Ask YC: What's the best way and place to start freelancing? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
  I am planning to start freelance coding but don't have an idea which is the best place and best way to start. Any help towards this will be great. <comment><USER2> Don't. :)

Seriously... Free-lancing is harder work than any job you've ever had. You have to be able to handle the work you take on as well as doing the accounting and bringing in the sales. It's just not feasible for most people without really working your ass off.

And then what do you get? You certainly don't have a business, because it's unsellable as such, and it doesn't exist if you walk away. What you have is the most time-consuming job possible. You didn't even get rid of your boss... In fact now you've got more bosses.

Speaking from almost a decade of freelance experience, I'd suggest you either get some partners or get a job.

<comment><USER3> I'd second that. If you are going out on your own, be a contractor, not a freelancer... i.e. find big companies who will pay you $80+/hr for 40h a week on an ongoing basis. The overhead and "bench time" (time between jobs) is more expensive than you think.

<comment><USER4> Or go the other way & be service provider. Saleable business, clients etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Find one client at a low rate and please the hell out of them. Then find another client, but increase your rates. Do the same; do anything it takes to get the job done ahead of schedule and to make the client as impressed as possible.

Eventually you'll find the ceiling in terms of how much you can charge per hour, but you'll have an entire mountain of reputation built by being fast, dedicated, and reliable.

I'm a student and due to a family lawsuit (dad's business partners ran off with the company's bonding money, fitting him with the bill) I can't get student loans so I freelance to pay my bills and to fund my own projects. My main philosophy when I'm working with a client (and I tell them this) is "the sooner I get in and out with this project, the sooner you do too" and I then sit down with them if they are available and work on it until it is done. It's not as feasible for programming as it is for designing, but the same focus on speed is killer as a freelancer.

I'm still finding work at $100/hr as a 22 year old freelancer, so soon I can finally begin leveraging my personal brand equity and my time to creating more passive sources of income, (i.e.: services and products).

Hope this helped a bit.

<comment><USER5> And on a side note: ALWAYS take the blame when something goes wrong, even if it's not your fault. A good client will appreciate that you have the balls to claim the fault is yours which will actually improve your relationship, and bad clients will show their true colors and give you an opportunity to send them to someone more desperate for work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately it is more about who you know than what you know.

So start networking...

<comment><USER7> I have freelanced a little, and now my best offers come from previous clients, or people who have found me by reputation. For example, on eLance, I was recently invited to a job which took me four hours but paid $1000. It was invite-only (they did not list it publically), and such a bid would never fly by usual eLance (i.e., Indian outsourcing) standards.

Fortunately, I have a regular income (and besides that am still young enough to mooch off my parents), so I can afford to only take nuggets like that. :)

EDIT: Come to think of it...I never look for a freelancing offer anymore, last I did was months ago. Now I simply accept the 5% or so of offers actually worth doing. Of course, doing those creates satisfaction in my new clients, which provide me more offers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to get serious fast, go to tech-related conferences. Take a stack of business cards. Shake hands. Constantly. Arrive early, don't eat lunch, stay late.

Be focused on how you can help people's business, even if you can't help them directly. (Don't make it all about "me, me, me". God, I hate when people are like.) You aren't trying to make a sale, you are building a relationship one handshake at a time. Directly or indirectly, you'll find plenty of business.

<comment><USER9> I'll second this. Conferences might seem expensive, but by giving you good business leads they often pay for themselves (and then some).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please only consider this as a last resort (which it may be, in this economy).

Here are some notes from my own experience here:

1\. Small, manageable deliverables. Always error on caution and honesty, instead of optimism and salesmanship.

2\. If your customer (who you should just call your boss, if there's only 1) isn't technical, you'll hate life. You may as well be selling corn futures to a martian.

3\. Two new phrases which will dominate your life: Requirements Management, Customer Expectations Management.

4\. Find customers by going to user groups/mailing lists for the technologies you're good at.

5\. If you have to integrate with any other software system, make sure you have access to enough information/support to handle hard-to-track bugs. The worst place to be is a remote freelancer guessing at what's going on, billing by the hour.

</comment><comment><USER11> Create a blog and start building a reputation. Interact on forums. You really don't need to go to elance or other such sites.

<comment><USER12> I second this. I like to hire freelancers and their blog is the most important thing I look for. Use your blog to give an honest representation of what you're interested in and how you think. It's much more important to focus on the world of people that you could work well with, rather than the world of people you could convince to do one project with you. That's because freelancing is driven by repeat business and references.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you are in a country where cost of living is low, then elance.com and other similar sites are an option. Competition there is extremely fierce, don't get into underbidding wars. Much better would be to work on projects where you do get some face time with the client.

<comment><USER14> his profile says he is in India

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most of the time with freelance coding potential clients want to see evidence of previous projects, or personal projects So to extend on what others have stated here... network --> work on personal projects --> practice --> ??? --> profit!

</comment><comment><USER16> I actually do have a "secret" method: Datacenters. If you're a programmer/network/system guy there is no faster way to get lots of clients than meeting people in datacenters. They're the most qualified leads you'll ever find.

<comment><USER17> How do you find them? What do you do? Look up datacenter locations online and then go hang out there to see if you can hang out with a techie? Or are you talking about contacts you make through your job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I second two things, the blog, and the previous projects. People want to see that you get things done. So if you can whip up an amazing project, then they'll know you can get their stuff done as well.The blog/website is the place to showcase that.

For example, if you design webpages and want to attract people looking for you to design their Wordpress sites, create a really great free theme. The better your work, the more people will notice it.

</comment><comment><USER19> IRC is your friend. I have gotten almost all my best jobs from corporations/people on an IRC channel looking for a contract for assistance doing X.

Replace X with your specialty, and find the associated Freenode channel.

Depending on your field, mailing lists may be useful as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> What language? What niche? What sort of development? The tactics will vary a lot based on the answers to those questions.

</comment><comment><USER21> check job postings in <http://craigslist.com>

</comment><comment><USER22> try contracting with former managers / employers who already know you can deliver.

</comment><comment><USER23> blog (to market yourself) and be able to show people what you've already done (to show your credentials / expertise / authority on some technology)</comment>


Tell HN: Style So Broken on Mobile - <AUTHOR> The mobile responsive of HN is broken on my iPhone X. I use HN on my phone all the time and it's hard to view the articles. It's only happening on the main page. Unsure if it's the "" on the top article <comment><USER2> This article on the front page is causing it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341855)

Once I hid it, things worked fine. I believe it's the long title that is causing the issue.

They seem to be aware of it in that thread.

Title in question is: CNLabelContactRelationElderCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

</comment><comment><USER3> Same for me. I see that [https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) has the correct style though.</comment>


Ask HN: If Apple iOS is pro-privacy, how to block Internet access for one app? - <AUTHOR> Is there a way to block iOS outbound traffic on a per-application basis, without jailbreaking the device? This would be useful for preventing data leakage and for limiting spending on mobile data. On Android, apps need permission for network access. <comment><USER2> For mobile-data (LTE/etc) yes, you can go into the "Cellular" section in the settings and disable/enable using cellular data for any app.

On wifi, not that I'm aware of.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean they need permissions on Android? Up until the last Android version (Marshmallow), you either gave an app all permissions or didn't install it. To deny network traffic outside of that you basically had to have root access (which is functionally equivalent to jailbreaking).

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I saw a non-root app on Android that provided per-app network permissions, but on second look it's just using a VPN. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think you're wrong. You cannot block Internet access on Android apps (not even on 6.0 Marshmallow) unless you're rooted.

<comment><USER4> They had to ask permission at install though in the old (pre-Marshmallow) system. That system had many issues but you could just choose not to install something that requested internet and didn't need it.

Google have gone the same way as Apple with Marshmallow though and apps can access internet without permission in the new system - INTERNET is a 'normal' permission automatically granted. [0]

[0] [http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/normal- pe...](http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/normal- permissions.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The short answer is no, not easily. A more elaborate solution would be to install a global proxy on the device and route the connection through a server you control, filtering the traffic you don't want to go through. You can use Apple Configurator to configure the global proxy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. That would work for whitelisting, but would block random web browsing. Or is there a way for the proxy to associate traffic flows with individual apps, e.g. permit all Safari traffic, block all other traffic that is not whitelisted?

