Crank: JSX-driven components with functions, promises and generators - <AUTHOR> https://crank.js.org/blog/introducing-crank <comment><USER2> This seems a very useful counter-argument to the current React "orthodoxy". I'm curious to see where this goes over time.

If I may offer two big pieces of advice towards either adoption or truly making a statement that React might have to react to:

1\. You probably need to answer the questions:

A. How do I use an existing React component? B. Can I use a component written in this inside of a React application?

If you can find a really good answer to either of these, and especially if you have a good answer for both, you can help get adoption. With as large as the overall React ecosystem is, it's going to be tough for any and all React-likes to gain traction without some sort of compatibility story. You don't have time for the React world to stop.

2\. Testing. Probably the biggest contributor to the "components should be pure functions" orthodoxy in React comes from a well intentioned perspective of testability. Pure functions are indeed easy to test. It is easy to forget that they aren't always the only thing easy to test. I see you've got some tests for Crank.js itself in the GitHub repository, that's a great first step. I think you would make a stronger statement _to_ the React orthodoxy if you added (and focused) documentation on testing each style of component.

I know from some experience there are some very good ways to test generators and even async generators. If you can show it and make it seem easy (because it should be), that could especially go a long way to saying why Suspense especially in trying to adhere to an early approach to keeping testing simple has in some ways pushed testing really complex.

So far as I can see the potentially most complicated part of testing will be how easily can you mock the `this` context. Should be something that is easy to build a reusable test context. Here too it should be possible to remind people that testing a custom function context should be as simple as `MyComponent.bind(testContext)` or `MyComponent.apply(testContext, {...props})`.

The more you can prove that testing all flavors of components here is simple to do, the more you might help assuage doubts that these aren't "pure" functions.</comment>


Calculators will be banned in maths tests for 11-year-olds in UK from 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20259382

<comment><AUTHOR> When I came to US in 10th grade, I was completely caught off guard by how dependent everyone was on their TI-83s (a powerful graphic calculator with a built-in OS that could accept basic programs, and even simplistic games) for the most basic stuff.

In 10th grade, I never imaged I'd be solving linear equations, let along see people use a graphing calculator to solve them!</comment>


Feedback on Fishing startup: FishBlab - <AUTHOR>

http://www.fishblab.com Looking for feedback, particularly UX/UI. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Congrats on the site. I'm not much of a fisherman, but I've been out on the Columbia here in Oregon a few times for Spring and Fall Chinook. Good eats.

I'm not formally a designer, but I fancy myself a fairly decent UX/UI guy and think I can offer some basic suggestions.

1) In your header, I would keep the Fishblab logo where it is, move the "Map Driven Fishing Community" tagline up next to/under the logo, and move the Login/New Account creation to the upper-right corner. Then, move your menu down to where the tagline and login currently reside. Right now, there's a lot of wasted space where the menu could be, and it seems awkwardly balanced to the left.

2) Remove the huge "Fishblab" logo in the main section. It's redundant, and doesn't really do anything for the users. What to put in its place? Add something for the user to do, like input their location or a type of fish they're looking for. Or, make this space a dynamic feed for other site content, like photos and forum posts.

3) Minimize your use of tag clouds. These were cool a few years ago and you still see them a bit today, but users may be overwhelmed at the sheer amount of them on your homepage. Think of your most prominent use cases for the site, and mold your homepage content around that.

4) Move the menu in the main section (Photos, Catch, etc.) over to the right or left side and turn them into actions the user can make. Instead of "Photos", make it "View and Submit Photos" or something like that.

5) Please, please allow for authentication from other sites like Facebook and Twitter. This will increase your trial and retention rates and allow you to leverage the size of those networks with your users and gain greater visibility. Let people tweet stuff and post stuff to Facebook!

6) Not really a UX/UI thing but it'd be really cool if you pulled information from each state's Fish & Wildlife Department website. You could probably write a fairly simple program to pull this info and dynamically display it on your site according to the user's location.

I could make a dozen other small suggestions but they'd mostly be nitpicking and personal opinion. Overall, I really like the concept and see a real need if there's nothing currently in this space (well, even if there is). I see you guys as a sort of "Yelp for fishermen"; you could probably take a few design and functional cues from their site to kickstart the ideation process.

Cheers and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> These are great suggestions, thanks for taking the time to make them. I agree with the header menu suggestions. I have been thinking about replacing the huge logo with a search box so I agree getting rid of it would be a good idea. I will be spending some going through your list as we continue to refine the landing pages and menus. Thanks so much for the detailed suggestions, they are extremely helpful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the site concept is great, but the UI looks like it was built in 1994.

I am no designer, but what I did is find a nice looking template on <http://themeforest.net> and modify it to meet my needs. Tabs, split windows, jquery sliders, quite a few of the templates us the same elements. Just find one you like.

Some people see fishing as a serious activity, others as a family activity. You can tailor the look of the site to either demographic. For the family theme, adding a nice "mascot" like a puffer fish could help. <http://graphicriver.net/item/puffer-fish/102251>

Can you try mine? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2689356>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the suggestions. Your site has a clean design. Looks like a cool idea for tracking tech skills - I will take a closer look. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.fishblab.com></comment>


Supreme Court rules Georgia state law annotations not copyrightable [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_7m58.pdf <comment><USER2> Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and time limits being inflated grossly to suit copyright holders in the current era.

In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create and publish things with absolutely no hope of profit or legal protection, and yet we bend over backwards to extend our protections for the lucky few to the tune of the author's life + 70 years. Even more if for hire. Tell me how that's in the public interest.

<comment><USER3> IP laws are anti-competitive and rent-seeking, that's exactly the point. I agree that the amount of time copyrights are good for is ridiculous, but I still think it's better than not having them.

Imagine if J.K.Rowling wrote the first 3 Harry Potter books but didn't see a dime because the second they got popular everyone with a printing press started selling them royalty-free. Would she have finished the series? I got to read all 7 books because J.K.Rowling was incentivized to write them by her copyright.

<comment><USER4> In the absence of copyright, one supposes that authors would get large up- front fees for publishing, and that the fee for book 4, book 5 and so on for JK Rowling would have been quite large, so I suppose she would have done just fine. Think "Kickstarter, but for authors".

<comment><USER3> The exact opposite would happen. No publisher would pay very much for rights to a book that they cannot defend. Once that book hits the shelves, everyone with a printing press will be copying it and selling it at cost, which will undercut the first publisher because they need to include royalties in the price. They certainly aren't going to print a million copies if they aren't sure that they can sell them before someone starts copying them, so that would naturally limit the size of launches, further driving down the value of a manuscript.

There'd be a small first-mover advantage for being the first to print a book and smaller operations not worth copying would still operate but J.K. Rowling wouldn't be a billionaire.

<comment><USER5> In this case, the "rights" would not be those of a _book publisher_ but those of a _patron /sponsor_. Being among the persons or corporate entities who e.g. J.K. Rowling officially acknowledges as the "sponsors" of her work would create a lot of clout, and with that a lot of very real value. Authors used to be funded like that before the current copyright-based system became predominant; it's not just a theoretical model.

<comment><USER6> If the model is so good, what is preventing her from doing it now? There is nothing in law saying you have to copyright your books, she could simply release it under creative commons. What even qualifies you to know what is best for authors and publishers? I love how so many people love volunteering other peoples work for free or propose they jump through hoop in some byzantine system to make money in a way that is acceptable to you.

<comment><USER7> > I love how so many people love volunteering other peoples work for free or > propose they jump through hoop in some byzantine system to make money in a > way that is acceptable to you.

Yes, that's called democracy. Copyright must be a system that is acceptable to most of us. In fact, copyright itself is more "byzantine" than just having the State issue a stipend to anyone who produces a work of art - yet must we be OK with such a solution?

Similarly, Joseph Galambos considered that people who coined words were due a royalty when they were used. Is is unfair that we decide to use that work for free instead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading the opinions, it is a breath of fresh air to see one of the branches of government relying upon fact and logical argument when discussing the issues. This is how America is supposed to work.

<comment><USER9> You mean this is _not_ the norm? The cases I've read seemed quite reasonable. They happened in the 90s and early 2000s though.

