Firefox fades in popularity - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/0301/Firefox-sees-popularity-fade

<comment><USER2> I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but I'm going to keep using Firefox. If nothing else, my paranoia senses are tingling with regard to Google. These days I'm heavily invested in Google - their software runs my phone, handles my email, and is my main way of searching. If nothing else, I'd rather not put all my eggs in one basket, and would rather diversify a little.

<comment><USER3> Why would you think you'd be down-voted for that?

<comment><USER4> I'd cynically say that it's because any post starting with "I'm sure I'll be downvoted, but..." tends to get a much better score than it otherwise would, even if it's not particularly applicable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I often wonder if the network effects in our profession leads to this desire for one product we use to win, or if our natural tribalism exacerbates the network effects.

I don't really care if one particular browser is going up or down, I just want a competitive market based on open standards so that I can use whatever the hell browser I like and not be locked out of anything.

At the moment that means I'm rooting for IE6 to die, and IE in total to fall to around a third or less globally so that they're forced to compete.

Chrome stealing alpha-geek users from Firefox doesn't matter to me as a) there's not that many of them, and b) it doesn't reduce IE usage (nor IE6 in particular).

</comment><comment><USER6> Mozilla should get their act together before its too late. Once they loose their mind share it will be over. Firefox on Linux is freezing and sluggish.

<comment><USER7> It really is about speed - both load time and rendering. Sadly, I can start Firefox and while it's loading I can start Chrome, IE and Opera and they all finish before Firefox (not an accurate metric, I realise). I love Firefox but speed rules sometimes.

<comment><USER8> The only reason I'm keeping Firefox installed on my machine is Firebug. Although, I have to mention that during my last _small_ JS project I only used Google Chrome's built-in developer tools, and I liked what I saw. Maybe FF 4.0 will be a game changer, but for the moment the actual FF is just too darn slow for a daily usage.

<comment><USER9> You might want to look at Dragonfly (Opera's competitor to Firebug):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117798>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The beauty of Firefox is the openness of the XUL platform. It's an amazing idea to make it possible for anyone who can hack HTML/CSS and javascript to be able to tweak the browser, bootstrapping web viewer with web tech. The webkit browsers doesn't have this, but most users doesn't care, and they don't care about the level of data google gets from chrome either.

But yeah, this firefox instance I am running now is pretty laggy. Something needs to be done about that.

<comment><USER11> How many popular XUL apps are there really?

Songbird? Flock?

Are they really popular or game changing?

The engineering effort for XUL slowed down Netscape 6 and Mozilla browser for years until it was of decent quality. No real apps have come out of it.

In 2010. Apps belong inside the browser. Browsers don't belong in apps.

<comment><USER10> not the apps, the firefox plugins. basically any web developer with enough perseverance can hack theorin own browser.

<comment><USER9> Opera uses the same open plugin interface as Firefox.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI>

[http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-opera-plug-in- interfa...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-opera-plug-in-interface/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The main issue with firefox currently is that its not webkit. Webkit is faster and thats what people care about mostly. That and the fact that firefox itself(the application) is slow or at least I find it to be in comparison to chrome and safari.

<comment><USER13> > Webkit is faster and thats what people care about mostly.

Not really. It really depends on the end-user. I'm sure there are lots of people like me who prefer Firefox because of the addons.

<comment><USER12> Chrome has plugins too, not as many, but I am sure it will grow as the number of users grows as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use FireFox for work and Chrome for surfing function/speed respectively.

FireFox keeps all my tabs nicely open, I can have all the helpful plugins installed on it. Chrome is completely fresh install, with only xMarks plugin to remain fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed the other day how I was using Chrome basically all the time at home even though I have Firefox setup with some very useful plugins that work well. I think it all comes down to speed. Anyone know of any good metrics on performance of chrome vs. firefox?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me it's all about speed. Funny thing is that the same thing made me to switch from IE to Firefox.

Only things that may keep me with Firefox are now Firebug and FirePHP.

<comment><USER16> I've been the same way. I switched to using Firefox first because it was _way_ faster than IE. Since then, it sped up a bit, and has since been bogged down by the same things that bogged down the Mozilla browser to begin with... which is why Firefox was made...

Full circle, anyone? And people are surprised they're having trouble compared to their booming, speed-oriented days? For me, Firefox is around for compatibility tests and the Web Developer toolbar (Web Inspector in Safari works better for a number of things, though, so it rarely gets used).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The address bar in Chrome works so much better than the separate address and search fields in Firefox. This is the main reason that I switched to Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER18> At work I test on Chrome and Opera(and on IE in VirtualBox), but my main workhorse is still Firefox (on Ubuntu 9.10).

Why? The wide choice of extensions. I do try to disable most of the ones I am not using at the moment, some tend to crash things.

Still, one has to admit Firefox has bloated quite a bit since early days pre 1.0.

</comment><comment><USER19> I stopped using FireFox recently as I was getting a bit fed up with it freezing and/or running at very high CPU utilisation and memory levels.

I will miss the "add in" support infrastructure but for the moment it is Google Chrome for general browsing.

<comment><USER20> Ultimately, I had to stop using FireFox because of these types of issues. I'd leave a few tabs open for a couple hours and find firefox at over a gig of memory use making everything run extremely slow. I don't have this problem with Chrome so I use Chrome.

<comment><USER21> Trouble is, it's usually add-ons in the first place that are causing these issues. I recently uninstalled Invisible Hand and noticed an immediate improvement in speed for example.

<comment><USER20> That's what I thought. I tried removing various plug-ins to figure out which one was the problem. I got down to only having ad-block enabled and I didn't want to disable it.

<comment><USER21> Fair enough. At that point I usually recommend trying a new profile, but honestly a jump to Chrome is probably going to be more of a performance benefit at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's worth pointing out that almost all of Chrome's share has come at IE's expense, not FF's.

<comment><USER23> It's like saying that voting for Nader was taking votes away from John Kerry :P

<comment><USER16> Or from Mickey Mouse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's wrong with Firefox?

Their biggest innovation for a long time has been Greasemonkey (was that done by Mozilla, or a plugin? Dunno, doesn't really matter). And it can't even run JS before the page loads.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a bit skeptical on the source for those numbers.

"according to a new set of data crunched by NetApplications" - At least he mentions the source, even though he doesn't link it.

He also doesn't mention what those statistics are based on. The number of users, on which websites they were measured, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does the statistic include Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer?

<comment><USER21> Honestly, who uses that?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And Chrome will keep gaining with things like Google Chrome Beta Browser Adds Translation, Privacy Features - <http://bit.ly/baCeoV>

</comment><comment><USER26> Another advantage of Chrome: extremely fast JavaScript engine. That puts them at a distinct advantage for the coming deluge of web apps.

</comment><comment><USER27> Chrome was catching up.

The h.264 idealism was the last straw.</comment>


Scientists Create a Form of Pre-Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/tpna/

<comment><USER2> I wonder what kind of result is more interesting. Creating something that can be defined as life that is how it happened naturally or something that can be defined as life isn't how we did it.</comment>


Branding to Founders: What Law Firms Got Right and Others Haven't - <AUTHOR> http://bhargreaves.com/2010/12/law-firms/

<comment><USER2> WARNING: Trojan.JS.Redirector.cq caught by my software comming from this site.</comment>


Trying to Keep the Internet Safe from Warrantless NSA Surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/trying-keep-internet-safe-warrantless-nsa-surveillance <comment><USER2> Very nice. Nothing new here, but this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with internet architecture and want to get up to speed with this particular facet of (seemingly illegal) surveillance.

However, I want to quickly point out one omission in the discussion of the risks of allowing this kind of activity to continue:

If the NSA is effectively spying on everybody who communicates with a server outside the US, it is trivial for them (or another government agency) to _fabricate_ traffic (presumably child pornography) in order to target someone.

The ACLU (and others similarly positioned to criticize this conduct) always rightly point to the risks to journalists and human rights activists of having their communications intercepted and accurately portrayed, but what about the ease of lying about it in order to target dissidents?

This seems like an obvious vector and deserves more attention and discussion.

<comment><USER3> If it were legal you could call it unconstitutional. The point is do not want. But really Google is so much worse than the NSA. We can't do anything about Google though. He's like an uninvited guest to every party. And now we have Microsoft to contend with as well.

<comment><USER4> > We can't do anything about Google though.

Yes, we can! Don't use Google, or use certain settings in the applications which enhance your privacy. The default settings are not always the best settings for the user.

Don't use Google Search. Use a search engine which respects your privacy such as the scraper DuckDuckGo (DDG).

Don't use Gmail. Use an e-mail provider which doesn't scan through your e-mail. Where you got IMAP access. Use a device where you can use GPG. Or use alternative methods of communication.

Don't use Google Maps. Use a maps application which respects your privacy such as OpenStreetMap or (arguably) Apple Maps.

Don't use Google Fit. [...]

And so on, so forth. Ask yourself the following: do I _really_ need this? The answer is often: "not really."

You have the option to use neither. If the choice is Android or iOS you pay more for iOS devices but your privacy generally suffers less. [Ignoring the option of dumbphones] there's a third option: _don 't take your phone with you._ It is a _choice_ to take your Android or iOS device with you. Among others, Bruce Schneier wrote about this in his book Data And Goliath.

