Ask HN: What are good software architecture interview questions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Not so much a question as an approach, but...

When interviewing senior people, I like to get them going on war stories. "Can you talk about a project you experienced that went very badly?" is a good one. It's not necessarily that _they_ went badly, but we've all been on death marches before (and I absolutely would not hire an architect who's never done a death march!).

The beauty of this is you can find out how they react to impossible demands and pressures. What they're proud of accomplishing in dire circumstances. Possibly what they're ashamed or embarrassed about, or mistakes/lessons learned (if they're that bold). You can learn a _ton_ about how they talk about their colleagues! Are they full of praise, or contempt? Do they find someone to blame, or talk about how someone else saved their asses? You can also learn a lot about their actual approach to technical decisions - <USER2> taste, for lack of a better word.

You can ask probing questions here, but the important part is to get them speaking in an unguarded way. Nobody makes it to the architect level in this field without at least kind of loving the job. Find out what they love. Find out what they hate. Find out what they regret. Find out any strong technical biases they have, and why. But most of all, find out how they play with others. Because the architect's job isn't just to design, but to _communicate_. You don't just want a technical expert. You want someone that can value and respect the rest of the team, or they're just going to cause problems.

<comment><USER4> >> Can you talk about a project you experienced that went very badly

I'd like to offer a spin on this.

In my experience, asking a question that demands one to recall specific details about a painful event in an interview, which is typically a stressful situation, may produce poor results.

What do you think about giving the candidate an opportunity to get advance notice of that you'll be asking that question, in an interview, and ask them to prepare three to five bullet points to discuss? Whether the candidate sends the bullet points back to you before the interview, or just brings them to the interview, is beyond the scope of what I'm proposing.

Let's say your trying to assess a 3 things:

* Has Architect been through the meat grinder at all? Bullet points with little depth log a warning, as there has been plenty of time to prepare a thoughtful answer.

* Does Architect talk about failure in a calm and composed manner? Bullet points give ability to ability to recall challenges before stress of interview sets in.

Does Architect trash talk former employer or coworkers? The stress of interview can erode one's asshole filter, and cause them to be a bit of the jerk they've worked really hard to not be (speaking a bit for myself here).

To wrap this up, I like interview questions that are functional with minimal side effects, meaning the person is given every opportunity to provide the answer you are looking without external pressure or distraction. If you want to see how a person handles stress, give them a situation that is stressful in a way it'd be on the job, perhaps leading with "apologies in advance for the following situation, which is intentionally stressful..."

<comment><USER5> > In my experience, asking a question that demands one to recall specific > details about a painful event in an interview, which is typically a > stressful situation, may produce poor results.

Stressful and painful are not the same. Every engineer is going to go through stressful situations. Good ones will learn from them: to minimize the risk of them happening, and to better cope when they do.

> If you want to see how a person handles stress, give them a situation that > is stressful in a way it'd be on the job

How is this any better?

> "apologies in advance for the following situation, which is intentionally > stressful..."

Stressful situations don't send calendar invites.

I'm not arguing one should be an asshole during the interview. I've been interviewed by clearly hostile engineers. I didn't like it, and it surely impacted my performance. But real life is like that. Being able to react in a polite and composed manner to an unexpected situation, and recover from it, is a superb data point in an interview.

<comment><USER6> > If you want to see how a person handles stress, give them a situation that > is stressful in a way it'd be on the job

Mainly because you're paying someone to do a job, not to interview. I've interviewed a lot of people, and sometimes interviewing just sucks for reasons that have nothing to do with the interview.

For example, say you're homeless, and you get your first interview in quite a while. Landing the job means housing for you. The pressure to perform is enormous, and it's not something you can prepare for. I was homeless for a bit, and in that situation.

I don't expect to get a job for which I'm not qualified, but it'd be nice if an interview process allows me to show I can meet the requirements of the position, regardless of the circumstances of my life situation outside of work.

I like screening people in for the right reasons, and not screen them out for reasons that aren't really all that important. And when you have a hard time getting any qualified applicants, can you really afford to false negatives?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Take an actual problem that your team solved. Distill it down to essential elements. Wargame out plausible solutions to it if one didn't have your team's context on your particular situation, particularly plausible solutions which would be top-of-mind to a smart, stressed person operating under incredible time pressure. (Your actual IRL solution should probably be one of them, but don't assume it is the only solution, the most likely solution, or the only passing solution.) Take insights out of those wargamed answers (e.g. "Ahh, this is performant", "Ahh, this approach fails loudly when our infrastructure is in a degraded state", "Oof, this creates a SPOF... not desirable here") and write them in a list. Group them by theme. Try to have somewhere between 5 and 10 themes.

For each theme on the list; make 3~5 variants of things which show the insight(s) related to the theme at varying levels of quality/discernment/depth/etc. Assign an appropriate numerical weight to that tier of answer. Your list is now two-dimensional; in teaching circles it would be called "a rubric."

Grade interviews against the rubric. On security, this candidate said X, Y, and Z, which are elements which most closely match a Good answer; 7 of 10 possible points awarded.

Even better, grade _written notes taken during interviews_ against the rubric.

Now, and this is the brutally organizationally difficult part, stop overriding the rubric when it spits out point values which imply next steps regarding a particular candidate that are clearly not what one wanted to do. Instead, fix the scenario and/or rubric.

<comment><USER8> > Wargame out plausible solutions to it if one didn't have your team's context > on your particular situation,

My least favorite interview ever, was essentially "Implement this generic problem that our team had to solve, but you don't have the context of our infrastructure, and I'll criticize you every time you deviate from the actual solution we came up with because your solution wouldn't work in our context". It really felt like a "read my mind" type of problem.

No further point. Just glad to see you point out the relatively obvious point that you need to evaluate a question for someone who doesn't have your current context.

<comment><USER9> We do this, but in an interactive way, to see the approach taken, additional context given, adjustments made along the way. This really shows how a candidate thinks and if they can on-their-feet. Often we will run out of alternatives before coming to a solution, with many avenues explored. Rarely we will discover a path that may have worked, possibly even better.

<comment><USER10> I was put through that once, it sucks. You're completely ignoring all the wrong turns you took to get there, the number of people involved etc. Expecting someone to just jump into your shoes and pull of the same trick is not very constructive. What if you framed the problem wrong? Maybe this is the candidate that would have helped you come up with a superior solution given enough freedom and time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My general line of questioning is as follows:

1) Explain to me a system you built/architected. How it worked, what it did, etc. I'm looking for a deep understanding around the requirements of the business, and how that played into technical choices.

2) Talk me through some bugs you encountered or mistakes you made, and how you course corrected. I try to make a candidate comfortable prior to asking this and usually tell a quick and horrifying war story from my own career. Here I want to understand how a candidate processes information and adapts the plan accordingly. Like mike tyson said, everyone's got a plan until they get hit.

3) If you had to build the system again today, what would you do differently? I'm looking for an awareness of how technology has evolved since they designed the system in question, as well as what didn't work well over time from an operational perspective (e.g. we didn't burn off time series data over time so table index rebuilds started to take forever, etc). I want to make sure the candidate supported the system they designed over time, and felt the pain/benefit of their decisions. I usually specifically ask the candidate at the beginning to pick a system they built and supported for an extended period of time.

I also ask about areas of technical expertise, and areas where the candidate feels less strong technically. For the former, I make sure they have the kind of expertise they claim, and for the latter, I want to see how they communicate with team members that are expert in those areas (and how they gain familiarity with new technologies).

<comment><USER12> I just don't remember enough of old projects to answer these questions in any detail.

<comment><USER11> I solve this by being very clear with candidates ahead of time (i.e. days before the interview) about generally what I'm going to ask, and I've never had a candidate tell me they couldn't recall at some some relevant details from a project. I am generally asking about experiences that were impactful and the lessons learned, not trying to test someone's recall ability.

<comment><USER12> That helps. I've had questions like that sprung on me, and I just don't have any prepared war stories to talk about.

I try to look forward and not dwell on the past. Or maybe that's how I rationalize bad memory. Either way, when asked about details of something I worked on 8 years ago, I don't have much to say.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, my mind just seems to just abstract it all just into the lessons learned decoupled from its origin. The story is something I can rarely recall. But I was always more into talking about ideas rather than trading stories.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, that describes me better than I could!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As with any interview, I like to make it as personal as possible. Tell me about something you have architected and why you've architected that way. I will ask probing questions about why you chose this stack, this database tech, this integration layer, questions about security concerns, areas for improvement, what you learned and would've done differently, etc., etc. This also allows you to see the interviewee's excitement and really turns the table to put them in a comfortable position where they are the most knowledgeable person, which makes for a much smoother interview. If that goes well, I may turn to some specific tasks or problems we have faced or are facing and discuss at large how those might be addressed, again really focused more on brainstorming than any "right" answer.

If you don't have any projects or work to talk about, the interview is basically over as I don't see much value in talking about cookie cutter problems.

