Be Productive Anywhere: Strategies for Better Remote Work - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/productive-remote-work/ <comment><USER2> > If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first > task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride. And it will > encourage you to do another task.

It bothers me when people present anecdata like this. I don't have a problem with people feeling this way. But it's a huge leap of logic to say that this phenomenon is generalizable, especially since there absolutely are counterexamples. I, for one, have never felt this way after making my bed.

<comment><USER3> As someone who is not a morning person and who is experimenting with daily habits like the above, I'd like to give you my thoughts on this.

One of the things that Charles Duhigg writes about in the "Power of Habit" is reducing the barriers to action. One of the examples he gives is starting a running program. The best thing that you can do is to reduce the barriers to action for yourself by putting your running shoes and socks by the door. By preparing yourself for action, all you have to do is act (e.g. lace up and go out the door). If you have to find your socks or shoes in the fog of your morning waking up, that is a barrier to action that might even be enough to make you stay in bed.

Making the bed in the morning is a symbolic action. I believe it mentally separates you from the 'sleep' part of your day to the 'wake' part of your day. By choosing to make the bed, you are choosing to take action on something that, honestly, isn't that important.

Once you start your morning, you can add other habits (reading a good book, meditating, drinking coffee, playing with your kids, walking your dog). Note that I didn't say these or good or bad habits - but something that you would like to do.

In fact, some life coaches argue that perhaps the goal is to extend your morning routine such that it takes up most of your morning and extends into the afternoon.

There is a famous demonstration that involves a glass jar, sand, large rocks (not so large that they wouldn't fit into the jar), smaller rocks, and gravel.

When you pour the sand in first, it is near impossible to smash in the rocks and even some of the gravel.

The counter demonstration is that when you put the rocks in, then the smaller rocks, and then the gravel, you can pour the sand in and it fits between the voids.

This is an analogy for making time for the important actions in your day. The ones that you want to do. The practical theory is that by doing what is good for you right away, you won't procrastinate all day (e.g. reading Hacker News) and do something relatively more useful like physical exercise or meditation or coffee with a good friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remote work is like catnip to me. Not the actual work thing (I spent 18 months working for a Texan university while five time zones away, so I know a little about it) but the thing for me is the _movement_

Remote work _should_ be everywhere. Almost every office job could be done remotely with far less crappy distraction. I think that there are genuine difficulties with close co-ordination, with productivity etc, but these are far far out weighed by the gains (I got some real work done remotely and I was not the one of the best)

There are I think three things preventing remote working taking off

\- managers cannot manage. With remote worker you have to manage the work itself, which means the proxies for good work (ie telling if someone is a good worker, is engaged is enthusiastic etc) are gone, and so it is necessary to define the work upfront, decide if you are getting that work and correct. This is really hard and usually the managers reporting line wants them facing up most of the time thus reducing the time they have to manage.

\- companies cannot compete. If your company is the only factory in say a thirty mile radius, you are a monopoly employer and get to pick the best workers for a pittance. If more factories spring up, you are now competing with those other factories for the best workers and salaries should rise. Now imagine the radius is 30,000 miles. Companies are now competing against _every other_ company for their workers. It is possible remote workers will act like football superstars and extract majority of profit from firms

\- the "out of place"'tipping point. Untill 51% of coworkers are remote the company culture does not change and you are a second class citizen

I think these are big headwinds for remote working

<comment><USER5> Or because people are like me - completely unable to work from home. I've been doing it for the past 6 months and it has totally destroyed my productivity. I've tried all the tricks, nothing helps. I'm just not fit to work remotely.

<comment><USER6> I've been mostly working remotely (80-90% remote work) as a developer and consultant for over a decade. The changing point for me was to have a dedicated office space (an entire bedroom or den). Let's face it, if you are working late in the evening at the office and no one else is in the office, what difference is there from working remotely? Now, for me, it mostly doesn't matter where I work from: home office, rented space, living room in a La-Z- Boy, coffee shop, etc; anything but a cubicle or an open floor plan.

Slightly off-topic: my wife, who also works remotely and has a dedicated office space (a tricked-out bedroom), commented today how she hasn't had a sick day in over two years because she is not exposed to the multitude of germs and viruses she was exposed to in the corporate office. I noticed similar results: I have not called in sick to a client in many years while working remotely. Not getting sick as much is definitely a productivity boost. Not having to shave and dress up (good ol' pj pants and a polo shirt top works great on skype) and make a two-way commute are also productivity/lifestyle boosts.

I also have a camera behind me, overlooking my monitors and the back of my desk chair (the monitors are not readable by the camera, can only make out color blocks but can't read 12pt text). When someone skypes me, I just turn around to face the camera. The viewer can more easily see that I am actually working and if I have to check something on the computer, I just turn around and let them watch me work on it. This has been very effective in eliminating comments/feelings that remote workers are ineffective.

This week I do have to be onsite and the weekly commute will eat 15-20 hours, depending on traffic, for my 26 mile commute (each way). That is 15-20 hours of basically nothing but listening to podcasts or music. That's a productivity hit, as other than the feel good of being in the office, there is nothing that I could not do remotely, but it is a new client so I think it is a fair trade off.

I also stopped using the phrase "work from home" as I truly can work remotely from any location with electricity and optionally, wifi/cell service. I once worked remotely for two weeks from the campgrounds near the Redwood National Park and just drove to Crescent City to send/receive emails and code every evening during my nightly and rightly beer run. I did have regular or extended cell service (no data tho) if someone needed to discuss anything urgent.

<comment><USER4> I like the camera position trick - very nice

<comment><USER6> Glad you liked it. I use a cheap $9.99 1080p manually zoomable camera and a 20 foot USB extension cable routed under the chair mat and up a 5.5 foot tripod to the camera. Having the camera taped to the tripod (no proper mount on the USB camera) makes it super easy to use the tripod controls to pan, tilt, or lock in place. Due to a conveniently located shelving unit, the tripod's legs are not fully spread out, reducing the tripping hazard. A simple loop of paracord and a knot 'secure' the tripod head to the shelving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The "you are all dehydrated and need to drink 37 glasses of water a day" myth really needs to die...

I'll let Dr Carroll rant for me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbHp7cu2Ubk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbHp7cu2Ubk)

<comment><USER8> 3.2 liters of water a day is much less than 37 glasses of water. The article mentioned 3.2 liters.

<comment><USER8> I am surprised by the down votes. I didn't realize drinking water was so controversial.

One data point: my neighbors, husband and wife, are a surgeon and a neurologist. We live in the mountains of central Arizona, and hiking is a favorite pastime. Both of these doctors say one should drink 1 quart of water an hour while hiking. I don't quite do that, but I certainly drink 2 liters on a strenuous 3 hour hike.

<comment><USER7> The claim you're supporting in the article is not about drinking water while on a strenuous hike in a hot, arid climate. It's about drinking water in routine, day to day life.

<comment><USER8> I was not 100% supporting the claim in the article. I was just pointing out what I thought was someone's error in converting 3 liters to 37 cups of water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These kind of advice articles about personal productivity never really take into consideration that you might be sharing your living space with someone else. Sure, I'll make my bed at 5.45 every morning, first thing of the day, just let me wake up my girlfriend super early too, just because I'm a productivity freak. Sorry hon', Tim Ferris told me to do that!

<comment><USER10> If you care about personal productivity, you don't have a girlfriend. ;). So waking her up every morning should solve that problem.

