Ask HN: Have you been ghosted during the recruiting process? - <AUTHOR> Have you ever been ghosted by a company during the interview process?
Just had a terrible experience with 'top' startup .  Over the course of about five weeks I did, in this order: three initial screens, an UNPAID three-day creative project, and then two video-interviews spaced a week apart.  Everything seemed to be going well -
And then... nothing.
One week after the last interview, I sent a follow-up e-mail.  No response.
Two weeks after the last interview, I sent a second follow up-email.
Later that day (today), I got a form-letter rejection with zero personalized content from a generic "talent" e-mail and not the recruiter I had been speaking with for over a month.
The second interview had moment that were pretty unprofessional... the interviewer was literally trying to draw pictures to explain the question they were asking and holding it up to the webcam.  Nothing prepared to share.
Is there any benefit in a name + shame?  I can post all the questions they asked and the project  requirements, I never signed an NDA.
I like what I built and will probably be able to publish it myself, but this whole process is INCREDBILY frustrating.
I've had it happen with big startups, small startups, and big companies like Google.
Have you all experienced this?  This kind of ghosting is so painful, and easy to avoid.  Just... communicate.
Shit like this makes me want to get out of tech. <comment><USER2> Ghosted by Snap. Manager of a team reached out to me personally before putting me in touch with their internal recruiter and then nothing. Not as much of a waste of my time as OP though somewhat odd. I do still find it mildly amusing that Snapchat's logo is a ghost.

I think a lot of times orgs/teams go through major restructuring in the middle of recruiting or otherwise rethink hiring strategy and unfortunately candidates oftentimes get left hanging. Also almost no one wants to deliver bad news, especially to a stranger.

Important thing is not to beat yourself up about it too much Always remember that interviews are 2-way streets and the signals you listed scream that it would be a complete effing nightmare to work there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, all the time, it's how it works - they don't want to give you any feedback (which IMO I should make a prerequisite for even interviewing me and wasting my time) but I barely get that. Just keep chugging along. I once worked at a company that barely hired anyone for 6 months, just kept wasting our afternoons interviewing people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response. Obviously it says more about how terrible their process is than it does about me as a candidate, but you can't help but internalize some of it. Appreciate the input - will keep chugging. Choo choo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I sympathize, but it's probably useless to get angry about this. The moral of the story is to always be putting multiple irons in the fire, and assume that most will ghost.

In a way they're doing you a big favor. They're identifying themselves as a company that you don't want to work for, and that information is gold.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I appreciate your sentiment.

Agree that individually it doesn't make a lot of sense to get upset about it, but this has been my experience with all of tech interviewing for years now.

Their behavior is pretty standard, from what I've seen: super drawn out process, unpaid projects, ghosting.

You'd think with all that "gold" from identifying these shitty companies that I'd be rich or something ;)

I'm just not sure about tech. I've been working in tech in San Francisco for 8 years since graduate school and in addition to all the problems with hiring and interviews, I have: been fired by startups a month before the equity cliff, had patents filed on my work with me as an inventor without my signature (company sold to Facebook on strength of those false patents; FB tried to get me to assign later; I refused and they dropped the patent),had to buy and pay taxes on options that ended up completely worthless when the startup folded, worked for a full year without a 1-on-1 meeting with a 'manager', been silenced by separation packages that require 'non- disparagement' in order to get the money you need to pay rent, etc.

You'd think the big companies would be better but they're not. I once spent 6 months interviewing with Google. Then they called me the next year to apologize for how shitty their interview process was.

I graduated college during the great recession so learning to code was a skill to survive and make money, but it's been almost impossible to make a stable career out of it.

I think maybe it's time to get out of tech. I have multiple degrees from Ivy League schools in liberal arts fields but I guess I believed the Silicon Valley dream. I'm not independently wealthy or anything - I'm the first person in my family to go to college at all and have had to figure everything out through some pretty painful and expensive lessons. I've got a lot of grit but this stuff is getting out of hand.

I've generated millions and millions of dollars of "value" for my overlords and have nothing to show for it.

Anyhow... thanks again for your post. I really do appreciate it.

<comment><USER4> That sucks. I've not worked in the BA, but can relate to a lot of this.

With respect to the interview process specifically, I've had an offer rate of maybe 30% over the course of my career (I'm in my 50s), and the process has been pretty easy. Sometimes a few whiteboard questions, but no take-home bullshit, etc. So, not too hard to find a job.

But on my last search, a few years ago, I experienced a lot of what you're seeing. Lengthy, unprofessional processes with maybe 15 companies. I finally ended up elsewhere, in an academic position. Pay is painfully low, but in pretty much every other respect one of the best jobs I ever had. And that's partly _because_ the pay is low--my manager knows full well that I'm virtually irreplaceable, so I have a lot of power in the employment relationship.

Anyway, the thought there is that perhaps before leaving the technology field altogether, it might be enough to leave "Tech(TM)" (the part of tech that's huge in the BA and here on HN). There can be interesting things to do at rather boring sounding places.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Name the company in a separate headline HN post.

Normally ghosting is expected, but since you put in so much effort it's really disgraceful to not give you a phone call and at least some sort of vague phony explanation.

What is it that would lead to a rejection at step 7, that they could not have discovered at step 1 or 2? Answer is "nothing", it's just really bad hiring practice.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your response, it really made me feel a lot better. it was TikTok, btw.</comment></comment>


Nifty Freeway Interchange Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120403340

<comment><USER2> This is exactly the type of article I like to see on HN. It presents a simple solution to an obvious problem that I hadn't even really recognized, and it reminds us to keep looking at things in different ways.

</comment><comment><USER3> In [un]related roadway news: [http://www.fastcompany.com/1660258/traffic- report-how-to-swi...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1660258/traffic-report-how- to-switch-to-the-other-side-of-the-road-without-causing-a-70-car-pileup)

One of the most vexing aspects of traveling between mainland China and Hong Kong is the car travel: People in the former drive on the right side of the road; people in the latter drive on the left (a vestige of the British empire).

So to quell confusion at the border and, more importantly, to keep cars from smashing into each other, the Dutch firm NL Architects proposed a brilliant, simple solution, the Flipper bridge.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a pretty big fan of Ontario's parclo design (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parclo>).

The most standard design (called A4 in the wikipedia article) has the same amount of traffic lights as this design. There is no driving on the left, no weaving, and there are no left turns with oncoming traffic.

Access onto the highway is a right turn for all directions. Access from the highway is light-controlled right or left turn. The highway has more capacity than the intersecting road, so while dumping traffic from the road onto the highway at a maximum rate using the easy right turns is fine, the light at the exit off the highway serves as rate limiter if necessary so that the road is not overwhelmed with traffic.

<comment><USER5> To be sure, those interchanges are the most pleasant to drive through, but at a cost of land. The interchange design presented in the NPR article is much more feasible in urban centers where you might be constrained by existing structures. The accel/decel ramps can run parallel to the freeway, leading to nearly-right angle turns at street level. (It's not drawn this way in the article, but it doesn't take much imagination to picture it.)

<comment><USER4> That's definitely a good point, but in this particular case the picture posted elsewhere in the comments by raquo [1] looks like it could fit or almost-fit a parclo (possibly in a slightly elongated/compressed arrangement). The more hippie side of me is tempted to suggest that if you can't afford the land, you shouldn't be building an expressway there :)

[1] [http://www.inside-lane.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/11/Diverg...](http://www.inside-lane.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/11/Diverging-Diamond-Springfield-MO1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be interested in seeing more analysis of this.

It is pretty close to a cloverleaf interchange (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverleaf_interchange>), but with the addition of stoplights on the road.

It seems that this will still suffer the weaving problem that plagues cloverleaf intersections - note how on the bridge cars first enter the road (from the freeway) and then shortly afterward, leave.

Perhaps this could be mitigated by placing stoplights on the offramps (which can be conveniently anti-synchronized with the lights controlling the bridge entrance), but I imagine space on the offramp could be a huge issue.

<comment><USER7> The main idea is that it's a much cheaper upgrade to the diverging diamond from a standard diamond interchange with left hand turn lights, but it's still a fairly substantial upgrade for traffic flow. The cloverleaf eliminates all the lights, but requires a lot more construction and takes up way more land.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Obligatory: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diverging_diamond_interchange>

Makes it easier to understand, seeing it from above. I also suspect I have seen this on an infrastructure blog which I can't recall offhand.

Instant edit: Could the submitted title be made clearer?

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems like a lot of lights, compared to a roundabout. I don't get why people don't like roundabouts, they seem to work quite well, at least until traffic backs up (at which point nothing really works). They also avoid the left (or right, where they are most common), but typically with fewer lights. The second light in this system seems like it will really slow things down, but maybe it works. I'd love to see video footage of it in action during a busy period.

<comment><USER10> I have a sort of visceral negative reaction to roundabouts, but I think because most of the ones I've seen in Europe, when the road is more than one lane wide in each direction, seem to end up with a crazy ad-hoc-lanes thing going on in them, where it's as if you drove onto a huge plaza with no lane markings, where everyone is driving in all sorts of criss-crossing diagonal directions trying to get from their entrance road to their exit road across multiple lanes of traffic. I imagine some countries have more orderly versions, but that's how the Paris ones all felt to me.

edit: video of an example, around the Arc de Triomphe -> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lay8aZlsbB0>

<comment><USER11> I approve of one-lane roundabouts and wish America would replace all its four- way stop signs with them. Four-way stop signs make no sense and just make everything painful, _especially_ for cyclists.

