What American universities can learn from Germany (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/07/27/heres-what-american-universities-can-learn-from-germany/ <comment><USER2> I 'm not sure if they are talking about "dualstudium", but I think this is a thing which needs to be advanced. There should be a separation between "skill education"(learning things for a job) and "human education" (learning things to become a better human/just for understanding). The latter we already enforce with 9 year Schulpflicht (which one could debate about prolonging) and then leave to the individual.

University education should not be or promise jobs, it should be about understanding certain fields on the deep level and being confronted with the bleeding edge of knowledge. Right now we are conflating the two, meaning we have a large number of students wasting their time in classrooms when for their _goal_ they should either be getting deeper, tougher confrontation with the subject (if they want to do research/understand deeply) or practical "on the job" education (if they want to get a job). BWL is the worst culprit of this as far as my friends who studied it describe it.

<comment><USER3> > I 'm not sure if they are talking about "dualstudium",

I agree with what you wrote but the OP is not about _Dualstudium_. The "dual educational" the article refers to, is about non-univerity tertiary education (Duale Ausbildung). The _dual_ part is the fact that this happens in a company and a (usually state run) school. [1]

As an example: If you want to work as a plumber in Germany you _have_ to get a certificate. The only way to get the certificate is to participate in the dual educational system.

For a plumber that means to find an employer that is willing to give them a three and half year apprenticeship contract. The apprentice will work only three or four days, the other days they have to attend school. The exact details depend on the trade, some have a three work week, one school week schedule, but the general idea is that work and school education happen at the same time.

Not all trades follow this model but if they do it's mandatory. Also the newly certified plumber is only allowed to do plumbing jobs. To be allowed to install a heating system for example they have to make a run trough the dual system again, now with the HVAC guild. Just to install a new heating system you need at least a HVAC company, a plumber, an electrician and a mason. The HVAC guy won't touch any pipes, cables or bricks because he is not allowed to by law and discouraged by his guild. Same for the plumber, electrician and mason.

What the article misses to mention is that the system makes every task that falls in a regulated area very expensive. As a consequence of this it also leads to a lot of illicit work.

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

<comment><USER4> You are right and I think half of the people here did not understand the difference between 'Duales Studium' and 'Duale Ausbildung'.

But on the other hand, I don't quite get what the Universities have to do with the dual education System?!? I mean, as far as I know, Universities are specialized in higher education.

<comment><USER3> The headline is misleading and I believe the article is not clear about the role of the universities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apart from stratification of students into tracks, America could also learn not to crush its students with debt.

A mandatory cap of tuition for universities receiving federal-debt funded students would be a reasonable way to harness the beast of tuition price inflation created by zealous federal financing of debt and questionable promises of benefits of "college", which seem to have very little to do with training and everything to do with signaling.

Colleges could then decide whether to accept students with federal debt by lowering tuition (and removing bloat) or not. Interested to hear ideas of pitfalls with this approach, and if they are worse than the situation of non- bankruptcy eligible mountains debt now.

<comment><USER6> I think stratification, or 'tracking; as it's called in the US I believe is one of the biggest failures of the German system.

From my experience in the US, high schools are about 4-5x the size of German schools. That allows for flexible curricular within one school, where you can get into the advanced Calculus class but take it easier with foreign languages, and, most important do sports etc, with everyone.

It really doesn't seem useful to sort people along a linear scale at 10 years of age, especially considering that empirically, the single most important factor for that decision is the parents' ambition.

The US' biggest flaw is quality differences between schools. I can't get my head around the idea that school finances heavily depend on the immediate neighbourhood they're serving. That's both morally bankrupt and severely shortsighted. The larger schools also double or triple the average commute, costing US students an hour per day, strengthening reliance on cars and making social life harder than it needs to be.

<comment><USER7> I totally agree that stratification at age 10 is pretty terrible, but stratification in universities seems like a very different story.

At college age, people are much more capable of making their own decisions, and their actual capabilities and weaknesses have also become clearer and more stable. And it's not like going to a Fachhochschule is going to set someone up for a hard life as being assigned to a Hauptschule pretty much does.

<comment><USER2> Fachhochschule gets a bad rep from snobs, but having worked with graduates, they often beat university grads in application fields. It's just a different focus

<comment><USER8> Having started out at a University and switched to a Fachhochschule (Bachelor CS for both) I can say that there weren't more practical things at the FH, but everything was simply way easier. Math was simpler (mostly because it was usually applied as opposed to proofs, so I guess math was indeed more practical) and the CS courses were way below what the university offered. So I'd say it's certainly understandable when people look down on FH (because it can easily be the case that it's subpar)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Should be noted that this is only one segment of german job education. There are of course also classical university courses without much or any contact to real job experience.

Also, what they describe is less the University route than the non-university route, being educated by and in the business. Germany has also universities that cooperate with business, but that's not the norm. The classical division is between universities (Studium) and education at the job (Ausbildung). Not sure how universities could learn from the latter, as it is an alternative to them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Probably o/t for the article:

My own experience is very dated, but in the late 80's and early 90's I attended public university in both countries.

Back then it really struck me how infantilized the student experience in the US was; but also how much more we actually worked, because a little arbitrary structure is pretty helpful for manic 19-year-olds.

For the self-motivated, academically serious student it was a kind of paradise with slightly shabby institutions, some of them very very old. Most professors, even the famous ones, were accessible, but in lieue of "homework" you were expected to keep up on the reading, for which at best you got a list of books (at worst: go figure it out). Nobody seemed to care at all about grades.

Even then, when public universities in the US were cheap, it was remarkable how much cheaper studying in Germany was, from the minimal fees to the ubiquitous subsidies. Student housing in California was a racket - the dorm cost way more than a shared apartment - but in Germany it was so laughably cheap you never really minded the bad parts. We even had a semi-official student bar with 1DM (50c) beers.

I think partly because of the freedom, partly because of the low cost, and partly because working-class kids mostly didn't go to university, there was basically no attention paid to the need to one day make a living. I didn't stay long enough to find out if that was a good or a bad thing; I did my best to avoid that question in the US anyway, and paid the usual price for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> please don't. I live in germany and our academic system is flawed to the extreme. Even the dual systeme.

I mean common our universities and schools has a worse system than america (and a lot of other countries). The dual system should've bridged school and labor skills, however it does not work that good. Especially not in IT. The problem a lot of kids come from different schools, some have higher educations some not. so the school tries to learn a lot of things which they should've teached in schools already, while they train you not a lot of practical things in school. Also a lot of practical things you learn in the school are mostly already learned since the school progresses way too slow.

As already said I think the problem starts already in the kindergarten/early school. And then progresses in middle schools.

in germany you basically get thrown to life either after your school years or after your university/higher schools. You always start with nearly no experience, even after you did apprenticeship in dual system you are not prepared for your life.

worse is even if you did something in west germany it could be slightly different in other parts of germany, so switching schools can be really really hard.

our system basically enforces "lax-iness" until a certain point in life and than you either get it or you get lost in the system. and it get's worse due to our polictics that loosens more and more rules

<comment><USER12> > our academic system is flawed to the extreme. Even the dual systeme.

Yes its flawed but not to the extreme like you suggest. One of the biggest problems we have, and this I think is common to almost all countries, is that there is very little emphasis on applied knowledge and much more on theoretical knowledge. The duale Studium is a better way to attack the problem than anything else currently out there IMHO.

Another problem we have is that motivations are flawed for our Professors. Many Professors want to conduct research and don't care about teaching the material, on the other hand you have some Professors that don't want to research and would just enjoy teaching the material, yet everyone is incentivized to conduct research because its the only way to progress. I think this is fundamentally wrong. Its bad for the students and bad for the professors. If a professor just wants to teach he/she should be allowed to focus on that area and be judged by how well his students can actually apply the learning they acquired in the course. If a professor wants to research he should be judged by his research.

There are so many other problem areas as well, for instance, I think we should allow much more mobility between disciplines than is currently the case. I've studied computer science and although I'm quite familiar with computational finance I would probably not be allowed to get a Phd in Finance since I've never taken business/economics courses. Although if you tested me on any number of financial subjects I wouldn't have a problem describing how to model/analyze/forecast the data. So there are a lot of arbitrary hoops that keep people down and force you to not to change you field of study. Its also very difficult for older people mid career to get a degree and increase their personal capital that way. These again are just some problems that we need to address but "flawed in the extreme" \- I tend to disagree on that one.

<comment><USER2> >Yes its flawed but not to the extreme like you suggest. One of the biggest problems we have, and this I think is common to almost all countries, is that there is very little emphasis on applied knowledge and much more on theoretical knowledge. The duale Studium is a better way to attack the problem than anything else currently out there IMHO.

As I've argued in a differnet post, the problem isn't too little theoretical knowledge, it's that uni is just seen as "the highest" and people who just want practical knowledge go to a place which is supposed to give you deep insight into the _theories_ and _research_ in your field because it gives the status qualification.

