Show HN: Founderkit – Startup tool recommendations from 1,000 YC founders - <AUTHOR> https://founderkit.com <comment><USER2> Once again, a tool recommendation site that doesn't do anything different or unique than what's been done or what's out there now. This is just like BestVendor.com (site was sold a few years ago, but more of an acquihire).

There are tons of these types of review sites. [http://www.stacklist.com/](http://www.stacklist.com/) [https://startupresources.io/](https://startupresources.io/) [https://stackshare.io/](https://stackshare.io/)

And they're all pretty much the same. They're mostly just a list of tools, sorted by popularity or recommendations.

I'm sorry, but this is just not that useful for me. It still requires a ton of time to look through and research the tools. Sure, it's useful just to help start your research, but it ends there.

I've researched this space in-depth and have a solution that's different, but way more useful. I'm just too busy working on other stuff to tackle it right now.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

To give you guys an idea of what I'm thinking, here is a tool comparison that is much more useful to me.

[https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/five-app- prototyping-t...](https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/five-app-prototyping- tools-compared-form-framer-origami-pixate-proto-io-c2acc9062c61)

It's ONE guy that researched 5 competing prototyping tools with a specific task in mind. He lists the pros and cons of each, and goes into some detail on each one and how they performed with his particular task.

I wouldn't be copying this exact format, but the takeaway here is that it's ONE person that has researched ALL or most of the tools within a particular category, and had an actual task to accomplish, so they have a much better idea of what each does, its strengths and weaknesses. The problem with founderkit and similar sites is that the reviewers have not researched all the tools within a category, so they're only giving you their viewpoint on one tool.

If anyone is interested in my idea, let me know. I may devote some resources to it if I find the right people.

<comment><USER3> It would be nice to see a review site modeled after Consumer Reports. They tend to compare, with a well defined criteria, products in a category. It's a professional unbiased review system rather than a crowdsourced low value review system.

<comment><USER4> I Was just thinking of something similar today. I was reading a blog tutorial on a tool I am unfamiliar with but want to learn. The whole time I was wondering if this author knew what he was talking about. It would be nice to have a vetted list of tutorials that could be trusted to be utilizing best practices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is obviously modeled after Product Hunt with similar rating/review systems, and suffers from the same issues regarding rating/review quality. Despite the emphasis on "unbiased" reviews, the reviews/comments (example: [https://founderkit.com/biz/slack](https://founderkit.com/biz/slack)) boil down to "I used it and it's good" which doesn't help _anyone_ , and is essentially a manifestation of confirmation bias and makes the entire thing a popularity contest, not a measurement of quality.

Also, giving each tool a ranking from 1-10 _when the only way to vote is Like /Neutral/Dislike_ is misleading.

<comment><USER6> I mean, no one is forcing you to use this product :) but I actually find the ratings to be really directionally accurate, which considers them in aggregate, and use this site all the freaking time. Yesterday I needed a decent conference calling tool, I went with the first one I found and the reliability was terrible - I know there are a million sites out there for this but good luck googling "best free conference call." One founder kit search later I jumped on uber conference and rescued the call. It didn't matter that I was using the best, most deserving startup, I just needed something that worked...

<comment><USER5> > I actually find the ratings to be really directionally accurate

That is the definition of confirmation bias.

> I know there are a million sites out there for this but good luck googling > "best free conference call."

OK. [https://imgur.com/a/f9JQ4](https://imgur.com/a/f9JQ4)

(Which more or less further supports my point of this being a popularity contest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate how they force users to sign up. You need to give access to your Twitter and LinkedIn. Who knows what kind of data mining they do.

Also: dude, you already have my twitter, why do you still need my email address? Twitter already gives you that. What If I don't have a title? Why is that required?

No thanks

<comment><USER8> It only required one of the connections for me. I used twitter, which in my view, is better than Facebook and LinkedIn as far as privacy concerns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shockingly, YC companies are always at the top of the lists in the categories they service. Smells like a growth hack to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's no secret that YC services are commonly used by YC founders, especially since founders of the big startups are often super generous with credits, to help founders just starting out. Nothing weird happening here, there are several categories where the commonly assumed best YC solution isn't #1, or even close. That made us realize we had something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I need a tool I check Zapier first. Why? Because I know I can easily integrate with other systems and because I get almost the full lay of the land.

That said... without knowing the size of the user base, how much cash these companies have, etc. whose to say even 1/2 of them will be around 5 years. These tools need to be used and integrated with great caution.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there any reason why there isn't a single security utility, aside from password managers on this list?

It seems that security is an afterthought at most startups.

<comment><USER12> People have requested it. Only now are there a handful of security service startups as opposed to good ole devops service providers.

We split categories when we get enough companies to support it. Let me know if you have a list and I'll happily get this in there, I'd love to have more security products as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Beta tested and used by almost 1,000 YC founders"

Most things I have clicked on have about 10 ratings tops and one line reviews. Even as a quantitative tool it's not that useful (yet). Would be interested in seeing some stats. From a first glance I expect a correlation between number of ratings and positive ratings. At least the subcategories I clicked through all followed that pattern.

I'd also love a filter on the subpages like: [https://founderkit.com/biz/optimizely](https://founderkit.com/biz/optimizely) where I can filter the negative feedback to the top (especially once there's a lot more data). I personally make most decisions after reading negative feedback and only roughly browsing the positive feedback.

Edit: I'd also like to read a bit more on the reasoning of the ranking. Why was this system (popularity, score, recency) picked over purely ranking on score?

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like reviews really need an A/B test at the very least, because someone comparing and contrasting two products gives you an idea of the relative importance of different features.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why do I have to sign up to see the reviews?

<comment><USER5> The copy is misleading and you do not need to sign up; you can just click the link in the toolbar: [https://founderkit.com/reviews](https://founderkit.com/reviews)

<comment><USER16> Classic antipattern. I don't really understand it: if you're willing to allow unrestricted reading, why pretend you don't? It just drives away page views.

<comment><USER17> Like ExpertsExchange "tired of scrolling?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A real problem for startups. People waste too much time on routine stuff.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think my biggest issue with all of these things is they tend to only serve YC companies and not the multitude of other independent hackers out there outside of that pipeline. I've just stopped sharing stuff like this because it hurts the entire ecosystem long term. _shrug_

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey lowglow, it actually started/was tested by YC founders, but we just onboarded several new founder networks in the weeks leading to launch, including First Round, Slow Ventures, Social Capital, Fuel Capital. There are many, many brilliant founders contributing (also note that ratings are hidden while written reviews show by whom they are posted).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Finding tools is (unfortunately) not the hard part about being a founder.

</comment><comment><USER21> There is not enough data on review list. You need to click the product sometimes to see what it does. There should be 3-4 sentence, non-biased, non- advertisement description.

</comment><comment><USER22> The recommendation site I wanted to have was [http://stackparts.com/](http://stackparts.com/) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2993371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2993371)) but nothing became of it...

Maybe there are just too many options nowadays for a visualization of possible stacks to be useful.

cc @joshu

<comment><USER12> This is a great idea. I think it can be done

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I liked it. In particular the categories which I think a lot of really small companies might find useful. Needs to be 40 times more users and less yc backed bias but still ok.

</comment><comment><USER24> Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

<comment><USER12> Thanks Ravi, seems we inundated the middle tier Heroku postgres servers. Bumped up and site seems to be humming again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great seeding network, resulted in a much stronger signal to noise ratio. Definitely going to be using this!

</comment><comment><USER26> Server error when I tried to register

<comment><USER12> Servers are getting slammed, try again just spooled up more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why do they need my email address during signup? Isn't access to my twitter account enough?

</comment><comment><USER26> internal server error when I tried to add myself

</comment><comment><USER28> omg!!!! Very cool. I need this.</comment>


Judge tosses Wikimedia's anti-NSA lawsuit because Wikipedia isn't big enough - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/judge-tosses-wikimedias-anti-nsa-lawsuit-because-wikipedia-isnt-big-enough/ <comment><USER2> Government engages in mass surveillance against its citizens and the only one getting in any trouble whatsoever is the whistleblower who made it publicly known. Checks and balances at work.

How anyone can say with a straight face that Snowden should've stayed and challenged the system via the legal channels when even after the whole thing came to light the "system" shows no sign of remorse much less willingness to change?

<comment><USER3> No need for hypotheticals. Just look at how much change Binney was able to accomplish in the last decade after going through proper channels[1].

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29#Whistleblowing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remember folks, the police can still search your house in violation of the 4th amendment. The only thing the legal system (EDIT: er, the criminal justice system) currently does is let your defense attorney keep them from using that evidence against you. Assuming you have an attorney who is being paid enough to go to suppression hearings.

[http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1588](http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1588)

If you don't have charges filed against you, then you don't have an opportunity to challenge the validity* of the FISA court warrant and jurisprudence around how warrants are issued makes it into the public record to be debated by law students, legislators, much less an appeals court or SCOTUS.

All you can hope to do is file a civil suit under a statute like 42 USC 1983 (see [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983) and thank you mikecb) It seems, looking through the civil complaint ([https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/wikimedia_v2c_nsa_- _compla...](https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/wikimedia_v2c_nsa_- _complaint.pdf)) that in this case, wikimedia actually only filed for an injunction to stop collection and pay attorney's fees on the basis of 28 USC 2412.

