Der Spiegel published around 60 stories from a fraudster - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-relotius-case-answers-to-the-most-important-questions-a-1244653.html <comment><USER4> The original German article is a bit too self-congratulatory for my taste. It's basically "we've got great, ethical journalists, a fantastic documentation department, and despite industry-leading defenses we were defrauded by him. Oh, did we mention how great we are?".

Sure, it's good you unveiled that. But in your article you're writing yourself how the first colleague to suspect something was stone-walled, had to fear for his job, got no support from superiors and investigated _on his own money_.

Maybe tone it down a bit.

<comment><USER5> Exactly my thoughts. Also, I definitely do not like the self-righteous and pompous shaming they are now doing. If you read the original German article(s!) on spiegel.de, Claas Relotius is painted as this criminal mastermind, "one of the journalistic idols of his generation" (as a German, I have never heard of him), because only a nefarious genius could've been able to do something like this the "Spiegel" and circumvent all these "great" safeguard mechanisms. They cite internal emails by him, which is just bad taste. They are even trying to introduce the term "a Relotius" as a synonym for journalistic fraud into the German language, as in: "this was a classic Relotius". It's pathetic.

I cannot help getting the impression that the Spiegel employees perceive themselves as some kind of high priests of democracy, and what Relotius did was not only high treason, but blasphemy. Sure, responsible journalism is important for any healthy society, but a certain amount of fiction to make a story more coherent and enjoyable is - at least this is my perception - <USER2> practice. Additionally, as others have mentioned, calling the "Spiegel" a defender of high-quality journalism would've been true 20 years ago, but today is quite a stretch.

Relotius may have massively overdone it, but come on - the guy visited a high security prison in Kurdistan to interview someone, so at least try to be fair.

<comment><USER6> I don't necessarily disagree that Der Spiegel could be more humble in its tone (I can't tell, not being able to read its indepth explanation in the original German). But I don't believe that Relotius deserves any sympathy or leeway if these allegations are true. Fabrication is a far bigger transgression than "massively overdone" it. What does visiting a high security prison in Kurdistan have to do with anything?

<comment><USER5> You are right, he does not deserve sympathy, but he deserves fair treatment. I really did not like the "he did everything wrong, we are gods" tone of the Spiegel articles on the issue today, so my post above was a bit opinionated.

I meant the prison visit as an example that not everything was fabricated by him. It wasn't like he sat down on a desk in Hamburg and started dreaming out interviews, at least that is my understanding (which may be wrong, of course). For example, in one case, he did Skype interviews, received a list of images made by the other party, and then, instead of describing these images, just wrote about them as a smartphone video which may not exist in reality (the article wasn't sure). In another case, he closed an interview with a description of the person praying, which was a fabrication (he admitted that) or described background music (which I thought was really strange) that was not playing in reality. In other cases, he invented background information on people he described, or minor characters in the story. I would be very surprised if you weren't able to find misconduct like this (on a smaller scale, of course) in any journalist's life work.

I find it respectable that it was the Spiegel who pointed out the issue, but I am convinced that ridiculing and publicly destroying Relotius like that was a mistake and will drive a lot of readers away.

<comment><USER6> I can only speak for myself, but as a relatively low-tier journalist, I can confidently say I've never fabricated anything in my reporting. I may have made errors (misspelling names/titles/etc), or ill-informed judgments (thinking someone was a better expert/source than they were). But making something up requires crossing a clear line beyond incompetence. And I would never trust the journalistic output of anyone who was found to have made up anything. Because the process of journalism is ultimately about complete trust -- no matter how many editors/fact-checkers you have, it all comes down to what the reporters themselves say they have witnessed/heard. It's already common enough to misobserve something, it's just as easy to lie about something that only you were "there" to see/her -- thus, the need to make fabrication (and plagiarism, which can be seen as a subset of fabrication) so taboo. And any reporter who justifies breaking this taboo has most certainly justified breaking rules in grayer situations -- e.g. I've never known of a fabricator to have fabricated just once. Once they get away with it the first time, what's the reason to ever stop?

It's not about the "damage" to the end user, i.e. the reader. It's about the complete betrayal of professional ethics. To use a tech analogy, consider a user whose credit card number has been compromised. To the user, the damage is the same whether the info was compromised by the sysadmin's failure to prevent a trivial SQL injection attack, or if the sysadmin decided to use their admin privileges to access and share the info of that user to fuck with them. The former sysadmin can learn their lesson and be redeemed -- the latter case is someone I would most likely never trust with admin privileges.

<comment><USER7> I don't really understand your logic. I get that there's (sometimes) a social contract that journalists should produce factual work. However, I don't think that facts organize themselves into stories, without a degree of fabrication. Whether that fabrication is just a matter of ordering, emphasis, spin - <USER3> even elements made from new cloth seems a bit arbitrary to me.

<comment><USER6> Maybe you're understanding "fabrication" for its meaning in manufacturing — e.g. fabricating a computer chip. In the journalism context, "fabrication" is used to mean, "making up facts/falsehoods".

I do agree that the way someone can spin a story can be just as misleading and dishonest and wholesale making up facts. The practical matter is that it's much easier to know that someone made up certain facts maliciously. Whereas whether something is maliciously spun vs. "telling it as it is" is harder to define.

But if a journalist is capable of malice in the former, they most certainly do the latter.

<comment><USER7> I'm broadly skeptical of the _possibility_ , even given a great deal of talent and integrity, of accurately and objectively reporting the events of a given day with the paucity of lead time that journalists work with. Historians take years to develop a balanced understanding of a given event. Journalists must do so in twenty minutes, after a morning coffee.

When you compound that with journalist's traditional role as the mouthpieces of various political and state organs, their own personal biases, career interests, and organized media management strategies - well, it's really a testament to the good faith that reporters bring to the table that the news cycle is even within spitting distance of the facts.

I don't think malice is the problem. I think the news, as an institution, was never intended to accurately report the events, is structurally incapable of doing so, and so, shouldn't be expected to. Hysterics over a reporter 'making stuff up' is more a defensive thing on the part of journalists, since the foundational conceit of the whole profession, and its defining contradiction, is between their obvious political role, and their equally obvious reliance on being perceived as fact-oriented.

I mean, this is Der Spiegel. It's hardly great journalism. Outsiders shouldn't take this kind of hand-wringing too seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good on Der Spiegel for bringing this into the light. This happens in journalism and the best thing we can do is encourage this kind of truthfulness on the part of Der Spiegel.

The last thing we want to do is punish Der Spiegel for coming out with this information as it would only disincentivize them and other newspapers from doing so in the future.

<comment> rv-de I think they just realized that this will surface sooner or later anyway and it will be very, very humiliating and embarrassing when this happens on a rivaling outlet like sueddeutsche.de.

This guy was able to do his thing for way too long - this says a lot about how "careful" journalism is produced there.

<comment><USER9> Why not just assume good faith for a change? It's also more plausible: both the guy and the publisher would have had an interest in keeping this secret, giving the prospect far better chances than you're suggesting.

Their coverage today was also about as extensive as, say, 9/11\. They could easily gotten ahead of it by releasing just one story, somewhere below the fold.

They also published at noon, their busiest time of the day (people checking the news during their break). On a Wednesday. Release it Friday or Saturday evening (i. e. "Take out the trash day") and far fewer people will see it.

<comment><USER10> It is literally their core job to gather data/stories, fact check and publish things. To get one or more wrong is not inexcusable, but its close.

They published at noon because its a big story that geta them clicks, and was crafted to put them in a better light than 'massive lack of basic oversight and fact checking' which sounds bad, because it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Only tangentially related but do we have any recent update on the situation with Bloomberg's "backdoored motherboard" story? Last I heard Apple was vehemently asking for them to retract the story but I haven't heard anything after that. Have there been new developments?

Seems crazy that such an important and far reaching news story ends up... basically just nowhere.

<comment><USER12> Most recent news I'm aware of (8 days ago): _" Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards"_ [0].

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654998)

<comment><USER13> I don't know why I should trust Super Micro investigating Super Micro.

I understand that Apple is bullish about there not being any evidence of their current hardware being compromised but it seems to me like it doesn't prove it never ever happened anywhere.

<comment><USER12> > I don't know why I should trust Super Micro investigating Super Micro.

You don't have to.

From the _very first_ sentence of that article: _"... an outside investigations firm had found no evidence of any malicious hardware in its current or older-model motherboards."_

<comment><USER14> Company hired by company finds finding that will make company hire it again in the future. Not news. Not saying the story is true ofc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The whole story in German: [http://m.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/fall- claas-relotius-...](http://m.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/fall-claas- relotius-spiegel-legt-betrug-im-eigenen-haus-offen-a-1244579.html)

I recommend DeepL for translation:

[https://www.deepl.com/](https://www.deepl.com/)

<comment><USER15> Deepl is really decent, I checked out the English-German translation. I used to send Google's attempts to my (born in Germany) mom for laughs.

<comment><USER13> Text auto-translation has come a long way, this is seriously impressive. It completely re-arranges sentence structure to make it read right in English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's too bad their main story on this isn't available in translation. It is, ironically, one of the most thrilling stories I've read in a while.

