Show HN: Poplar - Motion app for iOS/AppleWatch (Chance to win $500!) - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/poplar/id1136780824?ls=1&mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> $500 giveaway to first 1,000 users</comment>


Ask HN: Would You Accept a Trial/Exploratory Week Before Joining a Company? - <AUTHOR> Survey form: https://goo.gl/forms/6Sf7CqZyRBd9w96V2 <comment><USER2> No. Good candidates don't want or need this. Like every other job-related product or service, this is optimizing for the employer, not the employee.

It's a engineer's market right now. Find ways to make it easier for them.

Last year I piloted a project where I paid engineers ~$375 for 4 or 5 hours to work through code with me. By the end of it, if they were an engineer I would work with, I would recommend them to a select group of companies that I felt were the best places to work (great product, team, environment). The condition was that when I referred an engineer, they must be considered to have already passed the technical interview. At that point, they were simply there to see if they were a cultural fit and talk tech. Maybe some light technical questions, no white boarding or trivia.

This afforded the candidates the ability to fast track to the final round of an interview with 5-6 companies. And they got paid to do it.

It worked remarkably well, all parties loved, and it to this day I still get emails from companies and candidates asking if I'm still doing it. Alas, I a full-time founder and cannot do that anymore.

But should anyone want to take my idea, I can assure there is a demand for it, and it pays incredibly well.

<comment><USER3> That's a really amazing idea. I wish there were companies that did this. How did you make money with it?

It would be awesome as a candidate to take on five hour project and be able to apply anywhere and skip the technical interviews.

<comment><USER2> The hiring company pays a referral fee, typically a percentage of the hiree's salary.

To do this, though, companies have to trust you and your referrals (send one bad engineer and it can be game over). You also have to ensure the companies don't waste the candidate's time or put them through another full round of interviews. This wasn't really a problem because there's such a demand for engineers and I managed the hiring process very closely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this is your idea: This is a weird, bad deal for the applicant. Only desperate people will put up with the hassle and the insult. I predict you will be shocked when these desperate candidates are not as good as you wanted. Please do not take advantage of vulnerability any more than the world already is.

If someone's suggesting it to you: You deserve better.

</comment><comment><USER5> Am I getting this wrong, or did everyone else in thread got it wrong? Is the question more from candidate point of view, whether to join a company if you enjoy working for the trial period?

If my assumption is correct, the candidate will fall in this situation if they didn't already clear up the expectations, roles and responsibility before/during the interview. A friend of mine recently found himself in a situation where they decided to quit after working for less than 2 weeks at an early stage startup. He ended up quitting by the end of the month.

I believe it's a shared responsibility to clear up such things before making an offer (from company's POV) or accepting an offer (from candidate's POV). This situation doesn't help either party.

</comment><comment><USER6> Personally no, because that's what the 6 month trial period is for in Germany. On the other hand, I rejected offers which required this, and I know quite a few stories from friends where it was required too. In the end it depends on how bad you want/need the job.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I were unemployed, probably. If I were employed, absolutely not: I'm not going to violate my employment contract nor risk vacation time. Also, top performers are rarely unemployed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, if it comes with a signing bonus equivalent to 6 months' pay, wired to my bank account before the first day of the 1-week trial. The 1-week trial itself also has to be paid.

</comment><comment><USER9> This feels like something that is only remotely feasible for contractors or recent grads living with their parents. The interview process is enough of a logistical PITA for most of us. Extending it to a week is comically stupid. Besides, we already have one week trial periods in the USA. It's called at will employment. It would be nice to say take a month and try out 4 companies before making a move, but I can't see how that would ever work for your average senior dev with a job, kids, and a mortgage payment.

</comment><comment><USER10> The American phrase for this is contract-to-hire. You hire someone on a short- term hourly basis, with the understanding that this is a trial period that can be easily terminated by either side.

The huge downside for the employer is that you're never going to hire away anyone from another company, so you're pretty much cutting out anyone who isn't very junior.

</comment><comment><USER11> Been asked before. Said no immediately. Got the job.

If they ask that means you are good enough for the job.

</comment><comment><USER12> How are people supposed to do this unless they are unemployed?

Don't probation periods already exist?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps take some time off from current job?

<comment><USER13> PTO is scarce enough for most people to make that a fairly unattractive offering. Not even getting into things like that many are required to report paid work for others to their employers etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Of course not. Where would I get the week? I'd have to burn vacation time. I'm not going to come join your company unless I really want to work with you.

</comment><comment><USER15> I certainly would. It's often about discovering the actual people in the company more than advertised culture or engineering skills.

