being, however curt or brief, taking
it the point of calling it a "pejorative" an interesting reaction-IMO.
------
tivert
If you're concerned about package thieves, just buy an outdoor cabinet and put
it next to your door with a note asking that packages be placed in it. I use
an Ikea Josef:
[https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-
furniture/outdoo...](https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-
furniture/outdoor-organising/josef-cabinet-in-outdoor-dark-grey-art-00168990/)
You don't even need a lock for it. If you can get the deliverymen to
consistently place packages in it, the thieves will have no idea if there's
actually a package at your door to steal or not _without actually attempting a
theft_. For extra deterrence, you can install a motion activated camera next
to it. The idea is to reduce the thieves' expectation of reward while
increasing their expectation of getting caught.
~~~
shaftway
Yeah, we had a package stolen off our porch, so we did that. It's a bench with
a liftable top. The plan was to put a padlock on it. All of our packages are
addressed to:
Shaftway
Place in Bench - Code 1234
24601 Where I Live St.
My City, ST, ZipZipZip
We order a lot of stuff, and probably average 3 deliveries per day. In the
last 3 months we've had exactly one package placed in the bench. And we never
even got around to putting the padlock on it. All a delivery person has to do
is lift the lid. Delivery people don't care. I probably wouldn't either if I
were one. I'm not going to read the boxes I'm delivering for instructions; I'm
just going to leave it on the porch like I do with 99.99% of other boxes.
~~~
lucb1e
> average 3 deliveries per day
Wow. I really wonder what the environmental impact is of just one household
doing this. I think I order something once every.. two months maybe? Three?
And if I could get the desired electronics in a local store, I probably would.
Edit: To reply to the three initial comments at once, I see your point. I was
thinking "but it's not just about the last mile, it's about getting that
package all the way from China or where ever it comes from"... but of course,
if I buy it in a store, it still had to come from china. Someone driving to
your home all day seems terrible at first impression, but even without
grouping the deliveries, I guess it might not be much worse than someone who
gets groceries by car. I'd be interested to hear about research that looked
into the topic.
~~~
bbarn
Compared to someone who leaves their home by car once per day to get routine
items, it's arguably a lot better since that delivery truck makes hundreds of
deliveries per round trip.
Compared to someone who is super frugal, list driven, plans ahead, has one
trip a month to get necessities, and grows their food in their yard, sure,
it's more impactful.
Perspective always matters.
~~~
maccard
>Compared to someone who is super frugal, list driven, plans ahead, has one
trip a month to get necessities, and grows their food in their yard, sure,
it's more impactful.
That's being disingenuous. There are plenty of more moderate options which are
perfectly viable for the vast majority of households, like planning a small
amount know advance and getting essentials twice a week, or integrating it
into other trips (commuting, school runs, coffee runs, walks).
~~~
NullPrefix
>topic being environmental impact
>coffee runs
Can't you just brew coffee yourself if you care about the enviromental impact?
~~~
maccard
Absolutely, but my point was simply that people are already leaving their
houses for necessity/pleasure, and if they need a daily trip to a shop they
should combine their trips, regardless of the reason for said trip
------
rdtsc
This needs careful consideration if you ever decide to do it. Depending on the
local criminal culture they could exact revenge. Then also know where you live
and can do a lot worse things than taking a package. Police might later be
involved but it might not be worth it. You are dealing with people who have no
qualms stealing so it's not too crazy to expect other rash and illegal acts
from them.
I can also see some intrepid crooks suing for glitter damaging their eyesight
permanently or some other bullshit claim. Some attorney or DA might decide to
get free publicity and see if they can swing a "injured by booby trap" case.
~~~
kawfey
I learned from Nextdoor, that a neighbor of mine put cat litter in an amazon
box, and later found out her car's driver side window busted in and the litter
dumped on the seat. I now just have packages sent to lockers and UPS/FedEX
access points, and I know a few who have packages delivered to their office.
The crappy part is that she captured clear detail of both events but police
couldn't be bothered. Nest and Ring have been doing their part to fight back,
allowing people to publicly post and set up neighborhood watches against porch
pirates et al, but there's still a ways to go before security camera footage
can be sent to the PD and automatically identify the offender via facial
analysis.
~~~
DickingAround
That is a real shame. If the police are not going to mediate property disputes
between people, they take a lot of risk those disputes will escalate into
violence. Perhaps really-good passive defense is enough (e.g. package lock
boxes) but I also hope the police understand the deeper reasoning around their
position and role.
~~~
netsharc
Having lived in a "3rd world" country, I know the police there is useless, but
it's interesting how things like resource issues (not enough manpower) is
slowly turning living standards of rich countries like the US and UK towards
"3rd world" levels.
~~~
Jyaif
Robbers and burglers basically have immunity now because the police is busy
with... I'm not sure what.
~~~
roseburg
Most departments are understaffed. Turns out all the negative press against
police is having long term impacts on how many kids want to grow up and become
a police officer.
Also property crimes always take a backseat to more violent crimes.
~~~
omegaham
Also, the background check process is _intense_ , (and deals with the exact
same understaffing problems) and it turns out that most people aren't willing
to wait for nine months to get vetted for an entry-level job.
~~~
kristofferR
It's insane that police officer is an entry level job, no wonder you have so
many issues with the police in the US.
------
Rainymood
I'm honestly really shocked by how casually people seem to steal these
parcels, like what the hell?
~~~
stingraycharles
As a European, I'm surprised that the postal services in the US just leave the
packages outside, rather than ringing the doorbell and/or delivering it to a
neighbor.
Over here in The Netherlands, pickup points are common (my local groceries
store is one), you can choose your delivery time (also in the evening) and
they will deliver it to a neighbor when I'm not home.
Why not avoid this whole problem with any of these options?
~~~
rconti
Nobody's home during the day. What neighbor? How do you know which neighbor
will be home, or which neighbor to trust? When 90% of your package recipients
are not home, you spend 3x as much time per package delivery.
Carriers offload responsibility by allowing the sender or receiver to opt-out
of signature/package acceptance, so why would they care?
Just one data point, but I've been having packages delivered to my home my
entire life and never had a single one go missing. Seems like a really high
cost to prevent something unlikely.
On the other hand, I had never had a home or vehicle broken into until someone
smashed my car window last night at the movie theater. So, there's a first
time for everything.
~~~
Emma_Goldman
This is also the norm in the UK.
If you're not in they try and leave the package with a neighbour. If that
doesn't work, they'll try again, and if you're not there again, try for for a
neighbour again. If that fails for a second time, they leave it at a nearby
depot for you to pick it up.
I've never heard of a package being stolen here in the UK.
~~~
King-Aaron
America: "It's a real problem! There is no solution!"
Overseas viewer: "This literally never happens here. Try solution (a), (b), or
maybe (c) and see if that helps?"
America: "Yep there is no solution in the entire universe"
Substitute "package theft" for: Gun crime / public healthcare / public
education / insert social issue here
~~~
rconti
I agree with all of your points except for the package theft one.
The package theft "solutions" proposed really are insanely inconvenient and
unworkable* in most suburban environments. I've seen all of the reasons listed
many places here, so I won't bother rehashing them. If I'm at work on Tuesday,
for example, a redelivery attempt on Wednesday doesn't really help, does it?
* unworkable in the sense that they're less efficient than the alternative of just allowing the rare package theft to occur
~~~
King-Aaron
My local Caltex/7-11/Fuel Stations all do package holding here in Aus, I
honestly had similar thoughts until they started doing it. In the last 12 - 18
months I'd say I've had completely seamless package delivery because of it.
~~~
rconti
Thinking about it a bit, I bet one reason package holding isn't more popular
in the US is the (very Australia-like) combination of suburbs, and people
driving to work.
Assuming your employer allows it, it's convenient to have packages sent to
work, AND if you drove a personal car to work, it's easy to drive your own
package home. This equation gets flipped if you use transit or live in a
multi-unit building where it might get easier to just hold it "downstairs".
------
fcbrooklyn
The video is well worth your time. The device works very well, and the fart
spray has a purpose, in that it encourages the thief to ditch the package as
soon as possible, enabling him to recover and reload it.
~~~
dgritsko
Presumably the last thief never disposed of the package and was therefore the
only one to discover the cameras. I wonder what they were thinking, and if
they'll come across the video. Wouldn't be surprised if so, it was on the
front page of Reddit yesterday.
------
ragebol
In the Netherlands, when I order a package and no one's at home when it's
delivered, it either gets delivered to my neighbors or to the post office,
with a note of where to pick it up. It's never left at my door AFAIK.
How is this not an option in the US?
~~~
mcphage
Generally because people don't want it. Shipping used to be a lot stricter
about signatures, etc, but people usually aren't home when the packages get
delivered, and package theft isn't a significant enough problem to make the
extra security worth the inconvenience.
~~~
chrisseaton
> package theft isn't a significant enough problem
This guy had his package stolen many times in a short space of time. Seems
like the problem is pretty bad?
~~~
dec0dedab0de
The United States is big, with many different areas that have different levels
of crime. Sometimes with affluent areas in walking distance of destitute
areas, which is a whole other problem. One location being robbed repeatedly is
not surprising, and not significant. If it were, Amazon would be requiring
signatures instead of just sending you another one when something goes
missing.
~~~
derefr
Amazon requiring signatures wouldn’t much help in _preventing_ the problem.
They’d just get a signature from the thief “just returning home” in the front
yard, find out later that it wasn’t a match, and then... nothing, really.
They’d know the buyer wasn’t liable, I guess? Doesn’t do anything for them,
loss-prevention-wise; they still owe the buyer the thing they ordered.
What Amazon _is_ doing is much more clever: whenever possible, they’re now
recording the serial number of the product they ship to you. This way, if the
police find it when busting a fence, they can (hopefully) get the fence’s
providers out of them and then actually bust _them_ , too (because now they
have real physical evidence—along with testimony—that that particular person
stole a particular thing.)
------
slig
Direct link: [https://youtu.be/xoxhDk-hwuo](https://youtu.be/xoxhDk-hwuo)
------
binarymax
I've had fantasies of much worse punishments for package thieves, like a paint
gun sentinel. I'd buy this if he'd manufacture it.
~~~
onemoresoop
While all we can do to revenge is sometimes a fantasy, I'd say be rational
when you turn your fantasies to reality, you might end up paying the
hospitalization for the package thieves.
~~~
b_tterc_p
Sounds like you hypothetically need something which is inherently dangerous
(scorpions) but not purposefully dangerous to the person who opens it (drone
scheduled to attack package owner).
As an aside, I don’t know if it legal to ship scorpions.
~~~
modeless
> I don’t know if it legal to ship scorpions
That's easy, simply refer to Exhibit 526.5: Restrictions on Mailing Live
Scorpions
[https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm#ep203359](https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm#ep203359)
~~~
b_tterc_p
How wonderful, yet disappointingly sufficient. Coincidentally, as suggested in
the rules, writing “Live scorpions” will probably deter people anyway.
------
klausjensen
I really enjoyed the this. The insane over-engineering, the well thought out
details (like the 30sec fart-spray to get them to ditch the package,
maximising chances of recovery), the harmless-ness of it. Loved it! :D
------
TheLoneAdmin
Hmm, I'd be worried about retribution. Spread glitter in someone's car, they
might come back and torch your house. Assuming they can remember where they
grabbed the package from.
~~~
slig
I'd be worried as well. Even if the criminals didn't remember where they got
the package, now the video is going viral and it looks like the shows his home
address on a map.
Edit: as someone pointed out it's not his address. I just re-watched the video
and it's written on the map that it's not actually his house address.
~~~
themoat
I cannot believe I know this...but the location on the map is actually the
McCallister's house from Home Alone, in Illinois, Mark lives in California.
I looked it up a few months ago...and I recognized the google map as soon as
it popped up on the video.
[https://goo.gl/maps/1sytkJCxFqn](https://goo.gl/maps/1sytkJCxFqn)
~~~
duiker101
He mentions that he used that address on the package too.
~~~
lawlessone
This was very well thought out.
------
DeepWorker
I'm from India and packages there are always delivered in person. The delivery
person knocks your door and if you're not there, the package is either
delivered to your neighbor or another delivery is attempted. Why is this
practice not prevalent in the USA?
------
cosmotron
What are people's thoughts on if this is staged?
Considering the views / subscriptions are the main motivation here, it might
justify the expenses poured into this project – that is, it would be quite a
waste if all that effort went into the build just to have no one actually take
it off the porch.
If actors were used, it would explain the lack of police involvement (it's
easy to say, "police weren't interested" ).
An obvious consequence of it being a production without disclosure is the
copycats that this will spawn.
Edit: just to add a bit more food-for-thought in response to comments such as,
"why do that to your own car?" or "why get sprayed with fart spray": what
makes you believe it's their own car (could be a beater picked up for a few
hundred dollars) or that the fart spray actually smells?
~~~
kaivi
I've had the same thought when I first saw it. Some suspicious things: thieves
talking to themselves, that lady throwing the box into her own garbage bin,
zero attempt at disassembly or closer inspection of the box, no police
involved.
Also GPS is just not that good for locating anything of that size in given
circumstances, and it would not have worked in the parking garage.
Too many things could have gone wrong here, but they did not. The design is
subpar in my opinion, for somebody who worked on a Mars rover. Custom printed
board plus a bunch of smartphones, seriously?
~~~
aqme28
>Too many things could have gone wrong here, but they did not. The design is
subpar in my opinion, for somebody who worked on a Mars rover. Custom printed
board plus a bunch of smartphones, seriously?
What would you propose? The best design is often the easiest/cheapest one, and
this looks like pretty simple.
~~~
AstralStorm
Those are very much not cheapest unless he had them lying around.
There are ready made cheap boards with identical functionality to a cellphone,
few dollars a pop. And yes, they run Android.
That said, this way he can claim it had something valuable inside in case it
is still taken.
~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
What hardware hacker doesn't? I have at least 2 Android phones and one Windows
phone lying around my house in various states of functionality. Hell, I've got
$200 Peltier coolers and $400 peristaltic pumps in boxes somewhere sitting
unused.
I don't even know what this Mark person did, but going by comments here, if I
wanted to build something similar, the only thing I'd have to go out and buy
would be the glitter stuff.
Don't discount the stuff us weirdos have in our basements :-)
~~~
ryanmercer
>I don't even know what this Mark person did, but going by comments here,
Oh man, watch the video on his YouTube. It's pure comedic gold.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-
hwuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo)
------
MrBuddyCasino
Anyone else found it unsatisfactory that there was nothing about forwarding
the footage of the thieves to the police?
~~~
empath75
It's in the first minute of the video. The police don't care.
~~~
Someone1234
Given the police's complete inaction vigilantism was inevitable.
I wonder if an industry of decoy packages will spring up, maybe "sticky" or
"smelly" glitter. Or heck just go full ink bomb.
I wonder where the law stands on this? Can you really be liable if someone
steals your property then causes property damage using it?
~~~
matt4077
The law says booby-traps are illegal. Depending on the damage/injury you
cause, you will be prosecuted. Two wrongs etc etc
~~~
TheLoneAdmin
Booby-trap is usually defined as "to cause bodily injury when triggered".
Spreading glitter in someone's car isn't causing bodily injury. However, if
the glitter caused someone to choke and die, or blinded an eye, then a crime
would be committed.
------
anonu
This is an an awesome project... the kinda stuff I wish I had more time to
hack away at...
In the video he mentions his automatic bullseye dartboard project... even more
impressive than this glitter machine IMHO:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTizZ_XcUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTizZ_XcUM)
Calculating a projectile's trajectory in realtime.... wouldn't even know where
to start.
EDIT: dartboard code from that youtube link:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/rlmhdjoqzyumme1/darts.zip?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/rlmhdjoqzyumme1/darts.zip?dl=0)
~~~
breck
Is there a GitHub link?
------
criddell
Do you think the bomb maker could be held liable if the package were to be
opened in a moving car that subsequently crashed because of glitter getting in
the driver's eyes? I'd be a little nervous about doing this myself.
~~~
PakG1
IANAL, but is that seriously a legal risk? The guy would have to explain he
stole it.
~~~
jayess
Here in the USA, everyone is litigation crazy, so an enterprising lawyer would
probably happily file a suit against the maker if someone was injured because
of it.
~~~
duiker101
What if I just buy something very stupid that could scare someone but I
actually wanted it for myself? Or what if I actually bought the same device in
the video but I wanted it for some other use or for checking out how it's
made?
~~~
criddell
Intent matters. If you have a baseball bat in your car along with your glove
and cleats, you have a piece of sports equipment. If you step out of your car
with the bat and smash a car that cut you off in traffic, it's a weapon.
~~~
jwdunne
In the UK, if the police find a bat without a ball or some kind of proof it's
for sports, they can consider it an offensive weapon.
------
ljm
I appreciate this is HN so the main thread of conversation is going to
naturally tend towards security and tech. How to protect your stuff with
cameras and GPS trackers and what not.
Is such blatant parcel theft not indiciative of a greater societal illness?
Not simply poverty and drug abuse.
I find myself trying to imagine why I’d drive through suburbs with a partner
in crime and nab the odd parcel from a porch along the way. I could be looking
to fence something to pay for the next high, or I could be poor as hell and
looking to make ends meet. Or, maybe I might just think that the person I’m
stealing from is wealthy enough to deal without it and I simply need whatever
it is more than they do?
I wonder, because there’s a lot you can assume about someone living in a
pleasant suburb, ordering lots of Amazon packages. The likely colour of their
skin, their money, maybe even their politics. And we like to use attributes
like those to decide whether or not someone deserves something.
I’ve no idea, but I find it really difficult to explore this without trying to
understand why it happens.
~~~
pixl97
> not indiciative of a greater societal illness?
Pretty much been a thing since people have large enough societal groups
(larger than Dunbar's number), that some anonymity is allowed. We just get to
share these events via our high tech electronic networks and everyone gets to
see it.
------
Ajedi32
I'm really surprised at how many times he was able to recover and reuse that
device before it was lost for good.
It seems like during the last clip the stink spray failed to activate for some
reason?
~~~
aiven
Yeah, spray failed and because of this last guy kept the package. Probably
this is why it was the last video.
------
everyone
What I found interesting was that none of the people looked poor. Many of them
had cars, they seemed to have nice houses, they were all well dressed.
I reckon they are just average victims of 'asperational' media and general
consumerism and materialism, that is quite rampant in modern society. I reckon
they just want the latest gadget, or intend to sell it in order to get another
useless status symbol of some kind.
------
H1Supreme
I watched this video earlier today, and I've seen other videos where people's
packages are stolen off their front porch. One was a super busy street where
the porch was at street level and totally open for all to see. My first
thought is: Why are you getting packages delivered to your house if this is an
issue?
I live in a rural'ish area on a very low traffic street. I still get all my
packages delivered to work. All the offices I've worked in have never had a
problem with me doing this. My current office is a secure building with a
metal detector and armed security. No issues.
If someone's on the road, or out of the office constantly, then have the
package held at a UPS or Fedex store. Once UPS, Fedex, or USPS drop that
package off on your porch, it's your responsibility.
------
kwhitefoot
Why not use the sort of dye that banks use to protect ATMs?
~~~
mankyd
Fart spray and glitter are temporary and relatively harmless. Permanent dye in
someone's home are car is just being a jerk.
~~~
auiya
We sure wouldn't want to upset people stealing our belongings.
~~~
mankyd
I won't deny the criminality. I'm still not going to cause them thousands of
dollars in damage over it.
~~~
AstralStorm
Use UV active dye (usually transparent otherwise) so they get shiny. Say, a
package gets wet itself.
------
xenadu02
I recommend package drop boxes if package theft is a problem for you:
[https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17572893011](https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17572893011)
~~~
progval
Ironically, one of them has "assorted glitter colors"
------
ChuckMcM
Nice, I posted a link to the video yesterday
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704553))
I really like the reactions of all the folks who picked up the package. The
'fart spray' was a really nice touch. I was also thinking that if you could
aerosolize some cyanoacrylate when throwing that glitter bomb, it could make
for some good times. But there is a line you don't want to cross or you'll get
people into revenge mode. Glitter and farts seems pretty harmless.
------
irrational
In our area it was an Amazon driver who was stealing packages. He would
deliver his assigned packages, but then take any packages that were already
left on the porch from previous deliveries.
------
coryfklein
Wow the video codec just doesn't know what to do with that much glitter, does
it.
------
chrisseaton
I don't understand why the delivery people just leave packages on porches? Why
not leave somewhere safe and out of view? Or leave it with a neighbour?
~~~
astrodust
As a random delivery person do you know the neighbor's relationship?
If you know both parties personally maybe you can, but that's a rarity these
days for anyone outside of certain companies. Amazon's ad-hoc delivery service
never sends the same person twice.
------
emanuensis
For package thieves most of the problem, at least for those at home most of
the time, like me, is simply have the delivery man RING THE BELL. Why this is
not common practice for all deliverers, UPS/FEDEX/AZ etc. is beyond me. If the
delivery man is already at the front porch all he has to do is reach for the
bell.
------
linsomniac
This video has a couple scenes of people opening the package in what looks
like their own house. Like the guy vacuuming up all the glitter after the
fact, or the woman tossing the package in her trash can. Sure with Mark Rober
had given some details about what the police did in that case.
------
modzu
it's surprising and sad how 'average' the thieves all seem to be; i expected
to see somebody down on their luck, not a guy in a lexus or with a $2000 bike
in his room. im trying not to jump to conclusions about humanity. please help.
~~~
astrodust
Imagine how much money you could make hawking shit you stole on eBay and how
little income tax you'd pay on it.
Until you get caught.
Leasing a car isn't beyond the reach of petty criminals.
~~~
greedo
Ebay will report your sales if you reach a certain threshold.
------
gkfasdfasdf
Tangent, but my son and I used Mark's video on building a pinewood derby car.
He gives a list of 7-8 things to do to your car in order of effectiveness. A
theme in his video is that the car doesn't have to look fancy to be fast. We
implemented most of his recommendations and didn't have time to paint or
decorate the car. We ended up winning and we were the most unadorned car in
the pack.
TLDR: Mark is legit.
~~~
cwkoss
I built an aluminum forge and made some castings following one of his videos.
Only about ~$50 worth of parts needed (and $100+ in safety equipment to be
safe)
------
jakobegger
It's amazing how many people just use their cars to steal packages. If the
camera angle was slightly different, it should be trivial to track them down
(license plate).
I wish police would track down thieves more effectively...
------
techaddict009
Parcel picking seems a huge problem in USA.
I am from India. I didnt know about this untill recent. I gifted Kindle fire
stick to one friend in USA. They package was delivered and had note "Placed on
Back Porch". I didnt notice that properly and then found it was picked up :P
My friend didnt get it.
Thanks to amazon who bared the loss and recent one more again.
Hope govt. comes with some strict laws to fix this before it turns to huge.
------
tripzilch
The fart spray was the most brilliant part of the contraption, imho. If you
look at the video, you can see he pulled the trick numerous times with the
same (costly) device, mainly because the thieves were disgusted by the smell
and threw it out before they discovered there were four phones in the package.
------
apexalpha
I'm just amazed they leave packages outside your door for everyone to see and
grab.
Why don't they at least try the neighbours?
------
mirimir
Yes, he did a great job on design and construction.
But I wonder if sought legal advice before implementing. Because, as others
have noted, I gather that booby traps are illegal in the US. Maybe this one is
benign enough, but I rather doubt it.
Also, while it's true that thieves aren't so likely to press claims, what
about parents of juvenile thieves?
~~~
owenversteeg
I believe (someone more knowledgeable feel free to correct me) that booby
traps are only illegal when they hurt/damage people.
------
akeck
Stories like this, and other logistical issues I've personally faced (e.g.,
counterfeits), have pushed me back to shopping brick-and-mortar for certain
things. Yes, I have physically to go to a place to shop, but for some
expensive/desirable items, it's more discreet and simpler.
------
dplgk
I wonder how much time it took to get all these thieves? We get less people
stealing our packages in NYC.
------
linsomniac
All of the videos this guy, Mark Rober, does are worth watching.
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg)
------
WillPostForFood
Does this video seem fake/staged to anyone else? Particularly the reaction of
the thief, but also that they left the phones behind, the unlikely GPS signal
in the garage, he fearless approach to the crime scene. Nothing felt right.
~~~
loser777
It's definitely a possibility but:
\+ I think it's hard to guess what the reaction of a thief will be
\+ The only indication that there were phones inside appeared to be the tiny
holes for the cameras
\+ It appears he had a trace of GPS signals over time so that he would be able
to deduce it ended up in garage if it stopped transmitting there
I would say the "fearless approach to the crime scene" is probably the most
suspect bit.
------
irrational
It is interesting to note the various demographics: black/white, male/female,
older/younger, etc. There doesn't seem to be any pattern (other than being
unethical jerks) as to who steals packages.
------
poundtown
take one phone and repackage it in its old box. turn it on and throw it into a
amazon box and wait. once you have their address you can slowly exact revenge
via subtle methods that dont expose you. this glitter method would be like
kicking a shark in my neighborhood. made a good vid tho i really enjoyed
watching it. esp the fart spray parts.
------
dylan604
“Glitter: the herpes of all craft supplies. You can never get rid of it.” I
wish I was clever enough to have come up with that.
------
ttty2
What if somebody was driving and while it opens he has an accident and is dead
and/or kills somebody? What would happen?
~~~
craftyguy
Driving a car while opening a package is not exactly a safe activity to do in
the first place, regardless of what is in the package.
------
cabaalis
It'd the United States. Thief will sue for damages glitter bomb caused his
lungs, and win.
------
JCharante
So I guess parcel thieves should remember to open all their packages in a
faraday cage nowadays?
~~~
martin-adams
You'd need a portable faraday cage right. Otherwise you'd be tracked right to
it.
------
SCAQTony
Is this even legal or safe to have a glitter "bomb," or more accurately, a
spinning motor spraying glue if an accomplice opens the package within a
moving car? How about just a GPS signal to notify cops. The glitter stuff and
chemical spray is probably a civil liability as well.
~~~
myrryr
> How about just a GPS signal to notify cops.
Which would work if the cops cared about it at all... Which leads to the
glitter bomb being created....
~~~
SCAQTony
My understanding is that the police do care and Amazon is working with them...
and they are not using glitter or chemical scents like you advocate:
New York Times: [https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/12/11/us/ap-us-
porch-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/12/11/us/ap-us-porch-thefts-
sting.html)
CBS: [https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/police-
department...](https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/police-department-
teams-up-with-amazon-to-catch-porch-pirates-1396450883965)
~~~
seattle_spring
> My understanding is that the police do care
Oh you sweet, summer child.
------
jacquesm
PSA: do not piss off engineers with too much time on their hands.
------
amai
Why is not an option in the US to get your parcels delivered to your
workplace? This is quite common practice in Germany.
~~~
wuunderbar
People do it all the time; many US office workplaces are okay with it.
However, not everyone has an office situation like that nor should we need to
live in fear of getting items delivered to our home.
------
dmarlow
Why glitter though? I'd choose something that is far more difficult to remove;
like ink, motor oil, etc.
~~~
floatingatoll
He's using glitter that's as fine as sand. It coats every available surface
and sinks into the pores of all soft materials (such as leather car seats).
------
brightball
Do not mess with engineers
------
empath75
i dunno, 4 free iphones is probably worth dealing with glitter and fart spray
for a few minutes?
~~~
teraflop
Watch the video. The phones are hidden, and the fart spray is designed to make
the thief get rid of the package as quickly as possible rather than taking it
apart to see what might be inside.
~~~
mcv
Even so, wouldn't it be better to use 4 cheap cameras instead of 4 expensive
smartphones?
~~~
bsamuels
4 cheap cameras wont have lte radios
seriously, pick up x4 $30 prepaid phones from walmart and they'll do the job
perfectly
------
0898
I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but glitter is a microplastic – I
hope we'll see it being used less in the future.
~~~
mcv
I want to upvote you for your concern about microplastics, but my rule is to
downvote people who complain about voting.
~~~
MrStonedOne
I have the same rule.
It sounds so whiny when they start their message decrying that they'll get
downvotes for something.
Its even worse when its not something they will get downvotes for.
That's when you realize that they probably get downvoted a lot because of how
whiny they are, only they always blame it on some other aspect because they
have no self awareness.
------
bookofjoe
Related: [https://www.foxnews.com/politics/viral-video-shows-man-
getti...](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/viral-video-shows-man-getting-
shocked-trying-to-steal-electrified-trump-yard-sign)
[https://www.foxnews.com/politics/viral-video-shows-man-
getti...](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/viral-video-shows-man-getting-
shocked-trying-to-steal-electrified-trump-yard-sign)
------
djhworld
I'm not sure what this proves other than being a honey trap and good YouTube
clickbait.
This has been done on YouTube before with people setting up unlocked bicycles
attached to some strong difficult to see rope bolted to a nearby structure
(e.g. fishing wire), waiting for someone to come and take it, and then laugh
when the thief goes flying over the handlebars as they ride off
It's justice porn, but at the same time it makes me feel uncomfortable
watching.
------
mikece
Nice work, but I think I am not alone in hoping we get to see photos of the
skunk-glittered thieves soon!
Oh -- and to the engineer who made that: you've got a billion dollar idea on
your hands if you include a camera that takes video from inside the device
when it's opened. I can think of at least 14 people to whom I would send one
of these for Christmas, birthday, etc.
~~~
woofcat
It was made by Mark Rober a former engineer at JPL who worked on the Mars
Rover projects.
------
decebalus1
I don't know what to think about this. It feels staged. I know, I know, the
guy is legit, etc.. but I guess the internet made me a skeptic. People go to
great lengths for making things viral. I remember various Reddit legit 'Gods
of science', very popular IRL which were banned for having bot accounts
upvoting their contributions so I trust nobody.
And if it's not staged, I see this as an open invite for vandalism, or worse.
Those people were pissed and unscrupulous. What's stopping them from coming
back and throwing a Molotov cocktail at your house or slashing your tires if
you park on the street? First thing I thought about when seeing this video
was:"THE GUY KNOWS WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE".
Just ask a cop if he/she thinks this is a good idea. What was initially a
crime of opportunity can now escalate to something much worse.
Also, what if the thief opens the package when driving and hits someone? I
could easily see a lawyer or an ambitious DA going after the guy for booby
trapping a package.
Bad idea all around.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
They didn’t buy the DLC: feature that could’ve prevented 737 crashes was option - em3rgent0rdr
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/boeing-sold-safety-feature-that-could-have-prevented-737-max-crashes-as-an-option/
======
cmurf
If you're not trained on the MCAS feature, an "AOA disagree" indicator is
going to tell you what? That stall warning may not work reliably?
There's more going on here than just MCAS and angle of attack sensors though.
From the KNKT preliminary report:
_At 23:31:09 UTC, the LNI610 PIC advised the ARR controller that the altitude
of the aircraft could not be determined due to all aircraft instruments
indicating different altitudes._
Crash happens 45s later. (More correctly, the FDR stops recording.)
From the same report, four separate maintenance records containing one or more
defects in: indicated airspeed, indicated altitude, speed trim fail, mach trim
fail. These were reported by multiple crew, repaired by maintenance per
manufacturer procedure, and tested, and error state cleared.
The stick shaker was active for all of Lion Air 34 and most of 610. That is
not an airworthy aircraft, and the preliminary report states this.
Obviously something does not pass the smell test. Either there's a very
serious problem with the prescribed repair and verification procedure. Or
there's a very serious crime if the claimed repairs and/or verification are
inauthentic. Both seem incredible to me.
Common to airspeed and altimeter is the static system.
But as a pilot what really gets my attention, and not in a good way, is that
apparently automation is confused, detecting multiple current sensor
disagreements and flags, and yet it's still taking action.
~~~
olliej
Right? Especially given (per media so grain of salt maybe?) the Mcas system
was essentially engaged by a single sensor - implying a single sensor capable
of overriding all other systems, even the ones with actual redundancy.
I still don’t understand why altitude wasn’t considered - surely stalling
speed close to the ground would result in less damage than pitching towards
the ground an accelerating?
And how much can those sensors possibly cost anyway? (Real question - I have
no sense if we’re talking a few dollars, a few thousand, few million, or what)
------
cjbprime
This seems grossly overstated to me.
The optional warning they're talking about is just a light in a random section
of the cockpit called "AOA disagree". That's it. It can't help the Lion Air
crew, because the world wasn't aware that AoA was hooked up to a control
surface through a new system called MCAS. And it's not in the central EICAS
error display, so it's not where the pilots are _supposed_ to be looking for
information to help them diagnose an emergency. And it doesn't explain
anything about why it might be _super bad_ that there's an AoA disagreement.
So even if you know that MCAS exists and could malfunction, you'd have to also
know that it uses AoA internally. Basically, the light only helps you if you
already know both what MCAS is and how it works, and at that point you
probably weren't going to be crashing anyway?
The correct information in the cockpit to use to help with the problem is what
the Lion Air crew did the day before the crash: get a stall warning, see and
hear that the trim wheels keep moving, notice that the yoke feels heavy, and
move to the memory item for runaway trim.
~~~
olliej
I mean the real story should be “how much did a single light to say the flight
computer was deliberately fighting you cost?”
It’s an optional extra so I suspect that one led was being charged at an
absurd rate, because it was actually necessary.
The flight crew the day before had to hunt through manuals as well, and I
haven’t seen any indication anywhere that suggested that the problem persisted
for that entire flight - which could easily be the case if you tie a pilot
overriding flight control system to a single sensor. Further I’d question a
flight control system that pushes the nose down apparently without considering
altitude
~~~
cjbprime
Hey, I don't mean to pick on you, and I'm not a pilot, but everything in this
comment seems incorrect in one way or another:
> It’s an optional extra so I suspect that one led was being charged at an
> absurd rate
The optional extra is actually an AoA visual display, and the light just comes
along for the ride with the display. It's letting you know that you can't rely
on the AoA display. It's not trying to communicate danger or emergency. That's
not its job. There's already a system called EICAS for the plane to
communicate urgent errors to the pilots, and that's where pilots look.
> because it was actually necessary
It really really wasn't. That light should not be used by pilots to diagnose
anything. We don't want pilots to have to know _how_ the airplane's internal
systems were built. The MCAS system ultimately performs trim operations. We
want pilots to notice trim aberrations, which have many possible causes
(including purely mechanical ones!), and know how to disable the trim motor if
the automatic trim is malfunctioning. If they can do that, they can solve many
more problems than just MCAS. And if they can't do that, their plane will
nosedive from many more causes than just MCAS.
> I haven’t seen any indication anywhere that suggested that the problem
> persisted for that entire flight
As I understand it, it didn't persist on the flight the day before because the
third pilot correctly noticed that the trim was misbehaving and performed the
STAB TRIM CUTOUT that disables the motor, as trained. If the motor hadn't been
disabled, MCAS would have continued to use it to mistrim.
> I’d question a flight control system that pushes the nose down apparently
> without considering altitude
Why? Wing stalls are _the most common_ cause of aviation fatalities. They
usually happen during takeoff or landing, at less than 1000ft. If they
happened at altitude they wouldn't be fatal because you have time to recover
from them.
If one is building a system to try to prevent wing stalls -- and one should
because it's the lowest hanging fruit for reducing the fatality rate of
aviation -- that system should absolutely operate at low altitudes when you're
in the critical period of a stall being effectively unrecoverable once a spin
starts, because it takes a minimum of hundreds of feet to recover. That's the
time when the system matters most.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Mixpanel Introduces Query-Time Sampling - vijayjayaram
https://mixpanel.com/blog/2019/06/01/query-time-sampling
======
trefn
(founder of mixpanel here)
I'm really excited about this release - sampling has been necessary to support
some of our largest customers for many years, but has a bunch of issues, as
Vijay points out in this post.
I love the fact that moving sampling to query time lets us beat the tradeoff -
we get something like 90% of the speedup of ingestion time sampling with none
of the downsides, and the only incremental cost is storage which is cheap.
It's a big win.
------
throwaway808080
For an analytics engine, this seems impressive. I wonder how it compares to
memsql’s speed of querying.
Also Mixpanel’s pricing page seems to employ some dark patterns. How much does
it really cost? So complicated.
Why not simply charge based on data and compute used. like GCP, AWS, & Azure
billing?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do the Hong Kong demonstrators communicate? - baalimago
China surveils. A lot. And the amount of investments they have in this area is quite immense, I imagine.<p>So this made me wonder: how are the Hong Kong demonstrators circumventing whatever decryption technologies China has? Do anyone know? Using 'standard methods' surely can't be enough for them to stay anonymous.<p>The Catalonian independence vote led to some really interesting solutions, this is similar.
======
mtmail
> The Catalonian independence vote led to some really interesting solutions
Do you have details on those?
~~~
baalimago
Mainly thinking about this: [http://la3.org/~kilburn/blog/catalan-government-
bypass-ipfs/](http://la3.org/~kilburn/blog/catalan-government-bypass-ipfs/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Datapocalypso (RE: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse) - sjs382
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1649
======
wmf
The good part is at the very end where he actually proposes some kind of
solution.
------
Jebdm
I'm still not solid on what I think about private companies having the
responsibility to provide your data for you if they're closing down, but his
bit at the end about the archive team seems... well, brilliant. Hell, it could
even be a paid service. Monitor the web for companies shutting down and
download away. Of course, that's assuming that the data's not protected behind
some sort of wall (if Facebook was closing, or something like that); in that
case, contact the company and try and make a deal. You could get them to
simply give you all the data, or (in case of privacy concerns, etc.) offer the
closing company a solution where they commit to letting users get at their
data for 90 days (or some similar number) and after that, you put up a page
where people can pay to access the original site, or at least some sort of
download page.
Of course, people could just back up, but some stuff is just hard to do that
with, especially on the web.
------
Locke
On the other hand, perhaps it's good to allow data to be lost occasionally...
I've lost old emails, source code, and other documents that I _thought_ were
really important (to me at least). Turns out I was wrong, I don't miss any of
it.
It's a shame when people lose stuff for reasons other than neglect, but it
happens. Start over or work on something new (and treat it like an
opportunity, not a chore).
~~~
ajkirwin
There's no reason to lose data. Space is cheap.
~~~
Locke
It depends on how you define "lose". To keep all your data for a _long_ time
takes effort. Storage formats change. Disks die. Hosted storage bills need to
be paid, billing needs to be updated (credit cards expire), etc.
You really need more than one copy in more than one place if you want to be
really confident that your data won't be lost.
Is all your data worth the effort? Is it healthy to try to hang on to
everything?
~~~
ajkirwin
When I could simply offload to a drive and then throw that dive into storage?
Sure it is.
------
sjs382
Cross-posting:
Of relevance, Pownce had a similar shutdown recently. Pownce was bought and
users were given 2 weeks to export their data before the service was shutdown
and the data gone forever.
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/01/pownce-deadpooled-
team-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/01/pownce-deadpooled-team-moves-
to-six-apart/)
------
sutro
So losing the data you enter into some lame AOL web service because you forget
to check your email for a few weeks qualifies as an _apocalypse_? After
watching fat insane Brando in Apocalypse Now and buff ass-kicking Aaanold in
the Terminator flicks, this "coming datapocalypse" doesn't seem very scary.
~~~
undertoad
Dohn't you unduhsstahnd? Ohl ur daytuh veel bee losst!
<http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,317553,00.html>
------
gommm
The biggest problem I have with websites like hometown that shut down with
insuficiant notice is that burned users are less likely to trust new
websites... And as a webapplication developper I care about having users trust
me with their contents....
------
ajkirwin
I fully support this idea and infact, I am already wondering how you'd go
about implementing it.
I've been bitten by this before and didn't have sufficient backups.
~~~
sjs382
Well projects like dataportability.org are a step in the right direction
(making the export of data easier), but then there's the issue of how much
notice (if any at all) is given when a site is closing.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How To Write Unmaintainable Code - bpierre
http://thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html
======
btown
There's one line that says:
"Optimise" JavaScript code taking advantage of the fact a function can access
all local variables in the scope of the caller.
Is there a good explanation of how/why this is bad/unmaintainable practice? To
me, it seems _more_ maintainable than making an external function that
requires you to pass the caller scope manually... and wouldn't a good engine
make those kinds of optimizations?
~~~
esrauch
This is a very old text, and I believe he is not referring to function
closures (as I assume that you assume) but crazy shit like the long-since-
deprecated-but-still-works arguments.callee.caller.arguments
For example:
function test() { console.log(arguments.callee.caller.arguments); }
function test2(a, b) { test(); }
test2('x', 2);
Will print ['x', 2]. That is horrid; it makes it so you need to know the
calling context to determine the behavior (and it could be globally anywhere;
in a completely different .js file or even dynamically generated). With a
closure the context of a function can generally be determined by simple static
code inspection.
~~~
matthewowen
It's also deprecated in ECMAScript 5 strict mode.
------
keefe
this is actually quite a well written and amusing exploration of antipatterns
that are used or arise organically, especially in design-by-committee or
firefighting shops.
I'd say finding this article hilarious would correlate well with professional
coding experience :] and also I honestly had to laugh at myself a few times
reading it, clearly laid out these ideas are obvious but they can be sneaky
sneaky
~~~
rauar
Agree. However this article makes me dead angry because of dozens of self-
called overcoders who would love to (or do) believe this is how it should be
in reality. ... Aaaargghh.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Town dusts off typewriters after cyber-attack - dberhane
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45032132
======
dev_dull
This is exactly why I'm a huge fan of burdensome, difficult, snowflakey voting
systems. Every state should be different. It should take many people to count
the ballots. It should be _hard_.
Just like a natural organism, mono-cultures collapse because they are
vulnerable. Voting should be a distributed system.
~~~
mr_overalls
> snowflakey
I'm not sure if you're making a subtle political point here, or if there is a
use of "snowflakey" that I'm not aware of.
~~~
erk__
I guess it is used as a synonym of unique here.
~~~
dev_dull
Yes unique. Is that not what the word means anymore?
~~~
mr_overalls
I was thinking of how Trump supporters call liberals "snowflakes," but the
meaning didn't seem to fit here. Thanks for the clarification!
------
SparkleBunny
Their "backups" were both online and on the same network. Lol. There's a
reason tapes still exist.
~~~
justsomedude43
Not tapes, but sane sys admins. Whoever leaves backups on the same subnet as
the production servers, probably with the same credentials too, is NOT sane
and should not be working in IT.
------
closeparen
Are Windows desktops still running vulnerability-riddled network services?
(For what?) Otherwise, how does something like this affect an entire
organization at once?
------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Not a cyber attack, but a cyber “oopsie.”
