Ask HN: How do I get out of my unhappy coding job? - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I need your advice; I'm working in an internal IT department at a non-software company which is, as you can guess, far from ideal. I live + work in the UK.
I am starting to feel very depressed about my situation and am desperate to find a way out. I've applied to a job at a decent software company which unfortunately I didn't get (though it certainly gave me an idea of what to improve if I were to apply again, so was positive overall.)
I'm working on developing a programming language; it's extremely early days but I have certain convictions about what is important in a language and in the hacker tradition want to make something that fits those convictions.
I, much to my regret, don't have a degree in Computer Science (though I do have an engineering degree) - though I grew up loving programming I, for somewhat complicated reasons, ended up choosing the wrong subject.
As far as I can see the following steps are the way out. I'd be very grateful for any advice/criticism you care to offer about these steps, also with any suggestions you can offer me in finding a happier coding existence:-
+ Work hard on my language project; if I can actually do something with this I will have something very nice to put on my CV. Programming languages, compilers, parsing, etc. are really my passion; they are the one thing I'd like to get into more than anything else.
+ Develop knowledge of algorithms, big O, etc. - the kind of stuff I would have picked up on a computer science course, as well as being the kind of stuff asked at interviews.
+ Get involved with open source - I am especially interested in LLVM as it ties in nicely with my language project.
+ Practice, practice, practice - Practice coding, consciously trying to improve as much as I can.
And the most recent, most radical thought:-
+ Ditch the idea of going to work on someone else's stuff and get going on a Micro ISV. Keep the day job and work all the hours outside of work to put a product together. I'd like to somehow link this to my passion for programming languages, etc. - perhaps that old programmer startup cliche of a development tool of some kind?
Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me, it's really appreciated. Feel free to criticise + tear my ideas apart, by the way! Always happy for (constructive) criticism.
(I am using a different HN login from usual for obvious reasons.) <comment><USER2> I have been in your situation many times before and always struggled with it. Until I figured something out...

 _working in an internal IT department at a non-software company_ can be a HUGE advantage. Why? Because your "customers" are right there.

Please do not underestimate this as part of your career planning. Sure, we all want to create cool technology, but AFAIC, the single biggest shortcoming for developers that I've ever seen is what I'll call "detachment from users".

You don't have that problem. You have end users right there at your fingertips. Take advantage of it! Learn from them. Practice your systems analysis skills. Find out how to make that missing link, the connection between technology and people, work properly.

I have written significant pieces of technology for software houses, but was actually _more_ frustrated. Why? It took months, sometimes even years before anyone actually used it. And then, they were communicating with someone other than me. The technology was cool, but by not closing that loop with my customers, I always felt that my work (and learning) was incomplete.

By all means, continue your dreams and career plans. But don't waste your current situation by being depressed about it. I can't tell you all the times in my career when I stood head and shoulders above my peers because I had suffered in the trenches like you are now. Except you don't have to suffer. Because now you know to look for opportunities to get a lot better in other ways. They're all around you if you just look.

<comment><USER3> Some places insist on having a "Product Manager" handle all the face to face communications, which kills it even more...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Working on your language project is probably not the best avenue to get you out of your job, since monetizing something like that is pretty difficult. It's been done but it had better be a 'game changer', another variation on some theme is not going to help you become independent.

The abstract knowledge you pick up (such as algorithms, you already refer to that) will help though, since it will allow you to build relatively complex stuff where 'cut-and-paste' types will have a disadvantage competing against you.

Open source is great way to advertise your skills, but only if you want to be re-hired somewhere, is that your intention or do you plan to become independent ?

The last item on your list sounds like the best bet in the shorter term. But maybe first you should exchange your job that you hate for a nicer one to get you out of the frame of mind you're in and in to a more healthy one.

Then from a position of strength you can make your decisions, usually that works better (at least, it does for me).

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice; will definitely take it on board.

It's true that the language project itself is unlikely to be monetisable (especially since the chances of it ever being used let alone popular are close to 0), but I wondered whether I could develop something along a similar vein, say a code analysis tool or some such, which could find application of language-related techniques and keep me in an area I find especially interesting.

I guess I just want to be happy as a coder; whether that requires me to be independent or can be achieved working for someone else is something I'm not yet sure about. I agree I need to leave the negative situation, I guess part of what I'm asking is how best to improve myself such that I can get a job somewhere decent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> (jacquesm beat me to it, but I'm sure you can use more than one reply.)

Given your relationship to programming as you describe it, I am quite sure that you can break out of this job. So please don't feel depressed! Just steel yourself to work damn hard on other stuff, no matter how tired or bummed you are from work, and don't stop until you get somewhere you want to be.

Working on open-source projects is a great way to develop credibility. A huge advantage of this approach is that you build credibility with the right crowd - the ones who find the same things cool and interesting that you do. If I were you I'd work backwards from the kinds of companies I'd like to hire me and try to make substantial contributions to open-source software that such companies use. Either that or I'd make cool new library on top of one.

Working on a personal language is less likely, I think, to be externally impressive. Most people's reaction to that will be "yawn", unless you're able to demonstrate something fundamentally new about it, and even then there is a high barrier to convincing anybody. You'd be better off finding open-source implementations of some known language to work on. (I'm talking, strictly, about using it as a bridge to paid work. Obviously you feel passionately enough to make it worth doing in its own right, but that's a separate question.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. The positive encouragement of HNers means a _lot_ to me.

I think a consensus is emerging that putting the language project aside for a while to focus on OSS would be a good idea.

<comment><USER4> What are your skills ? (programming languages and so on ?)

<comment><AUTHOR> currently, mostly C#, SQL, F# and some scheme. Most of my experience (and entirely professionally) is on the MS stack, though I run linux at home.

<comment><USER4> Ok. I see ErrantX has already made you an offer, nice to see HN'ers help out other HN'ers!

I'll be running a pretty weird experiment in a few weeks, I'm not yet ready to explain it in public because I'm still tweaking the idea and I don't want to limit myself by nailing it down, if you are interested drop me an email (email in my profile).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quit.

Having a choice (in this case a job) is sometimes bad. If your back is against the wall, you'll be more driven to go after what you want.

I was working for a bank in the early part of my career. I was doing mainframe applications and I have always wanted to do web apps. So I quit my job and learned a web programming language (.Net). I learned it pretty fast and I built a small site to showcase my work. In two months since quitting, I found a consulting job that does web apps.

A few years ago, I was working for a big company in San Diego. I wanted to be in a startup environment. I tried my best to create one in my company but I failed.

So I quit my job and moved to the Bay Area. When I moved here, I realized that most startups use open source and I cannot find startups that use .Net. Actually I found a startup that uses .Net but they rescinded their offer when their investor told them to freeze hiring.

I was unemployed for months in the Bay Area so I said to myself I need to learn an open-source language. I ended up learning Python/Django.

I accepted a short-term web development using .Net and when that ended I continued learning Python/Django. Via networking, I ended up working for a YC startup and eventually moved to another startup in SF.

I'm really happy (but not satisfied) with where I am right now. If I didn't quit my job, I don't think I would have had the motivation to go after what I really wanted.

<comment><USER4> That advice may or may not be good advice depending on your location. I can see how in the bay area it will work, the OP is in London, so for him it probably would work too (even though the market is not quite what it was a few years ago).

But for some regions it is probably best to keep your old shoes on until you've bought some new ones.

<comment><USER7> Note: San Diego is not in the bay area. He quit his job and moved here without having an offer in hand.

<comment><USER4> Yes, he wrote that, I got it. The point is, that the Bay area is just about one of the best places to be an out-of-work programmer on the planet.

Even during a recession it would probably still be easier for a qualified coder to find some work there than in most other places, the fact that he found a gig within a relatively short time seems to prove that.

<comment><USER7> Though it wasn't part of his explicit advice, your location is not constant, especially if you've quit your job. Thus, the limiting factor isn't where you _are_ , it's where you _could be_.

<comment><USER4> That depends. If you have a family, kids in school, a mortgage, strong family ties, friends and so on that really counts for a lot to a large number of people, and that means that where they are is where they'll stay.

When you're young, unattached and without too many responsibilities this is a lot easier (and possibly even hard to imagine that one day it may not be that easy).

<comment><USER7> Yes, all of those things affect your ability to move and where you can move to. Whenever you make a major change to your life, some parts will get better and others worse. It's important to recognize what's actually important to you, and act to make the things you actually care about as good as possible.

Given the question, I assume that the thing he most cares about is getting a more enjoyable job,

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the answer is to apply to more positions. You say that you have tried for one and did not get it. Apply for several and see what happens.

