Event Cancelled - <AUTHOR> http://pinchingtheostrich.typepad.com/pinching_the_ostrich/2010/03/event-cancelled.html

<comment><USER2> It's kinda funny and clever. It will fall down if they do it consistently.

People who want to attend these kinds of events will begin to know that the "event canceled" stickers have been put up by the government and are false information. Presumably the stickers will look the same, and also who goes and bothered to put up "canceled" stickers if they genuinely are canceled?

It may even become a cachet - "dude, our event got stickered as 'canceled' by the government" etc.

<comment><USER3> Simple way to defeat that is to just come up with a bunch of different sticker designs.

Or, you could be even more devious. The town council could start putting up fake posters in non-designated spots that would mislead people to believe that something was happening when it wasn't. That way, non-approved locations will become associated with poisoned wells. A random person wouldn't be able to trust flyers in non-approved locations.

<comment><USER4> The problem with this idea is that people who hang concert posters don't sticker them when there are date changes. People are just going to ignore the stickers.

Concert posters aren't a lead generation mechanism. They're awareness marketing. The point of concert posters is to get you to go to a website to buy tickets. They don't need correct information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sure - it might work well. But isn't it against the law to publicly spread false information that affect someone's business? Whether it's the city, or a random person, I would expect the same rules to apply - and I would expect to get sued if I started putting "cancelled" stickers on all posters. Two wrongs do not make a right...

<comment><USER6> But it's a catch-22 situation. They would have to incriminate themselves to file a lawsuit. Or if they make the argument that they weren't responsible for the poster being put up, the local government can make the same claim. "I didn't see who put it up there, so it's not my responsibility".

Part of it's brilliance is how easily defensible it is.

<comment><USER5> Not sure about "easily defensible". If the city doesn't do it legally (as in police can quickly verify who is doing that), then:

1\. Person A puts up a lot of posters in an obviously illegal area where other posters are quickly "cancelled".

2\. "Completely unrelated" person B waits for the person adding the "cancelled" stickers, notifies the police about suspected behaviour. For more fun mentions "strange equipement" and "patroling the area for a long time". Bonus points for doing that near/on a government building.

Making it risky for other people to put the "cancelled" stickers would force the city to either stop this, or make it legal and well known.

Edit: I assumed it was US - not sure how easy it is to scare police in Belgium with suspected "terrorism".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about printing up a sticker that says "Support Act: Michael Bolton" and putting it on offending events

</comment><comment><USER8> A little comment on the Ghent mayor's office intentions:

The normal way of doing things is this: When a police officer notices an illegally put up poster, he has to do all the necessary paperwork to aid the public prosecutor in his legal actions against the person or organisation who put up the poster. That's, if the responsible person or organisation is known. If not, the police officer will have to do some inverstigative work. After that it has to go to trial and could cost the defendant 120 EURO per poster, while costing the community much much more. (cleaning, police hours...)

You can see the means and hours that would have to go into this...for a poster. Still, the city wants to get rid of the problem. Hence, this idea.

It's true that from a legal point of view, the city itself is culpable of putting up stickers where it's illegal to do that. They've admitted to that, but say that it's a choice between doing the 120 EURO fine thing or the quick and more cost effective way while getting public attention for the problem they want to address and create awareness for.

And since the story was all over the news...a job well done.

Take care, Karl (pinching the ostrich)

<comment><USER9> Or to put it differently, a choice between due process and political campaigning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've often wondered if we could deal with graffiti in a similar way. Since it usually consists of an "artist's" tag that personally identifies him, let's start appending "has an itty-bitty wee-wee" to tags and see if the broadcast of one's tiny manhood solves the problem. :P

<comment><USER11> This was the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch starring Rudy Giuliani, who was at the time Mayor of NYC.

"From now on, every time you write your name in graffiti on public property, we're going to put the word "Sucks" right under it. That's right. Instead of being Mr. Cool, everyone's going to think you suck."

Video at [http://hotair.com/archives/2007/02/06/video-rudy-combats- gra...](http://hotair.com/archives/2007/02/06/video-rudy-combats-graffiti- artists/)

<comment><USER12> No, they're going to ignore it. Rudy wasn't the first person to think of this, I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, what I'd want to do is find a couple acts I really hate, make a bunch of fake posters about their show, and get their "events cancelled".

<comment><USER13> Presumably you can already do the same thing and get them fined 120 EUR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Or they could just, you know, raise fines to absurd heights so no one ever again will think about putting posters outside of designated areas.

<comment><USER15> the problem is finding someone to fine and proving they did it (see tptacek's comment on false poster on acts he hates).

<comment><USER14> maybe if every poster, that will get out on a public surface, should get a city (or whatever legal entity) issued mark/stamp on it... like some products have already, cigarettes, coffee etc. (for taxation/anti-smuggling purposes). That could alleviate false poster issue and be cheap to implement. Might as well earn some cash for the city to keep those surfaces clean / lit or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess if you can't find the promoter to fine, you should be helpful and inform your citizens the event is cancelled. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's a video which shows the stickers (warning:ads):

[http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/994/stand-der- dingen/article/de...](http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/994/stand-der- dingen/article/detail/1082657/2010/03/20/Gent-overplakt-wildgeplakte-affiches- met-afgelast.dhtml)

</comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of the dunces cap that 37signals were putting alongside stupid or troll comments on the SvN blog. I haven't seen them do it for a long time now so perhaps it really worked.. :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> OK, funny - but they spend money on painting over the posters. Seems to me simply raising the fines would have been more effective, and better for city finances.

</comment><comment><USER19> But... Did they cancel the event, or didn't they? I'm confused there. Maybe they just forbid the organizers to go ahead. Maybe they _really did_ cancel it.

<comment><USER20> No, the point of the stickers is to ruin the effectiveness of illegal postings through disinformation; it has no effect on the event itself. (Although, if enough people _think_ the event is canceled, and no one shows up...)

<comment><USER21> ...and the parent post is a perfect demonstration of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's a crazy idea: why not just let people post notices in public places to promote their events and not bother trying to enforce a bylaw against it at all?

<comment><USER23> Great idea! I'll paste my poster over top of that stop sign over there! It'll have _great_ visibility!