<comment><USER5> But you can't avoid google analytics..

<comment><USER6> > But you can't avoid google analytics..

That's the easiest to avoid. Ghostery, or a simple edit to your /etc/hosts file.

The problem is that tracking is much more pervasive, and there are many more ways you can be tracked that are much harder to block than Google Analytics.

<comment><USER5> What about for iOS? Sure there's more pervasive methods, but I doubt any are as ubiquitous as GA. My ghostery plugin shows GA for nearly every website I visit.

<comment><USER7> I thought iOS browsers' adblockers can at least do domain-based blocking, which is enough for the typcial GA case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Meanwhile: Obama Opens NSA's Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community, Just in Time for Trump [1]

1\. [https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast- tr...](https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-trove-of- warrantless-data-to-entire-intelligence-community-just-in-time-for-trump/)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I hate it when this starts out with Trump bashing. Obama is much more guilty. I am not an american, so I don't exactly understand what the term 'liberal' means. Spying on your own people without warrant?

More discussion here - [https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5o1ovy/with_only...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5o1ovy/with_only_days_until_donald_trump_takes_office/)

<comment><USER10> Heh, that's funny. I am American and don't understand the meaning of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in our modern culture.

<comment><USER11> Ideology is basically meaningless. American politics is entirely tribalism.

The Democrats spent 8 years decrying the myriad ways the executive branch violated the Constitution under George W. Then Obama takes power and basically continues or expands nearly all of them, and with only a small handful of exceptions, the Democrats stop caring and forget entirely.

The Republicans spend 8 years decrying overspending and the national debt under Obama, even organizing an enormous 'Tea Party' movement predicated around resistance to it. Then, as Trump is taking power, they rally around a budget that will increase the national debt by 50%.

Ideology is an extremely loose set of guidelines that are only really adhered to in a coherent way by a tiny handful of true believers (folks like Bernie Sanders or Justin Amash). By and large, politics is purely about power -- once you win, all that matters is erasing any past victories claimed by the other party and then doing whatever will please your donors so you can win the next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Obama is ultimately responsible for trying to ram an international Internet surveillance mechanism into law ([https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp](https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp)) and giving the NSA a free pass to conduct mass surveillance against American citizens without a warrant. (New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or concern for privacy—share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report today by the New York Times. [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3283349-Raw-12333-su...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3283349-Raw-12333-surveillance- sharing-guidelines.html))

</comment><comment><USER13> The copies the NSA keeps of your intellectual property are definitely not piracy though.

</comment><comment><USER14> >"To use a non-digital analogy: It's as if the NSA sent agents to the U.S. Postal Service's major processing centers to conduct continuous searches of everyone's international mail."

It's worth noting that U.S. Post Office also records meta data of all snail mail:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service- confirms...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/postal-service-confirms- photographing-all-us-mail.html)

The last paragraph in the above link being completely laughable if course.

</comment><comment><USER15> > and even invited Russia to hack the emails of his political opponent

For the 1000th time. He didn't (and it's amazing how often this gets repeated) 'invite' them. He said they should release the documents if they already had them.

Note the story line and then the exact quote here:

[http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-putin-no- relatio...](http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-putin-no- relationship-226282)

"I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing".

Is not "hack Hillary Clinton". It's "if you've hacked Hillary Clinton release the emails". Key difference.

<comment><USER16> >For the 1000th time. He didn't (and it's amazing how often this gets repeated) 'invite' them. He said they should release the documents if they already had them.

The direct quote is as follows:

"I will tell you this, Russia: If you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,"

It's hardly a stretch to read this as an invitation, despite the later claims of his handlers.

<comment><USER15> > It's hardly a stretch to read this as an invitation

It's an interesting Rorschach test.

What would be fascinating is to do an experiment where someone didn't have an emotional attachment to the issue and see how this is interpreted by different parties.

For that matter do the same with this issue merely see what people who fell on either side (or in the middle) thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious to what HN crowd thinks about a question related to all this.

People are now under the assumption that US agencies are collecting all calls, emails, anything electronic for all citizens as it's technically possible and confirmation is slowly being revealed.

If a crime was committed to a citizen, how would said citizen legally make a request for information the NSA or any agency has that would be useful as evidence. Shouldn't all citizens be able to use what is being collected in court as the government is for the people? How would a person in court go about requesting anything if the possibility exists.

<comment><USER18> I know some people have already tried that and obviously failed. they just pull the "security" card and say any information they have cannot be disclosed in court because its a threat to national security. then they'd say those matters can only be conducted in a secret court where everyone has "security clearance", and oops - sorry plaintiff - you don't, so you're excluded from your own trial.

This was part of what happened to Ladar Levison, owner of Lavabit which was served with an NSL. He couldn't easily shop for a lawyer because he could only contact lawyers that were authorized to handle top secret material. And he had to appear at one specific court venue in Virginia even though he was from Texas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd less worry about NSA then character like googles Eric Schmidt. This one will sell you in a blink of an eye for his own political hallucinations.

<comment><USER20> Yep - both him and Zuckerberg are awful people is you are about privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you support this you should consider donating to Wikimedia or the ALCU:

[https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give](https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give)

[https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to- aclu](https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to-aclu)

</comment><comment><USER22> I feel like it will just get worse and worse.

No turn back possible anymore.

Maybe in fifty or hundred years we can talk about it again. For now. It will just get worse.

<comment><USER23> If it will "just get worse" then there will be no "again".

Frankly, elsewhere people get jailed for speaking their mind, and you know what some of them do? Speak their mind. We face pretty much no repercussions other than it not being so fun to discuss it, some people pouting because it holds up the mirror to their cowardice, so we.. don't? Nah. This is the _only_ way worms can get power, by giants lying down and falling asleep. So maybe just don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there anyway for us outside the US to stop the US government from spying on our comms, when we message people inside the US?

</comment><comment><USER25> Warrantless? Thats really splitting hairs. Warrants arent a problem for national governments. The goal must remain protection against all surveillance ... full stop. There is no room for backdoors, even for those with warrants.

<comment><USER23> push, meet shove.

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/tools-for- treason/](https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/tools-for-treason/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: alternative news management sites, worth the effort? - <AUTHOR>

Recently I found myself pondering an older idea of mine for handling news, that has many aspects in common with friendfeed. It is not the same, but I could imagine friendfeed could mimic those features relatively easy. Not sure if they would want to - anyway, I wonder if it is too late to pursue the idea? Will there be room for more than one friendfeed? I am (so far) just one guy and money is scarce, so there would be a disadvantage against ff.
How do digg and reddit co-exist, are they not essentially the same thing?
I remember to have read about several news filtering projects on HN, so I wonder if for you the effort was worth it, despite of Reddit and Digg having a strong hold on the market? Did any of the more recent projects gain any traction? <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a way of comment aggregation, eg for 1 article there are comments and duplicate articles at multiple degrees of separation:

\- Article + same story elsewhere on news site + each one's comments

\- Blog reference to article + duplicate references on other blogs + each one's comment

\- Digg + competing social news sites + each one's comments

\- Social network references + other social networks + comments

\- Comment communities, eg co.comment

\- Friend aggregators eg Friendfeed and competitors + their comments

Would be great to see framework or system to see all discussion in 1 place, not necessarily forcing users to discuss in 1 place, but to see from a historical perspective the different viewpoints. Maybe some type of tag that an original author can insert. Trackback V2 perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER3> You opened a rather large can of worms here, the short answer to your question is that you're kind of late to the game, there are hundreds if not thousands of Digg/Reddit competitors and taking on FriendFeed/Twitter has and IS being done on a daily basis (Plurk etc.)

Anyone familiar with Reddit or Digg will tell you they are about as similar as a Ford Taurus and a Honda Accord. They share the same basic function but vary vastly in audience, content and culture.

All that being said, if you can build a better mouse trap but all means do it. I'll be waiting on the sidelines cheering you on and sharing my thoughts on what you're doing right and wrong ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> One approach to Twitter is of course to create a site that is acting as a Twitter frontend, which I think friendfeed is also doing. Ideally, it would still be independent of Twitter, so that if Twitter goes down, my users could still communicate.

I think there are several popular implementations of IM clients (like Pidgin, Trillian, whatever), so perhaps the same could work for news sites - they all access the same data, but with different interfaces.

I will see if I can find a basic functionality that could be implemented in a relatively short timespan, then I'll decide if it is worth tackling... Certainly it would NOT be a reddit clone ;-)

Edit: of all the reddit clones, did any become a reasonable success? To "own" a project like Hacker News would make me proud (so I would count it as a success), but I doubt that something like HN would bring in a lot of money(?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You don't want to end up in a pissing match in a dominant market unless you've got something that will truly differentiate you up your sleeve. This isn't to say that you couldn't compete, but even in your best case scenario, you've captured part of a market that is heading towards being a commodity. Sure there are lots of IM programs out there. How many of them do you think generate revenue of interest?

Maybe consider open sourcing it so that folks can build their own friendfeed- ish sites.

