Apple More than Doubles Capital Return Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/04/23Apple-More-than-Doubles-Capital-Return-Program.html <comment><USER2> Nothing says "We are out of ideas" quite as powerfully as a company that announces a big share repurchase program.

Do you believe there are untold, unimagined technologies waiting to be invented? Do you believe that the future will be radically different than the present? Then you should be investing, heavily, in the future.

Do you want to be ambushed by the new kid on the block? Do you want to be the overly-confident behemoth who is cut down by the upstart, just as IBM was cut down by Microsoft? Well, then don't invest in the future, just buy lots of your own shares.

<comment><USER3> Apple has _140 billion dollars_ in cash.

Pray tell what you think they should do with it? Hire 70,000 engineers for ten years? Start an airline? Buy Wyoming?

Before Steve Jobs took over they were doing what you think they should do-- supporting every futuristic project that caught some executive's fancy. Spoiler alert: this was a bad strategy. Wasting excess cash is a common anti- pattern for big companies, such that it's a positive sign when they _don't_ spend money.

<comment><USER4> They could start with making maps work or, really, any of their cloud services.

<comment><USER5> Actually maps is getting better organically. It surpasses Google Maps in a number of cities and being vector has a much better overall experience.

The cloud services should be split. iTunes Music Store has been pretty rock solid since its inception. It's really iCloud Sync and the Mail features that need work.

<comment><USER6> ITMS kind of sucks, actually, and always has. The big issue is that the model of "device tethered to a single laptop" is confusing now that the device is wifi/4g enabled. But even in the iPod/iTunes days, iTunes was always kind of shakey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am way happier with stock buyback vs. dividend right now, since the stock is so undervalued. There are also tax benefits to buyback.

I would love to see Apple spend billions each (not tens of billions) on:

1) turning iCloud into something _amazing_ \-- an individual, small business, or enterprise framework to do device management, sync, etc. Everything Steve Jobs would have wanted as a consumer service, but also available as SAAS or on-premises, like BES, to manage the phones for a company.

2) Don't go into the enterprise software market, but buy a decent enterprise software company or talent just for talent, and get those guys to make Apple _the_ way to develop enterprise software. Basically everything Microsoft does with MSDN, easy hooks to build for the enterprise, etc.

3) Invest in GitHub, either in equity, or just in first-class support. Integrate GitHub and Apple software development and ideally some app development tool like Parse, so it's easy for power users, enterprise IT, and third party developers to build apps for the ecosystem.

4) Use security as a competitive advantage; build platform security like on iOS for OSX, but even _better_ than the best option out there today (ChromeOS). Great management tools for individuals, companies, developers to do MDM, ERM, etc. Make using Apple devices with Apple-blessed apps and Apple- blessed services actually safe.

5) Make i18n/l10n for the Apple ecosystem better and easier than for anything else.

(disclaimer: I have what for me is a fairly huge open call position in apple options over the next 2 years, so I'm pretty "invested" in Apple's success)

<comment><USER4> Most of those things involve communicating and partnering with external folks. Apple has no idea how to do that.

<comment><USER5> How do you think Apple makes its products ? Magic ?

They have to communicate and partner with lots of suppliers from small to large around the world. They also have content partnerships with Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, Tom Tom, Yelp etc. And the there is the huge array of media partnerships in the iTunes Store.

Seems like a LOT of partnerships actually.

<comment><USER7> Apple don't communicate and partner. They give orders and expect obedience. The only partnership I can think of is the iBooks one. And it went to court.

<comment><USER6> They're quite partnerific with their hardware vendors (in Asia, essentially).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I confess that I understand very little of this. Can someone explain what does this mean in layman terms?

I did understand that Apple is going to invest more money in its own shares, as a result of which, the portion of Apple, Inc. owned by other investors will be reduced. However -- what does this imply? Is this a general pattern that companies follow at some point in their lifetime?

Again, I apologize for my lack of knowledge in this domain.

<comment><USER9> What this means is that each share owned by the public will represent a (somewhat) larger share of Apple. If Apple buys back about 15% of the company (about what the $60B plan they announced represents at curren price) then what was previously 85% ownership of the company will now be 100%: about a 17.6% increase.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you have it right. The buy-back doesn't make each share owned by the public worth more of Apple. What it does is makes the company own more of its own shares (i.e. more shares are owned privately instead of publicly). The easy way to understand it is to take it to the extreme. If Apple bought every share but one, that one shareholder would not own 100% of the company. If Apple bought every share that would be taking the company private.

<comment><USER11> I doubt a company could take itself private. Who would own it? Would it own itself?

MaysonL's explanation in the grandfather comment to this one is right. You do have to take into account that the 85% that will now be the new 100% will have less capital on hand, though.

If the stock market price is efficient, the new apple should only have a market cap of 85% of the old one. If it's more (or less), the stockmarket is not really rational..

<comment><USER12> Companies can take themselves private. BestBuy is in the process of doing it right now.

The owners? The stockholders. They just aren't trading their shares on NASDAQ anymore.

MaysonL's explanation is incorrect.

<comment><USER13> You're all talking past each other. "Taking a company private" has nothing to do with stock buybacks. Stock buybacks are when _the company itself_ buys its own stock and then cancels the shares, which increases the percentage ownership stake of the remaining stockholders. Taking a company private means that a single large investor (or a cooperating group thereof) buys 100% of the shares and then votes to delist the company from the stock exchange and stop trading the shares publicly.

<comment><USER11> Yes. So a company can't take _itself_ private. Stockholders can take a company private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hacker News readers who are interested in how share buybacks work and how they can be a very _good_ idea (even in the tech industry) should read up on Henry Singleton & Teledyne:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Earl_Singleton> [http://observer.com/2003/04/the-brain-behind-teledyne-a- grea...](http://observer.com/2003/04/the-brain-behind-teledyne-a-great- american-capitalist/)

Think of it as a way to reinvest in the future of your current business without having to actually expand it (which, in the case of a company at Apple's size/stage, would likely be wasted on low-returning incremental investments). Apple returning capital is a good thing -- it's how businesses should work.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm so torn about this.

As a shareholder, it's great news for me. But as a member of the tech industry and generally idealistic guy, it hurts to see them bending to the calls of the finance industry.

<comment><USER16> I agree with you the fact that WallStreet continues to bend them for about a couple of weeks just so they could control the market. Maybe Apple needs to go private so there won't be anymore pressure from the so called finance industry and they could concentrate again to build awesome products.

<comment><USER17> > Maybe Apple needs to go private so there won't be anymore pressure from the > so called finance industry and they could concentrate again to build awesome > products.

This doesnt really make sense in Apple's case since they're at a such a gigantic size. The closing market cap 381B - cash 145B is a huge number. Who's going to pitch in to buy the rest of those shares? Good luck getting that done without any input from those you call the "finance industry".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this is a reaction to textbook Wall Street game-playing. A nice network of hedge managers went 5-6x on aapl, they sell it and bring the price down while "analysts" come up with all this bs about how Apple's record setting quarter doesn't meet their "expectations".

At the same time, I think Tim Cook has to be a little more vocal. It may not be the Steve Jobs way, but I think its ok talk to the press solely for the purpose of inspiring confidence in your company as opposed to waiting for product releases .</comment>


Programmer proverbs - <AUTHOR> http://futurice.com/blog/programmer-proverbs <comment><USER2> I'm actually a fan of the following proverbs. They are less pompous, and more humourous :

[http://theprofoundprogrammer.com/post/28552672458/text- maybe...](http://theprofoundprogrammer.com/post/28552672458/text-maybe-a- clean-build-will-fix-it)

[http://theprofoundprogrammer.com/post/30809835982/text- race-...](http://theprofoundprogrammer.com/post/30809835982/text-race- conditions-photograph-of-a-cheetah)

[http://theprofoundprogrammer.com/post/34818584135/text-do- no...](http://theprofoundprogrammer.com/post/34818584135/text-do-not-remove- photograph-of-the)

<comment><USER3> You aren't one of the authors over there, are you? I'd love to hang up a poster of the first link at my desk but the store is down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately I only agree with a handful of these particular proverbs. The set of proverbs that I've found are truly useful to programmers would be "The Zen of Python" (open a Python session and run `import this`)

The Zen of Python:

        Beautiful is better than ugly.
        Explicit is better than implicit.
        Simple is better than complex.
        Complex is better than complicated.
        Flat is better than nested.
        Sparse is better than dense.
        Readability counts.
        Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
        Although practicality beats purity.
        Errors should never pass silently.
        Unless explicitly silenced.
        In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
        There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
        Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
        Now is better than never.
        Although never is often better than *right* now.
        If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
        If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
        Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

<comment><USER5> These are some good maxims. But I have to be "that guy" and suggest that maxims and proverbs might not be the best ways to practice zen. I find that the more I memorize how i'm _supposed_ to do it takes me away from thinking about how I _could be_ doing it, with other people in mind.

There are some humorous/insightful koans from ESR, the Tao of Programming, the Codeless Code, etc. The best ones do not _tell you_ how to program; they open up your mind and let you discover the True Path. (They also sound more poetic, and programmers could seriously use more poetry in their lives)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Programming is about understanding with precision. Not about trying until it works.

I think you're talking about engineering, because programming is _definitely_ about trying until it works.

