Ask HN: How can a non-technical co-founder add value? - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,
I am exploring the idea of developing a software product with a few technical friends of mine based around an idea I have. Outside of the idea and some initial seed money, I worry about how much value I can add to a development team as a potential non-technical co-founder with limited business experience (I am a bioengineering grad student).
As a non-technical co-founder, what sorts of duties will I generally find myself performing at a budding company, and what are the general avenues by which I can add value? <comment><USER2> Well, if you're willing to throw yourself into the role, _somebody_ has to deal with marketing, PR, strategy, sales, business development, bookkeeping, regulatory compliance, making coffee, taking out the trash, etc.

So yeah.. there are a LOT of places for a non-technical co-founder to add value. Since most techies aren't very marketing-savvy, I'd suggest you go buy every marketing book you can get your hands on, and do a deep dive.

OK, maybe not literally _every_ marketing book. But if you're interested, here are a few items I'd recommend to a budding would-be marketer.

 _Permission Marketing_ \- Seth Godin

 _All Marketers Are Liars_ \- Seth Godin

 _Purple Cow_ \- Seth Godin

 _Unleashing The Ideavirus_ \- Seth Godin

 _Positioning_ \- Jack Trout and Al Ries

 _Differentiate or Die_ \- Jack Trout

 _The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing_ \- Al Ries

 _Repositioning_ \- Jack Trout

 _Marketing Warfare_ \- Al Ries

 _The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding_ \- Al Ries and Laura Ries

 _The Discipline of Market Leaders_ \- Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

 _Blue Ocean Strategy_ \- W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

 _Trust Me, I 'm Lying - Confessions of a Media Manipulator_ \- Ryan Holiday

 _Crossing the Chasm_ \- Geoffrey Moore

If this is a B2B play, I'd read Steve Blank's _The Four Steps to the Epiphany_ first though. Otherwise, I'd suggest starting with _The Discipline of Market Leaders_ and then go to _All Marketers Are Liars_.

What kind of duties would you be doing in a role like this? Writing web copy; writing press releases; writing whitepapers; writing blog posts; recording screencasts & demo videos; setting up mailing lists; running the Web, Twitter, Facebook, G+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Youtube, etc., presence; talking to potential customers and soliciting feedback; developing a marketing strategy, PR strategy, etc; working with your cofounders to choose a "value discipline" (See _The Discipline of Market Leaders_ ) and putting an operating model in place to fulfill that discipline; possibly talking to potential investors; talking to potential partners, doing business development; and SOOOOOOO very much more.

<comment><AUTHOR> WOAH, this is immensely helpful and a very thorough list. Thank you!

<comment><USER3> Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy" is oddly missing from the list, as it's one of the most influential corporate strategy books out there... if you like the spirit of that list, you should definitely add that one.

(Porter's "5 forces" are one of the highlights of a typical MBA curriculum).

Also, learning some accounting is extraordinarily useful (thinking about capex vs. opex, etc.)

<comment><USER2> Any or all of Porter's works would be fine additions as well. But they're bigger, longer, dryer and more academic, and - arguably - a bit less accessible. I'd recommend somebody coming to the "business side of things" maybe defer jumping into Porter until after reading some of the other works that touch on, or dance around, his material.

The Discipline of Market Leaders, in particular, could probably be seen as sort of a riff on Porter's ideas, albeit more focused. I'm actually a big fan of their approach, and that's really why I put that instead of saying "go read Michael Porter".

All of that said, the book _Understanding Michael Porter_ is a good introduction to his approach, and is probably more accessible than jumping right into _Competitive Strategy_ or the others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The value of a non-tech member is the same as the value a consultant, project manager, or a lawyer can give to their clients. It's about a mode of thought - reality checks, decision making and finding creative solutions to the problems you will definitely encounter on the way. Engineering is a great place to start from.

</comment><comment><USER5> Every engineer, regardless of specialty, learns to write code: At least one semester of C/C++. That's all you need to get started. Learn the rest on your own.

As a side note, stop calling yourself non-technical. It's embarrassing, especially if you know bioengineering. Give me the name of your school, and I will write them an email to complain about the lack of preparation for their students.

Stop being so lazy. And have some respect for yourself.

And yes, you're very lazy.

<comment><USER6> > Every engineer, regardless of specialty, learns to write code: At least one > semester of C/C++

I doubt this is universally true. It certainly wasn't in both my ugrad and grad institutions. Non-CS engg students had the _option_ of taking a introduction to programming style course, but it was by no means mandatory.

Most engg students there had their first introduction to programming via Matlab assignments, which can hardly be called programming.

<comment><USER5> Matlab is a fine first step for becoming a software developer. I used Matlab in all my courses for Control Systems, Communications Systems, Signal Processing etc. So if Matlab is all you got, then that's great!

The toughest part about learning to write code is to learn to think algorithmically. C/C++/Java/etc all have the same basic syntax.

I have a Computer Engineering degree, so I don't exactly help my argument here. However, I know for a fact that ALL engineering students (and math/physics/chemisty/etc) at my school, regardless of major had to learn C++. Mandatory.

Regardless.... you can always sign up for a programming course. In fact, to be an expert programmer, you need 2 courses:

1\. Intro to C/C++

2\. Data structures.

That's it. You can easily pick up Java or any other language in less than 1 month.

Just think about it. There's no excuse for not knowing how to write code. Just do it!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the idea related to bioengineering?

Once they have a rough prototype you can be the first tester and use your contacts to get a few additional users for the beta version. One very important task is to understand what the users say and translate that to something the developers can understand. Also, understand what is possible to do in the site and what would be useful for the users.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is an offshoot of my experiences as a grad student and also as a project manager at a core lab at my university. It is not strictly bio E oriented, but I agree that I could certainly test and find receptive initial users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ideally you would have prior experience in sales, marketing, or fund-raising. But if you have hustle that can be a substitute while you learn those roles.

</comment><comment><USER9> sales, investor relations, project and product management, marketing, PR, content creation, recruiting and hiring, CRM. There's plenty to do.</comment>


What a shoddy piece of work is man  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100503/full/news.2010.215.html?s=news_rss

<comment><USER2> _but we shouldn't too quickly derogate that which we do not yet understand_

Good idea. Considering how many pseudo-random search algorithms we're using to solve problems, "glass houses" comes to mind.</comment>


Foreign Student Dependence - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/12/new-report-shows-dependence-us-graduate-programs-foreign-students

<comment><USER2> An old professor of mine had a conversation with someone at MIT about a student trying to get into their PhD Econ program, and he relayed to me an interesting, paraphrased quote:

"Of the 30 person cohort they take in every year, only about 4 or 5 of them were domestic. I don't understand why that seems so odd to people--isn't it presumptuous to assume that every year, more than 20% of the top 30 students in the world are american?"

In other words, it really shouldn't surprise people that for universities that compete on an international level, a majority of students are international.

<comment><USER3> It would be odd if more than50% were Chinese. If we are talking about worldwide populations ans statistics.

<comment><USER4> Slightly, but not entirely. I wonder how many Chinese people want PhDs per year vs Americans? I'd expect the former is larger, partly due to sheer population size and partly due to the must-get-credentials culture that I've not seen in the US as much.

<comment><USER5> Chinese Uni's are PhD mills. Every student who attends, and can put up with indentured servitude for n years gets one. That's not to say that there aren't some very smart Chinese, and some good Uni's in China, just that the average Chinese PhD is meaningless. edit: (not meaningless, but that the avg Chinese PhD isn't equivalent to one from the US, Europe, Russia, etc.)

source: Colleague with a PhD from China, and living/working in China for a couple of years on a research project.

<comment><USER3> This is quite true. The best students go abroad to get PhDs anyways, or...maybe some very special institutes in China that are up to Western standards (e.g. Andy Yao's lab in Qinghua).