</comment><comment><USER5> Go for it. I've sat on my own ideas and watched the world go by to see the same ideas become popular websites. Ignore what you see as competition. The worst that happens is you gain no users. You learn from it anyway and its a springboard to your next great idea. Fear doubt and just start coding n</comment>


GitLab 4.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gitlabhq.com/gitlab-4-release/ <comment><USER2> From the website:

      What we removed in 4.0:
      SQLite support (I like it but this database got locked
      when several users use gitlab at once)

This is a pitty! I am sure there are many small teams where sqlite is totally sufficient.

Have you been able to measure and determine the problems with sqlite more precisely? It would be interesting to see at which point (number of concurrent users) the problems occur. Also it just reads like some data accessing backend is not properly closing connection / file access, so blocking might be just a bug, not a sqlite limitation.

Did you read <http://www.sqlite.org/lockingv3.html> ?

I personally do like having such important infrastructure like bugtrackers as simple as possible, beeing able to setup anytime anywhere with sqlite backend is really a plus in changing environments.

<comment><USER3> One important solution is to switch from journal mode to WAL mode. Journal mode (the default) makes readers block writers and vice versa. WAL mode makes it so only writers block writers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> GitLab looks awesome, both features and design wise, but the installation process is so tedious and complicated that I quit in the middle of it more than once: [https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/4-0-stable/doc/ins...](https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/4-0-stable/doc/install/installation.md)

This is feedback I heard from fellow developers as well.

I'm curious as to whether the maintainers are planning to simplify the list of dependencies and installation steps in the upcoming versions.

<comment><USER5> I'm sad to hear your GitLab installation didn't go smooth.

I hope to improve our Chef Cookbook for GitLab to the point where it can replace some of the scripts you need now.

Was there any particular part of the installation guide that we can improve in the near future?

(I run GitLab.com, offering GitLab as a service)

<comment><USER4> First of all, thanks a lot for the quick response.

Let me apologise in advance for complaining on an open-source project instead of trying to contribute.

Anyway, my personal feelings were that some of the dependencies could have been avoided (or perhaps set to some default value), at least for the community edition that I'm supposed to get up and running on an existing server machine.

Some examples: * Requiring Python (for a Rails project!), * Asking me to create special system users for the processes, * Setting paths, keys and chmods manually (and not in some install.sh process), * Configuring a database and access to it (this could easily use a default setting that pro users could edit manually).

From the comments around here, I realize that maybe I looked at the project in the wrong way and it should be installed either as a standalone service or as a virtual machine. If that's the case, I think a short Readme or Install doc explaining that would be very helpful for most users.

<comment><USER6> > Configuring a database and access to it

Welcome to the world of server software. I think everything web app I've ever installed required database configuration. I take it you've never installed Wordpress? Or Roundcube? Textmate? Gallery? OpenPhoto?

I agree that other parts of the installation are annoying (python2 link, which isn't standard [1]), but the configuring a DB is _very_ par for the course.

The special system users part annoyed me at first, but I realized I'm creating ssh access for git and so in that light it makes a lot of sense to create a new user. On the plus side, gitolite lets you have a ton of users that can use ssh to get the code without having a user account for each one, so it's a win over the long haul.

[1] On my Debian system (should also work with Ubuntu) I solved this with:

        sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python2 python /usr/bin/python2.7 7

This lets the package system know about the symlink instead of just putting some random symlink in a package-manager controlled directory.

<comment><USER4> The thing is, I actually did install most of the software you mentioned, and most of them just ask you for some credentials and run the db initialisation and population themselves. WordPress goes so far as to do that via a post- upload web interface, which is a superb UX IMHO, and something I remember writing into my own open-source PHP projects 10 years ago [1].

I really don't mean to disrespect but I think in the age of Rails and ORMs, these sort of tasks can be implemented even easier for the user and cleaner for the integrating apps.

That being said, I realise that GitLab relies heavily on some system-heavy dependencies ( _cough_ gitolite), and whoever wrote the installation guide is probably a system guy that didn't want to hide any of the details behind some automatic script. I just suggest that this should be the "Installation for Advanced Users" doc that's the alternative to some automated process.

[1] figuring this out made me feel very old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GitLab seems to be getting better and better, every month.

To anyone who is using this, how would you compare 4.0 to the current GitHub, in terms of UI/Features?

I'm thinking of moving from a third party host to GitLab. What should I be aware of?

<comment><USER8> The main feature I'm missing is forks/pull-requests across repos. It's a nice way to keep strict control over the main repo while allowing others to commit code at their leisure. I must admit that this took me a little by suprise after installing GL.

<comment><USER5> Consider voting for this functionality at [http://gitlab.uservoice.com/forums/176466-general/suggestion...](http://gitlab.uservoice.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions/3456722-issue- merge-requests-between-projects-repos)

<comment><USER8> I actually tried, but was greeted with a "Sorry, but we couldn't submit your vote." Something is broken but that's not gitlabs fault ;)

<comment><USER5> I guess UserVoice ops is on a well deserved holiday :-) <https://twitter.com/UserVoice/status/282207838149943296>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might be the push I need to install GitLab for my biz and site deployments, and bringing on contributors... until now, it seemed like too much hassle when I can simply pay $7/mo to use GitHub mini plan.

Looks fantastic though congrats.

</comment><comment><USER10> Github isn't just a list of features. It is also the community, expertise and maintaining uptime and availability, security, etc. I guess for so little money I don't know why I'd ever use this unless I was working at a bank or somewhere that was obsessed with security and self-hosting (and didn't realize github is better at this than they are).

Also, I have to admit it is a bit irritating that this is such a direct rip of github. The only real "feature" they're adding over github is getting everything github innovated without paying github.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't throw out the phrase "so little money" so eagerly.

I'm a student with practically no income, and I have about 50 repositories for my school and weekend projects. To use GitHub, I would have to pay them $100/mo.

<comment><USER12> Bitbucket offers unlimited private repos for students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> First of all, GitLab is awesome! However, I have to agree on making the installation steps easier. I was running GitLab 3.1 and followed the instructions on the official "From 3.1 to 4.0" update guide but when I checked GitLab's status at the end, there were several errors or uncomplete parts. Considering its a major release, I decided to reinstall everything from scratch instead of trying to manually fix everything displayed on the GitLab status check.

</comment><comment><USER14> GitLab is incredible. I just read the documentation on setting up databases: [https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/install...](https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/install/databases.md)

So it now supports both MySQL and Postgres, even though MySQL is preferred. Does anyone know what that means for a Postgres guy like me? Does "MySQL is preferred" mean that it has known bugs on Postgres? Is it usable?

<comment><USER5> According to the release notes GitLab 4.0 offers "Better PostgreSQL support". Unofficial PostgreSQL support has been around since 3.0 <http://blog.gitlabhq.com/gitlab-3-dot-0-released/>

Right now all the tests are green on PostgreSQL <https://travis- ci.org/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/jobs/3796920>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anybody know if GitLab does limit access to repos for certain people while the rest have unlimited access?

An example, CS team have access to issues/wikis only while the dev team have unlimited access.

This is our only deal breaker with GitHub.

If you know of other git-based system/service that does this, please let me know.

Thanks!

<comment><USER16> Yes by default there are 4 different type of privileges per project that can be assigned to a user : guest, reporter, developer, master & owner. The list of what each is allowed to do can be found here : <http://demo.gitlabhq.com/help/permissions>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been looking at options for Git repos inside the firewall so happy to see this. Has anyone used Atlassian Stash too? How does it stack up vs GitLab? I've been using GitStack for a few months, which hasn't been bad for the basics.

</comment><comment><USER18> Man, the feature that I've wanted for a LONG time is in this rev of GitLab. Groups / Namespaces and permissions based on those groups.

</comment><comment><USER19> We're using GitLab for 3 month now and it's an amazing project. Kudos to everyone who helped!</comment>


Tesla driver dies in first fatal crash while using autopilot mode - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot-death-self-driving-car-elon-musk <comment><USER2> Looks like the truck had a truncated view of the car because of a grade.

[http://imgur.com/a/lFRgf](http://imgur.com/a/lFRgf)

Elon says the radar ignores what it thinks are overhead signs.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748625979271045121](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748625979271045121)

More discussion:

[https://m.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4qnu4a/a_tragic_...](https://m.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4qnu4a/a_tragic_loss/)

</comment><comment><USER3> "The top of Joshua Brown's 2015 Tesla Model S vehicle was torn off by the force of the collision. The truck driver, Frank Baressi, 62, Tampa was not injured in the crash. The FHP said the tractor-trailer was traveling west on US 27A in the left turn lane toward 140th Court. Brown's car was headed east in the outside lane of U.S. 27A. When the truck made a left turn onto NE 140th Court in front of the car, the car's roof struck the underside of the trailer as it passed under the trailer. The car continued to travel east on U.S. 27A until it left the roadway on the south shoulder and struck a fence. The car smashed through two fences and struck a power pole. The car rotated counter- clockwise while sliding to its final resting place about 100 feet south of the highway. Brown died at the scene. Charges are pending."

source: [https://www.levyjournalonline.com/police- beat.html](https://www.levyjournalonline.com/police-beat.html)

given the above, I suspect that even if the Model S' brakes kicked in, they still would not have saved him. Unless the driver was asleep at the wheel or otherwise distracted.

