Ask HN: Tell me your biggest pain and I will try to solve it - <AUTHOR> I would love to run this experiment. Tell me what your biggest pain is and if I can I will try to solve it (e.g. through software, etc.). If I can't, probably someone else on here would love to help you.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> I don't expect you to solve it, but since you're looking for problems... I'm kind of a perfectionist (not in a good way) and whenever I want to learn something new, I spend days and days beforehand just searching for the _p.e.r.f.e.c.t._ books, video lectures and what not. For example, I'd like to get back into physics, especially quantum mechanics. A website that, given any scientific field, gives me a list of the most important books and papers per difficulty level would save me a lot of time. However, this service should only list the _best of the best_. I don't know if this is a common problem or how you could monetize such service...

<comment><USER3> Open source courses would be cool. Not open source like mit's ocw or coursera, but a platform where everyone collectively decides on the material. So, for an algorithms course, maybe MIT's hashing lectures are second to none, but some guy on YouTube has better explanations for divide and conquer algorithms. The idea would be to find the best material for each lecture and compile it into a class

<comment><USER4> How it can be resolved if there is a conflict? Like, for hashing, some are suggesting for Video A and some for Video B. So you ask them to vote? And then who is eligible to vote?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a cycle of habits that revolves around reading the internet. It goes like this:

Have an idea -> google for its existence

If idea is novel -> Google to answer questions about implementation; Else -> come up with new spin on idea or stop

Confirm findings or test idea -> have a new idea or new questions

I also have ADHD & can sometimes (ok...often) hyperfocus when I catch this cycle. I can lose hours upon hours in it. But that's not the main problem...

There are numerous ways to enter this cycle (ie. Triggers for any of the habits) & they occur so frequently that they disrupt the development of new habits. The standard triggers are having/encountering a new idea, a question without an answer, or an answer that needs confirming. I can also jump into it accidentally through procrastination means (eg. reading HN) or just as a result of everyday work (eg. searching for something on stack overflow).

I'm a programmer without a support system to enable me to disrupt these habits without unplugging for months, which I can't afford to do.

<comment><USER6> I've experienced that same thing (who on HN hasn't? ;). Tips and tricks to cut down on info-addiction can help a bit.

But the only thing that really works for me is when I focus on a positive goal I want to achieve, _instead of spending energy on avoiding the bad habits_.

Now, I'm focused on building my business. It doesn't mean I have stopped getting lots of shiny new ideas. But now I don't have to fight with myself. I just don't have the time or energy for these new ideas. Too focused on the current idea.

<comment><USER5> Were that all it takes for me, I wouldn't be posting here.

<comment><USER6> Sorry I think I misunderstood you. If you have a medical condition, then ignore whatever I said.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if the issue is that when some people refer to their "info addiction," it actually isn't an addiction (eg. "OMG! I am SOOO ADD sometimes!" says some person without ADD who needs a loving dose of perspective or strangulation) or if there are other things specific to me that mix with the info addiction such that having a positive goal I'm focusing on isn't enough.

Sorry for the previous curt response. This is essentially the only thing I'm trying to deal with right now because it leads to failure in all the things. And progress is slow because getting people to invest time in someone who has no money is seemingly impossible.

<comment><USER6> I did read your "I have ADHD" in the casual way that most people say it. I certainly don't have ADHD (not that I'm aware of, anyway). The only thing I can think to suggest is to seek professional help, if you haven't already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a business problem. My business sells B2B software. We can use Google Analytics, etc to see how people get to our site and whether they download the free trial (desktop/server software).

When it comes time to purchase, every once in a while the same person that downloaded comes to our online purchase page and we're able to attribute the sale back to the channel/ad/blog it came from.

Most of the time though, someone else (the boss, a purchasing person, etc) on a different PC comes to our online order page and pays. From Analytics point of view they came from nowhere. Or worse, they fax/email a purchase order.

I would love a way to accurately track the source of our sales without introducing painful process (requiring some sort of download ID for example) to the purchase process.

<comment><USER6> The simplest solution is to require your customers to register before downloading a free trial. I can't think of a good reason why you can't do this for B2B software.

And if you're worried about conversion rates dropping, I have seen many companies report that their switch from "no signup required" to "signup required" resulted in _no difference_ in conversions. It's certainly worth a test.

<comment><USER7> We do request they signup. But we allow the download without it. I'd guess 60% give us an email address. Mapping the purchase to the email domain shouldn't be too hard. Then we need to track the email signup to the original source (doable in Google Analytics???)

<comment><USER6> Don't request, require it. Ask for name, email, business name, phone number (optional).

Less fun than a clever analytics hack but it will work. Try it for a week or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cannot measure my tinnitus. Some nights it gets sensibly louder, yet I have no clues on how to "calculate" its loudness since the ringing I hear doesn't actually exist.

<comment><USER9> Not sure if your problem is your tinnitus or your inability to calculate it's loudness. If it's the former invest in a fan and leave it on near you when you go to sleep.

<comment><USER8> Ah, good point. I would not have the problem of inability to calculate tinnitus' loudness if I had no tinnitus in the first place, but let's say that now -- after ~3 years since its appearance -- I resigned to idea of suffering from tinnitus, so it's some how not a problem anymore, I now don't even need a fan or any other noise source to fall asleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Trying to have some minimal version of a normal life after struggling to function and stick around for 2 out of 3 decades.

A software-defined time machine would probably be helpful :) But really, software to spot patterns and correlations I wouldn't otherwise notice (based on life "microevents" of all kinds, food intake, feelings, interactions with others, environment factors...) would probably help a lot, literally life changing perhaps. A good AI to talk to as though it were just a close friend would make a perfect user interface for such a thing.

Domain specific AI to talk to would help on its own though, long term isolation itself is quite damaging.

</comment><comment><USER11> My wifi is ridiculously annoying - I live in an apartment block where there are literally 30 other wifi routers interfering with my own router. I pay through the nose for superfast broadband but it's completely redundant!

<comment><USER12> I've had this problem before. Try changing the "channel" for your wifi signal. You can do this via the admin interface for your router. If that doesn't help, the cause might be EM interference from other electronic devices physically near the router. Try moving other electronics (power supplies, cable modem, etc.) away from the router (at least 1 or 2 feet distance should do it).

Hope that helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm never satisfied with my multi computer setup / multi screen setup, i always ending with not knowing which one to use for what, or if i even need more than one, also i can never find that perfect keyboard...

<comment><USER14> BTC 6100, 6200, 6300

[http://www.btc.com.tw/english/2-7-25keyboard.htm](http://www.btc.com.tw/english/2-7-25keyboard.htm)

<comment><USER13> looks nice, but forgot to mention i'm a mac user and have a KBC Poker II with Cherry MX blues, do you have any mechanical equivalent ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Our impact on the environment continue to escalate - we can't agree on policies for avoiding it and we might not invent our way through the problem fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER16> The economic system as it now stands makes it impossible for me to sustain my life through work that is meaningful and helpful to others.

<comment><USER6> That sounds like a tough situation. I believe there is plenty of meaningful work out there. So I'm curious to know what your profession is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> An Electrum Doge wallet that actually works (ie has been adapted to AuxPOW) and has servers working to enable it.

There was one a few months ago but it has since been abandoned [http://electrum-doge.com/](http://electrum-doge.com/), yet there is still large demand for it. One exists for bitcoin that is working though.

It's fast on startup, non-Java and a headers-only wallet with a deterministic backup (1-time phrase based.) I read that the Core wallet might get a deterministic backup in the future.

Such a wallet would be great for newbies. ED also has plugin potential unlike the core wallet.

If you get it going, you could charge for its usage (eg a fee to connect with the servers,) and it may become popular on mobile devices if you could do a version for it (ie small footprint.) You could also do versions for other coins.

Full blockchain wallets are gradually becoming cumbersome as the blockchain size grows (that might be the true pain point.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Having my and my family's rent, food and health insurance paid for without having to hire myself out for it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have no income. I don't want much income, or rather I don't want much income in the long-term, just enough to pay the mortgage off and then I won't feel so completely stressed. I could take a low-key job or work on my own projects full-time (music, writing, and acting, and software lol), or ideally, open a martial arts school.

