Moving to New York: a Guide for Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://code.dblock.org/ShowPost.aspx?id=225

<comment><USER4> _The idea that New York cost of living is much higher is just false. You can sacrifice a bit of space and maybe the location and pay the same amount as you're paying now._

This seems objectively false. By definition, if it costs more to buy the same size apartment, then the cost of living (vis a vis housing) is higher. Yes, you can downsize and accept having to live with roommates to get by, but that doesn't mean the cost of living isn't higher.

According to a cost of living comparison between Austin, TX (where I live) and NYC, you would need to make 140k in NYC to match 90k in Austin:

[http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=90000&city1=548050...](http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=90000&city1=54805000&city2=53651000)

<comment><USER5> The real mitigating factor is the car. When you cut out car payment/car depreciation, insurance, gas, maitenance and take that money and put it towards your housing, it evens out.

I own my car outright, but I expect maybe $100 a month in maitenance, $100 a month in insurance, $200 in gas, and probably $100-$200 a month in depreciation. My current rent for a 3BR house with a yard is $1400. I don't need a 3BR, but I literally can not rent anything smaller that isn't a shitty apartment, so basically I can't spend less than that.

So what can I get for $1900 in NYC? From what I've seen, I'd like it better than what I have right now. Will I get exactly the same square footage? Of course not. I will have someone living above me and below me where now I have a single family home. But it's an apples to oranges comparison, it would take millions of dollars to buy the amount of land I'm currently renting and build a single family home - becuase its a _city_. It's just inherently different.

I want enough room to have a bedroom, a bathroom, an office with my computer and a pull-out couch for friends, a kitchen to cook in and a family room/dining room to have a couch, a TV and a table to eat at. I can pull that off on my current salary whether its in NYC or elsewhere. So a cost of living calculator doesn't take into effect the fact that although the dimensions of the room are smaller, the NYC apartment is functionally the same as my current one that is far, far, bigger.

<comment><USER6> Another data point: I've lived in Austin for 13 years witbout a car. I am 31. I live in what I consider the best part of Central Austin and ride the bus to downtown for concerts/drinks or to the University area, walk to nearby bars and coffee shops. 1100 sq ft with front and back yard, garage for 900. Split with roommate is 450. No state income tax. I understand that New York has a million options and many city amenities, but I dont understand how one could say the costs even out.

<comment><USER7> It won't even out from everywhere - I would say that living for $450 a month in a decent place in an urban part of a major American city is abnormally inexpensive.

The article's author came from Seattle - and I can say without a doubt that this city is _expensive_. Not NYC expensive, but if you took a nice place in Bellevue or Kirkland, and included the cost you're paying for your car - <USER2> would come up to NYC rent.

I'm in the middle of a relocation to SF right now, and equivalent rents in SF are maybe ~30% higher than here in Seattle... When you're in the ballpark as SF, you're an expensive city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _You will always a job in any city, state or country. Even if you suck, there will always be someone to hire you because the market of software engineers is hot and the numbers play in your favor_

As someone who has tried to figure out how to live in the area I grew up (northwestern Minnesota) instead of New York or the Bay area, this isn't quite accurate. In many (most?) flyover states software jobs pay 1/5-1/3 what you would make in NYC. The only technology needed is .NET or sometimes Java - <USER3> last 5 years of "scaling Ruby" or whatever you were doing, are more like a five year gap in your resume. The number of available positions are orders of magnitude less than NYC or the Bay. Often, you can get paid more and have an easier time getting work if you're an IT dude, rather than a software developer. The other option is being a remote worker for someplace cool but you usually need to have a career somewhere else for a few years to make connections. Of course, the American outback might be a good place to hole up and work on your own software startup for a while, but as soon as you need to hire you'll have to move again.

If you want to be able to throw a dart at a map and pick up high paying work wherever you want, the answer is still being an MD. The worst MD in North Dakota can make what the best software engineer in Manhattan makes. In a weird inversion of most employment reality, doctors can often make far more in a rural setting than they can in a mid-sided metro, due to "hardship post" style compensation. The career that is a close second for job mobility is "physicians assistant" - they make 80 grand no matter where they live.

<comment><USER9> Your "scaling Ruby" experience is in great demand in Minnesota, as one would notice from the volume of postings on the Ruby Users of Minnesota (<http://ruby.mn>) mailing list. At least in the Twin Cities, there are a lot of developer jobs now. Most of them suck, but most jobs suck everywhere. There are fewer startups, that is very true.

<comment><USER8> Cool, I'll check it out. However, I live five hours north of the Twin Cities, and am not really looking for a job unless its something really cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The idea that New York cost of living is much higher is just false. You can sacrifice a bit of space and maybe the location and pay the same amount as you're paying now."

Or I could do that HERE and pay less, too. So it's -true-.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. I just left NYC for Seattle. There were many reasons behind that - cost of living being one of them.

However, its all relative...

If I were single and wanted to eat noodles and share an apartment I could easily make NYC work - but things are still a bit more expensive, even buying beer on tap ($5 for Bud-like-quality, $6 for Guinness in many places). Don't forget you need to keep up with all those ironic t-shirts and that lomo camera ain't cheap :)

However, now that I have kids and would want very simple things like a garden, a good school, in a relatively safe neighborhood then you have to be prepared to pay a huge amount in rent to be in that school district and to get that ground-sloor apartment in a nice brownstone (in Park Slope, Brooklyn that would be close to $4K a month in rent for a 2bdr - thats based on some parents I know and what they pay).

<comment><AUTHOR> What's that place in Seattle that you're comparing with a ground floor apartment in a brownstone in Park Slope (the hot place to live for families)?

<comment><USER11> There might be better examples - but right now Ballard. 3bdr, 2br, loft, more sq feet, garage, in great school district, garden, separate deck, washer, dryer = <$2K. Probably pay $4K to 5K in NYC (Park Slope). 35 min commute to work (or I can cycle)

<comment><USER12> I live in Park Slope, and those numbers are a bit high. You can get a beautiful 3BR brownstone (exposed brick, high ceilings, hardwood floors, etc) in Park Slope for well under $3500.

<comment> old-gregg Hm... I failed to find any liveable 2br apartments for $2,700 in Park Slope in the fall of 08, despite banks going bust left&right. And from what I hear it only got more expensive since then. Ironically, UWS turned out to be cheaper so that's where I lived.

Haha, this was a typical NYC experience: comparing rents and not believing the deals other people are getting :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Drinking happens in New York every day, except Saturday. On Saturday people > try to hide as those people that only go out on week-ends take over. Life > resumes on Sunday night.

So true

<comment><AUTHOR> Finally someone noticed the important paragraph of my post! +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Simple little tip: You can save a ton of money for you and the rental owner if you go directly to the property management company and leave out the rental broker. I found several great apartments this way, I called the property management company told them what I wanted and they gave me a hand full of keys and addresses and I showed my self the apartments. The brokers make money from you and they charge the property managers a fee so you can actually get a place with lower rent this way.

<comment><USER15> Where can you find the numbers of property management companies?

<comment><USER16> <http://www.nybits.com/> lists no fee apartments Also, there is often a sign outside the building with the number of the management co. on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is my current apartment:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/squidiculous/sets/7215762598544...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/squidiculous/sets/72157625985445247/)

It does not look that nice right now. Those photos were taken by the previous tenant, who was an artist and put some time into the place. Still, I love this apartment. I pay $1,600 a month for it. I'm in Brooklyn (16 Waverly Ave, right by the old Naval Yards, about 12 blocks outside of Dumbo).

