Ask HN: How to employ the 30M Americans that will lose their jobs? - <AUTHOR> Most recent Coronavirus projections show that 30-40M Americans may lose their jobs.<p>How can new businesses / startups provide work to or help retrain this workforce over the next 6 months? <comment><USER2> Things are getting weird. I'm not sure how many people are even going to want to go back work at a normal job after a month or two.

A lot of people losing their jobs are people making less than $20/hr, and right now unemployment pays more than working. In fact, in California if you make under $25/hr your unemployment check will be bigger than your regular check. This only goes to July 31, but this sort of distortion is going to completely upend the labor market. If you made between $7.25 and $25 an hour there is little incentive for you to look for a job until July 31.

<comment><USER3> Social distancing in some form will likely continue through June, at least. So I doubt the economy snaps back overnight and everyone gets rehired in a months time. So there is your extra slack. However you haven't experienced this situation nor thought about it much so let me enlighten you about how there is no extra incentive to stay unemployed.

If you happen to have benefits, you lost them with unemployment. Matched retirement contributions, health insurance, tuition reimbursement, etc.

Do you know how much full insurance premiums are for most plans with COBRA? My brief unemployment experience showed me that just for me it ended up being nearly 700 a month and that's someone in their late 20's at the time with not the best healthcare plan I could have gotten but the middle range one with a 1500 deductible. For a family of 4? Easily 2k.

What you're saying is we shouldn't pay people to also sort of kinda have enough money to continue health insurance during a pandemic??? For those to don't have it and do get sick enough to need care there goes a good portion of that extra money and likely even more, especially if it involves hospitalization - without insurance or a job they'll likely be bankrupt unless that happen to have a lot in savings.

You also have to skip a week with unemployment before taking the benefit, that's a week lost income. Finally only in the states with the best benefits, eg NY pays 80% of your salary, do you possibly come out ahead. Some states only pay 45-50% cause they don't fund their versions as much comparatively.

Additionally unemployment is backlogged that means delayed payments and thus people will possibly incur late fees, interest and other penalties and costs associated with that.

Finally even if somehow someone comes out ahead due to being in a state that gives you a high percentage of your over all income, the amount of situations like that is small and if it happens it is likely a marginal increase at best. Considering we are likely not going to have enough jobs to get people back to work in any significant numbers by July anyway, consider any increase after all that a slight additional stimulus check for people who have been impacted by this and happen to also be low wage workers.

<comment><USER2> We decided to furlough people so they could keep their benefits. Also paid out their PTO balance which should hold them over until unemployment kicks in.

Here in California someone making $15/hr was making $600/wk. On unemployment they will now make $877/wk. That's a 46% increase. It's huge. We were trying to keep people employed while staying home but people literally started filing for unemployment anyway.

<comment><USER3> Did you offer health insurance? Again COBRA costs will easily take that extra $277 per week or more if you have a family. This situation is limited, it only applies to the few states with good unemployment compensation, if the person is a minimum wage worker and also if that someone didn't have insurance, doesn't opt for cobra (or has been picking up a separate plan through the ACA exchanges) and/or its just coverage for themselves for cobra then they might come out ahead. This extra money lasts until July and that's it.

I'm guessing some people might rethink it when they see the costs of cobra and the fact that the sooner they hit the unemployment compensation the sooner they start the clock of limited benefits. If they need it for more than 6 months or whatever the state allows the max to be then they're going to regret not first going for being furloughed. Unfortunately people also aren't rational or forward thinking.

The way they did unemployment insurance certainly isn't perfect in the stimulus bill. But I don't think it's all that problematic.

<comment><USER2> We pay 100% health insurance and will try to keep it as long as possible while they are furloughed. Things change day to day though. A number of our buyers, including some large public companies, decided to just stop paying their bills by switching to net-180 terms.

I can tell you right now most $15/hr employees aren't too worried about health insurance. Most of them have gone their entire life without, so suddenly losing it again isn't as big a deal as you might think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know anything about economics. My thoughts keep gravitating towards the US and Canada employing people to invest in infrastructure upgrades. It's a way to address a serious concern in both countries (especially the US), put cash into the hands of citizens, thus the economy, and give a lot of people a bit of hope.

You wouldn't need to create tens of millions of jobs directly in infrastructure, just enough that the money would move around and make related business possible.

Maybe this is a really stupid idea, I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER5> Helicopter money. The fed has fired up the money printer and will shovel cash out the door to any company that can take it and retain/hire people (though I suspect a substantial chunk of that will be raked by business owners and financial middlemen).

The reason that helicopter money won't lead to hyper-inflation is because the entire rest of the world is just as fucked as we are, so the dollar will remain the safest currency no matter how much the money supply is increased.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just give them their old jobs back afterwards?

<comment><USER7> Not all the jobs will still be there afterwards. If lots of restaurants, hotels, airlines, etc. go bankrupt, rebuilding will require someone who has the capital to invest in building new businesses to replace them.

<comment><USER8> Restaurants come and go all the time, I don't think there will be any big issues there. Businesses relying on tourism might be another matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Give them solid union jobs in manufacturing.

<comment> non-entity I suppose that will work in states that still have unions, but I know for sure that a lot of the states that are seeing large increases in manufacturing jobs are seeing that because companies fleeing unions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The green new deal sounds like a perfect opportunity... but unlikely in the next 6 months.

A UBI in the meantime would be a super cheap way to prevent a lot of issues.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are also twists to this story. I am a retired engineer with considerable drainage and roadway experience. The infrastructure bill will increase the demand for my skills, which can be in short supply in normal times. I may have a technical duty to go back to work to assist enabling the actual construction work.

</comment><comment><USER12> The workforce won't need retraining. The economy will need capital so there can be a workforce.

</comment><comment><USER13> Green New Deal has a Plan. Clearly the Gov. has the spare cash. Great opportunity to get serious about Climate, which if unattended-to will make Covid look like a walk in the park. Who knows, maybe we could catch up with India in renewable energy in a year or three.

<comment><USER14> What's the plan? Where do you think the cash comes from? How will climate change going to factor in?

<comment><USER15> For one, the US government subsidies a lot of fossil fuel companies, easily worth 50-60 billion in cash

<comment><USER16> That 50-60 billion isn't going to do much for the GND. You need to come up with something like 200 trillion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My biggest concern of the current recession is that a lot of jobs wont recover. They will be replaced with automation.

Companies now realise that the more services they can run autopilot the better they will weather future storms

</comment><comment><USER18> As a former waiter turned programmer, I genuinely hope we find more ways to make more programmers, even if it is at the expense of having less waiters.

Life is simply better in every way.

</comment><comment><USER19> Somewhat interesting and purely academic curiosity, but US GDP (20 trillion) split evenly among US pop (330 million) is roughly $60k/year, compared to average income at $63k/year.

<comment><USER20> That includes children. And, remember that the median income is only 30k, so the average is skewed by a few people at the top making ridiculous amounts of money. But if it were split evenly, you're right, the median American would at least double their income!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first iteration: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal)

Today's version: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal)

The federal government acts as employer of last resort.

</comment><comment><USER22> 30M jobs "lost" in a forced moratorium. They will be gained back when the shenanigans passes with this flu.

Not like people will stop drinking, going to activities, spending money and become monks after a couple weeks.

<comment><USER23> Very much not "the flu".

As far as getting old jobs back, many companies will cease to exist unless bailout money magically sustains them, which it likely won't.

Many businesses were weak, operating with high debt and thin margins. The math that allowed them to continue to exist just got destroyed, they aren't coming back. No cash flow, no cash reserves means no ability to service that debt. Taking on additional debt to bridge this crisis would create a new level of future debt service that isn't sustainable with previously good revenues.

Disposable income is going to be gone for many until we get a vaccine rolled out in 18-24 months. Hospitality, travel, foodservicr, events and entertainment industries will be decimated until we reach herd immunity.</comment></comment>


ARel 2.0: Active Record Performance in Rails 3.0.2 - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.attinteractive.com/2010/10/arel-two-point-ohhhhh-yaaaaaa/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome work. I've been following these commits on GitHub and it's great to see AR being optimized.

