Convincing engineers to join your team - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team <comment><USER2> > ... the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and > convincing them to accept it.

I think more effort could be made to sell before the candidate decides to interview. The best candidates have to be sold on the opportunity before they invest their time into an interview process because they have so many opportunities available.

Widen the funnel at the mouth.

Anecdotally I have had many experiences where the hiring manager didn't take the time to listen to what I was looking for before launching into their 10 minute spiel give everyone, and then they ask me for phone screen availability. Why is this the right opportunity for _me_?

EDIT: after reading TFA, I see this is exactly what they're advocating for. cool!

<comment><USER3> An easy step to widen the mouth is to get rid of the web forms that make you retype your resume into your boxes.

No one who isn't desperate is going to do that.

<comment><USER4> And you probably don't want to work for a company that does that anyway

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> During the recruiting process, I expect a company to be putting its best foot forward. If things seem disorganized at that stage, then I assume that day-to- day operations at the company are even _more_ disorganized.

Additionally, it always makes a big difference to me if people high up in the organization (even if they aren't technical) are involved in the interview process. If a founder or C-level employee spends some time talking to me during the hiring process, it's a positive sign that they see this as an important position and you as an important hire.

<comment><USER6> >If things seem disorganized at that stage, then I assume that day-to-day operations at the company are even more disorganized

I'm not really sure about that. In my experience there can be a pretty big gap between the initial recruiters (who often understand nothing about the actual qualifications necessary) that are just trying to get as many people in the door as possible, and the actual operations of the company. Granted I have a pretty small sample size, but I've had this misalignment go in both directions.

<comment><USER7> Having recruiters that are so clueless about the jobs they are recruiting for is a significant red flag for me and an indication that the company is immature and disorganized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My phone screen technique is more old school but I think works well. I pick their top language or domain (web or mobile or whatever) and ask 10 trivia questions. Medium difficulty questions I'd expect a programmer with any experience to answer. I look for maybe 70% correct and I look for quick answers. You know it or you don't. And I set that expectation up front so they can give me a few "I don't know"s with no penalty.

This is my sanity check and I think it's faster and more accurate than a FizzBuzz and doesn't require screenshare.

<comment><USER9> Could you provide a few example questions you would do? Just curious what medium difficulty questions look like to you.

<comment><USER10> "What do you think are the top strengths and top weaknesses of <language X>?"

Doesn't matter what the specific answers are, much less if you even _like_ language X or not. Instead it says: does the person really have an understanding of the language; do they have enough experience to say "well I really do like X, but I do often wish it had feature y of language Z". or "yes, I have a lot of JS experience since that's the job and I sure know how to sling it, but I far prefer Lisp which I found made me more productive than any other. Why? Well because at XXX I was able to do YYY...."

<comment><USER11> This is one of the best questions to ask imo.

It's very free-form and honest, and gives you the potential to dive into things technically.

Do you like C or C++ better? Oh you don't like pointers? How do you avoid them in C++? etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Have your recruiter keep a list of reasons why candidates said they wouldn't > move forward

So companies want this kind of feedback, but won't provide it?

<comment><USER13> True that! IMHO this has been a trend that I've observed where interview feedback is something that doesn't exist. More often than not, even when requested, I've never received any kind of feedback from companies. Despite the the abundance of companies like Hired, TripleByte, LinkedIn and others, recruitment still remains a black-art!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's with the standard of doing a full day interview? Who does this work for other than fresh graduates? I don't want to spend a whole day (which I have to request off from my current employer) answering probably-silly technical puzzles as the first round interview (the 25 minute phone call doesn't really count since it sounds like just a pitch).

Does a full day of whiteboarding really get you better candidates than say, a single hour technical interview or 1 or 2 hour homework? I'd rather do half a dozen video chat interviews spread out over a month than give a whole day just for the possibility of a new job. I'd prefer a single technical interview or homework over that by a mile.

If you tell me your interview process is a 25 minute call followed by a whole day of technical interviews, I'll tell you to take a hike.

<comment><USER15> A full day interview is standard. You grant that it's standard, right in the first sentence of your post. But you'll tell anyone who offers you a standard interview to take a hike?

This is symptomatic of a broader problem with HN comment threads on "how to interview" articles: for any given approach to interviewing, the top comment will be a middle-brow dismissal saying, "I would never interview at a place that interviewed that way." _For all X._

I would never interview at a place that does whiteboarding. I would never interview at a place that gave me a take-home assignment. I would never interview at a place that asked me to pair-program on a real assignment during the interview (I should get paid for that). I would never interview at a place that asked me to work as contract-to-hire. I would never interview at a place that used HackerRank. I would never interview at a place that looks at Github profiles. I would never interview with a recruiting firm. I would never interview if contacted by a recruiter (instead of the hiring manager).

And apparently some people would refuse to interview at a place that asked you to talk to half a dozen of your potential teammates before offering you the job.

There's just no good approach.

<comment><USER16> I have never had a full day interview, if it's more than 4 hours for a serious onsite I won't waste my time. They clearly don't appreciate other people's time and are quite frankly wasting theirs. The decision was probably already made before the second cup of coffee anyways.

I absolutely agree with refusing to interview and meet the teammates. All you have to do is rub someone the wrong way for whatever reason, hell they could be in a bad mood because they got cut off on the freeway. Meeting tons of people before an offer is an excellent way to reject great candidates.

<comment><USER17> I had a company want to do a full day interview, but I had to cut it short and beg off at 1 PM, because they had already blasted past my hotel check-out time, and were in danger of encroaching on the departure time of my return flight--that they booked for me. It was the worst interview experience I have ever had. They declined to arrange for a rental vehicle, so someone from the company had to drive me to and from the hotel, with airport ground transport handled by a shuttle van. Later, they ghosted me, and even tried to stick me with the hotel bill.

The one benefit was the lesson on how to recognize some early warning signs when interviewing.

To name and shame: Tyler Technologies, Eagle Division.

<comment><USER18> I will say that as someone generally on the hiring side of the equation, I do find that hotel chains and rental agencies drive me _CRAZY_.

No matter how hard I try and how many times I do it, there is _ALWAYS_ some idiotic hiccup that prevents me from paying for the candidate's room, car, etc. up front. I can give those companies all the credit cards and forms in the world, and _somebody_ in the pipeline will screw it up and demand a couple hundred dollar charge from my candidate. It's so bad that I normally show up to meet the candidate in person simply so that I can use my personal card to ride over the hiccup.

If somebody at HN is looking for a startup idea, here's a "grubby" thing that someone could turn into a service that could browbeat the idiotic hotel companies into submission on.

<comment><USER17> In this case, it was not the hotel that screwed up.

At the time, I was living in Madison, WI, and they booked my flight out of Milwaukee. With a connection in Madison. No, I couldn't just board the flight in Madison. No, they wouldn't pay for my mileage between Madison and Milwaukee, or for airport parking. The flight out of Milwaukee was cheaper, you see.

The service you are suggesting already exists. It is called a travel agency. Some even specialize in corporate travel. My spouse used to work for one. They lost a lot of business to self-booking sites like Travelocity and Expedia. As a result, some office peons in small and medium businesses are being tasked with booking travel sometimes, and they have no skill or training in handling the idiotic hiccups that will always happen when dealing with the airlines, hotel chains, and vehicle rental chains. Larger businesses tend to have their own travel agents, or contract to a travel agency, especially if their own employees need to travel frequently. If a company cannot provide you with an acceptable travel experience as a candidate, they won't do it as an employee, either.

To contrast, the next travel-required interview booked a reasonable flight, a full-sized rental car, a paid-for hotel, and sent me a per diem check without having to submit any expense receipts. The on-site interview was about 90 minutes, without whiteboarding or coding exercises or pop quizzes or brain teasers, and then they followed up on it and extended an offer. Which I accepted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hear that everyone?

"As a startup it's hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers"

Also, Oracle apparently had a lot of success building out their bare metal (now cloud infrastructure) team by making uncharacteristically (for them) good offers.

You can hire good people, if you're willing to pay them. Bullshit doesn't work anymore.

<comment><USER20> So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?

Besides work flexibility, culture, purpose, and equity, how is a new venture supposed to compete with an entrenched monopolist that is essentially printing money (see: Alphabet)? Sure, equity is a multiplier that can return a huge amount of money with huge risk, but even equity+salary can't come near total comp offered by these juggernauts. I mean, these companies generate mountains of profits after paying crazy salaries and perks.

How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?

<comment><USER19> > So are you saying that non-salary benefits are bullshit?

I'm saying the reasons startups typically give to justify their low salaries are largely bullshit and not persuasive.

> How can a startup compete for talent against these behemoths?

Outside of paying more, they really can't compete head-to-head with the behemoths. They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for Google/Facebook. Case in point: someone wants to work on self-driving cars but Google won't hire them to work in that group. That's someone a self- driving car startup has a shot at hiring.

<comment><USER21> > They should really focus on hiring junior people who can't or won't work for > Google/Facebook.

This is also antithetical to (some) startups' way of thinking, which is that they must hire only senior/"top" engineers because that's the only way to get a product out fast enough.

