EPA to Rescind Methane Regulations for Oil and Gas - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-to-rescind-methane-regulations-for-oil-and-gas-11597051802 <comment><USER2> Dr. Peter Carter, an IPCC expert reviewer, provides one of the most concise and sobering summaries of the trajectory of our planet as methane and carbon emissions continue to rise: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa13KrOvE2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa13KrOvE2s)

It's one of the first things I think about when I read articles like this that demonstrate that not only are the powers that be not taking climate change seriously, they are actively accelerating it for profit.

<comment><USER3> If you are one of the powers that be, and probably are of the ruling generation with 20-40 years left to live, why wouldn't you accelerate your gain? These people in positions of power don't care about the long term, because they will be dead by then, but will be able to realize that short term gain in their limited lifetime.

The only way to tackle climate change is to force politicians to sell all private assets and ban them from anything but investing in an index fund for the remainder of their life. Harsh, but public servants should really hold that name literally in my opinion. The science and engineering on climate change has been solved for decades. Whether or not we act in time is a political question, not a technical one.

<comment><USER4> I like your desire to restrain politician's incentives, & watching folks like Joe Biden takes these kind of steps (selling all his stocks thirty years ago) is a good thing to do.

At the same time it seems wholly insufficient. Whether Betsy DeVos has stocks is not really that relevant, when she still is going to act on behalf of her ultra-rich clan & other extremely well-monied interests.

I'm all for raising standards but I think there's a huge continent of politician who exist only to be bad guys, & some large large amount of people seem to love them for their wretchedness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't the name "EPA" increasingly inaccurate?

Shouldn't it now be called something like the _Oil & Gas Promotion Agency_ (OGPA)?

<comment><USER6> The EPA seemed to do a poor job even under the Obama administration.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2015/08/10/431223703...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2015/08/10/431223703/epa-says-it-released-3-million-gallons-of- contaminated-water-into-river)

<comment><USER7> Furthering their original point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This will be interesting for the LNG exports to Europe

The EU commission is looking at associated methane emissions from natural gas imports, so there is a risk that the US may very well shut off their access to EU markets, or be subject to taxation or similar

[https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/commission-open-views- methane...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/commission-open-views-methane- strategy-2020-jul-08_en)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's very hard to understand why the current administration has such an urge to roll back environmental regulations. I grew up in a time when rivers were red or green depending on what type of leather the factory upstream was processing at the time. The only fish you could see were dead. Breathing in cities was hard. Environmental regulation is a big success story that improved the lives of countless people while companies could still make enormous profits. Why try to roll that back? If anything we should get even more clean.

<comment><USER10> > It's very hard to understand why the current administration has such an urge > to roll back environmental regulations.

No, it's very easy. Environmental regulations cost money. Lots of money. It's much more profitable to keep these externalities.

<comment><USER5> > _"Environmental regulations cost money. Lots of money."_

That's a narrow-minded view. Sure, environmental regulations cost _oil and gas companies_ money.

But this fails to consider the external costs to society: increased healthcare costs and reduced life expectancy due to air and water pollution, future costs of global heating including property damage to coastal cities from rising sea levels, agricultural regions becoming less productive, etc.

Secondly, reducing dependence on fossil fuels (many of which are imported, even in America) will improve energy security and reduce energy costs in the long term. Great economic benefits, as well as environmental ones.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but oil companies have the narrow view. External costs to society: they care not. Any cost they can pass on to you, they will.

<comment><USER12> Those long term costs will be a political disadvantage for liberals, as they will give the GOP plenty of talking points about how they want to take away good honest coal mining jobs. This is the long game in action. Force liberals to make the hard decisions to save the planet, then completely own them with propaganda about those decisions.

It's a winning strategy. Not only in the US, but across most of the Anglo sphere. As an added bonus it provides huge payoffs to billionaires at the cost of the poor and middle class.

<comment><USER5> _"Not only in the US, but across most of the Anglo sphere."_

Not in the UK. Coal use has plummeted by 84% in 5 years (84 million tonnes in 2014 to 8 million tonnes in 2019), while renewable energy has been hugely expanded. All under "right wing" (Conservative) governments.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/09/is- this-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/09/is-this-the-end- for-king-coal-in-britain)

<comment><USER12> Coal use has collapsed in the US too entirely for economic reasons, but it doesn't stop the politicians from making ads about how liberals are coming for your jobs because they hate your way of life and airing them constantly in rural areas.

<comment><USER13> The Right was smart to latch onto coal. It will never come back, so they can complain about it forever. We all know that they love to sell nostalgia.

And their target demographic isn't too interested in facts, so they'll never learn the reality that it was deregulation lead to a natural gas boom, which lead to the free market dealing the death blow to coal. So they can keep selling evil job killing regulations as the reason for the decline of everything great in this country.

Renewables get the headlines, but those coal plants are mostly being replaced with natural gas ones. The media reports "renewables overtake coal for the first time," which gives the false impression that solar and wind are displacing coal. But that's not what's really happening, which is that those former coal plants now burn natural gas because it's cheaper.

<comment><USER5> > _" Renewables get the headlines, but those coal plants are mostly being > replaced with natural gas ones."_

Not true in the UK. Natural gas use has also declined, albeit only slightly, in recent years. There has also been a net loss of capacity in the past decade as more old NG plants have closed than new ones built.

Meanwhile, coal, which produced 42% of all UK electricity as recently as 2012, has almost gone to zero while renewables (the bulk of which is offshore wind) are at 37% - and growing every year.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I thought it was clear that my comments were specific to the USA, where 103 out of 121 coal plants decommissioned since 2011 have been replaced with natural gas plants.

[https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Natural-Gas-Has-Replaced- Ov...](https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Natural-Gas-Has-Replaced-Over-100-US- Coal-Plants-In-The-Last-Decade.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess the best way to put out a fire is to add more fire.

Methane is way worse as a greenhouse gas.

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://archive.is/ixNen](https://archive.is/ixNen)

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone have a link to an actual writeup of _which_ of these regulations are being rescinded? It's not clear from what's visible publicly on this WSJ article to a non-subscriber.

</comment><comment><USER17> Reading this after a megastorm just blew through my town in iowa

<comment><USER18> I'm in Moline and about to have our turn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not trying to make a political statement here but more about people and what they care about in general. Its amazing to me that trump's support is still at 40-45% in the country.

The people living in the same country can see things unfolding in front of their eyes and make completely different decisions on them is fascinating to me.

When I talk to my friends who are staunch trump supporters, they give me some fox news platitudes about him and Biden. But when I talk about individual issues and the things he has done all of them agree that its bad or really bad. I went down the list about 20-25 of them and did not get a single pushback. However they still vote for him. The human mind is a fascinating and complicated thing.

<comment><USER20> How many of those things materially hurt them in the short term? I assume most conservatives don't care about an issue unless they themselves are going to affected by it in the immediate term.

<comment><USER3> >I assume most conservatives don't care about an issue unless they themselves are going to affected by it in the immediate term

Unless that issue that doesn't affect these conservatives at all has something to do with what a woman can do with her body, or having a different skin tone, or worshiping a different god, that is. Rules for thee but not for me is practically a tenet of conservatism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The majority of politicians and voters didn't do enough to heed scientific warnings & prepare for an upcoming pandemic.. Similarly, we are not doing enough to mitigate climate change. Unfortunately the consequences will likely be much worse if we don't learn the lesson quickly..

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminder that your "regulations" are often my "protections".

</comment><comment><USER23> When we/you choose lockdown this is what you choose.

And it's only just beginning.

This is going to get boring real quick, complaints should have been in April or even January.

Environment/disability/healthcare will all be cut and stay cut for years no mater who is in charge.

</comment><comment><USER24> Terraforming: 80% complete...

</comment><comment><USER25> I suggest changing the headline to "outgoing administration continues to sabotage government for next administration as popularity continues to decline during incompetent response to viral pandemic".

Another example of something that was so important they waited until less than 3 months before the election to do it. It hardly needs saying, but this is devastatingly bad environmental and climate policy.

<comment><USER26> Clearly this whole situation is political but I'd make 2 points.

1\. You might be surprised at the election outcome. 2\. The headline is based on the article, not what people think it should be.

<comment><USER27> I can only have my confidence in the U.S. voting public renewed or absolutely shattered this November.

<comment><USER28> Even the outcome I would prefer isn't going to come anywhere near renewing my confidence. If it happens at all, it will only because a catastrophe made the incumbent's incompetence affect some of his supporters directly -- many of whom will still, in fact, remain supporters.