So I agree, if you want to increase your personal productivity, make your bed early every morning. :D.

<comment><USER9> > if you want to increase your personal productivity, make yourself single.

FTFY!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No matter what the work I still find being around people I work with to be much better than working by myself at home, despite Slack and email etc there is no replacement to talking with people in person. While the occasional day at home is fine I just can't enjoy being alone all the time and still try to be productive. I'm sure it works for other people but not me.

<comment><USER12> I'm actually the complete opposite I hate working with anyone in the room with me

It's almost as if everyone is different lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't give orders to other people when in fact you just present a list of things that work for _you_ (at the moment). There's nothing universal in those advices, it just fits _you_ (at the moment).

</comment><comment><USER14> Working remotely is hard enough. Working for yourself is even harder. A good manager should be making contact at task-appropriate intervals. Keeping organised and going shouldn't be too different from office life.

But when you're alone and it's your responsibility to keep yourself motivated... Base urges (and laziness) creep in. Takes a while to find your efficiency.

This may be relevant. [https://youtu.be/co_DNpTMKXk](https://youtu.be/co_DNpTMKXk)

</comment><comment><USER15> This article seems rife with BS.. Not going to bother going into detail. But one example: you need to drink 3.2 L of water a day, is completely baseless as far as I'm aware.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article assumes that you don't find your work interesting enough to keep your attention focused for a prolonged period of time. Maybe it is better to try to understand why it is not interesting and find ways to make it actually catching rather than figure out workarounds. Because why should we spend time on things we are not interested in?

<comment><USER17> sometimes work becomes work. I really enjoy providing control systems for hydro electric power plants, but when people change their minds and I have to re-do the same work, or if some equipment provided by another firm doesn't work properly and it eats up a bunch of my time it is a drag. Or I get burnt out after working 12 hour days for four months so that we don't get sued if the power plant isn't generating on time, and then I might have loads of work to do after to clean up the documentation and other parts of the contract so we can get paid the full amount, but man I just don't feel like working anymore, whereas if I'm doing a moderate amount every day with lots of time for exercise and socializing I really enjoy the same work.

edit: I should add that I work either on site at power plants or remotely from home

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There have been multiple comments here calling out drinking specific quantities of water.

I am not sure about the scientific validity of the advice and hence not going to comment on that.

But what I do have realized is (atleast is my case) often we mistake thirst signals from our body for hunger signals or rather as cravings and grab a snack. This idea was suggested in one of the n number of resources I read online about weightloss, so I am not able to cite the exact article.

Consciously noting craving signals and just substituting water often made the cravings go away. When it doesn't, obviously I am hungry :)

Now we are venturing deep into the land of extrapolation. So, take this with a huge grain of salt. I suspect that in our hunter gatherer days (or earlier0, water was not readily available at hand. So humans, then, would have depended on fruits and leaves as a source of water as well as food. Hence why atleast some of get our hunger and thirst signals mixed up ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> I have been working remotely for past few months after spending years at offices and I can say, it's way more productive.

<comment><USER20> The same for me. Author claims that remote working is less productive, but I can negate it very easily - for me, it is not. I feel much more productive when the only distractions are Facebook and Slack. They are still there in the office and we have to count in additional distractions like people talking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great article!

</comment><comment><USER22> Embrace contrived progress meters.

I put every trivial to-do related to a repo into a github issue.

I commit routinely, even for small changes, with a short message.

These stink of make-work, but they expose my progress to my other remote colleagues.

Slack is an exception...using it as a progress meter just annoys others.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm, I wrote a todo-inator that extracted todos etc from code comments. I would use that as micro-tickets so my progress was visible to me. Expanding the idea to show others what I was doing was a blog thing that never took off but I like the general idea.

Plus I hate slack</comment></comment>


Kitty Hawk's Flyer personal VTOL has now flown over 25,000 times - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/kitty-hawks-flyer-personal-vtol-has-now-flown-over-25000-times/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't it terrify anybody else that you are right in the rotational plane for those propellers? If one of them were ever to break, it's coming right at you.

<comment><USER3> Those blades are very light, probably carbon fiber. If the propeller breaks, the blades would be slowed down tremendously by aerodynamic forces in just a meter or so. Just like a piece of cardboard would be.

<comment><USER4> I know these propellers [0] are maybe 1/4 to like 1/8th the size of those shown but thee 56g weight surprised me a lot.

0-[https://www.robotshop.com/en/t-motor-22-x-66--carbon- fiber-p...](https://www.robotshop.com/en/t-motor-22-x-66--carbon-fiber- propeller-pair.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone able to find an actual flight footage with unaltered audio. I'm curious to see how loud this is. Considering all the flight footages are either muted or edited with music, I assume the answer is very loud.

<comment><USER6> Probably, though the only aircraft that aren't incredibly loud are gliders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In case you're not familiar, this is Larry Page's company (not associated with Google or Alphabet).

<comment><USER8> And as the article says, the company is lead by Sebastian Thrun who was the previous founder of Google X and their self-driving car team, as well as still the president of Udacity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the near future, I'd speculate that human-scale multirotor copters are not going to hold enough energy to be practical.

A design that lets you save energy after takeoff by using lift from wings and forward propulsion... maybe.

</comment><comment><USER10> Never heard of this before......this is, quite amazing.

I wonder what the scenario for this is. You couldn't fly these in urban centers unless it was similar to flying a helicopter, no?

Also, I wonder how fuel efficient they are.

<comment><USER11> Ditto. What's the advantage of flying 10 feet above the ground? Is it a true aircraft, or a surface effect vehicle?

<comment><USER10> I could see the advantage of these in swamplands or the 'bushes' if you will (places like remote parts of Africa, South East Asia, parts of the Southern United States, Alaska, come to mind).

But the practical use case I can't seem to envision yet. However, if the goal is to be able to fly these things like helicopters but get some sort of massive fuel advantage out of it, I could see them being used for certain types of deliveries if they can hold a substantial amount of cargo via an attachment or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am no airplane or helicopter engineer, but that just seems like a really bad idea and just some bad waiting to happen.

<comment><USER13> Why?</comment></comment>


Museum of Soviet arcade machines - <AUTHOR> http://www.15kop.ru/en/ <comment><USER2> Oh I remember those! Nice.

With the obligatory soda machine. They had a regular glass (made from glass, not disposable). Pushed it upside-down in this washer valve which sprayed water on the inside of it. So you "washed it". Then you put coin in, forgot how many kopeyks for regular fizzy water, it cost more to add syrup. Then the person behind you used that same glass, and so on.

Today I'd think it is crazy unsanitary, and would never drink out of it.

In the summer, throughout the city they also had large yellow barrels on two wheels with kvas (this fermented drink made from bread). Also with reusable glasses which the seller would quickly rinse with water before handing it to you. That was the best thing on a hot summer day.

<comment><USER3> It was 1 kopek for regular, 3 kopeks with syrup. Roughly equivalent to $3 and $9 in today's US dollars if calculated proportionally to median income. Prices are shown in one of the pictures, btw: [http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/gallery/#10](http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/gallery/#10)

PS. There's much more info about soda machines in Russian version, and lots of cool graphics too:

[http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/machines/](http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/machines/) (scrolls horizontally, in case you haven't noticed)

[http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/history/](http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/history/)

[http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/glass/](http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/glass/)

<comment><USER4> So wait, that means USSR had no coin valued at less than today's $1.5 by purchasing power (assuming the 1/2 kopek coin existed at the time)? Interesting.