That's my biggest pain point, that I have to work to pay the mortgage instead of pursuing my passions and living my life. I'm lucky, my mortgage should be paid off by the time I'm around 35, but I don't want to lose the next ten years to working...I've already been working for ten years, I want the next ten years to be a combination of passion, hard-work, and chasing MY dreams.

</comment><comment><USER20> I know HTML/(S)CSS like the back of my hand. I know enough JS for most use cases and I'm starting to explore React and other frameworks to expand my knowledge. In the backend side of things I can code in PHP without any problem and I have hacked a bit in Ruby and Python, currently trying to expand what I know in Ruby in my free time.

The local market sucks so I'm unable to escape from my agency job. I feel trapped making disposable marketing websites that will disappear in a month or two. I have applied to remote jobs but most don't want someone that is not from the US.

I have no idea what to do. I feel like my current job is killing my drive for web development even though I love it.

Sorry for venting here.

<comment><USER6> With your skills, you should be able to get well-paying remote work. But you have to get out of this mindset of being stuck in your local market.

 _I have applied to remote jobs but most don 't want someone that is not from the US._

That must be the case if you only apply to remote jobs at companies based in the US. Apply for jobs outside the US.

Make a good professional profile online.

Post your profile and apply for jobs on the monthly hiring threads on HN - [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wrote a list of startup/project ideas here a few days ago, some of which were inspired by personal pains: [http://syskall.com/crazy-and-not-so-crazy- startup-ideas-2015...](http://syskall.com/crazy-and-not-so-crazy-startup- ideas-2015-edition/) (too big to paste here unfortunately)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not really biggest pain, but I would appreciate your help on this. I am learning Swift and iOS Dev. What kind of apps I should have in my portfolio, so that I can apply for jobs? I have built basic to-do apps etc. and I am not getting any new ideas which I can implement. Either I find them too easy or too complicated for me.

</comment><comment><USER22> My biggest pain is not solvable through software? It is my back that hurts badly...

<comment><USER23> There could be more than one reason for your back pain. First try to understand what causes your problem for example: do you have all day sitting in desk job, do you lift weight frequently, your sleeping position etc.,

I had this issue couple of months back; i had severe pain which shoots down till my toes from hip. I knew it has something do to with the Nerve. I visited an Ortho and took an MRI and we found out I had a Slip Disc problem. (FYI..I am in a software job and I sit all day, also due to my height and my incorrect seating posture this problem developed). While my doctor suggested an Operation, I was shitty scared and was researching in internet about the problem. One of my friend suggested an alternative treatment "YOGA". I thought why not give it a try, I found an institute where they specialize in treating body pain through yoga, I had to stay there for couple of weeks and do the routine. At the end of the second week, I wasn't feeling any better, but the people in the institute asked me to keep faith and asked me continue the exercise.

I continued for a month and suddenly like a magic my pain got disappeared and never had again till today. So, the point is try to find out what is causing you pain and try to do some research and find the best physio or exercise. Happy to help you, if you need more information about my problem and how I got rid of it. All the best!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I need a CTO willing to work for equity that can help me finish my Django/Python application so I can bring it to market.

It's presold to 129 customers as a subscription before it's even done.

<comment><USER6> Too many people looking for a CTO. If you have that many customers, you should be able to hire a contractor.

<comment><USER24> Capital compensation for the product won't flow through the doors until we launch. We had a CTO start the product but he had to move into an advisory position due to health concerns.

Hiring an outside firm would also put the knowledge of the platform and the product into their hands. It'll make it more difficult for us to iterate and grow beyond just the MVP concept into a full business. That's why we want an equity partner. Someone who believes in the product and wants to see it grow with the rest of the team.

<comment><USER6> If your customers won't pre-pay, then I'm not sure you can count them as pre- sold. Do you have any sort of formal commitment?

If you're just assuming they won't pre-pay, then it might be a costly mistake. At least ask them - offer a discount or some sweet deal for taking a chance on you - at least a few of them might pay.

You're right that hiring a firm might get complicated, but hiring a solo developer could work.

Unless you are offering something other than equity - a chance to work with a team with a great track record, backing from investors, some unique ground- breaking technology - I'm not sure why anyone would want to work for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't know how to place an order for a user on Walmart.com, without ever visiting Walmart.com (i.e. programmatically as a third party).

Are there already services out there for this?

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm a junior/mid-level developer. I wanna know how will I know that I'm ready to be a contractor, also the dos/donts about being one.

<comment><USER27> Find your market. Suss out the places online and IRL where people with your skill set congregate, and where buyers for your skills are looking for talent. Start a portfolio web site right away, and optionally a blog. Put yourself on the market right now.

If you get a good offer (on-contract, upfront deposit) consider taking the plunge. Have 3-6 months of cash for a fallback - in case you fail and decide to re-enter the traditional job market. Or more likely, when you encounter an extended dry spell as you learn to build and maintain cash flow.

Prepare yourself mentally for a greater level of uncertainty. Your next paycheck is not guaranteed. Not only do you have to do the work to get a paycheck, you also have the additional work of _getting to_ the next paycheck: keeping a full pipeline of good-paying gigs. Always be marketing and selling yourself.

Not all customers/clients are created equally. Know what you're selling, set your price and stick to it. You're probably not in a position to work for equity. (Since most startups fail "working for equity" is the same as "working for free"). Be prepared to say "no". Be willing to gracefully exit a relationship with a troublesome client.

Stay away from odesk, elance, freelancer.com, etc. These are highly regulated, tightly controlled markets with enormous pressure to push timelines and costs down to the lowest common denominator. Unless you're in a country where bidding for $500 fixed price jobs and $20/hr contracts can make you a good living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Visualizing the relationships between my thoughts.

<comment><USER29> DMT or 5g Mushrooms

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Better golang package management.

<comment><USER31> Better erlang package management? (:

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How to find a marketing partner?

<comment><USER6> It depends on your specific marketing needs.

You should hang out on [https://growthhackers.com](https://growthhackers.com) and [http://inbound.org](http://inbound.org). Some of the best marketers hang out there. Even if you don't find a partner, you'll definitely learn some useful stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> No one in DC wants to hire a high school student as a summer programming intern.

</comment><comment><USER34> I can't fly unassisted

</comment><comment><USER35> I hate 0-day exploits while defending my IT infrastructure.

<comment><USER36> Are you actually targeted with undisclosed vulnerabilities, or are you just concerned about quickly patching your infrastructure after a vulnerability is disclosed? If it's the latter, I'd love to hear more about your pain points as it's an area in which I've been kicking around ideas for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Vladimir Putin

<comment> rational-future How come?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tinnitus

<comment><USER38> FYI: Some people find that magnesium helps with this. It may not resolve it, but it may make it more bearable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> the last time someone said this to me they offered me weed

</comment><comment><USER40> Porting to Python 3.</comment>


Is Stack Overflow allowing ads to use fingerprinting to track users? - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/332974/is-se-allowing-ads-to-use-fingerprinting-to-track-users <comment><USER2> Hey stack overflow if you are reading, I Just Dumped You! its not like i actually allow fingerprinting scripts, but the practice of attempting to take what is clearly being hidden from public use is an act of theft. there are a lot of sites that dont want scraping to occur regardless of reason, Noone should attempt to operate a website or server in a manner not welcome by the owner. and none should be prying into someones local data structures uninvited. Bye Bye SO !</comment>


Why do I not "talk myself out of" my bipolar moods? - <AUTHOR> http://www.passionatereason.com/2014/09/why-do-i-not-myself-out-of-my-bipolar.html

<comment><USER2> i think that rationality gets extolled, especially in the tech community, as the optimal way to live, but too often its confused with stoicism. although i have no evidence from cognitive science to affirm/deny her proposition that "feelings can be deeper than thought," it is true that people are disposed to moods on a sub-conscious level. although it is also true that we can consciously work to "change" our moods, to me this is too quickly dismissing their importance in the context of our experiences. yes, moods can set the stage for irrationally poor decisions, but my point is that they're important (not that they should govern our lives). by confronting and engaging with the emotional as well as the rational aspects of a situation, we come to a more complete understanding and can take more deliberate action.</comment>


An Interview with Leo Babauta on Writing and Publishing - <AUTHOR> http://wiredwritersguild.com/leo-babauta-on-writing-publishing-an-interview/

