Ask HN: Should I quit the well paying job that I hate - <AUTHOR> I am working at a late stage startup with good compensation and the stock payout would be pretty good if it could exit. The problem is I find my job to be boring and unfulfilling. I don't think I learnt much over the past year. Now I am almost depressed after days after days' bug fixing (mostly) and some uninspiring tasks.
I need two more years for the stock to be fully vested. Now I am thinking if I should quit so at least I could find another startup at least I could have interesting work to do.
Would love to hear what you guys thought! Thanks! <comment><USER2> Check your options before quitting. Go to a few interviews. Tell friends you might be free for offers. Stop ignoring recruiters on linkedin. Make an educated decision between real options, not between a real option and a hypothetical option.

Fixing bugs is part of the job anywhere. Sure, starting something new is fun - but getting something to be scalable and reliable is just as challenging.

Can you improve your work conditions at your current job? Can you initiate new and exciting tasks? Can you identify problems your company is dealing with? can you come up with unique ways to solve them?

Be proactive with your career, or you'll always find yourself ending up depressed with the job. Early stage, late stage or corporate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does the position you're holding now prioritize a proper work/life balance? If so, the position might be a good investment of your daylight hours while you sharpen your technical talents (and others) at night.

My suggestion: if the position lets you and if it's sufficiently well compensated, hold that gig while you work on yourself and tackle personally fulfilling and challenging technical hobbies. Outside all of that, keep your CV etc. polished and keep a low level job hunt going just in case you come across something equally as rewarding on the compensation front as it is on the technical front.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could you provide a bit more information? The information is not really enough to give a properly founded advice. Some examples that show you what I mean:

\- Do you depend on the money for e.g. Mortgage and be 100% sure to keep the house?

\- Do you hate your job so much you get so depressed you don't get up in the morning or see friends?

\- Do you work in a large company where you can change jobs within the company?

\- Do you just hate your job because of the boring software tasks you currently have but if you switch want to work for a big company? (All big companies have these tasks sooner or later for a period of time).

\- etc.

More information on your current situation and type of company would help or else this becomes a large thread about people who like to take risks vs those who take less (or don't).

</comment><comment><USER5> The only real reason the answer should be "no" is if you'd go to jail if you couldn't make $X K /month. Life is too short to spend it hating your job.

But you may have a gap while you look for other jobs. Plan to fill that out. It will get stressful, you might have to lose your current residence.

Life might be a little bit more exciting quitting your job, but you'll have different problems to deal with. If you're adaptable, then why haven't you adapted already?

</comment><comment><USER6> > Now I am almost depressed after days after days' bug fixing (mostly) and > some uninspiring tasks.

How much are you working? Are you doing the normal startup hours?

The only time I've personally had a problem with this is when I'm working > 6hrs (real productivity) a day.

Maybe you can make some adjustments that will bring you back up to enjoyment levels?

If you feel comfortable, speak to your management? Maybe they can give you a task that is more challenging.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The problem is I find my job to be boring and unfulfilling. I don't think I > learnt much over the past year.

Changing companies & jobs is fairly easy. Relative to your problem-- exactly what kind of effort have you put into your personal/professional growth?

On this subject Marshall Goldsmith has some masterful advice > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInGemfSBZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInGemfSBZU)

</comment><comment><USER8> As long as you have an option when you leave (another job) I say go for it. People always think this sounds a bit...grim.. but you're going to die anyways. You should enjoy your life. Making sure you have a safety net is a good idea, but 2 years is a lot of your life. If you have the option, head out, get a job you enjoy, or at least enjoy the adventure.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did you have early exercise of your options? Otherwise you may consider the tax impact of leaving the company and having to exercise. Can you afford it? Does it matter to you?

</comment><comment><USER10> If you have free time outside of work, and you enjoy learning, I would suggest starting a side project in something that interests you. You can build a new skill, and you will have something that drives you.</comment>


Getting started with Django, Pipeline, and S3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iambob.me/the-super-stupid-idiots-guide-to-getting-started-with-django-pipeline-and-s3/

<comment><USER2> Note: there is a great Django template at [https://github.com/tommikaikkonen/django-twoscoops- heroku-s3...](https://github.com/tommikaikkonen/django-twoscoops-heroku-s3/) that will automate the creation and uploading of the s3 assets. It uses `collectstatic` to upload the static resources to be hosted from s3 (which seems to be the more typical way to do this). This template also uses heroku to host the dynamic portion of the app.

You can start your new project with the command (the hyphens break the line, but it should be executed with the settings in place): django-admin.py startproject --template=[https://github.com/tommikaikkonen/django-twoscoops- heroku-s3...](https://github.com/tommikaikkonen/django-twoscoops- heroku-s3/archive/develop.zip) \--extension=py,rst,dotfile,rb --name=Procfile,Gemfile,base.html,404.html PROJECT_NAME

Follow the rest of the README and/or buy the rest of the Two Scoops book ([http://twoscoopspress.org/](http://twoscoopspress.org/)) if you're using django for any sort of large project (and want a standard/sane project layout).

<comment><USER3> Author of that repo here, I'm glad you found it useful! I've used that template as a starting template for purely personal projects, so beware: it does not have the polish of a well-maintained django package. But it's been convenient for getting new projects running up quickly on Heroku and S3.

If you decide to use it, you might want to look at the development of the original Django Twoscoops Project ([https://github.com/twoscoops/django- twoscoops-project](https://github.com/twoscoops/django-twoscoops-project)) during the last year or so, as they haven't been pulled in to my repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hopefully the author will see this, but please make sure to add a note to add the settings.py to the .gitignore file. If your AWS creeds are committed to github anyone can have access to your AWS account

<comment><AUTHOR> fixing this now, thanks for note!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Flask anyone? :)

<comment><USER6> Give me a few minutes and I'll write something up. I actually just finished Flask to S3 on a project I'm working on. Next stop is PostgreSQL to store the url's.

EDIT: [https://gist.github.com/tsumnia/9986374](https://gist.github.com/tsumnia/9986374)

I still need to add proper logging to my application, but for now I print to the console if there is an error

<comment><USER5> Coolio. Instead of uploading to S3 through Flask you can make a direct upload [https://coderwall.com/p/56a9ja](https://coderwall.com/p/56a9ja)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for this! I'm actually using Heroku as well, so I might make the switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of "idiot" guides to ops/stack-setups, partially because it's interesting -- and helpful -- to see what authors' assume about the "idiot"...and it's a real art to write something that can appeal to such a wide-variance of non-expert.

That said, let me ask the first idiot-question: is this a precursor to a more complicated stack? Because what's the use-case for setting up Django with an asset-pipeline to S3? I mean, what is the _Django instance itself_ running on? (as I imagine setting up Django on EC@ is generally the harder thing to do)

<comment><USER8> Serving static files from nginx still has overhead on the server and also can be slower that s3. Also, you avoid a whole rake of problems with backups, running out of disk space, sharing static files among servers, etc, by storing files on S3.

<comment><USER7> Sure...but _why Django_? If I'm missing something, how do you generate the static pages from the Django app? I see that django-pipeline compiles and generates the _asset_ files, but what about `mydjangoapp.com/books/1`, `mydjangoapp.com/author/smith-jon` and so forth, i.e. the data-pages?

edit: I guess I'm assuming too much...the OP is assuming you have Django app already online and running, and this process moves over the asset files?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah absolutely right, I'm just using the pipeline for my static files (i.e. styles, images, js) not for data pages. One more caveat I forgot to put in the post but should be mentioned is the collectstatic command. If you have a huge collection of static assets, collectstatic is _painfully_ slow copying its files directly to the S3 bucket. In my case, I don't have a huge number of assets so it's not a big issue, but if anyone has any ideas for making collectstatic faster, I'd love to hear them

<comment><USER9> Checkout something like this.

[https://github.com/antonagestam/collectfast](https://github.com/antonagestam/collectfast)

The problem is collectstatic will use modified date. When sending to S3 this means the entire static pipeline is uploaded each time. Packages like collectfast use the hash to look for difference and only uploads those files. Works reasonably well. We have had a few issues along the way that we have had to work through but its a start.

<comment><AUTHOR> that looks awesome, definitely going to give it a try. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


SICP in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://sicpinclojure.com

<comment><USER2> This seems like one of the more appropriate translations of SICP. I'm looking forward to it.

By the way, if this is your site: your comments are already being spammed.</comment>


World domination by PayPal? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/maggieshiels/2010/08/world_domination_by_paypal.html <comment><USER2> I love when MSM rehashes and restates the obvious. What? Paypal wants to dominate the market they are in?! Shocker.

What will be be interesting is if one of the major payment processors lowers transaction costs in the micro-payment space precipitating a race to the bottom situation.</comment>


Statistician Nate Silver – Serious Jibber-Jabber with Conan O'Brien - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU64QMpFGVw <comment><AUTHOR> Some of you may not know, but Conan is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard and a massive history buff.

It's a little hard to tell from his show, but he's seriously intelligent and these long-form interviews are where I think he shines. Highly recommend watching as many as you can.

</comment><comment><USER2> That was really interesting.