<comment><USER22> Here's an idea: let's assume most people aren't idiots. That way we don't have to ban an entire sweep of activities on the basis of a marginal edge case.

<comment><USER23> > _let's assume most people aren't idiots_

That's where you're thinking breaks down though. There are a large enough portion of idiots to ruin things for 'the rest of us.'

<comment><USER22> And yet countless actual cities manage just fine without draconian anti- postering policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wouldn't it be cheaper (stickers aren't free) and more effective to remove the poster? Nasa made a 1 million dollar pen to write in space, the Russians...

<comment><USER25> The Russians were at risk of pneumoconiosis due to breathing graphite dust and tiny little bits of eraser..</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Finding tech talent is getting harder. It's not a Bay Area problem only - <AUTHOR> If you're a CTO for a growing startup, this might be a familiar challenge for you.
On top of building the product, finding product engineers is becoming one of the hardest things for a CTO to do in 2019, especially in tech hubs like NY and London due to higher demand and competition.
This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area. Hiring is time-consuming and expensive, and many startups feel that they can't compete with some of the top salaries and perks offered by deep-pocketed alternatives.
It makes sense to rely on your network to hire the initial few developers, but this approach is not sustainable in the long run.
Job boards are getting crowded. Recruiters are generally worse.
I've read a lot of stories about using recruitment platforms. Few are great, but many are unpleasant. The flaw with many recruitment companies is they don't reliably deliver enough good candidates to build trust.
Asking for profile A and getting profile B is a common frustration. For startups, this tends to be a deal-breaker because hiring the wrong candidate has a significant cost and impact on backlog and team.
Is it that most recruiters or on-demand marketplaces aren't highly technical? Is it that they also suffer from talent shortage?
Remote work has been getting a lot of love in recent years to bypass the talent war. Although it has come a long way, it's still hard to pull off, especially for companies that are trying to do both local and remote but are not remote-first (think infrastructure and payroll primarily).
With that being said. How do startups in hubs currently find great engineers quicker? What's an approach that you have been investing in recently to hire product hackers? <comment><USER2> As a developer who has recently been through the hiring process, I think the problem is not a shortage of talent, but rather that companies are awful at hiring. Here are a few of the main issues:

1\. Don't limit your potential talent pool to the miserable and the unemployed. In theory, any developer who is currently employed might be interested in leaving their job to work for you. Perhaps you will offer them more money, or perhaps a better quality of (work) life. However, most developers won't bother to talk to you if they already have a job. Why is that? Simple, if they do talk to you, you're going to offer them a homework assignment. You're going to tell them that it shouldn't take more than an hour, but it will actually take two full days to do right. Giving someone a homework assignment isn't a way to woo them away from their current job. So you are left with a candidate pool that consists mostly of people who are desperate enough that they have to agree to jump through your hoops (i.e. unemployed, miserable in their current job, etc.)

2\. Don't discard capable people. The average interview begins with a remote code challenge whereby the candidate, who is probably nervous, has to pair program a completely contrived problem with a complete stranger watching them over a webcam. There are tons of developers who are good at coding solutions to real world problems in real world situations but simply don't perform well in this type of situation. This type of scenario is not really assessing a candidate's skills. It's assessing their familiarity with specific contrived interview problems and their ability to perform under duress.

Of course, the points you raised are fair as well. Recruiters are not technical people, they are sales people. You will have to find a good recruiter. They are out there, you just have to find the right ones. But my point is, once you find the good recruiter(s) don't waste the human capital they can being to you by having a terrible interview process. Here is my advice. Once your recruiter has a handful of resumes you like, carve out half a days worth of 30-minute sessions to meet with them at the recruiter's office. Ask them about projects they've worked on. You'll find out much more about what they know and what they're like to work with than you would with the typical remote code challenge. One you narrow the pool down a bit bring them in for on-sites.

Best of luck!

<comment><USER3> I'd estimate (without bothering to sit down and crunch the numbers) I've had a 30% success rate interviewing for programming jobs. I usually get about 2 rejections before I get an acceptance (and, of course, when I get accepted, I stop interviewing). Based on that, I'd be led to conclude that I was a _dismal_ programmer, probably not fit for the industry at all. If there was as tight a tech shortage as they keep insisting there is, I'd expect it would be pretty near impossible to be rejected for a programming job. Yet I find it happens to me with alarming regularity and based on what I read here, I'm not alone. It's almost as if the "talent shortage" is imaginary...

<comment><USER2> The talent shortage is absolutely imaginary. The hiring process is run by incompetent internal recruiters and competitive developers with Aspergers whose goal is to reject as many people as possible in order to prove that no one is as smart as they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area. Hiring is time-consuming and expensive, and many startups feel that they can't compete with some of the top salaries and perks offered by deep-pocketed alternatives._

Offer to teach the developer something.

"Java developers - want to learn Node and React?"

"Rails developers - want to learn Elixir?"

Get one senior person on staff who really knows the stack well and require that they pair program every day with a different member of the team.

Good developers are grateful for the opportunity to level up their skills, contribute, and still make a living.

Andres Camacho in SF has been VP of Engineering and CTO at several startups and is king of this strategy.

<comment><USER5> If good developers want to level up their skills, how do you keep the senior developer who you've turned into a tutor happy?

<comment><USER6> Mentorship and teaching are also valuable skills. Many good senior engineers would love to focus on them if their employer recognized it as valuable.

<comment><USER7> Is that really true? Maybe some, but I don't know about "many". I'd imagine when most people start on their dev career, they don't imagine their dream job to be "teaching," they imagine it to be coding. I think you'd have a tough time getting responses for a "senior engineer" job ad that says you'll actually be a full time mentor.

<comment><USER8> I'm just an anecdote, but if I could earn the same salary teaching and mentoring as I do as a tech lead I'd do it with very little hesitation.

<comment><USER9> This route exists, it's called training and you can earn even more doing that. Absolutely doable, but it's a long road to get there (salary- and lifestyle wise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's funny because people keep saying this yet I've noticed something... The interview process for developers is about 10X harder than it used to be a decade ago. It used to be that you'd chat with a couple of people about tech, projects you'd worked on... then get a job offer. Now there are multiple rounds spread out over weeks with a massive number of team members, live coding challenges galore, non-tech screening for all manner of sketchy things (culture fit, dedication to diversity...).