<comment><USER2> Leo nails what you need to do day in and day out to become successful in blogging: Publish today. Get it out there. Be authentic. Be extremely useful. Don't be spammy, don't have ads, don't have popups, don't push people to share or subscribe. Just put the reader's interest first, help him as much as humanly possible, be sincere about it.</comment>


Why Do Instagram Playgrounds Keep Calling Themselves Museums? - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/10/selfie-instagram-nyc-museum-ice-cream-immersive-experience/599875/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of this Vox video that talked about how "Instagram museums" are changing how traditional museums operate: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_r- dP22Ps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_r-dP22Ps)</comment>


NASA realizes SLS and Orion are too expensive, opens door to competitors - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/nasa-realizes-sls-and-orion-are-too-expensive-opens-door-to-competitors/ <comment><USER2> Ought to mention that Trump has, post-election, explicitly called for getting NASA out of the "logistics" business. Let's see if he can kill the Senate Launch System and move NASA from being so much of a public works program to doing what it's ostensibly supposed to do.</comment>


Learning "computer code" will be offered in French primary schools - <AUTHOR> http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2014/07/13/l-apprentissage-du-code-informatique-sera-propose-au-primaire-en-septembre_4456197_3224.html <comment><AUTHOR> Quick summary :

The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher.

For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology teachers.

Personal opinion :

While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and squeeze some extra hours ).

<comment><USER3> In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, yet the government want pupils to learn programming ? same old french bullshit.

Instead of letting schools adapt their teaching to local conditions and parameters , someone in an office in Paris is deciding for everybody.

That's at the heart of France problems. When the french government starts trusting its citizens things will change.Today there is too much power in a few hands and a total distrust of institutions.

<comment><USER4> I fail to see how the French kids' ability to write would be hurt by their being introduced to programming. Maybe you think the solution to their not being able to write is to sacrifice all other subjects to focus on writing. Though I doubt the writing is that bad, if it's the case I'd probably axe history before programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a kid in France (in the late eighties, quite young, but I can't remember when precisely), I had some "programming classes", using Logo on Thomson computers - [http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html](http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/9723/thomson.html)

Basically, all primary schools had some of them in a special room, and kids would get to do stuff on them, by pairs of 2 or 3 - part of the time was guided interaction, then you would "experiment" which what you'd learnt this day.

I can't say how effective it was, because it was not really integrated with the rest of the curriculum (government program gone wild!) but the interesting thing was that it allowed experimenting.

Before that, I read computer journals, wrote programs on paper, and "ran" them in my head. There I had a machine to do that and could spot differences between my intent and the action - ie where there were differences in the interpretation, ie BUGS!!!

What I remember most fondly about Logo, is how it allowed recursion and the very visual nature (lines, color, circles...). The programs were simple but allowed us kids to play with the concept of recursion.

</comment><comment><USER6> It should be noted that France had a nice, Papert-style "programming" curriculum centered on Logo in the eighties. Specific computers (hey, it's France) were developed, such as the Thomson TO7.

And then... Nothing.

<comment><USER7> You forgot OCaml, our national pride ! Our CS researcher have a large expertise in proofs and static analysis with Coq, Coccinelle and the like.

<comment><USER3> yep, and TurboPascal and Delphi ,then I moved abroad to study and I didnt even know C ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I learned basic electric circuitry in primary school in basically the same context (extra-curricular activity the hour after regular classes end, once a week) and it was great.

We learned how to solder stuff on circuit boards (yes, soldering irons, yes some kids burned themselves, big whoop), how to use glue guns (again, I burned myself a bit, nothing serious) to put components together when assembling basic machines.

Can you even imagine the kind of amazing physical computing kids could be doing with Arduino and Raspberry Pi these days. HTML & CSS seem like a no brainer. I learned those in a "Technology" (in regular class hours) during my last year of middle school (again, in Paris).

If it weren't for a sympathetic instructor who told us to do make a website using FrontPage on anything we were passionate about (RTS for me at the time) I'm not sure I'd be a web developer today. I think these kinds of a programs are a great first steps to get kids excited about the web and/or basic languages before middle school and high school classes (in our out of class schedule) provide more thorough or complex introductions to programming proper.

</comment><comment><USER9> Finland will[1] something similar. Programming will be taught from the first grade upwards, but the few first grades will use teaching methods like Computer Science Unplugged[2].

1\. [http://koodi2016.fi/](http://koodi2016.fi/) 2\. [http://csunplugged.org/](http://csunplugged.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> They're teaching my daughter python here in the UK at age 10.

I got taught BASIC (BBC BASIC) and some ARM assembler [1] in 1992 at school in maths.

[1] ARM assembler because our maths teacher was moonlighting selling RISCOS software and was quite helpful.

</comment><comment><USER11> As of September, programming is a mandatory part of the curriculum in UK schools.

<comment><USER12> I did not know that. Go UK :)

After a little digging here is an outline of the curriculum.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national- curricul...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum- in-england-computing-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england- computing-programmes-of-study)

<comment><USER13> Here's a better guide that teachers will be using to guide student learning.

[http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/origina...](http://community.computingatschool.org.uk/files/2466/original.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> According to other sources, it seems like what will be taught is HTML: [http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du- langage-h...](http://www.bafweb.com/2014/07/13/lapprentissage-du-langage-html- propose-en-primaire-des-la-rentree/)

The posted article also points out that the classes will be "périscolaire", i.e. outside of regular class hours. This means that the teachers who teach those courses will have to stay late. Only the super-committed teachers will volunteer to do that - and it's not a given that there will be such a teacher in every school. And even when there is, remember that the French school day typically finishes at 4.30p. The teacher will have to attempt teaching a group of exhausted pre-teens who just want to go home.

Additionally, again as mentioned in the article, almost a third of schools (16 000 out of 54 000) in France don't have access to high speed internet - <USER2> many, many students from the lower social groups may not have internet/computers at home. The government says that in September, half of these 16k schools will magically get high speed internet access through radio links. If history teaches us anything, those 9k schools certainly won't all get working internet overnight. I wouldn't be surprised if most schools still won't really have a functional internet by September 2015. And internet is not everything either- those schools (mostly rural and/or underfunded districts) are also very likely to have just a few, outdated computers for the whole school, without a budget to address that.

As someone with a graduate degree in computer science, extensive experience teaching CS/programming to kids/teenagers/adults, and an avid follower of work done by Piaget, Papert, Abelson, etc., I'm absolutely all for exposing children to computational ideas early, and using them to support and enhance learning. I've taught many such classes with kids 6-12 myself, and it can be done very successfully- even with kids who are not that interested in the first place.

Unfortunately here, it seems like it's a reactionary measure taken by our government to not be behind similar initiatives in the US and other countries, without much thought given into it. The fact that it is called "apprentissage du code informatique" rather than "apprentissage de la programmation" (or even "apprentissage de l'informatique") is not ideal either; the first thing that I associate it to is "apprentissage du code de la route" (classes that teach the laws behind driving, which you have to take before your driver's license in France), an association that I am sure many non-tech savvy parents or teachers will make in some way. With the taste French government has for putting certifications and "brevets" on everything, this is going to get silly quite fast (I remember the B2i I had to take in middle school, a "certificate" for internet & computers that we obtained after being taught what was essentially an internet explorer class by a shop teacher who was way out of his depth).

Interestingly enough, on the other side of the spectrum, the Ministre de l'Éducation is merging effective, proven 2-year university diplomas that produce high quality computer technicians (who can then easily take on a computer engineering/computer science degree) with tangentially related electronic engineering ones, just to save money: [http://linuxfr.org/news/au- secours-du-bts-iris-informatique-...](http://linuxfr.org/news/au-secours-du- bts-iris-informatique-et-reseaux-pour-l-industrie-et-les-services).

Things like the latter will definitely hurt France's ability to compete on the international tech scene. On the other hand, I'm not sure teaching HTML after class hours in schools were teachers are already overworked and lacking critical resources will do much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't knew about the HTML part, which is not such a bad news, when most of the self taught programmers I knew started (real) programming it was either on a calculator or because HTML was no longer enough. Even if I don't consider HTML to be real programming, it's enough to be a first step in the rabbit hole, and we all know how deep this hole can be if you care to keep digging.