Similarly, mentorship (something TFA does advocate) is seen as too much of a time/resource sink, a luxury only behemoths can afford.

This attitude makes some sense at seed stage, but after a few dozen senior engineers on staff, it loses credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes.

I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advice [http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from- interviewing-40...](http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from- interviewing-400-engineers-over-three-startups/)

For people that are "too good for this process" \- well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations. You're self selecting out and limiting your own options. For some people that's totally fine, but for most I don't think that's good advice.

<comment><USER23> _" For people that are "too good for this process" \- well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations."_

My experience is that most companies are asking for too much and being downright rude in the way that they do it. Especially from more senior people who have options.

I turned down a number of companies at (or just after) the phone screen stage during my last job search. Usually the pattern was that they'd done one form of preliminary screen, and then wanted to do one (or two, or three...) _additional_ steps before going onsite. One company I remember asked me to do an _eight hour_ programming exercise, after I had finished a phone-based technical screen. I told them it was unreasonable, and that I'd consider it only if I had nothing else to do with an entire day of my time. Never got back to them.

I am a tolerant person, but I am, indeed, too good for that kind of process. Early stage startups especially need to accept the reality that they're not attractive places to work, and behave accordingly. The less reasonable your process, the fewer good candidates will stay in the pipeline. Eventually, you're just intensely screening the people who didn't have better options.

<comment><USER22> I'm talking about people who don't want to go through the standard process outlined in this blog post. Specifically: 1 or 2 phone calls to establish high level alignment and technical fit, and then a full day onsite.

<comment><USER23> That's fair(er), but after you've gone through a service like Triplebyte, you're supposed to be screened. Extra screening steps beyond the onsite are excessive.

The promise of something like Triplebyte (for the candidate) is that I do one round of technical interview, and then proceed directly to my favorite companies for culture fit and personal evaluation. But every company believes that _they 're_ the special snowflake who deserves extra screening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone been able to reapply to Triplebyte after an initial rejection? Somewhat relevant question as this is an article by Triplebyte and Harj who I understand is a YC partner. They say you can reapply after 4 months but I can't find how to do that when I login and emails to their support line go unanswered.

<comment><USER25> When I was going through Triplebyte, I asked a lot of questions.

According to the recruiter I was working with, it could be 4-6 months between "refreshes".

I would say to keep trying to get in touch with them - everyone I interacted with on the Triplebyte team was nothing but helpful.

If you washed out of the process at the initial testing stage, make sure to let them know that you have been working on your skills and you are ready to re-take the test.

<comment><USER24> Thanks. I'm just going by their website that indicates 4 months but I'm actually at 5 months. I've tried emailing email@example.com but have not gotten any response. My first time around I made it to the online in-person interview and thought I did fairly well but got rejected after that point with some rather vague, generic reason and feedback. I just want to know if I should just cut my losses at this point so wondering if anyone has had any success at being able to just reapply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I often hear or read about how there is a developer/software engineer shortage. And the rising salaries seem to reflect that-- supply and demand and all that...

Yet it seems that there are hundreds of applicants vying for each position.

How is this possible? Are there really that many lesser-skilled people trying to finagle their way in as software developers? Is the shortage one of _skilled_ engineers, while the deluge of applicants is a result of posers and imposters trying to get a slice of the pie?

</comment><comment><USER27> Broken record, but here's our hiring process:

1\. An initial call, handled by a principal ("founder"), with the objective of explaining the role and the company and arming the candidate with as much detail about the hiring process as is practicable.

2\. A followup in email shortly thereafter confirming interest and locking down schedule.

3\. 1-3 work-sample challenges (our current set, for the role we're hiring now, is a short combined AWS/Django security assessment, an automated best- effort-secure deployment of that Django app in a fresh AWS environment we provide, and a short API scanner programming challenge):

3a. Introduction: provide the candidate with advance knowledge of what will be on the challenge and what they'll want to know going in, along with time expectations.

3b. Preparation: offer the candidate books, links to presentations, and a practice version of the challenge to get confident and comfortable with the challenge.

3c. The challenge proper.

3d. Scoring: each challenge has a pre-built scoring rubric, on a 1-5 scale, designed so that anyone on the team can quickly score a submission.

4\. Meet in person: after informing the candidate they did well on technical qualification, we do a single round of in-person "interviews"; no whiteboard, no coding, just meet and greet and discuss logistics.

5\. Offer.

Missing from this process:

1\. Recruiters.

2\. Resumes.

3\. Telephone interviews.

4\. Technical interviews from members of the engineering team.

5\. Any significant interruption to the engineering team's work.

6\. Interview exercises with a member of our team watching you code.

7\. Free pizza and coffee (though I guess if you asked, we'd send you one).

8\. 5 of the 6 hours onsite this recommended process includes.

I'm happy to keep repeating this just as a sort of reminder that we're hiring, but this is a streamlined and improved (we didn't have practice challenges at Matasano!) version of the way we've been hiring for coming up on 10 years, _and it works spectacularly well for us_. People keep telling me why what we're doing can't work, and I keep wondering what I'm doing wrong to make it work.

You should consider cutting way back on interviews --- especially telephone interviews, which I've found to be completely worthless as generators of real insight into candidates --- and replacing them with work-sample challenges. But be serious about it if you do: candidates hate "take-home projects", and when I ask them about it, it always turns out that those projects precede or follow a standard interview loop. Fuck the interview loop. Interviews are a random function. Figure out what skills you need candidates to have on day 1, and then just build something that checks if candidates have those skills.

<comment><USER28> What happens prior to step #1 from a candidate's perspective? How do candidates express interest and do 100% of the folks who express interest get a call?

<comment><USER27> They send us email. I get on the phone with them.

The way this "scaled" at Matasano was that we gradually got smarter with our outreach, so that instead of constantly circulating wide appeals to the whole developer community, we staged events (Cryptopals, Microcorruption) that targeted a specific community of enthusiasts with whom those phone calls were likely to be valuable to us.

But in the beginning, we just posted on the HN hiring threads; it's a fine starting place. That's what we're doing now. I'll do a couple phone calls a day at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The industry standard onsite interview to offer rate seems astonishingly low at 20%. Is this symptomatic of poor filtering early in the pipeline?

<comment><USER7> No, it's symptomatic of paranoid hiring processes, arbitrarily high bars, and interviewers who have no business interviewing people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely > they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. > The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people > decide to work and you can't expect someone to know if they want to work for > you without giving them that data.

The numerical salary shouldn't be the deciding factor. I want to know if you're interested in the work that you'll be doing and the team you'll be working with. I don't want you to think, "man I wasn't going to go there but they offered a huge salary!".

Of course the salary is relevant, but I want to know that we're just negotiating on the number, and not number+job.

Are you interested in the work that we'll be doing? Yes? Good, is this number high enough to make it worth your while? No? Ok, well that was the highest I could go, so thanks for your time.

<comment><USER31> I exclusively work for whoever is willing to pay me the most, at the least inconvenience to my current living situation. I would feel pretty comfortable wagering that I'm in the large majority there.

I may be off base here so apologies if so, but reading between the lines a bit I'm assuming that you are an early hire or possibly a founder of some startup. Very few people, probably nobody, will be as invested in your business as you are (unless you give them a non negligible amount of equity, and they believe there's a good chance that will actually be worth something). It's understandable that that's a difficult/frustrating fact to accept, but it shouldn't be hard to understand. Acknowledging it will lead you to a more effective hiring process.

<comment><USER32> I'd rather work at somewhere with a 0.9x salary with a healthy culture and work life balance and a product I'm excited about than a place with none of those that pays 1.1x salary.

I don't think I'm in the minority of that either. That's not to say salary doesn't matter -- it's very important because given two places I'm equally interested in, I'll pretty much exclusively choose based on compensation.

<comment><USER33> That seems reasonable, but the compensation ranges I've been seeing aren't 0.9-1.1 x a reference salary, they seem to range from 0.3x (crappy consulting) -3x (HFT) the compensation of a mid-range FAANG position. With that kind of variation, it's very possible that compensation differences could overwhelm a normal sized difference in culture quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've had many interviews such as "all day interviews" to ones that were only an hour or two at a time in America.

The current position I've accepted is a German owned company that has a Japanese branch. Small company. Pay is low when compared to compensation I could get in America.

BUT, the interview process was simple. Skype video call with a few people at the same time. Met two of the owners while vacationing in Japan. Got an offer and accepted it.

Despite the low pay, I accepted it because it is completely remote. The work is fulfilling (right now my project involves data that can help farmers). I'm learning a lot of new stuff.

It's actually because of all three that I might stay long term. Remote, fulfilling work, and learning new things checked all the boxes despite the low pay.

Stuff like that matters. Many companies don't understand this.

</comment><comment><USER34> Definitely shows their expertise in the space. Strongly agree with all of this, one of the most important things for me as a candidate is to feel appreciated as a person, not just "headcount". Being thoughtful and considerate is a very rare thing in a hiring process.

</comment><comment><USER35> Very valuable advise!

When I hired my first employees, I focussed too much on compensation. I ran the numbers and offered as much as I could afford.

I was really disappointed when great candidates declined my offers, and went with other companies that didn't even pay more (I asked).

