The saddest "Just Ship It" story - <AUTHOR> https://kitze.io/posts/saddest-just-ship-it-story-ever <comment><USER2> "just ship it" is just as dumb as "never ship it". Why are people so prone to these oversimplified polarazations?

Also, if I learned anything over the last few decades it is that the market supports many solutions to the same problem. Why do software developers believe that if someone gets there first that's it it's done? Someone invented and sells a toaster? Done. Someone started selling bikes? Better ditch my step design. Cars? Just one brand, obviously.

People release apps into oversaturated markets every day. Most fail, some do well, and not because they were better in every way than the competition, just because they were different, they were tried, and some people found them to be 'Good Enough'.

<comment><USER3> > _Why do software developers believe that if someone gets there first that 's > it it's done?_

It doesn't help that when you come to HN or Reddit releasing something, the comments are quick to point out other competing products in a seemingly snarky way.

"I use X. It has that feature plus these other ones. Why would I switch to yours?" I get the spirit of why someone would say that, but it's really hard to read tone in a forum post.

I don't know, man? Don't?

<comment><USER4> > "I use X. It has that feature plus these other ones. Why would I switch to > yours?" I get the spirit of why someone would say that, but it's really hard > to read tone in a forum post.

Maybe I'm naïve but don't see it as snark most of the time. I see those posts as "here is some springboard for you to share the product or your vision and goals.

Sometimes it is genuine snark but I like to believe it is usually curiosity even if it isn't true.

I mean look at Dropbox. The basic idea is so simple. If you've used rsync/robocopy you might think it is ridiculous this product even exists. Doubly so if you're aware of how cloud providers charge so much for network traffic. Even Google Drive unlimited has to cap the amount of data transfer in a day. But there are always ways. For example, I think Dropbox has now limited free users to three syncing devices.

Or gitlab. Like huh? But GitHub exists. And surely git-web or gitea is better suited for a web interface for git? But then gitlab has almost nothing to do with git. As far as I understand, the goal of gitlab has always been to be a complete product.

I bring up these two examples because maybe the comments were snark but the founders seemed to handle it pretty well in both cases (at least publicly). I think their self-confidence shows in the product.

<comment><USER5> > If you've used rsync/robocopy you might think it is ridiculous this product > even exists

I mean, only if you also have no understanding of other people having different backgrounds, skillsets and experiences?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in this same boat, but 8... EIGHT YEARS LATER! that competitor went out of business, and I bought them, their customers, and everything because I know the way I had more efficiently solved some of the same problems will let me run that business profitably.

<comment><USER7> That's not something I expected to read! Will you migrate them to your version of the app?

<comment><USER6> I'm in the process of rebuilding the entire system from scratch again with the knowledge I have.

The code I had written before would have been impossible to maintain, their code was written in a language I hadn't used before, and our databases were different enough that trying to merge things would have been insane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just saw, after over 18 months of off and on development, that some other company has exactly implemented my idea, minus one key feature. They did a really great comprehensive job.

After wailing and licking my wounds for a day I decided that just because they've done that doesn't mean the game is over. I actually decided it was an advantage because I could just copy their approach to solving certain thorny UI challenges.

Also, it's validation for my idea. Until I saw that I thought maybe the idea was just a pipe dream.

It's dumb to drop a project just cause someone else did it.

Maybe programmers tend to give up when they see someone else did it because programmers think the code is the business or the code is the win or the code is the success or something, when in fact success is much more than the code.

<comment><USER9> Experience taught me the opposite: If nobody have implemented your product idea, most likely it is because there is no need for your idea. If you don't find any competition - quit. The way you are going to be executing on an "idea" is what counts. Seldom is the case that the first one implementing the idea is the one that ends up taking over most of the market.

<comment><USER10> Being too much behind a product idea is doubly bad, because an idea isn't a business. You need some plan for how that'll progress over time, or how does any delivery, licensing, or potential investment get managed?

I'm about 1.5y into a startup that's picking up steam, and I've stopped feeling worried about similar "ideas". We have a plan for who wants our product, what they care about, and how much they'll pay for it. We have an platform that can be used to support a plethora of unique marketable products. We have a sales team in place. There's so much more going on than the original "what if we used version control thinking with contracts and legal knowledge?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes it's not just about shipping but also about knowing how to approach it and having the vision. Case in point - many many years ago, around 2004 or 2005, I built this stupid app with a couple of friends - it was a text message based gossip app where you can share updates on celeb spotting and subscribe to get notifications by tags or locations. Whatever. It didn't pick up understandably (it had like 200 users in our city), but we thought maybe we'll pivot it:

We aggregated the reports into a website with a nice feed, and then we thought, what if instead of one feed about celebs, people could just post whatever they want via text messages and others could follow them and get the texts or view the feed of these short (140 characters or so?) posts on a website? It would be kinda cool.

But mobile providers would not allow us to send media messages, and we thought the idea just kinda sucked and is not worth a start-up, especially since now we have group text messaging in newer phones! And MMS support that we don't have.

So yeah, I've basically written a proto-Twitter a bit before Twitter existed (the gossip version also predated Gawker Stalker by a year), but the harsh reality is that it didn't take off because of me and the people I worked on this with weren't made of the stuff of people who start billion dollar companies.

<comment><USER12> That "stuff" is utter lack of scruple and astronomic amount of luck, don't feel too bad. If there was someone like that among you, you'd probably end up like Noah Glass anyway.

<comment><USER11> Maybe. One other funny anecdote about this project was that I attended this big tech unconference around that time, and I wrote a version of this app that allowed people to post updates from sessions, notify about upcoming sessions, follow hashtags, etc.

So there I stood in front of 200-300 entrepreneurs and investors and internet pioneers (there were even a couple of billionaires or people who later became billionaires in that crowd), and I pitched it to them so they'd register and use it.

The response was pretty lukewarm and only few people used it. And not a single one saw anything special about the idea. Which again, is probably how I presented it more than anything.

But anyway the moral of the story is that contrary to popular belief, being in the right place at the right time, AND coming up with a "how come on one thought of that before" idea before anyone else, AND actually delivering a nice MVP - all those are not enough. Eventually it comes down to things like tenacity and charisma and boldness and obviously luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This happened to me in 2010. I love hiking, and when you get to the top of a mountain one of the things you do is look at all the other mountains and figure out which ones they are. It's called name-that-peak. Sometimes at scenic overlooks there's a nice hand-drawn placard with all the peaks labeled, so I wanted to make an app to do that.

When I started, there was kind of a website to do this already, but it was absolutely awful and I knew I could do way better.

So I did. I spent 100-150 hours working out all the math and coding up the program to reproduce that placard from terrain data. I still have all my notes. It was kinda slow — one panorama took 4-6 minutes to draw — but it worked.

And then I didn't ship. Life got in the way, and it was always harder for me to do the second 50% than the first, even though in this case the first 50% was way harder.

Three years later, one of my friends shared an app with me, just released. It did the same thing. The author did a good job describing how I felt then too, how the app was good but I hated it anyway. I never used it, probably because I ended up moving overseas anyway to a place without free high-res terrain data.

That was my best chance to date to do something I've always dreamed about: make something cool that a lot of people love to use. Novel, good ideas like that don't come along very often.

</comment><comment><USER14> > After 2 years of development, juggling between the fucking horror that's the > web platform, React Native, Expo, GraphQL, bitching about how there's no > ideal tech stack, the good old jQuery and Filezilla days, switching to other > projects, releasing other apps, losing passion, finding passion, coming back > to the app, etc. etc. etc...

> I just dropped it.

This sounds like a great project and a really good outcome. OP learned a lot and the project provided motivation for him to explore interesting tech and gain real insights about the drawbacks of each. If I had gotten that much of all my side projects that would be great!

If your expectation is that each side project will turn into an Instagram style success story, you'll most likely never be happy.

</comment><comment><USER15> One thing I find useful to remember is that every new feature is a new blog post, a new social media post, and more opportunities to promote yourself. Shipping with all the features is basically taking away a lot of those opportunities. Whereas if you ship small, you can keep creating buzz about yourself for the next two years and bring a lot of users on the journey.

<comment><USER16> I ship. But I fall flat on my face when it comes to YouTube explainer videos and blog posts. I published 4 videos when I launched my app over a year ago and have been coasting on those ever since. I have so much new (and relatively) exciting content queued up. Why don't I write and film? Because the editing experience is EXHAUSTING. I can't "fix a bug in a video" like I can with a new feature. Every day, when I've got a few hours to work on my project the last thing I want to do is film a screencast. Honestly, my problem is my standards are too high (script, quality, music, flow, etc) and I'm just not good at it.

For those interested, here's my app's most popular YouTube video: [https://youtu.be/hnqUP1CZd24](https://youtu.be/hnqUP1CZd24)

My project is an electron app for printing labels. You can find more info at [https://label.live](https://label.live)

<comment><USER17> I know where you're coming from. I'm far more comfortable working on my library's codebase - fixing, improving, etc - than I am with planning/writing/creating "promotional" stuff about the stuff I've fixed and improved in the latest release.

Promotion work is Hard Work. It's also depressing work when nobody notices the post ... or maybe I'm just too needy.

Loved the video, btw. I'm guessing the canvas part is Fabric.js based?