<comment><USER7> I think it's talking about people who don't know how to read code and discern what's happening and just end up tweaking things, cutting and pasting code, etc. just kind of crossing their fingers that it will work.

<comment><USER8> They also tend to be the ones who have only a superficial understanding of what their code/the language is doing, and to whom edge cases are an almost unknown concept. Those people would be well advised to apply the Feynman Algorithm more.

<comment><USER9> I think you might have misunderstand the Feynman Algorithm (alternative possibility, I misunderstood it).

My understanding of the Feynman Algorithm was that it was basically a joke by Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann was pointing out that no one else on earth (even himself, a Noble prize winner) could work the way Feynman did, the joke being that he only needed three steps: (1) Write down the problem. (2) Think real hard. (3) Write down the solution. It was about the absurd brilliance of Feynman, not intended as any sort of useful model to follow.

<comment><USER10> [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FeynmanAlgorithm](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FeynmanAlgorithm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Up there with those motivational pictures - banal, empty, of little use to anybody.

<comment><USER12> I was struck by how the backgrounds had utterly nothing to do with the verbiage. At least Despair.com strives for _some_ connection between image & words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favorites are:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." John Gall

"Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects." David Kelley

"It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it." Steve McConnell

And two quotes from the Agile Manifesto:

"Working software is the primary measure of progress."

"Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential."

[http://henrikwarne.com/2012/02/25/favorite-programming- quote...](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/02/25/favorite-programming-quotes/)

<comment><USER14> Add: Code is written for people to read 8196 times and machines to compile 2^0 times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15>
       1. Start with the answer, then work back.
       2. Don't repeat yourself. (DRY)
       3. Normalize the data. The process will follow.
       4. Isolate. Isolate. Isolate.
       5. It worked. You touched it. It doesn't work. It was you.
       6. Write for the next programmer, not the machine.
       7. If you don't hate your old code, you haven't grown enough.
       8. The first A/B test is your own.
       9. Focus on the microseconds & the nanaseconds take care of themselves.
      10. The fastest code is the code you don't write.
      11. The 2nd worst programmer is who wrote what you're maintaining.
      12. The worst programmer is the one who changes your code.
      13. Comments don't execute.
      14. The best technical co-founder is a code generator.
      15. The user never knows what they want until UAT.
      16. Fast. Cheap. Right. Choose 2.
      17. Perfect specs or rapid iterations. Choose 1.
      18. Start with "Hello World", then amend.
      19. Never deploy on Friday.
      20. Forget to unit test? That's a paddlin'.

<comment><USER16> > Don't repeat yourself. (DRY)

Beware the Share: [http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Beware...](http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Beware_the_Share)

It can bite you just as hard as DRY.

<comment><USER17> Really? I've never seen that happen in today's days of, well, maven.

<comment><USER16> I don't know your language's tooling, but I don't think that the decision of when to share code or not - (i.e. if it actually represents the same concept) is something that is solved by a specific tool, or is limited to a specific language.

<comment><USER17> I've never seen a problem that comes from code being shared, and I think that comes from maven getting the rules right:

* Releases are immutable

* Releases can only depend on releases

* Releases can only be made when all tests pass. Twice.

* The transitive dependency graph is a deterministic function of the config file; upstream changes cannot affect it

* Dependency versions are only updated by an explicit manual step

You never worry about "synchronizing" changes because other components can perfectly well depend on an old version of the library. You never accidentally break a downstream project, because everything's explicit. I have genuinely never seen the problems described in your link.

<comment><USER16> You are talking about binary compatibility and immutable dependencies. That's nice, but it's a different topic to the conversation that jerf and I are having about the semantics of shared code. I'm sure maven is good at what it does, but it's not completely relevant.

<comment><USER17> Fine, then let me put it this way: your initial claim in no way matches my experience. "Beware the Share" is bad advice; that wiki page is simply wrong. Factoring out common code is a good thing and will not bite you.

<comment><USER16> It's a wiki page, but it's also a book [1]. I have an actual paper copy, and I would highly recommend it. I've seen several of the authors give talks, most were good. Kevlin Henney (the Editor) was particularly so.

However I shall also treat the data from your deep experience with all due reverence.

1] [http://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Programmer-Should- Know/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Programmer-Should- Know/dp/0596809484/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424027969&sr=8-1&keywords=97+things+every+programmer+should+know)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here is one for to you add "Don't trust empty phrases on some random website".

</comment><comment><USER19> Jon Bentley's "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" pieces, collected in the _Programming Pearls_ book seem a lot better to me.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is some real pretty bullshit.

They read like horoscopes / fortune cookies.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The first symptom of stagnation is preference.

Love this one!

[EDIT]: I probably didn't understand it the same way. I read it as "don't have favourites, be open to new stuff"

<comment><USER22> It's quite dumb actually.

Having a preference means that you know all available options well, not that you think there are no better alternatives.

<comment> V-2 That stagnation / laziness is often disguised as preference doesn't mean that every sign of preference indicates stagnation.

<comment><USER23> Right, which is exactly why "The first symptom of stagnation is preference." is dumb. How do you tell the difference between "stagnation" and knowing the best tool for the job? What's that you say? It takes time and thinking beyond a pithy saying? Then why bother with the pithy saying?

<comment><USER24> Knowing the best tool for the job means that you pick different tools for different jobs. Having a (strong) preference means you pick the same tool if at all possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

[Source]([https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.c++/rYCO5yn4...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.c++/rYCO5yn4lXw/oITtSkZOtoUJ))

<comment><USER3> I don't know why, but I'm still consistently surprised that we have the ability to link to the obscure sources of well-known quotes from 24+ years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Actually hoped to see more true, but satirical, statements like: "It usually takes a long time to find a shorter way." or "Debugging software is the practice of removing bugs. Programming is the art of putting them in." Currently seems more like criticising a lecture.

<comment><USER27> Like this ? [http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis- alan/quotes.html](http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> See "The Klingon Programmer's Code of Honour" [http://www.klingon.org/resources/klingon_code.html](http://www.klingon.org/resources/klingon_code.html) \- First on the list:

      Specifications are for the weak and timid.

</comment><comment><USER29> Back in the days of Windows 3.11, in frustration, I coined one that so far has not gained any traction:

"that which can be configured must be configured"

Just like there are few people with IQ exactly 100, there are few users for whom all the default settings are appropriate. One has to review all config panels to be sure, and I have never done so without finding one critical default or another that was just plain problematic.

Lesson: make defaults clear, as few as possible, and all found in one place.

</comment><comment><USER30> One of my favourites: "I don't need to know how it works, or if it is secure, I just gem install it! Don't ask me, I'm just a web scale developer!"

</comment><comment><USER31> "Elegant, efficient, and effective code beats any argument."

The scary thing is, I know people who firmly believe that, even when the argument is on code correctness.

</comment><comment><USER32> I like this better: [http://programmingexcuses.com/](http://programmingexcuses.com/) (just press 'refresh')

<comment><USER33> This isn't serious, is it?

'The third party documentation is wrong' \- it's always right|?

'I haven't had any experience with that before' \- did I have experience with everything?

I really don't understand what this is getting at, if it's serious.

<comment><USER34> I think it's trying to say that the lazy programmer uses these excuses for why they failed/haven't made progress/have stopped working on something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not really a programmer proverb, but close enough and still pretty good.

Customer Disservice: "We're Not Satisfied Until You're Not Satisfied"

[http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/477940/Customer/](http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/477940/Customer/)

</comment><comment><USER35> My all time favourite:

 _There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies._

C. A. R. Hoare

</comment><comment><USER36> Most of these are horrible.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very schizophrenic.

</comment><comment><USER37> _Programming is about understanding with precision.

Not trying until it works

Unless you are working with Regex of course._

</comment><comment><USER38> Why do they have to be in Europe? :-(

<comment><USER39> Because we code too. What's the problem?

<comment><USER40> Homeboy wants a job but lives in the States.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Can you link to particular proverbs?</comment>


Ask HN: Service like compete.com that tracks total browser requests? - <AUTHOR>

With lots of mashups and facebook apps these days, looking at compete.com or alexa doesn't really give a complete picture of the traffic that an app serves.  For example, take the blog comment drop-ins like disqus and intensedebate.  No one goes to their .com sites, but they get tons of traffic.
Still, in most cases of these services, there is at least 1 client request back to the SaaS domain, and this could be used to gauge the level of traffic.
Anyone know of anything like this? <comment><USER2> How would that work, without access to server logs? There's no way for a 3rd party to track every request. One note: Alexa is getting better: "On April 16, 2008 many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released the new Alexa ranking system, claiming that they now take into account more data sources "beyond Alexa Toolbar users" [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Internet>]</comment>


Underscore's Scala books are now open source - <AUTHOR> http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2017/05/29/why-we-open-sourced-our-books.html <comment><USER2> Seriously, big thanks to Underscore for this. The Type Astronaut's Guide to Shapeless is amazing and I'd recommend it to anyone who is an intermediate Scala developer that wants to step up it's game.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious how up to date those books are with the latest version of Play/Slick, given how fast conventions move in those projects. The Play book seems to be from 2015, that sounds quite outdated.

<comment><USER4> I'm the author of the Play book. On the subject of that book...

