Ask HN: Salary Valuation - <AUTHOR>

I need the advice from those who are far more experienced than I am at salary valuations.
Background: I was hired in late February of this year as the copywriter for an Internet marketing company that has seen a lot of success since its inception last year. Since then, my responsibilities have expanded to that of what I'd consider the responsibilities of a product manager.
I'm essentially the jack of all trades for the company. I can pretty much play the role of anyone in the company in the off chance they are out of the office, although my main responsibility remains as a copywriter. However, lately I've been given the ability to hire people as I deem fit to complete projects. Next week, I sit down with my boss (the CEO) and his partner to discuss putting me on salary (I work hourly right now), and I don't know how to go about valuating my skills and the responsibilities I've been given.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. By the way, I'm 19. <comment><USER2> You don't get what your skills are worth. You don't get what your responsibilities are worth. You get what you can negotiate. This is the most important lesson about salary.

Your negotiating position is stronger because you're difficult to replace and weaker because the comparable for your salary is your hourly wage. Your bosses have had the milk for nearly free; any price for the cow is going to look expensive by comparison. (For example, if you're currently working for $10/hr and step up to $60k -- which is aggressive but, hey, key employees should be aggressive -- that would cost them on the order of five times more, when factoring in taxes and benefits.)

Oh yeah, benefits. You're 19, so you may not get the importance of this now, but professional white-collar workers either a) get them or b) have an hourly many times what you're making right now so that they can buy them for themselves. Typically this includes healthcare, some retirement option with employer match, paid vacation, and such other perks as may be standard or negotiated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting, patio11. Appreciate it!

Without trying to sound like an arrogant blow-hard, I would say I'm one of the most vital employees in the company bar none. As the months pass by, I continue to take on more & more responsibilities & today my boss pretty much confided in me that other than him, I am THE creative force in the company.

When I go into the meeting, I don't want to come off cocky. I want to come off confident, which is why I'm trying to gather as much info as I can about this stuff.

I really think the benefits thing should be factored into the equation. It makes sense, right? I know benefits are necessary. But, how do you quantify that? Just do some research into what it'd cost to buy those benefits myself and factor it in?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I'm going to splash some cold water on this situation. Except for senior management and engineering, pretty much everyone is replaceable. As others have suggested, your currently pay will serve as baseline and it's hard to think anoff would be mre than 20 or 30% above that. But I have two tips for you: 1) ask for a review after 6 months at which point you might be able to earn a raise. 2) if this is a tech startup that you think has a lot of potential and stock options are a component of pay, it might be smart to trade a few k in salary for more than a few k in addiional stock.

<comment><USER4> Baseline isn't so much current pay, but what others in the same company are making (if that applies). That's what makes them think "we can hire someone to do this for X".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You're in a good position to negotiate for things other than money right now too. Consider what is really valuable to you. Maybe:

1\. You're struggling to pay the bills or want to save up. Bargain for the highest salary you possibly can.

2\. You're doing well financially; what you really wish is that you had more time for your relationships or to work on your own projects. Negotiate to have extra vacation time, to only work 4 days a week, or whatever you like.

3\. Your commute sucks or you don't enjoy being in the office. Negotiate for the ability to telecommute twice a week. (This is also a decent way to address #2, because you have more control over your time when you telecommute.)

These are just a few possibilities. It could literally be anything you want that they can provide. Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

</comment><comment><USER6> This subject is very relevant to me, as I'm in a similar position.

I accepted a "full-time freelance" position in a hard time in my life for $15/hr, no benefits, no contract of any kind (contractor). I'm the only developer at an 8-month old, online-only print services provider, so I'd say I'm a pretty important cog.

Since I accepted the "job" I fixed the mess that the original (cheap) web agency made of the site, redesigned the entire UX of ordering prints (now with cropping! sliders! previews!) and will be launching a new e-commerce site that I built from scratch for them in the last couple months. I do server admin, design, development, UX, API, as well as occasional customer service with a smile.

What would the average market price be for the value I can bring to a startup or small business? What are my skills and services really worth? To rephrase that, what hourly range would someone with my skills and knowledge normally charge?

<comment><USER7> Just as a note: this will probably depend on where you live

<comment><USER6> Alas, nowhere near the centers of IT, but South Florida...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What you are your work are "worth" is of little importance.

The ONLY way you are going to get a significant salary raise (where significant is defined as more than they're planning to give you), is if you are ready to walk.

So.

1\. Have a number in mind. (ie. what are others similar in the same company making?).

2\. They'll offer you less than that.

3\. Say: I'm truly sorry, but I can't accept that offer, it would be hurting myself, so I have to respectfully resign. (Don't bluff, mean it)

That's really the best way.

<comment><USER8> I agree, and also fight for more tangible responsibilities. No offense, but its hard to sell a business owner on why your copy writing is worth X-more dollars than some other guys. Sales or code or ideas that have been implemented with a tangible profit are helpful when asking for more money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> things that determine your salary: 1) perceived value of your contributions 2) how much you could make if you left, weighted by the chance that you actually leave

even if boss's perceived value of you is really high, if you don't have the external credibility to actually get another job at the salary you seek, you don't have much bargaining power.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know there's not some algorithm to determining my salary, but is there a rule of thumb for figuring it out.

Would an average of 1 & 2 result in a good valuation? I can figure out the value of my contribution almost to a T with some things, but there are other things that are a little harder to put a definite value to, i.e the copy I write for our websites.

I want to come into the meeting with research at the ready. And, thanks for bringing up the external credibility aspect. I didn't consider that, so I will have to factor that into everything.

<comment><USER9> well, your self-valuation is 2, and your bosses valuation of you is 1. unfortunately, economics dictates that only your bosses valuation matters. willingness and ability to quit for another job is how you shift the economics in your favor.

if i was your boss, i'd offer you 1, with just enough padding to keep your morale up. However, as you continue to grow, your external credibility increases, which should grow your salary rapidly towards your true value.

how did it go?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have you considered the option of starting your own internet marketing business?</comment>


Try and view the source - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurlak.com/john/source.html <comment><USER2> I hit F12 in Chromium, dev tools open with the tree, knowing that I'm viewing the DOM and not the source I hit the Resources tab, and there is the source.

Not a problem at all.

In fact, I had to remember to go back to right clicking and View Source to try and figure out why this was so highly ranked and lots of the comments confused me.

Now I see why... but just like using JavaScript to try and detect right click, using replace state to try and obscure the source isn't likely to be effective in any reasonable way. I guess that's not the point, that this is more fun than anything someone will do, except... I bet someone does it on their live site.

<comment><USER3> > I bet someone does it on their live site.

I doubt it, as this method breaks forward/back functionality, thus probably breaking most sites.

Having said that, for all links, you could do a further re-write using the history API, before allowing the redirect to take place. I guess that would actually make it usable even if, as you say, it's futile in the end.

<comment><USER4> Many sites (hi, Twitter; #! you, too!) happily break the back button. It is a standard technique to "boost" engagement and "reduce" bounce rate. Seems spiritually inline line with this view-source gimmick.

<comment><USER5> There is a problem, of course. Going to the new url fails to render the site, so view source won't work but neither will bookmarks. And you DON'T want to prevent bookmarking. But good to know this works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A clever use of history.replaceState and some special characters (to make it less obvious that the state's been altered) - "view source" in Chrome operates on the currently active URL, which after the replaceState has executed is the "not that easily" page.

You can also reproduce the behavior by navigating back, then forwards again - you'll see the "not that easily" page that way, as well (as the "try and view the source" page has been replaced in your history list).

