500 Million Android devices activated globally - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/110023707389740934545/posts/R5YdRRyeTHM

<comment><USER2> Probably more than that, I would imagine there are plenty of Android devices that don't phone home. (Kindle Fire, for instance)

</comment><comment><USER3> Now this is really perfect timing to steal attention from the upcoming Apple press event. One might wonder if the time of the announcement is just accidental.

<comment><USER4> the announcement was last week at a motorola press event, so ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there any data on how many of those users spend money on apps?

<comment><USER6> Almost certainly substantially less than iOS users, which I suppose is the point you were going for, but I think that whole rabbit hole is a red herring.

The model of "sell apps to people for money" no longer works. We've depleted that gold mine (or vespene geyser, if you will). The only people who are having any fun on mobiles right now are services with mobile portals (think Yelp, AirBnb, eBay, etc) and sketchier-than-not "social gaming" apps.

<comment><USER7> Citation needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Statistics like this are not very meaningful. The only reason there are so many Android devices globally is because Google licenses the OS to crappy Asian handset makers.

I mean, it's not like 500 million people are using a high-quality device like Galaxy S3.

<comment><USER9> _it's not like 500 million people are using a high-quality device like Galaxy S3._

Sure, they don't have the latest greatest shiny, but so what? Its still market penetration, and unlike people just chasing shiny toys, they're looking for tools. And that's what they now have, a powerful tool that almost entirely everything the s3 does.

It doesn't have the most powerful graphics, and that userbase might mean targeting a lower API level. Thats about it.

I really don't see where you're going with that statement.

<comment><USER8> >>I really don't see where you're going with that statement.

I thought my statement was pretty simple. If there are two operating systems, and one is sold exclusively with a high-quality device, and the other is sold very cheaply with shitty phones, then when the latter's manufacturer says "we have 500 million devices running our OS" everyone is going to go "well, duh!"

<comment><USER10> That is 500 million potential users who would use google for search, use picasa to upload their photos or even Use Google Drive to store their data and Use Google+ for networking.

The mobile internet is well developed and affordable to even common man in most of the Asian countries.

And for a service like Google+, the it makes sense to have more people on the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what Google plans to do once, in a year's time or so, Android's userbase begins to slow, just as Facebook's has.

<comment><USER12> Well there's a key difference; Google doesn't exactly _need_ continued super- rapid user growth on Android. The reason slowing growth is a problem for Facebook is that it's the only way they could justify their valuation (or more importantly, grow their company), other than better monetization of users, which is their other Big Challenge.

Also, the hypergrowth of Android is essentially driven just by the hypergrowth of mobile devices (since it's the most accessible OS for manufacturers and thus consumers across the world). The point of Android for Google was to foster this rapid growth of smartphone adoption without being under the thumb of a single vendor (especially one as capricious and overbearing as Apple). If it ever gets to the point that the world is saturated with smartphones, Google probably won't care that Android isn't the majority of that growth anymore.</comment></comment>


Pagination Alternatives - <AUTHOR> http://justinfrench.com/notebook/pagination-alternatives

<comment><USER2> I finally just got a client to drop the idea of drop-downs beside the search bar. I wonder if they will got for a 'Load More" button instead of pagination.

Why are some people stuck in 2002?</comment>


Ask HN: Where to relocate business in Europe from UK - <AUTHOR> I'm a UK citizen and software developer. I incorporated a UK company in 2013. My SaaS business is small but reasonably successful. We're a team of 4 based in London. We turnover ~$40,000 a month. I'm the sole owner, we do not have investors or debt.
We've been thinking about relocating to Europe for a while now, and have decided it's probably time to take advantage of this opportunity before our freedom to live and work in the EU ends in March 2019 (earliest).
We'd also like to embark on a new, more ambitious project (probably also SaaS), preferably bootstrapped.
Our main considerations are: - We would like to move somewhere with a nice developer community (with a view to hiring, collaborating and socialising with other developers) - My wife and I would prefer to move somewhere comfortable, ideally where it's not too difficult to get by with English - Any incentives for young/small companies and entrepreneurs to move there would also be valuable - I'm open to taking external investment if it makes sense. Access to investors would be nice (but not critical)
Currently Amsterdam and Berlin top our list.
My question: which European city best fits our criteria? Also, based on our situation, are there any other considerations we should factor into our decision?
Any advice would be hugely appreciated
(I'd also appreciate avoiding any discussion re: pros/cons of Brexit)
Thank you! <comment><USER2> I would consider Dublin. Besides the language advantage it has lower taxes.</comment>


Mathematica on Amazon EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/11/mathematica-on-amazon-ec2.html

<comment><USER2> Still pretty much vapourware. "November 5, 2008--Wolfram Research announced an initiative today to develop a cloud computing service for users of their flagship technical computing software, Mathematica."

(Having said that, I'd expect Wolfram to do this sort of thing pretty well. Mathematica does stuff at a high enough level that automatic parallelization at least has a chance, and they've already got some of that for SMP systems in Mathematica 7. It'll probably need some tuning to make it effective in a cloud-computing context, where the communication overheads are higher.)

Also not Amazon-specific. "Nimbis Services will enable the Mathematica cloud service to access many diverse HPC systems, including TOP500 supercomputers and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud."

(Quotations are from the Wolfram announcement linked from the AWS article: <http://www.wolfram.com/news/cloudcomputing.html> .)</comment>


IYO, what is the best image viewer for Windows 10? - <AUTHOR> I need these three necessities in an image viewer: 1. Resize 2. Crop and 3. Save to various file types<p>Thank you! <comment><USER2> I recommend KrojamSoftPhotoViewerPro. It's fast and user-friendly.</comment>


Ghidra Decompiler Analysis Engine - <AUTHOR> https://ghidra-decompiler-docs.netlify.com/ <comment><USER2> It looks like they managed to finally get the source code released 2 weeks ago.

[https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra](https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra)

I'm curious as to what prevented them from doing that on day one. Any legal issues presumably would have been worked out prior to the announcement. I guess timelines didn't line up :)

<comment><USER3> Code arrived on this repo just 4 days ago. Previously, part of the code was released alongside the binary in a tarball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazing. Just what I needed today, when I was writing OpenRisc processor definition for sleigh. :)

<comment><USER5> What's sleigh?

<comment><USER6> Sleigh is the processor specification tool for Ghidra. He's making it so that Ghidra can work with OpenRISC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is the experience with Ghidra so far? Does anyone think a true free IDA Pro replacement finally come? I did some reverse engineering for ARM devices last year, and IDA Pro seemed like the only option but it costs around $1000.

<comment><USER8> I regularly look at ARM software and firmware. There are certain things that IDA does better, like FLIRT analysis, which I've missed since switching to Ghidra.

Ghidra also currently lacks support for certain ARM instruction decodings so you can get odd looking disassembly. That isn't to say you can't add it.

Ghidra has been very nice for reversing C++ code. After filling in most of the members for an object field it makes reversing other subroutines that use the defined type simpler, IMO.

<comment><USER7> Thx for your opinion. What about automatic ARM-Thumb swap on jump instructions? I tried Radare 2 before and it was so hard to work with ARM firmware. If Ghidra supports a proper ARM-Thumb switch, it sounds like a greate alternative to IDA for me.