<comment><USER10> It may be the norm, but they also get some completely wrong: Citizens United, for example.

<comment><USER11> Whether you agree with or disagree with the Citizens United outcome, describing the majority opinion as a straightforward "completely wrong" (when, for example, the ACLU supported the verdict) indicates that you have not, in fact, read any of the opinions or dissents, or done research about the specific case that was being litigated.

<comment><USER12> They overturned an at the time recent Supreme Court verdict, which is disruptive and counter to long standing precedent.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_v._Michigan_Chamber_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_v._Michigan_Chamber_of_Commerce)

<comment><USER13> That doesn't make a decision "wrong." Lots of Supreme Court opinions are wrong, and often obviously so. There is nothing wrong with overruling them.

 _Citizens United_ was an instance of the government sliding down a slippery slope of precedent, which forced that precedent to be re-evaluated. The facts (the government attempting to punish someone for distributing a political movie about a political candidate) were so stark, they revealed the defects in the precedent that may have been obscured previously. Moreover, the government made clear at oral argument that there was no limiting principle to its position—it acknowledged that, had the Court ruled the other way, nothing stopped the government from book banning and other core free speech violations.

<comment><USER12> Treating the court as a purely political entity which will flip flopping on issues as the majority changes is counter to it's design.

The the normal way this is maintained is to have narrow opinions on the specific issue at hand. As such I can agree politically and still say the ruling was unequivocally incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had never heard of the "government edicts doctrine" before. Doing a little research, I see why. It is a judicially created doctrine created by the Supreme Court ~130 years ago, and this is the first time since then it has been back to the Court.

What they decided way back then was that opinions of state court judges, like opinions of Federal court judges, were not copyrightable. They also decided a little later that annotations written by a state-employed annotator where the state did not claim copyright on the annotator's work could be copyrighted by the annotator.

What's new in this case compared to those cases that originally established the government edicts doctrine is that it was a state that was trying to assert copyright ownership of the annotations.

</comment><comment><USER15> Laws, and their official (albeit non-binding) interpretations should not be under copyright. This has struck me as an absurd assertion from the very beginning: We're supposed to live in a nation of laws: how could that ever be the case if the laws themselves are kept from the people?

<comment><USER16> Another related issue is the copyright of technical standards incorporated into law. A selection of technical standards, especially in the domain of civil engineering, the standards on fire, electrical safety, energy efficiency, and test design standards, are effectively laws. The implementation of standards is explicitly required by the laws and there's no alternative. Yet, these standards are often sold for-profit with copyright restriction.

The EFF has some coverage on the issue [0][1].

[0] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/eff-court-dont-let- pri...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/eff-court-dont-let-private- organizations-control-access-law)

[1] [https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg- prevail...](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevails- free-speech-case-over-publishing-safety-standards)

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty eager to see where the ASTM case lands. I'm rooting for Public.Resource.Org, but given that the DC Circuit remanded on fair use (rather than copyrightability), the court will probably consider "amount and substantiality" of the work reproduced relative to the original.

Public.Resource.Org photocopied and distributed the complete standards, cover to cover, including ASTM's illustrations, logos, etc. But what aspect of the manuals are the actual law? The technical measurements? From what I understand, the Georgia annotations became law by reference in their entirety. I don't think it's obvious here and I worry the court will rule against them :/

Regardless, I love Public.Resource.Org's work and wish them the best.

<comment><USER16> > _I don 't think it's obvious here and I worry the court will rule against > them :/_

Yes, ultimately, the issue of technical standard is still untested in court and remains a problem, it will take a prominent lawsuit before it's resolved.

> _But what aspect of the manuals are the actual law? The technical > measurements?_

What Public.Resource.Org is doing is still a gray area, as you said. But I guess it will not be a total loss - if there are legal challenges in the future, they can publish a "censored" version of technical standard and defend _that_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a welcome decision, but a very obvious one. Why did Georgia need to get told that we, the people, own the laws?

<comment><USER19> As a lawyer, I can chime in here. Annotated statutes are special. They have cross references to the cases which cite to the statutes. So if you're doing research on a statute, the annotated version will have the letter of the law word for word, then at the bottom it will have a little topical index (with topics based on a part of the statute) under each topic will be the cases citation which addressed that topic and a brief 1-2 line description of what that case held. Generally, one of the publishers puts them together instead of the state because it takes a lot of legwork and constant updating as new cases interpret the statute. State laws and statutes are obviously not something you can claim is your intellectual property but when they're annotated you are actually reading a lot of stuff that isn't the just the statute.

<comment><USER20> So why did Georgia feel the need to anoint this one the official annotated code?

There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from just doing the annotations on it's own initiative and selling the result itself?

What doomed their copyright is that they took state money to do it. Is it just corruption and they figured they can charge both sides?

<comment><USER21> > _There is obviously a market for annotations, what stopped LexisNexis from > just doing the annotations on it 's own initiative and selling the result > itself?_

Because the annotations angle is a red herring? In the Oyez transcript of oral argument[1], Citron (for the respondent) made what I believe to be a relevant remark disputing the petitioners' assertion that legal annotations would be more expensive:

> _One is the actual useful versions of these codes are already plenty > expensive. There 's a lot of discussion of the cost for a printed volume, > but online access, which is what really most practitioners need to use, most > people want to use, it's much more expensive than the $400. But, even > accepting that the price is lower, I think that favors us, because what's > going on there is an exchange of -- you're going to accept a price cap in > exchange for the right to publish this officially, not for publishing the > annotations, because Westlaw makes the annotations and is allowed to charge > six times as much. Lexis isn't going to agree to do the annotation work in > exchange for a price cap. What it wants for the price cap is the right to > publish it officially._

As I understand the game being played prior to this decision (to be sure, IANAL): although annotations undoubtedly have market value, the market (for liability and other reasons) will nevertheless tend towards official sources, and if you're the official publisher granted monopoly, who cares if the thing being sold has a price cap ($?) when the subscription to the service that provides access to said official thing won't ($$!)...and even if said subscription cost was pragmatically constrained by market forces, the dragnet scales from typical legal/government/academic players in the arena to capturing a proverbial crap ton of otherwise unmarketable endusers on the receiving end of the law ($$$!) while taking share away from direct competitors ($$$$!!). Then make a free, _unofficial_ version available in an attempt to pacify public dissent, but seed a mandatory disclaimer that it may contain errors, so anyone with skin in the game who can pony up will be compelled to do so.

[1] [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-1150](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-1150)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are interesting implications:

> First, the author of the annotations qualifies as a legislator.

Whoa! There is a massive amount of such code, and the folks writing it are usually thought of as private lawyers, rather than public legislators. That's a big deal, since the legislative process cannot be unconditionally private, but has to be balanced to keep the public informed.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does the Court's holding that officials cannot be "authors" have any implications for copyright in _privately written_ documents that have been adopted as laws or regulations? Is _Veeck v. Southern Bldg. Code Congress Int 'l, Inc._, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002) still good law after today?

</comment><comment><USER24> Yay for public.resource.org. Carl Malamud does excellent work. You can donate here: [https://public.resource.org/about/donate.html](https://public.resource.org/about/donate.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a huge win for civil liberty.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure that it is. While I agree with the final outcome (seriously, why would the states be able to copyright annotations?), it sounds like the court ignored precedent and effectively made up a new law out of whole cloth to reach this outcome.

We may be okay with this particular outcome, but would we feel the same way if they did it for say Roe v. Wade (or some other more established opinion that you like, depending on your political leanings)? I can't tell how serious this is, but it sounds like another attempt to weaken stare decisis to me (again, with the disclaimer that I am not a lawyer or legal expert of any kind and maybe it's not nearly as bad as it sounds to me?)

<comment><USER27> I'm not so sure it ignores precedent, although it definitely extends it. I think Ginsberg in her dissent says it well that the issue follows from related precedent as such: "To explain why, I proceed from common ground. All agree that headnotes and syllabi for judicial opinions—both a kind of annotation—are copyrightable when created by a reporter of decisions, Callaghan v. Myers, 128 U. S. 617, 645–650 (1888), but are not copyrightable when created by judges." She goes on to say "In contrast, the role of the legislature encompasses the process of 'making laws'- not construing statutes after their enactment." and that, "The OCGA annotations, in my appraisal, do not rank as part of the Georgia Legislature's lawmaking process for three reasons."