(*Most warrant requests in general get issued, but that is not because judges are rubber stamps, rather because prosecutors try to avoid wasting a judge's time. But I'm not sure we have the info to say that about the FISA court. Judges are human and an institution without the perspective imposed by public discourse will only become more and more susceptible to its biases)

<comment><USER5> Not quite true. 42 USC 1983 provides for a right of action for violation of constitutional rights including attorney's fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder, if an organization had access to the set of all emails sent through a link that crossed the U.S. border, how much information that organization could collect about the children of all federal judges. I also wonder how hard it is to credibly demonstrate that you can persuade the FBI and local law enforcement not to investigate a missing person case. I also wonder if an organization has multiple members are willing to prolong the existence of a disease such as polio in order to fulfill their duty--would they also be willing to threaten to kidnap only a single innocent person in order to protect an asset they believe is critically necessary to keep 300 million people safe?

If hypothetically there was such an organization, each member would be faced with something of a prisoners dilemma: Do I defect and go to the media, or do I stay silent? Given that going to the media means at best that you doubt if you really did the right thing now that you are in Russia and can no longer see your home, friends and family and at worst that you end up in solitary confinement for the rest of your life, I am curious how large such an organization would have to be before the chance of one member defecting rose above 5% a year. I also wonder how many people would need access to credible proof of such a pattern of action.

</comment><comment><USER6> Handbook to extra-constitutional data collection:

1) Do whatever you want

2) Invoke state secrets or national security when questioned on 1

3) Claim in court that no one has standing

Bonus card, use only once:

4) When a case reaches the supreme court where people notice how you invoked state secrets purely to stymie jurisdictional challenge, lie to the judges [1]

(As you see in this decision, which relies on the tainted supreme court decision, you only need the magic card once anyway to establish precedence)

After you've used the magic card in step 4, the question naturally occurs how to make use of the information collected. Try _parallel construction_ [2] should whoever you were targeting set foot in a court of justice. The point is to ensure people don't make it there; a hellfire will ensure in due course, US citizen or not, that a lot of paperwork is saved.

[1]: [https://theintercept.com/2014/02/26/doj-still-ducking- scruti...](https://theintercept.com/2014/02/26/doj-still-ducking-scrutiny/)

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

<comment><USER7> The existence of parallel construction is huge problem with the idea that the only result of gathering evidence illegally is that that evidence is excluded from legal use.

The police/NSA/whomever can still use that information to inform their investigations to discover other legal evidence that they could otherwise only have found by chance. Not to mention the possibility of just leaking information like this later to discredit or punish a political enemy.

<comment><USER8> I thought the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine meant that any evidence that is found by examining evidence collected illegally still cannot be presented. The problem with parallel construction is that the police/NSA lie about the origin of their suspicion and avoid the "poisonous tree". (I should mention IANAL so please correct me if my understanding is wrong)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ruling that wikipedia's traffic is insignificant when it is one of the largest and most trafficed websites ever is so absurd that it's hard to interpret the ruling here as anything other than motivated.

<comment><USER10> It takes sense in context. The court accepted that the NSA has some upstream capability, but says there is no proof that it happens everywhere. Wikileaks says it is so large that it almost definitely gets caught up. The judge didn't accept that argument.

The sum up the holding of the judge, Wikipedia has no evidence to show that the NSA is actually spying on their data transfers beyond mere speculation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can we get the headline changed? It is not at all accurate - the size of Wikipedia was a largely insignificant point in the judge's reason, as the article clearly states.

Maybe we should stop with the conspiracy theories about corrupt judges for a second and actually consider the legal situation. The judge's job is to rule based on the law, not to use his own judgment or fight for his idea of social justice.

For good reasons, you could only pursue a lawsuit against someone if you have real evidence of wrongdoing - not intuition or "common sense" or anything else. How would you feel if the RIAA could launch lawsuits against any teenager with a fast internet connection, based on a statistical argument and 'common sense' that most teens steal music?

<comment><USER4> You are right of course that having one's complaint not based on statistical likelihood but on actual evidence of a tort committed is an important principle. I was hoping someone with more knowledge of that area of law would jump in to start the substantive discussion of the issue as presented to the court.

My line of questioning above is based not on any actual evidence that anyone is actually being intimidated in that manner, but on speculation. It is still troubling if someone with more insight into game theory or organization theory cannot jump in with a reason why this sort of perversion of Justice wouldn't be possible. But that doesn't actually constitute any evidence whatsoever that it happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the judge's ruling:

"For example, one trillion dollars are of enormous value, whereas one trillion grains of sand are but a small patch of beach."

Not so small actually. The mass of a grain of sand (which I was able to look up on Wikipedia, of course) is about 10^-9 kg, so a trillion grains of sand is about a ton of sand.

I am reminded of John McCarthy's famous quote: he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

<comment><USER13> You stopped mathing too soon. A ton of sand is a little over a cubic meter. So a small patch of beach.

<comment><USER14> Where do you get 1 cubic meter? Anyone talking about grains in such a small area without referencing volumetric differences between grains, is making up measurements. There are multiple order differences between sand types.

[http://www.sandatlas.org/brain-games-with-sand- grains/](http://www.sandatlas.org/brain-games-with-sand-grains/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I sort-of agree with the judge, that "1 trillion" alone doesn't mean much. They should have put it in context: Wikipedia accounts of X% of overall Internet traffic, or that Wikipedia is ranked in the top-10 of all sites on the Internet, or that Wikipedia serves X% of all users on the Internet.

<comment><USER16> I'm not entirely sure that info (% of traffic) is possible for wikipedia to obtain accurately.

There are however 3.3 billion people in the world estimated to have internet. Assuming that 90% of internet traffic is autonomous, each person who has internet visits wikipedia on average roughly 30 times a year. In reality, it's estimated that closer to 60% of the traffic is autonomous; which means an average of 121 visits per year per person with internet.

Now we can't claim with 100% certainty the exact numbers (although I'm sure some statisticians could find a reasonable range with 99.95 certainty), but it's still pretty difficult to say that 1 trillion doesn't mean much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another Republican-appointed federal judge. Remember at voting time, there are three branches of government, and then ask yourself this: Do I want this person to be responsible for appointing or approving judges to the federal bench?

<comment><USER18> Supposedly this is the Democrats' problem right now: they can get the presidency, but nothing else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My favorite part: "plaintiffs conclude that there is a greater than 9.9999999999% chance that the NSA has intercepted at least on of their over 1 trillion communications on the basis of an arbitrary assumption, namely that there is a 0.00000001% chance that the NSA will intercept any particular internet communication. Plaintiffs provide no basis for the 0.00000001% figure, nor do they explain why the figure is presented as a conservative assumption."

I suppose they didn't technically, but the NSA (in 2011) stated they ~9% of 250 mil internet communications were from upstream (note, 22.5 million). For the .00000001% number to be true given any number less than 225 quadrillion connections through US nodes(yes, 225000 times wikipedia's traffic at #7 alexa ranking) to be made annually. Traffic such as netflix and torrenting (apart from initial metadata) would be disregarded as meaningless data in any meaningful system and as such would be redundant in this count. Even including that data, we can see that HTTP is at least ~10% of downstream data (from sandvine broadband) and can reasonably say 10000 trillion (10 quadrillion) total http connections(basing this on wikipedia's 1 trillion connections and adding some wiggle room, but I'm fairly certain it can be proven that it's [much] less than this) then we only reach 100 quadrillion total net traffic; less than half of what we would need for this number to be untrue.

Of course they still can't prove that the NSA isn't just ignoring wikipedia traffic somehow, so the case would still get thrown out.

</comment><comment><USER19> I realise that judges use the evidence put before them but aren't they supposed to rely on common knowledge as well. If a plaintiff said "we laced their food with arsenic" would the judge say, "well the defence haven't shown me that arsenic is a powerful poison so you can go free"? Surely the judge is expected to research common knowledge like whether a website is popular or not?

If I go to a search engine and search "website popularity" I get alexa.com as first hit, that leads me to [http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org) which says #7 in the world.

If the judge isn't allowed to do the basic research then presumably they're supposed to just ask in court "on a point of fact: is a trillion hits a significant number?".

Another analogy, would the government have to prove that a bird was really on the endangered species list when bringing a case against an egg-snatcher rather than rely on the judge being able to research common knowledge.

Whilst I understand the reasons - USA government don't want NSA exposed to court cases - the reasoning is moronic and makes [or possibly demonstrates that] the USA courts look completely corrupt.

Is there a process to follow this up in which this judge can be struck off?

<comment><USER4> > Is there a process to follow this up

Well, this was an opinion in U.S. District court, which is the first level. You can appeal dismissals to Appeals court. From there, it's on to the Supreme Court who can choose if they want to hear the case.

In Thank You for Smoking, the protagonist jokes that the thing that makes America great is "our endless appeals system" occasionally, I feel convinced that this really is true.

<comment><USER19> I was more considering an employment tribunal for the judge rather than a standard appeal.