Here are some nuggets, although I cannot do the original justice:

He fabricated impossible-to-verify "facts", such as quotes or other, often tangential, factoids

Many times, some eerily apt song was somehow involved (playing on the radio, sung by passing child etc). They write it's impossible to miss if you read all his stories at once, but wasn't noticed in the normal, daily flow with sometimes months passing between stories

He was caught by a colleague sharing a byline on the US/Mexico border. He survived a first round of accusation by being very convincing, but the colleague used a trip to the US to collect incriminating information that was impossible to dismiss. There was apparently lots of scepticism of the accuser, which they openly admit.

The SPIEGEL has 60 fact-checkers, but they have not had the mandate to search for intentional, bad-faith acts such as this. The reasoning is(/was) that fact-checking involves a lot of cooperation requiring trust, and that relationship would be destroyed by a fundamentally adversarial model.

Every single fact that _can_ be checked, is. For one (weekly) issue, they counted 1,000 edits made in this process (with about half of them being stylistic, typos, etc.). Examples they give:

\- "<Whatevertown> is a sleepy city of 2,446, an hour outside of Memphis" => They check the distance on Google maps, the headcount in US government data. They don't check the sleepiness.

They would "not investigate the journalist, but only their story". An example for what they don't do is checking rental car bills and if they fit the places the journalist claims to have visited (see above for reasoning)

If you want to help me do some sleuthing, I have a question: In one article, he portraits an American woman and describes a scene where she supposedly "locked her front door, turning the key three times". From my time in the US, I seem to remember door locks having a mechanism somewhat different than they have in Germany, namely one where it would not be possible (or increase security) to make three full turns of the key. IIRC, a second turn would actually unlock the door?

<comment><USER17> Most US locks are Schlage or kwikset (personal experience, but backed by [1]) - both require only a single turn and are direct locking - turn to the left locks, to the right unlocks, if it's already in the position you're trying to set it will only do a quarter turn, and the key must be in the upright position to remove. I would be very surprised to encounter a European style lock, but it may be that some regions prefer them (I'm in the northwest, having previously lived in the east coast metroplex)

[1] [http://www.locksmithsecurityservices.com/2016/06/top-5-lock-...](http://www.locksmithsecurityservices.com/2016/06/top-5-lock- brands-united-states/)

<comment><USER18> My experience is the same - door deadbolts are as you describe.

Locking knobs are a bit different, in that some have a deadbolt function, but most just lock-up the knob itself (to prevent turning). Regardless, these aren't often used as the primary means of securing an exterior door - there's almost always a deadbolt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small

[https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel- journalist-m...](https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist- messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7)

<comment><USER19> I just finished reading that piece and it was really good. This (Spiegel) author really spun the most outrageous lies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Remember when the Pulitzer-winning Washington Post series "Jimmy's World" turned out to be a fabrication?

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

</comment><comment><USER21> Not the first time in the German-speaking journalism world, Tom Kummer was another famous example ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Kummer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Kummer)).

The key is that access to really great international stories is super hard for journalists from smaller markets. They benefit though from publishing their stuff in local language, so no one notices. I bet that there is far more of this going on, this guy just got too big due to his awards.

Audiences in local markets thirst for bigger than life stories, in local language. Simply translating NYT does not work.

Whenever you read articles that mimic a very literary, prosaic style I'd be very careful. All those young journos read David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson, plus all the great Pulitzer pieces. But, then they sit somewhere in boring Middle-Germany and either a) write boring local stuff or b) make up grandiose stories.

Note that this has a long tradition in Germany, starting with famous author Karl May, who wrote legendary adventure books about the Wild West and the Orient - while never leaving Germany ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May)). Those books were written in a style suggesting being travel diaries, making a lot of readers believe in him being a real protagonist.

<comment><USER22> German is hardly a tiny little local language. Yes it's not English or Chinese, but it's big enough (as is Der Spiegel) that you can't blame fraud on language barriers...

<comment><USER16> The mechanism OP posits, and which SPIEGEL actually mentions in their reporting, is that _subjects_ would tend to ignore these stories because they either did not notice them due to the language barrier, or did not much care about them due to their unfamiliarity of SPIEGEL and its low importance for the US market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fraudster was named CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der- spiege...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiegel- journalist-resigns-over-fake-interviews)

</comment><comment><USER6> Because Der Spiegel publishes primarily in German, it was hard to even find the articles that Relotius wrote, even though DS says the articles will remain as-is until the conclusion of their investigation.

I did find on Twitter someone from Fergus Fall, MN, blogging a response to a feature story by Relotius, a story purportedly about Trump's America. The list of complaints seems quite convincing:

[https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel- journalist-m...](https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist- messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7)

An example of an allegedly-fabricated fact:

> _Perhaps the oddest fiction in a list of many is Relotius' depiction of > Bremseth as someone who "would like to marry soon…but he has not yet been in > a serious relationship with a woman. He has also never been to the ocean."_

> _We can attest that Bremseth has indeed been to the ocean, by his account, > "many times" and is currently happily involved in a multi-year, > cohabitational relationship with a woman named Amanda. In fact, here's a > picture of the two of them in front of, all things, an ocean._

<comment><USER24> Wow, reading their debunking, what that journalist did is fucking disgusting. The Spiegel article mentions the whole office is in shock, I can imagine, it's probably like realizing your wonderful spouse has been having an affair for the last 10 years.

It makes me think of this lady's TED talk, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg), and how that journalist [wait why am I referring to him as a journalist, he's a fraudster], how that fraudster is just making up his own story and presenting it as the truth, painting a an imaginary world for his readers' minds which they would accept as reality.

Sadly that's what lazy journalism and fake newsmakers do as well, so much that some people are convinced of the existence of FEMA death squads and a child porn ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant...

<comment><USER6> I'm definitely someone of low ambition and likely low imagination, but I've never understood the desire as a journalist to fabricate when, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. For the sake of argument, let's assume that places like Fergus Falls, MN, are actually representative of the communities responsible for Trump's victory, and that Trump's victory, to the Der Spiegel readership, is a "bad thing".

The obvious "duh" narrative is that everyone in Fergus Fall is a multiple-gun- toting, sex-repressed hillbilly who wouldn't know the difference between or even the existence of Germany and Russia. Such a caricature is more "viral"/tweetable. But if you as a journalist wanted to raise the alarm about the rise of Trumpism, the far more disturbing story would be one depicting Fergus Falls as the "normal" and non-extreme place that it ostensibly is. Because that would imply the scenario of the "good German", where people are uncaring of the purported evil until it's too late.

That the Der Spiegel reporter went for fabricating schlock is, to me, indicative not just of his total lack of ethics, but also shallowness of thought, though maybe the two things are highly correlated.

<comment><USER24> Indeed, indeed. This reporter also spent time in a midwestern town, his report painted a better picture: [https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/nov/16/how- trump...](https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/nov/16/how-trump-took- middletown-muncie-election)

The caricature in everyone's mind is also dangerous, a lot of Trump "haters" probably just think the average Trump voter is a racist, gun-toting hillbilly. They don't want to further consider e.g. why people who voted for Obama would switch to vote for Trump.

And how many people's image of "Muslim refugee" is immediately "ISIS fighter"?

The same thing is happening with the rise of the populist right in Europe, these are people feeling economically insecure about the future (thanks to, among other things, Merkel's austerity policies as the de-facto leader of Europe), they're confused, the right is exploiting this fear to get them mad, and the left don't bother listening to them and dismiss them as racists, and think the answer is posters promoting tolerance...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds like Johan Hari in the UK: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari)

<comment><USER26> And Jayson Blair in the US

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair)

<comment><USER27> And Stephen Glass: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass)

A very good film _Shattered Glass_ was made about it.

<comment><USER6> Stephen Glass seems like the better comparison. Jayson Blair was definitely a massive and traumatic blow to the NYT, which called it a "low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper" [0]. But his fabrications, numerous as they were, were relatively picayune, and he was still a cub reporter career-wise. Der Spiegel's reporter, in contrast, seems to have had international accolades and was promoted to editor-status, and was trusted to write important/dramatic features concerning international affairs. Similar to Stephen Glass, which is why "Shattered Glass" was so entertaining.

Not that Blair's misdeeds didn't deserve the same punishment and gnashing of teeth by the NYT -- any fabrication deserves the career death penalty IMHO. But he was caught on his way to becoming someone of Glass's stature. What I remember most about the NYT's investigation/reflection into Blair was how he made up quotes/details regarding real-life people -- and how none of those people apparently complained (loudly enough) to the NYT. Apparently, they thought it was just par for course, which is a hugely damning and depressing indictment of journalism at large:

> _In an article on March 27 that carried a dateline from Palestine, W.Va., > Mr. Blair wrote that Private Lynch 's father, Gregory Lynch Sr., ''choked up > as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle > pastures.'' The porch overlooks no such thing._

> _He also wrote that Private Lynch 's family had a long history of military > service; it does not, family members said. He wrote that their home was on a > hilltop; it is in a valley. And he wrote that Ms. Lynch's brother was in the > West Virginia National Guard; he is in the Army._

> _The article astonished the Lynch family and friends, said Brandi Lynch, > Jessica 's sister. ''We were joking about the tobacco fields and the > cattle.'' Asked why no one in the family called to complain about the many > errors, she said, ''We just figured it was going to be a one-time thing.''_

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the- record-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-times- reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-of-deception.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And it came out by a US border militia report. I count the hours till it will be picked up by the US political system. DER SPIEGEL is not exactly a conservative magazine.