<comment><USER5> No, it means that nobody had more than $300 on the hands officially. I.e. they were poor (except "nomenclature" and "valuable people").

<comment><USER6> The highest official salary was about 1200 roubles a month - two people had this salary, Prime Minister and President of USSR Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless, there were people earning (illegally, of course) tens of millions - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsekhovik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsekhovik)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The hotel I was staying at in Moscow in '92 had "Snaiper-2". I really liked it. Sure, it's a basic target-shooting game, but it's entirely electromechanical and it had a lens in the sight that made the target seem like it was further away.

</comment><comment><USER8> They just talked about this on the latest episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast! The podcaster's favorite was one with a mechanical car that drove on top of a video.

[https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/disable- enemi...](https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/disable-enemies-to- reveal-enemies)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been to the one in Saint-Petersburg. Probably worth a visit, but do expect most machines to be under-maintained, and keep you wondering if the game is even receiving your inputs...

Though, I suppose, when those machines were placed in random "palaces of culture" across the USSR in the 70-80s, their state on average wasn't any better.

<comment><USER10> It was, never played a broken one, I think. Look, they wouldn't be remembered so tenderly, if they were not working well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Look at the disassembly photos for Morskoi Boi! It's lovely oily electromechanical stuff. I'd love to have a go.

<comment><USER12> It's a clone of a U.S. product, Sea Hunter. Same for most of the other Soviet arcades.

<comment><USER13> Do you know if they run on 6502s and other Western chips of the time? Were they cloned, or imported? Or were there Soviet ISA's?

I remember reading years ago about how Russian computer scientists in the cold war were more honed in algorithm design, because they basically had to squeeze as much as they could out of their processors to compete with faster Western hardware.

<comment><USER12> Morskoi Boi/Sea Hunter has no computer, or chips for that matter. It's 1960s tech.

Some computer based arcades started to appear in late 1980s, but more like Pong clones and similarly simple "racing" games with 2600-like sprites. At this point the "coops" started popping up, offering pay per minute experience on Atari 800 and ZX Spectrum.

There was no Soviet 6502 or Z80 clone; there were however 8080A clones and DEC LSI-11 inspired designs. There were a bunch of creative programmers sure, although there hardly was a real "school" and CS remained largely backwaters to the West.

<comment><USER14> There were Soviet and East German Z80s, Bulgarian 6502s, etc.

<comment><USER12> If you mean the T34 one, yeah it was in USSR in the sense there was tenderloin in the shops. I.e. we knew the name but I never met anyone who could get hold of it. Even then not sure it was even heard of until 1990s.

Bulgarian 6502s were probably shipped with their Apple II clones. Those were hard to come by.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been to the one in Moscow, it was a great time. It reminded me a lot of the Musée Mécanique on the Embarcadero.

</comment><comment><USER16> A long time ago there was a similar thread. It only got 11 comments, but maybe people are interested. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668085)

</comment><comment><USER17> There appears to be an app that recreates the Morski Boi! game.

[http://www.148apps.com/app/541402297/](http://www.148apps.com/app/541402297/)

This reminds me of the Tetris story: Who exactly would own the various rights to this games?

<comment><USER18> Why link through 148apps rather than directly to the App Store? [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/morskoi-boi-sea- battle/id541...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/morskoi-boi-sea- battle/id541402297)

<comment><USER17> Because I googled the term and that's the first result I came across.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Magistral is so unfair. At any moment a blue car can come up from behind and rear-end you, including instantly after you respawn.

Is this by design, a sort of Soviet nihilistic humor?

</comment><comment><USER20> The pixelated face on 'Magistral' kind of looks like a hipster. Red beanie, big glasses, beard.

<comment><USER21> Imagine Pacman except with KGB Putin or Stalin chasing nukes

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Морской бой! My favorite as a kid while waiting for connecting flights at airports.

</comment><comment><USER23> Soda machine is the best !

</comment><comment><USER24> Морской бой was the shit!

</comment><comment><USER25> Super interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know where they and actually will probably visit the next time I'm walking past that street ad on the river bank :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Just rembember to shit in a corner if you do visit.

<comment><USER27> Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.

<comment><USER26> Sorry about this. Russia just did what I referred to in my country so I'm a bit emotionally upset.

Sweden is being attacked via the Internet by Russia; see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740587) for more detals. This is the substantiation.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Developers, how do you find high quality freelance work? - <AUTHOR>

A recent HN post got me thinking [1]...
Problem: Freelancer, elance, and similar sites appear to be crowded with foreign developers willing to work for next to nothing. In addition, many of the project listings on these sites come off as unprofessional and, at times, shady.
So how do capable, professional developers find serious freelance work? The problem becomes increasingly difficult with a small network and few industry contacts.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2540909 <comment><USER2> Have you actually tried bidding on jobs on these sites? Or have you just looked around at the other bids, gotten discouraged, and given up? I put myself through college as a freelance programmer and system administrator, primarily finding new clients through rentacoder and scriptlance. When I shut down the freelance work to join Google, I was charging $75/hour, and still probably could have raised my rates further. I was making roughly $30k a year, working part time during the school year, and mostly fulltime in the summer.

The key to making good money on these sites is differentiating yourself from cheap offshore talent. Figure out why you're different from the guy halfway around the world who is charging $5-10/hour, and show (not tell) the prospective client that. Some ideas:

\- You're a native english speaker, and can communicate effectively.

\- You understand the problem the client is trying to solve.

\- You're in the same timezone, and can respond to questions quickly.

\- You have good understanding of the technology, and can design an appropriate solution quickly.

You're not going to compete with these guys on price - you're going to compete with them on quality and reduced risk that the project will be done correctly and on time.

The best way to demonstrate all of this to a prospective client is to write really good bids. Ask lots of questions to start with, as well as a summary of your understanding of the problem, and how you might go about solving it. Consider it a dialog, not a 2 sentence cut and paste marketing blurb.

Lastly, be picky about the projects you choose to bid on. Because you're going to spend more time bidding on them, you can respond to fewer than the shotgun approach some offshore companies take. That's ok - choose projects that look like they care about getting it done right, and aren't necessarily just looking for the cheap shortcut.

<comment><USER3> well said. I have hired on elance and I always hire "personal bids", the developer or designer that takes the time to read about my vision. Offshore, although cheaper, just mass bids to anything! Quite annoying for a non developer

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My best work comes to me,either through word of mouth from satisfied clients, or my reputation in the community.

When I was first starting out, I took a lot of so-so jobs. You only have to have a couple really good clients to get word-of-mouth spreading among people like them, then you can start to be more picky.

<comment><USER5> Same case here. If you find yourself looking into job boards all the time, you probably need to satisfy more clients, because they will have to tell their friends about the amazing job they got done. Happy clients and a good portfolio equals the ability to be pickier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Coming from a business standpoint and a non-developer, Elance has worked for me. Although I prefer not to go offshore and to stay with in the U.S and give back to our country, some developers are really too expensive. I have a startup in Chicago and currently looking for a talented developer. If your interested dmlevi [AT] gmail

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny that you ask this. I'm currently working on a solution to your question. Feel free to contact me at andrew [at] amccloud.com

<comment><USER7> I'll be contacting you as well, fyi. I'm tired of clients working with me for a couple of months, and then asking me to quit my day job to work full-time for them.</comment></comment>


First impressions of the IPython Notebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.pgbovine.net/ipython-notebook-first-impressions.htm

<comment><USER2> The writer's remark:

'''...after prototyping in the notebook, I usually refactor some of my code into individual Python files so that I can edit more comfortably using my preferred text editor. I then import those modules [back] in the...notebook.'''