Those in the majority instead say "If judges, acting as judges, cannot be 'authors' because of their authority to make and interpret the law, it follows that legislators, acting as legislators, cannot be either." They say this extends to the annotations as "That of course includes final legislation, but it also includes explanatory and proce- dural materials legislators create in the discharge of their legislative duties."

Whether the majority is correct in their decision or not, I think this is definitely a reasonable clarification of past precedent. I think Justice Thomas's dissent is accurate when it says that this was not as clear cut a confirmation as the Majority opinion's writing makes it out to be, but I think saying the decision is incongruous with previous precedent is also incorrect.

<comment><USER26> That may be fair; rereading Ginsburg's dissent though I'm still left wondering if it makes sense to apply precedent in the way the majority did, or if they were just making things up. It's quite possible that I'm just misunderstanding what I'm reading too though.

<comment><USER27> It's definitely fair to disagree with the majority here. The written dissents also make sense, and as a 5:4 decision that wasn't along party lines you're in good company with Supreme Court Justices who think it was an incorrect decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For background on this, see [https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2019/12/justices-debate-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2019/12/justices-debate-allowing-state-law-to-be-hidden-behind-a-pay- wall/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Surprised no cite to the oral argument on Oyez in current discussion: [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-1150](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-1150)

</comment><comment><USER29> this is a huge win - although it's interesting that Ginsburg and some other "liberal" judges seem to side with Georgia in saying that the state should be able to put the law of the land behind a pay wall.

<comment><USER30> That dissent refers to "non-binding annotations" which are more like the opinions of the law-makers, hence not part of their duties because they are _not_ law.

<comment><USER31> Indeed, here is the very first paragraph of the dissenting opinion by Ginsburg (joined by Breyer), beginning at p. 39 of the linked submission:

> Beyond doubt, state laws are not copyrightable. Nor are other materials > created by state legislators in the course of performing their lawmaking > responsibilities, _e.g._ , legislative committee reports, floor statements, > unenacted bills. ( _Ante_ , at 8–9). Not all that legislators do, however, > is ineligible for copyright protection; the government edicts doctrine > shields only "works that are (1) created by judges and legislators (2) _in > the course of their judicial and legislative duties_." ( _Ante_ , at 9) > (emphasis added). The core question this case presents, as I see it: Are the > annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) done in a > legislative capacity? The answer, I am persuaded, should be no.

<comment><USER32> Which is reasonable, but isn't this publication THE only codified publication of Georgia's laws?

<comment><USER33> Correct.

Also, IANAL, but my understanding is the annotations are de facto required reading for practitioners of law. They give all the background and history of the law, without which, you would be at a severe disadvantage in the courtroom.

<comment><USER34> I can't quite agree that the annotations are 'required reading' for competent representation of a litigant. Some state's official printings of statute are pretty bare (Louisiana in particular), but Georgia's official documents are quite thorough. The area of law, the type of arguments, etc are all facets of what types of references make good arguments. I'm not aging the annotations aren't a good reference, but that some commenters seem to be placing a lot of emphasis on them, instead of other sources.

<comment><USER33> Two related questions...

1\. In a state like LA, where annotations aren't included, would a lawyer purchase an annotated version from a 3rd party? I assume the information contained in the annotations is expected to be known, regardless of how it is obtained.

2\. If a state elects to publish annotations as part of the only published code, does that lend any extra weight to the annotations (effectively, by putting them in the same book, and making that book the only copy of the state code, the state has signaled "these notes are the way we intend you to read/interpret/practice the law").

<comment><USER34> The answer to 1 is yes, although it is more common for the information contained in 'annotations' to be accessed via Westlaw or Alexis online subscriptions.

As to 2, I think the primary evidence for extra weight would be the number of citations to the 'official' annotations in rendered opinions, but that it would not be an official jurisprudential rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The point is, judges make decisions based on these annotations. Therefore, if you're a private citizen, or even an attorney, and you're dealing with the court system, you must have access to the annotations or you're at a serious disadvantage. For that reason, hiding them behind a subscription or paywall is the equivalent of "secret" laws, or perhaps justice reserved for the well-to- do.

</comment><comment><USER36> I haven't read the whole opinion yet, but it seems to be arguing that works produced in the course of a legislative function are not authored, and therefore not copyrightable. It doesn't seem to have much to do with the content relating to the law or not.

And if so, what is the larger significance?

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/georgia-v- public...](https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/georgia-v-public- resource-org-inc/)</comment>


Your calendar should be a whitelist, not a blacklist - <AUTHOR> https://critter.blog/2020/08/03/your-calendar-should-be-a-whitelist-not-a-blacklist/ <comment><USER2> This seems to acheive the exact opposite of what the author wants to achieve. If you create a small window of meeting time you are going to end up with any meeting of more than 3 people violating atleast one person's constraints. I think it goes to the core problem that meetings are the point at which an engineer actually has to acknowledge other people exist and have their own needs. If you are the type of person that needs deep, uninterrupted time that's fine - block out the time you need. But if you over-constrain your calendar you're creating huge headaches for the people who want to meet with you. Who wants to meet with you? Your boss, your product managers, your sales people, your project planners. All people who are going to dictate how useful your "Deep Work" is, all people who are going to be talking to your boss about your performance.

I've seen so many senior engineers so wrapped up in their small area of focus they've completly forgotten there's an enormous company around them that's meant to be telling you what the product needs to look like and selling it. Your value to your company isn't measured in git commits. It's measured in revenue.

<comment><USER3> When meetings become a systemic problem, having some forcing mechanisms to reduce their number and protect time can be a useful tool.

The problem you're mentioning is solvable by defining office hours across the team to make people constraints the same for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _We should be able to say say "I'm free for meetings from 2-5pm on Tuesdays > and Thursdays, and if you want to talk to me then that's when you can."_

It's a nice idea, but the moment you have more than a very small handful of people who need to meet this becomes untenable and obnoxious.

"Sorry, Mike says he'll only meet between 2 and 4 on Wednesdays, so I guess we'll have this meeting in 17 years when that works for everyone else. Or maybe Mike is just fired now? Either way, I suppose."

> _In most companies, doing that would make you an annoyance. Those companies > don't respect Deep Work._

The other perspective, of course, is that you don't respect collaboration.

<comment><USER5> We need both collaboration and deep work. In my experience, deep work is just shy of non-existent (or gets done late in the evening and on weekends). A proper balance between the two is when a company can truly shine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've gone back and forth on the topic, between protecting my calendar, which seem to do little good because people don't care, and deciding I would just say "no" if I don't want to go, which doesn't seem to fly well in my organization's mentality.

Overall I think whether blacklist or whitelist, these are just mechanisms to help reduce a systemic problem. Whitelisting works ok if your problem is scattered work time (hell to the craze for 45m meetings that leave you with 15m of useless time in between). Blacklist works as a defense mechanism when your calendar gets abused. But overall it would be better that the systemic problem gets fixed in the first place. So overall these address mostly the planning part of meetings, not the other part of the iceberg which is the usefulness altogether.

However, on that topic, on a conceptual level, I really like approaches of companies like basecamp or what's described in emergency remote[1]: replace meeting with tools. But I don't believe it's always the efficient way to get to decisions, when you need a meeting, planning can be collaborative (eg [2] scheduler which just iteratively asks people for their preference until finding a slot that works) rather than dictated by the organizers.

[1] [https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote](https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote) [2]

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This seems to have been flagged for some reason. It disappeared from the front page suddenly.

</comment><comment><USER6> I truly wish I'd ever worked anywhere that would actually allow this. There are too many mandatory meetings that simply don't make this feasible for (what I would assume is) a large portion of the populace.

<comment><USER7> Are the meetings really mandatory? Or just assumed to be mandatory? I'm part of an architecture team and we've all agreed to implement a policy where unless absolutely required (e.g. multiple SMEs are needed) there shouldn't be more than one team member in a meeting. Even our weekly team meetings aren't mandatory unless you are on the agenda explicitly if you can attend you should but if you have more important things to do then no one would mind if you don't.

