Ask HN: I'm an unemployed programmer in SF that will work for minimum wage - <AUTHOR> Live in San Francisco
B.S. Computer Science
Have used java, python, flex, html5 canvas, javascript, and css on various webapp projects
No 'real' job experience
Unemployed for 6 years trying to do a startup (yes 2005, when I just graduated and read my first PG essay)
Will work for minimum wage, or free if the work is interesting and may lead to a job
Will do any work, even if not programming related
Will accept any length term: internship, contract, contract to hire, full time, etc
Hey HN. After 6 years of trying to do a startup with no success, I'm close to giving up. I've been rejected from ycombinator (twice), various startup conferences (launch, etc), and even angellist. I have no connections to investors and have had no success trying to get introductions.
I've recently tried to apply for programming jobs in SF, but had trouble because of my complete lack of work experience. All my software engineer friends in SF are making $100k+ and telling me how hot the market is. I can't even get a minimum wage job flipping burgers at In N Out or bagging groceries at safeway because they have dozens of applications for each opening and my long period of unemployment looks bad.
Is there any possibility for me to make a fresh start? Will anyone take a chance on hiring me? Do you have any advice for me?
Your comments are appreciated!
edit: added email contact in HN profile
edit2: for all those asking for code samples, I implemented the reddit is hiring backend challenge in python (http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/fjgit/reddit_is_doubling_the_size_of_its_programming/). they said not to release the code publicly until after march, but if you send me an email I can show you privately. <comment><USER2> I can't help but feel like HN is getting trolled here. There is simply no way someone who has done a startup and has experience in all the listed technologies cannot find any job in the Bay Area. Spend a couple days at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View or go to an event like the 500startups one at House of Air last month and you'll meet dozens of people looking for talent.

I'm not just being cynical here-- I have lived in Palo Alto for just under 6 weeks and my RoR skills are subpar at best. Nevertheless I've been offered multiple jobs, co-founder opportunities, etc. And I'm not even that likable. If you're a nice guy, the opportunities are endless!

That being said, on the off chance that this isn't a troll and you don't have any luck with the replies here that are offering assistance: contact me (see my profile for info) and I'll throw some contracting work your way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish I was trolling, but this is the reality of my life. I did apply for one of the investor demo days at Hacker Dojo, but was rejected. I'll admit I am somewhat antisocial, and have not attended any networking events, which is totally my fault.

<comment><USER3> As you know, lots of programmers are anti-social, so that's less of a problem than it seems. It may well be easier for you to get a good-paying programming job than a lower-paying normal-person job. If I were you I'd find something interesting to hack on and then talk to other hackers about it. That doesn't require much social skill and is as least as likely to lead to work opportunities as the resume/interview grind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was a homemaker for about 2 decades. And sick as hell while job hunting. It took a while but I eventually got a job. It started at about half the wage that GIS jobs I was applying for started at. It has nothing to do with anything I want to do or any of my background education.

A) If you haven't already, pick up "What color is your parachute?".

B) Work on your resume. It shouldn't say 'unemployed for 6 years'. Mine did not say "unemployed for about 2 decades". Mine listed my education and I told employers that I was a "homemaker and homeschooling mom going through a divorce".

C) Whatever your buggaboo, stop harping on it. Mine was my health. I talked incessantly about my health crisis because I felt I needed to be "up front" and because it was uppermost in my mind...yadda yadda. The very first interview where I did not mention my health issue was the job I got.

I applied to a large company and got a phone call "According to your resume, you qualify for the following three jobs: blah blah morning shift, blah blah evening shift, blah blah evening shift." I knew I was too sick to work morning shift. I replied 'Put me down for the two evening shift jobs.'. I went in for additional testing. Afterwards, I was told "You still qualify for both jobs. Which would you like?" I said "I have no clue what either of these jobs really entails. I've been a homemaker forever..." and we chatted a bit about it. I think a contributing factor to the decision was one of them started two weeks earlier than the other, and that was what I went with.

I still have that job. I feel underemployed and so forth. But it has allowed me to keep a roof over my head, work on my health issues, get through my divorce and start my life over. In the aggregate: It's all good.

Good luck with this.

<comment><USER5> You really should write a book. I think anyone who has done something like this should write a book. Authentic stories of determination and persistence usually do well as books, movies and motivational speaking gigs. You'll need a good editor and publisher of course but I think it's worth a shot ...

<comment><USER4> That sentiment seems to be the general consensus. I've heard it repeatedly over the years, about various aspects of my life. But I am acquainted with a woman who wrote a book about her life and the publisher turned her down. It sounded too fantastical and they had recently been burned by someone else whose fantastical life story turned out to be all made up. I also get that kind of reaction a lot: That I am a liar, a teller of tall tales, etc. People frequently think I must be, at the very least, exaggerating. (The truth is, I do a lot of downplaying to try to minimize social problems.)

So it is unlikely that a traditional publisher will ever publish my life's story -- unless I get famous for something else first and publishers begin coming to me. I have found that it really doesn't work to try to 'sell' myself. When I go to them, people just think I'm full of crap and trying too hard. It works far better for me to wait for other people to discover me.

At work, I remain in that same entry level job -- a job that some folks have gotten right out of high school at the age of 18. (I have about 5 or 6 years of college, some of it the equivalent of graduate level work and lots of people hired after me have been promoted.) There are people in the department I work in that know I am bright. And I have submitted suggestions, proposals, etc. It goes nowhere, in spite of sometimes being initially met with enthusiasm. No one seems able to believe that some loser who can't get promoted out of an entry level job could possibly have meaningful solutions to systemic departmental problems (which is generally the scale I think on). And recently when someone did take a proposal of mine seriously, the implementation ended up bearing no real resemblance to what I was trying to accomplish. It ended up repeating the same systemic sins I was trying to redress. I take this as a hint that corporate America and me don't really mix that well. I'm disgusted and if I came into enough money say, this week/month, I think I would promptly quit my job and begin walking across the US. (Edit: The job I have seems to have a high-ish wash-out rate and I have kept it while recovering from being very ill. So I don't feel like a personal failure. I just feel like I have no real future at the company -- at least not one commensurate with my abilities.)

Which is to say "It's not like I haven't tried to go the traditional/conventional route." But it doesn't work for me. Most likely, I will need to go off and do something on my own. Winning over an audience single-handedly will probably be less challenging than winning over The Powers that Be in some existing bureaucracy (whether at a publishing house or at my place of employment).

But thanks for the feedback. I do appreciate it. :)

<comment><USER5> The powers that be are only interested in self preservation and nothing else. If you can modify your ideas so that it highlights that point then they will be interested in it.

ITs usually not worth the effort though. Start saving up and quit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ouch. this is why it's dangerous to read a pg essay on entrepreneurship when you're in college. He makes it look easy, and some kids just follow their dreams without building a support base first. Remember that for every guy like pg, there are 9 others just like him who went bankrupt. Coming out of college, you should always try to find a stable, legit job and try to build up a capital base. Get paid by someone else and develop a level of professional competency, build up your credit score and take out a loan and do something on the side, and only go solo once who you have some stable revenue. This is the way to do it, unless you come from money or are lucky.

So here's my steps to you for changing things around:

1) Completely revamp your resume, and to stop referring to yourself as unemployed. You were self-employed.

2) write down a list of all the competitors your startup had that are located nearby. Find out the phone numbers/emails to the higher ups in those companies through web searching.

3) phone or email those guys, and say that you are writing a freelance article about the industry. Say you want to interview them for their expertise (all guys love to have their ego's stroked: that's the way to get that introduction you want).

4) during the interview (preferably in person, or by phone), ask them some general questions about the industry, and mention that you had attempted to do a startup in the field but failed. Try to ask questions related to how their business succeeded, in order to compare and contrast with your own experiences. Ask them to give you advice on whether to pursue another startup in this field (even though you may have no intention of doing so) or look for a job in the industry.

Now at this point, it can go 1 of 2 ways. If you're lucky, the other person may see your interest for the field, and ask to see some of your work. If it's good, you will probably move to the top of the pile when a new hire is needed. If that doesn't happen, then repeat as necessary with every other company.

That's a better bet than anything else out there, don't waste your time with the craigslist blackhole

<comment><USER7> I make starting a startup look easy?

"Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it."