Also it sounds like you are trying to hop from internal IT to software/language development (is that correct?), if you have no previous official "programming experience" at a job, the open source projects might be your best bet. That way you can have programming on your resume that they can relate to. Personal projects are good but if the project is bigger than yourself it will carry more weight - and the world needs more open source programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, I want to switch from internal to a software company. I definitely feel like open source is really critical; I don't feel like I'm working in an environment where code quality matters to anybody, the only way I'm going to get to work on a decent code base with people who care (and will improve me) before moving job is by working on open source.

<comment><USER9> I also suggest to just apply to more companies, for example try 10 at first and see what they told you. C# is pretty much in demand, so it should not be a problem to get a junior programmer job.

But maybe don't be too romantic about a job in software company...you could very well find that it also isn't a ideal job...you will perhaps fight with bureaucracy, being forced to do dull work, etc. etc.

So before quiting your job, try to think really deep why exactly you don't like your current job. Maybe it is something more fundamental, and ordinary software company might also not fix it. Anyway, good luck, finding a software programmer job is certainly achievable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, but I don't think I am being romantic - I do realise jobs always have those boring, etc. elements, it's a matter of whether overall you are happy with it.

And I certainly don't accept the contention that there aren't jobs programmers can be really happy in (as some contend, not saying you are necessarily), I think that's lazy thinking...

In any case I certainly don't think it's something fundamental as it's not the work itself that bothers me so much, but rather the pain of working in a negative situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just quit. Walk out and never go back. Start working for yourself. Every day you're doing something you don't want to do is a day you never get back.

I quit my tech support job with no plan and 4 months of savings. Within the year, I had started my own business, and was making more money than I ever did at my old job.

Take the risk. Trust in your own abilities, and go for it. You'll never get the life you want by living the one you don't.

</comment><comment><USER11> As someone who has worked at startups and big companies, and has hired and fired, the best advice I can give you if you are looking for a new job is to try to find a good, fun company to work for, even if it's not the _ideal_ job for you. Be enthusiastic in the interview (first impression really is a one- shot deal), and make sure you are genuinely excited about what the company does (even if the job itself is not totally awesome). If you don't believe in what the company does, then you'll end up back where you are now.

Also: being happy at work is usually more related to your work environment and your co-workers than it is to the actual work you do (you may be different though). So try to meet the people you'd be working with, if that's a possibility, when you are interviewing.

There's nothing stopping you from still working on your own projects once you are at your new job, and if your day job is enjoyable, you will have more energy and motivation to put into your side projects too as a result.

</comment><comment><USER12> Forget improving your CV. Make sure it's good enough. Depending solely on your CV makes you average. Are you average? Of course not, you're on HN! Build practical shit. No seriously man, making your own language will invoke a yawn as another commenter said. Build a web app, build a piece of software that has practicality. Build anything, as long as it can be demoed.

I realize that you want a new job now. Well, that's going to take patience. Don't spam your resume! Trust me, I use to interview and this was very common... you could detect these types.

Start today. Just build something that can be demoed, something preferably practical.

Good luck man!

</comment><comment><USER13> Where are you based (roughly)? What is your skillset? What wage are you after?

I may have a job/project for you - and we can definitely work out something to accommodate your side projects/business. If it's any use to you drop me a line and we'll talk (always happy to help fellow HNers)

We are not a software company; we actually do security/forensics (which is super interesting) but we have a little software project that should be pretty lucrative.

If you'd prefer not to post such info you can drop me an email, it's in my profile)

Otherwise; pretty much I agree with what the others are saying. Put the programming language to one side for the moment and concentrate on FOSS projects if you can.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! I am definitely interested in discussing any possibilities (I have clearly been far too reticent on this front as is clear from discussion here), for obvious reasons I'd rather not post [all] those details here; have dropped you an email.

Roughly: based in London, mostly C# skillset (currently).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't believe UK has only two companies (the Royal Non-Software Company and the Royal Software Company?). Apply for other positions in other software companies. Even non-software companies with strong IT departments have nice jobs, technically speaking. Specially the very large non-software companies, who also tend to look beyond your specific degree - a large company usually can afford a hiring process that will allow them to understand your abilities (regardless of your nominal college degree).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have definitely been reticent on the jobsearching front. I guess a combination of inertia/laziness and fear have got in the way; also I suppose I am worried that if I apply to jobs before I am 'ready' (well practised in the algo stuff typically asked at decent job interviews, etc.) I will end up blowing my chances at these places then later when I come to apply with more experience in this area they won't want to hear from me. Is that a stupid approach?

<comment><USER15> Yes. Crikey. There are thousands of companies in the UK that hire programmers. How many of them can you possibly blow? Besides, the more jobs you apply for, the more practice you'll have applying.

<comment><USER16> I agree with your advice, but just a note on the UK:

Software companies aren't the same this side of the pond, the culture seems rather different. Maybe I've just had bad experiences, but London is full of soul crushing financial services/admin software type places. I'm sure the US is too, but there also seems to be a healthy community of fresh companies.

Check out your very own jobs.stackoverflow.com - this is one of the places I would expect a modern company to advertise, but there are nine jobs listed for the _whole_ of the UK, compared to over 50 for NY alone. If you want a "normal" programming job you have to take your chances with the vast sea of recruiters on Monster.co.uk.

(or, of course, build personal connections and/or do your own thing)

<comment> adam-_- There are still a number of interesting companies in London depending on what you're interested in...

Web development: check out NMA Top 50 for Agencies.

Startups: Check out the WiredUK Silicon Roundabout article _and_ the comments!

Misc: Check out things like Times TechTrack.

Interested in a particular technology? Check out the official language job board and search for London (e.g jobs.perl.org).

There are definitely interesting companies you just have to spend some time finding them because they won't come to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Be sure to ask yourself - is it the type of work you don't like doing or is it the company or manager that you're currently subjecting yourself to?

After spending a few years of my life contracting exclusively at non-software companies, I can definitely say that the culture can vary greatly from shop to shop so far as how well it caters to people who are there to hone their craft vs those who just show up for the paycheck.

Also, don't forget - jobs at software companies can suck too! :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Short answer: Build something that you would have built if you had your dream job. Show it to people who hire for your job.

Long answer: Its much easier to get an interview for a job if you can demonstrate that you've done it well before. It might still not be easy (because they may have degree requirements that you dont have ) but it will be easier than if you had nothing.

So go do what you really really want to do. Create a side project and do it. DO IT WELL. Ie, get feedback, make it as professional as possible. The project should have the same criteria for sucess as if it had been built by someone who's job you are seeking.

Then show it to the people who hire for that kind of position.

Pitfalls: 1\. The kind of job that your passionate about may not pay very well in the future. 2\. You might realise its not your passion and because of that you'd have done only an half assed job. This can be solved by trying something else. You'll know soon enough if this makes you happy or not.

Life is too short to have jobs that you dont like. I've been in that situation and have recently remedied it. I should have done this sooner.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been where you are before. The best advice I can give you is to turn your depression into something positive. Let it drive you to get out of your current position.

Aside from that, don't get discouraged. Good tech companies get to where they are because they have high standards. Getting a job with them takes practice. Don't get discouraged. Ask the people who turn you down for feedback. Honest feedback is surprisingly rare, but the ones who give it to you are the ones you want to listen to. Other than that just give it time! You'll figure it out eventually.

</comment><comment><USER20> Do you have any money? If I lived in Europe I'd go rent a flat in Barcelona for 3 months and put together a code portfolio on github. (I actually wouldn't do exactly that... I'd go to work on an iphone app)

If you like compilers I'd just do that. Life's too short. You might have to move somewhere far away if you want to be a professional compiler artist, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm ok for money, but not great (some debt) so can't really make that lovely lovely idea reality :) nice suggestion though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Work on your CV, then apply for more jobs.

</comment><comment><USER22> You could work for me. I'm attempting to found a tech startup this summer dealing with aggregating local music shows and gigs. Having a brilliant programmer would be awesome. I know more design than I know coding. email me: bensima[at]gmail[dot]com

</comment><comment><USER23> "I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core." \-- Lake Ilse of Innisfree, W. B. Yeats

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm in the UK too, but for a brief time I wasn't. I'd really like to hear from you, if you'd be happy to email (oliver dot saunders att google's mail service). Your situation reminds me a lot of where I was a couple of years ago.

</comment><comment><USER25> Get a degree in computer science. Go at night and on weekends if you must.

<comment><USER26> I disagree (and I have a CS degree) - the time spent getting another academic qualification would be far better spent on the more practical suggestions given elsewhere on this page.

<comment><USER27> I've found that having a degree is generally seen as more important in the UK than in the US; and I've seen more evidence of sniffiness, vague efforts to exclude people who went to the wrong university.

Another consideration is whether you ever want to work in the US. Getting a H-1B isn't easy without a degree.

<comment><USER26> The OP _does_ have a degree, just not a CS one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> what are your top programming languages? you should have put an outline of your CV in this, you sound awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you very much! I think you are perhaps being somewhat overly kind! I care about and love programming, though I do tend to feel like I somewhat suck at it. I guess right now I just want to find a way of actually getting somewhere where I can improve my coding chops.