<comment><USER29> Pretty much nothing in Germany is conservative by US standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> The AfD is our "Trump party."

<comment><USER29> They are. But even they wouldn't ban abortion, charge for universities or massively cut down on social welfare or allow anyone to buy assault rifles, right?

<comment><USER30> Actually they argued e.g. for removing the unemployment insureance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Good on them for being transparent about this. They could have handled that in a much more secretive way.

</comment><comment><USER32> Most of the articles about it are in German, but the Spiegel published an article answering the most important questions in English as well:

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-relotius-case- answer...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/the-relotius-case-answers-to- the-most-important-questions-a-1244653.html)

<comment><USER33> That's TFA.

<comment><USER34> What is 'TFA'?

<comment><USER35> TFA = The F*cking Article

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


YCombinator Fellowship List - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
My name is Juan Carlos CEO of piggate.com, I have thought that we can do a list with the name, description, url and linkedin of some co-founders.
Name: Piggate Description: Mobile Payments for machine url: piggate.com Linkedin: https://es.linkedin.com/in/juancarlosrodriguezrivas <comment><USER2> I made a list of founder videos for the fellowship here, check it out: [http://www.topchart.io/lists/ycombinator- fellowship-2015-fou...](http://www.topchart.io/lists/ycombinator- fellowship-2015-founder-videos)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope you have the best of luck, Jaun Carlos.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good luck!</comment>


Ask HN: As startup founder, how do you know what people want? - <AUTHOR>

i have following this awesome lecture http://startupclass.samaltman.com
I think that every success startup like airbnb, stripe and others is start from "make something people want"(of course, is known widely as ycombinator.com tagline). So i think, the most important step is to know what people want.
Please give me advice,thanks! <comment><USER2> Talk to your users! Before we started building our product, we spoke to hundreds of people in our target audience. We asked them their needs, their problems, and most importantly - what they wanted. We could zero in our solution to their problem by uncovering what they wanted most. So go talk to everyone you can about your idea and see what the audience you want to serve thinks about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> try to get 10 customers and then email them and ask what they like/dislike about ur startup

</comment><comment><USER4> You ask them.</comment>


Evolve yourself or evolve together 66 days at a time with Selfism - <AUTHOR> http://groapp.com/selfism/ <comment><USER2> Really cool, but it's iOS only.</comment>


Unicode in Python, Completely Demystified [Presentation] - <AUTHOR> http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/

<comment><USER2> The presentation is from PyCon 2008. Some of the statements from there are no longer true.

For example, Python 3.3, as described in PEP 393, has a flexible string encoding, and will switch between 1, 2, and 4 byte internal representations.

Things have changed enough that I would not point people to that presentation. I do not know of a newer one, but I haven't looked either.</comment>


Ask HN: Idea: Whoever gets to Mars first gets the planet - <AUTHOR> Since Mars is really the first unclaimed stake we've had available to our planet in ages, what is preventing the human race from simply agreeing that whomever gets there first with a manned mission gets claim of the planet? <comment><USER2> See Locke: [https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2017/10/22/john- lock...](https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2017/10/22/john-locke-on-how- things-that-are-no-ones-property-become-someones-property)

</comment><comment><USER3> I mean, that sounds likely to cause violence earlier than would be necessary?

Why would nations respect such a claim? And if they did not respect it, and they sent people, and those people claimed a part, how would the dispute be resolved?

Mars is pretty big. Just, claim the part you are using?

</comment><comment><USER4> that's not how it works. whoever gets there last keeps it. like all things, it's about power, if you can't protect it, it will forcefully be taken by violence or "legal" means.</comment>


Ask HN:Which open source tool is best for building a biometric app? - <AUTHOR>

Which open source tool is best for building a biometric app? <comment><USER2> I've noticed that your question has popped up several times, with no answers. I think this is because no one can answer this question without more information. Also, you might want to find a forum or blog with more focus on biometrics to ask your question. You could probably get more feedback there.</comment>


The 2048 guys stole my iPhone game - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattalicious/the-2048-guys-stole-my-iphone-game-5ba541283c4d?source=email-8b414752a443-1430351717099-daily_digest&sectionName=recommended

<comment><USER2> dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9454454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9454454)</comment>


Two Americas: The wage gap between the states has stopped closing - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/poverty-geography-economics-america-wage-gap-mobility-3bac216a-4aa6-41fe-b9e2-eca20623c008.html <comment><USER2> I agree that most nowadays don't have the resources to move and are stuck in their hometowns with limited income</comment>


BCG Gamma – Senior Software Engineer – Paris or London – Full-Time – Onsite - <AUTHOR> You are responsible for advanced software solutions; You develop innovative problem solving solutions will support mission critical decision analytics for our clientsl; You develop feature enhancements to our platform, develop industry-leading analytics software solutions and methodologies and provide talks and papers in industry leading conferences on behalf of BCG Gamma.
Tech: GO, C++, Java, Scala, JavaScript, TypeScript DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, unix-based command line Full stack development: GraphQL, React Data: SQL, Spark, Hadoop Data Science and machine learning (Pandas, Scikit learn) Deep learning (Tensorflow, Keras etc.) Cloud: AWS/Azure/Google
To apply: https://talent.bcg.com/apply/FolderDetail/CEMA-WESA-Gamma-X-Senior-Software-Engineer/10020852 <comment><USER2> Cool to see this posted. I'm a Principal working at BCG in New York. I've been with BCG Gamma for a year and I've loved it. Smart, hardworking, and humble people doing some really interesting work.</comment>


Be Obsessed With Something - <AUTHOR> http://www.collegefeed.com/blog/be-obsessed-with-something/

<comment><USER2> The opening statement, "The question on everyone's mind, whether graduating or not" is something that I think daily. I can choose to drop my minor and graduate a semester earlier...or keep it. Finding the "value" in the minor is tough (especially when that includes another semester's of tuition and fees).

I do agree that being obsessed with something is good...as long as it is something that can get you somewhere. I know too many people obsessed with video games (not even in a professional sense).

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." ― Confucius

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome insight. I don't think you can go randomly look for an obsession but if you are passionate about something- pursue it, be obsessed with it!

<comment><USER2> I think the hardest thing is focussing to realizing what to be obsessed about. Managing work + school + other commitments is hard to find some "me" time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is so true that college is where you find yourself, and when you can identify yourself with a desirable purpose, you will succeed!</comment>


Introducing Linode Managed - <AUTHOR> https://blog.linode.com/2013/05/29/introducing-linode-managed/ <comment><USER2> I would like to know what steps they have taken to improve their security. They have had serious security breaches in the last couple of months, and I don't trust them any more.

<comment><USER3> I think that's a reasonable question, but a bit tangential to the offering, no?

<comment><USER2> How can I trust them to manage my server correctly if their security has been less than stellar? I am trusting them with my data. Something they have failed to keep secure in the past. It is the question they will not answer, because Linode is now akin to an used car dealership.

<comment><USER3> I get that some people don't trust Linode with their data and I think that's fair. But it doesn't really have much to do with managed vs unmanaged. Surely if you don't trust them with a managed server you should also not trust them with an unmanaged one.

<comment><USER4> And vice-versa, which is what people are asking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's nice that AWS and GCE also have premium support offerings now. Seems like a good source of revenue as well as cost savings.

I'm pretty sure I'd never trust Linode even as just a bare VPS provider, let alone giving them more access to my machines to provide this support, though, given their long and horrible track record.

<comment><USER6> In the last Linode thread I asked the community for secure, comparable alternatives. AWS seemed to be the only option.

Is that still the case?

<comment><USER7> <http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/> (I haven't used them, but friends say they're good)

<comment><USER8> That depends if they can now live-migrate cloud servers from one physical host to another. We got burned because to do maintenance on the host they had to take down all 'cloud' servers, turn the server off, do it and switch it back on - and this was planned maintenance, not emergency.

This was before OpenStack, but trying to get information out of Rackspace about what's changed is like trying to get a Republican to vote Democrat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been on Linode for a few months, after years on AWS, and I'm not nearly convinced to trust them with these "Managed Services".

Why? Too much "scheduled downtime" (few hours/month) vs. AWS's 99.999% uptime.

Why else? Well, it's a perverse incentive. If they have less reliable systems, the pain goes up, to where more people will sign up for "Linode Managed". We should all get good uptime, not have to pay extra.

Most importantly, their offering is not an SLA. I don't see anywhere in the "Linode Managed" where they are guaranteeing uptime %'s, or penalties for lower performance. And, how can they realistically handle even 50% of the 3AM panic problems, if some of those will be my website's inability to talk to 3rd party sites (which neither of us have control over).

 __If they really can fix 90% of the 3AM problems, then they are the root cause of most of those in the first place. There's not many good reasons why Linux will break at 3AM often if you've setup your stack correctly. __

<comment><USER10> I've literally never had my servers go down on Linode's account, having run 'em for years now. Maybe the management panel goes down from time to time, but that's a totally different number than AWS's 99.999%—is that what you were referring to? Or has Linode actually killed your servers?

<comment><USER11> Linode hasn't killed my servers, but just informed me that they'll be doing maintenance on my production box that will likely be a two-hour window, but could take up to 8 (!)

Not very excited about Linode these days.

<comment><USER3> You can migrate it to another physical server at any time in advance of the maintenance window.

