Revolut staff claim they've been told to quit their jobs or be fired - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavirus <comment><USER2> Being from the US it wasn't immediately clear to me why they would do this.

Found the relevant part of the article:

> In Poland, workers say they were told by their line managers and HR that > they were underperforming and would be terminated if they didn't leave > voluntarily. But in Portugal mutual agreements stated that dismissals were a > result of a reduction of 40 per cent in the group's activity and a 30 per > cent excess in staff numbers. By getting employees to voluntarily leave, > Revolut has avoided launching a group redundancy consultation, that, among > other things would give employees the right to severance payments and the > chance to be offered alternative roles within the company. "[Mutual > agreement] is better for Revolut because they can't go to labour court > [employment tribunal]," says the source from the HR department. "The way > they prepare the terminations are so bad that if someone would go to court > Revolut would lose," the source claims.

<comment><USER3> I automatically assumed this was a ploy to dodge unemployment/redundancy benefits for employees. This also happens in the US. Much harder to get benefits if you voluntarily quit versus get fired or laid off.

<comment><USER4> Which is why US companies sometimes pay people to voluntarily retire instead of laying them off.

<comment><USER5> I was curious what the benefit was to the company if the unemployment insurance is already paid (sunk cost) so I looked it up -

> Employers with more unemployment claims against them will pay a higher rate, > and employers with fewer claims will pay less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Revolut is really scary organization... used them for a year or so, and then one day locked my account... harassed me for 6 months, asking for all sorts of documents, which I provided them. then one day, they closed my account, and sent back 2K balance to random people who sent me money in the past. When contacted them via twitter, the blocked my the same day :)

<comment><USER7> Yeah I knew they were a little farfetched when I saw their head of engineering job spec

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200406205828/https://jobs.leve...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200406205828/https://jobs.lever.co/revolut/7445f477-6ba8-43e8-ab50-fa61cb303630)

> School/university Olympic medal in competitions in physics, maths or > programming

:/

<comment><USER8> • 10+ years as an engineer • Minimum GPA 3.5/4 (US), 60% (UK), 8/10 in any other country

"So we know you've been out of school for 10 years, but can you send us a copy of your report cards?"

<comment><USER9> Well I had "we know you've been out of school over 20 years, but we really need to know which exam boards you did your age-16 English literature exam with before we'll interview you for this science degree requiring position ... that we previously employed you for".

Thankfully I quite enjoy hunting down lost information but I was not impressed with the HR personnel in that one.

<comment><USER10> So far what has worked for me in Germany when I got these forms from HR is to put "(by request)" into such fields. Which is, erhm, kind of cheating because, well, they _are_ requesting it right there in the form. But so far, funnily enough, nobody actually bothered. All they cared about was that the form was "completed".

<comment><USER11> AKA I'll happily bother with that if you're paying me, otherwise no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Primarily, it starts with their CEO Nikolay [Storonsky] being very vocal about their mentality, that if you do a 9-5 [workday] it won't work out...everything he has said is a recipe for burnout" says Stevie Buckley, co- founder of Honest Work and HR advisor to dozens of startups.

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/3/18248826/revolut- workplace...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/3/18248826/revolut-workplace- culture-burnout-finance-app-reports)

[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions- labour-...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour- fintech-politics-storonsky)

<comment><USER13> Never trust a founder who claims that extraordinary work effort is the key; they stand to reap the rewards while the costs accumulate downwards. You have to have significant equity (not options) before the risk/reward works out in your favor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everything that comes out of Revolut internally sounds horrific. I applied and was offered an interview, upon further research into how they work I pulled out of the process immediately.

They push their employees to breaking point (and with this, seemingly beyond). I'm so glad I didn't pursue that avenue, and feel so sorry for those caught up in this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Their have been various articles from credible sources over the last year or two making it clear that they are a really shitty company. You would be crazy to trust them with either your money or your career.

<comment><USER15> Here is one reference: "But former Revolut employees say this high-speed growth has come at a high human cost – with unpaid work, unachievable targets, and high-staff turnover." [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade- unions-labour-...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions- labour-fintech-politics-storonsky)

Their CEO sounds like scumbag of the first order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It sounds like these people were pressured into making a decision under tense circumstances (QUIT IN THE NEXT 30 MINUTES OR YOU GET NOTHING).

In the US this could probably qualify for nullification as it was made under duress. Don't know anything about Poland.

<comment><USER17> In the US it probably constitutes criminal fraud, as it's a transparent attempt to evade unemployment benefits. Again, though, Poland and the EU may be different.

<comment><USER18> It's definitely illegal if the employee was a EU citizen, but I'm not sure whether that's also the case if the employee isn't.

<comment><USER19> Are there EU-wide labor protection laws?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > "I thought maybe I should speak to another institution for legal advice > because I am a foreigner," Elena says. "[But] they said I had no additional > time and that I have 30 minutes to make this decision."

Really nasty tactics. Impossible to understand the consequences of what you're signing in that short of a time.

<comment><USER21> Correction: Really illegal tactics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's a well-known fact the Revolut CEO is a spoiled baby and a douche. I blacklisted their company long ago due to this.

</comment><comment><USER23> They also successfully pressured over 60% of their staff into exchanging salary for twice the value in options.

I've worked for dysfunctional companies, but I guess I'm lucky I haven't run into management trying to steal from me.

<comment><USER24> Any time a company asks you to forgo cash compensation for stock you should start preparing an exit strategy: this is doubly true if the stock isn't liquid.

I once worked at a unicorn that a week before bonuses were due to be paid changed them from cash to immediately vesting RSUs. Six months later they were filing for Chapter 11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> it is just sad to see the same tactics(people being bullied into "mutual agreement") used now as in 90s in Eastern Europe.

that is good enough reason to not use their product at all.

I am sure there is plenty of capable competitors.

<comment><USER26> I've seen the same tactics used in Germany as well.

Basically the HR rep and their line manager call them in a meeting room and play _good cop - bad cop_ so they end up just signing whatever the _good cop_ says is "best" for them.

That's why lots of companies here love hiring young expats sine they're easy to abuse like this as they're new in the country, don't have anyone to ask for help, don't know the language, don't know the law, don't qualify yet for unemployment and can't afford a lawyer and are emotionally vulnerable so they'll blindly sign whatever HR gives them and focus on finding a new job ASAP instead of fighting them in court.

It's one of the reasons I avoid working in companies that focus on hiring mostly expats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I dont understand how these new startup banks can stay in business. Previously banks could make money on the deposits in check accounts, now with negative rates they can only lose. Even big European banks are slowly dying.

<comment><USER28> There are still many ways for banks to make money, and challenger banks are betting on the fact they can do it with less overhead.

Big European banks have started closing down branches and laying off staff, while they were pumping VC money to scale across several countries/continents and acquire a customer base among socio-demographics with high potential (mostly young, tech-savvy, traveling, reasonably good with money). These people eventually grow a bit older and need loans, mortgages, investments...

<comment><USER29> The sad truth is that it's much easier to make money on people who are less savvy and _not_ good with money. They are less likely to switch, more likely to take a loan or overdraft, and have to pay higher interest rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My boyfriend manages a team at Revolut, and half of them just got laid off despite him fighting to keep them on since shutdown started, when he was prompted to fill out performance reviews. Some of them were hired within the past half year, were on a trial period, and let go the day before the end so they wouldn't receive severance packages. All of them were told it was due to their performance, even though he placed them all at high-performing in his reviews, so that the company can fudge their numbers on covid-related layoffs.

</comment><comment><USER31> I want to close my account but is transferwise any better?

<comment><USER28> I believe so:

* Transferwise has been profitable for a little while now.

* Their pricing if fairly transparent and they're always upfront when they need to increase some fees. I could be wrong, but it looks like they're trying to stay competitive but not take part in a race to the bottom.

* They haven't been trying to recruit new customers as aggressively as Revolut.

* Their MasterCard is a little bit more lenient with offline transactions, which can sometimes be a problem with Revolut.

* On the other hand, the mobile app is a bit bland. It does the job, but the UX isn't as good.

