Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in pursuing a few new concepts, and I'm looking for the best free resources for startups that aren't going through an incubator. Specifically looking for free tier or startup credits beyond what AWS / DO / GCP has to offer, or for off-the-beaten-path programs that single-founder startups might be able to take advantage of. I'll be using Stripe for processing any payments.<p>What do you folks use when you're looking to stand up your MVPs? <comment><USER2> I'm something of a free tier connoisseur, and recently built an entire project with 13 forever-free tiers. It was more of a personal challenge than a business decision, but it might be a good reference for what's out there: [https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria- fo...](https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-for-free-by- abusing-free-tiers.html)

Some other services not mentioned there that I've used for free recently:

\- humio cloud for log aggregation

\- nodequery for server monitoring (though its future is unclear)

\- braintree used to waive a big chunk of payment fees ($50k?) for startups, but I'm not sure the program exists anymore

Beyond things that are literally free, I'm a big fan of cheap vps providers if your uptime can take it and you can do your own ops. One of my projects makes ~$200/month and is hosted for $6/year on a 256MB vps. Lowendtalk/Lowendbox is the usual place I find these.

<comment><USER3> Have heard horror stories about the cheap VPS offered at LowEndTalk and similar outfits. What's your average up time? and can you recommend any service provider?

<comment><USER2> Pings from instances to nodequery are 98% on the low end and 99.9% on the high end. It looks like I'm at 500+ days up at impactvps.com, though I used to see cpu and disk degradations somewhat regularly with them. I haven't had any major outages in a few years of use, though one provider went bust recently after an overly-aggressive sale (alpharacks).

I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The next step up might be two vms across two providers + a cheap managed db.

I don't think I have any super strong recommendations. I did become a fan of BuyVM recently due to their $1/month shared sql plan. But, they're apparently they're planning to retire it, which puts them at a similar price point as something like vultr.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing the insights. Do you think one should stick with $5/month droplets or hit and try the low end VPS?

<comment><USER2> Depends on the use case. I think the main factors are reliability and security: if it's not a crucial service and isn't handling anything sensitive, then there's no reason to pay more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app.

My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on App Engine, but pretty hard on Heroku. Cinch on Lambda. Aggregated logs? Easy on most managed platforms. How about distributed tracing? Ridiculously easy on lambda. Need a quick queue? Horrible on heroku, alright on google cloud, but on AWS? Create one on SQS, wire it up to a lambda, done. There's a learning curve, but the power of the AWS platform is really what makes lambda a great choice.

<comment><USER5> The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is not a fast process and it kills momentum.

LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

<comment><USER6> Cleanly separate your logic from AWS dependencies using interfaces / protocols, summarily mock the required service by implementing said protocols (sparing you the pain of mocking the AWS services themselves), and voilà, you're running everything locally.

It's easy. But if that's too much for you, the serverless framework has some nice plugins for all of it.

<comment><USER5> I understand what one can do to create a leaky abstraction for local development. And it is leaky, and it can't be relied upon for correctness, and so while it makes "getting things done" possible, it makes getting things done _correctly_ much more difficult than it needs to be.

And local development when you've opted to use systems like Cognito are well beyond its scope, unless someone has something very clever that I haven't seen.

From a lot of experience doing this on AWS and on other clouds, I have learned that it is better to use systems that you can operate, and then use hosted versions where applicable. RDS is great, but it's great mostly because you can run PostgreSQL locally and inspect its brain. DynamoDB, SQS, etc. tend to be untrustworthy and should be avoided unless you have a bulletproof story for local testing (and none of the fake implementations are bulletproof).

<comment><USER7> I avoid systems like Cognito for that reason! SQS I've found to be ok when used as a backend for an abstraction. E.g. Laravel has a generic queue library that can be backed by file or redis or sql, ans using redis locally with SQS in production worked quite well with this.

<comment><USER5> SQS has different characteristics from a Redis queue or a RabbitMQ queue. That's the source of a lot of my nervousness around it: when those abstractions break and somebody-who-isn't-me has to debug it.

(I actually _have_ an answer for local dev with Cognito because my current employer already had Cognito when I showed up, but it amounts to "have configurable signing keys and sign your own JWT in dev".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you publish a free Alexa Skill (easy to make a basic one) you can apply for $100 in monthly free AWS credits: [https://developer.amazon.com/en- US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/al...](https://developer.amazon.com/en- US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-aws-credits)

<comment><USER9> Same thing for Google Assistant actions, which give $200 in monthly credits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a combination of hardware and cloud services could give you a cheap way to run pretty much anything you want. I will try to share what I am using :)

Tooling

For CI I bought a cheap Intel NUC that just sits on my table and runs Drone, Node-RED, my testing environment server.

1\. Here from Drone I get all the test pipelines and most of my executable/docker image builds at a much better speed than I would get with Travis, CircleCI and so on. My desktop runs a Drone agent too, so never waiting too long for new builds. 2\. Node-RED is used for various automation tasks such as healthchecks for all my services with rate-limits, a bit more complex checks (rather than just simple /health or /status endpoint ping), mailgun webhook handling, github brew formula updates and so on. It does control my TV too :D 3\. I also run some tasks on Google Cloud builder which is free and fast. 4\. Uptimerobot is also used ([http://uptimerobot.com/](http://uptimerobot.com/)) as it provides free, second opinion whether my services are down or not.

Compute

For compute I opted for GKE (at the time it was the best managed k8s you can get (and it's still probably is)) on Google Cloud with 3 1vCPU 3.75GB RAM VMs. That gives me plenty of resources to run my stack and any additional side- side-project on it. I tend to code in Go so I don't need much resources. I use managed postgres as a database so I can sleep peacefully.

For additional services I ended up choosing Vultr ([https://www.vultr.com/](https://www.vultr.com/)) as they have many regions available and their pricing is really good. There is a nice, non-official CLI and so far their uptime was quite good (few issues but nothing major).

It really depends how much time you want to spend on ops. If you are fine with doing quite a bit of ops, go with Vultr or any other cheaper cloud provider. If you want to spend more time on features, go with GKE and fully automate deployment. Git push -> Google Cloud Builder -> Keel ([https://keel.sh](https://keel.sh)) -> new version deployed :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Software Engineering Daily had a recent discussion with the founder of render.com, Anurag Goel, and I learned that it provides static sites for free, and services starting at $5 so it's what I'm reviewing now. Render appears to be using K8s and Docker containers to create instances from Github repos. Anurag gave a reasonable explanation of why he thinks render.com is superior to Heroku at 29:15:5 in the transcript. [https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp- content/uploads/2019...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/06/SED852-Render.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Render founder here. Happy to answer questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll tell you from personal experience--dont let free tiers influence your tech decisions. your early lock in decisions are the most costly and you will pay dearly long after the free tiers run out

<comment><USER14> This is worth considering, especially when you can get a DO droplet for $5/month and run whatever free software you like on there on Ubuntu. That has to be as un-locked-in as it gets. You could run the same thing from a Rasb-Pi at home!

I am happy to use Netlify as a static file host as that isn't much of a lock in: I can move to S3 later, or even the DO droplet and Nginx!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Linode is $5/mo. and I got a $50 credit for just being at a software conference; I also don't think that expires (which is good because I'm not planning on using that credit atm). That's 10 months of free service.

It's also pretty barebones in terms of upsold services, but apparently the customer support is pretty top-notch. I'd take a look at it.

<comment><USER16> All my credits seemed to expire after two months.

<comment><USER15> This comment spooked me so I went back to my emails and checked what Linode said:

> The $50 credit can give you up to 10 months of hosting on our 1GB plan. You > can also use the credit towards our add-on services such as backups, Block > Storage, or NodeBalancers. Use the promo code today!

So they mentioned 10 months in the email, and I searched a bit further and didn't see anything about service credit expiration. You can also get service credits using referrals, coupon sites, and even blog posts:

[https://www.linode.com/community/questions/8788/share- your-l...](https://www.linode.com/community/questions/8788/share-your-linode- experience-get-100-service-credit)

Airbnb cereal and all that. [https://medium.com/@austincoleschafer/a-short- story-about-ho...](https://medium.com/@austincoleschafer/a-short-story-about- how-airbnb-funded-their-startup-with-cereal-boxes-ac6e62cf4c4c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Check out [https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a- budget](https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-budget) for a great list of services/resources that offer free tiers to get you started.

</comment><comment><USER18> Best compilation of free resources I've come across: [https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev](https://github.com/ripienaar/free- for-dev)

Also: [http://www.lowendtalk.com](http://www.lowendtalk.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> Linode has a $5 "nanode" VPS and scales very cheaply compared to AWS.

Namecheap does free ID protect for domains.

PayPal offers a good micro transaction fee rate if you plan to do small ($10 or smaller) transactions.

You can use services like Algo or Streisand to set up a relatively secure auto configured Wireguard VPN.

Nextcloud gives you a HIPPA compliant personal cloud for email, calendar, chat, etc.

GitLab offers unlimited free private repositories and some basic CI.

