Help What should I do in this situation? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm stuck in a bit of a freelance-payment type of mess, and I was wondering how to tackle the situation.
So, I started (about 4 weeks ago) on a project which involved moving a fairly large website from a certain platform to a newer version of that platform for $1800.
I was on Skype with that guy constantly, and he seemed like a very nice person at the time, and was quite helpful and understanding.
So, in about two weeks, I was finished with the project, and we tested it together on a test server he had set up, and it seemed to be working perfectly.
So, I pushed in the code to Github, and he said he would be testing it "in a few days", and he would pay me $200 of the $1800 to keep trust, and I agreed.
After a day, he told me he had to talk with the investors in order to get the $200, and he delivered that money.
Then (this is where matters complicate), in about 3 days after that, he told me he had some urgent work he needed done for the website, and he needed my help urgently.
And, he payed me in advance for this project ($400), and I agreed to do it.
Now, I finished it in about a week, however, he, apparently has still not gotten around to finalizing the first project to release my payment (and said he would not for another month).
He has not responded to me over the last few skype messages or the last email I have sent him.
Now, this strikes me as two things:
1) He's not going to pay me. 2) He made some commits during the time that I made the Cake 2.0 port, and he's trying to merge them in there, which is taking time.
What's going on, and how would I tackle this situation?
The last time I asked him "when he would test", he said he didn't know why this kept coming up, and he had more important things to do at the moment, and it would take another month. <comment><USER2> "it keeps coming up because you haven't paid me, yet." is the correct response. You can't let people jerk you around as a freelancer. You have to eventually cut off anymore work until you are paid.

You shouldn't release the source until you're paid in full. Also, google "fuck you, pay me" for a humorous but insightful talk about contracts. I think the person giving the talk is named Mike Monterro, but I could be wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, but, how should I go about contacting him?

He gave me a live dump of his website, and I have his phone number (along with that of the CEO), should I use that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you exclusively control the github repo? If so, cut off access and don't give it until payment is made in full. You have an implicit copyright on the code, and he has no right to it until he's paid you in fill.

I'd go a bit further and tell him that if he doesn't pay you within 15 days, the "interest" is $100 per week. No reason you should not get interest on your debt.

Just FYI, I always let customers see "features", but not code, until they've paid in full.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, but, I don't have access to the main repo (he has a fork which has all the code) :(</comment></comment>


Block storage is dead, says ex-HP and Supermicro data bigwig - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/10/block_storage_dead_interview/ <comment><USER2> Is this trend empowered by SSD? Or should we expect spinning disks SSD hibrid in this model too?

</comment><comment><USER3> wow, very weird to find racism in an article on block storage. "no tickee, no laundry"? how offensive and out of line.

<comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550329](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550329)

<comment><USER5> I'm not the kind of person who gets easily offended. Like a lot of people, I enjoy environments where people are free to hurl creative, over-the-line and asinine insults at each other so long as everybody has consented to getting their chops busted.

Having said that, there's a time and place for everything. When talking publically, it's not only considerate to refrain from mocking accents, it's wise.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Groupon Sucks for Merchants and LivingSocial Doesn't - <AUTHOR> http://venturelevel.com/post/4798285366/why-groupon-sucks-for-merchants-and-livingsocial

<comment><USER2> Longish article, summary:

\- Restaurateur tests both Groupon / Living social

\- Groupon only phone solicitations, unresolved issues after a month vs. LivingSocial took time for in-person rep visit, excellent merchant service.

\- Groupon at 50/50 split, LivingSocial 60/40 in merchant favor

\- LivingSocial charges no CC fees, Groupon charges 2.5%

\- Non-scientific "LivingSocial customers [have] a little more IQ it seems [than Groupon]."

\- Merchant concludes LivingSocial taking more of a Zappos approach to stand out, and is succeeding.

<comment><USER3> You missed the part about the Groupon rep encouraging fraudulent Yelp reviews, which I feel is an important point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How much do you get to pocket on people not redeeming their groupons/livingsocial coupons? As in, what percentage are bought but never redeemed?

50% seems like a big hit, so for these to make business sense, the merchant must either make up for it by people buying more than the minimum, getting repeat customers, or getting some cash from people that pre-paid and never bothered to claim their goods/services and having that subsidize the others.

Also, speaking as a customer, you should not be bothered by those who use the deals without buying more than the minimum. It irritates me to no end when someone offers a deal to promote their business or to try and hook you, then treats you like a second class citizen for taking advantage of the terms that they offered. If I like it, and feel that it is a good value without the discount, I will come back.

Realize that many of these offerings can push things into different affordability ranges, so you will definitely get non-repeat customers just because the deal is too good to pass up. Granted, this probably doesn't apply to a "$5 for $10" deal.

<comment><USER4> The accounting term for this is "breakage".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakage>

Any business that runs a coupon campaign will usually account for breakage. It's factored into the numbers of whether a campaign is executable or not.

The percentage will vary for every business / every campaign even for the same business.

<comment><USER5> "The percentage will vary for every business / every campaign even for the same business."

Obviously, but for the same business, controlling for external factors (season, ...) and with sufficiently large sample sizes of customers, there must be an indicative spread?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMHO, this is what I would wish for either Groupon or LivingSocial to do. Instead of just throwing it back on to the business once the groupons are sold, be involved beyond that point. Infact, know which customers fit in to that top 5% who actually consistently spend beyond the value of the groupon. Those are the customers that you would want to refer to your clients. If there was a feedback loop back from the businesses back to Groupon or Living Social, then they could curate this list of customers and either start targeting them with better deals or charge more for businesses to get access to those customers. This way, Groupon/LivingSocial has a list of customers that are highly desirable for local businesses to reach, and businesses have a steady roster of customers who dont stiff them on these deals.

I am sure this can be done. Just not sure whether either of these two know how to do it.

<comment><USER7> This is a very good idea, but let's push it further. Groupon could let people collect points and badges for their continued patronage at stores that were featured by Groupon. These badges would identify the best customers, and Groupon could offer them rewards. People may feel even more motivated to continue shopping at such stores, and Groupon will know who the loyal customers are. Groupon could literally become an Air Mile card of sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The venomous use of the word "copycat" when it comes to competitors permeates the Groupon culture, from the C-Suiters to the sales folk. It's really something. They would be better off, IMO, dropping the nastiness, and simply continuing to find ways to dominate.

</comment><comment><USER9> Several questions spring to mind:

1) What kind of impact is had by running first a Groupon, then a LivingSocial deal in rapid succession?

2) Is it possible that the merchant just got a bad Groupon representative (ie, is that service representative of Groupon's interactions)?

3) Are the customers of QSR (ie, fastfood) group-deals different than those of higher end services (ie, day spa, hotel)?

<comment><USER10> In regards to 2, the author mentions the same concern, and a possible reason for the difference in service, way at the end:

> Or maybe my account rep with Groupon is just to blame? Perhaps Groupon grew > too big, too fast, to consider the value of communication and treatment with > merchants...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Groupon will drop the fees as soon as their shine fades. For now they need to show revenues and profits to fool the suckers to the tune of $15-$20 Billion

<comment><USER8> Definitely a serious ramp up going on here. We'll see if they can hold their ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It keeps surprising me that Groupon still find merchants given their current revenue share. Most deals are 50%, the share is 50% of 50% - 2.5% for credit card fee processing leaving the merchant with 22.5% of the original price.

If you sell anything that you buy, you'd need to have a 77.5% profit. Most restaurants only do a 10 to 20% benefit usually.

They'd be better served by pinning a huge promotion on their front like :'50% percent on friday'; they'd reach more customers in they neighbourhood, who would be more likely to come back and they'd keep a much better share of the deal.

It's not even nice for your actual customers who come the same day and pay the full price just to discover that they got screwed because they could have paid half by going to groupon.

<comment><USER13> > It's not even nice for your actual customers who come the same day and pay > the full price just to discover that they got screwed because they could > have paid half by going to groupon.

Precisely. I went to a burger place in SF the other day and the line was 20 people deep, all paying with Groupons. The restaurant's price was already relatively high, so I felt annoyed at having missed out (even though I was planning on eating there anyway.)

I think it may be detrimental to run ridiculous coupon deals _ever_ \-- if you have ever given away (or basically given away) your product, then people that know about that recalibrate the 'real cost' of it to that. This is especially true, I'd wager, in places that 'seem like' they should have a high margin anyway (like tours, or spas, or other more service-oriented places.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I've never heard is the redemption rate on those coupons. Do 100% of the buyers use them before the expiration date? Or do those count as super-awesome customers who gave up money and got nothing in return?

<comment><USER15> Ours was a good 30%

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why on earth is the CEO of anything engaged in a long-running email discussion over two fraudulent coupon redemptions of $10 coupons? Mentally chalk it up to "cost of doing business" and move on.

