The real reason Marissa Mayer left Google: She had to - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/17/marissa-mayer-yahoo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#s:mayer-1 <comment><USER2> Am I the _only_ one who is seriously considering about applying to Yahoo, now?

You have a company that is profitable and is known for developing good technology, but that never had an "engineer mindset" at the top. PG himself tells how their biggest problem is that Yahoo's top management doesn't think about "products", but rather about "properties".

Now - after God-knows-how-many "media" CEOs - you have this insanely capable engineer at the top, whose sole focus is on using the brain power at the company for creating products, instead of pushing ads or competing in "social" anything. If she manages to change the culture at Yahoo, I think they will have a strong comeback - and I'd love to be a part of it.

Actually, I'd love to have Paul Buchheit to chime in. He is the one that probably got closest to her, and might be able to provide some insight as to how much of an impact she can have on Yahoo.

<comment><USER3> I've been thinking the same thing. I'm just worried that the culture might be too entrenched for her to change it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> aside: I like that "OP/ED" is presented very boldly at the start of the article. I wish other news sites were as clear.

> The one thing she lacked is the sole reason she's now at Yahoo: Power.

That damn well better be the reason. There really can't be any other reason at least as far as my feeble mind can fetch.

If you're worth $300 million and you don't plan to take, say, _a year or two_ off to play and connect with your soon-to-be-firstborn child? Not to sound mean but what could _possibly_ motivate you to do otherwise, than lust for power?

$300 million and you could be everything to your child but you insist on attempting to _overwork?_ Jesus that just feels stark to me.

<comment>

Wait a minute, didn't Yahoo pass on promoting Susan Decker because they demanded that they find someone who had been a CEO before? I guess they dropped that requirement. For the record, Decker resigned when Yahoo announced that Bartz was to be the new CEO.

Not that Mayer is necessarily a bad pick, I'm not wise enough to say, I just find the whole Yahoo CEO parade these past four years to be a very odd affair.

<comment><USER5> > If you're worth $300 million and you don't plan to take, say, a year or two > off to play and connect with your soon-to-be-firstborn child?

If she were male, would you say the same thing?

<comment><USER6> HN is the whitest malest forum I'm a member of. Spend 30 seconds in the thread discussing a charity encouraging black girls to program[1] and it's blatantly apparent. At least 4chan is self-aware regarding the sexism and racism. Reddit tries to brush it off as jokes or isolated incidents.

HN on the other hand, a [male dominated] forum of established [white] professionals and aspiring professionals, exists in a bubble of absolute denial of these horrible attitudes.

The top voted comment about a new CEO literally questions her fitness as a mother.

I challenge anyone to find any posts questioning any other CEO's parenting choices. (Bonus points if top voted for on a story).

That shitty attitude doesn't exist for Gates, Jobs, Page, Brin, or Ellison. But a woman steps up and suddenly HN cares about her child and votes up a comment questioning how her decision affects her child and second guessing her motherly quality.

1 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619>

<comment><USER7> I admit it. I'm a white male. (I do have 4 half-Chinese half-siblings, but they are irrelevant.) However I'm married, and the father of two children.

The first reaction that I had when I saw that she was pregnant was, "She has no idea what she's getting into." I've been there, twice, and seen first hand what pregnancy and hormones take out of a woman who has a baby. I've experienced what it is like to go through the first few months. Sure, she has help. But I know how strong the desire is to connect. And as soon as she does, I know what amount of energy is required. And if she fails to devote enough energy, I know what the pain of being rejected by your own child is like.

This applies to some extent to both parents. I personally took much more than her planned 2 weeks for each birth, and am aware that my performance at work was directly affected for months. (My ability to work hard has been impacted for _years_ but that is a more complicated story.)

However all of this applies to women more than men for the solid biological reason that women are the ones actually get pregnant, go through child birth, have associated hormone shifts, and produce milk. (Yes, you can give the baby formula, but if you've read the research there is a significant chance that feeding your baby formula will reduce IQ. Do you want to risk that for your child?? However breast feeding is a significant time commitment, and opens you up for even more hormones.) And this is if everything goes well. It often doesn't. For instance about 10% of women suffer through postpartum depression, and being a high-flying exec has no correlation with the biology behind that. Or you can wind up on bed rest if the pregnancy is difficult - and the odds of a difficult pregnancy go up rapidly when the mother has external stresses.

Yes, it is PC to claim some sort of absolute equivalence between men and women. But this is very clearly false when it comes to child birth.

When I saw her saying that she'd only take 2 weeks of maternity leave, the first thing that I said was, "She has absolutely no clue what she's in for." When I told my wife the story and my opinion, her only question was, "First time mother?" I said, "Yes," then my wife laughed in agreement.

Now please disclose your experience. How old are you? How many children do you have? Have you considered the possibility that parenting might just be harder than you think, and people who have been down that path might just know something that you don't know?

<comment><USER8> The parent's point was not that these concerns are invalid but rather that HNers are severely biased since they only apply them to women. To counter, you proceeded to repeat the same concerns in the same bigoted manner.

 _I've been there._

I am a working, breastfeeding mother and I strongly disagree with your post. Does my opinion trump yours since I am higher on the been-there scale than you?

 _About 10% of women suffer through postpartum depression._

Up to 25% of _both_ men and women suffer from post-partum depression. Wikipedia it.

 _Being a high-flying exec has no correlation with the biology behind [postpartum depression]._

Numerous studies show that working mothers are less depressed than stay-at- home mothers.

 _Now please disclose your experience. How old are you? How many children do you have?_

The Yahoo board, who made their decision with full knowledge of Mayer's pregnancy, are collectively (and often individually) older than you, with more children.

 _Solid biological reason that women get pregnant, go through child birth, have associated hormone shifts, and produce milk._

Please, enough with science and biology as a means to justify frankly bigoted opinions. The same biology gives _most_ new mothers a noticeable increase in energy that makes it possible to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule to accommodate constant nursing and other demands of motherhood. The same biology makes us different so that there are women like your wife, who finds Mayer's plan laughable, and women like Mayer herself, with her two comp-sci honors degrees from Stanford, famously long hours, etc.

Since you like un-PC, factual conversations about hormones, let's turn this around and talk about you. Fair is fair. Have you ever thought how remarkably ill-suited _you_ as a male are to system design and coding? How do you, a highly-hormonal young man who spends an inordinate chunk of his time thinking about sex, ever get any work done, in a profession where continual focus is paramount? And is it fair to your two children that you spend so much time on HN and SO, the time that could instead be spent furthering their IQ?

Edit: FWIW, I know you are an intelligent guy, based on your HN and SO contributions. If above seems like a personal attack, please consider that your opinion that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work is _very_ personal to female HN readers like me - and the fact that you are clearly intelligent only makes it worse. I'd like to think that it's possible for me to nudge your opinion in a more equitable direction. If nothing else, please consider that dismissing a set of beliefs as worthless PC garbage is most often a euphemism for "other people's problems". I'd like to think that most male hackers don't think of female hackers in "us vs. them" terms implied by the above, despite the apparent misogynist demographic on HN. Peace :)

<comment><USER7> First, I think that everyone in this thread should read or reread <http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html> because it is very relevant.

What is my point? It is no more or less than that childbirth takes a huge and often unpredictable toll out of women. What toll it will take out of any particular woman is difficult to predict. In most cases the toll is far larger than the people involved expected. Any woman coming into motherhood, particularly for the first time, is naive if they think that they can plan to put motherhood in a box and be confident that it will actually stay there.

This is different for men. If a man with sufficient resources decides that he does not want his work to be impacted by fatherhood, it won't be. Whatever the cost to his family or the opinion of his friends, he really can ignore parenting and continue to work normally. I would not personally choose that, and men who choose to be involved with their children open themselves up for some of the same issues that women go through. But I am confident a high powered male executive who promises that has very low risk of failing to deliver on that promise.

You dismiss this by calling it bigotry. I claim that I'm on very solid grounds here based on statistics and biology. I think that having even a casual acquaintance with the facts, or having some personal acquaintances with some horror stories, puts me on solid ground to say what I did. (For example I know one woman who had problems with water retention that caused severe carpal tunnel. She was unable to pick anything up, drive, use a mouse or keyboard, etc for months. Good luck with that!) Calling me a bigot invokes a taboo, I'm a horrible person for thinking those thoughts, but it says nothing one way or the other on whether I am right.