<comment><USER15> This is great stuff. A fun bit to add is "That thing you made, if you had more time, how would you make it better? How would you make that version better?" And, so on until it start to get a little ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For me, the single largest differentiation between "senior programmer" and "software architect" is whether or not they can see the actual problem. The catch phrase is "see the forest for the trees" but in software it is recognizing you're in a forest and then understanding forest type issues. I was on a team that was nominally building a "video encoding protocol" because that is what they were asked for but the problem they were solving needed a remote procedure call protocol.

Happens all the time, a person wants to buy a waterproof computer, but really what they want is to see the results of a program while they are in a rainstorm. Or they want a "website for managing inventory" but they really want a way of tracking employee theft. So architects listen to the problem statement(s) and think about what is in play, will ask some clarifying questions and then reframe as the _actual_ problem statement. A senior engineer will ask evaluation level questions (how fast, how much memory, etc) and come up respond with a solution to the stated problem.

A _bad_ software architect will not be able to stop abstracting and will start with a 50,000' view and then float into orbit. A "good" software architect will add in the business or operational constraints to the problem and articulate where the ceiling is and why.

<comment><AUTHOR> >single largest differentiation between "senior programmer" and "software architect"

I am glad that you brought this up. My question was more from a perspective of distinguishing senior engineer vs architect interview questions. There is only a limited time in the interview. Shouldn't an architect be also asked the senior engineer questions in addition to the ones discussed here. Especially my our org setup they are also hands-on and individual contributor to the code base. One solution could be to restrict the 1st couple of rounds of an architect interview to senior engineer questions only . Fair ?

<comment><USER16> If you don't mind I'm going to go a bit 'architect' on you :-) Do you need a software architect or do you need a senior engineer. Interview questions are about finding out if you should say 'no', by definition if someone is called in for an interview you've tentatively said yes to them for the job you just want to know if you should change that to a no. So the problem set is understanding if the applicant in front of you will be able to do the job you need done.

Your comment that "in our org ... they are also hands-on" is the an echo of the Joel Spolsky 'architecture astronaut' type. Someone who spends all day architecting and none of their time coding. But here is the thing, at the end of the day its about how much product the organization ships at the end of the day and whether or not that product had does the job it needs to do right? So there is some nuance there to consider.

I certainly believe that anyone who considers themselves to have software architecture skills, should also be able to do anything a senior engineer can do caveat a deep discipline/subject matter engineer[1]. So interviewing for senior engineers will also get candidates who show architecture tendencies, and you will recognize them because of the questions they ask. If you want to provoke those questions then leave some of your coding or puzzle questions a bit ambiguous to see if they let their ideas play out or if they are sticking with the task.

Here is the thing though, you can have lots of really good programmers and all they need is a bit of structure around where they are going so that together they can make something awesome. That needs an architect who is spending all of their time keeping everyone on the same page, and if changes need to be made, moving to the new page. If your programming team is fairly senior and just "gets it" and will work out amongst themselves which parts need to fit with the other parts, then you just need another senior engineer like that. In my experience though group 1 is more common than group 2.

[1] There are irreplaceable senior engineers who have become so deeply expert in a particular technology you don't want them to do anything but own that code.

<comment><AUTHOR> >needs an architect who is spending all of their time keeping everyone on the same page Now here is he problem, the org needs someone like that but again the expectation is to contribute equally in the implementation during every sprint as his hours are accounted for sprint velocity. In this case I can't hire someone who does not write a complex sql or merge two linked list in code etc .

Most of th programmers are so young in this part of the world that Anyone having more than 9 years of tech would expect an architect position and there are high chances that is not actively programming in his previous company and thus it becomes nesssary to eveluate coding skills

<comment><USER16> Be careful you don't set them up to fail. Measure team power not individual power. Do you really care if they spend time writing code or not if the team is getting more done?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You should make sure they've actually stayed around in their companies a few years to see how it actually behaves. I've seen a bunch of architects that regularly move on to the next hot project, before the old one is properly completed. The architect never sees all the problems that come from their grand ideas so they dont get to learn what is practical. There is a big difference between architects that know all the hottest tech and buzzwords, and an architect that can deliver a reliable and maintainable platform.

<comment><USER18> I wish I could triple up-vote this. I've worked with a few architects who were great at envisioning fantastic, pure systems that looked great on paper. But, were nearly useless at actually building these systems and making them work in the real world.

That might be ok if the role is a pure R&D role, where they're "playing around" with the latest technology and ideas. We have some of those positions at my current employer. But, it's not very good for an architect who will be embedded with a team of developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have interviewed and hired software developers for many years at different companies in different countries. Which has given me the opportunity to experiment with different questions and correlate that with outcomes (how good the people I hired or recommended for hiring turned out over the next 5 years). And I have now narrowed the questions down to 4 types of questions that really filter the good developers from the not so good: (1) Ask the candidate to dive into all major groups of software development (DB/UI/Testing/OS/...) and see how deep the candidate can go (2) Ask the candidate to come up with a _practical_ solution to a NP complete _real_ problem (usually an optimization problem) (3) Ask the candidate how he/she would approach investigating and solving a specific _real_ problem for a large _real_ system (usually a mobile-server-DB system) and (4) how they would architect a system given a list of _real_ use cases. Candidates that do a good job of answering those questions are highly likely (as in 95%) to be successful if hired. They don't have to come up with a perfect solution. What is important is how they approach the problems and what kind of possible solutions/investigations they come up with and their reasoning behind it.

</comment><comment><USER20> An architect's role often has an economic as well as a technical part to it. So, it's important to find out whether your candidate has a strong loyalty to a particular vendor stack. Ask.

After you've had a conversation about a project in the candidate's track record, ask some pointed questions:

\-- what would you lose in performance and functionality if you reworked that project to run on cheaper infrastructure? (By that I mean such things as "standard edition" rather than "enterprise edition" of DBMSs, open source vs. paid licenses, etc.) This is a good way to get a handle on the candidate's economic reasoning ability.

\-- what was a significant performance bottleneck in that system? How did you address the problem?

\-- with the benefit of hindsight, what parts of that system would you say you overdesigned? underdesigned?

\-- what was a security vulnerability in the system? How did you plan for security? If you had to do security remediation, please describe it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I normally go with: "If you could do it from scratch how would you implement the infrastructure of X"

X being a currently widely known service (I'm usually going with Spotify). There is no "right answer" to this question but this shows you how the candidate thinks and how well they can protect their opinion if challenged

<comment><USER22> I think this is a good question, but that it falls prey to the same conceit that befalls those who claim they could "build Twitter in a weekend". A picture-perfect sketch of a system can illustrate one's knowledge of patterns and off-the-shelf solutions, but it won't cover the things that get in the way of a team building their way towards product/market fit.

You could lead with this question and then jump in with hypothetical roadblocks to see how the candidate reacts.

Ex:

\- "A network of microservices _would_ be a clean way to implement this. How would you foresee the operational burden of this impacting a small team?" \- "Imagine that you build this and it works well, but the product it powers ends up not resonating with customers. The team now wants to pivot to X. What changes would you make to the system to address this new problem space?"

<comment><USER23> > it falls prey to the same conceit that befalls those who claim they could > "build Twitter in a weekend"

A good answer would account for the fact that our initial approach to big projects tends to differ quite a bit from what the the end result is. Agility of architectural design is generally underrated in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The ORCA card system in the Seattle area is a great architecture question. You have a bus/transportation system that has:

1\. RFID cards that tie into

2\. Electronic wallets

3\. The busses are not always internet connected

4\. You need to be able to refill your card either online, or via kiosk.

5\. You also want to be able to refund card balances.

What system can solve this? What drawbacks would the system have? How could the system be scammed?

Bonus questions are: "6\. The LINK rail allows you go scan your ORCA card when you get on and get off the train, so you only pay for the number of stops you're on. How would you include that? 7. ORCA cards also allow for free transfers-- so if you take a second ride within 3 hours, it will be free. How would you include that?"

<comment><USER25> Would be interested in a case study on this. Has anyone published anything? My searches didn't yield much.

<comment><USER24> I'm not aware of anything published about it. My former boss was friends with an engineer on the ORCA project. :]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is specific to my codebase I was interviewing candidates for (heavy OO). Not all of these concepts are necessary for the candidate to understand, but a few go a long way towards a great developer experience when applied correctly:

\- SOLID principles

\- The Expression Problem

\- DRY

\- Dependency Injection

\- Composition vs Inheritance vs Delegation

\- Connascence

\- Law of Demeter

\- Invariance, Contravariance, and Covariance

</comment><comment><USER27> HN doesn't seem to like mine, but I've always asked "tell me about some project, can be a tiny shell script, that you did entirely by yourself: the code, the docs, the install". It has to fit through the filter of nobody asked you for help, if they sent you a thanks, that's cool, but they need to be able to install/learn/use it on their own.

If someone is claiming to be an architect and they've never done that, that's a red flag for me. Kinda like asking a building architect to talk about framing. You'd be surprised at how many of those guy have never swung a hammer and they "design" stuff that can't be built. Sort of the same with software, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER28> As someone else says, it depends on what you define as a "software architect". A co-worker from a former company that was a "technical fellow" and "technical director" (effectively an architect, at a 12,000 person tech company), came over to Google and just has the title of "Software Engineer". From the companies I've worked at, software architect covers a lot of different job descriptions.