My library's most popular video has 220 views. I was quite proud when it reached 3 figures! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LebxNhVWyOQ&t=31s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LebxNhVWyOQ&t=31s)

<comment><USER16> Yep, Label LIVE uses fabric. It's all wrapped in a React app that syncs state with redux, and app state elsewhere (e.g. user design files saved to disk).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To me this sounds like the 1-in-a-thousand project that was commercially right on the money, that was an exception to the general rule.

I've released projects, but no one gave a damn. If someone could figure out how to monetize on parallel tracks, some idea that I had... well, cool. I couldn't.

This ain't 2000, when you could be just name any service, google to see if it was on the Internet, and just throw it on there to start raking in the big bucks.

Most projects die of disinterest. So, it doesn't matter if you release, or not: it'll die anyway.

To do better, you have to either have marketing, or a product that solves a real market problem.

But that process isn't that easy, and if you weren't intentional from the beginning about this, you're probably not losing much, talking your time to learn something well.

</comment><comment><USER19> This story implies there can only be 1 or something in the market.

This is not true at all. Almost everything has more than 1 competitor.

Ship what you have.

<comment><USER20> Yes. Nice story but I feel like the complaints about the slow UI and the rest of it should have been fuel to go back and finish the app. Plenty of companies have made their name doing old ideas, but better.

Though, I can definitely understand that looking at a finished app and thinking "there's still so much to do on mine..." can be so overwhelming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this is an issue with software developers. They think "if I just build it" but I look at that story and think "they weren't really serious. The other developer _probably_ gathered a team of 5+ people and together they did all of the things the lone software dev didn't want to do. Sales, Marketing, Docs, Websites, sign up, customer service, etc etc etc.

I can ship a library or a demo or a small stand alone thing but it can be 10x commitment to actually ship a real service. Deciding to actually do the other 90% of the work is a pretty big hurdle for many, me included.

<comment><USER22> I work with people and keep pushing to ship it but all the non-engineer members are pushing for more features. I don't think it's just a software developer issue.

<comment><USER21> Sorry I guess I wasn't clear.

My point was many software engineers see the product in their mind and think "I can build that!" and think that building it is 99% of the work and if they just built it the money will flow. But it turns out building it is only 10% of the work and when the other 90% of the work presents itself the drive to ship disappears.

In the OP's case the people that shipped found a way to get all the parts needed to ship read. The person didn't ship probably just wrote some code and never even considered the other 9 of 10 things that would need to be done to actually ship.

I'm probably thinking of myself to some degree. I made a product. Maybe I didn't have enough confidence to find partners or investors. I piddled with it for about 18 months, had a few public displays, and then at a trade show I saw someone who was serious with basically the same product but unlike me they found investors, hired people, and had a real company. They didn't just make some tech and a demo (what I did).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shipping is important. It's a nice feeling to get it out there. But to imagine that if you'd just shipped it then everyone would be using your app instead of someone else's is nonsense. You're in full control of shipping. Getting distribution for your software - getting it to really take off - is super super hard. Being an engineer, I think we tend to gloss over this part.

I'm working on a product in a very crowded space (issue tracking [0]). Shipping is the easy part. The day to day grind to find distribution and drive more and more users to your product, that's the tough bit.

0: [https://kitemaker.co](https://kitemaker.co)

<comment><USER24> Is there a pricing page on your site? (also, does it sync issues to GitHub issues? I'm trying to find something that does for very non-technical clients where we don't want to give them full access to GitHub)

<comment><USER23> At one point we did have syncing to GitHub issues (e.g. an issue created in Kitemaker was automatically created in GitHub and vice versa, labels and comments were kept in sync, etc.). However, we ended up dropping this feature because it wasn't very popular with our users and it was a tough one to get working perfectly.

I'd be curious to know if there's interest in such a feature though. We could always resurrect some dead code ;-)

<comment><USER24> We would _definitely_ be interested in that. We have a few very non-technical clients who would just be a bit overwhelmed by GitHub. Add into this that GitHub's permission levels don't allow you to have an issues only user (their official recommended way to do this is to have an entirely separate repo, just for your issues!), AND that we would like to set 2FA as mandatory for organisation users, but then we're back to the non technical users for whom the whole concept of 2FA is alien.

Thanks for the pricing info too. Sounds promising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This guy is hilarious. I actually laughed reading this line: "Every time I'll get a payment notification it's gonna feel like stepping on a lego"

Anyway FWIW it's good and not bad that you found a successful competitor doing what you wanted to do. It is not the end of the line rather somebody else has validated the idea for you. The only time you should actually worry is when you can't find one single competing product to what you're building.

BTW as you put it that their app is slow buggy, there seems to be a lot of room for improvement and so it's still not too late and maybe time to outshine your competition and eat/share their lunch.

<comment><USER26> They could not be around in two years For any number of reasons and have a lot of customers looking for this unshipped product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A few years ago I came up with this orders portal idea at work,which nothing special on its own,but was unique to the industry. My manager blocks it on the basis that it isn't easy enough to use and our clients would definitely need a,b,c features. Eventually we drop it all together. After some time, my manager quits and I took over his position. After a few months I have a meeting with sales,who are asking how long would it take to create an orders portal. I explain a bit about my previous attempt in a vague manner and they tell me that anything woul be better than nothing and should work on it. We launch after few weeks.I tell the rest of the management about my new ingenious solution. Clients love it. It's basic but it's zillion times better than anything they had before. The thing is now part of the offering to large corporates and it did help to win some nice contracts. The portal is still buggy,a bit hard to use, have very few features and so on.

</comment><comment><USER28> If I was him I'd be shipping it immediately after seeing that. If anything it's encouraging and you should be highly motivated to make your product better knowing that there is competition out there that are actually converting customers. There's very few ideas on the internet that can only sustain one party tackling them. When this guy notices in another 2 years that there's now 3 other people who have launched a similar service while he sat idly by he's going to feel even more silly.

</comment><comment><USER29> To remove pressure from yourself as an indie dev look at shipping as a starting point, not a critical event that needs to be perfect. It will be messy, it always is, BUT there's a lot of value in real feedback and will give you ideas you would have not had otherwise.

A quote from Kevin Ashton: "Nothing begins good, but everything good begins. Everything can be revised, erased, or rearranged later. The courage of creation is making bad beginnings.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been in the same boat for 12 years now. I have a litany of half-complete revolutionary ideas. Believe it or not, I was working on a HelloFresh type product in 2008, before HelloFresh even existed. The exact same premise, except my idea required no pantry staples: every ingredient in the box from oil to sauce. People told me I was crazy, but look at services like that now...

It is hard to get out of the mindset of just shipping something, because I was raised and taught that first impressions matter.

<comment><USER31> >I've been in the same boat for 12 years now. I have a litany of half-complete revolutionary ideas.

Perhaps this is typical mind fallacy, but I feel like this is 60%+ of all HN users.

<comment><USER32> It's because the idea isn't the part that matters, ideas are near worthless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A few years back I released an app that was almost a direct copy of another app. It's made enough to buy a Tesla S. Never let people say "How is your idea different from X?" Honestly, sometimes it doesn't have to be... much or at all.

<comment><USER34> that cant be the whole story... did you do something different marketing wise? its not just features, its also how you sell right?

<comment><USER33> It was a plugin, so I relied on the plugin directory to do the marketing for me. Other than that, it was priced competitively. Enough people matriculated through. The app itself sucked (was new to programming), but it did made money.

Since then, I've actually tried to do a lot of what's considered "best practices". Ironically, none of these techniques (which many thought leaders promote) actually worked for me. It may have worked for them (eg. prelaunch list building, getting influencers to use their app and promote it) but as a relative nobody, I think the rules are different for folks like me. I like to think I need to be scrappier and to simply do things that are counter-trend.

I suspect there's a large contingent of developers making a decent side living who aren't really talking much about things (too busy, family, other hobbies) and what they did to get there. Sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's just doing really dumb (but obvious in hindsight) type of things.

Over the years, I've grown skeptical about a lot of existing indie start up dogma that's been built up over the years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> First app I wrote professionally I shipped 2 years ago.

Half the stuff I would have spent more time on before remain on my list and nobody has asked for.

Meanwhile I spent time adding and adjusting completely different features.

Another related app I created (sort of a companion app)...went in another direction that I wouldn't have predicted.

Things change dramatically in production. It seems obvious at times but how people use an app and what they want "now" is hard to know.

</comment><comment><USER36> My favorite just ship it story is the software to control the first SpaceX droneship landing attempt. The developers told Elon that there'd be no way the code could be ready in two weeks. He asked if they could give a 50% shot, they said yes so they shipped the code:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6T8mn6LD2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6T8mn6LD2E)

Of course they did learn a ton.

<comment><USER37> Hm, if the statements in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ) are correct that failure was because they ran out of hydraulic fluid, not software (but maybe/probably that's not the complete story)

<comment><USER36> The software likely caused an overuse of the hydraulics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Just Ship It" mentality produces this kind of sad outcomes [https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10961-boeing_737max_automated_cr...](https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10961-boeing_737max_automated_crashes)

</comment><comment><USER39> I think this story is less about shipping the product and more about treating a product as a product and treating a hobby as a hobby. If you're working on a new project that you think should be a business, you need to atleast have an idea going in what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve success. I feel like you could read the next blog post in this series and it will say

>"I learned to "Just Ship it" but I thought "If I build it they will come"

And then it'll be about how putting some code out the door isn't the same thing as launching a product.