<comment><USER2> View of intersection: [https://goo.gl/maps/nmbNuGMkbQs](https://goo.gl/maps/nmbNuGMkbQs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The first paragraph notes that this was Tesla's first known autopilot death > in some 130 million miles driven by its customers. "Among all vehicles in > the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles," the company then notes.

This statistic is a bit disingenuous, since the 1 fatality every 94 million miles is across all road types, where as Tesla's autopilot is only used for highway driving, mile for mile the safest way to drive.

<comment><USER5> Very interesting that you suggest highway driving is the safest part (I assume in the US). In Australia it is country driving that is the most dangerous. An area the Telsa self driving feature would be very suited.

[http://www.mac.sa.gov.au/campaigns/country- driving](http://www.mac.sa.gov.au/campaigns/country-driving)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is why i'm skeptical of tesla rushing out autonomous features. i think augmented driving being confused by customers as fully autonomous is extremely dangerous. teslas rush to market and resulting accidents could set back the whole industry.

I also don't understand how tesla can make the leap to fully autonomous vehicles learning/using training data from the semi-autonomous vehicles that are in the customers hands? google has driven 1.5 million miles fully autonomously (with some human oversight) on city streets how many has tesla?

another thought: if tesla does get to fully autonomous vehicles... wouldn't that destroy their sales? its generally agreed upon the demand for car ownership decreases dramatically with self driving vehicles. maybe theyre not afraid to cannibalize themselves akin to apple?

</comment><comment><USER7> Even if the software was blameless, I could see an incident like this setting back acceptance of autonomous driving a couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER2> Brad Templeton argues a perpendicular truck would look stationary to radar and be filtered out, so use LIDAR.

[http://ideas.4brad.com/man-dies-while-driven-tesla- autopilot](http://ideas.4brad.com/man-dies-while-driven-tesla-autopilot)

<comment><USER8> The reason they couldn't use LIDAR on the Tesla is because Tesla is literally the coolest car on the road, and the LIDAR protrusion on the top of the car would completely reverse that. It would go from the coolest car to the dorkiest car.

There isn't a way to just stick the LIDAR somewhere unobtrusive. So this is the thing that, strangely, almost no one (aside from myself) seems to have noticed: LIDAR is fundamentally incompatible with the current Tesla brand. And that was especially the case when there was only really the super high-end 'cool' model of Tesla vehicle. But still, the way the vehicles are marketed and designed today, they cannot add a functional LIDAR without that fundamental change.

This is a little bit ridiculous, but the reality is that at some level, most average adult consumers out there are not really much more sophisticated than the average kid in your 7th grade English class. So it just comes down to the fact that the thing on the top doesn't look cool.

Now, Elon Musk (and most Tesla fans) will never admit that.

<comment><USER2> You could add it as a fin, like BMW antennas. LIDAR is expensive and mechanically unreliable: you can't steer light electrically, so you need either a spinning motor or a phased array (under research). And isn't really needed after optical, radar and sonar.</comment></comment></comment>


Why C++ Programmers Aren't Moving to Go - <AUTHOR> http://commandcenter.blogspot.it/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html

<comment><USER2> How many times in a row can the same post be submitted?

</comment><comment><USER3> Posted yesterday, 268 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417319)

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe it is related to this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing)

If they post the same thing enough times, we become fatigued, inured, and even welcoming of an end with Go, just for the quiet in posting about how great life with Go could be, if only the incessant posting could stop.

We get it - a chosen few like Go, like the bore in the party with the single subject, trapping unwitting guests the kitchen, constantly going on.

What we haven't worked out - beyond the creator of Go wandering around Google, saying "Don't you know who I am?" whenever the technical merits of Go are questioned, is why Go even exists, and why we should down perfectly good tools for a new tool with a handle made of razor blades, and head made of glass, and usefulness yet to be proven.

Go? Be gone!</comment>


Facebook featuring/surfacing controversial/dumb comments from complete strangers - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/VJG3p <comment><USER2> >I don't know any of these people and most of the comments are either useless, or just plain dumb.

Uh..welcome to Facebook?</comment>


Guy Kawasaki offers Designers an opportunity, they get pissed - <AUTHOR> http://www.clanrossconcepts.blogspot.com/2010/08/guy-kawasaki-offers-designers.html

<comment><USER2> Designers _always_ get pissed about competitions. They call it "spec work", for "speculative". They have a lot of specific complaints:

* It requires them to trust the content-holder to honor the contest and not just take the best idea and farm it out to someone cheaper.

* It allows unscrupulous clients to harvest good ideas, for free, from lots of designers and feed them to the contest winner.

* It forces designers to do work they won't get paid for if they don't get selected.

* It prevents designers from getting to know the client and figuring out how best to deliver the project.

* It opens the project up to non-professional designers who are just as likely to have stolen design components as to have built them for the project.

Some of these arguments make sense (I wouldn't hold a contest after seeing how a bunch of them went). But a _lot_ it has more to do with a privileged position designers want to create for their field. In virtually every other field, some form of what a designer would call "spec work" is the norm. Lawyers do consults. Consultants offer advice in the run-up to a large project. Building a proposal might take 1-2 full-time weeks of work, and your hit rate on those might not be better than 50%.

<comment><USER3> The spec work of this sort is not a proposal; it is the actual work. Your analogies in other fields break down, because for the designers, this work is like the lawyer's case (not a consultation) and like the consultants "large project".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazing how simple this should be. If you don't find the $1000 prize worth it, don't participate. Likewise, don't tell someone who does see the $1000 prize worth it that he or she shouldn't participate. Market forces. Instead of seeing this as a sign of the times, they just complain. They don't seem to be able to understand that the world is a continually changing landscape. Nothing stays the same forever.

<comment><USER5> The $1000 prize is not worth it. It's not worth it for an established designer nor a fledgling designer. The time spent on the chance of being selected is far better spent doing one of two things: working on your portfolio presentation or approaching prospective clients. The fact is, designers are regularly under appreciated and their work is misunderstood. These types of projects only amplify that under appreciation and misunderstanding, while placing their work in the hands of a potentially unscrupulous individual with no contract in place.

A comment in the linked article states it plainly: if Kawasaki wished to encourage new, undiscovered designers he could easily have used his large network to identify and review portfolios. That would be either the honest method or the non-naive method of finding the designer that met his criteria. So really the question is, should I assume Kawasaki was naive?

<comment><USER4> By any chance, do you know of the podcast The Totally Rad Show? One of the main aspects of the show is asking fans to submit fan artwork utilizing the TRS logo, with the "prize" being that they will use it in their opening segment's backdrop. Essentially, their "prize" is zero dollars plus fame and recognition.

Tell me the essential difference between what they do and what Guy Kawasaki has offered. No one is up in arms over what the guys at TRS are doing. They're in fact offering less than what Guy Kawasaki is offering. Much much less.

I'm not hurting financially by any means, though I have been wanting to create something for TRS just for fun and the possibility that they'll use it in their show. Likewise, I might actually submit something for Guy's book as well.

So I pose a simple question to you? Who are you to tell me that I shouldn't?</comment></comment></comment>


How to make money using the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/how-to-make-mon.html

<comment><USER2> "Connect people who are proximate geographically."

Well, that's somewhat encouraging. I just spent all morning in meetings with business owners in Obama's neighborhood in Chicago. The hood has no media of their own and yet the media is and will be camped out there for the next 4-8 years. The neighborhood paper publishes just a pdf once a week and is universally loathed. Opportunity...

</comment><comment><USER3> This post why I keep clicking on the links to him here. Every once in a while he really nails it - simply and effectively.

</comment><comment><USER4> One sentence summary:

Every successful business connects its customers with a solution to their problem.

So just make sure you're solving a real problem, and you have a way to reach your customers. Or you can keep reading Seth Godin, master of the obvious.

</comment><comment><USER5> easy, gabe and max.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPsUmhqncAg>

</comment><comment><USER6> I was hoping for some affiliate marketing tips...

</comment><comment><USER7> _The essence is this: connect._

I dunno. As much as I enjoy Seth's posts, I would prefer:

"The essence is this: provide value."

Yes, connecting _can_ provide value, but it's a tough, extremely competitive way to go. Sooner or later, a lot of "connectors" will have nowhere to sit when the music stops.

Providing value with differentiating content or technology is a much more sustainable approach. And a much better approach for hackers like us.

For those who have difficulty providing value, connecting may be the only way to go. We hackers have better options.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1- Be Seth Godin.

2- Run a blog with ads.

3- Profit.

4- Expound obvious stuff couched as deep marketing voodoo.

5- Sell that.

6- Profit again.