At Google, more senior software engineers will have a "system design" type question as part of their interview. There are sample problems for this all over the internet[0]. For example, you could ask them "Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly.". When you ask open ended questions like these, there are so many parts of the system you can dive into that you can really test the depth and breadth of a candidate's knowledge.

[0] [https://www.hiredintech.com/system- design/](https://www.hiredintech.com/system-design/)

<comment><USER29> If I remember correctly, the system design interview at Google is for software engineers candidates of all levels, not only the more senior ones. I was definitely asked one of these problems when I interviewed as a newgrad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What is the role of an architect?

What architectural mistakes have you made in your career - what did you learn from them?

What architectural decisions are you proud of - how relevant are those ideas to other systems?

How much code should an architect write?

Have you been responsible for maintaining a complex system that you didn't design?

<comment><USER31> 1 and 4 is matter of opinion. Too many ways to answer it correctly but incompletely.

Number 2, 3 and 5 is asking about past jobs and may be even illegal depending on the applicant. NDAs are everywhere. Rephrase them to be generic.

Number 5 is worthless yes/no type of question as well.

<comment><USER32> Well, I don't think interviews are always about answering something _correctly_. It might just be nice to have an applicant's opinion on x y and z, to spark conversation, gain some insight into their personality and what is important to them, etc. In my opinion, discussions like that can be invaluable: sure, someone might have all the technical answers correct, and if so that is great. But humans are more complex than just being right or wrong. It's also good to see if the candidate has a similar view on the role they would be fulfilling.

<comment><USER30> Thanks - that's what I was getting at. I was in a bit of a hurry (OK in a conference call) when I wrote those questions ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> At Evernote:

1) Peer presentation - talk about past project

2) System design - design at the high level

3) Debugging - given a failing test fix the code so the test passes.

4) Coding - Straight forward problem to code and create.

For the peer presentation, we are expecting the candidate to be prepared. They have lots of notice about this portion of the interview. We want them to be articulate and clear about the technical problems, project management problems and unexpected issues.

System design - we come up with a sample issue that is easy to articulate quickly. For example, "we are going to design the first version of Wordpress". We then ask questions and extend the problem during the interview.

Debugging - we give them a random open source project and we break one of the unit tests. We then ask the developer to track down and fix the issue.

Coding - smaller scale than the System design question but focused on determining if the candidate can construct a small program end to end. So this is not a portion-of-a-program, but rather construct a quick command line program to do X.

For junior people we drop the peer presentation and add additional coding questions.

\</comment><comment>--

I liked this interview the best of all the places I interviewed. There was no "gotcha" and the problems I was asked were relevant to Evernote's business.

Walking out I didn't feel like I did the best I should have, (I have high standards) but I felt the problems were incredibly fair.

Now that I am at Evernote, hands down where interviews go badly are in the debugging section.

The peer presentation shows people who have not thought about the "why" behind their coding / design decisions - and it separates the juniors from the seniors.

Lastly, we expect and can demand a far higher interview performance because we tell candidates how to prepare. If they don't prepare, it shows soooo painfully. For candidates that do prepare we can have a more interesting and engaging interview that allows us to sell Evernote as a company.

</comment><comment><USER34> I once received the question: let's architect a web browser.

This was for an interview for backend engineering at uber, so by no means did I have any particular knowledge or speciality in browser design. Because I knew the product very well from a user's standpoint, and common knowledge about web standards, it was really fun and exciting to figure the architecture out.

Typically the questions revolve more around: "How would you design twitter/pinterest/facebook newsfeed?"

<comment><USER35> I got the "how would you design a news feed" (and similar) for data science positions as well fwiw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Some of my favs when I was recruiting, all meant to probe attitude more than knowledge.

What was the worst requirement you had to meet?

Where would you store 100Mb user data? 10Gb? 1000Gb?

Preferred deploy to production strategy?

Worst process you followed? ..what did you do to make it better?

<comment><USER30> "What was the worst requirement you had to meet?"

Thanks for mentioning that one - it means I get to think of a sensible answer rather than convulsing in laughter for a few moments. It did involve physical buttons for "Burger", "Beer" and "Porn".

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Asking them to whiteboard out software design thoughts, risks, etc, for things we all commonly encounter can be revealing. Things like an ATM, slot machine, bank of elevators, red light cameras, and so forth.

<comment><USER10> Toy problems get toy answers, you'll learn nothing that way. I couldn't care less about traffic lights and elevators, and I can code circles around many.

<comment><USER37> I feel like I learned something through your answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> \- Tell me about a problem related with software architecture that you find interesting, and why. Take your time.

\- Tell me some pros and cons of a library or framework that you have used recently.

\- Here's an hypothetical problem (describe the problem). How would you approach solving it, from the point of view of software architecture? Please think aloud and ask questions, the idea here is getting to know how you think, not necessarily arriving to a perfect solution.

</comment><comment><USER39> Software architecture questions are an interesting topic because unlike software implementation, you cannot simply give someone a task and ask them to demonstrate it. Architecture is not just a matter of selecting components, it's about understanding conflicting roadmaps for multiple teams and available human talent and technical resources.

My favored approach for it has been to ask people questions that mirror problems I've been forced to solve in the past at the current venue you're hiring for. I think this approach has a number of advantages:

1\. You know how YOU solved the problem, so you've got at least some qualifications to discuss it with authority.

2\. You can answer any and all questions the prospective architect wants to ask. These questions and their quantity are often even more telling than any hastily described solution ever could. Do they ask about infrastructure? Do they ask about expertise? Do they mention specific tooling you yourself decided on?

3\. This gives them a chance to wow you in a controlled environment. If their idea for a solution is better than yours, you know you have a very high value candidate.

4\. This also is a supreme test of technical communication skills. They need to rapidly get YOU to tell them things by asking questions, formulate an idea, and then communicate it to you in a way you can understand.

Of course this assumes the interviewer has done some architecture, but I think that's probably required to do this job right.

Personally, I think all this talk of "war stories" and whatnot is not a very good idea. If you're concerned about someone's personality and grace under pressure, you should treat that separately from their technical skills. That way you can weigh those attributes separately and fairly when it comes time to decide if you will hire the candidate.

</comment><comment><USER40> Give them a sample, 'The company you thought you're interviewing for is just a smoke screen, we're actually a stealth startup for a social network for pets" and have them diagram out how it might look for a MVP launch, 2 years in, 5 years in. What technology choices, how are they going to launch internationally, scale to hundreds of millions of pets, how are they going to achieve sub-second latency for the FindMyPet API, high-availability, do operational and business intelligence monitoring (and which BI metrics would he care about), unifying code across multiple platforms, etc.

Most importantly they should light up when they get the question. Like someone just sat a piece of cake in-front of a fat kid.

</comment><comment><USER41> Nice for the reading list: [http://aosabook.org/en/index.html](http://aosabook.org/en/index.html)

Practical overviews of design decisions in familiar open source software. I wish there were books like that!

<comment><USER42> These look amazing, and some really high profile projects as well (Asterisk, Audacity, Eclipse, LLVM, Mercurial, Git, GDB, MediaWiki, etc). Thanks for that! I wish there were more books like these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> One of my favorite:

You have written some code you'd like people to be able to reuse. Should you share it as a library or expose it as a service? Talk me through how you'd make this decision for a few cases and what the pros and cons are for each choice.

</comment><comment><USER44> For architecture I prefer to just ask for input on an actual issue my org is currently facing. Perhaps abstracted a bit to make answering less of a slog through details but I don't see any advantage to using some made up scenario. By using current issue I'm in both a good position to interact on the subject since its top of mind and get a sense for the relevance of the candidate's experience and/or their creativity. Also means I don't need any better rubric for evaluating their answer than "if I'd heard that in a meeting today would I have thought 'oh there's a good idea...'"

</comment><comment><USER45> I ask them to design a structure for a card games that uses a standard deck of playing cards, and how they would implement shuffle (not the algorithm itself) and dealing and hands. This is simple. People manage to grossly over engineer it.

My ideal response would be one struct with nothing but a suit enum and int value. A deck is just an array of these, as is a hand. But usually people start with a deck class, then try to reuse that for the hand, discard pile, etc. Things get complicated quickly, just like in real world problems, and a good architect can keep that in check while still providing useful abstractions.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ask them about a project they did. Let them talk. Ask questions about minor details that seem interesting and (hopefully) relevant to the position you're trying to fill _especially_ when part of their explanation is hand-wavy ("yeah, we used Kerberos because that seemed like the right thing to do." "Why?" "I tried other things. They didn't work." "Why?" etc.)

Ask a bit of trivia about the stack you're hiring for. They don't need to know the right answer, but their reasoning about it should corroborate with their experience.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have been through a few recent interviews and the technical questions seemed like they were from a college exam.