I agree with the person who said the main cost savings in New York is that you do not need a car. I get everywhere with my bicycle. When it is raining, I take the MTA. The unlimited MTA is about $100 a month, which is slightly more than $3 a day for unlimited travel by subway and bus. Not a bad deal.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd love to read the article "Moving to San Francisco: a Guide for Software Engineers" ... moving there in august.

<comment><USER19> [http://paulstamatiou.com/atlanta-to-san-francisco-moving- cro...](http://paulstamatiou.com/atlanta-to-san-francisco-moving-cross- country)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> An interesting read. I'm born and raised in the UK, 23 years old and would love to move to NYC in the next few years. The problem for people outside of the UK is always going to be the immigration process - I'm having trouble figuring out the chicken and egg problem (job first, or move first?) and how exactly I should go about moving.

That aside, I found this article interesting, especially with regards to rent. I loved every second I've spent in NYC, hopefully I'll be there to work eventually.

<comment><USER21> FYI : I'm a UK national that's been running a UK-majority owned LLC in NYC for the last ~12 years (check out the E-2 visa). If you'd like to discuss doing something productive software-wise in NYC, let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hey look, an interesting article.

 _As a software engineer you're very privileged. You will always a job in any city, state or country. Even if you suck, there will always be someone to hire you because the market of software engineers is hot and the numbers play in your favor._

Oh, it's satire.

EDIT: Okay, wow, apparently it's _not_ satire. In that case, i have no idea how the author got this idea but i don't think he could be more far off.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have a different experience, you should write about it! About a 100% of engineers around me have succeeded in finding jobs very quickly and had choices, which is not the experience of 95% of people in this world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shameless plug, but should you decide to follow the article and move to New York, my startup can help you figure out where to live and hang out: <http://nabewise.com/nyc> . We also cover many other places that engineers might want to live.

<comment><USER24> This site looks pretty cool. I'd like to see some more cities listed.

<comment><USER23> We're working on it! Our current plan is to get new cities up every week or two. We perform a lot of curation and research on top of raw data sources to get the cities in. Any places you'd like to see in particular?

<comment><USER25> Pittsburgh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-hawk One of the best places to live in New York is actually New Jersey. Large areas of Jersey City and Hoboken and their surroundings are just as easy to commute via the PATH subway or a bus or even a ferry. Rent goes very roughly 20% cheaper than Manhattan for similar digs, everything from tiny studios to ultramodern luxury towers. Hoboken has plenty of nightlife in its own right too. Car rentals for weekend trips are as much as 50% cheaper in NJ. Bonus: you don't pay NYC income tax, and NJ sales tax is a bit less than NY.

I've lived in NJ and commuted to NY for essentially my entire professional life, and quite happy with that setup.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll get to put this to the test in another month or so as I move from DC to NYC.

It helps that DC is almost as expensive, everything I've seen so far apartment-wise looks like I'll be paying the same amount of money for a 2 bedroom that I'm currently paying for a 1 bedroom (albeit smaller overall square footage).

I'll also have an extra 200 a month from not having a car (insurance and parking), and most other costs seem to be about the same.

If I were moving from somewhere cheaper, maybe I'd feel differently.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great article! If anyone is in the NYC area and interested in working on <http://min.us/pages/about> , feel free to send me an email! email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER28> Some are making it even cheaper to live in NYC with a Startup Co-Living space

<http://www.indiegogo.com/scls>

</comment><comment><USER29> Awesome article, if anyone knows of an equivalent article about moving to London, please provide a link

</comment><comment><USER30> A little off-topic, but how hard is it to move/work in NYC if you're Canadian?

<comment><USER31> If you have a bachelors degree in a useful field it's very easy with a NAFTA (TN) Visa.

<comment><USER32> This is correct, but US immigration are quite picky about the kinds of job titles that they will allow you to gat a TN visa for. The general rule is the job title needs to say "computer analyst" and "management consultant", and avoid the words 'developer', 'programmer' and 'manager'.

Also smaller border crossings tend to be better than large airports. YVR and YYZ are quite strict about documentation requirements and are a bit power- trippy from my and friends' experiences. Land crossings are better.

<comment><USER33> I've actually found the opposite. The people working at the smaller crossings seemed bored out of their minds, so they went crazy when we arrived.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meat stylus for the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/10/02/meat-stylus-for-the-iphone <comment><USER2> Reminds of me that table saw that stops in an instant when it comes in contact with a human finger. They tested with hot dogs to simulate a human finger (although the creator does use his own finger). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTUOhYcw4ZY>

</comment><comment><USER3> So disappointed; that headline had such promise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Someone needs to make some gloves where the fingertips are a material that works with touchscreens.

<comment><USER5> I believe these exist already. They feature a small metal mesh sewn into the tip of the index finger.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I didn't know these existed. Found via google <http://www.dotsgloves.com/>

<comment><USER6> I'm to understand that you can convert any pair of gloves to do this by just sewing conductive thread into the fingertips. ([http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...](http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8544))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It should be noted that any relatively thin glove made of wool or synthetic fiber lets you still manipulate an iphone screen (at least when there is an anti scratch protective barrier). There is no need for conductive fiber or the like!

<comment><USER8> I wear some old leather gloves that have the cloth lining worn off at the fingertips. They work well and are probably warmer than thin mesh gloves. As long as the leather is in direct contact with skin it should work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That was used by IDEO in their global Rube Goldberg machine video: [http://labs.ideo.com/2008/10/28/the-incredible-ideo- global-c...](http://labs.ideo.com/2008/10/28/the-incredible-ideo-global-chain- reaction-experience/) (at 9 minutes and some)

</comment><comment><USER10> This was actually a topic on a Dutch youth science quiz on TV.

</comment><comment><USER11> Roughly half of iPhone owners have one already.</comment>


Ask HN: Which CI Supports Docker Compose Way? - <AUTHOR> I've no idea why gitlab needs its on own .gitlab-ci.yml when I have a docker compose file. On side projects, I would like to run CI locally on my PC but there seems to be no solution. What do you suggest? <comment><USER2> CI needs a specific file because you have to define a pipeline and execution order not only services. I'd recommend you Drone CI [http://try.drone.io/](http://try.drone.io/) If you install the CLI you can run the pipeline locally as it would run in the server.</comment>


Maybe the Low-End iPhone Is Really a Mid-End iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130503/maybe-the-low-end-iphone-is-really-a-mid-end-iphone/ <comment><USER2> I think this would especially make sense considering the Lifetime value of these iOS customers. Forcing (the majority) of users to pay for upfront for the iPhone seems to drive a much better success rate on the iOS app store then we see with Android where users are just getting the best free phone their cell phone provide is giving them and may not have interest in apps. IMO, forcing potential users to recognize the value of the device before purchasing (charging more upfront), leads to better lifetime value as well as increased margin upfront.</comment>


Electronic music pioneer Simeon Coxe has died - <AUTHOR> https://pitchfork.com/news/silver-apples-simeon-coxe-dead-at-82/ <comment><AUTHOR> If his name doesn't ring a bell with you maybe Silver Apples does?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1xOZyBc2Ck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1xOZyBc2Ck)

<comment><USER2> Silver Apples were a musical UFO of the 60s: came out of nowhere, flashed on many people's radar, and then vanished.

RIP Grandmaster Serialized Oscilloscopes.