Could a per-app VPN be used to blackhole app-specific network traffic at the VPN server? If so, would this need a third-party MDM solution, or could the native IPSEC client be used?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> On Android, you can install "NoRoot Firewall" to give or deny internet access to any individual app without rooting your phone.</comment>


Show HN: Let's improve ratings - <AUTHOR> https://aeolipyle.co

<comment><USER2> What are you showing us here? Your home page says nothing and the "About" and "How" pages are very confusing.

Can you tell us what it does in a single sentence? "Let's improve ratings" reveals nothing. And no, you aren't getting my email.

<comment><USER3> [http://blog.aeolipyle.co/](http://blog.aeolipyle.co/) explains what its about. Not sure what the rules are WRT multiple submits as ShowHN...

<comment><USER4> That's still not a product; that's just explanatory information. For Show HN, you need to _show_ something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the multiple submissions (won't happen again) -- I've got the learning passes working quite well but really need interest (a critical mass of voters and comparisons) to perfect it.

I don't know the best approach to achieve this.

<comment><USER3> I have a machine learning project where I expect to have a very similar problem in a couple months. My plan is to build a stripped down tech demo/MVP and post a show HN at that point, add the URL to my profile, etc. If you have that already, your issue is that you are gating access to it with an email signup.

IMO you either need to drop the requirement for an email signup (use an anonymous cookie instead) or present a much clearer value proposition to users that don't need any more spam in their in boxes. They aren't going to read or believe any "no spam" commitments you make in your privacy policy and there is no reason for me as a user to give you my email address.

One final note. An algorithm is not a product. My first programming gig was at a company with one mad genius who had developed a video compression algorithm that they couldn't make any money on because they didn't really understand that an algorithm wasn't product (they were trying to sell an ICM filter). We were able to pivot and built a number of products around the core algorithm (IPTV and video conferencing platforms) and spent 90% or more of the engineering dollars on "productizing" the algorithm (which we ultimately dumped in favor of h.264). The point here is that you don't seem to be selling a product and even if you see this as a "project" that you don't intend to monetize you are still asking for something from users (e.g. time and input) and need to give them a somewhat valuable product in return. Hope that helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can't do a "Show HN" for a _landing page_.</comment>


Charlie Stross: Login 2009 keynote: Gaming in the world of 2030 - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html#more

<comment><USER2> Duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608345></comment>


Why Extreme Programming Fails - <AUTHOR> http://codewright.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-extreme-programming-fails.html

<comment><USER2> The thing that makes me most wary about XP is its origins. They developed XP practices while working on the Chrysler Corporation Compensation System, which was eventually scrapped in an unfinished state after 5 years.

However, XP is touted to be a system of practices to enable people to get software created on time and under budget that is more adaptable. The skeptic in me just screams, "But your first big test case failed on all those accounts. How can you recommend these practices when, in practice, they didn't work?"

Also: The 48 Laws of Power read more like the 48 Laws of Douchebaggery.

<comment><USER3> I was under the impression that while C3 wasn't finished when the project was terminated it was used productively after only two years.

Also, it the project replaced one that had tried to make something work for even longer, without producing anything working at all.

Also, I remember it that Kent Beck thought the projects ending had nothing to do with the performance of it.

<comment><USER2> The success or failure of C3 is a contentious point. However, I'm also wary of the testimony from people who have a stake in XP being successful rather than C3 being successful.

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationS...](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationSuccess)

<http://calla.ics.uci.edu/histories/ccc/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone clearly explain how these "laws of power" prove the author's point regarding XP? I've read this twice now, and I still don't understand the connection.

It seems like French is saying that these laws explain why some people wouldn't want to pair with some other people. I don't think anyone practicing XP would dispute that some pairs just aren't meant to be. However, I don't see how that leads to a failure of XP in general.

</comment><comment><USER5> Extreme Programming works well for debugging code (not development)

</comment><comment><USER6> There is no need to pair program all the time. Like many things in XP, adopting them all fully all the time is overkill. We don't do pure XP. We don't do pure Agile/Scrum. We do what works for our company and with our personalities and with our projects.

Pair programming works on our team very well in specific sets of circumstances (e.g. something has to be built by a certain deadline) and by combining forces (and sharing the pain) you improve your odds of getting it done and getting it done in a quality manner.

I hate the term "driving" as it applies to pair programming. "Can I drive now?". Argh.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yet another oversimplification. The 48 Laws of Power are certainly present in everyone's behavior, but it's a bit of a stretch to label them as the sole culprit for XP's failures.

<comment><USER8> Where is the claim that the 48 Laws are the _sole_ culprit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This xp post isn't that interesting, but the laws of power that it links to are [http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cgt/courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws...](http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cgt/courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws_of_power.htm)

</comment><comment><USER10> Linkbait-ish title. It's more like: "Why Extreme Programming doesn't take hold."

</comment><comment><USER11> XP and SCRUM can increase my productivity up to 300%. But, after 5 years of successful XP and SCRUM practice, I burned out. I just cannot think about work. Long vacations helps me a lot, but for short period of time - 1 month vacation restore my productivity for about 6 months only.

How to classify that? As success or as failure?

<comment><USER12> If it increases your productivity up to 300%, that means that you can work for 5 months, then take a month off. You will still get ~30 months worth of work done in a year. So thats a huge success.

<comment><USER11> You are right in general case. In my case, I was responsible for few large subsystems (Linux and related stuff, automated testing and continuous building, packaging, deployment, automating of common tasks, configuring, support and troubleshooting, training, documentation, reviewing, enforcing best practices, developing of development standards, predicting future problems, etc.). I just cannot leave that project for long period of time, because large amounts of tickets must pass through me in some way (investigation, suggestion, implementation, reviewing/fixing, approving).

I solved problem by training team, which replaces me. Then I leaved my work (IMHO, crisis is best time for that). Team works slower than me. Their solutions are not so good, because nobody has picture of whole project in his head. However, they can continue to work, while I cannot. As I can see, this scenario is typical.

IMHO, problem with XP and SCRUM that they producing too much load on the few competent persons. Overall result is better than with traditional methods, but competent person burns much faster, because they contribute more than others.

It is hidden magic beyond the process - XP and SCRUM just delivers task to competent person much faster than any other process. The drawback is that there no reason to grow for other developers, thus load on competent persons tend to increase over time. Pair programming and peer reviewing helps when people are roughly equal, but that is rare.

If we try to model situation, then we will see few major stages in evolution of project and/or group:

      * fast growing of project and/or group until physical limit of few key people will be hit;
      * degradation of group, because key people leave project, until there no overloaded people;
      * stagnation.

PS. I spent last few months to improve me in sport-dancing. I meet new very funny girl. I plan to work next 2 months as instructor for wind-surfing at Black Sea (Eastern Europe). I hope, it will help.</comment></comment></comment>


Feedly now ironically requires Google+ authentication - <AUTHOR> http://blog.feedly.com/2013/11/07/google-authentication/

<comment><USER2> _The change has been rolled back: you can now go to[http://cloud.feedly.com](http://cloud.feedly.com) and login using the old Google Authentication mechanism_</comment>


Show HN: Angular Translate Json - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cristianbote/angular-translate-json <comment><AUTHOR> Hi!

I've been using Pascal's angular translate module, since it launched, but moving to latest Angular it's been pretty frustrating not having it at hand. So, I've made a easy to use, angular2 and up, module that has almost same functionality.

I'd love to hear your feedback and if there's anything, please file an issue.

Cheers!</comment>


WikiTribune now lets you edit live news articles - <AUTHOR> https://www.wikitribune.com/top-stories/ <comment><AUTHOR> I had to link to the top stories page in order to submit this to HN as the TLD had already been submitted once before. If you look at the front page [1] you should see a list of draft and published articles available to edit.

[1] [https://www.wikitribune.com/](https://www.wikitribune.com/)</comment>


Traction Conf brings growth and product experts for 2 days of learning - <AUTHOR> http://tractionconf.io/speakers <comment><USER2> An incredible learning and activating experience, you will feel super engaged and motivated to get shit done. I've also connected with some of the most influential people in Tech that are making ripples and doing amazing things.</comment>


Ask news.YC: Is your startup making the world a better place? - <AUTHOR>

Do you spend any time evaluating the possible effect your startup could have on society if you succeed? Have you ever adjusted your plans in order to have a more positive impact on the world?<p>It's easy to argue that any time you make a free-market profit, you've made the world a better place, but I'm not sure I'd ever be content to make a fortune in something like domain squatting. What do you think? Are you attempting to create value, or to acquire wealth? <comment><USER2> YES! Absolutely! Personally, I've changed the focus of our startup to do some good in the world by first releasing a free product for the non-profit cause. I've been a huge fan of OLPC and we're developing a product for that market first. I don't think these two - making money and doing good - are mutually exclusive at all. Changing the world (for the better hopefully!) goes hand in hand with wealth and doing good can be highly lucrative. It's all about finding balance and being a good global citizen. Many companies have positioned themselves to be global leaders and also to have impeccable ethics and do good.