Shrinkage should not be a new experience to the owner of a fast food restaurant. (Neither should pathological customers, although I could see a Groupon getting you more of those than usual.)

<comment><USER17> Three emails regarding two separate incidents over the span of 28 days (and counting) does not seem excessive to me.

As far as the CEO being personally involved: he's evaluating the effectiveness of a potential long term strategic tool. His issue is with _the process_ in place by Groupon for dealing with said incidents, not the specific incidents themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is insightful post, but I think this kind of difference between service quality is to be expected.

Compare Groupon -- a well-funded company and relatively well-known brand, which seem to consider themselves to have strong position on the market, with LivingSocial, who seem consider themselves fighting an uphill battle against an incumbent.

No wonder LivingSocial works hard on differentiating themselves form the competition. No wonder Groupon tries to cut the costs by providing what they consider bare minimum service.

I think you'll find similar example everywhere you go, where imbalanced markets and competition are at work.

</comment><comment><USER19> Dealing with groupons sounds about as bad as dealing with Yahoo Search Marketing

</comment><comment><USER20> Confirms everything I've suspected for a while. Great article.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good user report.

</comment><comment><USER22> Prediction: Groupon will eventually become old news, and irrelevant. A "Copy- Cat" will focus on developing a customer base consisting of quality niche customers, and become the dominate player.

<comment><USER23> prediction on top of prediction. There'll be multiple players, in multiple niches and a few larger players in the general market.

prediction on top of prediction on top of prediction: Market forces and economics will come to play. (nature abhors a vacuum, where there's money people will flock).

<comment><USER24> prediction^3: Interest in group buying wanes both from consumers and business owners. Groupon branches out to a more traditional ad network/ad services company with a local focus to try to leverage their sales staff. Living Social accepts reduced margins compared to todays market and sticks it out in some of the niches that work well like day spas.

<comment><USER25> Another prediction: Most merchants will start their own deal website like <http://thesuperdeal.com/birmingham/deals/recent>

Read somewhere that these guys use agriya groupon software, part of their ideas were copied by real groupon in their 2.0 release.

<comment><USER23> prediction^5: We're all right. All of the above will happen, and many things we didn't see coming.

Also, coupons will still be boring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some great points in the article and I agree that Livingsocial is better all around than Groupon, not only from a merchant perspective but also with innovation and creativity in the group buying space.

At the same time I believe that daily deals are unsustainable for the large crowd that is out there. Groupon and living social will survive but many will die. My company is providing an innovative solution that complements daily deals and is another good source for marketing.

At Zooyan.com we are creating a marketplace for deals where people can go and search for or browse 100s of ongoing offers near them. All of the offers last on average for 6 months and provide similar discounts to daily deals. We allow customers the ability to buy what they want, when they want it and we allow merchants to have a long term marketing source that provides consistent and manageable sales. I'd love to know what others think. Www.zooyan.com

<comment><USER27> You couldn't even put the <http://> in your spam post for your link? Fail.</comment></comment>


Small Data: Tinder-like apps are the way of the future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/appszoom-insights/small-data-why-tinder-like-apps-are-the-way-of-the-future-1a4d5703b4b <comment><USER2> I've seen a few "Tinder for <X>" apps out there that try to emulate the swipe model for things like hiring, events, business connections, etc. I haven't found any of them useful; I think they overgeneralize the Tinder model.

Tinder works because the criteria the user is selecting for, physical attractiveness, really can be evaluated in a split second from a single photo.

On the other hand, the question of "do I want to hire this person" requires carefully evaluating their skills, credentials, education, location, availability. "Do I want to go to this event" depends on the kind of event, location, time, and other plans I might have that day. In both cases the photo is irrelevant. Once you have to look through each item for 10-20 seconds bare minimum, the Tinder model doesn't make sense anymore.

Another key UI consideration is filtering. In the hiring and events examples, you can easily filter algorithmically by skills, years of experience, event type, or location. But physical attractiveness can't be algorithmically filtered on. So Tinder occupies a unique niche where the selection criteria is 1) impossible to automate because it's vague and subjective but 2) easy for each individual user to evaluate in a split second.

</comment><comment><USER3> The secret to Tinder's success isn't that they use a swipe-based interface. It's that they solved one of the biggest pain points in dating: users never have to talk to anyone that hasn't already expressed mutual interest in them. Since the app discloses romantic interest only after both parties have reciprocated, Tinder offers a fundamentally better way of meeting new people than has existed previously. That was a game-changer for the entire dating scene, and that is why they are successful.

<comment><USER4> AFAIK dating websites had such a feature years before Tinder. Mutual selection as "favorite" or something like that leading to revelation of that selection to both isn't new at all.

<comment><USER5> It isn't the mutual selection alone, but that feature in combination with swiping (basically a first impression) and inability to go back make it substantially different than dating sites.

To my knowledge dating sites usually have pages of profiles you search though. If you see someone you select, but say you go through 5 pages and no one catches your eye but you're out of matches. You may be willing to go back through and lower your standards to make some matches.

This is also aided by Tinder being a more dynamic app. The number of people that are active(discoverable) changes day to day, whereas a dating site is essentially static; with only new users adding more potential matches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are so many holes in this piece it's amazing. It's especially apparent when it's boiled down by the author:

"There are many reasons why this makes for a better user experience:

1.Cognitively, you can only evaluate one option at a time. Seeing all the options laid out in front of you at once is just noisy and distracting, since you'll have to consider each one in turn anyway. 2.Making swipe-happy snap judgements allows you to make better choices, faster. See Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking for much more on the adaptive unconscious. 3.You can do it one handed."

There's no reference to cognitive theories dealing with various interface types. I'm doing an independent project this semester with user eye-tracking through a Netflix-like interface. Iris Vessey's theory of Cognitive Fit shows that there are some tasks where the-part-in-relation-to-the-whole is the main consideration. In those cases, a matrix interface is a better fit, leading to better (faster, more accurate) task performance. 2\. Malcolm Gladwell as main reference? ...no wonder no cognitive theory was explored. 3\. Why stop there, you could also do that with blinks or eye gestures, further isolated into a bubble of laziness.

</comment><comment><USER7> One big false generalization.

I mean Netflix's interface sucks for discovery, and the suggested improvement in the article is to force me to look at one suggested movie at a time? Seriously!?

<comment><USER8> Any claims for discovery efficiency is a lie. Shitty UX's "convert better" due in part to the way that they hurt their users.

Netflix cannot let you discover there is nothing you want to watch in their entire catalogue because you will unsubscribe. They have to make you believe there is more that you have not found.

Similar to Amazon, they cannot make search so efficient that you have the time and energy to search other sites or price compare. The strategy is to make sure they are the first place you visit and then exhaust you to the point you settle with what they have to offer.

<comment><USER9> > _Netflix cannot let you discover... They have to make you believe there is > more that you have not found._

That's an insightful observation and explains perfectly why Netflix does not provide a simple straight list of all titles that you can scroll through. I'll bet that the Netflix engineers have wanted to add such an obvious feature, but someone in marketing yelled, "Don't!"

If you ask the average non-techie user how many titles their Neflix subscription has, they'll be astonished to hear that it's only ~7750 in the US and even less in other countries (eg., ~4478 in Canada)[1]. Even though this information is easy to discover, it seems that most people don't bother to know.

[1] [http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.ca/](http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.ca/)

<comment><USER10> The other thing I've noticed having recently trialled Netflix in Australia is that they seem to push TV series harder than movies. I guess if you watch a movie, you're done in a couple of hours. If you get hooked on a TV series, you might be watching episode after episode for a number of seasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Following this "small data" concept I was also working on an app that works with a kind of "binary communication". You guys (and girls) seem quite critical, so I'd be really curious to hear what you guys think of this concept (sorry if this is considered self promotion, it just seemed appropriate to mention it here.) The idea is a messaging app where recipients can only reply Yes or No, and is intended for quick questions when you don't need an excuse (i.e. "Have you sent the file yet?"), the idea is to gear for wearables and provide a swappable tinder like interface for quick questions. [http://www.getmoshimoshi.com](http://www.getmoshimoshi.com)

<comment><USER10> Nice site and nice app design. I think the app has some merit but your challenge will be finding fun/obvious use-cases that are strong enough to get entire groups of people downloading it. Planning a night out seems to be one challenge no app has adequately solved so I'd steer clear, but the angle of convincing groups of people to join for outfit reviews is stronger. I could see girls using it in change rooms before buying clothes, or getting ready to go to a party or whatever.

<comment><USER11> Hi, Thank you! Yeah the idea is for every day quick questions like outfit reviews etc. Things that you just need an immediate "yes or no" answer to. The concept is to keep conversation short, sweet and to the point. It's mainly targeted at millennials. I know it's a bit buggy but it you got some time, I'd really appreciate it if you could play around with the app and possibly give it a review! Thanks again! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alan Kay once said something to the effect of: the best UIs are the ones that make the process of rejection as fast as possible.

