The Mythical Team-Month - <AUTHOR> http://speakerdeck.com/u/searls/p/the-mythical-team-month <comment><USER2> Just saw this posted here. If anyone wants to comment on the presentation, I'll monitor this thread to discuss :-)

There's also a screencast of the talk up on vimeo: <https://vimeo.com/38321427>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The presentation was pretty good (it has fallen into the category of things I wish I had been aware of 8 months ago, along with the litmus test from Mary Poppendiek[1]).

Unfortunately this required one more upvote to get to the first page (now it is too late for HN). You should try resubmitting it some other day (adding / or ? to the end of the url if needed, or better yet writing a blog post linking to it), as it is really insightful.

[1] [http://www.inbox- online.com/page/blog/en.html?view=post&...](http://www.inbox- online.com/page/blog/en.html?view=post&id=74)</comment></comment>


7-Day Free Online Workshop for creating web presence with no-code - <AUTHOR> https://mailchi.mp/ea519b9acac1/codeless-presence <comment><USER2> Installing WordPress is overkill ... if you're going to use WP, why not skip the domain and hosting steps - just pay for one of the WP hosting services who will also be happy to lease you your domain. If you're going to self-host, static site generation is probably the way to go.</comment>


France : The Senate confirms data collection in real time without a judge - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.numerama.com%2Fmagazine%2F27780-le-senat-confirme-la-collecte-de-donnees-en-temps-reel-sans-juge.html&act=url

<comment><AUTHOR> With this law, France aligns their interest in the NSA style from the US.

For a clearer understanding of what this set of laws does, here's a summary : [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=ht...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fkorben.info%2Fles- juges-ca-ne-sert-rien.html)</comment>


Denis Villeneuve is remaking Dune, and that's a good thing - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/denis-villeneuve-is-remaking-dune-and-thats-a-good-thing/ <comment><USER2> I find Lynch's Dune good even if he disowned his movie. I like watching it from time to time like Alien.</comment>


Browse code on GitHub like you're in an IDE - <AUTHOR> https://sourcegraph.com/blog/chrome-extension-tooltips-and-seamless

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the creators of this and am happy to answer questions (and get feedback).</comment>


A list of interesting Erlang links - <AUTHOR> http://www.aidanf.net/blog/a-list-of-interesting-erlang-links

<comment><USER2> that's odd, i thought this link would just take be back to the HN homepage

<comment><USER3> You got it.</comment></comment>


New Game of Thrones episode appears in the wild - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/04/new-game-of-thrones-episode-appears-in-the-wild <comment><USER2> I wish it was the manuscript of "The Winds of Winter" instead. I love the show, but really just want the books.

<comment><USER3> I've given up any hope. GRRM will never finish the series. It's made him too much money, and he doesn't have the drive to tie things back together. We're gonna get like 3 more in-the-universe stories, and maybe 3 years out we'll get Book 6, but we will never see 7 or 8.

<comment><USER4> Start reading Sanderson

<comment><USER5> What do you recommend from him?

<comment><USER6> His website has a good list of ways to dive into his creations. [https://brandonsanderson.com/books/where-do-i- start/](https://brandonsanderson.com/books/where-do-i-start/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The quality of these leaks is so bad I can't understand why anyone would want to watch them.

<comment><USER8> My thoughts exactly, but many people (my wife springs to mind) simply don't care. I'm always amazed how some friends are happy to watch the most awful pirate streams, even where they could comfortably afford a subscription to whatever streaming service it's on.

To each their own, I guess.

<comment><USER9> I often find myself wanting to pirate when watching an official stream that just plain sucks. The worst is when I am forced to watch ads when I start and scrub, then the video fails for some reason shortly after starting (and watching the ad). I refresh the page, watch the ad, scrub to where I was watching, watch another ad, then it fails again a few more minutes in. Finding the pirated copy might be a PITA, but I at least will have a file on disk that I can do whatever I want with and there's no question whether I'll be able to watch all the way through.

<comment><USER10> This is not my experience with HBO Go, however. There's one skippable "here's what else is on HBO" promo (I think it's skippable—usually I just queue it up while we're settling in to watch), then right into the show with no breaks. Is HBO Now different?

<comment><USER11> It's the same obnoxious minute long ad before.

At least it's only HBO shows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those skipping the article:

        Both HBO and Star India told The Verge that the leak was coming from Star India.

According to the article this leak was does not appear to be part of the recent hack.

</comment><comment><USER13> Leaking only one episode at SD resolution fits the extortion narrative pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not really any point to a single episode leak for something that will come out in a few days anyway.

</comment><comment><USER15> They mentioned the watermarked version of Dunkirk for composer Hans Zimmer. This makes sense... not because they distrust Zimmer, but because they distrust the chain of handlers, and his own security.

Which is totally reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been thinking about the potential impact of leaked episodes on HBO.

Unless it becomes a sustained leak, do you think that a significant number of people will stop (or fail to start) and HBO/HBO Now subscription? Sales for HBO itself are contacts through the cable companies, and those who have chosen to subscribe to HBO Now have decided that illegal downloading is inconvenient.

Edit: The standalone streaming service is HBO Now, not HBO Go.

<comment><USER17> I'd say one isolated leak like this mostly serves as PR. People see it and are reminded that they should watch this show that people are committing crimes to see!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only in 480p, I just checked on TPB.

The only good way to watch GoT is in 1080p or more.

</comment><comment><USER19> Have watched it. Worth waiting till it airs on Sunday. So far the best episode this season. #jamie v #danny v #dragon (hint should be enough for you to wait)

</comment><comment><USER20> I am very much against leaks...unless it's a Game of Thrones episode. Yeah, I guess it _might_ suck for HBO, after all they paid for and took the risk for the series, but who can wait until Sunday?

<comment><USER21> You would have to wait for 9 days to watch the 5th episode if you watch the 4th episode today.</comment></comment>


The electric aircraft is taking off - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/08/the-electric-aircraft-is-taking-off/ <comment><USER2> I would certainly feel better flying if I knew the plane wasn't also carrying potentially thousands of gallons of fuel with it.</comment>


Mark Cuban Charged With Insider Trading - November 17, 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1117081cuban1.html <comment><USER2> He commented on his blog: <http://blogmaverick.com/2008/11/17/the-sec/></comment>


Show HN: "A Social Network for Body Types" - <AUTHOR> http://fitbay.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, I'd love to get your feedback on Fitbay. It lets you connect with your Body Doubles - people with your height, weight and body type. Check it out - [https://fitbay.com](https://fitbay.com)

To sign up you take "The Body Quiz", entering your height, weight and body type to find your 'Body Doubles' – people with similar proportions. Based on your entries we match you with others who have answered similarly to questions including height, weight, body type, torso type, arm length, age, location and cup size (for women). There are 1,700,000+ possible matchings in this quiz, so it's very accurate.

We then encourage users to share photos of themselves (selfies) and tag the brands and sizes they wear. In turn, this creates a personalized shopping experience where everything is in your size, presented by people who have a body similar to yours.</comment>


How Airbnb Rewrote Its Recruiting Playbook - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/05/06/airbnbs-5-star-recruiting-twist-the-competitive-power-of-nice/ <comment><USER2> I had the most humiliating experience of my life interviewing with AirBnb couple of years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104)

<comment> trimble-alum 1\. Don't pay for anything out-of-pocket for a fly-in interview without solid assurances you won't be screwed (What assurances do I have your accounting people won't give me the indefinite run-around?) or disbursement delays forever (When can I count on being repaid?). Expense reimbursements normally requires receipts, prior approval (specific person in HR or hiring mgr) and talking to accounting to submit the right forms.

2\. Don't do a fly-in interview without the following minimums: a phone screen with HR, hiring manager and a video call or two with someone on the team, otherwise they don't have enough invested because they've not qualified you enough to not waste your time and money.

Or: find another or start your own company where people's time and money are not abused. (There's always some time / money invested on both sides of the table, and it's mostly wasted... The wise move is to reduce it as much as possible while still giving people enough of a chance.)

<comment><USER3> It's like you're saying "it's your fault, here's what you should have done". Someone came up with a good term for this sort of HN answer the other day, "hindsight snark" or similar. In fact, any way you look at it a company with decent cash and an ounce of self respect should not be out there screwing industry peers over for time and chump change when it wants to expand.

Disclaimer: I've had similar experiences with Google... outright missing interviews, saying one thing and doing another, failing to communicate entirely. Most of my own career has been at smaller companies or starting them myself. That's my resolution... just avoid big companies!

<comment> trimble-alum Most interviewing are wasted time and money, on both sides of the table, that is the presumption, it's a numbers game, also on both sides. It's when a pattern of excess accumulates which builds resentment: candidates just gauging their market worth OR employers being too picky about the wrong things OR not following up to make things right.

How are accounting people supposed to know a reimbursement needs to happen if former candidates and/or hiring managers do not let them know? They're not mind readers. Hiring managers should be clear about whom pays for what and how to recoup any out of pocket, or resentment will spread. Also, it does show lack of professionalism on the company's part if they do indeed seem to screw candidates, even if it were an actual innocent oversight. It would be titanically stupid to habitually, intentionally cheat unselected candidates in the modern world, for the ensuing exposure risks deterring good candidates at least and risks lawsuits at work.