<comment><USER12> This is true, Linode's support is top notch responsive. I've been with them for several years, no issues, great uptime, they keep bumping up what they offer without touching the price. There's no per hour gotchas. What they say they offer, they deliver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is no industry standard for what "managed" means. On their page they describe some of the services as co-managed. I suspect in reality "managed" consist of a comprehensive monitoring solution, along with "best effort" support. They are either going to to provide a support level well bellow customers expectations (not making ANY changes unless they have specific written consent) or they are going to take risks on customers servers which will blow up in their face from time to time.

Apart from the hacking indecent they have a really good brand with a reputation for doing the right thing. They provide infrastructure as a service, the service is clearly defined and they deliver. Unless they are really sharp then a managed service is not going to be clean, It's full of grey areas and trade off's about whether the team gave correct advice or did the right thing. They should have spun this off to a separate company.

<comment><USER14> Yeah. 'managed' hosting is /way/ harder to provide (at least while maintaining a reasonable reputation) than unmanaged hosting, primarily because:

>There is no industry standard for what "managed" means.

Managing expectations here? really hard. Really, really hard. I mean, for $100/month, the provider is probably not going to be involved with the planning and day to day operation; this means you end up with setups where the customer builds a site, gets it working, starts depending on it, and then something horrible happens, and at that point, linode sysadmins will have to step in and fix it. I mean, yeah, a good sysadmin can usually pull it off, but it's "heroic" work, in my mind... You have to sit there and figure out all the weird hacks the last amateur the customer hired used to get the system working. if you ask me to do something like that, I'm going to set an expectation of failure. But that's the problem with managed services, the customer expectation is always success.

This will not be fun for the sysadmin involved. It's much harder to fix a system you are unfamiliar with than a system you are familiar with, and the customer is going to have expectations that the success rate will be as if the sysadmin was familiar with the system. (I mean, hell, I go way out of my way to tell people I sell completely unmanaged stuff, and I still get customers blaming me when their out of date php whatever gets compromised.)

The situations where I would be willing to offer a competing product would be if I could charge (and limit the customers per sysadmin) such that a member of my staff could have weekly or monthly meetings with the customer, going over their architecture and what change have happened, and what problems might happen. (I'm guessing this is going to be more in the $500-$1500/month range, so it's not really competing.)

Alternately, I would be willing to provide a manged service where the customer doesn't have root, except through my tools. Idea being that then all the systems I manage would be substantially similar. I could do this for dramatically less money, had I the time to dedicate to setting it up, and enough customers to make building the tools worth it.

I wish Linode much luck. As a competitor to their unmanaged product, I know I will be referring my customers who need more handholding to this service. There is a whole lot of need in the industry for managed services; VPSs are so cheap these days that people who have no ability or interest in systems administration want to buy them, and they need a lot of help.

My expectation? the customer will generally get a good deal for $100/month. But sometimes? it won't be enough, and that customer will go away very angry and (publicly) disappointed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reading about Linode Managed on their website [1] appears to be nothing more than (1) OS backups, and (2) a monitoring agent installed on the OS to report the server is up and running.

Am I missing something here?

[1] <https://www.linode.com/managed/>

<comment><USER16> The article also mentions proactive response to issues they discover on your behalf. FTA: "If a check fails, our experts will take immediate steps to get your systems back online as quickly as possible"

There are a number of other services listed on that page, including "Longview Pro - the professional version of our system-level statistics collection and graphing service (currently in beta)."

I got all that from reading the page you linked.

<comment><USER15> I read that as well. But having someone else log into my server to just restart it doesn't seem all that appealing to me for $100/mo.

<comment><USER3> Then you are perhaps not the target customer. Rackspace Cloud offers very nearly the same service at a similar price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really don't see where all of the Linode hate comes from. That last hack was a pretty messy situation the way that I read it, but they seemed to do what was best for their customers when the shtf.

I've also had very few network outages or performance issues in Linode's Dallas datacenter, multiple uptimes of > 1 year on instances and I've only had one unscheduled reboot/failure in almost 7 years of being a customer.

<comment><USER18> The hate comes from multiple security breaches with very little communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From here [1] it seems that if sign up for Linode Managed, all your linodes are enrolled and you'll have to pay 100/month for each one i.e., there's no way to pay only for specific linodes.

[1] [https://blog.linode.com/2013/05/29/introducing-linode- manage...](https://blog.linode.com/2013/05/29/introducing-linode- managed/comment-page-1/#comment-444627)

</comment><comment><USER20> While from the blogpost it isn't 100% clear to me how far their management goes (do they restart apache if needed? Do they do security updates?), I think this fills a huge need!

Fully managed servers are really expensive and often inflexible, while with VPS you are all on your own, which not every developer wants (or feels confident in). I was just discussing a week ago how there is a big market in doing this management.

<comment><USER21> As with all things in this market, it really depends on the execution.

If the remote hands are awesome, this is well worth $100 per node. If they are anything but awesome, this wouldn't be worth it for any amount of money.

<comment><USER22> While my occasional experiences with their support team have been fantastic, this is being offered by the same people who had a CF vuln exploited in their management software and, it seems, would not have bothered to share any details with their customers if the perpetrators hadn't gotten on IRC to brag.

Their documentation in the Linode Library is also really great -- as a starting point. Assuming that they're using the same guides in recommending server configuration, there are some things that could be done better by a skilled admin. e.g., their LAMP server guide for Debian 6 doesn't include suexec or any variation of FastCGI, two must-haves for a public-facing web server IMO.

<comment><USER23> Worth noting it was a coldfusion 0day manufactured for that attack, and the story from the hackers (HTP) is that Linode was forced to announce it by the FBI despite being blackmailed with their customer credit card database.

Of course, they could have handled security internally better but I suspect other VPS providers appear more secure only because nobody has gone out of their way to target them.

<comment><USER22> Right; according to HTP (<http://straylig.ht/zines/HTP5/0x02_Linode.txt>), it sounds like Linode were willing to delay notifying their customers of a serious incident in exchange for a promise from the attackers that the data would be destroyed -- the supposedly totally secure data, according to a later blog post from Linode.

The takeaway is that now, while I don't know if I can trust other VPS providers or not, I _know_ I can't trust Linode. (Hell, to some extent, I trust HTP more than Linode now -- I haven't seen a dump of the Linode data on pastebin or a .ru forum yet.)

How a business handles disclosure of a compromise is as important to me as the fact that they were compromised. Notably, this is the second time they screwed up disclosure, after being raked over the coals for it the first time. I was willing to let the first one slide since Linode is so awesome in every other regard, and hope that they would handle the next incident more gracefully. Unfortunately, they didn't.

<comment><USER23> I agree, I just don't expect much from VPS hosts - although their handling of this _was_ remarkably poor.

FWIW I'll be finding a new host, I just like to play devils advocate to balance discussions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> $100 per month isn't bad for the inevitable crisis when you really will need a good sysadmin's help.

For me, the biggest reason for paying for managed services like Heroku etc. is avoiding that risk. This sort of thing would make me far happier to ship some of the load back onto Linode. Can't fault their hardware. :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting. I think this could be particularly popular if Linode introduces some fully supported stacks for common configs. Although at that point they would really just become a managed provider, but perhaps that is the natural progression of at least part of the hosting business.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's something about the picture that's rather unsettling (apart from the number of Macs ;).</comment>


Facebook bows to anti-science activists, shuts down 'We Love GMOs and Vaccines' - <AUTHOR> https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/08/04/facebook-bows-anti-science-activists-shuts-love-gmos-vaccines/ <comment><USER2> "Science" tries to present itself as unified, but everyone has a unique perspective. It would be nice if the people at the top of the science world would acknowledge that weeds have become resistant to roundup, that they will rapidly evolve to become resistant to the new pesticide that Monsanto has gmo'd soybeans to be resistant to, and that beta carotene is not retinol.

They should also try to figure out how to fix psychiatry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, but do you think Facebook should delete a opinion group "We Love GMO" when they're not being obscene, harassing anyone, etc? Obviously, it's their right to, but _should_ they? That's the question here.

Why are you afraid of rational discussion?

<comment><USER2> > Why are you afraid of rational discussion?

There are no rational discussions, there are only echo chambers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)</comment></comment></comment>


EditREPL - Open Vim from within the Python REPL - <AUTHOR> http://philipbjorge.github.com/EditREPL/

<comment><USER2> IPython has this feature baked in the magic %ed command [1].

[1]: <http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/config/editors.html>

<comment><USER3> Yes, and to edit the last thing you typed, you can run %ed _. When you exit %ed it runs the code and then returns the code as a string.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IPython can also be run as a server (ipython kernel[1]) and then connected to via a vim plugin called vim-ipython [2]. This means you can do the other direction: evaluate a vim buffer in a running IPython session, and then connect to that IPython session to actually use the code you wrote in vim.

See:

[1] [http://wiki.ipython.org/Cookbook/Connecting_to_a_remote_kern...](http://wiki.ipython.org/Cookbook/Connecting_to_a_remote_kernel_via_ssh)

[2] <https://github.com/ivanov/vim-ipython>

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice. Reminds me of a feature I have in Glass Table[0]:

Define a procedure, macro, or record type called foo:

        (define (foo x) ...)