<comment><USER32> I just had my TransferWise account closed during a transfer to pay rent while overseas. They are holding some of my money, with no perspective of returning it. They say they can't disclose the reasons, leaving you helpless.

I'd advise to be cautions with transferwise as well.

[https://transferwise.com/help/24/technical- issues/2961844/wh...](https://transferwise.com/help/24/technical- issues/2961844/why-was-my-account-deactivated)

<comment><USER33> If there's a suspicion of money laundering, you won't get any information from any financial institution, FWIW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Presumably this is legal in Poland...but the company is from the UK, this is obviously illegal in the UK, and it looks terrible.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

Even worse, they are a bank. Who would trust their money to people who behave this way?

</comment><comment><USER35> Why on earth would anyone voluntarily quit, particularly as in Portugal you will be eligable for unemployment benefits from having been laid-off, vs quitting and not being eligable for the same. Call their bluff. (I live in Portugal, and some foolish bosses tried the same and were rebuffed. FWIW the gov't agreed to pay 60% of the workers benefits during the lockdown in an effort to stem layoffs and furloughs etc.)

<comment><USER36> Because they were threatened with their career potentially being ruined with a bad reference?

<comment><USER37> Do people follow references much?

I don't think anyone has ever contacted my previous employers, despite me having supplied their contact details as a reference numerous times over the years.

Companies are discouraged from saying anything more than the facts of employment ("We can confirm that Bob was employed as a software developer between these dates...") these days, so there's not much value in the new employer bothering as far as I understand.

<comment><USER38> I've had previous employers contacted more than once, but it was always by a third party background check agency. I doubt "we fired him for cause" would have mattered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> By the way, anyone knows a competitor to Revolut that respect privacy (online banking, able to send/receive other currencies easily). I would love to switch but it is hard to find anyone actually better from a privacy point of view.

<comment><USER40> Transferwise - they also have a borderless Mastercard.

I use them to bring proceeds of RSU's back to the UK (0.6% commission on mid- market rate).

<comment><USER41> To mention my experience, for some reason whenever I try to open an account with them, they lock it without telling me why. They've put me on some sort of blacklist without any explanation, and all I ever tried to do with them is send $100 from one of my accounts to another.

<comment><USER42> I must have transferred multiple 10K s for various reasons and didn't have any problem with them.

Monzo is amazing in UK, but they don't support larger EU :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The legs are falling off the unicorn... which one will be the next WeWork.

</comment><comment><USER44> Winter is coming...

</comment><comment><USER45> The companies behavior was indeed poor, but I wonder how many people realize that laws that make it hard to reduce your workforce lead to this bad behavior.

Business needs change all the time, and being able to adjust your workforce in response is critical. Not being able to do that can be very costly for both the business owners and employees in the long run, or even the short run if the business has revenue or cash-flow problems.

<comment><USER46> If the bad behavior is skirting the labor reduction laws, we should get rid of the labor reduction laws to reduce bad behavior?

This argument doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER47> You see, you cannot skirt a law if there _is no_ such law.</comment></comment></comment>


How to cool down your MacBook Pro (really!) - <AUTHOR> http://meilij.com/blog/2008/03/09/how-to-cool-down-your-macbook-pro-really/

<comment><USER2> I buy the 3 year warranty on apple laptops and let apple deal with any problems in heat. That said, there are times when I need them to run full bore without the fan on, say when I'm mixing audio, so here is the fix...

Before you get the computer cranked up, put on shorts. Place the laptop on your bare legs with plenty of skin contact area. Now as the computer needs to dissipate heat it can send it straight into your legs where your advanced mammalian temperature control system can easily dissipate it. My G4 powerbook never turns on a fan in this configuration even saturating the CPU for long periods.

The disturbing part, is that I always expected cyborgs to come about for benefit of humans, instead I'm donating my body to serve the computer.

<comment><USER3> Wow. I have an old Sharp laptop that runs super hot. I'm terrified to put it on my pants, let along bare skin.

Hope you don't have dreams of posterity. :)

<comment><USER2> The key is to put start before it has a chance to get hot.</comment></comment></comment>


Collection of Interesting Research Papers - <AUTHOR> https://saveeo.com/p/dYfOCViX9 <comment><AUTHOR> Please recommend me more here so I can update my collection.</comment>


Apple Releases First Preview of Swift 3.0 for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/01/apple-releases-first-preview-of-swift-3/ <comment><USER2> >Swift 3.0 is not source compatible with Swift 2.2 as it introduces source- breaking changes

tee hee oh Apple, you scallywags!</comment>


CockroachDB Interactive, D3-Powered Simulations - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/database-evolution/ <comment><USER2> CockroachDB fares well on the distributed side of the spectrum, and thus shows all the best properties of this kind of systems: replication, resiliency, horizontal scalability, modern ops experience.

This is no small feat, and - personally - I am sold on it. Yet, looking at its benchmarks (pre 2.0), and knowing how carelessly some enterprise software is written, how would I convince a pointy haired boss to leave the practically monolithic mega-pumped Oracle RAC server he is accustomed to, and go down the distributed route?

<comment><USER3> First things first, you'll want a DB that doesn't have cockroach in the name.

I'm only slightly kidding.

<comment><USER4> When picking clever pun names, it's important to choose words that executives won't feel silly saying.

Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, created the GIMP in college.

<comment><USER5> Years ago I worked on a project where a lot of the code was done in Tcl (pronounced "tickle"). Management would not say "tickle", instead they insisted on saying T-C-L. Tcl is a pretty neat language, and while I was on the project, I couldn't help but wonder how much it's name had held it back.

<comment><USER6> I call it 'T-C-L' despite being a programmer, because calling it 'tickle' just sounds stupid to me. 'Sequel' for 'SQL' similarly sounds weird so I just say 'S-Q-L'.

Maybe that's just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We currently host our "monolithic" MySQL database on a fairly large VPS on Linode. At least on Linode, to increase storage space you need to double the capacity of the server, thus doubling the cost for each scale up. The idea of simple scaling horizontally is one I've dreamt of for a long time. However it just seems that the problem is not the monolithicness, it's the cost of storage. If we were to use CockroachDB with redundancy the cost would be equivalent to just using Amazon Aurora, which is fully managed!

That being said I'm very excited about CockroachDB. Cassandra did not live up to the hype for me because of the complexity and now that DataStax has split up with Apache in a weird way, it feels like a less appealing option.

<comment><USER8> > Cassandra did not live up to the hype for me because of the complexity

Which complexity are you referring to, specifically where CRDB has a better approach?

Interested as we are evaluating both.

<comment><USER9> CRDB and Cassandra are to totally different databases.

CockroachDB is full SQL ACID database. With transactions, consistent indexes, joins. It's also strongly consistent overall.

Cassandra is really just a key-value store, with a hierarchy of sorting keys as part of the key, so that you can do range scans with good performance (and various access patterns). Indexes are asynchronously updated (as far as I know). No transactions nor joins. Its consistency is varying (configurable).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is CockroachDB ready for production? If so what's the largest known production deployment?

<comment><USER11> It's been production ready for a year, although v2 will add some nice functionality like JSON.

You can check their customers page: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/customers/)

<comment><USER10> Nice, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I never understand what goes through some people's head when they name things............

<comment><USER13> This comes up every single time they are mentioned. Fighting an up hill battle, but they're committed sticking with the poor choice of name. Also always someone who wants to explain why it's called that like it's not obvious. Doesn't make it a good name for a product you're trying to sell people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What kind of consistency guarantees can this database provide? Does it support some type of lock so it can be used to give real-time account balances and prevent overdrawing an account?

<comment><USER15> Strong Consistency: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/strong- consistency...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/strong- consistency.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> i am thinking about using cockroachdb to power something like LDAP.

but the CIO said no because it has "cockroach" in the name and no one would sign off.

should i just do it anyway?

<comment><USER17> You may want to tell your CIO to check out BikeshedDB [0], which is built exactly for this use case.