>Another problem we have is that motivations are flawed for our Professors. Many Professors want to conduct research and don't care about teaching the material, on the other hand you have some Professors that don't want to research and would just enjoy teaching the material, yet everyone is incentivized to conduct research because its the only way to progress. I think this is fundamentally wrong. Its bad for the students and bad for the professors. If a professor just wants to teach he/she should be allowed to focus on that area and be judged by how well his students can actually apply the learning they acquired in the course. If a professor wants to research he should be judged by his research.

This follows from my point above. We mix "I just want a job students" with "give me _moar_ theory" students and the profs who (anecdotally) _love_ dealing with the second type (explaining things to interested newbs is stimulating for insight) have to dumb down things enough so the job hunters can get their employer mandated checkmark

>There are so many other problem areas as well, for instance, I think we should allow much more mobility between disciplines than is currently the case. I've studied computer science and although I'm quite familiar with computational finance I would probably not be allowed to get a Phd in Finance since I've never taken business/economics courses. Although if you tested me on any number of financial subjects I wouldn't have a problem describing how to model/analyze/forecast the data. So there are a lot of arbitrary hoops that keep people down and force you to not to change you field of study.

That I actually have to disagree with...I know loads of CS and EE majors in economics, the reverse less but also. Especially at the PhD level, as long as you _did_ something relevant, you can get in.

> Its also very difficult for older people mid career to get a degree and > increase their personal capital that way. These again are just some problems > that we need to address but "flawed in the extreme" \- I tend to disagree on > that one.

This is indeed a problem, but for example my alma mater has started offering part time degrees, with 25% of the workload required per semester and twice the allowed maxmimum study time. So there is change

<comment><USER13> > As I've argued in a differnet post, the problem isn't too little theoretical > knowledge, it's that uni is just seen as "the highest" and people who just > want practical knowledge go to a place which is supposed to give you deep > insight into the theories and research in your field because it gives the > status qualification.

People who went to a school not matching their needs and desires have no right to blame their bad choice on the school or on "the system", when better matching schools where perfectly available. If someone takes a course they hate for "status" the problem is entirely in their head, because that's where perceptions of status reside. And besides, switching is possible and does happen (even on the pre-academic age level, but it is much more difficult and rare there)

> but for example my alma mater has started offering part time degrees, with > 25% of the workload required per semester and twice the allowed maxmimum > study time.

This is a great idea (even if the "25%,twice" ratio puzzles me a bit), it basically formalizes what "perpetual students" had been doing for decades, if not for generations, before the "rush the kids to a degree" reforms. People who only take a small number of courses and even less exams each year won't have consumed more university resources when they get their degree at some unforeseeable time in the future than people who rush through.

<comment><USER2> The 25 % is the minimum required per semester, but you have double as long to finish. I.e., if during one semester you need to wind it down from the normal 50% due to life, it's still ok, and you can make it up next semester

<comment><USER13> Actually, the whole concept of a per semester minimum is foreign to me. Back in the old days, a few mandatory checkpoints were expected to be reached within reasonable time, but how you got there was entirely up to you.

Very liberal, but everybody I know who went through that system recognizes as familiar the occasional nightmares about university administration suddenly asking for some minor certificate one chose to indefinitely put off years ago. It's part of who I am, I would totally do it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty rich to use Drexel and Northeastern, two private colleges with a cost of attendance approaching $70,000 per year, as any sort of model.

</comment><comment><USER15> This article is total bullshit and so is the "dual education" model.

"Duale Ausbildung" has nothing to do with universities, if you go that route you spend up to _four years_ working at (on average) well below 1000€ while attending a government school that teaches at a rather low level. The government has to subsidize the income of those people _and_ the employer, in some cases.

[https://www.azubiyo.de/gehalt/](https://www.azubiyo.de/gehalt/)

Worse, if you don't buy into the "dual education" thing, you can't get most of these jobs. We're not talking about great jobs either, it's _most_ jobs that don't require university education. A lot of that is stuff you could be trained for on-the-job in six months or less.

Don't trust German unemployment statistics, it's basically the government paying at every end to have people employed at all costs and often at very low pay.

Also, don't buy into the German educational model, it's one of the most discriminatory systems in the world, even though it is "free" on paper, it's all about weeding out people at a young age so they're not allowed to attend the "free" university. We have parents suing the teachers of ten-year-olds for the grades they give, because of the impact it can have on their careers.

[http://www.focus.de/familie/rechte/das-kind-aufs- gymnasium-k...](http://www.focus.de/familie/rechte/das-kind-aufs-gymnasium- klagen-eltern-zerren-vermehrt-lehrer-vor-gericht_id_3104903.html)

[https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/hard-look- disc...](https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/hard-look- discrimination-education-germany)

<comment><USER16> > We're not talking about great jobs either, it's most jobs that don't require > university education. A lot of that is stuff you could be trained for on- > the-job in six months or less.

Have you actually learned a real craft, in germany, or looked at it's curriculum? Because they learn a lot more than could be thought in 6 weeks. You could argue that they won't need it for the things their employer needs them to do when they work, but they learn it anyway. If they switch jobs later they won't need that much training.

Example: If you learn as an Electrician for Energy and Houses at a big construction company, the only thing you might do is chopping cable canals and maybe wiring wall sockets. Both could be learned in 6 Weeks, no question.

But at the Berufsschule you still learn all the other stuff, for an example how to wire electrical Garage doors. If you later decide to switch Jobs, you'll be prepared.

> Also, don't buy into the German educational model, it's one of the most > discriminatory systems in the world, even though it is "free" on paper, it's > all about weeding out people at a young age so they're not allowed to attend > the "free" university.

Being a teacher at the very bottom of the german school system, the school formerly known as Sonderschule I 100% agree.

<comment><USER15> > Have you actually learned a real craft, in germany, or looked at it's > curriculum? Because they learn a lot more than could be thought in 6 weeks. > You could argue that they won't need it for the things their employer needs > them to do when they work, but they learn it anyway. If they switch jobs > later they won't need that much training.

Yes, they learn a lot of stuff they won't need for the actual job they will perform. If they switch jobs, they probably won't need it either, unless it's a very related job. For instance, if they become a painter, they learn _all kinds_ of painting techniques that they will never apply. That's all fine and dandy, except if they just want to work painting houses, why they _have to_ spend three years as an apprentice?

> But at the Berufsschule you still learn all the other stuff, for an example > how to wire electrical Garage doors. If you later decide to switch Jobs, > you'll be prepared.

If you already knew the one thing, chances are you could've quickly learned the other thing as well. Otherwise: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it)

<comment><USER16> > why they have to spend three years as an apprentice?

Have you actually looked at a curricula? A lot of it is repetition from school stuff. Sure the Electricians in my example learned in 7th class how to transform Volt to mV or kV. But they often can't reproduce this when they start their apprenticeship (imo the schools are to blame here).

If apprentices don't have problems with that Kind of Math, can write readable reports they generally get a Lehrzeitverkürzung up to 1.5 Years.

Source: I actually read curricula of Apprenticeships, talk with colleagues who work in the Berufsschule if my pupils might have a shot at a apprenticeship (they never do)

Besides that we have longer apprenticeships 1) so that the "german workforce" is more skilled in general. 2) so that if they choose to become Meister to be their own boss they don't need to learn all the extra stuff.

> If you already knew the one thing, chances are you could've quickly learned > the other thing as well.

That does certainly apply to abstract things but it doesn't apply well to craftsmanship. To quote RMS: A if-construct does not generate friction against the for loop. But if you bend the cables in the wrong radius, 20 years later when the plastic of the wire-insulation starts degenerating, you might run into problems.

> YAGNI comparing humans to programs? i like to live in a world with skilled > human beings that can realize at least some of their potential. an extended > apprenticeship might help some to do that.

<comment><USER17> Getting that extra education _may_ make more sense for trades like electricians, it makes zero sense for salespeople or cooks or house painters or hair stylists and yet all these people are forced into three years of underpaid labor and crappy government schooling.

Even if the German system was better (which it isn't), it makes you wonder how all the other countries in the world are going by without it. German workers are relatively underpaid even after going through the rites, _that 's_ what makes us competitive - not the fact that our workers have more skills than they need.

> so that if they choose to become Meister to be their own boss they don't > need to learn all the extra stuff

That _makes no sense_. Most never become a "Meister", but even those that do could learn that stuff when and _if_ they need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article is completely "fake news" as it is not about Universities in Germany. It is about apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is a widely accepted path to professional education here and works as described in the article. Your salary is also not as high as mentioned - normally around 500-800 Euros/month. Besides universities and apprenticeship, there are "dual studies" where you are partly working for (usually big) enterprises and partly studying for a university degree. But only a few students are doing this, most either do apprenticeship (which includes interesting professions like programmer or system administrator) or university studies.

<comment><USER19> For software developers and medium sized enterprises, the Duales Studium is an excellent way to grow new talent.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely. I just say that not the majority is doing this.

<comment><USER19> For a young person or a company it is not important what the majority is doing. Talent in software development is in high demand and a dual education (Ausbildung or Studium, or a combination of both) is for many companies an attractive way to get well trained staff in software development. For software developers this is a good alternative to a computer science degree, which is not that much about practical programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> TLDR; In Germany, 60% of people get vocational training as their "higher education" designed for vary specific jobs. Companies sign contract with young people at the age of 15-16. They get certification for this specific training by age of 20 and then get on with those jobs. At least half of the education system is designed as a "factory" that produces specific skilled workers that industry asks for.