I notice it was filmed after the 2012 election. It's fun to think about what questions he might've asked if the interview were held today....</comment>


Anonymous Consultant Rate Survey - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScW9PSUIy2oyFOGxv6m-ngapmVOnGQRfBP1x0LyFmCpJOvK0A/viewform?usp=sf_link <comment><USER2> How does someone know if it's truly anonymous, and will you post the results?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's 100% anonymous - you can use incognito mode to access the form. :)

I'll most certainly post the results and at the end of the survey, you can see the results too. I'll post the results in a week and share a link.

<comment><USER2> Just noticed I could see other responses when I submitted, so that was a nice preview.</comment></comment></comment>


New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail - <AUTHOR> http://www.gereports.com/post/107344100845/body-of-knowledge-new-machine-can-see-bones <comment><USER2> I'm on the design team for this product.

In the CT "super premium" market, the major players focused on different specs and tried to convince hospitals that the future of CT was in this direction (volume/slices/coverage, temporal resolution/cardiac, dose, new imaging/spectral, spatial resolution). Revolution CT is GE's attempt to deliver something that unifies on these goals and they hope to sweep this high end market.

<comment><USER3> "they hope to sweep this high end market"

How long before something like this ends up in the Gp's office?

<comment><USER4> When said GP has a few million to spend on stuff like this. And when they're no longer needed to send 80% of people home because they have the sniffles and need a doctor to tell them it's just a cold instead of ebola. (Because that's what GP's do in a lot of cases - deal with people who think they've got something worth going to a doctor for).

<comment><USER5> Yeah, my mom (who is a doctor) was just complaining about this, when she just started out she was a GP in pediatrics and said that 95% of cases were the common cold + over reacting parent, it made it much more difficult to find the interesting cases (read: actually sick kids who needed real treatment), she now works in ICUs and ERs and loves every minute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sort of thing is so exciting. I was at the Hunterian ([https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/hunterian](https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/hunterian)) last year and it's incredible to see how barbaric fixing (or trying to fix) someone was - and how far it's come in 100 years. Which I hope is much the same as our descendants will be thinking about medicine and surgery now.

</comment><comment><USER7> That looks very impressive. However, I ask how effective this machine actually is on a medical level. Do these scans provide an advantage over traditional CT scans in that they collect more information? Are they more accurate?

The reason I ask this is because I as a layperson am of course very impressed by the colored, realistic-looking, detailed textured scans -- but will this actually make a difference for a medical/clinical purpose? Will this enable doctors to make better decisions/assessments?

I suspect it will, so I'm very pleased with this innovation. I also note that it might provide more fodder for medical image recognition programs. This tool, combined with good computer vision and analytics, could be very powerful indeed.

<comment><USER8> The article is a little light on detail. However I see a cardiologist every couple of years due to a strong family history of isochaemic heart disease. He's been putting off more invasive scans since nothing in my medical presentation suggests I actually have a problem, but he said that this sort of scan where they'll be able to look for blockages on moving arteries will be a game changer for cardiac diagnosis - it's the very fast scanning on moving tissue that will be the big improvement. It's not clear whether this new machine actually provides that from the article, but he was expecting it to be developed and in use within the next couple of years.

<comment><USER2> Revolution indeed provides superior temporal resolution over its predecessor.

Though arguably Siemens dual-tube, dual-detector design provides yet better still temporal resolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is absolutely beautiful and makes me believe I'm living in the future.

<comment><USER10> Yep. I've often fantasized about a day when imaging and scanning tech is at the point where you can obtain a high resolution, three dimensional scan of a person's body and then apply software analysis that can detect all sorts of potential issues.

Sure, I basically described Star Trek or any number of sci-fi med bays but when comparing the sorts of internal imaging we could do 50 years ago to what can be done today, it makes me wonder what might be possible 50 years from now. Definitely just daydreaming on my part but seeing things like modern medical imaging always makes me think of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Correct me if I'm wrong, but this just looks like a modern CT scan. Impressive, of course, but definitely not a revolution. These machines have been steadily improving for thirty years.

<comment><USER12> The novel aspect is the very rapid exposure time at high resolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Medical imaging is a really interesting field.

Place I do a lot of work with are working on new imaging systems to map human organs like the heart.

While back featured by the BBC here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27536599](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27536599)

I only do web stuff but I love chatting to them about their systems when i can

</comment><comment><USER14> This is actually quite impressive!

I wonder how much time it takes to scan one person?

If these were made and distributed to enough hospitals adn scan is fast/cheap enough, I'm guessing you could make things quite more efficient/accurate

<comment><USER15> CT scan time is ~0.2-0.5 seconds for a 160mm slice, so a whole body can probably be scanned fairly quickly. However, CT scanning is only done for the body parts of interest, to keep radiation exposure low.

Most fascinating here is the ability to capture a beating heart!

<comment><USER16> It's also computationally intensive to reconstruct all the x-ray images into a 3D model. I worked for a company that wrote software to speed this up with GPGPUs. Standard software packages took on the order of hours for one scan, while parallelism brought it down to 10s of minutes - this was just to transform the x-ray data into voxels. Not sure how long the post-processing to identify & highlight organs would take.

It doesn't matter so much for humans, though. The main market for the above- mentioned software product was research labs imaging hundreds of lab rats.

<comment><USER17> The pretty pictures in the article can be rendered in real time using GPUs. Unless the pictures here use techniques that I haven't heard about, it is done by treating the voxels as a semi-transparent cloud of different-colored materials and using a fragment/pixel shader to simulate rays of light projected through this volume. It's pretty straightforward; the volume data is stored in a 3D texture and each ray of light is simulated using one "pixel" of the fragment shader.

This is enhanced by assigning more weight to the voxels that are in a boundary region between tissues of different density (you see this effect in the pictures of lungs, kidneys etc; the organ is transparent but the edges are visible) and applying a shading model to these boundary regions to improve perception of their spatial orientation.

Different organs can be pre-selected by marking their constituent voxels, and different models/colors/shading applied to each organ. This process can also sometimes be automated, if you have the luxury of a table that correlates voxel intensity (x-ray absorption value) with tissue type (bone, muscle, air, etc).

<comment><USER18> I thought even to get voxels you first have to "solve sudoku"?

You have sum of all the voxels "opacity" along rays from many directions and you want to know each voxel opacity.

<comment><USER16> It's much, much simpler than that. You just project a ray from the X-ray point source through the center of a voxel onto the detector, interpolate the X-ray energy detected, and add that energy to the sum in that voxel. Repeat for each voxel and each x-Ray taken (CT scans take a bunch of x-Rays going around in a circle), remove some noise, and boom you've voxelled the data. Fundamentally you're just summing the energy that passes through each point in space. It's trivially parallelizeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thes 3d scans are very pretty when visualized in an oculus rift: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWGBRsV9omw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWGBRsV9omw)

</comment><comment><USER20> Any sense of cost? I'd love to have my insides available for me to see.

<comment><USER2> In the US I think that they may be by prescription-only? Maybe not, worth a call to your local outpatient diagnostic imaging center. Don't call a hospital, they'll charge you too much.

I'd guess you could get one from any-old-CT-scanner for something like $500 to $1000? Someone who just bought this Revolution scanner will probably charge much more. Apparently some people get charged upwards of 10k USD [1]!

But honestly if you just want images of your guts you'd be fine with any old CT.

Once you have the 2d axial images, you can probably find open source software that will do the 3d projection.

1 - [http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/07/that- ct-...](http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/07/that-ct-scan- costs-how-much/index.htm)

<comment><USER20> Maybe Uber should get behind this. Click a button and have a Revolution scanner show up outside your house.

<comment><USER2> Believe it or not, there is a mobile CT! It's on a semi truck, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Those pictures are mighty impressive, but made me feel ill very quickly.

<comment><USER22> Made me think of all the things that can go wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> tumblr is blocked where I work, here's an imgur link of the image in question [http://imgur.com/9XZgzGv](http://imgur.com/9XZgzGv)

<comment><USER24> "tumblr is blocked where I work"

You need a new job ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How is this different from modern MRI?

</comment><comment><USER26> What's with the fake colors?

later edit: dear downvoters, you only get gray levels from a CT and those pretty colors assigned after what I assume is automated segmentation don't improve the diagnosis. I'd guess that any segmentation errors make the visualization more difficult.

<comment><USER27> The colours provide contrast. It makes it much easier for a doctor to find the parts they are interested in as quickly as possible. Not to mention the fact that doctors aren't always interested in the tiniest imperfections and may be looking for large changes.

When you have things segemented out and coloured, it is also much easier to view the object, be it an organ, blood vessel, etc. in 3 dimensions, which is something that is very useful.

Admittedly, they can get in the way sometimes, but that's why it is an optional feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail"

I call it a big knife. (b'dom ksh)

<comment><USER28> "Humor is such a subjective thing, don't you think, Mollari?" \-- Emperor Cartagia, Babylon 5.</comment></comment>


Making a pencil from scratch (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com/2013/05/making-pencil.html <comment><USER2> Making a small-diameter pencil is hard, although you could probably make a big one, like a lumber pencil, by hand if you had a potter's tools.[1] The first step is mixing and grinding graphite and clay into a water-based paste. You could do that with a mortar and pestle if you had to. Then you have to dry out the paste, grind again, and add more water to make a soft paste.