<comment><USER9> Seth's blog doesn't even have ads, unless you count the links to his books. And he doesn't even make that much money on his books; the only reason they aren't free entirely is because he wouldn't he able to get distribution and promotion otherwise.</comment></comment>


Dedicated React IDE – Reactide 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/reactide/reactide <comment><AUTHOR> Come checkout the new revamped version of Reactide. We're looking forward to getting feedback on our new and improved IDE.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my app. Better search for Mail.app - <AUTHOR>

Hi! I just launched my search app for Mail.app today. I've been working my butt off on it for almost 9 months during off hours (I have a day job right now).
It is a Apple Mail plugin that takes over the search field and provides a better engine. It does stemming, contact auto-suggestion, has powerful filters, and supports a large range of syntax.
I'd love to have HN take a look at my site and product, and let me know how I  can make it better.
http://www.getrocketbox.com <comment><USER2> You might want to try naming submissions like this as: "Ask HN: Review my improved Mail.app search algorithm", or "Tell HN: I made Mail.app better!" On the other hand, I'm new here, so what do I know? :-)

Great looking site btw, although I've never had a problem with searching for mail with spotlight / Mail.app and nothing I see here convinces me of the benefits. Maybe more obvious and cool screenshots?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.getrocketbox.com></comment>


Federal court rules that sharing your Netflix password is a federal crime - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/322602/password-sharing-illegal-rules-federal-court/ <comment><USER2> Good luck with that. People have weak passwords on lots of systems, it is quite often not possible to separate using a weak password and having an account compromised from having a password shared.

So essentially, now having a weak password is a federal crime.

And that's besides password re-use which frequently leads to accounts on all kinds of systems being compromised.

I understand what the judge is trying to achieve (to make sure that one 'buyer' of a netflix subscription equates to one consumer) but the side- effects of this ruling are considerable and very wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Less linkbait at Motherboard: [https://motherboard.vice.com/read/password- sharing-is-a-fede...](https://motherboard.vice.com/read/password-sharing-is-a- federal-crime)

A submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048621)</comment>


Opening in SF hacker house - <AUTHOR> http://divvyshot.com/event/hacker_house/ <comment><USER2> An update on the Palo Alto house: All of the original residents (including myself) have moved out. However there are 8 new coders (mostly YC S09 I think) moving in for the summer. There's probably going to be availability in the fall if anyone's interested. Email Jared Tame to organize: jmtame at google's email service.

Also: If anyone wants to start a HH in their local city send me an email: my first name @odio.com.

<comment><USER3> Is there a point in starting a HH outside of the Valley?

Or were you referring just to other cities in the area where people might want to do this?

<comment><USER2> Sure. Starting a HH outside the valley is a great way to increase the signal- to-noise ratio of the people you're interacting with.

I attempted an early version of the HH when I was in Charlotesville, VA. I met several great coders through the house (and ended up applying to YC with one of them).

<comment><USER4> I'm writing this from my bed in Charlottesville...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Sam secretly wants to be a real estate agent.

<comment><USER6> Until about 12 months ago, I think we all secretly wanted to be real estate agents.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The hacker house is home to 3 hackers (including one YC startup) and would love to get a roommate from the HN community. Email sf-house _at_ googlegroups.com or sam at odio d0t cøm to schedule a time.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am definitely Interested.</comment>


LR shutdown and owner arrested - <AUTHOR> http://www.ticotimes.net/More-news/News-Briefs/Costa-Rican-arrested-in-Spain-for-alleged-financial-crimes_Friday-May-24-2013

<comment><USER2>
      on charges of operating an illegal financial business

      sentenced to five years in prison for engaging in the business of transmitting
      money without a license, a felony violation of state banking law

So is bitcoin illegal too? Is this worldwide? I can't _transmit_ money to another person or between two people without some license? Where would I get one?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're an exchange, you need a license. If you're a consumer you don't. [http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001....](http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html)

<comment><USER2> So the United States can grab someone out of a foreign country and try them here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Only if you're trading in the US without a license, but that all depends on extradition etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator Accepts Record 60+ New Startups For Summer 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/10/y-combinator-accepts-record-60-new-startups-for-summer-2011/ <comment><USER2> This makes YC a lot less interesting to me. Being one of ~150 founders vying for attention/advice/mindshare of YC is just not very compelling.

<comment><USER3> As of last batch, which had 45 startups in it, we were able to give everyone the attention they needed, as measured by the results (= most observers thought w2011 was the best batch so far).

<comment><USER4> That sounds reasonable, but I'm curious if you have data on satisfaction as reported by the founders? As your reputation grows, you may be getting better results partially through having higher quality startups, which would cloud the issue.

<comment><USER3> The last couple batches I've started asking each batch at the last dinner what we need to improve. As of last batch there were no major gripes about not getting enough attention from us.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious. What are the major gripes?

<comment><USER3> The biggest were about Preview Day, where we introduce the startups early to a few top investors. We did it too late in the cycle, didn't give startups long enough to present, and some of the investors were lame. We're not sure if we'll even keep doing it.

There were also complaints about the food. It's getting better but it's still not that great.

It's getting crowded in the room after Demo Day. That will be partly alleviated by a 2x bigger room this summer, and we'll also probably write some software to let investors register their interest in a startup instead of assuming they'll connect afterward.

Some of the speakers were boring. There are always a few.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _None of Y Combinators competitors have anything like that to offer new entrepreneurs._

Y Combinator competitors would be foolish to try to compete on the money axis anyway - the cash has always been minimally important. They would do much better by identifying and focusing on YC's actual weaknesses.

<comment><USER7> What are YC's weaknesses?

<comment><USER3> The biggest is probably the meta-weakness of not focusing on any specific market. How much that matters depends on how unusual the market is. Education, for example, is a very unusual market, and Imagine K12 has a unique advantage in the network of schools they have access to.

<comment><USER7> What makes a market unusual?

<comment><USER8> Some guesses:

* Barriers to entry not commonly seen in the web/mobile space (complex bureaucracy + entrenched players with opposing interests able to grease that bureaucracy, etc.).

* Lots of disparate stakeholders that all have to be coordinated and managed (healthcare: govt, taxpayers, patients, doctors/staff, insurance companies. Education: Parents & taxpayers, teachers unions, students, local+state+federal govt.)

* The market is not traditionally tech-savy and/or early-adopting. Users have to be actively convinced. Getting traction is even more of an uphill battle.

* Anywhere the risks to loss of investment are not transparent or clearly understood.

Maybe all markets are like this to an extent, but some moreso than others?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So 60+ out of how many?

I must admit. I cant wait to hear the types of startups that made the cut this time. It would be incredible to know (or scary as hell) to find out if any of them are in essence, similar to what we want to do (or are in the process of doing).

YC has made it possible for some really cool technologies come to the marketplace. And YC has inspired many like me to get off our collective asses to chase our dreams. Even if what I am currently building does not amount to a whole lot, the essays of PG has sure inspired me and will in turn inspire a lot many more who I will be sure to recommend it to.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I feel naked for telling them every useful insight we had about our project.

<comment><USER11> I can promise you they barely remember the interview. After so many days with hours of 10 minute interviews, the chances they will even remember any useful insight you had is close to nil.

Moreover, YC would never take an idea you told them in an interview and tell it to another start-up.

<comment><USER12> The problem arises when you put these two statements together. Sometimes we hear a key insight or have an interesting thought and seem to forget it instantly. In reality, it's often filed away somewhere in our heads, only to be refreshed later when something similar jogs our memory.

The true danger for a non-accepted startup is for their ideas to be absorbed into the subconscious memory of the YC advisers, only to bubble up later as a seemingly-original idea or interesting angle for another startup to pursue. This kind of accidental "idea theft" is practically guaranteed.

<comment><USER13> Honestly, your idea probably isn't that great. Even if it truly is, these things tend to have pretty short half lives. By the time it accidentally made its way to another startup through a YC partner you'll probably have had a lot of opportunity to already act on it. Or someone else will probably already have come up with it.

<comment><USER12> I'm not talking about "my idea" (I didn't even apply) or the value of ideas in general. I merely dispute the notion that a YC partner would hear an idea, forget it, and never make use of it again. I've seen it said several times over the last few years by defenders of YC and I don't buy it.

The reality is that some people _will_ have genuinely good, novel ideas but not be accepted (perhaps the applicant didn't seem motivated enough). _Not_ using that idea takes conscious effort; "forgetting" the idea is exactly the recipe for inadvertently passing it on to someone else.

I'm not contending that it does not make sense to share an idea with YC as part of the application process. Weighing the financial impact of giving away the idea (most would contend this is relatively small) against the potential benefit of getting into YC, submitting an application to YC will often be the rational decision.

<comment><USER14> Just for argument's sake, let's assume your right - that subconscious idea leakage is unavoidable. Now ask the question, "how did the entrepreneur come up with the idea?". The thoughts any any individual has are a function of their environment (that's the abstracted version of your theory :). There are lots of people having lots of ideas all the time, many with in similar environments as the entrepreneur. The net result is that if the entrepreneur did not allow their idea to 'leak' into YC's consciousness, some other person in YC's environment would do so within a short period of time. So there is no loss to the entrepreneur of exposing the idea to YC, aside from a small chance of a small time shifting of the 'leak' (only if they really are the first person to expose that idea to YC, which is statistically unlikely).