<comment><USER7> Just to add to this, the "special characters" are "%E2%80%AE" which is the escaped form of the UTF-8 "Right-To-Left Override" control character (which effectively reverses the display of text).

If you try copying the URL to plain-text, you'll see: <http://www.kurlak.com/john/%E2%80%AElmth.ecruos>

<comment><USER8> Why is this possible? Is there a way to surpress this weirdness? I want to be able to trust my address bar again.

<comment><USER9> I believe that RTL character is one of the main failures of UNICODE. This should be part of the markup / rich text, not part of the plain text.

<comment><USER10> Even without the RTL directive, they might have used something like sourcе.html — which contains a non-ASCII glyph. So while RTL is problematic, I'm not prepared to call it a failure in that generally problematic space of unifying human communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why I love NoScript. Viewed it no problems and easily saw what you were doing. Pretty clever trick, thank you.

<comment><USER12> I recently learned about a similar trick that gets around NoScript:

<http://citeomatic.com/_asdf.html>

(This one only works in Firefox and Opera, not Chrome, sadly)

<comment><USER13> Nice trick. Spoiler:

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:49:27 GMT
      Server: Apache
      Link: <_asdf.css>;rel="stylesheet";type="text/css";media="all"
      Content-Length: 0
      Connection: close
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      curl -v -H 'User-agent: Mozilla/5.0' 'http://www.kurlak.com/john/source.html'

<comment><USER15> It says Chrome or Firefox.

<comment><USER16> Worked just fine for me in Chrome but that's why I love noscript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can also just type the view-source url directly into the address bar: view-source:<http://www.kurlak.com/john/source.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> In chrome you can easily view the current source by opening the elements section of Developer Tools.

</comment><comment><USER19> 'view source' for me has been command + option + j (dev console) for a while now. It will always show you the live element tree.

That said, pretty neat trick.

<comment><USER20> That's what I went straight for, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ha, nice try! I reverse-engineered it.

  <title>Source</title>   Can you view my source from Chrome or Firefox?

<comment><USER22> You missed a paragraph tag. And 'inspect element' in Chrome shows you the source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> found in 5 seconds, with firefox: ctrl+A, right click with mouse, View Selection Source

 <title>Source</title> <meta charset="UTF-8">
Can you view my source from Chrome or Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER24> Right click - Inspect Element (from Chrome) did work for me.

<comment><USER25> That's actually not viewing the page source though. That's viewing the current DOM state. If the author was more clever he could have left you a little note to that effect.

<comment><USER26> Yup -- I went (in Mozilla) to the Web Developer plugin's "View Generated Source", which works but likewise is cheating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yes I can view the source: <https://gist.github.com/2097197>

<comment><USER28> You do know about `curl`, right?

<comment><USER29> Why use a popular utility when you can write your own in _CoffeeScript_!?

<comment><USER30> No need to be snide guys. If you don't know, you don't know. And there's no shame in trying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> <!DOCTYPE html>   <title>Source</title> <meta charset="UTF-8">
Can you view my source from Chrome or Firefox?

This is on Firefox version 11.0. The creator of this page forgot the Firefox ecosystem has this nifty plug-in called NoScript.

</comment><comment><USER32> Less clever than other people's solutions, but save-as works too.

</comment><comment><USER33> In Chrome at least, it also breaks going back to the cached page after first view using back/forward navigation. (Try clicking the link from HN, go "back", then go "forward" again.) This might be obvious to people who know anything about browser caching, but I thought it was kinda interesting.

</comment><comment><USER34> FF 3.6.26 complained "Error: history.replaceState is not a function: <http://www.kurlak.com/john/source.html> at line 7". Source opened just fine.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is very interesting. I tried with the View Source option. Failed. But using the Debugger I got this:

<!DOCTYPE html>   <title>Source</title> <meta charset="UTF-8">
Can you view my source from Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER36> Simple with Firebug: <!DOCTYPE html>   <title>Source</title> <meta charset="UTF-8">
Can you view my source from Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER37> Right click: Inspect Element

<comment><USER38> That shows the current DOM state, not the source that created it. There's a distinction, especially if you use a lot of JavaScript to fiddle with the DOM.

<comment><USER39> What about (in Chrome) Inspect Element -> Network -> source.html -> Response?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I loaded the page, went to Firebug script panel, set a breakpoint on the line of javascript, hit F5, when the breakpoint got hit, I just hit escape to prevent it from running. Then, Ctrl-U as usual.

Chrome is broken on my machine (proxy issues) so I didn't test there, but I assume the same technique would work.

</comment><comment><USER41> IE seems to be the only browser not requesting the source again, which is what you would expect...

</comment><comment><USER42> I used to use this simple trick to hide my source where I would tell Apache to treat JavaScript files as PHP applications and then I'd use sessions to show the file. If the session was missing I would display bogus text.

</comment><comment><USER43> Right mouse button > inspect element. Wasn't aware there was another way...

<comment><USER44> That's not view source. You are looking at the current state of the DOM. Usually, it will be similar, but what you're looking for is the source that your browser received from the server. Inspect element won't give you that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> of course i had noscript!

<!DOCTYPE html>   <title>Source</title> <meta charset="UTF-8">

Can you view my source from Chrome or Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER46> Firebug for Firefox shows this. <http://cl.ly/3B3d2u1I1g0V2w1d3H1C>

</comment><comment><USER47> View Source works just fine in Opera!

</comment><comment><USER48> You can use firebug to view source

</comment><comment><USER49> Okay, I'm viewing the source in chrome.

<http://imgur.com/KPVks>

Now what?

</comment><comment><USER50> Right Click -> Inspect Element -> Resources . It was easy that way!

</comment><comment><USER51> Chrome: Tools -> Developer tools. Then select resources. Done.

</comment><comment><USER52> Yes, I do inspect element and I can see the page source.

</comment><comment><USER53> Couldn't this have been done with a cookie and caching?

<comment><USER40> Ctrl-F5 would then cause the new page to show rather than the original.

Great idea though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Can view the source without any problems in Opera.

</comment><comment><USER55> Firefox's Inspector views the source just fine.

</comment><comment><USER56> wget <http://www.kurlak.com/john/source.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> your secret character injection is sneaky. props. i see a potential for URL spoofing.

</comment><comment><USER57> Clever. Ctrl-Shift-I in Chrome.

<comment><USER44> That shows you the current DOM, not the original source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Works fine in midori.

</comment><comment><USER59> Clever trick!

</comment><comment><USER60> cute trick. I'll definitely use it as an extra security measure next time I'm working on something that leaks an id in the source

<comment><USER4> Please post the URL of your site, so we can all enjoy the functionality and not see any leaked IDs. And some AWS functionality would be great, I would love to use EC2 cluster computes on the "free" teir...

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I fired up Fiddler to see what was going on... but can't see the issue... what am I missing? Fiddler is showing me it's returned text/plain!

</comment><comment><USER62> I can't remember the last time I hit View Source. I always check via the Chrome Developer Tools.

Interesting hack nevertheless.

</comment><comment><USER63> Used the Pendule plugin to view the source.

But otherwise, very clever.

</comment><comment><USER64> command-shift + i => source

most people i know view source this way

<comment><USER65> F12 also will open the dev tools panel, in Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> $ curl <http://www.kurlak.com/john/%E2%80%AElmth.ecruos> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">  <title>406 Not Acceptable</title>
Not Acceptable

An appropriate representation of the requested resource /john/lmth.ecruos could not be found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
 </comment>


CanvasPaint - Microsoft Paint clone done in canvas - <AUTHOR> http://www.canvaspaint.org/

<comment><USER2> christopher clay who made canvas paint also is the designer of startup <http://soup.io/> (kinda like tumblr meets friendfeed) which recently went into beta.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't like the anti aliasing with the magnifying glass. The whole point of a zoom-in feature is to be able to see and edit single pixels.