Personally I'm not sure if any country should be adopting this model.

<comment><USER15> It's not just very specific jobs, it's most jobs. You work in sales? You learn to be a "Kaufmann/Kauffrau". You work as a house painter? You learn "Maler/in und Lackierer/in". You work as a cook? You learn "Koch/Köchin". For three years at much less than 1000€/month! It's no surprise that the drop-out rates are at 25%.

If you don't do that, you usually can't even get those jobs. It's a _stupid_ system. It's basically what became of the medieval guilds, in modern times.

People like to connect our low youth unemployment rate with this system, but I believe in reality most of these people are attending some form of education or job training program, so they don't "count" as unemployed. When they're done with all that, they're so old they don't count as "youth" anymore. That trick only works when a country can afford it, though.

<comment><USER21> What's wrong with this? Starting out in sales with a three year (not very well paid) apprenticeship still sounds a lot better to me than paying for college for four years, amassing a huge amount of debt and then going to work in sales afterwards with zero real world experience.

<comment><USER22> What's good about it: It produces people who actually know how to do the work, and does so more efficiently than college. The way we do it in the US is dependent on a company being able to decide who can and cannot do the work in a few hours of interviewing, and that doesn't work all that well.

What's wrong with it: It (probably) closes the door to non-traditional entry into the trades. Also, presuming I understand it correctly, it makes it hard to change careers. You hit 40, and decide that you don't like the life you chose as a 16-year-old? Well, _if_ you can re-take it at 40, that means three years of low-paid internship at some other trade.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bradley Horowitz Is Now Running Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/01/bradley-horowitz-is-now-running-google/ <comment><USER2> Memory of the exact context escapes me, but somewhere a few months ago here on HN, a user shared an idea of how Google+ could have leveraged their massive Google Reader user base to create a publisher's dream social network.

The argument was super compelling and I remember thinking it would have made complete sense, but instead ended up with the nightmare that became Google+, and a ton of pissed off former-users of Reader.

*EDIT: Found it: [http://www.scottporad.com/2014/04/24/a-totally-simply-way-go...](http://www.scottporad.com/2014/04/24/a-totally-simply-way-google-could-have-avoided-fing-up-google/)

"Google could have avoided angry Reader users and given Google+ a massive boost by simply integrating Reader into Google+.

Yes, just that simple…make it so that you could follow an RSS feed as though it were another user in G+. Make it so that you could put RSS feeds into circles, and share them, just like you do with other G+ users.

If Google would have done that G+ would have taken off like wildfire and nobody would have ever looked back. I have no idea why they didn't, but for some reason the lost potential has irritated me for a year. And, here we are now, with the whole effort going down the tubes.

What a waste."

Makes sense to me...

<comment><USER3> Absolutely baffling. I currently use G+ as a newsfeed for publications with a G+ presence (which is most of them), but it's been a long time coming and still lacks for significant user interaction with stories. There's no reason why Google couldn't have figured out some way to import existing RSS feeds.

That embrace would probably have killed off RSS within a couple years anyway, since native G+ posts have more attractive window dressing, but the move would have been a dead simple way to build an instant, passionate userbase that could have taken advantage of G+'s commenting and sharing features while providing a meta-view of how users like to sort sources into Circles.

G+ could easily have been marketed as Reader 2.0, married to Facebook 2.0 for social, Instagram 2.0 for advanced photo features, and Dropbox 2.0 for hoarding. I have no idea how Google dropped the ball at the endzone.

<comment><USER4> No to mention they could have integrated the office suite as well (docs, spreadsheets, presentations), oh and TV with youtube.

Then you haves News, Social, Photo, Video, Files, and Office too. Add some games and there is pretty much everything anybody does on a computer.

<comment><USER5> Heck they took more than a year to integrate their calendar into g+.

Facebook's events are one of it's great features, but it took Google ages to implement them, despite already having a calendar that's synced with every Android phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny thing I grew up in Michigan and in the 80's Brad played guitar in a signed indie band called Spahn Ranch. I was briefly their manager mainly because I had an Atari ST and a laser printer and helped out creating stickers for shows, and occasional digital artwork projected up behind them while they played. We toured the East cost around 90 play a festival in Pittsburg along with a few random shows along the way. They regularly opened for bands like Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, and one particularly interesting night, His Name Is Alive. After that particular show we all went back to Brad's house and hung out, an impromptu acoustic session broke out, with Brad playing guitar while Spahn Ranch's amazing vocalist Bob Sterner (RIP) sang without the aid of any amplifications. If you have ever sat in a room and hear someone naturally sing like that then you know how magical that can be. After they played the two women from His Name Is Alive took up the acoustic and played a few of their songs as well. It was a night I'll never forget.

It was a fun time for sure, Brad was always a very impressive guy. A practicing Krishna, he always seemed to have his head here and in 'another realm' so to speak; when you talked to him (back then at least) he had this rather intimidating look in his eyes like wheels were constantly turning in the background, solving who knows that computer or religious quandary caught his attention that day. I lost touch with Brad around his MIT days and only recently because of the passing of our mutual friend Bob Sterner been back in touch with him.

Here's a sample song that's a good representation of their [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJMkwuL05t4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJMkwuL05t4)

Entire Album: [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spahn+ranch+thi...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spahn+ranch+thickly+settled)

Best of luck Brad, how things have changed since those heady U of M days when Brad was _just_ a unique guitarist for an Detroit indie band.

Edit: better representative track.

<comment><USER7> Different band? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahn_Ranch_%28band%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spahn_Ranch_%28band%29)

<comment><USER8> Judging from a quick investigation, Thickly Settled LP is of Brad Horowitz band.

[http://phoenixhairpins.blogspot.ru/2014/01/spahn-ranch- thick...](http://phoenixhairpins.blogspot.ru/2014/01/spahn-ranch-thickly- settled-lp.html) (Brad Horowitz mentioned in the post)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it so frustrating to watch Google fuck-up social. Pulling photos and communications into their own group is clearly conceding defeat. Google's social initiatives are already too splintered.

I wish they had some somebody who could cut through all the politics and read tape and build a really great, unified, product.

The first thing on my hit list - Material Design. It's just bad. It's too spread out, the animations detract from the experience, and every ui element just seems flaky. ARRG!

<comment><USER9> It was the senseless need for a unified product that is the source of their social screw up. If they concentrated on making great products which fit together, people would naturally start to use then together without having to be shoved.

<comment><USER4> No no, unified is important, but if you are going to put all your eggs in one basket it had better be good. And hey, you don't have to get it right the first time, but it needs to grow and evolve as you see the weaknesses.

I totally agree that g+ should not have been shoved into every google product, instead it should have been a place you could go to access every google product.

I'm still convinced that the power of facebook is there is one url for everything an everyday person needs from the internet. People want one website that has everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Enabling_ unified is fine. _Enforcing it_ , as Google did, _against users ' express wishes_, isn't.

When my G+ and YouTube accounts were merged I ended up with (or as) the three top stories on HN (I've got a screenshot on Imgur somewhere, linked from my subreddit).

In December Google created a new "myaccounts.google.com" site where it's possible to manage Google accounts, including adding or removing services. While I can remove my YouTube account (there's nothing on it but history), it won't stay removed, thoughct that's in the cards. IOW: Google seem to be taking steps to disaggregate their offerings.

Several of the bigger blunders of G+ have revolved around both identity and bundling / tying. #nymwars, forced calendar integration (look up Robert Scoble's rant), the YouTube Anschluss. This is what Microsoft tried in the 1990s. Eventually people rebelled.

You cannot force someone to like you.

People want convenience, yes. But it doesn't mean it's got to be the same website for all of us -- I'd _really_ like to see federated services solved.

<comment><USER10> Looking at your subreddit +/\- 2 months of the May "all your YouTube are belong to G+" announcement, there doesn't seem to be any screenshot. Can you post a link?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1qsnks/dont_lo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1qsnks/dont_look_now_but_three_top_stories_on_hacker_news/)

[https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If Google is back into separate services can we get Reader turned back on please?

<comment><USER12> As a google employee, I wouldn't use Reader now even if it magically came back. Fool me once, etc., etc. In fact, I wouldn't use _any_ third-party service. I have the skills, and readers are easy to build; there's just no reason to outsource this particular product.

(Here's what I've been using for the past year: [http://imgur.com/a/kT3NN](http://imgur.com/a/kT3NN). Sources: [https://github.com/akkartik/spew](https://github.com/akkartik/spew))

<comment><USER13> I will latch on to this commend to recommend [http://tt-rss.org/](http://tt- rss.org/) which I have been running since the demise of GReader and have been very happy with it. Performant with a _huge_ number of feeds, able to share arbitrary items in your own public RSS feed, decent android client and wonderfully abrasive support forums. screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/I7YLePz.png](http://i.imgur.com/I7YLePz.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Things to fix:

Need a richer text/post editor that also allows inline images & albums.

Need easier post/comment editing (a la Facebook).

