HTML 5.1 is a W3C Recommendation - <AUTHOR> https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/5932 <comment><USER2> This is a completely irrelevant document. Browser makers follow standards written by the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), not the W3C.

I'm horribly oversimplifying, but to see the full ugliness, just google 'whatwg w3c'

<comment><USER3> Any specific article explaining what the difference between the two are ? My google being in french, I don't get much results...

<comment><USER4> You already got many relevant answers but just in case you need it again, [https://www.google.com/ncr](https://www.google.com/ncr) redirects to the international version.

<comment><USER5> For me, this redirects to the German version (I'm in Germany on a device with a German locale). I'd really love to have a way to tell Google to only show English-language hits.

<comment><USER6> Just append `&hl=en` to the URL. This should work.

I've set my browser to English as default and use `&hl=de` to tell Google to mix some German hits into the query result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From section 1.5:

 _It must be admitted that many aspects of HTML appear at first glance to be nonsensical and inconsistent.

HTML, its supporting DOM APIs, as well as many of its supporting technologies, have been developed over a period of several decades by a wide array of people with different priorities who, in many cases, did not know of each other's existence.

Features have thus arisen from many sources, and have not always been designed in especially consistent ways. Furthermore, because of the unique characteristics of the Web, implementation bugs have often become de-facto, and now de-jure, standards, as content is often unintentionally written in ways that rely on them before they can be fixed._

That kind of says it all when it comes to web standards!

<comment><USER8> I think about this when I am using XMLHttpRequest in a web worker, and can't actually get an XML document back because you don't have access to an xml parser because there's no dom in web workers.

<comment><USER9> Why would you use XMLHttpRequest in a web worker? Why would you not just delegate working with the result to a web worker? The requests shouldn't dispatch any faster.

<comment><USER8> only point here is it was it was explicitly created for getting back an xml document (by microsoft, outside of any standards body, no less) while 99% of the time it's returning text or json, and in a web worker this XML tool literally can't return an XML document at all.

<comment><USER10> What you're saying is technically true, but only because the XML classes are historically also (unfortunately) DOM classes. It's too bad that XML DOM can't be made into Transferrables (losing their DOM'iness) in modern browsers and thus usable in Web Workers. I suppose XML isn't that widely used in the browser, so that would never happen.

Read the history of XHR and you'll get a fascinating look at how clever teams can slip real innovation into products just by tickling the right business folks' ears.

[http://www.alexhopmann.com/story-of- xmlhttp/](http://www.alexhopmann.com/story-of-xmlhttp/)

> Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the > thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn't have any specific tie to XML other > than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML > into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed > like some good marketing for the component).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it > should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read > backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections > from the contents list and following all the cross-references.

Not sure if this is serious. [https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC- html51-20161101/introduction....](https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC- html51-20161101/introduction.html#how-to-read-this-specification)

<comment><USER12> It's mostly an import of the whatwg spec, which gets whimsical at times.

That is actually a pretty accurate representation of how reading entire specs with intent to implement goes. I've done this twice with the xhr and file specs :) Maybe not the reading backwards part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a document somewhere that summaries the proposed changes from HTML 5 to 5.1?

<comment><USER14> I assume this document [1] may cover some changes.

[1]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC- html51-20161101/changes.html#...](https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC- html51-20161101/changes.html#changes)

<comment><USER15> Interesting that "Having title, or writing email to a friend does not make an img missing alt conformant." What if you write an email to an enemy? [https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC- html51-20161101/changes.html#...](https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC- html51-20161101/changes.html#changes-to-existing-features)

<comment><USER16> >What if you write an email to an enemy?

Then I would probably prefer to use <blink> and <marquee>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have been thinking of the "HTML5" buzzword and its problems for a while now.

<comment><USER18> Care to elaborate? What specifically is wrong with HTML5? And how is it particularly worse than other offerings?

<comment><USER19> I don't think this is what yuhong was referring to, but there's a lot wrong with HTML5. Googling "w3c whatwg", as one commenter suggested, won't give you any real insight into the mess, but it will hint at it.

TL;DR The above document is irrelevant and should be ignored. Popular browsers' implementations define the HTML5 that most devs will want to target, and those browser vendors are members of the competing WHATWG body. They will largely ignore the W3C copy.

<comment><USER20> Those browser vendors are also members of W3C. That's not why W3C HTML5 is irrelevant.

WHATWG HTML ( _formerly_ HTML5) is "rolling release"; the only version numbers are the "Last Modified" date at the top of the document. Meanwhile, W3C HTML5 has defined releases that are thoroughly scrutinized, reviewed, and debated in endless committee meetings.

One of these models is good for rapid-release and fast iteration. The other isn't.

Finally, W3C members are large companies, not individuals (with a few notable exceptions, like Aaron Swartz). WHATWG members are mostly individuals, many of whom are ordinary web developers who don't work on browser implementations. This difference is largely the raison d'être of WHATWG; it was the perception of many that W3C standards were diverging from what actual web developers wanted.

<comment><USER21> Hi there, one of the WHATWG HTML editors here.

> Meanwhile, W3C HTML5 has defined releases that are thoroughly scrutinized, > reviewed, and debated in endless committee meetings.

While this was true in the past, these days it's not really the case. They mostly just copy and paste our work without scrutinizing it, and usually without understanding it (as can be seen by the bugs they introduce during the copy-and-paste process). There aren't really any technical deliberations or committee meetings, and they don't follow a well-defined process; the most recent fork (from which HTML 5.1 is based) was actually done without the knowledge of the membership, and broke several aspects of W3C process while doing so.

Why do they do this? Well, it seems to be largely an issue of institutional face-saving. See e.g. [https://github.com/w3c/charter- html/issues/14#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/w3c/charter- html/issues/14#issuecomment-108606731): "When the HTML WG co-chairs and Team presented our proposed After HTML5 plan to the W3C Advisory Board earlier this year, we received a clear message that it was not appropriate to delegate or assign the maintenance of a W3C Recommendation outside the organization." In other words, since they started copying and pasting back in the day with HTML 5.0, they can't stop now.

Meanwhile there's actually a lot of interesting deliberation between web developers and browser vendors over in the WHATWG HTML Standard's bug tracker. [https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulse](https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulse) might give a reasonable overview. Compare to [https://github.com/w3c/html/pulse](https://github.com/w3c/html/pulse).

Some relevant corroborating links:

\- [https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/01/film- at-11](https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/01/film-at-11) when this all started

\- [https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking](https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking) monitoring the ongoing copy-and-paste-induced confusion

\- [https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/364](https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/364) wherein they monitor our tree for things to copy and paste over

\- [https://github.com/w3c/html/commit/19fcaf241f4417b2078bc26bf...](https://github.com/w3c/html/commit/19fcaf241f4417b2078bc26bf957b196e1d76154) example commit of them copying and pasting our work en masse (Spot the bugs introduced! It's a fun game!)

<comment><USER22> So, when will the WHATWG finally fix the HTML standards?

Get rid of all the backwards compatibility shit, and actually create strict, and simple standards, with no unexpected behaviour, that only parse valid documents, and where anyone can write an implementation?

Because that's the definition of a standard.

That's what a standard is supposed to be.

Standards, from paper standards to screws to fucking cucumber regulations are supposed to be more strict than what came before them, so anyone can easily accept only one type, and know it will work.

The WHATWG "standards" don't fulfil the definition of standard in the least.

They are a strict superset of everything all implementers accept, making it a larger and more complicated mess with every single iteration.

So when will the WHATWG, as you say it's now the legitimate standards body, do what it, as standards body is supposed to do, and deprecate currently used behaviour to replace it with stricter, simpler, standard behaviour?

Yes, that will break the web, but yes, it will also improve it.

<comment><USER17> Because it would not be useful to any real web browsers.

<comment><USER22> That's not any justification – you standardize things so other people can easier work with them, create competing browsers, libraries, etc, and so more innovation happens.

If you just document what already exists for the benefit of existing implementors, great, you just got Microsoft Office Open XML.

That, and nothing more, is everything that can result from such a mindset.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flappy Bird Is Gone From The App Store - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/09/flappy-bird-remove-from-app-store/ <comment><USER2> damn i didn't download it yet

<comment><USER3> lol me either. And I don't really want to download a clone - I'll feel like such a sucker.</comment></comment>


Interviewing people that build side projects (EP 1) - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/rwQOoz5LLKA <comment><AUTHOR> Feedback is imperative and we wanted to put a spin on how it's delivered to make it much more meaningful. We're starting a new series where we interview people in our community that post their side projects on our website ([https://sideprojects.net](https://sideprojects.net)).

This is the first of many episodes we plan on doing. This is interview we did with James, creator of TrendTrack, which is a #nocode app using Bubble for keeping track with trends ([https://trendtrack.bubbleapps.io/](https://trendtrack.bubbleapps.io/))

Let me know what y'all think!</comment>


The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what? - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-japanese-traffic-light-blues-stop-on-red-go-on-what/ <comment><USER2> I've lived here in Japan for the past 18 years and I still tend to call them "midori", much to my wife and children's amusement. But, the hue of the lights are actually somewhere between the typical USA green lights and a blue. My wife (and kids) swear that it actually is a BLUE-hue light whereas I still see Green.

SAME issue with the sun. I say it's yellow, they say it's red, and it's not a kanji issue...

$0.02.

<comment><USER3> The sun is white.