<http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

"So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup."

<http://paulgraham.com/die.html>

"As you go into a startup, you'll be thinking "everyone says it's really extreme." Your next thought will probably be "but I can't believe it will be that bad." If you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: "and the reason I can't believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a job.""

<http://paulgraham.com/really.html>

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't say easy, but there seems to be an underlying message that it is a deterministic, repeatable process - if you're willing to endure the stress, are smart and hard working you'll succeed - when in reality luck plays a pretty big part, especially in built to flip startups.

<comment><USER7> "Actually the best model would be to say that the outcome is the product of skill, determination, and luck. No matter how much skill and determination you have, if you roll a zero for luck, the outcome is zero."

<http://paulgraham.com/really.html>

"There is a large random factor in the success of any company. So the guys you end up reading about in the papers are the ones who are very smart, totally dedicated, and win the lottery."

<http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

<comment><USER6> Granted, but sometimes the impression that comes off to a young kid may be akin to that of Lebron/Kobe telling innercity kids that they should study and go to college because not everyone can make it to the NBA. Stuff like that falls on deaf ears, because the only thing that the kids take away is "this guy with a high school degree gets millions for dribbling a ball and that means I can too".

Perhaps YC should focus more on attracting guys in their 30's or 40's? You'll end up with candidates who are more grounded and who will have a better idea of the risks they are entering into. They might also come up with better business and consumer solutions than the youths that typically apply. It might be worth trying out, even just as an experiment,to have one of your funding rounds be set aside exclusively for those who are 30+

<comment><USER8> The NBA example is exactly what I meant.

I'm not really referring to PG or YC specifically, more to the general attitude in the startup community: it's becoming increasingly becoming Hollywood-like, with founder profiles in Vanity Fair and NY Magazine (and startups like Quora that follow the Hollywood club model of celebrity hype + watered down drinks), but while most people know that success in Hollywood is largely random, few realize how much this applies to exit-strategy startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, I feel for you. Being unemployed sucks ass, especially when you have skills but can't seem to get a job. At the risk that this some very bizarre sort of dumb troll, I'll propose this:

If you ever want to meet up for lunch at Union Square, I meet with random programmers from the SOMA area all the time. You're welcome to show up and hang out with us. They probably all know of jobs and people hiring, or at a minimum can give you advice.

I'll probably do it the first week after PyCon, but feel free to contact me at my email (if you're smart, you'll figure it out as it's really not that hard to find out how to email Zed Shaw when he has a domain at ZedShaw.com).

<comment><AUTHOR> Lunch with Zed Shaw? Hell yes! Emailed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You need to reframe this. You aren't an unemployed developer willing to work for minimum wage--you're a former self-employed developer looking for his next gig. As such, you're going to charge your usual rate of $75/hr, because you know that the fastest heuristic for "Is this guy worth it?" is "What do other people think he's worth?" and the fastest heuristic for that is "What is he comfortable charging?"

Of course, you're not interested in internships, or non-programming work. _If you have to widen the net, you're giving people a great reason to reject you._

Start your negotiation from a position of strength, and you'll get somewhere. You're starting with surrender--don't be surprised if you lose.

As other people have said: post your Github. Post a link to anything you can about your startup. Start acting like a valuable programmer, so people will treat you like one.

(If it's any comfort, I've been in your situation in another industry. When I started doing what I've written above, rather than what you've written, my life improved dramatically.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Can you write code and actually get things done? Do you have examples of your work that look good? If so, get some freelance work. Charge $50 - 75 / hr and find work by responding to people posting Craigslist computer gigs.

If not, then find some way to survive for a couple months and build some simple projects. Like, really simple. Hell, just setup some wordpress sites with good-looking themes from Woothemes or Themeforest. Having 2 or 3 of those will satisfy 95% of people looking for really simple code-monkey work on CL. You won't get rich, but you can build up your list of clients in 6 months. Then you can either keep freelancing or roll that into a fulltime job ("I've been doing contract work for the last year...here are some example projects and client references.")

<comment><USER12> Is it really that easy to charge $50-75/hr without being recognized as a decent developer?

<comment><USER2> $50/hr is VERY cheap. A decent developer in the Bay Area really should be charging at least $100/hr-- otherwise, they can just get a job and make more with less risk. Seriously good developers can charge upwards of $300.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think 6 years "trying to do a startup" is the same as a complete lack of work experience, unless you spent the entire 6 years trying to raise money and making powerpoint slides. If you did any real programming work during that time, it still counts. I've seen plenty of resumes with "sole proprietor" type jobs. Maybe you don't get a job with a large company, but someone who is versatile and used to doing whatever it takes is perfect for someone else's startup.

I don't think it is wise pitching yourselves to companies who are hiring 100K+ engineers saying you are willing to work for minimum wage. It shows a lack of confidence that you are selling yourself so far under market. Pricing is often a signal for quality. More importantly, the cost of a bad engineering hire is far greater than the salary you're being paid -- a bad engineering hire takes time to get rid of, and often produces negative work output. People end up cleaning up a mess, opportunities are lost while a bad engineer flails at what should be simple code, etc. A bad engineer could work for free and still be a worse value for a company than an engineer making market rate. This is the signal you're sending when working for minimum wage.

</comment><comment><USER14> To be fair, $100k+ SDE positions and burger-flipping positions are in completely separate markets.

If you were working on a startup, then you were "self-employed", not "unemployed". Market yourself as such. And as others have already mentioned -- if you can't point at jobs held, then point at code/projects that you wrote. Some startups would rather look at your GitHub profile than a CV.

</comment><comment><USER15> Forget free. It's illegal, even fro interns, where you produce value for the company. I would consider it unethical for me to hire you for minimum wage, cheap is OK. You are in an oddball situation, so HR types wont pass your resume on. Forget BofA. Startups probably cant take the chance. However, there are usually a few companies on that advertise entry level. Non-profits are also a possibility, because they cant pay so well.

Your post is a good bet, so I upvoted it.

EDIT: I checked your profile. You dont have contact info. A job cant find you.

<comment><USER16> free = volunteer :) is volunteer work illegal?

<comment><USER17> I'm not aware of it being illegal per-se, ie criminal. But there is some rather strong evidence that volunteers for a for profit company, if treated like an employee (time cards, minimum work hours, training, etc.) would probably be able to successfully sue for back wages and penalties.

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

 _In February 2010, the United States for the Southern District of New York gave preliminary approval to a settlement between AOL and the Community Leaders totaling 15 million dollars. Final approval was granted in May 2010._

(Good luck to the OP, I know that situation can be rough)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In 2000 I was unemployed for a bit in the Bay Area and wanted to take a short break from techie stuff. Looking for interesting work I browsed the craigslist job boards, specifically the "ETC" and "part time" sections. You never know what you'll find there - I ended up working as an "extra" in the Matrix sequels. beaubonneaucasting needed people to drive in the background on a fake freeway in Alameda while cars were crashing/exploding/chasing each other. Paid about a hundred dollars a day, gave me some great stories and experiences to talk about at parties or in interviews, got me some random followup jobs...and now my Bacon Number is 2 and I have a good start on an entirely separate "performer" resume in addition to my techie one.

Having something recent - _anything_ \- on your resume is a big improvement on having nothing; having something "cool" that you enjoy talking about is better still. So I'd try that - think about your _hobby_ interests and cast a really wide net to find things you wouldn't otherwise have considered. And use Craigslist.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm convinced you're unemployed. Now convince me you're a programmer. You have a CS degree, but that doesn't make you a programmer. What makes you a programmer?

</comment><comment><USER20> Where's your github profile? Personal site with demos? Projects you contributed to? Anything counts, man! Even toy projects you built in a weekend just for fun, if they show your ability to reason about a problem.

<comment><USER21> I only hire people with work I can see in Open Source projects.

It's just not worth my time to try to sort through the people who claim skills that don't actually have them, particularly for contract work that is short- term. I might be willing to go through a long interview process for a full- time employee that I expect to invest significant time and money in, but for contracts? It's just not worth my time. I can look at someone's github, SF.net, CPAN modules, Drupal modules, etc. and know within minutes if they're worth working with. Why would I bother with someone that doesn't have anything to show?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking at the way you describe yourself, a big problem is that the description is inconsistent. What are you: an entrepreneur, a project manager, or a developer? If you're a developer, then what is your speciality: architecture, database, middle-tier, UI? You presented a list of technologies, but did not indicate your level of experience in each or how they tie together. It's a laundry list, not a picture of the man behind the qualifications.