Two-lane roundabouts are pretty dangerous, though -- while I've never had an accident in one I've always suspected that I might. And anything more than two just seems to be crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the biggest problem with such a design is simply people not being used to it. Once you're used to occasionally being on the left side of the road for thirty seconds twice a day, there's no downside. The first took a long time, the next few will come slowly, and then they'll become just part of the terrain like cloverleafs (bleh). I also expect their acceptance will vary geographically, like roundabouts (still bleh for me, YMMV).

<comment><USER13> I live in Springfield, and so far it actually seems like the most dangerous parts are the right hand turns from MO-13 on to I-44 (step 6 on the interactive diagram). A lot of people forget that although they have bypassed the traffic signal they still have to yield to the oncoming traffic from the _opposite_ side of MO-13 that they would typically be looking at to check right of way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found a video that helped me to visualize this design better than I could from the article. It is a 4 minute long animation of the interchange in action from the Missouri Department of Transportation found on this page: [http://www.modot.mo.gov/springfield/major_projects/Greene/I-...](http://www.modot.mo.gov/springfield/major_projects/Greene/I-44andRoute13.html).

And here is a direct link to the video (13MB): [http://www.modot.mo.gov/springfield/major_projects/Greene/DD...](http://www.modot.mo.gov/springfield/major_projects/Greene/DDI_13-01Med_Prog.wmv)

There are also some more pictures: [http://www.modot.mo.gov/springfield/major_projects/Greene/Di...](http://www.modot.mo.gov/springfield/major_projects/Greene/DivergingDiamondPhotos.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Am I the only one that's bothered by the left-lane merges? That's really difficult to implement, esp. in the way it's drawn in the diagram in TFA (no lengthy merger lane).

In the left lane, people go fast. It's dangerous and difficult to merge from an exit ramp onto the left lane.

<comment><USER16> See image: [http://www.inside-lane.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/11/Diverg...](http://www.inside-lane.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/11/Diverging-Diamond-Springfield-MO1.jpg)

The roads that merge both have only one lane. The one that comes from the right has a yield sign. It also has a rather sharp bend just before the merge so 1) the cars are unlikely to go at high speeds, and 2) the drivers can easily see each other before the merge, so it's actually good design.

<comment><USER4> I believe ComputerGuru was talking about the merge into the left lane of the intersecting road while exiting the highway and turning left. It's not the most intuitive of arrangements, especially when combined with the left-hand exit following shortly. Hopefully the drivers on the intersecting road will be sufficiently surprised by the arrangement to break the usual expectation of the left lane being a through lane with higher speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great article, very innovative design.

Also, something else caught my eye: City's name is Springfield, and the name of the woman that works at the gas station is Faith FLANDERS. :)

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks like a good idea. Picture your typical urban freeway interchange with left turn lanes to get onto the freeway. This design eliminates the left turns by moving each direction to the left on the bridge: English on the bridge and American on the approaches. There is a diagram that makes it all clear.

<comment><USER19> I agree, looks like a pretty good idea. Any type of change like this always gets negative opinions, same thing happened when they put roundabouts in and now everyone loves them and want more of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love this kind of stuff. It can be trippy driving through these things though.

How long before traffic systems start broadcasting the schedule for the next minute or two so cars can plan ahead and always get there when the lights green?

</comment><comment><USER21> The article ran in November of last year, so the interchange has (presumably) been used for half a year now. Surely Missouri's been collecting data about how the new system's been doing - I'd love to see it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm sure I understand why the stop light/intersections need to be there at all. Why can't the orange road pass over the red road on one side and then pass under on the other side of the underpass?

<comment><USER4> Building overpasses isn't exactly cheap and the article said no bridge construction was necessary when putting this layout up. It can definitely be done if the traffic level warrants shelling out extra for not having two traffic lights, but once you're going for a three-level interchange there are a lot of existing designs out there already (and some don't have the entrance- exit weaving pattern).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm pretty sure this is what they started building in American Fork, Utah. - <http://www.udot.utah.gov/pioneer> (video)

</comment><comment><USER24> This wouldn't be needed if they drove on the correct side of the road.

<comment><USER24> Downboats for being British. Not my fault you people don't have a queen anymore, get over it.</comment></comment>


Alphabet Shareholders and Employees Want Executive Pay Linked to Diversity Goals - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/alphabet-shareholders-and-employees-want-executive-pay-1826244537 <comment><USER2> No, one or more shareholders and a handful of employees are going to formally propose a plan to link executive compensation to diversity goals.

Alphabet opposes the proposal because they believe it's not in the best interests of the company or shareholders.

I don't think it's a good idea. I think there are better ways to nurture your company culture than depending on arbitrary objectives with vague, or even nonexistent, finishing lines.

My two cents.</comment>


Show HN: Leoh – New Tab Chrome extension with a clean and minimalistic design - <AUTHOR> http://leoh.io/chrome

<comment><AUTHOR> Before anyone mentions it, I'd just like to say that the design of this extension is based off of momentum. I had used momentum for a few days and quickly realized it was quite undeveloped and lacked some basic features that they had been promising to implement for a while. The reason why leoh and momentum are quite different is in the functionality and customization options. leoh is still in development and will be updated frequently.</comment>


Is Readability Just an Instapaper Ripoff? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/readability-vs-instapaper.php#.T1E6_3QH3hU.hackernews <comment><USER2> Short answer: yes. Long answer: very much so, yes.</comment>


Mozilla Gear - <AUTHOR> https://gear.mozilla.org/

<comment><USER2> Is there a place where I can do a $10/mo recurring donation? The donate page seems to be only one-time donations.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really want a hoodie with the firefox logo, I have this[0] and I love it.

Does anyone know any other stores that sell similar things? I would love a node.js shirt or python shirt(i love the logos), I've seen things on Redbubble but I've never ordered from them and since it's user uploaded I'm worried about the quality.

[https://www.googlestore.com/google+redesign/brands/chrome/ch...](https://www.googlestore.com/google+redesign/brands/chrome/chrome+full- zip+hoodie.axd)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd rather wear a Developer Edition blue logo shirt, though...

</comment><comment><USER5> I love the [Cunning Of Foxes t-shirt.]([https://gear.mozilla.org/products/firefox-cunning-foxes- tshi...](https://gear.mozilla.org/products/firefox-cunning-foxes-tshirt)) It looks like a normal silly t-shirt, the geek is subtle.

</comment><comment><USER6> A Rust logo shirt would sell, wouldn't it? I don't see one.

</comment><comment><USER7> I need stickers!

</comment><comment><USER8> I would love to get one :) They are great.</comment>


IPad + Car = pretty cool car hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSnIXfoSU6I

<comment><USER2> I was actually planning on building my own car pc - had all the parts ordered and ready to install....

Then I got word that one of the employees that works for my father-in-law killed two people via a head-on collision because he was watching a movie using an in-car dvd player while driving. The accident was terrible, and I believe the driver who caused the accident literally watched the victims burn up in flames inside their car.

Subsequently I decided to sell all my car computer parts on ebay so that I'm not a hazard to other people on the road. The temptation for me to fiddle with a computer while driving is probably too high.

<comment><USER3> Driving is one place where tactile feedback _really_ matter and touch screens are a POS. If the driver has to take their eyes off the road to change the radio station somewhere someone will get in an accident and die. On my G35 I really do not like how all of the radio preset buttons are smooth and flush next to each other no matter how 'nice' it looks. It makes it near impossible to push the correct one without looking. I added little bumps via super glue so I would know which button is which without having to look.

Going out of your way to add a generic ipad that is designed to require you to be looking at the screen and not the road is a bad mix. You could use it as a glorified screen and have special software that always ran and connected to the car via the usb port (exists on the iphone) and didn't let you do anything when moving that would be in a step in the right direction. Still, adding a distraction to the driver is usually not worth the risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It probably wont be long before someone find some cool place in their home to mount the iPad too. I'm thinking something like an iPad mounted flush into a coffee table at a slight angle so you can control your home theatre, lights, read the morning newspaper and check your TV listings. Or how about mounted into the kitchen wall to stream TV or get weather updates? Along the lines of this, except with an iPad:

[http://hacknmod.com/hack/ikitchen-diy-touch-screen-wall- moun...](http://hacknmod.com/hack/ikitchen-diy-touch-screen-wall-mount- computer/)

<comment><USER5> I thought that a magnetic fridge mount (as long as it didn't mess with the internals of the device) could be good. Attach the iPad to your fridge and then use recipe apps like Jamie Oliver's.

<comment><USER4> It might be more convenient to mount it under a cabinet, so that you can easily access it when cooking and baking. Something along the lines of this:

[http://www.instructables.com/id/Kitchen-PC-with-laptop- twist...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Kitchen-PC-with-laptop-twist/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori That mod is a car accident waiting to happen.

<comment><USER6> So is yelling at your kids, driving over 30mph, etc., etc.