<comment><USER4> Nonsense, it's white or yellow or red or otherwise, depending on the viewer and time of day and weather and whatnot. But the topic here is how people describe things, and in Japan the sun is commonly described as red.

<comment><USER5> maaark probably referred to that the sun actually is white, but may appears with different colors if you see it through a filter (atmosphere): [http://solar- center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.htm...](http://solar- center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html)

<comment><USER4> It's white by some definitions and not by others, there's no single objective truth to the matter. But none of this has any relevance to the post originally being replied to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The same character is used in Chinese where it also refers to bluish-green, tending closer to green than blue:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92)

There is also a character for a much deeper blue:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%97%8D](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%97%8D)

<comment><USER7> True, see the Pokémon case with the original Green edition and then the Blue one.

<comment><USER8> In this case, no - Pokémon Red+Green were the two games released together in Japan, and Blue was a special edition released later.

When it came out in the US, they based Red and Blue on the updated code+artwork from Blue, but with the catchable Pokémon split that was there between JP Red/Green (e.g. Electabuzz/Magmar were exclusive to JP Red/Green and US Red/Blue, respectively). (This is also why on, say, Bulbapedia the sprite lists for Gen 1 list "Red/Blue", "Yellow", and "Red/Green" as different entries.)

(I _think_ it was just that they preferred the red/blue contrast? I'm not sure I ever heard a definitive answer why, other than perhaps the fact that they mashed up the Blue and Green version.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're driving in Japan, you're likely to be eaten by a grue light. That said, we actually mix some blue into modern green lights, so that colorblind people can distinguish the two colors.

In official CalTrans terminology, the yellow lights are called "amber lights" \-- so we have our own weirdness in the U.S.

<comment><USER10> Amber, the color of traffic lights, waves of grain and... pretty much nothing else.

Reminds me of (grammatical) petrels:

[https://www.kith.org/words/lists/petrels- list/](https://www.kith.org/words/lists/petrels-list/)

It's as if when modifiers and nouns sense they are dying in a language, they clutch on to one another for support, and eventually become like a single unit.

<comment><USER11> I think there's also a naturally-occurring substance that's amber-colored, but I can't remember what it's called.

<comment><USER10> I've never heard "amber" used as a _modifier_ for "amber."

"Quick, bring me the amber amber, Amber!"

I didn't write the comment very clearly, but the petrels were a hint I was talking about language and usage, not simply objects in that part of the spectrum.

Ale is a notable omission, but the candidates dwindle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not just the traffic lights in Japan, it's the traffic lights all around the world, if you're a Japanese person. My wife and I always refer to it as blue when speaking Japanese and we live in my home country. It's jus St a cultural norm and the truth is not actually important to human beings, so it doesn't surprise me.

They call grass 'blue' too. There's even a familiar expression with a Japanese twist that goes "The grass is bluer on the other side".

Apparently "blue" used to be a pretty wide range of colors ranging from quite very dark, almost black blues to normal blue and the kind of green that is often referred to as blue. Japanese has a fairly large number of loan words for colors indicating some colors were introduced to their lexicon through contact with foreigners. Pink is an example of that. They have 'sakura-iro' which represents the color of cherry blossoms but it's not a proper representation of pink by itself as you wouldn't use it to refer to say a hot pink.

The level of cognitive dissonance I have to endure every time we're stopped at the lights still irks me.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, when this was last on HN I looked into it and apparently 青 historically meant any cool or pale color. The article mentions set phrases where it referred to green, but there are others that don't - 青ざめる (to turn pale), 真っ青 (pallid), etc.

Interestingly, 青 historically applied to such a wide range of cool colors that it survives in contradictory ways - e.g. 青毛 (blue+hair) refers to a black horse, while 青馬 (blue+horse) usually means a white horse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In short: Historically, blue and green were the same word. Green is now a separate word, but some green things are called "blue" including green traffic lights. Other "blue" things include apples and vegetables.

<comment><USER14> That doesn't seem to be what the article says at all:

> this was most likely due to the fact that red, blue and yellow (赤青黄) are > regarded as the three primary colors in Japanese painting. Hence the "blue" > traffic lights.

<comment><USER8> They're also regarded as the three primary colors in US painting - I recall having it explained to me when very young with two color wheels as combining paint versus combining light.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> English to the rescue. Japanese has the word ブルー ("buruu", blue) from English. That word only means blue, and not green. If you want to be specific that something is blue, excluding green, just use "buruu".

<comment><USER4> Outside of set phrases, 青 also only means blue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It also happens in Korean. The green light is 파란불, literally "blue light". (Thankfully, traffic lights are actually green around here.) In modern usage, 파란 means "blue" most of the time, but its variant 푸른 continues to mean "grue". The sky is grue, and so is the pasture.

I don't think Korean even has a native word for "green". The most common word for "green" in modern usage is 녹색, which comes from the Chinese characters 綠色 and feels more like a technical term than a native Korean word when placed in a sentence.

</comment><comment><USER17> /me lives in the Tokyo area, ethnically Japanese but grew up in the USA.

I still call these "grue" lights "midori" (green), confusing people around me.

</comment><comment><USER18> If they use anything like the hue that's used in the UK, it's been pushed a long way towards blue (IIRC the intention was to better accommodate people with red/green color-blindness).

You only really see it as explicitly "green" because years of training yourself to see it as green because that's what books depicted it as & that's what everyone called it.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, it's more like bright cyan in Finland as well (and I think basically everywhere I've been to). Speaking as someone who's red/green colorblind, it's a very good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another interesting things about Japan's traffic lights: as far as I can tell, they don't detect whether cars are waiting for the light. Last time I visited, I was waiting for ages for the light to change along with other cars, and light wouldn't change early even if there were no cars going through the intersection.

<comment><USER21> That's just fair - pedestrians aren't detected either

<comment><USER9> Pedestrians have a button to press to let the signal know they exist. Until we invent car-hands, that seems equivalent enough.

<comment><USER8> In a number of those systems, the buttons are a placebo that are wired to nothing. [1] [2]

[1] - [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/placebo-buttons- elevat...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/placebo-buttons-elevators- crosswalks.html)

[2] - [https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/nyregion/for-exercise- in-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/nyregion/for-exercise-in-new-york- futility-push-button.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been living in Japan for about 25 years and a lot of Westerners get confused over this.

Concepts like "blue" and "green" are abstract. The word 青 covers a different part of the spectrum than the word "blue".

People get hung up on "what's the Japanese word that means X", but often there is no word that means X. There is no distinct concept for X in Japanese. And this goes far beyond color names.

European languages largely share a common cultural heritage and concepts tend to map between them relatively easily, but many cultures aren't like that.

The Japanese stoplight colors are just the tip of a very, very deep iceberg.

</comment><comment><USER23> Take a picture of a traffic light, color-picker out the green and print it solid on a large sheet. Ask Japanese friends what color it is, they'll all say green.

(Disclaimer: I once did this. Also, I might need some hobbies)

</comment><comment><USER24> OT, but not much, if you google for "petrol blue" you will find a lot of colours that many people would call "green" and if you look for "petrol green" you will find a lot of colours that many people would call "blue".

We used to have a car of the exact shade of green (or blue) that people called alternatively green or blue, often only because of different lighting.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/petrol_blue](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/petrol_blue)

</comment><comment><USER25> Many languages don't distinguish between blue and green. Other western colors are also up for grabs: orange is named after the fruit, and didn't used to exist either.

</comment><comment><USER26> Apropos traffic lights, as a European driving in Japan I was amazed at the ability to go straight on a red light (with a green straight arrow).

</comment><comment><USER27> I read somewhere that the original green light was blue but green was easier to see at dawn or at dusk or at you or something so they switched

<comment><USER28> The number of myths surrounding this phenomenon are quite numourous.

* The character for blue is simpler than the character for green, so it's easier for young school children to read safety text, if we call it blue (heard this from several people)

* "It IS blue" (not uncommon either)

* It used to be blue (apparently contradictred by TFA)

<comment><USER29> I read somewhere (and a Google search brings up many articles that supports this) that among societies and languages that makes fewer distinctions between colors than the global educated society, blue and green are among the most frequent to remain undistinguished.

<comment><USER30> My dad also doesn't really distinguish between blue and green. It's mostly green to him. And he grew up in Italy...

<comment><USER31> He might just be slightly colorblind. Partial colorblindness is quite common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "backwards parking" :)</comment>


The Joy of Cryptography - <AUTHOR> http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~rosulekm/crypto/ <comment><USER2> I'm current enrolled in the Oregon State post-bacc CS degree program and I've heard great things about the class that this book is written for. Hopefully by the time I get around to my electives the professor is still teaching this class.

If you want to see the syllabus for the class it's available here: [https://oregonstate.instructure.com/courses/1761126/assignme...](https://oregonstate.instructure.com/courses/1761126/assignments/syllabus)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting to compare this table of contents with the TOC by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup which was updated in January 2020.

"A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography" [https://toc.cryptobook.us/](https://toc.cryptobook.us/)

Like this one, their book can be downloaded too.

It's often good to have different POV when learning cryptography. These seem to complement each other nicely, with Boneh and Shoup being more advanced, and more complete in many areas.

</comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone read this text and can comment on how good it is? I've been wanting to learn more about cryptography as a SWE who's mostly only done traditional web apps/microservices.