Then the hard step - extruding the paste into a rod. For a big-diameter "lead", you might be able to get away with rolling the paste into a rod by hand on a board, like working with dough. The rod then has to be dried and fired, like pottery. All this is a lot of work, but you'd make a batch of them at a time.

The wood casing could be made by whittling, in two halves. Cut a notch for the "lead". Then glue, which probably has to be made by boiling down hide scraps or pine tar. Some early pencils were wrapped with leather thongs.[2]

If you've made it to pottery, which most civilizations got early, you can get to a pencil.

[1] [http://www.generalpencil.com/how-a-pencil-is- made.html](http://www.generalpencil.com/how-a-pencil-is-made.html) [2] [http://museumofeverydaylife.org/exhibitions- collections/curr...](http://museumofeverydaylife.org/exhibitions- collections/current-exhibitions/visual-history-of-the-pencil)

<comment><USER3> > if you had a potter's tools

I think the article assumes that "from scratch" means that you have to make those, too (including the kiln), and including all the tools you need to mine the graphite.

<comment><USER4> Well that's the whole point of the exercise. To show how even creating a simple thing like a pencil requires vast amounts of knowledge and expertise that cannot be acquired by a single individual.

The way I like to frame this is by telling people to imagine they are strapped on an island with no clothes or tools. Let's assume there is fresh water and access to food (some fruits here and there and a decent amount of animals to hunt). Even if you have good knowledge about how our current world and economy works it would still be really challenging to create/build anything that has even a small degree of complexity.

Let's say you believe using some metal would help you build some useful tools and you want to start mining for metal. How would you to it with your bare hands? You need tools for that, but what tools can you build with your bare hands? Even cutting down a tree to make something out of it would be really challenging. What would you use, a rock? Imagine cutting a tree using a rock. With no tools it's almost impossible to do anything.

But this is the story of humanity, we started naked and without tools, and also with no knowledge about the world, we didn't know that we can make fire, nor how we could use it, we didn't know what to eat and what not to eat. We didn't know why we get sick or what a diseases is. We didn't know where we come from nor where we are heading and yet somehow, afters many years we now build rockets that go to space, algorithms that know what we want before we do, surgeries that make the blind see, devices that make the deaf hear and so much more. These humans are truly amazing.

<comment><USER5> This guy's YouTube channel [0] features videos of him making stone tools, cutting down a tree, digging up clay, making a kiln, roof tiles and huts; all from scratch. His videos are a great watch, and even with heavy editing it's pretty clear how difficult it all must be.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE)

<comment><USER6> This guy is amazing and his videos are well worth your time! There's something peculiarly, primaly satisfying about them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance". My favorite passage mentions Henry David Thoreau, who was a pencil maker by trade.

        Thoreau seemed to think of everything when he made a list of essential
        supplies for a twelve-day excursion into the Maine woods...
        But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that
        he most certainly carried himself... without it he could not make
        his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods.

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734155/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734155/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Also reminded me `how to make a chicken sandwich in 6 months` [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URvWSsAgtJE)

</comment><comment><USER9> While Leonard Read's essay was reasonably well known among Chicago School economists, the concepts it described were made more famous by Milton Friedman's Pencil Allegory from the 1980s PBS series "Free to Choose": [http://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8](http://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8)

You can read a critical article on the back story to Friedman and Read's writings on pencils here: [http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/milton-friedmans- pencil/](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/milton-friedmans-pencil/)

</comment><comment><USER10> So it seems like he didn't actually succeed in making the pencil from scratch, or if he did, he didn't blog about it. He did successfully make it to mining the graphite, which is more widely distributed than I would have thought: [http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.ar/2013/05/finding-graphi...](http://gse- compliance.blogspot.com.ar/2013/05/finding-graphite.html)

Other related projects include:

Thomas Thwaites making a toaster from scratch: [http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster- project/](http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/)

That guy who made a ceramic-tile-roofed house with underfloor heating from scratch just posted about adding a kiln and firing more pots: [https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/55/](https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/55/) This one is _really_ "from scratch"; he starts the project (in a previous video) by making stone tools from rocks he found onsite.

kd5bjo points out, "Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop!" They build a machine shop starting from scrap metal, starting with a charcoal foundry for casting aluminum and pot metal; there's now a US$75 hardbound edition of what was originally a seven-book series. [http://gingerybooks.com/index.html](http://gingerybooks.com/index.html)

Jeri Ellsworth demonstrating how to make integrated circuits at home: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM)

The Global Village Construction Set is working on a set of 50 machine designs capable of reproducing themselves: [http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...](http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set)

Of course we all know about the RepRap project that spawned the current proliferation of 3-D printer companies.

Project Oberon is one of a few different projects that has a whole self- hosting toolchain including CPU architecture, compiler, networking, GUI, filesystem, and applications in a form comprehensible by a single person; it's free software: [https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.h...](https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html)

<comment><USER11> Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is a later post from him on producing the graphite: [http://gse- compliance.blogspot.se/2013/05/finding-graphite.h...](http://gse- compliance.blogspot.se/2013/05/finding-graphite.html) Also quite fascinating.

</comment><comment> adam-a This is reminiscent of The Toaster Project[0] a really interesting book written by an art student as he attempts to build a toaster from scratch. Including visiting disused mines and making a plastic mould out of a tree trunk.

[0] - [http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm](http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm)

</comment><comment><USER13> I actually think that it could be a business building American made high quality pencils selling 10-20X the normal selling price.

When I was a kid our family had a friend whom you couldn't know for ten minutes and he would show you his NASA pen that could write upside down. Apparently they're still selling them:

[https://jet.com/product/detail/94fb28fc091a45ccbd2aee90942ce...](https://jet.com/product/detail/94fb28fc091a45ccbd2aee90942ce9a0?jcmp=pla:ggl:office_supplies_a3:office_instruments_writing_drawing_instruments_pens_pencils_a3_other:na:na:na:na:na:2&code=PLA15&k_clickid=56a5acca-0ef1-4b58-b4a1-b17d800f2365&gclid=CL7tgpWtrckCFUSPHwodkzUOJw)

The key would be superior marketing, having celebs or astronauts using your pencils. Look at what Shinola has done with watches, in fact Detroit would probably be the best place to start your pencil factory.

<comment><USER14> I'd be pretty surprised if you could make that sell. At least a pen _can_ theoretically be an expensive construction that you're proud to own. A pencil is inherently disposable; they are destroyed as you use them. A pen just needs to be refilled.

<comment><USER15> > _At least a pen can theoretically be an expensive construction that you 're > proud to own. A pencil is inherently disposable; they are destroyed as you > use them. A pen just needs to be refilled._

I was inclined to agree with you but then I reminded myself that pretty much everything around me, cheap or expensive, is designed on purpose to be disposable - to wear down quickly and be replaced with a new purchase. XXI century is an era of throwaway wealth. I can totally imagine someone selling very expensive pencils.

<comment><USER16> > XXI century is an era of throwaway wealth

Some might say this started with the Dixie cup or disposable diapers, but the _personal_ benefits vastly outweigh the "throwaway wealth" that was exchanged for them. As long as externalities can be dealt with, let people throw away their wealth so that someone can have a job and eventually throw away his or her wealth!

<comment><USER15> > _As long as externalities can be dealt with_

Yes, that's sort of the 100 meters tall elephant in the room. You know what's the one thing market economy absolutely sucks at dealing with? Externalities.

<comment><USER16> It's the worst, except for all the others. Capitalists aren't anarchists and they don't revolt when taxed. We all want the best government money can buy, and we want the benefits of the market economy. It's a trade off, so we get externalities.

<comment><USER17> > they don't revolt when taxed.

I hear an incredible amount of screaming from capitalists when it comes to taxes.

<comment><USER16> That's not revolt. I would imagine it's a pretty universal feeling when you work for something and are forced to give X percent of it to someone else. Chris Rock has a pretty good rant on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Did he ever publish the complete description of his method?

</comment><comment><USER19> This process he is describing seems incredibly different from our everyday work, but it's really the same core of learning anything.

Usually, you start with a top-level entrance (records for musicians, games for programmers, translations for language learners). Then, step by step, you go backwards in time.

That album was composed of songs. These songs are composed of harmonies and melodies. Harmonies are composed of chords and voicings. ... on and on until you're dissecting the very sound waves themselves.

This beautiful curiosity that exists in every deep learning experience is what sets apart the hobbyists from the geniuses.

</comment><comment><USER8> The novel "The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity"[1] from Russell Roberts contains the tale of surprising difficulty of production of the pencil and how it is the result of division of labor and free market's natural orchestration.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Everything-Possibility- Prosp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Everything-Possibility- Prosperity/dp/0691143358)

</comment><comment><USER20> This would be nicely accompanied by a photo-journal...

<comment><USER21> ... but it'd take him another lifetime to make the camera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> but what about inventing the universe first ? ([http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32952-if-you-wish-to-make- an...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32952-if-you-wish-to-make-an-apple-pie- from-scratch))

<comment><USER23> Universes are trivial to invent you just need literally nothing and an unternity of nontime; they make themselves.

<comment><USER24> Hard to generalize from a sample size of one (about which we don't even know that much).