You are too self-deprecating about your startup experience. Even if it didn't pan out, you must have learnt a lot, both on the technical and on the business side. You really have to reconnect with your passions and your strengths; if you are aware of your value, it is fairly easy to get the message across to others. What was driving you for so long when working on your startup? What was the vision? That's where your value is.

</comment><comment><USER23> There are literally hundreds of ways for someone with programming skills to earn money online - and make more money than hourly wages. Here are just a few to get you started: 1) Setup a profile on Odesk / Elance. Showcase your programming skills and start bidding on projects. There are thousands of eager buyers there. Sure you will be competing with programmers from India/Russia/Phillipines - but you can underbid them all and buyers in the US will hire you - as being in the US and cheaper than offshore programmers will be a huge plus for you. 2) Buy a domain name and build websites using Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal (pick any one), get a domain name for $8.00, use one of thousands of free themes, add some content, RSS feeds, add Google Adsense (all free), drive some traffic using SEO techniques. Then list the site for sale on Flippa, Ebay, Craigslist or any of the other sites to sell stuff. You can easily sell a site for anywhere from $50 to $500. Sell one site for $250 per week = $1000 per month. 3) Setup a site, Sign up for affiliate programs (Commission Juntcion, Linkshare, Amazon ...), Drive traffic and earn affiliate commissions.

4) Market complete websites to small business for under $500 using the technique in (2) above. ....

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried elance. They have a convoluted point system where you can bid on ~10 projects a month. I put in the lowest bid for a bunch of simple <500$ projects, but had no responses. They are lots of indian and russian contracting firms on there spamming every job.

<comment><USER23> Would you be interested in working with me on a couple of Twitter related projects? Currently outsourcing on ODesk, but can definitely consider using you. Let me know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A few notes:

\- You don't get a programming job by applying at In 'n Out.

\- Reframe your pitch. You need to signal to employers that you're worth hiring; "Hire me, I'm desperate and barely competent" doesn't really push that message.

\- What's "real" job experience? Did you write code for 6 years, or not?

\- I'm out of touch with what junior engineers get paid (hopefully it's less than $100k), but I'm guessing your friends have accumulated track records over the past few years and are in mid- to senior-level positions. I don't think you're likely to get one of those given your history (to say nothing of your self-presentation). If that's been your target, maybe aim a little lower, at junior-level jobs? Still difficult since there are so many junior engineers.

\- What everyone else said.

When presenting yourself as someone of value, remember that it doesn't matter if _you_ believe it. Just say it with authority. =)

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER25> Change of venue, maybe? Perhaps widen your net? I think San Francisco is your problem here.

A four-year degree is a solid leg in for a lot of backwards HR departments (isn't it? everybody telling me to finish mine seems to think so), so I'm surprised you're having difficulty. A bachelor's should at least get you into support somewhere, and you can start there. This makes me think that everybody who can operate a command line has descended upon San Francisco for the startup culture, and there's a saturation there. That wouldn't surprise me at all.

Last time I was there it was to visit my sister and do nothing computer- related, so I might be wrong.

<comment><USER20> Weirdly, _everyone_ I've met in SF is hiring. They're also all complaining that they can't find anyone who fits the job. Maybe it's just high standards?

<comment><USER26> Have you experienced their weird interview?

I bet it started off like this:

"We're using memcached. Ever heard of it?"

A: "Yes. I've heard about it" [but never use it]

"Ok, since we used it for internet scale, the standard memcached isn't good enough for us. So tell me, how would you improve memcached for internet scale?"

A: "Umm..."

Real story.

[The answer is to switch memcached from TCP to UDP implementation, but then you need to know first how memcached work internally and probably intimately]

The problem is that most of these companies ask specific questions regarding the weird libraries or esoteric programming languages that they specifically use to solve a very specific problems.

Might as well go and hire the contributors of those libraries/languages really.

<comment><USER27> A: "I don't know memcached that intimately. Why is it not good enough, what seems to be the problem ?"

If I was conducting the interview, I'd be thrilled to hear that kind of response given the candidate's self-admitted lack of domain expertise.

<comment><USER2> When I first graduated from college, I took an R&D position doing financial modeling. Multiple times a day, I would walk into my boss's office to tell him I had no idea how to implement the next part. He would start to explain and then use a term like "Gaussian distribution" and I'd have to stop him. Down the rabbit hole we went, filling up the white board with graphs and formula. Once we reached the point where I was adept enough to proceed ("oh, ok, so you just add them all.") we would begin to pop things back off the stack until we were back at the original problem.

It was a painful process for me. I'm sure it was even more painful for my boss. After a couple of months, I reached a point where I didn't really need help deciphering statistics.

A few months later, I read through the code of a co-worker who had been there much longer. I noticed some deficiencies in a statistical search method. When I asked my boss why my co-worker implemented all his models using such a poor technique, he told me, "Because he doesn't come into my office and say he has no idea what he's doing."

<comment><USER28> People get hired into an R&D position doing financial modeling when they've never heard of a Gaussian distribution?

<comment><USER2> It wasn't quite that simple. Yes I'd heard of it, but I didn't know how to randomly sample from a Gaussian distribution, nor why it was necessary to use it in the algorithm I was working on ("why can't I just sample from a uniform distribution?").[1]

Also, I was in a special situation. I had a strong passion for the work I was doing, knew my boss before I got hired, and had done related research that showed I was able to push my way through challenging problems.

[1] [http://www.nashcoding.com/2010/07/07/evolutionary- algorithms...](http://www.nashcoding.com/2010/07/07/evolutionary-algorithms- the-little-things-youd-never-guess-part-1/)

<comment><USER29> Sample from a univariate distribution by taking the inverse function of the cumulative distribution and plugging in a [0,1] uniform random number. So, if X is a real valued random variable, then its 'cumulative distribution' F_X(x) = P(X <= x) where P denotes probability. Then F_X is monotone increasing so has an inverse function, say, G(u) = F_X^(-1). Then if U is a random variable uniform on [0,1], G(U) has distribution F_X like X does. Note: Have to patch up a little in the case F_X is not strictly monotone increasing.

For the inverse of the mean zero, variance 1 Gaussian distribution, look in the old NBS AMS-55 math handbook. They have two nice, simple formulas that are plenty good as approximations; one formula is a little more accurate than the other.

For getting samles from a multivariate Gaussian, that is the second lecture!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ditto what mindcrime said about posting examples of your work/abilities if you can.

I'm starting a company 4/2 after my last day of full-time work on 4/1, and while I wasn't planning on hiring anyone right away, I do have a fair bit more work that needs doing than I can personally do, so I will be hiring contractors for some of it and if you're a fit, would consider hiring you remotely, assuming your skills matched up and you could handle working remotely (not everyone can).

I suspect you'll find a better offer on HN anyway, but if not, reach out to me with some details mid-month,

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm in the boston area and I have a similar experience I seeming to be outside the job market. While I don't have comp sci degree I have lots of work experience as well as a small web business that demonstrates lots of solid code. Just some people don't have the connections or the luck maybe?

<comment><USER32> The Boston market is hot right now. If you want, feel free to send me your web business / experience and I can give you an objective take on whether you are hirable (maybe you have something that is a "red flag"?). But if you know how to code--and especially if you have built your own web business--you shouldn't have a problem finding work here, so maybe you just need the connections.

<comment><USER31> I think the "red flag" is that I'm over 40. I get screened by HR because I don't have a comp sci degree, and then I end up interviewing with 20 something rails hipsters that just feel uncomforable around an old dot-commer.