I mainly program in C#, though I code in scheme (what a lovely language), F# which is a .net ocaml near-enough, and I am learning ometa which, though not a language, allows you to experiment with languages quite nicely in other languages.

As far as stuff I've done, I've mainly played around with stuff; outside of work I've been on-and-off working on the language idea for a while, at work I've done a bunch of internal stuff much of which sucks :'-(. I try to do as good a job as I can, though it's difficult to stay motivated when in such a negative environment. Am rather depressed about it all at the moment to be honest!

I feel like I have a lot more to improve on. a _lot_ more. In fact I have a terrible fear that if I was to apply for jobs now my suckiness would screw my chances at some of the cooler places blowing my chance to apply at them later. Argh.

<comment><USER28> whats your email? friend of mine is looking for great C# coders.</comment></comment></comment>


The Finnish developers indict Windows Phone 7 and RIM - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2011/06/02/the-finnish-developers-indict-windows-phone-7-and-rim/ <comment><USER2> A bit anecdotal, but I agree with their sentiment that WP7 shouldn't have Windows in its name. Thank goodness MS didn't call the Xbox the Windows Games Station and put desktop Windows on it.

<comment><USER3> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Windows Phone 7 doesn't even seem to have any windows in the interface left (they replaced them with tiles, right?) That makes the name nonsensical.</comment></comment>


Frames of Consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/to-say-what-consciousness-is-science-explores-where-it-isnt <comment><AUTHOR> sorry, the title doesn't give you much. Subheading: "Can electrical impulses in the brain explain the stuff that dreams are made on? What a new consciousness-detector reveals"</comment>


Numbers Guy: Are our brains wired for math? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/03/080303fa_fact_holt/?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> 2008\. Great author mentioned in this article, author of a more recent book

[http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution- Invent...](http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution- Invention/dp/0670021105)

about reading.</comment>


A Tale of Two Pitches: why the best VC pitches are discussions - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/09/a-tale-of-two-pitches/

<comment><USER2> _This meeting was a 10/10 for me. Who knows whether I will find his company interesting when I see the details at our next meeting. But so much of my decision on investing is based on the individual(s) that getting a chance for a true connection with somebody where you understand how they think about life, technology, management, etc. is important._

The way I read that, chemistry with the VC is worth a lot more then a good business plan.</comment>


Vue.js spring boot starter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kucharzyk/vuejs-java-starter <comment><USER2> This blog post is a great and thorough introduction to Vue.js: [http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re- introduction/](http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/)

Writing components in single files is mighty nice (w/ or w/o pre-processors): [http://blog.evanyou.me/images/vue- component.png](http://blog.evanyou.me/images/vue-component.png)

And it looks like a flux approach is in the works: [https://github.com/vuejs/vuex](https://github.com/vuejs/vuex)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate to be the one to ask but what exactly is this and what was it made for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at examples at [http://vuejs.org/guide/](http://vuejs.org/guide/)

<comment><USER4> I know what vue is but what exactly is a Java spring starter?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's integration for java.

Simple starter where Vue.js workflow work great with java application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Large companies have used this because, like Ractive, with which it kind of competes, you can produce something very quickly (Ractive was initially developed for internal news room use). Alibaba used Vue for Singles day, Nintendo for its forum, etc. Using it for quick-turnaround work is a breeze.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Updated starter version brings vue-router example</comment>


India against corruption: A million mutinies erupt across India  - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Anna-Hazare-arrest-A-million-mutinies-erupt-across-India/articleshow/9628615.cms

<comment><USER2> Here is an article with a bit more background [http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South- Central/2011/0816/...](http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South- Central/2011/0816/What-are-India-s-Anna-Hazare-protests-all-about)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the background story, Guelo.

People's protests all over the country should send a clear signal to the government. Corruption/bribery even in obtaining basis services has been a pest for way too long.. It's time for it to stop now.

Social media has played a nice role by allowing protesters to share news and coordinate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems that corrupt officials and citizens who don't pay taxes go hand in hand. I wonder which came first.

Regardless, intuitively it seems to me that these problems will be solved when poverty is reduced and everyone moves up the economic ladder.</comment>


Show HN: SlothTracker – cross platform time tracking desktop app - <AUTHOR> https://www.royalsloth.eu/products/slothtracker <comment><USER2> So don't take this too harshly, this looks well featured and I appreciate an ad-free model that can be used anywhere....

However... It truly amazes me how bad design and UX on many cross-platform desktop apps are. They often are literally the 'Big Bang Theory' of showing that backend engineers are downright inept at design.

This app uses basically zero affordances to help drive layout priority or association. Few Bold fonts, poor padding, time stamps are mashed together and VERY hard to read. The home-view table has an extra col, the time column is too wide and the title col is not wide enough to read whole task names. Your site literally illustrates a font-weight bug in the Mac version.

I'm sure it has great features and works fine! But your competition makes incredibly good looking products that are incredibly glanceable. Notably, many of the platform specific companies make amazing looking products that are deeply integrated into their OS. (Notably placement in the task/menu bar) Look at how Clockify is doing almost everything you do...for free. Sure, you offer data privacy by being fully offline..but then again you don't sync anything and forget about phones, you aren't even there!

I mean this looks like something you might find buried in an open source project from 2008...for $16USD.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only way to improve is to hear such opinions. So thanks, will see what I can do about the design. It's easy to get carried away with feature development.

<comment><USER3> Please make it usable from the keyboard. Nothing irks me more than to have to mouse-wrangle things around to track my time, which I do in 6 minute increments, so it can get frustrating.

If I have a way to switch tasks by keyboard, I'm more likely to use the app. If I have to mouse-wrangle .. just, meh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Better keyboard support comes in next version. Do you mind telling me why do you switch between tasks every 6 minutes?

<comment><USER3> Pretty simple: 6 minutes is the minimum default for time tracking in my realm, per contract. Clients don't want multiple entries for 30 seconds or 2 minutes here and there - instead, we report in 10th's of an hour.

I quite often fix bugs in 2 or 3 minutes, or even less - on separate tasks/projects.

However the minimum time allotment for these things (billing) is 6 minutes. All time tracking (per contract) is rounded up to the next 6-minute (1/10th of an hour) interval.

<comment><AUTHOR> The majority of the bugs I've been resolving take from 30min to a few hours (if I know the codebase) - but they are usually complex distributed systems issues.

What kind of bugs are those that could be fixed in 2 minutes?

<comment><USER3> All kinds of things. Mis-configured project defaults, typo's, additional formatting/UI tweaking, really a lot of productive things can be done in less than 6 minutes.

Different strokes for different folks - just because you don't work that way, shouldn't preclude thinking about folks who do. The world is a big use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see JavaFX app - best cross platform technology out there that is not very popular.

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has built a stats app for macOS, I wish you the best! Cross platform is a big deal and something I never got around to. I had trouble finding a business model that worked - have my upvote!

<comment><USER6> When I read "cross platform", it also implies that my data is available across these these platform. For example, I log my time when I am on my desktop writing, and I log my time on my phone when I am on the road visiting clients. Both set of data are collected into the one database.

Does "cross platform" also carry this meaning for you?

<comment><AUTHOR> No the word you are looking for is: synchronization.

Cross platform means works on multiple platforms (in this case Windows, Mac, Linux).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Learned about JavaFX. Why not Electron or other alternatives? Sorry if it sounds too childish.

</comment><comment><USER8> Have you make any sales so far?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes

<comment><USER8> Congrats. Out of curiosity, what is your market segment breakdown (EU vs US)?

Seeing that this is a desktop app, I wonder if EU has a different sentiment than US market.

<comment><AUTHOR> It didn't sell in such numbers that I could compare different markets and draw any conclusions. Maybe next time.

<comment><USER8> Do you mind if I PM you? I'd like to ask more questions regarding your thought process going into this route (Desktop app, JavaFX, marketing, etc) which I felt a bit unusual compare to the typical SaaS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure thing.

<comment><USER8> Mind to drop me a line (please check my e-mail, I just update it) with your e-mail?

Thank you very much!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't see email on HN. Check the website posted above and find my email there.

<comment><USER8> Sent. I really appreciate your time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Brave-Steak This looks interesting. I see that the license is only valid for a certain version. How often are new versions released? I couldn't find any info on release dates of previous/current versions.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are not bound to specific dates, as shipping to hit an arbitrary date creates a buggy software.

A version is released when a new feature/a set of features is ready. This is actually the first public release, that's why there are no release dates online.

<comment> Brave-Steak I just feel it's hard to evaluate the price if I don't have a rough idea of how often there might be updates. Is it a monthly thing? Every 4 months? 8? Once a year? I don't know how much time passed between v1.0 and 1.1 and 1.2. I don't even need exact dates. A statement like "We expect to push out a new version every few weeks/months/once a year or so" makes it easier to reason about the cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right that was updated to free updates for one major version (e.g: license 1.2.0 is also valid for 1.3.0, 1.4.0 but not for 2.0.0).

