THQ Dissolved - <AUTHOR> http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/01/23/thq-dissolved-saints-row-company-of-heroes-darksiders-devs-acquired <comment><USER2> Shame, they were one of the only publishers willing to take the risk on a new IP.

Which other publisher would dare take on the offensive, lewd sandbox game like Saint's Row, each sequel just a little more over the top than the last?

In a market full of repetitive sequels, played out plotlines, and annual cash- cows, I'm hoping Koch Media do Volition and Saint's Row 4 justice!

<comment><USER3> Thankfully EA, Activision or one of the other more cookie cutter publishers did not get ahold of Saints Row and Metro. If they did, each series might as well have died with THQ. I think I would be sick to see Metro or Saints Row turned into a Call of Duty or Medal of Honor knockoff.

EA just is not what it used to be and all my favorite classic franchises (Command and Conquer, C&C Red Alert, Sim City, Syndicate, etc) are just a shadow of what they once were.

<comment><USER4> You might find it amusing that I considered all those to be from a much less interesting iteration of EA than the one _I_ grew up with, which really did make some classic games:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E>.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark>

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

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Cities_of_Gold_(video...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Cities_of_Gold_\(video_game\))

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

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

<comment><USER3> I played 7 cities (the remake) in the late 90s, but the rest are long before my time or I'm sure I would agree with you on a personal level. 7 cities was fun though and I know M.U.L.E. was a pioneer in the strategy game area.

I didn't have a real PC until I was 11 or so and that was around 1996 (had an NES, Sega Genesis and SNES before that). I did play many of the classic games of the early 90s (original sim city, red baron, panzer general, doom, wing commander, x-wing/tie fighter), but ones from the 80s are kind of beyond my scope, even for an avid PC gamer like me. I could play them now, but not sure if I would be able to appreciate them on quite the same level with the same magic they had when they came out.

I do have one question though for the sake of curiousity. Did you ever lament or rage at the state of pc games in the 90s compared to those in the 80s? Your reply kind of hints at it, but was not sure what your actual point was for sure. I always second guess everything repeating itself, even something like this.

<comment><USER4> It's hard to completely remove nostalgia from the picture but yes, I do think the best games from the 80s were more creative than what followed. I'm not sure why. Maybe because more limited resources forced developers to focus more on concepts? Maybe because game publishing wasn't yet the risk-averse, well- oiled money making machine it came to be.

I hold out some hope for the new generation of indie game makers but mostly what I see coming from that crowd is platformers of various stripes. Maybe kids today just don't have the attention span for a game like M.U.L.E.?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I would agree that it's kind of been diminishing returns for many games out there. I think the strategy games put out by Paradox Interactive are still pretty decent for the most part (Hearts of Iron III and Victoria II especially).

I wouldn't mind seeing a remake of M.U.L.E. if it's done right. Though that would probably be somewhat complicated with the original creator dead and EA probably has all the rights to it still. Have to be independantly developed. I would hate to see what EA would come up with if they tried to put it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone whose employer just underwent Chapter 11 and a subsequent sale, I hope that the power-jousting, cockfights, backstabbing, and general dumbassery that I experienced will not happen to the members of THQ. The lengths some people will go through for some token of power...

<comment><USER6> Ironically, you just described the gameplay of THQ-published Saint's Row 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> With Sega's purchase of Relic, hopefully they can pick up the Homeworld franchise and do something with it again!

<comment><USER8> I'm actually quite pleased with that, Sega seems like a good home for Relic. They seem to do ok with The Creative Assembly (Total War games). Homeworld 3 please :)

<comment><USER9> Was Homeworld 2 any good, by the way ?

<comment><USER10> more slow paced than the first one ( + extension by barking dog studio ), but still a good homeworld game

<comment><USER8> I agree. It was a bit 'easier' in that there were features like automatically vacuuming up all resources on a map once a mission was complete. The graphics were more modern (not that Homeworld 1 had any problems in that department) and I seem to recall the tech tree being a bit more streamlined? Also a better UI - much more information could be on screen at the same time.

<comment><USER10> About the automatic resources vaccuming, I preferred the homeworld 1 way, where you could rebuild your fleet at the end of the mission (cataclysm added a much needed time warp). Still my favorite RTS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish you had posted a better source of gaming journalism, I don't like IGN at all.

[http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/23/fin-thq-sells- off...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/23/fin-thq-sells-off-most- studios-basically-done/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Metro and CoH 2 seems to be safe. Southpark may be in trouble, and Obsidian are in no need of additional trouble right now. And Ubisoft don't know what an RPG is.

Darksiders are done which is sad.

<comment><USER13> Ubisoft wants to buy South Park, but it looks like there may be legal trouble. South Park Studios filed a complaint saying that THQ did not have the legal right to sell South Park as long as South Park Studios reclaims the license by paying the full amount that THQ put into the game.

[http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a453020/south-park- stu...](http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a453020/south-park-studios- request-stick-of-truth-pulled-from-thq-auction.html)

<comment><USER12> I think that Ubisoft is a death sentence for any creative studio, and obsidian is that. I thought with the 2004-5-6 Prince of Persia trilogy and Beyond good and Evil that Ubisoft has finally found out how to make great games that are also creative.

But from all of their recent years - they ran Heroes into the ground, from the fabled AC franchise only the ACII is really good, and whatever they ship they manage to make unplayable with the uplay crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Metro 2033 is most likely in good hands. The parent company that bought them owns Deep Silver, who published one of the great games of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series[1], which I think Metro pulls from. Random fun fact, but the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game was also published by THQ. Probably why THQ were so interested in Metro 2033, which came shortly after.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R._%28series%29>

<comment><USER14> > which I think Metro pulls from

Metro 2033 is adapted from a russian '05 novel of the same name, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R is from both the '72 novel _Stalker_ and its '79 movie.

They bear no lineage.

<comment><USER15> Partly to help people find it in their bookshops, but mostly because I'm an anal-retentive pedant, the novel is actually called 'Roadside Picnic' by the Strugatsky brothers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hate how people echo Saints Row and Company of Heroes whenever someone mentions THQ. Darksiders and Darksiders 2 (especially the latter) are brilliant games.

<comment><USER17> Vigil is the part of this that most interests me, and saddens in me in that the current word last I knew was no one had shown much interest in picking the studio up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My first programming gig was an internship at Vigil Games when I was 20. I had an awesome summer there and worked with some amazing people; hopefully those who were still at the studio will find something soon.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can somebody leak the source code for the old Red Faction games?

Those didn't seem to be a franchise that got sold off, so maybe is abandonware?

<comment><USER8> My bet is that Red Faction comes along with Volition.

<comment><USER8> Or maybe not, if it's the same case as Homeworld: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106540>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope Homefront 2 ends up being good. Homefront is a ton of fun to play.

<comment><USER21> Exactly this! They can essentially start the story for Homefront 2 right where the first one stopped, and with Crytek's track record, it should look amazing as well.

That is, if it's not already deep in development, which I think I remember hearing that it is.

<comment><USER20> They need to balance the guns somewhat, fix the spawn points and get people playing the DLC maps but otherwise multiplayer is fantastic.

The ability to get additional toys per round is a huge mechanic IMO in replayability.

I also look forward to the improved graphics that Crytek will bring. My only fear is that Crysis from what I have seen feels pretty cold at times so hopefully that does not bleed over.

EDIT: I also don't get why Homefront was so panned by critics. The graphics obviously pale when compared to something like Crysis but like I said, I think they got many aspects of multiplayer very right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So long THQ.

I hope SEGA will make good use of my favorite games.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources to Learn Web Development - <AUTHOR>

I am a (cash poor) student and I have programed in java and C++ but I haven't done anything related to web development yet.  I want to try and start to teach myself some basic stuff but I have no idea where to start.  Anybody have any tips? <comment><USER2> This is a great resource to start:

<http://www.w3schools.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks nice. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> I believe <http://www.w3schools.com> should be avoided.

Try this instead: <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Web_Development>

(The info on this Mozilla site is good and it also has many links to other sites that will help you. Every link I checked out was better quality than the W3Schools site, and there are also some video tutorials thrown in, if you're more of a visual learner.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> css-tricks.com has a ton of great snippets for when you've gotten more comfortable with HTML/CSS/Javascript. Chris Coyier is very knowledgeable and writes great tutorials.</comment>


Show HN: 3DC.io – A dead simple cross-platform 3D design tool - <AUTHOR> https://3dc.io/app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Developer here, would love to get some feedback and answer any questions you might have. The app is available on iOS, Android and Web ([https://3dc.io/download](https://3dc.io/download)). There is also a gallery of user built content ([https://3dc.io/gallery](https://3dc.io/gallery)).