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Economic deja vu hitting tech startups - gibsonf1
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/BUU610261L.DTL
======
pxlpshr
Web 2.0 is becoming convoluted with me-too-variants, it's the same thing that
happened toward the end of 1.0. Early-adopters and technocrats see past the
distortion, but your mass-consumer does not. Growth for middle-to-late comers
does not match that of the early 2.0ers for which they've structured their
model around...
In many cases, these socially focused applications/sites are caught in a
whirl-pool... interest trickles-in and trickles-out, making it difficult to
self-sustain the business, particularly when it relies on the end-user for
content. While Twitter is doing well now, I believe they suffered a full year
paddling against this traffic current.
In addition, I feel there are too many startups trying to encompass
everything-social shooting for that big valuation; focus on low-commitment
reward for the end user and get the data later. Rolling out with with a stage
set for 10,000,000 makes adoption intimidating, and makes your infrastructure
costs a significant burden.
3.0 will see an increase in service-oriented applications and hopefully a rise
in XMPP whereby data of interest comes to you, you don't go to it... With all
the major communication networks moving over to Jabber, it's shaping to be the
next secondary telecom-market. I believe Facebook is poised early to make a
move here, as they are mirroring GTalks success integrating with GMail. The
beauty of Jabber is that it's essentially universal and real-time, so services
can be network-agnostic (ie: AIM, MSN, Gtalk, etc..). Think communication-bot
on steroids.
A tech recession is normal and welcoming TBH. It filters out some of the
pollution and with a globalized market, there's an abundance of it..
------
sharpshoot
This is over analysis to the point of paranoia. I've written about the
counterview here: <http://blog.snaptalent.com/?p=9>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Best way to legally project myself from my current company? - lpsoft
I have been working on a website in my own time for around about 5 years whilst working full time for my current employer. The website may be of modest financial value now, I currently don't charge for the website but am considering doing so in the near future. Speaking to a friend yesterday he was concerned that my current employer could have a claim on my website as my contract specifies that any ideas I come up with whilst employed belong to the company.<p>I was wondering if there is a way I can create a company so that I can protect myself. For example does creating the company in my wife's name help? I'm sure a significant number of web companies start out as hobbies whilst working for a full time employee so I am hoping there are so things I can do to help make sure I create a company on a sound legal footing.<p>Just to add...the website has nothing to do with what my current employer does.<p>Any advice greatly appreciated.
======
anigbrowl
The claim in ideas is _usually_ boilerplate to ensure you don't go into
competition with your employer or create a service that addresses some
shortcoming in your employer's product/service. An employment or startup
lawyer would be able to give you a good perspective on how such disputes
actually play out in your state, as well as the probability of such a dispute.
Since you say it has 'nothing to do' with what your current employer does
you'll likely be OK; I would expect that after advising you a lawyer would
then offer to write to your employer's legal department to explain your
position and ask for their OK. This would be better than making a casual
inquiry yourself because it would create a proper legal record of
communication from the outset and avoid arguments about who said what later on
if a dispute should arise. Many lawyers would give you a short consultation
for free or for a minimal fee, since the potential income from business
development later on would be much more valuable. If you're not sure where to
find a lawyer, call your state bar. If you're in Silicon Valley then then
there's no shortage of them.
Don't DIY and put it in your wife's name; in the event that a dispute does
arise that's _exactly_ the sort of thing that a plaintiff would point to as a
denial of honest services, and courts take a dim view of such legal
'workarounds'. If you absolutely insist on DIY then do _everything_ in
writing, send emails from a personal rather than business email address etc.
You can be circumspect (eg say you'd prefer not to say what your traffic is,
should they ask) but don't ever be dishonest - again, when a dispute arises
the first person to lie is often the one that loses in the end.
I'm not a lawyer, and I repeat that you would be far better spending a few
bucks getting a professional opinion than trying to wing it.
------
JSeymourATL
Time to go shopping for a good attorney with expertise in employment contracts
& corporate law. You can find one by networking for referrals with other
lawyers. Personally, I prefer sole practitioners, with previous Big Firm
experience. Usually they offer personalized attention, backed with major-
league seasoning, more reasonable fees. You'll want someone who listens, asks
good questions. Here's a good overview>
[http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/08/hiring-legal-help-ent-
law-c...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/08/hiring-legal-help-ent-law-
cx_rb_1008bovarnickhire.html)
------
lpsoft
Thank you kindly for your comments. As you suggest I think my next step will
be to get some professional advice.
------
001sky
Others may be able to give you general advice, but it's important before you
make any actual decisions to have someone also review the specific facts.
Especially if you are planning to transition your employement relationship.
EG, even if you keep this as an external side project you may want to protect
it going forward if you take another full time position (which you may
specifically negotiate in your terms of accepting and offer).
Some of the variables involved: You will need copies of your contracts and/or
employee handbook (or similar) as appropriate. Also relevant may be thinks
like using company resources for your project. And similar along those lines.
Again, its best to focus on being organized with the information you would
need to discuss this with someone knowledgeable, rather than try to anticipate
what such a person may say.
It may be better to solict advice and recommendations for contacts that may be
relevant. The Lawyer would need to review your terms of employment currently.
So, this is one step you can take now if you haven't already.
TLDR: This is (likely) a serious question for a lawyer.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is it time to close my first startup? - msencenb
Looking for a little life advice.<p>I'm currently debating shutting down my first bootstrapped startup (AdsReloaded.com). It's in the vein of tapzilla, appredeem, and apperang. I "launched" last June and have had about 700 in revenue since then.<p>The bottom line is that I think it has a lot of potential and it's in a big space but I'm out of money and simply don't have time to put effort into it while going to Stanford. I formed an LLC a little early and the upcoming 4/15 $800 tax is something I can't afford. In addition the competitors in the space all have funding and are able to work full-time on their companies.<p>Here are what I see as my options:<p>1) Find angel funding. I want to take about 7 months off (spring plus summer) to give the startup everything I have. So far I haven't had too much luck, mainly due to time constraints. I've had a few informal meetings with angels, although no investments yet.<p>2) Close the company. Move on, build something else sometime in the future, and concentrate more on school.<p>3) Find some consulting work. If I am able to find some part-time consulting work I might be able to float the company through the 800 dollar tax. I can do iPhone dev, although would love to do some A/B testing consulting.<p>4) I'm adding in this 4th option due to the comment below about flippa. Alternatively I could sell it to someone with some spare cash that wanted a pet project; however, I'm really unsure how much the company would go for, if anything.<p>What would you guys do in my situation?
======
nhangen
I recently paid both Tapjoy and AppRebates to launch an app and I can say that
your contact form is a problem.
I'd like to be able to login and start a campaign without having to fill what
I feel like is an old-school style form.
I also think your site could do better with a re-design, including a removal
of the video or finding a better thumbnail.
How much does it cost you to run, and are revenues going higher or lower?
------
Flippa_com
Some great responses here. I’m naturally biased but would strongly suggest you
give Flippa a try if you’re looking for a swift and low friction sale.
Appreciate you’re strapped so if you’re interested, set up an account and send
it via dm @flippa on twitter or contact our support team and we’ll waive your
listing/feature fees to get you rolling.
------
bdclimber14
Here's a hard question (I know because I've gone through it recently): What's
the least amount you would take for the site?
My experience on flippa has given me some interest, but it seems all the
buyers are only interested in existing, stable revenue streams, and not a
project that will take some work.
~~~
msencenb
I would like to recoup about half the costs I have spent on the company (~3k)
although that may be a bigger number than I can get on flippa.
Do you have any suggestions on other places to sell?
~~~
bdclimber14
I haven't attempted this, but I think a better route than listing on Flippa
(or another site) would be to seek out a strategic buyer, someone who would
see $1,500 of value in the website. This could be someone who wants the users,
or just the application. To justify $1,500 it seems buyers on Flippa would
want a few hundred in monthly revenue at least, and stable too.
Again, I haven't tried this, but what about looking on Elance and other
marketplaces for people who are looking to build a similar site. Offer to sell
the site and consulting services to set it up for them. To them, the value of
a tested application would be worth well over $3k I'm sure.
By the way, I'm in a similar situation with OrangeSlyce.com.
------
erichcervantez
If you can offload the website quickly and easily go for it, then proceed with
option (2). Who knows, the time you spend trying to sell it may end up
increasing traffic ;) I do have to agree with bmelton - how would shutting the
site down prevent you from owing taxes come 4/15?
~~~
msencenb
See comment above..
Thanks for the input though I think that might be the best option at this
point.
------
keiferski
Have you considered Flippa? <http://www.flippa.com>
~~~
msencenb
Do you mean to sell websites on the side or the company?
I would be open to selling the company as its fully functional but haven't
received any offers yet since it's low in traffic / not a huge amount of
traction (~600 people have registered).
~~~
keiferski
Sell your company. If it's between killing it and making a few hundred bucks,
why not?
~~~
keiferski
I'd also add that a sale (probably) looks better, resume and experience-wise,
than merely shutting it down.
Saying _"I developed a site, made some money on it, then sold it because I no
longer had time"_ is much more impressive than _"I developed a site, made some
money on it, then shut it down because it wasn't successful enough."_
------
zone2
kill it, focus on school, and work on your second idea.
------
bmelton
I'm not 100% sure I've read it correctly, but I'm also not 100% sure that
closing the company before 4/15 exempts you from owing taxes on the money
earned.
I'm horribly ignorant on the subject though, so hopefully somebody else might
be able to chime in.
~~~
msencenb
I'm ok with taxes on money earned. I can't afford the $800 annual tax that is
due on 4/15 for businesses running out of california. I already payed the $800
for the annual tax 3 months after the llc was formed (back in september).
~~~
bmelton
My apologies then, I had misunderstood.
Is that for business operating in California, or business that have
incorporated California?
~~~
msencenb
Operating in Cali. As far as I know it doesn't matter where incorporation
happens if you operate out of Cali you still have to pay the 800
| {
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The Modern Mini Cooper’s Designer Is Now Working on Flying Cars - scottie_m
https://www.fastcompany.com/40562526/the-modern-mini-coopers-designer-is-now-working-on-flying-cars
======
hawktheslayer
Elon Musk's quote comes to mind now whenever I read about flying cars: " _A
bunch of cars flying all over the place is not an anxiety reducing situation_
"
[https://youtu.be/2Nz69M6khCs](https://youtu.be/2Nz69M6khCs)
------
gregatragenet3
The mini Cooper, who's AC vents are optimized to freeze your knuckles while
leaving the rest of the interior baking. The placement of the exhaust pipes
optimally located to cause 2nd degree burns on your shins when loading
groceries. The design that screams form-over-disfunction.
| {
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IE9 beta's HTML5 support isn't there yet: 3 big canvas gotchas - kemayo
http://dt.deviantart.com/blog/37599369/
======
pavlov
The lack of globalCompositeOperation in IE9's Canvas implementation is a
pretty serious limitation.
It seems to come down to the limitations of Direct2D, which doesn't seem to
support any other compositing operations except source-over, a.k.a. "normal
alpha blending". This is fairly surprising when taking into account that
Direct2D is a very new graphics API (it shipped in Windows 7)...
I think the root cause is that Microsoft's graphics APIs have long evolved in
a different direction compared to everyone else. Make no mistake, Microsoft is
a very important force in graphics because they control Direct3D, and that has
placed them at the vanguard of high-performance accelerated 3D graphics.
Direct2D seems to mostly take design influence from Direct3D. One of its
explicit goals is to provide 2D utility graphics for Direct3D games -- stuff
like HUD displays for games. The traditional "Porter-Duff" compositing
operators (i.e. the blending modes missing from Direct2D) are not very useful
in this environment, so instead Direct2D concentrates on "game-like" stuff
like high-level geometry objects.
In contrast, the other major browsers use graphics APIs that fundamentally
derive from the Adobe school of print-oriented graphics, where an image is
built from low-level immediate mode operators. Think PostScript and PDF.
The original Canvas JavaScript implementation shipped in Mac OS X 10.4 to
support Dashboard widgets. Canvas was just a paper-thin wrapper over Apple's
Quartz API, which in turn was essentially a royalty-free implementation of the
PDF graphics model (before Quartz, Apple/NeXT were licensing Display
PostScript from Adobe).
I think Mozilla's Canvas implementation uses Cairo, which is an open-source
library heavily modelled after PDF and Quartz. Chrome uses their home-grown
Skia, which is also very similar.
Poor Microsoft. If they had taken the opportunity in 2004, they could have
easily dictated a simple web graphics standard that would have played to the
strengths of the accelerated graphics API that they control. But instead they
were busy building giant fortresses of proprietary APIs like the dead-end
Windows Presentation Foundation, and now they're having trouble implementing
something as superficially simple as Canvas.
~~~
stwe
Many globalCompositeOperation modes are also broken in WebKit based browsers:
<https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39177> But sadly nobody seems to care
too much about that.
~~~
pavlov
IMHO, most of the Porter-Duff compositing operations are fairly useless. There
is a nice mathematical purity to the model from which these operations are
derived, but that's also their weakness: they are based on an ultra-simplistic
abstraction instead of real world use cases. Punching out alpha mattes in
various ways just isn't very interesting in practice.
Porter and Duff can be forgiven because the "real world" didn't exist when
they designed this model in the early '80s. At the time, a frame buffer add-on
to a computer could cost as much as a car...!
When designing a modern graphics API, I think it would be more useful to look
at the operations that people are actually familiar with, e.g. Photoshop
blending modes, and design the interface to match those expectations.
------
treeface
In all fairness to Microsoft, the last IE9 beta was released on 2010-09-15:
[http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/downloads/Default.htm...](http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/downloads/Default.html)
I wonder if he has the same issues with the latest platform preview (which
came out nearly two months ago).
Now, all this fairness aside, I'm extremely curious why MS isn't adopting the
rapid release cycles that the Chrome team have used. As a (potential) consumer
of the Internet Explorer line of products, I feel like I'm left out in the
cold when I see that the last release was sometime last September. In the
meantime, Chrome has added a major enhancement to their JavaScript engine,
WebGL support, and more. More importantly, they've added this stuff
incrementally so I, the (current) user of Chrome don't have to wait for months
for the next major release.
Or perhaps more to the point, I'm curious why the IE9 marketing team don't see
the promotional advantages of rapid releases as compared to the old major
release model. As the Chrome team have said...market features, not releases.
~~~
kenjackson
I get that Chrome is fast, but do you hear what you're saying. They did a tech
preview in October and it's only been three months, which includes
Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years.
There's rumors that the RC is coming on the 28th. And RTW is probably a few
months after that. Not Google like speed, which is ridiculously impressive,
but a beta and 7 tech previews in this time isn't bad.
~~~
cryptoz
IE8 came out in March of 2008. By the time IE9 is out, it'll be close to _3
years_ between major browser releases from Microsoft. That is too slow. The
Internet is moving much faster than Microsoft understands. (Or perhaps if they
understand it, the Web is moving much faster than they can _handle_.)
Chrome went from a state of non-existing to very popular in the same time.
Microsoft's web browser development speed is abysmal for such a powerful and
large software company. They either don't care, or they want it to be slow and
have poor performance. I can think of no other reason for such slow
development of their web browser, especially in an era where _everyone_ knows
how important the web is.
~~~
kenjackson
Actually it came out in March 200 _9_. So it's two years between major browser
releases. In that 22 months they've dropped 7 tech previews and beta. So at
about a clip of every 3 months they've released a new build.
But I do agree that it's too slow. They really do need a Chrome like schedule.
~~~
cryptoz
Thanks for the release date correction. I even did my research and checked
Wikipedia first! Turns out I read the wrong date. Oh well, thanks. :)
------
pilif
So it just continues on. You implement something and it's going to work in all
browsers but will require specific tweaks and workarounds for IE.
Business as usual.
The only thing that changed is the nature of the needed workarounds (fix
broken canvas instead of fix missing canvas), so that IE9 just brings more
frustrating work to the table. One more special case to handle.
In the application I'm maintaining, we have CSS and JS to make the thing work
in real browsers and then one file for each version of IE to handle their
specific bugs.
As it's looking now, IE9 won't improve on the situation, but just require two
more files (CSS, JS) to fix the new, IE9 specific issues, thereby increasing
the development time of any new feature because one more special case must be
handled.
Why can't Microsoft just get their act together. This is so dammed frustrating
------
Groxx
There are lots of problems with the global composite operations in browsers.
Try your browser:
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial/Compositing> WebKit still
doesn't have all the -in or -atop working, despite bug reports going back very
nearly a year now: <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34027>
------
v413
It is interesting to see the HTML 5 compatibility charts (including for
canvas) according to w3.org here:
<http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm>
According to this no browser is currently following 100% the canvas spec.
~~~
mudimba
While that is true, I think the chart is misleading in that it doesn't
properly weight the tests. Failing to have any sort of
globalCompositeOperation is a huge thing, but IE only lost one point for it. I
would say that some of the things that the other browsers got dinged for are
much smaller in comparison.
~~~
smackfu
You could argue about the weightings all day though. Will people actually use
every single one of those composite operations in real life? Shouldn't the
important ones be weighed more? etc.
------
thwarted
_In my defense, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari did an amazing job of
coding to the HTML5 spec. I don’t know why Microsoft couldn’t as well._
I feel like this has been, and is, said about a lot of things that Microsoft
should be kicking ass on. Why is Microsoft either unwilling or unable to lead
the charge on these kinds of things? Can they say that it's not in their best
marketing interest to have a crappy, slowly developed product?
------
gruseom
Anybody care to comment on how good the SVG implementation in IE9 is? I've
found, somewhat counterintuitively, that you can get better rendering
performance from SVG than Canvas if your application is a good fit for certain
techniques, and I'm hoping that we can use them in IE9 too.
~~~
mudimba
"If your application is a good fit" is the operative phrase here. SVG does
some things very well, but lags in other ways. They really are different tools
made for different purposes (though they do have a little bit of overlap). It
is like Illustrator and Photoshop, which both can make pictures, but a good
designer will use both depending on the circumstances.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Show HN: Just Sayin' ! - wittysense
https://twitter.com/filesofnerds/status/342836948693553152/photo/1
======
3825
Some context please? This is big news and it is not inappropriate to have
multiple perspectives on the same story.
~~~
wittysense
I shewd EFF's link to an English major. He responded, "Come now, they've been
spying on us for years."
The big news is that in rationalizing it we will develop a schism across the
class line. Many of us are so poor, unlike the ranks of the increasing elite,
that we'd gladly sell our privacy for coin to eat.
Build the money machine faster. How else are we to build gittip for the
homeless without anonymous coin ?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bookkeeper: A double-entry bookkeeping system for Django - saurabh
https://github.com/SwingTix/bookkeeper
======
rahimnathwani
This looks cool. One question: how do you deal with split transactions? The
comments in models.py suggest that they are supported. However, the signature
of the debit and credit methods in AccountBase only have space for one account
on the other side of the transaction, e.g.:
def debit(self, amount, credit_account, description, debit_memo="",
credit_memo="", datetime=None):
Are you planning to implement it later, or did I miss it in my quick reading
of the code?
------
pbrook
When I last looked up double-entry bookkeeping for Django for some projects I
was working on, I came across Oscar and specifically
[https://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar-
accounts](https://github.com/tangentlabs/django-oscar-accounts) . Have you
seen that project? Any sense of how yours compares?
~~~
rahimnathwani
django-oscar-accounts includes a web UI (I assume from the screenhots when I
clicked your link).
bookkeeper has an empty views.py, and seems to be using django mostly for the
ORM.
I'm curious to know what other people are using for this type of
functionality. Does anyone reading this link their app directly to an
accounting package, and post transactions in real-time using that API?
------
NicoJuicy
This actually looks neat
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: The story of space debris, made with WebGL for the Royal Institution - stugrey
http://rigb.org/christmas-lectures/how-to-survive-in-space/a-place-called-space/7-space-debris-visualisation
======
CapitalistCartr
NASA have a quartery newsletter on space debris called, appropriately enough,
The Orbital Debris Quarterly News.
[http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter....](http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter.html)
------
gus_massa
(Just in case it's not obvious: Click the yellow link to see the animated
visualization.)
Each debris has a different color. What does it mean?
Do the page download all the initial data and make a simulation or it download
the positions periodically?
There is a ring at high altitude. What is it's origin? Geocentric satellites?
(I think there is another ring at medium altitude, but I'm not sure.)
Does this show the satellites that are currently in use or only the unuseful
debris? Can you add a button to show/hide them?
~~~
stugrey
Author here,
The debris is coloured to match the descriptive text.
Each years data is loaded when the user gets to that part of the
visualisation.
The ring you see is indeed all of the satellites in geosynchronous orbit. You
can also see the orbits of many of the GNSS satellites in medium Earth orbit
if you stare hard enough for long enough!
This shows all objects (functioning and debris) in orbit at the time in
question.
~~~
placebo
Impressive, nice work :-)
------
gjem97
It's a bit surprising to me that it's not made more clear that the individual
pieces of debris are not to scale. That is, just glancing at the visualization
(especially the early ones in the presentation that focus on low Earth orbit)
would lead the viewer to believe that space is much more crowded than it
actually is. This in turn would make the viewer believe that collisions are
much more likely than they actually are.
~~~
stugrey
Unfortunately, to show the Earth and the orbital positions to scale, it was
not possible to show the pieces of debris to scale.
~~~
neffy
Yes, sorry. The not-to-scale aspect meant it jumped the shark almost
immediately for me as well. As small as possible, following the initial
display of the object, might have conveyed the idea better - and that would
have made the Chinese explosion a little more fun.
~~~
DanBC
But see also the NASA visualisation on the NASA orbital debris site:
[http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/](http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/)
------
Cogito
FYI, this was broken behind my company proxy.
I _think_ the proxy was rewriting the "Content-Range" request header, which is
used in the function (papaparse.js:533):
_function getFileSize(xhr) { var contentRange = xhr.getResponseHeader(
"Content-Range"); return
parseInt(contentRange.substr(contentRange.lastIndexOf("/") + 1)); }_
I could work around this by using the "Content-Length" header instead, which
was available.
Once it was working, I thought it worked quite well, with only a little bit of
stuttering and visual glitches detracting from the presentation, but those are
probably on my end :)
I have seen a at least one similar presentations before, so I wonder if you
were involved in any other similar things, or have borrowed concepts from
them?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: HoloLens 2 pure JavaScript WebGL simulator (prototype) - rufus31415
https://rufus31415.github.io/sandbox/webgl-hololens2-simulation/
======
mncharity
Looks intriguing. But I hit quite a skill/learning barrier.
So perhaps start by showing a traditional video game key mapping and ui
summary? Or better, since the interactions are so unfamiliar, perhaps a
program-demo screen-capture video? Made with a tool that shows the keys
pressed and mouse movement. Which would also occupy the initial half-minute
load time.
My experience was one of baffled struggle, repeatedly trying things, and
thinking "Well, that didn't seem to work... Is it not supposed to? Am I doing
it wrong? Did I almost have it but hit slightly off? Is it modal? Does some
key need to be held down? Was there a bug? ... I've no clue, since I've little
idea what to expect." Thus the idea of a demo video. Answering "what does
skilled use of this ui look like?".
------
Communitivity
Nice work! With a bit more you are almost to a Second Life style editing
experience. I got 60fps when I used it, according to the meter. I am curious
though what makes this a HoloLens simulator as opposed to a WebGL VR demo?
Given the high price of HoloeLens from a consumer device perspective, getting
an open source VR platform that's compatible with HoloLens APIs and possibly
apps would be a big win.
~~~
rufus31415
In fact, I say it's a Hololens simulation because you can simulate the hands
with the SHIFT and SPACE keys, and toggle them with the T and Y keys. I also
want to transform this demo to show VR controllers instead of hands
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Opscode wiki and ticket tracker has been compromised - tomazmuraus
http://pastebin.com/5vfYB0Rs
======
crb
pastebin is a legitimate mirror of their own blog post:
[http://www.opscode.com/blog/2013/08/01/security-breach-
user-...](http://www.opscode.com/blog/2013/08/01/security-breach-user-
information-for-tickets-opscode-com-and-wiki-opscode-com-compromised/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Princeton University: Social Exclusion Can Lead to Belief in Conspiracy Theories - owens99
https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/02/18/social-exclusion-leads-to-belief-in-conspiracy-theories/116589.html
======
ebcode
>>“When developing laws, regulations, policies, and programs, policymakers
should worry about whether people feel excluded by their enactment,” Coman
said. “Otherwise, we may create societies that are prone to spreading
inaccurate and superstitious beliefs.”
I know, right! How many times do I have to keep hearing about the so-called
"moon landing"!?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What If Facebook Jumped in Against Twitter? - danielrm26
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/facebook-jumped-twitter/?fb_ref=zzDhaTAKle-Hackernews
======
niftich
Facebook 'Pages' are a rough analogue to Twitter personas [1]. Anyone can
create a 'Page' with an arbitrary name, and which can be followed, interacted
with, and be used to make public posts.
But Facebook should figure out if they want the cake, or if they want to eat
it, because they can't have it both ways. In the early days, public posts on
Facebook were actually public, and viewable by anyone without needing to (or
being begged to) log in to Facebook.
But they changed this behavior sometime in or after 2012 [2], and now nothing
that is generated by personal profiles is ever fully-public, and only 'Pages'
have the ability to produce content that's viewable-without-login. A good
example of this latter is John Carmack's posts (of Oculus), which albeit
publicly viewable in theory, present a nag-bar overlay asking the user to log
into Facebook [3].
[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/help/104002523024878](https://www.facebook.com/help/104002523024878)
[2] [http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2012/10/public-facebook-
pages...](http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2012/10/public-facebook-pages-no-
longer-viewable-unless-you-have-a-facebook-account.html)
[3]
[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1818885715...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1818885715012604&id=100006735798590)
| {
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Show HN: C++11 immutable string - syvex
https://github.com/syvex/native
I'm looking for feedback on this approach to an immutable string (istring). The idea is to provide a super fast immutable string that can be efficiently passed to lambdas as well as be 100% thread safe.<p>Another bonus is faster hashing. If a string literal is given to istring, then the hash is computed at compile time! Other strings will have their hashes cached for later use. The istring is designed more or less after the python string in this regard.<p>It should also consume less memory than std::string and perform faster in all other areas.
======
Nican
Just as a note, on Java 7, developers opted for not having a single buffer
backing multiple strings due to the backing references never been deleted. [1]
[2]
[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16123446/java-7-string-
su...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16123446/java-7-string-substring-
complexity)
[2]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1qw73v/til_orac...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1qw73v/til_oracle_changed_the_internal_string/)
~~~
nikbackm
Probably more of an issue when all of your strings work(ed) like that, as
opposed to here where you must explicitly opt-in to use immutable strings with
shared buffers.
------
thegeomaster
Great job. I like it how peole are moving to and developing for C++11 as I
think it's a huge step forward in the standard. The one cosmetic complaint I
have is that the slicing syntax is not verbose enough for my taste. Also, what
hash algo did you use? Asking just out of curiosity. I remember running a
benchmark a long ago of different non-cryptographic hashes. The collision
resistance was pretty consistent across all of them, but some were really slow
and some were really fast, and that could directly affect the performance on
hashtables and other structures that rely on hashes.
~~~
syvex
I can't say I'm 100% happy with the slicing notation. I played around with
some other wacky things, but then settled on overloading operator() to get a
concise syntax.
In principle, you use it similar to python--s(5,10) instead of s[5:10].
I would have maybe liked to end up with s[5,10], but the only way to overload
operator[] like that is with a pair. Then you'd end up with s[{5,10}]. So I
figured it would be best to stick with just s(5,10).
~~~
thegeomaster
Not relevant in this case, but you may find this interesting (assuming you
haven't seen it already): [https://github.com/klmr/named-
operator](https://github.com/klmr/named-operator).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Productivity brought by Clojure [slides] - tosh
https://www.slideshare.net/humorless/the-productivity-brought-by-clojure-149170292/
======
keymone
Clojure's immutable data structures (lists, vectors, maps and sets) are
actually _not_ copy on write, they're based on red-black trees such that when
you "mutate" the value, a new one is created that shares everything but the
mutated part with the original.
Clojure is amazing and i can't recommend it enough. I wish more people looked
past the unfamiliar syntax and understood why it exists and how it makes you
achieve more with simpler code.
~~~
lukifer
I'm pretty sold on Clojure's value, I've read up on its structure/syntax, but
generally struggle with learning the standard lib and trying to read/write
actual code. Any resources you can recommend for gradually ramping up, and/or
"lightbulb moments" for a dev steeped in C-like languages?
~~~
rafd
If you're new to functional programming, I recently gave a talk on applying FP
concepts at ClojureNorth:
[https://youtu.be/vK1DazRK_a0](https://youtu.be/vK1DazRK_a0)
The main example I work through is in JavaScript so that Clojure's syntax
doesn't get in the way (I love s-expressions, but they're not the point of the
talk).
~~~
pdsouza
Came across this talk a few weeks ago and I have to say this is one of the
best pragmatic talks comparing non-FP vs. FP paradigms I've ever seen. I
really like your example problem, how you explore state and mutation in the
different paradigms, and how you refactor step-by-step towards a functional
design. Thank you!
~~~
rafd
I'm very glad you liked it! Thank you for your kind words.
------
cleansy
Amazing how they just write a flat: "at least 30%" increase in productivity.
Based on what exactly? How did they even measure that? I don't want to talk
these slides down, especially since I think that a lot of use cases might
benefit from something like clojure but sources would be nice to read up.
~~~
chungus
If you are referring to the "30% increase in productivity from REPL driven
development", it could be he means not having to recompile after each change,
so not having your workflow interrupted.
~~~
EForEndeavour
That sounds like support for REPL-driven development, not specifically clojure
use.
~~~
6thaccount2
Agreed to a degree.
I find Python in the REPL to be great, but I think Common Lisp with Slime and
maybe Clojure with Cider take it to a new level. You can write your code and
when it errors out it drops you into the REPL where you can update the code
incrementally while it is running.
If Python gets me X% increase, Lisp and Smalltalk (and maybe Forth) get you
some X% + Y%. The parent comment is right that 30% is probably a back-of-the-
envelope calculation and not a rigorous one.
I'm only a novice/superficial language geek, so I can't tell you why Lisp and
Smalltalk can do that though. Extreme late binding? Hopefully someone more
educated can reply.
~~~
marble-drink
Python in a REPL isn't really possible because you can't reload modules. It's
OK if you're working on just one module but as soon as that's not true it's
just not possible. And if you use relative imports you can't even do that.
I'd love to know if anyone has a way to get it to work because I really miss
REPL based development from my common lisp and Clojure days.
------
dimitar
Really nice to see stories about Clojure on HN.
Initially, it wasn't clear for me what editor is used but it appears to be
Vim/Neovim with Fireplace: [https://github.com/tpope/vim-
fireplace](https://github.com/tpope/vim-fireplace)
Actually looks pretty simple and straightforward. There is a healthy choice of
different editors and IDEs for Clojure right now, thanks to building on common
foundations of
[https://github.com/clojure/tools.nrepl](https://github.com/clojure/tools.nrepl)
------
ecmascript
I have never really understood what people get from these slides, but my while
my experience with clojure is extremely limited I can say that I found it to
be rather interesting but hard.
I could not grasp several error messages, took me a long time to write
something to a database and it didn't really feel at all natural to me. But I
guess you'll have to get used to the functional nature, but I don't believe
all the hype about functional programming in general.
If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use
clojure. My experience is rather the reverse, it is harder and takes a long
time to develop in. Maybe it's more predictable and is better software with
less bugs in the long run, but I wouldn't really know since I lack the
experience.
A lot of programming languages today, like javascript, already has functional
stuff within it. I get the appeal for it, but I'm not sure it's the best tool
for every job or even most stuff.
If anyone is willing to post a youtube-talk or something that can convince me
of otherwise, please feel free.
~~~
LandR
> If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would
> use clojure.
I don't think this is even remotely true. As much as everyone in this industry
wants to believe it's fast paced and fast moving / evolving, it's hellishly
slow in picking up on good ideas and will waste an exorbitant amount of time
on bad ideas...
Cool / Hip seems to be valued more than quality when it comes to languages /
frameworks while the actually useful slowly, _painfully slowly_ , trickles
down.
~~~
zaphirplane
Java, c# and python are hardly hip and rank as some of the most used languages
~~~
kls
I was around at the dawn of personal home computing and for the
commercialization of internet technology so I have seen each of these come and
go. Though they are not the cool kids anymore, the sheer volume of code keeps
them around, and given that people have those skill-sets, new code gets
produced in them.
Java was certainly the fad dejure in it's time, OO was the craze and Java had
just been dumped out on the internet, by Sun, for free. In a time when a good
portion of compilers costed money (especially if you where not on an Intel
based PC), you could learn Java for the price of an internet connection.
c# was the cool kid if you where a Windows developer, Microsoft was looking to
update their aging development stack and give themselves hardware portability,
so they basically created the JVM for windows in the form of .NET . To ensure
that people switched over they kicked the legs out of VB6 and pretty much
forced everyone to the new dev stack. They offered a host of language that you
could use to write windows apps, but they conformed all of them to the OO
style that was popular at the time. With that said, VB.NET did not look like
VB6 it looked a whole lot more like C# with VB syntax. So given that
developers had to pretty much learn a new language even if it had familiar
syntax most opted to just go ahead and learn c# as Microsoft was pimping c#.
Python is the odd ball in your list as it kind of languished for a while. It
was not obscure but it was more like Ruby, it had it's devotees but was rather
flat, not obscure just flat. That being said, it did have it's cool kid, day
in the sun and that was when Google started using it heavily. The AI winter
really killed LISP as "the" AI language and there really was no heir apparent,
that is until (IIRC) Google started producing some of their machine learning
tech and they implemented it in Python. This instantly made Python the cool
kid and people started adopting it. My opinion is that Google felt they where
too heavily invested in Java and thus needed to diversify into another
language. At the time there where not a lot of options that had the
combination of mature enough/without legacy clutter/availability of
developers, to make the cut, that is why I think Python made the short list.
TLDR: the GP poster is right, popularity and trends have more to do with
language adoption than technical merit does.
------
erokar
The fact that Clojure runs on JVM turns me off. I find that Elixir is very
similar to Coljure, with a runtime that better supports immutability and
concurrency.
~~~
jwr
Why does it matter to you? I mean, I know why I find it to be a positive:
implementing a runtime is a vast and complex task, and doing it well is way
too expensive for most projects (see for example the problems Python has had
over the years with the global interpreter lock).
If you can use a runtime with gazillions of man-hours invested into making it
better, and get easy access to bazillions of native libraries, why not?
~~~
tdbgamer
While I agree with you that the JVM is great, I think most people that don't
like it really just hate Oracle. It's not really a technical argument as much
as it is philosophical. I don't really care either way, but I can see why
people would mistrust Oracle knowing their history.
~~~
jwr
I understand the sentiment, Oracle is a terrible company and I don't like it
either. But at this point we have the OpenJDK and you can use the JVM without
caring about Oracle at all.
------
whalesalad
Too many people conflate clojure with high paying salaries. It's not clojure
that is earning the salary... it's the kind of engineer who might practice
something like clojure that is desirable.
~~~
iLemming
I think the reason why Clojure (alongside with F#) is the most paid language
(according to StackOverflow and State of JS surveys) because more and more
FinTech companies are discovering that the language is exceptionally well
suited for manipulating financial data (and not just that). Another reason is:
like the one you've mentioned: Clojure mainly attracts more experienced,
"grumpy" developers, those who have seen things and tried different ways and
become almost apathetic and burned out from (over and over again) building and
maintaining projects that despite all the efforts almost always spiral into
big, unmaintainable clusterfucks.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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A Complete Guide to Rails Caching - nateberkopec
http://www.nateberkopec.com/2015/07/15/the-complete-guide-to-rails-caching.html
======
varmais
> Developers, by our nature, are very different from end-users. We're used to
> the idea that when you interact with a computer, it takes a little while for
> the computer to come back with an answer.
I don't agree. End users are used to shitty systems which take some time to
load, but we developers should know better. We should be able to recognise
performance bottlenecks during the architecture design and development, also
we should be able to measure the layers where optimisation is necessary and
useful. And when developing web app, caching should always be in mind as one
tool to improve system performance in one way or another.
Otherwise fantastic piece of information.
~~~
dmitrig01
Taking this further, as a developer, I find I have even less patience for slow
loading times than a 'regular end-user'.
I don't know exactly, but I assume this is because I know what goes on behind
the scenes, and 99% of the time, the website is doing way more work than it
really needs to in order to deliver the experience that I'm asking for.
------
douglasfshearer
Fantastic resource.
No mention of HTTP caching though, which for a whole class of applications is
a great way to minimise rendering time.
Rails has great support[1] for etag based content expiry.
[1]
[http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Conditio...](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/ConditionalGet.html#method-
i-stale-3F)
------
blizkreeg
Does anyone here use compression on all of their cached content? Our Redis
cache store has ballooned up to about 8G (we store a lot of html/json
fragments) and is unwieldy to ship around when we want to debug bad data bugs
on our dev machines. We are experimenting with lz4 compression now and the
speed-compression ratio tradeoff looks pretty good with it.
What has been your experience with Rails caching + compression?
~~~
pselbert
If you're using Readthis[0] for Redis caching you can use an alternate
marshaller to avoid the size and performance overhead of marshalling all
objects through Ruby. If you aren't using Readthis you really should, it's
faster than RedisStore, more customizable, and actually maintained!
Mandatory disclaimer, I wrote the gem.
0:
[https://github.com/sorentwo/readthis](https://github.com/sorentwo/readthis)
~~~
blizkreeg
Does marshaling pose a problem (leading to cache flushes) when you upgrade to
a new Ruby version?
~~~
pselbert
No, that hasn't posed a problem in my experience. Note that all of the stores
rely on Ruby marshalling underneath. To my knowledge Readthis is the only
cache that lets you choose something else like pass through, JSON, Oj, etc.
You will definitely have to flush before switching from no compression to
compression or changing marshallers though.
~~~
sandGorgon
I wrote a small snippet to share cache (particularly session) between a php
webapp and rails using Dalli long back. It might be completely broken by now,
but worked brilliantly back then.
it was based roughly on this
[https://gist.github.com/watsonbox/3170415](https://gist.github.com/watsonbox/3170415)
~~~
pselbert
That sounds like a job for phuby!
[https://github.com/tenderlove/phuby](https://github.com/tenderlove/phuby)
No, not really.
------
beefsack
I found the animated GIF next to the article to be incredibly distracting
while reading. I had to remove it using the inspector to be able to get
through the article.
------
driverdan
This is a great guide but it's not complete. One of the biggest problems with
all of these guides is that they focus solely on view caching.
As far as I can tell the Rails ecosystem completely lacks a good model / data
caching system. There are a few gems that do model caching but they all have
major flaws. I'd _love_ to see a good guide on Rails data caching and gems
that eliminate the mess of calls to Rails.cache.fetch.
~~~
mperham
This is because caching should be done as coarsely as possible. Caching views
and entire pages is the common case.
~~~
halostatue
So what’s the best approach for caching API responses?
~~~
karmajunkie
An api response isn't any different from a web page insofar as infrastructure
is concerned. HTTP caching is usually my first choice when I have the
wherewithal to do that.
[Edit: conditional responses are probably the best way to go – save the
bandwidth.]
------
arohner
Great article. You should additionally measure page speed as experienced by
your users, because other pesky things like network congestion, the user's
browser & hardware and the speed of light all affect website performance. If
you measure from _every_ user's browser, you'll get very detailed performance
info. A chart from a recent blog post of mine:
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.rasterize.com/cljs-module-
bl...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.rasterize.com/cljs-module-blog-
map.jpeg)
Just because the page loads quickly on your laptop doesn't mean it loads
quickly for everyone. I'm working on a tool to measure this stuff:
[https://rasterize.io/blog/speed-
objections.html](https://rasterize.io/blog/speed-objections.html), contact me
if you're interested in early access.
Contact me if you're interested in an early preview.
------
resca79
this is a great article
> The most often-used method of all Rails cache stores is fetch
It's true, but I think you should add performance tests while the app
write/read because the big problem of db/cache is the write that influence
also the read(fetch). Another big problem is the expiration vs garbage
collection after the memory is full.
~~~
pselbert
A request with dozens or hundreds of `fetch` calls will always be slower than
a few `fetch_multi` or `read_multi` calls. All of the current ActiveSupport
compliant libraries support both calls.
~~~
ghiculescu
We've found
[https://github.com/n8/multi_fetch_fragments](https://github.com/n8/multi_fetch_fragments)
to be quite handy for this.
------
chrismorgan
> First, figure about 50 milliseconds for network latency (this is on desktop,
> latency on mobile is a whole other discussion).
And outside the USA, add on another 200ms more. I, an Australian, visited the
USA last year and was surprised, although I had expected it, at how much
faster the Internet was.
I get the general feeling that people in the USA end up much more picky about
performance than their Australian counterparts, because they’re used to a
result which is quite a bit faster anyway.
It’s rather a pity that we as an industry don’t care more about performance,
because on average we’re utterly abysmally appallingly atrocious at it.
There’s simply no good reason for things to be as slow as they are.
------
why-el
> but usually virtualization is a mostly unnecessary step in achieving
> production-like behavior. Mostly, we just need to make sure we're running
> the Rails server in production mode.
Isn't this assuming your development mode has the same memory/cpu as your
production? I can't tell you how many times I get questions from clients who
ask why their 16GB dev box is running fine while their 512MB dyno is slow. The
point of a docker image is to limit these resources, which `rails s
production` does not do.
~~~
nateberkopec
Sorry, I should have qualified that sentence: "a mostly unnecessary step in
achieving production-like behavior *when trying to determine a page's average
response time". That's just been my experience with this. I haven't noticed
significant differences in my Macbook vs Heroku when measuring response times.
It's a fast-and-loose measurement, to be sure. Virtualization/dockerization is
the only way to get a super-accurate measurement.
~~~
why-el
Yeah I have been thinking about this as well. I guess it depends on how wide
the difference is (when I said 512MB, I really meant it. People are still
comparing that to their dev machines).
Somewhat related: How has your experience been setting up docker with Rails? I
have an idea for a project that seamlessly integrate docker into one's Rails
dev workflow, but so far I have found its setup (let alone working with it) to
be cumbersome to say the least.
------
derwiki
Why is `caches_action` not considered a best practice? Using that for popular
landing pages, I'm able to serve over half of my requests in < 10ms.
~~~
nateberkopec
Oh, I hope I didn't give that impression that it's no longer a "best
practice". But you can, of course, accomplish exactly the same thing as an
action cache with fragment caching. The cases where you can use action caching
are so limited (like you said - mostly landing pages) that I feel it's hardly
even worth bothering with when you can just wrap the entire view in a cache
method. That's all I was trying to get across.
