Ask HN: Does never having a "real" job hurt me - <AUTHOR> So I am sure this topic has come up before, but I couldn't find much on the search feature. I am basically just looking for some opinions on this subject.
A little about me:
24, college dropout, 1 exit (which is why I dropped out)
I founded a small software company while in college as a business/political science double major and accidentally sold it to a much larger company at the beginning of my senior year. They wanted me on as a consultant for a minimum of 8 months and after i finished up almost a year consulting for them I moved back to my home town and began doing mainly freelance work and living off of savings as well.
I'm getting to a point in life where I need a daily challenge and I want to get excited about working on a product on a daily basis again. I have a few ideas and always have some sort of small project going on, however I look at a lot of companies out there and think I would love to go to work for a company out there that is already making a dent in their market (e.g. Twilio) but I just don't know if I am "qualified" enough to work for some of these companies.
I do not really have a resume and even the one I have put together just consists of the companies I have owned over the years basically.
What have you done in this situation? anyone with some advice of what a guy like me can/should do?
Keep working on my own things? Apply fo jobs at a few interesting companies and just see what happens?
Thanks in advance for your input! <comment><USER2> <http://www.twilio.com/company/jobs>

There. Go. Apply. Put together a resume. Tell them why you want to work for them. Tell them what you've done. Email them. Hell, point them to this thread, about how they were the one company you could think of that you want to work for.

Let them decide if you are qualified.

The smartest people I know claim to know the least. It's that double-edged sword: the more you know, the more you know you don't know.

If you want, I'll take a look at your resume and cover letter. My email address is in my HN profile.

But seriously, if you want something, go for it.

Don't be the 'no' in your life.

<comment><USER3> Hey Zach,

I'm 25 and a college drop out as well. I work at Twilio. Shoot me an email, I'd be happy to chat. jdb at twilio

<comment><USER2> I'm not Zach that you replied to. Just in case this was mistakenly posted, and Zach doesn't read this, I don't want it to get missed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Apply for jobs at a few interesting companies and just see what happens?_

Yes. What's the worst that can happen? You don't get a job? Well you don't have one now, anyway.

Edit: maybe should say "employment" not job. You sound like the sort of person who is working on things, regardless. So if you want to try working for someone else, then apply. There are definitely some employers that won't consider you because you don't have a degree, but there are many others for whom your actual accomplishments are much more important.

<comment><USER5> I just accepted a new job last week and my employer sought me out largely because I am mostly self educated (I did a couple years of comp sci, may go back eventually). He feels that it shows a hunger for knowledge and lack of fear to learn new tools or ways to get things done.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Though I know everyone doesn't share this opinion, I believe that I'd rather hire someone with ambition and hunger and passion over someone with a piece of paper or a track record. Your history is important and can prove a lot and so can an education, but in the overall scheme of things, it means less than one might think. Count the number of greatest thinkers and successes who either never attended college or dropped out (from George Carlin who dropped out of the 9th grade to Bill Gates who dropped out of college).

Sometimes you need the guy with twenty years of project management experience and huge projects under him who can just jump in and grab the reigns and go from there. Sometimes it pays to take a chance on an eager person (of any age) who wants a shot. If it doesn't work out, you get rid of them. If it works out, you have a diamond in the rough.

And, as someone who was afforded that opportunity myself, there's no better learning experience than being in the real world and surrounded by incredible people. Part of what keeps me in the company and position I'm in is that I am surrounded by many of the people I've known for over a decade that are real powerhouses. They're smart as hell and work hard as hell and I am constantly challenged by them. They make me feel dumb and I'm better for it. I might have a better grasp of some common things a college graduate would walk away with, but I wouldn't trade it for anything and I think I'm a better employee now, because I was molded here and not in a class room.

Not that I have anything against "the system" or against "college boys" (well, maybe just a tiny _little_ biase). I'm just a really huge fan of self-starters and nothing makes me as sentimental as stories of successful self-educated and self-motivated people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I say this as a person who has read thousands of resumes and hired hundreds of people at multiple startups: Your record will hurt you badly at places you don't really want to work. It will help you at the places you want to be.

Make it clear what your passion is, what you've learned already, and what you want to learn. Then apply everywhere that looks good. You'll do fine.

</comment><comment><USER8> 'I do not really have a resume and even the one I have put together just consists of the companies I have owned over the years basically.'

Sounds like a resume to me..

<comment><USER9> Sounds much better than my resume.

Really, go for it. They'll be fighting over who hires you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a hiring manager, the only concern I'd have is whether you can work effectively on a team. If you can demonstrate that you can, then it's not really an issue.

<comment><USER11> There's an important distinction.

It almost certainly won't matter to the right kind of hiring manager at the rig kind of company.

It will 100% matter to just about any recruiter. Many vacancies only path to an interview with a hiring manager is via a recruiter - if you want any of those jobs, you've got a big hurdle to overcome. But I'm guessing you don't want those jobs anyway (well, except perhaps that mythical 2004 Google offer...)

<comment><USER12> I do think it is a fair concern for any hiring manager. The qualities that make entrepreneurs successful also potentially make them unmanageable or unable to take mid-level assignments in larger organizations.

I've also interviewed entrepreneurs and the other side of the coin is a concern that they want to return to an organization because they are burned out.

Finally is the fear that you will work there for a short period, understand the business, and raid staff and launch a competitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since when has being a truly unique candidate with a previous track record of success and a genuine entrepreneurial spirit hurt in job hunting?

I'd say that should make you stand out, not hurt you in any way.

If that's not the case, there's no hope for the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER14> I work at Twilio, and we'd love to talk with you. Please get in touch with me if you haven't already reached someone in the company at email@example.com

I'm 26 and a college dropout. We've got several college dropouts on the team - we're about "doers", the people who get it done. <http://www.twilio.com/doers>

</comment><comment><USER15> It so happens that Twilio's posted on the "Who's Hiring" thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504127>.

You have to at least give them the chance to reject you. It's tacky, but the only motivational poster quote that's ever resonated with me is "You miss every shot you don't take". Truer words have never been spoken.

Go get 'em!

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't normally share much personal information for the same reason I post with a pseudonym, but I'd like to share a story with you about someone far less qualified than you with far less going for them than you that made something out of nothing. The short version of all this will be "If a jackass like me can get where I've gotten, then _anyone_ can get _anywhere_.".

I dropped out of the ninth grade and by the time most of my peer group was packing for college, I was flying a thousand miles from home, to SF, with only the clothes on my back to sign a contract with Netscape. I had no formal education, no college, no diploma, and no family connections of any sort. Just an interest, ambition, work-ethic, and minor experience that I was able to cull from limited resources (an underfunded public school that still used Apple IIs, a single mom with three kids a low paying job and no child support, and a history of being a real legitimate troublemaker).

Through the iPlanet Alliance of the late 90s, I was able to parlay that into a career at Sun and I've made great money, worked with incredible people, made valuable contacts, and had the satisfaction of helping big companies and organizations around the planet do some pretty sweet stuff that, while meaningless to most of the world, makes _me_ feel like I'm doing something important.

I don't have any specific steps that I can list out to take you from where you are now to where you want to be. Only a tale of my own path and what I found important and not so important along my way which will hopefully dispel many of your fears and self-criticism. I also don't want people to take my story as bragging. Seriously, please understand that I was the family's trouble making black sheep with little ahead of me as a teenager. I just want to convey to young people out there that you can do what you want, despite perceived hurdles. An expensive college education is valuable; not necessary. Connections and a well-off family are valuable; not necessary. Even something as simple as a high school diploma is valuable, but not necessary.

If I can get where I am (a good position to be in life, though nowhere near as awesome as most of the people reading this, I suspect) with all of those strikes against me, then you -- with some college and some startup experience -- can get where _you_ want to be. You just have to build on your best traits, like having a strong work-ethic. Find something you enjoy doing and do it so well and with such obsessive gusto that people can't help but notice you. Even if it's in writing opinion pieces, writing code, advising startups on technical issues, helping in popular forums. Whatever gets some people to notice you. Get your foot in as many doors as possible. Even if it's only networking, for now. And when you get an opportunity, exploit the hell out of it.

Oh, and have balls. Seriously, it can pay to take brash and bold actions, in life. Especially when you're younger and the older folk can see you as a real bundle of potential just waiting for a nudge and a chance. (I think that when you're outside of your 20s, people start to react to that attitude with "if you were going to do something, you'd have already made your grand moves by now").

By brashness and exploiting opportunities, let me give a real brief example:

Before I went to SF, my only experience was - believe it or not - call center work. People called up and I helped them fix stuff. Mostly end users, even. Nothing complex and nothing that special. It paid less than $10/hr, had fairly high churn, and for a lot of people was a position they were filling because they had to fall back on something (that is, a lot of people working around me were in their 40s and 50s while I was not even drinking age and this was something they had fallen back on from something else).

