Ask HN: Do I have to go through recruiters nowadays, how do you find new jobs? - <AUTHOR> I posted on the Who wants to be hired thread last week. I have received a ton of recruiter spam, all saying "We have the perfect position for you". I quickly realized they say that to everyone. I'd rather talk to a company directly.<p>What's the procedure for getting a new job without going through external recruiters? <comment><USER2> I despise recruiters with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. That leaves me (and you) with a few viable options:

1) Use a matching service like interviewing.io or TripleByte to get connected directly with companies. (Effectiveness: Questionable but promising)

2) Use a job listing site like Indeed.com to find positions that you're interested in applying to. (Effectiveness: It works, but is like throwing mud on a wall to see what sticks -- hard and not very lucrative.)

3) Use Indeed / AngelList / whatever to find companies that are hiring, then use LinkedIn or some other method to find the hiring manager directly. Email them directly with your resume and cover letter (since it's effectively a cold-call, make that cover letter damned impressive). (Effectiveness: works great, in my experience)

4) Use your network. Email old bosses and coworkers and let them know you're on the market. If you've left a good impression, they'll usually be more than happy to do whatever they can to get you into good companies. (Effectiveness: fantastic, assuming you have a network in the first place.)

There are tons of other ways, but those are the strategies I've used. In the mean time, study up for your technical interviews. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> The entire recruiter economy is an enormous conflict of interest. They are like realtors. They are paid by commission and make significantly more money based on quantity of hires, rather than quality. So they have no real incentive to fight for you or help with your negotiations and a strong incentive to be mildly dishonest or exaggerate without burning bridges. This is terrible for both you and your employer (but most importantly you). They just want to fill as many positions as quickly as possible. There's possibly even a incentive to hiring folks that quit/leave in a short period of time to increase the number of opportunities that need to be filled and people that want to be placed.

<comment><USER4> I also feel that the recruiting industry leeches off of developers -- if companies are paying recruiting firms $30k per developer (with some companies I've seen having about a 1year turnover rate), then that's 30k that is essentially coming out of my salary.

<comment><USER5> That sounds right on first glance, but I wonder how much money companies would spend internally doing the same work the recruiter is doing. If it was THAT much cheaper, I'd think the recruiting industry would be in trouble. I think that $30k might be gone either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's how I did it.

I emailed any technical contact I could find at all the interesting companies in my city. I was following up all these emails with phone calls when I could get a number.

I found a blog article interviewing one of the researchers (call him Bob) at "Company A".

I sent this email that eventually led to my job:

Hello Bob, I've been researching [Company A] and came across this article from [BLOG SITE] that featured some of your work. I'm quite impressed with your assessment of the need for better data analysis tools in the [AREA OF RESEARCH], and the work you get to do in that area interests me. I found from your linkedin profile that part of your current research with the Company A Research Group is on [technical area I talk about below].

My recent PhD work at [University] involved a number of overlaps with your current work, both in technology ([short example]) and modeling physical processes ([short example]).

I am now looking for industry jobs in [City]. The Company A Research Group may be a good fit, but first I would like to learn more about what you do. Can you meet for coffee to discuss?

Best regards, -[my name]

He responded and asked for a resume. After further conversations, it turned out they didn't have room in their group (headcount freeze in their department) but we found another group at the company that needed someone with my skills. I was then "the guy Bob knows" during the interviews (which helped) and landed the job.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good Recruiters are out there but they are like needle in a haystack. It is tough to know good ones but when they do come, make sure they are in your rolodex

Having said that, I have found a couple of ways of finding jobs that I want:

Approach 1. Decide a company that you want to work for. Go to their careers page if they have one and then find a relevant position. Then go to Linkedin and search for "HR <company name>" in linkedin and try to find an HR contact in that company. Send them a short email that you are interested in that specific position. You never know and they may just connect you to the right hiring manager (has happened to me). BUT the trick is that you need to write effective and precise email. Don't send generic "I need a job" type of email.

Approach 2: Go to sites like indeed.com and shortlist a list of relevant jobs you like. They may not provide a direct HR/hiring manager contact but it could be a recruiter. That's ok for starters. Now take some of the keywords from that job posting and run a google search on the exact words. You may be surprised to get a direct listing from a company's career page. Now go back to Approach 1. (Done this as well)

Approach 3: The "good" recruiter can be very useful if you have found one. Then just go through them as it will be worth your time (done this as well)

Rinse and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hi, I'm a recruiter.

Look for job aggregators like Adzuna, Indeed, etc, which scrape all jobs on the web. When you see results, it should be easy to work out which jobs are posted by recruiters, and which have been posted directly by the company.

In my (massively biased) experience, you are better off applying for a position when you've been put forward by a recruiter:

* The recruiter knows what the client's salary range is, and wants you to get paid as much as possible (as the role is commission based) - they'll be able to make sure you're getting a good deal out of the client

* The recruiter is a professional sales person, and will chase the hiring manager for feedback, technical interviews, etc etc, in a way that as a direct candidate you'll come across as too pushy if you do yourself

* The recruiter will genuinely have a good view of other similar jobs you may not have found that you'd be a good match for.

* The recruiter will get much much more candid feedback about you than you'll ever get directly from the client

... and a whole bunch of other factors.

<comment><USER9> > wants you to get paid as much as possible (as the role is commission based)

I think recruiters can be great, but don't put too much stock into this point. Recruiters are similar to realtors- yes, they get more if you get more, but they would rather close the deal then to risk no deal at all over a few more thousand dollars.

<comment><USER10> Also, their relationship with the client (employer) is also important. If they can whittle down how much a client (employee/contractor) is willing to get, they will be who the employer calls first next time.

Also, if they know the budget, they may know how small it is too. If they are no other jobs, they may try to convince you to take whatever's in their book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am not a software engineer, but I am in finance with a solid resume. I say this because I am still a desirable candidate, but I probably receive about 1/10th the recruiter mail that you receive.

I am interviewing today with a great company, and meeting with another great company on Friday and I have a bunch of leads in the pipeline for next week. Here is my advice:

1) Figure out what companies and specific roles you want to work for.

2) Make sure you have your resume tailored to those roles and make sure you know how to answer the technical questions related to those openings.

3) Reach out to 1st, and 2nd connections to companies that interest you and ask to grab a coffee to learn more about the role.

4) If you are personable and seem like a good fit, they will ask what you are interested in and they will help make introductions. When possible, ask to meet someone else in the company closer to the role you are interested in. For example, if your friend works in sales, but you are in engineering, ask for an intro to someone in engineering. This is important because that other person will be better at vetting you.

5) You will enter the formal interview process with people already liking you and wanting you to succeed. You just walk in, have a good time and answer the technical questions.

6) Negotiate an offer.

6) When you get there, be a good person, help people out, build relationships and do great work. 5 years down the road, you will have more connections and more opportunities.

Don't make the mistake of letting leads come to you. That is how you end up in so/so companies and situations. Go after what you want.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a recruiter I can tell you all that I work my ass of to not be like 98% of everyone else in the business. Thankfully, I just have to not be a knob and I generally stand out.

Most agency recruiters are a pain in the ass because they are not actually recruitment professionals. Sounds odd, I know, but having worked for a few firms I can tell you that many will hire SALES people rather than folks who actually want to recruit, let alone have a clue as to what the f*ck it is.

If you want to try and figure if a recruiter is going to be a tool or not, look them up or ask them what their job is. Do the do business development and account management as well as recruit? If so, ask them which half the like better. Should be a neat chat.

Bigger recruitment companies will always claim to be HR Consulting/Service firms in all their media and PR propaganda, when internally, they hammer home that they are sales companies first. I worked for one of the largest recruitment firms in the world and that is EXACTLY how they operate.

Small/mid-sized agencies tend to offer a better candidate experience because their staff aren't focused on KPIs and arbitrary activities to keep their bosses off their backs. Instead, those firms just care about closing business and doing it well so the big firms don't kick the shit out of them.

In general, most recruiters are shit. I've been headhunted more than once and man oh man has it been painful. But I've engaged in the process because the opportunity at hand was worth the nonsense. Not pursuing an opportunity because a recruiter is an idiot is cutting your nose to spite your face.

<comment><USER13> I've met with some recruiters in the past (when I was looking for an engineering role) and it was a total waste of time. I got the sense that they just brought me in to see where I had already interviewed so they could get leads on who was hiring. I am wrong to think that, or do you know of recruiters who do that?

<comment><USER12> If I had to guess, I'd imagine that wasn't the only reason they brought you in, just that they sucked obtaining those details in a way that wasn't overt and/or greasy.

But, yeah, recruiters definitely do that.

If a recruiter wants to bring you in for an interview, they had better have a job for you. If they can't tell you about the job in any substantive way let alone tell you who the client is then I'd say they're full of shit and don't bother. I can count on one finger the number of times I couldn't say who that client was at that point (psycho client).

SOMETIMES, and I do this, I will ask someone to meet even though we don't have a job (at that moment) that's well suited for them. I'll do it because they're awesome as a person and professional and because they are looking for work in a core business of ours. But I will tell folks as much, and most are interested in meeting and chatting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the actual uses for LinkedIn.

Generally you probably want to work for people you like and respect. If you know some people like that, then finding out how to reach them on LinkedIn is a good way to let them know you are interested in working with them.