<comment><USER5> I'm wondering this too. If I want to specialize in something, what subfield has the most ROI?

\- Distributed systems

\- ML/AI

\- Crypto

<comment><USER6> When I first read this, I had the (snarky! unfiltered!) thought, "Well why dontcha go Google it? That's not exactly a philosophical question."

But that got me thinking... what if it _was_ a philosophical question, the kind of question that prompts responses that tell you what it's _really_ like to work in [x].

HN, what's it _really_ like to work in [Distributed systems, ML/AI, Crypto]?

<comment><USER5> HN will have the inside scoop. For example, the salary increase when moving from generic SWE to ML engineer. Or backend engineer to Netflix scale distributed systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love this site a lot. The fun thing is that, the missing of TLS connection will allow people to tamper this site which teaches people how to prevent tampering :)

<comment><USER8> It does support TLS, just doesn't redirect.

[https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~rosulekm/crypto/](https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~rosulekm/crypto/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >In particular, never ever write(x^a)(x^b)=x^ab. If you write this, your cryptography instructor will realize that life is too short, immediately resign from teaching, and join a traveling circus. But not before changing your grade in the course to a zero.

Ha! Love it.

<comment><USER10> Is it weird that I feel satisfied whenever I hear or read something that sounds like something I would say?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Slightly unrelated: Can we have the cake and eat too in the case of choosing e-book formats for academic e-books? I mean to combine the adaptiveness of epub and the advanced scientific notation and plotting possible with pdf.

<comment><USER12> Org mode has an extension export to epub from markup with latex notations.

[https://github.com/syohex/org-epub](https://github.com/syohex/org-epub)

Probably markdown/pandoc has similar options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm currently taking a graduate class in Applied Cryptography and will definitely use this as another resource for reference. Love that they've opened it up and made it free.</comment>


Reckless campaign of cyber attacks by Russian military intel. service exposed - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/reckless-campaign-cyber-attacks-russian-military-intelligence-service-exposed <comment><USER2> The problem with this is that no one cares. The announcement implicitly appeals to a sense of outrage at the violation of ethical principles with the presumption that such outrage would matter in some important way. It won't. You can't accomplish anything with non-existant outrage. The only things that matters in this theater are acts of violence in reprisal.</comment>


How does Google pay 2.4%? - <AUTHOR> http://cameronkeng.com/hn-how-do-i-pull-a-google/

<comment><USER2> Back when Commodore was a company I had the opportunity to get a look at its tax structure (I was interviewing for a VP position with the parent company). It was pretty impressive how effectively one could exploit nominal loop-holes in various jurisdiction tax codes to achieve near zero taxation.

One of the more dubious strategies was having a company in the Cayman Islands that owned the cars that people drove and paid for the gas and maintenance out of corporate accounts, and paid rent and bought food for folks. So your salary could be 'poverty' level and yet you could have quite a nice lifestyle. The poor company in the Caymans was losing money quite rapidly.

As a systems guy I had to be impressed at how they worked that particular system. A CPA friend of mine once quipped that if laziness was the mother of invention, taxation was the father of innovative accounting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol. It sounds like I worked with your friend.

I'd like to note that the US is also a noted tax haven for foreign countries. We aggressively allow our country act as a tax shield for European and Asian companies so we should be throw rocks either when we live in a glass house

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that makes sense. Let's say, hypothetically, the Europe and Asia have a tax rate of 99%. We offer a tax rate to foreign companies of 2%, to make it obviously worthwhile to funnel their money through the US. At the same time, we tax US companies at 98%. This makes sense because it maximizes revenue -- US companies aren't going to go abroad, and everyone else in the world will want to give us 2% of their money. Epic win.

I doubt the real world works like this, though.

<comment><USER4> Would wouldn't the U.S. companies just move abroad and funnel their money though the US?

<comment><USER5> Move where? Everyone else taxes at 98%.

<comment><USER4> Not if they funnel their money though the US. Then they're taxed at 2%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reality is much more complicated than the article or the blog post makes it out to be. Google's foreign tax rate is 2.4% (quite low), and they shift lots of their earnings offshore where it is not subject to US tax ($17.5B cumulatively, per Note 15 of the 10K).

However, it is not the case that Google only pays 2.4% of their US operating profit to the IRS, as a look at Note 15 of their 10K shows. There are lots of reasons that a corporation's effective tax rate will differ from the statutory tax rate of 40% (35% federal + ~5% state). To name a couple of common ones:

1\. Prior net operating losses (net of valuation allowances)

2\. Stock option exercises by employees (see 1999-2000 when over 50% of major tech companies' cash flows were from option exercise, and lots of them-- entirely legally--paid zero or "negative" tax, or so it appeared; in reality, the taxes were just paid out of a different pocket). There is a bill in Congress to remove this deduction.

3\. Adjustments for overseas taxes paid

4\. Use of NOLs, impairment charges, changes in valuation allowances, lots of technical items.

Some of the entries in Note 15 of GOOG's latest 10K that lowered its provision for US income taxes (effective rate) in the current period include:

\- Foreign rate differential (due to tax treaties with foreign countries, income taxed overseas is often not taxed again in the US)

\- Federal research credit

\- Tax exempt interest (interest from tax exempt bonds)

(Search for "Note 15" here: [http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/00011931251...](http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312511032930/d10k.htm))

The rest of Note 15 elaborates on their capital losses from investments, impairments of acquired goodwill, etc. Tax disclosures are some of the most complicated areas of financial statements, and they're very easy to misread. However, they can be very informative, as tax info can provide a window into the difference between accrual-based earnings and cash inflow/outflow.

Just for future reference, NOTHING in a financial statement is what it seems until you read the notes, period. That is the first thing they teach you in financial accounting.

Think of it as the equivalent of a typical developer's reaction to a blog post claiming "X outperforms Y"--usually, the first comment is "did you take into account setting Z?" The footnotes contain "setting Z."

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your thoughts and I will definitely take that into consideration in the future, the post was meant to simply the concept of how they tax plan their business and how difficult it is to enact such a plan.

To clarify, Google's foreign tax rate is 2.4% and their US tax rate is 21.2%. But, I believe it is important to delve further than the surface of these numbers. The 2010 fiscal year has been the most profitable year yet for Google and $17.5B is more than 7x the net income presented on their current financial statements. Also, they've refused to disclose the amount of income that is transferred to their offshore activities through their APA.

But, note that their income from foreign sources is equated to 52% of their overall revenues of approximately $30B. This would suggest that at a minimum their foreign sourced income held overseas is at least more than 50%. The APA is designed to help the company shift the tax incidence to different tax regimes, thus it would be more than likely that the true number is much higher. But, it would be impossible to determine without access to a number of documents beginning with the agreement (which lasts for 5 years before they must renegotiate for a new plan).

We could make this much more complicated, but I wanted to focus on the tax plan since most people were interested in that aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a great slide from my "Taxes for Hax0rs" (SHDH 44) presentation <http://www.transparentaccounting.org> regarding the history of the Federal Income Tax. In a nutshell, the way it was originally written was meant to tax corporate income only and only the most wealthy Americans, not common folk.

One needed to make >= $4000/year in deflated 1893 dollars to even be eligible to need to pay any taxes. Not sure, but one computation I came up with (adjusted) puts that around 100K in today's dollars. Imagine making anything up to 100K tax-free.

The goal was always to tax corporations more heavily than people.

Today even the poorest Americans likely end up short more than 2.4 percent (effective annual rate) in tax payments when their employers "withold" earnings.

So when corporations go out of their way and spend a lot of money to accomplish tax avoidance, that seems kinda wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ironically, corporate taxes these days generates less than 20% of the fiscal revenues for the government. Generally, 1040 individual taxes still make up the bulk of the taxes paid.

In addition, more than 35% of all taxpayers pay zero tax or pay no tax and get refunds. This number is constantly changing, especially recently with the economy. I've seen it go as high as 60%.

Lastly, when the government talks about corporate tax breaks and etc. Honestly, they barely matter anymore because we've essentially marginalized the revenue generated from corporations and businesses already. So, the amount of revenue and savings potential in the greater scheme of things is almost non-consequential.

<comment><USER8> Its important to note that if a person doesn't owe taxes directly, the probably do contribute through payroll tax. [1]

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/14/pf/taxes/who_pays_income_tax...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/14/pf/taxes/who_pays_income_taxes/index.htm)

<comment><USER9> Just saying they "contribute" doesn't get the whole point across. _They do pay taxes, it's just not visible._ Payroll taxes have to be the most ingenious method of hiding taxes from voters ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why hasn't someone created a company that handles this setup for small to midsize companies? Think of it as the Paychex for legal tax evasion. Their clients could all share the same legal addresses in Ireland and the Netherlands. They could keep up with the shifting tax laws and take care of opening all the appropriate banks accounts and filling out the right forms.

Of course, the loopholes should be closed, but until they are we could at least keep things fair by making the same techniques available to anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well technically it is available for small to midsize companies. There a number of websites that market these plans, but usually they're pretty sketchy haha. As an example, "www.escapeartist.com" are what's usually available openly.

Most tax professionals that are capable will provide these tax plans to their clients, but they'll do so quietly because its not something you'd want to advertise and also people generally dont like it when they find out you've gone "offshore" and etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Simple. They pay accountants a substantial portion of the taxes not paid.