All of that said, Marissa is a truly impressive woman. She brings a lot to the table here. There is a reason why she has triggered more discussion than anyone else in the previous parade of CEOs that Yahoo has had recently. Her pregnancy is an obvious risk factor for her, and it is silly to try to claim otherwise. But that is a risk, not a guarantee. Most women do not have particularly difficult pregnancies. Many women are able to balance babies and work. But you can't plan on this in any particular case. And she is likely to get a surprise about how much work it is.

Now let's turn to your attempts to personally attack me.

 _The same biology makes us different so that there are women like your wife, who finds Mayer's plan laughable, and women like Mayer herself, with her two comp-sci honors degrees from Stanford, famously long hours, etc._

It seems that you think I have a stay at home wife who has never done anything in her life. Nothing could be further from the truth. My wife has a PhD in biology from Dartmouth College, and an MD from NYU (one of the top medical schools in the country) earned with honors. Can you claim accomplishments of similar difficulty? Can you honestly claim to have done anything with close to the effort of a medical internship? If your answer is no, then you're in the same boat that I am. I have great respect for my wife.

My wife's opinions do not come from an inability to work hard. They come from her knowledge and experience of what motherhood can take out of women.

 _Since you like un-PC, factual conversations about hormones, let's turn this around and talk about you. Fair is fair. Have you ever thought how remarkably ill-suited you as a male are to system design and coding? How do you, a highly-hormonal young man who spends an inordinate chunk of his time thinking about sex, ever get any work done, in a profession where continual focus is paramount? And is it fair to your two children that you spend so much time on HN and SO, the time that could instead be spent furthering their IQ?_

Thank you for calling me young, at almost 43 I have not thought of myself that way for years. I also spend rather less time thinking about sex than you seem to imagine.

As for my children, my wife is right now going through a medical residency. I therefore am a full-time parent who does part time contracting on the side. Sure, I spend time on NH and used to on SO, but you may rest assured that my children are not be compromised by that. (If you go back I said that having children has limited my ability to work hard, now you know why.)

 _(If above seems like a personal attack, please consider that your opinion that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work is very personal to female HN readers like me.)_

Please stop projecting opinions on me that I do not have. Talk to what I am saying, and not the straw man argument that you think I said.

As my personal life makes clear, I not only do not believe that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work, but I am personally making serious professional sacrifices right now to allow my wife to achieve what she wants to achieve.

If this surprises you, then I highly recommend that you go back and read what I wrote to try to figure out what I actually think. Because what I'm saying really isn't that unreasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>=

 _Update_

I wrote that before your edit. Thanks for the kind words. I suspect that my opinions may be more equitable than you thought, but the opinions that you don't like are unlikely to change. They are not what I want the world to be, but are observations of how it actually seems to work.

On postpartum depression, I was looking for a condition that hits lots of women, and it was the first that popped into my mind, and the first link I found for it said 10%. Now that I look at it in more detail I find that there is disagreement on what it is and when people have it, on the frequency, and a lack of clarity on the causes. Indeed there likely are many factors that contribute. Many of the causes you'll find in the literature are tied to hormones and biology. Many are not. That was a bad example.

A better example would be Caesarian section. Caesarian sections are very common, and the usual recovery time for women is 4-6 weeks. Which is significantly longer than the 2 weeks that Marissa is planning on. Obviously being a CEO is not a physically demanding job, if need be she could do it from a wheelchair. But recovering from major surgery is likely to hamper her performance.

<comment><USER8> _Childbirth takes a huge and often unpredictable toll..._

Sigh. You can continue to talk about birth|breastfeeding|hormones|etc as if my and parent's point was that those factors don't exist. Of course they do. The point is - please reread the parent and the grandparent - they exist equally for both men and women.

 _This is different for men._

If ever bigotry expressed itself more clearly.

 _I claim that I'm on very solid grounds here based on statistics and biology._

I addressed, and refuted, your facts, point by point. You responded with is, "I claim solid grounds based on statistics and biology", only to continue with an anecdote about some woman you know having carpal tunnel related to water retention. Uh, ok.

 _It seems that you think I have a stay at home wife who has never done anything in her life._

I neither said, nor implied, anything of the sort. Please reread my post.

 _My wife has a PhD in biology from Dartmouth College, and an MD from NYU. Can you claim accomplishments of similar difficulty? Can you honestly claim to have done anything with close to the effort of a medical internship?_

Congrats on your wife having a PhD from Dartmouth. Not going to participate in your ridiculous fantasy where I am a defendant and you the supreme judge on whether I measure up to your wife. My proverbial dick is big enough, thank you.

 _I also spend rather less time thinking about sex than you seem to imagine._

Thanks for making my point for me. You said pregnant women/mothers live in a hormonal fog that makes them unsuitable for success in business. I turned it around and made up an example of how same bigotry could be applied to men. Now you know how it feels when the other half speculates on how your brain chemistry impacts your abilities, all based on cheap stereotypes. Feels shitty, doesn't it?

 _As my personal life makes clear..._

Ah, the good old I Have a Black Friend™ defense.

<comment><USER7> I see little point in continuing this discussion. I can respond point by point, but to what purpose? You will continue to ignore and discount what I say while accusing me over and over of being a bigot.

In your world, birth, breastfeeding and hormones exist equally for men and women. There is a basic equivalence.

In my world, childbirth is a very intense and somewhat risky experience that women have no choice about going through after they become pregnant and choose not to abort. Breastfeeding is significant experience that women may choose to go through as well.

In my world, men have a choice about whether and to what extent they we choose to be involved in parenting. Men who choose to parent will experience hormones, etc that may catch us by surprise. But we can choose not to parent, and if we do we will have no hormonal impact.

In my world, an intense and risky experience that you are committed to going through is in no way equal to being able to choose doing nothing. In my world acknowledging that something intense and risky is actually intense and risky is not bigotry. Bigotry would be categorically choosing to not give someone an opportunity for fear of the risk. But acknowledging that it is real is called honesty.

Now if you want to actually learn more about the important hormones and their effects, I suggest that you start with the big one, oxytocin.

You may have the pleasure of the final response. Unless you say something truly shocking, I won't be bothering to respond to you any more. We've both said enough that people should be able to decide what they do and do not agree with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't quite understand why we're celebrating articles that gossip about her career and life. This article felt like the nerdy version of a tabloid piece that also took some cheap shots at entrepreneurialism. I can't properly articulate why this article (and others like it) irk me, but they do.

<comment><USER10> It's industry news and gossip. It doesn't gratify one's intellectual curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good point about the fact that she had gone as high as she could go at Google, but the disparaging of startup CEOs:

"Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That's not power, folks; that's just working like a dog, and it's a gamble at best, no matter who's doing it."

I don't get her logic, the entire valley is built on people who did exactly that at one point. And now shes trying to convince us that well, obviously, she'd want to go take over a failed company instead of possibly trying to start her own, who'd wanna do that, that's just ridiculous?

A gazillion execs at companies like Facebook (Asana, Quora, I think), Paypal (SpaceX, Tesla, etc.) went and started their own company and have plenty of power.

Not to mention the obvious point that maybe "power" shouldn't be the only thing someone aspires to . . .

</comment><comment><USER12> "she is known for pulling 130-hour work weeks and trading sleep for a few more hours in front of a laptop"

Is this even humanly possible? What does that leave, 5 hours a day for sleeping, even on weekends?

<comment><USER13> ((7 * 24) - 130) / 7 = 5.43, actually. I suppose it's possible, although if I were to seriously contemplate such a thing, I'd want a supply of modafinil or amphetamines laid in...

<comment><USER14> Now assuming that she commutes, takes showers, eats, bathroom breaks, then that means that she was sleeping even less than that.

<comment><USER15> Only Americans believe that 130 hours in the office constitutes a 130 hour working week. Which is why the French work 35 hours a week, yet Airbus is as productive as Boeing.

<comment><USER16> French don't work 35 hours a week, we work much more than that. Only basic employees do that. I probably have around a 50 hours work week.

<comment><USER17> But then you have extra vacation days...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What did she contribute to Google exactly? Articles like this hand-wave through actual contributions with "influencing the minimalist and user- friendly interfaces of Google web search and Gmail" which is extremely vague and could easily amount to nothing.

<comment><USER19> Executives allocate budget. That's what she did. She chose what things to pay for. This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale.