<comment><USER8> I don't normally see ARM with thumb code so I couldn't tell you. I am fairly certain it is supported but to what degree I am uncertain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Prev HN thread (recent): [https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/ghidra/](https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/ghidra/)

<comment><USER10> I think [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19315273](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19315273) is what you were looking for

<comment><USER11> The sources documented in the original post here (Decompiler Analysis Engine, written in C++) weren't openly published before just 3-4 days ago. The post that was about that event, 3 days ago, got only 7 comments. So HN mostly missed that event until now.

The sources published earlier were the Java sources, and the engine documented here was only in the binary form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If Ghidra was really good, they wouldn't have had to release the source to it. ;)

<comment><USER13> It's Java, so it's not all that hard to reverse engineer.

<comment><USER14> The decompiler is in c++.

<comment><USER2> I believe this has now been released.

[https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/tree/master...](https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/tree/master/Ghidra/Features/Decompiler/src/decompile/cpp)

<comment><USER14> Yep!

That's why I stated the language so confidently ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Mods: why is every story about a major news event getting flagged? - <AUTHOR> I've seen 5 different stories about the fact of the Russian ambassador being shot dead get flagged off HN in the last hour despite many upvotes. If this isn't considered suitable for HN, then a little guidance to that effect would be welcome. <comment><USER2> HN Guidelines [1]:

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic._

This assassination falls squarely within politics and crime, and it's definitely something that'd get covered on TV news (and is). Clearly, some people felt that for these reasons, it's off-topic, and likely because it would be exceedingly difficult for such a story's HN comments comments to not pivot back to politics, geopolitical speculation, and the like. While stories like this have trended on occasion, there's not much substance here. While the event may or may not turn out to be relevant for all of us on a world sphere, it's more likely than not to be off-topic for this particular forum.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> The last NYT story I saw had ~20 upvotes, suggesting it is in fact of interest to hackers. I've been here about 7x longer than you, I don't need you to tell me what the HN guidelines say. Non-tech stories of global significance are frequently discussed here and always have been.

<comment><USER3> > I don't need you to tell me what the HN guidelines say.

And yet three people posted a link to the guidelines, probably in response to "If this isn't considered suitable for HN, then a little guidance to that effect would be welcome."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a mod, but the rules are pretty clear on this

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Also, if you want an answer from the mods please e-mail them:

 _Please don 't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to email@example.com. _

EDIT: and here is @dang calling this explicitly OT: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13213437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13213437)

</comment><comment><USER5> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), 2nd paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some things don't change Anigbrowl.

[http://imgur.com/a/sj98U](http://imgur.com/a/sj98U)

I'll be in the HNchat.</comment>


Show HN: Airsite – a mobile app for building simple websites - <AUTHOR> https://airsite.co <comment><USER2> Any service that claims to be "free" and doesn't have a very obvious business model gets me very suspicious. I usually start reading the service's privacy policy.

This website's "Privacy Policy" states:

> We collect [personal information] by fair and lawful means, with your > knowledge and consent. We also let you know why we're collecting it and how > it will be used.

Yet personal data is collected through Google Analytics without being mentioned anywhere and without my consent. The policy is also the linked privacy policy for the Android and iOS app. It doesn't let the reader know why personal information is collected and how it's used, as it claims. Is that different in the actual apps? Also, what data does the website and the app collect?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely need to improve Privacy Policy. I've just used some random privacy policy generator a few months ago when it was just a random side project.

There is a paid PRO plan in the app. It's pretty standard for site builders - pay for custom domains and premium blocks. I'll add this info to the website.

Thank you for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work!

Did you build airsite.co on Airsite?

Is there also a web version? I like the idea of quick edits on a phone but am having a hard time seeing building a whole site only on a phone.

I am thinking through a similar problem with Webase [1] which is a platform for building apps without coding. I have make it work ok on a phone, but I think most people will be more comfortable on a computer when using the tool.

Best of luck to you!

[1] [https://www.webase.com](https://www.webase.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I actually did build the [https://airsite.co](https://airsite.co) home page with the Airsite app (meta! :)

I'm still debating if I should have a bare bones landing page with just 2 download app buttons or show off the possibilities of the editor more.

I would probably add a web version at some point. Desktop is definitely more convenient for "building a website" type of work. I guess many people who want to build something on mobile now, just don't have access to desktop and therefore have to do it on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! I've been hacking on Airsite for the past few months. It started as a side project, but now I'm kind of full time on it.

The goal is to build something that's friendly and intuitive for someone who makes their first website. But also powerful and flexible enough for power users who can create pretty much anything they want. I made 3 iterations of the editor and the current one is pretty close to flexbox layout.

I would really appreciate any feedback! You can email me at email@example.com tweet @pyankoff or join the discussion on Product Hunt - [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/airsite](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/airsite)

<comment><USER4> Hi! Nice work. Genuine question, how do you plan to differentiate from the countless other non-coding website builders out there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thank you!

Great question, I don't think I realized how many website builders there are before I started working on Airsite :D Just on Product Hunt: there is another one launching today, and one yesterday.

I think the main differentiator now is that it's mobile-first, there are not that many of those and even fewer good ones.

The problem with the mobile focus is that building a website is kind of too complex of a task for mobile. Not having a mouse/keyboard and having all your controls on the same small mobile screen makes everything so much harder.

So, to summarize, I'm differentiating by focusing on mobile, but there are some trade-offs in that focus that make it harder to build a good product. I hope not impossible. I guess we'll see :)

<comment><USER5> FYI on Firefox mobile (preview and stable) your site overflows horizontally by a few hundred px. Also your testimonials made me laugh and admire your chutzpah, which may not be the effect you're going for :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yeah, definitely not the effect I was going for :) They are real though, but I see what you mean, lots of room for improvement.

Thanks for the note, fixing Firefox!

<comment><USER5> Your site looks cool, I've just never seen that kind of testimonials attributed to random ppl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Examples have some extra scrollbars on Firefox, is that intentional?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, thanks for letting me know. Will fix!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Getting back to the tech industry after a three-year break - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
This is going to be long, but please stick with me here..
My wife came to the US to do her MS in EE and graduated in 2011. After graduating, she started working at a company in the Bay Area, which wasn't e-verified at the time, meaning that she could only work for 1 year on her student visa using OPT. To add to that, they botched her H-1B application, resulting in her employment with them terminating when OPT ended, which was by the end of 2012.
As a result, she was forced to go back to being a student for a year or so, after which we got married and she came back to the US on an H-4 visa. Thanks to the new H-4 EAD rule that was passed in 2015, she was able to obtain an EAD in September via my H-1B visa.
Now, she is legally allowed to work for any employer, but she just hasn't been able to get any calls from any company that she's applied to so far (both big companies and startups). All in all, she's probably applied to 100+ companies over the last 6 months, but she hasn't received a single call back.
Though she has an EE background through her MS, her work experience was in C++ and Matlab development, and she's focused on sharpening her Java and Python development skills over the past year or two. She's mainly been applying to Java and/or Python development positions, or just SW Developer positions in general.
Recently, there was an initiative by Braintree (http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=Job&j=owj61fwG&s=PPpage) that fit her profile to a T, but she received a reject from them as well.
At this point, we're willing to try anything. Do you have any clues about why it is this hard to find a job? Is it the 3 year break? Her MS is from a decent school, she's done several research projects and has a year of experience in the industry.. She also has a profile at CodeEval, and plans to continue solving problems there and keep coding every day.
Any advice and/or help will be sincerely appreciated. <comment><USER2> _All in all, she's probably applied to 100+ companies over the last 6 months, but she hasn't received a single call back._

Your wife should consider sending in an unsolicited resume to be a no-op and, instead, start meeting people who either a) are hiring managers or b) can refer her to hiring managers.