<comment><USER4> i couldn't get that to work. firefox 2.0 here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> very cool</comment>


Why I Don't Write For Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/c7cc156bc5d9 <comment><USER2> > There isn't even a way for me to put a link to my twitter or my personal > website so that I can drive that traffic somewhere useful.

> Joe Wegner Career Nerd. Was an IT guy. Is a software engineer > (@CultivateStudios). Loves Christ. Married to @Erica_Wegner. > [http://t.co/yEBP9xbDiu](http://t.co/yEBP9xbDiu)

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Yes - that byline is on an eminently unreadable light-grey-on-white and is easily skipped - it had to be pointed out to me that a friend had actually written an article I'd read!

Do authors get any branding past that byline? Maybe on the main page, but not on the article itself, not that I've seen. Thanks to link aggregators/HN, I've only hit articles directly and not the actual Medium.com home page.

Nor, unless everything a writer writes is on Medium, is there any continuity - where's the Medium.com link to any of Wegner's other writings?

Good for Medium, not great for a writer.

Medium is all about Medium, which is Wegner's valid point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out of the building. Only Evan Williams can do 3 startups in a row, two of which are blog engines and one of which is... well, again a blog engine (albeit with 140 char limit). Granted he never seems to have any brilliant original ideas, but the dude knows how to spread his stuff like wildfire and pile up yet another billion dollar in the process. Almost overnight, posts on Medium has been appearing on HN like TechCrunch and other well known outlets who have put years on building reputation. To me, most posts doesn't seem to have that much of a substance but headlines are eye catching and they do get lots of upvotes (hopefully, not from faking). Seriously, how does he do it?

<comment><USER5> Medium isn't just a blogging engine, per se. As the author of this article points out, it's also a content farm. The genius of Medium is that it (theoretically) encourages people to post thoughtful, good content -- and the collective efforts of everyone doing this create a high-quality content farm at scale. This is different from the typical take on content-farming, i.e., paying a bunch of people peanuts to crank out endless iterations on aggregated Miley Cyrus headlines.

Now, one could certainly make the argument that Medium's game is a little shady. To paraphrase _The Usual Suspects_ : "The greatest trick Medium ever played was convincing the world it wasn't a content farm."

One could argue, furthermore, that most of the content on Medium isn't all that good. But I think the jury's still out on that charge. I've seen some good stuff on Medium, and I've seen some crap. But it doesn't seem, on average, markedly better or worse than what I'd expect to see on a random walk through any other blogging platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's play a game:

\--- False Medium or Real Medium !?! ---

1) "Yes, Vagina, There Is No Such Thing as Normal"

2) "I Tattooed My Friend's Name On My Head…And Then We Broke Up"

3) "Living With a Cracked iPhone Screen"

4) "Changing Condom Culture"

5) "A Night at the Laundromat"

6) "In which the NSA and I freak each other out on LinkedIn"

Some of these are really from Medium, some are from the parody FalseMedium [1]. Can you guess which ones are fake?! (Answers [2])

[1] [https://twitter.com/FalseMedium](https://twitter.com/FalseMedium)

[2] [http://pastebin.com/Kh7B1b9C](http://pastebin.com/Kh7B1b9C)

<comment><USER7> Medium makes me laugh the same way showing up at an open-mic night full of amateur "poets" at the coffee shop makes me laugh.

<comment><USER8> You mean the "laughing for 5 seconds and then burying your head in your hands" way?

<comment><USER9> Probably more like laughing for 5 seconds, then standing there awkwardly for another 120 seconds, then getting your coffee and getting the hell out of there as quickly as possible way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Github's indemnity clause is at _least_ as scary as Medium's licensing clause.

Any company that relies on user generated content needs users to agree to what Medium's legalese says. At least it's explicit. Assuming you own the copyright to content you put on Medium, how else can they publish it? Github's language is informal, and not written in terms of copyright, but is functionally the same ... though the full term isn't included in the parent:

> We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to > the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by > setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view > your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree > to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

<comment><AUTHOR> Allowing people to view my content is much different from giving a company the rights to redistribute it. Github's terms may be less formal, but they say very different things.

<comment><USER10> Serving your content up to readers is redistributing it. You are implicitly granting Github that right by agreeing to let them serve your content to other users.

Note that Github isn't in the user generated content business, primarily, so they are less at risk by leaving the terms loose and human. I would generally prefer Medium's terms, but written / translated into non-legalese. Some company did this a few years ago, I wish I could find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This person is very confused about copyright and the difference between an exclusive and non-exclusive right to redistribute.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love for you to expand on this. Truthfully I am not an expert on copyright law, but I do find many ToS to be fairly self explanatory.

I'd be happy to update the post if I was misleading somewhere.

<comment><USER10> Medium needs a license to your content to publish it. That clause grants them that license. Non-exclusive means they're not asking you for ownership, they're just asking for a license that allows them to distribute the content.

If they wanted ownership, they'd do something like Craigslist:

> You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that > you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, > unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), > worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative > works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) > and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and > assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against > any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or > exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you > post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, > harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post).

<comment><USER12> "they're just asking for a license that allows them to distribute the content"

The license is _much_ broader than this:

"By furnishing your User Content to Medium, you give Medium a non-exclusive worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to utilize all copyright rights now in existence or that may arise in the future with respect to your User Content, in any medium that now exists or may arise in the future, as well as to do anything else that is reasonably appropriate to our Service and its use of your User Content (including, but not limited to, use of your name in association with your User Content to identify you as the contributor). The license has no restriction as to the medium, dissemination method, type of Service we may offer, or the type of systems or products that may be used in conjunction with your User Content."

You can revoke the license by removing your content, which is a silver lining.

<comment><USER10> Most of this is just defining the scope of distribution.

Sublicensable is, perhaps, scary -- but it let's them legally allow other entities to distribute the content. This seems necessary for, say, RSS feeds if they want to let others use the content in aggregators.

The mediums (lower case m) all make sense, a "best of Medium" coffee table book is still distribution, and likely reasonable? I am actually curious what their general user expectations are for this type of thing. Note that this is clarifying language, though, the right to distribute doesn't imply a specific medium ... so they would be getting the same thing even without being explicit.

"Utilize all copyright rights" does include creation of derivative works, which would be an interesting thing for Medium to try and do (and probably go counter to what users would expect). I think that's the only one of the copyright rights that's "weird" for these terms.

The "anything else that is reasonably appropriate" clause let's them do stuff that's not normally in the scope of copyright. Reasonable is a legally restrictive word and would actually give power to what their user base generally finds fair. It really seems more like cover-your-butt language than a significantly larger scope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of that is pretty standard. However, this part seems overly broad:

       license to utilize all copyright rights now in
       existence or that may arise in the future
       with respect to your User Content

So if someone published an article on Medium speculating on what would happen if a United State Marine expeditionary unit was unexpectedly transported back to Rome in the time of Augustus Caesar [1], Medium could write a screenplay and shop it around Hollywood, and if it sold they wouldn't even have to pay the author anything?

In the United States, the copyright owner of a copyrighted work has these exclusive rights [2]:

1\. to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies.

2\. to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted works.

3\. to distribute copies of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.

4\. to perform the copyrighted work publicly.

5\. to display the copyrighted work publicly.