I think a lot of this is based on they myth of: A bad hire causes _tons_ more damage than not hiring a good person.

I call BS. To me this is just weak management. It's actually not that difficult to fire someone. If you're in doubt, put an explicit probation period in the contract. I think being able to effectively fire is management 101 but looks like it's becoming a lost art. I'm not sure if this is because people are afraid of confrontation or they're just cargo culting the story they've heard about bad hires.

Easy in, easy out and you'll see your dev shortage problem start to solve itself.

<comment><USER11> > A bad hire causes tons more damage than not hiring a good person.

I think it is true, but only if you don't identify it quickly and/or don't reassign or fire them as necessary. I'm a firm believer of a holistic and lightweight interview process followed by a trial period. The only way to really understand if someone will work well in the position is to let them give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The usual HN refrain here is 'pay more'.

And as a developer in NYC, I'd say this is accurate, but simplifies the problem a bit too much.

Companies like their salary bands. Companies like to hire people at around the same compensation as current employees in the same role with around the same experience.

The problem is that demand has recently gone up and pay should go up with it, but companies are refusing to adjust their bands and greatly increase pay for their current employees across the board.

So, instead of addressing the pay issue head on, we're seeing a few really really bad practices:

\- Lose candidates at the offer stage

      - Try to get comp expectations out of the way earlier.

        - Losing candidates to Big Co. for big pay discrepancies is likely tolerable
        - Losing candidates over $20k salary band issues is absolutely unacceptable
      - DO NOT let HR takeover the closing process.
        - Don't try to give an exploding offer
        - Don't say an offer is 'best and final'
        - The CTO or VP eng should give the offer and
          make it a priority to close the candidate

\- Giving pay increases to current employees only when they have other offers or explicitly ask for it

\- Giving regular title bumps to justify pay increases

      - Your 'senior' engineers will be involved with hiring.
        It's better to give junior/mid-level engineers big raises
        than title bumps that will make hiring talent more difficult

If these points sound obvious, they're not. As a candidate, I have not seen a single company that follows them.

And this post just addresses issues around compensation. I haven't even begun to touch on being honest around your interview process. But let me put a few questions out there as well:

\- How many rounds do you have?

      - 3 is probably a maximum. Never have more than one on-site

\- What is your accept rate at each round?

      - the accept rate should increase from round to round

\- For testing candidates

      - be very clear about what questions you're asking and why
      - know, objectively, what is considered a pass vs a fail for every question

<comment><USER13> I'd like to add on to that: "Pay more" and "Hire remote". Don't disregard the consultant firms either. Many times I've seen a big push to hire an FTE (or series of FTEs) to do a Big Project(tm), only to have to let the FTEs go after Big Project(tm) is completed because there was no more work for them to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If your business is essentially burning VC money for a decade to buy a ticket in the Unicorn lottery, then the easy answer is to spend a lot more money. You can do this by poaching expensive people, by offering more, or by hiring lots more people than you need and keeping the ones you actually want. The result will be more manpower faster, at significant expense.

You can also, as many companies default to, ration yourself by imposing very grueling hiring requirements (months of fly-in interviews and hours-long take- home assignments) and "competitive" (as determined by some non-market mechanism like an industry survey) pay. The result of the latter will be long hiring times for good-enough talent that is willing to work for whatever you've pre-determined to be fair.

It's really no different from looking for a car: you can have a known high- quality thing right now (buy new from a dealer/pay $$$ for top talent), or you can buy a lot of potential lemons for cheaper until one happens to last (grabbing random by-owner cars from Craigslist/hire-fast-fire-fast), or you can just wait things out until you find the perfect deal (trawl Craigslist a couple times a week until something jumps out as an incredible deal/pay "market" rates and have a long hiring process).

There are tradeoffs to be made, and you have to make them according to what you actually need and the resources you have. There's no physical law that says you're entitled to unlimited world-class talent at bargain rates to build your adtech startup.

</comment><comment><USER15> The cheapest way of finding talent is retaining it. I currently work on a project with an empty backlog and a sprint full of impediments. We are all looking for new jobs.

Hiring a good product owner would've meant retaining the team. Now you have to have to find six new developers.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm from Europe, so I will say why I don't want to work in London (and I get a lot of offers from there!)

The salaries that are offered are a joke in London. The expenses are so huge there! Even if the salary is a bit higher than my current one, I would spend much more.

There are a lot of joke startups, some new cryptocurrency or blockchain startups... Nope, I'm not gonna join anything like that.

Also, I'm not a huge fan of big cities and London is too crowded (for me).

Allow remote and I'm sure you are gonna find someone.

</comment><comment><USER17> Man, there is NO shortage of tech talent, stop lying to yourself. You are just not paying enough for people to even consider interviewing for your company. Period. This is actually a very simple problem. Throw money at it and stop complaining.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure I believe this.

Find a random research university near you. It is chock-a-block full of people, most of whom are very smart and many of whom can code. Since everyone other than tenured profs has a precarious, low-paying job, this should be a fairly easy pool to recruit from.

Nevertheless, I, a staff scientist in a computational field, get messages from (maybe) 3-4 recruiters a year, all of whom are from huge companies. It would be good to hear from more places and it would _great_ to hear from places that are willing to consider my actual experience (look at my code, hear about my data analysis) instead of asking me to dredge up half-remembered tricks from my undergrad data structures class.

</comment><comment><USER19> Shortage my ass. These companies are not paying enough, not looking for remote workers, and generally not offering enough attractive packages. There's no shortage. Start paying more. Offer remote work. Stop being a shitty workplace. Qualified developers will start pouring in. If you think a ping pong table and beer keg are going to attract quality talent over a proper salary and remote work you're delusional and shouldn't be in a position to hire.

</comment><comment><USER20> Of the dozen-or-so companies that I've been through at this point, there were only three where I would say they put a decent effort into trying to retain the talent they ALREADY HAD. So if finding "fresh meat" is becoming more difficult, maybe there is some good in that, if it incentivizes more to adequately value the talent they already have and put a decent effort into trying to retain them.