Unfortunately there is not enough info in these benchmarks to tell whether for a large production app 3.0 might be 10 times slower than 2.3 for that particular find you are benchmarking. Or 10 times faster. Or the same.

Here's why -- for MRI the time spent on each GC run is a function of total process size/# loaded objects, which is mainly a function of your code size. In a trivial test case you can run GC in a few milliseconds. In a production app it's 100ms+. Simply by loading more code into the benchmark it's possible that we can change results completely.

When benchmarking ruby code it's better to keep runtime, # of memory allocations and size of memory allocation separate and report all 3. Meaning you run the test with GC off and patch the interpreter to get the memory allocation info.

Different users will have different tradeoffs between runtime costs vs GC costs depending on the app size, ruby interpreter used, GC tuning parameters, available RAM, etc. It's certainly valuable to also come up with general "5x" number, but that should assume and state some reasonable values for the above.

</comment><comment><USER3> Admit it: you just wanted to use an AST so that you could easily convert SQL to and from XML for an upcoming talk.

<comment><USER4> How did you know? ;-)

<comment><USER5> And we thought SQL was enterprise ready already!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are there tests in the ActiveRecord code base to prevent performance regressions?

</comment><comment><USER7> technical erratum: if each node in the list adds all the previous nodes as new objects, then with 4 nodes, the total number of objects is 10, not 24, and the overall order of the operation is O(n^2). It's still cool that he is faster, and cooler that it is using an AST, which seems to me like the right solution.

<comment><USER4> Oops! You're right. Should be O(n^2). I'll update. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work. This is why the Rails community is so damn solid.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think 3.0.2 is a typo, as 3.0.1 is referenced later in the article, and was just tagged here:

<http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/v3.0.1>

(And released! It's available via `gem update'.)

<comment><USER4> No, it's really 3.0.2. 3.0.1 is a security release only. I've updated the article to remove mentions of 3.0.1. Thanks for catching that!

<comment><USER10> The 3.0.1 nested assign bug is pretty terrible; wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to remind your readers to update to it ASAP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is

attr_reader :foo

faster than

def foo;@foo;end

Is this in 1.9.x? or 1.8.x? or both?

<comment><USER3> Courtesy of Evan Phoenix... apparently in MRI, attr_reader doesn't create a method, instead creating a NODE_IVAR in the method table of the class. This circumvents method creation/invocation overhead and is therefore faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> haha! I didn't know this guy had a blog. I've heard Aaron Patterson speak, he is crazy and awesome at the same time, IE crawesome. Or, awezy (aussie?)

<comment><USER13> Aaron's real blog: <http://tenderlovemaking.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good article, though there's a hint of "I just had my coffee" in it.

Do programmers dream of O(n!) sheep?

</comment><comment><USER15> Release date?</comment>


Pharo – Quuve - <AUTHOR> http://pharo.org/success/Quuve <comment><USER2> Yes, it is an ad for Pharo, but I think it is nice to hear some success stories for technologies that always felt like they deserved better (like Smalltalk)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder why they didn't use moose[1]; I guess it probably started development before it.

[1]: [http://www.moosetechnology.org/](http://www.moosetechnology.org/)

<comment><USER4> The main reason is because Quuve is a web platform while Moose is desktop- like. But yes, Quuve (with a different name and even without a UI) was started several years ago, probably before Moose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought Smalltalk did native UI, but not so much web stuff? Is this that Seaside framework they talk about?

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is done with Seaside web framework. We also use Bootstrap, Ajax almost everywhere, JQuery, etc. Obviously we also use several JS libs like Highcharts, Datatables, CodeMirror, TinyMCE, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a headache from looking at the screenshot. Don't you think the UX could be a bit more streamlined?

<comment><USER7> I love that screenshot. Personally I really dislike the hot trend in UX to removing information in order to make the display look "cleaner."

For serious work, like investing, I want my software to use all my screen real estate and display as much information as is reasonably possible.

<comment><USER8> As you say, it's largely the difference between serious work - i.e. "expert" tasks - and other things tech is used for. To call it a "hot trend" seems to overlook the reality that humans use technology for a lot more nowadays than just cognitively heavy work.

Even when the work itself is cognitively heavy, it is sometimes imperative that the cognitive load of the UI is low, since the user is actually using most of their cognition outside the computer screen: In the actual world with which they are interacting.

If you were at a doctor's office, would you rather have the doctor focusing their attention on listening to you or on complex data on the screen? - Possibly both, depends on the situation. But if the UI for data entry there demands heavy cognitive load, there is probably a cost for how present the doctor can be for listening and observing their patient.</comment></comment></comment>


'Tatemae' and 'Honne' - White Lies and Honesty in Japanese Society - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A571565 <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the public / private dichotomy within corporations. Publicly, a corporate officer might need to say something to not offend potential partners or investors, but privately they may feel another feeling which they express to their coworkers.

It's interesting that culturally, the Japanese appear to have identified this behavior and have given it a name.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only one who had trouble following this? I read the article and still have no idea what "Tatemae" and "Honne" actually mean. Is it like "Fine"?

Also, is it really a news flash that spoken words aren't strictly meant to be taken at face value at all times?

The "I'm fine" "Great" is mostly just a handshake to give the other person a chance to talk first anyway (for whatever reason). I think there is a great deal of nuance and interesting parts of the exchange, and this article covers just about none of them. (And honesty has almost nothing to do with it)

<comment><USER4> I think you're having trouble with this because you're looking for the words to have a meaning in a context where they don't.

 _Tatamae_ is most literally equivalent to the English "putting up a front" — it's a wall of propriety between yourself and the outside world. It's not something you _say_ to people; it's the _reason_ you say those things.

 _Honne_ means something like "true thoughts." It's what you really feel. Exposing your _honne_ in situations that call for _tatamae_ is a bit like exposing your genitals in a situation that calls for pants — and like pants, _tatamae_ is what you're expected to put on most of the time.

Of course this kind of behavior exists everywhere to varying degrees, but it's rarely as formalized (both in practice and in the language available to talk about it) as it is in Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been trying to remember these two names for AGES. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER6> So, Britons still make fun out of French.

<comment><USER7> The choice of nationality seemed pretty arbitrary to me. In what way did the article "make fun out of [the] French"?</comment></comment>


Staff Engineer Archetypes: Team Leads, Architects, Solvers, and Right Hands - <AUTHOR> https://lethain.com/staff-engineer-archetypes/ <comment><AUTHOR> An important note: the non-management career path after reaching a senior engineering level is thoroughly under-discussed. This is the reason that the author cites for starting to collect and discuss this material (at [https://staffeng.com/](https://staffeng.com/))</comment>


This Beautiful Timeline Lets You Explore Wikipedia's World History - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/this-beautiful-timeline-lets-your-explore-wikipedias-wo-1735601693 <comment><USER2> Hm, this is amazing and could be extremely helpful as an educating tool.</comment>


Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s - <AUTHOR> https://fabiensanglard.net/discret11/index.html <comment><USER2> The system sounds similar to VideoCrypt. The French system delays lines. VideoCrypt worked by rotating each display line by a number derived from a PRNG. To decode the line the hardware had to buffer the line into a small piece of fast (for 1980s) RAM, and then using a number derived from the key would send the line to the TV starting at that offset and at the end wrapping around to the beginning.

I know all this because in my first job we did a bit of experimentation to see if it would be possible to reconstruct the encrypted images without the key, and in fact it was quite easy because images are very highly correlated from one line to the next, so you just had to rotate each line through each of the 256 combinations and compare it to the previous line, and pick the one with the least difference. Although our system was far too slow to decode a live feed (this would be early 90s), and had some other problems.

I didn't explain this very well - the Wikipedia page has a better explanation:

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

<comment><USER3> Ah I'm not sure there was fast (and cheap) enough RAM for that kinds of tricks in the 80's

Most likely they would use a delay line [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_delay_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_delay_line)

Regular PAL (and I guess SECAM) TVs used one of those

<comment><USER4> You also had Bucket-Brigade devices.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket- brigade_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket-brigade_device)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Growing up in Belgium in the 80s and 90s I also remember Canal Plus and their encryption scheme - and trying (rather fruitlessly) to watch through a movie regardless - but of course, without the sound, that was a fool's errand.