The perl community is much much better, which I'm going back to. The rails community has little tolerance for differences. Don't believe me? look at the "about us" in any rails shop, if they have pictures, what do you see? <http://thoughtbot.com/about/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Btw, thanks for putting yourself out there. Seriously. You've taken a really important step in fixing your situation - putting yourself in situations that are unlike what you've been doing in the past (which hasn't been working for whatever reason), and seeing what happens. Experimentation will get you _everywhere._

Secondly, I think you should put your work online. If you've really done website work, why not throw some of that work online for us to see or play with? After spending some time in design school, I see just how more powerful a portfolio can be than a resume. Pictures say a thousand words, and a good code sample or open source contribution says at least as many. :)

To those skeptical of this post, remember we're talking about someone without _any_ job experience. Not even an internship, it sounds like. Being able to code is one thing, but it's often hard to show experience in the "soft skills" of programming without having said you've done it before - from good code commenting practice and source control, to dealing with working for a boss. Hiring someone for their first job requires takes _some_ risk on the part of the employer.

Come to think of it, maybe if this HN post doesn't help, you can consider applying to paid internships? While many internships are just for students, some (especially smaller companies or startups) are happy just for the short- term help - and you might just turn it into a full time gig.

</comment><comment><USER34> From reading your post, my first thought is, "stop panicking, employers smell desperation from miles away". Stop worrying about it for a second, realize what you have to offer, and don't throw yourself out there as "please! I'll do anything!"

What I would recommend, is that you join ODesk, ELance, or one of the many other "let's play consultant" websites. Yes you'll be competing with the Bangladeshis but actually the good ones want big salaries too so you aren't competing against too much. What I would do, is when you submit a bid, write in something like "I'm only doing this to enhance my portfolio -- can I reserve the right to show this to future employers?" and if they say yes, you have something to show! If they say no, double your asking price, or at least bring it up to standard value, and if standard value doesn't scare them away, you get moneys!

Seriously, there are threads on both HN and reddit about people who have made serious money on those sites, with piles of advice about which jobs to take and stay away from. Using whatever portfolio you build up, take this into your resume.

And if you take the advice of others here, list your startup as "self employed", as well as the consultant time, odds are future employers won't even look at your code (and HR wouldn't know what to make of it anyway).

There is a lot of other great advice here too. Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER35> Email me please if you'd be interested in Box.

adunn[at]box.net

<comment><USER36> Is it just me, or are you Box.net employees the only ones who call it "Box"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think I am going to echo most of the other commentators.

I am working with a couple of startups and everyone is desparate for talent. I know many that would give a week or two with some small jobs to try you out.

That being said. Get some code samples out somewhere. Post a link to your failed startup. There may be another startup working on a similar or related idea who could integrate parts of your code and give you a job.

It is cool that you have a BS in CompSci but to me that means nothing. I know many people who have one but cant code for shit.

Let us know you can actually code.

Contact me and I will see what I can do to help you out.

</comment><comment><USER38> F!%# bro, that sucks. If I had a job to offer, I'd try to help, but I'm in the middle of the bootstrapped, funded-by-my-dayjob model myself, so I have no money to employ anybody. All I can offer is my best wishes and encouragement. The HN community is really awesome, so I'd bet there's a good chance somebody here can help you out. Keep your head up, things will get better!

Oh, and if you've worked on anything open-source, or you have any code you can open, make sure you put it up on GitHub so you can show it off. Code talks and bullshit walks, as they say.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm involved in two companies in the bay area that are hiring Java and Python web programmers respectively. They pay very competitive SV salaries. Contact me (email in profile) and I'll get you started!

</comment><comment><USER40> 1).Go to some meetups and start talking to people. At the last couple python meetups I went to here in SF, several companies announced they were looking for developers. You're more likely to get past HR if you can connect with an employee who can refer you. 2). In the meantime make some iPhone or Android apps and try and sell them and/or do some projects where you can show off your code.

Don't discount the experience you gained trying to do your startup. As others have said, you weren't unemployed but self-employed.

</comment><comment><USER41> We're looking for someone with Python experience, you could work mostly from home as soon you've proven your ability to deliver on time, otherwise we're in Sunnyvale, right off the CalTrain.

Get some code posted up at GitHub. You don't need to solve a new problem, just find an interesting way to solve any problem or show your skills off. The are 1000's of data sources out there, mash some stuff together.

Get active on StackOverflow, I've hired a couple of people based solely on what I saw there.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is your email?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Dude, I'm sorry to hear how rough it's been for you. I'd like to echo what many have said about posting samples of your work, and spelling out in more detail your particular skill sets as well as explaining what you _have_ been doing with your time.

That said, I'm afraid we're not hiring yet, however -- and no, this is not a shameless plug, but a genuine offer to help -- I can offer you this:

I think you would benefit tremendously from our new startup. The way that we match Opportunity Seekers (such as job seekers, like yourself) with Opportunity Providers (such as employers) should greatly assist someone in your position -- i.e., talent without experience -- to find a new job or even co-founders to build your own company. We're still prepping the beta (having some typical last minute issues) but you should definitely sign up and give it a shot: venturocket.com.

And as defensive as it may seem to do so, I would like to preemptively state that I'm not trying to take advantage of your seemingly dismal situation, but genuinely trying to help you get connected with something. That my desire to help you will of course benefit our startup -- and therefore me -- should not, on its own, in any way invalidate the sincerity of my claim. After all, if it weren't for my desire to create a more efficient way to connect people with opportunities, I would never be doing my startup in the first place.

Besides, I do believe a certain Mr. Smith once pointed out that "[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Best of luck either way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I signed up at your website.

<comment><USER42> Cool man. I hope we can be fully operational soon enough to help you out. In the meantime, I do wish you the best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd hardly feel as if working at a fledgling startup is considered unemployed even if it was considered so on paper. I'm quite sure that potentially you must have learned a wealth of knowledge during those 6 years and its in your best interest to highlight those on your resume and in any interview you manage to secure.

Being in the position of interviewing many candidates lately I get truly excited when people want to show me code and examples of stuff they've built, including the challenges they've met head on. Being in a startup gives you many life experiences that you need to address as a strength, whether you succeeded or not. A little secret that should be totally obvious is that no one wants to work with weak, incompetent, whiny developers because your life/project is in their hands when you have to get the job done by the deadline. Your team is only going to be as good as your weakest link.

I will tell you also that the market is hot. I just heard that in the tech sector the unemployment rate in CA is 5.9% compared to 12.3% for the entire labor force. So in actuality you'll face less competition finding a job in the tech industry currently than you will at fast food, etc. At my current company (in the Bay Area) we have a hard time finding good people locally, and I hear this same thing from many people at other companies. There is a very competitive job market (between companies) here and my employer is paying us handsomely if we can bring in a good new hire.

In addition I'd say play to your strengths. If you're an okay back end developer but excel at front end then apply to these positions or vice versa. Think of the hiring process from the other side of the desk and you'll be sure to land an interview.

</comment><comment><USER44> A lot of the skills you've picked will be marketable. Take a look at your resume, and ask yourself how well it communicates what you learned about: databases, web servers, system maintenance, typography, design, AB testing, payment systems, Apps (facebook, iphone, android), well known software/libraries, git, unit testing, agile, business development, networking, marketing, blogging, and sales.

You're in the business of selling yourself. Try writing about the 'benefits' you provide your employer, not your 'features'. For example: 6 years of startup experience is a feature. Ability to bring products to design- completion/code-completion/market is a benefit. Knowledge of several key technologies is a benefit because you don't need training nor time to get up to speed. Your startup experience means your used to working without much direction, you're used to working hard, you are flexible/resourceful, you understand the role and importance of sales, marketing, and customer service in an organization, and you are connected to the startup network -- a connection your employer could benefit from when hiring.

You should try to present the benefits you feel will maximally impress your future employee.

</comment><comment><USER45> I hope that if my startup doesn't take off that I'll be able get back in to a job. Though with 7yrs of actual corp. gig developing I might have a better chance.

Here some cool things you could do (some of which i'll have to do myself):

1.) Put your resume on Google docs NOW. Repost it from here. Make it a living document.

2.) Get a Google sites account. Possibly put up examples of your programming knowledge (essays?). Point your name.com to it if you can, otherwise make sure the site is sites.google.com/yourname

3.) Get a github account. Push your work up (even if it is only examples of your knowledge)

4.) Contribute to FOSS projects, get to know the committers and make contacts.

5.) Check out some freelance sites and as I understand it you could probably undercut a lot of these people. This might be some added experience you'll be able to add to your resume. After several jobs your resume should look a bit better.

6.) Good luck chap! Give me your twitter account so I can follow and RT. :-)

</comment><comment><USER46> I have no idea.