Now say:

        ,(edit foo)

Your definition appears in the editor of your choice. (Try running GT within Emacs and setting your EDITOR to "emacsclient".) Make changes; provided no errors occurred (like missing parens) the changes take effect when you save and quit.

It's a nice little workflow; if you squint, it almost feels like a CADR...

[0] <https://github.com/bitwize/glasstable>

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool.

Haven't looked at the code yet, but I wrote:

[https://github.com/Julian/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/pytho...](https://github.com/Julian/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/python/rc.py#L53)

which does something similar (and is interpreter agnostic as it looks like this is).

<comment><AUTHOR> Mine's not interpreter agnostic because I had to mess with the stack frames to insert variables into the global context.

But yours is able to do that because your importing a top-level edit function while I was pretty set on dynamically creating a vim() method and not having to import a function (just a module).

I love how yours lists the globals though! I might just have to bite that feature :).

<comment><USER6> Oh, yeah, well, importing stuff on interpreter startup is pretty much exactly what $PYTHONSTARTUP is for :).

<comment><AUTHOR> And this is why I post code online - to find out the right way to do things. PYTHONSTARTUP is exactly 100% what I was looking for, but didn't know existed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For Ruby IRB, there is interactive editor: <http://vimcasts.org/episodes/running-vim-within-irb/>

</comment><comment><USER8> I could be mistaken, but isn't this a GNU Readline feature?

Neat regardless.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is different because I'm full on opening an instance of vim. (I didn't know about GNU Readline though and it looks awesome - I'll definitely try and work it into a project at some point).

<comment><USER9> I'm only using GNU readline for my bash prompt, but if I press v it spawns a full-on $EDITOR instance to edit the commandline.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome (I still have a lot to learn about bash) and effectively what my module does.

Just so others know, you have to put bash in vi mode and press Esc before v (otherwise it's ctrl+x ctrl+e).

set -o vi

<comment><USER8> Aye, looks like I was wrong. This is a feature that bash has, not Readline. (in bash 4.2: bashline.c:858)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> oh my god this is awesome</comment>


Ask HN: unusually difficult Google first phone screen question - <AUTHOR>

I had my first phone screen today with Google.  I haven't signed an NDA, nor was I asked to keep this quiet.  The question was:
Given a permutation [1..n] inserted into a BST, write a function to calculate how many other permutations of the input produce the same BST.
I have been studying up for a few months: Cracking the Coding Interview, Elements of Programming Interviews... is it just me, or is this a very difficult "first phone screen" question?  I feel like my shot at Google was just obliterated.  After an additional 1 hr later after the ph screen I was able to come up with a solution... <comment><USER2> The phrasing of the question is imprecise, but I'm assuming the idea is that "inserting a permutation into a BST" means the nodes are inserted in order and the tree is never rebalanced.

It's an interesting question. And it's certainly much more difficult than any phone screen questions I've been asked by other companies, and also harder than my phone screen question at Google, but not as hard as some questions I had on-site there (I didn't get an offer).

Suggestions: eventually you'll want to get to some sort of recursive formula, but start with small, concrete examples and reach the answer simply by counting.

For instance, get the permutation [1, 2, 3] (or even just [1,2] then [2,1]), draw the tree and think about how many other permutations would generate that same tree. The point is to confirm with interviewer that you got the question right. Then you consider [2, 1, 3] and the other permutations. At this point you'll probably get a hint of one case when you can swap 2 numbers and one case when you cannot. Then you test it with some 4-node trees. Hopefully at some point you can come up with an informal, English-language formula on how to calculate the answer for a tree if you know the answer for the 2 subtrees. If necessary, refine it, but I don't think the interviewer would necessarily expect you to give a closed formula answer.

If it makes you feel better, I've recently had a phone interview with a certain large market data company and all they asked was HR bullshit like "what does make motivate /demotivate you?". Apparently I didn't give the expected answers, and I didn't pass.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, inserted as-is into BST without rebalance. Good to know it was an unusually tough ph screen question. But also good to know that there are harder on-site questions! Man!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What position you applied for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a general software position.</comment></comment>


Windows 10 tops Windows 7 as most popular OS - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/02/windows-10-tops-windows-7-as-most-popular-os/ <comment><USER2> It seems that the Linux desktop will never be a close 2nd to Microsoft Windows in my lifetime.

<comment><USER3> You're probably more likely to see the desktop become totally irrelevant.</comment></comment>


Dogs trained to detect prostate cancer with more than 90% accuracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/11/dogs-trained-detect-prostate-cancer-accuracy <comment><USER2> Take that ML!</comment>


The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/arts/design/15cott.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I was at a gallery with $10k+ paintings and sculptures. I asked the owner in a tactful way - why is the painting/sculpture worth $25,000 - who buys these? Her answer was the people who buy these pieces of art are buying them as investments (e.g. they would like them to appreciate in value, like fine wine). Kind of like discovering a cool band before they're hot. It's not totally gambling/investment and it's not solely personal appreciation of the artist's work.

<comment><USER3> Another reason is that it is a very convenient way to avoid taxes and cheaply transfer some of your wealth to your offspring. Art appreciation is hard to quanitify hence hard to tax.</comment></comment>


New Startup idea, looking for feedback and partners - <AUTHOR>

Hi! We're playing with an idea of localising social media posts and have built a prototype site at www.tilecase.com. We're looking for feedback, help with marketing and maybe funding. What does everyone think? Email me on firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> How are you going to drive a million people to telecase.com to discover these businesses? How are you going to drive 10 million?

This seems like it might be a feature - eg: on Facebook, where local businesses get featured based on the location of the user. In fact, I'm guessing it's already a feature of facebooks advertising platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Profile owners on TileCase can share their profiles into existing social media networks but increasing traffic is something we are working on and looking for idea. What did you think of the overall concept? Aggregating a users social media and making it available in a geographic area.</comment></comment>


Can Anyone Really Create Jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/magazine/job-creation-campaign-promises.html?_r=1&hp <comment><USER2> Interesting that none of these articles ever address the root causes of structural unemployment. Globalization combined with rapidly advancing technology are allowing an ever shrinking pool of extremely talented people to satisfy the world's demand for products. This is a reality that can no longer be ignored. It is not just the majority of Americans that are unemployable, but the majority of the world's population.

Technology's leveraging power has become so severe that a company like Apple can reasonably expect to supply the entire world market with smart phones. Another example is SpaceX, which is pioneering the future of space flight with a team of only 1300 employees.

Globalization depresses wages for traditional labor, while technology facilitates an extreme leverage for talent. These two forces are enough to obviate the vast majority of the domestic work force. As long as this reality is ignored, the discussion of potential solutions is futile.

Further reading: <http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/>

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. And I think the reason people don't talk directly about the issue enough, is because we really don't know what to do about it.

There are many jobs that are now obsolete, or will be due to technological progress. Not only are many 'labor' jobs being rendered obsolete, but so are many 'mundane' white collar jobs.

Toll-booth operators are obsolete (or will be)

Bookkeepers are obsolete (or will be)

Many back-office support-services can be automated or re-located

All cashiers could potentially be made obsolete

Many retail sales could be made obsolete (as people shop online)

Where do all these people go? During the last technological revolution, there was a relatively smooth transition from farming to manufacturing. But I honestly don't see how large swathes of the population that don't have specialized skills will fit in in the new economy.

Most of the people reading this comment will do just fine. But we face the really tough questions when dealing with the increasingly large number of people who don't have skills that are in the demand. And even if they all got the skills, employers simply wouldn't need all of them as labor becomes increasingly leveraged.

A couple professors fro MIT just wrote an e-book called 'Race Against the Machine' discussing this phenomena.

[http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating- eboo...](http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating- ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320497913&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER4> Most of the manufacturing jobs are already gone -- even as manufacturing production rises -- and yet just a few years ago in the developed world nearly everyone who wanted to work could find a job.

In fact, developed nations in Europe and the Americas are importing vast numbers of low wage workers to do low value per hour jobs where humans are still better than machines. It continues in the face of a prolonged severe recession.

So the emerging problem of no available work to do does not seem to be materializing. In fact, it's hard to imagine. Does every public park and private garden in your city look as clean, inviting, and pretty as it could possibly be? Is every street paved smooth without cracks and potholes? Does a bumper crop of fruit never go bad for lack of harvesters? Is every home clean and freshly scrubbed all the time and is a freshly cooked meal always waiting? Does every corner have a crossing guard during school hours?

There's a lot of intellectually undemanding work to be done in a utopia if we want to pay for it.

Right now, we import foreign workers to do cheap labor but we could take unemployed citizens and subsidize their wages to have our own do those jobs instead. The unemployed citizens are living on private or public welfare and social insurance today but they could be working. We could kick in public money to make it possible to pay a legal wage with benefits for the jobs undocumented workers do and the employers would prefer to stay legal by hiring citizens. We could even document the undocumented and add enough subsidies to employ them too.

Economic change driving social change is disruptive. But let's remember that technological productivity is a positive change that makes us wealthier.

Unemployment that follows from energy shortages or global climate change, if those ever get serious, would be a much bigger worry.

<comment><USER5> _Most of the manufacturing jobs are already gone -- even as manufacturing production rises -_

That seems to be the trend, long-term. But you can't say 'most', not yet.

There are still many manufacturing jobs available in the US. My employer has an open reqs out for our six manufacturing sites in the States. We're not the only ones in our industry.