I always wondered how the decoding worked, and for its time, using the serial number of the equipment as part of this calculation was a good one.

Also brings to mind the stories in the US of DirecTV pirating and how they put a stop to scores of pirates on Black Sunday - [https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday- ha...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack/)

<comment><USER6> > to watch through a movie regardless

Ahem, yes, "movies".

<comment><USER7> Spice Channel "movies" for the US people.

<comment><USER6> Was Spice Channel a full porn dedicated one, or just a paid channel? C+ was just a monthly paid channel with a diverse TV schedule, not just porn. You got blockbuster movies years earlier than in the free TV channels. You could basically watch The Matrix just months after the release on the theaters.

<comment><USER7> It was 100% porn. HBO had blockbuster movies during the day and softcore porn at night.

Spice TV: [https://youtu.be/B89oftmlOuI](https://youtu.be/B89oftmlOuI)

<comment><USER8> So, not sure if you used to watch The Movie Channel, but Joe Bob Briggs has a show on Shudder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the last few years they've put a low-bitrate channel on digital television that simulates the encryption: [https://www.cpchardware.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Canal...](https://www.cpchardware.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Canal.png)

It's not the real channel obviously (with digital TV the encrypted channels are simply blacked out), but it's a nice throwback.

</comment><comment><USER10> France also having been SECAM might explain why russian retro-80's concerts[1][2] often feature "Emmanuelle" (1974, NSFW) K7s in their "do you remember" interludes?

[1] [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дискотека_80-х](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дискотека_80-х) seems to be the main one, but it has competitors.

[2] from the 90s, but if the instigators of the US PMRC had ever seen eurodance like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Rotic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Rotic) they'd have been clutching their pearls.

(the retro-encrypt screen's "pour en savoir+" mdr)

</comment><comment><USER11> In the Netherlands, I remember electronics stores carried DIY kits with names such as "TV signal quality enhancer". I only later realized what these were actually for.

<comment><USER12> I remember some weird little black box with a red button my parents had between the cable box and the wall coax. I wonder if that was it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> IIRC, aside maybe from some technical limitations, the reason it was not "proper" encryption where you can't make any sense of the signal is that it gave some idea of what was playing. The sound was completely scrambled but from the picture you could tell the program and tell if it was a football game, movie, talk show, etc.

I had that channel for a while and watching WWE with French commentary was a favorite when I was a kid :)

<comment><USER14> The "make sense of what could be" might have been a good way to make people tempted to subscribe actually: it was so frustrating to identify a program you could be interested in and not be able to fully see it.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, a weird kind of freemium model. I am assuming it wouldn't be hard to turn off the encryption for say an hour every once in a while and advertise a 'free viewing' every once in a while to get people to subscribe.

<comment><USER16> That's exactly what they did and where they got most of their customers from.

Those 'free viewing' ( _canal+ en clair_ ) probably had one of the biggest impact on french comedy TV culture ever. Some shows of that era are still on AFAIK.

<comment><USER17> > biggest impact on french comedy TV culture ever.

And french politics. French politics in the '90s and '00s wouldn't be the same without Les Guignols de l'Info.

<comment><USER6> We had Les Guinols in Spain too, in the same channel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fabien Sanglard's blog is a true gem of the Internet. An excellent tech historian, in my humble opinion.

If you're enjoying this, you might also enjoy Creatures Of Thought at [https://technicshistory.com/](https://technicshistory.com/). Their history of the transistor series was superb reading.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it was used in 90s in Poland by Canal+? At least when you tuned to the encrypted channel it looked exactly like it says in the article - every line was shifted randomly.

I know people bought cheap pirated decoders that decrypted the channel without the need to pay the subscruption fee.

It couldn't be the exact same system because we have PAL, but it was something very similar.

<comment><USER20> Polish Canal+ used "Syster" encryption scheme. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagravision#Analog_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagravision#Analog_system)

<comment><USER21> French transmitters were converted from Discret 11 to Nagravision/Syster between 1990 - 1995. First Syster decoders had retrocompatibility with Discret 11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Analog encryption schemes are infinitely interesting to revisit today. The ingenuity of these folks trying to create an unbreakable encryption scheme with limited resources of 80's and 90's never ceases to amaze me. BTW A piece of software exists that can generate images encoded in various ways, that are supposed to be compatible with original hardware: [http://cryptimage.vot.pl/cryptimage.php](http://cryptimage.vot.pl/cryptimage.php) I have yet to lay my hands on some decoder and try this out myself.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a lot of fun to be had _today_ with broken OTA encryption on video content, if you have the land area to put up a C-Band satellite dish.

[1]: [https://www.lyngsat.com/hd/america.html](https://www.lyngsat.com/hd/america.html)

[2]: [http://colibri.bplaced.net/powervu.htm](http://colibri.bplaced.net/powervu.htm)

<comment><USER8> So, what hardware is needed here, besides a C-band LNB?

<comment><USER23> A knock-off dreambox or a PCI dvb-s2 card is your best bet. Any cheapo DVB-S2 receiver will work, provided that you can get the raw MPEG-TS stream out of it and into a computer that can run oscam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how this would have worked in practice with lot of noise being added to signals. Is the noise too negligible to "delay" that is added?

<comment><USER25> The idea of the Radio Plans decoder is that the video black level was a little bit higher than the start of the signal after the horizontal pulse signal. Because of that, it was possible to detect if the delay was 0 1 or 2...

Canal Plus reacted quickly by adding a little bit of noise to the signal after the horizontal pulse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty fascinating. CAS and broadcast tech is a pretty big interest of mine and I've been lucky enough to work for 2 of the biggest players in this space in the past (although not directly on the CAS side of things and sadly I'm not in the video space these days).

Some very cool engineering was done without much in the way of technology being available!

</comment><comment><USER27> > The audio stream is interleaved at the end of the blocks.

If I remember correctly, audio was transmitted on a subcarrier some 6 or so MHz higher?

Edit: Later in the article it is actually stated: "A normal SECAM signal uses FM on a 6Mhz carrier"

<comment><USER21> French SECAM was broadcasted in « L » (heritage from black & white 819 lines « E »), with positive image modulation and audio transmitted in AM. ([https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norme_et_standard_de_t%C3%A9l%...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norme_et_standard_de_t%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision#S%C3%89CAM_:_S%C3%A9quentiel_couleur_%C3%A0_m%C3%A9moire))

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems like three or four channels must have prompted at least some people to experiment with TV DXing. I wonder if that was very much a thing at the time.</comment>


How to Sort a List in Python - <AUTHOR> https://ao.gl/how-to-sort-a-list-in-python/ <comment><USER2> Python has a sorting HOWTO at [https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html](https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html) . I was the original author, back in around 1998 or so. This new article covers a subset of that HOWTO.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the time complexity? O(n log n) most probably. And what actual sort does it use? Quick sort or merge sort or any other?

<comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort)

> In the worst case, Timsort takes O(n logn) comparisons to sort an array of n > elements. In the best case, which occurs when the input is already sorted, > it runs in linear time, meaning that it is an adaptive sorting algorithm.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What the largest NTP clock drift you have observed and Why? - Avi-D-coder <comment><AUTHOR> I think we've seen years in drift, if only momentarily. Reasons unknown. In distributed systems, you can't trust the system clock for ordering of events.

</comment><comment><USER2> Even if I did observe such displacement I can't imagine any way of knowing the reason behind it.</comment>


Geek's guide to hiring marketing people - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/11576/A-Geek-s-Guide-To-Hiring-Marketing-People.aspx

<comment><USER2> I would start the discussion with development of a marketing strategy or possible marketing strategies and bring in the points of the article in for discussion.</comment>


What are the benefits for changing titles already on the front-page? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed this with someones blog post and then a Slate article. Other than making people think its a new link, if its on the front-page, doesn't that mean it gained traction in its original form? <comment><USER2> > I noticed this with someones blog post and then a Slate article. Other than > making people think its a new link, if its on the front-page, doesn't that > mean it gained traction in its original form?