I found this to be quite a headache myself, going between the iPython notebook and vim, until I discovered this great Firefox addon called "It's all text" [not affiliated] -- for those unaware, it lets you pop open a gui editor of your choice, whereupon you can send the text entered from that back down into the iPython notebook. Doing it this way you get the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER3> Vimperator also has this by default (^i triggers it I believe). Then you never have to have the disorientation of leaving a vim environment :-)

<comment><USER4> Awesome, didn't realize it worked in pentadactyl as well.

One small caveat: i use macvim, it opens a new window in macvim, i close/sync it with :wq. Any idea how I can have it so it jumps back to the firefox window instead another macvim window?

<comment><USER5> I found this on the MacVim wiki.

        mvim -f --nomru -c "au VimLeave * !open -a Terminal"'

for refocusing the terminal after editing a commit message. Think it'll work fine if you change Terminal to Firefox. The --nomru is to make sure the file isn't added to the recently edited files list, which is also helpful.

<comment><USER4> It does, thank you. For others, this is my solution for now:

set editor='mvim --nomru -f +<line> +"sil! call cursor(0, <column>)" <file> -c "au VimLeave * !open -a Firefox"'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IPython has been great for me doing statistics with students' assessments. Though I only deal with several hundred students I can get pretty quick results working with IPython.

Personally I like IPython qtconsole. It is basically a terminal with all the graphics turned on. Not as feature rich as the IPython notebook but it is faster and cleaner for what I use it for.

</comment><comment><USER7> SageMath[0] is another alternative, which I personally prefer as it's a bit more mature.

I also had a bad experience with Enthought EPD which resulted in a weirdly broken system python.

0: [http://www.sagemath.org/](http://www.sagemath.org/)

<comment><USER8> Then try Anaconda[0], I haven't had any problems with it so far and it includes IPython and most scientific libraries a Python programmer needs.

0: [https://store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda/](https://store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda/)

<comment><USER7> Cheers, that looks really interesting. I usually use pythonxy[0] nowadays on operating systems without package managers, but I'll give that a go next time.

0: [https://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/](https://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/)

<comment><USER8> You can actually install it alongside Python(x,y), though I get you don't need two Python installs. But at least you can experiment with some of Anaconda's interesting features, without breaking Python(x,y).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks great. I can understand what Philip goes through because I do pretty similar things for my work. I need to try the IPython once to check its feasibility for my tasks.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anybody have a similar data analysis workflow for languages other than Python?

<comment><USER11> Morespecifically, does anybody know of an attempt to do something similar in JavaScript (and ideally, languages that compile to it)? Having a notebook that could be entirely handled client side in a browser would be incredible.

<comment><USER10> What type of work would you do with that? Are there any libraries available for real data analysis with JavaScript?

<comment><USER11> There are a few rather immature ones, but you can do a lot more with a notebook than just data analysis.

I often need to do calculations involving many parameters, and there are three important considerations I usually have to deal with:

1\. I'm probably going to want to tweak the parameters.

2\. The calculation is going to be difficult to express as a succinct equation.

3\. I may want to look back over the result later.

Using an ordinary calculator is cumbersome because of 1 and 2, and doesn't satisfy 3. AN alternative is to use an ordinary interactive shell to put everything together, which helps with 2, but still makes for a lot of work on 1 and doesn't fix 3.

Writing a whole program to do the calculation is an improvement because it fixes 1 and 2, and it helps with 3 because I can leave myself lots of comments. I've found literate CoffeeScript to be very effective here (you can even turn it into a nice webpage to share your math with others), but there are still some drawbacks. The results are not interleaved with the code, so when I look back over it, it's not easy to check my work and debug. The workflow also leaves a bit to be desired. You can't, for example, quickly play with a small snippet as you're working through your thoughts.

A notebook, on the other hand, elegantly handles all of these considerations. I can use markdown to create a nice article for my future self explaining all of my calculations, have comments, code, and results all next to each other, and tweak parameters on the fly.

Yet I still find myself using literate CoffeeScript instead. And the main reason for that is that whenever I use Python, I constantly wish that I was using CoffeeScript instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The notebook format looks similar to Mathematica. Using Mathematica, I found it did indeed solve the problems mentioned in the article (e.g., having to choose names for graphs), but led to its own problems (e.g., I would organize graphs by idea, but then lose track of the chronology). Still, used the right way, it was an improvement. (And of course Mathematica is proprietary and not free.)

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/) comes in handy.

</comment><comment><USER2> The essay doesn't touch this issue, but I think it should also be mentioned that the iPython notebook's ability to issue parallel jobs (particularly across multiple machines) is really amazing! This was a huge draw for me in starting to use it.

</comment><comment><USER11> The awesomeness of IPython notebooks (and the fact that my wife has been trying to learn python and primarily uses a Chromebook) was the main reason that I finally took the plunge and signed up with a cheap VPS.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been looking to get into IPython for a while, and this gave me the nudge to get on with it.</comment>


Apply HN: Qbix, Inc Aims to Do for Social What Bitcoin Did for Money - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone. I've been posting on HN for the last 8 years (just checked). I'm also the CEO of Qbix, a startup which embodies a lot of the values that many of us here share, so when I heard about Apply HN, I got excited.
A few "impressive" stats first: our apps are already in stores & have been downloaded over 4MM times. They're used 3MM times a month! We've got users all around the world and most reviews are 5 stars. See http://qbix.com/blog
We already make steady revenue. But we've poured it all into building an open source platform that will:
1) give every community a way to host "its own facebook"
2) give people a consistent experience across domains & devices enabling unprecedented privacy, ease and control over their own data
3) give developers a stable, thoroughly tested platform on which they can build apps for communities, without reinventing the wheel on a thousand things (literally) that we take care of
You can see more here: http://qbix.com/platform
When Fred Wilson recently said this at Le Web, he was speaking about the platform we built: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s
Email, the Web, Wordpress, Bitcoin, Git are all decentralized. Yet social networks are still centralized; it is a hard problem to solve.
What if there was a web-based platform that ran on every device, letting any community choose their own host and install apps which would all work harmoniously? What if it would reconstruct people's social graphs across communities seamlessly and the apps would "just work"?
That's what we built. We're now working with several local communities that paid us to release apps for their members. After the beta, we will roll it out as a self-serve platform to all our 3MM users of Groups. We made several apps on top of this platform that we estimate will generate about $15/user/yr
The YC community can make a huge difference for us going forward would be happy to apply for YC! <comment><USER2> > When Fred Wilson recently said this at Le Web, he was speaking about the > platform we built: > [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s)

So how does each separate qbix instance sync with each other in terms of identity & social graphs? I may have missed it, but I didn't see it in the docs.

What differentiates you from the Diaspora project?

<comment><USER3> > Diaspora

I haven't heard them in ages... maybe that's the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, they didn't achieve the dream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clickables:

[http://qbix.com/blog](http://qbix.com/blog)

[http://qbix.com/platform](http://qbix.com/platform)

> When Fred Wilson recently said this at Le Web, he was speaking about the > platform we built: > [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s)

</comment><comment><USER5> From an end-user perspective, what advantage do you feel decentralization provides?