More info on their too-brief moment of fame: [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/09/silver- apples-...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/09/silver-apples- electro-stars-hendrix-stereolab-portishead-john-lennon)

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it interesting that I know an enormous number of bands that were influenced by Kraftwerk, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of Kraftwerk was inspired by Silver Apples.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Kraftwerk were ever quite that psychedelic, abstract, or naive. (Meant in a good way.)

It's more likely Silver Apples influenced early Tangerine Dream and other Krautrockers through the scene around the Zodiak Arts Lab in Berlin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kraftwerk is plenty abstract, they just put a very slick sauce over it and were much better at marketing themselves and running a business.

Some digging around turned this up:

"Obviously inspired by artists like the Silver Apples German artists/musicians Conrad Schnitzler and Hans-Joachim Roedelius started The Zodiak Free Arts Lab in an old building in West Berlin in the Halleschen Ufer, Kreuzberg. In fact it was (and still is) a theatre called the Schaubühne but at night the duo could use parts of the building.

The Zodiak was sub-divided into two main performance areas, one of which was painted completely white and the other completely black, and was filled with all kinds of instruments, amps and speakers which people could more or less do with as they pleased. Here, musicians were allowed to experiment with free jazz, psychedelic rock and avant-garde styles. Conventional forms of music were frowned upon: a phrase frequently used to describe the spirit of the times was that "songs were considered bourgeois."

Among the many artists and bands who passed through the Zodiak in their early days were Ash Ra Tempel, Geräusche (Noises), Plus/Minus, Curly Curve, Per Sonore, Human Being, The Agitation later Agitation Free, Klaus Schulze and, most significantly, Tangerine Dream. The club played an important role in the development of a style of music that would later be called krautrock. Acts like Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Amon Düül, Can and Neu all originated from the lab and would take up tape loops and synthesizers as an important part of their act. "

The timing works out just about right, and I hear a lot of 'Autobahn' in 'Oscillations'. It'd be nice if someone asked while there is still a chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Silver Apples is one of the most out-there musical acts ever created, and Simeon's willingness to take risks that were bold even for the famously bold timeframe in which he created makes him an icon that remains essential even today.

</comment><comment><USER5> Off topic but related: anyone have examples of novel things to play with in electronic music / generative? I recently got an itch to experiment with some analog synths and some hardware / software hacking to make music. Novel or just... fun!

<comment><USER6> Check out:

\- r/musicprogramming [1]

\- #opensourcemusicians on the Freenode IRC network [2]

\- VCV Rack [3]

\- Supercollider [4]

\- Overtone [5]

\- ChucK [6]

\- Awesome live-coding [7]

\- Muffwiggler Forum [8]

[1] - [https://old.reddit.com/r/musicprogramming/](https://old.reddit.com/r/musicprogramming/)

[2] - [https://freenode.net/](https://freenode.net/)

[3] - [https://vcvrack.com/](https://vcvrack.com/)

[4] - [https://supercollider.github.io/](https://supercollider.github.io/)

[5] - [https://github.com/overtone/overtone](https://github.com/overtone/overtone)

[6] - [https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/](https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/)

[7] - [https://github.com/pjagielski/awesome-live-coding- music](https://github.com/pjagielski/awesome-live-coding-music)

[8] - [https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/](https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/)

<comment><USER7> Modular synths seem to be in vogue lately, both in hardware and in software like VCV Rack.

Though I'm told that this started some years ago, possibly in the 2000s—maybe it's just that I finally figured out how it's supposed to work, with the Android daw Caustic. The app Hexen looks particularly impressive, but haven't tried it yet.

<comment><USER8> _> possibly in the 2000s_

Late 90s. It was Dieter Döpfer's creation of the eurorack standard that really kicked off the modular synth revival (though of course with anything, a lot of stuff was in the air and Döpfer was also in the right place at the right time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow the more creative you are the more harsh this society treats you. We are highly creative people not because we were born in the us but despite the fact we were born here.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you slept with a co-worker? - <AUTHOR>

Have you ever slept with a co-worker at the company you work at? <comment><USER2> No one advises it, for very good reasons, but the truth is that it happens all the time. Co-worker romance is also responsible for a very large percentage of marriages.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing good can come from sleeping with a co-worker. I think the saying, "don't shoot holes in your own boat" is the perfect way of putting this.

<comment><USER4> > Nothing good can come from sleeping with a co-worker

Except, you know, sex?

I know what you are trying to say, but categorycally saying 'nothing' seems a bit far-fetched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. I have found there is rarely a good result from this. In the one case I've observed, the guy courted the girl and quit before they started a serious relationship. This worked well.

This may be different at larger organizations. I have only worked at small companies where gossip travels fast and doesn't need to travel far.

</comment><comment><USER6> No, but I have worked with my wife, both as a peer and as her subordinate. No problems there.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, and it turned into a longer term relationship. No negative impact.

I also caught two people in my company having sex in the office toilets. They both got a verbal warning and told to keep it off-site.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, and it was a good life lesson of things not to do

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't shit where you eat.</comment>


Xi calls on Chinese not to waste food as crop shortage fears grow - <AUTHOR> https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Xi-calls-on-Chinese-not-to-waste-food-as-crop-shortage-fears-grow <comment><USER2> This sounds like a sort of preoccupation by those in power rather than a real risk at this point.</comment>


We are not normal people - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/we-are-not-normal-people/?utm_content=buffer495cb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER3> I don't know who "we" is, but there's nothing abnormal about programmers as programmers. Currently the profession is dominated by a few narrow demographics which have a limited understanding of people outside of those demographics, but that's a social issue, not one that comes along with technical competence.

My major problem with dealing with clients/customers that I'm doing custom work for is that instead of telling me what they do, or what they want to be able to do, in language that they understand, they convert it into their own private techspeak. They incorrectly drop in technical words that they've heard somewhere, and they ask for specific brands of software that they've never seen and often don't understand.

I _am_ a normal person. Tell me your goals and your problems in plain English, and I'll figure out how to get it done. I'm pretty good at it, and if I can't help you I can probably find you someone who can.

<comment><USER4> I don't even think that this is even a case of that. The writer is obviously not a programmer (he even uses the "Some of my best friends are _x_ " line where _x_ is some type of person you are trying to convince people you don't hate). It seems to me that the writer is trying to peg programmers into a hole where all we do is say "We _have_ to do this with the newest CSS Framework using the neatest database and the coolest programming language." And I think that's clearly a load of crap.

What bothers me most about this is the idea that programmers are some kind of underclass that just doesn't get "normal" people. The truth is that we're people too who have a lot of the same needs as "normal" people.

<comment><USER5> > What bothers me most about this is the idea that programmers are some kind > of underclass that just doesn't get "normal" people. The truth is that we're > people too who have a lot of the same needs as "normal" people.

I think the author was simply trying to articulate a rift that sometimes occurs between a party with a (perceived or actual) problem and the party with solutions for that problem. According to his barbershop example, that problem/solution rift is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem statement. If I could abstract the article in one sentence, I would say, "If you are trying to solve __a problem that you yourself do not have __, make sure you actually understand the problem from the perspective of the party you are solving it for before you go building things. "

The author may have gone a bit far in generalizing programmers/engineers, but would you agree it is fair to say that it is easy enough for _anyone_ to fall into the aforementioned trap if they are not conscious of it?

An occurring theme I have noticed while speaking with people (not just engineers and/or programmers) is that we have a tendency to project ourselves on other people. I don't think that is a bad thing in moderation (that's a different matter of discourse), but I have had at least two different conversations with entrepreneurs where they simply could not for the life of them understand why someone would rather "just get a job working for someone else" than start their own company. It simply does not register in their world view that someone does not share their way of thinking. My anecdote is tangential at best, but my point is that the object of the article is not to diminish programmers. Rather, it is to elevate the perspective of those subject to a certain myopia that they would otherwise not think to confront.