Her goal in achieving connection with the hiring manager is to secure a coffee date or other informal conversation. Her goal for this conversation is qualifying the company, impressing the hiring manager, and convincing the hiring manager to either invite her formal application or respond positively when she suggests moving to a formal application.

This is one of the huge knowledge gaps in the engineering community regarding getting jobs. Unsolicited applications are not how most people get hired. This is particularly true of smaller employers.

<comment><USER3> Did you write your Twitter posts before, or after, this comment? :)

You say this so succinctly there. I used to think it was all about the resume. It's actually one of the least effective ways to apply for work.

One other thing to consider doing... offer to work for free (or reduced pay, where laws prohibit free work) for a short period of time. It lets them see what you can do, and removes much of the risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just my statistics:

I don't have a valid working visa in the US and have been applying almost exclusively to American companies.

My "interview" rate is 10%. 100% if it's with people I know, even if I'm completely unqualified.

My "rejection" rate is around 50%, within 2 weeks. I assume the rest won't say anything if they reject.

General job sites (the ones where you can also apply to be a carpenter, etc) are a waste of time. They probably get so many resumes they end up tossing half of them.

Stack Overflow Careers gave me an awesome ~30% of interviews. As in I applied 6 jobs and 2 interviewed. Both of them were jobs I didn't fully qualify for.

Generally, direct emails gave me a 100% (5/5) response rate. An email, like firstname.lastname@example.com, not a form. Email lets me mention in subject line that I used to have a startup, so I stood out. Most of them rejected on lack of visa though.

I do spend ~10 minutes per cover letter. I really dig deep, like an investor would. I convince myself that I'm doing the company a favor by joining before writing the letter.

In the end, you just have to convince one company. If you have a lead, immediately latch to it... do research on the company, the interviewer, and write questions.

There's a certain bar you have to cross to convince people to hire. It's better to optimize for a few companies than to try to reach out to as many as possible. If you feel unworthy, then optimize for the lower tier companies who have lower standards.

<comment><USER2> _If you feel unworthy_

Don't. Feel. Unworthy. Any person capable of programming their way out of a paper bag is someone every hiring manager in the Bay Area urgently wants to meet right now. If you're hirable at their firm that's fantastic, if not they'll chalk it up to "I now know one more engineer who I can keep tabs on over the course of the next few years and potentially place in the future."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here are my strategy that I use for applying and getting hired:

1\. Do not apply 100+ companies. Select max 3-5 of them. And research them. Get to know people working there. What are their problems? What tools are they using? What meetups can I meet them? Are they active on some online community? Get in touch with people there. Just talk and show interest in them. It always good to know the company before applying and dropping it, if it's not a great match you can drop it. (Just like dating, get to know them before you marry them.)

2\. Fine-tune that resume. I didn't see your wife resume but I am sure it could be improved. Here are some very fine tips : [http://www.slideshare.net/perlcareers/how-to-write-a- develop...](http://www.slideshare.net/perlcareers/how-to-write-a-developer- cvrsum-that-will-get-you-hired)

3\. Build some portfolio. Anything is fine. Really. Just showcase that she understands/can write code. She can join on some open source community or just build something on her own. Better the first one, because she can be mentored and demonstrate teamwork.

4\. Blog about it, the learning experience. This about as much about showcasing work as communication. If she can communicate effectively that counts as much as programming. (Actually more if she really great communicator.) Don't be shy on this.

5\. Repeat from step one.

And one last thing. It is not just about what your wife wants, please be considerate about the company needs too. I know a lot of company that would be good for me, but for the company I would be just a drag. That's how it is.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does she have a github account with some examples of personal projects she works on? Does she go to networking events or meetups to expand her professional network, or could she maybe contact previous colleagues to ask for tips on upcoming openings?

I'm not in the states, so I don't know what the employment environment is like on the ground, but from what I know in general getting a job depends on who you know and what others know about you. In other words; getting employed via the traditional vanilla job application route is going to be tough. Especially for immigrants.

She needs to go out and meet people, work her personal network, and have some cool and interesting projects to hook people's attention with.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're in the Bay Area, you might try meet-ups. There's an quite a few of them in SF [1] and most of them are hosted by companies trying to hire or are explicitly hiring events [2]. Even if the host isn't hiring, you'll find companies that are hiring by talking to people. Most will either be hiring managers or people willing to receive a referral bonus. Worst case scenario, it's free food and some interesting talks about technical subjects.

Also, make sure your online reputation looks good. LinkedIn (make sure to enumerate skills) and Github are probably the two that get me the most recruiter touches.

Best of luck!

[1] [http://www.meetup.com/find/events/?allMeetups=false&keywords...](http://www.meetup.com/find/events/?allMeetups=false&keywords=java&radius=5&userFreeform=San+Francisco%2C+CA&mcId=z94101&mcName=San+Francisco%2C+CA) [2] [http://www.meetup.com/software/events/224734607/](http://www.meetup.com/software/events/224734607/)

<comment><USER8> > If you're in the Bay Area, you might try meet-ups.

Networking is solid advice! It's also hard to do and time consuming. Yet it often yields the best results. In addition to meetups- look for applicable conferences, workshops, trade events, etc...

It's true that most resumes (especially unsolicited ones) are completely ignored these days. Here's a good read with unconventional advice on why people buy ( this applies to hiring people) > [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75890.Little_Red_Book_of_...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75890.Little_Red_Book_of_Selling)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Folks, thanks a lot for all your comments. Let me try to respond to some questions that were raised:

She has a LinkedIn profile, with relevant skills highlighted.

She is not active on Github yet - that will be her focus now. She was focusing on sites like HackerRank and CodeEval so far.

If she finishes any projects, we will definitely post it to HN for feedback.

We are trying to find more "back to work" sort of programs - a lot of banks seem to have them, but the cutoff date for applications seemed to be the end of last year.

We do have friends working in the industry, but most are at large companies where it's hard to bypass HR and go to the team required, or companies where hiring is currently frozen, and so on..

We are going to try to find Hiring Managers to talk to or have a coffee with - if any of you guys are looking to hire an highly competent Python/Java programmer down on her luck, or would just like to talk, she'd love to talk to you over coffee anywhere in the Bay Area. Please send me an email at (username) at gmail if you'd like to talk.

It's great to see the support and advice from everyone here. Really, thank you.

<comment><USER2> _highly competent Python /Java programmer down on her luck_

As a sibling poster has said, never ever ever ever talk like this. In particular, don't talk like this in 2016 in the Bay Area, which is approximately the best time and place to ever be a developer. Your wife should present herself as a confident professional with substantial programming skills who is looking for a career change into software development.

n.b. That transition is not as smooth as changing between dev jobs, but practically speaking after she's gotten one software development position under her belt this conversation gets very, very easy in the future.

In the current environment clueful employers should be foaming-at-the-mouth rabidly enthusiastic to make your wife's acquaintance. Coding bootcamp graduates with minimal technical background, ~12 weeks of Rails training, and no related professional experience are hireable in Bay Area right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems like her H-4 EAD status might give some employers pause. First it is tied to your H-1B if I understand correctly, so if your status changes she could become unable to work. Not to mention if you decide to move to another country. Consider that her explicit status is that of a dependent, which gives a potential employer the signal that she is a "trailing spouse" meaning for her to stay with the company she not only needs to like her job and be good at it, but you need to do the same. Yet they can't interview you.