Smart students still come out of these schools in spite of the PhD programs, but there are plenty of wasted opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For what it is worth, I worked for ten years for the physics dept at one of the universities for which statistics were listed in the article. I got to know a lot of professors, a few deans, administrators, you know, the people who decide which students get admitted. I've had, and overheard this conversation with them a few times. It always comes down to money. American students won't live six deep in a one bedroom apartment in the low-rent part of town, like many of their foreign counterparts who come from a developing country. I got downvoted yesterday for saying it was about the money, but it's about the money. If your family is well off and doesn't mind footing the huge bill for you, then you can do it. Most of the kids who are smart enough to do post baccalaureate science work, can see that they will never get out of debt, so they don't. Other American students who I have seen make it to a PhD in Physics, had a supportive spouse, and often enough go into geophysics since there is money there.

PS It's about the money.

</comment><comment><USER6> As an American Electrical Engineering Master's graduate from one of the mentioned schools, the program I was in was flooded with international students (mostly from India, some from China, a few from Turkey).

What I found interesting is most of the Indian graduate students came for a masters, most of the Chinese graduate students came for a Ph. D. There were too few Turkish graduate students to make a generalization about.

I think this is good because most of the time, American's can earn nicely with their Bachelors in Electrical Engineering, so there's little incentive to pursue higher education. Having got a Master's in Electrical Engineering, I wouldn't recommend it as a way to further your career. The classes were interesting, but so far I haven't found a job that needed those specialized classes.

<comment><USER7> But what about all the jobs that require, absolutely require a Masters, and 5 years experience for an entry level position?

/s

<comment><USER6> Well there's a good chance that those job postings are created after they have the H1-B visa candidate already selected. List exactly the candidates "qualifications" so that no one is eligible. That way they can claim that there are no local engineers that can do this very specialized work.

/ns unfortunately...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And to nobody's surprise it becomes obvious why college labs are always TA'd by people who can't speak English. (Which in turn leads to more frustrated students quitting STEM fields...)

<comment><USER9> At good places you sometimes run into professors that you have difficulty understanding. At bad places they won't recruit professors that you have difficulty understanding because the darling students will complain.

That complaint of yours - it says more about the fellow who makes it that it does about the TAs.

<comment><USER10> I had a calculus TA at Berkeley whose English was so poor that she would respond to questions from Chinese students in Chinese.

When she didn't understand your question in English, she would make a blind guess as what you were asking about and then answer that, speaking as fast as she could so that you couldn't interrupt her to tell her that she wasn't answering your question. This would continue until you gave up.

<comment><USER9> I had a similar experience in an Algorithms class, where the TA had a firm grasp of perhaps 70 % of the material she was supposed to teach. This person was an American citizen, though.

When I was discussing the quality of TAs with the Instructional Director in our department this episode came up, and she was deliciously cynical. "The students are resilient", she said.

This is true. At university you are supposed to work yourself and to create learning networks with your fellow students yourself. It isn't highschool any longer, especially not at Berkeley.

<comment><USER10> Right: it's my fault for not learning Mandarin to take calculus.

And by the same logic, it's my fault for not figuring out how to cheat on all my exams.

Schools are for learning, not hazing. This kind of neglect can't be excused as some kafka-esque "character building" exercise.

<comment><USER9> The point of a university is to master the subject by any means necessary, which includes building up your professional and social network. This point was impressed upon us in our first week at uni. We were _encouraged_ by profs and TAs to set up informal learning groups, if we didn't we weren't going to cope with the pressure. I keep telling my students the same.

I hate to say this, but it must be said: anyone who calls dealing with an incompetent TA "hazing" when he is at a genuine university like Berkeley has missed something. Didn't you have fellow students to talk to to be able to pass Calculus?

I know there are not-universities, and anyone who passes through these is cheated, but Berkeley isn't among the not-universities.

<comment><USER10> If you don't want to get it, I can't explain it to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this is perfectly fine as long as foreign students are paying full non-resident tuition when at publicly-funded institutions. Private schools may do as they wish of course, but it's not a responsibility of US citizens to pick up the cost to educate foreign nationals.

<comment><USER12> In the sciences, almost everyone - domestic or international is paid a stipend. It's more accurate to think of PhDs are paid researchers rather than students. Taking classes is not the point of doing a PhD so it's not education in the sense that doing a Bachelors or Masters is education

For Masters, everyone pays tuition - unless one can find a research assistanship where the professor is willing to fund part or all of the cost, scholarship, etc.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which Google Cloud Product Supports Cross Region Replication? - <AUTHOR> Amazon Aurora supports it: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/06/amazon-aurora-now-supports-cross-region-replication/
RDS does, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cross-region-read-replicas-for-amazon-rds-for-mysql/
Dynamodb too https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/Streams.CrossRegionRepl.html
But no Google Cloud DB product supports Cross Region Replication.
How are we supposed to benefit from Serverless without having low latency database access in our cloud function? <comment><USER2> Google Cloud Datastore does support multi region - [https://cloud.google.com/docs/geography-and-regions#multi- re...](https://cloud.google.com/docs/geography-and-regions#multi- regional_resources)

Spanner does as well but it is expensive</comment>


Ask HN: Frontend Tools for this Backend Developers Toolbelt. - <AUTHOR>

I am a backend developer, usually on apps that don't have a web focus at all (think network monitoring).  However, these days I'm usually tossing on a web interface of sorts for easy statistics gathering.  And more often than not I'm not doing that is REST/JSON services as customers find them handy, and so do I.  So I've got the backend down for REST services.
What I currently don't have is a set of tools to build up quick user facing interfaces to display this data (and perhaps some admin functions) in a functionable way (I don't care too much about fashion).
Is Bootstrap and Backbone (or AngularJS) going to give me all I need?  I've played a bit with Bootstrap for some layout and widgets and like it.  But am looking for something to add more structure to my web pages (ok, single page apps).
Ideally I'd rather learn 2 or 3 libraries very well, so I can whip up quick user interfaces without thinking about it too much.  But the Javascript world is moving so fast right now it causes my head to spin.
Would something like Dojo or a Sencha product allow me to stay within the realm of a single product?  Community support is also important.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Check out [http://www.layoutit.com&#x2F](http://www.layoutit.com&#x2F); or divshot.com</comment>


Google, Microsoft and Others Delve Deeper Into Cloud Storage for Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/technology/google-microsoft-and-others-delve-deeper-into-cloud-storage-for-businesses.html

<comment><USER2> Not sure that anyone outside of the USA is going to trust important data to any USA company. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't trust these companies with my important business data, even if I lived in the USA.

<comment><USER3> You could always encrypt the data before uploading it. I see cloud storage as an extra backup method.</comment></comment>


Weird things about git, #2: no bug tracking system - <AUTHOR> http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200806#28 <comment><USER2> I think the author is confused between "tracking bugs" and "a bug tracking system". The former is a social process, and something that all projects do on some level. The latter is a piece of software, which may or may not help the project to do the former. The author even discovered the evidence for this, but missed the meaning: git's bug work happens on the mailing list, while mono's goes on in the tracker.

Don't confuse software with problems. That's how we get bad software.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anybody else feel like a bug tracker has a negative impact on community and coding enjoyment? I don't think I'm on-board with this argument, or his assertion that significantly more people are using Mono than git.

I find bug trackers satisfying, generally, but then again, I make money from my software--it's almost entirely Open Source, but nonetheless, my prosperity depends on the software being great. Anyway, closing out bugs is an enjoyable part of the job, and I simply can't keep up with things that come in via email or in the forums. I think there's a volume-of-issues-to-developers mismatch between my projects (which have two or three developers, tops, plus a few occasional contributors) and something like git (which has a primary maintainer, a few regular developers, and dozens of occasional contributors).

<comment><USER4> I agree that ticket systems and bug trackers cause some headaches for developers. When you have a problem on the shelf, you're compelled not to think about other things, which may be either nicer, or more important.

But there's a lot of value in being able to track things. You don't need a task list loading up your head in the same way, and for a distributed project it's vital for communication purposes.

One suggestion might be to have two lists: the central repository for bugs, which get voted on (and the votes diminish over time, like a hacker news of bugs/issues/enhancements). And then for each person, a 'shopping list'.