<comment><USER6> Successful product management is exactly closing that rift. Product management is distinct from either programming (making things) or sales (selling things to people).

The argument made in the article is "you are a programmer. Therefore you don't get product management techniques nor sales. Therefore you should buy my book."

It's a typical sales technique: Creating a sense of inadequacy in your target and right away offering a solution.

If you're cynical, you will notice that there's no guarantee of any kind that the solution you're being sold on actually helps. Because, people good at sales are more likely to be good at selling you random things than to be effective teachers of the knowledge they're claiming for themselves.

patio11 did a lot of good in actually teaching people to look at a market that's not themselves, but there are a lot of people following him who primarily want to make money with e-books because that is their most effective way of monetizing their skills in the absence of any ability to build products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also, we sometimes won't ask questions or talk to potential consumers for FEAR that our "great" idea will be negated.

The excitement of building something, using new technology, solving a problem (whether it exists or not) is exciting. Then you might start seeing dollar signs, or fame, or respect among peers, etc, in your mind. Nobody wants to INVITE someone to shut down those thoughts or feelings.... but we must.

I have a few ideas on my list that I think are really good. But I haven't started building them yet because I know I have to talk to a few people in certain industries first to confirm the ideas are good. They just sit there though. For some of these ideas, I'd rather they continue being a pipe dream instead of talking to someone and possibly have them shot down.

Or maybe I'm really not normal.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes, customers don't know what they might need. The danger of talking to potential customers when designing a piece of software lies in the problem that you're going to get a _long_ list of convolute feature requests that, if implemented, doesn't result in anything usable. On top of that, the exemplary barber is unlikely to ever use _anything_ besides paper. We might not be normal people, and normal people are unlikely to give meaningful design input.

In my experience it makes sense to talk to them twice, once to determine general needs, and then a second time to actually have them try out the prototype.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that is a common mistake. Customers are experts on their problems. _We_ are experts on solutions. Good products are found at the intersection of those two circles.

I never believe uncritically what customers say about solutions. And I never believe what developers say about customer problems. Especially when that developer is me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people enjoy using but I hate sales and marketing.

<comment><USER11> Did you think this article was scummy? Probably not, it provided some real value and insight. And guess what, it was a piece of content marketing for his new book. I was pleasantly surprised at the end with his CTA (call-to-action).

Marketing is just finding a way to communicate your value proposition to your target market. Yes, there are plenty of scummy ways out there -- but some awesome real-world examples come from our favorite tech startups like 37signals (e.g. their books) and Atlassian (e.g. their git tutorials).

That's the great thing about the inbound/content marketing movement these days -- you are typically not paying people to read it, so you first and have to step back and think, "what can I write about that would grab the genuine interest of people I want to reach?"

Just some thoughts from a product marketing manager at a startup in NYC.

<comment><USER12> In all honesty, I starting reading the article because I was lured in by the title (even though it's a bit link baity). Why are these people not normal, and why am I one of them?

Then I started reading, realized it was about developers marketing. I have never really considered marketing my strong suit so I continued reading.

When he started talking about his book, I felt as though I had been tricked, and I got a little mad. To me, it cheapened the article, and made me feel as if the author didn't really care about informing people, but rather was just looking to promote his book. At that instant I knew he had posted this link on Hacker News not to be informative, but to prey on developers with weak marketing skills, and get them to pay for his book. I normally wouldn't comment on something like this, but since you said so anyway, I would say this is an unethical advertisement because it pretends to be an article, but it actually was an advertisement. If he had said right out, "I have written a book on marketing for developers, here is a sample, and if you are interested you can purchase it here", then I might have been more inclined to purchase it (of course the book isn't even finished yet, so there would be no way to buy it anyway even if I was interested, but that's a separate issue I won't get into here.) Rather, instead the article left a bad taste in my mouth and reinforced my opinion of marketing as something scummy I wouldn't want to get involved with.

<comment><USER13> _At that instant I knew he had posted this link on Hacker News not to be informative, but to prey on developers with weak marketing skills, and get them to pay for his book._

OK, the fact that you would use a term like "prey on" in this context tells me that we probably have radically different worldviews, so there may be no point to this exchange, but...

 _I would say this is an unethical advertisement because it pretends to be an article, but it actually was an advertisement_

There's no particular reason a piece of content can't be intended to be _both_ legitimately informative, AND serve to drive awareness of something your selling. In this case, ask yourself this: If you took away the last paragraph or two of the article, would the rest of it still have been informative? Would you have gotten value from it? If so, how is it not an informative article, just because of the blurb tacked onto the end, sharing information about the author's book? Especially when the book is relevant to the audience who would likely discover that article?

OK, I get that a lot of developers just have a sort of general aversion to "all things commercial". Hell, I used to be that way to some extent, but yet I always found marketing fascinating, and now that I run a startup, I find marketing essential, so maybe my views have shifted a bit. Anyway, I understand - to a point - that a lot of us find that commercial interests take away from some notion of essential "purity" or whatever when it comes to technical content. But to call this kind of content marketing "unethical" is a bit extreme, IMO.

<comment><USER12> If it has value on its own without the paragraphs about buying his book, surely it would have just as much value if the author moved the final paragraphs to the front, and clearly identified it as an advertisement for his book. The fact that he did not do that indicates that he thought less people would read it if they knew it was an advertisement right from the start. So then the author thought he would have to trick people if he wanted to get them to read the advertisement, so he sneaked it in at the end. This intent to deceive is what I am calling unethical. Now, sure this could be an effective technique, but the kind of deceit and trickery usually involved in such marketing leaves me with a bad taste.

<comment><USER13> The point is, there isn't a binary distinction between "it's an advertisement" and "it's informative content". It's a legitimately informative and interesting article, whether or not he mentions his book. So what difference does it make if he mentions the book at the beginning, or the end, or not at all?

And putting that stuff at the bottom has nothing to do with being tricky, or sneaky, or unethical. It just makes more sense to mention the book _after_ the author has demonstrated some credibility through the content in the earlier part of the article.

<comment><USER14> The message, whether informative, promotional, or both, ultimately needs to reach its audience. On both counts, this article failed to reach tbirdz and likely many others.

It wouldn't have been too much trouble to bring those skeptics back to the conversation by adding a short disclaimer closer to the beginning of the article. So why not do it? If the article is going to be both informative and promotional, some will want that expectation to be set right from the beginning. And if the informative bits can stand on their own merit, there's no risk to the promotional side in adding the early disclaimer. (IMO, it's not an unreasonable request, and not without precedent.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "increasing the technical challenge while creating a product does not increase the chance for more sales"

This is true to a point, but if your strongest suite is your raw technical ability then it may be best for you to pursue problems that have remained unsolved because of technical challenges that have put others off. A significant technical barrier is also nice to have if it means you can get the market before your competition catches up.

Even a mediocre implementation of something "impossible" can make a lot of impact. See bitcoin.

<comment><USER16> _Even a mediocre implementation of something "impossible" can make a lot of impact. See bitcoin._

Bitcoin was perhaps the worst possible example you could have chosen... The implementation was the opposite of mediocre; its code predicted and solved implementation problems that no one realized were problems, except Satoshi. And on a technical level, the client has only experienced _one_ problem that had to be rolled back. There are few other implementations of anything that have that kind of track record.