If you can afford to delay monetization to do some good in this messed up World, definitely do it! You will be rewarded for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great to hear that!

Sometimes, it seems like the products that succeed in a free market are not necessarily the products that will make consumers happiest in the long run.

For instance: Facebook has a ludicrously high valuation, but is it actually creating that much value? I don't think so -- the monetary valuation of Facebook is mostly due to the fact that it is addictive and contagious, rather than due to any substantial consumer betterment created by the service.

(That general critique is also applicable to most of the facebook apps out there so far, I think)

<comment><USER3> I think it creates value in the ability to keep track of your personal social network. Its not entirely difficult to manage contacts on your own, but I think its nice that at the very least I can send a Facebook message to someone (if not gather their contact information via their profile if they choose to include it) if I'd like to ask them a question or catch up with them. In the past, you might have to ask a mutual friend or spend some energy figuring out how to reconnect with them.

But I agree that their revenue is generated mostly because most of their users have trouble limiting their time on the site, which can be considered a negative impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I aim for one of mine to be. The aim is to build a tool/resource that will help scientists speed up there research, which, in turn, will help society. Obviously, I won't be shy if a bit of moola came my way!

My other start-up is an email client that will hopefully, once and for all, relieve me of the frustrations I have currently with every other email service out there.

The first one is my real 'baby' because I am a scientist by trade; the second one is one that I would like to cash in on.

<comment><USER5> Data sharing sites for scientists are desperately needed. Every time you set out to do some real research the real problem is gathering the data. You can spend more time on gathering the data than doing the research.

Maybe a social network with some points based on contributions/uploads. A license like creative commons where you have to release the data&paper of any work based on data licensed through the site...

Could be a great positive change in the world.

<comment><USER4> Indeed they are needed, but they are only the tip of the iceberg in my vision. For me the whole data gathering process has to be revised and has to become more efficient, and data is useless if it's not organised and put into context - that's what I aim to do. As a biochemist I only know how to program a VCR [retro], and so I need to find some hackers to help me out.

<comment><USER6> I'd be interested in hearing more about what you're doing. Send me an email or post back here.

<comment><USER4> What is your email?

<comment><USER6> peter at pchristensen dot com. It's in my profile too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're dedicated to profit and non-profit motives simultaneously. Great technology foments social change. But better for us to spur that ourselves, early and often, than hope that it will happen otherwise.

I simply don't understand the demonization of profit. Wikipedia and craigslist are so great that they didn't need to eschew monetization for fear of consequences. Even ads on one-tenth of their pages could produce enormous benefits in related non-profits.

To me, the true power of information is in the minds who shape it. Web companies can never go wrong in supporting educational initiatives. In growing brains, the interpipes will flourish. It's a learning medium through and through. Foster a diverse user base, and the technologies will continue to be revolutionary.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think ours is.

</comment><comment><USER9> Off the bat, my little startup is in no way better then something like OLPC, but with my startup I am trying to make the world a better place by providing a place to get unknown music tracks identified. Hopefully I will expand into other media.

I know for myself, how music has enhanced my life and it may sound lame, but I still think that if you discover a new band or some band you never knew of, you might go to a show, experience different music, meet new people or just learn something new.

Beside my awesome answer, I think this is a great question and want to hear others responses.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just put up a few social networking sites around climate change, poverty, peace and wildlife. They're gathered on <http://www.bippr.com>.

Good to see what else is going on.

</comment><comment><USER11> Actually, yes I do. We're aiming to take software development past the next productivity hurdle. Right now we are researching some of the core ideas involved. If we succeed with software, our approach has applicability to other design related activities. Our first laughably trivial proof of concept might be ready within six months, we're not really sure yet. There is also the quite real possibility that may run into insurmountable difficulties, practical or theoretical.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is my favorite post on News.YC so far... I'm really happy to see something like this here.

Anybody working on a "do-gooder" startup that they want to share here?

<comment><USER13> Me too. I don't think you have to focus on a "do-gooder" target to make the world a better place, though. You can make the world a better place if you: \- Make it easier for people to do things they have to do so they can go home early and spend more time reading to their small children or whatever else they like. \- Make information more available and clear so people can understand better how things work and what's really going on, particularly with things that affect them directly

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i see a lot of people mentioning that they are releasing not-for-profit iterations so that they can make the world a better place.

you dont need to hold off monetizing a product so you can do some good :)

if you align your product and your revenue with your target audience (ie, the world), then you're golden.

if your product really does make the world such a better place, then making money off of it should be easy!

</comment><comment><USER15> is it making the world a better place as a side-effect or is its main objective make the world better?

I guess in theory as long as you are not making the world a _worst_ place, you must be adding values either directly or indirectly. If your company is successful then it must be satisfying a need, and that need could balance things out in the world, and either directly or indirectly make the world a better place. So in a way many of us are making the world a better place.

But if you ask how important is it to your startup to make the world a better place, or how much emphasis you give it, or is that one of your main goals, then you would probably find some interesting results, and I guess a lot of NOs (if people are honest!)

</comment><comment><USER16> I know most of the people using ourdoings.com, and it's definitely doing good for them. Relationships are being strengthened by photos that would never have seen the light of day if conventional photo-sharing sites were all that was available.

</comment><comment><USER17> Besides the overall mission of the startup, it is also relevant to have an ethical workplace. Of course the two go hand in hand, but it is so important to stress sound business practices - the ends and the means.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes - we are reducing the time needed to get things done by a large margin.</comment>


Show HN: Planleaf – Manage tasks completely over email - <AUTHOR> http://www.planleaf.com <comment><USER2> Really awesome!

My account managers just said "That's awesome! I'll use the s __* out of that! "

We're willing to be on the beta of the business version!

If multiple people send me tasks, does it condense my to-do lists into one to- do list?

bwalker at kouponmedia.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!! I'll be emailing you momentarily

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can task statuses be updated through e-mail? I don't see anything mentioned about it. I work on a team where it's typical to respond to the email when something is done instead of going to the web. There are many different ways it can be noted so I'm interested in how that would be solved.

This could be the "bookkeeper" of the e-mail chain of tasks and statuses.

<comment><USER4> If by task status you mean complete/uncomplete, yes - just click the checkbox next to the task or the edit button. If you mean custom statuses like "in progress", it's possible, but there hasn't been enough demand for it for us to add that functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found working on the todo list myself very easy, however I wanted to involve another person in the 'send me a tasklist' list and couldn't.

I tried: \- Add a new task with a @help at the end, CC them in along with the @planleaf.com email \- Add a new task with a @firstname.lastname@example.com at the end, CC @planleaf.com

Both didn't work and I received no email from Planleaf to say that it couldn't be parsed.

Creating a new list, CC firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com did work.

Is adding a new assignee after the list has been created supported?

That's my criticism with managing tasks through email: input validation and feedback isn't seamless. In an app UI this is instant. From what I've seen Planleaf doesn't give me feedback if I type something incorrectly.

As email is much more freeform than a form that's a barrier to being simple and intuitive. Not an insurmountable one, but I think you need to do a little more hand holding.

That said, it's a great idea with promising execution and something I've mulled over building for our marketplace.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi drsim, our current version doesn't have support adding people midway through a list. However, our version in dev does along additional help/tutorials. This is our MVP of Planleaf

I think we totally need to add more feedback for the user input as best as we can. We're even toying with adding a web-version of our product for power users. So web -> email will be very seamless.

Really appreciate the feecback, ping me at omar at planleaf.com if you have any other suggestions/concerns. I'm all ears :)

<comment><USER5> It looks like a great MVP Omar, I'll be keeping an eye out for updates!

Many of our customers are non-technical so a feedback loop with clear messaging is essential for us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Used this for starting a quick ToDo list between friends over the weekend.

I really like how this allows me to quickly collaborate with people across different platforms (and devices) without needing them to go through a signup process.