The idea is you don't want to take on too many tickets, because after a while, they go 'bad', like groceries -- they just stay in our fridge and we don't finish them.

You also want to be able to judge impact versus the time you think it will take, so you optimize for that -- something like the number of votes divided by the number of hours you think it will take _you_ will give you the priority.

Heck, this is actually starting to be a good idea. Maybe I should throw up a little HN clone for tracking, and see how it goes.

<comment><USER3> You're not alone. I was talking with someone from Google who works on the Gmail support team, and has an interest in user-to-user support, in general, the other day, and she was asking me about how hard it would be to convert the newly Open Source reddit into a ticket tracker.

I think it underestimates the importance of other aspects of a tracker--but my lack of confidence in the idea may be based on my own prejudices based on years of working with traditional issue trackers. I expect to receive an email when a new ticket is filed, so we'd need to add notifications. I'm missing emailed ticket submission (I miss it in my current tracker, and will be moving to something else because of this lack), so you'd need to add email ticket submission. Assignments are a core part of any ticket tracker--you need to be able to take ownership of an issue so that others don't spend time on it unnecessarily (though others should be able to follow it).

But, I do think several things would shake out of the model that are hard to do now:

Priority. The less someone knows the more important they believe their issue is. So, it's basically a no-op field in most trackers I've ever used. The developers might use them to good effect, and a few advanced users. But since greater than 50% of priorities are set incorrectly, it's a useless field for sorting (and my current tracker doesn't let me remove it from the form, as it is the primary sort key!). Since everyone gets a vote, priority as "hotness" would be a great improvement. But, it assumes your whole community is looking at the tracker, which is extremely unlikely.

Discussions. People rarely talk on issue trackers because the conversation tools are weak--the focus is never on making it work really well for discussions. reddit/HN have great threaded conversations, and you can vote on what's relevant and accurate. I would very much like better discussions in my tickets.

But, I think it would require something like a total conversion to this sort of forum as the entirety of your forums/mailing list/bugs system. Which might be a good idea for someone starting from scratch. If you have sub-reddit style categories, with one for tickets, that'd be a pretty effective system, I think. Though you can't currently "close" a thread on HN or reddit, and call it "fixed"...so that'd be something to add.

Anyway, I'd love to see how an implementation like this worked out in a reasonably large community. It might be something we'd want to try on our Open Source community site (our commercial site is already too set in its ways and customers hate change). But the Open Source site needs a bit of a refresh...it currently uses SourceForge for its tickets, which kinda sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps the reason Mono has no traffic on their mailing list is because Mono as a piece of software kind of sucks, at least in my opinion. Then again my perception might just be colored by my experience with using OpenEmbedded which I've come to dislike greatly and coincidentally also uses Mono.

<comment><USER2> I think more charitably it's because mono is in some senses a write-only project. It's a collection of people who are essentially writing software to an external spec. Except for design details at the very core (probably handled via private mail between the half dozen people involved), there really isn't any need for elaborate collaboration on development details. And futures issues (the "how do I do this?" kind of discussion) are all directed at microsoft anyway, not mono.

I guess I'd have expected it to be a little sterile. Certainly it isn't something I'm dying to work on.

<comment><USER5> It seems I've miss spoke. I was actually thinking of Monotone not Mono ( <http://monotone.ca/> ) I was just confused because I assumed the author was comparing version control systems. But they were actually just comparing open source projects in general. I have no opinion on Mono but Monotone sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> False. Trac has a git plugin. Ergo, Git has an excellent bug tracker available for anyone who wants to use it.

Or there's Lighthouse.

<comment><USER7> The point is that the developers of git don't _use_ any bug tracker. It doesn't matter how much bug tracking software is available if they refuse to use it. Honestly I'm not surprised; I don't think Linus uses any of the Linux bug trackers either.

<comment><USER6> Ah. I got the impression that people were complaining that the rest of us can't leverage existing tools.

Git's simplicity and pile-of-tools approach, along with daily use of the tool and prodigious debug output, strike me as exactly the sorts of things that minimize the need for bug tracking. If there's a bug in my own statistical code, for example, I usually know about it from the debug output. If that works for the Git developers, _fucking awesome_.

However, just because Linus doesn't use a bug tracker, doesn't mean that the big shops (RedHat for example) don't pick up the slack. I think Linus is a flawed example ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


7th International Scientific Conference "Space Technologies: Present and Future" - <AUTHOR> https://dpukrconfiaa.org/en/ <comment><AUTHOR> Today was first day. Last day - May 24, 2019. Comment from orgs:

> _At the moment we are editing the video report about the Conference first > day, meanwhile we propose you to look through the photos at our Flickr_ [0]

[0] [https://www.flickr.com/photos/yuzhnoye/albums](https://www.flickr.com/photos/yuzhnoye/albums)</comment>


[CSS] Yellow Fade Technique - <AUTHOR> http://kamranahmed.info/blog/2016/01/30/yellow-fade-technique-in-css/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know there is nothing special with this, but still posting it ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</comment>


xkcd's 2018 CVE List - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/1957/ <comment><USER2> Throwing that shade at Apple I see

</comment><comment><USER3> Transcript + explanation:

[https://explainxkcd.com/1957/](https://explainxkcd.com/1957/)</comment>


AES-CBC is going the way of the dodo - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/aes-cbc-going-the-way-of-the-dodo/ <comment><USER2> Presently extinct but trying hard to genetically recreate them?</comment>


Games for Programmers – Improve your skills - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingame.com/start <comment><USER2> Not that easy, but fun for developers</comment>


Love Ubuntu, but looking for something faster? Read on - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/82197

<comment><USER2> Xubuntu is also great:

<http://xubuntu.org/></comment>


Is an in-app purchase for removing ads like one for adding a color-blind mode? - <AUTHOR>

Some people are not distracted by ads much like some people are not color blind.<p>Isn't making people with a disability pay more morally questionable? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure of the context of this, but depending on context I do not find it 'wrong'.

Most people are not color-blind and of those that are - there are various forms of color-blindness! Is it fair to cater to them but not others with disabilities? Should every game be created in mind that some players may be missing fingers, hands, feet, or limbs in general? A user missing 3 fingers on their right hand might find Xbox games difficult to play. Should their disability be taken into account when designing the game? Would it be morally questionable to sell them a special controller designed for them with buttons in a different configuration? Would it be more or less moral to not create a controller at all and have them unable to play the game?

What is the difference, in production value, between "color-blind mode" and "alternative color scheme"? Some games sell alternative-color outfits and many apps allow users to fully customize the color, or the color is a part of their _branding_ and allowing change (or creating change) would hurt their brand.

What is the difference between charging for "alternative outfits", "themes", or "color-blind mode"? They all take similar production values. For some users "color-blind mode" is just an alternative color scheme. So charging for it may make sense, depending on context.

If you decide to cater to the color blind, do you cater to the most common form? Or all of them? Is it even possible to cater to all of them at once? How much money are you spending to cater to them? Is it morally questionable to not cater to them if it is going to lose your business money? Would it be fair to charge them to offset the loss?</comment>


Round 2 with HoloLens: A bright future ahead, a narrow field of view today - <AUTHOR> http://www.neowin.net/news/round-2-with-hololens-a-bright-future-ahead-a-narrow-field-of-view-today

<comment><USER2> Sounds like the earlier tech demos were running on more powerful hardware and could handle a lot more modeling and display. Now that they're moving toward getting it to work in something you might actually buy and use, it will have more to do with optimization for lower-powered and lighter components.

Still, I can't help but be excited by this stuff. I said the same thing when I got my Oculus dev unit: this is a lot like early portable and mobile computing. There were tradeoffs necessary to get the first portable computers to fit in a briefcase but now we've got ultrabooks. And I remember seeing early smart phone prototypes that did a lot more on a breadboard than when they were big, clunky Treos and PocketPCs at Radio Shack.