For many, an apparently going-nowhere hole. For me? I worked hard. The job was very 9-5, but I worked well into the night as well as weekends and holidays. I took on jobs and tasks and projects that I didn't have to. I put out enough fires that I became the go-to guy when you wanted things done right. Some contacts I'd made through the job saw this pattern of behavior and after a year in this position, offered me an interview. Overnight, I dropped everything to take the interview away from home. Two weeks after that, I had emptied my apartment and left my town, family, and friends with literally nothing except the clothes on my back and $900 to my name. I moved to the bay area, where at the time getting a place to live was impossible. There were actually bidding wars for low end crappy apartments in average or worse areas of town. And there was me, with no real rental or credit history just getting started.

I was too focused on work to fight through the tape of getting someone to finally rent to me, so I lived at work, instead. I worked sixteen hour days plus weekends and holidays. I slept under my desk and lived out of the free vending machines and soda machines. I used the employee showers and since I didn't have a place nearby to wash clothes, I just kept buying more so I always had fresh clothes in the morning. Hell, there was a mixup with my first few checks, so for two of those first months, I didn't even have money. I remember one time I actually had to borrow $20 from a coworker just so I could get a cab to go to the DMV and get my ID.

Anyway, the point is - your lack of degree or resume doesn't have to stop you. None of what you listed has to. Put together a good resume that emphasizes your strengths (read up on writing a resume - there are ways to focus your resume if you have experience but no education or education but no experience and so on). Shop it around. Talk to as many people as possible. Build up a portfolio and reputation online that people can refer to and become familiar with you through. If there's a project you really dig, participate in it (you've probably seen recent articles on HN about how you can leverage your github records and open source experience on your resume). And if there's a place you really want to work or a particular project you really want to be part of, reach out to them.

Seriously. Read up on Twilio if that is an interest. Check out their rules and requirements so you can avoid hitting an obvious speed bump and get disregarded for ignoring something in their process -- but contact people there and tell them of your situation and ambition. Startup-ish companies are even more likely, I think, to appreciate ambition and work-ethic and enthusiasm over "but how many companies have you founded?" or "when did you get your degree?". Bigger companies are often far harder to approach, because they have rigid processes and discard applications over any minor deviation quickly. Frankly, I'm a bit lucky that I skirted that problem in my case, since I went to well established big companies with more corporate culture than startup culture.

Also, as jasonlotito points out in his comment here, the smartest people seem to have the least appreciation for themselves. That isn't just in this field. It's like that in all fields. The best people most often are the most self critical. Musicians, actors, writers, programmers, CEOs. Part of what makes these people the greatest is the fear that they're not. The fear that they are defrauding everyone and they've merely lucked into their situation and any day, someone is going to discover it and call them out on it. So they work hard to stay ahead.

This was long. I said I had a good work-ethic; not a sense of brevity. :D

<comment><USER16> Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate your story. Reading it reminds me a lot about some of the "wild" decisions I've made along the way.

I was also my family's black sheep. My story is different I suppose (briefly): I left full time scholarship to study arts--I went to Florida with $500 my brother lent me. I didn't have money for food so I ate Starbuck's left over pastries for the first 2 weeks. I ended up taking 6 courses that first semester and worked 2 jobs to support myself. It was tough time but it was the most lucid time in my life.

While I did well at the arts school, I didn't end up doing arts after all. I am a web developer now--happy hacking my after-hours projects and chasing dreams. Taking good care of my family is also one of my dreams!

I usually think to myself, people should have ambitions and dreams. But only a real man/woman is willing to lay his/her life down for those dreams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Accidentally sold it"?

How does one accidentally sell a company?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Accidentally sold it"? How does one accidentally sell a company?

ok so this is a fair question.

What I really mean by this is that I was not looking to sell I was not out actively marketing the company or anything like that.

We had a product that made a dent in its market, I liked what I was doing and I was having fun doing it.

A bigger company with a presence in a lot more markets came along and made me an offer, I said no and came back with a number I deemed was improbable. They paid it anyway.

<comment><USER18> Sounds like a good problem :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Freelancing is a 'real job'. If you actually are freelancing, you'll have a string of clients to point and say you did work for them, freelancing.

Companies want someone that can do the job. 1 indicator is the resume, and you simply have to fill it out with work you did.

Be sure to frame the college dropout in terms of the opportunity you had, so they know you didn't just quit, but had a better offer. If you treat it like a negative, so will they.

</comment><comment><USER20> You should have no problem finding a job. Unique skillsets are unique, so there will be a small number of people who truly want someone with yours, but you'll be very valuable to them.

Things to do:

1) Make a resume and cover letter. Have many people look over it and give feedback. Take the feedback.

2) Do some practice interviews. Either a friend can do this, or second-tier employers can do this (start by applying to places you would consider as backups, and then apply to the first tier where you really want to work).

The major problem I've seen from people with your type of background is failure to understand what the employer expects and wants in terms of job application and interview. On a very high level, your goal is to convince them that you'll make them more money than you'll cost them, but you have to be fairly subtle about it in a bunch of ways. You also need to make sure you don't subtly convey things that will imply you'll cost them money (arrogant, hard to work with, needs babysitting, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Professionally, it depends on what you've done - in terms of resume the list of work you've done for people is exactly that.

Personally, the downsides tend to be limited to activities where you want to get credit - for example, buying a home or similar where they want to see that you're capable of making income.

</comment><comment><USER22> The companies you have owned should make up your resume.

</comment><comment><USER23> Depending on the level that your first exit was at, it sounds like you were missing the essential "first few jobs" where you figure stuff out. For me, my first few jobs were frustrating enough to motivate me to build side projects. In fact, I think the day jobs made my side projects more successful and more rewarding. If I were you, I'd look for a job in your industry and pretend you don't have a savings to fall back on. Then maybe you'll find what you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER24> I agree with the other commenters that having owned a business is an asset, however, the one thing you should be aware of going into interviews is that interviewers may look at you as a "flight risk". Having come up with your own ideas and run your own company, you may not be as tied down to a job as other people, and they may want to question you on that. You can easily come up with good reasons in advance to allay their concerns.

</comment><comment><USER25> Don't let not having traditional credentials get you down.

I don't know if you remember this story from HN a few weeks ago, but you should keep it in the back of your mind as you interview:

"How MIT Accepted a Student with No High School Degree, Thanks to His Brilliant Programming" [http://www.geekosystem.com/how-mit-accepted-a-student- with-n...](http://www.geekosystem.com/how-mit-accepted-a-student-with-no-high- school-degree/)

<comment><USER26> _"So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges."_

I would like to see his actual code that got him accepted, but I wasn't able to find it. Anyone else more luck?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Look at it like this, you're already a success and if they want to dick you around because you haven't had a "real" job then it probably isn't going to be a fit.

I'd recommend not filling out a resume and just talking directly with the people you'd like to work for. If they have an HR department it's probably already too late.

You're different than most candidates, embrace it.

</comment><comment> p-gregory I've learned that it never hurts to just "put your self out there."

I sit more on the design side of things, but in my experience people tend to be more interested in what I've done/built/created than simply where I have worked or went to school.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why dont you put your resume up for HN to review it for you? (Hide any identification information.)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'll help you with a resume if you like. My email address is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Apply fo jobs at a few interesting companies and just see what happens?"

Yes.</comment>


Secured.fyi – Ranking the most secure and private software tools - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! As the title suggests, I made this tool that ranks the most secure and private email, backup, VPN, cryptos and communication software :)
It's all based on a Google Sheet, which updates the website automatically when the spreadsheet changes: https://secured.fyi/edit
Couldn't find a good comparison overview like this, and want to see if enough people are interested in it, because I would like to spend more time on expanding the data set, and add more categories.
I wrote a medium post here that goes more in detail on how and why it was made: https://medium.com/@fredrikaurdal/secured-fyi-ranking-the-most-secure-and-private-software-tools-how-i-created-a-powerful-ranking-1f8a37913169
I'd like to monetize this by offering profiles with premium features, instead of relying on annoying ads.
If anything is not working, suggestions for improvements, what you love and hate is all welcome :) <comment><AUTHOR> I also submitted it to Product Hunt to get some feedback: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/secured-fyi- alpha](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/secured-fyi-alpha)</comment>


Step by step to Backbone.js — Require.js modules - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kjbekkelund/writings/blob/master/published/step-by-step-modules.md

<comment><USER2> Another great step by step guide. Thank you.

The jQuery to Backbone one was really great. ([https://github.com/kjbekkelund/writings/blob/master/publishe...](https://github.com/kjbekkelund/writings/blob/master/published/understanding- backbone.md))

To those who are interested, this guy has some more writings here:

[https://github.com/kjbekkelund/writings/tree/master/publishe...](https://github.com/kjbekkelund/writings/tree/master/published)</comment>


Iron Yard code school to close all campuses - <AUTHOR> http://blog.theironyard.com/2017/07/20/message-iron-yard/ <comment><USER2> I am going to go out on a limb here and say it has nothing to do with the code school business model but instead by the for-profit colleges that bought both the Iron Yard and Dev School (which shut down recently).

It is my belief that for-profit schools (in these cases Apollo Group and Kaplan Test Prep) have looked at code schools as potential cash cows devoid of the complications of both federal financial aid and the gainful employment entanglements associated with the "type" of students that typical for-profits schools attract. While for-profits seemed like a perfect fit for acquiring code schools (and I'm sure led to handsome paydays for the founders), these businesses brought bloat, inefficiencies, and baggage that could not operate in the fast-paced and nimble environments they bought into.