This outcome might mean that the article won recognition before someone (a moderator or the original submitter) noticed an error that merits correction.

For example, yesterday, someone posted an article about "Stephan Wolfram" that ended up on the front page. That's not the man's name, which means text-based search won't find the submission, which means it's lost to Google and posterity. To me, regardless of what score the submission has, such as error merits correction.

Also, some titles are correctly seen as linkbait, a term that means misleading or sensationalist titles meant to appeal more to emotion than intellect. Those also deserve correction.

If I saw an error in a submission I had made, I would correct it even if it was riding high on the front page. In fact, I would take that as a good reason to fix things.</comment>


Ask HN: Any Advise on Filing for an SBIR Grant? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to file for an SBIR grant, but I really have no idea what I am doing. If anyone done this before, I would appreciate any tips, pitfalls, or any advice you could give.
I also noticed this article: http://johnwhale.tumblr.com/post/137379311027/grants-aka-using-government-money-to-do-good
It makes it seem super easy, but upon some digging this seems like a massive mess for my teams startup. <comment><USER2> There are a ton of SBIR rules so you'll have to be prepared with your accounting system, timekeeping policies for employees and other legal contracting.

First, check your company's eligibility. If you're VC backed then I'm not sure your company is eligible for the SBIR program. I remember there being some proposed changes but I'm not sure they were made official or not regarding VC- funded small businesses. Also be aware that you are granting the government certain rights to the intellectual property that is generated under contract. You can still commercialize based on that IP, but the government has some rights to use of that software.

If you want a general overview of the program I think you can google for the "SBIR Coach" and he has some free online resources that give an overview of the program.

If you're planning to submit a proposal to an RFP, make sure to very carefully read all the instructions in the solicitation regarding formatting and everything.

Many government agencies participate in the SBIR program. Which agency are you considering submitting a proposal for?

Let me know if you have more specific questions. I worked in the SBIR industry for about 8 years.

<comment><USER3> Eligibility requirements - note the VC ownership issues vary depending on the granting agency - NIH, CDC and Dept of Energy allow majority VC owned small businesses to apply: [https://www.sbir.gov/faqs/eligibility- requirements](https://www.sbir.gov/faqs/eligibility-requirements)

In my opinion, the government "march-in" rights are not a significant business concern. Although technically the funding agency has the right the license your IP if you do not effectively commercialize it, in the real world this has never happened: [http://ipinspace.com/2012/04/11/patent-rights-and- obligation...](http://ipinspace.com/2012/04/11/patent-rights-and-obligations- under-sbir-grants-part-1-of-2/)

I agree that a maniacal focus on correct formatting is essential. My spouse had a grant bounced for a font that was 0.5 points too small.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any recommended finance materials for beginners? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Not sure what exactly you mean by 'beginner' and 'finance', but I tend to point people to [http://getrichslowly.org](http://getrichslowly.org) and [https://www.daveramsey.com](https://www.daveramsey.com). Dave Ramsey has links to several podcasts that are relevant, books, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Investopedia, StockTwits, r/Investing. Daily diet of WSJ, Bloomberg, CNBC. And Robert Shiller's Financial Markets course at Yale:

[https://oyc.yale.edu/economics/econ-252](https://oyc.yale.edu/economics/econ-252)</comment>


'There's no idle gossip in Braille' - <AUTHOR> https://splicer.com/2019/05/18/theres-no-idle-gossip-braille <comment><USER2> No mention of Braille so I was confused.

Looked it up. It's a quote from the Bauhaus song, "Small Talk Stinks".</comment>


You Are Not a Product - <AUTHOR> https://brave.com/ <comment><USER2> _" You are not a product. Why use a browser that treats you like one?"_

And that's why I use Firefox. At the end of the day, Brave is another for- profit browser: you are still the product, but with extra steps. I'd rather trust an open-source add-on to block ads and trackers than a web browser (much harder to make sure that it's doing what _you_ want).</comment>


Adafruit releases WebIDE alpha for Raspberry Pi, eases beginners into coding - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/05/adafruit-raspberry-pi-webide-alpha/

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to actual software: <http://learn.adafruit.com/webide></comment>


SurMD Hacker Challenge – Win $100,000 in Grand Prize - <AUTHOR>

Are you a security pro? If so, $100K is waiting for you.
As a secure cloud solutions provider, we are looking to work with skilled security practitioners and hackers such as you to continually improve security. Our engineering team claims that their final product can guarantee no data breaches. Now, we want to put this to a test. If you win this contest, you will get that $100K, or we will accept their claim and give them a bonus.
This event will be an offensive type of Security Hackathon wherein a participant (or a group of maximum 3 participants) will have to locate and decrypt a target document found in the server environment setup by SurMD. We will be providing you the login details for the administrative account. For more details on the structure of this Challenge, please read the section on 'How to Participate'.
Challenge our security standards as we design the next big thing in security together. If you are confident of your security skills, hacker skills, or math skills, or you are just interested, signup today at http://surmdhackerchallenge.eventbrite.com, as the stakes are high.
The winner gets to walk away with $100,000 in cash!
For more information, please visit http://surmdhackerchallenge.com <comment><USER2> While I applaud the idea of this, I think it is ultimately just a question of how much a linux zero day is worth (aka is it worth more than 100 grand). When the code base for everything on there server is going to be _huge_ (aka they use Linux and any common webserver), there is pretty much a gaurantee that there will be a vuln, the only question is if someone will drop a zero day for this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Question for security professionals:

How much would a freelancer or team of freelancers earn for this kind of job?</comment>


Teenager builds his own Lego prosthetic arms - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-08/lego-prosthetic-arm-made-by-man-missing-limb/10792598 <comment><USER2> > After graduating from university, he wants to create _affordable_ prosthetic > solutions for people who need them.

Builds them out of Lego.

Hmm.

But seriously, this is super cool. Prosthetics are usually ultra-expensive because they get the double whammy of being bespoke and medical devices. There's a real opportunity for the hacker community to do a lot of good here.

<comment><USER3> I've recently found that the price of Lego - at least on the used/second-hand market - has fallen, depending on what you are looking for.

Complete sets are still hella-expensive - especially vintage ones. Certain custom models can also be very expensive. Lego Mindstorms of the past two generations (NXT and EV3) are also still up there in price.

But bulk Mindstorms, Technic and Expert Builder are all still fairly cheap (just stay away from pneumatics - that stuff is still pricey for some reason).

I have found the Mindstorms RCX 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 (aka - yellow programmable brick) are all fairly cheap. The touch and light sensors aren't too expensive, and the going price for the PB is around $30.00 USD. Rotation sensors can be up there sometimes, and the temperature sensor is hard to find and expensive. Motors are cheap though (the 9 volt block ones) - most can be had for around $15.00 each.

Bulk parts are similarly low cost. Even the NXT and EV3 motors and sensors are fairly inexpensive (not as cheap as the older RCX, but not crazy). Since they use standard interfaces and connections, they can be easily controlled using a Raspberry Pi or Arduino. The RCX takes a bit more work (you have to use an h-bridge for each motor, and sensors require an ADC; easy on the Arduino, but you need something external for the Pi).

The various Mindstorms "Vision Command" and similar cameras are also fairly cheap; they aren't anything special - very low-res (352x488 IIRC) web cameras in a Lego enclosure. But you can get them to work with Linux (you have to preload the V4L1 library before executing a program like cheese or whatnot) - this used to not be the case (no driver existed about 8 or so years ago).

But yeah - if you're ok with hitting the second-hand market via Ebay or garage sales, you'll find it's now fairly cheap (again, staying away from things like the latest Mindstorms).

Oh! I also found that the Lego Dacta Control Lab (9751) interface can also be found cheaply - you can get 'em for $40-50 USD; they work with all the old 9V sensors and motors for the RCX. I've read that you can use a USB to DB9 serial port converter with them, and there is a ton of 3rd party libraries out there for control (I found ones in C, C#, Python, and Java).