</comment><comment><USER7> I work in a huge enterprise that will not allow any company data on third party servers. I also am constantly in need of ways to collaborate with team members on multiple different projects. But, I can't use any hosted webapps and have no way to set up my own instance within our company.

If there was an on-premise whitelabel version of this, and my colleagues and I could create new shared task lists for each project without having to install anything, that would be amazing.

I recognize that this is just the MVP, but consider this a suggestion for later if you want to scale this up and add an Enterprise tier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi mattkopecki, our enterprise/business version will be just that. You can host it internally and have email@example.com as your internal hook for tasks

great suggestion, ping me at omar at planleaf dot com if there is anything else you would like to see in an enterprise tier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice, I love the seamless use on mobile gmail.

However, does every interaction result in an immediate status update email, or are they 'chunked' together at all?

<comment><USER4> We debated over this, we want to group multiple together (waiting a bit before sending the update to see if any others come in), but people love the "instant feedback" of the update coming right away.

What we plan to do is have the first update come instantly, but then any subsequent ones would get grouped together. That way you still get the instant feedback 90% of the time but at the same time you don't get flooded if someone decides to do a lot of changes in a short time.

<comment><USER8> Ah. Seems reasonable. You could probably tweak the timing (updates no more often than every X minutes) and volume (no more than Y changes per update) dynamically with things like an exponential backoff (to some limit) to optimize engagement over time.

The ideal knob settings may change depending on whether people are trying to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously. BTW, are you currently doing diff-match-patch to account for multiple editors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ramoq: I haven't tried it, but what if someone spoofs the from address? For example, if I used the old telnet to port 25 trick, could I create a task from email@example.com to email@example.com? I have a feeling that since it may be re-routed through planleaf (is it?) that the destination server may not be able to validate the from address.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks a lot like [http://task.li/](http://task.li/)

I happen to know the team behind task.li - all extraordinarily competent. They completely rewrote it a couple of times until the backend as well as the frontend was not only smart, but also fast and highly reliable for different inputs and user agents.

Kudos for the competition, too(;

<comment><AUTHOR> We're familiar with task.li :) I think the two products share some similarities but are starkly different in their execution. Planleaf has made an entire task management ecosystem _completely_ inside of email. This is where we shine, we leverage your email client to facilitate our app.

But yes, competition is always fantastic.

<comment><USER10> So you 'check' your tasks inside the mail app?

Does that mean:

* You need a GUI mail client?

* You cannot share the task list with other people? If you can, how do you handle propagating the state of a task (done/undone) to multiple people?

<comment><USER9> Oh, that's a good point. I suspect that it won't work with Pine/Mutt or commandline email handling (vim+mail?). What about clients that don't support (or have disabled) html email?

EDIT: Added "Mutt" and non-html email question.

<comment><USER11> From their sample email: _" This is the plain text version of the email. Please enable HTML to be able to interact with the list"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty cool - I was happy to see it worked with HTML bulleted lists. Most managers I know don't use plain text emails.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not entirely sure that the use of the '-' char is a good idea .. isn't this, or rather the '\--' variation of it, something from SMTP, for use in separating mail content from the signature? I guess I should test it and find out .. hope it doesn't try to get my signature done! :)

<comment><USER4> Yes, double dash '\--' is the signature character which is different enough from '-' to detect. But even if you use '-' as the signature separator, we have a pretty good signature detection algorithm that would remove it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A great idea. And very well executed! One thing though, for some reason emails from the same list does not group together in my Outlook 2013, like "RE:" and "FW:" mails do. (In other words: The "Show as Conversations"-option doesn't seem to work on emails from Planleaf)

</comment><comment><USER15> Love the idea and execution :)

</comment><comment><USER16> The idea of it sounds horrible to me. I want less email, not more. Getting a daily digest and managing to-dos via email in general doesn't appeal to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> Clever how you do task management using email rather than an app or chrome extension. Any reason why you chose email over the other approaches?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We wanted to remove all barriers of collaboration. It's friction-less using Planleaf, you need nothing other then an email to get going :)

<comment><USER18> I really like this. I work for an NGO that does work all over the world and I can see something like this being really useful for areas that have bandwidth concerns!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice idea!

On backend, how do you authenticate the email sender? Would someone be able to flood a task list by spoofing an email ID?

<comment><USER4> We check email headers and have a few other factors to determine if the sender is genuine or spoofed. You would be able to create a new task list with a spoofed address, but you can't spoof your address to add to someone else's list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only one getting "Server not found"? :(

<comment><AUTHOR> everything looks good on our end. Try again

<comment><USER20> So weird... `dig` properly resolves planleaf.com to an IP, I can ping that IP but both Fx and Chrome say "Server not found" ... :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Integration with IDoneThis would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can't find pricing...? Am I blind?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not blind, lol. We're launching a business tier next which we'll charge for :)

<comment><USER23> +1 for having a business model. Too often I see great tools disappear because they got acquired, ran out of funding or something. I'd love to see this be an example of a tool that makes enough money to sustain it's team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> the task email froze my claws-mail in html view. js and pictures are disabled for html view.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me take a look into that for you. TBH, never heard of claws-mail until now :p

<comment><USER24> thank you, claws is an excellent email client</comment></comment></comment>


The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late? - <AUTHOR> http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-paradox/ <comment><USER3> Nice article. It reminds me of my year living in London, and taking the bus everyday to Imperial College from West End Lane in West Hampstead. There was a stop on both sides of the road - one for the outbound bus, and one for the inbound (the bus went from central London to a terminus and then returned mostly on the same route). Now we did not use schedules - way too inaccurate at rush hour, and the busses there were pretty frequent anyway. But we did expect an even chance of the inbound bus arriving before an outbound one did. My daughter and I became convinced after a while that this was not happening, so we invented a game (which we called "The Game of Life".) When our bus (inbound) arrived first, we added 1 to our score. We subtracted 1 for every outbound bus that passed before ours arrived (there were often more than 1). We realized that the result would be slightly skewed to the negative, but we expected the outcome to be close to 0 over time. Of course it was not. Anyway we extended the game to many statistical situations. For example, you go to the checkout line at the supermarket, and there are N people in front of you. When you get to the front of the line, you count the people behind you - <USER2> that M. If M is bigger than N, you scored life points. If it is smaller, you lost some. So you add M-N to your running score, and you get an idea of how lucky you are in life. However, I never followed up with any real analysis, so I enjoyed this article.

<comment><USER4> Your use of "of course" seems to imply that there's some statistical reason that the probability of the next bus being inbound vs outbound wouldn't be equal. Is there? If so, it seems like it must be a different reason than the one in the article. What am I missing...?

<comment><USER3> Because we might score -1, -2 or worse if 2 or 3 busses went in the other direction before ours came, but if ours came first, we score 1. We get on the bus and thus don't know if another one or more arrives first on our side.

<comment><USER5> This reminds me of a mathematical paradox that makes me doubt your conclusion: "In this country, every couple wants to have one daughter. They keep having children until they have a daughter, and then they stop. What gender balance should we expect?"

Couples can have any number of sons, and every couple has exactly one daughter. Still, the accepted mathematical solution is an equal gender ratio for the couples' children.

<comment><USER6> I think the "paradox" comes from how people implicitly assume "any number of sons" is somehow distributed or weighted in a way that favors towards numbers of 1 or above.

In contrast, "0 sons" is going to describe a full half of all marriages.

<comment><USER7> Same situation with the bus.

<comment><USER8> Not really. In the son/daughter case, the calculations are: expected daughters: 1 expected sons: 1/2 _0 + 1 /4_1 + 1/8 _2 + 1 /16_3 + 1/32 _4 + …

So number of expected daughters = 1, number of expected sons = 1. In practice since women can't have an infinite number of children, then this wouldn't be an infinite series, so the real number of expected boys would be lower than one, but there you go…

Now, for the bus case, you get +1 if your bus turns up first, and -1 for every other bus that turns up first. Assume that it is completely random, then: expected + score is: 1/2 _ 1 expected - score is: 1/2 * -1 + 1/4 * -2 + …

Expected + is 0.5, expected - is -1.

<comment><USER5> I guess it would be balanced if the rule was,

> _1 when your bus turns up, -1 for every bus going the other way._

<comment><USER9> Isn't that the same as what the OP's rules were?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me the bet in the bitcoin community [1]. If on average bitcoin blocks are produced every 10 minutes, and you learn that 5 minutes ago someone found a block, what is the average time you will wait for the next block? It turns out it's 10 minutes, not 5 minutes as you would intuitively think. (it's a memoryless process, so average expected time till block is always the same - 10 minutes - no matter how many blocks were recently found).