</comment><comment><USER16> If it is paid, absolutely.

<comment><AUTHOR> -

<comment><USER7> Targeting users to answer the survey pollutes it's results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Removing my comment, just curious how does it pollute the results? it's my first time launching a survey :)

<comment><USER7> It looks like: "I like that answer, please bias my survey findings!" Might have been n=1 and you might have asked the same of someone who answered different. Ideally you get random sampling to respond.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This would be an interesting study to do, prospectively. I'd be interested in collecting measures for both sides. By the way, some universities do this during "shopping week".

</comment><comment><USER18> Absolutely not worth the time.</comment>


West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with 'Intense Unbalanced Melting' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/west-antarctica-begins-to-destabilize-with-intense-unbalanced-melting <comment><USER2> This is why big countries suck. They are slow to change and a wrong move is horribly damaging. Look at the US or China, no matter how I or all my countrymen live in Sweden it won't really matter if climate change deniers get in charge in the US for example.

I just think it's so sad to see everything go to shit due to some greedy assholes that won't invest in solutions that are effective AND sustainable.

I plan to become a climate change prepper in the future because shit will hit the fan sooner or later.

<comment> hash-set It would be stupid to crash our economy and then find out that the "solutions" didn't work. Or that we come up with technological fix to the problem. Or that that whole thing was just a ploy by leftists to seize power.

Anyhow, if you expect 7 billion people to do anything in regards to climate change, don't hold your breath.

<comment><USER3> > Anyhow, if you expect 7 billion people to do anything in regards to climate > change, don't hold your breath.

Except that China is halting construction on 20+ coal plants. And deploying renewables faster than any other country. And putting in place heavy subsidies for electric vehicles. Chinese citizens overwhelmingly support renewables and the cost associated with it:

[https://cleantechnica.com/2016/09/29/china-cities- overwhelmi...](https://cleantechnica.com/2016/09/29/china-cities- overwhelmingly-want-renewable-energy/)

Americans? One presidential candidate wants more fracking, the other one _thinks China invented climate change_ , and everyone else is oblivious in their SUV on their way to Starbucks.

One might argue its easier for China to evolve to a non-carbon economy because their citizens haven't tasted the decadence Americans have of a carbon- intensive lifestyle; regardless, China is going above and beyond what the US has ever considered for climate change policy, and drag us Americans along for the ride. Thanks China?

<comment><USER4> Fracking has actually been beneficial in reducing climate change because the carbon footprint of natural gas is far lower than coal. Most O&G companies are currently pushing for a carbon tax.

<comment><USER5> That is like saying a ball peen hammer is beneficial in reducing damage to the skull compared to a sledge hammer.

<comment><USER4> And one saying which is relevant is "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the best way to profit from rising sea levels? Investing in land that's higher up in our nearby coastal cities?

<comment><USER7> This better be sarcasm

<comment><USER8> Trying to make a profit is the most effective way of helping people.

I hope that it is NOT sarcasm.

<comment><USER9> It's this kind of delusional faith in 'free market' capitalism and its profit incentive that has led us to the climate disaster that we face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Investment in coastal flood prevention technology for major city centers that can legitimately be helped. Places below sea level today - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_on_land_with_el...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_on_land_with_elevations_below_sea_level) \- need to be abandoned.

<comment><USER11> Won't a lot of this coastal flood protection infrastructure just add emissions to the atmosphere, thus grossly exacerbating the problem? Seems like _way_ to little, _way_ to late.

Trying to just "build a wall" around cities just doesn't sound like it's going to work, I even saw designs where buildings in Manhattan will have to be built on stilts, but how much environmental environmental damage will all this new construction do?

Probably best off to just start relocating these cities and find new homes for the inhabitants.

This combined with other issues like fracking, leaking methane into the atmosphere aren't exactly filling me with confidence.

<comment><USER12> You are overestimating the effects of climate change.

Sea levels will rise by a meter over the next hundred years. That's really not very much in the scheme of things.

<comment><USER11> Have a read of these:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/science/flooding-of- coast-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/science/flooding-of-coast-caused- by-global-warming-has-already-begun.html)

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/cities-exposed-to-rising- sea-l...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/cities-exposed-to-rising-sea- levels-2014-4?r=US&IR=T)

I'm going to say you're underestimating the affects of climate change if you think a one meter rise in sea level _globally_ isn't a big deal. Not to mention a selfish point of view, considering some peoples homes are already being inundated and the catastrophic effects it will have on coral reef systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Grow bamboo.