There are only two significant things that are out of date. A minor tweak in the JSON library and the new DI system. The former is an easy fix. The latter will require a new chapter. I'm happy to chat to anyone who is interested in collaborating on these parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They should redirect to https if they are accepting payment / donations.

I've got the shapeless book and found it really good. Keen to read the Cats one now. Does anyone know where you can get a hard copy. ?

<comment><AUTHOR> No hard copies yet for the Cats book---it isn't quite finished. When it is finished we'll look at creating hard copy. If you sign up with a real email address you'll get updates.

As for https---that's something we'll have to look into. Not sure what the situation is but I thought the Gumroad popup was over https.

<comment><USER5> Ok, thanks Noel.

Oh I see, the popup is https...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a direct link to built PDFs somewhere, or do we have to go through the whole process of signing up to Gumroad and having the PDF emailed to us?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. At some point we'll just host them our website but we haven't had time to do that. You can use a fake email to sign up to Gumroad if you want. Otherwise you can build the books yourself, which just requires Docker and a few hours to download the massive Latex Docker image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations for the effort and contribution!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Hope you enjoy the books :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are these books also available as single page HTMLs?

<comment><USER9> yes, they are

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have bought Type Astronaut's Guide to Shapeless, which is excellent. Can't wait to read the Cats book!

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't have any use for the foreseeable future but I congratulate the effort and the contribution!

</comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome. Thanks guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great to hear it's useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> thanks, it is just in time for me, I'm looking for book about slick :)

<comment><USER14> A decent Slick book is desperately needed.

While the Slick documentation is accurate and nicely written it is _really_ slim. I honestly think the paucity of documentation is holding back wider adoption.

<comment><USER15> As a sometime contributor to the slick project, I think the "Essential Slick" book, that is one of those that has been open-sourced here, does fill a gap in the documentation. I've recommended it in the past and now I can just link to it. Big thank you to Underscore for doing this.

It's an easy read with good examples that helps you get to grips with the concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks a lot :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Scala kotlin war?

<comment><USER18> I think one can live with Kotlin. Scala is too obtuse and Clojure is just bad and pays a heavy performance penalty when interacting with Java due to internal usage of reflection if no type hints are used.

The only thing I'm missing in Kotlin are some metaprogramming facilities.

<comment><USER19> I'll bite: in what way is Scala obtuse?

<comment><USER18> > I'll bite: in what way is Scala obtuse?

(obtuse might be the wrong word; I'm not a native speaker)

In the small: [http://www.wartremover.org/doc/warts.html](http://www.wartremover.org/doc/warts.html) (individually nothing prohibitive, but the sheer amount of caveats is frightening)

In the large: things like binary compatibility breaking between releases (note that this is on a different level from standard library incompatibilities, which are expected); not sure if this is an issue any more, I have last used it around 2009/2010.

<comment><USER20> It's a style guide (and a static style checker), not a list of caveats. Mutable values are not a caveat. It's like referring to [http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/checks.html](http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/checks.html) as a list of frightening caveats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think giving away the books for free is good. However I just had a look and the courses ain't cheap. A good way to generate customers huh? The way I read your post it seemed that you guys were broke and needed a donation.

Hey if I got that wrong sorry in advance.

<comment><AUTHOR> "broke and needed a donation" \--> This is not the case, and we wouldn't open source the books if we wanted to make more money. I could talk more about this, as I think the business angle is interesting and on topic for HN, but I'm at a conference right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tiny update on this. So far today 3808 books have been downloaded and about $81 in donations have been made. In a normal day we'd sell less 4 or 5 books and make between $100 and $200.

<comment><USER22> Could you talk more about the business angle, if you get the chance?

I'm curious how you view selling vs giving away books and how it ties in to other revenue streams.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook doesn't delete photos when removed, seems to keep them indefinitely - <AUTHOR> http://photos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs102.snc1/5013_96426961157_709851157_2130600_2272342_n.jpg <comment><USER2> I'll look into what's happening, but in general it's expensive / complicated to delete from edge-caching CDNs.

If there is a photo that gets constant traffic, the edge caches will do their job of keeping it around. Poking around the Googles, it looks like this URL has been reposted a lot, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and will keep it around in cache.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=5013_96426961157_709851157_21...](http://www.google.com/search?q=5013_96426961157_709851157_2130600_2272342_n.jpg&hl=en&start=40&sa=N&filter=0)

<comment><USER3> So you can't _delete_ delete a picture if other people, who don't own it, like to look at it?

<comment><USER2> It's more complicated than that and I'm talking and about edge caches in general here, not for my employer. I once saw a Flickr employee (Cal Henderson?) pluck the original Ludicorp logo out of Yahoo's edge caches. That's not to mention ISP caches and proxies, third party image search, etc, that neither you, I, Akamai, nor Facebook control. I'll look into it and see what's going on in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recall reading that the way the images are stored (for efficiency's sake) makes their deletion difficult. This analogy may not be all that correct, but I think of them as part of an archive in a fashion where their removal means rewriting part if not all of the much larger archive.

This is probably too simplistic, but the information caused me to wonder whether it would be practical to overwrite them in-place with equivalently sized data that represent a pure white or black image containing no metadata (EXIF, etc.). Data traces might be left, e.g. file name, perhaps some indexing (are metadata indexed?), but the image itself would essentially be gone.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- ash1/hs343.ash1/29302...](http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- ash1/hs343.ash1/29302_402323907715_512377715_4145109_6943900_n.jpg) (this picture is to make a point, but it was just uploaded to FB then deleted, I think this guy has a point)

<comment><USER6> Hm, wasn't Facebook launched in 2004?

<comment><USER5> Exactly. I can put whatever date I want onto an image, thus we should view the duration here with skepticism, but this does appear to be an issue nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Facebook has talked about this before in their tech blogs or presentations, mentioning it was too expensive to actually run deletes the way they store things; and that it was actually "cheaper" and easier to just keep going and not look back.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's probably because of how they store image data. <http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919></comment>


A Fast Functional Algorithm to Generate Random Latin Squares - <AUTHOR> https://functional.works-hub.com/learn/a-fast-functional-algorithm-to-generate-random-latin-squares-9119b <comment><USER2> The article must have a clear section describing the algorithm and then a section describing the implementation. Otherwise it is difficult to understand the algorithm and the merits of the Scala implementation.</comment>


Introduction to Computer Science with Python [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://mit.edu/6.01/mercurial/spring11/www/handouts/readings.pdf

<comment><USER2> Some additional info I turned up on the MIT site for this course:

If you don't like Scribd: [http://mit.edu/6.01/mercurial/spring11/www/handouts/readings...](http://mit.edu/6.01/mercurial/spring11/www/handouts/readings.pdf)

 _Think Python, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist_ : <http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf>

Whiteboard Demos [videos]: <http://alawi.csail.mit.edu/~alawi/as3/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Alternately if you are really interested you can check the video lectures of many courses and subjects, some are old but hey basics are still the basics they never change :) [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Different set of topics than I expected. More engineering focused. Not a negative, by any means, nut the ToC is worth a look tom determine whether this will address one's particular needs.

<comment><USER5> Technically, this class is intro to CS and EE; almost a third, if not more, is spent on EE subjects, and students should know python before this class. 6.00 is a class that specifically teaches CS and python.</comment></comment>


HN, please help... My host just screwed me over - <AUTHOR>

I put 8 months of hard work (70+ hrs/week on average) into my app (my first startup) and just so happen to officially release it today... which had to be coincidentally the absolute WORST time to release it.
Without telling me, my host decided to perform a file system check (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsck) and so now my server is offline for a few hours.
An hour or two ago I began telling dozens of high priority potential clients to check it out... each of which could bring in thousands of dollars per month.  About 30 minutes ago I noticed the site was offline... and I'm pretty sure quite a few have tried to look at it since then.  None have responded.  And I'm afraid they've all gotten a bad first impression, and may never bother to check it out again.
I've sent them all messages informing them of the server maintenance and that it should be back up soon.  I'm planning on sending them all another message when it's back up.
This is absolutely infuriating.  It feels like 8 months of work just went down the drain because my dumbass host didn't telling me they were going to perform some maintenance.
What can I do to make sure I don't lose these clients? <comment><USER2> First of all, get a new server. It takes only a few minutes with most hosting providers. DNS updates will be a while to re-map but maybe your "old" provider can help you with a temporary redirection. Get this up and running as fast a possible, even if you use a temporary domain name. Go, do it. Now.

Then, the post game analysis. Server apocalypses happen. There is a deeper lesson here.

On the technical side, there are some things you can do to prevent this kind of failure. Running fsck for hours on a live server is really inexcusable both from a technical as well as a service point of view. Most small hosting providers simply rent some rack space, put in their standard Dell server unit and call it a day. This way lies madness, total data loss and possibly the early seeds of an anxiety disorder. I'd suggest you look into inherently redundant hosting offers (like MediaTemple's grid service) or some high- availability virtual hosting (like Amazon EC2).