</comment><comment><USER21> When I look for a job, I spend time investigating companies who align with my experience, goals, etc - regardless of whether or not they're actively hiring. Consider doing the inverse: Contact developers who may not be looking, but who align with your company well.

It's flattering to hear from someone who is genuinely interested in hiring me - if you're interested in _me_, I might consider you even if I wasn't planning on leaving where I'm at.

Admittedly, it's time-consuming. But it's also "doing things that don't scale".

<comment><USER22> This seems similar to the "hire from your network" that was mentioned in the OP. Or, to rephrase, how do you find/target these developers?

<comment><USER21> I mean outside of your network - people you wouldn't normally get referrals for. LinkedIn in a starting point, then researching an individual (Github profile, Twitter, personal website, etc) to learn more. This will obviously only work if the dev has a public life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a product manager, I have gotten to the last round of multiple interviews (3 or more, meeting full teams and different departments).

Then been turned down as they are "going with other candidates", only to see the job reposted. This has happened on multiple occasions.

Maybe I wasn't the right person for the role. One specific role has now been up for 5 months. Which likely means the company is looking for an unrealistic set of requirements that no one can meet instead of training appropriately.

In my opinion, the person that will come in and solve all your problems without training does not exist. Make a decision and be okay with letting a new employee get familiar with your company and industry.

<comment><USER24> Some companies post "non-existing jobs" for the following reasons:

1- Gather information from candidates about how other companies are doing the same job or about their strategies

2- Go deeper into discussion with candidates who work for a competitor.

3- Look to be hiring for investors/competitors..etc

<comment><USER25> 4- Fulfill a "we really looked for domestic candidates, honest!" checkbox before hiring on visa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Job boards are getting crowded. Recruiters are generally worse.

It seems that most (young) recruiters these days rely primarily on Linkedin as a sourcing tool. But that's not where the best talent is found.

The Hack to finding talent is to truly learn the recruiting process. That is to say, can you identify, assess, and ATTRACT decent people on your own?

Start by asking: Who would know know my ideal candidate?

ON this subject, Lou Adler is masterful > [https://youtu.be/9KLR6rteoOU](https://youtu.be/9KLR6rteoOU)

<comment><USER11> > ATTRACT decent people

This reminds me of a recent post that rings pretty true: _" When hiring senior engineers, you're not buying, you're selling"_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18955731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18955731)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't think the problem is a shortage of talent. I think the problem is that the expectations for the amount of work a single employee can produce are unrealistic.

Everyone wants to hire the 10xer. The problem is that they're a) expensive, b) not always easy to work with, c) usually already employed.

If companies stopped focusing on getting the "best of the best" to produce results overnight, and instead spent energy in investing in young/less experienced candidates, things would be a lot easier for everyone. Of course, this means that companies need to come up with ways to retain talent so they don't "waste they time" on developing someones career to just have them poached.

I find it funny how posts like these alternate between "why can' I find a job?" and "why can't we hire anyone?". Obviously there's a disconnect somewhere. There is absolutely no shortage of talent, it's just mismanaged expectations (on both ends).

<comment><USER28> Something to consider, if every company told every candidate that had an on- site why they were not offered a position then the pool of candidates would more easily adapt, over time, to the needs of these positions. That would be a win for everyone involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Pay more or be more willing to work with people who don't have all the skills you want. (Yet.) A lot of startups want to hire senior FAANG type talent and pay them less than entry level at those companies. Good luck. You have to be scrappy as a startup and that includes how you find talent.

</comment><comment><USER30> > This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area.

When people question why so many companies start or stay in the Bay Area, "density of talent" inevitably comes up as one of the reasons. I can't reconcile that assertion with this one here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, Silicon Valley is the mecca of engineering talent. However, the demand for that talent greatly outranks the supply. With that being said, how can a seed or even a Series A startup stand out and be able to attract engineers when Facebook & Google are next door? Even better, how can a startup retain its engineer that's probably getting x10 inboxes a day from other companies with better packages?

I'm not challenging you here, but it's common questions I hear that can complement your perspective...

<comment><USER10> You have to pay competitively. If you can't afford to pay FB level salaries then you either didn't raise enough money or you have to be willing to part with _serious_ equity. I think the days of founders retaining as much stock as they traditionally have are over. You'll need to start compensating your developers like you would execs. If you think about it, it actually makes sense. Execs add value by scaling up an organization of people. Devs add value by scaling up an organization of code and machines. In fact if you think about it like that, devs should probably be getting paid _more_ than non-technical executives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Many here are commenting that you should pay more and that is true. But how about not wasting the talent you already have?

I've had several jobs from startups to big companies and I have never been utilized at anything close to 100% of my potential.

Try getting rid of pointless meetings, distracting open offices, insane IT policies, and needlessly overcomplicated architectures. You may not even need to hire any more enigineers if the ones you have are more productive.

</comment><comment><USER32> >Asking for profile A and getting profile B is a common frustration. For startups, this tends to be a deal-breaker because hiring the wrong candidate has a significant cost and impact on backlog and team.

This sticks out: the hiring process is really bad at making this judgement effectively. We face this problem at my company, most of our best and worst team members have been surprises.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is very relatable, and results primarily from failing to identify false positives and false negatives in the hiring process.

An interview can result in a bad engineer being hired and later fired (a false positive). And an interview can disqualify someone who could have done that job well (a false negatives).

In order to keep the false positive rate low in the face of this noise, companies have to bias decision ever farther toward rejection. The result is a process that misses good engineers, still often preferences credentials over real skill, and often feels capricious and frustrating to the people involved. If everyone at your company had to re-interview for their current jobs, what percentage would pass? This is a scary question. The answer is almost certainly well under 100%. Candidates are harmed when they are rejected by companies they could have done great work for, and companies are harmed when they can't find the talent they need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> And by the way of the 30 or so engineers I have hired in the last 10 years, exactly 1 would have been correctly filtered by a homework assignment and 7 or 8 would have been incorrectly filtered. Technical hiring in my opinion is so poorly done by most people because they think developers are commodities that can be standardized and quantified.