As for the outside of class hour part, as far as I know it's not 'outside class hour' literally but more reserved hours for non standard class activities ( back in my time that's were I was first taught English which was not a 'standard' class ). Besides, in primary school you only have one teacher, which means most of them will not be half decent at teaching CS, relying on volunteering teachers and/or parents seems like the good way to present CS to young children.

<comment><USER15> It's definitely not a programming language at all. But for young kids it's much more appealing to create a web page with colors and animation than a calculator in Python. And that's the goal, not make them able to program, but show them what are the possibilities.

And, on the teacher's side, it's going to be easier to teach most of them HTML rather than a real programming language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In Italy I had the first programming introduction at 11, using Commodore 64 and the language used for teaching was Logo. Logo had to be loaded from 5" floppy disks.

Commodore 64 were already obsolete by the time, in fact at 12 (the next year), we switched to Windows, and we used something to do hypertexts instead.

Needless to say, Logo was much more instructive to whatever bullshit we were using the next year (in fact, I don't ever remember what I was actually doing during these classes).

Our teacher was an Italian teacher, with the usual assumption at the time that programming language = natural language. The switching to hypertexts the next year/s was obvious for them in retrospect, though had little to do with programming at all.

At 15 we started "real" programming classes with Turbo Pascal under a dos environment. By that time, I was already programming by myself, so I always found these classes to be boring as hell. I was using the practical classes to program simple video games. Though pascal (and TP in general) was a huge step up compared to other "modern" classes we had in our school that were teaching Visual Basic or Java. Under TP we were actually doing some basic algorithms, while the other guys were left doing some useless GUI. With TP you could inline assembly, switch to graphical mode, and whatnot.

The teacher I had this time was a math teacher, which had only minimal CS knowledge. Better than nothing, but still a far cry. The "lessons" were split in two parts:

* basic math introduction to some concept (say, "calculate area of triangle")

* applied session of the concept, for example: make a program that computes the area of said triangle

Nothing much learned in these classes, if _anything_ actually.

I got several 0 marks (which got my math grades from 10/10 down _under_ the sufficiency and required me to _repeat_ the year) for arguing with the teacher about the limits of the machine words (I went with a print-out of a ~10 pages bignum library I wrote just to disprove her). I actually got suspended for asking the school director if I could be an assistant during these classes. I only have shitty memories about these times.

Different times, as CS was barely a "science" these days. Though my fear, especially after participating as a _real_ assistant in classes, is that there will be no CS at all, or at least nothing that would actually teach these kids anything.

In retrospect, the C64 was the best teaching environment I could ever have. You could understand the whole system (hw&software stack) in relatively little time. No chance you could do something similar with any modern system.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally get your point, when your passionate about something, as a student you need someone really good to teach you. And thus the issue when non passionate teachers ends up teaching something because they have to and not because they like it.

In the end I believe the point of CS lectures at such a young age is not to actually teach people programming but more let them know that this field exist, how it basically works and light the spark for some students. I've seen a lot of people when I was in engineering school going 'Ho my god I wish I had knew about CS before, would have saved me a lot of time' ( And some going the other way ). Having these kind of revelation 10 years before can only be something positive .

<comment><USER16> My main point here is that recycling a math teacher will not actually teach anything about CS, it will just add a "practical session" where you just write the same math concept with some boring language around it.

When I was a kid, for _some_ people the advantage was that they actually got to turn on a computer and type on a keyboard for the first time in their life.

But nowdays, you don't really need to do that. Not in France at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's terrific news.

The official word used is "coding", not "programming", which leaves a slightly bad aftertaste.

Anyway, there is already an option for the scientific students in the last year of high school, the so called "Computer and digital science" ([https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option- inform...](https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p1_482196/option-informatique- et-sciences-du-numerique-en-terminale-s)).

</comment><comment><USER18> Google Translated to English: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fsociete%2Farticle%2F2014%2F07%2F13%2Fl- apprentissage-du-code-informatique-sera-propose-au-primaire-en- septembre_4456197_3224.html&edit-text=)

<comment><USER19> Thanks. Hacker News is an English-language site. This is not to disparage content in other languages; it's just what the site is. Posts not in English will mostly be demoted, unless they're of major significance and not available in translation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't force, please. Period.

</comment><comment><USER21> Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER22> Could someone fix the title? There is nothing about enforcing, this won't be mandatory (and may not even be available in all schools).

<comment><USER19> We've attempted to.</comment></comment>


Error handling vs. exceptions redux - <AUTHOR> http://dave.cheney.net/2014/11/04/error-handling-vs-exceptions-redux <comment><USER2> Excellent article... I think another point you could have gone more into is how exceptions interact with multithreaded programming. Everyone always says you can't ignore exceptions, but that's not true... only exceptions in your application's main thread will take down the process. Exceptions in any other thread will just kill that thread. Also, handling exceptions in multithreaded programs becomes much more difficult, because you can't throw across thread boundaries, so now you need some different error handling mechanism to propagate errors in that case.</comment>


Ask HN: How to make my accomplishments sound more "active" as a developer? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I've just received a free critique of my resume from one of the professional resume service, and one of the suggestions is to use active language when talking about my accomplishments. For example, "Worked on x" or "Created y" make me sound like a doer, whereas I should say something like "Slashed costs by 30%" or "Increased revenue by 10%".
I've never measured or have been shared these things by managers or businesses. Is this particular critique even valid for developers? Would a hiring manger or HR person looking for developers care about this? <comment><USER2> Numbers always pop out on a resume. If you can get leadership to share the financial results of your work, it's always to your advantage to know. It's not necessarily to _their_ advantage, though, so they probably won't volunteer it.

For developers, the other thing that really pops out is "Launched X", "Shipped X", or "Created X", where X is some publicly visible feature or product. Links are good too; the hiring manager probably won't look at them, but the fact that your accomplishments are independently verifiable on the net helps a lot.</comment>


Cloudflare: This is strictly a violation of the TCP specification - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/this-is-strictly-a-violation-of-the-tcp-specification <comment><USER2> In the case the article talks about, shouldn't a TCP RST packet be sent back in response to all requests to a socket in the close_wait state?

</comment><comment><USER3> It should probably mention 2016 in the title.</comment>


How We Make Money at Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.blog/2016/11/How-We-Make-Money-at-Stack-Overflow-2016-Edition/ <comment><USER2> > We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story > to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of > developers. If that email is rejected, we'll unsubscribe you. If you're > unresponsive to emails we send, we'll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as > spam, we'll unsubscribe you.

How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

<comment><USER3> > If you mark it as spam, we'll unsubscribe you.

How would they know?

<comment><USER4> You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.

<comment><USER5> Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.

<comment><USER6> What information does this reveal besides your email address, which they clearly already have?

<comment><USER7> It confirms that the address is valid, and most likely attended by a real person.

<comment> angry-hacker But there are gazillion email leaks. Go scrape them all with hashed passwords. Active emails have no value.

<comment><USER8> Leaks may have emails that are defunct, belong to dormant accounts nobody reads, throwaway accounts like mailinator.com, honeypots, etc. This confirms the account belongs to a real human actively reading the email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great answer to a related FAQ in a post[0] linked from this article, about why !SO doesn't care about ad blockers:

> The truth is: we don't care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. > More accurately: we hope that they won't, but we understand that some people > just don't like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and > they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy > them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign > performance.

[0] [https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow- doesnt...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care- about-ad-blockers/#we-don%E2%80%99t-care)!

<comment><USER10> And a great explanation in the piece of how SO works to serve only quality ads.

Good enough, in fact, that I'm whitelisting Stack Overflow from my adblocker. I don't do it often, I don't even do it for sites I like; the reality is that anyone using an automated ad network is at significant risk of serving malware, and I don't approve even if I'm protected. I don't visit Forbes at all anymore, ever, because they broke their users basic faith in "see our ads, and we won't destroy your machine".

But a promise to serve relevant, low-impact ads, chosen by actual humans? That's something I'm willing to support.

<comment><USER11> Did you only do it today? 8 months after the announcement, because someone happened to mention it in a comments thread? Doesn't speak very much to that approach's effectiveness. Especially since you've got a strong opinion on it.