<comment><USER7> Yelling at your kids while driving isn't necessary, nor is a computer, which I suppose is the point. Unnecessary distractions cause collisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm planning to do the same thing in my car. Good iPod integrated headunits are expensive so if you don't mind a little DYI work this would actually be cheaper and more functional. I'm going to wait for the 3G unit to get GPS. Glare is going to be a big factor though. Not sure how well these anti-glare screen covers work.

</comment><comment><USER9> Soon after I started driving, my father said at every point in time I should have a mentally planned "exit path". That is - some way to escape oncoming or concurrent traffic that is not aware.

As more hacks like this come out, and with the amount of distracted drivers, I think the best "hack" for driving is knowing to escape someone using an ipad or an iphone coming at a closing speed of 200kph.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a bit of a CarPC enthusiast, I am interested to see how long this holds up. I have fabricated my own touchscreen into my car and did all the work to make it look as factory as possible, however it takes a lot of time to make sure that everything holds together. Honestly, from the clips they showed, it really doesn't seem that the iPad was made to stick in there if the roads got a bit turbulent. I have seen people's touchscreens fall out from not being properly secured into the dashboard (including my own from a particularly rough driving experience...)

Ultimately, I think it's pretty cool but the iPad interface is not a very safe one to use while driving. This is why I always, always, always install a dashboard frontend like Centrafuse or RoadRunner on mine to make navigation simple.

Aside from all that stuff, I am pretty curious to see a) how the iPad holds up on the car battery, and b) how well the screen illuminates during sunlight. Both of which are always interesting problems to work through when building your own CarPC.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice. Puts the BMW iDrive to shame ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a feeling that a car in broad daylight is a place where a glossy display can become rather annoying.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow. Soundman. These guys are in my town. I pass them on the way to work. I hope they got the data version so they can use maps. Regardless of the distraction potential, I think it's a pretty clever hack. Let's just hope he doesn't get distracted and kill me on my way to work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me or does this guy look like Mack from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia?

<comment><USER15> I thought the same

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For a few short moments while watching this video, I forgot how much I hate cars.

</comment><comment><USER17> How long before people are going to break into cars to rip off the IPad?

</comment><comment><USER18> As bad as smartphones were before Apple came along with the iPhone, car audio/navigation is a thousand times worse. Whoever turns out to be the Apple of autosound will have a license to print money.</comment>


Be Real in SEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.kumailhemani.com/be-real-in-seo/

<comment><USER2> Can't agree more! Love the way you described "What is SEO" LOL!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe.. That is one of the best parts of the post ;)</comment></comment>


Responding to Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/responding-to-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> This is a great idea. What about also funding companies that will help the economy regain its footing in the coming months/years? Covid-19 will drastically impact even the people who never catch it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is YC Summer 2020 still expected to be "in person" and require relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area?

<comment><USER4> Last I heard, that hadn't been decided yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great initiative, thank you!</comment>


Evolution of Web design - <AUTHOR> http://cssmysite.com

<comment><USER3> Nice. You missed "1999 Heavy", with its big swooping 3d-edged curves, 9-image table-based rounded buttons, "mystery meat" image-based navigation, and 400kb pageloads back in the day of the 56k modem.

I've kept my old eMachines box running in the corner these past 10 years, and it's still waiting for the NetZero homepage to load (using its NetZero dialup account of course).

<comment><USER4> Hah, I built one of those right around that time! A few years later, I went to design school and gradually came to understand the horrors I had wrought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should do design around the world too. In the US people still seem to love the textured background and serif fonts.

Eg <http://www.remax.com/> vs <http://www.remax.co.uk/>

They also seem to like using posed photos of people:

<http://www.verizon.com/> vs <http://www.vodafone.co.uk>

Anything else anyone's picked up?

</comment><comment><USER6> Really, the FrontPage one is infinitely better than all the actual FrontPage sites I remember from the era.

<comment><USER7> I'd love to see what a modern, talented web designer could do with an old copy of Frontpage. It would be a bit like the chiptune musicians who hack on 8-bit sound DSPs :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great! But are Dark and Grunge really the two latest? It seemed chronological up to Web 2.0, Textures, and even Minimal...but I don't understand why Dark and Grunge come after.

<comment><USER9> The Web 2.0 one looked like a bad attempt at the whole Web 2.0 look - <USER2> gradients should have been a lot more subtle.

<comment> saint-loup I assume that's on purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> +1 for using straight markup to create the "Flash" iteration.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks like design trends of the non-designer. I've found that web design has improved greatly over the past few years, as best practices and technology have "aligned" with designers' vision.

<comment><USER4> I think part of it is also that designers and developers have come to see each other less as the "other" and collaborate more closely.

An increase in the number of designers learning CSS and developers learning rules of composition certainly hasn't hurt, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where is last year's photo-realistic trend or the _dark ages_ of 2000-2005 before AJAX and web 2.0?</comment>


Google Fiber: A lesson on free market failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/internet/135687-google-fiber-a-lesson-on-free-market-failure <comment><USER2> This is a puff piece with a linkbait headline. In no way is Google Fiber a "lesson on free market failure." Moreover, the article concludes we need the all too broad "simplified" regulation for fiber/cable networks. This is all launched off of generating a straw man argument of a conservative and then going from there.

Laying down a network is a huge undertaking. Not only is it expensive in terms of infrastructure costs, but it turns out that you can't just dig up people's yards in order to lay your cable down. You have to (rightly) go through _a lot_ of red tape to do so. No person in their right minds would _ever_ back complete deregulation of a market which essentially requires imminent domain to be imbued.

Moreover, Kansas City did not deregulate. Kansas City is granting Google part in the oligopoly--Google did not arise as a fiber competitor without help from the city. Kansas City did, however, seek Google out and entice them to come to their city to provide competition.

This article is a long-winded straw man argument without much substance. I was hoping it would expound on some of the ways that cities can adopt broadband- friendly policies, or at least figure out why Google Fiber was a free market failure.</comment>


KDE Connect - <AUTHOR> https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ <comment><USER2> Been using it to control my projector from my sofa when watching stuff: the remote control allows me to pause, skip intro or choose a different film altogether.

</comment><comment><USER3> I only ever got file transfer to work, no remote keyboard nor desktop..the menu items just aren't there and it's impossible to discover why :(</comment>


Filling the Autism Gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0499dl7

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a BBC Radio Four programme in the "Face the Facts"[1] investigative documentary series.

> _John Waite investigates why scientists say autism research receives a > fraction of the funding invested in other conditions and that as a > consequence, there are very few effective interventions to treat the > disorder. Meanwhile, parents of autistic children say they face a long wait > for treatment provided by their local authority, and have instead turned to > unproven methods offered by nutritionists and psychotherapists._

[1] Bafflingly this series has been cancelled and they're not going to make any more. Fucking BBC.</comment>


Anti-patterns and Malpractices in Modern Software Development (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bryanedds/living-in-the-age-of-software-fuckery-8859f81ca877#.ukrojlabp <comment><USER2> One of the big topics and reasons given is the "problem of the commons". A ressource that is available to many will lead to the community's downfall since everybody takes as much as he can instead of as much as he needs, which leads to exploiting the ressource to its limits and beyond.

I would argue that the world is not THAT pessimistic. The thing is that most people are totally fine with "just a little more" than what they need. They don't want the max, they want a little more than the min. Only a few people will try to exploit the commons to their max.

But then why is it that the "problem of the commons" seems so reasonable? Why do we experience this self destructive path so often if only a few will over- exploit it?

I believe this is the case because A) the few over-exploiters will also fight each other which leads to (self-)destructive results, and B) stopping over- exploiters requires open communication (=everybody would need to admit his little exploits) and cooperation (=trusting each other).

As a result I believe that forcing open information and forcing cooperation by rules (e.g. by separation of power, by having some people getting paid to reveal the exploits of others) would save the whole system from over- exploiters and I believe there are areas were we already achieved that to a meaningful degrees (e.g. in democracies in comparison to dictatorships).

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary: The short term thinking, management, architects and co-workers etc. are all to blame. How to fix it: Tell the truth. Guy is self proclaimed semi retired since 30.

It is true that software creation is messed up from all angles and the result is rarely clean. None of that is new. Yes, the software from the good old days was written better (not really, see all the security issues and don't forget that there is a huge survivor bias).

Iff software actually ships it has filled a need at a sufficient quality, adhered to budget, time and integration constraints. Software is usually a team effort due to the sheer size of work and knowledge required. Working with people can be challenging - either in a good or in a bad way. The latter is result of two people not getting along well. Considering that everyone else is the problem I wonder about the author.

None of the "problems" is truly fixable. Faced with each one there are things one can do and being content with that rather than trying to come up with some silver bullets.

Scratch that. May I share with you my holacratic software process?

</comment><comment><USER4> Pfft... I wonder if he would feel better doing real engineering on a 50°C desert building football stadiums.

Personally, I don't care about all of this, the project is done, I get paid and the wheel keeps on turning.

Talking about "real engineering" and not to discredit fellow engineers, most of their job is done by already manufactured formulas and software simulations. All those bridges, stadiums and buildings, started as bits and bytes.

The real difference is those projects are signed and you're liable if they collapse. There are no EULAs for bridges... Yet!