<comment><USER3> I'm a manager of a team of 8. I've set a rule that you are free to skip or escape any meeting. We even use the nickname "the 2 feet rule : if your time is better spent someplace else use your 2 feet and leave.

I rarely see someone skip a meeting, and exceptionally seen someone leave one ; and almost every time they justify why. This is despite renewing the statement almost every meeting. And the meetings I'm in, despite having value most of the time, are NOT perfect in any regards, NOT useful or enjoyable to everyone, and do not require everyone in.

I'm regularly sending anonymous surveys on topics. One had questions around meetings, cadences and masses. About half the team doesn't mind the meetings and saw value in them, the other figures we have too many. The reasons why people are not leaving were majorly 1. peer pressure and fear of looking bad and 2. FOMO. And I consistently get good reviews as a manager...

I'm balancing between limiting the attendance (but ego / disappointment of not being invited?), reversing the default (why are you here?) or simply cancelling/forbidding them and trying to replace by other media (online collaboration?).

But the fact is that in a team with a lax manager on the topic who keeps repeating "not mandatory, get out if you want, no hard feelings", peer pressure is enough to keep people in.

<comment><USER7> >But the fact is that in a team with a lax manager on the topic who keeps repeating "not mandatory, get out if you want, no hard feelings", peer pressure is enough to keep people in.

That really depends on the team dynamics, overall communications and how much time team members have one on one with their manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article speaks to the deepest parts of my soul.

<comment><USER7> Start blocking time as "tentative" in chunks, then when it gets too much adjust the chunk to fit the meetings you need / want to attend and set the rest to busy.

I've been doing that for the past few years I also usually have chunks set as busy for the morning end of day to make sure I get an orderly start and end of each day.

At least anecdotally my productivity has improved.

I get an hour at the start and end of each day to catch up and tie any loose ends to make things don't fall between the cracks.

It really depends on your organization and workload tho so ymmv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is a waste of your time.

There's better things to read in life.</comment>


Show HN: Basic.css – Classless CSS Starter File - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vladocar/Basic.css <comment><USER2> One thing I consistently dislike in these efforts is the misappropriation of HTML tags with certain semantics.

In this instance, the
 elements should not be articles: they're not complete, standalone items. To be sure, as [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/sections.html#article...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/sections.html#article- or-section) says, there's subjectivity in deciding whether to use
 or
, but I'm content to say that
 is wrong here.

(Last time I looked into one of these classless CSS starter files, it was  being used for cards, which was _very_ wrong.)

In a case like this, I'd prefer the inner elements to be
 or
. Or better still, just start using custom element names which are perfectly valid, e.g. <grid-card>. There, no class. I will permit you to claim that that's cheating and avoiding the point of classlessness; I don't mind.

But the big pitfall of trying to go fully classless (if you interpret that as also meaning you can't use your own custom element names) is when HTML just _doesn't have_ tags for the semantic concepts you're trying to express. You want a quote, table numbered list? Yeah, we've got tags for those things, go knock yourself out. But you want a card? _Here, have an article within a section._ … what? That ain't semantic. How's an author supposed to guess that those tags will present like _that_? That's what classes or autonomous custom elements are good for, indicating _intent_.

<comment><USER3> > One thing I consistently dislike in these efforts is the misappropriation of > HTML tags with certain semantics.

As a counterpoint, I don't understand people pushing strict semantics in html elements where they're not really strictly defined or generally useful. Because of how loose the spec with how these things can be used (it it weren't it'd be like schema.org meets html) scraper and other UI tools don't really look for these things and are very flexible in parsing and identifying structure. It'd be foolish to implement a html parser for the general web that strictly expects articles to be in article tags.

Browser default CSS for these things mostly suck and are rarely used, in this case they're overriding them anyway. So why stay pseudo-semantic?

Besides general accessibility (which is tag attribute based mostly), its not obvious to me how this critique is repeated so often with such little value.

<comment><USER4> > Besides general accessibility (which is tag attribute based mostly)

I was under the impression that semantic html elements imply certain aria tags (I read some mdn pages on this recently so I'm pretty confident in this impression, unless I confused proposed and actual specs). So, they can help with the ease of writing accessible UI.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the first rule of ARIA is if you _can_ use HTML instead of ARIA attributes, do so; e.g. use <button>, not
.

Some roles inherent to HTML elements are only conditionally exposed; e.g. the
 element has the ARIA landmark role of "region" but assistive technologies that list landmarks should not include such section elements unless it has also been given an accessible name, e.g.

Contact Info
 ...
. I've read that the  element is not really an ARIA "complementary" landmark if it's the child of another landmark but in practice it still seems to be treated that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This feels weird. Classes exist for a reason. When I read the title, I thought about a kind of CSS reset, but what I'm seeing is also a template/grid framework?

The weird part is that by wrapping an article within a section now I'm designing with columns (which btw, it seems there's no way to control them). And section > article turns out to be the suggested semantics for a blog.

It's a nice effort, but what I'd look for in a starter file might not be a uncontrollable grid.

<comment><USER7> Seems like it would be awesome if HTML allowed you to set a default element

        <meta default-element="div">

and then use

        <.card>

as a shorthand for

You could be "classless" to the extent of being semantic and succinct but without having to misappropriate elements.

<comment><USER8> why not just write

<comment><USER9> <s>Not nearly as cool as <.card>, sorry</s>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Existing collections of "classless" CSS libraries:

\- [https://github.com/dohliam/dropin-minimal- css](https://github.com/dohliam/dropin-minimal-css)

\- [https://github.com/dbohdan/classless- css](https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css)

\- [https://github.com/ubershmekel/cssbed](https://github.com/ubershmekel/cssbed)

</comment><comment><USER2> In the examples, form labels are used badly in a few places. The textarea label lacks its _for_ attribute, and the radio buttons are done quite wrong: for best results, the entire group should be wrapped in a <fieldset>, with the prompt text ("Number:") being a <legend>, and then each radio button's text should be a .

</comment><comment><USER11> I do like these frameworks. Far more sites should use one of those or the principle behind them. My page [1] uses concrete [2] and has a page load of 125kb (including my picture) and loads in less than one second. I don't need all that bloat that comes with a lot of pages (checkout wired.com for a negative example).

The cards of this one look neat, but in case I need something like that I would add it myself to concrete. Nice place to start never the less.

[1] [https://marvinblum.de/](https://marvinblum.de/)

[2] [https://concrete.style/](https://concrete.style/)

<comment><USER12> _and has a page load of 125kb (including my picture)_

Imagine what you could get it down to if you just wrote CSS instead of using a framework.

<comment><USER2> 11.5KB of CSS, looks like you could probably take it to under 1KB. But the biggest weight is the 93KB 460×460 avatar image which is used in a 100×100 circle. That can be reduced to an decent JPEG of about 10KB without even shrinking it to 100×100. At 100×100 (low-DPI displays), it's under 5KB. I'd probably go for a single 200×200 image weighing about 8KB.

If you wanted to make that page _really_ fast, you'd inline all the CSS and the avatar image, and get it under 14KB so that the entire HTTP message could be transmitted in one TCP packet.

<comment><USER13> What network are you on that gives you 14kb packets from the internet?

My loopback has MTU of 16kb, everything else is 1500 or less

<comment><USER2> Oops, off by an order of magnitude, sorry. It's been a while since I've seriously optimised anything in this sort of way (purely for fun).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thank you! Brevity in code is underappreciated. People think it is about file size (and it partially is) but it is mostly about understanding what the code does so that you can extend it in the way that you want. This looks like a true foundation, unlike the namesake framework which is building on top of an existing buildings.

<comment><USER15> Another advantage is speed.

I did a proof-of-concept last week with MVP.css and it was so quickly put together that it was almost as convenient as from writing the content in a Google Doc (where I use borderless tables for the columns). Google Docs are usually my second step in the process, as I don't like to get feedback on sketches, but this might be it now. (My first step is that I sketch on receipt paper, it's the perfect width for mobile, super cheap, and can be as tall as you'd like for your design. Highly rec.)