H-1B is known to be a sort of lever that employers can use to keep you at a job. She seems to present just the opposite, yet with qualifications which are a dollar a dozen.

I apologize for being blunt, but it appears to be an atypical, disadvantageous situation. You might do well to embrace it and aim for some contract work in the near term--none of the above will be a negative then.

<comment><USER10> Curious what you mean by "a dollar a dozen?" I thought that the demand for developers in SV was high right now, and a master's in EE with coding experience would also be in high demand.

It seems like the reason she's not getting phone calls is more because she doesn't have a portfolio, not that her skills are so common that they're negligible.

<comment><USER9> A foreigner with MS from a US school but prior from a foreign school which as far as we know isn't a famous heavy hitter like Physics in Moscow. Minimal work experience. I said dollar a dozen after some consideration. There is some substance there but it simply isn't standing out relative to a thousand other candidates. More work experience will help, hence the contract suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My first filter on recruiting now is: "Has this person built anything I can see?"

A website, an app, a repo on Github. If the answer to that question is 'No' then my assumption is either a) this person isn't interested in the work, or b) they don't know how to code in the real world and I'll be paying them to learn.

I'm constantly amazed at the number of people applying for dev positions who claim years of experience and have absolutely nothing tangible to point out.

I run a small operation so I can't comment on big firms.

TLDR: Build something recruiters can see, and preferably use. It'll put you instantly in the top 10% of applicants.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure why whether I do work for free and in my spare time is a good gauge of programmer ability or that they're a desirable hire.

You wouldn't judge a mechanical engineer by whether they've built a car in their spare time, or an accountant by whether they spend their spare time doing accounting.

Some of us have lives outside of work, and like to spend our spare time away from a computer. I spend 9 hours a day in front of a computer at work, plus probably an hour outside of work doing chores. That's plenty for me. In my weekends, I like to actually get outside and do something away from a computer.

Also, depending on what you do, there's often not a lot that you could do open source. If you're an embedded systems developer for instance (like OP's wife, who is an EE), there's not a whole lot you can put up on Github.

<comment><USER13> I was job hunting recently and I can confirm this. Work as a developer at a previous company is better than work in the open (side project) and work in the open is better than work you can't show, and some experience is better than no experience (but having raw intelligence, willingness to learn, enthusiasm).

Then, even if the work is in the open you have to sell it to them. At one interview I didn't feel very well so I couldn't do this. But the website was on their laptop and they could have try to use it a bit. Instead they relied on questions.

Then you have the not-so-smart but with experience developer that never changed jobs and so they are now team lead etc. They ask you "how long will it take you to learn X". You say "2 months". Their reaction is "this guy is bullshiting me, I've spent 2 years learning this thing, how could anybody else learn it faster?"

Then there are the guys asking question google could answer for you. But because you don't know the answer they don't give you "the points".

After all this, they turn around and complain about how hard it is to find talent.

I'm from Eastern Europe.

<comment><USER11> If you're in Hungary and know ruby and/or JS then give me a shout!

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I appreciate it! I'm from Romania and I did get a job. Not the one I really, really wanted but the one that came after a few interviews when my interviewing skill got better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Job hunting can be very difficult. A lot depends on the types of companies and positions she is applying for.

It is easier to get a job with the skills and experience you already have and then try to migrate to newer skills. So maybe going for Java & Python jobs without relevant experience is an issue.

Whilst education is important experience is far more pertinent in hiring. As is the personality factors revealed during interviews or even in the covering letters. 100+ applications suggests that there are issues. The trick is to find out where they might be. Getting some professional advice might be necessary.

</comment><comment> a-saleh Do you have friends that work for companies she would like to work at? I.e. at place where I work we have incentives for seeking out new coleagues. The best thing about this, that when your friend tells his manager something like "You know how we have rack open for 4 months? I think I know a person." you usually bypass the HR guy skimming through 100 aplications and maybe thinking "C++ & Matlab? Who needs that?" or something like that.

If you have no friends that would help you with this, I would suggest going to local conferences and talking to speakers. On local linux group meeting, I had a conversation that literary went

me: "Hey, awesome presentation, do you think I could get your slides?"

speaker: "I don't think I want to hang them over, I might have divulged too much about our company internals so I don't really want to have it on the internet."

me: "That is a pity, good I was taking notes :-)"

speaker: "Well, if you liked it, you might want to work for us, we have a junior position open."

(Disclaimer, I was 22, still doing my masters at the time, your conversation might be different)

</comment><comment><USER15> Create a LinkedIn profile, with links to any projects she may have done. Use the right keywords. Recruiters use this to find and contact people with specific skills.

Maybe also take a 2-3 sentences to explain the gap, with a positive spin. "For a brief period, I was unable to work, due to visa issues. I therefore spent my time on the following independent projects: ... The visa issues have resolved and I am now actively looking for work in ... ." Or something.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does she have any projects to post here?

I also have an MSEE and looked for coding jobs. I only had one finished website* but it was good enough to get some responses and a few interviews.

* [http://sudokuisland.com](http://sudokuisland.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't find the specific posting, but IBM has some jobs that are being labeled "back to workforce" in the data scientist/analytics area. May be worth looking into?</comment>


Inside Newegg: A Look Inside Their Warehouse and Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2694

<comment><USER2> A fascinating look but it is still 3 years old...</comment>


Why Networking Sucks for Introverts (and one way I'm trying to fix it for us) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nahurst.com/why-networking-sucks-for-introverts-and-one-w

<comment><USER3> The "real hack" here is organizing the event in the first place. I can attest as an "also introvert" that I've gotten a lot of mileage out of, say, hosting a conference rather than trying to attend them. I have guesses as to why this is (control of the environment, the role as gatekeeper, having talked with folks ahead of time), but I'd suggest trying something similar if you're an introvert and you need to network.

<comment><USER4> It's also because as the host you have both a large built-in boost to your social status and a reason to talk to anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how much of what he ascribes to the extroversion versus introversion (EvI) struggle should actually be ascribed to the sensing versus intuition (SvN) conflict. (See Myers-Briggs for descriptions of these dichotomies.)

Software engineers have also been shown to be very high on the N scale and have classically been placed in the NT temperament. (For anecdotal evidence, see past MBTI surveys on Hacker News and Reddit.)

Main point: communication style discrepancies, by Myers-Briggs definition, should be attributed to SvN, not EvI.

</comment><comment><USER6> Voluntary forced socialization is usually fun and exciting, but currently it's only used in a few industries (like dating). There is a lot of possibility in hacking social forces.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've never seen being an introvert as a problem, and still don't see it as such. Well I'm an introvert, and from the very extreme case, I mean my own wife says I'm introvert, but I actually don't have problems connecting with peoples, I don't just like it, you just get boring questions from peoples talking about things you don't care about, so the site is a good Idea, but I'm not sure if that's a solution to introverts problems but, it's definetely a very good Idea for meeting employer and professionals, you can get that much noise in 5 minutes, great.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you only permit 20 candidates and 20 jobs, some of the attending candidates will be only be qualified to apply for a fraction of the jobs - perhaps even just one or two.

For example, if a Django front-end expert shows up and only 1 company is looking for a Django front-end expert, then that candidate only gets 1 interview and goes home.

Since most candidates have particular specializations that make them more or less qualified for particular jobs, it seems unlikely that every candidate will be applying for every job. I actually wish hiring companies cared less about skill specializations than they do but that's just how it is - <USER2> Django specialist is often not going to be taken seriously for the Websphere position even if he lies awake most nights dreaming about J2EE (fortunately, this particular example is quite rare).