<comment><USER4> Nope. In the U.S., the constitution stipulates that federal judges, "both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour"

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii](https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii)

"Good behavior" here does not refer to their opinions in rulings. If it did, that would eliminate the independence of the judiciary.

<comment><USER19> So, for example, if all of a judges rulings were turned over on appeal based on ignorance of common facts nothing would happen unless Congress chose to impeach them? Or are judicial rulings based on ignorance of common knowledge not considered problematic in law.

<comment><USER4> "Problematic" is too vague a term here. Do you mean "impeachable offense", or "something a group of people think is a problem"?

If literally all or even > 50% of a district court judge's rulings were reversed on appeal, would they face sanction? I've never heard of this happening so I don't really know. But I have never heard of there being a process for it. I am curious what process folks think there should be?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's the API, Stupid - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/07/its_the_api_stu.html

<comment><USER2> Since nobody has figured out how to make money off their databases then an API won't heard them.</comment>


How Technology Has Failed to Improve Your Airline Experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/technology/how-technology-has-failed-to-improve-your-airline-experience.html <comment><USER2> Well this happened in all other industries that the tech has 'upended'. Stuff that happens to both guests and hosts in airbnb just can't happen in a hotel. Uber is definitely a poorer service than taxis - with some nasty stuff happening from time to time as well. This is unavoidable because all of these were done to optimize just one variable - price.

I frequently converse with people on the airline experience, and rarely get any understanding. People love crappy low-cost carriers with non-reclining seats, nonexistent legroom, no meals, etc, because that is how they can afford flying. Most people who fly now would travel by train or stay home if we didn't have deregulation and those crappy low-costs.

The laws of scale also dictate that good airlines are destined to fail, their cost disadvantage means they loose too many customers, and eventually their cost go up because of lower scale, and customer experience goes down because of less frequent flights and thus less convenient connections... they just have to become as crappy as low-costs, or die.

A generation from now, we will have a choice between EasyJet and a Learjet. With possible exception of a few very popular routes like transatlantic London-New York and a few others.

A nice exception is Russia where there is no deregulation, Aeroflow owns the sky and decides who can fly, and Putin pays for most of your (domestic) fare. I never fly domestic flights in Russia, and international costs are not subsidized, and not cheap at all, but quality is superb!</comment>


The New iPad's Screen Under the Microscope - <AUTHOR> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2012/03/16/ipad_screen_microscope/

<comment><USER2> I inspected the 3rd gen iPad image, trying to figure out roughly how much gap there is between rows, because it looks unexpectedly large. It looks like the pixel-to-gap ratio is about 9:5. This would seem to indicate that the screen is 35.7% black.

Obviously, the eye doesn't perceive this large of a gap at no magnification, but still, I was surprised at how much of a gap there is between rows.

(Contrast this to the iPhone 4S, which is about 9:3.6, or 28.6% black.)

<comment><USER3> But it's a power efficienty issue. The black areas are covering up backlight areas that otherwise would show through as useful illumination. There was a discussion yesterday about this in the iPad teardown thread. I was surprised about the apparent power consumption, and this was posited as one of the reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's painful to see that some people have OpenPandoras, and use them to take reference images to show differences in LCD (and OLED) screen properties.

Me, I just want to hold it. Smell it. Feel it. I'm sure I will too, in another 2 months from now.

(Explanation: the OpenPandora (<http://openpandora.org/>) is a custom portable QWERTY Linux clamshell ultra-console. Or it was, three years ago when I ordered mine. Still waiting for delivery, it's a very small operation and they've had some hiccups along the way.)

<comment><USER5> I use it for other things, too :-)

<comment><USER6> I use mine (I have two) for development mostly. Oh, a bit of MAME with my legal roms too, now and then ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man this guy's got a lot of nice toys. What are the gaps in pixels for? Circuity? Or does it have something to do with the amount of light that needs to be transmitted vs. horizontal/vertical resolution of the eye to represent a square pixel?

<comment><USER8> Each subpixel needs a transistor (hence TFT - thin film transistor) to drive it, along with the addressing conductors to drive it. I suspect the transistors have to have a certain minimum size to be reliable enough, so their relative size to the size of the whole pixel grows with decreasing pixel size. I'm sure they'd make them smaller if they could, as the black areas absorb a lot of precious backlight energy. I also recall reading about progress with making the transistors (which are typically silicon-on-glass) transparent, but I guess that tech isn't ready yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you just make the pixels 100 times smaller you could have a holodeck.

Source: <http://www.phased-array.com/1996-Book-Chapter.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> I just unpacked mine. Looks gorgeous.

Although, I can still perceive the individual pixels if I look close enough. This is what I expected, because I often hold the iPad at about the same distance as an iPhone, and the iPad has still lower res (326 vs 264 ppi). It's not yet this "device that hides its technology in plain sight beyond any human capability and therefore appears magical". But it's very, very beautiful anyway.

Here's hoping that Apple will someday produce a 3x display with 396ppi :-D

<comment><USER11> They won't, because you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

<comment><USER12> A lot of people will be able to tell the difference. For example I routinely try to read pdf books on my iphone 4 ibooks (without zoom), but it's hard because there are not enough pixels!

<http://www.displaymate.com/iPad_ShootOut_1.htm>

.. Apple's definition of a "Retina Display" is actually for 20/20 Vision (defined as 1 arc-minute visual acuity). However, 20/20 Vision is just the legal definition of "Normal Vision," which is at the lower end of true normal vision. There are in fact lots of people with much better than 20/20 Vision, and for almost everyone visual acuity is actually limited by blurring due to imperfections of the lens in the eye. The best human vision is about 20/10 Vision, twice as good as 20/20 Vision, and that is what corresponds to the true acuity of the Retina. So to be an actual "True Retina Display" a screen needs at least 573 ppi at 12 inches viewing distance or 458 ppi at 15 inches. The 326 ppi iPhone 4 is a 20/20 Vision display if it is viewed from 10.5 inches or more. ..

<comment><USER13> Apple doesn't do that kind of stuff. Most people will not be able to see the pixels (at their comfortable viewing distances). That's good enough for them (also considering they are streets ahead of everyone else in the pixels department).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks great. The iPad screen really has jumped directly from doodoo to voodoo.

It would be cool to have the e-ink Kindle on that comparison there, too:

<http://www.e-ink-info.com/ipad-slcd-vs-kindle-e-ink-close>

<comment><USER5> Good idea. I've added a picture from a Kindle Keyboard (third gen).

<comment><USER15> I love how the e-ink looks up-close. If only the contrast was higher and in colour. Sadly, I've got a feeling e-ink technology will become extinct.

<comment><USER5> I think there will always be room for e-ink. This afternoon, I took an hour off to sit on the balcony and read a bit. It was so bright outside that I was barely able to read anything on the iPad. Switched to the Kindle, worked perfectly well.

I think it's a technology that fills a niche that LCDs or OLEDs won't fill for a very long time, if ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any chance you have a Motorola Droid (1st one) hanging around? I'd love to see how that screen compares. It was near-retina, at least by the look of it, and I think was AMOLED (since you mentioned the Nexus One).

<comment><USER17> It's LCD, 265 PPI.

<comment><USER16> Ah, my mistake, I should have looked first. Honestly, it was a beautiful screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any suggestions for a good cheap digital microscope? The author doesn't mention what she or he uses...

<comment><USER5> Mine isn't good, which is why I don't recommend it. But you should be able to find a reasonably good USB microscope at places like Think Geek, or similar gadget sites.

<comment><USER3> People have had reasonable success just taping a webcam on top of a used bench microscope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it only the camera rotation or is Apple switching from BGR to RGB?

<comment><USER5> It's just the camera rotation.

But it's kind of funny, anyway, since the home button is at the bottom of the screen, so the sub-pixels are arranged top-to-bottom when you hold the iPad with the home button where it should be.

<comment><USER19> Does that affect "crispness" of the fonts? Or maybe they reconfigure subpixel rendering during device rotation.

<comment><USER5> It would affect subpixel rendering of fonts, but I think the iPad doesn't do any subpixel rendering. Not 100% sure though.

It does create another strange effect, though. Since the screen effectively redraws sideways if you hold the iPad in portrait, scrolling vertically quickly makes stuff look a tiny bit distorted; horizontal lines look a bit slanted (like taking a picture out of a car using a cellphone camera, but much less so).

<comment><USER20> You're right about not doing subpixel anti-aliasing. It would need to change the direction of the subpixel anti-aliasing on a switch from landscape to portrait, which would presumably lead to strange visual effects.

<comment><USER5> Right! Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It looks like Nintendo 3ds screen is made from lego.

</comment><comment><USER22> Would there be a way to demonstrate off-axis viewing capability with the different screen technologies using the microscope?

<comment><USER5> The microscope only shows a sharp picture at a specific distance; as soon as you tilt something, most of the picture becomes so blurred that you can't see much anymore. And there's not enough space between the lens and the focus point to really tilt the device much, anyway. Sorry!

<comment><USER23> What is the microscope that you are using?

<comment><USER5> A cheap Bresser. Though I wouldn't recommend buying a low-end microscope, like the one I use. You should be able to get much better images by investing just a bit more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If the rows of pixels weren't far apart, visible pixels wouldn't be square.