<comment><USER16> Author of MVP.css here. Glad you liked it! If you'd like to share the site you built I'd love to take a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quick recommendation: add a focused style on form inputs so it's easy to see which input is active. A bright border color would help.

<comment><USER18> I am currently building my first website in Laravel. In the past I've just done WordPress. I was surprised at how much work went into styling the forms, both of general aesthetics and accessibility.

A great tip was to use an appropriately colored shadow for focus and errors in the forms. It improved legibity a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm really liking this classless movement. Looks like a nice basic template by itself for docs or a blog post in HTML too.

</comment><comment><USER20> OT, but I was entertained by Google asking me if I wanted to translate from Latin to English.

</comment><comment><USER21> another one i'm using for my site [1] is tacit[2] it's pretty basic but it works well - although i've been trying to find a well structured, well designed css framework with no classes - I haven't found one of my liking, I think the best way would be to use something very minimal like tailwindcss [3] which i still have to try

[1] [https://golang.cafe](https://golang.cafe) [2] [https://github.com/yegor256/tacit](https://github.com/yegor256/tacit) [3] [https://tailwindcss.com](https://tailwindcss.com)

<comment><USER16> > i've been trying to find a well structured, well designed css framework with > no classes - I haven't found one of my liking

Give MVP.css a try: [https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/](https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/)

It had some good community support (2.5k stargazers and about a dozen contributes).

(disclaimer: I'm the author)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The way this offers a grid without using any CSS classes based on nesting section elements is really neat - very clever trick.

</comment><comment><USER23> I thought CSS variables were still not fully supported enough to use in production. I know you can use a polyfill, but that seems to detract from the minimalist approach of these basic CSS frameworks: [https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables](https://caniuse.com/#feat=css- variables)

<comment><USER24> Based on your link, unless you support IE11, you should be fine with variables.

<comment><USER23> Good point. I just checked our company's web analytics and IE makes up about 2% of web traffic. So it's not dead yet, but I guess you can make a case for not supporting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There is some leftover lorem ipsum on the demo [0]. Under "Basic Forms"\- "Vivamus non leo magna, quis imperdiet risus."

[0] [https://vladocar.github.io/Basic.css/](https://vladocar.github.io/Basic.css/)

</comment><comment><USER26> These are cool, but I'd appreciate it if they covered every HTML element- , , , etc. I guess this one calls itself Basic so maybe it's just going for the 80/20 effect of the most common HTML elements.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a nice take on an old problem. If your project makes HTML creation more straightforward without introducing a tonne of baggage, I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice work. I personally find the way grid is implemented a bit weird, but I like the opinionated rounded corners, typography, spacing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's also [https://github.com/mblode/marx](https://github.com/mblode/marx)

</comment><comment><USER30> WOW! This is awesome.

Congratulations on releasing this!</comment>


"Teardown" of a $1.3M Oscilloscope - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2018/09/24/tearing-into-a-1-3-million-oscilloscope/#comment-5140303 <comment><USER2> His youtube channel is [https://m.youtube.com/user/TheSignalPathBlog](https://m.youtube.com/user/TheSignalPathBlog)

There are a lot of amazing teardowns on there.</comment>


If this video offends you, you may be a 'Tech Bro' - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/business/technology/if-this-video-offends-you-you-may-be-a-tech-bro/2016/02/19/2fa03274-d75c-11e5-a65b-587e721fb231_video.html <comment><USER2> I'll never know if it offends me because the page starts with a video ad and then throws me against the paywall anyway.</comment>


Proprietary Software for Ubuntu--What Will It Mean? - <AUTHOR> http://www.datamation.com/open-source/proprietary-software-for-ubuntu-what-will-it-mean-1.html

<comment><USER2> If it would be possible to create commercial software that could work across multiple distributions seamlessly, there would be the need of focusing in specific ones.

Each distribution that a vendor needs to support increases development and technical support costs.

This is nothing new, Linux distributions are just replicating the chaos many of us had to endure across commercial UNIX systems in the 80-90's.

<comment><USER3> Graphical applications tend to be far less portable than command-line apps though, no?

<comment><USER2> The same issue also applies to command line applications, specially because not all UNIX systems implement the same POSIX version, with the same behaviours.

Like any other standard, each vendor likes to implement certain parts its own way.

<comment><USER3> So a bit like web development then?

 _sigh_

<comment><USER2> yup

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some of the benefits are widespread--for example, the new improved nVidia drivers aren't tied to Ubuntu.

For the rest, proprietary software vendors should realize that supporting multiple Linux distributions benefits them. It's good to not have a single point of failure that Microsoft or Apple can attack.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand that, if you can run it on Ubuntu you can run it everywhere else. Maybe you have change packaging a bit, but this is nonsense conversation. We should be glad that Ubuntu is gaining traction.

</comment><comment><USER6> I expect what will happen, if this becomes a major advantage of Ubuntu over other distros, is that projects will surface to create a sort of emulated Ubuntu sandbox for proprietary software targeted at Ubuntu. It will be sort of like Wine, except that it will work way better.

</comment><comment><USER7> Installing proprietary software without my consent was actually the main reason I ditched Ubuntu for Debian.</comment>


'Abstraction' is a Dirty Word - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@pjsdev/abstract-programmers-acada09df860 <comment><USER2> When you don't know why you're using the term .. yes.

But if you don't use abstraction, you get lost int he weeds in seconds

Always use the proper level of abstraction for the scenario at hand</comment>


Punchd is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://getpunchd.com/shutdown

<comment><USER2> ... and; What was Punchd? For those of us not familiar with their work.

<comment><USER3> Punch'd was a loyalty mobile app. It was basically the digital equivalent of the punch cards you get at sandwich shops. They have been shut down like almost every other startup acquired by Geocommerce at Google.

I really hope Bufferbox doesn't follow their path.</comment></comment>


The creation of the io.latency block I/O controller - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/782876/ <comment><USER2> So many algorithms, data structures and patterns in computer sciences were based on the idea that hard disks are slow and their seek times are especially slow. However, the introduction of solid state drives has changed this. There days I have almost no server with an actual disk drive on it.

I wonder how (1) the software has evolved to face this new reality, (2) how much of the old code is still being used and (3) what are the performance penalties we pay for using disk performance characteristic assumptions in code that actually runs on solid state drives?

<comment><USER3> Incidentally, SSDs also benefit from read and write locality. Although there's no seek penalty, there's still a large benefit from dispatching multiple reads and writes from/to the same cell. You get those for free by trying to minimize "seeks", although the underlying logic behind this optimization is simpler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry, I don't understand what this article is taking about. Is it about the classical CFQ/Deadline I/O schedulers and/or the new multiqueue schedulers? Or something completely different? Thx :)

<comment><USER5> (per my understanding) This isn't about a new io-scheduler. You'd use this io.latency io-controller that sits a layer above the io-scheduler and reduces io queue-size as a means to throttle write requests. The key insight in how to do this per control-group is to use a hierarchical non-blocking data-structure to represent related workloads, which could be classified into 'fast' and 'slow', with 'fast' penalising the 'slow' group (by the way of reducing the io queue-size available to it) iff 'fast' sees higher read latencies. 'Unrelated' group doesn't get penalised as it isn't part of the same hierarchy, as it were.

There are some gotchas though, for instance, priority inversion occurs where 'fast' needs more memory but 'slow' needs to be paged-out first, resulting in 'fast' being peanlized indirectly for the write-throttling on 'slow'.

The approach here is reminiscent of HFSC qdisc for TCP/IP (which only a handful of people understand?): [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hzhang/HFSC/main.html](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hzhang/HFSC/main.html)

<comment><USER4> Thx

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It kinda boggles the mind that an org as successful and as well-staffed as FB still does something as primitive as chef on a cron.

<comment><USER7> What would you do instead?</comment></comment>


After Apple's Disappointing MacBook Pro Refresh, What's an Engineer to Do? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/after-apples-disappointing-macbook-pro-refresh-whats-engineer-greg?trk=hn <comment><USER2> Answer: Move on to other things

</comment><comment><USER3> The Wikipedia article for OLEDs mentions significant longevity problems, particularly at the blue end of the spectrum. Has Apple indicated anything about the lifetime of the touch component?