Thanks for suggestions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Minimum 2GB or RAM!!! Seriously... WTF?

<comment><USER10> I think it's a joke.

<comment><USER9> He's selling this thing so I would think you wouldn't want to joke about the requirements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whatever software you buy, there are usually some kind of minimum system requirements listed so people don't run it on some ancient potato and complain how it doesn't work.

It uses ~220Mb of RAM in total.

<comment><USER10> Roger that.

btw, I really dig the execution - all platforms covered, simple/straightforward function. Nice work.

My only comment (and perhaps I simply missed the info) is it would be great to have keyboard shortcuts available to tie into my keyboard program buttons or Elgato deck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the list of current shortcuts (not much I know): [https://docs.royalsloth.eu/slothtracker/documentation/#keybo...](https://docs.royalsloth.eu/slothtracker/documentation/#keyboard- shortcuts)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER4> Anything that any salesman or customer service employee mentions that plugs into salesforce. A mail button for sales force ? A print button for salesforce ? A make my phone call customer button inside salesforce button? Oh sweet only $20 per month per salesman....so we have 50 people on salesforce so only 1,000 a month, only $12,000 a year? This should help get us out of dept so fast !!! FML.

<comment><USER5> I'm guessing you weren't pushing for Salesforce, but out of interest, did your company evaluate any other CRM platforms? If so, do you know why they chose Salesforce?

<comment><USER4> They bought into it when they were a tiny company over 7-8 years ago and barely used it for a few years, a few yeas ago me and some other devs joined and said why do you have this and why spend this much money for storing a customers email and some notes when we you also have 2 other systems doing the same thing. We tried to pull them away and build a small system for their small needs but that's when they dug the hole ten times deeper with numerous integration. No matter how big or small the integration the prices add up quickly. They were a company with out developers at one point and still never learned to ask if we can do something vs buying into mailchimp or salesforce plugin. No matter what the CEO wants he's afraid to take away the salesmans costly toys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I need an easier way to send my clients quotes, invoices, and reminders.

Quickbooks is nice if you're an accountant who likes entering stuff into tables. But I am not an accountant and I'm bad about keeping on top of my accounts. It takes too many clicks to send a stupid little invoice once in a while.

This is a space that could really use chat bot support. I want to quickly type something or go through a wizard to do my accounting. "Hey Accounty, can you send Client B an invoice for The Big Package at $200 for 12 months? Make it recur annually". And Accounty goes and sets everything up and sends the emails. No interface. Completely automated. When an account is overdue, it'd message me and say "Hey, Client A is overdue, shall I send a reminder?" If someone replies to the invoice email, it'd say "Hey, Client C replied to the invoice and asks 'Can I pay later?', how do you want to respond?". Wire that up Siri or some other speech to text engine and I can do my accounting on the drive in to work.

<comment><USER7> What industry do you work in? I'm surprised there isn't a lightweight accounting software for freelancers / consultants

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great question, there are many opportunities here. Network with entrepreneurs, sole proprietors, private practice physicians/dentists/etc, and other small business owners and you'll often hear similar complaints or pain points.

As a general rule I'd say nearly any business would pay 10k/year for:

\- Anything that would offer 2x that (or greater) in ROI

\- Anything that would automate or handle routine tasks that otherwise an expensive person must perform (there are many of these if you think about it)

\- Anything that saves 10k+ worth of someones time (this is not too hard to identify if you focus on the expensive persons)

\- Anything that generates 12k+ of new revenue

\- Anything that replaces 10k+ worth of annual contractor/consulting work

\- Anything that undercuts competition charging more for the same service, without a degradation in service quality

You probably want specifics, so two areas I often see smaller businesses struggle with are email lists and security/software updates.

There is substantial opportunity in finding new ways to monetize the boring old email/customer list in nearly every industry. I frequently hear small, medium, and even some larger businesses struggle to monetize an email list in any meaningful way, and so instead the primary metric is always about 'engagement' and other buzzword centric statistics that rarely translate into revenue. Private practice doctors and dentists often struggle with this, as do everything from bakeries, app developers, web sites, authors, interest groups, etc. There are many businesses with large customer lists or customer prospects in the form of email lists that make $0 from those lists.

Another is anything related to security, particularly anything that takes a perceived complicated task and makes it easy or handles it outright without any downtime or complication to the end user(s). Whether it's routine client and server software updates, routine security audits, moving web apps/sites to https, maintaining and keeping up with web/email/crm/accounting software updates for small businesses, etc, there is huge opportunity out there for much of this to be a subscription type service rather than expensive periodic consultant or contract work that is often very distracting for the small business to implement.

Anyway, those are just two simple ideas that I see/hear frequent issues with. Usually a focus on something common that already exists but needs improvement will be much easier than trying to do something completely unique.

<comment><USER4> Extra good point for security. It's easy for us to say we are using 10k security product to make 60k customer happy but we can also brag to any customer from there on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're looking for more of these problems:

1K - <USER2> [https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4](https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4)

10K - <USER3> [https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5](https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5)

</comment><comment><USER10> Tableau. We pay far more than $10k/year even after the pricing model change.

<comment><USER11> Think about running your own Superset instance. Could be the solution and IMO it's much better than Tableau.

<comment><USER12> Is Superset mature enough? We have been exploring a lot of BI tools so much so that we near scraping the bottom of the barrel. But Caravel/Superset never came up because it is still under incubation and that doesn't go well with the enterprise managers. It doesn't help that there have been constant name changes.

<comment><USER11> It's great and IMO pretty damn mature. They use it widely in prod at Airbnb so the only ways in which it's not "mature" are in customizability.

<comment><USER12> What kind of customization?

<comment><USER11> I think there are just certain scenarios it may not support, like at one point writing queries in the editor for JSONB fields in Postgres was either hard or impossible, things like that. But generally it's pretty great and ready to be used IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do fraud investigations for a bank. We spend an insane amount on labor costs because all of our transactional data resides in different systems. Want to review credit card data? Go pull system X. Want to review wire transfers? Go pull system Y. Etc etc. some of these things have to be separated out of necessity (e.g. card data is stored in a particular way due to regulations), but I would easily pay 10k / y to be able to get a complete view of customer transaction activity from a single place. We'd save millions in labor costs if someone could pull it off correctly.

<comment><USER14> I'm in a bank as well but I reckon 10k won't be enough to solve the issue. We've built an enterprise data warehouse that pulls everything together and it still hasn't been perfect. What we do well though was extract the data at a higher level of abstraction - we came across a tool called Thoughtspot that also helped us join things together and drill down but from what I heard, it's pricey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anything that increases team productivity significantly. If my team of developers is > 10 then I'm probably spending about 100k per year in supporting tools:

\- source code management \- server monitoring and metrics \- payment processing \- testing tools \- continuous integration tools

Any of those could easily cost 10K/year, or more, depending on what the team is doing and how fast they are growing.

Beyond that, anything that ties back to revenue. Email marketing, PPC, SEO. Also possibly things that optimize finances, analytics or anti-fraud.

<comment><USER16> Would [https://feram.io](https://feram.io) fall into this category? (Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder)

<comment><USER4> Interesting, working on a bitbucket version?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Acquisition of high-quality clients for my software agency is a problem for which solution I'd be willing to pay 100k/year.

<comment><USER18> those are some pretty high quality clients then. What type of projects do you do. We've implemented a pretty good model for our agency to attract quality clients without networking and doing all sorts of stuff that we don't like. Happy to help.

<comment><USER17> I'd be very happy if you sent me a message about your model, my address is email@example.com.

We tend to describe ourselves as "the tech team for your (tech) startup", our goal is to be a one stop shop for tech-heavy startups and companies.

We work with Node.js, TypeScript and React/React Native. We've created a bunch of quite unique libraries and components that help us develop a lot faster and with less bugs (I can get into detail over e-mail).

The company is new (founded in March 2017) and so far I just used my contacts from the past to find us work (7 developers, 2 analysts/consultants), but this source is quickly drying up. Right now we're finishing our website and my plan is to go to some meetups, but I'm not entirely sure it's going to help and I'm afraid I'm going to lose time.

Our biggest problem is that we don't have much of a portfolio, only a bunch of internal applications we can't really show. Clients I found online don't trust us and/or want our services extremely cheaply, which is a problem because our developers are senior guys that charge a bit - but that was a deliberate choice, we want to make high-quality software.

<comment><USER18> You can find my contact info in my profile. Basically in short, what's worked for me is side project marketing:

\- Create a tiny free product, that solves a tiny problem for your target customer \- Promote your side project. Since it's free and frictionless, it's so much easier to have it spread on the internets. \- On that side project, there should be an email subscription form somewhere and your main service as an upsell.