Even before that, enormous numbers of people were harmed, but they weren't among his supporters. Indeed, for them, the negative outcomes were the desired effect. Even if they lose in the fall, they will continue to prefer to insult, harass, and even defend murder if it's of the people they don't like.

November won't even begin to fix what's wrong. It began long before 2016, and my biggest fear will be that come 2024 they'll elect somebody who is not only hateful, but also competent, and not saddled with a crisis immediately before the election.

<comment><USER27> November will not fix what's wrong, it will _begin_ to fix what's wrong.

<comment><USER29> It will prevent further backsliding. It would take 20 years or more of significant effort to undo all the damage caused. Look at the ramifications of other "bad" presidents.

This comment works for both sides of the political game, even though I only believe it works for one

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Trump is like a caricature of anarchy capitalism

</comment><comment><USER31> >It's very hard to understand why

As republican former secretary of the interior James Watt put it, "Why worry about the environment when the second coming is at hand?"

<comment><USER32> That's not even close to the Republican mainstream now though.

The "Christian Right" is a relic that died during the first Dubya administration.

It's nothing more than a boogeyman for progressives now.

<comment><USER33> Then why is DT still talking about how biden is an ungodly man who is going to, and this is an exact quote, "hurt god".

<comment><USER32> He's a 74 year old speaking to other 70+ year olds there.

Talk to some younger Republicans, even Christian ones, who aren't in your social filter bubble.

The whole Falwell family has long been disgraced and ignored.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority#1988](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority#1988) If you scroll down and do some followup reading you'll see that his plans to revive the organization failed miserably.

<comment><USER34> Have you looked at who's in power lately? There are a lot of ~70 year olds in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. It seems relevant what they think.

<comment><USER32> Have you looked at the demographics around COVID-19 deaths?

They'll all be gone soon enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Edit: I stand corrected.

<comment><USER36> Biden's website lists as his plan: "Requiring aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and gas operations." [https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/](https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/)

<comment><USER37> I read the first half and it seems very weak to me. The only actual climate point is unspecified executive orders and a plan to get carbon neutral by 2050 (about 40 years too late and we'll after the end of his 5th term assuming he does that well).

After that, it's road and bridge building and protecting communities of colour.

What will Democrats (this needs to come from Congress, the presidency is basically powerless to make real change here) actually do?

(edit, finished reading, just more about unspecified investment, workers rights, and unmatched American innovation).</comment></comment></comment>


Moscow Deploys Facial Recognition to Spy on Citizens in Streets - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/moscow-deploys-facial-recognition-to-spy-on-citizens-in-streets <comment><USER2> Now they just have to get _enhance_ to work, and it'll be just like the action movies!</comment>


Funding my work on Drupal 8 - <AUTHOR> http://alex.vit-al.com/node/15

<comment><USER2> What's really cool, is it's the first time that gittip has demonstrated that people can raise this level of money this quickly. The equivalent of ~$12k/yr in only a few days. With those numbers it might become a legitimate alternative to things like kick starter even for things that are more project oriented.

</comment><comment><USER3> This really gets me excited, Gittip is turning out to be a GREAT platform for supporting people. I'm hoping we can help Alex meet his goal to continue developing Drupal full time.</comment>


First Experimental Flight of India's Launch Vehicle GSLV Mk-III Successful - <AUTHOR> http://isro.org/pressrelease/scripts/pressreleasein.aspx?Dec18_2014

<comment><USER2> This is a good first step. The GSLV has been notoriously difficult to get right for ISRO.

Next step is to get the Cryogenic Upper stage to actually provide the critical thrust that will finally power it into a GesSyncronous orbit. On this mission it was bolted on but passive.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm happy to see other countries are advancing their space capability, and hope this trend continues.

<comment><USER4> The only down side is that a country that can launch a payload into orbit, can launch that payload into an orbit that intersects the planet (effectively making it an ICBM). You really want such countries to be run by reasonably stable governments (I know you don't get to choose but still). I think India having this capability is great, Pakistan? Not so much, Iran? Probably even less excited, and North Korea? Not excited at all.

<comment><USER5> _The only down side is that a country that can launch a payload into orbit, can launch that payload into an orbit that intersects the planet (effectively making it an ICBM)._

This is exactly what the original space race was all about. All the launch platforms up until Saturn were for nuclear launch.

<comment><USER4> Of course, and the trick is monitor payload size, getting 500kg into Low Earth Orbit doesn't help your nuclear ambitions at all, but getting 5,000kg into LEO does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is the ultimate goal of GSLV? What kind of crew vehicle will it ultimately launch?

<comment><USER7> ultimate goal of GSLV itself is to become the cost reliable option for geostationary launches. until a few years back, India and other nations had to rely on extremely expensive (comparatively) options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those animated flag gifs don't do much to contribute to their credibility.

<comment><USER9> Animated flag gifs are unfortunately a part of many Indian websites, especially in many research and/or government organizations. Don't let them make you think any less of the credibility, its just a cultural thing.</comment></comment>


A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/108/7/2693.full <comment><USER2> It sounds like the statistical basis for this: [http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! And I'd also add my most favorite PG essay: [http://paulgraham.com/determination.html](http://paulgraham.com/determination.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to interpret this without a clear sense of what is meant by "self- control".

<comment><USER4> Probably the same meaning as the Big 5 trait of "conscientiousness": a high dopamine level. These kind of studies basically find that groups with a lot of people in them with undiagnosed ADD/ADHD function poorly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does it have to do with self-control if we are only measuring our willingness to submit to being controlled?

</comment><comment><USER6> well, I'm hosed.</comment>


Homeland Security subpoenas Twitter for data breach finder's account - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/homeland-security-subpoenas-twitter-for-data-breach-finders-account/ <comment><USER2> What is the remit of the U.S.'s Dept of Homeland Security? How does it relate to the Department of Justice and its agencies, FBI and ATF (and others?)? What is the oversight and limit on DHS's power?

Remember that DHS is much more than immigration. It contains FEMA, the Secret Service, TSA, the Coast Guard, and more. If I understand correctly, DHS's focus was supposed to be terrorism and, apparently, border security. However, as I've posted before, it seems to claim a broader jurisdiction:[0]

 _As the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE is responsible for the enforcement of laws that promote the legitimate movement of people, goods and currency in domestic and foreign transactions._

That quote is related to DHS taking down a website involved in prostitution. In the OP, DHS is involved in data breaches. Neither of those actions seem related to terrorism or border security.

The quoted definition is very broad; it includes almost everything that every business or individual does. It's the nature of bureaucracies to try to expand their power, but I wonder how this overlaps or competes with the Department of Justice, if DHS has the same legal oversight as DOJ, and if it's political - DHS seems more willing to carry out the President's policy than DOJ, which has an obligation to remain independent.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/nyregion/raid-of- rentboy-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/nyregion/raid-of-rentboy-an- escort-website-angers-gay-activists.html)</comment>


The future of technology: why Turkish delight beats the nanobots - <AUTHOR> http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2008/06/the-future-of-i.html

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, solving the small problems well will never be as sexy as futzing around on the big ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> I's happening. I'm not so old, I'd say maybe 10 years of programming, and in this time things changed a lot. Maybe I just progressed from making my own buttons in pascal to using libraries, but now I look at what a beginner programmer can do with the right tools and it's way beyond what I could. Part of it is the internet. I'm sure there was always a barcode library around, but now it's only a matter of googling "barcode library". Also widespread garbage collection, web interfaces, open source... The craft of programming is getting better by the year.

</comment><comment><USER4> Damn it, now I really want to eat Turkish delight. Haven't had those things in years (for reasons I shall rediscover after the first one).

Luckily I am living in the ethnic enclave of Copenhagen.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks to this article I finally looked up Turkish Delight in Wikipedia. Turns out it's not sliced beef as I had assumed.

You learn something new every day.

<comment><USER6> Turkish delights are awesome. I like them with nuts, almonds especially (pistachio delights are good too). Back home they are traditionally given to people if you are visiting, for weddings, deaths, etc.