<comment><USER20> Sheesh I have been struggling with the last few steps of wireguard/algo. Gotta revisit again

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Zeit Now 2.0 has a free serverless tier: [https://zeit.co/now](https://zeit.co/now)

MongoDB Atlas has a free cloud database tier: [https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas)

<comment><USER22> I have been running a small scoreboard on Zeit's free tier for almost 3 years now...I set it and forget it, only use it once per year and for a while i couldn't even figure out why it was still working or where it was hosted. Love Zeit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My entire app is "serverless" and I host it on AWS and netlify using the free tier. So far I have been able to keep resource use below the free tier thresholds.

<comment><USER24> I'd like to second this. The amount of free compute available to serverless infrastructure is insane! Serverless does have a learning curve but it's worth it to learn.

The next best is Heroku's free tier.

<comment><USER25> I feel like Heroku got left behind in the current k8s craze but they're still a good choice for a lot of use-cases, cheap MVPs being one of them.

<comment><USER26> Heroku is still significantly easier to use than Docker/K8s.

<comment><USER27> That depends on your mental model. The isolation and reproducibility of Docker is much easier for me than dealing with build pack nonsesne.

<comment><USER28> You can deploy Docker images to Heroku. [https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/deploying-with- docke...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/deploying-with-docker)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome list for Free for Dev resources:

[https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev#major-cloud- provid...](https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev#major-cloud-providers)

</comment><comment><USER30> Google Firebase has a very rich set of features and almost everything is included (but very rate-limited) in their free tier and a flat $25/mo gets you quite a bit further. On the downside, it's very much a PaaS solution so lock- in is a big concern.

[https://firebase.google.com/pricing](https://firebase.google.com/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER31> GCP used to give an additional $200 credit if you register through the GitLab referral, with the total of $500. I don't know if it still working.

[https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/google-cloud- platform/](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/google-cloud-platform/)

</comment><comment><USER32> your own computer.

<comment><USER33> I understand why some are downvoting this but, with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down and a threadripper giving you like 100 cores for a few bucks, this can be a very handy solution, with quicker deploys and easier management.

security might be too much of a concern for some applications

<comment><USER34> > with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down

Step out of your Silicon Valley bubble and recognize that this doesn't apply to everyone.

I only have 30 megabit up/down with Frontier. I can get faster, but it gets expensive quick, and I don't need more than 30 mbps, even as a gamer. Xfinity only offers 150 megabit down in my neighborhood, with a puny 15 megabit up, and for twice the price.

And as others have mentioned, it creates a single point of failure and if you get hacked, your entire home network is compromised. The last thing you want to have happen is for some unsavory type to decide they don't like you or your services and DDoS your home internet connection. I've had it happen to me and it's not fun.

<comment><USER35> "Step out of your Silicon Valley bubble" ... I have Business Fiber Internet package from Bell in my house in Toronto. Residential area far from city core with an old houses, definitely not a Silicon Valley. 1000 up and down. It costs me $80 Canadian pesos. Not bad.

<comment> user- Im in the same boat as you (350/350 for $35 tho) but we are outliers even in the Canadian market. Fast internet is just now getting to everyone at affordable prices, even though ive personally had gigabit for 4 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you setup a domain and a c-corp/limited company, you can apply for $1,000 of AWS credits under the AWS Activate scheme. Careful tho because if you get the $1k, you won't be eligible for further AWS credits under an incubator worth $100k+

[https://aws.amazon.com/activate/](https://aws.amazon.com/activate/)

Not sure if they still offer the $1k credits for startups outside of incubators. Here's a thread where someone else got some credits.

[https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/i-just-earned-1-000-in- aw...](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/i-just-earned-1-000-in-aws-credits- through-aws-activate-c001da4a91)

</comment><comment><USER37> You can run a decent amount of stuff off OVH/Hetzner/Online.net dedicated server with monthly rental price under $100/mo.

At OVH you can have a Intel Xeon D-1540 (8 c / 16 t - 2 GHz / 2.6 GHz) with 64GB ram for like 90 Euros/month + VAT (US link: [https://us.ovhcloud.com/products/servers/infrastructure- serv...](https://us.ovhcloud.com/products/servers/infrastructure-servers))

<comment><USER34> OP is asking for free tier stuff and you respond with servers that start at $69/month?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> StackPath has a startup program [[https://www.stackpath.com/resources/propel- startup-program/](https://www.stackpath.com/resources/propel-startup- program/)] and a sandbox for testing out serverless scripts [[https://sandbox.edgeengine.io/](https://sandbox.edgeengine.io/)]

</comment><comment><USER39> As others have mentioned, Linode is great value. Pair it with Dokku and you've got an even cheaper / more customizable (but _not_ scalable) Heroku.

However, be weary of Linode's "backup" service if you intend to store a lot of files (as opposed to lots of data / large files). It's file-based (not block- based) backup, and I can confirm it _does_ fail. In our case, we weren't storing _tiny_ files either, they were images uploaded to our infrastructure. Granted, don't do that(!), use S3.

Also, regarding AWS/S3, there's a plethora of ways to get into AWS's Activate program ([https://aws.amazon.com/activate/](https://aws.amazon.com/activate/)) which includes a decent chunk of free credits.

<comment><USER40> > However, be weary of Linode's "backup" service if you intend to store a lot > of files...

Huh? Wouldn't it be a lot better to be _wary_ of that service, thus lowering the risk that you'll be _weary_ of it at some point?

<comment><USER39> Sorry, I was weary when I wrote 'weary', whilst I meant to write 'wary'. I'll be more wary of being weary next time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This might come in handy a bit later for you but we were having headaches with the ramp-up pricing of JIRA+Confluence. We explored open source alternatives and found OpenProject to be a great product. Free of charge of-course. Once you get some of the free/cheap VMs mentioned by other posters, feel free to checkout OpenProject. [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00T6OCWRU](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00T6OCWRU) for EC2 . [https://www.openproject.org/](https://www.openproject.org/) for the main website.

</comment><comment><USER42> Other people have mentioned GCP/Firebase for the $300 free trial, but I'm going to specifically mention their startup program: [https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/](https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/)

I'm hosting my game servers today on $1000 of free credit from this program. If you have VCs and whatnot, they'll be able to get more credits out of the same program for you, but this was great as a solo founder.

<comment><USER43> Same. I got $1300 credit simply for applying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I don't think Best (or Good) will be Free, after a certain tier (e.g AWS only gives a t2.micro for a month (750 hours to be specific))

Most of the cloud providers have some kind of startup program, where they offer free credits to startup.

We (my company) got credit benefit from IBM, it's been a real savior for us. You can check it out here [https://developer.ibm.com/startups/](https://developer.ibm.com/startups/)

<comment><USER5> Having some uncomfortably close experience with IBM Cloud very recently, I would have a hard time recommending it for just about anything.

I'd go to Azure over IBM Cloud, and I have perturbed many electrons about how frustrating Azure has been.

</comment></comment><comment> jamieson-becker At Userify ([https://userify.com](https://userify.com)), we offer a free tier for SSH key and user management for up to 20 servers free (billing doesn't begin until 21 servers) with our SaaS offering (versus 10 free for our on- premise product). Try it out at [https://userify.com](https://userify.com), no credit card required.

</comment><comment><USER45> Quite important question. Indiehackers might be a good place to ask as well. I got introduced to this open-source tool Hasura. It gives you free service for back-end and handles a lot of issues about scalability. Please DM for more details [https://hasura.io/](https://hasura.io/)

</comment><comment><USER46> You could always use www.evolute.io with free credits and simply shift between the free usage tiers, across platforms. If you develop your software in a "serverless" fashion, you might even find a way to be "free" for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER47> Azure has 25+ "always free" services besides the $200 free credit.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/free/?v=17.39a](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/?v=17.39a)

</comment><comment><USER48> What do you need to run? Many live systems can run on pretty cheap hardware.

</comment><comment><USER49> I see a lot of linode recomendations here, but if you are looking at mostly European audience scaleway.net has very cheap VMs starting at 2€ per month, while not being that much slower than linode

<comment><USER50> online.net is the sister company of scaleway. scaleway has some ARM bare metal which is cheap but sometimes you see issues if you try to run software only optimized for x86.

kimsufi has 3.99 euro/mo baremetal server but very hard to get (have to keep trying).

hetzner cloud has cheap vps and also has auctions for servers. I got some i7 8core 16GB RAM & 1-4TB HDD for 22 euro/mo. They are closer to 30 euro/mo but likely your best bet for budget dedicated with better specs.

i have a few other dedicated servers (old Xeon) running off a bulgarian service provider

<comment><USER49> ARM servers at scaleway actually start at 3euro/mo. I find that others have a bit more difficult setup the server. Finding the best auctions isn't the best way to spend your time in a startup. You are better of doing something that improves the quality of your product, and until some point, the server quality/price isn't your concern at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Hi, if your business is data driven based on a cloud datawarehouse you can check out repods.io - there you can start out with a full functioning pod for free without expiration

</comment><comment><USER52> dedicated hetzner

<comment><USER53> And Cloud Hetzner, starting from 3 euros

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Don't try this at $HOME, but I have a friend who ran an early "cloud computing" start-up company in the 80's called "Computer Time Share Corporation", that actually sold time on another company's computers! We affectionately referred to them as "Computer Crime Share Corporation".

</comment><comment><USER55> zoho.com for email hosting.