So, if each attending candidate only qualifies for a single job, then there is a possibility that the entire event will be over in 5 minutes. As a candidate I would be fine with that, since it's one extra interview under my belt and - since I didn't pay to attend - I don't lose anything. As the host, you will go home with $6,000 - minus expenses for the space, unless you hooked up a free space through a personal connection, in which case you came out with a nice profit. However, from the perspective of the hiring company, everyone may not be so happy about the return on their time and money.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is definitely a possibility. We're coping with it for this first event by targeting companies that aren't cherry picking skill sets; they're willing to give someone time to learn as long as it's a smart developer who gets things done.

For future events, we'll try to break things out more and specialize, not only by programming language, but we'll start to have events for designers, systems administrators, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How relevant should networking and extr-vs-introversion be in the age of internet. Online forums create more value (more variety, more open critique) than face to face converstions. I'd bet extroversion and physical networking increasingly become liabilities in business. Those who communicate onlne and just get work done should be doing better than 'movers and shakers'.

<comment><USER10> Somehow I don't think you'll get much traction with that idea. You're moving against tens of thousands of years of human social interaction that means face to face is how we want to be.

Online forums have their place and they are efficient, but the sure don't create what most people think of as more value.

<comment><USER9> It might be human imperative to meet face to face, but I'd argue that those who can control the urge or are naturally inclined not to seek it will do better financially.

To give an example, Warren Buffet is an introvert and spends most of his day alone working, and he beat all his competition.

Even very successful actors such Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford, Anthony Hopkins, Clint Eastwood, are introverts.

Industries where extroverts rule also happen to be industries that create negative value to society - politics, traditional investment banks, sales.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: closed million+ monthly forum coz of spammers, now what? - <AUTHOR>

I just closed (after 10 years) http://poorbuthappy.com/, a popular forum with million+ pageviews/month, because of some serious hating & personal threats going on (long story!). HN: now what? The archives are still available. I suppose Google juice will slowly go down and traffic will lessen over time? What else could I do with it? (Do not want to reopen it). <comment><USER3> Peter, as a daily user of your site, (PBH), for over 5 years, I cannot understand this unannounced decision. The site is an unexplained winner, a freak, or in other words; you struck lucky.

The whole thing has been a glorious mix of debate, idiocy, playground banter, wit and solid information for a long time. In my view, you could have solved the obvious problems by simply having delayed registration, anonymous moderation, deleting rogue users' IP addresses, offensive comments and threads without explanation. But I know nothing of these things and I pretty much stopped posting some time ago because I realised I ended up much happier not doing so.

Many saw the site as a democracy when that should/was not the case.

You have allowed this to become personal, and the trolls fed on that and in a way, (many ways), made it a success; the whole host of satellite sites you allude to was sparked by your suggestion. I agree, they are nasty, dysfunctional, needy people the likes of whom you should have never bothered yourself. Their efforts will now flourish, (briefly), an essential tool and meeting-place for many will disappear. You will have gained nothing and the response from the peanut gallery on going back would be terrible, I suppose ;-)

I fail to see how just throwing it all away solves things, or is it a posture? I would gladly buy it off you if I knew how to run it, technically.

Tambien estoy en Colombia y te mando un abrazo, amigo...gracias

Alma del Norte

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll take it! :) I don't know why you would shut something down that has a decent rank. When you run a forum, you have to moderate.

Spammers can be reduced by requiring a captcha and/or a question they have to answer (What is 3 + 4?). If they get through, you have to delete them. The absolute best way to handle this is to manually approve each user that signs up and/or ban users with email addresses from certain domains. (Like ones that end in .ru, sorry Russia). You will learn very fast, just by looking at the email address which ones are valid users. I've been doing it for years and only had a few spammers get through.

With regards to users causing problems, it's your forum. Make everyone aware of your policies and then delete anyone who repeatedly breaks them. Yeah, they'll just sign up again, but they'll get tired of that and just go away at some point. You could always ban their IP too. You have to be careful since you can affect other users that way, but it can work well enough.

Why don't you want to reopen it? What else could you expect to do with it? I'm not sure what you are really asking.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have been clearer: spam wasn't the problem, it was abusive users, including abuse against our members on _other_ websites (which is very hard to manage). I won't reopen because I don't think I can reduce the abuse, and I won't run a forum that causes this kind of abuse. I guess my question is pretty vague, just hoping that perhaps someone has a good idea of what to do next, apart from just keeping the site closed with archives up...? Maybe that's all there is to do..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd keep the archives open on your site. An archive that large and that old will continue to drive traffic (and ad revenue..?) for some time to come.

This should preserve your page rank a little longer than just letting the site die and it gives you time to consider your options.

You could find someone interested in running the site where you retain ownership but share profits from advertising.

Or you could outsource moderation. As others have suggested, re-establish the rules, then look for a freelancer to moderate the forum for you.

If you've put 10+ years of your life into this it would be a shame to let it die. Sometimes that's the right choice but why not wait a few weeks/months and be certain if that's what you choose to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, keeping archives open. It's a shame, really, especially because I had hopes for the potential of that site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So you don't want to re-open it? and also you have a 1 million page view/month forum? (I estimate the unique visitors to 500K).

My Question is: Are you ready to open another one? If yes, you already have the server that handle such traffic and the traffic that will boost your forum.

Put up a new forum, make an ad, or something that attract the organic traffic to your new forum and fire up new discussion with a new community.

I'm just giving arbitrary numbers: Let say you have 500K unique per month, only 10% follow your ad -> 50K unique, only 10% register and become active member -> 5K, in one year that's already 60K. If 1/6 is active daily, you forum will get around 50K post per day, that's in one year :D

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> Your post in the forums doesn't really mention spammers, but abusive users:

"PBH has run for over 10 years as a great place to get and share information about Colombia. Unfortunately, during the last few years, there has been a (very) small minority of people who thought it was ok to personally attack, threaten and harass, both on phb, on other websites and in real life, other members that they disagree with. You know who you are. "

It sounds like a different problem than just throwing up a captcha. Have you banned the users/IPs of the offending people? Can't you just add a "report user" button by each post and then have users or IPs with X number of reports automatically banned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tried all of the above. We can control abuse on our own site, but once removed from the site, these people would start abuse on other sites (against our members). It went way too far.

<comment><USER7> Closing permanently seems like an extreme thing to do. If you've done all that you can do, then I don't see why you would feel bad about abuse on sites that you can't control.

Another slightly less extreme option could be to start over clean. Delete all user accounts and ban any IPs from users who have ever accessed your site from creating a new account. That way you don't have to close it down permanently.

Overall, I'm getting the impression that you feel personally guilty and responsible for the abuse against your users on other sites and are looking for validation from HN that it's okay to shut it down and move on. Maybe you should freeze new accounts and freeze forum posting for a month and see if you feel differently after some time has passed. That would also give your users time to cool off.

If it's time-consuming to run the site, then tell your users that you need a few select people to step up and act as moderators, otherwise the community will be shut down. If no one cares enough to moderate, then go ahead and shut it down. If they do care enough to moderate then write some basic tools to give them control to monitor abusive behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are plenty of volunteer moderators, that's not the problem. The problem is that there are a few people that will go through great (!) efforts to drag certain members through the mud (using other websites) and even threaten them physically, which in Colombia (I live in Colombia) is something that I take more seriously than if I were to live somewhere else.