<comment><USER2> That's not true at all. Maybe for the given shape of the pixels on these displays, but as a general statement, this is false.

If you have red, green, and blue subpixels that have exactly a 3:1 height-to- width ratio -- thus forming a perfect 1:1 square -- then you could have zero black space on all sides, and the pixels would appear perfectly square.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Huh! I _JUST_ bought a stereomicroscope. I should try looking.

</comment><comment><USER26> What's funny about this is just how distorted the pixels are. Ever since I've understood what displays were (and CRTs before that) I've always imagined this idealized array of perfectly round, very tightly packed red green and blue circles as the pixels. Even looking close (not under a microscope) they look like a grid of squares... not these rectangular things with lots of space between them.

They seem to be getting more distorted over time. Maybe when they're so small its less of an issue. I'm surprised at how the red and blue on the kindle fire are so much bigger than the green. The eye is most sensitive to green... yet on the PSP Vita the blue seems to be the smallest of the pixels (meaning the blue pixels will have to put out more light to compensate, or the screen will have a green/red color cast.)

<comment><USER27> Are they really distorted though? I wonder if it's an artifact of trying to image a light source, maybe caused by the display not being perfectly level to the microscope stage.

I ask because some of the images really do look perfect with sharp edges (the 3DS, the PSP), compared to the blobs of light you see on the other ones.

<comment><USER5> The OpenPandora shot doesn't look sharp because it has an anti-glare coating. Some of the others may be a bit too bright for the cheap microscope I'm using, so they're a bit blurry. But mostly, the pixels really do look that way; most of them aren't rectangular at all.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the pics! Since you have these devices and can simply count up the number of pixels and divide by the size of the display, would you please consider photoshopping in scale bars to reflect the length of some unit of measure?

<comment><USER5> The pictures are less than 1mm wide. I've added a grey bar that approximates 1mm at the same scale at the top of the post to give a sense of the scale. Does that help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just unpacked mine. Gosh... the screen has an issue... As if there was a white-led behind the screen. It appears only on bright colors.

</comment><comment><USER30> Funny there's no comparison with one of Apple's main competitor phones: Samsung Galaxy SII/Note. How about adding that?

<comment><USER5> No conspiracy, I just don't have access to these devices. I'll add a Sony Tablet S when I get around to it, though.

(Update: I've added the Sony Tablet S image.)

<comment><USER31> lukas thanks for it. Any idea about Nexus One -- how come green pixel is so relatively small. is it just brighter??

<comment><USER5> No, that's how PenTile screens work. There are twice as many green pixels as red and blue ones (one "visual" pixel is made up of a green and red pixel, or a green and blue pixel, so there are two sub-pixels per pixel). Thus, the green pixels are smaller.

<comment><USER32> And the reason why is because the human eye is more sensitive to green than other colors. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I just picked one up and I'm kind of disappointed. There are 3-4 specks of dirt under the glass, and with the exception of the amazing display, I'm not sure it's worth the upgrade from the iPad 2. Probably going to return it, and either get my money back or get a device that has a clean display.

<comment><USER34> Almost certainly your local Apple store has a stock reserved for replacements-- you should be able to walk in, show it to them and walk out with a new device.</comment></comment>


Resumes suck for hiring engineers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alinelerner.com/resumes-suck-heres-the-data/?hn=1 <comment><USER2> Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation.

When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops.

I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list of names down to a reasonable number to actually call. So I'm not judging people's skill levels yet -- I'm looking for something in their history that tells me they are bringing more to the table than knowing how to code. I don't even have preconceived notions of what that might be - just something that sparks me to think their experience has something in common with what we do. We'll weed out the weak technical candidates in an initial call, then continue with the people who are both strong technically and a good fit for the work and the culture.

So the whole premise that I am not getting it "right" when judging a person skill based on their resume is missing the point. It isn't that I don't care... but I know reading a resume won't give me an accurate answer, so it isn't even a piece of the decision making criteria yet.

<comment><USER3> > When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go.

With that attitude, I hope you aren't complaining about how hard it is to find talent.

> It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in.

This gets parroted a lot around here, but with no supporting evidence other than highly improbable hypotheticals or black swan events. On the other hand, I know plenty of companies that have had to deal with poor candidates, from a Fortune 500 with 70000+ worldwide employees down to a small 12-person shop, and none have suffered serious consequences from these poor choices. Considering the lack of hard evidence supporting your statement, I believe these companies I am familiar with are the typical case and not "lucky".

<comment><USER4> I've seen many negative consequences from poor software engineers being brought into companies first hand.

I saw a junior engineer try to add a patchwork of libraries just because he was not confident in his ability to do something correctly, leading to a lot of maintenance overhead that grew very quickly.

Many of the previous frontend engineers got fired from my current company because they did not produce at all - a direct result is a polluted codebase that needs to be scrapped asap because it has led directly to poor perception of product. It also is extremely difficult to iterate upon.

One company I was at had some very terrible legacy code from full stack engineers. The person who wrote the code was fired as well, but not before leaving damage that persisted for years - some triply JSON.stringified JS object, along with some other extra parentheses, was stored right into the database as a string! This meant every time the data had to be fetched, it had to be parsed by the server to fill certain other data, but the core answer object was still sent as it was due to the difficulty associated with sending a parsed form (the backend was Java), which meant that the frontend also had to parse it! Thankfully we were able to silo the damage to an easy to adapt modular service, but it was the cause of much sadness, especially when it was a core piece of data for our product.

<comment><USER3> First off, thanks for providing some concrete examples.

That said, those all fundamentally sound like process problems to me. They would not have been allowed to happen at either of the companies I have worked for or any of the companies I have worked with, at least not to a degree that they would harm products. Sure, we have shit code down in the bowels of our libraries, and some of it was put there by people who didn't know what they were doing. I would not characterize any of it as serious problems, though. Those tend to either not live long or not make it into the codebase in the first place.

I understand there is a tradeoff here, and that "process" is a dirty word to many people. A little process can go a long way, though. It can make problems like those you describe minor or non-existent. To me this seems like a small price to pay for opening up your hiring process and dealing with the poor choices.

On a slight tangent and speaking of costs, I get the impression that many people discount the cost of a false negative. You are trying to hire people for a reason. Your company is incurring costs from not having this person, be it the lost revenue from expanding or the actual costs of working your current engineers harder to meet deadlines. That needs to enter into the equation, along with the costs of false positives and the costs of mitigating same.

<comment><USER5> Even though process is intended to mitigate the damage an individual can cause, in practice it's hard to have a good process without good people. Everywhere I've felt that a poor hire had serious negative effects on a company, those employees were also obstacles to bringing in a better process.

I agree with you that the cost of a false negative must be considered. The kind of bad hire I'm thinking of here is a net negative producer that actively costs the company money (or even causes good employees to leave), even after they're gone (if you can manage to get rid of them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know what's frustrating? When you don't even make it to the interview stage because hiring managers think that "Red Hat" and "Linux" are two different things.

I was recently passed over because my 15 years' of experience with Linux has been with multiple distributions (including RPM-based ones) and my resume didn't have a line that just said "Red Hat" on it.

Them: "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't hire you because you don't have any JavaScript experience..."

Candidate: "What do you think all of this stuff with JS in the name on my resume means?!"

<comment><USER7> Treat CV writing as a SEO task: "JavaScripted the JavaScript scripts using the JavaScript MVC framework Angular.js (JavaScript)." instead of "Implemented using Angular.js".

<comment><USER8> I've recently written a resolution engine for keywords when matching cv's to job descriptions. it also helps finding patterns in other skills that may be transferrable. i hope to show HN as soon as i finish some performance improvements (which includes writing a brand new db driver :'()

<comment><USER9> Add me to the list of people to notify when your project is done, plz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would think that the other interpretation of this result is just that many engineers suck at writing resumes, which is totally plausible. In fact, one could analyze this in the current data set by looking at the total number of correct predictions versus the different resumes in the set. A well-written resume would then be one which results in correct predictions most frequently. You'd then have two dimensions for each resume - quality as judged by the author and signaling accuracy in the resume itself.

I've seen resumes in all corners of that plot, so I can't say that I'd throw out the resume straight away, but it does indicate that there is some large gap between what hirers want and what candidates think they want.

<comment><USER11> Since technical writing is part of an engineers job requirements, I would argue that an engineer incapable of writing a decent resume is already at a disadvantage.

<comment><USER12> Resumes are inherently hard to prepare because the requirements are often deliberately withheld. Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag, but other than basic linguistic elements it's not really a fair way to evaluate someone's technical communication skills. Some companies treat the job posting itself as a type of puzzle you're expected to guess at with your cover letter and resume.

Also, a lot of job postings are terribly written, extremely vague or otherwise problematic, so it's not a one-sided problem. It's hard to know if you're meeting the employer's needs when their posting is asking for someone who could engineer a mission to Mars on their lunch break and will work for $50,000 and 1 week of vacation.

<comment><USER11> "Granted, if a resume has basic formatting, spelling or grammar problems that's a big red flag"

I agree. The same could also be said about a companies job posting. If the job posting is "vague or problematic", it also indicates the company has no idea of what skill set they need.

This has many parallels with a client not properly being able to specify his requirements. Usually if a client cannot properly specify his requirements, he also underestimate the amount of work / cost it will require to develop.