A better example of a mediocre implementation of something would be the original Quake engine. Ha, got you, just kidding. Actually, I can't think of anything that's made "a lot of impact" while also being both a mediocre implementation and very difficult on a technical level. Even Minecraft wasn't mediocre. Difficulty and mediocrity seem to be opposites, the way magnetic poles are.

<comment><USER17> Would Twitter v1 count?

<comment><USER18> No. Figuring out how to post short bits of text on a website is not a difficult technical problem. All of the "hard" problems twitter has solved came later as a result of scaling up to millions of users and hundreds of millions of bits of text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At Yandex (Russia's largest search engine) among engineers they/we used to have a motto: "I am non-representational" ("я не репрезентативен"), reminding about just that. Another useful motto was "I'm not your target audience". Some even had these on T-shirts.

You, the developer, are not a normal user, by definition (unless you're building tools for fellow developers). Anything user-facing should be tested on real users, on members of the target audience. What they find convenient and useful may seem inconvenient and useless to you. This is OK; such a view is usually reciprocal.

BTW this is often a point of contention in open-source software. It is built mostly by engineers. If the target audience does not also consist of engineers, users may find the UI confusing and inconvenient, despite authors' best effort to make it clear and convenient _for themselves_.

</comment><comment><USER20> Great post! This really hits the sweet spot for so many here at HN.

I especially like:

 _The problem is that all of this is focused on us, the creator, and not on the customer, the consumer._

 _If we 're actually going to sell products, we need to quit thinking about what's cool to us, and focus on what customers actually need._

I've talked about this here so many times, I don't have much more to add. I'd just direct you to #195 and Chapter 10 here: [http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html](http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html)

Justin, this is important work and I look forward to it. Let me know how I can help (email in profile). I wish you great success. This community could really use it.

</comment><comment><USER21> On the barber anecdote, I think something that a lot of software solutions miss is how _fast and flexible_ paper is. It's ready for you the _instant_ you need it, and you can draw arbitrary shapes quickly and easily in addition to text.

We're still feeling out getting this convenience into user's hands. Keyboarded platforms suck for drawing/using standing up, tablets suck for typing.

Ultimately, the only thing I could offer this barber is a cloud-synced whiteboard with week-planner drawn in-behind the screen, and the only advantage it would have over paper is cloud syncing.

<comment><USER22> Does the barber need arbitrary shapes in this case?

It looks like his pain point was that he was walking to a computer. Perhaps having a tablet by his phone could fix this problem? It could be as easy as the paper calendar solution, but since it's all being done electronically, you could allow people to schedule appointments online and such.

<comment><USER23> > Does the barber need arbitrary shapes in this case?

But why is the default assumption that the barber needs software, and we must prove out that he doesn't? The barber just wants to note some info and get on with things.

<comment><USER24> Because we are software writers and we are looking for problems to which our skills are a solution. The barber might just need another paper calendar, but then where does that leave me, the software developer? It leaves me still in need of a job.

<comment><USER25> Then find one, but don't waste everyone's time selling things to people who won't realize value from them. You'll either fail or hurt people in doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sometimes a software puts the business in a cast.

Me and my friends used to go to a cafeteria every day. Every day we needed to reach for change money, etc. We suggested the cashier to create a "pre-paid" account for every person so we could pay once a month, in advance, with credit card. He/she could not do it because "the system does not implement this".

In another epoch, I went every day to the same restaurant, at the fourth day the cashier offered to open an account to me. She opened a big notebook and put my name in a page, case solved. (She even offered post-paid bit I took pre-paid because I detest owing money.)

<comment><USER27> ERP software is notorious for doing this.

Many a growing company has found itself forced to change its business processes to align with the SAP way of doing things, instead of the other way around.

At the top end of the scale, companies are large enough to write custom software. At the bottom end of the scale, you can't yet justify buying software, so a lot of processes are still done manually.

It's in the middle that you tend to get squeezed. You're too big to do things on paper, but you don't have the in-house development talent to customize the software to fit your needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is true for many things.

In a marketing class long ago the professor asked what % of the US beer industry was imported. The answers were all over the place, with most answers between 30 and 50%. She responded with, "It's less than 10%, and this is why you have to look at the #s rather than intuition even if you're a consumer of the product yourself."

Technical complexity and fancy features aren't what helps crack the bottom of the market, which is the heart of disruptive innovation. "Because it's cool and I like it" may have worked for Steve Jobs, but he's the exception and not the rule.

<comment><USER29> > In a marketing class long ago the professor asked what % of the US beer > industry was imported. The answers were all over the place, with most > answers between 30 and 50%. She responded with, "It's less than 10%, and > this is why you have to look at the #s rather than intuition even if you're > a consumer of the product yourself."

You'd just have to take a look at what brands sell the most in the US to get an approximate answer. I'm not American so I can say for certain, but except for the yuppie preference for microbrews, most Americans stick to domestic light beers — Budweiser, Coors, Miller.

Per the essay, _I 'm not normal_ and most people don't really know the companies that make the products they consume, but estimating 50% of the US beer industry to be imported is something fairly inadequate for someone in college taking a marketing class.

Maybe the german-sounding Budweiser/Anheuser-Busch threw them off, but I'd guess most college students either drink (legally or not) or see people drinking, and could make a better estimate.

<comment><USER28> This was before the craft brew revolution. I think so many folks drank Corona, Heinekin and Molson that they assumed everyone else did. But the power drinkers (multiple pitchers a night) go with Busch, Bud and Miller High Life.

The general point of overconfidence is very true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nothing is more normal for an individual than thinking he is _not_ normal.

<comment><USER31> Isn't that the Forer effect (or at least related to it):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> In that barber example... selling to the barber directly might make the most sense, but better scheduling software would allow people to self-schedule (well, 'better' for end users). I _hate_ trying to coordinate a time with my barber - his schedule is erratic, mine is erratic sometimes, the place doesn't call me back some times, they don't email, etc.

What is efficient for _them_ as a business is highly inefficient for _me_ as a consumer, and I may end up taking my business elsewhere because of it. I like the guy and he does a good job, but there are other places to go. If any of them make it easier on me to schedule on my terms, I'll go there.

So... yes, it might be easier for the barber to just look at a piece of paper on the wall, does it increase his business? Is he looking for more business, or an easier job?

<comment><USER33> IME people will do things like book online and then call because they don't trust the booking app. And that's the people that will bother to fill out the form rather than just ring up anyway.

If you're relying on an online system too it has to be absolutely solid - which means expense. Or at least more expense than a wall-calendar or a paper diary [book].

It's hard to have an over-view of, say, the next couple of months work with an online system - a big wall-calendar makes things easier to visualise. Of course you could have a massive touch-screen computer ...

If you're running a salon, with multiple barbers then I can see it being cost- effective to try and have customers self-schedule but it seems for a single barber that they'd have to be very up-market to make it worth while.

Would you go to a worse barber so you can schedule online instead of by phone? Would you pay more, how much, to be able to schedule online?

Personally if I use a barber's it's a simple drop-in service.

[Any suggestions for an appointments booking system to check out?]

<comment><USER34> > _It 's hard to have an over-view of, say, the next couple of months work > with an online system - a big wall-calendar makes things easier to visualis_

I don't doubt that you're right, but it _should_ be much easier with a computer:

\- It can "think" for itself. For example you could ask it for all available 1 hour slots on a Tuesday or Friday in the next two months, that are also after 3' O clock, and.. and..

\- Regarding overview, you should be able to zoom in and out. Think google maps vs. normal maps.