But things that can only be done in prototype or with less "wow!" in early consumer products have a way of progressing pretty quickly once engineering and software development races to catch up to demand and proof of concept.</comment>


No, We're Not the stupid ones - <AUTHOR> http://philcrissman.com/2010/02/16/no-were-not-the-stupid-ones

<comment><USER2> Ahh, users. Can't live with them, can't live without them. After we've had our little venting, can we get back to ways to make it easier for them to pay us money?

I have a screenshot on the front page of my website. The screenshot has buttons on it. The buttons are, obviously, not functional. This is a difficult concept to grasp for a sizeable portion of my user base -- you should see the CrazyEgg heatmap and the big red dot right over the "New" button, or the emails I got about how "I tried to use your program but none of the buttons I clicked on worked."

There are productive and unproductive responses to that. Telling users "Look, doofus, that's a photo. You can't interact with elements in photos. You should know this by now." is an unproductive response: it does not help your user or advance your business goals. Having the site actually do something when someone clicks on the photo, to clue them in to the fact that it is in fact not the program itself, is a productive response. It will cut > 90% of support requests of that nature and increase your sales at the margin.

<comment><USER3> There's a reason why people use framing devices like 3/4 views or coverflow widgets

<comment><USER2> I think I understand what you said there up to the word "use". Can you provide a translation for the UX-impaired?

<comment><USER3> I feel like I've stumped the sphinx or something!

By "framing device", I mean to add context to the picture so that it's obviously not real -- so that the monkey viewing the image perceives the monkey on the screen as a representative icon and not another live monkey.

One option is to literally put it in a picture frame, especially scaled down to much smaller than "life size". Make it a full screenshot with the start bar, have the app unmaximized with some desktop around the borders with "My Computer" peeking out, leave a mouse cursor on the image, show the mouse hovering over some modal rollover state like a menu.

The 3/4 view is fairly extreme -- skew it isometrically so that it's not on the normal plane. You can fall back on the shareware standby of photoshopping it onto the front of a glossy retail box with a UPC code and system requirements fine print on the side.

CoverFlow is kind of the nuclear option, one of the most extreme slideshow effects you can get away with, that combines all of the previous techniques: <http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#coverflow> \-- frame the hell out of it on a contrasting 3D background with shadows and skewed reflections, and skew the remaining images isometrically into a carousel of cards. Note that Apple's screenshot of the effect is scaled to 1/9th of real size, and itself has a reflected (though not skewed) shadow applied to it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People who submit stories: please submit the URL of the _article_ , not the anchor-laden URL of the _comments_.

This happens all the time, and it's annoying.

Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> D'oh.

Okay, I am one of the stupid ones. Carry on.

I can edit the title but not the URL of what was submitted; which is surely by design (and makes sense, you wouldn't want submitters altering the URL after the fact), so I can't fix it. Noted.

<comment><USER5> Clearly this is a major UI-fail on HN's part for not knowing you wanted just the article and not the comments link :)

That doesn't bother me, though. What bothers me is that _your site isn't facebook!_ _WHAT IS GOING ON!?_ __

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's strange that people treat this as a moral question: "It's _okay_ to expect them to learn how to use the internet". As if you have some sort of obligation to serve everyone.

If you do "expect them to learn how to use the internet', then you will exclude some percentage of users, which may or may not be a good idea depending on what you are trying to do. But moral exhortations like "users _should_ learn the internet" or "developers _should_ make their software easier to use" are worthless.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am no expert, but I have been working for a few months in a user experience team for enterprise collaboration software. In the enterprise sector we need to assure that our applications can be used as intended by a teenager as well as a 65 year old CEO. There are ways to make user interfaces intuitive. One is to copy things from the material world: folders, archives, tabs, etc. The other is to follow abstract paradigms that have been popularized by a few big applications: microblogging, my profile, my wall, etc. In my opinion, the use of paradigms that were created just a few years back, such as most of the interactions in social networks, cannot be assumed to be understood by everyone (stupid or smart) and should be made as intuitive as possible.

<comment><USER8> _In the enterprise sector we need to assure that our applications can be used as intended by a teenager as well as a 65 year old CEO._

Seriously? I mean seriously?

Enterprise applications are the worse offenders for UIs I've ever seen in my life. I've had to use a number of these programs throughout high school and 2 colleges. I've used enterprise level bug trackers and I have to say most linux GUIs manage to be easier than these products.

The product you are working on may not be a sin against humanity but there is a reason "enterprise" has a bad rap.

<comment><USER7> I completely agree. I didn't mean to say that enterprise products do a good job at this. I was just trying to point a case where it is really important to adapt to all user groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "It is okay to expect people to invest a little time to learn how stuff works and to retain an adequate portion of that education."

Amen.

<comment><USER10> From the time you get up to the time you go to bed, do you know how everything you interact with works?

<comment><USER11> Essentially, yes. Perhaps not in enough detail to replicate the world's technologies in a time machine disaster, but certainly enough to create a consistent mental diagram about everything around me. Cars, electricity, furniture, plumbing, health, advertising, the economy, and most certainly, computers.

The desire to understand the world around oneself is one of the key qualities of a hacker, and is the central divide between this community and the world at large.

<comment><USER10> I think you might have a detailed mental model at the low level we are talking for this scenario in some other areas, but I have a hard time believing you do in some of the fields you mentioned (just to pick one where models seem to be rather tough: economy).

I think expecting everyone who drives to be as knowledgeable as a NASCAR driver is foolish, just as I believe expecting everyone who has learned a behavior to adapt every time something subtle changes is too far.

usable by experts or prosumers is really not the goal.

<comment><USER12> _I think expecting everyone who drives to be as knowledgeable as a NASCAR driver is foolish, just as I believe expecting everyone who has learned a behavior to adapt every time something subtle changes is too far._

But I think it is fair to expect people not to use their car keys to try and unlock someone else's car, get angry when it doesn't work, and proceed to blame the owner of the other car and/or the parking lot.

Which, honestly, is about the level of what this article is asking for. Is that _really_ so much?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would imagine that some of the results for people searching for fully qualified domain names mentioned in the article may be due to something that trips me up all of the time:

When I work on other people's computers, which are invariably slower than my Linux boxes, I hot-key to the address bar, start typing a FQDN and hit Enter, only to have my focus shifted for me sometime during this process to the search engine box on the page from a slow firing page load script (thank you msn.com, yahoo.com, etc.).

I have to retrain myself to open a browser, get another cup of tea, THEN hot- key to the address bar and start typing.

Okay, well, yes, a cup of tea is an exaggeration, but I think you get my drift.

<comment><USER14> Usually, when I'm working at any public/not-my-own computer, I start holding Escape right after opening any browser windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't the problem kind of start with browsers automatically doing a search for the stuff that is entered into the URL field? So people never had to learn what an URL actually is.

I think there is at least a lesson to be learned. Typing just a name into the URL bar and "feeling lucky" seems to be EXTREMELY common. In fact, watch anybody who is not an IT specialist surf the web, and they probably do it that way.

So I wouldn't blame web site UIs so much as Browser UIs.

Curious: those Facebook Connect people were using IE, or FF? Wouldn't IE use Bing search?

<comment><USER16> I would say the problem is not understanding the concept of search results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I bet these people were typing in 'facebook login' into the Firefox URL bar, which did an I'm Feeling Lucky search on Google. Most days, that takes you to the actual Facebook login page, but that day it went to ReadWriteWeb. How confusing for people who don't understand the complex rules of how the address bar works, and who are used to seeing Facebook redesign their page without warning every few months.

<comment><USER18> No, they didn't. The first result (and the one you'd get from I'm Feeling Lucky) was still the actual Facebook Login page. The RWW article was in the Google News results, which appear above the search results on the Google results page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if the hundreds of people wanting to log into Facebook via the Read Write Web search result are an artifact of Google just having such huge traffic.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126659>

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure. And really... as staggering as the hundreds of comments were on RWW, a few hundred people is not really a large percentage of the FB user base. It's an incredibly small percentage.

<comment><USER8> I'd imagine at most only a third of those comments are from people actually trying to get to facebook. The rest are trolls.