In other words, when you're waiting for bitcoin transaction to be confirmed and go to check how long ago the most recent block was produced, in order to estimate how soon the next one will come - you're doing it wrong. Even if previous block was found 9 minutes ago, you're average waiting time for the next block is still 10 minutes.

[1]. [https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7rs8ko/dr_craig_s_wrig...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7rs8ko/dr_craig_s_wright_has_refused_to_pay_up_on_a_bet/)

<comment><USER11> This is actually wrong. The average expected time till next block is almost never 10 minutes because hashpower goes on and offline all the time. It gets adjusted every 2016 blocks based on historical block timing so that if no changes occur then future blocks would be 10 minutes on average - but changes always happen so this is never accurate. As such, you do learn something by looking at prior block times.

<comment><USER12> What you say is not a rebuttal of the parent comment. Parent explicitly said that average block times are 10mins in the assumption. The most recent block time doesn't change that.

<comment><USER11> Parent is talking about bitcoin, where that is false. If they are assuming the average, then they're assuming something false.

<comment><USER13> the important thing is that it doesn't matter what the parent assumed.

whether the actual time is 10 minutes or 100 years, knowing that somebody else solved one recently doesn't speed up your time to find one

<comment><USER11> Of course it doesn't speed up your own time, since you have perfect information about your own hashpower. But it does tell you information about the total hashpower that's online, statistically.

I'll give an extreme example to make this clearer. Suppose 10X hashpower just came online an hour ago. It's quite likely that ~60 blocks have been found in the last hour, assuming the difficulty adjustment hasn't happened since. Seeing this, one could deduce that hashpower went up by ~10 and that the expected time till next block is roughly 1 minute instead of 10.

Now, in most cases hashpower doesn't change that drastically but it remains true that recent block times give you more than 0 information about hashpower and therefore about the expectation for future block times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slightly related, my ghost town had few buses and sparses. I could never rely on printed hours. If I got there 10 min earlier to be sure, I'd still never be sure I'd wait 20 min for nothing because it was 11 min early. Of course half the time if I decide to walk to the next town where buses are many, I'd see all my town buses (both ways) pass me <yell-at-cloud.png>

I think it made me completely careless about time, I would just go between stops and take the first one, go with the flow. By experience I'd know the range it would take for me to reach big places around the area.

I had a friend who was completely foreign to this mode of thinking, she was very dilligent and fully trusting (although she mostly used trains so a lot less divergence).

It reminds me of kid studies about intelligence / wealth ratios. When you're environment is random, you think random. When it's predictable you planify.

</comment><comment><USER15> > a Poisson process is a memoryless process that assumes the probability of an > arrival is entirely independent of the time since the previous arrival. In > reality, a well-run bus system will have schedules deliberately structured > to avoid this kind of behavior: buses don't begin their routes at random > times throughout the day, but rather begin their routes on a schedule chosen > to best serve the transit-riding public.

I've never really understood any example involving a poisson process. They always seem to involve bus arrivals or light bulbs burning out, and I can't understand why the memory less property would ever make any sense for these.

Even if the bus system was poorly run, why would it make sense to assume that the expected value of time to arrival doesn't change based on how long you've been waiting?

What is an actual phenomenon that is well modeled by a poisson process?

<comment><USER16> > What is an actual phenomenon that is well modeled by a poisson process?

Time to next Bitcoin block mined. It's 10 minutes, regardless if whether you've waited 1 hour, 10 minutes, or 10 seconds.

Makes sense though, because all the failed hashes are useless, thus no memory.

<comment><USER17> To add on, there was this article posted months ago on the same topic:

Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469382)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Highly recommend reading this to any folks that are just sitting the discussions.

The simulations were worth the article on their own. The real world analysis was a great bonus.

Anecdotally, i was expecting confirmation bias to be the main culprit. Pleasantly surprised to seei was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hah great analysis. One factor with bus' is the schedule is likely planned to minimize early arrivals at the risk of being late more often. Usually when a bus is early it has to sit and wait until its departure time. A late running bus can be more efficient, and if kept until departure time might not ever get a chance to average down the bursts of lateness.

<comment><USER20> I don't think this is always true. My city measures buses as being on time at inner stops as being between something like 5 minutes early and 1 minute late (yes, you read that right). Timing stops, where they have to wait, are pretty infrequent (mostly bus terminals).

I don't know how common it is but it does exist. And buses perpetually being early means that if you're on time you wait even longer for the next one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> OneBusAway is surprisingly accurate, at least in my experience. Google Maps has very good transit support too.

One reason buses are late is because a bus must travel a circuit. Cars provide linear transportation, so the delay can only happen in the direction of your travel. Since buses run a circuit, they are impacted by delays in the direction opposite of your travel as well.

Your bus might be late because the return route has traffic or other delays. Or maybe a drunk or drug user got in a fight with the driver and the police were needed. Or someone in a wheelchair had a problem getting onto the lift.

<comment><USER17> Why is modeling required? Can't we just put a sensor on every bus, and just return the empirical expected time it takes for the next bus to drive to your station given the time of day and day of week?

<comment><USER22> That's how it works (at least the OneBusAway feed in the Seattle area). They started in the 90s with an RFID transponder on bus stops, read by the bus as it went past; more recently they use things like odometry or GPS to feed information into the system.

But:

> just return the empirical expected time it takes for the next bus

There is a world of complexity in "the empirical expected time", there... expected according to what models?

Anecdotally, I think it's especially hard to model because any given delay is probably attributable to one or a few specific incidents. This isn't a situation where everything averages out and we can use a nice tractable AWGN model; we're down in the muck and the shot-noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The memorylessness of the Poisson process makes the statistical aspect a bit trivial. But here's an interesting variant: how should you update your beliefs while waiting if there is a certain probability that the bus won't come at all? "The Ups and the Downs of the Hope Function in a Fruitless Search", Falk et al 1994: [https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/bayes/1994-falk](https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/bayes/1994-falk)

</comment><comment><USER24> I've encountered the inspection paradox in debates about factory farming and people talking past each other points.

If you take the average farm, chances are that it's doing humane farming. But if you take the average animal, it has an overwhelming chance of being in an industrial farm.

<comment><USER25> Just like if you pick an average human being she probably is poor and black/indian. But average GDP per capita is pretty high worldwide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of a similar article that measured a similar kind of question about the wait times for NYC subways conditional on how long you've been waiting ([https://erikbern.com/2016/04/04/nyc-subway- math.html](https://erikbern.com/2016/04/04/nyc-subway-math.html)). I think it's a pretty safe bet that people who like this post will like this article as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> It strikes me that even with a perfectly regular starting schedule, buses might clump together in time because the schedule is probably dynamically unstable. To explain, picking up passengers from a stop costs time and a long time between buses implies a high probability that passengers will be waiting at a given stop. This further adding to the delay and shortens the time to the next bus in the schedule.

I'm sure drivers try to actively manage this, but if they didn't I suspect the system would naturally evolve toward pairs of buses leapfrogging each other on long routes.

<comment><USER24> I think another confusing factor about that specific example is that bus shouldn't ever start _before_ their schedule. Otherwise you run the risk of a bunch of people missing their bus even though they showed up on time. I think bus, trains and planes can only be late.

For example this is an article about a Japanese Train company issuing a public apology for departing 20 seconds early. [https://www.bbc.com/news/world- asia-42009839](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42009839)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This Wikipedia article seems relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual_time)

(From reddit - [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s4j58/the_wai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s4j58/the_waiting_time_paradox_or_why_is_my_bus_always/e8ntcng/) )

</comment><comment><USER29> Can't believe no one has yet mentioned the PASTA theorem - Poisson Arrivals See Time Averages ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_theorem#Theorem_for_ar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_theorem#Theorem_for_arrivals_governed_by_a_Poisson_process)). It is one of the theorems I remember the most from my Queuing Theory classes at the university!

</comment><comment><USER30> In prague, the trams all run on time - within 2 minutes or less of the posted time. So I think this article is incorrect for this particular context.