<comment><USER40> I find that an early release forces me to align the following updates with what I actually need the product to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The biggest reason to ship it is to start learning what you don't know yet as early as you can.

<comment><USER42> Or you find a customer base you didn't expect. Which has happened on products I've worked on a couple of times.

Not to mention a lot of markets look like this. Takes a year before they notice you. A year for them to realize you aren't going away. Another year before this buy anything. Another year before they buy in quantity.

Consider those first two years. None of those guys would know your current product is a POS because have haven't bought any yet. And they won't really mind finding rough edges as long as they are convinced they'll fixed.

<comment><USER41> I've never shipped anything commercially on my own. But my gut feeling is that there's a fear of, "I'm going to ship something that's not great, and so people will look at it, decide against it, walk away, and my chance is gone forever."

I have a feeling that in reality there is always a constant stream of new potential customers who will consider your product, and eventually the number of people who reject it and walk away will start to go down.

<comment><USER42> My company has two customers that were unhappy enough that we refunded their money and they came back a few years later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This happened to me a long time ago - i was making a "social" type product that was location based and a competitor launched theirs too but their founders were famous and they got loads of users straight away. In social, network effects matter so launching first does have a large benefit especially if the idea is new.

I gave up on the idea a few months later but kept an eye on the project. It didn't take off the way it was supposed to, and I have a feeling that if I was still working on my version I could have pivoted and taken advantage of what I was learning by watching them faster than they could have (they had so many users etc to support)!

And that was in social - in most other products network effects are nowhere near as powerful e.g. I tried linear.app for a side project even though i actually enjoy using lira at work. Since i have many projects it's easy to try new things on some and drop / change what doesn't work.

I think the "just ship it" oversimplification comes from the fact that getting user feedback is vital for most products. It doesn't mean that launching first is the goal though. The product I'm working on now is in a super crowded space (landing page creation) but it has an edge over others for a particular type of market (developers who don't want to mess around with UI, drag and drop etc but still want beauty and control) and even though the product is "ready" im not "just ship it"-ing because I'm busy "talking to users".

</comment><comment><USER44> I have experienced creating products.

For me, "just ship it" is a totally wrong advice to give, in the same way as "we will ship is when is ready"(and never is ready).

You have to plan ahead, know your limitations and say NO to adding things you can not complete on time. And you have to plan for things that look simple being much harder to implement in practice.

You need discipline for saying no, and it is not as funny as just trying new things all the time(new languages, new platforms, new methodologies, new projects). But you are an adult, not a kid, you should be able to control yourself(and most people can't BTW, they drink coffee and smoke because they need external controls instead of internal).

You should try new things, but not too much. It takes time for being efficient and master something. There are diminishing returns too but productivity while learning something new is almost zero compared with the master.

How much is too much? It depends on your specific job.

I recommend people to write down and document the actual real work that something takes on calendars and their expectations.

Over a period of time, you will be able to compare your expectations to your actual work in detail. You will surprise yourself where you spend most of your time.

Then you will be able to take decisions and say NO to those areas that take most of your time and give you back little on future projects.

</comment><comment><USER45> Something that makes me a bit reluctant to "just ship it" is that you can post things on HN and producthunt only once, so often I'm motivated until I do that, so that my launch is more succesful, but then later I think: Only a few users, is it even worth it to keep working on this? I wish it was possible to keep people who upvoted/liked your product updated. Or maybe poll them on things like: Would this feature be valuable to you?

<comment><USER46> i don't know about ph, but i don't think hn minds if you post updates every month or two?

<comment><USER47> > i don't think hn minds if you post updates every month or two?

but it's also likely not to care

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Then there are ideas you just don't get around to... [http://www.procrastinationjournal.com/](http://www.procrastinationjournal.com/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Being first to market is overrated, once the market is established you have much better information on how you can carve out your slice, whether that be on pricing or some other point of difference.

Even the established players in a field get complacent or too large to move quickly to address an emerging need and leave themselves open to disruption.

<comment><USER7> It might be overrated, but clearly it STILL MATTERS. I mean the entire article is about a developer who stopped working on an idea because he was beaten to market.

<comment><USER50> That is more about him and how he reacted than how it actually works in the market. If you have a better vision and a better execution, you can worry less about being the first, especially in an industry with a low barrier of entry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> You did not lose time, you learned. You could have built and shipped, it still would have needed a lot of effort (and luck) to be successfull. Next time you have a project you already have that knowledge and you can capitalize on it. Don't the say that "The doing is often more important than the outcome".

<comment><USER52> > Don't the say that "The doing is often more important than the outcome".

If you're burning through your own money to bootstrap something, wrong/bad decisions made early can cost so much time and money it makes it unfeasible to continue. If you're burning investors money, it's less devastating personally and you can afford that expensive learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I was a part of a project like this. A LOT of money was dumped into development, we built stuff from scratch, took months and months of hard work - and it felt revolutionary.

Then HUGE COMPANY X released the exact same product but 50x further along and we could never compete.

We all walked away feeling like shit, with a lot of money and time down the drain, and our tail between our legs. Most of us on the team haven't spoken since and it's been about 12 years.

Now-days I work on projects where competition doesn't really matter. There's a lot of other people doing the same thing, but we're all a little different, and just different enough that everyone who likes these types of products buys them all if they're good.

<comment><USER54> What do you make?

<comment><USER55> Adult entertainment?

<comment><USER54> I was thinking video games. But that can be it too. The guy was so cryptic about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> So, what was the app?

<comment><USER57> I recently found Responsively [1], which looks a lot like OP's Sizzy [2], but I doubt it's about those apps, because Sizzy has been shipped for a while now, and Responsively is free (Kitze mentions paying in the article).

[1] [https://github.com/manojVivek/responsively- app](https://github.com/manojVivek/responsively-app)

[2] [https://sizzy.app](https://sizzy.app)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Developing without shipping is saying "I know what my (potential) customers want better than they do". People with big egos may actually believe this; but I think most people pretend they believe it so no-one ever gets to criticise their precious.

Either way, it's a monumetally stupid position - just about everything ever sold has been massively improved by customer feedback.

<comment><USER59> bridges, vaccines, cars, skyscrapers, aeroplanes, ...

<comment><USER60> For vaccines, the clinical trials are basically customer feedback collection via closed alpha and beta releases, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The exact thing has happened to me over the years about twice now, even though some of my more recent apps I have actually shipped... It frustrated me so much that I decided to not take anymore contracts for a few months and just put my head down and pump out a few mac / iOS apps I've always wanted to make...

</comment><comment><USER40> I try to release early because it's a lot easier to prioritise issues on something that's live. I find the motivation to update a live product a lot easier to find.

It's also a lot easier to improve a product I use than one I'm just running locally. It also gives the website some time to rank in the search engines.

</comment><comment><USER62> But if you ship it, will they come?

For the author, yes, perhaps. He appears to have a sufficiently large following to help with this.

For the rest of us, finding a way to reach an audience willing to pay will likely remain the biggest problem.

Which is not to underestimate the discipline required to just ship it. Everything the author said still applies there.

</comment><comment><USER63> It's particularly pertinent I've had this tab open for 4 days meaning to read it. wow.

In that time, I had plans and started an app and decided to leave it for too long thinking now one would like it. Then that sailing game was on the front page of HN, that's almost exactly what I was working on.

I also have a pet project in development about making a google sheet more presentable for users, does that sound familiar to anyone else? Yeh also on the front page recently, not mine though.

I just keep telling myself, ideas are cheap and don't get bummed out by it. Good job everyone else executing. I'll still make some of them anyway.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm building a business facing SaaS for a market with about 10 current incumbents of varying scale (millions to billions of revenue). The technology is about 40, maybe 50 years old, my stack will be a bit more modern but still based on ancient specifications.

Once my product is close to parity with the basic competitor offerings (i.e. copying 1-2 features and ignoring the rest), I'll market it and I'm hoping that my automation level will give me a massive margin that allows me to operate at a lower scale and still churn out a decent amount of net profit each month.

</comment><comment><USER65> "Shipping is a feature too."

</comment><comment><USER66> Money in the bank beats a lot of things

That's why when I hear stories about "being perfectionists" or "you _have_ to use X technology, because X is perfect/everybody uses it/it's 'best practice' and the rest are second-class" I get skeptical

Facebook still uses PHP. PHP! Can you imagine if Mark had stopped to rewrite the thing in, I don't know, Scala because PHP sucks (well, it does, but it works)?

Aim for money in the bank.

</comment><comment><USER67> (on the refrain of Michael Jackson's "Beat it")

Ship it, ship it

Ship it, ship it

Merge into master and release it

Add some more features, fix some more bugs

it doesn't matter if it don't compiles

Just ship it (just ship it, whoo!)

<comment><USER67> ohohoh downvoted xD someone here has bruises and it shows

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This was a funny read. I think a good way of thinking about this problem is: it's not a matter of shipping the product. That is, putting the product into market but, a matter of getting your product into customers hands. The market and shipping is really just a means to that ends. Also, knowing what features customers need and what features customers can do without helps a lot.