Now I understand that I just failed to excite them. You really need to tell people how awesome the work is, good engineers will always have many options. And also understand that what excites you may not be what excites the candidate, so starting with asking about what the candidate is looking for is a really good idea.

<comment><USER36> Both are certainly important. A few years ago, received offers from two places. One had employees that were excited about the work, the culture was great, the job had a combination of data science and programming that was right up my alley and we talked in-depth about real problems.

The other office was just depressing. I mean, it was literally kind of dark and bare. They seemed evasive about what day to day work was like -- something about "dashboards." No one seemed happy to be there. It was a satellite to the main office in New York.

When I got the offers, the second job offered $25k more than the first job. I did a little bit of moral handwringing, but... you know, I was getting married the next week, we wanted to buy a house, and an extra $2k a month can make up for a LOT of shitty work environment. I took the second job, got a $5k raise each year, and haven't regretted my decision at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You are not Facebook, you are not Google, you are not Apple. You will never be any of these. They have piles of cash and can afford almost anything, they have unimaginable datasets about private lifes of billions of people. Stop using the same practices as them, stop using the same frameworks and stacks as them, even reconsider using technologies produced by them.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why would companies need to change anything? Every engineering job gets hundreds of applicants. Its an employers' market.

<comment><USER39> But of that hundred, maybe 1 or 2 are somewhat qualified.</comment></comment>


Market Simulation - <AUTHOR>

Say you are writing an app for the intended purpose of selling products. Wouldn't it make sense to test it out with virtual items and fake money first? <comment><USER2> yep.</comment>


The shortest paper ever published in a "serious" math journal - <AUTHOR> https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest-paper-ever-published-in-a-serious-math-journal-john-conway-alexander-soifer <comment><AUTHOR> Explanation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvvkJT8myeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvvkJT8myeI)</comment>


Setting a High Bar and Holding People Accountable - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/business/chip-bergh-on-setting-a-high-bar-and-holding-people-accountable.html <comment><USER2> My experience? Letting people go is actually easy. It might be hard for a day and you genuinely feel bad but it's really not a hard thing to do. What's hard is putting in the effort to help someone out of the hole they are in. Giving official warnings is also easy (and often also not properly done, especially in small companies). Even giving people opportunities to perform better is easy. Really if you find any of the above hard you are a bad manager or kidding yourself.

Now the really hard thing is to try and educate someone to be better at their job. Spend time and think and plan for them to be better and examine yourself if they don't achieve that.

Now assume my perspective is somewhat correct. Does that article sound like great advice or someone justifying their self-interested actions?

Again, this is just my perspective.

</comment><comment><USER3> Levi Strauss has a terrible corporate culture and can barely go 6 months without a reorg. These are not people you should be looking to for answers.

</comment><comment><USER4> >> Find something you love because you might be doing it for the rest of your life. Passion is worth 10 index points. If you really love what you're doing, it's not work.

My bullshit detector went into an overdrive reading these lines.

</comment><comment><USER5> Did I miss something? The article doesn't seem to say much other than "Setting a high bar and holding people accountable is important." I wanted something actionable but found nothing.

<comment><USER6> Its a bullshit PR puff piece to make the culture at Levi more appealing - "look everyone this great guy is in charge and he cares so much!". Probably a response to employee dissatisfaction or trouble retaining them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I'm not a big fan of organizations where people backstab or talk behind others' backs.

...

I've got some trusted people who will tell me if that stuff's going on behind my back."

Trusted people who will tell what they want, and who are trusted because they appear trustworthy: an ideal position for backstabbing and/or manipulative ambitious bastards.

Naive "leaders" who believe they are smarter than everyone else and perfectly in control cannot keep those people in check.

</comment><comment><USER8> IS it just me or was that article written in "simple English"? It felt like he was speaking to a child.

<comment><USER9> The text is so chock-full of sports metaphors that I couldn't read to the end. I don't even know what half of those mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Meh, sounds like a typical C-type. Where the data at? How do you quantify performance? How do you ensure you're actually rewarding top performers rather than the top politicians/sales people.

For example, going through someone's resume to try and find 'a history of winning' is a good way to get the latter. It's a measure of someone's ability to tell a story and sell themselves (which, to be honest, kinda sounds like this guy).

Better to give them a case study or some other more concrete measure of reasoning and analytical ability. It's like how Jeff Atwood started the whole 'test that coders can actually code' thing. It turns out that relevant work tests are a really good idea but these c-types would rather just hire people like themselves.

<comment><USER11> Metrics are an important part of leadership, but not necessarily the whole story.

I inherited a group at work who in the surface appeared to be both successful and well-led. They were hitting their KPIs, the management were recognized with rewards, and everything was great. Their upstream management had kept a distance, as the metrics looked great.

I'm a hands on type of guy. After the re-org I started sniffing around and discovered that not only were they not performing, they were negligent to the level of deriliction of duty.

The point is, you need to look beyond the numbers and below the surface. Otherwise, your role as a manager isn't adding any value to the organization.

<comment><USER12> just talked to a family member yesterday who's in charge of "quality assurance" \- reviewing internal medical documents for errors. Her team has the lowest scores. It's because she and her team keep finding the most errors. She was told to start counting every 6 errors as 1 error so they're numbers will 'match' the other teams. The "errors" have to do with grammar and punctuation with (US) English. The "other teams" are offshored in various countries, and her team is US based. But hey... the other team numbers look better, so just... just quit counting so many damn errors so our numbers can all look good...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The facts don't support this guy. Levi Strauss has no magical tech in place, just some commodity clothes with a bit of history, marketing attached to it. Management style adda very little here.</comment>


Ask HN: How many published papers should you have when applying to PhD programs? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I'm thinking about applying to PhD programs focused on Theoretical Neuroscience and Deep Learning this fall, and quite frankly I feel like I'm not good enough.
I'm finishing two Master's degrees, one in Biology and one in Computer science, from Harvard and Georgia Tech respectively. I previously did my undergraduate studies in Cognitive Science from UCSD. My GPA in my masters is a 4.0.
I just started doing research in the past 6 months, and I feel like I'm so far behind my peers its not even funny. I have a paper accepted for a small conference in the fall, but after talking to some folks at Phd programs at places like Stanford or MIT, I hear that students often come in with multiple first author publications. Is this true? I don't know how I can compete with that :/
I want to do research, I love it and have been working 80 hour weeks juggling two RAships and a research internship this summer, but I just feel like I won't be able to get into a solid background because of my non traditional background. My undergrad was non technical, and my research record is short, if a little intense.
Do you have any advice for a nervous kid? <comment><USER3> I have no special knowledge of this field or of academia but it sounds like a classic case of Impostor Syndrome to me. You sound very accomplished - <USER2> Master's!? Most people only have one or zero when they start a PhD. I'm sure you're more than qualified.</comment>


Svgbob: Convert your ASCII diagram scribbles into happy little SVG - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob <comment><AUTHOR> This is so good. It makes making documentation with diagrams a less painful process. I would love to see some integration with asciidoctor.

<comment><USER2> I'm glad you like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I used to make most of my notes in plain-text. Horribly inefficient, but I love ASCII games so drawing all my diagrams in it was fun to me. Just ran some of them through this software and, beside a few formatting errors, they look amazing! This is unbelievably useful.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just leaving a happy little comment to say how much I appreciate the Bob Ross reference :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> In the same vein: [http://ditaa.sourceforge.net](http://ditaa.sourceforge.net)

</comment><comment><USER6> Very nice! Reminds me of Markdeep diagrams [1]. The examples are almost identical, so I'm curious if one of them should give credit to the other? Or was there a shared ancestor?

Either way, the core insight that it's OK to map the the monospace grid 1:1 to diagram coordinates was IMHO a breakthrough in text->diagram conversion that previous tools like ditaa missed by trying too hard to parse "semantic structure". (After that it's 99% perspiration of course.)

The editor is pretty great.

[1] [https://casual- effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html#basicfo...](https://casual- effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html#basicformatting/diagrams)

<comment><USER6> Found another similar tool, also preserves the grid & uses monospace text — aafigure: [https://github.com/aafigure/aafigure/blob/master/documentati...](https://github.com/aafigure/aafigure/blob/master/documentation/examples.rst) -> [https://aafigure.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html](https://aafigure.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like it for creating a fast little part of an SVG that I will use in something else. You use the right graphical primitives for things, I hate when a circle is drawn out as a couple arcs cause then I have to fix it by hand anyway. I love that you output lines and so forth, everyone always just goes ahead and makes thousands of little paths that I then have to figure out what it actually is.

Things I would like to have improved - indent markup when I download svg. If it's a small SVG it isn't a problem but when I looked at the example it was hard to read.