Sometimes they won't be interested in working with you, its a fact of life and you have to let that go. Sometimes they are open to the idea but they don't have any budget. And sometimes they will get you interviewed and move you over right away.

If you are in the "any job but this one" mode, you are at a disadvantage. If you don't know what you want to be doing then people will have a harder time knowing if you would work out well in their position. Its painful when there is a job available but you know it isn't what you really want to be doing, do you suck it up and work there because its a job? do you turn them down? Depending on your financial status it can be a very tough call.

When folks ask me "should I look for a new job?" I have two pieces of advice regardless, one is that you should always be considering new opportunities, and two you should think about what you jobs you like doing while you are not under pressure (say being unemployed) because it helps you be more honest with yourself on what you like and don't like.

Recruiters can sometimes get your name in front of a manager at a company you want to work for when you don't know anyone there. But generally their value is more to hiring managers than the people they represent.

<comment><USER15> I've left my LinkedIn profile open for this very reason.

It's also given me another axis on the graph. I'll routinely get email from a recruiter about a position, which I'll ignore because I'm either happy where I am, the job isn't a total fit, or you see the typical signals that their comp is out of whack.

Then, a week or two later, I'll get _another_ email about the same job from a _different_ recruiter. Now I know the target company is having some trouble. Are they flailing about? Are they using multiple recruiters for some reason? Pay too low? Hiring criteria impossibly high? Is the place a black hole for developers?

Now I have more information to work with.

<comment><USER16> Or the recruiters found a public listing and are trying to insert themselves in the process. Periodically I get emails from recruiters that are "I have a great candidate for your open position..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like to go through a recruiter because I hate managing a job search myself. I build up relationships with four or five recruiters, and they simply send me opportunities, and then I just talk to them and go on interviews. I do not have to follow up or devote any conscious attention at all to the process.

Corporate hiring is a massive shit show and I consider recruiters to be an incredibly useful sanity saving device. People that want to deal with corporations directly, I just have to ask, why in the world would you want to do that? So annoying.

Imagine you worked in any other profession than coding. Having someone else manage your job search is an unimaginable luxury. When I talk to my non-coding friends, and they ask how many hours I've devoted to a job search, they're amazed and jealous when I tell them about my recruiter-enabled workflow.

</comment><comment><USER18> How common is it for recruiters to "inject" themselves into the process? I ask this for a couple reasons.

I interviewed for a position a while back where the person interviewing me at the end asked, "What firm sent you again? Was it Firm A?" when I had been sent by someone with Firm B. I'll also get contacted by recruiters from different firms for the same position.

There have also been a couple cases recently where I've been submitted for a position by a recruiter, interviewed with a company, and got a pass or didn't hear back at all. And then I'll see the position show up a couple weeks later on a site like StackOverflow Careers. I got the impression that a recruiter jumped on an opening they came across and just kind of threw me in there and the company hiring decided they weren't getting much in return for the potential money they'd be laying out. I was pretty well qualified for one of these positions, so I wondered if they wouldn't have been more enthusiastic if there hadn't been a recruiter between us.

My conclusion after about a year of working with a number of recruiters in my area (Southern California) is that the industry is dominated by a few big firms (I refer to CyberCoders as the McDonald's of recruiters, but that may be being too generous) and has a lot of turnover. I suspect they have most their success placing more junior developers in less critical let's-get-this-seat- filled kind of positions. I've come across a few that I would call real professionals. Unfortunately, they always seems to be focused in areas or locations that don't line up with my own.

I still look at a number of recruiters emails each week. But now I only respond if I am convinced that they have an actual working relationship with the company they claim to be representing and aren't just trying to win some race against the rest of the rodentalia out there.

I also put together a page on my wiki for Recruiters to which immediately I refer them any time I am contacted:

[http://klenwell.com/is/Recruiters](http://klenwell.com/is/Recruiters)

This has been helpful in quickly filtering out the most callow practitioners.

<comment><USER8>
        > I got the impression that a recruiter jumped on an opening
        > they came across and just kind of threw me in there and the
        > company hiring decided they weren't getting much in return
        > for the potential money they'd be laying out. I was pretty
        > well qualified for one of these positions, so I wondered if
        > they wouldn't have been more enthusiastic if there hadn't
        > been a recruiter between us.

I mean, I can't speak for _all_ situations, but generally the costs are accounted for differently, and unless the company is absolutely cash-strapped, they just weren't that interested in you.

        > But now I only respond if I am convinced that they have
        > an actual working relationship with the company they
        > claim to be representing

In the EU they're legally required to be upfront with you about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've also received a ton of recruiter spam, but leave my profile on LinkedIn as other's have mentioned to see what happens. The worst part right now, is how untargetd most inbound recruiter cold-calls are - for skills that I don't have or don't want to acquire, in locations I wouldn't even consider, or at companies that I have no interest in.

We're working on this problem at Paysa [1], trying to enable employees to find and be alerted about relevant jobs that match your skillset as they become available, in your desired locations, and meeting the pay requirements that you specify.

We're also interested in helping to solve the matching and communication problem, by putting candidates directly in contact with companies that they're interested to work with - in positions that actually match their skillsets, pay their market value, and further their careers.

Check out our salary and experience based jobs search at [https://www.paysa.com/jobs](https://www.paysa.com/jobs), and sign up to receive job alerts as we find new jobs that match your skills/experience and meet your target criteria - around location, and salary expectations.

The comments in this thread are really interesting. I'd love to hear any more feedback/thoughts about what we at Paysa could do to provide the best job matching and communication experience from the candidate side. Feel free to email at zach at paysa.com any time.

[1] [https://www.paysa.com](https://www.paysa.com)

<comment><USER20> You got me. I thought this was going to be a legit post instead of an advertisement until the third sentence in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know most job boards are pretty noisy, but there are a few that are really good. Depending on the city/industry you're interested in, there's likely a niche board - including HN itself.

I'm at The Muse (YC W12) - I think we have a pretty good selection of jobs as well, especially in NYC/SF: [https://www.themuse.com/jobs?job_category%5B%5D=Engineering&...](https://www.themuse.com/jobs?job_category%5B%5D=Engineering&filter=true)

Feel free to email me too if you're looking for something specific, I'm happy to help. yusuf @ our site's domain.

</comment><comment><USER22> Disclaimer: I've used recruiters to find every job I've had other than the first one.

> _I 'd rather talk to a company directly._

Why? What benefit do you get from that? You're not like to negotiate a higher salary than you would without the recruiter, and you're not in a better position to get hired either (over the total spend of an employee's lifespan the recruiter commission is a drop in the bucket). Some companies I've worked for place candidates they receive through external recruiters _higher_ than self-selected candidates because they've already presumably gone through some sort of screening process.

A good recruiter will understand what you're looking for and won't put crap in front of you. That doesn't mean you'll get the perfect hand-picked job, and they'll probably challenge you on some of your assumptions, but if you're a .NET developer they're not going to try to get you to take a PHP job.

But here's how I generally go about looking for a new job:

1\. Email bosses I've had who I would want to work for again and let them know I'm on the market. Just a quick "Hi _______, I wanted to let you know I'm ready for a change from my current environment. If you hear of anything I'd love to take you out to lunch and discuss the opportunity." LPT: They will buy the lunch 95 out of 100 times :)

2\. Email recruiters I've used in the past and send them an updated Word resume, salary/commute requirements, and what I want v. my current job (bigger, smaller, different sector, whatever).

3\. If I'm very gung ho I will go on Ladders, Indeed, etc but the above typically hasn't taken very long to find something.

<comment><USER23> > Why? What benefit do you get from that? You're not like to negotiate a > higher salary than you would without the recruiter, and you're not in a > better position to get hired either (over the total spend of an employee's > lifespan the recruiter commission is a drop in the bucket).

Misaligned incentives.

The recruiter is incented to get you to accept the position. Their compensation isn't tied to maximizing your happiness, job fit, or salary. While every recruiter I've worked with wanted to see me find the _right_ fit, ultimately they wanted to find a position that was good enough that I would accept. An extra $15k in your salary is not material enough to the compensation of a recruiter.

<comment><USER22> Especially in tech, a recruiter's #1 incentive is almost certainly to foster a good relationship so that you come back to them when you want to leave. With people moving jobs every 1.5-3 years, a recruiter who consistently places people in positions where they are unhappy and underpaid is not going to make very much money 5 years from now.

<comment><USER23> With that same logic, a recruiter isn't also incented to get you a dream-job either, lest you never re-enter the job search market.

Personally, I don't have a problem with recruiters. My skills are marketable enough that it doesn't hurt to have someone else looking to place me in a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm constantly being contacted through LinkedIn by recruiters who clearly haven't actually read my profile - they'll say they've read it and then say that they think I'd be perfect for the Senior Developer position they're hiring for, when my profile clearly has me as a student looking for entry -level positions. When I respond, or when they call me, I tell them my actual qualifications and they say that they'll definitely contact me in the future. To date I have not heard from a single one of them again.

<comment><USER25> I get exactly the effect you mention here all the time from LI: recruiter spam from people who tell me they've read my (junior dev) profile, _then_ offer me Lead Dev positions for their young company, while at the same time saying the requirements for the role are 10 years of "progressive software dev experience" (which I don't have and is definitely apparent from my profile).