</comment><comment><USER69> If this is a habit, then I agree you need to just ship more. On the other hand, a lot of people ship half-baked stuff and then move on, leaving a trail of disappointed users and never learning how to actually polish a product. I guess the latter is marginally better than the former, but I prefer a goldilocks approach to shipping.

<comment><USER70> Then there's the Halfbakery, where you can share your ideas so you don't have to half-bake them yourself!

[http://www.halfbakery.com/](http://www.halfbakery.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I spent a few years on a (semi) clone of a game only to have one of the original creators essentially show up and announce an official remaster. I did eventually ship, but man if only I'd shipped earlier...

</comment><comment><USER72> I've been writing ship software almost my entire adult life. Not everything I've written has been good, or successful, but most of it has _shipped_. Some of it has been quite successful; usually in ways I didn't plan.

I remember a manager I worked with, once wrote on a whiteboard at our first project meeting:

 _"The #1 Feature is SHIP."_

That project was a difficult and ambitious one, with a huge amount of tension between over-structuring and over-featuring, but it did result in a shipping product that was quite good, and lasted for a number of years. It's been decommissioned for years, but still runs today. My wife still uses it, and dreads when it will finally die.

The first version wasn't what we wanted, but it grew into something a lot better.

I also worked on a project that was killed just before it was to ship, because it couldn't meet spec, with all that "between done and ship" stuff.

To this day, I don't know if we made the right decision, by doing that. I have never encountered any software that does what it did, anywhere near as well as it did.

Wasn't my decision. I would have shipped it. I think it would have revolutionized the workflow, and set a high bar for everyone else.

In my experience, there's a _huge_ amount of work that has to happen, between when we declare it "done," and when it's ready to ship. _It's important to plan for it._

It's quite possible to overplan, but, in my experience, it's a lot more common to underplan.

Here's a metaphor that I use[0]:

 _Shipping is boring.

Ever watch a building go up? A good prefab looks complete after three months, but doesn't open for another nine months. It looks awesome and shiny, but is still behind a rent-a-fence. What gives?

That's because all that interior work; the finish carpentry, the drywall, the painting, etc., take _forever_, and these are the parts of the building that see everyday use, so they need to be absolutely spot-on. The outside is mostly a pigeon toilet. It doesn't need to be as complete; a solid frame and watertight is sufficient. They just needed it to keep the rain out, while the really skilled craftspeople got their jobs done.

I like to make stuff polished, tested and complete. I don't like making pigeon toilets._

But that's just me. YMMV.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220324)

</comment><comment><USER73> If that were me, I'd have sent them an email, I'm sure they'd be happy to talk to you, just have to be a bit tight lipped about details of what you did until money changed hands.

</comment><comment><USER74> Just ship it mantra has worked for me.

I created filament even when my tolerance was slightly off, I managed to label it +/-0.03mm and sell it in market even with limited colour choice

</comment><comment><USER75> The irony is that he still didn't ship it !! Even when there isn't anything to lose :(. Please do!

</comment><comment><USER76> I shipped early, I have no customers. How do I know when to give up?

</comment><comment><USER77> I thought this was going to be about the Boeing 737 MAX.

</comment><comment><USER78> I loved reading your story Kitze - as you mentioned 99% :-) try to see the glass half full - always - no matter what.

Stay humble homie.</comment>


A Journal of the Plague Year: Daniel Defoe's Account of the Great Plague of 1665 - <AUTHOR> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm <comment><USER2> Journal of the Plague Year is actually a fictionalized novel but one written very soon after the actual events so it seems very true to life. I found it a great antidote to the tiresome zombie apocalypses plots that infest our tv screens.

Large swathes of London were dying in horrible ways, nobody knew why, and efforts to contain the plague often seemed to make things worse. People fled the cities (which worked, sometimes) but I found it heartening that people didn't immediately form the sort of murderous, paranoid, isolationist mobs that film and tv would have you believe.

<comment><USER3> I read it when I was a kid, and loved it. It's pretty cool to see this on HN, I almost never run into anyone who has read this book.

<comment><USER4> Well bump

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a recent book on the Plague following real people in 1348:

[http://cobblestonepub.ie/events/book- launch-1348-a-medieval-...](http://cobblestonepub.ie/events/book- launch-1348-a-medieval-apocalypse-the-black-death-in-ireland)

</comment><comment><USER6> See also Pepys and Evelyn. The plague was followed by the Great Fire of 1666, which both recount in their diaries.

<comment><USER7> Ty. Took a look at pepys. Thought it was odd he referred to "2 o'clock" I was under impression time was not recorded or referred to often in that manner .

Also two entries I read seems to be readable - as if it was somehow massaged

<comment><USER6> The originals were in shorthand, so versions in readable English have been edited for readability. He also wrote some bits in "code" which he didn't want his wife reading. [http://www.pepys.info/bits.html](http://www.pepys.info/bits.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: With a single site per comment, which sites do you visit regularly? - <AUTHOR> That way, you can upvote your favorites instead of posting a new, unique combination. <comment><USER2> [https://www.pornhub.com](https://www.pornhub.com)

<comment><USER3> I appreciate your honesty

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://sci-hub.tw](http://sci-hub.tw)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.physicsforums.com](https://www.physicsforums.com)

Great for physics and math, both homework, casual questions and more advanced stuff. Large number of active professors, phd studens etc.

</comment><comment> frosted-flakes [https://css-tricks.com/archives](https://css-tricks.com/archives)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://google.com](https://google.com)

(weird these hadn't been added)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW](https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW)

<comment><USER8> At first glance this appears to be a thinly veiled misogynist support group?

<comment><USER9> The link is not my cup of tea but I appreciate and welcome honest answers here. That's the best way to find offbeat refuges, obscure corners of intellectual obsessions, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://phdcomics.com/](http://phdcomics.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.techmeme.com](https://www.techmeme.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://quillette.com](https://quillette.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/](https://en.wikipedia.org/)

It might have been better to ask for the sites we think are coolest, even if we don't visit them regularly.

</comment><comment><USER13> HN

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://stackoverflow.com/](https://stackoverflow.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> NewsBlur: [https://newsblur.com/](https://newsblur.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://github.com/](https://github.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://secrethitler.io](https://secrethitler.io)

<comment><USER17> oh wow, this is well built. themed mafia/werewolf game with a twist

<comment><USER16> ty

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.archlinux.org/](https://www.archlinux.org/)

and subsites like:

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/](https://wiki.archlinux.org/)

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://drudgereport.com/](http://drudgereport.com/)

The zeitgeist of the country. A much cleaner web page than most things he links to.

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html](http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> [https://tomato-timer.com/](https://tomato-timer.com/)

My fix for back pain and a host of other problems.

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://hackaday.com](http://hackaday.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://duckduckgo.com](https://duckduckgo.com) (aka ddg.gg, ddg.co, or duck.com)

</comment><comment><USER21> gmail.com (which redirects to [https://mail.google.com](https://mail.google.com))

</comment><comment><USER22> [http://www.tokyojazzjoints.com/](http://www.tokyojazzjoints.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://www.predictit.org/](https://www.predictit.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.stackage.org/](https://www.stackage.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Stack Exchange

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://venturebeat.com](https://venturebeat.com)

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://www.biorxiv.org](https://www.biorxiv.org)

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://theweblist.net](https://theweblist.net)

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com)

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://macrumors.com](https://macrumors.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://youtube.com](https://youtube.com)

</comment><comment><USER29> [http://f5oclock.com](http://f5oclock.com)

</comment><comment> stone-monkey [https://italki.com](https://italki.com)

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://reverb.com](https://reverb.com)

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://chess.com](https://chess.com)

</comment><comment><USER32> reddit.com

<comment><USER33> old.reddit.com :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> slashdot.org

</comment><comment><USER35> 9gag.com

</comment><comment><USER36> tweetdeck.twitter.com

</comment><comment><USER37> Cross Validated

</comment><comment><USER38> arstechnica.com

</comment><comment><USER39> skimfeed.com

</comment><comment><USER40> distrowatch

</comment><comment><USER34> osnews.com

</comment><comment><USER41> skimfeed.com</comment>


Phishing Attacks via Google translate - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.akamai.com/sitr/2019/02/phishing-attacks-against-facebook-google-via-google-translate.html <comment><USER2> > However, like the Google page, this Facebook landing page also uses an older > version of the mobile login form. This suggests that the kit is old, and > likely part of a widely circulated collection of kits commonly sold or > traded on various underground forums.

This is actually the current design of the [https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com) login page, the version of the Facebook mobile site for lower-bandwidth connections and less- capable devices.

</comment><comment><USER3> > One interesting side note relates to the person driving these attacks, or at > the least the author of the Facebook landing page - they linked it to their > actual Facebook account, which is where the victim will land should they > fall for the scam.

Is this based on any evidence or just an assumption? It seems to me that the 'actual Facebook account' could just as readily be either a random or intentional framing of someone else by the one(s) doing the phishing attack or the page designer, in which case it would appear that it worked perfectly in that it apparently convinced Akamai.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what motivated the article's author to redact the scammer's email address.

<comment><USER3> > I wonder what motivated the article's author to redact the scammer's email > address.