</comment><comment><USER34> There is no such thing as a labour shortage. There is only an unwillingness to pay. If you can't afford to attract talent at market rates then your business model as it is exists isn't viable.

A big aspect to this is that the equity lottery of startups is largely gone because companies going public is increasingly rare, companies stay private longer (which presents real problems for the liquidity of employee options) and there are just so many ways an employee can get screwed out of their equity value that as the time a startup is private increases the value of the equity inevitably approaches zero. Down rounds, liquidity preferences, that sort of thing.

Equity is a pretty terrible deal for employees. Great for VCs. Great for founders (mostly). Horrible for employees.

<comment><USER35> > There is no such thing as a labour shortage.

bullshit. we are looking for talent as hard as we can and we pay premium rates compared to market.

90% of the people that enters the door can't code a for loop. a lot of the candidates, especially those on the younger side, have terrible work ethics, like they find hard to work in a team or under direction and to follow instructions; they won't listen to anything and they'reso set into their own way of doing things they will dismantle working software even after being directed precisely to where and how to implement/fix stuff. and it doesn't stop in the work are either, we got one that tried watching cartoons off a pirate streaming site.

there's a huge shortage of people with brain, agency and will that can fill a 10x position, leaving company that don't do the umpteen iteration of the average vertical tiered enterprisey app short and longing for employees.

<comment><USER25>
      we are looking for talent as hard as we can

... and yet you neither mention details nor have any contact info here or in your profile.

<comment><USER35> ...yes? people can talk about their situation without being living advertisement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It seems to me that there is more talent going to software than ever and the Junior dev starting salary has been steadily declining over the past decade.

</comment><comment><USER37> I can't imagine it's really that difficult.

I work remote, and love my job. But if something ever happened to change that, I'd be glad to work for another company.

The other company just has to allow remote workers. Given that, I think there's probably a big pool of talent to draw from.

</comment><comment><USER38> Curious what your definition of an A versus B profile is?

<comment><USER39> Not OP, but during a recent hiring process we asked for backend engineers (e.g. java/golang/databases etc). Half of the CVs we received were for Angular/React developers.

I'm unsure how this could happen with any sane vetting process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, is that even true?

I do believe the "technical" layer in a recruiter is the most important thing. Amarraja, how do you go about vetting your recruiter? Have you had any set of criteria to identify a solid talent acquisition partner?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Pay more.

<comment><USER40> To add on to this: offer remote, and if you have an office, don't have an open office setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Tech salaries have gone up faster than founders/VCs expected and it's becoming more expensive to run a startup. Perhaps startups should wait a little longer to raise money. It seems more important than ever to find product-market fit before hiring.

</comment><comment><USER42> Hey y'all,

there's a huge tech talent shortage in Prague, which has approximately 1000x higher quality of life than the bay area. You can make a high salary here and live extremely well. Bonus: no human feces on your front doorstep!</comment>


The Final Goxing - <AUTHOR> http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/post/77988833128/the-final-goxing <comment><USER2> Even if this scenario is correct, and the private keys have been lost, there's no law of physics that says the coins can never be recovered.

The set of legal transactions on the blockchain is determined entirely by what the majority of miners will accept. So far that has always meant executing and verifying the transaction's script, but a currently-illegal script could be declared valid by persuading enough miners to treat it as an exception. In particular, suppose MtGox can produce an audit trail showing that a particular set of addresses corresponds to their inaccessible cold wallet, and nobody else challenges their claim by signing a message from one of those addresses. Then they could petition miners to grant an exception and have the coins transferred to a new address by fiat. _(ha!)_

It would certainly be an unprecedented intervention by the core Bitcoin community. But if it would restore public confidence in the protocol and economy, then it would be in enough people's interest that I think there's a slim chance it could be made to happen.

EDIT: it's not quite that simple; see the discussion below.

<comment><USER3> > But if it would restore public confidence in the protocol and economy

It actually scares me. If any private body or group could somehow amass 51% of the miners in some way, they would then control the currency.

<comment><USER4> No, you basically only control the order of transactions: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_computing_power)

<comment><USER5> You can _also_ rollback history and block transactions which you disapprove of from happening with 100% probability. Other than that, no major problems.

<comment><USER4> Technically, you need 100% hashing power in order to block a valid transaction forever.

<comment><USER5> Oh, you can certainly use your 49% to publish a block or two, or even twelve in a row -- good for you, probability sometimes works like that -- but eventually I will have more blocks mined privately than the rest of the network does publicly, at which point I publish them (with my choice of confirmed transactions) and all your work, the transactions which you chose to confirm, and your mined coins just go down the memory hole.

<comment><USER4> The mined coins, sure, but you can include the _transactions_ that were omitted in the revealed fork in the blocks after that. That's why the document states _An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network 's computing power can, _for the time that he is in control__

I'm not saying that when this would happen it would be a good day for Bitcoin by the way.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand. I think "for the time that he is in control" means "as long as he has > 50% hashing power". No need for 100%. As long as he has > 50% he can eventually overtake any fork that includes a new transaction.

In theory, given enough time (a _very_ long time), someone able to maintain 50.0000001% of hashing power could eventually rewrite the _entire_ blockchain after the genesis block.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't say what _did_ happen (theft? lost key?) or why it happened now (feds? out of money?); it just says what _didn 't_ happen (collusion). We still don't know where the 750k bitcoins are.

Two interesting theories, the second being my favorite (but both agreeing there's no way 750k bitcoins could have been stolen):

[http://jesse.forthewin.com/blog/2014/02/unilateral- statement...](http://jesse.forthewin.com/blog/2014/02/unilateral-statement- regarding-fucked-up-shit-and-the-greater-good.html?cpm=329)

[http://letstalkbitcoin.com/somethings-not-right-at- gox/#.Uw6...](http://letstalkbitcoin.com/somethings-not-right-at- gox/#.Uw6btIWrFsw)

<comment><USER8> The second scenario (lost access to 2nd tier of cold storage) seems the most likely. It is also compatible with Mark's statement that the coins are _" technically speaking [...] not 'lost' just yet, just temporarily unavailable"_. [1]

[1] [http://www.wickedfire.com/shooting-shit/179038-my- conversati...](http://www.wickedfire.com/shooting-shit/179038-my-conversation- mark-karpeles-mtgox-2.html#post2164682)

<comment><USER9> It looks to me like a more likely reading is "I believe I have not lost my coins, although Gox does not have them, because Gox will make customers whole using future profits."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is Mt. Gox getting thrown to the wolves. I think there is a constant undercurrent of fear, and rightly so, in the bitcoin community that regulation will mean the end of bitcoin. Also, for those who are speculating heavily on BTC, anything that undermines confidence is a direct threat to their holdings. So here we have a potential massive fraud (or fear-compounded incompetence) and publicity discussing fundamental security flaws with the BTC system. A double threat. It's a perfect rationaly-self-interested reaction to try to distance ones self from threats as quickly and thoroughly as possible, but I can't bring myself to think of this as anywhere near altruistic or civic minded.