Furthermore, on the candidate side of the table, it signals wisdom on behalf of a candidate if they socially-appropriately limit themselves to risks of screwed. This is a hiring signal of value, whereas someone that hasn't a clue is usually not respected as seriously. (To be fair, many of the best employees in their fields can seem shy, humble and odd to most. This is why it's crucial for astute interviewers to be non-threatening and mutually explore 1. how good will this person be on our actual work and 2. will they not mess up the shop's mojo... Hazing doesn't overcome current business problems, it guards incumbents' sense of in-group entitlement)

PS: I've interviewed as an SRE manager at GOOG before and helped others with their projects there, but I've decided to stay "executing" (bizword bingo) independently on something else. The issue at GOOG is that their interviewing process is somewhat more pragmatic than most but still doesn't go far enough and is too ad-hoc/ineffective. Really though, I just don't respect their products enough to commit the emotional energy into someone else's ship. The advantage of small shops are like small towns: less chance of Tragedy of the Commons because there is nowhere to hide. Unlike most small towns, everyone in small shops must be able to pull their own weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good recruiting experience in my opinion indicates a well run business at many levels. It's a key differentiator, especially for lower level staff. Much akin to how someone treats wait staff, how recruiters and employees treat potential employees shows a lot about their character and organization. I'm somewhat suprised the simple requirements AirBnB uses (such as providing feedback promptly) are not more widespread.

<comment><USER5> Personally, reading this article, I doubt even AirBnB does a good job. Lets check it out.... I haven't interviewed with them but I can go thru my normal job hunt process.

This may sound harsh but I consider applying for a job to be a serious process. I know companies seem to take candidates for granted a lot, and there's a lot of emphasis on weeding out bad hires.... but how many people think about the fact that you're going into a situation where they ask you questions, don't give you much time to learn about them, and then expect you to be there for 3 or more years?

I care about my life and I don't want to waste 3 or more years in a bad situation, because it does lasting damage to your resume. So, you have to be very perceptive, and look closely at the information you do get. Based on this experiment (what I will write up below) I would never even apply to AirBnB because the indications are they are not a good place to work.

You're right that good recruiting is a competitive advantage, but it seems like AirBnB doesn't have it. And I'd guess it's because the corporate culture is too arrogant... anywhere here's my notes upon evaluating AirBnB as a place to apply:

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

\- First off, their jobs page is full of HR BS, it's not genuine at all, it comes off as completely fake. By genuine, I mean relatable to a potential employee. And by fake I mean written by an HR person in vague generalities that don't really mean anything. This is a strong indicator that the culture may really suck hard. Example, BS like this: "Everyone is creative. Think scary big. Volunteer for impossible situations. Get shit done." Volunteer for impossible situations? So, you want me to set myself up for failure? Cause I'm a ninja, right? Words do have meanings.

\- No remote engineering positions. Most of their jobs are in the bay area. Two strikes indicating a lack of care for their employees. Working in the bay area is about %250 as expensive as living elsewhere (I did a comparison to Austin and when cost of living (which is high in Austin) and additional taxes in california are added, then I would have needed a %150 pay raise to have the same take home pay-- and the salaries being offered in california are not that high.) Your 500th engineer does not need to be in california.

\- Their job listing page for a job highly relevant to me-- pretty good. The listing is very polished but more genuine than the jobs page. No "ninja" but they do fall into "We want someone who is great at X but also not-X and this other unrelated not-X as well." For values of X and not-X that are kinda mutually exclusive (yes, you could be a designer who codes but you're going to be more one or the other not really both, and certainly not all three. Pick one.) They bragged about doing something where they literally did a half assed job. EG: "We've done X a lot, in fact we've done it Y times!" Where Y is half of what it should be for a proper professional solution.

\- Benefits: What's a "employee travel coupon" They should explain it. Also, if you're going to make me drag my butt into your office every day, at least give me a standing desk, preferably motor operated. At home I can just work out whenever I want.

\-- Looks like an open office plan. When you're at that level of operations you should give engineers the option of a 1 or 2 person office, and make it clear on your recruiting site. If you don't offer this, you don't know what you're doing.

I haven't interviewed with them, so here's my review of recent (Eg this year) reviews on Glassdoor:

\-- Bad technical interview, using a clearly inappropriate technical question (Eg: let's entertain ourselves by watching the candidate squirm, and get an ego boost as well for knowing the answer.)

\-- Yeah, this one I'll just quote: "This was one bad experience. I have interviewed at many places- big and small companies and experience at AirBnb is easily the worst. I applied online and HR called to schedule a phone interview. We went back and forth and they could not interview on the dates I had provided. I was going to be in SF for something else the next week and they suggested that I come onsite directly for onsite interviews as the phone interview dates were not working out. So I extended my stay (my own expenses as I am not a local candidate) and got ready for onsite interviews. When I went there, and asked for the agenda - the HR tells me - that its going to be just 1 interview - similar to a phone interview except that its going to be in person. I was shocked. I showed them the email where they confirmed me for onsite and they simply stated it was a communication mishap. This costed me heavily in terms of time and money. The HR seemed very careless and inefficient.

As for the interview, the interviewer asked me a Dynamic Programming question (hard one) and said - he didn't care how I implemented it but just wanted a working code in 30 mins. I tried and was very close to the solution. I had a minor bug in the base case of my recursion. The interviewer just stood up at the 30 min mark and left abruptly. I came out and quickly tried the solution in my laptop. I was able to complete it and get it working in another 5 mins. But from the looks of it, there is no credit for implementation idea, thought process or any such thing.

Overall, very negative experience."

Sounds very much like the experience from several years ago posted elsewhere in this thread.

BTW, if you're just looking for working code and you're not caring about the candidates thought process, you fail, and you should be fired from interviewing on the spot. Multiple of the reviews mentioned this, so clearly this is a pattern which makes me think it's a policy! That's kinda astounding!

Yeah, it just continues from there, bad experience after bad experience:

"Recruiters at Airbnb are the most unprofessional bunch of people. They don't reply to emails for weeks and don't attend you during onsite. In my onsite, one interviewer didn't come to interview room on time, the other was busy doing her work after giving me a question. I have interviewed at big/small all kind of companies, have offers from them but this was the worst experience so far. All my respect for the company gone down in drain. They publicize their "core values" so much, one of which is "Be a host." They were the worst host an interview candidate can get."

More than enough negative reviews and more importantly indications of bad arbitrary interview process in the positive reviews as well to tell me to stay away.

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember applying to work AirBnB back in 2009 or 2010. I still recall today the curt response sent back to be:

"We don't accept applicants without a college degree."

Needless to say, I'm sure the policy has been amended; we work in a very different world now.

<comment><USER7> airbnb: where it's cool to roll a front end engineer into my scheduled interview for ML 24 minutes late without having read my fucking resume

<comment><USER2> Same. None of my interviewers read my resume (or my github)and bemoaned the fact that my degree was not from an IVY league university, right to my face.

<comment><USER8> That sounds like a raw, perfect insight into a company I wouldn't want to work for.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, these comments are far better than the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel AirBnb paid for this article. It all feels like a big ad from AirBnb. I also feel it's sponsored by YC by putting it in front page with 37 points in 9 hours (at the moment of writing this comment)

</comment><comment><USER11> So they started giving a shit and treated people with respect. Puff piece.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading the article it seems like Airbnb took the strategy many companies choose not to take. I call the strategy, "Don't be a dick."

<comment><USER2> > Dont be a dick

Opposite of what I experienced.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300104)

<comment><USER13> It sounds like they realized they had a problem and turned it around. (Or it's just pure PR spin, and the problem remains. Any recent interview experiences?)

<comment><USER5> IT's pure PR spin. Glassdoor reviews from the past couple of months, both positive and negative indicate to me that the process is very broken and disrespectful.

For instance, multiple people mentioned not being able to get the answer to the problem coded and running with unit tests in 30 minutes.

IF you're testing programmers on the speed at which they code then you don't know what you're doing.

The more productive programmers are slower out of the gate. (EG: think about something for awhile then write it out and produce something that works better and requires less debugging and bashing into shape over the next 2 weeks.)

Even if you disagree with this hypothesis, testing for speed is measuring just one parameter. Apparently they only care if the program runs in the aloted time, not the thought process the engineer goes thru in writing it.

<comment><USER14> Completely agree. Yet, the number of companies using hacker rank and other timed tests is going up! I honestly prefer a whiteboard interview, where I can actually explain my thought process with the interviewer. Its far better than bash out the first solution that comes into my head, as I don't have time to think it through properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone have a picture of the storyboard?

</comment><comment><USER16> They also take a very data driven approach to hiring by leveraging applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse and testing platforms like HackerRank. This helps to surface top candidates and keep the operation smooth and tight.

<comment><USER5> This alone tells me that they don't know what they are doing.

I interviewed for a job using Hacker Rank about 6 months ago. They insisted that I complete their problems. The problems were trivially easy (that's ok, there was a time limit so you don't want to make things too confusing or difficult) but I struggled and barely got it in on time due to how terrible the HackerRank system worked. I ran into innumerable bugs, from not compiling the code correctly (poor install of the language) to front and bugs that would cause edits to be lost -- I eventually started coding in a text editor and copy and pasting the results in to submit-- but that didn't work very well either, possible because they have an anti-cheat system or something.

I literally spent 5 minutes writing a solution to one of the answers, 1 minute running it locally (worked the first time) and then 20 minutes trying to get Hacker Rank to accept it. Some of them it never accepted-- the code would be there but I couldn't get the hacker rank system to run it to check its output.

Of course, the "scoring" on hacker rank is how fast you are and whether you get the correct output-- and this company explicitly stated that they rank people by score. This was the only "technical" part of the interview process.

Of course I told them about the issues I ran into but at some point that's going to sound like complaining, right?

So, now, I take outsourcing technical interviews to hacker rank as a sign of incompetence.

IF the hiring manager isn't technical enough to conduct a technical interview, then your company is not competently managed. PERIOD.

And hacker rank was such a joke that it shows they didn't even try it themselves.