So yes, I feel responsible for that, and don't want to run a website that somehow produces a result like that... Crap.

<comment><USER7> Well, that does seem out of the ordinary for a normal website. Then whatever you feel comfortable doing is probably the best thing. Keep it going, make it a read-only archive, sell it, or just delete the whole thing completely. You're probably the only one who can really decide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a forum which was literally 90% spammers (I didn't even realize it - <USER2> had built the site, never actually launched it - then a few years visited to find hundreds of thousands of posts, which seemed to all be bots.) the traffic was insane though. That said I figured I could just sell the domain on sedo.com. So I listed it, and even though it didn't get any bids, it did make money through their landing page program.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I won't re-open it because it's too much hassle in my life. I could probably sell it, although I am attached to it (been running it for 10 years!). Not sure if it'd be worth it..</comment>


Opera reportedly has multiple predatory loan apps in the Play Store - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/21/opera-predatory-loans/ <comment><AUTHOR> They have just updated to apps to change the length of the loans offered to comply with Google, but according to the reviews posted on these apps, if a repayment is missed they spam the contact list of people with the app to shame them into repaying.</comment>


Humans accidentally created hidden carbon sink in the desert - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27971-humans-accidentally-created-hidden-carbon-sink-in-the-desert/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand how the carbon is being stored here. Is it in the form of dissolved CO2 that's with the salts dissolved?

And how did humans create this store?

This article seems very light on details.

<comment><USER3> Agricultural runoff. Some amount of CO2 dissolves in the runoff, then it enters the aquifer, where it remains. As far as carbon sinks go it's probably pretty small but it's interesting nonetheless.

<comment><USER2> That makes sense. I was discounting ag runoff as negligable, which I shouldn't have done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So we are saved and we don't have to worry about global warming any more, nor even food shortages? All we need is lots of water and to farm in the desert. Awesome.

<comment><USER5> A little bit of global warming won't hurt. I'd like to have Coconut palms growing in the UK.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, but the UK gets the crappy end of the global warming stick. Increasing temperatures melt the Greenland ice sheets, which decreases the salinity of the north atlantic. That shuts down the processes that drive the gulf stream, which brings warm water to us and gives us a warmer climate than most regions at our latitude. So global warming may well end up making the UK colder.

<comment><USER7> Is that actually accepted thinking now/still? I was taught this logic by my prep. school geography teacher ~15 years ago, but I haven't heard it touted much lately, so maybe it's no longer the most common expectation?

A (very) little googling didn't bring up that prediction, generally it's thought that the UK's temperature will indeed rise from global warming. For example this [1] piece in the Guardian from a couple of years ago suggests that global warming is likely to lead to wetter winters and more flooding, and summers that are both dryer and hotter. Similar stuff from a random city council's website (Bradford)[1].

Obviously the recent anecdotal data also supports rising temperatures (the five hottest years on record for UK are 1995, 2006, 1990, 2011 and 2014 with the latter being the hottest, and I think 2015 set to top that), but doesn't necessarily mean that the ice melting won't cause UK temperatures to drop again... but the fact that predictions don't seem to take it into account, my assumption is that either it's plain wrong, or it used to be the commonly accepted expectation and is no longer, or perhaps it's still expected but over a larger timeframe than the next 100 years?

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/08/potential...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/08/potential- impacts-climate-change-uk)

[1] [http://www.bradford.gov.uk/bmdc/the_environment/climate_chan...](http://www.bradford.gov.uk/bmdc/the_environment/climate_change/about_climate_change/how_will_climate_change_affect_UK)

<comment><USER6> I have no idea, thanks for posting the links.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: rate my idea - shared office finder - <AUTHOR>

Hi I just got an idea that might be interesting. A lot of us are freelance developers and working from home is not very effective, but renting office just for one person is not money efficient. Yes there are some covorking spaces, but not everywhere. So here is my idea: OfficeBuddy - you can search for place in office of other people from your field(or whatever field) and you can add your office with free seats. what do you think, would you use it? <comment><USER2> I did customer development around a similar idea in London and discarded it. End users (desk seekers) want it, but it's a marketplace and the value proposition for desk sellers is more troubling.

You get useful postings in 1 of 2 ways:

      * You keep the data fresh yourself
      * Office managers keep their own data fresh

In the former case, you need to be making money to continue spending the time beyond its novelty period. In the latter, the office managers need to be getting good value-for-time or some related benefit which is enabled via their site activity.

Of the potential problem office managers care about, you've got:

      1. Dealflow & advertising
      2. Showings & deal closing
      3. Dealing with current tenants

#1 is adequately handled by craigslist/gumtree. I thought it would be a pain point, but the office managers disagree.

#2 is a huge pain, but you can't resolve it without manpower that would require a much more profitable business model than exists here.

#3 is the most promising, and is a legitimate pain point, which is where I decided the most plausible business lay. If you can handle the billing for office managers, then they'll put their desk spaces on your site to be saved the problem of hustling tenants for payments. There are liability issues here, but it's probably a similar model to AirBnb.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for a great reply. You seem very systematic in your evaluation of the idea. Any tips of books i can read that teach me about this kind of process.

<comment><USER2> 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank did the trick for me, but a lot of people find it too detailed/boring.

There's an ebook at custdev.com that's meant to cover the same content in a more accessible way, but I don't think it's a good starting place since it assumes you have some knowledge about the concepts. Just googling around and digging into "customer development" is probably a safe starting point, and then grab Steve's book if it resonates w/ the way you think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Though I've never used it, Loosecubes (<http://loosecubes.com>) is doing just this. Offices list their spare space (on a daily or monthly basis, for a fee or for free) and the types of people they're looking to work with, and people seeking office space can apply for those spots.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://sunshineny.com/>

Copy+paste business model. My impression is that it's an extremely volatile model and market.

> _A lot of us are freelance developers and working from home is not very > effective,_

Is it? How many people have you spoken to about this? Is enough of a problem that people are really willing to pay for it? Is it a big enough problem that freelancers are wanting to throw money at you to provide them this service? Isn't one competitive advantage of being a freelancer that your overhead is low (and thus a lower fee than agencies)?

</comment><comment><USER6> You might want to take a look too at coworking.info, which runs a directory[1] and allows people to add spaces or register their interest for one.

I've never used it so I can't testify to how easy it is to use, or whether it could be improved in any way.

[1] <http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/29303049/Directory>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I looked at all the mentioned and they look like they provide coworking center system for offices(daily free seats, reservations and to on). My idea was more simple - something like directory with "I am rails developer and looking for place to work next 3 months in Prague" or "we have 2 seats in office, for $XY a month". Thanks for ideas, I will have to think about it more.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's an interesting idea, albeit maybe a crowded field (in 2011). Startups that come to mind that do that same thing include: Desks Near Me (<http://desksnear.me/>) and Kodesk (<http://kodesk.com/>).

<comment><USER8> Nomatime.com as well (mostly in Europe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think using it or not depends on people. If I am to become a freelancer, no, I won't use it, not when I'm just starting up. Maybe later, when am an experienced freelancer, It would make me feel like if I had a startup or something.

</comment><comment><USER10> Similar idea: <http://desksnear.me/></comment>


Away Replaces CEO Steph Korey After Verge Investigation - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003787/away-luggage-steph-korey-ceo-new-lululemon-stuart-haselden-replacement-investigation <comment><USER2> Bitter words of ex-employees.