</comment><comment><USER56> buy a .edu email, use google compute till you have an MVP to sell

<comment><USER57> How do you "buy" a .edu email (without signing up for a long and expensive course or college)? I've seen some hacks online to get one for free, but not sure if they work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Anything for free GPUS?

</comment><comment><USER59> Bizspark

<comment><USER60> Bizspark changed and is no longer available. I was in the last round when they shut down early.

<comment><USER59> They still seem to have something going:

      Available for qualified Startups

      Technical enablement
      Microsoft technology to help your bottom line:

      Up to $120k of free Azure cloud for two years
      Visual Studio Enterprise cloud subscription
      Office 365 Business Premium
      Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Talent
      Enterprise grade Azure support

[https://startups.microsoft.com/en- us/benefits/](https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/benefits/)

<comment><USER61> I think you have to be introduced into the program by an accelerator now.

I´ll miss it, it was a pretty awesome program.

<comment><USER62> I believe you can email your pitch deck in and get a code to apply.

<comment><USER61> That´s very interesting to hear. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Your own laptop.

</comment><comment><USER14> I started this list [https://gist.github.com/mcapodici/25d225848eda987071a0263b31...](https://gist.github.com/mcapodici/25d225848eda987071a0263b31491ba6) \- I keep meaning to keep it up to date.

<comment><USER14> What netiquette have I broken here?

<comment><USER64> Best guess you said it's not been updated and on visiting it doesn't have many services listed, all of which have already been referred to in the comments elsewhere

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> First you leverage already existing blockchain technology to create simple program that allows you to access gpu, cpu, network, and storage of a pc it is installed on. Second you adverties it to people telling them they can earn cryptocash you have invented in exchange for resources used on there pc. Third any surplus of access you have sell to a third party or mine a more popular cryptocurrency.</comment>


How Americans Hate Each Other - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/how-americans-hate-each-other/ <comment><USER2> What this article lacks is any per capita context. For example, it says 54.6% of hate crimes are perpetrated by white people. According to

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity)

however, 72.4% of the population is white, so white people are, on average, less likely to commit hate crimes. Likewise, only 22.4% of racial hate crimes are targeted against white, so white people are far less likely than average to be the target of a racially motivated hate crime.

There is a lot of missing context required to understand this data.

</comment><comment><USER3> The numbers here are actually not alarming, even positive.

In every human population there is a small percentage of people with some ideology that makes them inclined to do harm to others. 3700 anti-black incidents, 1100 anti-semitic, in the US - the population is about 300+ million. The hater-attacker percentage is something like 1 to 3 x 10^-5. That is tiny!

Of course it is deplorable that we have this much, and undoubtedly it implies a larger percentage who are hateful but not crazy enough to attack people. Still it does not seem a crisis. The situation has improved greatly in the US, I think other places have worse problems of this kind (e.g. see waps on this page).

<comment><USER4> Agree - not super alarming numbers, when gauged as a percentage of population. Still, depressing to think that no matter how much we progress, bigoted subcultures will always be there to make life hell for minorities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing's for certain : clearly IVR designers hate the rest of America.

On a serious note, at least in Western Europe religious hate crimes go ever more unreported because the larger portion is muslim-on-jews violence in the larger cities. Any investigation of these, often serious, incidents results in violence on the police, and complaints about racism against muslims.

So they just let everything go and every now and then they set themselves up at the border between muslim and jewish territory in Antwerp and Brussels, like the railway bridge in Antwerp. They the police gets assaulted by muslims, usually right after prayer, and arrest a few dozen of them, throw them in jail for a day or so, and life goes on. Then there's complain about not being able to find a decent job because of a scary arrest record (not that there are many people who make it through higher education in the inner city, outside of the Jewish population. But it is kind of true that an orthodox Jew is unlikely to find employment outside of Jewish businesses. There's plenty of those though. One reason for this is that if the company employs muslims, such a hire is sure to result in violence).

The police is slowly losing control of the situation, jews fortify their houses and well, that's it. They of course find an administrative solution : classify the hate crimes as "misfiled" if there is the slightest error by anyone. If necessary inserting such errors.

<comment><USER6> "On a serious note", this post is nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aww. Based on the title and domain, I was really hoping for an analysis of the political industry.</comment>


TorChat: p2p instant messenger with a completely decentralized design. - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/torchat/

<comment><USER2> Why not running TorChat over OTR? or multi-party OTR?

<http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/>

It would limit some kind of traffic analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cute, but I'm not so sure that using the same ID for all people you want to talk with is all that clever.

It's also vulnerable to traffic analysis, but then so all are all real-time mix networks like Tor.

<comment><USER4> This uses Tor's hidden services. The project page says each client makes 3 "random hops" and meet in the middle to create a secure tunnel. The communications never leave the Tor network so, I could be wrong, but I don't think traffic analysis applies here.

<comment><USER5> Tor has random hops, but no cover traffic, so black-box traffic analysis is trivial if you cast a wide-enough net.

<comment><USER6> Tor has cover traffic.

<comment><USER5> If by "cover traffic" you mean there are other users on the system then you are correct. If by "cover traffic" you mean internally generated traffic that can be used to obscure traffic between any two links (e.g. keep a fixed size bandwidth pipe full even when not in use) then you are incorrect. The former is of little value in thwarting traffic analysis and the latter is costly in terms of already limited system performance and imposes costs on participants that few are willing to bear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "completely decentralized" is a strong claim when depending on a network that relies on a canonical directory of relays (at least during client bootstrap?), unless I'm missing something.

<comment><USER8> Well, as true decentralized bootstrapping is still an open problem (as far as I know), I'll give them a bit of a pass on that.

It's an interesting idea, but I'd agree that there are possible ramifications of repeated pseudonymous communication over Tor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I think tor and something like torchat is good in theory, its big negative in reality is that the speed makes it unusable most of the time. Not to mention if you are altruistic and plan to run a node, you also run the risk of the FBI knocking on your door for someone who used your (exit) node to upload their kitty porn (the exit is not encrypted).

And if you do run that exit node, you can sniff what people are doing (so there goes the anon part).

<comment><USER10> Tor was pretty bad for web browsing - latency and pages requiring multiple resources meant that pages took forever to render _. But how much is being transfered or rendered with chat? Not very much. IRC is usable even over atrocious connections. I rather imagine that textual chat over Tor would work fine.

_ and I say this as someone who ran a Tor relay on his Xbox to get 1 hop out of the way

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This would make an awesome android app

<comment><USER12> I believe <https://guardianproject.info/apps/gibber/> does exactly this, in conjunction with Orbot

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the link</comment></comment></comment>


The Buccaneer - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pirate3d/the-buccaneer-the-3d-printer-that-everyone-can-use?ref=category <comment><USER2> This looks very slick and very cheap. If only I could justify buying one.</comment>


Open Angel Forum Silicon Valley  - <AUTHOR> http://openangelforum.com/2010/03/05/applications-open-for-oaf-silicon-valley-april-16th/ Our fifth chapter will be in Silicon Valley and hosted by Dave McClure and Shervin Pishevar.
Applications are being accepted now and will be reviewed on a rolling basis. We've had just over 100 applications to each of he first three cities. Typically half of these are not ready for angel investing (i.e. they are business plans), so at this point you have a 10% chance of getting in if you have a decent product that is actually built.
I would say 50%+ of the ycombinator/techstars companies would be "OAF worthy" by the end of each program. Basically, if you're good enough to get into one of those programs and finish a good product you would probably be good enough for OAF.
We are taking a pause at five cities (LA, SF, SV, NY and Seattle) three times a year (so 15 yearly events) because I don't have anyone besides myself and Tyler to review the 2,000 applications we will get this year. However, we have launched five $50,000 national sponsorships for service providers (i.e. law firms, recruiters, etc) and technology companies (i.e. google, yahoo, microsoft). IF we can land 2-3 of those we will hire one or two full time staffers and be able to get to 12 cities (36 events a year). any questions hit me up here or at email@example.com <comment><USER2> We've got a big demo we need to finish in March. I suppose we'll give it a shot.

<comment><USER2> Note: We're totally awesome enough to win. We just have a lot of other commitments ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone here applied?

</comment><comment><USER4> Not yet, waiting on Chicago chapter to get formed

<comment><AUTHOR> we've got a lot of interest from chicago and the midwest.... however, i'm not sure how robust the angel market is there.

might be better moving the company to a more established technology city to be honest (at least if you want an angel network at scale).

<comment><USER5> The companies could always move after they got funding.</comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla Shooting For March 22 Firefox 4 Final Release - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_thread/thread/18a347956e4693eb?pli=1 <comment><USER2> I want to be excited by this, but FF is just no longer a compelling browser option for me anymore. I recently had it installed only for Firebug, but now that Chrome and Safari have embedded reasonable developer tools, I feel like I don't have any need for another browser. I know the FF team is planning on a more continuous update cycle, but I wonder if it may be too late.

<comment><USER3> What in particular do you prefer in Chrome and Safari over Firefox 4?

<comment><USER2> I don't have any specific features in mind, really. Being on OSX, I can't opt out of Safari. Chrome is my main browser because it feels fast, and rarely causes me pain. Safari is my backup. I just don't have a need for a third browser, and the first two slots are taken. One by default, and one because it's a great piece of software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> RC1 has been very stable for me so far, no crashes or instabilities even with beta addons (Firebug). Upgraded from 3.6 about a week ago.