I can't speak for these two code schools but I heard from a reliable first- hand source that when Dev Mountain was bought out by Capella Education, the founders "checked out." What checked in was a bureaucracy that was more concerned about asses-in-seats than providing a bleeding-edge, entrepreneurial-driven education. If you look at the reviews of Dev Mountain by recent students there is no doubt whatsoever that this is what happened. Is this possibly what befell Iron Yard and Dev School? I can't say. What I can say from decades is that when you sell out to a for-profit school, you are very well dancing with the devil.

<comment><USER3> I was one of the original advisory board members of DevMountain (and father of one of the three founders). I also run an entrepreneur bootcamp in Utah, where DevMountain is located. This assertion about the founders of DevMountain "checking out" is unfounded. Sure, they are now wealthier than they were and have security and may seem more at ease (a natural occurrence after an exit), but they take their continuing roles seriously. Only one of the three to date has "retired" (about 8 months after the acquisition) and the other two (including my son) are still there working every day. Capella has been pleased with them. Also, just 10 minutes ago I heard about some exciting things being worked on and arranged by the founders -- innovative approaches to the industry. These two founders are still the top two leaders in the DevMountain subsidiary of Capella. They continue to innovate in the areas of coding bootcamp curriculum development, student success, marketing, and much more. As a side note, Capella has been a great acquirer, basically leaving DevMountain as it was, only adding some financial clout and general oversight, leaving the original DevMountain CEO in that position with nearly full discretion over the enterprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can tell you all without a doubt, The Iron Yard closing has nothing to do with its performance. Someone bought somebody else and the new people in charge just don't want to spend the money. That's all.

Unfortunately there's nothing to be learned about code-bootcamps from this. I can tell you, however, as someone who recently completed TIY and now has a better job than any of my college-completing friends have, going through TIY was the best decision I ever made.

And you can safely ignore anyone who dismisses the level or quality of what you learn at TIY. I learned how to code and I learned how to continue to learn how to code. That's more than I can say for any of my other learning experiences which were almost completely focused on "passing".

<comment><USER5> I went to one of their showcase events where the students show projects and bring resumes to meet potential employers. The amount of progress the students made from "never done this before" to show day was really impressive.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, only one person in my 8 person class had ever done any coding before. It would've taken me significantly longer than 3 months to get to that point and I don't know if I ever would've understood as much as I do now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Knew two people who worked at their Detroit campus. If I'm remembering correctly they had more jobs lined up than students. Now Detroit isn't even listed on their website, yet it only opened in 2015. This filled a real need in Detroit and it saddens me.

<comment> chao- _> This filled a real need in Detroit and it saddens me._

The same is true for Houston. I'm about to hire an Iron Yard graduate for a junior dev position, and if I had the budget to more people, one of the other top candidates was also an Iron Yard grad.

<comment><USER7> If you'd like you could send me that dev's info (also in Houston)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The comments are pretty heart warming and show they definitely got something right.

<comment><USER9> I was an instructor there for 2 cohorts. It was probably the hardest I ever worked. The same was true for my fellow instructors. We were/are senior engineers who took the job for reasons other than money (it was a pay cut for me). We wanted to contribute back.

A few students had pretty bad experiences, I think. It was a _very_ demanding program. Several times, I had full-grown adults break down and cry during our 1:1s. But over all, the majority of students thrived. It was life-changing-- in a good way-- for most of them, and that's why I and my fellow instructors were there.

It was one of the most meaningful periods of my career. I wouldn't go back and undo any of it, but I also won't be teaching at a code-bootcamp again. I'd consider a slower-paced program such as a university, tech school or high- school, though.

<comment><USER10> Question: if the pay was such that you weren't taking a pay cut, would that have made you stay longer? What would the conditions have to be like for someone who's a senior engineer to even consider making "a career change" into teaching swe for the next 10 years of their career, rather than a 2 year moonlighting stint? (Wondering what the setup had to be too make this sustainable)

<comment><USER9> Well, market-rate pay would be a good starter. TIY was really close. It was _almost_ a horizontal move for me.

But there are a few other things that these kinds of institutions need to solve:

\- How to keep your staff from burning out

\- How to keep your staff up to speed

Both are hard problems. TIY (at the time that I taught there, anyway) was staffed by people who had 10-15 years (and more in some cases) of industry experience in a broad range of fields. If I spent the next 10 years of my career teaching, I suspect my value proposition would go down over time, as I began to have less and less relevant industry experience.

One thought was that schools of this nature should be a two-sided business. Instructors would teach for a cohort (or two) and then flip over into the consultancy side of the business for some time doing real-world industrial work.

<comment><USER11> I have a genuine question: What's different about doing consultancy that allows one to keep up to date? (As opposed to teaching)

My confusion comes from thinking of them both as full time jobs (so therefore where would you get the time to do extra study on the side).

Would the consultancy allow you to 'learn by doing' (i.e., you pick a new technology to use and figure it out as you build and deploy it)?

<comment><USER12> Consulting exposes you to problems in the field; teaching is where you tell others about problems you're familiar with. If you don't have an input of new problems, you're eventually just recycling the same material...

<comment><USER13> But then the great teaching would have to be informed by coding's great problems. Your average consultant doesn't encounter "the great coding problems" on a daily or even yearly basis. This is why it might be better for teachers to devote themselves to seeking and researching these challenges and problems as a part of their teaching like all great teachers of any lifelong pursuit have done. If these bootcamp teachers did that, the level of teaching would rise very high. It might finally be worth its price tag, even if students didn't get jobs. I guess that is why the pro-level musicians pay so much for a summer spent with master teachers with no promise of work at the end-- it is because those teachers actually teach them something of great value at the craft that pays for itself and helps the student become an artist at what they do. And for the most part, unfortunately, software engineers are not treated by their companies as artists of value either, like these classical musicians were, at least for many years before that began to decline sharply. There is so much precedent about where this bootcamp model and this "dearth of technical talent" will lead- and these places are not good. They lead to the worker getting paid very little and there being very few low- paying jobs in the end. But this is tech, so it will happen at speed and scale like never before. I've already watched tech do everything in classical music from 1950-1990 in about five years (including the sexism and its accompanying legal battles and outcries). Well, everything except great teaching at the "camp" level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shouldn't place like these be growing instead of closing down? What did they get wrong? The demand for qualified developers isn't slowing afaik.

<comment><USER15> 1\. People who can effectively teach others to program well enough to secure professional employment may have better options than teaching open-enrollment entry-level programming classes.

2\. Because of that, and for any of a number of other reasons, we may generally be overestimating how effectively these kinds of schools are educating people.

3\. It's an open secret that hiring in the technology industry isn't based on aptitude, but rather on credentials and hazing rituals. Something like 3 decades of cultural development have trained developers that the most important risk they face in hiring is accepting someone underqualified, rather than passing on someone who is in fact qualified.

Given all these problems, it's not surprising that a school with a model of charging a 4-5 figure tuition in exchange for attempting to increase the likelihood of graduates employment would fail.

<comment><USER16> Regarding #1, an Iron Yard competitor offered a six-month contract for $45,000, 1099, here in Boston (with "an option" to re-up, at the same rate). It would not exactly be difficult to beat that number by doing almost anything else.

Another was talking about $80K/year...in freaking Ohio.

I would love to teach more than I do, and I'm starting to work on some web courses because I've learned from corporate training that I'm _good at it_ , but the money doesn't make sense at all.

<comment><USER17> > $80K/year...in freaking Ohio

I don't get this sentence, is this good or bad? I grew up in Ohio and for the majority of people I know there, they would be absolutely thrilled at that salary. The cost of living is nowhere near SF levels.

The "freaking Ohio" part, yeah I can understand that for a lot of parts of Ohio, but it's highly dependent on where in the state you're talking about.

<comment><USER18> 80k is great in Ohio - I think that's the implication. 80k goes a long way when rent is 800/month.

<comment><USER17> Agree that it's great, but the feeling I got from the OP was along the lines of "They only offered 80k, and on top of that it was in Ohio"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They were a staple of the community in Greenville, SC. This news was a shock all around.

<comment><USER17> I was surprised by this as well, when I think of Greenville and tech startup- ish companies, I think of the The Iron Yard. Are there any other companies around with that sort of strong presence? I haven't lived in Greenville for two years now but I've had thoughts of moving back there.

<comment><USER19> ChartSpan and eRad are 2 'startups' in the area growing relatively fast and blend tech and healthcare. Other than that it's a lot of smaller groups. Lot of automotive and Windstream, GE, Fluor, INFOR have strong dev presence here as well.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget Benefit Focus. They have office in Greenville and Charleston (HQ), have been growing like crazy and went public a couple years back. That company is doing really well and can't seem to hire people fast enough.

<comment><USER20> Benefit Focus from everyone I've known who has worked there pre-public said the company is absolutely terrible to work for from the engineering department perspective.