<comment><USER17> FWIW, I had to use hackerrank for an interview some time ago and it worked ok, so I'd consider that possibly the specific platform you used (i.e. Go 1.x.y or Ruby 2.x.y or whatever) might have been poorly tested.

But I wouldn't discount a company just for using that or anything like it, I think there is a reasonable use case for tools like it, i.e. as a glorified FizzBuzz to weed out obvious non-hires, which is what it felt like when I had to use it.</comment></comment></comment>


NASA Won't Be Going Back To The Moon In Our Lifetimes - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacepolitics.com/2013/04/05/back-to-the-moon-not-any-time-soon-says-bolden/ <comment><USER2> There is really no point in the U.S. sending humans back to the Moon. It has nothing we need or can use, and we've already been there several times.

Other nations might want to send people there for the same reason that people still want to climb Mt. Everest today, long after the first ascent.</comment>


Why Twitter Must Expand Beyond 140 Characters - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_twitter_must_expand_beyond_140_characters.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d5cdf15270377f0%2C0 <comment><USER2> I wouldn't say twitter must or must not expand the limit, or even if they should or shouldn't, but I would most definitely welcome that change. Sometimes 140 char limits is too limiting and that's the reason for other microblogging platforms like tumblr gaining popularity.

Of course, twitter has more important issues at hand like monetization, and it's not very likely expanding limit has high priority.

</comment><comment><USER3> Twitter <= 140 <= {Tumblr, Buzz, Blogger, Wordpress}

There are better alternatives to twitter > 140 chars but <= 140 chars none.

</comment><comment><USER4> Twitter should NOT throw the 140 character limit away, they should continue to enforce it because its their value proposition.

There are several sites such as Deck.ly (highlighted in the article) for longer tweets and they aren't really popular with mainstream users. Moreover, unlike its considered rivals (Facebook, which I don't consider to be a rival although many tech blogs do after Facebook implemented the status feature) is that Twitter only release changes to its users after a lot of consideration and testing which is another reason as to why they won't throw away their value proposition.

Additionally, and potentially the most important fact is that Twitter is a place to communicate with people, discover what new in your world and let them know "what's happening" hence the ability to do so via SMS. By editting the limit etc, they are alienating a core of their users and a CORE which has been the heart of its growth especially during the Iran Elections etc and by editting the limit and adding meta data to it, users in these regions wouldn't have been able to see the tweets properly because everyone on the planet don't own a smartphone. Which would result in a change in using Twitter especially for people in these regions and altering its culture, something which companies work hard to protect and develop.</comment>


Show HN: Leader – VIM's leader key for your terminal - <AUTHOR> https://dhamidi.github.io/leader/ <comment><USER2> It is not a good idea to use the backslash as the trigger key since it is the traditional line continuation and escape character on UNIX.

Furthermore it is not a good idea to replace the command line with a menu since that limits what is possible in UNIX. If we didn't design a menu driven system on UNIX in the past 40 years there is a reason for that:

[http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/)

<comment><AUTHOR> > It is not a good idea to use the backslash as the trigger key since it is > the traditional line continuation and escape character on UNIX.

Well it is also the default key binding for VIM's leader key and placed on the home row on US keyboards which makes it really accessible.

What is not shown in the demo screencast is that leader detects whether the cursor is inside a quoted string and in that case doesn't present a menu but tells the shell to insert a literal backspace at the current cursor position.

For continuing lines on an interactive shell the user would have to press Ctrl+V followed by a backslash to insert a literal backslash. In my experience this is rarely necessary in an interactive terminal so the extra utility gained by having leader on the home row outweighs the extra key press necessary for continuing a line.

> Furthermore it is not a good idea to replace the command line with a menu > since that limits what is possible in UNIX.

That is true. Leader is not _replacing_ the command line, the command line still works as usual, the only difference is that you can launch a menu by typing backslash to quickly run a command.</comment></comment>


How would you design a spherical compass with"squared degrees" for space travel? - <AUTHOR> "2 radians equals 360 degrees. Thus 1 radian = 180/ degrees, and 1 degree = /180 radians. d(A,B) = R a /180, These formulas can be checked by noticing that the arc length is proportional to the angle, and then checking the formula for the full circle, i.e., when a = 2 radians (or 360 degrees)" <comment><USER2> [caveat: I am not an astronaut]

Over significant distances, it is probably worth considering the curvature of space time and not relying solely on a Euclidean model.</comment>


Unmutual friend: How Charles Dickens tried to place his wife in an asylum - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/charles-catherine-dickens-asylum/ <comment><USER2> Knowing all the allegations that surface against people these days, it's pretty chilling to think about all the stuff like this that was just swept under the rug or condoned for centuries.

<comment><USER3> From talking with various in-laws who grew up in middle-upper class East coast families, there was some very sketchy stuff happening before the 60s, especially to women. Things like lobotomies or institutionalizations, just to get an undesirable person out of the way.

<comment><USER4> This reminds me of Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch.

<comment><USER5> Care to tell us why/how?

<comment><USER6> It's a movie about an abused girl who is casually institutionalized and abused and finally lobotomized.

She escapes into a fantasy where she and her friends go on adventures.

<comment><USER5> Aha, yeah, I read a bit about that a while ago. Is that a spoiler?!

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978764/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978764/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to wonder though... Someone taking twice daily injections of morphine because of a little domestic neglect is not.. Well not all there.

Certainly it's not enough to be put into those horrible lunatic asylums but to be fair, people thought they worked. It would be roughly the equivalent of putting someone in therapy today I believe.</comment>


Alerts Amazon shoppers if a company engages in harmful business practices - <AUTHOR> http://www.jointribe.us/ <comment><USER2> What does the service say about Amazon [100s of brands] products? Should I not be buying those due to their business practices?</comment>


How much does typing speed matter? (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/09/does-typing-speed-matter/ <comment><USER2> "Keeping up with your brain" is an underrated concept here. I used to type about 120 wpm, although that number has come down a lot over the years due to carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. But I still think it's important that I can type out code almost as fast as I can think it up. It's important that I not have to think much about getting the idea drafted, because this gives me a lot more time to clean it up and revise it. It's like I have a chance to write and test several revisions of my code in the time it would take a very slow typist just to key in the code once. I have worked with hunt-and-peck programmers and it is painful to watch them work.</comment>


If the NSA can tap all traffic, can they not control/stop all Internet traffic? - <AUTHOR>

Assuming the severity of the NSA's reach into deep packet flows is such that they can intercept pretty much any communication - it would be negligent to believe the NSA could not shut down any/many/the most important communication networks.
This, to me, is the most egregious fact - We are utterly beholden to the actions of the NSA.
Irrespective of any slurping capability they may have - where, given sufficient public outcry/upstanding/revolt, which may be able to stop said slurping; the real problem is that the NSA is truly capable of STOPPING global comms when they feel the need to do so (like, for example, when the world realizes how absolutely controlled they are by banks, and decides it shall no longer be tolerated)
Is there anything anyone can say which would help me have faith in the reality of any true freedom remaining in this world? <comment><USER2> That's old news: [http://www.extremetech.com/computing/132585-us-president- iss...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/132585-us-president-issues- executive-order-that-gives-him-control-of-the-internet)

Back in 2012 Obama was working toward an 'Internet Kill Switch'.</comment>


Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died - <AUTHOR> Ezra Zygmuntowicz, a founder of the rails hosting company Engine Yard and original developer of the web framework Merb, passed away Wednesday, November 26th. No details yet, but what was a rumor on twitter has been confirmed by Stuffstr.com's VP Steve Gutmann, the last company Ezra work at as their CTO.<p>Will update as more information is known. <comment><USER2> One time I was working on doing some tricky distributed routing for a freelance customer that was using Merb. At the time I didn't know Ezra and we'd never personally met, but I explained my problem over email and asked if he had any suggestions. I wasn't really expecting a reply -- it was essentially a cold call.

He immediately dropped what he was doing and emailed me back, "that sounds like a really interesting problem -- can I call you and we'll set up a screenshare?" He then spent two hours helping me get it right, free of charge, and he never asked for anything. (I eventually had to email a few of his colleagues to figure out his office address to send him a thank-you present.)

I think that is the sort of thing that epitomized Ezra, from everything I've heard from his many other friends: he was funny, patient, and most of all kind.

<comment> jim-greer That sounds just like the guy I met at RailsConf in 2006. We were starting Kongregate and I saw Ezra's talk on Rails Deployment. It was amazing and after talking to him I decided to try to use Engineyard for Kongregate hosting. We were one of their first five customers and unfortunately the distributed filesystem didn't work well for us. We switched off to our own colo but Ezra helped us at every step of the way, long after it was clear we weren't coming back.

Such a loss.

Link describing the talk:

[http://martyhaught.com/articles/2006/06/25/railsconf-2006---...](http://martyhaught.com/articles/2006/06/25/railsconf-2006 ---day-two/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is Ezra's brother, Eli Zygmuntowicz. Thank you all for you kind comments. I know he valued his programming and tech community immensely. He will be sorely missed by his family, friends and son. If any of you are interested, we are having a memorial service for him in Portland this Wednesday, Dec 3. We are also setting up a memorial trust fund for his son, Ryland. Please email me at email@example.com if you would like details about either the service or fund. Best. Eli

<comment><USER4> Thanks so much for the info Eli. For those that want to attend the service, do you have a time and location available? Or should they contact you to get that? I'd like to pass it along to people who have asked on twitter.

<comment><USER3> Yes it is ok to share with friends on twitter. The service is for family and close friends of Ezra's.