<comment><USER20> In briefly checking out the profiles of the accounts I'd say that at least 2/3rds of the "i cant login this sux" comments were legit. Most of the accounts commenting like that were middle aged women with many friends and a profile picture.

<comment><USER8> That really puts a dent in my opinion of humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Missing the point entirely.

Yes, Google worked as it was intended to work.

No, how Google is intended to work is not the ideal solution for the problem people are trying to solve when they use Google.

It's the wrong solution. That's the point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, if I follow you, you're saying that because people are trying to use Google (or, let's just say, "Search") for a purpose other than it was intended, it's the wrong solution.

That's really not too different from what I wrote; except I'm saying: people should be _expected to recognize_ that they're using the wrong solution, and that they need a different solution.

You seem to be suggesting that _Search_ should change something to suit the people who are using it "wrong". (Feel free to correct me on that.) It sounds like you're saying "Search should know what you _intend_ to look for, not just what you _typed into the search field_".

I'm not sure I expect an algorithm to know our _intentions_. (Though Google's 'did you mean...' is clearly already trying to accomplish this, as much as possible.)

<comment><USER22> But they may not know of any other solution.

I actually had a similar problem just an hour ago. I needed to look up the price of a piece of metalworking equipment. Since I had purchased items from Wholesale Tool in the past, I entered "www.wholesaletool.com" into Firefox. Then spent the next few minutes trying to figure out why my search for a 1-inch threading die wasn't turning up anything useful. It turns out that the site I _really_ needed was www.wttool.com instead!

And I'm a software dev who spends a lot of time on the web! How much longer would a non-expert have wasted before figuring this out? It's not necessarily anyone's fault; it's just that the web can be awfully confusing at times!

<comment> brown9-2 For this to be a fair comparison you would have had to have been browsing a news article about wholesale tools and trying to purchase a tool from this news article.

You mistook one wholesale tool store for another, whereas these users confused a news article about facebook's redesign for the place where you login to facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Somewhat ironically, the image of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is a Photoshop (among many other debunkings, see <http://www.hoax- slayer.com/elephant-moon-quiz-question.shtml> ).

It's a minor point, but somebody commenting on how stupid users are to believe anything that Google says has himself fallen for a common Google-powered meme.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know that... still humorous, though.

... You've also apparently misunderstood the post. I _don't_ think the users are stupid.

I think that the statement "Google and developers are stupid and/or have failed for allowing events like this to happen" is _incorrect_. That's the whole point of the post.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage contact with your users? - <AUTHOR>

Recently, I've been thinking about how I can do a better job of giving admins at one of the websites I run better tools for managing their relationships with users and customers.
In my head, I'm envisioning a tool that's easy to feed information into about user activity and that also makes it easy for my admins to keep track of interactions and give context about a user when they have a conversation with them.
I've been looking at tools like Highrise for CRM, Tender Support, and a few others but nothing perfectly fits the bill.
So I'm asking, does anyone else out there use a particular tool or have a set of strategies to manage relationships and communications with users of your service? <comment><USER2> Highrise + GMail for Domains + Google Calendar for Domains

<comment><AUTHOR> Highrise was my first choice to use, actually. It's probably excellent for managing customers, but the hard limit of 50,000 contacts makes it impractical for managing users.

I was envisioning piping certain key user events into a CRM, so that information about their site behavior was available to employees when they contacted customers. Since the community I'm responsible for has more than 50k users that means Highrise won't work for me sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Xobni + Outlook

</comment><comment><USER4> getsatisfaction</comment>


Ask HN: Google Phone Interview - <AUTHOR>

I have a phone interview with Google about one month from now. They ask me to refresh my basic data structure and algorithm. Does anybody have any Google interview experience? Do you guys have any recommended reading sources for this? Thanks <comment><USER2> That is too vague to get really good answers back. What position are you in for?

That said, the best practice you can hope for is to INTERVIEW AT A LOT OF OTHER PLACES FIRST. Just trust me on this. Interviews require practice, and the best way to do it is to interview at other places that are good. If you don't trust me, listen to this guy, who says the same thing (and got the job at Google) [[http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-interviewing- sto...](http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-interviewing-story.html)].

That all said, you will probably want to review your basics of analysis (e.g., big O), as well as things like binary search. You will probably get asked to implement code of some sort, so be really well acquainted with your favorite language. Pick up a copy of Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley, and work through a problem or two every day. By "work through", I mean try and do it yourself, and THEN look at the answers. The idea is to be thinking well come time for the interview.

Other things everyone knows are, you want to be really well acquainted with what Google is doing in your area. One of the ways they vet candidates is to see who actually knows what Google is an does in practice, rather than asking why they want to work there. A lot of their questions will probably come from problems they actually have.

Brush up on your books from college. Give the algorithms and data structures 101 stuff a quick look over and make sure you understand it.

That's not a comprehensive list or anything, but if you want more material or advice, and you don't want to divulge more information here for whatever reason, feel free to hit me up.

</comment><comment><USER3> What position? It varies a lot based on which job you're applying to.</comment>


What colour is it? - <AUTHOR> http://whatcolourisit.scn9a.org/ <comment><USER2> It would be awesome to have it combined with something that gave you the name of the color, like Sip does, so that you can tell right away that it is "Hunter Green" or "Downriver" o'clock.</comment>


Introducing HBO Max, a New Streaming Service from WarnerMedia - <AUTHOR> https://www.hbo.com/hbo-news/hbo-max-streaming-service <comment><USER2> I am just astonished at how bad HBO/Warners' ability to brand these things is.

Currently they have two streaming services, HBO GO and HBO NOW, both of which stream the same programming (whatever's on HBO) but are different because one's for people who subscribe to HBO on cable and the other is for everyone else. The services have easily mixed-up names that have nothing to do with the difference between them, and practically identical logos/icons, so it's super easy for new users to get confused about which one they actually want.

Warner's solution to this confusion is to add a _third_ streaming service, _also_ branded with the HBO name, but not having any connection to HBO beyond carrying some of its programming. If you already have HBO GO or HBO NOW, that subscription doesn't mean you can access HBO MAX; as far as I can see it doesn't even earn you a discount on it. And if you're coming to HBO as a cord- cutter, now instead of there at least being only one choice that's right for you, you now have to choose between HBO NOW and HBO MAX -- and they don't even do you the courtesy of at least clearly positioning MAX as "everything on HBO plus some more stuff" so the choice can be simplified to "just HBO" vs. "HBO++".

If you were going to set out to intentionally design a menu of streaming services that was as confusing as possible to the customer, you'd be hard pressed to do better than this...

<comment><USER3> They're likely piggybacking on the HBO brand that has, _for years_ , been some of the best long-form programming on television (even their serial shows).

The fact that they'd jam a bunch of re-runs and television shows into a product whose name is literally "Home Box Office" shows how little AT&T/Warner really understand HBO beyond "it generates piles of money."</comment></comment>


How U.S. Marshals used Redskins tickets to bust fugitives in 1985 sting - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2015/12/18/how-u-s-marshals-used-redskins-tickets-to-bust-fugitives-in-1985-sting/ <comment><USER2> > _" Leschorn eventually mailed more than 3,000 invitations to the last known > addresses of fugitives with 5,117 outstanding warrants among them. About > half of the invitations were returned because the suspects had moved."_

> _" The letter that was included with the invitation was signed by I. Michael > Detnaw. (Spell the last name backwards and say the first and middle > initials.)"_

Why would anybody in their right mind do this? I guess, there were quite a few of the non-attending ~1400 recipients of this letter who recognized this semordnilap and stayed away from the sting.

<comment><USER3> Criminals, for the most part, are dumb. The Marshalls still got a 50%-ish response rate, and cut their capture-cost down to 10%. Not bad for a first- time novel approach.</comment></comment>


In Booming Oil Field, Natural Gas Can Be Free - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-booming-oilfield-natural-gas-can-be-free-11545906601 <comment><USER2> Enough flaring that the fields show up at night via satellite, rivaling some cities:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a-mysterious- patch-of-light-shows-up-in-the-north-dakota-dark)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the more interesting crypto mining ideas I've been exposed to (and it's been quite a few...) is co-locating shipping containers with natural gas generators plus compute at oil fields flaring off natural gas.