<comment><USER17> I worked there for two years. Loved the people there, but the engineering definitely wasn't great. Imagine a Java application that started in 2000 and hasn't really had any significant rewrites and is now too big to change. They run a good business and offer a lot of value to companies who use their product, but the engineering was definitely tough in the not-so-fun way due to the sheer amount of legacy code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone care to shed some light on what precipitated this?

<comment><USER22> Can I make a comment which is not specific about this school, to which I have no connection, or to coding bootcamps?

For-profit education is a regulated industry in the United States and is experiencing significant adversarial attention at the moment, as a result of widespread looting of federal tuition assistance programs, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Can I name a Greek god who has non-zero relevance to this story? Apollo.

<comment><USER13> Why Apollo? I got this from Wikipedia: "...Apollo was also seen as a god who could bring ill-health and deadly plague." In that case...I see your point.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.apollo.edu/](http://www.apollo.edu/)

<comment><USER13> oh, okay. thanks. but still funny anyhow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Dev Bootcamp just shut down also - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758364).

</comment><comment><USER24> What is the root cause for the decision to end this business?

Insufficient income? Costs too high? Cash flow issues - unsustainable inflows vs outflows? Mismanagement or something else?

<comment><USER25> So according to the numerous comments below asking the relatively similar question, it was difficult to run the business, partially because good teachers are hard to find and partly because the program is intense on the student and lastly because the money to run such operations is unsustainable in the long run.

There is a business model that works but the industry is still in an exploratory phase in trying to discover it.

<comment><USER24> > There is a business model that works but the industry is still in an > exploratory phase in trying to discover it.

Industry business model? The cynic in me says that there is still interest in how to best extract money from the growing flood of people interested in programming as a job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe the truly surprising thing about The Iron Yard is that they were able to run so many campuses in third tier markets for as long as they did.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ex TIY employee here. I only left the place because I wanted to go back to developing fulltime.

As someone who worked with the instructors and campuses, the global team, and taught for years at The Iron Yard, I can tell you the team -- especially the campus teams -- were largely the right mix of talent - great engineers that cared about communicating well and respecting folks from all walks of life.

With that said, after the investment rounds some things definitely began to take shape:

1\. The global staff slowly became more and more steps removed from the daily convo's of the instructors and campus directors

2\. There were regional managers and others who were brand new to the business; the company hired mostly from outside to bring in management team and half of them never ran a local campus first (to me their credentials from prior positions didn't always matter). They should have hired all mgmt from within, as they sadly did not mirror the culture of the campus teams.

3\. There's such a plethora of schools out there now competing for the same customer-base. The Iron Yard spent a LOT of time, effort, and money making some of the best curriculum I've ever seen - including its own platform for distributing content, videos, running live-editable code blocks of any language on Docker instances on the fly, and homework and review features for staff. But a lot of places competed on price and still operated without approval from state education boards or meeting any national standards.

4\. Instructors needed a change of pace, as they are constant learners too. Any churn and change of staff usually meant that "If it wasn't documented, then the lessons were not learned in-full for the next employee". So, I definitely saw some campuses run into trouble because when a veteran employee left (no upward movement for them, etc because there was already too much mgmt in-place) the impact was quite hard.

I loved the team, but ultimately a few miscalculated moves and operational/strategic retries burned the candle at both ends faster than the mgmt expected.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is the first I've heard of them, and having colleges/universities dedicated to teaching coding is impressive, and hearing positive things out of it.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are a great number of excellent reasons not to be in Detroit, as a business or an individual. The taxes are outrageous, the government is corrupt, the people who could afford to leave have all but left, the infrastructure is even worse than you'd expect given the ratio of revenue to services. 90% of murders go completely unresolved. That is, out of every ten people killed, and there are a lot, the perpetrators in nine of those murders will likely walk completely free. I don't know how anyone gets by, except perhaps in the gated communities, and in the communities which have organized more closely despite the odds. Even there, the shallow/immediate opportunities are effectively gone.

You truly can not expect many with another option to choose Detroit as it stands. My family on my mother's side grew up there, and it seems it's really breaking their heart to see it today. My mother holds on to hope that the artists will somehow "save" Detroit, which could be somewhat true. I'm of the opinion that nothing will save Detroit until it is so bad that the politicians no longer get anything for their corruption and excess.

<comment><USER30> > _You truly can not expect any sane person with another option to choose > Detroit_

This is the second time today that we've had to ask you to stop posting uncivil comments to HN. I don't want to ban you, but if you don't fix this we'll have to, so would you please fix this?

(Re-)reading the following might help:

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

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

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817477) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER29> I guess I didn't see it that way, I hope my change is adequate.

That said, I think that what I said was about as tame as newsguidelines.html itself: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.", which resorts to some light chiding which _I personally do not mind being subjected to_.

Note: I think you'll find Detroit1234's and Detroit12345's genuine account by looking at the list of people who have downvoted all of my comments in this thread. This is, assuming you folks aren't already doing work like this.

And again, sorry to waste your time. The expected colour of discourse here is a bit different from what I'm used to in person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Never heard of it ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</comment>


Ralph Nader says SEC should look into trading in Tesla - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/05/ralph-nader-says-sec-should-look-into-trading-in-tesla-based-on-the-stocks-recent-spike-higher.html <comment><USER2> I'm such a big Elon Musk fanboy that it pleases me to no end that the short strategy is failing. We need heroes of industry who engineer the things they think are important for society. I hope they can get their production ramped up to justify my optimism.</comment>


Solve Sudoku puzzles with Lego Mindstorms - <AUTHOR> http://tiltedtwister.com/sudokusolver.html

<comment><USER2> I can solve Sudoku on hard at 75% of the cases at my current skill level. I am not sure that I like the idea that a piece of Lego is better than me at it...</comment>


A typical day on the ward - <AUTHOR> http://listrunner.tumblr.com/post/91225625025/youll-cringe-when-you-read-this-but-this-a-typical <comment><USER3> When I was a med student in 2009, I did my surgery rotation at a community hospital outside of Boston. Each morning two students were responsible for copying down overnight vital signs from the EHR onto paper. The job took upwards of 45 minutes, and morning rounds were at 6am...

I didn't mind driving through icy Boston roads at five in the morning -- but I did mind the fact that I was doing a job that computers should be able to do far faster and more accurately.

The EHR was a terminal-based system, and I wound up routing traffic through a local proxy, analyzing the logs, and figuring out how the protocols worked. (I'm sure that reading about terminal emulators would have been more effective than reverse engineering them; I can only blame sleep deprivation.) I ultimately built a Python script to drive the terminal based on a list of medical record numbers, recording vital signs and slotting them into pre- formatted progress notes for printing. It even plotted sparklines for fever curves.

It worked. And the chief of surgery loved it. He wrote me a stellar evaluation that prominently mentioned my work with the computer system (I also did good clinical work and all).

Two months later when the medical school dean read my evaluation, I got a very angry phone call. She was horrified that I had "hacked" into the computer system and taken matters into my own hands. I tried my best to explain how the system worked, and why it wasn't a threat. But I didn't really get the message across.

The upshot, though: I realized just how broken healthcare information systems were -- and that I enjoyed working on solutions. After medical school I joined the research faculty at Boston Children's Hospital, where I'm working on open specs, tools, and standards that make it easier to integrate third-party health apps with clinical data and EHRs [1]. It's been an interesting ride -- and I've learned an incredible amount about health interoperability, politics, data, and security along the way.

1\. [http://smartplatforms.org/](http://smartplatforms.org/)

<comment><USER4> Do you know the guys working on XTK [1]? They are also working out of Boston Children's Hospital. They have an awesome medical library for webGL based applications. If so, tell them I say hi!

Your story reminds me of my current struggle with a massive medical company in orthopedics and when I learned to never say the word hack again. I was brand new to medical working with WebGL to create a web based bone cutter app for surgeons. Marketing was behind this project idea and had to have it on the Ipad. I used ludei [2] to natively port it to Android and iOS support wasn't completely implemented when I presented to marketing. They demanded it be on the Ipad, I could promise if & when it would be available but suggested a possible 'hack' to get around the Ipad's webGL limitation. They flipped shit on the word hack and went bezerk. I feel your pain.

[1] [http://www.goxtk.com](http://www.goxtk.com)

[2] [http://www.ludei.com](http://www.ludei.com)

<comment><USER5> Somewhat offtopic---do you have an opinion on ludei vs. phonegap, or know someone who does? Working on a js project I'd like to port to mobile, and somewhat bewildered by the choices...

<comment><USER6> PhoneGap just runs on the built-in web controls of the platform. Ludei reimplements the web control to run faster. Generally you only use the latter for games and graphics intensive apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My mom who is an NP, (nurse then) used to say 20 years ago that the nurses are the "rememberers" and the doctors, the "thinkers". The most important job of the nurse was to remember what was going on with each patient and get the doctors up to speed as efficiently as possible.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm in the late stages of writing up a PhD on this topic (nursing documentation in a community setting). The major problems are:

1\. EHR technology is sold to managers, not clinicians.

2\. The leadership of introducing the EHR is fragmented and highly dependent on local conditions such that success in one location does not guarantee success in another location. Likewise with failure.