<comment><USER2> What are use cases for this tool? It's too simplistic. No shapes other than (combined) primitives, no textures.

<comment><USER3> One of the most interesting use cases so far has been in education, where the low learning curve provides a frictionless experience in studying design as well as materialising one's ideas. Thus, lowering the barrier of entry for younger creators. (Another developer here)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let me know if you want to do an integration with our [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io) 3D presentation and modeling tool! Would be nice to have some data transfer back and forth.

<comment><AUTHOR> We should have a chat yeah, just saw a three.js pull request by you, that I want to discuss :) (Image and Texture related, single image -> multiple textures. Long story short, we are building the exact same thing :) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 3D tools can often be overwhelming, especially if you only use them occasionally. The push/pull feature reminds me a bit of SketchUp, which I really like.

Anyone have any thoughts on what I could use for building up a scene? Ideally something where I can move things around the world with scripting.

<comment><USER4> How did you get the push pull aspect of things? I couldn't get that to work.

<comment><USER5> Press the <-> arrows on the bottom right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Ono-Sendai Good stuff btw. I don't think most people appreciate the amount of work that goes into making something simple to use like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. And yes, the details take up 10x more time than the features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can see myself using this for simple communication on 3D geometry work to my colleagues (I work a lot with 3D rendering). Hand drawing is so hard sometimes :). However, for that it would need at least a transparency option so I can layer boxes and all.

Otherwise, it feels really smooth in my browser. Good job there. I can see more shortcuts in the future but as I have very basic needs these are not a showstopper for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of people have been asking for transparency lately. We can add it, but would need to rework how object selection/deselection looks visually. Thank you for the feedback.

<comment> Ono-Sendai What you probably want to do is draw an outline around your object when selected.

<comment><AUTHOR> We played around with it a while back, but didn't quite get it right (visually), will give it another shot.

<comment> Ono-Sendai It's a bit tricky to get right, try a Sobel filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Impressive! I think a "Lathe" tool could be made from your "Draw" shape tool fairly easily.

Interesting problems you have... Balancing flexibility/power/precision and simplicity/low learning curve/finger input.

I'd be tempted to go more the flexibility route... but what is essential? for who? Where's the line drawn for "dead simple"?

Would precision for the "drafters" slow down/confuse the "doodlers"?... Could build flexibility underneath and carefully build an advanced UX that people can graduate to, but at what costs?... At what point is the focus lost?

</comment><comment><USER8> i like it. i like that it's offline (or atleast when my firewall blocks it, it still works)!! and i like that you dont need an account to use it.

Mobile version is basic and exporting to obj is the freedom i'm looking for. I see myself using this for when i'm really mobile and i need to prototype a basic idea then use another program to take it to the next level.

Keep improving it, there is lots to do but focusing on enhancing modularity should be your core focus as you already know -- and an obvious idea is selling batches of models (not singles like 50s or 100s) so folks can plug and play and maybe try to create a unique rendering style so your program has a signature.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been a blender hobbyist for about a year now and it's a bit creepy how smooth this is on my iPhone at the moment. Thanks for sharing I hope I remember to dig more into this tomorrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! A lot of that is on Apple as well, Safari with all its bugs is really fast on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a really great app if you want to troll someone. Been using it on the great Danish Troll Hunt servers to make big things happen. <comment><comment>~~D()()=(solve the puzzle to make a rocket ship)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love it! Would be nice to get the option to log-in without a facebook account. I don't have facebook, so I used it without logging in. Not sure which features I was missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Adding google login in the next release. Basically you are missing out on a public profile/portfolio and the option to comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Full CSG. Very nice. Clipping a cube with a sphere works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh boy. Getting that to work fast enough on mobile devices warrants an article of its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is the best 3D design tool for Linux?

<comment><USER4> Blender

<comment><USER14> As much as I love Blender, I don't think Blender is very good for "design". It lacks parametric solid modeling primitives and operators. I've tried many times to do architectural modeling in Blender. It's good for sketching and rendering stuff like that, but not so much for "design". It's just not streamlined and is missing too much fundamental stuff. Some day, I'd love to see Blender improve in that regard! Someone recently made an addon called "archimesh". There's also "sverchok", a parametric modeling plugin. I suppose that could be used for design. And of course, if you're writing your own python scripts, the sky's the limit.

I think with a couple basic improvements, Blender could crush as a design tool:

1) Comprehensive solid modeling tools, including quality measuring tools for volumes, surface areas and lengths.

2) Some kind of plugin or extension to allow for composable, parametric "widget" type object groups. So you'd have a parametric wall section composed of parametric material pieces. The window unit would be a parametric composition of parametric subcomponents, like layers of glass, a tweakable frame, etc. A window widget would know to boolean cut through a wall. Archimesh does this kind of thing, but it's buggy and still in beta, and not so general purpose. Maybe Sverchok and some python would do it.

Along with Blender's excellent constraint and modifier system, these would go a long way.

Edit: I Just remembered that there was (and maybe still is) a long term push for "node based everything". I think this might fulfill #2.

<comment><USER15> For a more of a cad thing, solvespace is my favorite. It is pretty simple as far as cads go, but still capable enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love it. Would really love the ability to "code" a shape using JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER17> Keeps on showing the spinning art for me, for couple of minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible that WebGL isn't supported on your device and our error detection fails to give you a message. Looking into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This works sooo well on mobile, loving this!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! What platform are you on and are you using the browser version or the native app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> there's been a mobile openSCAD app for ages.

<comment><USER20> Are you talking about Scorch CAD or something else?

If the former, then yeah - it's been around for a while, but the one thing I wish the developer would fix is the ability to switch between perspective projection and iso projection; right now, iso is all there is. Which is great when you want to check measurements without distortion, but sometimes you just want a regular 3D view.

Unless you know of another app?</comment></comment>


$132K pledged to Kickstart fingertip-sized Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1608192864/rfduino-iphone-bluetooth-40-arduino-compatible-boa?goalMet

<comment><USER2> Nifty. I'll buy some.

</comment><comment><USER3> At a $20 price point, thats awesome.

Jesus, you can now have a Rasberry Pi running as a $40 server and then build a system of these RFduinos and have a very affordable platform on which to build an incredible range of applications.</comment>


The Programming Talent Myth (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/641779/ <comment><USER2> > > The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, it is just a > bunch of skills that can be learned.

This may be true if your definition of programming is the literal act of writing code / recalling syntax, and learning new tools. Of course, that's not really what programming is. That's the easy part.

Programming is about problem solving, code is simply the tool. Critical thinking/problem solving ability, the ability to think in abstractions, the ability to hold a large amount of information in your head all at once, etc. are all skills, and not skills that the majority of people are particularly good at.

We wouldn't judge a carpenter on e.g. his/her ability to use a saw, or a EE on their ability to use a scope. I never understood why so many put so much emphasis on the tools a software dev knows.

<comment><USER3> I do believe these skills can be learned, but it's the enjoyment I derive from these things that I believe is the difference between some people and I. When I was in junior high I would do various logic problems for fun. I asked for nothing but a TI-85 for my birthday one year. There probably are people who are better than me at coding who hate the work. But I've hated every job I had until someone started paying me to sit, put on headphones, and solve problems with code. I go home with a sense of satisfaction, whether it's a skill, talent, passion is interesting but doesn't matter to me really.

<comment><USER4> After (as an adult) watching kids develop, there is a huge positive feedback loop for various abilities.

When you are slightly better or faster or just find doing it (whatever "it" is) more rewarding compared to your peers, then it takes lower effort to get the same reward. This means you are more likely to spend more time doing it. This means that after a while you have more practice than your peers, so the difference in ability is amplified. Now various grownups around you notice and complement you on it, get you lessons to do it better, provide you with supplies, &c. and the difference grows.

By the time you are looking at teenagers, it's hard to tell how much of the difference stems from natural ability, and how much of it is this snowball effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to be a "rock star" programmer. I could run rings around my coworkers. I wrote an embedded OS for running machine tools (I had help.) Back then, you read books and memorized everything. I knew x86 assembly and could use a logic analyzer to debug my code. This was in the 80's.

Now the amount of knowledge required to do even mundane tasks is an order of magnitude more. No one can memorize all the APIs and frameworks needed to do their jobs programming. I couldn't work without search. I don't memorize anything anymore. I work on dozens of different technologies.

Basically, I've become a mediocre programmer at a large number of different programming tasks where once I was expert at a very few. I'm the same person but the meaning of what is a programmer has changed over time. I'm OK with that.

<comment><USER6> >you read books and memorized everything.

Why did you have to memorize everything? I have also done x86 assembly. You remember what you can. You look up the rest. Same today.