<comment><USER25> In fact, it's really easy to generalize like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought this was going to be about the MIT educational programming language.

</comment><comment><USER27> OMG!</comment>


How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://thehftguy.com/2016/10/24/heres-how-to-make-a-good-github-project-for-your-resume/ <comment><USER2> I definitely make this mistake. I have a handfull of maintained projects, but nearing 100 repos, most without readmes, many are just random ideas

The last time I interviewed the technical interviewer actually had me go over my openEtG project, & dive into the guts of the AI's eval. They also stumbled upon [https://github.com/serprex/brainwebfuckassembly](https://github.com/serprex/brainwebfuckassembly) which ended up having a profanity filled interview

They started to explain the code challenge that would follow if I was invited to a 2nd tech interview before realizing I'd already done it: [https://github.com/serprex/backend-coding- challenge](https://github.com/serprex/backend-coding-challenge)

I fixed their github pages page (previously wouldn't load stats & projects) [https://github.com/coveo/coveo.github.io/pull/3](https://github.com/coveo/coveo.github.io/pull/3) but that didn't come up

I didn't get past the first tech interview. Admittedly I'm terrible in interviews: bring up feeling I have a weakness with mathematics, don't have a prepared answer for "what is clean code", when asked about "code patterns" I start rambling about how data structures are essentially a pattern

<comment><USER3> My difficulty with interviews is, I'm a fairly good programmer. But when asked to put these kinds of things into words, that's just not how my mind works. I see the patterns in abstract ways, and I know which ones to use when. And I can write clean code pretty well. And if presented with a concrete problem to solve, I can communicate effectively on how to solve it. But during interviews, or any kind of abstract discussion about "code in general" (whatever that means), I fumble and stumble and can't put my thoughts into words no matter what.

<comment><USER4> I often see an inverse correlation between being able to "talk about code" and actually producing good code.

That is not only between persons: I can get myself into a talker's mindset in a couple of days just by reading, drawing diagrams and generally doing anything that increases self confidence.

My actual coding abilities drop in the process because the ability to see abstract graphical patterns decreases.

On my best coding days I'm barely able to utter a coherent sentence at the end of the day.

<comment><USER5> I think there's a correlation between being able to explain something and fully understanding it. Being able to think clearly and communicate clearly are interconnected -- if you're programming by instinct then you're not thinking critically about the problems you're solving.

<comment><USER6> And how can you get better at it?

<comment><USER7> Writing. When you engage in writing out your thoughts you quickly realize that you may not have as coherent or clear explanation as it may feel to you. You end up doing some research and thinking about how to express it. At the very worst, you come away with a better way to express one specific thing. Even just trying to provide quality explanations to comments on Reddit is a good practice.

That won't always help when it comes to verbally expressing things on the fly. If you can't practice with someone, you can try recording yourself trying to explain a topic on the fly, and playing it back. It's best to have a partner. Attending technical Meetups is another venue where you work this mental muscle.

<comment><USER8> I agree. Writing helps. Murakami thinks so too! Have you read What I talk about when i talk about running? It might be interesting for swes. He writes about how writing helps him refine thought and relates this to training in running. Great book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Nobody cares about your code"

That's a peculiar claim about people who hire employees to create code.

"It's not the code that counts, it's the product"

So is everyone only hiring programmers who write code which can be sloppy and full of technical debt and impossible maintain, as long as the product works okay for now?

<comment><USER10> Yeah. Code _is_ the product.

It's like saying, "we don't sell ingredients, we sell meals".

<comment><USER11> ...which is true. Restaurants sell meals, not ingredients. Chefs don't give you ingredients to eat, they craft the base ingredients into something worth selling, preferably with a good experience.

I get your point, but that analogy has backfired on your point. I'd rather cook something that tastes really good using whatever ingredients are around and then improve the ingredients (among other things) later on.

<comment><USER10> The meal is made up of the ingredients. You can't make a good meal from spoiled meat.

Restaurants sell meals. Because of that, they have to pay attention to their ingredients. At least to make sure they won't make anyone sick. And, if they are making a premium product, they need high quality ingredients to make a high quality product.

You can't just replace the fresh mozzarella with Kraft singles and still sell pizzas for a premium price.

<comment><USER12> Fast food begs to differ: you can make some pretty tasty stuff with terrible _terrible_ ingredients.

It's tasty alright... Just don't expect to wake up feeling great the next morning.

<comment><USER13> That's true, _but_ fast food ingredients are not substandard ordinary ingredients.

Fast food ingredients are highly tuned and customized products -- they're just not optimized for traditional notions of quality or nutrition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's my solution: [http://maxleiter.com](http://maxleiter.com)

Also have the same repos on my pinned repositories on github. On the site, for the projects I contribute to, I mention the majority of what I actually worked on and provide links to the PRs. Also, the "contributor" badges lead to a Github search of my name on the project.

<comment><USER15> Fantastic profile for someone still in high school!

One unsolicited suggestion: You can fetch the number of stars of each repo to showcase the their significance, recruiters are more attracted to quantified numbers.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. I was thinking about that but really enjoy not requiring JavaScript, however maybe its worth it. I'll try it out

<comment><USER15> Actually you can write a Node.js script that fetches and generates the static html to display the repo stars, so the website itself won't load any JS. You just need to run the script once in a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you expect the people reviewing it to be developers:

1) Tell me how to run it locally (docker is a good idea, if relevant) and where the code's entry point is.

2) Don't use a framework. I don't want to spend time figuring out which of the 20+ code files here have actual code you wrote and which are auto-generated or boilerplate. I'd much rather see something simple but well-written using the language's standard library and a couple well-selected imports than a Twitter clone in Rails or Django or whatever. I certainly don't want a tiny little todo app in a big-ass framework. I won't get upset over it and write you off as a candidate or anything, but you're not gaining many points.

3) You want people to actually engage with what you wrote, spend time on it, and want to talk about it? Don't write a todo app or any of that crap at all. Write a simple game. Put "game" in the title so it shows up in the URL.

<comment><USER17> I failed a interview for a job I'd like to have gotten by trying to impress the reviewers with more handrolled stuff and nothing bloated. I asked and the folks who passed just used Rails. My submission was alternately perceived as underwhelming and trying too hard.

<comment><USER18> Sounds like you dodged a bullet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This doesn't make any sense, as an interviewer I will definitely read your code on Github. It's a great way to get a sense of how someone writes code without having to ask for a time consuming assignment.

If you have a popular open source library on your github thats a huge plus. It shows that you've mastered quite a few different skills. From documentation, to promotion, ease of use, testing, accepting contributions, review etc.

But even if it's just a 1 star repo, it at least gives an overview of your code quality and style.

PS. we're hiring [https://angel.co/stream/jobs](https://angel.co/stream/jobs)

</comment><comment><USER20> As an engineer hiring engineers, if a candidate gives me a guthub url then I'm going to take a look. There are too many people coming through the door who are marginal coders, so if I can get a sense of what they do for something other than a white board problem then that's a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a quite "complete" github ( [https://github.com/franciscop/](https://github.com/franciscop/) ) and still totally agree with this article. Githubs profiles/repos are not for resumes. They are for many other reasons, but if that's your main reason it shows.

On the other hand some employers might find you straight from your github or some of the projects you have made. I was also contacted as one of the "top devs" (whatever that means) of CSS and JS in my country according to [http://git-awards.com/](http://git-awards.com/).

<comment><USER22> You authored Picnic CSS? I've used it and I loved it.

Not sure why someone with a similar repo, high quality with lots of stars, would not include it in their resume.

<comment><USER21> Yes, I am the author, thanks! If you have any public site please let me know.

What I mean is that there has been a larger (apparent) impact directly from my project(s) than from the fact that they are in my resume ( [https://francisco.io/resume](https://francisco.io/resume) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Conclusion: Noone cares about GitHub. Noone is gonna read it. Everyone is > gonna ask for it nonetheless, cause it's hype.

True. We don't ask for GitHub links because they are pointless from a screening perspective. I'm happy to talk about them during an interview, but if I see a github link in a CV, there's little chance I will visit it. (Source: I'm a hiring manager at a tech company, have been in a similar position at previous jobs for several years).

The fact is, as a hiring manager, I would have no time at all to do anything if I start looking at all my candidates' github links. I would be more than happy to look at a portfolio showing _products_ built by them, if they look interesting, I can ask technical details during the interview.

<comment><USER24> >I would have no time at all to do anything if I start looking at all my candidates' github links.

How do you decide to get the candidate in the pipeline? Presumably you're reading a CV and a letter, then having a phone call, etc. You don't think it would add context and clarity if you took 20 minutes from those activities and devoted them to examining a specimen?

Do you do whiteboard interviews? I've never done one less than an hour, and I think you'd be able to glean quite a bit of the same information by looking through the log.

Do you do homework? Who examines it? Could you not get similar perspective from looking at contributions on GitHub?

>I would be more than happy to look at a portfolio showing products built by them

To me, a candidate that has full-blown products out there is fast-tracked.

<comment><USER23> > You don't think it would add context and clarity if you took 20 minutes from > those activities and devoted them to examining a specimen?