So, "yes", Tinder-like apps are the way of the future, but we could have been living in the future a long time ago if people had been paying more attention to the lessons of the past.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really hope not. For anyone not above average looking, Tinder, et al, are a bunch of apps that basically show you everyone in your area that would never talk to you. I'm fairly positive that at least in my area, anyone who even matches with me is a robot.

<comment><USER14> Are you able to date successfully as an unattractive person without Tinder?

Maybe in the future Tinder should segment its users better so that attractive people are presented to other attractive people, and the plebs stay in their own pool, but it seems more appropriate to just abandon anyone without the resources to make themselves attractive to solitude.

After all, there soon won't be enough jobs for everyone anyway; the growing acceptance of polyamory combined with the divorce (pun not intended) of marriage from its religious basis means we can expect polygamy and polyandry to be legal within our lifetime; as more and more of the world becomes hyper- unequal, why do we expect dating to be any different?

Of course, this is a totally unrelated tangent to the article, which was about the card swiping interface and the advantages therein, but let's not expect an unequal world to be equal in some respects.

<comment><USER15> An unattractive photo does not always mean an unattractive person.

<comment><USER16> And vice versa.

<comment><USER17> I hope to join you guys in your fantasy world one day

<comment><USER16> Never heard of MySpace angles?

You seem bitter. So here's some drive-by unwanted advice. I assume you are male:

\- Hit the gym, lift weights. Eat enough to be non-scrawny. (Or lose weight, if you are currently fat.)

\- Acquire currency---as a HN lurker you should at least be able to talk your way into a tech job.

\- Get someone knowledgeable to help with your outfit.

\- Get some nice pictures of yourself. Either practice the art of the selfie until you are good, ask a knowledgeable friend, or pay someone.

<comment><USER17> Haha thanks buddy. I interpreted what they were saying as "looks don't matter", which is obviously false

<comment><USER16> Oh, OK. Looks do matter, but looks are not set in stone.

(And since they are not, you don't need to feel too bad about judging somebody by something they have at least some influence over.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is so dumb... One paragraph they're introducing the concept of "small data", the next paragraph they're talking about how getting the swipe information for huge numbers of users helps them train their collaborative filtering algorithm...

Ultimately it's a big data hype article... GASP we can infer your preferences from your behavior... Written by someone with a Medium tagline of "Sassy futurism. Tech and words."

<comment><USER18> That is not at all dumb. Doing the preference learning for a huge number of users lets you set up a prior over the preferences that includes correlations between different attributes. Then you use the population prior together with the data for the individual to get the posterior for their personal preferences, which will then take into account the correlations revealed in the population data. This is what we do with [http://findmelike.com](http://findmelike.com) where we perform the Bayesian update over the user's preferences after every user interaction.

<comment><USER17> Ha ha... I'm not against learning preferences at all... I think you misunderstood my comment

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Gag I hope not. Otherwise we risk our future reduced to Idiocracy.</comment>


Bitcasa is out of beta - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitcasa.com/2013/02/06/the-end-of-beta-as-you-know-it/

<comment><AUTHOR> They are also offering the first year at $49 for beta users.</comment>


George Eliot: A genius who scandalised society - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20191119-george-eliot-radical-writer-novels <comment><USER2> Reading Middlemarch was a life-changing experience. Fun fact: George Eliot was not only a novelist, but also very well read in philosophy and even translated Spinoza into english.

My favorite quote by her:

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

My other favorite passage by George Eliot (the excerpt is a screed written by a political polemicist in Middlemarch):

"Here is a sharp stroke or two. If we had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the most evil sense of the word—we should say, he is one who would dub himself a reformer of our constitution, while every interest for which he is immediately responsible is going to decay: a philanthropist who cannot bear one rogue to be hanged, but does not mind five honest tenants being half-starved: a man who shrieks at corruption, and keeps his farms at rack-rent: who roars himself red at rotten boroughs, and does not mind if every field on his farms has a rotten gate: a man very open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester, no doubt; he would give any number of representatives who will pay for their seats out of their own pockets: what he objects to giving, is a little return on rent-days to help a tenant to buy stock, or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather out at a tenant's barn-door or make his house look a little less like an Irish cottier's. But we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance."

<comment><USER3> Is the philanthropist described Bulstrode, specifically?

<comment><USER2> I believe it's actually implied to be Mr. Brooke, Dorothea's uncle — the passage is being read to him by another character.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me Eliot's genius lay in her attitude to her characters, and so I assume to real people: she saw through their facades and was happy to drily point out their flaws and even mock them; but she clearly had a genuine affection for them, a willingness to understand, and to forgive though not to whitewash or give up on demanding better.

</comment><comment><USER5> Eliot's sociological novel, an overarching view of how society works, is part of the inspiration for my logging library, named Eliot ([https://eliot.readthedocs.io](https://eliot.readthedocs.io)).

The intro docs are inspired by Middlemarch: [https://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/introduction.html](https://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> It is my shame that I have not read George Eliot. I move to correct the omission, late but not too late.</comment>


In Flew Enza: Remembering the Plague Year in Berkeley - <AUTHOR> https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/fall-2017-bugged/flew-enza-remembering-plague-year-berkeley <comment><USER2> The first - and until now only - time I came across that 'grim little ditty' was in LeTourneau's autobiography "Mover of Men and Mountains".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pY8hllCePA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pY8hllCePA) gives an example of how children might chant it as they skip rope.

</comment><comment><USER3> Strange that no one brings the recent H1N1, maybe because it was a fail at trying to produce mass histeria?.</comment>


The Violent Afterlife of a Recycled Plastic Bottle - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/what-actually-happens-to-a-recycled-plastic-bottle/418326/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> _A MRF sifts through recyclables to recover ... glass, metal, and plastics with the resin code #1 or #2 (that's the little tiny number in the triangle on the bottom). It discards the rest._

I have heard this, that a good bit if not the majority of the waste that people think they are recycling ends up in the landfill anyway. Would it not be more efficient to just say "don't bother recycling anything except metal, glass, and #1 or #2 plastic." The rest can be trucked directly to the landfill, saving the extra trip and energy used to take it to the MRF for sorting.

I think there's a good bit of political deceptiveness going on, people like to think that they are recycling and helping the environment so local government sets up a program to make it appear that they are. I wonder how many would be shocked to learn that half of what they recycle ends up in the landfill.

<comment><USER3> I have a friend who's an environmental engineer and he say's while no one says this publicly, the only thing that is clearly a win for the environment is recycling aluminum. The rest is either questionable, or not even close.

<comment><USER4> Glass, copper, steel and even asphalt scraped from roads are eminently worth recycling, plastics and paper recycling tend to be swayed by commodity prices, but you can't have a policy that recycles only when crude price is above $60 a barrel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At one point, California had about 110% plastic bottle recycling. Then the California Highway Patrol caught the outfit that was bringing in semis full of crushed bottles from out of state and the recycler that was paying for them.

<comment><USER2> Kramer and Newman?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Metals, such as, tin and aluminum are then extracted by magnets. "

umm, what?

I know aluminum can be slightly magnetic under intense magnetic fields, but surely this isn't the case in this situation?

<comment><USER7> The article should have said: "by magnetic induction". An AC current driven electromagnet induces a current in the metal, the induced current in the metal also has a magnetic field (basic physics), and it is this magnetic field that is then used to "sort" the conductors (metals) from the non-conductors (non- metals).

But then, the article was likely written by someone lacking an engineering/physics background, and so "extracted by magnets" was likely as much as they could comprehend of the process.</comment></comment>


A home for apps that push the boundaries of iOS. No jailbreak required - <AUTHOR> https://altstore.io/ <comment><USER2> It seems like this uses the free iOS developer license to install a few apps temporarily on your phone. I can't see this gaining much traction with the 7 day refresher periods though</comment>


Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3/answer/Michael-Wolfe?srid=kw

<comment><USER2> I was on a project where a friend had a stroke and I had to have my heart restarted because of super ventricular tachocardia brought on by sleep deprivation. It was on Christmas eve, so I know the sentiment well.</comment>


Velcro - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brunolazzaro/velcro Velcro is a simple, flat-file, blogging platform. It uses Markdown and Jade. It's also my first open-source project! Check it out. <comment><USER2> What makes it better than, for example, Jekyll?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not aiming for better than. I was just aiming on building something useful for me, and from that this was born. Jekyll never really appealed to me.

This _might_ not be better, but it uses things that i like: Jade for the templating system and markdown for posts. You can have multiple templates for your blog, configuration files with variables for each (that are exposed to the template) and some other cool stuff :)

<comment><USER2> _nods_

Good luck ^^</comment></comment></comment>


Scala React interface: Cross-platform apps using Scalajs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chandu0101/sri <comment><USER2> Wow! This is some fantastic stuff. To be (slightly) cynical, I wonder how much code reuse one could get out of this _in practice_. At any rate, I think it's a win to be able to do all of this kind of coding within the same language. Also, being able to bring functional programming, immutability, and types to these different environments is a sure win!