It's baffling. Don't tell me you've read my resume if you clearly haven't. These people are not helping themselves by blasting a canned message to those who match whatever keyword they're filtering for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm really surprised that more companies aren't open about their intangibles that set them apart. Why can't I search for jobs based on location, dress code, office layout? Because I want to wear jeans, have a short commute, and sit in a private office. Or at least not a godforsaken open office layout. When it comes to internal line of business apps, let's face it, most of the work is the same. It's the individuals that you'll be working with + aforementioned intangibles that differentiate.

</comment><comment> white-flame If you get an email about an interesting position from a headhunter that doesn't seem to be very knowledgable, you can often google parts of the job description and find the direct posting from the client. You don't have any agreement with the recruiter, so you're free to take whatever path to application that you choose.

It's the same thing with searching listings on Dice or wherever, especially if you see multiple organizations posting for the same job.

I simply don't see any value add to 99% of the recruiters out there. So many of them just keyword match and are unqualified to actually vet the candidates, and give the clients terrible lists. A company's own HR department can post the listings onto Dice or do LinkedIn searches just like the headhunters do, for FAR lower cost than going through an organization.

I have zero problem with bypassing the headhunters via a bit more web searching.

</comment><comment><USER27> A counterpoint to that is that if a company is hiring a recruiter they are serious about hiring somebody.

There are some places where they bring in a huge number of candidates, interview them, and then never hire anyone. For instance, at a local Uni, they had a position open for 2.5 yrs.

If there is a recruiter involved there is a sense of urgency at least.

<comment><USER8>
        > is that if a company is hiring a recruiter they are
        > serious about hiring somebody

Perhaps. It doesn't cost a company anything to engage a recruiter if they don't place any of the candidates.

<comment><USER16> That is true, but it does mean there is an interested contact at the company. Compare to places like Indeed that scrape listings and have no way to tell if a position has been filled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I also absolutely despise recruiters, after having deleted my LinkedIn profile and answering every e-mail with "please remove me from your database" I think I'm finally free of the spam.

When I am looking for a new job, I try to think about where I actually want to work. One of the core issues I have with recruiters is that I am _a developer_ to be placed in _a development role_ , when in reality I have a set of wants and needs in a job that I'm sometimes not even aware of myself until I read a description and see the part that sticks out like a sore thumb to me. So, my advice is don't go looking for any old job, find the company/companies you'd like to work for and check what vacancies they have. If none, pay attention to what events etc. people from that company go to and make a point of meeting them.

</comment><comment><USER29> Googling "the name of the company you're interested in + careers" usually does that. Or you can go on linkedin and search for internal recruiters from that company, but you'll be wasting time.

<comment><USER30> Agreed on the wasting time part. I've actually had significantly better response rates from companies when going through a recruiter instead of applying directly to the position on the website/linkedin/whatever. At least with a recruiter you get someone with an active interest in getting your resume in front of a hiring manager, as opposed to your application disappearing into the sea of 100+ applicants vying for keyword supremacy.

<comment><USER31> Your comment seems to be contradicting itself. You say that looking for a recruiter is wasting time, but a recruiter is the best choice. Which one do you mean?

<comment><USER32> The reference to wasting time was about internal recruiters. OP is advocating for the use of external recruiters.

<comment><USER31> I see, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The key with recruiters is to find one that is like you. Read their messages and if they say something that "hits on something" for you, then go with that one. Trust your gut!

The benefit of a recruiter is that you won't have to do the whole "meet for coffee" thing, where the company does an initial check to make sure you don't have any crazy red flags. With a recruiter, you "meet for coffee" once, he vets you (or tells you you have a big red flag), and then does your leg work.

A recruiter is also your negotiator. The money they make is dependant on your salary, so it's in their best interest to get you the highest salary possible. I suck at negotiating, so I really appreciate this aspect of recruiters.

And if you picked the right recruiter and they are open with you, they can really help cut through the bullshit that are most job postings. They'll say things like "This posting says X, but I talked to the CTO and he really just needs someone to take a functional spec and build an interface out of it".

Without a recruiter, you'll need your wits about you, lest you end up being deceived by a flowery job posting. And you'll need to have confidence and a firm understanding of your abilities so you can negotiate a good salary. You'll have to pour through job sites and you'll submit the same application form over and over and over... It's tiring.

</comment><comment><USER34> Find a company that you want to work for and then go on the site and read through the company blog. Hopefully those posts will be authored by someone and not just the 'company'. Then find that person on social media (twitter/google/linkedin) and use that to reach out to them via email or twitter (not everyone reads their linkedin because of the spam) referencing something interesting they've been working on. That's an effective way to get an 'in' if you don't have a network there already.

Also find out if they're hosting any events or speaking at any and attend. The process is a lot easier once you've actually met someone who works there.

Though I'm a developer now I got my last job in Sales/VC when I went to see the founder speak at an event, he intro'd me to the hiring manager who rejected me initially as I didn't have a start-up network (the job was finding start-ups deal-flow for funding). I got that job as I said I could create a network in 3 days and proved it.

[https://medium.com/tech-london/not-a-hacker-or-a-hipster- how...](https://medium.com/tech-london/not-a-hacker-or-a-hipster-how-i-got-my- first-start-up-job-922399a7dfbb#.j64iauh0e)

I agree with you about the spam. I've been gradually disabling my Linkedin as a result.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'll throw in my recent experience:

Rewind 2 years, looking for a more-legit DB dev job, coming out of a hybrid client-facing analytical role, with somewhat light dev work.

Resume is up in all the usual spots (Indeed, Dice, etc) get a call from a Tech recruiter asking if I was interested in a position paying nearly 2x what I was making. Jumped on it, and less than 24 hours later I was hired. I've come to see now that that was a HUGE red flag. The interviews were non-technical, among many other things.

Fast forward to this last month, workplace is horriffic, no process, no management, all the worst things. But I do have 2 more years exp in DB dev, so it's time to start looking again.

Put resume back up on the usual sites, this time I also put it up on a smaller, more focused site here in CO: builtincolorado.com which is aimed at start-up and post-start-up IT jobs.

Had a few interviews through companies I found there. Tons of calls/emails from recruiters, nothing catches my eye. Found a company thru BiC, and they go through a recruiter for a lot of their tech screening.

This recruiter is completely different than the previous one. Actual assessment testing, recruiters who've working in the field for years. Process took about 5-6 weeks.

So all in all, recruiters aren't always bad, but many are. And like some have pointed out, many have conflicts of interest in trying to just fill positions. The company I was hired by only uses them for tech screening, and doesn't to CTH, which I think helps lessen the conflict of interest, and only uses this recruiting company because they bring quality candidates. The moment they cease providing that, I don't doubt they'd use another screener or do it all themselves.

</comment><comment><USER36> Here's a question for the recruiters in this thread: When someone is rejected for being _" too senior for the role"_, what are the actual reasons?

I ask this as someone who's been dealt that card 10 times in the past few months. I've got a good idea as to what the actual reasons might be, but looking for confirmation. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is strange advice, but the best advice I can give: don't be looking for a job - instead look to help interesting people, to get to know them, and to establish lasting relationships.

These people will get to know you, will find out about jobs you might like way before the recruiters do, or before they are posted on job sites, sometimes even before they're announced. They'll know, and want, to let you know about the jobs too, and you'll do the same for them.

This strategy has worked very well for me, and I've built a network of amazing friendly people in the process.

The trick to this strategy is to always be connecting (nod to Glengarry Glen Ross there), before you ever are in need of a job. If you are in need of one and haven't done that, then I'd advise like others have here and try to leverage what network you have.

</comment><comment><USER38> Disclaimer: I am a software engineer at Underdog.io.

There are a lot of platforms nowadays that help to remove the "middleman" of external recruiters. Underdog.io, Hired, Vettery, InterviewJet, and others. These platforms typically are working to connect companies and candidates together directly by removing the "find and apply to each company individually" type approach. Instead they accept candidate applications, put them through their own internal approval process, and then, if selected, present them to companies to then make the decision if they want to talk to the candidates directly. In my opinion is approach is a much nicer and less stressful process for candidates.

<comment><USER8>
        > Instead they accept candidate applications, put them
        > through their own internal approval process, and
        > then, if selected, present them to companies to then
        > make the decision if they want to talk to the
        > candidates directly

So ... they're recruiters then?

EDIT: Looking at their website, it's a recruitment agency with some small amount of candidate selection automation built in.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, sometimes products like these try not to market themselves as recruiters or agencies. When really they usually fill a similar role for companies, providing them with candidates for open positions. Some offer slightly different value than hiring an agency, but the role they play for a company is usually that of a recruiter/agency.

I think what is most important for candidates is that finding a new job is really hard and takes a lot of work, and utilizing as many options as you can to find the right job.

This also goes for companies as well, finding the right candidate for a job is hard and they should utilize as many options as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It is a numbers game.

You will be falsely rejected from some companies.

You will be falsely accepted from some companies.

I got my current job by applying on their jobs page.

</comment><comment><USER40> A lot of people here are harping on ineffective recruiters but it really depends on the industry. As a programmer in finance, pretty much no one posts job openings. Sell-side may but buy-side definitely doesn't. Using your network or going through a recruiter are the only real avenues to finding a job in this industry. Outside of new college grads, I've never met anyone that was hired from applying for a job directly through a company's site.