The actual amount any country can tax it citizens and corporations is a complex relationship between its own tax laws, every other country in the world's tax laws, and the cost of the tax lawyers that figure out how to shuffle funds around to minimize their tax liability.

When politicians say "we will close this loophole and collect $xxx MM more in taxes" my BS meter pegs. There is _not_ going to be a 1:1 relationship between a loophole's current deduction and collected taxes if that loophole is closed. There will be some increase in collected taxes (presumably), but people will minimize their taxes using different "loopholes" so the "recovered taxes" will never be as much as the politicians sell it as.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fixing this sort of loophole should be far higher on Congress's list of priorities than it is now. There is no reason why a massively profitable corporation like Google should pay so little in taxes when poor Americans are nickel-and-dimed with sales, payroll and income taxes.

<comment><USER13> The problem goes far beyond Google Ireland and Google Netherlands. What about Tata, Reliance, Baidu and Guinness? None of them pay their fair share to the US government.

Something must be done about these evil corporations which exist outside the US, don't bring money into the US, do no business in the US, and pay no taxes in the US!

<comment><USER14> Would google exist if not for investments in education and r&d made by US taxpayers over the past 50 years?

<comment><USER13> Should US corporations pay the Indian and Chinese governments taxes if they employ people educated by the Indian and Chinese governments? Should all computing companies worldwide pay the British government for their investments in foundations of computing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If your not attached to the USA you can just move you and your business to a territorial based corporate income tax country (singapore, etc). Income not repatriated into the country and not generated from the country is tax free. If your an american citizen you'll still have to pay personal federal income tax to the USA, even if you don't live in the USA, and to your country of residence but you can work with that much better with the ~$100k not living in the USA tax deduction that the US gives you.

<comment><USER15> I also want to note that the USA is the only country in the world to base income taxation on citizenship/green card and residency, vs residency only for the rest of the world. Be a citizen of anywhere else and you can be really tax free/low tax.

<comment><USER16> Not only does the US tax its citizens who live and work abroad, it will also do so for 10 years after one renounces citizenship.

<comment><USER17> How do they enforce that one, or even get a hold of your income to know how much they're missing out? Or is it just a general "set foot on this country again and it's prison time for you"?

<comment><USER15> You have to submit accurate tax returns with possible audits resulting extraditions and criminal charges if you don't. And there is FBAR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's another idea: drop the corporate tax rate to 0% and raise income, high- end property (let's say houses that cost 2x the median in a particular area), and high-end consumption taxes (a "yacht tax".)

Another handy related idea would be to have a maximum income multiplier. Something like "the highest paid employee cannot make more than 20x the lowest paid in total compensation", so if you want to make one million a year, the lowest paid employee must be making 50k.

<comment><USER19> _Here's another idea: drop the corporate tax rate to 0% and raise income, high-end property (let's say houses that cost 2x the median in a particular area), and high-end consumption taxes (a "yacht tax".)_

If corporations don't pay taxes, then won't everybody who can afford to just do all their business (income and all) through shell corporations? Sort of the way that currently wealthy people skirt the estate tax by having a company own their land, so their next of kin can just inherit the CEO position of the company?

<comment><USER20> This already happens to varying degrees, because if you make enough money the corporate tax structure doesn't hit you as hard as the personal income tax structure. There are plenty of other tricks available as well, such as deferring income, etc.

If you also eliminate income taxes and shift completely to consumption-based taxes, it gets a lot harder for wealthy people to avoid taxes; in fact, the only way to avoid consumption taxes is to live the lifestyle of a less-wealthy person. Even illegal sources of income get taxed when you switch to a consumption-based tax system: you can't tax the income of a gangster with no declared income, but you can tax all of the shiny stuff he buys. Regardless of the source of income, the same truth applies: if you want to enjoy your wealth, you will end up paying taxes on it.

Of course, some wealthy people will choose to live more frugal lifestyles in order to avoid taxes (many wealthy people already do so, for a variety of reasons). The reduced consumption might hurt the economy some, but they have to put their money somewhere, and that somewhere is generally some sort of investment, which helps the economy.

The biggest problem with consumption-based taxes is that they tend to be highly regressive because there is generally an inverse relationship between income and the percent of income spent on consumption. However, there are ways to correct for this. You can target specific categories of goods which only the wealthy can afford (the aforementioned "yacht tax,"), but this tends to be very destructive to those industries and can cause big distortions throughout the rest of the economy. You can exempt certain categories of goods, such as groceries and other basic necessities, but this also creates huge distortions, and also creates a situation where industries buy politicians in order to get their products exempted. Another approach is to offer rebates equal to the consumption taxes paid by a typical low-income family, so that such families will pay zero net tax, but that's complex and expensive to administer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone interested in this will also be interested in learning about IKEA: [http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=691913...](http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=6919139)

And, more recently, some details about how they do it: [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2437643c-2985-11e0-bb9b-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2437643c-2985-11e0-bb9b-00144feab49a.html#axzz1SbQvblTs)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've actually been asked about IKEA in the past as well. The crux of the issue is that IKEA is the largest single employer and GDP powerhouse of Sweden. So, the country has been more than understanding of their "tax plan."

The founder of ikea essentially owns everything through a charity and avoid all taxes for effective purposes.

<comment><USER22> Yup, I have a number of Swedish friends. When I mention "That guy [Kamprad] is a crook" they all say "But he [IKEA] has done so much for the economy and providing jobs for Sweden."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google has an effective tax rate of 2.4%? They are being robbed as GE not only pays no taxes but also gets a refund.

Personally, I am tired of millionaires (or well of people like John) complaining about taxes.

<comment><AUTHOR> GE is a special case. Their tax department has been compared to the big four accounting firms as the unspoken big 5.

They pay their tax staff very well and truly are some of the best in the field within every tax specialty.

But it's unfair to single out John. I'm sure given the opportunity you'd attempt to maximize your profit. It's quoted from judge Learned Hand of New York, one of the most respected legal minds that it is your legal right and American duty to tax plan.

The code is set this way obviously due to politics but also because the American people value jobs over taxes. We would rather have high employment that additional Corp tax revenue.

<comment><USER13> GE is also a special case because they are using a loss carryforward. GE Capital lost billions in 2008 and 2009 which means GE's profit averaged over the past few years is close to zero.

This allows them to pay yearly taxes as if they made little profit.

This is actually a good thing - it avoids disproportionately taxing companies with volatile incomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Generally, Google and companies of similar size are audited every year. Thus, the IRS actually has a permanent office within the Googleplex compound because they audit them year-round" I think this statement is incorrect. The auditors hired (PwC, Deloitte, E&Y, whoever) are at the Googleplex all year round, but not the IRS

<comment><AUTHOR> I misspoke, I stated auditors but I wasn't specific about his. Pwc, deliotte and friends are financial auditors meant to provide assurance. But the IRS auditors are there for tax audits.

It is IRS policy to generally audit fortune 500 companies annually. Usually they hold an area for the IRS because it makes sense for them to be kept away from daily operations. A former coworker works in the LMSB dept that handles these cases.

When the IRS starts printing special forms for you because the lines don't fit your revenues, you know you've made it lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why on Earth do we bother with a corporate income tax at all? Just get rid of it and bump up capital gains to compensate.

<comment><USER26> Great question. My understanding was that the (primary) purpose of corprate income tax is not to directly collect revenue, but rather to encourage reinvestment by firms in the economy. Increasing CGT would discourage investment. Can others please enlighten us?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the corporate tax is meant to collect revenue but it's secondary goal is promote certain activities. Mainly, they want to promote job creation and increased productivity, which is in theory done through reinvestment.

When you reinvest into equipment, the logic goes that the productivity increases and new higher paid jobs are created even though the lower end labor is eliminated or reduced.

Increasing capital gains tax would in effect make everyone accelerate the sale of their company before the taxes are effective, so it was a mass liquidation of capital.

But, I don't believe it would discourage investment because people would simply tax plan around the capital gains tax. A while back, during Reagan and friends presidency, the personal income tax as well as capital gains tax was more than 35%. People actually invested more into corporations because the corporate tax rates were lower (ironically).

<comment><USER15> I think as a side effect it encourages companies to use credit as a financial buffer (single digit interest rate vs. double digit tax rate) vs. savings since corporate taxes are effectively a tax on corporate savings longer than a few months to a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> With Double Irish slices of bread and Dutch cheese in the middle, the Dutch Sandwich "leaves no tax behind to taste".

</comment><comment><USER28> Our congressional representatives are corrupt, doling out tax breaks to wealthy corporations, while ordinary people are left to pay high tax rates on ordinary income. I think Google should be ashamed to be part of this corrupt system.

It's BS to say that they owe it to their shareholders to try to defraud the federal government of as much tax revenue as possible. They should instead be fighting for corporate tax reform and closing loopholes to make a level playing field and not rewarding "scumbag" corporations.

<comment><USER15> It's not fraud, there is no lying involved in this. Your an international company that gets money from everywhere, your based everywhere, and you have employees everywhere. Who deserves the bulk of the tax revenue?

Should Toyota pay the majority of it's taxes to the US because they sell a large amount of cars there, or only the income taxes of their employees in the US and the profits they receive from car sales in the USA? Should Japan get the majority of Toyota's tax revenue because they are headquartered there? Even though the majority of Toyota's income from Japan is minor vs the rest of the world combined? What incentive would they have other than personal reasons to stay then vs just use it as a net-loss R&D center and minor manufacturing plant to avoid tariffs?