<comment><USER3> Taking a task that a JavaScript developer could do and putting a dependency on them being a Scala developer as well isn't a win imo (as a Scala/Javascript dev)

<comment><USER4> I fully agree. I've done minor things in Java and I've been doing PHP for about 3 years. I've picked up React and I've been trying to get into Scala. It's only been three days, but I think it's not for the faint of heart. I can think of a number of solid front-end devs whose lives would be hell if you threw them into Scala (as an aside, I actually like what I've learned so far, though I wish their 'documentation' was not terrible, though I imagine it's probably done that way since it would be too hard to keep it up to date)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this meant to be a replacement for/improvement over scalajs-react [1] or scala-js-react [2] (two other libraries that wrap ReactJS in ScalaJS)?

[1] [https://github.com/japgolly/scalajs- react](https://github.com/japgolly/scalajs-react)

[2] [https://github.com/xored/scala-js-react](https://github.com/xored/scala- js-react)

<comment><USER6> not 100% , [https://github.com/chandu0101/sri/issues/3](https://github.com/chandu0101/sri/issues/3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is scalajs now? The last time I checked it out, it baked in about 100KB of overhead into the simple hello world.

<comment><USER8> According to this[1], as of 2 years ago, hello world was only 2.63KB. It's probably even better now as there have been several releases in the past 2 years.

[1] - [https://github.com/scala-js/scala- js/issues/4#issuecomment-2...](https://github.com/scala-js/scala- js/issues/4#issuecomment-20937230)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> nope.avi</comment>


Ask HN: Where to Find Obscure Literature? - <AUTHOR> While reading about William S. Burroughs' "Cities of the Red Night" I found out about Konstantīns Raudive's book "Breaktrhough".
This book was about electronic voice phenomena (EVP) and the attempt at recording voices from the afterlife. Even if you don't buy into the concept of it, the content struck me as highly poetic.
I was fascinated by the book (which I never heard of) and was wondering if anyone could recommended me resources to find more "obscure", "interesting" and completely "left field" literature. (I put the previous words in quotations because these are things which are hard to quantify). <comment><USER2> [http://www.openculture.com/](http://www.openculture.com/) has many lists of free books, audio, movies, images. Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org Also look at [https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en](https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en)

and, of course, archive.org which has the book you mentioned: [https://archive.org/details/BreakthroughAnAmazingExperimentI...](https://archive.org/details/BreakthroughAnAmazingExperimentInElectronicCommuninicationWithTheDead.ByKonstantinRaudive).

The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian have huge digital collections.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://b-ok.cc/](https://b-ok.cc/) is good, search isn't that great on it though.</comment>


Ask HN: Book Recommendations for Teenagers - <AUTHOR> Hello All! What books would you recommend for a teenager who is trying to discover their passion for computer science and form a foundation of core mental models about life? Also books that help them learn computer science foundations would be helpful. Some examples I was thinking were<p>- Principles By Ray Dalio - Seeking Wisdom by Charlie Munger<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) by Barbara Oakley

How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

I'm not sure but I heard Little Brother by Cory Doctorow covers ideas of privacy and information security?

I haven't read it myself yet but I heard great things about Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for these suggestions! Just ordered on Amazon!</comment></comment>


Proposal to add clause to license prohibiting use by oil and gas extraction - <AUTHOR> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2020-July/080803.html <comment><USER2> So oil and gas companies will subcontract to companies which use NumPy and sell their own systems to oil and gas companies.

Or would it be better to force any company using NumPy to stop using it if their goods or services turn out to be resold to oil and gas companies?

</comment><comment><USER3> Some good thinking about the issue in the email threads, sounds like it won't happen and that the counter-solution is to fork it, change the license, and advocate for deps to switch</comment>


Why do many companies on Inc's 5000 list seem like they don't belong? - <AUTHOR> I really don't intend this to sound condescending or arrogant in any way but a number the top 50 in Inc's 5000 are not businesses I would expect to be on the list. Yet, clearly they're doing something right. My question is, what are the key things they did right/different to achieve such growth?
Let's take a few specific companies as examples:
#11 - Small Business Owners of America provides short-term financing to businesses and offers services to startups, including incorporations, business plans, and pitch decks. SBOA has a 3-year growth rate of 12,060%
#13 - Suju Juice makes organic, cold-pressured, non-GMO juice beverages and has a 3-year growth rate of 10,511%
#21 - C&H Financial Services provides capital for small businesses, including loans, merchant cash advances, residual based lending, and e-commerce, mobile, and retail payment processing services. Its clients include nonprofits, municipalities, and restaurants. C&H has a 3-year growth rate of 8,053%
#22 - Paykings provides debit and credit card based payment processing services and has a 3-year growth rate of 7,905%
Again really don't mean to sound condescending but if you provided me nothing but the descriptions above, I would never guess these companies are in the Top 50 of Inc's list. Clearly my knowledge is limited and I'm missing something here. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Maybe these companies started at a low base.

<comment><AUTHOR> They definitely must have to hit those rates but regardless, that type of growth is huge. Wish I could talk to one of these companies and hear their story</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone tried running two start ups at a time? - <AUTHOR>

I know its a lot of work, I know its a crazy question, But what I mean is did anyone try running two small startup/sideprojects at a time. Doesn't matter alone or with a team<p>Did you make money? was it the right thing or would you have been better off focusing on one thing at a time <comment><USER2> TL;DR - I've done it. One had a successful exit, the other bombed. Spend all your time, energy and passion into one and make it win.

I used to run two startups in parallel - 1) an online b2c startup - review and recommendation site for local businesses and 2) manufacturing and installation of bird spikes.

Not only were both businesses completely different in all aspects, they were also run out of two different cities. I used to run the online businesses, while the manufacturing one I handed over to a friend and would touch base with him very week to check progress and help troubleshoot sales, marketing etc.

The online startup was a roaring success. We exited successfully in just 3 years of starting up. The manufacturing one failed - the friend lost interest, I couldn't manage the day to day affairs and it ended up being a disaster.

So don't do two things in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tried that recently. Doesn't work. A product needs all the attention, and switching between two is very difficult, specially during the early stages which are critical for customer development and growth.

There's a reason why successful startup founders with a wide portfolio are called serial entrepreneurs, not parallel entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe too soon for me to be answering, but I'm running two now, though one is not-for-profit. The for-profit one I founded in part to generate a percentage of profit to seed the not-for-profit.

I say too soon because I haven't released the for-profit one to the world yet (still coding). The nonprofit has generated substantial interest in its field, despite minimal funding to date, and netted me one full-time job offer at the pinnacle of the field, and likely played a role in some other contracts I've had since.

But I don't know that two at once is right for most people. It's pretty insane, and probably only works for now because the nonprofit is in partial operation (advocacy) and the for-profit is in development. But then both are seriously big-scale in terms of their aims, so maybe that doesn't help, given that you said both of yours are small.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm running four projects - usehuman.com, octopus.org, mostvaluablepro.com and thecloudforum.com. They're all side projects but eventually I'll have to focus on one for sure. As others have said, dividing your time between things divides your ability to focus.

</comment><comment><USER6> the general advice is to focus on one project at a time. However, I can't do that.. I am currently working on 3-4 projects, besides my one-man consultancy business. I can't say I'm profitable with any yet though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Elon Musk.</comment>


Critical vulnerabilities in LastPass plugins for Chrome, Firefox leak passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/21/lastpass_vulnerabilities/?mt=1490185154916 <comment><AUTHOR> The craziest thing is that apparently LastPass' "fix" for the published vulnerabilities was just to disable DNS for the demo'd link, and the vulnerability may actually still be live if performed via the IP address!</comment>


The world has a new fastest computer, thanks to video games - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21566611-world-has-new-fastest-computer-thanks-video-games-deeper-thought

<comment><USER2> Too bad this article is almost devoid of technical information. But then again, The Economist is not the publication to read for technical information...</comment>


Purifying spoiled randomness with spoiled randomness - <AUTHOR> https://mittheory.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/purifying-spoiled-randomness-with-spoiled-randomness/

<comment><USER3> I haven't read either of the papers yet, but can anyone comment on what makes it difficult to output multiple bits. Naively, couldn't you gather weak random data from the two sources, get a single bit, then gather more weak data, and run the extractor again to get a second bit?

<comment><USER4> Hi gizmo686. Yes, what you propose is correct. But this requires that every time you iterate this process, you're required to find additional sources of weak data that is _completely independent_ of the sources of weak data you used in the previous iterations. In that case, you're describing an extractor that requires multiple independent sources.

What the challenge was (and it looks like there was some progress a couple weeks ago), was that you'd like to produce multiple bits using only two independent sources, and no more than that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone in the know post a conceptual description of roughly what's going on here?