But as with every desert, don't eat too much of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's what you get from companies that don't understand the value of experience.</comment>


Startup that eliminates resumes and cover letters in the hiring process. - <AUTHOR> http://www.employify.me

<comment><USER2> I signed up, but am left wondering what they are doing. Their landing page is all about telling people about them, but why would I when I have no idea what they are going to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback! I am the founder and I will be sure to change the description to be more informative. What we do is provide a way for job seekers to apply for jobs without a resume or writing cover letters. This process is inefficient and outdated. Instead we make the process more effective and insightful, by even giving you an actual taste of the job before you apply. Good that you signed up, because now you can actually find out the way we do this when we launch. Again, I am sorry that it wasn't clear from the first instance.</comment></comment>


Code iOS Apps in OCaml - <AUTHOR> http://psellos.com/ocaml/

<comment><USER2> OCaml is a highly underappreciated language. The biggest problem is the haphazard syntax, but if you can get over that, it's really a joy to use for application programming. You get the strongly-typed, type-inferred, functional aspects of Haskell, but without the drawbacks of laziness (for example, you can safely do IO outside the IO monad, and space leaks are less common) and with a simpler type system. There are no null pointers, and coupled with exhaustiveness checks in pattern matching, you frequently find that "if it compiles, it works". The compiler is a simple non-optimizing compiler, but it's more mature than, for example, that of Go (especially in the GC), so it beats Go in performance.

<comment><USER3> OCaml's largest problems, IMO, are:

1\. Global interpreter-lock, and the effect that has on the ability to write multi-threaded programs.

2\. False negative proof, the same issue Haskell has. The fact that it's "had its chance" to catch on and hasn't done so marks it as a failure (or "not production ready") in the eyes of people who make decisions.

Scala has better odds than Ocaml and Haskell for this reason alone.

3\. The perception that there's a lack of libraries relative to, say, the JVM. I say "perception" because Ocaml has bindings to leverage the C libraries. However, it doesn't have the Java libraries, and those are proving to be an important asset even in un-Javay languages like Clojure.

On Scala, since I'm resigned to the fact that it is more likely to win (and find I like the language a lot) the unresolved question in my mind is: _is Scala an acceptable ML?_ I like Scala a lot and I'm leaning toward "Yes", but I haven't worked with Scala on something big enough to have a fully formed opinion there.

4\. (Small one.) The name. I would like it just as much if it were called FishGuts, but names matter in adoption. I think Ocaml's a fine name, but I'm weird.

<comment><USER4> I do not think Scala is an ML. The use of the word acceptable and indeed restricting it to an ML derivative loses the point of what Scala is supposed to be. Scala is supposed to be something different: a successful melding of OOP and functional. And it is the best at that I have seen. It succeeds on this better than the next biggest contender: F#, which is the most acceptable ML, IMO. F# is more typically functional, using the usual Hindley Milner Inference and sharing a core with OCaml but with significant whitespace. So it can be very succinct. Typically functional idioms like algebraic data types, Piping, point free, currying and combinators is more natural to F# than Scala's more OOP way. I prefer F# to Scala but that is merely a subjective preference.

There are a number of things that Scala does naturally that are cumbersome in other languages because of how it manages to meld a powerful combination of orthogonal features. To use Scala as just another functional language is to miss its power. Those who criticize OOP have not used a language that does it right. Abstractly, in a simplified categoric setting, we can consider OOP (objects as coalgebras) and FP (algebraic data types) as duals of each other. A proper unification of the concepts gives something more powerful than either. I think Scala comes the closest. Sure you can be 100% functional in it, or replicate Java but to call it one or the other is to make the same mistake as to say that light is both a wave and a particle and think you understand what that means.

<comment><USER3> Brilliant synopsis. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OCaml would be my main and only language if it had real concurrency ... but I'll definitely have to give this a try.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a Haskell equivalent?</comment>


Rails/Django/PHP/etc. developer needed for a medically related web startup. - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
I'm Kyro Beshay, and I've paired up with a fellow news.yc'er Dustin Curtis in hopes of pursuing a startup. We are both aspiring entrepreneurs who are also very interested in the medical field. Thus, our idea is a medically based web service, and we're looking for a developer.
I will handle all of the business/logistical/creative aspects, and will also continue to pickup programming to aid the developer, and Dustin is a very talented designer who will design and code the front-end. Examples of Dustin's designs can be seen at http://www.foreigncookie.com , http://www.itsalltaken.com , http://www.quarkfactor.com and app.itsalltaken.com/index.php
We're looking for a Rails/Django/PHP/etc. developer to become a cofounder of a potentially awesome startup that, we think, can revolutionize healthcare. We know that the news.yc community is full of charismatic, talented, and smart people, and we're hoping to spark interest in you. To be a cofounder, you must be able to communicate well, be incredibly motivated, be creative, be open to opposing suggestions, and have all of the other characteristics that make a great leader. Those who lack a taste for sushi need not apply.
We're two funny, smart, creative guys who genuinely want to change healthcare and help people.
If interested, email me at: firstname.lastname@example.com or chat me up on yahoo/aol: hybridxaos, just don't ask me what I'm wearing or to webcam.
Hope to hear from you soon, Kyro and Dustin.

<comment><USER2> You might say where you're located, or hope to be in the near future.

<comment><USER3> California.

<comment><USER4> Bay Area?

<comment><USER3> Yup!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My god, Dustin is a wonderful designer. Your work is beautiful. Good luck.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, good luck guys... send me an email/google chat invitation if you want to talk some time, now is a great time to be getting into the medical/biotech field.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are you selling to consumers or to doctors/hospitals?

<comment><USER3> It's consumer-oriented, with a doctor/hospital component.

<comment><USER7> Selling to doctors/hospitals will be very hard work, even if you're from that background. I wish you the best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good Luck Guys!

</comment><comment><USER9> beautiful design. I wish I could help =[

</comment><comment><USER10> Med 2.0?</comment>


Hire Literally Anyone - <AUTHOR> http://arches.io/2016/01/hire-literally-anyone/ <comment><USER2> "Growing" people is totally doable.

I worked at a company that couldn't find DBAs in the late 90s for a reasonable salary. They would pluck kids too smart for call center work and put them in database apprenticeships. They deal with support cases, do drudge work fixing data problems cause by one of the applications, investigate chargebacks, etc. 4/6 that worked for me are all high end tech folks now.

Another example was a .gov stuck with secretaries rendered obsolete by MS Office. They offered training and transitioned many to IT roles, mostly in training, sysadmin and business analyst roles. Most of them did great, one I knew 15 years ago as a junior training person is now a director of a big erp implementation.

<comment><USER3> As a DBA I think if you have an installation of considerable size you really absolutely need one of those high salaried people. The rest - sure have juniors. But there is a reason people with a lot of experience demand a lot and that's because all of the little things we know make up for a lot of improvements and help when things go bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like how he assumes that test engineering and project management are things you can just "fill someone's time with" until they learn something useful, like coding AND that someone will take 30k a year for. Really? In the valley, both test engineers and PMs for software eng projects are >90k/year positions.

I've done both of those jobs and they've both required me already knowing how to code, writing code, and having a CS degree. I think it's sort of ironic that he manages to devalue the very same non-software engineering skills he ostensibly says to value.

<comment><USER5> I find it pretty odd that you'd take a PM role that required you to write code and have a CS degree. It's definitely good if PMs _understand the technologies they 're working with_, but requiring they know how to code, and actually code, as well as have a CS degree seems like an employer who is actually looking to hire a developer and get a PM for free. Or vice versa.

<comment><USER4> Specifically, regarding the PM role, I took a TPM role. I like it much more than devops/sre(no pages) or test engineering(not as tedious). To be sure, there is also a non-technical PM on my team, as well as devs who do the product coding. While the role could be abused in the way you are talking about, I suspect that's company dependant, in much the same way the devops role can be abused.

The coding work I'd put in the "internal tools/analysis" category, such as writing some scripts which makes sense of the non-technical PMs' spreadsheets, browser plugins which deal with a favorite but slightly broken tool, log analysis, writing dashboards, or lightweight ETL.

The "knowing how to code" comes in use since a fair amount of the work depends on being able to understand what the devs have actually submitted and if they are flat out BSing or not on status, if a particular pattern/integration/library/tool would be a good fit, or having meaningful conversations about testing, scope, and technical roadblocks. The CS degree is useful for having credibility with the devs(shared culture goes a long way in getting work out of people who don't report to you) and not just being another PM having sprints and scrums and pigs and chickens and swimlanes (oh my!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, what a crock of shit. How did this get to the top of HN?

\- It seems the author has some problem with technical people but they never state what the problem is.

\- The author identifies that technical people aren't strong on "Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching, communication, attention to detail, organization, etc." What the shit? These are exactly what makes technical people so strong.

Maybe the author doesn't like the terse and functional communication method used by technical people; but if they can't handle technical people or understand why we talk that way then they are the problem.