<comment><USER5> If you didn't develop in that timeframe you might not get the difference between then and today. It takes forever to look things up so you end up memorizing instead. And it isn't a big deal because the number of things needed to be a successful software developer wasn't that great. To be successful and finish projects more or less on time, memorization was needed.

Edit: For example, for a different project I knew the hex codes for every 8051 instruction. This was necessary to be successful debugging using a logic analyzer. Looking up each op-code would be prohibitively slow.

<comment><USER7> It's a caching problem. If memory access is slow you want to cache more, if not then you don't bother. Things you use a lot will spend more time in the cache, things you don't you'll have to keep retrieving from memory.

We really aren't as different from computers as we sometimes like to believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The 2 sides debating "talent" are always talking about 2 different things.

(#1) "talent" doesn't exist: knowledge and skills can be _learned_. No infant comes out of the womb knowing 5 languages or physics equations or the syntax of "printf("hello world")". Every single human who knows how to do something well at one point in their life _did not know_ how to do it well. If one can _improve_ by learning, it means talent doesn't exist. This aligns with Carol Dweck's "growth mindset", the 10000 hours meme, self-improvement, etc. This _internal_ perspective compares oneself at time_before vs time_after.

(#2) "talent" is a subjective _ranking_ of people's abilities: there are people who are noticeably better at expressing their skills. E.g. NBA basketball player Shaq O'Neal has spent more than 10,000 hours practicing free throws with a dozen different coaches to achieve 52% success, but there's a high school kid that can sink them at 80%. We can say the kid is "more talented" at free throws. To say that "free throws" is a "learnable skill" doesn't change anything about noticing the obvious difference in abilities. If Person A _learns faster_ than Person B, that in itself is a talent. This _external_ perspective compares people against other people.

People who hold meaning #1 vs people thinking of meaning #2 are having 2 different conversations. E.g. when companies say _" they are looking to hire the most talented"_ (meaning #2), they are not talking about people who can self-improve (meaning #1).

In this essay, Jacob Kaplan-Moss is talking about meaning #1. Yes, you can read it and take all his advice to heart. However, you still have to understand meaning #2 _to properly decode_ what others are talking about when sports teams, music record labels, Hollywood, venture capitalists, and startups all say they are _" looking for the best talent"_.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lately, I've started thinking of programming as an art form. If you substitute programming with music, how would you make all of these evaluations about the craft and of its practicioners?

You may be hiring for guitarist and require at least 3 years experience playing the guitar. J.S. Bach applies, but has never played the guitar. As an industry, we typically wouldn't hire him due to lack of experience. Instead we might hire some mediocre kid with the 3+ years experience and a history of guitar lessons, even though after a 100 days on the job, J.S. Bach would have been a mind blowing, mesmerizing guitar player, even if he was still a little clumsy. And after a few years, he'd be more amazing still. Yet as an industry, we focus the ability to be productive on day 10 instead of day 100 or 1000. For long term positions. Why?

How would the software industry conduct an interview for a musician? We'd ask you about all of the songs and instruments you've ever played and have you talk about those experiences. We might ask a hypothetical question about what if you had to play a certain piece, how would you handle it. Maybe we'd have you answer some trick questions: "What are the frequencies of the first five harmonic multiples of B right below middle C?"

I find this to be utter madness.

I think the best way to find a good (or potentially good) developer is to have them do what we do in our jobs, which is, given some vague requirements and some undefined period of time -- a few days or so -- write code to solve a simple problem.

And I loved the part in the article about mediocrity. I've found the best developers to be humble enough to constantly work on improving their craft. So, don't reject a candidate because they appear to "lack confidence".

<comment><USER10> will you pay me for those 3 days' work? and tbh it's not even the money, it's my non-existent time.

<comment><USER9> No, but I will let you put what you created on GitHub. That becomes part of your portfolio. Put a link to your GitHub account on your resume.

If you already have enough sample code, there may not be a need to provide more.

<comment><USER11> I think your ideas are valid, but there are many potential candidates who cannot do any of the above because they have full time jobs that prohibit open source contributions without prior approval.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While on the surface of it, sure, programming is a skill and not an innate talent, it would be foolish to compare it to other career fields in that way. You can go to school to learn how to be an architect, then go and get a job as an architect and be immediately productive. You can go to school to learn how to lay bricks, then go to a job site and immediately start building something.

You cannot go to school to learn how to be a programmer, and then expect immediately to be productive at any arbitrary programming job, _unless you 're a talented coder_. The education gap is too great. It's like medicine in which you need a few years of residency before the medical field considers you fully competent.

If you go to code school and learn Rails and React, then you can expect to be somewhat immediately productive on a Rails / React project. You can't expect anything out of them if it's not a Rails / React project. They may be able to ramp up quickly, if they're talented. If they're not talented, then they won't be able to, and the employer has to take the hit.

We will need a revolution in software development pedagogy before individual aptitude stops mattering to employers. The state of education at the moment is so bad that unschooled yet talented individuals can be much much better at fulfilling business requirements than trained and educated professionals. Try that with medicine!

<comment><USER13> > You can go to school to learn how to be an architect, then go and get a job > as an architect and be immediately productive. You can go to school to learn > how to lay bricks, then go to a job site and immediately start building > something.

Do you actually know anyone who's worked in these fields? Because that's not true. Wanna be an architect? Go to school + get 2 years of experience + take a professional certification THEN you can be employed as an architect. Wanna lay bricks? Get a job and you'll be taught there.

<comment><USER14> I've never laid brick, but I've been an electrician. Tradesmen are almost never working independently, and certainly not when they are working in a junior position. There's a lot of mentorship that goes on, and a lot of tribal knowledge that's shared - things that are simply not written about.

When I started as an electrician, I knew a lot about electricity already. I've always been a bit of a nerd and knew more about how electricity actually works than many journeymen I met. I knew almost nothing about how to actually put that into practice, though.

For example - when wiring an electrical outlet, you have to wrap the end of the wire around a small screw. It's obvious enough that if you do it clockwise tightening the screw holds the wire in place; if you do it counterclockwise, tightening the screw moves the wire and makes life difficult. What _wasn 't_ obvious was that instead of taking a pair of needle-nosed pliers and bending the wire to the right shape, there was a small hole in each side of a pair of wire strippers that was exactly the right size to do it: [http://www.kleintools.com/sites/all/product_assets/catalog_i...](http://www.kleintools.com/sites/all/product_assets/catalog_imagery/klein/11046.jpg)

Had the person I was working for not shown me that, I would have probably never figured it out.

I think the role of a junior developer is very similar to that of an apprentice electrician, in that the dev knows at least enough to implement something on their own so long as they are given concrete tasks. A mid-level dev is similar to the journeyman; they take a partially-defined task, break it into well-defined chunks, and either implement or delegate. A senior dev is the master electrician - they decide what tools to use, make the larger-scope decisions on a project, etc.

This analogy breaks down once we start talking about software "engineers" or "architects". I can't really think of anything I saw in the trades that maps to it; it's more about identifying and anticipating important changes over time and mitigating their costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> adam-a I think this is absolutely spot on. So many people put their programming expertise or productivity down to some innate quality (that is apparently overabundant in white men). To me it seems nearly every one of those rockstar ninjas has also spent an enormous amount of time learning their trade - usually a lot of time outside of formal school or a 9-5 job.

I think if there's one skill that might be innate and that helps people be better at programming, it's patience. Learning to program and learning programming tools is for most people a boring and extremely frustrating task. You need patience to stick with it after spending two days solid trying to debug some linker error or CSS bug or whatever esoteric programming issue you inevitably have to deal with.

<comment><USER15> > So many people put their programming expertise or productivity down to some > innate quality

Yes. Some people (both as kids and adults) seem to be innately interested in different kinds of activities. And it is perhaps impossible to separate talent with passionate interest since B leads to A.

Take the kids from my tribe, extremely passionate about patterns and things and systems and numbers and coding from early childhood, _despite_ concern from parents and teachers, social ostracization, and efforts to limit computer time. We also tend to acquire talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If our starting point is that programming is mostly about skills, productivity starts getting interesting - what does productivity mean?

My personal take is that it means solving _problems_ with less wasted effort. Less code (a 0.1× programmer can solve problem with 10% of the code - [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/)), but also by solving the right problem, and coming up with better solutions ([https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills- pro...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills- productive/)).

These are all skills you can learn. And I think focusing on learning technologies obscures a lot of these skills, since they're about communication and listening and project management.

For productivity in terms of technological knowledge I'm starting to think that, since choosing _which_ tool is more important than _how_ to use it, a better way to get better is to study case studies. Instead of trying to learn "how can I use Mongo, how can I use PostgreSQL" you try to learn "when should I use Mongo, when should I use PostgreSQL".