But the core of the issue is unrelated to this technical stuff. Telling everyone at once was a mistake. There is a reason why most projects start out gradually, starting with a beta phase when everyone still has a lot of compassion for bugs and crashes. It's tempting to send invites to all possible contacts once you're finished, but it really has no upside because you're introducing a single point of failure. I'm not even talking about having only one server and no backup. In this case, the blitzkrieg launch date itself was that single point of failure. Even if the server hadn't crashed and burned, your app is very likely to still have bugs and kinks to work out. Bringing potential clients in one by one would have given you the opportunity to collect valuable feedback so you can show a more refined version to people who come in later.

When it comes to handling this issue from the CR side: don't send out apologies for the outage. Instead, check back with high-potential contacts in a few days and ask "did you have a chance to look at my new project?" and when they reply they couldn't access the server, invite them to try again and concede there were some outages but the problem is fixed now. My guess is, you'll be surprised how few people were actually affected and noticed that the server was gone.

In my opinion, it's unlikely that your bad luck actually ruined anything. Most people don't look at random invites in their mail right away. If they're really interested in the product and/or know you personally, they'll check back again later even if your site is offline at first. Interested people will still look at your stuff. Chances are, those candidates for your first mass invite will not even turn out to be your most valuable clients. Nothing is lost.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get another host immediately, put your app on it, use a subdomain or even a new domain if necessary (temporarily), send all your potential clients an explanation that your host did not tell you your server would be down but you've busted your butt to get it up on an alternate host, and give them the new link.

Then as soon as humanly possible, transfer your original domain to the new host and never use the host that screwed you ever again.

</comment><comment><USER4> Holy crap, I've never heard of such a thing. What kind of server plan are you on?..

</comment><comment><USER5> Ask your host to send them all an email explaining the issue and apologizing for it.

<comment><USER6> IMO, do not do this. To me (opinion), this seems like asking your mom to write you a note excusing something for school.

You're a big boy (or girl); take responsibility for the issue, because even though the most proximate cause of the outage wasn't within your control, the choice of host and choice of architecture are under your control.

If you tell the clients that there was a rare downtime event, that you are working with your technical team to understand and prevent a recurrence, they are less likely to think that's what they should expect if they host with you.

As a potential client, I'd rather hear that you take responsibility for ANY issue that happens to my site; passing blame to a third party ISP to make yourself look better today actually makes you look a little weasely IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You should check out Lightcrest, they provide high-availabilty hosting infrastructure - Amazon EC2 and Rackspace are incredibly expensive when you take into consideration steady-state load.

</comment><comment><USER8> Who is the host?

<comment><USER9> the lesson is more important here -> choose your host wisely.

<comment><USER8> 1\. I don't have a problem with my host and while I get the lesson part, why would that change anything in terms of me knowing who the host is.

2\. I'm still curious regardless of what the point is, who's the host?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stay positive. Two years from now your launch story will be gold: you'll have proven you can endure a challenge.

The app looks great. It's got great utility. Hang in there, just a minor glitch today.

</comment><comment><USER11> You tell them that your ISP is having unexpected system problems that took your site offline and that it will be back as soon as they fix it.

There's no need to be melodramatic about losing thousands of dollars per month; you haven't lost your work so nothing is "down the drain." No ISP runs fsck for no reason, in the middle of the day, without warning, nor as a matter of routine maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good lesson. I will be sure to have a backup hosting plan.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do you have an e-mail address? I think we can help you out - I run a managed hosting company and would like to offer you some help as a member of the HN community.</comment>


YouTube's struggles to shut down video of the New Zealand shooting - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/18/inside-youtubes-struggles-shut-down-video-new-zealand-shooting-humans-who-outsmarted-its-systems/ <comment><USER2> It should be available for those who really want to view it.

<comment><USER3> Nobody's stopping you from hosting it on your own server.

Private companies can choose not to spend their resources distributing this stuff or helping people find it.

<comment><USER4> New Zealand man, 22, arrested for allegedly distributing video of mosque shootings - ABC News - [https://abcnews.go.com/ABCNews/zealand- man-22-arrested-alleg...](https://abcnews.go.com/ABCNews/zealand- man-22-arrested-allegedly-distributing-video-mosque/story?id=61742270)

PM Jacinda Ardern asks public to not share video or manifesto from Christchurch shootings suspect | Stuff.co.nz - [https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/111327182/pm- jacinda...](https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/111327182/pm-jacinda- ardern-asks-public-to-not-share-video-or-manifesto-from-christchurch- shootings-suspect)

Teen accused of sharing a livestream of the Christchurch massacre faces 14 years as he's denied bail | Daily Mail Online - [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6820769/Teen- accuse...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6820769/Teen-accused- sharing-livestream-Christchurch-massacre-faces-14-years-hes-denied-bail.html)

<comment><USER3> Only relevant if @xfitm3 is a resident of New Zealand and subject to their Films Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been....odd.

Reddit completely banned two subreddits: r/gore and r/watchpeopledie, despite having been on the site for 7+ years (and mods claiming they did admin's bidding and banned NZ videos).

On top of that, there is some sort of media blackout on the 74-page manifesto the shooter supposedly wrote.

Someone shot 50 people, left a detailed explanation, and no one can find out why. Was he anti-immigrant, anti-semetic, disaffected of government... _no one knows._

I'm not a conspiracy guy, but if there is something that starts the mind racing it's an active, near-universal cover-up. What is going on?

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

<comment><USER4> I kind of understand video ban, not really the manifesto. Someone's analysis: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM2oWwNahEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM2oWwNahEA)

<comment><USER5> > understand video ban

Yeah, especially on YouTube. (Reddit is a cesspool; seems odd to suddenly have standards.)

> Someone's analysis

Thanks.

<comment><USER6> Reddit is trying to make money, get investors and better ads. It's. No mystery why they've been trying to clean house lately. I wonder when they'll realize that it's a lost cause?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google upgrading to Ext4, hires former Linux Foundation CTO - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/google-upgrading-to-ext4-hires-former-linux-foundation-cto.ars <comment><USER2> "Despite the fact that Ext4 adds a number of compelling features to the filesystem, T'so doesn't see it as a major step forward. He dismisses it as a rehash of outdated "1970s technology" and describes it as a conservative short-term solution. He believes that the way forward is Oracle's open source Btrfs filesystem, which is designed to deliver significant improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management."

-[http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/linux-collab...](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/linux-collaboration-summit-the-kernel-panel.ars)

Theodore Tso is the main developer of ext4 and numerous times he has said that it is simply another step forward, nothing new or remarkable, and that he believes that btrfs will be the implementation that really pushes the envelope for filesystems. Why is google moving to ext4? Why not wait/get involved with the development of btrfs? Does google know something about btrfs that nobody else does? If they want stability, why not just stay with ext2? I feel a lot of important facts are being left out of this advertised switch.

<comment><USER3> The main point of ext4 (and ext3) is that they are backwards compatible; you can use your existing on-disk layout. Google probably has a zillion disks that they can't just reformat.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should i stay as a freelancer or start an agency - <AUTHOR> I run a successful freelancing business, i have enough work to keep me busy, and even more work than i can handle. As it stands my work has no expenses, and my country encourages businesses that bring in foreign currency, so i'm exonerated from any sort of tax. Been thinking lately of starting my own agency, hire a few people rent a big office... the whole nine yards.
I'm used to keeping 100% of my income, but if starting an agency will help me grow, i don't mind making the change. I'll still be exonerated from tax, but i'll have office rent, employees payments...
What do you think? Should i make the change? And why yes, or no! <comment><USER2> To me, tax status isn't really a prime consideration. The big consideration is whether or not running a company is an attractive replacement to doing the technical work. The principal of an agency is responsible for the care and feeding of the beast. That means the primary activities are attracting and retaining clients; attracting and retaining staff; and billing and collecting revenue.

It's not twelve hour days at the keyboard. It's dinner meetings and human resource management.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can make any change you want, you're the boss after all. But if you're currently seeing 'more work than you can handle' I'd suggest a quick road to an improvement is to simply raise your prices until you start seeing some rejects based on price.

That way you can make a higher jump-off point in case you do decide to go the agency route.

Good luck, whatever you choose!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mate. And i do realize that i can make any change i want, i just wanted to hear your inputs. Its a big decision to make, and i wanted to be well informed before i make it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Agree that you can start raising your prices. If you know someone that does exactly what you do, and you trust the quality of the work, as a first step, you could start passing work to a second person, then add a third, things going well, rent some desk space, add fourth person, rent a small office...or work remotely and keep the overhead down. Comes down to how you want to spend your time.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would test the waters with a contract employee first and have them work remote.

If you build a small remote team and things are going well you could think about an office.

You could even run an agency style business with remote employees as contractors so you don't have to do payroll or have the expense of an office. If most of your clients are remote I would avoid the expense of an office. Unless you chase local work and need a place for meetings and to show off the team.

Good luck expanding your business.

<comment><USER6> I don't think remote subcontractors are a good plan to start with.

The main challenge when moving from a single freelancer to an agency is not the salary payments, but becoming the manager responsible for other people's work.

* The entire point of starting an agency is taking on more, larger projects. This means more discussions, negotiations and planning with clients.

* With more than yourself working on the project, suddenly you need to start communicating and planning among the developers. You need to start estimating the complexity and time required based not on your own, but other people's skills and experience.

* You take the risk of having to deliver the project to the customer on time and on budget even if your employees or contractors fail you.