Harvest it.

Bury it.

That's the sort of thing we have to start thinking about.

<comment><USER14> Burying bamboo or other biomass is not a particularly reliable or effective form of carbon sequestration. (Anywhere you bury it, it will decompose and most of the C02 removed from the atmosphere will wind up as CH4 + CO2.)

Carbon sequestration is a very active area of research, but for the most part, you're looking at injecting liquid C02 or water with a very large amount of dissolved C02 into deep reservoirs. Ideally, you want to inject it into a rock that will react with it to precipitate carbonate minerals over time, instead of dissolving what's already there.

At any rate, large-scale carbon sequestration is an interesting but difficult problem. It's been done successfully on small scales, but how do you do it on a global, carbon-neutral scale? It's surprisingly tough to figure out, and we're not putting anywhere enough focus on it. It's certainly better funded than a lot of things, but it needs more research and more funding.

<comment><USER15> Instead of trying to bury it, grow more. Increasing the total _living_ biomass would reduce CO2.

<comment><USER14> Only for a year or a few years. Biomass doesn't really sequester that much carbon on a long-term scale.

You need to move CO2 from the atmosphere into the geosphere. Biomass can do that (e.g. hydrocarbons), but it's inefficient (a lot of it goes back to the atmosphere) and slow. Carbonate precipitation is much more permanent, and it's something we can force to happen at a high rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What a depressing, predictable series of events. Just wait until people start connecting the dots between climate change and global instability. I predict useless hysteria.

</comment><comment><USER17> We cant stop it, can we at least do ecology transplants?

Little patches of nature system, taking from destabilizing temperature zones to areas where they could thrive?

Basically, give up the concept of a invasive species, and speed a adaption up that would occur anyway?

</comment><comment><USER18> What, exactly, is "West Antarctica"?

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Antarctica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Antarctica)

<comment><USER20> To save the click: "West Antarctica, or Lesser Antarctica, one of the two major regions of Antarctica, is the part of that continent that lies within the Western Hemisphere, and includes the Antarctic Peninsula. It is separated from East Antarctica by the Transantarctic Mountains and is covered by the West Antarctic Ice Sheet."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bloomberg rarely does proper math. Melt both polar caps and the ice of Greenland, and you barely get global sea level rise by very few inches. Antarctics as a whole is 90% of the world land-based ice. 29 mln cubic km. All of the floating ice is around 3 mln cubic km. It may look that it can cause 60m high sea level rise, but most of this will be evaporated into milder global climate and stronger rivers. We shall have larger Caspian Sea, larger Aral Sea, perhaps green Sakhara, and perhaps come catastrophic rains in the temperate zone. Picture is very distant and very different from global warming speculations anyway. The Earth seen past with no polar caps, it also seen ice ages, these will inevitably happen again.

<comment><USER22> You're forgetting thermal expansion (And it takes decades for increases in atmospheric temperatures to cause a likewise increase in water temperatures.)

<comment><USER21> I actually bet on thermal contraction and the new ice age to come faster than melting of all of the polar ice we have today.</comment></comment></comment>


Lisper's take on Arc - <AUTHOR> http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-take-on-arc.html

<comment><USER2> One of the things I've tried to do differently in Arc is to design the language based on what actually happens in programs, rather than a priori theories. For example, let is for the one-variable case because I looked at a lot of CL code and found 76% of the lets bound one variable. Cond doesn't have implicit progn because I found most cond clauses didn't use it. Etc x 100.

So in reply to the a priori argument that shadowing global function names will cause problems (How big? I don't know. Big!) I reply that extensive experience has shown that it's just not a big deal.

I'll add modules eventually, of course. But it's not a high priority.

<comment><AUTHOR> > (How big? I don't know. Big!)

I didn't say it was a big problem, I said it was a _real_ problem. And the larger your code base, and the more people start sharing code, the more real it will be. It is only a matter of time before someone writes something like:

(let foo snoz (jims-macro frotz))

and gets an error of the form "42 is not a valid function" and has to spend an hour puzzling over where that error came from before realizing that Jim's macro expands into Bob's macro which expands into Ann's macro which uses a helper function called foo.

Is it a "big" problem? Maybe not. But it's a real problem, and given that one of your stated goals was to design "the 100 year language" I think it's a shame that you chose to solve it by placing the burden on the programmers. (And I use the plural advisedly here, because the potential for encountering this problem grows as the community grows and people start re-using each other's code.)