This is good practice to prevent the possibility of revictimization in case the actual motive of the phishing attack was not phishing but to cause reputational damage to the owner of said email.

Consider: if someone wanted to target you and cause you potential legal and employment difficulties, they could launch a phishing attack using amateur code such as this, and have your work email appear as the "scammer's email", and then sit back and wait for the attack to be discovered and reported.

And even if not a reputation attack, the scammer could also simply be using a compromised email account, so once again redaction helps preempt the possibility of revictimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best defense is a good offense. That means taking your time and examining the message fully before taking any actions. Does the from address match what you're expecting? Does the message create a curious sense of urgency, fear, or authority, almost demanding you do something? If so, those are the messages to be suspicious of, and the ones most likely to result in compromised accounts. This is why I never open links directly from an email.

<comment><USER6> You could explain this over and over to my 65 year old parents, they still would fall for it. They're far from dumb, it's just that it's a lot of information of to handle.

<comment><USER7> One solution is to set up a free lastpass account, change all the passwords to something random and only use autofill. They have to go out of their way to enter the password into another domain

Sucks if they want to log in using a new or borrowed device

<comment><USER8> I've got my mom using an iPad which also reduces the attack surface, not to mention it's pretty hard for her to screw up the device on her own. I haven't had to help with anything computer related in about 4 years.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Top Python Functions I Wish I Knew Earlier - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/top-3-python-functions-i-wish-i-knew-earlier-8732e6f35161 <comment><USER2> I find I use getattr(obj, "name", default) much more than hasattr().

exec() is a security hole, or nasty bug, just waiting to happen.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your funniest hiring interview story? - <AUTHOR> Funny might be interpreted in both good and bad way. <comment><USER2> I was applying for my first real tech job as a help desk/sysadmin/LAMP stack admin role at a webhosting company. I had some experience doing a bit of this type of work on my own, but by no means was I an expert.

During the interview I was asked something like, "Can you explain what the LAMP stack is and what each piece does?" I gave my answer but when I got to MySQL I prounced it "My-Sqwill." The interviewer kind of gave me a funny look, chuckled a bit, and said, "Do you mean, 'My-Sequel'?", I gave the excuse I didn't know what the word was because I never heard anyone say it.

I walked out of the interview pretty defeated, but a few days later I heard back and got the job.

A month or so in I was speaking with the interviewer and he said, "Do you know why I hired you? Because you mispronounced 'MySQL' and said you didn't hear anybody say it out loud, but you could still tell me how it worked, what it did, and how to use it. To me that says you were mostly self-taught."

He was right and huge props to the interviewer for recognizing that.

<comment><USER3> Oh man I once made a huge ass of myself by hearing someone call SQL "Sequel" for the first time and saying I had never heard of it while talking about database design. Everyone else I had ever heard say it out loud had used the "Ess-Cue-Ell" version of pronouncing it.

Weeks later I heard someone else call SQL "Sequel" and I had enough context there to know they were talking about an SQL database and put it together. I think the person from that first conversation just thought I was a complete fucking moron though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny "strange/tragic" rather than "haha." Two stories. Heck, a bonus third.

My teammate was calling a candidate who had submitted their resume. Teammate got their voicemail where the candidate drops the N-Word. To top it off, Teammate was African. Non-plused. Candidate frantically called back apologizing saying it was a joke voice message. A big nope from our side.

A candidate comes in, brings their laptop for the shared screen coding section. Frantically clears all the Asian porn tabs while sharing. When we get to the questions for us part, he asks about the open travel policy and if that can be used to go to Thailand (no, open travel was to our other offices, all in the US). A bit cringy.

Bonus round. Early in my interview experience. Candidate comes in and two of us are going through coding questions with her. Simple stuff. She is woefully not qualified. We reach out to our in-house recruiter (much more experienced than either of us) for help on ending the interview early. Co-interviewer and I step out and go to the kitchen to commiserate on the negative experience. After letting the candidate go, In-House-Recruiter comes over. "Man, I've never seen someone cry so hard at being told it wasn't going to work out." Queue us interviewers feeling gut punched and like total jerks, totally gap faced. In-House-Recruiter laughs and says just kidding, Candidate knew she wasn't qualified and was just interested in trying a dev interview as she was normally a project manager and was perfectly fine and smiling as she left. Man, got us good.

<comment><USER5> Was candidate culturally authorized to use the N-word? Whether it was appropriate or not in a work environment I can see that paragraph reading completely differently with more context.

I actually had to re-read it 5 times at the "non-plussed" part, I just assumed the candidate was of African descent before reading the teammate was too. In which case the voicemail recording wouldnt have been a "flag" just not prepped for professional settings. Many people's voicemail arent whether its a competitive or not.

The combination would have resulted in smiles and nods for that almost distinctly American experience. But I guess it was just some suburban kid of non-African descent that really wanted to use the N-word.

<comment><USER4> It was a white kid with the hard "r" at the end, and not a jovial "ah" ending. My bad for being unclear, had just woken up and was typing from mobile.

<comment><USER5> The real question is whether the EOCC would consider the candidate to have said something hateful in a work environment or whether they would consider the candidate disqualified on basis of race

I should be a lawyer what am I doing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first car, an Alfa Romeo 75 (aka Milano) broke down on the highway. Engine siezed--the car had a timing belt issue earlier from lack of maintenance. Found a clean Volvo 850 being sold privately. Met the guy who was very pleased to deal with me. He threw in a set of nice Nokian (yeah they made those too) winter tires and sold it to me when there was a better offer because he didn't like negotiating with the other buyer. The car was clean--he and his wife would hand wash it every weekend for the life of the car.

So as we're finishing the transaction, he sees my engineering ring and asks about it. Yes, I do software. Hmm, he asks if I could help him out of a jam. He needed someone to add a print function to a Windows NT app. I say sure, I'll take a crack at it. He shows up that weekend with a laptop all set up with a dev env and source code. Figure out how to do GDI printing stuff and get it done. When he picks it up and sees what I did, asks me if I want a job. Worked as Director at that telco spin-off consulting place for years.

Another fun story is how when roommate of mine was interviewing for a company I interned at, I joined them for the interview because it was done over lunch due to scheduling issues. At the end of the day, I drop by their interview room to see who else is around to say hello to. The VP of R&D is there with a job offer in an envelope. I don't know how they expected to be seeing me that day. Good thing though, I was dragging my feet applying for grad job interviews.

In general, I haven't looked for jobs, they find me one way or another (pre LinkedIn). I did once submit an updated resume--after I was hired.

<comment><USER7> Wait what is an engineering ring. I don't have one of those.

<comment><USER8> In Canada, the title "engineer" is taken more seriously and restricted to people graduating from specific engineering programmes. The ring is a symbol of that: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring) (in the US, a similar thing exists for certified engineers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_Ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_Ring))

<comment><USER9> My Batman Decoder Ring™ didn't help with my interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hiring for a programmer position, It's January and it's the coldest day of winter, down in the low single digits.

The candidate is a 40-something man with a pretty good resume for the slot.

I start off with small talk.. "Wow, can you believe this weather? I can't remember the last time it was this cold."

He replies, "Is nothing. In Russia is where cold grabs hold of you, deep in bones. Only one thing help."

He reaches into his bag and pulls out an half empty pint bottle of vodka, opens it, takes a pretty decent swig and offers it to me.

"Is that from today??? I ask.

"Yes, very cold this morning."

End of interview.

<comment><USER11> You missed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I applied as an intern to a prop trading firm during my junior year of college. After the phone interview, I was invited in for an on-site. I get there and it's your standard electronic trading firm setup. Open office, desks grouped somewhat by the team you were on or what product you traded, so on and so forth.

They take me into this small conference room off of the main floor. It really could only seat two people comfortably but had seats for four. We started to talk about a pairs trading project that I'd done in my spare time when I hear a yelp come off of the floor and then the ear-splitting noise of Bawitdaba by Kid Rock blaring from the desk immediately outside of the conference room.

I can't emphasize enough just how little of a reaction the interviewer had. I paused momentarily and he gave a look to encourage me to continue talking, only now I had to yell. I answered the rest of the question as though we were communicating at a construction site. He then asked a follow-up, only this time he yelled as well. This continued for the approximately four minutes that the song lasted from start to finish, and when it was over we went back to our normal speaking voices. Neither of us ever acknowledged the impromptu Kid Rock concert.

I got the internship and was later offered a full-time position but turned it down to do startup-esque things.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not something I witnessed personally, but at one of my previous places (a web agency) my boss interviewed a guy that showcased a porn website as one of his projects. Apparently the interviewee was pretty pleased with himself on the how he tackled technical aspects of the work - handling favourites, tags, account part etc. while going through the live site with all the videos without a hint of reflection.

<comment><USER9> Reminds me. After the dot-com crash I couldn't be picky, and thus interviewed at a porn company. One of the interviewers was clearly a porn star or ex porn star and had huuuge breasts for her otherwise skinny frame.

She was watching my eyes the entire time. I realized if I looked down to examine her uniquely proportioned features, I'd fail the interview. It took a lot of will-power to never even glance. She was probably there to test my will-power, since she didn't ask technical questions. (I didn't get the job for reasons not related to anatomy.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interviewer: What are your strengths? Me: Cache Invalidation and Naming Things.