I'd love to hear about good sources of case studies. [http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html](http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html) is good, but doesn't cover kind of programming one would do at a company, much.

<comment><USER17> This is exactly correct. In the past, I didn't consider myself an excellent programmer, because I struggled to solve esoteric number permutation problems and recursive graph search problems during whiteboard interviews. It seemed to me that all my peers could do it, and they were getting good jobs for it.

Over time I learned that the real value comes from solving the right problems, and recognizing wasted effort. It comes from architecting systems that are easily maintainable. That's what makes money in the business.

Solving narrow, intensely interesting algorithms, is a rare case that is not widely needed in the industry at large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, it is just a > bunch of skills that can be learned.

Aren't these all talents?

* learning many things

* learning difficult things

* recalling things you've learned when you need them

If something is a skill, one would expect all engineers to get better at it with practice. But there are many abilities in engineers that don't seem to work that way.

<comment><USER16> Learning is a skill you can get better at, so it's just a dependency. Learning is not an unchangeable talent. Some books that will help you learn better:

* Power of Intuition, about naturalistic decision making - [https://www.amazon.com/Power-Intuition-Feelings-Better-Decis...](https://www.amazon.com/Power-Intuition-Feelings-Better-Decisions/dp/0385502893/)

* How Learning Works - [https://www.amazon.com/How-Learning-Works-Research-Based-Pri...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Learning-Works-Research-Based-Principles/dp/0470484101) (my review: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/03/19/how-learning-works/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/03/19/how-learning-works/))

No doubt others can recommend more books.

<comment><USER18> Wether or not a trait is mutable is different from the _degree_ to which that trait is mutable. The distinction is important. Most breeds of dog can be trained to learn some simple commands, but good luck getting some mutt from the pound to herd sheep like a border collie.

Here's a video of border collies in action: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpjP3mxv21s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpjP3mxv21s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The only thing stopping someone becoming a programmer is a genuine interest in the craft.

People generally don't get good at things they find boring.

We software developers are not special. We don't have something that non- programmers lack, apart from maybe an inflated sense of self-worth.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone else disagree with this article? There is talent for programming, and that talent is correlated with IQ. A person with average or below average IQ is very unlikely to excel as a programmer. There is a lot of academic literature to back this up.

<comment><USER11> I think innate intelligence (whether measured by IQ or more qualitatively) is a real thing. I think people implicitly live that way and organize society that way.

I also think it's also considered a faux pas to actually say as much. People tie respect, identity, and self worth into intelligence a lot. It's hard to say Kimberly is smarter than David without offending people. Let alone to say engineers are generally smarter than elevator operators (to pick a mostly extinct job).

To some degree, all the interview hazing and discussion about "programming talent" is all dancing around the West's inability to discuss intelligence quantitatively and dispassionately.

To be fair, historically there has been a lot of sexism, racism, bigotry, and pseudoscience tied up in the science of intelligence. I'm not sure how to get society to re-approach the subject in a scientific, productive, and beneficial way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The sentiments in this article are all very nice and progressive, but... have you ever actually tried to interview people for a programming job? The simple fact is that lots of people, perhaps most people who apply for jobs as programmers, are completely helpless. They couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. It's actually really depressing interviewing them, because you _want_ them to be successful and yet most of them fail miserably at the most basic things.

</comment><comment><USER22> "programming" is not one thing.. most comments here fail to make even a basic distinction between [ php forms developers; dev-ops Go pipeline builders; game developers; domain-specific problem solvers] or other. Include in any of those categories varying, more or less GUI design, more or less quality, more or less efficient execution, more or less language mastery, more or less elegant design.

Fish apparently are not good at describing water (!)

</comment><comment><USER23> All I'm seeing here is that regardless of actual dictionary definition I still won't be hired because of some vague opinionated definition in someone's head.

</comment><comment><USER24> I guess "programming talent is a normal distribution, not a U distribution" doesn't make for as catchy a headline.

</comment><comment><USER25> > The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2020 there will be a 1.5 > million programming job gap

This makes me wonder 2 things

1) Why are we debating if we should keep the ~500k H1B visa holders around (of course we should) and

2) Why don't we just train the top 10% (in ability + willingness) of the ~13M unemployed people in this country?

<comment><USER11> a. There isn't really a gap. Employers are just slow to adjust to market rates for quality engineers.

b. If engineer salaries went up to the market clearing rate, certain business models that assume certain labor costs will become flawed

c. Who is going to pay for the training, especially in the case that all the training doesn't actually end up making the candidate any _good_ at the job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't want to be mean but it looks like programming is both:

Talent:

1\. natural aptitude or skill.

Passion:

2\. strong and barely controllable emotion.

...

* an intense desire or enthusiasm for something.

...

<comment><USER11> Couldn't passion be innate as well? If you hate cilantro, you certainly won't have a talent for eating cilantro.

(Also, passion in this context doesn't imply any sort of lack of control. You don't program in the "throes of passion".)

<comment><USER26> I've skipped meals programming, when things are interesting at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's like drawing. Sure maybe with a lot of effort anybody could draw a close approximation of a good drawing but unless you are innately talented and driven you will never be at a good enough level to make a great career at it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why do computer science curriculums yield such a common thought toxicity? How can they engage greater diversity and cultivate empathy, compassion, and give students perspective to self-evaluate themselves?

</comment><comment><USER29> I understand why it's important to emphasize that programming skills can be learned and that we aren't just a bunch of god-given talents. But how far are we going to take this? Surely we can admit that for any given set of skills some people are going to take to it more readily than others, and we can't account for the difference simply in terms of amount of practice or hard work. The top mathematicians or violin players or whatever in the world probably do work harder than others in their field, but that's not the same as saying that the difference between them and others is simply the amount of work/practice.

<comment><USER30> I think his point was that there's a bell curve and chasing this idea that there is a load of top talent is absurd. There obviously are really great, amazing developers out there, but there are magnitudes more 'mediocre' developers that can still accomplish some really great, amazing products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you believe programming is not a talent then you won't complain when your pay is not structured the same way that talent pay is.</comment>


Critique of Kant leads to man being shot in Russian shop - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/09/19/russian_rubber_gunfight_in_rostov_follows_philosophical_argument_about_immanuel.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is one of those The Onion headlines that are actually real and any comment one can make would be inadequate.</comment>


Show HN: Curated Toolkit for Remote Work - <AUTHOR> https://nohq.co/tools/ <comment> jon-wood I see four different, yet incredibly similar, video conferencing tools on that list. That doesn't fill me with confidence when it comes to just how curated the list is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could do a better job on showing differences for sure, especially in that category. In the end, they are all well working solutions, with two of them being free and handling organization differently, the go-to app on the market, and a enterprise solution. All have their own place in that crowded ecosystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I just tried to submit Krisp.ai, but realized at the end it was a paid curation. I'm not affiliated with Krisp, I'm just a remote worker who recently added it to my must haves...

<comment><USER3> Completely on a side note, but I've just recently realized how much of a noise-cancellation magic comes buil-in with Zoom. My wife was grinding coffee literally next to me, and no one on the call could hear it. Now I'm learning that the whole standalone startup exists dedicated to doing it for all the platforms. Cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of overlapping between different categories. Misplaced app within a category -- hiring app inside Project Management. And so on...

The idea of putting together such list is noble, though. It just need more consistency.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of them have multi-categories, that's right. I believe the app you're talking about offers project management functionalities with freelancer hiring options, so it's part of both.

Let me know if you see an app that logically should not be in one of the categories. This is curated by hand, so errors may happen.

<comment><USER4> Categories aside, if you allow me to suggest something, I would have built your toolkit in a different way. Instead of app type, I would have grouped them by process following the natural order that the business takes form in a start-up or any organization.

To me, the sequence that comes to mind is: Sync Comms > Aggregation of unstructured data/documents/media > Collaboration (whiteboarding, sketching, mind-mapping etc.) > Administration > Project Management > Development > Security, Monitoring and Reporting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since this is full of proprietary services, I will note that I have replaced most of that on my team with Office 365 with Microsoft Teams. Chat, video conferencing, kanban boards, file sharing all in one place with single sign on.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks great. Just submitted Taskade ([https://taskade.com](https://taskade.com)) to the list, a unified workspace for distributed teams! :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like the toolkit, I find it very useful. I kust bookmarked for future use. Did you use a template to build it or it's done from zero by you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! This is completely self-built. I use Tailwind for the frontend, makes this kind of design pretty easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anything that fixes the timezones on the list? Flat Earth?

<comment><AUTHOR> Smiling through the pain and working long nights

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The description of the tools seems to be to vendor's marketing tag line, which I find not very helpful to understand what the tool actually does.