Looks like Mozilla taking their time with this release wasn't completely unjustified. I just hope the overall quality won't decrease when they start to shorten their release cycles.</comment>


Creating a Solar System with Raphael - <AUTHOR> http://factore.ca/on-the-floor/50-building-a-solar-system-with-rapha-l

<comment><USER2> That's seriously awesome. I can't wait to see more of these experiments pushing out our conception of what you can do with HTML5 and its assorted technologies.</comment>


The New Sex Scorecard  - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200306/the-new-sex-scorecard

<comment><USER2> From what I have read so far, this has nothing to do with "keeping score" sexually. It seems to be about physiological/medical differences between the genders. Bad title, IMO.</comment>


Why the U-Shaped Travel Neck Pillow Is Useless - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/against-the-u-shaped-travel-neck-pillow/542472/ <comment><USER2> This is true.

The only one I had that seemed to help (a little) would close around your neck like those devices people wear after they get whiplash.</comment>


Paperless with Evernote - <AUTHOR> http://sirupsen.com/paperless-with-evernote/

<comment><USER2> Shameless self promotion - I'm the author of VueScan Mobile which will let you scan to your iPhone/iPad using WiFi printer/scanners from Epson/HP/Canon. I've been using this for awhile to scan all of those random forms I seem to accumulate and save them in Evernote. I especially love that evernote OCR's and indexes all of the documents so that I can search through every document I have scanned.</comment>


Why Google AMP Is Bad for the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/google-amp-not-good-thing/ <comment><USER2> What are the "amazing benefits" of publishing on Medium?

I've heard Medium authors boast that they got 50 views on a Medium article and I tell them I've gotten 50,000 views on a blog post.

Medium is just a bad neighborhood where content marketers who weren't smart enough to make it as content marketers 5 years ago write marketing messages to other content marketers. Real people see the stupid sign-up pop in and hit the back button.</comment>


Microsoft launches VM Depot to ease Linux deployment on Azure - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-launches-vm-depot-to-ease-linux-deployment-on-azure-7000009666/

<comment><USER2> It cracks me up every time I see a Microsoft+Linux headline.

Are most Azure users running Linux rather than Windows servers?</comment>


Ask HN: What project ideas have you had, think it would work, but will never do? - <AUTHOR> Why do you think it would work?<p>Why don't you do it? <comment><USER2> Do they have to be potentially commercially viable projects, or merely interesting ones that'd work?

For me, I'd say:

1\. Some sort of commission/freelancer marketplace for game development, since the biggest issue people have in this market is getting games finished without all the necessary skillsets and connections. Though I guess I may still create that one.

2\. A HTML 5/JavaScript based arcade script. Always thought the future of those online game sites would be to move away from Flash and to open standards, and a good open source CMS for that would help too. But it's unlikely I'll do this, because... well I'd need to get a bunch of games to go with it.

3\. Open source video hosting CMS. Not an original idea, but I do feel a WordPress/Magento/Mediawiki/whatever type 'standard' with decent community backing is needed here. But the sheer amount of technical work involved (so people's sites can basically replicate YouTube or Twitch with a simple install) makes this a project for another day.

4\. I've also considered the idea of starting an event or convention for something too. Maybe web development related stuff, since (unfortunately) it seems the vast majority of them are in the US and I don't live there at the moment. Won't do this because well, I have no idea how to run an event and one look at the articles about it show you ideally need a decent team of volunteers, quite a bit of money and at least some experience in the field.

And that's about it at the moment. Any other ideas I have are ones I actually plan to put in practice at some point, likely on the project I'm working on right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something on the back of your car, that using a combination of your speed, the distance between you and the car behind you, an understanding of the weight of both cars (using a lookup on the Reg), and the stopping distance, taking into account weather.. is able to calculate the likelihood that the car will crash into you if you slammed on your breaks

And then display that figure in a big lcd panel in your back window.

Haven't done it, because every time I remember it, I'm driving my car and forget by time I'm home.

<comment><USER4> Are you driving now? :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A heads-up display to tell people in front or behind you on the road to turn off their brights. People either don't know or don't care that they are blinding others. I'm probably never going to do it because it would also attract negative attention.

</comment><comment><USER6> Database as a service; before you say RDS, cloud db is not what I mean, I mean postrest, an http/rest interface to a relational db, with jwt authentication etc. A backend for static html sites.

<comment><USER7> I haven't used it yet, but sounds a lot like Postgrest (you almost nailed the name ) [http://postgrest.org](http://postgrest.org)</comment></comment>


Building a Data Science Team at a Startup - An Engineering Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://kurt.karmalab.org/2012/01/30/building-a-data-team/ <comment><USER3> This is pretty spot on with what I've seen up close. Specifically:

1) "Throw [y]our normal engineering practices out of the window." - We treat Data Science very much like the "R" in R&D. We point them generally towards a problem and give them time and latitude to solve it. Trying to fit that into our normal scrum process is impossible.

2) "Data scientists are going to end up building things that need to be translated into production code." - Our hand-off between Data Science and Engineering can be pretty messy. Getting stuff into production efficiently is an ongoing challenge.

3) "Trying to explain some of the hard math that's going on to the entire company isn't a productive use of time." - This point is pretty self explanatory. I get in pretty deep on a regular basis and it gets over my head quick. It can be very hard for the average account manager or marketing person to keep up.

<comment><USER4> yeah, my experience is that big data + agile planning = fail.

in the typical agile process, calendar time is ignored, and people pretend that you can just manage punchclock time. the result of that is that you end up with two days to go to the end of the sprint and a four day job that needs to run.

<comment><USER5> Where is a two day delay for delivery "fail". There is no incompatibility with agile planning. You don't go on vacation every time a job runs, you work on another project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll chime in here as a member of a 'Data Science' team at an early stage company. A lot of this really resonated with me. In particular - I think several of his points are consequences of the others:

1) We sit on an island, quasi-separated from engineering. We have our own processes, codebase, and tools, that are mostly different from what engineering has deployed in the wild.

2) This leads to 'throw normal engineering processes out the window,' which is good and bad . We write plenty of code, but not much of it makes it to source control. Why? so much of what you write is "throwaway code" - this, of course, is no good, but it's very tough to tell apriori what is going to work and what isn't.

3) This makes getting things deployed to production hard. Your code isn't written in the Java that the rest of the backend is. There was never the thought that there'd be a build process attached to it. Deployment? Nightmare.

As far as not scaring the rest of the company with all the math - <USER2> agree, but only to an extent. If your models are so sophisticated that they can't be explained to an engineer, or your customers, in plain (insert locale- specific spoken language), they might be too complicated.

In terms of having an impact immediately - I think this goes for all engineers and data scientists. Someone should be able to put a fresh set of eyes on your problems, and be able to solve a new one with enthusiasm.

</comment><comment><USER7> Something more interesting to me is how do you convince a company to build out a true data science. Every company can use one but very few have one. Has anyone had any experience convincing management of the value?

<comment><USER8> In my experience if management isn't asking the question, then its a dead issue. At a large company I worked at - data analysis was flat out rejected. I've been told to stop doing and return to standard procedure using heuristics . Even something as simple as introducing a new data model - at a large company I've been told that "my future replacement" wouldn't understand it. Management looking for continuity will not accept new ways of doing things.

<comment><USER7> Yea - that's what I'm afraid of. I've been trying pretty hard to get people to view data as an asset and it's very hit or miss. Some people embrace it, most will agree with me but not do anything more than that, others don't care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of this advice is also applicable for managing your team of magical pixie fairies.

<comment><USER10> Hit the nail on the head. A "data scientist" is just a business analyst by day, hipster by night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kurt mentions it early in the article, but I have to also recommend "Building data science teams" by Patil:

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/building-data-science- teams...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/building-data-science-teams.html)

<comment><USER12> I'm hoping to write a couple of follow-up posts talking about some of the trade-offs that you're going to have to make when you're a startup that doesn't have the resources of a Facebook or a LinkedIn. It's difficult to do everything in that (admittedly great) article if your resources are limited.

<comment><USER13> I'm a data scientist. What sort of resources could I provide to the startup communities? Is it just consulting needs or could I provide an "data science" API?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the data science models => production code problem, could PMML<[http://www.dmg.org/pmml-v3-0.html>](http://www.dmg.org/pmml-v3-0.html>); be (part) of the answer? Anyone have any experience using it?</comment>


Part 1: A vector type in Lua - <AUTHOR> http://merics.posterous.com/part-1-a-vector-type-in-lua

<comment><USER2> The second link is munged, s/b

<http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/hopl.pdf>

("The Evolution of Lua")</comment>


Individual Freelancer VS an Agency – All You Need to Know - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/individual-freelancer-vs-agency-all-you-need-to-know-bf24c61f5e08 <comment><USER2> Written by the founder of the incredibly pushed agency company in this article... I'm sorry, but this is a poor and biased find.</comment>


SpaceX Successfully Launches First 60 Starlink Internet Satellites - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com/watch?v=riBaVeDTEWI <comment><USER2> They continue to show everyone else how it's done, simply amazing.