<comment><USER31> Trams don't have traffic in the way that buses do, and there are only minor differences in the drivers that could cause anomalies (I.e. you can't steer a tram the wrong way) so they're much easier to keep on time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is the inspection paradox what would happen if you surveyed everyone on how many siblings they had, and every sibling double-counted N-1 times (where N is the number of siblings in their family), inflating the resulting "average number of siblings", or is that something different?

<comment><USER33> This is my first exposure to it, but yes, I think so. My paraphrase is: The Inspection Paradox is when you ask someone "in the mix" about the mix. You're only going to get an accurate estimation of the mix by standing outside of the mix.

So yes, if you want an accurate count of siblings, you would consult some spreadsheet that just lists how many children each family had. If you go and start asking the families themselves (those "in the mix") then your results will be skewed.

I thought the article that this article linked to was also very good, "The Inspection Paradox Is Everywhere," by Allen Downey, [http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-inspection- parad...](http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-inspection-paradox-is- everywhere.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> On a related note, arrival time predictions can be biased early to prevent people from missing buses, which also increases the perception of lateness.

[https://nextbus.cubic.com/FAQs](https://nextbus.cubic.com/FAQs)

</comment><comment><USER35> Is there a "evil" distribution which maximises the waiting time? Or is the Poisson distribution already the theoretical "evil" maximum that a public transport provider can achieve?

<comment><USER36> Send all buses at once

<comment><USER37> If something like that is an option, just don't ever send any.

<comment><USER36> Well but anything else would equally be bound to the extreme of the rule. "has to come within a 10 minute timeframe" = send one at the beginning, the next one at the end, so always 2 come together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A bit off-topic: How can you integrate a jupyter notebook in a blog post like this one? It looks really nice!

Nice article, btw, interesting topic!

<comment><USER36> if I'm not mistaken there is a html export function that bakes it in to a static html

<comment><USER38> That's true! :) Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I hate the poisson distribution because it completely against the naive instincts of how random behaves.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nice article. Since I just started learning Stats, I wish I could find more of such notebooks.

Any recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER41> Would not be easier to actually time the actual waiting times as he waited for the bus every day?

<comment><USER42> That would probably make it seem, though, that the buses actually don't arrive (on average) every 10 minutes, since you'd oversample the buses that take longer than 10 minutes.

<comment><USER43> I'd argue that it's not _over_ sampling at all, but, rather, that the measure of "average bus arrival time" is what's invalid or misleading.

After all, the point of the bus arrivals isn't in service of the bus (or driver) but of the passengers. Observed average wait time at each bus stop is a better measure. The even better measure would be average wait time weighted by number of passengers [1].

[1] which is tougher to measure empirically, or even model, than just average wait time for that one person, since it requires counting passengers boarding, not just bus arrival times.

<comment><USER44> That's a nice idea but ignores all the people sitting in their offices or homes, choosing to go or not go out of their places down to the bus stop.

Better to consider each bus stop as an asset to invest in, the more valuable it is, the more people you can serve.

<comment><USER44> @mmt to clarify, you seem to be treating bus stops independent of alternative means of transportation. Measuring the average wait time of people at the bus stop is not enough: there are people who chose to ride a bike today instead of waiting at the bus stop, because of what happened to them yesterday at the bus stop.

<comment><USER45> Wow that is...quite the edit lol. I'm all for small corrections and addendums, but completely changing the meaning of your comment from an attempted callout is something else.

<comment><USER44> Glad to have impressed you. My edit was intended to bring the comment in line with HN guidelines.

<comment><USER45> Ah, I thought it was because you realized that your accusation was wildly inappropriate and unfounded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is a straightforward consequence of modelling an arrival process as a Poisson distribution with a constant rate of arrival lambda...

Go from arrival to cumulative arrivals to time of arrival to recurrence of arrival (next arrival). All are Poisson processes, including the recurrence process, which has a fixed expected value.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm glad I live in east Asia. Busses and trains are almost never late

</comment><comment><USER48> It's all much easier than that:

It's just the Poisson process, e.g., with a nice chapter in E. Cinlar, _Introduction to Stochastic Processes_.

Buses come as _arrivals_. So bus arrivals are a _stochastic arrival process_ where _stochastic_ just means varying _randomly_ over time where, really, the _randomly_ doesn't mean anything, includes deterministic arrivals, that is, known exactly in advance, but also admits any case of unpredictability.

Well, in short, if have a stochastic arrival process with _stationary, independent increments_ , then the arrival process is a _Poisson_ process and there is a number, usually denoted by lambda, so that the times between arrivals are independent, identically distributed random variables with exponential distribution with arrival parameter, the arrival rate, lambda. The _stationary_ means that the probability distribution of the times between arrival does not change over time. The _independent increments_ means that the time from one arrival to the next is independent of all the past _history_ of arrivals.

The exponential distribution has the property, easy to verify with simple calculus, that the conditional expectation of the arrival time given that the arrival time is already greater than some number is the same as the expected arrival time.

So, net, if bus arrivals form a Poisson process, then the time until the next bus arrives is the same after waiting five minutes as not having waited at all.

Cinlar's treatment is nice because it is _qualitative_ , that is, has assumptions that can often be confirmed or believed just intuitively. And we might not believe that bus arrivals meed the assumptions.

This subject can continue with, say, _hazard curves_ for equipment failures and a lot more about Poisson processes.

E.g., the sum of two independent Poisson processes, say, Red buses and Blue buses, assuming that they are Poisson processes, is also a Poisson process with arrival rate the sum of the Red and Blue arrival rates. If _randomly_ throw away some arrivals, then what is left is also a Poisson process with arrival rate adjusted in the obvious way.

In Feller's volume II is the renewal theorem that the sum of independent arrival processes, Poisson or not, with mild assumptions, converges to a Poisson process as the number of processes summed grows. So, if the users of a sufficiently busy Web site act independently with mild assumptions, then the Web site will see arrivals accurately as a Poisson process.

The vanilla Poisson process is Geiger counter clicks.

There is much more to the pure and applied math and applications of Poisson processes.

</comment><comment><USER41> > When waiting for a bus that comes on average every 10 minutes, your average > waiting time will be 10 minutes.

This is very ambiguous. Unless he gives a time frame the numbers do not make sense. Average in a week? Average in a year? This is not how it works in real life.

And I cannot accept his premise. My experience tells me that, in New York, when I used to take a bus to work, sometimes the bus was coming as I was walking to the stop; sometimes I would wait a long time. Sometimes not very long. There was no observable bias.

<comment><USER49> In statistics, "average" often means "expected value". No time frame is specified (although you could consider it an infinite time frame). With a small sample size your actual average might not be 10 minutes, but as your sample size grows, it will tend toward 10 minutes.

<comment><USER15> > it will tend toward 10 minutes

If you are talking about spherical-cow style poisson buses, yeah (that's what the author means by "reasonable assumptions). But as the author concludes, bus arrival times are not well modeled by a poisson process.</comment></comment></comment>


Interviewing at EA Mythic (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://seanmountcastle.com/blog/2006/12/10/interviewing-at-ea-mythic/ <comment><USER2> Do your research.

EA can be good - for a time - when the studio is in the initial investment phase after acquisition.

EA can be a soul sucking experience in slowly seeing all passion and enjoyment die if the studio is in the advanced monetization phase.

EA, unlike for example Ubisoft or 2K does not take innovation risk. They buy studios with innovative IP and successful innovations that can be scaled by infusing cash.

Once the monetization engine is running, the creative people who built the studio will leave on their own after their Stock Options and RSUs are cashed in and they realized they won't ever get to do anything new again ... just more of the same. Once the genre wanes due to overexploitation and stale ness sets in, promotion freezes and yearly 10-20% staff purges will eventually do their thing.

So there is a great opportunity to move forward your career, learn and spend a lot of money in the scaling phase but when the first layoffs happen you better get into the boat if you lasted that long in the boredom of financial innovations to meet responsibility profit

<comment><USER3> There is no such thing as studio purge at EA, I'm actually pretty sure the turnover rate is lower or equal than other bug publisher.

<comment><USER2> There is yearly purges in any studio past its profit zenith.

Source: Industry and multi times EA veteran

<comment><USER3> What studio had a purge recently?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually interned at EA Mythic in summer 2007 and remember everybody out there being talented, obsessed with games (I miss those lunch chats, people would work on games and talk about games when not working on games) and great to work with. It felt idyllic at the time, didn't at all match the "EA spouse" experience I was half-expecting. Maybe it was too early in the studio's relationship with EA for that to become reality.