<comment><USER6> Zak Khalique, cofounder here. Let me try to weigh in on this.

Right now, you don't have much power with FB. When they rolled out the newsfeed, or instant personalization, or made site changes there were huge outcries, but it didn't matter. If you want to customize your profile, or get paid for your content, you can't.

If you're a company, you have to pay just to reach your own fans: [http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mark-cuban-facebooks- sponsor...](http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored- posts-are-driving-away-brands/)

If you're a developer, you live in fear that the platform can kick you off at any time or compete with you: [http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/twitter-photo- services/](http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/twitter-photo-services/)

There is a story trending on just how powerful FB is: [http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is-king/](http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is- king/) and it's bought Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate even further. More centralization means less power and choice for the end user. And if you're an end-user in Africa or India or somewhere without a megabit connection to the global internet, your community can't even connect with each other. A local network would work much better.

<comment><USER3> This makes it sound like FB and so on are becoming the new 'Coca-Cola' company. Coke's cheaper than water in some parts of the world, and soon it'll be FB etc as the only "outlet".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I checked out your website but pricing still wasn't clear to me. How are you going to make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> We already make money, through our consumer apps as well as our new market: communities paying us to release apps for their members. But we will make a lot more through apps which we build on our own platform and deploy to our user base. We have around 4-5 different revenue streams planned.</comment></comment>


Understanding Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2007/07/17/understanding_engineers_feasibility/

<comment><USER2> _So there is no necessary relation between a task being trivial, and how long it takes._

I wish more non-engineers could grasp this. It's so annoying when people say, "It's not done yet? But you said it would be a trivial feature to add!" I am then forced to explain all that means is I know _how_ to add it and can visualize the general diagram in my head, but since I am not regurgitating the precise implementation from memory it isn't merely a matter of rote data entry.

This may be a problem caused partially by us, too; I don't care about implementation time because the implementation is the trivial part; it'll be done whenever it's done and I'm not really bothered by that since the problem itself is already solved. Hell, most of the time I don't even have an interest in fully implementing a solution to a problem I've already mentally solved.

I guess I should note this doesn't apply much for me at the moment seeing as how I co-own a company, but it's an annoyance when it comes to dealing with clients.

<comment><USER3> If you use a word in a way that most people don't, how can you be surprised when they misunderstand you?

I use "straightforward" to describe trivial problems, when I can see the implementation path clearly. "Trivial" implies easy and quick to most people. It's not hard for them to grasp, you just have to communicate more clearly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of Richard Feynman. "mathematicians designate any theorem as "trivial" once a proof has been obtained--no matter how difficult the theorem was to prove in the first place. There are therefore exactly two types of true mathematical propositions: trivial ones, and those which have not yet been proven. "

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Trivial.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> There's trivial to implement, then there's trivial to implement in our product without breaking everything else.

Also, they missed a category: Stupid. As in: I could do that, but it would be Stupid.

</comment><comment><USER6> My wife is annoyed by my reluctance to speak in absolute terms. Expressing an estimate of likelihood seems much more precise to me than rounding a probability to "always" or "never."

<comment><USER7> Just integrate over longer periods of time: _"yes dear, that always happens -- just so long as we live forever."_ ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Title is incomplete. It's "Understanding Engineers: Feasibility."

I do like how he framed out the difficulty of problems into categories.

</comment><comment><USER9> Engineers are tuned to think in terms of RIGHT or WRONG and MBAs think in terms of PRIORITIES.</comment>


Students paying to get internships? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html?src=tptw <comment><USER2> This only really applies to humanities students. Take a degree in the natural sciences, engineering, CS or mathematics and you may find that people are much more willing to part with money for your services.

<comment><USER3> I must have done something wrong then. I graduated with a Masters degree in a traditional/hard Engineering discipline (GPA ~3.5) in 2008 and worked as an unpaid CAD monkey for 6 months. I submitted more resumes than I can remember for full-time positions, but didn't even get a single interview call.

I am now gainfully employed, but doing nothing related to my undergraduate/graduate education.

<comment><USER4> Is this Germany (judging from your username) ?

<comment><USER3> No, USA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These $ <= 0 sorts of internships seem concentrated in fields where social capital is highly valued -- politics, PR, talent management, etc. Could it be that young people from upper class backgrounds are the most likely to possess the social skills and pre-filled Rolodexes required to be successful in these industries? Even if this is not true, it is certainly possible that the head of a PR firm from a wealthy family could not imagine it otherwise. I also wonder if, in addition to no pay, the price of the internship is actually negative because of the reciprocity expected from the social connections used to secure the internship for the recent college graduate.

I am imagining a voice mail like this:

"Hey, Joe [the VP at the PR firm which represents Large Company X], this is Bob, [the internal head of PR from Company X] calling. Would you mind doing me a favor and taking a pass at my niece's resume? She's interested in PR and would love the opportunity to do an internship with you guys this Summer. The pay isn't as important as the experience, and she can stay in her aunt's apartment on the Upper East Side. It's great that we do business together. Talk to you later."

How much has Joe "paid" for his niece's internship?

<comment><USER6> You're on the right track. Rich kids can afford to work for free.

<comment><USER5> More than that, it may be that the families of the affluent implicitly pay for their kids' internships.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This hits close to home for me. My wife is currently going through the process to get a one-year internship to for her psychology doctorate, which is required for graduation. Having to pay for the privilege is an understatement - her university counts this as a 'class' so the tuition cost for her to turn in some paperwork at the end of the year will be about $3000. In addition, with gas at $4/gallon, there'll be about a $200/mo commute cost for the next year. So far the internships she's looked at pay a $5000 stipend for the whole year.

Of course that pales in comparison to the cost for child care for this year; most of the child care we've looked at in the Bay Area is ~$1700/mo, so her internship is going to cost us about $20,000.

I don't see this system changing anytime soon. As it stands, there are fewer internship slots than there are students. Because it is so competitive, my wife has already been declined by two agencies which had openings directly related to her thesis. I already don't understand how more placements aren't willing to get nearly-free labor, so forcing employers to pay some kind of minimum wage for interns will only reduce the number of slots available to students. Indeed, in addition to all of the indirect costs (child care, etc) we would gladly write someone a check for her to have an internship in the area so that she can finish this year. If she is deferred because there are no placements, it is another year before she starts a "real job".

<comment><USER8> While the price tag is pretty bad, at least she'll be ending with an advanced degree. Some of the people in this article had comparable liabilities but were going to wind up with undergraduate degrees. I hope it works out for you all, regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Imagine that you have an opportunity to "bid" on the right to be a waiter this evening at Masa, the NYC $400/plate (not including alcohol) sushi restaurant. You are an experienced waiter and expect to average 18% in tips on 20 plates served over the course of four hours. Presuming that no one orders alcohol, that's $1440 or $360/hour. If there were no labor laws and Masa really had a free market system such as this in place, it would be rational for a waiter to pay a great deal for the right to collect these tips given that there are few opportunities available to make this much money relative to the supply of capable servers.

I see the internship market as similar. How much is it worth in future earnings to directly observe "how the sausage is made" in a Senator's office? To watch a PR mogul operate after Client X is caught on video grinding up cute puppies in a blender? There are many more people who could profit later from these experiences than there are internships to dole out. It is only the relatively constrained supply of good software engineers which prevents Google from charging for the right to spend a Summer there (not that I think it would even if it could).