Android/G+ photo autobackup is great, but god help you if you ever want or need to access those photos. The current method of manually moving a max of 500 at a time into other albums is a non-starter, especially if you had set auto-backup to also backup other local image folders from your mobile devices (Whatsapp/Telegram, photo editors, etc).

The client is waaaaaaay too heavy. G+ is unusable on a Chromebook if you have Gmail and more than one or two other tabs open.

The half-assed merging of Picasa web albums into G+ was aggressively user- unfriendly. There are a lot of us who still use the quite excellent Picasa desktop app for light photo editing and album management. The G+ album viewer/browser is horrifically bad.

Photo commenting is pretty much broken. You can comment, but it's pretty antisocial, unlike imgur/instagram/facebook.

A lot of content houses & brands don't publish to G+, or if they do, it's half-assed secondary crap that seems to just be bots posting links. Very few seem to interact with the G+ community.

The Hangouts integration is heavy & crappy compared to the nice and light fb chat integration, and almost no one seems to know about video chat, much less the ability to (in some countries) dial phones via Hangouts.

The idea of Communities is a good one, but it operates as sort of the opposite of Usenet. If someone leaves a community or deletes their account (granted, this may be a bigger problem for Google Apps for Work customers) all their content goes with them.

As other commenters have noted, G+ seems to have been created with the mission statement of being everything to everyone, but in the process it has alienated many and broken a lot. I suggest focusing on fixing the discrete parts and only then deciding whether it makes sense to integrate them.

I, for one, am thankful to at least be able to use my Google/G+ credentials to login to a bunch of common sites now, so it has that going for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish Horowitz the best... but it looks like Google is starting to break up G+ into separate photos/streams (newsfeeds)/Hangouts sections, and I really hope they avoid that.

I'm downvoted every time I say so, but combining photos with social MAKES SENSE. There are exactly three things anyone wants to do with photos -- we want to hoard them, we want to organize/enhance them, and we want to share them. G+ addresses the photo question better than anyone else on the market. There are improvements to be made -- starting with deduplication and better integration with GDrive so I don't pay twice for the same storage -- but G+ is a fundamentally excellent idea.

Combining that photo/social experience with the newsfeed aspects of Facebook ALSO makes sense. In the absence of popular adoption, G+ is still a pretty excellent newsfeed if you follow publications with a G+ presence. It's also a fantastic place to tap into the personal musings of Silicon Valley's best and brightest, though tech is admittedly one of the only niches with a presence on G+. Tied in with the fantastic implementation of Circles, it's pretty easy to switch between newsfeeds and share posts with only those I want to see my thoughts.

\- - - - -

That said, G+ HAS failed so far despite technical excellence and fantastic user experience. The operative idea here is "so far"... there's no reason why G+ can't be the network of choice of the next generation, and given the ecosystem benefits, it's hard to imagine digital natives NOT choosing Google products to organize and share their lives.

Horowitz, if you read this, target young women. Give them a place to organize/enhance/share their photos in a safe, private environment. Instagram did this (at least to the extent of enhancing/sharing their photos), and as always, the men followed. Just make it dead simple to dump a disorganized mess of redundant photos into GDrive that will then be automatically sorted, tagged, and enhanced. Suggest Circles based on their frequent contacts in Gmail. Give Hangouts better, more intuitive sticker options and play up the videochat features (which very few people seem to know about). Run ads where young people publish an invitation on G+, split the dinner tab via GWallet, pick up German guys via GTranslate, share their photos in a group post on G+, and track their progress the night before on GMaps.

All the pieces are already in place, they just need one last shove to make life easy for the average user. Nobody wants to deduplicate and sort their photos by date or location. Nobody wants to juggle photos between hard drives or try to figure out how many photos their limited cloud storage can still handle. Just let users dump their photos on an unlimited, subsidized GDrive subscription with full confidence that they'll be sorted, organized, enhanced, and ready to share without any further work on their part.

<comment><USER15> > combining photos with social MAKES SENSE

I'm not sure this makes sense for everyone. There are so many different uses for photos/social, that I don't think there's any single way that `makes sense`. All services have a slightly different way of sharing, but I'd say there are some specific themes here:

\- photos as messages (like instagram)

\- photos as art (like old flickr)

\- photos as galleries (g+, new flickr)

\- photos as... memories? current events? sharable stuff? (like facebook, twitter)

I think galleries are the ones that make the least sense with social. People share galleries with family / friends - many of who aren't even on the same platform and don't want to be.

<comment><USER16> > I think galleries are the ones that make the least sense with social.

They make very much sense with social as long as social doesn't have to mean "share publicly".

<comment><USER17> For photos, you need a story for how to do something that's equivalent to "share publicly" without the implications that that usually comes with on a social network.

There are photos on G+ that I'd like to show my family. This is "public" from G+'s point of view, because I'm not going to make them log into G+.

Nothing goes wrong if other people see these photos too; however, I don't want people who have me in their G+ circles to get notified that I'm now "sharing" these photos that they have no interest in, and I don't want some boring photos to represent me on my "feed".

This use case worked on Picasa, but G+ broke it.

Right now I find the extremely concealed download link and e-mail them. This is not how a photo product should work.

<comment><USER16> Totally agree with you.

What I meant isn't that any product gets it right ATM but rather that there isn't a good technical or, I guess, social reason for why galleries couldn't be a killer social feature. It seem there are a few economic/marketshare etc reasons though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He said: "It's important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements"

I read: "It's important to me that you don't think of this as a bad thing"

</comment><comment><USER19> It might be a nice gesture to send him a sympathy card.

</comment><comment><USER20> My condolences.

</comment><comment><USER21> What did he do?</comment>


Ask HN: Geo Tracking in offline products? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know the cheapest way you could use geo/gps tracking in an offline sense? I mean using it with a real world product that wasn't a cell phone.  So it could be implanted into an item and then you could track it online? Say for instance a football.<p>Is this possible? <comment><USER2> Could you be more specific about what kind of device you want to track or why you'd want to track it? What use would you have tracking a football?

<comment><AUTHOR> A football is a bad example. Say you wanted to track a toy. And allow for check in's or have your movements tracked?

<comment><USER2> Checkout passive GPS tracking devices. They record movement, then you can upload the data back into a system via USB. RFID might work if you're tracking movement within a building. If you want to be able to locate or track an item remotely, I believe you would need a device with GPS & wireless data capability.</comment></comment></comment>


This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5374890/this-is-a-photoshop-and-it-blew-my-mind <comment><USER2> Sigh...third time today and I only got one karma point for pointing it first. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862216> if you feel sympathetic :)

EDIT: gee guys, the smiley should tell you this ^ is not a serious complaint. I thought people might actually be interested in reading the actual paper v, since project page link has been inaccessible. Sheesh.

Site is down but this is the Siggraph paper: [http://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/eletp/Papers/sigasia09_pho...](http://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/eletp/Papers/sigasia09_photosketch.pdf)

I have downloaded the binaries (also requires openCV1.1, recently updated OpenCV2.0 doesn't work) and have made some progress, though it's very clunky and the instructions are, um...lacking. <http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files/> <http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/>

<comment><USER3> In today's hypercompetitive world, branding is key. Compare:

"Photorealistic image composition from simple sketches"

                 vs.

"This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch"

Which one would _you_ rather click on?

<comment><USER2> The former, obviously. This is why I can't have nice things :-D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The obligatory shark attacking a helicopter is a nice touch. This technology has epic potential in the LOLcat market.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm having a very hard time believing that this is real. If it is, they have just made breakthroughs in multiple domains in computer graphics, recognition, and composition at the same time. Here's hoping it's real.

<comment><USER6> My guess is that it's real, but that it doesn't usually work as well as the example images provided. If it really works for any kind of input sketch, then how come there are so many images of dogs catching frisbees and bears catching fish?

<comment><USER7> Yup. When I see a real-time demonstration showing a bear catching a frisbee (probably, but not definitely, while jumping out of a shark-threatened helicopter), then I'll believe it.

Edit: I'll also believe it if anyone on this site claims to have seen same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ariel Shamir (4th author listed in the paper) also worked on Seam Carving (<http://www.seamcarving.com/>) and Improved Seam Carving (<http://www.shaiavidan.org/papers/vidretLowRes.pdf>), two widely publicized papers from the past two years.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey, this is the technology from Wag The Dog.

De Niros character is a Hollywood producer, hired to produce a fake war in Albania to distract from a sex scandal before an election. At one point, he's directing news footage by shouting something like "there's a girl in front of a village, it's on fire .. hmm, no, more smoke.. her hair is too light. Can she have a cat? Show me cats" while having a technician type in the request and watching the result appear in real time.

<comment><USER10> Ha, true. FWIW, though, the character you're describing is played by Dustin Hoffman. Awesome movie, though.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, you're right. I think the quotes page on IMDB has the names backwards, or I'm really in need of re-watching that film.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A link to the original research paper that works: <http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm>

</comment><comment><USER12> This is going to make the copyright brigade go into apoplexy if it starts to become popular!

</comment><comment><USER13> The probability of mis-matched images seems like it would be incredibly high, but if they manage to pull this off, it would be amazing.