* You take the risk of paying out to employees or contractors, even if the client does not pay you.

This means that you need to dedicate a significant portion of your time to "management" rather than billable work. Even with a part-time remote contractor, all these issues are present, and you will get less rather than more work done at first.

All friends who I have seen starting successful agencies have used the "partnership of 2-3 freelancers in one office" as the starting point. You work together daily, so that you can quickly solve any planning and estimation issues. You work as partners not employees/subcontractors, and take the risk of not getting paid equally.

Once that partnership is going smoothly, then you can start scaling out by hiring employees or subcontractors. Having 2-3 senior, trustworthy people is important for that - then you can afford to split risks, split management overhead, and cover for each other when someone goes on holiday or sick leave. Doing it alone is _very_ difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Regardless of field, the smart advice I've repeatedly heard and that I pass on is that, when you become a small business owner, you take on _two_ jobs.

Once, the service you are providing. Two, running the business.

You should -- you _need_ to -- think of them as two separate, full-time jobs.

I've repeatedly watched people, including family members, struggle with this. And failure to understand and plan for it, going in, and to address it pro- actively on an ongoing basis, seems to be a primary reason for business failure, here in the U.S.

If you know some people who have done what you're considering, who you think are genuinely smart, making a success of it, and whom you trust, have some honest conversations with them.

I also like jacquesm's alternative of raising prices, particularly if you like the work itself more than the idea of expanding into being an employer.

</comment><comment><USER8> I second what others have said about raising rates. If you have more work than you can handle after that, then starting an agency will be easier.

The other issue is what do you like doing more? If you like human resources, project management, and sales, then an agency might be great for you. If you prefer computer work, then maybe just stick with solo. The types of tasks you do to be very successful in each role are quite different.

</comment><comment><USER9> Depends what you want. I'd personally prefer to grow by developing a product rather than selling people's time. I imagine in most cases it is more scalable and profitable. Is there a common denominator to the work you do which you can turn into a SaaS?

</comment><comment><USER10> May i ask what country you are in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tunisia

<comment><USER11> please, can you tell us more about working remotely as a developer out of tunisia? great to hear exporting businesses are tax exempt. how is the internet connectivity?</comment></comment></comment>


The best cities to get ahead are often the most expensive places to live (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/11/why-its-so-hard-for-millennials-to-figure-out-where-to-live/382929/?utm_source=SFFB&single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is not a paradox, it's one of the best known axioms of economics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent)

The key driver is that land values rise when earnings rise. You can't move land, so there is set amount of it within commutable distance of these cities. Also, each bit is in a unique location relative to all the other bits, so every bit of land is either better or worse than the others in terms of your earning potential when you live there. Close to the centre = cheaper and quicker commuting, whereas further out means more expensive and slower. Buying or renting a bit of it to live on is always an auction, so the best bits (where you earn most) are won by those who those who feel it's worth paying extra to get them (because they are the ones who earn the extra income by living there).

In this way, if wages rise, then the maximum bid that a person can justify paying in order to live in that city rises, and therefore property is more expensive.

This is not a free market, BTW. Land is monopoly.

<comment><USER3> > This is not a paradox, it's one of the best known axioms of economics: > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent)

I wish more people understood this principle, because so many superficial economic "analyses" I see in the news completely ignore it.

By the way, you're giving the example of physical land, but the general form actually applies to property ownership of any form. (That is, the rent on any property will rise to be equal to the surplus that the renter receives from it, after accounting for transaction costs. In the long run, the property owner is always able to claim all of the surplus from the renter.)

<comment><USER4> _Landlords grow richer in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title._ \-- John Stuart Mill

> In the long run, the property owner is always able to claim all of the > surplus from the renter.

Which to me is what's broken about land and other natural resources as private property. If the spirit and intent of a free market is to reward people for working hard, for innovation, and for solving problems, then this is the opposite. It rewards people for just sitting on their wealth. That a finite sum of money can buy you an infinite source of income is antithetical to free market principles.

> This is not a free market, BTW. Land is monopoly.

The only mitigating factor is property taxes, which as a stand-in for ground rents that geolibertarians and Georgists argue for. By the way, the latter are the more honest of the libertarians, as most other schools of libertarianism especially the popular form continually consider property taxes theft.

I wish more libertarians understood the Matthew Effect as well as they did supply and demand.

<comment><USER5> For other readers (I assume you've read it or are aware of it), I really highly recommend at least skimming Progress and Poverty by Henry George [PDF: [http://www.henrygeorge.org/pdfs/PandP_Drake.pdf](http://www.henrygeorge.org/pdfs/PandP_Drake.pdf)]

It's mindblowing in its simplicity and how obvious it is in retrospect. Essentially that rent, so private land ownership, is the root cause of the persistence of poverty despite huge growth in production and capital. He goes on to make fairly strong (albeit polarizing) ethical arguments for the abolition of private land ownership and so on.

Easy to read, pretty entertaining, and eye opening.

<comment><USER6> abolishing private land ownership has problems -- who decides how the land gets used? Ownership enables execution.

Property taxes are a way to recover some rent from the property owner, while still enabling the independent decision making that capitablism relies on for its productive success

<comment><USER7> I haven't read George's original works, but his philosophy allows for private ownership of land - it's just that the 'rent' of the land - the value derived solely from e.g. its location - will be taxed at a very high rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who's lived in both the Dayton and San Francisco areas, I have to say: SF has a lot more going on and might be my choice if I were still single. But with a family, I'm a lot happier living in the Dayton area now.

It helps that my mortgage here it ~1/2 of what rent was in the bay area (and ~1/4 of what I would have paid for a smaller place in SF proper.)

Of course, the big differentiator in my case is that with working in software, I can work remote - I've spent more time working for California companies from Ohio than from California.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who is trying to convince my girlfriend about why living outside the south for at least a few years is necessary to get a good career start, this article is invaluable. I wish it were the case, but the good jobs (particularly technology-related jobs) unfortunately don't happen to be evenly spread over the United States.

<comment><USER10> This applies for jobs outside of technology, but the unfortunate part my household is finding out is that even if you get a name brand institution on your resume, moving to an area with very scarce jobs like most areas in the South outside an international airport means your credentials don't matter perhaps as much as your last name because the tier of jobs you're looking for with a solid middle class job is the .1%er jobs of big cities equivalently.

<comment><USER11> Your exclusion of cities containing international airports seems odd to me. You're excluding most major cities. You're basically saying there aren't many solid middle class jobs in the rural areas of the South. I think it's generally true, outside of the South as well, that urban areas have more middle class jobs.

I'm not trying to invalidate whatever experience you and your household are having.

I'm just saying there are tons of tech jobs in the South. Many Southern cities are in the top 25 cities/metro areas for software jobs, e.g., Austin, TX; the DC suburbs in VA and MD; Jacksonville, FL; Raleigh, NC. And while they typically don't show up on lists, I know first hand that cities like Mobile, AL; Huntsville, AL; Tampa, FL; Richmond, VA; Nashville, TN; Knoxville, TN and Atlanta, GA have healthy tech sectors as well.

I find it mildly ridiculous when people act like you can't find a good programming job outside of West Coast / Chicago / Boston / NYC.

<comment><USER10> All of those places have international airports except Knoxville, Richmond, Tampa, and Alabama. My point is mostly about having sufficient population density that an international airport is justifiable for the region, and that spurs sufficient mass of _high quality_ information-centric jobs rather than primarily jobs low on the capitalist value chain. To further elaborate and simultaneously move the fence posts (but was part of my snarky intent) is that the tech jobs that are in these places aside from mobile software are almost always ones people on HN overwhelmingly do not want. These jobs are disagreeable from either an ideological perspective (defense, oil) or ambitious career perspective (industry-specific CMS apps, subcontracting support / maintenance on legacy applications, outsourced enterprise J2EE development, IT).

To me, the equivalent of "there's tech jobs all over the place in the US" is "there's jobs all over Craigslist, why are you complaining about lack of jobs?" Trust me when I say that most of the jobs I've seen outside areas with strong tech sector presence are likely not very good "tech" jobs. There's absolutely exceptions, but they are oases in the Sahara desert to me.

<comment><USER11> I agree that population density is the key point. The South inarguably has lower population density overall, but my point is there are plenty of urban areas dense enough to have healthy tech sectors with "good tech jobs".

I live in Virginia. I lived in Alabama for a long time. I have friends who are good, solid developers living throughout the Southeast using technologies like Ruby on Rails, Go, Clojure, Node.js, Elastic Search, Cassandra/Spark, etc. Sure, some are consulting gigs, but plenty are startups. And none are for ideologically-questionable industries, unless you include NASA in defense.

My "anecdata" does not disprove what you're saying, but your statement doesn't mean much to me when you add qualifiers like "outside areas with strong tech sector presence." Sure, you're going to have fewer options for jobs in rural areas, but isn't that true everywhere?

In other words, the South has lower population density overall, but it still has areas of high population density, i.e., cities. And in my experience, the jobs in the Southern cities are no worse than jobs in other cities. You can find smart people using new exciting technology to solve interesting problems all over the South.

<comment><USER10> I think we agree overall, just some nuances and me being a pompous jerk.