But I would reiterate that the lack of abstract data types is IMO a much bigger problem than the lack of hygienic macros. (And just so you know I'm not just sniping from the sidelines, I have proposed solutions implemented in CL which I'd be happy to help port to Arc if you agree that this is in fact a problem.)

<comment><USER3> I'm not a lisp programmer neither I know the peculiarities of each lisp implementation, but I think I understand it a little bit.

My question is, what hinders Arc (or other Lisp if it has the same problem) to create an operator that finds any global symbol from the top, like when an absolute path starts with "/" to find a file?

For instance, let's stay that there is an "unshadowable" operator called "." and let's take your example:

      (let foo snoz (jims-macro frotz))

Well, that shadowed "foo" is causing the problem. As you said ("Jim's macro expands into Bob's macro which expands into Ann's macro which uses a helper function called foo."), this symbol is shadowing the actual function "foo" used by Ann's macro.

However, if Ann's macro were written carefully (and all macro writes should know that macros can be used in any context, any scope), Ann would care to call "foo" from the top using the "." operator, like:

      ...
      (. foo args) ; excerpt of Ann's macro.
      ...

In this case, in every "(let)" or another scope definition method, you could always escape to the global scope using this operator, behaving like a hole to the outside world.

Of course, I'm just a Lisp newbie, maybe I'm just creating a huge mess with the concepts :-).

Is there any Lisp using that approach?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's kinda the right idea. There are two problems with your specific proposal: 1) it places a considerable burden on the programmer to annotate every invocation of a top-level function. For complex macros that can become quite annoying. 2) Baking the concept of a single top-level into the macro system makes it hard to add modules later.

If you pursue the idea of having the system walk the code and automatically insert those annotations you will (almost certainly) end up re-inventing hygienic macros.

(For the record, I much prefer the Lisp2 solution, because it's the hacker's solution. It's not mathematically elegant, but it's simple (compared to hygiene) and it gets the job done.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice article Ron, non-pc & certainly learnt something reading it. Though I reckon this ones a ripper...

 _"... So I can't really go into many specifics about what happened at Google because of confidentiality, but the upshot was this: I saw, pretty much for the first time in my life, people being as productive and more in other languages as I was in Lisp. What's more, once I got knocked off my high horse (they had to knock me more than once -- if anyone from Google is reading this, I'm sorry) and actually bothered to really study some of these other languges I found #myself# suddenly becoming more productive in other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python. ..."_

Going to submit this post? ~ [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6f75cfb5a2...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6f75cfb5a289d3f6)

<comment><USER5> "For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python. ..."

To Lisper:

It seems several people are comparing Arc to other Lisps.

I think that's somewhat unproductive. The Lisp user base is so small now that there isn't much sense "marketing" to that audience by comparing Arc to Scheme, CL, etc.

So, an alternative question: what would it take for you to use Arc instead of Python for web programming?

<comment><AUTHOR> > It seems several people are comparing Arc to other Lisps.

Not me (at least I hope not). I was trying to judge Arc entirely by the standards that Paul set for it in his foundational essays.

> what would it take for you to use Arc instead of Python for web programming?

At the very least better documentation :-) There appear to be some really cool things in the Arc web infrastructure, but the only way to figure out how to use them at the moment seems to be to reverse-engineer the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree. I was alarmed, too, by non-hygienic macros combined to the terse names of standard functions. It seems too easy to shadow them (I have to change my custom to name the argument 'obj').

About generics, I expected that the type annotation system (annotate, type, rep) would be the basis of some sort of user-expandable generic dispatching mechanism. In arc0 only macros using it and its handling is built-in to the core, so it's not clear how PG want it to evolve. He's probably putting it off, but it's where the _fun_ is...

Another point I was alarmed is the automatic promotion of non-function objects to a function that tests equality to it (some, all, rem, keep, ... all does that via testify). It is useful since it captures typical pattern. However, on the other hand, aggregate data is 'callable' when used in the function position. I can make a table that maps elements to booleans and I can use it as if it is a predicate, but that illusion breaks once I pass it to other procedures which eventually pass it to 'some'. (In my Scheme implementation, any objects can be made callable. It is handy, but I then learned that to keep that "handiness", I had to give up most of checking if something is procedure or not.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Look I know it's an ignorant post of mine. But I use CLISP and I am very busy with a lot of things these days. Too many to count...

But my plan is to continue to use CLISP until I become convinced that arc will help me in some way. I have almost 20,000 lines of CLISP I have developed and thus I am quite reluctant to even contemplate a switch.

I will put it bluntly, "what's wrong with common LISP?"