Sure. If I had to go through only a few CVs, maybe. And some times I do that for the ones our recruiters screen. But tbh, looking at github/source code and figuring out something (of value) out of it will be more than 20 min. Instead, maybe a blog post or products portfolios would be way more useful and give me something to ask for details on an actual interview.

> Do you do whiteboard interviews? I've never done one less than an hour, and > I think you'd be able to glean quite a bit of the same information by > looking through the log.

We do, and let me say that `git log` will absolutely not tell you the same info. One is the final version of a thought process (the log). On an interview, at least for me, the result is only one part of what I'm after. How you get there is way more interesting to me, the questions you ask, etc.

<comment><USER24> >Instead, maybe a blog post or products portfolios would be way more useful

Of course. That's why the author advocates for linking to a specific repo with a readme.

>We do, and let me say that `git log` will absolutely not tell you the same info >How you get there is way more interesting to me

I get a lot of value from the revision history. To me, that is how you get there. When I see something, and I say, "I wish it was more like..." and a few commits later it is, I know we jibe. Likewise, if it's good, and it's something really novel and clean and clever and I never would have thought of it, that's just gold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For the last two or three contract jobs I have got, including my current one, _just the fact I had a working github repos_ was enough to impress the hiring guys.

In all three cases, I eventually trained everyone how to use git, so there is that as well.

<comment><USER26> > just the fact I had a working github repos was enough to impress the hiring > guys.

as opposed to a non-working repo? do you mean the code in it "worked" or just that you had repos up?

ANECDOTE TIME: I knew of a guy who was hired because his github profile page showed a lot of stars. It didn't dawn on them until after he was hired that those are things that _he_ starred, not stars received for his projects. He had "a lot of repos". Cursory inspection showed all but 2 (of the 40+) were forked. He was a horrible hire, and left after a few months, but the dept manager who'd hired him (against input from some of the team) got uber- defensive about any criticism (this person was in way over their head from a tech and management standpoint) and... multiple people (surprisingly, anyone who'd made any criticism of the 'mr github stars' profile) ended up getting 'reduced' (laid off) a couple months later.

</comment></comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Are you sure about not linking directly to github? There is now the PIN functionality which you can use to highlight up to 8 projects, even those where you contributed but not directly own

</comment><comment><USER27> Amusingly, my most recent job interview - which ain't even for a programming job per se - did involve one of the interviewers having gone through my GitHub profile. We only briefly discussed the contents thereof (he seemed to be mildly interested in my involvement in an Elixir web framework), though we did have a bit of an awkward moment when he mentioned finding github.com/yellowapple/heroku-sucks (especially seeing as how the company uses Heroku for its website).

All in all, it was pleasantly surprising to see an interviewer actually do one's homework to the same level that I typically do mine.

</comment><comment><USER28> > There is one project structure to rule them all. There MUST be separate > directories for source, test, libraries, compiled binaries, etc…

I don't think so. Look at the Git sources ([https://github.com/git/git](https://github.com/git/git)). Most of the C source files are in the top directory.

Some other people like to write unit test in the same directories as the source files, by adding a `.test` suffix to each source file name.

Some other people like to embed unit tests in source files, "à la" Rust.

There is no One True rule. Not organizing things the way you do is not necessarily bad.

</comment><comment><USER29> What about NDAs and in-house projects?

I have contributed to many projects in the past years that are not publicly available, not even as a product/service because they are, for example, DevOps tools or improvements to servers or a development/management/sale process. My GitHub account is mostly personal projects and nothing — except for a couple of them — are used in production. It is very difficult to show your value as an active contributor to open-source projects if your contributions cannot be public.

<comment><USER30> I think even more people will be affected by IP clauses in their work contracts which state that any work they do even outside on their own time is the property of the company they work for. many cannot do any open source work at all. Some need to get explicit and lengthy approval from HR, managers etc.

in short, most in companies cannot easily build up a personal github profile.

<comment><USER31> The marketplace is too scattered to understand, seeing as its common knowledge that most devs can't fizzbuzz on command, and also everyone knows all interviews are piles of buzzwords surrounded by infinite whiteboard algo discussions.

Given that disorder in the marketplace, you might be worried they're asking for an entire tech startup, but they might be happy with little more than a personal fizzbuzz hello-world analogy. If your employer were jerks enough to demand ownership of your fizzbuzz-alike, you could write another in a day or two.

Something more like a weekly homework assignment from school, and less like a PHD thesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The first piece of advice doesn't make sense to me. You can easily tell from going to the root of my GitHub what projects I'm most proud of: [https://github.com/misingnoglic](https://github.com/misingnoglic)

I will say I'm inclined to agree that probably no recruiters have ever actually looked at my GitHub for more than 10 seconds though.

<comment><USER10> I've looked through GitHub code before, but it's hard to weight it too much since not everyone can even have significant open source code in the first place.

That being said, a particularly impressive project or a history of contribution is a huge plus to me. It's a great way to add some credibility to your claims of technical interest. Everyone says they're in to big data or ML, but actually showing some (even throwaway) work in that area lets me know you are active in your interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Often when I see candidates' github accounts they are mostly forked repos with no changes and projects with rails scaffolding. There might be something there but it's really hard to dig through and find. I would suggest candidates build their own projects using documented pull requests and point the hiring manager to the closed PR page of their project. Or even better, point them to a substantial PR they completed on someone else's open source project.

<comment><USER34> Are you just looking at the master branch on their forks? If you want to send a PR to another repo, you _must_ fork that repo.

I have 43 repos, but 21 of them are forks. I've never committed anything on master on any of the forks, but I've created my own branches in order to open PRs on 18 of them.

The easiest thing to do is use the "Sources" option from the drop down on their repos page (shows only _their_ repos) and use something like [https://showmyprs.com/](https://showmyprs.com/) to see their external contributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The last part is definitely not true at all. I skipped the coding part of the interview process for my current job because I had good code on GitHub. Also got job offers out of the blue because I contributed to multiple projects. I feel there are companies looking at only GitHub (for a good reason IMO) nowadays for candidates.

<comment><USER36> I got my current job just with GitHub. I was asked to only show my GitHub profile. I didn't need resume at all. Some companies might not care about your GitHub, but they are always some that do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you apply for a job, someone _might_ actually read your code! But most people, especially your users, don't care if the program is written in C, "brainfuck" or Java, they just want something that works and is easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER38> What about personal websites, portfolios etc? Do recruiters simply ignore these too?

<comment><USER39> I've sent my portfolio to recruiters as part of an introduction and had them call a few times. I write maybe 4 sentences about how I think I fit the job they posted, then a portfolio link and a phone number. I'm very early in the job search and those conversations haven't gone anywhere, but at least I know they look at the page and it's what they talk about when they call. But I have only a small amount of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Nobody cares about your code" piece of advice doesn't make sense to me. There are people who cares about your code, I had projects in GitHub I'm really proud of

<comment><USER41> In general, I would look at it like this ... Your coding style is your opinion and how you understand a program works. Until, I am required to understand it or until you grab my attention, I or anyone won't care. It is nutting personal but time constraints and also, we (developers) are the only ones who care about code quality. If product needs to be built fast then code quality is placed in the backlog.</comment></comment>


Visual Docker-compose.yml file generator - <AUTHOR> https://nuxx.io/2kdWM69Tjk <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this. I created a simple, relatively complete example of a project [https://nuxx.io/2kdWM69Tjk](https://nuxx.io/2kdWM69Tjk) to get a better view.

My original idea was to let users define their application stack visually, and then actually deploy it to my cluster or into their own cloud provider like DO or AWS. Then with application code changes they would just run a CLI command like "nuxx push" git style to roll out app updates. But I had problems connecting this technically in my head, between the visual UI and the CLI. Like, which comes first. Or does this become a completely different product.</comment>


Ask HN: How did AirBnB solve the marketplace problem? - <AUTHOR>

Jason Cohen recently wrote "Solving the 'marketplace' business model" http://blog.asmartbear.com/marketplace-business-model.html<p>How did AirBnB do it? <comment><USER2> <http://vimeo.com/10119028>

Here's the story from the founders themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice interview - at around the 16:30 mark for those interested.</comment>


What to chooce? Bitdefender free or Avast free? - <AUTHOR> Please help to chOose a software for my PC. Bitdefender free or Avast free? <comment><USER2> I think it is not so diffcult to ask it Google?

There are many answers about that:

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comments/8qkeyg/bitdefend...](https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comments/8qkeyg/bitdefender_vs_avast_free_editions/)

\- [https://reviewedbypro.com/free-antivirus-2018-bitdefender- an...](https://reviewedbypro.com/free-antivirus-2018-bitdefender-antivirus- free-edition-vs-avast-free-antivirus/)

I hope it will help :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Neither. Use windows built in protection (Windows Defender Antivirus.) I switched over a few years ago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Meitene24,

Thanks for the answer. I am not that good in PC, so I like more personal answers.</comment>


Samson and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/samson-and-javascript-3ff39a4f836d <comment><USER2> > Just look at the many open source JS libraries out in the wild–how many of > them use prototype objects well? If they use OOP, it's usually class-based, > and it's pretty ugly, too.