I would also like if the output SVG was rendered left to right top to bottom, right now it can difficult to find where something was actually drawn at. However as I said I would probably use it to draw little things that I would put together later, so when I say I would like it - well it probably doesn't apply to my usecase anyway.

on edit: when I say rendered left to right I mean written out left to right, just in case there was any confusion.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks pretty neat, but the random-looking spacing between works is pretty weird. If you want to preserve the approximate text layout with respect to the diagrams, why not at least use a fixed-width font? The Q&A complains that it makes it look like it was made "for devs", but the random spacing just looks bizarre and, quite frankly, awful.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been looking for something kind of like this for process or flow charts, but automatically places the blocks/nodes, yet allows "hints" to nudge things as needed. Example syntax:

      Title:    // chart page title
        Flow-chart Shorthand Rough Draft

      Decision:
        Too big a project?
        @Yes #label02  // arrow to #label02
        @No #label01

      #label01

      Process:
        Make lemonade
        $options: no-point, foo   // no arrow-head, etc.

      Process:
        Sell lemonade
        $linetext: This is text near line coming to this process
        $hint: north-east   // positioning hint

      #label02

      Terminator:
         End

Perhaps the hints could have an optional strength parameter: "$hint: north- east 60%". If you invent an implementation, I'll give you lots of Ycombinator points. I once used a tool called "graphviz" to kind of do this.

<comment><USER10> Have you tried [http://plantuml.com/](http://plantuml.com/)? Built on top of "graphviz".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anything exist that would allow me to make LibreOffice Draw diagrams without fiddling with the mouse for hours? (And without drawing ascii boxes, please.) I.e. Mermaid, but with output to the Draw format.

I need to make a diagram for someone else, but the process of laying it out is annoying.

<comment><USER12> If you're familiar with GraphViz (I'm not familiar with MermaidJS, but the syntax of the graphs themselves look kinda-sorta the same) then you should be able to convert a text DOT file to SVG using GraphViz then edit the SVG in LibreOffice.

I wouldn't want to do a ton of edits in LibreOffice because the generated SVG isn't the cleanest. I think it should do the job if your focus is on defining nodes and edges of a graph and don't want a specific layout at the end.

<comment><USER11> The output is targeted for printing and then possibly further editing in the future, so I think SVG in LO will be unstable for that—that's why I'd prefer the native format. But guess I could try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to use this in Markdown embedded API docs in code, for generating HTML+SVG API manuals.

<comment><USER2> [https://ivanceras.github.io/spongedown/](https://ivanceras.github.io/spongedown/) I haven't revisited these projects for awhile now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think I'd be totally sold on actually making diagrams this way than with, say, Dia or draw.io, but I'm now wondering if there could be converters from those programs' native formats to the ASCII format described for Svgbob with a view to using it as an interchange format that can also be quickly converted/previewed using the actual Svgbob converter. That would be spiffy.

<comment><USER15> Why not just SVG as the interchange format?

<comment><USER14> I tend to think of interchange formats as human-readable and free of styling. SVG is definitely human-readable but it's harder to visualise than a well- formatted ASCII diagram, plus SVG marries content and style (text is styled by CSS, for example). The diagram aspect of an ASCII diagram is, I would say, structure, not styling, and so remains suitable for use as a basic interchange.

SVG is great as an interchange for image editing, but I'm not sure that's necessarily what is best suited to basic diagramming. I'm sort of thinking like a diagram equivalent of Markdown.

<comment><USER16> IMO, SVG is less editable than ASCII diagram when you're in the console

<comment><USER14> Indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems that it has improved very much since I've first seen the demo, but it still takes up to ten seconds to render changes. I guess that's simply because the demo page _is_ huge, but that negates the purpose of the demo; it would be great to have a partial rendering mode if feasible ;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Jesus christ, the amount of work that must have gone into making this is astonishing. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been using this PHP project for diagrams in my books: [https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg](https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg)

</comment><comment><USER20> This kind of tool should be integrated in every browser!

Would make page like this look so much better: [http://root.rupy.se](http://root.rupy.se)

<comment><USER21> Maybe integrating it into a terminal first would make more sense ;-)

<comment><USER22> That'd be very cool. As much as I dislike Electron, something like Hyper already can render SVGs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> wow this is legitly cool</comment>


Choosing a Distributed Version Control System - <AUTHOR> http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2007/12/28/dvcs/ <comment><USER2> There's also svk from BestPractical (better known for RT).

<http://svk.bestpractical.com/view/HomePage></comment>


The Problem of Excess Genius (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.monad.com/sdg/Journal/genius.html <comment><AUTHOR> This complements some of pg's essay, especially "Cities and Ambition" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html>; "Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence" ) and "The Word 'Hacker'" (<http://paulgraham.com/gba.html>; "I lived for a while in Florence. But after I'd been there a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York").

I think the real question is always the same: where are the excess geniuses gathering now? Where _will_ they gather tomorrow? And is there even a reliable way to answer these questions?

<comment><USER2> I think there probably isn't a reliable way to answer those questions unless it is after the fact. The problem is that true geniuses usually aren't recognized until after they are long gone, so you won't identify an excess until after the excess has disappeared. Most people who are hailed as geniuses in our own time (any famous startup founder) probably aren't on the level that the article was mentioning. They are smart businessmen, but I don't think they compete with the ancient Athenians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is genius born, or made?

Clearly, it's a combination of both, but which factor is more important?

Are geniuses the genetic elite, the 0.00001% of humanity? They appear only rarely, but their genius shines through wherever they appear?

Or are potential geniuses more common -- maybe the top 0.01% -- but need the right conditions in which to flourish?

One way to find out would be to look for _failed geniuses_ \-- those who showed great potential, but had it nipped in the bud. I suspect a big genius- killer -- bigger than early death or jealous elders -- is access to pleasant career opportunities.

If you're living in Tsarist Russia, writing might be the only interesting pastime. If you're living in 21st century California, starting a me-too consumer web app is a lot more inviting than working on groundbreaking new technology.</comment>


Apple Pay Is Cutting Off White Supremacists - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/apple-removes-payments-support-from-white-nationalist <comment><USER2> Just a curious question: is Apple applying the same standard and blocking also black supremacist and black nationalist (and say Islamacist stuff that is clearly anti-others) with the same vigour as it blocks white supremacists and neo-Nazis?

A double standard in this matter would send a terrible message.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is anybody else worried that this "Shut off from the world" approach might not solve the problem at its root?

I'd worry that it wouldn't resolve the underlying tension but would only up the anger and cause them to retaliate in the only form they can - violence.

<comment><USER4> ... you say that like this wasn't literally a response to their _present_ violence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So this is how we prevent wars in the 21st century. Insurgent DoS.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Techmeme summary: _Apple Pay and PayPal disable support for several sites that promote or sell items glorifying white supremacy_</comment>


Is my startup about to fall apart?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm involved in an online dating startup with one other cofounder and it has the interest of a prominent angel investor who is willing to pull the trigger with a full-time CTO on board (we are both mostly non-technical). 1.5 months in, and communication issues are beginning to surface (we didn't know each other that well before forming the company.) Although I know he is invested in the company/adds a lot of value, he maintains a consulting gig on the side to pay the bills, and he is very particular about how he divides his time between the two commitments. Whether it's for this or other reasons, he occasionally falls off the map (sometimes for days at a time) and doesn't pick up 99% of my calls first time around. Having said all this, he has been meeting his deliverables and progress on the company is being made.
At this point, I've sat him down twice to discuss the issue, but nothing has sunk in as there have been no improvements. My options are threefold:
a) Go solo with the project - risk him doing the same - and search for someone as a cofounder and/or CTO to build the product. I'm very into the concept but this will be a process as I'm a first-time entrepreneur, so I imagine attracting someone will be tough.
b) Give up on this project and commit full-time to another project I had been working prior to this opportunity. The other is more of a "dude business" (can easily outsource dev) which I am at least AS into as the former and I think I could learn a lot from. However, no interested investor and it's a monetized Q&A community, so probably won't have the same reach/credibility as an online dating site, assuming success in both cases.
c) Try to work out my differences with the cofounder (although it seems I already attempted this...) and try to forge a path forwards.
Any advice or feedback on this situation would be hugely appreciated. <comment><USER3> A startup lives in a perpetual state of 'about to fall apart.'

Sometimes you just feel it more acutely than others, based on circumstances and how emotionally volatile you are at the time, in addition to other factors like how important the issue is in terms of actual survival (yours, the startups - which are two different issues, although codependent variables).

Many more issues surface in your short post.

1\. You're only 1.5 months in and you've attracted the interest of a prominent angel investor AND your cofounder is meeting his deliverables? That's doing well, not falling apart.

2\. You're beginning to feel the strain. That is under your control, and only your control. Look at how you're managing yourself and your energy levels instead of just looking at the business and reaching out to potentially inflate other issues into 'startup ending' crises upon which you could then heap blame when you quit.

If it seems too tough, that's because it IS.

What you have to figure out is whether or not it is too tough for you. Do you want this kind of stress/strain/doubt to surface almost every day for the next 2-7 years?

Are you willing to continue to take on this kind of risk?

Because that's what your startup will require.

Granted, if you're lucky, passionate, and good, and you work your ass off, those will be intermittently interspersed with such blinding moments of success that you'll wonder how you could have possibly considered quitting at any point.

3\. Your cofounder relationship seems to be a big potential issue for you. I take it your cofounder is perhaps slightly 'more' technical than you - <USER2> could be wrong since you don't state this explicitly.

His risk tolerance is also lower than yours, it seems, as he's maintaining a 'safety' net with the consulting gig on the side.