<comment><USER12> The fun thing is that I think Reddit once used both types of ads. I don't think they do that anymore though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> StackOverflow is an extremely valuable resource for all programmers. I've not seen the option anywhere, but a yearly donation would definitely be something I'd do for a substantial amount (substantial to me as a student, so it's not the moon but not a beer either).

<comment><USER14> My following suggestion is a very unpopular one, but it is this:

If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an expert.

If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of money).

Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content.

I am also interested how they approach the subject of money:

> How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our > users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great > business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great > pride in the fact that we're one of them.

Personally, I would love to see how this works out and I wish them well. Hopefully they can prove this model works well. Users need this model to work well for other businesses to adopt.

<comment><USER15> >>book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become

I've tried that before, many times. Unfortunately when you are trying to do real work those books are many times useless. Example, I kept trying to build a newtonian physics simulator so I got a Statics and Dynamics mechanical engineering book. The book was a text book for Mechanical engineering students and yet the examples they teach you are for toy problems. I could not generalize them to real world scenarios. To actually build the physics simulator I had to scour the internet until I found something that actually explained what I needed in an easy to understand manner [1]. And that still was not enough. I still had to use more online sources to find out all the other pieces, like the separating axes theorem for collision detection.

So no, I would not rely on books anymore, at least not exclusively since they often do not provide a full picture. One last thing, books seem to be getting progressively worse in my experience. All of this is anecdotal of course.

[1][http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics](http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics)

<comment><USER10> As an aside, buying a print reference book frequently feels counterproductive.

Even if I'm going to get a formal reference text, instead of online resources, I probably want a digital copy. Otherwise, I find myself going "I wish I could do text search for this thing..." and wondering why I didn't get the version that actually allows that. When I read for pleasure I enjoy the physicality of books; when I read for technical reference I demand the interface of a computer.

<comment><USER16> For books without ebooks from the manufacturer but for which I can find an illicit PDF or djvu, I usually buy the print one and read the digital version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Stackoverflow is the prime example for how a company can generate tremenduous value without making that much money.

It's difficult to estimate its contribution to the world economy quantitatively, but I'd definitely say billions, many many billions.

<comment><USER18> How do you know they don't make that much money? I didn't see that anywhere in the blog post.

I agree that they make an enormous contribution to the world economy. Joel really did knock it out of the park -- remember expertsexchange? His goal was to get rid of that and it worked.

<comment><USER19> Joel, eh? Think you might be forgetting someone in there, somewhere? ;)

<comment><USER20> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always got the impression from the podcasts that while you both designed it, it was more you actually programming it. I could be mis-remembering after all this time!

Didn't you quit your job and program it while Joel was still mainly focused on Fog Creek day-to-day?

<comment><USER19> Yes, it was Joel's famous "servant leadership". We brainstormed ideas once a week on weekly calls (which became the podcast) and he trusted me (and Geoff and Jarrod, the first two people at the company after the founders) to build Stack Overflow as we saw fit.

Community feedback was a huge part of that feedback cycle once the beta was live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another good article linked from this one: [https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow- doesnt...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care- about-ad-blockers/). Stack Overflow is IMO the site to look to if you want to do ads correctly. So many big sites have incredibly trashy ads, SO shows that they care to not subject their users to that junk.

<comment><USER22> I'm actually surprised ads work at all on StackOverflow. I would have guessed that most of their visitors are blocking ads.

<comment><USER23> Most of the ads are served to non-logged-in visitors who come to specific question pages through a web search.

SO actually shows you fewer ads the more reputation points you have.

<comment><USER24> What's the flow there for a user? They're researching an answer ... do they ignore the issue and run off and buy something? I sometime have poor focus but when you're problem solving it seems the least likely time to distract yourself with shopping.

I did once follow a Google ad about 10 years ago, but in my defence I was just surfing cool tech and the image looked interesting. Of course I didn't buy anything, who lets advertisers tell them what to buy?

I digress.

<comment><USER25> > They're researching an answer ... do they ignore the issue and run off and > buy something?

Yes, that's an entirely credible idea. To use the first ad I found as an example, maybe I'm debugging an annoying issue with migrating my MongoDB cluster and I notice an ad for a managed MongoDB service and realize I'd rather pay them to deal with this.

> Of course I didn't buy anything, who lets advertisers tell them what to buy?

I do! There are millions of useful services out there and ads are an effective discovery tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I paid a good amount of money for the jobs listings because it is Stack Overflow.

The sales person was very persistent and available while the negotiations were happening to use their service (yes, you can get discounts). As soon as I paid, she disappeared and was never to be heard from again. No follow up at all.

I also got _zero_ good jobs references for an extremely profitable tech business in the heart of downtown financial district in San Francisco. All the people who applied were basically spam and that wasn't any better than just posting on LinkedIn or HN for free.

Not really a complaint, just one small data point to consider.

</comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps it's time they consider paying Moderators for their time and effort. It doesn't need to be anything large, even a small stipend will suffice.

Moderators are the real lifeblood of StackExchange. They spend countless hours ensuring their respective Sub Exchange hums along. Yes, it's a volunteer "job", but it's a job none-the-less - especially since once you become a Moderator, it's more-or-less expected you have certain responsibilities and obligations. Given StackExchange makes a pretty healthy profit off the efforts of the "volunteers", and given StackExchange is a for profit company, it seems fitting they should have to pay for the labor that creates their profit.

Currently, StackExchange kicks back and rakes in money via various avenues, but then doesn't have to pay staff to actually manage the growing plethora of Sub Exchanges.

We all give companies grief for underpaying or mis-classifying employees, but somehow everyone overlooks StackExchange.

I believe it an accurate statement to say, StackExchange would not be a thing today, if it were not for the innumerable hours worked for free by a growing army of "volunteers".

<comment><USER28> Are you a moderator?

<comment><USER27> > Are you a moderator?

No, and have never been. I have no dog in that race - but as a long time Stack Exchange user, I witness these people's hard work every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Every new email, except for transactional emails like "Forgot your > password?", sent through this system will have three links at the bottom: a > one-click unsubscribe, a direct link to manage all categories, and feedback.

It's terrific that they're doing this. The first two links are what the CAN- SPAM Act requires. The "feedback" link is not a result of complying with CAN- SPAM, but is a good idea for any online business.

[https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/can...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business)

</comment><comment><USER30> I like Stack Overflow, but I seriously don't know how all these answers end up there. I think about 80% of all my questions are answered sooner or later by myself. And some of them are quite massively upvoted too afterwards, so they weren't always niche problems.

</comment><comment><USER31> A reminder that you don't need to use the latest or fanciest tech stack to achieve success in business. In the case of SO, boring wins, it's proven and seems like it allows them to focus on their product and to create new value for users.

<comment><USER32> what's their stack?

<comment> Nick-Craver If curious, I did a post on that a while back. I'm settling into a new house and will pick this series back up soon.

[https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the- ar...](https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the- architecture-2016-edition/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> TLDR: They make money through ads, job postings and their enterprise product. The author believes that they can make money and serve users at the same time.

<comment><USER34> In my opinion, they do a pretty good job of balancing the needs of users and advertisers.

<comment><USER35> I ask a lot of question, and thus get banned from asking more...

I wish they would have a "luxury" option for like 49.99 a year where students could ask like unlimited questions.

Is this crazy?

<comment><USER36> How many questions does it take before you are banned?

<comment><USER37> If they started banning users for asking questions or even for asking poor (read extremely poor) questions, then the overall traffic would reduce _significantly_.

<comment><USER38> I wish. We've been doing this for 5-6 years now, and it hasn't. Quite honestly, if we could get rid of the worst 20% of questions instantly, life would be a lot better for the remaining 80%... But, identifying those 20% when often SO is their only option is... Brutally hard. I've seen the same person try to post variations on the same question dozens of times before finally getting around the quality checks... Only to have it sink like a rock because of course it was still unintelligible after all that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm so happy we have stack overflow.

Do you guys remember experts exchange.com?

<comment><USER40> That site made me wish I could set up a "exclude from search results forever" on Google.

<comment><USER41> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal- blocklist...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by- goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef?hl=en)

<comment><USER42> Chrome only, has be installed on each PC, not on mobile. Bleh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> So is it cash flow positive? I hope so, because it's hands down the most useful site for programmers. I even got the gold medal for using it every day for a long time.