But you might try selling your abilities. Can you demonstrate your failed startup's code?

</comment><comment><USER47> Post some examples of your work. If you don't have anything then create a project to showcase your skills. That's where I'd start if I were in your shoes and it will generate interest if you have solid skills.

</comment><comment><USER48> Move to NYC. The companies there are desperate and will hire anyone.

<comment> clark-kent I am in NYC, I would like to know who is hiring?

<comment><USER49> If you're looking, email me. I make software for banks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> You actually do have work experience if you've been building your own company for the last 6 years. Do you have anything to show for it? If so, that's your resume. If you don't...well why not? That would be your real problem, not the lack of work history.

</comment><comment><USER51> What was the startup? You should be able to make an interesting pitch to other companies in the same field. You can present the idea, and what you accomplished-- it may be that a company in the same space would hire you and even buy your code.

</comment><comment><USER52> If you aren't attending events regularly, following the people you need to know from these events in advance on twitter and getting to know them and what they're about then you should be.

</comment><comment><USER53> What was the startup? Did you write code for that? Is there a website? How did you manage to spend 6 years with nothing to show for it?

</comment><comment><USER54> Do you have a site where you showcase your skills?

</comment><comment><USER55> we definitely need more stories like these to balance out the belief that doing a start-up is some how "easy". The reason is not to discourage people but to let them know what they are in for so that they can prepare better. It would also give some CS undergrads second thoughts about dropping out of college with the attitude that start-ups are easier.

</comment><comment><USER56> an unwillingness to work on closed-source webapps adds a further wedge to the situation. you have it pretty good - desperate "work on our proprietary centrally-hosted webapp" pleas for talented developers are oozing into every crack of the internet

</comment><comment><USER48> Out of curiosity, how did you support yourself without employment in SF for 6 years?

<comment><AUTHOR> Living in SF I spend less than $15,000 per year on rent and food (I cook). It isn't as expensive as many people think, especially if you limit your entertainment and activities to free things on the internet.

<comment><USER48> Well, I've done that, too, but I still had to have a job. Where did the $15,000 come from? That is what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Contact me -- my info is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER58> What is your startup? What does it do?

</comment><comment><USER59> I might have some work for you.

Can you speak Hindi?

<comment><AUTHOR> No but I can speak english and mandarin.

<comment><USER60> Where were you born? Do you have US citizenship?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, U.S. Citizen.

<comment><USER60> OK, thanks, I was wondering if maybe you were here on a visa that would require sponsorship for work or something.

Just trying to figure why there have been no leads before. I assume you have some sort of product you created and residue business stuff for the startup you did, right? It's not just that you spent 6 years in development and never released the product.

Well good luck, looks like you've got a few things lined up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm glad that I've spent the last couple of years making a name for myself in the big consultancy firms.

I may have to work as hard as a start-up founder but at least I get a nice pay packet and none of this '6years out of college with no career or anything to show for my efforts'.

I don't get why people spend years coming up with crap start-up ideas, failing, then trying the same failed recipe again. I wouldn't try and take something to market unless it was really hot. Your average web 2.0(crap) is just a waste of everyone's time. You could have been working your ass at a big consultancy or trading firm as a technologist in that time and made yourself some good money whilst actually having a life that doesn't involve ramen noodles.

<comment><USER61> Down voting me because you don't agree with me is stupid.

<comment><USER61> Typical HN downvotes. Far too busy circle jerking over your failed statups that rarely lead to anything other than wasted youth.

<comment><USER62> > Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it > makes boring reading. - <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> See how "PG is hurting the kids"? :) anyways, seriously I also find it hard to believe that someone with this kind of skill is willing to work for minimum wage. And seriously a successful startup will never be built by someone willing to work for minimum wage! Sorry to say this but you got issues bro!</comment>


Major sites and platforms experiencing outages... Dropbox and Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/26/major-sites-and-platforms-experiencing-outages-today-including-dropbox-and-google-app-engine/

<comment><USER2> Tumblr also seems to be affected by this outage.</comment>


Predator drones use less encryption than your TV, DVDs - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/predator-drones-use-less-encryption-than-your-tv.ars <comment><USER2> Related: [http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/not-just-drones- mili...](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/not-just-drones-militants- can-snoop-on-most-us- warplanes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+WiredDangerRoom+\(Blog+-+Danger+Room\))

While merely embarrassing on the surface, one has to consider the strong likelihood that the intelligence-gathering operations of other countries have probably known this for years and could by now have accumulated a vast amount of data on the disposition and tactics of US forces in multiple theaters. What an enormous strategic blunder.

<comment><USER3> That sounds somewhat overwrought. You can get much more and higher quality data on 'the disposition and tactics of US forces' from satellites, traffic analysis, reading the official sites of US military units and soldier's blogs than you can from terabytes of narrow-field grainy footage of the Hindu Kush or Sadr city. It might be of some tactical use to someone engaged in 'asymmetrical warfare' against US forces and is probably even more useful as a propaganda tool. The intelligence-gathering operations of other countries probably have more storage space dedicated to episodes of The Simpsons than intercepted US UAV video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would expect more rigorous reporting from ars. The reason that encryption techniques protecting DVDs and games fail is that the thing doing the decrypting is the thing that the enemy possesses: the game machine or dvd player. The machine has to have the decryption key in it somewhere, thus the whole stack of cards is a sham.

This is totally the opposite. The drones need only have the capacity to encrypt their video and decrypt command/control information from the host.

Both drone and host are unique devices that could (given their incredible pricetag) easily have unique public/private key pairs for each drone and each control station. Before takeoff each could be paired by an exchange of fresh keys. The only attack is brute-force with an as yet unavailable amount of computing power.

That they failed to do something like this for so long, well, words fail me.

<comment><USER5> >The only attack is brute-force with an as yet unavailable amount of computing power.

If they were doing it today all they would need is a $30 32 GB flash card full of random data to use as a one-time pad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Do they trust their soldiers/Marines with these encryption keys? Don't know that._

It's interesting to see how the Army and the MPAA respond differently to the same problem - it only takes one person to crack the code (or leak the secret keys) to render the whole scheme useless. The MPAA builds ridiculously complex encryption schemes in the hopes of slowing people down, and sues the downloaders it can find. The Army doesn't bother with encryption because it's too much of a burden, and kills the downloaders it can find.

<comment><USER7> Admittedly, the MPAA doesn't (yet) have the second option. Maybe it's the better of the two?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While it's momentarily surprising that the video feeds aren't encrypted, remember that the lead time on this type of equipment is often measured in decades. The drones deployed right now were probably designed in the early 90s, using early 90s computers.

No video feed back then was encrypted --- military or otherwise --- because the computers with the power even to digitize video in real time, let alone digitize it and then encrypt the digital stream, would have been huge.

It was a common selling point for satellite receivers back then that you could buy them and use them to watch the raw feed of just about everything being broadcast, because it was all analog streams being relayed in the clear. There's actually a pretty good movie floating around the internet called "Feed," [1] made by a guy recording satellite feeds of the 1992 election coverage.

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104244/>

<comment><USER9> I disagree on the point that digital video is required for scrambling the feed. Commercial feeds such as HBO have been scrambled since 1986, albeit with analog schemes. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocipher>

DVB-S came out in 1993 and was one of the first digital standards. It uses DES-based encryption. <http://www.dvb.org/about_dvb/history/>

While it may have been difficult to fully-encrypt the video with airborne hardware in the early 1990's, they certainly could have made some effort to scramble it. And by now, it should have been updated to 2002-era webcam technology.

Most of the surprise is people confusing the NSA with the military. While the NSA may have the latest and greatest tech, the military is always much farther behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said."_

Right. Because people in third-world countries are clearly far too backwards and ignorant to understand anything involving _computers_ or _technology_.

<comment><USER11> This is the comment in these stories that has irked me the most.

<comment><USER12> It is just political posturing, not an oversight

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This isn't really news to the satellite feed community. The military and private military contractors have been broadcasting unencrypted feeds of operations for a long time.

<comment><USER14> Citation? Any links to a satellite feed community forum in which they've discussed receiving a predator drone feed?

<comment><USER13> The posts in queston to have been removed (for obvious reasons I presume)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am wondering if we don't have a bit of an overreaction to this story here. The presence of the drones is not a secret, nor are their locations.