</comment><comment><USER41> I saw a job listed by a third-party recruiter that sounded interesting. Problem is they won't give me more information until I meet with them, which would take an hour+ train ride, missing work, and expense. This isn't even the hiring company just some random job board like recruiting company. I tried googling around for the company itself, but don't have enough to go on. Anyone run into this?

</comment><comment><USER42> There are good recruiters but they tend to be the ones that are working directly for the said company and are paid via a placement fee one-time or simply salaried. The worst ones tend to be the middle-man recruiting firm that claims to be a tech firm and just takes hourly off the top and has no technical understanding of anything. That's like having two bosses where the recruiting firm is not involved enough to even know what's going on from your perspective and is just there to annoy you with bro speak. There is no value there other than the initial placement. I hope there is a general revolt to that among tech workers as we don't need this and it hurts the companies hiring through them as the workers will not want to stay in that situation long term. My friends from India seem to have to put up with the worst ones imaginable.

I use LinkedIn as a self-advertising tool explicitly listing I am a consultant corp-to-corp which definitely reduces the amount of bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER43> CTO of Workshape.io here - we are a hiring platform for software engineers that's primary focus is matching developers to opportunities based on your passions and how you want to spend your time in your next role. When you match with a position you interface directly with someone at the company without any mediating through recruiters. Added bonus: there is no need for uploading your resume/CV!

With 2 of the founders being developers we can relate to the level of recruiter spam in this space and so we created Workshape.io to cut through the noise and make meaningful intorductions between developer and company based on shared requirements.

We have about 200 postings on the site right now spread across the globe, but mainly concentrated in Europe. That said though, we do cater for people seeking remote work + relocation so if you fall under that remit then you may find us even more useful.

Would love for you to check us out and would welcome any feedback.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have found that most sites that promise matching to many possible positions have a two way signal-noise problems. You are likely to get too many recruiters; and companies are likely to get too many applicants.

1) Find a conference that videos presentations in a domain that you are interested in. Apply to companies that represent speakers for topics that you are interested in. (also gives you material to talk about in interview)

2) As you find interesting companies, select the ones that you have never heard of, and find them on sites like linkedin. Use tool to find similar companies (this is useless for large and well known companies).

3) Of the 'match maker' sites I've used, Craigslist is surprisingly good (this may be location specific). Some of my most interesting interviews were from random craigslist jobs.

I would be interested in knowing companies' strategies for handling the flood of applicatants to "HN: Who's Hiring"

</comment><comment><USER45> Recruiters are probably the worst thing on the planet. Because besides interviewing with them, giving them all your info, you still have to do all the communication with the company. I recommend this, recruiters are kind of an evil you have to live with. So allow yourself one recruiting company that has a good bearing in the area. I.e. you meet them in an office that they own and not at a star bucks because it's a one man show.

Then uses sites like indeed.com, venturefizz.com, or apply directly to the company. Use hired.com if you got a nice fancy resume for them to show off, but avoid it if you are strictly entry level.

The troublesome part is that only recruiting companies can get you in to startups that are still in stealth mode or too small to hire someone just for recruiting and hr.

</comment><comment><USER46> Shameless plug: I made a search frontend for the monthly "Who is hiring?" threads that are here on HN

[https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/](https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/)

It might help you in finding some favorable leads.

</comment><comment><USER47> Just write to the companies you find interesting. I once got a job offer just because I mailed a in depth review/my thoughts to some CTO (I was not even looking for a job). Rare but happens + you stick out

</comment><comment><USER48> Call up your friends and tell them you are looking for a new gig. Your peers will likely make better matches and more meaningful intros to companies you'd actually want to work for than recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER49> Interviews can be a little easier for contracting because there's a 6-12 month interview called the contract. If you work with the right recruiting company I think it can work out pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER50> In the UK there's something seriously wrong with the IT jobs market. On the job sites (TotalJobs is my go-to example) literally 99% of DevOps positions on any given day are being advertised through recruitment agencies. I was forced to deal with them for years and the majority are either incompetent or shady. I wrote an essay on this ([https://mocko.org.uk/b/2015/10/14/dont-feed-the- beast-the-gr...](https://mocko.org.uk/b/2015/10/14/dont-feed-the-beast-the- great-tech-recruiter-infestation/)) a few months ago detailing some of the appalling behaviour I've seen from recruitment agencies on the London tech scene and in the ensuing HN debate people raised equally harrowing examples of their own.

What's wrong with this? Well, from my perspective it's now basically impossible to land a job without either knowing the people hiring (i.e. networking, something we nerds are bad at) or lining the pockets of some talentless parasite who's found a way to insert himself into a high-value transaction.

The "only work with the ones you like" argument people often respond with completely misses the point. I believe it's based upon a misapprehension of the dynamic - nerds see "agent" in their job title and assume something like a literary agent, someone with incentives aligned with their own who'll pimp them around a variety of potential employers. The truth, however, is that agents aggressively pursue companies for leads (I've been on the hiring side too and had dozens of calls a day) and some actively threaten companies ("use us or we'll poach all your staff") into using their services. The social engineering they use to navigate the corporate phone system to reach decision makers can be quite ingenious. Companies with the backbone to say no are sadly rare, so from the the applicant's side if you see a job advertised and if you want it, you have no choice but to to kiss the agent's ass for an introduction to the employer.

This rent-seeking behaviour generally nets the agent a sum equivalent to the first few months of the applicant's salary or 10-20% of their contract rate for as long as they stay there. The only real service the agent offers in return for this is spamming nerds who they'd like to apply (as happened to the OP) and weeding out obviously bad applicants to save the employer's time.

Since writing that essay I've flat-out refused to have anything to do with recruitment agencies. Internal recruiters are fine (hey, if you're hiring a lot that's totally a specialised job) but I take the use of a recruitment agency as a sign that an employer either 1) gave in to an agency's aggressive sales tactics or 2) has a reputation so poor that putting their name on job ad actively discourages the best candidates.

In short - most recruitment agencies (at least on the London scene) are dishonest, greedy, target-driven parasites. They aren't your friend and the more you feed these people the worse the market gets.

Just say no.

<comment><USER51> I have to agree here. I flat out refuse to use recruiters in London because my experience with them was really bad. I once was put through an interview process through a recruiter. I did all interviews with this company and they were happy with me. After each interview the recruiter called me and asked me what kind of questions I was getting. It turns out he was betting on another horse to succeed as I found out later. Another guy was on the race for the same job and the recruiter was feeding him all the questions before he got to the interview. He must have pitched him really hard for him to get the job.

Be very wary of those practice. Recruiters are not your friend.

<comment><USER52> Recruiters are sharks. Its quite funny when you play them at their own games though. I did a few interviews with different recruiters in my last hunt. Told them all 'I am interviewing for one other job' so I didn't look desperate but at the same didn't look too committed (so I was a good horse to bet on). Then once I got the offer I wanted I dropped all other interviews immediately (one on the day). Got some anger for that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> If you have the time, go to local meetups. They can help you build a solid network and often have information about employers looking to hire. My last two jobs came from networking in this way.

<comment><USER54> Assuming, of course, that there are companies you want to work for locally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> i agree. that was part of the inspiration behind [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441183) . I am making progress on the product but primarily i think linkedin is biased towards serving recruiters better than users.

At the very least there should be a way to filter out good recruiters from the bad ones. I hate to say but more like a review system where you can rate your interaction with a recruiter.

</comment><comment><USER56> Stack Overflow Careers. LinkedIn. Glassdoor sends me emails - seems similar content to what comes up on LinkedIn. The Python Meetup group here in Barcelona often has jobs posted to the mailing list. Jobserve used to be the one to use in the UK, but I haven't lived there for a while. Infojobs in Spain.

Many years ago a recruiter contacted me about a job for a well known Investment Bank, we had the usual bullshit conversation and never got back to me. I applied directly and got a job.

</comment><comment><USER57> Hi there!

Why not give us a try at [http://www.thinksquare.io](http://www.thinksquare.io) :)

We use A.I to match you with jobs, your profile is hidden from companies until you accept a match.

Once you accept and the company accepts as well, you'll be connected with the hiring manager.

FYI we're mostly live in Canada, a few positions in the US and Europe. However, we're moving into the remote space very soon if that potentially interests you.

</comment><comment><USER58> A little late to the party but I just recently created a job board that aims for organizing the tech job market. [https://www.zeroinjobs.com](https://www.zeroinjobs.com)

I know it's a bit misaligned with the ask in the thread but thought it could be a good resources for job seekers. Personally got sick of creating pseudo regex's on job search sites.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even though it's technically a 'recruiter', Hired.com is pretty painless. The main point I appreciated is that it was not terribly pushy. They asked that you respond to offers, but that's about it.

I havent gotten a job through them, I'm still 100% through friends/excoworkers, but the process was nice and I did get offers (and a friend did land a job through them).

</comment><comment><USER59> A while ago I wrote something called [https://whoishiring.io](https://whoishiring.io) is an aggregator for IT jobs, it has decent IT amount of job posts (~15000) including HN's "Who is Hiring?" which you start with btw.

But as it was mentioned couple of times here: Indeed, Glassdoor, Adzuna are good places to visit as well.