\- "we need to value non-code skills much more highly and explicitly." They never explain why you want to hire janitors with mathematics intuition, or brain surgeons who can also tap dance; but if you're a programmer then you damn well better be extrovert! I don't care if you can code just give me a nice conversation about sports and cars. Idiot.

\- "But resumes, interviews, the whole hiring process is set up to focus on technical ability."

Actually a very tiny tiny portion of Silicon Valley hires on extreme programming challenges. The 99.999% rest of companies all over the rest of the world hire based on how much they like you in the interview - causing much frustration for people who are highly skilled and eager and ready to go for some job but got turned away because they were brogrammer enough.

\- "Hiring devs is really hard". What? How? Because there aren't enough? Because of some other problem? Just stating shit out of the ether doesn't make it true. A bit of introspection and elucidation would go a long way.

\- "Can't code? GTFO." If you were an engineer you'd be told to GTFO. If you were a pilot you'd be told to GTFO. If you were a surgeon you'd be told to GTFO. If you were an accountant you'd be told to GTFO.

The only places that don't tell you to GTFO are fast food and strip joints. I can see the author holds IT skills in high esteem.

This article is a pile of shit.

<comment><USER6> I read your post before the article so I expected something completely different. You're clearly reading this article through a very interesting lens.

You claim that "The author identifies that technical people aren't strong on "Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching, communication, attention to detail, organization, etc." What the shit? These are exactly what makes technical people so strong."

You may want to reread the first paragraph, because it AGREES with you:

"I have number of recent example of people . . . already SO strong on the non- code aspects of programming . . . Problem solving, teamwork, self-teaching, communication, attention to detail, organization, etc. "

Your other observations may have merit or they may be just as clouded as this one, so you don't seem like a very reliable source here.

<comment><USER7> I got the impression from the article, like the parent post, that the author thinks these skills are more prevalent outside of tech. Why else would he suggest hiring for this above all else? Does he think that it's impossible to get people that are BOTH good communicators and solid engineers? These people aren't unicorns! I'd say the vast majority of coders I've worked with are totally fine at soft skills.

If the author thinks that technical people can be equally strong in these people skills, then why are they advocating explicitly hiring non-technical people for the job? It's not like there's a scarcity of engineers that aren't total mouth-breathers. Just hire engineers that also happen to have good communication skills. You don't have to go to some absurd extreme of hiring incompetent people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Teaching people to develop software is hard. It requires commitment. In the framework author is describing if those people want to succeed they will not be able to do it part time while doing non-technical work for you.

Also rubber ducking with the actual developer takes a lot of developer's time (and it's hard) - so the organization will take a big productivity hit if developers work half time as programming teachers. This is not realistic. Basically - non technical people must work extra hours (not have a life) with people who work full time training them to succeed. And the programming camps do this - but most non technical people feel the effort is not worth it.

<comment><USER9> I'll offer a counter-argument that teaching non-technical skills is at least as hard as teaching basic development skills. You just generally get more years of "free passes" to develop non-technical skills (ex., negotiation, conflict resolution, self-management, etc.) on the job than you do if you're expected to be productive doing technical work.

I've taught non-developers to produce, or at least understand, basic code typically in a few weeks while they were working on other stuff as well, but teaching developers to be good managers has always been much more difficult in comparison. I think it's easy to assume that since a lot of people aren't interested in writing code, it's fundamentally difficult to learn.

<comment><USER8> Well - I consider teaching non-technical skills even harder. That fact does not make teaching programming easy. Author is trying to solve problem of developer shortage. There is a huge gap between "being able to produce basic code" and being a developer that can solve a class of problems by him / herself.

I mentored few non-developers into becoming full time developers - but it took a year of their full time commitment to achieve the level where they could get hired as a developer and continue to develop their skills themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is no shortage of developers. There is a shortage of _perfect_ developers that meet every preconceived notion of lazy companies that don't believe they have any responsibility to develop and grow people. There will always be a shortage of top performers in any field. If only top performers are acceptable to you, you will have a very tough time growing. I have to laugh when I see these posts where people have 'discovered' that you can actually train people to make them better. I saw one a few months back where the 'secret' to using bootcampers turned out to be 'provide a guided program to finish developing their abilities', as if no one ever heard of this before.

<comment><USER11> There is a shortage of cheap developers. In a Taxi in Dublin a year back and the taxi drive explained his friend couldn't find the staff. "Well he could, but they wanted too much money".

<comment><USER12> I turned down a job a year ago because the pay was 20% below expectations, and saw the company in the news a week later talking about the shortage of programmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. The industry interviews this through 'culture fits'. Personality is not something your can put on a resume very well, it comes out in culture interviews. You need to pass personality and a technical bars in most interviews.

2\. We already hire 'anyone' by hiring people from 3 month coding boot camps which are usually pretty cheap in price and time compared to college. Passing a coding boot camp or showing self developed apps & their source code I feel is the reasonable compromise for hiring 'anyone'. There is a segment of the population where programming is not for them and learning to pass fizz buzz equivalents is a lot more work for them than others.

<comment><USER10> Like most interviewers are skilled judges of 'culture'. This is why most tech companies are filled with bros telling themselves how cool they are and how they are changing the world. Utter BS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Microsoft used to have a one year program for new grads that hadn't taken CS, called TAP. I knew some good devs who came out of that, its a real shame they scrapped it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like many companies are afraid to do this because there's no guarantee their newly trained people will stay for so long as to make it worthwile. What if instead of "literally anyone" they trained non-technical colleagues that have already proven commitment?

Anecdote: next to my Information Science studies, I worked as a community manager for a few years. This was at a small startup so I was in practice doing more than that (marketing, data analysis, QA, etc). Once I finished my studies my CTO asked me to become a developer - he knew I was dedicated to the mission, knew just a little about coding but had the right personality for it. Sadly, in the end they realised that they didn't have enough time to train me and had to withdraw the offer.

I think it would be great if more CTOs made such offers, though in practice it seems unlikely. Small companies are less likely to have the resources to train and in larger companies perhaps the CTO is less likely to know community managers and such well enough to make such offers.

<comment><USER15> That fear is unfounded and is a good example of short term thinking. My number one goal now is to make sure wherever I work the people I work with "level up" in some way. I'm going to be working with these people at other jobs and if they suck then I'm not doing anyone any favors. Having proper mentoring and training pipelines are indicators of a healthy company. The alternative is companies shuffling mediocre workers amongst themselves which is again not doing anyone any good.

<comment><USER14> Just for the record, I do agree, but I don't think all companies realise this (enough).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I was starting out right out of school, the corporate bank I went to work for had a 3 month program for recent grads to teach basic programming and database design along with company coding rules. They had non-coders in this program and started from scratch. Some of the folks in it with me were English majors. It was very successful and everyone in the program I kept in touch with went on to great careers. You interviewed for the company with round- robin interviews where 6 different department heads would have a sit down interview with you one at a time throughout a day. There was no coding involved.

I personally did very well there, went on to a financial services startup of all folks who'd left said bank and then branched out on my own doing web applications for clients and building a successful open source project with millions of users. I'm not sure if I'd get through the modern code-in-front- of-us-at-a-whiteboard approach that all the tech companies seem to favor now- a-days.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's fine, you do that, but I do not want to be an engineer at your company. I already have a junior engineer I'm working with and it's hard enough spending hours a week making sure their PRs get fixed, every PR has 20 to 40 comments in it. With someone who doesn't even know how to code? Forget it.

<comment><USER3> PR?

<comment><USER18> Pull request, I assume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a great idea but the reason why this won't work is because after you have invested time to train them from nothing, they will leave for another company.

There is plenty of precedent for this, during the dotcom days and in India the last 10 years.

<comment><USER20> I'm reminded of the cliche posts I see on LinkedIn about this.

What happens if we invest in our people and they leave? What if we don't, and they stay?

<comment><USER21> Exactly this, people leave for other reasons and generally it isn't because you're investing in them. Sure it happens but it isn't the usual case in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _We represent ourselves as front-end devs instead of INTJ devs_

This is a good thing. INTJ and other Meyers-Briggs types have no basis in science and they aren't related to what work a person can do for a business.

<comment><USER23> A good rule of thumb is that if a model of humans asserts that we fit into an enumerated set of "types", it's probably either substantially incomplete or outright pseudoscience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > We desperately need new paths to success and we desperately need to lower > the barriers to entry. Our current approach is so black-and-white. Can you > code? Here's $70k+. Can't code? GTFO.