<comment><USER44> They make over 10 million dollars a year.

<comment><USER24> Between 300 people cited elsewhere that's only $30k. Presumably they pay for hosting, facilities. Doesn't sound like it leaves a lot of pre-tax pay unless they're using primarily overseas workers in low-cost countries?

<comment><USER45> $300k, surely?

<comment><USER24>
          10,000,000 ÷ 300
        = 1,000,000 ÷ 30
        = 100,000 ÷ 3
        ~ 33,333

(commas for grouping)

Or 1e07/3e02 = 1e05/3.

<comment><USER45> Whoops...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have tweeted about SO several minutes ago before I discovered this topic on HN: [https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136](https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136)

StackOverflow is so powerful resource on the Internet, alongside with Wikipedia and Internet Archive.

I wish I could donate two ways: 1) Yearly or monthly (subscription) donations, like on Wikipedia 2) I would be extremely happy to donate authors of some great, life-saving answers. I feel so excited when I find the right answer after searching a solution for hours.

Just shut up and take my money!

<comment><USER47> SO intentionally does not want to integrate payment of any kind for answerers because of Motivation Crowding Theory[1], the idea that intrinsic motivations like altruism can be crowded out by extrinsic motivations like profit, which is problematic because intrinsic motivation is generally stronger and effective for longer than extrinsic motivation.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > And we don't want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us.

So they do direct deals mostly, which is antiquated and probably to preserve their branding as a "tech site".

> Did you know we have a lot of unpaid inventory on Stack Overflow every > month?

This is what trying to guess your avails with direct ends up doing. Leaving inventory unmonetized. Typically, you get paid less for less of your inventory trying to do monthly manual trafficking.

All they do is display, so it's rather silly to quibble about CPMs in the 25 cent range...until you look at the traffic and realize that translates to real money.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you are missing is that there is a cost associated with monetizing the full inventory with automation.

You lose control over what is being shown, you are diluting your brand and you are at risk of alienating your users.

At Stack Overflow we are not willing to make this trade off.

<comment><USER48> > What you are missing

Automation costs are actually administrative costs (platform fees), which have recently increased via unmonetized opportunity cost models (opportunity being a specific technical term in advertising). SO is not fully or optimally monetizing, probably because they prefer to keep the old tech they are using and/or the staff that has been there since early days. It's also possible they want some dejour/nonstandard controls. Saying they are making an informed tradeoff is simply incorrect. Saying they are making a (unspecified) choice, then not really talking about that choice, is what the article skirts.

Sub 10k/mo for platforms at 2 billion opps per day is AOL and SpotX. That schedule doesn't matter at the volume SO works with. Fees and Opp costs are not the issue with the unmonetized inventory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's great you are making money. If only there wasn't so many terrible answers ranking no.1 on Google.. :-/

</comment><comment><USER50> Upon reading the title, I thought they made it possible for users to make money on Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER51> They did with job placement potential.

<comment><USER52> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thank you for submitting this on HN. I am really happy to see the site grow.

> I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here. > It's is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the > community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to > work for a company that respects that trust, and I do.

> How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our > users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great > business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great > pride in the fact that we're one of them.

I can see that they believe in this. As I wrote in my Quora answer [https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing- in-201...](https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing- in-2016/answer/Subhobroto-Sinha-1):

"They are gaining a lot of goodwill because they have committed to attach a high value to user experience over monetary gain (they learnt from sites in the past that lost their community because they plastered the site with ads. Needless to say, those sites eventually failed)"

I remember other sites that did something similar but they got lost on the way and sold their users away and ultimately fell to disrepair because no one came back.

I hope they continue to stay true to this course.

> We don't because if we don't have anything even remotely good to show you, > we shouldn't.

> And we don't want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us. > We looked at this. It didn't allow us the control we required to maintain > the level of quality we want to maintain. We have intentionally left a lot > of money on the table. Sacrificing quality is not what we want to be known > for. We believe there are better ways.

In my limited experience with online advertising, one metric that almost all advertisers ask for are page views.

I believe this is a fundamentally flawed metric. It can be gamed easily and ultimately targeting ads by page views lead to a suboptimal user experience.

I would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad.

SE is bigger than just page views. It's a successful ecosystem that has a vibrant community behind it that will grow and nurture itself.

It's great to see that their management would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad.

> If you have time though, I'd appreciate if you told me why in the comments > so I/we can do better.

Introduce anonymous answers.

I know of very talented developers who would like to answer questions without setting up (throwaway) accounts. Spam is a non-issue here unless spammers model answers like good answers (of which we have a pretty large set to train from)

<comment><USER53> For my own curiosity, when you mean anonymous answers do you mean by people who don't have accounts on our platform at all, or do you mean people who already have accounts disconnecting their persona from a specific answer?

<comment><USER14> You got it in the latter (former would be even better). Explained here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Ads. Of course. And over half their staff is marketing/sales.

[http://stackoverflow.com/company/team](http://stackoverflow.com/company/team)

</comment><comment><USER37> Does somebody has a clue about what % of the revenues come from ads and jobs? I understand that there might be other sources too (documentation and such).

</comment><comment><USER55> I would pay to get bugs fixed. The snippet editor has been broken for about 6 months. Funny that a site about code would have a buggy code editor.

</comment><comment><USER56> Seeing their salary calculator makes me depressed what a 1-year experience 1x developer in the NYC metro makes.

<comment><USER57> Consider how depressed developer salary is in Japan, I'm surprised how well Stackover pays... I'm guessing their Japanese office is tiny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> What do you think is the purpose of this piece?

Seems like it came straight from PR land to me.

</comment><comment><USER59> tldr: Display Ads and Talent.

> We help companies build their brand and source technical talent through our > business products: Display Ads and Talent.

</comment><comment><USER60> I love Stack Overflow but its community is right now poisonous that i don't want to participate anymore but to be a lurker like many others.

My 2cents.

</comment><comment><USER61> Interestingly, this article was flagged on the new page. I had to vouch for it.

Weird that a previously flagged article made it to the top slot:)

</comment><comment><USER62> Would it be thieving, if i made a NN-Crawler, that condensed the Stack overflow-Conversations into a query able chat bot?

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you know that we provide the complete set of questions and answers (from all sites, including Stack Overflow)?

No need to crawl anything.

You can find it on the internet archive:

[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

<comment><USER63> And there's also the API - [http://api.stackexchange.com](http://api.stackexchange.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> And the Data Explorer (use SQL in the browser to query the Stack Overflow database): [http://data.stackoverflow.com](http://data.stackoverflow.com)

<comment><USER62> Thanks, thats great..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Re: 'Why we make money'

Is it now shameful to make money, so you have to defend it when you do?

<comment><USER65> yeah. it's crazy. it costs money to run the servers itself. We are lucky they haven't made the site subscription based or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I always thought they earned a nickel for every time they closed a question as "not constructive"

</comment><comment><USER67> At this point, I have no desire to participate in or help stackoverflow. The attitudes there are such hostile, elitist garbage, where someone is incapable of asking a question, because it will instantly be closed by the mods. God forbid they are a newbie to the site. Responses essentially amount to go RTFM.

This sums it up well.

[https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack- overflow-7cb69fa...](https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack- overflow-7cb69faa575d#.oyn9b1aoz)

<comment><USER68> I used to be very active on SO and I stopped because dealing with new people to the site is a waste of everyones time.

SO has the goal of being a Q to A catalog. You're not contributing unless you are asking a new, answerable question or providing and answer to a new or existing question.

There are tons of people asking questions that are already answered, tons of people asking questions that would take a book to answer, and tons of people asking questions that are subjective and time sensitive. All of this needs to be closed and removed.

The fact of the matter is that tons of questions have already been asked and answered. In fact unless its for a newer technology there are probably not that many left to ask. Because of this about 95% of all new content ought to be removed. In fact you will find a vastly different culture if you stick around the GO tag vs the Java tag.

But the issue is there is a never ending trickle of people who don't realize the above. They sign up and start asking answered or impossible to answer questions, trying to start discussions, or trying to make you debug their specific issue.