Worth mentioning some that do use prototype objects, such as Closure Library [https://github.com/google/closure-library](https://github.com/google/closure- library)</comment>


No anti-virus software? No Internet connection - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/no-anti-virus-software-no-internet-connection/story-e6frfro0-1225882656490

<comment><USER2> Anti-virus software is not going to fix the problem when the users are the problem, mandating it will just annoy more advanced users who find anti-virus slow and unnecessary. Australia really needs to back off their internet regulation ideas, they're terrible.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that is a poor idea (and Australia has been full of those for years now) but the concept of restricting access if your PC is compromised isn't awful and would have to be worth discussing further.

<comment><USER4> It's probably good for the AV-software manufacturers though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or has the Australian govt gone a bit nuts with respect to the Internet in the last year or so? Every other week it seems I see a new story like this.

<comment><USER6> Very much so. Glad to be heading back home (from Australia) in 2 weeks.

Porn is a very serious issue out here. In addition, I cannot stand paying for bandwith (switching from "unlimited" internet to pay for what you use has been an issue).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Workarounds will be easy to find and the market for "antivirus shells", programs that _pretend_ to be antiviruses, will actually help spread viruses.

</comment><comment><USER8> there are already some universities in the states and canada that require its users to have anti-virus software installed before they can use the campus wireless network. i'm not sure how they handle mac users.

<comment><USER9> At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Macs get on the network without any checking. So if you spoof your useragent you can bypass the check.

<comment><USER10> If someone knows how to spoof a useragent, they probably don't need virus protection anyways.

<comment><USER11> Yes but the underlying problem here is the your non-technical person on a Mac _does_ need some sort of education or anti-virus. It's further building onto the illusions that Mac OS is invulnerable to viruses and spyware.

<comment><USER12> _your non-technical person on a Mac does need some sort of education or anti- virus_

Education yes, antivirus no. There are roughly zero active Mac viruses; the real threat is phishing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As far as I know I have never been infected and I've been running Windows without antivirus for the last five years.

<comment><USER14> Be careful with "as far as I know" -- since you haven't been running any virus detection software, you could well be infected. Of course, the risk of undetected infection for technically advanced users doesn't go down when antivirus software is installed, as advanced users know how to avoid the common or visible viruses.

<comment><USER13> Right. Well, the other thing is I have seen no evidence of it outside of my computer. It seems like if I was infected with anything significantly dangerous I'd have had my identity stolen by now. Of course, it could happen tomorrow, but it doesn't seem likely.

<comment><USER14> I don't disagree with you, and for what it's worth, I don't run antivirus software either unless I notice suspicious disk or network activity. Since I don't run untrusted binaries, use Adblock, Flashblock, and Firefox, keep my computer up to date, and avoid visiting unknown or potentially-risky web sites, I never have any problems. My point was that antivirus "believers" may not believe you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, if I have a toaster with internet connection I'll have to install an anti- virus on it? <http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/></comment>


IPhone App to Sidestep AT&T - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/109173/iphone-app-to-sidestep-att

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how to interpret the rather strange reviews for this at the App Store, but the "2 lines, 1 phone" official tagline, while making me chuckle, does not inspire confidence.</comment>


JustHearIt.com - Music from anywhere on the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.justhearit.com

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. I'm normally not a fan of entirely flash-based websites, but since they need it here in order to play the music, I can certainly understand.

I've been using lala.com for streaming music recently- They have a model which more emulates iTunes on the web, for $1/album.

I'll be interested in learning more about their Membership once it goes live, which allows you to create a media library- That's what I like about lala.com currently.

I think their business model could certainly work, but it's going to be a tough sell- Let's say they charge a $6/month subscription for membership - Assuming a 1 cent fee per play (per [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/27/the- sorry-state-of-musi...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/27/the-sorry-state- of-music-startups/)) Unless I listen to over an hour of tracks, every single day, they're ahead.

If they can target people who only listen once in a while, they might do well.. The problem is, those people are unlikely to sign up for a web-service specifically to play music.

I see on the site that they're going to offer Advertising, but the click through rates have to be pretty abysmal.. If I'm listening to a playlist, I'll likely not be paying close attention.

This works in traditional radio, but advertisers have been hesitant to pay high rates without clickthrough online.

I'll love to watch and see how things turn out!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not my startup, but this site looks pretty slick and wondering if anyone here is involved with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different from seeqpod, which filed for chapter last week...

<comment><USER3> nevermind. they pay to license the music. Serves me right for commenting before reading the About page...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So it's like grooveshark?

<comment><USER5> Well, sort of. The difference is that, at least on my box, Grooveshark actually works (as in music plays).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where did alllll of these come from in the past couple of months... I love them all but Grooveshark, Mixturtle, Justhearit, whats going on here?</comment>


Interview with the author of React-like Inferno about JavaScript optimisations - <AUTHOR> http://survivejs.com/blog/inferno-interview/ <comment><USER2> I've spent a lot of time optimizing the startup time of large React codebases. In my experience the size of the React bundle is irrelevant; it will be quickly dwarfed by the product code for any meaningful application. The real problems in startup speed are twofold:

Browsers are stuck optimizing an outdated model - parsing and compiling JavaScript on the critical path is madness. The only benefit of that model is that a web developer can right click and view source to see some unreadable minified JavaScript code. The cost is that every web user has to wait hundreds or milliseconds or multiple seconds for the browser to do busy work. Even advancements like Service Workers don't do anything to mitigate this problem.

The second problem is that browser vendors are locked in a arms race chasing artificial metrics. This started years ago when the Chrome team introduced V8 with a huge PR push to sell the benefits of their JIT. It looks awesome to say that your browser tops SunSpider but those metrics don't necessarily correlate to how sites use JavaScript. Firefox has a heavily optimized JIT that kicks in when a function is run 1,000 times. When loading Facebook the hottest codepath is run 900 times.

<comment><USER3> Note: I'm the author of Inferno

I commonly hear the same thing – you've benchmarked React and it performs fine. Did you benchmark this on a modern MacBook/laptop by any chance?

The realism is that the desktop market is only 15% of the entire global online market. In developing nations, Android mobile performance is essential. React, Angular, Ember and other libraries have never performed well in this space.

If you're shipping a huge bundle for your app – you're doing something wrong too. You need to take into account that mobile users are likely to have a 3G connection at best and are likely to be on a 5+ year old device. You need to endorse code-splitting, service workers and other PWA features to better accommodate those users. Inferno will deliver the best in class mobile performance when paired with those features.

<comment><USER4> Please, please, write more, and more details!

To much web developers have that "works on my (fastest possible) desktop or notebook" attitude, and every developer that understands and talks about what's actually going on by most of the users (those using the slower devices) is worth gold.

<comment><USER3> The interview actually talks quite a bit about how I went about making these changes. Worth fully reading!

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I've read it, what I'd like to see is more of the stuff addressed to other developers, exactly like in your response above.

You understand the issues because you personally compared, measured, whereas most of the developers just consider something as "working" if they personally "don't wait" too much for the stuff they are producing. That's why I wanted to motivate you to consider talking about your experiences that more developers can directly use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sadly, this article has nothing to do with an inferno OS port to js.

[http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/](http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/)

<comment><USER6> Agreed and similarly disappointed. Can we please change the title to point out that this is specific to ReactJS?

<comment><USER3> This has nothing to do with React. This is a JavaScript library called Inferno – the title makes sense to people in the JavaScript scene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You'll have to excuse my ignorance as I just like to lightly follow the JS web dev community and am no way a JS expert, but what is the reasoning behind the React spin-offs? There's Inferno, Preact, ivi, and possibly more, but are all of these so different that they require their own repository? Is it out of the question to simply contribute to the other existing open source projects? I imagine there are some backwards compatible breaking changes but it feels a bit weird to have so many React-like spinoffs. Could anyone shed a light on this? I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER3> Note: I'm the author of Inferno and know the authors of Preact and Ivi well.

That's a great question and one I frequently get asked. The "current" React codebase is legacy in many ways, the React team are hard at work on React Fiber which is complete re-write of the entire codebase.

The legacy codebase isn't something we can actively make better (I've had my PRs merged though) without a huge rewrite. If we tried to make changes, it would break React for many people due to how coupled many things are.

A lot has changed in the last few years and the approach to virtual DOM has been one of them. Going forward, the React team are making big efforts to change this.

<comment><USER8> I haven't kept up with React like I should. When you say they're undergoing a re-write, is this going to be like Angular 1 vs Angular 2? I just took a quick look at their react fiber demo page [0], is it going to be opinionated react as redux based? That's the vibe I'm getting from this.

[0] [http://reactbits.github.io/fiber/](http://reactbits.github.io/fiber/)

<comment><USER3> Unlike Angular 1 -> Angular 2, React Fiber will be fully backwards compatible with the current React.

<comment><USER9> I probably wouldn't claim 100% compatibility but we're already passing ~95% of the tests, and intend to fix more. There will likely be a few minor differences but we also have 20 thousand components that need to "just work" so we're striving for as much compat as possible, and any changes would be very contained.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I misunderstood the title and was very confused as to why Dan Brown would have things to say about Javascript perf.

</comment><comment><USER11> React's event system is one of its strong points. Like with many alternatives, I stopped looking into them when i read "no event system" in the README. Perf is not the single most high priority in a framework.