Wait WHAT?! How is that bad? Who does this benefit other than people that want to do a job that they're not actually qualified for? "Can you do this thing or not" is a pretty fair test of if you deserve the job!

</comment><comment><USER24> So here's an idea for a program:

An apprentice goes to a coding bootcamp, paid for by an company with a $2,500/month stipend. Then, the apprentice would work for the company for $2,500/month for one year, or otherwise the coding bootcamp tuition must be repaid.

This would work out to a cost of about $55,000 for a year of labor.

That would be significantly cheaper than hiring a coding bootcamp grad, and removes the economic risk from the apprentice. What if the market were to soften? What if they ended up being one of the graduates that could not land a job?

This offloads a lot of training to the bootcamp, which have job training as their core competency. Other commenters have pointed out flaws with the system proposed by the author.

In addition, it generally aligns incentives so that the apprentice is less likely to leave right after the initial training. As part of the deal, the coding bootcamp would help the apprentice with finding some other job, since they have already committed to an employer. If they did renege on that part of the deal, the employer only lost out on $7,500. And once the apprentice proves their worth (in the event that they do), the employer could offer a market salary that would start after the apprenticeship, along with a signing bonus of about $20,000 or so. The apprentice would probably want that signing bonus immediately, and sign that offer unless the candidate disliked the company.

If anyone wants to kickstart this concept, I think this would make a great nonprofit. Figuring how to implement such a program would be a distraction for the company, especially if they just wanted to dip their toes in the water with one apprentice at first. The nonprofit would get $10,000 per apprentice, and additional donations by companies could lead to higher priority in selecting potential apprentices.

</comment><comment><USER25> Isn't this what they do in Germany? [http://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280301-the-apprentice- pro...](http://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280301-the-apprentice-programmer)

<comment><USER26> Do keep in mind that the author already knew some programming before he started his apprenticeship:

"They did things differently than everyone else. Most of the company used an esoteric programming environment called Rosie SQL - which seemed like death to my Demo Szene honed sensibilities (Assembler, Pascal or bust!) - these guys used Delphi."

MathWorks is doing a similar thing to

"The first 3 months in the cafeteria meant I quickly met everyone in the company and learned what kind of coffee or tea they liked."

Mathworks starts everyone off in support, to make sure they know the products and the customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think the author's suggestion of hiring people to "just sit there and watch/talk with (senior devs)" for 30k/year makes much economic sense.

Also the explicit discrimination based up on how represented applicants' "communities" are being recommended ahead of looking at actual technical skills is disturbing. I don't _think_ it's illegal, but I also don't think it's good business or ethical.

Honestly, this kind of rule is how schools like Harvard keep low numbers of Asians (or in the past, Jews).

</comment><comment><USER27> While I agree with this, and have been training someone in this manner for a while, it does put a drain on the trainer, and you have to take that into account, as Fred Brooks wasn't wrong...

</comment><comment><USER28> > we need to value non-code skills much more highly and explicitly

Doesn't this, and most of the other stuff this is talking about really refer to project managers and people managers?

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm a self-taught career changer and work for a team that has several new developers transferred from other departments.

It works out surprisingly well. The 2-3 experienced devs and myself do the harder development parts and the new developers are actually quite valuable as they contribute plenty to the code but also often explain some of the business considerations from other departments.

</comment><comment><USER30> Many people these days miss the fact that software projects fail for at least 10 different reasons. And, only one of those is sloppy code.

</comment><comment><USER31> one of the best ways for someone who wants to start coding is to join a smaller technical company as customer support. You'll know the product intimately and you'll know how to improve quality of life for users. If you're motivated enough, start talking to engineers and contributing to the codebase and you're on your way.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hiring non-technical people into technical roles is OK if you also have some senior tech people to guide them.

You wouldn't want to have the inexperienced non-tech people making critical engineering decisions. Software development is like building a house of cards - If you want to build a tall structure, you have to start with a solid base.

</comment><comment><USER33> It seems makersquare's financial assistance works to solve the boot camp pain point mentioned, and with a programming job salary after, it shouldn't be bad paying it down.

[http://www.makersquare.com/financialservices](http://www.makersquare.com/financialservices)

</comment><comment><USER34> I think we should do this with medicine as well. Hire literally anyone and train them to slowly take on the tasks of a medical doctor. The theory and focused study that comes from a degree is really overrated. This would really help with the shortage of doctors as well.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Hire anyone with decent standardized test scores," would be my baseline after managing a large, technical support callcenter where many new hires were simply not able to learn the (imho fairly rudimentary) modem troubleshooting steps after weeks and months of on-the-job training and support.

The people who seemed the sharpest in the first two weeks of training usually excelled, most others didn't. Some were simply unable to learn fairly basic concepts. It mostly came down to raw intellect. I'm sure the same would be true for aspiring developers.

<comment><USER36> Don't count on it. I failed out of college due to my inability to take and pass tests, yet at work, I'm being promoted constantly to higher ranks due to my productivity.

<comment><USER35> Considering I managed literally thousands of agents over a period of years, you would statistically be an extremely rare exception to a rather well- examined trend.

Did you ever take the SAT / ACT?

<comment><USER37> Standardized testing doesn't measure the same skills needed to be successful at creative work.

Please don't ever do this.

<comment><USER35> Sure, that's why every college relies on them for admissions, not to mention everyone taking the GRE / MCAT for grad school.

Are applied sciences grad programs not "creative work" in your mind? Standardized tests statistically predict success within those programs.

[http://portal.scienceintheclassroom.org/sites/default/files/...](http://portal.scienceintheclassroom.org/sites/default/files/post- files/science-2007-kuncel-1080-1.pdf)

<comment><USER10> More and more colleges are NOT using them for admissions because they predict NOTHING.

<comment><USER38> Where's your source? The parent's source is about 8 years old but still completely valid.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I built my MVP in 5 hours and got to $10k MRR in two months - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@Vinrob/how-i-built-my-mvp-in-5-hours-and-got-to-10k-mrr-in-2-months-cf013aa198 <comment><USER2> This is a bit misleading as the article is about a service and not a product based business. The terms MVP and MRR do not translate well to a services based business as the two scale in vastly different ways. $10k monthly revenue does not equal $10k MRR as there's nothing reoccurring about it. If these are reoccurring revenues (say from a retainer) then the article does not mention it, and even if so MRR is much less impressive for a services business because scaling is so hard while in a digital product business, if there's demand scaling is considerably easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! OP here :)

I agree that it is not a product. Another more correct term would have been "MVO" (Minimum Viable Offer)

It is a productized service business offering design as a service. For a fixed per month we do design requests, so it is recurring in that sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems pretty bogus to me, or something is unexplained.

ManyPixels offers unlimited monthly design work for a fixed price that's less than what a good freelance designer would charge for a day.

This can only work if the customers rarely even use the service, or if he's found some new source of cheap and easily available design talent.

In the article he already mentioned how hard it was to find talented freelance designers. I get that you can smooth out those costs if you aggregate demand. Maybe the company can get good at sourcing good designers. But then you need to guarantee their availability. Which means it's just a design firm.

Seems hard to do when you are drastically underpricing.

The MRR, is that calculated on a few days of operation? Or have you really taken on ~50 clients who can demand unlimited design work in one month, with no permanent staff and where you probably lose money on each client?</comment>


Learn more about fundraising with SFHN on June 27 - <AUTHOR>

SFHN is throwing a really great event aimed at entrepreneurs and hackers wanting to learn more about raising a seed round. We have awesome and experienced panelists lined up to share with you their knowledge and insight.
Click here to RSVP and get your tickets: http://bit.ly/14MFqpB
I look forward to seeing everyone at our event! Thanks for your support in helping make the community strong and awesome!
-dan <comment><USER2> This is going to be at the Pivotal Labs office, right? I can't wait, that's an amazing venue for this!