The last time I read up on randomness, I was given to believe that it's not really an observable quantity - that is, a sequence of numbers is random only to the extent that nobody's found a pattern in them yet, and as such, the most rigorous way we have of testing strong RNGs is to run them through a battery of test for the sorts of patterns that are known to show up in weak RNGs. But that sounds far-removed from the situation the article describes, where this or that generator can be proven to be perfect or imperfect.

Is this the gap between theoretical analysis and real-world implementations, or am I misunderstanding something more fundamental?

<comment><USER6> You're on the right track with randomness. "Random number" is a bad word - <USER2> implies that randomness is a property of the number, rather than the more complete picture of "you can expect that people will be unable to predict the number, given a certain set of background information."

<comment><USER7> To expand on that a little, the main property you're looking for is that if I give you the N random numbers that have already been generated you can't predict what the next one will be with certainty beyond random chance.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseud...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator#Requirements) has more detail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought that entropy solved this problem: your "weakly" random numbers from the thermometer might have, say, 1.3 bits of entropy for every reading. So you assemble 100 readings and that gives you 130 bits of randomness, which you extract by putting your 100 readings through a cryptographic hash algorithm that outputs 130 bits.

Presumably I'm missing something. Can someone tell me what it is?

<comment><USER9> Whether a hash function is cryptographic or not is irrelevant: either way, it's computable, therefore you can reverse it and get information about the original data you hashed. Because that data was only weakly random, it's not independent of future data from the same sources, so you can compute what future results of the hashing algorithm are likely to be.

Obviously this is impractical in the real world, but in TCS randomness is defined as algorithmic randomness, which completely ignores the question of running time. Randomness is a mathematical concept, something can't suddenly become non-random because you gained a faster computer. For more information see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Kolmogor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Kolmogorov_randomness)

<comment><USER9> To correct that: there are many different definitions of randomness, and they're not actually using a form of algorithmic randomness in this paper (there are many definitions of _that_ too), which I guess isn't so relevant for randomness extraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How far away are we from using this practically? e.g. /dev/random</comment>


Show HN: Math-research programmer available for hire - <AUTHOR> Math-researcher working on the Grassmann-Clifford-Hestenes geometric algebra available for hire
Please have a look at my github or liberapay
https://github.com/chakravala https://liberapay.com/chakravala
Would appreciate any suggestions for getting hired or funded, I've got valuable skills but am struggling to find career opportunities <comment><USER2> There is an official "Who is hiring? / Who want to be hired?" post the fist day of the month. [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring) Remember to find the correct thread and post there.

I'm not sure that the exact subfield of algebra is important outside academy. Try to give more relevance to your generic skills.

Most of your projects are written in Julia. Do you have one in C? (Some people like "canonical" languages, not me, but other people do).

Do one of your projects produce nice graphics? Nice graphics are good for submissions. (Some project are very interesting and important, but don't produce nice graphic. Anyway, that "photo" of a black hole is worth a thousand pages of grant request paperwork.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback.

Since I am working on scientific computing, I would use Fotran instead of C language, with which I have experience.

Geometric algebra isn't my only skill, but it is what sets me apart from most other programmers out there.

Geometric algebra can be used to make more efficient transformations in almost any field, including: automatic differentiation, optimizing electronic circuits, computatations involving relativity and spacetime, machine learning, and countless other scientifc computing applications. It is still largely unexplored in terms of applications and has very much to offer.

<comment><USER2> I work in a group with Physics, they love Fortran, so I have to program in Fortran from time to time.

Reading again my comment, a part of it is very badly written. I wanted to say that if someone is hiring you, they will not care too much about your specific specialization. I didn't want to say that the field has no application.

If you want to continue working in someone related to your field, you probably have to make a few blog post with some interesting application and explanations about how the algebra helps, so someone with a similar programs perhaps may be interested in hiring you instead of learning algebra.

Put a few graphics, so the advantages of the algebraic approach is easy to see. Don't make it too long or too short. Don't make it too technical or too diluted. Hopefully I could give more detailed advice. I can't guarantee that you will get a job, but hopefully we will enjoy a few nice blog post here :).

As an example, I like the post of [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=righto.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=righto.com) they are very technical, but not too much. They have always a few photos and diagrams. (But some fields are not easily photographable.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again for your helpful comments, I am definitely planning to put some more information out there and I may also make some youtube videos also.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/12/google-commits-1-billion-in-grants-to-train-u-s-workers-for-high-tech-jobs/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how long it would take for Google to spend an extra $1 Billion by bringing janitorial, food service, and other non-technical jobs in-house instead of contracting it out to the lowest bidder.

To put it in perspective, $1 Billion is 10,000 times $100,000. Or 1000 $100,000/year jobs for ten years before discounting for the time value of money. Instead, big chunks of the money will get siphoned off to administrators and technical instructors and computer manufacturers and lots of other areas that already have plenty of money.

A billion dollars is less than half the annual budget of University of Nebraska for serving ~50,000 students [1]. Back of envelope turns $1 Billion into ~22,000 student years which is in the same people-helped ballpark as the 10,000 worker years, with the difference being that those 10,000 worker years come with actual jobs at $100,000 a year. And the 10,000 worker years are offset by the current cost of contracting out the work and the value that work returns to Google's bottom line.

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

<comment><USER3> They aren't doing this for charity - they are doing it to ensure a steady supply of technical hires. Technical jobs are profit centers; non-technical contracted services are cost centers.

<comment><USER4> They are getting tons of apps from top schools like harvard, stanford, etc. I don't think they will have any problem hiring people. Maybe this would help some small company a lot more that can't afford pay google salaries. Also If you believe the Pareto principle most of people at google probably aren't that important to their successes.

<comment><USER5> They actually do have problems hiring enough. They get tons of applications, but the vast majority are not worth looking at.

The people from top schools are in high demand, and Google no longer has monopoly on cool tech workspaces with free lunches and random expensive perks.

They have plenty of openings and they harass qualified people trying to poach them just as hard as everyone else. And since they actually DO have some unique challenges, they sometimes actually DO need people who know more than Rails CRUD apps, which makes things even trickier.

<comment><USER4> It seems the only stories you hear of them are interviewing people and then ghosting them. If they actually cared about hiring people you figure at least they would treat their candidates better. In my experience even amazon has been more on the ball with the recruiting process.

<comment><USER5> I'm not particularly fond of Google or the way they interview, but I've lived just a few blocks from their Cambridge office (so almost every engineer I know around here has interviewed there at one point or another).

Aside for their criterias and interview questions which I find absurd (but that's subjective, I know a bunch of people who think they're fine), I haven't heard much that was really wrong with it aside for obviously underqualified candidates being brought in and then leaving pissed off after bombing it.

The reality is that in this industry right now, unless what you're doing is little webapps with REST apis that store/retrieve data and not much else, hiring people is hard. All the somewhat large companies have 100+ openings at any given time and the majority of candidates are code monkeys. My current employer is doing decently and our reputation seems to allow us to get a steady stream of above average people applying, but there's still so many openings.

Only so much you can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's never been easier to get training in all sorts of things, for free. For example, I'm currently taking MIT's 6.002 electronics course because I never learned circuit analysis properly. It's on youtube, it's free, I watch it anytime.

There's the Khan Academy, too.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but there's no certificate. And, despite what everyone wants to believe, most employers still want that certificate or degree. They're not gonna accept "I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube" as an alternative.

<comment><USER8> >>They're not gonna accept "I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube" as an alternative.

Soon they will.

If the internet people come at cheaper prices.

There isn't much difference between people who watch a lecture on the internet vs those who watch it live.

<comment><USER9> > If the internet people come at cheaper prices.

But filtering out the good ones from the "internet people" is more expensive than seeking through college graduates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does flooding the market with developers that will never be able to pass their interviews help them? I guess it will increase the amount of people in the 1% by expanding the size of that pool?

Just seems like Google out of all companies has a need for the best, not just blue collar code slingers. Many people with 4 years CS degrees from good schools do not get hired.

<comment><USER11> A couple misconceptions seemed buried in here. First of all, plenty of Google engineers are doing "boring" work that can be done by coding school grads. Secondly, Google declines qualified candidates roughly 50% of the time according to people who work there. The hiring process is far more random than we'd like to imagine it is when you have a "high bar".

<comment><USER10> > First of all, plenty of Google engineers are doing "boring" work that can be > done by coding school grads.

Google's hiring process does not reflect this at all. Even entry level positions have very high bar. Boring has nothing to do with it, Google wants the best.

> Secondly, Google declines qualified candidates roughly 50% of the time > according to people who work there.

That's not random, that's just setting a really high bar.

Have you been through a Google interview? Their phone screen questions are equivalent to many companies' "hardest" interview problems.