The idea was the companies would potentially even pay you for taking it, since most states(?) will charge you some nominal "environmental" fee for flaring it.

I have no idea if anyone actually went through with the idea, but it certainly was discussed quite a bit a couple years ago.

It's an exceedingly interesting use case. Effectively free raw energy, but almost no proper connectivity. Very few use cases for such a situation, but even a 3G modem is fine for mining. I'm not certain what other uses one could come up with for on-site use of this energy...

<comment><USER4> Would this be the same flaring off that one sees on Oil Rigs? -- I wonder if @RDL would be inclined to speak on the idea of floating a data-barge comprised of the sea-based-data-tubes that Gates has been funding (Project Natik)

[https://gizmodo.com/microsofts-newest-data-center-is-a- giant...](https://gizmodo.com/microsofts-newest-data-center-is-a-giant-metal- can-at-t-1826606291)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A guy a went to trade school with, two decades ago, used to tells stories of drilling for oil in South Australia and finding nat gas, more nat gas, and nat gas again.

They'd just cap the well and move on.

</comment><comment><USER6> This situation will not last forever because new chemical plants and pipelines will be built. Typically the natural gas is processed into things like plastic pellets that are then shipped to China for assembly into goods to be shipped back. It is easy to see why reducing fossil fuel use is so hard when it acts like the juice of life for economies near the places that have it.

<comment><USER7> Not true. Flaring of natural gas will happen until it's prohibited, as it has since the inception of the industry. Building pipelines and chemical plants is not viable in most of the cases where gas is flared.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure it's a safety issue. You can flare the natural gas, or you can collect it, if it's economic to do so, but you can't just let it accumulate in the general vicinity. Boom.

<comment><USER9> Not only that, but poisonous gases (mainly H2S) are also present in natural gas, which can kill you in concentrations as low as 100 ppm, which, in percentage terms, is 0.01%. This gas is heavier than air, so it also tends to concentrate in low lying areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/4ZTV5c](https://outline.com/4ZTV5c)

</comment><comment><USER11> Given the excess pipeline capacity to Mexico from the article I'm guessing building a chemical plant in Mexico would be good thing, except it probably takes 3 - 5 years before you can bring a plant online and who knows what gas prices or demand will be like 5 years from now.

</comment><comment><USER12> Disclaimer - couldn't read more than an introductory two paragraphs - this may be addressed in text.

I wonder why they don't just start stockpiling liquefied natural gas and wait for the value to eventually rise. Even if prices don't rise sufficiently to sell it could potentially be vertically integrated to substitute for burning coal for input heat in oil refineries. Perhaps it is related to the liquification process costs plus storage.

<comment><USER13> One big problem is that the production usually starts at a high rate, then declines quite rapidly - say 20-50% per year - for the remainder of the field life.

If you design for the peak rate, the plant will be expensive and underutilized. If you design for a lower rate, the plant will economically insignificant and you still have to flare a lot of the gas initially.

<comment><USER12> Ah so even if they could make some sort of mobile liquifier (no guarantees of something sufficently big like that being energy efficient net let alone financially a good investment) it would be a logistical pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The resulting greenhouse-gas emissions are equivalent to the daily exhaust emitted by about 2.7 million cars"

why i find those seriously concerned about carbon footprint from eating meat a bit strange..</comment>


The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985) - <AUTHOR> https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/320599.320696 <comment><USER2> What I find most interesting about Apollo and DOMAIN/OS is that by 1983 (at the latest, see the Getting Started document [1]) the designers had managed to peer into the future and come up with network filename syntax that matches what would eventually become known as the scheme-relative URI:

      //node/directory/subdir/file

This is also (as far as I can tell) the rationale for a rather interesting caveat in the POSIX specifications [2] section 4.13 (Pathname Resolution):

 _> If a pathname begins with two successive <slash> characters, the first component following the leading <slash> characters may be interpreted in an implementation-defined manner, although more than two leading <slash> characters shall be treated as a single <slash> character._

[1] [http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/002348-01_Getting_Starte...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/002348-01_Getting_Started_With_Your_Domain_System_Oct83.pdf)

[2] [https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap04.html)

<comment><USER3> //node/directory was pretty common in network file systems, I remember using that on SunOS in the early 80's. I think it was called 'remote file system' on Sunos at the time

<comment><USER2> Ah, interesting, I wasn't aware that this syntax was also in use with SunOS...

<comment><USER3> I got curious - SunOS 2 introduced NFS, that was in May 1985, and I was incorrect - it used hostname:/path/... thought I remembered a colon in there somewhere

SunOS history: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS)

and NFS originally started in 1984 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_File_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_File_System)

examples [https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/5-nfs/](https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/5-nfs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to use Apollo workstations in the late 1980's (probably around 1988). I used to have a DN3000 on my desk with a massive CRT monitor.

They were pretty heavily used in my company for CAE work, designing printed circuit boards, schematics and later VLSI design. We moved from software called "Racal Redac Visula" to Mentor Graphics at some point.

They were indeed well ahead of their time. I could open a "pad" in the window manager from any machine in the network. The pad was like a infinite text shell, but it was quite elaborate. You could also open up a UNIX shell within the same environment. At the time, I don't think there were many other graphics-rich workstations which were as comprehensive and focussed on computer-aided engineering.

Apollo was acquired by HP after I stopped using them, and ultimately Mentor Graphics software was likely ported to other systems like commodity PC's and Sun Workstations.

<comment><USER5> The Unix flavor wars were in progress, so as a response they had another interesting innovation, which was a complete set of executables for each different flavor, including I think Domain, BSD, and SysV variants.

Each flavor had some bin directories with a text oriented symlink like /usr/$OS_FLAVOR/bin (I forget the path) but the interesting thing is that symbolic links were always resolved per process, every access, using the environment.

Oh and they also were waging the windowing wars at the time, so they tried to support all of X10 and maybe X11, as well as that Pad arrangement.

<comment><USER6> These were officially called "variant" links. Within Apollo R&D they were known as "deviant" links. They got the idea from Pyramid.

Apollo's downfall was that they clung to their proprietary OS long after everyone else had switched to Unix. They kept putting more lipstick (compatibility layers) on the pig (Domain/OS) but it wasn't enough. To be fair, at the time Apollo was founded commercial Unix wasn't possible because of licensing issues. By the time Sun was founded just a couple years later Unix was the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember using DOMAIN/OS computers at university in 1990, by then it had been acquired by HP. The biggest difference from Unix I first ran into was that you couldn't always kill processes with kill -9, sometimes you had to "Blast" the process if it was waiting / hung on a network lock.

<comment><USER8> Seems similar to having zombies when doing that under Linux and the BSDs.

<comment><USER7> A zombie process is a process that has exit()ed but hasn't been reaped (wait(), et al) by its parent yet; a different mechanic that has to do with keeping the child's exit status and process statistics due to wait() being asynchronous, not to do with network locks.

<comment><USER8> From an endusers point of view(who couldn't care less about the internals), _killdashnining_ anything which had open files over NFS resulted in _Z_ in ps, pstree, top, htop etc. in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Windows file sharing (and by extension Samba) came from Apollo. It's little known:

[https://www.oocities.org/zuhair_ali/linux/samba.html](https://www.oocities.org/zuhair_ali/linux/samba.html)

<comment><USER10> A nit to pick - MSRPC came from Apollo RPC, but SMB came from IBM: [http://ubiqx.org/cifs/SMB.html](http://ubiqx.org/cifs/SMB.html)

<comment><USER9> Another little tidbit which is not much known:

 _Furthermore, I didn 't find out that Samba inter-operated at all with any version of DOS or Windows until nearly two years after I did that first release. The earliest versions of Samba were aimed at being compatible with clients for the Digital Equipment Corporation "Pathworks" product suite, which was an early implementation of the SMB protocol that was quite popular at the time, and that ran on Ultrix and VMS systems. My initial motivation was to implement the same protocol on SunOS, so that I could use my desktop system to access the departmental Unix server._ \-- Andrew Tridgell

(Weird - my hospital also has those IBM Type-1 token ring jacks.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Domain/OS on Apollo DN3500 software emulator (a little fiddly to set up): [http://mess.redump.net/howto/apollo](http://mess.redump.net/howto/apollo)</comment>


The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US - <AUTHOR> http://factsandotherfairytales.com/2013/01/04/the-least-stressful-job-for-2013-a-real-look-at-being-a-professor-in-the-us/

<comment><USER2> The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-).

CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job."

Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard."

Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world.

Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-).

In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained- to-broken for several structural reasons:

1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to another city.

2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants, participation in "centers", that are all hard to move).

3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit"

4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI.

5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D. defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time.

6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot after all."

7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M (see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally) evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then.

[1] My calculation:

1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr

2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full salary and doing no other work

3) assume $100k/yr salary

4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k you'd make consulting

5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream

6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M, but obviously this depends on interest rates

<comment><USER3> > Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have > unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, > sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should > you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just > want to, you know, live life and see the world.

In many (US) universities though, _perish or die_ is still a very valid concern, _even_ when tenured. You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you _can_ be fired, even from tenure. Futhermore, universities thus value a number of small articles more than a book, because you are supposed to publish continuously all over the place. While you write a book, chances are you don't have time to deal with additional articles (on top of your other obligations).

Add on top of that all the administrative tasks in the department, faculty, university etc. and even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.

<comment><USER4> I don't get the big deal about publish or perish. Isn't that a core part of the job?

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2495](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2495)

<comment><USER3> I'd disagree both with you and the comic.

The problem with _publish or perish_ is that it leads to people gaming the system. If pay rises (or employment) solely hinge on the amount of (however graded) publications you have achieved, this leads to people essentually using parts of books they are writing as articles etc. This in turn leads to a doubling of information, inconsistencies etc, alongside the fact that not every topic can be adequately dealt with in a journal article.

The system _actively punishes_ big projects and thoughts in favour of small, more easily digestible (and thus publishable) projects. If a university only looks at the number of publications and not _at their nature_ , they shift from quality to quantity, which in turn is bad, because it fundamentally undermines the purpose of academia.

edit: I just saw _dps also linked to the gamification bit, but the rest holds true nonetheless (and I _do_ agree with him)

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying that publish or perish is an optimal solution, just that there's nothing special about it. Plenty of people have "file your TPS reports with cover-sheets or perish", but there's not special jargon for it.

<comment><USER3> _Publish or perish_ is _not_ just about _doing_ your job, rather it limits you in how to do your job, and that limitation runs counter to what your job often requires.

It's not so much "publish" in itself that's the problem[1], it's how publishing is defined and handled, and that a certain form of publishing is seen as right to the detriment of any other form of published material, whereas the preferred method is often not the best method for a given project.

[1]: though it certainly is a big part of the overall problem of uniting teaching, research _and_ publishing

<comment><USER5> And I think the point that zimbu668 is making, is that such situations are still not unique to academia. Perverse or misaligned incentives are the norm in quite a few industries.

For example, sales guys are compensated based on sticker price, not profit margin, which means that the guy who sells $2MM of work for $1MM (i.e. at a loss) gets more commission than the guy who sells $0.5MM worth of work for $0.75MM. For another example, grading programmers by lines of code... 'nuf said ;). Another totally ubiquitous example: grading office workers by ass-in- seat time rather than value produced. Another also ubiquitous example: Departments in a company encouraged to spend as much money as they can at the end of the quarter, so their next budget doesn't get cut.

I could go on, but I'll stop here. The point is, even if "publish or perish" refers to misaligned incentives, that still means it's basically the same as 90% of other jobs out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm related to a few professors, and they largely carry massive chips on their shoulder about this. For example:

 _And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the 'real world' — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and 'become' a pundit or consultant later in our careers we're stuck because Americans are scared of smart people._

is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.

(Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure- track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you going to grad school?")

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry but this is a very ignorant assessment. I spent 5 years doing research in academia and none of the professors on our team had as easy of a work life as 99% of the software developers I have worked with do. I am in no way criticizing developers, being a professor is just damn hard and very stressful in comparison.

The demands of the sink or swim nature of academia, the need to be constantly seeking grants, teaching classes, participating in running the department and being an active member of their research area (organizing conferences, editing journals, etc.) are enormous. A good academic is expected to do all these things and do them well.

I grad school I was mostly a night person and so would frequently be at school around midnight. So would several professors on our team, except they would also be there at 8:30 in the morning every day, and work at home on the weekends. In the 7 years I have been a developer I have never seen a workplace that puts as much demands on it's employees. Not even close.

<comment><USER8> Your comment doesn't strike me as being in tension with patio11's. Rather, it seems to underscore his point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was never in academia, but I was a researcher (at NASA) so I played the publishing game. And if you look at my record, I was relatively good at it. Not only was my publications list fairly long, but my work was also pretty widely referenced. But since my career no longer depends on it, I am now free to say that I credit my success almost entirely to gaming the system. This is not to say that I didn't do good work (I think I did), but there was virtually no correlation between what I thought was quality work and what I actually got rewarded for. The vast majority of my publications were minor tweaks on previous work that were specifically engineered to get past the program committees of key conferences. My best work (by my own quality metric) either went unnoticed, or could not get accepted for publication at all. When it got to the point where I was faced with a very stark choice between continuing to produce bullshit and get rewarded for it, or to do what I thought was good work and eventually get fired, I quit.

<comment><USER10> Industry isn't so different. My salary is determined by 2 days of interviews and negotiations, and only slightly perturbed by my performance over the next several years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _"loads of us finish our Ph.D.'s (which is what you have to have to be a 'regular' professor) with between $75,000 and $160,000 in debt"_

The link/citation for this statement never mentions 75,000 or 160,000. In fact it says:

 _"According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), individuals earning research doctorates in academic year 2009-10 did so owing over $20,400 on average in education-related debt, of which about $14,100 on average was graduate debt and about $6,400 on average was undergraduate debt"_

Granted this NSF data is limited to research doctorates but it certainly does not support the statement that "loads of us" have 75k to 160k of debt. Moreover the NSF data says that 52% of the research doctorate population graduated with no debt.

</comment><comment><USER12> Pre-tenure, it all boils down to just being above average on 3 numbers:

* how many journal articles have you published

* how much grant money are you bringing in

* what is the average rating you get from students

Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers. Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: <http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf> [http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1...](http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1105)

And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can count: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms> I've seen blog posts with more impact than average journal articles.

Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school. The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well- trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project - it goes to the university's administrative overhead.

<comment><USER13> _Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning:_

Well... duh? Obviously students are going to give higher ratings to professors whose courses seem easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.

<comment><USER15> > It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can > take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.

<comment><USER14> yea, I never said that. I was just describing what the vacations are. If you think that they don't do research you are partially right because of a lot them don't do it after their permanent status.

<comment><USER15> Do Professors really have three months of vacation in Canada? I assumed you meant 3 months without classes (which is totally different from vacation). I find it hard to believe that they would get 3 months of vacation.

I am from Austria, and here and in some other European countries typically one has about 5 weeks of vacation per year, so 3 months sounds like a lot. How many weeks of vacation do other people in Canada have, for comparison?

<comment><USER14> You are required to give 4 classes a year. If you give 2 in the Autumn and 2 in the winter you have your summer free.

<comment><USER15> Interesting. That seems to be quite different from any other system I've encountered so far. Hereabouts being a professor is an all year job (with usual vacation times), with the two-fold task of doing research as well as doing teaching.

The time periods in which there are no classes are usually used by professors to focus more on their research and take their vacations (5 weeks per year like everyone else). Similarly, these time periods are not strictly holidays for students, with many students taking exams.