<comment><USER20> > This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale.

Totally false. They _do_ allocate budget, but they also recruit, retain, and motivate the best staff members they can find. They proactively keep an eye on potential opportunities, order research when necessary and follow up on it. They keep track of how their business unit is operating (not just "are we working on the right problems?" in terms of allocation; also: are there morale problems? are there critical risks that need to be reduced? how will our market evolve around us as we operate? and more) and care for and feed it.

Don't underestimate how hard it is to keep a heterogeneous group of big egos all moving in the same direction, together. It's not at all just reading proposals in a vacuum and deciding what to fund. A company is a human organization, and the main job of an executive is to align that group of people towards a common goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> and if she turns Yahoo's better assets (news, Flickr, dev tools) into the face of the company while inventing something ridiculously awesome (maybe a dead simple, language agnostic calendar/scheduling api...lol), she'll be hailed as a genius.

if you're an entrepreneur and you've already made it, taking the biggest risk seems like the obvious choice (elon musk, anyone?)

good for her.

</comment><comment><USER22> > She could have run off and been a startup founder and "CEO," but what kind > of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a > handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building > everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use > it. That's not power, folks; that's just working like a dog, and it's a > gamble at best, no matter who's doing it.

Portraying visionary people believing in what they do are "beggars" is stupid way of explaining things.

</comment><comment><USER23> The elephant in the room: why exactly didn't she get a promotion to Googles top tier? Considering that she was one of the first 20 employees there has to be some reason for that. I have the impression that there is some piece missing here.

</comment><comment><USER24> Terribly misleading title.</comment>


Why I loved building Basecamp for iPhone in RubyMotion - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3432 <comment><USER2> I spent four years developing Ruby full time. The last few years, I've been doing iOS full time, and there's no way I'd add a third-party layer to my app.

If you want to ship a high quality iOS app, you need to understand Objective-C inside and out. If you are using RubyMotion to avoid learning Objective-C, you will ship at the the cost of massive technical debt.

If you already know Objective-C, Ruby gives you a more concise syntax. Having used both languages for a while, and now that ARC exists, I'm comfortable using Objective-C as a high level language. Objective-C is wordier than Ruby, but when I return to the code a year later, I can still understand what it does.

As much as I hate Xcode, Apple expects you are using it. Sometimes features land in Xcode a version ahead of the command line tools.

For the handful of benefits I see from RubyMotion, I see a mountain of risks. Will Apple change its policy on accepted languages? Will the translation layer blowing up when you need to ship a hot fix the day before the iTunes store shuts down for Christmas? Will someone acquire the RubyMotion team and sunset the product?

Maybe I'm a different target audience. If an industry-changing platform appeared, I wouldn't leverage what I already know to dabble in it. I would do things the idiomatic way. Even if it takes longer to ship my first app, I think it's the faster path to mastery.

<comment><USER3> If you spent a few minutes to read RM's doc you'd have seen that RubyMotion runs on top of the Objective-C runtime. The only thing it "replaces" is the language, the syntax if you will. API, calls, parameters, ... all is native. This is not Adobe Air, it's Ruby on top of the Objective-C runtime. There's no translation involved, no interpretation.

<comment><USER2> I understand what RubyMotion is.

RubyMotion is another layer. You can argue it is minimal. That doesn't change that it is a dependency, out of your control, and unsupported by Apple.

Let's say the RubyMotion team is acquired, and the product sunsetted. What do you do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> Respect the Style

RubyMotion is Ruby, which is normally succinct, short, and sweet. The iOS APIs stick out like sore thumbs amongst what is normal Ruby code: camelCase usage is pervasive and reallyFreakingLongParameterNames can't be tuned out._

When I first read the above paragraph, I was afraid this was going to be a case of someone using a great tool to enable willful ignorance, but:

 _> So far, I've ended up with staying in Objective-C style. All of the API calls you make into the various iOS frameworks need to be in that style, and seeing the different opinions of variable and method naming clashing ended up hurting my head._

I commend the author for being perceptive and pragmatic. There is also a reason why things are the way they are in iOS and Cocoa. Long Intention Revealing names document what's going on, and reduce the incidence of unwanted name collisions. It has a heritage from Smalltalk, so it's been around and developing for something like 40 years! That puts it in the same league as Lisp as a way of doing things with merit that stands the test of time.

</comment><comment><USER5> The major concern I have with something like RubyMotion is that Objective-C - the language it stands in for - is _not_ a difficult language. The Cocoa/CocoaTouch API and its verbosity is the real problem, and I think that trying to map the extensive documentation written in Objective-C to a Ruby equivalent runs the risk of adding too much mental overhead. That it requires a paid-for license means that Ruby specific documentation will be comparatively thin on the ground, and the same applies to the resources found on StackOverflow.

I'm a Ruby developer, and I find Obj-C a nice language to work with (though I do prefer the s-expression style in favour of the more recent dot notation). I still haven't managed to justify using Ruby in place of Objective-C.

The only major benefit I see is the REPL that ties into the simulator, and losing the dependency on X-Code, but again, I feel that the verbosity of the APIs is the fault for that.

<comment><USER6> It hasn't been that hard for me to translate Objective-C code into Ruby. The hardest thing has been APIs that have varargs that end in nil for some reason.

Recently the RubyMotion team published this yardoc that translates all of the existing APIs for you into Ruby:

<http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/api/index.html>

But I didn't refer to that for the majority of the development since it wasn't around yet...I was knee-deep in the Apple docs for most of it.

<comment><USER5> I think that's an issue of moving from Objective-C (and pure C), to what is normally a dynamic language.

Using nil as a final argument (also called the 'sentinel') is fine for C to mark the end of a variable length array like it expects with 'strings' (so it doesn't stretch into the next unrelated block of memory), but you'd expect Ruby to handle that for you. Because in any other circumstance, it does.

<comment><USER7> Objective-C is dynamically typed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a fairly experienced iOS developer and a Ruby beginner. I bought a license just to play with and learn about Ruby in a familiar context. But one thing I did not find mentioned is how slow the RubyMotion build-deploy cycle is.

For small changes, on a 2011 MBP, Xcode takes a few seconds to rebuild and deploy to the simulator. RubyMotion takes ages, easily exceeding one minute (single-core process?). Repeated a few times, it's enough to shift my thinking from play-mode to plan-mode. At this point I'm still too uncomfortable to begin new projects with RubyMotion, just because the slowness is so annoying.

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh what a joy it is to read this! My experience with RubyMotion is very similar, and I am very happy to see major, high-profile app made with RubyMotion.

However, I was somewhat disappointed to see that they use BubbleWrap persistence instead of true CoreData. I've been struggling to use CoreData without Xcode with RubyMotion for a while and haven't found a great solution yet.

<comment><USER10> What is the tradeoff between the two?

<comment><USER9> CoreData is a very powerful object store with many libraries that support it. I haven't tested BubbleWrap much, but it's a very simple system, without searching, indexing, migrations and other CoreData features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I liked the post and the general message, but the 'Avoid Xcode' part is rubbish.

You shouldn't make such assumptions when you don't fully know how to use a tool, specially when you have such large audience.

<comment><USER12> I agree with this point. A lot of RubyMotion fans seem to be trying to build an app for iOS while learning as little as possible. While that's great if you're on a tight deadline and want to play to your strengths, Xcode is an incredibly powerful tool and features like the static analyzer, visual debugger and core data visualizer shouldn't be thrown out because some command line utility will let you Build & Run.

<comment><USER13> It's not a question of learning something new. It's that there's a fundamental, philosophical split between people who hate IDEs and people who love them.

It's one of those long-running holy wars of programming that goes back way further than iOS development.

<comment><USER14> A lot of people who use Xcode don't realize you can use many of those tools without it

A lot of people period, don't bother to use the analyzers and instruments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I got into iOS development via RubyMotion. I was a Rails developer for a few years, now I'm an iOS developer (using Objective C). I've only really started with Objective C and XCode. Objective C isn't a huge barrier, but Cocoa and XCode definitely are. That's one of the reasons I really enjoyed RubyMotion.

If I could choose (and wasn't working with other people) then I would go with RubyMotion. The toolkit is a lot less mature than XCode. But the productivity is definitely higher and there's much more room for improvement via the OSS community.

RubyMotion side-bonus: you don't have to merge (basically) binary files when you're working entirely with code for UI.