This exact model is pretty much all we do and it's resulting into at least 5+ figure each year worth of client work. We spend zero time networking or doing all sorts of stuff that is time consuming.

<comment><USER17> That's a good idea. I considered something similar, but different - I merely thought about having the SaaS app as something to point out as a reference project. Thank you for your time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Extracting data from PDF in a reliable way.

<comment><USER20> Extracting at least text from PDFs is not always 100% perfect, due to inherent issues with the PDF format (partly because it is a graphic format, and does not have a one-to-one mapping to text, also maybe because of some weird decisions they made). I both read about this and was told about this by a key person at a PDF software product company, whose product I researched and then used in a project. The product was xpdf (a C library, it also had binaries or EXEs), from Glyph and Cog. I was contracted by a client to research PDF libraries for extraction of text from PDF; found and evaluated a few, then recommended xpdf to the client, and used it in the project. That is how I know this.

The only guaranteed way to get 100% accurate text from PDF is ... to not do it :) Instead, get the text from the same source that is used to generate the PDF. Obviously, that will not always be possible, but when it is, it is the better solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Correctly identifying if the customers are going to pay their bills or run after two months without paying, leaving a bill of ~1000 (consider that the State justice system doesn't work and the customers are individuals).

<comment><USER22> Do you report them to any credit agencies?

<comment><USER21> No, because they can sue me if I do and even if I'm right I don't want the risk of having to pay an indemnification, Brazilian judges are crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For a dev shop, anything that brings in more than (more or less) $20k /year.

Otherwise also fundraising (as someone else said).

Though for both of these, if the business is cash-strapped, the results would have to be pretty much assured.

</comment><comment><USER24> Enterprise pays the most for ERP. If you can create a better SAP, then you will make millions. I am saying as an SAP user, it is good but really expensive.

<comment><USER25> Creating an standard ERP system is not the hardest part (it's still really hard tho).

Deploying ERP for enterprise customers means writing tons of custom modules & processes specific to the customer. That's why integrating an ERP for the first time or switching vendors is costly and risky. Most successful ERP systems for enterprise customers are basically domain-specific frameworks to create customer-specific solutions.

However, there is still a big market for business management software for SMBs. The market is so big and ever expanding that I doubt it can ever be saturated. Aside from english-speaking market, there are even bigger opportunities for localized solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Better EDA tools.

Oh my god, i would pay so much for that...

<comment><USER27> I'm interested in this field. What are the current pain points with EDA tools? And are we talking device level, process level, circuit level or all levels?

<comment><USER26> Pretty much everything.

There's a landmine of bugs in even the best EDA software. I'd just like for the software to run nicely once, like TensorFlow... sigh.

If you're thinking getting into this field, I might suggest a modular software architecture where the non-proprietary parts are open source and everything NDA-sensitive is kept closed source (pretty much anything the foundry touches/provides).

<comment><USER27> Super super interesting. So this is the case for the big expensive commercial products like those that come out of shops like Synopsys? It strikes me that helping to improve (device side) EDA is probably a pretty sound investment of my time, since I've got some phys chops and it's pretty important to the global economy.

<comment><USER26> Oh, believe me, in many ways it's _worse_ with the big expensive tools because those are produced for only a few companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Slack. Apparently.

<comment><USER29> My current employer doesn't use Slack and instead uses XMPP and a web front- end called "Movim". I can tell you right away, it is shit. I'd gladly pay 10k/year for the privilege of using Slack, so please don't bash on it until you realise how bad the alternatives are.

<comment><USER30> Discord is free and in many ways better. If you don't mind the gamer vibe.

<comment><USER31> In what ways?

<comment><USER32> It doesn't have (as much) performance issues. Seriously, loading a couple hundred messages shouldn't take even a second, what are we, living in 1990?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> On the fly image processing & optimization.

<comment><USER34> Like [https://www.imgix.com/](https://www.imgix.com/) ?

<comment><USER33> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Credit card fees.

</comment><comment><USER36> Fundraising.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is good thread for anyone wanting to figure out what B2B SaaS business to build.

<comment><USER38> I presumed that's why the question was asked; someone is looking for opportunities.

<comment><USER39> Problem is that pretty much everyone in here is already a software engineer so their problems might be quite hard to solve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> saving 20k/y (cloud bills, for example)

<comment><USER41> I would also pay 10k / year to save 20k / year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Advertising.

</comment><comment><USER30> databases, migration tools

<comment><USER4> I've written a sql to elasticsearch mapping tool I feel I should of released. Eleasticsearch is in desperate need of many tools we take for granted in sql land, like a command line client you can easily punch in queries on the fly because trying to write multi line json into the commandline curl is death so I'm forced to install kibana.

<comment><USER42> Can you give a few more examples ?

I am interested because writing these support tools IS effort+time+focus but not usually a technical problem.

<comment><USER4> Mostly emulating what phpMyAdmin can do, the time spent for a elasticsearch beginner trying to figure out how to clear a index without losing or having to rebuild their mapping is insane, basically the answer is just don't and just copy your mapping but if something could easily extract that and say flush index then awesome. Creating mappings is a nightmare if you don't remember what types they have and it would be insanely simple to do the phpMyAdmin style of create table where you type in a "column" name and then use the drop down for the type "string, date, geo point".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> maybe CI

</comment><comment><USER44> Curious. About 1 week ago I saw a post on reddit that asked "What product would you pay $20,000 for?" I thought that was odd, typically that's not how you plan a business, you find something or create something of value and then you sell it. You don't start from how much you want to earn and then look for ways to earn that much.

Now here's a similar post, what would you pay "$10,000/yr" for.

You can label me a skeptic, but I wouldn't buy anything from anyone who's primary motivation for starting their business is to make X amount of dollars in Y timeframe.

<comment><USER45> It's a standard way of finding business ideas. look for where there is a need. hackernews has these every week, I actually think they provide interest, even if the intention is business rather than discussion.

<comment><USER44> Fair enough, I just think that people should look for their career by either finding ways to monetize activities which they already enjoy, or by looking for ways to create new kinds of value for the world. If you do those things, revenue often comes.

By contrast, every disgusting corrupt snake who has ruined the world for everyone else has started out with the goal of making X dollars in Y timeframe. So while I'm not saying they're all going to be evil, all of the evil ones share that trait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> an AR headset that allows us to work on 50, 60 inch displays where ever we are, without having to mount large displays to walls etc.

<comment><USER46> What's your business that you guys like to work on large displays?

<comment><USER18> We design User Interfaces for Web and Mobile development teams ([http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro)). Working on large displays seriously increases productivity.</comment></comment></comment>


The Workstations of Popular Websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/02/the-workstations-of-popular-websites/

<comment><USER2> I am suprised that no one was using a linux-based system. Then I realized that we weren't necessarily looking at developer desktops. Even where I intern, we do all our stuff on macs. Though I do enjoy working with macs, I often wonder what their big draw is. They do not seem 'special' over Windows as far as I can tell, and as a developer I would much rather have a linux-based workstation.

<comment><USER3> I used to be of your thought pattern. The thing about the mac os as it stands is that you can leverage all the power of the *nix os with the nice gui that just works. (Seriously though... try unplugging the monitor with your laptop to see what I mean.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like most people are using laptops as their primary systems these days. Is the ideal setup for most designers/developers now a laptop with external monitor/keyboard/mouse?

<comment><USER5> I would say so because its very portable. You are not stuck at one place. Especially, everything can be wireless now it's very easy to work anywhere else as long as you have your core system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> But where are all the dishes?

Seriously these are way too clean :)

</comment><comment><USER7> All of these workstations look the same, and my workstaton is no different.

Macbook + 30" inch monitor.

Enough said.

</comment><comment><USER8> LOL--they ALL look "minimalistic" compared to the mess I have...!

<comment><USER9> I think they were just cleaned up for the pictures. They are designers that use Macs -- anything unclean in a photo would be unacceptable, dontcha know ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love the Usability Post setup. Having a vertically oriented monitor like that allows for a wonderful amount of context when coding.

<http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c25361/usabilitypost.jpg>

<comment><USER11> If one vertically oriented monitor is good, are two better?

<http://is.gd/kqNA>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone else amazed at all the single-monitor set ups?

When I'm doing any web coding, I go crazy if I have to constantly switch between code and browser(s).

As cheap as monitors are these days, I'm amazed anyone still programs on just one.

<comment><USER13> Is it much of an improvement over multiple desktops? I hear leopard has them now.

<comment><USER12> Personally I'd say it saves me a few hours a month: A little by not constantly fumbling around switching apps, and (much more significantly) it makes fixing some bugs easier because you can see the effects of your code and your code at the same time, so there's no need to mentally 'flip' from 'coding' mode to 'web site evaluating' mode. And with three monitors editing an image->uploading the image->updating html/css->viewing the web page becomes one seamless workflow.