I've seen a few professors simply neglect their research and take the whole time period where they don't have classes as "vacation", but this seems to be limited to a few older professors who are still state employed, basically untouchable and seem to have lost their motivation over the years. They usually seem to not do much research at all anymore, but are often willing to pick up additional teaching duties to ease the load on their colleagues.

Most people however do actually work on their research in this time period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doubtless this poll is capturing the essence of something interesting, but when I look at that list of professions, a host of statistical moderators come to mind. I claim this list isn't measuring what they think it is measuring.

I think the reason "professor" ranks first is that the compensation seems to be proportional to the responsibility, whereas most other jobs appear to under-compensate. People are sensitive to this, but they misattribute it as "lower stress."

Well, the job itself (professor) is really hard, but the lifestyle (everything outside work) is really great. It's a great damn job. That's different from being "stressful."

Where does the stress come from? Well, I bet the HN community knows professors better than most, but between publication and grant writing, there's a ton of professional evaluation that directly impacts your quality of life. Your personal and private lives will blend much more than in other professions, and being rejected professionally (i.e. being denied a major grant) will mess with your personal life as well.

There's no free lunch here.

</comment><comment><USER17> A slightly tangential observation: I've had the good fortune to meet and work with people in all walks of life. Oddly, I've found the amount of stress they feel at work is hugely related to the type of personality they have.

I'm not discounting external factors: surely those bomb disposal guys have it tough. But some folks just seem naturally sunny and light-spirited, while others seem to be on the verge of a monstrous breakdown. I've seen people who were stressed who were moved from a stressful situation to a much less stressful situation stay just as stressed as before. Perhaps, like weight, there is a "set point" for the amount of discomfort you feel in your job, and over time you can train yourself to become more and more stressed, regardless of the externalities?

Beats me. Interesting subject, though. Definitely falls in the nature versus nurture arena.

<comment><USER18> Good point. I tend to operate under a certain level of self imposed stress plus whatever actual stress there is with the job. Not monstrous breakdown type stress, but definitely a heightened sense of urgency most of the time. Personally, my self imposed stress comes from my desire to make things perfect and my fear of failure regardless of the job at hand. I attributed most of my personal stress to nurture, and the lack of a family to fall back on should I fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Academia's the biggest fucking scam there is. Look at the prize. Around age 35-40, if you work 80-hour weeks and don't make any mistakes, the prize is _getting a job that you can't be fired from_. Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living.

It's billed as "the life of the mind", but the reality is that a lot of the work is mindnumbingly boring: writing grant applications, grading papers, attending committees. Every industry has some boring work and vicious politics, but most industries are honest about it. In software, having been fired once because of political bullshit is par for the course. Yep, that happens. In academia, getting shot down for tenure is this huge mark of shame.

Finally, the academic industry has a _huge_ underclass of people who spend lots of time between adjunct gigs on teaching work that is viewed as a commodity and paid extremely poorly.

I'm sorry, but this industry has sold out a generation and a half, while tuitions have shot toward the moon, and that's fucking inexcusable. University leadership: stop building fucking ziggurats and colossuses and get fund some goddamn research and teaching. In other words, do your job.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure I agree with this bit:

 _Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living._

In this realm, I really don't think software, finance and academia are all that different. You go where the work is, and on average, the best you can do is to nicely secure a comfortable, upper-middle class position for yourself with plenty of job security.

You're right that being _lucky_ enough to get a tenured position, but "applying that luck" to software or finance, can make you a millionaire. Problem is, that kind of luck is not a known probability on which we can set rational expectations. If I go work 80 hours/week at a software start-up, I can't _expect_ even a 3% chance of becoming a millionaire. It's just _not_ a random process with a set probability distribution. So you can't "apply your luck" to software _instead_ of academia, because we're talking about two different kinds of luck.

<comment><USER19> This is a good point. The types of people who thrive in one environment are not necessarily going to do well in another.

My issue with academia is that it has minimal job risk but high career risk. So, while it's rare that someone actually gets fired (I've seen 9th-year grad students lose funding; I guess that counts) the risk of ending up in a ruined career is high. On the other hand, in software and finance getting fired is practically a rite of passage-- happens to everyone, especially ambitious overperformers-- and it's painful but it doesn't end your career.

On the other hand, one thing academia has going for it is career coherency. In industry, you serve a boss and have to make it look like you value his political aspirations over your own career development. In academia, your job _is_ to invest in yourself-- to publish and develop a reputation, to attend conferences, to improve your skills. So that's one thing that's nice about it.

<comment><USER13> Ok, so here's the question: what options could I have in software, where I can actually have a career and get comfortable and eventually even raise some kids, that don't involve me in awful levels of politics/deception (particularly regarding my own "career coherency", as you put it), and don't bore me to death?

Because I've programmed for a hobby since age 11, and I've programmed a few times "for reals" in actual paid work, and while I've every bit of _respect_ for the craft of programming, merely doing that every day under industrial production conditions drives me a little out of my mind.

I won't finish my research-track MSc for a while, so I don't have to _definitely choose industry or academia_ for a while. Still, I'm back doing this because I found that without a higher degree or industrial experience in such, you really can't get into the cooler, higher-level jobs in "the real world" either. If you get out of school and code for a living, you will eventually find yourself locked out of the deep wizardry of computing (systems programming, programming languages, networking protocols, security, etc.)... unless you find _just_ the right company willing to take a chance on you.

It's rather frustrating.

<comment><USER19> Yes, getting the Master's degree is a good call, for the reasons you mentioned. PhD bigotry is pretty severe in a lot of places.

CS academia is less scammy than other disciplines, because of the high-quality exit options. You're not doing wrong by going for the MSc. That's a good call.

Regarding being "locked out", I think the new rules are:

* network aggressively at all times. When you join a big company, network _internally_ so you can get a decent transfer after 6+ months. You won't get hired on to the ML project at the front door. Nor will you get it through official channels. Network aggressively and find someone who will request you.

* keep learning. Eventually, you'll stand out as the guy who's 30+ and keeping abreast of cutting-edge software trends, and that has its own kind of impressiveness.

It's harder than it should be to get interesting work, because the world is run by idiots, so there isn't much tolerance for interesting stuff. I'd love to see that change, but for the mean time, you just have to figure out how to play the world that is. Stealing an education from work is usually a good idea (don't consider it "deception"; honest people mouth off and get fired.) Keep Learning and Carry On.

<comment><USER13> Well, bizarrely, my internship hunt for this summer is actually going pretty well. Got about 4 companies I'm interviewing with at this point, one of which is The One that I absolutely want to work for. Not as a Final Career Destination or anything, but I think they do some of the best and most interesting work on Earth, so I'm very interesting in seeing how they've built a _business_ out of the stuff.

 _CS academia is less scammy than other disciplines, because of the high- quality exit options. You're not doing wrong by going for the MSc. That's a good call._

Actually, in this case I think it's a good idea because even the coursework here seems very devoted to _building artifacts_. This semester's project in my Coursework Course is building a static analyzer for LLVM IR of C code. Next semester I'm going to try to take Advanced Operating Systems, in which project groups build a small OS from the ground up.

These aren't exactly start-ups, but they're the kind of coursework that generates project code which you can throw on Bitbucket and use as proof not only that You Can Code but that You Can Do Advanced/High-Level Work.

Surprisingly, my undergrad institution wasn't very good at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My adviser is rather lucky: he commutes to Technion via carpool, which puts a strong limit on the amount of time he _can_ spend in the physical office everyday. Of course, he works plenty from home, but physical office-time limits things like committee drag and teaching load. And we get TA's here.

</comment><comment><USER20> Plus you have to add the 8-10 hours a week of complaining about all the sacrifices you're making to be a professor. That can really add up.

<comment><USER7> HN needs down votes for crap like this.

<comment><USER21> HN has downvotes (and the post you refer to did get downvoted) but you don't get access to that feature until you have a certain level of karma.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook offers solution to end drunken posts - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30432493

<comment><USER2> I was expecting something like Google's Mail Goggles. This sounds pretty unreliable. (Though I suspect Mail Goggles is too.)</comment>