</comment><comment><USER4> I moved from Apple a year ago; I moved to Thinkpad X220 running Ubuntu with i3wm. Secondhand laptops with excellent keyboards, very cheap, fast enough to do most things, extendable (inc swappable batteries), very long battery life (I routinely get 15+ hrs). Unless I get into AAA game dev I do not need anything else for many years to come...

</comment><comment><USER5> First impression is that this guy doesn't do serious development when the only three application he needs are Chrome, Terminal, and Sublime Text. The one major advantage that macOS has over Windows is the Unix environment. So that means all command-line development tools just work. And not to mention that there's a lot of pretty development tools with a GUI that's been built for macOS.

In Windows, you could replicate this with a virtual machine. Furthermore, you most likely don't want to be running your application code in Windows anyways. The best practice is to develop in as close to an environment as possible to what you will be using in production. However, with the proliferation of Docker, it's becoming less and less dependent on what your host OS is going to be. Still, it's just more convenient to have a Unix environment.

<comment><USER6> _First impression is that this guy doesn 't do serious development when the only three application he needs are Chrome, Terminal, and Sublime Text._

You know what they say... First impressions are dumb and wrong. Oh wait, they don't say that. But they should because in this case they'd be right.

Our forefathers and foremothers did everything from dumb terminals. They did serious things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, just get a nice Linux laptop from one of several vendors. Laptops with Linux preinstalled don't suffer from the typical issues that users often complain about when switching from Windows. They also have the added benefit of running Linux...

Don't like the desktop environment? Change it.

Want more than four virtual desktops? Add more.

Want/don't want fancy 3D desktop effects? Turn them on/off.

You also don't have to reboot constantly to apply updates and there's literally thousands and thousands of self-updating packages you can install in seconds without having to "search the internet." And they're not just limited to "apps."

Even better: If you're developing software to run on Linux servers you can test your code locally without having to upload it anywhere and you don't have to worry about zillions of platform gotchas.

Lastly, with Linux you get access to all sorts of neat things natively that you just don't get to fool around with in other OSes like cool filesystems, virtualization tricks, networking features up the wazoo, low level access to hardware (many motherboards have GPIO pins you can fiddle with natively!), and lots of other "fun" stuff (well, I have fun playing around with the new toys that are regularly introduced :).

<comment><USER8> I used to be fond of trying out new desktop environments, playing with "fun" stuff etc. At this point in my life I no longer gain a lot of enjoyment from just fiddling around (at least not usually). These days a laptop is just a tool -- and ideally, one that works efficiently so I can do the work I need to do and get on with my life.

The reason I've used a MacBook Pro for so many years is because it really does "just work," or at least consistently has in the past. It's very, very rare (in my personal experience) to run into any system-related issues. I used to run Linux on a laptop and spent ages fiddling around with my Xorg, troubleshooting wireless issues, dealing with buggy desktop environments, etc...

I think a lot of other people are in a similar position, in that the "neat things" and "fiddling" are a negative. I just want a machine that works well with minimal configuration. Is desktop Linux at that stage right now? Popular opinion seems to say no, but I haven't actually tried running desktop Linux since for years.

(I do use Linux every single day, but it's always over ssh/tmux)

<comment><USER9> I'm with you, I just want to get work done, I don't customize anything, the last thing I want to do is waste time configuring every machine I use (i.e. work provided machine and personal dev machines). Since I usually work in big dumb corps I use Cygwin on Windows (it has been really good for a few years now). I've been using Ubuntu for personal use since 2008. Desktop Linux has been good enough for a long time in imo. With caveats that you should research your hardware before you buy.

Nowadays a lot stuff just works, like tonight I just connected a bluetooth key board to my dechromed acer c720 running xubuntu 14.04. It paired and everything worked first time. Even reconnected after restart. I even exclaimed to my wife how surprised I was. Dechroming and getting xubuntu on there was a bit of work, but the guides online were good enough. Ymmv of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> PuTTY is a fine terminal emulator

I hear this a lot, and it's quite sad. PuTTY is not a great terminal application. It just happens to be the only usable SSH client on Windows, and so everyone uses it because they have little choice in the matter. Connection management and copy/paste is such a pain. Microsoft's release of PowerShell as an attempt to improve upon cmd.exe was an enormous failure.

<comment><USER11> I highly recommend you try out cmder. It's a bundle of the excellent conemu console emulator, clink for bash style completion in cmd.exe, and some unix tools.

[http://cmder.net/](http://cmder.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone comment on how effective WSL is for normal web developer tasks in Windows? I'm a longtime Mac user who is really disappointed in the latest Macbook Pro. At this point my decision is essentially a coin flip between a 2015 Macbook Pro and a Razor Blade.

<comment><USER13> You're a web developer, right? Why are you disappointed in the MBP? It's not like web development needs more than 16GB of RAM, or the absolute latest GPU.

<comment><USER14> I'm a web developer / front-end engineer, and I work on a 2014 MBP with 16GB. It can slog. With multiple Chrome instances running, Atom with 12-15 documents open, sometimes IntelliJ looking at BE code, and our dev server(running on the JVM), Slack, and sometimes Sketch(and/or gimp). If you are just a "coder" that designs static sites or edit a WordPress theme, maybe that works for you.

But my company is right now looking for a upgrade path out of MBP.

No 32GB option, no Kaby Lake, substandard GPU, AND $500 more? No thanks. We have about 15 machines that were locked into auto purchase for Mac, but now we want to move not only the Eng/Data Science teams away from Mac, but our entire company(through Linux and ChromeOS most likely). Our ~60 person company's IT budget won't cause any pain for Apple, but I wonder how many other similar teams will consider a similar path forward.</comment></comment></comment>


Carbon Transistors to Increase Speed, RAM of Smartphones and Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://techpp.com/2012/07/20/carbon-transistors-increase-speed-ram-smartphones-tablets/

<comment><USER2> Low voltage consumption is the key</comment>


Imagine Getting 30 Job Offers a Month - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/imagine-getting-30-job-offers-a-month-it-isnt-as-awesome-as-you-might-think/284114/ <comment><USER2> I used to get recruiter spam, then I tried this one weird trick and all the recruiters stopped emailing me...

Actually, it wasn't that weird. I just moved out of the US. Changed my location on GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and the recruitment spam stopped overnight.

As for the few recruiters who are still working off of old lists and still have me as living in NYC, I just politely reply that I'd be interested in talking with them if the position they're hiring for would consider a remote working arrangement.

So far, not a single recruiter has replied that they are ok with remote...

<comment><USER3> I just moved from NYC to Oakland. When I moved, I switched my LinkedIn location to "Oakland, California". Immediately, I went from 2-3 recruiters per week to none at all.

Mostly out of curiosity (since I'm not looking for a new job), I switched my location to San Francisco Bay Area. And like magic, the recruiters immediately returned in full force.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I get a trickle here in Dallas (1 - 2 per month, counting Amazon in- house recruiters). Never tried changing my location to see what happens, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a monster resume that gets 30+ emails a day.

[http://www.xyhd.tv/2008/05/how-to/seo-when-updating-your- res...](http://www.xyhd.tv/2008/05/how-to/seo-when-updating-your-resume-on- monstercom-is-good-for-the-ego/)

Emails aren't offers. They are typically auto-generated. As an executive I use the honey pot that gets bombarded with recruiters as a way to filter out which recruiters I won't ever work with.

I want to work with recruiters who will give my company a good name. When they spam people and include my company name they are hurting my reputation. That's not something I can risk.

That said, as a candidate SEO for your you CV is important. A good recruiter will look for certain phrases that you need to have to drive up your odds of getting noticed. This is especially true for specialized jobs that can be great paying because of the limited number of candidates. Did you use some weird software that is proprietary to an industry or company? Put that on "A" CV.

You can have more than once CV and tuning them to every kind of job you could do is a great way to get to the phone call stage. Then send a CV tuned for what that employer actually wants after you get a job description.

But most importantly, "It isn't the number of jobs it is the quality of the job" (at least until you are desperate then it is take what you can get)

</comment><comment><USER6> Getting an email from a recruiter is a whole lot different than getting a job offer.