</comment><comment><USER5> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12778824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12778824)

</comment><comment><USER6> An article with bunch of barely coherent notes about software "engineering" not being engineering... Ok, welcome to the industry.</comment>


A question about a question - <AUTHOR>

I'm turning to HN for some advice, but before I do I have a question.. to make the most of the actual question I want to ask :)
I'm looking for a mentor/advisor and I am preparing some material about my startup. I'm detailing everything I have with a video demo, 2 page PDF with an overview and my CV.
My plan was to lay it all bare at HN and ask for advice about the content. But before I do I want to know if that sounds like a really stupid idea, basically telling everyone everything about my startup?
Are there pitfalls to my approach? <comment><USER2> The first pitfalls would be an apathetic audience or disinterest, which you can't control. You're best to just show it off, hope you get a lot of feedback (positive or negative, you need feedback), and then prepare to adapt from what you've heard and what you agree with.

Worrying about a future time to worry is a waste of at least half your time, if not all.</comment>


The broken promise of Web Components (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://dmitriid.com/blog/2017/03/the-broken-promise-of-web-components/ <comment><USER2> I have a working-theory-slash-rant as to why things are the way they are. Some may disagree - it's a bit left-of-center - and I accept downvotes, but hear me out.

The mess everything's in is because things are working as designed. I think the State of The Web™ is actually a working psyop primarily on Google's part to make everything as complicated as possible in order to enforce their agenda.

Google introduced a browser to get a position on Web steering committees, then forked [from] WebKit so they could deepen their agenda down to the technical levels of the stack and simply sidestep the committees by throwing resources at what they want to actually be developed.

I learned (from an old novel) about the lawyer-training industry concept of "sweat files", contrived fictions built up over years that are indistinguishable from real client files and are solely for the purpose of exhausting and testing a lawyer's metal. I don't think that's happening directly with the Web, but I think something similar _might_ : what if, some of the "web technologies" that are out there, are simply to create noise?

I'm not talking about noise for noise's sake, or conflating the thousand and one JavaScript frameworks developers build To Save The World© with Google's high-level agenda. But I do think it's a very interesting thought experiment to suggest/wonder/ponder that maybe that noise - so easily attributed to people learning - is the result of a deliberate social psyop within the Web steering industry (I consider it an industry).

The Web steering committees seems to be extremely weak in terms of strength of social structure. What I mean is that their defaults seem to be stagnation, bureaucracy, slow development, arguing about minutiae and trivia instead of analysis, dividing and conquering and commitment to measurable rapid high- level/real-world progress. The way I poorly express it it to say that these groups' instinct seems to be travel ever inward (zooming in on the details) instead of defaulting to traveling forward.

This situation seems ripe for social exploitation :(

I wrote a couple more comments on these lines a few days ago. Unfortunately there's no way I can link to the reply chain (hiding messages outside the chain) like you can on reddit :(

\- Top of reply chain (all context, 20 pages of unrelated text :/): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176032)

\- More focused, but less useful context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176299)

\- Just my comments, no context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192992)

<comment><USER3> From what I've seen, it's not the W3C that drives standards forward. It's browser vendor developer teams emailing each other.

<comment><USER2> Yup. The W3C just stands around chasing after everyone and claiming the credit. :(

Which only stands to make everything that much more trivially socially engineerable, IMHO...</comment></comment></comment>


An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff's lines in a bizarre short film - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/04/an-ai-wrote-all-of-david-hasselhoffs-lines-in-this-demented-short-film/ <comment><USER2> Hey, I'm one of the creators of this -- I trained the LSTMs that wrote the computer generated segments in this film. The ballet choreography was generated with a context-free grammar, because I couldn't find enough material to make a ballet choreography LSTM.

Here's our film from last year, Sunspring, which was written entirely by an LSTM trained on science fiction screenplays: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc)

It's worth noting that this year I used subtitle files rather than screenplays to train our LSTMs, so we only had dialogue rather than dialogue + action descriptions. The Ars Technica article explains everything.

<comment><USER3> I'm incredibly interested in the ballet part, what was it trained on? Any more info on that part?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I simply ingested words in French from a few online ballet dictionaries into a JSON object, and used a recursive context-free grammar to generate (generally) grammatically correct sentences. The result was a mixture of English and French because the dancer (Sarah Hay) requested that I add a few words of her choice in English as well.

Here's some information about context-free grammars: [http://www.decontextualize.com/teaching/rwet/recursion- and-c...](http://www.decontextualize.com/teaching/rwet/recursion-and-context- free-grammars/)

<comment><USER3> The dictionary gives you the terms but how do you get the rules (like S -> NP VP) to combine them? Or were the rules the same as the English language just with the verbs from the ballet dictionary? Thank you for the link also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Today I learned that Markov chain generation = "AI."

Shame on Ars staff for conflating this parlor trick as "artificial intelligence," and failing to explain how this rather simple process works.

For fucks sake, they find the raw screenplay of a movie like Knight Rider, regex out the crap, download a Markov chain generator off of github, and train their model on the text. And of course by "training", I mean they run a single command to process the text document, and wait. Why this is described as a "...long short-term-memory recursive machine-learning algorithm" probably has to do with the fact that Ars has their hand in promoting these short films.

<comment><USER5> They describe it like that because it's a long short-term memory recurrent neural network, which is a machine learning algorithm.

How exactly were you able to infer that they were lying and were instead using a Markov chain from a few snippets of dialogue?

<comment><USER6> defending hype-building like this is why we keep having AI winters

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ok, so it's not very smart AI; emacs's eliza might do as good a job.

But setting aside the article's lack of technical rigor, and its scientism, the film itself is interesting. I was impressed by how the actors could convey feeling, even with a randomly generated script. I imagine that, in acting school, actors have to do this sort of thing as an exercise: learn how to convey feeling using random words or grunts (is this done?).

For me, it's interesting that there's another side to human communication that has nothing to do with verbal meaning. It sounds hard to do THAT using software.

<comment><USER8> Are they actually conveying emotion, or is the kuleshov effect [1] at work? I know one of the things they teach film actors is to 'act less' when they don't know what to do. We as humans tend to interpret the actor as displaying an appropriate emotion if their face is otherwise somewhat neutral.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect)

<comment><USER7> Cool! I had thought that Eisenstein came up with that, but it looks like Kuleshov taught Eisenstein.

I guess that's why there's an Oscar for editing! The temporal context of a shot matters as much as the shot itself.

But even if my reaction to the film is conditioned by editing, and not just Hoff's acting, I still find it weird that I'm feeling things that don't depend much on the content of the words he's speaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Sidenote: a 30+ year old film Death Wish (about a woman who's dying young and how her life becomes a reality tv show) predicted AI-written novels.

<comment><USER10> Can you tell me the name of the director, producer, or some of the actors?

That sounds like a very interesting movie I would like to watch very much. But search for Death Wish only turns up tons and tons of the one with Charles Bronson going postal.

<comment><USER9> Sorry it's Death Watch!! My fault!! Some sort of a slip! It's a bit slow as a film, but well-done and engaging. Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow are in it. The director is Bertrand Tavernier.

<comment><USER10> Thank you!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> do people actually fall for this? It's so clearly just writers passing it off as an AI because ML is the buzzword of the month that gets funding and attention.

<comment><USER12> The overall story was written by humans. The just-barely-not-quite-nonsense that the actors speak when they get "turned on" are the lines the algorithm wrote.

If you view the credits, it shows all the corpuses the various bot-generated lines were trained on. Hasselhoff's lines were trained on a whole bunch of baywatch episodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNyXYPhnUIs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNyXYPhnUIs) ?

<comment><USER10> Wow, I have never seen Knight Rider in English. The narrator's voice sounds a lot more dramatic than the German sync-version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this is probably the weirdest thing I have seen on the Internet so far.

But if we end up with androids dreaming of electric sheep, this is where it started.

</comment><comment><USER14> Terrible.</comment>


On 5th anniversary of Snowden leak, Michigan effectively bans the NSA - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/on-5th-anniversary-of-snowden-leak-michigan-effectively-bans-the-nsa <comment><USER2> It feels like we are collectively missing the point.

The problem isn't so much that governments are spying on their citizens so intrusively: It is that they are _able_ to spy so intrusively.

Another thing: Anything the NSA can do the mafia can do also, albeit on a smaller scale. Regulating the NSA will do nothing to stop other actors, including some decidedly unpleasant ones.

This is a far bigger problem for technology than it is for government.

Why are we making technology with so many gaping vulnerabilities?

Surely there is something wrong with the way we develop software and hardware if it is so easy for us to ship vulnerable systems and so hard for us to secure the systems that we have already shipped.

This is a hard problem to solve, but until we put our man-pants on and face up to it, then we remain stuck.

Everything else solves only a tiny fraction of the problem, and mostly serves only as a distraction from the central issue: The technical challenge of making systems and software that we can trust.

<comment><USER3> The mafia rarely performs parallel constructions to get innocents thrown in prison.

<comment><USER4> True, they just erase people, destroy careers, blackmail etc.

<comment><USER5> I can't tell which group you're referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank goodness the Brookings Institute had the foresight to hire a lawyer who could tell this reporter that NSA is great and this law is terrible and also this law won't affect NSA at all.