My advice is to see how they operate... Give them a problem, even a vague one, but then solve it together, have them use google to seek out ideas. See how the person approaches it, don't expect a bunch of memorized answers off the top of their head.

The big thing is to see what questions they ask. How will you and the person collaborate in a normal working environment.

The personality and adaptability are far more important than memorizing the exact command line or function call.

</comment><comment><USER48> Looking over their public work experience and perhaps open source contributions you will already know if this person will be a good fit.

When tasked to interview I have found that asking a question which you know the candidate will be unable to answer will show you the most-intriguing parts of their character. Something deceptively simple like a puzzle or logic problem but scales up quite quickly.

This is when you can learn things about them that they would not put to paper and thereby determine if they are for you.

</comment><comment><USER49> My favorite way is to start with a very vague design question, with no expectation of any predefined answer. Then I try to make it a discussion, see if the candidate asks more questions, pokes around, can think in terms of abstractions - I don't expect any of it to match my own thought process.

Another question is to pick a project they've worked on, and ask them how would they do it if they were given a clean slate.

</comment><comment><USER50> Give me an example of a violation of the Liskov Substitution Principle that is not the canonical Rectangle/Square example.

</comment><comment><USER51> Your question is too broad. Which industry? Which type of products? which technologies are you referring too?

</comment><comment><USER52> I'd go with:

'What do you expect to be involved in as a software architect and what can you contribute?'

and take it from there. If you are interviewing for that role then surely what they do in the context of your organisation is key and open questions help you understand whether the person is a fit for that.

</comment><comment><USER53> It's not specific questions that are important so much as the process. You want the questions to be tailored to the candidate.

See this example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfyWvJdsDRI)

</comment><comment><USER54> How do you communicate your "design" to others (stakeholders, developers, ops, sec, etc)?

</comment><comment><USER55> "If you were the size of a quarter and trapped in a blender, how would you reconcile having a dime-sized 'package'"

I forget the blog, but it was from an unused script off of silicon valley, interviewing for a new CEO of PP.

</comment><comment><USER56> One of the twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto is "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." Does your style of architecture fit well with self-organizing teams?

</comment><comment><USER57> One of my fav is to ask their preference on Composition vs Inheritance. It's a fundamental question that will give you lot of insights on how they view building applications to last.

</comment><comment><USER58> Please implement on heap sort on the whiteboard.

Let's face it, we would all love the meaty architecture questions, but most interviewers are still stuck on the CS101 algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER59> How could you detect possible plagiarism between documents in a large DB of documents?

Given such a system, how could you process a document to subvert it?

How would you fix the system?

How could you subvert the fix?

...

</comment><comment><USER60> "How do you come up with estimates?"

</comment><comment><USER61> I've written about how I interview here: [http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/07/07/how-i- interview](http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/07/07/how-i-interview)

</comment><comment><USER62> Who pays?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes but only @ 75 percentile .

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Tell me about a technology you were initially excited about but that later you regretted using?

<comment><USER30> I'd be tempted to reply "All of them" to that question :-)</comment></comment>


Varnish Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brandonwamboldt/varnish-dashboard

<comment><USER2> I wish somebody would build a real-time dashboard for nginx like this.

<comment><USER3> I shall look into it.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, let me know if you get it done (contact in profile), would love to try it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> stephen-mw This is extremely slick. Nice job!

<comment><USER3> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Keeping your social networking secret - <AUTHOR> http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/keeping-your-social-networking-secret

<comment><USER2> If there's anything more amazing than how the wheels keep turning, it's that we're sixty years into the computer revolution and people always think this is the last turn. I don't think we're quite done with the back-to-the-server swing (or "cloud" as they are called today), but a combination of still-ever- increasing horsepower available cheaply and the development of replication-to- the-cloud technologies already in progress replacing the only-in-the-cloud storage will bring a swing back to personal servers in the home. We're still in the early phases of this work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand how my data is safeguarded by my home server when it's data I'm sharing with users who aren't on that same server. Once the data is shared, it's no longer under my control. I've wondered if there is a way to protect it, but I've yet to figure it out.

Of course, I'd love to find that there is someone who has a solution. I was unable to determine if buddycloud has figured it out.

<comment><USER4> There's no way to share information with another person and be sure it is protected, but if you do trust that person, then you can encrypt the data so only he can read it. All these new supposedly secure social networks still rely on the server admins and such not to look at or "lose" your information.

<comment><USER5> The problem has been discussed a lot here and I believe that you are correct that no amount of gymnastics will allow one to escape this dilemma.

For example, see:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1789435></comment></comment></comment>


Rate My App Pilot: Justin.tv - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-mXm7lzWfA

<comment><USER2> your threads seem to have a high fatality rate today.

Maybe it has something to do with the underage content on that site ?

I suggest you put in an age filter pdq or you'll be attracting every pedophile on the planet. Also make sure that your users know that their stuff is rebroadcasted elsewhere, and that you have their permission to do so.

Ww.com has a similar element called 'the component' that allows you to plug your livestream into your website elsewhere, I'd be _very_ wary of opening up all the livestreams for rebroadcasting on 3rd party sites. It's asking for trouble.</comment>


Invite Rick to Rick Roll Your Zoom Calls - <AUTHOR> http://inviterick.com <comment><USER2> Love this idea! Just few weeks ago we had a little scandal in my country, when password to top-level government coronavirus-related Zoom meeting was leaked by one of the politicians accidentally on Facebook and random people started hijacking it and it was hilarious (part of it was uploaded to YT, skip to 3:12 for their reactions [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub82Xb1C8os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub82Xb1C8os))

<comment><USER3> Polish politicians had this in 2013:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vljNIU38sUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vljNIU38sUU)

(For context: Macierewicz is a nutjob politician at PiS, then opposition, now ruling party. He led an unscientific "investigation comitee" to explain how Smolensk 2010 plane crash happened. It obviously never really explained everything, for its goal was to accrue political capital on the death of president Lech Kaczyński (PiS), claiming it was Russian interference, TNT, artificial fog, birch and whatnot.)

<comment><USER4> The youtube link doesn't work in Canada. Here's a mirror someone uploaded to Vimeo though [https://vimeo.com/148751763](https://vimeo.com/148751763)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone interested I just found the source code for this on Github [https://jonplackett.github.io/astley](https://jonplackett.github.io/astley)

<comment><USER6> "Just found". Dude - it's a cute project (really) - but... c'mon ;)

<comment><USER7> I presume you didn't click the link because it's written in COBOL so that's noteworthy in itself.

<comment><USER5> Of course. Everyone knows COBOL is the new Clojure ;)

I like how this is showing how few people click on links before commenting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought this was going to be like www.cameo.com and Rick Astley was really going to show up in your zoom calls. You'd pay $40 for a 2.5 minute cameo or something.

<comment><USER9> Sort of like Goat To Meeting

[https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting](https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting)

<comment><USER9> It just occurred to me (and thankfully it's likely no one will ever read to me) that someone could combine memes and do goatse to meeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's fascinating how this meme refuses to die.

A Slashdot commenter was already pondering about its longevity 10 years ago: [https://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563258&cid=312739...](https://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563258&cid=31273926)

<comment><USER11> It's more benevolent than the Goatse man [NSFW] that used to be common on Slashdot via disguised links. In the end they had to put the domain next to the link text so people couldn't get caught.

<comment><USER12> I'm upset that you made me remember that meme.

<comment><USER13> The curse comes in many forms: I can't remember the last time I felt comfortable looking at a schematic diagram of a coil/ferrite transformer:

[https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal- tr...](https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-transformer- figure-compressor.jpg)

Apologies for the puerility.

<comment><USER14> I feel you. I have a similar issue with the logo of this Norwegian company: [https://www.bus.no](https://www.bus.no).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I thought at first this was a cameo.com - like thing from Rick Astley where he'd personally rick roll for like a hundred bucks.

I think he'll probably hear about this from some of his fans. He relaunched his career. He's an awesome dude.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love these stupid fun projects. There's no commercial motivation, no shady manipulation: it's just _fun_.

'Whimsical' is the word that I think best describes it. I love the whimsy of it. I wish more of the internet was like this.

<comment><USER17> _> I wish more of the internet was like this._

It used to be.

I'm am old pre-WWW guy. We had a lot of whimsy, "back in the day."

Then serious money started to happen, and that changed everything.

It's not all bad -at all. I think a lot of modern stuff is very cool, and I'm glad folks are making money on this, as it helps with that ol' "rising tide lifts all boats" thing.

But I do sort of miss the "dorky" whimsy (I wonder if anyone remembers "Kill Dean's Inits!"). The current IT scene is fairly cutthroat and deadly serious.

<comment><USER18> By pure volume, there's got to be more whimsy on the internet today than back then. There are orders of magnitude more people on it.

But sure, the percentage is probably lower.

That says to me that this is a search problem. Could we build a search engine that favors indie/personal labors of love over commercial sites?

Or maybe it's a curation problem rather than search. In which case a site like HN is just the thing to help it bubble to the surface.