</comment><comment><USER16> At face value, I like the idea of RubyMotion, but I can't help but feel like it's a crutch to avoid picking up a few subtleties in Objective-C. The article even points out that RubyMotion doesn't hide much of the API from you, so in some ways it feels like 6 in one hand, half a dozen in the other. I'm not trying to be a naysayer, but I don't think the barrier to entry is as high as some make out to be.

<comment><USER6> Call it my crutch, but I got an app shipped without having to worry about a lot of the baggage that comes with Objective-C as a language. Here's two of my favorite examples of things I didn't have to worry about:

<http://nshipster.com/nil/> (wat)

[http://ashfurrow.com/blog/seven-deadly-sins-of-modern- object...](http://ashfurrow.com/blog/seven-deadly-sins-of-modern-objective-c) (6/7 of these don't apply...testing is something I need to work on though!)

<comment><USER12> You're definitely right — nil / NSNull is confusing to newbies, but Ruby is just as bad. The way it handles UTF8 is somewhat backwards, and the fact that symbols and strings are different (but sometimes used interchangeably) can cause 'gotchas' for newbies too. I'd argue that your language of choice is really dependent on which set of baggage you've internalized :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think there's a disproportionate amount of beginner's material that involves the use of storyboarding and Interface Builder, which gives the impression that iOS development is a lot like it is in Visual Basic.

Perhaps other iOS developers can weigh in on this, but I feel like it's fair to say that the most qualified developers do everything programmatically.

I've been doing everything exclusively programmatically since I've started, and I've never had any problems with XCode - to the point where I was surprised when I heard people complain about it for the first time.

From that point, the only downside I see to using Objective-C over Ruby is verbosity, but that seems pretty inconsequential given some of the benefits sandofsky mentioned above.

It's nice that there's something out there for experienced Ruby developers though.

<comment><USER18> It always baffles me the amount of developers that prefer to endure designing GUIs with code instead of GUI designers.

This doesn't scale when doing projects where the UI tends to be redesigned every few days.

In a few hours it is possible to design UIs that some require days to do it.

<comment><USER19> Interface Builder doesn't let you do anything very dynamic (moving panels, things that animate, etc) anyway. In my experience, a person experienced at programmatic view creation is a bit slower on initial creation, but a lot faster at refactoring or changes. A few well placed variables, for example, gives you a lot of instantaneous visual control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As cheap as it may sound, I would love to try/use RubyMotion if I didn't have to pay for it.

<comment><USER21> The price is a pretty big barrier to entry. I understand why, but an eval option would be nice.

<comment><USER22> <http://www.rubymotion.com/support/#faq>

Discount for students/academics.

<comment><USER21> For non-student/non-academics that just want to try it out and see if it works for them, it is a very steep price to pay. I strongly support paying for the tools you use, but $200 for a feet-first dive is steep.

<comment><USER23> That's one of the reasons I like Xamarin's approach with MonoTouch. You can use it and target the Simulator for free, but if you want to run your app on the device, you need to pay for a license. Seems fair to me. I wish RubyMotion would offer this as well. I bet a lot of developers (myself included) would then try it out. But like purephase, I can't justify paying $200 just to try something out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What I like about coding is that you learn every day and starting a new language is always inspiring and broadens you views. I just don't get those who like to approach everything with just one language.

Rubymotion won't hide the Objective-C API anyway, so people have still to learn and understand all of the Objective-C libs. There's no single reason to use Rubymotion. This paired with the all the typical fanboyism around Ruby, Rails, 37Signals is kind of annoying. Sorry to be harsh, but I don't care how a client for an aged app (Basecamp) is built with a cumbersome layer of abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER25> If youre comparing Interface Builder to Visual Basic, you just dont get it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ruby Motion is amazing, mostly due to it working in my existing setup. I can use VIM and Rake to do everything :)

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice article - easy-to-understand analysis of the benefits of RubyMotion.

I went the JS route with Titatium Appcelerator for our iPad app, but I've followed RubyMotion since it appeared and always wanted to give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've dipped my toes in RubyMotion and it's a lot of fun.

</comment><comment><USER29> How does this compare to phone gap? I wouldn't know about rubymotion since I can't afford it.

<comment><USER30> Night and day different. Phone gap wraps html inside a web view in an app -- you write your app logic as you would any dynamic web page. Rubymotion buils a true native app. You write your app logic like you would in objective-c, using cocoa and foundation classes.

<comment><USER29> Would you say it was worth it though? If I was going to go native, I might as well go full on obj.c otherwise I'd do phonegap.

I love ruby, but is that the only business case for rubymotion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does something simular to RubyMotion, but in Python exist?

<comment><USER9> Put simply: no. RubyMotion works because Ruby and Objective-C are very similar internally, both being inspired by SmallTalk and sharing almost all "core" language features - it allows to run ruby code on Objective-C Runtime. In this regard, python is a very different language, that would be extremely difficult to port, and it wouldn't really feel like python.

<comment><USER32> Well, sort of. I wouldn't really call it running "ruby code on the Objective-C runtime". Your Ruby code is effectively being converted to Cocoa API calls during the compilation process. RubyMotion has a number of Objective-C subclasses that match back to Ruby objects (for example, strings in RubyMotion aren't NSStrings, but a subclass of them). If you dump the headers out of a RubyMotion app you can pretty clearly see this.

Ruby and Objective-C definitely _aren't_ that similar internally - as someone else has suggested, there's no technical reason you couldn't do something similar for Python. It just happens that Ruby to Cocoa bindings have been around for a while (for some time with Apple support), and as a result there has been generally more interest in carrying it forward.

I've probably failed to adequately explain how it works, but the MacRuby source is available on GitHub, and Laurent Sansonetti has done a run through how RubyMotion does it's thing here: [http://rubysource.com/laurent- sansonetti-on-rubymotion-inter...](http://rubysource.com/laurent-sansonetti- on-rubymotion-internals/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I knew most of this, but for some reason had an impression that ruby was in particularly nice spot to subclass Obj-C classes. I have to agree, you are right, and other languages could follow RubyMotion's model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> holy mother of awfulness - $200?

<comment><USER34> A small price to pay considering what you could create with such a tool.

<comment><USER33> For a student who wants to explore Ruby for iOS apps instead of going through the whole Xcode-ObjC learning curve? I think not.

<comment><USER35> There's a discount possible for students : firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a forum to discuss business models of various companies? - <AUTHOR> I have noticed a paucity of business discussions on HN.<p>Do you guys know of any online forums where people discuss business models, marketing strategies etc. (but not markets nor macro economic trends)? <comment><USER2> I think I saw a couple of good posts on [0] GrowthHackers. I don't think they have a lot of stuff on business models, but discussions on market strategies go in depth.

[0] [http://growthhackers.com/posts](http://growthhackers.com/posts)

</comment><comment><USER3> /r/Entrepreneur

/r/SmallBusiness</comment>


The Deleted City — Take a walk around Geocities - <AUTHOR> http://www.deletedcity.net/

<comment><USER2> Geocities forgot that in real cities people have to pay taxes.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure you're joking, but just in case: lots of people offered to pay for the cost of hosting, or even to buy the data to host themselves. But Yahoo decided to kill it anyway. <http://www.reocities.com/> People actually invested a ridiculous amount of effort and a lot of money to save a copy. <http://www.reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html></comment></comment>


Why Calexit probably will – and should – remain a pipe dream - <AUTHOR> http://dailybruin.com/2017/03/19/the-quad-why-calexit-probably-will-and-should-remain-a-pipe-dream/ <comment><USER2> The author starts with a thesis; scrapes around for facts to support it; is soon enough disagreeing with their own numbers, and concludes with an appeal to codependency.</comment>


Mapping the World of Music Using Machine Learning: Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://tech.iheart.com/mapping-the-world-of-music-using-machine-learning-part-2-aa50b6a0304c#.c057zss41 <comment><USER2> HN link for part 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269568)</comment>


The Fall 2011 Google AI Challenge (Ants) is over - <AUTHOR> http://aichallenge.org/rankings.php#!1

<comment><AUTHOR> 27th place's code and description of how it works: [http://forums.aichallenge.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=2169&...](http://forums.aichallenge.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=2169&p=13317#p13317)

and profile: <http://aichallenge.org/profile.php?user=3845>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 11th place's code: <https://github.com/a1k0n/ants/tree/master/bot>

and profile so you can watch how it works in action: <http://aichallenge.org/profile.php?user=432>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 16th place's description of how their code works: <http://www.decompilinglife.com/>

and profile: <http://aichallenge.org/profile.php?user=4728>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here are some histograms from before the finals of how different languages and countries did compared to each other: <http://imgur.com/a/Li1b4>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Overall Winner's Code and description of how it works: <http://xathis.com/posts/ai-challenge-2011-ants.html></comment>


Cache on Delivery (Mining random people's memcached) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/sensepost/cache-on-delivery

<comment><USER2> I like the Sensepost people, but can sum up this talk very succinctly:

* You need to make sure you've firewalled (and/or on single-host configurations bound it exclusively to lo0) memcached so people can't talk to it from the Internet.