This is quite the historic launch too. It's the beginning of the entire world (ignoring government restrictions) having low-latency high-speed Internet access. It's also possibly the beginning of SpaceX funding their own Mars plans.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kudos SpaceX. Your determination and persistence is a inspiration in these trying times. Godspeed.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for finding internships? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, HNers,
I'm a 19 year-old, self-taught programmer (C/systems + ruby experience) and I'm having a hell of a time finding relevant programming internships/job opportunities in the Chicago-land area.
Currently, I've been most "successful" (if you can call it success) by first tracking down software companies operating in Chicago and then checking if they have any available internship opportunities. Is there a better way?
How would you go about looking for internships (or an entry-level job) as a self-taught programmer? Are there any companies in the Chicago-land area willing to take a chance on a passionate programmer without a degree? <comment><USER2> _Currently, I've been most "successful" (if you can call it success) by first tracking down software companies operating in Chicago and then checking if they have any available internship opportunities. Is there a better way?_

Why not contact them anyway? Whether they've posted an internship or not? I know it's easier said than done, but this is a scenario where you'll lose nothing by emailing interesting companies. Give it a shot!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, achompas,

Good advice. I've already done this with one company, but I will be more proactive about this in the future. After all, as you say, what's to lose?

Now the only rub is finding interesting companies! Especially when the smaller ones, who tend to be more flexible, I'm likely to have never heard of.

<comment><USER2> I'd suggest looking for companies funded by Chicago-based incubators (there are a few, right?) or working from co-working spaces. Go through that list one by one and check each company out.

The above has an extra perk: companies who meet the above criteria are probably smaller/newer, and thus more willing to take interns on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried looking at venture websites? They often have a job board for their portfolio companies and I know for a fact that startups are desperate for interns

Some examples: <http://www.trueventures.com/jobs/> <http://500.co/startups>

</comment><comment><USER4> My experiences with my own startup have told me this: There is no right way to go about anything. There may be some "norms", but just be creative to get the job done.

Hell, just show up to some tech companies and badger them. If you're THAT dedicated to getting an UNPAID internship, they will take notice.

</comment><comment><USER5> [Shameless plug.]

Go to job fairs like the one at upcoming ACM Reflections | Projections conference at UIUC. We have around 30 companies coming for our informal CS job fair. It's a great way to meet recruiters and get interviews.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.enternships.com/></comment>


Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture - <AUTHOR> http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/ <comment><USER4> Dear God this was my life at a past employer. The biggest issue is that Get Shit Done usually turns to Get Shit Done exactly how I want even though I won't tell you what it is because I'm "Getting Shit Done!". I know better now. If I see that at an interview now, I'll run, not walk, run away. People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. Then bitch about them not being good enough. It's like buying a sports car and putting shitty watered down gas in it and complaining about how the car doesn't perform like it should.

<comment><USER5> > People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire > talented developers but put them in shitty positions.

Notwithstanding the fact that the GSD mentality _is_ often nonsense that comes from folks who don't know what they're doing, I would make the point that _a lot_ of software jobs are "shitty" in the context of what many expect to find when they decide to become a developer. And that's life.

Even at many of the biggest names in tech, a lot of developers are performing mundane tasks that are not nearly as interesting or sexy as one would imagine. If even the biggest companies in tech, which deal with some of the biggest problems, can't create more "good" positions than "shitty" ones, it shouldn't come as a surprise that smaller companies and startups can't either.

Incidentally, it's like this in just about every profession that is glamorized in some fashion (i.e. investment banking, law, etc.).

<comment><USER6> "That's life" what a load... no, that's a corporate job which doesn't give a shit about you. It's not really life.

The only reason people put up with it is because they're told "that's life" or "that's just how it is." when that's meaningless bullshit.

<comment><USER7> Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you? It's not a person (regardless of what the Supreme Court says...), it doesn't have feelings.

Your parents love you unconditionally. If you want anyone else to care about you, you have to make it happen through your actions.

<comment><USER8> _Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you?_

Why would I expect the company to treat me decently? Why _do_ I expect the company to treat me decently? It's because people do not only have rights, they have duties towards their fellow man, that's why!

This is a long-standing idea in German political thought - it's called _Sozialpflichtigkeit des Eigentums_ , and it made its way into both the Weimar and present constitution. "Eigentum verpflichtet", it says there. Americans have a hard time understanding this.

<comment><USER9> > they have duties towards their fellow man, that's why!

That's exactly what he's saying. It's a company, not a person. You are not its "fellow man"\--because it's not a man. It's a legal structure that exists to generate profit.

<comment><USER7> Yeah.

It's not unreasonable to expect your boss to treat you decently, at least if you treat her decently. She's a person, after all.

But the corporation as a whole? The corporation is a system. It responds to the environment around it. If it doesn't make the right response (as in one that maximizes its chance of survival), it is replaced by other corporations that do. That right response may be at odds with your interests as a person.

You, your boss, your boss's boss, and all your coworkers are part of that system. If _they_ don't take the "right" action (as in, the one that maximizes their chance of survival within the organization), they will be replaced by others who do. If you feel you've been mistreated by this, your only option is to look for a _different_ place in that system where you will be happier.

It's a two-way street. It's not just that people should refrain from treating you poorly, it's also that you shouldn't put yourself in a position where you will be treated poorly.

<comment><USER10> The documentary "The Corporation" actually illustrates this point quite well. The psychological profile of a corporation is one of a sociopath, hell bent on making profit, at the disregard of all else.

Don't be loyal to a corporation, don't buy into propaganda about the well- being of the corporation == your well-being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think I have a different definition of get shit done than this blog post describes.

To me getting shit done means actually getting your work done. It means you don't read Hacker News all day long (oops) and send cute cat pictures to the entire office every hour. It doesn't mean you take every possible shortcut and hacky workaround to save a few hours of implementation time.

However, sometimes (and ONLY sometimes) that's what you are going to have to do. Just make sure you fix it later. If you do that all the time, it's going to blow up on your hands sooner or later (or on the hands of the poor schmuck they hire to work on it long after you're gone).

I work for a startup getting pressured by several BIG competitors that have all the advantages (client base, billions in the bank, established brand names, etc.), so we're under a tremendous pressure to "get shit done". There have been times (actually, I think only one time) when the right call was to get shit done in the wrong way of the phrase. We fixed it later. The core of the solution was solid, though.

We've also been unlucky to hire people who do NOT get shit done. It's like they have some sort of perpetual procrastination engine built in their brains. No amount of planning or iterating worked. Shit just wasn't getting done in any way, poorly or excellently. If you can't decide what approach to take, just pick ONE and move forward. Chances are you'll learn something along the way to validate or invalidate your approach, and you can then adjust.

</comment><comment><USER12> I said this a while back in another thread, but it's actually more on-topic here:

One of the worst things about tech culture is that it's full of socially awkward people who have learned a neat low-effort hack for getting around their poor social skills: be an asshole.

Being an asshole is easy. It requires no actual effort spent in learning the intricacies of human social interaction or human nature. It requires no effort spent getting "outside your own head," trying to connect with other people, investing in forming genuine bonds or understanding the motivation of others. All you have to do is learn to at least feign confidence, to be superficially charming, and to throw your weight around.

The tricks of the asshole trade are status symbols, name dropping, rank- pulling, appeals to credentials (I went to Stanford so I am better than you), fast talking, claiming you have "no time" for anyone who doesn't kowtow to your superior assholery, etc.

Like many low-effort hacks it "works" in the sense that it creates a superficial sense of social proficiency and permits the user to navigate meatspace. Sometimes you can even get things done. But it's a cheap trick and it doesn't scale forward either in size, scope, or time.

<comment><USER13> This has nothing to do with tech, IMO. Wander over to Wall Street, go into some white collar office with a bunch of people doing data entry, go to some fulfillment center warehouse, and then go to a construction site and you'll see the same behavior.

Managing people is not trivial. So, to bring tech into it, it really boggles my mind when I see these awful styles. I mean, we spend years developing our skills, and break our arms patting ourselves on our back on how skilled we are. Then, for whatever reason, we end up on the people side and suddenly making it up as you go is fine. We have books on managing people - they are not a panacea, but I'm shocked at how few people in these positions have heard of them, let alone read them.

For example, the Microsoft Press books form the 90s are great. _Debugging the Development Process_ , _Software Project Survival Guide_ , _Writing Solid Code_ , _Rapid Development_ , and then books like _The Mythical Man-Month_ , and _Peopleware_. Just a passing familiarity is all I ask. But no. Favored people and 'can't be hit by a bus' people get away with anything, great people with a few rough edges get fired at whim, no guiding principles on what it takes to execute a project (get shit done doesn't count, sorry), no concept of personal development. Ugh.

<comment><USER14> What I find particularly interesting about this is that, as technology creeps further and further into the mainstream, we're going to need more people writing/maintaining software. And they're likely going to be from the fatter part of the bell curve w/r/t skill (or else wouldn't they have become interested in software anyway?). So will it get easier or harder to manage coders when the average ability level moves toward the mean?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If your only goal is to get shit done, then too much of what you get done will be shit.

<comment><USER16> People who routinely work long hours usually wind up generating more shit than work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my experience GSD is just an excuse to avoid the organization and planning work that's not particularly interesting compared to banging out some code.