Simple version: _even if subconscious-idea-leakage exists_ , the likely cost is vanishingly small, as your idea is unlikely to be new to YC. If it would have been new, then withholding it only buys you time until the next bright person exposes the same idea to YC.

If you believed in conscious/active idea leakage the numbers would look different. I feel confident that no such leakage exists - it over estimates the caching capabilities of those involved ;)

<comment><USER10> Newton was not the first person to detect gravity, but he took notice. Guess what we did? We wrote a paper about "discovering gravity" and instead of publishing it we passed it on to an assembly line that produces paper- publishing scientists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The more popular and powerful YC becomes, the more it becomes evident that there's an emerging niche in the market for facilitator-type enterprises doing what YC does. Something akin to _mentorprising_ ; PG et al are _mentorprisers_ of

I guess this is to be expected as geek culture becomes more mainstream.

<comment><USER16> _mentorpreneurs?_

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most everyone trying to get accepted by YC is familiar with PG, his writings, and the YC partners experience regarding startups. It's a primary reason many apply.

Respect that PG and the other founders know how to scale the program and handle the workload. They have all the experience of running YC, while each of us has none.

They would be the first to limit their startup count if that needed to happen.

</comment><comment><USER18> That would put Yuri on the hook for what $9 million this time around?

<comment><USER19> The interesting bit is that $9 million is a normal amount for one company's series B round. In this case, that money is going to (in theory) benefit 60 companies. That is a big change that could have a significant impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> is this going to suffer from the same problems as increased class sizes? less personal mentoring, for example?

i guess you can argue that it increases the pool of connections, but that's a lower quality (unproved) pool than contacts with established players, no?

<comment><USER21> _is this going to suffer from the same problems as increased class sizes? less personal mentoring, for example?_

Probably NOT. The bar has been higher in recent batches and as a result, relatively more _established_ companies make it to the batch, as compared to, say, in 2005 - 2007. This benefits both the companies and YC -- the companies benefit by the excellent environment and networking opportunities, and YC ends up making somewhat (again, relatively speaking) safer investments.

<comment><USER22> YC is certainly getting and accepting applications from more established companies now, but they're also still funding very, very early stage companies (i.e., two founders and an idea).

My cofounder and I were in the Summer 2010 batch and fit that description, and I know of founders in this summer's batch who do as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For a second I thought 60+ was referring to an age. That would be real news.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know if this data is available, but I'd be interested to see what percentage of this class was incorporated before applying, and what percentage got incorporated as part of the process.

Also interesting would be what percentage of this class include repeat YC founders.

<comment><USER3> I think there are 7 alumni doing YC again this summer.

<comment><USER10> Why? I mean under what circumstances would you (a YC alum) rinse repeat?

<comment><USER3> When you want to start another startup. You could do that either because the old startup didn't succeed, or because you got acquired and are now finished working for the acquirer, or because although the old startup is doing fine, you decided to leave to do something new. We've had all 3 cases.

<comment><USER10> It's unbelievable how candid and forthcoming you are as a business owner (YC being your business).

Is it wrong to assume that the value of YC diminishes with each additional serving? And as a follow-up, do you have any third (or even fourth) time founders?

<comment><USER3> I don't know. Obviously some of general stuff we talk about, you'd already know, if you'd done it before. But on the other hand maybe there are other advantages you'd be better equipped to extract the second time through. E.g. if I went back to college now I'd be able to learn a lot more than I did at the time.

<comment><USER10> I think I inderstand. I can now imagine it being sort of like watching a really fast paced and complex movie for the second time. A second viewing may enable you to peel off deeper layers of complexity (that you might have missed the first time around). Also, it can never hurt getting the YC stamp on your venture - again! :-) Thanks for the answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know what the chances of them taking someone who applied late might be? We just heard about Y Combinator and applied a couple days ago. Their information is vague on this only saying that chances are very slim. Probably more slim now that they are taking 60 off the top.

<comment><USER26> Only if you would have been a true stand-out application in the regular round. Definitely more slim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish I could invest in YC.

<comment><USER27> Then pull a Yuri

<comment><USER7> Yuri Milner (as an individual and not via DST-Global), along with SV Angel's Start Fund, invested in the individual companies that participated in YC -- not in YC directly.

Though Sequoia Capital is a LP in YC.

\- - -

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156560>

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/yuri-milner-sv-angel- offer-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/yuri-milner-sv-angel-offer-every- new-y-combinator-startup-150k/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not-a-bubble!

Seriously though, there are so many software startups these days. Time to get into something else?</comment>


10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA is the Law That Saved the Web - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/ten-years-later.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I submitted this, I want to be clear I don't think it's a good article. I'm kind of stunned by this, hoping to believe it is satire...

Is this the conventional wisdom about the DMCA?

<comment><USER2> It's not satire. Some people believe that without the DMCA, every "user- generated content" site would have been slapped with a zillion-dollar lawsuit (or rather, the first few would have and nobody would have been willing to start new ones after that).

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard such negative things about the DMCA, I was surprised to see this article.

The general thrust of the anti-DMCA on the wired site seem to be that the DMCA was bad law, not because it was 100% bad, but because it went far beyond the needed provisions like you just described to push through a lot of restrictive provisions that hackers seem to dislike.

<comment><USER2> The DMCA has some completely unrelated things in it: notice-and-takedown: good, anti-circumvention: bad. There have been some more balanced articles published this week.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Women 2.0 x Startup Quote: Arianna Huffington, co-founder, The Huffington Post - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/6802999673

<comment><AUTHOR> We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success.

\- Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff)

<http://startupquote.com/post/6802999673></comment>


Dean Baquet Responds to Jay Carney's Medium Post - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@NYTimesComm/dean-baquet-responds-to-jay-carney-s-medium-post-6af794c7a7c6 <comment> rm_-rf_slash Interesting that a Medium post was refuted with just a Medium post, given that it's essentially a row between to companies, one of which happens to be a newspaper. I wonder what their strategy is by leaving it there, as at time of writing I see no reference to it on the Times' website.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is one heck of a rebuttal.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has had 30 upvotes in the past hour and yet is already on the second page.

I don't usually go all tinfoil about HN votes, but it's pretty easy to assume is flagging this one down.

<comment><USER4> We marked it as a follow-up post, which downweights it. The reason is that there shouldn't be two posts about the same story on the front page.

The top comment in the other head begins with a link to Baquet's rebuttal, so it's unlikely that anyone will miss the chance to read both posts.

<comment><USER5> People who read the first submission (before the rebuttal) will miss the follow-up if it doesn't reach the front page. Assuming they don't go back to the first submission to read new(?) comments.

<comment><USER4> Fair point, but then many of those people would miss the rebuttal even if it did stay on the front page, since a lot of readers check HN in the morning and then get to work.

I don't think there's any way to get perfect or even very good balance here—the instruments we have are too crude.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps not marking rebuttals as follow-up posts might be a good start?

It's one thing to downweight a post that duplicates content on the front page. It's another thing entirely to downweight a post that tells the other side of the story.

<comment><USER4> > Perhaps not marking rebuttals as follow-up posts might be a good start?

It's easy to argue for a different approach when you care about one story in particular, but we need an approach that generalizes well. Front page slots are the scarcest resource on HN, and we have a responsibility to keep them diverse. If we didn't do that in general, I guarantee you that many more readers would complain.

Btw, this isn't a question of taking a side in the dispute. The original NYT article received more attention on HN than any of the pro-Amazon responses did. We weren't anti-Amazon in that case and we aren't pro-Amazon in this one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vancouver in Flames - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/16/photos-riots-fire-destruction-after-vancouvers-loss/

<comment><USER2> I find the story shocking (Canada, WTF?), but I guess I am going to ask how this is HN news.

ADDENDUM: I almost didn't ask the above, except that the story seems to have so little intersection with the main HN themes.

After looking at the pictures, I retract my question. I'm put in mind of Heinlein and similar, commenting on anticipated de facto anarchy and societal implications including technological implications.

Only, per Heinlein, such was supposed to pre-dominate _below_ the 49th parallel.</comment>


Bundler can now make bundles that don't need bundler or rubygems. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/carlhuda/bundler/commit/9278bf57fd41b08580bb869c56f38503672f3a71#commitcomment-196731

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm super excited about this:

> This is useful for packaging up an app using something like warbler, rawr, > or as a .app using MacRuby

This can only help make developing desktop apps with Ruby easier.</comment>


SETI has observed a "strong" signal that may originate from a Sun-like star - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/seti-has-observed-a-strong-signal-that-may-originate-from-a-sun-like-star/ <comment><USER2> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376805)</comment>


Ask HN: If your company cares about security, why does it use Slack? - <AUTHOR> It's insane to me how many "security conscious" companies use Slack purely out of convenience.
The fact is, it's an enormous, centralized application written in PHP (not always a bad thing, but certainly not a language that keeps you from shooting yourself in the foot), with a massive target painted on its back.
How is it acceptable to you to use a chat solution hosted by a third party? Why not use an alternative you can host yourselves? It's just a matter of time before there's a huge incident. <comment><USER2> Umm... why do people always assume "hosting it yourself" is more secure and not less? Do you have Slack's security expertise and budget? In my experience when small to mid-size companies attempt to manage security themselves they do a passable job but are convinced they are doing an excellent job - until they get hacked.