* If you survey the Internet, you'll find a lot of people who have not obeyed this rule.

* If you don't obey this rule attackers can get and possibly alter most of your data; an exposed memcached is probably game-over for your site.

The only things you should be able to talk to on anything in your data center are ports 443 and 80, plus 25 on your single mail relay if you have one, plus 22 (heavily filtered) on a single relay SSH server. If you can talk to more than that, you've probably done something very wrong.

<comment><USER3> Personally I am so paranoid with SSH that I don't run it on the default port.

That alone allows you to avoid most attackers trying to guess valid server ips.

Now to put a honey pot on port 22.

<comment><USER4> Oh yes, the first thing I do is change the SSH port, eleminates 99,99% of the auth attacks.

<comment><USER5> Damn. Why didn't I ever think of that? I'm doing that tomorrow.

<comment><USER6> Remove root login over ssh and disable password logins and you are good to go. If you want to get fancy Google for ssh port knocking.

<comment><USER7> _disable password logins_

I can't emphasize this one enough. Unless you need to login from a lot of different machines, there really isn't any excuse not to do this. It also has the bonus of making logins really easy since you don't have to type a password.

<comment><USER8> If you host your systems on a VPS service like linode or slicehost then you have the backup of a web based console in case you screw up royally and have a HD crash on the one machine your SSH key was on (for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've come across unprotected Memcached deployments in a couple of pen-tests. On one engagement in particular someone poking Memcached would be able to (temporarily) increase their account balance and even access CC numbers from recent transactions. :(

As far as I see it, this is one of the unintentional side effects of "hosting in the cloud". If you had co-located servers you'd whack up a firewall and only allow your internal IPs to access non-HTTP ports. Alas everyone now just spins up an S3 image and palms it off to Amazon.

<comment><USER10> With EC2, you have to opt-in any ports open to the public.

<comment><USER9> There you go, I stand corrected.

Are you able to make requests between instances on non-public ports? As someone else pointed out Memcached infrastructure typically won't sit on your local webserver.

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's pretty easy to set this up with security groups, you can restrict ports to only open to machines within another security group.

So lets say you've got memcached, mysql and a bunch of webservers.

On the memcached security group you open 11211 to the webservers group

On the db security group you open 3306 to webservers

On the webserver group you open 80 and 443 to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How can people not run a restrictive firewall on their externally-accessible boxes? EC2 even has this built in as a network-wide feature. Our production servers run with the following setup:

* block everything from outside internal network

* open port 80 on web server

* open port 22 on all boxes, but only allow key-based authentication. Oh, and only allow connections from an ip whitelist.

The restrictions on port 22 are probably a little overkill, I admit.

<comment><USER13> Restrictions on port 22 are NEVER overkill. In fact, you should run another port entirely.

<comment><USER14> If you're already using key authentication, that doesn't add much security. A port is just a very short password shared by all users--- instead of logging in with "I'd like to login, please initiate public-key authentication", you now have to login with "I'd like to login, the magic number is 2222, and please initiate public-key authentication", which isn't really any more secure.

<comment><USER15> Call me an engineer, but I don't understand why anyone would dismiss security through obscurity just because it's theoretically useless. If you can reduce the lifetime expected value of successful attacks on your system, it should be considered a win regardless of how you do it. (Of course, relying solely on security through obscurity is a sure-fire way to greatly increase said EV.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The blog entry on the topic is available at <http://www.sensepost.com/blog/4873.html> Also, GoWalla & Bit.Ly were informed pre-publication, and fixed their stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> Memcached by default only connects to localhost. Were these people using it like that and/or does that matter?

<comment><USER18> In most deployed configurations, you use memcache in a distributed fashion (so N machines can connect to a pool of caches), so you usually have them bind to a public interface. One that you stick behind at least one firewall.

Exposing memcached (or riak or whatever) is operational malpractice.

<comment><USER14> It's definitely dumb, but people might be lulled into thinking it isn't necessary because the trend among other servers is to essentially include their own firewalling setup, with a default of blacklist-everything that you have to explicitly override by whitelisting IPs, or by having clients authenticate. For example, you used to rely on firewalls to make sure nobody was sending spam through your internal mail relays, but these days most MTAs handle that filtering themselves, taking whitelists of "relay from here is ok" IPs in their config files, even though in theory iptables/ipfw/etc. could handle that job just fine, and more efficiently. More relevantly, most RDBMSs have a similar setup--- they won't just let any client talk to them, even when bound to a public IP.

For efficiency, though, memcached explicitly decided not to handle that kind of filtering itself, e.g. by having the memcached config file take a list of IPs of other memcached servers to talk to (defaulting to none), or including some kind of auth mechanism, and instead relies on the system firewall for that. That's a reasonable design decision, but increasingly unusual. Most servers these days see the system firewall as a backup level of defense, not the primary one, and aim to be secure even when unfirewalled.

<comment><USER19> I lulled

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This was one of my favorite briefings at Blackhat.</comment>


Why Catholics Built Astronomical Features into Churches - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/catholics-built-secret-astronomical-features-into-churches-to-help-save-souls <comment><USER2> "Update 11/15: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Galileo was executed for his beliefs." \-- that should serve as a hint about the overall quality of the article.

<comment><USER3> Up until college, I had always heard the story of the Catholic Church persecuting Galileo as sort of the prototypical example of the church's attitude toward science. As a Catholic, I figured it was an episode where Galileo was clearly in the right and the Church was clearly in the wrong.

In college, though, I discovered that many influential Catholics strongly reject the idea that Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church because the Church disagreed with his theory or felt it threatened to undermine its teachings:

[http://www.catholic.com/tracts/the-galileo- controversy](http://www.catholic.com/tracts/the-galileo-controversy)

tl;dr - It's more complicated than the typical anti-Catholic narrative suggests. The episode was primarily a clash of personalities (Galileo was a jerk and insulted thin-skinned Vatican officials who misused their power to punish him), rather than a dispute about science, or even a dispute about the intersection of science and religion.

<comment><USER4> Except the standard narrative is fairly honest, if reductionist. Of course the details are far more interesting, but I find there's this new historic revisionism that's trying to whitewash Catholic history and its fairly repugnant. Look at your comment. Putting in qualifiers like Galileo was a jerk and those selfless Vatican officials were just a little "thin-skinned" is making excuses to promote a pro-Church narrative and to blame Galileo. You are aware we are discussing the Inquisition here which, if we include the entire church all through Europe, led to the deaths of over 125,000 people. This wasn't some protocol slight taken overly-wrongly, but an active system of censorship, oppression, imprisonment, and mass murder Galileo was on the receiving end of.

I hate when the "Oh, there's more to this story" attitude is used to defend the wrong narrative. I see it all the time on the internet. Edison is on par with Hitler for some reason, Lincoln is a war mongering criminal for going against the peace loving Confederate states, etc. The larger narrative is dismissed for smaller details that are presented in a way to distract or contradict the larger narrative. Its purposely viewing the trees and ignoring the forest. Sadly, its a popular way for disingenuous people to promote their views.

<comment><USER5> Except the thing is, Galileo's model was _not supported by science_. They had neither a proper theoretical model for deriving it (Newton's and Kepler's work on gravity and celestial movement, which came after Galileo), nor did the Galileo's model agree with available observational data. From the point of view of scientists of that age, his model was more like a crackpot theory. Which turned out ok, but _only much later_.

So if anything, Galileo's story is about the Church being _on the side of science_ , not against it.

<comment><USER6> I came to post this. There is another important detail: Galileo did not contradict scripture (religion), rather he contradicted Aristotle (science). The Catholic church was actually rather interested in science at the time, and were far from the anti-intellectuals that the common narrative makes them seem.