</comment><comment><USER60> > What's the procedure for getting a new job without going through external > recruiters?

Same as always, networking :). Go to meet ups, go to conferences, talk at conferences. Do this for a while and your network will grow fast, and you'll be skipping technical interviews even. It's not quite practical for a lot of people but that's the breaks.

</comment><comment><USER61> A lot of companies post their job listings on their own site, then stick the same descriptions on recruiters' sites.

The job posting sites often seem to mix it up and purposely anonymize these job descriptions, but they're pretty lazy. You can google little unique sounding bits of the description and find the actual company.

</comment><comment><USER62> You can also try company bots on CodeFights : [https://codefights.com/bots](https://codefights.com/bots) if you win and apply your information gets submitted to respective companies directly.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some companies require a recruiter. I'm a contractor, and my contract is with the recruiter, not their client. This is through my own company, with its own insurance etc.

</comment><comment><USER63> If you want a job at a startup, contact a recruiter/talent partner at a VC firm. You will have more interviews than you know what to do with.

</comment><comment><USER64> Mileage may vary but recruiters fill a networking gap and are useful to outsiders for getting a foot in the door.

</comment><comment><USER65> AngelList is great and it's (part of) how I got my current position.

</comment><comment><USER66> I actually just posted this [http://weworkcontract.com/](http://weworkcontract.com/) for London contract jobs aggregated from job boards (and recruiters).

<comment><USER67> Is this for London onsite contract work only? remote ok?</comment></comment>


"Anonymous OS" Taken Offline Due to Security Concerns - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/anonymous-os-taken-offline-due-security-concerns

<comment><USER2> Interestingly, there doesn't appear to be any info on how it was actually booby-trapped. The sourceforge release [1] only references the BBC article [2]. The BBC article, in turn, makes no statement as to any malicious content, it only indicates that security researchers are looking at it.

Any one know if anyone actually has examined it? Or is everyone just suffering from a lack of trust?

1: <http://sourceforge.net/blog/anonymous-os-response/> 2: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17381214>

</comment><comment><USER3> so what? Script kiddies getting pwned..

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone had a chance to run it in a VM and watch the traffic?

<comment><USER5> I'd be wary of Anonymous-OS including exploits to break out of a VM and infect the host.

<comment><USER6> Is that even possible? How would one even go about doing so?

<comment><USER7> Yes, it is entirely possible for software to break out of a virtual machine and run code on other VMs or the host. Isolating something in a virtual machine does provide rather good security, but none is perfect. Vulnerabilities have existed in many virtualization systems which allowed this to happen.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, that actually stops me from trying to get the OS running.

However, why did gnu8 get downvoted? Seems like a reasonable comment, relevant to the discussion.

<comment><USER8> My guess is he was downvoted either for political reasons (by someone who's pro-Anonymous and mistakenly took his comment as a knock against them[1]), or because the downvoter wasn't security-savvy enough to know that gnu8's concern is legitimate.

[1] "Anonymous is not unanimous" and all that, but at the risk of No-True- Scotsmanning, either the distro is legitimately from Anonymous and contains no malware, or it contains malware and isn't legitimately from Anonymous (rather is intended as an attack against them).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Pitch Naked - <AUTHOR> https://blog.deepgram.com/how-to-pitch-naked/ <comment><USER2> "naked" = pitching investors without a "deck"</comment>


A MongoDB Garbage Collection - <AUTHOR> http://mathias-biilmann.net/posts/2011/7/a-mongodb-garbage-collection

<comment><USER2> I asked the same thing on the blog but I thought I'd ask here as well.

Is there a better way to move a document to another collection with out inserting into the new collection and then deleting?

I am guessing it wouldn't be a straight move, youd actually have something like this in your document {collection_from: users, timestamp: now(), data: $moved_collection_data}

<comment><AUTHOR> In our case the documents we move to the garbage collection already have a _type property that stores the class name and we do add a "deleted_at" property to the new document in the garbage collection.

But in the end, there's no other way to do the move than creating a copy and then deleting the original. This is also neither atomic nor transactional, but since we create the copy in the garbage collection before deleting we won't loose data no matter what...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering if anybody else has been using this technique with document oriented databases?</comment>


Watch pg write an essay in real time - <AUTHOR> https://code.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences?doomed=true <comment><USER3> This is fantastic. I've been an addict of [http://reddit.com/r/artisanvideos](http://reddit.com/r/artisanvideos) for quite a while, because there's something fascinating and enlightening about watching artisans perform their work (for example, Alexis Ohanian designing the Hipmunk bellhop logo - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYEQpwduyPU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYEQpwduyPU)).

It's especially interesting to note that there are few, if any, words in the entire essay that he didn't edit multiple times. A lot of times when you read something as well-written as PGs essays you get the feeling that the person writing them just sits down and hammers out brilliance. But in reality, at least in the case of PG - and I would venture a guess that most great authors are similar - greatness comes through sweat and repetition more than raw talent, until eventually that thing becomes second nature - or does it ever? I would kill to watch some of the great authors of all-time (a la Shakespeare, Hugo, Dickens etc.) write in real-time - it would be fascinating to know what their process was like.

<comment><USER4> Everyone revises their work, many times over. But yes the great authors do as well. I think this tool is cool for that reason.

"I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers." -- Vladimir Nabokov

But are you really trying to compare a bullet-point style blog post (not really an essay) to Shakespeare, Hugo, or Dickens?

<comment><USER5> > Everyone revises their work, many times over. But yes the great authors do > as well.

You state that as if it's some universal truth but it's certainly not. We know that Asimov only ever wrote a first draft and a final draft and Heinlein wouldn't even create a first draft most of the time. Neither of them is a Nabokov or Hemingway but they certainly fall into the category of "everyone."

<comment><USER6> Quite, and Ben Jonson writes

'I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand," which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.'

([http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5134/pg5134.txt](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5134/pg5134.txt))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a roll-your-own version of this, you can use the 'script(1)' shell command, the timing argument, console editor of your choice, and 'scriptreply(1)'.

Script is a Linux utility which makes a typescript of a terminal session. Traditionally this was mostly of use for shell sessions which _didn 't_ involve full-screen (ncurses) utilities, as the cursor-movement characters would typically present a jumbled mash on your screen.

Using the '-t' (or '\--timing') arguments sends timing between movements to stderr, or the specified file. With this, you can then replay a typescript file, with the timing information, to show what was actually presented on screen. An optional argument varies the replay speed.

I've made use of this to log and replay serial console activity (available on most servers through IPMI or related hands-off / lights-out management tools), which can be both instructive and helpful in documenting steps.

Further fun may be had by playing the output of scriptreplay through the phosphor(6x) X11 screensaver hack.

</comment><comment><USER8> pg actually posted this himself, 1769 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336)

<comment><USER9> That was on Etherpad. I wondered how the same text ended up on Stypi and how they are related. I found this:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is- etherpad...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpad- reborn/)

I guess pg exported his text from Etherpad and gave it to the Stypi team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Needs a moving background showing his face as he types up each word.

<comment><USER11> No offense to pg, but I don't think that would make it any more interesting to see.

<comment><USER12> It's a tongue-in-cheek reference to Kevin Rose's idea for a writing/blogging platform.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6UW0JY5PUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6UW0JY5PUs)

<comment><USER11> I know, so was my reply. Watching a writer's face while they write is probably about as captivating as watching paint dry in a dark room.

<comment><USER13> I think the OP agrees with you and was being sarcastic with his comment.

It made me chuckle regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just waiting for someone to quote a snapshot out of context.

</comment><comment><USER15> The interesting part about watching this isn't watching it being written. It's watching it being edited. What to leave on the cutting room floor is always the hardest part, and Stypi's "Doomed" feature does a great job of showing you how someone comes to the decision to self-edit.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, speaking as someone who's just reached the 30 hour mark on my current round of edits to a novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cool. However, I feel that watching it, doesn't really give the full effect, requires tons of patience too. Couldn't the editing data be visualized in some data science illustration for a real insight into what it represents?

<comment><USER18> Maybe like the final draft, overlayed with a heatmap of how much editing was done, then on clicking, provide a tree like comment history of each branching edit. This could show the anatomy of how different people form thoughts in written word. T his is an insight we could learn much from at a massive scale.

I would imagine Facebook or another hosted blogging platform could get this data with relative ease.

<comment><USER17> That sounds like an awesome type of interactive visualization. Great idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I seem to remember seeing this very same demo on Etherpad back when that was a thing.

</comment><comment><USER20> It would be awesome to see something like this with code - on hackathons especially.

<comment><USER21> That would probably be insightful, but at least we have commits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This functionality seems like it would be right at home in Google Docs.

<comment><USER23> This functionality was in etherpad, which was also YC-funded and also demoed their software with a playback of a pg essay.

While etherpad lives on as an open source project the original company/team was acquired by google and this resulted in google docs getting real time cursor movement and edits shortly thereafter (google docs originally updated via polling and often had collisions).