<comment><USER7> This.

Getting 30 job offers a month probably _would_ be as great as the author thinks. But how many of those 30 recruiter emails will lead to job offers? Probably zero.

My beef with recruiters is that they repeatedly pitch me jobs that I _know_ their client won't ever hire me for. They're not only wasting my time, they're wasting their client's time, too.

<comment><USER8> the best is when you say "yeah I know the folks over at X company. they're great but I'm not the right fit." then they continue to try to pitch you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I get 10-15 recruiter mails every month. Much worse, IMO, than being recruited, is the fucking useless recruiters who spam me about _recruiting for me_ (which happens once you list CEO on LinkedIn, or get any press).

And the shitty contract-dev houses, mainly in India.

I'd categorically never use a recruiter who contacted me like this, nor a contract-dev house.

<comment><USER10> I've had a highly successful career so far (though I'm only in my mid 30's) without maintaining any significant online presence. My HN profile is probably the only place where you'd find my email address listed. No LinkedIn, no Twitter, and a Github account that is only mentioned if someone wants to vet my work remotely.

Granted, it could lead to trouble down the road if I ever seriously wanted to leave Austin, but just keeping good meatspace contacts in the Austin VC community along with a good track record of delivering quality output has allowed me to comfortably enjoy my career and take interesting jobs on my time schedule.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'd love to think that the bullshit associated with meticulously grooming some social media facade is by no means a prerequisite for a career in software engineering.

Obviously being a CEO requires a completely different degree of public visibility, so it's not a comparison to your situation.

<comment><USER9> I've found being online to be really helpful -- it caused me to meet most of the people I've ever worked on projects with, and I've picked up some really high dollar and/or interesting consulting work (which allowed me to work without a salary on various other projects) for most of the past 15y.

It especially helped while I was spending a large amount of time outside of major tech centers (Caribbean 1998-1999, Sealand 2000-2002, Iraq/Afghanistan/Kuwait/etc. 2003-2007 2008-2010.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Trying to recruit DHH for a junior RoR position is quite a faux-pas. In that position (no ... I'm not famous), I'd be very tempted to show up for the interview after submitting an appropriately junior resume!

<comment><USER12> even worse is the fact that his partner is on the Groupon board of directors :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favorite quote from the article "I tried, and failed, to speak with Valley- based recruiters, who seem to be considerably less eager to return emails than to send them."

<comment><USER14> I'm constantly amazed at how hierarchical email return etiquette is. I constantly see people only returning emails to people that they see as more powerful than them. If fact, I've found that it's the engineers that are best at returning emails, and everyone else that is terrible at it. Even when they've requested your participation in the conversation. I have an email triage system. Priority emails I respond to immediately, important emails within the day, and queries within the week. In that way I respond to all my emails. With others, it's just like there's a giant email black hole that my emails fall into - never to be heard from again.

<comment><USER15> One has to enforce classism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finding people actually interested in changing jobs is challenging. I'd say it's probably one of the hardest parts of recruiting.

All the engineers at [https://www.MightySpring.com](https://www.MightySpring.com) (we're building an app that matches companies with job seekers) spent this week doing traditional agency recruiting to get a better sense of the problem. Recruiting really is a numbers game. Finding the right balance between personalization and efficiency - knowing that most emails get deleted immediately, unread, is hard. We don't envy the recruiters who do this all the time.

<comment><USER17> The one thing that made me take my current job is the personal touch I was given. The person who contacted me was simply just being human, and not seeing me as just another number. That makes a difference.

<comment><USER16> Totally agree. And that's why we're taking the time to make it personal. But doing this has made me understand why so many recruiters just let everything slip into automatic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dear (insert your name),

I am working with a company in (roughly your area but not specific and probably more than 100 miles from your nearest city) seeking candidates who have good skills in (very broad term 1), (very broad term 2), C++ and (redundant broad term 3).

There are a variety of positions available with different types of contract, which is my excuse for not knowing anything about the job, if it actually exists.

Salary would be around (3 times your normal rate) although if you actually did get an offer it would be (1.1 times your normal rate, max).

If you are interested, please let me know so I can set up a 30 minute telephone interview with a more senior recruiter who also knows very little about this position. He only wants to make sure you don't sound like a moron so he can forward your resume rewritten with C++/.NET/Python/Matlab/LAMP screaming in Arial Black 32pt Bold centered at the top.

If you are interested, we will arrange a gauntlet interview with a minimum of 3 interviews before you get a clear idea of what job is actually on offer. You will probably be rejected and the client will never call you to let you know.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why do recruiter emails bother people so much? Just ignore them.

Sometimes they give me a small piece of visibility into the job market. Mostly they are a non-event.

Why let it bother you?

<comment><USER20> It's the complete lack of care and attention some recruiters put into their job that is annoying.

As programmers, we all take great pride in our work and would hope that others do, too.

<comment><USER19> If that's the case, why not be upset at something that matters. There is lots of much more impactful incompetence to complain about. Bad recruiters are largely harmless.

And seriously, I can't imagine a more elitist, entitled attitude than being seriously upset at people trying to pay you lots of money to work. Do you know what a privilege that is?

<comment><USER21> > I can't imagine a more elitist, entitled attitude than being seriously upset > at people trying to pay you lots of money to work.

I think the recruiters that most people complain about aren't "trying to pay you lots of money to work." The recruiters people complain about are just looking for people and don't really care whether or not those people actually fit the job description.

They may not even have a job they're recruiting for and may just be looking for people to keep "on hand."

So rather than "paying lots of money," they cost money in terms of time spent filtering them out and communicating with the duds.

In addition to that, the recruiters themselves aren't actually the ones paying money... the companies are. I don't think anyone is getting upset about companies offering jobs -- just shoddy recruiters who waste our time.

So saying that complaining about bad recruiters is an "elitist, entitled attitude" seems to me like saying that people are elitist and entitled for not liking Nigerian scammers... hey, they're offering you free money!

But they're not.

<comment><USER19> Complaining about Nigerian scammers is also pretty stupid - both useless and tiresome. Delete and move on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Obviously I have very limited experience with jobs though wanted to share some here. I am getting a few recruiter emails lately from various companies. Some of them really do over-estimate me (I always tell them the truth though) and some just don't mind and will continue the recruitment and interview process with me. For example, this week someone tried to recruit me for a senior level (from a famous company). I told him the truth; I am only an undergraduate senior, I can't really call myself a senior level engineer. At most, above junior level. The email, I am not sure if it was generic or not, but started with "I'm impressed with your experience and work...". It could be just a generic body - to make people like me excited about the email! From what I understand, they usually just crawl through mailing list and Github-like places. So to students out there, participate in OSS and OSS mailing list will get you some attention. I promise.

I obviously don't mind someone getting me 30 recruitment emails every month. But I guess when I reach that level of famous, of competence and successful, I will look at them as spams. If I want to recruit someone that successful, I'd meet that person in real life. Go to the conference, walk up to him and tell him the offer.

<comment><USER8> I generally don't get past the recruiter for jobs I would be perfect for. then for some reason recruiters always want me for something out of my league like CTO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's understandable that recruiters are playing a numbers game.

Imagine if recruiters were paid using the formula:

% of filled position salary / # of contacted recipients

This would encourage recruiters to contact only the best-fit(s) for the position. While at the same time reducing the "spam" some of us receive on a daily basis.

A win-win.

P.S. I understand it's nearly impossible to track the # of contacts.

</comment><comment><USER23> I get a lot of random recruiter pings, probably mostly because I don't bother to do anything to proactively limit them (and I tend to use my real name on forums, social networks, etc and will often post my real gmail address and such).

But for me it doesn't seem like they are that big of a deal and the vast majority of them I just completely ignore. If somebody emails me out of the blue unprompted, I don't feel guilty about archiving their message away without a response. And practically speaking, given the shotgun nature that most of these emails come in on, the recruiter isn't even going to notice that I didn't respond, let alone feel slighted by it.

Getting about an average of one easily-ignorable email per day trying to let you know about an open job opportunity in your field is truly a high level first world problem... one that a lot of people living in the first world in other professions would likely be very happy to have.