<comment><USER6> That is nice. But it sucks how misleading this title is. I would have completely missed this part of the article until you pointed it out.

<comment><USER3> One of the two of us could stand to make our irony a bit more obvious.

Brookings Institute poses as a "centrist non-partisan think tank", but as we see here is really just a sock puppet for the military-industrial complex, among other evil plutocratic interests. Like lots of "centrist non-partisan" organizations.

<comment><USER7> Sorry for the pedantry, but ... this isn't a lie _per se_ , rather usage of deceptively-meaningless terminology. Specifically, "centrism" of the American Left-Right dichotomy, is poorly defined.

There are multiple ways to arrive at a balanced compromise between:

* the Left's platform (use government to ensure everyone is fed, entertained, coddled and unoffended); and

* the Right's platform (use government to exert Christian theocracy, and to earn bribes by exerting the largest pocketbooks' wills, even if that means building an empire).

Two notable extremes of such compromise are:

* use government to do everything under the sun, from wealth redistribution to world conquest (cf Horseshoe Theory); and

* don't use government for anything for which it isn't absolutely necessary (cf libertarianism aka classical liberalism).

IMHO classical liberalism is better than nationalist-socialism, and it seems you agree; but both positions could be described as "centrism" since they lie between the Left and the Right.

<comment><USER3> That seems to be a misrepresentation (not a lie _per se_?) of Horseshoe Theory? Those of us at the heel don't support world conquest. That is very much a toe thing. I would countenance a _great_ deal of redistribution in exchange for a great deal less conquest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > the new Michigan law is broader, banning "material support or resources to a > federal agency to enable it to collect or to facilitate in the collection or > use of a person's electronic data or metadata," except if the collection is > done with informed consent, a warrant, or a legal warrant exception, such as > instances in which there's no expectation of privacy.

I wonder about the practical effectiveness of it:

It only covers state and local government agencies (if I understand correctly). How much surveillance do they perform? Business performs far more AFAIK. Can they continue to hand over data to the federal government? What about federal contractors such as Palantir? What about state and local data sold on the market, such as drivers license and voting information (at least in many/most states; I don't know about Michigan).

The law makes an exception for _a legal warrant exception, such as instances in which there 's no expectation of privacy_. 'No expectation of privacy' is, I understand, how every business gives data to the government and seems to allow government and business access to everything but a lead-sealed, windowless, Faraday cage in your house (but the smart power meters can identify a lot of your activity anyway).

Also, other factors make it seem symbolic:

> The Michigan law doesn't make cooperation with the NSA a crime or outline an > enforcement mechanism.

and

> passing with a single "no" vote in the legislature

<comment><USER9> > other factors make it seem symbolic

I don't think this is actually true. A single no vote just means that it wasn't unanimous (but almost so).

As for not defining a crime, much of law (e.g. the constitution) does not define crimes, but regulations of government which may be enforced by courts. E.g. the government must not station troops in your house in peacetime (Third Amendment) or the government must appoint you legal counsel in a trial (Sixth Amendment).

> The law makes an exception for a legal warrant exception

I also wonder about this, particularly as a lot of the NSA's activities do have "legal" warrants issued by the secretive FISA court.

<comment><USER8> >> other factors make it seem symbolic

> I don't think this is actually true. A single no vote just means that it > wasn't unanimous (but almost so).

The implication I drew from it was that the bill was uncontroversial. If security agencies thought it was a threat then I'd expect much more of a fight, though that would not necessarily happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Michigan

<comment><USER11> Thank you. The omission of the state's name is a deliberate clickbait ploy.

[Edit for context: the title of this post and the accompanying article have both been updated to "Michigan" instead of simply saying that a state had done so.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice to see that even with all the, uh, distractions the Trump Administration is providing us with, there are still people concerned about the government spying on its citizens.

I don't know that this law will have more than symbolic effect, but I'm glad to see it anyway.</comment>


There is nothing wrong with using your cellphone at dinner. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-entrepreneurs-journey/defd9264bf14

<comment><USER2> I wholeheartedly disagree.

This isn't why I disagree with the article, but I think the example of a newspaper is a poor one.

Newspapers are a one-way information exchange. People take information from a newspaper and traditionally use this information as 'conversational currency' with other people within their peer groups, or such as in the picture used in the example, locality.

"They say it'll rain all through the week." "How about them Yankees?'", "I can't believe our court systems let _him_ get away with _that_!"

A mobile device is different, as it is a means of two way communication. We can take in the information from this method, but we can also spread this information, or "spend our conversational credits" with the device as well, with other people linked to us by their similar devices.

A person on a device is commonly networking with a very large group of other people, and the information exchange is nearly never one way. Humans like to receive feedback on information they receive. This gives us a wider perspective that is further detached from ourselves, and is generally more well-rounded in regards to the opinions the rest of the world shares.

People now use devices like this, to gain a larger amount of opinions so to form their own views. As humans, that feedback loop with other humans is necessary.

The problem : It has not been sufficiently shown to me that we are capable of honoring both information sources very well at once. Most people who I have spoken with who are busy (different than idling on) on their mobile devices have a level of disconnect between myself and themselves that I have never experienced with someone who was simply reading a newspaper or watching a television.

I believe that this level of disconnect that I have experienced in an anecdotal fashion may be related to the cognitive overhead being higher for two way communications methods compared to information-receiving systems.

I don't believe technology is ruining us..

but, I wouldn't care to have dinner with someone who'd rather be spending time on a device that'll be there once the food is gone.

It's more a human respect thing. I don't _need_ to believe that technology is ruining us to be irked by the fact that someone can't be bothered to turn their attention to those around them for forty five minutes out of the day when those people are doing the same for them.</comment>


Next Up for Amazon: Checking Accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-you-ready-for-an-amazon-branded-checking-account-1520251200 <comment><USER2> Article is paywalled for me.

I would only add that I would be interested if they offer virtual account numbers like CitiBank does, so that online retailers get a CC specific to them and a spending cap.</comment>


FreeBSD 11.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/announce.html <comment><USER2> While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everything else on OpenSSH. ;)

So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status.

[0] [https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/](https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/)

[1] [https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html](https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html)

<comment><USER3> Surely Netflix should be donating. Surely Sony should be donating. Surely Nintendo, Facebrick(Whatsapp).

While you're here what did they donate?

<comment><USER4> Netflix currently employs about 8 FreeBSD committers (possibly more, I'm counting on my fingers before coffee, so I might be forgetting people). Most of us contribute our changes back to the project. Some of these are major things, like async sendfile. Our goal is to upstream everything we can.

We also do other things, like sponsor conferences, and work behind the scenes, advocating for FreeBSD support from a wide variety of enterprise hardware vendors.

<comment><USER5> But why FreeBSD over Linux? Honestly it all seems like a waste of time. Linux is already the dominant free OS. Maybe it would be better to put resources into improving Linux (like Microsoft and Google do) instead? You can advocate for it all you want but the idea that FreeBSD is going to ever become as relevant as something like Linux is extremely unrealistic.

Not to mention Linux has a much better license for end-users in that it makes some effort to guarantee the code stays free, and that corporations can't close and modify the code and redistribute it for profit.

I feel like "advocating for FreeBSD" really does more harm to the open source ecosystem than good.

<comment><USER6> >You can advocate for it all you want but the idea that FreeBSD is going to ever become as relevant as something like Linux is extremely unrealistic.

Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

BSD literally invented the networking stack that was copied (poorly) by Linux, and most other Unix variants including Darwin (macOS). It is strictly superior for networked applications. Read here for more info ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8167126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8167126))

<comment><USER7> Would also add that, overall, BSDs are much more lean and well designed than Linux. There are thousands of Linux developers submitting patches all the time, in every direction. That's part of what makes Linux great, but it also makes it a huge mess of code duplication and design bloat. Dbus is a mess, /proc is a mess, netlink is a mess, systemd is a mess, hell eBPF is an insane mess. Linux has a huge legacy of bad APIs, tools and design choices, that were integrated in a rush. That makes Linux trendy, but definitely not what you want when you're just interested in a stable, understandable kernel to run your core infrastructure ou embedded equipments. Not to mention even tooling and network daemons on BSDS are much easier to work with and configure IMHO.

I've been doing kernel development for Linux since a while now, and I'm always amazed at how much time it takes me to understand a new subsystem I didn't use before, because everything is SO damn over engineered it's a farm fest for geek. Whereas when I hack OpenBSD or FreeBSD on my free time I feel like I can be productive making changes in an unknown subsystem in just a few days of reading code and playing with it.

<comment><USER8> They way I've seen it described is that BSD is designed, Linux is grown.

Every part of BSD is from BSD. The kernel, network stack, init system, userland, sshd, etc are all made and released together. Ideas are driven by teams and committees and then implemented.

Every part of a functioning Linux system is from a different vendor. "Linux" makes the kernel and network stack, the init system comes from the FreeDesktop project, the userland comes from GNU, sshd comes from BSD. Things are driven in a variety of different ways, by different people, with different goals and thoughts on how Linux should look. Eventually it all gets glued together and we see what we've got.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone else in this thread, speaking of something else, wrote this line:

"I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?"