I think that I'm probably on the extreme end, but when I can I code with three monitors, a 22" widescreen for code & ftp or versioning, 22" widescreen for photoshop or illustrator, and 'normal' 19" for browsers (since it's much closer to the average use).

Newegg.com currently sells a nice 22" LCD for under $200, so if it saves a programmer at normal US wages 2-6 hours lifetime, it's paid for. It strikes me as a no brainer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm utterly disappointed by the lack of the best input device I've ever touched: The Trackman Wheel. The amount of time, desk space, and wrist strain it's saved me over the years is unfathomable. Mice of any kind feel like toasters now.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it weird that so many of these designers use the default OSX background?</comment>


The Myth of the Sophisticated Investor - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2010/04/27/myth-sophisticated-investor

<comment><USER2> The author of this post shows the difference between sophisticated investors and himself:

 _Consider synthetic CDOs like Abacus. Banks would need to lend out $50 billion of mortgages to regular people in order to create a $1 billion CDO like Abacus, according to Michael Lewis in The Big Short._

A sophisticated investor realizes that banks didn't need to lend out ANY mortgages to create a synthetic CDO. A sophisticated investor realizes that a synthetic CDO is the long side of a bet against the markets. A sophisticated investor will also form their own opinion about the bet, based on information about the assets underlying the bet (which were available to every investor), and will not really care that "omfg, the other side of this bet is a no-name mid-range hedge fund!"

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure, however, that there's a huge use to society in allowing many bets like this given at the very least it's a huge sink for quality human capital.

I understand that there is value from the insurance/hedging side, but as we've seen recently risks may be concealed rather than allayed.

<comment><USER2> John Paulson and a few other smart people told the world "hey, we are in a bubble". They put their money where their mouth is and shorted the market. They and helped prevent us from funneling further labor and resources into housing we don't need.

Do you really think the world would have been a better place if Paulson built twitter 2.0 rather than pushing CDO prices down?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but the bubble itself was created by investors building and selling complex financial instruments in the first place. Wouldn't it be better if investment bankers had been building legitimate businesses rather than working out new ways to repackage and sell subprime mortgages?

<comment><USER2> The bubble was created by simple instruments: home mortgages.

It would have been better if women weren't forcing their husbands to buy houses they couldn't afford, government wasn't encouraging lenders to make bad loans, and realtors weren't adding fuel to the fire. I don't see a way to prevent all of that, since all of those things are still happening.

The only reason the bubble burst was because of investment banks and other speculators eventually figuring out the problem and putting a stop to it.

<comment><USER3> No it wasn't. It was caused by lenders being able to lend money that wasn't theirs, facilitated by complex financial instruments.

If you're a bank and you're lending your own money you've got an incentive to make sure the loans can be repaid.

If you're a bank and you can instead take the loans you've made, parcel the debt up in a complicated financial instrument, sell it off to others and take an essentially risk free commission then you've got an incentive to loan money to anyone who can hold a pen and sign a document. This means you're going to lend a lot more money and this is what caused the bubble.

It's not because women were forcing their husbands to borrow, it's because financial wrangling shifted the risks from the lenders to third parties further down the line.

<comment><USER2> The problem with your theory is that many banks kept the riskiest tranches of loans for themselves while selling the safer tranches to others. They would only have done this if they believed the underlying mortgages were still good.

Regardless, none of this would have been possible if housing consumers didn't become housing speculators. Realtors ran commercials encouraging women to browbeat their husband into buying houses they couldn't afford (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubsd-tWYmZw>). Bush and Barney Frank encouraged commercial banks to lower lending standards. Speculators followed the crowd and suffered for their folly. The bubble would have existed without speculators, though it probably would not have been as large.

<comment><USER4> _The problem with your theory is that many banks kept the riskiest tranches of loans for themselves while selling the safer tranches to others. They would only have done this if they believed the underlying mortgages were still good._

Actually, that doesn't necessarily create any problems for Phil's point of view. That tranche of highly risky loans had to be kept by the banks - it was because this high risk stuff had been taken out of the pool that the rest of the pool looked so appealing to investors. However, the calculations to determine what percentage of loans needs to be in the high-risk tranche was very difficult to evaluate, especially if you were the investor seeking to buy the "safe" tranches, and not the bank that had originally sold the loan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The way "sophisticated investor" is used bothers me.

In most places where it's currently used, I want "sophisticated investor" to mean people who are fully responsible for their money. If they invest it and quintuple it, cool for them (and they can keep it). If they invest it and lose it, sucks for them (and we don't bail them out).

Using this definition, if "sophisticated investors" lose their life savings to Bernie Madoff, sucks for them. They would still have a civil claim against him in court for lying, but they shouldn't get a government bailout.

I also want to be able to sign some government-support-waiver, and be able to invest my money however I want. Even if my net worth isn't $2 million and my salary is less than $500k/year.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've always assumed that "Sophisticated" Investors are those that have more money to invest/lose.</comment>


Building software vs. building a bridge - <AUTHOR> http://blog.untrod.com/2012/01/is-building-software-like-building.html

<comment><USER2> I was discussing exactly this with my dad (a retired civil engineer and expert on bridges) just the other day. I (like you) thought that that was the way bridges were built, but it turns out it civil engineering is much more like software development.

Bridges are built with detailed but slightly vague plans: there are always many unknowns that can only be fully discovered during the building process mostly to do with the environment in which the bridge is built and the exact behaviour of the often custom-designed and custom-built components being used.

The engineers are required to re-design parts and to rework components on-the- hoof. Sometimes new prototypes are built and tested to destruction. Some components go through stages of iteration.

It is never certain that a major construction project will come in on-budget and on-time.</comment>


Why didn't I start a company in my dorm room and pocket millions before I turned 30? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wordyard.com/2008/08/05/sarah-lacys-once-youre-lucky/?

<comment><USER2> _And it just looked, and felt, different to me: at the start, it was much less about retaining control of one's company and much more about giving control to one's users._

The great thing about Web 2.0 was that these things turned out to be synonymous: giving users a platform that encourages them to create high- quality content (rather than coming up with the content yourself) means that you can tap VCs for contacts and advice, rather than just money.

</comment><comment><USER3> I liked this review, seems to have been so much hype over that book, which I won't be reading now (I'll wait 6 months and get a copy for 50 cents of ebay. Just something about the essence of money like this author says that does not sit well with me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cuz it's hard.</comment>


Ask HN: Increasingly Forgetful? - <AUTHOR> I seem to be increasingly forgetful. I remember clearly in my younger years (high school and younger) that I could just glance at some reading material or tv show and have perfect and fast recall of events. Now my memory seems more patchy and takes more time to recall events both old and recent. While this could be just a natural process in aging, I seem to be increasingly more forgetful than some of my other friends and I'm wondering if this is something I should be concerned about. And if it's a concern, who I should go to. <comment><USER2> Maybe you should keep a diary or something like that for events you feel are memorable.

As a developer, my memory is trashed. I feel like I'm constantly trying to load so much info in my head that there's no way I can keep much in memory. My method of dealing with this is repetition of the important stuff, writing down the things that I know I will forget and allowing everything else to disappear.

This requires excellent organization of your info, but it's far better than trying to remember everything. I would rather do without the baggage anyways. Garbage in, garbage out.

</comment><comment><USER3> At 31 my memory isn't nearly as good as it was at 18. I remember I could sit through my classes, do none of the reading and still get perfect scores on my tests (as long as the material was covered). However, my ability to internalize and relate complex ideas is MUCH improved. I'm way better at abstract math now, I'm not sure I would have even had the patience for it previously.

Another thing to consider: many people get minor bouts of depression in the winter. Generally your memory is worse while depressed.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used to have the same exact issue. There were two things that I did that returned me back to the level that I was accustomed to operating at.

1\. High-quality supplementation. I take Total Balance Men's Premium and Omega 3/QH from Xtend-Life. Please note that "regular vitamins" from your corner drug store or GNC are "McDonalds"-grade vitamins and are simply not sufficient as they contain low-quality nutrients and--pardon the vulgarity--they just get urinated right out instead of being fully absorbed. The downsides with Xtend- Life is that they are pricey and the shipping takes a longer that I'd prefer (they are in New Zealand) but, ultimately, they are absolutely worth it: <http://www.xtend-life.com/>

2\. Sign up for Lumosity. It's a cognitive training web site based on sound science from research Universities. They have plenty of working memory and even dual n-back exercises: <http://www.lumosity.com/>

I can assure you without any doubt whatsoever that if you do both of these things, you'll be feeling tremendously improved--if not even better than the level that you were originally operating at--quickly.

<comment><USER5> Ditto on the Omega 3/fish-oil. It's a must-have daily drug for me. If I don't take at least 3 capsules a day, I start acting all jittery and crazy.