~~~
gingerlime
Or `caches_page` and then it won't even hit rack / rails and can be served
directly by nginx. But I agree that the usage scope is quite limited. We still
use it for pages served to not-logged-in users where it makes sense, and both
the performance boost and the reduction of load on the system is noticeable.
------
mosselman
Don't forget to divide the result from `ab` by `x` where `x` is the
concurrency amount (`-c x`).
The 'time per request' that has 'mean, across all concurrent requests' behind
it is the mean of every single request. All other ms values show you the
response time per single request * concurrency. So the percentile table is
only interesting when you take this into account.
------
drm237
In the example where you cache the todo list and use an array of the todo item
ids plus the max updated time, why is that approach better than just updating
the list updated_at time whenever a child record is changed? With your
approach, each todo item needs to be pulled from the db which should be slower
than just checking the parent's updated at time for a cache hit.
------
rubiquity
> _Why don 't we cache as much as we should?_
An alternative question:
_Why do we have to cache so damn much in Ruby and complicate the hell out of
our infrastructure and code?_
Because Ruby is slow.
~~~
nateberkopec
What about caching in Ruby is complicated to you? It seems pretty simple to
me.
What production website _doesn 't_ cache? You make it sound like it's a Ruby-
only issue.
~~~
swanson
Caching involves adding generally untested code to your production
environment. Caching can bring your production environment out of sync with
your development environment. Caching introduces state between generally
state-less requests - increasing the mental overhead of understanding why you
are seeing certain behavior. Subtle bugs can result in disproportionately bad
behavior (wrong cache key could accidentally show one user's private data to
another user).
I don't think you should never do caching - just that is is non-trivial,
especially once you move past a 15min-blog use case.
~~~
Bluestrike2
Caching makes things more complex, but unfortunately, that's the nature of the
game and there's no escaping it. If you plan things out and break your caching
strategy down into more manageable pieces, you'll be able to work out a way to
make it work as a cohesive whole. It's really easy to just ignore caching
until you're almost done with a project, only to be stuck in the painful
position of trying to make it work with a shoehorn. Just thinking about the
basics in the beginning will help make it a lot easier for you later on.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Any “bootcamps” or courses for intermediate/advanced people? - peruvian
Yesterday, I saw a HN job ad for One Month - a company that offers a 30-day "bootcamp". I looked at their courses[1] and noticed they're all aimed at beginners.<p>I'm past the stage where I need a course on Python syntax or HTML. Like many of you, I could teach myself these things. However, I would definitely pay $300 (the cost of the courses mentioned) for good hands-on intermediate or advanced coursework in both software engineering and computer science. Unfortunately I can't come up with any ideas at the moment, sorry :-)<p>[1] https://onemonth.com/#premium-course-schedule
======
ozanonay
Hi! I'm one of the instructors at Bradfield:
[https://bradfieldcs.com](https://bradfieldcs.com) . We teach computer science
to strong programmers, typically those who were self taught, attended
bootcamps or weren't quite satisfied with their conventional CS experience.
We teach in small classes, strictly in person in SF. I know this sucks for
folk (like OP) who are outside SF, but honestly you can't teach this stuff to
a high enough standard remotely. We do get plenty of interstate and
international students who visit for a course or two.
We also maintain a self-teaching guide
[https://teachyourselfcs.com](https://teachyourselfcs.com) for those who don't
need the full classroom experience.
Happy to answer any questions in person: [email protected]
~~~
cusack
I did [https://bradfieldcs.com](https://bradfieldcs.com) after working as a IC
for awhile and found it hugely valuable. I didn't have a CS undergrad and
worked in Node, so skipped the majority the deeper fundamental studies around
databases, networking, and computer architecture since I was abstracted from
them in day-to-day work (or at least thought I was...:)).
I took a 10wk leave from work to go full-time through Bradfield and would
recommend it to anyone that's spent time working as an engineer and is
interested in leveling up generally or refining a specific skill set.
The stuff I learned there has ended up showing up almost daily for me at work
and I've since been promoted to technical lead.
~~~
bogomipz
>"I took a 10wk leave from work to go full-time through Bradfield and would
recommend it to anyone that's spent time working as an engineer and is
interested in leveling up generally or refining a specific skill set."
Can you elaborate on the "full-time" part. In looking at the site it looks
like the independent course modules are each 4 weeks with two 3 hour sessions
a week for $1800 each. Were you somehow able to take multiple modules per week
for each of the 10 weeks? If so how many did you do? Thanks,
~~~
cusack
Yeah i did it last November when the courses were structured to be done as a
full-time program. They've restructured to make it compatible with having a
full-time job simultaneously. I think they've still had students take all
courses concurrently though, even with the new model. Worth sending @oz a
note!
~~~
bogomipz
Was there any type of discount for taking multiple classes? I looked on the
site and didn't see any mention but at $1800 each module it sounds very pricey
to take them simultaneously.
~~~
cusack
The price structure was slightly different then since he was all bought as one
package, but still about the same cost overall. It is pricey, but a great ROI
from both a base salary standpoint (you can pretty reasonably ask for a raise
once you're back) and a deep gratification of being more skilled in your craft
than you were 3months ago :)
------
modalduality
Recurse Center: [https://www.recurse.com/](https://www.recurse.com/).
Anecdotally, not so easy to get in.
~~~
sotojuan
OP here. I'm an alum! Fall 1 2016. It's not quite the same thing - RC is self-
directed. You do what you want instead of following a course or teacher.
~~~
giggles_giggles
Summer '13 saying hi from across the batches. Self-directed, but plenty of
experienced folks to rub off on you, in my experience. The diversity of
experience at RC was incredible when I was there. Definitely fantasize about
going back for another batch sometimes -- I know so much more now and I'd get
so much out of doing it a second time.
------
soham
[Disclaimer: Shameless self-promotion]
We run something called Interview Kickstart:
[http://Interviewkickstart.com](http://Interviewkickstart.com) .
It's a part-time bootcamp focused on preparing for technical interviews at
(so-called) top-tier places i.e. places which interview heavily in DS/Algos
and Large Scale Design for their core engineering roles, and also make
staggeringly high offers. Think G/F/A/Netflix/Amazon/MS etc.
It is intense and also taught by Sr. Engineers working in core systems at
these places. There is a rigorous academic take to it, with homework, tests,
mock interviews etc.
A little known fact, is that many people come to the program with no intent to
look for a job. They are already at good places, paid well, and just want to
get better as an engineer, which I think is what you're looking for.
Many have figured out, that the structure and the forcing function challenges
them to be better. Most of your peers will have backgrounds in CS/CS, and
you'll also see people coming FROM some of the same companies others are
aspiring to go to (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft etC).
We start an online cohort every month, where people join from all over US and
Canada (and sometimes even other countries).
Feel free to check it out.
~~~
Retric
Just a suggestion for possible improvements... Looking at the sight I really
just wanted two questions answered. How much time? How much money?
The first took a while to find: _Two 4 to 6-hour sessions per week, for 8
weeks. 200+ hours of work._
The second looks sketchy: _Tuition: Not cheap_
~~~
soham
Thanks! Will consider. With that comment on pricing, we just want to deter
people who think this can be done cheaply.
~~~
OJFord
Isn't it possible that someone considers whatever your price is to be 'cheap'?
Why not just list the price, and deter whoever's deterred?
------
crispyambulance
Advanced folks will have very specific needs that are hard to meet for any
course with a pre-determined curriculum.
Perhaps a better approach would be to hire an expert from a consultancy,
negotiate a detailed custom curriculum together and go from there? It would
certainly be expensive but perhaps within reach for a small group or for
heavily motivated individuals?
~~~
xxSparkleSxx
I have had the same thought about college-courses. Why have 100+ people paying
2k+ for a course being taught by a grad student.
If you could cut out the middlemen (schools), we could probably get better
"professors" (i.e. one of the best people in the field - im sure people in
industry would love to pick up an extra 10-20k to teach 1 class a year) for
cheaper and in smaller class room settings.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........Just gotta figure out how to do the signaling
properly so businesses will look at the classes you took and think 'I want to
hire that person.'
~~~
sbov
That's what you get for going to a research school: grad students teaching
classes. I went to a non research school (a CSU) back in the early 2000s, and
all classes were taught by real professors, but it isn't as prestigious as a
Stanford or Berkeley. Beyond that, the teachers for night classes were all
from industry. I took a graphics class taught by someone who previously worked
on OpenGL at SGI, a database class taught by someone who was at the time
working on DB2 at IBM, and a j2ee class taught by someone who at the time was
working at Sun Microsystems.
------
zumu
How about moocs? Am algorithms class will level you up for sure.
[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/algorithms](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/algorithms)
comes to mind.
------
austenallred
Lambda Academy of Computer Science - a six month, full-time deep dive into
software engineering and computer science. Closer to a CS degree than a one-
month bootcamp. You need to know basic programming before enrolling.
It's free up-front and takes a percentage of income after you get a job, or
you can pay up-front.
[https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science](https://lambdaschool.com/computer-
science)
(I'm a co-founder, happy to answer any questions)
~~~
sosodaft
I'm a currently-employed web developer (bootcamp grad) and I'd love to see a
part-time (nights and/or weekends), cash up front offering to deepen my CS
knowledge. Just throwing that out there in case part-time something you guys
have thought about. I'm sure I'm not the only bootcamp grad that could use an
in-depth CS program.
~~~
austenallred
Yeah, we think about it a lot. We want to be very careful about scaling into
something like that because the part-time dynamic is very different than full-
time, and the most important thing to us is our student experience.
It would also be long, if we used the current curriculum. Like... a year long.
We're not sure if that's too much of a commitment for most folks, so we're
asking.
~~~
hello_newman
I'm in a similar boat to the person above (bootcamp grad working as software
developer). I have been trying to do a comp-sci degree but that cost, degree
requirements (classes unrelated to my major) and actually going to school
after work is a major pain. I would definitely pay for a year long (or more)
part time CS course if it was intense and online. I'm doing that already, but
it would save me a lot of time/money of not having to actually commute to
school.
~~~
austenallred
Cool. Mind if I email you to ask a few questions?
~~~
hello_newman
that sounds great!
------
otterpro
Big Nerd's Ranch
([https://www.bignerdranch.com/](https://www.bignerdranch.com/)) especialy for
mobile app development. Their bootcamp is called "retreat", and they also work
as developers and publish books.
~~~
randomstep
disclaimer: I am an instructor for Big Nerd Ranch, teaching our various iOS
courses. That said, I came to BNR after being blown away by the quality of
their Mac programming book, years ago. I believe deeply in what we do.
tl;dr: Big Nerd Ranch offers short retreats for intermediate and advanced
instructors. They are not cheap but they are thorough and powerful, as long as
you're willing to put in the work.
Details: We have short (typically 5 day), intensive courses. The instructor
leads the class through a series of lectures and intense labs, building out
real applications throughout the week. The instructor works with each student
to help them maximize what they can learn and achieve during the week.
There is no magic for scaling across different ability levels, but there are
ways to do this better or worse. Our courses target intermediate to advanced
level learners. We intentionally build our chapters, demonstrations, and
lectures to be very dense with material. For the advanced students, they're
able to glean API gotchas and sharp corners, as well as real world tips
(pretty much all our instructors are also active consulting developers), and
lots of looks at different working practices. Seeing another developer work is
a great way to learn new techniques.
For intermediate or closer to beginner students, they won't that level of
detail as much, as they're still absorbing all the new APIs, design patterns,
and details necessary to just get apps building and shipping.
Our courses allow you to get out what you put in. In other words, there's not
any particular magic to leveling up. You have to put in the hard work
yourself. But I believe our retreat-style approach - where we remove or take
care of all possible distractions, and provide expert aid at your call - gives
you the best chance to maximize how much you can learn in a week. Food and
lodging is included. You'll spend the week learning, programming, and going
for hikes every day. It's sort of my ideal world. :D
We don't call them bootcamps half-heartedly. You'll be exhausted by Friday.
But if we've done our job right, you'll feel like you've just shortcut several
months of work in leveling up as a developer.
~~~
bogomipz
>"That said, I came to BNR after being blown away by the quality of their Mac
programming book, years ago. I believe deeply in what we do"
So can the same level proficiency be gained by either the book or the retreat?
Is there parity there then?
------
zengr
I have done CodePath twice and highly recommend for iOS and android bootcamps.
[https://codepath.com/](https://codepath.com/)
~~~
bogomipz
The site states:
>"Students must pass a rigorous selection process to be admitted to any of our
programs."
Would you be able to share what that selection process entails exactly?
~~~
calren24
From my experience, selection process was submitting your resume, going
through a short phone screen (15-20 minutes, mostly just chatting about why
you're interested and your background) and completing a intro project (it took
me around 8-10 hours)
------
gaius
At this level you should probably just take a Masters. I did mine part time
over 2 years while working full time. Many if not most good colleges will
offer some sort of programme.
------
baron816
I highly recommend Frontend Masters:
[https://frontendmasters.com/courses/](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/).
Lots of different courses taught by the likes of Douglas Crockford, Kyle
Simpson, Ryan Chenkie, and Kent C Dodds. It's not just front end stuff--they
cover data structures and algorithms, building REST apis, Electron and React
Native, testing and debugging, functional programming, prototyping, and even
SEO.
------
jbot29
I have been working on this idea for a little bit. Started putting together a
list of intermediate projects for people that finished a bootcamp. It is still
in its infancy. I ran a programming bootcamp for a year and a half and think
there is a need for this, but still figuring out the right way.
[https://github.com/Jbot29/intermediate-programming-
projects](https://github.com/Jbot29/intermediate-programming-projects)
------
eorge_g
This is heavy ruby/rails focused but has other content as well. Tagline is
"Get the junior out of your title"
[https://thoughtbot.com/upcase/](https://thoughtbot.com/upcase/)
~~~
chriswoodford
I've been advocating Upcase to Junior Rails devs for a couple years now. Has a
lot of great content around improving your testing skills, refactoring, and
best practices for object oriented design.
although most of the content is ruby/rails based, the concepts are widely
applicable to improving your skills as a software engineer.
------
spudsfurious
Profuse apologies in that this is not a so-called boot camp type avenue, but
if you're really interested in some computer science concepts, UMass Dartmouth
offers a computer science certificate.
[http://www.umassd.edu/extension/programs/computerscienceonli...](http://www.umassd.edu/extension/programs/computerscienceonlinecertificate/)
~~~
spudsfurious
And.. what I forgot to add was that you really don't need to take the
certificate. Look at a few of the 'foundation' courses they offer online for
people without a CS undergrad, most notably:
CIS 322 Data Structures and Fundamental Algorithms CIS 323 Fundamentals of
Computer Systems
------
sixhobbits
I'm working with Hyperion Development[0] which has a wide variety of online
bootcamps with 1:1 mentor support. We have courses targeting beginner,
intermediate, and advanced. Currently we are just about to deploy a big update
but have a look and you might find what you are looking for.
[0] [https://hyperiondev.com](https://hyperiondev.com)
~~~
bogomipz
Asking people for all of their contact details in order to simply read course
descriptions seems pretty lame. I also can't imagine that's doing the business
any favors.
~~~
sixhobbits
I'll submit this as feedback to our team :)
------
mcx
If you're in SF: [https://bradfieldcs.com/](https://bradfieldcs.com/)
~~~
jtmcmc
has anyone had experience with this? I'd love to get some actual reviews of
this place?
~~~
ozanonay
Hi! I'm one of the instructors, if you ping me at [email protected] I can
connect you with past students or answer any questions you have :)
------
valbaca
Udacity Nanodegrees are geared toward "post-beginners looking to specialize"
(my words, not theirs).
[https://www.udacity.com/nanodegree](https://www.udacity.com/nanodegree)
For example, the Android nanodegree assumes you're already familiar with Java
and OOP, but not with Android.
The "Full Stack Web Developer Nanodegree" suggests you have "Beginner-level
experience in Python." (direct quote) [https://www.udacity.com/course/full-
stack-web-developer-nano...](https://www.udacity.com/course/full-stack-web-
developer-nanodegree--nd004)
These courses are not cheap, they take a lot of time, but if you have the time
and money, they are absolutely worth it IMO.
~~~
parthdesai
If you are at intermediate level, you can always just follow video
lectures/assignments for free and try to improve on your own. That's what i
do.
------
vikp
I'm the founder of Dataquest
([https://www.dataquest.io](https://www.dataquest.io)) -- we teach data
science online from the basics, and have a comprehensive curriculum that
includes machine learning, spark, and data visualization. You can skip the
Python basics and start with more intermediate/advanced material (and build
your own projects!).
We also have a data engineering path that teaches more CS fundamentals, and
may be a good fit (this is still being developed, but has a few courses).
------
yamalight
Shameless self-promotion:
If you are interested in front-end and/or node.js courses (javascript, react,
webpack, all that kind of stuff) - I've been doing a free open source course
called "Building products with javascript" [1] that is aimed at
intermediate/advanced developers who want to learn javascript more in-depth.
[1] [https://github.com/yamalight/building-products-with-
js](https://github.com/yamalight/building-products-with-js)
------
southphillyman
Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't most bootcamps geared toward preparing
people for jobs? I feel like in this current market having to attend a
bootcamp as a experienced developer would send off negative signals about
one's ability to stay up on current tech/trends.
------
luckycharms810
Highly recommend 'Design of Computer Programs' on Udacity. Its a 300 level
class taught by Peter Norvig, and while the quizzes and homework's aren't
terribly challenging, its a great way to learn how to break down problems for
an intermediate developer.
------
lukas
I've been teaching classes on machine learning for engineers (shameless self
promotion: [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/technical-introduction-to-ai-
ma...](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/technical-introduction-to-ai-machine-
learning-deep-learning-tickets-34671486349))
One of the coolest parts of teaching these classes is how awesome the people
are that show up. The engineers that want to learn new things mid career are
exactly the kind of people I want to work with and hang out with. I think
there's a real opportunity for more classes like this.
------
markfer
I've actually been thinking about starting a Sales bootcamp aimed at teaching
technical founders, or people with no background in sales.
Not sure if there would be any interest though.
~~~
fillskills
That would be VERY USEFUL. Speaking as a tech founder who had to learn and
appreciate sales after launch.
~~~
markfer
Mind if I email you with some more questions?
------
nilkn
This is not exactly what you're looking for, but it's somewhat similar and may
be of interest to some readers of this thread.
The Google Brain team accepts residents:
[https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/](https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/)
It's similar to a one-year research-focused advanced degree in machine
learning (with the focus being, of course, entirely on deep learning).
------
seanlane
MIT's OpenCourseWare [1] has a lot of great material that's as rigorous and
in-depth as anywhere you'll ever find. I've been using it to supplement and
extend areas where my alma mater's curriculum has fallen a bit short, or where
I just want to focus.
[1] [https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm](https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm)
------
werber
Not a bootcamp, but egghead.io is a fantastic resource, and udemy can be an
awesome resource for specific classes (but there is a lot of junk to wade
through)
------
shadyrudy
Want to learn SQL Server from the best? Check out SQL Skills:
[https://www.sqlskills.com/sql-server-training/immersion-
even...](https://www.sqlskills.com/sql-server-training/immersion-events-
schedule/) They are the best and most comprehensive. Not associated with them,
but a long time, satisfied customer.
------
prettygenius
Does anyone have experience with [https://www.udemy.com/intermediate-advanced-
java-programming...](https://www.udemy.com/intermediate-advanced-java-
programming/)? I've been eyeballing it for a while, $10 is cheap but I'm
afraid that's also indicative of the quality.
------
zitterbewegung
Although, part of the program is an intro to python development (which you can
easily skip) [https://www.dataquest.io/](https://www.dataquest.io/) is a set
of guided lessons that teach you data analysis/science/engineering .
------
mjhea0
I am building out an advanced-beginner course at
[http://testdriven.io/](http://testdriven.io/). It details how to set up a set
of microservices with Flask and Docker. Let me know your thoughts. Cheers!
------
shalperin
I'm surprised that Coursera and Udacity don't figure higher in the responses.
There are a tonne of advanced algorithms, machine learning, data science, and
domain specific stuff on there like computational biology and computational
neuroscience.
------
tarheeljason
For data science:
[http://insightdatascience.com/](http://insightdatascience.com/) only accepts
those who have completed a PhD
~~~
mindcrime
That has to be one of the weirdest things I've ever heard in my life. You
don't need a PhD to do data science. Hell, most companies would be taking a
huge step forward if they got somebody who knows how to do linear regression.
------
asimpletune
There's a great option here in SF called BradfieldCS.
------
jancsika
> I'm past the stage where I need a course on Python syntax or HTML.
It's hard to guess what stage you are at.
What have you built so far in Python?
------
Maven911
this is more of an AI bent to it but I have heard good things about the
following in NY that comes with a job placement:
[http://ivydatascience.com/](http://ivydatascience.com/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Truth About Reddit - followmylee
http://adage.com/article/the-media-guy/truth-reddit-unnecessary-apology/241277/
======
zalzane
>You know what? Humans, especially during times of crisis and confusion,
speculate. They do it offline and, in 2013, they increasingly do it online.
The fact of the matter is that one of the Boston suspects (later revealed to
be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) seen in the early grainy surveillance-video stills
released by the FBI did resemble Tripathi.
I dont really understand this section. Is the author trying to defend reddit's
holier art thou attitude towards the world and their tendency to stick their
nose in matters they shouldnt in the name of internet justice?
>And Reddit actually has much better checks and balances in place -- thanks to
a combination of the upvote system and moderator intervention.
This is just plain false. Subreddits are not moderated by reddit employees,
only by the people who founded the subreddit and whoever they choose to
moderate the subreddit with them. This is why hate groups like /r/atheism and
fox-news-tier biased news subreddits like /r/poltics can exist. Hell, the only
visible admin-intervention I've ever heard of on reddit was when they took
down the child porn reddits, and even that required -two- pieces by major news
outlets on how reddit was hosting child porn.
The upvote/downvote system is literally only useful for propagating
viral/interesting content. Far too many people are relying on reddit as a news
source nowadays, and thanks to the upvote/downvote system, all it takes is 51%
disapproval for an article to virtually disappear. Since everyone uses the
downvote button to say "i dont like this content" rather than "this content
isnt good/isnt relevant", you get lots of wonderful skews. This is why
/r/poltics has such a intense liberal bias - all it takes is a 51% of the
users to disapprove of an article that supports republicans in order for the
submission to disappear from view of everyone else. Imagine how horrible the
news would be if an entire political viewpoint is censored just because the
majority believes differently. That's news on reddit.
~~~
lowboy
> Subreddits are not moderated by reddit employees, only by the people who
> founded the subreddit and whoever they choose to moderate the subreddit with
> them
That's still moderation - the article didn't say that the moderation was from
admins or reddit staff. Also, there are reddit-wide rules[0] that apply
regardless of sub.
Also, r/atheism isn't a hate group. There's plenty of asshats and the
occasional hateful post, but it's not a hate group in general. Take a look at
the sub[1] on any given day, and most of it isn't hateful
[0]: <http://www.reddit.com/rules/>
[1]: <http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/>
~~~
err_badprocrast
OK, easy example. Top item right now on r/atheism (only sample taken, you
couldn't pay me to visit that subreddit):
[http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1e0vcv/if_there_is_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1e0vcv/if_there_is_a_god_words_carved_into_the_cell_wall/)
A few comments down (above the fold on even a tiny monitor) we have this
exchange:
Poster talking about his Holocaust-surviving grandfather (32 upvotes):
"My grandfather became a believer, but he didn't go all orthodox. He just
believed. His reasoning was that if it weren't for god - he would have died
many times during the war."
The reply, with 100 upvotes:
"Explanations like that are precisely what makes me hate religion. When people
tell themselves these things, they betray an inner conviction that they are
somehow better and more special than the countless men women and children who
died at the hands of the Nazis. Makes me sick when people say things like
that."
Link to comment:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1e0vcv/if_there_is_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1e0vcv/if_there_is_a_god_words_carved_into_the_cell_wall/c9vtodx)
~~~
mindcrime
So what's your point exactly? You could argue that that comment is
insensitive, maybe even caustic... you could argue that the person who posted
it is a bit of an ass probably. But how does any of that support the idea that
/r/atheism is a "hate group"?
~~~
err_badprocrast
I agree "hate group" is stronger wording than would be appropriate (at any
rate I don't want to quibble over a definition of that term) but I personally
dislike intolerance - and I avoid forums[1] where it is considered upvote-
worthy rhetoric.
There are insensitive and caustic comments _everywhere_ \- but when they are
promoted through upvotes they discourage participation from affected
individuals, breeding an environment where people only feel welcome if they
subscribe to the dominant opinions. This results in a hollow echo chamber,
which is not a satisfactory equilibrium for any forum trying to encourage
healthy discussion.
1\. Pre-internet definition of forum.
~~~
mindcrime
Fair enough. I also _generally_ dislike intolerance, but I do have my areas
where I find it hard to be tolerant. As an atheist, I have very little use for
religion, religious dogma or teachings, etc., and I think that religion is
actively harmful to society. So in that regard, I'm probably not so far
removed from the guy you quoted above. But... I have no problem being tolerant
of religious _people_ in that I don't find much need to go around trying to
convince everybody who isn't an atheist that they are an idiot, or doing the
inverse of what I have having done to me - excessive proselytizing. I'm not
out to convince Christians or Hindus or Muslims, etc. to disavow their faith.
But when I come across situations (public education, for example) where
religious beliefs start affecting things that I believe belong outside the
bounds of religion, then I start to get a bit prickly about the whole thing as
well.
I guess that was just a long-winded way of saying "it's complicated".
The other thing I'll add is this: I do visit /r/atheism, albeit infrequently.
And you're probably right that it's not a particularly nice place to visit for
people who are actively religious. That doesn't bother me only because I go in
with the assumption that they aren't going to be there, aren't interested in
being there, and that the few who do come in and stick around are the kind of
people who can look past the stylistic stuff and still engage in a
conversation which is - hopefully - enlightening for both sides.
I guess that was a long-winded way of saying "it's all about expectations".
Nonetheless, I can understand why you might shy away from /r/atheism. That
place has it's own character and it's not for everybody. But what forum is?
------
pavel_lishin
> _3\. If you regularly read Reddit, it makes the rest of the internet seem
> stale._
This is absolutely true; it's actually very interesting watching a new 'meme'
make its way through the internet, and then the personal, pipeline. In the
morning you'll see a reddit post, in the afternoon your friends will send you
links to it, and your mom will mention it to you when you call her that night.
> _it's not like Reddit is a major focus of corporate attention, either._
And thank $DEITY - the last thing we (it) need(s) is an owner trying to
exploit it for another subsidiary's benefit.
On the other hand, it's been long speculated that Reddit is constantly being
gamed, that corporate voting cabals are responsible for advertising content
rising to the front page, and plenty of other news sources lift information
without bothering to credit Reddit or its users.
~~~
nhm
_> In the morning you'll see a reddit post, in the afternoon your friends will
send you links to it, and your mom will mention it to you when you call her
that night._
Increase that timescale to days for friends and weeks for parents, and you'll
be about right.
~~~
jiggy2011
It's interesting how some nerdy phrases/memes have made their way into the
mainstream.
I was watching the UK Apprentice the other day and during the "boardroom"
scene they were showing a group of stylish , upwardly mobile, adult business
women arguing about whether or not something was an "epic fail".
The term "epic fail" is a reference to an obscure neogeo game called blazing
star which I doubt any of these women would ever have played.
------
Centigonal
I think this article may be overstating the point through its use of the term
"mainstream media" to refer to sites like the Gawker Media network. Those guys
have had the same business model for upward of a decade, and the only change
the rise of sites like Reddit has made to that model is that it's now even
easier for them to find content to syndicate.* When The Washington Post and
the New Yorker and the BBC are sourcing their big stories from Reddit -- that
is when I'd be alarmed.
*...err, syndicate implies paying the original content owners. Is there a word for credited and monetized reproduction of media without profit sharing?
~~~
cerales
Indeed. Nice little sleight of hand where the article reference "mainstream
media" and then switches to "mainstream blog media" before citing any
examples.
------
purplelobster
Reddit's gradual decline has long ago tipped the scales. I was on reddit
starting '08 I think, so I didn't see what the initial community was like, it
was already fairly big by then, but nowhere near what it is today.
Just a few days ago, there was this trailer on the front page, for a movie
with mecha robots fighting godzillas or something, and it was just...
terrible. For whatever reason, maybe to get some reassurance, I read the
comments. 3000 people falling over themselves wanking over it. In disbelief I
loaded more and more comments just to try and find at least one negative
comment. What are these people, 17 year-olds? And then it hit me. They ARE 17
year-olds.
I get it, subreddits blah blah blah, but there's no point. Sticking to
subreddits destroys the sense of community which is so important for online
forums. When the front page is dominated by teenagers, how long do you think
others will stick to the site? Not to mention, having to log in to see your
own specialized front page is a hassle when you're on many devices and don't
really care enough to have an active account. Subreddit discovery is also too
difficult, and then there's the whole filter bubble going on. I'd prefer a
general purpose forum with higher quality people than hiding in some corner of
a site dominated by teenagers.
More and more, HN is filling that purpose for me, with a healthy balance of
tech and non-tech. I sort of wish there was a separation between "tech" and
"general" though, so that the general discussions could expand without
affecting the tech side of things.
~~~
skinnymuch
What movie was it? If it was Pacific Rim as it sounds like, then that reaction
could make sense. Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) is directing
it.
It might not be that movie though. Still, have you seen the top raved about
films on HN (there was a frontpage show hn on this recently)? Pretty obvious,
typical choices. And there is nothing wrong with that. I'm cool with your
reddit opinions. Just weird to use comments about a movie as an example
against reddit and then swing over to endorsing HN.
~~~
purplelobster
It was Pacific Rim, but regardless of director (loved Pan's Labyrinth), this
movie is clearly catering to the Michael Bay mindless action crowd which,
while having fans of all ages, generally are targeted at teenagers. Maybe
that's disputable? Personally I don't think so... Also, it's not so much that
people loved the trailer, more that it was 3000 comments of people explaining
how much they "just came", and not a single critical voice. I really doubt
that would be the case on HN if it had been submitted/allowed here.
~~~
skinnymuch
Yeah, HN probably wouldn't have gushing, juvenile, and repetitive comments,
one after another like reddit did.
But still, the movies that are gushed about here are so typical and mainstream
and many times mirror imdb's top movies that it really makes any case of
trying to use movie opinions to show HN as better than Reddit rather silly.
------
tokenadult
From the submission: "Reddit's longtime tagline is 'The front page of the
internet,' but it could just as easily be 'The crib sheet for weary bloggers
who need to hit page-view quotas.'"
Yep. I've learned mostly to tune out any incidental mention I see of such
"stories" in the news-seeking methods I use. I'm not a fan of linkbait-style
stories wherever they come from.
"If you regularly read Reddit, it makes the rest of the internet seem stale."
I don't regularly read Reddit, so I don't put the hypothesis of this statement
to the test, but I find plenty of interesting things to read online without
Reddit, so I think I can live without Reddit.
"Simon Dumenco is the 'Media Guy' media columnist for Advertising Age."
I was expecting him to explain how Reddit might actually make money to recover
the large investment that went into buying out Reddit from its founders, but I
see no explanation of that in the article. It's still not clear to me how
Reddit can ever become anything other than a community of free-riders.
~~~
alaskamiller
Maybe I should have wrote the article. I have a 6 year badge on Reddit. In a
few more months it'll roll over to be a 7 year badge.
Currently the various revenue streams:
1\. Reddit Gold. Pay $3 for a month of pure margins for Reddit. In return the
user gets account modifications, minor UX tweaks, ability to save links.
Within the community it's often used to reward others for their posts or
contributions. Often gets handed out in the larger more mainstream subreddits,
especially AskReddit where the user generated content worthy of merit earn one
or two or sometimes even ten little gold stars.
2\. Ads. Self-service model, pay $20 and get crazy CPMs from a group of people
that have adblock on.
3\. Merchandise. T-shirts out the wazoo. Reddit makes $5 to $8 a shirt from
official channels and various other knick knacks from redditgifts.com
4\. Exchanges. You buy exchange credits to trade amongst each other in the
community, things like socks, shirts, snacks. They keep exploring new
verticals, now there are comics and a variety of other things.
Reddit has the same problem as Tumblr. They both essentially are feeds that's
replaced Facebook for a big demographics that in turn has replaced television
with said feeds.
Tumblr is embracing native ads, they opened an LA office to better interface
with media buyers. They're shooting for the moon on closing 6 figure accounts
to sell more native ads.
Reddit is going the less glamorous route.
We'll see who wins.
------
ultimoo
Most of the default subreddits could be classified not only as mainstream but
also much diluted from what they were a few years ago. The way I use the site
nowadays I entirely unsubscribed from most of the default subreddits.
In the smaller subreddits, karma doesn't matter as much as the rest of the
site, which is what makes them better IMO. YMMV though.
------
420365247
a few years ago Reddit was a totally differant community. I think word got out
and more and more people got into it and it evolved into what it has
become...i still head over there once in a while, but most of the posts are
not any good anyhow...reminds me of the old DIGG
~~~
burntsushi
Eh. I absolutely agree with this analysis for the major subreddits. The
ecosystem and quality of content has definitely decreased.
However, I still find plenty of very high quality content in smaller
subreddits. I wasn't a Digg user myself, but I suspect the subreddit aspect of
reddit is the difference maker: folks seeking HQ content can stick around in
the smaller corners while the more popular corners of reddit become
mainstream.
And here's an anecdote: over the years, I've noticed more and more of my non-
technical friends becoming reddit users. But most of them seem almost
oblivious to the fact that there are subreddits outside of the ones you're
subscribed to by default.
[EDIT] - spelling, thanks sliverstorm
~~~
longone
I completely agree. Reddit, for me, would be useless without niche subreddits.
There was a time when you could go to the front page and find links to some
really interesting articles or videos, but these days its "guess which
celebrity I met and look at the funny pose they made." Thats fine and all but
just not for me. However, I can still subscribe to smaller subreddits and have
good discussions with people.
I'm finding the same thing with friends as well. The popularity of that site
has jumped so much in the last two years or so. I feel like an old man.
------
JoeKM
I find subreddits that have disabled image posting to be far more insightful
and interesting. Once a subreddit allows image posting it degrades to memes,
unless it's properly moderated.
------
sk5t
This was not an informative article--quite superficial unless one knows
nothing about Reddit.
------
6ren
> state-of-the-art-circa-1998, text-centric user interface
Said like it's a bad thing... reddit works great on less powerful devices, and
doesn't crash my browser, unlike mainstream websites usually do (actually,
almost always).
Dear "Mainstream" "Print" media: 1. if it only runs on later devices, it's not
_mainstream_ , it's niche; 2. _print_ can be done with text, it doesn't need
to be pictorial, video, audio, interactive, nor assembling 20 webservices and
APIs from across the universe.
------
orangethirty
Reddit is also a great tool for marketing and sourcing talent.
------
nilved
I thought this would be able the misogyny, racism and paedophilia.
~~~
NegativeK
That's just the internet in general.
~~~
cerales
And yet reddit is corporate-owned, being hailed ITT as "the mainstream media",
and there's plenty of evidence of senior Reddit moderators showing solidarity
for the more criminal subreddits. Defending Reddit's dark side by comparing it
to the wild world of message boards and comment sections is disingenuous:
Reddit has a pervasive culture of "free speech" at all costs, and this is a
consequence of it
~~~
voltagex_
>showing solidarity for the more criminal subreddits.
Like?
~~~
timpattinson
/r/picsofdeadkids /r/beatingwomen
~~~
prawn
I know the original remark was "more criminal", but are these criminal or
tasteless and ugly?
------
cuillevel3
Threads like these show the ongoing decline of hacker news.
~~~
michaelwww
I'm not sure what criteria you are using to form this opinion. I took a look
at the front page from 2 years ago and it looks about the same to me.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110505135841/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110505135841/http://news.ycombinator.com/)
------
thoughtcriminal
The truth about Reddit is that it's a clone of Digg, and Digg was a clone of
Slashdot.
Hacker News is a clone of Slashdot too. Just giving credit where credit is
due.
~~~
wslh
They are technical clones but not social clones. The technical part in some
way is irrelevant.
~~~
jbooth
It's a mix, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message>
Certain commenting schemes lend themselves to "loudest retard gets most
visibility" and some attempt to steer towards the opposite.
~~~
mtowle
>FIRST
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
China Says Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong No Longer Binding (2017) - CameronNemo
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-anniversary-china-idUSKBN19L1J1
======
nabla9
If UK wants to stay involved and be responsible, they should grant British
passport to every HK citizen who was citizen when before handover and their
descendants.
They should have done that before the handover.
~~~
benj111
The Britain that post Brexit will be in desperate need of a trade deal, will
be offered a really really bad one by the US that will never be accepted by
those that actually voted for Brexit, so those same people will go shopping
around for anyone that can possibly replace the EU and US, at the very least
if only to give them leverage against the US?
I don't think Britain can afford to be pissing off China right now.
~~~
pimmen
Roughly half of the UK did not want Brexit at all though and wouldn't be that
swell to hear that they have to appease a dictatorship now.
I doubt Boris Johnson could pull that off with such a razor thin majority in
parliament.
However, I do agree that China is _an_ option even though it's an unrealistic
one and its reception domestically, if the UK has to do major concessions to
get it in place quickly, is probably not going to be warm. But, the UK can't
afford to have _no_ options on the table.
~~~
benj111
"Roughly half of the UK did not want Brexit at all though and wouldn't be that
swell to hear that they have to appease a dictatorship now"
Id count myself in that half, that isnt the half motivated by ideals of
sovereignty and control of their own destiny at the expense of all else, plus
that half isnt currently in the drivers seat so I kept that half out of the
discussion.
------
basicplus2
A thought experiment..
What if a country would say to every Hong Kong person.. come to our country,
build a new Hong Kong in our country, tranplant the whole there, and be free,
bringing all the culture and business with you
~~~
Nux
Nobody will say that. Plus, it was a very specific set of conditions and
circumstances that led to Hong Kong being what it is, leading to the present
days. You can't just transplant it.
~~~
DissidentSci
To be fair, the set of conditions and circumstances cropped up in Singapore as
well. One could be forgiven for thinking that if the circusmtances could be
engineered then, they could be engineered now.
~~~
simonh
One of the main circumstances is a common border with the mainland with
proximity to Shenzhen. How do you engineer that?
------
rodneyzeng
The China can end the "two systems" policy to Hong Kong, in maybe 28 years or
so, and the world would treat Hong Kong as a mainland city, not a free trading
city, and Hong Kong passport should be the same as PRC passport. That is fair.
~~~
gravelc
One suspects many Hong Kong residents would see that differently.
There's been an outbreak of tensions between Chinese and Hong Kong students
here in Australia. Suspect it's only going to get worse, as the University
governing bodies and indeed the government itself seems paralysed. The Chinese
education dollar is huge here, which means everyone is very wary of causing
any offence, even when fights break out as happened a few weeks ago. Nothing
compared to what's going on in HK itself, but an interesting microcosm.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Free eBooks On Machine Learning - mhausenblas
http://efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=121516
======
phoen
The LION Way: Machine Learning plus Intelligent Optimization
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=9575](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=9575)
A Course in Machine Learning
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=9395](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=9395)
A First Encounter with Machine Learning
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=8818](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=8818)
Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=5283](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=5283)
Introduction to Machine Learning
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=4493](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=4493)
The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=3267](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=3267)
Reinforcement Learning by C. Weber, M. Elshaw, N. M. Mayer
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=3227](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=3227)
Machine Learning by Abdelhamid Mellouk, Abdennacer Chebira
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=2852](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=2852)
How Are We To Know? by Nils J. Nilsson
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=2710](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=2710)
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1825](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1825)
Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1774](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1774)
Machine Learning, Neural and Statistical Classification
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1118](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1118)
Introduction To Machine Learning
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1117](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1117)
Inductive Logic Programming: Techniques and Applications
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1105](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1105)
Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=32](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=32)
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
[http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=21](http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=21)
------
hengheng
The bad part about eBooks is that they always pile up. They are probably the
most non-read books in existence. Or why should I bother reading 16 eBooks on
the same topic, when reading a single good one would be the sane solution (the
one I'd choose for paper books)?
~~~
farresito
I certainly agree with you. Often, it's just better to buy a paper book than
try to read a little bit here and there. After all, paper books are not that
expensive. My personal problem is than I often buy books that I never end up
reading, or that I read after years (five, six, or even more). I'm pretty sure
I'm not the only one that suffers from this, though.
------
hbbio
Interesting.
I didn't knew that the Hastie/Tibshirani/Friedman was legally available as a
free download. I would recommend it to anyone with a sufficient maths/stats
background.
~~~
tom_b
Yes, both 'The Elements of Statistical Learning' and 'An Introduction to
Statistical Learning with Applications in R' are available free in pdf.
For fans of hard copy, I recently found that if your local (university?)
library is a SpringerLink customer, you can purchase a print-on-demand copy of
either book for $26.99, which includes shipping. Interior pages are in black
and white (including the graphs), but that is a really cheap price for these
two.
Andrew Ng's course notes from his physical class at Stanford (CS 229 - Machine
Learning) are extensive and available as well at:
[http://cs229.stanford.edu/materials.html](http://cs229.stanford.edu/materials.html)
------
nocoment
Dangerous links (Google ad network masquerading as downloads of the content.)
First listing is from a commercial solver, rather sales oriented, though it
looks like the topics may not depend on it?
------
etherealG
i'd suggest following prof ng's free online course instead, just finished it a
few weeks ago and it's really good!
[https://class.coursera.org/ml-004/](https://class.coursera.org/ml-004/)
~~~
11001
I'd suggest going back to the original youtube[1] and course materials[2].
Coursera version is nothing but a hand-wavy watered down "feel good" version
of the original class. I also really like the Caltech's take "Learning from
data"[3]
[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E)
[2] [http://cs229.stanford.edu/](http://cs229.stanford.edu/)
[3]
[http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html](http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html)
~~~
etherealG
sorry but i disagree. the in video questions, the randomised problem sets, all
the coursera stuff really helped me to learn the ideas.
------
kurumo
While not free, 'Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective'
([http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0262018020](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0262018020))
is the best book I have found so far. I also second the recommendations for
Tibshirani's and MacKay's books; the former for mathematical foundations, the
latter for the intuition.
------
alleycat
[http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-
Bu...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Building-
Applications/dp/0596529325)
I found this to be quite a good introduction.
~~~
gautamnarula
I also have this book and highly recommend it.
------
nichochar
First of all thanks for sharing. I would like to study machine learning. I
have a good code and math background. Which of these books is the most
recommended?