If somehow people don't like all the redundancy, well use the subset you like. That's what I do. Sure it would be nice to have a language that forced some kind of uniformity and consistency in its nature. But these are abstract/fluffy terms. And like I said I have 20k lines of LISP that I am not interested in porting...

But if a crystal clear reason were to emerge, then yes I would do it. I do have an open mind.

<comment><USER8> >I will put it bluntly, "what's wrong with common LISP?"

PG already covers many of his objections to CL his essays. I will not repeat them here. It might be more fair to ask "What's wrong with Scheme?", as Arc seems much closer to Scheme than CL.

As I see it, one of the biggest reasons to create Arc is social. It doesn't have to do anything CL and Scheme don't already if PG and RTM can build a real community around it.

<comment><USER7> Yes, sorry I was being cranky yesterday. I had just come off a harrowing (but productive) week on the Job... Publish or perish time for me!

So after my hangover wore off (we went out last night), I decided that I shouldn't be such a grouch and I should take a gander at arc rather than just shoot my mouth off about how I don't want to dick around with my near 20k lines of CLISP code (wc #of lines, which include comments).

I looked very quickly at the tutorial and I have to say that I very much like the feel. And although I am under strict personal orders not to think about code these days, I can't help but to plot out a potential porting path. The first thing will be to build some macros so that my common lisp code looks more arc like. This would force me to clean a lot of things too, perhaps knocking it down to 10k if I am lucky. I also know I am doing a lot of dumb things here and there so perhaps if I am really lucky/skilled I can get it down to 5k.

Then I will see how things evolve and do the port when I get the time. It looks like arc will have good momentum and will breath life into the community, so yes I think it's a great thing.</comment></comment></comment>


What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Startups 4 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://blog.amirkhella.com/2011/02/23/what-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-5-years-ago/ <comment><USER2> He's right. The most important thing we tell each YC batch, immediately after interviews, is _start now_. Startups should be building stuff and talking to users, and not much else.

<comment><USER3> having done a startup with no "network" at all, and one knowing of and taking part in the tech startup community, I do think there is massive amount of value added when you are a part of "the scene"

You gain a network who will push your startup, introduce you to customers, investors, partners, media, you get some knowledge shared from people in the same situation, tools and methods they used and sometimes its just comforting being part of a group of people in the same situation who you can all relate with.

obviously a lot of this comes as part of the package with YC, imo one of its biggest attractions.

(and obviously this definitely cannot be done in place of building a product / talking to customers)

<comment><USER2> Introducing people is easy for us, but we need some ammunition to make introductions effective. We need to be able to say not just please meet x, but please meet x, who have built an amazing y.

<comment><USER4> At the risk of being pedantic, and because I know a large percentage of folks do not understand what you are saying, by "amazing" do you mean something with a lot of users and proof of traction? Not something that looks cool, is an incredible program, or most programmers would think is awesome? Because the average user of HN's opinion of "awesome" and yours might be very far apart.

<comment><USER2> When I say to investors that something is good, I mean good from their point of view. Which means that users do or will love it, and the market is big.

<comment><USER5> This is a gem of an advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am a little more pragmatic about this whole thing, without HN I really wouldn't have realised the benefits of MVC, Memcached, JQuery, SEO, github, the options for charging for an app, Python, the concept of bootstrapping, timing attacks, how easy it is to become a contractor, incubators, even the realisation that you don't need funding to setup a web app. And many more that don't pop into my head now. It's made me a more confident programmer.

There is a lot to be gained in coming here and reading the blogs, the advice. Perhaps more from the comments. Admittedly there is a fair bit of noise and distraction too.

There are benefits as well as negatives, I think it's one of these cases of all things in moderation. I go to the occasional startup meetings and developers meetings near me for fun and relaxation, not because I think it will gain me riches. Because it interests me. Occasionally it motivates me (seeing Rob Wilmot (freeserve) and Joel Gasgoine (myonepage/bufferapp)).

While get it done and ship is a lesson I sorely need beaten into me at this last stage of development, I for one do not begrudge myself these distractions.

<comment><USER7> I agree, I've got the same value out of these things as you. But pretty much all the people I know who have had some amount of success with anything didn't know these things and didn't care.

They just hacked something together and didn't stop...

So I think the value you are describing comes a fair distant second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great post!

AFAIC, Success = (BuildingStuff) * (TheValueOfEverythingElse)

If you're not building stuff, it doesn't matter how much value you get out of everything else. Zero is still zero.

Sorry it took you 4 years to learn that lesson. It took me a while too. I don't really know how long because I don't look back. I suspect none of us should.