Too bad Warhammer Online ended up flopping and sealing the company's fate, given all of the hard work put into it. Not clear if the market had room for one more ultra-successful MMO after WoW at that point.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm the author of the original post. Re-reading it now nearly 14 years later is a bit embarrassing. I love where I ended up so it was all for the best that they didn't offer me a job.

As akurilin stated, they had an immensely talented and very passionate group of gamers. I think everyone wants to work with folks that are passionate about their work and their field. It is a shame that WAR didn't succeed as it was an ambitious vision. Many of the folks I interviewed with have gone on to end up elsewhere with successful careers—which I'm very glad to see.

I do wonder how Dan Luu came across my old blog post. I really enjoy his blog. Maybe I need to start blogging again.</comment>


106 years after tragic crash, locomotive located in Lake Superior - <AUTHOR> http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/news/4098295-finding-694-106-years-after-tragic-crash-locomotive-located-lake-superior <comment><USER2> Perhaps the most tortured and obscure opening paragraph I've ever read in a newspaper:

 _Guided not just by the hands of operator Tom Crossmon, but also by the past efforts of an extended network of divers and the collective memory of a community, the remotely-operated vehicle descended into the depths of Lake Superior._

<comment><USER3> There are some pretty bad ones here [1]. And also a few gems [2].

> One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the > back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in > West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of > powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to > be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it > into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not > an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a > 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle > rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful > blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole. -- Caitlin Flanagan, The > Atlantic

[1] [http://www.poynter.org/2014/and-now-for-some-really-bad- lede...](http://www.poynter.org/2014/and-now-for-some-really-bad- ledes/248149/)

[2] [http://www.poynter.org/2014/gallery-of-good-ledes- recommenda...](http://www.poynter.org/2014/gallery-of-good-ledes- recommendation-edition/248323/)

<comment><USER4> That ... is perhaps the best opening paragraph I've ever read in a journalistic publication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The amazing thing about wrecks in Lake Superior is that they are incredibly well preserved and free of corrosion. The lake is fresh water, and is only a few degrees above freezing in most places all year long. Corrosion moves very slowly.

Full dry-suit diving, though, if you go to see them yourself.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why can I not highlight the txt? I can't be the only one who likes to highlight as they read. If it's to stop copying they should have disabled double click and ctrl+a.

<comment><USER7> I hate when sites do this. Also when they ask you to share the text you're highlighting (looking at you with a shaking fist, Medium!). No, I just didn't want to lose my place when I get interrupted in a few minutes, but now I have to figure out how to click out to make the giant share modal go away, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmmm... the black and white opening sequence in the accompanying video appears to be a model of the train in question... like an HO scale thing or so, as opposed to actual historical "before" photos. I don't recall seeing a presentation like that in something like this.

<comment><USER9> Very likely an HO model. I had that engine or a similar one as a kid.

The other video linked at the bottom of the article[1] shows a historical photo of #722 which was the same model locomotive.

[1] [https://vimeo.com/176065209](https://vimeo.com/176065209)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Additional photos of the dives: [https://m.facebook.com/townshipofschreiber/posts/10153887671...](https://m.facebook.com/townshipofschreiber/posts/10153887671985819)

GUE Quest magazine article about the history and the dives (pay wall): [https://www.gue.com/quest-vol-16-no-3](https://www.gue.com/quest-vol-16-no-3)

</comment><comment><USER11> Now what? With enough money and effort, they could pull the locomotive up, an option discussed in the article. But why?

The locomotive was a Canadian Pacific D10. About 500 were built, 9 survive in museums, and three are maybe in running condition. Exporail near Montreal has one on display. The South Simcoe Railway in Ontario runs theirs. So it's not something lost to history.

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone who lives in Duluth, this is not surprising at all. It's a magnificent sight when Lake Superior freezes over and you are able to walk/drive over it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm accustomed to seeing underwater footage of boat and plane wrecks, slowly eaten away by the years. Seeing a... locomotive... in that state is strange.</comment>


An Oral History of Laurel Canyon, the 60s and 70s Music Mecca (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/02/laurel-canyon-music-scene <comment><USER2> This argument came up during discussions of Amazon HQ2. Whether its better to distribute. Or concentrate talent all in one location to foment a collision of ideas and egos.

I think about The Eagles and Hotel California a lot. It took them 2 years to record that album. Their previous rock-country records went platinum. But Hotel California sold like 10M+. That's what 10X improvement looks like. And it's obvious the effect of having Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, Lindsay Buckingham, et al right next door or down the street to bounce around riffs and lyrics.

PBS doc Soundbreaking also has some great Laurel Canyon apocrypha:

[https://www.pbs.org/show/soundbreaking/](https://www.pbs.org/show/soundbreaking/)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps. They also had just completely changed their lineup, getting rid of Bernie Leadon and adding Joe Walsh.

And they had been surrounded by amazing musicians the whole time, Glen Frey lived above Jackson Browne before they formed, and they started out as Linda Rondstat's backing band.

But hey it's a good story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All this amazing music came out of one place. Is it possible part of that is connections in promotion? Especially in the gate keeper era? In other words there might be great music in many more places but unless it gets promoted by the right people no one ever hears it.

<comment><USER5> A bunch of very talented pop musicians moved there, and made pop music. That's why you've heard it, and that's why you like it. These people were very good at making music designed to appeal to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to miss out John Mayall - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_from_Laurel_Canyon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_from_Laurel_Canyon)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm 72 and nothing in my life has ever touched me like the music of that era. It breaks my heart that I'll never experience anything like that again.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have a few musician friends who lived in laurel canyon in that era and swear by that article. Sounds like it was truly a magical place and time

</comment><comment><USER9> When I think of Laurel Canyon in the 60's and early 70's, I always think of Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell.

Plus the miles and miles of tape they produced that has yet to drop as a compilation or make it to air (figuratively).

To me, they always seemed to be more at the center of those artists who were at the center of things creatively.

<comment><USER10> I love that album Joni did with Jaco Pastorius. Coyote is a beautiful song and the bassline is one of the most melodic I've ever heard. It's really difficult to describe how amazing it really is...

<comment><USER9> Agree. I saw her live in '79 at the Coliseum in Portland. Backed up by Jaco and Pat Metheny, both of whom performed separate solos that featured them playing against loops recorded in the moment.

Similiar to Dovydas: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsOCQFRWUng](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsOCQFRWUng)

She released a live album in 1980 that featured some of these performances. I think there's video on youtube of the Santa Barbara shows.

For me, FZ's Black Napkins guitar solo, live at the Palladium in 1977, ranks as one of his best. It's included in his movie "Baby Snakes." Watermelon in Easter Hay is another that makes you put the pen down and listen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real story of Laurel Canyon was written by Dave McGowan and it goes into great detail of how the hippie counter culture and music scene was completely created by the MIC. Anything saying anything else is just propaganda.

<comment><USER12> What is the MIC?

<comment><USER13> Military Industrial Complex

I was sold on McGowan's piece until I read his work on the moon landings, which was utter raving nonsense. I was much less sold after that.

But I think it's still fair to question the extent to which psychedelia and pro-peace (as opposed to anti-war) culture was deliberately seeded and manufactured - in the same way that abstract art and music were promoted to intellectuals by the US primarily for nationalistic and political reasons.

<comment><USER14> It's always important to know when someone is out of their specialty. The researcher I practically worship on a particular subject once wrote a defence of something I personally know to be complete nonsense because I was there and know what happened.

Dave's Laurel Canyon piece is meticulously researched and he's in his specialty. He's wrong about the moon landings.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't matter how meticulously researched it is if the conclusions are just plain bonkers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free Javascript and Python eBooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.codersgrid.com/2013/06/09/free-javascript-and-python-ebooks/

<comment><USER2> Those lists are great but they lack an important part — some signal of quality. How would a user know if the book is any good? Or if it shows best practices? Especially if it's meant for beginners.

It would be of course unreasonable to expect the author of the list to review each and every book but maybe users could post reviews? Or vote? Or just comment?

<comment><USER3> This is precisely what I came to this comment section looking for. I'd like to know which of these books HN users would suggest over others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have an old link for "Natural Language Processing with Python" \- the NLTK book. It's moved to [http://nltk.org/book/](http://nltk.org/book/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Each book is missing its edition and year of release.

</comment><comment><USER6> It'd be great for a download button for offline reading.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it possible to search within the documents?