</comment><comment><USER9> The graphic style looks very similar to Slack's. Is this an official project by them?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's just the style that's "in" right now. I believe this is from an illustration package somewhere.</comment></comment>


COS - The C Object System (ObjC + CLOS inspired) - <AUTHOR> http://ldeniau.web.cern.ch/ldeniau/html/cos-oopsla09-draft.pdf

<comment><USER2> A few years ago I tried to mangle COS into compiling on Microsoft Visual C++. The problem is that COS's syntactic magic relies on C99 features like variadic macros, and MSVC still doesn't implement the ISO C99 standard.

Microsoft does have their own incompatible implementations of the necessary features in C++ mode, so theoretically it should be possible to adapt COS to build on both C99 and MSVC++. I never got it working, though. (I didn't spend many evenings on it either...)

<comment><USER3> Don't have time to investigate the C99 magics in COS. But MSVC++'s implementation of several c99 features are not compatible with normal interpretations (gcc, icc and clang).

<comment><USER2> Right. That's what I was hoping to work around by adding an MSVC-specific code generation path to COS, but I didn't figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a tutorial or getting started or some examples around ? Does C99 imply it will compile with gcc (current builds on OSX, I think gcc 4.x).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The homepage can be found here: <http://ldeniau.web.cern.ch/ldeniau/oopc.html>

It's all C99 compatible, and yet it appears to have support for closures, message passing, multimethods, generics, autorelease pools, exceptions, KVO/KVC, pre and post conditions for methods, and is apparently faster than Objective-C (see benchmarks in the paper).

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192791></comment></comment>


Daily Mail – live traffic dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/stats

<comment><USER2> [http://www.shouldireadthedailymail.com/](http://www.shouldireadthedailymail.com/)</comment>


Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-mckenzie-on-why-your-customers-would-be-happier-if-you-charged-more/ <comment><USER2> I've only just skimmed this -- won't have time to fully read & listen to it until much later today. But I wanted to bring up something that I didn't see mentioned anywhere in there.

You _have to_ charge more. Aside from all of the arguments in terms of value and avoiding pathological customers and so on, there's one more really good reason to charge more: you need the money if you want to be awesome.

I've been running a small business for a while now that helps a lot of people that need help but can't afford it. That's all fulfilling, heart-warming work, but it's also put me into a very difficult position. Right now, I _need_ to hire more people, but I can't afford anyone that's _good_. That's directly hurting my customers. Our turnaround times are really hurting as a result. I've got an opportunity to hire on a brilliant old friend of mine, but I'm not sure yet if I can swing it, because the bank account really doesn't have enough in it to afford him, and I don't know if I can work long enough hours to get that kind of money in there.

I've resisted every other justification for charging more. Vacations? I don't need more than just a few days off once in a while. Toys? Don't need those either. Avoiding pathological customers? But those people need help too, and I want to help them.

But not being able to build a strong business with lots of talent under my current model? That's pretty hard to ignore.

<comment><USER3> You can afford to hire people who are good. You just can't afford to do it the same way Square can, or with exactly the same candidate pool Square works from. Ping me sometime. The most important part of my job for the past 2 years has been this problem.

<comment><USER4> Recruiter?

<comment><USER5> No, he isn't. He runs a services company that was recently acquired. Definitely someone worth listening to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the 2nd part of the interview mini-series with Ramit Sethi on starting a consulting business, though we both talk products in this interview as well.

I'm happy to answer questions, as always.

P.S. I normally try to space out publishing things, to avoid a) reader fatigue on my favorite topics and b) imposing on HN goodwill by showing up on the front page too often. That said, the next two weeks are going to see a few more posts on the blog than usual. Several independently managed processes, with varying numbers of steps, people in the loop, and pipelines, all decided to terminate roughly simultaneously. I apologize in advance if it's mildly irksome -- believe it or not, it is the exact opposite of a planned media blitz.

<comment><USER7> I think it's awesome how aware you are of your own impact of appearing on the front page more than normal and how considerate your attitude is towards the impact of that on the experience of other HNers. Total. model. citizen.

<comment><USER8> It's also a self-serving attitude -- in a practical way, not a bad way. Part of maintaining a successful relationship with people is to understand what might piss them off, and avoid it. 99 times out of 100, being considerate is the smart choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am right now contracting, and I am learning a variant on this lesson that I have reason to believe will prove very valuable to me and hopefully others.

1\. If the value of what you contribute can be measured, people are happy to pay you ridiculously more on a pay for performance model than they are with hourly consulting rates.

2\. A/B testing can provide a way for them to measure the value of your contribution.

Why is this? Well in pay for performance, the company takes no risk. Furthermore it lines the incentives up correctly from everyone's perspective. Suppose that compensation model inspired you to spend 2x the effort that you otherwise would for 1/3 better performance. Odds are that they've just covered the amount they have agreed to pay you and are laughing all of the way to the bank. But if you are compensated hourly, and they are not sure it will work, there is no way that they want you to spend 2x the effort up front, even if there might be a slightly better return.

I am not at liberty to share specific numbers. But keep this fact in mind in the future. It may prove valuable to you.

(I should think about writing this up in a blog post, along with lesson #3. That lawyers systemically fail to place a value on your opportunity cost...)

</comment><comment><USER10> As a freelance developer myself, and thanks to Patio11, I've always had the charge more mantra firmly placed at the front of my head. So it's a little disheartening to hear on the basis of what was said in this conversation, that I'm still selling myself short. Without the advice I've read here, I doubt I'd of lasted the four months I have so far...

The hardest part of this "charge more" philosophy is finding the clients. For example, I went to see a client yesterday, who knew my daily rate. We had a very positive meeting and I was told "they were glad they'd found the right man for the job". Yet today they stated they could get two developers for the price I was charging and would have to think about hiring me unless I was prepared to negotiate.

I do wonder if maybe the world of freelance developing does have a payment cap, and that to reach the next level we need to sell ourselves as something other than just developers.

Or does making the charge more philosophy work to its full extent in the development game, mean joining big company x, or selling my soul to big company y.

The question I'm asking myself right now is. Would Patio11 be able to charge the same rate as a freelance developer as he does as a "I will help you sell more software" freelance consultant?

<comment><USER6> _Would Patio11 be able to charge the same rate as a developer as he does as a "I will help you sell more software" consultant?_

I charge the same rate for software development as I do for making graphite etchings on paper in aesthetically pleasing patterns. Consulting clients buy both of these things from me, in isolation or combination, on a regular basis. So if that's the way you're asking the question, "Yes, I could."

If the question is "If you brought nothing to the table other than the ability to write Ruby code, would you be able to charge $YOUR_RATE for writing Ruby code?", I think I'll go with "I can guarantee you that _someone_ gets that much for writing Ruby, and probably more besides, but it probably wouldn't be me" and "Wait wait wait, you seem to want to sell yourself as a commodity coder, don't sell yourself as a commodity coder, down that path lines madness."

<comment><USER11> It might be helpful to the wider community of freelancers if you used your popular bully pulpit to expound upon the procurement tactics you have encountered, and how you responded to still win over the clients.

The "we found someone else cheaper than you" line is used all the time. It doesn't matter if it is true or not. Procurement's job definition is to convince you, Joe Freelance, that you are a commodity that competes solely on price for them. If you let them manipulate you into that mindset, then it is time to re-evaluate your unique value proposition and your negotiation process. This approach is also why you always see the business "hand off" to procurement once you have convinced the business they need you. They are trying to use the process to negotiate piecemeal and divorce the value props you just used from price, and the failure of procurement to realize why you are different and a better value is not a bug, it is a feature of their process. There is a lot more to be said, but I find a lot of technical consultants who look down on sales people are unaware of these basics of negotiation.

<comment><USER3> Walk away. If they really do have someone cheaper, you either got unlucky this time, or you've positioned yourself as a commodity. Neither of those is a problem you can solve with negotiation.

Often, procurement is actually at odds with the real buyer. All you have to say is "sorry, I cannot offer you a discount" (or "cannot without a 6-month commitment" or whatever value you might want to extract here). The buyer will yell at procurement, and procurement will back down. Walk away, and the client will often come back to you. Happens all the time. Be nice and don't raise your rates on them out of spite when they do.

But if you're getting this constantly on potential gigs, I would worry that you haven't done enough to position the work you're doing. If you're a (say) "Rails developer", then despite the fact that Rails developers are in high demand, a savvy client probably _does_ have someone who will do your job cheaper. Don't be a "Rails developer". Be a world expert in solving XXX business problem who, lucky you!, just happens to use Rails as their tool.