<comment><USER3> Inferno also has its own event system like React does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love it. When it comes to PCs I am a speed junkie. Maybe because the first thing I started to learn as a kid was 3D graphics dev.

Anyway most websites are incredibly slow and clunky. With 20+ scripts and everything pops up or moves while loading.

On the speed of pure JS. I recently developed a JS game just for fun. Optimizing in a language with GC sucks.

</comment><comment><USER13> the big motivation for small size seems to be shaving the time spent on parsing the js. Is there any reason this can't be parceled off to a background worker, and using the main thread only for rendering?

</comment><comment><USER14> Pro tip: function calls (especially anonymous ones) are the biggest performance bottleneck. I've done pretty extensive research on this: [http://youtu.be/BEqH-oZ4UXI](http://youtu.be/BEqH-oZ4UXI) .

<comment><USER15> So I watched that and heard that you used BenchmarkJS which I believe intentionally prevents optimization from occurring, otherwise many tests would just end up being optimized away. Have you considered how function inlining might affect your results versus benchmarks like you ran in the video? Have you profiled them side by side under actual usage?

"Anonymous" function calls (function expressions, either immediate or not) are generally only more expensive because they're re-created all the time. Sometimes this is necessary to create a closure, often it's not. If you were to profile `var foo = function() {}`, performance should match the function declaration variant identically, so it's not the method of declaration that affects performance.

<comment><USER14> That is something I have been suspecting of BenchmarkJS, which is unfortunate because I am/wasn't expecting to be responsible for building a better benchmarking tool (we are already building a database and a distributed testing framework).

FireFox does inline, and we can tell even with BenchmarkJS, which is why I think V8 wasn't (although it has improved significantly recently).

We ran an "actual use" test that saved 100M+ records a day for $10 total (on about 100GB+, processing, storage, backup). However since it is an "actual use" we don't know if inlining happened or not (I still suspect not, since I haven't seen that in V8 - but again, maybe that is BenchmarkJS killing it, despite seeing it in FF).

Correct correct. The function call is still expensive (anonymous or not), and managing scope is extremely expensive. You are on top of this stuff! Sounds like you do performance testing regularly?

<comment><USER15> I do, but it's also easy to sound smart when you're standing on the shoulders of very smart people. @jdalton and @petkaantonov are two that I've regularly followed and read their code for learning purposes. IRHydra by @mraleph is a great tool for learning about V8 internals and examining what's going on under the hood. Bluebird is an amazing example to follow if you _really_ want to optimize, however the vast majority of libraries and apps don't need to concern themselves with some of the crazier optimizations that are performed there.

The biggest takeaways that I've had are mainly that if you really want to optimize, then write the kind of code that the various engines can optimize best. With that in mind, TypeScript is not only a great language, it's actually a great performance tool since it can help you to identify polymorphic functions that _maybe_ could be changed to monomorphic ones if they're in the hot path.

I've got another fun hacky kind of optimization for you though that I've mainly used for benefit in some angular code/expressions that are executed potentially millions of times. If you can make some assumptions about the name of the property being accessed for security reasons and it's going to be repeatedly used, compare the following:

// Setup

const makeGetter = (prop) => new Function("obj", "return obj." \+ prop");

const slowGetter = (obj, prop) => obj[prop];

const fastGetter = makeGetter("foo");

const obj = { foo: "bar" };

// Test

slowGetter(obj, 'foo');

fastGetter(obj);

This is primarily an optimization for Internet Explorer, but if I recall it was somewhat positive in other browsers at the time as well. It makes more sense if you consider it in the context of executing a simple angular expression repeatedly, though 1.6.0 might narrow that gap significantly now that the expressions sandbox was removed as I think they generate code similar to my "makeGetter" factory. Haven't re-tested yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


For a German Chef, Hospital Food Is the Ultimate Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/world/europe/germany-chef-hospital-food.html <comment><USER2> Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a challenge that few kitchens seem to master. The spectrum is surprisingly wide. Some fail utterly while others produce decent fare on a comparable scale and budget. Hospital food and university cafeterias in Germany are pretty comparable in that each have similar budgets per person.

The worst offender that I encountered was a kitchen that only had a very limited set of standard dishes and they still predictable failed to prepare them in exactly the same way each time. Some meals were charred black when they were supposed to be lightly fried, the pizzas had an inedible crust hard as concrete, and so on. And that went on for years...

I also wonder how long the increase in quality in Havelhöhe can last before some beancounter sweeps in and turns the system on its head again based on some pretext. I hope that this never happens, but reality has a way of throwing a wrench into the works every time.

<comment><USER3> > Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a > challenge that few kitchens seem to master.

the part that confuses me here is the "on a budget part". i attended two very different schools for undergrad, but the meal plan pricing and food quality was very similar. when divided by the total number of swipes, meal plans at both schools cost about $11-13 per meal. the food was not inedible, but it was far worse than an $11 meal would be pretty much anywhere else. both schools offered a la carte cafes run or chains that would take cash and charge about half that for a filling meal that was much tastier (and was able to accommodate pretty much any allergy or dietary restriction).

the universities will always say something like it costs extra to be make enough food to feed everyone without knowing who will dine there on a given day, but don't all restaurants face that problem to an extent? is there some genuine reason why it has to be so expensive/bad, or are they all just taking advantage of the mandatory freshman meal plan to subsidize other parts of operation?

<comment><USER4> The extra cost may be due to labor if the university is unionized.

The college cafeteria has to deal with, at least, the intention or pretense of making something nutritious, but also that people will actually eat. K-12 school lunch programs face this problem too: Kids won't eat healthy food.

But yes, even when I was in college 30 years ago, some students figured out that paying cash at the cafeteria was cheaper than the meal plan, and they raised a stink about it.

<comment><USER5> Making nutritious food that tastes good on a budget just requires compromise. Fatty meats are cheap and tasty, but they're not great for you. Legumes are cheap and healthy, but most people don't find them very exciting. If you use both, you get something better.

America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route, which results in many meals which are barely cheap and not good. Of course, my culinary opinion is based on my personal taste preferences. But I mean, like, burritos.

<comment><USER6> > America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route

I'm constantly complaining to my family that meat here (in the US... more precisely, the Bay Area) isn't tough enough. They tell me I'm weird, and meat in the US is soft because that's how Americans like it.

(Lest the phrasing confuse people, all of us are Americans.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really cool. I wonder how it could be scaled up to make it easier for organizations that can't get a chef like this to do something similar? His process was pretty custom (parenting with people he knew from his career as an haute cuisine chef and making gourmet food from scratch) that would be difficult to replicate, but if he could systematize this in some way that would be an amazing win for large organizations (dorm cafeterias, hospitals, schools etc). Given what we know about nutrition and the importance of fresh, high quality food and it's role in all aspects of health, it's high time that hostpitals (and everyone else) serve better, healthier food.

<comment><USER8> Concerned about the decrease in meat, and ultimately protein in the diet. His meals only serve meat three times a week? For a surgical patient trying to heal their wounds, a decrease in protein content is the last thing they need.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps meat three times a week shouldn't be a decrease to start with?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not to cheapen the work that Wodni's accomplished, but I imagine a very large part of the reason why this has worked is because a talented, passionate chef has decided to work in a hospital, rather than achieve notoriety and fortune running a high-end restaurant.

The average person choosing to work in institutional kitchen is not one that is looking to make a difference… they're looking to make ends meet.

This is scalable only if they managed to encourage more talented individuals to choose institutional kitchens over commercial ones.

<comment><USER11> > This is scalable only if they managed to encourage more talented individuals > to choose institutional kitchens over commercial ones.

I'm not convinced that this is as difficult as you make out. Commercial kitchens don't usually pay very high salaries, but there is a social status achieved by working for a top-end restaurant. Large-kitchen institutions may not be able to compete on either, but their longevity (compared to restaurants which come and go) allows them to invest in people, taking interested low- skill candidates and bringing them up through a kitchen's roles in a predictable way, including possibly financing culinary degrees for people working their way up.

It's not like Wodni is doing something particularly different (? for lack of a better word) here. Instead of buying from low-quality suppliers whose prices were higher for ensuring consistency at wholesale scale, he bought from a multitude of high-quality suppliers at wholesale market rate. He then, using experience and education, adapted to the differences in inventory that come with working with small-scale suppliers, while ensuring that his budget was efficiently utilized by not wasting anything (e.g. saving fish bones for stock instead of buying fish stock from a supplier). Yes, that requires education and experience to do and do well, but I don't see why more institutions couldn't invest in more people to get that education and experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last time I was in hospital I was dreading the food but it was in fact amazing and came with a pamphlet explaining how they configured each meal specifically for whatever was wrong with each patient. This was my local NHS.</comment>


"I, along with almost all of Disney Imagineering, am furloughed without pay" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1247979904118882304 <comment><USER3> Off topic: I used to love lemondoor's blog when I was into lisp.

<comment><USER4> Thank you! I'm glad people enjoyed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah that really sucks. Hopefully they got the same email from A&A the rest of us at other Disney subsidiaries received, meaning they'd still have their healthcare benefits covered and Disney will be handling employee/company premiums.