These things are significantly more gray than you think.

<comment><USER28> The highest marginal federal tax rate for corporations is 35%. I think that's too high. But Google, a US Corporation, who derives most of it's earnings from it's US operations, is paying but a small fraction of that.

I think in the case of Google, they should at least be paying higher tax rates on all advertising earnings from US users; it seems to me they are maying barely 1 tenth of that amount currently.

Just as "selective enforcement" of laws leads to corruption, so too does gaming the tax system. Large corporations pay legislators to create these tax loopholes for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One of the big problems with our overcomplicated tax system is that it creates these sorts of moral ambiguities. Is person X or corporation Y paying their fair share of taxes? Only the accountants and (maybe) the IRS have any idea. So people with a negative view of business can get all riled up and angry, and people with a positive view of business can get all riled up and angry.

The presence of ambiguities in the system breeds mistrust among the citizenry. This cannot be healthy for society.

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't many companies pay nothing? IE if my company earns $100k and I pay out $100k in salaries and overhead, there is nothing left to tax as all my expenses were deductible?

Google may pay 2.4% but presumably the money is getting taxed at a higher rate when it gets to individuals.

<comment><USER31> In the first paragraph, yes the tax due would be zero, in general (certain industries and/or countries could harbor exceptions). The final amount paid is independent of the tax rate on profits, though: if revenues are offset completely by expenses, it doesn't matter if the effective rate is 2.4%, 40% or 90%, it still comes to 0. But you want the former if your company is highly profitable.

For your second point, I don't know the specifics in this case. But even if it's just deferring taxes that have to be paid eventually, that can be a huge win, since it lets you collect interest or store funds for an emergency. There are probably other financial benefits too though; maybe someone who knows can comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Isn't that a tax rate of 2.4% on foreign income? Or does "effective tax rate" mean taxes across all income? If they've only saved "$3.1 billion since 2007" (to October 2010), it seems like they haven't saved that much (er, relatively...).

</comment><comment><USER33> Actually, no company _really_ pays taxes. Taxes are another cost of doing business which is passed on to the consumer

<comment><USER34> Not generally true; companies already attempt to charge the highest rates that the market can bear, so if they could easily just raise prices, they would've already raised them _before_ the tax to gain more profits.

In the general case, an increase in costs will come out of some combination of: 1) increased prices passed onto consumers; 2) decreased wages at the firm; and 3) decreased profits at the firm. There's no economic law that says they'll all come out of #1, unless it's _such_ a perfectly-competitive commodity business that everyone is charging barely above cost for their services to begin with (not the usual case in Silicon Valley).

Consider the flip side: If all cost reduction were automatically passed on directly into price cuts, there would be no incentive for companies to trim costs. But that isn't the case, of course; one reason firms aim to reduce their costs is that reducing costs while keeping prices fixed is one way to increase profits. Similarly, increased costs without the ability to raise prices can reduce profits. In both cases it depends on the surrounding market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> and we were laughing at the mobster furious as his 4% percent in "The Firm"! Ultimately, he happens to be right as paying 4% instead of 2.4% seems to be a pretty valid reason to be furious...

</comment><comment><USER36> Just searching "Double Irish" should explain it well enough.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=double+irish>

<comment><AUTHOR> I answered this question a while back for an HN member back on the day the article first hit the web. I have a bunch of questions from members that I've answered over the last year that I'm unloading onto my website. I figured its makes more sense economically if I shared my advice openly instead of giving it to individuals specifically.

The problem with googling this is that it only tells you the basic premise and fails to tell you the problems and the reality of actually applying these tax models.

As someone who's worked on these tax models in the past, I can tell you that its never as picture perfect as they make it sound. These companies are always getting audited even though these plans were drafted, approved and done by the "big 4 accounting firms."

It was a running joke that the big 4 plans it and the law firms would defend it. It was like we were self-generating projects for us to work on by creating a new "plan" every other year. The IRS always comes back and audits these clients.

<comment><USER37> its not like it was years ago when CitiCorp set up theri stock trading units in the Islands for a similar purpose..

<comment><USER38> Citi went farther. They did things like declare a particular desk in a skyscraper in NY to be legally in the Cayman Islands.

The IRS was not amused.

<comment><USER39> Do you have a source on this? I'd love to read more about this.

<comment><USER38> I wish I did. I heard about it because I used to work with someone who had worked there some years previous.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm vaguely aware of Citi's tax plan, but I'd have to look into it. If I can learn the details, I'll start a series of case studies that break down the tax strategies of different fortune 500 companies.

<comment><USER38> The incident I was discussing was back in the 90s. It was resolved a long time ago.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fake job listings to get users? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
I'm a first-time poster but long-time start-up fan.
Recently I started looking for some work to help me through college. I found a job on my school internship page and applied, but a few things made me suspicious.
First, the job was for a "content selector", who must find good content and "push it through" to the site. But on this site, that is exactly what the users are supposed to do. Why hire someone to do the users job?
Second, they ask the applicant to sign up on the site and post a certain number of items, then include their username as proof. I have never seen that as a requirement before.
When I applied, I mentioned I found a large bug. But their response to my application was very canned-sounding and they did not ask about the bug. Instead, they asked me to give feedback on the invite-a-friend feature.
I responded that I would give my feedback during the interview instead. After sending a follow up a few days later, I still haven't heard a non-cut-and-paste response.
I noticed that the job is not posted on my city's de-facto job boards. It's only on my college internship page and their Twitter, from what I see.
Also, it's "to be done remotely", and I see a few users on the site who have about the same amount of activity as I do, from different areas.
Does this sound like a ploy to get users to anyone else? Is there a way it could be proven, if it is? Is this illegal? Is this common in startups? Who can I report this to?
Thanks a for reading. <comment><USER2> For reference Reddit created thousands of fake user accounts to solve the problem of "ghost town" website[1]. I created a product that relied on users creating/posting content to their accounts on the site however only a few users are brave/inquisitive/adventurous to post content on a site that's a "ghost town". So to mitigate this a company might pay interns to create an account, post content and share that content, essentially become a legitimate user of the site. The hope is that as they start to create content, post content and share it, their friends will see it and maybe want to join too.

Regarding the other stuff you mentioned about the bug, if it was my site I would have investigated your bug report and if it was indeed a big bug I would have fixed it and hired you.

[1] [http://www.dailydot.com/business/steve-huffman-built- reddit-...](http://www.dailydot.com/business/steve-huffman-built-reddit-fake- accounts/)</comment>


Ask HN: How does one size a market? - <AUTHOR>

I have always read that when validating a possible new venture one needs to know what the size of the market is for the product or service you will offer.
This seams like a simple task if you are opening a gas station in a neighborhood because you have easy access local demographic information but I have had difficulty coming up with realistic numbers for previous situations I have been in.
Take this product for instance. "A centralized log monitoring tool for J2EE applications". One would have to know how many companies in a target region develop or run applications based on J2EE technology. I have to this date not been able to find an accurate number for that.
Or another "A web based staff planning application for small businesses". In 2008, there were 29.6 million businesses in the United States but what percentage of those businesses would this product even apply to.
I am starting to think that the market analysis included in most business plans is somewhere between magic and pulled from thin air.
Can anyone offer some resources to help me better understand how you can accurately size a market for a particular product or service. <comment><USER2> _I am starting to think that the market analysis included in most business plans is somewhere between magic and pulled from thin air._

There's probably a lot of truth to that, but there are sources of information... you may just have to do some digging. For starters, the big analyst firms (Gartner Group, Forrester, IDC, etc.), do a lot of research on this stuff and publish reports and whitepapers that you can use. They do publish some information for free, but a lot of it is kinda pricey. You can also commission custom research / studies to answer specific questions. The problem is - as you might guess - this stuff isn't necessarily cheap.

Outside of those guys, there is market research you can do using information from the US Census Bureau, various State government agencies, and local / regional trade associations. You may have to extrapolate and make some guesses, but you can probably come up with something that's a little bit better than complete BFM / "pulled from thin air."

This book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Business-Research- Straight-...](http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Business-Research-Straight-Need --Fast/dp/0974080136)

is fairly inexpensive and gives some useful - if basic - advice on doing preliminary market research.

Note that there are also smaller market research firms (sometimes as small as one individual) that you can hire to do custom market research. I've never used any of these outfits, so I can't really speak to how expensive or how effective they are. But I know they are out there.

You may also find some useful information by trawling through the "Market Sizing" and/or "Market Research" topics on Quora:

<http://www.quora.com/Market-Sizing>

<http://www.quora.com/Market-Research>

</comment><comment><USER3> Firstly there are market research firms which specialize in doing this kind of research, it tends to be expensive but if you have a local business library you may be able to use it to get free access.

For your J2EE example I'd have a look at the existing products out there and see how many users they have (if it's open source look at their download figures, if it's commercial see if the company accounts are publicly available). Remember you don't need a precise figure, an order of magnitude will do for judging a market size.

For your web based staff planning application, I think you need to be much more specific about what your product does. If you can't figure out which business your product will apply to then you'll have a hard time selling to them. Start by thinking how you'll identify customer to sell to and the generalize from that.

</comment><comment><USER4> If an investor quibbles market size its usually due to lack of traction and velocity of traction.

</comment><comment><USER5> Total number of people who are potential customers * amount your product could sell for / number of realistic buyers * 10% == more realistic outlook.