Better yet, upload your google calendar an let it suggest a few appropriate time. Click the one you want. Done.

Edit: does that last one exist? Would be a cool thing to make.. (but then again, does anyone actually want that? :)

<comment><USER33> WRT overview I was thinking from the proprietor's perspective.

The "upload your calendar" might work well but people won't want to give up their data so I'm thinking a client side component could transmute all a person's calendar entries to remove the details then upload and do a match with the store.

Glancing across is always going to work better than zooming IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Actually, computers aren't _just there_ yet. Imagine if we actually had huge and paper thin displays that could be used like paper, few on the desk, few on the walls, cheaply and ubiquitously. There's still lots to do to get there, but we will.

</comment><comment> workhere-io _If I have to walk over to the computer, I've already wasted too much time._

Wouldn't the point of scheduling software be that, unlike his current phone solution, he doesn't have to do something when a customer schedules a time? Ideally he'd enter his work hours and holidays into the scheduling system, and customers could schedule a time without interrupting his workflow. Then he'd only need to look at his iPad once in a while to see who the next customer is.

Other than that, I think the article makes an important point.

<comment><USER36> Barber: "Almost all my bookings happen on the phone, or via text message."

<comment> workhere-io That's the point: If the barber has a lot of younger customers, the reason that most of the bookings happen on the phone or via text message is that the barber doesn't have a good website set up with a decent booking system that the customers could use instead of the phone.

What OP could have told the barber is this: "We'll put up a system that enables your customers to schedule a time automatically - that way you'll only have to schedule times manually in the 20% of cases or so when a customer prefers to call rather than use the website".

It's not rocket science - plenty of barbers have such a system.

<comment><USER33> >plenty of barbers have such a system //

I'm really interested in this. Could you link some?

<comment> workhere-io I've only tried ones in Denmark. Here are a couple of examples (in Danish):

[http://www.hairtools.dk/](http://www.hairtools.dk/) [http://www.bapoon.dk/Information/for- frisoerer.htm](http://www.bapoon.dk/Information/for-frisoerer.htm) [http://hairbydahl.bestilling.nu/?locale=en](http://hairbydahl.bestilling.nu/?locale=en)

<comment><USER33> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "I could build this on the Twilio API!" "I could learn that new CSS framework!" "I could use this new tool I just purchased!"

I've never thought this way when I learn about some new technology...my way of thinking has always been "This task I'm doing really sucks, how can I make it easier?" This way of thinking seems so much more intuitive and less mentally taxing. Do others here really think the way the author describes? I'm curious.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't disagree with the OP's overall point...my favorite developers are "not normal" at least in the sense that, yes, they have an opinionated drive for perfection that I admire, particularly because it benefits so many of us who rely on their work.

What I do object to is this zero-sum attitude, that it's either "do cool technical stuff" or "MAKE MONEY", and wanting the latter implies a direct reduction of the former. To one extent, that's true...because our time is finite. But on the other hand "MAKE MONEY" gets in the way of technological innovations that could leap frog the market?

Why not think of technical innovation/investment as a loss leader? In the same way that it'd be questionable for a gas station to say, "fuck selling gas, let's just focus on selling coffee! ([http://www.nbcnews.com/id/23904590/](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/23904590/)), realize that tech innovation can be the underlying reason for profit, even if it doesn't have a direct contribution on the balance sheet

</comment><comment><USER39> If you own the product to-be-built and it is your startup, then you need to think like a businessman and that includes listening to customers.

But if you work as a salaried employee or contractor - lets face it - <USER2> really in a position to care more about your personal income and care less about customers who will be buying the product you don't directly benefit from. You better realize that you can and will be let go on a minute's notice and no one is going to drop a tear that you're no longer there.

And hence your survival depends on convincing the management to build the product using technologies that _you can benefit from by knowing them_ , just in case you decided to quit or will be let go.

Even though above may sounds selfish - this does not mean your personal interests are not aligned with the company you're working for.

Quite often the opposite - and quite often it's win win for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER40> I agree with the underlying message, which is to _listen_ to your market. I just feel that the example Justin used is somewhat unfortunate, because I feel it describes a missed opportunity.

Of course the barber doesn't think he needs anything beyond a better paper calendar, but what do his customers think? Would they, perhaps, prefer to book online instead of over the phone?

I guess that what I'm trying to say is that you should definitely listen to your customers, but you shouldn't let that blind you. It's like that Henry Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." The problem, of course, is that very few people are Henry Ford material ;)

</comment><comment><USER41> Steve Jobs took exactly the opposite tack -- he would say things like "People don't know what they want until we tell them" \-- and he succeeded with that outlook. I'm not saying the article is wrong, only that it's not a self- evident position.

Chances are a product will succeed or fail for reasons neither the designers nor the customers understand. Consider the personal computer -- the best minds in technology were offered a chance to get in at the start, and nearly all of them turned it down. Hewlett-Packard repeatedly rejected Steve Wozniak's proposals until he quit and developed his ideas with Steve Jobs in a garage. Then IBM created a rather limited knockoff PC, expecting it to serve only as an "entry system" to their main product line, which was large systems. Pretty soon the tail wagged the dog.

And the Internet -- no one saw it coming, even when it was on top of them. No one was able to predict any aspect of that phenomenon, something that remains true.

About people's tastes and choices in entertainment, Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman famously said, "Nobody knows anything". I agree, and I think it applies to technology as well.

The bottom line -- if you ask customers what they want, what they might buy, they won't be able to tell you. I disagreed with Steve Jobs about practically everything, but he was dead right about this.

</comment><comment><USER42> The whole point of the post is that we are different than our users. What we want, or what we think is important, often doesn't match up with what users really need.

</comment><comment><USER43> There's no reason a creative developer couldn't foresee the barber's predicament without speaking with the barber.

Patiently visualised, devised imagined scenarios. Phone rings, barber says "excuse me" to his client and walks over to the phone. But does he put the comb down first? Perhaps. Barbers have trays handy, but they might walk around, tools in hand. (This is obvious, and doesn't take research to imagine.)

The phone needs to be next to the computer - no screen savers, the scheduling software always on, with clear and large fonts, minimal clutter (generally good interface design anyway). Think "high quality app design", not "looks like Excel".

A beautifully designed interface that would impress the barber if demonstrated. Custom default views and all that.

It's ok to start from the blue sky and work down to the reality instead of working up from "what the barber likes with his paper calendars". Which isn't the wrong way, but could skew the potential. Top down isn't wrong, if you've done your visualising!

Not that research and getting out into the world isn't valuable. (obvious). I'd probably take a look at the book anyway... sounds ok.

</comment><comment><USER44> I get told constantly that not only am I not a normal person, I'm not a normal programmer. This is in the context of me listing things I'd like to see in a product.

The irony is that when I build a product that I'm told that "normal" people/programmers will want, it usually fails. When I build a product that I would use myself, with weird features I'm told nobody wants, it does well.

</comment><comment><USER45> The point is not just "listening to people" (which is important too). The main point is "putting yourself in your user's shoes". I.e. one has to think through various use cases from the perspective of the actual user. That's very important in any development if you care about robustness, quality, usability and even security.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a useful perspective, but not the whole picture.

Quality drives a portion of sales. Technical ability to perform, create features, respond to customer needs, and maintain a service contributes highly to quality. The technology and tools and process chosen enable that technical ability to a large degree.

Therefore, some portion of your sales is driven by your technology.

It's useful and important to think at a high level about your customers directly, at times. This is your UX role, doing user research and understanding all the intricate details and desires of your users. It's also marketing, understanding the market and who the target consumers are.