<comment><USER9> I think you're missing what's actually happening here. In these cases, the students are paying the university for a "registration credit," in order to legalize work without pay. The provider of the internship does not receive this money, and the amount is, more or less, arbitrarily decided by the academic institution. The amount the student pays is therefore cushioned and abstracted from the sort of market forces you describe.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, but my point was only that paying (or simply taking a loss by paying rent in NYC for the Summer) might actually be rational on the student's part. Whether or not the firm receives the payment makes little difference to me in this case although I do appreciate the distinction. My comment about Google charging certainly could have led one astray.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mark Cuban has a lot to say from the other side of the coin. He tried to set up an unpaid internship program and was denied by their legal department.

[http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid- internship...](http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship- so-you-can-get-valuable-experience-screw-you/)

<comment><USER11> Yeah. Having to pay people when they work for you. What sort of crazy shit will people dream up next?

<comment><USER10> I think you missed his argument. He isn't saying "We want to take advantage of interns." He's saying that there are a lot of interesting positions and projects which frequently are scrapped because they are not financially viable. He wanted to offer these positions to unpaid interns, giving them press passes and full access to the resources they need. Either they turn into financially viable projects, in which these interns have a job prospect, or they become a valuable bit of hands on experience for a resume.

<comment><USER9> A valuable bit of hands on experience working on a failed project considered too risky for a big-time entrepreneur to waste minimum wage on? Sign me up.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like a lot of open source software.

<comment><USER12> True, but with open source at the end of it you have the right to continue using what you created. In this other case, you are gifting the value of your work to the corporation irrevocably and retain no rights.

<comment><USER10> But you also get to slap that company's name on your resume. Never having been in a hiring position, I'm curious as to which sounds better:

"I worked on OpenOffice.org providing support for a specific file extension"

"I worked for Microsoft as an intern. I built support for a file extension in Office 11, though it was not used in the final product."

While the first statement has the value of "Let me show you what I wrote", I don't think the second statement is anything to scoff at.

<comment><USER12> Microsoft doesn't have unpaid internships, nor do they have internships you have to pay for. Nor does Google. Do you have any examples of technology companies with great reputations that charge students for internships?

<comment><USER10> Nope. Just trying to draw an analogy. Journalism is a very different ballgame. The concept of high profile open source journalism is non existant.

My question wasn't about whether they were paid or not, it was about whether a scrapped feature is still valuable resume experience.

The logic chain is this: If a scrapped feature is still valuable resume experience, then working on a project not deemed worthwhile by a corporation is still valuable experience. If it's still valuable experience, there may be situations in which it is beneficial to take such an unpaid internship.

The whole argument here isn't whether or not to pay interns for such a job. It's already established that they will not be paid for such a position. Either unpaid interns do it or nobody does it. End of story. The question is whether or not to allow people to pursue such an opportunity without pay. I think there are many people that would benefit from such an arrangement. Not just students, but with the high unemployment rates, anyone trying to gain a little more experience or get their foot in the door.

<comment><USER12> Someone doing work with no business value for another party doesn't make much sense to me. Sure perhaps it benefits the worker in some way. Perhaps he learns the value of coming to work on time and obeying arbitrary orders to do work that everyone agrees is useless and unneeded (which is the premise you have made - I am presuming it for the sake of argument here). I postulate though that it would be even more valuable experience to do work that everyone agrees is useful and needed. It's not like there is a shortage of that. In development, there's tons of valuable software that needs to be written. The state of practice in this industry is quite poor, especially of much corporate produced software titles compared to indie releases. Why not write valuable software instead of useless when there is so much valuable software to write? Writing useless software for the purpose of experience seems a not optimal choice when one could just as easily write useful valuable software.

And now, given that one is writing useful valuable software that is of benefit to others, of course the developer should be paid for their work.

<comment><USER10> yes but is that true in journalism? (The topic Mark Cuban is discussing)

Software development is unique in that there are no real barriers to entry. Rather than take an unpaid internship writing code, I can write code at home. But what he wants to provide to aspiring journalists is a space in the locker room after games, access to practices, players and coaches, etc. That's very different.

Also, the premise wasn't useless and unneeded. It was not financially viable. In Cuban's article, he mentions plenty of reasons why it would be useful. But they aren't enough to justify the cost of starting such a project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Waterloo University has the biggest coop(internship) program in the world, and it has had the program since the university's inception in 1957, and the program is required for all their Engineering students and optional for the other faculties. In Engineering, all students alternate between school and co- op usually every semester, so the length of the whole degree gets extended to 5 years, with 3 full years worth of studies, and 2 full years worth of experience.

The way it works is that the co-op department, CECS, has an internal job posting website, where students view jobs, and submit their resumes and maybe cover letters. The employers will then look at the resumes and decide on the students they want to interview. Most interviews happen in interview rooms in the CECS building. If the employer cannot attend, then Skype or phone interviews are arranged instead. After the interviews, both the students and the employers rate each other 1 through 9, and the students get automatically paired with the job where the sum of the ratings is the lowest. CECS constantly contacts companies to get them interested in hiring uWaterloo students. Companies that currently hire uWaterloo students include FB, Google, MSFT, Apple, all the big banks in US and Canada, Qualcomm, RIM, and tons of other medium and small companies including Allerta, which HN has been hearing about quite a bit, and which is currently employing me. In terms of job locations most jobs are in North America, however there are quite a few in Japan, Germany, NZ, Australia, UK, and students can set up their own jobs if they don't like what's offered through CECS.

Now about salaries, even for a first work term engineering student the range is $12-$22.50 with an average of $15.94. CECS requires that employers pay the students. Until now however there were few exceptions: start-ups were able to discuss with CECS to see if they could offer unpaid internships, however that's now being phased out. If the company can't pay the students with money, it is now required to pay them through other means such as equity.

The latest Earnings Information for uWaterloo can be found here: [http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/Hourly_Salary_Information_...](http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/Hourly_Salary_Information_2010.pdf)

On another note, I think having all these internships spread out, is better for us, students, since it allows us to try out different type of jobs. Once semester you can work for a start-up, while the next one you can work for a big corporate.

EDIT: Even humanities students get paid however relatively less than say, Engineering.

<comment><USER14> _In Engineering, all students alternate between school and co-op usually every semester, so the length of the whole degree gets extended to 5 years, with 3 full years worth of studies, and 2 full years worth of experience._

From what I've seen(my undergrad had a similar program), this is actually a very bad deal for many students.

If you do coop, you pay roughly the same price as a 4 year student. (Typically you pay fees in the semesters you are working.) Your financial aid is significantly reduced, since you now have income, so you might even pay the college more money. 5 years after starting college, employers will consider you a better than average fresh grad. (I.e., your salary on graduation won't be ordinary graduate + 2 years worth of pay raises.)

In contrast, if you graduate in 4 years, maybe doing (usually paid, but even unpaid) summer internships, you get more financial aid. 5 years after starting college, you are an engineer with 1 year of experience, and with a commensurate pay raise.

If you work as hard as coop students, you can even graduate in 3 years. This considerably reduces your costs, and at the end of 5 years, you have 2 years worth of pay raises under your belt.