This can mean many things, but you should perhaps be most worried about this if you're in the CEO/#1 role, as it can indicate a cofounder's lack of trust in your ability to 'drive.'

Falling off the map can happen (I've been guilty of it), but it usually means either you're frantically busy trying to sell, raise funds, etc. or that you've got a life on the other side of the startup which would suffer if you left it, and which you're not quite ready to give up.

It's your job to find out which is going on with your cofounder, preferably before you accept funding. If he's not committed and leaves after funding, and you're nontechnical, you're in a very tricky spot.

You also don't mention the equity split, but if it's 50/50, you've got bigger issues. Maybe the cofounder wants more, maybe he or she thinks she's got 50 % of nothing. If so, it's your job to communicate (and then actually hit deliverables like sales, funding money in the bank, etc) that make the point.

4\. Who is going to recruit the CTO? Does the angel know 'a few people?' Does he have a specific person in mind? If so, has he named them, shared the name and a few sentences of this person's experience, and said he'd email or call them by X?

If not, and assurances are vague at best, he's probably relying on you to find someone.

Do not discount the tremendous time, energy, and effort it takes to find this kind of executive as a first time entrepreneur.

Given the other issues, it's challenging but not impossible for you to find a CTO at this point in the company history.

5\. Going solo with the project? When you're fearful of him doing the same? Not a great idea. It's a worse indicator that you don't know if he'd pursue the same project independently. That should be what you focus on tomorrow - figuring out who would keep the kids if you divorce.

6\. "Another full-time project" will not help you answer whether or not the life of a startup founder is for you. Nothing you've named here (although we're operating on not much data) is a disastrous issue that would require jumping ship.

Reading through the text it sounds like you're feeling itchy, scared, and looking for justification for moving on to the next big thing, before you've even figured out if this one can work.

Side note: Don't assume success in both cases. Assume failure. Your investors will, while hoping you're different.

Not until you've explored the myriad of ways in which you can fail, and confronted these head on with users, competitors, and investors during pitch meetings (ie post launch), will you have any idea of what success and failure will mean for this company.

Work your ass off to learn what you can while working on the one you choose, and you might find a different definition of success than the one with which you began.

And you might be one of the lucky ones with 1x, 3x, etc. exits.

<comment><AUTHOR> First, of all, thank you. Seriously. Second of all, here are the gaps in my narrative:

3\. He is more technical than I am, and the reason he is maintaining his PHP shop is to pay the bills, whereas I am fortunate enough not to have that concern for the immediate future. This unavoidable disparity in commitment levels may have caused a bias in me as to how invested we both are.

4\. We have been looking for the CTO. It has been difficult and the guy we were pinning our hopes on ultimately didn't come through. As of now we have someone who is willing to build the MVP if we pay him, and we feel he'll do a good enough job.

5\. He has intimated that he will pursue the project independently. Since I really want to bring this concept to life, I may end up doing the same if we part ways.

6\. I'm not sure about this last statement... The extent to which our issues pertain to the operations of the business itself is obviously important, but equally so are the overall relations between the small number of people who are trying to build it.

In general, I completely agree with your assessment of the situation, and I've suggested a call with him tonight to attempt once and for all to iron our our differences. This comment was mostly to fill you in on the details which were lacking in a post you were kind enough to respond to regardless. If you have anything to add given the new info, that would be great - if not, no worries, and thanks once again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If he's making his deliverables, then you don't have a problem you won't have with anyone else you might bring on. He probably just doesn't like phone calls and is too polite to say so. The grass will likely not be greener with someone else in that guy's place.

</comment><comment><USER5> While I agree with the current comments for the most part, I have found communication to be a really significant part of team relations. Often, this type of problem compounds and I have seen similar situations end with a member leaving the team.

That being said, I have found that this type of issue can usually be solved by talking about what your expectations are and being clear when they are not met. Just make sure that your expectations are reasonable and leave room for error here and there.

Finally, you need to decide if you are ok with having your teammate working part time. Someone splitting their time between two projects usually contributes less than half of their potential to each team.

As others have mentioned, the fact that he has been meeting his deliverables probably means that the issue is less about contribution and more about communication. If you cannot solve the communication issues then you may want to look at alternatives without this partner.

</comment><comment><USER6> Your problem is one of team building. There's you (non-technical) and a "co- founder" (some technical) who aren't really communicating with each other. We've got your side of the story but not the other's. Then there's the lack of a good CTO/technical lead. I know Y-combinator likes to have teams live and work together and that is for a very good rason: it builds the team into a unifying force!

What do you have to do? 1) Build your relationship, first. Go on a retreat together. Get a cabin somewhere, go hiking, escape life, talk, grow, code, design, build, mock, fish, cook, eat, sleep. Do not network, call, email, read news, or communicate with the outside world. Focus on yourselves and your project. Build off that energy and take it to the next level. 2) Either that succeeds or you fall apart. Lesson learned. Move on.

</comment><comment><USER7> A few years ago I dealt with the same issue but at that time in a different industry - resort real estate development. My suggestion is to go with a) or b). In my experience, things only get worse with business partners if they start off this well. I didn't know mine very well before entering into the deal and also confronted this person and it just didn't "sink in." That became a common occurrence. This will be a huge drain on your energy and it is better to go ahead and rip the bandaid off now than be dealing with issues down the road. I know every person and situation is different but why risk it?

</comment><comment><USER8> You seem open to work and ready for input (inference based on that fact that you asked advice). He may very well not be on the same page, but I suggest taking the 16 Personalities Test and figuring out where you and he stand. Great partnerships can be found in odd pairs; don't give up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the responses. First time on Hacker News (came to it on a friend's recommendation...) and I'm really impressed/grateful at how engaged the advice has been.</comment>


What have you learnt writing as a software engineer? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-06-27-how-did-this-start/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just sharing my learning journey! What have you learnt writing technical posts thus far?</comment>


War Stories: How This War of Mine Manipulates Your Emotions (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/war-stories-how-this-war-of-mine-manipulates-your-emotions/ <comment><USER2> Meta: the title would be much clearer if 'This War of Mine' were quoted somehow. Though IIRC HN sometimes strips those on submit?</comment>


Show HN: iMessage Stickers subreddit section - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/iMessageStickers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I have created an iMessage Stickers subreddit section. You can post your iMessage Stickers or anything related to iMessage Stickers. Enjoy!</comment>


One Plus 3 - <AUTHOR> https://oneplus.net/global/3 <comment><USER2> It has 6GB of RAM... this has me wondering if I can plug it into a monitor and treat it as a linux box. Any comments?

<comment><USER3> There are ROMs that can do this, but probably none that work on this phone at this time.

That is where everything is heading, though. Eventually we will all carry a single phone that fills the bulk of all processing and storage needs we have. It will mount into tablets, VR headsets, and PCs to create different user experiences, but the processing and storage will largely remain on the one device. Personally, I think that is fantastic. Being able to write code or play games with a mouse and keyboard, create/edit images on a tablet, and still carry all that data with me everywhere on my phone is fantastic. You'll never need to carry large devices with you when you go places. Just find a nearby tablet/PC dock and load your own system right away.

Microsoft's Continuum feature is sort of a first step towards this. Google adding the Play Store to ChromeOS and multi-window support to Android also seems like a step in this direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was me expecting a page with "4" on it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One Plus 3.... A low price Phone for big specs!!

What do yoy guys think of it ???

Do let me know ???? YOu can also recommend me any other!!!!</comment>


Young women with high emotional intelligence more likely to be manipulative? - <AUTHOR> http://www.psypost.org/2016/02/young-women-with-high-emotional-intelligence-more-likely-to-be-manipulative-40990 <comment><USER2> I was under the impression that emotional intelligence was largely debunked because it didn't correlate with any real meaningful outcome. If this exists as a good correlation it does mean we can use emotional intelligence to weed out the manipulative?

</comment><comment><USER3> AKA People who can, do.

<comment><USER4> To be specific for this context: "young women who would like to be manipulative but have low emotional intelligence stymied; forced to play nice."

Really does make you wonder how much more manipulation would go on in the world if everyone were charismatic and quick-witted.</comment></comment>


Hooks. Get desktop notifications with jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://hooks.events/

<comment><USER2> "* Free version pushes notifications about the song Baby by Justin Bieber each 30 minutes."

Clever way to get people to pay. Cruel, but clever.</comment>


Ask HN: Free / reduced price housekeeping (subsidized by in-home advertising) - <AUTHOR>

My company, The Happy Home Company, is testing out a few new services. One of these is a free housekeeping service, subsidized by advertising.
It would work by the house cleaners leaving products / samples / offers in your home for you to sample / try out.
Depending on your cleaning needs, your cleaning would be either entirely, or partially subsidized.
What do you think? Is this too invasive? Or does it make an expensive service (house cleaning) more affordable through a fair trade-off.
Any and all thoughts would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> Is it free housekeeping, or cheaper cleaning? You're claiming both, so what's the business plan and how much are people saving?