It's also useful and important to ensure you get your process and systems right to meet that market head-on with the _ability to solve the problem_ that you now understand. Ideally these are several roles communicating seamlessly. It's not always ideal, but that's the goal.

</comment><comment><USER47> Working with software product companies, we always debated on the product is "technology driven" or "market driven". Back to the days of using EJB, often times we were technology drive (not all).

That's why we have product team and product manager to work out the requirements before the development team start to prototype and implement. For startup companies, this kind of process may seem too luxury in the early stage, we called it "discover" stage.

Once we define the target market and learn the customer needs, we will build the most compelling features first. We listen, but not tight to specific customer needs, because we know the direction we want to build, and gradually lead the customers toward that end product.

For any new product, customer friction is always there very naturally. That's why we need marketing and sales team to remove the friction. It's a lot easy to say than to do.

</comment><comment><USER48> Not only that we are not normal as a consumers, but we are also not normal, for most part as developers, there are huge number of people who just are not up to speed with latest technology and simply don't use it. It helps to remind yourself often about that.

</comment><comment><USER49> Posts with a similar sentiment seem to appear on HN occasionally. I find it entirely reasonable, but it's also quite banal compared to research on product design done by people in Participatory Design[1] and User-centered Design[2]. It has often surprised me how limited many North American PMs and software designers seem to be in their knowledge of these areas.

[1] [http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/14-p-partic.html](http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/14-p-partic.html) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User- centered_design](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design)

</comment><comment><USER50> What the barber shop owner doesn't realize is that an appointment scheduling software is supposed to reduce phone calls which would decrease the workload of the staff. Also, what if I want to schedule an appointment when the shop is closed?

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder why this is a new topic then. Isn't it pretty established in either Lean Startup or Design Thinking that when building product, we should talk to/interview/research the people who will be using it? Especially in Design Thinking, it's required to do needfinding, which is talking to the barber in this case. And solutions in the brainstorming stage are certainly not confined within software.

We just need to be constantly reminded that our perception and reasoning about the world is subjective and often conscious. As designers, or product builders, we should be willing to understand other people's reasoning, putting aside ours.

</comment><comment><USER52> Being pedantic, if you're thinking "I could use this new tool I just purchased!" then you're doing things backwards.

<comment><USER53> How is that being pedantic? That's one of the main points of the article.

<comment><USER52> I stopped reading after I saw an opportunity to be pedantic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Nobody's normal. Every developer and client is unique. And learning to listen to potential clients is sound advice.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is definitely not a rule of thumb, but this point of view does fit in most of (small) cases.

Want an example? One of the most beloved practices by the software industry is kanban boards. It's at least curious how people writing systems prefer to have a physical board rather than, well, a system.

</comment><comment><USER56> There are no normal people. By definition normal people do not exist in the world.

With the title and point of the article being formulated in a way showing a lack of understanding of the matter, it is doubtful the rest of the post is any better.

</comment><comment><USER57> My future recruiter and employer are my customers. I can assure you that they are most certainly interested in technologies I am going to use. Welcome to CV-driven development!

</comment><comment><USER58> If the business is risky (which is probably is), use safer tech choices. If the business seems boring, use a few extra bleeding edge solutions to engage us technical folks.

</comment><comment><USER59> Ah, there.

Another programmer matures, having the same epiphany that every other decent programmer does at some point in his career.

Welcome to [career] adulthood, it's nice of you to finally join us :)

</comment><comment><USER60> So what, it's the maker mindset. Add to that with the appreciation for _what_ to make, you have a very impactful being indeed.

</comment><comment><USER61> Insightful post. I wish I'd read something like that years ago, instead of finding out the hard way. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER62> Hmm, sorry but the teaser didn't appeal to me.

Where can I unsubscribe? (Can't find a link.)

</comment><comment><USER63> Or as usability people say: "you are not your user".

</comment><comment><USER64> seriously?

<comment><USER65> Yes.</comment></comment>


Using the Unix Chainsaw: Named Pipes and Process Substitution - <AUTHOR> http://vincebuffalo.org/2013/08/08/the-mighty-named-pipe.html

<comment><USER2> Awesome - I never new about process substitution. I wanted to convince myself I knew what it was doing, so I started kicking this around a bit. I expected the first command to output "test." I'm not sure I can explain these results:

      $ echo <(echo test)
      /dev/fd/63
      $ cat <(echo test)
      test

<comment><USER3> <(blah) runs the command blah, and pipes its standard output to a file descriptor (/dev/fd/63) above. You shell replaces the <(blah) with a path to the this file descriptor, so here, echo is just printing the file descriptor name.

Since echo test prints "test" to standard out, in your second example this is piped to the file descriptor, which cat then reads from (printing "test").</comment></comment>


Studies find 'young' blood rejuvenates aging mice - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/studies-young-blood-rejuvenates-aging-mice-191130330.html

<comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7695621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7695621)

Other submissions of this story, each with their own description:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697574)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697487)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7695231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7695231)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7695073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7695073)

None have discussion, none have more than one upvote. As so often happens, the same story is submitted many times, and one gets traction, seemingly at random.</comment>


Minitel – The Rise and Fall of a National Tech Treasure [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g <comment><USER2> We were running a multi-user text adventure on Prestel at the time, and BT wanted to put it Minitel (in a lot of ways, Minitel was Prestel done right - at least technically). Cue some days in Paris running around with a 'portable' Panasonic PC that must've weighed 25lbs; 4.77MHz, orange plasma screen and 2 ISA slots, one of which was used to hold the full-length X25 card used to connect to Minitel. I got a lot out of that visit (mostly increased upper-body strength).

<comment><USER3> Looking at your HN username, I am guessing you are referring to Shades? Hello there, Arch-Wiz! ;)

I lost 1000s of hours playing Prestel Shades... endlessly typing 'ret ls' at everyone and everything... ah those were the days.

Hmm, I think I still owe my father a ton of money for all those MASSIVE phone bills!

<comment><USER2> That'd be 'coder' to you, Sir!

Sorry about the bills - I always felt bad about them.

<comment><USER3> Ah yeah, 'Hazeii the Coder' \- I'm old, my memory is not what it was!

Do you have anything to do with the Shades that runs at games.world.co.uk ?

<comment><USER2> Yes, Perialaga hosts it and I look in from time to time. Write a message on the chattrack if you make it back there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The irony is even stronger if you consider that Louis Pouzin was a strong inspirator of packet based communications (having just done the cyclades network system) and TCP/IP but for some reason the French national telecom agency didn't believe in it and stuck with a different protocol for too long.

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that telecom in general balked at packet switching. To them it violated the core tenent of their business, that of maintaining a continous circuit between customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FWIW, my engineering school's IT team still has Minitels in use in their various server rooms, because it can be used as serial console for a variety of devices (you know, just in case everything is broken and physical presence is required). The Retrocave Man should be able to do the same and enjoy our AZERTY keyboard.

<comment><USER7> AZERTY really is a terrible layout though, I can't find anything it's good at, not even typing french. You can't write É, È or À on a standard AZERTY keyboard for instance. If you're programming you're going to have the alt-gr key pressed half the time but admittedly that's mainly because programming languages are qwerty-centric.

But hey, you can type 'µ' with a single unmodified keystroke!

<comment><USER8> On Linux, CAPS-LOCK + é produce É. Ithink it works on Mac OS too. Only windows doesn't handle it.

But I do agree, Azerty is not that good most of the time. Especially when it comes to programming.