<comment><USER7> Aristotle is not just "science" \- it's long been at the center of Christian theology, carrying the main argument that could reconcile Christian faith with the empirical world. Until very recently (and certainly by Galileo's times), contradicting Aristotle meant doing away with the entire building of Christian theology.

<comment><USER8> Well, in Western Christianity the thought of Aristotle has been important since about A.D. 1,100. Not so much in Eastern Christianity, which has favored the thought of Plato for nearly 2,000 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Too many misconceptions.

 _at the height of the Church's calendar problem, in the second half of the 16th century, the eastern Church and the western Church were an incredible ten days out of sync with one another. This was only reconciled in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII implemented what has become known as the Gregorian calendar reform._

This doesn't sound right at all. Why would the church calendars be out of sync at the time? In fact, it was the Gregorian reform that put them out of sync. They are still out of sync and the gap is growing.

Bonus history trivia question: What month did the Russian October Revolution happen?

<comment><USER10> Seriously, what planet is this guy from? My family is Eastern Orthodox and this year we have Easter on the same day as the Westerners (Catholics and Protestants). It's a big deal because this very rarely happens. Sometimes we're as much as month or more apart from one another. Nothing has been resolved on the calendar issue between east and west.

<comment><USER11> This depends on the particular church. I know that Serbian Orthodox and Russian still officially use the Julian calendar. AFAIK the most of other Orthodox churches like Greek, Romanian, etc. have switched to the Gregorian calendar, e.g. they celebrate Christmas on Dec the 25th, not January the 7th, like Serbs and Russians do (Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian at the moment).

<comment><USER12> Even for the Romanian and Greek Orthodox churches, the Easter rarely coincides with the Catholic Easter. You are right about the Christmas though, it is on 25 for both churches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The whole Galileo thing is funny in retrospect because it was Galileo who was accused of being unscientific! He was so unscientific about meteorology (even proposing wild theories like inertia) that the church forbade him to keep postulating physical reality of the absurd Copernican model.

Galileo got off easy even after having violated the ban and insulting the pope.

If you have a few hours to spare, read "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown" for an entertaining trip into that period.

[http://tofspot.blogspot.ch/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic- smack...](http://tofspot.blogspot.ch/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic- smackdown.html)

<comment><USER14> Just to muddy the water further, Claudius Ptolemy is often revered as the founding father of astrology based on his "Tetrabiblos". The article glosses over the significance of the zodiac signs adorning these meridian lines but the presence of supposedly pagan symbols inside these great cathedrals leaves much unanswered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When living in Rome I often would spend my lunch walking to Santa Maria degli Angeli to watch the solar transit across the meridian line. A precise scientific instrument, in a Catholic church, built inside a Roman bath (by Michelangelo no less) is one of my favorite examples of the layers of history in that city. The wikipedia article is quite good:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_degli_Angeli_e_dei...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_degli_Angeli_e_dei_Martiri)

<comment><USER16> Wow, I was in Rome this past summer, I didn't know anything about this, I would have loved to see it!

Sadly, I don't know if I'll ever have the chance to go back. =((

<comment><USER15> If you do, it happens daily at local solar noon, so around 12-1 each day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Vatican still retains a small astronomy group run by one of my MIT classmates Guy Cosomologio. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Observatory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Observatory) They mainly operate out of Arizona these days. Guy gives public lectures about astronomy, faith and science etc.

<comment><USER18> You mean Guy Consolmagno? He co-authored "Turn Left at Orion", which is one of my favourite reading recommendations to beginning amateur astronomers of any age :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've only glanced at the pictures in the article and seeing the zodiacal signs and months of the year reminded me of ideas I've read on solarmythology.com. That the story of Jesus can be linked to the path that the sun takes during a year, and that 2000 years ago, due to the precession of the equinox the sun slowly went from Aries to Pisces at spring equinox in the northern hemisphere and that it must have been a pretty big change for people who were keeping track of that for agricultural purpose. Miracles like walking on water could be the sun crossing the milky way. Being dead and resurrected could be the sun lowering in winter solstice and coming back up 3 days after. I thought that was interresting.

<comment><USER20> Looks cranky. Some Christian motifs may have been ripoffs from other religions, but it's the first time I'm hearing this about Jesus and crucifixion.

There _are_ non-Christian sources mentioning the crucifixion of Jesus within few decades afterwards.

If they think that crucifixion was a common motif in religions of the time they would better provide some examples. Their /cr.htm just repeatedly states it as fact.

No, this "Orpheus crucifixion" stone doesn't count because it was probably created by Roman Christians who were known to combine Jesus with Orpheus in their art due to the obvious parallels. And the original Greek myth of Orpheus says nothing about crucifixion.

<comment><USER19> I just ignored that part and skipped to the astronomical allegory where he makes connections between some verses and each constellations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I believe the meridian line in a church was a plot point in 'The Da Vinci Code' so I'm surprised they are not more common knowledge. Yep, described here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Line) Well, the actual meridian line refernced is this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomon_of_Saint- Sulpice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomon_of_Saint-Sulpice)

</comment><comment><USER22> I run Firefox + Noscript, and Atlas Obscura is the only website I've encountered where pages are scrolled down on initial load, and I don't know why. Often it's all the way down to the footer, but this article scrolls about halfway down. This is sorta annoying since there's been several popular items on HN recently.

</comment><comment><USER23> Newsflash: Astronomy grew out of astrology; calendars are related to astronomical relationships; and science and religion went hand in hand for a very long time.

Film at 11.</comment>


Ask HN: How to convert from amateur web app developer to professional? - <AUTHOR>

This is more of a practical question on web app development and deployment process.
Here is some background information.
I use PHP for server side scripting, javascript for client side. I use Netbeans and notepad++.
I user Firefox and firebug for debugging and testing.
The process I use is very amateurish, I code something in netbeans, something in notepad++ and since there is nothing to compile, I just refresh the firefox browser and test it. This is convenient and faster compared to the Java development enviornment where you would have to atleast compile and deploy the jar files before you could run them.
I have been thinking of putting a formal process in my development and find it hard putting it together. There are so many things to do before you can deploy your final web app. I keep hearing jslint, compression, unit testing (selenium), Ant, YUI compressor etc but I am now looking for some steps that I can take to make me more organized.
For e.g I use netbeans but don't use any projects within it. I directly update the files. I don't use any source control but use my Iomega backup that saves each save into a different version and at the end of the day I backup the dev directory to my Amazon s3 account. For me development environment is just a DEV directory, TEST is my intermediate stage and PROD is the final directory that gets pushed out to the server. But all these directories are in the same apache home. I have few php scripts that just copies the needed files into the production directory. Thats about it for my development approach.
I know I am missing the following - Regression testing (manual or automated ??) - automated testing (selenium ??) - automated deployment (ANT ??) - source control (svn ??) - quality control (jslint ??)
Can someone explain what are the missing steps and how to go about filling those steps in order to have more professional approach. I am looking for tools with example tutorials in streamlining the whole development to deployment stage.
For me just getting a hang of database, server side and client side development all in synchronization was itself a huge accomplishment. And now I feel there is lot missing before you can produce quality web application.
For e.g I see lot of mention about using automated testing but how to put in use with respect to javascript and php. How to use ANT for the deployment etc.
Is this all too much for a single or two person development team? Is there a way to automate all the above so that I just keep coding in netbeans and then run a batch file that is configured once and run it everytime to produce the code in the production directory?
Lot of these information is scattered on the web and here, if someone can guide I would be happy to consolidate here.
Thank you for your patience :) <comment><USER2> There are a lot of small, detailed things you probably need to know to become a "rounded" development professional and they are only really learned "in the trenches" so to speak.

Don't overly stress the "process" you are using, if you ask 10 people this question you will probably get 10 different answers, the best process is one that is repeatable and you feel works for you. The process can also change depending on the type of project you are working on, team size and location, tools being used....don't be afraid to try different things out & see what fits.

Down to brass tact's, unit testing I find to be most important when it comes to tests, write the test cases first, then write the features they are to test.

Learn git and setup a repo for every project you develop - even personal side projects. Use github.

Use a good project management, task management tool like pivotaltracker.com

Use to use frameworks e.g. zend and other MVC frameworks correctly, use industry conventions and existing libs, you do not need to reinvent the wheel for everything you need to do.