There's more nuts and bolts to know about handling procurements people; there are rituals you'll have to do with some of them to close deals. But basically it's all a game of chicken, except when you lose you don't die, you just learn something important about your business.

<comment><USER11> The rituals you mentioned is information I feel is too-frequently overlooked by hackers trying to don their businessperson hat, and the wisdom of how to respond is diffusely spread out on the Net. What most need to hear from someone who has been-there-done-that is after saying "sorry, I cannot offer you a discount", they are going to hear lots of scary talk from procurement. Most hackers have no idea how this dance is done, and have never learned before starting in business.

Procurement will shoot back with all sorts of lines, but basically they will try to intimidate you by saying something along the gist of "we're going to have to reconsider this/shop this around since you can't offer us a discount", or "we're disappointed in you/to hear that". The trick here is to have a good enough pipeline that you feel comfortable to stand your ground and not take it personally when procurement finds someone else; learning how to shrug off losses as long as we were pulling in on target was one of the harder skills for me to pick up when I started.

Most hackers trying to freelance _need_ to hear the kind of talk they will run into out there, and not just what to respond, but _how_ to respond. When hackers hear about "don't sell on price, sell on value and positioning", many don't know how to translate that into the nuts and bolts of what happens in the trenches and thus even if they themselves do not sell, a key toolkit for evaluating non-technical co-founders is underutilized.

There is lots of talk here on HN about how rare great non-technical co- founders are, but there is precious little on actual pragmatic ways to detect them or adopt their principles and methods.

<comment><USER3> All of these scary things you're talking about mean the same thing. "Give us a discount or we're not going to give you a purchase order".

From what I can tell from dealing with this problem (not nearly as directly as my business partners, but enough), there are basically just a few things you can productively do:

* Walk. A lot of times, the company will come back, and procurements is bluffing.

* Cave. You need the money enough to permanently sacrifice your rate at the client. You should really avoid doing this, because it is extraordinarily difficult to recover a concession on your rate.

* Convert to budget discussion. Try to get procurements to talk about a "number" they want to hit across the project (you can't do this with hourly billing HEY WAIT MAYBE THAT HOURLY BILLING STUFF ISN'T SUCH A GOOD IDEA AFTE--- anyways). Now take that number back to the real buyers and massage the scope of the project.

* Trade. Procurements wants a discount, you want a committed pipeline of work, a customer reference, or whatever. Again: if you're negotiating, make sure it's on the project rate, not the hourly.

You do not need a nontechnical cofounder to understand this stuff. You just need to know the role of procurements and you need to truly grok positioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm putting together a fun little video this weekend where I'll be reading aloud (and toasting to) emails from people who have read my book (<http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com>) and are now charging more.

The dozen or so responses that make up this upcoming video and the corresponding shifts in worldview are _directly_ inline with everything Patrick and Ramit have to say in this interview. Here are my takeaways from these testimonials:

* Most people price themselves in the same way commodity markets price corn, oil, and hogs.

* Fear keeps us from breaking away from market/cost-plus pricing to a pricing strategy that's focused on the value we deliver to our customers.

* When you focus on _why_ people hire us (to increase revenue or cut costs) and approach everything with that end goal in mind, you can dramatically increase the value you produce and the cost for that value. Commodity pricing is thinking "I write Ruby for my clients" or "I setup Wordpress sites". Pricing based on the value you deliver is "I help businesses increase profits by minimizing the amount of clicks the sales team needs to make in order to process a new transaction."

</comment><comment><USER13> I would have never paid any attention to Ramit unless he came with Patrick's seal of approval.

The problem is that I shudder inside a little every time I hear the word 'info product'. The whole industry is beset by frauds and hucksters, and I think that generally people are a little skeptical when they see yet another person making claims such as "I will teach you to be rich".

Ramit provides great, actionable advice in his content. The problem is that he sells himself the same way as everybody in his industry does. It's things like the way he speak to his sales site that puts a small part of me off and puts me on the defense.

</comment><comment><USER14> I did not read the full post, but the basic gist reminds me of the book 'How to sell at margins higher than your competitors.' I wasted a lot of time in my early 20's reading business advice books, but that book is well worth the time. It transformed my perspective on prices, what customers you want, and how to sell. Although it was written for salespeople in commodity markets (think lumber supply), it transformed my small software company. I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Whilst I agree with the basic thesis of "charge more and compete by providing value". The difficult part for me seems to be finding people who have money they can part with in the first place, you can't really sell somebody on the benefits of something they can't afford.

I've recently been trying to pick up some part time freelance work to supplement my income and pick up a wider range of experience.

So first stop was elance.com/Guru.com and similar sites. Looking at the jobs it seems like around 90% of the bids were from individuals in India or the far east happy to work for $7 per hour. So I figured I could "compete on quality" , however a lot of the individuals I would be competing against had CS or design degrees (often from western universities) , 5+ years experience and portfolios full of slick looking corporate websites. Besides, at the rates on offer I figured I'd have to complete at least one fairly large project a week to match my current salary and I'm not confident about producing quality on those kind of deadlines.

Most of the project descriptions were also either extremely vague (I want a website), impossible (I want a website, must be #1 on google for <competitive search term>) or possibly illegal (I want a keylogger, must not show up on AVG).

It also seemed like a lot of the bids came from various outsourcing companies who had a bunch of different skills in house and providing 24 hour coverage which would kill my timezone advantage (besides a lot of buyers were in the US when I'm in the UK or were in India/Far East themselves).

Looking at the profiles of freelancers from the US/UK etc , most of them appeared to have never won a project despite being on the site for over a year often.

So I gave up on that and figured, "It's all about networking right?" so I attended a local business networking event for "entrepreneurs". First bad sign was after sitting down and introducing myself to the lady next to me, "what do you do?" , "I build websites , computer software and mobile apps" , "wow, you TOO".

Everyone there who wasn't a freelancer of some description desperate for business was either a recent university grad full of enthusiasm, bright ideas but no funds at all or some small mom and pop operation who were stressed out about meeting their mortgage payments that month and absolutely not looking to drop a chunk of change on any kind of bespoke software.

Now I'm sure there are people out there with money to spend, but they are probably hiding behind an army of secretaries etc. Besides even people with money are looking to save it, and there are plenty of monied businesses like investment banks etc who are still offshoring all of their dev work.

Any bright ideas on how to break through this firewall?

<comment><USER6> 1) Don't use the freelancer sites. They're markets for lemons.

2) There are a variety of networking mechanisms besides networking events. Anything pitched as a "networking event", explicitly, is going to self-select for people who have nothing better to do than go to networking events. Successful businessmen _largely_ don't go to that sort of place because _they have networks_. They go to places which _promise value to them_.

One specific example is e.g. focused presentations or conferences on a topic of immediate need to their business. For example, the Business of Software conference charges something like $2k a ticket, and is pretty much totally attended by people who own or work at software companies that can justify $2k a ticket and a half-week at a luxury hotel if it sells more software. That might be a good place to meet well-heeled software companies if you're in a mind to do that. (How to avoid paying an arm and a leg for conference tickets? One way is to get invited as a speaker. How to do that? a) Get really good at something. b) Reach out to conference organizers. c) Tell them that if you speak about your thing at their event it will receive high ratings and people will talk about it after the conference.)

Another hack: can't get invited to a party? Throw a party. Invite yourself. You must be a desirable person to meet at the party, after all, you're throwing it. Ryan Carson talks about this all the time. It takes absolutely nobody's permission and a budget in like the two to three figure range to say "October 22nd: SEO For Law Firms seminar, Community Center Conference Room A, 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM with reception to follow. Register now to reserve your ticket."

3) _they are probably hiding behind an army of secretaries_

Is this an obstacle that the world is presenting to jiggy2011 or an obstacle that jiggy2011 is presenting to jiggy2011?

I know at least 30 people who can greenlight 5 to 6 figure engagements. 25 of them have publicly routable telephone numbers... I assume, anyhow, because calling people scares the heck out of me. Every last one reads their own email. None has a bodyguard separating them from the hoi polloi at e.g. industry events.

You don't need to get the CEO of Bank of America on the phone to charge $1X0 an hour. A company the size of a BoA _bank branch_ can be a great, great client to have -- one or two people in the decisionmaking loop, monthly payroll of $X00,000 to $Y million so your invoices won't threaten the ability of anyone to make their mortgages.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the reply, certainly some food for thought there.

I guess there are a few things at the crux of this.

Having worked on mainly typical "line of business" type software and CMS type systems I've tended to find myself on projects where the number of voices has meant that everything tends towards mediocrity and anything approaching an innovative idea gets shot down immediately.

In other words it's difficult to produce something that you feel _proud_ of and would be happy to show people as an example of your skill.