<comment><USER15> _In contrast, if you graduate in 4 years, maybe doing (usually paid, but even unpaid) summer internships, you get more financial aid. 5 years after starting college, you are an engineer with 1 year of experience, and with a commensurate pay raise._

In this economy, it's not usual to graduate in 4 yrs and not be able to find work in your field - even with an engineering degree. The guy with the internship experience under his belt is going to have an advantage in this situation.

Employers these days don't want to invest in training "entry level" employees so getting experience (even if you have to pay for it) is sometimes the only way to get your foot in the door.

<comment><USER14> Is 3 summer semesters of internship or summer research that different from 6 semesters? When I graduated from college (right after the dotcom bubble burst), I didn't observe any real gap between coop students and regular ones.

The coop office also refused to publish any numbers (in spite of being asked repeatedly), so I suspect there wasn't much of one.

Caveat: this was 9 years ago, and not at Waterloo. But even a few years ago (back when I had students), it seemed like the only people who couldn't find work were the people who weren't very good. Will internship experience help you if you bomb a technical interview?

<comment><USER13> Well it probably won't help you if you bomb the interview, but at the same time, chances of bombing the interview are considerably lowered, since by the end of the degree we would go through 30 if not even more interviews, so you should have a feel for the type of questions they ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the U.K the Conservative Part were auctioning internships in several prestigious organizations. One Crispin 'I make money' Odey offered a week internship at his Hedge Fund for £5,000.

Its quite common. Personally, I have used my own personal contacts to get work experience. But when you involve money into this matter you are just creating more of a gulf between the rich and poor.

It is extremely common across all the industries in London. Very unfair. Media/Journalism is the worst culprits of this.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's also important to understand how the internship dynamics change as you progress through the four years of college. Getting a paid internship after your freshmen or sophomore year is extremely difficult. Very few large, "name brand" companies include freshman and sophomores in their internship programs. Those that do typically have ratios along the lines of 90% juniors, 10% freshman and sophomores.

The catch is that landing the junior year internship in large part depends on having at least one previous relevant internship. That leaves most freshman and sophomores struggling to find internships at local businesses in their field of interest. Most of the businesses don't have an actual internship program, have no idea what to do with an intern, and don't have the money to pay one even if they wanted to.

This describes the experience of me and 95% of my friends at Duke over the last 4 years. Many of us have awesome, extremely high paying jobs lined up after graduation, but we got those jobs as a more or less direct result of working for free after freshman or sophomore year.

My personal experience: Freshman summer: part-time job to support myself, took a summer class, did a lot of (free) work for Duke Student Government Sophomore summer: 3/4 time job as a waiter in a restaurant to support myself. Spent all my free time programming. Junior summer: awesome internship at Microsoft. Post-grad: offers from Google and Microsoft, trying to start my own company.

Basically over the past 20 months or so my pay has gone from ~$6/hr part-time, to ~$75 full time. Trust me, I am not 12-13x smarter, more valuable, or more skilled now than 2 years ago. The system is broken.

Although I never had an unpaid internship my ability to land a paying one after junior year was dependent on the projects I worked on in my free time the previous summer. And that is in the tech industry, which is in by far the best shape. The internship situation in other field (as SandBOx mentioned) is much, much worse.

<comment><USER18> I'm an NCSU student, so I'm in the same area, looking at mostly the same jobs. What I found is that most students just aren't willing to go through the work to find a job. They want the jobs to be posted somewhere online, so they can fire off a resume they spent a couple hours making (if that). I actually managed to nab a development / systems administration internship straight out of high school for a company out of Durham, mainly because I met one of the management at the company and just asked about a position. I spent two years working for that company (paid, part-time during the year, full-time over the summer) and then a summer and a semester doing [paid] research at NCSU. This summer I've got an internship lined up with Google.

You're absolutely right that a lot of it is dependent on finding internships early on, but I don't think its necessarily that companies aren't hiring underclassmen (though MS, Google, etc. likely aren't), but rather that a lot of students aren't willing to go the lengths to _find_ the job. Not all of them are posted online. Go to your local PUG/LUG/*UG/2600 meeting, and ask around. Most people there will be willing to talk about one with you if you seem relatively competent and willing to learn what you don't know. Plus, as you said, doing projects in your spare time is a HUGE plus. A lot of the things I end up talking about in interviews are side projects that I've done.

Though I'll put the disclaimer that this is all only applicable to the tech field. Unfortunately, other fields don't have it as nicely as we do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Particularly in the humanities, journalism, and social science fields, where most internships are poorly paid (if paid at all), a prospective intern needs to have enough of a financial cushion to both pay their expenses while not earning money at a paying job. This selects for students from higher-income families. Paying for an internship spot sounds like the next logical step under the current system. The question is, how can we level the playing field?

</comment><comment><USER20> There are other options, in Quebec they have a couple of universities doing co-op programs where students work (paid) half time and go to school the other half, the schools find prospective employers and work out the duties the students need to perform. My cousin did this for his architect internship, this is a required part of his program, he needs two semesters like this to graduate. He had a positive experience and made a decent amount of money at the same time.

I took a different route, while in College (in the Florida) I worked full time for the university as a System Adminstrator/Software Developer. I gain 4 years of experience doing it and only pushed my graduation a year back or so. It was hard, work sometimes clashed with school but right after I graduated I had not trouble finding work (I decided to leave the University to explore new stuff, 4 years in one place can get boring :) ).

I would never take an unpaid internship because it's obvious that A) you don't learn anything filing papers all day B) it's obvious employers use this to get free labor even if they aren't supposed to, of course in the tech world we are lucky enough that self learners can quickly get jobs based on skills only. Not so in the other professions I guess.

</comment><comment><USER21> Takes a lot of guts for a company to say "Pay us so that you can eventually work here." And it's such a tough time for young folks these days that they essentially need to take the deal or run the risk of not finding employment after college.

<comment><USER22> If you read carefully, the scenario appears to be "Pay university based on number of credit hours applied to degree" + "Get credit hours for internship". The student is not paying the company.

My alma mater put a similar rule in place regarding study abroad: credits transferring from study abroad programs would be charged at the university's standard rates regardless of the cost of the underlying program. (This was effectively a wash for me, since Japan was a high-cost option, but it was highly detrimental to folks who would e.g. use a year in Israel or any of a few African destinations at $5k to get a year of credit which normally cost about $40k.)

(There is another scenario, in which students -- well, rich parents -- pay brokers to arrange internships for e.g. DC governmental institutions. Someone I know works at one such broker, where commercially reasonable best efforts to find a placement cost about $10k. She's deeply conflicted about their business model and is quitting soon largely because of it.)

<comment><USER23> The article definitely said Dream Careers was selling internships to students.

<comment><USER10> Those weren't their own though. Dream Careers is like an unemployment agency for internships. You pay them a fee and they find you an internship. They even figure everything out for you (housing, travel, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I opted out of the internship during school for various reasons. I graduated about two weeks ago and landed an unpaid internship.

I know there are plenty of paid internships out there but companies that offer those do not understand what an internship is or are looking to take advantage. All the paid ones I have seen want you to have either advance knowledge in the subject, x years of experience, and/or previous work history.

<comment><USER25> What field are you in may I ask? Because it sounds like the exact opposite of what I've seen for CS; extremely well paid, and _very_ understanding about expected skill levels (as in, I was easily able to land a very good, and well _ish_ paid position after merely my freshman year)

<comment><USER24> web development

<comment><USER25> Have you considered taking other sorts of CS positions? It's pretty messed up if companies expect you to do development work for free...