We paused and looked at each other for a minute and then we burst out laughing.

<comment><USER15> That is fantastic.

"There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, and naming things." \-- Phil Karlton

<comment><USER16> > There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, > naming things, and off-by-one errors.

I think this version is better, sadly no idea who to attribute it to ... ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was trying to break into web programming from desktop programming, so I was willing to start with a relatively low salary to get my foot in the door.

The interviewer asked what I expected as salary. I replied, "I'll accept peanuts to get started in web". A voice then rang out from a random cubicle: "Well that's exactly what they pay here!"

Another time an interviewer asked, "can you work well with difficult people?" Of course that set off a yellow alert in the back of my mind. Unfortunately, it was just after the dot-com crash and I couldn't be picky, so took the job. There was indeed a very good reason they asked that question.

<comment><USER17> Could you write some more about "difficult people" you worked with?

<comment><USER9> I worked in a small room with 3 IT employees. They all 3 had big quirks. (They'd probably count me as #4.) One guy, my de-facto supervisor, was from the military and brought military culture with him. He strictly dictated my tool-set and work-practice conventions without debate, which was the main reason I left. I could live with the other quirks. (My actual supervisor was in a different building and knew almost nothing about IT.)

The other two people liked library-style quiet and rarely talked unless necessary for work, and were not sociable. I had a habit of talking to myself, such as grumbling about Microsoft. But, I had to quickly quel that habit. The least annoying guy liked classical music, which was something we had in common and the only non-IT chit-chat I did there. A toast to classical music! (clink clink)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was applying to a developer position and the recruiter sent me a url to a web application for online tests, this was very long time ago when they weren't so popular, and this was the first time I was sent one.

The mail with the link arrived while I was at work. They told me that it is time-limited so I wanted to wait until I got home to be be free of distractions, but I was getting curious.

I though I can log in with another email and take a look at what kind of questions would I get, so being still in the office I logged in using a very old email address I had: 'firstname.lastname@example.com'. I went through the questions without thinking too much, and finished very quickly.

10 minutes after that I got a call from the recruiter:

\- Hey, have you finished the test?

\- (What a pain! I though.) No, I'm waiting until I get home after work to do it.

\- OK! (hang up)

5 minutes after he called me again:

\- Are you lying to me?

\- Why would I do that?

\- The client told me that some guy called 'crazy bastard' has finished it already, but it wasn't you. Did you give the test to someone else to solve it for you?

\- Actually I tested the website, logging in with a different email just to get familiar with it, but I expected to do 'the right one' later when I get home.

\- That was a single use link, you only had one chance to do the test!

\- Ups! I didn't know that.

\- Now the client believes that you were trying to cheat. Sorry I think you fucked up!

\- Why would I give it to someone else to do it on my behalf but pretending to be someone called 'crazy bastard' instead of myself? That is the opposite of cheating. Please tell them that I'm sorry for the confusion, tell them the story and that my intention was to prepare as best as I could for the task. Pleeeeease!

\- I'll see what I can do...

Later in the day he called me again to tell me that the client though the story was to stupid to consider it cheating, and since I got 90% of the questions correct in half of the time, they wanted to proceed to the next interview round.

</comment><comment><USER19> Less than a year into the industry - we were a bunch of kids handling a not- so-easy project, and we were told to hire some experienced people. So we started interviewing. One of the candidates was very experienced and she got annoyed because we asked her "very simple, beginner, kid level" questions. And she cut the interview short and left.

We felt bad for her (we were never disrespectful, we just asked questions to the best of our ability. It didn't help that we were just fresh college grads with no real world experience). It is kinda funny if I think about it now.

Edit: Another one, not personal, but happened in a place I worked

The sysadmin team was hiring. The candidate walks in, lists the names of all the servers we had and a whole bunch of other details that only our sysadmins were supposed to know. The candidate had hacked into our network and had leisurely browsed around and made detailed notes. He was hired on the spot and his first task was to plug all the holes that he had used to get into our network.

</comment><comment><USER20> A few years ago, I was on my way for an interview. An asshole cut my way in the most dangerous way you can imagine that I nearly kill a pedestrian, because both the pedestrian and I did not know where to do, thanks to this F1 driver and his expensive car, so I hit brakes and the poor pedestrian jumped onto my car to avoid getting hit by that moron.

I swore the shit out of this bastard. He was looking at me like the devil...

15 minutes later, I was outside the reception of the company I was about to get interviewed.

The lady told me to go to the conference room.

Guess who came for the interview? The ASSHOLE!

"oh, you! Hi, bye!"

</comment><comment><USER21> At the time I was a firmly entrenched back-end dev and was put onto this job by a recruiter and it was just up the road from the house, blissful commute through a park, not the best salary offer but that was negotiable, in short - great potential.

In the nitty gritty of the interview I found they asked me a lot of javascript questions (okay I thought, maybe they were testing my limits - they were confident in my 'advertised' back end skillset from just reading my CV?).

Turns out the recruiter had put me up for the wrong position, it was front-end and to my credit they were willing to hire me as front-end but I had other interviews for positions I'd prefer.

</comment><comment><USER22> back in the days, I was interviewing over the phone with the hiring manager of a large startup in SF. Basically doing live coding on a shared note pad. The guy started chatting with his colleagues and completely forgot about me. 10 minutes in the exercise I had a bunch of clarifying questions to ask. I kept yelling and calling him over the phone, he did not hear me and kept talking with people around.

15 minutes into the interview I hung up. 15 minutes later he tried to call me back on my phone (apparently he took him 30 minutes total to remember I was interviewing). Got an email from the recruiter mentioning a "connection problem during the interview". Then the day after I got another email from that recruiter saying "I wasn't a great fit for the role:.

I think startups really win the #1 spot when it comes to horrible candidate experiences.

</comment><comment><USER23> Leaving church one day, guy in a nearby parking lot having trouble starting their motorcycle. Had a balloon tied to the seat, there'd been some goofy balloon ceremony after service so I said Hi! want a lift?

In the car we talked, I said I worked remote in CA but would like to try a local job. He said they'd been looking for a Project Lead at their startup, I'd be a shoo-in. I went over, they talked a bit and made an offer.

<comment><USER23> Was at a gaming convention in Milwaukee, in the hotel room, phone rings and Mark an old client of mine was calling. "Hey we got bought, won't be doing any more contract engineering, can you take over support of one of our customers?" Thinking fast I said "Yes!"

Turns out it was Mark's biggest customer, they'd been designing their products for 25 years, and its become a multi-year contract for us for a year now and several years to come.

Glad Mark still had my phone number!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> We had one guy who completely flubbed the his whiteboard question, something like "sort a deck of cards"; his routine totally didn't do what we asked. I gently asked something like, "umm, is that going to solve the problem?" He said, "Oh I'm a total fucking idiot", laughed, and fixed it. Great hire.

BTW I've been using whiteboard interviews for years. I know a lot of people hate them but if you don't use trick questions, let the candidate use whatever language they like, and treat them more as a collaborative effort you can get a good feel for a candidate (i.e. see through nervousness) and give _them_ a chance to see if we are a-holes or not. Think of the whiteboard more like scratch paper. If somebody gets wrapped around the axle on some part you can gently guide them out of the problem and then usually they can find their balance.

</comment><comment><USER25> At my previous job, I would start screening interviews with "What is the difference between a bit and a byte?"

A candidate actually replied: "One bit is 0.12 byte"

<comment><USER26> And since you had asked for the difference and not the ratio, the candidate immediately failed, right?

<comment><USER25> Funny :) I would have hired the candidate who would have told me the difference is 7 bits!

Still a failure because the ratio is actually 0.125, but I kept going for a few questions, I stopped when they could not explain the difference between a thread and a process...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was applying for a junior dev position. I already had some experience so I wasn't completely junior, I liked the company though and they only had a junior position available. So I thought what the heck I might try it.

I had been already waiting about 20 minutes in a boardroom when two guys came. We all introduced and sat down. One guy looked at my resume and after a while said

> "Well, if I had time before this meeting and looked at your resume I'd > prepare myself because you're clearly not a junior level developer."

It's worth noting that they had my resume about a week in advance.

<comment><USER28> Oh, if I had a nickel for everytime somebody dropped by my cubicle and said, "Can you sit in on this interview?" while throwing a resume at me.

"When is it?"

"Now."

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I walk into the office of the VP of Business Development, interviewing for a role to lead their ecommerce team. And I sit down and notice a fidget spinner, a couple of fidget cubes and a scrambled Rubik's cube on his desk. As we are sitting down I casually ask if he's into puzzles, he says no, he spends a lot of time of the phone and is always looking to do something with his hands.

Anyway, 10 minutes later, his cell phone rings, presumably a family member, as he looks concerned and very politely asks if he can step out to take it, in case its an emergency. I say, "of course" and I'm just sitting there with nothing to do but stare at the wall.

I didn't want to take out my phone, so I grab the cube and start solving it.

He steps back into the office thanking me just as I'm putting his solved cube back on his desk.

Not the main reason, but I did get offered the job.

</comment><comment><USER17> In our company there was a candidate. Always, at the end of interview there is possibility for employee to ask whatever he/she wants:

\- We've got all the answers from you, thank you. Maybe you have some questions for us? Is there anything you'd like to know?