I can see Medium needing a royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable license to do #1, #3, and maybe #5.

I don't see a need for them to have any #4 rights. For example, if someone publishes a play on Medium I don't see why Medium would need the right to perform that play publicly.

I don't see any need for them to have #2 rights. I can see that they might want to do things like publish collections of the best of Medium, but doing that would require exercising the copying right (#1) and the distribution right (#3), not the derivative work right (#2). When you include a copy of a work in a larger work, such as an anthology, you are not making a derivative work--you are making a collective work [3]:

       A "collective work" is a work, such as a periodical
       issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number
       of contributions, constituting separate and independent
       works in themselves, are assembled into a collective
       whole.

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

[2] [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106)

[3] [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101)

<comment><USER14> Okay, but Reddit could do that to the Rome Sweet Rome thing, too. Their TOS has the same set of rights granted, spelled out even more explicitly:

>>> Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy, you agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.[1]

I guess that what I'm saying here is that this clause is not in the least bit uncommon.

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/wiki/useragreement](http://www.reddit.com/wiki/useragreement)

EDIT: In fact, I noticed after posting this that the Rome Sweet Rome wikipedia article has a section about "Licensing Issues", talking about reddit's TOS. (Plus general content contributed by other users.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> An article linked to Medium, about Medium, to get people to talk about Medium, on Medium, which you are not allowed to write for, and keeps ownership of everything created by those who are allowed to write for. I can see the appeal.

<comment><USER16> right to use is _not_ ownership. Ownership is a misplaced metaphor for things like articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is irony in multiple dimensions here. By publishing an article critical of itself but whose core argument actually has very small teeth, Medium gets to appear magnanamous and balanced and thus receives a net benefit in reputation. And likewise on the author's side, with one hand the he condemns that writing for Medium benefits Medium more than it benefits him, but with the other hand he reaps the clear benefit of the notoriety gained from publishing it on Medium. It's all a very clever scarf trick.

</comment><comment><USER18> At first, i thought "Hey, what an idiot - why does this take me to medium then?".

But then i actually read it and i agree - everyone should read the ToS of a service they use, but sadly most people don't.

And therefore are mostly surprised when i tell them that $service owns every word, photo and whatnot they publish on it.

What really bugs me is that most people you tell are really indifferent to this. They plainly don't care that they gave up every right on, say, a photo they made to a megacorp - this should change.

<comment><USER11> You don't give up every right or even any right. You retain all your rights. But you have to give medium (or google or whomever) a license to redistribute what you wrote, otherwise they cannot do so and it's pointless to have written it using that service.

<comment><AUTHOR> But why do we have to give them that right to redistribute? Using github, or even better your own server, the service doesn't gain any right to redistribute my content.

<comment><USER10> Because Medium is, by definition, redistributing your content every time someone loads up the article. They just distributed the parent article to me. If they sold the company, the acquirer also needs to distribute the content (transferable).

Github's terms grant them the same ability, just not as explicitly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why in the quote from Medium's terms of service he chose to bold "non-exclusive".

<comment><AUTHOR> That bolding is from Medium's terms. I did not add the formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> These articles kind of miss the appeal of something like medium. If you have a blog and/or an audience, you probably don't want to use medium very often; but if you have something to write that you think might appeal to a broader audience medium might get you more publicity.

I mean, if you have your own blog, why write an op ed for the New York Times? Why write a comment on HN? Why do a TV interview? Why write or speak anywhere but your own website? Because many of those [ah, fuck, how do I choose another word than] media can reach a bigger or different audience than your website, spreading your ideas, increasing your reputation, etc.

The other nontrivial factor for medium specifically is for people who want to write something every few months or so. They're unlikely to build an audience for their own blog, but if they write on medium they might get read.

</comment><comment><USER20> He's got a real point here. Medium helps you drive traffic to... Medium. From a personal branding POV, you're probably better off with even a free Wordpress site. (Though, really, if you want to control your online presence, you should definitely host your own blog. It's not hard or expensive.)

<comment><USER21> The uniform look of Medium sites also pushes value in their direction instead of yours. When I view an article on Medium, I always look at the same-as- every-other-page-on-Medium design and think "oh, this is Medium" rather than "oh, this is <insert author's name here>."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish all these posts didn't look the same. Honestly the same exact layout on every single one is so boring now that I just figure the articles are just as boring, which they usually are. Its like reading the wannabe New Yorker without any cartoons. /rant

</comment><comment><USER23> What's so good about the Medium editor?

</comment><comment><USER24> I want to build a SAAS based licensing sub module for existing blogging platforms (does not matter it is wordpress, blogger, or your own website) as long as your integrate with the licensing SAAS platform, you can license your content. Anybody interested in something like that? Idea and discuss about welcome.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is the exact reason why I built Silvrback. If you haven't seen it yet (was on HN a couple weeks ago), here it is: [https://www.silvrback.com/dsowers/introducing- silvrback](https://www.silvrback.com/dsowers/introducing-silvrback)

Shipping soon.

<comment><USER26> I loved the idea, but like Logdown (posted on here today), they're hosted. I'd really love something like an amalgam of both services but self-hosted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This can help the numerous of people that asked your help for a static website

[http://blog.wercker.com/2013/07/25/Using-wercker-to- publish-...](http://blog.wercker.com/2013/07/25/Using-wercker-to-publish-to- GitHub-pages.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> They need a license to display the content, and if they ever want to sell the site they need to be able to transfer it. Seems reasonable to me. They made it non-exclusive so you can still own it, and even publish it elsewhere if I'm reading it right.

</comment><comment><USER29> I had no idea that medium owned the content. When it started, I read on HN that medium was a platform like wordpress.com but now it is clear that that is not true at all.

What are people on medium thinking then? or do they simply not know better?

</comment><comment><USER30> Wasn't this exact same post posted here a couple of weeks ago?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope - I just wrote this this evening. Perhaps someone else had similar ideas.

<comment><USER31> [https://medium.com/writers-on- writing/336300490cbb](https://medium.com/writers-on-writing/336300490cbb)

<comment><USER32> There's also [http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left- medium/](http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left-medium/)

Not on Medium but relevant to this discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There was basically the same article on medium a few weeks ago titled something like "A shiny content farm is still a content farm". I have to agree... not really new.

</comment><comment><USER34> The service Medium provides is that people will actually read what you write. If you've already built an audience, then it's probably not for you.

</comment><comment><USER35> So, how is Silvrback development coming along, I wonder?</comment>


Health care: Microsoft ending 100% coverage for employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/10/health_care_microsoft_employees_to_share_in_their_costs_in_2_years.html

<comment><USER3> _"We can confirm that Microsoft has begun to evolve its employee health care benefit," the company said in statement._

Wow, way to make it sound more ominous, corporate PR person. You could have just said you were knocking your benefits down a peg, but no, it's only the beginning of Microsoft's benefits turning into... well, what? Something much less generous, I guess.

Here I thought Microsoft was just bowing to the enormous costs of health benefits, but with that turn of phrase, it seems like Microsoft has some kind of new attitude.

</comment><comment><USER4> An out of pocket maximum of $1k ($2.5k for families) is still a very good deal.

Bottom line - If you're generally healthy it won't make that much of a difference. If you or a family member require expensive care, or you're unfortunate enough to be in a serious accident, you'll still be very glad you're covered by MSFT.

<comment><USER5> If you're generally healthy and have health costs < $1000/yr, then this could mean going from 100% coverage to 0% coverage, depending on how they set it up. Still a great deal for accidents, though, compared to what most people have.