... and _that_ is everything that is wrong with FreeBSD - and has been for over ten years.

I wrote a long critique of this issue in 2012 that you can read in the mailing list archives:

[https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- hackers/2012-Jan...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- hackers/2012-January/037294.html)

... and although many of the core team had agreeable sentiments in the very long discussion that followed, nothing at all has changed.

The poster is correct - there is indeed no point in using the 10.x branch. What he doesn't know is that there has been no point in using the 10.x branch for over a year now[1] but since the 11 release was at "dot zero" you were ill-advised to use that as well. This means that for over a year _there has been no good answer to the question "which version of FreeBSD should I use"._

In summary:

FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. It is very difficult to invest time and money into FreeBSD because the platform is neither stable[2] nor long-term. Finally, FreeBSD, possibly unwittingly, loses a lot of end-user development and reinvestment since end users are never working on the same OS that the developers are.[3]

[1] As usual, all new drivers and non-critical bug-fixes go to 11, since that is what "is current" and nobody bothers backporting any of it to 10. This was true _even before 11.0-RELEASE came out_.

[2] I don't mean stable in terms of reliability - FreeBSD is rock solid and we trust all of rsync.net to it - I am speaking of the stability of the OS platform itself and what functions it is capable of.

[3] I'm not interested in your success stories running CURRENT in production. The official stance of the FreeBSD project is that CURRENT "includes works in progress, experimental changes, and transitional mechanisms". They go on: "FreeBSD-CURRENT is not in any way "officially supported".

<comment><USER10> _This means that for over a year there has been no good answer to the question "which version of FreeBSD should I use"._

Not true at all. The answer is:

1\. If you have systems which are already running 10.x, you should run the latest 10.x release.

2\. If you're deploying a new system now, you should deploy it with the latest 11.x release.

3\. If you're building a product which you will be selling next year, you should build it on top of FreeBSD HEAD, so that it will be running a recent release when it ends up being deployed.

Old STABLE branches get updates and new releases because there are deployed systems which are using them. Think of 10.3 as "FreeBSD 10, service pack 3".

<comment><USER9> "If you're deploying a new system now, you should deploy it with the latest 11.x release."

Unless your organization, after wasting a year and tens of thousands of dollars on 5.0, has implemented a SOP to never use the x.0 of FreeBSD.

I think that's a decent heuristic _in general_ \- for instance, I don't buy a car until they've been rolling off the line for 9-12 months - but in the case of FreeBSD it is a concrete rule based on experience - not a superstition.

So again, the cool kids all stopped working on 10.x[1] over a year ago, and 11.1 was not released.

In our case, 10.x was working fine for us and nothing was terribly broken driver-wise (unlike 8.x when we desperately needed intel NIC fixes circa 8.2 that all went to 9 and never got backported).[2] So we kept deploying 10.3.

[1] Driver fixes all go to 11, non-critical bugs all "committed to stable", etc.

[2] Well, except for some nice new bhyve features that all went to stable were not available to us for the last 12-18 months (and will never go to 10).

<comment><USER10> _Unless your organization, after wasting a year and tens of thousands of dollars on 5.0, has implemented a SOP to never use the x.0 of FreeBSD._

Frankly, if that's the lesson you learned from FreeBSD 5.0, I don't know that there's anything I can say to help you.

A more appropriate lesson to learn from FreeBSD 5.0 would have been "don't use releases which are cut from HEAD and announced as being for 'early adopters'". The FreeBSD 5.x stable branch started at FreeBSD 5.3.

<comment><USER11> I think the long-standing impression left by 5.0 (despite carrying explicit warnings about being appropriate for early adopters) carries a good lesson for us: this sort of lore is surprisingly sticky. It doesn't matter that 5.0 was very much an anomaly that wasn't repeated, and that recent .0 releases were very stable. I suspect end-users like John are going to avoid .0 releases for as long as they use FreeBSD.

<comment><USER10> You're probably right, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't point out at every possible opportunity that 5.0 was an anomaly and was clearly identified at the time as being an anomaly.

Maybe we can't convince John to unlearn his wrong lessons, but I'd like to avoid having him teach those wrong lessons to everybody else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This release also finally compiles NAT-T into the kernel by default. I can finally run a strongswan/ikev2 server without needing to compile a kernel just for nat traversal. woohoo!

<comment><USER13> I use IPSec for my VPN needs (accessing my stuff at home from remote places mainly) and run FreeBSD. Getting it set up was annoying, to say the least.

I have no idea why they didn't include NAT-T by default in 11.0. I'd hazard a guess that most VPN connections involve at least one end being behind NAT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> First system (NAS) upgraded flawlessly with `freebsd-update` and I'll see how it fares over the next week before upgrading the rest at home and work.

Many thanks to all the FreeBSD crew for all their hard work.

</comment><comment><USER15> If I'm comfortable using command line tools, should I just use FreeBSD and ZFS directly to build a NAS, or should I go with FreeNAS?

I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?

<comment><USER16> You don't have to use FreeBSD if ZFS is your only draw, though. Ubuntu supports ZFS out of the box.

<comment><USER14> ZFS on Linux is quite inferior; there's a lot of missing functionality and some not so nice bugs. You also can't run ZFS on root without manual installation (I've done this).

ZFS on FreeBSD has been flawless for me. ZFS on Ubuntu is functional but limited, and I've experienced some odd glitches.

<comment><USER16> Other than difficulty with ZFS on root, I think you're just making stuff up. I run a rather heavily used set of RAIDZ2 arrays and everything works fine. No "odd glitches" or anything.

<comment><USER14> On the contrary, it's quite true. I'm a little disturbed by how readily people ascribe nefarious intent to assertions regarding things they have not experienced themselves. You might not have experienced problems, but that does not logically imply that it is free of problems.

A few months back, I booted my Ubuntu 16.10 workstation. No ZFS datasets were mounted at boot. Regular "zfs mount" and "mount" failed. Could not get the datasets to mount at all, even though the pool was active and the datasets were visible. Solution: changing the mountpoint worked for some reason. Still no idea what triggered this or why the fix worked. Either way, it broke the system's normal functioning through no intervention of my own.

I've also had the zfs and zpool commands get stuck in "D" state indefinitely because something internal had blocked everything. Mounted filesystems continued to work, but no admin commands would work. Triggered by running some trivial admin function. After a few days I had to hard reset the system to regain control. This looks like a locking bug.

I've also had poor behaviour when a disc glitched and I got an oops rather than ZFS coping with the short outage. IIRC I got the same "D" state issue as above.

I never encountered any such problems with FreeBSD, and I've run it on both platforms for years. ZFS on Linux is functional, and I use it daily, but the FreeBSD implementation is better.

<comment><USER17> Maybe ubuntu is just as usual buggy junk? Anything other than lts can usually be assumed to be problematic.

I think its worth noting that 16.04 is is 16 months out of date on zfs releases and even 16.10 is 10 months out of date.

In a version of software in development the most current stable release potentially has a lot of bug fixes that ubuntu users are missing out on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anybody know what the deal with blacklistd is? I googled and finally found the man page, but it's not immediately apparent why one might choose using it over using something like fail2ban (which works for any service and can block all ports, not just ssh)?

<comment><USER19> It listens on a socket for failed login notifications from other daemons. I'd say this approach is better than what fail2ban does (scans logs with regexps), but it has to be supported upstream so the daemons actually notify blacklistd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As for powertop on Linux, on FreeBSD you have powermon (from Ports):

# kldload cpuctl # powermon

                      Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2640M CPU @ 2.80GHz
                          (Arch: Sandy Bridge, Limit: 44W)

       4.98W [</comment><comment>=>                                                           ]

     Package:           Uncore:             x86 Cores:          GPU:
     Current: 4.98W     Current: 3.34W      Current: 1.44W      Current: 0.21W
     Total: 14.37J      Total: 9.79J        Total: 3.62J        Total: 0.96J

Also for power management, powerdxx (from Ports) is better then powerd:

/etc/rc.conf powerdxx_enable=YES powerdxx_flags="-n hiadaptive -a hiadaptive -b hiadaptive -m 1600 -M 3000"</comment>


Tuktuk - <AUTHOR> http://tuktuk.tapquo.com/

<comment><USER2> Wow. looks fantastic. Breaks my heart this is not MIT/BSD or Apache2. Still a great addition to the community though. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, could you elaborate a bit on your concerns? Put another way, _what 's the worst that could happen?_.

Also, it seems to be GPLv3 licensed [https://github.com/soyjavi/tuktuk#licensing- options](https://github.com/soyjavi/tuktuk#licensing-options) with a _special_ commercial license for OEM's. I don't know how exactly that works - i.e. their methods of detecting OEM users and definition thereof (hence, without knowing these things, I see where problems could come about, but how likely are they to?)

I skimmed through the license/terms of use as they stand at time of posting this, and from [https://github.com/soyjavi/tuktuk/blob/master/LICENSE.md#24-...](https://github.com/soyjavi/tuktuk/blob/master/LICENSE.md#24-commercial- royalty-free) it seems pretty tame.

tldr: GPL3 vs. MIT? What's wrong with the former? Or is something else there you see that I don't?</comment></comment>


App makers sue Apple and claim it uses 'monopoly power' to charge fees - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/05/app-makers-sue-apple-and-claim-it-uses-monopoly-power-to-charge-fees.html <comment><USER2> This is most likely a direct result of the recent Supreme Court decision in Apple v Pepper where the Supreme Court upheld the Ninth's decision that app buyers could sue Apple for price inflation.