Service & Burial - 1:30 pm, Weds. Dec. 3 River View Cemetery - Adams Chapel 0300 SW Taylors Ferry Rd Portland, OR 97219 503-246-4251

We will be setting up and sharing info about a trust fund being set up for his surviving son Ryland soon as well as central place for people to share their comments Ezra.

Thanks for all of your kind words and support

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ezra was the first to start making Redis popular, wrote the initial implementation of the Ruby client, gave the first talk I remember at lightning conf. One time I met him at EY office with his family, with the 2 months old child. At some point he started to disappear more and more, we were supposed to meet in Portland at a Redis conf and he was not able to make it. I was concerned about him every time I saw a rare tweet. I'm sorry Ezra.

</comment><comment><USER6> When I was first releasing Haml, I remember that Ezra piped up and encouraged me. Actually, thanks to the Internets, it's still there [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubyonrails- talk/UqYlo_N59zo...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubyonrails- talk/UqYlo_N59zo/MzZpxDhHbakJ)

Seeing someone as brilliant as Ezra saying he liked my project (Haml was the first thing I ever released) really encouraged me to continue on in OSS development. And, of course, we added iterators to Haml shortly after Ezra suggested it.

Also, Ezra was super helpful when we built m.wikipedia.org using Merb... helping me get everything set up so that we could scale that project to 2 billion pages a month through the three dinky machines I had!

I'm totally surprised and gutted to hear that he's passed. :(

</comment><comment><USER7> He used to fly little radio controlled helicopters all over our office at Engine Yard. Playful and fun. The real tragedy has little to do with his departure from the world of technology. The real tragedy is that his son, who must be no older than six, has lost his father. So so sad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hello everyone. Here is the link to my Brother Ezra's son Ryland's Memorial fund. If I know one thing at this time it was that my brother loved and wanted to provide for his son. Please help us do that any way you can. Please share via Twitter or any media or with friends who want to help out. Thanks for all the support.

[http://igg.me/at/ezrazyg/x/2405939](http://igg.me/at/ezrazyg/x/2405939)

Best, Eli Zygmuntowicz

</comment><comment><USER8> Ezra was so good to me. He helped write Chef, tool our idea and ran with it as a critical part of Engine Yard cloud. We wrote chef solo together . He and his wife made my wife and I feel warm and welcomed in San Francisco. Rest well, big guy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you didn't know Ezra, some of his talks are available on Confreaks:

[http://www.confreaks.com/presenters/59-ezra- zygmuntowicz](http://www.confreaks.com/presenters/59-ezra-zygmuntowicz)

In particular, his last talk at RailsConf 2012 is a fascinating history of Ruby on Rails:

[http://www.confreaks.com/videos/911-railsconf2012-what-a- lon...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/911-railsconf2012-what-a-long-strange- trip-it-has-been)

</comment><comment><USER9> He moved to Portland, Oregon for a new job, but I believe mostly to jump back into the glass blowing scene he helped create in the 90's. Ezra was a innovator in the glass pipe world. A world class artist that reinvented lampworking.

</comment><comment><USER10> The way I will always remember Ezra: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/adelcambre/2932034431/in/photo...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/adelcambre/2932034431/in/photolist-5ubuft-5t6rFM-5t6ru6-5taRmY) (MerbCamp, 2008)

<comment><USER11> Those photos bring back a lot of good memories. I believe MerbCamp was the first time I had met Ezra in person. Really enjoyed hanging with him and the other members of the Merb team. Ezra has impacted my life in a very good way and will be missed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ezra hired me at Engine Yard about two months before he left. I loved discussing infrastructure and software with him. He did a lot for the Ruby community and brought to light lots of great tech (redis and nginx). He had a big impact on my career and for that I will be forever grateful. Prayers and thoughts with this family. Rest in peace Ezra.

</comment><comment><USER13> I shared a cab ride with Ezra from the New Orleans airport to the RubyConf hotel in 2010. In the very short time we spent in the car talking about his new role at VMware working on Cloud Foundry, his enthusiasm and passion for Ruby and the community's future left a huge impression on me.

Ezra, you will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER14> When I was getting started with Thin (the Ruby web server), Ezra sent the first few patches, talked about it at confs, used it at his company and helped me debug it on IRC for hours. Only because, he thought it was cool tech. His passion was contagious.

He's the reason why my tiny project became popular and I'm sure many other tech we use today. Thank you Ezra!

</comment><comment><USER15> What do you say about a man who embodied everything that is good and precious about the culture of sharing in software? When we all got that Rails was the next big thing in '05 and '06, Ezra was there in IRC and freely gave of his time and expertise and all but tutored me in Rails and Ruby. I was so deeply moved by his generosity, that on meeting him at the first Rails conference, I just had to hug him.

Goodbye, friend. The kindness you showed to me and to so many others lives on. Thank you.

<comment><USER16> Right there with you. I can't count the number of times he helped me on IRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you were building Rails apps in 2005/6, more than likely you were reading Ezra's blog post on how deploy to your VPS. It was tricky to get right, but Ezra made it so that it was no longer impossible. He was always there to help people with their own tricky configurations too.

</comment><comment><USER18> I meet Ezra at RailsConf 2007, this was pre Engine yard if I am not mistaken. At this point he was all merb. He was fun to be around, very positive attitude and extremely smart.

Sad day…

<comment><USER19> Ezra agreed to co-found Engine Yard in January 2006, and was full-time in August or September I believe.

Merb was built to handle a high-traffic endpoint for one of our customers. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> So Merb's genesis was in response to a customer's need? I remember Rails, Ruby, and the hosting stack being mighty slow back in the early days.

<comment><USER20> Merb started as essentially a wrapper on top of mongrel handler. Merb = Mongrel + erb. Mongrel had concurrency and it was super lightweight. However, it did not have goodies like routing or templating engine. Ezra write Merb as modular framework which did not care if you used datamapper or active record. Haml or ERB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I woke up this morning to Regan's post on that old photo.

It's an incredibly sad day: a great hacker, founder, and community member has been lost forever.

Goodbye Exra, I'll miss you.

</comment><comment><USER21> In the early days of both Engine Yard and Kongregate Ezra and I worked closely on solving some problems during high pressure moments. He was smart, dedicated, and genuine. He worked hard to not just solve problems, but to communicate and teach everyone around him.

We lost touch over the years, chatting occasionally and always saying "hey, we should meet up sometime." I'm sorry now we didn't.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ezra was a playful hacker who was never afraid to strike out and build something crazy.

</comment><comment><USER23> He taught me how to deploy Rails apps, and with his help I figured out what I needed to get a production environment running on Windows. Then he asked me to contribute what I know to [https://pragprog.com/book/fr_deploy/deploying- rails-applicat...](https://pragprog.com/book/fr_deploy/deploying-rails- applications) (out of print now).

He's one of three people responsible for turning my career completely around back in 2005. He always paid it forward, and I have always done that myself since.

He was amazing. Honestly, we need more of that and less "you're doing it wrong."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I met Ezra back at RailsConf (2007) after a talk he gave. Scary smart, yet friendly and humble. The man left us way too soon.

</comment><comment><USER24> I too would like to echo the sentiments that already have been expressed here. I remember discovering nginx through his blog post about how to easily set up rails with it. I had issues with backgroundrb and he was so kind to help me out over irc and countless other moments. I also remember him bringing Redis to my attention I think he did so for a large number of us. I followed his work as I had a deep respect and admiration for him as a person. So tragic to hear this news. Really gutted. I will never forget him.

Never had a chance to meet him in person so Thank you Ezra.

</comment><comment><USER25> This was horrible news to wake up to last night. The importance of Ezra in the Rails and related communities cannot be overstated. He was a great guy with a big heart; always busy making things whether in the programming world, with glass, or 3D printers. A true hacker. I wasn't lucky enough to call him a friend, more of a professional connection/acquaintance, but I'm glad I reached out to him during his darkest moment and got to know him a little better in the process. He will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER26> It looks like Ezra has been battling an illness for over a year: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trinitylabs- talk/f8XOageAwcY...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trinitylabs- talk/f8XOageAwcY/3vJE5pEKApQJ)

I'm very sad to hear such bad news about a great person. :( I learned a lot about developing by hanging out in #merb and #engineyard chatting with Ezra and the crew.

<comment><USER27> Do you know what illness that was?

<comment><USER28> His colleagues and family went to considerable lengths keeping it out of the spotlight - so we can assume he didn't want people to know. That means it's probably an illness with a significant stigma, likely something with a strong mental component.

While personally I think it's a missed opportunity to raise awareness of a potentially fatal disease, and a missed chance for the people who admired him to make a final human connection (cause of death is generally considered a necessary element of reaching closure), it's their prerogative to keep it a secret. And if he wanted people to know, he'd probably have addressed the issue.

<comment><USER27> Was it diabetes?

"I'm also not jumping back in too quickly as the stress had agravated my recently diagnosed type 2 adult onset diabetes which is what landed me in the hospital." \-- Ezra Zygmuntowicz

"@inetdavid type2 adult onset. too much hacking for 18 hours a day drinking red bull and eating fast food. lost 118lbs after diagnosed!" \-- Ezra Zygmuntowicz

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trinitylabs- talk/f8XOageAwcY...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/trinitylabs- talk/f8XOageAwcY/ez7jv_qTfcoJ)

[https://twitter.com/ezmobius/status/362228490176692224](https://twitter.com/ezmobius/status/362228490176692224)

How can type 2 diabetes kill a person after only 1 year of being diagnosed? What the hell? :-(

<comment><USER29> There can certainly be complications, but diabetes is usually considered manageable with an otherwise healthy patient. There's really no point in speculating without more information, so I'd drop it unless/until more is made public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ezra Zygmuntowicz Memorial Fund for His Son Ryland(indiegogo.com) [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ezra-zygmuntowicz- memoria...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ezra-zygmuntowicz-memorial- fund-for-his-son-ryland) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690794)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm very sad to hear this.