[0] [https://github.com/tschottdorf/bikesheddb](https://github.com/tschottdorf/bikesheddb)</comment></comment>


High-Fidelity Quantum Logic Gates - <AUTHOR> http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.060504 <comment><USER2> "Oxford team achieves a quantum logic gate with record-breaking 99.9% precision, reaching the benchmark required to build a quantum computer"

[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4wghmo/oxford_team...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4wghmo/oxford_team_achieves_a_quantum_logic_gate_with/)

<comment><USER3> I find it interesting that 99.9% (e.g. a failure rate of 1/1000) is considered "good".

On a traditional CPU, if it gave the wrong answer 1/1,000,000,000 that would probably result in a recall.

<comment><USER4> The 99% threshold is that required for error correction protocols to work. So imagine a thousand of these 99.9% error rate gates with some error correction routine on top of that so that the net effect is one very reliable gate. Where "very" depends on how many of these unreliable gates you use. But below 99% error rate none of this stuff works and so the whole scheme (quantum computers) can't get off the ground.

<comment><USER5> Any constant bound suffices to make error correction work. It's just that the number of extra bits that you need goes up.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately this is not at all true for quantum error correction protocols. In the quantum world error correction makes things _worse_ below the error threshold. Source: me doing a PhD on the subject at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a good thing of course, but it's also trapped-ion qubits, so this is not exactly something that can freely scale or be widely manufactured. It is in short, probably not the future of quantum computing, it's just another important step on the way.

<comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I used to work on trapped-ion systems.

I hear this a lot about trapped-ion qubits, but in their current state, no technology is scalable. The usual suspects are superconducting, quantum dots, or diamond NV-based qubits, but each technology has their own scalability problems. Superconducting qubits suffer from either requiring massive (vacuum tube sized) cavities or a ton of crosstalk. Good luck isolating superconducting LC circuits from one another on one circuit board - a reason why these are limited to only a few qubits. Quantum dots have pretty awful decoherence issues and I'm not sure they can be implanted deterministically. Moreover, I don't think people have demonstrated non-photon mediated entanglement, which is not particularly scalable. NVs have the same implantation and entanglement problems, though at least they can be used at room-temperature. Superconducting and quantum dot technologies require million-dollar dilution refrigerators and large amounts of (expensive!) helium-3.

Obviously, these technologies also have their advantages over trapped-ion qubits. But trapped-ion proponents also have their own roadmaps to scalability (surface traps created using lithiography).</comment></comment>


Deep Successor Reinforcement Learning (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02396 <comment><USER2> It's not clear to me how this is interestingly different from model-based RL, where you learn the state function and reward function, and then use various types of simulation to learn a value function. I guess I'll have to read more than the abstract...

<comment><USER3> Section 3.2 shows the successor representation (SR) definition. If I'm reading it correctly the SR might also be described as the discounted stationary distribution over states.

I haven't seen SR before in the RL literature, but the paper argues that this representation is useful for sub-goal identification. I guess I'll have to read more than the abstract as well :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it true that Google cut the 20% time for personal projects? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> "I don't work for Google but it is so important to know it"

is similar to

"Which one of the top actresses would I want to go to bed more".

The crude but seemingly valid answer to both is: if it was really relevant to you, you would know anyway :)

</comment><comment><USER3> No, not as far as I'm aware (I just launched a 20% project).

Note that 20% time should be used on something that could benefit the company in some way. Open sourcing a library = good use of 20% time. Building a model trainset = not good use of 20% time.

Here's a recent blog post from the official Google blog that mentions a cool use of 20% time: [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/robot- hackathon-c...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/robot-hackathon- connects-with-android.html)

<comment><USER4> "benefit the company" is kind of relative. That model trainset might use a revolutionary system that could help Google if it decides to try transportation.

<comment><USER5> Which it already has, by way of computer controlled cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My experience at Google was that 20% time worked on the honor system. I'm not aware of anybody trying to measure it, nor do I know how you would. That said, I think most people, most of the time did not take 20% time, so the real amount of time spent was probably much less than 20% averaged across the company anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if non-googlers can work on Gmail apps/plug ins? I have some cool ideas that would benefit a lot of people in their daily email writing.</comment>


Hacker fuel: lifeguard's red beans & rice/potato/noodle recipe - <AUTHOR>

Save money, be healthy, eat good food!
Every Monday I cook some red beans.
99 cents for 8 servings of dry red beans.  One serving is over 33% RDA for protein, 15% Iron, 10% Vitamin C.  Add rice or potato and you are full!  5 lbs of potatoes is 1 - 3 dollars.  Ramen 99 cents for 4 - 8 packs.
1.  before you go to sleep for the night, put 1/2 cup of dried red beans in pot full of cold water to soak at least 8 hours (or bring to a boil, let set for 10 min, change water and follow recipe)
2.  two hours before you want to eat, start cooking beans:  drain old water, add 3 cups fresh water and bring to a boil, then reduce to a low simmer for around an hour
3.  add 2 spoons wershishire sauce, 2 spoons catsup, 4 spoons oil, salt, pepper, bay leaves, oregano, basil , hot sauce.  add optional chopped onion/garlic/bell pepper/jalapeño and simmer for 40 more minutes
4.  use a big spoon to smoosh 1/4 of beans against side of pan to thicken sauce and start boiling water to cook rice/potato/noodle. About 20 minutes.
Serve beans over rice/noodles.
OR -- just cut a potato into chunks and throw into pot to cook for 20 minutes
OR -- just throw in a ramen noodle packet in beans and cook last 10 min
OR -- microwave/bake a big potato and pour beans over this with some fresh chopped onion if avail.
Make a double size batch and save half of it and make burritos or whatever in a few days. <comment><USER3> I once wrote a very simple recipe for a delicious tomato soup - here it is copy pasted:

 _worlds fastest tomato soup_

       canned and diced tomatoes

       spray cream (with sugar added, ideally)

       some italian spices mix.

pour the diced tomatoes with the juice included into a microwave safe jar and put cream on it (cover about half or three fourths of the surface with a 1cm thick layer), stir it with a spoon, and make sure it is all well mixed with the tomatoes. add spices. put it in the microwave at approx. 700W for 5 minutes (dont cover the jar). enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, that's a lot of _TIME_ as well.

When I was in leaner times, I did a lot of the stuff in <http://onceamonthmom.com/> and [http://www.amazon.com/Once-A-Month-Cooking- Spending-Enjoying...](http://www.amazon.com/Once-A-Month-Cooking-Spending- Enjoying-Delicious/dp/0805418350)

You can get a lot of nutrition for very little time and money if you do this

</comment><comment><USER5> Elon Musk used to eat sausages with bread - not buns (bread is cheaper) - <USER2> one orange to not die from lack of vitamins - and he did fine in the end! Maybe someone should do a proper investigation on what successful hackers used to eat?

<comment><AUTHOR> I eat corn tortillas -- even cheaper than bread!

Breakfast taco: fried egg on a corn tortilla cooked on open gas burned with tapatio hot sauce. I swear it tastes gourmet!</comment></comment>


How to do a startup in your spare time - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bellebethcooper.com/how-to-do-a-startup-in-your-spare-time <comment><USER3> I have a list of concerns and questions as I am doing something similar. Would be interested to see what you make of it:

What does your boss/supervisor think of your startup? How much do you talk about it at work?

Are you worried that your full-time employer will think you're doing your work on their time? Are you worried that you may be technically doing your work on their computers (even by logging into Asana or a similar site)?

How do you juggle meeting clients, contacts, mentors, other cofounders, with your day job? Not everyone can meet in the evenings and at weekends.

How do you send urgent emails related to your startup in your day job?

Will you consider leaving your current job/position to work full-time? Have you set yourself goals or conditions for going full-time (revenue/traction/funding/other?).

<comment><USER4> Not the author but I've done something similar before, so here's what I can offer:

> _What does your boss /supervisor think of your startup?_

My boss had no reason to know, although she eventually found out through other means. It didn't affect my day job at all so it was a non-issue. I had no reason to bring it up and neither did she.

> _How much do you talk about it at work?_

Not at all. Work is for work.

> _Are you worried that your full-time employer will think you 're doing your > work on their time?_

They knew me well enough to know that I would never do that to them.