However, I wonder about this technology being used for evil (custom porn). =/

<comment><USER3> Wait, custom porn is evil? I guess I'm the only one who's tired of all this cookie-cutter porn.

<comment><USER7> So glad the downvote maxes at -4

|</comment></comment></comment><comment>-----|.......................................

|..............|Bear...................................

|..............|.........|</comment><comment></comment><comment>-|...............

|..............|.........|</comment><comment></comment><comment>-|Fish...........

|</comment><comment>-----|................................|</comment><comment>--|

....................................Yo Mom|</comment><comment>--|

<comment><USER14> Box for 'Yo Mom' needs to be bigger! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If this could be extended to movies, the possibilities would be awesome. Just write a script for a movie, sketch out the different scenes and voila, a ready made rough of your new romantic comedy!

The program could be extended further to recycle old movies, and to replace the actors heads with new one.

I have to start writing a business plan for this right away. Please send me a message if you want to join in on this.

<comment><USER2> In all seriousness, that's part of why I find it so interesting. The software works (I use the term loosely!) on downloaded images, ie it doesn't yet include a web client that does an image search for you.

So for movie purposes, you could save a _lot_ of time using a (more polished) version of this to prepare your storyboards - shoot pictures of your selected or desirable actors, background plates that look like your desired locations, and major props. Draw stupid sketches and _voila_ , you have rough photoboards. In conjunction with some other imaging technologies, it has massive possibilities. There's a saying that a film (especially a low budget one) lives or dies in pre-production; the more decisions you can make before you begin shooting, the less expensive the production process is and the more predictable and cheaper your post-production will be. Sure, quite a lot of Great Art happens on the spur of the moment, but serendipity is rare while dithering is common, and expensive. Adobe, for one, is pushing strongly to bring the use of their tools forward in the production process, so that the film is sketched out before shooting takes place and directors can spend more of their time 'filling in the blanks'.

What you mention (going from this to an actual movie) is obviously not practical now, but I'm happy to say that it's being reduced to an engineering problem - the fundamental technology to do most of what you describe already exists, and it's a matter of making it usable and timely. I will venture a guess that we'll be able to do this in clunky/very expensive form by 2015, and by 2020 it will be possible to make an entire feature film this way that looks about as good as a mid-90s low-budget sci-fi film - say, _Escape from LA_ \- at home.

tl;dr although this has been presented as an entertaining toy, with thematically-organized material there's a _lot_ of near-term commercial potential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did anyone get a chance to try it before their site went down so we can hear some first hand accounts?

</comment><comment><USER17> Alright I may have a tendency to be overly excited about new technologies, but this is seriously amazing. The possibilities (and problems) that arise from this application are vast. This could completely revolutionize the stock photography industry and web design in general.

Copyright and privacy issues are my greatest concern though. For example, could you imagine seeing yourself as a digital model on some corporate website --doing something you never actually did. That is a scary thought in my opinion. I wonder if you could input your own pictures into the system and have it perform the same procedure though (I loathe the pen tool).

<comment><USER18> Sounds like hyperbole, but this technology has the potential to change the way people use language and speak and think.

Ever notice how many Americans use "like" as a preamble to a reenactment of a scene from a TV show, or an event, or even an abstracted, generalized occurrence? "It was like..." then on to the enactment. People wouldn't speak like this if it wasn't for ubiquitous video entertainment.

In David Brin's Uplift trilogy, uplifted sentient dolphins sometimes "spoke" to each other by mimicking echolocation returns and beaming pictures and scenes directly into each other's heads. If software like this gets good enough to compose scenes for us on the fly, it will drastically alter the way we speak, just as television did.

<comment><USER19> People wouldn't speak like this if it weren't for California girls in the 80's.

<comment><USER2> That's not just a California thing, actually. Growing up in 1970s Ireland, the word was sprinkled liberally throughout our sentences, like. You may like this exploration of metaphor as a fundamental part of consciousness (if so, do follow up and read the mentioned book): [http://www.therebel.org/opinion/health/the_thing_to_be_descr...](http://www.therebel.org/opinion/health/the_thing_to_be_described_2009092455185/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow, this is revolutionary. Anything that can use sophisticated technology to actually make things simpler for the end-user, instead of the other way around, is definitely a plus. I want to try this thing out right now.

</comment><comment><USER21> If this is for real, then why can't the same thing be done for music? Drum a beat, whistle a tune, sing a few notes - and let the software extract best- matching samples from a library of millions of songs.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't get how this is going to replace photoshop.

The images will not look as good, or as clean as a regular photoshopped image, I doubt that automated image editing is that advanced right now.

The examples they gave, is probably the best that was available, I bet on average, the results don't look nearly as good or clean.

But hey, I could be wrong.

<comment><USER23> Good enough for display on TV news or a newspaper ?

Get me a picture of the president, put a girl in a red dress in his eye-line. Get me a picture of evil dictator - add some WMD in the background.

At the moment you need an intern to do this be much better when you can do it yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Gotta love the random deer in picture 5.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really want to try this, but the actual site seems to be down now.

</comment><comment><USER26> boring. i have been able to do this in emacs for over 10 years now

</comment><comment><USER27> That picture with the weeding, the sunset, the sailboat and the birds is so unnatrual that it makes my soul twist.

<comment><USER28> ah, nothing better than a bit of weeding at sunset

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Images aren't from flickr, not enough cats.</comment>


Sydney Schanberg has died - e-sushi http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36754206 <comment><AUTHOR> I just watched 'Swimming to Cambodia' again earlier this month. ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieMCKk_7Hs8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieMCKk_7Hs8)) It's Spalding Gray's fantastic monologue on The Killing Fields; I highly recommend it. It draws you in fast and the next thing you know, you've just listened to an hour and a half of spoken word on the intertwining insanities of Cambodia and the west.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for this, I didn't know this existed. Bookmarked

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The original title, "Killing Fields journalist Sydney Schanberg dies at 82", is better. Not everyone knows Sydney Schanberg by name.</comment>


Is "Senior Software Developer" a Meaningless Title? - <AUTHOR> https://www.eduardobautista.com/senior-software-developers/ <comment><USER2> Are "Senior" titles meaningless in many companies? Absolutely. But they also matter in many others.

It seems as though the author's "juniorness" is showing through while writing this. In particular, the assertion that "programming skill is the most important skill for senior developer". I'm not sure that's true. You cannot write code in a vacuum; software development requires communication and understanding of the business to ensure you're solving the right problem. Doesn't matter how great your code is, if you write a solution to the wrong problem, you provide zero value. At companies where seniority is done well (FAANG, etc.) your performance is measured not just on the quality of your code, but the impact you provide to the business: this includes code quality, but also working on projects that matter to the bottom line of the business, enabling teammates to do their best work, bringing in new people, basically acting as a multiplier force.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree with the author's stance on everything but I do think that programming skill is the most important skill for a senior software engineer/developer, for a few reasons:

\- Code that is confusing/hard to approach for others (including future you) is bad code, so no "seniors" or "architects" that write crazy complex code aren't good at what they do -- true masters make complex things simple.

\- Identifying the right problem to solve is not the engineers job -- this is squarely in business planning/project management domain, which is rightfully a different specialization

\- Like the above, engineers shouldn't even be wasting time chasing down requirements, this is the job of project management, making people who have and specialized their craft over years spend time playing politics is wasteful.

I _do_ recognize the need for the other skills you noted in a modern business, but maybe we should be calling those skills + programming skill something different. As far as I can tell with your response and others, a non- exhaustive list non-code metrics for "senior"s are:

\- Business value understanding/delivery

\- Guiding junior engineers

\- Navigating politics

Maybe we can call that "Senior Engineering Project Lead" instead and make the required skill sets more distinguishable. The fact is that if you start optimizing for some of these other skills you're going to take a hit on architectural/programming skill -- time and attention is limited. If what the position requires is someone who spent 60% of their time honing their craft, and 10% learning to navigate politics and 30% focusing on business-level understanding, then maybe we should signify that with a more descriptive title. I guess the crux of my argument is that "Senior Software Engineer" is a misleading title.

As a side note, I think this is just yet another way for companies to extract more value from employees -- build in more and more requirements into an role denoted to be strictly for engineering, make another rung on the bullshit internal payment ladder to climb. I also would be more sympathetic to the "business impact" if more of the "business reward" was shared with those producing the value, and FAANG didn't actively collude in the _last decade_ to reduce employee wages.

<comment><USER4> > identifying the right problem to solve is not the engineers job

But the senior engineer has a vital role in advising which problems are solvable. Either in terms of technology, skill, time or budget. That input needs to start at the commencement of a project.

Here's my rough delineation: a Senior knows why a particular requirement is in the Func Req Doc. A Junior doesn't.

> [and if] FAANG didn't actively collude in the last decade to reduce employee > wages

I laughed at that. FAANG salaries are so out of context of most around the World that they are irrelevant. As a 15-year Senior in the UK I was earning $50,000 equivalent. And no stock options. I don't think FAANG salary ladders even start that low.

<comment><USER3> > But the senior engineer has a vital role in advising which problems are > solvable. Either in terms of technology, skill, time or budget. That input > needs to start at the commencement of a project.