The same with a job posting, if they cant properly specify a job posting, an employer also might think the job is easy or he can pay someone peanuts to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I took the survey, and would have done a 20-minute phone screen with five out of the six resumes I got. All six were basically qualified for their roles.

That is vastly different from reality. When I post job ads, at least 25% of the resumes I get are completely unlike the job requirements, and another 50% superficially match but are obviously unqualified. The remaining 25% look like the resumes I saw in the survey.

When I get resumes from recruiters, I generally don't get any of the "didn't even read the ad" resumes, but I still get about 1/3 obviously unqualified candidates.

So overall, a resume filter lets me skip hundreds of useless phone screens or face-to-face interviews. I may lose a few good candidates in that process, but not many.

I'm really not sure why this author is trying to use resumes to decide whether to interview these candidates. Once you have them filtered to this level, a quick phone screen gives you much better information than a resume, and doesn't take too much time.

</comment><comment><USER14> The experiment looks flawed. It seems that ALL (or almost all) resumes are, at least, OK.

Resumes can work for weeding out bad fits, or people doing things clearly out of the scope of interest. They are not, and cannot, be a tool for choosing the best. (Unless success is so spectacular, that you know the person by name anyway.)

It's HR's delusion that previous -perceived- presented achievements written on one's resume can serve well for predicting future achievements in our company. So, don't overoptimize it an do technical interviews with people actually working on a given technical problem.

<comment><USER15> But can we have technical interviews instead of brain-teasers?

Maybe it is just me, but I don't do puzzles. I solve big problems, and I have a track record of being very successful at it. I juggle people, and tools, and objectives, and timelines, and get things done.

I like projects, and I am not afraid of hard work. If I like the objective of a project, I will wade through human vomit to get it done.

Brain teasers are none of that for me. They are some kind of parlor-trick brain-test. I am not necessarily bad at them... but I am just a bit better than okay. I do not want to have to practice them just to get past an interview.

<comment><USER16> [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3660-the-person-theyll- become](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3660-the-person-theyll-become)

<comment><USER15> Interesting, and a point I agree with, but I don't see how it relates to the above?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here:

[http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup- offers-a...](http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a-new- way-to-network-interview/)

We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance. A study that Google released last year supports that.

The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. They chose what they wanted to work on together.

In a sense, we were batch processing applicants while gathering much richer information than resumes provide. Strong candidates we didn't hire, we shared in the Sequoia network.

We ended up making eight interview offers (several candidates decided to work elsewhere), and we hired one engineer.

The whole event was inspired by this essay: [http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234](http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234)

<comment><USER18> > The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a > weekend at no cost other than their time.

As in working for you for free, and on a WE to boot?

For a student or someone who is unemployed, that might work.

For someone with a job and a family life, I don't think so. Especially if that person can command a $120k+ salary.

<comment><USER19> Dude, they get to contribute to the company _for free_.

<comment><USER20> I almost spit out my coffee when the OP stated " _for free_ ", as if not having to pay anything but time, my most valuable asset, was some perk.

I'm sure the OP means well, and it may have been a success for them, but I don't know anyone in my circle who would participate in something like this, unless they were utterly desperate for a job. I thought there was a serious talent crunch? Who is courting whom?

I wonder what sort of engineers self-select in a process like this?

<comment><USER17> One reason why engineers and companies have trouble discussing the job market is that talented people who know how to craft their resumes don't imagine that any other kind of candidate exists.

Unemployed people have lots of time. Understand that and you'll understand why a weekend like this makes sense.

One reason they're unemployed is that they don't know how to demonstrate their value. A lot of engineers are actually poor at communicating, and not that great at resumes.

This weekend was for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm in the process of going through technical interviews with a bunch of companies (some I approached, some approached me.) The coolest thing has been some peoples' reaction to the little details on my CV (Resume.)

Compared to the other very unsuccessful interview, where the MD just listened to me talk for a few minutes and said "you're not what we're looking for" (no programmer in the interview), getting engineers to ask me end-of-interview questions with a smile on their face was really fun (whether or not I get the jobs in the end.)

The OP says that engineers were quite good if the CV contained enough detail about what the candidate had been _doing_ , the substance of the projects. In both cases, the little question was where I had included a bullet thinking "noone in HR will know what this means, but I think it's cool" were the ones that got the smile question.

For the record, all my CVs are skills-based (that is, a set of bullets around "programming", "teamwork", "communication" etc) followed by a brief chronology of work and education, rather than having to list every position (student volunteering included) in order to say what I did there that was relevant. Customising which bullets (and even sections) you include on a per-application basis is extremely important, of course, so that the HR person can see "skill that we asked for: 5 bullets" right there on the first page.

<comment><USER22> This may be off-topic, but it sure sounds to me like what you're submitting is not a CV but a resume. Those are two different items. CVs are a comprehensive history of yourself and your accomplishments, resumes are short, tailored briefs of why you are fit for the job.

<comment><USER23> Interesting, certainly makes etymological sense. I never realized that, in Israel the two terms are used pretty interchangably. Wikipedia says CVs are much more comprehensive in some countries, esp. North America.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sadly one of the biggest problems I have found regarding Resumes/CV's in the IT industry and companies is the rise of HR departments who will just word filter the candidates and even remove people they deem not suitable. Even the classic case of filtering out people they deem `overqualified`, which sadly means the IT manager most often does not get to even see or known about the better candidates and ends up with a selection picked by HR people who know nothing of the work involved.

I for one welcome phone interaction and tests, though not all tests perfect and found many flawed tests and errors in tests in the past. Some companies appreciate when you tell them of mistakes and others will hold it against you, though again, found HR departments if you point out a mistake will not take it onboard and take it as criticism and in a negative way and hold that against you.

So for me, I do feel HR departments play too large a part in recruitment in IT than their skillsets entail.

Not saying a golden solution, but I do feel that many recruitment processes have gone down hill with HR wedging themselves into the process more and more and filtering out candidates that the manager doing the recruiting, never even knows about.

Though this is all based upon my experience and I'm sure others had different views. But for me, having been turned down for a job for being overqualified and case of you actually knowing the manager and he never even got to see your CV, well, sadly I know it is very true and happens.

<comment><USER25> It this really a problem?

Because most of us wouldn't want to work for a company with such a broken hiring process, it's a big red flag for a lot of other things being wrong in they way they treat their tech people.

And those who do want to get in should be smart enough to play the game and cater their resumes to those HR practices. If you can't or won't, you probably wouldn't happy or successful working for such a company.

As far as I'm concerned, any recruitment process is essentially self- selecting: it will attract and pass the candidates that are a good fit for the company. If a company finds it can't get the right candidates, they should take a step back and look at their entire company culture.

Broken HR processes are a symptom, not the root cause. And it's a filter that works both ways, preventing naive candidates form inadvertently getting hired for jobs that will make them miserable.

<comment><USER24> I agree, though for many companies recruiting those fields of work have long established institutions and recognised exams, be those lawyers or accountants. now IT has its own institutions and exams but the difference is, those change so frequently or that anything with credibility has changed or indeed expired due to technology changes at a frequency higher than the educational process too learn those skills fully.

Accountant exams and lawyers as the best examples have not changed. So for HR to see filter is not only easy but obvious process in such stable measures. In IT those change so much that it is mostly recruitment agency input that has those factored into requirements and as for agencies. Well some good at filtering and know the trades and others mostly work upon (1) get CV's (2) get companies (3) push CV's and effort done by wine and dine approach with HR.

So not only is it the HR department but the agency factor and in the web based direction the added level of filtering does get down to keywords still and little if not mostly none at all human sanity by somebody who knows the role and can see the signs of somebody who knows the skills.

Then keywords do not bestow what level of competence and that varies greatly as we all know.

This all said sometimes the gains outway the broken HR if you get an offer and not every time do you have the luxury of saying no.

Though as a personal anecdote I once had a job interview with a company and got there on time, left waiting and eventually HR bod came down and said fill this in (form which was all details upon my CV), so I ask can I just attach my CV you already have and told no. So I had to fill out in pen on a form that you just know somebody will have to type into a system, details already upon my CV. Did that, still waiting for HR bod to return. They return then have interview with HR. Was very belittling with much attitude of thats a lot for money for somebody your age and in short really off putting attitude. I then saw the boss of the IT department, was interview with him and IT contractor, not only aced the interview and blew them away but taught them things as well like undocumented debug modes in software they used (dataease so talking 90's here). Given the contractor was a `specialist` in this product he was mind blown. Also the small bonus skills I totally aced, in short a perfect interview at every level.

Not only was I offered the job before I got home from the interview but they had offered 20% more than the agency had put me forward for and that HR person had been so much attitude towards me (I was early 20's). It just totally put me off, and turned it down, just due to that HR experience. Though have many other HR anecdotes, some good and some bad, as we all do and shall not mention the posture nazi's for want of a better term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What I feel right now is that the hiring process is more and more based on personnal branding. If you want to have a job interview in top startup you have to have a good github, smart blog posts, a good stackoverflow, a good kaggle, some certificats from coursera, some conf etc.