In the very early days of Rails Ezra was one of the most helpful people on the IRC channel. When he mentioned that he worked only a few hundred miles away I helped hire him at a small software outfit in Spokane, WA and worked closely with him for over a year.

From there he left to co-found EngineYard.

He did so much for the Ruby community and will sorely missed.

I'm glad I had a chance to know him.

</comment><comment><USER32> He left us to early. It is very, very sad. RIP you will be missed :/

</comment><comment><USER33> Wow, this make me really sad. I remember interviewing him about Engine Yard on my old podcast.

He always impressed me and I was so happy he took the time to talk: [http://web20show.com/2008/07/episode-47-ezra- zygmuntowicz/](http://web20show.com/2008/07/episode-47-ezra-zygmuntowicz/).

</comment><comment><USER34> I'll miss Ezra and his outgoing spirit. Goodbye, old friend.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ezra was a pioneer in the glass-blowing/pipe industry. Here is some of his work: [https://www.facebook.com/jason.lee.16568548/posts/1020460894...](https://www.facebook.com/jason.lee.16568548/posts/10204608940297763?pnref=story)

</comment><comment><USER36> I am deeply saddened by this news. I remember trying to convince Ezra to join us to help out with CloudFoundry. I, like others, knew Ezra through the Ruby community where he was a larger than life presence. My thoughts are with his son, his family and friends.

</comment><comment><USER37> Ezra was an inspiration to me. My first ever OS contribution was to merb, and his was so helpful, it inspired me to keep going. It was great to work with him on that project, and later at Engineyard. So sorry to hear of his passing.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow... Very sad news. His twitter page shows him living in Eugene, Oregon, my hometown. I wonder what he was doing there.

<comment><USER39> He was getting in touch with his glass blowing roots. He had a studio that he opened down there last march or April.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The Ruby and Rails community has lost one of its kindest souls. Ezra has left behind a legacy everyone must aspire to.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ezra was a nice guy. Very approachable and even though he was probably smarter than most he talked to he never came across superior.

He is also the one who introduced me to nginx and I think he was instrumental in making nginx a western webserver that is now used all over the place.

</comment><comment><USER42> Condolences to Ezra's family. He'll be missed my many lucky people whom he influenced.

</comment><comment><USER20> :(( What happened ?

<comment><AUTHOR> All just speculation right now, but apparently there will be a service on Wednesday December 3rd in Portland, Oregon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is terribly sad. Profound loss for the Ruby community, among many others.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ezra is an upstanding human, a generous and helpful spirit. He will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER45> Oh wow. So sad to hear about a pillar and pioneer in the Ruby community.

</comment><comment><USER46> With my brief encounter of him, he was one of the nicest guys I've ever run across. He took everyone seriously despite the level of customer. He always helped like jx5 was saying. Damn.

</comment><comment><USER47> Rest in peace, Ezra.

</comment><comment><USER48> RIP Ezra!

Thank you very much for your contributions and Merb.

</comment><comment><USER49> shit man! that sucks, you will be missed :-{

</comment><comment><USER50> He left us too early. So sad to hear it.

</comment><comment><USER51> :(

</comment><comment><USER27> Sorry to ask, I know it's a very personal thing, but was he ill? :(

RIP Ezra.

</comment><comment><USER27> Such a big loss. May you rest in peace.

What was the cause of death?

<comment><USER52> Seriously: it's really uncool that you keep asking this.

I'm sad that you're sad, but you're not taking the hint.</comment></comment>


The Software Design Handbook - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/software/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thrilled to announce my latest book focused on designing web applications. After the success of my last book, The App Design Handbook, I had a lot of people asking me to write something specific to web applications. I actually started writing the outline for this book back in 2009, but it wasn't until a few months ago that I actually started writing.

Happy to answer any questions about it!

<comment><USER2> First, good job! I hope to add "authored a book" to my resume some day.

Question, though: if this book is specifically geared towards web apps, why did you give it such an ambiguous name that mentions nothing at all about web apps?

Is your book about architecting applications (on a code level), or is the "design" relating more to the artistic definition of design? Judging by the sample content, it looks to have little-to-nothing to do with actual code, and mostly focused on UI/UX.

As-is, the title just seems really inaccurate; "software design", at least for me, is a very specific area which deals exclusively with UML and other code- level architectural concerns.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess we are using the same words to mean different things. I'll see if I can come up with a title that is more clear.

The book is focused on designing software from a user's perspective. That includes how the application flow works, making sure it is intuitive, and adding a layer of polish with colors, textures, and animations.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the correct term "web apps"? I've never heard anyone refer to them as "software".

<comment><AUTHOR> I was trying to name it using "Handbook" like my last book, but "The Web Application Design Handbook" was already taken.

I would love better ideas!

<comment><USER3> Why not The Web App Design Handbook? It matches your branding...

<comment><AUTHOR> There is already a book with that exact name :(

<comment><USER3> "App" or "Application"? I searched for "App" and nothing showed in Google...

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Web+App+Design+Handbo...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Web+App+Design+Handbook%22)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks really cool. Sorry to nitpick, but I think you should say "DESIGNING WEB SOFTWARE IS DIFFERENT from DESIGNING WEBSITES" (it might at least help with the British crowd)

</comment><comment><USER5> Where's your definition of 'site' vs 'app' coming from? How does, e.g, Amazon, fit into this?

</comment><comment><USER6> Discount for people who bought previous book? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll do a 25% (ish) discount on launch day and will be sure to let everyone who bought the previous book know about it.

<comment><USER6> Great, thanks! Can't wait for this book.</comment></comment></comment>


Start-ups: Understand what you mean when you say "market" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.intercom.io/chinese-gloves-and-addressable-markets/

<comment><USER2> The biggest point this is missing - the cost of acquisition. If you sell your product to 0.1% of China, you'll have tonnes of revenue. If you have to send salesmen out to knock on half a billion doors to get that 0.1% to buy, your profits won't be so hot.

Or, you could buy adwords. You can try a "viral" strategy, which magnifies your acquisition (by a factor you can calculate - if 90% of your customers can sell to a friend, you get 1/(1-0.9) = 10X the acquisitions you'd get without the viral strategy), but it's not a holy grail unless every customer brings in _more_ than 1 friend. Guess how often that happens?

<comment><USER3> Hey Wisty,

Good point. I left this out as I wanted to do a separate post on the importance of profitably acquiring customers for start-ups, but there's a big overlap here with the dangers of hitting large markets that I should have included it.

Cheers, Des

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only thing I disagree with is the limiting mindset of who your addressable market is... A better formula would be deciding who you WANT your addressable market to be, and finding a way to reach them.

For example, a local cafe might appear to be limited by geography, but could just as easily build a reputation beyond their borders and become the Omaha Steaks of Coffee.

I think you subtly made the point that things like making your product and experience remarkable, will expand your addressable market, but I think it is important for businesses and startups to realize that "Their Market" could be by design, and doesn't have to limited to the apparent cards they were dealt.

In fact, any marketer worth their salt should be able to find any consumer or target market no matter how big or small, no matter where they are and no matter the barriers and limitations and find a way to engage them.

<comment><USER5> I too prefer this way of thinking. It is the kind of thinking that leads to coffee 'trucks' rather than coffee 'shops'. As in "Hey my potential customers are all over the city, but not all at the same time ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Happy customers beat the crap out of any marketing team you could hire..."

You should beat the crap out of your marketing team if they aren't bringing you happy customers.

<comment><USER6> I dunno.. I hate marketing as much as the next engineer, but just because a customer is happy doesn't mean they will bring you as many new customers that a good marketing strategy will. They could be happy and never come back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's called market segmentation and is fundamental to most businesses. I say most businesses, because there are always cases of businesses that succeed because of dumb luck or just being in the right place at the right time.

The statement "Happy customers beat the crap out of any marketing team you could hire" is pretty ridiculous because it downplays the importance of great marketing, without which, most products will get ignored.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great breakdown of the different markets that exist. I think it can even help in calculating "back of the envelope" numbers, because you know you need to, "drop some zeros" a lot of the time. Pricing is kinda glossed over. But isn't Freemuim disrupting some of the 'Age old formulas'?</comment>


What nobody tells you about documentation - <AUTHOR> https://www.divio.com/en/blog/documentation/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure they've got the boundary between Reference and Explanation quite right.

They seem to be thinking of the Explanation category as less than formal, and of the Reference category as organised around individual items (a list of methods, or command-line arguments, or configuration options).

What a lot of projects miss is formal, complete-and-correct documentation of what the program does and doesn't promise to do, independent of any user- controllable knob.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very similar to the advice of Jacob-Kaplan Moss, architect of the Django documentation [1]. I used this very advice in the authoring of the Open vSwitch documentation [2] though I, like other commenters here, did have difficulty distinguishing between tutorials and how-tos.

[1] [https://jacobian.org/writing/what-to- write/](https://jacobian.org/writing/what-to-write/)

[2] [http://docs.openvswitch.org/](http://docs.openvswitch.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> "nobody" is attention-getting hyperbole. People have been explaining the differences between (say) Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity for years, now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Definitely a nice article. Somehow I would in a real case be hard pressed to distinguish Tutorial and How To. When teaching a child how to cook, I would do so by showing/helping to cook a simple meal. This would be done in a series of steps. Very much like the definition of howto in the article.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good article with actionable advice. I wonder if anyone has good templates to do something like this for technical docs for libraries.</comment>


How to Read a Schematic - <AUTHOR> https://rawhex.com/blogs/news/how-to-read-a-schematic <comment><USER2> That's a breakout board - mostly connectors, little functionality. Not too interesting to study. A simple blinky board with a 555 timer would be a better place to start.