The people that _make_ node.js, ES, Cassandra, Clojure, etc. are not in these areas so much - plenty of _users_ of technology all over the world (pretty sure South Africa has RoR users and Arduino hackers). Compared to the relative population sizes of these metro areas to, say, just SF and NY (let's exclude Seattle and even Boston) there is a clear and obvious _lack_ of comparable companies like those making OSes, databases, compilers, etc. in the Southeast (the Northwest is overweight considering how few people live there compared to the rest of the country). Integration is pretty common, and that's one of the areas of software that is kind of plug and chug and mostly innovative in a business sense rather than technology. For relative population sizes counting, we should have one company in the Southeast like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. But there just isn't. Heck, Zappos is in Vegas but they were _moved_ there last I remember (but is Zappos a tech company? I dunno actually).

But I must insist on distinguishing between companies that make revenue from tech and companies that use tech to make revenue, and that this business driver creates major differences in the distribution and attractiveness of job opportunities available for tech folks. It's the difference between the very typical non-tech companies that outsource all their software development for key products to the South for cost reasons while their sales folks and executives' families stay in the Bay Area and those that are paying $400k+ in comp packages for world-class Javascript developers they scour from all over the world.

I'd like to pull some hard numbers, but laziness prevails here. Searching through jobs before in the past before I moved between the West and Southeast, your boring J2EE job is 80% of the software jobs in software in the Southeast, but it's maybe only 30% of the jobs in the Bay Area. The mere presence of good software jobs (and middle class jobs) is not what I'm debating though but the relative number, and that (the real questionable assertion to me) that this spills over to lack of _other_ middle-class jobs in comparison that are also related to the capitalist value chain.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think you're right. You make a good point about there being plenty of _users_ of interesting tech everywhere, but the _creators_ of interesting tech are rarely in the Southeast. I can't think of any big players really.

To be fair to you, I was partially responding to a general attitude I find on HN that if you're not on the West Coast, then you're clearly not a real/good/respectable software developer – which is _not_ what you were saying.

And I'm probably somewhat biased by the awesomeness of my little town (Charlottesville, VA), which has interesting startups like VividCortex (creating awesome DB monitoring tools using Golang), RoomKey (since purchased but started here as a Clojure shop), Center for Open Science (creating frameworks and doing cool stuff in Python), etc. And people in my circle are committers to Elastic Search, Kafka, etc., but I acknowledge that's uncommon.

<comment><USER10> There's a fair chance I met you at a meet-up in the DC area, which smaller professional communities can be good for. I'm familiar with VividCortex and met a few engineers up there at DevOps DC. When there's less companies, it's easier to form tighter bonds and there's less chance for negative competition like in much denser areas of competing professionals.

Charlottesville, VA is a sort of Sunnyvale, CA in my mind - it's about the same mental distance as the craziness going on in the real urban area up north of it, and it has some history with some access to capital (UVA / William & Mary alumni really). Heck, I considered moving there but I consider it still tough for local jobs without the relative drop in cost of living. Granted, where I moved it sunk potential income harder, but the even lower cost of living is critical when bootstrapping companies, and cheap craft beer is a perk few areas where you can buy a great house for under $200k can claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it a paradox? It makes sense if you think about it. If you are in a city that is very good for moving up, then you will make more money. Then homeowners can sell their houses for more money and property owners can charge higher rent. If you are in a city with little opportunity for moving up, then you won't be able to afford to pay higher prices for housing, so homeowners and property owners will be forced to lower their prices to make a sale or land a tenant.

<comment><USER13> I agree with this, but I don't think that it accounts for everything. For example, my experience in Denver is that wages are below national average, but cost of living is much higher. The consensus that gets spouted here is that the _opportunity_ to live _near_ the mountains is great enough to offset whatever monetary discrepancy there is.

<comment><USER14> Denver has traditionally been very close to the national average for cost of living, and also has average wages (much lower on both fronts than, say, San Francisco.)

In the last 3 years or so, rents have gone up largely because laborers who can't find work in other cities have been able to find work in or near Denver, driving up demand for housing while simultaneously driving down average wages. This is slowly being alleviated as new housing is being built, but it'll be a few more years before an equilibrium is reached.

<comment><USER13> I guess it's all a matter of perspective. I don't think that comparing anywhere to San Francisco yields many meaningful results, though. It's pretty much an outlier no matter how you look at it.

I would hazard to say that the legalization of pot has more to do with these troubles than anyone wants to admit to. It draws in people who subscribe to that lifestyle from a huge surrounding area (increasing demand for housing and supply of labor).

I'm not sure that equilibrium is really something that is in the cards here, anyway. The job market is just one piece of the puzzle, and the horrific city planning isn't doing anyone any favors.

Needless to say I'm aggressively looking for other places to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Minneapolis/St.Paul MN is right in the sweet spot. Tons of really good jobs out here, plenty of reasonably affordable and interesting housing in the sub/urban areas. Good education system, great music scene.

There are some downsides of course, the winters of course and there are some racial social issues (not addressing here to avoid derailing thread).

With all that being said I am looking to add some good software devs to my green field project at a very big local player in the medical insurance field.

<comment><USER16> It's also strangely in that sweet spot of big city that you have to drive everywhere in. It's in the top couple good case studies of mid-20th century American urban planning.

I mean, that light rail system is just, man. It's no wonder the Twin Cities are (one of) the most bike friendly cities in the country -- if you're not driving somewhere it's the only other way to reliably get where you're going in reasonable time :)

<comment><USER17> Except, ya know, during the 6 months of winter :)

<comment><USER18> It's even more reliable then, compared to public transit. I think we have one of the largest winter commuting populations in the country. The down side is the trails get plowed last, after the roads and highways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Actually this is the same conclusion usually associated with richer kids being more successful. "The best kids to get ahead are often the richest".

</comment><comment><USER20> My solution to this problem was to find a remote job.

<comment><USER21> That's simply not solving the problem. Yes, you get the money, but you're not getting all of the benefits of living in a major hub. You're missing the times you meet a valuable contact on the train, or at a house party, the free or cheap events and seminars, the chances to see someone important in your field and ask them questions directly. And that's not including all the non-business benefits of living in a socioeconomic hub: good places to eat, public art, etc.

Certainly it might be worthwhile to trade all that for lower rent, but don't think you're getting the same thing for less money. You aren't.

<comment><USER22> I do the remote-thing from Louisville, KY. There has never been a moment that I feel like I'm missing out on the non-business benefits. I've gone to more concerts, plays, excellent restaurants, operas here than I've ever gone when I was living in one of the trendy coastal cities. This is directly related to having more disposable income.

Networking opportunities are less, certainly. There are plenty seminars, workshops, and what have you to keep up technically, but there are no big name companies or famous practitioners around. Few SW engineering companies, but decent amount of industries requiring developers.

There is undoubtedly a trade-off, but I am not wholly convinced that choosing the high cost/high opportunity trade-off is necessarily the best one. Personally, I felt like I drank the kool-aid a little too much when living in Sodosopa.

<comment><USER23> Do you miss interacting with your coworkers in person? That is one thing I feel like I would miss, and I am talking about both people that I work with directly and those that I don't.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I do. I go work on site a few times a year, for a couple of weeks each time. That helps rekindling contacts. Frequent webcam and an open chatbox help too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This paradox sounds like what my Canadian friends describe Vancouver BC as.

The house prices on the west part of Vancouver are more than $1.5M CAD for a single family home, but the average salary is around $60-70k. There is almost no real industry in Vancouver, except for tourism, and some people that work in HQ for mining companies, etc, so there isn't enough actual high-wage earners to afford paying those preposterous prices.

And yet the house prices keep going up. Everyone says it's mainland Chinese coming in a driving up the prices, but that's what they've been saying since the 1980s, so it can't be true.

<comment><USER25> A system like that is very easy to counter. If residents are truly not the ones buying property, they can simply vote for stringent renters protection, and liberal squatting laws. That will quickly dry up the market for foreigners buying property and letting it sit there.

<comment><USER26> Land value taxes would be more useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I spent the summer in Provo, UT (45 mins south of Salt Lake) and what I saw impressed me. Lots of development, lots of tech companies, low housing costs, low crime, low density. Also of the few cities in the world that have Google fiber, Provo is one of them.

Some drawbacks: only a little public transit infrastructcure, community has high percentage of mormons, strict laws on drinking.

Overall though there's a lot to like about it. If I had the money to invest in real estate, I would be looking in that area first, since I suspect that the place will boom within the next decade.

<comment><USER28> I wonder if a boom would bring a change in some of the issues that many people find less desirable (ie. drinking laws).

Part of why the Bay Area sees the demand it does is not just because of jobs, but because of the combination of great weather, great food/drink, lots to due in the area, and a highly liberal bent.

Those things would likely outlast any sort of future tech bubble popping (if we are indeed in another one).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The "Top 10 Cities for Social Mobility, Ranked by Affordability" graph suggests that the affordability drop is extremely sharp, but as we can see from the "Percent of Homes Millennials Can Afford vs. Social Mobility" graph, Absolute Mobility remains fairly steady for a number of cities beyond the top 10 cities. Cutting off at the top 10 makes the affordability vs mobility tradeoff seem more severe than it is.