> Here's my rough delineation: a Senior knows why a particular requirement is > in the Func Req Doc. A Junior doesn't.

I still think this makes sense if the problem is an _engineering problem_. The problem is rarely whether you _can_ or _can 't_ do something (unless you're doing some suuuper cutting edge tech) -- it's whether you should or not, and that's a project management/business/product person's job to decide, when they draw up the plan for the project.

I know this isn't how it will work in the real world, but the senior engineer should be called on to clarify parts of the plan, not to start doing the planning & figuring out how to maximize business value. Once you start bringing in those other aspects, it's no longer about the engineering discipline -- so the job title should reflect that -- It's _obvious_ that a "senior engineering project lead" knows why a particular requirement is in the functional requirements -- it's less clear to me (at least) that a "senior engineer", all I expect from that person is engineering ability.

Maybe it's just pedantry/semantics but it seems like a distinguishable difference to me.

> I laughed at that. FAANG salaries are so out of context of most around the > World that they are irrelevant. As a 15-year Senior in the UK I was earning > $50,000 equivalent. And no stock options. I don't think FAANG salary ladders > even start that low.

I can't argue with your context, but I bet FAANG's profits are also out of context compared to the companies you're thinking about in the UK as well. Tech is literally one of the US's biggest (if not biggest, I think the entertainment industry might be the biggest) export. Just because there was more money to go around doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong and extremely employee-hostile.

As a side note, maybe you should move to another company/industry? No one is forcing you to be paid less, especially with 15 years of experience... Go to one of the companies with enough money to pay you lavishly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I started at my current company, Senior Developer titles were given out by management. They didn't have the capability or the information to judge people based on technical skills, and the title was mainly used as a perk to keep employees at the company to avoid having to retrain. I feel like this happens in a lot of places, and is probably the cause of what the author describes in the article.

I'm now a director at the same company, and I've laid out criteria for achieving the Senior role that developers seem to understand. It's now something that they can work towards instead of simply aging into, and it makes the title more meaningful.

Core criteria for a Senior Developer:

* Mastery of their toolset, maybe not 100% but enough to solve any problem.

* Ability to take an entire project from start to completion without assistance. This doesn't mean they don't get any assistance or can't ask for help, but if no one is available, they should be able to arrive at a sensible solution to any problem.

* Understand our business, and prioritize decisions that have a net benefit for the business / team. Balance personal desires for perfection against the pragmatic needs of the customer and our business. We're here to do a job.

* Uses their time effectively. If I see a developer who has a few days of downtime between booked client work, I want to see them take on a task or learn a skill that will benefit the business.

* Client facing attitude and communication that reflects positively on the team. We don't put developers in front of clients often, but each should be able to provide notes in a JIRA to help a client understand an issue or clarify available options. Clear, concise, polite and helpful.

These are skills that I think the average developer would gradually learn in five years on the job, but having them spelled out helps junior and mid level devs understand what is important to the business.

<comment><USER6> One thing that I would say is missing from your list is that a senior developer should actively be working with junior developers. Not necessarily as a mentor, but they should be available to help less senior people improve their craft.

<comment><USER5> I agree this is an important skill (and attitude), but whether it's a core requirement for senior probably depends on the size of your shop. Senior devs who are keen to mentor, passionate about fixing organizational flaws (process development), and are good at managing upwards are starting to tick boxes for Team Lead or engineering management.

If the team is big enough to support it, I think it's acceptable to have a senior dev who doesn't give a lot back in terms of mentoring but handles their projects and doesn't create messes.

<comment><USER7> What's the next step up from Sr then?

I agree that you don't have to mentor people but I think that makes you way less effective than you would be normally. Now you may be making a distiction on working with others and mentoring but I think it's the same, if your helping others become more effective at any task thats mentoring.

Ive also seen a tendency of people who are excellent solo to make broader scope problems due to less trust or just less communication with others.

I'm also always very worried when I hear a piece of software was written by one person.

<comment><USER5> Some people just don't enjoy teaching that much. I think generally most people get satisfaction from helping others, but some devs just seem to prefer working mostly on their own. They still have to write pragmatic and maintainable code (the "dont make messes" part), and they don't level up others in the business, but they can still be incredibly valuable.

In smaller shops, there really isn't anywhere "further" to go past Senior unless you want to take on leadership of other devs. And it makes sense, in a lot of cases once you get to a certain level of experience the most valuable thing you can do is pass on some knowledge and act as a multiplier for others.

<comment><USER7> You can lead without being a manager, eg lead by example, lead without force, lead by halping when asked, or providing guidance when asked. That's all mentoring. That's all pure technical. We may be agreeing.

But I wouldn't want to be in a place where there was just good at coding was the end of my growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sure, but not for the reasons the (really light) blogpost suggests.

It's not about seniority in a specific technology or in sitting at a particular desk for enough years.

It's about judgement and experience. Yes, some people never acquire these things, and some people have an unusually large amount of it from the get-go.

But when you've been in the trenches for a decade, you (tend to) simply know things a junior doesn't. You know where you spend your efforts, and which red herrings to avoid. You know how to navigate the systems, the politics. How to interface with colleagues. And so on.

</comment><comment><USER9> The article is misleading. It should say "Seniority is not about time spent at a company, but skill level."

If you are "senior" only through being with one company for a long time, you will have a very hard time interviewing and switching jobs. If you are "senior" through skill, you will have a very easy time and feel comfortable that you can find a similar job should the company go under / you are fired / etc. Likewise, people won't resent you for the title.

I actually thought about it recently. One of our devs just left for a "Senior" position - this kid is bright and has a CS degree. He recommended me for a "Senior Lead" position - I declined, because I have gaps in my knowledge that preclude me from doing that. (#humblebrag)

It's very easy to "jump past your skill level" in terms of positions in IT atm, but it costs you. Mainly it costs you like any other lie - you spend more time keeping up appearances than really improving. When you are at an "appropriate" position, you don't feel bad admitting you don't know something.

That's not to say that some worthwhile people don't get promoted - it's easy to get stuck in a position, IF you are unwilling to leave your company. There is also getting stagnant - jumping roles gives you more exposure, but it needs to be exposure you can handle.

<comment><USER10> I would argue that you should always be aiming for just past your current skill level. Nothing like jumping in the deep end for leveling up quickly.

The further I get up the ladder, the more I realize that everyone is faking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let me preface what I am about to say by stating that I live in a major metropolitan area in the US that is not the West Coast or NYC. So when I refer to salaries below, not only is it not a humble brag, it's below starting total comp for a developer one to three years out of school at a FAANG. Now on to the post....

Titles have been absolutely meaningless my entire 20+ year career.

1\. My first job was officially a computer operator that I took just to get out of the small town where I graduated but within three months, I was developing a data entry system in C that doubled the size of the company. I stayed for three years still officially a "computer operator".

2\. I stayed at the next company for nine years, my career and my salary stagnated after the second, I have no idea what my title was.

3\. I left and as far as I know, my title at my next job was just "software engineer" and I was paid about what a mid level developer would make. I purposefully took this job to pivot away from being a bit twiddler to being an "Enterprise Developer".

4\. Working for what was at the time a Fortune 10 company, my title was "Senior Software Engineer" but I really honestly couldn't call myself that until I left three years later. I was still paid like a Mid level developer just slightly more.

4\. I found out about two years in that I wasn't considered a "Senior Software Engineer" at my next small company, even though by now I was making the low end of what a Sr. software Engineer should be making.

5\. Changed jobs again two years later and was officially the dev lead/"Senior Software Architect" of a medium size non software company with a small software department but making about the median for what a Sr. Software Engineer should be making.

6\. I purposefully self demoted, at my current job two years later to "just" a "Sr. Software Engineer" at a small company so I could spend time filling in some technical gaps to prepare for my next role as an overpriced "Cloud Consultant"/"Digital Transformation Consultant". But I'm making about the median salary of an "Architect".

</comment><comment><USER12> For a long time I had no idea what senior meant and whether I was it or not. It does seem it means something different depending on the company you work for. Some companies have a "medior" between junior and senior, others don't care about such titles at all.

It's certainly not just about programming skill or how fast you can fix bugs. Or at least the programming skill it's about is about more than writing code and solving problems. I was great at solving problems in university, but I was not remotely senior.

Seniority is, as far as I understand, often about carrying a project, keeping an eye on not just what the customer or PO says they want, but on what they need or what the project needs. On code quality, on what needs to be refactored and whether or not now is the right time for it. On how to organise and divide various modules. On keeping it testable, deployable, performant, and most importantly, maintainable.

It's entirely possible to be good at those things but worse or slower at fixing bugs or writing features. I've seen cowboys who develop complex stuff at an insane speed, but leave an unmaintainable mess.

Programming is not a one-dimensional thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> When I was twenty-five I didn't think experience was all that important and chaffed at the fact that it was so considered by others. Today I think the opposite.

Was I right back then or I am right now? Will the author of this post feel the same way he does now in ten more years?

We can all write blog posts filled with earnest arguments and anecdotes, but unless there is some sort of good data around to look at I doubt anyone's mind is going to be changed.