~~~
snotrockets
"The Elements of Statistical Learning" is great. It assumes an astute reader,
but if you've made it through some post-graduate level work, you'd be fine.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Good SDK for client-to-client game prototype in the browser? - justindz
I have an idea for an iPhone game that I'd like to prove out first without diving in to an Intel mac, iPhone and dev license. The concept should be demonstrable through the browser, but it's a kind of head-to-head game where some content comes to and from a content server, but the logic would all be between two players fighting each other on different machines. Graphics wouldn't be too fancy.<p>Can anyone recommend an SDK or set of technology to do this? Most of my experience is with web app development using Rails, Sinatra, Django, etc. I'm thinking that the client-side logic and graphics would be more suited to something like Flash or Silverlight or whether I could actually pull this off with a ton of javascript. But, I don't know about network communications between two instances. Any tips or leads?
======
wmf
RTMFP or proxy all communication through the server, probably using Comet.
------
cpr
Cappuccino might be a good start, as it's pretty cognant to Objective-C, and
also provides the same kind of graphics primitives as you'd be using on the
iPhone.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
China’s awful internet speed has spread malware to millions of smartphones - d2fn
http://qz.com/506582/chinas-awful-internet-speed-has-spread-malware-to-millions-of-smartphones
======
voltagex_
Most of the links to non-Apple downloads of XCode from
[https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=xcode%206.4%20%E4%B8%8B%E8%BD%BD](https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=xcode%206.4%20%E4%B8%8B%E8%BD%BD)
seem to have been taken down.
If anyone else is interested, the SHA256 of XCode_6.4.dmg is
fc25d75f23d82084dd740d7e29d0e5adea96dd600d1e19bc86408c133d1edf66 but you
should verify that yourself as Apple don't seem to publish it (!).
This is one of those cases where a torrent + webseed would absolutely shine.
Many torrent clients will try to prioritise peers that are closer
geographically to speed up downloads.
------
voltagex_
I'm not sure that graph will be entirely accurate - it says the data comes
from Akamai - at least for my ISP in Australia they have an Akamai node about
15km away from me (not sure of cable length). Australia definitely shouldn't
be third on any graph of Internet speed.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What spiritual book had an effect on you? - zuzuleinen
======
hjek
Peter Singer: Animal Liberation
------
ammar_x
The Quran
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How the greatest startup program in Brazil is being killed by politics - pecanha
https://medium.com/@lhfaria/how-the-greatest-startup-program-in-brazil-is-being-killed-by-politics-cfce46034027
======
diegottg
#salveoSEED
------
robertavlv
#salveoSEED
------
claudiomeinberg
#salveoSEED
------
pedrosantiago
#voltaSeed
------
pedrovascon
#voltaSEED
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Systems that defy detailed understanding - a7b3fa
https://blog.nelhage.com/post/systems-that-defy-understanding/
======
Ididntdothis
I often wonder if things would be better if systems were less forgiving. I bet
people would pay more attention if the browser stopped rendering on JavaScript
errors or misformed HTML/CSS. This forgiveness seems to encourage a culture of
sloppiness which tends to spread out. I have the displeasure of looking at
quite a bit of PHP code. When I point out that they should fix the hundreds of
warnings the usual answer is “why? It works.” My answer usually is “are you
sure? “.
On the other hand maybe this forgiveness allowed us to build complex systems.
~~~
yuliyp
This often devolves into extremely fragile systems instead. For instance,
let's say you failed to load an image on your web site. Would you rather the
web site still work with the image broken or just completely fail? What if
that image is a tracking pixel? What if you failed to load some experimental
module?
Being able to still do something useful in the face of something not going
according to plan is essential to being reliable enough to trust.
~~~
twic
Systems need to be robust against uncontrollable failures, like a cosmic ray
destroying an image as it travels over the internet, because we can never
prevent those.
But systems should quickly and reliably surface bugs, which are controllable
failures.
A layer of suffering on top of that simple story is that it's not always clear
what is and what is not a controllable failure. Is a logic error in a
dependency of some infrastructure tooling somewhere in your stack controllable
or not? Somebody somewhere could have avoided making that mistake, but it's
not clear that you could.
An additional layer of suffering is that we have a habit of allowing this
complexity to creep or flood into our work and telling ourselves that it's
inevitable. The author writes:
> Once your system is spread across multiple nodes, we face the possibility of
> one node failing but not another, or the network itself dropping,
> reordering, and delaying messages between nodes. The vast majority of
> complexity in distributed systems arises from this simple possibility.
But somehow, the conclusion isn't "so we shouldn't spread the system across
multiple nodes". Yo Martin, can we get the First Law of Distributed Object
Design a bit louder for the people at the back?
[https://www.drdobbs.com/errant-
architectures/184414966](https://www.drdobbs.com/errant-
architectures/184414966)
And let us never forget to ask ourselves this question:
[https://www.whoownsmyavailability.com/](https://www.whoownsmyavailability.com/)
~~~
andai
> systems should quickly and reliably surface bugs, which are controllable
> failures
I was thinking, if the error exists between keyboard and chair, I want the
strictest failure mode to both catch it and force me to do things right the
first time.
But once the thing is up and running, I want it to be as resilient as
possible. Resource corrupted? Try again. Still can't load it? At this point,
in "release mode" we want a graceful fallback -- also to prevent eventual bit
rot. But during development it should be a red flag of the highest order.
~~~
numpad0
Are robustness and loose engineering the same/overlapping quality
measurements?
If so makes sense to be not strict, if not it’s you(and us all) rolling up two
different modes of failures into a single classification.
------
smitty1e
Great article.
Recalls Gall's Law[1]. "A complex system that works is invariably found to
have evolved from a simple system that worked."
Also, TFA invites a question: if handed a big ball of mud, is it riskier to
start from scratch and go for something more triumphant, or try to evolve the
mud gradually?
I favor the former, but am quite often wrong.
[1]
[https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gall](https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gall)
~~~
ssivark
> _if handed a big ball of mud, is it riskier to start from scratch and go for
> something more triumphant, or try to evolve the mud gradually?_
Reminiscent of Chesterton’s fence. But then, we end up in such a “complex”
situation only when one thing can have multiple causes & effects — which is
difficult to model correctly in a clean slate formulation.
The simplest solution seems to be to avoid making software that complex in the
first place (we can exert far more control than in the physical world).
But then if we think about Peter Naur’s perspective about programming as a
mode of theory building (of the domain) (unsurprising, given the basic
cybernetics principles such as the law of requisite variety & the good
regulator theorem), then the answer seems to be — unless your domain is really
complex, think hard before you implement, and keep refactoring as your
understanding improves (and truly to pick problem formulations / frameworks /
languages which make that feasible. Of course, easier said than done.) The key
point is to _keep refactoring “continuously“_ to match our understanding of
the domain, rather than just “adding features”.
Aside: In my experience, software built on a good understanding of the domain
will function well, untouched, for a long time — so long as it is suitably
decoupled from the less-well-understood parts. The latter kind, though,
generates constant churn, while also being an annoying fit. Really brings home
the adage _“A month in the laboratory can save a day in the library.”_
~~~
BurningFrog
> _The key point is to keep refactoring “continuously“ to match our
> understanding of the domain, rather than just “adding features”._
This is also what I wanted to say.
One important part of that is that refactoring is a pretty difficult skill,
and many programmers do not have it.
So... for those people, some other advice is probably better.
~~~
karmakaze
I wish this process was called 'factoring' and you had to be able to name the
concept that was being isolated. Often 'refactoring' just means moving code
around or isolating code for it's own sake. If a factor was properly isolated
you shouldn't have to do that one again. Sometimes you choose different
factors, but that's much less common.
~~~
mntmoss
"Factoring" is sometimes used in the Forth world, since code being factored
into small words is of such eminence.
And it offers good lessons about what's worth factoring and how. Forth words
that are just static answers and aliases are OK! They're lightweight, and the
type signatures are informal anyway. "Doing Forth" means writing it to exactly
the spec and not generalizing, so there's a kind of match of expectations of
the environment to its most devoted users.
On the other hand, in most modern environments the implied goal is to
generalize and piling on function arguments to do so is the common weapon of
choice, even when it's of questionable value.
Lately I've cottoned on to CUE as a configuration language and the beauty of
it lies in how generalization is achieved while resorting to a minimum of
explicit branches and checks, instead doing so through defining the data
specification around pattern matching and relying on a solver to find logical
incoherencies.
I believe that is really the way forward for a lot of domains: Get away from
defining the implementation as your starting point, define things instead in a
system with provable qualities, and a lot of possibilities open up.
------
mannykannot
Big balls of mud result from a process that resembles reinforcement learning,
in that modifications are made with a goal in mind and with testing to weed
out changes that are not satisfactory, but without any correct, detailed
theory about how the changes will achieve the goal without breaking anything.
~~~
bitwize
Sounds like all of Agile, really. One can characterize Agile as a ball-of-mud
maintenance process that scales desirably with the amount of mud.
------
carapace
"Introduction to Cybernetics" W. Ross Ashby
[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html)
> ... still the only real textbook on cybernetics (and, one might add, system
> theory). It explains the basic principles with concrete examples, elementary
> mathematics and exercises for the reader. It does not require any
> mathematics beyond the basic high school level. Although simple, the book
> formulates principles at a high level of abstraction.
~~~
AndrewKemendo
I find it really sad that cybernetics completely evaporated as a field with
the closest remnant being cognitive science. I think there is a huge need for
more interdisciplinary fields
~~~
carapace
A lot of it was incorporated or duplicated in feedback control theory, but
mostly in the context of industry, so it didn't really feed back (heh, sorry)
into other, more academic, areas. And, on the other hand, it spun off into
(IMO) fluffy "second-order" cybernetics and became a kind of toy philosophy.
I find it sad too. PID controllers are great but from my POV they're barely
the first step.
However, another way to look at it is, you can study and apply "Intro to Cyb"
and leapfrog into the future.
------
xyzzy2020
I think this is useful even for systems (SW stacks) that are much smaller and
"knowable": you start by observing, trying small things, observing more,
trying different things, observe more and slowly build a mental model of what
is likely happening and where.
His defining characteristic is where you can permanently work around a bug
(not know it, but know _of_ it) vs find it, know it, fix it.
Very interesting.
------
naringas
I firmly believe that _in theory_ all computer systems can be understood.
But I agree when he says, it has become impractical to do so. But I just don't
like it personally, I got into computing because it was supposed to be the
most explainable thing of all (until I worked with the cloud and it wasn't).
I highly doubt that the original engineers who designed the first microchips
and wrote the first compilers, etc... relied on 'empirical' tests to
understand their systems.
Yet, he is absolutely correct, it can no longer be understood, and when I
wonder why I think the economic incentives of the industry might be one of the
reasons?
for example, the fact that chasing crashes down the rabbit hole is "always a
slow and inconsistent process" will make any managerial decision maker feel
rather uneasy. This make sense.
Imagine if the first microprocessors where made by incrementally and
empirically throwing together different logic gates until it just sort of
worked??
------
jborichevskiy
> If you run an even-moderately-sophisticated web application and install
> client-side error reporting for Javascript errors, it’s a well-known
> phenomenon that you will receive a deluge of weird and incomprehensible
> errors from your application, many of which appear to you to be utterly
> nonsensical or impossible.
...
> These failures are, individually, mostly comprehensible! You can figure out
> which browser the report comes from, triage which extensions might be
> implicated, understand the interactions and identify the failure and a
> specific workaround. Much of the time.
> However, doing that work is, in most cases, just a colossal waste of effort;
> you’ll often see any individual error once or twice, and by the time you
> track it down and understand it, you’ll see three new ones from users in
> different weird predicaments. The ecosystem is just too heterogenous and
> fast-changing for deep understanding of individual issues to be worth it as
> a primary strategy.
Sadly far too accurate.
------
woodandsteel
From a philosophical perspective, I would say this is an example of the
inherent finitudes of human understanding. And I would add that such finitudes
are deeply intertwined with many other basic finitudes of human existence.
------
lucas_membrane
I suspect that systems that defy understanding demonstrate something that
ought to be a corollary of the halting problem, i.e. just as you can't figure
out for sure how long an arbitrary system will take to halt, or even figure
out for sure whether or not it will, neither can you figure out how long it
will take to figure out what's going on when an arbitrary system reaches an
erroneous state, or even figure out for sure whether or not you can figure it
out.
~~~
nil-sec
I’m not sure about this. Define your “erroneous” state as “halt”. Now the
question becomes, for a systems that halts, find out how it reached this
state. The mathematical answer to this is simply the description of the Turing
machine that produced this state. Whether you can understand this description
or not isn’t relevant.
------
natmaka
Postel's Robustness principle seems pertinent, along with "The Harmful
Consequences of the Robustness Principle". [https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-
thomson-postel-was-wrong-03....](https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-
postel-was-wrong-03.html)
------
INTPnerd
Even if you can reason about the code enough to come to a conclusion that
seems like it must be true, that doesn't prove your conclusion is correct.
When you figure something out about the code, whether through reason and
research, or tinkering and logging/monitoring, you should embed that knowledge
into the code, and use releases to production as a way test if you were right
or not.
For example, in PHP I often find myself wondering if perhaps a class I am
looking at might have subclasses that inherit from it. Since this is PHP and
we have a certain amount of technical debt in the code, I cannot 100% rely on
a tool to give me the answer. Instead I have to manually search through the
code for subclasses and the like. If after such a search I am reasonably sure
nothing is extending that class, I will change it to a "final" class in the
code itself. Then I will rerun our tests and lints. If I am wrong, eventually
an error or exception will be thrown, and this will be noticed. But if that
doesn't happen, the next programmer who comes along and wonders if anything
extends that class (probably me) will immediately find the answer in the code,
the class is final. This drastically reduces possibilities for what is
possible to happen, which makes it much easier to examine the code and
refactor or make necessary changes.
Another example is often you come across some legacy code that seems like it
no longer can run (dead code). But you are not sure, so you leave the code in
there for now. In harmony with this article, you might log or in some way
monitor if that path in the code ever gets executed. If after trying out
different scenarios to get it to run down that path, and after leaving the
monitoring in place on production for a healthy amount of time, you come to
the conclusion the code really is dead code, don't just add this to your
mental model or some documentation, embed it in the code as an absolute fact
by deleting the code. If this manifests as a bug, it will eventually be
noticed and you can fix it then.
By taking this approach you are slowly narrowing down what is possible and
simplifying the code in a way that makes it an absolute fact, not just a
theory or a model or a document. As you slowly remove this technical debt, you
will naturally adopt rules like, all new classes must start out final, and
only be changed to not be final when you need to actually extend them.
Eventually you will be in a position to adopt new tools, frameworks, and
languages that narrow down the possibilities even more, and further embedding
the mental model of what is possible directly into the code.
------
jerzyt
Great read. A lot hard earned wisdom!
------
drvortex
What a long winded article on what has been known to scientists for decades as
"emergence". Emergent properties are systems level properties that are not
obvious/predictable from properties of individual components. Looking and
observing one ant is unlikely to tell you that several of these creatures can
build an anthill.
~~~
svat
Your comment was very puzzling to me, as I couldn't figure out what kind of
misunderstanding about this article would prompt a comment such as this. But
finally a possibility occurred to me: perhaps you think the point of this
article was simply to say that there exist "systems that defy detailed
understanding". It is possible that one could think that, if one went in with
preconceived expectations based only on title of the post. (But this is a very
dangerous habit in general, as outside of personal blogs like this one, almost
always headlines in publications aren't chosen by the author.)
But we all know such systems already: for instance, _people_! No, this post is
a supplement/subsidiary to the previous one ("Computers can be understood" —
BTW here's another recent blog post making the same point:
[https://jvns.ca/blog/debugging-attitude-
matters/](https://jvns.ca/blog/debugging-attitude-matters/)), carving out
exceptions to the general rule, and illustrating concretely _why_ these are
exceptions (and what works instead). It is useful to the practitioner as a
rule-of-thumb for having a narrow set of criteria for when to avoid aiming to
understand fully (and alternative strategies for such cases). Otherwise, it's
very easy to throw up one's hands and say "computers are magic; I can't
possibly understand this".
(The point of the article here is obvious from even just the first or last
paragraphs of the article IMO.)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs to travel the world, how did it go? - temp_-_
I seem to read so many comments on discussion threads in which individuals encourage others to "Quit your job! Travel the world!", which often comes across as shallow and even flippant to me, given that the advice is so easy to extend but the action itself can quite be difficult for one to do, whether due to concrete reasons or any personal reservations.<p>So, my question: those who have traveled for an extended period of time, either instead of working or by finding a new way to work, what was the experience like? What were you able to do? How did you choose to budget? What moved you to this decision, and how was the process of finding work again after your travels, if applicable? If you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?
======
kosma
Strange how all the stories here are positive & cheerful. I did the very thing
two years ago, mostly due to peer pressure and reading too much HN, and it was
a disaster. I didn't meet any interesting people, had no exciting adventures,
tasted no great food, had no job opportunities, and pretty much only existed,
lived in crappy hostels, drank bland coffee and burned all my cash reserves. I
came back tired, broke, lonely, sick and with a fleeting feeling that there's
something seriously weird about my complete inability to connect with people &
navigate the unknown. It did open many new doors on my road to self-discovery,
but if I were to go on such a trip again, it would have to be a vastly
different arrangement.
Stepping too far out of your comfort zone can result in anxiety and paralysis
instead of the much desired change. Try it if you want, but don't be too
surprised if it ends up in a big disappointment. Contrary to what the cheerful
startup crowd may want to to think, it's not for everyone.
~~~
cylinder
I think travel as a universal solution for everyone and every problem is
clearly overdone.
Having said that, I'm assuming you are introverted. You probably would have
had a better experience traveling in a pair with a highly extroverted friend
who can break the ice with other people for you then bring you into the fold.
Just a thought.
~~~
kosma
It's not the travel itself that matters, but the challenges and new
perspectives that it brings. You won't get an epiphany on an all-inclusive
trip; and I've seen people relocate across the globe and continue to live the
same life they had back in their home countries. Trying to solve anything by
running away is just that - escaping. It may work for a while, but at some
point you'll have to stop and face your demons.
PS. It's not a matter of introversion, as I know plenty of introverts who can
strike up a conversation with a stranger. I can't, no matter how hard I try -
and it gets awkward pretty fast if I try too hard. And yes, having social
"guide" around does help - but it always feels like being a burden.
~~~
butwhy
You say it isn't a problem of introversion; I say it is. It 99% is. What you
have described is absolutely the opposite of travel experiences I have. Once
you solve the introversion part, you will absolutely have a great time, meet
amazing people and do really enjoyable things.
Funnily enough, we seem to have taken very different roads. Travelling was the
the thing that actually turned me from being semi introverted to not being
introverted at all. Hostels are great in that they put me in touch with very
extroverted people and showed me how easy it is to approach people, as most
are friendly and welcoming. Once you get that down, you then hang out with
people, go on pub crawls, go sight seeing or on road trips together etc.
"It's not a matter of introversion, as I know plenty of introverts who can
strike up a conversation with a stranger. I can't, no matter how hard I try"
\- this sounds disillusion. Perhaps you should look up what being an introvert
entails. What you have just described is a person that's less introverted than
you. Being introverted occurs at different levels in everyone. You having a
lot of trouble talking to people actually means that you're more introverted
than him. If you think it is something else, then what is your diagnosis? Do
you have a physical speech impairment that prevents you from talking?
"Trying to solve anything by running away is just that - escaping" \- so what?
You "escape" into a totally different lifestyle to make new relationships,
enjoy new activities and cultures, and ultimately change your life. It can be
a permanent "escape" for some.
~~~
iman453
Introversion isn't an inability to talk to strangers. Like OP suggested,
plenty of introverts can strike up conversations with strangers and even be
'the life of the party', so to speak. Most introverts though tire out with
excessive social interaction, specially interactions comprising primarily of
small talk, and need some alone time doing activities they enjoy to recharge.
On the other hand, meaningful, deep conversations that go beyond talking about
the weather with strangers would probably energize an introvert. Being unable
to initiate conversations with strangers can be shyness/mild social phobia, or
something else, which you probably mean when you refer to introversion. Susan
Cain's book Quiet, does a good job of explaining introversion. Her TED talk is
a sort of cliffnotes version of the book:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4)
~~~
jinushaun
Amen.
I can talk to strangers in hostels like a pro, but I'm still an introvert. I
can small talk and shoot the same backpacking bullshit conversation topics
like a champ, but I tire of deep or extended social interaction.
------
cedricd
I quit my job for a year and did this with my wife. We didn't work while
traveling -- it would have been too hard / distracting. This might sound odd,
but traveling takes as much time as a real job -- the amount you spend just
figuring out where to go next and what to do is significant. If you want to
work while travel then your best bet is to taking a break from travel and live
somewhere for a little while. It's not a bad way to go but it's not what we
did.
One interesting thing is the amount we spent for a year of travel was slightly
less than the amount we spent simply living at home. If have saved enough
where you can spend a year without salary then you can afford to do it.
A few recommendations -- don't plan ahead. You can't. Just plan the first
place you want to go to and go from there. You'll have ample time to figure
things out and be open to changes in plan. A corollary to this is that if you
plan on spending less than 5 months traveling then you may not be able to
travel quite that way. It takes a few months just to get into the swing of
things.
Lastly, don't stretch your budget thin just to hit an arbitrary length of
time. Spend what you need to and leave a few months earlier. You won't enjoy
yourself if you have to scrounge for every dime. I'd see people stay in super
nasty places for $5-10 / night in places that had simple, clean, and
comfortable places for $15 / night.
~~~
afarrell
> don't plan ahead
Don't take this too far though. Otherwise you might end up at some dude's
house in Kilkenny trying to determine if he's going to let you crash in on
couch or if he wants you to sleep in his bed. Or you might end up walking from
Juno to Omaha beach hoping that you can hitch a ride with some Canadians back
to Caen.
~~~
zacharycohn
Second one sounds awesome. I hitchhiked with two German girls back to
Jerusalem from the dead sea in some Russian dude's car. Fascinating guy.
Highlight of the trip. YDIMA (your disaster is my adventure)
~~~
afarrell
I mean, it was fun for me too and wasn't a disaster because I _did_ in fact
run into a Canadian couple whose son happened to be going to RPI. I'm just
saying that not everyone is prepared for an 8-hour hike in the dark through
the french countryside and those folks should plan ahead.
------
seekingcharlie
I've been a "digital nomad" for the last year. I left my full-time job in
Australia & headed for Berlin & just picked up a few casual consulting gigs
via Dribbble (I'm a designer).
I quickly realized that I really enjoy slow traveling - staying in places for
2-3 months & trying to keep a normal routine. I work full-time now, pretty
crazy hours, but I generally move somewhere new every 3 months. I spend a few
months of each year in SF & the rest in Europe. I'm heading from SF to Split,
Croatia in 3 weeks for most of the summer.
As a final note, there are many different ways to travel. You never really
understand how cheap it is until you actually do it. Before I left, everyone
told me that I would need a liquid $50k to spend a year in Europe & I remember
being worried that I only had about half that - very funny to me now. I've
saved more traveling than what I have paying rent somewhere in Australia.
TIPS: * Try & get paid an SFBA salary & live in cities that have a very low
cost of living in comparison. * Re trying to get a remote job - move to the
job for 3 months first, work your ass off & prove your worth, THEN ask to move
remote. * Sell everything. Forget about clothes, shoes, books, records. If you
can't pack light at first, believe me, you will learn on the road!
~~~
helandrion
May I ask you when you go for these 3 month stints in a city, what do you do
about housing? Do you go for temporary apartments or some sort of temporary
roommate situation? I work as a freelancer and while a lot of my work can be
done independent of location, I've been interested to move for certain
projects. However, since we're only talking a couple of months, I wasn't sure
about the best housing options.
~~~
seekingcharlie
I've done a mix of both, but mostly I do AirBnb. It's much cheaper if you're
renting for 2-3 months & owners usually always agree to some kind of discount
as it's much better for them to have a secure long-term booking.
~~~
helandrion
Thanks for that tip. I didn't even think of possibly asking for a discount for
a multi-month booking.
~~~
theycallmemorty
Most hotels will do the same thing FWIW.
------
reddytowns
I quit my job to travel the world about 5 years ago. I lucked out in some
investments and am now in an early retirement, mostly spend my day working on
my own computer projects, surfing, and occasionally going on trips to
different places.
I came back after a year, but after spending 18 months in the states, wanted
to go travelling again. I'm currently staying in Taiwan, and periodically
travel to the neighboring countries.
I'm not sure whether it was a good decision or not. It felt like I unplugged
myself from my peers, friends, and culture. After coming back, I felt out of
place, and just not into what everyone else around me was. It's strange how
much a shared perspective on life seems to matter regards to enjoying your
relationships with others. It was like I was being slowly wrapped in a
spider's web, being bombarded with the thoughts and concerns of others that I
couldn't relate to anymore.
There was quite a lot of loneliness I had to deal with. That was the main
emotion, I think, from when I started. Everyone became a foreigner to me after
awhile.
I wasn't sure about mentioning this, but I think it's kind of important. I
know of two other people who travelled like I did.. They both were really
smart, both into IT, paid well, and they both (separately) went travelling for
an extended period of time and ended up committing suicide. I can't really
speak for why they did it. I know I felt depressed for a period of time, but
got out of it.
However, it is really fascinating going to a new culture. And the longer you
stay in a single place, the further the intricacies of the culture are
revealed to you. There is something that is really hard to describe when you
let people from other cultures rub off on you. After coming back to the
states, I used to have dreams of my trip, nearly every night, coupled with an
intense feeling of longing, which is a big reason as to why I left again, the
second time.
So, I learned a lot of amazing things, but at the same time, I think I lost
something that I can never get back.
But heck, my sadness may have to do with not needing to work anymore and
adjusting to that life. Or because I've always been an introvert, and becoming
an outsider, too, was just too much to overcome in order to establish solid
relationships with people from my own culture again. Or because I had a tough
childhood, etc., etc. I really don't have a conclusion, and probably never
will.
YMMV. That's all I can say, really.
~~~
walterbell
Possibly relevant:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid)
~~~
ggreer
I think the comparison to third culture kids is quite relevant.
My dad was in the military for my first 15 years, which meant we lived in a
lot of random places. My parents wanted to expose me to other cultures, so
they typically lived off-base and sent me to local schools. The whole
experience made my childhood more stressful than most, but looking back I'm
very thankful. I admit I'm missing out on some things. I don't have a home
town. I don't remember the names of childhood friends, let alone keep in touch
with them. I find it hard to care about local sports teams. But the benefits
far outweigh the downsides. My view of culture is much less parochial than
most. I've seen the same mental algorithms running on different data sets.
It's almost like cultures are using one Mad Libs template, but substituting
different words. And unlike a lot of people in my demographic, I've been on
the receiving end of racism (both explicit and unconscious). I find this helps
me empathize with victims of current discrimination.[1]
It's fascinating to hear from someone who first experienced other cultures
later in life. The realizations seem similar, but more unpleasant. While
reading the grandparent's post, a strange thought popped into my head: "It's
as if an adult just discovered the truth about Santa Claus." Writing this, I
can still see the resemblance. GP: Please don't take that as an insult. Most
people never realize how provincial their worldview is.
1\. It also helps me see the perpetrators as victims of their own culture.
Obviously, this doesn't excuse their behavior, but it does help one understand
it. Had I spent my whole childhood in Alabama, there's a decent chance I'd be
an unpleasant bigot. Instead, I see such people and think, "There but for
fortune go I."
------
aidos
I've done a few 3-4 month trips in the past. I was fortunate to be earning a
good day rate as a freelancer before I left and I was young, with no
responsibilities and no need for a life plan. It was easy to quickly save up a
little money, and travel can be really cheap, especially when you don't care
about sleeping in a nice bed.
The first couple of times I travelled a lot. Too much. Moving on every day or
two. Seeing the various famous sites to see along the way. It was a great
adventure, but I didn't learn that much.
One day I was talking to someone on my daily train commute out of london and
she was telling me about a friend of hers that was travelling the world by
boat. I thought it sounded amazing, and I always wanted to sail, so I booked
myself in to do a leg of the Clipper Ventures [0] yacht race - from Liverpool
(England) to Brazil (took about 4 weeks).
When I arrived in Brazil I didn't have a plan at all. I booked in to learn
Portuguese while stating with a local family. The 4 weeks I lived there
changed the way I look at travelling. I learned about the local culture, made
friends, and learned a lot about myself in the process.
In a lot of ways tourism is a much easier route than immersing yourself in a
culture. Being totally alone in a country where you can't speak the language
is pretty soul expanding.
I've only managed one (big) trip since then (with my now wife) through Central
America. We stayed with a family in Nicaragua for a couple of weeks at the
start to learn Spanish. We loved it. The hosts are always amazing (we ended up
doing it a few times during the trip). Also, it's _really_ cheap. I think we
paid $100 / week for accommodation, food and school (for both of us).
So my main bit of advice would be, try to be a local, not a tourist. It's
scary, but incredibly rewarding.
[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effh9W_xHSg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effh9W_xHSg)
~~~
jeremyis
Curious - when you travel, how do you find families to live with? That sounds
really fun.
\- On week 3 of a (hopefully) ~9mos trip, in Chiang Mai.
~~~
aidos
As heliodor mentions below, language schools will sort you out.
In Brazil I walked in and made gestures that I wanted to learn Portuguese
(they refused to speak English, even though some of them could, a little). The
conversation went on like that and eventually one of the staff took me on a
bus to where I would stay with a family. I ended up with a relatively wealthy
family, others at the same school were in totally different environments.
One thing I hadn't accounted for was the paranoia of that situation.
My host family were really nice, but early on we had a discussion about how
much people earned in the UK (with the aide of a translation dictionary). The
next night I heard them arguing, I could tell it was about money, I was fairly
sure it was about me. I recorded a little snippet of it and when I played it
for a friend later when I got back to the UK he said they were talking about
footballer's salaries :)
At the time it made me really self-conscious. It's tough when you're all alone
and you don't have anyone to talk to in your native tongue. Leaves you
entirely alone with your thoughts.
~~~
jeremyis
Thanks for the great reply.
I want to end my trip by spending 3 months in Spain learning Spanish. I'm
thinking of Valencia because I think it'll be fairly warm there even during
winter months, it's somewhat central, I hear it's fun, and everyone speaks
Spanish... Barcelona would be a really fun city to live in also but I think
it'd be better to be surrounded 100% by the language I am learning instead of
Catalan :-)
Before now, I've only heard of living with a foreign family as a thing younger
students do. I'm approaching 30... would it be weird to do at this age or is
it normal?
~~~
aidos
Cool!
Totally normal. My wife and I were 28 last time we did it. The language school
would put you somewhere appropriate I would have thought. Last time we were
with a lovely lady in her 60s.
~~~
jeremyis
Awesome - thanks!
------
sitkack
It is often cheaper to travel that sit at home in your western apt. If you can
sublet or give up your place, costs are not exorbitant.
1) Find an itinerary using
[http://www.airtreks.com/](http://www.airtreks.com/) they are amazing. Seattle
-> New Zealand -> Australia -> Malaysia -> Nepal -> Turkey was about 3300 USD.
2) Get a nice place for when you land, like 3 days. Use that time to find
lower cost habitation.
3) Don't over plan. Don't over spend. Talk to everyone. Read people, find good
people and befriend them. Be nice. Not everyone is out to hustle you, locals
often live on $5 a day. Don't flaunt your western wealth.
Total cost for 9 month trip, including the above flight and the crazy
expensive flight home, 15k. I should have done this 20 years ago, experience
would have been very different, more raw. As you age, the senses dull, our
wealth bludgeons any immediacy and hardship (both good and bad). You are
shaped by what you see and do, so see and do early.
~~~
waterlesscloud
On the flip side, I traveled a lot more when I was younger than I do now, and
I wish it was the other way around.
I didn't have the perspective to appreciate everything when I was younger, and
a lot of it is sort of a blur. My experiences these days tend to come with a
lot more appreciation and depth.
Grass is always greener, I guess.
~~~
sitkack
Maybe traveling while young allows you to see with appreciation and depth now.
------
jbutewicz
I got laid off from a job I was at for four years. Always wanted to travel but
with school and work never had a chance for any extensive travel. I took two
trips on my time off.
USA Road Trip. 14 days. 17 states (NJ, PA, MD, VA, TN, NC, MS, LA, TX, NM, CO,
KS, MO, IL, IN, KY, WV). 6,000 miles. Total for two people: $2750. Per person:
$1375. Per person per day: $98.
[http://jbutewicz.com/usa-road-trip-video-concluding-
remarks/](http://jbutewicz.com/usa-road-trip-video-concluding-remarks/)
European Road Trip. 44 days. 14 countries (Italy, Vatican City, Monaco,
France, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, Belgium,
Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway). 12,000 miles of driving. Approximate
total for two people: $12,000. Per person: $6,000. Per person per day: $133.
[http://jbutewicz.com/europe-trip-video-concluding-
remarks/](http://jbutewicz.com/europe-trip-video-concluding-remarks/)
My blog has much more in depth detail if you are interested.
~~~
smm2000
Nice trip but your daily driving distance is insane. 428 miles/day is ~7 hours
driving per day. It's pretty much driving the whole day. I recently did 2500
miles/20 days trip and felt that I was driving too much.
~~~
lafar6502
7 hours? Maybe, if you never stop and never leave motorway. 8 h drive, 8 h
sleep, remaining 8 h for finding place to stay, packing & unpacking stuff,
eating and other necessities - doesnt leave you much time to interact with
local or experience new culture.
------
Kequc
Best decision of my whole life so far. It requires attaining an incredible
amount of humility, selling everything, even that couch you like. You probably
won't be back and storage costs a fortune, basically get rid of all of your
material possessions. That's really by far the hardest part then take the
smallest amount with you that you can.
And... suddenly, life seems brighter. I left north america probably 5 years
ago, wasn't satisfied with the uk though. I don't need to spend all of my
money financing a stressful lifestyle. Most places outside of na make it easy
to rent a furnished apartment. Life outside of na is largely much cheaper when
compared to large na cities. And life outside of na is much more interesting
because it's there due to longer than 250 years of history.
Feels great man.
If you're a software engineer, you can basically work anywhere.
~~~
caseyf7
Right on. I'm just now unpacking the stuff I packed up ten years ago before
traveling the world. I wish I had gotten rid of everything but the mementos
back then. Few things will have value after a year, three, or ten.
------
personlurking
With clothes and computer, and pretty much at the drop of a dime, I started
traveling abroad and have done so for the past several years, around S.
America & Europe, staying in places for at least a few months each. When you
find a few overseas places that feel like "home", you can go back and forth
between them when needed. Luckily, I knew some people with startups in the US
who needed part-time VAs and thus this is what I've done this whole time. I've
literally spent between US$400-600/mo since deciding to live overseas. Since
my work is part-time, and at times sporadic, I often don't make much more than
what I spend.
So on one side, it's totally doable to live in tons of cool places on the
cheap (it's become a game of sorts to live frugally). On the other hand, when
you travel w/o extra funds, you cannot do an about-face when you need to (ie,
you cannot retreat from a bad situation) so you then have to find ways to
stick it out, which can easily mean enduring odd living quarters, strange
neighborhoods, shady people, etc. I've had thousands of both amazing and not-
so-amazing experiences I would not have had, had I stayed in the States doing
the same ol', same ol'. My hope is that I continue to have thousands more such
experiences and most importantly, to do it wisely now that time has taught me
what not to do (and now that my job responsibilities are gradually
increasing).
------
recursify
I quit my job at Amazon and went on a 4 month long bike tour through South
East Asia... it was kind of a sporadic decision, but basically it was a gut
feeling that I needed to get out there and mentally reset.
Great experience and would definitely do it again, especially bike touring.
You kind of get into this rhythym of: wake up at sunrise, eat breakfast,
decide on route, cycle as much as you feel like, go swimming, talk to people,
find a place to camp/sleep, fix bike, go to bed. Every week or so you'll hit a
major tourist centre where you can get a western meal/talk to other English
speakers... then you're back on the road!
If you're burnt out/are looking for a reset, I'd avoid trying to work and
travel at the same time, if you can afford it.
Budget: I think it worked out to about $15/day over the 4 month period, which
may have included a flight home too.
I came back feeling energized, optimistic, and found a job at a great startup
within a month of being back!
~~~
kukabynd
Hey, thanks for sharing! Could you please elaborate on your trip and countries
you’ve visited?
~~~
recursify
You're welcome!
I picked my way through sections of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. I didn't
feel like being dogmatic about always cycling, so I hopped on trains when I
felt like it (you can easily put your bike on the train for a modest fee). For
example, I trained down south to Krabi/Ton Sai and then cycled back up the
southern coast, which avoids having to bike the same route twice.
Generally you don't need to camp, since there are plenty of cheap guest houses
where you can shower and get a good meal, although it's handy to have a tent
just in case.
This will give you inspiration, and is a great read, even if you don't end up
cycle-touring: [http://www.amazon.com/Travels-Willie-Adventure-Cyclist-
Weir/...](http://www.amazon.com/Travels-Willie-Adventure-Cyclist-
Weir/dp/0965679284)
This is a great resource to get started:
[http://www.mrpumpy.net/](http://www.mrpumpy.net/)
I don't have anything in the way of a blog, but I do have pictures:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/robotkenshi/collections/721576...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/robotkenshi/collections/72157629864712066/)
------
amag
I fully agree with aidos. It's much more rewarding if you go to a place and
live like a local. In my case I've done a few voluntary work trips, the
longest I did together with my wife and it lasted a year. I always try to
learn the language in countries when I stay more than a couple of weeks. It
quickly breaks the ice when you work side-by-side with the locals, trying to
speak their language. You may not get to see all the main attractions in a
country but you get to see and experience much more interesting things.
However, I also agree with reddytowns. Traveling like that changes you. You'll
probably not notice until you return but it's quite likely you will feel
disconnected from your peers, friends and family. You have changed and they
have not. I would recommend anyone planning to go on a long immersive journey
to consider going together with some one you like and get along well with.
Then at least you will have that connection when you get back. This is
important since this disconnected state could very likely be permanent. At
least that's how it feels for me, it's been almost ten years since my wife and
I spent a year abroad and I'd say we lost something then that we haven't been
able to get back. We've spent nearly ten years back home, buying a house,
raising kids and yet we don't really feel like we belong in our own country
with our own families.. maybe it's just our personalities..
So in the end, would I recommend quitting your job and travel the world? I
guess it depends on how well you'll handle the disconnect. The fact that your
own family may feel like strangers to you.. In my case I can't really regret
going, I've got too many amazing memories, too much fun with people I got to
call my friends for a while. The sad part is though, you can't really go back
either. Trust me I've tried. It will never be the same. Leaving and coming
home changes you yet again.
~~~
remar
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say you feel disconnected from
others when you get back? Do you mean in the sense that you feel their
understanding of the world is limited compared to yours because you've
seen/experienced more of it? Or in the sense that you had a different kind of
fun/adventure that they'll never experience or know about?
~~~
heliodor
You go to a new place and start doing things differently. You discover better
ways to do things and realize people back home don't understand what they're
doing.
For example, in New York City, it seems the main activity for young people is
to go out to bars and restaurants.
You pack your bags and head somewhere tropical. You pick up a water sport like
surfing or kiteboarding. You start waking up at 6am with the sunrise and
realize it's amazing. Back in NYC, your awake hours were more like 10am to
2am. You start cooking at home.
Now, you look back at your friends and view them as wasting their life in bars
and restaurants. You start identifying with the older crowd who comes to the
office at 6am or 8am instead of 11am. You also start wondering why your
friends don't ever do anything outdoors.
When you move, you end up with new habits. Your brain has a need to feel
correct, so it views any changes as improvements; therefore, the ways of
before (and of your friends) are now considered wrong, otherwise your mind
experiences dissonance. You'll find a way to justify things to stop the
dissonance.
~~~
amag
Yeah, I think the last paragraph probably nails it down quite well.
------
Jack000
A lot of detailed posts here, I'll try to be brief
\- It gets tiring after a while, I kind of missed my car/TV/desktop.
\- Finding a new place to stay every month or week is a bit of a pain.
\- I think it helps to have something to do other than existing in a different
place. Eg. My photo blog: (shameless plug) jack.ventures
\- I definitely don't think the nomad lifestyle is right for everyone, it can
be very isolating.
~~~
vosper
I think this is one of the most useful responses to the question, and I
suspect it's closer to the average experience. I have done a decent amount of
traveling, and so have most of my friends, and my opinion (and theirs, I
think, through our conversations) agree with this. None of us are extremely
introverted, or extroverted - I'd say we're pretty normal, unremarkable
people.
On the nomad matter I would go further, and suggest that it only really works
for a very few people, and that most who try don't turn it into a lifestyle;
it's something they do for a few years until they eventually settle down and
mostly stay in one place. Most of the excited blog posts are written within
the first year - I've yet to see the 10-year postmortem from a committed
digital nomad.
~~~
Jack000
I had planned on making the nomad transition permanently, but now I think 3-6
months is the way to go, like an extended vacation. I thought I needed a
complete lifestyle change, but I just needed some time away from everything.
some more points I thought of:
\- I packed a full suitcase with everything I thought I'd need (mechanical
keyboard, projector to replace my tv, a full week's wardrobe etc) and it
turned out to be impractical. Next time I'll just bring a single packpack with
my laptop, camera and two changes of clothes.
\- discovery is a big problem that I haven't solved. The best experiences I've
had were when I knew someone in the city and they could show me around.
~~~
Throwaway90283
Use couchsurfing, and search for hosts that 'want to meet up', and were online
in the past week. There are tons of people interesting in showing travelers
their city, so send them messages. Or, check the couchsurfing forums and
meetups. It's usually just a bunch of locals and travelers grabbing drinks.
Popular cities have hundreds of people attending and daily events, while less
popular cities might have 5 or 10 people getting together for drinks once a
week. There are always new people at every meetup, so you'll fit right in
showing up at the pub alone and joining the group.
Or, if you're staying somewhere for a few months, then offer couchsurfers a
couch to sleep on. People are always passing through, so you give an
interesting person your couch for a couple of nights, and discover the city
with them.
It's made my travels a lot more fun, and I now pick places to live that are
popular on couchsurfing because it's that much easier to meet people.
------
jsackmann
I traveled for about two years. I was able to work remotely, so I didn't have
to worry too much about a tight budget or finding employment upon return.
It was a great experience, and here's what I'd change:
\- spend more time in fewer places; be less of a tourist. (bonus: for the most
part, the less you move around, the less expensive it is.) I would
particularly try to do this in places that aren't typical tourist
destinations. Think of stops of 1-3 months (perhaps with side trips) rather
than 1-2 weeks.