> _Are you worried that you may be technically doing your work on their > computers (even by logging into Asana or a similar site)?_

Do not do anything on work hardware, ever. In many parts of the US this may actually entitle them to something (though IANAL and don't want to open that can of worms). Just don't do it. There's no reason to.

Ideally, you wouldn't even do startup-related things on your personal hardware (e.g. phone) during work hours or while at work.

> _How do you juggle meeting clients, contacts, mentors, other cofounders, > with your day job?_

The job I had when I was doing this had an owner who was a butts-in-the-office type (part of why I left). Because of this, the simple answer was "I didn't," unless it was over lunch. If the folks your meeting with know you're working full-time - they probably should - then they'll know you can't meet for coffee at 10 AM. Most of the time they will be impressed that you respect your employer enough _not_ to use their time to build your business.

The job I have now is not so stringent on time. I could go have coffee with someone at 10 AM if I had a really good reason (up to me to decide), and we all put in enough hours that nobody is counting how long you're away from the desk.

> _How do you send urgent emails related to your startup in your day job?_

As I said earlier, work is for work. It needs to be _really_ bad to require attention from you when you're being paid by your employer to do what they want.

I obviously can't answer the last point, but I'd like to leave you with one thought. It would be great if everyone had the time, ability, and means to bootstrap a business on the side while getting paid full time, but the unfortunate truth is that some people don't. You may have a job that required you to sign something prohibiting it explicitly. You may just have a job that is too close to your passion such that any business would be a competitor. Or, you may just have an asshole boss who makes you work 60-80 hours a week for a 2% raise and a $300 Christmas bonus.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, some folks may have employment contracts with $dayjob which give that company intellectual property claims on all technical work by employees whether done on or off the job. The extent of those claims obviously depends on the contract itself, and enforceability varies by jurisdiction. (California is better on this than most US States, but even there, employers with a will may have enough wiggle room to make trouble for an employee with a side project that's taking off.)

So, if you're actually trying the "ignorance is bliss" strategy for managing $dayjob relation, then consulting a lawyer up front could save you an awful lot of trouble later.

<comment><USER6> About this type of clauses, I've heard that "well, they are standard and are almost always ignored, as long as you don't cross the line (e.g. code for your side-projects in your day-job office)".

I know this depends on the company, but, as a general rule, are these clauses really taken so lightly?

<comment><USER7> I was running the engineering group of a VC backed firm when the side project a couple of my people were working on nights & weekends got some great press coverage. By the time it hit TC the Engineers' names were there along with a quote about how their work was supported by their "day job" ... Our VCs took notice and our boilerplate employee PIIA was trotted out to claim rights to the side project. The project was completely unrelated to our line of business BTW...but it didn't matter as the VCs smelled IP value in the press exposure.

I fought the good fight against some silly assertions such as "They could not have built this in so little time without overlapping working hours" but lost the battle when the VCs pointed to the timestamps of some support/feedback comments posted by one of my Engineers on the project's website. He had written those and posted during working hours while sitting in the office of said "day job"

Project squashed, all the IP was rolled up and shelved. It was a bad day.

TL;DR these clauses are typically not enforced because your side project is typically viewed as worthless. If on the other hand your project is seen as a source of value... tread carefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry to say but this post really rubbed me the wrong way. Let me explain...

Her important headings for "doing a startup in your spare time":

      - Managing tasks
      - Sharing links
      - Talking to other founders
      - Emailing customers
      - <USER2>
      - Weekly catch-ups

All of this stuff sounds nice, but face it, it's all fluff. We really need to talk about the elephant in the room, the single most important item in a part time startup: _how to get stuff built_. If you can't get it built in your spare time, none of this other stuff will matter.

Building anything of value tends to be difficult; doing it in your spare time is _incredibly difficult_. Here's why:

\- In spite of you best efforts, you will be too tired after your day job.

\- When you're "in the zone" you won't be able to work on your start-up. When your working on your start-up, you won't be able to get "into the zone".

\- You won't have long enough blocks of time to get large chunks done.

\- Your attention will more easily be diverted to other things (the day job).

\- It takes so much longer to have a deliverable, you will lose momentum and interest and get easily distracted or drawn to something shinier.

So what should you do? 3 things, religiously:

1\. Determine your "Big Fat What". Have a precise definition of exactly _what_ you're going to build. That's right, you must write requirements to yourself. Following the path of least resistance simply won't work for a part-time start-up because you will never be able to sustain enough momentum. Writing requirements forces you to have better discipline and better plan, and it's also the kind of work that fits nicely into those 2 hour blocks of time you have during the week.

2\. Determine your "Big Fat How". This is when you translate your requirements into technical specs. You know, program definitions and flows, page layouts, data base schemas, etc. Yes, again you will be writing specs to yourself. Steps 1 & 2 are kinda like linear algebra; you'll spend a lot of time doing seemingly mindless unnecessary steps to get to the where you really want to be...

3\. Build it. You do this on weekends when you have large enough blocks of time to crank. But your capability to build will only be as good as your preparation. As you struggle with Step 3, you'll appreciate Steps 1 & 2 and get better at them. Then you'll be surprised at how much progress you can make building in your spare time.

Once you have something built (a true feat in any part-time start-up) then (and only then) do OP's suggestions come into play.

<comment><USER9> Ed, you have the power of experience, and your suggestions are all good.

But I can't figure out why you even bothered to comment about her posting. If you had to "educate" every startup hipster on what is wrong with their self aggrandizing blog posts, you would never have time to produce anything. Were you afraid other founders would take her musing as "law" and ruin their lives? I think the less attention these interruptions get, the better chance they will die out of pop culture, and more production can get done. I can't believe i'm wasting my time writing this.

<comment><USER10> Well, if it helps, I feel like I learnt something from reading both of your thoughts on this. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Co-founder here - let me respond to some of the concerns voiced here. Firstly, I think if this was titled "what _we_ use to help us do a startup in our spare time", it would make a little more sense. We are not advocating for any particular approach. This is more a list of things that help us.

Doing a startup in your spare time is really, really hard. We could've launched months ago but with limited time we're forced to keep pushing back. There are benefits to this — it keeps you really lean, because you just don't have time for all the little extras. But I'd still rather have more time, especially in big blocks. Our main time is evenings and weekends, which limits us severely.

Belle works full-time for Buffer doing content, and they're incredibly supportive of us and Exist. Working for a startup who have been there not so long ago is probably one of the points to mention which make this more sustainable. Belle's time is flexible as she works remotely, meaning she can make time in her day for meetings, emails, etc., and still be able to complete her work for Buffer.

And I'm freelancing at the moment, meaning my time is just as flexible (in theory — if you're flat-out, that doesn't mean much).

I think edw519's points are good complement in terms of actually building your product and managing your time.

</comment><comment><USER12> Mistitled. Using services is not way to do startup in spare time.

<comment><USER13> This is more like a how to be a startup hipster in your spare time- guide. Just missing tips like where to order your single estate coffee for your hacker space. Managing to juggle two demanding jobs at once is very difficult and what tools you use are pretty irrelevant.

<comment><USER14> Even the start-up sounds like a joke. Just a bunch of semi-insightful metrics on a flat dashboard...ugh...er, I mean, yeah there's definitely a market for that.

<comment><USER15> I thought a web app that lets users upload pictures was so easy there's no way you could make much money with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doing a startup in your spare time is a good way to get fired. It is also a good way to ruin your good idea.

Part time startups work only if you are trying to start a "home business" that is very different from you day job.

You work at Best Buy, and want to start a new search engine. Great. That is better than quitting you job to start a new search engine.

You work at Google and want to start a social network. You are going to get fired. There is a good chance Google will own your code, and you won't have enough time to get your social network off the ground, so now you are doubly screwed.

You work at Google and want to start a business selling Clay ovens on the weekend. Congrats you have a startup that won't break Google's moonlighting rules.

<comment><USER17> For the vast majority of people, their startups/side projects are vastly diff. than their day job.

<comment> alok-g >> "Vastly different"

This is not the case to the best of my knowledge.

See details in my older comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6245810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6245810)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Seems like a list of things most startups do/should do. Doesn't seem to have anything specific to doing a startup in your spare time.