<comment><AUTHOR> The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the next best time is right now ;)

<comment><USER9> Maybe the best quote I ever read. Never heard/read it before but I will probably quote it over and over again for the rest of my life. If it's from another language I'll probably get a pretentious tattoo of it.

I finally live according to that dictum now, but it took me 37 years to get to that place.

Facebook itself is brilliant testament to that. They entered an insanely crowded marketplace, with many leaders way way ahead of them. The were as late as late could be to create a "Social Network". It would be like showing up to a potluck at 2AM with a tray full of appetizers.

And then they mowed everybody down.

<comment><USER10> Appetizers tend to be good snack food, and by 2 AM most people are hungry again and need something to sober up with... so actually your analogy works better than you probably intended.

<comment><USER11> So if its 2am and you're holding a tray full of appetizers, show up any way? (Next best thing, after all.)

<comment><USER10> Absolutely

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is better to make $5 a month on something you created than spend a million dollars on learning how to build the perfect startup.

The more I learn about startups the more I realize that the answers are not found in a book or on a blog somewhere. Startups are about _synthesis_ , not instructions. That means until you execute, you don't know what you're doing. Hell, you don't know what you're doing even after you execute.

Also the more I learn the more I realize that me sitting around and writing comments like this are a big part of the problem. Both for me and others.

Back to work.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely agree. Execute first and make $5 online instead of reading books on how to make your first $1 million.

But I don't see you writing this comment as a problem. If it reaffirms your beliefs, results in you taking action, and teaches someone, you have just taught two people something. Back to work...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am Milton from Innotech and I hate my life. I'm stuck where I am because I am working full time and a full time student. But neither is really satisfying. I can't seem to raise enough capital to get my ideas off the ground and I can't seem to think of any good ideas that require no capital and can be completed with only a few hours a week.

But I will graduate eventually, then I will make more money and get out of debt. until then all I can really do is watch things from the sidelines and keep learning.

<comment><USER14> I did the same thing, and I can assure you that it's a wonderful feeling from the other side. It is, however, hell to go through.

<comment><USER15> Especially when you realize your red stapler is missing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of my favorite violinist, his one of the cleanest players you'll find: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mixnMzHUYxA>

Once he was asked what music piece he thought was most difficult to play, his reply was something like: "Either you can play a piece or you can't, there is no difficult, difficult leads to friction in your playing"

The 'not best' players when faced with difficult passages will consciously or subconsciously have fear of it and stress out, this is will cause tension and can be picked up by the viewer.

Milstein's was known for taking any musical piece he liked and 'hacking' it till he knew it inside out, for every passage he will try all sorts of fingerings. An average player will be content to play one fingering well, relying mostly on muscle memory, but Milstein would study a piece and really play from his head, at each moment he could choose between different fingerings. Thats how he thought and practiced, and if you look at his performance he is always relaxed because his preparation is so thorough and he played from his mind.

</comment><comment><USER17> Good post, I've been through a similar situation. I worked for some large evil company, and needed all of those meetups and blog posts to validate the idea that I wanted to work on or at a startup. But I am not sure that cutting them out totally is a good idea. They do help you build your network, and some people you meet at these events CAN actually be helpful. Maybe like with alcohol, it is good in moderation. But I agree, it is easy to get swept up in the spirit of entrepreneurship but never become one.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think networking, from a business perspective, is a lot like display advertising. It's more about building credibility for when you need it later than about the immediate sale. You want people to say "Hey, I've heard of that guy before."

Several competitors, when they wanted out of the business, approached me about buying them out for cheap. I even went through with one of the deals (the customers and some of the other assets, but not the name, of tilenetworks now belongs to prgmr.com. We'll be announcing a KVM product at some point based on the tilenetworks stuff.)

But much like advertising, it's not much use until you have something to buy or sell.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great post!

I would add one thing about momentum: don't be afraid to say "I'll get back to that problem" and focus on keeping the momentum going. This has made a HUGE difference in my project. A feature could have stopped me in my tracks, I bypassed it to keep development going and now it turns out that I don't need that feature. It could have stopped my process for weeks, but now, not at all.

Just, keep track of those things so you can get back to them later.

</comment><comment><USER20> Great article despite the irony of advising people to not read it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I know a lot of people who could tell you the name of every startup that launched on TechCrunch last week. Pretty much none of them have been successful. My advice to most of these people is "take a month off of the blogs and actually do something."

<comment><USER22> If you spend your life watching the waves, you're never going to catch one let alone make one.