Secondly, people always take free samples, so what's the benefit of cleaning their home? Why can't you walk down the street and hand out advertisements and free toothpaste or lotion samples? You can easily give out hundreds in an afternoon, and it doesn't cost a thing. So, why clean a house for free, or give them $10 or $20 off the cleaning, just to drop off a couple of samples in one household?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. You can obviously just hand out stuff door to door - however, the vast majority of those samples get thrown away.

Here, you can put a shampoo sample directly in their shower, or a yogurt same in their refrigerator. Advertisers will pay far more for that, allowing us to subsidize home services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Free house cleaning in exchange for being an in-home product tester might be an interesting proposition. Reduced price for accepting rather than using free samples has a fairly obvious base case under models of economic rationality.

</comment><comment><USER4> As long as you're not leaving banner ads on my walls, I'm happy. I'd try it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great - send me an email at email@example.com, and I'll set you up.</comment></comment>


Start-ups in Japan - some basic data (email newsletter) - <AUTHOR> http://www.japaninc.com/tt587_where-start-ups-get-money-from

<comment><AUTHOR> I read this on Monday and thought it would be of interest to the HN folks. There seems to be a real lack of information in English (either that or I'm not looking in the right places). I have seen people asking about this kind of information, so hopefully it's of some use.</comment>


Debian Installer Preseed - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed <comment><USER2> This is a great strength of the Debian installer—which is not to say it's unique, it's just the installer I'm familiar with. You can do essentially anything you need to do in a (nearly-)hands-free installer, which is great when you want to image a whole programming department's machines with a fresh version of Debian. (at $DAYJOB we even do truly awful things like building oldoldoldstable chroots during the install process :wink:)</comment>


Big Talkers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/23/johnson-boswell-big-talkers/ <comment><USER2> "There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it."

</comment><comment><USER3> Another fine recent article about Johnson:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811718)</comment>


The Berkeley Document Summarizer: Learning-Based, Single-Document Summarization - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gregdurrett/berkeley-doc-summarizer <comment><USER2> Anyone else work with NLP but unlikely to try this tool simply because it's in Java?

Do any Python NLP engineers integrate Java tools in their setup, e.g. via Jython? How does that work for you?

<comment><USER3> I work with NLP and do not plan to try this tool, though, not because of Java, but because I'm not interested in a summarizer right now.

Our current production back-end doing NLP stuff is written in Java and most third party libraries it uses are also written in Java. It was initially written in Python, but at one point we realized that most libraries we use are in Java and Python is just moving data between them. The choice of these Java libraries wasn't driven by any love towards Java either. By the time they were just a fair bit more advanced both in feature set and performance than their Python counterparts. One example is Stanford Parser and CoreNLP toolkit--up until Parsey McParseface it was the most accurate parser, and CoreNLP toolkit had more features (that interested us) than Python's NLTK.

<comment><USER4> In the end, language and libs don't matter as much as the actual relevancy of the algorithmic methods. This is where the real innovation and invention occurs, in the ability to mimic human cognition as closely as possible. This is also why side-by-side comparisons are the ultimate litmus and why there is now a separation happening between companies that regurgitate voyeuristic ideas (geocities, friendster, myspace, facebook-aol, snapchat, twitter- majordomo) verses companies that truly invent and innovate hard-to-duplicate initial algorithmic solutions (Google, SENS, Buck Inst., Human Longevity, SpaceX). It's like fake AI vs a path toward some semblance of real AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> would be cool if projects like these could show some examples of what they are capable of ... What results i should expect.

<comment><USER6> From the linked page:

See [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~gdurrett/](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~gdurrett/) for papers and BibTeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how it compares to the reddit summarizer bot which is absolutely amazing. It frequently is most upvoted comment on long news articles.

<comment><USER8> Summarizing news articles the way the bot does isn't really that difficult. You face the task of picking 5 sentences out of 20. Since journalists write in a very compact style, the result will almost always look decent. You just follow a few simple rules like:

      - Length of sentence without stopwords
      - Distribution of words across the article
      - Words shared with the title
      - Position in the article
      - Position in the paragraph
      - Does the sentence address the subject in third person? (avoid)
      - Does the sentence contain direct speech? (avoid)

Stuff like this. It's a bit of a Mechanical Turk, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does it compare with the summarizer in Microsoft Word (removed around 2010)?

<comment><USER10> I sometimes tell people about this (e.g. students who need to shorten their papers) and nobody believes this was a thing. Of course, the results were pretty poor back then. I guess there should be better tools by now. Side-by- side comparison anyone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I personally like context-controllable summarization [http://www.lexcognition.com/summarai/](http://www.lexcognition.com/summarai/)

</comment><comment><USER12> So how does this compare to the stuff Google was doing with document summarization? Is the content unique, meaning does it summarize using brand new words?

It's unclear but still seems Really promising.

<comment><USER4> Google has been to busy trying to lift methods from Berkeley Lab and passing it off as their own, in particular Tomas Mikolov [https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp- tutorial/forums/t/1234...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp- tutorial/forums/t/12349/word2vec-is-based-on-an-approach-from-lawrence- berkeley-national-lab)

<comment><USER13> You need a better argument than "somebody else has been working on word vectors before Google"

No shit.

<comment><USER4> That's not what was said. It's how the feature attributes in the vectors are constructed, scored and ranked in addition to the calculations used to score vectors for similarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like this approach, its interesting to see that coherence factoring into the summation amongst other things.

</comment><comment><USER15> Could HN run this automatically on every post? That would be cool :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone have an example of a summary done with this library?

<comment><USER14> If you look at the paper it has one annotated: [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~gdurrett/papers/durrett-berg- klein...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~gdurrett/papers/durrett-berg-klein- acl2016.pdf)

<comment><USER17> I don't think it does? Figure 4 is an example of a manually written summary in the dataset.

There are some examples of how the sentence compression works, but no complete automatic summaries that I can see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's some competition: [http://sumve.com/slack/sumbot/sumbot11.html](http://sumve.com/slack/sumbot/sumbot11.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hey, this is the guy whose dissertation talk I went to several months ago, which is on the same topic!</comment>


A biologist, a mathematician, and a computer scientist walk into a foobar - <AUTHOR> http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/biologist-mathematician-and-computer-scientist-walk-foobar <comment><USER2> The title sounded like the setup for an awesome joke.

The problem is, now I want to hear that joke! :(

<comment><USER3> I'll take a stab at it (fools rush in where professionals fear to tread):

The biologist says "another new species to categorize!"

The mathematician says "I don't see how the foobar follows from the rest of the proof."

The computer scientist says "that variable is badly named", and renames it.

The biologist mourns another species lost to extinction.

<comment><USER4> That's great!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The embedded video presentation is high quality and informative...after the opening remarks from the podium.

[https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA](https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA)

<comment><USER6> The speaker starts at 5 min 38 sec into the presentation. This should link to the direct start time: [https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA?t=5m38s](https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA?t=5m38s)

Edit: And continues from background ML/Bio to core talk at 11 min 50 sec here: [https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA?t=11m50s](https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA?t=11m50s)

Edit: _Focus is on design of experiments using bayesian analysis_

Edit: Second half is at 32 min 22 sec and is more focused on synthetic biology / information processing in biomolecular systems: [https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA?t=32m22s](https://youtu.be/iHazsSvn3VA?t=32m22s)

 _very cool biomolecular computation info in the last section_

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey! Give me my joke!

<comment><USER4> I gave you the lead in, now you provide the rest!</comment></comment>


How to pass docker.sock to your containers while keeping security - <AUTHOR> https://scene-si.org/2016/04/25/exposing-your-docker-api/ <comment><USER2> This is a great idea, I've always been wary of mounting docker.sock into a container. Does a read only mount make any difference I wonder?

<comment><USER3> From security point of view there is little practical differences. The container can still communicate with docker normally and trivially become a root on the host. What it prevents is altering ownership and permissions of the socket.

<comment><USER2> Ah okay so thats why I see people using read only mount on a docker socket. that makes sense. Some how I never thought of that implication I was just thinking about how in the world a file descriptor permission would effect the http traffic as it travels over the socket, but obviously it doesn't.</comment></comment></comment>


Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/25c2c8e0-491e-11dd-9a5f-000077b07658.html

<comment><USER2> I'm personally more concerned with keeping CS as a study of the science of computing rather than adapting it to improve the job prospects of students. My feeling is that really so many people going into CS aren't looking to study the science. They're going for software engineer/architecture/analyst jobs that make them a decent salary.

Some of us went into computer science out of genuine interest in one of the most revolutionary sciences in our lifetime. If it hurts our job prospects, well, that's part of the sacrifice.

I think what we need to do is ask CompSci students what they're wanting to achieve after school. Universities need to offer (and encourage) a broader selection of software development degrees (software engineering, business software, etc) rather than try to dilute CS to be all businessy. I know some schools offer more, but I'm not sure they set student expectations appropriately. Businesses (maybe even more importantly) need to learn how to ask for the degrees/expertise they actually want rather than asking for CS all the time for every software engineering job.

If you're reading this and making hiring decisions-- you can help by changing the wording in your job postings. Stop asking specifically for CS degrees when you really just need someone with a degree who can hack with the best of them.

<comment><USER3> Kids these days don't want to be programmers, they all want to be "Certified Enterprise Solutions Architects" and whatnot.