\--

there are 7500 hospitals in the US which could buy my product for $100,000 dollars per hospital, but only 25% of them would actually be able to purchase it for various reasons of which I only have the ability to produce/call/sell to 10% of those in the first year == ((7500 x 100,000) x .25) x.10== ~$18,000,000 addressable market.

Then I would get even more pessemistic and assume that you'll have an exceptionally long sales cycle getting out of the gate and that you'd only land say 10% of those customers in the first 12-18 months. while not hitting your stride fro say 36 months.

Calc out your opex and this gives you an idea of the funds needed to support your runway.</comment>


Ask HN: Open Courses vs. Master degrees value in the IT market - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I am getting my degree in pharmacy soon. I'm seriously considering to pursue a "Master's degree in CS" at the Greek Open University (EAP).  Costs 3.500 euro/year but I noticed that their course material is exactly the same as the 'coursera' courses. For example "introduction to algorithms", "design patterns", "networking I and II" and "cryptography".
Both are remote but coursera doesn't have a structured path, which is something that I like, it's free BUT does NOT hand you a valid degree. Just a verification that you successfully taken these classes and passed.
If I ever wanted to apply for a job in IT, do you think that a series of "Coursera" courses would be an acceptable skill-set? (Say I take math I/II, algorithms I/II, crypto and classes like design patterns).
ps. Googling I found this[1]. It's Master's degree in CS by Georgia + Udacity. If anyone got accepted, please share your experience. I don't think I would be accepted, but I'd like to know the total cost per year, I was not able to calculate it on the fly. Thanks
[1] http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program/ <comment><USER2> I don't know much about the situation in Europe, but between Oct-Dec'13, I informally surveyed ~30 Silicon Valley tech employers (recruiters and hiring managers) and asked them _exactly_ this question ("Will you hire someone who doesn't have a CS degree but has taken the equivalent MOOCs?"). The research was for my startup, which is in the space.

Here's a rough summary of the findings:

\-- Overall, in spite of there being a shortage of developers, there's a general reluctance to hire people without a CS degree.

\-- In general, hiring managers were more open than HR / recruiters to the idea of "self-taught" candidates.

\-- Startups much more open to hiring entry level folks without a CS degree than large companies who generally have more choice (and bureaucracy).

\-- Among those who were open to hiring self-taught candidates, 100% said they would like to see a strong portfolio of projects that the candidate has built.

\-- Greater willingness to hire for non software developer roles. e.g. I heard multiple stories of people without CS degrees getting a foot in the door as QA / testers, and then rising through the ranks into engineering (e.g. at Zynga).

I believe the GaTech-Udacity degree costs ~$7k, BTW.

<comment><USER3> My experience has been very different. My only degree was a BA in Japanese. When returning to the US after a long stint in Taiwan, I considered going for a name brand masters degree but instead chose to do online study and Hack Reactor. I don't think it's been a barrier at all.

Sure a lot of start-ups are flexible, but I was also invited to interview at Apple, Amazon, Google, FB and other large companies before I chose to take the start-up entrepreneur path instead. I don't think the degree ever came up, except for during one interview with ZeroCater.

<comment><USER2> Super interesting! Very curious about a few things:

\-- How did the large company recruiters find you, and what do you think made them contact you (e.g. If through LinkedIn, what credentials / keywords did you showcase there)?

\-- How much of the attention do you attribute to Hack Reactor (which is selective, and hence has some of the signaling benefits of a name brand university) vs. your own online study?

\-- Did you pursue any of these conversations? If so, how did they go?

I realize I'm asking a lot of questions, and am happy to take this offline if you prefer. I just love learning more about alternate education.

<comment><USER3> That is a lot of questions! I'll do my best here, and please just check out the links in my profile if this doesn't cover it.

Hack Reactor has a brand now, but I was in it over a year ago. When I graduated it had no brand whatsoever. It was selective, but nobody had even heard of it. Worse still, employers I did tell about it, tended to immediately assume it was essentially the same as another coding school with barely half the instruction hours and a far worse student teacher ratio. For the most part, what I got from Hack Reactor was the hard skills.

I presented prototype of a robot fighting game at an Backbone.js meet-up, I did a hackathon at fb and I went to a bunch of other meet-ups that focused on actually coding things as opposed to mixers. I also had profiles on AngelList, White Truffle and Stack Overflow, all of which linked to my Github account.

The vast majority of the inbound messages I get on LinkedIn are pretty much just looking for me to work with exactly the same technologies or even just a subset of the technologies I worked with at Groupon. I ignore them. But sometimes, a company has noted the MOOCs and more often than not those opportunities involve learning something new and are much more interesting to me.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for answering!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Greetings. I was exactly at the same position two years ago but decided to get my license and work as a pharmacist instead.

I am not sure how invested you are against working as a pharmacist, but I would humbly suggest that you at least do that for a while (perhaps 1 to 2 years). Being both an experienced healthcare professional and hacker/developer enables very wide career opportunities. You will be the most tech-savvy pharmacist in the department/company. You will be the most efficient in any kind of data analysis (because your peers are having trouble learning to use Excel Pivot Table while you are writing scripts that take the files as input and perform 1000 Pivot Tables in a second). You will be tasked to be the go-to person for anything remotely related to the million-dollar enterprise software the pharmacy uses. You will get to be involved in the most technologically advanced project the pharmacy is having (think automation, robots, electronic medical records).

In the startup world, the professional status gives you instant, significant positive reputation gap as compared to your usual competent-developer-without- domain-knowledge kind. Not to mention the advantage of having extensive domain knowledge should you manage to find an idea that somehow involves pharmacy.

After that, you can slowly think to get your CS degree (as I am thinking of getting in the near future), or just do the Coursera courses along the way. As you would have some experience working as a pharmacist already, this credential (plus all the experience being involved in pharmacy IT projects) would stay even after you get the CS credentials.

[PS: I'm in Singapore working in a public hospital here.]

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Leonth!

It's a nice feeling knowing other people out there are facing the same situation. Actually, I'm expected to work as a pharmacist at the family-owned pharmacy and manage a small medical office (3-4 offices). I'm partner in the pharmacy, owner of the medical office. The pharmacy work is extremely demanding but my parents will work there, they just need help. The medical office is 20-days old, so it's extremely easy to handle for now.

I'm planning to work at least for 2 years full time in these positions and see how it goes from there. I'm already building small-scale applications (using ruby) to solve problems that arise, setup a digital-signage system using RPis, etc.

However, I'd like to get a better, more 'rounded' education at the same time which would allow me to skip to IT, if I ever wanted too.

thanks for your comment! :-)

ps. Out of curiosity, what was your thesis about?

<comment><USER4> Nice to hear back from you. Seriously what are the odds of meeting another pharmacist in HN? :)

Your situation seems to be very fortunate and I'm sure that heading to pharmacy is something your parents are pushing for :) Since you're a partner already, I believe that in the coming years of working in your pharmacy you will be able to apply even more of the programming skills to help operations.

I think if one has a desirable portfolio of projects and good referral, getting a job in IT should still be possible even without a relevant degree. Keep also in mind that not all IT work needs programming on a daily basis unless you are a real hardcore engineer. From what I see there is as much opportunity in vendor support, project management, integration (need technical chops but more on the ops/networking side as compared to programming), at least in enterprise IT here. People already working in these sort of work can very well be less proficient in programming as compared to you right now.

Aside - here not all students do thesis because of the limited number of professors, but I did a shorter thesis-style project about finding gene signatures that may give rise to resistance to imatinib (Glivec). Used a modification of Support Vector Machines (SVM) and recursive feature elimination. It was fun and took the life out from my old laptop because of the heat from crunching the numbers :) Want to hear about your thesis as well :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, what are the odds? :-)

Yeah my parents are eagerly waiting for me in the pharmacy, my sister too! But anyway!

My thesis requires building a Proof of Concept sequence alignment program. Should be able to compare sequences (proteins and DNA/RNA sequences) and also give a sequence alignment score in order to test if say a bacteria has the substrate to produce a specific protein.

I'm building it using the ruby Sinatra framework. It's more about bioinformatics but my professor was very pleased to have a student that could build even an elementary system like this because for BLAST was complicated!!!

I choose my thesis early though, otherwise I'd choose to build a system where you put patient data and proposes medication/therapy (from drugs to lifestyle changes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a hiring manager: get the real degree, because the computers you will interact with professionally will understand it.

The Immigration Control's computers will understand it, and you'll get extra points for an advanced degree. Megacorp's HR systems will understand it, and you'll get a different salary banding. When you decide to do an MBA, the Admissions Department's computers will understand it, and rank you accordingly.

As an aside, I carry a fair amount of personal bias after getting a CV from a lady who claimed in the headline she'd studied at Harvard, MIT, and some other big name I don't remember. When you dug in to it a little deeper, she had watched a few iTunes U videos from each. Yeuch.

<comment><USER6> I've discussed this with several other hiring managers I know. We've all taken at least one MOOC course, and while they may be useful for the learning experience, we agreed that we couldn't trust the credentials.

One trend that we all noticed is for students, nearly always from developing nations, to focus solely on the credentials and very little on the course material itself.

Even before the courses were complete, with coursework submission deadlines still looming, we'd see people post stuff like "I'm still waiting for my certificate! When will I get it?" in the courses' discussion forums.