<comment><USER9> Back in the early days of the web, one of my regular stops was Worst of the Web which was a collection of the most embarrassing things people put up on personal "home pages."

(As an aside, at a work meeting last week, someone used the term home page to refer to a web page and I was instantly transported to 1995. I remember one upper level manager excitedly declare that the term home page should only refer to the page that opens when you start the browser and not to the page that we had at our companies main address.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The author explains how he came up with the idea. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)

<comment><USER20> Nice try, but no

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tried inviting Rick to our morning management scrum. I was sitting there grinning for about 15 minutes, then our admin was like "oh hey, some stranger named Rick is trying to get into the room! good thing I've got streaming on, no strangers getting in here today, no sir!"

Oh well, it was fun thinking bout it.

<comment><USER22> I was confused for a moment – you meant "good thing I've got _screening_ on".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > There's a simple intake form on the site that you can drop your meeting > invite link into. That saves to a local database that I, sorry, Rick, will > be monitoring. When Rick sees a new link come in, off he goes to deliver > happiness, smiles, and cybersecurity audits. Once rolling has been completed > to Rick's satisfaction (about 15 seconds) he'll check that meeting off the > list and move on to the next one.

As users tend to re-use meet links, this seems like a privacy breach waiting to happen, even if it is done in jest, and does seem like a fun idea.

How long until someone decides they might be interested in trying to get access to that database?

<comment><USER24> Exactly this. I'm surprised that I had to go way down the comments to find someone raising the issue of giving away zoom links that usually are static for recurring events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This thread is a minefield of Ricks. I can't trust HN ever again. (This is very fun guys, a good break from all the tech and serious news)

<comment><USER26> Shh

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My pet conspiracy theory, with absolutely zero evidence, is that Rick Astley is behind the rickrolling meme. Other people might get a laugh out of it, but he stands to gain financially every time it happens. Follow the money!

</comment><comment><USER28> For those who (like me) didn't understand, this is a meme involving the music.

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

</comment><comment> event-horizon If this could be modded to invite any youtube video, that would be kind of cool.

<comment><USER29> This is something that should be a native feature. I especially don't get how it's not a native feature for Google Meet.

edit: from the "how does Rick do this" ... seems he's just using a video loop with Manycam virtual webcam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yep, it's nice to spice up those Zoom calls sometimes. I've been playing music videos for my friends from a spare computer. Get & compile v4l2loopback and then it's just this bash script on any video file (which you get with youtube- dl first ;)

#!/bin/bash mkfifo /tmp/pipe videofile=$1; (/opt/v4l2loopback/examples/yuv4mpeg_to_v4l2 /dev/video0 < /tmp/pipe & ); mplayer $videofile -vf scale=480:360 -vo yuv4mpeg:file=/tmp/pipe

Of course, first rickrolling was a sexy webcam girl joining in the chat =D

</comment><comment><USER31> Tried this out in my own personal Zoom meeting. Can confirm that it works :)

<comment><USER32> My work requires a password for zoom. Will this work I wonder?

<comment><USER33> As long as your company does not have a security policy which would frown upon handing out your zoom password to a random troll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Super cool!! Is he manually joining these Zoom calls or is there a script running to let him join automatically (seems to be the former)?

Was looking into a side project that was a Zoom Timer (i.e. dial into Zoom with a timer background to keep everyone on track), but was worried we'd hit captcha if we tried to automate. Curious if he solved this :o

</comment><comment><USER35> Can someone create this for unwanted phone calls? "Answer" "Straight to Voice Mail" "Rick Roll"

</comment><comment><USER36> Links in this thread are not to be trusted!

</comment><comment><USER19> You could have kept Rick Roll a secret. It's more fun when we randomly click a YouTube link on the internet, and Rick Roll plays!

</comment><comment><USER37> I wanna try this, but what if the zoom link points to a zoom room? Will Rick keep popping in forever?

</comment><comment><USER38> Now we need something for Microsoft Teams as well of course.

</comment><comment><USER39> The styling of the site is so on point, nicely done!

</comment><comment><USER40> Hopefully this will degrade the Zoom experience, helping adoption of better, safer, open alternatives.

<comment><USER41> If you look at the way it's implemented, it's not difficult to adapt this to work with "better, safer, open alternatives" as well.

<comment><USER40> Sure, but so what.</comment></comment></comment>


Are iPhone apps the new gold rush? - <AUTHOR>

Thanks to the media and the astounding success of some iPhone apps, suddenly everyone around me seems to think it's an easy route to riches, especially for the lazy and unmotivated acquaintances of mine (who can't code). Any one experience the same? Is the media exaggerating success? <comment><USER2> When Apple gets its act together on the "enterprise" front, so people can write apps that organizations are willing to pay for, then it might be a gold rush. Right now it's a land grab, like the 90s on the web.

There was a story on the BBC I think, not long ago, about how it's basically impossible to make money on the App Store. You'll be ignored if you're not on the front page, and people are willing to only pay $0.99/app, it's just not viable. The only reasons to do it are a) for the love of it and b) to get your name out there ready for when there is some commercial demand.

</comment><comment><USER3> They were the "it" thing 1.5 years ago. Now we have better market data about the odds of hitting it big (for non-fart apps that is.)</comment>


The CrunchFund: Actually, Tim, We Don't All Have "Different" Standards - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/02/crunchfund/

<comment><USER2> For the first time, I have seen someone calling his ultimate boss "Fuck you" on Twitter. Tim Anderson and AOL have handled this situation in the worst possible manner, but it is sad to see people questioning Arrington's ethics over this matter. TC (for that matter, anything popular) draws a lot of different opinions, but no one can deny that Arrington and TC have done startups a lot of good.

Will TC be the same now ? I don't know. The fact that Mike is no longer at the top, controlling things, makes me feel that AOL may misuse TC. Why did Arrington have to involve AOL in this deal is beyond my understanding ? He has enough repute to set up a VC fund on his own.

Arrington has owed up to his mistakes in the past, and I hope he is writing a post explaining how he plans to handle the conflict of interest between AOL, CrunchFund and TC.

</comment><comment><USER3> What percent of stories on TechCrunch these days are about TechCrunch?</comment>


Homemade GPS Receiver (2013) - brian-armstrong http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPS/Main.htm <comment> brian-armstrong DSSS [1] is really interesting and worth reading up on if you're already familiar with LFSRs. To summarize, you start by generating a deterministic, pseudorandom, periodic sequence. You then take your message and modulate (bitwise XOR) each bit of the message by the entire sequence e.g. if my sequence is 31 bits long, then my message modulated is now 31x long.

The receiver just correlates the received message by the pseudorandom sequence. The correlation gives me what each bit is and a belief/probability for that bit.

This works really well because the sequence is orthogonal to just about every other sequence (it's white noise!). It's even orthogonal to time shifted versions of itself, meaning that it does well at rejecting multipath distortion.

1: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct- sequence_spread_spect...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct- sequence_spread_spectrum)

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems like a common sort of trick in electrical engineering. XLR cables used in professional audio have three conductors to carry a single signal. Why? One of them exists purely to collect interference - the _same_ interference that affects the primary transmission. The equipment on the other side subtracts it from the primary signal to get a clean result. This is why hundreds of feet of unshielded cable can still sound fine.

<comment><USER2> This is called balanced input/output. TRS connectors are also quite common, especially for interconnects. I find TRS/XLR combi sockets [0] used for this purpose fascinating :)

Third wire does not collect interference in a balanced line. Instead, voltage signalling balanced line uses one ground and two signal lines of opposite polarity and input is difference between these two signal lines. Induced interference is more or less the same on both signal lines, therefore cancels out. At a quick glance this article [1] seems to explain this without delving into electronics. Some differential lines (e.g. RS-485, popular in industrial automation) use current signalling thus requiring two wires per signal.

[0]: [http://www.cliffuk.co.uk/products/combijacks/combijacks.jpg](http://www.cliffuk.co.uk/products/combijacks/combijacks.jpg) [1]: [http://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs- unbalanced/](http://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/)

<comment><USER3> > Some differential lines (e.g. RS-485, popular in industrial automation) use > current signalling thus requiring two wires per signal.

Virtually all high-speed digital communication uses differential signalling.

<comment><USER2> Agree on that, but all high speed interconnects I know use voltage signalling.

<comment><USER3> That's orthogonal to differential or single ended, but typically the transmit side uses some form of current steering; it just goes well with it.

E.g. PCIe transmitters are HSCL, which is a form of current steering that gives the receiver exactly the voltages it needs to see at nominal currents and termination values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is impressive enough, but his other projects are also awesome and totally worth a look:

[http://www.aholme.co.uk/Projects.htm](http://www.aholme.co.uk/Projects.htm)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for linking this - I didn't even think to look and his work is amazing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Further work in this space: [https://gnss-sdr.org/](https://gnss-sdr.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> See also previous discussion from 3 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9470376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9470376) (55 comments)

</comment><comment><USER8> should have [2012] tag.