Here's one of my schematics[1] with a detailed explanation of how it works [2] This is a small board which is used to power old Teletype machines. It's a mixed analog/digital board, with a custom switching power supply onboard to provide the high output voltage needed using only power from the USB port.

This gives some insight into why modern power supplies have so many parts. They work by creating big spikes, and they're always a few microseconds from a short circuit. So they need bypass capacitors and ferrite beads in the right places, and protection circuitry in case something fails. (MOSFETs tend to fail into the ON state.)

If you really want to learn this stuff, get "The Art of Electronics", by Horowitz and Hill.

[1] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/John- Nagle/ttyloopdriver/m...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/John- Nagle/ttyloopdriver/master/board/ttydriver01.png)

[2] [https://github.com/John- Nagle/ttyloopdriver/blob/master/READ...](https://github.com/John- Nagle/ttyloopdriver/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER3> +1 for using KiCad to draw the schematic - it's important to use open source software when you're developing open source hardware. The licences for Altium, Eagle and co can cost many hundreds or thousands of dollars/euros/pounds a year, which bars entry to a lot of hobbyists. Improving what is already a fantastic piece of software (KiCad) is a big priority in my view. It's good that places like CERN are getting behind it.

<comment><USER4> Eagle has a free licence version, If you're ok with 2 layer pcb's and fairly small boards, which would suit quite a lot of hobbyists. KiCad was in need of some UX love back when I looked at it 2 years ago, the feature set is definitely impressive though, maybe time to revisit it in the near future.

<comment><USER3> The software is still in a strange transition between the old layout engine and the new OpenGL one developed by CERN. I believe the old interface is being killed, but not immediately - you can switch between them as you use Pcbnew (KiCad's board editor). I initially found the old interface to be more intuitive, coming from Eagle. I used the new one for my most recent boards (primarily due to its support for differential pair routing), and once I learned the interface I now much prefer it.

There are still a few quirks, like, for instance, if I want to delete a whole track, I find it quickest to switch to the old interface and press "Del", then switch back. The new interface only deletes segments of tracks with that key. Saying that, despite the rough edges it's pretty solid and functions effectively in the professional and research environments I've worked in. It's only going to get better, too, as the community grows and the new interface fully replaces the old one.

<comment><USER5> I use Kicad these days but am an Eagle refugee too. The only thing I use the old interface for is the spread and place all components function, which I can't find in the new one. For deleting tracks I use i and u to select either the local segment or the whole track, and then press delete. One thing I'd really like to have is have the shove router do its thing when moving components that already have traces connected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One trick I learned at university while analyzing a circuit is to identify the various 'design patterns' in it - just like software engineering, circuit design also features a lot of recurring common patterns.

Here is a fantastic post on it: [http://www.arachnidlabs.com/blog/2013/10/17/electronics- patt...](http://www.arachnidlabs.com/blog/2013/10/17/electronics-patterns/)

<comment><USER7> Exactly this. The first step for me is usually to redraw out the messed up crap the last person drafted as things that look like the design patterns.

Even Tektronix and HP can produce some dire schematics so when you've got your head in some old kit I'd probably spend more time deciphering the service manual schematics than actually fixing it (something I do as a leisure activity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few pro-tips on _drawing_ schematics:

1\. ASME Y14.100 and its references, in particular, Y14.1, Y14.2, and Y14.44.

2\. IEEE Std 315 for symbols and reference designators.

3\. Zen feng shui a la Tufte.

4\. For multi-sheet schematics, provide a list of every reference designator and applicable sheet(s). Use sheet/zone references for all labels that span multiple sheets.

5\. In general, functional left-to-right flow tends to be optimal for interpretation. Keep the application intent in mind.

6\. Sideways text is _never_ acceptable.

7\. Q0O5S2Z1IX...if these characters aren't distinct, your typeface is busted.

8\. Minimize net crossings. If you feel cross-eyed looking at any sheet, your schematics are likely busted.

9\. Assume black/white printing. If you need colors to disambiguate, your schematics are certainly busted.

10\. Electrical schematics convey _eletrical intent_ , mechanical drawings convey _mechanical intent_. Sometimes it's useful to convey elements of the latter in the former.</comment>


Can software start-ups succeed with non-programmer founder(s)? - <AUTHOR>

Can non-programmers have success at raising money for a software start-up?
Also, do you know of any success stories(received more than angel funding) where the founder(s) were not programmers?
Thanks,<AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> _"... Can software start-ups succeed with non-programmer founder(s)? ..."_

Well lots of startups succeed already with non-dev founders. But they also most likely have hackers on the founder team. Could a software startup be successful with _all_ founders not being programmers, hackers or without the ability to write code? I imagine not many.

I can't think of any startups without a single programmer/hacker founder, anyone else?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure whether the effectiveness of the federal contracting model can be accurately compared against a start-up, but here goes.

My paying job is that of a systems engineer and it is my responsibility to keep track of meeting customer needs against cost and schedule. This being said, part of my work is to correctly capture customer needs and then make sure that the development and environment teams are able to architect and design according to specs. From a business standpoint, this dual team environment is effective in that the company for whom I work continues to win contracts because the customer's needs are met.

I think the arrangement where the founders are not currently developers would be equally effective as a team of developers as long as they are able to accurately capture and understand their customer's needs prior to the start of coding.

<comment><USER2> _"... I think the arrangement where the founders are not currently developers would be equally effective as a team of developers as long as they are able to accurately capture and understand their customer's needs prior to the start of coding. ..."_

I wish all or some customer needs could be fixed at the start of coding but it's not likely to happen. For a start, exactly "who is a startups customers?" You can ask them, but you need a demo first. If you build _new products_ (stuff that by definition has not been built before) a constant dialog with users is required _'at'_ the time of coding and development not before.

 _"... If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse. ..."_ ~ <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Ford>

There is one other problem I can think of. Sometimes the customer is not in the position to know what is possible. So it's up to the developer(s) to build something not specified directly by customers. Zenter is an example. In a talk with Crosby & Walker ([http://www.grid7.com/podpress_trac/feed/178/0/vCast070807_Ze...](http://www.grid7.com/podpress_trac/feed/178/0/vCast070807_Zenter.mp3) Podcast #24 - Founders of Zenter, 46Mb ) it becomes apparent that in developing Zenter it was not merely just a copy of MS Powerpoint. It required knowledge of what existing users require. Then extend it to the Web. Exploiting the Webs unique properties.

The gap of knowing what customers need (upfront or close to upfront) and taking a guess where users need now and in the future is what makes startups "late binding" in needs requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know of any examples of successful startups who didn't have at least one hacker founder, though I hope that changes in the near future.

Neither my partner nor I are programmers--we're both researchers/designers (certainly not managers!). We're both willing to bootstrap an initial prototype--and maybe even up through the first phase. We'd like to take on a tech lead partner, though still wouldn't expect him to do all of the programming--would want someone to contribute financially and serve as a Tech Lead.

If there's anything I've learned in all my startup research, it's that if people tell you something can't be done, it probably can.

As far as VCs finding other programmers to do your project: VC's are in the investment business, they aren't entrepreneurs themselves. Otherwise, they'd just be taking all the ideas and implementing them themselves: why share ownership with anyone when you can pay programmers to build it for you?

Ultimately, I realize that I did not answer your question, but I say go for it. What have you got to lose?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with everyone who've said that at least one founder needs to be a programmer/developer.

The initial technical assessment on the feasibility of an idea or feature is within the domain of a programmer/developer, but I think it would require a non-developer to help do the cost/benefit trade-off. The reason for this is I've worked with so many developers who are excited by a technical solution, when the cost of it is prohibitive. It may have been the "best" solution, but it would have been very costly.

I intend to submit my startup idea as part of the YC winter funding event, even though I do not have a developer on-board yet. It's been hard finding a developer who is able to take the plunge and sacrifice the security of a cubicle farm. I have advisors/friends who are developers, but they don't want to take the risk, despite agreeing with the idea.

Thank you to everyone who have shared their thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would say no because the founders would be managers who would have to direct things. The programmers they hire probably will not be 100% behind the project.

Non-programmer founders for a software startup can be seen as middlemen. Why should VCs pay a middleman when they can find any old programmer themselves to implement the idea?

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, but I think you can curve the difficulty level a bit if a non-hacker founder will devote some of his time to learn how to hack himself. Then he can have the choice of choosing the technologies he wants for his startup.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if all founders must be hackers, I've knew a few hackers with a lot of experience in programing but with no idea of web design. I really think Usability and Design matters. Also a startup needs to be changing fast in code and design, so maybe you need both of them.

<comment><USER5> I guess so, what I really want to say is that at least the founder in question should at least give some effort to try to understand what we the hackers know so that they can have some sort of common point to agree || disagree on. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Constant Contact and Intuit are examples that come to mind. Intuit is debatable since the programmer was the first hire and was working partly for equity. For both companies, the founder came out of Bain Consulting. MySpace might be another example - I don't think their founders were really technical.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure what you mean by a software business, but I am not a programmer and I'm starting an Internet company. We are definitely software based and web 2.0.

There is no way that I could start this business without a programmer on board, but if this company was started solely by hackers it would not be nearly as good.

<comment><USER9> "but if this company was started solely by hackers it would not be nearly as good"

Interesting bit of prejudice here. What makes a hacker less capable of doing whatever it is that non-hackers do? Is it the thick held-together-with-tape glasses? Maybe the caffeine addiction addled brain?