After the course had completed and the certificates were awarded, there would inevitably be many more of these students asking why they haven't received theirs, even after openly admitting to not doing most or even all of the required coursework.

For these people, it was all about getting a PDF of a certificate containing their names. Learning anything at all wasn't even a consideration.

While traditional academic institutions may have similar problems, it's never to such an extreme as with MOOCs. At least students at any reputable institution will have had to demonstrate at least some understanding of the material being taught.

<comment><USER7> Accredible has done a lot of work to try and address the concerns that hiring managers have with online learning. The top 3 concerns we have identified are:

1\. How do I know if you really did the course? 2\. How do I know how seriously you took the course? Did you just browse through it passively or did you really do every assignment and maximize your learning? 3\. How do I know if the course was high quality or of sufficient depth?

I believe the best way to address these concerns is to change the structure of the credential itself to have evidence of learning embedded into it. We (Accredible) have been working with some MOOC providers to create a portfolio credential tailored for this kind of situation - currently in trials and going well!

So, hopefully, once the credential formats update to match the learning environment, this will become much less of an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Generally speaking, at least in the USA, having an agree from a relatively well regarded school counts for a lot more than listing some Coursera certifications on your resume. This is especially true earlier in your career when education is a bigger factor than experience.

Part of the reason for this is while you say they are 'exactly the same' I think there is a lot of skepticism that this is true. With the university system, most of us got our degrees and have a better sense of what that degree means. If it is from a school of a certain caliber, we know the minimum statement that makes. For Coursera, that's just not as clear unless you've gone to the trouble of doing both. I believe a Coursera educated person can (and perhaps maybe often even is due to self selection, who knows) be more knowledgeable than a person educated more traditionally. I'd still see hiring a Coursera person as a bigger risk because it is less of a known factor.

As an aside, in the US system those sound more like Master's courses than undergraduate courses. This is part of the confusion on what Coursera should count as. No one wants to look into the curriculum themselves, see how exams were proctored, projects administered, etc. That's what accreditation bodies and institutional reputation are for. Coursera hasn't replaced that (yet).

</comment><comment><USER9> If you do go down this route, make sure you produce a portfolio of completed work. So you'd have a program or three that you've written for each course (or similar) that demonstrates your knowledge and is on github and indexed and explained well [1], and a big file folder you can take to interviews and say "I know it's not a degree course, but it's the same content and here is all the work I did to make sure I actually understood the material" (rather than just watching the lectures and barely passing/cheating in the online exams.)

[1] Github links on resumes: it doesn't have to be perfect, but not much time is spent reviewing resumes, so make sure your best projects are easy to identify and explore.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely - There are some great tools out there too for showcasing the work done in online courses. Accredible (my startup) lets you build portfolio credentials designed for showcasing knowledge from online courses. There's also Pathbrite, GitHub, Dribble, etc. for less online-learning focused portfolios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my experience from several global companies over 15 years, you will be accepted in IT if you have a Master's degree in another field, as long as you have the real life skills. A Master's in Pharmacy should be enough. However, don't confuse Coursera with real skills in IT. Reality is very different from any university education. You need experience before you can tackle hard problems. Make sure your first job is at a place with skilled senior colleagues and you will soon realize that this this is the start of your real education. Good luck in your career!

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey there! I actually work at Udacity and can (or will find the person that can) answer any questions you may have. You specifically mentioned our MS Computer Science program with Georgia Tech ([https://www.udacity.com/georgia- tech](https://www.udacity.com/georgia-tech)), also the FAQ ([https://www.udacity.com/georgia-tech/faq](https://www.udacity.com/georgia- tech/faq)). The price sits right around $6,600 I believe and the admissions process is entirely handled by Georgia Tech. I don't believe you would meet their prerequisites for students (must have a BS in Computer Science or a BS in Science), but I very well may be wrong (I'm not on the GT team). I do know, unfortunately, that regardless it would be awhile before you could start. We just started our summer session a week or two ago.

The good news is - you're free to take any of the other courses we have available (seriously it's all still free and I believe we're still planning to get our Georgia Tech courses out there publicly as well)! If you're interested in having the assistance of a coach/mentor while completing a course, along with a validated certification and graded course project assignment (good for the portfolio!) we also offer our Premium experience at the flat rate of $150/mo.

Ok - done with the Udacity pitch; now my personal comments. I never finished my degree and I've been a developer for over 16 years. Don't let some piece of paper stop you or make you doubt yourself. In this industry, at least as a developer, projects, projects, projects, projects - that's what really counts.

Before I joined Udacity I worked for Gov Contracting firms, I've with the NSA, DIA, VA and the Air Force. Projects, projects, projects - that's how I was offered those positions (and how the recruiters found me).

I say take a couple of online courses to gain the knowledge/skillset you think you require, then come up with a fun project, something that excites you, and build it!

<comment><USER12> Their page appears to say just a bachelors, not a bs in cs, not even a bs:

> Evidence of award of a 4-year bachelor's degree or its equivalent (prior to > matriculation) from a recognized institution, demonstrated academic > excellence and evidence of preparation in their chosen field sufficient to > ensure successful graduate study

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER11> Nice catch! I'm going to assume, since GT really does handle all of the admissions stuff, that their page is the correct one. It does look like, on our page, we are displaying GT's "preferred prereqs" but labeling them as "required prereqs".

I've emailed the guy running that program and will post a reply if I'm told there's a different reasoning behind it (and hopefully we'll get our page updated too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are two distinctly different paths you can take. You can either maximize your _credentials_ or you can maximize your _skills_. In some cases both paths would lead you to grad school, albeit putting different levels of effort into your school work. In other cases, the skills maximizing path won't lead you through the traditional schooling process. This is especially true in the arts, writing, sales, and certain types of engineering.

Taking the credentials path is safer at least up through age 40 or so. You're less likely to end up struggling to get a good job, and you'll likely end up with an above average salary.

Taking the skills path is very difficult at the beginning and you can expect to be paid less than more credentialed peers earn for the same work. You'll have a harder time getting your foot in the door. You'll have to have stronger skills. The flip side is that your skills will be stronger in the long run. If you can build a substantial body of work and get "so good they ignore you", then you'll have or even create opportunities that are closed off to even the candidates with the prettiest resumes.

What's your risk tolerance and how confident are you in your abilities?

<comment><AUTHOR> Risk tolerance big, I have other income waiting for me.

I'm confident about my UNIX skills, not so much about programming because I was never involved in _big projects_. On the other hand, whatever I needed to do... I did it. BUT given the programmers I see on SO and here, I really can't say if I could excel at professional without trying, not because I don't believe in myself (quite the opposite) but because I see extremely talented people with striking resumes. What gives me hope though, is that .. HN/SO it's a sort world-stage. You have Google engineers, consultants, encryption gurus etc. commenting.

I'm more eager to pursue the _skills_ mastering. That's another dilemma I have: Spend time studying for a university or writing code/attacking real- world problems/contribute to an open source project, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Have you come across Scott Young's feat? [http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit- challenge/](http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/)

I believe in the real world, you are best represented by a body of work and/or the ability to demonstrate that you are capable of tackling the problems associated with the job in which you are considering.

The world of information technologies is vast. There are computer scientists, software engineers, data scientists, test engineers, and many more.

It'd be best if you could narrow down what it is that you're interested in working on. I think a degree in computer science gives you a phenomenal foundation for any of the above, but it doesn't make you immediately in demand, particularly if you're missing a body of work.

I am a software engineer without a CS degree, but I've studied algorithms, some design patterns, and some math relevant to my areas of expertise.

That's my two cents, but I'm sure other people have some useful ideas as well. :)

<comment><USER14> > I believe in the real world, you are best represented by a body of work > and/or the ability to demonstrate that you are capable of tackling the > problems associated with the job in which you are considering.

This is such a good advice! I remember reading Norvig's spellchecker[0] and said to myself: "This code is so elegant and beautiful. I could never write something like this."

I learned more about NLP, learned some Scheme, worked through Norvig's Design of Computer Programs[1] and improved my Python a lot.

What have I learned? Firstly, people like Norvig have tons of experience and are incredible clever. Also they have worked in the same (or similar) domain for decades. Of course they know cool data structures and algorithms for NLP problems. Back then I didn't realize this and thought that I was dumb. Today, I'm less dumb and know that it takes time and experience. Build, learn, build, learn, ...

[0]: [http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html](http://norvig.com/spell- correct.html)

[1]: [https://www.udacity.com/course/cs212](https://www.udacity.com/course/cs212)

<comment><USER15> Experience is more about knowing a million little tricks than it is about actual domain knowledge. Norvig's spelling corrector is an application of inverting the problem.

Instead of attempting to correct a misspelling, he attempts to misspell a word, then stores the misspelled word along with the original word. Then, to correct a misspelling, you simply look it up in the hash table.

Incredibly powerful mathematical concept that inversion thing. And there's a million of them.

Other "tricks":

* shuffling a deck of cards in O(1) (or shuffling anything at all)

* sorting in O(N) (with a limited keyset, and guaranteed no repetitions it's easy. Think about it).

* knowing the url to MIT's bit twiddling manual [1]

* know how to "rewrite" english (or any language) text. Really impressive. Also, mostly useless. It's called Markov Chains.

* understand how and why "every language compiles first to LISP, then to machine code" is true. Thinking about this yields no end of clever programming tricks

* make sure to have spent a few months in each style of programming. Imperative (doesn't tend to be a problem). Functional (NEVER change the value of a variable, ever, for any reason). Dynamic (write a calculator using eval, and go from there. Exploit it).