Larger companies usually have the budget, tools and expertise. But even then there are lots big companies with mediocre security too.

<comment><USER3> Corollary question: Why do you assume that Slack's security expertise and security budget is greater than your own?

All we can do is assume that Slack cares about security enough to be sufficient. Last I checked, they didn't have any form of compliance certification, yet HIPPA, PCI, etc. compliant clients use them without reservation.

<comment><USER4> _> Why do you assume that Slack's security expertise and security budget is greater than your own?_

I don't assume it. I _know_ it for a fact; I've met some of their team and I know others by reputation. And I'm not exactly a slouch when it comes to this stuff (I don't eat and sleep crypto but a large part of my business is building secure infrastructure/consulting on the systems running on that infrastructure for regulated as well as non-regulated environments).

<comment><USER5> Slack has, publicly, a multi-member security team! That's entirely focused on the chat system that I don't have to put any of my teams time towards.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious...

Which is more secure?

A) Slack.

B) Open source software on a LAN accessible only through physical entry, SSH, and/or a VPN.

<comment><USER5> I'd vote slack.

<comment><USER6> > I'd vote slack.

Then I suggest you put more effort into securing your LAN situation because that is a vote indicating your belief your workstations are insecure.

<comment><USER5> If you don't assume your user/dev workstations are insecure, you're going to have a rough time in life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hosting shit yourself != more secure, and only someone with a highly naive view of their capabilities as an organization would make that assessment. Facebook is written in PHP too, but you don't see that being a huge secure vulnerability, do you?

Slack has an entire security organization dedicated exclusively to securing its stuff. My security team is focused on securing our operational systems.

Do you run your own bank? How could you outsource something so critical (literally all your money and financial details!) to a 3rd party who doesn't even let you audit their stuff?! It's just a matter of time before there's a huge incident.

Do you run your own electrical generation facility? How could you outsource something so critical to a 3rd party? I bet they don't even have an SLA!

etc. etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> The usual answer is "the self-hosted options are worse to use and make people hate them". Mattermost is a prime example, it's really clunky and uncomfortable to use. I like Rocket Chat and have hosted an instance of it myself, but it's shot through with inconsistencies and annoyances that Slack just doesn't have.

The notion that self-hosted is more secure is curious, though. Slack's security team is almost _certainly_ better than yours, for most--not all, but most--values of "yours". You might be the rare exception (I'm certainly not, and I build reasonably secure systems by habit, if only because I don't have the time or money to focus solely on _a chat service_ ), but I doubt it.

<comment><USER7> Hi Eropple, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear your Mattermost experience wasn't smooth. Could you share an example or two of what we can improve? We ship new releases every month on the 16th. If there's something you feel should be corrected I would love to see it addressed. There's over 500 contributors on the project and thousands of companies that deploy it.

In terms of security, I would propose that professionals dealing with sensitive data are often more comfortable with a self-hosted solution. As an example, former members of the CIA, FBI and NSA have used Mattermost on national television in the US: [https://about.mattermost.com/open-source- mattermost-software...](https://about.mattermost.com/open-source-mattermost- software-helps-ex-cia-nsa-fbi-hunt-us-fugitives/)

<comment><USER4> I'd be a lot more inclined to spend time responding to you, because I certainly have a list of beefs with the software, if you didn't immediately launch into pimping your stuff and trying to sneak in how wrong I am. That's "I choose to exhibit the social acuity of a space alien" behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TLDR we chose Mattermost over Slack because of security. [https://www.mattermost.com](https://www.mattermost.com)

We recently evaluated many chat systems for a large tech consulting project that includes security needs.

Slack was the frontrunner because of ubiquity, ease of use, plentiful third- party integrations, openness to free areas, and helpful in-person meetings with the Slack staff.

We picked Slack for our informal connections with external developers for non- confidential discussions.

For our own teams' use, I really like Ryver. The security is better (IMHO), the team-oriented features are stronger, and the billing is much clearer. The Ryver team is fully open to discussions about how to grow the platform and improve the security.

Ultimately the security team chose self-hosted Mattermost. We liked the combination of intranet deployability, plus a ramp toward security compliance capabilities that we do need for a few projects.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps this is a bit immature of me, but I despise Ryver for their ads that they put on Twitter a few months (a year?) back where it was completely trying to discredit Slack while having a sub-par UIX itself. Maybe I'll give it another look in the near future.

EDIT: Security-wise, I would think Slack, as a bigger company, would have better security, but that's all assumption. Do you have anything to back up the idea that Ryver is more secure? If so Ill definitely give it another look.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you about the UI/UX. For security, it depends on your threat model.

My threat model emphasizes ease of security by normal users. For example, is it easy for my teammates to see when they're in a public area or private area? Can my teammates manage access controls the ways that they want? IMHO Ryver is better at this than Slack.

My sec team's threat model emphasizes the underlying platform getting hacked. IMHO Ryver and Slack are both SaaS, so both in the same boat on this: the info is outside the firewall, which incurs legal issues, compliance issues, revocation issues, etc. I believe that SaaS providers can be excellent at security, yet the SaaS target is much bigger, and the alerting is murkier, and revocation is not thorough. This is why we chose Mattermost for secure chat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most successful software apps in the world are built with PHP. Facebook, Wikipedia, Slack, WordPress, Flickr, Yahoo. Users don't care about your tech.

<comment><USER11> PHP does have a track record of terrible security, though. WordPress and Yahoo both _still_ have reputations as security clusterfucks; Facebook did too until they grew up as a company and were able to hire some really good security people.

However, most of the backend services at Slack (the ones you'd actually want to attack) aren't even in PHP anymore: according to their job reqs, they're in Java and Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not just the setup of a self-hosted solution, but maintenance, and otherwise. If you look at the enterprise space, bigger and bigger companies are becoming comfortable with cloud-hosting of services. Growth of companies like Okta demonstrate that shift. As far as it being acceptable, I think there are a few things to consider:

1\. The Slack model is such that your staff could start using it without even getting permission from the top. This is the Slack strategy for sales. It comes into companies from the bottom, so companies are more responding to the fact that their employees are using it vs bringing it in from the top.

2\. Yes there are risks with cloud products, but risk is a cost consideration so you look at cost impact to the company of a breach and you compare that to a self-hosted high maintenance solution. This is a much more difficult calculation and it really depends on the size of your company, the value of the information Slack will be holding, etc. It's also possible Slack could be seen as more secure because an internal system breach may not include a complete Slack hosted breach. It could be seen as data segregation and diversification.

3\. Slack is not the only company that is making inroads here. Slack is known well in the tech industry, but less-so in other industries. Microsoft is a giant because Skype for Business is huge, and there's many others.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well that's a loaded question... this could easily be rephrased as "How do your companies align the need for security with the use of cloud hosted services like Slack?"

But then again, that assumes an honest question and not an agenda...

</comment><comment><USER14> You should assume that chat logs can become public at anytime, if you host it yourself or not. Don't put sensitive/embarrassing unencrypted information in chat or email. People forget this is still data at rest.

<comment><USER15> A corollary of this is a saying a friend's dad used to have, "If it isn't in writing, it doesn't exist". Of course, with VOIP, video, etc, it is more, "if it isn't done in person via voice, it does exist". If it would be damaging to leak, seriously consider whether it should be written down at all, especially in casual conversations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have an analogy.

Why would a zebra have evolved to have black and white stripes? You could see a zebra from _miles_ away due to how it stands out! Yet.. when it's in a _herd_ of zebra, it's hard to pick any individual one out, and that's why the pattern works.

And so it goes with using services like Slack, Gmail, S3, etc. My account on its own may not be the most secure thing ever but it's hidden in such a large pool of data - much of it far more valuable than mine - that the safety of the herd becomes relevant.

</comment><comment><USER17> Because they care about convenience as well, and that value outshines the elusive "lack of security". You'll probably end up with much less secure option if you try to host one yourself, unless you're really dedicated to the chat app, in which case you have your priorities wrong. You should be focused on your own product.

</comment><comment><USER18> We discuss nothing sensitive in chat, just as we refrain from doing so over unencrypted email. Pretty straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER19> >> It's just a matter of time before there's a huge incident.

I suppose that's correct. When (or maybe if, but probably when) Slack gets breached/hacked/owned it's going to be _huge_ because a _huge_ number of people are going to lose something that they didn't want to lose.

When I'm self hosting something and that thing gets breached/hacked/owned it's going to be _huge_ for _me_ because I and/or my company are going to lose something that we didn't want to lose.

I don't believe I can keep my stuff much safer than the big guys, though the point about Slack having a massive target is a good one. Maybe that makes it less secure?

I really don't know what's better for us in the case.

<comment><USER9> Really depends on if you're a target yourself. If someone is trying to target you specifically, use Slack as it's much harder. If you're not a target and are worried about Slack in general and have the budget to run your own stuff, do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the point is much "do I trust a third party service ?" not regarding the techs involved.