Also to the OP: If you're drinking coffee, I suggest gradually stopping. It can cause seizure-like sensations for some people who can't tolerate it well.

Everyone else has some good suggestions: exercise regularly! sleep early, and cut down on the processed foods, and eat more veggies. Also, I recommend adding in some spirituality for good measure. All of these are prudent ways to prevent mental breakdowns as you get older. Programmers are especially prone since some of us don't get much social interaction everyday

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Medical doctor here(well, almost!). One huge misconception I want to clear up is that memory loss is not a normal feature of aging.

I don't have a lot of information to go off of here(when did it start?, is it getting worse?, did you notice it yourself or did others around you notice it?) but the common causes of memory loss in the below 50 demographic are hypothyroidism and B12 deficiency. If you're a vegetarian B12 def. is the likely culprit.

What to do: Go see your general practitioner. He/She will run all the usual labs and check your thyroid and B12 levels as the first step in your workup.

Another possible factor is depression. Depression and memory loss go hand in hand. (Sidebar: If I see a geriatric patient with memory loss I'm thinking either Alzheimer's or depression. The differentiating factor is that Alzheimer's patients don't know that they have memory loss.)

Go get checked out. B12 deficiency is reversible in the short term but can cause permanent damage.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it started after college and I am almost 29 now. I have had depression and my memory retention was really bad during this phase. I started getting treatment and therapy for it nearly 1 year ago. I think I have always been kind of oblivious at times, but now it seems like I need to use repetition tricks remember important things.

I'm not a vegetarian, smoker, drinker, and exercise at least weekly. It could be bad sleep hygiene, but I'll definitely check out B12 and thyroid problems. Thanks!

<comment><USER6> Glad to hear that you're getting help. You can email me(check my profile) if you have any questions down the line. Take care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too much web surfing and tv watching? Too much multitasking? Stop surfing the web for a week and see what happens. On HackerNews I will often looked at 10-20 articles and soon forget the first articles I looked at.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I had this problem at my last job. I had to read around 1000 pages a day of material. I couldn't remember people's names 10 seconds after meeting them. I stopped remembering phone numbers completely. Since I stopped that job life is a lot easier, my brain has so much more space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are actually things you can do, nutritionally, to support brain health. Most folks are not really interested in hearing that, so I won't waste my time elaborating.

</comment><comment><USER10> Look into your diet. Are you eating a lot of processed food and a lot of food from aluminum cans (soda) - as well as cooking in aluminum pans?

Aluminum causes Alzheimers.

<comment><USER11> There is no evidence that aluminum causes Alzheimers. Some early studies indicated a very faint correlation at the population level between aluminum in brain tissue and alzheimers. Some of those studies explicitly noted the likelihood that amyloid plaques were incidentally prone to aluminum accumulation, meaning that Alzhiemers might aluminum buildup, not the other way around. Subsequent research has largely failed to corroborate the correlation, and no causative relationship has ever even been proposed to my knowledge.

If aluminum did cause Alzheimers, then we'd all be screwed, regardless of whether we drink from cans. Aluminum is widely used to treat potable water. You consume large amounts of aluminum in your fruits and vegetables, tea, bear, and grains. You eat aluminum in antacids and pickles. The list goes on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe you should add how old you are.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe you should quit smoking marijuana.

</comment><comment><USER14> TL;DR version: If you're experiencing something that you don't like, look to fix it, ESPECIALLY when related to your health! Your quality of life decreasing due to memory loss is enough of a concern to justify getting it checked out. Issues w/memory that I've experienced at different points in my life were related to diet, sleep deprivation and thyroid problems.

Are you experiencing any other issues? How's your mood stability? Do you get enough to eat/drink/sleep (7-9 hours) each day? Memory issues can be tied to a lot of issues, but some things may not be the root cause. Sleeping/eating disorders could be affecting your memory, but the disorders themselves could be caused by other underlying issues.

Personally, I had memory issues related to chronic sleep dep (driven by a "sleep is for the weak" mentality and a firm insistence for years that I only needed 4-5 hours a night). Getting onto a regular sleep cycle fixed the memory problems and a host of other issues. Having sleep deprived myself from age 14 to 25, the impact it had was incredible. I became much more creative & productive.

I started having sleep/memory issues again in the past year (along with mood issues and irregular appetite) with increasing frequency. I've got a currently undiagnosed (waiting on blood work) thyroid issue, but started taking synthetic thyroid hormone a few months back. The fact that it's resolved all problems points to hypothyroidism, so now I'm hunting down its cause.

Thyroid issues can be notoriously difficult to diagnose, since (I think) all tests could come back inconclusive/negative & most doctors use the TSH test to rule it out. The TSH test usually only reports thyroid issues in extreme cases, though, which is why there's a growing movement in medicine to educate doctors against using it as a thyroid litmus test. As my mom puts it (thyroid problems run deep and wide in our family), "it pretty much just tells you if you're alive".

If you suspect a thyroid issue, you'll want all thyroid blood tests run, especially thyroid antibody tests. If a doctor isn't willing to order them all, find another that will. I saw an endocrinologist who repeated incorrect thyroid information related to my test results that I've both read about and have been told about by my GP & a dermatologist friend of the family (both are excellent diagnosticians & doctors). I won't be seeing the endo again.

One thing that makes thyroid issues difficult to pin down is that it requires the patient to be knowledgeable & assertive about their own treatment in order to properly gauge their doctors. Here's a collection of links w/info on different thyroid aspects: [http://thyroid.about.com/od/gettestedanddiagnosed/Get_Tested...](http://thyroid.about.com/od/gettestedanddiagnosed/Get_Tested_for_Thyroid_Disease_and_Properly_Diagnosed.htm)

Sorry to go a little offtopic on thyroid stuff. That little gland has plagued my family for generations, so I'm pretty adamant about pointing it out as a potential cause of things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like something I definitely need checked out and look into the thyroid issue, although my family doesn't have a history of thyroid problems. I don't think I have any of the issues with diet (mostly cook for myself), but it could be bad sleep hygiene/routine and lack of regular exercise. Definitely I'll check in with a doctor now. Your response on the thyroid issues sound scary and really informative, thanks a lot!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Find the best book prices across online stores in India - <AUTHOR> http://www.kbooksearch.com/ This weekend I just sat down and coded away. This is the result. I have tried to make it as fast and clean as possible. Have a look <comment><USER2> Looks very nice and useful app. Thanks for sharing. Suggestion: An auto- suggest while you search would add lot of values.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very useful.. and it's pretty quick as well.. Nice work.. All the Best !!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) Let me try adding auto suggest.

<comment><USER2> I think you are on Google app engine. You can add a python service for auto- suggest, an example here: [http://www.sarathlakshman.com/2011/03/03/implementing- autoco...](http://www.sarathlakshman.com/2011/03/03/implementing-autocomplete- with-trie-data-structure/)</comment></comment>


Forget About the Mythical Lone Inventor in the Garage - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/05/argonne_national_lab_director_on_the_myth_of_the_lone_inventor_in_the_garage.single.html <comment><USER2> Well, like so many other things, it's field-dependent. :-)

If you're working in software, you don't even need a garage: a dorm room or studio apartment, a laptop, and a few thousand dollars to pay for web hosting, will fill your need for physical equipment. I think that one of the great achievements of the past few decades has been the invention of an entire field of technical endeavor in which the base costs are so low.

But not all innovation is in software, and it's good to get a reminder that most fields have substantial equipment materials and equipment costs. A lab doing electronics, biotechnology, energy research, and many other _totally necessary things_ has much higher requirements.

When I was doing microfluidics work in grad school, I was doing some of the cheapest microfabrication research out there. All I needed was a continuous supply of photoresist ($800/L), some decent-quality silicon wafers ($200/pk of 20), access to a high-resolution transparency printer for masks ($150/print), silicone plastic for making devices ($50/lb), and a good fluorescence microscope ($50,000 or so). Oh, and access to a clean room with about $1,000,000 worth of equipment, but that was shared and I don't know what our "rent" for access was...

Edit: costs estimated from the Internet and 2yr-old memories, but I think they're pretty close.

<comment><USER3> Another advantage of a "lab" is interaction with other bright people in the field. It's a key benefit of YC; Jobs designed the pixar building to enhance this; many great software ideas came out of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC; and I've also experienced it myself at my old compsci dept.

<comment><USER4> The Internet has, if not replace, then extended that metaphor considerably.

Or at least it does when people with a common interest can reach out and find one another.

One of my huge frustrations with so-called "social media" is that they frequently make just this sort of interaction very difficult.

People who _empathize_ similarly can reach out and like one another. However, people who can actually GSD need to wade through a ton of noise in search of signal. Even old Usenet did better (charters and cancelbots FTW).