Failed with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside- amazon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon- wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html)

Some people I knew bought Amazon shares after the NY Times piece came out.</comment>


How to Get Out of the Building with the Validation Board - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leanstartupmachine.com/2012/10/how-to-get-out-of-the-building-with-the-validation-board

<comment><USER2> good guide. it's hard to walk up to strangers in NYC.</comment>


Shameful Innumeracy in the New York Times - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/shameful_innumeracy_in_the_new.php

<comment><USER2> I actually kind of enjoyed watching this guy spin himself into a frenzy and conclude that the NYT editors have no basic understanding of anything, based solely on what could have easily just been a typo. Some people really have too much time on their hands.

<comment><USER3> You posted a comment about your enjoyment of the authors failure, and judged his time management skills due to the fact that he posted his rant about another persons failure on the internet.

Do you not see the hypocrisy?

<comment><USER4> Isn't your response to the comment (and my response to yours) guilty of the same fault?

If we keep going like this, we'll meta ourselves up a black hole or something.

<comment><USER5> The fault of hypocrisy? No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a teenager, I had an almost exactly similar conversation to this with a _line editor of the GED_ (after looking at a "sample question" on the official GED website). I exchanged a couple of emails and I'm pretty sure she flatly did not understand the concept of a percentile.

Yes, I'm sure that she was the problem and not me. I ran it past my father, a Ph.D. physicist, and he couldn't figure out how to attach a sane interpretation to her remarks either.

<comment><USER7> Speaking from personal experience, understanding the concept of much of anything is, alas, not really required to pass the GED. So I fear that anyone who can comprehend an advanced concept such as "percentiles" would be wasting their talents on anything involving the GED.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> comment #6 on the blog said

"Some well established federal organizations (ie, NIH) do percentiles backwards. That is, 85 percentile score better than 15%. Maybe that's what's going on...."

<comment><USER9> I'd really like to see a better explanation of that, or some evidence. It's possible to order things from "best" to "worst", with the bottom one percent being the best, but there's really no way to interpret "below the 85th percentile" as anything other than "among the bottom 85%" without some special, personal, opposites-day definition of "percentile".

To show that at least some at the NIH have a perfectly reasonable understanding of percentiles, here's a chart of boy's blood pressure by height percentile: [http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/hypertension/child_tbl.p...](http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/hypertension/child_tbl.pdf)

The NIH's percentile scoring system for grant applications certainly knows the proper meaning of "percentile": [http://www.med.nyu.edu/spa/education/PaylinesDescription.htm...](http://www.med.nyu.edu/spa/education/PaylinesDescription.html)

My guess is that the commenter was mistaken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > I just never quite manage to absorb how clueless the average person is.

Gawrsh, I'm shore glad we have these here science bloggers to help drag us clueless folks out of the mud.

<comment><USER7> Reality check: The median regular poster on HN is probably in the 95th percentile or better for intelligence, knowledge, and general cluefulness. Hell, the median poster on _slashdot_ is probably well above average.

The bloggers on ScienceBlogs are, in general, competent, intelligent, and well-educated. A faux-folksy disdain for competence plays well for the masses, but politically correct or not there _is_ such thing as actual expertise and I don't know why you're insulting someone for pointing out that a large majority of people are completely unequipped to discuss anything involving even very basic statistics (or any other practical math).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author is the same person who wrote the much-commented scienceblogs post about why he won't go to his high school reunion. The post and the comments are well worth reading, if you haven't seen them before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709733>

</comment><comment><USER12> Half of all low-income students have below average test scores! We need new laws, new taxes, and new government initiatives to fix this problem!

<comment><USER13> Be careful about distributions; not everything's a bell curve.

Consider: 99% of Americans own a below-average number of houseboats.

<comment><USER12> There are 3 different measures of "average", just choose average = median and you're set.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Top rules as a good-developer to stay on top of your game - <AUTHOR> edit: Although I originally intended this question to full stack web development - answers from any domain developers are welcome. (Minor changes to sentence)
Full-stack / web app development have a lot of moving pieces and these evolve at amazing speeds. As a developer/startup how do you stay on top of your game with these evolving pieces ?
Im new to web development and looking for top 5 rules from battle-hardened developers, mainly, how do you keep evolving products-teams-yourself ? <comment><USER2> Going to be a bit unpopular here, but what the hell.

To be a great software developer you need to work on pet projects for yourself and for others. Some people do the 9-to-5 and that's fine. But those are going to be your median developers. Not your great developers.

Nothing wrong with that.

Great software developers are great because they sharpen that edge for fun. They straight up love writing code.

When you work on pet projects you research new tools, new ways of doing things, and broaden your horizons. You open source stuff, forcing you to write clean code with proper documentation.

That _directly_ influences how you write code for your job. That knowledge applies in strange and unexpected ways. In my experience you end up using a lot of the new stuff you pulled in through your escapades.

You want to be a great software developer? Write open source code. Read open source code.

<comment><USER3> "working extra hours at something will make you better than someone who doesn't work extra hours"... of course.

<comment><USER4> I'm hoping you're being sarcastic, because in my little world that has never been true.

My observations say the correlation is pretty much the other way around: You work more hours because you can't get the stuff done during your allotted time. You're not learning new stuff, you're doing the same you've been doing the previous 8 hours of that: Struggle.

Of course there is brilliant people that just enjoy their work and stay longer every day; but staying longer is not the reason why they're brilliant. Being brilliant, specially on a trade that has a strong creative component, it's not something you can always train. Or at least not by repeating the same tasks over and over.

<comment><USER3> I think you misinterpreted my statement. My point was that working on side projects in your own time is the equivalent of working free overtime.

<comment><USER4> Thank you both for the clarifications!

I see your point and I agree that side projects could help increasing your skills and/or knowledge. However, I'm not sure they're an effective way of doing that or if we [tend to use mostly the skills we have / tend to learn skills that are so different than our daily jobs that can't be applied or aren't useful for professional development]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would suggest a three part method to success.

First, know what you do know and don't chase after everything you don't know. If you are good at php, use it. If you understand rails, use it. If you are a master of all things RDBMS, use one. When you are looking to tackle a problem, don't look for a new technology, language, or paradigm to solve the problem. Use what you already know, and solve the problem.

Second, solve the problem. Also, don't pick a technology and then try to shoe horn that into the solution. In other words, when you have a new project, or an existing project that needs improvement, don't say, "Well I am going to need a, b, c, and d because every good project needs those!" Instead say, "What is the problem I am trying to solve? How do I define the problem? What value am I bringing?" Then find technologies and solutions to fit into the answers to those questions.

Finally, learn new things incrementally. For example, maybe you are working on a web project and need a good mobile first css framework (due to the answers you received from the questions in the second part above). You always use Bootstrap. You add bootstrap into the project (because you know bootstrap, see the first part above). You've never used Sass but you'd like to add that. This might be the right time to add it to your skill set and this project. Notice how you didn't add a whole new css framework, a whole new application framework, a whole new language, a new server technology, a new javascript framework... you added one new thing incrementally. You can do that as often as it makes sense. But never more often.

<comment><USER6> I think this makes sense if you are trying to build skills to start a company yourself, but I think if you want to ride the pay curve, you need to be more agile when it comes to learning new tech.

It is a fact that php devs earn less than RoR engineers. If you want to stay at the top of the pay curve, you need to stay up to date with the latest 'sexy.'

<comment><USER5> I am going to respectfully have to call you out on this one. First off, where is this fact that php devs earn less than RoR engineers? I am sure there was some who earn less and some who earn more. The point though it that if you are aligning yourself on the latest technology, you will absolutely always lose in the long run.