<comment><USER9> > I think it works on Mac OS too

Indeed, same on Apple's "French" keyboard layout, unless you select the "French (numeric)" one, in which case caps lock produces numbers. Also, ` is a dead key, as is ^ and ¨, which works with caps too, but there's no dead key for acute accent (é).

Other bits of trivia:

On macOS, the numeric keypad (if any) is always num-lock'd.

The Apple "French" layouts are vastly different from the PC ones (also available as "French - PC"), relying on visual symbolism for extra glyphs which makes them (sort of) easier to remember:

        option-n is ~ (which turns out to be a dead key)
        option-l is ¬, option-t is †
        option-shift-l is |
        option-( is { and option-shift-( is [
        "smart" 'quotes' are on " and ' with option and option-shift
        there are ligatures too: shiftable æ œ fi on option-a o and g
        question and exclamation marks are reversed with option too: ! -> ¡ and ? -> ¿
        option-d is ∂ PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL, option-shift-s is ∑, option-m is µ, option-f is ƒ
        now guess how you do: © ™ ®
        £ gives # when option'd (even though there's a dedicated @+# key)
        shift-- is underscore, option-- is en-dash, option-shift-- is em-dash
        similarly, there's also (grouped per physical key: no mod, shift, option, shift+option):
            < > ≤ ≥
            = + ≠ ±
            : / ÷ \

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those who are interesting in "Minitel revival", a guy did some great job recreating a Minitel server !

[https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur- Minitel.html](https://www.jelora.fr/post/2017/08/27/Serveur-Minitel.html)

<comment><USER11> It's featured extensively in the video.

<comment><USER10> You're right. I just listen to the first 4 minutes and it remains me this wonderful post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, some very creative "graphical" stuff), ...). Then those scams become so pervasive that trust in the system is completely lost, which makes it useless. Three, rapid mass abandonment when even a lower quality "free" alternative becomes available (internet over slow modems, hell, even BBSes posed a serious challenge to minitel).

The thing people always forget to mention is that minitel was metered. Every second you spent on minitel was charged, with some part of that charge shared with the content provider. There were also content providers (ie. "webshops") that paid for the customers to be able to be on their site for free.

The reaction to increased scams ? Why France Telecom stared charging more, of course, making the scams worse ... and worse ... and worse. Then suddenly all was abandoned in 2003 or so, with only paid-for sites remaining (essentially web banking, and some stock broker type stuff that's similar but more complex than web banking).

Of course, the whole exercise was repeated with "value added services" on Cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s (also charged by the "time spent online", and also filled to the brim with scams), and now again with android and iphone.

<comment><USER13> I used to work as a system's engineer for the biggest service provider of the minitel era, back in 1989+. MOST of the services were for professionals -- in fact the biggest by far for volume and revenue was a transport exchange for lorries...

There were a few 'pink services' (can't call that porn really, it was just chatbots with (sometimes!) real 'hostesses') as mentioned, but they were nowhere near the biggest. The biggest after the lorry service were sport services (Stade 2 etc during footy times or Tour de France) -- then .gov stuff and education (exam results).

I think for most people the 'pink services' were the ones that were advertised most, therefore there is a bias as to what was used and popular at the time, but from my point of view, it was nowhere near as popular as what people believe.

For the technically minded, we were running a (lot) of Pr1me computers running Primos -- in fact we were their primary customers before they died; we eventually moved on to HPUX on the very first PA-RISC that came out. The Pr1mes continued ticking along for a long while...

<comment><USER14> Ineresting I never new that BT's other online service Telecom Gold also used Pr1me's I think we where the largest non black user in the UK - I used to have root on all of them and super root on the billing systems.

<comment><USER2> I thought they were GEC's but might well have been Primes.

I do recall being in Baynard House one night and having a furious shift leader burst in and shout that he wasn't putting up with Shades overloading various mainframes around the country ("what, my little box?" :) ).

Although I never saw much backroom stuff on Minitel, from the outside it was pretty sweet compared to working with BT.

<comment><USER14> Prestel was GEC's GEC 4082's Telecom Gold Was Pr1mes I think all 750's

I should have really had a trip out to baynard to check it out as I was I suppose the dev-op on the Dialcom side working on the new Billing system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently bought a Minitel (v2 I think). Any ideas about what to do with it? I'm thinking something with a Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER2> Text search engine? (submit the query to $SEARCH_ENGINE, and display the results - or bonus points for using Gopher).

Shouldn't be hard to do 1200/75 on the Pi audio, even on the stock audio output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you like that video, you might enjoy this great book about Minitel:

[https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform- Stu...](https://www.amazon.com/Minitel-Welcome-Internet-Platform- Studies/dp/0262036223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497646280&sr=8-1&keywords=Minitel+Welcome+to+the+Internet)

I have started to read it, but haven't made it all the way through. I love tech history and the book is great so far!

</comment><comment><USER17> One of the "funny" thing with the minitel was it was originally designed to be a set of services. During the first experimentations at a city-scale, people used it to find old friends from school ect. Then it ended up with its traffic being mostly directed to erotic services (mostly online chats).

It would be interesting to compare the bandwidth percentage used at the time for those services, and the one from today with Internet.

<comment><USER2> Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb ethernet link. Downstream would be 16 times that, so 10Gb would handle it all. Of course, in practice a lot of time the line would be idle so actually numbers would have been far less than that.

Prestel in the UK (very similar to Minitel, also 1200/75) ran on around 10 GEC 'mainframes', which I was 'privileged' to spent many hours around. Each mainframe ran at a whole 1MIP, amd there were seried ranks of disk and tape drives to accompany them.

 _Edit: Number formatting._

<comment><USER18> I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.

<comment><USER2> I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low- bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances)) about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998.

I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris (and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink) adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I seem to recall Minitel was cracked, too, and used to spread spoof stock prices? Read about it in high school in the 90s but can't find anything about it on Google.

</comment><comment><USER20> tech treasure? Seriously? Nostalgia aside, it was slow and expensive to use. Internet had no penetration in France at the time so a crappy solution that does things worse and made France late to pick up Internet afterwards hardly qualifies as a treasure in my book.

<comment><USER21> The Minitel service was rolled out 1978-1982, about a dozen years before widespread commercial adoption of Internet connections for consumers in any country. So the Internet penetration is not really relevant here.

Yes, existing legacy technology sometimes works so well that newer things have a hard time replacing it.

<comment><USER22> It should be added that it wasn't made technically irrelevant the minute internet appeared either, Minitel had a few things figured out (thanks to its centralized monolithic ways) that took internet a while to achieve. Most important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying-number and several numbers for different price point; payment and authenticity were the norm. Selling stuff to every days common users was a normality, it was done without any security risk, and an impersonator pretending to be your bank or whatever would be much taken out by France Telecom.

Meanwhile we were still trying to convince people they could buy on the internet by the late 90's, and how to recognize which site is their official bank and which one is a scam.

PS: Xavier Niel (the CEO/founder of Free/Illiad) is well known for having made his money on paid minitel adult services.

We suffered late internet adoption because of the minitel, yes, but that's because the minitel had been so good for so long that it had become part of our normal life by then.

<comment><USER23> > Most important of those due to centralisation, the service-tied-to-a-paying- > number and several numbers for different price point; payment and > authenticity were the norm.

And service providers could do both IAP-style (pay-for-bundle) and ongoing- style (pay-for-stay), the latter being a great model for news services or story providers (serials and the like).</comment></comment></comment></comment>