\- if you're traveling with someone else (particularly a significant other):
(a) be really, really confident that you want to travel together for that
long; (b) do whatever you can to find destinations that you both are
interested in; (c) explicitly acknowledge that you will want to spend time
apart during your travels; and (d) expect the relationship to get rocky at
times even if you do all of the above perfectly. It's hard.
\- Plan to return to your current home, if at all possible. I didn't do this,
and re-adjusting to 'normal' life was much more difficult without an existing
set of family and friends around. Even if you do go back 'home', re-entry
won't be seamless. One of my friends spent two years in Japan and claims that
she was more homesick upon returning home (USA) than she ever was in Japan.
~~~
JacobAldridge
"Reverse Culture Shock" on returning home is a definite thing. After all, you
have moved forward in your life and your 'home' (friends, colleagues, and the
city/town itself) have moved forward as well, but not together.
~~~
j780
Not only that.. but depending on where you're from and where you traveled you
might have more trouble with reverse culture shock. We in the west tend to be
quite wasteful and this is even more acute in North America. Commercialism
drives our workforce and the continuing arms race of work and buy is even more
apparent once you've seen more of the world.
------
junto
In 2004 I spent most of a year travelling around South and Central America. I
met my wife on that trip (she was also travelling) and now we have two awesome
children.
Travelling refreshes the mind. It breaks bad habits and it frees your soul.
Sounds like mumbo jumbo I know but I can't recommend it enough.
Give yourself at least 3 months. Take eery opportunity and trust your gut. It
can be dangerous out there if your mind isn't aware of what is going on around
you. A bit of common sense and you're fine. Also get to meet the locals.
Sticking around the hostels with other backpackers can drive you potty in the
end.
Best thing I ever did. Finding contract work when I got back was easy due to
great old contacts who hooked me up.
------
acqq
My biggest problem with the "traveler's" stories is my impression that often
they tell them from the angle of a "Topper":
[http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-06-24](http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-06-24)
I accept that they enjoyed what they did, but it's often that some (for my
perspective) important parts of their stories are completely omitted
presenting their "adventure" as much more successful than it really was.
"I've once traveled 5 months with 8K USD"
"That's nothing..." then you hear something amazing, like "for 1K" but only
after you research more, if you insist, you discover that the person omitted
the detail that they count just 1K of cash but not the money they got from
actually working. Or that the girlfriend paid for everything. Or the parents.
Or that they mostly lived in the hole. Or that they drove 10 hours per day
every day. Or...
That being said, as I was younger, I made a trip through the Europe by mostly
sleeping in the night trains. And I conveniently won't mention my relatives in
London and my friends in some other places. But you could do the same, it's
amazing. I really enjoyed it and it gave me profound insights, enough to sit
in front of the computer writing this instead of doing something amazing.
You're welcome.
------
allworknoplay
A few years ago I quit my job with the idea that I had three projects I wanted
to work on, I could do them from anywhere, and probably one would pan out into
my next startup. TLDR: it worked, one did, and I had an awesome four-month
trip in the process.
I subletted my room in NYC for a bit more than I paid, bought a plane ticket
to Goa, and started there. It was the right decision insofar as it's a very
soft landing in India, which can be a fairly difficult place for a lot of
people. After two weeks and some research. I moved on and spent time in a
bunch of different cities in India and Nepal; most days I would simply sit and
write code in whatever hostel or home stay I was at, eat cheap street food for
lunch, and generally be really, really productive. When I felt like it, I'd go
take a walk or see something cool in the area or take a couple days and go on
a short vacation somewhere else (e.g. I would never have wanted to spend much
time in Agra, but it's a short overnight trip from Jaipur to go catch the taj
mahal at dawn and then explore agra fort and take a walk before getting on a
bus back).
It's actually the perfect vacation -- traveling can be really stressful,
always trying to get to the next place, cram in all the stuff you have to see,
etc. You wind up doing crazy things like exhausting yourself taking overnight
buses to save time and hostel costs. But I spaced out what could have been a
3-4 week trip across four months, and it was relaxing, productive,
interesting, and fun. I got pretty well into each of my projects (all of which
involved acquiring new skill sets), figured out the one that had legs and was
right for me, and turned it into my next startup.
The toughest part was in Kathmandu, where at the time power cuts were 14 hours
a day, and of the 10 hours with power, they were mostly at night. But it was
actually nice -- I got up early every morning with a charged laptop, worked
until the thing was nearly dead after the power had gone out, went to a
rooftop cafe to read for a while, went back and worked/charged again for a
while, went for a long walk, and got back with enough charge left to last
until the power came back on.
Overall, a pretty great life.
~~~
eyeareque
Sounds like a great trip.
But did you ever get sick from the street food? :) I'm not that adventurous I
guess.
~~~
allworknoplay
Once! It was probably the most miserable day of my life, but in retrospect
it's just a totally awesome story. I've gotten sicker from street food
elsewhere (giardia in the amazon was insanely uncool), but this was
particularly crazy.
I was traveling from Varanasi (India) to Kathmandu (Nepal); you can fly, but I
decided to see some scenery and do it by train and bus. I left Varanasi on the
day before Holi, which is the indian holiday where hooligan kids throw dried
paint at people who don't look like they want to be hit with lots of dried
paint. I got to Gorakhpur at like 1:30am on the train, had a shitty hostel
booked and aimed to catch the notoriously small government bus to the border
town at 7am the next day. Got myself some samosas from a random street vendor
since I hadn't eaten for like eight hours, devoured them, and went to sleep.
Woke up at around 5am with my stomach churning; promptly threw up a bunch, but
had to get packing and go find the bus. First thing when I walk outside? Paint
in the face. A lot of laughing kids. More paint. People saying "why are you
traveling on Holi? Very bad idea!" or even worse: "why are you playing holi?
just tell them no!" (as if that worked for me even once).
Once I found the bus, it took me about twenty minutes of bumpy riding before I
had to throw up again. Luckily I'd gotten the rear-most window seat, so I just
leaned over and vomited out the window. It was terrible, but it worked. I
think I made the poor woman with a daughter sitting next to me really, really
uncomfotable, but hopefully she understood that this sick white dude covered
in paint was having even less fun than she was.
But it got worse: because it was holi, kids were pelting the bus with paint
pretty much the whole way to the border, so we couldn't keep the windows open
on the cramped government bus with no AC. So everyone's overheating like
crazy. On top of that, all out luggage is on top of the bus, and every time we
have to stop (or even just slow, really), kids are climbing onto the the top
of the bus, riding, and throwing more paint around, so I'm getting really
paranoid about whether my frame pack is even going to be there when we finally
stop.
At the border I made another stupid decision. I needed some fresh air really,
really badly, so I decided to walk the 0.75 mile of no-man's land between the
bus stop and the nepal visa office. Whoops. Turns out the guards literally
don't give a shit about indian kids crossing the border in order to follow
tourists and keep throwing paint at them. So by the time I get to the other
side, the nepali guys are all just laughing at me because I am totally covered
with paint and still have 8 hours of bus ride to go.
But the ride got better from there, and now it's a fun story. Plus the blanket
I got in goa that I took all across india with me has some nicely set colors
to it that remind me of my cool trip.
~~~
artursapek
Wow, I envy you. That sounds like an amazing trip.
------
songzme
I've always wanted to travel the world but haven't done it yet. The way I see
it, right now the market is doing amazing, unemployment is low. As an
employee, you have leverage (negotiate for higher pay or choose another place
that offers you more pay). My plan is to work hard and make/save as much money
as I can in this economy. There will be a recession one day and rather than
fighting with everybody else for a job with shitty pay, that will be the time
I travel and enjoy the world.
~~~
rsync
All true, but you forgot to mention: you're older than you've ever been and
now you're even older.[1]
Ditching it all to be a ski bum in aspen for a year or two is a lot different
when your knees are 45.
You don't want to be that weird dude in the Phuket hostel that's 12 years
older than everyone else.
(and so on)
[1] ... and now you're even older.
------
phillc73
In early 1999 I'd been working as a contractor at a major Australian bank,
writing VBScript, building an Intranet site. A three month contract became
nine. By then I'd managed to pay off my student debt and put aside a decent
amount. I quit and traveled.
Three months in southern Africa and three months in the United Kingdom.
It was my second trip to southern Africa and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Different the second time around. While I was exploring different areas, I had
a much better sense of what to expect from each situation.
My first trip to the UK. I wasted a lot of time in those three months, which
could have been better spent. I did see quite a lot, but generally I treated
it mostly as a tools down and relaxation period. I did return to Australia,
but 12 months later, I was back in the UK and lived there for a further 13
years.
Returning to Australia, it was straightforward enough to find work. I think I
was offered something on my third interview. This just happened to be with a
company which would go on to become a dotcom giant, survive the crash and
continues to do reasonably well today. Everything worked out well enough.
I would certainly do it all again. If I had the choice to do things
differently, I probably would have cut short the UK period and seen more of
Europe, although I did a lot of that in subsequent years.
In short, I would encourage people to do something like this. I don't think
breaks of even up to 12 months in a career should be a concern, especially if
explained easily enough. The experiences are worth a great deal.
------
zzzmarcus
In 2007 moved with my wife and 5 year old from Virginia to Montevideo, Uruguay
for 9 months then to Buenos Aires, Argentina for another 4 months. When we
arrived, we didn't know a soul and chose that part of the world based mostly
on the fact that it was relatively inexpensive and safe.
We lived mostly like locals. We rented a house and bought a car. I worked in
the mornings and we spent afternoons and vacations exploring the area. We saw
quite a bit of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil and met a ton of great
people along the way, both locals and other expats, many of whom we keep in
contact with still today. My son went to preschool in Uruguay and learned to
speak Spanish fluently. My wife picked up a ton of Spanish and my own improved
immensely.
While we were down there we lived frugally and my part-time work as a software
developer was sufficient to pay our expenses. It wasn't hard to come back and
find a full-time job.
It was an awesome experience, I'd highly recommend something like it to
anyone. I briefly blogged while I was down there, if interested, it's here:
[https://guay.wordpress.com](https://guay.wordpress.com) and if you haven't
already, check out Rolf Pott's _Vagabonding_ book.
------
panorama
I quit college to travel for 2 years and played online poker as a means of
income. There are parts of it I regret, like being a bit callous with money
and not really knowing what I would do afterwards, but I was young (20) and
having disposable income (which I regret not saving) can affect you as a kid.
It should be noted that dropping out of college is NOT something I regret. I
think that may have been one of the best decisions I made when I was younger.
1\. By leaving school, I ended up teaching myself by traveling and
experiencing different cultures, living on my own outside of my comfort zone,
and meeting smart, successful people around the world. It's hard to replicate
that sort of education in an institutionalized environment (not to mention how
expensive a degree is).
2\. I sucked at budgeting. Nowadays there are a lot of good resources online
for budgeting[1] and nomading[2] that I wish I had access to back then.
3\. I didn't like thinking too far into the future at the time but I didn't
really have any backup plans after poker. I just assumed I would make enough
to eventually invest in some other venture. I did, but that venture didn't
work out too well. I eventually taught myself how to code and I've been
working as a dev in SF for the past few years.
4\. I would follow the nomad lifestyle[2]. Knowing which areas maximized life
happiness + low cost of living would have really helped. I think anyone who
has a craft that can be monetized online and doesn't have significant
responsibilities (family/kids) should try work-traveling for some time.
[1] [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/)
[2] [https://nomadlist.com/](https://nomadlist.com/)
~~~
marincounty
"I quit college to travel for 2 years and played online poker as a means of
income." Wow--online poker! I couldn't imagine the worry factor, but I'm not a
gambler. When I look back on my life, the only real money I made was doing
something risky. Right now, you made me realize I need to add more risk to my
life.
~~~
SamReidHughes
Online poker is (or was) pretty low risk -- you play a bunch of tables, play
reasonably, there are betting limits, and you reliably win money from people
that are bad at it. It's really just a grind. Of course, that's not the only
way to play it.
------
orofino
In May 2012 my wife and I did this. It went well, but little went to our
initial plan.
The experience was far more stressful than either of us expected. Constantly
having to find food, a place to sleep, and figure out where/what is next, was
tiresome. However, we really enjoyed the experience and found some places off
the beaten path that we really loved. We found out that we love hiking and
that we wanted travel more in the future.
I can't remember how we ended up settling on a budget, we targeted $80/day for
two people. We saved 60k for the trip which from what I can remember was
somewhat arbitrary. We also saved 20k as a 'return fund' to ensure that we had
ample runway to find jobs. Returning home was incredibly expensive, we sold
everything we owned before we left, make sure you budget accordingly.
Finding work after traveling was simple for me, a bit harder for my wife. I
had two job offers, both from people I worked with prior to leaving, before
I'd been home for more than a couple weeks. My wife wanted to change where she
worked, so it took her a bit longer. None of this was to plan, we had planned
to move to the west coast, the sway of a job was too strong.
If we did it again... that is hard to say. Both of us wish it was planned a
bit more completely, but I see no way to actually accomplish this. I might say
stay in one place a bit longer that we did (maybe a week/city). My wife says
she would blog less, and I think I agree, documenting the trip was a lot of
work. We did it for ourselves and our family, but it was more work than
anticipated.
In the end we finished traveling after only (sorry I know "only" sounds
ridiculous) 8 months. We thought we would travel for 1.5 years or more. We
spent way more time in South America than initially planned and took a boat to
Antarctica which was entirely unplanned. It was really amazing.
If you have questions I'm happy to address them further, I tried to keep this
short as I can talk about this for hours.
~~~
jacquesm
> I can talk about this for hours.
Please do!
Is your blog still up?
~~~
orofino
Yes, in my profile.
~~~
jacquesm
Fascinating, you've done an absolutely amazing job at not just your travel but
also your 'inner journey' about how the travelling changed you. Thank you!
------
japhyr
I'm a high school teacher. After four years of teaching, I quit my job and
spent 13 months living on a bicycle. I went Seattle > Maine > Florida >
California > Alaska.
I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It's nearing 20 years since I started that
trip, and that experience still keeps me grounded today. I plan to bicycle
across the continent again in my 50's or 60's to see how much has changed, and
how much has stayed the same.
------
aidanlister
I did the digital nomad thing for 5 years and 9 months, across 70 countries:
[http://www.trott.in/accounts/1/worldmap](http://www.trott.in/accounts/1/worldmap)
It was incredible, and I would recommend it to anyone.
And, it's never been easier to do ... if you haven't got much tying you down
then give it a shot, take as long as it still feels rewarding. You'll know
when it's time to go home.
I've now settled back in Australia this past year (much to my surprise) and am
equally enjoying having a fixed address, a great friendship group and
relationship, and having time to really focus on my startup. I wouldn't change
a thing.
------
ifyoumakeit
I spent the last four years doing web development while on playing drums in
multiple touring bands. I got to travel abroad for free, and meet great people
through it.
Unfortunately I remember very little of this time because I was taking on
freelance projects to make side money and using mobile broadband to work in
the van. It was incredibly stressful and one of the worst ideas. Multitasking
the two jobs just burned me out quicker.
I wish I had planned it all out better so I could actually enjoy it fully. If
you're going to travel, make sure you have the time to actually experience it.
~~~
jsabo
For what it's worth I've really enjoyed some of your output during that time
though, I was actually listening to one of the o pioneers pink couch recording
earlier today. Sorry to hear it burned you out though, I can definitely see
how that'd happen trying to tour and work freelance simultaneously.
~~~
ifyoumakeit
Thanks! I really want to get back to recording those sessions but it's so hard
to get up and running.
------
andkon
I've travelled a lot, and worked as a travel blogger, but never 'quit my job
to travel.' It's a lot cheaper than you'd expect. You could probably do it for
$10-$20k a year.
I think it's hard in that it's hard to get good at, but there's not a very
sharp learning curve. You need to learn how to find deals, and how to meet
people when you're tired, and how to not get ripped off, and so on. But
mostly, extensive solo travel isn't that difficult. It's just about amassing
common sense.
------
joefreeman
I left my job in the UK nearly nine months ago. I travelled overland through
Europe to Turkey while working on a couple of freelance projects, mostly
staying in hostels. Since then (and after spending a month over Christmas with
my family), I've been in India for nearly four months, working on more
freelance projects. I'm going to try somewhere more digital nomad-friendly
soon though.
It's hard work. As one of the other comments mentioned - travelling itself is
time consuming. But I think the biggest issue for me travelling alone is a
lack of regular social contact. I suppose I'm a relatively solitary person - I
enjoy spending time with people, but can survive without it. Europe was way
better for meeting people (in part due to staying in hostels). India is
tougher in that respect - but it's cheap, it's such an amazing country, and
the people are friendly. Having the opportunity to read more has been cool.
And learning to kite surf.
I've been really lucky to have worked with some awesome clients so far (in
part because they've been both understanding and just generally curious of my
lifestyle - but also just because they're great people working on fun
projects).
The digital nomad lifestyle is something I'd wondered about for years, and I
knew it was something I had to try, even if just to get it out of my system.
Travelling without a time- or money constraint changes your experience for the
better, I think. I have no regrets - I absolutely recommend it, even if it's
just a short-term thing that you change your mind about later on. And yes,
pack light :)
------
kevinprince
Literally about 4 weeks from finishing my job and hitting the open road /
seas. It's taken me several years to do it but the timing this year has kind
of worked out (I also turned 30 this year).
The Why?
I am basically just "surviving" month to month paying rent, seeing same
people, doing same things and not really having any new experiences. At 30,
this is my last chance to qualify for various visa options which would allow
work in other countries. I also recently finished paying off all my college
loans etc.
The how:
I finish my job on the 28th May (also move out of my place that day) and will
be joining friends for a few weeks of sailing and then heading for Asia for
summer and Canada for winter.
Financially speaking it's going to be tough I am leaving a well-paid permanent
role but not a huge amount of savings (but no debts). The one plus side is the
average gap year costs about £5k including flights and insurance and I am well
above that amount so happy.
Am I scared? Yes of cause, but I have done several multi-week trips in Europe
and lived abroad before and work is only ever a plane ride away. I am actually
pretty happy to be doing bar work or working retail and having some different
experiences to being stuck in-front of a keyboard.
It's going to be an adventure regardless and a change I need!
------
zhte415
Don't work illegally. It may seem easy (and is) but you never know the
nightmare it can unleash.
Travel is what you make it. You can travel without moving - interact with
different people locally. You can travel by changing career. It is simply a
process of changing environment. Join a hiking group, a cooking club, even
learn a new skill, 'push your bubble' \- that is travel.
Travel the world... Take the decision carefully, but if travelling physically
it is easy to not travel. Everywhere has a Starbucks to grab a coffee, apart
from the places that don't, but if travelling to places that don't, is choice
made simply because they don't have Starbucks and if that is in the decision
chain, when why not travel to somewhere that does and not go to Starbucks? Is
9 months backpacking 'travel' when it is done with a group of similarly minded
people with a half-hearted effort to learn a language?
Home is where the heart is. If you feel your heart is somewhere else, then
travel to find it, it is simply a change in lifestyle, physical travel is
often the opposite - a preservation of lifestyle in different conditions;
without recognizing that, no change is gained.
~~~
doorhammer
This isn't terribly profound, but I think I just like to read books in
different places.
I enjoy it; it feels satisfying. The volume on that seems to edge up when I'm
in a _really_ different location, like another country.
That's not a counterpoint to what you said. It's just what hit me, and I
thought it was funny.
~~~
partisan
I think part of the joy of traveling is leaving things behind including the
distractions and worried that keep you from enjoying the things you love to do
such as reading. Time seems to become your own again, because it is not
fractured by the typical concerns. I always buy a new book or two when I go on
vacation because I know I will find the time no matter what.
~~~
doorhammer
Yeah. Definitely.
Usually part of the fun for me is finding a used book store wherever I'm at
and exploring it.
That was particularly interesting in Thailand, because one of the shop owners
wanted to talk about buddhist philosophy and seeing the types of books they
had around was really fascinating
------
notahacker
The worst mistake, arguably, was getting the job back on my return 22 months
later (I stumbled across an ad at a temptingly higher salary, and it arguably
did make the adjustment to reality a little easier) If I did it all again, I'd
ensure I made a more radical break from the past on my return.
I didn't work whilst I was away, though I did read and write an awful lot
more, and an awful lot more _selectively_. I can believe the people that find
the myriad attractions of exotic destinations a less toxic distraction than
constant invitations to party or the urge to procrastinate that comes from
being stuck in your comfort zone, but I enjoyed the experience more for being
completely guilt-free about not achieving anything in particular in a given
day or week. And some of my favourite destinations had really crappy internet
connections.
Budgeting was easy, even on my sub <$10k year, but then again I've never had
expensive taste. A down-side to this is feeling slightly grumpy on your return
when realising a single spirit measure costs more than a meal and a _much
better_ day or night out in dozens of other places you've visited...
------
Causalien
I am on year 3 of what was originally a 6 month trip. 6 months, I find is when
most people decide to go home, but it is also the crucial wall that allowed my
travel personality to take over.
There was no magic pill for me. My first 6 months was miserable, it was an
adventure, sight seeing and meeting fellow travelers awt hostels was still
something I wanted to do. I ended up very lonely at the end of 6 months and
didn't make any friends.
After that is when I mentally stopped thinking about traveling and seeing the
world. I just exist and tried as hard as possible to listen to that voice
inside. I went for crazy experiences that I only hear in passing. That hermit
in a jungle that someone talked about in passing? I went and visited him. The
cult with promise of salvation? Yeah that too.
Then I got too many friends. The experience didn't just transform what existed
in me. I am literally a different person. But I had to leg go of the notion
that I am just traveling and that I am going back later.
------
homakov
Didn't quit the job (working remotely), on my 3rd around-the-world already.
Feels perfect
------
j780
1 month trip, skipped return flight; became a 6 month trip. another 1 month
trip turned into 7. last second 2 month trip... got home 2 years later!
Not having a planned return date made it much easier to travel. I met people
1/2 way through a year trip who were having a complete breakdown. I always
figured I'd be home a month or so later and just wanted to see a bit more
before I headed home! I'm very clean cut so I never had any issues with
alcohol nor was I even tempted to try drugs. Remote island = cash payoff but
same country caught at the airport is jail or even a death sentence! Don't get
complacent. Better yet just don't do it. I had a relative get stabbed 8 times
at home while I was out "risking my life" traveling... all I got was rabies
shots "just in case". Oh.. rabies.. NO CURE. Once Symptoms appear = DEATH in
99.97% of cases. Insurance flies you home to die. Research it!
------
ghettosoak
Hey all – long time lurker, first time poster – I’m about to embark on my own
odyssey (again), and it’s absolutely wonderful / enlightening / empowering to
hear the experiences of others, both positive and negative. Thank you all for
your words of wisdom, I could not be more excited about this next step!
------
nchuhoai
I just blogged about this here:
[http://nambrot.com/posts/24-semi-nomadism-a-way-of-
life/](http://nambrot.com/posts/24-semi-nomadism-a-way-of-life/)
Tl;DR: Post-college I negotiated a remote deal and spent the last months slow
travelling, while still producing good work. I think logistically, everything
works out very well, it really isn't a financial question at all (if you are a
half-decent developer) unless you spent most of your travels in expensive
Western cities. I prefer this over full-time travel.
However, the worst thing ended up being the transient nature of travel, no
matter how slow you do it. If you are a person that does well by him/herself,
then that's fine, but having a stable and sustainable social life has become a
greater priority for me.
------
DocG
I havent started my career yet, because I've been traveling and moving from
the time I graduated. Most of the trips I do are sponsored through one program
or another. How has it changed me and am I happy?
Well, I was/am introvert. First time moving away was to Istanbul, through
exchange student program I was forced(guided basically) to socialize. It
teached me how to make friends in any place I am, how to act in different
cultures. Currently I am in Africa, Cameroon, volunteering. Been here for a
month, and will be staying here for two months. No big concerns regards moving
from europe to africa. How do I do it and what is my secret? I dont have place
I call home in my country, so my home is where my ten things are. My home is
where my laptop and my cameras are. I also try to find something to do on my
travels. As I said, most of the trips are sponsored trough EU or some other
program, this usually means I already have a contact ahead and my travels
usually have a reason. Thanks to this there isnt usually a problem to
kickstart my social life locally either. The most benefit I have gotten out of
my trips are self discovery, through putting myself in new situations.
only regret? Sometimes I still think where would my career be if I had stayed
back home.
anything bad? access online is quite s*it through out the places I have
traveled.
Ps. Anyone in sw cameroon wants to meet up?
------
iuguy
I did this without quitting my job last year.
In 2013 my then wife of 10 years and I divorced. From when my primary employer
broke up till mid january, I travelled Europe. Had a (mostly) great time too
but it was a little too long. When I came back a leak had damaged most of my
house, so I came stayed, fixed the leak, dried out the house in January and in
February spent 6 weeks in Berlin. While there my ex-wife hadn't had that great
a time so we agreed she'd stay in the old house and I'd travel for just over a
year, knocking some cash off the divorce settlement in exchange.
I'm only a few months away from moving back, and while I enjoyed travelling
I'm looking forward to being in one place for a while. Thankfully I travel a
lot for work anyway, so filling in the spaces on extra weekends and things
wasn't hard. I mostly stuck to Europe, so time differences weren't a major
issue for me.
Partway through the year I met a girl in London, so I became more London
based. Well, kinda.
One of the things I found travelling was that the longer I spent moving
between places the less connected I felt to anywhere. Sometimes I felt that
everything was so transient it felt pointless making the effort to meet
people. After so much travel, the UK felt like another temporary destination
instead of home, so I returned more or less permanently-ish and moved in with
my girlfriend.
I'm still travelling a lot (this is my first full weekend at home in 7 weeks)
but hoping to calm things down a little at least when I get my house back.
------
MalcolmDiggs
I'm doing it now (driving around the US with my dog), and so far so good. It's
fun, it's exciting, but it can also get lonely and stressful. In the last few
months I've done some awesome stuff (Like going to Mardi Gras, and hiking
national parks, and partying with spring-breakers). But, it's a mixed bag. A
few points:
1\. Budgeting is key. It's easy to tell yourself that you can't budget for
such variably-priced things as hotels and eating-while-vacationing, but you
can. Make a budget, stick to it.
2\. Get hotel-rooms (or airbnbs) with kitchenettes. Having access to a
refrigerator will save you a lot of money and will allow you to eat healthier
food. (Because you can go shopping at local grocery stores instead of eating
out every meal).
3\. Keep many income streams. If you do independent contracting (like I do),
don't just have one client. I prefer to have 3-4 at one time, to even out the
late-payments and such.
4\. Save first, have a big emergency fund. If you're a Suze Orman fan, she'd
probably say to have an 8-month emergency fund in place before doing anything
like this. If youre a Dave Ramsey fan, he'd probably say 3-6 months. Either
way, you need money for emergencies. Once you have that, the regular up-swings
and down-swings of your finances won't be so stressful.
------
rukuu001
Summary: great experience, be prepared for uncertainty and no security.
I think it's superb.
I've spent around 2.5 years overseas over my lifetime. Study exchange in South
Korea, random trips here and there, a month at a time, and most recently I
quit my job and went away for a year in Latin America.
My partner and I had been considering this for a while - a years travel before
kids and marriage etc. Then my dad was diagnosed with a fatal illness, which
put a fire under my ass and we got moving.
We travelled slowly, a month or three in each country. We were planning on
surviving by teaching English, but a 'work away' (try google) we did turned
into ongoing paid work we could do online, so that funded the rest of our
travel. Note - the pay was _exceptionally_ poor, but enough for us to live on
carefully while travelling without giving up major experiences.
We met amazing, inspiring people. Our ideas of what's possible in life were
expanded significantly.
Now, the year's over and we're splitting time between living with our parents.
This isn't a terrible thing, as it's temporary thing before we head overseas
again - South East Asia this time.
A return to 9-5 work looks like _hell_ at this point, so we're busy setting up
an online biz that will support us, first in developing countries, then the
1st world.
If we decided to look for work, we'd be ok - a lot of friends and family have
offered work (so much it was overwhelming) - so while we'd be fine, we
wouldn't be happy.
------
patcon
I created my going-away party as a Facebook event for three weeks out, invited
everyone I knew, and worked backwards from there with my apartment and job and
deciding where to go. It worked out splendidly, and I can't imagine having
done it any differently. After all that, it would have been totally
embarrassing to still be in the city of I'd failed to make it happen :)
(disclaimer: I already did and still do have a wonderful relationship with my
landlord and employer.)
------
Lucadg
> what was the experience like?
life changing, in a good way.
> What were you able to do?
Travel for 10 years instead of the planned one. On the way I created vacation
rentals booking site, like Airbnb, (in 2001) and that financed my travels.
> How did you choose to budget?
You kind of start as cheap as possible and slowly adapt to the situation,
spending a bit more if you can. But mind, the more you spend, the more you
isolate yourself. Stay cheap and you'll be forced to meet people.
> What moved you to this decision, and how was the process of finding work
> again after your travels, if applicable?
the decision was easy: I felt I either did this or wasted my youth. After that
I never needed to find work again. Travel opened my eyes and changed my
perspective. Also, it forced me to make some money fast and that gave me the
drive to try the Airbnb thing. Without that drive I would have probably been
overcome by fear.
> If you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?
nah...it was just perfect :)
Since all is about meeting people, if you are an introvert, make sure you'll
try to be more open, otherwise I guess you'll have a bad experience. Travelers
are very open, you can easily meet people and travel for weeks together in
total intimacy (same rooms etc..) but you have to be open too, don't bullshit
them, they'll stay with you only if the like you. It's so easy to say "ok, I'm
gonna go to Bali, see you around"
[edit: formatting]
------
kinduff
1 year ago I quit my old job as a web developer at a startup company in Mexico
City. Had been working in multiple digital agencies, small and big ones and
always doing freelance projects or personal ones in my spare time.
Had the opportunity to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina for two weeks, so I
asked for my paid vacations and that trip changed my mind. I've never
travelled at my age (22), so when I was back and in only one month I quit my
job and start selling all my stuff I bought for 3 years. In the meanwhile I
started to look for more freelance projects, and just two weeks before I took
the plane - I had already bought my ticket - one remote job position was
opened for me. Lot's of benefits like good salary and a brand new laptop, and
they agreed that I was in another country and I was going to be traveling
through all latinamerica.
One year since that, I was in Argentina for the whole year - I have really
good stories. One month ago I arrived back to México, I still have my remote
job position, I'm using my extra hours to have more freelance projects and I'm
saving everything I have because I'm planning to go to Central America in
August (Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panamá, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru).
The things I learned from this experience is that traveling isn't that hard,
you just need to plan ahead. You can decide what kind of traveling experience
you want. My sister right now is bagpacking from Buenos Aires and she's right
now at Ecuador, she's selling jewelry and food on each city she arrives. In
the other hand, my kind of traveling involves a stable job, lot's of food and
a good place to sleep and work. But that's your choice, there are different
flavors for different people.
------
craigds
I didn't quit my job, but arranged with my employer more flexible hours for
six months while I travelled around Europe, working remotely (I live in New
Zealand.) It was an amazing experience and I'd recommend it to anyone with a
similar background who can afford it.
Working remotely was amazing. One thing I'd recommend is to work at most 4
days per week, and preferably 3 - travelling takes a lot of time and can wear
you out.
If you're an introvert like me, you'll need careful management of how social
you are. For six months by yourself, you will get quite lonely unless you put
significant effort into meeting people. I found it helpful to spend most of my
time in hostels, but 2-3 days every fortnight in a hotel to recharge from all
the socialising. Hotels are expensive but as an introvert they were a
lifesaver - I could just kick back and take a break from meeting new people
every day.
If it's your first time doing this, I don't recommend committing to more than
six months away from home. It can be more challenging than you realise.
If you're working while travelling, it's a good idea to find an office that
you can share for a while. I spent 2 months in Germany, working from an
acquaintance's office. I made some friends there, and it was a good base to
make weekend trips from. But also having the option to _not_ travel on
weekends was very valuable to me - sometimes I just got exhausted! There are
definitely times when all you want to do is lie in bed and surf the internet.
Make sure you have time to do that.
Travelling possibly isn't everyone's cup of tea, but if you're unsure, I would
advise to give it a go. Most people don't get the travel bug by sitting at
home. You might enjoy it. You might even love it :)
------
cconcepts
I had the benefit of taking some time before leaving to build a client base so
I wasn't leaving "cold turkey". Have been living in the developing world and
working remotely for nearly four years now and I really enjoy the freedom it
has given me. Some of the challenges are:
1) Being alone all the time can make it hard to maintain motivation
2) Having multi-day fights with local ISPs when they randomly cut or throttle
my connection (always have a backup mobile dongle)
3) In a hot climate, being tied to a laptop doesn't do great things for your
body. I was previously working on physical construction projects 50% of the
time and the other 50% was spent on the computer designing and managing those
projects. Now I'm just on the computer 100% of my working time and find it
hard to stay in shape - I find gym's unnatural but I have to deal with that in
order to stay in shape.
4) Not seeing people eye to eye means you have to get good at written
communication, fast.
------
issa
I would say that traveling has been a uniquely rewarding experience. I spent
the better part of 10 years on the road. Certainly I could have worked that
entire time and banked a ton of money in my 20s. But, while I'm sure I will
continue to enjoy traveling again some day in the future, traveling is for the
young. Do it while you can!
------
sunriseproject
Great question. I agree.
I quit my job with no plan and about 4,000 saved up. My original plan to teach
English in S Korea but realized I would rather not so I got a working holiday
visa for Australia in 1 working day and booked my flight for the montha fter.
Basically, I came to Australia hoping to find work pretty quickly which was
not the case. As a recent graduate making 60k a year, I didn't want to get
hospitality work and to be honest, don't have thick enough skin for it. So, I
went completely broke.
Living in hostels was pretty rough too, I am young, but I'm not a drinker and
prefer interesting conversation over sex with a stranger and found that aspect
difficult within the typical travel community, but it just took me finding my
own way and that wasn't a problem anymore.
I survived 4 months living as cheaply as possible, doing work exchanges for
room + board for a few months then succumbed to the call of money and picked
up a full time freelance job at a studio in Sydney. It was pretty easy getting
the job. I'm wrapping up my 3rd month here and off to road trip around
Australia and then travel Asia.
Basically, the experience was a bit more difficult than I thought, but in ways
I could've never foreseen. I've grown so much as an individual, and also, make
it my mission to help inspire other people to ask for more in their lives. I
don't do that by pretending my experience has been smooth sailing, but I'd
like to think that just by being me, and being confident (something I've
gotten better at on the road) and alive and well, that it makes people
question their situations.
Either way, stick to your own path. What feels right to you? Don't think with
your head. This decision must come from some place deeper than logistics.
You'll figure it out. No matter what happens. Let go of control on this one.
Then instead of relying on other people's opinions and experiences, you can
rely on your gut instead.
Best of luck. :)
------
mikekchar
After 20 odd years as a programmer, I quit my job with the intention of
spending 1 year teaching English in Japan. My main reason for doing it was
that I wanted to learn Japanese and I felt that there weren't enough hours in
the day to do it in Canada. I'm very risk averse, so I wanted to make sure
that I had a job and a place to live. I was accepted into the JET Programme (I
was 39 at the time -- the cut off age!). At the time, I had all the trappings
of a successful developer: car, house, mountains of things in the house. I
packed a backpack and let some friends live in my house rent free so that
there was someone to look after it.
After 3 months in Japan, I knew I never wanted to go back to Canada.
Eventually, I asked one of my friends to sell my house ( _that 's_ one hell of
a favour!) and got them to give away all my worldly possessions. I loved
teaching English, although I was completely unqualified for it and it took me
a few years before I was at all competent. My job was only 35 hours a week so
I had lots of time to write code in my spare time and I did so almost every
day. I learned Japanese fluently and even got married to a Japanese woman who
didn't speak much English at the time. I stayed there for the entire 5 years
that was available on my teaching contract.
After that, my wife wanted to go somewhere so that she could learn English. I
was feeling quite a bit more confident at this point that the moving thing
would work out... somehow, but I'm still very risk averse ;-) I managed to get
an entry permit for myself and my wife through my English ancestry which
allowed us to work in the country and we just went. We budgeted $30K for a
year and in the case that I couldn't find a programming job I had a startup
plan. I didn't have to worry as I found a job within a month.
Before we left, I warned my wife that it might turn out like it did when I
went to Japan: that we would live in England for ever. We went with that view
in mind and gave away/sold the things we had in Japan (except for a few things
which we left at her mother's house). I, especially, was down to again owning
nothing that I couldn't carry by myself. We stayed for 2 years (to the day!),
but eventually decided to return to Japan to help look after my wife's mother
who is getting older. I am now working remotely on contract for the same
company that I was working for in London. We are very happy in Japan and don't
plan to move again, but who knows.
For advice: You probably don't need to be as risk averse as me. Things will
probably "just work out... somehow". I really, really liked staying in the 2
places for years on end. I have to say that I don't like travelling, per se,
but I have really enjoyed living and becoming part of a community in another
place in the world. Also, spending the time to learn Japanese and to learn a
new trade has completely changed my life for the better. And I got married
(which is actually a bit of a miracle to be honest).
In the 5 years that I was away from a programming job, things changed in the
industry quite a bit. Also, getting a programming job in a new part of the
world meant that I didn't have any contacts and the popular technology was
quite different. Even though I programmed every day on my own, my technical
level dropped by a fair bit. I had one especially bad job interview where I am
sure I looked like a complete idiot because I couldn't do anything. But I
ended up with a great job, probably precisely because I found someone who was
willing to give me a chance to prove myself.
One of the responses here says to "plan to return". As you can see, I went the
other way. I planned not to return. Either way can be good, but I agree whole
heartedly that you need a plan because it can be an emotional roller coaster
ride. If you plan to return, realize that your friends will have moved on in
their lives, your job probably won't be there waiting for you, and _you_ will
fundamentally change. It will be like another new place.
Other people seem to be saying similar things about the things you have
accumulated over time. You don't need/want it. Except for a few things that
have incredible sentimental value, get rid of it all. Trust me. Having to get
rid of your stuff while you are thousands of miles away is not a thing that
you want to experience. Get rid of it before you go. If you can't easily carry
it, then it is useless.
One strange, but I think important piece of advice: don't break local laws. I
have been really, really careful, but I have met people who have had problems
with the law in Japan. Things don't work abroad the way they work where you
live. Even minor things that would be overlooked where you live now could be a
HUGE hassle for you in a different country.
A big one for that is if you intend to get a job in the country you are
visiting, get the proper visa. Many times you can get away without the visa
and it will be fine. The times where you don't get away with it? It will not
be fine at all -- especially if you like travelling. Spending weeks, perhaps
months in a holding cell (which you have to pay a large fee for) until they
deport you, and then having a huge problem ever travelling anywhere again...
This is really not good.
I have a few friends now who work remotely for overseas companies while they
travel. This can work really well if you plan things well (don't assume you
will have good internet access/power!!!) Remote working is quite difficult,
but also rewarding. That is a whole topic to itself.
My last piece of advice is to get comfortable with the idea that you will
change on your trip. Circumstances will force you to be a different person.
This has worked out really well for me and for many other people I know, but
it can be shattering for some people. The "success" of the trip will depend
more on how flexible you can be rather than how much you have prepared in
advance.
------
wooyi
I quit my job and travelled for almost year in South America. I later spent 2
years in grad school (studying social science) as part of an extended "break"
to figure out what I wanted to do. I had no grand plans, goals nor did I
become enlightened from it. I did learned Spanish and met my wife during my
trip, so personally, it had a big impact in my life.
Definitely, had some regrets about grad school as it was a fairly academic
program. I went straight back to coding/software after graduation.
My advice is, if you know what you want to do, just do it. There is no need to
travel the world or go on any journey. But if you don't, or if you haven't
travelled yet, then yes, it does wonders to expand your experiences.
~~~
caseyf7
I had the same experience with grad school after extended traveling. The rules
and administration were suffocating after having so much freedom. I also had a
hard time relating to classmates and their concerns seemed so trivial compared
to the rest of the world. However, this might have been the same if I'd gone
back to work.
------
martiantim
About 3 years ago I traveled for 13 months with my wife (then girlfriend).
Mostly traveled in Asia then the transiberian to Europe, some Africa and the
middle east then a road trip across the US. Lots of awesome advice here. One
thing I'd add is to not be afraid to do something just because western
travelers rarely do it. There seems to be a lot of "common wisdom" about what
is a safe/reasonable thing that is just off. As for money, I programmed 10
hours/week (mostly on overnight bus trips and the like) and our costs were
approx $50/day/person in less expensive countries then $100/day/person in more
expensive countries.
------
cmos
I quit my job making video games and cycled across the country for fifteen
months.. I worked a bit in the last 8 months from my tent (40-60 hours a
month).
It was epic! I would definitely do it all over again.
------
mmphosis
I am still traveling. It's definitely not for everyone, but I would recommend
traveling to anyone because of what you might learn along the way. If you
haven't traveled much, or at all, it is definitely harsh at times, but like a
challenge it is rewarding -- and life changing. I would say take it slow to
start. Travel around your neighborhood. Take different routes to work. Take
different modalities: bus, metro, train, ferry, cycle, sail, walk.
------
monk_e_boy
did it. loved it.
[edit] but if you have to ask the question, I don't think you want to go.
People who go and love it really really want to go and explore. Maybe you
should pick something like "hit all the tech trade shows" around the world, or
what makes you feel excited. Getting an internship at google may be a better
way for _you_ to spend a year. My SO did a few months in an African school,
she loved it more than sightseeing.
I went to hit the biggest and best waves in the world. I got most of them, it
made me a better water person, but surfing perfect waves for a year made me
hate surfing in the UK. It's a bit shit compared to Hawaii.
We got to see lots of non-touristy parts of the world. Some waves you really
have to go far from the beaten path to find. So that was fun for me.
------
diba
I quit my job at a top-tier HFT firm to travel the world while working on a
pet project. This was an extremely difficult decision since I really enjoyed
my job/friends and was setup to do quite well financially. The main reasons I
pulled the trigger were:
1) A strong thirst to experience more of the world (and knowing it would be
more difficult when I'm older (I was 26)).
2) The desire to run my own show on a project I felt like I was born to do.
I received a 1-year paid non-compete, so the plan was to give the project a
shot while traveling, and if it wasn't panning out, to get back into the HFT
industry. I was very fortunate to have earned enough to where budget was a
non-issue (though I've managed to live quite cheaply) and I had my brother and
good friend joining me on my travels and helping out with the project for the
first couple months.
I could write a lot, but here are the highlights after spending time all over
Europe, USA, Mexico, and South Africa.
_The good:_
\- Seeing more of the world and experiencing new cultures has been an amazing
and rewarding experience.
\- Working on my passion project has been a blast, and I've thoroughly enjoyed
the freedom and flexibility it has allowed.