<comment><USER9> Or perhaps 2014, as it contains an update from September 2014.</comment></comment>


The Day the World Didn't End - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-day-the-world-didnt-end.html <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty sure Geoffrey James is a dumbass.

I'd love to hear some tales of Y2K fixes.

<comment><USER2> Not sure if you are right or not about him in general. But he is spot on about Y2K.

I was a sysadmin for about 500 person site of an engineering company, Solaris, some Windows NT, and storage on some early NAS with a bespoke OS and hardware RAID card. We knew about it, were patched, tested, and ready to go by Dec _1998_. Yes, you can actually _test_ date changes up front and not wait till midnight 2000! It was a about a weeks work, all told.

Then the corporate _idiots_ started panicking around June of 1999. They hired a Y2K czar. He demanded reports! Plans! Contingency plans! He hired a dozen people for a department that normally had three. The resultant bureaucracy and meetings wasted 100% of now 16 people's time for 9 months.

And... Nothing was actually done, nor needed to be. Reports listing all the patches that had been applied a year earlier we demanded and made. Of course the answer "we're done, it's fine" was not conducive to career and empire building. So we kept turning in reports that said "we're done , go away". They kept getting translated into "we need to hire more managers because we can't get accurate status and no progress is being made".

And you know, the only thing I worried about was the Unknown-Unknowns, like a phone switches or alarm or power conditioners we didn't know about. Of course, the Y2K commission didn't know they existed. Thankfully the intersection of sets "things that even know the time" and "things that are hopelessly unmaintainable embedded devices" ended up to be empty.

The corporation sent out dire warnings in December to it's employees that their credit cards would stop working, they had to stock up on food, and quite possibly not show up to work for the month of January if things went badly. The engineers that worked there by then were having none of it and it was a joke.

My actual contingency plans involved dropping by to make sure everything was still alive on Sunday the 2nd, before everyone showed up to work on Monday. One seldom used license on a flexlm server was broken, but that was because it had an expiration date of 12-31-1999, not quite a Y2K thing. It was perpetual, and shouldn't have expired. But it correctly used a four digit date and knew what time it was. New license file was obtained in the next week. Nobody even noticed.

That was _it_. File storage, makefiles, incremental backups. All fine.

Did the bureaucracy that got created for this great effort disband? Nope. They continued the meetings for at least three months. They all got awards for doing such a great job. They stayed on to help guide and run the IT department indefinitely, due to such demonstrably good management. A short while later the commission pivoted to "Security" and "Anti-Virus" paranoia. Oddly that was the beginning of the decline in reliability and good IT at that site. Nothing ever really worked well again. It wasn't Y2K, it was having a 20 idiot managers instead of 3-4 guys that knew what they were doing. Within a couple of years we all quit.

Now, I've always assumed that _somewhere_ there were actual hairy problems. Perhaps in a government or banking mainframe. It was said you could get rich writing COBOL. It didn't seem worth it.

But yes, it was a total non-event for workstation and PC based networks.</comment></comment>


It's been a pretty insane 12 hours across the Bay Area - <AUTHOR> https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?new&prod=XXXAFDMTR&wfo=mtr <comment><USER2> There are plenty of Bay Area adults who can't remember the last time there was lightning here. It's that rare. Fun times!

I worry about wildfire in the hills, since it hadn't rained for months. Thankfully, it wasn't an entirely dry storm. We had quite a bit of rain in my corner of Palo Alto last night - more than the 0.01 trace amount officially reported.

<comment><USER3> Adults in the Bay Area. who can't remember lightning have memory issues. There was a huge [lightning] storm in 2012, and there was lighting in [edit: this] May... I've seen lighting, thunder, and hail (caught on video) in the last 12 months.

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Thunder- lightnin...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Thunder-lightning- could-hit-Bay-Area-in-weekend-15303095.php)

<comment><USER4> I thought it rained frequently there? I love far enough away to not know. Have also lived in the driest part of the US in the past...gratefully the past.

<comment><USER5> It rains quite a bit in winter, especially November through January. But lightning is very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in Southeastern VA. We had our first hurricane this year in early August, which is very unusual for for region. July was unusually hot with no rain, and now August is nothing but rain every day. What's most interesting to me, however, is that it seems that weather prediction models have literally stopped working all together. I use Windy.com (incredible weather site if you haven't tried it) and you can look at the ECMWF (aka European model), NAM, GFS and Meteoblue models. ECMWF is the most accurate model we have, and it has always been very reliable in my experience. Starting this spring, it seems the model has become wildly inaccurate. It can't even predict the weather anywhere close to accurately even the same day. Highs and lows are often off by 10 degrees F, and rain...forget it.

I don't know the exact source of these inaccuracies, but I would be willing to bet climate change has broken some of the assumptions that these models rely on to make their predictions. Those factors may be in a state of flux so that the model can't even be corrected at this point.

I would be very interested to hear from anyone else who is familiar with ECMWF and has (or hasn't) noticed the same problems.

<comment><USER7> I believe I heard on NPR that due to the grounding of many planes from Covid, weather models have less data points for prediction.

<comment><USER8> Normal passenger planes provide significant data collection for weather predictions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> UK weather has been very odd over the last 12 months. We've just had a week of record August temperatures, and very few people in the UK have air conditioning in their homes.

Climate change seems to be really starting to have measurable day-to-day affects.

<comment><USER10> Here in Seattle we've had an exceedingly mild summer. Anecdotes work in both directions.

<comment><USER11> No, climate change works in both directions. It causes extremes in both directions. Source: I have a PhD in Oceanography with focus on climate modeling

<comment><USER10> So, you agree that anecdotes are worthless? I don't understand your comment.

<comment><USER12> I think OP meant those anecdotes are both examples of climate change. Causing extreme wildness and extreme craziness elsewhere

<comment><USER13> climate change just causes bad weather. So when the weather is bad you can just say - "That's climate change for you."

Some people complain about this, me, I think about the poor bastards in the past who had no response at all and I think, "eh, it's an ill wind indeed that blows no good."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not nearly as common at night. The last time I recall a night time thunderstorm was in the 80's. That said, this morning at dawn it felt straight out of a movie thriller. All we needed was the leading edge of an alien spacecraft to emerge from the cloud bank :-).

It was also interesting to note on Nextdoor the Midwesterners who were unfazed by the storm and people who have lived here their entire lives freaking out. Those roles reverse when we have a magnitude 5.x or lower quake.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love the NOAA commentary as it adds context to what is expected.

Having (barely) slept through the bay area weather this morning, others took advantage of the situation to get some gorgeous photos of lightning. [https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/08/16/rare-august- thu...](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/08/16/rare-august-thunderstorm- rolls-through-san-francisco-bay-area-lightning-strikes-sparks-widespread- wildfires/)

There's also some maps for lightning strikes in the bay area that are fun to look at: [https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=;...](https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=;ts=0;y=37.3228;x=-121.9762;z=9;d=2;dl=2;dc=0;ar;as=20-08-16T12;src=6;ts24=0;) (8-16-20, 12 UTC for example)

</comment><comment> huy-nguyen When the National Weather Service calls something "insane" in their bulletins, you know it's actually insane.

<comment><USER16> It's insane by Bay Area standards, but having lived in Atlanta it reminds me of typical Southeast summer weather.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I read most of it. Sounds nasty. Lots of wind, lightning, only scattered rain though?

I can't really figure out what is so insane, or even very interesting about this at all? Just that it's uncharacteristic for the area? Is it that a large number of HNers are in the Bay Area this is trending?

<comment><USER18> It's quite unexpected weather for the region— though of course what's seriously abnormal in one place might be old normal hat for another. The dumb example here is "Oh, snow in the sahara? Well, here in Alaska we get snow all the time so what's the big deal!"

For me the chief concerning thing is the "literally dozens of new fires" around the area.

<comment><USER17> This is true. I was confused at first, but I can imagine how it would be jarring to locals. Let's hope the fires don't get out of control.

I live in the south east, I remember a few years ago we were in a serious drought, and we experienced a run of widespread wildfires. For weeks on end there was a visible 'fog' in the air from the smoke. Very strange.

<comment><USER19> > Let's hope the fires don't get out of control.

In the realm of Apocalypse 2020, yesterday (Saturday) northern California had a fire tornado.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been reading about rolling power blackouts in California due to excessive demand. Shouldn't this situation be ideal for solar power? high power demand during the day, lots of daylight hours?

<comment><USER21> Look at the "Net demand trend" graph here, and take a look at yesterday: [http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx](http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx)

Non-renewables (edit: all minus solar and wind), hit their peak at 6pm and stayed there until 8:30pm.

The problem is that solar isn't available during the late evening hours, where, e.g., A/C demand remains high.

<comment><USER8> Provide a financial benefit for those who use during peak power (to day get their home down to with AC 65F) while solar production is high, and then turn off their AC from 5-9.

<comment><USER22> I've heard of people charging up their powerwall at night with cheap power. (TOU plans) And then they consume that power when electricity is normally expensive

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't say I've read a ton of NWS weather bulletins, but are they usually so colloquial in the discussion or is this one of those "so nuts its warranted" situations?