It wasn't until the recent upgrade of Air Force 1 that the communications between ground and the president's airplane were encrypted. Anyone with a short wave radio could listen in.

What exactly is the risk that they are reading this?

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't mistake what I mean here, General Atomics should be embarassed about this whole entire ordeal...

But.

Is it really necessary that they encrypt the video streams? The people these aircraft are surveiling, for the most part, know of the plane's presence. Are they really gaining THAT much of an advantage of being able to see their _own_ position?

Beyond that--not to go into full tinfoil-hat mode, but maybe this non- encryption is _intentional_? Letting the surveilled see SOME of the footage, then playing LOTS AND LOTS more would only serve to confuse/frighten them.

<comment><USER17> Usually if you're conducting surveillance, you don't want other people to know that you know their position. Something tells me that getting access to this type of information would... lessen.. its strategic use.

But hey, this means I can start sending user logins in cleartext and add in the product page that we have "military-grade security."

<comment><USER18> But would you be honest and claim military grade unencryption?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how much the contractor charged us taxpayers for this system?

<comment><USER20> Not that I really know, but in defense of the contractor I'm guessing that the Predator-to-satellite uplink and satellite-to-HQ downlink protocols were dictated by the Pentagon in the RFP and statements of work to use existing military signal protocols and the contractors really didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do the control mechanisms depend on a secure authentication system, at least? I mean, some of these drones carry weapons...

</comment><comment><USER22> Someone took too far the "DRM free" slogan.</comment>


Kurzweil's new book: How to Create a Mind - <AUTHOR> http://howtocreateamind.com/

<comment><USER3> >He describes his new theory of how the neocortex (the thinking part of the brain) works: as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers.

So is this _On Intelligence 2_?

I'm glad he's figured out how the brain works. He's going to need it to solve the turing test in less than 17 years: <http://longbets.org/1/>

On a serious note, if you're going to have a "Videos" page on your new book's website, you need to have more than 2 videos (3 and 6 years old). If your argument is that technology is progressing at an exponential rate (which I find stupid, but let's take it at face value), then two videos from several years ago are probably worthless by now.

<comment><USER4> It can't just be pattern recognizers at every level of the hierarchy of abstraction/organization anyway. I mean, eventually, after I process inputs and come to understandings of them, I also produce patterns, sequence them, compare them, prune them, and occasionally produce them as outputs. Unless that phrase "of pattern recognizers" is supposed to be labeling only the lowest level of building blocks that go into the self-organizing hierarchical system, in which case, it is much like saying a jet-engine is just atoms arraigned somehow... not a very complete explanation.

Also, self-organized? I know the way he meant it. But it irks me, considering all the structured inputs that a child gets, training material for the programming of neural connections, different at various stages of mental development, tailored toward particular chosen outcomes using centuries to eons of human experience on building minds in young brain matter. A modern person's mind is also quite constructed by, if one is lucky, one's good parents/family and cultural environment.

I know, I know, I'm picking on a promo-speak blurb, there no doubt better ways for me to have spent this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every time I hear about the inevitability of the singularity, all I can think about is what a precariously balanced collection of hacks actual computer programs are at their core, and how far off that is from true intelligence. Am I just pessimistic or are we a complete paradigm shift or two away of even getting close to true AI?

<comment><USER6> I would argue that evolution overall often looks like a "precariously balanced collection of hacks". So, it would be irrational to expect evolution's solution to the problem of intelligence to be any different.

<comment><USER7> Evolution may seem like a "precariously balanced collection of hacks" but it takes a long time. As an analogy, the singularity is so far off because our current computing power is essentially invertebrate multi-celled organisms. Computers still need a backbone, get out of the oceans, and breathe air - <USER2> this is long before they can store a human existence.

Kurzweil seems to think it's close out of _hope_. I think he's just insanely afraid of dying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I look forward to reading this book, I recommend interested people balance it somewhat with one of the books by Uttal. Neural Theories of Mind and The New Phrenology are both good reads that raise theoretical and practical hurdles to reverse engineering brains.

</comment><comment><USER9> Obvious differences aside, there's something about the presentation of this (e.g., "the secret of human thought revealed") that reminds me of Deepak Chopra.

<comment><USER3> Well, Kurzweil _did_ write a book called _Age of the Spiritual Machines._ And he does think he's going to be able to live forever and essentially reconstruct his dead father. And he does take 150 (previously 250) supplements and 10 glasses of alkaline water per day. And he did write a nutrition book about avoiding fat, particularly butter, organ meats, and eggs.

So I'd say there's more than a passing resemblance to the master of woo himself.

<comment><USER10> > _And he does think he's going to be able to live forever and essentially > reconstruct his dead father. And he does take 150 (previously 250) > supplements and 10 glasses of alkaline water per day. And he did write a > nutrition book about avoiding fat, particularly butter, organ meats, and > eggs._

Yes, and Michael Jackson avoided germs at all costs, and slept in oxygen tanks. I wonder how that worked out...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's sad this crank gets support from so many influential people. I guess since the death of science journalism they embrace whatever is out there.

<comment><USER12> This crank is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more accomplished than you!

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#section_1>

Stop insulting yourself.

<comment><USER11> Ironically the kind of measurement he would appreciate as sound science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I keep trying to read the singularity is near. It just feels like a a drag so it gets put down. So much repetition and irrelevance, diversions etc. I hope his writing has improved.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/13/singularitaria...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/13/singularitarianism/)</comment>


New data uncovers the surprising predictability of Android lock patterns - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/new-data-uncovers-the-surprising-predictability-of-android-lock-patterns/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why people ever use a pattern lock beyond using it to kid- proof their phone. It can't stop a serious attempt to unlock the phone.

edit:typo</comment>


Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;jsessionid=BYRFMD0QYRQTVQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/money/2007/09/19/bcnsaudi119.xml <comment><USER2> N.YC is now one step away from becoming another reddit. All we need now is one "bush/cheney is evil" story on the front page and the transformation will be complete.

<comment><USER3> The comment/submit buttons needs to be hidden in the source, like the down vote button was, so only hackers can figure out how to use the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to reddit this means we're all going to fucking die.

<comment><USER5> Before or after we invade Iran?

<comment><USER6> After we're beaten up and attacked with Tasers at the door of Best Buy for failing to show our papers but not before we've seen the best picture of a tree we've seen all day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One country that has a lot of gain from maintaining the peg is China and it happens to have the resources to do so if it comes to it.

</comment><comment><USER8> From what I understand, currencies tend to reflect purchasing power parities. Something as arbitrary as the currency used in oil sales won't change US productivity, which is the most important component of wealth.

So I'm not too worried about this kind of thing.

I can imagine some disruption caused by reaction to this though, especially if congress tried to solve the problem.

Either way, I have a mortgage. Nothing would make me happier than to have my debt mean less which a falling dollar :-P

<comment><USER9> What, do you get paid in Euros?

<comment><USER8> My mortgage is a fixed contract, while my salary is fluid.

<comment><USER10> Children playing with stacks of worthless currency, Germany 1923: <http://sablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/weimar2.jpg>

I'm not saying it'll happen in the US, but anything's possible (especially to degrees, see current subprime crisis), especially with a reckless leader at the helm who doesn't understand that we need to, you know, actually pay back all this debt we're accumulating as a country one day.

Great article on the subject: <http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5955/>

<comment><USER8> That must be come foil to Godwin's Law, right? Talking about economic matters and bringing up Weimar :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fans of the 'Arab pullout causes dollar collapse, worldwide financial panic' genre may want to NetFlix 'Rollover' (Kris Kristofferson, Jane Fonda, 1981). And also stop posting such stories to YC HN, unless they've got a hacker/startup angle, like "How to profit from the coming financial collapse with AJAX Facebook Apps!"</comment>


QT 5 launched by new owner, Digia - <AUTHOR> http://digia.com/en/Home/Company/News/Digia-launches-Qt-5-cross-platform-application-development-and-UI-framework/ <comment><USER3> "Qt 5 delivers a step function increase in performance, functionality and ease of use and will be the platform on _which full Android and iOS support will be delivered during the coming year_."

<comment><USER4> I've heard people mentioning they already have Qt applications in both App Store and Google Play, but I don't know any specifics. So I suppose the support is there with some tweaking already.