<comment><USER6> An out of pocket maximum is generally not the same as a deductible. My wife and I have a similar plan now. It's $1500 (I think) maximum, but we still only pay the routine $20 co-pay for normal visits... $75 for emergency room.

I don't think we've ever actually spent more than $100 out of pocket over and above the monthly premiums. If something went terribly wrong, however, that cap would mean we'd owe at most $1500/yr. That worked out well for my father when my mom had cancer. 4 years of treatment totaling WELL over $1M, and I think he paid like $3500 total.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may have an impact on recruiting senior hires. It didn't come up often, but when recruiting folks with families and getting on in years -- especially with pre-exiting conditions -- this benefit helped close people who had salary and stock package offers from other companies that I couldn't match. It's really hard to argue with 100% coverage for even things like autism treatment and visits to naturalists/homeopathic-care, which was quite unusual at the time.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't know any other companies this generous even after the change in two years.

<comment><USER9> Microsoft is generous with their employees, but stingy when it comes to defining "employee".

<comment><USER10> Microsoft is also great at dodging taxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The healthcare coverage was something that drew me in when I started work at Microsoft. It showed a pretty serious level of respect to their employees.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder why they would make this announcement now? Why not a year ago, or a year in the future? My first guess would be there margins are slipping, or they expect there margins to be thinner in the next few years. Thus, they are starting to look for some minor cost savings.

<comment><USER13> The announcement was timed to coincide with Microsoft's Open Enrollment period - which opens in November.

<comment><USER14> Nope, the changes don't take effect for two years.

<comment><USER15> If you're switching to an HSA and anticipate good health in the near term, you could benefit from switching early and saving the unused portion of Microsoft's contribution to the HSA in your account, or otherwise contributing and allowing it to appreciate as savings.

So yes, it could be helpful information for future planning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Incidentally, how is it that Mary Jo Foley has her name spelled wrong on her blog heading?? (with a hyphen)

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-tweak- emplo...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-tweak-employee- benefits-and-more-news-of-the-week/7609?tag=mantle_skin;content)

</comment><comment><USER16> While MS's health care coverage had been very "generous" previously, make no mistake: this is a pay cut for every MS employee.

<comment><USER17> I am already on an HSA so this actually is a pay increase for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've heard of people who've worked at microsoft for exactly their chosen childbearing years. It's equivalent to 2x+ salary, and a nice paragraph on the resume.

<comment><USER19> Help me understand this math? We've had 2. They're expensive (and ours were both complicated births), but 2x?

<comment><USER18> The maternity leave was ridiculously long. So not so much 2x salary, but they worked 1/2 time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When you're taxed heavily by the government for having 'premium coverage', it kind of gives you the incentive to make the coverage crappier.

<comment><USER21> Nice try, but the the excise tax on "premium" plans doesn't go into effect until 2018. So if their only motivation was taxes, they'd have waited.

Furthermore, I'm not losing any sleep about the government taxing only the portion of the value of a health plan that exceeds $27,500/yr -- in other words, the first $27,500 remains tax-free -- when the average employer- sponsored health plan is valued at $13,375/yr (2009). And here's what a $20,400/yr plan looks like:

 _For the secretaries and environmental engineers, game wardens and van drivers who work for the state of New Hampshire, surgery is free, even at Boston's top teaching hospitals if it's necessary. So are MRIs, CT scans, and X-rays._

 _Pregnant women pay nothing for prenatal care; alcoholics aren't billed for short stints in rehab. Seeing a therapist costs just $10, as many as 20 visits a year, and prescription drugs top out at $30 for a three-month mail-order supply. New Hampshire state employees get $450 annually toward gym memberships, if they go regularly, or $200 toward their own treadmill - <USER2> there's a $150 annual reimbursement for yoga classes, diabetes clinics, and nutritional counseling._

[http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/0...](http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/07/04/healthcare_overhaul_could_limit_tax_breaks_on_benefits/)

Yea, cry me a river if well-paid employees now have to buy their own treadmills or pay for their own rehab.

<comment><USER22> So if a company (or state government in your example) wants to provide health care benefits to be competitive in the marketplace, they should be penalized for that?

Additionally, your statement about "well-paid employees" doesn't seem to fit with the article you quoted. Secretaries and van drivers aren't generally highly paid positions.

<comment><USER21> _So if a company (or state government in your example) wants to provide health care benefits to be competitive in the marketplace, they should be penalized for that?_

I don't accept your premise that taxes = penalization.

Employers who pay their employees $35,000/yr have to pay more in federal taxes than if they paid their employees $34,000/yr. I don't consider that a penalty either. Its progressive taxation.

 _Additionally, your statement about "well-paid employees" doesn't seem to fit with the article you quoted. Secretaries and van drivers aren't generally highly paid positions._

"Well-paid employees" referred to Microsoft employees.

The government positions (secretaries & van drivers) mentioned in the article, I would agree, probably aren't highly paid. They have a great health plan because of the unions that represent them and fight for those benefits. If they were non-union, they'd probably have much crappier health plan options.

But as the article said, the value of their plan is $20,400/yr. The excise tax is on whatever amount exceeds $27,500/yr. So they, and the state government they work for, will not be subject to any new taxes under the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

The reason I quoted the article was to show how great a $20,400/yr health plan is. Just imagine the benefits you'd get from a $27,500+/yr health plan. The people who have plans that expensive, most of them executives and other highly paid employees, are not hurting and I could care less if they have to go with a slightly less lavish plan that doesn't cover things like rehab, treadmills and gym memberships or choose to pay what amounts to income taxes on the portion that exceeds $27,500/yr.

<comment><USER23> _I don't accept your premise that taxes = penalization.

Employers who pay their employees $35,000/yr have to pay more in federal taxes than if they paid their employees $34,000/yr. I don't consider that a penalty either. Its progressive taxation._

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Just because it's called "progressive taxation" doesn't mean it isn't penalizing. I consider any tax at all penalizing. It's the exact reason politicians raise taxes when they want to discourage certain activities or lower them when they want to encourage more of a certain activity.

<comment><USER21> _I consider any tax at all penalizing._

Heh, so all taxes should be abolished because the government shouldn't be penalizing us for making money, right?

<comment><USER23> I suppose if your goal was to let people keep as much money as possible, then sure -- don't tax them on anything. However, voters have accepted a certain amount of self-inflicted pain in exchange for services that the private sector can't or won't provide. However, generally speaking I don't believe the government is a particularly efficient means of reallocating society's capital, I'd rather give entrepreneurs in the private sector the chance to do it better.

<comment><USER21> Yea, those crazy voters...engaging in a little self-masochism because they want things like police officers, firefighters, armed forces, potable water, roads, education, and social security.

In general, I agree that the private sector can do better than the government in many areas. The problem is, when it comes to health care coverage they haven't, not when the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical bills.

Furthermore, entrepreneurs still have the chance to do it better. Nothing in the health reform bill prevents them from doing so. So if you think you can do better d2viant, more power to ya. There are tens of millions of Americans with no health care coverage who are waiting for your better & more efficient solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Goodbye last conceivable reason to ever go back to Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, this is a gonna be a $2.5K pay cut for us, straight up. We used to take our kids to the doctor whenever they were showing signs of sickness - fever, cough, runny nose, skinned knees. Now we're going to have to weigh whether they're sick enough to shell out $20 to take them to the doctor. And I guess this is the end of lollipop Tuesdays.</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone found co-founder through HN? - <AUTHOR>

We are 2 of us, one technical and one non-technical, trying to build a web app (the idea for this app has been validated by many people so that's why we are now building it). The technical guy is moonlighting so cannot spend enough time on our app. So we are looking to add 1 more technical member to the team. We have been searching for a while, but so far no luck. So, now we are considering putting up a post on HN to see if we can find a cofounder.
We want to know if any of you has found a cofounder through HN post. If yes - - can you share your experience? - what / how much information about your project did you share in your HN post? - any other suggestions you have for us?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> From my perspective (and it is a very, very small perspective, I'll probably get torn apart), it's very hard to find a co-founder, especially a technical co-founder, without knowing them in person.