Learn search and sorting algorithms for a start, then start of popular design patterns - only way to really understand these is to use them.

Finally I would strongly recommend you try and get a junior development job or internship with a good dev shop, this was by far the best thing I did when I was learning how to program for a living. Nothing else will match it in terms of learning & giving you confidence.

Hope this helps in some way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hint, just because something is used in the enterprise doesn't mean it's better.

That said, source control is a must, start there.

<comment><USER4> > _That said, source control is a must...._

Based on my 25+ years of IT industry experience, I'd say put that in an infinite loop. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I understand what you're asking for. Some things you need to learn through experience and whether you can afford to spend any money on utilities, but if you're comfortable working in English check out url: <http://github.com/plans>

If you read/write/speak a non-English language or character set you may want to try and find similar tools in your native language.

Generally speaking a development process can be exactly as you describe, but what you want to achieve in order to be professional varies widely. I had a point of sale vendor working with a customer (I was fixing their performance problems) and the developer was "source code controlling" with copy and paste on their personal work station. If I paid that person money to MAKE something, I would have had them shot. Except they are in Canada and shooting people is probably frowned upon.

So here is my advice:

1\. Look at how you're working right now, strip out all but the essential steps that you can write on a piece of paper

2\. Grade the list with how much time you spend each week on each step in the process

3\. Keep working on that list for a few days or a week even, logging the time you spend - note also if you lose progress or work due to error, or how many times you do something where an automatic solution may help

4\. Use the list above to determine, based on where you can probably save time with utilities and tools, or come back to ask HN more specific questions

For a one or two person shops, I'd be storing my source code online at github or similar source code repository. As for what you need to do for yourself, start abstracting what you're writing in script as an "architecture". Try keeping a high level document describing the workflow you're automating and what the purpose is.

From there, break down into component parts, how you think about it and how others may need to work with it.

The easiest way to act professional is learn how and what to comment in your scripting. What is apparent to you right now, won't be in a year when you need to back and chance something, or even better, when you start collaborating with other developers.

Being professional means that you invest in the time it takes to collaborate with others. Despite posting this on a site called "HackerNews", I'm SO not a hacker, and I would generally pitch a fit at hacker behavior. But then I've witnessed and personally experienced the pain and limitation of hacking, in lisp, pain, oh pain.

As to automated testing, don't worry about it until you're finding yourself testing more than coding. If you can't get a cheap hand, or friend or family member, or (chuckle) a customer to test the product, don't worry about getting a tool.</comment>


Thousands of Scientists Declare a Climate Emergency - <AUTHOR> https://earther.gizmodo.com/thousands-of-scientists-declare-a-climate-emergency-1839635242 <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the paper as the one in the article triggers a security warning for me for some reason [https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance- article/doi/10.1...](https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance- article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806)</comment>


Facebook cannot act in your best interest - <AUTHOR> https://ckuhl.com/blog/your-best-interest/ <comment><USER2> The article says that to make more money, FB must "acquire more users and show more advertisements to existing users". There is a third option, which is to show higher efficiency (higher CTR) advertising to existing customers.

This, of course, does not invalidate the main thrust of the article's argument, as the way to increase advertising efficiency is to accumulate and exploit ever more data about its users. Recent events suggest that this is not in users best interest, as FB has proven an untrustworthy custodian of user data.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think federated social networks (GNU social, diaspora ... etc) will solve this problem. In their case they are not in your best interest due to the time that will be wasted. I think "social" interaction should be left in real life where it can influence people in a positive fashion. IMO the Internet is really only good for disseminating information and for certain utilities it provides.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would disagree that federated social networks would face the same pressure to increase time spent on their sites. By the nature of federation, a sort of marketplace of social sites would allow people to move to whatever serves them best (for whatever their definition of best is). So if a member of the fediverse starts feeding someone unenjoyable content, they could leave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is particularly rich to see a "human-computer interaction" tag on a post where the body uses nearly-invisible thin grey font on a white background.

<comment><USER5> Firefox reader mode. I activated it after 15 seconds...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It runs under the wrong assumption when it comes to digital advertising. Advertisers care about engagement. Its not about adding more ads or increasing view time, its about delivering ads that are more relevant to the user so advertisers pay more.

<comment><USER7> And to deliver greater engagement, Facebook must collect and sell more personal data

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I usually see people comment on the font and scoff as it's generally not aweful, but that font color just looks terrible and unreadable on my screen. Is it a really light grey for everyone or just me?

</comment><comment> ryan-allen I have 'tuned' my Facebook feed with the 'unfollow' option, by employing the following narcissistic rule: if it makes me angry, upset, or any other negative emotion, for any reason at all, that person or thing gets an unfollow from me.

My feed is now composed of synthesizer groups, funny dogs and funny birds. I get a lot of positive things from my feed, and a lot of relevant advertising for things I'm interested in.

It doesn't matter if it's your sister, your best friend, or your mum, just unfollow. They don't know about it (unless they ask if you 'saw their post'), and you can improve your experience.

<comment><USER9> Serious question... do you understand the issues with "the bubble"?

Because you are proudly explaining you've made one.

<comment><USER10> if you are going to live in a bubble anyway, you might as well have one that doesnt upset you all the time?

<comment><USER9> Fair point. But considering the overall damage it does to block off well put together condiractory opinion, I see it as: _if I'm going to choose to step on a nail it's going to be a small one._

But, if you're cutting out reddit-quality "discussion", well, I get that.

<comment> ryan-allen Yep, I aim to get my news from places other than social networks. As they say in Australia, I couldn't give a rat's arse what other people think about current events, I'll take my news from various reputable sources, not the 'wisdom of the masses'.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of 'Massive' Hacking Attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/europe/france-macron-hacking.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277346)

</comment><comment><USER3> Corrine Erhel, Macron's person for everything dealing with surveillance, digital control and the like, dies suddenly of a heart attack yesterday. She dies the same evening the Macron leaks are released. Coincidence?

Considering the parallels with the USA 2016 election, and the murder of Seth Rich - I don't think so.

<comment><USER4> Good ol' Confirmation Bias.

<comment><USER5> How does it apply here?

<comment><USER6> You are seeking to confirm that there is a targeted attack on Macron and his movement. En Marché has been hacked recently, Wikileaks published it. Now one of his campaign leaders, 50 year old woman who helped him with everything regarding privacy and surveillance, dies. Then concluding from this that it cannot be conincidence is what is known as confirmation bias. Seeking to confirm one's pre-formed hypothesis.

<comment><USER5> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> WikiLeaks has already identified several files in the leaks containing [Cyrillic tags in their metadata.][1]

[1]: [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860855087165571073](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860855087165571073)

<comment><USER8> At this point, I'm not sure that's indicative of anything. With all of this _The Russians are coming!_ noise that's been spewed out over the past year, it strikes me as the first thing you'd do to deflect casual attention would be to plant some Cyrillic text in a place that looks suspicious.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you the meta data could mean nothing.

But "noise"? More likely you're a paid troll.

<comment><USER8> I wish somebody was paying me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From wikileaks:

French media warned not to publish [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860841351595921409](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860841351595921409)

No fakes that we see [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860638153471918081](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860638153471918081)

Timing curious [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860603123236315137](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860603123236315137)

<comment><USER11> WikiLeaks is not neutral

<comment><USER3> WikiLeaks also a 100% track record of being correct. Biases accounted for, they are accurate.

<comment><USER12> They routinely make claims not supported by the evidence they have. They retweeted the pizza child trafficking garbage, made up facts about redirecting responsibility for attacks.

<comment><USER13> > They retweeted the pizza child trafficking garbage,

Please, dear god, tell me you're kidding and no sane person is taking that theory seriously.

<comment><USER14> >Please, dear god, tell me you're kidding and no sane person is taking that theory seriously.

I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The downvote brigade is out in full force here again.

The upvote/downvote forum experiment doesn't work for political topics (which everything has an element of), it just results in censorship of non-status quo opinions.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's scary to think that a teenager at home could setup something more resilient to attack than many of these important systems.

Like wow.