I would say I am in the top 5% of engineers by salary in my area. I never lead out with the language or framework or cool new 'sexy' technology that I think a business should/could/has to use. When looking for employment I never even worry about what the company is currently using. I literally only worry about aligning myself with their business objectives. What are the problems they are facing? How can they decrease costs or, often more importantly, increase revenue? Why do they need me and how can I solve their problems starting immediately?

Now, you might say, well then you won't get hired on everywhere you apply to. Absolutely! And thank goodness. If I walk into an interview and all the current employees can talk about is the finer parts of minutia within the latest build of Rails, I would rather not work with them. If all I can be asked is how many ways you can concatenate a string in .Net and an example of when to use each, again, I will pass on that company. (yes, I have been asked exactly that question, and there are more ways than you think). Why would I pass? Well they sure as hell aren't aligning themselves with the needs of their business, how am I going to?

Trust me, if you would like to stay on the top of the pay curve, align yourself with business objectives, particularly those which align with money. Don't worry about the 'new sexy'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My main tips:

1) Read a lot about what is out there. Reading viewpoints helps prioritize what you want to learn next. Talk to opinionated, passionate people and understand why they hold strong views.

2) Experiment with things well outside your comfort zone. Eg., a language that you may never get deep into, but can give you a new perspective.

3) Figure out what NOT to learn. There are so many new things and the rate is increasing. I feel I cannot afford to spend a long time learning the wrong things. So for example I focus on python instead of python+c#, postgres instead of postgres+mysql, linux instead of linux+osx. Spreading me less thin. But to do this you have to know why you choose X over Y, the reading and experimenting infom you for this.

4) Learning "technologies" is not enough imo, you need to couple that with theory to produce really powerful systems. Machine Learning, Crypto, Controls, Discrete, whatever you are interested in. You can learn this alone, but sometimes a course or two is the best way to beef up your theory.

5) I've come to think about digital systems having an "anatomy" similar to the human body. Different components are like various organs. Building complete, balanced systems requires understanding all the various types of organs. Assume you have blind spots, and seek to discover and master the organs (types of components) that are least familiar to you. You do this by inspecting other systems and seeing how they are composed and how that differs from how you compose your systems.

Very interesting to see what others say about this.

<comment><USER8> >4) Learning "technologies" is not enough imo, you need to couple that with theory to produce really powerful systems.

This is HUGE. I'm able to keep up to speed and learn more ML and stats comparatively quickly because I have strong applied math foundations (from a physics and applied math background) and have learned the theory behind the stats (from lots of hard work and self study). It fits into the "work smarter, not just harder" bucket.

If you can learn 1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+1=4,... that's a ton of shit to memorize. But learning how x+1 works for all x, you only have to learn one thing (kinda). It's a rough analogy, but that's how I think of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Learn the concepts behind the technology. If you understand MVC, you can pick up React/Flux. If you understand callbacks, you can pick up promises. If you understand process isolation, you can pick up Docker. If you can install a program manually, you can pick up Chef/Ansible/Puppet. If you understand the practical limitations of memory, disk and the network, you can grok why MySQL, PostgreSQL, Mongo... all have the strengths and weaknesses they do.

And so on.

The downside is that you'll end up taking a look at the hot new technologies and shake your head a bit as you see the same concepts being reborn again and again, frequently with the same lessons to be learned.

</comment><comment><USER10> Find excuses to learn things outside your comfort zone, at your work or through pet projects.

The pet project can be easy, as long as you have the time and motivation - pick a tech and make a small hacky thing. (I must admit to being an unrepentant procrastinator so this is advice I have rarely followed myself.)

The work route can also be rewarding though, given the appropriate work culture. I haven't found it too hard to take the time to learn about a thing that is blocking my team, and in my case I've gradually built up my knowledge of infrastructure and deployment practices where previously I'd mainly only written code.

When you run into a bug, make sure you dive down into _why_ it broke in the first place, as well as what. This will help you avoid [cargo-culting][1] and can also give you some [pretty fun stories][2].

      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
      [2]: https://medium.engineering/the-curious-case-of-disappearing-polish-s-fa398313d4df

</comment><comment><USER11> The best developers I've ever worked with are the ones who are insatiably curious and relentlessly pragmatic. They always want to understand how and why things work the way they do, but they also understand the need to ship.

</comment><comment><USER12> The short answer is spend some (not all) of your free time on learning skills and self improvement. Over the last six years I've always tried to have side projects going, I have volunteered to help other people's projects and I have picked up a lot of skills from those. I also volunteered to attend training and read books that I might not have in the past.

</comment><comment><USER4> Define "stay on of your game" first :)

Does it mean "keep or increase your value for your company"? If that's the case: learn to understand the business. Try to walk in your CEO's shoes when making decisions. It'll make your way better. You might learn a new technology and want to apply, but does it play well with your current infrastructure? is it cheap to maintain? will the company be dependent on your existence to fix things?

No technology, programming language or framework would be more valuable than understanding the business.

If it means "know about the latest buzzwords and newest programming languages and frameworks" then I don't know, reading HN to spot the trends maybe? :)

By the way, a golden rule of the so-called battle-hardened professionals is to let someone else fight the battles and learn from their results. In other words, don't be the first to deploy the new buzzword in production :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Work with a talented team. You learn things you would never learn otherwise as a solo dev. The human interaction side, writing more universal code. You'd be amazed how much code makes complete sense to the author but isn't clear to team mates.

Learning new things on your own is good. Having a good employer that encourages on the job learning is very important. Whatever you use this year might be obsolete the next. Action Script anyone?

Don't pressure yourself to work all the time. Maintain a healthy balance. Eventually I think every developer goes through a period of being overwhelmed. You can't learn it all, even if you work 15 hour days. Learning is a journey so pace yourself.

</comment><comment><USER14> In addition to having side projects going, don't hesitate to put them up on GitHub. That's a great way to show off your skills. And these projects don't have to be huge, even if they are small utilities or apps that scratch a specific itch, that's also good to show off, especially if it's for a problem which has not been solved before.

If you're especially lucky, you may wind up with an employer who lets you open source some of what you write. :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Be good at learning

I don't mean technical stuff only, but the entire process of software development is to automate knowledge.

You can't automate knowledge that you do not have.

</comment><comment><USER16> learn tricks, tips, etc on how to write code that is easy to understand and maintain.

It is said that we spend 10 times as long reading code as we do writing code. If you can optimize for that, it saves lots of effort over the long term.

<comment><USER17> Yup. If I'm working with code I can understand, making changes takes very little time. If I'm working with code I don't understand, I might be able to hack something together that makes things even harder to understand. Probably the best bet is to spend however long it takes to dive into it, and possibly rage-refactor if it's too much to dig into without being the person who wrote it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think you need to be more specific. I don't think, except with a handful of exceptions for really stellar individuals, that there are good developers. Rather, there are good developers for a situation.

imo, the things that make you successful in a google or apple vs in a small startup vs a consultant vs a one-person company are wildly different.

Which are you interested in?

</comment><comment><USER19> Look at open source code. I think it is just as important to review well written code as it is to practice writing code.

</comment><comment><USER20> To actually answer your question about "how to stay on top of your game": Don't try to keep up with all the new shiny things coming around. Focus on a few things you want to learn and learn them deeply. This will make it easier to adapt new things later in case you MUST learn something.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's a paper that might be of value:

[http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...](http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.PDF)

</comment><comment><USER22> ABC: Always Be Coding.</comment>