\- I've grown a ton both as a person and as a coder/statistician (it's nice to
have the freedom to spend large segments of time learning new skills.)
\- Adopting a minimalist lifestyle has been cathartic and rewarding.
_The bad:_
\- It's really hard to balance time between work and travel/leisure. I've
opted to spend long periods settled in one place while focusing on work,
"living like a local", etc., and then taking pure leisure trips where I hop
around to many nearby places.
\- Hard to stay connected with friends and family back home.
\- Hard to make lasting relationships while traveling, especially when english
is not the country's primary language.
\- Learning a new language (beyond common phrases) takes a lot of time, and
doesn't give much bang for your buck (beyond a challenging mental exercise)
when your spending less than 6 months someplace.
My 1-year is almost up and it's still unclear whether the project will pan
out, but I'm planning to continue my work/travels as I'm still enjoying the
experience, learning a lot, and there's more of the world I want to explore!
~~~
therealdrag0
"I received a 1-year paid non-compete" How'd that work?
------
slackstation
All these experiences, I wonder are there any nomads who are black? I've heard
traveling through Eastern Europe and parts of Asia and South America. You get
treated very differently if you are black. Anyone with that experience willing
to share?
------
technological
For some reason this post reminds me of movie "Into the Wild"
------
stickfigure
At the end of 2007 I quit my job as the CTO of an online porn company, bought
a new motorcycle, and rode south. I kept a pretty detailed blog:
[http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=305107](http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=305107)
It went _great_. I thought I would be gone six months but it ended up being
just shy of a year. It gave me all the adventure I had hoped for and more -
new friends, beautiful locations rarely seen by tourists, love affairs, very
difficult situations, even a fair amount of genuine heart-pounding danger
(jumping out of a moving cab at gunpoint; involuntarily evacuated from the
Darién by the Panamanian army). I came back feeling tested and proven.
Yeah, I sound like a cliche. But it was really, really good for me.
To your questions: I started out with $100k in the bank. I didn't have a
budget; I figured I would come back when I was either bored or felt poor
enough. After a year I came back with about half that (including ~$14k on
bike+gear, "fully depreciated" by the end of the trip). Honestly though, I
burned money left and right; you could easily do the trip on 1/3rd that,
especially if you're not an obsessive foodie. I didn't work on the road, other
than pondering the question of "what to work on next".
Re-entry was fairly graceful. I spent all the rest of my money working on
startup ideas that failed, but also building some opensource software that
took off and eventually working that into a consulting business that at least
pays the bills. I came back to SF expecting to enjoy a good long stretch as a
heartbreaker but almost immediately began a torrid romance with a woman who is
now my wife... so while nothing turned out like I expected, I count it as a
success.
The trip didn't make me a fundamentally different person, but it did change
me. When you can negotiate in broken Spanish to get your broken-down
motorcycle pulled out of a goat trail in the rain with an ox-cart, most of the
annoying hurdles that modern life throws at you feel pretty mild and
tractable. Not much gets me worked up anymore.
My advice for novices considering extended world travel:
* Stick to the cheap but tourist-friendly parts. Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, Turkey.
* Travel by unusual modes. Motorcycle is great. Bicycle is better. On foot is even better. My wife and I spent two months walking the Camino de Santiago across Spain a year ago and it was the best trip of my life to date. The slower you go, the more people you meet and the more detail you get to see. Travel by bus or train is the _worst_ \- you can't even stop when you see something interesting. Although, amusingly, there's a contrary problem on foot - you have to make hard decisions about points of interest that are just a mile off track.
* Depth is better than breadth. Spend more time in fewer places. You can always take more trips.
* Take language lessons. It's a good way to spend a week somewhere and you'll often make friends.
* Do remote consulting, if you can. It not only brings money but gives you an excuse to stay in one place for stretches at a time. I wish I had my current contact network in 2008; I might still be out there.
* Assuming you are in technology and at least competent, don't worry about finding a job when you get back. Don't wait until your bank account is about to run dry, but also don't fret about it. Softwarewise, not that much really changes in a year. And when it does, it's usually not a good idea to be on the bleeding edge anyways.
------
j_lev
I lived in a van for about nine months while traveling around Japan.
I lived primarily off savings, though I worked for three weeks at a beer
garden over the summer, two weeks washing dishes at the Sumo in Tokyo and did
some consulting work here and there for previous clients.
Once you find your groove it's easy. For me, it was 1) from about 6pm try to
find a place to shower, then a place to park. 2) spend about an hour planning
the next day's activities. 3) get into some sake, read some comics, then
sleep. 4) wake up early enough and move on so that no-one notices you just
camped there overnight. Head into town and start sight-seeing.
Fortunately it was 2007 when I came to Tokyo to look for "proper" work and
there were all these jobs supporting these people working in something called
"sub prime mortgages"...
I was 27 at the time. Still here almost 10 years later though I live in an
apartment now. Next month I'll be heading back to Australia to work on a few
projects and the thought is a bit daunting. It was much easier at 27 to quit
the job and pack it all up, but I think having the experience under my belt
makes it easier the second time around.
Second time around will be more like what you describe above, the "quit your
job and into the unknown." My tips (as much for you as for me) from doing it
once are 1) less is more when it comes to luggage. If I didn't have to work
I'd probably go entirely bagless (see: Scottevest) or close too it. 2) A lot
of it comes down to a few simple requirements that need to be taken care of
every day. Once you have these under control your mindset changes in ways that
could fill a blog post on their own. 3) For many hiring managers, a year
traveling on your CV is poison. That's their shortcoming, not yours. 4)
Consider doing "local" jobs while traveling. I was working and being paid
minimum wage but loved every moment of it, and I still keep in touch with my
colleagues from those experiences (I've since worked at a bean-sweets factory
and a hot spring resort, another stint at the Sumo, and there was a hotel
somewhere in there too). 5) The more food prep you're prepared to do the more
you can save. If I knew there was a market nearby I'd be up at the crack of
dawn jostling with the old ladies for discounted local produce. I learnt and
employed time-tested methods for preserving food (salting, spicing,
fermenting, drying, etc) or bought from markets pre-preserved (I spiced and
dried some meat hanging in my car one time while on the freeway with my
windows open. The drag probably cost me more in fuel than I saved by being
able to buy the discounted meat lol). I had several go-to meals, and became a
master of one-pot cooking. Worst case I would go without, or spend a buck
getting some cheap calories from the convenience store. 6) Talk to people.
Everyone has a problem they need solved, and you might be the person to solve
it. Maybe one thing leads to another and you have a source of income for a
while, or more. All of my part-time jobs above bar one came from introductions
from people I had spoken to or worked with along the way. Often you can bring
a unique perspective, or worst case you learn something yourself.
------
eru
I switched between a few jobs in different countries and continents. Not quite
travelling, but much more relaxing and paid for.
------
jefecoon
tldr: My year off was fantastic. Not life-changing, but amazing. In the years
since I find individuals reaction to hearing of my year off very telling in
what they'll be like to work with and their take on work/life balance. May
have set career back... by a year-ish. I would do it again.
I'd spent around seven years as part of an early-stage startup team, built up
company to 500+, was worth tens of millions on paper then actually made
nothing. I needed a break, and thought a couple months off would be great.
I had hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles and had planned to go
first class to India, train around, see the Himalaya, then end up on a beach
in Thailand as the finale. Still hope to do this, some day.
Instead I stayed in N America: skied Mt Rainier and several other Cascade
volcanoes, rafted Grand Canyon with my parents, lived in Yosemite Valley
climbing for nearly two months, climbed many amazing places in Cascades,
Rockies & Alaska. I ended up spending around ten months off chasing
adventures.
I did receive phone calls about jobs from people who knew I was off, wondering
if/when I'd come back to reality. One of these calls lead to my next job,
consulting at Microsoft for several years.
With over a decade passed since I took this year off I can say concretely I
have no regrets. It may However, I do have friends who've taken extended time
off who've felt it hurt their careers...
I've noticed a curious thing: I now intentionally tell people about my year
off when interviewing, etc, and find reactions to my extended time off very
telling indicator: reaction: "Hmmm, really. What can you tell me about your
work ethic?" => Do not work for someone like this, period...
"A year off? I hope you got that out of your system and are ready to work hard
here at Widget Corp." => Likely have zero concept or concern about work/life
balance; will question your time-off requests.
"I could never do that, sounds so scary but incredible... did it hurt your
career?" => These people are fine, and will love your slide-show screen-saver;
intentionally pause your powerpoint every now and then to give them a taste
because they'll enjoy it.
"OMG __really??? __I 've always wanted to... where did you go? how awesome was
it? would you do it again?" => Almost 100% of the time people with this
reaction are awesome. Find these people.
------
cr_huber
Terrible for me. Spent all my money. Couldn't find a job for 6 months when I
came back
------
markbao
I was pretty young when I quit (20), so I'm not sure how useful it is, but:
_— [W]hat was the experience like?_
10–11 months, through Europe, quick stop in Turkey/China, Southeast Asia, and
finally South America. Really amazing and eye-opening, especially at my age of
being relatively sheltered in my childhood mostly in the northeast USA. Nearly
every day was a day where I learned or saw something new, which was awesome.
It was also pretty challenging at some points, but of course, that made it
engaging as well. I'm reminded of me, a shoddy hiker, backpacking with a heavy
pack through Torres del Paine in Chile, only completing it because I took
breaks every 15 minutes to motivate myself with peanut M&Ms.
And yeah, it was a very formative experience, and I came back changed for
sure, and, I think, more resilient.
Responding to some of the commenters before me, I was also an introvert when I
went and I absolutely had some hellish times while staying in hostels and I
can see how other introverts might have experienced the same. Over time, I did
become more of ambivert, but yeah, I definitely also experienced some trifling
times as an introvert. This contributed to a good amount of fatigue from being
outside of my comfort zone (see below).
_— How did you choose to budget?_
Not very well, but thankfully, traveling (even in some places in western
Europe) is very affordable compared to than living in a top-tier city. I could
survive off of $50 a day in Europe lodging at hostels, and anywhere from $30
down to $10 a day in Southeast Asia. I generally spent more than the average,
since I wanted to experience the places I was going thoroughly.
_— What moved you to this decision, and how was the process of finding work
again after your travels, if applicable?_
A desire to expand my problem space and create a better mental model of the
world that better matches reality. As for post-travel, I went back to school,
but being a developer, I suspect I wouldn't have had any trouble finding work
again. I didn't, though, because traveling accelerated my quasi-
disillusionment with tech and my move into behavioral science.
_— If you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?_
Be more fearless. I was a 20-year-old kid so a bit of worry was probably on
par, but being nearly 23 now, I would have taken more risks. I certainly
wasn't conservative, but I could have done more. I came back home after South
America because I was fatigued after challenging myself. Interestingly, I
think I would have been more fearless if I let myself just realize I was
burned out and let myself rest without feeling like I was wasting time "not
seeing the world" or something. It doesn't always have to be go-go-go and then
resting only so you can do it again—rest for rest's sake. Long-term traveling,
as any traveler will tell you, gets tiring.
I would also optimize for meeting more people and traveling with them more. I
did meet a lot of people, but didn't really travel with too many of them
(perhaps 10% of my trips were with others). Solo travel is freedom to the nth
degree, but it's also really great to have a mix of shared and solo because
it's nice to experience things with others sometimes.
There's lots more I can say, but it was a pretty transformative experience and
it's something I wish everyone would experience sometime.
------
harmmonica
After spending a couple of years traveling on and off after quitting a job,
there are a few things I wish I'd known/asked myself beforehand.
1\. In your daily life, are you typically happy/comfortable not having a
schedule? You might say "I'm traveling to get away from daily life," but
longer-term travel is not like taking a vacation. It's much more like daily
living. If you're happy not having a schedule in your normal life, don't plan
much when you travel. I didn't even ask that question before I went traveling,
but by nature I have a hard time not having a plan so I planned the s __* out
of my travels (I picked destinations around the planet, bought plane tickets
to a chunk of the first destinations, planned activities /goals along the way
and even had future destinations in mind (zoom out on Google Maps and just
dream/lust after places! You'll almost immediately have a plan even if you
don't like planning!). Anyway, I'm super stoked I planned the trip. I would've
been a bit bummed if I hadn't, but as some posters here have said, planning
isn't for everyone and you have to know what you like. And of course you can
have a bit of both. Doesn't need to be "no plan" vs "plan every day," but
structure, if you enjoy structure, is key. If you are too structured and are
traveling to change yourself, of course ignore this advice.
2\. Do you feel a need to accomplish things? I'm just going to go out on a
limb since you're asking this on HN that you like "getting stuff done." You
might be an "enjoy the journey more than the destination" person, but a big
part of the journey is progressing/growing and so, again, related to schedule,
plan on actually accomplishing some things while traveling. My partner and I,
though not particularly outdoorsy, took advantage of several months of
traveling to do some short, but serious (for us) hiking and I have to say that
absent those events during our travels we wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as
much. It's awesome seeing the world, and talking to the people who inhabit it,
but the desire for accomplishment doesn't go away when you do longer-term
travel. Like I said, it's not like a vacation (though of course we were happy
to find ourselves on nice beaches after pushing ourselves to reach "the top of
the mountain." And your mountain can be hiking, learning a language, building
an app, volunteering, etc. We just happened to want to see some epic nature)
3\. Does my partner "love" me enough to not kill me if we're on top of each
other for months on end (and vice versa)? You can only ask this, of course, if
you're planning on traveling with a partner. You can always take breaks from
each other, which is likely easier if you're traveling with a friend instead
of a romantic partner, but I think saying upfront what you're both comfortable
with is important
Apologies for the long post. Not sure if you, the OP, will read it, but if you
want a spreadsheet with an around-the-world budget, hit me up and I'll share a
Google one with you. I think I still have it. The single longest trip we did
during the 2 years was three months (far shorter than a bunch of the folks who
commented), but I/we stayed almost right on budget the whole time, which is
actually much easier than you might think because as long as you have some
flexibility timing-wise you can always save money on the big-bucket items
(air/travel, lodging, food).
Oh, one last comment... If you love travel, and have dreamed of doing it more
extensively and think you can pull it off, just do it. The only frustrating
thing about traveling (for people who really enjoy it!) is not being able to
do more of it.
~~~
chargeur_rapide
Hey, thanks for sharing your experience! I will be graduating soon and I am
wondering about travelling too and trying to figure out a budget. It would be
great if you can share your spreadsheet with the around-the-world budget.
------
humanarity
Wow, I got my first "That comment was too long". Okay, I'm breaking this into
two replies because it's just too good to not put here.
I ended up getting a better job overseas (paid to research and code what I
want). And then I quit that and ended up getting an even better opportunity
after travelling again, and after a fun period interning at a magazine, then
making investment banker money for building an ecommerce site.
I think the more glibly you express it, ("Quit your job! Travel the world!"
would have to be one of the more concise expressions) the more possible
meanings that statement can encode, so the more open it is to interpretation.
I think the essence of being successful doing that (by essence I mean one main
cause and requirement) is simply the willingness to leave one opportunity to
find a better one.
From a thermodynamic viewpoint, the more you raise your energy (unbound
state), the more possible energy states you can access. The more "stable"
things are, the less energy states (read possibilities) you will access.
From an "multivariate optimization" perspective (how you maximize your utility
over a couple of metrics relevant to you with the space of possibilities some
kind of undulating surface) you are searching the landscape of possibilities,
the willingness to "pivot" off a local maxima and begin searching again is a
strategy that makes finding higher peaks possible.
Diving deeper, heuristically the landscape is large (there are many possible
configurations of your axes of utility, i.e, many possible situations), and
also mostly self-similar (because there are certain rules which operate in the
world which cycle and combine to produce familiar patterns, for example, human
psychology, means that, broadly, people's reactions to a given situation will
mostly be the same across cultures, and their motivations will be similar as
well, such as in aggregate people are motivated by their fears (of not having
enough, of shame) and by their ego (competing with other egos), and by their
culture (social norms, shared history and cultural identity), and by what the
narrative they choose for themselves (hero, victim, "normal", "outcast",
"individual" roughly corresponding to high school film tropes, thou becoming
more multifaceted and specialised with age -- people become niche experts at
being who they are, is another way of saying habits become ingrained). So
these personal identities and cultural identities drive people, and these
identities are shaped by forces uniform across the world, and people drive the
world, so the world, in most ways you look, is essentially the same. It is
also very very different, yet the difference is obvious. The sameness merits
mention because it is one of those "hacks" that is not always inherently
obvious, and even when it is, there's a lot of depth to the self-similar
characters of different places, and a lot of utility to be gained by learning
about what's similar wherever you are.
So back to the "optimization" analogy, if we are walking a landscape that has
two characteristics, it's large and mostly uniform, there are some
consequences suggested by these observations. If I'm on a local peak in a
large landscape (i.e, I have one a many possible jobs in many possible
places), and that landscape is mostly uniform, then there's probably a lot of
other peaks even a far way away.
~~~
humanarity
__continuing __
It 's like the universe at galactic scale: broadly the same in all directions
as far as you look.
And if I'm on this one peak of many peaks, then if I go off searching, it's
likely I'll find other peaks comparable to where I was. So the first
unintuitive result is that search is likely to produce comparably stable
conditions, instead of the "shattering fear and chaos" which may be feared to
result from leaving a local peak.
The second result is based on the following observation: the peaks are
distributed across a range of heights that's modelled well by a bell curve
(based on subjective metrics of personal utility). The very small and the very
large peaks are rare. This has a number of relevant consequences. Firstly,
it's roughly as hard to fall off the cliff and into chaos as it is to ascend
to the heights of huge success, which reinforces our first unintuitive result
that search mostly preserves the equilibrium. Because comparable conditions
are the most common, you're more likely to keep finding them than anything
distressingly (or delightfully) too different.
The second relevant consequence for our discussion of optimization of your
lifepeak is because more successful and less successful than you are more
rare, it's unlikely where you are starting out in your search is anything
close to a global optima. In fact it's overwhelming more likely it's just a
normal peak, no matter what narratives you attach to it (like the story I told
above, as good as that sounds, it's still overhwlemingly likely that's mostly
normal). The great thing about this is there's a whole bunch of peaks out
there that are better than where we currently are. And we give can find them
if we try. We give ourselves a chance to find them only if we try.
The other great thing about looking for higher peaks is, and this is similar
to the argument about why you should only focus on the biggest problems, that
great peaks are mostly unoccupied. The higher the peak is, the less life is up
there, because it's themodynamically harder to reach it.
And thermodynamics applies everywhere. Well, everywhere that matters for
optimizing your life peak. I.e, it's unlikely you'll want to be on the edge of
our knowledge inside the event horizon of a black hole. But personal utility
is subjective, so...Maybe that works for you.
These two unintuitive results, first, that by searching you are more likely to
find comparable conditions than worse or better ones, and second, that where
you are is unlikely to be the best and there are other better ones out there
that have paths untrod and are unoccupied, (peaks that are waiting just for
you), provide a compelling reason for us to search from where we are.
And if you lay breadcrumbs, you might even be able to trek your way back.
This "existence proof" of a better life waiting over the horizon of travel, is
not constructive.
It doesn't actually tell us how to produce such a better life.
Tho, strangely, these results do offer some heuristic algorithms for search.
1\. Because where you are is unlikely to be the best, you are better off
pivoting if you are desiring a higher utility co-ordinate for yourself. And
you don't even have to worry about "am I up to this" because you were "up to
it" to find your current peak, and given the relevant characteristics of the
landscape (uniformity and scale), this means you are up to it to stumble,
however hopelessly you may feel you stumble, upon comparable conditions
elsewhere! If however, you have your heart set on "better conditions" then the
corollary of this is that, while travel may "open your eyes" to lower energy
paths through the landscape, the Universal Rules, uniformity and scale, mean
that you will need a similar additional quantum of energy to raise your peak
abroad as you will at home.
Let that sink in. It's actually not going to be any easier, thermodynamically
speaking in the aggregate, to get your life peak better if you travel far away
than if you don't. Because this is a law of aggregate statistics it goes hand
in hand with all its individuated exceptions, and it still operates: broadly
speaking, you've just as much chance of finding a higher peak in your
neighbourhood than across the globe.
This unintuitive result has other nice corollaries in that it's not really
easier to make it if you're overseas than if you're at home, contrary to the
sometimes myth that it is, a result which you can contribute as a reason to
variously stay or to go, as you please.
So returning to our second algorithm heuristic for lifepeak search, it works
to start by realizing that there will be additional energy requirements to
improve your life, wherever you are.
Now, this is where it gets really interesting.
Someone has said that perspective is 80 IQ points. That simply presenting
something from a perspective that works has huge utility in itself.
Perspective is a super power. You can enhance or limit your inherent abilities
with your choice of perspective.
In chemistry, we call this a catalyst. Perspective lowers the barrier of entry
to different achievements, making it easier to unlock higher lifepeaks.
Perspective flattens the energy landscape, allowing to see further.
And travel, can give you, perspective.
That's probably one of it's most powerful operations.
And it's not some mythical hand-waving argument that travel gives you
perspective just so, it's actually because (cue hand-waving mythical argument)
the conceptual lag between the apparent nature of things (their difference) in
other places, and their unobvious inherent sameness (the Universal Rules),
gives you space. You get mental space where even though you feel you are in a
different place, you are actually in inherently the same place, aggregately
speaking.
And when you have space you are free to move around.
And being free to move around is freedom to change your perspective. That's
the definition of perspective, mental space to move around in. And it's the
very appearance of things you find in travel (the apparent difference of which
hides their inherent sameness), it's the very lag before you catch up to that,
before you learn that patterns, which gives you that mental space to gain
perspective to flatten the energy landscape to trek your way to that new,
higher, peak.
So being in the unknown is not mythically just better for you, it actually
works by this mechanism to make it easier for you.
It's still going to take more energy to get to a higher peak, though maybe
you're new found perspective has made that energy requirement less than it
otherwise would have been, for you, and because you've learned something (by
not yet learning how similar things really are) it is easier for you to go to
that new higher life peak.
Time here to offer a word of caution. What makes it easier to go up also makes
it easier to go down. And many a foreign expat in a faraway land has succumbed
to one form of burnout or another. The fresh perspective is not a magical cure
all: it's a powerful tool, and it's up to you and your choices what results
you produce with that power you chose to give yourself. So if you're thinking
travel will solve all your problems, maybe it will, and yet just go cautiously
that you have enough resourcefulness and resilience to keep yourself away from
the chasms, because even though that landscape flattens now, when it finally
straightens out as your learn the inherent sameness, those chasms will seem
mighty deep, I imagine, so, buyer beware.
Finally, returning to the search algorithm heurstic suggested by this line of
reasoning, we have: keep your eyes open, stay loose and let go, don't try to
see the sameness straight away, see the difference, because you're going to
catch up anyway and the longer you stay in the unknown the more perspective
you have. This is the fourth unintuitive result: spend time in ignorance
longer in a new culture, let the difference go to work on you. Learn less
language, not more, because being in the dark will keep you on your toes and
also keep your perspective fresh, and if you're searching for that higher life
peak, and fresher perspective is one of the things which works to have in your
toolchain.
Now these two heuristic search algorithms we've presented:
1\. Pivot. Just go 2\. Stay loose. Stay dumb,
(which conveniently seem to encode rigorously the very hippy traveler
aesthetic practised by the most seasoned nomads and incurable wanderers --
likely hooked on the perspective high),
neither of these, guarantee you'll find higher peaks, what you get is up to
you. And maybe you'll create your own algorithms to optimize your travel
experience, or even to find higher peaks in your neighbourhood. That would be
awesome. Heed the general principles above is likely a place to start with
that works.
And, finally, something must be said to address this question.
What if you search and you find that you were at the apex already?
Sit up there and have a cup of tea? Gaze down superiously at your surrounding
kingdom and minions?
Or maybe you got to ask yourself, if you wanted to leave what was the Everest
in that landscape, maybe you're in the wrong space?
So, the remedy for that is ... more travelling to gain clarity for what kind
of space might work better for you.
Peace out.
------
contingencies
_What was the experience like?_
Better than staying put!
_What were you able to do?_
Everything. Importantly, lose my introverted character. Literally went
INTP->ENTP (ENTP-A). All the travel stuff, learn languages, cycle-touring,
paragliding, caving, exploring, plus try other types of work, start a company,
learn a lot of computer stuff, learn a lot of history/culture/geography, etc.
_How did you choose to budget?_
Variously. Some periods pushing red or even red, other periods (after 7+
years) back to the salary-snatch. Had a scholarship for awhile, free
accommodation to boot. Initially working wasn't necessary, as $50 bought me a
month's rent in 2001 in China and I left with $15k. Made it through Laos,
Thailand and Taiwan on those funds. Later, I tried English teaching but found
it wasn't for me.
_What moved you to this decision?_
Exposed to travel a little bit at a young age. Bored of the commuter 9-5
lifestyle by age 18 or 19 after only 1.5 years exposure.
_How was the process of finding work again after your travels, if
applicable?_
Surprisingly easy. I left Australia having been on a salary of 60k AUD at age
18. 7 or 8 years later I rocked up in London with effectively no western work
on my CV for that period (I had actually started a company in China, kept up
many interests in programming, etc.). Once I'd taken a permanent/salaried
position (at GBP 40k, which moved to 60k within 3 months) I was surpried to
realise that people in 'normal' career coding positions rarely get the ability
to go deep in their learning the same way living cheap in some random country
being your own boss lets you. I'd done diskless systems, clustering, VOIP,
digital fax, replicated databases, SMS, lots of mapping, business process
automation, and all of that in 6 human languages. I'd also learned Chinese.
Thus, I was in some ways more broadly employable than if I had never spent
time away. After two years of salary (one in London, one in LA) I found a
remote position, then moved back to China. My wife and I have since had our
first child, lived a year in Thailand, and traveled broadly in Southeast Asia,
Australia, New Zealand, and currently Europe, where we are looking to
resettle.
_If you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?_
If I did the entrepreneurial thing for the first time while in a foreign
country again (a real learning experience!), I would pay or beg an experienced
CEO back in my home country - one with some nous - to give me a strong
education in business accounting up front. What's critical, what different
parties look for, how they evaluate, how to present, how you can usefully
evaluate numbers yourself, etc. I would try to meet and involve skilled
mentors in my businesses from day one. Other than that, nothing. Maybe buy
bitcoins early on ;)
------
Nathannn
I'm currently doing this. I've been out for about 3 months, currently in
Taipei, and hopefully I'll be out for a year. I did quit my job but I didn't
quit working. There's contract work that I've done on and off for the last
month. It's only part time though, which is good.
Since I make iOS and Android apps, it's fairly easy to get contracting work,
and it's nice to not have to worry that much about money. I've happy that I
can get private apartments and not have to stay in hostels. I'm not 19
anymore.
A lot of other commenters have hit the nail on the head about travel. Here are
a few things that I totally agree with:
1\. Traveling will not instantly make your life amazing. You will worry about
money, you'll get lonely, and you'll probably really want some food that you
don't have. Every city I go to I try to find coffee that's on par with
Stumptown or Four Barrel. You'd be amazed what a Google search for "Hipster
Coffee shops in xxxx" will turn up. However, many many times I have to settle
for Nescafe, especially in Thailand.
2\. Loneliness can be a big problem. I'm lucky enough to be traveling with my
fiance so at least we have each other, but I've seen other travelers and
digital nomads that are having a rough time after about the 6 week point.
3\. After a while, if you're not working, you'll get bored. It happened to me.
Being on a beach for a week is great if you're stressed. It's not so awesome
if you're already a little bored. Find something you like doing. Make a list
of books you want to read, programming topics you want explore, or whatever
floats your boat and do that for 4 hours a day while you're out. It keeps your
brain sharp and gives you a purpose.
Other observations: 1\. Many digital nomads are software developers (including
myself) but many aren't. The ones that aren't tend to be in pyramid schemes.
Have you heard of the drop shipping lifestyle? Would you like to? It can get
irritating, especially since every blog post or Facebook comment is about how
they're winning at life and you should too!
2\. Coworking spaces are great for meeting people that are also traveling or
starting their own companies. They would also totally be down to hangout and
grab a drink. See point #2 above. They can clue you in to where the best expat
bars are or where to find an IPA.
3\. It's ok if you don't actually want to go to museums, temples, or whatever.
Finding the best coffee shop in town can be so much more enjoyable than making
the trek to temple #5 and seeing the second tallest Buddha statue in the
country.
4\. Move slowly. The days when I'm in the worst mood are the ones that I have
to put on my pack, navigate to the train station, hop on a plane, and somehow
find my AirBnB in a new city. It's a pain. Spend at least a week or two in a
city if you're doing long term travel. You can get cheaper rates if you do
weekly or monthly rates anyway.
~~~
seanmcdirmid
I have developed a taste for Nescafé, especially the cold stuff in cans, so
much so that I miss it when I'm back in the west (Switzerland used to have a
lot of it, but they don't seem to sell the long skinny cans there anymore).
Thailand has some great coffee shops in Bangkok, the rest of the country is ok
but nothing special. Bali does ok also, and the phillipines...
I'm not a digital nomad though, I just need to get out of beijing every few
months to stop from going crazy.
------
tzakrajs
Has anyone done this with their professional spouse? How did it go?
~~~
orofino
My wife and I both quit our jobs before we left to travel. We've been together
for 13 years at this point, were at about 10 years when we started traveling.
Something about the travel just resulted in us bickering way more than we ever
have before. We aren't 100% sure what the cause was.
I think traveling even slower 1-2 weeks/city might have helped with this, but
then again, some cities just don't warrant that much time.
Since coming home we've since traveled for a 5 week trip together and it was
much smoother. Perhaps we just needed to learn how to travel together.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Do I Owe My Employees a Career Path? - Sukotto
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/do-i-owe-my-employees-a-career-path/
======
DanielStraight
It sounds like his employees just need a raise. If I was making $500k a year
cleaning toilets, I wouldn't care about a career path. Obviously this example
is extreme, but if losing people is a disaster, you should be paying them
enough that it would be insane for them to leave unless they were planning a
complete career change.
As for more responsibility, just give people more say in how the company is
run. If your employers are better at something than you ever see yourself
being, they probably have insights that you would never have. Ask them.
Implement their ideas.
I don't think people really want to feel overpaid or overextended any more
than they want to feel underpaid or underutilized. If employees are asking for
more money or more responsibility, it's probably because they feel underpaid
or underutilized, not because they want excess.
~~~
ojbyrne
I think a few years at $500k cleaning toilets and you'd have enough money in
the bank to think about a career change. Even if it was
a. Running your own toilet cleaning business.
or
b. Retirement.
~~~
flyosity
What if cleaning toilets is your favorite thing to do in the world? Why start
a business (and, ostensibly, pay others to do the thing you love most) when
you could just keep on doing it, day after day?
~~~
ojbyrne
On a recent trip to Vegas, I was briefly in a bathroom at a casino where
someone had completely missed the toilet while having a crap. I just don't see
that being _anyone's_ favorite thing to do in the world.
~~~
flyosity
My favorite thing in the world is designing & coding software interfaces. I'm
sure there are a ton of people out there who look at me the same way you might
look at a toilet cleaner :)
------
jtbigwoo
I knew a secretary at a big telecom equipment company that had been paid in
stock back when the company was just getting started. Twenty-five years later,
she was worth over $10,000,000 and still working the same job. She didn't have
a career path, she had two things:
-a job that made a difference at the company
-a share of the rewards
Give your employees those two things and they'll stick around.
~~~
shasta
I think you mean - she didn't have a career path, but she had two things:
\- a job that made a difference at the company
\- $10,000,000
~~~
jshen
He had it right. A share of the rewards is a gamble that there will be
rewards, but the outcome is unknown when the promise of rewards are given. She
only knew that if the company did well that she would also do well.
------
c0riander
I think the more accurately stated question is: Is it better for my company if
I create a career path for my employees?
Everyone's knee-jerk reaction to using the word "owe" will be no. But I think
the question is an interesting one that I, at least, don't know the answer to.
On the yes side, there is the possibility of long-term retention and providing
more benefit to employees as a recruitment tool. On the no side, the potential
for these employees to then leave for better jobs, the resource drain in
creating such a program, the difficulty placing these people within a small
company, etc.
So I'm curious to hear what people who've had this experience think -- _is_ it
better for the company?
~~~
sp_
I used to work for a startup (employee) and I was wondering the same all the
time. One of the perks of working at this company that you were allowed to
speak at as many conferences as you wanted to and everybody who worked there
made good use of it.
On the one hand, this was basically our primary marketing tool. We talked
about our tools, other engineers saw them and convinced their companies to buy
our software. On the other hand, our engineers were constantly in contact with
people from big companies (Google, MS, ...) that tried to recruit them.
Curiously, only one of our engineers ever left the company voluntarily (that
was me, after four years), so apparently the boss managed to create a work
environment that was so great that even constant top-dollar recruitment
attempts by other companies had no effect.
~~~
KMStraub
That's great to hear. A company that is so confident in what its doing and its
hires, that it trusts and encourages them to expand their skill set and degree
of influence.
------
grammaton
I think much the same dynamic is in play in the average developer's career.
Think of all the job postings you've seen asking for 5 years experience in
language X and 10 years experience in platform Y. Employers seem to want ever
more specialization out of their developers, which for the most part is
exactly the opposite of what is in the developer's own best interests. What
developer wants to end up wedded to a single platform or language - if they're
smart, or even just ambitious, they'll know that technical knowledge has a
frightfully short shelf life. Not to mention that the only way to get a
promotion or raise as a developer is typically to jump ship and go somewhere
else. So it seems to be in their own best interests to branch out and try new
things, which typically involves going elsewhere.
In the software industry, at least, employers by and large feel little if any
obligation to give their developers a career path, and that's why most
developers move around so much. Not that I don't understand the employer's
motives as well - especially in a field as in demand as development can be,
why should they feel an obligation to give us a career path when we can
essentially write our own ticket if we choose to?
Don't feel any obligation to give your employees a career path, then - but
don't expect them to stick around either. And no, it's not because they're
lazy or spoiled or entitled or disloyal - it's a simple matter of economic
incentives.
~~~
wtracy
Well, whether or not specializing in one technology is good for your career
depends on your career goals.
Being an expert in one obscure technology is an excellent way to become a
consultant.
If you don't want to spend your career maintaining someone else's code, then
it's probably a bad idea to specialize in one technology.
------
gte910h
Have you heard of golden handcuffs? While there are certainly anti-employee
versions of that business trope, there are certainly pro-employee ways to do
that. Profit sharing that goes up by year is a good one, as is benefits
increases.
Even just increase pay over time past what they'll earn elsewhere. They'll
keep doing their highly specialized job because no one else can hire them at a
competitive rate.
Find areas they can flex their brains that don't cost you much. Say, publicity
stunt woodworking (I'm sure you could make things that get you press), novelty
items you can use as gifts to prospective clients, etc, completely designed
and done by these skilled tradesmen.
Or hell, just give them stupid amounts of time off. It's very hard to leave a
place that has 20-40 days of vacation.
Or even make a community oriented approach. Have them teach a class on X etc
to the community, mentor at risk kids, etc.
~~~
sosuke
If you're going to use the vacation time route then please don't go to
unlimited vacation. To some employees unlimited vacation is the same thing as
none.
~~~
gte910h
I want to run a company someday where if you've not taken all your vacation,
then at the end of the year your email, phone forwarding and door access card
all turn off till Jan 1.
~~~
bartonfink
So... overnight on Dec. 31?
------
PaulHoule
My favorite quote from that article is "That made for an interesting job, but
it wasn’t efficient enough to support living wages and benefits."
It points out a real contradiction. If you want to be able to pay people a
lot, you need to create an environment where they can be highly productive.
The answer for that, in industrial systems, is specialization. If the people
are having to think a lot about what they do, they'll spend their time
thinking, doing different things, and fixing problems caused by doing things
differently -- this work isn't paying work since it comes off their wages.
Another part of the problem is that there are fewer spots the higher up you go
on the pyramid. The other day I was browsing the remainder rack at my local
Uni's bookstore and found that there's now a "One Minute Manager" book about
managing yourself.
I guess these days organizations are being hollowed out, so that few people
have a chance to be promoted to management and that many of us don't get the
managerial attention we need.
~~~
jamesbkel
Sort of on the same note as providing a good environment... at probably the
best company I've worked for, my boss wouldn't blink if I came to him with a
request. Be it a software package, new machine, more hours/machines on EC2.
He realized that compared to what he was paying me to work, these were small
costs to make sure I could work effectively and to help build the company.
Consequently, I had enough respect not to abuse the privilege.
I'm always shocked when I talk to friends at other companies who bitch about
working with shitty machines or generally not having the right tools.
Generally my rule of thumb would be 10% of salary for upgrades/tools/software.
Think about it: for a salary of $50k, what's adding another $5k/year to
significantly improve an employee's productiveness?
Also important is to let them make the decision, not just arbitrary upgrades.
~~~
javanix
Those improvements aren't as fleeting either. If the employee leaves, whatever
process improvements they had gotten with that 5k has a good chance of
sticking around and helping for the future.
~~~
jamesbkel
That's a good point and actually applies perfectly in my case. They still use
essentially the same setup I created.
------
ryanhuff
Some jobs are just jobs. Do job x for pay y. But in many employee/employer
relationships, there is a tremendous opportunity for the employer to have a
lasting impact on peoples lives beyond the paycheck, and its more than a
career path at a company. Is it just a job, or a building block of one's
career that ultimately impacts the employee, and his/her family for years to
come?
Whether providing a career path at the company, or providing employees with
improved skills and marketable experiences that will set them up for the next
step in their "portable career path", businesses should recognize there is
social responsibility in the employer/employee relationship. As an example,
the career positioning and experiences gained by a 25 year old employee can
have tremendous and direct impact on their life, and that of their families.
With that said, there are certainly limits to what a business can sustain.
Some forethought in employee selection (right people on the bus), a little bit
of coaching and mentoring, and understanding the goals of the employee can go
a long way to creating a work experience that goes beyond the basic career
path.
------
asolove
Do your employees owe you to care about the good of your business?
------
bediger
Do you "owe" your employees a career path? In a word, no.
But having a career path is something you can pitch to prospective employees
as an additional reason for working at your company.
Besides that, the jump from "lead engineer" to "frontline manager" should be
something that's not just "be at the right place at the right time" or
"sucking up to the right upper level manager" I think corporations universally
handle this transition poorly, probably due to looking at people as "human
resources".
------
JoeAltmaier
No; its capitalism, you owe them money for work.
Should you provide a career path? Sure, you outlined all that in the article.
You need to keep highly-skilled longtime employees somehow.
------
autalpha
As someone who worked in a lot of environment (factory manual labor, meat
packaging, tech), I find that good employers are those who care for the growth
of the employees as much as they do the company growth. Even a perception of
"care" really goes a long way to create employees' loyalty. I think this video
says a lot about this point: [http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/animate/rsa-
animate-driv...](http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/animate/rsa-animate-
drive).
------
JanezStupar
Am I just being idealistic or is this an tremendous opportunity? What is
better for owner than his employees to want to take on challenges, by
themselves even, assuming they have the chops to pull it off? Employees
showing ambition seems like just as good a reason to expand as demand picking
up, again assuming that the market is there.
I reckon that the founder/manager/owner is not the only one that deserves a
career path (he went from running a one man band to actually managing people).
And someone coming to you and saying - I want to do your work has to be the
most awesome thing an entrepreneur could get to hear. You have a willing
replacement so you can move to something even cooler - now that is some sweet
burden.
What seems like a more interesting question to me is how can I get people to
want to take my job consistently?
------
MaysonL
No, but don't get bent out of shape when they leave. And they probably will
leave, whether you have a "career path" for them or not.
So plan for it, prepare for it, and work with your employees to prepare
succession plans for when they do leave.
------
bluesnowmonkey
If you've had a guy spend 18 years building bases for conference tables, his
brain is mush. Even adults have to be exposed to new ideas and challenges in
order to continue to grow mentally. So he's not loyal -- he sticks around
because he's become useless for anything else and probably doesn't even
notice.
I know developers who've written basically nothing but RPG for 18+ years. Same
principle. Mush.
------
ibagrak
I read the article and I didn't see a word about career path. The answer to
the question is still a "no", in my view.
Once I hire a person, I expect them to approach me with their career
aspirations and ideas. It is primarily their responsibility to come up and
discuss/suggest opportunities for growth. Failing to do that, I actually think
they become one of those idle 6s the article is talking about. I should also
note that at this point I start looking for a replacement.
But do I owe them a career path? No. I owe them honesty and transparency,
which includes not misrepresenting what the opportunities for growth are for a
particular position they are being hired into.
Of course I am talking about those roles where personal ambition is
indispensable, and where proactive behavior is highly valued. Genuine desire
to grow and evolve is very natural and needs to be accommodated, but it can't
take the form of personal interest completely eclipsing team interests and
overarching direction and goals. That's a balance every manager needs to
strike.
~~~
crpatino
> Once I hire a person, I expect them to approach me with their career
> aspirations and ideas.
You may consider that under this strategy, your work force will self select
amongst the extrovert go-getters. This may be exactly what you want, or the
complete opposite. It all depends to what degree your business relies on
typically introvert traits such as creativity or lateral thinking.
But if you are ok with that, I am ok with that.
------
michaelpinto
The traditional notion of a career path is that you get promoted from job x to
y — this works in large organization. However in a small biz a career path is
taking on the extra work load and creating the job you want to grow a
business. That atmosphere must come from the CEO, however the employee must
have an intraprenurial mindset.
------
orky56
If you were to set up a rotational program that identified leadership, it
would be beneficial to both parties. Imagine a group of high potential workers
who rotated around doing each other's jobs. They would have new skill sets and
would be able to do their original jobs better. Productivity would go up for
each individual task and they would be able to cover for each other if one
were to fall sick or get laid off.
There seems to be a bias that a career path exclusively means promotions but
in this case rotations can provide new challenges and benefits that will
naturally cause an increase in pay.
------
DennisP
This talk by Daniel Pink seems relevant.
[http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/animate/rsa-animate-
driv...](http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/animate/rsa-animate-drive)
------
invalidOrTaken
He should give his employees a raise if he can afford it, and raise his prices
if he can't.
And if raising his prices isn't feasible, maybe his employees don't deserve a
raise.
------
lotusleaf1987
If you don't it's basically just a dead end job and you're not going to be
able to attract high-caliber employees and you won't retain most employees for
long. Your employees will just look for another opportunity and as soon as it
arises move on.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
David Foster Wallace on iPhone 4's FaceTime - thekguy
http://kottke.org/10/06/david-foster-wallace-on-iphone-4s-facetime
======
delackner
This wasn't even the best part! Wallace in the full version describes how
people end up getting so obsessed with their video-chat personae that they use
fake masks and backgrounds. The masks part sounds nuts to us today, but
already iChat has green-screening yourself into a tropical environment so
maybe it is just around the corner.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Please help a fellow hacker identify the guy who assaulted him in Vancouver, BC - chazmath
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTOyaZQqmXI
======
chazmath
This is a video that I took during an assault on myself by one of these 7
Canadians. The assault happened October 2010 outside the Lamplighter night-
club in Vancouver, BC.