<comment><USER4> ah vintage ones.. Ice Planet 2002 serie, one day I'll complete you ;)

but exactly, when you spent decent amount of time at websites like bricklink you can complete sets for a fairly lower price than usual.

It's always a good idea to check the local online market platforms as well.

<comment><USER5> 2002 isn't vintage. Now get off my lawn.

Edit: It isn't from 2002 its from 1993/94 [1], I'll buy some cookies, _then_ get off my lawn :)

[1] [https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Ice_Planet_2002](https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/Ice_Planet_2002)

<comment><USER6> 1993 isn't vintage... ok this could go on and on!

<comment><USER5> Reading around, vintage seems to be pinned at about 25 - 30 years, so it is on the cusp.

I'll get off your lawn now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love stories like this. Honestly, I can't think of a better prototypical example of the "hacker ethos" that this guy and what he built. Kudos and thanks for the inspiration!

<comment><USER8> You might find the Merkur construction set and its relation to contact lenses very interesting: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a video of one of his prosthetic arms in action [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrWckNLgshc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrWckNLgshc)

</comment><comment><USER10> > _In a presentation video on his YouTube channel that he runs under the > nickname Hand Solo, the Andorran said his aim was to show people nothing is > impossible and disability cannot stop them._

It annoyed me more than it should that they did not link to his channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSjwgNfrF5oTp1PdBrsptKA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSjwgNfrF5oTp1PdBrsptKA)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow that is incredible. Nicely done!

</comment><comment><USER12> If then uses his prosthetics to create better prosthetics, does qualify as singularity?

</comment><comment><USER13> OMG! Thanks for the story. It's so inspiring. We need such good news everyday

</comment><comment><USER14> that is really awesome. thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER15> I think when he actually go into production and jumps through all the regulatory hopes, it's probably not going to be that affordable any more.

<comment><USER6> It could be open source and even 3D printable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> how does one build arms without arms?

<comment><USER17> How does one comment without opening the article?

<comment><USER16> Forgot no humor allowed here</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has my IP been banned from HackerNews? - <AUTHOR>

I can't access HackerNews since last night. Any page I try to access gives me the error (502) message below:
"Yeah, that didn't work. Try again, perhaps later?
Web server is returning an unknown error
There is an unknown connection issue between CloudFlare and the origin web server. As a result, the web page can not be displayed."
followed by a Ray ID, my IP address and the CloudFare Location.
The only unusual activity I had before that was that I changed my password and that I am trying to code a script to get some data from my submissions and comments here. <comment><USER2> What's the Ray ID?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a different one each time. Some examples:

d07066ee93c0749 d07068829a60749 d0720374a2700de

<comment><USER2> I'll poke around and have a look to see why. The Ray ID will be different each time; it's a debugging feature that identifies the request when something goes wrong.

If this persists please contact support AT cloudflare DOT com so we can track it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Anyone Cloning the Raspberry Pi Zero? - <AUTHOR> Like so many people, I've had difficulty obtaining a Raspberry Pi Zero. (Got one finally, thanks, Pi Hut!) It's an open source design, right? Isn't it easier to do a hardware startup these days, especially with no R&D required? Why isn't someone making a killing by cloning the Zero? <comment><USER3> >> Why isn't someone making a killing by cloning the Zero? Because at $5 it's not profitable.

My company sells ~25-30% of the Raspberry Pis in Australia.

When we spoke to the manufacturer for our region they said they weren't looking at manufacturing the Pi Zero V1.3 due to the economics. Their inventory of the Pi Zero has also dried up (as they focused on the RPI 3 Model B). When they did sell the the Pi Zero they sold it as a kit with marked up micro HDMI and USB adaptors.

As @mmosta pointed out, the Raspberry Pi is heavily subsidised by sweetheart deals from their manufacturers and component vendors.

This is all ok: The point of the Pi is to make computing accessible at a low price, not to make money.

It will be interesting to see how the ecosystem as a whole plays out. It's hard to tell. I haven't seen an unsubsidised/non-VC company put out a "cheap" single board computer.

The Pi Zero's closest competition ([https://getchip.com/pages/chip](https://getchip.com/pages/chip)) has had a round and I suspect is getting a nice deal from All Winner too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for a fascinating and very informative reply. Answers so many questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It really boils down to the deal the foundation has with Broadcom, even if you could source the chip you would never be able to beat their unit price.

The "openness" is rather limited too, there are all manner of NDAs and minimal order quantities associated with the parts in the BOM, nor are the gerbers available. A real pain point for the bleeding-heart OSHW types.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well you just answered about 15 nagging questions I had. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think that Raspberry Pi is open source hardware at all - <USER2> schematics are public, the documentation is open, but I don't think the PCB designs are.

<comment><AUTHOR> D'oh! Without access to the PCB designs it would be completely asinine even to consider such a venture. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most businesses try to make a profit. In business, competing against a high volume very low margin incumbent is pretty much #1 on the list of things you should never ever do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Man, ain't that the truth. Any BOM I try to come up with doesn't get remotely close to the Pi Zero's list price, but I don't know Shenzhen well enough to understand if they could make it happen in quantities of, say, 10,000. But I'm not a hardware guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do you think that a hardware startup would do a better job of ramping up production than the Pi people do now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Where did I say that?</comment></comment>


European Commission Betrays Open Standards - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2957&blogid=14 <comment><USER2> This is not particularly surprising, the EU Council is unelected and undemocratic, and the Council appoints the members of the Commission.

There is still a chance to defeat this in Parliament I guess, since they're elected and (marginally) supposed to be somewhat responsible to the people who voted for them, instead of being beholden to corporate agendas.

<comment><USER3> Quite the contrary. It was the EU that slapped Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour related to interoperability and open standards.

I guess some folks who stuffed ISO NBs to pass OOXML found new occupation.

<comment><USER4> The funny thing here is that Neelie Kroes was the Commissioner for Competition and the one who slapped Microsoft. Guess what! She is now the Commissioner for Digital Agenda.

<comment><USER3> It's apparently time for an interview...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is 'open' such a dirty word in Brussels?

<comment><USER3> More interesting would be why has it become a dirty word.</comment></comment>


Tagging is broken - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kippt.com/2012/07/17/tags-are-here/

<comment><USER2> The point I was trying to make was that tagging is broken but tags are not dead. They just need to have a purpose. Making the user to catalog the content instead using search is not a valid purpose.

In many apps, the tags just seems to add up in a mess. You will more tags that you care of and in the end you're not sure what's the point. Are you tagging them for finding them later or just for fun?

In the end we gave in, but with hashtags, since they don't add any complexity if you don't use them. We still try to guide to people use them purposefully. I like how in twitter they're very subtle but can be a powerful way to guide the discussion.

If you want to find something, use search. Don't rely on tagging and trying to remember the tags you sued.

<comment><USER3> So the difference between tags and hashtags is that there isn't a separate textbox for adding tags, because hashtags are entered into the item description, right?

Sounds like a good way to simplify the UI, but I'm not sure how it would add any purpose that regular tagging is purported to lack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "We hate tagging. Here's tagging!"

But grabbing page content and using it as search engine fodder is very smart. All the bookmarking sites should have been doing that from day one.

<comment><USER5> oh, like we had the resources to do that in 2003 or whatever.

fwiw the significant tags that users used on pages were often not contained in the text of the page.

<comment><USER4> I was wondering about both things. Sorry for the implied criticism - what you built was obviously a very important turning point, and I was an avid user for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing with tagging, when it's done by users, is that it communicates personal meaning and the users' interpretations.

When it's done by search engines, the user's voice is lost.

Now, yes, tagging is annoying in many cases and so I'll grant that it's "broken" – but I'd claim that removing the user's voice from it is not the best solution.

Is there a way to look at what I've tagged manually, previously, or any other classifications I've placed on other content and suggest meaningful tags for new content, based at least in part on how I've tagged stuff in the past?

</comment><comment><USER7> Tagging is broken, so you just add a # in front of it and call it a hashtag. Genius!