And of course Qt will be the main SDK for both Blackberry 10 and Jolla's Sailfish.

<comment><USER5> Didn't know about Sailfish. Interesting that they're focusing on multitasking.

It made me wonder whether BeOS might not make a great mobile OS. Designed for limited hardware, excellent multitasking, and an opensource version in alpha status now.

<comment><USER6> Having experienced BeOS, I've always been bummed it didn't see wider success. Its UI responsiveness under heavy load has never been equaled.

<comment><USER7> Achieving UI responsiveness under heavy load is not particularly challenging - the Amiga did it well too, without much effort:

Put UI handling in separate threads/processes (Amiga "Tasks" would've been processes in a memory protected OS, but since AmigaOS isn't, for all intents and purposes a Task behaves like a thread in modern OS"s), and prioritise input and UI control handling threads higher than others.

Lack of UI responsiveness under load in modern OS's is down to laziness - <USER2> was largely a solved problem 20 years ago, on hardware magnitudes slower.

<comment><USER8> It's not particularly challenging theoretically, and yet it is so seldom achieved that it is very sad.

My old iphone 3G stalls for seconds at a time due to memory pressure; Windows stalls for seconds at a time due to CPU pressure. So does Linux with X; I have no experience with Android, but I'd be surprised if it is different.

So apparently, it IS a challenge, even though there is no rational explanation why it should be.

<comment><USER9> * Garbage collection

* APIs blocking on network operations (e.g., gethostbyname())

How does BeOS avoid/avoid lagging with these things?

<comment><USER10> The achieved the latter by making "the right way" also be "the commonly-used way"

Be Inc did 2 things well in this regard

* They designed their API/App Framework so that launching threads was easy, and passing messages between threads was safe & easy

* They developed a culture (both within the organisation and also within their developer community) of using those features everywhere.

Those two things are more closely linked than they may appear. The framework was explicitly message-based. You interacted with different components by sending and receiving messages. And it was heavily threaded (Be called it "pervasive multi-threading"), to the extent that every window had its own thread, separate to the main app thread.

By having those features, and not having any particularly good way to write apps except by using the official framework, the developer community was forced to learn how to develop multi-threaded, message-passing apps.

And once developers started to think in terms of messages and threads, it was natural for them to use those elements to solve all sorts of problems, so that no self-respecting BeOS developer would ever think to do significant processing inside any of the UI handling threads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People from hacker news, check out qtquick or QML, it's like html but without the legacy and the bad parts, just powerful syntax for developing apps, and thanks to network transparency QML can be downloaded from the web also.

QT5 is a dream come true, and when it becomes omni-deployable (android, ios, raspberry pi) it will be even better.

<comment><USER12> QML is nice, but make sure you have the processor overhead for it. It's all javascript and the interpreter will suck up your processor time.

For people doing lower-end embedded stuff Qt5 isn't going to give you much, if you can run it at all.

<comment><USER13> Qt5's QML2 is using V8 as the JS engine and an opengl es2 scenegraph, so it's actually quite fast. Depending on your embedded platform, you should still be able to achieve pretty impressive performance.

<comment><USER12> Um, okay. Can you point me to a MIPS implementation of V8 that runs well on a 360 MHz R1 architecture? Oh and my CPU doesn't have any hardware OpenGLES acceleration. How should I work on that?

<comment><USER14> fortunately or unfortunately the future will require all gui capable computers to have hardware accelerated graphics. To compensate for bad drivers there will be fallbacks to somewhat fast software rasterizers like llvmpipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a recent presentation on the Qt 5 Roadmap available online:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QgG9oYhH-c>

Slides for this and other Qt talks are available here:

<http://qtconference.kdab.com/node/25>

</comment><comment><USER16> So I see that there is the open source project Qt-Jambi, which provides java bindings into Qt, and apparently has a "generator" for working with future versions of Qt.

Assuming it comes up to speed with Qt5, I'd like to try this with clojure.

Anyone have any experience with Qt and Java/Clojure?

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

<comment><USER17> I tried it out a few years back. Using it from clojure was a bit painful at the time but you might have more luck today. Qt-Jambi relies pretty heavily on Java introspection eg scanning the fields of a class to find things of type Slot. I also had to write my own repl because UI actions are only allowed to happen inside the event loop thread. Check out github.com/jamii/inkling for some examples which may still be relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great news, QT is such an amazing platform, I'm happy to see it's being actively developed by their new owner :)

</comment><comment><USER19> They are also going to expand support for OpenGL in Qt 5.1, it seems:

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1N...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1NjI)

</comment><comment><USER20> I've really wanted to dive into this for a side project. On the limited time I've had, I notice the Creator IDE UI and tutorials take an extra step I'm not used which is probably from translating the experience from Finnish to my own language (American English). Just a random guess but the commercial version could increase uptake by doing a round or two of "visual/workflow qa" for a wider-range of global users (especially the folks looking to speed through to working QML/JS demos). Will keep digging ... the "deploy local windowing" to Lin/Win/Mac looks truthy. (I think I should just start simple with a text editor and the compiler next go round)

<comment><USER21> if you want to play with it and learn your way around the api, it's easier to get up and running with python+pyqt than with c++. the python bindings are very well supported and there're lots of blog posts and tutorials out there.

<comment><USER22> Does pyqt work with the just announced version 5.0?

<comment><USER21> yep. see <http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/news/pyqt-496>. the pyqt bindings are supported by riverbank, which offers commercial licenses, so they have every incentive to keep it up to date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Qt's "Write once, deploy everywhere" has been able for many years on the desktop, until mobile revolution came with incompatible interfaces and now we have to start again. Good news they are working on a solution to this challenging problem!

</comment><comment><USER24> Now gimme PyQt5 and ill have a very merry Christmas indeed :)

<comment><USER25> You meant PySide 5, right? ;)

<comment><USER24> After i migrate from Solaris to Linux i suspect yes. Oh the things I'll be able to do once Solaris is merely a bad memory...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Qt is the best. Without it, I will not use c++ anymore.

<comment><USER27> Hah, that's pretty much what I said: [http://weblog.jeroen.ws/blog/2012/11/19/how-relevant-is-c- pl...](http://weblog.jeroen.ws/blog/2012/11/19/how-relevant-is-c-plus-plus- today/)

<comment><USER28> Wtf! We work together for months and you never tell me that you have a blog?

<comment><USER29> Seriously dude, I'm pretty upset about this. Please see me in my office first thing tomorrow morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why link to the press release and not the epic video? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhWS_bN-T3k>

<comment><AUTHOR> beacause... reading! Really should have linked to the changelog

</comment></comment><comment> shawn-butler The new signal-slot syntax for Qt5.0 [0] really makes a lot of sense when combined with new c++11 lambdas. But I guess I don't understand what they mean regarding support for c++11 generally.

Are we talking about significant rewrites and with what compiler? I don't see vendors reaching compliance for at least a year.

[0]: <http://qt-project.org/wiki/New_Signal_Slot_Syntax>

<comment><USER9> Will it still require a custom preprocessing step?

<comment> shawn-butler The new syntax would not as type safety is being enforced at compile time. However the old syntax using strings is also available so if it is, then yes used the same preprocessor macro step will apply.

Was reading to find answers to some of my own questions and found this link helpful regarding use of c++11 in Qt5 [0]. Use of c++11 features seems limited in the first release which makes sense.

[0]: <http://woboq.com/blog/cpp11-in-qt5.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you already know C++ what would be a good book to learn QT?

<comment><USER32> C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (2nd Edition) seemed ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there a dance? (see <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbTEVbQLC8s>)

</comment><comment><USER34> I really hope, Qt5 will become the same native cross-platform solution for mobile platforms which it became for desktop applications.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here, I thought that Apple had sold Quick Time.

<comment><USER36> People will never learn to spell Qt correctly. _Never_. Same with pronunciation.

<comment><USER37> You know why this is? Because there is no correct pronunciation in English for two consecutive consonants. Similarly, SQL is not pronounced "sequel", because it contains no vowels. TeX is not pronounced "teck" because there no letter chi in the Roman alphabet.

All these cutesy insider pronunciations only serve to confuse and alienate the uninitiated, it's elitist nonsense.