</comment><comment><USER24> That article is missing a really key point. Being contacted by a recruiter is not a job offer. It's an offer to begin the application process. People aren't getting 30 job offers a month. They're getting offered the chance to submit 30 resumes, conduct 30 phone screens and finally 30 onsite interviews.

</comment><comment><USER25> The recruiter emails are mostly awful. One of the worst was where a recruiter emailed me three times about a position, each time getting more desperate and ending with a title about how he will change my life.

On the flip side of things, a good recruiter did help me get my first job in the tech industry, and I'm currently enjoying a great experience with another recruiter who I met at several tech meetups in the area.

I keep a pretty low profile (excepting on github), and yet I get a few attempts a day, whether via phone or email...personal or work, and my work email isn't even publicly published as far as I'm aware. The spam has got to end - it seems like these are low quality recruiters.

<comment><USER16> Were they towards the end of the month? :P

Most agency recruiters are fresh out of college, up against some hard quotas, and super stressed. Turnover is very high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been 'recruited' for positions where I was the hiring manager. They must've seen a posting online since we never hired recruiters that I was aware of. I'd expect they'd be embarrassed when that was pointed out to them along with 'we're not contracted with you' but frankly two out of the three times it's happened they then went on to tell me about how many great candidates they had for me.

</comment><comment><USER27> My favourite part is in the comments, where the #1 recruiter on recruiter spam[1] responds to the article:

> I think the bottom line is that recruiters tend to be very intelligent and > multi-talented, and frankly, sometimes candidates get jealous.

No shit.

[1]: [http://www.recruiterspam.com/stats](http://www.recruiterspam.com/stats)

</comment><comment><USER28> But no serious manager / founder will want to hire David Heinemeier Hansson. DHH is way too ambitious to work for someone else -- he is not a good role for a position even if he is extremely talented on paper.

</comment><comment><USER29> Oh... I think I could _probably_ psychologically handle 30 job offers in a month if just one of them was from a company like Google :|

</comment><comment><USER30> I wish that stuff happened to me... I only have been invited to a job once, or something like that, I don't remember other attempts...

<comment><USER31> What do you do? What technical skills do you have? Where do you have your resume posted online?

SEO your resume (honestly, no making up stuff you can't really do), and you can get lots of hits too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> As soon as I changed my location from San Francisco back to Australia these emails almost stopped.

</comment><comment><USER33> I lol'd hard.</comment>


Ask HN: How good is aluminum foil for making a faraday cage? - <AUTHOR> Ask HN:<p>I'm trying to go cheap here, but I also need the grounding protection for my experiments. Does anyone here know of a good source for the use of Al foil in faraday cages? We currently use copper mesh, but that is rather expensive compared to foil, and we've put so many holes into the mesh that it is time to replace it (working in electo-phisiology). Thanks for any tips or citations. <comment><USER2> My gut feeling about Aluminum foil is that because of the hard oxide coating it's difficult to get two pieces to make a continuous electrical connection along any length of it. And you can't solder to it.

My suggestion is to use copper tape or thin tinned copper sheet instead.

My other suggestion if hand prototyping is to use vector board with top and bottom ground planes. Note a lot of vector board designs are total crap. Either no ground plane or has 'power buses' The buses are horrible for grounding. The reason is you want the return current in any signal to travel in a ground plane under the wire. with a 'bus' the return current runs off down the bus creating a large loop.

Loops are bad, any magnetic or electrical field that the crosses the loop will induce noise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Aluminum is fine, but foil that's only a couple hundred microns thick will only provide useful shielding above say 100 kHz. Fine for microwave shielding, but audio frequency EM waves will go right through it.

Also aluminum foil is a pain to work with in many ways. Can you buy a cheap premade aluminum enclosure that's as thick as the copper mesh you have now?

Examples: [https://www.google.com/search?q=aluminum+enclosure+electroni...](https://www.google.com/search?q=aluminum+enclosure+electronics&rlz=1C1ASUT_enUS628US628&espv=2&biw=1292&bih=943&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=vJNwVcGXLoOCsAXwtIOoAw&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg&dpr=1)

Then you ground the box same as your mesh is grounded now.

</comment><comment><USER3> (You may have to give in to the temptation to try aluminum foil for a while, before you see what I mean about it being a pain in the butt to work with. It sounds so easy!)</comment>


Compression garments reduce muscle fatigue - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328485.000-compression-garments-reduce-muscle-fatigue.html <comment><USER2> I wear compression shirts when training jiu jitsu/muay thai. They are amazing for wicking away sweat and keeping you cool. You simply can't go back to cotton t-shirts which soak up sweat and get heavy.

However, how do these garments help keep you warm? I was under the impression that their breathability exposes you to outside temperature more efficiently (which is usually cooler than your body temp).

<comment><USER3> You wouldn't normally wear a compression shirt on its own if you were training outside. It's all about the layering - so you have a compression shirt that would wick moisture away, a mid-layer of variable material depending upon the temperature, and a 'shell' outer layer (also breathable). The outer-layer helps prevent wind-chill and water getting in, the mid-layer insulates you, and the inner compression layer wicks the moisture away and keeps you comfortable.

Of course, different strokes for different folks, and some people feel the cold more than others!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Compression garments aren't worn by athletes just to keep warm. There has been a hypothesis for years now that compression garments improve performance, speed up recovery, and/or help with injury prevention. That's why I wore compression sleeves a couple months ago for Ironman Cozumel, where it was 85 degrees and I didn't need any help keeping warm.

I realized when I got started in endurance sports a couple years ago that sports are full of advice that somebody tried out and it became doctrine without scientific evidence to support it. Studies like this are key to prove or disprove that conventional wisdom.

</comment><comment><USER5> The proposed mechanism is very counterintuitive- it is not clear to me why compression would stimulate blood flow, as it typically restricts it.

<comment><USER6> Your veins normally circulate blood by using the normal skeletal muscle contractions in combination of a series of one way valves. In essence, it is a passive system. By applying constant external pressure, you shift the balance of blood flowing between your surface and deep veins (your deep veins carry way more blood). The increase in pressure also increases your blood velocity. Here's a linky

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10633254>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Over a decade ago I started developing serious, chronic RSI issues in my hands and wrists due to keyboard/mouse time. I tried changing seating position, etc, and it helped a little.

What really helped though was getting some handeeze gloves. They are fingerless, snug fitting lycra gloves with a double layer of lycra for the cuff. Don't know exactly how they work, but it sounds like it could be a similar principle, and they helped a lot.

</comment><comment><USER8> I tried to wear a compression shirt for Golf once and it was the worst round of my life. I literally ripped the thing off at the 11th hole.

The thing about compression garments that I learned a good lesson that day is they restrict movement. Reason I guess you don't see any pro golfers use them or NBA players.

<comment><USER9> Sports like rugby, NFL or basketball are very different to golf. The others involve aerobic/anaerobic fitness and strength components along with their skills. While golf involves a very precise, repeated movement (with some speed/strength component) but almost no opportunity for the speedier removal of lactic acid to help you.

The garment just probably interfered with the swinging of your arms, even if only slightly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> On Friday when I cycled home from work, I wore a compression shirt under my cycling jersey for the first time. When I arrived home, I had drunk less than half the water I did the previous trip. This is anecdotal at best, but I'm going to wear it again on the next ride.</comment>


A Turn in the Capital Cycle - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexanderbcampbell/a-turn-in-thecapitalcycle-4fd0b6193579#.4b2w98ev9 <comment><AUTHOR> My follow up to the Unicorn Economy piece (link below) given the recent market moves

[https://medium.com/@alexanderbcampbell/more-than-500bn-of- we...](https://medium.com/@alexanderbcampbell/more-than-500bn-of-wealth-has- been-created-on-paper-by-the-unicorn-economy-f5a56514a0c1#.2xatvxf0p)</comment>


Ask HN: What are some ways to reduce browser repaints or reflows? - <AUTHOR>

Having some issues with jank on a website. Trying to figure out some techniques from jankfree.org.<p>What are some means or techniques in order to reduce repaint, fight jank and / or page reflow? <comment><USER2> Always use CSS transforms to place things that are going to move rather than setting an X/Y absolute position or changing the margins and padding.</comment>