<comment><USER11> I've been through the entire Google interview, yes. And I'm going to go (slightly) out on a limb and say that if Google could reduce their false negative rate, they would. IOW, yes, that's a factor of having a high bar, but what that statement is capturing in aggregate is the fact that their interviewers are not all equally calibrated and the interview process can be very uneven, although always looking for very strong people. They then turn around and give those really strong engineers a very high salary and (in many cases) relatively uninteresting work. It would be surprising to me if that changes as a result of this $1B grant, but I would be equally surprised if they don't try to skim the cream off that particular crop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google spends what, upwards of $10B a year on software engineer salary and benefits? So, seems like a good deal. If they can spend $1B and decrease salary's and benefits by at least 10% over a few years, they get return on investment.

<comment><USER13> Why would salaries or benefits decrease?

<comment><USER14> Your paid based on your leverage not how much your output is worth. If supply of workers with your skills goes up, your leverage to negotiate goes down and so does your wages.

Labor does not get to share in economic growth, they get to split an ever decreasing share of profits. The more people that are available to sell their labor, the more pieces that shrinking pie has to be cut into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish Google could spend just a fraction of that money employing technical writers to better document their technologies. So much of the documentation is outdated or flat out broken. Even stock sample projects right on the Android Studio sometimes fail to work.

Oh, and remember the mess Gradle was in 2015/2016? How much money could it possibly cost to better document some of the major tools?

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand why they don't open more remote offices instead. Around 90% of their employees are currently within the US, wouldn't it be a lot easier to find tech talent if they had a major position in other areas of the world as well?

<comment><USER17> two reasons time difference and communications

<comment><USER16> Those are not issues when you have thousands of employees at a location, then you can base entire products there. There is plenty of people in Europe who would love to work for Google but there are so few positions here that it is almost impossible to get one unless you want to move to the US, it wouldn't be hard for Google to get ten times as many engineers here as they currently have if they just wanted to.

<comment><USER18> There's plenty of people in Europe that work in Google's European offices. When I left in 2014, Zürich was something like 1500 people, with London and IIRC Paris having similar sizes, and many other smaller ones. That's hardly "so few positions", let alone "almost impossible to get one".

Also, time zone differences (and to a lesser extent communications) were inconvenient, although there were very viable ways to work around them.

<comment><USER16> I know, I work there. Most I know don't even bother applying since it is hard to get an interview, they don't see getting into Google as an alternative. All Google would need to Gobble up all talent in Europe is basically to start pestering every developer like they do in Silicon valley, they already pay twice of what 99% of developers are earning so taking everything would be easy for them.

<comment><USER19> Does Google pay more than decents contracts in European big cities (i.e. 120k+ €)?

<comment><USER20> Depending on your skill level: yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Universities need to start focusing on skills instead of general education. Imagine the amount of skills you could learn if you didn't have to take 60 hours of nonsense credits and focus on skills you require.

Programming / Networking / Hardware need a new type of University that is similar to Trade colleges but focus primarily on the skills and nothing more. The first 1-2 years could focus on the foundations while the next 2 years focus around solid design principles and actually developing projects (real or fake).

<comment><USER22> Name a giant in this industry, that person benefitted from a liberal arts education.

<comment><USER21> I'm sure all the gender studies classes has helped the vast majority of tech students become better developers

<comment><USER7> Given all the stuff that's happening lately with people like Susan Fowler, a whole lot of developers could have benefitted from more of those.

Of course, that's completely ignoring that there is far, far, far more to "liberal arts" than gender studies.

<comment><USER16> Diversity training doesn't work though and it often makes things worse.

[https://hbr.org/2012/03/diversity-training-doesnt- work](https://hbr.org/2012/03/diversity-training-doesnt-work)

<comment><USER23> You will need more citations to prove that point. Same publication, more recently published, "Two Types of Diversity Training That Really Work".

"For one, a recent meta-analysis of over 40 years of diversity training evaluations showed that diversity training can work, especially when it targets awareness and skill development and occurs over a significant period of time."

[https://hbr.org/2017/07/two-types-of-diversity-training- that...](https://hbr.org/2017/07/two-types-of-diversity-training-that-really- work)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You know, I'm actually really impressed with Google for speaking with their money on this. There's a lot of "why don't these hicks just get a real job", but no one really seems interested in furthering that sentiment.

There's popular opposition to Trump's promise to give people jobs by resurrecting industries that a lot of people (probably Google as well) would rather see stay dead. But there's no denying people need jobs, and formal education ain't cheap.

Now we've got a tech giant backing that up with cold hard cash. It would be great to see other companies getting on board and putting some dough in the ring or at least offering some kind of internship/work experience programs for people coming out of an education funded by these grants.

</comment><comment><USER25> Stated differently: "In light of recent criticism on its ability to import foreign, cheap labor, Google commits to improving their public image for American labor"

<comment><USER26> How is Google importing foreign, cheap labor? Their H1B applications are public and you can check the salaries yourself. None of the majors are abusing foreign labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yeah, more bootcamp trained JS-"artisans" and Ruby-"artists" for all of us! If they wanted to do good, invest in the school system, use your power to monitor Betsy DeVos and call her out for the bullshit to come from her. If Google could raise interest in STEM in High Schools already that would be way more organic.

<comment><USER28> Don't think there is anything wrong or ignoble teaching people JS. It's an excellent start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> To the critics in this thread- maybe it's time to consider unionizing tech workers after all?

<comment><USER30> I agree but how? Or would co-op consulting shops make more sense?

<comment><USER29> Why not try both? The point is that the status quo is untenable, corporate power is going to commodify devs just as they have done to workers in many other industries, and you might as well try fixing about it rather than getting disrupted like so many other dinosaur entities that tech has done to.

<comment><USER31> The status quo is untenable???

I am not sure what world you live in, but the world that I live in is one where software engineering salaries and jobs have continued to increase over the last 5, despite all these bootcamp grads and the large increase in CS majors.

<comment><USER32> The tech labor shortage seems to me to be essentially a fabrication invented by tech companies to encourage further oversaturation. I just cannot believe jobs are growing faster than the workforce when my experience has been this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15461080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15461080)

The status quo is untenable because it's a bubble. There are far too many junior programmers.

<comment><USER31> Hmm, I am a couple years out of college and therefore fit the definition of "senior developer", so perhaps you are right, and I just haven't noticed the effects yet.

But right now, things are really really good for developers who only have a couple years of experience. But perhaps that is going to change as all these junior devs become senior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Google is often criticized for not hiring developers who "still need more work", and instead hires experienced people. Hiring less capable people and training them internally would make some sense to me.

<comment><USER34> I'm not Google, but my guess is they'd rather invest in the market to let _it_ float the "experienced" people rather than take a gamble on a known "inexperienced" person and attempt to train them.

Maybe this is shitty, maybe it isn't, but it's probably more economical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Makes sense given the antitrust movement is getting stronger.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be far more effective both in terms of actual skills transfer and in terms of future career trajectory than Yet More Retraining Programs untethered from any actual employer or employment opportunities. We've been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy administration to little effect.

<comment><USER37> Another major glaring problem that no one wants to admit is that lots of tech work requires (at the very least) college-level-IQ, which excludes the majority of the population. And the lower-IQ jobs are quickly being automated away.

<comment><USER38> IQ just means potential not capability. Given enought time I believe most people can be trained to do almost any job.

I don't think our brain suddenly evolved in 200 years from illiterate peasants to software engineers. We just have more school time these days.

<comment><USER39> Since it is empirically obvious that 200 years ago the world was not entirely populated by illiterate peasants ...perhaps your population model of the distribution of IQ and causes thereof is inaccurate.

<comment><USER38> Not entirely but the vast majority. It's empirically obvious writting existed 200 years ago therefore someone somewhere knew how to write.

What do you think people did before the industrial revolution?

<comment><USER39> A lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am glad to see Google doing something like this.

All of humanity growing together towards a brighter future for everyone is truly our highest calling.

</comment><comment><USER41> But nobody wants to address the mounting student loan problem!!

Degrees don't come for free, technical graduates don't come for free, students have to go to college for that and in US you need a LOT of money for that.

This is the chicken and egg problem where nobody wants to address the real problem an everyone is going around giving superficial solutions.

<comment><USER42> Student loans are only a problem to students doing one or more degrees in low-2nd and 3rd tier schools with few job market prospects.

The rate of student loan defaults is actually inversely proportional to the amount owed.

<comment><USER41> I don't say that student loans aren't getting refunded, I am saying that you need to take a loan to study. That's the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What they mean by high tech specifically ? Android dev, web dev, etc qualifies as high tech job?

</comment><comment><USER44> I think not only do we need to be thinking about getting people "prepared" with new skills, but also about smooth lateral movement across industries.

In a lot of cases these are probably viewed as the same thing but, for example, I would ask: When was the last time a Senior Java Developer was a candidate for a Senior FrontEnd Web Developer position?