The punch was completely unexpected for me because I was looking into my phone
when the guy landed it. The group started insulting me outside the night club
just when I was about to leave. After a few minutes of a purely verbal
argument, I decided to take my phone and film all of them in case something
bad happened. This is when one of them decided to punch me in the face,
causing me to lose consciousness and hit my head against concrete with full
force. I was then taken to a hospital by ambulance, which I do not remember at
all (I lost 2 hours of memory).
The police cannot make any progress until the guy is identified. Please help
me find this guy who left me with a concussion, fractured sinus, facial scar,
dizziness and constant headaches. Please share this video with your friends
living in Vancouver!
------
MisterWebz
Try Reddit. Wider audience.
~~~
chazmath
Done:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/e6wkv/please_hel...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/e6wkv/please_help_me_identify_the_guy_who_assaulted_me/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Facebook Coin Imitates Hedera Hashgraph - jjesus
https://www.hedera.com/blog/our-contrarian-approach-validated
======
verdverm
Unfortunately, the best technology or system does not always win. Being
successful in the market takes more.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Uber drivers to launch legal bid to uncover app's algorithm - MindGods
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/20/uber-drivers-to-launch-legal-bid-to-uncover-apps-algorithm
======
century19
\-- under GDPR regulations, which are similar in the UK and the Netherlands...
GDPR is an EU law. What is the "similar" UK version post Brexit?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apple's market cap could conceivably exceed ExxonMobil's - amahadik
http://fnno.com/video/331-apple%C2%92s-market-cap-could-conceivably-exceed-exxonmobils
======
api
All on the strength of _design and aesthetics_.
~~~
amahadik
And one really driven CEO!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
I made a Chrome Extension, Rick Roulette, which swaps videos out with RickRolls - ben174
http://www.rickroulette.com
======
ben174
Not quite sure why :).. might come in handy for pranking people. If nothing
else, I think it gives a good overview on scaffolding out a quick simple
Chrome extension.
Please do let me know if you see anything I could have done better.
[https://github.com/ben174/rick-roulette](https://github.com/ben174/rick-
roulette)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
IBM https broken - smonte
https://ibm.com
======
A010
* Server certificate:
* subject: C=US; ST=New York; L=Armonk; O=International Business Machines; CN=redirect.www.ibm.com
* start date: 2015-09-30 00:00:00 GMT
* expire date: 2018-11-28 23:59:59 GMT
* subjectAltName does not match ibm.com
Why redirect.www.ibm.com??? It doesn't make sense.
------
mawkus
[https://www.ibm.com](https://www.ibm.com) seems to work OK. As long as
they're not using [https://ibm.com](https://ibm.com) for anything, I guess
that's not such a big deal.
Of course it makes sense to fix it though.
------
sigsergv
[http://ibm.com](http://ibm.com) redirects to
[http://www.ibm.com](http://www.ibm.com) and so on. Not https.
------
hachre
Nice.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Write Mynd App - WriteMynd
http://writemynd.com
======
WriteMynd
What do people think about this app?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Face masks from China intended for France 'hijacked' by US at the last minute - Cantbekhan
http://www.rfi.fr/en/europe/20200402-china-coronavirus-face-mask-france-stolen-us
======
robocat
France hijacks masks and other PPE intended for EU:
[https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/coronavirus-
eur...](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/coronavirus-european-
solidarity-sidelined-as-french-interests-take-priority-1.4216184)
“On March 3rd, President Emmanuel Macron announced that he was requisitioning
‘all stocks and the production of protective masks’ for distribution to
medical personnel and French people infected with Covid-19. One fifth of all
surgical procedures in the EU use personal protective equipment imported from
Asia by the Swedish company Mölnlycke. The company’s main distribution
warehouse for southern Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands is in Lyon.”
~~~
RegnisGnaw
The better quote would be this:
"Mölnlycke’s entire stock of an estimated six million masks was seized by the
French. All had been contracted for, including a million masks each for
France, Italy and Spain. The rest were destined for Belgium, the Netherlands,
Portugal and Switzerland, which has special trading status with the EU."
------
RegnisGnaw
Germany did the same thing to Switzerland (seized rather then outbid)
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/germany-f...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/germany-
faces-backlash-from-neighbors-over-mask-export-ban)
Countries that have the power are doing everything to ensure they have masks
first. I'm not surprised France and US are doing it.
------
ardy42
So what's going on? This article claims that millions of N95 respirators
_located in the US_ are queued up to be shipped overseas:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2020/03/30/i-spent...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2020/03/30/i-spent-
a-day-in-the-coronavirus-driven-feeding-frenzy-of-n95-mask-sellers-and-buyers-
and-this-is-what-i-learned/)
> By the end of the day, roughly 280 million masks from warehouses around the
> U.S. had been purchased by foreign buyers and were earmarked to leave the
> country, according to the broker — and that was in one day.
> To his knowledge none of the masks had been purchased by buyers in the U.S.
------
jb775
Shouldn't France be pissed off at China for re-selling the already sold masks?
The US probably wasn't even told the masks in question were already sold.
The countries should coordinate who needs masks sooner, and work out the
logistics. My wife is a nurse in the US and they literally don't have enough
masks for nurses/doctors to wear.
------
mantap
SARS was 20 years ago. France has had 20 years to prepare for this but left it
to the last minute. Of course the masks are going to the highest bidder,
that's entirely predictable.
~~~
conchulio
It’s like if you paid for a new car and when you want to unlock it and drive
it home someone else pays two times more and takes it from you.
That’s not not allowed even in the freest markets in the world.
~~~
mantap
It is allowed. It's a fundamental principle of international law that states
are not subject to the laws of other states, except by treaty. There's no
applicable law that would prevent China from doing this.
Besides even in the consumer space you have things like airlines overbooking
flights and then kicking people off the plane when too many passengers show
up.
------
timwaagh
It is pretty ugly what is happening now. france seizing european masks. the us
seizing french masks. dutch ventilators getting seized in the us. we're
supposed to be allies. let's stop this now. Perhaps we can let nato take
charge of mask distribution and procurement. Otherwise that thing with
Italians getting russian aid might not be a one-off.
~~~
notechback
Italy got more masks and PPE from Germany and France than China and Russia.
You don't hear much about the former as their intention is to actually help,
while the latter are doing a propaganda campaign.
~~~
zepto
I.e. the propaganda campaign is working
------
sfj
Meanwhile, Taiwan is donating 2 million masks to the US:
[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-
national-s...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-
security/taiwan-to-donate-2m-hospital-masks-to-united-states)
------
Verdes
France gave back half of the Swedish masks (coming from the Molnlyncke supply
in Lyon) and they were first seized in France, because of a French requisition
law... Will the US Government give back half the plane they stole from French
people in China?
------
edwinyzh
Things like this is really an eye-opener to me, frankly.
------
diebeforei485
Even removing the "paying 3-4 times more, and in cash" aspect, the US probably
needs it more at the moment.
~~~
MagnumOpus
France has 900 cases per million vs the US at 700 cases per million. So: no,
unless you think French lives are worth less?
~~~
diebeforei485
Masks cannot be divided fractionally, so per-capita analysis does not work
here.
~~~
mantap
That doesn't make any sense.
~~~
thatguy0900
You need masks based on the number of patients, not the number of patients per
capita, it makes perfect sense. Not that I'm defending this.
~~~
drusepth
Looking at either number of patients or patients per capita both result in
nonfractional masks given to individual patients.
It's just a matter of whether someone morally thinks more patients equals more
urgent (60k FR vs 235K US), or a higher percentage of the population as
patients (0.08% FR vs 0.07% US) equals more urgent, no?
~~~
Wowfunhappy
I don't know where diebeforei485 was going with "fractional masks" either, but
thatguy0900 makes a good point in isolation.
A country of 1,000 people and a 10% infection rate has a greater shortage of
masks than a country of 5 people and a 100% infection rate.
~~~
drusepth
I agree with you, but I think that was MagnumOpus's point of bringing up
patients per million.
A country of 1,000 people and a 10% infection rate has more patients that need
masks, but it could be argued that a country of 5 people and a 100% infection
rate needs the masks more, lest their entire country suddenly collapse and
cease to exist.
Seems like arguing that France has more patients per million implies they have
a bigger threat to the country itself (traditions, systems, jobs, etc) or that
the spread is less contained (and therefore more in need of PPE), compared to
another country with a lower patients-per-million that is theoretically not
hit "as hard", but still may have more individual patients at risk.
------
osobo
Such an American thing to do. Joke's on them though: These Chinese masks are
often defective.
~~~
kharms
France blocked the export of (purchased) masks to Switzerland, and other
nations.
[https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/coronavirus_medical-goods-
from-...](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/coronavirus_medical-goods-from-the-eu-
remain-blocked/45642340)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Topics deleted from StackOverflow - ranit8
http://www.stackprinter.com/deleted
======
ErrantX
I started contributing to the Literature Stack Exchange when it launched last
year - which quickly became _not fun_. Most of the decent questions were
closed as off topic, answer quality declined because the remaining questions
were too narrow, new users were put off by the attitude of mods.
It was explained to me, in detail, that this was to preserve the focus and
quality of the site.
So I left. It says a lot that 6 months later I am still the #6 user by all-
time karma.
The few trickle of questions they have left deal mostly with trivia.
I think SO/SE's moderation policy has gone a step too far. Once it lightly
highlighted quality. Now it stamps on most questions.
~~~
joelthelion
I think there may be a space for a friendlier version of Stack Exchange.
------
Tangurena
The mods on the StackOverflow sites seem to be trigger-happy deleting and
locking posts. Most of my major upvoted answers are on threads now closed as
off-topic - so this tells me that the StackOverflows have changed to be a
place that I'm not welcome at anymore.
~~~
betageek
The rise of the "opinions are not wanted here" attitude on SO is disappointing
- I understand the motive but they may be kicking out the baby with the bath
water.
~~~
DanBC
Stack Overflow has a vigorous moderating policy. That's usually a good thing.
It helps form a community, and keeps stuff out.
The problem comes with a huge site like SO, because there are so many "not
welcome here" topics which get closed, with no suggestions about where to put
those questions, and without great explanations about why those topics aren't
welcome.
It's not as thoroughly toxic as some[1] aspects of wikipedia are, but it's not
pleasant for some people.
[1] for various values of some, including "all" for a few users.
------
chris_wot
Wow, some of these questions actually seem pretty reasonable - like this one:
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c>
Any ideas why they were closed so early?
~~~
SecretofMana
Disclaimer: Stack Exchange moderator(mind you, on one of the other sites, not
SO).
The main reason this was closed is because determining what or what does not
constitute a hidden feature is highly subjective. Depending on the audience,
some features that are considered common knowledge could be considered hidden
features. We generally want to focus on the domain of questions that have
solid, objective answers, or rather, that solve a clear problem that people
have, whereas this question is more focused on trivia.
Furthermore, "List of <X>" questions, as we dub them, generally aren't well-
suited for the Stack Exchange format, especially when the question is as
popular as this one. Note that navigating the list without OP's quick-link
breakdown is a pain because of the way that each individual's answer is
separated.
~~~
dionidium
I can accept that questions of this type are a little messy, but there's
absolutely no need to apply real-world metaphors of messiness to the web. We
don't need to clean these things up. They're fine just sitting there. We're
not running out of bits.
I'm sure there's some personally type that experiences a deep need to organize
and delete (and it's probably over-represented in the SO community), but
that's all this is. I find it highly unlikely that deleting these posts is
having any effect on the quality of new questions asked.
~~~
cruise02
This isn't about running out of bits. The primary reason for creating Stack
Overflow was to increase the signal/noise ratio for programming information on
the Web. If we don't reduce the noise, then search engines have a harder time
trying to find the signal. So in this sense, the metaphor of messiness does
apply to the Web.
Also, this particular post is locked, not deleted. Google will still find it.
~~~
henrikschroder
> If we don't reduce the noise, then search engines have a harder time trying
> to find the signal.
Let the search engines figure that out! It's their job!
Is there _any_ evidence whatsoever that deleting/closing questions like these
make SO a better place and improves the rate with which people can find
answers through search engines?
I suspect there's none.
~~~
cruise02
> Let the search engines figure that out! It's their job!
Ummm... right. You go ahead and keep posting noise to your site and let the
search engines figure it out. Let us know how that works.
~~~
dpark
Search engines tend to place Wikipedia high for almost every relevant query.
This happens despite the amount of useless crap on Wikipedia. Hell, how often
is Yahoo Answers on the first page of results. "Noise" won't stop you from
getting listed if you've got enough page rank.
------
stcredzero
I posted this idea elsewhere, but I think it is worth considering, so I'll
repost it here.
What about a series of "Stack Exhume" sites where the "deleted" information
gets moved to? (Trash can?) Even though they are "noise" when trying to find
specific answers to concrete questions, they are still interesting information
in their own right, in much the same way queries are interesting.
------
Smudge
Strange suggestion: Mods should be required to view and consider search engine
traffic when locking or deleting topics.
I've noticed lately that a Google search brings me to SO as the top result,
but then the post itself is locked and marked off-topic or (the one I find
more puzzling sometimes) "not a real question." If it's not a real question,
why does it have a real answer which seems to answer my own question? Can't we
just edit the question to make more sense, if it wasn't clear to the mod?
I'm not saying that locking or deleting posts isn't appropriate. But crippling
or removing SO questions that appear high for particular search queries seems
like a silly way to run a website, unless the question and answers really
wouldn't be helpful to the incoming search traffic. (In which case, better to
not show up at all than to appear but be unhelpful or incorrect.)
~~~
cruise02
We do look at number of views and links to a post before deleting it. That's
why a lot of questions that aren't really on-topic for Stack Overflow are
simply locked instead of deleted. We're trying to clean up the site without
breaking the rest of the Internet in the process.
> Can't we just edit the question to make more sense, if it wasn't clear to
> the mod?
Yes, of course. Anyone can suggest an edit to a question, whether it's open or
closed. If you find a question and its answers helpful, go ahead and edit it.
Flag it for a moderator to consider reopening when you're done.
Also, if you found a Stack Overflow question through a Google search, then
it's not deleted. Deleted content isn't visible to search engines.
------
ghewgill
Here is another deleted question archive that's not over its quota:
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-
st...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-stack-
overflow-deleted-question-archive-now-available)
~~~
ranit8
Nice, it's much better looking than the one I posted.
I wonder if I should have posted a Google cache link instead of the original,
to prevent exceeding their quota.
------
billforsternz
I was excited to see this and find some damn good content (tm) I contributed
to stackoverflow that was deleted by the over-exuberant moderators there.
Please stackoverflow moderators, you're killing a great site. Stop. Just stop.
------
sparknlaunch12
Nice. Thanks for sharing. Looks like hacker news crashed your site.
------
huskyr
'Over Quota
This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again
later.'
Pity.
------
steventruong
Site could use search, especially if it expands
~~~
obituary_latte
It has search.
It also searches for similar questions when you enter the title to a question.
You can also use google (e.g. google.com/search?q=site:stackoverflow.com
variables) which is what the founders had in mind.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
In Software: Simplify, Simplify - eVizitei
http://codeclimber.blogspot.com/2009/01/simplify-simplify.html
======
RiderOfGiraffes
Beware the "Analysis Paralysis" tarpit ...
Ever notice how every simple (simplistic) piece of advice that's obviously
true has an equally simple (simplistic) piece of advice that's obviously true,
and exactly opposite.
"He who hesitates is lost" vs "Look before you leap"
Yes, code should be simple, but sometimes it can only get that way _after_
you've written the wrong version. Sometimes it's only then that you really
understand the problem.
------
baddox
While reading all the lengths he was considering going to to make the thing
blink, I just assumed an animated .gif was not an option. Seems pretty darn
obvious.
~~~
newt0311
"Seems" being the key word there. Its the same reason that sooo many people
get screwed in the stockmarket. They look in the past and in retrospect, the
great upheavals seem to obvious that they think that they can predict them and
before they know it, they are down 50%. Same with great ideas. The concept of
the wheel may seem simple to us now but I wonder how much thought it took to
come up with it for the first time.
~~~
DavidSJ
I don't think he's saying, in hindsight, after reading the whole article, that
an animated GIF was obvious.
He's saying that he thought of the animated GIF option before coming to the
end of the article, but that it was so obvious to him that he assumed the fact
that the author had neglected it meant that it wasn't a possibility for
technical reasons.
~~~
baddox
Precisely.
------
rivo
I just spent five days researching how to generate PDFs dynamically or
alternatively how to fill PDF forms dynamically from a server-side script.
Just so anyone who purchased a ticket to our concert can print it out
themselves (the ticket will include a barcode which can be scanned using a
mobile phone with Java and a camera).
Then it dawned on me that I could simply point them to a (HTML) page which
they can print out. Believe me, I felt stupid.
(But at least I learned about PDF forms, (X)FDF, and JavaScript in PDFs. Oh
well...)
------
markessien
It's easier to find the simpler solution after you implement the complex
solution.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Unit testing is for lazy people - Swizec
http://swizec.com/blog/unit-testing-is-for-lazy-people/swizec/3752
======
3wetwetw
And we're proud of it! It's lazy to do things right first and lazy not to want
to fight with our code, seeking out bugs. BTW, Unit Testing is getting even
lazier with Typemock Isolator V7 (<http://www.typemock.com/isolator-v7>). It's
finding the bugs for you, so you don't have to waste 2 hours hunting around.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
All Chrome OS hack attempts fail at Pwnium 3 - memoryfailure
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/all-chrome-os-hack-attempts-fail-at-pwnium-3-2013038/
======
benologist
Submitter is a spam account by Ziff Davis (geek.com / extremetech.com /
pcmag.com / etc), one of a few they use to spam HN.
~~~
natrius
I've never understood why people care about this. Lots of people submit their
own stuff. All I care about is the quality of the articles and discussion,
which is orthogonal to the identity of the submitter.
~~~
benologist
Why would you not care if people are here to exploit you and the rest of this
community?
Almost nobody unaffiliated submits their crap in spite of a year+ of spamming
with about 8 different accounts so obviously their work is not even very
relevant.
Systematic spam by these guys and a handful of other sites drowns out content
real users find legitimately interesting.
------
gtr32x
This website is horrendous. While opening the page, a overlay banner flashes
across the content area at snail speed but high enough that I cannot
accurately click the close button while it's moving (well i can try but I'm
risking clicking on the actual ad itself). It took a total of 10 seconds for
it to completely cross the page before I was able to start reading the
content.
I think this kind of ad serves absolutely no purpose. Even if I wanted to read
it before I wouldn't now, and it totally killed the website's credibility for
me.
------
codex
I'm not sure hackers brought their "A" game to this event. In contrast to
earlier events, winners must disclose their methods to participate in return
for only $150,000 per exploit. A black hat hacker could make much more from
their methods, and a white hat hacker could as well--in consulting fees.
~~~
magicalist
You're thinking of Pwn2Own. Pwnium has always required disclosure, while
Pwn2Own only required full disclosure for the first time this year.
And $150,000 is actually getting quite close to what you could make for an
exploit of a browser on the black market, especially with all those Java and
Flash plugins still running all over the world, depressing exploit prices as
long as they're available.
------
qwertzlcoatl
The fact that the total prize money is Pi million dollars is adorable.
~~~
pardner
That's irrational, sorry.
~~~
10dpd
At least its not imaginary...
~~~
mheathr
Technically Pi is a complex number that has the real number coefficient a = Pi
and b = 0 resulting in a complex number of pi + 0j. This is because the set of
real numbers is a subset of the set of complex numbers and Pi is an element of
the set of real numbers.
~~~
Ao7bei3s
It's still not (0) imaginary.
------
zobzu
also, minix didnt get pwned.
~~~
zellyn
This comment made me unreasonably happy.
------
drivebyacct2
Plain Chrome in Linux faired similarly didn't it?
~~~
ukdm
"Chrome was compromised using similar methods to the IE10 and Firefox attacks.
MWR Labs bypassed Chrome’s sandbox and used a Windows kernel vulnerability in
Windows 7 to elevate privileges as well as execute commands outside of the
sandbox. In addition to executing code, MWR researchers were able to read
memory and find the base addresses of certain .DLL files."
[http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/internet-
explorer-10-...](http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/internet-
explorer-10-chrome-and-firefox-hacked-at-pwn2own-2013037/)
~~~
hollerith
Since that page does not mention Linux, I cannot imagine what relevance it has
to grandparent.
~~~
ukdm
Yeah, my mistake, I meant it to be in response to mtgx
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Atari Is Jumping on the Crypto Bandwagon - mido22
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-15/pac-man-video-game-maker-atari-is-now-a-cryptocurrency-play
======
jerf
So, reasonably honest question (i.e., save the generic blockchain sarcasm for
the many other posts that will presumably be made here), does anyone know what
the game plan is for these companies? They have tokens, OK, great, but then
what? Are we supposed to buy them? Are we supposed to accumulate them in some
manner and trade them for something else? Are we supposed to accumulate them
in some manner and sell them? So Kodak is starting a blockchain to "pay
photographers", but does anyone have any details beyond that? If someone's
buying them, who, and why? How do I get a blockchain entry for a photograph?
How does that do anything?
I'm not asking for the really obvious sarcasm, so please only post "they have
no idea" if you've got decent evidence that they really do have no idea. I
presume they have _some_ sort of vision as to how these are going to do
something. If they merely have a bad or stupid plan, I'm asking for the bad or
stupid plan, not sarcasm. (I'm honestly just sort of assuming that none of
these plans will do anything that wouldn't work better with a centralized non-
blockchain-based infrastructure, but I'm at a loss as to what they even plan
to do with their probably-unnecessary blockchain.)
I've done at least a bit of poking at a couple of these things but I can never
find a concrete plan. (Including probably at least 15 minutes with Google
trying to figure out what Kodak was talking about when they first announced
it. Perhaps tech details have emerged since then?)
~~~
fludlight
1.) Get publicity
2.) Sell coins for USD
3.) Hope the SEC doesn't mind
4.) Sell stock (via a secondary offering) for USD
5.) Give USD to executives
6.) Build a cheap MVP to pay photographers or whatever
7.) Give more USD to executives
8.) "We're shutting down photopay because we couldn't get traction. Your coins
still exist. Let's pretend they aren't worthless."
9.) Give still more USD to executives to pursue machine learning for squirrels
~~~
aje403
10.) First squirrel in history gets promoted to Head Of Deep Blockchain
Diversity Learning for publicity
11.) Repeat
~~~
drharby
Red or grey?
~~~
joering2
slight OT, but visiting Europe for vacation I found black squirrel to be most
beautiful:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_squirrel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_squirrel)
~~~
stevekemp
I was visiting Mozart's grave in a Viennese graveyard (also the resting place
of Strauss) and managed to see a Red, Gray, and Black squirrel all within the
space of an hour.
------
asciimo
This article stumbles right out of the gate. "Atari SA -- perhaps best known
for 1980s video-games 'Pac-Man' and 'Space Invaders' \-- is now jumping on the
cryptocurrency bandwagon." Those games were created Namco and Taito,
respectively. They were household titles well before Atari ported them to the
2600.
~~~
jedberg
To be fair, Atari SA isn't known for anything either. They just bought a well
known brand name. Even if they had listed actual Atari titles, you could make
the same criticism. :)
------
corprew
I wish journalists would publish headlines like this and Kodak's recent
adventure as "The company that currently has the rights to the name [Whatever
Past Beloved Consumer Brand] is [Doing Whatever]"
It would be a lot clearer.
------
reaperducer
I wonder what the throughput is on an Atari 2600 trying to mine Bitcoin.
Probably going to need the Supercharger cart.
~~~
asciimo
I'll take your question seriously and provide this story of an 1985 NES
attempting to mine. ([http://retrominer.com/](http://retrominer.com/))
~~~
Cyberdog
> For the portions of computing that do not happen on the NES, I've got a
> raspberry pi housed in a Makerbot Replicator2 3D printed case.
Shenanigans.
------
granaldo
If you treat each token issued by companies, the total number of them to equal
the stock market that is the multitude of stocks available. Then it do not
appear too strange. Already more than 1000 tokens in the market now according
to [http://coinmarketcap.com](http://coinmarketcap.com) and
[https://www.coingecko.com/en](https://www.coingecko.com/en) at current pace
we are going we will see 20000 tokens or coins, with people trading back
fourth with some value put to them
------
dawnerd
Considering Atari seems really into making free to play in app purchase style
apps these days that completely ruin a great franchise (see roller coaster
tycoon), using coins as an in game currency does make sense.
------
snarfy
Time to short Atari?
~~~
zanny
Seriously, companies have had "buy X coins for $Y" since, well, forever. But
the most blatant one is arcades. Making the tokens digital and on a
decentralized trustless ledger? for some reason is not innovative at all, and
I highly doubt Atari is interested in developing a decentralized minable
gaming token cryptocurrency. They are just using a buzzword that makes people
with money shit their pants to implement something that has existed since
before currency itself.
------
JustAnotherPat
Plan to buy some.
------
vannevar
Can we return the word "crypto" to its proper usage, for encryption? Then we
can come up with a new term for cryptocurrencies.
I suggest "tulips."
~~~
mikestew
I am totally with you on this, but I’m afraid that ship has sailed. Languages
are dynamic, blah, blah, blah. I’m just going to go back to ranting about the
proper use of “couldn’t care less”.
~~~
Deestan
The word "crypto" has been literally decimated, and I could care less.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Launch HN: OneGraph (YC S18) – Build API Integrations with GraphQL - sgrove
Hey HN,<p>We’re Sean and Daniel, founders of OneGraph (<a href="https://www.onegraph.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.onegraph.com</a>). We're a single GraphQL endpoint that brings together all your SaaS APIs.<p>We make it easy to build integrations for your app into services like Salesforce, Stripe, GitHub, Clearbit, and Gmail. Since each service’s API is unique you usually have to read their documentation, implement their specific authentication, make very specific calls to their servers, etc.—it seems normal right now, but all of this adds up.<p>Both of us have done plenty of integrations into these services for different startups over the years, so we knew intimately how painful it can be, especially when you have to coordinate data from multiple services.<p>Then GraphQL came along, and we saw that it could be a query language for all of the APIs we wanted. We can express our data requirements—even between services—succinctly, and let a single execution engine figure out how to translate those requirements to specific API calls.<p>We’ve built a GraphQL service that does just that - it knows how to talk to each backend API we support to pull out exactly the data you need. Here’s an example of how it works:<p><pre><code> {
youTubeVideo(id: "YX40hbAHx3s") {
snippet {
title
uploadChannel {
snippet {
title
}
twitterLinks { # twitter accounts associated with the channel
twitter(first: 5) {
tweets {
text
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
</code></pre>
(You can see the full result of the query <a href="https://gist.github.com/sgrove/5f17d046e535763c3c85258054ed00fb" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/sgrove/5f17d046e535763c3c85258054ed0...</a>
or play with it yourself <a href="https://bit.ly/2NL89GA" rel="nofollow">https://bit.ly/2NL89GA</a>)<p>We charge based on the services you’re integrating with, whether you want white-label authentication for your users, and overall usage. Eventually we’ll offer an on-premise solution for bigger enterprises that need it.<p>We’d really appreciate your feedback on OneGraph. We have a lot we want to improve on, and would love to hear where you want us to go next.
======
simonw
In my experience one of the hardest parts of dealing with APIs is sticking
within their rate limits.
I would expect concurrent API requests made via GraphQL to make this worse -
since it's very easy to accidentally construct a GraphQL query which results
in a flurry of API requests under the hood.
How are you handling this? Are you doing your own internal rate-limiting, or
are modern APIs more generous with their limits than they used to be?
~~~
sgrove
Long story short, we give you a way to declare what rate-limiting strategy you
want.
\- You can tell us to immediately fail the whole query right away, \- Fail
just that sub-part of the query \- Back off for that API and try again
(delaying your overall query but now you don't have to deal with the
failure/rate limit case at all) \- Potentially do this for _all_ requests
across your app, queuing up the api requests to the service that's rate-
limited so that you don't have to worry about reasoning locally/globally about
rate-limits.
We've found this is the level that developer usually feel comfortable thinking
about the trade-offs, rather than in the nitty-gritty implementation steps.
~~~
simonw
That's a great answer, thanks. You've clearly thought very hard about this
problem.
------
anilshanbhag
Congrats on launching !
Two questions:
1) In the example you show above, how are you figuring out which twitter
accounts are linked to the channel ?
2) API integration is a one-time effort and largely done using libraries. Do
you have a real world use case example ? My sense is most calls are isolated -
for example I want to read my last few trasactions from Stripe or get last few
tickets from Zendesk. Would it make sense to go through an intermediary like
you and pay another monthly fee ?
~~~
dwwoelfel
Thanks!
For 1), we're parsing links the creator added on the about page of their
YouTube channel.
For 2), a great example is [https://heysavvy.com/](https://heysavvy.com/), a
company building omni-search across all your SaaS apps. Before OneGraph, they
invested a lot of time learning the idiosyncrasies of the underlying API for
each new integration they added. Now, they just open up the Explorer in
GraphiQL and find exactly the fields they need without needing to look at
documentation or install any new packages.
------
addcn
Congrats! I feel like this is a modern approach to fulfilling the unrealized
promise of the semantic web.
I've worked with a bunch of big companies and they have dozens or often
hundreds of individual APIs and micro-services. Would it be feasible to deploy
OneGraph in a closed environment like that? I can't think of a big IT
department who wouldn't want to interconnect their internal services like
that.
~~~
SahAssar
So your approach to the semantic web is to use a proprietary service to bundle
proprietary api's that is queried in a language controlled by a single
corporate entity and where the resulting data is pretty much never able to be
semantically understood by anyone except the api client that constructed the
query? A lot of that sounds like the opposite of what the semantic web was
supposed to be.
~~~
adamkl
I agree with some of your points here, but I think you might be missing some
context in the technologies that are being used to accomplish what OneGraph is
doing.
I agree that this example is that of a proprietary API bundling other
proprietary APIs, but the technologies they are (likely) using are open source
and make it possibly to build self-documenting (via GraphQL introspection)
APIs with visualization [1] that can be combined in a modular fashion [2].
If every API was a GraphQL API, there’s no reason you couldn’t easily create a
facade that links university course curriculums to, say, associated Wikipedia
articles.
Not the semantic web, but it can be a very powerful way to combine data.
[1] [https://apis.guru/graphql-voyager/](https://apis.guru/graphql-voyager/)
[2] [https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graphql-tools/schema-
stit...](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graphql-tools/schema-
stitching.html)
~~~
sgrove
Thank you, this is a really succinct and clear explanation of how I think
about it as well.
------
sgrove
Here's an example OneGraph app that'll extract the captions/subtitles for a
given YouTube video and let you search through them, so you can e.g. find when
a term is mentioned in a talk - pure React/Apollo app!
Source to it is on GitHub: [https://github.com/OneGraph/youtube-captions-
helper](https://github.com/OneGraph/youtube-captions-helper)
Try it out here: [https://onegraph.github.io/youtube-captions-
helper/](https://onegraph.github.io/youtube-captions-helper/)
It might be fun to build a site that has transcripts for tech talks and use
this to 1. bootstrap the transcript and 2. search across all talks for a term
and be able to jump into the video exactly when the term is mentioned.
------
hyperpallium
This kind of middleware has the potential to be as significant as relational
databases.
Did you ever use one of those "xml data mapping" tools in your integrations?
If so, how would you compare their strengths and weaknesses with your
solution?
This comparison could be compelling for enterprise customers (though your
early customers will be the less risk-averse, more technical startups/small
companies).
------
orarbel1
Congrats guys.
If this works as advertised, this is huge.
When I'm making API calls from my app to different services, I know for a fact
that there is no extra latency that might be caused by a third-party. How do
you deal with maintaining low-latency while still having to re-route my
original API call?
Again, as someone who dealt with many APIs over the years, I think this kind
of service is game-changing.
~~~
sgrove
Great question, we spend a lot of time on overall latency questions.
If you're hitting a _single_ API endpoint (imagine getting a tweet without
getting the user information), we'll introduce an overall latency of ~100-ms.
So this may well be slower, and might not work depending on your use case
(though we have plans for working on lowering the overall latency).
But if you hit more than one API endpoint, or especially if you're jumping
between API services, we'll deliver a really big win, in part because of
declarative nature of of GraphQL. As we descend each node we know that we can
execute the subsequent API requests concurrently, so this usually ends up
being an automatic win.
And if you're doing something like joining against Salesforce data, we can
automatically switch the query to use the SOQL/batch API, which can be both
faster and _significantly_ cheaper, all without changing the implementation on
your side.
------
simplify
Very intriguing. Does OneGraph support mutations? Or is it read-only data?
~~~
tdhz77
It would be nice to have fire base support so you could have your own mini
database for mutations.
~~~
sgrove
Firebase would be a great integration! Being able to query/store data from it,
and jump into any service from it seamlessly - that's the dream.
We're thinking about different approaches to pulling this off - if it's for a
greenfield app, then maybe we control your schema.
If we're integrating with an existing app, we'd probably have to walk your
entire schema and try to pull out the normalized data-structures and figure
out nullable fields/their types/etc., then allow you to make the final edits
that would be enforced when accessing/updating it from OneGraph.
------
nikolasburk
I just want to chime in with a link to a talk that Daniel gave at this year's
GraphQL Europe conference:
[https://youtu.be/eLSWLtmzdWU?t=3m43s](https://youtu.be/eLSWLtmzdWU?t=3m43s)
(It links to the OneGraph demo Daniel gave during the talk.)
------
swyx
this is an interesting idea. offhand i would have to weigh the risk of adding
a (Smyte-able) middleman api vs the potential benefit of time saved having
basic integrations done for me. putting a business hat on i'd say it'd be
great to start with onegraph for sideprojects but once these data pipes become
serious business it would make sense to invest some time bringing it inhouse.
Will be interesting to see if that hypothesis is wrong; I know nothing about
this market.
as a former product manager i could see an internal-facing product here
pulling up analytics for nontechnical employees; PMs, marketers, even customer
success/support. any interest in pursuing that kind of customer?
------
HNNewer
Do you plan to release the endpoint code as on premise? What's your SLA?
For some companies/developers (including myself), using centralized cloud
services is a red flag, especially for security and for downtime.
------
petrbela
Very cool! I actually considered building something similar myself about a
year ago but got pulled into other projects... definitely see a lot of value
in providing a single interface.
How are you planning to handle the explosion in complexity? Once you have
hundreds/thousands of different services integrated, the schema becomes rather
huge, especially if a specific user only needs a fraction of it. Is the plan
to toggle services on/off and then only stitch the schema for a particular
user with the limited set of fields?
------
lewisf
Congrats on launching! This is really cool. How hard would it be to integrate
OneGraph into an existing GraphQL endpoint that I'm already hosting to power
my application?
~~~
dwwoelfel
It depends on the backend that powers your GraphQL API, some are much easier
than others, but all are doable. Which backend are you using?
We have already done a lot of the groundwork, embedding other GraphQL APIs
like GitHub's into OneGraph. We're careful to namespace all of the types so
that there will be no collisions.
~~~
lewisf
I'm using apollo-server-hapi. I've briefly looked into schema stitching before
but haven't done that recently. Is that something that you'd recommend doing
with OneGraph?
------
swampthing
I remember Sean showing this to me earlier this year - it's really cool to see
this work in real-time. It's like magic. Congrats on launching!
------
sidcool
Congrats for launching! This is very promising.
------
nivertech
1\. Can you please integrate Auth0?
2\. Can OneGraph Authentication be used for user and session management
instead of Auth0?
3\. RE: pricing, is it $24/mo for 5K/mo is ~ 1 request every 20 minutes. The
next tier is about 1 request per second on average. So I guess your Individual
plan is for evaluation and side-projects?
------
swyx
fyi running the query in [https://bit.ly/2NL89GA](https://bit.ly/2NL89GA)
gives
{ "data": { "youTubeVideo": null } }
right now. did a limit bust?
~~~
sgrove
Oh, no, you just need to authenticate with YouTube to run the query. We need
to make that much more clear (should be in a week or so, have some big plans
for much nicer errors)
------
adamkl
SSaaS (schema-stitching as a service) :D
~~~
sgrove
And Schema-as-a-Service! :D
------
sharemywin
does 24/MON mean $24/month?
~~~
dwwoelfel
Yes!
------
atroche
Are you guys using Clojure(Script)?
------
colinmegill
This seems smart!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Learn X in Y Minutes PDF builds - parvarez
https://github.com/aviaryan/learnxinyminutes-pdf
======
dluan
This is awesome.
~~~
parvarez
I know. very helpful to learn new programming languages once you know the
basics.
------
kelsolaar
Very nice!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How to connect two computers to one USB-C display? - raasdnil
Has anyone found / know of a KVM switch that will take USB-C in from two computers and output USB-C to connect to a USB-C only monitor?<p>I have my laptop for work and a gaming computer under the desk currently with a DualLink HDMI to an old 30" Apple Cinema display but need to upgrade as the monitor is starting to get old. Would like to go with some of the 4k/5k options, but they seem to be trending towards USB-C and I can't find any way to replace the KVM easily.
======
cerberusss
Couple of links:
[https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-usbc-
model](https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-usbc-model)
[https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-Port-Type-C-Delivery-USB-
KC...](https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-Port-Type-C-Delivery-USB-
KCPD/dp/B07Y2HKN37/)
[https://www.blackbox.com/en-
us/store/product/detail/usb-c-4k...](https://www.blackbox.com/en-
us/store/product/detail/usb-c-4k-kvm-switch-2-port/kvmc4k-2p)
(From:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/))
------
Exmoor
Hmm... USB-C is complicated because there are a couple different ways it's
used to display video. If your computers are able to output Displayport over
USB-C I would think you should be able to utilize a Displayport KVM and
USB-C->Displayport cables on the input of the KVM and the same cable in
reverse on the other end. I think the hard part is figuring out if your
computers all push Displayport over their USB-C ports or not.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
U.S. assures Russia Snowden won't be executed or tortured - JumpCrisscross
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/26/us-usa-security-letter-idUSBRE96P0NV20130726
======
FellowTraveler
Obama also assured us that he would protect whistleblowers:
"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste,
fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to
public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and
patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars,
should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees
as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will
strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste,
fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal
agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and
whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."
So perhaps his assurances are of no value.
------
sockgrant
It's sad that the U.S. has sunken to a point where this kind of guarantee is
necessary.
~~~
hansjorg
It doesn't mean as much as it would have 15 years ago either. With many
techniques redefined from torture to "enhanced interrogation", they could keep
their word and he would still be in for quite a rough treatment.
~~~
recusancy
On January 22, 2009 President Obama signed an executive order requiring the
CIA to use only the 19 interrogation methods outlined in the United States
Army Field Manual on interrogations.
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInt...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Amazon announces unlimited MP3 storage with any Cloud Drive plan - phinze
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tsm_1_tw_s_dm_lnxnwv?node=2658409011
======
thamiam
E-mail I just received from Amazon. I can't believe how exactly right this
this, and how unexpected that is.
(full disclosure, I am an Amazon employee, not affiliated with the MP3 or
cloud drive team. I was just independently motivated to share this, because
not one hour earlier I had been looking at my downgrade options on my phone).
"Information About Your Cloud Drive Account
Hello,
Thanks for your prior purchase of the 100 GB Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan.
Beginning today, all paid Cloud Drive storage plans include unlimited space
for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no extra charge for a limited time.
Learn more here:
<http://www.amazon.com/mp3gettingstarted>
Because your current plan now includes unlimited space for music, we're
refunding the difference between the cost of your original Cloud Drive plan of
100 GB and the cost of a current 20 GB plan ($20), which is the least-
expensive Cloud Drive plan that includes unlimited space for music. A refund
of $80 will be issued to the card originally used for your Amazon Cloud Drive
storage plan. Refunds are typically completed within 10 business days and will
appear as a credit on your credit card statement.
We hope to see you again soon!
Sincerely,
The Amazon MP3 Team <http://www.amazon.com/mp3>
------
technomancy
Q: What is the cloud?
A: The cloud is a term used to describe the Internet. [...]
Hm; that kind of straightforwardness is actually kind of refreshing.
------
reaganing
Clarification, obvious: You only get unlimited MP3 (and AAC) storage with any
_paid_ Cloud Drive plan. You won't get it with the free 5GB plan.
Of course, I think most people are probably on the 20GB plan since Amazon was
giving those away with the purchase of an MP3 album for quite some time.
------
kylec
Are there any indications on what "for a limited time" means? Is there a term
for which Amazon has promised to provide this service for free? Once the
unlimited storage is no longer offered, will the existing files in the cloud
be 'grandfathered' in and continue to be free to store, or will people be
expected to pay or face loss of access to the files in the Cloud Drive?
~~~
chris11
I don't know what "for a limited time" means, but when accounts get
downgraded, you keep the higher storage capacity until the end of the billing
cycle. Then they give you a limited amount of time to delete files and
download them.
------
mcpherrinm
I wonder how much verification is done that the files are MP3? You could
reasonably put other data inside MP3 containers and use Cloud Drive as a nice,
inexpensive backup solution.
Time to start writing a tool ;)
~~~
unfletch
People did this to share non-mp3 files on the original Napster. I wonder if
Wrapster still runs... <http://www.team-mp3.com/mp3/wrapster.htm>
~~~
JonnieCache
Thank-you for that dose of nostalgia.
------
llambda
Okay I tried and failed: what qualifies as "eligible" MP3 and AAC files? I
misread the "Learn More" link that was related to previous purchases as being
the "Learn More" for eligible files, but afaict that "Learn More" link related
to eligible files isn't active so I'm confused as to what will qualify as
eligible.
~~~
TillE
In my cloud drive settings (I have a temporarily-free-with-purchase 20GB
account):
"Upload an unlimited number of songs in any supported file format with Amazon
Cloud Player.
Supported file formats for songs Cloud Drive currently supports song files in
the following formats:
.mp3—Standard non-DRM file format (Includes Amazon MP3 Store purchased files)
.m4a—AAC files (Includes iTunes store purchased files)
Any MP3 or AAC files added to your Cloud Drive will be available for playback
and download using Amazon Cloud Player. Upload your music now with Amazon
Cloud Player."
~~~
chris11
Do you know if this includes filters for length? For instance would rips of
audiobooks be viewed as eligible for free storage?