Why does this myth persist? It might be that these jobs are no longer in traditional manufacturing areas. A decaded ago we had two sites in traditional blue-collar areas: one in Mass, one in Washington. We closed them down and relocated the work to existing sites in Idaho and Wisconsin, expanded there.

Because the labor and other costs in the old sites were higher than the drive- past states.

So ... a guy in Mass sees a shuttered factory. A guy in Wisconsin sees new construction. Perhaps the guy in Mass needs to move to where the jobs are. We're hiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think one bizarreness needs to be pointed out, lest it seems too strange for some people who are used to a slightly more rational universe — all this talk of "job creation" is a lunatic side-effect of our economic system. One might think that millions of homeless and unemployed people represent a huge untapped demand for goods and services; they're humans like any other. But of course, our system doesn't work that way.

The notion of systematic unemployment is bizarre. (No matter what justifications were invented to paper over its absurdity with.) It represents idle hands which have nothing to do. The US could have enormous productive output. The infrastructure and know-how is there; it's not like someone dropped bombs all over the place and reduced it to a 3rd world nation. But as a society, we choose not to use these resources, nor do we allocate much of our output to the "lower classes" of people.

<comment><USER7> _The notion of systematic unemployment is bizarre. (No matter what justifications were invented to paper over its absurdity with.) It represents idle hands which have nothing to do...But as a society, we choose not to use these resources..._

"As a society", we choose nothing. If you believe their output is useful, why don't you hire some of them?

Structural theories of unemployment are merely theories which claim that you have no idea what job they can profitably perform, and they have no idea what jobs to bother applying to. Or, alternately, there are barriers preventing them from taking such a match (e.g., some people may consider unemployment benefits + leisure superior to a marginally higher paying job).

<comment> bjelkeman-again As swombat says [a] "straightforward way that politicians can create jobs: by spending money on big infrastructure projects."

That is indeed a way that the society you live in choose to spend money to create jobs. Other ways of spending money to create jobs are, for example to increase the size of the military, which may or may not be as useful for a nations economy as creating infrastructure, depending on the state of your infrastructure and the size of your military.

<comment><USER7> Big infrastructure project don't work in this day and age. The recession would be long over before the environmental impact reports are even submitted, and you'd need to repeal Davis-Bacon to make things affordable.

But some variant of the New Deal approach would be possible. For instance, instead of paying people not to work for 99 weeks (as we currently do), we could pay people wages equal to unemployment benefits for jobs that would otherwise be done by a unionized government employee. For instance, unemployed skilled workers could become DMV clerks and unemployed unskilled workers could become DMV janitors.

Such an approach would allow us to both create jobs and cut spending. Strangely, we don't go down that route. It's almost as if our elected officials and unelected bureaucrats aren't looking out for our best interests.

<comment><USER8> what would the ex unionized government employees do then?

<comment><USER9> Get jobs that actually help the economy. The government can't add jobs to help the economy by definition, because they don't work in the realm of profit/loss. This is called the economic calculation problem. We've ignored this problem, and that's why we keep creating jobs from stimulus while losing twice as many as created.

<comment><USER10> Huh? Aren't government employees paid in the same currency as employees in the private sector? Don't those employees spend that currency largely in the private sector? If those people wouldn't otherwise be employed, how are their jobs not "helping the economy"?

<comment><USER11> You are propounding the Broken Window Fallacy. To discover the flaw in your reasoning see:

<http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html>

<comment><USER10> It looks to me like this is only a fallacy on the assumption that government employees are like glaziers fixing broken windows: absorbing value that, but for a loss, could otherwise be put to another use. It is that assumption that I meant to question, though I see I did not express the point adequately.

<comment><USER7> If you wish to question such an assumption, you need to show that government employees _produce_ something of value, not that they _consume_ something of value.

<comment><USER12> I think the people at the DMV produce something of value. They limit who's allowed to drive making the roads safer. That is extraordinarily valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found it humorous that the writer announces his bias by identifying other biases and then doing the same thing himself.

 _The current economic downturn has been called a housing crisis, a financial crisis and a debt crisis, but the simplifying logic of the political season has settled on what is really more a result than a cause. We are now, according to nearly everyone running for office, in a jobs crisis._

Jobs are like money -- they are the end of the process. They are the socres on the scoreboard, but you don't play the game by watching the score. These are metrics of results, not causes. I don't open a business with a chair and a big sign that says "give me money," even though money might be the way I judge success. Likewise, and for exactly the same reasons, you don't sit around trying to "create jobs" Jobs are the result of somebody creating value, they are not a goal in themselves.

I hate to say it, but this was a really bad article. I had a premonition of this when I looked at the title "Can Anyone Really Create Jobs?" It's yet another in a long line of political commentary that takes whatever the current problem is and announces that it is insolvable. This reached ludicrous levels in 2008, with lots of articles asking "Is this the end of capitalism?" I don't know how many of these you have to consume before you finally figure out that no, whatever is happening right now, it's not the end of something that's been going on for thousands of years.

Americans need to start getting honest about their economic situation, no matter what their politics. If you drop hundreds of billions of dollars paying for government workers that the government cannot afford, you are not simulating anything. Money is just continuing to be spent in the same patterns as before. Likewise, if you cut taxes for the rich, and they continue to spend their money in the same way, you are also not doing anything except to run up the debt. If you are living a house you cannot afford, no matter how much we help you, you are probably still stuck in a house you cannot afford, and the rest of us are much poorer. Simply because an idea sounds good to your political party doesn't mean that it accomplishes anything but buying votes. These facts sound cruel, and I apologize, but some of this commentary is beginning to sound like dispatches from somebody's fantasy land. People are smarter than that.

<comment><USER14> Did you read the second page? Because, the author essentially says a similar thing. In fact, the last paragraph is pretty blunt. (but, I can't get to the text anymore, to verify)

<comment><USER15> Here's the last paragraph for you:

"When this crisis ends, we'll also be faced with other deep problems. Our tax code is a complex mess; we need a more effective education system; it's hard to picture a healthy United States in 2050 without some major change in health care. Unlike the short-term jobs crisis, these are areas where we can find compromise. Let's not do what we usually do by spending the bad times arguing over things that won't happen and the good times ignoring the things that should. "

<comment><USER14> Thanks for posting. But it must have been the 2nd to last or 3rd to last paragraph. Basically, I suggest reading both pages. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I didn't read the second page, because the first page seemed to miss the point so badly.

 _The most popular types of jobs programs involve state tax breaks or subsidies that seek to seduce a company from one state to another. While this can mean good news for "business-friendly" states like Texas, such policies don't add to overall employment so much as they just shuffle jobs around._

Such subsidies can also seduce people from one country to another. And in that sense, they would indeed create jobs.

The same argument applies to the industry-specific legislation he mentions later.

Finally, he doesn't mention, on the first page, the very straightforward way that politicians can create jobs: by spending money on big infrastructure projects. Those certainly do create jobs, and they have been a common method to do so in a recession.

To top it off, lumping politicians in with "everybody else" seems unfair. As argued above, even politicians can and do "create jobs", but it is ludicrous to argue that the founders of Google or eBay or Paypal didn't create jobs. They created tens of millions of jobs that people live off of, in the US and in other parts of the world.

<comment><USER17> Big infrastructure projects have the problem that they cost a lot of money and time. Another disadvantage is the inherent problem all Keynesian ideas have, they very much depend on timing. If you start such a project too late you severely harm a recovering economy, start it too early and it won't help at all or even have a negative impact.

<comment><USER9> Also, there is no way to show whether a government project is profitable or not. This means we can't tell whether the project actually helped or hurt the economy.

<comment><USER17> Infrastructure projects don't have to be profitable that is neither the goal nor does anyone care. The goal is to create a lot of jobs and a lot of income relatively fast to increase demand which helps the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article makes a very strange factual error: _...permanent cuts in taxes and regulation. These policies may (or may not) make the economy healthier in 5 years or 10, but the immediate impact would require firing a large number of America's roughly 23 million government workers._

This is not true. You could cut taxes and reduce compensation for 23 million government workers.

<comment><USER18> It would probably be an even worse idea to cut government wages than to cut government jobs (also a very bad idea). It is true that people are unhappy if their wage increases don't keep up with the rate of inflation--if inflation is 4% and you get an only 1% wage increase, you're unhappy. But people are furious if your boss cuts your wages--if inflation is 1% and they cut your wages by 2%, you're not just unhappy, you're enraged. There's something about cutting the number of dollars that you're going to be paid for doing the same work in the American psyche that gets people really angry, and makes them really unwilling to put in the effort to be good workers.

And so, because each company know that cutting people's wages is a way to guarantee that they'll do a lousy job, businesses are overwhelmingly unwilling to cut people's wages at all. They would rather fire more people.

<comment><USER7> Businesses tend to fire people because cutting wages is likely to cause adverse selection - the good people (with options) quit, the bad people (no options) stay. This is why during the recession, jobs were cut, but comp (per worker) actually increased.

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM>

Regardless, the government could cut overall comp without cutting any individual's comp and therefore never making anyone mad. They could simply freeze wages (rather than raising them, which they did during the recession) and apply the lower pay scales only for new hires/promotions.