I think the future is going to be a lot less about being hired for "jobs" with "companies". Instead it's going to be substantially more about "projects" being done by "groups / organizations". The groups / organizations being assembled / disassembled with high frequency.

</comment><comment> Chiba-City Start with basic observations. Tool acquisition is not tool mastery. Tool mastery does not mean jobs for or at Google. Janitors are not getting IPO payouts for lives of leisure. Cold war coastal higher education, city living and corporate trading prowess have drained many interior communities of their best brains throughout decades of deindustrialization and deskilling.

Some better nerds here can hardly imagine perfectly smart people who cannot yet touch type or turn a spreadsheet into a group calendar. Our miraculous simple decision support tools are still opaque to majorities of Americans. Only Americans far outside Google will create value to create jobs. That takes planning for any possible sweat equity or financial investment. We have generations of people to train with tools. The boy genius prizes for ever new tooling are not really separate concerns. Cultivating and harvest new boy geniuses from the field is expensive. They don't exactly grow on trees.

Google like Apple or Microsoft had to discover and rediscover their own relevance. They cultivate their markets now with intensive growth. This is a good move.

</comment><comment><USER45> Everyone hates a cynic so bring on the downvotes:

I'm going to warn everyone of what's coming.

Software engineer jobs will be blue collar, $40-$60k a year jobs, by 2030.

The HUGE push from government, and private business, to fill the PERCEIVED lack of engineers, will come to fruition around that time.

Make no mistake about it - there is NOT a lack of skilled engineers right now. There is a disinterest among business to pay higher, and higher salaries.

If you are a SWE right now, save your money, and invest your time into improving YOURSELF. Have a backup plan, because I promise you, the good times are coming to an end sooner than you think.

<comment><USER46> "PERCEIVED lack"? Doesn't the fact that salaries are sky rocketing essentially disprove your point? Why are the salaries getting pushed higher and higher? Because demand for SWEs is outstripping supply.

This to me looks like the same kind of privileged outlook that other professional guilds like the AMA desire. Do you want cheaper healthcare, or doctor compensation to keep going up? Hey, letting nurse practitioners take on some of the load is "flooding the market with n00bs"

This just seems like protectionism by another name.

Yes, the good times for software engineering will come to an end. I'm a software engineer, this will affect me. But the question is, do I have a natural god given right to have a ballooning salary every year, while fighting attempts to increase labor supply that might cut that growth rate?

<comment><USER47> > Yes, the good times for software engineering will come to an end. I'm a > software engineer, this will affect me. But the question is, do I have a > natural god given right to have a ballooning salary every year, while > fighting attempts to increase labor supply that might cut that growth rate?

Does our owner class have a natural god-given right to a 6% return on their investment every year, for doing nothing?

They are certainly spending their energy on fighting attempts to spread the economic pie around. We need solidarity, not shaming people for protecting their means to make a living.

<comment><USER6> > Does our owner class have a natural god-given right to a 6% return on their > investment every year, for doing nothing?

You, too, can become an "owner class" by opening an online trading account and buying stocks. Commissions are often under $10 for a trade.

<comment><USER47> Since I wasn't born into money, or won the lottery, I can't live off that 6% return for another two decades.

Either way, even if I can, the guy who makes my morning coffee can't, and never will be.

<comment><USER6> > for another two decades

I.e. start investing and in 20 years you'll be financially independent. Sounds good to me to be living in the US.

> the guy who makes my morning coffee can't

I talked with a guy once who told me he "can't". He was driving a new car, and the payments, rent, etc., added up to more than his income. I suggested he sell the car, buy a car he can afford to pay cash for, and start investing.

He partially did take my advice. He sold the car, bought one he could pay cash for, and then blew the extra income on some other luxuries. Of course, then he still was in "can't" territory.

My current car I bought used 25 years ago and still drive every day. It costs me practically nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How many of these grants are going outside of already tech heavy areas? How many of them are going to coal country, or to the Rust Belt?

It's great that they're doing this, but unless they're going to be doing it in the places that are hurting, not much is going to change.

</comment><comment><USER48> Better link: [https://blog.google/topics/causes-community/opportunity- for-...](https://blog.google/topics/causes-community/opportunity-for- everyone/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Stated differently, "Google commits $1B to flood the market with newbie tech workers, and to grow future client businesses".

The cynic in me can clearly see their interest in the effects of this grant, but thinking on it more that interest might serve us better in the long run. I just hope the community gains from that money before it makes it's way back to Google.

<comment><USER29> For a long time the anti-H1B segment has been critical of Big Tech for trying to undercut American tech workers instead in investing in citizens. So now they're investing in the wrong citizens?

<comment><USER26> I swear, many of the HN crowd seems like they'd be happiest if they were the only developer on the planet.

<comment><USER47> You should ask taxi drivers about how they feel about millions of people getting paid peanuts to drive for Lift and Uber.

Or lawyers about how they feel about millions of people with law degrees unable to find work as lawyers.

Or Physics PHDs about how they feel driving a cab^wUber.

Or musicians, who live off selling t-shirts.

Why do you think supply and demand does not apply to the IT labour market?

<comment><USER26> Because labor generates additional demand. There isn't fixed demand for software engineers that persists across all time. The demand for engineers has grown over the last fifty years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> always remember: the industry's involvement in CS education has less to do with philanthropy and goodwill than it does with lowering the cost of labor over the long term

<comment><USER51> High labor cost just because of skill shortage may be gratifying and lucrative for the happy few but is not an efficient allocation of resources for the wider society. Increasing the skill supply is the right thing to do.

Replace "developer" with any other profession to convince yourself.

<comment><USER52> The only people who care about efficient allocation of resources for the society are socialists and academics. Certainly CEOs with multi-million dollar annual compensations don't think they're contributing to allocation inefficiencies by negotiating their compensations. Neither do doctors and AMA, who we all love and respect. Neither do military leaders or politicians, who demand half the country's budget for military expenditures. Etc, etc.

Increasing the skill supply is the right thing to do if you're Google stakeholder, or broadly speaking, a capitalist. It's much more questionable if you're in the labor force.

<comment><USER53> Or, more bluntly:

Google should pay high salaries. The market will supply the skilled workers when the salaries are high enough to attract more workers.

(Google does pay high salaries. If they want more skilled workers, raising their salaries is the most efficient way to get that outcome.)

<comment><USER7> Well, it's more than just pure salary. I'm sure if they changed things so that one did not have to work crazy hours while there, they could get away with paying less.

<comment><USER54> You don't have to work crazy hours at Google. At least at the teams I was on; there were occasional reports of lousy conditions in some groups (e.g. Nest), but they were very much the exception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> As much as something like this is appreciated, the history of job retraining programs are filled with over promises, under-commitments, and disaster, stretching back to the 1970's.

There is no need to train more CS people. There is a need for recovering the "grand bargain" between employers and employees that began in the 1940's and was slowly unwound beginning in the mid 1970's.

The reason that business schools exist on university campuses in the first place is because they were supposed to train business leaders to aspire to the same ideals as a university: knowledge, development of character, the search for truth to create a better word, etc.

If people knew how much harder they work today for fractions of a chance at a reward that is now 3x expensive, gestures like this would be seen for what they are, a band-aid in place of a tourniquet.

BTW if you're upper-middle class, know life is now pretty good, but your economic base is being slowly eroded as well and there will be a time when your economic fall will come.

*- - - -

EDIT: Keep in mind, this is the same company whose head of HR (Laszlo Bock) literally says he does not believe training helps at all develop people. This sounds like I am taking him out of context but I kid you not. I wish I was at home so I could find the physical page numbers, but he says it in his book "Work Rules!" from a couple of years ago. It's at the beginning of the chapter where he talks about the New York Yankees.

<comment><USER56> That "grand bargain" is over, and never returning. The economy is global, cutthroat and changes on a dime. Every man/woman is in a mercenary situation today, whether they're aware of this fact or not.

<comment><USER57> If this was the case, then why wouldn't Google just tap this global labor reserve instead of training people? Why is the federal reserve expecting inflation to rise as unemployment continues to be low?

<comment><USER56> "If the sky is so clear and the sun is shining, how could there possibly be a hurricane approaching...?"

<comment><USER58> Those of us who depend upon exchanging our labor to survive are in a mercenary situation (some in better situations than others). But I think it's a stretch to equate it to a physical source of scarcity, but maybe I'm taking your analogy too far...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> So this means there are new open positions for foreigners/H1B at Google?

<comment><USER17> No its about training US workers - they have seen the anger / nativisam stirred up by the last election and are trying to improve their pr

<comment><USER59> And implied that US workers aren't on par with the rest of the world, therefore it will help them get better _in the future_ but meanwhile, while the next generation of tech-savvy US workers appear they will need skilled foreigners working at google for at least the next 10 years. If my predictions are correct, seems a good time to apply for Google at this moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Prediction – people will still bitch and whine, as always.