<comment><USER17> If you are the target of a foreign intelligence service, you are going to be hacked, end of story. There is very little you can do to protect yourself from a threat like that over time.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but if I'm a major candidate in a national election, perhaps I should be protected by my domestic intelligence service. This is what I don't understand: why aren't we playing defense? Why isn't it a huge embarrassment to the Secret Service (in the US) or another defense agency when a campaign under their protection is successfully attacked like this? I would love to see the Russia investigations in the US Congress add a focus on bolstering defenses, rather than just doling out blame. The same should go for France and elsewhere. Cyber-defense is an arms race, but it's a battle that can and should be fought. Surely this is something all parties can agree on!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the new normal, also I'm glad this is happening. Here's why: perhaps this is what it takes to get politicians to take security seriously. Once enough elections have been won/lost because of security breaches in consumer products and commercial networks surely we should start to see consumer protection agencies given charter to protect consumers and bring suits against companies for mishandling breaches or gross negligence.

<comment><USER20> I'm not a security expert so this is a serious question.

Do you think there's a way to take security seriously enough to successfully defend against state-sponsored hacking? Is it simply inevitable that this sort of hacking leak will happen, or is this leak likely the result of some low- hanging fruit security tips being ignored?

<comment><USER19> I have no idea. My guess would be no. It sure would be nice if we were trying harder though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's well-timed, if the goal is to have Macron stagger into office as seriously damaged goods.

<comment><USER22> This is correct. The goal is not to elect La Penne.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, and Trump's victory surprised everyone, including Russia and Trump. Electing Le Pen may not be the goal, but it could happen (I'm not familar with French elections).

<comment><USER20> There would have to be a seriously large polling error. Much bigger than the Trump margin. [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/le-pen-is-just-a- gargan...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/le-pen-is-just-a-gargantuan- polling-error-behind-macron/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think probably the Russians, since not many Western countries trust them anyway and so not much to lose, lots to gain.

Or it could have been the US (I'm American). The US administration likes LePen and nationalism.

"According to the study, the U.S. intervened in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, while the Soviet Union or Russia intervened in 36." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention)

And if that doesn't work, sometimes we just overthrow countries. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change)

<comment><USER24> Le Pen is openly supported by Russia, just like most right-wing parties in the EU. And it's been like this for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if anyone had time to dig in?

It seems to have conflicted reports on the Internet about how important it is and if some documents were in fact faked as alleged by the Macron campaign at least in the first time. The french media blackout to follow election rules doesn't seem to help.

</comment><comment><USER26> What people may not realize is that we have a complete renewal of the parliament in less than two month, and if macron doesn't have a majority, then his prime minister may very well end up being a political opponent.

Rigging or trying to influence french elections would mean rigging four votes over the course of two months ( not even counting primaries inside political parties, each with two turns), which seems a bit unlikely to happen. I'd say our system is pretty secure in that matter.

</comment><comment><USER27> >yes we said it

>but we didn't want you to know we said it

</comment><comment><USER28> So far it's not gaining a lot of momentum. And beside a large phoning campaign that is a bit low, I didn't see anything really nasty or even controversial. Nothing like paying your bodyguard as a parliament aid while he never landed foot in said parliament or your office.

Time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if by "hacking" they mean social engineering.

<comment><USER23> They mean the vague superset. No one checks with HN on terminology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No need to worry guys, the pro-establishment bilderberg/Rothschild puppet will be elected as the next French president.

</comment><comment><USER10> Will a more qualified woman be passed over for a less qualified man, yet again?

Probably as these leaks are about 4 days to late.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good. This good old boys club of insiders is not good for the average person.

Research who is funding these people. Research what they do when they think no one is looking. Figure out who the media is pushing for, and vote the complete opposite.

Twitter is actively supressing the #MacronLeaks hashtag. [https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MacronLeaks&src=tyah](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MacronLeaks&src=tyah)

The propaganda machine is supporting Macron outright: [http://i.imgur.com/rDppmI3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/rDppmI3.jpg)

Call this karma.

<comment><USER12> Yes, vote for the candidate the totalitarian is supporting, that's always worked out for the best.</comment></comment>


Computing the intersection between linear and quadratic Bézier curve - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.floorplanner.com/post/66681002205/computing-the-intersection-between-linear-and-quadratic

<comment><USER2> Interesting, I did the same thing the other day. Though I used the method of finding the (possible) three roots of the equation, and then pinpointing the locations of the intersections.</comment>


First day with Windows Phone 7 - <AUTHOR> http://leovernazza.com/2010/11/20/my-first-day-with-my-windows-phone-7/

<comment><USER2> "Haven't really used an iPhone to test but based in other reviews I am pretty sure the Windows Phone is superior."

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, will remove that line. Thanks!

BTW, I was JUST talking about the input experience</comment></comment>


PBS Frontline – Secrets Politics and Torture [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secrets-politics-and-torture/

<comment><AUTHOR> This must be the best episode of Frontline I have ever seen. It was riveting. And in my opinion, the very best part of it is when they show Michael Hayden walking amongst the crowd right before President Bush presented his public response to the torture accusations. They made no commentary on Hayden, but they showed him very deliberately. Hayden played a key role in the NSA spying program that would eventually be revealed to the world by Edward Snowden, and seeing Hayden immediately added that entire enterprise of deception to the context of the story being told. That single shot of him added a huge amount of depth and gravity to the whole thing.</comment>


Access 2200+ JavaScript libs in C# using Retyped - <AUTHOR> https://blog.bridge.net/2200-js-libraries-in-c-using-retyped-dcfafb28b119 <comment><USER2> This is an incredible use of the wealth of d.ts files there are! I've used bridge.net in the past and it's great using the .net toolset and c# language to build production ready javascript.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool. Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


Show HN: I made a tool for tech managers to document performance of their teams - <AUTHOR>

Based on the feedback from my closed beta customers and a lot of answers on this thread http://www.quora.com/Management/What-are-common-mistakes-that-new-or-inexperienced-managers-make/answer/Ian-McAllister, I decided to pivot my product to make a nimble performance documentation tool for managers to document the good/bad feedback to their reportees at one place.
I am currently doing this by generating an email address that managers can 'cc' while emailing any feedback to their team members.
All the feedback that is collected is visualized as a timeline which the managers can access at the time of annual/semi annual performance review to know the evolution of the team member, the little wins and course correction feedback that was given out to him/her.
I am giving it to a handful of managers to try it out and yet to make a page for it.
What do you people think about it? If you want to try it out, I have an old page to register for it. You can enter in your details and I'll generate the email key for you: http://52metrics.com/redcarpet <comment><USER2> i love computer very much!i have a dream about becoming a computer progromer since i was a child.But i don't know how to start my dream.i need a kind man or women who can give me some advice</comment>


Black business is fading? Startups and collaboration can be the cure - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20131209/OPINION/131209835/black-business-is-fading-startups-and-collaboration-can-be-the-cure

<comment><AUTHOR> Very important discussion that we all need to have.</comment>


The Death of the PC Has Not Been Greatly Exaggerated - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/death-pc-not-greatly-exaggerated/

<comment><USER2> LOL Wired you did it again. The thing your article does not say is that Gartner's report does not count Apple Mac sales as PCs, so actually as a whole the market is pretty much the same size as last year.

And yes, Apple Macs are PCs : they have the same internals, while they ship with a different OS - and as far as I know you don't discount Dells shipping with Linux either.

Seriously journalists, do your JOB.

<comment><USER3> That "they have the same internals" doesn't qualify them as PC's; it's the fact that they are Personal Computers. They were Personal Computers when the were PowerPC based and they were Personal Computers when they ran Motorola 68000 processors. In this case though, you are entirely wrong.

"Of all PC makers listed, only Apple saw year-over-year growth..."

Seriously, RTFA.</comment></comment>


Valuations and fundraising - <AUTHOR>

I was talking to a buddy of mine that's been through a few rounds at a few startups.  One interesting point he raised is that investors want to own 25-30% of a company after they've invested.  In his opinion, this was a hard lower limit.
What this means is that raising $250k implies a $1M valuation.
And that if you really do think you're worth $4m, you should raise $2m for a post-money $6m.
Have others found this to be the case? <comment><USER2> It is the case that there is between 20-30% valuation that they typically need to invest. And yes, that does effect valuation math. However, there are of course plenty of other cases outside the "norm"

a) A super hot company people will always make exceptions for. Especially smaller more focused funds like Union Sq.

b) No VC is going to give you $250k on an A round valuation and expect 25% of the company. They will either be angels (who will take more like 2-25%) or if a VC they will do the $250k as convertible debt to the A round.

Do not raise $2m if you don't need $2m. Structure your round around the capital requirements, not the other way around.</comment>