I.e., a current G6 makes $30577 (ignoring COLA). When he upgrades to G7 under the current pay scale, he gets $33979. If all pay scales were lowered by $2500, the individual would continue making $30577 for as long as he is a G6. When he transitions to G7, his pay would only go up to $31479. No individual's pay is ever cut, but compensation for government workers as a whole is reduced.

<http://www.fedjobs.com/pay/pay.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why doesn't the USA charge full rate taxes on individuals and corporations with extremely high incomes - and THEN deduct based on the number of new domestic hires they've done that have stayed for at least a year.

Seems super simple enough and then the REAL job creators get the credits they are demanding. The fakes then have no excuses.

<comment><USER20> Every tax creates distortions. If the tax break was high enough it would encourage people and corporations with extremely high incomes to hire people for 366 days and then fire them and hire another domestic replacement.

<comment><USER19> Then just subtract terminations. It's not complicated - net jobs, period.

<comment><USER20> So if a company is efficient and has to terminate people they will have to pay more taxes?

Smart businessmen (with smaller businesses) would just start a new company every year and move the profit from 1 to another. It isn't a very big accounting challenge to change which one of the companies you control shows a profit.

<comment><USER19> Yes if a company makes higher profits by eliminating workers then they should lose the savings from their taxes.

If they moved the profit and terminated the workers, that year they would still have to pay full taxes. The new company would not have people for a year so no credits - they also wouldn't have profits to pay taxes on either. There is no way to game the system, you cannot shuffle workers because you lose credits.

Why is this so complicated to appreciate? A large corporation's worth to society is not to ship jobs overseas but to create domestic jobs. How else do you encourage them to not ship jobs overseas and get slave labor for pennies?

<comment><USER7> Why should we encourage a corporation not to ship jobs overseas? Why do you intrinsically want to favor Priscilla over Poonam? Is a brown girl who speaks Marathi somehow less worthy of a job than a white girl who speaks English?

Personally I don't think so. But perhaps that's because to me, Poonam is a real girl, very short, who makes frowny faces in google chat and real life when I tease her. Maybe I'd think differently if Poonam was a faceless foreign devil.

(Note: The girl is real, the name is not.)

Also, you are simply wrong that a corporation's value is creating jobs. It isn't. A corporation's worth is the consumer surplus their products create. If my company helps a woman find a dress she values at $100 and she pays $80 for it, she gains a consumer surplus of $20. How much of that $20 we are responsible for is dependent on what her NBA would have been.

<comment><USER19> What if that woman is unable to get a job because all the jobs are shipped overseas and cannot buy a new dress at all?

What is that corporation's worth to society that it is not generating any domestic income and only extracting dollars from a society?

<comment><USER7> _What if that woman is unable to get a job because all the jobs are shipped overseas and cannot buy a new dress at all?_

Then she will lower the cost of her labor until her prices become competitive, and people will then choose to hire her.

 _What is that corporation's worth to society that it is not generating any domestic income and only extracting dollars from a society?_

Corporate value to society = consumer surplus generated - cost of printing green pieces of paper

(This assumes the corporation takes delivery of green pieces of paper rather than electrons, in which case it's value is even higher.)

Also, you still dodged the question of why your white girl deserves this job more than my brown girl. Is my girl simply less of a human being than your girl?

<comment><USER21> Your "white girl vs brown girl" scenario is a pure straw man. It does not deserve to be answered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It was only about 10 years ago that we understood how to allow the economy to create jobs and operate properly: keeping a steady monetary base, cutting taxes, loosening regulation and ending wasteful gov't programs that crowd out private investment.

It's a shame that 1921 and the post-war boom have been buried under theories that tow the line for the managerial-state.

<comment><USER9> Just for clarification, this isn't trolling. It's true. In the last few years we've blamed the free market for these problems. I don't consider the federal reserve (a monopolist on money) to be a free-market institution. I don't consider government-guaranteed mortgages to be a free market program. I don't think forcing banks to give loans to people unworthy of credit is how a market should operate.

But with all that meddling causing the current crisis, we look for yet more government involvement to solve the problem. I look at history and theory and see that the injection of government involvement throughout the economy doesn't work. Ask the people who tried to hop over the Berlin wall!

<comment><USER22> It sounds like you're blaming the Community Reinvestment Act for the mortgage crisis. The downvoters probably consider that a GOP talking point with no basis in reality. I know I do, but I'll reply instead of downvoting.</comment></comment></comment>


New Coursera class, "Startup Engineering" - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/course/startup <comment><USER2> Primary instructor here. Was going to wait to post this to HN till I had more material up, but please check out <http://startup.stanford.edu>.

We'll have a bunch of speakers over the course of the class from more than a dozen of the top startups in the Valley (Square, Uber, Stripe, AirBnB, etc.) to round out the technical material. Agreed with one commenter that there are indeed a lot of TLAs, but that's for the SEO ;)

The class is being taught on the Stanford campus now from January through March, and the lecture notes will be open sourced (probably under AGPL) in April. This will provide a free textbook to combine with the MOOC itself, so that those in the developing world have access.

Any constructive feedback would be most appreciated, and my email is balajis at stanford dot edu.

<comment><USER3> Looking forward for your course on Coursera! By the way, while looking at your introduction slide on <http://startup.stanford.edu> I've noticed that "Frontend JS Framework" and "Frontend CSS Framework" are in the wrong order (Page 11, Column name "Type").

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Will fix this and a few other typos (DCVS -> DVCS).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I signed up for the class. In the confirmation email is a pitch they should've used on the class page:

 _Finally, perhaps one anecdote will give a sense of what you will gain from the course. In 2007 a relatively small Stanford class of 75 students wrote apps for the then-nascent Facebook platform. Within ten weeks, the students had amassed more than sixteen million users and one million dollars in revenue. And that was five years ago, before the worldwide installation of hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets. What will happen today once we have 100,000+ students learning startup engineering in parallel, building apps with mobile platforms as a first class target?_

The link it refers to is: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html?pa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

<comment><USER5> Well, I think what would happen today is that those apps will be buried in the noise of Facebook app streams and will be less successful (in expectation at least) than their 2007 counterparts (unless the course comes with an equivalent focus on marketing efforts for such apps). There are just _so_ many more commercial apps with heavy marketing resources behind it, that the average student app would unfortunately have a much tougher time getting the attention of eyeballs.

That being said, I have enrolled :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Learn the engineering skills needed to build a technology startup from the > ground up.

"Learn the engineering skills needed to build a web startup from the ground up." FTFY

<comment><USER7> I guess the web isn't technology...

<comment><USER8> Technology is not the web

<comment><USER7> You don't know what technology is, do you?

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

<comment><USER9> I think the point he was making is along the lines of "all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks pretty cool:

Syllabus:

Introduction and Quickstart Tools: VMs, IAAS/PAAS, Unix Command Line, Text Editors, DCVS Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS, Wireframing, Market Research Backend: SSJS, Databases, Frameworks, Data Pipelines APIs: Client-side templating, HTTP, SOA/REST/JSON, API as BizDev Devops: Testing, Deployment, CI, Monitoring, Performance Dev Scaling: DRY, Reading/Reviewing/Documenting Code, Parallelizing Founding: Conception, Composition, Capitalization Business Scaling: Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation, Accounting Summary and Demo Week

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow the topics look pretty solid. I've never met Dr. Srinivasan but his credentials look impressive.

What I like most about the topics are that they are focused on what is needed from the tech side when starting a company.

In fact I would argue that a technical cofounder should be able to offer pros/cons and at least a few suggestions for each of these topics. Being semi opinionated about these types of topics is sometimes what separates a senior engineer from a junior one. (But not blindly opinionated).

For examples:

\- VMs - Big leader is VMWare followed by a host of others. Almost any cloud service will be based around some form of virtualization such as Xen. Most startups use VMs because it is cheaper than buying regular hardware.

\- IAAS/PAAS - Talk a bit about Amazon EC2 for infrastructure services. Jump into stuff like Heroku and why it is different than EC2.

\- Text Editors - Pick whatever one you like. Don't be afraid to learn a new one if it helps your productivity.

\- Frameworks - Use one. Don't write your own unless your startup is predicated on selling a framework to developers.

Etc...etc.

<comment><USER11> bth, the set of topics seems like an amalgamation of buzzwords and TLAs. I seriously doubt they can go into any sort of depth if they are all covered.

<comment><USER12> Sometimes a view of the entire landscape puts everything into perspective enough that it's much easier to go deeper on your own into the areas that you need the most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks like an extremely expansive menu of topics, pretty much anything on that list could be an entire 10 week course in itself.

<comment><USER2> Right, the idea is a survey course with links for depth. Many of these are areas you need to have at least some familiarity with at the inception of a new company, and they really aren't taught well (even at a survey level) within academia at the present time. This is a first step towards remedying that; hopefully more in-depth courses will follow.

<comment><USER14> This is a powerful approach. I know a lot of really brilliant people who want to "do a startup" but they don't have the tools and don't even know what tools they need to start building. Thanks in advance for teaching this course!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> this looks perfect for all those who "want to do a startup"

<comment><USER16> Sincere question though, I imagine the linking too the pre-req cs198 Standford course work, that even doing, e.g. Udacity intro to CS101, Learn Python the Hard Way may be too "light" of knowledge to sign up.

Should I try and gear up C++/burn through as much as possible of: <https://cs198.stanford.edu/cs106/> (I did some C++ in highschool YEARS ago, but was mostly a mIRC script kiddie).