</comment><comment><USER3> I am looking forward to this as we are preparing to raise a seed round. I'll be driving from Palo Alto to SF so if you're interested in carpooling, email me (in profile) next week.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for posting this. Let me know if I can help you out in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: [http://bit.ly/14MFqpB](http://bit.ly/14MFqpB)

</comment><comment><USER4> I am looking forward to this event. I hope to see everyone there.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is for the San Francisco Hacker News meetup group!</comment>


Invest in your people, not crypto - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/latticehq/status/995105414805995523 <comment><USER2> I would tend to agree with this sentiment.</comment>


Sade's Quiet Storm of Cool - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/style/sade-sade-sade.html <comment><USER2> I was walking down the Danbury Square Mall in 1985. Now I pride myself on not looking at women just because they look nice because I didn't want to grow up looking like a dirty old man or make women feel creeped out. BUT THIS ONE TIME, I was walking at the mall with my friends and this woman was walking towards us with some geeky curly hair guy and I stopped. She walked by and I said "Who is that?" I knew she had to be famous and my friends said it was Kenny G's girlfriend but they didn't know her name. Well she was Healen Abu the lead singer for the band Sade. Kenny G and her dated for a time and he wrote a song called Sade for her.

Now I have seen her 2 times in concert and none of them were larger than a 1000 people due to Sade's request for small venues. Wish I actually bought a t-shirt at the shows. She is just an amazing singer and her band is one of the greatest of all time in terms of just talent. I am and will always be a Punk Rock Kid but I have always admired her music and still to this day my friends and wife joke about Sade with me.

Best album was Love Deluxe.

</comment><comment><USER3> DJ Spinna's best of sade mix is good:

[https://www.mixcloud.com/Double0Soul/dj-spinna-best-of- sade-...](https://www.mixcloud.com/Double0Soul/dj-spinna-best-of-sade-mix/)

Fave sade jams are "love is stronger than pride" (especially the mad professor lover's rock remix), "I couldn't love you more", "cherish the day"

I remember laughing at my friend's mom for playing "Smooth operator" in the car when i was 10, now i love that jam hehe

</comment><comment><USER4> A friend introduced me to Sade this year and I love her down tempo soulful sound. The music has a sort of background sadness which I wouldn't have understood when I was younger.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sade needs to be on HN more often.

</comment><comment><USER6> Kiss Of Life is one of the best love songs ever.

</comment><comment><USER7> smooth operator is 100% my jam

</comment><comment><USER8> Sade - Paradise has to be my fav track.Im a sucker for that bass

</comment><comment><USER9> Paradise and Cherish the Day are my favorites. Long live Sade!

<comment><USER5> Cherish The Day is my favorite unintentional 9/11 tribute.

[https://twitter.com/kchoudhu/status/913295169868328960](https://twitter.com/kchoudhu/status/913295169868328960)

(Not that it was ever intended as such... circumstances have kind of retconned it into the role)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Truly one of the greatest underappreciated artists.</comment>


Show HN: The app that pays you for saving money through a monthly lottery - <AUTHOR> http://www.monilo.io <comment><USER2> How is this funded? Is this just another way to mine people's data?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on a banking partner. They will give us referrals for each person who creates an account with them, which we will use to fund prizes.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I made an app called Monilo, that rewards you for saving money through a free daily scratch-off lottery and a monthly lottery. I would love feedback and beta users! Thanks :)

<comment><USER3> Do users still get the usual interest rates?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Stocker, what stocks to buy and when to sell - <AUTHOR> http://getstocker.com <comment><USER2> There's really not much to see here: a screenshot, a price list and an e-mail signup page.

To convince me to spend $10 per month, you'd need to tell me how I can profit from using your service. You say there are alerts for when I should buy or sell - that implies some kind of algorithm that knows when a stock is underpriced or overpriced.

\- Who created the algorithm, and what experience do they have with investing?

\- What has been the performance of this algorithm over time? Does it beat buying and holding an S&P 500 index fund? (If you're selling an algorithm that's never been tested, why should I be willing to test it on my own investment portfolio?)

\- Is the algorithm aware of tax implications (long-term vs. short-term capital gains)?

Also, there's no privacy policy. Potential customers are going to want to know if you're going do stuff like sell their personal information to a brokerage, etc.

Finally, there's a typo on the home page: "when you _may should_ sell".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback.

Yes, good point, probably we need to explain better the benefits.

It's not a very sotisficated algorithm: based in our own little experience (1 year and a half), ourselves would have liked to have a tool like this. The flow at that point is you set at what price you purchased the stock and then we'll alert you when the stock price reaches the estimated, updated target price and some variables (EPS updates, PER updates, dividends changes if proceed, news, etc.).

No, we don't have tested it yet. Since it detects the stocks in S&P 500 too, probably it would works in that way and also you can get more stocks like this (or better if proceeds).

About the taxes, and also the broker's fees for example, you can set up in the tracking portfolio and get the current net benefit, the remaining benefit and more.

No, the emails will be used only for remind them when the app is ready, we deployed this weekend and need to add more to the landing page.

Thank you again, feel free to post your comments or write us.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does code style matter to you? - <AUTHOR> When working in company, where more than a couple of people share the same code base, should we enforce a code style?
Is it fair to ask someone to fix a style/comprehensibility issue like: change a variable name; prohibit lines longer than N chars, ...
or should you just focus on the feature/behavior the code should implement/fix?
What are you doing in your current job:
- Do you have a well defined code style? Is it public? Where is it?
- How do you enforce it? Comment on commits/ pull requests?
- Are you automating style reviews? How? Are you using tools like JSCS, Scalastyle etc? Are you using services like Codacy?
- How do you think a well defined code style is helping your code/work? <comment><USER2> Change a variable name, yes absolutely depending on context and the language in use, this can range from using foo_bar/fooBar through to inappropriate variable names (I've seen swearwords used as variables when someone has been doing debugging in code and needed to grab intermediate values, seeing "cunt is undefined" in the console is not going to do you any favours on the professional scale) or ones that lack clarity.

Prohibit lines longer than N chars, again absolutely, many languages have standards like Pythons PEP8, I find 80 chars constricting sometimes but I stick to the standard because it is the standard (de-facto or not).

\--

I stick to standards where they exist, for PHP thats the relevant PSR's, for Python, PEP8.

I enforce it by using the IDE to flag non-conformance and auto format either on the fly or on save, since I'm the only dev I don't need to enforce it on commits/pull requests.

Style Reviews are not applicable since there is just me (see above).

I think coding against the languages 'default' styles whether de-facto or imposed (I wish all languages had gone the gofmt route so we could obviate this problem nearly completely) helps, it certainly requires less context shifting when jumping from code I wrote to third party libraries in the same language.

In the past when I've worked with teams I've found having a defined standard helps hugely since it settles the inevitable bikeshedding arguments that crop up when programmer A wants to do foo and B do bar, often there is no clear winner so just picking one and adding it to the standard kills the argument dead the next time.

Personally I've always preferred :-

        if foo()
        {
            stuff();
        }

to

        if foo(){
            stuff();
        }

but since PSR2 says not to do that I stopped (or more correctly I let the IDE handle it till it became habit to do it PSR style).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say yes but don't get too strict about it. It is common sense and the key point is readability. Long lines are hard to read, avoid them. Meaningless variable names are hard to follow/read, avoid them. Un-indented code is hard to read, avoid it. Shorthand statements are hard to read, use them but train your programmers to use them. Break long/big functions into smaller ones. Agree on files/directory structures. In my company we've never used hard rules, mostly common sense, and I think it's working.

As long as readability is working for everyone, rules that are too picky like camel case vs underscore, indent with tabs vs spaces, etc, will just add overhead.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like to enforce code style because I use automated-formatting on all the files I change. So, to avoid useless lines in git diff we have everybody use the same settings in their IDE to make sure we don't have to go through a bunch of "tab to space" changes.

I personally don't care much for style per se (e.g. should I leave an empty line after each class declaration and garbage like that). The only one I like: no lines longer than 80 characters, simply because I occasionally work on small laptops and like being able to see the whole line at once.

</comment><comment><USER5> Code style doesn't matter but tools like Eslint (or other linters) that can enforce some unimportant stuff, can also be very huuuuuge help for JavaScript programming. They can point most JS errors, for example.

<comment><USER5> I mean code style doesn't matter in JavaScript world. If I was developed in Python I would follow PEP8. But this just proves the point - code style doesn't matter to me much, so I could follow some other's codestyle, just to keep standards.</comment></comment>


Stop reading HN, start reading HN newsletter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lanzani.nl/2011/interview-kd/

<comment><USER2> Of course, there's always Hacker News Daily, an automatically generated list (RSS available) of the top HN stories:

<http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>

I particularly like the one aspect of non-repeating entries,

"The 10 highest-rated articles on Hacker News on September 29, 2011 _which have not appeared on any previous Hacker News Daily_ are:"

On an unrelated and related note, while I appreciate the effort that goes into a hand-picked newsletter, I also accept that I might end up getting sucked into a cool example of technology. The solution isn't a newsletter or even a condensed RSS feed -- the fix is self-control (which can come in different forms and is typically a mix of motivation, guilt, and software).