* having the experience that any style of configuration eventually ends up being a turing complete programming language, and so you should just import and use an existing language

* having experienced the power of query languages. Instead of having a few reports, implement an interpreter that allows you to query them. Then amaze everyone by having every new report they ask for done in 10 minutes.

* knowing the power of automated source translation tools, and how easy these things are to write IF you can munster the discipline of never touching generated code

All of these things will have people tell you it's impossible. And when they see simple code that demonstrates things like this, it's cheating (e.g. O(N) sorting is not fully general. That doesn't make it slower than O(N), and it's still applicable to a lot of situations) ...

[1] [http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html](http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html)

<comment><USER16> > shuffling a deck of cards in O(1)

How? I'm aware of Knuth shuffle which is O(n) but I can't find anything about constant time shuffling.

<comment><USER15> You use the algebraic property that x _y mod n will generate a shuffle of Zn if y and n are relatively prime (don 't share any divisors). So if you then redefine "element a" to not refer to the index of the original array, but to a_y mod n, and you've got your shuffle. You pick y randomly, and in order to make y and n relatively prime, you simply change n to be a prime number.

None of this requires you to actually go through the list. You'd have to modify this to support lists of non-prime lengths, but this is the basic idea :

      import random
      lst = [1,2,3,4,5]

      class newlist:
          def __init__(self, lst):
              self.lst = lst # assuming lst has a prime length.
              self.y = 0
              while self.y % len(lst) == 0:
                  self.y = random.randint(1, 999999)

          def __getitem__(self, index):
              nidx = (index * self.y) % len(lst)
              return self.lst[nidx]

      # Start shuffling
      nl = newlist(lst)
      # End shuffling ... algorithm done.

      for i in range(len(lst)):
              print i, nl[i]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What about the edX X-Series[1] certificate for computer science? is it worth something? I know it's not entirely free, but it's quite cheap compared to anything else, and has a clearly defined structure, any thoughts?

[1] [https://www.edx.org/xseries](https://www.edx.org/xseries)

<comment><USER18> The first two courses, which were formerly one, have great material and require a solid effort from students. However, I am under the impression that the schedule seems to have slipped a couple times for when later courses will be offered, and the fee structure may have changed, and it is not a very fast schedule to have to wait so long between courses.

While I trust that anything EdX offers would adhere to very high standards, considering that it's even a little difficult to find x-series from the main pages of EdX now, I wonder whether prospective students should wait around for them to start if they have alternate options that are programs that are more likely to occur and involve less potential downtime between courses.

<comment><USER19> > However, I am under the impression that the schedule seems to have slipped a > couple times for when later courses will be offered,

I don't think it has; I don't have the original dates written down, but I remember them as originally all late 2014 through 2015, which is still where they all fall, so I don't think there's been much change.

> and the fee structure may have changed,

I don't think the fee structure has as much changed as been defined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm doing the Georgia Tech MSCS and can vouch for its rigor and quality. The cost is indeed about $7000 [0]. It is much cheaper than the on campus version, however the degree is exactly the same (no indication it is online). Their graduate program in CS is ranked #9 in the US by US News and World Report [1]

You need an undergraduate degree with GPA 3.0 or above to get "conditionally" accepted, no need of GRE or GMAT. to "really" get accepted you need to get B or above in your first 2 core courses. (not impossible, but requires work)

They are very serious about this program and put a lot of effort (both GT and Udacity) to make it happen, I really hope they succeed.

Bottom line, I personally think this is the most cost effective CS graduate degree in the universe at the moment.

[0] - [http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2013/05/15/georgia- tec...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2013/05/15/georgia-tech-udacity- shock-higher-ed-with-7000-degree/)

[1] - [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best- gradu...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate- schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, it's 7k USD/year or for the entire course (2 years IIRC)?

UPDATE: It's 7k for 3 years. The price is amazing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Master degree at TEI of Crete is 3 semesters * 600 euro = 1800 euro in total

[http://www.epp.teicrete.gr/msc/](http://www.epp.teicrete.gr/msc/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointer, but is this remote? Because it doesn't say so.

EDIT: Unfortunately is not, requires actual presence which is not an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "If I ever wanted to apply for a job in IT, do you think that a series of "Coursera" courses would be an acceptable skill-set?"

No, never, a course is not a skill set in IT.

Also, it seems to me you are Greek, I lived some time in Thessalonica, US, and other places, I was born in Spain. Those places(Greece, Italy, Spain, even Germany) have title-itis, but is different in other places in the world. In the US they don't care what is your title if you can do something, most of IT is in the US.

BUT, you can start a real project, using the "Coursera" courses to COMPLETE it. Then you could basically work whenever you want in IT, given that you have a real proof that you could use the knowledge.

Active learning is very different form passive learning. In the Universities where I studied they forced you to do active learning via practices and so on.

</comment><comment> raving-richard Is it possible to get recognition of prior learning or something similar? If so, you can do the free courses, and then go to the uni and say "I already know that, and that, and that", etc. Then you don't pay for those courses. I don't know if you can opt-out of the entire course structure like that, but it might be worth looking into.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not exactly 100% relevant but I'll take work experience over a degree all day.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would never ever hire some one based on what school/program someone went to. As long as the grades are ok don't really care about that either.</comment>


100 Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds/2008/02/12/100-attributes-of-successful-entrepreneurs-now-an-e-book/

<comment><USER2> This is neat. It's actually 100 short tips for entrepreneurs in PDF form: <http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds/files/2008/02/ebook.pdf>

The tips might be common sense around these parts, but they're good as far as I can tell.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone in NYC area want to hack? - <AUTHOR> Hi there! I'm tired of being a cog in the machine. I'm going to attempt the impossible here on HN: find a co-founder.
If you are in the NYC area and aren't entirely repelled by the idea of starting a startup, are an exceptional programmer, and want to get together with other exceptional programmers and build stuff for fun to see what happens, read on.
It's not all about tech in a tech company of course. People, sales, and determination matter. One key seems to be working well together as a team, committed in a shared partnership. Another is trust between co-founders who will be practically be married to each other. And playfulness, and audacity to try crazy ideas out to see if they'd work, which is practically what hackers do anyway.
Don't like being told what to do? Here's a chance to start something your own and run the world by your rules.
Post here or shoot me an email. It'd be nice if you mentioned a hack you are playing with and other awesome stuff you've done. <comment><USER2> Well, that's a clickbait title.

It should be "Seeking CoFounder in NYC".

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I thought someone wants to organize a Hackathon, or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> There will be hacking. Hacking won't be the first thing that happens though. A problem with hackathons is you can't have them in someone's apartment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't you say something about who you are, a hack you're playing with, and some of the other awesome stuff you've done?

<comment><USER5> That would take all the "im" out of meeting the impossible, wouldn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Assuming you are serious and not here to troll, I would suggest checking out Founder Dating ([http://founderdating.com](http://founderdating.com)). I don't have any affiliations with the company though I am a member and it's a very active community and the website helps connect people together to build something together.

</comment><comment> smith-kyle I'm DTH

<comment><USER7> You're a Distributed Hash Table? :-)

<comment><USER8> Down To Hack, I'm assuming.

I've frequently been asked if I'm DTF by nearly-strangers on local chatrooms. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who are you? What are your skills? What's the idea/s?

</comment><comment><USER10> This may be the craziest idea that ever worked! In any event, shoot me an email. I am always open to help fellow entrepreneurs out in any way I can.

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://github.com/WalnutiQ/wAlnut](https://github.com/WalnutiQ/wAlnut)

<comment><USER12> interesting project

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Always up to meet interesting people. Drop me an email (in profile) and we'll get together.

</comment><comment><USER14> Please excuse my bluntness, but who are you trying to troll?

a) You ask for somebody to marry you (your words) but don't tell anything about yourself.

b) You don't present a single hint of _your_ ideas but ask what your potential significant other can offer (to stick to your metaphor).

c) Every "exceptional programmer" is good at analysis - my analysis of your post lead to a) and b).

Edit: By no means I want to deter you from pursuing your goal, I'm really just trying to give useful feedback wrt your post.

<comment><USER15> Ideas don't matter. Execution does. OP gave a taste of their opinions on execution. Seems sufficient to me.

<comment><USER9> Ideas do matter, there are a lot of useless ideas. Good ideas _alone_ don't matter if you can't execute.

Either way it's helpful to know what field OP wants to work in, especially when trying to find a cofounder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Figure out how to make burritos and a proper salsa bar?</comment>


Cutting Sugar Rapidly Improves Heart Health Markers - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2016/07/19/cutting-sugar-from-diet-rapidly-improves-heart-health-markers/?mtrref=query.nytimes.com&_r=1&referer=http://lm.facebook.com/lsr.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwell.blogs.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F07%2F19%2Fcutting-sugar-from-diet-rapidly-improves-heart-health-markers%2F%3Fmtrref%3Dquery.nytimes.com%26_r%3D0&ext=1470544634&hash=AcnfIOUeeqZWqkYWzEMi7NQm_rgwGvUwm0UCOXcTMOG4kw&_rdr <comment><USER2> Getting rid of pastries also gets rid of a lot of soybean oil. Because of the holy war against fructose, it is easy for them to interpret the results of their study as confirming their assumptions.</comment>