Also as very much a generalist (everything from server admin to dev to SEO) it's difficult to find an area where I would feel confident speaking as an "expert" on any particular subject.

Perhaps, I would be better off using the time to develop things of my own that people might find useful/interesting and would give me something that I could talk about?

<comment><USER6> _Also as very much a generalist (everything from server admin to dev to SEO) it's difficult to find an area where I would feel confident speaking as an "expert" on any particular subject._

This is a common worry in our field, even for people who are absolutely drop- dead world-class experts in things! You do not have to be absolutely drop-dead world-class expert in things to teach hugely valuable things to people, because _the overwhelming majority of people are not experts at $FILL_IN_SUBJECT_.

You do server admin? Hypothetical example: Have you ever administered a MySQL server? Have you written a backup strategy for one? _Once_? Jiggy2011, you know more than I do about a subject which very nearly cost me $$$$ and a heart attack last Thursday. Would I be listening to hear you talk about MySQL backup strategies? Heck yes. I burn with need for that right now. Are there other people who know it better than you? Yes. Do I know who they are? No. I know almost nothing about this field, which includes not knowing the straightforward paths to learning more about this field. You know this subject better than I do, maybe you could tell me who they are, but you can probably also tell me that they're busy building Facebook and since you aren't you're the one _actually talking about this stuff_.

<comment><USER15> Mysql Backups:

Ghetto solution is to find a service that will allow you to rsync files to them and take care of offsite backups etc themselves. Once you have done that it's a simple case of setting up mysqldump to create timestamped .sql files and setting that up on a cron job to rsync to the remote server via SSH (you need to generate a key pair and copy the public key to the other end).

If you are using characters from weird character sets you definitely want to make sure all of your unicode settings are correct which may take some trial and error and I've never entirely trusted mysql in this regard.

If you are paranoid you should have a separate job that automatically downloads and restores your backups after a period of time and runs a few test queries on the data. Of course the hard part is knowing what the results of these queries should be.

Of course the problem here is that this will chew up increasing amounts of your remote storage over time, so it depends if you can afford to delete backups of over a certain age.

You can also enable binary logging in mysqld and do incremental backups by writing the binary log to the remote host at certain intervals (I think this only works properly with InnoDB databases), though I have no practical experience doing this because frankly I've never needed to. Nightly dumps were always _good enough_ so my boss wouldn't want me spending any more time on it.

That's the crux of the problem with working for a non tech company, most of the time once the solution is "ok" it's time to move onto something else so you never get a chance to really kick ass which is what you need to do to justify a high rate.

These are really commodity skills though, you could have figured all of this out yourself by reading a few blogs (that's basically all I did). Alternatively if you had posted "Mysql backup solution needed" on eLance you would have probably had at least 20 offers to do the whole thing for $20 or so.

<comment><USER6> _you could have figured all of this out yourself by reading a few blogs (that's basically all I did)_

Could have. _Didn't._ Was too busy building my businesses to care to do the research. _Many people are like me._ Would listening to Jiggy teach me about MySQL in a nice, packaged, Jiggy-does-the-work-so-I-don't-have to format provide value? Yes, clearly. You already quintupled what I know about the subject _with an HN post_ , think of how entertaining talking for an hour would be.

 _These are really commodity skills though... do the whole thing for $20 or so._

You are no longer a commodity after you've successfully convinced me that you are the expert who can e.g. listen to my particularized needs and tell me a solution which will work for them. In fact, even if I were non-technical and _stark-raving insane_ and thought that $20 was a reasonable price to pay for this, the fact of having read the above would convince me that eLancelot wouldn't have his uni-codes sorted on the cronSyncServer or whatever that was, so I should entrust the _future of my business_ to the guy who seems to know what he's talking about who is quoting numbers closer to what I pay for e.g. insurance than what I pay for toilet paper.

<comment><USER16> Something about this exchange reminds me of the old Monty Python "Motor Insurance" sketch:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO2R_DDZPCM>

 _Well, Reverend Morrison, in your policy…_ [pause to remove wadded-up document from the inside pocket of an old tweed jacket] _…in your policy it states quite clearly that no claim you make will be paid. You see, you unfortunately plumped for our "never-pay" policy, which if you never claim is very worthwhile!_

(Incidentally, it's fun how well this sketch holds up today if you imagine that Michael Palin's character is playing the role of the Internet.)

Anyway, the point is that it's not buying the insurance that's hard: It's ensuring that you can collect when the emergency happens. The same is true for backups. When you try to restore the backup, and you can't find the guy who set it up in the first place, and the _second_ guy you hire for $20 from eLance tells you that the first guy messed up the Unicorn settings or whatever, or that his script broke four months ago and nobody noticed, now you're screwed, and you _don't even know which of your two $20 minions made the mistake_.

How much will someone pay, as a monthly retainer, to avoid that nightmare? Well, how much is their data worth? How quickly will they want to restore it when disaster strikes, and do they already have a full-time employee with a pager who knows how to perform the restore?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While not in consulting, I have actually found the same to be true in selling advertisements on my website.

My original plan was to sell ads at rock bottom prices - thinking that because they were inexpensive, they would sell out quickly. What I found was that the advertisements didn't sell out, and I was making rock bottom wages. I recently upped the price by 10x and have already sold an advertisement at the price, effectively making in 1 sale what would have previously taken 10 sales.

I have also thought that advertisements at such low prices signaled low quality to potential advertisers, making them less inclined to purchase from me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great advice but gotta be careful this is really only applicable to freelancing/consulting as an individual. Building a self-sustained company is a very different beast. There certainly are scenarios where you're well enough positioned to set the price you want (Barney's), but if you're not targeting a very specific niche prices are already set for you (for example .99 in the Apple store and zero in Google play) and it all comes down on having a great novel and well presented product with tremendous operations efficiency and low cost. Unless you're running on VC free money of course :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Best quote:

"If you got into this business to make peoples' lives better, and you have produced something which will succeed with that, and you are aware of truth about reality such as "better marketed products beat better engineered products every single bloody time", then you have an obligation to get better at marketing yourself."

</comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone here read Ramit Sethi's book? Thoughts? I'm thinking about picking up the Audible version.

By the way, thanks for this podcast, Patrick, I'm about to listen to both parts.

<comment><USER21> Highly recommended. It's a very quick read, and gave me multiple tips that more than paid for cost + time invested reading the book.

As a Canadian, much of the investment advice was irrelevant to me. But I switched to ING direct as a result, which simplified my banking (big time saver) and eliminated a lot of fees.

He also has very good scripts for dealing with customer service reps. Various other small tips have been useful, such as better tracking of recurring expenses.

Conservatively, I've probably saved at least $1,000 since reading that book two years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, perfect timing, I am just writing a contract proposal this weekend!

This (novella-sized) article definitely resonated with me, will try applying some of their advice soon...

</comment><comment><USER23> A long thread like this and no mention of price elasticity?

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow. This is a great piece, even though I realize I've been guilty of just about every single thing they say NOT to do...

</comment><comment><USER25> That's all wonderful form consultant's point of view, but if everyone reasoned like this guy, there would be no open source software, no cheap consumer software, everything would be SaaS and... well, I'm not sure I would want to see a world like that.

<comment><USER26> Why not open source software? They actually say something like "you can be free, but you can't be cheap". Making money with OSS is not easy, but there are certainly ways to do it.

And for cheap consumer software, it's just that you need to be really big to win money being cheap. You can't do it as a one man company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Got 2 paragraphs in - realized author lives in fantasyland.

</comment><comment><USER28> "</comment>


No Safe Harbor: How NSA Spying Undermined U.S. Tech and Europeans' Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/europes-court-justice-nsa-surveilance <comment><USER2> Good. Money talks more than moral outrage ever will, however justified. The only way it will stop is if enough companies with money (read: tech companies) tell the government that these policies are destroying their business and hence damaging the US economy.

We base a great deal of our foreign policy on corporate interests anyway, the obvious solution here is to make corporate interests overlap with our righteous indignation at government snooping.

<comment><USER3> All intelligence agencies of the West are working together, but you can't hate the entire West, that would be stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not yet grasping what it means. I'm a lone developer targetting a B2B ecosystem made of 75% US, 15% EU. As far as I understand, the following activities are now forbidden. If so, that's the strongest protectionism that EU startups could ever dream of...

\- Emailing my EU customers using MailChimp,

\- Pasting my EU customer data in a Google Spreadsheet,

\- Using Google Analytics,

\- Hosting my services in AWS-US

Am I totally off?

<comment><USER5> I think its worse than that - one interpretation is that you can't use AWS _at all_ because it isn't wholly owned by an EU company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real problem is that even if the US passes a law that EU citizen data is out of reach for the NSA the "backdoor" known as GCHQ still exists.