3\. Researchers have a tendency to treat evaluation of health technology as epistemologically equivalent to evaluation of pharmaceutical technology even though a cursory examination of the logic underpinning this assumption clearly demonstrates that this is not the case.

(point 3 makes my job very difficult and political. Fortunately this work[1] and the very few others like it, generally from the same research group lends my work instant legitimacy. Without it, getting my thesis through the committie would I fear be impossible).

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22188347](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22188347)

<comment><AUTHOR> singingfish well outlined! would like to see more of the thesis. good luck!

<comment><USER8> my other problem is that I've turned into a moderately successful software developer and the phd is no longer necessary for my career. along with the politics, that creates big motivations problems for me ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> After a 12-hour stay in the ICU a couple of years ago, this doesn't surprise me in the least. I was given a different patient's discharge papers by mistake, and when I got all the records of stay for reference afterwards some of the clinician's reports were utterly illegible. I guess this is why I ended up answering the same medical background questions over and over again during the night.

-

This looks like a great tool How are you going to deal with the inevitable hurdles of HIPPA compliance? (HIPPA = patient privacy laws in the US, for people who don't know).

<comment><USER10> As a medical technician in a neuro department, I had to take an illegible referral to the neurologist who wrote it (luckily he was in-house). Even he couldn't read his own handwriting: "But I know the patient, and he needs...".

<comment><USER11> Why is this tolerated? It seems like such an absurdly basic problem to fix. Years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of advanced medical training is distilled into a note/prescription that looks like a fucking five year old wrote it. It's pathetic.

A personal anecdote: I went to a doctor recently. He opened my notes, squinted at them, and then asked me what medications he had prescribed me. That was my last visit to him.

<comment><USER10> It's actually an extremely difficult problem to fix. Anything new that restricts doctors in any way, shape, or form has to come from up high, and it also has to be across the board. Few hospitals have the luxury to turn away doctors, and few areas have enough doctors doing general practice. Make a new regulation, and some doctors will sigh and do it - but other doctors will move on... unless there's nowhere to move to that doesn't also have the new requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This description of a typical day on the ward is of course ridiculously inefficient to us as digital natives. We deal with information flows every day and can imagine ten different systems that could do this without even opening the door to the hospital.

The big 'but' is that there are so many hidden requirements here. Privacy is a huge concern. Data on patients may not leave the hospital. With the devices we have these days, it is almost impossible to create a near offline system. Almost all devices are connected to "the cloud" in some form or another, making them vulnerable.

The fact that health insurers are grossly incompetent in this aspect does not mean that hospitals should go down to that level.

Another hidden requirement is that this system has to work, always, no matter what happens. Paper notes may not be efficient, or complete. However, you can be pretty sure that while the hospital is still standing, this system works. Making a digital system that is as reliable is a very hard task.

All this will make such a system a huge investment, not only the system itself, but also in training. Balanced against the cost, it is not so evident that this is really an acceptable investment.

<comment><USER13> I dunno about the "always works" claim. I have nothing to do with health care, per se, but I always tell everyone to factor in a base 1%-5% error rate for basic information and data entry that a human beings end up doing manually...

I imagine the number of errors/deaths/kerfuffles due to the opportunity cost of professional time, not to mention transcription and human errors of such systems are not inconsequential...even if they aren't at the forefront of our minds, and even if some of them haven't been measured accurately.

<comment><USER12> You are never going to take away the human from this equation. Notes are taken over the course of the day, and many of the proposed systems end up taking _more_ time: nurses do their rounds, use pen and paper to take notes while walking around, and at the end of the shift copy the notes from the paper into the system.

This means that you have basically added another data entry level, increasing both time and error rate.

<comment><USER13> Well I can't comment on the system/app offered by the author of the OP, but obviously the point of designing a system to fix/improve such operations wouldn't just be adding another level of data entry and subsequently multiply risk, but instead to minimize it.

The goal is not to remove humans from the equation, since that is probably both impossible and undesired, but to separate humans and computers into supporting each other in the task at hand by specialising into what they do best: computers for tasks that can be broken down into repetition, replication, automation, speed, validation, and volume, and humans for creation, ambiguity, complexity, context, service delivery and interpretation.

At the moment i'm guessing there's a fair bit of humans doing the jobs computers are good at in hospitals around the world...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      Oh my god, we still have to write things down on paper?!

Yeah, and so what? Writing things down on paper is a damn tough pnemonic system to defeat.

The problem arises when _others_ have to discern an individual's short hand notes.

So, an array of shitty post-notes is weak and lacks integrity, but similarly, so do disparate plain text files, haphazardly saved in an array of folders with haphazard file names. And yes, you could theoretically grep such a data store for meaningful details, but then again: Have you ever actually tried to parse someone else's randomly sorted plain text notes? It's a brain nullifying experience sifting through someone else's disorganized stream of consciousness.

This is a garbage-in-garbage-out scenario, and coping with a tide of inadvertently injured humanity does not lend itself to well-formed XML and proper SQL grammar. People don't plan on coughing up a lung, or getting shot, or run over. No one plans on syphlis dimentia.

You can bulldoze a landfill of printed circuit boards onto this problem, and still come back and say "boo-hoo, healthcare broken."

It's a hard problem, and there's always going to be a 50% share of elbow grease to pony up on the buy-in. Hospitals are hotels where people disintegrate in the most controlled manner possible.

Feel free to try and automate garbage collection in this environment. You'll assuredly end up with more bloated heap space than a Windows virtual machine running a JVM that emulates a .NET runtime environment.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article glosses over the fact that wards rounds are typically an exercise that requires vast amount of highly dimensional data. Hidden in the article is the requirement that the information - lab values, vitals, patient location / status, problem list - must be maintained electronically. This by itself is already very hard, especially as paper records never have downtime / network issues and do not talk back when invalid values are written.

Please be assured that the state-of-the-art is not as described. Sufficiently advanced hospitals would have means for healthcare workers to access vitals, lab values, patient location, current medications, current problem list / diagnoses, medical history from previous days and even previous visits, and even medical history from other institutions - all electronically. Staffs enter data into system directly and no transcribing is required. These are available as discrete data i.e. not freetext strings only decipherable by humans.

Also don't forget about electronic prescribing of drugs, glorified vending machines with pockets that only open when there is an order for that particular medication, and barcoded medication administration system.

<comment><USER16> MD here. I agree that many EMRs can do the things you list. What you have missed is how painful/clunky it is to do so, which is why it's still so often done by hand.

Of course, some EMRs may be good... just none of the 10 or so I have used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I first shadowed on a post-op floor in Detroit, I was shocked to see how much information nurses had to copy by hand during a shift change. Even new medicine orders and drug administration schedules were being penciled into the margins of already-crammed pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a lot of ways, nurses have it even worse. They're constantly on the front lines they lose so much time in having to rewrite the same information over and over again.

<comment><USER10> I have a friend who's been a QA engineer at a couple of hospitals. At one hospital, he noted that the doctors would have their ward meeting half an hour before the nurses would have their ward meeting. One nurse would attend the doctors' meeting, and transfer the information. In order to prevent errors from occurring due to being given second-hand (or the 'transferer' not asking the right question for a patient), he suggested melding the two meetings, which were only half an hour apart. The doctors wouldn't move their meeting "because we consult in the morning", and the nurses wouldn't move theirs because "the doctors meeting happens at a scheduled break time". So errors keep on happening...

He had a few other glorious stories of the amazing politics that goes on in hospitals - sometimes it seems like a bloodsport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems like the essentially free work done by interns/medical students is instrumental to these bad systems and procedures continuing.

I wonder what would happen if an intern group got together and said "No. This is a stupid and dangerous way of doing things. We're no longer going to turn up an hour early for a 12-hour shift to copy out notes that should have been taken in a more sensible way to start with."

<comment><USER19> Interns are typically not fully licensed to practice medicine without supervision, which is the point of a residency program (they take more exams to this effect at the end of the residency). This is why the hospital has enormous bargaining power over them and the hours/wages are markedly different from those of attendings. Unionization of residents is still very rare because the hospital essentially has the power to end the residents' careers for such behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links." [1]

@jeeshan, I'm assuming you're the author. Why have these practices (archaic maintenance of lists) been maintained?

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Good and (complex) question. Essentially, the person deciding or purchasing technology in a hospital (an IT administrator) is not the person seeing patients (the doctor). They often work in completely different buildings and no have overlapping experience.

My bad incorrectly submitting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are a few mentions of ListRunner in there but no links to the site - <USER2> should update the blog template to handle that if you can.

For anyone else, the URL is: [http://www.listrunnerapp.com/](http://www.listrunnerapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> What's the easiest way to learn about and work towards changing/improving these places as an individual?

<comment><USER23> The most difficult part is selling to a hospital. So if you can crack that half of the problem the technology is the easy part.

<comment><USER24> Amen to that.

The tech parts of these problems (from personal experience) are pretty mundane and pedestrian--like, summer intern pedestrian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Golly. I thought this was going to be about a hospital ward in sub-saharan Africa, some abandoned corner of Asia, or even a VA hospital here in the US.