</comment><comment><USER30> Would you expect the same pattern to be prevalent in other international tech hubs such as Berlin vs. London or Tel Aviv, for example?

</comment><comment><USER31> I would love to see a much more granular look at the data.

Particularly another source that maps affordability against social mobility to see if there are smaller communities that sit in the sweet spot but were maybe too influenced by proximity to another market. But maybe just the original data sets. Curious if anyone has some tips on where to find that?

<comment><USER32> The first author of the original cited work makes some of the data available on his group's website: [http://www.equality-of- opportunity.org/index.php/data](http://www.equality-of- opportunity.org/index.php/data)

<comment><USER31> Very helpful, thank you for this

</comment></comment></comment><comment> r-w The third chart should have been a scatter plot, not a sorted line graph—which isn't actually a thing, since you're just plotting scatter plot data sorted by one variable and not the other, and connecting the dots for whatever reason.

</comment><comment><USER33> I live in Minneapolis right now and we have tons of jobs and the cheapest housing ever. The graph is true!

<comment><USER34> Can you tell me any names of companies to look at for applying or websites/resources/organizations where I might find names? I'm interested in checking the city and its opportunities out.

<comment><USER33> BestBuy, Allianz, Thompson Reuters, UnitedHealthGroup, Optum, Cargill, 3M, Target, Oracle, Wells Fargo, USBank.

Also check out the Nerdery. They are hiring, based in Bloomington.

google "minnetonka minnesota companies" for more. All of the big ones are either in minnetonka, hopkins, eden prarie, or downtown minneapolis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stop using "Millenials" in titles.

<comment><USER36> Can you suggest a better term that would enable a speaker to convey a generally identifiable demographic?

<comment><USER37> Postgrads

Youth / Young workers

Entry level? (Though I still don't see enough of this to actually feed the demand for experienced developers of X).</comment></comment></comment>


Shape-Shifting Mobile Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130428230421.htm

<comment><USER2> This has a ton of potential. I can't wait to see this kind of thing take off.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> the paper: <http://www.anneroudaut.fr/papers/roudaut_chi13b.pdf></comment>


Why the Unemployment Rate Has Become a Bad Joke - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/41583533

<comment><USER2> It's pretty easy to measure some form of unemployment by the number of people receiving unemployment benefits. Does anyone have any idea how they estimate the number of people sidelined like in the article that have simply dropped out of the workforce and stopped looking for jobs because it's so bad?</comment>


Ask HN: OS X tips/tricks/must knows for developers?  - <AUTHOR>

Anyone have links to any resources that helped improve your workflow and understand of OS X? I just ordered a retina 15" MBP and I want to get familiar with it. <comment><USER2> I've found the 'OSX' tag on Apple.StackExchange to be helpful with discovering what you're talking about.

[http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/osx](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/osx)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I've found a few really good threads. What should I search for on HNSearch to final previous discussions about this? I can't find much but I'm sure someone has asked before.</comment></comment>


Singapore witnesses the rise of the entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.themalaymailonline.com/money/article/without-fuss-or-fanfare-singapore-witnesses-the-rise-of-the-entrepreneur?platform=hootsuite <comment><USER2> The biggest problem I see in Singapore is that regulations are directed at making startups hire locals. Aside from strict quotas, there are also rules about not being able to underpay _or_ overpay foreign talent. This means paying 5k/month for a programmer can often be deemed "overpaying" and the application gets rejected. This is a problem because you can't make a top-tier tech hub on Singporeans alone.

Even Silicon Valley wouldn't be Silicon Valley if it only employed Americans as early employees either. Just look at all the Indians who were early Google employees, Jan Koum of Whatsapp, the Canadian team behind Flickr and Slack.

The US immigration system is deeply flawed and hurts the tech ecosystem. Singapore has a golden opportunity to compete on this axis, but it isn't.

[https://www.techinasia.com/talk/dark-side-tech- development-s...](https://www.techinasia.com/talk/dark-side-tech-development- singapore)

[http://sbr.com.sg/hr-education/news/singapores-new-hiring- ru...](http://sbr.com.sg/hr-education/news/singapores-new-hiring-rules-target- foreign-professionals)

[https://www.quora.com/How-does-a-Singapore-based-startup- hir...](https://www.quora.com/How-does-a-Singapore-based-startup-hire- overseas-talent)

<comment><USER3> My startup was actually incubated by the writer of that first article you linked. I agree with his points.

I fear the truth is that it's simply hard to hire good talent from overseas when you have limited funds anyway. This goes back to the larger issues of limited investor risk appetite and difficult market conditions/access.

Personally I've seen fellow startups try to hire foreign developers, and successfully get approvals from the government (yup it's troublesome), and then the developers decide not to come to Singapore after all, or come but don't perform to par. You can't mitigates risks like these without significant cash in the bank (which only the top-funded startups have).

My chosen alternative was to hire remotely and not muck around with approval from government, which also meant benefiting from lower market salaries in cheaper countries. It's taken a lot of filtering of employees, but things are going fine so far. This approach won't work for everybody, of course.

All that said, I do think the core issue holding Singapore startups back is the market size/access thing. It leads to most of the other issues, including startups' inability to pay for skilled developers. Looser government regulations on employment by startups would help somewhat, but it might not change the outcome significantly.

<comment><USER4> > it's simply hard to hire good talent from overseas when you have limited > funds anyway

Interesting you mention that. I applied for a JavaScript job in Singapore and expressly mentioned that I don't want a Google-esque salary, just something I can live by in Singapore. I would even pay for my own relocation expenses, I said.

They flat-out told me "Sorry, locals first."

<comment><USER3> Sorry to hear that. I guess that company thought it could get a local developer of sufficient calibre. It's more administratively troublesome to hire a foreigner, so some companies ask for citizens/permanent residents only. Did the job ad specify that?

You'll probably have better luck applying to larger, foreign tech firms based here, if you still want to come. They'll have a process in place for hiring foreigners.

<comment><USER4> There really wasn't an ad for the job. They mentioned on their website that they always welcome applications from motivated programmers. But as I said the subsequent email exchange with them went nowhere. In the end I went to work for a startup in a somewhat less glittery Southeast Asian city (KL).

This all happened a couple of years ago. In the meantime I'm back in Europe. These days I see a lot of job ads originated from SG so maybe I will try again, and this time with more luck :)

I didn't want to apply to a large multinational because I was looking for a vibrant and small startup environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's not much new here for anyone who's already read an article or two on Singapore's startup scene. My view as a local startup founder is, it's not as rosy as one would expect for a city of burgeoning startups:

\- Singapore startups face the big difficult of a tiny domestic market (5m people) and a fragmented regional market (10+ different countries). To expand, you have to localise to multiple different languages and market environments. Entrepreneurs don't have exposure to the problems & conditions of these foreign markets, making it harder to find scalable opportunities.

\- Therefore, the ideas that stand a good chance of success are mass-market, possibly copycat ones, not technologically innovative ones like one would find in SF or Boston. We don't have too many high-value niches here.

\- The winning exceptions are startups that target a globally integrated market, e.g. gaming products (Razer) or web services (Zopim). If you can sell to the world (or very large markets) instead of struggling to penetrate many small markets, you're golden. Israel has been a leader in this regard.

\- There's a lack of exits because most startups struggle to gain huge reach in such a fragmented region. Plus, monetisation can be a problem in the poorer countries.

\- Angel investors are therefore more cautious and mostly take small or less risky bets. Which encourages entrepreneurs to focus on more mass-market, less innovative ideas. It's hard to build a Google without a wide-ranging and risk- taking investor network as exists in Silicon Valley.

\- The government's general support for startups is a bright spot, but a startup's success general depends on whether they manage to expand overseas and build their partner/investor network. Those are high barriers for most startups.

A small market can't support that many competing ideas anyway, so as Dr Theseira says in the article, _"Entrepreneurs should make sure that they are valuing their own time appropriately when making the decision to become an entrepreneur or when they are considering whether to remain or exit from an industry."_

</comment><comment><USER5> I spent some time in Singapore. The startup ecosystem has critical pitfalls and successes.

There is a lot of money (Government and private), accessible accelerators, mentors, and business ecosystem support. Taxes are low and registering a business can take only 1 day. [1]

But the ecosystem lacks genuine technological development and experimentation. Most startups I saw were ineffective copies of semi-successful American startups. My entrepreneurial friends there lambasted their friends' desire for stable careers at the expense of creative engineering.

If anything, it'll become a home first for lifestyle entrepreneurs. It's a lovely place to live, it's easy to start a business, and may become a great 3-year "start a business for fun" destination for expats.

However, Singapore has top-tier scientific institutions (NUS in particular) and the government is ruthless in attracting talent internationally. [2] This may be a good sign for proprietary science startups.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Is-starting-a-business-in-Singapore- di...](https://www.quora.com/Is-starting-a-business-in-Singapore-difficult) [2] [http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/three-top- singaporean-...](http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/three-top-singaporean- scientists-coming-home)

<comment><USER6> >If anything, it'll become a home first for lifestyle entrepreneurs. It's a lovely place to live, it's easy to start a business, and may become a great 3-year "start a business for fun" destination for expats.

It's not that great for that either. Property rents/prices are sky high and cars are all but unaffordable except for the very wealthy.