I think it's a shame that google never implemented more of the core ideas from etherpad, such as playback and contributor text highlighting. It's still the best online collaborative tool I've ever used. I had experiences writing letters to politicians in real time with dozens of anonymous strangers who we gathered via twitter, and collaborative grant proposal writing sessions that I can only describe as thrilling. It's also been fun to use etherpad to collaboratively take notes during conferences, and truly fascinating to replay and see how largely anonymous editors quickly start taking on certain roles without any prior discussion--one person gets very interested in fixing spelling mistakes, someone else gets really good at finding relevant urls for background information and links to slides, someone else just barrels ahead with whatever the presenter is currently talking about knowing that the others will fill in the gaps. A lot of the innovation happened in subset hardier, but etherpad made it way more accessible and this useful.

Etherpad deserved all the attention that google wave was receiving at the time because it really delivered on the promise of a truely flexible tool for collaborating and communicating more effectively than email.

<comment><USER24> > _I think it 's a shame that google never implemented more of the core ideas > from etherpad, such as playback and contributor text highlighting_

> _Etherpad deserved all the attention that google wave was receiving at the > time_

I find your post confusing because I thought that Google Wave _did_ have playback and contributor text highlighting.

I suspect that the reason Docs never gained these features was that Wave was supposed to replace it, but AFAICT Wave never saw the kind of user adoption it needed (probably due to its sluggish performance) and was killed off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's the highlighting about?

<comment><USER26> This was my favorite part of this product, the highlighted text is "doomed" and will be altered or removed at some point in the future. It's great to see how much editing happens after the initial draft.

<comment><USER25> Very cool :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is fantastic, I thought I had some sort of dyslexia, because of my non- straight, back and forth type of writing :-P

Good to know _I 'm not alone_. The more I read HN the more I find people, who are successful in their field and have the same behaviors as me. It's relaxing :-)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd really love to hear pg's comments of wether there is a piece of software, a tool, that could help him write the essays. Is there something that constantly comes to his mind when he writes, in form of "if only there was X so that I could Y".

Or anyone else's

<comment><USER29> Not really. Vi is all I need. I could probably think of things I'd like but don't realize I need. E.g. controlling an editor directly with my brain, so I didn't need to type. Hard to say about the narrower question of whether there is anything I'd want that's possible with existing technology.

<comment><USER28> Thank you Paul. I'm missing an ability to collapse / uncollapse parts of written text (meaningfully), so you could see only the plan, or summaries of each chapter, or paragraphs, etc. It would require a very good interface to be useful, but imagine the implications for consuming / learning when knowledge is presented in this way.

honestly been wanting to build this for myself forever

<comment><USER30> Have you tried using Workflowy? More of a list app, but could allow for very structured writing as well...

<comment><USER28> I'm a big fan. I referred 20+ people to it, so they gave me a pro acc. Love it, but it's not for writing at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> who is pg? and is the playback function part of stypi?

<comment><USER32> Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator. This is the essay he's writing: [http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there a way to verify this is actually Paul Graham writing, not someone else who reenacted it based on the published essay?

<comment><USER34> I guess I'd answer the question with a _cui bono_ question. Why would someone of Paul Graham's standing need to fake this? What would be his incentive to do so? He has nothing to gain from faking it. And I can't think of anyone else who stands to gain, either.

Occam's Razor explanation is that he just thought it would be cool to show.

<comment><USER33> Without the link from his own site we can't tell who even claims to have done the typing. Someone who isn't PG may have all sorts of reasons to fake it. Gentle suggestion - if you think the answer to someone's comment is obvious then it's a good sign there's a miscommunication and you should consider other interpretations.

<comment><USER34> _" Gentle suggestion - if you think the answer to someone's comment is obvious then it's a good sign there's a miscommunication and you should consider other interpretations."_

To the contrary, I didn't think the answer to his comment was obvious. I don't claim to have the correct answer. And if that's the tone my comment conveyed, i.e., a dismissive one, then I probably conveyed myself improperly. That was not my intent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How can I speed up playback? I signed up for an account, but this doesn't seem to be an option in the actual app.

</comment><comment><USER36> So much fun, but why on new years?? I'd love to watch.

</comment><comment><USER37> what happened to Stypi? their last blog entry is more than a year old (which usually is a sign of death/abandonment).

<comment><USER38> They were acquired by Salesforce: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/01/the-team- from-yc-backed-sty...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/01/the-team-from-yc- backed-stypi-heads-to-salesforce-to-work-on-enterprise-collaboration/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Any ideas on connecting Vim to this?

</comment><comment><USER40> Real time?

<comment><USER41> Real time, as in a 1:1 ratio between the time it took him to write it and the time it takes for you to see it played back. Not as in live, where you see it as he's typing it.

<comment><USER29> No, that's not true. The keystrokes are played back at a constant rate with no breaks.

<comment><USER42> I'm still waiting for XEP-0301 to become ubiquitous (which transmits key delays with text, and would be closer to what the GP thought he saw) - <USER2> really miss this feature in chat systems.

[http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html](http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html)

And the great demo: [http://www.realjabber.org/real_time_text_demo.html](http://www.realjabber.org/real_time_text_demo.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is really cool.</comment>


Ask YC: Idea for making web app developing a no-brainer? - <AUTHOR>

Right now if a programmer wants to create an application, he has to decide if it is going to be a desktop application or a web application (oversimplified, I know). Now web applications are becoming extremely popular, but they are still held back. If I wanted to make open source graphing software, I would be an idiot to design it as a web application. Nobody wants to pay to run a public server and users don't like typing in 127.0.0.1:8000 if it is run locally.
I think that web browsers could address this issue by creating a button to list local web apps (they would be more than extensions). These apps could simply register themselves in a text file (and the browser would ask the user to authorize these 'installs'). Think of all the great open source software that would go from depending on different platform APIs to simply writing javascript/html/css and letting the browser become the potential crux we know it can be.
I am a bit of a lurker here (this is a temp account), and I know this idea is probably phrased horribly, but I just thought I'd throw it out there. Hopefully someone can figure out what I mean. <comment><USER2> I really couldn't understand fully what are you asking about but if you're not sure if the final product should be a web or desktop application maybe you can try developing using Flash environment. If you start as a webapp but then decide to switch to desktop you can just take the code from the swf file and put in into an Adobe Air application.</comment>


The Logic of Risk Taking - the-mitr https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf41029d3 <comment><AUTHOR> I feel like this idea of 'tail risk' is pretty well understood in the gambling community, especially in the poker world of no-limit holdem tournaments.

For example, everyone knows that pocket Aces are the best possible starting hand in poker, and the default strategy is to call any all-in call if you have them; your expected value will always be positive, no matter how many other people call or what they have.

However, there is a well known exception to this rule, and many poker books talk about it - if you are the small stack at the final table, it might make sense to fold your pocket aces pre-flop if more than one larger stack has already called.

The reasoning is that even if you win the hand, you aren't certain to move up in finishing position, which is what determines your winnings. On the other hand, if you lose the all in, you are CERTAIN to not move up. If multiple other people have already called the all-in, then there is a good chance that SOMEONE will be knocked out, moving you up in the finishing position without having to take a risk. Therefore, even if you have a positive expected return, it makes more sense to avoid the 'ruin' situation and fold the pocket aces.

<comment><USER2> I have an idea for a poker metric that measures your risk for entire tournament. Each time you face elimination, your percent chance of surviving is multiplied together. So let's say you finish a tournament and faced all in 3 times with these survival rates:

80% * 50% * 70% = 28%

Then you would have a maximum of 28% chance of reaching that point again.

<comment><AUTHOR> An interesting idea, but the number of times you face an all-in is dependent on how you do the rest of the game - if you win every hand, for example, you are never going to face an all-in because you will always be big stack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Taleb loses me at the end (Nicomachean ethics? come on), but I love his "take risks, but don't take stupid risks" stance. A stance which I first encountered in _How to Legally Own Another Person_ [1].

The key takeaway is twofold, in my opinion:

\- People underestimate tail risk in their day-to-day: Bob smokes and drinks daily and eats red meat and doesn't exercise at all. These are "small" events independent of each other, but the aggregate will probably lead to ruin (probably a heart attack in his mid-50s).

\- People overestimate tail risk (due to a lack of courage[2]): Jill says she's "risk averse" and that she won't start a business because it might ruin her -- although in the grand scheme of things, 6 months of your life and a $10,000 investment are not ruin-inducing.

[1] [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/employee.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/employee.pdf)

[2] Maybe dragging ethics into this wasn't such a bad move after all.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I take fish oil, eat a mostly plant-based diet, don't smoke/drink but live comfortably in a van for cheap. Why? Survival is easy. All risks are not created equal, and following the heard may result in running off a cliff, ie debt, consumption-oriented, spendy, no love/children/friends, workaholism /not enjoying vacations/travel/life and worrying about the wrong things that don't really matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems to be a chapter in his book coming out in Feb. 2018. I'll probably buy it because I usually find his books to be worth reading despite his writing style, but I dearly hope he has an editor to fix the final product from whatever this is.

</comment><comment><USER6> > If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis [for russian roulette], he > would have claimed that one has 83.33% chance of gains, for an "expected" > average return per shot of $833,333.

Forgot to consider the "cost" in the cost-benefit analysis. Most would value their life significantly higher than 6*$1m, so the expected return is negative.

<comment><USER7> Interesting that you think most people value their life over $6M USD. I bet you that across the entire world, more than 50% of adults would take a 15% chance of death to win $6M USD.

<comment><USER8> $6M is a life changing amount of money. Tempting...