<comment><USER24> Entirely depends on who is writing it. I like to read the forecast discussions because they tend to give more of the rationale for the forecast. You learn the thought process that goes into it, based on what they're seeing.

That said I'm also a trained severe weather spotter so the forecast discussion is where I go to see if spotter activation may be likely or not.

<comment><USER25> I've found one benefit to reading the bulletins is they give context to how they are generating weather probabilities. They may say there's a 50% change of rain 5 days from now, but then you learn this is because computer model "A" says 100% chance of rain, while computer model "B" says 0% chance, so they split the difference. Or maybe they say chance of rain is 80%, because model "B" is often off in this specific weather scenario.

It's also fun when some major storm is coming in and they are like "PWAT values are over 2 inches... this is historic!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> By the way, if you want to learn a bit more about your local weather, start reading your local "Area Forecast Discussion" (just search for that phrase plus your local region / airport) - you'll end up predicting the weather on a qualitative basis, while picking up new vocabulary and observing more about the world around you.

I think the format predates ASCII.

As a bonus, if you watch the local news on TV, you'll hear the local weather personalities parrot language from these forecast discussions...

</comment><comment><USER26> Meh. You have seen nothing! Imagine walking home at night, along a park which gives unusually wide views of some parts the horizon. Weather feels OK, partially cloudy. Nonetheless something is _OFF_.

What is "off"? Startled you see glowing and flashing clouds, but it is so far away, you can't exactly tell. Also dark. And no sound of thunder at all? Then you see tiny bright threads arcing between mountains of towering dark clouds, maybe 30 to 45° upwards from the horizon. The dark clouds begin to glow stroboscopically. Still no sound at all. It shines pink, violet, electric whiteblue, orange, yellow, sometimes, especially in the upper regions even greenish. You stand there, awestruck, and still don't know what it is. Cars on the street stop, drivers getting out, asking you what that is, because they've seen it since maybe 10 minutes, and didn't know what it was either.

You tell them you have no clue, never seen something like this before, but it's probably just a large thunderstorm, far away and high up in the sky, maybe 50 to 60km away.

About 10 minutes later, back home, you open [https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en](https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en) and see an inferno unfolding. It dawns on you that the "tiny threads" which flickered horizontally between the glowing clouds for up to 1.5 seconds must have been dozens of kilometers long.

For some strange reason I had clear line of sight in form of a cone into that front, maybe 60 to 80° wide. Very unusual.

Next day the media is full of it. Also some very impressive videos of it in the net.

Anyways, I'd have expected that one can see this far from some mountaintop, or tower, or a plane, but not from the ground.

TBH my first thought was: Is _this_ how it(WWIII) begins?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm sure this is abnormal for the Bay Area, but insane seems kind of overblown - this doesn't sound out of the ordinary for the midwest at all. Thunderstorms, hail, and occasional tornados are routine in the summer.

Just last week, the windspeed equivalent of a category 2 hurricane rolled through IA/MO/IL, destroying homes, business, and billions of dollars of crops: [https://twitter.com/coldbrewedtool/status/129407960042804429...](https://twitter.com/coldbrewedtool/status/1294079600428044290)

<comment><USER28> In the 26 years I've been in the bay area, nothing like last night has occurred here. So, a qualified "insane" for the Bay Area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Strange weather here in Southern IL too. Wettest August I've ever seen (In my ~30 years here).

It's supposed to be dead dry right now. It was dead dry last August.

But now we've been getting random thunderstorms almost daily.

Weirdass weather.

<comment><USER30> It's called (human-induced) climate changes

<comment><USER31> Wait i thought the problem is that it creates droughts, not _more_ wet weather?

Or is it one of those things we could to point at if the needle moves in any direction?

<comment><USER32> Climate change causes... climate change. Whatever the climate has been for centuries in your area it will probably be different in the next 10-20 years. It might be warmer, wetter, cooler, drier or just more variable. It's hard to predict.

<comment><USER30> Exactly, it causes more instability, plus a slightly but steadily growing temperature.

And unfortunately, vegetables, plants, trees, nature like stability

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> While a lot of it is just humor, some people are really nervous about everything because of COVID19.

It seems pandemic stress is intensifying our feeling about other events. People immediately relate every incident to 2020 as if everything is getting worst.

I don't remember any year that some places on earth didn't report unusual weather conditions. Maybe people are reading more news and incident news are trendy and get more coverage.

</comment><comment><USER34> Meanwhile in Colorado, dry conditions and lightning sparked the Pine Gulch fire, which is just one of four major fires ongoing right now. People are getting pretty concerned.

[https://www.denverpost.com/2020/08/16/colorado-wildfires- pin...](https://www.denverpost.com/2020/08/16/colorado-wildfires-pine-gulch- grizzly-creek-cameron-peak-williams-fork/)

</comment><comment><USER35> The NOAA.gov mobile site is a joy to use and should be a case study on usable mobile design. Everything is where it needs to be, contextually relevant, and easy to navigate back and forth between cities and forecasts. Check it out if you haven't already, if you add it as a bookmark on your home screen (Android), you can launch it as a webview chromeless app.

</comment><comment><USER36> Coincidently, the transformer unit in our neighborhood failed on Friday.

The storm was a welcome surprise.

</comment><comment><USER37> As a former forecaster, I've always appreciated the little Easter eggs and irreverent comments that are occasionally embedded in forecast discussions... But yeah, this actually sounds like insane conditions for that area.

</comment><comment><USER38> 2500 lightning strikes does sound like a lot. Would be interesting to know how the world stacks up in terms of "average lightning strikes per hour" during a typical thunderstorm for that area.

<comment><USER28> > during a typical thunderstorm for that area.

That's why this is "insane." It's not typical to have _any_ thunderstorms in this area. It's also not typical to have rain in August.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't know how in my mind weather forecasts and discussion from NWS came to carry such weight, but they do. Generally, they are not BSing.

I think the most frightening thing to read in Courier all caps is, "EFFORTS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD NOW BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION".

F-- Twitter and the political BS, this kind of all caps is real.

</comment><comment><USER40> Gusty wind gusts

</comment><comment><USER17> So this is news because lighting is so rare there, it's literally 'once in a lifetime'!? I couldn't figure out why this was here :) It is kind of weird to see this kind of reaction, to those of us in most other parts of the country.

Edit: I didn't really appreciate the drought conditions, let's hope the wildfires don't get bad.

<comment><USER41> Tell me any part of the country where it wouldn't be news to have months of essentially no rain, followed by 1200 lightning strikes, still with very little rain.

The issue isn't simply the lightning (that would be rare in the Bay area). It is the lightning combined with drought conditions making wildfires a major issue.

<comment><USER42> Alot of the eastern edge of the rockies meet this criteria. Take a look at the string of hotspots between Denver and the southern border. Those are mostly in desert climates where it isnt terribly unusual to go without rain. As you would expect, fires are a major problem there as well.

[https://ecle.biz/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/avg_sd_2005-2014...](https://ecle.biz/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/avg_sd_2005-2014_CONUS_2km_grid.png)

<comment><USER41> You are right.

The population density is probably lower though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd expect geocentrism from local media but not a federal domain.

There are numerous bay areas in the US. Maybe drop an SF in that headline NOAA?

<comment><USER44> It's a local area forecast discussion from the local office and the local area is officially named "San Francisco Bay Area/Monterey". What do you want from them exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> There's additional evidence that someone is adopting Colloquial Millennial in a Federal weather advisory:

> _The biggest impact appears to have been numerous fire starts. The fire > agencies are still flying recon but literally dozens of new fires from the > North Bay, East Bay, South Bay, Santa Cruz mtns and down to Monterey._

I don't understand the need to say "literally" there.

Until recently, "literally" was a powerful word, arguably best held in reserve for important occasions. The most recent years of popular use have diluted it.

I don't believe that "literally" was intended to be said by a speaker numerous times each day, to be a filler word like "um", nor for general-purpose emphasis, nor to express unhinged enthusiasm, nor to convey "listen to me, I am the center of the universe right now!", nor to plead "I'm actually not lying this time".

I blame Rob Lowe for this (and other things).

<comment><USER46> What I take issue with is that _there's no verb in the second part of that sentence_. The overuse of "literally" is one thing, but the fact that, "literally" has come to mean, "literally [there are]" bugs me a hell of a lot more.

<comment><USER47> > the fact that, "literally" has come to mean, "literally [there are]" bugs me > a hell of a lot more.