\- Yes. How can I get to railway station...

</comment><comment><USER30> After an absolutely terrible interview the interviewee asked about opportunities for promotion as their any other question. I had to bite my tongue and not say I wouldn't worry about it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I was looking for my first job out of college, I went for an advertised junior developer position, all the questions where about electronics (yes even a whiteboard).

<comment><USER32> I've had this recently as well, even with a few years of software dev experience. It was for a software dev role. I graduated with electrical however, and was met with whiteboarding random hardware questions. Circuit theory, bit fiddling questions, op-amps, even using a spectrum analyzer. I had to dig deep on the spot from my school years. I managed an offer for the software position but I was so confused. I waited a week and took an offer for a more exciting position. It was very strange.

<comment><USER33> I graduated with an MSEE (originally started with CS, but changed majors late in my Junior year) and my first job was a SW job at a defense contractor. My favorite meeting was one where the HW teams and SW teams sat around blaming each other for something not working. I floored them all when I pulled out printouts from a logic analyzer and let them know that neither the hardware nor software were performing exactly to spec.</comment></comment></comment>


I saw aid for starving people spent on staff salaries through inept planning - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/mar/22/i-saw-aid-for-starving-people-spent-on-staff-salaries-through-inept-planning <comment><USER2> The article is IMHO a tad bit too vague and generic, but it does resound with my little experience with some "no-profits", over the years I have become increasingly critical on the way many of these are managed, notwithstanding the good will of most financers, volunteers and participants.</comment>


General Assembly launches Dash, a Codecademy-style site that teaches you to code - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/10/15/general-assembly-launches-dash-codeacademy-style-site-teaches-code/ <comment><USER3> I'm not sure about Dash (haven't tried it yet), but General Assembly puts out incredibly high quality courses taught by people working at well-known companies. If you live in NY or SF, take a look at their course listings: [https://generalassemb.ly/](https://generalassemb.ly/)

</comment><comment><USER4> In the context of code, "Dash" makes me think of the documentation browser: [http://kapeli.com/dash](http://kapeli.com/dash)

I hope that's not confusing enough to cause problems for either of them.

</comment><comment><USER5> What new features does Dash offer? The only one OP mentions is viewing your code on a simulated mobile device. While that's useful, it's not particularly relevant to the target audience of beginning web developers.

Note: Learned the basics of web programming from Codecademy - <USER2> helpful service.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the pace of the course is too fast for the beginner. For beginners, trying Codecademy or Treehouse might be better.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do you know if they get to advanced concepts about front end design? :)</comment>


Museu de la Tècnica - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704 <comment><USER2> I was just at a conference with Marcin in Barcelona, where we ate giant hotel breakfasts together for three days and tried to speak with one another in Polish about technical topics.

A lot of those conversations were about fonts and keyboards, his passion for them, and the history of mechanical writing. And then he drives off to sightsee and finds this place the next day.

It could not have happened to a nicer guy.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is the Museu de la Tècnica de l'Empordà in Figueres, website [http://www.mte.cat/](http://www.mte.cat/) . According to the website, only open by appointment, so he got lucky indeed that he could just randomly walk into it. The tweets make it seem like the museum is far outside the town, but it's actually just 200m outside the city centre. Figueres is easy to reach by road and both classic and high-speed rail.

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the key takeaways for me from this story is that we've lost serendipity thanks to the information overload.

Almost all vacations, tours, travels, etc are mapped out and pre-scheduled (even prepaid if possible) before we start on a vacation. The key exploration aspect is lost upon our generation.

Only populist establishments enjoy decent patronage, this affects us culturally as well. We're only exposed to a well curated section of various cultures instead of experiencing them unadulterated.

<comment><USER5> On the one hand, I think you're right to an extent - when I travel, I've almost always booked all my accommodation, car hire and so on in advance, all mediated through the Internet, and making my plans relatively inflexible. The internet definitely advantages the "well curated" stuff.

On the other hand, technology has also enabled _more_ flexibility in travel. When my grandmother went on her once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe 30 years ago, she spent all day on bus tours, going wherever the tour company had chosen to take her. When my father and I went to China, South Korea and Japan two years ago, the only bus tours we went on were to visit the Great Wall and the DMZ. Our accommodation? Bar one location, all booked through sites like Hostelworld. Our air tickets? Booked directly by us, over the internet. We got to choose where and when we did things. Sure, backpackers and so on have been travelling with independence before we had the internet to help us, but technology has brought this independence to a far wider audience with a lower appetite for uncertainty and risk.

<comment><USER6> > When my grandmother went on her once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe 30 years > ago

I think it's really sad to do a "one in a lifetime trip to Europe". Every single country has way too much to offer to do just "one trip for everything". Hell, you can spend a month a year touring France like my parents and never run out of interesting things to see after 25 years.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, but in defence of my grandmother...

A) Things were a bit different 30 years ago. Flying from Australia to Europe is expensive now, it was even worse then.

B) Things are particularly different when, like my grandmother, you're a working class person, living in a working class inner city suburb, in government housing.

Given those circumstances, I think planning a "once in a lifetime" trip is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sheet music typewriter (from the linked story, if you click "show more" enough times): [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvzBRKIXgAA- cp_.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvzBRKIXgAA-cp_.jpg)

It makes sense that such a thing would exist, but I've never really thought about what such a machine would look like or how it would work.

<comment> jay-anderson I'd like to know more about them honestly. I'm not sure music typewriters would be as practical as transfers (buy a sheet of symbols and rub them onto the page) or stencils. From what I understand the highest quality music typesettings engraved the music in plates. (More info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_engraving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_engraving))

<comment><USER8> I bet it has push buttons for advancing the paper up and down the staff, greatly simplifying keeping notes aligned compared to a stencil.

It also looks like overstriking the lines on notes above and below the staff would be easier than adding them over a stencil.

I guess it would serve different purposes than engraved music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a more readable version (like Storify) and, contrary to the other Twitter Moment shared here, has all the original tweets intact: [https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

</comment><comment><USER10> Twitter is a terrible medium for whatever message might have been hidden in there. I'm sure it must be good for something, but whatever that might be, a story like that is not it.

</comment><comment><USER11> >Marcin Wichary, the lead typographer and designer at Medium,

Yet we had to read what should have been a blog post in a series of tweets. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> For those who want to learn a little more about the museum, there's an English language page here:

[http://www.mte.cat/content/blogcategory/64/178/lang,ca/](http://www.mte.cat/content/blogcategory/64/178/lang,ca/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Wonderful. However, a blog-post on their web-site or, say, a post on Medium would have been so much more readable than a tweet-storm you have to keep doing "Show More..." on.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is the most inspiring story I have read all week. Not a typewriter geek but this story makes a good case. I wish for everyone to stumble like this on a treasure related to what they love.

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of a similar museum my wife and I stumbled on in Girona this September: Museu del Cinema. Four stories of movie-making history with a very heavy focus on pre-motion picture equipment and devices like magic lanterns, zoetropes, 3D viewers and shadow puppets. We were the only patrons there in this otherwise touristy part of town. Highly recommended!

[http://www.museudelcinema.cat/eng/colleccio.php](http://www.museudelcinema.cat/eng/colleccio.php)

</comment><comment><USER16> This museum would make Tom Hanks ecstatic [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208662)

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh man, I don't care (as much) about typewriters but yeah, what a happy story. It's like visiting a town for a day and learning by accident that the band you've loved for years but never seen live is playing there this very night.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a terrible way to tell a story.

<comment><USER19> I enjoyed it. Something about reading it tweet by tweet made it feel even more like I was on the ride with him as he's discovering something new.

<comment><USER20> It's not a great UX for reading the story. Which is why the 'moments' version is better:

[https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

<comment><USER21> Still pretty intolerable, having to read it sentence-by-painful sentence (I read in blocks), scrolling down half a page and realizing I haven't even read a full paragraph yet.

I finally found something worse than listening to a technical procedure on YouTube.

<comment><USER20> Sure okay. I see your point. For reading it's no good. Perhaps Twitter should allow normal paragraphs in moments. The tweet could be just the title of the document, but from then on it's anything goes. That would be great, but they probably won't do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Possibly OT, but given his offline Google Maps failed him for info/directions, worth noting this place is findable on OSM: [http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3809950661](http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3809950661)

</comment><comment><USER23> For all those warning about clicking the 'Show more' ...come on, there aren't that many times you'd have to do it !! ...and the story is worth it ! I mean, yeah, I agree with all the criticism of twitter UX etc if I were to randomly select a convenient medium that lets me put up series of photos and some text as an ongoing narrative, I'd probably go with twitter as well ...broken as it is from the reader's perspective.

All that said, I find that story fascinating ! Not that I know anything about typewriters but I can relate to the enthusiasm and sheer joy of such a serendipitous discovery. I give my thanks to all the obsessive collectors and connoisseurs of everyday things !

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a great set of photos if you are into retro- or paleo-tech anything. Really cool.

Also, it is special when it feels like the universe has lined everything up to give you a unique experience. I'm glad this guy shared his.

</comment><comment><USER25> The irony of using 140 character tweets to talk about old typewriters.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hope he let the guy downstairs know about his feelings somehow!