One of Apple's arguments in that case was that Apple couldn't be sued by app purchasers because they could be sued by app developers. Think of it sort of as Apple claiming a sort of "Double Jeopardy" defense. The Supreme Court wrote that this argument was not persuasive:

 _It is true that Apple's alleged anticompetitive conduct may leave Apple subject to multiple suits by different plaintiffs. But Illinois Brick did not purport to bar multiple liability that is unrelated to passing an overcharge down a chain of distribution. Basic antitrust law tells us that the "mere fact that an antitrust violation produces two different classes of victims hardly entails that their injuries are duplicative of one another." 2A Areeda & Hovenkamp ¶339d, at 136. Multiple suits are not atypical when the intermediary in a distribution chain is a bottleneck monopolist or monopsonist (or both) between the manufacturer on the one end and the consumer on the other end. A retailer who is both a monopolist and a monopsonist may be liable to different classes of plaintiffs—both to downstream consumers and to upstream suppliers—when the retailer's unlawful conduct affects both the downstream and upstream markets._

This new lawsuit appears to be app developers taking that quote to heart.

<comment><USER3> Also the "time to play fair" Spotify campaign may have inspired some people

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Should have poured their time into making the web a viable alternative to native. Well, let's see what the next 10 years of mobile bring...

</comment><comment><USER5> I think we have two very different situations.

Small app developers who use apple infrastructure to reach millions of people should not complain about the fees.

On the other hand, companies with own infrastructure should not have to pay apple 30% for doing very little. The article mentions Spotify and I am 100% behind Spotify/Amazon/Netflix/... on this.

<comment><USER6> If you understood how much development has gone into the App Store and delivery infrastructure, you'd realize it wasn't 'very little'.

Those large suppliers who use the App Store to market their products are also capturing an outsize amount of the profit.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't it be interesting if Apple offered some kind of compromise and made it more like a warehousing scheme?

"Okay, instead of 30% we will take 0%. In return, you owe us $x/month to store your app on our servers and CDNs, then $y per download to deliver it onto the phone. And $z per query to show up in the search engine.

And we'll need $10,000 up front on deposit to make sure you don't skate on the bill."

<comment><USER6> There is a lot more than a CDN and a stored download.

<comment><USER7> Being abstract here, but you get the idea.

"We'll also need $50/hour to review the app...no upper bound on the time..."

<comment><USER5> That would not be fair either.

Remember the time apple placed Spotify app on review-limbo for months when they were to announce Apple music?

<comment><USER7> That's the root philosophical argument of this whole thing, which we will be arguing about with bad metaphors and mismatched analogies for the next 2-3 years by my estimates.

<comment><USER8> You think we'll stop doing that in 2-3 years?

<comment><USER7> Not at all. =) Just talking about the Apple app store class action suit specifically.

I think HN's servers are powered by bad analogies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why don't they just develop for Android then?

<comment><USER5> You realize apps like Spotify and Netflix need to be on ALL platforms.

For the same reason Apple Music is available on Android.

<comment><USER9> But they don't, really. They just need to work in the browser.

I uninstalled Spotify long ago and just run the browser player now. It's more limited functionality, but that's Spotify's fault.

Can we please stop assuming we need native app support for everything?

<comment><USER5> IMO Spotify is one of the few apps which should be native :)

(better background operation, lower memory usage, less battery drain)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hunting the Elusive First "Ms." (proposed in 1901) - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1895/

<comment><USER2> I really don't see the relevance of this to anything discussed on HN, does anyone else? I would normally flag this, but I'm aware of Linguistics and Etymology being quite a niche "hacker" interest, so I'll ask for guidance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Each of your two sentences answers itself.

This article is about language, history, and technology. These things are discussed on HN.

<comment><USER2> My criticism was deliberately vague on the off chance that I got an answer and was just being opinionated, but I don't think you can justify it quite so easily. The article amounts to a search .... that's it. There was no expansion on the technology behind this and no real content. There are an abundance of topics available for discussion within this community that could stem from that article.

I had a quick look at the software, but couldn't be arsed to go beyond the "trial" limitations, but from what I saw the article is watered down and the author makes no attempt to range into the MANY areas open for debate. Like I said, language and etymology are interesting, but it's the theory that is interesting, I see little to no such thing here.

Not trying to call you out, gruseom - do a blog on it if it really interests you? I think it could make a very interesting topic, otherwise I wouldn't have made my comment in the first place.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Self-Care Toolkit for Remote Work - <AUTHOR> https://self-care.remote.tools <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

I have always felt that self-care is often misunderstood, ignored and even misused. The question isn't 'Do you take of yourself?' rather it is 'In what ways do you take care of yourself?'. I use a lot of self-care apps myself including Calm for meditation, WaterMinder to remind me to drink water or Reboot for taking breaks. So thought, why not create a mini directory of such apps with a short review on each.

The stash is live at [https://self-care.remote.tools](https://self- care.remote.tools). Have also written an accompanying post at [https://www.remote.tools/newsletter/self- care](https://www.remote.tools/newsletter/self-care). This is a simple side project I picked up in my spare time and would love to hear your thoughts/ feedback!</comment>


Ask HN: What are pros and cons of using an LLC holding company in startup?  - <AUTHOR>

Let's say you have a company with a launched product.  The company is incorporated in Delaware. The founders that started the company all have shares in an LLC which owns 80% of said company.  The company has raised a decent amount of seed money and debt.  Shares in the LLC can be redistributed at any time with a unanimous vote by all founders (6).
There are only three active founders at this stage, one of them technical.
What are the pros and cons of the above structure as the company pushes for a Series A?  Or, how should this company ideally be organized. <comment><USER2> IANAL: my comment is worthless, but

Pro: it's cheaper.

Con: investors dont like LLC's so they will make you convert to a C type, so in the long it will be more time, hassle, and money than you would have saved.

<comment><USER3> Going through this now. We started as a consulting LLC. Then developed IP/ideas, decided that's what we wanted to do (develop one of the major apps / business ideas we had). Had to switch to C Corp.

Although that switch was beneficial, as it forced us to do our due diligence on ourselves, and make sure all the legal work was setup. One of the guys in the startup has a law degree, so it was cheap... but we're really happy we have our paperwork together now that we're talking with vcs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=s...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&q=llc+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=)

This topic has been discussed quite extensively in the past. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't as simple as corp vs. llc, the company in question is already incorporated. Investors have invested in the incorporated company. However, the founders have ownership through an LLC.

<comment><USER4> Then the issue isn't about the LLC but that only three out of the six original founders are active. I would try to find a way to reduce the 80% ownership of the LLC and give the difference to the active founders. Or to find a way to buy out the three non-active partners. If that's in fact the objective, then keeping the LLC might actually be quite useful. Keep in mind that when you start to make money, all proceeds distributed to the LLC is subject to self- employment tax, something that might not be optimal for the non-active founders. In short, find a knob and start turning. Good luck.</comment></comment></comment>


A Quick Node.js Jumpstart - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2011/4/8/nodejs-jumpstart

<comment><USER2> You should be using coffeescript though, makes the javascript in the example look like:

      fs = require('fs')

      for i in [1..3]
        fs.readFile 'test.coffee', (err, data) ->
          console.log("#{i}. Finished reading file")
        console.log("#{i}. doing something important...")

And if you want to get rid of that "gotcha" (which is a javascript one, not a node.js one):

      fs = require('fs')

      for i in [1..3]
        do (i) ->
          fs.readFile 'test.coffee', (err, data) ->
            console.log("#{i}. Finished reading file")
        console.log("#{i}. doing something important...")

This will output the number you'd intuitively inside the file read callback function.

<comment><USER3> do you need to preprocess the coffescript somehow before node runs it, or will node run it directly?

<comment><USER4> You have to compile it.

<http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/>

<comment><USER5> Not necessarily. The distributed `coffee` script will automatically compile before running the script. Plus it shows you coffeescript-friendly tracebacks on error.

<comment><USER4> Whether I manually compile it or it's automatically compiled it still has to be compiled which was the question I was responding to. Which is to say Node.js will not run CoffeeScript directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who has read about node but never actually looked at any demo code, this was a pretty good example. Now I understand what all the fuss is about!

</comment><comment><USER7> If folks have node questions, we would be happy to help - wompt is built on node.

<http://wompt.com/chat/nodejs>

<comment><USER8> what is a good way to share something like a db connection between modules?

<comment><USER9> I think using require would do the trick. Something along the line like:

/* foo.js _/

var date = new Date();

exports.Date = date;

/_ bar.js _/

var foo = require('./foo.js');

exports.Date = foo.Date;

/_ foobar.js */

var foo = require('./foo.js');

var bar = require('./bar.js');

console.log(foo.Date);

console.log(bar.Date)

> console.log(foo.Date);

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 01:05:12 GMT

> console.log(bar.Date)

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 01:05:12 GMT

We are dealing with the same date variable between modules.