<comment><USER3> Another option is <http://hndigest.com> where you get the daily HN summary in an email. It has more items than Hacker News Daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just want to say that I subscribed to the newsletter, and it's great. Unfortunately it didn't cure my HN addiction; it simply allows me to keep up to date for those unfortunate days (working abroad, or else) when I missed some threads.

Actually, the "Classic" section even makes it worse, because it brings you to read old threads you missed years ago, or had forgotten.

My advice: HN newsletter is fantastic, go subscribe now! but don't expect it to free you from your procrastination, it will get you even more addicted :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone care to give it a review? I, for one, am all ears.

 _However, if you get distracted easily, you end up downloading 33GB of academic papers and maybe reading some of them. Or you get caught in a HTML5 version of Mario and there goes your day._

<blushes>

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm, I hadn't heard of hackernewsletter before. It looks like it's put together pretty well.

I'd love to see an RSS feed for it though. I don't really care to get newsletters in my email.

</comment><comment><USER7> :) When I first stopped at Hacker news, I tried to find the RSS link. It was there. Then I thought of email subscription. Checked at feedburner. There was one feed being burnt, but had to email subscription.

So, I created one at feedburner and have been following it. It works with a charm, at least for me. If you want, give a try.

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator/hackernews></comment>


User-Specific XKB Configuration - <AUTHOR> https://who-t.blogspot.com/2020/02/user-specific-xkb-configuration-part-1.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Nice — I've long wanted to write an article up along the same lines, but focused on getting these same layouts working on the console as well (those are the bits I am unfamiliar with).

In the old days, a friend and I did some special modifier-key handling to emit shortcuts with Latin script instead of the Cyrillic used for the Serbian layout: I long wanted to revive that since we didn't push it into xkeyboard- config (it also conflicted with built-in gtk+ similar functionality).</comment>


Firefox Add-ons developers and their privacy policies - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/dfljak/beware_firefox_addons_of_ambiguous_privacy/ <comment><AUTHOR> Oh...apparently my 2 year old reddit account, with 2 posts and 3 comments is shadow-banned. Nobody knows when this happened as my last post was a year ago. Yet if you look at my comments on the 3 topics I commented on, they were all helpful comments to the OP.

Here is the mod's smuck reply: [https://pictshare.net/kyesom.png](https://pictshare.net/kyesom.png)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm quite selective of the Add-ons I install. I've been using this particular one for a long time, and I really like it. Hopefully the developer will accept the suggestions put forth and amend the existing privacy policy, otherwise I might need to go on another vetting field-trip for an alternative :/

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> lame...yet not surprised.

Link to the post on reddit: [https://web.archive.org/web/20191009192003/https://pictshare...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191009192003/https://pictshare.net/w6i7wj.png)

Links to the url's in the reddit post:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVhOLkIs20A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVhOLkIs20A)

[https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie- AutoDelete/issue...](https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie- AutoDelete/issues/577)

</comment><comment><USER2> The content has been removed from Reddit.</comment>


HTML5 music visualization - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/surunzi/VisualMusic <comment><USER2> I think this might get more traction if you were to post a link to the demo page, [http://surunzi.github.io/VisualMusic/](http://surunzi.github.io/VisualMusic/), rather than the project page [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com).</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you spend on Hosting? - <AUTHOR>

How much do you spend on Hosting per month for you personal OR part-time OR startup project? <comment><USER2> We have <http://ridewithgps.com> hosted on our own co-located server with <http://colostore.com> for $50 a month. It's a 2U server with dual 700w power supplies, setup on two separate breakers. Server was setup within 4 hours of UPS dropping it off last December, and we haven't experienced any downtime or network issues.

Colostore is the best Zack or I have found so far, however, they are not the people to use if you require much help or a managed solution. Also, it looks like they have jumped up the price of co-location since then to $70 a month, which is still pretty good for the level of service they offer (2TB a month, 5 IP addresses). I would still happily pay that amount for their service.

</comment><comment><USER3> For my toy stuff, about £30 for a smallish VPS in the UK, $20 a month for the smallest slicehost in the US, and I also have dreamhost (about $120/pa) that I use to host screencasts and things. I'd never put anything critical on there, though.

<comment><USER4> how do you like slicehost?

<comment><USER3> The service itself is great, but it's getting a little bit pricy for what it does.

I really like that you get a web-based terminal for the console session, if you need one.

The host I use in the UK (Tagadab) doesn't have that - but they have absolutely brilliant phone support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> $12/mo Xen slice from prgrmr for web & source

$200ish a month from Amazon for hosting for some consulting work (although I don't pay for it)

$0 for a few apps on App Engine

</comment><comment><USER4> I spend $80/Month I have 3 different accounts with different hosts which are good for different things. I'm going to be consolidating soon though..hopefully

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty much everything personal (aroundf 10 sites) is thrown on a £70/year shared hosting package - which works just fine.

</comment><comment><USER7> working on a product POC, using Rackspace cloud (formerly mosso), paying around USD 11 - 15 per month for a very own instance of Jaunty but limited/shared machine resource with some minimum thresholds guaranteed.</comment>


Watch New York Tech Meetup Live Broadcast at 6pm PST - <AUTHOR> http://www.livestream.com/nytechmeetup guess this is last months, the actual broadcast will be at 9pm after the event is over.  No idea why <comment><AUTHOR> sorry guys, I guess this isn't live yet (no idea why)</comment>


Weekly Vim Focus - <AUTHOR> http://phonons.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/weekly-vim-focus/ <comment><USER2> For those wishing to ingrain Vim keys into their muscle memory, and improve their browsing experience, I recommend the Vimium[1] extension to Chrome. Additionally, Firefox has Vimperator[2] and Opera has VimOperate[3] (not as many features on the latter unfortunately).

[1][https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb) [2][https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/vimperator/?s...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/vimperator/?src=search) [3][https://addons.opera.com/en/addons/extensions/details/vimope...](https://addons.opera.com/en/addons/extensions/details/vimoperate/0.3.2/?display=en)

<comment><USER3> pentadactyl is the best vim keybinding plugin for firefox now. It used to be vimperator though. Check it out <http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/>

<comment><USER4> whats better about pentadactyl

<comment><USER5> From the Pentadactyl home page:

"Pentadactyl was once called Vimperator, initially written by Martin Stubenschrott, then developed and maintained by Doug Kearns, Kris Maglione, and several other invaluable contributors. Doug and Kris, the primary Vimperator developers for several years, have left the Vimperator project and now develop and maintain Pentadactyl in its stead."

So it's essentially the successor to Vimperator, or at least a well-maintained fork by the original authors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When starting with Vim I completely changed all of the software that I interact with. That means: mutt for email, vimperator, vimprobable or vim plugin for chrome, mocp with vim keybindings, newsbeuter and dwm with simple keybindings.

After getting comfortable with this setup, I find it is now a pain to drop down to use the arrow keys. This type of setup really helped me 'convert' to a vi way of thinking. I am still learning, but am liking the minimal setup.

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't take a long time after you remap the arrow keys to be broken of that habit. I love not having to move my hands for the small navigation things now. Highly suggested.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that annoying in insert mode?

<comment><USER7> You shouldn't be navigating in insert mode. If you mess up a word it's easier to ctrl-w to delete the last word and retype it.

<comment><USER9> Just as a datapoint: I've been using vim for >12 years and I still use the arrow keys. Don't sweat the dogmas too much, try out what works best for you and stick with it.

<comment><USER7> I don't want to come across as a dick, but as another data point my boss has typed on keyboards for longer than I have been using computers and he still types with two fingers. Just because he is not crippling himself too much doesn't mean that he is getting anywhere near the same utility out of it that a touch typist would.

<comment><USER9> There's little correlation between finger count and utility.

I use only 4-5 fingers most of the time and go faster than most touch typists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Learning how to use "t" was a game-changer for me. Before that, I used "f", which cost me a fair bit of time when deleting things since the extra character was deleted. (c/d)t<space> is a great sequence that I use a lot.

I suggest VimGolf as a way to learn new commands, especially how to use them efficiently. It was how I learned to use "w" and "b", as well as macros.

</comment><comment><USER11> I didn't use the hjkl keys until two things happened, about the same time. The first was getting a job as an SA, where on older (and less GNU) operating systems would NOT support the key mappings.