</comment><comment><USER11> _" Sources also tell me that multiple investors who were approached restricted their own employees from buying or selling bitcoin themselves as soon as they realized the extent of the damage at Mt. Gox."_

I wonder how many employees felt all that "restricted," given that it would be very hard to enforce such a dictate.

<comment><USER12> There was obvious insider trading, with large dumps of coin just before bad news broke. Someone was doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The interesting thing is that MtGox failing should have zero impact on the USD value of the Bitcoin, particularly if those Bitcoins were stolen and still in circulation.

Indeed, if the hypothesis in [http://letstalkbitcoin.com/somethings-not-right- at-gox/#.Uw7...](http://letstalkbitcoin.com/somethings-not-right-at- gox/#.Uw7y-_RdVvB) is true, that the Coins were actually LOST from the Cold- wallet because of a EC bug, or other error - then it's possible that losing 740K coins will drive up the value of the remaining coins.

<comment><USER14> Price depends on the balance of both supply and demand. Even if there are less coins to go around:

* Many existing bitcoin users have had their coins and conventional currency holdings wiped out - and don't have enough money left to buy them back.

* Many users who lost their money would not want to re-invest after getting burned.

* Many potential new casual users will be (rightly) scared away by the news.

It seems to me that even if 6% of the coins are gone, demand could drop more than 6% and still lower the price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15>
      ... engaging in an arbitrage scheme that leveraged the depressed
      Mt. Gox price to reap gains on other exchanges. This was allegedly
      happening well before the exchange's breaking point ...

Step 1: Drive the Gox price into the basement

Step 2: Buy devalued Gox-BTC using the fiat you have left

Step 3: Sell those coins on other exchanges at full price

Step 4: Rinse and repeat until solvent

What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER16> This would only work if the coins were still there. If the Gox coins are stolen/lost, then what are you buying? A worhtless claim to coins that don't actually exist, and that you can't sell.

<comment><USER6> IIRC, Gox was accepting deposits (both bitcoins and fiat) until very recently.

<comment><USER16> Who would deposit bitcoin in an exchange where the average price is a fifth of what is was in other exchanges? Fiat deposits wouldn't matter for this plan.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. Who would leave their bitcoins in an exchange that had been demonstrating withdrawal problems for 6 months?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So now, the only way in which someone would buy Gox is if the crisis strategy posted earlier is not very accurate. That is, if coins are NOT lost, but indeed are inaccessible for some reason and there is a chance of recovering them.

No one would ever touch Gox if they had to return 770k BTC while the public actually knows those coins were lost. And now you also have authorities involved... If they could keep it secret - then maybe a buyer would be optimistic enough he could convince customers everything is going to be fine. But not now. Unfortunately for Mark, he's going to be in a lot of trouble now if all this is true. I lost all my savings with Gox, but one thing I'm certain - I wouldn't want to be in his shoes now.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious if any sane investor would be interested in acquiring Gox and promising to pay, say, 20% of its debts. In that case, a large percentage of customers may simply sue and the investor will be in a real bad position. So, if the 700K BTC figure is correct, this scenario is basically impossible as you can't buy that much BTC for reasonable price, right?

Much better for potential investors would be to just wait for Gox bankruptcy and pick up the pieces. I'm not familiar with bankruptcy law, just theorizing.

<comment><USER19> IANA banktupcy L, but this seems like what can happen in bankruptcy, with the blessing and protection of a judge. You don't assume massive risk just on our own, you get a court to approve your takeover and attempt to make debtors partially whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR: Blah Blah Blah --- never trust the consultancy firm Mandalah with private documents. Got it.

<comment><USER21> The way I read the situation is that while Mandalah prepared the documents, MtGox deliberately called meetings where they showed participants the documents in an effort to get emergency funding/bailout, and then failed to ensure they did not keep a copy. But who knows what really happened.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what would you put in course for data science? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering putting together a university course on data science, and would like your input as to the skills and techniques you'd expect a data scientist to have fresh out of school.<p>You all are the experts on what you need, and I'm all ears. Fire away! <comment><USER2> It depends on what your background is. And what the role looks for. There is a wide spectrum of programming vs statistics background that may be required for a job. Having said that, here is a list of basic stuff that may be useful to know.

1\. Computer Science:

\- Algorithms/D.S. Enough to be able to identify what sort of problems are C.S. problems or statistics problems.

\- Systems. You may not have to build a system but it is useful to know how the real world systems are built, what sort of constraints come into play, what trade-offs are there. Especially, if you will be working with large scale datasets. You don't want to be remembered as the dude who did a select * order by rand limit 10 on an HBase table.

\- Programming Language: Learn one programming language well. Depending on your job, you may need to learn more than one. Python is a nice starting language. One useful trick to learning more languages is to learn one language really well and see how stuff you can do changes in the other language. Also, side note: don't get into one true language debates. They are useless. Every language has its pros and cons.

2\. Stats/Math/ML:

This is tough to kind of characterize. Because the field is so diverse.

\- Probability: Get some basic probability under your belt. Getting the intuition right is more useful than learning a lot of stuff. You can pick up more complicated stuff (Stochastic processes, Stochastic Calculus stuff) as and when you progress further anyway.

\- Statistics: At the very least, figure out hypothesis testing, biases, p-values, estimators and regression. The more statistics I learn the more I am of the opinion that the tools matter less as much as a critical understanding of where statistics should apply. What biases are there and how you can identify them.