<comment><USER14> I think this is something that is timeless and universal. At least now we have experience to back up our valuation. When we were young what did we have? Some basic logic that we spent a small amount of time thinking through?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's already well understood that "senior" and other titles and even total years of experience say very little about an individual's level of ability as a software developer. Most software development teams ask stringent coding questions during job interviews for precisely this reason.

<comment><USER16> When my team interviews junior engineers we mainly focus on coding questions. When we interview senior engineers we tend to spend about half the time on design questions, many of which involve no coding at all.

This is because the important difference between a junior and senior engineer is not coding skill -- it is the ability to implement solutions that work properly, fulfill the requirements, and are scalable and fault tolerant.

Junior candidates can sometimes do that, but most of the time they don't know when a design lacks fault tolerance or has scalability problems. When design flaws are pointed out, they don't know how to fix them or how to defend them as better trade-offs compared to the alternatives. It takes a bit experience to be able to do that -- especially experience fixing things that went wrong.

<comment><USER11> I would go even further, my last two jobs, I was asked no coding questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The issue with "senior" in tech is that it has two different meanings. You can be a senior engineer in the sense that you've been in the industry for a long period of time and have the kind of deep expertise and understanding that only comes with having spent a long time immersed in something (you've seen some shit), but that's entirely different than having a job title of "senior engineer."

For example, at the SF-area non-FAANG unicorn I work at, if you are L5 then you are considered a senior engineer by virtue of your job title, but when the directors and heads of XYZ department refer to the senior engineers, they mean L6 (staff engineer) and above.

FWIW, my own opinion is that if you have less than 10 years' experience, you are not a senior engineer, regardless of what your job title says. You might still be a complete superstar and understand algorithms inside and out and be able to produce efficient, bug-free code that compiles on the first try, and that's great, but there is no substitute for the wisdom learned over time, particularly if you're going to be expected to deal with _people_ as part of your role.

<comment><USER18> > [...] but there is no substitute for the wisdom learned over time [...]

This is so very true. And, took me many years before I finally learned this!

Fortunately, early on in my career, I had the opportunity to work with some very senior developers. Even though I was a self-proclaimed 'rock star', they managed to open my eyes as to how much I still had to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So true. "10 years of experience" means nothing. It could mean "10 years of in-depth focus on X subfield and skills" or "1 year of work experience repeated 10 times."

<comment><USER20> well put. I have interviewed way too many "experienced" candidates who progressed very little since 2 years out of college.

It's as if people just get way too complacent and lazy to keep learning beyond the 2-3 years point, where the learning curve starts flattening.

<comment><USER21> Could it be that people are not _actually_ complacent and lazy, and instead were simply never trained or upskilled by employers who didn't see any business incentive in doing so, and simply squeezed every last bit of juice out of the employee's existing skillset?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not only is the title meaningless, but the usage of it seems to be changing over time. When I started in the field (~2004) Senior felt like it was a 10 years of experience bar. Maybe this was just fallout from the .combomb, but it felt like something more real. Something where you've been through multiple release cycles, and have good instincts.

Now it does seem to be a butt-in-chair measurement, and 5 years seems even on the higher end for what I hear is senior these days. I've seen some job applications for senior say 2-5 years of experience even.

I feel like a part of this is related to compensation though, as companies love to say they anchor to x percentile of job title for their starting offer. In order to pay someone more, you have to inflate their title. Skill, other than interviewing skill, seems to have little to do with it.

<comment><USER23> Just an alternate bit of anecdata, I was a junior dev around the same time and senior titles seemed to start in the 3-5 years of experience range near where I lived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Titles are meaningless in general. They exist just to put you on the "career ladder" type threadmill where the next title (or "level") is withheld from you until you put what your employer considers to be your "very best" to obtain it, or you're just pals with your boss, or good at self promotion. In fact I'd say that the latter two things are more conducive to obtaining a fancier title if you choose to play the game.

The corollary of all this is: pay zero attention to titles. Only two things are important and material:

1\. Whether you enjoy the job

2\. How much you get paid to do the job

That's it. Titles are cheap. Do not get taken by this scam. Focus on the two "fundamentals" listed above, and "titles" will take care of themselves in time. Also, don't stay with the same employer for too long unless you like to work harder for less.

<comment><USER16> Titles signify expectations, and expectations are far from meaningless.

For example, achievements that would get a junior engineer promoted are expected to be the normal level of achievement for senior engineers.

<comment><USER24> >> Titles signify expectations

Only tangentially, and only within a particular organization. That's how they justify the treadmill to you. It is not possible to evaluate "expectations" (or "performance" for that matter) without bias. Titles do not translate across companies. And the most senior person quite often contributes the least to the success of the project. They're often viewed as "having paid their dues", but really, they've mostly been in the right place at the right time. Exceptions are few and far between.

Shit, at one point I was "led" by a CTO who couldn't architect his way out of a wet paper bag and showed up at work for a day every two weeks. Very "senior", yet totally worthless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Senior" in this industry typically means "not a beginner". You should not be right out of school if you are applying for these positions. And "experience required" is certainly a useful concept.

But "senior" isn't really a good name for it, because people with only a few years of experience are not trusted to make big decisions and build (or lead) big things, which is what "senior" tends to mean in other contexts. The title is therefore a bit deceptive. But I'm not sure what to replace it with.

And finally, to be fair, there are a few places where "senior" is fairly senior. At Google, it's two promotions up from entry level, and I seem to recall Amazon listing it with seven years of required experience, which is getting up there.

</comment><comment><USER26> When I was a jr developer I worked on small tasks. Fix some random bug here, update documentation etc. but it gave me insight to how the company did stuff and also let me prove that I can make contributions without breaking stuff. Later people started asking my opinion on stuff because I had been working so closely with the code base. Eventually I was promoted to sr and I began directing the workflow of jr devs, deciding on projects etc. And now as an architect I work directly with business stakeholders to identify issues and design solutions. I work with the sr developers and they do the bulk of the more advanced work, where the jrs work on smaller pieces that I used to do. We have a pretty good system and there are clear differences in our roles and skill sets.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's how I got 'senior'

'Can you give me a raise?'

'Well we've had budget cutbacks, etc'

'Okay, how about if I get a senior title?'

'Sure, that doesn't cost anything'

Eight months later, I left for a place that paid me a senior salary.

<comment><USER27> Been there, done that, got the 'raise'.

It was fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If a company calls an "senior" to an engineer who sat in the seat for 8 years but is otherwise identical to the 2-year non-senior, then yes, it is meaningless.

I have not seen anybody use the term that way though.

It's the difference between SVP and VP: the former has greater skill/judgment/foresight/leadership and therefore greater authority/responsibility than the latter (possibly due to greater experience and career length but possibly not).

</comment><comment><USER29> I was given that title after 4 years of being with the company. Then they took it away because it was just a title and meant nothing. No extra pay either. Sounds good on a resume though. I complained about it and got fired for my troubles. They had a 90% turn-a-round rate and that is how they saved money using new people without raises.

<comment><USER30> I used to work at a place that did this and know other people that have too. Not necessarily over job titles, but generally pushing people out over stupid shit to keep salaries low.

I just can't imagine that is more profitable in the long run. The overhead of constantly training new people has to cost more than giving raises..

<comment><USER29> They didn't train them. Just gave them a book on SQL Server and wanted them to be a DBA. So we had database problems. I had to fix the programming issues as a super debugger but spaghetti code is hard to fix esp when it isn't documented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Titles are useless when comparing between companies. They're quite useful when comparing within the same company.

<comment><USER16> They aren't useless. You cannot expect a one-to-one mapping between titles at different companies, but titles are a general indication of what is expected from an employee at that level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Having been both the "Senior Software Developer" and in management, it's hard to avoid HR policies that take tenure and seniority into account. Like it or not, positions need to be bucketed to drive things like pay grade, salary, etc.

That said, whenever possible I drive title based on how productive one makes other people. I don't expect a Junior developer to make the team more effective. I do expect seniors, principals, chiefs, etc to do so. If you are a Principal or Chief, you better be able to make your whole team much more productive.

It isn't about the coding skill of that person. It's about how the decisions they make affect the rest of the team. In the end, no one person, no matter how good can do it all. Making other people more effective is the hard part that I wish more devs focused on.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well, it depends on the company. But as a rule, said titles are:

1\. Entirely meaningless between companies, since different companies have different ideas as to what counts as junior, midweight or senior respectively. For instance, a senior at Google and a senior at a small agency are a million miles apart.

2\. If the company isn't a tech company or technically minded, they're probably meaningless within said organisation too. The most accurate thing you can say about 'seniors' is that they're usually the more experienced web developers in the company, whatever more experienced actually means in said case.

But yeah, meaningless between companies, meaningless in ones which aren't tech savvy and don't take them seriously, maybe meaningful at FAANG type companies.

</comment><comment><USER33> The problem with this article, it talks about years of experience vs. actual experience. The title is relevant when properly defined.

Senior Engineers have the following traits.