The neat thing about an all-hacker startup is that hackers can choose NOT to hack part or all of their time when the job calls for it. A non-hacker doesn't have the ability to shift gears during the early days of the product to just work on shipping the damned thing.

I'm a hacker, and have code running on millions of machines world-wide in numerous Open Source projects, but in our startup today, I predominantly do not hack. I still spend about 25% of my time hacking, but it's becoming less every month, as other aspects of the company become more pressing (marketing/evangelism, money management, support, hiring contractors, design, etc.). I happen to have a lot of business experience, as well, and I don't think that J Random Hacker would step right into this kind of position without some study and work, but to imagine that being an all-hacker company would lead to it being "not nearly as good" is funny. Hackers are people, generally smarter than average. Many happen to have other skills and experience outside of hacking.

I'm just picking on you, of course. I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that there are magical skills that disappear when one becomes a hacker, or that the hacker mentality is a form of retardation that dramatically negatively impacts other skills.

<comment><USER10> SwellJoe - To give the argument a different twist, it's hard for most people to hold different perspectives beyond their best core ability. For many hackers, they're so engrossed in it, and for good reason. As you say, they are smarter than average, and programming affords them the opportunity to execute their ideas easily. Once you get so good at anything, including hacking or, more specifically, software development, it becomes hard to think about usability, design, business development, etc. Then, there arises a need for systems thinking or other thinkers with different areas of expertise. Would you agree?

<comment><USER11> <Once you get so good at anything, including hacking or, more specifically, software development, it becomes hard to think about usability, design, business development, etc.>

Wow, I really disagree. While some programmers aren't especially good at those things, I don't think that there's any reason a top hacker couldn't be good at them. Actually, a good hackers have such a drive to create that they are forced to deal wth design and usability. They may not like business development, but if the drive is there, they'll do it.

I will admit to having poor aesthetic ability, though. I do need a designer to make my interfaces look good. But that's quite different from fundamental issues in usability and design.

<comment><USER10> Don't take it just in the context of a hacker/programmer. Think about all those other professions/occupations/specializations. We tend to zoom in one specific aspect of accomplishing something. I'm simply hypothesizing that comes at the expense of seeing the big picture. The best of us are those that see it from multiple angles and gain multiple specializations. Then again, they become "jack of all trades, master of none". That's another discussion. Is that useful?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


San Francisco, now with more dystopia - <AUTHOR> https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-with-more-dystopia <comment><USER2> The root of the US problem: it's turning into a poor country because the vast majority of the greedy rich people hoarding trillions, that used to go to middle class as wages and to general government funds, and their corrupt politicians enabling this vicious cycle.

Social welfare and mental healthcare exist so people aren't crawling on the street. Every living person needs a basic level of respect, care and dignity... if the can't provide for themselves, falling through the cracks is not a solution but a source of many more, more expensive and worse, problems. So socialism for the rich and nothing for the poor isn't sustainable and people will eventually go "French Revolution." A stable democratic country has to balance competing tyrannies: rich vs. middle vs. poor, country vs. city and community vs. individual.

<comment><USER3> > Every living person needs a basic level of respect, care and dignity...

Can you substantiate this claim?

<comment><USER4> Sure[0].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights)

<comment><USER5> As one SF writer once said. It's easy to claim Right to Individual bathroom if there is one or more bathroom per person. Problem is what happens where these twenty or more person per bathroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Concluding paragraph:

 _" San Francisco is in the future. San Francisco's future isn't pretty. It's cold, hard, technological. It's fueled by both extreme poverty and extreme wealth. By technology and heroin. It is the future of dystopian novels. It is the future of Gibson and Philip K. Dick. It is the future of Blade Runner. Someone needs to take hold of the dystopia dial and turn it back down. Quickly. Before it becomes too late."_

<comment><USER7> I saw _Blade Runner_ (1982) in the theatre this last weekend. First time I've watched it in probably a decade. It's still an absolutely mesmerizing film, but I couldn't help but think of San Francisco and Los Angeles while watching. The fact that it's always raining in what's supposed to be Los Angeles in 2019 foretells environmental disaster that seems not far off. The abject and gross poverty reminded me of the tent villages in SF. It's a timeline I have little faith we'll jump out of.

<comment><USER2> Life isn't a movie: there are no mandatory self-fulfilling prophecies and learned helplessness is optional. Also, you can break by the bystander effect by actually doing something. Most people just pretend homeless people don't exist, don't deserve to be treated like people and shouldn't be helped. Be different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> San Francisco has become polarizing over the past decade(+,) though SOMA used to be pretty much a shanty town in the 80s: [http://ww2.hdnux.com/photos/42/55/37/9099221/3/rawImage.jpg](http://ww2.hdnux.com/photos/42/55/37/9099221/3/rawImage.jpg)

"Mayor Dianne Feinstein leads a group on a tour of Shantytown at Seventh and Berry streets in 1986. The group includes her press secretary Tom Eastham (left), Public Health Director David Werdegar and Thomas Dalton, "mayor of Shantytown."

One more: [https://www.wired.com/2015/01/janet-delaney-south-of- market/](https://www.wired.com/2015/01/janet-delaney-south-of-market/)

<comment><USER9> For reference, 7th and Berry is exactly 4 blocks from where AT&T Park is now. Berry dead-ends at 3rd right smack into the Giants Dugout store.

<comment><USER10> Not really "four blocks" by the way that most people would measure blocks. Berry Street stops at 6th Street and restarts on the other side of the Caltrain tracks at 7th. On top of that, the blocks in that part of the city are quite huge, probably 3 to 4 Manhattan street blocks.

There is still a shantytown that gets built up on 7th street every so often and is torn down once it gets big enough. I saw a well-constructed hut there that had a fire extinguisher mounted to the outside, with a building-code sign saying "Fire Extinguisher" pointing to it.

<comment><USER9> Was it the same back then? It looks like a body of water to the right, and there is no water between modern 7th & Berry and the train tracks.

<comment><USER11> Mission Bay ends at Berry Street:

[https://goo.gl/maps/jkCgyCZVw4C2](https://goo.gl/maps/jkCgyCZVw4C2)

It looks like this photograph was probably taken on Berry street on the other side of the Caltrain tracks, near the Embarcadero Freeway, and "7th and Berry" is only an approximate location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mike just removed the price he paid for the wine (25$) and for the meal (250$ per person). Makes me hope that he realised how hypocritic it is to accept to pay that amount of money and complain that 'someone' needs to do something about the situation.

Everyone is in power to change their own behaviour and inspire others to do the same. That's the easiest way to change 'the system'. Refuse to accept and inspire others.

</comment><comment><USER13> So what is it there to save USA from dystopian future ? Is it social democracy a la western europe. I kinda doubt that. I do not think that is sustainable either. For it to work you need rich consumers (usa, china ) and extraction of wealth from the weaker beasts in the forest ( eastern europe, africa , asia ). What could we do to have a fairer system for everyone ?

<comment><USER14> Appoint leaders that have a strong sense of empathy and a great moral compass.

Educate the youth on the benefits of sharing and caring.

Use the tax system to redistribute wealth.

Use the defense budget for diplomacy and education.

Make a real effort to help grow the economy in third world countries.

<comment><USER15> You've summarized the political views of the majority of people in San Francisco.

<comment><USER14> ...and The Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and many more.

<comment><USER16> I'm not aware of Swiss people being fond of money redistribution through taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think an unintended takeaway here is that Deliveroo is likely to be looking for office space either in the city or the South Bay.

</comment><comment><USER18> > San Francisco is in the future. San Francisco's future isn't pretty. It's > cold, hard, technological. It's fueled by both extreme poverty and extreme > wealth.

I don't think extreme wealth would agree that extreme poverty is "fueling" wealth's future. At best, wealth might describe it as holding back the future, or at least the view.

I think equilibrium will be reached when basic services are automated, the poor have died, left or been pushed out, and $250 meals will be served by human waiters shuttled in to the city that they can't afford to live in.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like San Francisco is exactly on pace, then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> as someone that does not live in SF, it is mind boggling that a city with such a high concentration of wealth, talent (both technical and non-technical) and visionaries supposedly (not trying to be trite) trying to make the world a better place have arguably failed miserably to make their own city a better place... Silicon Valley's PeaceFair parody seems to ring true here

</comment><comment><USER21> In 2013, SF had[1] 7350 homeless population. In 2017, that number is 7499. So in spite of spending $240M/yr on homelessness, the number just keeps on increasing?

I would love to see detailed stats about: churn in homeless population (how many left the streets, how many joined), where exactly do we spend our tax dollars.

And then you see infuriating headlines like this[2] and wonder if "lack of money" is even a problem or is it just entrenched interests on all sides which won't let anything happen.

[1] [http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/San- Francisc...](http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/San-Francisco- PIT-Executive-Summary-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf)

[2] [http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends- record...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends- record-241-million-on-homeless-6808319.php)

<comment><USER22> $32k per homeless person a year?

If they relocated them somewhere with a low cost of living, and just paid this money to each of them, all these people could just have a reasonably decent life, even without working.

This is, of course, just a thought experiment; it is impossible for a number of reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The world OP describes SF as becoming is that of Atlas Shrugged where failure is never misfortune but a personal failing with the poor reaping their just desserts.

Ayn Rand is quite popular with the Silicon Valley technorati: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/10/silicon-valley- ayn-r...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/10/silicon-valley-ayn-rand- obsession)

</comment><comment><USER24> To be fair, most of San Francisco is not like this.