Any form of true protection of EU citizen data requires throwing out the Brits. I personally hope that we won't have to kick them out because they will exit the EU out on their own for good.

<comment><USER3> Removing every country whose intelligence service is cooperating with the US would leave no EU at all, although that may come about anyway.

<comment><USER6> There's a difference in cooperation between US/UK and USUK/Rest-EU.

<comment><USER3> Germany is littered with US military bases so I don't see how you think they are not cooperating much.

<comment><USER6> FVEY is on the receiving end of the pipeline, Germany only gets fed what the US wants to feed.

<comment><USER3> The Fourteen Eyes consist of the Five Eyes plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. According to a document leaked by Edward Snowden, the Fourteen Eyes are officially known as SIGINT Seniors Europe, or "SSEUR".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if Native American tribes are able to ignore government request? That is whom I deal with each day.

</comment><comment><USER6> @dang: holy crap, what is going on with this thread? 95 upvotes in 1h and it's dropped to #14?

<comment><USER8> When there's an ongoing major story, we downweight follow-up posts (ones that don't contain significant new information) as quasi-dupes. Otherwise the front page tends to fill up with copycat articles. This is the lesson we learned from l'affaire Snowden.

Arguably it shouldn't be on the front page at all, since [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10337299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10337299) is, and that's the thread the HN discussion crystallized around. Edit: and then there's [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338904). But I think that on the day the story broke, a few different angles are ok.

(p.s. I only saw this by accident. If you want to make sure that we see something, please email email@example.com. We can't read all the HN comments but we do read all the emails.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting that you don't see this post as containing significant new information. The Business Insider article had only the briefest of mentions of the NSA, and nothing about the political consequences, and doesn't have any perspectives from US privacy and civil liberties organizations. The EFF unsurprisingly gives more context on all of these aspects. So the net result is a textbook example of Hacker News' "objective" policies penalizing alternate perspectives.

<comment><USER8> There's a fallacy here (what's its name? maybe just sample bias?) where you're assuming that we've analyzed this as closely as you have, therefore must be making as precise a judgment as you, therefore must have an opposite agenda to you, therefore must have a hidden opposite agenda to you.

But that's not how HN moderation works. In reality it's probabilistic: all we do all day is guess. There's no hope of reading every story closely and making precise calls. Not even close!

If you'd do what other users (including other users who feel strongly about mass surveillance) do—consider the tradeoffs and help clarify which stories are best by HN's standards—you'll get better results than accusing us of sinister silencing.

<comment><USER9> I don't think he's accusing you of anything sinister. To me, it sounds like he's saying "here is the result of your policy". It's almost as if you're both saying the same thing :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed :)

<comment><USER8> It still amazes me how easy it is to misread these things—invariably because one has a pre-existing picture that the new data snaps into. Sorry for making a wrong assumption.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikimedia Foundation now accepts Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/30/wikimedia-foundation-now-accepts-bitcoin/

<comment><USER2> Two thoughts:

1) About time! You'd have thought a crowdsourced open source software community would have adopted Bitcoin sooner.

2) Why does the Coinbase donation form require my email and mailing address? Just give me a QR code.

<comment><USER3> If this donation is tax deductible, I expect it is so they can send you a receipt.

Still, an anonymous option would be nice.

<comment><USER4> They also are legally required to collect donor information for donations above $1,000 [1]. Mostly this is to ensure that nonprofits aren't playing weird games with funneling money around, e.g. being registered as a 501(c)(3) charity but actually being funded mainly by one person who also controls the board/spending.

Maybe they can rework the donation flow so it allows anonymous donations below that limit? But if that has the effect of making large donations seem different/weird/complicated, it might be counterproductive: you have to get a _lot_ of extra $5 donations to make up for a single lost $10,000 donation. I'm no UI/flow expert though so maybe there's a good way of doing it. There are basically three cases that would need to be worked in: 1) above $1,000, information is mandatory; 2) between $250 and $1,000, information is not mandatory but must be entered if the donor is American and wants a receipt that would enable them to deduct it; 3) below $250, receipts aren't necessary for tax deduction so donor information isn't needed at all.

[1] More precisely, they're required to report all donors who gave more than $5,000 cumulatively in a given year (or possibly a higher threshold for very large organizations), which requires keeping a running sum of per-donor totals. Except that as a concession to ease of recordkeeping, individual donations below $1,000 do not need to be included in the total, and therefore I believe (?) could be accepted anonymously. Or so I read the IRS's guidelines, but IANACPA; see Form 990 Schedule B or your local accountant specializing in nonprofit law for details.

<comment><USER5> How are you going to ensure that you're legally compliant with "only $X per- year per-person" unless you keep track of who's making every Bitcoin donation to you?

If you don't do that you could trivially go over the limit by just donating >$X over multiple Bitcoin transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You mean, "Wikimedia now uses Coinbase as another payment provider to collect US currency for donations"?

<comment><USER7> Imagine they accepted Japanese Yen instead of Bitcoin.

They would still convert it to USD, but would your opinion still make sense?

<comment><USER8> When I used to donate previously, my DKK were converted to USD. But I still use DKK every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember that there were multiple userbase attempts to lobby Wikimedia for this in the past. Looks like Coinbase's recent partnering successes have made the difference, in this case at least.

<comment><USER10> Some of these "userbase" attempts involved doing some things that people perceived as unethical (e.g. bribes) and caused damage that took effort to undo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where is their address, how do I just send them bitcoins?

</comment><comment><USER12> I started BTC donation, but they ask you for your name and address... what! Anyway I found out you can go through with a bogus name and address.

<comment><USER13> I find myself unsurprised that the _very first_ reaction of Bitcoin fans to this is to complain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> At the time of the last fundraising round I was quite surprised that they didn't accept bitcoin. Good news.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like coinbase.com is not loading at the moment. Is it conceivable that this crashed their site?

<comment><USER15> Interestingly, it seems to prevent BIP 0070 from working properly, although the payment went through fine.</comment></comment>


MS Research Paper on How Kinect Recognizes Body Positions - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=145347 <comment><USER2> Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2369867>

"Microsoft explains the technology behind the Kinect." (newscientist.com)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your digital media - <AUTHOR>

I am facing a problem of managing our photos and videos. The problem is me and my wife take photos and video using our 2 iPhones, 1 iPad, 1 canon DSLR and 1 Fuji Point and Shoot and then find ourselves looking for pictures in various devices. Also as a result we have no physical pictures because all the photos are scattered in different places and have not been consolidated. I am sure other people (specially new parents) are facing this problem and  I wanted to know what kind of tools or setup you guys are using to conquer this problem.
I am wondering if there is a solution where all this media could be housed in once location and then be viewed seamlessly by any type of device (mobile phone, home computer, overseas via browser) ?
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> At home, we have 5 HTC phones and 2 Apple devices (iPhone and an iPad) and a Canon DSLR. We face the same problem too, but then, the solution is really simple, but involves some manual work - Though it will be rewarding in the end. I have a Seagate 1 TB hard disk just for this purpose and I have a folder called "Photos". Inside this folder, there is a naming convention that all of us follow - Each family member has to create a new folder by the norm "Date, Title, Name". As you guessed, the date represents the starting date of the first photo in the album (be it the phone or the DSLR) and the title could be anything, Eg. "Las Vegas" or something. Name represents the (shortcode) name of the family member uploading the photo. this actually makes searching for a particular photo or album easier. Say, I want to find out albums uploaded just by me, so I could just search for "name" and bingo! There you go..

Now, we're a Windows family, so all we do is just share this folder for everyone else from Windows within the home network. So anyone can access the "Photos" folder from any device (Mobile OR PC) and can transfer their photos to this folder. So, there' s no confusion. For mobile devices (android) there are some apps that let you do this - either through FTP, etc. The kids in our home use it, but I personally connect it via USB, drag and drop the photos straight to the "Photos" folder.

This may appear like a complex process, but once you follow this, it's actually not. Also, I make sure I take backups of the 1TB drive and burn them to a dozen DVD's once in a while to make sure everything's safe and we don't lose any data. Probably you could get yourself a dropbox account to make all this easier, but I am still not convinced about the cloud based solutions, mainly because it takes too much time to view these images as a gallery (each image is approx. 10-30 MB depending on the device).

We've been following this procedure for about 3 years now and it sure gets the job done. Maybe there are specific apps to make some intermediate processes easier, but with Android there's the issue of some apps not working as they should in ALL of our devices. So, I never really bother with the apps, I just plug the USB and upload stuff. Oh, I forgot to mention, I have a docking station, so that makes things a bit easier - connecting the DSLR, HTC phone or iPhone, etc.</comment>