I'm glad people care, but for me, these are first world problems compared to drug shortages, inadequate facilities for water and sanitation, missing diagnostics, payroll shortfalls, and so many things.

Sadly, though, these are not problems that programmers can do much to fix.

<comment><USER26> I empathize with your compassion but I've downvoted you because the existence of worse problems shouldn't preclude all other discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would love to have a list of tasks for each of my patients on my phone. This would make being an intern far easier. In fact, I'm currently validating and building a solution for this exact problem, which I will talk about below, but first it's important to understand what an intern (at least here in Australia) does during the actual ward round where most of their tasks for the rest of the day are created.

An average intern during a ward round has to do the following things for each patient : 1) Handwrite notes into the patient's bedside notes as the senior doctor takes a history / examines the patient. 2) Look at the patient's vitals chart and medications chart. 3) Handwrite a plan in the patient's notes at the end (this is essentially a list of tasks for the intern to do during the day). 4) Often while the intern is still writing the plan, into the patients notes, the rest of the team is already moving onto the next patient. The intern will hurriedly re-write any tasks from the plan onto their personal printed patient list (takes < 5 seconds) and then quickly go get the notes for the next patient and begin this process again. Also note that often the patients are scattered around multiple wards in the hospital.

Now Listrunner, in their demo video shows a list of tasks for each patient on an iPhone. Awesome!

But where in the ward round does my list of tasks get copied into Listrunner? If I have to manually find the patient in the app and then manually add the tasks to an app it would take minutes, not the <5 seconds it does to rewrite the tasks on a personal list in super shorthand. And no senior doctor is going to wait a couple of minutes for you to write each patients tasks into your phone (this would add 40 minutes to a 20 patient ward round).

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think a solution using google glass would be super amazing here. I'm currently in the prototyping and validation stage of the project (following Eric Reis' 'build-measure-learn'). Happy to talk to any doctors interested in it.

It works as follows:

1) After you finish writing the patient's plan you take a photo of it with google glass. 2) OCR is performed on the photo, right then an there (hopefully in <= 1 sec) and the OCR is shown to the google glass wearer who can confirm that the OCR is correct.* 3) Those tasks are then synced to the doctor's phone, or for security reasons perhaps a hospital owned phone or tablet.

The advantage of this system is that it doesn't change the current workflow at all. It doesn't affect the speed of the ward round. Thus, faces a lower level of resistance to adoption.

Disadvantage - doctor's are notorious for bad handwriting, thus it will not work for all doctors. It's expensive. However, as google glass (and perhaps other similar tech) gets cheaper this may not be significant.

*Patient labels are already affixed to the top of the page (so OCR can be performed on the label to associate the tasks with the patient). But if the solution became widely used, a simple QR code could be added to patient labels, to make this easier.

<comment><USER28> As a techie with a medical doctorate, I've considered these sorts of things too.

The basic problem is that if you want to have records in the computer someone has to input them in a more or less structured manner. This is the issue that is usually left out of EMR discussions. Electronic health records are a _trade-off_. Everyone realizes there are benefits, but if you ignore the costs when making important decisions, it usually turns out badly.

Because of this, usually what happens is that skilled medical professionals end up saddled with a second data-entry job.

OCR and voice recognition (which you didn't mention, but I think is also a good fit) are both useful tools. However, if you really think about it, the minimum viable product in this space is actually a medical transcriptionist service. Let doctors (and nurses) use the easiest, fastest system they can for recording data (ie paper, or voice), let the DBA's store everything in a massive database for efficient retrieval and make money by providing an efficient reliable method for converting between the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hospitals already put a bracelet on every in-patient, right? What if you had an RFID chip in the bracelets and scanned at entrances/exits to the ward, to keep track of where the patients are and have been?

<comment><USER30> why? I think you are mis-understanding the problem, which is not where patients are but what teams they belong to and what has happened to them overnight</comment></comment>


Chrome and Opera Optimize for Mozilla-Pioneered Asm.js - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/11/26/chrome-and-opera-optimize-for-mozilla-pioneered-asm-js/

<comment><USER2> Asm.js is intrinsically superior to native client (and yes, I do see them as competing technologies) and will inevitably push NaCl out of the market for one simple reason: even if the browser doesn't explicitly optimize for asm.js, _the code will still run_. It may not be usably fast, but something will happen. As opposed to native client, where if your user base doesn't support it you're just dead in the water. And the trend so far is javascript getting faster and closer to native running code. Google _must_ eventually build asm.js optimizations into Chrome. What's their alternative strategy? Ignore asm.js and let Mozilla tout Firefox's javascript engine as faster? NaCl's writing is on the wall and Google knows it.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure "intrinsically superior" is the right way to think about this. If you were asked for a mechanism to get web clients to execute stuff "fast" that was generated from a traditional C-like compiler front end, you _surely_ wouldn't have designed asm.js. You'd probably have ended up with something more like the JVM or PNaCL.

It's true that asm.js wins for compatibility, for obvious reasons. And that's a powerful advantage. And it works in the same runtime that existing web apps do, which likewise a win; Java and especially NaCl have complicated interoperability paradigms. They are not just "a faster web page", which is what 90% of developers really wanted to begin with.

That said, the remaining 10% really do want something more. They want to write targetted architecture-specific assembly, perhaps. They want access to syscall-level abstractions like threads and true sockets (buffer sizes, Nagle settings, timeouts, etc...). And asm.js has nothing for these people.

And despite its simlicity, asm.js is still mostly just a toy. It's got one working compiler backend that isn't packaged sanely anywhere. I've three times now decided to get serious and build emscripten from source, and three times given up -- it lags LLVM releases, it has glitchy behavior. Compare to clang and especially gcc which build robustly and cleanly everywhere and come with elaborate test suites. This isn't a toolchain I'm about to start betting a company on, for sure.

Give it time. I like asm.js too. But it's never going to be The Answer to remotely deployable "native like" code any more than Java was.

<comment><USER4> _I 'm not sure "intrinsically superior" is the right way to think about this._

It's fast enough. It's compatible with the existing web. It's platform independent. It runs in any standards-compliant web-browser. That's four wins right there.

It's fundamentally superior. End of discussion.

 _That said, the remaining 10% really do want something more. They want to write targetted architecture-specific assembly, perhaps._

If they do, they can go do it somewhere which isn't the open web.

When I use a web-browser, me and my devices aren't going to wait for you to fix your webpage to support the architecture I happen to be running. We're going to go somewhere else.

Imagine how _impossible_ it would have been for early Macs and ARM-devices to enter the market if the web was already entrenched in platform-specific Intel x86 code. How many of those websites out there do you think would have been "fixed" in order to work on other platforms, years after the authors abandoned them? I'm guessing a tiny fraction.

They didn't have to though, because the web is cross-platform. This is by design.

We should thoroughly ignore Google's best efforts to reverse this with their proprietary NaCl. Why on earth would we want to change the best quality of the web now that it has already proven its value?

<comment><USER5> > Imagine how impossible it would have been for early Macs and ARM-devices to > enter the market if the web was already entrenched in platform-specific > Intel x86 code.

Are you aware that NaCl (the platform-specific version) is only enabled for applications installed through the Chrome Web Store? Chrome will not load NaCl modules from the web. All that is supported for the web is PNaCl, which is platform-independent. See: [https://developers.google.com/native- client/dev/nacl-and-pna...](https://developers.google.com/native- client/dev/nacl-and-pnacl)

So your hypothetical is not in danger of happening.

<comment><USER4> Ok. Fair enough.

That said, that's not what the post I was replying to was suggesting. It was suggesting writing _architecture-specific assembly_ code and putting it on the web. And citing that as a legitimate need which should be addressed by browser-vendors.

Needless to say, as someone who supports an open, cross-platform web, I strongly oppose any such measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this accurate? My understanding was that the V8 team wasn't explicitly optimizing for asm.js, and just optimized V8 in general (and that often asm.js hit fast-paths even without explicit optimization).

It sounds from the article like Epic announced that Chrome/V8 is fast enough to run the Unreal 3 engine, and Mozilla's trying to spin it as V8 explicitly optimized for a "spec" invented by Mozilla when actually they just made V8 really, really fast.

That said, they do include an asm.js benchmark in Octane 2, so it's clearly on their radar. But as far as I've heard they haven't actually implemented special asm.js typecheckers / AOT compilers like Mozilla has.

<comment><USER7> Not sure where you see "spec" mentioned in there?