</comment><comment><USER18> Write this article when you've succeeded and quit your day job.

When.</comment>


The most important design guideline (2014) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tg1ONG18H8 <comment><USER2> Anyone want to post the clickbait antidote?

<comment><USER3> "Make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly."

<comment><USER4> And just to add one more clarification, 'interfaces' refers to both UIs and APIs.</comment></comment></comment>


The UK's porn filter is blocking the latest League of Legends update  - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/209261/The_UKs_porn_filter_is_blocking_the_latest_League_of_Legends_update.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29

<comment><USER2> Now that is too harsh. Taking away both porn and league of legends means male 16-25 only past time will be rioting ...

But not unexpected - there will be a lot more false positives.

Also having /sex/ as regexp is maybe the dumbest possible filter.</comment>


By following up with employer, this is what devs loose - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tipsnguts/should-i-follow-up-after-interview-243a18e27211 <comment><USER2> Programming/Technology or otherwise, if you spend that much time worried about 1 interview, you will end up just like Hyde that is, out of a job. You have to send out hundreds of resumes (pace yourself maybe 10 to 15 per day is good) and you have to do many interviews.

In the tech industry you are going to meet many people who believe they are God's gift to tech. Do the interview, ignore them, move on to the next. The goal is landing a job not validating yourself against the 27 year old so- called CTO who wrote the first line of code of a robo-dialer. Don't get caught up in the "feel bad" game. Keep applying.</comment>


Italian family's inability to feel pain spurs research for chronic patients - <AUTHOR> https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/12/19/italian-familys-inability-feel-pain-lead-relief-chronic-sufferers/ <comment><USER2> Leprosy is the classic disease where the most visible deformities are due to a lack of feeling pain. The mycobacterium is thought to attack the long nerves of the arms and legs, which results in the patients being unable to detect damage - resulting in burns, infections and loss of toes/limbs.

One of the problems of treating chronic pain is that it doesn't just involve pain nerve fibres, but also the cerebral perception of pain. Patients who have had amputations can have a 'phantom limb' syndrome, where it seems the cerebrum has remapped it's input somewhere else. They can also get phantom limb pain - which given there isn't a limb or nerve fibres shows how difficult it can be to treat chronic pain.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198614/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198614/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This jumped out at me:

With 10 percent of the world's population — more than 60 million people — living with chronic pain...

Its true that 700 million is more than 60 million, so technically its correct but a word way to phrase it...

</comment><comment><USER4> We've come a long way from the 2007 study by Italian nuns on the connection between stress and disease. You know, which I read about at the job I started on March 15th (ref: HELen).

<comment><USER5> > We've come a long way from the 2007 study by Italian nuns on the connection > between stress and disease. You know, which I read about at the job I > started on March 15th (ref: HELen).

Have you read about theory of mind? It involves the ability to imagine the beliefs, knowledge and perspective of others as different from one's own. Now, imagine you are a person other than yourself. You come across a comment such as yours. What would you make of it?

<comment><USER6> Maybe another approach to the problem could be found in

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


Ask HN: Going from Programming to Full Developer - <AUTHOR> For anyone who started off programming quick fixes or on-top of systems. How did you learn the development, packaging, and deployment side of programming? <comment><USER2> The best thing is to join a team of professional engineers that have or plan to introduce CI/CD, code reviews, versioning, and other modern practices. It can be a job or an open source project. You need to see how to do such practices in real projects, experience the whole process, learn and get feedback from experienced people.

You can learn something on your own from books, articles, adopt and follow them on your pet projects, but comparing to working in a team this will be less efficient.</comment>


IRS: Sorry, but It's Just Easier and Cheaper to Audit the Poor - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor <comment><USER2> I hate this article. It's an important issue - the IRS not having the resources to review complex tax returns - but it's hard to read past the authors efforts to build outrage around unfairness and actually understand it.

He claims throughout the article that the IRS focuses disproportionately on poor families over the wealthy, but the first f$&@ing sentence says that the IRS audits the working poor at the same rate as the wealthy. You can argue that that's not good policy, but it's literally the definition of proportionate. The sub-head and the first sentence literally say opposite things.

I'm so frustrated with the article because I feel like the focus on "disproportionate enforcement" (which the article itself says isn't happening) distracts from the very real and outrageous problem.

Sorry for the rant

<comment><USER3> If the purpose of audits are to recover tax revenues, then auditing the poor at the same rate as the wealthy is very disproportionate.

If the purpose of audits is merely to find and punish tax cheats, then auditing everyone at the same rate makes sense I suppose. Though I suspect certain higher income levels are more prone to cheating.

<comment><USER4> If the purpose of audits is to find and punish cheating, then auditing in proportion to number of exemptions/deductions would make the most sense. Sure, audit people claiming EITC more, but also audit people claiming lots of exemptions for money transferred to/from trusts or Caymans corporations, deductions for depreciation and business expenses, and every other special provision in the bookshelf-long tax code. Sure, a lot of these provisions have legitimate reasons for existing and are genuinely necessary for some people (like EITC), but each one also has some potential for abuse and when the tax code has thousands of them it becomes like a recipe book for those looking to evade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Simplifying the tax code would allow more audits for a fixed amount of IRS funding.

</comment><comment><USER6> > For now, the IRS says, while it agrees auditing more wealthy taxpayers would > be a good idea, without adequate funding there's nothing it can do.

Why not pay out a portion of the tax recovered from audits as a bonus. The IRS auditor gets 1-10% of the tax they recover for the people of the USA.

It'd work like the commissions the big accounting firms receive of the amount of tax they save for their clients.

I bet there'd be a benefit in retaining those really smart auditors who could pass all the tests as well. I can't help but imagine some of those auditors _leave_ the IRS and go _straight_ to those aforementioned accounting firms. Farm team style like the Senators and Representatives do to lobbyists.

<comment><USER7> Incentives matter and that is a really dangerous incentive.

<comment><USER6> The perverse incentive is rewarding an organization for enabling the defrauding of the American people. My bonus scheme will only _balance_ that.

<comment><USER8> I literally had to read your comment twice, because you're creating an incentive for the agents of the IRS to strongarm the public because it directly lines their pocket. You're also creating an incentive to bribe IRS agents, because why take 1-10% if a fraudulent taxpayer would readily offer you at least twice that amount...

The reason I had to read it twice is I thought you were suggesting the "organization" in question was the IRS itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Improper Payments Act report shows just under $19 billion was lost in improper EITC payments in FY2018. NASA's FY2018 budget was $20.7 billion just to compare the scale of the loss. Every little bit of fraud, waste, and abuse does add up to something quite large in the aggregate.

ProPublica is asking the wrong questions. They should be asking what we should do with refundable tax credit programs that have such high error rates in payments. What we're doing currently isn't working best.</comment>


Loser's Lunch - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2018/09/03/losers-lunch/ <comment><USER2> Great read, two things I found interesting:

1\. The whole mental gymnastics of tournaments' attempts to depict courtsiding as illegal, it feels reminiscent of many moral outrage arguments these days. It's not enough to say that a certain behavior is wrong, we now need to broadly paint everyone who doesn't follow our rules as bad people. I see this everywhere nowadays and I don't like it, nuance and mutual understanding is the only way any adversarial situation ever achieves resolution.

2\. You'd think that it'd be very easy with today's technologies to remain undetected while transmitting these simple pieces of information. I'm curious how these spotters actually find courtsiders, especially those with no history in the industry.

<comment><USER3> As they note in the article, there's only a small amount of known courtsiders, they have their pictures, they're taught to look for them. One of the courtsiders even says he just keeps his phone out, because it's his face that gets him caught.

"iirimets said that since just his face is enough to get him kicked out, he doesn't make much of an effort to hide his cell phone anymore. For Pete, it's the same. And I can see how they're both distinctive-looking enough to stick out like sore thumbs—Rainer is tall with close-set eyes and thick eyebrows, while Pete has big, glowing eyes that take up much of his squarish face. The first catch instantly halves the viability of a courtsider's career; the hundredth means it's almost pointless to continue."