<comment><USER24> I'm not in CS, i'm an interactive media person trying to switch over to advanced front end development.

It does suck but I am not going to complain I have nothing on my resume so something is better than nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Imagine that a group of good software developers were assigned to pick 10 interns out of a pool of 100 applicants for a role at a Facebook, Google, etc. (substitute any software organization which attracts a great applicant pool). What's the probability that most of the ten chosen will be regarded as top engineers ten years from now? I argue that it's pretty high because raw talent is easily measured by skilled practitioners. One or two might have marginal careers because they're flaky or have other, non-technical issues, but the odds of securing a good intern pool from which to hire are quite high.

Are the skills required to be a good lobbyist, talent manager, etc. so easily measured in young people? An internship program wouldn't be terribly valuable for Google if only 1/10 interns were regarded as potential hires after a Summer of observation. What are the implications of such relative randomness on rational behavior on a firm's part w.r.t. internship programs?

</comment><comment><USER26> As a first years CompSci undergraduate at Cambridge, I've found more or less the opposite of this: it seems like I've suddenly become really recruitable. Despite the fact that I'll have only had a years CS tuition, and no industry experience, I've managed to get a well paying internship for the summer.

</comment><comment><USER9> In cases where a student can earn academic credit and not just a certificate for the internship, it could be a worthwhile investment. The student has to pay for those credits anyway to graduate, and real-world experience can provide educational benefits unlikely to be gained in a classroom.

If, on the other hand, the university or college does not give genuine academic credit but simply notes it on the transcript AND they charge for that notation, it's likely a bum deal.

</comment><comment><USER27> makes me glad I'm in the tech field. Most of my non-CS friends were amazed that my summer internships paid as much as they were going to make after they graduated.

<comment><USER28> After you subtract the cost of the credits, how much are you left with? Hourly rate?

<comment><USER23> In my case, $500 went to the university (less than what they'd normally charge for the two credits), which works out to about a 42¢ decrease in my hourly pay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In third world countries a similar dynamic is common for government jobs. For a job where you can collect a lot of bribes, you will usually have to pay to get the job in the first place, and also kick back a certain portion of your income to whoever you got the job from. In this case you are paying to merely add to your resume, which in a sense is even worse than being an underpaid third world government employee.

This is really a consequence of the very weak job market we have now. You can see some people here commenting that they have no problem getting well-paid internships, but this is only true for people who are at the top of the heap, in terms of attractiveness to employers - there are a lot of such people who read Hacker News. Relative to the population at large though, it's a small percentage of the population.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Menlo College, a business-focused college in northern California, [...] sold credits to a business called Dream Careers. Menlo grossed $50,000 from the arrangement in 2008, while Dream Careers sold Menlo-accredited internships for as much as $9,500."

I hadn't heard about this before, but it's an interesting model. Perhaps some day we'll literally be able to trade academic credits like commodities.

</comment><comment><USER31> in Canada, a CS undergrad can expect to get a paid internship with about CAD $40,000 annual salary (thought that may varies on where you do your internship, which year you're in, where in Canada, etc).

CS undergrads here know that and hardly any of them would go for any unpaid internships.</comment>


Zero-Downtime Restarts with HAProxy - <AUTHOR> http://www.igvita.com/2008/12/02/zero-downtime-restarts-with-haproxy/

<comment><USER2> An interesting method, but as the comments say, getting your load balancer or proxy to do the right thing is the tip of the iceberg. Migrating your database on the fly requires schema version-aware code, facilities for split-brain upgrades (e.g. with mmm MySQL), sensible handling of in-progress requests. All that gets costly in terms of development time and complexity that, unless you're really big or run a critical-availability service (from hospital down to ad serving), is arguably better used making your product better. Just eat the few minutes of downtime after setting your customers' expectations properly.</comment>


Tim O'Reilly: Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/kindle-oreilly-ebooks-technology-breakthroughs_oreilly.html

<comment><USER2> > Amazon's Kindle file format doesn't provide support for tables or for so- > called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our > line of technical books

Wow... and I was considering getting one for technical books. No thanks.

<comment><USER3> The Kindle's not a good place to get books that rely on formatting. They offer one serif font and they generate paragraphs and line breaks but don't offer any other formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just because the open standards won on the web, doesn't mean they will always win. Microsoft won for decades. Often, standards are closed for a period, then opened when users won't pay for further improvements, and a competitor has almost caught up. Adobe did this with postscript fonts.

Interesting alternative of the iPod supporting _both_ a closed eco-system and open standards:

 _People didn't populate their iPods solely with music purchased from Apple. It was easy for them to "rip" their own CDs into the standard mp3 file format and load their entire music collection onto the device._

But, of course, Apple _is_ trying to keep the iPhone closed.

What's stopping competitors from making an e-ink device to compete with Kindle? The tech is only going to get cheaper. A difference from Apple is that Amazon already has a book store online.

<comment><USER5> Is the Kindle closedness about ensuring that the hardware experience is good or about ensuring eBook marketplace control?

People call me naive, but I honestly think that Apple's motivation in running the various iStores is to ensure a good experience.

The music store was targeted to ensure that people would be able to buy all their music digitally. The labels _required_ that DRM be on every thing. When Jobs won, he kickdropped the DRM.

Apple isn't required to sign every app that goes on its phones, but keeping rigorous controls has kept the user experience pretty good and, like it or not, it's encouraged an ecosystem to grow because developers can ask for a little money for their work and get paid for it. Also, let's be honest about these apps for a minute. You're not gonna run that shit in an emulator on your Googlephone. There is no iPhone clone. And when your iPhone dies and you get a new one, you just sync it all back up again.

To be fair, I didn't think it was a good idea when Steve-o said there weren't going to be native apps on the iPhone, but I don't know how much of that was some sort of weird business decision and how much of it was because they had no idea when the SDK was going to be ready.

It's the balance between practical freedom and idealistic freedom. The Kindle trods upon a lot of practical freedoms at the cost of little in the way of an enhanced experience.

<comment><USER3> I'd bet that they have publishers complaining about their stuff being available as an easily-copied file online. Book publishers are quieter than the RIAA, but they've got very strict ideas about what's good and what's not. I would bet they're the ones who want DRM.

Outside of the Kindle store, you can add books of any ebook format, DRM or no DRM. Most of my Kindle is entirely open. Amazon likes open formats, and they're trying their best to support what they can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform."

Downside - you probably wouldn't have a business right now.

Good choice from Tim - I wonder how long he considered it for?

<comment><USER7> I'm afraid the web might come full circle back to something like we started with separate networks and walled off content. The recent buzz about Cable companies wanting to restrict online content to paid customers and the net neutrality flap are examples of this. As belts tighten content owners are getting scared and want to monetize their 'stuff' with more control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the little I know about of the Kindle architecture, it would be a simple software update to open it up. Right now, Amazon is making a hefty buck off only supporting its own proprietary standards. I'd imagine that Amazon is a smart enough organization that as soon as the business requirements change, we'll see Kindle supporting PDF, epub, etc., but while there is no market pressure, one can't hold it against Amazon from leeching the market as much as they can.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's a really old/dated analogy they pull to highlight why the Kindle might fail if it stays closed. It almost doesn't even seem relevant due to how much has changed since the days just before the WWW. I can think of a few more modern closed systems that are doing quite fine.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is such a tired argument. We all know these things don't really matter to the average consumer. It will be other factors that will determine it's success.</comment>