It's a good thing for hiring process, you could judge a candidat more easely if you could read some of his code or thoughts. You could have more interesting job offers from people that actually understand what you do. The problem is that you have to spend lot of time in improving these things. Some are easy because it's natural to do some work on a open source project that you're interested in, the personnal branding thing it's just a bonus, but some other need works...

I believe that in all automatic job applying process that I tried recently there were fields for linkedin, github, personnal blogs, websites etc.

<comment><USER27> A company that relies on GitHub and blog posts will miss tons of highly- qualified candidates who don't (or cannot due to their employment agreement) work on open source and who don't spend their weekends blogging and posting to StackOverflow. Sure, I can see interesting programming side projects being a nice bonus, but it's not a replacement for a resume + technical interview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the > board, and after running the numbers, it began to look like resumes might > not be a particularly effective filtering tool in the first place._

Her theory - people suck at filtering because the tool they use is poor.

> _it may not be a matter of being good or bad at judging resumes but rather a > matter of the task itself being flawed — at the end of the day, the resume > is a low-signal document._

Resumes suck for hiring _all_ people. But that's not the purpose of a resume -- it's a low-signal filter to weed out the initial batch of candidates. If you treat hiring like a sales funnel (and you should), then a resume is a great way to eliminate unnecessary time for your team to assess someone's cultural fit. Expecting the resume to be high signal filter is pretty naive.

<comment><USER29> > If you treat hiring like a sales funnel (and you should), then a resume is a > great way to eliminate unnecessary time for your team to assess someone's > cultural fit.

Where's the evidence that it is great at this? Certainly, its _a_ basis for narrowing the set of candidates that get further review, but is it a _good_ basis?

<comment><USER28> Where's the evidence that there is a better alternative?

I was slightly perturbed by the original author as she offered no real solution.

<comment><USER30> She did suggest an idea - asking for a clear explanation of a project, as a sort of writing sample.

<comment><USER30> It's definitely not a solution for an employer who is just like scraping resumes off of Monster or something, but it's not much different from the uncontroversial practice of asking for a cover letter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >For each resume, I had a pretty good idea of how strong the engineer in question was, and I split resumes into two strength-based groups. To make this judgment call, I drew on my personal experience — most of the resumes came from candidates I placed (or tried to place) at top-tier startups. In these cases, I knew exactly how the engineer had done in technical interviews, and, more often than not, I had visibility into how they performed on the job afterwards. The remainder of resumes came from engineers I had worked with directly.

Does anyone else think this is a huge caveat getting thrown into a blender of numbers? Why does this person's opinion even matter? Why should I take this at face value? I'm not trying to say resumes are a good indicator of anything, but neither is this "study".

<comment><USER32> Thank you. This entire 'study' is nonsense because this recruiter has no idea how 'strong' these candidates really are. She only thinks she knows, just like every arrogant jerk who's ever conducted a technical interview.

<comment><USER33> Yep, nonsense in = nonsense out. This "study" is pointless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As someone trying to hire, I find myself going through resumes for the firs ttime...

And honestly, my primary metric is if the word "rails" appears anywhere (It's a ruby on rails job). I might even let that go if I saw a cover letter explaining why they liked rails (but maybe don't have professional experience in it).

Honestly this is a pretty low bar. And the way I've been doing it, the phone screen that follows is pretty softball. But after that, I give out the coding exercise...

If you complete it, you get an in person interview for the most part. But all the rest of it - looking at resumes, the phone screen - sort of seems like a waist of time. I don't care how big a game you can talk, if you can't do the coding exercise (which, btw, is the most common outcome - they beg a couple extensions and then give up), then... oh well.

<comment><USER35> Honestly, if hiring permenant staff for long term occupation, I probably wouldn't even require that much. If they have php, perl or python on their CV, then they'll have had the opportunity to know everything else you'll want them to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's hard to gauge a person's qualities from a resume. Things like culture fit (extremely important IMO), fast thinker, quick learner - are all aspects that can't be garnered from a resume. IMO, resumes are only a decent filter for experience, and provides a baseline for the interview.

There are many I've interviewed that padded their resumes and said they are experienced in something they really aren't, and there are some who dont have much experience but are smart and quick learners.

Without a resume, what else can we go with when it comes to hiring? In my career, the best hires have always been from two sources:

\- someone i've worked with and trust before

\- someone who was recommended by someone i worked with and trust before

<comment><USER37> Are you hiring right now?

I wrote exactly these two tags "fast thinker" / "quick learner" in my CV / cover letter / LinkedIn profile and I removed them a few months later because from my experience it looks like they drive recruiters away or scare them.

<comment><USER38> I can only speak for myself but terms like that set off my BS meter and probably make me think at least marginally less of whoever sticks them on their resume. They're vague and unquantifiable. They're of a class with words like acclaimed, industry-leading, and so forth in copy describing products.

<comment><USER37> Yes, for that reason I took it off, still the question is how can one communicate that one is? Should you write "constantly programmed faster and leaner and with less errors that his colleagues?". I don't think there is a way to communicate this but I still think it matters.

You can easily determine if some one is a BS guy in a technical interview anyway, so I don't think, BSers are very frequent in IT and much less so in programming.

<comment><USER38> Results, achievements, accomplishments. Frankly I don't really care if you were better than the guy in the next cube. He might be an idiot or a complete slacker.

And I'm not sure I wouldn't get negative vibes from someone who felt they had to position themselves by de-positioning the people they worked with.

>You can easily determine if some one is a BS guy in a technical interview anyway, so I don't think, BSers are very frequent in IT and much less so in programming.

Of course they're frequent. They are everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I feel like this data is a small piece of the age long debate about hiring methods and competence/success indicators.

There's been a lot of data about how even people who think they are experts at finding good candidates are really no better than someone flipping a coin.

How then, if the line between "strong/less strong" candidates are so blurred, does Aline draw the line between "strong/less strong" herself? Isn't the way she splits the candidates' resumes also part of the exact thing she's trying to measure?

 _> "...then even if my criteria for whether each resume belonged to a strong candidate wasn't perfect, the results would still be compelling"_

<comment><USER30> I don't think you actually demonstrate this statement:

> if the line between "strong/less strong" candidates are so blurred

It is hard to tell prospectively whether someone will be a good programmer. It is not too difficult to tell retrospectively. (Any research that tries to measure competence/success indicators must be using something as its dependent variable, right?) The line you quote is specifically about the fact that resumes could be meaningful even if her competence assignments were not. Resumes seem to fail at that test as well.

The biggest threat to validity would probably be that different people will be good/bad developers in different environments, and that this effect is very strong. Then each reviewer could be good at selecting for success in their own company, but they would only agree with each or with aline to the extent that their environment was similar to that of other companies or the ones that aline placed those engineers at. I am pretty comfortable rejecting this theory out of hand myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> A resume is a list of qualifications, and to see how a candidate frames themselves. They also set expectations for me, the interviewer for the questions I would like to ask (they say they're a Node and Clojure expert? I will tailor my questions to verify that).

It's also a way (in addition to the cover letter) to quickly judge their communication skills.

I wouldn't hire someone without 1) a cover letter 2) a resume 3) a phone screen 4) review of their projects (ie github) 5) a team interview 6) references. Granted, I don't have to do it at scale.

It's time consuming, but not as much as a bad hire.

<comment><USER38> I tend to agree that a lot of the hate on resumes seems to be missing the point. Sure, if I know or know of someone, maybe a resume doesn't add a whole lot. But they provide: \- A first pass at there being some match between experience/background and those needed for the position. \- Some guidance for the interview process. Frankly, a lot of the details on the resume don't really matter all that much to me but, overall, it usually gives me a sense of which avenues are worth probing in more detail and which ones I can skip over fairly quickly. Sure, I could draw a lot of this out during the interview but it's easier to read over a couple of pages in advance and spend a few minutes thinking about how to spend the interview slot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The real questions are: What would be better than sending a resume? Should the job ask for a resume as well as have every applicant submit a project somewhere, one which will be "unit tested" automatically to filter candidates? Should they just ask for the project?

Should there be something other than a resume like a timed coding test or something (where the applicant needs to take half an hour and write a program to do X in the language that they will need to work in, probably something really simple)?

<comment><USER16> A friend of mine made it through the initial interview stages at SoundCloud. He was then given three days to build an iOS app using the SoundCloud API that showed off his experience and skill. I like that approach because three days is a nice length of time to build something you can be proud of. He was interviewing for the iOS team, of course.

<comment><USER42> Was he paid for his work? If he wasn't, he's part of the problem in hiring processes in our industry.

<comment><USER43> Agreed, I did a coding exercise for the Nerdery once, I epended about 8 hours on it, no one even reviewed it. Total waste of time. Yes I am naming them intentionally, I felt that behavior was antagonistic and exploitative.

<comment><USER42> This industry is filled with what I've come to call the "Naive Narcissist". There is a very large percentage of developers who are so eager for "kudos," renown, and other intangibles that they will happily subvert their own livelihoods and contribute to the culture of relegating programmers to second- class commodity labor in the pursuit of overcoming a (usually arbitrary, artificial) challenge.