Think about it, when was the last time you saw "programmer" as a job title? At the very minimum now it's "developer" or "software engineer". No-one actually wants to get their hands dirty with code. And I'll tell you why: in today's modern culture, nothing is right or wrong. Lines, boxes and clouds on a whiteboard and just someone's opinion, no more valid than anyone elses. But code, that requires you to say "this is right" and "this is wrong". Kids these days can't face the pressure of making definitive statements.

<comment><USER4> "For to learn, is to submit to have something done to one; and persuasion comes soonest to those who have least strength to resist it. Hence young men are sooner persuaded than those that are more in years..."

That's Plutarch, complaining about the same thing almost 2,000 years ago.

 _And get off my lawn!_

<comment><USER5> Your quote says young people have an easier time learning something new, so its actually the opposite of what the other person said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you seen consultants from overseas in an internal IT dept? I think this is total ____, and it sounds like another PR ploy to lobby a raise for the visa quota. I work for one of the investment banks, and I would say a low ball estimate is 25%-30% of the back office IT, is visa related individuals in the US (either consultants or internal hires), not to mention the "24 hour" teams they like to implement with India. I don't have a problem with companies needing to import talent at all, but I do have a problem with companies driving the wages down by using these excuses of a lack of talent. Subsequently, paying these people below US market value. If a shortage was the case, companies should pay a premium of something in the ballpark of 10% more, because of the "lack" of demand. Instead, they look at this as a cost saving tool. It's so blatant, and its so obvious, just work in the back office of Wall St. for a month, and you will agree. I wonder what it's like on the west coast.

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems like what IT really wants is trade school graduates. Someone who should be going to DeVry to learn the J2EE stack or .Net and is only doing so for the paycheck, not genuine interest in software development.

When I was in college (1996-2001), I would say an overwhelming majority of the CS students were there solely for all those tech jobs that their parents read about. They were only interested in learning something for either a grade in class or that someone might hire them to do it. Really, trade schools should be handling those types of people.

<comment><USER8> _It seems like what IT really wants is trade school graduates._

No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers".

It doesn't matter what technologies you learned at college, high school, trade school, or from books. Whatever it is, it won't be enough anyway. You'll be expected to get to work, use what you know, and pick up what you have to. _For the rest of your life_.

More importantly, you will be expected to understand abstract ideas (people and tech), break down complex issues, develop effective work habits, and communicate intellegently with many different types of people. Aren't _these_ exactly the type of things that college is for?

<comment><USER3> _No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers"._

That's simply not true. I agree that that is how it _should_ be. But the vast majority of companies hire by key/buzzwords on a resume. You could be the greatest coder in the world but if you don't have "10 years Visual X+#" you won't even get past the HR screen. Everyone loses in that scenario, you don't have a job, the company doesn't have a worker. Sucks, but there it is.

<comment><USER9> So, it is the responsibility of the companies to make sure that they hire competent people and not only by the key/buzzwords. The ones who know how to hire will be more competitive.

<comment><USER3> I expect this is a significant factor in the productivity advantage of small companies/startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see the current problems with the financial markets have already had much impact on CS/software hire, especially in London. I hope this is not a return to the bad days of UK CS job prospects, circa 2001-2002, after the internet bubble burst and 9/11.

Back then even very proficient students at leading universities had hard time finding jobs. These were people who did programming outside of uni courses, had good summer work experiences, built multi-threaded distributed desktop apps as well as web apps, and were actual 'problem solvers' with good skills in mathematic modeling and algorithm design and architectural design skills. However there was simply no market, regardless of how good they were.

Now, it seems as courses get diluted it really only harms all parties concerned and I often think the best thing someone with good A-levels should do is go directly into industry or in a startup/SME atleast before going to uni.

<comment><USER11> 2001-2002 wasn't bad. I know it seemed that way but it really wasn't.

1990-1994 was frickin' nuclear winter for (almost?) all engineering in (almost?) all western nations. Senior staff in many offices would be left reading newspapers at their desks (superb people with no contracts and nothing to do) and there were extremely few junior positions to be filled. Any work which brought in food and paid rent was welcome, and most of that was stuff I never thought I'd see with a degree.

On the flip-side: After surviving that, bootstrapping a company from scratch was a breeze.

<comment><USER12> Where did you work?

<comment><USER11> At the time? Any place which would pay!

Here's the dynamic a recent graduate faces in a severe recession:

No companies in your field are hiring. Period. Contract work is out as well, since larger companies are now scooping up all of the 'crumbs' which used to sustain junior contractors. There are no boring Q/A jobs to temporarily take, no support jobs, no documentation jobs. Nothing.

You could bump your expectations down and try for work for which you are 'overqualified', but there are tons of experienced, desperate and unemployed people fighting for those jobs too. They will accept less pay than you and any employer with half a clue knows you will bolt the moment you get an offer that fits your qualifications anyhow, making you an inevitable cost and waste of resources to train. Barring an awesome network or family favours, those are out.

So, where does that leave you? I'm sure the seasoned Gen-Xers on the board remember :-)

My own low point was sitting in a basement, handling dispatch phones for a school board's janitorial service, while the 'senior manager' of the group was briefing me on the arduous tasks I'd be facing; at one point explaining to me how to add a column of figures by hand ('you have to carry the one here...').

Most of my friends have similar recession stories and we can all laugh about them now, but things can get far shittier far faster than you'd ever dream possible.

I wouldn't suggest you face the future with dread, but don't kid yourself when you plan out what your 'worst case scenario' could be. Bad economic times can be _really_ bad and it's often a struggle to get through them.

You will, though. It's all cyclical and prospects do improve with time.

<comment><USER13> _So, where does that leave you?_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/apply>

<comment><USER11> ..and for those who don't make the cut?

A recent graduate in recessionary times rarely has the luxury of sitting back and waiting for the next application round. When there's rent to pay, food to buy and an empty bank account facing you, things can be a little rough.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply YC is the solution for everyone. I just wanted to point out that we're still funding, regardless of the economic weather. (The average startup takes longer to succeed than economic cycles ordinarily last, so we ignore them.)

<comment><USER14> Even if one doesn't get YC funding, working on a startup is probably better for your career than cleaning toilets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would estimate that the vast majority of IT jobs are not programming- related. Most are in technical support and admin. And an employer is just as likely (maybe more likely) to employ a liberal arts graduate to do technical support, as hire a graduate of a computing-related subject. I've worked in several smallish companies (circa 500 employees), where I was the only person in IT who had a computing-related degree. Furthermore, I was the only one who had any interest in IT per se, and the only one who had any knowledge of IT beyond what was required to do the job (even in that knowledge some of them were woefully ignorant). The truth of the matter is that there is a wide gulf between a university education and what employers actually want/need.

</comment><comment><USER5> It will be funny when doctors and lawyers are outsourced. Programming was outsourced not because it is an easy profession but because it was the entire profession that enabled outsourcing, and so was looked onto as magical by people who had never seen computers or had as good a way to make a living before.

But there's really no reason why outsourcing will be limited to manufacturing and IT, especially as the kids of the 3rd world IT specialists grow up and choose new professions for themselves. You really only need surgeons, dentists, nurses, and pill dispensing machines on shore. American law books and internal medicine facts can be studied very well off-shore, and trials and meetings can be held via online video. Everything would be digital and operate even faster than ever before. Nurses would have two main specialties, consisting of taking care of the old and taking a patient's vitals for off- shore doctors and computers that are good at predicting events and prescribing solutions, to calculate.

This would also reduce the costs of healthcare for everybody. ;)

<comment><USER16> Without wanting to start a debate about licensing, unionisation and so on, I expect that to take decades. Much of the enabling technology is here now, but the medical and legal industries have decades (or even centuries) of experience in limiting entry to their industry and thereby maintaining high wages... er, I mean, "high standards". They won't let this happen without a PR war on whichever government is "allowing it to happen".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reads like a PR plant from IBM trying to bend public opinion so they can outsource their career development responsibility to universities.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. What bothers me especially is that these comments are made by managers with combinations of elite business degrees and experience which will enable them never to be limited in the kind of work they do. And yet, they are practically demanding that CS students be neatly packed turn-key packages that can do no more and no less than what is required of them in typical business programming roles. "Limited career prospects" cannot begin to explain what I see in this scheme of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The figures point to the brutal reality behind technology companies' > complaints that universities are not tailoring their computer science > degrees sufficiently to meet business needs.

This is idiocy. Computer science has as much to do with their business needs as pharmacists have to do with biology. That's why biologists have figured out how to make separate programs for them.

</comment><comment><USER20> I really wonder how this can happen in the UK. Here in Switzerland it's the opposite. We have only like 300-400 people a year graduating with a CS degree and 2-3k jobs open. It's a real crisis, and companies are outsourcing to anywhere. Not to save costs, but because they simply can't find people. In my school ETH Zurich, in 2000 there were over 300 people starting CS, this year it was less than 100. I think salaries just have to continue raising until they meet bankers so that engineering and CS starts getting attractive again...