You either ignore them or try and help them understand the site by telling them to RTFM.

<comment><USER67> Your core group of know it all people, won't be around forever. If you keep discouraging new users, by treating them like second class citizens, and a "waste of time". Then the old boys club, is not going to last. I agree entertaining basic programming questions is foolish, but I've seen many examples of legitimate questions, that get the boot because they've been addressed(poorly) previously. At what point do you start just running a Wiki of programming answers, and not a community of programmers. Because the former sounds like what the programming police at stackoverflow want.

<comment><USER69> I don't agree with your premise. I've seen many users join the site and succeed in recent years, because they cared to understand what they were joining, and how they could contribute to it. If you're only looking for an answer for yourself, people are not going to cater to you. It's not a great environment for random newbies looking for personal help because that was never the primary goal. They're more expected to benefit _as consumers_ of the content that more experienced programmers generate.

From the announcement of Stack Overflow, before the site was even in private beta ([https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow- com/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/)):

> _Stack Overflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange meets wikipedia > meets programming reddit._

The community elements of the site are nice, and I have made some friends there, but "wiki of programming answers" _is_ much closer to the original vision of the site than "community".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fred Wilson: Patience pays for founders - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/02/patience.html <comment><USER2> Patience pays for VCs too. It was my understanding that many quick sell outs were a result of VC pressure. MySpace former ceo, for example, filed a lawsuit against its investors (VantagePoint) for pressuring them into sell out for a quick $580 million. VCs are much like shareholders in corporations; they often vote for a buyout or merger if a corporate raider, like Carl Icahn, promises quick short term dividents. The way I see it, a founder is more likely to stick to their company than an investor whose only interest is cash.

</comment><comment><USER3> completely off topic, but here are Fred Wilson's top CD picks for 2006:

http://www.squidoo.com/fredsmusic/

(If you read his blog, you know that it's half music and half venture capital stuff)</comment>


15 Books Every Entrepreneur Should read - <AUTHOR> http://yourhiddenpotential.co.uk/2010/02/03/15-books-every-entrepreneur-should-read/

<comment><USER2> 15 books seems like a bit much. If it were shorter (~5-7) it'd be alot easier to grok.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It was just the 15 that i personally thought were awesome and every entrepreneur should read.</comment>


Security recommendations for any device that depends on random numbers (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/secure-random.htm <comment><USER2> If you are interested in subject of high quality random sources, you may find this useful: there exists a project named League of Entropy [1] dedicated to reliable generation of public randomness based on group of servers with high- quality random sources (like lava lamps or seismic activity).

These distributed randomness beacon servers can also provide private random data. There exists a project with daemon [2] which collects entropy from distinct sources and produces secure output, which can be used to reseed Linux /dev/random and /dev/urandom. It may be useful for devices without reliable HW RNG.

[1] - [https://www.cloudflare.com/leagueofentropy/](https://www.cloudflare.com/leagueofentropy/)

[2] - [https://github.com/Snawoot/drb-client](https://github.com/Snawoot/drb- client)

</comment><comment><USER3> Btw, are there any hardware TRNGs like EntropyKey that have a keyed-encrypted channel (either PCIe or USB)? I was looking at Quantis, ComScire CryptoStrong, TrueRNG v3, TrueRNGPro, OneRNG, and the Linux hw_random source tree and haven't found anything similar. [0] EK was such an interesting product.

0\. [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/char/h...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/char/hw_random)

<comment><AUTHOR> This:

[https://sc4.us/hsm/index.html](https://sc4.us/hsm/index.html)

is not exactly what you're looking for out of the box, but it's open-source and it includes a HWRNG, so you could make it do what you want with some custom firmware. I would be happy to discuss a custom development for you if you don't want to do it yourself.

Disclosure: the SC4-HSM is my product.

<comment><USER4> I'm not seeing a secure element in there (nor in the uC)... is there one? If not, why not?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no secure element but there is a hwrng built in to the SoC.

<comment><USER5> So it isn't an HSM.

Calling a device an HSM comes with an expectation that it will resist tampering or intensive analysis. A standard microcontroller on an exposed PCB cannot fulfill that expectation.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is an HSM notwithstanding that it does not contain a separate component marketed as a secure element. The SoC is not a "standard microcontroller" (well, it is, but not in the sense that you mean it here). The STM32F405RG has security features built in designed to secure proprietary firmware against industrial espionage. The same hardware features can be used to secure keys. I'd be happy to provide you with additional details, but I'd suggest starting by reading the documentation of the SC4-HSM and the the SoC.

<comment><USER5> I'm quite familiar with the characteristics of the STM32.

The STM32F405 is a standard microcontroller. Its security features are generally comparable to those which are present on other STM32 microcontrollers, as well as most microcontrollers in general. The PCROP (proprietary code readout protection) features which you appear to be referencing here don't help, as your application code is already open-source, and the key data that you're trying to protect must be readable to be used. Moreover, PCROP functionality is absent on the STM32F405.

STM32 readout protection is not particularly robust. There are a number of known attacks which can be used to bypass it on certain families without decapping the chip. I'm not sure if there are any attacks currently known against the F4 series, but I wouldn't doubt that they exist.

Most STM32 parts actually have a tamper detection feature which can be used to clear the contents of a battery-backed RAM when triggered. This sort of configuration still doesn't make a HSM, but it would be a step in the right direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now this has degenerated into a quibble about semantics, and the difference between "it's not an HSM" and "it is an HSM, but it might have a vulnerability due to an unpublished zero-day against the hardware." Unpublished attacks against your silicon are _always_ a concern, even (perhaps especially) if your silicon is marketed as a "secure element".

The SC4-HSM costs $75. It is intended to compete against the likes of the Trezor, the Ledger, and the Yubikey, not the SafeNet Luna. Its primary threat model is a compromised host, not loss of physical possession. Is it the most secure HSM you can buy? No. Is it the best choice for use in a data center? No. Is it secure against loss of physical possession to a state actor? Probably not (though you can always choose to encrypt the keys, which has a pretty good shot of holding up even against state actors). Is it fair to say flat-out, "It's not an HSM" implying that it provides no security at all? No.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596805784/ <comment><USER2> At Loopt we tried to do this. We made a hybrid app (Loopt Star), using web views for content and native code for tabs, Facebook Connect, modal dialogs, animations, etc. It didn't work. WebViews/Safari basically don't cache anything at all, and javascript performance is awful.

Out of desperation we even tried including a reverse proxy as part of the app to force meaningful image and css caching. Yes, the webviews were serving content from localhost, which was proxied transparently to our real servers and cached aggressively. Even that wasn't enough.

If you want your app to have a first class user experience, you have to go native. Maybe in the future things will improve, but right now users can tell.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been thinking about getting into iOS development but I'm on the fence about diving into learning objective-c. I'm a ruby/javascript guy primarily and I think I'd rather go the js route than objective-c, but I want to know what the limitations will be? Anyone have any insight they could share?

<comment><USER4> The main limitation is not technical in nature. The App Store is a marketing force that you get benefit simply by releasing a native app.

Can you name any good HTML/CSS/JS iOS "apps"? Either there aren't many (any?) or people don't know about them (which is basically the same thing)

edit: responses noted, guess I didn't read carefully enough

<comment><USER5> You'd likely never even know that an HTML5 app wrapped in PhoneGap or Titanium wasn't native. There are many of those on the app store already. In fact, the subtitle of the book specifically mentions the app store: Making _App Store Apps_ Without Objective-C or Cocoa.

<comment><USER6> It's worth noting the response to O'reilly's own Safari To Go iPad app on the Safari Books online blog which was based on PhoneGap. The app has since been pulled from the App Store. See [http://safaribooksonline.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/ipad- app-s...](http://safaribooksonline.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/ipad-app-safari- to-go-update-november-24-2010/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Using phonegap I created an app using Canvas & javascript called Tank! (knockoff of atari combat). It was super simple to do and banged it out in two weeks on the side while working full time. I probably spent less time developing it that it would take to actually learn objective c to start developing it using that language.

The biggest issue was framerate, which when tracking 4 fingers at the same time, it drops down to 6-8fps on the original iphone. Tracking touches is more cpu intensive than actually drawing the sprites. I capped the framerate at 8 fps and slowed down the tank movement so that this effect wasn't noticeable.