Huge shoutout to the Imagineering team, their work is incredible!

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like the original tweet got deleted, but archive.org got us covered:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200409030935/https://twitter.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200409030935/https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1247979904118882304)

<comment><USER7> That link is dead too. Does archive.org update its archive based on deleted content?

<comment><USER6> Mhm... I don't think so, that would be counter-intuitive.

I guess someone wants to get rid of this tweet thoroughly.

<comment><USER8> I want to guess that someone begins with a D and rhymes with Sidney.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200409030935/https:/twitter.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200409030935/https:/twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1247979904118882304)

</comment><comment><USER10> As with all HN submissions, this is archived over at archive.is: [http://archive.is/https:/twitter.com/lemonodor/status/124797...](http://archive.is/https:/twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1247979904118882304)

</comment><comment><USER11> The tweet has been removed.

<comment><USER12> Probably that implies he doesn't want a big thread about it here either, so I've buried this one. If it were a discussion worth keeping, that might be a hard call, but it's mostly wretched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The link is not working anymore. Seems like the tweet has been removed.

</comment><comment><USER14> "This Tweet is Unavailable". Hmmm, somebody got to them.

</comment><comment><USER15> From a pure cut-throat capitalist perspective, this seems like a stupid move. Teams like this are not easy to replace, and Disney has plenty of money.

<comment><USER16> Maybe Disney too got overrun by MBAs, and their optimization horizon shortened to "until next quarter"?

<comment><USER17> More like their money printer, ESPN, ran out of ink. Theme parks shuttered, movie shoots scrubbed. Theatrical releases delayed to next year. Disney+ is doing great but that's like saying the orchestra makes great iceberg accompaniment.

They are freaked out and making any decision they can to stop the cash burn, if it's a good idea or not.

<comment><USER18> For the size of Disney empire, they'd have more than enough cash to survive as a whole for months instead of cutting pay to [sic] Imagineering R&D department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Disney's net income in 2019 was 11.05 billion U.S. dollars, marking one of the highest figures to date.

<comment><USER20> Does it mean you have to distribute it to employees?

It seems to me that even if Disney earns 100 times that, their employees should not get more than the market rate.

<comment><USER21> Agreed, if it causes the company to have severe financial distress or even possibly go bankrupt, hard decisions such as these have to be made. If the company goes under lots more jobs and wealth is lost.

<comment><USER22> Ah yes. Hard decisions about whether the new CEO will wipe his ass with that 11 billion, or use it as fuel for his fireplace. Decisions, decisions.

<comment><USER12> Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban accounts that do that because it kills the spirit of curious conversation, which this site exists for.

If you wouldn't mind taking a look at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and using HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it. It's understandable that temperatures rise and pots boil over, but we all need to control ourselves in those areas, or else we end up ruining this place.

<comment><USER23> > we all need to control ourselves in those areas, or else we end up ruining > this place.

So you don't think attitudes like what trophycase was responding to, ruins this site? I've known more programmers leave this site because of ugly attitudes worded civilly and so left unchecked, than because of responses like the one you're complaining about. I think you're threatening to ban the wrong people.

<comment><USER12> > _So you don't think attitudes like what trophycase was responding to, ruins > this site?_

That doesn't follow, and I'd be careful about drawing such conclusions. It's difficult to reply meaningfully to general statements like those in your comment here, because they can actually be referring to a wide range of different things. I'd really need to see specific links.

In the case of the comment trophycase was responding to ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820206)), the fact that it was heavily downvoted already indicates a kind of community moderation, signalling that there's something objectionable about the post. The fact that I didn't reply with additional censure doesn't mean I somehow like the post or agree with it. It was a low-information comment with an ideological slant. But HN gets a huge number of those, from all ideological sides. If we were going to try to moderate all of them, first of all we couldn't because we'd be spending all our time doing nothing else, and second it would generate a massive backlash from users who don't agree that such comments clear the threshold for public scolding.

(The difference between that and " _Ah yes. Hard decisions about whether the new CEO will wipe his ass with that 11 billion, or use it as fuel for his fireplace. Decisions, decisions._ " is pretty stark. Note also that I was responding to a repeated pattern.)

I'm by no means happy about such comments on HN, but there are limits, much harder limits than people assume, to what moderation power can achieve. Usually when people demand more from moderation, what they seem to want is for us to ban anyone who supports an ideology they disagree with. That's not an option for HN (even though we get accused of doing it all the time). It would kill the community, and I don't see what good that would do anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm from a country with public health care, so this comes as an interesting shock - would employees immediately lose health benefits if made redundant / fired etc?

Seems to incentivize getting rid of people when they need healthcare the most (eg "I have cancer" -> "Look, we're going to have to let you go, your performance the past few months hasn't been up to scratch"). I assume there'd be a bunch of health related after-effects to jobloss too, particularly around mental well-being.

<comment><USER25> So yeah people totally lose their health care when they lose their job. Typically it runs through the month and then you're on your own. You can by law keep buying the same plan at full price (employers typically pay between 50-80 and sometimes up to 100% of the premium).

However, when you get sick that rate doesn't go up, so there's no incentive from your employers standpoint to fire you when sick. Because of the "losing coverage" part it's still extra shitty when they double up (cancer plus being fired sounds pretty awful).

Obamacare notably created markets for folks not receiving health insurance through work to purchase it directly (in addition to subsidies for low to middle income folks to do so, and several regulatory changes around other parts of the system), but that basic system wasn't fundamentally altered and has been more or less how the US has done things since world war 2.

Fun bonus fact, employer based insurance was first offered as a workaround for world war 2 era wage controls.

<comment><USER26> Large employers typically self-insure, including a large majority of companies with over 500 employees [1]. You might see, say, Blue Cross on your card, but they're just administering - the actual payments to doctors, etc. are in fact coming from your company. Sometimes the company will still show a percentage of "premium" that they are covering; it's not a real premium in that case, just a percentage of the average care covered per employee.

This means there could be a strictly financial incentive to dismiss a sick employee. This is of course entirely illegal if that were the purpose. [1] [https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr- topics/benefits/pa...](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr- topics/benefits/pages/self-insurance-aca.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow, that's some testament to employee morale. The company you work for effectively fires you because things don't go so rosy for a month and all you want is to go back lol. The company can really be lucky to have you and I guess you can be lucky to have such a great work that you actually want to go back after they pull off a stunt like this (which is essentially a punch in the face).

Unfortunately for many people, because things like this just show companies that they can (even) treat high-tech employees like disposable items and get away with it. The right reaction would be to make sure that no one in your division EVER goes back to this company and prevents everyone in their close circle to start working there, unless they pay some really nice and big severance package.

I wonder if this is more related to "game development". This isn't game development but it is kinda related. Perhaps people just think differently there and the normal employer - employee separation of concerns just goes out of the window. An employer collects HUGE profits from your work in the IT sector, no matter your level. You, as an employee, sacrifice these profits for convenience, essentially. Now they take your convenience away and you still want to work there. It's kinda baffling to me. And the game industry always spat on engineers, probably because too many people "want" to do it.

<comment><USER12> We asked you to stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. Since your last three comments are this one, "So what? Did you ever look at a production codebase?", and "Right, so you would rather die than risk germ infection?", it seems clear that you don't mean to use HN as intended, which is to say for curious conversation.

Therefore I've banned the account. If that ever changes, you're welcome to email us at email@example.com and let us know. In the meantime, please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Furloughed without pay? Isn't that a breach of the contract by the employer?

<comment><USER29> That would depend on the contract would it not?

<comment><USER28> Absolutely. But even if such contracts were possible, wouldn't people avoid signing contracts that allow the employer to simply stop paying?

My contract has a 3 month notice so unless I agree to anything else, I'd be paid 3 months regardless of whether the business is able to operate at all.

But I suppose that if my contract didn't have that and I instead had a signing bonus or some other comp that gave me a few months of security then that would be equivalent.

<comment><USER30> It's uncommon in the US to have a set duration employment contract - <USER2> every state allows either side to terminate employment for almost any reason. Those represented by unions usually do have a collective bargaining agreement that puts more restrictions around when and how employers can terminate employees, but union membership in the US is low.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you like the new design on NXdom? - <AUTHOR>

www.nxdom.com is my brainstorming tool for short available domain names. I'm trying to eliminate scrolling and show similar names together. How do you like the condensed display format with several names on each line?
Also, do you prefer the basic or advanced sort options on the left side?
Thanks in advance, I really appreciate your feedback. <comment><USER2> That's pretty cool. But I would like to see what TLD is available.

Perhaps allow to only pick up .com or .net, or maybe have a grouping feature.

I like the minimalistic nature too. (Oh and advanced options on the left is good.) Edit: I just select "without dashes" and the top option had a dash.

</comment><comment><USER3> 10/10 for coolness factor, but the usefulness has plummeted. How can I tell which domains are still available now? Oh that's right, I have to click thru?

If I were cynical, I'd say you're just trying to get people to click your affiliate registrar links :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken. I have now integrated the display of taken (and parked and error) top level domains again, trying to make it useful but not too distracting.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.nxdom.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Better branding. There's been multiple occasions when I thought of your website but couldn't remember the name.</comment>