I think you're jumping to an incorrect conclusion. There are numerous sentences in the article (and others from NOAA) with no verb, it has nothing to do with the word literally. This isn't a piece of literary writing, it's abbreviated language intended for a very narrow field of professional readers. There are many examples of other professional communication that similarly do not follow normal conventions for casual writing nor conversation. Look up airline or boat pilot transcripts, or medical science papers, or HAM radio users... a huge number of niche fields that have their own sub-languages.</comment></comment></comment>


I have a game idea, not sure where to go from there... - <AUTHOR>

Hey good people of HN,
I have a game idea that I would like to bring to life, but am not sure how to proceed. Do any of you know of a site where I can find others to work with on this idea? I don't care about making any profit on this, I just want to create a fun game.
It's going to be a 2d beat-em up game where all the characters will be using musical instruments as weapons. The characters to choose from will be a brute (bass player, strong but slow), the average knight-like player (guitar player, somewhat fast and semi-strong), ranger (singer, fast and favors attacking from afar with microphone  - thus "ranger")...maybe even a drummer as a bonus character.
Any help would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> If you know what platform you'd like to deliver it on, find forums, IRC channels, etc. for that platform? Lining up artists and marketing might help you attract a developer as well ("I have an idea, make it for me" tends to get dismissed).

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool thanks! I have no intention of being the "I have an idea, make it for me" guy, as I am a programmer/graphic designer. I just am not well versed with game programming.

<comment><USER3> If you have any content at all (code, graphics, story) you should maybe make this available. Github would be possible or at least a simple website where people can get as much information as possible about the actual state of the project.

As others pointed out already, gaming sites and forums get many requests of this kind, without some proof that you are serious about the project they won't care about it (though will most likely give some general advice that's helpful.) A less specialized site to post would be reddit in some of the gaming oriented subreddits like <http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might want to check out <http://www.gamasutra.com/> they are more geared towards the game industry and you will definitely get solid advice over there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!</comment></comment>


Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman – Premortem to eliminate thinking biases - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzTNMalfyhM <comment><USER2> This sounds intriguing for sure. But it seems like it would be hard to ever know how likely premorteming is to kill a good idea as compared with a bad one. And conditioned on some version of a plan being shipped after a premortem session, it's hard to guess - after how many cycles of premortem and corresponding plan revision should the net effect be most likely positive?</comment>


Show HN: Hurricane Tweets - <AUTHOR> https://hurricanetweets.com/ <comment><USER2> Full disclosure: I'm a PM at Snap, Inc.

Best coverage is on Snap Map. Zoom to the Keys and the west coast of Florida and check out the first hand accounts.

<comment><USER3> I tried to figure out how to open Snap Map without googling for help.

Discover section? Nope. Somewhere at the top or bottom of my friends list? Nope. Somewhere in Ghost icon thing? Nope.

So I gave up and googled for help. Turns out you have to pinch-zoom-out anywhere.

<comment><USER4> I'm early 30s and relatively tech savvy, the snap app is the hard app to figure out.

<comment><USER5> I'm 22 and also tech savvy, but I find it quite simple to use. I think the target users are those that have pinch-to-zoom interfaces as kids (the today's teens), so the UX is meant to be "cool" instead of intuitive.

Another thing I've seen quite a lot is that you need to invest some time and have lots of friends already using the platform to know about the hidden gems, which I think the app itself promotes that behavior of friends sharing their knowledge instead of easy to use UI (not saying I think it's a good thing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat! But this is near impossible to read. Perhaps add new tweets to the bottom and have a toggle to "scroll with tweets" or something?

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Looks awful.

Get some Bootstrap on there at least.

The media object in Bootstrap 4 Beta will probably be suitable for this:

[https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/layout/media- object/](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/layout/media-object/)

<comment><USER8> Didn't make it but my thought is maybe the person left styling off so it would load quickly, mobile coverage is an issue during hurricanes.

<comment><USER9> There is already some stiling on the page, it's just not fancy. And that extra 100 bytes to make it readable don't make a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> phoe-krk _ahriannag-IRMA STOP MESSING WITH MY GAMEPLAY I SWEAR TO GOD_

It is refreshing to see that some of the world's priorities do not change even in spite of natural disasters.

</comment><comment><USER10> I saw this live at the hackathon today! Very impressed that you got it all integrated and deployed and on the front page of hacker news before judging.

<comment><USER11> Which hackathon was this?

<comment><USER10> The AngelHack Satori hackathon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> or a live windmap, if you prefer: [https://www.windy.com/?26.407,-82.222,7](https://www.windy.com/?26.407,-82.222,7)

also submitted it a bit ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213499)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Glad folks like my project!

As toomuchtodo posted below, [https://www.reddit.com/live/zkadef2ttzql/](https://www.reddit.com/live/zkadef2ttzql/) is also a really good source of live info.

</comment><comment><USER13> I almost went to this hackathon! Even bought a ticket and all, then decided I need rest more than a hackathon.

This is a great idea. Love it!

One suggestion I'd have is to make photos more prominent. Events like this are mist interesting in the image and short video format.

<comment><USER10> I went to the hackathon and slept during the night which meant we didn't get as much code throughput. I was really impressed by the projects though.</comment></comment>


Scriptbots: Evolutionary Artificial Life Simulation of Predator-Prey dynamics - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/site/scriptbotsevo/ This guy, Andrej Karpathy (http://karpathy.ca/) made an enormous job an built an open source artificial life simulation, which is very successful and focused correct variables among the other similar projects. <comment><USER2> The clip showing hunting pack behavior, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=RjweUYtpNq4&t=3m17s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=RjweUYtpNq4&t=3m17s), really makes them come alive, almost like they'll run off the page. Chilling. Reminds me of George Martin's "Sandkings" (don't go to Wikipedia, read the full story).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since this is open source, i think this could be a good start to build a way more complex artificial world, like three dimensions, similar earth conditions (temperature, wind, terrain specifications etc.)

I think the main point to build such an artificial world is to give a start of the life of a creature, which surprises it's own creators with it's behaviors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very neat; reminds me of <http://swimbots.com>, which focuses more on locomotion and the evolution of locomotion. But still, nice.</comment>


A Problem Entrepreneurs Should Solve: Veterans not getting Jobs - <AUTHOR>

Watch the Daily Show from Oct 24, 2012 with Dakota Meyer.
Earlier in the show at around 10 minute mark there are two veterans. They talk about the difficulty of getting a job related to their professional training in the military and then doing a mock interview. Both of the veterans are medics, so the jobs they are interested in are nursing field related. A field where we have a sharp shortage of workers...
Yet it is really hard for veterans to get a job because most professional license boards do not accept military certification or training. Even if they have a lot of experience doing the job in the field, in combat and under fire. They need to go back to school to restart their learning to get some trade licenses.
This is pretty horrible when we are have shortage of these professional across the country and we have veterans who want those jobs. I think it is also an opportunity for entrepreneurs.
There are peoples economic welfare at stake and there is a lot of money to be made, in good way, solving this problem.
Paul Graham maybe you can make a new RFS??
Daily Show Link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-october-24-2012-dakota-meyer <comment><USER2> I don't think this is Hacker News, but... Seems to me like the gap between military certification and professional licensing is due to protectionism (due to the number of veterens) and politics (because the military can be forced to innovate and iterate on a much shorter cycle than the professional community would like).

I was reading the other day about how military trauma response is pretty far ahead of the civilian law enforcement world. Particularly how with $100 in basic medical supplies and a little training you can quickly treat gunshot and blast wounds that typically cause the victim to bleed out before EMS can arrive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brittany Laughlin is working on this for the tech sector with her new company Incline (<http://inclinehq.com>).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats interesting. Thanks for the link. Yet that is different, because it's teaching them a brand new skill. There needs to be something to help them transfer the skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What does this have to do with hackers? This has to do with laws, legislation, and authority.

<comment><USER5> What does this have to do with hackers? Good question, since I understand that hacking just pertains to programming. I must of been thinking of "solving hard problems" was for some other term.

<comment><USER6> Completely agree, but in Silicon Valley usually applies to solving hard problems that involves technology and not hard problems that involve changing legislation unless it is the "ask for forgiveness, not permission" approach of an Uber or AirBnB. I don't see that approach working in a space where medical care is being given.

Licensing boards and organizations for medical care and legal advice are well funded and smart. These are not exactly the organizations you want to be up against as a startup. Taxi commissions are trivial adversaries in comparison.

If you want to solve hard problems that involve changing legislation, then you need to be on the other side of the country in Washington D.C. YCombinator and other accelarators, incubators and tech investors are hardly equipped and networked to help a startup in the policy arena succeed. It's simply a bad investment.

<comment><AUTHOR> There has to be a way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ShowHN: GitCV - Need feature advice. - <AUTHOR> http://gitcv.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The goal here is to support the idea of companies hiring developers based on what they've done online and not a resume/1 hr interview.

Right now, GitCV only supports github, and I plan on adding more sites once I get all of the features down.

Any feedback/advice would be appreciated. I'm working on this for free, and hosting it for free (no ads) because I think it would be cool to make it easier for fellow developers to get hired.</comment>


Emerging technologies shaping the future of cities - <AUTHOR> https://cities.envisioning.io <comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

We're an independent and distributed research institute focused on tracking advancement in emerging technology. Envisioning began as a series of speculative future infographics in 2011 and have since developed visualization tools in d3.js, a methodology for scouting emerging tech as well as our own backend for tracking these changing data.

Today we are launching a platform for tracking tech around urban innovation [linked] meant to help public officials make better decisions around tech and promote more democratic futures.

AMA.</comment>