As you say, Google included asm.js code in Octane 2, and you can see progress on asm.js benchmarks as Google optimizes in ways that help that style of code on arewefastyet,

[http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=11&view=breakdown&suite=asm...](http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=11&view=breakdown&suite=asmjs- ubench)

This is also not something new, Google has optimized for asm.js code since the IO keynote much earlier this year where Google reported a 2.4x speedup on an aggregate asm.js benchmark,

[http://culturemass.com/2013/05/17/google-io-2013-keynote- par...](http://culturemass.com/2013/05/17/google-io-2013-keynote-part-ii/)

There are many ways to optimize for different types of code. Firefox uses the asm.js type system for asm.js, and does AOT compilation, while Chrome chose a different approach. The two approaches have different benefits. But both browsers certainly optimize for asm.js, they both announced doing so and the numbers are proof that they are succeeding.

edit: add link to Octane 2.0 and the asm.js benchmark added there, [http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/announcing- octane-20.html](http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/announcing-octane-20.html)

<comment><USER8> Even before asm.js there was emscripten (the primary generator of asm.js and inspiration for much of the spec), which has been used for a number of high profile demos and likely got optimization attention for years before asm.js.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure azakai is familiar with emscripten. ;)

<comment><USER10> This doesn't happen anywhere except on HN. I check parents profile before I ever reply for this reason ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's frustrating to see incorrect information regarding NaCl in top comments.

NaCl is not going to make the web x86-dependent. Recognizing the danger of an architecture-specific web, Google has disabled NaCl for everything except the Chrome Web Store. So unless you believe that the Apple App Store has been making the web ARM-specific for the last five years, Native Client is not the x86 lock-in that you may fear.

And in fact, Google now recommends PNaCl over NaCl for this very reason. It recommends NaCl only in certain limited situations: [https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/nacl-and- pna...](https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/nacl-and-pnacl)

And even PNaCl, which requires browser support to run "normally", has a JS fallback called pepper.js. So applications targeting PNaCl do not have a hard dependency on a PNaCl runtime: [http://trypepperjs.appspot.com/](http://trypepperjs.appspot.com/)

<comment><USER11> > Recognizing the danger of an architecture-specific web, Google has disabled > NaCl for everything except the Chrome Web Store.

And plus.google.com. :(

<comment><USER5> Really? I hadn't heard that -- do you have a reference with more info?

<comment><USER12> [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6723956](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6723956)

Basically, there is a whitelist of domains in Chrome where NaCl is enabled for non-web-store apps; the basic criteria, according to Google, is that (like the web store) these are places where Google has a lever to move people using NaCl from NaCl to PNaCl over time.

Obviously, this applies to Google's own properties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This isn't right - the Chrome team have explicitly said they're going after general optimizations that just happen to help asm.js performance greatly, but are applied regardless of if asm.js is being used or not.

<comment><USER7> What you say is true, Chrome is using a general approach to optimize asm.js code, but that does not contradict what the post says. It says that both Firefox and Chrome have optimized for asm.js, and that's correct. For example as reissbaker's comment mentions, Google even added an asm.js benchmark to Octane 2.0. That shows it is optimizing for that style of code, among many other styles of course.

<comment><USER14> That's one tortured and oriented way of looking at it. By your logic, every single dev who has ever made a js lib can make an article titled "Chrome and Opera Optimize for Whoever-Pioneered whatever.js", since the changes improve their lib.

That title is making it sound like the changes were aimed at making that one case faster, when they weren't.

And them adding a library to their benchmark doesn't in any way mean that they aim to optimize for it, only that they want to keep a reference on how their code perform. Just because I regularly check how my website renders in IE 6 doesn't mean I'm optimizing for it or that I consider it a target.

<comment><USER15> I think there's probably a subtle distinction that's hard to show. I'd imagine the line is drawn at interpreting the

       "use asm";

which signals the asm.js optimizations should be used. Instead, I'd bet the Chrome team are just watching for JS which matches the asm.js spec and optimizing for those cases, like they do for other code paths & structures. That would mean they are optimizing for it, but not supporting it directly.

<comment><USER16> > Instead, I'd bet the Chrome team are just watching for JS which matches the > asm.js spec

No. All optimizations that V8 are doing are following from the JavaScript specification itself, not from asm.js specification. V8 does not use asm.js specification in any way (including type rules that asm.js prescribes). If you take asm.js code and slightly change typing so that it will no longer pass asm.js type check but still be reasonable V8 will continue to optimize what it can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Please put down these Asm.js vs PNaCl arguments. We are all going to win in the end as both ASM.JS and PNaCl run on pure Javascript (PNaCl through a pepper.js fallback and ive heared asm.js is already a PNaCl target)[1]

In the end, some hugely popular cross compiled games will drive adoption of both technologies to the point where they are ubiquitous and supported by all major vendors. Apple doesnt want people saying "Wah look at how poorly Safari handles that game compared to Chrome/Firefox".

[1] [http://games.greggman.com/game/thoughts-on-asm-js-vs- pnacl/#...](http://games.greggman.com/game/thoughts-on-asm-js-vs- pnacl/#comment-1140569220)

<comment><USER18> But it's better to pick the one that could potentially lead to JS being phased out.

<comment><USER19> You are naive. If you don't understand JS, you can try something else that compiles to JS. There are some cool tools for people like you!

<comment><USER18> Transpilers are just a work-around, tooling is not mainstream yet. At the moment debugging the script is easier despite being unpleasant. I work with JS almost daily and understand it's strengths and weaknesses. I do not consider it a silver bullet which seems to be a shared sentiment around HN. A language designed to make documents more interactive should be just that. Especially if it is evolving in 5-year cycles ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#Versions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#Versions)).

<comment><USER20> I believe you're missing the point: with asm.js, JS isn't being used as a "silver bullet", but merely as a kind of "assembly" of web browsers. It's not that we love JS so much, it's that it's pretty much part of every browser, and as such code compiled for asm.js will run in any browser, albeit without any asm.js specific speedup if a given browser does not support it.

<comment><USER18> Can I run CLR/JVM/Mono in asm.js today? Are there any clear plans for it? Will performance of this scenario equal to that of NaCl? I have my hopes about asm.js but it's good to see that there is an alternative that is evolving in parallel.

<comment><USER20> You could try compiling Mono/Java to asm.js and see for yourself. Of course performance will not be equal to that of NaCl, but portability will.

I don't see NaCl as a viable alternative, I see it as an attempt of locking down the user to a specific browser, and also as a potential security worry.

<comment><USER18> The thing is that NaCl lets e.g. game developers use languages and tools _they_ like _today_ to generate great products that run with reasonable performance and are deployable to a decent app-store, here is a poster child: [http://www.tested.com/tech/web/3263-how-bastion-can-run- in-a...](http://www.tested.com/tech/web/3263-how-bastion-can-run-in-a-web- browser-with-googles-native-client)

<comment><USER20> You can do the same with Emscripten + asm.js. You don't code in Javascript, you just compile to JS. The products will run with less performance than native, I'm sure, but at least they're not dependent on Google's app store.

And, for me personally if I'm going to run a native app, I see no reason at all to have it run inside a web browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any concrete data to support "You still get the best performance in Firefox"? I get around 26fps for 1920x1200 fullscreen on the latest Firefox nightly, but 40fps on the latest Chromium. Ubuntu precise.

<comment><USER22> Comparing a pre-alpha quality nightly build is never a good way to compare real products.

Comparing the current stable Chrome 31.0.1650.57 and Firefox 25.0.1 on my Windows box running at 1920x1200 yields 57.8 fps for Chrome and 81.7 fps for Firefox. Note that Firefox is pegged at a maximum of 60fps by default which will affect benchmarks. You can disable that limit with the information in the FAQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does this officially open the possibility of running Mozilla Firefox on a Chromebook (ChromeOS)?

<comment><USER22> Nope. That will likely never be permitted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Mozilla seems pretty desperate for asjm.js press :-/</comment>


Microsoft issues Internet Explorer zero-day warning - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2488013.mspx

<comment><USER2> This one is a guaranteed way to get infected by malware. It even has an active proof-of-concept exploit that will launch arbitrary executables:

<http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/15746/>

Don't let family and friends surf with IE!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Aside from the obvious, if you are responsible for any hosting or internet presence services that have a free option and allow you to serve arbitrary or unsanitized CSS you should probably keep an eye out for people using your platform for drive by attacks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do people insist on using the term "zero-day"? It means nothing other than an unpatched vulnerability.

<comment><USER4> Not quite. It means a vulnerability that was being exploited before the software developer was aware of the exploit.

If Microsoft issued a warning about a vulnerability they didn't know was already being exploited, it's not a zero-day exploit.

If Mcirosoft was informed of the vulnerability a week ago and it's being exploited today, it's not a zero-day exploit.

If Microsoft issued a warning about a vulnerability they already patched but saw being exploited because the patch isn't widely installed yet, it's not a zero-day exploit.

<comment><USER3> Tell that to everyone using the term "zero-day", they don't seem to be aware.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whatever happened to Mark Pilgrim? - <AUTHOR>

Mark Pilgrim, the celebrated author of Dive Into HTML5, Dive Into Python and other programming books disappeared from the internet about a month ago [1]. I'm just wondering if anyone knows what happened to him.
[1] http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2011/10/04/searching-for-mark-pilgrim/ <comment><USER2> Also curious about this, i loved both of those works and was sad to see them disappear.

I know the HTML5 one has been re-hosted in a few places, not sure about the Python one... regardless of how the original author may feel about his works being shared without his consent.

<comment><AUTHOR> > regardless of how the original author may feel about his works being shared > without his consent.