I've seen _a lot_ of startups just failing utterly because their primary philosophy is this one, and it tells them that it's ok to skip the hard/boring parts of your duties.

On the plus side those who are thinking through their experiments and still failing fast but intelligently choosing what they are trying rather than just skipping the planning and hammering out some code can really out-compete their GSD'ing competition. I have some good friends doing exactly this and doing it very consciously right now (just yesterday I told them they should call it Hammock Driven Biz Dez since we are all Rich Hickey fans). It is working very well, and that's measured in revenue.

<comment><USER18> Last company I worked at, we were doing planning for 2 years and have yet to ship a product. There is something to be said for GSD, but only for startups in teams of under 10. Why? - because shipping a product gives you something to look forward to, live product is something you can brag about show and change the world with. It is better to ship than not to ship. If you can't do it in 2 months - cut features out, etc etc.

If you have razor sharp focus and most people are apt in their roles and know what to do without looking up to a central person - thats called teamwork. However when you get to point when you start getting less focused and start looking for a new target, things got to get reorganized, thats when GSD is useless. When realigning troops you got to give some wiggle room instead of blindingly forging ahead, maybe off the cliff. When you hire more people - grow beyond original team - GSD can be a bit hard to deal with and frankly destructive on the whole to the growth of a company.

It is never easy.

my 2c.

<comment><USER17> Yes, obviously over-analysis/over-engineering is also bad but I'm not sure why that provides any evidence that doing none is good.

It is definitely not impossible to fail fast and emphasize MVPs and shipping while still being highly organized. People do it all the time, and they produce _way_ more useful features than the GSD'ers because they are organized. And by the time they've been working for a few months they are moving faster than the GSD'ers (in my experience anyway, the actual timespan probably depends on how complex the problem is).

Maybe we aren't agreeing on what exactly GSD is? Because even on tiny projects where you come up with an idea and ship an MVP a week later I've abandoned the GSD style blind flailing. I spend maybe 5% of that week thinking about it and planning a few things out, altering that plan as you build it and another maybe 10% keeping technical debt low. That thinking time saves at least a few dead ends that I would have otherwise gone down. The low tech debt makes debugging easier throughout the entire rest of the 85%.

That 15% investment has never not seemed to pay off. Not so far. And then on week two, when there's feedback and it's time to iterate you are sitting pretty, not starting from scratch and just winging it some more like you would be with the GSD strategy. I've done both, and I really can't emphasize enough how much of a payoff there is to keeping lightweight, flexible but mandatory process in place. Always.

GSD style cowboy development is something I kick myself for wasting so much time with when I was younger, and it is totally natural to fall into that style when you like writing coding and are lazy.

Sorry, that was quite the wall of text, I guess that's my 4c.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this an actual thing? Are there really people out there who think running around yelling "Get Shit Done!" constitutes actual project management?

We are doomed.

<comment><USER13> Sure. Friday on LinkedIn I got one of those "recommended jobs" thingies in my story line. It was full of "you should value execution over planning". It pretty much sounded like a 20hr/day sweatshop of fighting endless bugs and chasing the whims of the founders.

Are the VCs listening to this? You are funding people who don't take spending your money very seriously. There is a huge continuum (shall I say gulf) between not over-engineering something when you don't yet have proven market share and just randomly tossing shit together.

<comment><USER12> _" you should value execution over planning"._

People who hold to this philosophy should practice it while driving. This would reduce the number of people who hold this philosophy.

<comment><USER20> Or at least reduce the number that arrive at their intended destination...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> UK-AL The whole start-up culture encourages this behaviour. The current fire fast trend, rather than trying find the root cause for example.

Firing someone can completely mess up someones career, but people are being told to fire someone on a whim, if they're not right fit(I mean that could be anything). Turn it around, and put yourself in their shoes.

<comment><USER12> I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain unnamed big startup on the East Coast.

I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web- based marketing product. Management was completely by the book Scrum, including actual use of terms like "pigs" and "chickens" and such. I roll my eyes at that kind of thing, but I don't really mind and can just roll with it. It's by no means the worst "management design pattern" you could use.

The place had a superficially awesome culture, even had a foosball table. Roll eyes a little again, but who cares if it's startup-cliche. It actually is fun so again roll with it. Communication in the team feels good, stuff is actually getting done, etc. One person is a bit of a dick but everyone else seems cool. Nice view from the common office window. I feel pretty good about this job so far.

My first and only real hint that anything is amiss is that the code I am tasked with working on is shite. I mean hacky, ugly, uncommented, generally nasty-ass crufty Rube Goldberg machine Java code that takes over a gigabyte of RAM to do trivial things that ought to take under a hundred megs. It's also uninstallable. Just try running it in a dev environment. Seriously. Just try.

I had obviously been given the bastard child of a Red Bull fueled late night coding binge to untangle. That's cool. I'm on it.

My task, should I choose to accept it, was to add a few features to the product and fix a list of several bugs.

Problem #1: this code was so badly written it was incapable of handling the load of current customer demand. Short term solution #1: fire up more EC2 instances. I calculated that for this product alone they were spending almost 1/4 of my salary on EC2 compute instances to compensate for the code's general clunkiness. To do something that ought to be able to be done on a Pentium-4 with a gig of RAM they were running enough EC2 compute nodes to do protein folding on a complete genome.

Problem #2: the code was full of static, global, mutable state. This meant that the easy way of reducing overhead by parallelizing things was an exercise in banging one's head on the table.

I am told this needs to be done. I start feeling as if I'm getting pressure. Sprint is coming to an end soon. Everything I do fixes this or that problem but the boat anchor continues to suck so bad my demonstrations and tests fail simply on sheer bloat. Fucking nasty-ass sack of crap is so bloated I can't even properly test it on my dev workstation.

Fuck it. All weekend coding spree time. I am going to -- wait for it -- rewrite the core.

I stay up late all weekend at home doing this, coding furiously, and by Monday end up with a functional core of this product that does the same thing the old one did but used ridiculously less resources. The old version took many EC2 nodes to do what it did, while the new version does the same thing on less than 512mb of RAM on my Macbook and does it in a fraction of the time. Coffee has now supplanted hemoglobin as a principal oxygen/CO2 carrier in my bloodstream.

Unfortunately I'm going to have to spend a bit longer to get things done by the end of sprint on Tuesday, but never fear. I have cleared my schedule and plan to stay at the office until all sprint tasks are completed, which should now be do-able without wrestling a greased shoggoth.

The meeting is awkward though. I show this to people and I have a strong sense that something is wrong. Later that day I'm called into the office and told I'm being let go, though with a bit of a severance (??? not sure why but I'll take it).

Why?

(1) Performance doesn't matter. Don't I know anything? "Premature optimization is the root of all evil," even if said optimization saves 1/4 of my salary in compute costs and makes the product instantly responsive.

(2) "We don't want to maintain all this new code you wrote" \-- but it was less than the old code, I argue, and the old code was... never mind.

(3) My favorite: apparently what I did was "not agile," and I would be "better suited for a research position."

<comment> UK-AL Sounds like a Daily WTF, but it's also very common.

Its seems most companies don't realise the easiest way to move fast, is a extensible, easy to change/understand code base. And not going through spaghetti code with a fine tooth comb. Odd they recommended research, they only care about one off prototypes.

The problem is future employers assume your the problem.

Btw, Proper scrum/agile encourages people to refactor and keep technical debt down.

<comment><USER12> Luckily this engagement was so short, and followed after a period of independent consulting, that I was able to be only _slightly_ dishonest and call it a short-term consulting gig.

Thing that pissed me off the most was that I was proud of this code. It was elegant asynchronous java.nio-based stuff that used something like 1/100th the RAM and brought the product's response time down from a several hours "we'll get back to you" to less than a minute for small customer sites. It could also run the entire product on one EC2 compute node instead of like a dozen. I also commented it thoroughly and wrote a design document to hand to other developers describing exactly how its central queue based async architecture worked. Every method had a complete JavaDoc comment including the method's "contract," etc.

It's actually some of the cleaner code I've written. Not the thing I'm most proud of, but probably on the top ten.

Didn't have full unit tests yet, but could have done that in a day or so easily.

The second thing that pissed me off was this: I have a _strong_ suspicion based on circumstantial evidence that the fact that my college degree is from a po-dunk Midwestern school had something to do with it. I have a strong suspicion that what I did would have been brilliant if I'd gone to a top-ten university. The founder apparently had such a hard-on for top-ten talent that he wrote about making sure candidates were from "the right schools" repeatedly on his blog, and I got the sense from the get-go that he was skeptical of my hire.

Whatever. My career is looking good and I can probably code the guy under the table so :P

<comment><USER21> > The founder apparently had such a hard-on for top-ten talent that he wrote > about making sure candidates were from "the right schools" repeatedly on his > blog, and I got the sense from the get-go that he was skeptical of my hire.

Fuck these people. I have a fancy degree and I work with better programmers who never even went to college.

I work for a client that is very scrumy and I did a huge rewrite/refactor similar to you one week, although probably smaller considering I also delivered the other tasks expected for the sprint. Nobody even cared that the rewrite made the product 10x faster. Nobody cared! But they were ecstatic about other lame changes that were assigned.

I think it's because management didn't ask for it to run faster, but they did ask for the other things.