</comment><comment><USER8> Any recommendations? Thanks

</comment><comment><USER9> would be awesome pdf format for the books :)

<comment><USER10> Print to PDF?</comment></comment>


The two top performance problems caused by ORM tools - <AUTHOR> http://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2013-04/the-two-top-performance-problems-caused-by-ORM-tools

<comment><USER2> In short, the problem with ORMs is that they trade off efficiency for ease-of- use and conciseness.

In a world where anyone uses languages other than C for anything, this should be considered a non-issue. If something's too slow for Ruby, you can write a C extension or do some clever caching, or in general get to the problem and write around it. ORMs are no different.

I think the greater problem is ORM users being unaware or unwilling to write SQL where their tool of choice might be a bottleneck, and occasionally where ORMs deny the programmer the ability. I've rarely worked on an ORM project that never had to do a raw SQL query for efficiency's sake, but those queries are by a large margin the exception to the rule for any reasonable ORM.</comment>


How SimpleGeo Survived the AWS Outage - <AUTHOR> http://developers.simplegeo.com/blog/2011/04/26/how-simplegeo-stayed-up/

<comment><USER2> The AWS Outage is not over! Many RDS clients are still experiencing all kinds of issues. SimpleGeo got lucky, our RDS was also not in east 1-a but we still got creamed.</comment>


Ask HN: Which are some good resources for software design/planning? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
so far, I've only worked as a coder in teams and on (very) small projects of my own. In the (near) future I want to (need to) design and manage a larger software project of my own (a fairly complex Django + x project).
Since I want to avoid 'stupid' mistakes, adhere to best-practices, and respect (and utilize) the hard work and research that has gone into software design, I'm looking for some good resources (books, classes, ...) to learn the basics of software design and how to plan (larger) software projects.
A little bit about myself: I'm a fairly confident coder/'engineer', but my degree is not in CS. Nevertheless, I'm not appalled by 'hard' stuff and I really want to learn.
Thank you so much! <comment><USER2> This may not be a good introductory overview but will contain a bunch of interesting ideas: [http://aosabook.org/en/index.html](http://aosabook.org/en/index.html)

Old but good: [http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/parnas- criteria.html](http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/parnas-criteria.html)

More ideas:

[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made- Easy](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy)

[http://misko.hevery.com/2008/07/30/top-10-things-which- make-...](http://misko.hevery.com/2008/07/30/top-10-things-which-make-your- code-hard-to-test/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd highly recommend Design It!: From Programmer to Software Architect by Michael Keeling. Plenty of practical examples (including a scenario enterprise application thay unfolds during the book), up to date in terms of technologies and approaches such as microservices architectures, cloud etc and just generally very readable. A good grounding to enterprise-class design. It also by nature educates you on leading teams through the design process.

<comment><USER4> Just snagged this, thanks for the recommendation!</comment></comment>


Farbod: Open-Source Persian/Arabic Font - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/font-store/font-farbod <comment><AUTHOR> After a couple of decades, we no longer need Arial or Tahoma fonts for web. Because we now have Farbod. A font designed by Mohammad Saleh Souzanchi.</comment>


Ask HN: Mails form JavaScript (client) securely? - <AUTHOR> I want to send mails to me whenever sth happens on my site without implementing server.<p>I'd love to use mailgun or mandrill, but this expose my API key. Is there a service where I can still use API, but make it safe by sending mails only to myself? <comment><USER2> [http://stackoverflow.com/a/21041537/654416](http://stackoverflow.com/a/21041537/654416)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I've seen that - but it's not a solution.

"Keep in mind that your API key is visible to anyone, so any malicious user may use your key to send out emails that can eat up your quota."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> AWS JS SDK + AWS SES + reCaptcha</comment>


CNN says that it's illegal to read Wikileaks for anyone but the media [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/DNCleaks/comments/57qg6f/cnn_says_that_its_illegal_to_read_wikileaks_for/ <comment><USER2> The reporter defends his statement on twitter: [https://twitter.com/ChrisCuomo](https://twitter.com/ChrisCuomo)

edit: maybe HN will care about CNN collusion with the Clinton campaign...

Larry King on a hot mic telling Bill Clinton that Ted Turner (CNN founder) would "serve" him [https://youtu.be/VCUIlV-AKY4](https://youtu.be/VCUIlV-AKY4)

CNN reporter Donna Brazile gave town hall question in advance [https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/5205](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/5205)

CNN edits HRC speech [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-18/cnn-edits-out- tired...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-18/cnn-edits-out-tired- clintons-reference-nyc-explosion-bombing?page=3)

CNN coaches "independent" focus group before interview [https://youtu.be/jz5Jtz74CUU](https://youtu.be/jz5Jtz74CUU)

For those who would dismiss this as conspiracy theory, none of this stuff is remotely "out there." This is just what's on tape and record.

This kind of stuff makes me genuinely afraid for the future of the American people and western democracy.

<comment><USER3> With Amy Goodman and Deia S. facing charges for doing their ostensibly Constitutionally-protected civic duties and job requirements, either ND gov went full George Wallace or enforcement and accountability for journalistic protection is reaching a historic low. would have check CPJ for quantitive data, but qualitatively it seems to feel like it's 1964 and rights have to be fought for anew, all over again. Don't take them for-granted, eternal vigilance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Remember it's illegal to posses these documents. It's different for the media; everything you're learning about this, you're learning from us

This is terrifying. Like, 1984-style terrifying.

<comment><USER5> Members of the media routinely make the argument that they are different from the remainder of the public when it comes to free speech and campaign finance issues; we shouldn't be surprised when they take a similar view of access to information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is insanity. Can you imagine if Richard Nixon had told the world that the Watergate tapes were a Russian plot to defame him, and not only the media went along with it, but they also insisted that it was illegal to listen to the tapes?

<comment><USER7> Watergate was someone's attempt to defame him... Why do we still reference Watergate as if it's any worse than surveillance today?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a rebuttal from attorney Eugene Volokh, writing in the Washington Post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12727143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12727143)

 _" Now, while knowingly possessing tangible stolen property would often be a crime for both the media and others, possessing copies of illegally leaked materials is generally not treated the same way. See Pearson v. Dodd, 410 F.2d 701 (D.C. Cir. 1969). But in any event, remember that, whatever First Amendment rules may apply, the media has no more First Amendment rights than the rest of us."_

</comment><comment><USER9> Just to create a discussion here instead of jumping all over the guy for his questionable legal assertions:

You could make the argument that a news organization in possession of stolen documents has a legitimate claim to possessing them for the public good. An individual could not reasonably make the same claims.

<comment><USER5> So you're saying that the media organization should be allowed to collect information, and filter what gets told to the public, but the public should not be able to 'double-check', or use their expertise and perspective to examine the same materials? If we are to entrust all information gathering and interpretation to media organization, shouldn't we let them vote for us too?

<comment><USER9> I didn't say that at all, but I'm going to respond to your questions anyways. I don't actually believe the media should have special legal carve outs (namely because it creates alignments that end up being against the public interest), but it's fun to argue it anyways.

> but the public should not be able to 'double-check', or use their expertise > and perspective to examine the same materials?

If you have a free market for the media, then they should be double checking each other.

> If we are to entrust all information gathering and interpretation to media > organization, shouldn't we let them vote for us too?

The US is a representative democracy. Your political representatives are already acting as surrogates for your interests. Thus, the media acting as an additional surrogate on top of that would not make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER10> > If you have a free market for the media

And how would a new player in a "free market for the media" enter the playground? If you have to say "A new player has to be more than an individual" then it's not a free market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wikipedia says "Media (the singular form of which is medium) is the collective communication outlets or tools that are used to store and deliver information or data".

Hmmm so basically these media people are just tools :)

</comment><comment> chroem- There is absolutely no reason for this to be flagged. Both candidates' actions and the media's response to them have been deplorable this election cycle, and we have a right to recognize them as being such. I am deeply concerned that CTR may now be operating on HN.

I have vouched for this submission to be reinstated.</comment>


Lessons of life from an uneducated man - <AUTHOR> http://krmmalik.posterous.com/lessons-of-life-from-an-uneducated-man

<comment><USER2> I enjoyed this article. The part about helping other people reminded me of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture and what he said about enabling the dreams of others: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo>

<comment><AUTHOR> That was a great video. I watched it a few months ago, which inspired me to write this blog post too. Thanks for the link!</comment></comment>