If you're location independent you might as well pick somewhere with a lower cost of living.

Added to which, the ease of starting a business is something of a trap. You can only go so long before creating some jobs for locals which isn't so much fun if you want to keep your lifestyle business small.

<comment><USER7> >>Added to which, the ease of starting a business is something of a trap. You can only go so long before creating some jobs for locals which isn't so much fun if you want to keep your lifestyle business small.

What do you mean by starting up a business being a trap?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I lived in Singapore for 15 years. I founded a startup in the US, and we ended up opening an Ops and Sales office in Singapore.

Being +12 hours ahead of NYC, it worked out great for us to get to 24x7. Back in 2008 it was easy for us to bring in foreign talent (both from the region and from the US), and we built a great team there.

It's much tougher now, for foreign startups that want to hire foreigners there. Quotas and salary thresholds to get visa approval are much higher.

Why did we want to hire foreigners instead of locals in the first place? Definitely both educational and cultural. Educational: I can relate to this since I went to a Singapore school for a while and the only thing they cared about were your test scores. You really weren't encourage to think; just memorize stuff. It was awful. Cultural: there was a bit of a stigma working for a small scrappy startup, good candidates always wanted to go work for a large multinational bank. This was much more extreme than in the US.

Overall, it's changing for the better. The Singapore government is actually super competent, and this problem isn't lost on them. Hopefully it will change quickly and Singapore will have a better local start up scene over time.

<comment><USER9> >Quotas and salary thresholds to get visa approval are much higher.

In Singapore, this is partly (or more than partly) due to a strong, rising anti-foreigner attitude that has caused much formal protests from the locals. The government has allowed the free hire of foreigners to take the nation to a point where nearly half the population is from other countries, and this has finally weighed thin on the others.

It's certainly not a unique problem: many nations (certainly the U.S. included) are having problems convincing the locals that foreigners/immigrants can be a good thing for the society. But it's up to that society to decide.

I lived in Singapore for several years and enjoyed many parts of it, but I agree that global success for any company based there would absolutely require foreign talent.

The last 2 years in particular have seen a significant change in the government's open-arms strategy for foreigners to work there, and it is now much harder indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >we have not yet seen many successful exits that are typically seen in mature ecosystems such as Silicon Valley.

This doesn't surprise me. Singapore provides tons of cash for new startups but the quality of the talent just... isn't that great. If your startup requires creative, detail oriented professional work (e.g. a developer), good talent isn't easy to come by.

This isn't really the fault of Singaporeans per se, it's just the nature of how the society has shaped them. Compulsory military service and test-driven schooling engenders this type of attitude at a subconscious level and on top of that, pay scales are way out of whack - you'll get paid more as an average manager as you will as a really good developer.

The successful businesses in Singapore that I've noticed tended to be rather blatant imitations of other businesses and a lot of the failures tended to be cargo cultish SV wannabes.

Added to which, the local market is tiny and the regional market is highly fragmented.

<comment><USER10> Do you think it would be possible, and if so a good idea, for foreign talent to form startups in Singapore targeting foreign markets?

<comment><USER6> No, since you'll have to maintain a proportion of local employees in order to keep your business there. Most companies I had dealings with ran up against this limit all the time.

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify, the proportion-of-local-employees isn't really a problem if you're mostly hiring programmers. Programmers generally come in under Employment Passes, which there's no official quota on. The main issue is the wait time and the uncertainty of approval.

The businesses that run up against the limit are those that hire lower-pay foreigners, which the government doesn't want to encourage anyway. For tech/innovation-driven startups, the limit shouldn't be a barrier.

@sjogress: It makes sense to start a company in Singapore if you're looking to target multinational companies that have their regional headquarters here. Also, if you're considering setting up in Singapore, it's good to have a Singaporean as a cofounder - it makes getting the smaller grants simpler.

@nopzor: Really? Is it an unwritten quota? All the official statements are that there's no quota for Employment Passes[1][2]. It makes sense that the government wouldn't allow a company to be 100% foreigners on EPs, but I think there's some flexibility in how many EP holders you can hire.

@mdda: The advertise-to-locals-first rule only applies to companies larger than 25 people, so it doesn't really hinder startups. We actually applied for an EP for my co-founder (a foreigner) and got it on appeal, with only 1 local employee besides me. As you say, the process is fairly straightforward if somewhat tedious.

[1] [http://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/employment- pass/key...](http://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/employment-pass/key- facts)

[2] [http://www.mom.gov.sg/~/media/mom/documents/brochures/servic...](http://www.mom.gov.sg/~/media/mom/documents/brochures/services- sector-quota-english.pdf)

<comment><USER11> New rules were instituted, requiring jobs to be advertised locally first : [1]

In addition, as a EP-holding business-owner, I was 'asked' to explain my plans to employ Singaporeans/PRs in the coming year.

OTOH, I don't see this as entirely unreasonable : After all, the USA does the same (for E-2 investor visas, for instance). Moreover, the Singapore visa turn-around time is only a few days (after an online application), whereas the US visa process makes one long for the friendliness of the DMV...

[1] [http://www.mom.gov.sg/employment-practices/fair- consideratio...](http://www.mom.gov.sg/employment-practices/fair- consideration-framework)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's true that the number of entrepreneurs in Singapore has increased dramatically, compared to 5 years ago when my cofounder and I started our company. When we started back then, many investors told us that to succeed, we needed to move to SV. However, being based in Singapore has numerous advantages.

My bootstrapped startup is not consumer focused, so having a large local population is not key. But working with corporates, it's a bliss being based here. There are hundreds of multinational companies, of which many base their (edit: regional) headquarters here. It's so easy for us to reach to potential customers, and from there, to expand to other regional and global offices of these multinational companies.

Hiring can be an issue, but it's not difficult to get work passes for skilled foreigners here. Yes, there are quotas for companies hiring foreigners, but these are largely for less skilled foreigners. Many foreigners study in local universities like NUS and in turn have a bond to work in Singapore after they graduate. If you have a degree from a good, recognised university, it's not difficult to get an employment pass here.

</comment><comment><USER13> Singapore needs a Role model. For years parents and teachers in Singapore encourage their children and student to stay stable and follow the traditional way of success - work hard, steady income and promotion. The role models of Singapore society are always those who did so. in fact, it is not even possible to name a sound,successful entrepreneur. But in a real startup ecosystem (US and China in particular), the role models come from the entrepreneur world. Their success encourage people to take risk. If Singapore can have one or two Mark Zuckberg or Jack Ma, it will greatly help the ecosystem to grow

<comment><USER14> > The role models of Singapore society are always those who did so. in fact, > it is not even possible to name a sound,successful entrepreneur.

There's, among others, Sim Wong Hoo [1], the founder of Creative, and Tan Min Liang [2], the CEO of Razer. I think a problem comes from these companies preferring to identify themselves as "foreign", as being "local" is, ironically, not looked upon as favourably in Singapore.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min- Liang_Tan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min-Liang_Tan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does entrepreneurship tie in with Singaporean culture? Having worked at a company headquartered in Singapore, I'd imagine that a talented engineer would be be pushed towards getting a job at AltaVista rather than make Google.

</comment><comment><USER16> I stay in Singapore and used to work remote.

I want to differentiate the tech scene and start up scene.

There's a lot of noise in the start up scene just like most places. Over the years, I have definitely seen an increase of entrepreneurs. But I care only at a gossipy level.

The tech scene on the other hand is closely knitted. Running the tech scene is challenging here. We haven't have much support from companies as successful local start up don't end up paying forward as much as we hope they would, but it's improving. We often depend on some government helps and a few very passionate and committed people.

Over the years, the tech scene have grow slowly but surely. More people are contributing back in term of sharing knowledges through meetup or doing open source stuff. This is what truly make me hopeful of Singapore.

I think if we just focus on ourselves and be open to things and grow together. We can be decent together. :)

Here's some links to get a sense of how far we have come:

Events: [https://webuild.sg](https://webuild.sg) Data: [https://data.webuild.sg](https://data.webuild.sg) Talks: [http://engineers.sg](http://engineers.sg)

<comment><USER17> Is it hard to get a visa there if you're going to not work at a local Singapore company?

<comment><USER16> It could be challenging I think. But I think tourist visa is 90 days if I'm not wrong. I really recommend visiting. The food is great and the city walk at night is kinda beautiful and very safe. :)

<comment><USER17> I want to visit, but I don't have anybody to go with me, and nobody to see there... so I'd just be wandering around by myself.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Atmos2: Like Meteor, but works with your old REST API - <AUTHOR> http://documentup.com/vojto/atmos2/

<comment><USER2> This sounds good, it's what quite a few of us are looking for. Is there a similar project that doesn't require SpineJS, or can Atmos2 be made to work with other front-end frameworks?

<comment><AUTHOR> The code that deals with Spine model interface is encapsulated in the AppContext class: [https://github.com/vojto/atmos2/blob/master/src/app_context....](https://github.com/vojto/atmos2/blob/master/src/app_context.coffee)

There are methods such as create, update, and theoretically, all you need to do is to replace that class with your own.

Practically, I haven't tried it, and some of the code might be dependent on the Spine framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What licence is it released under?

<comment><AUTHOR> MIT. I forgot about that, added it now.

<comment><USER3> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>