\- Linear Algebra: Again a very basic undergraduate linear algebra course (with vector spaces) should help you understand say Matrix completion stuff. Of the top of my head, I think grokking how vector spaces work, what independence means, how dimensionality reduction, kernels work is useful.

\- Machine Learning: This is mostly a tie up of the kind of stuff you learn in the math courses. My basic 101 ML grad school covered the following: Unsupervised Learning (KMeans or some clustering algorithms), Supervised Learning (Discriminative, Generative approaches, bias - variance tradeoffs etc). I also learnt some silly bullshit on Genetic algorithms.

So yeah, as long as you learn the basic fundamentals really well, you should be able to pick up stuff fairly easily.

E.g. Recommendation systems, I never learnt most of this in school as part of a specific course. However, once you know what goes on in Matrix decomposition and know what regression is, you can understand the why of why people do what they do when they solve these problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestions. I'll probably structure the course in the stats/ml vein-- that corresponds to what I already had in mind.

Do you have any recommendations for big data components? Would it be worth teaching how to use a Hadoop cluster, or is a small toy cluster too far abstract from what using a large cluster requires?

<comment><USER2> Well, I took a couple of courses at UT which dealt with "practical" distributed systems. The first was more on the lines of here is a large dataset, how do we design a distributed system that handles it. There, we learn about principles/paradigms such as MPI, threading, CUDA to address these issues. I took another course that was basically only Hadoop. Both are good. It completely depends on what the outcome of your course is: If you are looking for someone who just needs a flavor of what it means to think at that scale, generating an EC2 cluster and working on a few Map Reduce problems should be fine. If you are looking more to inculcate general principles of how to think at scale, the former should be good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think a good way to structure a course would be to cover several problems from end-to-end: motivation (what you want to achieve), theory, data preprocessing, algorithm development, and finally setting up a "production grade" system that solves the problem.

In my experience learning ML, learning concepts in theory is good and all, but I never really understood the details until I had to implementing the algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bill Howe did a solid intro course for the University of Washington. Videos and other materials are available on Coursera.

[https://www.coursera.org/course/datasci](https://www.coursera.org/course/datasci)

The one thing I'd really change is to tighten up the range of tools used. It seems helpful to show students a range of tools, but it usually ends up being a major distraction for students and a lot of extra effort for course staff. Any such course is already going to be a blitz of new concepts and technology.

Go full Python, plus interactive tools as helpful (Weka, Tableu). Let them pick up R or D3.js or whatever later, after they have a better appreciation for the concepts and such which make them useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> The hard part is not the coding or statistics; the hard part is figuring out what to code/analyse.

I would want something on identifying actionable dimensions and how to talk to people to figure out how to help them</comment>


A16Z: The Talent X Opportunity Fund - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2020/06/03/talent-x-opportunity/ <comment><USER2> These were the guys running that pump and dump crypto scheme right? Well it's good to know they're socially responsible shysters.

I appreciate they're doing something positive, but I've got to feel a lot of skepticism when companies are like "Oh yeah, we've been working on this for 6 months".

<comment><USER3> > "Oh yeah, we've been working on this for 6 months"

Very skeptical and suspicious about this line. It sounds like as if they were waiting to react to another appalling racist act, despite previous events happening to black communities for years around this to launch this "fund" in exchange for equity and "support".

While this is a positive act from a16z, but after reading that line, the whole post now feels 'manufactured for the event' to specifically attract black founders. I'd say no thanks and no deal.

<comment><USER4> It could be a PR stunt, but it says in the article that all the funds remain in the fund to invest in future businesses. And that they are basically managing the fund for a non-profit. So I don't think they stand to directly earn money from the fund.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: From where do you buy a domain ? - <AUTHOR>

Where would I find a .com domain at cheaper rate? Wheres do you buy domain from and why? who is popular, who is trustworthy ? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339823>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186369>

I use NameCheap, myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1and1 - though I wouldn't ever buy hosting from them.

<comment><USER4> oh yeah. we had a terrible time with their support. I use softlayer (and ec2 for not so critical sites or with multiple servers). works for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Straight from the src: www.netsol.com Everyone else is 2ndary, they try to force some hosting option on you.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.joker.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> godaddy.com</comment>


Markets Are Conversations (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cluetrain.com/book/markets.html

<comment><USER2> Marketing is identifying potential, communicating willing and the executing transactions.

It is the activity that makes selling redundant.

<comment><USER2> Curious. As someone doing a degree in marketing I was happy to finally contribute.

Peter Drucker : "There will always, one can assume, be a need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous…"

[http://sustainabilityneedsmarketing.com/2013/04/17/marketing...](http://sustainabilityneedsmarketing.com/2013/04/17/marketing- makes-selling-redundant/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If markets are conversations, then why do we allow basically a single company (incidentally Google) to moderate all these conversations?</comment>


Bright minds at HN, suggest lifestyle business ideas to earn $1000+ per month. - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for lifestyle business ideas/opportunities that can let me have sustainable monthly income of $1000 or more per month. What suggestions do you have?
Here are some technology skills I am good at -
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, BootStrap, jQuery, angular.js, PHP/CodeIgnitor, Python/Django/Flask, C, MySQL, MongoDB.
I'm good at both UI/UX design and programming. <comment><USER2> A task-based SEO service for small businesses. Charge $29-79/mo for X tasks. Tasks are basically content creation or link building. If you template out HTML pages and build some niche sites, I think you could easily scale it to 25 or 50 customers ($1-2k/mo)

FYI my wife is considering doing this aimed at wedding professionals.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here are some things that immediately come to my mind :

1) Design themes/templates and sell it on sites like themeforest

2) Write ebooks and share your knowledge/expertise

3) Write custom premium php scripts like HN, Reddit clone and sell it.

4) Develop premium wordpress plugins

<comment><USER4> I actually tried to go that route and turned back. There's just too much headache with WordPress to do it every day.

<comment><USER3> So what you ended up doing?

<comment><USER4> Still a CS student, WP was just a "funny or die" adventure for last summer. For now, I do client work and sharpen my axe with Haskell.