<comment><USER8> This really confused me too. I still don't understand the innovation here, if there is any.

<comment><USER9> The innovation is getting HN and others to pay attention to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wholeheartedly agree with the premise, but not necessarily the solution.

I've been bookmarking crap for a very long time and even though I am extremely organized, I have ended up with a mess. One of these days I'm going to take the time to convert my bookmark export file into some format Google Refine can parse and clean things up. Synonyms, homonyms, singular and plural versions of the same tag, different conventions for handling multiword tags, etc. It's not pretty.

Searching is great. I have a tendency, however, to bookmark indirect sources. So a HN comment thread gets indexed instead of an article. Not always helpful.

Also searching isn't useful when you want to categorize things into some personal context (e.g. "Favorite Books" or "ReRead". I think the mentioned 'lists' solution might help here.

Not sure hashtags are necessary. Reddit users have been bitching for tags since day one and the devs never gave in. I think this was a good decision, sometimes people ask for things that wouldn't work well in practice.

</comment><comment><USER11> Kippt, please do not offer "Log in with X" and then require a username and email in the next page. I know you want my email address so you can frequently send me newsletters that I don't want, so if what you meant was "register with X" then write that instead.

<comment><USER2> We want to send you email when your friend or coworker invites you to a list, or when someone comments on the things you share.

You can unsubscribe from all the emails from your profile settings.

<comment><USER11> I've received 4 emails in the last month, none of them for those things. I don't care so much about the emails as I do the login buttons that aren't actually login buttons, they're registration step 1 buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am so, so tired of $x is broken. "$x is broken" is broken.

<comment><USER13> But today I learned that #$x is not broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The first thing I missed when I moved from my browser's built-in bookmark manager to Pinboard.in was the folder structure. With folders, I could easily browse the list of topics I've made folders for, and drag a new bookmark into one or another folder. Folders can also have subfolders, so if I bookmarked something about PostgreSQL optimization, I could tuck it under Databases/PostgreSQL/Performance and easily find it later. But of course, not every article fits cleanly under one category, so sooner or later I ended up having to decide which folder to drag my bookmark into.

Tags are a wonderful way to solve this problem, because every item can have multiple tags. Even while using the browser's bookmark manager, I began to rely more on tags and less on folders. When I moved all of my 6000+ bookmarks to Pinboard, I thought I'd forget completely about the folders and start using tags exclusively. But that didn't work out as well as I thought it would.

1\. You have to type tags manually. Pinboard has autocomplete, but I still need to remember the first few letters of the tag to find what I want. Yes, it also shows a tag cloud below the new bookmark window, but when you have thousands of bookmarks and hundreds of tags, discoverability just goes out the window. Moreover, what happens if you accidentally type PsotgreSQL instead of PostgreSQL?

2\. Tags are like global variables. The more tags you create, the more garbage you have in the global namespace. Combined with (1), this makes it even more difficult to find that obscure new database system that you bookmarked 6 months ago. Instead of going into the "Databases" folder and looking inside it, you have to browse the global namespace and try to remember the name of the tag. That's a much larger search space.

3\. I can't rearrange bookmarks unless I mess with their timestamps. When I research a topic and collect a few dozen articles on it, I usually decide which articles are the most authoritative or comprehensive and move them to the top of a folder. When I revisit the topic later, I can start with these articles and get up to speed quickly. This worked wonderfully with my browser's bookmark manager. With today's bookmarking services, everything is sorted by timestamp. Yes, Pinboard has a Star button, but it's not quite the same as having something appear at the top of a list.

I partially mitigated these problems by renaming all my tags to a Usenet-like namespace structure. So PostgreSQL becomes comp.db.pgsql and Ruby becomes comp.lang.ruby. Now it's a little bit easier for me to organize my bookmarks, but it's still a mess because all those tags still pollute the global namespace. It's like how PHP throws all functions into the global namespace with a copious amount of underscores in between words. This sucks. In addition, I can't go to comp.db to see all the bookmarks I added under comp.db.mysql, comp.db.pgsql, etc. because the system doesn't support any notion of a hierarchy among tags. I also still can't rearrange bookmarks within a tag, so often the most important articles on a topic end up at the bottom of the list. Finally, I need to type even more, because namespacing make my tags longer.

Do I want to go back to folders? Hell no. I've got too many items filed under multiple tags for folders to make sense anymore. But there is definitely room for improvement while keeping to the concept of tagging. I want:

\- A drag-and-drop interface for adding tags. This will drastically reduce the duplication caused by mistyping tags. With folders, you drag an item into a folder. With tags, you might want to drag tags into an item.

\- Tag namespacing. My ideal bookmark database would have at most a dozen "supertags" in the global namespace, and everything else would be filed under "subtags". Searching by a supertag would show all items filed under subtags, too. Other people might have different preferences, but nothing stops them from making all tags global anyway.

\- An option to sort tags by something other than the timestamp. Not everyone is interested in the latest articles from the last 15 minutes. I often revisit articles I bookmarked a year ago. A rating system would be great, for example, if accompanied by an option to sort by rating.

The author proposes search, lists, and hashtags. But search would only exacerbate the everything-is-in-the-global-namespace problem if you use it to find things that you yourself created. (It's great for things other people created.) Lists might not be very useful unless you could have sublists for different subgroups within a team, and hashtags are just as chaotic as plain old tags, only with an extra Shift+keystroke.

tl;dr: We might not want to organize everything in a neat hierarchy all the time, and we might not always want to do it ourselves. But the ability to impose _some_ hierarchy on your data is a good thing when you have more than a certain amount of data to juggle.

<comment><USER14> > Tag namespacing.

I think tags model all the information you want.

Perhaps there is UI problem.

Available tags can listed with number of tagged documents as an ordering criteria.

So then you click on databases. Interesting things to show are other tags for documents tagged with databases (subdirectories), and documents with only databases as a tag (members of this directory).

I think sub/super tags are not necessary.

<comment><USER3> > I think tags model all the information you want.

> other tags for documents tagged with databases (subdirectories), and > documents with only databases as a tag (members of this directory)

I don't like to tag my items "databases, mysql". I just want to tag them "mysql" and I want the system to know that MySQL is a type of database. Besides, there might be too much noise in the "other tags" list once you have a large number of tags. Just because I bookmarked an article about making TLS connections to MySQL doesn't mean that "tls" belongs to "mysql" just as much as "innodb" does.

Tags don't model all the information I want. Even if it does, I feel like there's a serious impedance mismatch between the tagging model and my mental model. MySQL is a database. Give me all the items that I tagged with (any database + rails) between 20120701 and 20120731. The mountain lion is a big cat. Give me all the items I've tagged with a big cat. Some things in the world naturally fit into categories like that. The world is not a flat namespace in my mental model. A good UI would help narrow the mental gap, but the gap will always be there.

To say that a one-dimensional tagging system can model all the information I want is like saying that a key-value store can model all the information I want. Just because I can stuff my data into it and make basic queries doesn't mean that it's the best way to organize my data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> the real funny thing is that tagging never really worked, yet it all comes down to the "roach motel" theory of life.

the del.icio.us API was all about take, take, take. they wanted your bookmarks but they weren't going to let you get anybody else's public bookmarks out. they built nothing interesting based on the bookmarks (except for tag-driven RSS feeds that were great for feeding phony content into a spam machine)

tags have always been about getting stuff in and not at all about getting it out.

In 2012 we've almost got text analysis tools that can autotag content with DBpedia and Freebase identifiers... almost.

<comment><USER5> actually, the API was about being enough so that someone could write a nice client for your bookmarks.

we did actually build a recommendation engine (fell down due to scale) and popular within tag feeds (that were quite good, but the d2 redesign broke them after I left.)

text analysis and feature extraction is very different than tagging.

<comment><USER16> Are there any examples of machine learning and tagging beingused together in an online bookmarking service?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dorian-graph Luckily, I had been using #tag on my Kippt bookmarks in lieu of them not having tags.