You need a special set of circumstances for the stars to align:

* The person needs to want to be a co-founder with someone they have never met before (or have only exchanged a few emails with)

* They need to want to work on your idea (and be passionate about it)

* They need to be someone who either has a bunch of free time and or unemployed, and also would be willing to work for lower than average salary or equity (or both)

It ends up being a hard sell, or at the very least, limits the pool down tremendously. You need all 3 characteristics, so even if someone has 2 of the 3, you have to keep looking.

As for how much info to disclose about the project, I'd be pretty honest about it, at least giving the general idea, but maybe keeping the specifics to yourself. Most people won't drop everything they are doing just to steal your idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes!. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595472> Nobody wants to be the "sole developer" to an idea guy. So if you have built something show it. I got a couple of bites, tried a few people out. Stuck with 1 great co-founder and we're moving along.

It is incredibly encouraging to see someone else's commits. Good luck!</comment>


New Hydrogen Production Method Could Support Sustainable Fuel Creation - <AUTHOR> https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_682950_en.html <comment><AUTHOR> The article can be found here:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12831-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12831-0)</comment>


Patreon Has Become a Lifeline for Creators of Weird, Alternative Games - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804076/patreon-altgames-games-ooblets-kentucky-route-zero-crowdfunding-developers-indie <comment><USER2> It's a lifeline for a lot of creative work that people will support but where there's no expectation that _every_ content consumer can support it without transaction fees being insane and where advertising isn't a fit. Podcasts like Do By Friday, a wide variety of adult oriented artists, Youtubers who aren't viral, etc.

Patreon offers a way for people to use their money to say "I like what X is producing and I want to make it possible for them to keep making it available to the world."</comment>


Zelda: Link's Awakening: Kennel Glitch - <AUTHOR> http://artemis251.fobby.net/zelda/kennel/kennel.php <comment><USER2> Back in 1993 when this was released, in the pre gamefaqs era, I found a glitch where pausing the game while transitioning to then next screen would warp you all the way to the same position on the next screen. E.g. Leave screen on the left side, appear on next screen all the way to the left instead of the right side of the screen. This allowed you to break the game in all sorts of fun ways :)

I assume the internets have known about that glitch for a long time but it was really fun to feel like I had some secret trick as a kid that no one else had found.

<comment><USER3> That was actually mentioned in Nintendo Power volume 50, it's one of the most well-known and easy-to-perform video game glitches.

They also mentioned the Zelda 2 glitch where you could wrong-warp by jumping off the top of the screen and using the Fairy spell. You could get into a weird town that didn't exist, and if you left you were stuck in the middle of the ocean.

<comment><USER4> Oh good grief, that happened to me by accident once and I had no idea what was going on. I think I had to restart the game! Thank you for clearing up this mystery for eight-year-old me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can actually use this glitch for an ending warp to finish it in minutes: [http://www.speedrun.com/run/9me9l88z](http://www.speedrun.com/run/9me9l88z)

<comment><USER6> I was wondering whether that would be brought up - that link is actually to a friend's run, as far as I know he still holds the record for fastest finish of that game, although I don't think he actively tries to defend it anymore.

<comment><USER7> It still is the world record for Any%, yes. I'm surprised that a speedrun on an emulator is accepted though, but it seems most of the GBC runs are ran on an emulator.

<comment><USER8> Game capture from a gbc/GBA is not possible, without using a game boy player for the GameCube - hence the emulator is used so they can actually capture the run. Speedrun.com distributes the allowed emulators on their site so everyone is on a level playing field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who read the title as "Kernel Glitch"?

<comment><USER10> No, you are not. I also stumbled into Kennel Gulch before I actually figured out how to read again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Video showing "worlds" 0-2:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjOO2pkN9KU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjOO2pkN9KU)

</comment><comment><USER12> > This glitch _can_ permanently ruin a game file and, in the extreme case, > possibly even erase or damage your cartridge.

How can this glitch erase the ROM in a cartridge?

<comment><USER5> I doubt it's implying that. It's maybe possible that you could glitch the save data in a way that the game would crash or misbehave just from trying to read it, though, with no way to fix it short of discharging the save data somehow (I don't recall if gameboy games used battery backup or some kind of flash).

<comment><USER13> Game Boy games used a CR2016 or (later on) a CR2025 battery to maintain save data.

These are soldered in place, which makes replacing batteries rather annoying, though they're replaceable if you put in the effort.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately that trend didn't continue with the GBA, whose games tended to use semi-volatile memory chips that will die after enough time or read/writes. Many of my old GBA games won't hold a save longer than a day or two anymore, without any viable way to repair them. Too bad, so sad.

<comment><USER15> But hey on the bright side emulators for GBA and GBC are seemingly perfect and run on anything. If someone makes a Gameboy advance micro clone for emulators that is decent I would buy that in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER16> If you already have a GBA Micro, or other GBA, you can just get a Everdrive GBA: [http://krikzz.com/store/home/42-everdrive- gba-x5.html](http://krikzz.com/store/home/42-everdrive-gba-x5.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Found accidentally another glitch near the end of game, in the dungeon where you carry a big heavy metal ball you can throw around.

It ended up stuck on a wall, completely glitching the game. Reloading didn't help. My save was dead. I was devastated at the time :)

<comment><USER18> I got all the way to the end where you are supposed to open the egg, did the thing to open the egg, and it didn't open. I spent days going back through every dungeon to try to trigger it but never could. I couldn't bring myself to replay the game and hope it worked this time.

I got the game the same year it came out and still have never beaten it because of that. Sounds like it was just a super glitchy game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I played links awakening last year, and I hit this glitch by accident. I just turned my gameboy off though.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there any similar writeups of the fishing glitch where you get the fisherman to sit on the tree and then go fishing? That's one of the two I found as a kid. The other gave me some super item but I never could recreate it.

<comment><USER21> Didn't know about the fishing glitch, take it you mean this one?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocEh8PzoUOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocEh8PzoUOg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Vaguely related, I'm surprised Nintendo doesn't update the graphics on these games and re-release them for iOS, Switch, etc

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know if this works on virtual console?

<comment><USER24> I think most emulators have to simulate all the hardware, including the glitches as some game rely on them in order to work.

I wouldn't be surprise if most glitches discovered were also working on an emulator.

<comment><USER25> The useful features of hardware are emulated. The quirky edge cases, unused opcodes, and more esoteric features are often left out.

The programming oversights in the game logic will remain, but the behavior can sometimes vary when you get to the glitches that play around with memory in a way that they normally wouldn't.

<comment><USER26> I'd only add that for the GB there really aren't tons of quirky edges cases that you can avoid handling. The GB was around in the time when developers pretty much abused the hardware to get what they wanted, and the GB doesn't have tons of logic to emulate in the first place. That said, what you've described is 100% true about more advanced emulators.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Logo Story - <AUTHOR> http://blog.directededge.com/2009/08/10/the-logo-story/ <comment><USER2> Damn. And I was so looking forward to reading something about Turtles .. :)

Downvoted to zero, hmm .. Logo, the programming language. The virtual turtles. Teaching computer programming in the kindergarten .. Was it a stretch to expect this to be a part of shared programmers' folklore ?