I come from academia. I know what its like to work toward a goal for the sheer pleasure the challenge brings without expecting (much) compensation. But that's academia. This is (typically) private, for-profit industry. There is no _good_ reason to not demand fair compensation and respectful treatment that includes not being given unpaid monkey-work to "show off" for some ass with a superiority complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Many recruiters don't read resumes and many of those that do, don't understand them, be they from HR or IT depts.

Arrogance, disrespect and plain unpreparedness.

<comment><USER45> Actually, from my last experience, winning the recruiters was easy, it was the company RH/Engineers was tough

They're the first step in the funnel, if you can't get through them your resume usually needs fixing.

And of course the interviewing flaws that are discusses several times on HN play a part as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> If you exclude a single outlier (a candidate rated poorly by the experimenter scores 100% in the resume test), the resume test doesn't look too bad.

Apart from that one, the consistently well-rated CVs are all from the strong side.

So it could be argued that CVs work pretty well for recruiters - hiring from the best CVs makes it unlikely you'll hire a weak candidate.

<comment><USER47> This also gives us concrete data on what makes a good CV, provided anyone has access to the ratings and can also come up with a good classification metric to extract attributes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Funnily enough I've been working on this a lot lately for a book I've been writing[1].

It seems there are several audiences for a CV (recruiter, hiring manager, supporting interviewer) and a fundamental error that people make is writing a CV for more or less than these three types of people.

The fundamental truth is that no-one wants to read a CV. They're at best an advert, but people tend to overstuff them or fill them with things irrelevant to the position they're applying for, so they get ditched by people who have tons of them to read through.

I have a free email course about career hacking for anyone that subscribes to my book's mailing list. It's focused on people who want to become penetration testers but the career material is applicable to anyone wanting to get into a discipline that they're not already in.

[1] - [https://www.rawhex.com/](https://www.rawhex.com/)

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not very surprised that resumes aren't a good indicator of performance. They're real only useful as an indicator of experience. In other words they tell you about quantity and not quality. I'd say if they seem reasonable for the role then move them on to the next step of the hiring process. Every interview process that I've been involved with has had a series of increasing expensive steps designed to find specific information and weed people out as early as possible.

It's also worth noting that several of the criteria people used to reject candidates in the article aren't good predictors. For example, lack of pedigree doesn't tell you much. People from a variety of backgrounds can be good or bad as coders. A good or bad pedigree can be a useful indicator.

</comment><comment><USER50> They remind me of these folks: [http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/05/when- a-project-mana...](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/05/when-a-project- manager-speaks-to-another-project-manager/)

</comment><comment><USER51> I am not sure how I would feel if my resume was posted here. I've already found someone I was able to quickly identify by looking at the resumes. I would have expected more discretion on the recruiters part.

<comment><USER52> Aline here. I got permission from everyone whose resume I used in this experiment.

<comment><USER51> Fair enough....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Totally agree! KeepSafe is taking this exact approach to hiring right now. [https://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html](https://www.getkeepsafe.com/noresume.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> As a hiring manager, I want those resumes as an initial filter. No, they don't say much about engineering skills, but they tell me quite a lot about a number of other things.

Things like communication skills, priorities, attention to detail and motivation are strongly reflected by someones resume.

The only people who can afford to not put serious effort into their resumes are people that have an online (Github etc) or offline (network) footprint that speaks for itself. But those also tend to be the people that don't get recruited via the formal application process.

</comment><comment><USER54> In the part of the article that lists "Rejection Reasons" one rejection type is "Too Enterprisey". Could someone please clear up what that means for me?

<comment><USER38> This blog post discusses it a bit. [http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/](http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/)

It wouldn't shock me if it also gets used as code for things like "hasn't worked at a startup before" or, frankly, "too old."

<comment><USER55> I wrote the piece you linked, and I do see still see that feedback on some candidates almost two years later. I think your interpretation of this as code for other things is fairly accurate, although not as much for the 'too old' piece. I've heard it for even the 7-10 years of experience range (though perhaps that could be construed as too old for some).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Interestingly, why didn't she do some kind of text mining/classification to try to show what features gave the highest discrimination between the two classes?

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't see anywhere the Ockham's Razor explanation that bad candidates fudge their resumes in order to make themselves look like good candidates.

<comment><USER58> I think it's even simpler just to observe that the way someone chooses to write and target a resume has no particular relationship to how well they would do the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Resumes are just a broad filter for skills and a way to find useful questions to later flesh out a candidate and their competence/experience level. It shouldn't be shocking that code samples and/or a short programming test and a phone call will tell you more about the candidate, and if they should come in for a full interview, than blind keyword bingo.

</comment><comment><USER60> Keep in mind that sending out resumes is not the only way to get a good job. Some relevant previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338859) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532886)

</comment><comment><USER61> My own experiences with interviewing HR pre-filtered resumes bears this out, so I can't imagine what the entire firehose is like.

</comment><comment><USER62> I can tell you that I got interviews at 6 "startups" (ranging from garage to multi-million dollars) in San Francisco without giving any of them resumes. And I live in Milwaukee, so they even had to fly me out.

Seems like SF is on top of it, Milwaukee on the other hand, only cares about how many years of experience you have. Nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER63> Some of the worst people I know also have the best resumes. I think they've learned to optimize where they can.

<comment><USER64> It also works the other way around. Some of the best people I know have horrible resumes or no resume at all. Resumes are probably subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect that tends to plague software development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I like the article but really if resumes suck then what doesn't. Companies look at resumes for 1-2 minutes on top will they ever have time to browse through hundreds of lines of code, projects, portfolios, etc. I don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER66> for anyone relating with every "engineers suck at writing resumes" comment; I've been using my stackoverflow profile as a resume and it's been working out great.

</comment><comment><USER67> The interesting part is that recruiters seem more in agreement when identifying low performers. When faced with a high performer their scores differ wildly.

<comment><USER38> It wouldn't especially surprise me if that were the case. It's a lot easier to identify people who don't meet the requirements of a position than to intuit how good a job they'll do based on paper qualifications. You'll make mistakes in both cases, but more in the latter.

Testing like SATs are similar. A low score is probably a much better predictor of (lack of) success at an elite school than a high score is a predictor of success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Resumes suck for hiring anyone.</comment>


Ask HN: Any solopreneurs here? - <AUTHOR> Would love to connect and exchange notes with other solopreneurs.<p>* What businesses do you run? * How much time do you spend on them? * How long have you been at it? * Do you outsource to contractors, VA's? * Is is sustainable or do you have to take up day jobs or do consulting on the side? * How do you deal with being the only employee (motivation, validation, automation, ...)? <comment><USER2> As I said in the "recurring income" thread recently, I'm mainly working on <http://www.improvely.com> , <http://www.w3counter.com> and <http://www.dialshield.com>

This is my full-time business, and I've been building it since half-way into my freshman year of college 8 years ago. I don't generally outsource anything -- I really enjoy all aspects of the work, from design and development to helping onboard new customers to managing marketing efforts.

Being the only employee does mean everything needs to be automated. I use Pingdom to check that every site and API is responding with proper content. Monit and custom scripts make sure various services/daemons are always running on the right servers, and restart them if something fails. Everything is set to SMS me, and I'm never far from a computer, even on vacation.

When you're the sole employee, you're the one responsible for disaster recovery. Data center on fire, hard drive corrupt, billing mistake, etc. -- your problem, at 3AM when you get that SMS that your service is down.

So prepare for that. Keep all code in a ready-to-deploy state in a hosted repository, with local copies in case the repo host is down too. Keep all your service configuration files backed up too, or have scripts that can deploy them automatically. Have all your databases backed up, automatically, to at least two different data centers. Don't hard-code IP addresses in your code. Test all these things. These days, every server I have could be hit by a nuke, and I could have my customers back online as fast as new servers provision and DNS caches refresh.

The only issue is keeping support requests manageable. I have almost 100k users across all the sites. Requests come in through SnapEngage, ZenDesk tickets, feedback forms in the app and e-mails. I try to treat every support request as an opportunity to make something easier to find or easier to do so that the next person in the same position doesn't need to contact me -- fix the bug, fix the process, create a FAQ entry, make the documentation easier to find, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dan, your work is very impressive & inspiring.

Where do you host your apps?

<comment><USER2> SoftLayer primarily. They're rock solid, their hardware is top notch, their management tools and infrastructure are top notch, their support staff is top notch even at 3AM on a weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a solopreneur, and I work on iOS apps. I've been at it for 2 years now (!). I have not outsourced to contractors, and have been doing all the coding and art myself.

Check out my apps at: <http://www.squarepoet.com/>

My best performing app is Tiny Piano, which recently reached 2 million downloads: <http://itunes.apple.com/app/id477014214> I also recently updated my Japanese learning game: <http://itunes.apple.com/app/id492005575>

My company became profitable starting this June. Tiny Piano has made enough revenue over the past several months to pay all my bills, though revenue is dropping fast. :-) That's how the App Store works... you get an early bump and then your downloads begin to trail off.

I left my full-time job 2 yrs ago, and so I spend most of my waking hours hacking on apps.