The second was once my job was automated, I got to play a bit of nethack. A text based game that uses that style of navigation did help a bit.

</comment><comment><USER12> One thing that bothers me and I couldn't find an answer for vi/vim is how do you undo one character at a time? Command u always undo all the text typed since the last insert. Something like ctrl-Z would be great.

<comment><USER13> You can modify undo to chunk based on words with the following:

:inoremap <Space> <Space><C-g>u

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> <C-R> to paste in insert mode?? That doesn't work for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> followed by the register you want to paste. " is the default register you get when usually pasting.

<comment><USER14> oh. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Upvote for teaching me about <C-R> to paste in insert mode.

</comment><comment><USER16> For a long time user, usage of up/down/left/right should be punished!

<comment><AUTHOR> I bow my head in shame and promise to mend my ways.</comment></comment>


A Closer Look at North Korea's Ullim Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://38north.org/2017/03/mwilliams030317/ <comment><AUTHOR> Before I read this article, I was one of those people who was "hoping the greater spread of portable electronics will increase the ability of North Koreans to freely access information"

This article does a great job of explaining why it isn't that simple. This isn't like using a VPN to circumvent the Great Firewall.</comment>


How to ensure that your program does not run under Windows 95 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplechapter/Chen_bonus_ch02.pdf <comment><USER2> This is an excerpt from "The Old New Thing" by Raymond Chen, in case you were wondering like me.

<comment><USER3> One of my favourite books ever. Raymond Chen's blog of the same name has a new and almost always very interesting article about software development (on Windows in particular, of course) every workday. The most interesting and entertaining blog posts were expanded and make up the book. Chen has formidable talents both as a programmer, as well as as a writer.

<comment><USER4> A bit of Raymond Chen trivia: he is as far as I know the only person to appear in the Linux kernel credits file with an @microsoft.com email address.

<comment><USER5> Huh. Looks like it's for scripts/Configure, which doesn't exist in the 2.6 series? Was this an older version of `make config`?

There are certainly a lot of people in `git log --author=microsoft.com` (and in MAINTAINERS), for Hyper-V guest drivers and the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although the author removed the names of the publishers to protect the guilty, you can google many of the error messages to find out who he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER7> The proper way, in 1996, to insure that your program would not run under Windows 95, was to make it run under Windows NT 3.51, which was available and stable at the time. Under NT, you could use OpenGL, NTFS, security features, and TCP/IP networking (that was an add-on called "Plus!" in Win95) which consumer-grade Win95 didn't support. You could run high-end applications such as Softimage|3D. You could even run NT 3.51 as a network server.

NT 3.51 also offered a nice feature known as "not crashing". It was a far more reliable OS than Win95, which had a huge amount of legacy and backwards- compatibility code. On NT 3.51, the 16-bit subsystem could be disabled at boot time, and everything ran fine without it.

Windows 8 _still_ has the 16-bit subsystem.

<comment><USER8> Could you really not use OpenGL under Windows 95? I seem to recall running GLQuake and GLQuakeWorld a good while before the release of Windows 98. GLQuake was released in 97.

<comment><USER9> Windows 95 included OpenGL and used it for screensavers.

<comment><USER10> Not until Windows 95 OSR2 [https://web.archive.org/web/19991013115738/http://support.mi...](https://web.archive.org/web/19991013115738/http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q154/8/77.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Look how far we've come since the early 90s. Like, no, really--this is the sort of arcana that we can basically ignore today completely.

</comment><comment><USER12> I actually have found memories of Windows 95, Service release 2.5 of course. Yes programs crashed here and there but it wasn't until Windows ME did I know the true meaning of crashing. Thankfully I had also had Windows 2000. I thought it was the best piece of software ever written at the time!

<comment><USER13> It's frankly amazing that Win ME managed to be so much less stable than previous iterations of Win 9x. I dealt with it for a year or so in college before I was able to get my hands on something better, and it was basically a "run once" OS, as in you ran your applications once and then rebooted because anything else would guarantee the appearance of the BSOD.

People complained about Vista, but it was smooth sailing in comparison.

<comment><USER14> I also used ME for about a year but I don't remember it crashing once. Never understood why everyone had such problems with it, I thought it was just Windows 98 with USB drivers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If MS didn't turn OS/2 2.0 into a fiasco, DOS gaming would not last as long.

<comment><USER16> they didn't turn it into a fiasco. they did what they are good at at the time. bait and switch.

they baited ibm (oh boy, yet again. don't they ever learn) and then run away with as much code the contracts allowed and then some and launched NT.</comment></comment>


Bootsrap 3 SASS/SCSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zakelfassi/bootsrap3-sass-scss

<comment><USER3> As I see, there are at least 3 projects for Bootstrap 3 SASS:

* [https://github.com/vwall/compass-twitter-bootstrap/tree/3.0....](https://github.com/vwall/compass-twitter-bootstrap/tree/3.0.0-wip)

* [https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass/tree/3](https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass/tree/3)

* [https://github.com/zakelfassi/bootsrap3-sass-scss](https://github.com/zakelfassi/bootsrap3-sass-scss)

<comment><AUTHOR> The first one is a fork from the WIP-3 Bootstrap branch (deprecated to RC1). The second one appears last been updated 12 days ago -SCSS files- (i.e. before the BT3 RC1 release).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All I see is "TODO : Add detailed README"

What is this? Why should I care? I assume from the name that it's a fork of Twitter Bootstrap (maybe)?

<comment><USER5> Bootstrap is LESS. There's a huge repo[1] for a SCSS version of Bootstrap: this repo seems to be trying to release it earlier than Thomas McDonald's version. That being said, there is a branch[2] on that repo that (at time of writing) was updated three hours ago.

[1]: [https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap- sass](https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass)

[2]: [https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap- sass/tree/3](https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass/tree/3)

<comment><AUTHOR> @kmf : Didn't notice this branch.

Actually, my version is up-to-date with the latest Bootstrap 3.0.0 RC1 - <USER2> manually converted the LESS code to the SASS version.

I will run a diff with the mentioned branch later on.

@csense : I just had to throw it on Github ASAP as I'm using it in a current project. Will add details + a Ruby gem later on.</comment></comment></comment>


Why killer bees aren't that bad - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151123-are-killer-africanized-bees-really-that-dangerous <comment><USER2> For anyone who has lived in the American South or Southwest in the last 20 years, I don't think there's anything new in this article. Pretty much everyone knew that yes, of course, "killer bees" doesn't mean they're terrorizing the countryside, but it does mean you have to be a lot more careful around them.

I remember hearing reports of people being stung to death because they accidentally knocked down a hive while working in the yard or mowed over a burrow. I think everyone, after the initial panic, just learned to recalibrate their behavior around hives and got accustomed to the "new normal".

<comment><USER3> Part of the problem was concern that the invading species would become an epidemic. Think of the stinkbug infestation that started in the eastern U.S. a few years ago. They were blanketing peoples' windows and doors and no one could predict how bad the infestation would become. It would have been frightening if it had been a stinging or biting insect.

We now can see that local fauna have adapted to eating the stinkbugs. And maybe some harsh winters helped kill some eggs. Not to mention pesticides that target stinkbugs showing up in stores. But we couldn't have foreseen that. It was just as likely to become another gypsy moth problem. People in the southwest I expect had the same concern about africanized bees.

Now, how are you doing with the crazy ants these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Being scared was more fun:

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Now, Asian giant hornets... be VERY afraid of those motherfuckers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice try, killer bees.</comment>


Ask HN: What version of Python do you use? - <AUTHOR>

The post on Arch Linux moving to Python 3 made me wonder what versions are used most widely amongst HN users. Vote away.<p>http://www.archlinux.org/news/python-is-now-python-3/ <comment><USER2> 2.7 with -3 and from __future__ import print_function, unicode_literals

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 2.6

</comment><comment><USER3> 2.7</comment>


Forgot password – No account registered – Securiry breach? - <AUTHOR>

When using the "Forgot password?" option from any portal, generally it should acknowledge if the email entered was registered in the application. People claim that this allows for a hacker to verify a whether an email address is valid or not.<p>What could be the solution? How do a person know if he types wrong mail. <comment><USER2> If you have the bandwidth, handle forgotten passwords manually through a customer service call and ensure they give you email, username and billing details if applicable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just say 'we sent a mail to ' whatever address they entered. If it's incorrectly typed, the user can see it then and try again.

</comment><comment><USER4> _If there is an account registered to this email account, a recovery email was sent to it_ etc.</comment>