<comment><USER9> I have that kind of money and I can tell you: there is nothing up here worth losing your life over. I certainly would not risk my life to keep my present lifestyle vs. the one I had in my early twenties when I made and had much less.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if you guys have spent time in Nepal, India or China or other poorer countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> what is most fascinating about nassim's writings is the night-follows-day certainty with which they will cause a flock of bitter nerds to crawl out of their dimly-lit offices to unwittingly mutter one item or another from the "nassim taleb is wrong because he's not one of us" list, which isn't so much to proof him wrong, as it is to quickly find one another so that they can fall into each others arms, delivering reassurances that they are not wrong in opposing him, and that their distinct lack of real-world success stems from the cruelness and wrongness of the outside world, not because their supposed superior insights are not, in fact, so.

Their all-time favorite, to be repeated with ceremonial regularity, is that his insights are 'trivial'. ignoring for a moment that these people also believe it 'trival' to bring a product to market once it has been figured out (by them) in the lab (if they even lower themselves to think in terms of 'products' for the 'populace'), treating his literary writings, which are intended for the general public, which is very much in need of trivial insights, as if they were his scientific writings, then dismissing his scientific writings based on his literary writings, is simply malicious, owed to the fact that he is the wrong kind of academic, who lifts weights and calls people 'imbecile' on twitter, hence reflects poorly on their comic book-like self image of scientists as some kind of quasi-master-race, which is above cursing, emotion and whose physicality is a mere inconvenience, getting in the way of dreaming up ever more distant alternate realities, to be sold to the public as discovery.

<comment><USER11> You should consider using more punctuation. This entire post has only 3 sentences. It's essentially unreadable. You might have a good point, but I can't understand anything you've said.

<comment><USER10> i know. it is sort of fun writing it like that, which is why i did it.

<comment><USER12> Not much fun reading it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Economics and statistics understand perfectly well the distinction between gambling returns that happen in parallel versus gambling returns that happen in series.

For example, in financial economics, suppose you're investing and the returns of each stock during each year is an iid random variable R.

If you split your money over 10 stocks and 1 year, you take the arithmetic expectancy of R to calculated your expected returns. If you're investing in 1 stock over 10 years, you should take the geometric average of R to get your average yearly return.

In other words, if each stock returns 50% chance 3x and 50% chance 0x, you should definitely invest if you can split your money over a pool of 100 independent stocks over the one time period (you'll have > 99% chance of >100% gross returns!), but definitely not if you were forced to invest in one single stock for 100 time periods (you have a >99.999% of 0% gross returns).

I'm not sure why NNT feels it necessary to say the smartest Nobel Prize winning physicists are needed to under this. I'm pretty sure anyone with a rigorous high school math education can understand this. As a matter of point, the above distinction was belabored to me in undergraduate statistics class and a first year graduate economics class, both many many years ago.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is this word salad

</comment><comment><USER15> >You can safely calculate, from your sample, that about 1% of the gamblers will go bust. And if you keep playing and playing, you will be expected have about the same ratio, 1% of gamblers over that time window.

This whole argument is based on the false assumption that all gamblers have the same chance of winning and losing. In reality (and depending on the game), skill results in a massive disparity in outcome among gamblers. This is similarly true for the author's stock market analogy. As the weaker players are flushed out, you should expect the rate of "bust outs" to slow.

<comment><USER3> Gambling games that require skill are in the objective minority (Blackjack, Poker, and sports betting); Roulette, Craps, War, Keno, Slots, Bingo, etc., are all purely luck-based.

NB: Even in skill-based games, the odds still always (and I mean _always_ ) favor the house. Taleb is right. If you play any game for an infinite amount of time at a casino, you _will_ go bust.

<comment><USER16> Even if the odds favor you on each event, if they are < 100% success and you play long enough, you will eventually lose everything. Gambler's Ruin always wins.

<comment><USER17> Just not true. Let's say I do a bet of 1 dollar, and I have 50% chance of winning, and I can make 1000 bets every day. If start with 100 dollars it is much more likely to die with a lot of money than broke.

<comment><USER18> You've defined a fair game [1], one which you're just as likely to win or lose, by the same amount each time. Clearly neither side of this game has an advantage over the other, for any given coin toss. But you expect that long term it will work in your favour?

[1] technically it's a martingale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(probability_theory...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_\(probability_theory\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My god, this guy is so irritating. As usual, he's not completely wrong, but he is entirely useless. It's tautology wrapped in a bunch of garbled language and name-dropping.

Lesson #1: you don't know where you fall in a statistical distribution.

No shit. Really? There is a 1% chance of failure in a game. If I play the game an infinite number of times, I will fail to win 1% of the time.

The alleged twist: if the nature of the game is that a single failure results in you no longer being able to participate in the game, you cannot play the game an infinite number of times.

Color my mind blown. I'm absolutely shocked that Murray Gell-Mann was able to grasp this concept so quickly. A friend of mine has a PhD in Statistics, and I remember once telling him that the probability of a fair coin tossed an infinite number of times and landing on heads approaches 50%. He grasped that concept immediately. I was impressed. We started a company to explain this.

I'm kidding. That didn't happen because it would be stupid in every possible way.

Lesson #2: Cost benefit analysis is impossible if you don't know where you are in the distribution.

Somehow, not knowing where you are in the range of possible outcomes means that you can't know the range of possible outcomes.

The alleged twist: even when you know the range of possible outcomes, you apparently don't.

I don't even know where to start with this. I can't even make fun of it properly.

When you're gambling, the range of possible outcomes is well-defined for most people. You lose all your money, you break even, or you win. This model is incomplete because it doesn't take into account human pathology. Some people cheat. Some people take out loans from shady people and lose everything and get a leg broken. Some people commit suicide because they lost a few hundred dollars.

Guess what, if you include human behavior in the model of Russian roulette, it's also a broken model. People will cheat. People will chicken out. People will want to die and pull the trigger twice. That does not make a cost/benefit analysis "undefinable," it just makes the range of possible outcomes larger than most people are comfortable with. That's why most people choose to not play the game.

What Taleb does here (again) is conflate a legitimate criticism of frequentist statistical models with a critique of incomplete decision models.

But the critique of frequentist models is entirely sophomoric. It boils down to, "You can't do something an infinite number of times. Therefore, everything we know is wrong."

Fuck off, man. This gets addressed in every basic statistics intro. I'm not saying there aren't problems with the idea. There are. But it's the same problem as saying that the limit of x as y approaches infinity is 1. Is calculus fucked and completely broken because y never gets to infinity?

No. Not even a little.

Lesson #3: social sciences are broken.

Completely agree.

The alleged twist: They are broken because the basic concept of probability is broken.

The absolute comically stupid apex of all of this linguistic garbage is that Taleb uses the social sciences to prove how little his argument makes sense.

He can't tell the difference between a bad model and a broken system for creating models. He proudly claims that probability is broken because the models that people create to estimate outcomes are bad. And he uses the worst possible collection of models for the most complex systems that we know of as proof that the system is broken.

There are absolutely legitimate criticisms not only of frequentist statistics, but of inductive logic in general. It's only a conversation that's been going on since, I don't know, Pythogras? Maybe before?

There is nothing new or insightful here. Taleb is wrapping up and idea that everyone already knows in a word cluster so obtuse my 5 fifth-grade English teacher would destroy as some deep new insight.

But hey, he posted it on Medium, so it must be awesome.

Give me a break.

<comment><USER20> I was hoping to find a comment about how terrible the writing was, thank you. The writing is terrible.

<comment><USER19> I'm not completely convinced that Taleb isn't an elaborate hoax designed to win the Turing test.

Look, I don't like being so harsh. But the guy gets really fundamental things really really wrong. He makes me angrier than Gladwell combined with the Freakonomics guys. Which is a lot.

There's a genre of pop-statistics that is genuinely bad for people. And it all follows the same pattern. Science says x is true, but if you think about it, surprising y thing is true. Because I'm a special snowflake, and so are you.

It's absolute garbage.

And I don't even know that much about stats. I dropped out of a violin performance and music theory degree. I just read a few stats textbooks and had some good professional mentors because some of this is relevant to my work as a data engineer.

This is basic level stuff that's going wrong. The guy is clueless about everything he writes. But I'll give it to him that he's a genius at marketing.

He publishes books and makes money off of them. I do not. So he wins that way. But if I ever write a book, it won't be in the fiction section where his belongs.

<comment><USER21> > He can't tell the difference between a bad model and a broken system for > creating models. He proudly claims that probability is broken because the > models that people create to estimate outcomes are bad. And he uses the > worst possible collection of models for the most complex systems that we > know of as proof that the system is broken.

> And I don't even know that much about stats. I dropped out of a violin > performance and music theory degree. I just read a few stats textbooks and > had some good professional mentors because some of this is relevant to my > work as a data engineer.

 _eye roll_

> What Taleb does here (again) is conflate a legitimate criticism of > frequentist statistical models with a critique of incomplete decision > models.

 _double take_

..bullshit?