I'm a pretty competitive person, so wanting to "win" or wanting to "not fail" keeps me motivated enough. I have a few concrete goals that keep me focused. 1) Get 10M+ downloads so I can say on my resume that I made a "hit" app. 2) Buy a house in the Bay Area. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> You seem to be doing pretty good. A couple of questions:

1\. Is this ("Tiny Piano has made enough revenue over the past several months to pay all my bills") all ad revenue Edit: Just saw the in-app song pack purchases. Is that where all the revenue is coming from?

2\. Isn't, the music niche very competitive on the app store? What are you doing differently?

3\. Given that (as you say) downloads begin to trail off, how are you planning on getting to 10M+ downloads?

4\. I like the specific goals :) Is being specific (10M+ downloads) a hack you had to come up with to stay focused or just something you wanted?

5\. Are you a musician yourself?

<comment><USER3> 1\. About 33% of my revenue is from sales. 67% is ad revenue.

2\. Yes, it is very competitive. My app has dropped from the #8 spot in iPad/Free/Music to the #41, and it's hurting. :-) It has done very well in east Asian markets though.

3\. Not sure. I might try to add some viral channels in the app. Otherwise, I'll have to slog it out, and get to 10M+ the slow way.

4\. Specific goals is more or less a hack / dangling carrot. It's hard to say, "I'll succeed when I succeed." Two years ago, my specific goal was to launch a single app. This January, my goal was to make revenue. Now that I'm making some revenue, my goal is higher. Maybe when I hit 10M, I'll want to hit 100M? :-)

5\. No, I'm not a musician. That's why I built the easiest piano on the App Store. :-) If you have an iOS device, download it and let me know what you think! <http://itunes.apple.com/app/id477014214>

<comment><AUTHOR> Your answers lead me naturally to my next question :)

Why/how did you choose to build music related apps (given that it's a competitive space and your not a musician)?

Thanks for taking the time to answer. Hoping you'll reach your goals sooner rather than later :)

<comment><USER3> I've always been interested in learning to play instruments (who isn't?). I tried playing piano when I was younger, but gave up. I am currently (on and off) trying to learn guitar.

I had just bought an iPad in 2010, and was playing around with it and thought that it'd be cool to play guitar on it. I made a quick prototype and sent a video to two friends. They said it was cool. So I committed and started hacking. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I will be launching the big one at the end of this month. It's _different_ kind of review site called Review Signal. I work full time on it (including most weekends). I've been working on this project for ~1.5 years with a few small breaks. I outsource small things like PSD slicing/coding. I work with a talented designer on the UI.

It's not sustainable in the sense it's making money now, it's made a small amount off the beta but nowhere near livable. I've got other income sources and keep expenses to a minimum. Burnt through most of my cash building this and committing full time.

Motivation: joined Affinity Lab (coworking space in DC). I have a hard time getting work done outside that space now. Why I end up there til 1am on a saturday night. It surrounds me with awesome people who understand what I am doing and we help each other constantly. I don't think I've been there a day where I haven't been helped in some small or large way and helped someone in a small or large way. It plays a large part in what keeps me going.

Validation: I had a private beta in march, the same coworking space was a great place to start getting users. I also have been reaching out to people who I think would benefit from my service and having them try it. It has worked pretty well and the feedback really helped. I built a tool to help automate this process as much as possible. Which leads into...

Automation: love it. I've built a lot of tools to reduce the amount of time I spent doing things which are repetitive or semi-repetitive. As a solo founder everything is competing for my bandwidth. There is a lot of high value, repetitive things (hustling) which I think can be automated to some degree. I've built some infrastructure to help me do that. Trying to constantly watch myself and figure out where my time is best spent is important. However, this often conflicts with motivation: doing some valuable things suck. You need to find a balance or simply will yourself through, I don't have a good solution for this, yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've run a couple small startups as a solopreneur. Currently I'm running the Birdy - <http://thebirdy.com>. It's been online for about a year, and I just recently quit my job to work on it full time. The only thing I've outsourced so far is the mobile app development (still in progress). It's ramen profitable, so not sustainable yet, and I'm hoping to grow it to a lifestyle business or better.

For validation, I usually turn to my users. I do a lot of user surveys and collect a lot of feedback. For automation, I use a lot of services out there - supportbee, google doc, build my own internal apps...

Motivation is a tough subject. Even tho I've been lucky enough to see continuous growth of the Birdy, it's hard to stay interested, focused and excited about it. I take breaks, I try to find related projects that interest me, and I talk to a lot of people about it. I try to present it publicly as often as I can, so new people hear about it, and give me feedback.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure about "solopreneur", isn't an entrepreneur just a single person anyway :) Although I wouldn't title myself with either.

I've worked on my own since '03, currently in here <http://qiip.me/edlea/blogger/post/4019>

I freelance mon-fri 9-5 and I build my project evenings and weekends. When I have enough cash I get some help from another developer.

Interestingly RescueTime says I'm ~10% more productive at weekends when I'm working on my project... so I guess I love to work on it, so I do wish I could do it full time.

Motivation (in no particular order): 1\. prove to myself I can do it 2\. make money 3\. help people with a problem that stops them working on what they love 4\. [perceived] freedom 5\. challenges not in my freelance work

and if you're curious, <http://qiip.me> is my project.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using "solopreneur" to mean someone running a company of one.

qiip.me looks nice. How did you get Guy Kawasaki on board? What's your plan in terms of making money with it?

<comment><USER6> I just emailed Guy as per the suggestions of this forum (and a couple of other people). Guy kindly replied. Hopefully have a few more names on there soon :)

Re: making money. I plan to sell extras, like premium themes etc So keep the core product free and make worthwhile add-ons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I created <http://outgrow.me> \- the first marktplace exclusively for successfully crowdfunded projects.

I work on Outgrow.me full time, and I'm a full time student in the evenings. I outsource here and there. I wake up each morning and punch the day in the face.

</comment><comment><USER8> I run <http://namingkings.com/> and <http://pitchremix.com> largely by myself, although I sometimes get friends to help and get second opinions. I probably spend ~10 hours a week working.

I'm currently a student, but I also have a part-time job. Motivation-wise, it definitely helps to get business. :) Every time I get a sale, it energizes me to work on marketing the site some more. I also try to tell as many friends/coworkers/people on the street about it. Without a co-founder, it can be hard to stay in the entrepreneurial mindset, so telling others about it helps reaffirm that mental state.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I gradually switched (since Jan 2011) to consulting part-time (I'm down to 2 days in a week) at my previous employer and I've got one product (<http://apps.shopify.com/fliptabify>) that makes a decent amount of money (enough to survive* but not yet comfortable) and I'm working on a few more.

Currently doing everything myself. Lucky to have a few friends I can bounce off ideas with.

Edit: * To add more context, I'm married and have a 17 month old daughter.

<comment><USER6> I didn't realise shopify had an app market. Is it big enough to make decent money? Does shopify take a cut of your subscription income?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's big enough for me to make decent money and growing all the time. If you use Shopify's billing system they take 20%.

I've written the popular PHP client adapter for the Shopify API ([http://wiki.shopify.com/Making_A_Shopify_App#.E2.80.9CI.E2.8...](http://wiki.shopify.com/Making_A_Shopify_App#.E2.80.9CI.E2.80.99m_a_PHP_developer.E2.80.9D)). If you need any help with getting started with Shopify, feel free to get in touch with me.

<comment><USER9> Hi Sandeep,

Just emailed you asking for some help. I hope you don't mind :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Replied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm just starting out with <http://www.jamaicanize.com> , really small compared to other but it's a start. I've been searching HN and learning a ton. I'm hoping to release something bigger soon :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I consider myself a solopreneur. I run <http://bbguard.com.ve> which is a panic button for BlackBerry users that live in dangerous cities (main focus in LatinAmetica)

My email is in my profile. Would love to connect.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've just launched <http://www.bravecreators.com> and <http://www.alicecombes.com> and I'm hoping to turn both into businesses eventually. I have a full time job at the moment so only have time in the evenings and weekends.

I've tried doing other things to make money, like opening an online shop selling craft kits, etc - but my passion wasn't there. So one thing I've learnt is that it is very important to do what you love, follow your passion. Your passion is your motivation.</comment>


Show HN: Emit.js – Efficient minimalist event emitter in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RobinBressan/emit.js

<comment><USER2> Why would I use this over the native one? Just curious...

<comment><AUTHOR> Just made it to specify the event name with a regex or a callback instead of a string.</comment></comment>


Tesla says its factory is safer. But it left injuries off the books - <AUTHOR> https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is-safer-but-it-left-injuries-off-the-books/ <comment><USER2> Tesla's response [https://www.tesla.com/blog/not-so-revealing- story](https://www.tesla.com/blog/not-so-revealing-story)</comment>


Ask HN: Are wireless and electromagnetic fields dangerous for health? - <AUTHOR> It seems this topic haven't been discussed here on HN, so I'm asking now.<p>- Are wireless and electromagnetic fields dangerous for health?<p>- Should I be worried about and take more care when using my laptop Wi-Fi too close to my body?<p>- Should I keep my cellphone away as much as possible?<p>- Are microwaved food dangerous?<p>- How close can I stay to a Wi-Fi source, let's say my router, or laptop, or cellphone? <comment><USER2> "no adverse health effects" for anything you'd usually use in your household.

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave#Effects_on_health](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave#Effects_on_health)</comment>