But if the first time you've seen the sea was when you ran into it with a brand new board, the waves are going to catch you.

I engage in my own startups as if there were nothing else in the world. But the instincts I have come from my own participation, and also by consuming startup news in time I can easily afford.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The problem with all the blogs/interviews/features about strategies or lifehacks or whatever is that _if it hadn't worked, would they have bothered to write a blog about it?_

Meaning, hundreds of other people might have tried and failed with the exact same thinking, but you don't hear about _them_ , making success stories seem more significant than they really are.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the "wasted time" the author refers to is, in fact, time needed to get ready. Some folks won't need as much of it (or any at all), others will need more.

In the end, finding that "fear of not starting" is incredibly important, but I posit that could only be found by the author after his "walk in the wilderness".

</comment><comment><USER25> Bhahaha. I bursted out laughing when I saw Milton.

I agree with most of the points, but one thing I've learned in my years doing web startups is making sure their is a need for your product. Lots of Lean Startup principles are unbelievably useful at showing your idea has legs before investing any time or money into it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I use technology entrepreneur sites for inspiration when I'm getting sluggish after working the day job all day. Devoting more energy to "learning about being an entrepreneur" can be really unproductive. The best learning will be done by doing. I agree with this link.

Now it's time to go back to work!

</comment><comment><USER27> I stopped reading techcrunch a year back. I will stop reading HN for the next 60 days

</comment><comment><USER28> I think a valuable complement to this is the idea of finding the fastest minimum viable product you can create and start getting feedback on, and if the original idea would take months to launch, then trying to plan a path to it through a space of increasingly involved products that are viable at every step from the most quickly launchable initial product, even if that doesn't bear much resemblance to the original idea.

</comment><comment><USER29>
        I stopped reading startup news and blogs for few weeks, and I realized I didn't miss anything related to my products.

Fallacy?

<comment><USER30> The way I understand the message is that you don't _need_ startup news. By reading startup news, you feel productive and informed, but that doesn't contribute to actual time building your product.

Who cares how much Quora, Groupon, Fb, etc are valued. Who cares what new feature Gmail has or what new tablet Apple is coming out with. Most startup news is filled with these headlines that don't impact your startup.

By not surfing HN, Reddit, etc., the author was able to focus on building his product.

<comment><USER31> I turn to HN when I hit a road block. Sometimes I learn something new, but a lot of times Im just procrastinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Truth. Theory and practice are not separate, they are one. I am learning this myself right now. I finally realized the only way to change the fruits (results) is to the change the roots (actions). Consuming empty information are like consuming empty calories. It adds nothing but confusion and wastes nothing but time and energy.

BTW: Favorite HN post of the month. :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Great post. The discrepancy between the title and the URL made me smirk, even though it was probably not relevant.

</comment><comment><USER34> "work now and talk later"

this is just dead simple lesson in theory but why it takes time to actually practically feel this?

i think i will read and re-read only this post for few days. no more popurls.

</comment><comment><USER35> Good advice; Do you have other startup advice? I'd love to read all about it!

Isn't irony great; momentum and actually doing work is super important. Really good post.

</comment><comment><USER36> Great, great post. To honour it's spirit: it should also be the last post I read on HN. Before long another four years will have passed by.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wish someone had told me about startups 4 years ago :-).

</comment><comment><USER38> really great!

</comment><comment><USER39> _Don't be an entrepreneur by association. Be an entrepreneur by action and results._

That's one of the best things I've ever seen on HN. It (unfortunately) hits close to home.

</comment><comment><USER40> _Whenever I get an idea nowadays, I do something to pin it to my reality, and to make it tangible. I do it in a quick and ugly way, then figure out how to do it better, and learn only what I need for that._

Perfect.

After reading a number posts/articles similar to this, I feel like I'm pretty lucky to have gone the route I've taken. Being young and full of myself and thinking I can do pretty much anything I put my mind to is also a big factor, I'm sure. But it's also of course had negative impacts.