<comment><USER2> Yes, I read the article. I'm wondering how they catch those _new_ to the game, how that record gets started. If you're telling me that all they need to do is rotate out the cast, sounds pretty simple, but I naturally doubt that it is just that easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > A Wimbledon spokeswoman said in a statement that the All-England Lawn Tennis > Club is "committed to achieving the 'gold standard' of measures to protect > the integrity of The Championships," including courtsiders.

Of course, courtsiders are simply transmitting factual information: they aren't harming the integrity of the games at all.

The integrity of those involved in catching, apprehending, and banning courtsiders for life, on the other hand, is certainly in question.

<comment><USER5> I wondered the same thing. You would think that betting on the match should not be under the jurisdiction of the tennis club, rather the gambling regulators.

I fail to see how someone electronically (or otherwise) relaying non- confidential information about a tennis match would in any way harm the integrity of the match.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand why the tennis organisers care so much about cracking down on this. Their incentives are mainly aligned with the courtsiders: they pay for seats and facilitate gambling which encourages viewers. The data firms like Sportradar are the only ones with a financial incentive to stamp them out: their service is worth more if it's a monopoly. So they must be putting the squeeze on the tennis federations and threatening to cancel contracts.

It's clear that the Sportradar service isn't competitive for real-time gambling, but why don't they offer a service that is? Put a guy at each match entering the scores (and any other information) faster than the chair umpire and sell that data. If there's enough money to have multiple spotters and courtsiders (up to 50) at the event, Sportradar should be able to capture enough of that to employ one person to do data entry.

</comment><comment><USER3> The most interesting thing to me is that it appears that most of these bets are really just head-to-head between sparring courtsider: trying to control the betting line through speed (and betting algorithms.) It's just a high- stakes game of SlapJack.

"Often, courtsider-led betting syndicates will match up against each other, putting both the fast fingers at the tournament and their respective algorithms to a head-to-head test. It's common for courtsiders to recognize one another from across the court at a match. At bigger tournaments, they may spot a dozen or more such familiar faces in the crowd. Brad Hutchins estimated that there have been as many as 50 courtsiders working simultaneously inside the main stadium at a Grand Slam; another thought the number could be nearly twice as high."

</comment><comment><USER7> HFTT, High Frequency Tennis Trading.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm looking forward to the day when people start using satellites to collect data on sporting events. Satellites can't trespass, and they aren't subject to TFRs. Too expensive right now, but won't be for long.

Of course, I guess the events can always be held indoors.

<comment><USER9> How expensive would it be to rent a hot air balloon and use a telephoto lens?

<comment><USER10> In the USA, you'd almost certainly be in violation of a TFR (Temporary Flight Restriction) which are usually established over stadiums during games. That is a federal problem that'll get your pilot in a huge amount of trouble.

<comment><USER9> Did not know that, thanks.

Back to satellites, then.

<comment><USER11> The Goodyear blimp looks to be getting some kind of allowance to fly over the same areas. I wonder if that flight path has to receive approval from the company that runs the sporting event, or if it's more of a government shall grant situation.

<comment><USER10> Quite likely the TFR is actually to protect the blimp! TFRs pop up for all sorts of reasons - rocket launches, presidential motorcades, volcanoes, sporting events... They're situational and specific rather than blanket restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an interesting concept. I'm somewhat surprised the author didn't draw a connection between the stock market and insider trading, which is more analogous in my mind than card counting in black jack.

<comment><USER13> In cards, stocks and tennis, we can map the system thus:

1\. Decision about action is made (Firm decides on merger during board meeting/Roddick decides to serve a topspin/Dealer decides to deal in alternating order)

2\. Action occurs (Firm announces in press release/Roddick serves/Dealer deals)

3\. An observer relays info about action (Stock trader instantly reports shares beginning to soar/Courtsider pushes button for "it's a topspin" and potentially "point scored"/Card-counter relays number of cards in dealer's hand to player or himself)

Insider trading is when a person who was present at step 1 performs step 3 (relays information) ahead of step 2 (Action). The analog in tennis would be if Roddick (insider to his own playing) told someone he would serve a topspin prior to serving it, or worse, if Roddick told someone he would lose a match on purpose.

Courtsiders, unlike a typical inside trader, have no special inside knowledge about what kind of serves a player shall make, and they certainly cannot influence a player's playing. Just like a stock trader, their only power is transmitting the events that do occur at lightning speed. Rapidly counting the number of cards in a hand after they've been dealt (action) is this, too.

As you can see, insider trading is the wrong analogy to make.

<comment><USER12> I would disagree that it's the "wrong" analogy to make... maybe just different.

To me, insider trading is analogous to court siding, in that, in both cases, someone is seeking to use "private information" (information that isn't yet publicly available) in order to make money. So I would order the system:

1\. Action occurs "privately" (firm decides on merger but hasn't announced it publicly; court sider reports data that the ump hasn't recorded yet/doesn't record; player notices how dealer plays the cards)

2\. Party with the private information makes bets based on this information in an effort to beat the system

3\. The public finds out about the previously private information and responds accordingly.

So, courtsiders don't have knowledge about what the player WILL do, but they can tell people what the HAS done faster than they would get normally.

Though I can understand how card counting may be a better analogy for courtsiding simply because of the fact that they're both legal gray areas, as opposed to insider trading, which is explicitly illegal.

<comment><USER13> That's an interesting system.

The extent I could agree with it largely depends on how well this step - "courtsider reports [private] data that ump hasn't recorded/doesn't record" \- represents the real game.

I would think the courtsider and ump record scores at an almost equal pace (and the advantage a courtsider might get from guessing a score ahead of the ump by a few milliseconds is likely negated by wrong guesses). But the stuff the umpire "doesn't record," like a player's injury, can be seen by every attendant of that match.

If the injury (or some other event the ump doesn't record) is seen by most of the stadium, isn't it more "public knowledge" than "private information"? If so, then courtsiding isn't like insider trading. If the stadium full of people counts as a "private" party, then it is.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Flask Seed App - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/muicss/flaskapp <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. As for the password hashing, have you tried the one built in to Werkzeug? [http://flask.pocoo.org/snippets/54/](http://flask.pocoo.org/snippets/54/)

Btw., I have a similar project (with a much smaller scope) at [https://github.com/codenhagen/startflaskproject](https://github.com/codenhagen/startflaskproject).

<comment><AUTHOR> The Werkzeug password hasher looks interesting. It uses PBKDF2 under the hood but bcrypt seems to be considered more secure: [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4789/most- secure...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4789/most-secure- password-hash-algorithms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried the flask cookiecutter's?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't aware of it but Cookiecutter looks interesting!</comment></comment>


Tesla says its factory is safer–but it left injuries off the books - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610889/tesla-says-its-factory-is-saferbut-it-left-injuries-off-the-books/ <comment><USER2> It's fine. They also regularly blame the drivers for their manslaughtering "autopilot" software.

Our high tech community does not have time for whining. We need to move forward at any cost.</comment>


Eye Contact - The Invisible Grip - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/features/influence/ESQ0806INFLUENCE_81?click=main_sr

<comment><USER2> I read this when it was first published in 2006. It's a bit strange to say, but it actually had a significant impact on my life and how I interact with people.

<comment><USER3> It comes across as hostile ("I thought of it as a kind of dominance, holding them in the kind of invisible grip you might have once seen employed by a villain in a DC comic...", etc). Am I interpreting this incorrectly? Can you elaborate on the impact it's had on your interactions?

<comment><USER4> I'll let you know; I've noticed the phenomenon but never put it to use myself. I will do so over the next few weeks.

One thing the article isn't clear on: is the author simply _staring down_ the other person (i.e. eye contact with no words), or is he simply maintaining eye contact while speaking to them?

If the former I'd certainly think that's hostile, if the latter... well.

<comment><USER5> Isn't this a bit of a false dichotomy? There's a middle ground between being hostile and sociable. People playing a game generally aren't hostile but they do want to win. One might want to use eye contact to achieve some end result without wishing the other person ill - which a claim of hostility would connote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is true, every word. I can absolutely vouch for what this says.