His critique:

* E[f(x)] is different from E[x] ~ X

* Jensen's inequality => use a convex decision/utility function/behavior whenever you are exposed to events out of your control

* Things like coin flip outcomes or binary true/false observations ( __i.e. not simply just probabilities! __) depend on their zeroth-moment; no dependency on magnitude of the moment, such as in outcomes that are made complex by outcome-dependency upon higher-order moments

* Bet on processes whose payoff f(x) has a stochastic first moment, but don't do so stupidly, and bet rarely

* Any uncertainty about the generating process concerning higher-order moments of very small probability outcomes makes the payoff more attractive for this class of complex outcomes

If you care at all, the preprint of Silent Risk will more than satisfy for a collection of proofs. Hell even the page I just happened to be looking at would [0]

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/W1V3jyV.png?1](https://i.imgur.com/W1V3jyV.png?1)

<comment><USER19> All of that hinges on your 3rd bullet point.

And translating into plain English means that if you bet your life or your life saving on the outcome of a coin toss, you're an idiot.

That's not an effective critique of frequentist statistical theory. That's obvious.

The absolute best and most courteous interpretation of this is, "Don't be an idiot." Thanks, Taleb, for that most insightful piece of advice.

The problem here is that this series of thoughts ascribes an attribute to statistical theory that is absolutely non-existent: that there is any weight given to any individual trial of an outcome. No one thinks that. He, and now you, are arguing against a completely non-existent point.

Look, if you have anything approaching a decent model, you know the range of possible outcomes.

If you want to understand flipping a fair coin, the outcomes are that there's a heads and a tails and it has to land on one of them.

What Taleb and you are arguing is that there's a third possibility you didn't think of where the coin lands in an alternative universe, and Margaret Thatcher is the queen of the United States, and all the puppies die.

And if that's the real set of possibilities, I want to play that game. Because I would trade all of the puppies for Queen Thatcher right now. (No offense to you if you are actually a puppy. I just really don't like Trump.)

Saying that statistics is broken because infinity doesn't exist is like saying that basic arithmetic is broken if 1 equals 0.

No shit. Yeah, when you change the basic rules of how things work, things get broken really quickly.

I'm sorry if I'm being obtuse here, but I don't see anything even remotely worthwhile in his article, your post, or your link.

Trying to work backwards from a stochastic model to the outcome of an individual event will never work. And no one thinks that it will. If you want certainty, you have to use an entirely different model of logic.

Taleb is criticizing inductive logic for not being deductive, and then claiming that you'll get just as good a result by limiting the inductive model and using only a portion of what makes it work.

It's utter and complete bullshit, as far as I can tell.

Happy to be corrected, if you think I'm wrong.

Can we agree that a charitable plain english version of what he's trying to say is this:

Don't play the long odds if you aren't playing the long game. If you're playing the short game, don't risk more than you can afford to lose.

If he's saying more than that, please enlighten me. In my first post on this topic I said that he wasn't entirely wrong, but he is entirely useless. If you've made it past the age of 5 and haven't figured this out already, well, reading his book won't help you because you won't understand a goddamn word in it.

I will read his next book because it's unfair to criticize something you haven't exposed yourself to. But I can't imagine any possible way that it could comprise a collection of proofs.

Again, what is there to prove? That probability doesn't work good when you change the rules about how it works? That you can't take a distribution and apply it to a single point in time? That you can't take a collection of inductive data and use it to prove a universal truth?

No sane person has ever claimed that you can do any of those things. All I can tell is that Taleb is claiming to be both interesting and original by writing a book that says you can't do any of those things.

Welcome to the grown-up world, Taleb. We already knew that.

P.S. Santa Clause isn't real. Maybe I should write a book about how not real Santa is. I bet Murray Gell-Mann would immediately grasp this concept.

<comment><USER21> [https://imgur.com/a/OAd0W](https://imgur.com/a/OAd0W)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see why Taleb thinks Kelly, Shannon and co. are the only ones who understand ruin. Daniel Bernoulli formalised what is now known as the Kelly crterion in the 1700's. Kelly and Shannon's contribution was to demonstrate a connection to information theory, which was incredibly fashionable in the first half of the 20th Century.

It's really quite an old result.

</comment><comment><USER22>
      Recall from the previous chapter that
      to do science (and other nice things)
      requires survival t not the other way
      around?

Uh, what?

I don't understand that sentence? Is " _survival t_ " a typographical error?

<comment><USER23> I believe the t is meant to be a comma. The author is saying that you can potentially survive without science, but you can't do science if you're dead.

<comment><USER21> Correct

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> tl dr ?

<comment><USER25> Taleb trying to sound smart.

<comment><USER7> It's my opinion that:

1\. Taleb is incredibly smart 2\. He is not being arrogant or trying to impress (any more than any other writer) 3\. He is writing about something that is interesting and not everyone knows

<comment><USER16> On #2, when he mispresents fields that have addressed the effect he is discussing routinely for decades as not merely addressing it inadequately but of missing it entirely, he's either being self-aggrandizingly hyperbolic or stunningly ignorant. Or maybe its a rhetorical trick to get the reader to pay attention because they are getting a nugget of secret wisdom. But certainly plenty of other writers don't play that kind of dishonest game.

<comment><USER26> I've noticed a formula many seem to follow in drawing attention to ones self as a public intellectual:

1\. Find some topic or idea that's interesting and fairly well-accepted but not receiving a lot of attention. 2\. Claim ownership over the topic or idea as if the prior literature doesn't exist. Invent new terminology ideally; abandon existing terms to eliminate a trail to prior authors and ideas. 3\. Present the idea or topic in a sensationalistic way. 4\. When furor inevitably develops about lack of acknowledgement of previous writers and researchers and issues identified by them, frame argument as being about ad hominem critics versus solidity of your own arguments. Sidestep actual criticisms.

<comment><USER19> This is a much better description of the phenomenon than I could come up with. I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread, but this is truly better than what I described.

Well done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another non-closable pop-up window.

<comment><USER28> Just use uBlock Origin.</comment></comment>


Restructuring the Braze Product Team - <AUTHOR> https://www.braze.com/perspectives/article/building-braze-product-team-reorganization-success <comment><USER2> Removing dependencies is the number one thing a company can do to make teams more productive.</comment>


New Chrome update: no more HTTPS or www in address bar - <AUTHOR> https://www.ghacks.net/2019/08/01/chrome-76-no-more-https-or-www-in-address-bar/ <comment><USER2> It is possible for a web site to be configured so that www.example.com and example.com are different in some way, as mentioned in the article.

If the browser tells me I'm on example.com and I'm really not, that seems like a huge problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, one of the features is that you have to click twice to see the url, but if you click once and try to copy the shown shortened-url you instead get the full address; the one you can't see... clearly, well thought out

<comment><USER4> Unless it's a Google AMP URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sigh... Turning to AOL browser one update at a time...</comment>


Can Mathematics Unlock the Secrets of Terrorism? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/0324math_terrorism.shtml <comment><USER2> Im sorry, but unless this 'math' is going to educate these terrorists, it's not going to do anything. How do you beat something that has no concern for self preservation? Kind of sounds like the race to find psychics during the World Wars...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised to see decision trees referenced: they are unsuitable for modeling real-world situations unless _every_ possible alternative can be determined aforehand, something simply impossible for terrorism (or for most human activity, for that matter).

<comment><USER4> Possible scenarios can easily be abstracted. E.g. Building attack, car bomb, etc etc. They have the data.

<comment><USER3> Certainly scenarios can be and are described but not all possible scenarios can be listed because they are infinite in number, And this is true in a non- trivial sense.

When you say "They have the data." I assume you are speaking of statistics. But

\- These are rare events and statistical analysis is at it's limits,

\- The past is no predictor of the future. Example: the introduction and continued enhancement of IEDs in Iraq.

Although he doesn't elaborate on my first point above, I recommend that you also read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, "The Black Swan".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Can mathematics unlock the secrets of x?" seems to be equivalent to "does science work?"</comment>


Message Security Layer: A Modern Take on Securing Communication - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-modern-take-on.html <comment><USER2> People should read Ryan Sleevi (of the Chromium security team) and Brian Smith (of the Mozilla security team) on Twitter for background on what this is, and why it might not be something to be excited about.

@sleevi_ and @BRIAN____.

<comment><USER3> You mean @BRIAN_____.

<comment><USER2> Also I'm wrong about where he works. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This a very interesting development, an OTT* protocol for secure communication that can sit on top of HTTP. Perhaps this was inevitable given that so much of the underlying security infrastructure has been compromised. It appears to be able to function independently of the application layer protocol as well.

[edit] *I originally wrote 'over-the-top protocol', which in the telecom industry just means "on top of HTTP". Puzzled as to why this got down-voted until I realized some people probably interpreted it as a negative remark. On the contrary, I think OTT protocols like this may be a great way to leverage existing infrastructure while layering on new and potentially better approaches to security.

</comment><comment><USER5> Given Netflix's position on browser DRM, and their references in this post to "platform integration" and device keys, it sounds like they're trying to implement HDCP for sockets.

Ugh.

<comment><USER2> That's pretty much what this is. As I understand it, this predates WebCrypto, too, and is also the reason that Mozilla will ( _pointlessly, dangerously_ ) deliver WebCrypto code over non-TLS HTTP connections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another new crypto protocol... "Yay"

What about when HTTP/2 becomes popular? You'll still have to deal with TLS then unless you deal with TCP connections directly (and bypass HTTP).

<comment><USER7> Nobody's taking HTTP/1.1 away.</comment></comment>