When I left my old lifestyle ("rockstar" lol emphasis on the quotations) I immediately dove into the little side project I was working on while in the band... and said, "Alright I'm gonna turn this into an actual business. Should be pretty easy... there's definitely tons of bands and management out there who would use it and I've already gotten most of it done." Little did I know, after working on it for a month, I saw vast potential in the basis of the project and decided to start over but make everything insanely flexible. Being arrogant as I was, I figured it wouldn't take more than a month or two. But of course it added on a few more months of (hard!) work and now almost 8 months later I'm literally less than a day away from actual release. (Look out for a rate my startup thread, hopefully tomorrow! ;))

Now, my determination (more like obsession) to get it 99% to what I'd imagined it to be months ago has led me to probably a situation that could be better. I probably could have released the app months ago at 50% and received awesome feedback along the way molding its design to exactly as customers want... while having a much larger customer-base and awareness than I do currently (practically none! :()... but I was afraid it would get a bad reputation early on and turn off more customers in the long run. But now in retrospect, if I'd known this from the beginning I'd have gone in a direction that allowed me to release much earlier without compromising the app's reputation. My mind was just so set on that one full idea I had from the beginning. I guess next time I'll be more prepared!</comment>


S&P 500 companies have returned $1T to shareholders in tax-cut surge - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/r-sp-500-companies-return-1-trillion-to-shareholders-in-tax-cut-surge-2018-5 <comment><USER2> Worth noting that for last year the S&P 500 returned around $950 million via dividends and buy-back.

<comment><USER3> $950 million? Billion you mean?

<comment><USER2> Yeah sorry, 950 billion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ffs ... this site thinks I have an ad blocker when I don't. Guess I'm adding them to the "just don't go there" blacklist.

<comment><USER5> I block all js and it works just fine.</comment></comment>


Fyne: Native Mobile UX in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne/releases/tag/v1.2.0 <comment><USER2> A thread from 11 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19478079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19478079)

<comment><AUTHOR> Twas not mobile then, tho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm trying to understand why this project calls itself "based on Material Design"? The example screenshots in the README have nothing that looks like what's widely known as Material Design. ([https://material.io/](https://material.io/))

<comment><USER4> They mention themes. Maybe there's a way to attach a material design theme?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does fyne's architecture compare to gio[1][2]?

[1] [https://gioui.org/](https://gioui.org/) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21186293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21186293)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the easiet native cross platform UI toolkit I ever use.

I'm on a Mac, and only thing I do was `go get` and it is able to build even ios/android version.

Some downside: The UI layout is a bit limit and inflexible. Many callback function basically has no signature at all...

Other than two minor above thing, I was able to go from zero to a fully function desktop app in a week. [https://github.com/yeo/bima](https://github.com/yeo/bima)

<comment><USER7> Same on Windows too. go get.. then you're up and running.

<comment><USER8> Yup, but I find it somewhat ugly. It would be great if it could mimic platform native widgets like Qt does.

<comment><USER7> I did get wxWidgets running a while ago, maybe worth trying.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, wxGo is not maintained.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its pretty good, it is written by the author of "Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go" which covers pretty much every gui option in goland. Its the easiest to use, just use go modules and it compiles without messing around with external dependencies.

<comment><USER9> I was looking at this last night. I'm interested in setting up a simple project with it -- so far, it looks the most promising to fill the GUI gap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How easy is it to style these components? I've worked at a lot of IoT companies that run full-blown android just to get access to the UI libraries on android. I've been looking for something high level that can be used to build a completely customized kiosk interface on low end hardware. You shouldn't need a 4core CPU with 2GB of RAM to get reasonably clean user interfaces working.

<comment><USER11> I'd think Qt on embedded linux could do much the same with a lot less, or littlevgl if you want to go even lower. The cost is in finding good people for a reasonable wage.

<comment><USER4> You can also use PySlide or PyQT5 to write all the base in Python with Qt components. Python+QT works really well if you build good unit tests. I used it recently to build an mpv front-end:

[https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/mpvbuddy/](https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/mpvbuddy/)

<comment><USER12> What are the specific pyqt unit tests? Curious since I use this stack at work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks very interesting. Congrats on the mobile support!

Is there an example Android APK of an app built with Fyne? I had a few issues getting `fyne package` to work with the calculator example[1], despite following the instructions[2]. I'm really curious how it looks/works on mobile.

I suppose any native platform access (sensors, camera, etc.) is out of scope for a UI framework. Any ideas how feasible this is nowadays as a Java/Kotlin/Flutter/Swift alternative? Is there some native bridge layer for Go?

[1]: [https://github.com/fyne- io/examples/tree/develop/calculator](https://github.com/fyne- io/examples/tree/develop/calculator)

[2]: [https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne/blob/master/README- mobile.md](https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne/blob/master/README-mobile.md)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder why wxGo ([https://github.com/dontpanic92/wxGo](https://github.com/dontpanic92/wxGo)) is not maintained.

</comment><comment><USER14> OpenSnitch was on HN recently and someone wrote an alternative UI[0] for it with Fyne which is interesting.

[0] [https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/257](https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/257)</comment>