I read a story from a blogger [1] who was visiting an Airbus facility for an A350 presentation and when he came back in plane, his neighbor, an Airbus sensitive contractor, was editing internal documents on a Chromebook using google doc. Yep. No fear.

[1] [https://korben.info/vous-proteger-de-lespionnage- industriel-...](https://korben.info/vous-proteger-de-lespionnage-industriel- cest-bien-vous-assurer-que-vos-partenaires-le-sont-aussi-cest-mieux.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> It seems like Quip, the document service, should be a much bigger concern:

Based on their security practices document, they seem to store documents _unencrypted_ on their servers. It's encrypted in transit, sure, but not in storage? I was shocked when I found out.

[https://help.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?fil...](https://help.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file=0150M000003kuXGQAY)

At least Slack encrypts data at rest [https://slack.com/security](https://slack.com/security)

</comment><comment><USER22> Have you tried Semaphor from SpiderOak? We provide a secure Slack alternative designed using our No Knowledge architecture--meaning that we (SpiderOak) know nothing about the encrypted data you store on our servers. This approach allows a third party to host the data, making it way more convenient from an operations standpoint. Slack provides convenience, but it severely lacks in security.

</comment><comment><USER23> Because its convenient and easy to use.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Weird, this post appears to have been nuked from orbit. What happened?

<comment><USER24> Well, I flagged it and I imagine others did too. It's not an 'Ask HN' it's 'Yell my opinion at HN while pretending to ask something'. Which isn't that great.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're kind of right. At the same time, the comments appear to be answering the question, so...

<comment><AUTHOR> But, perhaps more relevant, the post doesn't say "flagged" on my end (which I'm pretty sure they do when they're flagged).

<comment><USER24> It has to be flagged enough to get that tag. As to 'commenters are commenting', that's not the criterion for what makes a good post. You're basically trying to stir up a silly fight. Sure, that gets upvotes and comments. It's still bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, ok. Would it have been OK if I hadn't posted it under "Ask HN"? Surely this site supports sharing opinions like this one in some contexts -- it's not like this was a political shitpost or something. Right?

<comment><USER24> Probably but the result would have likely been similar. The standard is supposed to be a bit higher than 'isn't a political shitpost'. If you have something interesting to say about this, you can always write it up as a blog post and submit that. If you just want to vent a bit, it's probably not going to get too far as a post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You could say the same about using Windows.

</comment><comment><USER26> Php is more secure than C.

<comment><USER27> This is so only for the core language with no libraries. API provided by PHP until recently typically provided convince over any notion of safety leading to terrible bugs.

For example, it is hard with C API for databases or templates to get SQL injection or XSS bugs. With PHP it is trivial and such usage still simpler than safer versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A selection of reasons I have heard.

\- Because self hosted HipChat / IRC / XMPP / is not cool enough.

\- Because we are all supposed to use Lync / Skype for Business, but it sucks on OSX / Linux / in general.

\- Because we are a small team, and maintaining a chat server is too much for us.

\- Because we don't know (or want to know) how Slack works.

\- Because shiney, such giffy, such memes.

\- Because its free.

\- Because my software engineers don't know how to connect to IRC

There is varying levels of good and bad reasons in there. (personally I am still a irrsi / IRC person, but I fully acknowledge I am not in the majority anymore)</comment>


Startup principles applied to create a legitimately dangerous, real life cult - <AUTHOR> http://www.integralworld.net/scofield8.html <comment><USER2> He was not the first.

Frederick Lenz, III aka Zen Master Rama 1950-1998 or more like Rama-Lama-Ding- Dong [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Lenz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Lenz)

WIRED 2.01 The Code Cult of the CPU Guru [http://www.ex- cult.org/Groups/Rama/wired](http://www.ex-cult.org/Groups/Rama/wired)

CULT OR COMPANY? [http://www.ex- cult.org/Groups/Rama/westrptr.txt](http://www.ex- cult.org/Groups/Rama/westrptr.txt)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was thinking about a startup accelerator for cults. I think much of the process could be reused with different content to capture different segments of the market.</comment>


Bug in windows calculator (10 * 10 + 10 * 10 = 1100) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQuzNzE1soU

<comment><USER2> Not a bug.

In standard mode Windows calculator does the operations in order (just like most handheld non-scientific calculators). You're doing (10 * 10), ((10 * 10) + 10), (((10 * 10) + 10) * 10).

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think so. What the calculator does is simply (((10 * 10) + 10) * 10) like a basic pocket calculator.

<comment><USER4> its funny how people never realized that calculators only do what they are told, unless you insist on the calculator doing 10 * 10 and then 10 * 10 and then putting those two results together. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The calculator won't use BIDMAS by default, as far as I know. So it may not be a bug.

</comment><comment><USER6> 200 in scientific mode</comment>


A new approach to the resume skills section - <AUTHOR> http://salexander.posterous.com/a-new-approach-to-the-resume-skills-section

<comment><USER2> Stop. You're overthinking this. The purpose of a resume isn't to sell you as an employee; it's to sell you as an interview candidate. Two very different things.

Keep your resume concise, send it as a PDF (if you're working with a system that doesn't allow PDFs, chances are you're targeting the wrong system at your prospective employer), make sure it gracefully includes the right keywords, groom your work history so that it sells your suitability for the role instead of trying to tell your life's story, and put the balance of your energy into a cover letter.

Then tear the cover letter off, turn that into an email, send it to the guy who's actually going to manage the role they're hiring for, and attach your simple PDF resume to it.

Done, move on to getting ready for the interview.

<comment><USER3> So this isn't satire?

<comment><USER2> I don't know, but whether he's making a statement about how hard it is to write an effective resume or how hard it is to glean useful information out of a resume, either way, he's using them the wrong way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not beneficial to the applicant to be very specific about skills -- the applicant would much rather you were in the dark about it, and had to interview him to get a specific idea of his skillsets.

In other words, the incentives just don't line up, so this will never happen.

You could FORCE applicants to fill something out, but people would still game the system just by marking everything 777 or marking everything to a pattern determined by the job posting etc.

<comment><USER5> You need to display your skills, period. I have hired over 20 developers in the last 6 months and received over 30 resume for every 1 good resume. I did not have time to read everyone's work experience explanation either on the first run. I could only spend less than a minute on a resume. So we rely a lot of the Skills section.

\- Put it on a table. Include how many years you have been working on a specific skill. It will be helpful to list when was the last time you used that skill. So that is the first cut.

\- After going through the skills section, we look at the Employment history and what you actually did with those skills that you listed. Then you get a telephone interview and possibly invitation to an in-person interview.

You are not going to get into the interview list if the HR person does not know what you are skilled at. Trust me, they are not going to use the interview as a discovery session. They don't have time for that, especially when there are other candidates who were clear in displaying their skill sets.

<comment><USER4> You rely a lot on the skills section, and you have an HR person doing the initial filter.

Your process is exactly what causes people to fill resumes with buzzwords. "I touched a prior version of fizzbuzz, once, at 3am" is still going to put fizzbuzz on the resume, so your HR person doesn't chuck it in the circular file.

This is the kind of process that guarantees a lack of clarity on the part of the applicant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I usually just put dates next to skills (2005-present, etc) which gives some indication. Unix file permissions are a good idiot filter, but unfortunately most recruitment agents are _completely_ clueless and wouldn't understand it.

</comment><comment><USER7> That still requires people to make self accessment of their skills. There's isn't much incentive to be completely honest on their resume, if they put it on their resume they should be able to 777 all those skills but that rarely happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are many job postings which say that knowing language X is a big plus. If I had non-expert familiarity with language X, I may not apply to a job where it is the primary requirement, but I would definitely put it down on my resume with the permission assignment corresponding to what I felt my level was. This would let me say, hey I sort of know it and also give the interviewer a chance to figure out if I knew it well enough for their needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The skills section of a resume serves two masters, the HR Dept/Recruiters, and hiring managers. You need to list out every keyword ever to get through the first, yet somehow signal to the second which skills are more prominent than others.

A pie chart, tag cloud, or some other visualization would probably go a long way - just don't get too obfuscated, or HR will just get confused & move on to the next guy.

<comment><USER9> This is where the work history and various other sections of the resume come in. Explain some of the most significant projects you've worked on and describe the nature of your contributions. If you describe 10 years of experience in web development environments using PHP, when you put C in your skills section it will be clear that C is not one of your core skills. You're probably trying to make the point that you can read and understand C if you have to, and if that's important to the employer they should follow up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like it. Another benefit is it could help you filter out prospective employers. Most people wouldn't get it, but the ones that did would be promising.

</comment><comment><USER11> The skills section of a resume tells about what "self-assessed skills" a candidate have. It's never meant to tell how good a candidate is.

The efficiency, mastery and attitude of a candidate will be determined in the technical exam and personal interview not by a detailed resume or the "unix permissions" metaphor.

That is exactly why we have a "hiring process" in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Sometimes I think that programmers should keep two versions of their resume, one for recruiters and one for other developers. But that's a totally different topic all together._ <http://blog.rishavrastogi.com/?q=node/2>

</comment><comment><USER13> Have people classify their relative skill distribution using a pie chart. Test them on a slice or two to calibrate. Dumb idea?</comment>