\- Self-motivated - They need a little direction on knowing what's important to focus on. Just because you're "working", doesn't mean you're working on what's important. \- Organized - Being organized is an important factor in such a title. As a senior engineer, you're going to be leading others and if you're not organized, then you're not going to be very effective at leading. \- Diverse experience - Senior engineers should have diverse experience in the industry. They've experienced building systems from the ground up, scaling them out, learning what's important to build a product that is maintainable, etc. \- Keeps technology aligned with business - We write software to support the business. This means being able to identify what's important and a priority. \- Strong communication - To be clear, I'm not just talking about writing skill. I'm talking about the ability to communicate status, level set expectations, communicate during times of trouble and more. \- Deals with pressure - A lot of junior engineers tend to "react" to everything when the pressure is on. The above items help people deal with pressure. \- Leadership skills - I touched on this, but I wanted to be very clear. Being able to influence, lead, organize, etc are all certainly senior engineering skills.

I was once that 19 year old engineer at a company who thought I demanded a higher title, more money etc. I get that feeling of pride and respect you have for yourself. That being said, I also really came to understand my shortcomings when I was around 29-30.

There's on very important thing I want to point out. I worked with people who had 20 years of experience, but were not that smart. I wouldn't classify them as "Senior" at all. They would argue "years of experience" and I would counter it with actual experience. If you're 20 years of experience was dealing with one product, on one team at one company, you screwed yourself out of actual experience.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Senior Engineer" titles have a very specific and useful role in my experience - you can avoid the Peter Principle if people are rewarded for a job well done not with a change of role, but with recognition/prestige and a pay raise. This also serves as a useful tool for managers who want to make sure every team has a certain proportion of "seasoned coders".

Companies that _don 't_ have a Senior Engineer title tend to promote good engineers into management roles where they are often quite mediocre.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've worked for 8 years professionally.

The title of Senior is usually granted to people who are able to be capable of writing software without needing someone to watch over them daily.

They may ask questions or talk to their peers about problems, but unlikely juniors, they will be capable of finding out solutions to problems.

</comment><comment><USER35> From my experience, most promotions are a salary band change.

The company is willing to pay you more because:

1\. They believe you will be able get a 'senior' band offer at a competing employer.

2\. They believe that either you are worth the senior band pay or that you leaving will cost them more than the senior band pay.

</comment><comment> Spartan-S63 So, as a counterargument, I was recently promoted to senior software engineer at my current job. I've been with the company for two years and out of college for the same amount of time (I'm 24). Where I work, it's treated as an ability to deliver impact at a team level. Whether that be through technical contribution or leadership. For me, I found a niche in being a serial anchor for the team which led me to take on extra responsibility faster. That, in turn, led to me delivering a team-wide impact in a substantially reduced amount of time compared to some of my coworkers.

In some places, yes, the senior role is somewhat useful and based on time-in- job. In others, it's based on your impact to those around you and the larger the impact, the more "senior" you are.

</comment><comment><USER36> Titles mean different things at different companies; heck sometimes they mean different things per department. I always look for achievements, they're a better metric for seniority.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's almost guaranteed to be useless considering I've gotten recruiting emails for 12+ years experience as a junior.

<comment><USER12> Getting recruitment emails doesn't mean anything. Some recruiters just mail everybody. Getting hired is what matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Senior" is a mid-level programmer in most hierarchies. It's regularly given after 3-5 years of experience.

I don't think that's either good or bad. Just the way it is.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does Betteridge's law of headlines apply here?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER40> Betteridge's law always applies - and whenever you bring it up in HN comments you invariably get downvoted.

<comment><USER41> Probably because it's predictable and therefore boring. Most people got the message about Betteridge years ago and headline writers generally avoid it. It's no longer the kind of problem that needs to be called out every single time it appears.</comment></comment></comment>


Donald Trump signs directive to send astronauts back to Moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42322236 <comment><USER2> > Correspondents say any realistic effort will probably need Congress to agree > to a big funding boost.

This is the real issue here. Trump can say all he wants, if the Congress doesn't allow more budget, nothing will happen.

<comment><USER3> "I want to make America great again but congress is blocking me, vote the dems out of congress"

<comment><USER4> I actually get the feeling that he's going to do something about pollution and climate change, but on his terms. Probably by suggesting something outrageous off the bat, then winding back to something better than we'd currently expect.

[clarifying: not a trump supporter - just a guy from the UK]

<comment><USER5> Well, only if someone in his entourage wants to do something about pollution and climate change. And then he will propose $50 millions to do it, while investing billions on other things that pollute and accelerate climate change...

Otherwise, forget it, he hasn't done a single thing, good or bad, in almost a year.

<comment><USER6> Look on the bright side! No race riots like we had in St. Louis and Baltimore. Record low unemployment. Record high stock market. Record low illegal border crossings.

There's a lot to be happy about, no matter what your politics may be. There's _always_ something good to find.

<comment><USER7> > There's a lot to be happy about, no matter what your politics may be. > There's always something good to find.

With the right optics, maybe. I see white supremacist riots, inexcusable wealth concentration, income inequality, stagnating wages, and high labor drop-out. Overall, it's feeling a lot like the 1920s. The stock market? I hope you time it right, Black Tuesday is coming up.

Low border crossings reflect our underlying economic problem - illegals have been declining for over a decade due to automation, job exports, and declining middle-class jobs... rats abandoning a sinking ship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> President Obama said he scrapped the plan to go back to the moon because he saw it as just recapitulating 60s technology development. He said he wanted "game-changing" new technologies instead. That made sense to me at the time, but maybe you need to fund rebuilding a project from the 60s, and then the game changing ideas will appear along the way.

I am unclear if President Trump's order calls for bringing back the program Obama cancelled or if it's more of a general statement of direction.

</comment><comment><USER9> "With this directive, Mr Trump abandons plans set by his predecessor Barack Obama, to send humans to an asteroid near earth."

Isn't this the problem? Every President gives Nasa a new set of priorities, which they work on for a while until the next President comes along and changes things again. Back in 2004, George W Bush was also announcing a return to the Moon:

"Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond. Beginning no later than 2008, we will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods. "

Jan 14, 2004 - [https://history.nasa.gov/Bush%20SEP.htm](https://history.nasa.gov/Bush%20SEP.htm)

<comment><USER10> Am I the only one who sees a clear pattern here: each and every action of the current US president undos something that predecessor Barack Obama has accomplished.

There are the obvious things, like health insurance, immigration policy and the like. Whenever I cannot at all understand a certain action of the PotUS, like, for example, the scaling down (or closing) of two National Parks in Utah (Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante), I'll do a little research and find: the action is undoing some former act of Barack Obama.

Each day I get more and more convinced, that Mr Trumps only motivation is the extinction of the traces of his predecessor. As cited: it is not about Moon or Mars, it is about "abandoning plans set by his predecessor Barack Obama, to send humans to an asteroid near earth". Therefore it is absolutely unimportant, if the program gets funded or executed. The directive has fulfilled its purpse by rescinding an Obama act.

I am into archaeology and history. Extinguishing the traces of the predecessor is a very common pattern in history, you know, like chiseling away the former pharao's name from the temple walls. Alarmingly archaic, primitive and despotic.

Even the most absurd actions of the US president become completely reasonable, when seen in this context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do it for commerce. Enrol the likes of Elon Musk to build a space hotel. to do that you need space mining, smelting and construction industry. to do that you need fifo space miners.

one thing will lead to another and next thing you know The US (or whoever does it first) will be the biggest active population space community.

</comment><comment><USER12> Instead of focusing our budget on resolving climate issues and pollution on our own planet, we somehow try to blow our money into space exploration. I get that it's a good thing to do in the long run, but until we fix the issues that are present around us, there won't be a long run.

<comment><USER13> ahhh climate change and pollution is the new "poverty and war"...

<comment><USER14> Not that we've solved those problems and needed a replacement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Without any details on whether this means funding SLS for another $4 billion/year to accomplish nothing vs. fund some real innovation like Blue Origin or SpaceX, it's kind of "Meh" as announcements go.</comment>


FireSass - Bridging the Gap Between Sass and Firebug  - <AUTHOR> http://nex-3.com/posts/92-firesass-bridges-the-gap-between-sass-and-firebug

<comment><USER2> For those who may not know (I didn't), Sass is a meta-language for CSS, which adds variables and some syntactic sugar. It stands for "Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets."

<http://sass-lang.com/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sass_%28stylesheet_language%29>

</comment><comment><USER3> Very, very useful. I got used to having 10+ sass partials and it's becoming an inconvenience to track specific declarations in firebug. (Here's an interestin post about how to structure a sass project [http://wiseheartdesign.com/articles/2010/01/22/structuring-a...](http://wiseheartdesign.com/articles/2010/01/22/structuring- a-sass-project/))

</comment><comment><USER4> It'd be fantastic if there was a way to integrate firebug with the actual .sass/.css files, so I can make my adjustments, see them instantly, and press save if I like them.

It would stop me having to context-switch between my browser with firebug, and TextMate.

I can't imagine it being terribly difficult to do this, but what do I know?

<comment><AUTHOR> You should look into xrefresh. It's a really great way to edit in sass and then see the changes in your browser right away.</comment></comment>