</comment><comment><USER17> The beauty of tags is that they can do all the things he lists; taxonomic description, lists, and ad-hoc grouping. It's up to the user, and they can be used all ways at once.

</comment><comment><USER14> Having the system create auto tags sounds good.

Recordings a strength to the association between an entity and a tag is useful.

This makes the lists created by tags ordered.

</comment><comment><USER18> I just use Google...</comment>


Software Katas - Practice in Public Makes Perfect 	 - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/11/code-kata-video <comment><USER2> I studied karate for several years and I've been a programmer for 10 and I never quite enjoyed the software kata concept. In martial arts, a kata is about micro optimizations as you attempt to match the unachievable idea of perfection of the form - they are the core of martial arts. You are trying to avoid mistakes, not find a solution. In programming, once a problem is solved then it stays solved - if I figure out how to parse a particular string, why should I continually clear and redo this work? Why not just put it behind a nice interface and spend my programming effort on something new? In martial arts I am trying to stay sharp and avoid errors where in programming I am just trying to solve a particular problem to get towards some greater goal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Consider this message a standing ovation.</comment>


Ask HN: How long did it take for your startup/side project to break even? - j-rom <comment><AUTHOR> Approximately 6 weeks for Bingo Card Creator (counting from launch and assuming my time is free). Appointment Reminder took longer -- off the top of my head, it was cash-flow positive after about 3 months and had paid back R&D costs (exclusive of my time) after maybe 6ish.

</comment><comment><USER2> The first few customers covered the ongoing costs (hosting, payment processing, etc), and I picked up the first few customers the day I launched. That can be said of my last few products. I'm not a big risk taker, I've never launched something where I didn't expect it to pay for itself pretty much immediately. The only real sunk cost up-front is my time.

<comment><USER3> So the only thing you didn't answer is the actual question, which was how much time it took you.

And "your time" counts when we discuss "how long"...

<comment><USER2> How do you figure that? I think I answered the question the same way every other person here did. The question was how long it took to break even on costs, not how long it took to develop. My time isn't a monetary cost.

<comment><USER4> Thank you. The arguments here that you need to calculate your time developing a side project at your market rate for clients or it "doesn't count" is ridiculous, and frankly kind of self-important.

A side project is something you _choose_ to do, and saying you're still in the red because of your time, even though it cost you $4k to get off the ground and it's given you $40k back is ludicrous.

<comment><USER5> There are also ways you can mitigate the risk to some extent.

If possible build something your existing business needs. That way if it doesn't take off as a product you still have something that meets a need you have.

Launch the smallest thing that solves a problem your prospective customers have. The smallest thing they will be willing to pay for, then iterate from there.

Our product was something we needed in our service business (a small CMS that didn't insert unwanted markup) and took us about 4 weekends to get to launch in terms of the product, and about the same for the infrastructure around it (documentation, sales site and so on). It was tiny compared to where it is now, but enough people wanted it to make it worth continuing development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see an awful lot of people dramatically under-valuing their own time in here. Anyone who's capable of building and launching a successful software system necessarily commands a pretty high rate.

I value my R&D cost based on what I used to make when I was coding for the man. Which was a lot.

So three years in, I haven't broken even on my real opportunity cost. Given my trajectory, I fully expect to. But it's not an overnight thing.

<comment><USER7> _So three years in, I haven 't broken even on my real opportunity cost. Given my trajectory, I fully expect to. But it's not an overnight thing._

Same here - approximately three years in. We aren't _far_ from "breakeven" in terms of actual dollars spent, because we don't actually spend much money right now. But in terms of return on founders time, we're way in the red right now.

But, we're in the B2B space, doing complex enterprise software that addresses challenging problems using cutting edge technology. You don't go from zero to thousands of customers overnight. TBH, we're only just now at a point where we have a real product (two products, really) that are ready to sell to the early adopter / earlyvangelist types. So now I get to go out and meet customers and see if I can retrain myself, on the fly, to be a sales-person.

So yeah, nobody expected this to be an overnight thing either. It's been a tough slog so far, but we think we're getting close to really turning a corner.

<comment><USER6> Your story sounds much like mine: using modern software to solve a complex problem for business customers.

One difference is that we've been out talking and selling from day one. Our first customer was willing to be an early adopter and was sold on the vision of what we could build for them. We couldn't have mastered the problem domain without having real users and data.

It's actually a good deal for both sides: the customer gets high-touch, custom-tailored software for relatively little money (because you're funding the development and you own the software). You get a proving ground and data. As long as you've identified a problem shared by other customers that you'll be able to sell again and again, it can be a big win.

It also helps that we've been out selling (at least regionally) for three years now. It adds to our legitimacy. People in the industry are getting to know us, and that has made them more willing to say yes.

And B2B sales cycles can be absurdly long. We have heard "sounds great, but I just finished making my budget for this year", and then eleven months later they're back with a signed contract.

<comment><USER7> Sounds good. We've been out "talking" but for most of the early years weren't "selling". But part of the reason for that is that what we're doing isn't _entirely_ novel. There's a known market for the general class of things we're doing, so we're not operating completely in the dark.

It doesn't help that we don't yet have a dedicated salesperson with selling experience. So I've been working to reinvent myself as a salesperson over the years, and I think part of it is that I'm only not starting to feel like I know what needs to be done to go out and sell this stuff.

That said, there are things I would certainly do differently if I could go back and do it again. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Immediately. The beauty of a service business! Not massively scalable, but we don't need investors and do $4M in profit (before-tax) between 2 partners. It took us ~6 months to hit this run-rate.

<comment><USER9> May I ask what kind of service business?

a. Web Consulting (Rails, iOS, Android)?

b. Cleaning / Laundry / etc?

c. Foodservice ?

d. Niche Software Consulting ?

e. Other ?

<comment><USER8> It's in an industry ancillary to web development.

<comment><USER10> Is it recruiting? You cited $10k minimum customer spend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My sideproject, fantasysp.com, cost basically nothing to start around 7 years ago. I found free baseball boxscore data online and bought the domain and ran it on hosting I already had. The main cost was my time involved to code everything.

"True" costs didn't arrive until I thought I actually had something worth investing in. Which meant I had to purchase boxscore data for the sports I couldn't find.

So to answer your question... ideally your project should cost very little to start with. Once you discover that you might be on to something, then slowly increment costs. Baby steps.

<comment><USER12> It's like they say, a one-handed hand-stand is just a half-cartwheel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It hasn't broken even yet, and I have no idea when it will. I've probably spent $10,000 over the past seven years on gear, classes, and consumable materials for it, but I'm finally starting to see some monetary return on my investment.

Of course, I'm talking about photography, which I do because I love it and not because I expect to make money at it. I'm ok with it being permanently in the red and have no intention of ever trying to make it my primary source of income, as that would suck all the fun out of it for me.

<comment><USER14> I think you echo my thoughts pretty well. I'm a photographer who probably has about £10,000 worth of equipment, and while I get paid every two-three weeks (Anywhere from £10-£150) it's something that I do because it is fun, not from any rational income-generating sense.

I've absolutely zero interest in trying to be full time, because as you say it would suddenly become non-fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perch CMS had paid back all costs (other than our time) 24 hours from launch.

It took almost 4 years for it to replace our entire income as a consultancy and for us to stop taking on client projects. Between launch and that point we were slowly scaling back the client work as the customer base for Perch grew.

</comment><comment><USER15> Bugrocket broke even during the beta period - about 3 months. CourseCraft isn't SaaS, more like a marketplace, so some months it makes a lot more (from transaction fees) than it costs and sometimes less, but overall/on average it is break even, launched in December 2013.

</comment><comment><USER16> It took us about year and a half, as a side project to breakeven at [http://startuplift.com](http://startuplift.com) \- That being said, we did pivot a couple of times and keep changing the product, offer and pricing. We started at the beginning of 2011 and it's not almost middle of 2014. I recently quit my job and investing myself full-time, and now I feel we are finally getting closer to our 'sweet spot'. Should've have quit a long time ago, when I started seeing some intitial interest.