This is one of the reasons why topically-organized sites (Reddit, HN, etc.) do far better for communications in my book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> While I do agree with a lot of the points here, I wonder if perhaps recent advances in technology (particularly those that might be considered platforms for future innovations) are making the idealistic "Garage Inventor" more and more realistic. It probably still requires a big lab to create new technologies or new branches of science, but nowadays anyone with a laptop and some money for web hosting can create something that reaches millions of people. Although that's entirely different from what Edison, Hewlett, and Packard were doing, I'd argue that it's still within the realm of "innovation". (not to say that every website is particularly innovative, just that the possibility is there.)

</comment><comment><USER5> The author can't be too happy with the picture of Albert Einstein at the top... For those that don't remember this Albert guy made one of the most important discoveries of all time; working in solitude, in the Swiss patent office, in-between reviewing patent applications. :)

<comment><USER6> And soon after, a team of experimentalists the world over set about proving him right. People rarely remember the experimentalists, the guys who go through all the hard work of providing the evidence to the theorists.

See: Michelson and Morley, Eddington, and others.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man who works in giant lab extols virtues of giant labs. Film at 11.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good piece, with major implications for public policy. Encouraging more people to go into startups is great, but funding more R&D (especially in energy) is crucial as well. Also, Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From makes this case very well at book length.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't wait until some of the programmable-matter type approaches really take off. The closest we have is 3d printing.

What I am hoping to become popular and inexpensive something like 3d printing but with the ability to either assembly parts into machines automatically or the ability to print functional machines all in one go.

When you have inexpensive machines that can do that type of thing, then you really will be able to program reality in your garage, and print out fully assembled machines from open source components you downloaded from the internet.

On a slightly different topic, I was thinking, in response to this article, in a way, no one who is trying to innovate in technology (especially things like software) is really working alone. Instead we are building off of existing platforms and modules that others have created. For example, I am probably one of the most introverted programmers around, but the platform that I am building, ostensibly working on it completely alone, integrates many, many different pieces of open (and closed) source software/APIs, created relatively recently by hundreds or thousands of different people.

I'm working on a product based on jQuery, jQuery UI, WebKit (V8), CodeMirror, NodeJS, jQuery context menu, noty, NowJS (socket.io), CoffeeScript, FckEditor, jQuery editable, jquery ipweditor, Google Web Fonts (more than a dozen contributed fonts by many different authors), Google API hosting, AjaxUpload, NodeJs (NPM, shellJS, formidable, rimraf, async, request, cssmin, vows, zlib, mongolian, etc.) Rackspace API, PayPal/Stripe API, Ubuntu (Debian), Xen. Just look at the huge number of people that have contributed to Debian/Ubuntu, V8 or WebKit or Node.js recently or the rest of it over the years -- there is no way I could even consider doing this project without that stuff. So in a way everyone is in the lab already which is open source/APIs/github or whatever.

<comment><USER10> What's happening are CNC machines are starting to be sold as consumer devices. You can attach a lot of tools to a CNC-like machine, be it a laser etcher, a plastic squirters, millers, etc. It's kind of like kitchens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Solitude is great for creativity. Labs/offices/hacker spaces are great for making that creativity a reality. You don't hire in more people in a startup because you want to stifle creativity... you need to get shit done sometimes.

The "why not both" meme comes to mind. Go sit in a hammock for a month or two, come back to the lab and try to get somewhere practical, then go back to the hammock. You need creativity, but you also need critique from peers out on the same ledge you're on.

Which reminds me of the hammock driven development talk[1]. The talk really resonated with me.

[1]: <https://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586>

</comment><comment><USER12> The inventor in the garage is a real, re-occurring figure in the rise of industries, although the author is correct that these figures are more commercializers and integrators than scientific trailblazers. The irony is that there's no greater example than the namesake of Bell Labs...

</comment><comment><USER13> Most real paradigm shifts happen outside the mainstream though.</comment>


The Screw-Me Scenario - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/05/10/the_screwme_scenario.html

<comment><USER2> If you are presenting to management, learn this lesson. As a consultant, I do a lot of presentations, and attend a lot of meetings where other people present. Rands provides the best advice: if someone hits you with a surprise, acknowledge the concern, admit you don't know the answer, and offer a plan for coming up with the answer. Sometimes one of the players (and not necessarily the person who brought it up) will try to leverage the outstanding issue to delay a decision (or drive the decision the "wrong" way). Knowing in advance that a "screw-me" may come up, and being prepared to handle it, will help you deal with this situation. You may be able to get agreement that the issue is not material to the decision, or you may be able to get a provisional decision pending an answer to the open question. What you want to avoid is losing another week while you research, communicate, and reschedule the meeting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've only recently (thanks to Rands) discovered the value of meeting with key stakeholders prior to meetings to hear their concerns, state my case, and insure there are no surprises at the formal meeting. Most of my meetings are becoming quick rubber stamp affairs! Soon I'll either be working on more complex projects or I'll be able to get things done without having formal meetings at all.

<comment><USER3> Many to many meetings are often a huge waste of time and a poor way to get things done. The fact you're going retail to the individual people also gives you a LOT more influence than you would in the large meeting.

It seems like more work, but due to its high levels of relative effectiveness, it is so much less work because it works so much more often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's things like this that make me remember why I only work in smaller businesses these days. Ah, no politics, other than the usual wrangling with clients.</comment>


Incrementally Better Cookies - <AUTHOR> https://mikewest.github.io/cookie-incrementalism/draft-west-cookie-incrementalism.html <comment><USER2> Based on the title, I was expecting an equally nerdy take on incremental improvements to the classic cookie recipe, along the lines of this great article by Kenji Lopez-Alt: [https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food- lab-the-best...](https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best- chocolate-chip-cookies.html)

<comment><USER3> Me too, and I was looking forward to it.

When I have time, I want to experiment with doing a sort of gradient descent on an array of different cookie recipes to find the best ratios of ingredients. That would be an interesting project.

<comment><USER4> You would have to constrain your experiment to some definition of "cookie" to prevent it from converging on a "cookie" that is pure dark chocolate.

<comment><USER5> You'd have to get there through gradient descent, though. A pile of dark- chocolate chips is quite good, but a "cookie" that is a pile of chips baked with a small but nonzero amount of butter, flour, and baking soda... isn't. Gradient descent would have trouble with getting you through that, because cutting out the baking only makes it worse, and cutting out the other ingredients without cutting out the baking _also_ only makes it worse, and reducing the amounts of everything that isn't chocolate without bringing them to zero _still_ only makes it worse.

<comment><USER3> Instead of gradient descent, I should have said the shotgun method. I imagine giving out a few cookies of varying quantities of ingredients to neighbors and then choosing the best. Though, this method does lead to potential local maxima.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well I too was hoping for cookie iteration, mostly because that's been one of my side hobbies for a while.

I don't have Food Lab style process shots posted anywhere because this took me a decade of fussing over dozens of iterations, but I do have my current recipe here:

[http://devansdesign.com/personal#/cookies/](http://devansdesign.com/personal#/cookies/)

<comment><USER4> It starts off with "The egg sets the baseline unit for all other ingredients; 1 egg mass = 1 unit." and

        1   egg
        2   white sugar
        3   brown sugar
        4   AP flour
        e   unsalted butter  [2.72]
        π   chocolate chips  [3.14]

but then it continues on with this usage of absolute volume measurements:

        1/2 tsp baking soda
        3/4 tsp kosher salt
        1   tsp vanilla extract*

Is it really true that cookies made with hummingbird eggs need a much larger portion of those ingredients than cookies make with ostrich eggs?

<comment><USER6> I'll concede the point on relative vs absolute units (poor geek form) with practical caveats:

\- the preamble clearly calls out the FDA std ~50g large chicken egg as the nominal egg unit.

\- the recipe targets home bakers with basic equipment and small batches.

I've converted the small volume measures into mass & egg-ratios in the past, but the numbers butt up against the tolerances of most home kitchen scales and results get dicey. I've also discovered that OXO scales use some some of smoothing function that allows you to load 20 grams of slowly ground salt at "0" grams if you do it slowly enough. That was a bad batch...</comment></comment></comment>


Tractionless Motion Is Possible - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-12-discovery-reveals-tractionless-motion.html <comment><USER2> Either this article was poorly writen, or this is beyond dumb, much less impossible.</comment>


My Experiences as a Black Computer Science Student at Stanford - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/debugging-codeswitching-my-experiences-black-computer-williams <comment><USER2> Wow... talk about microaggressions...

Imagine that a white guy had said:

1.) My perfect advisor would be a white male. He would understand where I come from.

2.) Only a white male can speak my language.

3.) The closest thing I could find to a white male was a Mexican. He's cool and all, but he knows he's not white enough to really identify with me.

4\. I hate having to talk like the other people here... it's like we're supposed to actually communicate or something! Why can't we just speak American?

In other words.... here it comes.... THIS DUDE IS RACIST AND DOESN'T EVEN RECOGNIZE IT!!!!</comment>