<comment><USER21> At dinner, we were discussing European countries that we might consider moving to. My friend mentioned that Switzerland is one of the hardest countries to get a work permit and later residency (ten years uninterrupted). I immediately started to wonder if the Switzerland IT job surplus is due to their pretty restrictive immigration policies, to say nothing of the notorious cleanliness standards (that you must adhere to when selling your home)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reads like a PR plant from IBM trying to bend public opinion so they can outsource their career development responsibility to universities.

</comment><comment><USER22> The quality (and curriculum) of comp sci courses in the UK varies dramatically. I know of Comp Sci graduates who don't know how to program. I also know of Comp Sci courses that don't expose the students to anything like client engagement or general business skills.

Another question worth asking is what exactly is an 'IT Job'? From the sounds of things the IBM chap wants a Comp Sci degree to mean an IT Consultancy Degree. How useful that would be to some other business that wants really good developers is another matter.

</comment><comment><USER23> This seems to be a improbably high number. I live in Germany, and here the unemployment rate for CS graduates is among the lowest of any education, with the prognosis still being very good. Do any of you who live in the US or UK have had problems finding a job when you were searching for one?

<comment><USER24> It's not improbable at all. When I graduated (2002), I knew a few people who had a lot of trouble finding a job. They got killed on interviews with questions like "have you done any programming outside of class?", "what is the complexity of insert on a vector?" and "what is your preferred unix shell?" (note: resume had unix skills).

Eventually, they would up getting either non-computer related jobs or being hired by clueless PHBs. There are some BAD programmers out there. 10% would not surprise me.

<comment><USER18> I agree. When I started studying in 1998, the bubble was still growing and many of my co-students were only in CS for the money they thought they were going to make (and were they disappointed when we graduated!).

Some of the commentators in that article argue that CS degrees should be more relevant to the business world. I disagree - too many universities have already hobbled CS degrees to make them (apparently) more relevant to the business world. This leads the wrong people into CS and under-prepares the good students.

It's interesting that they mentioned medicine. Med students learn about a lot more than most of them will ever face in their careers. So medicine is hard and it takes a lot of work. But we expect this, because we expect them to have an integrated view of the body in order to diagnose us correctly.

So why do we settle on CS degrees that are patchworks of business communications, XML and web design?

My (not so humble) opinion: do justice to CS and push the standard up. Graduates from such degrees will be able to handle whatever you throw at them.

<comment><USER23> I think the problem is not so much the low standard, but the lack of reliable tests for the personal aptitude, and this should not only be a problem in CS. Universities should spend a lot of effort prior to someone beginning their studies, to find out if the person really wants to do what they chose, in a way that the person itself realizes that quickly. This phenomenon is still huge in Germany, I started studying CS in 2002 and after one year, 60% of the people in my year had quit, mostly because they did not have any idea what was expecting them...

<comment><USER9> At least the found out in the first year. They could have found out after four years.

<comment><USER23> There still were some dropping out every year after that, but the number was significantly smaller after each step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's a rider to that headline. The effect is in UK, not the US. Here in the US, I do find that in the entry-level employers are more than willing to recruit people who get on-the-job training.

That said, I hope they find decent jobs.

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually learnt more outside my CS course, experimenting in my own time, than on it. People should be encouraged to experiment more in education and not spoon-fed.</comment>


Your CPAP machine is spying on you - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/you-snooze-you-lose-insurers-make-the-old-adage-literally-true <comment><USER2> Yet one more reason why GDPR-style legislation is a global requirement. Yes, there will be growing pains, but the current hidden costs aren't worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18503060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18503060)</comment>


The Why of Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://abhaikollara.xyz/posts/2018-11-16-the-why-of-engineering/ <comment><AUTHOR> The article is strictly from the perspective of Indian engineering colleges (except a few top notch colleges)</comment>


New Jersey giving away the $5B+ farm to lure Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/10/16/amazon-hq2-new-jersey-newark-jeff-bezos/ <comment><USER2> As a life-long resident of New Jersey, I hope this happens.

Yes, $7 billion in tax incentives is a lot. But it's not like New Jersey / Newark would be collecting those property/wage taxes if Amazon didn't move in. But Newark needs help - the city was recently giving away land virtually for free to entice people to build homes and move in, and even then not many people took it.

The city is centrally located, accessible by public transit (NJ Transit and PATH), close to a major airport hub, etc., and despite that there's just no industry there. The city's been trying very hard to lure tech talent to the city (and managed to get Amazon's Audible to base itself there). Bringing Amazon would be a huge win for the city and the state.

And for me, personally, since I could cut an hour off my commute by going to Newark instead of NYC. So do it, Amazon!

<comment><USER3> I want you to be right but that's simply not the reality on the ground. Our infrastructure is not very good.

Here is something Path tweeted half an hour ago:

@PATHTrain: Due to a signal problem on the Hackensack River Draw Bridge, service on NWK-WTC line is subject to a delay. [44]

This is the same panynj that was able to find $4B for a WTC station with a $2B budget. Almost 100% over budget when we should be spending more on fixing that bridge signal problem that seems to happen daily...

I have hope. I am not holding my breath.

Update: @PATHTrain: Concerning the earlier signal problem on the Hackensack River Draw Bridge, service on the NWK-WTC line is resuming normal schedule. [46]

<comment><USER2> Oh I'll be the last person in the world to defend PATH or NJ Transit. Or the turnpike for that matter.

But hey, they're something at least, and if you're gonna base 50,000 people in the Northeast, where else would you go? NJ has the talent, proximity to major transportation hubs and NYC, and it's willing to make major incentives happen. Not a bad choice, if you ask me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fact that Christie, Booker, and Baraka are able to share a stage together without petty sniping shows how serious NJ is about winning this bid. That being said, I feel that this is going to simply act as the bar for other states to top. We still have 6 days left before the deadline, so I expect other places to roll out their plans as the week goes by.

I also see no mention of property tax relief. NJ has the highest property taxes in the country, and as someone who moved out of Jersey (but didn't own a house), I have no desire to ever pay property taxes at those rates.

</comment><comment><USER5> Too many companies in NJ have been killed of by militant unionism, plus tax/pension/wages for civil serpents for Amazon to think of it. Why do you think NJ is turning to dust

</comment><comment><USER6> Also the most polluted air in the states: [http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/nj_air_ranked_by_cl...](http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/nj_air_ranked_by_cleanair_grou.html)</comment>


C# moved to #3 on TIOBE chart - <AUTHOR>

Just noticed that C# moved up to #3 on the list of most popular programming list for month of February 2012. I'm assuming this is due to growing popularity of ASP.NET framework. What are your thoughts?<p>http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html <comment><USER2> It's a nice language and a nice platform. The new ASP.NET MVC and EntityFramework stuff is very nicely done too. The community is in the lift as well thanks to the professional stackoverflow network and initiatives like NuGet. It really isn't a bad place to work in. Same deal goes with Visual Basic. Same power, different (imo easier to read, more annoying to write) syntax.

But for a low-budget startup the licensing costs are what'll get you in the long run. Stick with something free to use like ruby, javascript, php, etc.

<comment><USER3> _But for a low-budget startup the licensing costs are what'll get you in the long run. Stick with something free to use like ruby, javascript, php, etc._

I take it mono isn't a reasonable replacement on non-Microsoft OSes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps main reason for this MS is promoting the language at the expense of Visual Basic. Personally, I think it is a shame that a language targeted mainly to a single OS gain such popularity (not counting Mono.)

<comment><USER3> _I think it is a shame that a language targeted mainly to a single OS gain such popularity (not counting Mono.)_

I do hope you hold the same cynicism for Objective-C. :P

<comment><USER4> Objective-C is actually worse.

<comment><USER3> I have to respect consistency. :)

I find it interesting that the poster mentioned the growth of C# (going from 4th to the 3rd), but didn't mention Objective-C's much larger growth spike (from 8th to 5th place).

To me, that's the bigger story - I imagine all that Objective-C growth is getting targeted squarely at the mobile platforms. That's a _lot_ of dev interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little bit off-topic but does anyone else find odd that Javascript is still ranked below Perl of all things? You'd think between node.js and all the client-side craziness it would have a much stronger showing.

</comment><comment><USER3> ASP.Net might be behind the growth, but I wouldn't discount native application development (particularly in the enterprise space). Not everyone writes web apps, after all. :)</comment>


Tesla likely to face SEC investigation following Musk tweets - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/08/tesla-likely-to-face-sec-investigation-following-musk-tweets.html <comment><USER2> That short burn attempt actually limited the loss of short sellers since they know $420 is the cap

So thats when you double down knowing that the SEC is going to cause a legal headache shanking the acquirers confidence in the gut. And if the only people that can cough up that much financing are in Saudi Arabia and China, good luck getting that past the President.</comment>


Ask HN: Why no charset in your head tag? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed that Hacker News doesn't provide a charset in its <head>.  Is there a reason for this?  I would have thought that a site like this would indicate this. <comment><USER2> The charset is specified in the response header. Doctype omission is the major issue here.</comment>


Researchers Say PDFs Are 'Unfit for Human Consumption' - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3az4dy/researchers-say-pdfs-are-unfit-for-human-consumption <comment><USER2> The article mentioned was discussed a few days ago here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108950)</comment>