<comment><USER3> I share your disappointment. Maybe a logo interpreter in F# [1] can cheer you up.

[1] <http://www.intellifactory.com/articles/LogoInterpreter.aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I told you to pick that logo, you didn't listen until Paul drew it. Either way, I think it's pretty easy to see that you've got a good logo if someone draws it to explain your company.

</comment><comment><USER5> how much did it run you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can understand the curiosity, but I don't think it's appropriate to state how much we paid for essentially a consulting service in a public forum.

<comment><USER5> yeah, figured it was coming.

I really hate when companies make you get a quote, since you don't know what the price will be for comparison purposes. The range is usually so big that you really don't know who you can afford. It can be from $99 to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

<comment><USER6> the prices largely depend on what these companies think you can afford.

<comment><USER7> Yes, the reason they don't state a price publicly is so they can segment the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heh, it looks bit like a groupoid (albeit PG version even more so)!

</comment><comment><USER9> That's a really cool story.</comment>


Show HN: Instantly improve the performance of (most) sites with one line of JS - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.mobify.com/

<comment><USER2> The conversions on this landing page are going to be close to zero. Not enough information about what it does, what the value is etc before trying to capture email address.

I would look to get a mini conversion rate optimization review ASAP.

Some things to look at: \- Switch over to the /features page as primary landing page \- change form fields to name, URL and email to reduce cognitive burden \- clearly state what value you get from submitting that form: "Enter your details to get a mobile version of your website"</comment>


Bookshelf.js: An ORM for Node.js with transactions, eager loading, promises - <AUTHOR> http://bookshelfjs.org

<comment><USER2> We've been using this in our app. So far it's been awesome. We've completely overhauled our server in a few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks really great! One thing really bothers me however: a dependency on all of Backbone. Pulling in a bunch a view-related code for an ORM has a certain code smell.

Is there any effort to modularize Backbone itself, so that Bookshelf can only depend on the model and collection pieces?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out! While the view/history/router related code should be okay just sitting there unused, I agree that does seem like a bit of a code smell. I know Jeremy has been against modularizing Backbone in the past, and there is something to be said about keeping everything packaged nicely together in a single file - though maybe something like this would change his mind.

It's definitely something I'll begin to look into a bit, possibly splitting up the Backbone components into a separate library specifically for Bookshelf, similar to lodash's custom build process. If you have any ideas for a good way to go about this, feel free to open a ticket.

<comment><USER4> Demis Bellot took a crack at modularizing jQuery, perhaps there is inspiration there: <https://github.com/mythz/jquip>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome! How does it compare with Sequel.js? <http://www.sequelizejs.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Bookshelf only focuses on the relational aspect of the ORM, sitting on top of an full featured underlying query builder, <http://knexjs.org>. It handles eager/nested eager loading properly, as you'd see in something like Ruby's DataMapper or Active Record. It also defines relationships with named methods on the model, which allows the creation of really dynamic relationship with different constraints, etc.

It also has support for handling database transactions, which seemed to be missing in any other libraries I had looked at, and also doesn't force you into a particular way of doing other things like validations or typecasting (though it does provide hooks/events for handling both).

The ORM is also just a single ~900 line file that takes a lot of inspiration from Backbone as being a library you can easily read through and understand, and focus on the important parts of database interaction, rather than trying to provide the kitchen sink.

<comment><USER6> Single 900 line file does not seem like a pro - non-modular code is a con

<comment><USER7> I feel the same. Why would it be a good thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks awesome! Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, you might also like to checkout the underlying query builder library at <http://knexjs.org>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a port of Eloquent from Laravel [0], which is brilliant. I haven't used this, but if it's a faithful port it'll be awesome.

[0] <https://twitter.com/laravelphp/status/333971780886728705>

<comment><AUTHOR> The underlying query builder - <http://knexjs.org> \- is much more of a 1-to-1 port. Bookshelf shares a number of similar features with eloquent, such as the process of defining relations, and handling eager/nested eager loading, but it also draws a lot of inspiration (and code) from the Model & Collection patterns of Backbone.js.

I owe a lot of thanks to Taylor for writing Eloquent, he has been really helpful with any questions I've had in putting this together.

<comment><USER10> I love Eloquent and I love Backbone. It's awesome to see that you've harmonized the two for Node. I've only used SQL with Node once, and wrote raw queries for the most part. I'm looking forward to refactoring everything to use this.

Nice work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> wow this looks great!</comment>


Mainframes Are Having a Moment - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/mainframes-programming-language-cobol-news-coronavirus <comment><USER3> I used to work at an environmental law firm in downtown Manhattan and accounting and other core financial systems were running on a VAX OpenVMS mainframe, and the document creation and storage was on PCs over a Token Ring, Banyan VINES network. The DOD was using VINES at the time. Memories of playing DOOM in 1994 downloaded from an FTP server somewhere while working the night shift to make backups on huge tape cartridges. The VAX system was pretty reliable and easy to deal with IIRC. A good thing from a hardware/help desk angle is that you didn't really need to troubleshoot terminals; they broke (keys or monitor) and required replacing. The mainframe was in the climate- controlled room, all in one place for any hardware servicing. I think Token Ring primarily was replaced because cheap, twisted-pair wiring made Ethernet less expensive. Token Ring had these twist-on bulky connectors. In a way we almost went there with Chromebooks basically being pared-down PCs and being served by a virtual mainframe, the cloud ("Spenser Confidential" movie "Give me the cloud scene" is hilarious).

<comment><USER4> VAX's were minicomputers, not mainframes.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000) "The VAX 9000, code named Aridus or Aquarius, was a family of supercomputer and mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA)."

<comment><USER4> I never heard of that model. I suspect it probably wasn't very successful because DEC started to move to the Alpha architecture not many years later.

I worked with a lot of VAXen back in the day but I never heard anyone refer to them as "mainframes".

<comment><USER5> Aye, not common and for many will be a surprise as mention VAX and the DecVAX workstations and as you say, midrange setups spring to mind. I did some C work upon them late 80's and was very impressed and some profiling tool that was a whole new experience of joy.

Will add, you could win a lot of proposition bets that Dec made a VAX supercomputer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mainframes have been having a moment. Or, perhaps more accurately, certain enterprises are finally waking up to the fact that firing all those mainframers wasn't the best idea for the long-term. The current problem isn't the lack of interest of availability of training; both would be there if it weren't for the fact that enterprises are more interested in having their code written by consulting companies in India than by domestic employees.

<comment><USER7> It is not only lay offs it is also retirements. And the pressure is mounting with baby boomers gone soon. I was once in a discussion taking over the maintenance of a system and the picture was grim. The crew running the system was so thin it was hard to imagine them having the time handing it over. Besides they barely understood all the details as the system had been build by people 30 years ago all gone a long time ago. A big bowl of spaghetti in a core part of their enterprise. We decided not to try to take this on - <USER2> much risk.

<comment><USER8> I was at a talk about mainframe security recently where the state of play with one company was, there were three users in their admins group for the mainframe, two had retired, and the third was past retirement age...

When you combine retirements with decades of under-documented code doing critical functions, it's not a recipe for good long term success...

<comment><USER9> I dunno; rewriting it in some shit tier EC2 FunNewLang framework that changes every year doesn't sound like a recipe for long term success either.

When I look at how mainframes work, and how "clouds" work, I wonder at how imbecilic IBM management (or one of their competitors) must have been to not capture that value in the first place.