<comment><USER61> Wow, literally a self-fulfilling prediction!

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Someone cares to try to put this story in political perspective?

</comment><comment><USER63> How about a billion to high tech trains

</comment><comment><USER64> This is absolutely lovely news.

</comment><comment><USER65> Actually spending $10 million. Talking about $1 billion over 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER66> Before you go patting Google on the back, consider this. They stole money from engineers by colluding with the other big players to keep engineering salaries artificially low and now want to use some of that money to train more workers to create more supply which lowers salaries even further.

</comment><comment><USER67> mkdir plan

git add $1B

git commit -am "train US workers for high tech jobs"

git push

(please PR for a better git joke)

</comment><comment><USER68> Great, it's about time that these companies stepped up to bring more people into their workforce. It's ridiculous to complain to legislatures about skills shortages without stepping up to bring your own resources to bear on the issue.

Still, as nice as giving money to other organizations is, it would even better to see them actually training people from a diverse variety of backgrounds. They're not exactly taking any responsibility here.

<comment><USER69> >It's ridiculous to complain to legislatures about skills shortages without stepping up to bring your own resources to bear on the issue.

Do you hold people who want to fight climate to the same standard? Is it ridiculous for an individual to support a carbon tax without voluntarily buying carbon credits on their own?

<comment><USER68> Well it depends on the means of the individual, but basically yeah. I'd expect someone with a decent amount of disposable income to purchase renewable energy from their utilities company or a 3rd party. It's not crazy expensive compared to other discretionary expenses, and it's a pretty clear ethical obligation in the current times.

Maybe Yellowstone will erupt in 80 years and it won't matter, but on balance, it's a no-brainer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> They just want cheap labor! There is nothing altruistic about Google and their commitment to their fellow man. They merely want children (teach a kid scratch so they can be enslaved for a lifetime!) and people in lower income countries to take up where the people here need more inorder to live here. And if Google were to be honest they need people who want to live in the bay area and are willing to enslave themselves to do it! And now that the flow of new blood was cut off now Google again needs fresh souls...so they are coming for anyone who can type, and wants to move the CA and live in their Hooverville.

<comment><USER44> I say let them attempt to improve peoples' lives.

I doubt it will make you feel any better, but I don't think there will be a place in the world for a private company the size of Google (comparatively speaking).

Imagine a world where individuals will be starting up companies in their garage with a scale equivalent to Fortune 50 companies of today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Great! They won't need to offshore any more work! Or rely on exploiting H1B's!

<comment><USER72> There is exploitation of H1B workers but it's not at the hands of the tech giants. Pretty much all the abuse of foreign workers on visas I've seen is at the hands of these Indian bodyshops that, given the long wait for green cards for those born in India, such jobs are tantamount to indentured servitude.

Speaking as a Xoogler who was on a visa and got a green card sponsored by Google, from my own experience I and others in my position were treated very well.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Medly – Make Music on iPhone and iPad - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/medly/id940268124 <comment><USER2> Is there a story behind Medly's development?

<comment><USER3> We just wrote a post about it: [https://medium.com/@baldajan/the-pursuit-to- make-everyone-a-...](https://medium.com/@baldajan/the-pursuit-to-make- everyone-a-musician-3f5fb659ba24#.la82gisqz)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do with a old MacBook Pro? - <AUTHOR> I have a 2011, 17inch MacBook Pro and when I tried to update it to the last OS X I found that it won't as this laptop has entered unsupported hardware territory.
the laptop works just fine even today (2.5 Ghz intel i7), 8GB Ram and 512GB SSD. Other than the fact that its a bit heavy compared to the new MacBooks it works fine for everyday tasks. The keyboard is superb!
I am looking to understand what all I can do with this laptop. I could sell it to some kid but I feel with the unsupported hardware and OS I am duping them? Other option is I can give it to apple - while they won't pay me they will recycle it.
My Questions:
* What are folks doing when they encounter this situation? Linux? kids? some other interesting project?
* Do you follow any rules where after certain x amount of time, you simply trade in the apple hardware so as to get something reasonable for it and use it towards the next hardware. In essence have a certain amount of 'working capital' that is constantly used towards the hardware but that capital is < than the full price of the laptop (due to the trade in money gotten as part of every trade in cycle) <comment><USER2> FWIW, I just upgraded my late 2011 macbook pro to Catalina using [http://dosdude1.com/catalina/](http://dosdude1.com/catalina/) because I needed the latest XCode.

It's working fine, though you need to live with the fact that it's now a "compromised" system.

</comment><comment><USER3> _I could sell it to some kid but I feel with the unsupported hardware and OS I am duping them? Other option is I can give it to apple - while they won 't pay me they will recycle it._

Giving it to a kid is another option. It will run Linux just fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm at the same point with my MBP2012-pre-retina.

The last one without ram soldered to the board so you can upgrade it.

It's still my daily driver in 2020 with 16gb ram and an ssd.

I was looking at the 2020-MBP with the new keyboard but beyond some graphics/performance improvements in games, I'm not seeing a compelling argument to upgrade.

Having it on the LAN plugged into some external hard drives as a no- additional-spend NAS might work.

<comment><USER5> I have the same model as you and love it. I didn't think about Apple stopping updates to it. Is your laptop actually utilizing the full 16gb of ram? I upgraded to 8gb but was not sure if 16gb is fully supported or not as Apple said it wasn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have an old mid 2012 27" iMac in a similar situation except that it's extremely slow and almost unusable. I'm thinking about keeping it until its supported by end of this year and then move to Linux.

Too bad such an expensive computer at the time its barely unusable specially on XCode.

<comment><USER7> My 2011 Mac mini was extremely slow for a while (early in its life) and the cause turned out to be the hard drive's slowly failing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made a home media server with plex when faced with the same question.

</comment><comment><USER9> I kept my old laptop (used to be win7, now Ubuntu) since my printer only support USB printing. Other than that you can keep it for side projects within your LAN =)

</comment><comment><USER10> My 2011's SATA cable kept going bad, so I finally just sold it to someone and got a 2015. Awesome decision.</comment>


Drug firms fueled 'pill mills' in rural WV - <AUTHOR> http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20160523/drug-firms-fueled-pill-mills-in-rural-wv <comment><USER2> For a street-level perspective, I recommend the documentary "Oxyana" [1] about pill abuse in Oceana, WV

And for a more in-depth look at the origins check out Frontline's "Chasing Heroin" [2]

[1] [https://youtu.be/jrE1uxGd6OQ](https://youtu.be/jrE1uxGd6OQ)

[2] [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/chasing- heroi...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/chasing-heroin-a-two- hour-special-premieres-feb-23-on-frontline/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Half the story is missing -- who is paying for those pills? Insurance coverage? Individuals paying cash (and suspected of reselling, or fueling personal addictions?) Are individual patients' prescriptions for two many pills? Or too many patients getting prescriptions compared to averages in other cities/states?

<comment><USER4> Many "pill mills" are essentially drug-dealing operations using a doctor and a pharmacy (who get a cut of the profit) to obtain huge quantities of opioids which are then sold on demand, cash-only basis, to anyone who wants them.

In some cases the doctor gets paid to just sign a big stack of blank prescription slips to be filled in later. In other cases the doctor is paid to "prescribe" for anyone who comes in and complains of pain.

Also note that quite a lot of the problem is blamed on pharmaceutical companies allegedly misrepresenting the effectiveness of "extended-release" formulations of their drugs, leading patients to take larger doses and become dependent. Purdue has plead guilty to misleading the public about the risk of dependence with OxyContin, for example.</comment></comment>


Microsoft's html5/ie9 Promo - <AUTHOR> http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> 2 Years ago, I might not have imagined this if you have asked what wildest thing Microsoft can do? Bravo! IE9 Team</comment>


How do I un-upvote something on HN? - <AUTHOR>

I've accidentally upvoted the wrong HN article a couple times.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to undo my click.  Am I missing something, or is my upvote permanent, even when it's unintentional? <comment><USER2> Sorry, I've never gotten around to implementing a way to do this. It doesn't seem too urgent a problem; I don't think a few mistaken votes have much effect.

<comment><USER3> Whoops, I appear to have given you a downvote. I really wish I could fix that. It makes me really paranoid when I go to up or downvote people that I'll accidentally click the wrong one.

EDIT: Since I appear to be able to still edit this, I would like to pose a question:

Is the published HN source code current? If so; would you be willing to accept a patch in Arc to implement this feature? (Assuming the code was decent.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any karma blessings you bestow on other articles/comments unintentionally are all part of the plan of the internet rep gods who nudged your cursor off target.

+rep and be saved.

</comment><comment><USER5> You cannot un-upvote. I am exactly not sure but to do that you need to have certain amount of Karma points. Which I see you don't have currently.</comment>