The next week I got asked to find out what my changes broke because the app is behaving so much quicker. I had to remind them that I rewrote the slow part and there's nothing wrong. Still, nobody was excited... except me, because now it was a lot easier to develop with because it was faster and easier to debug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> " _Everyone has the potential to be productive or unproductive. There aren't people who are A players and C players. Just people who are performing at an A level and at a C level._ "

But some people will go from 0 to A faster and with less assistance than others _within the scope_ of a specific set of tasks for which they have innate talent or relateable experience.

Further, if the skill set demanded is fungible it is cheaper to buy talent than build it in-house. Firing a C to hire an A is better business than hiring a C and expending time and energy to increase the probability of them converting to an A at some unknown point in the future _provided that_ there is a ready supply of As (or Bs) on the market. With regards to entry and mid- level programming positions, that appears to be the case.

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, it's difficult to evaluate the _quality_ of the work that you will undertake as a developer from the outside. This leads to tons of employers with C-quality work clamoring for A-quality individuals when they could find a B-quality candidate much easier.

How much of 'business' is predicated on this zero-sum mentality? It's all very tiring. You don't need the best; you just need good enough.

<comment><USER22> " _How much of 'business' is predicated on this zero-sum mentality?_"

This is a problem of asymmetric information, i.e. employees generally knowing themselves better than prospective employers, and wide uncertainty bands around the evaluation of prospective employees. A rational employer retains a C over replacing them with an expected B who might be an A or an F.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> GSD for us is less of a management tactic and more of a trait we find in engineers. Some engineers spend too much time in the design phase, planning out features nobody is going to use. GSD is about finding the fastest route to a solution. The quality of the solution is orthogonal to GSD. Bad GSD results in spaghetti code. Good GSD means providing the minimal solution without painting ourselves into a corner. It means a clean interface and set of behavioral tests with perhaps a hackish library implementation that can be pushed to production. Building out that hack vs taking the time to "do it right" can mean 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars of revenue. Sure it builds up a bit of tech debt (which we resource immediately), but that's often well worth it.

</comment><comment><USER25> The only way this "strategy" works is if a few things are already happening:

1\. Communication is already really good

2\. You have a basic plan in place, milestones laid out, and because of #1 being good you're ready to handle anything that doesn't go to plan (because things definitely won't)

3\. If you have a plan in place you better have discovered some hint of product-market-fit (figured out who your customers are, what pain point they have, and how you think you can solve it) that the plan is based around

If you have those things in line, there isn't anything wrong with "get shit done!" (which I really take to mean less meetings, less screwing around over- planning, etc). This mentality or strategy backfires when you are missing a few items from my list, or you have bad managers / founders who don't understand the importance of the list.

<comment><USER26> Agreed, there is nothing wrong with GSD as long as it's organized. I see this in science all the time, "I'm too busy to show you how to do something, just GSD!". That ends up meaning: 1\. GSD 2\. Do it again, it wasn't done right 3\. Do it again, because it still wasn't done right (repeat 2 & 3 a few times over) 4\. .... 5\. Profit! This would be more effective if they followed what you posted, then said "GSD". Communication, planning and proper support are critical and without them, you aren't getting shit done, you are getting SHIT done (and wasting time). Plan quickly, train quickly and throughly, then get shit done effectively. GSDE would be a better mantra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's like anything else, if taken to an extreme, you can make anything bad.

The inspiration of "get shit done" are the bureaucratic nightmare environments where the mundane and irrelevant are debated for weeks, months or years, and many people make careers out of coming up with excuses why things cannot, should not, or will not get done.

Some not-so-good managers with poor leadership ability turn this into a power trip. I'll tell people to "shut up and get shit done" when I sit through a meeting that's nothing about debating things that aren't important, or just travelling down rabbit holes with no way out. And I don't deliver that message in an offensive or nasty way.

</comment><comment><USER28> We just got a bunch of "startup vitamins" at our new office. My "favourite" is "Fuck it. Ship it."

Hmm, this doesn't pass tests? You didn't run the tests? It breaks something else? Fuck it, ship it. So now when support comes and asks why everything is broken, I just point to the sign.

<comment><USER29> See: healthcare.gov

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the author is missing one of the points of 'get shit done', which is instead of debating whether you should use Go/PHP/node, just fucking do it. Instead of agonizing over a design choice, just make the damn thing and tweak it later. Don't over-engineer things.

<comment><USER31> This can't be overstated enough. Just getting started on the problem is half the battle. Choosing a naive solution is fine since a) you can improve it later, but with better more actionable knowledge b) it is very difficult starting a complex project from scratch, so you might as well just start somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I couldn't help but feel that this was a blog post that I've been meaning to write for a while.

This, mixed with "beer culture", and measuring productivity based on hours sitting in the office as opposed to features produced/bugs fixed. Complete disregard for security vulnerabilities that may put our users at risk because "we don't have time for that shit", issues of "you are not 100% committed" when you leave on time one day because your mother is terribly sick. Stalking your LinkedIn then making a huge fuss about it when it clearly hasn't been updated in a long time, adding the fact that you have a website to not "100% committed", etc.

Guess it's time to finally go write that blog post.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone who has endured more than one startup will tell you GSD is a bullshit line. The _only_ people who ever mention this are those who usually have not been in a position of control to execute (usually because they worked at BigCo, Inc.) and are now free of those constraints. It's the occupational equivalent of moving out of Mom & Dad's house and getting your own place.

GSD, when first brought up, was about the fact that startups needed to not over-analyze and move to do things simply. And, if you moved quickly, simple solutions would follow. Or so the thinking went.

But the goal was lost in translation, and now GSD looks like something that should die along with other awesome concepts such as bro-gramming.

</comment><comment><USER34> I won't call what we're in a "bubble", but the culture seems to be going in the direction of mass producing startups, and this is the result. I see many startups popping up that seem to be creating a product just for the sake of creating a product, with no real long term goals.

Some VCs seem to be encouraging it, throwing millions at redundant social network apps that do things like "Gamify brushing your teeth!".

The tech industry has an immense ability to "make the world suck less" as Alexis Ohanian puts it, and it's important that we focus on that.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'll put in a plug for Roy Osherove's "Notes to a Software Team Leader" which discusses some of these issues and how to deal with them. It especially deals with how to handle "overload" and the feeling of falling behind and the decreased productivity that can bring a team.

</comment><comment><USER36> These sorts of generalizations do not end well. For example, if you really think that "There aren't people who are A players and C players. Just people who are performing at an A level and at a C level." then fire your entire recruiting department and hire anyone who walks in through the door. After all, there are no bad people, only those who perform badly right? So if those strangers who walk in do not do well, it is the fault of your environment and management, right?

</comment><comment><USER37> If you are taking your management cues from a slogan on a wall, you're probably dealing with shitty management.

<comment><USER38> From my recollection, the slogan can be attributed to Zuckerberg.

<comment><USER39> There's a difference between the company who wrote it on the wall and the company who read it from the wall. There's surely more to "The Facebook Way" than 3 words can convey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I used to say "Get Shit Done" to my team, but for a different reason. That company I was at then is (still) so bogged down in meetings, changes, planning, etc that nobody ever had more than a few minutes to code without hours of interruptions.

So, different scenario but I get the post's point.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's already down (it's the database... why does it always gotta be the database... sigh. Actually, it's probably a blog post so why is it even hitting the database to begin with instead of being served from cache?)

I guess someone didn't prioritize "getting shit done" haha

<comment><USER42> Sorry about that, should be better now, replaced the broken caching plugin with w3edge.

<comment><USER43> Don't feel bad about the crash. My wp blog also crashed the first time I got to the top of hacker news. You will learn a lot making sure that won't ever happen gain ;) Caching is going to get you through this one but checkout c10k.

Great post, btw!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What are you working on? / The shit. How much longer? / Not much. Almost done. Is it hot? / It IS shit. Is it tight? / It's DONE. Awesome. Can I blog about it? / Yeah... you're the CEO. Later... Hey - this is a pile of shit! / It IS done.

You're a cog in someone else's machine. You are a means to an end - which is some form of naive auto-fellating bullshit. Shut up and get the shit done. Someone wants to disrupt the treehouse club!

Treat me mean. I need the money.

Maybe they should A/B the color of their log in finding the A players.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm nervous to think that "get shit done" is likely the current mantra of Healthcare.gov, as contractors are scrambling to fix an untested spaghetti- codebase before Thanksgiving....

</comment><comment><USER46> The fallacy of "just" should be added to the standard lists of logical fallacies. "Just do X" assertions are problematic in a number of ways:

1\. "Just" carries a hidden assumption, that the thing is simple and straightforward.

2\. It's awkward to respond without tacitly accepting the burden of proof for why you can't do the thing.

</comment><comment><USER47> > There aren't people who are A players and C players. Just people who are > performing at an A level and at a C level.

That sounds very nice, like something Barney the Dinosaur would say. People who consistently perform at C level are C players. Maybe they would be A players doing something different but that's not much use to you.