<comment><USER8> There is a middle ground between those two extremes of course.

I'm not surprised at the mainframe's lack of success at all, the barriers to entry are extreme, meaning there's an inevitable lack of activity.

I've worked in environments which had mainframes deployed and even as an employee it was inordinately difficult to get any access to them.

Combine that with IBM's "enterprise" sales process and it's not a mystery that they lost the fight to attract newer systems...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMO the hard part isn't learning COBOL -- that's just another programming language. It's learning the whole operating environment that comes with it -- mainframes. Stuff like JCL, EBCDIC, PDS. I did this for a year or so back in 1999. It felt very ancient back then. If you invest your time in gaining expertise with these technologies, you are not doing your career any favors.

<comment><USER11> Depends on your point of reference. If you buy into the ecology you could build a sane career where experience actually meant something instead of being level set every two years by the new shiny tech stack that's going to save the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this is just an IBM PR piece. It ticks all the boxes: quotes from IBM customers, quotes from IBM staff, mentions the "Master the Mainframe" contest. You can tell because when it says "mainframe" it doesn't mean "any large computer", it means "Something descended from the IBM 360".

<comment><USER4> Yes, because that's what the word "mainframe" means today, simply because all other machine architectures that were considered mainframes are now extinct.

I'm not saying it's not IBM PR, though.

<comment><USER13> Unisys's ClearPath series are considered to be mainframes (or so says Wikipedia). The most recent ClearPath Dorado model was introduced in 2015.

As for the article: This may be what Paul Graham called a "submarine".

<comment><USER14> Unisys represents two different mainframe families - those descending from Univac/Sperry 1100 and those descending from the Burroughs mainframes. Both are purely emulated on x64 these days. Personally I think the latter are especially interesting, much more so than IBM!

IBM is really going with whatever positive publicity they can muster trying to obscure the profoundly awful age discrimination that they're guilty of. It's brutally ironic that the same people who are preaching "young people need to do mainframe" are the same who are aggressively ditching their own senior, experienced, expensive mainframe people.

<comment><USER15> There are more surviving mainframe families than just IBM and Unisys:

\- Groupe Bull still supports GCOS mainframes (descended from General Electric GECOS)

\- NEC still supports ACOS mainframes (also descended from General Electric GECOS, but a different fork from Bull's) – only sold/used in Japan now, although in past decades NEC did attempt to sell them outside of Japan (not sure if anyone bought them though)

\- Fujitsu still supports ICL VME mainframes (still used by some UK government agencies) and BS2000/OSD (still used in Germany mainly)

\- I think some Fujitsu MSP and Hitachi VOS3 systems survive in Japan. (These are less than 100% compatible forks of IBM MVS.) They also used to exist in some other countries–e.g. here in Australia, although I doubt any are left here.

<comment><USER13> I notice that you repeatedly say "still supports". Do any of them still _manufacture and sell_ those lines?

<comment><USER15> Fujitsu announced new GS21 mainframe models in 2018 [1]. (GS21 is partially IBM compatible at hardware and software level, mainly survives in Japan.)

And new BS2000 mainframe models in October 2019 [2]. (BS2000 is partially IBM compatible at instruction set level, but the OS is incompatible with any IBM OS; low end models are actually x86 servers running Linux with software emulation of the 390 instructions, while high end models have S/390-compatible CPUs.)

Atos (who own Groupe Bull) uploaded a brochure to their website in October last year [3] advertising their GCOS7/GCOS8 mainframes. The mainframes are actually Intel Xeon Windows servers running the legacy mainframe architecture under a software emulator. However, while in principle the software emulator could run on any Windows server, they only license it to run on their own hardware.

[1] [https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press- re...](https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press- releases/2018/0417-01.html)

[2] [https://www.fujitsu.com/emeia/about/resources/news/press- rel...](https://www.fujitsu.com/emeia/about/resources/news/press- releases/2019/emeai-20191015-new-fujitsu-bs2000-se-infrastructure.html)

[3] [https://atos.net/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/BullSequana_M_BR...](https://atos.net/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/BullSequana_M_BROCHURE_en.pdf)

<comment><USER4> It doesn't sound like any of that amounts to a still living architecture like the Z series with its own silicon still under active development. I wouldn't consider mere software emulation or an IBM compatible offshoot to represent an extant independent mainframe architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The surge in demand is being driven almost entirely by state unemployment systems. Most of these systems haven't seen a surge in unemployment claims since the 2009 recession and haven't had to change the underlying rules governing eligibility in even longer. Once the systems are patched and/or the surge in new claims subsides, 90% of this sudden demand for "Cobalt programmers" will evaporate. It's one thing for retired mainframe programmers to come out of retirement and work as consultants for a few months, it's quite another to start changing CS curricula nationwide along with launching mainframe bootcamps for career changers. I'd urge caution.

<comment><USER17> Whenever you see "urgent need" in headlines it's too late to profit from this crisis.

If anything learn COBOL in about 10 years for the next crisis.

<comment><USER18> Maybe the 2038 problem?

<comment><USER19> To be fair, Linux kernel devs have been working hard to solve the problem for years, with progress coming in every new kernel version. The works required at the kernel upstream is almost completed [0]. Now the ball moves to libc, and the progress is optimistic.

Indeed, what happens to those already deployed legacy systems and programs are another story.

[0] [https://lwn.net/Articles/776435/](https://lwn.net/Articles/776435/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> COBOL is living proof of the power of incumbency.

Once technology is entrenched, it becomes self-sufficient and very, very difficult to replace. I remember when mainframe/COBOL apps were being re- written for the client/server era, often using tools like Tuxedo/c++ for the backend and Visual Basic for the front-end. Where are those re-writes now? (Probably replaced a couple of times again, where the COBOL-remainers are still in place.)

I think the days of higher-paying COBOL gigs are still ahead of us. When the greybeards actually go away, there will be a strong need to fill.

<comment><USER21> COBOL might just be software properly amortized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mainframes - the original cloud computers.

I started on mini-mainframes but then worked mostly with networks of PCs. The old mainframes guys used to say 'just you wait the pendulum will swing back to centralized computing'. In the age of cloud computing they were right, and those mainframes are still there too.

</comment><comment><USER23> COBOL in 100 seconds: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d7-etf- wNI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d7-etf-wNI)

</comment><comment><USER24> Unemployment applications are fairly small structured text records requiring some rather simple logic to process. I believe a single server built on a most powerful x86 CPU available today running an MS SQL Server instance (or Postrges perhaps, but I don't have experience with it) is more than enough to process all the unemployment applications on the whole fereakin planet. Why do they insist on using an ancient mainframe? That sounds fun but bizarrely irrational.

</comment><comment><USER25> is the inertia of rewriting these systems in a modern stack so great that it's cheaper to keep finding COBOL specialists forever? why not just sit down and rewrite these systems?

<comment><USER26> COBOL is unstructured. It doesn't even have functions. When you've got some million+ line tangled mass that has all kinds of undocumented behavior, it's really better just to add more duct tape and punt it off to the poor bastard who actually has to fix it in 20 years.

<comment><USER27> Since 1985 that COBOL can be structured, and since 2002 object oriented as well, with the latest ISO update being done in 2014

Besides compiling to native code, there are compilers that target JVM and CLR as well.

<comment><USER28> > there are compilers that target JVM and CLR

So could you wrap it and slowly add new features and replace pieces with Java code over time, using JVM for interop?

<comment><USER27> Yes, it is possible, for example check Visual Cobol from Micro Focus.

[https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual- cobol/overv...](https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual- cobol/overview)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>