~~~
re
Answered here, somewhat:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200704820&ie=UTF8)
> Files must be music recordings in MP3 (.mp3) or AAC (.m4a, iTunes non-DRM
> files) format and must be less than 100 MB in size... audio recordings that
> are not of songs and non-audio files (even if in MP3 or AAC format) are not
> eligible for unlimited music space.
------
mfringel
So.... the paranoid part of me thinks this sounds like:
"Upload all of your mp3/aac files for free with any paid cloud drive plan...
until we start charging for the 'mp3/aac files don't count towards your quota'
option, which is $9.99/mo."
------
esrauch
Amazon seems to use images of text an awful lot. Anyone know why that is?
~~~
drivebyacct2
Very frustrating for anyone who is on mobile or happens to like how their text
renders. These images are flat out difficult to read in places.
But since I bought an MP3 album a while back, I effectively have a free cloud
to store my 40GB of music in. I'll take text-ful-images for that.
~~~
esrauch
Are you planning on actually using it? I uploaded some music to Amazon's mp3
when it first launched and more to Google's MP3 and I have found very little
need to use either one. I obviously can't fit all my music on my phone (an
android) but I generally am ok with the music I have at any particular time
and swapping.
~~~
reaganing
I don't stream much with it on my phone. But it's great to be able to download
the album(s) I want to the device without needing to connect to my computer.
Also, can never have too many backup copies of my music.
~~~
allwein
> Also, can never have too many backup copies of my music.
That's going to be my primary use of this service. I already have ways of
accessing my music on my home machine remotely. But an additional offsite
cloud backup of 150GB for $20 a year? Sold.
------
dons
Well, that's kind of interesting. I just bought 100G so I could store all my
mp3s in the cloud player while travelling. After uploading about 40G, this
plan must have activated, and it shows "< 1%" of 100G used. Cool idea: I might
use the space for data now.
------
samstokes
Still no Linux support? :(
(I know about the web-based uploader, but it's super-clunky for uploading more
than one or two albums - unlimited MP3 storage is no good if you have to spend
a week navigating the interface, never mind the actual upload time!)
------
cmelbye
Wow, Amazon continues to amaze. I'd really love an iPhone app, though. This is
kind of useless for me until they release one (I prefer iTunes to listening to
music on my laptop, it's faster and has a nicer interface.)
~~~
neuroelectronic
You can use the web player through safari.
------
WalterSear
What's to stop me from changing all my file names to 'mp3'?
------
yarian
I wonder why they are not offering ogg vorbis support. Is it just not as
popular? Are the files typically larger? Either way, it's a glaring omission
imo.
~~~
jonknee
Almost no one uses Ogg, not a very glaring omission in my opinion. Amazon
sells MP3s. Apple sells AACs. No one with any market share sells Ogg files.
~~~
wazoox
AFAIK all games sound and music have been in ogg format for ages.
~~~
jonknee
And none of that would be in Amazon Music... Again, no one with any serious
market share sells music in Ogg.
~~~
wazoox
The amount of music sold in file format is totally dwarved by the amount sold
on CDs. For a while I used to rip to ogg, I'm probably not the only one.
------
dfischer
So I get unlimited space for music at $20/yr? Umm, yeah sign me up unless
there's a catch.
Unlimited space for music details Limited time offer: All paid storage plans
include unlimited space for music at no additional charge. Upload as many
songs as you like without taking up any of your storage space. Listen to your
music anywhere with Amazon Cloud Player.
------
mark_l_watson
Big win. I got a free 20gb account for a year just for buying a Johnny Winter
CD (as MP3s) and I'll certainly pay for 20g after my free year is up.
I am using the player right now: very convenient to use from my laptop or
droid. I haven't tried it from the living room on Google TV yet but that
should also work fine.
------
jrockway
If I wanted to sue people for having pirated copies of my content, the first
thing I would do is ask everyone to upload all their files to my servers so I
could inspect them. If I paid them, they probably wouldn't even realize that I
was out to get them.
~~~
baddox
How could they really know if the music you uploaded was pirated? Even if your
stuff is tagged with scene groups, that's not even close to proof that you
pirated it.
~~~
pyre
I imagine through fingerprinting, checksums of files, etc. Though that's not
fool-proof as people can an do change the metadata, filenames, etc of the
files they download. (That's not even touching people that download FLAC and
then convert to mp3 for 'actual usage').
~~~
technomancy
Easy enough to claim fair use. "I had this on CD, but it was more convenient
to download it rather than rip it myself." seems pretty bulletproof to me.
~~~
pyre
If they come to you with a lawsuit threat, you'll still have to pay money to
argue that defense in court.
------
nicksergeant
I'd really like to know which of my files were not "eligible". I selected a
folder which had 9,192 MP3 / M4A files in it, and only 6,822 were "eligible".
I'm fine with some not being able to be uploaded, but please tell me which
ones.
~~~
nicksergeant
Completely, 100% never mind. There's a small, not-so-obvious link for "Music
that cannot be uploaded"
------
8ig8
Anyone have experience mounting the Amazon Cloud Drive on OSX? It's apparently
different than S3.
I did find a reference to mounting it as a virtual drive on Windows.
Specifically I was wondering about the possibility of rsync.
------
qixxiq
I wonder how much offering this actually costs them.
There must be some serious file duplication between users especially if
they're offering unlimited mp3 sharing, since many people will have the same
MP3 files (they can profit off piracy while pretending it doesn't exist).
If they're really clever about it they might even store the data separately
(which will increase duplicate collisions quite a lot due to retagging)
------
Apocryphon
This, my friends, is why competition in markets is a great thing.
------
sid0
No FLAC support?
~~~
reaganing
The Cloud Player Web and Android apps don't support FLAC, and the unlimited
storage only applies to MP3 and AAC files.
But you're able to store any kind of files in Cloud Drive if you just want
access to them to copy to different computers.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Representing generalization: Classes vs. Prototypes - sebastianconcpt
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.48.69&rep=rep1&type=pdf
======
sebastianconcpt
Biological systems seems to use prototypical and suggest that classes are just
our biased world view.
Natural Selection could easily "have a different opinion" about that view.
So if you are more into biomimicry on software, then prototypical computing
seems to be a more natural fit. Because it seems to have less impedance
mismatch among objects in the system and the artificial model done on
sowftware.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Warner Bros Acquires Flixter and film review site Rotten Tomatoes - michuk
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/warner-bros-acquires-social-movie-site-flixster-and-rotten-tomatoes/
======
michuk
A movie giant owning a site reviewing their own movies sounds worrying? Try
Metacritic.com as the replacement for RT and Filmaster.com as the replacement
for Flixter (it's in app store as well!). It's not like there are no other
options.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Exim – remote attacker can execute programs with root privileges - eternalny1
https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20190906.102039.7eeb3210.en.html
======
mkl
From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exim):
Exim is a mail transfer agent (MTA) used on Unix-like operating systems. [...]
In August 2019 [...] approximately 57% of the publicly reachable mail-servers
on the Internet ran Exim.
Yikes.
edit: This might be a better summary of the vulnerability:
[https://www.tenable.com/blog/cve-2019-15846-unauthenticated-...](https://www.tenable.com/blog/cve-2019-15846-unauthenticated-
remote-command-execution-flaw-disclosed-for-exim)
~~~
techdevangelist
cPanel I believe still utilizes Exim which I suspect drives that number up.
~~~
ttul
This is the entire web hosting industry. The attack surface is massive and the
industry has been so squeezed of costs that patching stuff will take a long
time. This exploit will be alive for a long long time.
~~~
ianhawes
To its credit, cPanel updates nightly and the developers will push security
patches out within hours. I don’t have a box to check but I would imagine a
cPanel patch is already live.
------
beautifulfreak
_As stated in the initial bug report by Zerons, an unauthenticated remote
attacker could send a malicious SNI ending in a backslash-null sequence during
the initial TLS handshake, which causes a buffer overflow in the SMTP delivery
process. This would allow an attacker to inject malicious code that Exim then
arbitrarily executes as root. This vulnerability does not depend on the TLS
library in use, so both GnuTLS and OpenSSL are affected._
[https://www.tenable.com/blog/cve-2019-15846-unauthenticated-...](https://www.tenable.com/blog/cve-2019-15846-unauthenticated-
remote-command-execution-flaw-disclosed-for-exim)
~~~
nineteen999
Why is exim running as root at that point? At least that is the question in my
mind. Once it has bound to the port it should setuid() or seteuid() to a less
privileged UID, unless I'm mistaken.
Granted, there will still be the possibility of remote code execution as a
non-root user, but at least you're not handing an attacker root privileges by
default.
~~~
tryauuum
Exim can do a lot of things, including delivery of mail to users' directories.
Root privileges are required to access those directories. Oh, also ".forward"
files in users' home directories.
I guess this is why Ubuntu ships exim binary with setuid bit on it
~~~
nineteen999
Ugh, the deliver program should be a seperate process then with some sort of
privilege seperation scheme perhaps. Postfix also handles .forward files from
memory, I wonder how it does it.
Maybe the Exim people don't feel like its worthwhile to rearchitect it, given
that there are MTA's with more secure designs/implementations out there
already.
~~~
avian
Maybe Exim people are smarter than you give them credit for. Exim does use
separate processes and privilege separation.
SMTP daemon itself does not run as root (on default Debian it runs as "Debian-
exim" user). Some processes do need to run as root for local delivery, as
others have mentioned.
How exactly this exploit works around that I don't know. PoC isn't public.
Bugs happen, even with secure designs.
~~~
nineteen999
Thanks for the information, I haven't used Exim since I last used Debian where
it was the default MTA in the 1990's. I wasn't trying to imply that they
weren't smart. If Ubuntu has it setuid root, than that's a different issue,
although I still don't see why it wouldn't drop those privileges at the
earliest opportunity.
~~~
upofadown
Here is an explicit discussion of how Exim handles this sort of issue:
* [https://www.exim.org/exim-html-3.20/doc/html/spec_55.html](https://www.exim.org/exim-html-3.20/doc/html/spec_55.html)
Like any MTA it needs to be root to connect to port 25. It can and does drop
privilege after that. Like any MTA it needs to have a process running as root
to do local deliveries as a particular user and to do .forwards . It appears
that process is what is being attacked here. If you don't do local
deliveries/.forwards, you don't have to have any processes running as root.
~~~
daurnimator
You shouldn't use root to bind to port 25; just the capability
CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
~~~
nineteen999
It's worth noting that as far as I can tell, Linux didn't support
CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE until 2.6.24[1], which was released in January 2008[2].
Exim itself dates from 1995[3].
I'm not really up to date on the use of capabilities, but it would seem that
it can be setup before running the main processes anyway[4] using the setcap
command (not sure how portable this is on other platforms, eg. BSD's) and it
would appear to be a distribution/packaging issue in that context anyway.
There is also always the possibility of setting the port used for SMTP
connections to a port higher than 1024 anyway, and using iptables/firewalld
etc. to forward port 25 to that unprivileged port, as also discussed in [4].
Of course, neither of these options help in the specific case of needing to
access user's home directories, either to read .forward files or deliver mail
there directly.
[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/413807/is-there-a-way-
fo...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/413807/is-there-a-way-for-non-root-
processes-to-bind-to-privileged-ports-on-linux)
[2] [https://lwn.net/Articles/266521/](https://lwn.net/Articles/266521/)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exim#Origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exim#Origin)
[4]
[https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/71922/postfix-m...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/71922/postfix-
master-running-as-root)
------
lelf
C at its finest
[https://github.com/Exim/exim/commit/cdc7f9a9667ecf31d803fc8d...](https://github.com/Exim/exim/commit/cdc7f9a9667ecf31d803fc8d1a31b466284360bd)
~~~
userbinator
*(++p) --- what did you think it would do without the parentheses...?
isdigit(ch) && ch != '8' && ch != '9' --- why not the simpler ch >= '0' && ch <= '7' ?
That code reminds me of FizzBuzz and the huge gap in competence it
demonstrates, i.e. a surprisingly large number of "programmers" fail to write
correct solutions to the simplest of problems. Perhaps "unescape a string"
needs to be an interview question with as much attention as FizzBuzz, both
because it has a practical application and can show a lot about someone's
skill. Admittedly, I may be biased because I have done a lot of parsing and
other compiler-ish work, but parsing text is really not an uncommon thing to
do in a lot of applications.
------
fulafel
There have been many Exim bugs like this, why are people still running it?
It's like the modern day sendmail.
[https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/10919/Exim.html](https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/10919/Exim.html)
12 RCE CVE entries since the CVE system started.
~~~
cheez
What should people be using instead?
~~~
fock
opensmptd (which seems a) to have a simple config and b) is a new
implementation). Though you then still need Dovecot or co. for mailboxes
(unless you prefer SSH for that).
Disclaimer: just reading about opensmtp, I'm using postfix
~~~
tannhaeuser
Dovecot is an IMAP server while exim, sendmail, postfix, and opensmtp (I
guess) are SMTP servers (aka MTAs). An SMTP server is for sending/forwarding
mails to or through, and IMAP (or POP3 or new-fangled jmap, supposedly) is
what your mail program uses to browse your received mails and mailboxes etc.
~~~
fock
I'm well aware of this distinction, yet it's also part of the equation when
looking at "how to secure my email-server"
------
florz
Just in case any Exim users are reading here, you might want to be aware that
Exim also does not check TLS certificates reliably, so any authentication
credentials (as well as message contents, of course) that you might be
transmitting via TLS to a remote server, using Exim as the client, can be
intercepted by a MitM if the remote host is specified as a DNS name:
[https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20181228.202226.22d1c4...](https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20181228.202226.22d1c497.en.html)
I just tested version 4.92, which is still affected, and it doesn't seem like
there is any interest in fixing this vulnerability.
~~~
yborg
The release announcement itself directly states not to use TLS as a
mitigation.
------
pjmlp
Yet another buffer overflow CVE....
------
lelf
Some mitigations mentioned in
[https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20190906.185037.1ff8bb...](https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20190906.185037.1ff8bb42.en.html):
> _Add - as part of the mail ACL (the ACL referenced by the main config option
> "acl_smtp_mail"):_
deny condition = ${if eq{\\}{${substr{-1}{1}{$tls_in_sni}}}}
deny condition = ${if eq{\\}{${substr{-1}{1}{$tls_in_peerdn}}}}
------
mmcgaha
When I read about email being too hard, I hear about configuration headaches,
deliverability, and spam, but the real reason that I outsource email is
because of security. The horrible history of MTA security drives me into a
very conservative mail strategy. Short of DJB devoting his life to qmail, I
don't know if this problem can be solved.
------
saagarjha
> Details: doc/doc-txt/cve-2019-15846 in the downloaded source tree
I can’t find this file in the Git repository. Does anyone know where it is?
~~~
justicz
It's not on master:
[https://github.com/Exim/exim/tree/exim-4.92.2%2Bfixes/doc/do...](https://github.com/Exim/exim/tree/exim-4.92.2%2Bfixes/doc/doc-
txt/cve-2019-15846)
~~~
saagarjha
Thanks.
------
eternalny1
"The mail server survey published on September 1 by E-Soft Inc, a company
specializing in web server surveys, says that Exim is currently the most used
MX server with 57.13% out of a total of 1,740,809 mail servers, representing
507,200 Exim servers being visible on the internet and accepting connections."
------
orf
The fix:
[https://github.com/Exim/exim/commit/2600301ba6dbac5c9d640c87...](https://github.com/Exim/exim/commit/2600301ba6dbac5c9d640c87007a07ee6dcea1f4#diff-2df79c106af94fb3d05bc3f75d7f2abb)
------
kazinator
> _Do not offer TLS for incomming connections (tls_advertise_hosts). This
> mitigation is_ not* recommended!*
No kidding? Turning off TLS isn't an option at many installations. It's gotta
work.
------
pontifier
This kind of thing (among others) is why I've lost all faith in
cryptocurrencies.
~~~
kfrzcode
Well that's like saying the USPS is unreliable, so therefore banks are not to
be trusted
~~~
pontifier
Heartbleed was the start of my fatalistic view of computer security.
I just don't trust data to be secure AND persistent.
Would any of the people downvoting me stake their life on keeping a short
string of characters secure on a connected computer forever?
~~~
inimino
I wouldn't stake my life on any bank, either.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering - mariuz
https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/sss-intro/
======
bhouston
Here is a WebGL Demo of subsurface scatter I created a couple years ago:
[https://clara.io/view/5c7d28c0-91d7-4432-a131-3e6fd657a042](https://clara.io/view/5c7d28c0-91d7-4432-a131-3e6fd657a042)
It is based on the DICE method described here:
[https://colinbarrebrisebois.com/2011/03/07/gdc-2011-approxim...](https://colinbarrebrisebois.com/2011/03/07/gdc-2011-approximating-
translucency-for-a-fast-cheap-and-convincing-subsurface-scattering-look/)
------
irq-1
Curious about the latest (?) tech. nvida's RTX, I found this:
> RTX causes a visible performance hit, which is offset by a technology known
> as DLSS, which stands for deep learning supersampling. In order to create
> this, Nvidia trains a neural network on pre-release game engine images at
> lower and higher resolutions. The AI provides the weights information for
> Tensor Cores in consumer GPUs through driver updates.
> When DLSS is turned on, the game is rendered at a lower resolution, with
> Tensor cores working to upscale to a higher resolution using Deep Learning.
> This results in a higher frame rate with a slightly worse image at high
> resolution. This can be used in conjunction with ray tracing to provide
> better framerates. NVIDIA claims that users can achieve performance similar
> to ray tracing off with a combination of DLSS and ray tracing on.
[https://analyticsindiamag.com/nvidias-real-time-ray-
tracing-...](https://analyticsindiamag.com/nvidias-real-time-ray-tracing-ai-
powered-rtx-explained/)
~~~
rasz
DLSS makes games look like blurry poop [https://www.game-
debate.com/news/26617/nvidia-explains-blurr...](https://www.game-
debate.com/news/26617/nvidia-explains-blurry-dlss-image-quality-in-bfv-and-
metro-exodus-more-improvements-inbound)
AMD in turn whipped out contrast adaptive sharpening shader that does the same
thing without bingo filing buzzwords.
[https://www.techspot.com/review/1903-dlss-vs-freestyle-vs-
ri...](https://www.techspot.com/review/1903-dlss-vs-freestyle-vs-ris/) This
move forced Nvidia to work on their own sharpening filters making fancy DSLL
obsolete with dump brute force filter. So much for AI.
------
tehsauce
Great write up!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Bit of Heresy: Functional Languages are Overrated - kyleburton
http://www.benrady.com/2010/06/a-bit-of-heresy-functional-languages-are-overrated.html
======
devonrt
A really incoherent article that's wrong in a lot of ways. The title is
misleading because the author's main beef is with the idea that functional
languages are the "solution" to the concurrency "problem." He admits that he's
tried to learn both Erlang and Haskell and given up because the languages are
too hard, too complex and "absolutely full of academic shitheaddery" and
points to the reference manuals of Haskell and OCaml as proof (edit to add:
Erlang is the opposite of "academic shitheaddery". Totally born and bred for
business!). I might come off as an asshole for saying this, but if attempting
to learn and then giving up on Erlang and Haskell is your only experience with
functional languages then you're not in a position to comment on it. Keep
digging into Haskell until you run into a Monad Transformer stack a mile long
or spend some time with Clojure.
The author then conflates Actor based concurrency with functional programming
in general. Let me lay my bias on the table right now: I'm sick to death of
hearing about Actors. Erlang put them on the map and I think Scala made them
popular, but Scala missed the point. Erlang's actors are only one piece of its
distributed-ness; there's a lot more to Erlang that lets it scale as well as
it does: a VM tuned for a large number of green threads, a transparent network
stack, the supervisor model etc. Scala has none of these. Not only that, but
actors themselves only solve one tiny problem in the world of concurrent
(really, for actors, distributed) computing. They do nothing to address shared
state. Finally, neither of these languages is really, truly functional.
If the author has titled the post "Actors are Overrated" I might have agreed
with it.
~~~
Scriptor
Completely agree. The author mentions that he tried to learn Erlang and
Haskell (we don't know how much he tried), uses the technical specs of Haskell
and O'Caml, and then makes a side swat at Scala.
It looks like at the beginning of this year he had decided to learn Haskell as
a way to explore functional programming:
[http://www.benrady.com/2010/01/language-of-the-
year-2010.htm...](http://www.benrady.com/2010/01/language-of-the-
year-2010.html).
I simply don't think being unable to learn a language qualifies you to bash
it. It'd be more fitting for him to post about the first point in whatever
Haskell resource he is using where he became confused.
------
jerf
The error here is confusing the language for the paradigm. He all but concedes
that functional programming is a good idea and you can do it in current
languages. True. When you do that, you have a functional program. The
"functionalness" or "objectness" or "logicness" of a program is a
characteristic of a _program_ , not the implementation language. When you do
object-oriented C, it isn't a "hack", it really is object-oriented C. You just
don't have language support, you're doing objects by hand, with the
corresponding disadvantages (syntactic pain) and advantages (no privileged
concept of objects means you can do your own thing, which can be useful; want
'prototypes'? just do it! arguably easier in C than C++). When you do
functional Javascript, it really is functional programming, you just don't
have the same language support. When you refuse to mutate values and treat a
language's values as immutable, even though the language permits you to mutate
them, you have immutable values; the essense of immutable values is that _you
can depend on them not being mutated_ , not that the language makes it
syntactically impossible to express mutation. This has obvious advantages if
you want to use an immutable style, but is not strictly necessary.
Proof: It all ends up running on assembler anyhow, which isn't functional or
OO or logical or any other paradigm. All of those things are categories of
programs, not intrinsic attributes of the environment.
The author isn't being anywhere near as contrary as I think he'd like....
~~~
cageface
The title of his article is that functional _languages_ are overrated and he
specifically points out that functional _techniques_ are available in other
languages, so I don't think you can say he's confusing the two concepts.
~~~
CodeMage
Yet he has a bias and it shows in his comments on Scala:
_And if you're working in a hybrid language, what assurances do you have,
really, that your system is really thread safe? Indeed, the risk compentation
effect might give you a false sense of security, giving you a system that
actually had more concurrency problems that one written in a "dangerous"
language._
The phrase "hybrid language" in the original text is a hyperlink to Scala. By
author's own admission, the languages he has tried were Erlang and Haskell. He
hasn't mentioned either trying or not trying Scala, but the article seems to
imply the latter.
The problem with what he said is that he seems to be dismissing "hybrid"
languages like Scala as equally overrated or worse than pure functional
languages like Haskell. Just like Jerf pointed out, it's the paradigm that
matters more than the language. A language like Scala is designed to make FP
paradigm easy to do, without being a pure functional language. As far as I
know, it's not designed to make your programs "thread safe". I believe that
the author wouldn't have made his claim about "risk compensation" if he had
actually studied Scala and tried it out.
~~~
loup-vaillant
> Just like Jerf pointed out, it's the paradigm that matters more than the
> language.
Note however, that languages are extremely good at making us use their
prefered paradigm.
~~~
CodeMage
Which is why we have hybrid languages to help us combine paradigms.
------
yummyfajitas
_"The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of
academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell."_
The author links to the _formal specification_ of Haskell and decides pattern
matching is "academic shitheaddery"?
Is the formal specification of Java any better?
[http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/gramma...](http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/grammars.html)
~~~
knieveltech
Java (being rife with academic shitheadery itself) may not have been the best
choice if you're trying to suggest the author doesn't have a point.
~~~
yummyfajitas
I picked Java because a) I know where to find it, b) the author mentions Java
positively and c) the C++ standard costs $18.
Any formal language spec will look ugly and hard to read. That's just the
nature of formal specs.
~~~
sprout
R5RS is a pretty light read.
------
cageface
In this interview: [http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-
erlan...](http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-erlang-
haskell)
Simon Peyton-Jones, the father of Haskell himself, dismisses the idea that
avoiding mutable state automatically buys you easy concurrency:
_But it turned out to be very hard to turn that into actual wall clock
speedups on processes, leaving aside all issues of robustness or that kind of
stuff, because if you do that style of concurrency you get lots of very tiny
fine-grained processes and you get no locality and you get very difficult
scheduling problems. The overheads overwhelm the benefits,_
There are some useful and novel ideas in the FP languages but they're no
silver bullet. Whatever the conventional solution for concurrent programming
turns out to be, it will have to be exploited in languages more accessible to
the median programmer than Haskell.
~~~
loup-vaillant
Beware: you say "concurrent", but SPJ was talking about "parallel". Not
exactly the same.
~~~
cageface
"Concurrent" is the word he uses repeatedly. What distinction do you make
between "parallel" and "concurrent"?
~~~
loup-vaillant
"Concurrent" is about observable behaviour. Like with a web server, serving
many many requests concurrently. When SPJ is talking about concurrency, he is
most likely talking about shared state with software transactional memory.
"Parallel" is about optimizing an otherwise linear, or atomic program. Like
map-reduce, which can be run on a single CPU or on a distributed cluster. When
SPJ is talking about parallelism he is most likely talking about nested data
parallelism.
The distinction between the two can be made without ambiguity with the terms
"task parallelism" (concurrency), and "data parallelism" (parallelism).
~~~
cageface
_When SPJ is talking about concurrency, he is most likely talking about shared
state with software transactional memory._
If you read the interview he is talking about the kind of implicit concurrency
FP advocates often suggest you get for free with FP.
_I suppose Haskell initially wasn't a concurrent language at all. It was a
purely functional language and we had the idea from the beginning that a
purely functional language was a good substrate for doing concurrency on. But
it turned out to be a lot harder to turn that into reality than I think we
really expected because we thought "If you got e1+e2 then you can evaluate e1
at the same time as e2 and everything will be wonderful because they can't
affect each other because it's pure."_
They had to add things like STM and explicit concurrency management because
_you don't get this for free just because you're doing FP_.
~~~
loup-vaillant
Oh. He says "concurrent" to talk about data parallelism. (Bayesian update in
progress…)
------
Zak
I'll speak to the languages I know here.
Haskell is a research language. It has become usable for practical purposes,
but at heart its still a research language. Haskell focuses on isolating side
effects over practicality or ease of use. For certain classes of problems,
that turns out to be the most practical thing. Want to be sure certain parts
of your program don't access /dev/nuclear_missiles? Haskell is your language.
Is your app mainly centered around a complex GUI? Maybe you should look
elsewhere.
I notice no mentions of Clojure in the article aside from including it in a
list of functional languages. Clojure is a practical language designed for
getting stuff done. It offers the most comprehensive solution for managing
shared state I've seen in any language and does its best to get out of your
way.
~~~
nostrademons
"Want to be sure certain parts of your program don't access
/dev/nuclear_missiles?"
Actually, if you want to make sure that parts of your program don't access
/dev/nuclear_missiles, I think that E is your language. In Haskell, it's as
easy as `unsafePerformIO $ hGetContents "/dev/nuclear_missiles"`, which at
least warns you that it's unsafe but doesn't really give any assurances
otherwise. And if you're in the IO monad anyway, you don't even need the
unsafePerformIO.
------
Robin_Message
If you think shared state is hard to scale and you are arguing for message
passing, then what's wrong with Erlang? In fact, you can't conflate Erlang,
Haskell, O'Caml and Scala together as FP.
By being immutable by default, FP makes message passing simpler and in some
cases forces you not to do shared state, so FP helps you do concurrency that
way. Closures are old news and are in almost everything now anyway (I'd
include Java anonymous inner classes, they just have a nasty syntax, although
good for grouping methods, e.g. mouse events).
Other than immutability by default and closures, what makes a language
functional anyway? Because if you take the languages you suggested together,
that's all I see them having in common.
~~~
yummyfajitas
_...what's wrong with Erlang?_
Strings:
1> [98, 114, 111, 107, 101, 110] == "broken".
true
Records are not real records, just compile time labels placed on top of
tuples. The syntax, seriously, three different line terminators?
Python and Haskell both make great go-to languages, and you can solve a wide
variety of problems in them. Erlang is the language you suffer with when you
truly need massive concurrency and distribution.
~~~
cageface
Haskell seems to have too many rough edges to make it nice for real-world
work. The inconsistent error handling (errors vs maybe vs either), weak record
syntax, and ruthlessly strict stance on mutability don't sound like things I
want to wrestle with on a large scale.
Scala, on the other hand, seems to strike more reasonable compromises on these
points and has all the java stuff to draw on when you need it.
~~~
kwantam
> inconsistent error handling
I don't understand how offering several choices is synonymous with
inconsistent. If you really really want "consistency", establish a policy for
your code and stick with it. All three have distinct uses, and each is better
for certain things than for others.
Anyhow, there's nothing particularly special about the Maybe or Either monads;
you should be able to easily implement either of those yourself, and calling
them a feature of the language---beyond the fact that they happen to be in the
standard library---is somewhat specious.
~~~
cageface
Error handling is one thing you want to have handled consistently across all
code, including third party libraries. I may be able to enforce a convention
in my own code but the typical app uses a dozen or more libraries.
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3077866/large-scale-
desig...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3077866/large-scale-design-in-
haskell/3083909#3083909)
~~~
Robin_Message
Consistent error handling is needed if you are returning 0 for success and -1
for failure. Or was it 1 for success and 0 for failure? But there's nothing
wrong with a type signature that precisely describes what you can get back.
Only argument I'd have with Either is it's not obvious which is the error
(although left is the convention and baked into the monad), although in
practice you'll be returning "Either ParseError ParseTree" which makes it
rather obvious. Also, do-notation over the Maybe monad is just perfect for
simple error handling, but sometimes you need to return more than None.
Happily, you can switch to Either without changing a great deal. But you can't
mix them easily, and that is a suckful thing about monads indeed.
~~~
cageface
So what do I do if I want to write a function that takes another function as a
parameter, and some of the possible functions use Maybe and some use Either?
What would this code look like?
~~~
yummyfajitas
f: (a -> m b) -> ... -> m Result
Maybe and Either are both monads and by convention Left errCode is the fail
method of the Either monad. This will work exactly as you think it should. It
will also work with, e.g., io actions that might fail.
------
pavelludiq
Im all for heresy, even though i don't agree with the author, his heresy is
useful, we must avoid programming religions. It at least helped me understand
a cultural problem programmers have at the moment with FP. The downfall of OOP
was that it was misunderstood by all the imperative programmers. Even though
it was adopted, it was misused. The downfall of FP will be that it is
misunderstood by all the oo programmers, if it gets adopted it will get
misused.
I never found FP hard to learn or use. I know now that it was because when i
got introduced to it, i only had about a year of imperative programming
experience and no OO experience at all. I was a rather fresh mind. My advice
to all OO programmers willing to learn FP is to approach it with a fresh mind,
it may save you a lot of headaches. Imagine you know nothing about
programming, you may be surprised how close to the truth that is for some of
us(including me).
------
dusklight
Why is our time being wasted with this article.
The author himself says that he is too dumb to understand functional
languages. He knows so little that he keeps carping on about concurrency, when
that is nowhere near any of the central reasons why functional is valuable.
Better support for concurrency is an accident, a side-effect. What makes
functional important is the ability to create living abstractions, and
understanding how functional allows you to do that and why it is important
makes you a better programmer in any language.
There is no heresy here, only ignorance. The author is basically saying
functional languages are "overrated" because he is unable to understand them.
There are definitely valid arguments to be made against the functional
paradigm, but he has made none of them.
------
jcromartie
> I think the downfall of some of these languages is that they get wrapped up
> in being "functional" rather than focusing on solving a particular class of
> problem. They abandon convention and common sense for complex type systems
> and functional purity.
He's obviously not really looked at Clojure, then. The design philosophy of
Clojure can be summarized as "functional programming is great; people also
need to get stuff done."
------
kyleburton
I don't think FP is all about concurrency - it's about more than that. In my
experience it reduces the possible bugs in code (type inference / checking,
referential transparency) - these aspects make concurrency easier to achieve,
but that's not all there is to FP.
~~~
nirav
Unfortunately though, FP is being sold as panacea of concurrency problems, at
least in Java world.
I think that FP is much more than that, it actually helps me solve problems in
a very different and elegant way. I don't know how you classify this benefit
but for me it was analogous to solving a problem with recursion or loop; while
both can solve problems, recursion seems to be much more intuitive and elegant
way - Same for FP vs Imperative approaches.
~~~
vamsee
I'd agree to that, and solving problems in FP always made me think harder to
get an elegant solution. Though, it also means that you're uncomfortably close
to math. I think to fully exploit/understand FP, the programmer also needs to
be good at understanding the mathematical models/formulas behind FP.
Otherwise, I think he cannot truly exploit the potential of the tools he's
using. I haven't spent a lot of time doing FP to justify that opinion fully,
but whatever FP I did made me wish I took my math classes more seriously.
------
dman
I would have loved this if the blog post contained more technical details and
some code snippets about the tradeoffs involved. Functional languages cover a
broad spectrum. There are often multiple concepts being explored in a
language, then there is the issue of cultural heritage of the respective
communities, and the fact that FP languages have traditionally had multiple
implementations with different tradeoffs. as an example -> lisp and scheme are
functional without being immutable. scheme favors a small spec while lisp
includes large number of inbuilt primitives. Clojure introduces persistent
datastructures and interesting new concepts like agents and integration with
the jvm. I know too little about haskell and ML to make any informed comments
about them but they appear espouse static typing unlike lisp / scheme. So if
you have a particular beef about a functional language, look further and you
will find one that doesnt share those traits.
------
dkarl
_The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of
academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell._
(Where "seriously" and "hell" are links to the Haskell and O'Caml language
documentation.)
God oh god I wish every language I used could be specified as precisely as the
Haskell example. I didn't bother figuring out what the notation meant, but if
I used Haskell, I could afford the time to understand it. Seriously, Perl and
C++ have equivalent complexities; you just aren't expected to understand them.
Experienced programmers steer clear of unfamiliar constructs, which works well
_enough_ , but it would be so much nicer to actually understand stuff.
------
jeb
The future of programming is when both my mum and my little brother can write
small code that does some particular task for them. Neither of them will ever
understand functional programming. That's basically the answer to what
paradigm will win.
~~~
CodeMage
Do you honestly believe that? The history of programming is littered with
failed attempts to do that. For example, does "Microsoft Acess" ring any
bells?
The future of programming is definitely not to turn users into programmers.
~~~
loup-vaillant
Oh yes it is. Users should be programmers. All of them. Just so they can write
those little scripts. It's a question of independence.
You probably wanted to say that the future is not to dumb down programming to
the level of my "mom". I agree with that.
~~~
CodeMage
Maybe I have a weird family, but my mom does not want to write any scripts.
She just wants the damn thing to _work_.
For her and many other people I know, it's a bit like driving a car. If you
want to drive a car, you have to know certain basic rules and that's it. The
guys who do maintenance and repairs are the ones who know what happens under
the hood and you take your car to them whenever necessary.
I also know lots of people who know what happens under the hood and love to
tinker with their cars. I'm not one of them myself. I do that with computers,
but not with cars. I don't see why computers should be a special case where
everyone has to know how to tinker with the "stuff under the hood".
~~~
loup-vaillant
First, what we want an what's good for us are two different sets of things.
Especially when you don't have total information.
Second, programming does not always mean tinkering stuff "under the hood".
Advanced spreadsheets are front-end _and_ programming at the same time. Even
that:
$ cat * | grep "groceries" | sort
is a program (though a rather trivial one). "Real" programs will still be
professional and hobbyist stuff. But scripting can be everyone's business.
Third, computers are fundamentally different from any other device: they are
general purpose. They can process any information you care to feed them, in
any way you care to program them to.
Finally, when our moms want to do something the computer can't presently do,
but could, they have 3 alternatives: give up, acquire a program that does the
job, or program it themselves. For many many jobs, acquire a program is the
only viable solution. But for small, specialized tasks, the existence of a
dedicated program is less likely. So if our moms want the damn thing to "just
work", they have no choice but to program it.
Knowing how to use computers (and the internet) is becoming as important as
knowing how to read. Because computers are general purpose machines, knowing
how to program them is an important part of knowing how to use them. It's a
big investment, but so is reading.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Economics of The Formula One Grand Prix of Monaco - mcarvin
http://smartasset.com/blog/news/the-economics-of-the-formula-one-grand-prix-of-monaco/
======
chaz
This article is a weird non-graphic infographic that turns a data table into
prose. I suppose it's mildly interesting if you haven't seen these numbers
before. From the title, I was hoping for an analysis behind the business
economics.
If you're new to F1, the Monaco GP is this weekend and is considered by many
to be the one to watch of the entire season (though I tend to like other
circuits). Aside from the raw speed, fame, and fortune, the technology itself
is a big draw for a lot of F1 fans. This site does a great job of analyzing
the nonstop flow of new F1 tech: <http://scarbsf1.com/>
------
josh2600
Normally I'm very patient with new people posting on HackerNews, but this is
almost ridiculous.
1) Your "PLEASE SIGN UP" full page flashover is so annoying. I don't know what
to say other than I hate this :(.
2) The Infographic at the bottom is like a list of numbers with no real rhyme
or reason (relative to the kinds of content we've come to expect from
companies like priceonomics).
3) This is just a kind of lavish puff piece about how great Monaco is; there's
not a lot of meat.
In short, I was actually hoping to learn a lot more about Monaco, but your
harassing signup page and the content didn't work for me. Better luck next
time, but please do try again because it seems like you want to produce good
content. This kind of long-form stuff is exactly what you should be doing,
just try to produce new insight instead of regurgitation and turn off the spam
signup thingy when you post to HN.
~~~
PhantomGremlin
Flashover, what's that? :)
By default I browse the Interwebs using Firefox and NoScript. HN is quite
readable w/o Javascript. And I didn't see any flashover when I read the
article, because I invariably view unknown random websites with Javascript
disabled by default. NoScript is my sine qua non for browsing.
I'm _not_ saying you should use Firefox. I'm _not_ saying you should browse
with Javascript off. To each his own. HOWEVER, if you have an easy way to rid
yourself of some of the worst excesses of the web, then I think you've ceded
at least some of the moral "high ground" by complaining rather than by simply
using tools easily available to you.
~~~
josh2600
I suppose that's true. That's really only one of my complaints though. I care
much more about the content (or lack thereof) than I do about the annoying
popup.
Point taken though :).
------
JonnieCache
Wow, someone found a way to make the modal begging cup even more annoying!
Congrats! Enjoy your bounce rate!
------
fsar7
I found this interesting but annoying to read, so I pasted it into jottit
here: <http://www.jottit.com/fsar7>
~~~
stblack
Thank you!
------
waterside81
As one of the FB commenters on the article mentions, the ironic thing is
Monaco is one of the worst races to watch, from a pure driving point of view.
Lots of narrow turns, very little passing, next to no straightaways (unlike
Hockenheim where you can really let loose).
~~~
k-mcgrady
It depends on why you watch F1. If you want to see the drivers constantly on
the edge, kissing barriers, and interesting strategies Monaco is unbeatable.
If the rain hits it's usually spectacular. If you want to see cars go fast and
overtake quite easily then thanks to DRS and KERS every other race is better.
I like both aspects of racing but I find Monaco even more special now that
overtaking is so common in other races (due to DRS).
~~~
exDM69
> If the rain hits it's usually spectacular.
Every spring I wish it rains in Monaco. There are few things more spectacular
than an formula car racing the streets of Monte Carlo in full wet conditions.
------
fijal
This is the first time I see someone using Fahrenheit degrees outside of 0-150
range. Do Americans usually use F for stuff like material limits etc?
~~~
jetti
I haven't come across temperatures that hot very often, but my assumption is
that the average non-scientific US resident would use Fahrenheit for all
temperatures, no matter what range, just because it is what they were most
likely raised on.
Just out of curiosity, what would you suggest they use instead? Celsius?
Kelvin?
~~~
paganel
Not the OP, but I'd say that for high temperatures it doesn't really matter if
one uses Celsius or Kevin, and that's because 1 degree Celsius = 1 degree
Kelvin. So, let's say that you have a reading of 800 Celsius, you just need to
add ~ 270 to it if you want Kelvin. If I then get a second reading of 1200
Celsius I know for sure that it's 400 degrees higher compared to the first
reading, no matter if I'm thinking Celsius or Kelvin.
For Fahrenheit things are not that straightforward
~~~
sp332
1200-800=400 in Fahrenheit too, you know :p
~~~
paganel
Really? Ok, I learned something new today :) Of course, if it wasn't obvious
enough enough I'm from Europe where Fahrenheit has always confused us.
~~~
sp332
Yeah :) They're both linear. What confuses people is that degrees F are both
smaller than degrees C _and_ the 0-point is lower. They meet at -40 (so -40C
== -40F) and from there, the F number changes faster than C, that's all.
------
NatW
There are some interesting prices here, but to get to the economics of the
situation, I'd want to hear an economic rationale for car companies to
participate, not just prices. It seems really expensive for them. I assume
they're in it for the marketing? But would that money be better invested in
Research & Development for their products on the road or for car commercials?
~~~
chaz
At a high level, the teams are largely their own companies that get money
through sponsorships, and spend their money on developing cars. For companies
like Mercedes-Benz and Red Bull Racing, it's a big advertising opportunity
(and obviously a selling point for Mercedes-Benz sports cars). For teams like
Williams and Force India, they're independent ventures.
Every car needs an engine, which may be developed internally or purchased from
a supplier. Ferrari supplies engines for its own team (the "factory team"),
but also sells engines to other teams like Toro Rosso and Sauber ("customer
teams"). Engine development is extremely expensive, so amortizing the cost
across several buyers makes sense. Smaller teams cannot afford to develop
their own teams.
The best teams can afford to pay their own drivers lots of money, upwards of
€20m/year. Some teams can only afford to pay €150k/year, and the drivers hope
to prove themselves and move to a faster team after their contract is up (many
top drivers came up this way). Some teams can't even afford that, and are
willing to take "pay drivers," who pay the team to drive. They're not bad
drivers, but they're not necessarily the best ones, either. Cutting loose a
good paid driver for a worse pay driver is bad for the sport.
Participating in F1 has a unique marketing value to the right customer, and
can't be replaced with just R&D or more commercials. I think it's fair to say
that Ferrari wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they quit F1, as it's
so much of their brand identity.
------
mavroprovato
The amusing thing is that the trophy given to the winning driver is the
cheapest in the Formula 1 calendar. I remember hearing that it costs something
like 700 euros, but I cannot find a citation now.
~~~
tgodard
Seriously?
~~~
mavroprovato
Yes, I'm not joking, I remember the commentator telling this on TV during the
GP some years ago.
------
neilmiddleton
Sir Lewis? Eh?
~~~
waterside81
He was awarded an MBE by the Queen after winning the F1 title a few years back
~~~
mpclark
He'll have to wait a while longer for the knighthood.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
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