<comment> UK-AL Of course they are. Get them doing that other thing they are good at. People naturally gravitate to tasks they are good at. Are they're any tasks they are voluntary doing? Is there a full-time position for this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Great post, David! You especially nailed it with the paragraph about disciplined routines and productive habits. In retrospect, we'd wasted more than 10 years in our company by just getting shit done. Our solution to this problem was to keep a simple "logbook" to regularly record and reflect our achievements and experiences in a team context. (We released a public version of our internal logbook tool called "teamspir.it" a couple of months ago.) I must admit that it was damn hard to convince all of our team members that it is really important to write regularly. Even today most of the people I talk about this habit ask "Why the hell should I do that? I know what I've done, no need to write it down...". There are several good approaches for answers to this question in your post!

</comment><comment><USER42> Sorry about the server issues.

Cached version: [http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?&d=760352947104&mkt=en- US&set...](http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?&d=760352947104&mkt=en- US&setlang=en-US&w=sC04SOfAJwkhmsiOww3uGSEad-yAAxny)

<comment><USER49> "Could not find the requested document in the cache."

This worked for me:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get- shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> As the manager/co-founder, helping with tools, coping mechanisms, etc. is often not enough. When an employee has shit falling off of his/her plate, he often needs help prioritization. Managers/co-founders often _assume_ everyone knows the priorities of projects and that's often not the case. If the manager's or company's priorities have shifted, that needs to be communicated to everyone. If you have a meeting scheduled with some big-wig tomorrowand I'm providing data for that meeting, I need to know; otherwise you may not get your S until it's too late. But, by God, I'm GSD!!

</comment><comment><USER51> "Get Shit Done" is completely different than the other ideas lumped in here, ie "ship something", "fail often" etc. Many people may mistakenly apply these concepts in such a way, but it is not inherent.

</comment><comment><USER52> The assumption made in this article is that startups with the "get shit done" mantra only say to "get shit done" when you're not performing. I feel like the entire article is based on a bad assumption..

</comment><comment><USER53> This isn't really a problem with startups but people in general. The average person just isn't very empathetic, and especially so when you you're focused and stressed out working around the clock during a startups early stages of life. Also: if you were a CEO or manager what incentive is there to try and dig deeper into why someone is unhappy with their job? Most of the time, its not fixable, and interviews are there to help filter out individuals who aren't a good fit both on a technical and personal scale. Now, if all of your employees are unhappy thats a different problem.

</comment><comment><USER54> Kind of offtopic, but it really grinds my gears when a site is perfectly functional without javascript, but then it has a noscript element blocking you from reading it. I know how to hide the noscript element. Even if it's not a noscript element, I know how to delete it from the DOM tree. Why would a site writer purposefully block people with js disabled from viewing their site? It's not like you can accidentally disable js in a browser, if it's off, it's off because I went out of my way to turn it off. And I can hide your opaque fullpage div just fine.

</comment><comment><USER55> Another site reporting "Error establishing a database connection". For anyone posting blog entries telling people that they are doing things wrong, it really destroys your credibility when you can't set up a server that continues to function with a moderate amount of traffic.

Mirror:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&s...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&sclient=psy- ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwhatspinksthinks.com%2F2013%2F11%2F04%2Fget-shit- done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever%2F)

<comment><USER56> You are assuming that the person who wrote the article is in charge of the server.

<comment><USER57> Possibly not directly, but at least indirectly (by choosing where they're hosted).

<comment><USER56> You are assuming that everyone that has a website and/or blog knows what we're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Glad I didnt take my first offer out of school. This was exactly what that company was about. I knew classmates who took the jobs but left before 6 months.

They were paying 15-20% more for _some_ positions, now I know why. Their motto was hire and fire, most managers were with them for less than 1.5 years and promoted because they were most senior after about year.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think you interpret "get shit done" different than I do. Not trying to put words in your mouth, but I think you interpret as get this product out ASAP. I think of it as take responsibility for yourself, if you need a break, take a break. Whatever you need to do to "get shit done", do it.

</comment><comment><USER60> I agree in that "Get shit done" shouldn't be a culture but a goal. It should be a reminder that, after all your pontificating about monads or whatever, nobody but you cares about that shit and you need to produce things that they _do_ care about.

</comment><comment><USER61> Get Shit Done is a value, not a management tactic. If managers are considering it as a management tactic then they are utterly incompetent as described in the article, however I hope and believe that's it's a strawman and this practice is not widespread.

</comment><comment><USER62> No, there are definitely C players. People who, if you give them all the advantages in the world, will still be completely unable to perform at the expected level. It's perfectly possible for an A player to perform at a C level, but not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER63> Kind of depends on how you interpret it. Many developers over think and feature creep. When I see Get Shit Done I'm thinking about doing what needs to be done now instead of working on solutions to problems that haven't happened yet.

</comment><comment><USER64> I was thinking of writing a longer comment but I have to get back to getting shit done.

</comment><comment><USER65> I think GSD is most appropriate for the earliest stages of a startup (ie. few to no employees), where you really do need to just get a working product.

Obviously middle managers screaming this mantra at paid employees is silly...

</comment><comment><USER66> What's your experience with larger multi-layer structures, as if someone up the chain is pushing GSD, there is less opportunity to fix this downstream, leaving people to constant stress.

</comment><comment><USER67> Tripadvisor's slogan is "Speed Wins," which seems like it would translate into "rarely pay down technical debt." It's always put me off of working there.

<comment><USER68> But if you rarely pay down technical debt you'll go slower. So maybe "Speed Wins" means they do pay down technical debt. Just playing the devil's advocate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> "Getting Shit Done" will result in exactly that : Shit

</comment><comment><USER70> "what a good manager does is help this person identify the things that are causing them to be unproductive.

They'll help them develop new habits and encourage them in their efforts to adopt them.

They'll force them to take a step back and see the bigger picture.

They'll work together to build new systems that will help them be successful.

Shit, at the very least they'll recommend a good self help book."

Are you serious??? With all due respect, if you are not capable of developing new habits, stepping back and looking at bigger picture or (sigh) reading a good self help book _on your own_ without someone holding your hand, then you have a problem. Wake up my friend and GET SHIT DONE!

</comment><comment><USER71> Can anyone compare a GSD culture to a ROWE culture? I haven't seen 'ROWE' lately.

</comment><comment><USER42> Site should be performing better now. W3edge helped with caching. Thanks for reading.

</comment><comment><USER72> So I wonder, what is the percentage of YC companies that match this profile?

</comment><comment><USER73> "Does this situation feel familiar?"

 _cough_... YES!

</comment><comment><USER74> +1 for a static jekyll blog :)

</comment><comment><USER75> the powerful people know better...they get other people to get their shit done

</comment><comment><USER76> great post david!

</comment><comment><USER77> Yeah, yeah, stick to your Eclipse and get shit done - exactly a Java sweatshop paradigm.

Now this Java shit is about to hit the fan.

</comment><comment><USER78> Error establishing a database connection

<comment><USER78> why i got -1 points?

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I can't read this. Maybe you should get shit done... like a working website ¬_¬

<comment><USER42> Working on the server issues. Unfortunately FatCow is slow to fix. I wasn't expecting to be on HN today (=

<comment><USER79> no prob. sorry for the heavy stab. i'm a big advocate of getting shit done - <USER2> prejudged your argument as invalid before seeing it. :)

having now read the article you have a valid point. there is a real problem with the idea that people can be hired and left to autonomously work - <USER3> ignoring literally thousands of years of experience we have with leadership and its value.

i've had this exact same problem myself. its really quite difficult and offensive it seems to tell your boss 'please provide some leadership and management - its your job, /you/ need to get shit done before i can do mine...'. the best solution it seems is to not have to be in that position.

fortunately my current 'boss' always takes the approach of 'what am i doing wrong?' rather than 'why is he dicking me over?'</comment></comment></comment>


The Burden: Fossil Fuel, the Military and National Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.theburdenfilm.com/watch_the_film <comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link to the video: [https://vimeo.com/194560636](https://vimeo.com/194560636)</comment>


The ABS programming language - <AUTHOR> https://www.abs-lang.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: author here :)

This is something I've put together to see how scripting with an elegant language and easy bash commands would look like.

Happy to hear your feedback, both positive and negative!

<comment><USER2> Thx for stopping by! would be great if you could provide bit more details of what platforms are supported (eg does it run on any of the BSDs, Windows, more esoteric OSs?)

having a full-featured cross OS scripting, that also hides OS-specific and distro-specific differences, where possible -- would be very useful.

Since you had written in Go, perhaps long term those cross-OS capabilities, were part of your aspirations

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, 100%. Being able to compile across platforms is one of the reasons Go was an absolute no-brainer:

[https://www.abs-lang.org/misc/technical-details](https://www.abs- lang.org/misc/technical-details)

Currently, there are binaries for a few different platforms:

[https://github.com/abs-lang/abs/releases](https://github.com/abs- lang/abs/releases)

Interestingly enough, the releases are built with an ABS script:

[https://github.com/abs- lang/abs/blob/master/scripts/release....](https://github.com/abs- lang/abs/blob/master/scripts/release.abs)

:)</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook - The World's Dominant Media Company - <AUTHOR> http://loukerner.tumblr.com/post/419766555/facebook-the-worlds-dominant-media-company

<comment><USER2> By comparing their stats to other successful companies you sure would think so. I would still be looking for that killer income app that can be connected to: per person, per hour, per link, etc, before I jump all the way in first and declare them the winner..</comment>