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow, this story makes me thing that we treat "hipster" pretty badly for trying to bring back retro stuff. Museums don't last forever and what better way to keep the past alive than to keep using it in the present. People need to keep shooting in film, using typewriters, restoring old cars, maintaining old technical documentation, just so we can keep having moments like this and ensure that culture lives on.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow, I was surprised at how much the 'Moon Alphabet' diagram reminded me of the Graffiti handwriting recognition alphabet from PalmOS: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_\(Palm_OS\))

I wonder if this is convergent design, or if Palm's Graffiti was more directly influenced by the Moon Alphabet.

</comment><comment><USER29> Someone really needs to figure out how to make this kind of content readable on Twitter, since I know Twitter won't.

</comment><comment><USER30> personally, Dali's theater museum is my favorite museum in the whole world and definitely something to check if you are in barcelona/figueres

</comment><comment><USER31> This reminds me of the similar joy of stumbling across a pianola museum in Amsterdam.

Always a pleasure to find such a well curated niche set of exhibits.

</comment><comment><USER32> Where are the '1' and '0' on the Bar-Lock? Or did hackers of that time do direct I/O?

<comment><USER33> The same is true of other old typewriters, e.g. the one patented by Sholes [1]. Typists used l/O instead. This slightly reduced mechanical complexity.

[1] [https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pages/US207559-1...](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pages/US207559-1.png)

<comment><USER32> This is so wrong… Did they use old-style figures, too? That's the only way I can imagine it might have looked OK.

<comment><USER34> I've still encountered text on the Internet that substitutes I for 1 and O for 0, presumably written by people who learned in an earlier era and haven't shaken that habit.

But it's slightly hard to search for because a lot of the search results are OCR errors. Still, I'm sure not all of them are because I've seen this in newly-published news articles (maybe written by journalists or edited by editors who've been in the news business for some decades?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is so freaking cool! A mini-history told by someone passionate about it.

</comment><comment><USER36> He never found the dali museum because it was in the opposite direction

</comment><comment><USER37> That is amazing

</comment><comment><USER34> For people who didn't want to click "Show more" a lot, it's a super- enthusiastic story, in tweet form, about accidentally stumbling upon the world's largest typewriter museum in a small town in Spain -- by someone who loves typewriters. If you like typewriters or enthusiasm, you might like reading the story.

<comment><AUTHOR> And submitted to HN by someone who was in Spain (from Australia) just a few days prior to this and would've loved to have visited this museum had I known it existed!

I came across the tweet-story via William Gibson who is very prolific on Twitter (@greatdismal).

I read it in the older OSX Twitter app and didn't have to continually click to unveil more.

<comment><USER38> Neuromancer was written on a typewriter and William Gibson had never even used a computer before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This link seems to provide a more readable version of the story:

[https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400](https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400)

It doesn't require readers to click 'more' or wade through other users' comments.

I don't know much about Twitter, can someone explain why there are two views like this?

<comment><USER24> Moments are basically curated collections. The tweets in them don't have to be from the same thread, or even the same user.

Here is a Moment with _all_ of the guy's tweets and photos from the thread: [https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

<comment><USER40> I urge even people who had read through our link to click the above: it includes pictures that aren't in our current link.

Dang, or Scott, I encourage you to please change the link from the submitted OP link to the above one! While the submission is exciting to click through one by one (an enchanting story), in fact the missing photos (such as of the actual rooms in question) are too much. I enjoyed both reading experience, but the above one should have been our link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> All this story did to me was remind why I don't read twitter. Short messages, interspersed with some random people's comments... I'm sure whatever did happen was downright magical, but the medium destroyed it for me. Can someone pastebin the story?

</comment><comment><USER42> Why not use Medium instead of twitter?

"Marcin Wichary, the lead typographer and designer at Medium, is obsessed with all things typeface, including typewriters. So when he chanced upon Museu de la Tècnica in a small Spanish town, nothing could have prepared him for what he found." [https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400](https://twitter.com/i/moments/792044988842598400)

<comment><USER43> While I agree that Twitter is terrible for this kind of thing (I actually struggled to get back to reread the beginning..), to play a devil's advocate:

Maybe he wouldn't write a blog post about it. Maybe in the beginning, he just thought, I will post this little story that surely will fit in 140 characters. And then, as he uttered first couple tweets, he just started to, kinda naturally, add interesting things he found in the museum. And voila, a blog post.

On the other hand, if he thought, let me write a blog post about it, he could also think, ah scratch it, that's gonna take an afternoon.

So I think twitter simply needs an interface to convert a series of tweets into a blog post. (Or maybe Medium needs a "Smallium" which would work like Twitter except it could convert a series of nanoposts into a Medium post.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Mods: would make sense to retitle this as "I found a typewriter museum in Spain and I was excited" as the title as it currently stands has limited value.

<comment><USER45> I believe it has exceptional value, in the form of not spoiling the whole thing before you even click on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> To be frank, I totally lost interest in whatever the magical moment was after clicking the link and realizing I would have to piece it together from a dozen or more twitter posts. If your story involves more than three sentences or so, you can invest a few minutes to post it in a coherent format if you want people to invest the time to read it.

<comment><USER20> Yes Twitter is painful when read this way. I made it to the end but wasn't happy about the experience.

Then I came back here and discovered the "moments" version of his story here:

[https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704](https://twitter.com/i/moments/791746773643464704)

And FWIW I wouldn't be missing the Dali museum. I appreciate old typewriters, but Dali was the master. There are few artists that come close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think this is a parody to Twitter storytelling. The title is the end of it. Even after opening the log, it's difficult to follow and parts of it remain hidden under "show more" buttons.

</comment><comment><USER48> Why exactly is this on the top page of HN?

<comment><USER49> Because people find it interesting?</comment></comment>


Want to see gaming's past and future? Dive into the "educational" world of PLATO - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/want-to-see-gamings-past-and-future-dive-into-the-educational-world-of-plato/ <comment><USER2> I'm always glad to see PLATO getting its due. We had a PLATO terminal in our house - beautiful wood frame with an orange plasma screen, hardwired in to the University of Illinois mainframe at 1200baud. Besides remembering playing a lot of Empire with the college kids, there was also a cyber-nanny called "The Enforcer" which admins could place on "educational" accounts to limit access to games at certain hours of the day (or if games were taking up too many resourced on the mainframe.) My Dad used The Enforcer as a very effective incentive to get my homework done.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad I didn't know these games existed , I might have not been studying. Plato terminals where great for freshman chemistry. example exams and problem sets were available in the almost always empty room in the tower library.. it's time in the early 90s before the web made info uniquitos, I really appreciated the quizzes and the explanations of the answers it gave..

</comment><comment><USER4> You can experience it for yourself by requesting a login here : [https://cyber1.org/index.asp](https://cyber1.org/index.asp)

As a Wizardry fan, it's fascinating to play the precursors.

<comment><USER5> Wizardry was my all-time favorite computer game growing up! Agree, fascinating to see the precursors. I had absolutely no idea about this.

<comment><USER4> You might also be interested in the book "Dungeons and Desktops". The guy who wrote it does really great videos as well. Do a search for "matt chat wizardry" to see interviews with Robert Woodhead et al.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey! I worked with John Daleske years later (an embedded project). Its good to see John and Empire getting some recognition!

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember PLATO (PLATO Notes, specifically) as one of the inspirations behind Lotus Notes. It's quite interesting to see how seminal the ideas behind it were -- given the right commercial decisions, Notes could have pre-empted the web.</comment>


Microcredit was a hugely hyped solution to global poverty. What happened? - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/15/18182167/microcredit-microfinance-poverty-grameen-bank-yunus <comment><USER2> It was a marketing gimmick to get financing for local lenders. It was never actually about you funding a specific person.</comment>


Pat Metheny's Orchestration: A mechanically controlled jazz ensemble - <AUTHOR> http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/

<comment><USER2> What an amazing setup. What I'm wondering is whether something similar, in terms of automated jamming, could be made available to more people through software, perhaps a puredata program. That would be a really interesting project to work on.

<comment><USER3> For a virtual drummer, Jamstix seems to be popular, although I've never been impressed by its behavior. <http://www.rayzoon.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazing. I can't wait to hear what comes out of PMG next; The Way Up blew me away in a way that no other jazz recording ever has, and I can't imagine the next one won't do the same.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I remember listening to Letter From Home as a kid and just loving every note that came out of my speakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always appreciated PM for his musical prowess, attention to detail and ethereal style - but this is too much (in a good way)! Solenoid and pneumatic accoutrements unsullied, steampunk retro-coolness, as a musician I am blown away. The most beautiful part is the programming - there is none! (ironic huh?). All other instruments are 'coded' by parroting his guitar, the ultimate in simplicity. MIDI seems like a form of torture. I have to have one!

<comment><USER7> The guitar-as-master-control system is beautiful, but it makes me wonder what kind of UI he has set up to select instruments. It's too bad the video didn't show much of the tech behind the amazing suite, though there's also something to just seeing it work like magic.</comment></comment>


A book of another 68 essays from "97 Things Every Programmer Should Know" site - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/97-Things-Every-Programmer-Should-Know-Extended

<comment><USER2> The other 68 essays are available online for free at OReilly: [http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/QA_Tea...](http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/QA_Team_Member_as_an_Equal)</comment>