<comment><USER38> I pronounced SQL by saying each letter for a long time, as I'd learnt all about it online and never spoken to anyone about it. It didn't help that I often worked with MSSQL, or... Messequel?

<comment><USER39> "Sequel Server", maybe? It's more pleasing to the ears.

<comment><USER40> I tend to say "Sequel Server" but also "My S Q L". Am I weird?

<comment><USER41> Not as weird as me because I've been calling it "Mysquirrel."

<comment><USER42> It can't be that weird, as I too call it this. I had assumed that I was the only one!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> QT5's success will lead to sailfish,BB10 and other qt based project's success.And it's contest between C++ and objective-c.

</comment><comment><USER44> Does anyone know if Python bindings are on their way?

<comment><USER45> PyQt 4.9.6 already supported Qt 5.0-rc1, so I guess it's a matter of days (or you could try compiling that against 5.0 GA , it might work just fine).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone has an idea of how much it costs to license Qt?

<comment><USER47> It's licensed under LGPL 2.1 (or GPL3 if you prefer), so it's free for proprietary/closed-source usage as long as you don't modify Qt itself, or if you at least distribute the source code of the modified Qt binaries. There is also a commercial license if you want support or to be able to modify Qt for a closed-source project, but that requires direct contact with their sales folks afaik.

<comment><AUTHOR> i would assume the more interesting information is how much does it cost to license in a commercial project.</comment></comment></comment>


Spore is about evolution. Or is it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2199922/pagenum/all/#page_start <comment><USER2> I bought Spore the day it came out. Played till space stage. It's ultimately boring. The 2 evolution stages are a lot of fun but the game loses depth after that. It's way to easy to conquer the world in tribal and civ stages. Space is little more than making colonies and buying/selling spice for money. The combat system seems like it was added as an afterthought. You can terraform planets, but it's not as cool as it sounds. There's just way too much micromanagement going on. If I'm trying to spread around the galaxy, it's annoying to have to manage riots in cities on various worlds while being at war and trying to stabilize several ecologies by moving the right kind of grass or bush from one place to another. The whole game is just incredibly shallow.

<comment><USER3> yeah the space stage is very boring after you spend a few hours getting your things together

Trade? I have 4 systems within a short range of my home system, each has every planet maxed out and every colony maxed out. Which means I get 30 items of spice very quickly. When I stopped playing(after 2 days) I had a grand total of 90 million.

Terraforming? I have the maxed out cargo bay and have 50 items of each stage for terraforming. If I run out, I can go to any of my planets and just shoot the beam around getting only those that I like

Battle? I have 5 sidekicks, they are useless though since my ship has something like 11000 health, has the shield option that makes it invincible for a few minutes and has maxed out weaponry. Meaning I can take out another home planet(8 colonies) w/o needing to recharge/heal...takes like 30 seconds to hover over a colony, shoot up the main ring of buildings, and then have them surrender with 3 shots at the town hall.

Customization? Sure its fun at first, but it gets boring fast, by the end of it I just went to the database and pulled out old designs.

Alliances? Also boring, I'm down to only needing to do one mission to get a full fledged alliance and there is only like 3 variations there.

Looking back I'd say I spent more time designing the creatures, buildings and units than I did playing the actual game. i.e. I spent more time designing the town hall in the world stage, than I did actually playing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Spore contains Intelligent Design elements? How awful! Let's build a computer game in which the player has no direct influence whatsoever!

<comment><USER5> you've been upvoted because despite your sarcasm I actually think a game where you control some of the initial settings and then sit back and watch mutations/evolution happen would be really cool. More like a digital mutant ant farm.

<comment><USER6> That would be Tiny Crawl World, or one of the related designs: <http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=29>

(Sean Howard's work is about as close as you'll get to "Game Design design patterns.")

<comment><USER5> wow thanks for the link! Some interesting ideas on there for sure. While it meets the criteria of "passive interaction" it doesn't really touch on mutation/evolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it's because I live in Massachusetts and not Kansas, but I really deplore the fighting back and forth between armchair (and actual) evolutionary biologists with the anti-science rightwing religious groups. While I am on the side of science of course, it annoys me how counterproductive the whole fight has become. The need for evo bio people to fend off ID types in arguments has made the pro-science public less humble, and less accurate too, because we forget how little we actually know about how evolution works, and instead cling to the politically strongest ideas that science generates. In fact, many fundamental problems that need to be solved are being bullied into the margins by the need to make evolutionary theory seem stronger than it really is. In the last 10-15 years The MIT Press has put out several good books delving into the cutting edge of evolutionary theory, among other things exploring the role of complexity in evolution. It may surprise some that "natural selection" is not universally agreed on, as there is a competing paradigm in which the production of forms is the driver of change, and selection is hypothesized to be a filter, having more of a conserving than progressive force on organisms. The problem is that too many scientists outside of biology assume that the neo-Darwinian synthesis popularized by philosophers like Dennett and Dawkins (also fighters in the battle against religion, not coincidentally), is the one and established view, and allow it to shape the interpretation of results in other fields. Perhaps if we were to ignore the creationists instead of fighting them, then we could acknowledge the primitive state of our models and make some real progress.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow this guy just destroyed my childhood love of simcity....</comment>


Vigil: Open Source Status Page in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/valeriansaliou/vigil <comment><AUTHOR> Notes:

\---

Vigil is an open-source Status Page built in Rust that you can host on your infrastructure. You can use it to monitor all your servers and apps, and get a Web Status Page visible to your users (ie. on a domain of your choice, eg. status.example.com).

It is useful in microservices contexts to monitor both apps and backends. If a node goes down in your infrastructure, you receive a status change notification in a Slack channel (eg. #infrastructure). Your phone / watch / etc. will ping you when something goes wrong, or when the infrastructure auto- recovered from downtime).

Vigil is usually used in a SaaS context to monitor tens of services, but it can also prove useful to monitor services on eg. a personal server, or monitor a small infrastructure made of APIs.

\---

This is an open-source version of [https://status.crisp.chat/](https://status.crisp.chat/) which we've been running over the last 2 years. It saved our service from small to large downtimes hundreds of time. This is why we're now releasing it as Open Source, as most SaaS starting up won't need to use a complex, expensive commercial solution while a self-hosted app would do.

This is part of our effort to give back to the OSS community. Hope this can help :)

We're open to feedbacks & feature requests.

</comment><comment><USER2> Again a banana attached to a gorilla and a whole jungle. Why can't we have a dashboard that just displays whatever is in its configured data store, and a data store filled with whatever is collected about the environment? It's always another dashboard-with-datastore-and-monitoring-agent in one complete, impossible to separate package, which is effectively a crippled attempt at building a monitoring system? (I wrote all three separate things, dashboard, data store, and monitoring agent, and I am using them in production, so I know it's a doable plan.)</comment>


100 Years of Computer Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/100-years-computer-science?utm_campaign=technology&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

<comment><USER2> Interesting list. I expect I've never read a paper pre-1980s. I find older papers difficult going. Firstly because they are often scans from typewritten text and can be difficult to read, but more importantly because notation and nomenclature changes over time. Trying to work out if the old term is the same thing as the new term can take a surprisingly long time, particularly if the paper references other papers for its core definitions.

<comment><USER3> > because notation and nomenclature changes over time.

That is why there are desires to standardize Physics notation [1]. It would be nice if a newer field, such as CS, could learn from those mistakes early.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831497)

<comment><USER4> It is probably a safe bet that a large portion of notation and nomenclature that is in wide use, was put forth as a means to standardize its use. It isn't like folk thought, "I want to confuse folks with my terminology."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was a cute nod to _Growing A Language_ , the one-syllable description.

</comment><comment><USER6> I liked the first two papers. Also when two years prior I did read the Shannon's paper. Must read for anyone looking for some Theoretical Mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER7> Non-Cooperative Games is down sadly</comment>


Why Obama Can't Ignore Education Tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc20081223_067401.htm?campaign_id=rss_topEmailedStories <comment><USER2> Computers don't matter if the kids can't read.</comment>


McDonald's opens new $250M headquarters - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/08/inside-mcdonalds-new-250-million-headquarters.html <comment><USER2> This is built on the old Harpo Studios (Oprah) location in Chicago. Nicely done. But, you can class up the headquarters but you're still selling burgers at the end of the day.</comment>