<comment><USER25> That only makes the dynamic even more exaggerated when you travel from a reasonably clean, streetcar-suburb neighborhood like West Portal or the Outer Richmond to the city core and are abruptly surrounded by a mass of bodies failed by society.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that same for every city? Even London has its Peckham (well not anymore it's been gentrified).

<comment><USER26> No other city has such a stark contrast between the areas. In London, the poorest neighborhood is Canning Town, and even in its grimiest pockets, immediately south of Newham Way, it's not as bad as parts of Tenderloin.

<comment><USER21> > No other city...

I would urge you to travel to Asia if you think so. Mumbai would be a fine place to start.

SF is not "racing ahead" to a dystopian future; its merely becoming a regular city where very rich and very poor cohabit. This egalitarianism is merely a passing phenomenon, which lasted for ~50 years, and is now shrunk to Western/Northern Europe and a few other small countries.

<comment><USER26> I, of course, should've said "no other city in a first-world country", but if you think that Mumbai is a fine goal for Californians to aspire to, so be it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> They're not poor _while_ you're rich, they're poor _because_ you're rich, in some manner of speaking. "Somebody" turn that dystopia dial down.

<comment><USER16> That's not true. Wealthy people often do a lot of nice things for the homeless, and most of wealthy people didn't get rich taking money from the extremely poor.

<comment><USER28> Well thanks, i guess we'll have to trust you on this one? Are you suggesting that money was taken from the "moderately" poor?

<comment><USER16> Usually middle class people are the largest buyers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Big rewrite: C++ to django - <AUTHOR> http://blog.awarelabs.com/?p=67

<comment><USER2> That's 500 lines of code per hour. 8 per minute. 10 seconds per line.

I'm not sure what to think of it. Can someone really be that productive in producing (mostly) debugged quality code? Or maybe he did a mostly literal translation so that the logic wasn't refactored much.

edit: yeah, he cut-and-pasted, that's what I was hinting at when I said "quality code". He could have taken two days to do it instead and properly abstract out the relevant parts. Otherwise, it's not a rewrite, it's just a translation from one language to another.

<comment><USER3> If it's very cut & paste code, then large amounts of code can be rewritten with appropriate tools. The Rewrite Tool from the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser can be used this way. I once rewrote 2500 "Database Transformers" for a single "change request" this way in just a few days. Each one of those took up 2/3rds of a page printed out. I decided to do this, because these "transformers" were defined with code blocks, and clueless programmers were shoving business logic into them. I discovered that about half of the blocks fit about a dozen repeated patterns. The Rewrite Tool lets you do syntax directed translations with wildcards that can be used in the generated code. I wrote a small hierarchy of Database Relation objects that also understood what to do with simple attribute values, and created syntax directed rewrites.

We put the thing into production next release. Something crashed every client on the production floor -- we discovered that clueless programmers had put a fix to the business logic (1) into the guts of the "Database Transformer" framework. We moved that code over, and after that everything just worked!

(1) - On top of that, this case wasn't covered in the tests! I was glad to have left that shop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why did this have to be done in twelve hours?

<comment><USER5> Those Django kidnapping gangs are upping their ransoms these days what with inflation and so forth.</comment></comment>


Why Do We Still Care About the Dow? (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/02/07/146546183/why-do-we-still-care-about-the-dow

<comment><USER2> > It would be extremely convenient if there were still one number or index we > could check to make sense of our economy, especially during times of chaos.

The per-capita debt would be a good start.

Funny to see Apple named as Microsofts successor. I think they're roughly equal in terms of 'launch date', of course the context is successor in the Dow but if you just put the most successful companies in the index (which they do...) then that already causes it to lose a lot of its meaning because any structural 'bad news' will get filtered out.

The idea is to provide a sliding window over history to capture trends, such as to embody the trend of moving away from the Desktop to mobile devices (Microsoft -> Apple) but that's a very imperfect science because a lot of that trend will never materialize simply because a whole pile of stuff (creation, mostly) does not happen on mobile devices but on good old desktops.

Mobile devices tend to be _much_ better at consumption than creation (which is entirely consistent with the trends in computing as a whole).

<comment><USER3> > Mobile devices tend to be much better at consumption than creation

Except when it comes to shooting videos.

<comment><USER2> That's more of a case of 'convergence' (handycam + phone + still picture camera) than one of transition, but yes, mobile devices have traditionally been much better at creating video and pictorial content because they can move to the scene rather than to have the scene move to them, but this has been true since the 'camera obscura' (literally: dark room) has gone out of fashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think anyone who knows a bit about finance focuses on the Dow.

However, since the news always reports it first, everyone takes note of it. Since everyone takes note of it, the news reports it first... and so on, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER5> I care aboutthem all and read it like the matrix. Tools like Mometic.com and stock-touch give me a much more visual read if you can handle the thought required. Otherwise just stare at a line chart!!!

</comment><comment><USER6> The story missed the original purpose of the Dow with was a leading economic indicator... watch prices of the industrial giants to see broader market moves ahead of the market, at least optimistically. Not a terribly bad idea although info theory kicked in and once everyone knew and applied the theory the price results got baked into the cake of the prices themselves so it was no longer a money maker. That and changing the company mix from industrials to "big whos who mix of services and energy companies" pretty much eliminates the "industrial" part from the dow jones industrial average which makes it a useless leading indicator.

Another anecdote is in the 20s and 80s there was a lot of grown in mutual funds or I think the 20's term was stock cooperatives or whatever, the point is its "semi-unusual" for most equities to be owned by the equivalent of internet link aggregators, so other than index fund owners the dow doesn't really mean anything. My grandfather owned railroad stock, real railroad stock. Not a fund that owned a fund that owned 50 railroad stocks. You don't see that so much anymore. Diversification is good other than the immense parasitic load, which worsens at low return rates obviously... anyway investment has been abstracted away from the public, both by mutualization as per above and obviously by the destruction of the middle class (a stereotypical factory worker in 1970 probably owned some stock, at least in a retirement fund, but a stereotypical American of 2015 only gets minimum wage McJob or Walmart worker no benes no retirement savings at all therefore has little/no skin in the game anymore and no reason to care). So the public literally has no reason to care. Its not like they're going to startup and IPO and neither is their megacorp employer anytime soon. Equity markets are broken, don't matter much anymore. And with SOX compliance they suck for fund raising. We have a lot of capital sloshing around blowing bubbles and no legal way to apply it anymore.

Finally it was invented pre-central bank, and our equity prices now mostly represent central bank interest rates. Lower rates mean you get a lower return from riskless .gov bonds means equities need to return less, means in a constant dividend world, the price will explode once return rates around zero beat sticking the money in a mattress or .gov bonds. The PE ratio of our stock equities are controlled by the .gov centrally controlled interest rate, more or less, at least on a very long term. So obviously a multi-generational low in interest rates results in a multi-generational high in equity prices. How could it be otherwise? The market isn't going to tolerate a P/E ratio of "4" when the fed is only paying 0.25%, capital is going to flood into equities until you get a P/E ratio "similar" like maybe 100 or so.

<comment><USER7> "Our equity prices now mostly represent central bank interest rates."

What are you talking about?. I fear you may be confusing the Fixed Income market with the Equity market.

Equities (in general, as a class), are negatively correlated with interest rates. Specific sectors though (e.g. Banks) may be more positively correlated to interest rates - but overall, the link is tenuous, at best.

<comment><USER6> "Equities (in general, as a class), are negatively correlated with interest rates."

We're not disagreeing, although I was less clear than your line above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "None of these criticisms will come as news to finance professionals, most of whom use far more precise measures — like the S&P 500 or the Wilshire 5,000, which cover more companies more precisely — when making investing decisions."

Never understood the Dow. Never understood the importance of a healthy 3-5 percent interest rate until now. I used to make $500/yr. on my cd. I now make $9/year on a .1 percent rate. Have always been too scared to invest in the stock market. There's a small part of me thinking about putting my meager savings on Microsoft--and letting it spin? I've been able to call the huge downturns in the market, but always lost on predicting stock upturns. I feel a downturn now. I am always contrairianly wrong on stock picks--so much so, I think it might be a good strategy?

I don't see too many people talking about the money lost by the poor and middle class who rely on cd's? One other thing I noticed is the Indexes seems to go up on Mondays and down on Fridays? (I think the big boys take their risk out for the weekend and put it back on Monday?). I wonder if HF trading will mask the next downturn?

In college, I had a finance instructor let slip out something interesting. "Ah --in the end you would be surprised about just how much Insider trading plays a part." Students, "What?" Teacher, "Um--Um--the SEC regulates that! lets move on." And then there's that quote in that movie about the psychopath, in the 80's, who pushed penny stocks played by McCanawho, 'Noboby knows when the stock will go up, or down.'

(sorry about the ramble)

<comment><USER9> Putting all of your money in CD's is like overpaying for insurance. Index funds are your friend as you get the market portfolio (important for risk minimization) with minimized costs.

WRT "market timing," the lay investor wins by NOT relying on market timing. Even if you think the market will move in a direction, it's impossibly hard to guess when. Don't believe me? Check out this study which shows that missing single days can adversely impact a 20-year holding.[1] In this study, researchers looked at 20 years worth ('95-'14) of daily returns and asked what'd happen if you missed the best days and/or ate worst days. Missing the top 10 days of gains -- out of 5,036 trading days -- cuts your portfolio value in half. Miss 20 days? Your portfolio doesn't move.

[1][https://www.ifa.com/12steps/step4/missing_the_best_and_worst...](https://www.ifa.com/12steps/step4/missing_the_best_and_worst_days/#ChartFlashID323)</comment></comment>


Worlds lartgest integer - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/number/index.html

<comment><USER2> I'll go for BB(99) where BB is the Busy Beaver function.

You are outnumbered.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver></comment>