It's quite startling the first few times you try it. Then it gets fun. It's easy to push it too far.

<comment><USER7> Eye contact alone is golden. With no words offered from me, the car salesman negotiated the price of our new car down and double the trade in of our old car.

<comment><USER8> So after his initial offer you remained silent and held eye contact, then he continued to give you a more favorable deal?

<comment><USER9> I do this every time I'm buying things with negotiable prices. My trick is to not use any eye contact until negotiation time. The surprise throws most people off their game enough to give you an advantage. Plus, it is kind of fun watching someone talk themself out of money. FYI, it doesn't work every time, typically there will be an awkward silence and I'll have to throw out an offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just curious: what's with all the esquire.com articles?

<comment><USER11> I think it is has a couple factors.

First, a guy who found a site that does not have a lot of articles from it that are submitted and someone who found that the esquire is a major booster of karma.(I guess it matters to some people)

Secondly, on the weekends it only takes a few up-votes for a story to reach the front page.

<comment><USER12> All the stories were submitted by the same guy, a 3 day old account who's also submitted fastcompany, popularmechanics, and similar sites.

<comment><USER13> Are all those magazines published by the same company?

<comment><USER12> Esquire and Popular Mechanics are published by Hearst, but that's the only commonality, and enough IMO to be a coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is quite a body of knowledge about eye contact when applied to hacking women. Viz. the original experiments by David Shade: <http://www.fastseduction.com/youarenew/eyecontact.shtml> \- Jeans Joe's manual on eye contact mastery: <http://www.jeansjoe.net/blog/?p=14> \- Joseph W. South podcasts with Jeans Joe about eye contact: [http://www.jeansjoe.net/download/jws.and.jj.-.eye.contact.po...](http://www.jeansjoe.net/download/jws.and.jj.-.eye.contact.podcasts.zip)

<comment><USER15> Hacking whom, now?

<comment><USER16> Jack the Ripper was a pioneer in the field, don't'cha know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's funny that "The National Association of Staredown Professionals" mentioned at the bottom of the article is a real organization. I wonder what their meetings are like?

<comment><USER18> They all blankly stare at each other...</comment></comment>


ASCIIFlow Infinity - <AUTHOR> http://asciiflow.com/ <comment><USER2> There's also Monodraw, ASCII drawing with a native MacOS GUI and more advanced tools.

[https://monodraw.helftone.com/](https://monodraw.helftone.com/)

<comment><USER3> Monodraw is _incredible_ , and vastly more useful than ASCIIFlow just by dint of the fact that objects _remain objects_ after drawn - you can drag them around and the graph remains intact.

<comment><USER4> ASCIIFlow does keep models of drawn boxes, lines, and arrows. If you use the "resize/move boxes and lines" tool, you can adjust drawn objects.

<comment><USER3> Ah, so it does. Not especially well, but it does. My mistake!

<comment><USER5> Author here - it does but it doesn't, which is why it doesn't always work so well. It never actually keeps track of the shapes in a seperate data model - the text itself is the only data model. When you resize, it retraces out the lines that need editing. I did this as the expected use case is for diagrams in code, where diagrams may be copy pasted in and out of the tool and I'd lose any underlying models that I was working with. For fun: [https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2/blob/master/js- lib/draw...](https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2/blob/master/js- lib/draw/move.js)

<comment><USER6> Grateful user here. I've relied on ASCIIFlow for all the diagrams in my Internet drafts since IETF 88. Truly an essential tool in my arsenal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also previous discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=asciiflow.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=asciiflow.com)

Also, this looks like it is the repository for ASCIIFlow and you can run it locally:

[https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2](https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2)

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of JavE ([http://jave.de/](http://jave.de/)).

EDIT: What would be extra awesome would be a mode where it saves SVG. And/or a tool that renders SVG as ASCII art.

EDIT: Also, JavE does much more than asciiflow, as it even allows you to create ASCII _movies_.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like this. Unfortunately it's not as semantic as I expected:

                X
         +----+XX</comment><comment>----+
         |     XX          |
         |      XX         |
         |       +XXX</comment><comment>+
         |       |   XXXXX
         +</comment><comment>-+       XXX

         If I try to resize
         a rectangle that's
         crossed by a free-form
         curve, it stops being
         a rectangle.

(Now that I think, I could also use this as a feature).

<comment><USER10> This is explained by a comment from the author (bootywizard) above:

Author here - it does but it doesn't, which is why it doesn't always work so well. It never actually keeps track of the shapes in a seperate data model - the text itself is the only data model. When you resize, it retraces out the lines that need editing. I did this as the expected use case is for diagrams in code, where diagrams may be copy pasted in and out of the tool and I'd lose any underlying models that I was working with. For fun: [https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2/blob/master/js- lib/draw...](https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2/blob/master/js-lib/draw..).

<comment><USER11> This could be fixed by being more expansive/creative with choice of glyphs, so that two intersecting lines get represented by a glyph that uniquely corresponds to the 2 glyphs that overlap at that position (possibly also encoding z-depth stack in the glyph choice)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool! I can use it to make some ASCII arts for my console applications.

However, please change the icon of Freeform Drawing Tool. Because currently that icon make it looks like a Curve Drawing Tool in the first glance.

<comment><USER13> There is also a bug when you press a key during freeform drawing on Firefox Nightly. It doesn't properly set the active character. Works fine on Chrome though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very cool! It would be awesome if it had a mode that used the unicode box- drawing characters too [0]. It can get a little tedious copy and pasting them and drawing things manually.

\- [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box- drawing_character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character)

</comment><comment><USER15> As a Linux sysadmin, this is incredible flowchart software and I really enjoy using it. Is there a diagram software for console I could use thats just as easy I wonder?

The downside is it has very limited sex appeal for *.managers. Microsoft Visio has turned diagrams into blinding tapestries of overpriced clipart, fancy arrows, and logos. Worst of all, its an enabler for the cardinal sin of diagrams: overlapping lines.

<comment><USER16> Check out PlantUML - there's a nice demo here: [https://www.planttext.com/](https://www.planttext.com/)

Plenty of editors support it, both console (vim/emacs) and GUI-based (VSCode, Sublime).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> On similar lines, I very recently discovered the combination of emacs + Artist Mode + ditaa for creating diagrams, and the experience has been pretty good so far too.

<comment><USER18> Oh yeah, this combo is actually one of the better modes in Emac-land. Whenever I see yet another ASCII art link posted here, I just gaggle cos Artist mode is that good.

<comment><USER19> Like many emacs things, there more than one. There's also picture-mode. I haven't used either very much, but my sense is that artist-mode is more mouse- oriented and possibly supports more sophisticated drawings but picture-mode may work better in terminals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pretty cool, but the text tool really needs some figlet-like functionality with fonts and outlines!

</comment><comment><USER21> Great tool. I used it to create a state machine diagram - one that I then included in the inline documentation of my Elixir code.

<comment><USER22> Clever. I once had to diagram a state machine for a PR to an OSS program since the code is a bit inscrutable if you don't understand the purpose. This would have been quite useful in that regard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great execution!

I understand the impetus to keep things simple. But PNG image export would be a tremendous boon to me. Should be trivial as you are just drawing text to the canvas, no?

<comment><USER24> As a workaround you can just take a screenshot (although that could get cumbersome with large diagrams).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> quick emacsen, let's augment artist-mode to match it (especially the topology friendly resize)

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, that smart resize tool is awesome, and makes this a good tool for roughing out dungeon maps. :)

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to use asciiflow for some of my network sketching, and it can be enjoyable to play with. That said, I have been thinking about the subject of network maps for quite some time now as a senior sysadmin, and I no longer use it for a couple of reasons.

First, I don't like the idea of being tied to a webservice for my map drawing tools. I would really like the source code so I can self-host. I looked around the new updated asciiflow website and didn't see any links to source so correct me if I'm wrong.

Second, and most importantly, as a senior sysadmin over the years I have seen hundreds of network maps, the vast majority of them being in visio due to it having market dominance, and there is a problem that neither visio or it's competitors has addressed, and that's automated network mapping with versioning so you can diff and walk back in time. It's the thing even the best automappers still don't do right because they tend to get the topology wrong (such as one of my favorite automappers like librenms's).