The major upside is that you can test and develop in the browser every change you make without compiling anything, then dump it into the framework and push it to the device. This really speeds up development.

</comment><comment><USER8> Tl;dr: jqTouch jQuery plugin, convert webapps into real apps, tips on HTML5 client databases, and accessing some ipod info.

<comment><USER9> Anyone looking at jqTouch should also check out jQuery Mobile <http://jquerymobile.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As long as you're using web technologies why not make it cross-platform? It's pointless to use them JUST for the iPhone.</comment>


Chinese National Charged with Committing Theft of Trade Secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-charged-committing-theft-trade-secrets <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18738775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18738775) \-- 238 points and 141 comments from yesterday

</comment><comment><USER3> Trump does a lot of dumb shit but getting tough on China is smart policy. China enforced outrageous constraints on businesses that operate within its borders.

<comment><USER4> It could be smart in principle, I'm just afraid that in practice it is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm happy to hear this.</comment>


Show HN: I built this website to help people with hashtags. Hope you'll enjoy it - <AUTHOR> http://hashtagoverload.me

<comment><USER2> Satire requires a bit more groundwork than this really.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought this would look for words in your text that make for a good hashtag, e.g. converting "you only live once" to "#yolo", and make hashtags from nouns but not verbs and commonly used words. Unfortunately it seems to just put a "#" in front of every word, which (for me) isn't even worth it to go to that website, type my text, copy it over to twitter/instagram, paste it, then send it.

<comment><USER4> I think the main point of the site is the list of hashtag suggestions below your freshly hashtag-prefxed content. Mildly interesting idea, however the suggestions I got with a few tests weren't that awe-inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Putting a # in front of every word is not exactly what hashtags are meant to be for.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the joke :p

<comment><USER6> It's just not a very good one really, with all due respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In what way does this help people with hashtags? What problem is adressed? Just by looking at the use of hashtags by my non-technical acquaintances on Twitter or Facebook, nobody seems to have a problem with them. #confused

Idea for your next website: de-hashtagify a text. Implementation: something like s/#//g on the input text.

<comment><USER8> #satire #tongue-in-cheek.

I imagine it's in response to the fact people are hashtagging everything.

<comment><USER9> the developer here: yes, that is what it's about :)

<comment><USER8> It's an excellent riposte to the frankly silly amounts of hash tagging that's now occurring. I personally blame Instagram for it as the root cause.

<comment><USER9> yeah, if there's enough people who are confused about what this is about, I might write a blog post about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> #This #might #be #a #joke #but #there's #actually #a #lot #of #fun #work #to #be #had #in #building #systems #that #can #auto-tag #text #(or #"auto #classification" #in #the #pre-hashtag #era #;-)).

<comment><AUTHOR> #thank #you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shameless plug: if you really need something that can help you with hashtags, you can try my [http://hashtagify.me/](http://hashtagify.me/)

<comment><USER9> developer here: Can't believe I met you here :) your domain was the first one that we wanted to buy but isn't available.

<comment><USER11> It's a little world ;)

PS: Please, don't sue me, I'm still bootstrapping :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The $('.pure-g h3.l-hashtags')-Headline is driving me insane.

I guess this is not satire, since this tool suggests some tags. (I guess the hashtagging of every word is just a little side-joke.)

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems like a joke , but then kinda doesn't... 2 stars.

<comment><USER9> It's a joke. Trust me.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://instantrimshot.com/](http://instantrimshot.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only one who gets annoyed when there are 3+ hashtags?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're not the only one ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> i dont get it. is this meant to be humorous? also - why did it take 3 people to build this?

<comment><USER16> Yes, I don't get it either. I guess that with the web now, this is what it looks like as people learn programming? I know for me my thrill in programming growing up was to write some dumb game that worked on console and then convince my parents and friends to use it. I guess this is the equivalent? The fun thing these days, you can get thousands of users and maybe do something with it other than immediately discard it. So, I see these as Hello Worlds to the next level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> #satire

<comment><AUTHOR> #classy

<comment><USER18> #hashtagyoloswag

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> #bump</comment>


Should the schools teach students to move a pointer around a monitor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/the-mouse-faces-extinction-as-computer-interaction-evolves/2012/10/07/759aafa6-0e48-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story_1.html <comment><USER2> Please link to the first page of the article ;)</comment>


NASA makes astronauts posters for everything from Star Wars to the Matrix (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-posters-inspired-by-pop-culture-2017-7 <comment><USER2> Oof, I was hoping for something artsy I could buy and hang on my wall. These are cringe-worthy.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's fun to see these people having fun and making nerdy posters, makes them a bit more relatable than 'some people working at NASA'</comment>


Black Friday Is Right: Our Relentless Consumption Is Trashing the Planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/black-friday-consumption-killing-planet-growth <comment><USER2> The most pro-environment thing a person can do is to not have kids. There are way too many people given the level of consumption that people desire. Something has to give and it eventually a price will be paid unless world's population decreases to a reasonable level.

<comment><USER3> On the flip side, what could be more valuable than giving rise to a new consciousness?

<comment><USER4> If you have children and you enjoy raising them, maybe that's the most valuable thing in the world. What I've seen so far, it changes your life completely. It turns your life around, the child is the main focus. It costs lots of money, time and effort which one can put in other places. And even if you try raising them well, you have no idea what this consciousness is goign to grow up into. You have no guarantee that you will have good relationship with them. It's a huge gamble, basically. Is it really worth it? I guess it depends on the person.

<comment><USER4> Not even mentioning, we have no idea what this planet is going turn into within the next 50 years, from what is observed, it probably won't be nice. Does one really want them living in such a world?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Knowledge-based accreditation, a boon to small hedge funds - <AUTHOR> http://www.regressionist.com/2020/08/28/knowledge-based-accreditation-a-boon-to-small-hedge-funds/ <comment><USER2> do you have to have a company sponsor your to take the test?</comment>


Being Frugal is for the Rich - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/3840/frugalwoods-frugality-millennials?zd=1&zi=7gxry37j <comment><USER2> I liked the article, I think there's a lot of truth here. These people could avoid their hypocrisy by stopping preaching frugality and instead talk about how they are succeeding by being a remote worker and a business owner. Then they would be admirable. Although of course they'd need an alternative business and therein lies the problem. I'm sure they could think of one though give the success with this frugality nonsense.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree. Reducing their monetary outgo is only a part of their story. If someone makes minimum wage, there's a sharp limit as to how "frugal" they can be.</comment></comment>


Here's a *real* Bill Gates Windows installation debacle - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2014/heres-real-bill-gates-windows-installation-debacle/

<comment><USER2> And that, folks, is arguably the single biggest contribution to Apple's success. Every hero needs a villain, and if Windows had actually been good instead of merely the lesser evil I think Apple would have had a much harder time of breaking into the desktop market. I know it's "cool" to shit on Windows and Microsoft, and I actually despise Apple products, but let's be frank: Microsoft had a great opportunity and they blew it. Windows 8 will not return them to their former place of glory.

Microsoft had _huge_ mind share. Everybody's aunts and uncles were all running Windows in the XP heydays. Microsoft has (had?) enormous talent but it's seemingly been squandered. Their design decisions in the last decade or so seem to continually shift from one boneheaded idea to the next. Using a modern Windows is an exercise in frustration from start to finish, as Bill so helpfully illustrates here.

I've never worked at MSFT but every single bit of news I read about them points to massive, systemic cultural problems and I think those problems manifest themselves in what could have been a truly stellar series of operating systems.

IMHO I truly think the only thing keeping Windows in the OS game is gaming. As soon as gaming on Linux (or even OSX) becomes viable I believe Windows will cease to exist outside the mobile space.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quote: "if he brings even a fraction of that attitude to his new role as technical adviser, it would at least keep Microsoft's product teams on their toes"

But the problem is the issues that Gates saw did not get fixed. Even Bill Gates could not get this stuff fixed. The mess continued.</comment>


Yahoo uses Google Apps - <AUTHOR> http://mail.google.com/a/yahoo.com/

<comment><USER2> I don't think the conclusion is correct. You'll get a login page for any _claimed_ domain -- something someone at Yahoo may have done defensively.</comment>