</comment><comment><USER17> Day 1. We do 1-to-1 mentorship for web development helping our clients go from 0 to fully functioning Backbone/Angular/Rails/Node apps- designed for people who have time to learn on nights and weekends. Hosted free workshops and utilized our network to get clients. Now our pipeline is mostly from internal referrals from clients.

</comment><comment><USER18> My side project is a simple and fairly specialized electronic gadget. I don't pay myself a wage. I spent maybe a few months of sporadic evenings, and a few hundred dollars, to design and produce a half dozen prototypes that I gave away. My only hope had been to not lose my shirt. People who received those prototypes wrote favorable reviews on web forums -- a boon that I actually hadn't anticipated.

A possible milestone for break-even was when I was able to use the same PayPal account for booking sales and for all of my business expenses. That took roughly another few months, so maybe nine months all told.

My biggest cost is my time, even if I don't hang a number on it, because I've got a finite amount of it. I try to keep a running estimate of dollars profit per hour of work. To expand the business at this point, I have to let some older models slide into oblivion, and come up with something that can attract a higher price.

</comment><comment><USER19> 8 months brought no revenue at all with me facing bankrupcy living on rice and water. the 9th month things kicked off and I am doing about 12`000 euros a month. Hopefully this will grow now i have figured out which side is up. Medical Lead Gen

</comment><comment><USER20> Do you have a minimum size for side projects in mind? To take my smallest: I have a project that costs $2-3/month to host, and it made more than $3 in ads in its first month up, so it's always at least broken even. :-)

<comment> j-rom No, I don't really have a minimum size. I suppose I was thinking a little smaller since most of my projects I've done solo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We became profitable at [http://nutshell.com/](http://nutshell.com/) about 2.5 years after we launched. Building something as expansive as a CRM takes a lot of time. We made the decision to begin at the small end of the market (with pricing to match), and started with a lot of small customers as we scaled the product to bigger companies.

We also have higher expenses in terms of our support team (3 full-time) — there are higher expectations for sharp, fast support in an industry like CRM.

<comment><USER9> If you don't mind sharing, I'd love to know some more. According to what you've written plus your website: founded in 2010 (FOWD), so broke even sometime in 2013, and currently supporting 14ish people + is profitable. Kudos. That is really cool.

\- How many founders do you all have?

\- How did you get your initial set of (small) customers?

\- How are you all expanding to new customers (bigger customers): via advertising? word of mouth? initial customers increasing seats? other? salesmen ?

\- Why did you all pick CRM initially? (isn't it pretty crowded already: SugarCRM, ZOHO, Oracle, et al.). I'm genuinely curious as I don't know much about the market.

Thanks.

<comment><USER21> _> \- How many founders do you all have?_

There are four of us on the founding team — three of whom have some other obligations, and myself. I spend 90% of my day coding or working on product with our designer.

 _> \- How did you get your initial set of (small) customers?_

Primarily through Google Adwords. Initially we had an inside sales rep who worked hard to talk to every trial, even if it meant spending a few hours walking a 4-user shop into signing up.

We were also one of the early CRMs to be in the Google Apps Enterprise Marketplace (i.e. integration w/ Google Apps). We got some free front-and- center placement there, and this brought in a lot of customers. This was in summer 2011, and for a while it doubled our monthly trials.

 _> \- How are you all expanding to new customers (bigger customers): via advertising? word of mouth? initial customers increasing seats? other? salesmen ?_

We're definitely spiraling into more organic growth. We're also doubling down on some more marketing efforts like a booth and sponsorships at SXSW. The product has also matured quite a bit into a place where it's a genuine competitor with the lower end of the Salesforce market.

And we're doubling down on integrations with other services, which (in my mind) is the "partner / channel program" of the SaaS world.

But this is an area of interest to me, and one we've been talking about a lot. I'm interested to hear what others are doing in the heavy growth area.

 _> \- Why did you all pick CRM initially? (isn't it pretty crowded already: SugarCRM, ZOHO, Oracle, et al.). I'm genuinely curious as I don't know much about the market._

It was borne out of the sheer ineptitude of the market. Salesforce is ugly, expensive and nobody likes it. Sugar is an OSS clone of Salesforce. Zoho is trying to be Microsoft Exchange as well as CRM. </hyperbole>

We focused on bringing beautiful design and ease of use to CRM: something that a lot of smart people are doing to various components of business software (Freshbooks, MailChimp, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Never.

Well, in terms of money. But my side-projects that I wrote to make me more productive have been paying off since shortly after starting to write them. The most useful one for me is Phoenix[1]. Although that'll soon be useless to me when I switch to Linux after finally becoming a nerd[2].

[1]: [https://github.com/sdegutis/phoenix](https://github.com/sdegutis/phoenix)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450019)

</comment><comment><USER22> I put ads on [http://jsonblob.com](http://jsonblob.com) about a month ago and didn't really expect much, but have been pleasantly surprised! I should have put them on it when I launched it a little over a year ago...

In terms of breaking even, it's in the black if you don't consider the time I spent building it (and rebuilding it when Grails started falling over). It runs on a single Heroku dyno, so that's not casting me anything and uses the free tier of MongoHQ.

<comment><USER14> You seem to have an issue with javascript.

If somebody enters a string value with "<script>alert(3)</script>" that breaks it. For example:

[http://jsonblob.com/53303712e4b03569cc710b73](http://jsonblob.com/53303712e4b03569cc710b73)

<comment><USER22> Thanks! Fixed this - [https://github.com/tburch/jsonblob/commit/4f70b44910b98224bd...](https://github.com/tburch/jsonblob/commit/4f70b44910b98224bdb76f9264f77a662475951f)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I generally don't try to make money from side-projects, letting them cost money and just accept that the things I learn and other advantages are worth the cost.

<comment> j-rom I have a similar approach. But it doesn't hurt if you end up making some money out of it either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Almost at a level where my software consulting will be replaced by the fabrication, design and sales of hardware. The transition is painfully slow compared to web.

<comment><USER25> Quick tip: your email field isn't public in an HN profile, so your last "Hire me!" is hard to do, because no one can contact you outside of HN in an easy/obvious way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> About 18 months ... Did have a popular product (website) before incorporating, but had to choose and implement a business model on top of it.

<comment> j-rom What product is this, if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER26> A price comparison website. It used to be free for merchants and users alike and after incorporating we managed to establish a PPC model without losing but a few merchants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Day 1? Apps are great side projects.

If you consider my time...well.

</comment><comment><USER28> My three big projects (dbinbox.com, textbooksplease.com, and emailtipbot.com) cost almost nothing out of pocket to get off the ground sans about a week of my coding time, ~$8/month in server costs, and ~$10/year for the domain name.

Any money they've made gets immediately reinvested in advertising. One of these days I'm going to make enough to pay myself.

</comment><comment><USER29> I started development on rukus.io about a year ago. Over the past few months we've been starting to get decent sized contracts, with many more planned for this year. We've done a great job keeping our costs extremely low, so it only took a couple contracts to cover all of our out-of-pocket expenses.

<comment> j-rom Interesting product. How long did it take for clients to start approaching you as opposed to the other way around?

<comment><USER29> My brother has quite a few industry connections, so we had some great leads to start with. With that said, he's been relentless in seeking out new opportunities which has benefitted us greatly.

Since we no longer have scaling limitations, we don't have to temper our client conversations anymore, allowing us to take on much larger campaigns.

Many of our leads lately have been from new clients contacting us from word of mouth which is extremely exciting. So it's taken about a year since we started to get the potential clients contacting us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My project broke even after around 8 weeks and has done so since. We achieved this by using social media (without paying) in combination with a niche idea being displayed in said media.

<comment> j-rom Nice, what's your project, if you don't mind me asking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Still not breaking even after two years (full-time!). But I'm getting there, and it's an exciting space to be in (zenobase.com).

<comment> j-rom This is a pretty cool idea. I was considering making something like this (automate data retrieval and then analyze it) but I wasn't sure how to approach the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> 30 days. A manufacturing training and certification business.

</comment><comment><USER33> kitestring.io

Not quite breaking even, but the cost to run the service is tiny. Been operating for two months.</comment>