[edited. not a good place to share code. gist over github: <https://gist.github.com/910994>]</comment></comment></comment>


Despite perihelion in January, max speed around Sun was on Xmas day. - <AUTHOR> http://twitpic.com/838m7v <comment><AUTHOR> This graph shows the different effects on the Earth's speed around the Sun. It's complicated.

Perihelion was at 1am GMT 5 Jan.[1] However, the Earth and Moon orbit a common center of gravity[2], and when the Moon is closer to the Sun than the Earth, the center of the Earth is moving marginally faster than when the Earth is closer to the Sun than the Moon.

The Moon travels about 1 km/s in orbit (Earth relative)[3], the Earth–Moon mass ratio is about 81:1[4], and the distance to the Moon is about 60 Earth radii.[5]

References:

[1] <http://1.usa.gov/AykBoB>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_mass#Astronomy>

[3] <http://www.freemars.org/jeff/speed/index.htm>

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Double_planet...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Double_planet.3F)

[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon></comment>


Shutup.css — Hide Comments on Many Popular Websites - <AUTHOR> http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup/

<comment><USER2> And to go full circle, has anyone checked to see if it works on Daring Fireball With Comments?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097490>

<comment><USER3> <http://twitter.com/stevenf/status/8605087781>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really do not get this. Sorry to state the obvious, but if comments are that annoying just don't read them, problem sorted.

<comment><USER5> I rather enjoy the comments on the blogs I read. Especially my own where often someone will bring up a correction, addition, etc and just in general add value to the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> What's really clever about this is that the stylesheet you download and use in your browser merely imports another stylesheet on stevenf's own site, so that additional CSS rules to hide comments can be added for the immediate benefit of everyone without them having to download updates.

<comment><USER6> I'd hardly call an @import statement "really clever".

<comment><USER2> Okay, not so much the use of the CSS @import rule as much as the mechanism used to deploy the rules. I haven't seen a lot of user installable stylesheets that "phone home." Seems like an under-utilized technique.

UPDATED: Yes, I understand @import is used frequently on the web. My point being A) You don't see a lot of _browser-installed_ stylesheets and B) the few that I've seen haven't made use of @import.

<comment><USER6> It's used all the time by many people. I use it to let affiliates skin their own sites on apps I host. Referencing a stylesheet on another server is hardly anything inventive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice comments:

        /* shutup.css
         * web - peanut gallery = bliss

</comment><comment><USER8> Does it work here?

<comment><USER9> Yes.</comment></comment>


Github is down again - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com/?#

<comment><USER2> seriously, are we going to get a HN submission every time github gets DDOS'd?

I think we all know there's a problem now, and if github is acting up, we'll check the status page. Not sure we need a submission every time...

</comment><comment><USER3> Web site gives 500.

<comment><USER4> Not a surprise since Github is down, right? :)</comment></comment>


Weebly Adds Slick iOS App To Its Quietly Huge Web Site Creation Business - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/02/weebly-adds-slick-ios-app-to-its-quietly-huge-web-site-creation-business/

<comment><USER2> We spent a little over 6 months developing this app and really focused our efforts on a clean UI, a great new user experience, and a complimentary set of features to the web app. Would love to hear your feedback! Easy download link: <http://www.weebly.com/weebly/mobile/landing.php>

Funny story: We filmed the demo video outside our offices on Pacific Ave. To get a smooth tracking shot down the sidewalk, Richard (our Head of Customer Service) was filming Trish (Office Manager) from an Aeron chair being pulled backwards by David (CEO). We shot another scene a few feet away and turned to get the Aeron for another take and it was stolen! Total film budget was $25 for the music and $500 for the chair :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> 3 Weebly posts on HN front page now? Where can I buy this kind of exposure?</comment>


BC Startups: The Government Is Not Your Friend - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@benjaminfox/bc-startups-the-government-is-not-your-friend-195ea432e40f <comment><USER2> Without divulging problematic details about the industry I work in, let me say that government incentives in the US are not much better. In the industry I work in, the government can step in and crown winners and losers with various grants and subsidies. These grants and subsidies are so lucrative in fact, that many businessmen in this space are really not entrepreneurs so much as expert lobbyists.

The net result for society is actually much worse than just free market competition, because the companies that just focus on product can actually end up worse off than the companies with third-rate products that focused on making friends with politicians and bureaucrats.

And yet the industry is addicted to these subsidies and contracts. Its the only way of doing business that they are familiar with. They can't imagine the same industry without the government's involvement. As a result, I think the American industry is about to have an existential crisis when competitors from abroad arrive on these shores with new products that are actually built for novel markets, and not for a bureaucratic selection committee.

<comment><USER3> > that many businessmen in this space are really not entrepreneurs so much as > expert lobbyists.

We call those "SBIR Farms". Get rewarded not on the products you create but by the paperwork you fill out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post puts into nice terms something I have been feeling for a while regarding my own startup. Why spend 40 hours filling out paperwork when I could spend 40 hours developing the product and actually making money? What good is a tax credit if I didn't pay any taxes because I didn't make any money?

<comment><USER5> SR&ED is a tax _refund_ \- cash in hand at the end of your taxable year.

<comment><USER6> "if you did not pay taxes". No income, no taxes, no refund, no cash in hand at the end of the year.

Yes if it works anything like the US system you could probably credit that would-be refund towards the following year, or the year after. But is that worth the time away from product when your company needs it the most?

<comment><USER7> It's actually a _refundable_ tax credit. You receive it even if you have no income or profit (and paid no taxes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All government-run company funding programs are flawed for one simple reason: the bureaucracy is unfit to judge early-stage companies.* The only protection the bureaucracy has is layers of rules and lengthy application processes. These barriers naturally increase over time as various bad actors game the system.

* Later-stage / mature companies can be evaluated on financial statements.

<comment><USER8> True, but in some cases the barriers that governments erect to enter the marketplace are barriers that I very much want. I want agribusiness to get their food to me in a clean state. I want car companies to demonstrate that they can produce a car that meets safety requirements before they can sell road-worthy cars. I want pharmaceutical companies to meet the basic requirement that their drugs do what they claim that they do. So not all barriers increasing are due to bad actors, but sometimes due to demands of society to have clean food, safe cars, and lead-free drugs.

<comment><USER5> Agreed - my comment is specifically re funding programs. Government employees are not equipped (to put it charitably) to evaluate the likelihood of success of startups. Their proxy metric is an onerous rules-based application process. Perversely, this excludes the startups they are trying to select for because those startups can raise capital elsewhere faster and on better terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The SR&ED complaint is not all the experience I've had. Received 3 successful grants in a row now, all prepared by a 3rd party consultancy. Payment is always fast. The first year we applied we were required to submit some extra documentation to support our claim. This amounted to submitting our git commit logs verbatim. They were happy with that.

You don't have to submit hour-by-hour breakdowns either. You submit what % of an engineers time was spent on SR&ED work and what the engineer's salary is. That's it.

I imagine it might have to do with which tax centre you're dealing with. Maybe the ones in BC are tougher than the ones here in Toronto/Ontario?

<comment><USER10> My experience, and several others I have talked to, is completely opposite of yours. Making the claim, even through a 3rd party consultant, was a pain in the ass and the results were very underwhelming. We needed to submit a lot more detail about the work done on the claim than that. Can I ask what years you did your claims?

<comment><USER9> 2012, 2013, 2014

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great article by Ben -- see many comments that SR&ED isn't "that bad". The first time, it might not be. As you scale and add more engineers, the risk of audit starts to outweigh any benefit.

<comment><USER12> As you scale and add engineers, you should be adding operations people and documenting your system anyway. You'll be able to better determine exactly how much time is development time, and have the benefit of not needing your most valuable people doing firefighting work.

<comment><USER11> It's not a strict calculation of "how much is development time". For things like IRAP, the time spent has to be cataloged against a specific R&D project you've received the grant for. For SR&ED, you will be laughed at for claiming 100% of an engineers time.

There's a chasm between SR&ED being "easy" with less than 5 people and when you have enough "operations people" to make this "easy again"; I would bet that most companies don't have the operations resources until they are well over 50 people. At 50+ people, you're past the point where these grants can have the most impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just forward the article to Bill Vander Zalm; he will descend upon the scene, _deus ex machina_ and magically fix things.

No, don't forward, on second thought. It works better if you just silently pray.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure I buy the SR&ED complaint. A friend of mine got some SRED credits refunded while he worked on a tool. It didn't seem to onerous from his perspective. Of course, that was a few years ago. Things may have gotten worse recently.

<comment><USER4> It's brutal, my company does SR&ED every year and it ties up all of the directors and our development lead for at least 3 months. The executives push it because all they see is the tax credits, but don't see the ridiculous amount of man hours that go into it.

<comment><USER15> Similar experience here. I've seen SR&ED bring all development to a halt for multiple months. 60 page documents per developer were not uncommon.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Framework or App for building API documentation site? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a small API-based SaaS and am starting to build out the developer-facing documentation. Can anyone recommend some tools to make this a little easier? Especially on the front-end/design side. <comment><USER2> [https://readthedocs.org/](https://readthedocs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://gohugo.io](https://gohugo.io)</comment>