If diveintomark.org was still up, I'd be able to link to Pilgrim's amazing "Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you" essay, which defended his decision to licence his books under the GNU Free Documentation License. Here's the HN discussion on that piece:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=891726>

<comment><USER2> Good to know, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


The Ultimate Flying Machine: Sexy as a Sports Car, Portable as a Jet Ski - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/17-01/mf_icon_air

<comment><USER2> Very nice, but in my opinion, nothing beats the cri-cri.

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

<http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TDmnjwbJrVM>

It's genuine - I've seen one fly. It's enough to make me think seriously about losing some weight and learning to fly.</comment>


Add threaded comments to Rails in only 7 lines of code: has_threaded_comments - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/aarongough/has_threaded_comments

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually my first serious open-source project. I have nominally released other code as open-source, but never in a way that made collaboration easy. The system itself is an extraction of the commenting system that I have been using in production on one application for over 6 months. I've learnt a lot by putting this together, hopefully other people find it useful too!</comment>


Elon Musk says ppl should receive a universal income once robots take their jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/elon-musk-universal-income-robots-ai-tesla-spacex-a7402556.html <comment><USER2> Elon also says that people will then have more time to do more complex things, once robots take over the mundane tasks.. That is the key point here, isnt it

<comment><USER3> There is a fine balance between clickbait and honest lengthy headline. Very few are able to do walk that line.</comment></comment>


Don't try to dodge the recession with grad school - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/03/dont-try-to-dodge-the-recession-with-grad-school/

<comment><USER2> I agree with most of the advice but med school is the one advice I would for the most part disagree with if we are talking about generalizations which the article for the most part does. Med school in general is still a winning proposition, while it is true the market is a mess and insurance companies have limited the up side, the reality is the majority of doctors do well. My wife went back to med school and should she decide to practice she would do quite well. Med school is one of the few that I would consider if I where at the point in my life where I was making a decision on education.</comment>


A.I. Experiments - <AUTHOR> https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com <comment><USER2> It asked me to draw a tree. I drew a palm tree. It said "palm tree" on the bottom, but then said it failed.

I drew the palm tree because I've studied AI and that's a classic AI mistake.

If you go to Hawaii and ask students to draw a tree, almost all of them will draw a palm tree. Ask them to draw a bird and it looks like a parrot (instead of the robin you see typically in the "lower 48").

It's interesting that this seems to suffer from the same selection bias.

<comment><USER3> It seems biased. When it said draw the moon, I drew a circle with a smaller crater shaped circle inside it, and it immediately guessed "the moon". Later when it asked me to draw a cookie, I drew the same exact shape (circle with smaller circle) and it immediately guessed cookie, not moon. What's going on?

<comment><USER4> Sounds like that drawing satisfies both criteria. (shrug)

<comment><USER3> So it's not really "guessing", it's just seeing if my drawing matches a predetermined bank of answers? Makes sense, since one time it asked me to draw a "police car" and before I had even finished drawing the chassis of a normal car it had already guessed "police car" and moved on.

<comment><USER5> I'd say it's "guessing" from a predetermined (rather small) bank of answers, since the same guesses appear over and over again.

<comment><USER6> it's correct that we have "only" trained it on a couple of hundreds of classes, so it will only guess from that dataset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google please, don't confuse my snake that just ate an elephant with a hat: [http://imgur.com/lBtGUKr](http://imgur.com/lBtGUKr)

<comment><USER8> ...and that lamb is exactly like I imagined. AI has no poetry. [https://unsee.cc/notarude/](https://unsee.cc/notarude/)

<comment><USER9> Not sure what that link is meant to be, but it has pop-up ads on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/quick- draw..](https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/quick-draw..). this is just too cool. Basically, you draw a picture and see it guess what you are drawing. Worth 2 minutes of your time!

<comment><USER11> Apparently it's supposed to learn as people supply more things it doesn't recognize? This sounds familiar... [1]

1: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft- cha...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot- racist)

<comment><USER12> A future where all the drawings must be Swastikas?

<comment><USER13> Or Mohammad.

<comment><USER14> A sausage A drill A Lighthouse with a broken roof A One eyed snake Oh, i know - a wiener is you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I didn't know what a "see saw" was, but it didn't stop google from guessing it right. [http://imgur.com/a/LfYxs](http://imgur.com/a/LfYxs)

</comment><comment><USER16> The drum machine is awesome. A shame there appears to be no way to share your dope beats...

[https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/drum- machine/view/](https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/drum-machine/view/)

</comment><comment><USER17> In some of the experiments they use t-SNE. To me t-SNE is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. [https://lvdmaaten.github.io/tsne/](https://lvdmaaten.github.io/tsne/)

<comment><USER18> I can give a shot at explaining TSNE over skype if you're interested.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the offer. I've seen this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA) and I think I understand how it works but still think the results are amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These are fun. Be wary of dragging your mouse around on the sequencer thing or the bird call classifier. Makes a hell of a racket.

What I really want in there is the computer-generated music and sample-level speech synthesis they have limited demos of in the WaveNet post:

[https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw- audio...](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I would like to mention I have used a similar service by Microsoft.

[https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en- us/computer-...](https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/computer- vision-api)

Would be interesting to for example submit the same blurry image with text to both services and see which one has the best algorithm to extract text.

<comment><USER20> I just did a test. I took picture of my monitor with this thread open. then sent it to google and microsofts OCR API.

Microsofts won and got far more things right. here is the output of the ocr scans: [http://pastebin.com/YuRinwN2](http://pastebin.com/YuRinwN2)

here is the sample I submitted: [https://i.imgsafe.org/c3147b06a3.jpg](https://i.imgsafe.org/c3147b06a3.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting. Quick Draw is similar to a game I made called Drawception ([https://drawception.com](https://drawception.com)). Which is basically the telephone game meets Pictionary with a 10 minute drawing limit that you play with random players.

I've often wondered at what point an AI would be able to play the game in a convincing way. Looks like things are getting closer!

</comment><comment><USER22> I am shameless and evil. Everytime it asks me to "draw" something, I just "draw" the letters for the words it uses to describe the thing it wants me to draw. The poor network is always very confused by that.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there an API to convert primitive doodles into guesses?

I'm trying to develop an app which would do this with things people "draw into the air" with their finger.

</comment><comment><USER24> Firefox: "Your connection is not secure"

[https://www.chromeexperiments.com/](https://www.chromeexperiments.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't know what the drum machine one is doing, but my computer can't keep up. It can't even keep time because of the lag.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's so interesting to see how these random Google websites differ. For instance, this website has been made with Bootstrap and jQuery. Weird choice already given the internal tools they have at their disposal.

Weirder still, the grid of videos doesn't use the Bootstrap grid at all. The elements are set to _display: inline-block_ and then their width (and height, which we'll get to) is adjusted every time the window resizes using JavaScript.

This is presumably to maintain square blocks, because that's the design they've opted for and grid systems do not give you much control over height of the grid cells.

But using JavaScript to try and ensure squareness of grid cells is totally unnecessary. You just need CSS, as I shall demonstrate:

[http://codepen.io/amdouglas/pen/eBddBd](http://codepen.io/amdouglas/pen/eBddBd)

[http://codepen.io/amdouglas/full/eBddBd](http://codepen.io/amdouglas/full/eBddBd)

Sometimes JavaScript is the best tool, especially in terms of accessibility; in this case, it adds nothing, only an expensive event handler. The resize event is really an awful way of achieving responsive web design. Media queries are the best option in 99% of cases.

* * *

Returning to the original thought, Google seems to have very different teams working here and there on their various marketing websites.

If you look at gv.com, their site also uses jQuery (with Slick and Velocity plugins).

If you look at duo.google.com and allo.google.com, they're Angular sites — which is what you'd expect from Google. A lot of their websites are based on Angular, it's a framework they're invested in (along with Polymer) and so on.

More recently, some of their marketing sites are being made with MDL. Usually small, less significant ones, not for apps but for random initiatives and projects that few people are going to look at. Which seems rather telling.

Polymer is in use, but seems to be reserved for applications like Youtube Gaming or Play Music. I think the Google PDF Reader is Polymer-based was well. That makes sense, Polymer is barely supported in browsers other than Chrome without a hefty bunch of polyfills.

There's also the Closure JavaScript libraries/tools, which Google used to use a lot for things like GMail (blog.google is the most recent instance I think).

For some reason, I find it odd that they don't have a unified internal toolkit for this sort of work. I'm not actually critical of this fact, I'm no critic of pragmatism. I'm just surprised.

I wonder though: does this indicate that these sites were outsourced to an agency?

<comment><USER27> I don't find this very surprising - I've seen a similar level of framework heterogeneity even at much smaller companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Which sketch dataset are they using for the "Quick, Draw!" experiment?

<comment><USER6> We have created our own dataset for this experiment based on internal data collection. Its currently a rather small dataset, some categories only have a handful of samples, but works anyway. Jonas (developer behind quickdraw)

<comment><USER28> Why didn't you use one of the existing sketch datasets? Was it because of license issues? Do you think that the accuracy would be the same if you had a bigger dataset?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thank God we got this new Google press release to the top of HN so we can all help them teach their AI for free.</comment>