In preparation for this course to be valuable to a non-coder (that's learning), like myself?

<comment><USER15> I'd say don't waste your time going through C++. Python is a great language to get started with, and will serve well for many web focused startups, as well as with dev ops and systems administration. This course will likely emphasize giving you the broad base of tools and habits you need to succeed, not drilling code syntax and algorithms into your head (which you can always do later). So imho, do your CS101 and dive in. // CTO, and tech advisor to several startups

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find it unusual that Vijay Pande is co-instructing this course. Of course I'm intrigued because computational structural biology is my area of research, but is Dr. Pande really qualified to teach about the topics in the syllabus?

</comment><comment><USER18> Definitely signed up for this. Should be really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER19> _Bringing up node.js REPL:_ \- No, thank you.)</comment>


Ask HN: How do I correctly build a global marketplace? - <AUTHOR> Hey everybody,
I am a junior dev building a marketplace
I would like to release it eventually so I have a few questions that I figure some of you might know a thing or two about:
1. What kind of payment gateways should I use? I have already configured Stripe and Braintree (for PayPal support), however I want to tackle most international markets, specially Latin America where many do not have international credit cards, how can I ensure that most people can buy through my platform? What are the best tools?
2. How do I manage different currencies? Imagine a brazilian buyer wants to buy a product that is in $, should I convert prices through established rates or should I allow the sellers to add their own prices for each currency they want? (what would happen if they dont specify a certain currency?). How do I take cuts from different currencies? Do I need bank accounts in each currency and establish businesses in each country?
3. Refunds What happens if someone wants a refund or a partial refund? What if the customer pays in dollars but his card is european and the market rate changes, how should that refund be processed? does the gateway take care of that or must it be done manually?
4. Taxes and importing fees How do I correctly charge and set taxes? If the seller is from one country and offers a certain product, the buyer can be from the same country and state, different state, different country or different continent, how do taxes vary in those cases and how are they set depending on the type of product?
5. Legal ramifications? What happens if someone buys something and the seller does not deliver it? Or if he does deliver it but the seller says it never arrived? Or they deliver a different product? What should I do? Can I be made legally responsible for these situations?
I know this is a really big undertaking but it motivates me, so please dont shoot me down, just looking for friendly advice (mentorship would be great!)
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> I also posted this on the new HackerForums but thought it might also be good to post it here (this is the link on the forum [https://hackerforums.co/ask- hf-f6/ask-hf-how-do-i-correctly-...](https://hackerforums.co/ask-hf-f6/ask-hf- how-do-i-correctly-build-a-global-marketpla-t25.html) )</comment>


Ask HN: Feels like my brain doesn't want to work anymore - <AUTHOR> Since I've gotten back from my last internship, it has been feeling like my brain has been refusing to work.
Over the last 10-12 months, I got extremely burnt out from a team that was rushed to finish a product - that included staying late often (4AM late). I was then only recommended for another internship, not a full time job. Feeling pretty defeated, I came back to school and took another heavy course load, which seemed to make brain not want to work part even worse.
I remember 2 years ago, I was coding projects in my spare time, had the enthusiasm of a 5 year old, and was just a generally happy guy. I used to love life! Now a simple task seems to take ages. My brain, when reading, doesn't actually read in the data. It feels like it caches it, and then throws it out when the next thing comes along.
Has anyone ever gone through something like this? What has helped you?
So far, it seems like video games (i haven't played them in years) and going to the gym, and overall relaxing and taking things one step at a time has been helping. But... it's not the 100% capacity I know I can exhibit. <comment><USER2> I Will tell you something I wish my psychology would had told me: go some weeks to the coolest hostel you can. Don't go with your laptop, go just to have fun, meet people, to enjoy your present, that you are fucking alive. In fact if the hostel is good, you will be able to make at least 20 new "friends" almost fucking instantly. You will hear so many different life stories and you will tell yours. This year I went to one with some friends after living a big depression of the same "working" feeling and just by the second day I was feeling "fuck I wish I had done this way before ". I overstayed alone for two more weeks than my friends. I even ended working in and from the hostel and staying for free. Hope it helps you as it did for me.

<comment><USER3> I can advise the same, but without all the fuck words... ;-)

<comment><USER4> I would say the same thing. Do something not related to tech on your time off. Go hiking or explore a new city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Life is a balance. This persistent lack of sleep, stress and over-exertion needs to be given back. Your mind and body are trying to tell you something. You need to listen.

Take some time off if you can afford it. Travelling is a good way to get away from everything related to work. No computers and mobile phone.

When you come back, you'll have lots of new perspectives, new ideas and feel refreshed.

I'm not sure where you live, but if you are in the US, try a flight down to central America with a backpack and a good pair of walking boots, keep your mind open, watch your back and you'll have a blast.

The backpacking trail through central America is awesome. Depending on how frugal you are, you can live pretty cheaply.

<comment><USER6> Although probably frigid cold now, the US has the Appalachian Trails, over 2000 miles, from Maine to Georgia.

There was a movie featuring it recently too: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178665/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178665/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It takes time to recover from burnout - sometimes months. The best thing for you to do is just let that take its course, and not try to push yourself back to 100%. That will only bake in the burnout, and it'll take longer for your to recover.

So go on holidays, meet with friends, read fiction, find some new hobbies. Whatever gives you pleasure, and isn't work, or an attempt to push yourself.

And with time, you will find yourself returning to how you were.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just in case the occasional anti-games mentality rears its ugly head around here: whilst there are lots of good suggestions coming up, games are certainly a pretty solid way to relax too.

In the last couple of months I've been recovering from mild-to-moderate burnout symptoms myself, and a lot of how I've been doing that is playing The Witcher 3. It works. (It probably helps if the game you're playing is one of the most astonishing artistic creations of the last couple of years, to be fair.)

The big thing is this: you can't force it. One plausible explanation for burnout is that it's a defense mechanism from your subconscious against excessive delayed gratification: if you're very self-disciplined and work very hard on something that you think will give you rewards in the end, but doesn't whilst you're doing it, then don't get those rewards, after a while you start building up subconscious resistance to doing that again.

It sounds like you're not too long away from the death-march project. If so, just give it some more time of _not trying to do things_ (counter-intuitive and often scary for highly motivated people, I know), and see how you're doing in a month or two.

<comment><USER9> Yes, there's a lot of bias against gaming, which to me isn't right. However, I find that playing video games feels either too dry or too much like work these days. I spent a significant amount of money building a gaming PC just to get back into the gaming life but I never play the damn thing because the games I have are either too boring or too hard to play in short bursts. I've pretty much burned out on gaming ... lool. What was initially a recreational hobby became too serious and time consuming and it sucked all the joy out of it. So moral of the story is, try to balance your life a bit more.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that can totally happen. I know people who burned out pretty hard doing things like running MMO guilds or trying to compete in PvP games like Hearthstone.

Definitely, do what works for you at that time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _But... it 's not the 100% capacity I know I can exhibit._

That'll be the 100% capacity that you did for a while and it burnt you out, right?

No one can work at "100% capacity" forever. You need to rest, to relax, and to do things that aren't work and aren't "productive". That downtime is recuperative and informative. As counterproductive as it might sound, taking time away from your computer to do other things makes you a better developer.

Working at what feels like 90% all the time is better than working at 100% for 6 months and then working at 40% for the following 6 months when you're burnt out.

</comment><comment><USER11> This can be a crazy profession that will willingly chew people up...

Realize that....when money's to be made some will drive you until you can no longer function....

There's a lot to life...part of it is fast-lane, part of it is slow- lane...different parts have their purpose...

What matters is which lane is right for you right now...choose wisely, and take care of yourself...

</comment><comment><USER12> If travelling is not your cup of tea, doing a little creative art work ( or anything that can be done is a short time and have a tangible result to show for it) can do wonders.

One of the causes of burnout is putting in long hours to finish something that later amounts to nothing (because it never gets released or the end product is much below your expectations). All work and no satisfaction.

In such cases, small work that can be accomplished in a few hours can give back the oomph factor and infuse some energy into one's life. Glass painting worked marvels for me. Nowadays I find it fun to just take my time and colour a picture with crayons :) Yep I have kids.

A cross country hike or some carpentry maybe?

</comment><comment><USER13> I am currently in the same position you are in except with school. I love learning but I am burned out from reading chapters on top of chapters and writing "novels". My brain is definitely on strike and the quality of work I am producing is not the best. Not to mention, I am averging about 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night.

I decided to take a break for a few months after this last class I am in. I did not want to, however at this point it is very necessary. I can't wait to just do nothing for a day or two.

I hope you find balance and are able to find some time to step away from everything to reset.

</comment><comment><USER14> you are like a battery. if you need to work 100%, you also need time to recharge. take a vacation, without laptop, without phone, far away from tech. take some friends with your and just clear your head.

</comment><comment><USER15> same</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to collect beta testers email? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to collect Beta testers for ggmbhnews.com/make-mobile-site/ , I've set a google form to do that here: http://www.gmbhnews.com/make-mobile-site/mobilize/beta-tester , what do you use collect beta testers credentials ? <comment><USER2> You can develop your database to collect it for you or preferably use mailchimp email form to collect emails.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to use a database for that, Mailchimp could solve the problem indeed, I'll give it a try.</comment></comment>