This is why one of the utilities I have been working on is a bash-script cobbling together nwdiag ([http://blockdiag.com/en/nwdiag/index.html](http://blockdiag.com/en/nwdiag/index.html)), a subset of the blockdiag, with nmap and (h/f)ping scanners as the generating input and cronified daily versionable text output with checksums, with bonus things like new kea-dhcp lease triggering rescan via the kea restful api.

I think the future of network maps needs to be both automated and text based to enable admins and executives the ability to fully visualize the network at any given state in time, with the ability to walk the cat back with confidence in the accuracy of the map you are looking at(I would like to integrate gpg as well).

It's not quite ready for release, (sitting in my github projects folder waiting for push), but I lazily named it anmap for automated-network-mapper.

So right now how I use it personally is I have an emacs-org mode file that is cronified to output daily latex pdf reports that calls the bash script and generates the output map which is then listed inside the rest of the org-mode systems report which does other stuff like give me go-no-go on system usage via stuff like lynis, rkhunter, ckrootkit, and ossec.

tldr - Basicallly the network map industry is extremely ripe for competition and all these web-based network mapping tools are still not addressing a core needs usecase for sysadmins.

<comment><USER27> I haven't tried it, but could it be this one? [https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2](https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2)

<comment><USER26> That looks like it to me, though for some reason I didn't expect it to be java. Regardless, thanks so much for the link! Huge bonus that it's gplv3 for me, I will def be playing with this. Did you find it from the website and I just missed it or did you have to search for it?

<comment><USER27> A few weeks ago I was interested in this project, too, and looking around I came across this link. The author's profile also points to the AsciiFlow website, so I assumed that would be it. I think you might have misread the language; it's actually written in javascript :-)

<comment><USER26> I'm going to blame my phones autocorrect, but it was mostly because I hadn't had coffee yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Awesome application! I used it in the past to draw ASCII diagrams for my blog posts (e.g. [0]) as I was looking for an alternative way to display "images". Still needs some tweaking for mobile usage, but on desktop it's just great because of the removed loading times for images.

\- [0] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/learn-react-before-using- redux/](https://www.robinwieruch.de/learn-react-before-using-redux/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've never seen that "Can you help us?" Google donation tab before.

Is that new? It looks like Google requires you to register as a non-profit to use it. Am I looking at the wrong thing?

[https://support.google.com/donations/answer/7570174?hl=en](https://support.google.com/donations/answer/7570174?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER30> There's also my favorite, Asciio [https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Asciio](https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Asciio)

It allows saving the object format for later modification or export as pure ascii text, as needed. And it works on all platforms that support Perl (a lot).

<comment><USER31> good stuff. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l9W84PhOyI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l9W84PhOyI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Love seeing more tools for good old ASCII art, but it seems ANSI art has become a forgotten relic of the past...

</comment><comment><USER33> This is great. I've made a few diagrams with it today, and they've been easy to do and came out just right.

I do wish I could toggle the background and view the diagram on blank white; having the grid visible makes some things look more obvious than without, and that would be useful to know ahead of time.

</comment><comment><USER34> Another project we worked on using machine learning (decision tree) to transform an input image or video frame into printable ASCII characters:

[https://art.pixlab.io](https://art.pixlab.io)

</comment><comment><USER35> In Firefox, arrows that point to boxes have the head set to '^' regardless of their actual direction.

So an arrow to a box might look like ----^

<comment><USER36> I just tried it with Firefox (latest). I didn't have that issue. When I moved the line the > became ^ until I dragged it back into place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It is a great tool. I use it to create simple GUI mockup, then copy-paste it to github/gitlab issue.

<comment><USER38> I'm working on a prototype that's basically made for what you're trying to do. A text command based UX tool. You can create both text-renderings and image- renderings: [https://medium.com/proof-of-concept/creating-a-true-ux- tool-...](https://medium.com/proof-of-concept/creating-a-true-ux- tool-2-speed-9e68d0b2740)

I wrote a number of articles on it, and soon will open up an online version of the prototype. Love to get your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> this is so cool, is there any plan to make it work in a terminal?

</comment><comment><USER40> Emacs has a built-in mode for doing this - picture-mode

<comment><USER41> Did you get this to work on a modern emacs ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wow! Works very well on my iPhone, too! Great work.

</comment><comment><USER43> sweet

</comment><comment><USER44> Why is there a separate tool for creating text? It would be better to just click to place the cursor and start typing.

<comment><USER45> Also this works on mobile.</comment></comment>


The RuboCop Name Drama Redux - <AUTHOR> https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-drama-redux.html <comment><USER2> I'm looking forward to the day when people are empowered to solve the root causes of woifao problems instructions of feeling only capable of acting on tangents. I'm looking forward to a day when "cop" is deservedly considered a compliment by all decent people.

I'm looking forward to day when people can look more than half a word deep to understand the meanings of words. RoboCop was a police officer who was forced to becomenm a tool of evil by a corrupt police establishment, and overcame all the odds to resist and dismantle the corrupt police establishment.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's funny that in the name of political correctness things like this happens

it's funny because the culture that created the computer science revolution is worth preserving, coming from the alternative side of our recent history

They were people who loved and often invented or participated to science fiction, fantasy, building alternative words, framers and utopians, but also people who dressed and acted weird, outcasts, minorities, that we think today should be protected and included, they became know as "nerds" as an insult and now it has become cool being one, even though nobody who call themselves nerd is really a nerd, in the original meaning, as in "an eccentric human being with a very strong lateral thinking side"

So we have daemons, dependencies, zombies, commands, kills, super users, penetrations, abuses, firewalls, agents, webs, spiders, dragons, bitten apples, wizards, catastrophic errors, crashes, instructions (aka orders, you have to follow them to the letter or you'll fail, yes we also have failures) and most of all bugs...

But! we can't have a rubocop...

</comment><comment><USER4> Name changes of popular OSS projects feels contentious, but like anything built on language it's inherently political and full of bias. As with anything, it's worth striving to improve things where we can. There are a few great examples including:

1\. FactoryGirl -> FactoryBot: [https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot/issues/921](https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot/issues/921)

2\. Whitelist -> Allowlist API in Rails: [https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/33677](https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/33677)

The irony that rather than engaging in the conversation and attempting to understand where people are coming from, bbatsov wrote a code of conduct then enforced it is not lost on me.

> edited for formatting</comment>


Facebook to be UK gov's "primary channel" for communicating cuts to public - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/politics/10563598.stm

<comment><USER2> Title misleading: "communicating with public about their suggestions of what to cut" is not the same as "communicating cuts to public."</comment>


DigitalOcean gets $130M credit line because servers are really expensive - <AUTHOR> http://xn--http-k69x://techcrunch.com/2016/04/14/digitalocean-gets-130-million-credit-line-because-servers-are-really-expensive/ <comment><AUTHOR> I can understand the SaaS business model where you lose money in the short term to acquire customers, because that customer will be worth money over the next four to six years. If you are expanding aggressively, you will be losing money as a company for sales and marketing in order to acquire many long-term customers.

But I don't understand why Digital Ocean should be losing money. Unless I am mistaken, they do not seem to be spending on sales in order to acquire long- term customers. If they are losing money on operations, then doesn't that mean their business model is broken?

Perhaps they lose money on small-scale hosting as a marketing expense in order to acquire big long-term customers? Or perhaps they have big capital expenditures for data centers? Otherwise, this doesn't look good for Digital Ocean.

<comment><USER2> They said right in the article that the credit facility will be used to deploy additional capex...

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't seem like the author of the original article knows what they are using the credit facility for, note the "maybe":

 _This new credit line means two things. First, DigitalOcean is sill investing heavily in its infrastructure. Maybe existing users will get a performance upgrade with new servers replacing existing servers. Or maybe DigitalOcean will expand its product offering._

And if they have to take out a credit line simply to upgrade existing customers, without bringing in new revenue, that is bad news. That means they are losing money simply to maintain their current position.</comment></comment></comment>