I wish I had an interesting idea for a web product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Setup a service converting PSD files into Bootstrap layouts. Huge demand and you could easily do 5~10 a month and make $1000 (depending on what you charge for each one).

</comment><comment><USER6> Google Andre Chaperon spend 20 mins and read his stuff and you will be on your way...they key is finding the audience before you build</comment>


Anonymous asked: What advice would you give to a graphic design student? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.frankchimero.com/post/979706728

<comment><USER2> Two things I'd add---learning design never stops. And the vast majority will be after formal training. Spend time looking at everything and ask why it works or why it doesn't work. Continue for life :) The second thing is harder ---hang on to as much naivete as you can. Doing something that everyone else knows is impossible because you didn't know leads to all kinds of possibilities; not the least of which is that for you at that time it was possible. Again, try and do that for life.</comment>


Ask HN: Which books changed your life? - <AUTHOR> What books inspired you? Changed your worldview? <comment><USER2> _Universe_ by Freedman and Kaufmann [http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Roger- Freedman/dp/142923153X](http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Roger- Freedman/dp/142923153X)

 _Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre_ [http://www.amazon.com/Existentialism-Dostoevsky-Sartre- Revis...](http://www.amazon.com/Existentialism-Dostoevsky-Sartre-Revised- Expanded/dp/0452009308/)

 _A Kierkegaard Anthology_ [http://www.amazon.com/Kierkegaard-Anthology- Soren/dp/0691019...](http://www.amazon.com/Kierkegaard-Anthology- Soren/dp/0691019789/)

 _Party of One: The Loner 's Manifesto_ by Anneli Rufus [http://www.annelirufus.com/partyofone/](http://www.annelirufus.com/partyofone/)

 _The Mindbody Prescription_ by John E. Sarno [http://www.amazon.com/The- Mindbody-Prescription-Healing-Body...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Mindbody- Prescription-Healing-Body/dp/0446675156/)

</comment><comment><USER3> In no particular order:

Politics and philosophy:

Ishmael - Daniel Quinn (even though in the end, it's just a cute, in essence a softies introduction to anarchist communism)

On property - Proudhon (Meta, ye oldist anarchy) Das Kapital (If you read Marx, also read _on_ Marx, can't stress this enough)

Beyond good and evil (but in his thought in general) - Nietzsche (Mainly for showing there are no absolutes, moral is what we make of it, and in that moral we can excel)

And so, so many others, philosophy really adds up, just keep on reading, there's fundamental books for sure, but every publication adds up in some respect.

Sports and nutrition:

Starting Strength (for making me bad ass strong in the last couple years)

'Paleo' diet (for showing an extreme solution for a more simple problem, that actually worked and made me not fat anymore)

Some random books that made a huge impression the last years:

The Alchemist, for showing how humble you can experience the wonders of life

Siddhartha, same really.

A short summer of anarchy (biography of Durrutti, rise of anarchism in 30s Spain, out of print)

Crime and Punishment and Karamazov (There's beauty in the darkest corners of the human spirit, and so much more)

The Prince

Butler (For using Nietzsche's deconstruction to argue against 'genetic' discrimination, controversial, but very good)

Metamorphosis - Kafka (I don't have a one liner to summarize this. Just read it, it's < 100 pages)

Funny enough, as far as Tech and Business goes, I skim books to get some details, but at the end of the day most value comes from hacking around. For both.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Who moved my Cheese" ([http://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-My-Cheese- Amazing/dp/0399144...](http://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-My-Cheese- Amazing/dp/0399144463))

And in conjunction to that, this article "Someone is Coming to Eat You" ([http://randsinrepose.com/archives/someone-is-coming-to- eat-y...](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/someone-is-coming-to-eat-you/))

</comment><comment><USER5> _Antifragile_ by Nassim Taleb

 _Invisible Cities_ by Italo Calvino

 _Il deserto dei tartari (The Tartar Steppe)_ by Dino Buzzati

 _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ by Dale Carnegie

<comment><USER6> I second this book: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

<comment><USER7> After seeing this on so many Hacker News comments to threads like this I finally gave in and started to read it. It has definitely opened my eyes to how I interact with people and made me a lot more self aware.

<comment><USER8> Warren Buffet credits it for much of his success. I don't much like the bastard but he learned his lessons well.

<comment><USER7> Why is he a bastard?

<comment><USER8> His views and past behavior with respect to employees below top management. He seems to believe that only owners should profit from success because only they create it.

This comes from my reading of Schroeder's authorized biography.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

Be Here Now - Ram Das

Whole Earth Catalog - Stewart Brand

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Savage Continent - Keith Lowe

Forged - Bart D. Ehrman

Young Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore

Court of the Red Czar - Simon Sebag Montefiore

<comment><USER9> Ram Das has such great lectures. I have yet to read his books. I am reading The Power of Now and I wonder how different it is to Be Here Now.

<comment><USER8> The message is pretty much the same but the presentation is considerably different. After the wordy introduction which is more or less the story of his transformation from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass, Be Here Now is as much a work of art as it is a book. It tries to reach around your intellect.

I haven't had a copy for many years and just ordered one from Amazon because you made me think about it fondly again. I first read it shortly after it was published in '71 and it's time to read it again. :-)

There is a trap in the thinking that it took me a long time to understand. The present is a consequence of past behavior that cannot be safely ignored. The future is a consequence of present behavior and cannot be safely ignored. Discarding that caution brought me a lot of trouble I would have been better off avoiding. This is obvious but excess enthusiasm for mindfulness of the present can easily lead one to places that one wouldn't want to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Steve Job's book was very inspiring and motivational for me. The way he saw the world was very enlightening. Here's a video of what I thought was really profound for me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw)

</comment><comment><USER10> Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall For Harmony And Strength by Thomas Rohlen

</comment><comment><USER11> In no particular order:

What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness

1984

Farenheit 541

Foundation (all saga)

The Hobbit

The Lord of the Rings (all saga)

The Prince

De Bello Gallico and Other Commentaries

The Design of Everyday Things

The Riverworld (an entire saga of 5 books)

On the Good Life

Treatises on Friendship and Old Age

Asimov On Numbers

Asimov on Chemistry

The Roman Republic

And hundreds more I cannot list.</comment>